The original research (2008) studied the records of people "engaged in political violence."
So the point is that active (in some sense) terrorists are more often engineers. It isn't a random selection of all people who are part of terrorist organizations, only those who actually participate in actions, who do things. I could suggest reasons other than political philosophy for that.
That shouldn't be true. For example, part of compliance with things like PCI (Payment Card Industry) level N certification is how your systems are set up to block *internal* users from accessing information.
Just like any security system, people find it easier to leave internal access wide open, and that creates a massive security hole, because security means protecting from all unauthorized access, and unauthorized doesn't just mean "outside the organization."
There will always be internal users with more access and more sensitive access, but a well-designed system sharply constrains that access, logs activities, and in cases like the admin unblocking himself, makes it visible to the user. It doesn't sound as if Google's systems are well-designed in this way.
The Feds prosecute Lori Drew, under the theory that breaking TOS is criminal, but they see no way to prosecute school administrators for photographing young people in the privacy of their homes. How much sense does that make?
I agree completely: this is exactly the sort of experiment that helps all kinds of simulations be more accurate, and makes predictions that may not be testable more likely to be correct.
This kind of thing is also why I always distrust the stories (evolutionary psychologists are the worst offenders) given by scientists instead of experiments: "It's logical that people who helped each other would be more successful, so they reproduced more often...." But logical is often disproved by experiment, so if it hasn't been tested, it's a guess.
They've successfully converted this from, "Is there an issue with touching a part of the iPhone that we should have caught during development," to "Is the iPhone better or worse than other smart phones when held in a death grip?"
When Steve Jobs gets to define the question, the answer will never be seriously negative for Apple.
Yes, it's disinformation. Of about the same order as saying, "We have 3000 people working on the clean-up," when in fact they have 2998. That would be stupid to do, because if someone discovered the real number, they'd claim BP was "inflating" things, but it would be pretty trivial.
If they had photoshopped in 8 screens when they only had 2, I'd say that was "doctoring" the image. Putting a fake display on screens that really exist may just have shown what it looked like 15 minutes before the photo was taken.
So a reasonable business model for the pay-wall might be to roughly recoup the costs of distribution, i.e., run the site. I'll bet if they priced it based on that, the cost of an online subscription would be a lot lower, and they'd get a lot more eyeballs to use to sell the advertising.
Perhaps, although climate change science suffers the same problem.
While it's perfectly valid for ecologists to weigh in on what effect climate change will have on species in various environments, it's unfortunate that the ecologists get lumped into the "all scientists" who agree on the climate trends and the source of the problem, when in fact there are just a very few climate scientists who study those areas.
This problem occurs on both sides, of course: everyone feels a right to an opinion.
I don't think your analogy is very good, for two reasons. First, the relationship between DNA and protein folding has been under investigation longer, and second, it can be studied under controlled circumstances.
A better analogy would be paleoanthropology. The science is fairly young, and not very amenable to experimentation. From time to time, someone is able to do something like check DNA from a frozen specimen.
But there doesn't seem to be thesame kind of horrified reaction, with cries of "skeptic" or "denier," when someone proposes an alternative theory in this field.
As a couple of comments have said, the Chief has every right to go after anyone committing libel or pretending to be an official.
But from the article:
They have since researched their legal options and decided that from now on, they might launch formal investigations into such posts, Acevedo said. He said investigators might seek search warrants or subpoenas from judges to learn the identities of the authors -- he thinks some could be department employees -- and possibly sue them for libel or file charges if investigators think a crime was committed.
"A lot of my people feel it is time to take these people on," Acevedo said. "They understand the damage to the organization, and quite frankly, when people are willfully misleading and lying, they are pretty much cowards anyway because they are doing so under the cloak of anonymity."
Assuming the comments in the first paragraph are accurately paraphrased, the Chief certainly seems to be using the threat of legal action to quiet people who are making negative comments.
Reading between the lines (the whole purpose of/.:-), the whole thing seems more directed at his own department: he keeps mentioning department employees, and the article has a couple of mentions of regulations about posting on social networking sites. That would explain why he wants to learn identities, then possibly file charges.
The Austin PD must be a really happy organization!
It's a decent article, but I don't see any surprises there.
Rational people and, by extension, rational IT departments choose software based on the overall value for cost. The features are the obvious value, of course. Individuals may think of ease of installation as a feature, while an IT department sees it as a cost.
