I think augmented reality hs amazing potential, but I'm more than a little concerned about the impact on human function. We're already so dependent on machines, we're forgetting that it IS possible to know dozens of people's phone numbers with resorting to a cell phone address book.
What happens when we depend on augmented reality to remind us who it is sitting across from us at the coffee shop?
I don't want to sound like a Luddite here, but when your entire existence is dependent on external, technological goods, it becomes very easy for you to be controlled.
Wipe the memory of the device? Someone's lost their ability to communicate within their community, since they don't know jack about their friends/acquaintances, likely can't remember their face clearly -- since we'd no longer identify people by their faces, but instead by what our little computer tells us.
Never mind the potential for hacking.
I still think it's an important field for research, and will have many promising uses -- but as a cultural norm, I think we'd run into a host of problems, the worst of whcih being the potential for abuse by the state and/or corporate interests (if they differ:))
From the article '[the device] is slightly less elegant than the traditional neural implant
Umm, where is the research being done, that neural impants that do this are traditional? Did he step out of the future or something?
I've just invented a levitating car (patents pending). Sure, it's less elegant than the traditional flying car, but I've never been a slave to tradition anyway.
Libertarinas would of opened access to all comers who could pay to lay cables, fiber, or lines. It wasn't libertarians who gave cablecos and telcos their monopolies.
No one would pay to lay cable etc without some reassurance of profitability... so if you wanted to stifle telecomm as a whole, then sure, Libertarianism would have worked.
And you're right, it wasn't libertarians who gave monopolies, it was the nature of the market that gave the monopolies. You really need to re-read your eocnomic histroy.
And as to the moniker of 'Robber Baron' or 'Railroad Baron' -- that had more to do with noncompetitive business practices (including brutality to 'dissuade' competition, as well as gouging when owning a monopoly) than anything else. It had nothing to do with eminent domain, according to every source I've read -- if you want a quick review, check the wikipedia entry.
Still, I think what you're missing out on here is that, with the high cost of infrastructure, the only viable business model would have been based off monopolies. The natural setup of the industry would have resulted in monopolies anyway, so would you rather that they can wield those monopolies to the detriment of the consumer, or would you rather that they are regulated?
Part of me thinks it's just me growing older, realizing that politics affect the very fundamentals of our lives, day-in, day-out.
Unfortunately, because of the extreme power that politicians wield in the US, politics have to be a dominant topic of discussion because it has the ability to make all other discussions moot.
I also think it's because the technical knowledge needed to discuss a lot of emerging technology is way beyond the average slashdotter... so we discuss what everybody has some knowledge (however mistaken) of -- politics.
I love it actually -- there is a stigma attached to discussing politics in social situations in the US, which started after the Civil War. I'm all for people of all types discussing politics on a daily basis.
The more I look at the issue, the more I'm concerned that this could open the floodgate of a free-for-all where you don't have a voice unless you've got a bunch of money to be able to pay for it.
You have a problem with Capitalism? And Libertarianism? Why do you hate America?
"This wouldn't even be an issue if the ISPs were not government-sanctioned monopolies"
Umm, they're not, with the exception of ISPs who are an arm of a telco -- and even in that case, the ISP subsidiary is not a government-regulated monopoly.
The telcos, whose fiber they are using, are government-regulated monopolies.
Perhaps you misunderstand what the whole point of regulated monopolies are, why they came about, and what the current problem is with how they are regulated.
The government regulates, and allows these companies to exist: (1) To provide universal service. There is no economic incentive to lay cable out to Bumblewatsit, so in order to make sure the telco monopolies do, they force them. (2) because of cost of entry. There is a natural monopoly in telco because of the cost of cabling and other infrastructure. (3) Largely because telephone service is considered a necessary utility, government wants everyone on equal footing when it comes down to acquiring service.
So what's the problem? It's not the monopolies themselves, they are the most efficient way of delivering these services -- the government needs to ensure that the consumer is not gouged, however. The problem is that government regulation has fallen short of its mark, and the telcos (who are in their strong position in terms of internet service due to their monopolies granted for telephone service) are taking full advantage of the pay-to-play government we have now.
if you actually look at any individual telecommunications market, and see real competition
OK, look at my market. Cablevision (OO). Verizon DSL. Dialup, from many providers. This isn't about the ISPs, this is about who owns the fiber they transmit over, and the monopolies that exist in the throughput fiber market.
