Pure electronic ballots would have given us the same problem as Florida 2000. We just wouldn't have noticed.
If X percent of the population is unable to correctly use a paper ballot, then I can guarantee that X percent are unable to correctly use an electronic ballot. This boils down to the fact that humans using any device will have an error rate. With paper ballots you at least have a feel for what that error rate is.
The books were bought after the alleged murder. Both sides agree on this fact. So they do not indicate pre-meditation, but rather favor the "scrambled to cover up the evidence" theory.
There may be reasonable evidence that he killed her, but that is a far cry from First Degree which requires pre-meditation. As far as I can tell from the reports of the actual trial, the prosecution didn't even make an attempt to prove pre-meditation.
This verdict quite frankly scares me. If they could convict Reiser on this little evidence, then how easy would it be to convict an innocent man that was in the wrong place at the wrong time and paranoid enough to look suspicious.
That is a cool project, but in all fairness that CAPTCHA probably works for the same reason "the Mac has no viruses". That is, it is so little used that spammers have focused their efforts on bigger targets. Thus an inherently less secure system can be less likely to be broken.
As as example, since the Asirra project takes its photos from Petfinder.com, all a spammer has to do is scrape all the Petfinder photos and categorize them by what words (e.g. "cat" vs "dog") are near by in the HTML. Once this database is built, it simply becomes a problem of looking up the images in the database (likely an easy task).
As long as Asirra doesn't become popular, it will be successful, but if it becomes popular, expect it to start failing.
But saying "bundling always favors the seller giving them more power and money" is not true; for example, you can see cars as a huge bundle of tires, motor, etc; but it actually serves the consumer that it is bundled, because the economical impact of scaling is so big that cars can be made much cheaper than the sum of their gears.
I'll grant that, but...
Because the cost and difficulies of knowing what every internet user downloads is so high, it's just not doable (part of the cost: I would be protesting in the street if it was the case).
... this is way off. ISPs tracking peoples downloads and blanket (i.e. bundled) music taxes are not the only options. For example, iTunes is able to keep track of who downloads what quite well without the help of ISPs. Even with blanket pricing the ISPs still have to keep logging information for non-music related police investigations so there is no economic improvement there, but blanket pricing would reduce competition which incurs an economic cost.
This is all just a protection racket: "Nice ISP you have there, wouldn't it be terrible if someone were to sue you for hosting pirated content."
Maybe a better example would be Disneyland: you pay to enter, and that pays for the haunted mansion, even if you never go there.
This is an example of bundling (i.e. you always have to buy "a" and "b" together). Economically bundling always favors the seller giving them more power and money (the reasons are to complicated to explain here; look it up in an Econ book). It is not illegal, but it can really disadvantage the buyer and when the seller is running a de facto monopoly (as most non-metropolitan, US, broadband ISPs are) they could be hauled up on anti-trust allegations.
For example, most people wouldn't object to the grocery store bundling batteries with their flashlights, but if the water company required you to buy a car with your water service then people would squeal. Here it is all shades of gray depending on how related the items being bundled are and whether the buyer has alternative to buying the bundled items. Personally I think this steps across the line. For me the internet is a utility and I really don't want it to be bundled (e.g. the AOL portal model) with things that I have no intention of using. After all who is to say there shouldn't also be a Slashdot tax on ISPs to pay for running the Slashdot site.
Now, you want the really silly part? I work for the electrical and computer engineering department. Yes, that's right, people with PhDs in engineering, who have all taken classes on this kind of stuff, are afraid of the radiation boogieman.
I think there was a study about Harvard graduates and asking them the reason it is hotter in the summer. They almost all said it was because we are closer to the sun in the summer. (*) This aspect of human behavior astonishes me, but it seems quite common. What I want to know is how do we fix it? More education obviously doesn't work. But this problem of human behavior makes us waste time on non-issues.
(*) I can't find this with a quick Google so I hope I'm not perpetuating an urban myth.
There continue to be links between cell phone use and brain tumors and, though I haven't heard anything recently about power lines, I would not buy a house near high voltage lines.
Inverse square law. You get orders of magnitude less EM radiation from the 12KV power lines in your backyard, than the 120V wires running through your house.
