If this was an Apple announcement I'd likely be excited, since most new Apple products have lived up to their hype. But I've been burned by Microsoft too many times. Until the products are on sale, until we have detailed specs, until MS proves it can over-deliver and under-price, I don't much care.
Take a simple PIN for instance. Pair it up with the setting to erase the device after ten fails. Then an attacker gets the device and looks for fingerprints. One smudge on the device -- trivial. Two smudges and a four digit PIN can mean a 10 in 16 chance of getting the result. Three smudges, a 10 in 27, and four smudges, a 10 in 256 chance.
If someone uses a longer PIN, it becomes harder to guess things.
How do you get 256? 4 smudges means a 10 in 24 chance (4*3*2). Three or two smudges are even easier though I don't recall how to calculate the odds.
Compare to face unlock which protects a lost cell phone pretty well, but gives little protection against your friends. I know which attacker I care about more.
Pro Choice carries the implied decision that it isn't a 'life' and therefore it isn't a very important choice at all.
A minor point: your description shows that you are pro-life. "Pro choice" makes no direct implication about the fetus; it makes the implication that the mother should have a choice and anyone else (government, priests, etc) can go bugger off. Most (all?) pro-choice people are quite certain that the fetus is alive, though when it counts as a person and when it gets legal rights separate from the mother are less clear.
But I agree with you otherwise; the terms of the debate help frame the debate.
Your bar for evil is set a bit low. Getting Verizon to agree on net-neutrality on wired but not wireless is going farther towards net-neutrality than many others have. If that's evil, all of the companies which didn't get any net-neutrality agreements from a major ISP must be truly diabolical.
I would argue that the regular people against "net neutrality" in the US know exactly why they're against it. Because all the legislation proposed so far that has been billed as "net neutrality" with hopeful-sounding titles has had very little to do with *actual* net neutrality (throttling, etc), but have been principally about government gaining more control over the internet.
We're still waiting for a *real* net neutrality bill to be introduced in the US Congress that does not also hand the government far more control & regulatory power over the internet (or at least one that hasn't been instantly killed by one or both sides because of that lack).
Strat
Well, you're technically correct. The "net neutrality" proposals in the US have tried to add government regulation to force AT&T, Verizon, etc to treat all packets the same. You may want the "net neutrality" which allows ISPs to share $50/GB for Netflix and Skype packets, and $1/GB for Xfinity packets.
For some reason, most of the "government will control our lives" rants I've heard recently are traceable back to lobbyist companies paid by large companies. You see, lobbyists know that "the government is taking over" makes people's minds shut off and their knees jerk wildly.
Government taking over industry to control how much mercury they can emit near me and my kids? I like it. Government passing regulations to force credit card companies to use standardized contracts and terms? Please! Government regulations forcing companies and states to treat married homosexuals just like married heterosexuals? I wish!
If you use "government taking over" as an argument against something, you aren't making a real argument. Many regulations are bad, and the government does lots of dumb-ass and scary things. But you need to argue the against the actual regulations, not jerk your knee against "the evil government".
First post is AC or new account? Check. Anti-Google? Check. Barely related to article? Check.
Microsoft, you really should spend the cash for a competent astroturfing company. This one is really pathetic, and however much you are paying, it's way too much.
Both this and the rise of the Meternet make me shake my head, and make me want to grab one of those legislative or corporate suits by the shoulders and shake them and tell them "What the bloody hell is wrong with you!?".
It's obvious what is wrong. If you believe that everything the government does is wrong and everything the free market does is right, and you have complete unshakeable faith that this is true, then what can you do when presented with absolute evidence that a government-run organization is working well, making money, and making people happy? You can either change your beliefs, or you can change the rules so that the government-run organization will fail. And let's be honest, people hate changing their beliefs.
And why are you in such anticipation of this show? Because its creators and distributors promote it so that you will crave your next viewing, as they should.
Exactly! It's not our fault, it's the creators and distributors fault that we download it! There is no action so bad that we cannot blame someone else for it.
