Nothing the State of Vermont did caused the plant to be shut down. It was entirely Entergy's own stupidity on multiple levels. First they decided to run as a 'Merchant' plant, refusing to sign a contract to provide VT with power (ironic as it was us who bore the burden of the threat of some disaster, etc). They could have locked in a profitable rate but they were stupid and greedy and screwed themselves. Secondly they were INCOMPETENT, or at least in many instances managed to LOOK incompetent. Parts of the cooling tower fell down, they lied to the regulators about tritium leak issues, etc. Thirdly they failed to do basic good cost accounting, for instance not planning for the replacement of a condenser who's rebuilding was MUCH MUCH more expensive than they 'guessed' it would be.
As for the decommissioning cost thing, this is not some new thing or a bolt out of the blue. The original operators sold the plant to Entergy to get out of these liabilities and Entergy never properly funded the fund. It was a routine matter of discussion in VT TEN YEARS AGO that this day would come. What they did back then was come up with a plan to 'invest' the fund in something-or-other and then decommission in 60 years using the projected proceeds (and then of course get hammered in 2008, like they cared). After that they tried to spin the plant off so they too could escape from the burden of dealing with the twin messes of decommissioning and waste disposal.
Overall Entergy has been rather dishonest and conniving, not to mention a bit less than totally competent at some level. Mark my words, the state will end up getting boned. Everyone will be paying for decades, yet magically "Nuclear power is cheap!" continues to be the mantra. All I can do is roll my eyes.
A complete highly extensible interpreted language with a built-in editor, macro assembler, etc in under 10k lines of code which did everything any modern scripting language does, except they all require at least 200KLOC to do it in.... This is the most elegant piece of software ever written, bar none. It isn't even a contest.
Creationists have all the air time and chance to express their views anyone could ever wish for. Equal time, what a bunch of crap.
As for the "our views aren't being considered", this is a SCIENCE SHOW, it deals with scientific evidence. The day creationists can show ANY EVIDENCE that the Earth is young, that life forms didn't progressively evolve from simpler to more complex, that there is no single unifying tree of life, etc then they can complain that they haven't gotten a proper scientific airing. Given that they have NOTHING, no contrary testable hypothesis, no evidence that stands up to any scrutiny, etc they've got no leg to stand on. Its too bad for them that their Flying Spaghetti Monster is not science, but it isn't our problem.
Yeah, well, there is that. Once a system can learn then it can change, and it won't ever be really predictable. We'll have to get used to our machines having personality, or else turn back the clock to good old FORTRAN:)
Code exists because code is very flexible and plastic. Its the duct tape of systems. You can do anything in hardware, but we do do everything in code. Once you leave the lower levels of abstraction where you can achieve anything you move into a realm where code, in the form of instructions to computers, just isn't that valuable. Either the assumptions and built in limitations of the platform have to becomes greater and greater in order to reduce complexity, or procedural/declarative/imparative logic are simple not adequate to the task of dealing with higher level things in the real world. We tried 'visual programming', but it didn't actually fix the complexity problems or the brittleness problems, and it only allowed at best a tiny increase in abstraction at a huge cost.
The way forward, IMHO has to be natural learning systems and adaptive systems. The 'ware needs to learn how to write itself. Not sure we will want to call it software anymore at that point.
Yeah, that's the definition I always knew, a Coulomb is one Avagadro's Number of fundamental charges. The problem is that's a great theoretical definition, but actually measuring out 6.022x10^23 electrons is a bit difficult... As someone pointed out earlier in the thread, the error in the known value of NA is about 1 part in 30 billion, which is not bad, but not good enough either. There are some other ways to measure an Amp of course, but they all get complicated rather quickly because you have to know at least 2 other values very precisely.
Indeed, learning assembly language is a real good start. I got my first real understanding of computers by learning PACE machine code. My uncle gave me an S-100 based typesetting workstation he scavenged parts for. I learned by reading the PACE manual (helpfully supplied) and learning about how a computer bootstraps, how the disk drive worked, and most important how the CPU actually works at a low level. I never did get that machine to do a whole lot, but 6 months of wrestling with machine language will really make a good understanding.
