xnull1guest's comments

James Risen tried to publish it in 2004 but the Times fell to government pressure and refused to make the information public until over a year later (only because Risen threatened to tarnish their image over it); when the Times did publish it but buried under other stories.

So... both.

Time for a proportional representation clause.

> So don't think Iran is the only country on the list, they just trumpet that to dig up thoughts of terrorism oh my.

For some reason Americans still overwhelmingly and falsely believe that Iran had something to do with 9/11.

> Certainly information from these businesses on how they believe different legislation will effect them is useful to voters, their representatives and their appointees in performing a legislative calculus.

> But what certain companies 'advocate' for? This is hardly useful information for the design of legislation...

We agree. I'm not saying ignore everything they possibly say. What I am saying is ignore what they merely advocate for and pay attention to why they advocate for it and what information they can give relevant to the design of a healthy and flourishing industry.

When political discussion devolves into a series of corporate for-against it looks more like a sport and cheerleaders than a democracy. Legislation can not be about deciding who wins in the market but about designing markets that eliminate rent seeking, moral hazard, and externalization of costs while promoting fair competition between businesses of all sizes. You can't know how to design such legislature without understanding the conditions of an industry and how changes will effect current players. But you also can not design markets within the confines of regulatory capture or by merely noting which current players will stand to benefit or lose from a given legislative delta.

The word insanity here is meant to convey a lack of grounding in the reality of the situation: advocation doesn't signal whether legislation will make a market healthier or serve customers/citizens/nations. We know what Sprint wants - more money. What we need to know from Sprint is not whether given legislation will or will not lead to their getting more or less money but details that clarify how proposed legislation will or will not "eliminate rent seeking, moral hazard, and externalization of costs while promoting fair competition between businesses of all sizes."

It's a sort of an accepted insanity that the positions which these large businesses take are considered important.

Certainly information from these businesses on how they believe different legislation will effect them is useful to voters, their representatives and their appointees in performing a legislative calculus.

But what certain companies 'advocate' for? This is hardly useful information for the design of legislation (it's a single bit, and a complicated one). As these large businesses should have no direct say in how they are regulated, I don't see why we the people should care what companies 'endorse'. They don't get a vote.

Whether Google or Sprint or AT&T or Comcast sanctions or opposes net neutrality should mean nothing and should not be worthy of news. The companies that happen agree with the general public do not do so on the ground of ideals or liberty or heroism but on the ground of profit. They are not the stewards of public interest or champions of the public - only the public can do and be this. We can't count on Sprint or Google or any other company to get the legislation we want passed - because if we condone that we also condone their passing of legislation we don't.

What exactly makes privately run VCs more efficient than government run VCs exactly? They are both centrally managed and entirely top-down. There are plenty of examples of horribly run, crash-inevitable private VC.

I can think of two possible differences but perhaps there are more:

A) For independently wealthy VCs, the money comes directly from personal funds, so investment is presumed to made carefully

B) For VCs where a panel/firm decides how to invest capital provided from someone else's fund, commission on success and legal contract may provide incentive for firm members to be careful

In theory, similar leverage (bonuses, legal trouble) applied to those making analogous top down decisions in a governmental organization would produce like incentives and therefore competitive efficiency.

Theoretically the public/governmental investment model could have other benefits. For example projects like Wikipedia, which provide 'social' income rather than 'financial' income, can be invested in. Another benefit is that the VC is more free to ignore investment bubbles (hyperlink, ad space, 'social', big data). Finally, since private VC circumvents the IPO process and is able to capture the majority of growth value of new businesses, it highly concentrates wealth. This caustic side effect may be side stepped by public programs.

First, note how the only numbers addressed are the '2,776 instances publicly known'. So from the start we're working with unreasonable numbers. But let's run with it.

Hmm. If the average number of mistakes an analyst makes is 0.1 per year and there were 700 mistakes only, this means 7000 analysts (or do we need to model this as a poisson distribution?). Is 7,000 analysts reasonable? Anyone have more details on this?

