Albener Pessoa

Ultracompacto "verde" dobrável foi desenvolvido por espanhóis

Lars Christensen has a theory of airport security:

…my theory is that if you meet an unfriendly bureaucrat at the security check in the airport then it is also very likely it will be hard to start a business in that country. Therefore, I tend to think of airport security as an indicator of the level of government regulation of the country’s economy. This is something that makes me terribly bearish on the US’ long-term growth perspectives every time I encounter a TSA official in an US airport – and makes me terribly depressed about the prospects for Ukraine and it gives me an understanding of why the Scandinavian countries ‘works’ well despite excessively large public sectors.

It was therefore a pleasure today to meet friendly and efficient people at the security check in Chopin airport (Poland). And if my theory has any value this is an indication that Poland has “matured” and the level of regulation is luckily getting lighter. That is good news. So now I am thinking of raising my long-run growth forecasts for Poland…

I recently asked my young son whether he thought he could travel by himself to visit his grandmother in Victoria, Canada. He said that he could navigate the airports fine and getting into Canada was no problem but he was afraid of the security people coming back into the United States. Bear in mind that my son is American.

The FBI wants a new law that will make it easier to wiretap the Internet. Although its claim is that the new law will only maintain the status quo, it's really much worse than that. This law will result in less-secure Internet products and create a foreign industry in more-secure alternatives. It will impose costly burdens on affected companies. It will assist totalitarian governments in spying on their own citizens. And it won't do much to hinder actual criminals and terrorists.

As the FBI sees it, the problem is that people are moving away from traditional communication systems like telephones onto computer systems like Skype. Eavesdropping on telephones used to be easy. The FBI would call the phone company, which would bring agents into a switching room and allow them to literally tap the wires with a pair of alligator clips and a tape recorder. In the 1990s, the government forced phone companies to provide an analogous capability on digital switches; but today, more and more communications happens over the Internet.

What the FBI wants is the ability to eavesdrop on everything. Depending on the system, this ranges from easy to impossible. E-mail systems like Gmail are easy. The mail resides in Google's servers, and the company has an office full of people who respond to requests for lawful access to individual accounts from governments all over the world. Encrypted voice systems like Silent Circle are impossible to eavesdrop on—the calls are encrypted from one computer to the other, and there's no central node to eavesdrop from. In those cases, the only way to make the system eavesdroppable is to add a backdoor to the user software. This is precisely the FBI's proposal. Companies that refuse to comply would be fined $25,000 a day.

The FBI believes it can have it both ways: that it can open systems to its eavesdropping, but keep them secure from anyone else's eavesdropping. That's just not possible. It's impossible to build a communications system that allows the FBI surreptitious access but doesn't allow similar access by others. When it comes to security, we have two options: We can build our systems to be as secure as possible from eavesdropping, or we can deliberately weaken their security. We have to choose one or the other.

This is an old debate, and one we've been through many times. The NSA even has a name for it: the equities issue. In the 1980s, the equities debate was about export control of cryptography. The government deliberately weakened U.S. cryptography products because it didn't want foreign groups to have access to secure systems. Two things resulted: fewer Internet products with cryptography, to the insecurity of everybody, and a vibrant foreign security industry based on the unofficial slogan "Don't buy the U.S. stuff -- it's lousy."

In 1993, the debate was about the Clipper Chip. This was another deliberately weakened security product, an encrypted telephone. The FBI convinced AT&T to add a backdoor that allowed for surreptitious wiretapping. The product was a complete failure. Again, why would anyone buy a deliberately weakened security system?

In 1994, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act mandated that U.S. companies build eavesdropping capabilities into phone switches. These were sold internationally; some countries liked having the ability to spy on their citizens. Of course, so did criminals, and there were public scandals in Greece (2005) and Italy (2006) as a result.

In 2012, we learned that every phone switch sold to the Department of Defense had security vulnerabilities in its surveillance system. And just this May, we learned that Chinese hackers breached Google's system for providing surveillance data for the FBI.

