tc

"quaint, adj., 3. Highly incongruous, inappropriate, or illogical; naive, unreasonable -- usually used ironically."

Edit: While sarcasm in writing is a generally bad idea, the tradition of thoughtfully written irony and satire goes back a ways (c.f. A Modest Proposal). It of course does require the reader to reflect intelligently while reading, but that is what we expect in this forum. Since my final three grafs made my position pretty clear, I was rather unsure until your response below whether you were intentionally trolling.

[1] My statements are likely true, paradoxically, but we react strongly to the fact that they shouldn't be.

In a high-pressure situation they sometimes fall back on their quaint expectations of rights and basic human respect. I would wager that someone who had spent serious time in prison would do much better in these situations.

The guy probably had a long day. I bet he just wanted nothing more than to get home and go to sleep. He obviously didn't understand what all the fuss was about, and he ended up stepping on someone's hair trigger. It seems terribly unlikely he did something that you or I would consider physically threatening. After being pepper-sprayed and man-handled, and likely not in the soundest state of mind, maybe he even flailed a bit -- guaranteeing an assault charge (and possible conviction).

Perhaps that's how it went down. It'll probably turn out that the border guards "followed procedure." But that's exactly the problem that makes the story frightening to us:

The path from "long day + non-violent temporary failure of judgement" to "being physically assaulted and facing a life-altering felony charge" seems terribly short.

If staying in business and out of the cross-hairs of the DoJ's anti-trust division means you have to play ball with some data retention "requests," then you're probably going to rationalize a million tenuously logical reasons why that's the right thing to do.

Perhaps he is saying, "The fact of the matter is that we're required to retain and release lots of information. If you don't want that information being passed around, you probably shouldn't give it to us. Sorry, we do the best we can under the circumstances."

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be [googling] it in the first place."

There are some counter-examples (e.g. Franz, LispWorks), but I think it's best to just consider this sort of work a labor of love.

Above though, I'm just pointing out that simpler is often better in a number of different fields, even for complex problems. The Supreme Court spends a great deal of time trying to lay down the simplest tests and precedents they can. The Bill of Rights was a simple document which addressed centuries of complex abuses. Smart companies try to find the simplest policies and procedures that could possibly work. And yes, in technology we often find that a simpler process scheduler works better than a more complex one.

When you apply that sort of thinking to code, the result is an explosion of special cases, and you get buggy, slow, and unmaintainable software.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the best societal innovations have been as simple and neat as the best code hacks. "All men are created equal," rather than, "Some men are created with more rights than others -- there's a complex hierarchy to be followed. We have rules for this!"

Edit: Yes, the analogy to code was not to be taken too seriously, though I don't think it should be completely dismissed either. Do the complex problems that a large organization faces require a ton of complex rules? Netflix doesn't think so. As for my implied argument that "simpler rules make for a better society," if you don't like the Jefferson example, there are plenty of other historical examples you can find. The Constitution is an extremely short document considering the magnitude of what it set out to accomplish. It structured an entire federal government in only a tiny fraction of the words found in the currently proposed healthcare bill.

Arrington mentioned that the deal being contemplated involved a new entity buying Fusion Garage. I'm sure that would have required the approval of FG's shareholders, who don't currently seem to be strongly behind Chandra.

If that's all actually the case, then perhaps the mistake was failing to recognize early enough that Chandra wasn't the final decision maker.

As noted below, there was quite a bit of investment in the company. Breaking into the retail payment processing industry is definitely not an easy task. Still, the relatively quick acquisition shows there is value to be had by taking on the incumbents. Perhaps a more capital-efficient indirect assault on the sector would be possible.

If you take as a given that the HN population is not representative of the population at large, then it is clear that Myers-Briggs measures something, as it correctly identified that.

If you'd asked me for a hypothesis before the survey, I would have predicted a significant overrepresentation of NT-types. That would seem to give the test some predictive value, unless you attribute the full significance of the findings to selection bias in who chose to answer (in which case Myers-Briggs would be an outstanding predictor of who will answer surveys).

Perhaps our Erlang-flooding people-filter has some influence on this.

There's an old story that once, in a meeting, Milton Friedman was chastising Sir John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong's Financial Secretary, for not collecting the economic statistics that Milton and other economists wanted. Cowperthwaite replied that the omission was intentional; he knew that if he collected the data, the bureaucrats back in the UK would see the numbers and expect him to do something about them.

