On 8/17/04, The Enlightened Prisoner said:

"The problem with education is that it creates narrow-mindedness."

Why it is bad that the Government spies on me?

I live in a country generally assumed to be a dictatorship. One of the Arab spring countries. I have lived through curfews and have seen the outcomes of the sort of surveillance now being revealed in the US. People here talking about curfews aren't realizing what that actually FEELS like. It isn't about having to go inside, and the practicality of that. It's about creating the feeling that everyone, everything is watching. A few points:

1) the purpose of this surveillance from the governments point of view is to control enemies of the state. Not terrorists. People who are coalescing around ideas that would destabilize the status quo. These could be religious ideas. These could be groups like anon who are too good with tech for the governments liking. It makes it very easy to know who these people are. It also makes it very simple to control these people.

Lets say you are a college student and you get in with some people who want to stop farming practices that hurt animals. So you make a plan and go to protest these practices. You get there, and wow, the protest is huge. You never expected this, you were just goofing off. Well now everyone who was there is suspect. Even though you technically had the right to protest, you're now considered a dangerous person.

With this tech in place, the government doesn't have to put you in jail. They can do something more sinister. They can just email you a sexy picture you took with a girlfriend. Or they can email you a note saying that they can prove your dad is cheating on his taxes. Or they can threaten to get your dad fired. All you have to do, the email says, is help them catch your friends in the group. You have to report back every week, or you dad might lose his job. So you do. You turn in your friends and even though they try to keep meetings off grid, you're reporting on them to protect your dad.

2) Let's say number one goes on. The country is a weird place now. Really weird. Pretty soon, a movement springs up like occupy, except its bigger this time. People are really serious, and they are saying they want a government without this power. I guess people are realizing that it is a serious deal. You see on the news that tear gas was fired. Your friend calls you, frantic. They're shooting people. Oh my god. you never signed up for this. You say, fuck it. My dad might lose his job but I won't be responsible for anyone dying. That's going too far. You refuse to report anymore. You just stop going to meetings. You stay at home, and try not to watch the news. Three days later, police come to your door and arrest you. They confiscate your computer and phones, and they beat you up a bit. No one can help you so they all just sit quietly. They know if they say anything they're next. This happened in the country I live in. It is not a joke.

3) Its hard to say how long you were in there. What you saw was horrible. Most of the time, you only heard screams. People begging to be killed. Noises you've never heard before. You, you were lucky. You got kicked every day when they threw your moldy food at you, but no one shocked you. No one used sexual violence on you, at least that you remember. There were some times they gave you pills, and you can't say for sure what happened then. To be honest, sometimes the pills were the best part of your day, because at least then you didn't feel anything. You have scars on you from the way you were treated. You learn in prison that torture is now common. But everyone who uploads videos or pictures of this torture is labeled a leaker. Its considered a threat to national security. Pretty soon, a cut you got on your leg is looking really bad. You think it's infected. There were no doctors in prison, and it was so overcrowded, who knows what got in the cut. You go to the doctor, but he refuses to see you. He knows if he does the government can see the records that he treated you. Even you calling his office prompts a visit from the local police.

You decide to go home and see your parents. Maybe they can help. This leg is getting really bad. You get to their house. They aren't home. You can't reach them no matter how hard you try. A neighbor pulls you aside, and he quickly tells you they were arrested three weeks ago and haven't been seen since. You vaguely remember mentioning to them on the phone you were going to that protest. Even your little brother isn't there.

4) Is this even really happening? You look at the news. Sports scores. Celebrity news. It's like nothing is wrong. What the hell is going on? A stranger smirks at you reading the paper. You lose it. You shout at him "fuck you dude what are you laughing at can't you see I've got a fucking wound on my leg?"
"Sorry," he says. "I just didn't know anyone read the news anymore." There haven't been any real journalists for months. They're all in jail.

Everyone walking around is scared. They can't talk to anyone else because they don't know who is reporting for the government. Hell, at one time YOU were reporting for the government. Maybe they just want their kid to get through school. Maybe they want to keep their job. Maybe they're sick and want to be able to visit the doctor. It's always a simple reason. Good people always do bad things for simple reasons.

You want to protest. You want your family back. You need help for your leg. This is way beyond anything you ever wanted. It started because you just wanted to see fair treatment in farms. Now you're basically considered a terrorist, and everyone around you might be reporting on you. You definitely can't use a phone or email. You can't get a job. You can't even trust people face to face anymore. On every corner, there are people with guns. They are as scared as you are. They just don't want to lose their jobs. They don't want to be labeled as traitors.

