Don't know where you shop, but I frequently observe employees asking for the card, then keying in the last four digits by reading them from the card, and this after swiping.
I know, but the vast majority of cards still have it, which means that cards without it get more scrutiny... so if your cloned card with fake printing doesn't have raised lettering, it might get a second look, at which point the person swiping it might notice that something's a bit off.
Chip-pin is standard in Europe (and maybe elsewhere too) but practically non-existent in the U.S. Everywhere here is still swipe with the magstripe. Sometimes you swipe on your own, but just as often you hand the card to someone else for them to swipe (or at restaurants, for them to take away to the terminal, swipe there, and bring back).
And if some schmuck walked up to me on the street and asked me for my card number, name, and expiry date I wouldn't give it to them -- this makes it possible for people who you have no intention of giving this information to able to get it without you even knowing.
At which point, they face the same hurdles of using credit card information fraudulently that every other fraudster does.
I'm not saying this doesn't make it easier to get the information - it clearly does. However, you typically need to put in more effort than just getting that information before you can perpetrate the fraud, which the article ignores. I also don't care for the insinuation that Google should ban NFC apps.
They probably shouldn't put NFC chips in cards - there's little benefit to be had from tapping your wallet versus swiping a card. NFC payment via phone makes more sense, since you could toggle availability of the information. And NFC for automation of other tasks is great.
The point is not that it cannot be done - I have cloned magstripe cards myself. The point is that there are hurdles to jump before you have a card you can actually use in person, and other hurdles for card not present transactions.
If you are willing to print on the card face and do the raised lettering for each card's information, good for you - what is the time and cost involved in doing that, versus the value of the fraudulent purchase you can make, versus the risk of the fraud being traced back to you?
It will allow you to clone the card and make "swipe" based purchases.
Are you also going to fake the look and design of a bank card, including, possibly, raised numbering/lettering? Or are you just going to clone it on an old library card?
All this is is a slightly easier way to obtain credit card information from a limited number of NFC enabled cards... but getting that information wasn't particularly hard in the first place...
If it's a card not present transaction, the security code should be required, and presumably that isn't being transmitted as well.
I've got a hot news story for you - everyone person you hand your credit card to is able to access your card number, name, and expiration date!
CBC News asked Google why apps capable of skimming credit card information were available on the Google Play store.
You mean, why are apps capable of using the NFC capabilities of your phone available on Google Play? You might as well ask why eBay sells magnetic card readers.
1. A method of sharing information for accessing content on a computing device, comprising: generating, on a first device, an encoded information signal, the information signal including information associated with accessing the content; outputting the encoded information signal as an audible signal; audibly receiving, at a second device, the encoded information signal; decoding the information signal to identify the information associated with accessing the content; and accessing the content with the second device utilizing at least part of the information associated with accessing the content, wherein the second device accesses the content from a source other than the first device.
So... if I take an acoustic coupler, amplify its volume, and put it near two handsets, then use the connection to access a URL, I'd be violating this patent. If this is granted, it will be (another) sad day for the USPTO.
I know it was long, but it also answered some of the questions you posed.
You asked if he wrote the manifesto or not. She explains that it had four authors - a group had written it during a conference in Italy, and Aaron brought it back to her, and yes, his name was on it. But she testified that there was no way to know whether he had authored a particular sentence.
The prosecutors were stretching to find some kind of motive in anything he had written. Ask yourself if this really makes sense. You've been on/. for some years now - I suppose it's fair game for prosecutors to go over every one of your comments with a fine-tooth comb, establishing a "motive" for something you've done?
From NK's point of view, this might NOT be about 50k, it might be about the millions/billions the RIAA claims are made by copyright infringement that they want a slice off. The UN gave one small island group the rights to hurt the US by giving them permission to violate US copyright law... NK could hardly get in more trouble for doing the same AND thinking they are going to get payed for it.
The UN did no such thing. You are thinking of the reports about Antigua winning a WTO dispute case against the US because of the US banning its citizens from online gambling hosted there. The WTO is a completely separate entity from the UN.
The US, which is a WTO member and benefits massively from its dispute resolution procedures, in this case was a defendant. The US was found to be violating its treaty commitments by a court whose decision the US agreed to abide by. The penalty allows for the aggrieved party to extract compensation from the defendant by engaging in "cross sector retaliation." In this case, since the US was violating its treaty commitments with respect to gambling in Antigua, Antigua was given the right to violate its treaty commitments with respect to copyrights held by US companies, up to a certain monetary value.