I simply can't justify spending that sort of money for the few shows that I am interested in, furthermore, I am offended that the majority of the money I spend would go to subsidizing all the shit programming that is aired on all these other channels.
I know what you mean. I don't think that having a car is worth the thousands of dollars a year in price, fuel, and insurance, and besides some of the money goes to evil terrorist arabs and evil bailed-out car companies. So now I keep my conscience clear by "borrowing" a car whenever I want to go to the grocery store. Since I never keep the car once it runs out of gas, it isn't stealing. Really, it's the only moral thing to do.
You prefer the Microsoft license which has all the same issues (pity the poor wight who sells "upgrade" copies of Windows with new hardware after Microsoft lawyers notice), and adds license codes which fail if you ever need to wipe/reinstall after a virus or disk failure? Really?
They also have a monopoly on "devices which I am using to type this reply". Toyota has a monopoly on "4-wheeled vehicles in my garage", and Aeron has a monopoly on "chairs thrown by Steve Ballmer" (warning, I made that last one up). Sadly, none of these are classes which do or should receive monopoly protection.
I misunderstood you; I apologize. A staple of most libertarians seems to be "get rid of government services which I don't need" of which public schools are a usual choice.
I agree that in theory more school choice could help; in practice it doesn't seem to work as well as we'd like. My area started allowing charter schools in the past decade, and many were started by people with the best of intentions. They sucked funds from already struggling public schools (via a voucher-like system); since they could reject students they (like private schools) left the public schools with the disruptive and learning-disabled students and took the best; and most of them have not done well at all. I want them to succeed because I really believe that we need a different educational paradigm in this country, and maybe one of them will figure it. But so far they've caused more harm than good. "More choice" may be necessary, but it is certainly not sufficient.
If, instead, parents were given freedom of choice in schools and teachers, the good ones would be oversubscribed, the poor ones undersubscribed and laid off / fired, and quality would improve dramatically and quickly.
Could be. I rather suspect that the result would be that the rich would get nice schools, while the middle class and the poor would get worthless schools. That happens today to some extent, of course, but it would be much more pervasive.
But you can easily disprove my theory. Point to a country without public education which has a healthy, thriving, affordable education system. If privitizing schools is a great idea then there should exist some libertarian utopia with small government and good schools for everyone who wants them.
I'll go first and point at the Scandinavian countries as having centralized, affordable, good-quality education. You?
Just like forcing banks to take on loans from people who cannot pay them back,
Which would be a major problem if it had ever happened outside of Wall Street propaganda. Do you really think that the government has the power to do that to banks? Or that banks (who have almost limitless lobbying pockets) would allow it? If only.
Insurance companies only care about your revenue/cost ratio. They only care about pre-existing conditions because they are a good predictor of a poor ratio. Anything else which indicates a poor ratio is just as bad. If they were allowed, insurance companies would drop everyone the second they got a serious illness.
Given a choice between an insurance company (where the cost of my illness subtracts from their profit and their officers' yearly bonuses) and a government (which I can occasionally influence by voting), there ain't no comparison.
It was certainly about federal power. The federal government (controlled by the northern states) wanted to end slavery and the southern states wanted to continue it. It was also about economics; northern factories during the industrial revolution needed skilled workers, while southern agriculture benefited from massive cheap unskilled labor. And many other issues, most of which came down to the same root cause. Different regions always have different issues and goals, then and now. But so far the only difference which caused a massive secession was slavery, and arguing for another primary cause is historical revisionism.
Yes, it was truly a tragedy that the federal government felt that owning human beings was wrong. If only they had let the southern states keep their own slavery policies.
There are some points you can make in favor of states rights, but calling the civil war a tragedy isn't likely to help you.
The government assigns them. Each number is supposed to uniquely identify a citizen and is used mostly for SS (and a few other governmental uses). So far so good; the government assigns them and (apparently) uses them appropriately as a unique ID number.