I would also argue that the comparison is distorted because commercial products undergo selection: a commercial product that fails to provide a certain minimum value goes away. FOSS, on the other hand, can stay around forever. If commercial apps were compared only to those FOSS apps that were installed at least as often as a low-selling commercial app, the differences might be so great.
Everyone understood that they could be sued for violating TOS. But losing money is a little different (for most people) from going to jail.
And while it's convenient to say, "a prosecutor isn't going to waste their time trying to criminalize a ToS violation when no action of a criminal nature has occurred," this has the potential to open things pretty wide for a prosecutor who has extreme ideas of criminal behavior. How about someone who wants to crack down on pornography? Or a republican prosecutor who decides that the servers sending out Obama's emails might be violating the terms of the backbone connection they use?
I imagine (hope) the latter would lead to a huge uproar, but the former might be applauded.
"It's only a problem if you're doing something wrong," has often been used to minimize concerns as rights have been curtailed.
I think both sides are pretty guilty of spin and other uses of the media. When the IPCC summary talks about 500 scientists signing the report (or whatever the number was), that's supposed to blow everyone away.
But how many of those scientists have a truly informed opinion on this matter? A lot of them are ecologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, geologists, etc. All are critically important to discuss the symptoms, but none have any more right to an opinion on the cause than the supposed fringe that's always being dismissed.
Exactly. Imagine that the technical solution is perfect. Is the system (rules plus technical solution) a net plus or minus?
If we believe the terrorism experts (if there are really any such), terrorist organizations are recruiting like crazy. How successful are intelligence agencies at getting valid names to add to the list? Even if a counter-terror organization has tumbled to someone, how do they know when to add the name to the no-fly list? Because when they add the name, you have to assume that that person knows they're suspected.
Viewed as an access control system, it would still have a ridiculous number of failures of both kinds: failure to allow authorized people to fly, and failure to prevent unauthorized people from flying.
The net result would be money wasted for a false sense of security, money that could be better spent elsewhere.
I used to perform locally (not enough to make a living, but we did get paid), we didn't spend heavy money on transportation, and we were our own roadies. I ran across people who made some kind of living with semi-local performing and direct-sales CDs.
But whether you could or not isn't the point: the work is done once, why get paid forever? A band might do a much better performance some night than the tracks in a studio, but when the lights go dark, money stops flowing. Why does making a permanent record of it create something that someone can sell over and over again, and legally prevent me from sharing?
If other athletes can compete using the same springy devices strapped to their calves, then this should be allowed, otherwise not.
If this truly is at best neutral, or a disadvantage for this person, then there's no reason not to allow anyone who desires to put on a gadget of this sort, and use them instead of sneakers.
I believe the outcome would show that there's a significant advantage.
"Just a bit silly", perhaps, but it's in response to Google's own self-promotion.
People don't say to GM or IBM or McDonald's, "I can't believe you're selling in China." Everyone expects GM to be about money, money, money.
But if Google sells itself as a new economy, uber-green (being good for humanity, much less the planet) company, they'd better expect a lot of heat when their privacy behavior is gray, or when they help keep the internet from being the instrument for change that some hope it will be.
I couldn't agree more. Trying to extend rules of behavior to outside the classroom is insane. Why not use homework as an adjunct, and let students do whatever they want with it? If they fail to perform on the test, maybe the homework wasn't well designed, or maybe they didn't use it well.
With some effort, cheating on tests can be reduced, too. The hardest test I ever took was in a compiler design course many years ago. It was open book, open notes, you could bring anything except a portable computer (which were about 30 pounds in those days). And the questions, of course, were things like create an algorithm for converting from formalism X to formalism Y, and figure out what could cause it to fail.
But of course, it demanded that the instructor, who was absolutely fantastic, think about the exam, and actually have a thorough knowledge of his own subject. Not common.
They say, "List operators, marketers, and email users complain spam filters are too strict."
I'll bet 99% of marketers, 90% of list operators (not the 10% that are legitimate), and 1% of users think it's too strict.
I'm with you. The number of/. articles I've forwarded or mentioned to others has gone down: I'll be that if we did a poll, it would be down for all. Or maybe not, maybe down for old users, up for people who started reading recently.
They should absolutely be taught to question scientific theories. The problem is that all these bills specifically target questioning evolution. In fact, that's one of the reasons the bills fail, because the courts aren't stupid: they know that it's evolution that gets certain groups unhappy. How about a bill to teach kids that magnetism is only a theory?
The site even says it's a hybrid fixed-wing/rotary-wing: no one said a hybrid couldn't break the mu-1 barrier. And the statement that "When the tip is stationary, other parts are moving backwards" is false, too. The tip is the extremum.
