Resonant Information - Education - Comments

I got in anyway

Zed — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:42:00 -0400

Security appears to be nonexistent. A few grad students are also drifting about. This is just as well, because it's the day before testing, and there was a server emergency I had to take care of.

Probability Seminar in exile

Bogdan — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:10:14 -0400

It seems that the Mathematics Department Probability Seminar was unable to meet on campus today.

Quote:

PROBABILITY SEMINAR
4pm-4:50pm Monday September 26, 2005
1030 Magnolia Wood Avenue (Kuo Residence)

Some Aspects of Poisson Noise

Speaker: Si Si
Aichi Prefectural University, Japan

Locked out of the office

Zed — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 01:34:38 -0400

Dryly amusing to me is the note I received that employees won't even be let into their own offices:

Quote:

Lockett Hall will be open to the public from 10:00 A.M. until 12:00 MIDNIGHT. A security guard will be on duty. To be on the safe side MAKE SURE YOUR OFFICE DOOR, ALL LAB DOORS, etc. ARE LOCKED. YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO ENTER YOUR OFFICE ON MONDAY ONLY. IT WILL BE DIFFICULT TO COME ON CAMPUS SINCE YOUR REGULAR PARKING PERMIT IS INVALID ON FOOTBALL GAME DAYS.

So the university will be open to the public... but not students, faculty, or staff. I'm not entirely certain how that's supposed to work. I'm tempted to show up tomorrow to find out.

Nothing new

Zed — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 12:16:10 -0400

I did hear of a presentation at UTexas that said the government was planning to start audits, but I haven't been able to confirm that anywhere else.

Any update on the status of the proposed BIS EAR changes?

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 12:32:28 -0400

I'm unable to find any further information on the proposed changes you describe, and the Federal Register article is gone. Heard anything new?

- Gregg TeHennepe

What I wrote to the BIS

Zed — Mon, 09 May 2005 22:39:19 -0400

Quoting myself, Regulations.gov #: EREG - 48:

I am the head system administrator for the Department of Mathematics at LSU, and I am gravely worried by these changes. Most universities have UNIX-based labs with authentication based on a single login, and due to their ability of each machine to receive batch jobs remotely, these labs constitute a de-facto computing cluster. Most operating systems do not have the ability to prevent a user from logging into multiple machines at once, which is what would be necessary to prevent their use as a supercomputing cluster. While this doesn't so much affect anyone from a Tier 2 country, the limits on Tier 3 countries (and obviously Tier 4) are so restrictive that having 20 cheap PCs from Dell (as common Pentium 4 processors are now producing more than 10k MTOPS) in such a lab will mean that universities will be unable to provide accounts (or jobs administering or performing simple maintenance on these machines) to students who were born in Tier 3 or Tier 4 countries -- even if they are now US citizens!

This change in regulation may very well have the net effect of forcing universities to no longer accept students from Tier 3 and Tier 4 countries at all, as access to computing labs has now become a requirement for many courses. I think this will be bad for the United States, and bad for the scientific community in general.

I also believe that this will have little to no effect on securing technology. Anyone capable of turning the computational results from 20 desktop computers into a weapon will also likely have the resources to export that many high-end laptops (or even desktops), simply by leaving the country with them one at a time. I should also note that Intel has manufacturing plants in Israel itself, a Tier-3 country, and thus making university computers unavailable to Israeli students or professors is a futile and wasteful gesture at best.

Cheap clustering technology has made this regulation obsolete; the computers are already available worldwide. I respectfully suggest that rather than attempting to enforce strict rules about usage within the United States that harm those within the United States much more than they harm the enemies of the United States, that you look instead into finding ways for us to better benefit from the full use of our own technology.

Secession

Zed — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 23:19:51 -0400

Voters tend to be allergic to decisions that drastic unless there is extreme provocation, and to be honest, I'm not so sure that the feds wouldn't nuke California rather than see it secede. As soon as one splinters away, a lot of others would follow, and it would tear the country apart. It's not possible for states to win a civil war at this point unless they somehow gain control of a nuclear arsenal, so the best a state can hope for is to be a constant nuisance until they get their way, or follow Montana's example and openly declare that they won't cooperate with federal agents.

New York would be absolutely mortified to have something in common with Dixieland, anyway.

Such an optimist

Lynne — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 20:19:35 -0400

Quoting Zed: "I expect that this batch of silly bills will be soundly defeated, just like all of the similar ones before them, but it is important not to let the people around us forget the foundation stone, the reason for those defeats."

I hope very much that you are right. However, I think it is only a matter of time before such bills are passed. Why? Because they are constantly brought up. The sponsors never learn from their defeats -- they only take an even harder line and resolve to introduce the bills again. They are allowed to do this by their constituencies because the vast majority of people don't pay attention to what goes on in their state legislatures, so incumbants (who always have an advantage anyway) aren't usually voted out. Some may even think that this voter apathy amounts to approval. And, so long as these bills keep returning in these times when legislatures are full of right-wing fanatics, there is always the strong possibility of passage.

As for building a wall around Alabama... I am reminded of a discussion a while back about the Blue States leaving the Union. The Red States would learn very quickly just how dependent they are on money from those liberal, un-godly states when it comes to keeping their roads (and schools, and hospitals) in good condition. Sure, it wouldn't be fair to those people who didn't deserve to be in a Red State, and that is something that would have to be addressed. But it still might be worth it. How much are those states holding the Blue States back? What would life in California be like if they didn't have to send however many billions of dollars to the federal government each year?

Actually, why hasn't California (or New York for that matter) left? The last I heard, California's economy was something like the fifth in the world, and the federal government wouldn't bomb them into submission.