Though I would like to disagree with the GP, your comment is a good example of what the GP was talking about.
I used to be pretty judgmental of pop music. But, shit, somebody has to write it. Somebody has to perform it. Somebody has to slave for hours for the final mix. Is the sum of all that talent worthless just because we think we're better than that?
Yes.
Value is determined by utility not by labor. I'll grant that just because it's pop music doesn't mean it's bad. But by the same token, just because someone worked hard on it doesn't mean it's any good.
There is no contradiction here. It is simply the rules of burden of proof.
When an individual is accused of a crime, he or she doesn't have the burden of proof; the prosecution does. When a company is asking us to trust their machines to accurately count our votes, they do have the burden of proof to show that their products are fit for that purpose.
A party who has a burden of proof but fails to provide prima facie evidence looses their case or debate by default. If they not only fail but also refuse to provide such evidence, then one ought suspect dishonesty on their part.
From my understanding it does serve a practical purpose in that intercepting the message changes it. Thus while you can't stop people from tapping into your message, you do have instant feedback about when that happens.
In most quantum protocols a one-time-key is sent using quantum mechanics and not the actual message. After you know that no one has tapped into the transmission of the key, you can send the encrypted text using any classical means. So there is no worry that you have to stop transmitting quickly to keep them from getting the message.
So yes, the quantum aspect only tells you if someone has tapped in, but that is enough to allow us to send completely secure messages.
(That isn't quite true. Quantum protocols assume you have another communication channel that is able to pass around authenticated but not secret messages (authenticated = the message sent is the message received and is from who it says it is; not secret = others might have overheard it). However, authentication is in general a lot easier to arrange. Quantum cryptography is basically takes an insecure quantum channel and an authenticated classical channel and turns them into a guaranteed secrecy key-distribution channel that is subject to DoS attacks. From guaranteed secrecy you can build most other things that crypo people are interested in.)
This paradox is called Gambler's Ruin. The key is that it has nothing to do with game, because like you said, it doesn't know who is playing. Rather, it has to do with your ability to continue playing the game.
Think of a coin flipping game at 1:1 odds where every bet was against the house and had to be all-in. Statistically coin flipping is an even bet, but if every bet is all-in, then just one loss will put you out of the game. Thus at the end of the day the house wins even though the game was played at "fair" odds.
Of course, this example simplifies a lot of things and there are a number of ways to mitigate or eliminate gambler's ruin, but that example should give you the basic idea without having to go into averages and standard deviations, etc.
WARNING: Math Content
For those who want to think in math terms, the paradox boils down to the assumption made in statistics that the number game played is infinite and that each play is independent of the previous plays. But this is not actually true. To accurately model the situation, you have to cause each play of the game to pay a net of zero (because you've stopped playing) once the accumulated payoff is below some number (because you're broke) or above some other number (because you broke the bank), thus each play becomes dependent on the previous plays. Further, how far you have to be behind before you're broke is significantly less than how much you have to be ahead to break the bank which introduces an asymmetry that explains the paradox. So if you walked in with more money than the house has, the paradox will work in your favor... but that doesn't happen too often.
Tell me, have you used a log table in the past ten years?
Actually, yes I have. It comes very much in handy when multiplying powers of 2. Example from my work yesterday: How may bytes does this 16x256 array of double (8 byte each) take. 16->4, 256->8, 8->3 so the total is 15 which is 32k. I'm only 25 years old and I find it useful day to day work.
This just in: Arithmetic is now an obsolete skill. Now days people just use calculators.[/sarcasm off]
Just as arithmetic is rarely(*) used in every day life, the same could be said for assembler. But also just like arithmetic, to use the tools well (calculator/compiler), you have to understand what happens under the covers (arithmetic/assembler). In that sense assembler is far from obsolete.
I agree with some of your sentiments about these being logical fallacies. Unfortunately the art of persuasion often requires quick slogans (insert rant about the decline of peoples ability to reason here). The reality is that if someone quotes to you "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear", then you have about 5 seconds to make an argument that rebuts their argument before they assume you don't have a good response and stop listening.
