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Comment: Re:Great, let's forgo schooling altogether! (Score 1) 361

by dcposch (#41357097) Attached to: Why America's School "Lag" Has Never Mattered

I'm pretty sure by age 12, you can pretty much tell who the academic stars will be, who is mediocre and who the lazy slobs are.

This is a dangerous attitude, and I think it's actually one of the strengths of American education that we don't adopt that attitude. I think the ideal high school experience is a combined, diverse high school for everyone--but with lots of elective hours and extracurriculars so that gifted students can advance faster and follow their interests.

The notion that "by age 12, you can pretty much tell who the academic stars will be" leads to bad systems like the one that's common in German-speaking countries. You have a Gymnasium for your "academic stars", who are generally college-bound. You have Hochschule for the rest, and you have Lehre (apprenticeships) that culminate in eg. a plumber certification, or an electrician's license.

Students are split like that in what we'd call the 8th grade. This is thankfully a bit older than "age 12", but it is still far too young. Seeing some of my 16-year-old relatives who are already set for a lifetime career as a welder makes me sad. K-12 education with "forks in the road" hampers freedom and it represents a waste of potential.

Comment: Re:BitCoin (Score 1) 528

by dcposch (#39155243) Attached to: North Korea's High-Tech Counterfeit $100 Bills
BitCoin is very relevant to this, actually.

Yes, it is over-hyped and has some serious weaknesses (like the part where it's capped at 20m Bitcoin, the most that will ever exist).

But I see it as a demo, not a finished solution. It shows the feasibility of a very interesting idea--anonymous, non-physical money. That idea is a bit fringe now because it's so easy to use anonymous, physical money -- like cash and bullion -- but if advanced counterfeiting tech continues on the same trend, it will outpace countermeasures. The gov't will have motivation to move off of physical currency entirely. And virtual money (like bank transfers, credit cards, Paypal, etc) are heavily regulated and designed not to be anonymous.

So the more the government tries to limit the use and exchange of cash, the stronger the motivation to use Bitcoin (or Bitcoin 2.0).

Comment: Re:All I Can Say (Score 2) 336

by dcposch (#38925861) Attached to: Anonymous Posts Audio of Intercepted FBI Conference Call

That's the real story for me, and I find it disheartening. Some dudes from 4chan just hacked the emails, phone systems, and then simply sat in on a phone conference between the FBI and British police.

I had the same reaction when I learned about the Wikileaks cables. 3 million people have access to the database? Many of those with 'secret' clearance? Unlimited downloads? Some kid downloads the _entire database_ logged by himself, on his work computer, without raising so much as a single eg. Nagios alert? Wait, no audit whatsover?? They literally discovered him because he bragged about it to his friends.

It's doubly disheartening since the heads of intelligence in the free world used to be so badass. We all read about Bletchley Park during WWII, about Alan Turing, about the Enigma, about OXCART and HEXAGON during the Cold War. These used to be lean, incredibly focused organizations with large budgets; they used to attract the smartest people in the world, who dedicated their lives to these projects knowing that freedom and democracy were at stake.

Today, our military and intelligence agencies seem to have devolved into a bureaucratic stupor. We layer one embarrassing mistake on top of another. Plenty of raw data on Osama bin Laden before 2001, for example, but no actual intel until far too late. He then proceeded to live in a big, comfortable house in the 'burbs in an ostensibly allied country, while we spent an epic amount of cash ransacking a different country and not finding him for a solid 10 years. Meanwhile, the CIA interrogated and tortured a German-Lebanese dude named Khalid el-Masri for several months at a "secret location" because they confused him with a different "el-Masri". Wikileaks showed that "CLASSIFIED", "SECRET" and "TOP SECRET" are a joke. And now, Anon drove the point home, repeatedly.

It's triply disheartening because there _are_ intelligence agencies today that are lean, mean, and narrowly focused. They're just not ours. They're not anywhere that's free and democratic. And you can bet that when they sit in on a conference call between the FBI and Scotland yard, they don't run to Pastebin to brag about it afterward.

Comment: Re:Why? Bitcoin and Slashdot? (Score 1) 258

by dcposch (#37121236) Attached to: GPGPU Bitcoin Mining Trojan

So what are dollars backed by? The "full faith and credit" of a government, which can simply poof them into existence. In the case of US Dollars, this has worked reasonably well. In the case of Zimbabwean Dollars, not so much.

Maybe you want to go back to a Gold Standard, where the bills are "backed" by vaults full of metal. Then what is gold backed by? It's turtles all the way down.

UItimately, the only reason Bitcoin has value is the same reason USD, bars of gold, or anything else has "value": because some critical mass of people agree that it does.

