And what if you don't get the green card? Then you will go back home, and be the ideal candidate for offshoring the job you care currently doing -- although at much lower wages.

Understand, I *want* you to get the green card too. We should just issue more green cards faster to tech workers if we need them. If there is an H-1B program, it should be a fast track toward permanent residency.

Concentrations of tech workers *create* jobs. That's why Facebook moved from Boston to the Bay Area. Boston has plenty of tech talent for a small company, but if you're planning on growing from a half dozen to thousands of tech employees in three or four years the Bay Area is arguably the only place you can do that. So why would we want to kick tech talent out of the country? Only to send their jobs with them.

This has nothing to do with protectionism. Nobody is saying not let foreign software into the country.

As for foreign labor, I have no objection to bringing foreign labor in. My objection is kicking that labor out after it has gained experience. If there really was a tech worker shortage, these are the very workers we'd want to stay.

What this does is create a pool of offshore labor that's familiar with the work being done *here*. The obvious purpose is to use the immigration system to assist companies that want to relocate work overseas. And there's nothing special about American tech people; anything we can do can be done in India or Ukraine. That's fine, but I don't think the US government should be in the business of making it attractive for companies to move jobs overseas.

It's something so irrational (if we were to assume for the moment that the US government works for the welfare of the American people) there isn't even a word for it. It's the mirror image of protectionism. It's self-predation.

Well, Windows 8 is a capable OS too. It's just got a somewhat awkward and unfamiliar graphical shell.

I don't even hate the Windows 8 shell; I pretty much take it for granted that modern desktop shells suck. That's because designers keep trying to get them to do more for users, when users don't really need *more*; they need the shell to do what they want, when they want it, and then stay the hell out of the way. On top of that there's the unfamiliarity. Windows has always UI problems with putting a cheery facade over a complex train wreck, but the fact that they keep changing the signposts.

I just roll with it. It's like learning to conjugate irregular verbs when you're mastering a language, only they keep changing them every few years. As an *OS*, apart from the somewhat confusing shell, I have no complaints about Windows 8, unlike Vista, whose aggressive "optimizations" broke a number of tools I use regularly. It's all increasingly peripheral, anyway, as more information is managed through the web. The desktop is no longer the focus of the user's experience, it's just a terminal.

I've heard this story, but it was after my time there. It's definitely in the classic style of MIT lame nerd humor. There's an often element of ironic self-deprecation in MIT humor.

Up until the 80s at least MIT had an archaic phone system in all the dorms. It was almost certainly maintained in part by student labor, since due to tuition costs most students had work study jobs -- often quite technical.

Well, there actually is a legitimate issue here.

Not every takedown notice in the Chilling Effects database is bogus. By putting the text of legitimate notices in a searchable database, Chilling Effects can be used to find infringing content. For example I didn't see "Interstellar" when it was in the theaters near me. Using Chilling Effects I very easily found a number of sites offering bootleg downloads.

If Google removes an infringing link from search result, having the takedown notice copy stored at Chilling Effects appear in Google search result effectively nullifies the takedown. The offending URL is right there in the takedown text.

So what is being balanced here is Chilling Effects' mission -- serving as a database for researching takedowns -- vs. the legitimate copyright interests of the people issuing the takedowns. It won't stop legitimate or illegitimate users of the Chilling Effects database, but it won't guide casual search engine users to infringing content either.

Of course this won't satisfy intellectual property interest groups, whose only mode of operation appears to be "scorched earth".

Diving to 30+ meters? Probably air. And I'm guessing it's probably not a good idea to work divers to exhaustion.

They still use dot matrix printers in some rental car agencies -- if you're getting nostalgic.

As for the old rotary phones they were quite ingenious. The technology didn't exist to have out-of-band signaling between the terminal (phone) and the central office switch. Instead as he dial unwound it would interrupt the circuit between the phone and the switching station, essentially hanging up very briefly. Each of these brief pulses in the circuit current would rotate a series of servos at the switching office by certain amounts. What that meant was that you could dial a phone buy tapping the receiver cradle at a certain speed. When I say "you could" I mean in the same sense as "you can pick a lock with a piece of bent wire and a thin lever." In other words your mileage may vary.

When I was an MIT student a club I was in had a lock on their phone's dial to prevent people making unauthorized calls (long distance call used to cost lots of money. The lock was next to useless because so many people knew how to dial phones by tapping the number out on the receiver cradle.

They looked at the radiation coming out of the sample to find evidence of Am-241, an impurity that would be formed if the sample were created in a cyclotron but not if it were created in a reactor. This test doesn't require the sample even to be touched.

