> One factor that made Aaron Swartz's behavior so reprehensible was that he _kept doing it_, apparently at full capacity, > despite the obvious consequences to JSTOR and to MIT.
If you read JSTOR's own account, available on their website, Swartz continued to download between September and January, but without them noticing it. Somehow that makes me believe that he modified his behavior (including throttled bandwidth) so that only a new kind of analysis on JSTOR's part (probably statistical) gave him away.
> But I do believe that was already planned when Aaron got caught.
Obviously I cannot refute this, nor can you back this up with hard evidence.
> JSTOR is a library service, a non-profit. They'll do what they can _afford_ to do to make the information available.
They continued to pursue Swartz in January not because his downloading was costing them too much money, but because they feared that what he would do with the documents would cost them their goodwill with their upstream publishing partners. They could well have been correct (no one can know exactly what Swartz's long-term plans were). It seems pretty obvious to me that JSTOR, albeit a non-profit, was also an ossified bureaucracy, and whatever changes have happened since the incident are due to their management suddenly understanding that the way things "worked" ten years ago was no longer exactly what their users (or society) expected now (e.g., when they were founded, 99.9% of anyone looking for academic papers through the net were anyway academics/geeks --- now, I expect that a good segment of the general browsing population is also interested).
> If you persist in this belief that committing a DDOS or other disabling attacks is OK
Judging from your Slashdot ID, both you, and I, then, have participated in many actions which you seem to consider DDoS attacks --- namely, Slashdottings. I wonder if you'd be OK, then, that you should be charged with felonies for each and every one of those actions? Oh, I forgot --- you don't have to worry --- you're not someone who has a public presence so that convicting you could be politically worthwhile.
As for JSTOR, I find it telling that somehow, suddenly, they decided that it wouldn't ruin their business model if they made access free to the 6% of their database which anyway was in the public domain. They're not Elsevier, for sure, but it sure seems that Swartz did accomplish forcing JSTOR to reconsider what might be better for society, yet still OK to enable their non-profit business to continue running.
Steven Chu was just recently in that post, and he is a Nobel laureate. Could this mean that "technocratic" has nothing to do with anything (except, possibly, someone on the net trying to get more page views)?
This depends, they might have some kind of contract with local government which obligates them to provide service. In that case not servicing prime numbered addresses would probably not be a crime, but would be actionable in a civil suit.
> Those who wrote math text and teach math are not math experts. They are teaching experts. Their math may not be right.
This makes no sense to me. Please explain. Do you actually believe it's better to more skillfully teach wrong facts compared to less skillfully teach correct facts? Or were you talking about things like, we would only confuse second graders with negative numbers, so when teaching them, we'll just implicitly assume that negative numbers don't exist.
Holy shit. That has to be the only room in my primary school which I still remember --- and I can't begin to think about how much I learned from books I found there (including one on introductory electronics with explanations of resistors, capacitors and inductors!). I'm not sure, however, if the copy of Asimov's "Realm of Algebra" which really kickstarted my math knowledge came from that library or the public library, though...
I think he meant it with regards to wisnoskij's post --- as in it would be completely retarded to mark as wrong a student who prefered, for example, the OLIF method, even though said student always got the correct answer using his method.
Personally, I had never heard of "foil" as being any kind of theorem whatsoever in math, BTW. Did I miss something? I can see that other kinds of theorems apply to prove that it gives the correct answer, though...
OK, being pedantic about syntax I can understand, a necessary tool for acquiring knowledge is an ability to learn and use a shared language of concepts for the purpose of communication.
But being pedantic about methods? This just seems to be a symptom reflecting the failings of the education system. I can see only two justifications for this: either the teacher has such a limited grasp of the material that they cannot understand any deviation from the "method" (or the same thing in a different "dimension", possibly they feel they have a lack of authority and cannot allow students any freedom for fear of losing the minimum amount of control necessary to do their job), or it is to give the message (either implicitly or explicitly) to the student that the purpose of the education system is indoctrination, rather than the inculcation of knowledge and the tools necessary for self-education.