So, go ahead and open it up for competition. Who is going to lay the thousands and thousands of miles of fiber on speculation that they can compete?
Not only that, but by opening up the market, you've just limited your ability to regulate that market. So what you'd get is people in dense markets getting options, while people in scarce markets getting dick-all.
You mistake YOUR inferences for what I was implying. Your misconceptions lead you astray, here.
A 'dirty' word is one that is not acceptable in polite society, even when its use is otherwise appropriate. My point was that China is largely and seemingly a fascist state, but that few people who discuss the topic would refer to China as fascist. Fascist should not be a dirty word... using the term and discussing it is important to ensure we don't experience it again.
To put it another way, 'ass' is a dirty word, but 'posterior' is not. We avoid saying 'ass', yet they both mean the same thing in a biological sense. This is what I mean by 'dirty' word -- it doesn't change the connotations or the meaning, but rather, people's willingness to use the word.
The Bill of Rights is not an all-inclusive list. It just lists some of the specific rights that were felt, at the time, needed to be specifically enumerated due to recent experiences with the British Crown and its agents.
The Right to Privacy has been confirmed by SCOTUS as a fundamental right that is only to be violated with due process (meaning court-ordered warrants). Warren and Brandeis do a pretty good job of explaining it in this 1890 brief. While this largely applies to Right of Privacy from private interests, it applies also to the government. Never mind the fact that the US ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Article 17 of which states: "1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation."
Of course, the ICCP doesn't apply to US domestic law (only international law), exception are made in times of formally declared exigencies, and the US ratified with the disclaimer that Articles 1-26 are not self-executing.
However, ratification of this treaty serves to reaffirm the US's belief in the Right to Privacy as a fundamental humand right.
So this contradicts what you were saying earlier? I'm just not sure if you were writing of something else when you said it wasn't government...
"I'm not sure I see how this is systemic. There are hundreds of thousands of government employees. That there were a small number of them that racked up $30m doing something doesn't really make it seem that systemic to me."
$30 mil is a lot of money for a 'small number' of individuals. Does the system (the government) allow this activity? The answer is likely yes... otherwise proper oversight (I know, that's hard enough to get in the federal bureaucracy) would have stopped it. If it were a handful of 'rogue' individuals, that would be one thing -- but I think we're talking hundreds or thousands of individuals, which clearly indicates systemic approval of the process. Sure, there are 10^5's of govt employees, but how many are involved in investigations, which is the subset we should be concerned with? How many of those are involved at the level of investigation that would require this sort of info-gathering? I think we're looking at this method of investigation as being a de facto source for info, as it is more expensive (time-wise) and more risky (success-wise) to approach a court for a warrant.
"This (as in the subject of the article) has nothing to do with the NSA or the large-scale business of gathering phone records."
Sure it does, they are both issues involving the right to privacy and excessive government access to personal information. Yes, phone records are not private per se, but the basic issue is still the same. With the NSA issue, the real problem is fishing and data mining as investigative methods (not allowed). With the issue in TFA, the issue is use of illegal methods to gain access to information. They are still two sides of the same polygon.
"You could spend that much 10,000 times before you became a line-item on the federal budget. Think about that for a second."
That's not the issue either. I believe your point is that the amount of money is insignificant, and therefore can be explained away by rogue employees acting against the rules. To let you know, I'm an accountant by trade -- and while the general federal budget would not include an item that small (except when it can't be jammed into another budget for legal reasons), that budget is made up of hundreds or thousands of hierarchical budgets. $30 mil would definitely be significant to a lot of those budgets. Again, you have to look at the $30mil or the number of employees in the context of what's being spent on investigative services in the same vein if you want to determine relevance and the likelihood that the problem is systemic or not.
Froma corporate perspective, does a $2,000 expense matter to a company with a revenue of $2MM a year (BTW, that's MM as in the accounting thousand thousand, not as in the metric Mega Mega)? You can bet it does. How about 10 $200 expenses? Or even 200 $10 expenses? Drops in the bucket, but important nonetheless -- and they definitely indicates a systemic problem.
Sure, but a small percentage of students are enrolled in those programs. Unfortunately, a BA in English from Yale means a lot more than a BA in English from $[STATE U], despite the fact that the State programs are typically harder, from everything I've heard.
You're right about disregard by the government of the rule of law, but the whole point of political independence is that you don't have to abide by others' laws. That said, we (on the surface, anyway) agree to respect the laws of other states, simply because to do otherwise would harm our relations with them. And of course, domestically, the government should abide by the law with absolute conviction at all levels.