OK, I read it, and I wasn't impressed.

The reason is that your definition is circular:

That's fine as an operational definition of what a society *treats* as privacy, but it does no good in telling us what those boundaries should be.

I worked in an engineering lab at MIT when Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980, and we'd developed one of the first digital field seismometers, and we used a similar technique. Seismometers that were left in the field for weeks were designed to start recording on to mag tape when an event started, but the problem was you'd lose the crucial minutes *before* where interesting things might be happening. Memory was fabulously expensive, so we fed the data off the A/D converter into an array of discrete flip-flops that functioned as a shift register. When recording was triggered, the mag tape would start recording the seismic reading from thirty seconds ago.

The thing is, memory is *not* fabulously expensive anymore. You can find 128 GB USB flash drives for under $20 retail, so the memory chips must be tiny fraction of that. It should be feasible to record an officer's entire shift -- even a double shift -- from an affordable device. I think it's much more practical just to load up on memory than to try to wire up an patrolman with cables and switches. And as with a volcano exploding, the seconds, even minutes leading up to an event are crucial to understanding it.

I took a course on computer privacy law a few years ago, and one of the big questions is "what is privacy"? After looking at all the various philosophical and legal definitions, I came away with this definition: privacy is autotomy -- the right to conduct your affairs without unreasonable and uninvited interference.

So I would define online harassment as deliberate and uninvited interference. Unpleasantness is simply one *means* by which the interference is accomplished, but it is not in and of itself harassment.

Example 1: you make the mistake of delving into Youtube comments. That's like crossing a Norwegian footbridge with a sack of goats. You have chosen to dive into a pool of nastiness, and unpleasant feelings are an unfortunate but non-actionable consequence of that decision.

Example 2: you decide to block some of the more obnoxious trolls. One of them figures this out and creates a new account so he can continue harassing you. Now that's harassment, because you have explicitly un-invited that interaction. He is interfering with your right to ignore him.

Example 3: one of the trolls doxes you and follows you to another website. That's harassment too because his *intent* is to interfere with your enjoyment of that website.

Example 4: You are on a website and someone violates the site's "harassment" policy. This is a matter for the site admins, not the police or courts, unless the person is cyber-stalking you. A reasonable person doesn't expect site policies to be strictly and swiftly enforced -- it almost never happens. By choosing to use any website you choose to expose yourself to obnoxious people.

citation needed.

Back when people rode horses relatively few people did it. In the 1870s US, the cost to keep a horse in stable would cost almost a third of a typical laborer's daily wage ($0.50 out of $1.75), most of which was already spoken for.

You mean like this one (text available here)? Or this one? Or this one? Or this one?

The problem is that people who demand Muslims condemn violence actually don't care what Muslims have to say. It's just posturing.

Except there's no way of telling whether those addresses weren't being used proxies too.

This is an exercise in Bayesian logic. If you had a high degree of prior suspicion that NK was behind this, it'll look like a smoking gun. If you have a low degree of prior suspicion, it won't look nearly so significant. Personally, I'm in the middle. I think this makes it more likely that NK was behind the attack, but I don't regard it as a "smoking gun". It seems perfectly credible that someone who can orchestrate the Sony hack could hack an NK host. We know that the attackers *sometimes* used proxies. So which is more likely, that the NK addresses are just another red herring, or that they "got sloppy"?

The reason for my agnosticism is the sheer diversity and chaos of the Internet. Arguments that "it makes sense" for so-and-so to have done something hold no water with me, because there are people out there who will do things for reasons that make no sense to me, or won't do things when I think they should. It makes perfect sense for NK (as we understand them) to be behind this, but that doesn't signify.

Motivations are weak evidence for anything. It's like me and my brother-in-law, who is a big-shot cultural studies professor at a prestigious university. I once mentioned to him I always wanted to have a Unimat -- a miniature desktop machine shop. This totally mystified him. He couldn't imagine why someone would want to have such a thing. On the other hand, if I'd said I'd wanted to meet third wave feminist philosopher Judith Butler he'd have found this perfectly understandable and logical. Many people who understand the attraction of mini-machine tools might not understand the appeal of meeting with a major post-structuralist thinker, and vice versa. Unless you see the attraction of both, your understanding of one or the other group's motivations is bound to be unreliable.

Our reading of other people's motivations is apt to say more about ourselves than about them. Hard evidence is what is needed before motivations can contribute to our beliefs one way or the other. Tracing the attack (in part) is a step in the right direction, but far from conclusive.