nathaniel

When we talk about wingloadings everybody seems to play fast and loose with causality. What proportion of people die more than 0.25 miles from home and without a chaperone? I'd guess it's a fair portion. Think of all the suffering we could prevent! nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Of the two crimes you mention, which is more likely to intimidate people that weren't directly involved? I don't necessarily agree with hate crime laws (I'm noncommittal, actually) but I think I have a good idea of why they came about: You're aware that there's been a history of particular types of crimes, such as against homosexuals or against religious and ethnic groups etc. Crimes were and are committed in furtherance of a (sometimes surreptitious or just "coincidental") conspiracy of intimidation. Granted it's a lot less so now than it was, say, around and before Brown vs. Board, but the intimidation factor warrants additional censure. Hate crime laws are about effecting changes in patterns of crime. Kinda like how penalties for speeding in different areas are different. There's a bit of injustice involved, but on the whole it works out for the better (or so a proponent will tell you). nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Well, the whole government thing from the get-go is pretty up front about being not perfect. It's the first line of the Constitution that says it's about creating a "more perfect union" instead of a "totally perfect union". Just that there's downsides to certain legislation isn't grounds enough for disqualification. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

OK, just to stir things up a bit--and not endorsing any individual in this discussion--analogies are wonderful things. I know (for real) a woman who lives in Manhattan. She's lived in Manhattan for 50 years. She seldom leaves a 5-block radius from her apartment, and she's petrified whenever she does. She needs serious coaching and a couple friends' direct support & encouragement to leave the isle. She's more or less healthy and her physical attributes are no impediment. She's managed to survive so far, and as long as she stays within 5 blocks or so of her apartment she's an ordinary happy person. drumroll please.... Therefore, every city dweller should stay within 5 blocks of home, and should have a pair of chaperones when they leave. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

In a word, revocability. Once someone has compromised your biometrics you are locked out of the system. Since you can't change your biometrics like you can change a credit card number. Combine this with the stuff being so new that nobody (other than what marketers of the systems tell you) has researched the products and how difficult they are to defeat. Several first-gen biometric products had non-obvious failure modes, like breathing on a fingerprint reader to trigger the heat sensor and provide the previous fingerprint by condensing steam on the observation plate. What proof do we have that other non-obvious holes don't exist? Why should we feel more confident in computers and biometrics than our current systems? I understand technology is neat and all, but it's a huge Risk. The payoff for getting it right can be very high and the penalty for getting it wrong can be huge. Certainly a little forethought is appropriate. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Aye, the questions are tangential to the pitfalls of biometric ID, that's the point Then we agree there is a major difference. We differ in our a priori trust of computers vs people. I think computers today are and for the medium to long term future will be both more falliable and more corruptable than people in all interesting cases pertaining to ID. Not your card, your data. Your card may not physically hold the data, but that's irrelevant. It's that once your identity is compromised the patrons of the system won't ever again be able to differentiate the real you from the compromised you. The manifestation of your ID in the physical form of a card is not relevant to the failings of biometric systems. When you lose your credit card identity (your CC#, exp date, etc) the old number is deactivated and you get a new one. Your association with the old one is invalidated and you are paired with the new one. When you lose your biometric ID data (ID in this sentence is not the same as ID card) you'll have to appeal to your deity for a new one. Doing it this way eliminates what's called revocability. Would you disagree that revocability is a Good Thing? A. Go in through the front door with your compromised biometric ID. It's the Sword of Damocles. B. Your tissue is not protected. This is the no-GED-required bit. Tissue grows easily, and we drop free samples everywhere. All it takes is a petri dish. Replicating tissue != cloning. The specific example of replicating tissue is not applicable to retinas or fingerprints, as they are not replicated simply by replicating tissue. Tissue samples would defeat biometrics based on genetic alleles and other properties of tissue. The Big Problem with biometrics is that the compromises are not well understood. Broad awe of technology is not enough to provide security. It's precisely our poor understanding of the failure modes of biometrics that makes them an extremely poor choice for ID. It's absolutely fallacious to suggest that the paucity of studies done on biometrics implies they are safe. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Getting DNA and cell samples is easy, humans leave a trail everywhere they go and on everything they touch. Stealing it is part of defeating certain biometric systems, though obviously not fingerprints and retina scans. You seem to be confused about what biometrics are. Your photo isn't used how people biometrics would be used, it's on the other end of the spectrum of automation. Your photo is there for another human to perform a gut-check on the rest of the data on your id card. Biometrics would /be/ some or all of the rest of the data on the card. The part of the card that would be replaced would be the credit card number, driver's license number, social security number, or equivalent. Whereas numbers are assigned more or less arbitrarily to people, fingerprints and retinas are not. Once your essential biometric data is compromised you're kaput until you can get a new body. No amount of calls to the bank or DMV will help you get a new biometric ID. Biometrics can't be used to replace a photo because there's simply no way that millions of people will ever be trained to assess them--machines will always be involved in digesting biometrics into a form that people can understand, and therein lies weakness. It's just as bad for a photo to be used as a biometric data source... nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Thinking of what I did in 6th grade, I think it's just fine. The verbiage is excess, but that's OK or even desirable in an extra credit problem, it makes em think about wtf they are doing. Many of the math problems I've solved since I graduated ('00) are problems where my peers confused the relevant data with the bad. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