Thus the need for a slogan. It provides the foot in the door for the rest of the argument to get in. Only after you get the slogan in will you have a chance at elaborating a more complicated argument. I absolutely hate it that that is the way the world works, but there it is. Sometimes you have to fight a war to stop the killing (heh, another slogan; if you want elaboration on that I'd be happy to do so).
Now this slogan isn't as logically fallacious as it might sound at first. They don't have a reason to search unless they have probable cause. Perhaps a more logically correct statement would be "if you don't have probable cause, you have no reason to search" but that isn't at catchy and is less likely to get a hook in the other persons brain. Nevertheless the follow on to this slogan should probably proceed along those lines. The key is to move the burden of proof (about whether you have something to hide) off of you and back onto them. "Nothing to hide; nothing to fear" tries to move the burden from them to you, but "nothing to hide; no reason to search" moves it back to them.
All of that said, if their are other concise arguments to rebut "nothing to hide; nothing to fear" I would love to hear them. But remember to be effective you have to be able to state them in a single sentence that is powerful enough to make the other person engage you in logical debate.
I get that ISPs are not common carriers, but could someone explain why they are not and how they avoid being liable for illegal content send over their wires?
Well starting from first principals, I'd have to be of the philosophy that society does have a duty to provide for it's members. Or rather to make it possible for its members to provide for themselves. However, enabling free-riders is both counter-productive and actually lowers the dignity of the person acting as a free-rider. (That last part might need explanation. If I constantly catch your fish for you rather than teaching you how to fish, then I make you dependent on me and prevent you from reaching your full potential. (Engaging in equitable trade for my fish instead of you learning how to fish is perfectly fine. I'm making a point more about when my giving you free stuff may harm you ability to care for yourself.))
In theory any societal or political structure that is capable of achieving the twin goals of providing for its members and enabling those members to reach their full potential as human persons is acceptable (this includes productivity in work as well as spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical, artistic, etc. aspects). In practice, things are quite a bit more messy since humans are very flawed, selfish creatures and so some social structures just don't work.
On the more practical side of things I can really only make two claims.
First, it is usually better for a smaller sub-group of society rather than a larger sub-group to be the one to try to accomplish any particular task provided that smaller sub-group is able to do so to a satisfactory degree. (This is sometimes called the "Principal of Subsidiary" but you might have a hard time googling for that.) This tends to reduce administrative overhead as well as gives the individuals more control and makes the society more responsive to the changing and differing needs of its members. For example, trash service should be provided at the city level rather than the state or federal level. On the other hand, while individual neighborhoods or individual people could purchase trash service from various companies, below a certain level it becomes unworkable (e.g. having 5 different trash trucks come by each weak). (Note, by sub-groups of society I include more than just city/state/federal. I also include individual, family, circle of friends, private companies, charitable and religious organizations, etc. Sometimes the groups overlap and sometimes one group is considered a part of (a subsidiary of?) another group (e.g. local chapter of an origination versus the national level of the organization).)
Ok, so the second claim is that economists have a lot of tools for understanding ways of organizing a society that most of us don't take advantage of. Economics isn't just about money. The very word comes the Greek word for household management. What little I learned from the one class in (micro) Economics that I took, made me realize how many political questions are easily settle with a bit of understanding of Economic theory. For example, any "luxury tax" won't actually tax the buyer. A luxury by definition has a very elastic demand. This means that if the net price goes up, people will buy less of the item. In response the seller has to lower the price in order to maintain a profit. The net result is that the ones producing the luxury items "pay" the tax because they are selling the item for less while the buyers of the luxury items don't "pay" for the tax because the lowered price balances out the increase of the tax and they pay the same net price. (There are mathematical models to describe all this in more detail and I'm actually glossing over quite a bit.) This all goes to say that people (myself included) who want to debate things such as universal health care should really study economic theory. Otherwise their opinions are likely to make about as much economic sense as the opinions of your average non-scientist about black holes and quantum particles or a non-programmer about "clogged up inter-tubes".
I think something got lost in translation and we actually agree. Let me try again.
I'm in favor of universal health care (i.e. any socio-economic scenario where affordable health care is readily available), but not Nationalized health care (i.e. Big-U Universal, government run health care).