What I like about FORTH is its underlying simplicity and elegance. The entire language and all its features are contained in a few 1000 lines of code, and all of it is accessible for experimentation using the outer interpreter. Because the language and the stack machine/inner interpreter are highly exposed in FORTH code it is both easy and necessary for a student to understand how the thing works at a pretty low level. Yet at the same time you can construct powerful domain-specific languages and applications. Certainly powerful enough to satisfy any beginning programmer (and frankly there are plenty of spacecraft, aircraft, and many other systems around that are built using FORTH, its not a toy).
I think its sad that the language and the philosophy of simplicity and transparency of technology has gone out of style. IMHO starting out software engineers on FORTH would be a great boon to the industry. They will go on to other things, but the lesson of simplicity and elegance of design is never lost.
I think its like other posters have said, the attraction is that you need nothing more than a browser and a text editor to get started with it, and you can see some fairly flashy results quite quickly. You could get flashy results with something like say COLOR FORTH too, but you would have to acquire the software and its not as easy to find an abundance of documentation.
Yeah, I can't really disagree with that. FORTH is perfectly usable, but its not widely employed. I can understand why JavaScript is attractive. Honestly though, I think JavaScript is a terrible language to learn with, and its sad that using something so complex prevents the student from understanding the tool.
JS is nice, but have you ever tried using something like FIG FORTH as a teaching tool? This is some very elegant and simple software with which very powerful things can be done. It certainly is a good intro to the topic of virtual machines, interpretation, binding, and different forms of optimization. An actual debugger is moderately irrelevant, you can interactively step through code. I've had very good luck with this tool.
Very simple, very cheap, no false alarms, and unless you're home invaded by murderous thugs it WILL be effective. Even you ARE home invaded by murderous thugs it will still probably pay off! Everywhere I've lived when I've talked to any law enforcement about home security that's their advice, get a rotweiler, they really do work. They're also a lot cheaper to feed than a kodiak, and probably legal pretty much anywhere.
ALL that matters is if the monitoring company is licensed in your state (most states requires this in the US), and UL Rated. If it is UL approved service, you have the proper permits, etc then you will have ZERO problem with claims. If your insurance company bitches, take them to the state insurance board in your state, they'll cry uncle in approximately 5 seconds flat.
Here are some other things to know. UL Rated monitoring should cost NO MORE THAN $9.00 a month, if you pay more you're getting gouged. NEVER EVER EVER IN A BILLION YEARS sign up with people like ADT where you'll pay some ludicrous fee like $45 a month, plus a land line, plus MORE if you want to use wireless. Don't EVER sign a contract, you can get $9.00 UL monitoring on a pay-as-you-go basis.
The big firms will try to 'give you' all sorts of 'free' equipment to induce you to their overpriced service, its not worth it. ADT might give you $1500 worth of stuff, but they'll lock you into an expensive 3 year contract, and there WILL be hidden fees, little extra things you won't get that you need, etc, so by the time your done the cost will be very significant AND you're still overcharged.
Yeah, that could be true. Personally the chances that I will suddenly, after 10 years of using desktop Linux, care much one way or another about what comes out of Redmond or what they do is dim. Now there is only one proprietary monstrosity left to fear, but is it called Apple or Google? lol.
Actually, according to the article you linked, Asus is once again making Eee's, the 1015 model ships with either Windows or Ubuntu. So assuming Wikipedia is correct Asus indeed did not get the 'memo' from MS...
Right. Its probably not a major factor in sales though, since few enough people know what Ubuntu IS, let alone know that they could install it and get extra functionality. I thought about picking up one of those things, but my old Asus Eee PC1000 is still doing fine running Asus' wonky Linux distro.