The NSA has said that it performs about 20 million queries a month, or 240 million queries a year. If these are done by analysts that's 16 manual queries an hour or 130 a day assuming a standard work week. That seems reasonable. Or at least reasonable"ish". [240,000,000 / 7,000 / (5/7 * 8 * 365)]

But it would also imply an error rate of 700/24,000,000 = 0.000002917 (which is absurd, if the error are presumably due to 'typos').

> Even for the NSA the potential of a backdoor is a problem, because every division has to trust the person that has actually generated the points. And as the Dual_EC_DRBG was used by the DoD, this person potentially has the keys to some very sensitive parts of the kingdom.

While this is generally true, it is possible for a person or organization to remove the backdoor by generating their own point and/or by reducing the number of bits generated from curve points at each RNG step (which NIST had pushed for an insecure number of).

I can't claim to know for sure, but it would be my guess that the implementations used at the Federal Reserve, the DoD and other highly sensitive areas of government that use public algorithms highly vetted to remove known implementation problems and weak parameterizations.

I absolutely acknowledge that bad regulation is a problem, and wish more liberal minded folk would as well. But the problem is again not a binary one: the 'free' market also favors monopolies and incumbents and without a system of punishment and enforcement it is fact (historical and current) that companies will do everything in their power to externalize costs, fix their own success and seek rent.

So it's more a matter of creating 'good' regulation and designing markets (think cap-and-trade) that meet all criteria. It's not easy and you are right to be skeptical of industry's current role in designing its own regulation.

The Net Neutrality 'debate' is an example of politics I'm beginning to see all the time in the United States. A real problem is presented along with a single problematic solution from which voters, with as much or little influence they actually have, and their representatives are asked to select the 'lesser of two evils'.

The real discussion is not whether the country's big media duopoly should be forced to conduct their business model like a public utility or not, but whether a duopoly is healthy at all. If communication infrastructure requires few large investors and centralized ownership it is a natural monopoly and should be managed as such (and in fact resold on a market of small service providers a la the UK's internet and American power). If it does not, let anti-trust law hammers fall. Comcast and Time Warner consistently collect the very worst consumer reviews (Comcast was the worst of all corporations for year running). They are both larger and more predatory than Ma Bell was leading up to 1984.

"In another embodiment, a data storage system receives a request from a third party to access a user's stored, encrypted data, where the data is stored in the data storage system according to a predefined policy. The encryption on the data prevents the storage system from gaining access to the encrypted data, while the policy allows the encrypted data to be released upon receiving a threshold number of requests from verified third parties." - Cloud key escrow system, Microsoft Corporation

https://www.google.com/patents/US20120321086

Anyone here speak patentese?

Anyone who downvoted this care to explain why? It's extensively sourced and entirely on topic. As its content will find its way into future posts, if there are honest and well reasoned misgivings I would be interested in hearing them so that it may be improved.

A fair and informative comparison.

You can't reasonably compare against the US which dominates the world financially and is 4% of the world population but has 25% of its wealth.

PTIME <= BQP <= EXPTIME

This is what I mean by 'closer'.

I had to use EXPTIME rather than NP because of Savitch's Theorem.

> In general, quantum computers only have a quadratic speed-up as far as we know.

Not really true? In the time setting, there's the case of sampling problems, hidden subgroup problems, the evaluation of linear systems, etc. There are also many other settings (Merlin-Arthur-like round complexity) and communication complexity where exponential and even superexponential increases can be had.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Department_of_Justice_inve...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibrahim_Jassam

[3] http://www.salon.com/2012/04/08/u_s_filmmaker_repeatedly_det...

[4] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwald...

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/28/us/case-of-james-risen-tim...

[6a] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/04/former-l-times...

[6b] http://www.democracynow.org/2014/9/5/headlines#959

[7] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/may/29/iraq.usa1

[8] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04...

[9] http://www.globalresearch.ca/psyops-media-warfare-and-the-we...

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallujah_during_the_Iraq_War

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fallujah_during_t...

[12] http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/14/nyt-nsa-leak...

[13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayman_Mohyeldin#2014_Israel.E2....

