Kelly consistently puts out the highest-quality political cartoons out there. In a field comprised of over-the-top garbage, Kelly manages to make his points while mocking the format that he himself is using. He deserves the Political Cartooning Pulitzer without having to redefine it, or invent a new category.
The tools themselves are a completely amoral force. You can question the ethics of the decisions of the people surrounding these tools; whether it is ethical to create them, or to use them in a given situation, but the tools are just... things.
I mean, look at gun control laws. I'm for gun control laws, personally. However, it would be ridiculous to say that "guns are bad". I think guns are dangerous, but this isn't a moral judgement on them. It's a more pragmatic evaluation of expected-outcome-of-confrontation-involving-a-firearm. (Gun control is not the issue here. I seriously don't want to debate guns right now.)
I think a more interesting question is when, if ever, it's ethical to "nudge" people using subliminal tools. If you're nudging a person towards doing good, is that acceptable in a way that nudging them towards consumption is not? Are we willing to say that the "nudging" itself is amoral, and we only care about the outcome; if it's used for a "good" end, it's good, and if it's used for an "evil" end, it's evil? Or is there an ethical component towards nudging someone towards doing anything that they might not want to do on a conscious level?
You're absolutely right. If you're a sociopath, if you honestly give no fucks when other human being suffer because of the things you do and the things you fail to do, you have no reason to take any action that will benefit anyone other than yourself. I don't mean this as a personal attack; I want to believe that you actually are capable of doing good things without the threat of eternal damnation hanging over your head, but if you honestly cannot, you are broken.
I can't make you want to do good things, like save the Earth for people who aren't born yet. But, on a social level, there are still enough people who give a shit to put pressure on sociopaths to do good things. If you don't, we will use our laws to make you. If you break those laws, we will take your things and lock you up.
Why should we, as a society, make those laws? It is the only way that the "Society" system can outlast any given member. When we reach the point where we stop making and enforcing laws that benefit the long-term stability of society over the individuals currently in it, society will collapse as a system, and something more stable will take its place. Something with a lot fewer people in it, probably. Evolution will weed out the unfit and replace them with new systems able to deal with changes, the way it always has. That's how life operates.
Saying one would have to take a security course might be pushing it a little. Honestly, it seems like, in order to pull off this attack, one simply needs to notice that your own account ID in in the location bar. This is "hacking" that a twelve-year-old could figure out. In fact I'm pretty sure that I did try this sort of thing trying to "hack" a Pokemon BBS when I was 12 or 13. (It didn't work.)
No, of course I don't. I was talking about how they should act, which is completely divorced from how they do act. They publish the stories that bring in readers. Hell, this story was probably posted by an unpaid intern who thought it was interesting and put in his 15 minutes worth of research before hitting the "Submit" button. Looking at his profile over at ITworld, this dude writes pretty much exclusively about Anonymous's latest exploits; this isn't quite the pinnacle of journalism we're dealing with here.
Day-glo orange hat, maybe? I honestly don't believe that they're in it for the technical side of hacking, which is what brings the best white- and black-hats to the table. They're in it for the social and political aspects of hacking. They don't look at a system and say, "How can I do this?" but rather have a set of tools, and say "Who should I do this to?"
Who is paying them too much attention? The news organizations? They've got a tight balance that they have to maintain; they have to weigh the benefits of publishing this kind of information (a more informed public) against the costs (possibly "enabling" LulzSec). In the end, I think they made the correct decision, but that's up for debate.
While I don't disagree with you, I'm not sure that they're the type to take your advice. Nothing these guys have done has been a "good idea;" honestly, they seem more the type to try, just to see if they can, and, if they can, to brag about it.
These guys aren't black hats; they're a different breed. They're clearly not in it for the money. They're not in it to help people. They're in it for the chaos, and the power trip, and, well, the lulz.
They're probably going to get caught, but I don't think it's quite fair to characterize them as "incompetent," just because they're playing a different game than everyone else.
I think we might have a difference in understanding in what "outlier" means. An outlier isn't a data point that is shown to be incorrect; it's a data point that is numerically distant from the rest of the points in a set. The difficulty with this data set is that it's not just the extraordinarily high values that are incorrect, but that the statistically-average values are under suspicion as well. There might very well be one large company who actually did lose $30 million due to a security breach, and 100 small companies who reported losing $25,000 when they actually lost something closer to $2000. The problem is that the incorrect values aren't outliers; there's a whole bunch of them, so they don't look statistically different from the rest of the data.