The new FBI proposal will fail in all these ways and more. The bad guys will be able to get around the eavesdropping capability, either by building their own security systems -- not very difficult -- or buying the more-secure foreign products that will inevitably be made available. Most of the good guys, who don't understand the risks or the technology, will not know enough to bother and will be less secure. The eavesdropping functions will 1) result in more obscure -- and less secure -- product designs, and 2) be vulnerable to exploitation by criminals, spies, and everyone else. U.S. companies will be forced to compete at a disadvantage; smart customers won't buy the substandard stuff when there are more-secure foreign alternatives. Even worse, there are lots of foreign governments who want to use these sorts of systems to spy on their own citizens. Do we really want to be exporting surveillance technology to the likes of China, Syria, and Saudi Arabia?

The FBI's short-sighted agenda also works against the parts of the government that are still working to secure the Internet for everyone. Initiatives within the NSA, the DOD, and DHS to do everything from securing computer operating systems to enabling anonymous web browsing will all be harmed by this.

What to do, then? The FBI claims that the Internet is "going dark," and that it's simply trying to maintain the status quo of being able to eavesdrop. This characterization is disingenuous at best. We are entering a golden age of surveillance; there's more electronic communications available for eavesdropping than ever before, including whole new classes of information: location tracking, financial tracking, and vast databases of historical communications such as e-mails and text messages. The FBI's surveillance department has it better than ever. With regard to voice communications, yes, software phone calls will be harder to eavesdrop upon. (Although there are questions about Skype's security.) That's just part of the evolution of technology, and one that on balance is a positive thing.

Think of it this way: We don't hand the government copies of our house keys and safe combinations. If agents want access, they get a warrant and then pick the locks or bust open the doors, just as a criminal would do. A similar system would work on computers. The FBI, with its increasingly non-transparent procedures and systems, has failed to make the case that this isn't good enough.

Finally there's a general principle at work that's worth explicitly stating. All tools can be used by the good guys and the bad guys. Cars have enormous societal value, even though bank robbers can use them as getaway cars. Cash is no different. Both good guys and bad guys send e-mails, use Skype, and eat at all-night restaurants. But because society consists overwhelmingly of good guys, the good uses of these dual-use technologies greatly outweigh the bad uses. Strong Internet security makes us all safer, even though it helps the bad guys as well. And it makes no sense to harm all of us in an attempt to harm a small subset of us.

This essay originally appeared in Foreign Policy.

Here’s more work.

Conquanto os métodos de formulação de política econômcia tenham melhorado muito (…) , ainda proliferam, entre nossas elites, certas idéias econômicas que não são de melhor quilate do que a rebelião contra a tabuada”. (…) Em tese, todo nacionalismo equivale a uma descontinuidade afetiva localizadas nas fronteiras de um país. [Simonsen, M.H. Brasil 2001, 1977]

Em especial, a rebelião contra a tabuada, em sua forma sofisticada, é a prima primeira do bolivarianismo e irmã gêmea da heterodoxia brasileira.

Além disso, a definição de nacionalismo não poderia ser melhor descrita: Simonsen tinha o dom da palavra.

Filed under: Uncategorized

In an old piece making the rounds on Twitter, the British sociologist Michael Young, who coined the term “meritocracy”, urges its removal from the public lexicon. Although a lifelong man of the Left, Young sounds remarkably like Charles Murray:

Underpinning my argument [in The Rise of the Meritocracy] was a non-controversial historical analysis of what had been happening to society for more than a century before 1958, and most emphatically since the 1870s, when schooling was made compulsory and competitive entry to the civil service became the rule.

Until that time status was generally ascribed by birth. But irrespective of people’s birth, status has gradually become more achievable.

It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.

Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education.

A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education’s narrow band of values.

With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before.

The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.

