Astrology is not falsifiable, astronomy is.
Actually, Astrology is falsifiable, and also falsified. Practitiioners makes predictions that can be tested, and under genuinely controlled testing they generally fail about as often as chance would predict.
To suggest that anyone else is unfit to work in any field requiring security is absurd.
I think he was saying if you're in an environment where you both need to use very strong passwords *and* its not acceptable to write them down in something you carry securely all the time, *then* that suggests you either have to have a very good memory or you're not qualified to operate with those restrictions.
Lord "Justice" Laws might have just as easily said with the same straight face: "We do not know what data they have, but if they happen to have plans for top secrete weapons, and publish it, then they will endanger everyones lives.". So basically what the high court has done is make up a possible threat in order to get the ruling they wanted (or were told to get more likely).
The (UK) government made the assertion in court that the documents Miranda had contained information whose release could endanger lives and Miranda's legal team did not refute that statement. Instead they basically said it was the job of responsible journalists to take steps to ensure that did not happen, conceding that the government had a legitimate reason to believe there was a real threat but claiming that threat should be handled by the journalists themselves.
The problem with this argument, which the court described in its ruling, is that while journalists have a professional responsibility to act responsibly with respect to such potentially dangerous information, they have no actual *legal* responsibility to do so under UK law. Furthermore, Miranda himself was by his own admission not a journalist, and therefore not actually subject to those codes of conduct anyway. What Miranda's defense team seems to be arguing is that even if the government had a legitimate reason to be concerned over the documents Miranda was carrying, the fact that he was "working with journalists" should be enough to convince the government he should be trusted to act safely and responsibly.
Now, this is not me making these statements, and not even the court itself: this is Miranda's legal team making this argument: that the government should by default trust anyone claiming to be working with journalists to handle sensitive and dangerous information properly. Your characterization of the UK government's actions isn't just contradicted by the court ruling, its contradicted by Miranda's lawyers themselves.
This story links to the BBC which also appears to be very uncritical of the UK government press freedom violations these days. A much better news source would be the new real investigative reporting at The Intercept:
Actually, both of those articles claim the UK court ruled that the journalistic activities David Miranda was indirectly involved with "equate" to terrorism. “I’m of course not happy that a court has formally said that I was a legitimate terrorism suspect..." quotes one of those two articles.
The UK court did not rule that way if you read the judgment. In fact, it explicitly states it did not make such a distinction. The court ruled that the law in question doesn't say that the government can detain people it suspects of being terrorists, it actually says the government can detain people who have any connection with such activity to determine if they are or are not involved. The court explicitly ruled that the law was not constructed to detain people who provide "probable cause" in the criminal sense, because the detainment is not specifically targeted at criminals or even suspected criminals directly. Its designed to provide the government with a tool to investigate people who might be, and for whom there doesn't necessarily exist criminally sufficient probable cause for search.
The UK court also ruled that while the statute refers to "terrorist activity" it actually explicitly defines the term for the purposes of the law, irrespective of what people consider "terrorist activity" to be, and the court was required to follow that definition. For the purposes of that statute only, "terrorist activity" is any activity that:
“(1) In this Act ‘terrorism’ means the use or threat of action where— (a) the action falls within subsection (2), (b) the use or threat is designed to influence the government or an international governmental organisation or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and (c) the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause. (2) Action falls within this subsection if it— (a) involves serious violence against a person, (b) involves serious damage to property, (c) endangers a person’s life, other than that of the person committing the action, (d) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or (e) is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.”
Basically, its any act or threat of an act intended to influence a government or governments, involves serious property damage or mortal danger of some specific serious nature, and is intended to advance a political agenda. Notice the law doesn't specifically say you have to threaten to kill someone or kill someone. It actually says you have to act or threaten to act in such a way that death or damage is a consequence of that act. The court itself noted that the law appears extremely broad in its definition, but it wasn't being asked to rule on whether the law was overbroad.
The court ultimately ruled that the government had a legitimate reason to believe that David Miranda was involved with people who were at the time acting or threatening to act in a manner which was designed to influence a government and forward a political agenda, and those acts had the potential to cause death or serious property damage. All those appear true on their face, and thus the law states the detainment was legal. The law doesn't say David Miranda is a terrorist or was involved with terrorists, nor did the court so rule.
Its worth actually reading the judgment, because the court doesn't just rule on the merits of the case, it also summarizes the legal points made in the case both for and against. And if the ruling accurately summarizes the legal points being made by David Miranda's legal team, he's going to keep losing appeals, and he *should* keep losing. The argument being made appears to be this:
1. Governments should never interfere with journalists, ever.
2. Journalists must be allowed to decide for themselves on what they are justified to report.
3. If Governments want something from journalists, they should ask and the journalists should be trusted to respond to those requests appropriately.
