How is gaining access to the contents of your phone not "just surrendering information which is stored outside your brain"?

Your phone and its contents are evidence and once a warrant is issued (which I hope is still a requirement) it is fair game. What is not fair game, thanks to the American constitution, is to say "Either you can tell us that you committed the crime and we can send you to jail for the confession or you can tell us you didn't and we can send you to jail for perjury."

The password on your phone is not protected information because it requires your consent for the police to look at it. It's protected information because divulging it proves you own and have access to the contents and giving it up equates to admitting the same. You can't be compelled to make that admission.

But if the police prove by some other means that you do own and have access to the information, then you're no longer protected from being compelled to dislose the password. E.g., we have had articles here where a defendant admits it is their laptop computer and they know the password, and then are ordered to reveal it.

How is someone with only high school as experience expected to assess how well they will be doing in 401 Statistical Mechanics down the road, what job they will have, how difficult it will be to make their student loan payment on top of a carpayment, rent check, groceries, etc.? Up to this point in life most of them have lived at home, had no job, no responsibilities, and are used to having all the important decisions made for them. Their first real life decision shouldn't concern whether to sign up for a hundred thousand dollars in debt. They realize it's a lot of money but it's all part of some nebulous future to which their parents, teachers, and peers assure them a "good college" is the key to success. And their actual responsiblity to pay back the loan is deferred four or five years into that future.

What's missing here is the other party to the risk. If you were to take out a loan to buy a house or start a business, you would have to convince the bank that it was reasonable for you to pay it back. The goverment has removed that risk to the seller of the loan on the theory that now you can take out a cheaper loan, but with the downside that there is no second assessment on whether the loan is a good idea.

But in the grander scheme the bank is mostly just an accessory. They're earning a percentage, it's the colleges who are pocketing the lump sum, and the colleges are also doing so with the entire risk shifted onto the student, despite their continued intimate involvement in whether the student's investment will pay off.

IMHO, the university should be as responsible for the loan as the student. Call it a partnership.

You're comparing analysis of a decades long trend to single data points. The question which is being asked is "Why has the proportion of females in CS declined?" Yes there are many complicated factors which go into a woman's decision to pursue a career in CS -- more than we could ever hope to analyze -- but taking all those factors as a given, and then allowing a change, it's possible correlate any increase/decrease to that change. This study is purporting to have isolated economic factors as providing that correlation for a particular set of data. No, it does not explain the job market breakdown between women in CS/psychology/art history, etc., but it does explain why the ratio for CS now is different from the ratio for CS in 1985.

I don't see why establishing unrealistic views of reality would ever be constructive. Imagining the week will excel in every way and finding out that it doesn't isn't what I consider "positive thinking" -- obviously the week is going to fall short and then the lesson learned is not going to be a habit of thinking positive, it is going to be the opposite, that thinking positive is futile and incorrect.

What I consider "positive thinking" is a realistic perspective which acknowledges the good and the bad but emphasizing the good aspects. Seeing losing your job as an opportunity to start a new chapter. Seeing the misfortune of others as an opportunity to help them. Being thankful for what you already have instead of craving everything you don't. It's a more accurate view in any case -- it's quite rare that losing a job or a relationship deprives the rest of your life of meaning or success, and solving problems actually does give the brain a sense of euphoria, so why should you be upset about encountering them?

The mental contrasting approach the article describes seems oriented along those lines, but to me it's not a matter of "contrast" so much as a matter of compatibility -- positive thinking doesn't contrast with realism, realism simply sets the context in which positive thinking should take place.

The risk factor is non-zero regardless of what procedures are followed. Even if ebola is not generally transmissible by air it's not quite against the laws of nature for the virus to find itself in some liquid drop which just happens to follow the right air currents in the right time frame to get taken up in an orifice etc. Then there's the possiblity of tears and defects in protective equipment, etc. The fact he spent so much time near ebola patients may have turned a one in a million risk to a one in a thousand or one in a hundred and from there it was bad luck. Of course, he might have botched it, too, but realistically if someone is spending all of their time around carriers of the disease they should be considered at risk of contracting it whether they're being clever about it or not.