Now we have dozens of private businesses using them as a password. Fine, I guess it's a free country. But somehow, if someone finds out my number and uses it to open a loan in my name, *I'm* liable for the loan. It's my phone that rings with creditors and my credit score which is damaged. It seems to me that the problem is these corporations which use these numbers as passwords but disclaim liability for fraud. Make it clear that financial institutions have the liability for bad loans they originate, that bad credit reports MUST be cleared unless the financial institution can prove they are true, and that there are very strict penalties for companies which abuse these rules, and the "identity theft" problem will vanish very quickly.
So what you are saying is that google does exactly what you want when you search when not signed in, and when you browse signed in after disabling all of the personalization results?
Natural processes cause people to die and cities to fall into decay. All people die, all cities are eventually emptied.
Dropping lots of bombs also does this. Is leveling a city and killing all of the inhabitants a natural process of nature?
More specifically, a city gradually being abandoned because the people migrate (over generations) to a better area is one thing. A city being abandoned because the water topped the dikes for the third year in a row is not really the same thing. Both are natural processes, but they do not cause the same amount of (economic, social, physical) problems and hardships.
The positives and negatives are relative and complicated.
Some places which are currently good for crops will become bad; some which are bad will become good. The type of crops which will grow will change. I think that overall, slightly warmer weather and more CO2 will make it a bit easier to grow crops, but that likely won't be a major difference.
In the US, we have (comparatively) rich and educated farmers. We can move farms and change crops. Any change in farmland will produce some short-term problems for us, but overall our agriculture will be fine and possibly a bit better.
In parts of the world with poor farmers who barely survive now, changes in farmland will drop the farmers and possibly whole countries below starvation levels. Since the farmers have no education and no resources, it will be hard for them to change crops or move farmland. Their agriculture will be much worse off.
Does that help? There are lots of similar effects: a rise in sea level will create some new seafront property which is fine if you aren't one of the billions of people who now live on underwater land; some species will do quite well as their ecological rivals go extinct. Most of these changes would have happened anyways over thousands+ of years and would have caused minor effects; the same changes occurring in less than a hundred years will be far more damaging and will give people and ecologies little time to adapt.
So, you get warmer weather in March (and more blizzards in March some years). And poor farmers in Africa starve. Is that a net positive or a net negative for you? And for the world?
"cult of the expert" implies the uncritical acceptance output of people considered to be experts, with complete unwavering faith, without scrutiny, without independent examination.
And that would indeed be a problem. Though virtually everything "accepted by scientists considered to be experts" is accepted because it has been through the wringer of cross-examination and replication by others, including those who would see their careers rise if they could prove the current "experts" wrong.
Astronomers believe that the earth revolves around the sun because that theory matches observations and predictions better than any other theories. Environmental experts and doctors believe that secondhand smoke harms people (especially children) for the same reason. Climatologists believe that large amounts of CO2 and methane cause climate change for the same reason. Not many people are arguing about the heliocentric view anymore, but many people dislike the conclusions of environmentalists and climatologists (coincidentally, mostly those who would see economic harm if actions were taken based on those conclusions). But claiming that such things have no scrutiny is very odd.
Or perhaps those are not the basis for your "uncritical acceptance" statement. Maybe you have other things which are "uncritically accepted", though I'm not sure what that would be. But science is based on "regular and rigorous due diligence". Sure, it's not perfect, and sometimes incorrect theories are believed for longer than they should be, and often initial results and fakery are taken as truth for a while (see vaccinations and autism for a sad example). But since many scientific views have shifted over the years based on new evidence and better models and theories, claiming there is no due diligence is odd.
Absolutely anyone can show evidence that current scientific belief are wrong, of course. But such evidence will also be subject to due diligence. Insisting that people believe such evidence, even after they have shown it is flawed, is not due diligence; it is the avoidance of DD and the antithesis of science. As an example, the models of climatologists have matched new data much better than the predictions of the opposition. This is an example of DD working as planned. The anthropomorphic-leaning climatologists have also had better models (rather imperfect since nature does not encourage straight lines or clean fits, but still better) than their opponents. Either suck it up or provide more predictive models, but for gods sake stop wailing about conspiracies and cults.
More specifically, conservatives distrust scientists because of the technocrat angle. A lot of the attitude is rebellion against the idea of rule by the "cult of the expert".