The court went so far as to note that when the government witness explained their rationale for how those disclosures could directly threaten lives and damage national security, Miranda's team barely even responded at all, essentially saying "not" but without refuting any of those claims, as if they had no obligation to prove those assertions were unreasonable.
No matter how paranoid you are about government activity and how protective you might be about journalistic endeavors, that can't possibly be a winning argument anywhere. A better legal strategy would probably be to attempt to overturn the actual law itself as being unconstitutionally overbroad (I'm not as versed on UK Constitutional law, so I don't know on what basis you'd do that), but I have a suspicion Miranda's legal team isn't actually attempting to win this case on legal merit. Its attempting to use the case to try to make a non-legal point. The fact that they're framing the ruling as "see, the government thinks journalists are terrorists" when there's no way to read the ruling in that way tells me they almost want to keep losing, because losing makes their point and winning makes the story go away.
The US has no interest in saving the environment. Neither is (really) any of the other first world nations. Like Europe, the US will not get the worst of climate change, and in any case, there is no place better prepared to deal with the consequences
That may be true in a literal sense, and a lot of people think this, but what they often fail to acknowledge is that the first world also has the most to lose. The US, for example, is the world's largest food exporter, something most Americans don't fully appreciate. Climate change is going to change things in many places in many difficult to predict ways, but there's no change possible that will improve America's food production situation. As the big winner, it can only get worse.
I think too many people believe that America is in the good position its in because of some innate greatness of the country that won't change, but the truth is that America was also dealt a great hand and any reshuffling of the deck is far more likely to generate a worse position than a better one. The First World were the big winners in the rule-the-planet lottery. If they were smart, they would do everything possible to help the rest of the world maintain that status quo. If they were smart.
A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.
In line with Star Trek's "Every species except humans has some ludicrously rigid hardcoded trait" style, that is a Ferengi problem; but I suspect that it'd be a major issue for at least some people and some cultures in a hypothetical post-scarcity environment. In fact, we don't even need to hypothesize: In situations where supply starts to increase, particularly when it increases to the point where everybody who is remotely anybody can have some for pocket change, you virtually always see the creation of additional 'tiers' of artificially scarce versions. The fact that the creator bothers with this is a revenue maximizing move(and so the same incentive wouldn't exist if there were no scarcity generally, and no reason to bother with this 'revenue' nonsense); but the fact that it works... there's the rub. Everyone can have a high quality reproduction of FuzzyFuzzyFungus' masterpeice 'The Hyphae Horror', for the simple cost of printing; but they'll still pay more for the numbered-limited-to-500 edition, more still for print #1 in that edition. Why? All the prints are identical; any you value the one that possesses 'firstness'? I suspect that people would love to get away from scarcity in whatever areas they feel are out of their grip right now(whether they are super poor and that is food and shelter, middle class and that is healthcare and college, and so on); but, in our perversity, we seem to still crave the exclusive, the unique, the rare, in whatever nonessentials are relevant.
Its interesting to hypothesize how the Federation, and Earth specifically, managed to reach its post-scarcity model when so many other cultures didn't, and it doesn't seem obvious we in reality are on that same trajectory because of the need for producers to continue to generate high profit margins as you suggest.
And there is a possible way for that to happen that is both plausible and relatively unique to Earth in the Star Trek universe. The Earth, and eventually Federation centered on Earth, we see in Star Trek comes about as a post-nuclear war society with the invention of warp drive. So, simplifying greatly, suppose that in the aftermath of WWIII, with most political AND economic superpowers and powerhouses turned to nuclear ash, a proto-society centered on the invention of warp drive emerges that quickly overtakes everything else on the planet. This society has the advantage of being the only one with direct access to interstellar trade and quickly gains access to space-based resource mining, space based energy production, inexpensive heavy-lift-to-orbit technologies, and rapidly becomes THE energy and resource producer on the planet. And suppose it decides to unify the planet through sheer bribery: join us and get (virtually) free energy, food, housing, and materials. The government of this society wouldn't be motivated by monetary profit, but by the desire to unify the planet under its flag. So instead of corporations constantly looking to maximize revenue, you'd have a government attempting to maximize footprint by making it very easy to get what most of the planet no longer has and it now has mega supplies of. Imagine a global public works project like the one that rebuilt Europe after WWII, but across the entire planet and driven by a government that has a thousand times the resources that the United States had after WWII.