This all happened in the country where I live.

You want to know why revolutions happen? Because little by little by little things get worse and worse.

But this thing that is happening now is big. This is the key ingredient. This allows them to know everything they need to know to accomplish the above. The fact that they are doing it is proof that they are the sort of people who might use it in the way I described. In the country I live in, they also claimed it was for the safety of the people. Same in Soviet Russia. Same in East Germany. In fact, that is always the excuse that is used to surveil everyone. But it has never ONCE proven to be the reality.

Maybe Obama won't do it. Maybe the next guy won't, or the one after him. Maybe this story isn't about you. Maybe it happens 10 or 20 years from now, when a big war is happening, or after another big attack. Maybe it's about your daughter or your son. We just don't know yet. But what we do know is that right now, in this moment we have a choice. Are we okay with this, or not? Do we want this power to exist, or not?

You know for me, the reason I'm upset is that I grew up in school saying the pledge of allegiance. I was taught that the United States meant "liberty and justice for all." You get older, you learn that in this country we define that phrase based on the constitution. That's what tells us what liberty is and what justice is. Well, the government just violated that ideal. So if they aren't standing for liberty and justice anymore, what are they standing for? Safety?

Ask yourself a question. In the story I told above, does anyone sound safe?

I didn't make anything up. These things happened to people I know. We used to think it couldn't happen in America. But guess what? It's starting to happen.

I actually get really upset when people say "I don't have anything to hide. Let them read everything." People saying that have no idea what they are bringing down on their own heads. They are naive, and we need to listen to people in other countries who are clearly telling us that this is a horrible horrible sign and it is time to stand up and say no.

source

Thoughts on Edward Snowden

This was some good background material. On one hand you've got to admit his motives have quality but, the stigma of his social habits are a concern. Being a social enigma in this day and age is akin to a personality cloaked in deceptiveness. But then, that describes way too many of our serving elected officials doesn't it?

One of the most interesting parts of his motive admissions was being so upset with the Obama administration because it didn't investigate and prosecute the previous administration's gross transgressions of public surveillance.

In my police investigative days I can recall so many instances where I became aware of undocumented information of community members that reflected badly on their persona. But, it's how you use the information, not that you possess it. To be aware of it and pass it along to someone just to excite the air makes you little more than a blow-hard gossip. And you know how we treat those dingbats!?!?

Your's in debate............Scotty

Edward Snowden says motive behind leaks was to expose 'surveillance state' - The Washington Post

Body Snatchers

After reading this article, we had some words to say...

http://www.plainsite.org/articles/article.html?id=2

The idea for creating a mafia collection of body-snatchers (I guess that's the new word for psychopathic personalities that manipulate the unwary) has reached the cyber world.  I have heard the industry for copywrite (or patent) infringement in this country was huge but, didn't get an idea of the scope until I once read that it's the second biggest non-farm industry in California after the tourist industry!!!!

 

One of the true freedoms of our society over others is amazingly easy access to the courts.  In terms of the down-trodden, that's good but, it also serves a dire purpose for those who seek a sanctimonious outlet for crime by intimidation.  (Gee, I just reread what I said and think I coined a new phrase that even impressed me!?!?  Maybe I should get it on the blog to protect the copywrite????)  Okay, just kidding but, the opportunity for someone sued by one of these vulture outfits to learn about them could be the basis for a new cyber investigative agency???

 

The limitations on doing such investigative work before has always been the huge date base and ability to cross-reference for effective retrieval. 

The Irony in the SEC

Today the Netflix CEO posted that the SEC is filing suit against Netflix for giving the netflix facebook followers “material” investor information about the company and stock, because they used facebook to publish the news instead of a 8-K filing or press release.

The SEC does not recognize social network postings as public knowledge, and by association they probably don't yet recognize blog posts as public knowledge. This is stupid.


Original Post by Reed Hastings

SEC staff questions a Facebook post. Fascinating social media story.

We use blogging and social media, including Facebook, to communicate effectively with the public and our members. 

In June we posted on our blog that our members were enjoying “nearly a billion hours per month” of Netflix, and people wrote about this. We did not also issue a press release or 8-K filing about this.

