I'm convinced that most people are clueless about how to be a good parent, period, whether they have children or not. By and large parents are successful because of parenting instincts and because children are resilient. But while raising a couple of children may give a person some experience and a useful perspective on things, I don't think it confers much knowledge on how to best do things in the long term.
Some parents and teens may be able to do that. But I think that in many cases it's not possible due to the personalities or capabilities on each side. And in those cases, much of the time the parent tries to preserve the friend role at the cost of the parent role.
If you can do both, great. If you can't, being a parent should take precedence.
If the kid won't talk to his/her parents... what did you want the parents to do? Tie them up and force them to speak?
Yeah, that wouldn't be bad.
When I was a teenager I was like this. (Not the suicidal bit, just the part where I didn't want to talk to my parents.) I think it would have been really good for me if they had sat down and really forced me to discuss things. I kept a lot of stuff to myself, and it wasn't healthy. I made some errors in high school and in my first year of college that I regret, and I wish somebody with more sense would have been aware enough of what was going on to talk to me, tell me how dumb I was being in a supportive manner, and set me straight. But my parents respected my wish to be left alone and as such I ended up on my own when I didn't really want to be.
Now, I turned out alright, and I don't hold this against my parents. But yeah, if your teens don't want to talk, force 'em. Make a habit out of sitting down with them and prying information out. Find out what's going on in their lives. If they don't like it, tough. A teenager may think he's an adult, may try to act like an adult, may go out and do adult things, but ultimately he's still a child (at least an the lower end of the range, like this girl was). And you're still that child's parents. You're not their friend, not their roommate. You're not doing them a favor by leaving them alone or respecting their wishes not to talk.
Far too many teenagers end up in an adversarial situation with their parents. And I think the cause is, paradoxically, because parents try to be too friendly with their children. Far too often, when a daughter hits the teen years her mother says, woo, now we can go out and do fun girly stuff together! The same thing with sons and fathers, except not girly. Parenting needs to be based on respect and authority, not friendship. Children usually already have friends, they don't need two more. What they don't have are role models, authority figures, and people who can give sound advice from a perspective of older age.
The most screwed up young adults I know are those whose parents tried to be friends with them. Conversely, the most well adjusted young adults I know are those whose parents stayed in the role as a parent. They weren't mean or cruel or overbearing, but they raised their kids instead of befriending them.
You can say that the policy is driven by the military industrial complex, with 9/11 and al Qaeda as the excuse. I can say that the policy is driven by 9/11 and al Qaeda, with the military industrial complex overseeing and guiding. Ultimately it's the same thing.
The electron volt is a measure of energy. It is the energy gained by an electron accelerating through an electric field potential of one volt. And since energy and mass are equivalent, this miniscule measure of energy also makes for a useful miniscule measure of mass.
Terminus was great. Full of problems and overall kind of half baked, but still great. The enormous range of customization allowed in ship configuration took things to a whole new level.
I think that what this really shows is how stupid it is that this information is considered "private". Come on, birthdays? Dozens of people know my birthday, not counting the many government and private organizations who have the information in their databases. And a social security number is just nine digits that get assigned to you at birth, why should that be private?
Currently, society is essentially authenticating by username only. It's stupid, anybody who works with computers knows that it's stupid, but we persist. If we're going to authenticate people we need the equivalent of password authentication. Authenticating people based on some basic information that anyone can discover with a little work is just plain dumb.
You apparently failed to read the context. I was replying to this:
They recently refused to release computers to officials investigating kidnapping of a child. In that case it didn't have an impact, but in the next it, could. Is the life of someone worth YOUR presumed rights to surf anonymously on a public computer?
Which seems to imply that these rights shouldn't exist in "special" circumstances. I was not discussing the incident in the main article.
People's perceptions of the NSA tend to be somewhat behind the times.
Used to be that this idea that they could crack all of your crypto was based somewhat in fact. Back when DES was being developed, the NSA had design input on it but people didn't really understand what their changes did. Decades later, a whole new field of cryptanalysis was discovered (differential cryptanalysis) and, lo and behold, turns out the changes that the NSA made to DES made it resistant to this technique, decades before anybody in academia knew it even existed.
Much later, SHA-0 was published by the NSA and then quickly withdrawn. SHA-1 was then published a bit later, with one minor change. No real explanation was given. Years later, an attack on SHA-0 was discovered which SHA-1 is resistant to.