Intriguingly, in Enterprise its mentioned by the Vulcan ambassador late in the series that one of the reasons Vulcan tries to keep Earth on such a short leash is that Vulcan is actually afraid of Earth: Vulcan took about a thousand years to recover from its planetary nuclear war, and their witnessing Earth replicate that feat in less than a century. Perhaps the reason why is because Vulcan had to dig itself out on its own, and its inspiration was philosophical in nature with Surak. On Earth, its inspiration was aided by the Vulcans themselves: they became the example that the proto-Earth government could strive for, and thus Earth's inspiration was more pseudo-economic in nature: we can rebuild it even better than before, and we already know what the future looks like. That indirectly implies that Earth's rebuilding after WWIII was unexpectedly rapid. Perhaps it happened so fast that the "join us we have free stuff" philosophy took over the planet faster than anything else could replace it, faster than any corporation could hope to significantly take advantage of it.
And that's also why its rare. To make it happen, you first have to destroy everything else and start fresh, and you have to be rebuilt by people who are practically handed the keys to unlimited resources and decide to give it all away to gain control of the planet. Its a social experiment that if you try to conduct it, usually you just end up with a dead planet. On Vulcan, this experiment ended with the remaining people deciding to spend centuries retooling their culture so they could slowly rebuild in a controlled way. On Earth, and only Earth, you had a race like the Vulcans come along at just the right time to inspire just the right people to rebuild the planet through resource bribery, at a time when the most of the population was more than happy to be bribed into utopia AND ironically Vulcan also discouraged significant contact with other species which left Earth free to rebuild the planet under the "join us/free stuff" flag without interference from the outside.
Why do you want to take the rules from two of the most screwed-up parts of our economy and apply them to one of the few areas that actually works pretty well?
Its only by the standards invented for the software industry alone that the software industry "works pretty well." By any other standard of quality it scores a zero on a scale of one to ten. We all sit around and agree that software is complex complex complex and its amazing programmers get computers to do anything at all blah blah Turing blah and then we judge software with preschool rules that say you can't hold any failing against software. And of course on that scale it works pretty well. By that standard 12th century medicine worked pretty well, astrology works pretty well, and always betting on black works surprisingly well in Vegas.
In reality, the truth is its impossible for most people to write non-trivial programs without bugs. Just like its impossible for most people to consistently land airplanes without crashing. In air travel, 99.9% of those people are weeded out of pilot programs. In programming, they move on to the next project.
Part of the problem is that the programming profession hasn't had its professional renaissance like the medical profession had in the twentieth century. We don't train programmers to be skilled, efficient, and above all conform to an agreed to set of professional standards. There's no such thing as programmer malpractice. Basically the software development industry is exactly where the medical profession would be if everyone owned a medical text from ancient Greece and treated themselves and their friends based on guesswork and late night infomercials.
That analogy doesn't work. Quack medicine is often worse than no medicine at all (there is evidence that, prior to the 20th century, doctors were as likely to kill the patient as to cure them). In contrast, a buggy and incomplete program may still be better than no program at all.
Most of the time, when code gets screwed up, nobody dies. In those cases where shoddy code actually could put lives at risk (e.g. embedded systems for vehicles, medical equipment, etc.) then there usually is more rigorous quality control, better and more comprehensive testing, and so forth. But if you demand that every piece of code in existence be written to those standards, most people and organizations won't be able to afford having any code written at all.
How is it then that we can afford so much better medical services, so much better air transportation, so much better everything else, but if we want reliable code its going to cost extreme amounts of money? What your thesis above seems to be saying is if only software killed more people, not only would we have better software, but it would be cheaper as well. That's an interesting conjecture to forward.
It's a slippery slope. You really want the government setting up detailed regulations governing software development and how software projects are to be managed?
The government does not dictate which scalpels to use or how much stitches to sew, and yet the medical profession is about a gazillion times more reliable than the software development industry, even though the medical profession is also saddled with performing services on a platform far more unpredictable than any computer system created. Even Windows.
It won't change until we all collectively believe it *can* change, and demand change, and refuse to allow those that refuse to change to work in this industry.
There's no way to change that without adopting Stalinism, where the government owns and runs the corporations.
I see.
It's different with hospitals because lives are on the line and there's specific laws created to deal with the liability involved there.
Stalinistic laws, I suppose.
And even if the stars align and you manage to get an all-star team, the product can *still* suffer bugs due to resource issues, like management shortening a deadline without input from the team, poor or non-existent testing environments, or poor equipment and tools.
Here's the thing. Why do we accept that as just the unavoidable state of software development. If a hospital told you a loved one was injured or killed because they just decided to use experimental drugs or rush the surgeon so he could move on to the next patient, we'd all scream bloody murder. We would not accept that as being reasonable. But we do all the time with software development. And because we accept it, there's no incentive to change it.
It won't change until we all collectively believe it *can* change, and demand change, and refuse to allow those that refuse to change to work in this industry. Until we do, we might have C students treating us in hospitals, but completely random people writing the software that increasingly controls all of our lives.
