Joe Schmoe: Hi I want to be your Facebook Friend!
You: Oh, sure, did we meet at that huge party?
Joe Schmoe: Yup!
With no indication that the request came from the government. I wouldn't be surprised if the process had been automated -- if the only time a live person was involved was when the target sent a message asking for details about the friend request.
There is a difference, though. A lot of people think that by setting information their privacy settings, they are ensuring that the government would have to put effort into getting the information (e.g. a court order).
Except that the government is not supposed to be free to do everything that an individual citizen can do. The bill of rights does not apply to individuals, it is a restriction on what the government can do.
The problem with Facebook is that most people do not feel that what they are sharing on Facebook really needs to be private -- after all, they are sharing things that their circle of friends already knows. The difference is that, where previously the government would have actually had to put effort into learning those details from a person's social circle, they can now just ask Facebook, and that process can be automated. Dispatching an agent to infiltrate your circle of friends and learn more about you would necessarily be reserved for cases where it was necessary; with that no longer being necessary, the government can keep track of citizens' lives en masse, which at the very least runs counter to the spirit of the 4th amendment.
In fact, 1 is exactly the same as 0.999...; 0.999... is just a geometric series. 1 is also the same as 1/2+1/4+1/8+... and 2/3+2/9+2/27... and a variety of other infinite expansions in other bases.
Difficulty understanding the question is not the same as difficulty understanding the answer. People will get tripped up by the answer to the Monty Hall problem, but they will usually understand what is being asked -- so in terms of problems whose answer confuses people, Monty Hall is a winner. People won't be confused by the answer to 0.999... = 1 if they cannot even understand what you are asking.
You are not alone. I have shown this proof to a lot of people, and I have even proved it multiple ways to those people, and I am still confronted with "this cannot be right."
Except that I was counting non-mathematicians as well. A lot of people have difficulty grasping what is going on with 0.999... and what it means for that number to equal 1 (the idea that a number could have two representations in the same base goes over a lot of people's heads).
Small numbers usually win; express 1/3 as a decimal, and multiply by 3. The problem with that, though, is that people have trouble accepting that there was nothing wrong with what they did -- a lot of people have this implicit assumption that if a few simple steps bring them to a result that doesn't look like it makes sense, then they did something wrong. If you get them a more complicated proof (assuming they can follow it), they are more willing to accept the result.
0.999... = 1 is second place to the Monty Hall Problem on the list of things that people have difficulty understanding and accepting the proof of. It is second place because the only department where I do not see graduate students giving me a confused look is the math department; with the Monty Hall problem, I will sometimes get a confused look even from people in the math department.
The other reason I put it in second place is that most people have difficult understanding the problem at all, whereas very few people have trouble understand what the Monty Hall problem is asking.
Sounds like the standard and ancient Microsoft attack on everything not-Windows. Actually, that is what this whole video sounds like -- a standard tactic that Microsoft has used for over a decade now.
Maybe your iOS development fee will also include a license for Mac OS X on your low-end iOS desktop? I really wouldn't put that sort of thing past Apple.
The bottom line is you can't expect advertising to be a miracle solution. Everyone hates ads. A lot of people block them. The click rates are low. And yet people want content for free. Am I missing something here?
Why do ads work so well for TV and radio? The way I see, the problem was not advertisements on websites; the problem was that greedy advertisers noticed that computers could create intrusive, invasive, and highly annoying advertisements -- basically, what they had been hoping for all along, since they believed it would give them an edge over their competitors (who, of course, were doing exactly the same thing; talk about the prisoner's dilemma).
Look at Google, and how much money they made from simple, unintrusive, text only advertisements. People did not start blocking ads because they wanted to avoid Google-style advertising. Ads are blocked because of advertisements that are drawn on top of the web page we actually wanted, and because of Flash (and earlier, Java) ads that burn through CPU cycles trying to get our attention.
Really, if people want to make money advertising on the web, the very concept of web advertisements needs to be rethought. Maybe instead of focusing on clicks, we should treat web advertising the way we currently treat advertisements in printed newspapers: a way to promote the product itself, rather than a way to try to get people to visit some other website. Of course, that will first require advertisers to regain the public's trust that allowing an advertisement won't prevent us from reading what we wanted to read.