In order for North Korea to do the same thing, they'd have to bring and win a WTO dispute against the US. Or anyone. Which isn't going to happen, because they're not a WTO member. Also, I'm sure they already pirate plenty of software, and no one really cares... there is no way to enforce copyright law there. What are you going to do, sue in a North Korean court? Or sue in your jurisdiction, and seize North Korean assets?
Also, I don't have access to online shopping so I'd also like a pain free way of salvaging many simpler parts such as resistors as well
Save yourself the time and effort and get access to online shopping. Frankly, even if you have to wait a month or two, or place a bulk order, it'd be worth it. Standard rolls of resistors and capacitors are cheap.
Not only that, but in modern technology most stuff is going to be surface mounted and useless to you. You'll probably find through-hole components in the VCRs, but it takes time and effort to desolder stuff, and you're left with tiny leads... all for a part that in bulk probably costs 2 cents. You should really only be doing this kind of salvage if you're trying to fix your spacecraft on Mars.
That said, it might be worth desoldering large or unusual components if you think you might have a use for them. If any components or daughterboards are connected with ribbon cables, etc., it's easy to remove those.
Wear gloves. If you don't, you're going to end up with cuts all over your hands, not to mention dirt, dust, adhesive, and who knows what else.
First off, on the time issue, I think a lot of time between submission and publication (or decision) is eaten up by reviewers. You can't expect to get immediate responses from your reviewers (after all, while they are doing this as part of their job, they also have their own research and teaching to do). And some reviewers will be really bad in getting back to the editors in a timely fashion.
Second, inertia plays a large role. Sure, everyone could agree that open access journal X is just as prestigious as closed access Journal Y, but there is a lot to be said for a journal name that everyone recognizes. People use journal names and reputations as a heuristic for quality precisely because they can't reasonably assess the quality of every paper.
Essentially, there is no inherent reason why you cannot have a prestigious open access journal. The problem is that prestige takes time to develop, as well as concerted effort on the part of people who are choosing to submit to the open access journal rather than somewhere else. That's not going to just happen by itself - you'll need an organized effort to get tenured faculty to publish in specific journals (and in some disciplines, they may be more interested in ongoing conversations taking place in other journals).
Termination of subscribers’ connections is specifically mentioned by the Center for Copyright Information as a penalty that will not be imposed under the Copyright Alert System. The strategic partnership between rights-holders and ISPs makes it obvious why the CAS does not—and in fact cannot—threaten to terminate Internet subscriptions as a penalty for alleged copyright infringement: the five ISPs participating in the CAS would never voluntarily agree to give up the revenue associated with allegedly infringing subscribers. In theory, rights-holders could perhaps convince ISPs to terminate allegedly infringing subscribers if rights-holders were willing to compensate ISPs for the associated loss in subscription revenue. In practice, however, the cost of such compensation for rights-holders would far outweigh the benefits to rights-holders of halting the average alleged infringer.
My experience, and that of my fellow graduate students, was similar. They weren't asked to teach by themselves, but they were made teaching assistants in their very first semester. Some were straight out of college, and might have even had a degree in a different field. Yet on day one, they're expected to teach a class when they themselves are taking a class on the very same subject (albeit at a much higher level).
I wasn't required to teach, so I waited until my third year, and felt much better prepared about the content. As for pedagogy, it consisted of a single 1-credit online course that I took in the same semester that I was teaching. It was a little helpful, but the onus was on me to care enough and learn about some basic principles of teaching.
As for why it's not a priority... teaching doesn't get you a job. At least, not the jobs that people covet. If you want to work at a major research university, you've got to have research, grants, and publications. That takes lots of time, which doesn't leave much time for teaching or students. Classes take away time from the things that will get you hired, and once you're hired, classes take away time from the things that will get you tenure.
Major research universities may say they care about teaching, but if a candidate has a stellar teaching portfolio but no publications, they're not getting hired. The situation is different at smaller colleges and liberal arts schools which focus more on students and perhaps don't have graduate programs.
If you try to change this culture, you'll get pushback about what the purpose of a university is. Students may think it's all about them, but faculty are likely to rank producing new research and scholarship higher on the list of priorities, so they don't really see a problem.