In early July, I publicly posted on Facebook to the over 200,000 of you who subscribe to me that our members had enjoyed over 1 billion hours in June, highlighting how strong our content was. There was press coverage as there are many reporters and bloggers among you, my public followers. Some of you re-posted my post. Again, we did not also issue a press release or file an 8-K about this. 

SEC staff informed us yesterday that they are recommending that the SEC bring a civil action against us for my July 1 billion hour public post, asserting we violated “Reg FD”. This rule is designed to ensure that individual investors have equal access to information as large institutional investors, by prohibiting selective disclosure of material information.  

The SEC staff believes that I gave you all “material” investor information in my post and that we needed to instead release the June viewing fact “publicly” with an 8-K filing or press release.  

I want to note a few things. 

First, we think posting to over 200,000 people is very public, especially because many of my subscribers are reporters and bloggers.  

Second, while we think my public Facebook post is public, we don’t currently use 

Facebook and other social media to get material information to investors; we usually get that information out in our extensive investor letters, press releases and SEC filings. We think the fact of 1 billion hours of viewing in June was not “material” to investors, and we had blogged a few weeks before that we were serving nearly 1 billion hours per month.  

Finally, while our stock rose the day of my public post, the increase started well before my mid-morning post was out, likely driven by the positive Citigroup research report the evening before.  

We remain optimistic this can be cleared up quickly through the SEC’s review process.  

-Reed

Why is Marijuana illegal?

Seems like the vote in Colorado and here stirred up the hornet's nest and gotten the interest of the media.  Again, here's an article that claims the government's decision to classify marijuana as a dangerous drug was made arbitrarily with no scientific basis. 

I had heard this way back in my law enforcement career and wondered why it wasn't more of an issue.  I'm still wondering why there's so little said about why it keeps being driven into an illegal status which benefits the opportunists controlling the illicit market when it is so cheap to provide?

my best explanation is that extremely lobbying from tobacco companies mixed with an easy 'sell' on the idea that the drug is dangerous.
the idea of 'DANGER' is easy to sell because it is better to error on the side of safe. If you can argue something might be dangerous and can't be proven it is absolutely not dangerous then the damn DEA decided that they can increase their budget if it remains illegal. they would probably have to let go half of their staff if it was decriminalized and legalized. 

Is marijuana bad for you? - The Week 

The Napster of Education is Happening

This is a repost of the article originally written by clay shirky titled:

Napster, Udacity, and the Academy. 

I have reposted it because his website stopped working, and i wanted to save the text before the google cache erased it in case his website really did suffer a fault.

Fifteen years ago, a research group called The Fraunhofer Institute announced a new digital format for compressing movie files. This wasn’t a terribly momentous invention, but it did have one interesting side effect: Fraunhofer also had to figure out how to compress the soundtrack. The result was the Motion Picture Experts Group Format 1, Audio Layer III, a format you know and love, though only by its acronym, MP3.

The recording industry concluded this new audio format would be no threat, because quality mattered most. Who would listen to an MP3 when they could buy a better-sounding CD at the record store? Then Napster launched, and quickly became the fastest-growing piece of software in history. The industry sued Napster and won, and it collapsed even more suddenly than it had arisen.

If Napster had only been about free access, control of legal distribution of music would then have returned the record labels. That’s not what happened. Instead, Pandora happened. Last.fm happened. Spotify happened. ITunes happened. Amazon began selling songs in the hated MP3 format.

How did the recording industry win the battle but lose the war? How did they achieve such a decisive victory over Napster, then fail to regain control of even legal distribution channels? They crushed Napster’s organization. They poisoned Napster’s brand. They outlawed Napster’s tools. The one thing they couldn’t kill was the story Napster told.

The story the recording industry used to tell us went something like this: “Hey kids, Alanis Morisette just recorded three kickin’ songs! You can have them, so long as you pay for the ten mediocrities she recorded at the same time.” Napster told us a different story. Napster said “You want just the three songs? Fine. Just ‘You Oughta Know’? No problem. Every cover of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ ever made? Help yourself. You’re in charge.”

The people in the music industry weren’t stupid, of course. They had access to the same internet the rest of us did. They just couldn’t imagine—and I mean this in the most ordinarily descriptive way possible—could not imagine that the old way of doing things might fail. Yet things did fail, in large part because, after Napster, the industry’s insistence that digital distribution be as expensive and inconvenient as a trip to the record store suddenly struck millions of people as a completely terrible idea.

Once you see this pattern—a new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know—you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.

It’s been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own backyard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.