Is it part of their legal duties to install these devices without getting a warrant? You know, I see someone tampering with my car, placing what looks like a bomb on the undercarriage, and then I point a gun at them and they say, "We are FBI agents! Really! No, we cannot show you our warrant, we don't have one..."
You could really mess with them and try to sneak it onto a government vehicle that is likely to visit high-security locations (like, say, a vehicle that will go to the nearest military base). When you show up in court (assuming you show up in court), you just say something like, "Oh, I was just trying to give it back to the government" and then sue them for warrantless surveillance and whatnot.
Or they might just throw you in a military prison somewhere.
I take the opposite view, to be honest -- I think they might be overcounting a bit, or at least misusing the term "data center." A field office with a couple dozen servers in a back room is not a "data center," and I am not certain that there is much to be gained by consolidating such an office into a large data center elsewhere. I think the consolidation plan should focus more on creating a uniform infrastructure, so that employees of a given department can log in and get their work done regardless of which office they happen to be in. Servers in a local office could be useful to keep things running in the event of a failure (uplink to a WAN goes down, central data center has an outage, etc.), or to reduce latency for commonly accessed databases.
500 square feet is not a lot, I am pretty sure my high school had a server room about that size (for clarity: this was a "server room" in the sense that it housed all of the old desktops that had been repurposed as servers, and some networking equipment; you wouldn't recognize it as a server room otherwise). The CS department at my current institution has a server room that looks about that size (10'x50'), and that is just for the department itself.
You give the man a lot of credit, and I do not really understand why. Why would you assume that a Democrat would actually want to change things? If you have not noticed, the Democrats represent the same philosophy on what America should be like as the Republicans do, with a few superficial differences.
Slashdot Mirror
More like,
Joe Schmoe: Hi I want to be your Facebook Friend!
You: Oh, sure, did we meet at that huge party?
Joe Schmoe: Yup!
With no indication that the request came from the government. I wouldn't be surprised if the process had been automated -- if the only time a live person was involved was when the target sent a message asking for details about the friend request.
There is a difference, though. A lot of people think that by setting information their privacy settings, they are ensuring that the government would have to put effort into getting the information (e.g. a court order).
Except that the government is not supposed to be free to do everything that an individual citizen can do. The bill of rights does not apply to individuals, it is a restriction on what the government can do.
The problem with Facebook is that most people do not feel that what they are sharing on Facebook really needs to be private -- after all, they are sharing things that their circle of friends already knows. The difference is that, where previously the government would have actually had to put effort into learning those details from a person's social circle, they can now just ask Facebook, and that process can be automated. Dispatching an agent to infiltrate your circle of friends and learn more about you would necessarily be reserved for cases where it was necessary; with that no longer being necessary, the government can keep track of citizens' lives en masse, which at the very least runs counter to the spirit of the 4th amendment.
Maybe he used the long division algorithm.
In fact, 1 is exactly the same as 0.999...; 0.999... is just a geometric series. 1 is also the same as 1/2+1/4+1/8+... and 2/3+2/9+2/27... and a variety of other infinite expansions in other bases.
Difficulty understanding the question is not the same as difficulty understanding the answer. People will get tripped up by the answer to the Monty Hall problem, but they will usually understand what is being asked -- so in terms of problems whose answer confuses people, Monty Hall is a winner. People won't be confused by the answer to 0.999... = 1 if they cannot even understand what you are asking.
You are not alone. I have shown this proof to a lot of people, and I have even proved it multiple ways to those people, and I am still confronted with "this cannot be right."
Except that I was counting non-mathematicians as well. A lot of people have difficulty grasping what is going on with 0.999... and what it means for that number to equal 1 (the idea that a number could have two representations in the same base goes over a lot of people's heads).