Exactly. This law is going to exist until someone, anyone, brings it to trial for any reason. Any judge is going to take one look at this and strike it down.
Firstly: No. Outliers are part of a data set, and it's dishonest to simply dismiss data that does not fit with your expectations.
Secondly: The over-reporters aren't outliers. There is systematic error in asking people to self-report loss due to security breaches. People either fail to respond to polls due to internal security procedures, or they tend towards overestimating their own loss. It's not simply that there's one guy out there saying he lost $5 billion due to hackers; it's that people who respond to the poll tend to overestimate their real losses by some unknown percentage.
There's actually an interesting article here, but the link the summary just goes to a page explaining why he won't be expanding on his earlier, better post.
The problem isn't consumption; the problem is production. Those figures - 1.5 earths - also represent the amount of environment it takes to dump all of our (garbage/pollution/etc) in a maintainable way. You can't fix the problem of "too many widgets" by telling everyone else to catch up to our widget-production levels.
When was this? I'm talking about the NERC standards that went from being opt-in to mandatory in, uh, June 2008, maybe? I'm not familiar with all of the CIP, EOP, and PRC standards; maybe there's nothing in there specifically to deal with a solar event. However, any time your transmission is down for an extended amount of time, potential fines do start piling up. It's gotten damned expensive to not be prepared for an emergency.
Back in 1989, we had a solar flare that knocked out Quebec's transmission system, spread auroras down to Texas, and made people panic, thinking that the Soviet Union had launched a first strike.
Our electronics are more sensitive in a few senses; however, this does not mean they're more prone to failure. In the past 6 years or so, reliability standards have been put into place for the transmission and distribution systems in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. We're actually much better prepared for such an event now then we were 20 years ago.
This event ejected about a billions tons of material; contrast that with the mass of the earth, at approximately 9.5 x 10^21 tons.
So, no, this is nowhere near large enough to form planets. This wasn't even a particularly large solar ejection. Planets tend to come from the violent deaths of stars, not a little burp like this one.
I guess it remains to be seen whether content sites will actually implement this, or whether it'll just be another tool in the black-hat SEO bag. I can see how this may be useful on, say, Wikipedia, which is content-dense and could be rapidly renovated; however, I kind of get the feeling that Wikipedia doesn't really need the help getting to the top of Google's results list.
Come on, you know that this was done as "pure science," and that the justifications were tacked on at a later time. I worked in a research lab over a summer studying machine learning as applied to conversational branching in natural language processing. The specific problem I was working on had to do with picking cost-evaluation algorithms which would allow for a fully expressed Markov tree, while minimizing the solution space - so, almost nothing to do with NLP at all. You can bet that when someone who knew nothing about my research asked what I did, I came up with some lame "real world" application, instead of taking a few hours to discuss the nuances of machine learning, and why it was terribly interesting that a Monte Carlo algorithm could eventually stumble upon a solution in very specific circumstances where Q-Learning never would.
They do point out that they're measuring the "remember-ability" of an image, rather than the emotional response to an image:
Landscapes? They may be beautiful, but they are, in most cases, utterly forgettable. “Pleasantness and memorability are not the same,” says MIT graduate student Phillip Isola [...]
The "worth" in "Worth remembering" is also up for debate. If you look at it as an unconscious - rather than a conscious - evaluation of value, our brains are naturally predisposed to remembering images "worth" remembering. While an emotionally-charged photograph may be pleasant (or unpleasant), there may not necessarily be any value to remembering it, rather than simply experiencing it in the moment.
Regardless of how you want to define "memorability", I'm willing to cut the researchers some slack on this one. They laid out their terms and definitions beforehand, and it's likely that any misunderstandings are more the fault of the media, trying to turn this into a story, than the scientists doing the actual research.
Slashdot Mirror
Kelly consistently puts out the highest-quality political cartoons out there. In a field comprised of over-the-top garbage, Kelly manages to make his points while mocking the format that he himself is using. He deserves the Political Cartooning Pulitzer without having to redefine it, or invent a new category.