To quote Warren Buffet:

Comment: Re:Amen to that (Score 4, Interesting) 591

by dcposch (#35716204) Attached to: Piracy Is a Market Failure &mdash; Not a Legal One
I certainly agree that cannabis should be legal and that its legal position relative to alcohol and tobacco is ridiculous. I also agree that the general lack of rationality and open-mindedness surrounding that debate is frustrating. However, I don't think it's fair to blame just the gov't. California had an election this November on legalizing pot, and it failed by a significant margin. This is partly due to popular stupidity, and partly, I suspect, because the puritan types show up to elections more reliably than people who care about marijuana. If even California, the hippy state, can't muster a majority on that issue, how can we expect the rest of the US to do better? We're a democracy, after all. The federal gov't keeps a hypocritical drug policy around in part because a majority of Americans still seem to want it that way.

Comment: Re:the problem is the reverse (Score 2) 791

by dcposch (#35568604) Attached to: CS Prof Decries America's 'Internal Brain Drain'
Accidentally posted AC, reposting as myself:

I couldn't agree more.

America is in an amazing position where despite our culture's lack of respect for education and academia, and despite the very uneven quality of our K-12 education system, we have many of the world's best universities. Students from all over the world dream of making it into places like Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. And every year, thousands of them do.

Some of the smartest people I've met at Stanford are international students. The thought that they might be forced to go home after they graduate is sad, and the people who think this is desirable strike me as either stupid or profoundly short-sighted.

Worrying about H1Bs because they'll "increase competition for jobs" is false economics. Jobs are not like poker chips, little entities that can be won or lost or "stolen". The job market is not a zero-sum game. Whenever Google hires a brilliant, top-0.1% programmer from China, for example, it results in more jobs for Americans. It creates jobs both directly--that programmer may soon have a few people reporting to him--and indirectly, through all the money he's spending in America and the value he's adding to Google.

We're enormously lucky that people like that want to pull up their roots and move to America in the first place. America's image--it's position as a global hub for innovation and research--is one of its greatest assets. It is certainly not guaranteed to stay that way.

For now, the best and brightest want to be here. I think it's absolutely essential that we take advantage of this as much as possible, for as long as we can.

Comment: Re:The research is complete garbage (Score 1) 269

by dcposch (#35017626) Attached to: 100 P2P Users Upload 75% of Content
Actually, there often is an incentive to seed, but it's not a cut of trackers' ad revenue.

Certain private trackers have vast amounts of high-quality content; they generally always have a ratio requirement. For example, if you're downloaded more than X GB, then you must maintain a ratio of 0.5 (ie, in that bracket, your total cumulative downloads can never be more than twice as much as you've uploaded).

Since you're competing for upload slots with the things like dedicated seedboxes on absurdly fast connections, maintaining a ratio can be difficult, even if you're constantly seeding everything you've ever downloaded. Throw in the respect of your peers and additional incentives (eg "power user" designation with extra privileges for people who have a very high ratio), and you definitely do enjoy an "economic benefit", just not in the form of money.

Comment: Re:Nobel Prize (Score 1) 919

by dcposch (#34397684) Attached to: DDoS Attack On Wikileaks Increasing

The leaks don't discredit diplomacy, they simply reveal its normally hidden workings, which are a bit rough around the edges. Not all diplomats are particularly diplomatic.

Ultimately, though, the leaks give me more confidence in diplomacy, because they show that even authoritarian, closed governments like that of China have a solid underpinning of common sense. The cables reveal that China is not nearly as friendly towards North Korea as their Communist affiliation forces them to pretend; in private, they concede that Kim Jong Ill is nuts. The cables also reveal that many middle eastern leaders are just as concerned as we are about the prospect of Iran becoming a nuclear power.

Comment: All about the balance (Score 5, Insightful) 833

by dcposch (#34380766) Attached to: Compiling the WikiLeaks Fallout

Of course the gov't has a legitimate interest in keeping certain secrets, but at the same time, letting politicians do things without even telling voters about it--let alone taking responsibility--is always going to be abused.

I wish we took a middle route. For example, things could be classified, but with the requirement that they have to be reevaluated every year. Anything the gov't does should be public as soon as it's safe. Currently, it seems like the path of least resistance is to keep anything that's classified secret indefinitely, which is dangerous and wrong.

If classified docs were actually released in a timely way, the government could build trust--if we knew that foreign policy from five years ago was reasonable, then we could be more confident that whatever is happening in secret today is reasonable. As is, we just found out through Wikileaks that Hillary Clinton ordered the state department to spy on a bunch of European diplomats (steal credit card info, frequent flyer numbers, etc). Not long ago, Wikileaks gave us video of American helicopters machine-gunning a photographer in Baghdad; he had been working for Reuters, and some soldiers mistook his camera for "a weapon".