Gosh I guess major vendors like Asus didn't get the memo, lol. They've been shipping Eee PCs with their own weird dedicated Linux distro for years. It works quite well. Runs FF, Skype, well pretty much anything if you know how to install. Its perfectly easy to use, and provides some pretty useful features that Chrome can't, like namely SKYPE, something I find quite valuable on a netbook. I'm still using my Eee PC1000 model from several years ago. On battery power they're not the snappiest thing on Earth, but they do pretty well. I think Asus got around the whole MS nonsense by including an XP license. Nobody in their right mind would actually INSTALL XP, but I guess Redmond got a few bucks out of it.
Seems like Google found a pretty good formula there. I'm not sure Chromebooks will ever be even the single #1 overall netbook OS, lots of people need support for things Chrome doesn't do, but it is pretty impressive that they've got this much market penetration. I'd have scoffed at the possibility a year ago myself.
Yeah, that's one approach. I don't really have a problem with that conceptually, though of course REALITY matters too, who really does have your data and how to do they actually use it. I'd like to be able to put some restraint on individuals by having like power over them. I protect THEIR privacy as well as they protect mine. If they're spies, well, then they need to insure that they are not only doing the right thing but that we BELIEVE they are doing the right thing. I think moral boundaries in society grow out of needs, they solve problems. I think that if we have a problem where we all, potentially, know too much about each other then some scruples against using that power will arise to keep society working. Things will be different, but there's reasonable hope that we can then have SOME privacy. We just have to guard against a grossly asymmetric situation where only one group ends up with ALL the information and thus all the power. Something like a copyright could potentially be used to embody this desirable behavior with some legal force, but moral force is always needed too.
That doesn't strike you as largely futile and not the way of the future basically? Realistically very few people will do that kind of thing, and even fewer will do it for very long. Look at the end-game, the new status quo. It isn't going to be everyone spending an hour a day making the NSA's life hell. Even if you do all this stuff how effective is it really? You will never know for sure. Not as long as we drive the data collection into the dark alleyways of the digital world.
As it becomes easier and easier for more and more people to potentially spy on pretty much anyone we will have a society where you can't EVER be sure you are not being watched or listened to. That's just a fact. Nobody will stop that. Lets say however we make it a serious offense to keep your data secret, then we can create values in society that will mostly make people not get too nosy lest they suffer the same fate. Any other set of values just isn't going to work any way you cut it, so we might as well encourage right behavior. If someone damages you, you're still perfectly able to sue them. If someone is a big shot and inevitably someone else spies on them, well hey, they made that bed, they'll just have to sleep in it. Nothing is perfect either. There isn't going to be some utopia, we just need to find the right state of affairs where we can go on functioning as a society. I suspect over time people will simply stop expecting such a high level of privacy, its not like privacy rights are universal invariants in human society either. YOU may not be entirely pleased, but I don't think the evolution of society, or the available choices we have, are made to your order. Life goes on.
Wow, I'd mod you even higher except the very second I hit this forum/. expired my damned mod points! Oh the humanity.
I'd expand on your answer. The truth is that the cat is out of the bag. We can't get this sort of privacy back. We probably can't ever get back the CERTAINTY of any sort of privacy. If there's advantage to be had, someone will listen. You will never be SURE that the NSA (which isn't going away) isn't or can't listen to you, get all your facebook data, etc. Even if it isn't them it could be SOMEONE. You can't ever truly know what software any modern computer is running for certain. You absolutely can't be sure that your SSL connections are secure, or that if you use Tor that someone is STILL not tracking you.
The truth is, we're better if we go with the flow and take control of the situation. Live more in the open. That's what we ARE going to do, but if we do it RIGHT then we put at least SOME controls on things. We need to insure that whatever the government knows, we know. If there isn't some absolute direct reason why given data should be hidden, then it should be open. All data about what people do should belong to the public. It should make the rules. I think we'll all find at that point we want to exercise restraint and life will be able to go on. The alternative is we fight for a losing cause, total privacy, and end up with all our data owned by corporations and stuck in Top Secret NSA vaults, and all these people just listening to everything without the slightest oversight.
So, nothing concrete then. I couldn't find anything, either.