Things like this make me believe that liberals and conservatives are divided by a common language...
I have no idea what a "technocrat" is, but "cult of the expert" sounds to me like: We shouldn't make rules based on what the experts believe. We should make rules based on, um, something else. (What the Bible says? What Rush Limbaugh says? What makes old while men more money? I truly have no idea.)
Maybe this means something different, but it does seem to me that taking information form experts out of the rule-making loop is a really, really bad idea.
I have never opted-in or clicked 'yes' on any agreement with Google. Why are they collecting my search data?
Because you send it to them every time you use them? Because they've always been clear about what they are collecting and how they use it? Because, as far as anyone can tell, they adhere to their policy that they collect and use data, but do not sell that data to others?
If you don't want them to collect your search data, don't use them. You can use another search provider, probably with a worse privacy policy, or you can write your own. Or use one of the many systems which use google while hiding your identity from them.
Yeah, so when the shitstorm comes, they can say.. "see ! we already had some website that was never on the front page of google which told you what we were doing. Why didnt you click and see ?.. its your fault for not hiring a $300/hr lawyer to explain to you our terms of service"
I truly hope you get paid to be google's little whore on slashdot. Surely.. you cant be as retarded as you appear here.
So, you complain loudly and bitterly about the company which shows you what they collect about you, and don't complain about companies which collect the same data but will not tell you. An interesting strategy indeed, and it's working perfectly; almost no companies try to be transparent, since the only reward is chorus of whining.
Nope. In Europe, the consumers won because the European governments passed laws/rules to force cell companies to unlock phones.
In the US, we lose because the telecoms pay lots of lobbying dollars to avoid those eeevil job-killing regulations, so you can only usually only switch carriers if you figure out how to unlock the phone yourself. I think that T-mobile will unlock their phones after a certain amount of time, but that doesn't seem to have helped them much.
Slashdot Mirror
If this was an Apple announcement I'd likely be excited, since most new Apple products have lived up to their hype. But I've been burned by Microsoft too many times. Until the products are on sale, until we have detailed specs, until MS proves it can over-deliver and under-price, I don't much care.
Take a simple PIN for instance. Pair it up with the setting to erase the device after ten fails. Then an attacker gets the device and looks for fingerprints. One smudge on the device -- trivial. Two smudges and a four digit PIN can mean a 10 in 16 chance of getting the result. Three smudges, a 10 in 27, and four smudges, a 10 in 256 chance.
If someone uses a longer PIN, it becomes harder to guess things.
How do you get 256? 4 smudges means a 10 in 24 chance (4*3*2). Three or two smudges are even easier though I don't recall how to calculate the odds.
Compare to face unlock which protects a lost cell phone pretty well, but gives little protection against your friends. I know which attacker I care about more.
Pro Choice carries the implied decision that it isn't a 'life' and therefore it isn't a very important choice at all.
A minor point: your description shows that you are pro-life. "Pro choice" makes no direct implication about the fetus; it makes the implication that the mother should have a choice and anyone else (government, priests, etc) can go bugger off. Most (all?) pro-choice people are quite certain that the fetus is alive, though when it counts as a person and when it gets legal rights separate from the mother are less clear.
But I agree with you otherwise; the terms of the debate help frame the debate.
Your bar for evil is set a bit low. Getting Verizon to agree on net-neutrality on wired but not wireless is going farther towards net-neutrality than many others have. If that's evil, all of the companies which didn't get any net-neutrality agreements from a major ISP must be truly diabolical.
I would argue that the regular people against "net neutrality" in the US know exactly why they're against it. Because all the legislation proposed so far that has been billed as "net neutrality" with hopeful-sounding titles has had very little to do with *actual* net neutrality (throttling, etc), but have been principally about government gaining more control over the internet.
We're still waiting for a *real* net neutrality bill to be introduced in the US Congress that does not also hand the government far more control & regulatory power over the internet (or at least one that hasn't been instantly killed by one or both sides because of that lack).