Slashdot Mirror
The original research (2008) studied the records of people "engaged in political violence."
So the point is that active (in some sense) terrorists are more often engineers. It isn't a random selection of all people who are part of terrorist organizations, only those who actually participate in actions, who do things. I could suggest reasons other than political philosophy for that.
That shouldn't be true. For example, part of compliance with things like PCI (Payment Card Industry) level N certification is how your systems are set up to block *internal* users from accessing information.
Just like any security system, people find it easier to leave internal access wide open, and that creates a massive security hole, because security means protecting from all unauthorized access, and unauthorized doesn't just mean "outside the organization."
There will always be internal users with more access and more sensitive access, but a well-designed system sharply constrains that access, logs activities, and in cases like the admin unblocking himself, makes it visible to the user. It doesn't sound as if Google's systems are well-designed in this way.
The Feds prosecute Lori Drew, under the theory that breaking TOS is criminal, but they see no way to prosecute school administrators for photographing young people in the privacy of their homes. How much sense does that make?
I agree completely: this is exactly the sort of experiment that helps all kinds of simulations be more accurate, and makes predictions that may not be testable more likely to be correct.
This kind of thing is also why I always distrust the stories (evolutionary psychologists are the worst offenders) given by scientists instead of experiments: "It's logical that people who helped each other would be more successful, so they reproduced more often...." But logical is often disproved by experiment, so if it hasn't been tested, it's a guess.
They've successfully converted this from, "Is there an issue with touching a part of the iPhone that we should have caught during development," to "Is the iPhone better or worse than other smart phones when held in a death grip?"
When Steve Jobs gets to define the question, the answer will never be seriously negative for Apple.
Yes, it's disinformation. Of about the same order as saying, "We have 3000 people working on the clean-up," when in fact they have 2998. That would be stupid to do, because if someone discovered the real number, they'd claim BP was "inflating" things, but it would be pretty trivial. If they had photoshopped in 8 screens when they only had 2, I'd say that was "doctoring" the image. Putting a fake display on screens that really exist may just have shown what it looked like 15 minutes before the photo was taken.
So a reasonable business model for the pay-wall might be to roughly recoup the costs of distribution, i.e., run the site. I'll bet if they priced it based on that, the cost of an online subscription would be a lot lower, and they'd get a lot more eyeballs to use to sell the advertising.
Perhaps, although climate change science suffers the same problem.
While it's perfectly valid for ecologists to weigh in on what effect climate change will have on species in various environments, it's unfortunate that the ecologists get lumped into the "all scientists" who agree on the climate trends and the source of the problem, when in fact there are just a very few climate scientists who study those areas.
This problem occurs on both sides, of course: everyone feels a right to an opinion.
I don't think your analogy is very good, for two reasons. First, the relationship between DNA and protein folding has been under investigation longer, and second, it can be studied under controlled circumstances.
A better analogy would be paleoanthropology. The science is fairly young, and not very amenable to experimentation. From time to time, someone is able to do something like check DNA from a frozen specimen.
But there doesn't seem to be thesame kind of horrified reaction, with cries of "skeptic" or "denier," when someone proposes an alternative theory in this field.
But from the article:
They have since researched their legal options and decided that from now on, they might launch formal investigations into such posts, Acevedo said. He said investigators might seek search warrants or subpoenas from judges to learn the identities of the authors -- he thinks some could be department employees -- and possibly sue them for libel or file charges if investigators think a crime was committed.
"A lot of my people feel it is time to take these people on," Acevedo said. "They understand the damage to the organization, and quite frankly, when people are willfully misleading and lying, they are pretty much cowards anyway because they are doing so under the cloak of anonymity."
Assuming the comments in the first paragraph are accurately paraphrased, the Chief certainly seems to be using the threat of legal action to quiet people who are making negative comments.
/. :-), the whole thing seems more directed at his own department: he keeps mentioning department employees, and the article has a couple of mentions of regulations about posting on social networking sites. That would explain why he wants to learn identities, then possibly file charges.
Reading between the lines (the whole purpose of
The Austin PD must be a really happy organization!
It's a decent article, but I don't see any surprises there.
Rational people and, by extension, rational IT departments choose software based on the overall value for cost. The features are the obvious value, of course. Individuals may think of ease of installation as a feature, while an IT department sees it as a cost.