What? They sure are. Individual employees acting with government authority in the course of government work are not government? Even if the employees are acting outside of the scope of their duties, they are still government employees, acting with government authority, billing the charges to the government, and hence, government. This is not an isolated problem relating to a few individuals, it is systemic, and therefore a problem with government, not with individuals working in government. Even if it were a small set of isolated individuals, it would still be a government issue, since the government is paying for it, and there is apparently not enough oversight.
Your apologist attitude notwithstanding, those two examples definitely ARE red herrings. They are not in any definition a representative sample of the records acquired (far too small a sample, and not identifiable as representative) and thus cannot be used to analyze the records, and the acquisition of the records, as a whole... as such, they are not relevant to discussion of the problem. This makes them red herrings, meant to distract people from the larger, and more important, issue at hand. It asppears that some people willingly fall for this time and time again.
"If this were an NSA-like operation to gather everyone's records, it would cost orders of magnitude more and would not have been through a third party."
The NSA doesn't pay for this. They ask... and receive.
Regardless of whether there is a central database bein created, there is still the concern about illegal methods used to acquire personal information, never mind the fact that this type of information is likely illegal to gather anyway without a warrant[1]. It IS worthy of concern, especially considering how common it is.
[1] Depending, of course, on why the information is being gathered -- whether in order to investigate a specific crime (in which case it's legal without a warrant, since the records are not considered private) or whether it's for fishing, in which case it is not legal.
Come on -- do you think spying on another country is "legal?"
Yes, yes it is. Oh, do you mean legal according to their laws, or legal according to ours?
I think if you check Article II Section 4 of the US Constitution, you'll find the blanket authorization that allowed the Congress to grant permission by law to the President:
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
(emphasis mine)
Foreign espionage, at the time of the writing of the Constitution, was definitely considered under the domain of the President, as a normal function of ambassadorial duties (what do you think Franklin was doing in Paris and London in addition to negotiating and womanizing? Gathering intel).
Foreign espionage was not explicitly allowed for in the Constitution -- but it was implicitly allowed for, since explicit mention of it would have caused an international incident.
Even if Yahoo! News cut-and-pasted the AP story, you've still got to attribute your source -- in this case, Yahoo! News (though a link and attribution to the AP story would have been preferable).
Second, many news sites (and papers) rewrite the AP copy, and some even do a little additional research. Semantically, Yahoo! News is doing the reporting, not AP. AP may have done the research and written the copy, but it is Yahoo! who is presenting it to the public (reporting).
OK, so these are individual people who happen to work for the Government - not the government itself, ie; it's not like theres the "department of buying phone records" set up somewhere.
What the hell do you think government is, but a collection of individuals? And how can they spend $30 mil, plus have had untold free requests honored, if there was not some systematic acquisition of records?
Hey, look! Some of the requests were by individuals for individual records relating to individual research issues!!!1 Therefore, there is no systematic inquiry!/sarcasm
One, it doesn't matter whether it is systematic or not -- there is still a privacy issue.
Two, those individual cases are red herrings.
Three, the government is a collection of individuals that are employed by the people, along with the established rules governing their activities and ours. If a system (in this case, the government) allows regular abuse, then the system is at fault just as much as the individuals abusing the system -- particularly if the abuse is so rampant that those individuals don't even consider it out of the ordinary.
"In a perfect Communist society, I was born to do something and as long as I work hard and do it, I get the exact same education you get.
You've got it wrong there. If what you were born to do doesn't require higher education, then you should waste state resources by getting higher education. Education is not a reward, it's a means to an end -- in the true Communist state, a way of creating workers to satisfy needs of the people that can only be done by those with higher education.
So how does one identify who should be assigned these higher-education-requiring jobs? That's what the testing is all about. The idea is that the tests are fair as can be, since everyone is on equal footing when faced with a written examination.
There isn't supposed to be competition dividing people into two classes (one worthy of secondary education, one not)
In this case, you're a person who exemplifies why the system doesn't work -- you ascribe different values to the roles that workers take based upon their education. The janitor should be as highly esteemed as the doctor, provided they both do their jobs to the best of their abilities.
I think you're missing the biggest issue here -- China is no longer a Communist state, if it ever was one. Capitalism is taking over, with the State bing the largest source of capital. This makes it more of a fascist system (though the word has become 'dirty' from its association with certain European governments of the 20th century).