Strat
Well, you're technically correct. The "net neutrality" proposals in the US have tried to add government regulation to force AT&T, Verizon, etc to treat all packets the same. You may want the "net neutrality" which allows ISPs to share $50/GB for Netflix and Skype packets, and $1/GB for Xfinity packets.
For some reason, most of the "government will control our lives" rants I've heard recently are traceable back to lobbyist companies paid by large companies. You see, lobbyists know that "the government is taking over" makes people's minds shut off and their knees jerk wildly.
Government taking over industry to control how much mercury they can emit near me and my kids? I like it. Government passing regulations to force credit card companies to use standardized contracts and terms? Please! Government regulations forcing companies and states to treat married homosexuals just like married heterosexuals? I wish!
If you use "government taking over" as an argument against something, you aren't making a real argument. Many regulations are bad, and the government does lots of dumb-ass and scary things. But you need to argue the against the actual regulations, not jerk your knee against "the evil government".
First post is AC or new account? Check. Anti-Google? Check. Barely related to article? Check.
Microsoft, you really should spend the cash for a competent astroturfing company. This one is really pathetic, and however much you are paying, it's way too much.
Both this and the rise of the Meternet make me shake my head, and make me want to grab one of those legislative or corporate suits by the shoulders and shake them and tell them "What the bloody hell is wrong with you!?".
It's obvious what is wrong. If you believe that everything the government does is wrong and everything the free market does is right, and you have complete unshakeable faith that this is true, then what can you do when presented with absolute evidence that a government-run organization is working well, making money, and making people happy? You can either change your beliefs, or you can change the rules so that the government-run organization will fail. And let's be honest, people hate changing their beliefs.
And why are you in such anticipation of this show? Because its creators and distributors promote it so that you will crave your next viewing, as they should.
Exactly! It's not our fault, it's the creators and distributors fault that we download it! There is no action so bad that we cannot blame someone else for it.
I simply can't justify spending that sort of money for the few shows that I am interested in, furthermore, I am offended that the majority of the money I spend would go to subsidizing all the shit programming that is aired on all these other channels.
I know what you mean. I don't think that having a car is worth the thousands of dollars a year in price, fuel, and insurance, and besides some of the money goes to evil terrorist arabs and evil bailed-out car companies. So now I keep my conscience clear by "borrowing" a car whenever I want to go to the grocery store. Since I never keep the car once it runs out of gas, it isn't stealing. Really, it's the only moral thing to do.
You prefer the Microsoft license which has all the same issues (pity the poor wight who sells "upgrade" copies of Windows with new hardware after Microsoft lawyers notice), and adds license codes which fail if you ever need to wipe/reinstall after a virus or disk failure? Really?
They also have a monopoly on "devices which I am using to type this reply". Toyota has a monopoly on "4-wheeled vehicles in my garage", and Aeron has a monopoly on "chairs thrown by Steve Ballmer" (warning, I made that last one up). Sadly, none of these are classes which do or should receive monopoly protection.
I misunderstood you; I apologize. A staple of most libertarians seems to be "get rid of government services which I don't need" of which public schools are a usual choice.
I agree that in theory more school choice could help; in practice it doesn't seem to work as well as we'd like. My area started allowing charter schools in the past decade, and many were started by people with the best of intentions. They sucked funds from already struggling public schools (via a voucher-like system); since they could reject students they (like private schools) left the public schools with the disruptive and learning-disabled students and took the best; and most of them have not done well at all. I want them to succeed because I really believe that we need a different educational paradigm in this country, and maybe one of them will figure it. But so far they've caused more harm than good. "More choice" may be necessary, but it is certainly not sufficient.
If, instead, parents were given freedom of choice in schools and teachers, the good ones would be oversubscribed, the poor ones undersubscribed and laid off / fired, and quality would improve dramatically and quickly.
Could be. I rather suspect that the result would be that the rich would get nice schools, while the middle class and the poor would get worthless schools. That happens today to some extent, of course, but it would be much more pervasive.
But you can easily disprove my theory. Point to a country without public education which has a healthy, thriving, affordable education system. If privitizing schools is a great idea then there should exist some libertarian utopia with small government and good schools for everyone who wants them.