[14] http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ferguson-no-fly-zone-...

[15] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-elections...

[16] https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o...

[17] http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20...

[18] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/heroes-error?pag...

[19] http://www.salon.com/2005/02/23/more_gannon/

[20] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_Williams#.22No_Child_...

[21] http://www.thenation.com/article/bushs-war-press

[22] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/13covert.html?pag...

[23] http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrishamby/government-says-federal-a...

[24] https://web.archive.org/web/20031025141143/http://www.channe...

[25] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Lynch#Controversy_rega...

[26] http://thelibertybeat.com/anti-propaganda-law-repealed-state...

[27] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/politics/09intel.html

[28] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/politics/06intel.ready.htm...

[29] http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jan/27/world/fg-infowar27

[30] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/heroes-error?pag...

[31] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

[32] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/us/austin-goodrich-spy-who...

[33] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Kearns

[34] http://boingboing.net/2011/02/18/hbgarys-high-volume.html

[35] http://www.marayamedia.com/company.php

[36] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Voice

[37] http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf

[38] http://aibrt.org/downloads/EPSTEIN&ROBERTSON_2014-Manipulati...

[39] http://jhfowler.ucsd.edu/massive_turnout.pdf

[40] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full.pdf

[41] http://reclaimdemocracy.org/political_reform_quotes_presiden...

[42] http://www.amazon.com/No-Debate-Republican-Democratic-Presid...

[43] http://www-tc.pbs.org/now/politics/2004MemorandumUnderstandi...

[44] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Debate_Commission

[45] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/nsa-releases-12-years-su...

[46] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06...

[47] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Tomlinson

[48] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheryl_Halpern

[49] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Broadcasting_Act_of_196...

In addition to crackdowns on news media (including surveillance operations against journalistic outfits to dissolve their ability to work with confidential informants [1]) and both persecution and prosecution of journalists (e.g. Ibrahim Jassam [2], Laura Poitras [3], Glenn Greenwald [4], James Risen [5], many others), media partnership with the state (e.g. Ken Dilanian [6], Judith Miller and Michael Gordon [7]), the manipulation of US news media to achieve geopolitical goals (Zarqawi Psyop [8], Fallujah Psyop [9]) [note here that it has been recently anonymously removed from Wikipedia [10] that this happened - see this old version of the article where it was still present! [11]], the use of state pressure to prevent stories from circulating (Risen's NSA story 2004-05 [12]), the nonchalant sale of journalism to hide things as large as genocide by major media outlets (look up the CNN-Bahrain scandal), the pulling of journalists with unfriendly coverage on key international issues (e.g. Ayman Mohyeldin [13]), the use of journalism exclusion zones (foreign and also domestic [14]), death threats by the state against whistle blowers and their families (US held Binney's family hostage [15]; Binney by the way is a cripple), the capability to manipulate online discussions for geopolitical purposes [16], the use of false international cables to manipulate the press (both historical [17] and recent [18]), use of fake journalists during US press releases to direct conversation and ask softball questions ("Jeff Gannon"/Gannongate [19]) [a note here that this scandal has been covered up by a 'controversy over Gannon's sexual preferences' as though that's the scandal - the real issue is that he was a plant - looking to see coverage on Gannon is a good litmus test of journalists and media outlets to see whether they are covering real issues or just gossip] and similarly the blocking of journalists that don't "play ball", the payment for positive media coverage by the government (e.g. Armstrong Williams [20], Gallagher and McManus [21]), WCIA's injection of (hundreds of) unattributed fake news stories into local news channels by the US through the Office of Broadcasting Services [22], presumed ability to impersonate private citizens to influence other Americans [23], fake letters sent to media outlets from the US Army [24] [the article has been removed from the web but I was able to find a cached copy on the Internet Archive probject], invention of hero stories (e.g.fabricated Jessica Lynch fall and rescue story [25]; propagandized story enshrined by Hollywood Director Ridley Scott's 'infotainment' version ironically named "Body of Lies"), that the Smith-Mundt Act anti-propaganda law was eviscerated this year [26] (like many other important legislative changes and additions) with hardly any press coverage, use of coerced testimony to justify policy goals [27] when it is known to have been fabricated [28], that foreign aimed propaganda accidentally makes it in American media [29], and also that this is done on purpose to circumvent anti-propaganda law [30], that the government has a history of manipulating media and through the Cold War had over 800 American news networks and personel [31] (names you may know such as Austin Goodrich [32] and Frank Kearns [33]), that the United States hires [34] contractors [35] and has software [36] to manipulate social media[37] [note here that the last link shows formerly linked references to CENTCOM claims that Facebook and Twitter cannot be targeted are false], that research on vote manipulation have been done on both Google [38] and on Facebook (in the case of Facebook, 61 million American people were experimented on during the 2010 US congressional elections [39), that experiments have been done (successfully) on controlling emotions by manipulating Facebook feeds [40] (on a grant from the State Department), that beyond blocking third parties [41] from the presidential "debates" [42] (which American citizens consider extremely important to their vote) that the rehearsed questions, topics and terms are prenegotiated [43] by the joint Republican and Democrat owned organization [44], that agencies publish documents compelled of them by law at inconvenient times to discourage large press coverage [45], it is also true that the the now president and CEO of the Public Broadcasting Service Patricia Harrison testified before Congress that President Bush considered Office of Broadcasting Services (1/4 billion dollar) state sponsored propaganda powerful strategic tools for swaying public opinion [46].