Assuming Star Trek economics won't happen any time soon, I think the government should use natural market forces do their job though perhaps poking the market every once in a while to counteract the inelastic aspects of health care which tend to drive up costs.
I wonder if you want Universal Health Care? I wonder if you even realize why I ask? Oh, I want universal health care, but I don't want nationalized health care.
I'm not sure but I'm going to guess that the terms "irrational" and "rational" more likely derive from the word "ratio" than any sort of commentary on the sanity of the people involved. Just like numbers that can be expressed as a fraction are sometimes called "fractional".
Slashdot Mirror
Pure electronic ballots would have given us the same problem as Florida 2000. We just wouldn't have noticed.
If X percent of the population is unable to correctly use a paper ballot, then I can guarantee that X percent are unable to correctly use an electronic ballot. This boils down to the fact that humans using any device will have an error rate. With paper ballots you at least have a feel for what that error rate is.
The books were bought after the alleged murder. Both sides agree on this fact. So they do not indicate pre-meditation, but rather favor the "scrambled to cover up the evidence" theory.
There may be reasonable evidence that he killed her, but that is a far cry from First Degree which requires pre-meditation. As far as I can tell from the reports of the actual trial, the prosecution didn't even make an attempt to prove pre-meditation.
This verdict quite frankly scares me. If they could convict Reiser on this little evidence, then how easy would it be to convict an innocent man that was in the wrong place at the wrong time and paranoid enough to look suspicious.
That is a cool project, but in all fairness that CAPTCHA probably works for the same reason "the Mac has no viruses". That is, it is so little used that spammers have focused their efforts on bigger targets. Thus an inherently less secure system can be less likely to be broken.
As as example, since the Asirra project takes its photos from Petfinder.com, all a spammer has to do is scrape all the Petfinder photos and categorize them by what words (e.g. "cat" vs "dog") are near by in the HTML. Once this database is built, it simply becomes a problem of looking up the images in the database (likely an easy task).
As long as Asirra doesn't become popular, it will be successful, but if it becomes popular, expect it to start failing.
I'll grant that, but ...
Because the cost and difficulies of knowing what every internet user downloads is so high, it's just not doable (part of the cost: I would be protesting in the street if it was the case).This is all just a protection racket: "Nice ISP you have there, wouldn't it be terrible if someone were to sue you for hosting pirated content."
This is an example of bundling (i.e. you always have to buy "a" and "b" together). Economically bundling always favors the seller giving them more power and money (the reasons are to complicated to explain here; look it up in an Econ book). It is not illegal, but it can really disadvantage the buyer and when the seller is running a de facto monopoly (as most non-metropolitan, US, broadband ISPs are) they could be hauled up on anti-trust allegations.
For example, most people wouldn't object to the grocery store bundling batteries with their flashlights, but if the water company required you to buy a car with your water service then people would squeal. Here it is all shades of gray depending on how related the items being bundled are and whether the buyer has alternative to buying the bundled items. Personally I think this steps across the line. For me the internet is a utility and I really don't want it to be bundled (e.g. the AOL portal model) with things that I have no intention of using. After all who is to say there shouldn't also be a Slashdot tax on ISPs to pay for running the Slashdot site.
I think there was a study about Harvard graduates and asking them the reason it is hotter in the summer. They almost all said it was because we are closer to the sun in the summer. (*) This aspect of human behavior astonishes me, but it seems quite common. What I want to know is how do we fix it? More education obviously doesn't work. But this problem of human behavior makes us waste time on non-issues.
(*) I can't find this with a quick Google so I hope I'm not perpetuating an urban myth.
Inverse square law. You get orders of magnitude less EM radiation from the 12KV power lines in your backyard, than the 120V wires running through your house.
Though I would like to disagree with the GP, your comment is a good example of what the GP was talking about.
Yes.
Value is determined by utility not by labor. I'll grant that just because it's pop music doesn't mean it's bad. But by the same token, just because someone worked hard on it doesn't mean it's any good.
There is no contradiction here. It is simply the rules of burden of proof.
When an individual is accused of a crime, he or she doesn't have the burden of proof; the prosecution does. When a company is asking us to trust their machines to accurately count our votes, they do have the burden of proof to show that their products are fit for that purpose.