If you were to publish neutral research showing that, were the US were to draft all men 18-35, then the US armed forces would grow by X% and we could fight Y major wars at once while occupying Z square miles of foreign territory, then it would seem mostly senseless to direct anger or criticism at you if your claims were factually sensible.

If on the other hand, though, you were to promote the idea that the draft was needed, that it would produce a socially useful outcome, and that people who oppose your view are being irrational and selfish, then you've entered into a moral debate.

And further, if you own a large defense contracting firm, then your claims and your moral position about the necessity of forcing people to join the military would be subjected to additional, admittedly ad hominem, scrutiny.

If living a 'natural' life is higher on your value scale than preventing a possible infection, then you wouldn't want the vaccine even if no one else was getting it either.

Let's say your neighbors want to build a $1M lake. They want you to chip in $50k. You're going to get the 'benefit' of the lake one way or the other. But you don't even like lakes. In fact, you'd prefer they didn't build a lake, as lakes attract mosquitoes, and you are (perhaps irrationally) concerned about infections from mosquitoes. Would it be selfish for you to not chip in? Would it be rightful for them to take the $50k from you by force since you're getting the 'benefit' of the lake?

People often throw up absurd objections to factual research because they have a moral stake in the debate but limited evidence (or knowledge, time, or interest) to engage on a utilitarian front. Unfortunately, it seems to be more politically successful to fight via convolution of facts than to engage in the moral issue directly.

The public seems to undervalue legitimate moral arguments, so competing interests instead engage in a proxy war of claims about benefits and harms.

I was disappointed to see at the end of the 10gui video a concept keyboard with staggered keys and with backspace way over in the corner. If we can't move keyboards past the constraints imposed by mechanical typewriters, what hope do we have at changing the mouse paradigm?

[1] Typematrix is the only keyboard maker I know of that currently does this while still building a relatively standard keyboard (and something that could be integrated into a laptop).

Never comment on how difficult something should be. Just don't do it. Physically restrain yourself if necessary from saying, "but it's only doing X, it shouldn't be that difficult." [1]

If a smart technical person says that it's going to be hard, then it is going to be hard. If it really is a blocking issue for you, you instead need to bring your team into the bigger picture and ask, "At the end of the day, we're trying to solve a problem like X. How can we permute X into something we can solve more easily?"

[1] Only if you are technical can you get away with this. You'll still be wrong if the other person has thought about it quite a bit more than you have, but at least you'll be able to understand and appreciate the explanation they'll throw back at you about what deep complication makes the problem hard.

Martha Stewart might disagree.

In many ways, the rich and famous actually make perfect targets. Prosecutors and politicians can stir up some of the general contempt that many people still quietly harbor against the wealthy. It can be a great way for a budding prosecutor to break into higher office (c.f. Eliot Spitzer).

Your observations are otherwise completely sound.

http://www.huntingtonnews.net/state/090605-rutherford-statet...

And in any case, arguing around the edges of self-defense is a far cry from the sort of felony paperwork violations that got us into this discussion.

So perhaps the most clarifying question I could ask is: how many examples can you find of case law criminalizing paperwork mistakes with no criminal intent or intent to harm others, as compared to how many examples of that are there in statute law?

The hard, borderline cases that you mention are relatively rare. No matter how complicated your system of laws, these cases tend to require humans, either judges or juries, to make a careful decision.

If you have 10,000 laws rather than 10, you end up instead having to decide which of the many conflicting laws that could be applied should be applied to the situation. In marginal cases, human judgement is extremely difficult to replace.

Common law has tended to focus obsessively on mens rea. Statute law has tended to disregard it. The difference probably has something to do with having to make a judgement about a particular case with the humans that are going to be affected standing there in front of you, as compared to dreaming up a bunch of laws in the abstract, or coming up with laws to address a politically attractive but wildly uncommon situation.

I believe this argument is empirically strong. You can see for yourself that there are (at least) hundreds of years of case law about murder. And yet the law surrounding murder seems quite a bit more straightforward than the laws surrounding, say, exporting electronics. This is because criminal case law has been sharpened by a focus on criminal intent.

I'm certainly not defending the FLSA's farm exemption, which was clearly just a bow to a powerful special interest group [1].

Of course children don't want to work on farms or in factories. Does anyone want to work in a factory?

My point is simply that if you go to some random third-world country where children are working in factories, and you do nothing else than prevent them from working in factories, you very likely have not increased their quality of life. To your horror, you will see an increase in children scrounging for food in dumpsters. You will see them selling wares on the street. And you will see fewer families escaping a brutal life of farm labor to seek a better life in cities.

