Users like yourself
Sorry AC, not a user. I work on the support/administration end, where 90% of my life is cleaning up turds left behind by cowboy devs who think that "practices" interfere with their "creativity," and the "users" (aka THE PEOPLE YOUR JOB EXISTS TO SERVE) are somehow beneath notice. But thank you, I really appreciate your dropping by and proving my point for me.
Q: Why would any enterprise allow/sanction/encourage the use of mobile devices in their workspace? Why would they add a Blackberry Enterprise Server or an ActiveSync connection and allow their staff to pull down corporate messaging onto their personal devices? Don't they understand about the security risks and the administrative/support overhead of bridging the gap betwen company equipment and personal equipment?
A: Silly rabbit. These technologies push the executive mindset of being permanently at work down the management chain and into the front line staff. Employees "steal" 5 minutes away from work to check their bank balance etc. only to lose 10 back responding to "urgent" emails or chasing arbitrary deadlines that can only be met by working after hours. Extending the enterprise into employee's mobile devices is effectively a rollback of decades of labor law that today's workers accept willingly. Remember kids: Stay in "non-exempt" job positions as long as possible!
Nine times out of ten it's an electric razor. But every once in a while it's a dildo. Of course, it's company policy never to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. We have to use the indefinite article, "a dildo", never "your dildo."
My electric razor was in fact responsible for delaying the takeoff of a plane once. Thankfully this was prior to 9/11. Aside from the delay, the only adverse impact was having to dissapoint the two bored baggage handlers who knew the Fight Club reference and were desperately hoping that I would produce something embarassing. Today, I'd expect that the bag would be destroyed and I would be held for questioning. I love to fly but airlines, airports, and the TSA have all convinced me to opt for the road trip for anything inside a 600 mile radius.
The development of modern computing and telecommunications is not an industrial revolution of the type characterized by IR #1 and IR #2, and this is where Gordon's assumptions falter and Krugman's skepticism gains traction.
The "I" in this case refers to Information not Industry, and it is the 2nd one. The 1st one was the development of the printing press. From this standpoint, IR #1 (the printing press and movable type) took centuries for it's impact to be fully realized. The depth and breadth of it's influence on western civilization is difficult to measure in "simple" macroeconomic terms. Likewise, IR #2 (the electronic digitization of information) is a revolution that is so fundamental in nature that I don't believe it lends itself to being mapped as cleanly as Gordon implies.
Krugman starts the conversation in a couple of good spots: robotics and it's impact on GDP, and the potential of Big Data to drive decision making. What about desktop manufacturing (aka 3D printing)? MOOC? Genomics? Realtime translation?
In fact the more that I think about it, the more I think that Gordon has successfully found an important trend, but has the wrong story to explain it. The first two Industrial revolutions owe their economic impacts to advances in our energy metabolism as a species. Gordon's IR#1 was about the conversion of hydrocarbons into mechanical energy using steam. Gordon's IR#2 was about the conversion of hydrocarbons into electricity using steam turbines, and into mechanical energy using internal combustion. Economic benefits from the digital revolution has much more to do with efficiency and productivity, and almost nothing to do with finding new sources of energy to exploit. Indeed we're using more energy than ever to push information around, but each joule expended has had a significant ROI from an economic standpoint. Consider Just In Time production techniques, which are dependent on the ability to rapidly gather and disseminate information up and down the manufacturing supply chain. There's not a whole hell of a lot more efficiency that we're going to wring out of JIT. In fact, Japan's Tsunami disaster demonstrated that we are now SO optimized from an industrial standpoint that natural disasters in one part of the world can have nearly immediate impacts across the global economy. In other words, we have reached the point of diminishing returns on the productivity gains that digital information can provide to the industrial economy.
So Gordon is wrong, but about the right things.
I programmed this in my spare time as a service to my lab. If you pay me to write it for android and ios, i'd gladly do so. But I'm not paid enough to listen to ugly flames like this
Simple solution James. Release the source. Most of the knee-jerks will ignore it, but I would be surprised if you didn't get at least a couple useful optimizations passed back up to you. It's amazing too how many knee-jerk whiners crawl back into the woodwork when they are confronted with a little empowerment.
Great. I was wondering what it would take for the Slashdot crowd to pervert this dipshit into a hero.
"Dude, check it out! He destroyed all his data before he did this! That way, them dirty screws in law enforcement won't ever know a thing about him, won't understand what happened, and won't have any way to prevent it from happening again! Yeah! That's so awesome! Power to the privacy! Privacy rights for all! Woo!"
Attempting to smash up his PC and HDD and leaving the wreckage in his place is about the most n00bish form of data destruction you can imagine, and has probably only been partially successful at best. I'll leave it to the numerous other comments already posted to detail this sick kid's failure to cover his tracks adequately. If you're going to irresponsibly portray privacy and security advocates as paranoid deviants who cheer mass murder, you're going to need to try harder.
'A European security source said investigators now believe the suspect became disgruntled because he felt he was being ignored and his advice on operating the data systems was not being taken seriously.'"
Okay poindexter, what exactly was the issue? Some non-technical middle manager didn't understand the overarching brilliance of your recommended filesystem? Afraid the key length is too short? Too much Linux? Not enough Linux? Welcome to the real world, where your temper tantrum effects no change for anyone else but you. Hope your issue wasn't genuinely important, you'll have a hard time making your case from prison.