And if you're willing to jockey with 3-5 cables when you settle down at your desk, you can save the $100 you would have spent on the docking station and use it for jump money. On many laptops the dock is primarily for convenience. I recently shopped for a PC for my sister and it turned out the cheapest/best deal we could find was an IBM b/c they had a promotion for a free 512 MB ram upgrade. Came in at around $450 with the monitor + shipping IIRC. So do some homework and see if you can get hooked up with a promotion...sites like http://www.gotapex.com sometimes have pretty decent deals on them from major manufacturers. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

What happens when someone steals your biometric id? You can't just call up the DMV/bank and ask for a new one. Think it's not possible? Think hard. Early computerized fingerprint readers (middle 90's) could be triggered just by breathing on them softly. They were triggered by heat and moisture, and when the breath condensed on the optical plate it provided enough contrast to read the previous fingerprint. The mind boggles. Tissue cultures, gel casts, DNA theft, the works. It's not cloning we're talking about here... and it doesn't take a GED to do this kind of biology. As Mr Schneier describes, the Risks are massive and the benefits are small. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Just to nitpick: Not looking for work is different from unemployed. The definition of unemployed is looking for work. People often get mixed up about this. Also, there's other figures that indicate unemployment beyond enrollment in federal unemployment benefits programs (which are temporary) IIRC there's a federal survey sent out every month or so to a few thousand people asking whether they are employed, looking for work, or out of the labor market. from the BLS website How the Government Measures Unemployment: but your point is not lost. Statistics come with margins of error. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

We are getting in the uncomfortable territory where culture blends with fad. That's fine and all, but we should recognize it's not entirely the same as the more common use of the word culture. Buzzwords are cool for a while, but "fixing" diction is the wrong approach toward shifting attitudes. The order is backward...shifting attitudes are how diction is changed. It's fallacious to assume that engineering collisions between words will conflate their meanings. If anything it hinders ordinary discussion (witness the threadjacking ). nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Have you forgotten the settlement of the Colonies, and the situation of the people that founded what exist today as the states of New England? I think Britain should have to pay up one way or another for its mistreatment of the Puritans and Anglican Separatists in 16th and 17th centuries. It still affects me today! Or is 200 years not enough? Off the top of my head I can think of a few races of people that overcame centuries of oppression. Consider the Mamluks in Egypt. Slaves from the 9th century on, they captured the caliphate between 1250-1260 AD. How about the Jews, oppressed for 2000 years and today pretty much just like everyone else. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Ultimately it's a moral judgement so it's going to be hard to find a proper basis. The pitfalls of framing comparisons of utility is what leads many to the rejection of utilitarian standards. Contrast "do no further harm" with "maximize utility via reallocation". Like the expression: when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

And this would be an example of one of the ugly faces of collective utilitarianism. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

This is where the conspiracy theories start. White folks aren't as a whole in collaboration with each other, and the same can be said of any non-trivial ethnic group. And every ethnic group seems to have some subset willing to collude against all the others. I think one reason AA is subject to criticism is that it's literally robbing Peter to pay Paul. I'm not about to say that's never justified, it's a one-way test the other way. In economics it's called Pareto efficiency. Try to make everyone better off without sticking it to anyone in particular. Collective utilitarianism falls short on moral grounds to many people, I suspect, esp when you get to the part about free will. It's a calculus more cruel than slavery. So here's an alternative: let the market sort it out. If qualified people aren't getting the job from employer X due to discrimination, market theory suggests X will hurt itself by reducing the pool of labor suppliers. Let X and its investors decide if the "benefit" is worth the absolute price--company X's that don't choose correctly will be competed (slowly, perhaps) out of the market by those that do. I know I know "we've tried this already". Well yes, it has been tried before but not by us in this economic climate. I perceive that the increased competition provided by globalization in many industries means that it's much more difficult to afford a staff that excludes candidates on bases other than their proper qualifications. The walls between cultures I think are shrunken in light of the threat of offshoring. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