I am just thankful that I didn't have your math teachers, while growing up... although I do remember having to explain, to one of my teachers, my personal method of long multiplication which minimized and postponed the necessity for remembering carries until the final summation step, by doubling the number of rows before that step.
And when this happens "on a computer", it should be considered to be the same as physical destruction? I'm all for not making new law for "on a computer", but, well, I don't think that's a good idea (since in many cases the computer user is not the only one controlling his computer --- segue to NSA from GCSB).
I looked at it when Technocrat closed down, but it was/got, well, too weird even for me... Even Technocrat was a bit ingrown, kuro5hin was too much like that.
OTOH, it's been a looooong while. Maybe I should give it a second look.
Wow, this stuff got republished in 2001-2002? I loved reading it when I was a kid, but can't imagine enjoying it that much if I read it now, nor that my own children would be at all interested. Some things just have to be experienced at the right age and in the right context, I think.
Well, well, maybe this comment does have something to do with the new beta (omega?) design, after all...
> My understanding is that during a classified, closed door session > with committeee members, the actual truth came out.
How would you know? The members of the Intelligence Committees are clueless/corrupt, and even less reliable sources of information than the intel brass.
> Sometimes, you are required by law to lie, even to Congress
Oh, I see, no matter how quickly they do their work, they only get a fixed number of patents. Well, it might work, except that one would think they'd value their free time, also, even assuming they were forbidden to take on extra work on their "off hours".
our system would be much better if the people doing the reviews actually got the full cost of the patent application.
I can't for the life of me figure out why you think this will help. Why shouldn't reviewers just shove through as much junk as they can in as little time as possible? Your idea could possibly work if in addition, they would be penalized triple the cost for every patent they let through which is invalid --- but then, not many people would like such a high-risk job.
may now be partly responsible for a documented decrease in Americans' scientific understanding
No, actually, there are probably two culprits involved with that:
The education system has no interest in teaching critical thinking skills and what science really is about and how it actually works, because it is graded by how well the students it churns out do on standard tests (mainly) of factual knowledge only which don't require these skills (and it is not that easy to make tests which test these skills). In addition, government, which controls the education system, has a disincentive to improve the public's critical thinking skills, because that makes them less manageable/manipulable.
The media has no interest in trying to teach what the education system didn't, because it is graded by profit which is, more or less, how many people watch, and it seems that most people, of their own free will, are not interested in watching content which is intellectually challenging. In addition, the journalists themselves are a product of the previous mentioned education system...
The only way to change this is to change the incentive structure enough to overcome a basic failing in human nature. Not easy.
Somehow I had thought that the "prison for the unemployed" scenario would look more like Christopher Anvil's vision, but after seeing what the current American public is willing to endure for the illusion of safety, I wonder...
> You simply won't be able to keep hundreds of bits of entropy in your head > without flaw unless you practice them over and over.
This is why it pays, for all of those passwords for websites which are low-risk, to either use some kind of "Password Safe" program, or simply have a personal algorithm for generating passwords which enables you to write down reminders in a personal shorthand.
Anyone who needs to keep hundreds of bits of entropy in their heads is simply "doing it wrong".
Uh, it's still only going to take 24 tries before you get it correct, in the very worst case in the scenario you propose. And the xkcd strip was making a "differential" argument, not an absolute one (e.g., for the same security, are you more likely to forget a password of random characters versus a series of words).
What's actually of greatest importance is how often you use the password. In my experience, complex passwords which are seldom used are a recipe for disaster. When I go on vacation, I sometime take SHA1 hashes of my more problematic passwords with me so I can "practice" them...
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever. It's actually refreshing to see fanboism for something like JSTOR. Since I got distracted, I suppose this thread is dead anyhow...