As to tuition:
The most important change is the one from 1999 where tuition fees were introduced. It is my understanding (though I could be wrong) that money is often tight and your standard laborer in China makes roughly $50-$100 USD per month. Can you expect them to afford tuition rates of £200-400? Not really.
First off, you're using two different currencies there. Second, compare that to US tuition. Say, for China:' $75 US per month = $900/yr. Even converting GBP to USD, tuition of $680/yr. So you've a ratio of 1.32 median income to tuition in China, using your figures (source?).
In the US, the median income is just under 44,400 for a family of four, while the same year, the average total cost of college was 11,354. So the ratio is 3.91. However, consider that the median US family has 2 kids -- and your ratio is now 1.96. Now, also consider the fact that US citizens pay for a lot of services that Chinese citizens do not (either because the services are not available, or because the Chinese government pays). Finally, consider the fact that a college education in China (due to the selectivity) is the equivalent of a top-notch education in the US, where you can expect the costs of a year of top-notch college to be in excess of $30,000. In this light, the US ratio would be 1.48, which is remarkable close to the Chinese ratio.
The difference-make here might be scholarships and grants, and I don't know if the equivalent exists in China. But the culture of sacrifice for one's child means that most parents whose child is accepted to university in China can, and do, afford to send the child -- whereas in the US, kids go to state schools even when they qualify for better education, simply because it is more easily afforded by the parents.
Some Indian guy yelling bhen-chod at a Nigerian... love it. Though from my experiences with most of my Indian friends, it would be more likely to be a racist epithet.
Nope. It's gotten to the point where if you you value status in our economic system, you've got to make yourself valuable to the entities that control that status... just like any other societal system. The only difference between now and two thousand years ago, in this context, is who controls the status (in this case, wealth).
Well, the importance of the research is still there, since the unwillingness to breed with the hybrid offspring indicates a method by which speciation occurs. Basically, it indicates isolation of the subspecies via absolute preferential breeding, instead of geographic isolation preventing interbreeding, which is the most common hypothesis for branching speciation instead of linear evolution.
Re:But what about the tetrahedron?
on
Earth Sandwich
·
· Score: 4, Funny
so that they describe a giant tetrahedron inside the earth itself.
Well, that's still inferior to the sandwich. After all, the tetrahedron is inside the Earth, so it leaves off the tasty corners, whereas the sandwich includes the whole thing.
Then again, if you're the type of person who likes the crusts cut off their sandwiches, then I guess Barr's work takes the... erm, cake.
On the down side of the sandwich, of course, is the fact that it may have have awakened the Devourer of Worlds, Cthulhu. Nothing like a nice sandwich to go with your galactic soup, I always say.
Slashdot Mirror
I think augmented reality hs amazing potential, but I'm more than a little concerned about the impact on human function. We're already so dependent on machines, we're forgetting that it IS possible to know dozens of people's phone numbers with resorting to a cell phone address book.
:))
What happens when we depend on augmented reality to remind us who it is sitting across from us at the coffee shop?
I don't want to sound like a Luddite here, but when your entire existence is dependent on external, technological goods, it becomes very easy for you to be controlled.
Wipe the memory of the device? Someone's lost their ability to communicate within their community, since they don't know jack about their friends/acquaintances, likely can't remember their face clearly -- since we'd no longer identify people by their faces, but instead by what our little computer tells us.
Never mind the potential for hacking.
I still think it's an important field for research, and will have many promising uses -- but as a cultural norm, I think we'd run into a host of problems, the worst of whcih being the potential for abuse by the state and/or corporate interests (if they differ
So we flatten and pave the hills. Really, I don't see the problem -- we need to do that to get to the last of the hydrocarbon reserves anyway.
I've just invented a levitating car (patents pending). Sure, it's less elegant than the traditional flying car, but I've never been a slave to tradition anyway.
And you're right, it wasn't libertarians who gave monopolies, it was the nature of the market that gave the monopolies. You really need to re-read your eocnomic histroy.
And as to the moniker of 'Robber Baron' or 'Railroad Baron' -- that had more to do with noncompetitive business practices (including brutality to 'dissuade' competition, as well as gouging when owning a monopoly) than anything else. It had nothing to do with eminent domain, according to every source I've read -- if you want a quick review, check the wikipedia entry.
