Category: Technology

Are Angels Watching, or Is the NSA?

By , November 6, 2013 11:51 am

Madison said it best,

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Alex Tabarrok rifs on that theme at Marginal Revolution when he asks Did Obama Spy on Romney? He answers his own question:

No. Some people claim that President Obama didn’t even know about the full extent of NSA spying. Indeed, I imagine that President Obama was almost as surprised as the rest of us when he first discovered that we live in a mass surveillance state in which billions of emails, phone calls, facebook metadata and other data are being collected.

Who knows? As Tabrrok reminds us, the NSA listened in on Angela Merkel’s phone calls. What if Romney called her during his 2012 campaign? In any case, he’s certainly right when he says that “Men are not angels.” Nevertheless, Tabarrok doesn’t think the NSA forwarded any tapes on to the Obama campaign. Still, “Men are not angels,” right?

Did the NSA use the information they gathered on Mitt Romney and other political candidates for political purposes? Probably not. Will the next president or the one after that be so virtuous so as to not use this kind of power? I have grave doubts. Men are not angels.

The Nixon administration plumbers broke into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to gather information to discredit him. They busted into a single file cabinet (pictured). What a bunch of amateurs.
The NSA has broken into millions of file cabinets around the world.

Nixon resigned in disgrace. Who will pay for the NSA break-ins? (Emphasis added)

Bearing Children and Building Websites . . . aka The Law of the Harvest

By , October 22, 2013 2:05 pm

Third, we are doing everything we can possibly do to get the websites working better, faster, sooner. We got people working overtime, 24/7, to boost capacity and address the problems. Experts from some of America’s top private-sector tech companies, who’ve, by the way, have seen things like this happen before, they want it to work.

They’re reaching out. They’re offering to send help. We’ve had some of the best IT talent in the entire country join the team. And we’re well into a tech surge to fix the problem. And we are confident that we will get all the problems fixed.

President Obama, yesterday in the Rose Garden.

Yeah, but . . .

The second fallacious thought mode is expressed in the very unit of effort used in estimating and scheduling [a programming job]: the man-month. Cost does indeed vary as the product of the number of men and the number of months. Progress does not. Hence the man-month as a unit for measuring the size of a job is a dangerous and deceptive myth. It implies that men and months are interchangeable.

When a [programming] task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned. Many software tasks have this characteristic because of the sequential nature of debugging.

Frederick P. Brooks, “The Mythical Man-Month.”

And for good measure.

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

By , April 23, 2013 11:55 am

Without comment.

Emily Litella: Act II

By , January 4, 2013 11:10 am

A leading environmentalist and opponent of GMOs (genetically modified organisms), Mark Lynas, has issued a blunt statement that he was wrong to oppose GMOs.

I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

So I guess you’ll be wondering—what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

Emily Litella was available for comment.

Norman Borlaug would be pleased.

Brazil Must Be Doing Something Right

By , April 25, 2011 10:57 am

Greenpeace activists mark the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl with a puff of orange smoke in front of BNDES, Brazil’s development bank, to get it to suspend financing of the Angra 3 nuclear plant.

All the coal miners who’ve died in mining accidents were unavailable for comment.

Damn Malware

By , March 26, 2011 12:04 pm

Hey, I’ve been out of the blogging business for most of this month. Some malware infected this and some other sites I own, and I haven’t had the time (largely because I don’t have the smarts) to fix things. My time should free up in a week or two. In the meantime, I ask any readers (reader?) out there to be patient.

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