Over the years said undergrads are becoming professors; how do you account for that?
Not the dumb ones. No one's saying that all the students are becoming uniformly worse. There are still standouts, and always will be. It's the standouts who go on to finish PhDs and compete successfully in the academic job market. And competition for tenure track positions at universities is only increasing.
The dumb ones who decide they need another diploma probably end up in a second rate business or law school.
I'm not saying you have to be brilliant to get a PhD, but to get a PhD and a tenure track position, you can't have been an average student as an undergraduate. Or, you can have been, but something must have substantially changed between then and now.
Now, many undergraduates aren't actually taught by tenured professors; they're taught by adjunct faculty, or graduate student teaching assistants. Still, adjuncts usually have PhDs, and my experience was that TAs were usually better teachers than the professors - they had been in college much more recently, and remembered how bad the teaching was, so they put some effort into trying to make it better.
The post to which I was responding implied that the quality of professors was declining, but offered no evidence. I'm not going to do research for you, but given that the academic job market is only becoming more competitive (this is well-established, and there are figures on declining numbers of tenure-track positions, you can look them up yourself), it seems logical to assume that the quality of professors is not in fact declining.
Yes, I realized I left out the "post-" after I posted the comment. We sometimes also call it tertiary education. Then grad school becomes quaternary, etc.
The problem with your argument is that professors have pretty much never been trained in pedagogy. I think most people in secondary education, including the professors themselves, would agree that learning about how to teach effectively is not high on the list of priorities for most professors. There are a lot of reasons for this, some of which are problematic and should be changed. But the thing is, this has been the situation for decades. Most professors aren't good teachers. That's true today, and it was true in the past. So how do you explain declining performance of students when the quality of professor has remained constant?
A gun is more like a car. If you want to own it and operate it there some regulations to limit the risk that your neighbors have to endure.
There are also rule about privacy of car ownership. Under federal law, you can't simply call up the DMV and find out the registered owner of a car based on the license plate. You have to have specified, limited reasons for doing so, and there are records kept of such requests: Driver Privacy Protection Act
I think it's funny you brought up the EMP scenario, since I mentioned it one of my other comments. I recently read Lucifer's Hammer... not an EMP, but a comet creating a post-apocalyptic world where guns were very important.
In large part I agree with you... gun violence, and violent crime in general, is on the decline, and so maybe we shouldn't do anything at all. How much effort should we exert on relatively rare occurrences?
As I've mentioned elsewhere, the most striking thing about this conversation (on/.) is what seems to me to be an anti-advancement attitude. Did musket owners feel the same way about self-contained ammunition? Will future people feel that way before phasers or whatever are widely adopted?
The vehicle death rate has increased since seatbelts and aribags were made mandatory; people feel safer, so they're more prone to do stupider shit.
That's simply empirically false. This chart and the associated statistics show that while the absolute number of deaths is increasing, the frequency of deaths is declining, a trend evident since the late 1960s at least.
Cars have clearly become more complex over the same period, and so there is no simple correlation between increased complexity and increased frequency of death.
Do a bit of math to compensate for the differences in population and rate of vehicle ownership and it still holds true.
Does it hold when you include higher speeds, higher density of vehicles on the road, etc.? Does it hold when you compare vehicles before seatbelts and airbags were mandatory? Besides, the question isn't really about whether Model Ts were safer in their time... I'd wager a modern car with air bags and seatbelts is safer than most cars made prior to such requirements, including the Model T, would be today.
Further, your counterexample, which I assume was intended to demonstrate how ridiculous GP's statement was, actually serves to illustrate the point he was trying to make.
I realized after posting my comment that it wasn't really apropos, but didn't correct myself because the GP was an AC.
He seemed to be implying that the relative complexity of cars to guns is somehow responsible for the fact that cars kill more people than guns.
I don't see how that makes any sense. The reason cars kill more people than guns has far more to do with their ubiquity and daily use than the fact that they are more complex than guns. I don't see how complexity is relevant to the issue at all.
What I tried to communicate in my response to him, was that we in fact have examples where morecomplex devices kill fewer people (as you pointed out as well).
If I need to put a bullet in my assailant's arm before he's able to put two in my chest, I don't have time to check that the batteries are inserted correctly, the power switch is on, and the NVRAM holding my fingerprint ID hasn't been cleared.