Still, I think what you're missing out on here is that, with the high cost of infrastructure, the only viable business model would have been based off monopolies. The natural setup of the industry would have resulted in monopolies anyway, so would you rather that they can wield those monopolies to the detriment of the consumer, or would you rather that they are regulated?
Part of me thinks it's just me growing older, realizing that politics affect the very fundamentals of our lives, day-in, day-out.
Unfortunately, because of the extreme power that politicians wield in the US, politics have to be a dominant topic of discussion because it has the ability to make all other discussions moot.
I also think it's because the technical knowledge needed to discuss a lot of emerging technology is way beyond the average slashdotter... so we discuss what everybody has some knowledge (however mistaken) of -- politics.
I love it actually -- there is a stigma attached to discussing politics in social situations in the US, which started after the Civil War. I'm all for people of all types discussing politics on a daily basis.
Whoooooosh :)
I guess I forgot the sarcasm tag.
If you're a member, check out my complete post history... you'll find I've advocated the same thing endlessly.
"This wouldn't even be an issue if the ISPs were not government-sanctioned monopolies"
Umm, they're not, with the exception of ISPs who are an arm of a telco -- and even in that case, the ISP subsidiary is not a government-regulated monopoly.
The telcos, whose fiber they are using, are government-regulated monopolies.
Perhaps you misunderstand what the whole point of regulated monopolies are, why they came about, and what the current problem is with how they are regulated.
The government regulates, and allows these companies to exist:
(1) To provide universal service. There is no economic incentive to lay cable out to Bumblewatsit, so in order to make sure the telco monopolies do, they force them.
(2) because of cost of entry. There is a natural monopoly in telco because of the cost of cabling and other infrastructure.
(3) Largely because telephone service is considered a necessary utility, government wants everyone on equal footing when it comes down to acquiring service.
So what's the problem? It's not the monopolies themselves, they are the most efficient way of delivering these services -- the government needs to ensure that the consumer is not gouged, however. The problem is that government regulation has fallen short of its mark, and the telcos (who are in their strong position in terms of internet service due to their monopolies granted for telephone service) are taking full advantage of the pay-to-play government we have now.
if you actually look at any individual telecommunications market, and see real competition
OK, look at my market. Cablevision (OO). Verizon DSL. Dialup, from many providers. This isn't about the ISPs, this is about who owns the fiber they transmit over, and the monopolies that exist in the throughput fiber market.
So, go ahead and open it up for competition. Who is going to lay the thousands and thousands of miles of fiber on speculation that they can compete?
Not only that, but by opening up the market, you've just limited your ability to regulate that market. So what you'd get is people in dense markets getting options, while people in scarce markets getting dick-all.
You mistake YOUR inferences for what I was implying. Your misconceptions lead you astray, here.
A 'dirty' word is one that is not acceptable in polite society, even when its use is otherwise appropriate. My point was that China is largely and seemingly a fascist state, but that few people who discuss the topic would refer to China as fascist. Fascist should not be a dirty word... using the term and discussing it is important to ensure we don't experience it again.
To put it another way, 'ass' is a dirty word, but 'posterior' is not. We avoid saying 'ass', yet they both mean the same thing in a biological sense. This is what I mean by 'dirty' word -- it doesn't change the connotations or the meaning, but rather, people's willingness to use the word.
The Bill of Rights is not an all-inclusive list. It just lists some of the specific rights that were felt, at the time, needed to be specifically enumerated due to recent experiences with the British Crown and its agents.
The Right to Privacy has been confirmed by SCOTUS as a fundamental right that is only to be violated with due process (meaning court-ordered warrants). Warren and Brandeis do a pretty good job of explaining it in this 1890 brief. While this largely applies to Right of Privacy from private interests, it applies also to the government. Never mind the fact that the US ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Article 17 of which states: "1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation."
Of course, the ICCP doesn't apply to US domestic law (only international law), exception are made in times of formally declared exigencies, and the US ratified with the disclaimer that Articles 1-26 are not self-executing.
However, ratification of this treaty serves to reaffirm the US's belief in the Right to Privacy as a fundamental humand right.
"Of course they are."
So this contradicts what you were saying earlier? I'm just not sure if you were writing of something else when you said it wasn't government...
"I'm not sure I see how this is systemic. There are hundreds of thousands of government employees. That there were a small number of them that racked up $30m doing something doesn't really make it seem that systemic to me."
