This is crazy. This is embarrassing.’. . . I said, ‘Give us the algorithms that allowed you to come up with this stuff.’ They wouldn’t even do that. And I was screaming, ‘You gave these people fucking money?’
That pretty much sums it up perfectly. I think part of the problem that allows things like this to happen is that, to some people, computers are magic. They don't understand how they work and feeding Al Jazeera video feed through a computer program and having it spit out terrorist plots sounds almost feasible.
The sad thing is that the people who are screaming "You gave these people fucking money" are likely in the minority and also likely often marginalized.
Part of the problem is a fairly large number of projects are theoretical research initially. What is more surprising is they didn't seem to apply a "peer review" to this.
I find it very hard to believe that the DoD (NSA?) do not have sufficient highly talented programmers / analysts to review these programs.
Another issue is that after 9/11, they were evaluating a larger number of possible solutions, In the hope that at least some of them produce viable results.
Not sure if you can really bucket this under "theoretical research." Theoretical research is at least grounded in logic and paper rationale. This case seems like a mix of equal parts ponzi scheme showmanship, conspiracy theory, and tech-illiterate paranoids.
I don't even think this ever got to the hands of the NSA or people who have the technical proficiency to call bs (this in and of itself is surprising given the sheer stupidity of what this clown was trying to sell).
If anything this fraud was faciliated by petty political and institutional bureaucratic jostling for relevance, power, and funding. Basically some tards, convinced that they're onto something big, hides it from everyone else because they don't want to share in the credit/fame. Not surprising given this is the US govt. Hell most corporations are like this too.
What I find most troubling about all of this is that after 9/11 there was a such a stink about intra-department communication and cooperation. The argument being that if people simply talked more with one another lapses in security and plain dum-dum-ness would be greatly reduced if not eliminated outright. Fuck, Bush even created a whole department to do just this!
If I want to get myself up to speed on an issue, idea, or problem I examine the issue from as many angles as possible, then start narrowing my focus. Some of my "first round" selections taken out of context might look pretty bad but give me the necessary feedback that I am on track and what is reality and what is not. It's really the money that I find bothersome.
This story made me laugh, because it's like a modern re-telling of the Hans Andersen story "The Emperor's New Clothes". The Emperor, in this case played by George Bush and company, are so eager to believe all sorts of paranoid fantasies, such as that evil-doers are broadcasting secret messages via TV, that when a charlatan comes along claiming that he can prove that their darkest nightmares are true they're keen to make sure he gets to work on the tailoring right away, with no expense spared!
No it doesn't, and that's why the Hans Andersen story is so timeless. Foolishness in the form of being too quick to believe your own prejudices is, alas, a common failing.
Hey, remember that whole discussion about measuring the productivity of programmers through the amount of money someone is willing to pay for their "output?"
Sounds like this guy was a very productive programmer.
i don't want to be 'that guy', but Playboy does publish legitimate articles (in the style of, say, Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair or GQ). at least in its early years, it was well-known (in part) for its left-leaning editorials and investigative articles
wasn't it around 2004 that Playboy published a pretty high-profile interview with the Google founders right before their IPO, and there was some legal hiccups with the SEC due to what they disclosed in that interview?
Sure. Among interviewed subjects - Bertrand Russel, Jawaharlal Nehru, Albert Schweitzer, Nabokov, Dali, Martin Luther King, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frederico Fellini, Fidel Castro, Arnold Toynbee, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ralph Nader, William Buckley, Jr., Albert Speer, George McGovern, R. Buckminster Fuller, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Milton Freedman, Tennessee Williams, Walter Cronkite, Jimmy Carter, Edward Teller, William Shockley, Lech Walesa, Ansel Adams, Yasser Arafat, Carl Sagan, William Safire, Bill Gates, Salman Rushdie, Pope John Paul II.
I am no fan of Rand, but I reflexively downvote any comments like yours. Answering faulty reasoning with sheer dumbassery isn't helpful.
The fact is, Rand's work was a legitimate reaction to some very real abuses, and it was extremely influential in economic and political circles throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The fact that you don't like her ideas doesn't alter the first fact.
Oh getting all frothy at the mouth in an essentially joke thread is absurd. And 'reflexively downvoting' is a lot closer to dumbassery than replying to a comment. Whatever I think of her ideas, I don't think Ayn Rand is remotely in the caliber of people I put on the list, in terms of importance. That's why I didn't put her on the list and that's what I was explaining to the responder.
I have that issue (March 1964). Authors and essayists/interviewees included Rand, Shel Silverstein, P. G. Wodehouse, J. Paul Getty, Arthur C. Clarke, Lenny Bruce, and the Greek humorist Apuleius. It's just plain jaw-dropping to see how much cultural deterioration we've undergone since then, going by a then-and-now comparison of the magazine's table of contents.
Back in the day, when someone claimed they only read Playboy "for the articles," there was a good chance they weren't lying. It was well worth the 75-cent cover price.
It's not cultural deterioration at all. It just happened that the first guy to put real production money into a skin magazine had serious intellectual pretensions. We're all better off for the nice interviews, but there's a reason they had to be bookended with lots and lots of porn for the project to be sustainable.
Now that Playboy is a relic instead of the only game in town, they can no longer indulge such expensive tastes. It says nothing about the wider culture except that we've become more accepting of pornography.
Close. Actually it was more a case of Comstock-era blue laws requiring serious artistic or literary merit, or at least a semblance thereof, before the magazine could legally be mailed.
When the legal climate improved, the need for all of that expensive content went away, at least in Playboy's mind. Which is unfortunate... if someone published a magazine like that today, I'd subscribe to it.
That pretty much sums it up perfectly. I think part of the problem that allows things like this to happen is that, to some people, computers are magic. They don't understand how they work and feeding Al Jazeera video feed through a computer program and having it spit out terrorist plots sounds almost feasible.