Notice it went from decades to years. Although it's very tough to tell, indications are that the NSA is now just a few years ahead of the state of the art in academia. Back in the 70s they had a radical cryptanalysis technique that nobody else even knew existed, and which no doubt allowed them to crack all kinds of stuff. Today, it's extremely unlikely that they know about any fancy techniques that would work against modern ciphers well enough to actually come up with a practical break.
Those acres of supercomputers at the NSA aren't doing codebreaking against modern ciphers. They're breaking old ciphers, ones which largely have breaks known to the public, weak implementations of modern ciphers (Debian, I'm talking to you) and they're doing non-codebreaking tasks like traffic analysis, data mining, keyword scanning, etc.
If you use a good AES implementation to encrypt your communications to Mohammed in Afghanistan, it's a very safe bet that the NSA has no idea what you're saying. But it's also a good bet that they know you're talking to him, unless you've taken extreme care. But "they know" really means that it exists in their big database somewhere, to be called up if anyone ever ends up caring about you, not that your name goes in a personalized report to the director.
Is the life of someone worth YOUR presumed rights to surf anonymously on a public computer?
Well yes. That's kind of the whole point of having rights. You don't get to go around breaking them just because there's some kind of emergency.
If a situation came up where my family was in danger and a possible clue is in library computer that some ALA putz with a stick up their ass refused to release, I would hold them and the ALA personally responsible for any harm that occurred.
And that is precisely why we don't let people whose families are in danger make these kinds of decisions.
If there is reasonable use for such things as evidence or as part of an investigation, get a warrant. They're not hard to get, and they don't take long. The system is in place for a reason. You don't get to violate it just because you think the situation is special and the rules do not apply to you.
Why shouldn't the police have asked? It's standard police procedure to ask for things that they have no right to require. Police will ask to search your car during a traffic stop, or to look inside your house if they have some suspicion but not enough to justify a forced entry. The subject of the search is entirely within his rights to refuse, but many people don't, because they want to be helpful, or they don't know their rights, or whatever reason. The fact that people are overly kind or uneducated is not the police's problem.
Put it this way. If some guy on the street comes up to you and asks for $100, and you give it to him, do you blame the guy for asking? Maybe, if you're spineless and weak-willed, but otherwise no.
If the threat is real and the police can be convinced to communicate it (which it sounds like they can), then I'd say the correct response is to get them to do it while on hidden camera, then distribute to the local media. Corruption should be fought, not submitted to.
By that logic, the director should never do anything without first checking with higher ups. In which case, he has no reason to even be there, the higher ups can do everything themselves.
There's something called delegation of authority. The president or board have powers, and they give these powers to someone more involved in day to day affairs. He was almost certainly acting within the powers delegated to him when he took this action.
They can ask anything they want. What they can't do is demand.
For example, this is legal: "Can I search your car?" If you say yes, and then they find the cocaine you had hidden under the seat, you have no grounds for complaint.
This, however, is illegal: "I have no evidence of wrongdoing, but let me search your car or I'll arrest you."
It is perfecly legal for the police to ask you something that would be illegal for them to demand without a warrant. It's also perfectly legal for you to refuse such a request. We don't need to make it illegal for the police to ask for things, we need to educate the populace as to their rights and the fact that they can stand up to the police.
Of all the nations in the world you might hope would be wary of pervasive monitoring, you'd think one that bills itself as a "jewish state" would be it.
Unfortunately the Israeli philosophy seems to be that it's not a problem as long as the right people are doing it. Which is true, it just ignores the fact that the right people never stick around forever.
For example, terrorists couldn't possibly care less about our freedoms. Their goal is not to destroy the 4th amendment or whatever else. That's just a side effect. Their goal (speaking of the standard Islamic terrorist here) is to get Western troops out of the Arab countries.
In this case, spammers just want to make money. But as a side effect to this, they end up destroying the utility of e-mail. So people start thinking that destroying the utility of e-mail is actually their goal, when it couldn't be further from the truth.
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I'm convinced that most people are clueless about how to be a good parent, period, whether they have children or not. By and large parents are successful because of parenting instincts and because children are resilient. But while raising a couple of children may give a person some experience and a useful perspective on things, I don't think it confers much knowledge on how to best do things in the long term.
Some parents and teens may be able to do that. But I think that in many cases it's not possible due to the personalities or capabilities on each side. And in those cases, much of the time the parent tries to preserve the friend role at the cost of the parent role.
