The call quality on both cell phones and IP phones is worse than those on traditional phone lines. IP phones echo and stutter. Cell phones give no aural feedback in the earpiece of the person speaking, which is why everyone is always yelling over their cell phone, and cut out when no one is speaking, which sounds like a dropped call. I think anyone who enjoyed two, three, or more decades in the last century, making phone calls over POTS lines, would agree that we have taken a step back in call quality. Every phone call is like an overseas call from the 1970's. Pulling up the POTS lines would be a mistake.

Bruce Schneier commented on this a while back:

I'm not sure he's thought this through, though. I would be more worried that someone would kill me in order to get the documents released than I would be that someone would kill me to prevent the documents from being released. Any real-world situation involves multiple adversaries, and it's important to keep all of them in mind when designing a security system.

I'm not sure what Snowden's alternative is, but a doomsday switch isn't exactly foolproof.

Was that professor of yours one of your professors in your MBA program, or a professor you had while earning a different degree? Also, if you don't mind me asking, it's not definitively clear to me whether you're agreeing with that professor or not. (I think you are.) Can you state unequivocally?

Finally, if you don't mind, I'm intrigued by this quote from the article:

[MBA programs] teach people that you must be special, and it causes people to close down their feedback loop and not rigorously examine when they are wrong.

I don't get it. Do MBA students have this kind of smoke blown up their asses by their professors or the departments? Did you experience anything like this as an MBA student? What are some of the kinds of things that MBA students are told? Thanks.

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When people say "our outcomes are worse," isn't it the case that they're painting with a really broad brush, lumping in the uninsured with the insured? Medicine in the United States is first-rate.

Ancient Greece did this before Rome. In Athens, for example, slaves did all the work. The genesis of Western Culture comes from what the non-slave elite did. On the one hand, they developed theater, sculpture, architecture, philosophy; and on the other hand, they killed Socrates.

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Two words: Alger Hiss. Two more words: You're wrong. Two final words: (I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader.)

It was not "being a communist"; it was being a member of the Communist Party, a secret political organization swearing allegiance to a foreign government that was nominally our foe and having as its expressed purpose the overthrow of the United States Constitution and government.

If you know of a good book on the history of Japan at that point, I would be interested in reading it. Thanks.

That's not my thing.

The rollout is being delayed until after the 2014 congressional elections. The problem is political, not technical.

There was an article on alcoholism and cultural norms that I read a couple of years ago in the New Yorker: "Drinking Games: How much people drink may matter less than how they drink it." Going from memory, the idea was that there is a genetic component to alcoholism. However, whether or not someone with this predisposition actually becomes an alcoholic has much to do with the "rituals" behind alcohol consumption in one's society. That seems to explain why some countries have higher rates of alcoholism ("problem drinkers" who screw up their lives) than other countries. I think it's a broader application of the same idea behind what you're describing. Social setting seems to matter.

Exactly! When a secret program is set up based on the secret interpretation of vague law, what exactly would constitute abuse?

[I]magine an Amber Alert that says it's for a kidnapped child but actually happens to be for a political dissident like Snowden...and that's when I turned off the Amber Alerts.

You do know that weather alerts and amber alerts can be turned off, but not alerts sent out by the President of the United States, right?

I don't know about you, comrade, but I sometimes wonder what's going on in this country.