Small numbers usually win; express 1/3 as a decimal, and multiply by 3. The problem with that, though, is that people have trouble accepting that there was nothing wrong with what they did -- a lot of people have this implicit assumption that if a few simple steps bring them to a result that doesn't look like it makes sense, then they did something wrong. If you get them a more complicated proof (assuming they can follow it), they are more willing to accept the result.
0.999... = 1 is second place to the Monty Hall Problem on the list of things that people have difficulty understanding and accepting the proof of. It is second place because the only department where I do not see graduate students giving me a confused look is the math department; with the Monty Hall problem, I will sometimes get a confused look even from people in the math department.
The other reason I put it in second place is that most people have difficult understanding the problem at all, whereas very few people have trouble understand what the Monty Hall problem is asking.
Sounds like the standard and ancient Microsoft attack on everything not-Windows. Actually, that is what this whole video sounds like -- a standard tactic that Microsoft has used for over a decade now.
http://userbase.kde.org/Kontact
The Linux kernel has been rejiggered several times, and nobody runs plain GNU/Linux anymore...
Maybe your iOS development fee will also include a license for Mac OS X on your low-end iOS desktop? I really wouldn't put that sort of thing past Apple.
The bottom line is you can't expect advertising to be a miracle solution. Everyone hates ads. A lot of people block them. The click rates are low. And yet people want content for free. Am I missing something here?
Why do ads work so well for TV and radio? The way I see, the problem was not advertisements on websites; the problem was that greedy advertisers noticed that computers could create intrusive, invasive, and highly annoying advertisements -- basically, what they had been hoping for all along, since they believed it would give them an edge over their competitors (who, of course, were doing exactly the same thing; talk about the prisoner's dilemma).
Look at Google, and how much money they made from simple, unintrusive, text only advertisements. People did not start blocking ads because they wanted to avoid Google-style advertising. Ads are blocked because of advertisements that are drawn on top of the web page we actually wanted, and because of Flash (and earlier, Java) ads that burn through CPU cycles trying to get our attention.
Really, if people want to make money advertising on the web, the very concept of web advertisements needs to be rethought. Maybe instead of focusing on clicks, we should treat web advertising the way we currently treat advertisements in printed newspapers: a way to promote the product itself, rather than a way to try to get people to visit some other website. Of course, that will first require advertisers to regain the public's trust that allowing an advertisement won't prevent us from reading what we wanted to read.
will car mechanics be gagged by the FBI from telling customers they found an odd box or two that don't belong?
Do you even have to ask?
Is it part of their legal duties to install these devices without getting a warrant? You know, I see someone tampering with my car, placing what looks like a bomb on the undercarriage, and then I point a gun at them and they say, "We are FBI agents! Really! No, we cannot show you our warrant, we don't have one..."
You could really mess with them and try to sneak it onto a government vehicle that is likely to visit high-security locations (like, say, a vehicle that will go to the nearest military base). When you show up in court (assuming you show up in court), you just say something like, "Oh, I was just trying to give it back to the government" and then sue them for warrantless surveillance and whatnot.
Or they might just throw you in a military prison somewhere.
Maybe we could just overwhelm them with suspicious activity, until the burden of tracking everyone becomes more than they have the budget for.
(More likely, they will just track whoever they do have the budget for, following the same logic as the DEA follows.)
Because individual rights mean squat these days?
Thus explaining why the FBI took the time to question him about the blog post?
s/motorcycle/bicycle/
Good luck hiding anything on my bike...
I take the opposite view, to be honest -- I think they might be overcounting a bit, or at least misusing the term "data center." A field office with a couple dozen servers in a back room is not a "data center," and I am not certain that there is much to be gained by consolidating such an office into a large data center elsewhere. I think the consolidation plan should focus more on creating a uniform infrastructure, so that employees of a given department can log in and get their work done regardless of which office they happen to be in. Servers in a local office could be useful to keep things running in the event of a failure (uplink to a WAN goes down, central data center has an outage, etc.), or to reduce latency for commonly accessed databases.
You give the man a lot of credit, and I do not really understand why. Why would you assume that a Democrat would actually want to change things? If you have not noticed, the Democrats represent the same philosophy on what America should be like as the Republicans do, with a few superficial differences.