"Dumb insecure fags": +1 Irony
The tools themselves are a completely amoral force. You can question the ethics of the decisions of the people surrounding these tools; whether it is ethical to create them, or to use them in a given situation, but the tools are just... things.
I mean, look at gun control laws. I'm for gun control laws, personally. However, it would be ridiculous to say that "guns are bad". I think guns are dangerous, but this isn't a moral judgement on them. It's a more pragmatic evaluation of expected-outcome-of-confrontation-involving-a-firearm. (Gun control is not the issue here. I seriously don't want to debate guns right now.)
I think a more interesting question is when, if ever, it's ethical to "nudge" people using subliminal tools. If you're nudging a person towards doing good, is that acceptable in a way that nudging them towards consumption is not? Are we willing to say that the "nudging" itself is amoral, and we only care about the outcome; if it's used for a "good" end, it's good, and if it's used for an "evil" end, it's evil? Or is there an ethical component towards nudging someone towards doing anything that they might not want to do on a conscious level?
You're absolutely right. If you're a sociopath, if you honestly give no fucks when other human being suffer because of the things you do and the things you fail to do, you have no reason to take any action that will benefit anyone other than yourself. I don't mean this as a personal attack; I want to believe that you actually are capable of doing good things without the threat of eternal damnation hanging over your head, but if you honestly cannot, you are broken.
I can't make you want to do good things, like save the Earth for people who aren't born yet. But, on a social level, there are still enough people who give a shit to put pressure on sociopaths to do good things. If you don't, we will use our laws to make you. If you break those laws, we will take your things and lock you up.
Why should we, as a society, make those laws? It is the only way that the "Society" system can outlast any given member. When we reach the point where we stop making and enforcing laws that benefit the long-term stability of society over the individuals currently in it, society will collapse as a system, and something more stable will take its place. Something with a lot fewer people in it, probably. Evolution will weed out the unfit and replace them with new systems able to deal with changes, the way it always has. That's how life operates.
Saying one would have to take a security course might be pushing it a little. Honestly, it seems like, in order to pull off this attack, one simply needs to notice that your own account ID in in the location bar. This is "hacking" that a twelve-year-old could figure out. In fact I'm pretty sure that I did try this sort of thing trying to "hack" a Pokemon BBS when I was 12 or 13. (It didn't work.)
No, of course I don't. I was talking about how they should act, which is completely divorced from how they do act. They publish the stories that bring in readers. Hell, this story was probably posted by an unpaid intern who thought it was interesting and put in his 15 minutes worth of research before hitting the "Submit" button. Looking at his profile over at ITworld, this dude writes pretty much exclusively about Anonymous's latest exploits; this isn't quite the pinnacle of journalism we're dealing with here.
Day-glo orange hat, maybe? I honestly don't believe that they're in it for the technical side of hacking, which is what brings the best white- and black-hats to the table. They're in it for the social and political aspects of hacking. They don't look at a system and say, "How can I do this?" but rather have a set of tools, and say "Who should I do this to?"
Who is paying them too much attention? The news organizations? They've got a tight balance that they have to maintain; they have to weigh the benefits of publishing this kind of information (a more informed public) against the costs (possibly "enabling" LulzSec). In the end, I think they made the correct decision, but that's up for debate.
While I don't disagree with you, I'm not sure that they're the type to take your advice. Nothing these guys have done has been a "good idea;" honestly, they seem more the type to try, just to see if they can, and, if they can, to brag about it.
These guys aren't black hats; they're a different breed. They're clearly not in it for the money. They're not in it to help people. They're in it for the chaos, and the power trip, and, well, the lulz.
They're probably going to get caught, but I don't think it's quite fair to characterize them as "incompetent," just because they're playing a different game than everyone else.
In the FAQ he states that the hoverbike "cannot autorotate." Do you think this is what he's talking about, or does that refer to something else?
How safe is the Hoverbike? .] .]
* Very Safe. [. .
* Parachutes. [. .