Young’s diagnosis of pretensions of the modern elite seems unimpeachable to me. As I and others have argued on this site, the current system of educational credentialing has the function of preserving and transmitting privilege, even though it was designed for much the opposite end. The conceptual hinge of this transformation is the ambiguity of the term “merit”. If we’re not careful to specify what we mean by merit, the (strong) instrumental argument for distributing tasks and responsibilities to those best able to fulfill them tend to slips into the (weak) moral argument that the most capable few deserve greater power and wealth.

What’s more, the close association of merit with educational achievement tends to depreciate abilities and dispositions that may be more suited to many positions. Consider what happened when bankers learned to consider themselves the smartest guys in the room.

It’s too late to get rid of meritocracy: both the word and the ideal it represents have been too deeply ingrained in our ethical culture. What we can do is insist that its ambiguities and disadvantages be acknowledged, particularly by those who claim to act in the public interest. As Young’s example indicates, this is a task in which many socialists, libertarians, and traditionalist conservatives can cooperate. As much as we disagree on other matters, we know that meritocracy is a dangerous illusion.

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Chávez o falastrão palhaço de Caracas, e seu successor, o orangotango stalinista Maduro, entregam o que prometeram. Queriam fazer da Venezuela uma nova Cuba e estão obtendo um sucesso estupendo. Sua primeira conquista social do socialismo do século XXI é a Fome. Estado venezuelano estuda sistema para limitar compra de alimentos.

Holy hell, they're making a movie based on Bill Willingham's acclaimed Fables comic. Please be good. Please be good. Please be good. Please be good. Please be good. Please be good. Please be good. Please be good.

Read more...

Dedicated to Eric! Hope you have a great birthday tomorrow!

Here are more zombies!

Here’s more texting.

More gorillas.

Gosto de me considerar um liberal. Se fosse escolher meu slogan político favorito, ele seria: "um socialista é alguém que ama tanto os pobres que está disposto a dar tudo que os outros têm para ajudá-los". Meu liberalismo me faz torcer o nariz para o crony capitalism -- capitalismo de compadres -- brasileiro, onde para as empresas amigas do rei vale tudo e, para as outras, é a lei kafkiana de um lado e o mercado distorcido, do outro. Por falar em leis, também acho que, quanto menos delas houver, melhor.

Mas meu liberalismo talvez seja meio sui generis, ao menos em relação que vejo por aí na internet: por exemplo, acho que o governo deve, mesmo, oferecer saúde pública e programas de transferência de renda. O ideal liberal é o da sociedade que permite que o indivíduo tome o maior número possível de decisões sem qualquer tipo de coação, e doença e fome são formas de coação, geralmente mais presentes, até, que a coação das armas.

Para quem diz que essas coisas estimulam "vagabundagem", respondo que realmente não acredito que uma pessoa normal precise ver os filhos à beira da morte por febre ou inanição para resolver trabalhar. Ou Steve Jobs parou de ter boas ideias depois de ficar milionário?

A ameaça contida na frase, atribuída, se não me engano, a Lyndon Johnson, de que "um governo forte o bastante para lhe dar tudo de que você precisa também é forte o bastante para tirar tudo o que você tem" é em si bem plausível, assim como é plausível a relação direta entre responsabilidade e poder: se o Estado assume mais obrigações, ele precisa de mais poder para executá-las e, quando menos esperamos, eis o Leviatã tirânico lambendo as presas afiadas, bem diante de nossos olhos.

 Esses perigos são reais e devem ser sempre levados em conta ao se contemplar as ações e missões do governo, mas deixar-se paralisar por eles ignora o jogo de freios, contrapesos e legitimidade das democracias, como também ignora tiranias outras que existem fora do Estado.

E aqui é o ponto em que me vejo à beira do desespero, quando assisto à aliança entre liberalismo e conservadorismo que se vai forjando no Brasil -- ao menos, de acordo com o que é mais aparente nas redes sociais. Isso porque, a despeito da breve convergência de agendas, especificamente na área fiscal,  isso não faz o menor sentido. Ou, só faz sentido na velha lógica biliar de inimigo-do-inimigo.