$30 mil is a lot of money for a 'small number' of individuals. Does the system (the government) allow this activity? The answer is likely yes... otherwise proper oversight (I know, that's hard enough to get in the federal bureaucracy) would have stopped it. If it were a handful of 'rogue' individuals, that would be one thing -- but I think we're talking hundreds or thousands of individuals, which clearly indicates systemic approval of the process. Sure, there are 10^5's of govt employees, but how many are involved in investigations, which is the subset we should be concerned with? How many of those are involved at the level of investigation that would require this sort of info-gathering? I think we're looking at this method of investigation as being a de facto source for info, as it is more expensive (time-wise) and more risky (success-wise) to approach a court for a warrant.
"This (as in the subject of the article) has nothing to do with the NSA or the large-scale business of gathering phone records."
Sure it does, they are both issues involving the right to privacy and excessive government access to personal information. Yes, phone records are not private per se, but the basic issue is still the same. With the NSA issue, the real problem is fishing and data mining as investigative methods (not allowed). With the issue in TFA, the issue is use of illegal methods to gain access to information. They are still two sides of the same polygon.
"You could spend that much 10,000 times before you became a line-item on the federal budget. Think about that for a second."
That's not the issue either. I believe your point is that the amount of money is insignificant, and therefore can be explained away by rogue employees acting against the rules. To let you know, I'm an accountant by trade -- and while the general federal budget would not include an item that small (except when it can't be jammed into another budget for legal reasons), that budget is made up of hundreds or thousands of hierarchical budgets. $30 mil would definitely be significant to a lot of those budgets. Again, you have to look at the $30mil or the number of employees in the context of what's being spent on investigative services in the same vein if you want to determine relevance and the likelihood that the problem is systemic or not.
Froma corporate perspective, does a $2,000 expense matter to a company with a revenue of $2MM a year (BTW, that's MM as in the accounting thousand thousand, not as in the metric Mega Mega)? You can bet it does. How about 10 $200 expenses? Or even 200 $10 expenses? Drops in the bucket, but important nonetheless -- and they definitely indicates a systemic problem.
Sure, but a small percentage of students are enrolled in those programs. Unfortunately, a BA in English from Yale means a lot more than a BA in English from $[STATE U], despite the fact that the State programs are typically harder, from everything I've heard.
the Navy grinds instead of cutting a flap.
(carrier landing).
Altitude?
- 1500 feet, sir.
Gear?
-Yes, sir.
Flaps?
- Open, Sir. What the hell? Everything's gone blurry and dark!!!
Not those flaps, Lieutenant!
(Crash... Blammm... splash splash of bits falling into the ocean).
You see, there's a reason they grind instead of do anything involving flaps, and there's also a reason I'm not employed writing comedy dialogue.
You're right about disregard by the government of the rule of law, but the whole point of political independence is that you don't have to abide by others' laws. That said, we (on the surface, anyway) agree to respect the laws of other states, simply because to do otherwise would harm our relations with them. And of course, domestically, the government should abide by the law with absolute conviction at all levels.
"And no, individuals aren't 'the government'."
What? They sure are. Individual employees acting with government authority in the course of government work are not government? Even if the employees are acting outside of the scope of their duties, they are still government employees, acting with government authority, billing the charges to the government, and hence, government. This is not an isolated problem relating to a few individuals, it is systemic, and therefore a problem with government, not with individuals working in government. Even if it were a small set of isolated individuals, it would still be a government issue, since the government is paying for it, and there is apparently not enough oversight.
Your apologist attitude notwithstanding, those two examples definitely ARE red herrings. They are not in any definition a representative sample of the records acquired (far too small a sample, and not identifiable as representative) and thus cannot be used to analyze the records, and the acquisition of the records, as a whole... as such, they are not relevant to discussion of the problem. This makes them red herrings, meant to distract people from the larger, and more important, issue at hand. It asppears that some people willingly fall for this time and time again.
"If this were an NSA-like operation to gather everyone's records, it would cost orders of magnitude more and would not have been through a third party."
The NSA doesn't pay for this. They ask... and receive.
Regardless of whether there is a central database bein created, there is still the concern about illegal methods used to acquire personal information, never mind the fact that this type of information is likely illegal to gather anyway without a warrant[1]. It IS worthy of concern, especially considering how common it is.
[1] Depending, of course, on why the information is being gathered -- whether in order to investigate a specific crime (in which case it's legal without a warrant, since the records are not considered private) or whether it's for fishing, in which case it is not legal.