Proper design can eliminate many of these potential problems. Presumably you already are going to, at a minimum, switch off the safety? Ensure that a loaded magazine is in the gun, and a bullet is in the chamber? Or maybe you left it loaded already.
IF (and I admit that it is a big if) it could be made reliable, and as simple to operate as switch off the safety, I don't see why it would be disastrous.
We put battery operated pacemakers inside peoples' bodies. Gentleman, we can rebuild guns. We have the technology!
If the device was a pacemaker then that's 3x the deaths due to failure. Why would people buy that product if it was 3x more likely to fail?
Because they gained some other benefit not quantified in the failure rate? E.g., maybe the less-failure prone pacemaker needs to be removed for battery replacement every three years, whereas the (slightly) more-failure prone one has a battery that lasts ten years?
There's no need to make things unnecessarily complex. The debate is really about what features we want.
BTW, cars are a hell of a lot more expensive to maintain these days.
I would actually like to see a historical dataset of automobile maintenance and operating costs (inflation adjusted), but I can't seem to find a decent source right now. However, even if that is true, again, there is a tradeoff. If there are gains in safety, efficiency, utility, and comfort, the added expense can be justified.
Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should. This topic is kind of a straw man anyway; none of these measures would have stopped the bloodshed last week.
I'm not saying we should do it because we can, I'm saying maybe there are in fact good reasons to do, AND we can (since so many people seem to argue that it's impossible). Why is there such defeatism and resignation about the potential of technology in this area? It's irrational.
Second, the reason I was thinking about this RFID idea was specifically as a way to prevent what happened last week. If Lanza's mother had a key fob or implanted chip, Lanza would not have been able to use the guns without it. Could it still have happened? Sure. Maybe Lanza's mother would have given him his own fob. Maybe he would have taken her keys, or cut the chip out of her wrist. Maybe he would have cloned the fob himself. Any of those things are possible, but it would involve more time and effort, and introduce additional hurdles. If there is a process for obtaining a fob, maybe Lanza would not have met the burdens of the process. If he attacked his mother with a knife (because he couldn't use a gun), maybe she could have escaped and called the police.
Or maybe it still would have happened. Is that a reason to not consider any policy change? No. Maybe new policies and technology can prevent or reduce the risk of OTHER tragedies.
And if a hunter's gun doesn't fire when that nine point buck is in his sights, you're going to have one pissed off hunter who will never buy that brand of gun again.
This is why I suggested limited the requirement of such technology to only certain weapons. E.g., we don't mandate it for bolt action rifles.
But seriously, my main observation here is that so many people are spending lots of energy on inventing reasons for why nothing can be done.
Remember that when it fails, people DIE. One failure EVER is too many.
This is the kind of statement I'm talking about, though. Guns ALREADY fail.They occasionally jam and misfire. If they are not cleaned and maintained, they fail more often. We tolerate this unreliability because it is infrequent and we can keep it that way through maintenance.
Let's say you have a gun that is 99.99% reliable... so one out of every 10,000 rounds it jams or misfires. And now, we add electronic safety components to it, and with testing and good engineering, we produce a gun that is 99.97% reliable. So it jams, misfires, or fails to fire 3 out of every 10,000 rounds.
The question is, I think, whether that decrease in reliability is an acceptable tradeoff for the increase in safety gained due to only the owner being able to fire it. Nothing is perfect... but can we make something acceptable, where the benefits outweight the costs?
Good try on the car analogy though, somebody had to do it.
Thanks:-)
You can't add electronics to a simple mechanical device and make it more reliable. Electronics are less reliable than simple mechanical things, so any such change is a step backward.
Okay, even if it is a step backward in theory, in practice, are we really not able to engineer something to an acceptable level of reliability? Guns already do not work 100% of the time. They occasionally jam and misfire. We tolerate this unreliability because it is infrequent.
Let's say you have a gun that is 99.99% reliable... so one out of every 10,000 rounds it jams or misfires. And now, we add electronic safety components to it, and with testing and good engineering, we produce a gun that is 99.97% reliable. So it jams, misfires, or fails to fire 3 out of every 10,000 rounds.
The question is, I think, whether that decrease in reliability is an acceptable tradeoff for the increase in safety gained due to only the owner being able to fire it.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't know where you shop, but I frequently observe employees asking for the card, then keying in the last four digits by reading them from the card, and this after swiping.