We have several advantages over the recording industry, of course. We are decentralized and mostly non-profit. We employ lots of smart people. We have previous examples to learn from, and our core competence is learning from the past. And armed with these advantages, we’re probably going to screw this up as badly as the music people did.

* * *

A massive open online class is usually a series of video lectures with associated written materials and self-scoring tests, open to anyone. That’s what makes them OOCs. The M part, though, comes from the world. As we learned from Wikipedia, demand for knowledge is so enormous that good, free online materials can attract extraordinary numbers of people from all over the world.

Last year, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, an online course from Stanford taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, attracted 160,000 potential students, of whom 23,000 completed it, a scale that dwarfs anything possible on a physical campus. As Thrun put it, “Peter and I taught more students AI, than all AI professors in the world combined.” Seeing this, he quit and founded Udacity, an educational institution designed to offer MOOCs.

The size of Thrun and Norvig’s course, and the attention attracted by Udacity (and similar organizations like Coursera, P2PU, and University of the People), have many academics worrying about the effect on higher education. The loudest such worrying so far has been The Trouble With Online Education, a New York Times OpEd by Mark Edmunson of the University of Virginia. As most critics do, Edmundson focussed on the issue of quality, asking and answering his own question: “[C]an online education ever be education of the very best sort?”

Now you and I know what he means by “the very best sort”—the intimate college seminar, preferably conducted by tenured faculty. He’s telling the story of the liberal arts education in a selective residential college and asking “Why would anyone take an online class when they can buy a better education at UVA?”

But who faces that choice? Are we to imagine an 18 year old who can set aside $250K and 4 years, but who would have a hard time choosing between a residential college and a series of MOOCs? Elite high school students will not be abandoning elite colleges any time soon; the issue isn’t what education of “the very best sort” looks like, but what the whole system looks like.

Edmundson isn’t crazy enough to argue that all college experiences are good, so he hedges. He tells us “Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition”, without providing an analogy for the non-memorable ones. He assures us that “large lectures can also create genuine intellectual community”, which of course means they can also not do that. (He doesn’t say how many large lectures fail his test.) He says “real courses create intellectual joy,” a statement that can be accurate only as a tautology. (The MOOC Criticism Drinking Game: take a swig whenever someone says “real”, “true”, or “genuine” to hide the fact that they are only talking about elite schools instead of the median college experience.)

I was fortunate enough to get the kind of undergraduate education Edmundson praises: four years at Yale, in an incredible intellectual community, where even big lecture classes were taught by seriously brilliant people. Decades later, I can still remember my art history professor’s description of the Arnolfini Wedding, and the survey of modern poetry didn’t just expose me to Ezra Pound and HD, it changed how I thought about the 20th century.

But you know what? Those classes weren’t like jazz compositions. They didn’t create genuine intellectual community. They didn’t even create ersatz intellectual community. They were just great lectures: we showed up, we listened, we took notes, and we left, ready to discuss what we’d heard in smaller sections.

And did the professors also teach our sections too? No, of course not; those were taught by graduate students. Heaven knows what they were being paid to teach us, but it wasn’t a big fraction of a professor’s salary. The large lecture isn’t a tool for producing intellectual joy; it’s a tool for reducing the expense of introductory classes.

* * *

Higher education has a bad case of cost disease (sometimes called Baumol’s cost disease, after one of its theorizers.) The classic example is the string quartet; performing a 15-minute quartet took a cumulative hour of musician time in 1850, and takes that same hour today. This is not true of the production of food, or clothing, or transportation, all of which have seen massive increases in value created per hour of labor. Unfortunately, the obvious ways to make production more efficient—fewer musicians playing faster—wouldn’t work as well for the production of music as for the production of cars.

An organization with cost disease can use lower paid workers, increase the number of consumers per worker, subsidize production, or increase price. For live music, this means hiring less-talented musicians, selling more tickets per performance, writing grant applications, or, of course, raising ticket prices. For colleges, this means more graduate and adjunct instructors, increased enrollments and class size, fundraising, or, of course, raising tuition.

The great work on college and cost-disease is Robert Archibald and David Feldman’s Why Does College Cost So Much? Archibald and Feldman conclude that institution-specific explanations—spoiled students expecting a climbing wall; management self-aggrandizement at the expense of educational mission—hold up less well than the generic observation: colleges need a lot of highly skilled people, people whose wages, benefits, and support costs have risen faster than inflation for the last thirty years.