"...except for all the others" is a quip on the same lines as "...and you are ugly, but I will be sober in the morning". It is not an argument.
No, its not an exposition of facts, except it demonstrates the sentiment of a person who was actually acquainted intimately with government, as opposed to your purely theorycrafted opinions which ignore facts and history. It is far from the last word, but I won't bore you with the wisdom of great liberal thinkers, you clearly won't appreciate them...
Note the industrial revolution started in Stuart England under a monarchy. Liberalism is a response to society growing wealthier, not a cause. This is something that is tacitly acknowledged by today's commentators, talking about China, for instance: they tell us that once a middle class starts to grow in China, then they will demand democratic rights etc. (Not that today's China is a monarchy, of course, but I hope you see the connection).
Ummmmm, OK, show us some evidence that links monarchy with economic growth. Again, take a gander at Alexander's little graph of GDP growth over time and the spot where it turns non-linear. You can of course argue that wealth is the cause and liberalism the result, but you cannot argue that 99% of all human progress has come in the last several hundred years under progressively more liberal democratic governments. Its just a fact. This kills the notion that wealth generation and liberalism are incompatible. The most generous statement which could be made is that our modern economy began under less free conditions than we have today.
Truthfully if you look at history without your fascist agenda what you see is that society progressed rather slowly for millennia under largely totalitarian and highly unfree conditions. Over time personal freedom and wealth built up synergistically. Those nations which liberalized the most quickly climbed that curve the fastest, lead by England, which even in Stuart times was vastly more liberal than practically any other society in history up to that point. If absolutist monarchism did anything it was to retard and distort this process. The economic policies of the English Crown were frequently terrible and counterproductive. In fact I would describe them as more of a long bitter slow retreat from a state largely controlled by an elite who were far more concerned about their social status and would happily have held society in the middle ages if they could have. The problem was personal liberty worked. First the Dutch seized it and became hugely successful, England virtually was forced to follow suit, as eventually were all the other European countries one by one, and in EACH CASE economic growth accelerated rapidly with liberalism.
You can try to confound cause with effect all you want, but you're almost certainly wrong and the vast majority experts on the subject agree.
You and Alexander are confusing the agricultural feudalism of the middle ages with the unitary monarchies that replaced them, as soon as communications technology advanced to the point where a monarch could effectively supervise over a large area, rather than delegate for periods of years to largely independent barons.
I'm not confusing anything with anything. Totalitarian governments, which include monarchs with their secret police and 'obey me under penalty of instant death' legal systems, fight constantly and are horribly unstable. You can barely find a period of peace in Europe from the fall of Rome until the liberal enlightenment that lasted 3 days. You are ignoring such gems as the 30 Year's War which was so devastating that the population of Germany did not recover from it for 2 centuries. Not to mention all the endless dynastic squabbling in France and England which went on from time immemorial right up to the effective end of the French monarchy and even beyond.
Yeah, sorry, his facts are in accordance with history as far as I know it, and I do actually know my history. Do you really expect me to think that his ENTIRE argument rests on some specific fact about Tudor England anyway? You have MUCH more serious problems than that... Your entire reading of history manages to be both pathetically naive and pathologically paranoid at the same time. Its kind of amusing actually.
There's a very simple reason we have the saying "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest" because it is TRUE. Monarchy was a horrible disaster. It probably worked pretty well in an impoverished society where NOTHING could raise the lot of the vast bulk of clod-busters because agriculture REQUIRED 97 out of 100 people to either work the land or starve. There wasn't fuck all to worry about the government, things couldn't GET worse in most cases, and nature was a bigger threat than some goombah with a sword. As soon as their was ANYTHING for even a small privileged class to fight over war broke out, almost infallibly.
Did you read NOTHING of the utter demolishment of the very factual basis of argument for even the necessity of some change? Your cause is simply lost, it never stood a chance. If you wish to go on and argue individual points, great, but don't be under the illusion that you can salvage this argument. Alexander crushed you all, and there's no getting back up from that.