> One factor that made Aaron Swartz's behavior so reprehensible was that he _kept doing it_, apparently at full capacity,
> despite the obvious consequences to JSTOR and to MIT.
If you read JSTOR's own account, available on their website, Swartz continued to download between September and January, but without them noticing it. Somehow that makes me believe that he modified his behavior (including throttled bandwidth) so that only a new kind of analysis on JSTOR's part (probably statistical) gave him away.
> But I do believe that was already planned when Aaron got caught.
Obviously I cannot refute this, nor can you back this up with hard evidence.
> JSTOR is a library service, a non-profit. They'll do what they can _afford_ to do to make the information available.
They continued to pursue Swartz in January not because his downloading was costing them too much money, but because they feared that what he would do with the documents would cost them their goodwill with their upstream publishing partners. They could well have been correct (no one can know exactly what Swartz's long-term plans were). It seems pretty obvious to me that JSTOR, albeit a non-profit, was also an ossified bureaucracy, and whatever changes have happened since the incident are due to their management suddenly understanding that the way things "worked" ten years ago was no longer exactly what their users (or society) expected now (e.g., when they were founded, 99.9% of anyone looking for academic papers through the net were anyway academics/geeks --- now, I expect that a good segment of the general browsing population is also interested).
> If you persist in this belief that committing a DDOS or other disabling attacks is OK
Judging from your Slashdot ID, both you, and I, then, have participated in many actions which you seem to consider DDoS attacks --- namely, Slashdottings. I wonder if you'd be OK, then, that you should be charged with felonies for each and every one of those actions? Oh, I forgot --- you don't have to worry --- you're not someone who has a public presence so that convicting you could be politically worthwhile.
As for JSTOR, I find it telling that somehow, suddenly, they decided that it wouldn't ruin their business model if they made access free to the 6% of their database which anyway was in the public domain. They're not Elsevier, for sure, but it sure seems that Swartz did accomplish forcing JSTOR to reconsider what might be better for society, yet still OK to enable their non-profit business to continue running.
Steven Chu was just recently in that post, and he is a Nobel laureate. Could this mean that "technocratic" has nothing to do with anything (except, possibly, someone on the net trying to get more page views)?
This depends, they might have some kind of contract with local government which obligates them to provide service. In that case not servicing prime numbered addresses would probably not be a crime, but would be actionable in a civil suit.
> because they don't need to 'justify it'.
This isn't exact true, all hell would break loose if they decided they "just" didn't want customers with Latino family names, for example...
> Those who wrote math text and teach math are not math experts. They are teaching experts. Their math may not be right.
This makes no sense to me. Please explain. Do you actually believe it's better to more skillfully teach wrong facts compared to less skillfully teach correct facts? Or were you talking about things like, we would only confuse second graders with negative numbers, so when teaching them, we'll just implicitly assume that negative numbers don't exist.
> At primary school we didn't even have a library
Holy shit. That has to be the only room in my primary school which I still remember --- and I can't begin to think about how much I learned from books I found there (including one on introductory electronics with explanations of resistors, capacitors and inductors!). I'm not sure, however, if the copy of Asimov's "Realm of Algebra" which really kickstarted my math knowledge came from that library or the public library, though...
I think he meant it with regards to wisnoskij's post --- as in it would be completely retarded to mark as wrong a student who prefered, for example, the OLIF method, even though said student always got the correct answer using his method.
Personally, I had never heard of "foil" as being any kind of theorem whatsoever in math, BTW. Did I miss something? I can see that other kinds of theorems apply to prove that it gives the correct answer, though...
OK, being pedantic about syntax I can understand, a necessary tool for acquiring knowledge is an ability to learn and use a shared language of concepts for the purpose of communication.