"Programming without bugs is easy. It's just slow and expensive. so nobody wants it. It's cheaper and easier to write bad code and ship it, absorbing backlash, than to build it right in the first place."
Tell me. I am currently involved in a project that involves parsing text from thousands of pages written by different people. And it's a horrendous task. Even though the pages are somewhat standardized, there are variants of wording, variants of spelling, typographical errors (those are particularly bad to deal with), etc. Trying to create bug-free methods for parsing those into their constituent parts is a difficult job indeed. I did not realize when I took the job just how NON-conforming all these different pages are. After all, they're in a "standardized" format. Haha. I'm sticking with the job, though, because if I can pull it off, it might also pay off. But bug-free is just impossible in this case (unless you're IBM, maybe... but even Watson made mistakes). The best I have managed is to get most of them right, and flag the rest as needing human intervention. As long as I can keep the latter to a minimum, it will be okay. But none? Not a chance.
I don't think you understand the difference between writing a program with no bugs, and writing a program capable of performing any task however ill-defined. No one credibly expects the latter. But if your code *correctly* parses the formats it understands and *correctly* flags those it confirms are in different formats, that program is bug-free if that's its intended function. If your program core-dumps in the middle of processing because someone misspelled a word, that's a bug and also avoidable. If you claim it can process all documents even in formats you haven't anticipated and it fails to do so, that's your fault for overpromising, but not a bug.
"Part of the problem is that the programming profession hasn't had its professional renaissance like the medical profession had in the twentieth century."
No, it isn't. The current state-of-the-art is such that programming is still as much an art as it is a science. If/when it ever gets to the point you can test and certify programmers reliably the same way you do mechanical engineers, WITHOUT stifling innovation in the process, THEN you'll have reached that goal.
Which it will never achieve, so long as its seem as an art and not a science. If you're going to wait around for software development to magically achieve a state of being objectively judged, it will never happen. Its not going to happen voluntarily or organically. It didn't happen that way in the medical profession either.
And honestly, "innovation" in programming is only interesting to me if it produces *reliable* results unobtainable any other way. And those innovations in software development are few and far between on large scales.
In the absence of any keep out signs, (there weren't any), even in France, public items are for free for public consumption.
The only strawman around here is you, and you seem to have most of it in your head. This guy did nothing wrong. The documents were freely available on the web. There was no security on the site, and no copyright on the documents.
As he states on TFA:
The article has an update posted:
UPDATE: Laurelli ended up admitting in testimony that when he found the documents, he traveled back to the homepage that they stemmed from and found an authentication page. This indicated that the documents were likely supposed to be protected. That admission played a part in his later conviction in the appeals court.
In other words, he admitted to the court that he deliberately attempted to determine if the documents were intended to be publicly accessible or not, and had determined *to his own satisfaction* that they were likely not intended to be made public. That's probably why he was not acquitted on the basis of the documents being public. They were, to an uninitiated person. But Laurelli actually knew what he was doing and admitted to the court that he himself believed the documents were not intended to be publicly accessible. So while he thought they "ought to be" public, he also knew they were not intended to be. So by his own admission, he had the requisite intent to steal them from people who did not want them taken.
It seems the lower court acquitted him because all they knew was he got the documents through a public search, and did the right thing by acquitting him. And the appeals court also did the right thing in upholding that acquittal. What they convicted him of was the different crime of retaining and disseminating those documents *after* he realized they were not intended to be public.
It's a bad analogy because non-software engineers who do really creative work generally do have similar failure rates to software engineers. If you look at builders of original architecture they have to deal with fixing a lot of problems. Petroleum engineers have all sorts of inefficiencies and failures. Bridges that are in any way original are frequently known to fail. Let's stop comparing complex software applications to incredibly standardized roads.
Not even close. Yes, the farther you venture from standard building codes or standardized engineering, the more likely it is that novel designs will have flaws prior engineers did not have to deal with. However, the failure rates outside of software are probably several orders of magnitude less frequent on average, and generally at least an order of magnitude lower in severity.
Yes, occasionally something spectacular happens and you have something like the Tacoma Narrows bridge. But then everyone learns from that disaster, and almost no one anywhere makes that same mistake again. If they do, they often go to jail or face severe penalties. In software, a spectacular crash caused by a particular kind of bug isn't publicly analyzed and the entire software development industry doesn't pass new standards that proscribe avoiding that error in the future. In engineering, the saying goes that code is written in blood. A mistake happens, people die, and building codes are changed to prevent that from happening again. Its often spoken about in engineering circles with a fair amount of derision: people actually have to die before we decide to change the rules. But in software its far worse because NO AMOUNT OF PEOPLE DYING would eliminate a class of bug. Because software is just this crazy complex beyond human comprehension thing we can't make rules about because its all voodoo and chaos theory.
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin