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Nothing the State of Vermont did caused the plant to be shut down. It was entirely Entergy's own stupidity on multiple levels. First they decided to run as a 'Merchant' plant, refusing to sign a contract to provide VT with power (ironic as it was us who bore the burden of the threat of some disaster, etc). They could have locked in a profitable rate but they were stupid and greedy and screwed themselves. Secondly they were INCOMPETENT, or at least in many instances managed to LOOK incompetent. Parts of the cooling tower fell down, they lied to the regulators about tritium leak issues, etc. Thirdly they failed to do basic good cost accounting, for instance not planning for the replacement of a condenser who's rebuilding was MUCH MUCH more expensive than they 'guessed' it would be.
As for the decommissioning cost thing, this is not some new thing or a bolt out of the blue. The original operators sold the plant to Entergy to get out of these liabilities and Entergy never properly funded the fund. It was a routine matter of discussion in VT TEN YEARS AGO that this day would come. What they did back then was come up with a plan to 'invest' the fund in something-or-other and then decommission in 60 years using the projected proceeds (and then of course get hammered in 2008, like they cared). After that they tried to spin the plant off so they too could escape from the burden of dealing with the twin messes of decommissioning and waste disposal.
Overall Entergy has been rather dishonest and conniving, not to mention a bit less than totally competent at some level. Mark my words, the state will end up getting boned. Everyone will be paying for decades, yet magically "Nuclear power is cheap!" continues to be the mantra. All I can do is roll my eyes.
A complete highly extensible interpreted language with a built-in editor, macro assembler, etc in under 10k lines of code which did everything any modern scripting language does, except they all require at least 200KLOC to do it in.... This is the most elegant piece of software ever written, bar none. It isn't even a contest.
Creationists have all the air time and chance to express their views anyone could ever wish for. Equal time, what a bunch of crap.
As for the "our views aren't being considered", this is a SCIENCE SHOW, it deals with scientific evidence. The day creationists can show ANY EVIDENCE that the Earth is young, that life forms didn't progressively evolve from simpler to more complex, that there is no single unifying tree of life, etc then they can complain that they haven't gotten a proper scientific airing. Given that they have NOTHING, no contrary testable hypothesis, no evidence that stands up to any scrutiny, etc they've got no leg to stand on. Its too bad for them that their Flying Spaghetti Monster is not science, but it isn't our problem.
Yeah, well, there is that. Once a system can learn then it can change, and it won't ever be really predictable. We'll have to get used to our machines having personality, or else turn back the clock to good old FORTRAN :)
Code exists because code is very flexible and plastic. Its the duct tape of systems. You can do anything in hardware, but we do do everything in code. Once you leave the lower levels of abstraction where you can achieve anything you move into a realm where code, in the form of instructions to computers, just isn't that valuable. Either the assumptions and built in limitations of the platform have to becomes greater and greater in order to reduce complexity, or procedural/declarative/imparative logic are simple not adequate to the task of dealing with higher level things in the real world. We tried 'visual programming', but it didn't actually fix the complexity problems or the brittleness problems, and it only allowed at best a tiny increase in abstraction at a huge cost.
The way forward, IMHO has to be natural learning systems and adaptive systems. The 'ware needs to learn how to write itself. Not sure we will want to call it software anymore at that point.
Yeah, that's the definition I always knew, a Coulomb is one Avagadro's Number of fundamental charges. The problem is that's a great theoretical definition, but actually measuring out 6.022x10^23 electrons is a bit difficult... As someone pointed out earlier in the thread, the error in the known value of NA is about 1 part in 30 billion, which is not bad, but not good enough either. There are some other ways to measure an Amp of course, but they all get complicated rather quickly because you have to know at least 2 other values very precisely.
Indeed, learning assembly language is a real good start. I got my first real understanding of computers by learning PACE machine code. My uncle gave me an S-100 based typesetting workstation he scavenged parts for. I learned by reading the PACE manual (helpfully supplied) and learning about how a computer bootstraps, how the disk drive worked, and most important how the CPU actually works at a low level. I never did get that machine to do a whole lot, but 6 months of wrestling with machine language will really make a good understanding.
