What we learned from Boston was that there is no reason for centralized surveillance. Privately owned cameras (around businesses) provided enough coverage. And the police were then able to provide warrants to acquire the video. It worked perfectly from a privacy standpoint and in providing necessary information to law enforcement.
To clarify his point (yours is valid but you're not addressing his claims fully):
Could more cameras in New York City help prevent attacks like the one at the Boston Marathon? That's what Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says the NYPD is looking into.
The department already uses so-called smart cameras that hone in on unattended bags, and set off alarms.
Emphasis mine. I totally agree with you but the argument here is that they could prevent attacks. I find that argument specious and foolhardy in that a bomb could be disguised as anything and a suicide bomber (as these individuals clearly had no intention of surviving a police encounter) would simply continue to wear the explosive into the crowd. I think they need to reevaluate what little benefit it would provide against the massive issues and rights violations it could cause system-wide.
Kelly dismisses critics who argue that increased cameras threaten privacy rights, giving governments the ability to monitor people in public spaces.
“The people who complain about it, I would say, are a relatively small number of folks, because the genie is out of the bottle,” Kelly said. “People realize that everywhere you go now, your picture is taken.”
There's a stark difference between a store knowing I am in their store and a centralized location storing all of my visits. And then there's an even further jump when it's a government doing that. I'm fine that I go into Gamestop and Gamestop gets tapes of me looking at games. I'm fine that I go to Chipotle and there's a camera on the cash register. I'm fine that I then walk by the entrance to an electronics store and I'm on their cameras passing by. That's cool, if they want to put together the odd footage they have of me going there, I'm not really concerned about that. And that's the stuff that ended up helping catch the Boston suspects.
I'm not okay when one centralized location stores that data and my complete movements can be tracked. If a Gamestop employee got my address from a purchase and wanted to search my house, he'd have only the time I'm on camera to do it. If my whole trip is detailed, it could be done covertly quite easily.
Decentralizing the stores of this video information has its own merits and disadvantages but I think there is a very small group of people that are uneasy with being videotaped at a grocery store by the grocery store yet a large group of people (once they think about what their tax dollars are being spent on) that would be uneasy about a government system centralizing this and putting individuals in charge of it.
What worked here is that businesses realized they each had a piece of the puzzle to solve a heinous crime. This commissioner's claim that technology exists that would have prevented these attacks had it been a government controlled and centralized effort is largely horseshit and what benefits that pretends to provide are insignificant compared to the possible evils it could unleash.
This actual study itself has at least one very good point that may not be obvious to people: our leadership's drive to promote the idea of a STEM shortage is primarily to justify guestworkers and allow them to add provisions like OPT-STEM extensions. Don't get me wrong, there is a sort of shadow brain drain war going on here that for a long time the West had easily been winning. UK, Germany, USA, etc had been sucking up the talent from India, China, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, you name it we took the brightest from it. And it was really really easy. And now Western leaders are kind of getting uncomfortable because, well, it's not really working in our favor anymore. I care that our politicians are being deceiving about this concept but I don't care about the "taking our jobs." In fact, I'm one of those meritocratic boogeymen that thinks our borders should be open with nothing more than a background check into your criminal record before you're granted entrance to the United States. Sure, some other stuff would need to change but that's an entirely different argument I'm not going to get into.
The main point of this study, however, is what the Post picked up on and is being reiterated: there is no shortage of STEM workers here in the US. And while that's likely true, the study (though comprehensive) doesn't really seem to ever step up to the plate and look at STEM versus non-STEM in the cases of employability and what those industries do for our GDP. Our leaders like Obama are operating on the assumption that a surplus in STEM workers is better than a perfectly equalized workforce with zero unemployment. They're not going to say that but my guess is that they're getting uneasy that China is mandating how many STEM workers it will produce and limiting the number of liberal arts degrees. The West is now uneasy that they might start losing the STEM war and they're trying to figure out how to scare their populations into letting them selectively brain drain other countries. A fake "massive shortage of STEM workers" is pretty much their only card so far.
it turned out that those who had played the game successfully were basically admitting that the only way to win was to act as an unpaid Quirky promoter to your friends. And more to the point, it meant that the winners would not be the best inventions, but rather just the inventions that met the minimum requirement of not being embarrasingly stupid, whose inventors were the best at playing the promotion game.
Shouldn't this be up in the summary? Why did I have to read down so far to get to this information that immediately tips me off that Quirky is like one of those terrible schemes where you start "your own" store selling shitty products to your friends who, if they start their own store, earn money for you further up the chain? I don't want to be that guy that thinks he's a genius for selling his friends vitamins to make them healthy while I get a negligible profit from a company that's making even more profit. And I don't want to be the guy that shows up at your house and asks you how my invention that you bought from Quirky is doing and I expect it to be prominently in use.
I'm a smart guy but those companies that prey on people like that... they just... *shudder*... are like some sort of vampire that hurts my brain when I contemplate what they do. And that's the feature on Slashdot today? At least let me know what's going on before I invest in reading this stuff. Clearly that should be your thesis.
First it's not quite clear by the title if you're looking for purely fiction so I will recommend George Gamow's "1, 2, 3... Infinity" for a pure science book that reads nicely (though be warned that some of the concepts like DNA are a little outdated). As for fiction, there's some great Bradbury like "Martian Chronicles" and I think Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov have some titles that might be accessible, Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron might be short enough but a bit too heavy... actually I felt like I've answered this question before and I have you should just read that thread.
If anonymous speech didn't exist, this wouldn't have happened.
That's not true at all. Anonymous speech has existed for a long time. Look at something as inane as graffiti, no newspaper is reprinting graffiti on its front page and saying "Now we know who killed JFK." Conversely, if graffiti contained something thought provoking or poetic in its own right, it might make the front page -- say if it was Banksy commenting on social problems.
The problem isn't anonymity, the problem is that people took what was being posted anonymously and gave it undue credibility. If you read about my experiences with drug abuse on Slashdot and you walk away with a life lesson, it doesn't really matter if those drug addiction stories are true or not. It would be nice to be able to verify it but it's not really necessary if what I'm saying rings true. But if I say "George W. Bush was behind 9/11" and you believe that without verifying it and then newspapers start to publish it, that's where the problems arise in an obvious manner.
The media was thirsty to break this story because of all the money it would bring them. Reddit and 4chan were all too happy to put on their inspector gadget hats and play the part of armchair detective. And that's fine, you can go make your subreddit all you want. The problem is when you start to act on it (harass the families) and when you start to disseminate it as "verified." Further problems arise when you then go back and delete and block all this stuff that implicates you as a liar because then your credibility is protected and you can always do it again.
The problem is anonymous speech.
No more so than the internet is the problem. Those are two tools used to carry out a witch hunt. Those aren't the problem, the problem are the irresponsible parties involved with propagating this from an internet forum to media and social networks. They preyed on confusion, hatred and fear without relying on law enforcement to do their job. Those are the real problems.
If you're going to reprint or reshare something as true and fact then you better verify your source. With anonymous speech, you can't verify your source so you should instead look for supporting evidence or not act on it at all and ignore it.
I was passed along three images following the bombing. I deleted them because they were completely unverifiable and had no attribution on them. And I turned out to be right.
As detailed in my last post on this topic, some responsible individual on Reddit named Thirtydegrees decided to give us a little background on what went down (I know it's long but it's worth the read for chronological context).
But wait! We can do better than that! Let's go look at/r/FindBostonBombers to see exactly what happened! Well, you can't. Oddly enough, the founder of that subreddit decided that he should just set it to private (here's a Reddit friendly vulgar meme of my request). Guess what? The founder of findbostonbombers doesn't want to be identified! Bizarre that he/she would create a subreddit devoted to identifying people and then themselves think that it's completely acceptable for their identities to be protected. Should you have a right to know who is accusing you of what? Well, you find out that you have done something wrong... time to own up to it, right? Right? No! Not in the futuristic amazing world of crowdsourcing!
Also hilarious is that they are saying the bombers have been found. Wrong. Whatever they did, they are still innocent until proven guilty! I am quite upset with everyone dropping the "alleged" word and referring to them as "the bombers" instead of "the suspects." They will get their day in court, that's how this stuff works. That's what lead to all the bad stuff that happened in/r/findbostonbombers. They went straight from "we have images that our untrained eye finds suspicious" straight to "these are the guys who killed innocent people, help us identify them and harass their families."
"The 4chan crowd, poring over images of the Boston marathon, identified two dark-skinned and bag-carrying suspects (among others). This was then picked up by The New York Post, who ran the image on Thursday's front page with the headline 'Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon.' And now, a completely innocent teen now finds himself scared to leave his home."
Yesterday on my facebook news feed I saw no less than three fake images that could have been mean pranks. And I didn't even see the one listed above. So now all the "crowd sourced" news folks are going to remove images of this man and this woman and this guy. The reason I didn't propagate these things was that they could have been anybody! You could play a mean prank on a friend/enemy if you have a picture of him with a backpack.
Also there are many fake first hand accounts but also some real first hand accounts in crowdsourced news. Ignore the former and herald the latter. People will think you're doing god's work simply because they didn't watch the shitfest that is crowdsourced news in the moments of pure confusion immediately following the event. The signal to noise ratio, the added noise, the fact that people can start leads anonymously, it all reeks of a really bad, lawless, unaccountable lynch mob.
So now post hoc you scrub out all those false leads and you clean up all the things you were wrong about. Then when that's done you point out the few leads you were right about. Then you go on and on at length about how 4chan and reddit are the new real sources of journalism. The mainstream press is busted to all hell (do not confuse this with a free pass or defense for them) but they know they'll be held accountable and the New York Post's gamble should really turn into a slander/libel suit with damages paid out to that young man. NYP made money off those 'exclusive' images at the expense of a person's safety and that should be a civil suit that should expose the NYP for what it really is: a piece of shit rag no better than a tabloid version of "crowd-sourced" news.
Who was it that initially fingered Salah Eddin Barhoum? You don't know and no one ever will because there is no integrity with how that lead was developed.
I can't seem to play the video and there's no transcript but I was impressed with Jon Stewart's drawing and quartering of CNN's coverage. He hit the nail on the head of what "journalistic integrity" has fallen to. Jon Stewart was saying CNN had an 'exclusive' story on the arrest... exclusive because there was no arrest.
Get on Twitter, say some stuff that sounds legit. Sit back and watch it retweeted, then it'll hit the blogs and finally the 'news.' And all they have to do is try to track down the original source (you) but they seldom do. And that's what "crowdsourced" news has come to. Whenever someone heralds the amazing results from crowdsourced news, it's always post hoc cherry picked results of an actual first hand account or someone who got it right. They seldom look at the entire volume of tweets prior to what we know is true and what is conjecture/wrong.