It's that the groups you distinguished are not entirely distinguishable. Are you asserting that I can't claim Africa as part of my ancestry? I'll tell you now: I don't have any living African relatives and I've never been to Africa. Likewise Anglos, Saxons, and Lithuanians. But I still believe I've got African ancestry, it's just that it was probably more in the thousands BC than AD. So here's the point: it's all relative, and the imprecision of the language can give rise to inaccurate statements. Edit: So, to address your literal question, what do you suppose is the average unemployment in African nations? gripe: It's practically impossible to discuss issues of race without getting cast into racism... nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

This sounds like a case in which what's legal and what's a bright idea don't always coincide. Some places, like financial companies, are required by federal regulation to record all conversations with clients and prospective clients--including email. In this kind of situation it's generally going to be the case that the company errs on the side of caution and records everything since it's a) cheaper than paying for filtering and b) less likely to result in Big Problems. I've worked at places where this was the Rule. I saw staff and managers fired for accessing the retained email inappropriately, and I saw staff fired on the basis of activities that were revealed in the retained email. It's definitely a gray area--I can't imagine I'd be working for anyone very long if I knew they were abusing the records they kept about me. It sounds probable that the bossman in this case is over the line, wherever it is... nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

The only African people in America I know are white... I know several black people, but afaik they're no more African than I am. I saw an article recently that More young black men have done prison time than military service or earned college degree (The link will expire in a day or two) from the article published this week in American Sociological Review and about a study at the University of Washington: Without addressing why this might be the case, I'd say it's probably a factor. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

In Great Britain they pay about the same figures on the gas pump, except its in GBP per Liter instead of Dollars per Gallon. I think I'd take up bicycling before I paid $100 for a tank of gas. It'd certainly make fuel efficiency a more attractive proposition. Currently the extra cost of hybrid engines vs regular internal combustion is more than the amount you'd save on gas over the lifetime of the car for most people. And somehow I sincerely doubt it's fuel efficiency concerns that dropped the sales of SUVs down 15% last year... nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck...it's a duck! There is no standard to which IQ tests are held...there is no difference to me between what it is and how people use it. Calling it an IQ test isn't a measure of prestige; it has negative connotations IMO. And every other IQ test is subject to exactly this type of flaw: one number is never enough to measure the worth of a person. It sounds like we are in hostile agreement =). nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

There is no IQ Test per se, there are dozens. IIRC Stanford-Binet version is the archetype with the 100/16 figures defined, and a handful of impersonators following suit. Some of them assign the number 100 to the median of some sample population. The SAT is an IQ test with a median calibrated between 800 and 1000 over the set of all takers in a year. edit: now I see they're going to make it median 1500 out of 2400 possible with the new essay section. Oh bother. It's all shifty business tho. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Pol Pot with his anti-intellectual campaigns and Hilter come to mind. Let's not forget how effective the Cultural Revolution was in China. But I'm just being persnickety, I've got an extraspecial disdain for IQ tests. The capability of a person is not something that can be reduced to one number...and a single number is not enough to describe what we are talking about when we are comparing two persons' abstract capabilities. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

The first two categories are not exclusive, IMO. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

The bomb went off but didn't contaminate a wide area. Enough gas to detect, but not enough to seriously injure the people around it: from one of the articles All in all it's consistent with a device that has been constructed long ago and put away somewhere to rot, which is how most 3rd world (1st world?) munitions are disposed if they are not used in anger. IOW, it's not a WMD anymore if it goes off in the middle of a group of people and doesn't incapacitate any of them. Sounds most like it was disposed of, just not quite in the way we do it in the west. Disposed of and stumbled upon by someone without much of a clue as to what it was or how to use it--ie that it could not be used anymore. The question of whether Iraq ever had WMD is moot, Iraq used them in the '80s. The question of whether any lasted into the late '90s is less definite, and unfortunately this device offers only additional proof of the former. nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?