A party who has a burden of proof but fails to provide prima facie evidence looses their case or debate by default. If they not only fail but also refuse to provide such evidence, then one ought suspect dishonesty on their part.
In most quantum protocols a one-time-key is sent using quantum mechanics and not the actual message. After you know that no one has tapped into the transmission of the key, you can send the encrypted text using any classical means. So there is no worry that you have to stop transmitting quickly to keep them from getting the message.
So yes, the quantum aspect only tells you if someone has tapped in, but that is enough to allow us to send completely secure messages.
(That isn't quite true. Quantum protocols assume you have another communication channel that is able to pass around authenticated but not secret messages (authenticated = the message sent is the message received and is from who it says it is; not secret = others might have overheard it). However, authentication is in general a lot easier to arrange. Quantum cryptography is basically takes an insecure quantum channel and an authenticated classical channel and turns them into a guaranteed secrecy key-distribution channel that is subject to DoS attacks. From guaranteed secrecy you can build most other things that crypo people are interested in.)
This paradox is called Gambler's Ruin. The key is that it has nothing to do with game, because like you said, it doesn't know who is playing. Rather, it has to do with your ability to continue playing the game.
Think of a coin flipping game at 1:1 odds where every bet was against the house and had to be all-in. Statistically coin flipping is an even bet, but if every bet is all-in, then just one loss will put you out of the game. Thus at the end of the day the house wins even though the game was played at "fair" odds.
Of course, this example simplifies a lot of things and there are a number of ways to mitigate or eliminate gambler's ruin, but that example should give you the basic idea without having to go into averages and standard deviations, etc.
WARNING: Math Content
For those who want to think in math terms, the paradox boils down to the assumption made in statistics that the number game played is infinite and that each play is independent of the previous plays. But this is not actually true. To accurately model the situation, you have to cause each play of the game to pay a net of zero (because you've stopped playing) once the accumulated payoff is below some number (because you're broke) or above some other number (because you broke the bank), thus each play becomes dependent on the previous plays. Further, how far you have to be behind before you're broke is significantly less than how much you have to be ahead to break the bank which introduces an asymmetry that explains the paradox. So if you walked in with more money than the house has, the paradox will work in your favor ... but that doesn't happen too often.
If the Air Force is sending that info over unencrypted e-mail, they have bigger problems than just the e-mail going to the wrong domain.
This kind of makes me suspicious that he article might just be hyperbole.
Yeah, no one ever uses coax anymore not even the cable company ... oh.
Actually, yes I have. It comes very much in handy when multiplying powers of 2. Example from my work yesterday: How may bytes does this 16x256 array of double (8 byte each) take. 16->4, 256->8, 8->3 so the total is 15 which is 32k. I'm only 25 years old and I find it useful day to day work.
This just in: Arithmetic is now an obsolete skill. Now days people just use calculators.[/sarcasm off]
Just as arithmetic is rarely(*) used in every day life, the same could be said for assembler. But also just like arithmetic, to use the tools well (calculator/compiler), you have to understand what happens under the covers (arithmetic/assembler). In that sense assembler is far from obsolete.
(*) Well maybe not as rarely as assembler.
I agree with some of your sentiments about these being logical fallacies. Unfortunately the art of persuasion often requires quick slogans (insert rant about the decline of peoples ability to reason here). The reality is that if someone quotes to you "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear", then you have about 5 seconds to make an argument that rebuts their argument before they assume you don't have a good response and stop listening.
Thus the need for a slogan. It provides the foot in the door for the rest of the argument to get in. Only after you get the slogan in will you have a chance at elaborating a more complicated argument. I absolutely hate it that that is the way the world works, but there it is. Sometimes you have to fight a war to stop the killing (heh, another slogan; if you want elaboration on that I'd be happy to do so).
Now this slogan isn't as logically fallacious as it might sound at first. They don't have a reason to search unless they have probable cause. Perhaps a more logically correct statement would be "if you don't have probable cause, you have no reason to search" but that isn't at catchy and is less likely to get a hook in the other persons brain. Nevertheless the follow on to this slogan should probably proceed along those lines. The key is to move the burden of proof (about whether you have something to hide) off of you and back onto them. "Nothing to hide; nothing to fear" tries to move the burden from them to you, but "nothing to hide; no reason to search" moves it back to them.