There is nothing about the current FB process that contains any true accountability. This is a marketing exercise designed to give the noisiest contingent of FB users something they can do to create the illusion that they have a voice. Consider:
1. The current voting process has a minimum participation requirement for decisions to be binding. This participation threshold has never been met.
2. One of the changes being voted for is doing away with the voting system.
This is how it's going to play out: Facebook is going to work harder and harder to monetize the details of your personal life until somebody powerful and/or well-loved by the public is burned by their behavior, a la Gen. Petraues. Then there will be legislation to curb the powers of private entities like Facebook as a knee-jerk reaction. That is what a real "messy democracy" looks like.
All of the "Why the hell are we talking about sports on Slashdot?" commentary above is to be expected... but let's get this established for the record: You people are talking about of your ass.
To the uninitiated, watching basketball can feel tedious and repetetive, with guys running back and forth, making similar looking movements, play being stopped for unfathomable reasons, and so forth. If you experience this sensation, it is because you are a noob. N00B. You are not trained to understand the numerous split-second decisions that are being executed within the span of a 24-second shot clock. Of all professional sports, watching basketball has the steepest learning curve. That is reason #1 why it is the perfect spectator sport for geeks.
This leads to the next point, which is that basketball is the most cognitively demanding of all professional sports for the player as well. Because the game is has a relatively small number of players on each side, and each player faces an ongoing series of 1-on-1 interactions with those players over the course of a quarter, a game, or a season. Good players study detailed scouting reports of their opponents in each game which details their strenghts, weaknesses, and habits. If you are going to defend Steve Novak knowing he is a phenominal 3-point shooter but not good on the dribble drive, then you are going to close in on him so that you can bother his jump shooting. But a guy who has a strong ability to drive will get right past you if you get too close to him on defense. If you're defending a guy like Kobe Bryant who can both shoot and drive, you've got a much harder job. Another player on your team may have to offer "help defense" which means rotating off of his own man to help you defend. That means the NEXT player over on the court has to notice that the help defender has left his own man, and the next guy "rotates" over so that the one guy on the floor being left open is as far away from the ball as possible. If the player on offense then chooses to throw a pass to the open man, the entire defensive lineup needs to rotate back into proper position. Good team defense requires the coordination of a dance team while improvising like jazz musicians. So that's reason #2 for nerds to like basketball. The stereotypical "dumb jock" will not excel in this game.
Actually, I have to cite another example for reason #2 because I know I'm going to get pushback on the notion that people who devote their lives to physical activity might possibly be really smart: Guys who have phenomenal bodies and weak minds can be successful in pro ball assuming they don't get injured... but eventually their limited mental agility makes them predictable, which makes them less effective. "The book" is out on them and they become easy to counter. Once they start getting near 30 years old, they lose their elite athleticism as well and become largely useless. Guys like Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, and Ray Allen who continue to be highly effective, star-level players into their mid-30s do so because they have tremendous minds for the game they are playing.
"Moneyball" was largely about using statistical analysis to acquire players who were undervalued by other teams because the old-school methods of player evaluation were unscientific and based on folklore and assumptions regarding pro baseball. Baseball is, in video game parlance, a "turn based" game. It is slow. Everyone has a clearly defined role. The mathematics involved in baseball analytics isn't trivial, but it's roughly akin to "value investing" in financial terms. It's harder than balancing your checkbook but it ain't rocket science. OTOH, basketball analytics really *IS* rocket science. Basketball is chaotic and non-deterministic by nature. Outcomes result from a rapidly cascading series of interrelated events. Quantifying this is possible, but it is really, really hard. The Moneyball revolution has led to many NBA teams hiring and retaining full-time analytics teams where statisticians and data miners vie to determine who should be drafted or traded for. Or which players on the roster should be on the floor together, or kept the hell away from each other. So reason #3 then is that basketball provides endless opportunities for you to argue with people about whose statistical models are good, and whose are total crap.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Or Paul Allen's. Or Malcom Gladwell's. Or MIT. Here's some resources for those who aren't married to their own stereotypes:
Basketball on Paper by Dr. Dean Oliver.
Mathletics by Wayne Winston.
This NY Times article describes how an otherwise anonymous Small Forward named Shane Battier uses careful study of player tendencies to be an indespensible member of his team.
Admittedly, I don't expect to change a lot of minds here. But knee-jerk haters need to STFU.
American soldiers have to pull the trigger. Period. Any "anti-theft" modification to an existing weapon system is either going to going to be vulnerable to cheap circumvention or is going to take far too long to develop and implement to be relevant for this conflict. Or both for that matter.
This is a political problem, not a technology problem, and not a logistics problem. If NPR can put American reporters on the front lines in Aleppo, then SOCOM can insert and extract anyone they need to at any point. That's not a solution to the political problem either. Even if special forces personnel got in and out without being noticed, it would be impossible to deny US involvement and be believed. At that point, you might as well just do what we did in Lybia: Establish air superiority, pure and simple.
Personally, I suspect that we haven't gotten more involved in Syria specifically because of the election cycle. Our "I got your back" strategy in Libya was very successful but outside of the circle of foriegn policy nerds, the administration got surprisingly little credit for a creative solution that saved thousands of lives and manufactured a lot of goodwill in the region. With that tepid public reaction, there was no way were they going to stick their feet in the Syrian swamp before today. Assuming a re-election is secured, you can expect US involvement in bringing down Assad to move back to the front burner. Our foreign policy goals with respect to both Iran and Israel are too important to let this bump along indefinitely.
A computer scientist is someone who fixes things that aren't broken.