What I like about FORTH is its underlying simplicity and elegance. The entire language and all its features are contained in a few 1000 lines of code, and all of it is accessible for experimentation using the outer interpreter. Because the language and the stack machine/inner interpreter are highly exposed in FORTH code it is both easy and necessary for a student to understand how the thing works at a pretty low level. Yet at the same time you can construct powerful domain-specific languages and applications. Certainly powerful enough to satisfy any beginning programmer (and frankly there are plenty of spacecraft, aircraft, and many other systems around that are built using FORTH, its not a toy).
I think its sad that the language and the philosophy of simplicity and transparency of technology has gone out of style. IMHO starting out software engineers on FORTH would be a great boon to the industry. They will go on to other things, but the lesson of simplicity and elegance of design is never lost.
LOL, yeah, you can write it in FORTH in maybe 5 minutes ;)
I think its like other posters have said, the attraction is that you need nothing more than a browser and a text editor to get started with it, and you can see some fairly flashy results quite quickly. You could get flashy results with something like say COLOR FORTH too, but you would have to acquire the software and its not as easy to find an abundance of documentation.
Yeah, I can't really disagree with that. FORTH is perfectly usable, but its not widely employed. I can understand why JavaScript is attractive. Honestly though, I think JavaScript is a terrible language to learn with, and its sad that using something so complex prevents the student from understanding the tool.
JS is nice, but have you ever tried using something like FIG FORTH as a teaching tool? This is some very elegant and simple software with which very powerful things can be done. It certainly is a good intro to the topic of virtual machines, interpretation, binding, and different forms of optimization. An actual debugger is moderately irrelevant, you can interactively step through code. I've had very good luck with this tool.
Very simple, very cheap, no false alarms, and unless you're home invaded by murderous thugs it WILL be effective. Even you ARE home invaded by murderous thugs it will still probably pay off! Everywhere I've lived when I've talked to any law enforcement about home security that's their advice, get a rotweiler, they really do work. They're also a lot cheaper to feed than a kodiak, and probably legal pretty much anywhere.
ALL that matters is if the monitoring company is licensed in your state (most states requires this in the US), and UL Rated. If it is UL approved service, you have the proper permits, etc then you will have ZERO problem with claims. If your insurance company bitches, take them to the state insurance board in your state, they'll cry uncle in approximately 5 seconds flat.
Here are some other things to know. UL Rated monitoring should cost NO MORE THAN $9.00 a month, if you pay more you're getting gouged. NEVER EVER EVER IN A BILLION YEARS sign up with people like ADT where you'll pay some ludicrous fee like $45 a month, plus a land line, plus MORE if you want to use wireless. Don't EVER sign a contract, you can get $9.00 UL monitoring on a pay-as-you-go basis.
The big firms will try to 'give you' all sorts of 'free' equipment to induce you to their overpriced service, its not worth it. ADT might give you $1500 worth of stuff, but they'll lock you into an expensive 3 year contract, and there WILL be hidden fees, little extra things you won't get that you need, etc, so by the time your done the cost will be very significant AND you're still overcharged.
Yeah, that could be true. Personally the chances that I will suddenly, after 10 years of using desktop Linux, care much one way or another about what comes out of Redmond or what they do is dim. Now there is only one proprietary monstrosity left to fear, but is it called Apple or Google? lol.
Actually, according to the article you linked, Asus is once again making Eee's, the 1015 model ships with either Windows or Ubuntu. So assuming Wikipedia is correct Asus indeed did not get the 'memo' from MS...
Right. Its probably not a major factor in sales though, since few enough people know what Ubuntu IS, let alone know that they could install it and get extra functionality. I thought about picking up one of those things, but my old Asus Eee PC1000 is still doing fine running Asus' wonky Linux distro.