I'll go first and point at the Scandinavian countries as having centralized, affordable, good-quality education. You?
Just like forcing banks to take on loans from people who cannot pay them back,
Which would be a major problem if it had ever happened outside of Wall Street propaganda. Do you really think that the government has the power to do that to banks? Or that banks (who have almost limitless lobbying pockets) would allow it? If only.
Insurance companies only care about your revenue/cost ratio. They only care about pre-existing conditions because they are a good predictor of a poor ratio. Anything else which indicates a poor ratio is just as bad. If they were allowed, insurance companies would drop everyone the second they got a serious illness.
Given a choice between an insurance company (where the cost of my illness subtracts from their profit and their officers' yearly bonuses) and a government (which I can occasionally influence by voting), there ain't no comparison.
It was certainly about federal power. The federal government (controlled by the northern states) wanted to end slavery and the southern states wanted to continue it. It was also about economics; northern factories during the industrial revolution needed skilled workers, while southern agriculture benefited from massive cheap unskilled labor. And many other issues, most of which came down to the same root cause. Different regions always have different issues and goals, then and now. But so far the only difference which caused a massive secession was slavery, and arguing for another primary cause is historical revisionism.
Yes, it was truly a tragedy that the federal government felt that owning human beings was wrong. If only they had let the southern states keep their own slavery policies.
There are some points you can make in favor of states rights, but calling the civil war a tragedy isn't likely to help you.
-Kevin
I have no idea what you mean by "owner".
The government assigns them. Each number is supposed to uniquely identify a citizen and is used mostly for SS (and a few other governmental uses). So far so good; the government assigns them and (apparently) uses them appropriately as a unique ID number.
Now we have dozens of private businesses using them as a password. Fine, I guess it's a free country. But somehow, if someone finds out my number and uses it to open a loan in my name, *I'm* liable for the loan. It's my phone that rings with creditors and my credit score which is damaged. It seems to me that the problem is these corporations which use these numbers as passwords but disclaim liability for fraud. Make it clear that financial institutions have the liability for bad loans they originate, that bad credit reports MUST be cleared unless the financial institution can prove they are true, and that there are very strict penalties for companies which abuse these rules, and the "identity theft" problem will vanish very quickly.
So what you are saying is that google does exactly what you want when you search when not signed in, and when you browse signed in after disabling all of the personalization results?
Natural processes cause people to die and cities to fall into decay. All people die, all cities are eventually emptied.
Dropping lots of bombs also does this. Is leveling a city and killing all of the inhabitants a natural process of nature?
More specifically, a city gradually being abandoned because the people migrate (over generations) to a better area is one thing. A city being abandoned because the water topped the dikes for the third year in a row is not really the same thing. Both are natural processes, but they do not cause the same amount of (economic, social, physical) problems and hardships.
The positives and negatives are relative and complicated.
Some places which are currently good for crops will become bad; some which are bad will become good. The type of crops which will grow will change. I think that overall, slightly warmer weather and more CO2 will make it a bit easier to grow crops, but that likely won't be a major difference.
In the US, we have (comparatively) rich and educated farmers. We can move farms and change crops. Any change in farmland will produce some short-term problems for us, but overall our agriculture will be fine and possibly a bit better.
In parts of the world with poor farmers who barely survive now, changes in farmland will drop the farmers and possibly whole countries below starvation levels. Since the farmers have no education and no resources, it will be hard for them to change crops or move farmland. Their agriculture will be much worse off.
Does that help? There are lots of similar effects: a rise in sea level will create some new seafront property which is fine if you aren't one of the billions of people who now live on underwater land; some species will do quite well as their ecological rivals go extinct. Most of these changes would have happened anyways over thousands+ of years and would have caused minor effects; the same changes occurring in less than a hundred years will be far more damaging and will give people and ecologies little time to adapt.
So, you get warmer weather in March (and more blizzards in March some years). And poor farmers in Africa starve. Is that a net positive or a net negative for you? And for the world?
"cult of the expert" implies the uncritical acceptance output of people considered to be experts, with complete unwavering faith, without scrutiny, without independent examination.