Cheap graduate students let a college lower the cost of teaching the sections while continuing to produce lectures as an artisanal product, from scratch, on site, real time. The minute you try to explain exactly why we do it this way, though, the setup starts to seem a little bizarre. What would it be like to teach at a university where a you could only assign books you yourself had written? Where you could only ask your students to read journal articles written by your fellow faculty members? Ridiculous. Unimaginable.

Every college provides access to a huge collection of potential readings, and to a tiny collection of potential lectures. We ask students to read the best works we can find, whoever produced them and where, but we only ask them to listen to the best lecture a local employee can produce that morning. Sometimes you’re at a place where the best lecture your professor can give is the best in the world. But mostly not. And the only thing that kept this system from seeming strange was that we’ve never had a good way of publishing lectures.

This is the huge difference between music and education. Starting with Edison’s wax cylinders, and continuing through to Pandora and the iPod, the biggest change in musical consumption has come not from production but playback. Hearing an excellent string quartet play live in an intimate venue has indeed become a very expensive proposition, as cost disease would suggest, but at the same time, the vast majority of music listened to on any given day is no longer recreated live.

* * *

Harvard, where I was fortunate enough to have a visiting lectureship a couple of years ago, is our agreed-upon Best Institution, and it is indeed an extraordinary place. But this very transcendence should make us suspicious. Harvard’s endowment, 31 billion dollars, is over three hundred times the median, and only one college in five has an endowment in the first place. Harvard also educates only about a tenth of a percent of the 18 million or so students enrolled in higher education in any given year. Any sentence that begins “Let’s take Harvard as an example…” should immediately be followed up with “No, let’s not do that.”

This atypical bent of our elite institutions covers more than just Harvard. The top 50 colleges on the US News and World Report list (which includes most of the ones you’ve heard of) only educate something like 3% of the current student population. The entire list, about 250 colleges, educates fewer than 25%.

The upper reaches of the US college system work like a potlatch, those festivals of ostentatious giving. The very things the US News list of top colleges prizes—low average class size, ratio of staff to students—mean that any institution that tries to create a cost-effective education will move down the list. This is why most of the early work on MOOCs is coming out of Stanford and Harvard and MIT. As Ian Bogost says, MOOCs are marketing for elite schools.

Outside the elite institutions, though, the other 75% of students—over 13 million of them—are enrolled in the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of: Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. Bridgerland Applied Technology College. The Laboratory Institute of Merchandising. When we talk about college education in the US, these institutions are usually left out of the conversation, but Clayton State educates as many undergraduates as Harvard. Saint Leo educates twice as many. City College of San Francisco enrolls as many as the entire Ivy League combined. These are where most students are, and their experience is what college education is mostly like.

* * *

The fight over MOOCs isn’t about the value of college; a good chunk of the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of provide an expensive but mediocre education. For-profit schools like Kaplan’s and the University of Phoenix enroll around one student in eight, but account for nearly half of all loan defaults, and the vast majority of their enrollees fail to get a degree even after six years. Reading the academic press, you wouldn’t think that these statistics represented a more serious defection from our mission than helping people learn something about Artificial Intelligence for free.

The fight over MOOCs isn’t even about the value of online education. Hundreds of institutions already offer online classes for credit, and half a million students are already enrolled in them. If critics of online education were consistent, they would believe that the University of Virginia’s Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies or Rutger’s MLIS degree are abominations, or else they would have to believe that there is a credit-worthy way to do online education, one MOOCs could emulate. Neither argument is much in evidence.

That’s because the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it. The most widely told story about college focuses obsessively on elite schools and answers a crazy mix of questions: How will we teach complex thinking and skills? How will we turn adolescents into well-rounded members of the middle class? Who will certify that education is taking place? How will we instill reverence for Virgil? Who will subsidize the professor’s work?

MOOCs simply ignore a lot of those questions. The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.

Those earlier inventions systems started out markedly inferior to the high-cost alternative: records were scratchy, PCs were crashy. But first they got better, then they got better than that, and finally, they got so good, for so cheap, that they changed people’s sense of what was possible.

In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs.

If this happens, Harvard will be fine. Yale will be fine, and Stanford, and Swarthmore, and Duke. But Bridgerland Applied Technology College? Maybe not fine. University of Arkansas at Little Rock? Maybe not fine. And Kaplan College, a more reliable producer of debt than education? Definitely not fine.