If you can do both, great. If you can't, being a parent should take precedence.
If the kid won't talk to his/her parents... what did you want the parents to do? Tie them up and force them to speak?
Yeah, that wouldn't be bad.
When I was a teenager I was like this. (Not the suicidal bit, just the part where I didn't want to talk to my parents.) I think it would have been really good for me if they had sat down and really forced me to discuss things. I kept a lot of stuff to myself, and it wasn't healthy. I made some errors in high school and in my first year of college that I regret, and I wish somebody with more sense would have been aware enough of what was going on to talk to me, tell me how dumb I was being in a supportive manner, and set me straight. But my parents respected my wish to be left alone and as such I ended up on my own when I didn't really want to be.
Now, I turned out alright, and I don't hold this against my parents. But yeah, if your teens don't want to talk, force 'em. Make a habit out of sitting down with them and prying information out. Find out what's going on in their lives. If they don't like it, tough. A teenager may think he's an adult, may try to act like an adult, may go out and do adult things, but ultimately he's still a child (at least an the lower end of the range, like this girl was). And you're still that child's parents. You're not their friend, not their roommate. You're not doing them a favor by leaving them alone or respecting their wishes not to talk.
Far too many teenagers end up in an adversarial situation with their parents. And I think the cause is, paradoxically, because parents try to be too friendly with their children. Far too often, when a daughter hits the teen years her mother says, woo, now we can go out and do fun girly stuff together! The same thing with sons and fathers, except not girly. Parenting needs to be based on respect and authority, not friendship. Children usually already have friends, they don't need two more. What they don't have are role models, authority figures, and people who can give sound advice from a perspective of older age.
The most screwed up young adults I know are those whose parents tried to be friends with them. Conversely, the most well adjusted young adults I know are those whose parents stayed in the role as a parent. They weren't mean or cruel or overbearing, but they raised their kids instead of befriending them.
Semantic games.
You can say that the policy is driven by the military industrial complex, with 9/11 and al Qaeda as the excuse. I can say that the policy is driven by 9/11 and al Qaeda, with the military industrial complex overseeing and guiding. Ultimately it's the same thing.
Except that unlike Nazis, current US government policy is largely driven by 9/11 and/or al Qaeda, so the reference is much more apt.
The electron volt is a measure of energy. It is the energy gained by an electron accelerating through an electric field potential of one volt. And since energy and mass are equivalent, this miniscule measure of energy also makes for a useful miniscule measure of mass.
Terminus was great. Full of problems and overall kind of half baked, but still great. The enormous range of customization allowed in ship configuration took things to a whole new level.
I think that what this really shows is how stupid it is that this information is considered "private". Come on, birthdays? Dozens of people know my birthday, not counting the many government and private organizations who have the information in their databases. And a social security number is just nine digits that get assigned to you at birth, why should that be private?
Currently, society is essentially authenticating by username only. It's stupid, anybody who works with computers knows that it's stupid, but we persist. If we're going to authenticate people we need the equivalent of password authentication. Authenticating people based on some basic information that anyone can discover with a little work is just plain dumb.
Welcome to Slashdot, where if you can't be the absolute best at everything, you might as well not bother at all.
The one which talks about righteous people not remaining so when they're given power for a long period of time. Specifically:
Power corrupts.
Or more completely:
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
This may be more properly attributed to Lord Acton, but his version was slightly more wordy.
As far as I can tell your proposed quote has nothing to do with people turning bad after being given power.
You apparently failed to read the context. I was replying to this:
They recently refused to release computers to officials investigating kidnapping of a child. In that case it didn't have an impact, but in the next it, could. Is the life of someone worth YOUR presumed rights to surf anonymously on a public computer?
Which seems to imply that these rights shouldn't exist in "special" circumstances. I was not discussing the incident in the main article.
They've outright stated that this is what they want. They've taken no action which would indicate otherwise. Why not believe them?
A perfect illustration of my point!
What a spectacularly useless comparison to make.
There's no need to quote a movie. Churchill put it much more eloquently, not to mention shorter.
No, I just believe in liberty over safety.
Hard to argue with that!
People's perceptions of the NSA tend to be somewhat behind the times.
Used to be that this idea that they could crack all of your crypto was based somewhat in fact. Back when DES was being developed, the NSA had design input on it but people didn't really understand what their changes did. Decades later, a whole new field of cryptanalysis was discovered (differential cryptanalysis) and, lo and behold, turns out the changes that the NSA made to DES made it resistant to this technique, decades before anybody in academia knew it even existed.