I think we might have a difference in understanding in what "outlier" means. An outlier isn't a data point that is shown to be incorrect; it's a data point that is numerically distant from the rest of the points in a set. The difficulty with this data set is that it's not just the extraordinarily high values that are incorrect, but that the statistically-average values are under suspicion as well. There might very well be one large company who actually did lose $30 million due to a security breach, and 100 small companies who reported losing $25,000 when they actually lost something closer to $2000. The problem is that the incorrect values aren't outliers; there's a whole bunch of them, so they don't look statistically different from the rest of the data.
Exactly. This law is going to exist until someone, anyone, brings it to trial for any reason. Any judge is going to take one look at this and strike it down.
Firstly: No. Outliers are part of a data set, and it's dishonest to simply dismiss data that does not fit with your expectations.
Secondly: The over-reporters aren't outliers. There is systematic error in asking people to self-report loss due to security breaches. People either fail to respond to polls due to internal security procedures, or they tend towards overestimating their own loss. It's not simply that there's one guy out there saying he lost $5 billion due to hackers; it's that people who respond to the poll tend to overestimate their real losses by some unknown percentage.
There's actually an interesting article here, but the link the summary just goes to a page explaining why he won't be expanding on his earlier, better post.
The problem isn't consumption; the problem is production. Those figures - 1.5 earths - also represent the amount of environment it takes to dump all of our (garbage/pollution/etc) in a maintainable way. You can't fix the problem of "too many widgets" by telling everyone else to catch up to our widget-production levels.
When was this? I'm talking about the NERC standards that went from being opt-in to mandatory in, uh, June 2008, maybe? I'm not familiar with all of the CIP, EOP, and PRC standards; maybe there's nothing in there specifically to deal with a solar event. However, any time your transmission is down for an extended amount of time, potential fines do start piling up. It's gotten damned expensive to not be prepared for an emergency.
Back in 1989, we had a solar flare that knocked out Quebec's transmission system, spread auroras down to Texas, and made people panic, thinking that the Soviet Union had launched a first strike.
Our electronics are more sensitive in a few senses; however, this does not mean they're more prone to failure. In the past 6 years or so, reliability standards have been put into place for the transmission and distribution systems in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. We're actually much better prepared for such an event now then we were 20 years ago.
This event ejected about a billions tons of material; contrast that with the mass of the earth, at approximately 9.5 x 10^21 tons.
So, no, this is nowhere near large enough to form planets. This wasn't even a particularly large solar ejection. Planets tend to come from the violent deaths of stars, not a little burp like this one.
As it's made out of machined aluminum, I'd bet that it wouldn't blend, but the only way to be sure is to throw down $35 for one of the Primes.
Scratch glow-in-the-dark paint. Let's go with Radium paint instead!
I guess it remains to be seen whether content sites will actually implement this, or whether it'll just be another tool in the black-hat SEO bag. I can see how this may be useful on, say, Wikipedia, which is content-dense and could be rapidly renovated; however, I kind of get the feeling that Wikipedia doesn't really need the help getting to the top of Google's results list.
Come on, you know that this was done as "pure science," and that the justifications were tacked on at a later time. I worked in a research lab over a summer studying machine learning as applied to conversational branching in natural language processing. The specific problem I was working on had to do with picking cost-evaluation algorithms which would allow for a fully expressed Markov tree, while minimizing the solution space - so, almost nothing to do with NLP at all. You can bet that when someone who knew nothing about my research asked what I did, I came up with some lame "real world" application, instead of taking a few hours to discuss the nuances of machine learning, and why it was terribly interesting that a Monte Carlo algorithm could eventually stumble upon a solution in very specific circumstances where Q-Learning never would.
Landscapes? They may be beautiful, but they are, in most cases, utterly forgettable. “Pleasantness and memorability are not the same,” says MIT graduate student Phillip Isola [...]
The "worth" in "Worth remembering" is also up for debate. If you look at it as an unconscious - rather than a conscious - evaluation of value, our brains are naturally predisposed to remembering images "worth" remembering. While an emotionally-charged photograph may be pleasant (or unpleasant), there may not necessarily be any value to remembering it, rather than simply experiencing it in the moment.
Regardless of how you want to define "memorability", I'm willing to cut the researchers some slack on this one. They laid out their terms and definitions beforehand, and it's likely that any misunderstandings are more the fault of the media, trying to turn this into a story, than the scientists doing the actual research.