Actually, managers handling jobs in any work stoppage situation DO get a course equivalent to the basic training of a beginning crafstperson for the job they will be expected to do. At least that was the case during the period when I worked for the Bell System and its Operating Company successors (roughly 1970-2000).

We (data systems people, for example) went to "plant school" any time there was a potential work stoppage situation, if we were given emergency assignments in the field. When I first started (in Illinois) lots of managers had TONS of experience because of a protracted strike there in 1968. (Remember the Democratic National Convention? Coverage was spotty because of the telephone strike.)

Then too, a lot of middle managers were promoted from craft ranks during that time, so they already knew how to do those jobs.

Whether the situation is the same today or not I don't know. Things may have changed in the decade since I've been away from the business.

I said it was "financially questionable". Hence their financial decisions. They have accountants as well as econometricians.

Probably somebody stealing apples from your orchard in FarmVille.

It's not so much that they haven't REALIZED it, it's just that, well, you said it yourself ... Over What Bandwidth? Video on demand (or even just a three-channel broadcast station configuration like the 1950's) in a ubiquitous network would take more spectrum that we're likely to see available to the wireless carriers in the near future no matter WHAT kinds of tricks they can pull out of their hats by way of reuse or compression.

AT&T has very good econometrics people working for them, and they know very well what their elasticity of demand is. They are choosing to use a price mechanism to ration existing scare infrastructure resources, especially spectrum, instead of trying to acquire more through more efficient use (technically questionable) or outright purchase (financially questionable). Their current lock on the hot Apple end user devices is driving demand higher than their network can tolerate at times, and they are attempting to "enhance the user experience" (smile when you say that, pardner!) by "voluntary" rationing. Enforced by cost, of course.

THAT is what is known as groundless optimism!

In the days of the Bell System, and even afterwards, there was such a thing as "customer proprietary network information." Anything the customer owned, did, or said that touched the telephone network was protected by the strictest privacy protections except to the minimum extent required by the explicit order of a court. Anyone who breached this principle lost thier job, period, dot!

Somewhere along the line this principle apparently got lost, and our society is much the poorer for it.

Any old miracle will do. Why be choosy? If it works, why not use it?

It would be interesting to see a rigorous statistical study of this effort, comparing those locations to a comparable period picked from locations that, prior to the experiment, has similar characteristics, to see if there is a significant difference. Pseudoscience, or placebo effect? How do you tell? Let the numbers decide.

As I understand it, the speaker was NOT just talking about the USSS, but about law enforcement in general. And given so many violations of individual privacy by various branches of law enforcement (e.g., border searches of laptops and other egregious intrusions going back to and beyond the Steve Jackson case), nobody is crying for them. There has just been too much abuse by the law enforcement community for the tech community to garner much sympathy for any of them, even if they might deserve it in individual instances.

Come to think of it, wasn't the USSS INVOLVED in the Jackson case?

The reason that Texas has so much clout is that the State of Texas (or its school boards, under state supervision) actually BUYS the textbooks and issues them to the students throughout the state for use during the academic year. Perhaps if other states set similar standards and were similarly active in actually putting their money where their mouths are, they would be able to overcome the unique position that Texas finds itself in. It's one thing to bitch about how Texas chooses to make their educational decisions; it's quite another to actually put up or shut up when it comes to laying out actual state dollars to provide the children of the state with their textbooks.

Something haunting reminiscent about the Steve Jackson case about this. The government doesn't seem to want certain information to get out, regardless of its validity.

By the way, street rumor has it that the original 1971 work has long since been heavily "improved" courtesy of the CIA and/or others in the government, and that reprints since the mid-70's have not been reliable.

Even the college curriculum is getting weaker all the time. I teach statistics, and a couple of years ago the program director I worked for told me point blank that it was not important that my students know what the variance or standard deviation of a distribution weere; what was important was that they get grades good enough that they got reimbursed by their employers so they would stay in school and eventually qualify for the school's masters degree program.

The math program throughout our undergraduate program is slipping. A few years ago, candidates for all four-year degrees had to have basic algebra (the equivalent of a high school freshman course) plus one "liberal arts math" course beyond that. Now that requirement has been dropped. Most degrees no longer require that additional course, and some no longer even require algebra.

That's because everybody knows that price elasticity of demand does not exist, right?

And by derivation, what others consider their "right wing" are a bunch of flaming leftists, no doubt.

The "left wing" has recently shown themselves (in cases like Jewel v. NSA, for example) to be even worse than their "right-wing" predecessors in attacking rights to individual privacy in electronic communications. There's no help there. Apparently there ARE no American mainstream politicians who actually believe that freedom of speech should be part of our fundamental rights in the 21st century.