Your book The Sun, the Genome and the Internet was published in 1999. In the past 15 years, what specific progresses have been made towards your vision of a future in this book? Have we taken any divergent roads? Have there been any unexpected blockers that have arisen in that time? Are you still that optimistic about our future?
I notice that you've long had an interest in climate studies and have proposed novel ideas for removing carbon dioxide. Are there any good texts on the current state of engineering solutions to the symptoms of the problem of anthropogenic global warming? Also, in regards to engineering fast growing plants to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, wouldn't these be a scourge on the land and interfere with crops and food sources much like algal blooms and kudzu?
Why did you take a fellowship at Cornell and stay in the United States? There's plenty of world renowned institutions in the United Kingdom and you were a pilot in the RAF -- what appealed to you about the United States? Do you have any comments or opinions on H1-Bs and the United States' current stance on immigration?
When weighted against population, it appears that there are fewer "Renaissance men/women" than there have been historically. I've heard many regular people opine about how fields require more depth and learning to make progress in them but, as a polymath yourself, what is your opinion on it?
It was detected by seismic networks. Note that the most common reason for "earthquakes" at zero depth is a quarry explosion, so that's how they initially labeled it. They've since changed it to read simply "Explosion". Click the "did you feel it link" and you can see that some people felt it as if it were an earthquake. Strangely, they are north of the event. Either the waves propogated that way, or people south of the event saw the cloud and realized it was an explosion not a quake.
Here is how it looked dangerously close (warning, the people taking this video were way too close so if you can't stomach listening to young girl in complete fear, don't watch that video all the way through) I'm guessing and hoping those people are okay being that the video is on YouTube.
Bitcoin is already down to $90, where is that $1000 bitcoin troll at now?... [all the early folks are] cashing out now and laughing all the way to the bank though.
One of my childhood friends does internal auditing for a large bank. One time I asked him what his biggest fears were (having been able to look at all the books) and he told me at the time it was actually price anarchy. This was around the 2008 time frame and he was trying to describe a situation where nobody knows how much money to charge for something. I later heard a This American Life episode that details life in Brazil when something like this happens.
So my friend told me that his biggest fears are when you go into a market one day and eggs are 68 cents a dozen and you go in the next day and they're $5.92 a dozen... and you can go to the store management and they're looking at some graphs at the beginning of each day to set their prices but they're doing guesswork because the money fluctuates so quickly. So my friend's real fear was that there's some point where that swings wildly out of control and -- similar to the bank runs that happened before regulation -- weird swings cause people to act erratically and irrationally. And those actions cause the swings to get even wilder and suddenly you have price anarchy where nobody knows what anything is worth at a given point in time. The funny part is that on some days he would watch the terminals and freak out and go withdraw as much money as he could from the ATM to hedge into some liquid assets since he kept everything in the bank. That amused me because by using inside information he was performing what were erratic behavioral patterns... but I guess that's another discussion.
Anyway, yeah, back to Bitcoin... if you want some entertainment, keep this tab open throughout the day. So many people are gaming Bitcoin right now that it makes for an excellent show! Behold, the completely unregulated market!
Why not rip the games and give the kids a link to scummvm?
I do when I can. It's great, those guys are doing god's work and I implore anybody who could even foresee the use of it to kick them a couple bucks. But the fact is that it doesn't cover all the games I grew up playing like it only handles half the Dr. Brain series which that first game was fundamental in my understanding of logic and programming. And when I said LucasArts, I was mostly talking about X-Wing and Tie Fighter -- which I don't think used the SCI engine and I do not believe are available on scummvm. I think they can be run in a Win7 compatibility mode but I'm trying to sever Windows entirely from my dependencies.
It's more so a consumer protection and ethical question: how are we preserving that which we have valid licenses to? What is a company's responsibility (if any) to aid you in moving forward with those games?
Possible topics I'd be interested in considering are things like: should companies make an ethical move to include licensing terms that state they will open up source code they control if they go bankrupt? Should it be viewed as anti-ethical to shelve source code and let a product decay? To what level is that? I'd like to see a movement in the software world towards a future where we do not have "lost" ideas and art that were sacrificed to default greed at literally no benefit to their original owners/creators. It just feels wrong to think back on all the software I've used and realize that anything older than 6-ish years is very nearly completely gone. Games are the obvious example but I'm talking everything, even the stupid little versions of music players and instant messengers I used in college.
No one's asking these questions but here we are, hung up on the symptoms... long live (literally) open source, I guess.
What's the best way to make sure your "digital inheritance" gets passed down?
Put it on physical media and give it to them. Or remove the DRM (if any) and put it on a disc and give it to them. Or (if you're okay with it) move it to a third party pay system like Google Drive where you can make it readable to them. Keep in mind that in doing so you will almost certainly be violating the usage agreement you clicked on with the distributors your got that music from -- in some cases you are violating it two or three different ways in that scenario.
This story wasn't true but you'd essentially be facing the same obstacles.
Based on principle that I don't want to get into, I refuse to purchase anything from Apple. So I don't have to deal with that problem. I do make purchase on Amazon, however, whenever a Big Bach box of 100 Bach songs goes on sale for $1. So what I do is I download them all in mp3 and put them out on a redundant SAN in my house. I do this with all books, music and movies -- if I buy the CD or DVD I rip them out to this. If I get a DRM'd ebook, I free it with calibre and put it out there. Pretty sure I'm violating a ton of shit doing this but... meh:
2.2 Restrictions. You must comply with all applicable copyright and other laws in your use of the Music Content. Except as set forth in Section 2.1 above, you may not redistribute, transmit, assign, sell, broadcast, rent, share, lend, modify, adapt, edit, license or otherwise transfer or use the Music Content.