Raised lettering is no longer required.
I know, but the vast majority of cards still have it, which means that cards without it get more scrutiny... so if your cloned card with fake printing doesn't have raised lettering, it might get a second look, at which point the person swiping it might notice that something's a bit off.
Chip-pin is standard in Europe (and maybe elsewhere too) but practically non-existent in the U.S. Everywhere here is still swipe with the magstripe. Sometimes you swipe on your own, but just as often you hand the card to someone else for them to swipe (or at restaurants, for them to take away to the terminal, swipe there, and bring back).
And if some schmuck walked up to me on the street and asked me for my card number, name, and expiry date I wouldn't give it to them -- this makes it possible for people who you have no intention of giving this information to able to get it without you even knowing.
At which point, they face the same hurdles of using credit card information fraudulently that every other fraudster does.
I'm not saying this doesn't make it easier to get the information - it clearly does. However, you typically need to put in more effort than just getting that information before you can perpetrate the fraud, which the article ignores. I also don't care for the insinuation that Google should ban NFC apps.
They probably shouldn't put NFC chips in cards - there's little benefit to be had from tapping your wallet versus swiping a card. NFC payment via phone makes more sense, since you could toggle availability of the information. And NFC for automation of other tasks is great.
The point is not that it cannot be done - I have cloned magstripe cards myself. The point is that there are hurdles to jump before you have a card you can actually use in person, and other hurdles for card not present transactions.
If you are willing to print on the card face and do the raised lettering for each card's information, good for you - what is the time and cost involved in doing that, versus the value of the fraudulent purchase you can make, versus the risk of the fraud being traced back to you?
It will allow you to clone the card and make "swipe" based purchases.
Are you also going to fake the look and design of a bank card, including, possibly, raised numbering/lettering? Or are you just going to clone it on an old library card?
All this is is a slightly easier way to obtain credit card information from a limited number of NFC enabled cards... but getting that information wasn't particularly hard in the first place...
If it's a card not present transaction, the security code should be required, and presumably that isn't being transmitted as well.
I've got a hot news story for you - everyone person you hand your credit card to is able to access your card number, name, and expiration date!
CBC News asked Google why apps capable of skimming credit card information were available on the Google Play store.
You mean, why are apps capable of using the NFC capabilities of your phone available on Google Play? You might as well ask why eBay sells magnetic card readers.
Yeah, I read the claim (there's only one):
1. A method of sharing information for accessing content on a computing device, comprising: generating, on a first device, an encoded information signal, the information signal including information associated with accessing the content; outputting the encoded information signal as an audible signal; audibly receiving, at a second device, the encoded information signal; decoding the information signal to identify the information associated with accessing the content; and accessing the content with the second device utilizing at least part of the information associated with accessing the content, wherein the second device accesses the content from a source other than the first device.
So... if I take an acoustic coupler, amplify its volume, and put it near two handsets, then use the connection to access a URL, I'd be violating this patent. If this is granted, it will be (another) sad day for the USPTO.
I know it was long, but it also answered some of the questions you posed.
You asked if he wrote the manifesto or not. She explains that it had four authors - a group had written it during a conference in Italy, and Aaron brought it back to her, and yes, his name was on it. But she testified that there was no way to know whether he had authored a particular sentence.
The prosecutors were stretching to find some kind of motive in anything he had written. Ask yourself if this really makes sense. You've been on /. for some years now - I suppose it's fair game for prosecutors to go over every one of your comments with a fine-tooth comb, establishing a "motive" for something you've done?
From NK's point of view, this might NOT be about 50k, it might be about the millions/billions the RIAA claims are made by copyright infringement that they want a slice off. The UN gave one small island group the rights to hurt the US by giving them permission to violate US copyright law... NK could hardly get in more trouble for doing the same AND thinking they are going to get payed for it.
The UN did no such thing. You are thinking of the reports about Antigua winning a WTO dispute case against the US because of the US banning its citizens from online gambling hosted there. The WTO is a completely separate entity from the UN.
The US, which is a WTO member and benefits massively from its dispute resolution procedures, in this case was a defendant. The US was found to be violating its treaty commitments by a court whose decision the US agreed to abide by. The penalty allows for the aggrieved party to extract compensation from the defendant by engaging in "cross sector retaliation." In this case, since the US was violating its treaty commitments with respect to gambling in Antigua, Antigua was given the right to violate its treaty commitments with respect to copyrights held by US companies, up to a certain monetary value.