Much later, SHA-0 was published by the NSA and then quickly withdrawn. SHA-1 was then published a bit later, with one minor change. No real explanation was given. Years later, an attack on SHA-0 was discovered which SHA-1 is resistant to.
Notice it went from decades to years. Although it's very tough to tell, indications are that the NSA is now just a few years ahead of the state of the art in academia. Back in the 70s they had a radical cryptanalysis technique that nobody else even knew existed, and which no doubt allowed them to crack all kinds of stuff. Today, it's extremely unlikely that they know about any fancy techniques that would work against modern ciphers well enough to actually come up with a practical break.
Those acres of supercomputers at the NSA aren't doing codebreaking against modern ciphers. They're breaking old ciphers, ones which largely have breaks known to the public, weak implementations of modern ciphers (Debian, I'm talking to you) and they're doing non-codebreaking tasks like traffic analysis, data mining, keyword scanning, etc.
If you use a good AES implementation to encrypt your communications to Mohammed in Afghanistan, it's a very safe bet that the NSA has no idea what you're saying. But it's also a good bet that they know you're talking to him, unless you've taken extreme care. But "they know" really means that it exists in their big database somewhere, to be called up if anyone ever ends up caring about you, not that your name goes in a personalized report to the director.
Is the life of someone worth YOUR presumed rights to surf anonymously on a public computer?
Well yes. That's kind of the whole point of having rights. You don't get to go around breaking them just because there's some kind of emergency.
If a situation came up where my family was in danger and a possible clue is in library computer that some ALA putz with a stick up their ass refused to release, I would hold them and the ALA personally responsible for any harm that occurred.
And that is precisely why we don't let people whose families are in danger make these kinds of decisions.
If there is reasonable use for such things as evidence or as part of an investigation, get a warrant. They're not hard to get, and they don't take long. The system is in place for a reason. You don't get to violate it just because you think the situation is special and the rules do not apply to you.
Why shouldn't the police have asked? It's standard police procedure to ask for things that they have no right to require. Police will ask to search your car during a traffic stop, or to look inside your house if they have some suspicion but not enough to justify a forced entry. The subject of the search is entirely within his rights to refuse, but many people don't, because they want to be helpful, or they don't know their rights, or whatever reason. The fact that people are overly kind or uneducated is not the police's problem.
Put it this way. If some guy on the street comes up to you and asks for $100, and you give it to him, do you blame the guy for asking? Maybe, if you're spineless and weak-willed, but otherwise no.
Sounds like corrupt police, to me.
If the threat is real and the police can be convinced to communicate it (which it sounds like they can), then I'd say the correct response is to get them to do it while on hidden camera, then distribute to the local media. Corruption should be fought, not submitted to.
By that logic, the director should never do anything without first checking with higher ups. In which case, he has no reason to even be there, the higher ups can do everything themselves.
There's something called delegation of authority. The president or board have powers, and they give these powers to someone more involved in day to day affairs. He was almost certainly acting within the powers delegated to him when he took this action.
They can ask anything they want. What they can't do is demand.
For example, this is legal: "Can I search your car?" If you say yes, and then they find the cocaine you had hidden under the seat, you have no grounds for complaint.
This, however, is illegal: "I have no evidence of wrongdoing, but let me search your car or I'll arrest you."
It is perfecly legal for the police to ask you something that would be illegal for them to demand without a warrant. It's also perfectly legal for you to refuse such a request. We don't need to make it illegal for the police to ask for things, we need to educate the populace as to their rights and the fact that they can stand up to the police.
Of all the nations in the world you might hope would be wary of pervasive monitoring, you'd think one that bills itself as a "jewish state" would be it.
Unfortunately the Israeli philosophy seems to be that it's not a problem as long as the right people are doing it. Which is true, it just ignores the fact that the right people never stick around forever.
People confuse effects with motivation.
For example, terrorists couldn't possibly care less about our freedoms. Their goal is not to destroy the 4th amendment or whatever else. That's just a side effect. Their goal (speaking of the standard Islamic terrorist here) is to get Western troops out of the Arab countries.
In this case, spammers just want to make money. But as a side effect to this, they end up destroying the utility of e-mail. So people start thinking that destroying the utility of e-mail is actually their goal, when it couldn't be further from the truth.