Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: The Big 2012 US Election PAS Thread, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Democrat Elizabeth Warren’s opened up a small, but consistent, lead despite, shall we say, a rather unpleasant primary and an enthusiasm gap among her own party.
She's run a strong and consistent campaign for the last few months, did very well in the three debates they had, and Brown has not helped his own case.
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Hard News: The Watching World, in reply to Ben Austin,
I take it you are living in the US. What is the mood like if so? Have you been past any voting booths so far?
Apparently turnout here (in our area of Mass) is crazy - really long lines, running out of parking spaces, etc, and this was at 8.30 in the morning. The local bet is that it's the senate race driving the turnout - Warren has very strong support here, as you'd expect in a college area. There's nothing else on the ballot that would get people out like that, unless it's the medical marijuana ballot question (referendum).
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I'm going to mosey along with a couple of friends to their local polling place to see what the lines are like and how they do things over here (from a respectful distance, obvs.). Should be interesting.
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For my money, the single best thing they could do to ease up the logistics of US elections (apart from making vote-by-mail widely possible, like it has been in Oregon for fourteen years without any noticeable signs of the apocalypse) is separate out the elections for state government/judges/environmental boards/dogcatchers from the federal-level elections. Even discounting often lengthy ballot questions/referenda, it's quite usual to be presented with a ballot asking you to make decisions in ten or more races. That's going to lengthen waiting times no matter how well-run the election.
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Silver is making it harder to just make shit up and be believed. It's the buzz-killing demise of visceral punditry -- at the hands of geeks.
It will be a very slow death. Far, far too much advertising money is tied up in TV shows where said pundits endlessly rehash talking points for actual probability theory or facts to get in the way of it. They don't bother engaging with Silver, for the most part - they just ignore him.
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OnPoint: #WTFMSD: "Damning", in reply to Bart Janssen,
It is a failure of management if the staff below do not feel it is possible or appropriate to pass information of this kind upwards.
It is simply poor leadership.
It's also a failure of procedure. Good security protocols should not allow urgent security breaches to not be passed up immediately. Whether they are acted on is still probably going to be subject to somewhat arbitrary decision-making, but it shouldn't be possible for them to just not be reported (at least, without someone actively choosing to not do their job.)
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Ross Mason,
Rowan Atkinson supporting the idea that you should be allowed to insult someone.
The question of whether insults should be subject to legal strictures is quite, quite separate from the question of how Russell chooses to moderate discourse in his own online space.
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Instead, they’ve clearly got access to the basic facts, but either just didn’t understand, or else deliberately chose to misrepresent them.
In my (science-based) experience it's usually a matter of context; they have the facts, but haven't put them in the context which makes them accurate. Sometimes the lack of context doesn't even make them interesting.
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
You haven’t met any IT security people? Their default first question about any new thing is “no, you can’t”.
Married to one. That's their default first *answer*.
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to Matthew Poole,
And because they enjoy it, they’re strongly inclined to keep figuring out new ways to do things. Some of them even have esoteric hobbies, like Paul Craig’s fascination with cracking kiosks, and those hobbies carry have direct application to their testing.
From what I can tell, the basic qualification for being an IT security expert is being the kind of person whose default first question about any new thing is "how would I break that?". The difference between them and hackers is basically the self-control to not follow through unless they've been asked to.