In order for North Korea to do the same thing, they'd have to bring and win a WTO dispute against the US. Or anyone. Which isn't going to happen, because they're not a WTO member. Also, I'm sure they already pirate plenty of software, and no one really cares... there is no way to enforce copyright law there. What are you going to do, sue in a North Korean court? Or sue in your jurisdiction, and seize North Korean assets?
Also, I don't have access to online shopping so I'd also like a pain free way of salvaging many simpler parts such as resistors as well
Save yourself the time and effort and get access to online shopping. Frankly, even if you have to wait a month or two, or place a bulk order, it'd be worth it. Standard rolls of resistors and capacitors are cheap.
Not only that, but in modern technology most stuff is going to be surface mounted and useless to you. You'll probably find through-hole components in the VCRs, but it takes time and effort to desolder stuff, and you're left with tiny leads... all for a part that in bulk probably costs 2 cents. You should really only be doing this kind of salvage if you're trying to fix your spacecraft on Mars.
That said, it might be worth desoldering large or unusual components if you think you might have a use for them. If any components or daughterboards are connected with ribbon cables, etc., it's easy to remove those.
Wear gloves. If you don't, you're going to end up with cuts all over your hands, not to mention dirt, dust, adhesive, and who knows what else.
First off, on the time issue, I think a lot of time between submission and publication (or decision) is eaten up by reviewers. You can't expect to get immediate responses from your reviewers (after all, while they are doing this as part of their job, they also have their own research and teaching to do). And some reviewers will be really bad in getting back to the editors in a timely fashion.
Second, inertia plays a large role. Sure, everyone could agree that open access journal X is just as prestigious as closed access Journal Y, but there is a lot to be said for a journal name that everyone recognizes. People use journal names and reputations as a heuristic for quality precisely because they can't reasonably assess the quality of every paper.
Essentially, there is no inherent reason why you cannot have a prestigious open access journal. The problem is that prestige takes time to develop, as well as concerted effort on the part of people who are choosing to submit to the open access journal rather than somewhere else. That's not going to just happen by itself - you'll need an organized effort to get tenured faculty to publish in specific journals (and in some disciplines, they may be more interested in ongoing conversations taking place in other journals).
Termination of subscribers’ connections is specifically mentioned by the Center for Copyright Information as a penalty that will not be imposed under the Copyright Alert System. The strategic partnership between rights-holders and ISPs makes it obvious why the CAS does not—and in fact cannot—threaten to terminate Internet subscriptions as a penalty for alleged copyright infringement: the five ISPs participating in the CAS would never voluntarily agree to give up the revenue associated with allegedly infringing subscribers. In theory, rights-holders could perhaps convince ISPs to terminate allegedly infringing subscribers if rights-holders were willing to compensate ISPs for the associated loss in subscription revenue. In practice, however, the cost of such compensation for rights-holders would far outweigh the benefits to rights-holders of halting the average alleged infringer.
My experience, and that of my fellow graduate students, was similar. They weren't asked to teach by themselves, but they were made teaching assistants in their very first semester. Some were straight out of college, and might have even had a degree in a different field. Yet on day one, they're expected to teach a class when they themselves are taking a class on the very same subject (albeit at a much higher level).
I wasn't required to teach, so I waited until my third year, and felt much better prepared about the content. As for pedagogy, it consisted of a single 1-credit online course that I took in the same semester that I was teaching. It was a little helpful, but the onus was on me to care enough and learn about some basic principles of teaching.
As for why it's not a priority... teaching doesn't get you a job. At least, not the jobs that people covet. If you want to work at a major research university, you've got to have research, grants, and publications. That takes lots of time, which doesn't leave much time for teaching or students. Classes take away time from the things that will get you hired, and once you're hired, classes take away time from the things that will get you tenure.
Major research universities may say they care about teaching, but if a candidate has a stellar teaching portfolio but no publications, they're not getting hired. The situation is different at smaller colleges and liberal arts schools which focus more on students and perhaps don't have graduate programs.
If you try to change this culture, you'll get pushback about what the purpose of a university is. Students may think it's all about them, but faculty are likely to rank producing new research and scholarship higher on the list of priorities, so they don't really see a problem.