Há uma tentativa em curso de se definir "conservadorismo" como "respeito pelo passado" ou, de forma mais específica, como a ideia de que tradições, pensamentos e estruturas que nos são legados pelas gerações anteriores existem por uma razão, e que seria imprudente descartá-los sem exame.

Mas isso não é "conservadorismo", é apenas bom senso, o que levanta, desde já, sinais de alerta. Uma doutrina que tenta se redefinir usando termos de que ninguém em sã consciência poderia discordar está, por tabela, tentando definir seus opositores como loucos ou idiotas. É retórica eficaz, mas desonesta.

A melhor definição de conservadorismo é a do cientista político Corey Robin, autor de The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin: "a experiência vivida de ter poder, de vê-lo ameaçado, e de tentar reconquistá-lo".

Mencionei, alguns parágrafos atrás, as "tiranias outras que existem fora do Estado". É exatamente nelas que se encontra o poder que o conservador teme perder: o poder do homem sobre a mulher, do pai sobre os filhos, do patrão sobre o empregado, do rico sobre o pobre, do clérigo sobre o leigo, do branco sobre o negro, do "normal" sobre o "desviante".

Conservadores insistem que o cidadão deve buscar refúgio da tirania do Estado nos braços da religião e da família -- mas a experiência histórica nas democracias é exatamente o oposto disso: tem sido nos agentes dos Estados democráticos que as vítimas de opressão pela família e pela religião encontram algum tipo de apoio, fugindo da violência doméstica, do abuso sexual, da ignorância imposta como dogma.

Liberais verdadeiros não deveram nunca se esquecer disso. John Stuart Mill, talvez o maior dos filósofos liberais, escreveu contra a tirania do Estado, mas também em favor do feminismo, pela abolição da escravatura e até especulou a respeito dos limites que a natureza poderia impor ao crescimento econômico.

O espírito liberal é um de oposição a todas as tiranias. Não deveríamos permitir que o medo de uma, ainda hipotética, nos jogue nos braços dos defensores de tantas outras, reais, que ainda grassam ao nosso redor.

Ao menos para quem, como eu, está olhando de fora, a fé religiosa, principalmente sob a forma de apego a uma tradição ou denominação específica, parece existir numa espécie de espectro contínuo que vai da pura superstição fundamentalista -- onde até mesmo cobras falantes são aceitas como fatos -- aos picos rarefeitos da teologia sofisticada, onde praticamente tudo se dissolve em um conjunto de metáforas mal-definidas que, como as mitologias de antigamente, embasam um certo modo de pensar e um senso de comunidade.

Também, aqui olhando de fora, vejo como as pessoas que estão num dos extremos da escala adorariam poder prescindir das que se encontram no outro; mas como, de fato, as duas pontas do espectro estão firmemente amarradas uma à outra. É a teologia sofisticada que dá ao fundamentalismo o verniz de credibilidade que o distingue da superstição mais grosseira, e é a âncora fundamentalista que impede que a teologia sofisticada se dissolva de vez em mito, estética, etiqueta e vagas boas intenções.

Com isso, claro, as hierarquias se veem obrigadas a andar numa espécie de corda-bamba, que é especialmente instável no caso da Igreja Católica, em sua tentativa de apelar a um rebanho cada vez mais heterogêneo em termos intelectuais, e que tem um nervo bem exposto na relação mantida com o antigo ritual de expulsão de demônios. Como se viu na reação embaraçada ao exorcismo acidental que teria sido realizado pelo papa Francisco.

De cordo com a imprensa internacional, o papa argentino estava abençoando, com imposição das mãos, uma série de cadeirantes na praça de São Pedro. Sem que ele soubesse, um desses fiéis tinha sido levado até lá por um padre que acreditava que o homem estava possuído. Diz a Associated Press: "Francisco pôs as mãos na cabeça do homem e recitou uma prece. O homem ofegou profundamente uma meia dúzia de vezes, tremeu e então relaxou na cadeira de rodas". Um canal de TV ligado à conferência episcopal italiana disse que, "sem dúvida", Sua Santidade tinha realizado um exorcismo.