Bush said "see, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda" some see him as a bumbling, silly fool. I see a (perhaps overly) honest and transparent man.

It's probably true that the revisions to the Smith-Mundt Act will not open the flood gates of government sponsored media manipulation. Given that Kenneth Tomlinson [47] (a chairman to the foreign media propaganda arm of the United States) was put in charge of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR and PBS) before handpicking State Department official Patricia Harrison to supersede him, and that Harrison has brought in Cheryl Halpern, Tim Isgitt, Mike Levy, Helen Mobley, and other State Department officials formerly in charge of US overseas propaganda efforts [48], and that Tomlinson left after an internal investigation charged him with Ethics Violations for breaking the anti-propaganda law Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 [49] (but no arrest...) these things are probably nothing to worry about.

Propaganda exists in many forms in the United States but it is still held at bay to many degrees (when compared to some other nation states; it is by no means the worst) by the sorts of laws that the Smith-Mundt Act used to be. In my opinion every anti-propaganda law we lose or weaken is a big deal for liberty.

Does anyone know if you get a bump from PSPACE closer to EXPSPACE with a quantum harddrive similar to how BQP gets you closer to EXPTIME from PTIME?

Haven't private corporations been hacked by the US also (Brazilian PETROBRAS)?

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/05/us-governments...

Given the first Geneva article placing private targets within international convention if they are of military interest (including media and broadcast services), and SONY's cooperation with the State Department in producing "The Interview", might SONY then qualify under international law?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimate_military_target

Regardless of whether FBI is lying (I believe they are telling the truth in broad strokes) here are reasons to implicate NK (when both Russian and Iranian signatures were present the malware):

- Instability in NK means instability in China

- NK is a nuclear power and rapidly rising as a country on the world stage (according to CIA director Panetta)

- Russia's sharing of hypersonic missile technology with North Korea heightens already mounting global nuclear tensions

- Temporary division of Korea was set up by US and allies as a result of WWII - it was slotted for reintegration within a few years but Cold War tensions blocked cooperation between the nations required to achieve this; meaning:

a.) North Korea has never been recognized by the US as a 'legitimate' state to begin with

b.) The Korean War was fought for and activity in the area continues to be of proxy interest to greater geopolitical goals

- Cooperation between SONY, RAND corporation and the State Department on the development of "The Interview" (and the gutting of the Smith-Mundt Act at the time this cooperation began) lends favor to the narrative that the film is a "Diplomacy Product" of the US State Department and that North Korea was the target to begin with

- The United States is engaging in a mammoth amount of effort to establish international norms for cyberattacks and needs to show proactivity in this area