Your point about free markets also misses the mark. You could repeal all the child labor laws today in the US, and you would not find (a statistically significant number of) factories hiring children for the simple reason that with modern industrial techniques children wouldn't even be productive enough to justify their space on a factory floor. This is part of the reason why teenage unemployment is so high even though teens will work for minimum wage.

[1] Not to say that I think much harm comes from this today.

Of course, juries work better when they are able to find on both the facts and the justice of the law. We've deviated from this at our peril.

Mens rea, criminal intent, has historically been the simplifying agent in law. That's why you don't see a terribly complicated set of case laws surrounding, say, murder. The problem with lots of current criminal statutes is that you can be guilty of violating them without any intent to harm.

Technology, a capital infrastructure, and pervasive wealth solves this problem, not politicians.

[1] To your point: it's true that we have more things we can make laws about, but I suspect that it isn't true that we should make laws about every specific thing. Fraud is fraud, murder is murder. It shouldn't matter whether you use the internet, a telephone, or pencil and paper to defraud someone, in the same way that we don't need a separate murder statute for each choice of murder weapon.

I think you may be unfairly maligning a bunch of folks who do actually care about their customers, but in any case, the correct answer is to enable competition, not to add regulation.

As for how sweeping it is, knowledgeable people in the industry feel like this is going to impair their ability to make reasonable network design choices, and in some cases force them to lay physically separate networks to do an identical job. Once it is established that Washington has that level of control (effectively making a public resource out of private networks), it seems reasonable judging from historical precedence that they will expand their jurisdiction (the special interests will smell blood).

(On a meta-note, I wrote 2&3 before seeing your response. We were likely writing in parallel.)

With appropriate capacity, a VLAN/QoS configuration is functionally identical to having physically separated networks. On an abstract level, if you object to provider prioritization, you should probably object to them running separate physical networks for their own services.

As to your point about feeling screwed by the (mostly theoretical) possibility of intentional service degradation, I sympathize. I'll point out though that 1) I'm quite certain this isn't terribly prevalent in the US, 2) in most cases where people think this is happening it is the result of simple under-capacity or generally bad network design or management, and 3) the correct answer to this general issue is to enable provider competition, not to impose ham-handed mandates.

Prioritizing EBS as was suggested above is prioritizing by server. But let's say that there was some reasonable way to priority-queue EBS-like traffic regardless of the provider (there really isn't [1]). The DDOS attacker would then certainly use this priority channel, which would magnify the effect of their attack ten fold.

[1] Let me explain this in greater detail:

The best way to do QoS is to have end-devices tag their own IP traffic with the appropriate DSCP bits. After all, only the end devices can be really certain about the class of some packet. In your network, you then establish policies for how the various classes of packets should be prioritized and limited.

This works great inside a private network (like AWS, or an ISP). For one thing, you can establish clear standards on how different types of packets should be marked, and you can order them appropriately. You can trust the classifications to the same degree you trust your own systems and (potentially) your customers (depending on checks you do at your service edge). Also, your network gear can prioritize efficiently because only one bit field needs to be checked to determine priority.

Once you step outside of a private network, this all breaks down. First off, most carriers strip DSCP bits at the network edge, so these don't propagate end to end on the internet. Even if you receive a DSCP tag from the outside though, why should you trust it, and how could you trust that it is tagged according to your policies? If Youtube sets all their traffic network control priority, and you trust it, your network would grind to a halt under load. More problematically, though, how can you meaningfully (and generically) differentiate Youtube packets from DDOS packets?

I don't expect you to have answers to these questions; they are hard problems that the best internet engineers in the world haven't solved yet. But this is the background on why an enforced government Net Neutrality mandate is going to throw all QoS policies into question.

[2] And trust me, I've very sympathetic to that intention. On net, Net Neutrality would be a win for my business. But it is still bad policy. What makes people so sure we should give politicians like GWB or Pelosi final say about network engineering [3]...

[3] Once the interest groups realize that centralized national network engineering policy is up for grabs in Washington every 2 years, have you thought about all the unpleasant directions this could go?

In all seriousness, I agree that Amazon should probably be using QoS here so outside traffic can't affect your EC2 to EBS link. I just want to point out that it is difficult to be simultaneously in favor of Amazon doing this while being against ISPs prioritizing voice traffic, which provides similar resilience for voice against outside influences [1].

[1] I'm not suggesting that the parent poster suffers this potential cognitive dissidence.