Over the years said undergrads are becoming professors; how do you account for that?
Not the dumb ones. No one's saying that all the students are becoming uniformly worse. There are still standouts, and always will be. It's the standouts who go on to finish PhDs and compete successfully in the academic job market. And competition for tenure track positions at universities is only increasing.
The dumb ones who decide they need another diploma probably end up in a second rate business or law school.
I'm not saying you have to be brilliant to get a PhD, but to get a PhD and a tenure track position, you can't have been an average student as an undergraduate. Or, you can have been, but something must have substantially changed between then and now.
Now, many undergraduates aren't actually taught by tenured professors; they're taught by adjunct faculty, or graduate student teaching assistants. Still, adjuncts usually have PhDs, and my experience was that TAs were usually better teachers than the professors - they had been in college much more recently, and remembered how bad the teaching was, so they put some effort into trying to make it better.
The post to which I was responding implied that the quality of professors was declining, but offered no evidence. I'm not going to do research for you, but given that the academic job market is only becoming more competitive (this is well-established, and there are figures on declining numbers of tenure-track positions, you can look them up yourself), it seems logical to assume that the quality of professors is not in fact declining.
Yes, I realized I left out the "post-" after I posted the comment. We sometimes also call it tertiary education. Then grad school becomes quaternary, etc.
The problem with your argument is that professors have pretty much never been trained in pedagogy. I think most people in secondary education, including the professors themselves, would agree that learning about how to teach effectively is not high on the list of priorities for most professors. There are a lot of reasons for this, some of which are problematic and should be changed. But the thing is, this has been the situation for decades. Most professors aren't good teachers. That's true today, and it was true in the past. So how do you explain declining performance of students when the quality of professor has remained constant?
A gun is more like a car. If you want to own it and operate it there some regulations to limit the risk that your neighbors have to endure.
There are also rule about privacy of car ownership. Under federal law, you can't simply call up the DMV and find out the registered owner of a car based on the license plate. You have to have specified, limited reasons for doing so, and there are records kept of such requests: Driver Privacy Protection Act
I think it's funny you brought up the EMP scenario, since I mentioned it one of my other comments. I recently read Lucifer's Hammer... not an EMP, but a comet creating a post-apocalyptic world where guns were very important.
In large part I agree with you... gun violence, and violent crime in general, is on the decline, and so maybe we shouldn't do anything at all. How much effort should we exert on relatively rare occurrences?
As I've mentioned elsewhere, the most striking thing about this conversation (on /.) is what seems to me to be an anti-advancement attitude. Did musket owners feel the same way about self-contained ammunition? Will future people feel that way before phasers or whatever are widely adopted?
The vehicle death rate has increased since seatbelts and aribags were made mandatory; people feel safer, so they're more prone to do stupider shit.
That's simply empirically false. This chart and the associated statistics show that while the absolute number of deaths is increasing, the frequency of deaths is declining, a trend evident since the late 1960s at least.
Cars have clearly become more complex over the same period, and so there is no simple correlation between increased complexity and increased frequency of death.
Do a bit of math to compensate for the differences in population and rate of vehicle ownership and it still holds true.
Does it hold when you include higher speeds, higher density of vehicles on the road, etc.? Does it hold when you compare vehicles before seatbelts and airbags were mandatory? Besides, the question isn't really about whether Model Ts were safer in their time... I'd wager a modern car with air bags and seatbelts is safer than most cars made prior to such requirements, including the Model T, would be today.
Further, your counterexample, which I assume was intended to demonstrate how ridiculous GP's statement was, actually serves to illustrate the point he was trying to make.
I realized after posting my comment that it wasn't really apropos, but didn't correct myself because the GP was an AC.
He seemed to be implying that the relative complexity of cars to guns is somehow responsible for the fact that cars kill more people than guns.
I don't see how that makes any sense. The reason cars kill more people than guns has far more to do with their ubiquity and daily use than the fact that they are more complex than guns. I don't see how complexity is relevant to the issue at all.
What I tried to communicate in my response to him, was that we in fact have examples where morecomplex devices kill fewer people (as you pointed out as well).
If I need to put a bullet in my assailant's arm before he's able to put two in my chest, I don't have time to check that the batteries are inserted correctly, the power switch is on, and the NVRAM holding my fingerprint ID hasn't been cleared.