Clearly google should have a team of philosophers, ethicists, social activists, and legal theorists evaluate each of the 1000 requests per day to ensure that each link removed is a "good judgment."

Converting natural nickel to nickel 62 is a bit outside the magician's domain. If the scientists only examine the fuel at the begining and end maybe there is opportunity for some slight of hand (although not any I think a magician would be more likely to catch given there were 32 days to make the switch). If they are making consistent measurements, however, it could be very tricky to fake data which shows consistent rates of consumption for nickel-58 and nickel-60 given the starting abundance.

If you have a large applicant pool (which I believe is true for the FBI) false positives are not a concern. It's only false negatives which they would actually fret about.

For your convenience I have put some good resources in C:/ on the FBI mainframe.

We're also so considerate of ourselves as to intercede if other humans are in jeopardy. Even if it's an overpopulated area, we confer humans with individual importance, unlike with, e.g., endangered species where we only seem to care if they are fulfilling their ecological niche. If the ethical dilemma includes whether or not to eat octopi but not whether or not to intercede when octopi are, e.g., about to be eaten by a shark, then at the very least I see that as a philosophical inconsistency.

Perhaps that should be the qualifier for the species itself--does it express a love for its own identity as a species, one in which it abstractly reasons that there is a better world in which octopii are free from predation and other concerns? Embracing that image ourselves then becomes a direct application of empathy. Does the species simply instinctually react to avoid danger? Even if it can bring complex algorithms to bear on resolving the problem, that doesn't mean it has a philosophical desire for a world in which it would be free from harm. So, other than our interests, why would we feel compelled to create such a world for it?

Surely the physicists should have just made their grad students move them?

I don't actually browse the entire internet and have no interest in guaranteeing equivalent revenue to everyone selling penis enlargements. My share of the burden is only a dozen or so websites visited regular. But since many of those are content aggregators let's go ahead and say I visit 100 x that many websites, and consider these casual visits as equal to supporting the website for an entire year.

This makes $230 / 1,036,878,123 websites (internetlivestats.com) * 1200 = 2.7*e-4 dollars to cover my website burden. And I feel I probably deserve some credit for subscribing to Netflix and Amazon prime. Obviously bandwidth is a better measure of the 'cost' I need to cover for these websites to remain hosted, but averaging over all websites does (in a difficult to quantify way) account for the fact that many of the websites out there even now are not profit-motivated.

I hope the authors of this study were also sure to deduct the cost users already pay due to web advertisements in the form of malware infections, including the compromise of bank accounts, identity, etc.

Increasing the expected cost reduces the expected profit.

Which takes resources, thus increasing costs, thus reducing the expected profit.

While we're discussing profit as the be all and end all, I'm curious how Spamcop is supposed to monetize this? And does preventing people from seeing spam not "disrupt the flow of money"?

It's great to say there are other ways to go about fighting spam, but anything which makes the spammers' efforts a little bit more difficult or a little bit less effective contributes toward minimizing the industry.

As a product of academia I am professionally trained to get things done on the cusp of deadlines. I'm not joking. Both on the student and instructor side there is simply a great deal of latitude. There's no time management enforced in any form except for "deadlines," so that's when you learn to get things done.

As lovely of a thought as it is that entering the workforce will automatically instill a newfound sense of responsiblity and dedication to all a graduates (and I'm sure it does for at least a few weeks or so), I for one am not surprised that working unsupervised at home at a government job with quarterly deadlines results in people observing the same habits they have for the past 6-10 years.

Admittedly, I wouldn't want to rush a result such that it is inadequately reviewed either, and I don't know if patent clerks have projects which would actually take an entire quarter to investigate, but the first thing I would do is have them sync all of their edits/notes/research in a way to make them reviewable. It's amazing how a little bit of transparency encourages people to make regular progress.