I think if you check Article II Section 4 of the US Constitution, you'll find the blanket authorization that allowed the Congress to grant permission by law to the President:
(emphasis mine)
Foreign espionage, at the time of the writing of the Constitution, was definitely considered under the domain of the President, as a normal function of ambassadorial duties (what do you think Franklin was doing in Paris and London in addition to negotiating and womanizing? Gathering intel).
Foreign espionage was not explicitly allowed for in the Constitution -- but it was implicitly allowed for, since explicit mention of it would have caused an international incident.
Second, many news sites (and papers) rewrite the AP copy, and some even do a little additional research. Semantically, Yahoo! News is doing the reporting, not AP. AP may have done the research and written the copy, but it is Yahoo! who is presenting it to the public (reporting).
What the hell do you think government is, but a collection of individuals? And how can they spend $30 mil, plus have had untold free requests honored, if there was not some systematic acquisition of records?
Hey, look! Some of the requests were by individuals for individual records relating to individual research issues!!!1 Therefore, there is no systematic inquiry!
One, it doesn't matter whether it is systematic or not -- there is still a privacy issue.
Two, those individual cases are red herrings.
Three, the government is a collection of individuals that are employed by the people, along with the established rules governing their activities and ours. If a system (in this case, the government) allows regular abuse, then the system is at fault just as much as the individuals abusing the system -- particularly if the abuse is so rampant that those individuals don't even consider it out of the ordinary.
So how does one identify who should be assigned these higher-education-requiring jobs? That's what the testing is all about. The idea is that the tests are fair as can be, since everyone is on equal footing when faced with a written examination.
In this case, you're a person who exemplifies why the system doesn't work -- you ascribe different values to the roles that workers take based upon their education. The janitor should be as highly esteemed as the doctor, provided they both do their jobs to the best of their abilities.
I think you're missing the biggest issue here -- China is no longer a Communist state, if it ever was one. Capitalism is taking over, with the State bing the largest source of capital. This makes it more of a fascist system (though the word has become 'dirty' from its association with certain European governments of the 20th century).
As to tuition:First off, you're using two different currencies there. Second, compare that to US tuition. Say, for China:' $75 US per month = $900/yr. Even converting GBP to USD, tuition of $680/yr. So you've a ratio of 1.32 median income to tuition in China, using your figures (source?).
In the US, the median income is just under 44,400 for a family of four, while the same year, the average total cost of college was 11,354. So the ratio is 3.91. However, consider that the median US family has 2 kids -- and your ratio is now 1.96. Now, also consider the fact that US citizens pay for a lot of services that Chinese citizens do not (either because the services are not available, or because the Chinese government pays). Finally, consider the fact that a college education in China (due to the selectivity) is the equivalent of a top-notch education in the US, where you can expect the costs of a year of top-notch college to be in excess of $30,000. In this light, the US ratio would be 1.48, which is remarkable close to the Chinese ratio.
The difference-make here might be scholarships and grants, and I don't know if the equivalent exists in China. But the culture of sacrifice for one's child means that most parents whose child is accepted to university in China can, and do, afford to send the child -- whereas in the US, kids go to state schools even when they qualify for better education, simply because it is more easily afforded by the parents.
No, you're supposed to develop your skills enough that it becomes cost-effective to employ you here. Or, move to Zimbabwe.
Awesome.
Some Indian guy yelling bhen-chod at a Nigerian... love it. Though from my experiences with most of my Indian friends, it would be more likely to be a racist epithet.
Nope. It's gotten to the point where if you you value status in our economic system, you've got to make yourself valuable to the entities that control that status... just like any other societal system. The only difference between now and two thousand years ago, in this context, is who controls the status (in this case, wealth).
Well, the importance of the research is still there, since the unwillingness to breed with the hybrid offspring indicates a method by which speciation occurs. Basically, it indicates isolation of the subspecies via absolute preferential breeding, instead of geographic isolation preventing interbreeding, which is the most common hypothesis for branching speciation instead of linear evolution.
Then again, if you're the type of person who likes the crusts cut off their sandwiches, then I guess Barr's work takes the... erm, cake.
On the down side of the sandwich, of course, is the fact that it may have have awakened the Devourer of Worlds, Cthulhu. Nothing like a nice sandwich to go with your galactic soup, I always say.
Spot on.
This furor over current sample quality is similar to that of those who decried CDs because crappy masters dubbed onto CD still sounded like shit.