Gosh I guess major vendors like Asus didn't get the memo, lol. They've been shipping Eee PCs with their own weird dedicated Linux distro for years. It works quite well. Runs FF, Skype, well pretty much anything if you know how to install. Its perfectly easy to use, and provides some pretty useful features that Chrome can't, like namely SKYPE, something I find quite valuable on a netbook. I'm still using my Eee PC1000 model from several years ago. On battery power they're not the snappiest thing on Earth, but they do pretty well. I think Asus got around the whole MS nonsense by including an XP license. Nobody in their right mind would actually INSTALL XP, but I guess Redmond got a few bucks out of it.
Seems like Google found a pretty good formula there. I'm not sure Chromebooks will ever be even the single #1 overall netbook OS, lots of people need support for things Chrome doesn't do, but it is pretty impressive that they've got this much market penetration. I'd have scoffed at the possibility a year ago myself.
Yeah, that's one approach. I don't really have a problem with that conceptually, though of course REALITY matters too, who really does have your data and how to do they actually use it. I'd like to be able to put some restraint on individuals by having like power over them. I protect THEIR privacy as well as they protect mine. If they're spies, well, then they need to insure that they are not only doing the right thing but that we BELIEVE they are doing the right thing. I think moral boundaries in society grow out of needs, they solve problems. I think that if we have a problem where we all, potentially, know too much about each other then some scruples against using that power will arise to keep society working. Things will be different, but there's reasonable hope that we can then have SOME privacy. We just have to guard against a grossly asymmetric situation where only one group ends up with ALL the information and thus all the power. Something like a copyright could potentially be used to embody this desirable behavior with some legal force, but moral force is always needed too.
That doesn't strike you as largely futile and not the way of the future basically? Realistically very few people will do that kind of thing, and even fewer will do it for very long. Look at the end-game, the new status quo. It isn't going to be everyone spending an hour a day making the NSA's life hell. Even if you do all this stuff how effective is it really? You will never know for sure. Not as long as we drive the data collection into the dark alleyways of the digital world.
As it becomes easier and easier for more and more people to potentially spy on pretty much anyone we will have a society where you can't EVER be sure you are not being watched or listened to. That's just a fact. Nobody will stop that. Lets say however we make it a serious offense to keep your data secret, then we can create values in society that will mostly make people not get too nosy lest they suffer the same fate. Any other set of values just isn't going to work any way you cut it, so we might as well encourage right behavior. If someone damages you, you're still perfectly able to sue them. If someone is a big shot and inevitably someone else spies on them, well hey, they made that bed, they'll just have to sleep in it. Nothing is perfect either. There isn't going to be some utopia, we just need to find the right state of affairs where we can go on functioning as a society. I suspect over time people will simply stop expecting such a high level of privacy, its not like privacy rights are universal invariants in human society either. YOU may not be entirely pleased, but I don't think the evolution of society, or the available choices we have, are made to your order. Life goes on.
Wow, I'd mod you even higher except the very second I hit this forum /. expired my damned mod points! Oh the humanity.
I'd expand on your answer. The truth is that the cat is out of the bag. We can't get this sort of privacy back. We probably can't ever get back the CERTAINTY of any sort of privacy. If there's advantage to be had, someone will listen. You will never be SURE that the NSA (which isn't going away) isn't or can't listen to you, get all your facebook data, etc. Even if it isn't them it could be SOMEONE. You can't ever truly know what software any modern computer is running for certain. You absolutely can't be sure that your SSL connections are secure, or that if you use Tor that someone is STILL not tracking you.
The truth is, we're better if we go with the flow and take control of the situation. Live more in the open. That's what we ARE going to do, but if we do it RIGHT then we put at least SOME controls on things. We need to insure that whatever the government knows, we know. If there isn't some absolute direct reason why given data should be hidden, then it should be open. All data about what people do should belong to the public. It should make the rules. I think we'll all find at that point we want to exercise restraint and life will be able to go on. The alternative is we fight for a losing cause, total privacy, and end up with all our data owned by corporations and stuck in Top Secret NSA vaults, and all these people just listening to everything without the slightest oversight.
So, nothing concrete then. I couldn't find anything, either.