Every five years or so I upgrade the drives to medium quality drives that are larger for more storage. So this machine running as an internal server to my home is unencrypted and I can access it with my PS3, Xbox or computer. I will simply hand over that machine and drives to my offspring in my final will and testament.
You should honestly still be asking about MMORPG accounts, apps and games that you paid for... I'm sad that I cannot give my children my old Lucas arts games. The media is archaic and my "license" with the company is meaningless more and more each day as Disney dismantles and guts LucasArts. I wrote a journal entry about this in 2006 and it was on the front page but that discussion seems to have been lost to the ages. I'm certainly not the first person to puzzle over this quandary and it will only snowball further and further.
If you click the link to the research at the bottom, there is a summary available that reads:
High mountains may serve as “cold traps” for persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and ice cores can provide long-term records of atmospheric deposition of pollutants. In this study, DDT, hexachlorocyclohexanes (HCHs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in an ice core from East Rongbuk Glacier were analyzed and the deposition fluxes of these pollutants were investigated. Concentrations of total DDTs reached maxima of approximately 2 ng l1 in mid-1970s, which is corresponding to the peak of malaria cases in India (in 1976). The decrease of DDT concentration after 1990s was in-line with the ban of DDT in India (in 1989). High level of -HCH was observed in early 1970s and it showed a decrease to undetectable level at the end of 1990s, which is in agreement with the period when India banned the usage of HCH (in 1997). Concentrations of total PAHs sharply increased after 1990 and the peak (approximately 100 ng l1) was found at the end of 1990s, when India entered the rapid industrialization (urbanization). PAHs in the ice core are dominantly pyrogenic in source, and are mainly from incomplete combustion of coal and biomass burning. Good correlations among concentrations of PAHs, nssSO42 and microparticles in snow pit samples showed that the origin of the PAHs and nssSO42 is often the same and they may be absorbed by particles and transported to high mountain regions by atmospheric circulation.
(please note that Slashdot does not support the superscript I just copied and pasted)
"When U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate"
Got to wonder about an article that starts out this way. Grant you, I haven't gone back and reviewed the video in a while. Still, I'm pretty sure what he said was that about 47% of the population wouldn't be interested in him and a platform for a smaller government.
Romney: There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. And he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that's what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like. I mean, when you ask those peoplewe do all these polls—I find it amazing—we poll all these people, see where you stand on the polls, but 45 percent of the people will go with a Republican, and 48 or 4
I did enjoy, however, how you removed the inflammatory notion that "there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it" and replaced it with "a platform for a smaller government."
It's amusing to call out one summary as being inaccurate and replace it with your own inaccuracies. I found the line you quoted from the summary more accurate about Romney's "giving up on them" attitude than your "they refuse a small government."
Every campaign focuses their attention on those votes they're most likely to get. You didn't see Obama spending a lot of his campaign in states that weren't likely to go his way no matter what. Certainly he had his strategy sessions that had they been publicly released wouldn't be especially flattering either.
So quote them. Go ahead, you don't think he's mindful of what he says to a large group of people? Your accusations that Obama was just as bad as Romney are backed up with absolutely zero citations.
Will ocean acidification kill all ocean life?
No. However, many scientists think that ocean acidification will lead to important changes in marine ecosystems.
As well as:
Isn't it better that we sacrifice the oceans and let them keep on taking up CO2 and buffering climate?
Ocean acidification and climate change are two sides of the same coin. Both are direct consequences of anthropogenic CO2 emissions and cannot be separated from each other.
Those are just the beginning of longer answers but there's a lot of data on that FAQ if you're genuinely interested in this.
Something that has often perplexed me is fossil distribution through time and tectonic shifts. For example, one can go to the middle of North America and find sea fossils. So, perhaps with your knowledge of what happens to things in the deep, are there untold fossils lying under the seabed floor? Perhaps a localized population of what once used to be land animals situated such that we have never seen these fossils at the vast bottom of the Pacific Ocean? If you can fill me in on why this is or isn't possible (I have no idea what plate shifts do to the top layer or what effects untold pressure has on fossils), I would be extremely interested! Thanks!
You've worked in television, what are the pros and cons in the deltas between Netflix and one of the big networks/cable goliaths? Do they still goad you into putting a cliff hanger at the end of the episode so the couch potato continues to veg-out and just hit 'play' on the next installment? Are you glad you don't need to plan for commercial bumps? Any dark sides to being paid by Netflix?
Time travel is a sticky area in Sci-Fi stories and is so pervasive it has caught the eye of Chinese censors. Since H.G. Wells it's been a major staple of sci-fi movies and has become quite pervasive from fantasy books like Harry Potter to television series like Lost and Futurama. Even modern Sci-Fi stories like Stephen Baxter can still win awards for novels based on time travel. I'm not incredibly familiar with your work so I don't know if you've relied on time travel yet, however, I would like to hear your take on it. Is it a tired cliched mechanism that is overused or do you still find yourself thoroughly entertained with the possibilities it presents? If you wrote it, would/did you go infinite parallel universes or single universe with time travel paradox correcting crumple zones?
Slashdot Mirror
What we learned from Boston was that there is no reason for centralized surveillance. Privately owned cameras (around businesses) provided enough coverage. And the police were then able to provide warrants to acquire the video. It worked perfectly from a privacy standpoint and in providing necessary information to law enforcement.