All of that said, if their are other concise arguments to rebut "nothing to hide; nothing to fear" I would love to hear them. But remember to be effective you have to be able to state them in a single sentence that is powerful enough to make the other person engage you in logical debate.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no good reason to read it.
I get that ISPs are not common carriers, but could someone explain why they are not and how they avoid being liable for illegal content send over their wires?
Well starting from first principals, I'd have to be of the philosophy that society does have a duty to provide for it's members. Or rather to make it possible for its members to provide for themselves. However, enabling free-riders is both counter-productive and actually lowers the dignity of the person acting as a free-rider. (That last part might need explanation. If I constantly catch your fish for you rather than teaching you how to fish, then I make you dependent on me and prevent you from reaching your full potential. (Engaging in equitable trade for my fish instead of you learning how to fish is perfectly fine. I'm making a point more about when my giving you free stuff may harm you ability to care for yourself.))
In theory any societal or political structure that is capable of achieving the twin goals of providing for its members and enabling those members to reach their full potential as human persons is acceptable (this includes productivity in work as well as spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical, artistic, etc. aspects). In practice, things are quite a bit more messy since humans are very flawed, selfish creatures and so some social structures just don't work.
On the more practical side of things I can really only make two claims.
First, it is usually better for a smaller sub-group of society rather than a larger sub-group to be the one to try to accomplish any particular task provided that smaller sub-group is able to do so to a satisfactory degree. (This is sometimes called the "Principal of Subsidiary" but you might have a hard time googling for that.) This tends to reduce administrative overhead as well as gives the individuals more control and makes the society more responsive to the changing and differing needs of its members. For example, trash service should be provided at the city level rather than the state or federal level. On the other hand, while individual neighborhoods or individual people could purchase trash service from various companies, below a certain level it becomes unworkable (e.g. having 5 different trash trucks come by each weak). (Note, by sub-groups of society I include more than just city/state/federal. I also include individual, family, circle of friends, private companies, charitable and religious organizations, etc. Sometimes the groups overlap and sometimes one group is considered a part of (a subsidiary of?) another group (e.g. local chapter of an origination versus the national level of the organization).)
Ok, so the second claim is that economists have a lot of tools for understanding ways of organizing a society that most of us don't take advantage of. Economics isn't just about money. The very word comes the Greek word for household management. What little I learned from the one class in (micro) Economics that I took, made me realize how many political questions are easily settle with a bit of understanding of Economic theory. For example, any "luxury tax" won't actually tax the buyer. A luxury by definition has a very elastic demand. This means that if the net price goes up, people will buy less of the item. In response the seller has to lower the price in order to maintain a profit. The net result is that the ones producing the luxury items "pay" the tax because they are selling the item for less while the buyers of the luxury items don't "pay" for the tax because the lowered price balances out the increase of the tax and they pay the same net price. (There are mathematical models to describe all this in more detail and I'm actually glossing over quite a bit.) This all goes to say that people (myself included) who want to debate things such as universal health care should really study economic theory. Otherwise their opinions are likely to make about as much economic sense as the opinions of your average non-scientist about black holes and quantum particles or a non-programmer about "clogged up inter-tubes".
Ok, maybe that was
I think something got lost in translation and we actually agree. Let me try again.
I'm in favor of universal health care (i.e. any socio-economic scenario where affordable health care is readily available), but not Nationalized health care (i.e. Big-U Universal, government run health care).
Assuming Star Trek economics won't happen any time soon, I think the government should use natural market forces do their job though perhaps poking the market every once in a while to counteract the inelastic aspects of health care which tend to drive up costs.
I'm not sure but I'm going to guess that the terms "irrational" and "rational" more likely derive from the word "ratio" than any sort of commentary on the sanity of the people involved. Just like numbers that can be expressed as a fraction are sometimes called "fractional".
Hmm, sounds alot like an RPG or a LARP.
And I was so looking forward to bringing my own antique Flintlock pistol to the revolutionary war reenactment at Battery Park.