And that would indeed be a problem. Though virtually everything "accepted by scientists considered to be experts" is accepted because it has been through the wringer of cross-examination and replication by others, including those who would see their careers rise if they could prove the current "experts" wrong.
Astronomers believe that the earth revolves around the sun because that theory matches observations and predictions better than any other theories. Environmental experts and doctors believe that secondhand smoke harms people (especially children) for the same reason. Climatologists believe that large amounts of CO2 and methane cause climate change for the same reason. Not many people are arguing about the heliocentric view anymore, but many people dislike the conclusions of environmentalists and climatologists (coincidentally, mostly those who would see economic harm if actions were taken based on those conclusions). But claiming that such things have no scrutiny is very odd.
Or perhaps those are not the basis for your "uncritical acceptance" statement. Maybe you have other things which are "uncritically accepted", though I'm not sure what that would be. But science is based on "regular and rigorous due diligence". Sure, it's not perfect, and sometimes incorrect theories are believed for longer than they should be, and often initial results and fakery are taken as truth for a while (see vaccinations and autism for a sad example). But since many scientific views have shifted over the years based on new evidence and better models and theories, claiming there is no due diligence is odd.
Absolutely anyone can show evidence that current scientific belief are wrong, of course. But such evidence will also be subject to due diligence. Insisting that people believe such evidence, even after they have shown it is flawed, is not due diligence; it is the avoidance of DD and the antithesis of science. As an example, the models of climatologists have matched new data much better than the predictions of the opposition. This is an example of DD working as planned. The anthropomorphic-leaning climatologists have also had better models (rather imperfect since nature does not encourage straight lines or clean fits, but still better) than their opponents. Either suck it up or provide more predictive models, but for gods sake stop wailing about conspiracies and cults.
More specifically, conservatives distrust scientists because of the technocrat angle. A lot of the attitude is rebellion against the idea of rule by the "cult of the expert".
Things like this make me believe that liberals and conservatives are divided by a common language...
I have no idea what a "technocrat" is, but "cult of the expert" sounds to me like: We shouldn't make rules based on what the experts believe. We should make rules based on, um, something else. (What the Bible says? What Rush Limbaugh says? What makes old while men more money? I truly have no idea.)
Maybe this means something different, but it does seem to me that taking information form experts out of the rule-making loop is a really, really bad idea.
I have never opted-in or clicked 'yes' on any agreement with Google. Why are they collecting my search data?
Because you send it to them every time you use them? Because they've always been clear about what they are collecting and how they use it? Because, as far as anyone can tell, they adhere to their policy that they collect and use data, but do not sell that data to others?
If you don't want them to collect your search data, don't use them. You can use another search provider, probably with a worse privacy policy, or you can write your own. Or use one of the many systems which use google while hiding your identity from them.
Yeah, so when the shitstorm comes, they can say.. "see ! we already had some website that was never on the front page of google which told you what we were doing. Why didnt you click and see ?.. its your fault for not hiring a $300/hr lawyer to explain to you our terms of service"
I truly hope you get paid to be google's little whore on slashdot. Surely.. you cant be as retarded as you appear here.
So, you complain loudly and bitterly about the company which shows you what they collect about you, and don't complain about companies which collect the same data but will not tell you. An interesting strategy indeed, and it's working perfectly; almost no companies try to be transparent, since the only reward is chorus of whining.
Wait, what am I saying? I'm sure Google would never, ever share this kind of info with any government agency, especially without a warrant.
Looks like you're right: Though the Justice Department also demanded that Yahoo, Microsoft and America Online hand over similar records, Google was the only recipient that chose to fight the subpoena in court.
Nope. In Europe, the consumers won because the European governments passed laws/rules to force cell companies to unlock phones.
In the US, we lose because the telecoms pay lots of lobbying dollars to avoid those eeevil job-killing regulations, so you can only usually only switch carriers if you figure out how to unlock the phone yourself. I think that T-mobile will unlock their phones after a certain amount of time, but that doesn't seem to have helped them much.