To clarify his point (yours is valid but you're not addressing his claims fully):
Could more cameras in New York City help prevent attacks like the one at the Boston Marathon? That's what Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says the NYPD is looking into.
The department already uses so-called smart cameras that hone in on unattended bags, and set off alarms.
Emphasis mine. I totally agree with you but the argument here is that they could prevent attacks. I find that argument specious and foolhardy in that a bomb could be disguised as anything and a suicide bomber (as these individuals clearly had no intention of surviving a police encounter) would simply continue to wear the explosive into the crowd. I think they need to reevaluate what little benefit it would provide against the massive issues and rights violations it could cause system-wide.
Kelly dismisses critics who argue that increased cameras threaten privacy rights, giving governments the ability to monitor people in public spaces.
“The people who complain about it, I would say, are a relatively small number of folks, because the genie is out of the bottle,” Kelly said. “People realize that everywhere you go now, your picture is taken.”
There's a stark difference between a store knowing I am in their store and a centralized location storing all of my visits. And then there's an even further jump when it's a government doing that. I'm fine that I go into Gamestop and Gamestop gets tapes of me looking at games. I'm fine that I go to Chipotle and there's a camera on the cash register. I'm fine that I then walk by the entrance to an electronics store and I'm on their cameras passing by. That's cool, if they want to put together the odd footage they have of me going there, I'm not really concerned about that. And that's the stuff that ended up helping catch the Boston suspects.
I'm not okay when one centralized location stores that data and my complete movements can be tracked. If a Gamestop employee got my address from a purchase and wanted to search my house, he'd have only the time I'm on camera to do it. If my whole trip is detailed, it could be done covertly quite easily.
Decentralizing the stores of this video information has its own merits and disadvantages but I think there is a very small group of people that are uneasy with being videotaped at a grocery store by the grocery store yet a large group of people (once they think about what their tax dollars are being spent on) that would be uneasy about a government system centralizing this and putting individuals in charge of it.
What worked here is that businesses realized they each had a piece of the puzzle to solve a heinous crime. This commissioner's claim that technology exists that would have prevented these attacks had it been a government controlled and centralized effort is largely horseshit and what benefits that pretends to provide are insignificant compared to the possible evils it could unleash.
By the way, if this topic interests you then you should be watching Germany closely.
This actual study itself has at least one very good point that may not be obvious to people: our leadership's drive to promote the idea of a STEM shortage is primarily to justify guestworkers and allow them to add provisions like OPT-STEM extensions. Don't get me wrong, there is a sort of shadow brain drain war going on here that for a long time the West had easily been winning. UK, Germany, USA, etc had been sucking up the talent from India, China, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, you name it we took the brightest from it. And it was really really easy. And now Western leaders are kind of getting uncomfortable because, well, it's not really working in our favor anymore. I care that our politicians are being deceiving about this concept but I don't care about the "taking our jobs." In fact, I'm one of those meritocratic boogeymen that thinks our borders should be open with nothing more than a background check into your criminal record before you're granted entrance to the United States. Sure, some other stuff would need to change but that's an entirely different argument I'm not going to get into.
The main point of this study, however, is what the Post picked up on and is being reiterated: there is no shortage of STEM workers here in the US. And while that's likely true, the study (though comprehensive) doesn't really seem to ever step up to the plate and look at STEM versus non-STEM in the cases of employability and what those industries do for our GDP. Our leaders like Obama are operating on the assumption that a surplus in STEM workers is better than a perfectly equalized workforce with zero unemployment. They're not going to say that but my guess is that they're getting uneasy that China is mandating how many STEM workers it will produce and limiting the number of liberal arts degrees. The West is now uneasy that they might start losing the STEM war and they're trying to figure out how to scare their populations into letting them selectively brain drain other countries. A fake "massive shortage of STEM workers" is pretty much their only card so far.
it turned out that those who had played the game successfully were basically admitting that the only way to win was to act as an unpaid Quirky promoter to your friends. And more to the point, it meant that the winners would not be the best inventions, but rather just the inventions that met the minimum requirement of not being embarrasingly stupid, whose inventors were the best at playing the promotion game.
Shouldn't this be up in the summary? Why did I have to read down so far to get to this information that immediately tips me off that Quirky is like one of those terrible schemes where you start "your own" store selling shitty products to your friends who, if they start their own store, earn money for you further up the chain? I don't want to be that guy that thinks he's a genius for selling his friends vitamins to make them healthy while I get a negligible profit from a company that's making even more profit. And I don't want to be the guy that shows up at your house and asks you how my invention that you bought from Quirky is doing and I expect it to be prominently in use.
... they just ... *shudder* ... are like some sort of vampire that hurts my brain when I contemplate what they do. And that's the feature on Slashdot today? At least let me know what's going on before I invest in reading this stuff. Clearly that should be your thesis.
I'm a smart guy but those companies that prey on people like that
First it's not quite clear by the title if you're looking for purely fiction so I will recommend George Gamow's "1, 2, 3... Infinity" for a pure science book that reads nicely (though be warned that some of the concepts like DNA are a little outdated). As for fiction, there's some great Bradbury like "Martian Chronicles" and I think Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov have some titles that might be accessible, Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron might be short enough but a bit too heavy ... actually I felt like I've answered this question before and I have you should just read that thread.
If anonymous speech didn't exist, this wouldn't have happened.
That's not true at all. Anonymous speech has existed for a long time. Look at something as inane as graffiti, no newspaper is reprinting graffiti on its front page and saying "Now we know who killed JFK." Conversely, if graffiti contained something thought provoking or poetic in its own right, it might make the front page -- say if it was Banksy commenting on social problems.