"...except for all the others" is a quip on the same lines as "...and you are ugly, but I will be sober in the morning". It is not an argument.
No, its not an exposition of facts, except it demonstrates the sentiment of a person who was actually acquainted intimately with government, as opposed to your purely theorycrafted opinions which ignore facts and history. It is far from the last word, but I won't bore you with the wisdom of great liberal thinkers, you clearly won't appreciate them...
Note the industrial revolution started in Stuart England under a monarchy. Liberalism is a response to society growing wealthier, not a cause. This is something that is tacitly acknowledged by today's commentators, talking about China, for instance: they tell us that once a middle class starts to grow in China, then they will demand democratic rights etc. (Not that today's China is a monarchy, of course, but I hope you see the connection).
Ummmmm, OK, show us some evidence that links monarchy with economic growth. Again, take a gander at Alexander's little graph of GDP growth over time and the spot where it turns non-linear. You can of course argue that wealth is the cause and liberalism the result, but you cannot argue that 99% of all human progress has come in the last several hundred years under progressively more liberal democratic governments. Its just a fact. This kills the notion that wealth generation and liberalism are incompatible. The most generous statement which could be made is that our modern economy began under less free conditions than we have today.
Truthfully if you look at history without your fascist agenda what you see is that society progressed rather slowly for millennia under largely totalitarian and highly unfree conditions. Over time personal freedom and wealth built up synergistically. Those nations which liberalized the most quickly climbed that curve the fastest, lead by England, which even in Stuart times was vastly more liberal than practically any other society in history up to that point. If absolutist monarchism did anything it was to retard and distort this process. The economic policies of the English Crown were frequently terrible and counterproductive. In fact I would describe them as more of a long bitter slow retreat from a state largely controlled by an elite who were far more concerned about their social status and would happily have held society in the middle ages if they could have. The problem was personal liberty worked. First the Dutch seized it and became hugely successful, England virtually was forced to follow suit, as eventually were all the other European countries one by one, and in EACH CASE economic growth accelerated rapidly with liberalism.
You can try to confound cause with effect all you want, but you're almost certainly wrong and the vast majority experts on the subject agree.
You and Alexander are confusing the agricultural feudalism of the middle ages with the unitary monarchies that replaced them, as soon as communications technology advanced to the point where a monarch could effectively supervise over a large area, rather than delegate for periods of years to largely independent barons.
I'm not confusing anything with anything. Totalitarian governments, which include monarchs with their secret police and 'obey me under penalty of instant death' legal systems, fight constantly and are horribly unstable. You can barely find a period of peace in Europe from the fall of Rome until the liberal enlightenment that lasted 3 days. You are ignoring such gems as the 30 Year's War which was so devastating that the population of Germany did not recover from it for 2 centuries. Not to mention all the endless dynastic squabbling in France and England which went on from time immemorial right up to the effective end of the French monarchy and even beyond.
Yeah, sorry, his facts are in accordance with history as far as I know it, and I do actually know my history. Do you really expect me to think that his ENTIRE argument rests on some specific fact about Tudor England anyway? You have MUCH more serious problems than that... Your entire reading of history manages to be both pathetically naive and pathologically paranoid at the same time. Its kind of amusing actually.
There's a very simple reason we have the saying "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest" because it is TRUE. Monarchy was a horrible disaster. It probably worked pretty well in an impoverished society where NOTHING could raise the lot of the vast bulk of clod-busters because agriculture REQUIRED 97 out of 100 people to either work the land or starve. There wasn't fuck all to worry about the government, things couldn't GET worse in most cases, and nature was a bigger threat than some goombah with a sword. As soon as their was ANYTHING for even a small privileged class to fight over war broke out, almost infallibly.
Did you read NOTHING of the utter demolishment of the very factual basis of argument for even the necessity of some change? Your cause is simply lost, it never stood a chance. If you wish to go on and argue individual points, great, but don't be under the illusion that you can salvage this argument. Alexander crushed you all, and there's no getting back up from that.
Ummmm, http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ go to town, I really cannot outdo Alexander.