* * *

Udacity and its peers don’t even pretend to tell the story of an 18-year old earning a Bachelor’s degree in four years from a selective college, a story that only applies to a small minority of students in the US, much less the world. Meanwhile, they try to answer some new questions, questions that the traditional academy—me and my people—often don’t even recognize as legitimate, like “How do we spin up 10,000 competent programmers a year, all over the world, at a cost too cheap to meter?”

Udacity may or may not survive, but as with Napster, there’s no containing the story it tells: “It’s possible to educate a thousand people at a time, in a single class, all around the world, for free.” To a traditional academic, this sounds like crazy talk. Earlier this fall, a math instructor writing under the pen name Delta enrolled in Thrun’s Statistics 101 class, and, after experiencing it first-hand, concluded that the course was

…amazingly, shockingly awful. It is poorly structured; it evidences an almost complete lack of planning for the lectures; it routinely fails to properly define or use standard terms or notation; it necessitates occasional massive gaps where “magic” happens; and it results in nonstandard computations that would not be accepted in normal statistical work.

Delta posted ten specific criticisms of the the content (Normal Curve Calculations), teaching methods (Quiz Regime) and the MOOC itself (Lack of Updates). About this last one, Delta said:

So in theory, any of the problems that I’ve noted above could be revisited and fixed on future pass-throughs of the course. But will that happen at Udacity, or any other massive online academic program?

The very next day, Thrun answered that question. Conceding that Delta “points out a number of shortcomings that warrant improvements”, Thrun detailed how they were going to update the class. Delta, to his credit, then noted that Thrun had answered several of his criticisms, and went on to tell a depressing story of a fellow instructor at his own institution who had failed to define the mathematical terms he was using despite student requests.

Tellingly, when Delta was criticizing his peer, he didn’t name the professor, the course, or even his institution. He could observe every aspect of Udacity’s Statistics 101 (as can you) and discuss them in public, but when criticizing his own institution, he pulled his punches.

Open systems are open. For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look terrible at first. But anyone who has watched a piece of open source software improve, or remembers the Britannica people throwing tantrums about Wikipedia, has seen how blistering public criticism makes open systems better. And once you imagine educating a thousand people in a single class, it becomes clear that open courses, even in their nascent state, will be able to raise quality and improve certification faster than traditional institutions can lower cost or increase enrollment.

College mottos run the gamut from Bryn Mawr’s Veritatem Dilexi (I Delight In The Truth) to the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising’s Where Business Meets Fashion, but there’s a new one that now hangs over many of them: Non Potest Quae Non Manent. Things That Can’t Last Don’t. The cost of attending college is rising above inflation every year, while the premium for doing so shrinks. This obviously can’t last, but no one on the inside has any clear idea about how to change the way our institutions work while leaving our benefits and privileges intact.

In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now its our turn, and the risk is that we’ll be the last to know that the world has changed, because we can’t imagine—really cannot imagine—that story we tell ourselves about ourselves could start to fail. Even when it’s true. Especially when it’s true.

What stops light from going faster?

So, lets approach this a few different ways. First with the simplest, and then to increasingly more accurate descriptions.

So, as theduffer said, according to the laws of electricity and magnetism, the speed of light is related to these two variables, permeability and permativity of the material its going through. Now, why is that? That is because following the classical derivation of electricity and magnetism, we come up with some differential equations which describe the proegation of a wave. This wave is what we call light. This light is self perpetuating, just the same as a pendulum is self perpetuating. A pendulum will continue to swing forever as long as there is no friction or drag. This is also in the same way the fact that earth is self preptuating around the sun, it is in an orbit. In the same way, as light is traveling, the electric and magnetic fields are oscillating back and forth, necessitating that the light continues flowing forward. A good way to understand that light is just due to this oscillation, we can just look at a radio antenna. Radio waves are light, as is all electromagnetic radiation. We make radio waves by literally pushing and pulling electrons to one end of the antenna, and then back to the first end Doing this creates an electric field which is oscillating, this in turn creates a magnetic field that is oscillating, which makes an electric field that is oscillating, each one extended in space a little, creating a wave that physically moves and travels.

So, what describes the speed of that light? Well, we have equations which describe if you put an electron at point A, and another electron at point B, and we can measure how strong those two things pull on each-other. Likewise we can do this with spin and magnets. With these measurements, we find out that nature itself has a fundamental strength when it comes to electric and magnetic fields. And, there is a physical response of the universe to these things, that just always is the same no matter where and how we measure it. We have overtime determined that this fundamental and universal thing we keep seeing is also the same limit of the speed of light.