The problem isn't anonymity, the problem is that people took what was being posted anonymously and gave it undue credibility. If you read about my experiences with drug abuse on Slashdot and you walk away with a life lesson, it doesn't really matter if those drug addiction stories are true or not. It would be nice to be able to verify it but it's not really necessary if what I'm saying rings true. But if I say "George W. Bush was behind 9/11" and you believe that without verifying it and then newspapers start to publish it, that's where the problems arise in an obvious manner.
The media was thirsty to break this story because of all the money it would bring them. Reddit and 4chan were all too happy to put on their inspector gadget hats and play the part of armchair detective. And that's fine, you can go make your subreddit all you want. The problem is when you start to act on it (harass the families) and when you start to disseminate it as "verified." Further problems arise when you then go back and delete and block all this stuff that implicates you as a liar because then your credibility is protected and you can always do it again.
The problem is anonymous speech.
No more so than the internet is the problem. Those are two tools used to carry out a witch hunt. Those aren't the problem, the problem are the irresponsible parties involved with propagating this from an internet forum to media and social networks. They preyed on confusion, hatred and fear without relying on law enforcement to do their job. Those are the real problems.
If you're going to reprint or reshare something as true and fact then you better verify your source. With anonymous speech, you can't verify your source so you should instead look for supporting evidence or not act on it at all and ignore it.
I was passed along three images following the bombing. I deleted them because they were completely unverifiable and had no attribution on them. And I turned out to be right.
As detailed in my last post on this topic, some responsible individual on Reddit named Thirtydegrees decided to give us a little background on what went down (I know it's long but it's worth the read for chronological context).
/r/FindBostonBombers to see exactly what happened! Well, you can't. Oddly enough, the founder of that subreddit decided that he should just set it to private (here's a Reddit friendly vulgar meme of my request). Guess what? The founder of findbostonbombers doesn't want to be identified! Bizarre that he/she would create a subreddit devoted to identifying people and then themselves think that it's completely acceptable for their identities to be protected. Should you have a right to know who is accusing you of what? Well, you find out that you have done something wrong ... time to own up to it, right? Right? No! Not in the futuristic amazing world of crowdsourcing!
/r/findbostonbombers. They went straight from "we have images that our untrained eye finds suspicious" straight to "these are the guys who killed innocent people, help us identify them and harass their families."
But wait! We can do better than that! Let's go look at
Also hilarious is that they are saying the bombers have been found. Wrong. Whatever they did, they are still innocent until proven guilty! I am quite upset with everyone dropping the "alleged" word and referring to them as "the bombers" instead of "the suspects." They will get their day in court, that's how this stuff works. That's what lead to all the bad stuff that happened in
We live in an era of digital lynch mobs.
"The 4chan crowd, poring over images of the Boston marathon, identified two dark-skinned and bag-carrying suspects (among others). This was then picked up by The New York Post, who ran the image on Thursday's front page with the headline 'Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon.' And now, a completely innocent teen now finds himself scared to leave his home."
Yesterday on my facebook news feed I saw no less than three fake images that could have been mean pranks. And I didn't even see the one listed above. So now all the "crowd sourced" news folks are going to remove images of this man and this woman and this guy. The reason I didn't propagate these things was that they could have been anybody! You could play a mean prank on a friend/enemy if you have a picture of him with a backpack.
Also there are many fake first hand accounts but also some real first hand accounts in crowdsourced news. Ignore the former and herald the latter. People will think you're doing god's work simply because they didn't watch the shitfest that is crowdsourced news in the moments of pure confusion immediately following the event. The signal to noise ratio, the added noise, the fact that people can start leads anonymously, it all reeks of a really bad, lawless, unaccountable lynch mob.
So now post hoc you scrub out all those false leads and you clean up all the things you were wrong about. Then when that's done you point out the few leads you were right about. Then you go on and on at length about how 4chan and reddit are the new real sources of journalism. The mainstream press is busted to all hell (do not confuse this with a free pass or defense for them) but they know they'll be held accountable and the New York Post's gamble should really turn into a slander/libel suit with damages paid out to that young man. NYP made money off those 'exclusive' images at the expense of a person's safety and that should be a civil suit that should expose the NYP for what it really is: a piece of shit rag no better than a tabloid version of "crowd-sourced" news.
Who was it that initially fingered Salah Eddin Barhoum? You don't know and no one ever will because there is no integrity with how that lead was developed.
I can't seem to play the video and there's no transcript but I was impressed with Jon Stewart's drawing and quartering of CNN's coverage. He hit the nail on the head of what "journalistic integrity" has fallen to. Jon Stewart was saying CNN had an 'exclusive' story on the arrest ... exclusive because there was no arrest.
Get on Twitter, say some stuff that sounds legit. Sit back and watch it retweeted, then it'll hit the blogs and finally the 'news.' And all they have to do is try to track down the original source (you) but they seldom do. And that's what "crowdsourced" news has come to. Whenever someone heralds the amazing results from crowdsourced news, it's always post hoc cherry picked results of an actual first hand account or someone who got it right. They seldom look at the entire volume of tweets prior to what we know is true and what is conjecture/wrong.
Your book The Sun, the Genome and the Internet was published in 1999. In the past 15 years, what specific progresses have been made towards your vision of a future in this book? Have we taken any divergent roads? Have there been any unexpected blockers that have arisen in that time? Are you still that optimistic about our future?