A linha oficial do Vaticano, no fim, foi a de afirmar que o papa havia apenas "rezado por um doente sofredor", mas não consta que o padre-exorcista Gabriele Amorth, que disse que a ação de Francisco tinha constituído um "verdadeiro exorcismo", tenha sido repreendido.

Um observador cínico poderia, talvez, argumentar que as versões contraditórias foram produzidas para atender às necessidade de públicos diversos, com a nota impessoal do Vaticano dirigida aos católicos sofisticados e a fala apaixonada de Amorth, à turma do fogo e ranger de dentes.

O Vaticano produziu, sob o reinado de João Paulo II, uma nova versão de seu guia de exorcismos em 1999, substituindo o texto anterior do século XVII e, em algo que foi notícia na época, reafirmando a existência do diabo como entidade pessoal e sobrenatural.

Ainda na década de 70, o papa Paulo VI já havia advertido contra a conversão do demônio em mito ou metáfora: "Quem se recusa a reconhecer sua existência (...) ou o explica como uma pseudo-realidade, uma personificação imaginária ou conceitual (...) se afasta da integridade do ensinamento bíblico e eclesiástico".

A despeito da sanção papal, a maioria dos bispos nos Estados Unidos considerava, na virada do século, o exorcismo "um embaraço, um atavismo medieval", de acordo com um sociólogo ouvido pelo NY Times.

Um dos pontos importantes do guia sobre exorcismos é a necessidade de se garantir que o possesso não seja vítima de uma doença orgânica, ou da própria imaginação.

Como explico em detalhe no meu Livro dos Milagres, não parece haver nenhum caso claro registrado, em toda a história, em que ambas as possibilidades tenham sido realmente excluídas. De fato, diversos avanços da psiquiatria, como o diagnóstico da Síndrome de Tourette, têm deixado o espaço para o demônio cada vez mais estreito.

E agora, como prometido, o clássico da Carta que Muda de Cor:

Lex Friedman:

Pour one out for Camino. The Mac-only browser, born a decade ago, is no longer under active development.

Camino was a free, open-source browser for the Mac, built on Mozilla’s Gecko engine. Unlike other Mozilla-based browsers of its era, Camino featured a totally native OS X interface from day one. By contrast, Firefox has long used a cross-platform interface markup language, which to this day makes some Mac users feel that the app isn’t quite “Mac-like.”

A precursor to Safari — not in code, but in spirit. Camino (née Chimera) was like a glass of ice water on a hot day for Mac users who wanted a modern but Mac-like browser in the early years of Mac OS X.

When negotiating for a salary, most of us reach for a nice, round number like $65,000. Or $90,000. Or $120,000.

But, by favoring all those zeros, we may be missing an opportunity to score a better deal, according to a new paper from researchers at Columbia Business School. They found that using more precise numbers in an initial request—or anchor, as it is known in negotiating parlance—generally results in a higher final settlement.

Precision conveys the impression that the job candidate has done extensive research and deeply understands the market for his services, said Malia Mason, the lead author of the paper and a professor at Columbia who teaches a course on managerial negotiations. When people use round numbers, by contrast, they’re conveying that they have only a general sense of the market rate for their skills.

…In one experiment, Ms. Mason and her team had 130 sets of people negotiate the price of a used car. When buyers suggested a round anchor, they ended up paying an average of $2,963 more than their initial offer. But buyers who suggested a precise number for a first offer paid only $2,256 more, on average, than that number in the end.

When it comes to negotiating salary, Ms. Mason’s research indicates that a job candidate asking for $63,500 might receive a counteroffer of $62,000, while the request for $65,000 is more likely to yield a counteroffer of, say, $60,000, as the hiring manager assumes the candidate has thrown out a broad ballpark estimate.