So now, we have determined that the fundamental speed of light is due to the medium through which it travels, and in a vacuum, it still has a characteristic speed that is not infinite. This is to say, space itself and electric and magnetic fields in space cannot respond instantaneously. Then we must ask, why not? What is physically stopping us here. And this is where we must get into relativity.

As it turns out, the universe itself has some fundamental relation between the dimension of time and the dimension of space. This is to say, space and time can be turned into each other (in a sense). If you were to start moving very very fast the distances you are traveling and the time you experience will be different from someone who is stationary. This ability for us to transform from time to space is contained within the math of "Lorentz Transformations"

So, this is to say, nature has a specific way for us to change physical dimension, length into time. These things as it turns out are necessarily directly related. These things are two heads to the same coin, except that time itself is always propagating in one direction, and the spatial dimensions are things we are free to roam around in. (That is a much harder question and concept to try to tackle, and up to much debate)

So! Now we have made mention that space and time are actually connected, they are actually fundamentally related somehow. Well, we measure time by counting essentially. We find a pendulum and count how many times it has ticked. We assign an arbitrary number to that and say "15 ticks have passed, and it ticks once every millisecond, therefore 15 milliseconds have passed" That is how a second is defined. And now, we have space, how is space defined? Well, we used to have a stick on the ground and said, this stick is "1 unit" length, and people called it a foot, a meter, whatever they wanted. And with these two variables, we are able to measure what the speed of light is, as a length over time. Some 3*10^8 meters per second. However, as it turns out, due to relativity, meters and second should be the same thing in some way. They are both measurements of length in their dimension. So, we could have just as easily stopped at the definition of 1 second, and then said that c is the speed of light, and called that "1" At this point, we would say that the stick you placed on the ground is actually 3 nanoseconds long. In this sense, nature actually specifically relates these two dimensions and defines C in such a way that that is how the two dimensions talk to each other.

So now, I have two last points to make.

One: That in fact, speed of light is less of a "speed" and more of a conversion factor between time and space. For this reason, when we are wondering why you cannot go faster than the speed of light, why isn't speed of light higher, etc. what we are really asking is why is the ratio of time to space defined as is? Why can space not be longer for the same amount of time? Now that is the hardest question to answer, as we are getting deep into the fundamentals of general relativity, and the limits of modern physics. As it stands right now, its almost taken for granted, that... space itself is all wibbly-wobbly, and the amount of bounce and shape and cushion that space itself has fundamentally is described by some physical _constants_ and in that sense, the speed of light is one of them. In some way, space itself has some built in number that explains this, and all we can do is measure it. This is the same way as asking about the other fundamental constants, which as it is understood are fundamental descriptions of the universe. One possible interpretation is that there is some symmetry group which describes the universe, and under this symmetry there are constants, and from these constants come other constants such as the speed of light. (Noether's theorem)

And Two: just a small side comment / joke: When I saw your question about "c+1" I actually read that as is twice as fast. It turns out, when you write down the math, if you measure length in seconds, and time in seconds (or length in meters and time in meters. (I'm 7 parsecs old!)) then c is just equal to 1 exactly. In this sense our notion of "3*10^8" is almost arbitrary. And that is why we have defined it precisely (for the sake of the definition of the meter) as being: 299,792,458 meters per second _exactly_. But we could have just as well defined it as 17 potatoes per hour. And then measured our lengths in potatoes.

So... **TL;DR**: Sorry for just going on for so long, but I felt like a lot of background is needed for this unsatisfactory sounding answer... As far as we know, light goes as fast as it does because it simply is the constant in the universe that is the "fastest" anything can go. And therefore, it cannot go faster because the concept of moving faster than that simply does not exist. Also, yes, light is truly self perpetuating.
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Wiki articles that are worth looking at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permittivity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_permittivity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permeability_(electromagnetism)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_permeability
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem

Is it fair for a poor majority to tell a rich minority to hand over the money?