I notice that you've long had an interest in climate studies and have proposed novel ideas for removing carbon dioxide. Are there any good texts on the current state of engineering solutions to the symptoms of the problem of anthropogenic global warming? Also, in regards to engineering fast growing plants to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, wouldn't these be a scourge on the land and interfere with crops and food sources much like algal blooms and kudzu?
Why did you take a fellowship at Cornell and stay in the United States? There's plenty of world renowned institutions in the United Kingdom and you were a pilot in the RAF -- what appealed to you about the United States? Do you have any comments or opinions on H1-Bs and the United States' current stance on immigration?
When weighted against population, it appears that there are fewer "Renaissance men/women" than there have been historically. I've heard many regular people opine about how fields require more depth and learning to make progress in them but, as a polymath yourself, what is your opinion on it?
It was detected by seismic networks. Note that the most common reason for "earthquakes" at zero depth is a quarry explosion, so that's how they initially labeled it. They've since changed it to read simply "Explosion". Click the "did you feel it link" and you can see that some people felt it as if it were an earthquake. Strangely, they are north of the event. Either the waves propogated that way, or people south of the event saw the cloud and realized it was an explosion not a quake.
Here is how it looked dangerously close (warning, the people taking this video were way too close so if you can't stomach listening to young girl in complete fear, don't watch that video all the way through) I'm guessing and hoping those people are okay being that the video is on YouTube.
Bitcoin is already down to $90, where is that $1000 bitcoin troll at now? ... [all the early folks are] cashing out now and laughing all the way to the bank though.
Sounds like you just answered your own question.
One of my childhood friends does internal auditing for a large bank. One time I asked him what his biggest fears were (having been able to look at all the books) and he told me at the time it was actually price anarchy. This was around the 2008 time frame and he was trying to describe a situation where nobody knows how much money to charge for something. I later heard a This American Life episode that details life in Brazil when something like this happens.
... and you can go to the store management and they're looking at some graphs at the beginning of each day to set their prices but they're doing guesswork because the money fluctuates so quickly. So my friend's real fear was that there's some point where that swings wildly out of control and -- similar to the bank runs that happened before regulation -- weird swings cause people to act erratically and irrationally. And those actions cause the swings to get even wilder and suddenly you have price anarchy where nobody knows what anything is worth at a given point in time. The funny part is that on some days he would watch the terminals and freak out and go withdraw as much money as he could from the ATM to hedge into some liquid assets since he kept everything in the bank. That amused me because by using inside information he was performing what were erratic behavioral patterns ... but I guess that's another discussion.
... if you want some entertainment, keep this tab open throughout the day. So many people are gaming Bitcoin right now that it makes for an excellent show! Behold, the completely unregulated market!
So my friend told me that his biggest fears are when you go into a market one day and eggs are 68 cents a dozen and you go in the next day and they're $5.92 a dozen
Anyway, yeah, back to Bitcoin
X-wing and Tie Fighter should run fine in DOSBox. That runs on Linux just fine.
I don't think these companies care, nor will they ever.
You underestimate the power of the Disney side ... :-(
Why not rip the games and give the kids a link to scummvm?
I do when I can. It's great, those guys are doing god's work and I implore anybody who could even foresee the use of it to kick them a couple bucks. But the fact is that it doesn't cover all the games I grew up playing like it only handles half the Dr. Brain series which that first game was fundamental in my understanding of logic and programming. And when I said LucasArts, I was mostly talking about X-Wing and Tie Fighter -- which I don't think used the SCI engine and I do not believe are available on scummvm. I think they can be run in a Win7 compatibility mode but I'm trying to sever Windows entirely from my dependencies.
... long live (literally) open source, I guess.
It's more so a consumer protection and ethical question: how are we preserving that which we have valid licenses to? What is a company's responsibility (if any) to aid you in moving forward with those games?
Possible topics I'd be interested in considering are things like: should companies make an ethical move to include licensing terms that state they will open up source code they control if they go bankrupt? Should it be viewed as anti-ethical to shelve source code and let a product decay? To what level is that? I'd like to see a movement in the software world towards a future where we do not have "lost" ideas and art that were sacrificed to default greed at literally no benefit to their original owners/creators. It just feels wrong to think back on all the software I've used and realize that anything older than 6-ish years is very nearly completely gone. Games are the obvious example but I'm talking everything, even the stupid little versions of music players and instant messengers I used in college.
No one's asking these questions but here we are, hung up on the symptoms
What's the best way to make sure your "digital inheritance" gets passed down?
Put it on physical media and give it to them. Or remove the DRM (if any) and put it on a disc and give it to them. Or (if you're okay with it) move it to a third party pay system like Google Drive where you can make it readable to them. Keep in mind that in doing so you will almost certainly be violating the usage agreement you clicked on with the distributors your got that music from -- in some cases you are violating it two or three different ways in that scenario.
... meh:
This story wasn't true but you'd essentially be facing the same obstacles.
Based on principle that I don't want to get into, I refuse to purchase anything from Apple. So I don't have to deal with that problem. I do make purchase on Amazon, however, whenever a Big Bach box of 100 Bach songs goes on sale for $1. So what I do is I download them all in mp3 and put them out on a redundant SAN in my house. I do this with all books, music and movies -- if I buy the CD or DVD I rip them out to this. If I get a DRM'd ebook, I free it with calibre and put it out there. Pretty sure I'm violating a ton of shit doing this but
2.2 Restrictions. You must comply with all applicable copyright and other laws in your use of the Music Content. Except as set forth in Section 2.1 above, you may not redistribute, transmit, assign, sell, broadcast, rent, share, lend, modify, adapt, edit, license or otherwise transfer or use the Music Content.