But being pedantic about methods? This just seems to be a symptom reflecting the failings of the education system. I can see only two justifications for this: either the teacher has such a limited grasp of the material that they cannot understand any deviation from the "method" (or the same thing in a different "dimension", possibly they feel they have a lack of authority and cannot allow students any freedom for fear of losing the minimum amount of control necessary to do their job), or it is to give the message (either implicitly or explicitly) to the student that the purpose of the education system is indoctrination, rather than the inculcation of knowledge and the tools necessary for self-education.
I am just thankful that I didn't have your math teachers, while growing up... although I do remember having to explain, to one of my teachers, my personal method of long multiplication which minimized and postponed the necessity for remembering carries until the final summation step, by doubling the number of rows before that step.
US and UK government agencies... ripping? Impossible, we all know they're in the pocket of the copyright maximalists...
I smell comments about a certain-greek-letter distribution... lurking...
Thanks for the link. The page source is hilarious, looks like the "great lazer eyed bunny" is a much bigger threat!
And when this happens "on a computer", it should be considered to be the same as physical destruction? I'm all for not making new law for "on a computer", but, well, I don't think that's a good idea (since in many cases the computer user is not the only one controlling his computer --- segue to NSA from GCSB).
I looked at it when Technocrat closed down, but it was/got, well, too weird even for me... Even Technocrat was a bit ingrown, kuro5hin was too much like that.
OTOH, it's been a looooong while. Maybe I should give it a second look.
> Am I just missing something, or is that feature unavailable in beta?
I couldn't even figure out how to get a permalink to a comment... ugh.
> I would prefer that firefox shows the "302 Found" webpage instead of redirecting me, always, even for non slashdot pages.
There are multiple extensions for that, IIRC.
Mad Scientist's Club FTW!
Wow, this stuff got republished in 2001-2002? I loved reading it when I was a kid, but can't imagine enjoying it that much if I read it now, nor that my own children would be at all interested. Some things just have to be experienced at the right age and in the right context, I think.
Well, well, maybe this comment does have something to do with the new beta (omega?) design, after all...
> My understanding is that during a classified, closed door session
> with committeee members, the actual truth came out.
How would you know? The members of the Intelligence Committees are clueless/corrupt, and even less reliable sources of information than the intel brass.
> Sometimes, you are required by law to lie, even to Congress
No. Just, no. Clapper has on numerous occasions refused to answer questions in open sessions while providing the information in closed session (to the same Congressmen, not just committee flunkies).
Oh, I see, no matter how quickly they do their work, they only get a fixed number of patents. Well, it might work, except that one would think they'd value their free time, also, even assuming they were forbidden to take on extra work on their "off hours".
I can't for the life of me figure out why you think this will help. Why shouldn't reviewers just shove through as much junk as they can in as little time as possible? Your idea could possibly work if in addition, they would be penalized triple the cost for every patent they let through which is invalid --- but then, not many people would like such a high-risk job.
No, actually, there are probably two culprits involved with that:
The only way to change this is to change the incentive structure enough to overcome a basic failing in human nature. Not easy.
Somehow I had thought that the "prison for the unemployed" scenario would look more like Christopher Anvil's vision, but after seeing what the current American public is willing to endure for the illusion of safety, I wonder...
> You simply won't be able to keep hundreds of bits of entropy in your head
> without flaw unless you practice them over and over.
This is why it pays, for all of those passwords for websites which are low-risk, to either use some kind of "Password Safe" program, or simply have a personal algorithm for generating passwords which enables you to write down reminders in a personal shorthand.
Anyone who needs to keep hundreds of bits of entropy in their heads is simply "doing it wrong".
Uh, it's still only going to take 24 tries before you get it correct, in the very worst case in the scenario you propose. And the xkcd strip was making a "differential" argument, not an absolute one (e.g., for the same security, are you more likely to forget a password of random characters versus a series of words).
What's actually of greatest importance is how often you use the password. In my experience, complex passwords which are seldom used are a recipe for disaster. When I go on vacation, I sometime take SHA1 hashes of my more problematic passwords with me so I can "practice" them...