The sad reality: Wikileaks is a necessary institution. It is a blunt instrument, but it is the only effective check we currently have on a government that often hides wrongdoing from us in the name of national security.

Comment: Re:Where you go matters -- for grad school (Score 1) 256

by dcposch (#34148130) Attached to: College Application Inflation &mdash; Marketing Meets Admissions

"Debt for the rest of your life"?

As a wise man once said, you're doing it wrong.

At least at my school, the gov't largely pays for the R&D grad students do. And undergrads, for that matter, since undergrad research opportunities abound. It also has need-blind admission. Tuition is, in fact, less than a third of the cash flow here. You can't take that $50,000/year at face value.

Comment: Re:Too Many Applications are Stressful and Useless (Score 1) 256

by dcposch (#34148086) Attached to: College Application Inflation &mdash; Marketing Meets Admissions

I'm currently majoring in CS at Stanford.

I have to disagree with the idea, often-repeated on Slashdot, that $50k/year for college "isn't worth it". Even with a very mercenary take on it -- just considered future income potential -- based on all my friends who have recently graduated, it's worth it. Some are amortizing their tuition in a very short amount of time, assuming they weren't on financial aid.

If I consider things like the friends I've made and the experiences I couldn't have gotten anywhere else, it's absolutely worth it. Last year, I took a quarter off of school to race across Australia with Stanford's Solar Car Project. That quarter didn't cost any tuition; it did cost me most of my summer income in travel expenses. Summer income I got from a job programming. Also definitely worth it.

Comment: Googlewin? My attempt at a nuanced opinion. (Score 5, Insightful) 168

by dcposch (#34078438) Attached to: New VP8 Codec SDK Release Improves Performance

Google follows a really interesting pattern. As far as I can tell, all their software is reactive, rather than proactive.

It is the result of saying "Everyone's using X, but it sucks. We can do it better." They then take a very methodical, PhD-oriented approach to solving the problem. A few parts innovation, many parts simple engineering.

  • It started with just Larry and Sergey, working on their PhDs, using AltaVista and realizing that there was a capital-B Better Way.
  • Then, Gmail was a response to the festering bag of fail that was Hotmail. I distinctly remember the moment when I got my account, back at the very beginning when each one had two invites. I had been in middle of my annoying daily routine, cleaning my Hotmail inbox to get it under 2MB. Gmail had a gigabyte of storage and Google search. My 14-year-old mind was blown.
  • Google News was a response to all those spammy, human-curated news portals like Yahoo and MSN.
  • Google Maps was a response to MapQuest.
  • Chrome was a response to IE and FF just not being fast or stable enough.
  • Now, VP8 is a response to patent-encumbered codecs and shitty Flash.

Now they have 10000 employees, but the basic formula hasn't changed. Is there software that Google has made that hasn't been a direct response to an existing product?

That said, I think there's definitely a case to be made that Google is the software industry's first adult. Software's awkward adolescent foibles are on their way out. No more 90s, no millions and millions of VC dollars being spent on, no more Netscape and Microsoft working furiously on really terrible codebases adding incompatible nonstandard crap to the internet. No more Myspace, no more Geocities. No more paperclips bouncing around asking me if I'm writing a letter; I'm using Google Docs now.

Google approaches software the way a civil engineering firm would approach a skyscraper: they are actual engineers. They collaborate with academia. They write papers. They sit on the W3C and help create standards. They have architects, PMs, devs, testers, and even lawyers to support their projects.

In a way, this is a sad thing. It was a magical time, when a university student in Finland could just sit down, write a simple OS for x86, and watch half the internet run on it a few years later. When a kid from Texas could create a whole new genre of games in a few thousand lines of C. Sometimes I worry that I was born a couple years too late.

Halfway through my CS degree, I hope that the era of cowboy coders isn't entirely done. It would be a terrible shame if CS became just another engineering specialization. At the same time, Google's professionalism is a breath of fresh air.

Comment: Re:So he was done on a technicality? (Score 3, Insightful) 321

Why is it that the Westboro Baptist Church gets away with picketing real-life funerals again and again, while this schmuck gets four months for internet douchebaggery? By "picketing", I mean standing there with giant signs that say things like "god hates fags" at the funeral of a dead soldier:

The way I see it, free speech comes at a cost: you have to put up with other people saying things that are stupid, offensive, and downright wrong. If you want a right to free speech, you can't have a right not to be offended. Mr. Coss' behavior was certainly wrong, but nobody should serve jail time for posting to a Facebook page.

If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.