Every five years or so I upgrade the drives to medium quality drives that are larger for more storage. So this machine running as an internal server to my home is unencrypted and I can access it with my PS3, Xbox or computer. I will simply hand over that machine and drives to my offspring in my final will and testament.
... I'm sad that I cannot give my children my old Lucas arts games. The media is archaic and my "license" with the company is meaningless more and more each day as Disney dismantles and guts LucasArts. I wrote a journal entry about this in 2006 and it was on the front page but that discussion seems to have been lost to the ages. I'm certainly not the first person to puzzle over this quandary and it will only snowball further and further.
You should honestly still be asking about MMORPG accounts, apps and games that you paid for
High mountains may serve as “cold traps” for persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and ice cores can provide long-term records of atmospheric deposition of pollutants. In this study, DDT, hexachlorocyclohexanes (HCHs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in an ice core from East Rongbuk Glacier were analyzed and the deposition fluxes of these pollutants were investigated. Concentrations of total DDTs reached maxima of approximately 2 ng l1 in mid-1970s, which is corresponding to the peak of malaria cases in India (in 1976). The decrease of DDT concentration after 1990s was in-line with the ban of DDT in India (in 1989). High level of -HCH was observed in early 1970s and it showed a decrease to undetectable level at the end of 1990s, which is in agreement with the period when India banned the usage of HCH (in 1997). Concentrations of total PAHs sharply increased after 1990 and the peak (approximately 100 ng l1) was found at the end of 1990s, when India entered the rapid industrialization (urbanization). PAHs in the ice core are dominantly pyrogenic in source, and are mainly from incomplete combustion of coal and biomass burning. Good correlations among concentrations of PAHs, nssSO42 and microparticles in snow pit samples showed that the origin of the PAHs and nssSO42 is often the same and they may be absorbed by particles and transported to high mountain regions by atmospheric circulation.
(please note that Slashdot does not support the superscript I just copied and pasted)
Also, my google fu turned up one of the original research articles that appears to be hosted for non commercial purposes only.
"When U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate"
Got to wonder about an article that starts out this way. Grant you, I haven't gone back and reviewed the video in a while. Still, I'm pretty sure what he said was that about 47% of the population wouldn't be interested in him and a platform for a smaller government.
Well, after five seconds of googling I found:
Romney: There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. And he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that's what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like. I mean, when you ask those peoplewe do all these polls—I find it amazing—we poll all these people, see where you stand on the polls, but 45 percent of the people will go with a Republican, and 48 or 4
I did enjoy, however, how you removed the inflammatory notion that "there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it" and replaced it with "a platform for a smaller government."
It's amusing to call out one summary as being inaccurate and replace it with your own inaccuracies. I found the line you quoted from the summary more accurate about Romney's "giving up on them" attitude than your "they refuse a small government."
Every campaign focuses their attention on those votes they're most likely to get. You didn't see Obama spending a lot of his campaign in states that weren't likely to go his way no matter what. Certainly he had his strategy sessions that had they been publicly released wouldn't be especially flattering either.
So quote them. Go ahead, you don't think he's mindful of what he says to a large group of people? Your accusations that Obama was just as bad as Romney are backed up with absolutely zero citations.
Have you noticed any affects of acidification of the world's oceans?
Well, it would be interested to hear his first hand accounts (if any) but his institute has a page devoted to it with a FAQ that may provide some more information on observables such as:
Will ocean acidification kill all ocean life?
No. However, many scientists think that ocean acidification will lead to important changes in marine ecosystems.
As well as:
Isn't it better that we sacrifice the oceans and let them keep on taking up CO2 and buffering climate?
Ocean acidification and climate change are two sides of the same coin. Both are direct consequences of anthropogenic CO2 emissions and cannot be separated from each other.
Those are just the beginning of longer answers but there's a lot of data on that FAQ if you're genuinely interested in this.
Something that has often perplexed me is fossil distribution through time and tectonic shifts. For example, one can go to the middle of North America and find sea fossils. So, perhaps with your knowledge of what happens to things in the deep, are there untold fossils lying under the seabed floor? Perhaps a localized population of what once used to be land animals situated such that we have never seen these fossils at the vast bottom of the Pacific Ocean? If you can fill me in on why this is or isn't possible (I have no idea what plate shifts do to the top layer or what effects untold pressure has on fossils), I would be extremely interested! Thanks!
You've worked in television, what are the pros and cons in the deltas between Netflix and one of the big networks/cable goliaths? Do they still goad you into putting a cliff hanger at the end of the episode so the couch potato continues to veg-out and just hit 'play' on the next installment? Are you glad you don't need to plan for commercial bumps? Any dark sides to being paid by Netflix?
Time travel is a sticky area in Sci-Fi stories and is so pervasive it has caught the eye of Chinese censors. Since H.G. Wells it's been a major staple of sci-fi movies and has become quite pervasive from fantasy books like Harry Potter to television series like Lost and Futurama. Even modern Sci-Fi stories like Stephen Baxter can still win awards for novels based on time travel. I'm not incredibly familiar with your work so I don't know if you've relied on time travel yet, however, I would like to hear your take on it. Is it a tired cliched mechanism that is overused or do you still find yourself thoroughly entertained with the possibilities it presents? If you wrote it, would/did you go infinite parallel universes or single universe with time travel paradox correcting crumple zones?