I would also argue that the comparison is distorted because commercial products undergo selection: a commercial product that fails to provide a certain minimum value goes away. FOSS, on the other hand, can stay around forever. If commercial apps were compared only to those FOSS apps that were installed at least as often as a low-selling commercial app, the differences might be so great.
Everyone understood that they could be sued for violating TOS. But losing money is a little different (for most people) from going to jail.
And while it's convenient to say, "a prosecutor isn't going to waste their time trying to criminalize a ToS violation when no action of a criminal nature has occurred," this has the potential to open things pretty wide for a prosecutor who has extreme ideas of criminal behavior. How about someone who wants to crack down on pornography? Or a republican prosecutor who decides that the servers sending out Obama's emails might be violating the terms of the backbone connection they use?
I imagine (hope) the latter would lead to a huge uproar, but the former might be applauded.
"It's only a problem if you're doing something wrong," has often been used to minimize concerns as rights have been curtailed.
I think both sides are pretty guilty of spin and other uses of the media. When the IPCC summary talks about 500 scientists signing the report (or whatever the number was), that's supposed to blow everyone away.
But how many of those scientists have a truly informed opinion on this matter? A lot of them are ecologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, geologists, etc. All are critically important to discuss the symptoms, but none have any more right to an opinion on the cause than the supposed fringe that's always being dismissed.
I might agree with that, and might even applaud Google keeping the top hits from always being bait-and-switch.
Except for the fact that their "partner," business.com, is much the same sort of thing.
If what's happening is the partner is beating out other directories, solely by the relationship with Google, that's purely anti-competitive.
Exactly. Imagine that the technical solution is perfect. Is the system (rules plus technical solution) a net plus or minus?
If we believe the terrorism experts (if there are really any such), terrorist organizations are recruiting like crazy. How successful are intelligence agencies at getting valid names to add to the list? Even if a counter-terror organization has tumbled to someone, how do they know when to add the name to the no-fly list? Because when they add the name, you have to assume that that person knows they're suspected.
Viewed as an access control system, it would still have a ridiculous number of failures of both kinds: failure to allow authorized people to fly, and failure to prevent unauthorized people from flying.
The net result would be money wasted for a false sense of security, money that could be better spent elsewhere.
But whether you could or not isn't the point: the work is done once, why get paid forever? A band might do a much better performance some night than the tracks in a studio, but when the lights go dark, money stops flowing. Why does making a permanent record of it create something that someone can sell over and over again, and legally prevent me from sharing?
If this truly is at best neutral, or a disadvantage for this person, then there's no reason not to allow anyone who desires to put on a gadget of this sort, and use them instead of sneakers.
I believe the outcome would show that there's a significant advantage.
I'm wondering why all the back-and-forth about "Which was the first recording?"
This was more analogous to an oscilloscope, not a recorder, in some ways more difficult. Someone give him credit for inventing that.
"Just a bit silly", perhaps, but it's in response to Google's own self-promotion.
People don't say to GM or IBM or McDonald's, "I can't believe you're selling in China." Everyone expects GM to be about money, money, money.
But if Google sells itself as a new economy, uber-green (being good for humanity, much less the planet) company, they'd better expect a lot of heat when their privacy behavior is gray, or when they help keep the internet from being the instrument for change that some hope it will be.
With some effort, cheating on tests can be reduced, too. The hardest test I ever took was in a compiler design course many years ago. It was open book, open notes, you could bring anything except a portable computer (which were about 30 pounds in those days). And the questions, of course, were things like create an algorithm for converting from formalism X to formalism Y, and figure out what could cause it to fail.
But of course, it demanded that the instructor, who was absolutely fantastic, think about the exam, and actually have a thorough knowledge of his own subject. Not common.
They say, "List operators, marketers, and email users complain spam filters are too strict." I'll bet 99% of marketers, 90% of list operators (not the 10% that are legitimate), and 1% of users think it's too strict.
I'm with you. The number of /. articles I've forwarded or mentioned to others has gone down: I'll be that if we did a poll, it would be down for all. Or maybe not, maybe down for old users, up for people who started reading recently.
They should absolutely be taught to question scientific theories. The problem is that all these bills specifically target questioning evolution. In fact, that's one of the reasons the bills fail, because the courts aren't stupid: they know that it's evolution that gets certain groups unhappy. How about a bill to teach kids that magnetism is only a theory?
The site even says it's a hybrid fixed-wing/rotary-wing: no one said a hybrid couldn't break the mu-1 barrier. And the statement that "When the tip is stationary, other parts are moving backwards" is false, too. The tip is the extremum.