Proper design can eliminate many of these potential problems. Presumably you already are going to, at a minimum, switch off the safety? Ensure that a loaded magazine is in the gun, and a bullet is in the chamber? Or maybe you left it loaded already.
IF (and I admit that it is a big if) it could be made reliable, and as simple to operate as switch off the safety, I don't see why it would be disastrous.
We put battery operated pacemakers inside peoples' bodies. Gentleman, we can rebuild guns. We have the technology!
If the device was a pacemaker then that's 3x the deaths due to failure. Why would people buy that product if it was 3x more likely to fail?
Because they gained some other benefit not quantified in the failure rate? E.g., maybe the less-failure prone pacemaker needs to be removed for battery replacement every three years, whereas the (slightly) more-failure prone one has a battery that lasts ten years?
There's no need to make things unnecessarily complex. The debate is really about what features we want.
BTW, cars are a hell of a lot more expensive to maintain these days.
I would actually like to see a historical dataset of automobile maintenance and operating costs (inflation adjusted), but I can't seem to find a decent source right now. However, even if that is true, again, there is a tradeoff. If there are gains in safety, efficiency, utility, and comfort, the added expense can be justified.
Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should. This topic is kind of a straw man anyway; none of these measures would have stopped the bloodshed last week.
I'm not saying we should do it because we can, I'm saying maybe there are in fact good reasons to do, AND we can (since so many people seem to argue that it's impossible). Why is there such defeatism and resignation about the potential of technology in this area? It's irrational.
Second, the reason I was thinking about this RFID idea was specifically as a way to prevent what happened last week. If Lanza's mother had a key fob or implanted chip, Lanza would not have been able to use the guns without it. Could it still have happened? Sure. Maybe Lanza's mother would have given him his own fob. Maybe he would have taken her keys, or cut the chip out of her wrist. Maybe he would have cloned the fob himself. Any of those things are possible, but it would involve more time and effort, and introduce additional hurdles. If there is a process for obtaining a fob, maybe Lanza would not have met the burdens of the process. If he attacked his mother with a knife (because he couldn't use a gun), maybe she could have escaped and called the police.
Or maybe it still would have happened. Is that a reason to not consider any policy change? No. Maybe new policies and technology can prevent or reduce the risk of OTHER tragedies.
And if a hunter's gun doesn't fire when that nine point buck is in his sights, you're going to have one pissed off hunter who will never buy that brand of gun again.
This is why I suggested limited the requirement of such technology to only certain weapons. E.g., we don't mandate it for bolt action rifles.
But seriously, my main observation here is that so many people are spending lots of energy on inventing reasons for why nothing can be done.
Remember that when it fails, people DIE. One failure EVER is too many.
This is the kind of statement I'm talking about, though. Guns ALREADY fail.They occasionally jam and misfire. If they are not cleaned and maintained, they fail more often. We tolerate this unreliability because it is infrequent and we can keep it that way through maintenance.
Let's say you have a gun that is 99.99% reliable... so one out of every 10,000 rounds it jams or misfires. And now, we add electronic safety components to it, and with testing and good engineering, we produce a gun that is 99.97% reliable. So it jams, misfires, or fails to fire 3 out of every 10,000 rounds.
The question is, I think, whether that decrease in reliability is an acceptable tradeoff for the increase in safety gained due to only the owner being able to fire it. Nothing is perfect... but can we make something acceptable, where the benefits outweight the costs?
Good try on the car analogy though, somebody had to do it.
Thanks :-)
You can't add electronics to a simple mechanical device and make it more reliable. Electronics are less reliable than simple mechanical things, so any such change is a step backward.
Okay, even if it is a step backward in theory, in practice, are we really not able to engineer something to an acceptable level of reliability? Guns already do not work 100% of the time. They occasionally jam and misfire. We tolerate this unreliability because it is infrequent.
Let's say you have a gun that is 99.99% reliable... so one out of every 10,000 rounds it jams or misfires. And now, we add electronic safety components to it, and with testing and good engineering, we produce a gun that is 99.97% reliable. So it jams, misfires, or fails to fire 3 out of every 10,000 rounds.
The question is, I think, whether that decrease in reliability is an acceptable tradeoff for the increase in safety gained due to only the owner being able to fire it.