Considering that the wealth of the wealthy is only possible in the context of a society, a nation-state context of today, they must fund the government which gives their wealth meaning. The 'wealthy' really have pieces of paper which are nothing more than IOUs or statements, whether that is currency, stocks, treasuries, or bonds. These things are totally meaningless, as is the concept of ownership of things like machinery without a means of either enforcing ownership claims or acceptance of those pieces of paper as currency.
So they are not only morally obligated to fund the system/society to the level that enables it to function to the benefit of all, but they have a self interest in doing so, as it mean funding that which gives their wealth meaning and therefore power.
Fairness means nothing in this context, as their wealth is dependent on the acceptance of the public of it. Is it fair that the public accept that some few should be mega-rich when so many are suffering so badly and could have their lives improved significantly through marginal outlays of some of that 'wealth'?

In the context of what you seem to define 'fairness' as, it is that of the individual to have property rights above all else in a society and have an authority enforce meaning of their wealth and their rights to that property. Fairness though could be defined in any number of ways and is really therefore meaningless when discussing what if 'more fair'. What would make more sense is discussing what is moral in the context of a system that enables wealth as we understand it.

Washington Initiative 502 Results, Marijuana Legalization

I-502 - Washington’s New Marijuana Regulation Law 

Frequently Asked Questions   

The ACLU of Washington will be working to ensure that Washington’s new voter-approved
marijuana law is fully and fairly implemented, and offers this brief FAQ about implementation
of Initiative 502.  

• When can adults legally possess and use marijuana?      
• As of December 6, 2012, adults age 21 and over in Washington state can no longer be arrested under state law for possessing limited amounts of marijuana.  
• How much marijuana  can adults legally possess under I  legally possess under I-502?
• Under Washington law, adults can possess 1 oz. of useable marijuana, 16 oz. of marijuana infused product in solid form, and 72 oz. of marijuana-infused product in liquid form. 
• Can I grow marijuana at home?   
• No. Unless you are an authorized medical marijuana patient under Washington law, home growing is not allowed.  
• When can  can marijuana retail outlets sell marijuana?    
• The Washington State Liquor Control Board, Department of Agriculture, and Department of Health will have until December 1, 2013 to complete rule making that will create a system to license and regulate the production, processing, and sale of marijuana.  Commercial businesses can be set up after rule making is complete and once a license is obtained. 
• Where will stores be located?
• Licenses will authorize stand-alone marijuana businesses, with similar restrictions to the old state liquor stores.  Marijuana stores must be located at least 1,000 feet away from schools and parks. the number of marijuana store licenses will also be determined in rule making. 
• Does I-502 change Washington’s medical marijuana law?
• No. Washington’s Medical Use of Cannabis Act remains unchanged.    
• Can marijuana be used in public?   
• It will remain unlawful under Washington law to use marijuana in public. Similar to a traffic offense, violations will result in a civil infraction bringing a fine but not arrest.  
• Can a prospective employee a prospective employee still be drug tested for marijuana when applying for a job?   
• I-502 does not change Washington state employment law, which allows for employment drug testing in some situations. 
• How do the DUI provisions work under I-502?
• I-502 creates a standard for marijuana impairment while driving, similar to the .08 cut-off for alcohol. The DUI provisions focus on active THC in one’s system that can impair a driver and not inactive marijuana metabolites that do not cause impairment.  As is currently the law, an officer will need to have probable cause for an arrest and reasonable grounds to believe a driver is impaired before requiring a breath or blood test. Nor does it change the fact that blood tests can only be administered by medical professionals.
• How will the federal government respond to I-502?
• Proponents of the new law look forward to working with federal officials in a spirit of collaboration and cooperation to ensure that it is fairly implemented. The law’s tightly regulated system will improve public safety and increase respect for law enforcement. We hope that federal officials will respect the will of our state’s voters and not enforce federal laws against Washington residents who are obeying state law. 
• When does I-502 take effect?
• Here is a summary of important dates for implementation of I-502: 
• December 6th 2012: Initiative 502 goes into effect.
• On this date it will be legal for adults 21 and over to possess limited amounts of marijuana under Washington law. I-502’s Driving Under the Influence provisions will also take effect.  
• December 1st 2013: Rule making Must Be Completed.
• The Washington State Liquor Control Board, Department of Agriculture, and Department of Health must conduct rulemaking as specified by I-502 to set up a system to license and regulate the production, processing, and sale of marijuana.  No commercial business can be set up until rulemaking is complete and licenses are obtained. 
• September 1st, 2015: Evaluation 
• The Washington State Institute for Public Policy must provide legislature with a preliminary evaluation and recommendations regarding the cost-benefit outcomes of I-502. Additional evaluations will be produced in 2017, 2022, and 2032. 

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