There is more here,  Mason’s home page is here.  The paper itself is here.  Here is her TEDx talk on mindwandering.

baddovah:

i;ve been laughing for 3 years

We’re hoping to raise $30,000 in two weeks to power this effort and cover the fees needed to file an inter partes review with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

$30,000? That’s it? Geeks like us have raised a lot more money for far less important things. We can do this.

I donated. Gruber’s link tonight boosted it so much that they’ll probably hit their goal within an hour or two, but let’s not stop there. If you like podcasts, if you like the EFF, or if you simply want to fight a high-profile patent troll, please donate what you can.

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This post by Aleatha Parker-Wood is very applicable to the things I wrote in Liars & Outliers:

A lot of fundamental social problems can be modeled as a disconnection between people who believe (correctly or incorrectly) that they are playing a non-iterated game (in the game theory sense of the word), and people who believe that (correctly or incorrectly) that they are playing an iterated game.

For instance, mechanisms such as reputation mechanisms, ostracism, shaming, etc., are all predicated on the idea that the person you're shaming will reappear and have further interactions with the group. Legal punishment is only useful if you can catch the person, and if the cost of the punishment is more than the benefit of the crime.

If it is possible to act as if the game you are playing is a one-shot game (for instance, you have a very large population to hide in, you don't need to ever interact with people again, or you can be anonymous), your optimal strategies are going to be different than if you will have to play the game many times, and live with the legal or social consequences of your actions. If you can make enough money as CEO to retire immediately, you may choose to do so, even if you're so terrible at running the company that no one will ever hire you again.

Social cohesion can be thought of as a manifestation of how "iterated" people feel their interactions are, how likely they are to interact with the same people again and again and have to deal with long term consequences of locally optimal choices, or whether they feel they can "opt out" of consequences of interacting with some set of people in a poor way.

This, by Judge Kozinski, is from a Federal court ruling about false statements and First Amendment protection

Saints may always tell the truth, but for mortals living means lying. We lie to protect our privacy ("No, I don't live around here"); to avoid hurt feelings ("Friday is my study night"); to make others feel better ("Gee you've gotten skinny"); to avoid recriminations ("I only lost $10 at poker"); to prevent grief ("The doc says you're getting better"); to maintain domestic tranquility ("She’s just a friend"); to avoid social stigma ("I just haven't met the right woman"); for career advancement ("I'm sooo lucky to have a smart boss like you"); to avoid being lonely ("I love opera"); to eliminate a rival ("He has a boyfriend"); to achieve an objective ("But I love you so much"); to defeat an objective ("I'm allergic to latex"); to make an exit ("It's not you, it's me"); to delay the inevitable ("The check is in the mail"); to communicate displeasure ("There's nothing wrong"); to get someone off your back ("I'll call you about lunch"); to escape a nudnik ("My mother's on the other line"); to namedrop ("We go way back"); to set up a surprise party ("I need help moving the piano"); to buy time ("I'm on my way"); to keep up appearances ("We're not talking divorce"); to avoid taking out the trash ("My back hurts"); to duck an obligation ("I've got a headache"); to maintain a public image ("I go to church every Sunday"); to make a point ("Ich bin ein Berliner"); to save face ("I had too much to drink"); to humor ("Correct as usual, King Friday"); to avoid embarrassment ("That wasn't me"); to curry favor ("I've read all your books"); to get a clerkship ("You're the greatest living jurist"); to save a dollar ("I gave at the office"); or to maintain innocence ("There are eight tiny reindeer on the rooftop")….

An important aspect of personal autonomy is the right to shape one’s public and private persona by choosing when to tell the truth about oneself, when to conceal, and when to deceive. Of course, lies are often disbelieved or discovered, and that, too, is part of the push and pull of social intercourse. But it’s critical to leave such interactions in private hands, so that we can make choices about who we are. How can you develop a reputation as a straight shooter if lying is not an option?

Two books on the evolutionary psychology of lying are related: David Livingstone Smith's Why We Lie, and Dan Ariely's The Honest Truth about Dishonesty.