Jesus. Sorry for you. I actually had not just permission but a contract that this would be my independent senior project. Then, one day, out of the blue for no reason given they kicked me out of the only lab capable (in those days) of processing video. The lab was "private" (they said) and if one of the PIs didn't want you there, they agreed the person was out. I never met or interacted with the PI who I was told didn't want me there. No reason was given. Nice huh? "Private" entities (a couple guys) using public money and rooms and equipment and rescinding access to people they've never met. It didn't make any sense but I am uh, make that was nothing if not a go along to get along kind of guy. Was. Was. Of course, it was all a lie, as I found out later.
At that same time they did some really despicable things which were very very highly illegal. Highly illegal, never mind bendy stretchy rules. If anyone ever tells you, or you naturally think as I did, that you aren't and couldn't be worth any individual sustained and negative and even criminal attention of a large entity because hey, you're nobody in the large scheme of things and comparatively unremarkable at any rate, you may want to consider that not everyone shares your opinion of yourself if they see you as a threat to their established revenue stream. Apparently also there are people sitting around waiting to justify their substantive paychecks who have nothing better to do than spend some quality time fucking over your life, You just never know when you've stepped on an highly sensitive, if hidden, organizational nerve .
Suffice it to say that whatever happened, I had no idea it was happening or why and I found out later only because a prof who was then only loosely associated with the school was SO disgusted with it told me in some detail. In the moment I was so stunned I couldn't even think to ask the really important questions, it seemed surreal and I wasn't sure he wasn't making it up. Only much later when the moment was gone did I think of the important questions I wanted answers to.
Believe me they've been systematically fighting this for 15 years, not less. Higher education isn't a just a bubble, it's a criminal organization intent on sustaining itself in its present form no matter what and intensely worried about it's position. There are seriously scary and completely amoral people serving as public employees in these large universities just like the ones you'd expect to find in the worst-of-the-worst corporations. We're talking The Firm style just lawlessness. No kidding. Where do you think these authors get their stuff from in the first place? An aside, sort of- the writers for Damages, it seems, based their lead character Patty Hewes on a real life attorney whose name is *just barely* different from the imaginary character and whose firm was *really* investigated by the Feds where the charges involved over 30 (!) years of corruption, kickbacks, bribery, witness tampering ob.of j., perjury and a host of other things and THOSE are the things they could prove sufficiently to b=work into the plea deal, with much worse things still strongly suspected but unproven. This is a real world highly respected law firm we're talking about with partners pleading guilty to horrendous things. This is the world of big money big egos and big institutions and you're in it whether you meant to be - or want to be- or not. Take it seriously, because they're going to take you seriously.
I think i know what's going on with your post.. The prison part and rotation and all that.
It's OK to be gay. Hear me? We're not going to hate you for it. Some of my best friends are gay. It' s ok to be gay. Just come out of that closet and you'll stop projecting your rabid hatred of Real Men who have Done Things That Matter in The World and you're afraid make you look girly by comparison. No one cares that you're girly. It's OK to be girly. Just, come on, come out of the closet. You'll feel better about everything. We'll all be better off.
It does make me feel better, but- and here I am being extremely personal and not at all objective- those are MY ideas MY insight . When I saw Khan academy I just thought *what took you so long* but also *is that it? *
There's so so so much more that could be done. I am doing it. Maybe someone will get there before me but given that I've left school, had a full career, and finally turned back on what is STILL a blank space for whatever reason I think I just have to do this because surprisingly things obvious to me aren't obvious to everyone.
I get what edX doesn't. I understand where the defensible part of this business model is, and defensible by force of nature and not by fiat , and I take up my position there.
And not because I originally had that as an insight- I just knew what it was like to be an engaged learner and what the blocking issues were- but because being forcibly excluded from this whole thing, from the fun parts, I was forced back on the most basic parts of it. If someone tries this, how do they eat? How can I create actual value? What is value, exactly, precisely, abstracted away from all specifics and high minded economic ideas, what is value?
Once we've found that, what does a system of value creation built around it necessarily look like? What is it we do when we educate and how can that be served in a bare bones way that is hardened and unassailable from people with a lot of money and political clout, with the power to make laws and declare things illegal and declare things mandatory?
How can education *go out of control* so that there's no getting it back under control no matter who tries with what means?
I spent a lot of unhurried, unpressured, truth-only- please, time reading widely and getting my head around these answers since I left uni. My natural forte, my special thing is understanding what it's like to be a not-knower, to have to move molecules to learn. My personal contribution will be two fold . One part is the creation of tools that are spectacularly isomorphic to a student's actual needs, to what it's like to be a frog, as it were.
The other is a cockroach attack on the higher education model for *many* things - enough to starve the beast of customers and cash and finally bring it down. That is if it hasn't already imploded , with much hand wringing and NY Times ink being spilled you imagine.
I consider myself more or less unstoppable at this point. I grasp of unbiased reality. I have the skills to make it happen. I have the truth and I have nothing to lose. I don't care about higher education, or what happens to it or all the fine people employed by it That's a sea change for me.
In the long term I think the whole thing is going just where history is going to take it, no matter who stands in the way. It's not just fiat, historical accident and tradition driving things anymore. *It's* *all* *over* I don't know why it took ten years after the internet was full on for Khan's Academy to happen. Is at least this little bit, this smallest part not 100% obvious? I think part of the reason is the same reason I had my cord pulled at uni - anyone who could do it or is likely to do it is also strongly motivated not to do it or even see it happen. It's just no-go territory in their minds, in their imaginations. Out of the corner of their eye they get a little glimpse, and shudder.
I follow all this shit. They're trying to recreate what they have in a different form. This is Harvard and Stanford trying to preserve Harvard and Stanford as they are, nothing more. It doesn't work. They're going to burn through a bunch of money and in the end be left with nothing remarkable. They're fucking fucked, and I'm glad of it.
I know I am a troll when I show up to these stories and type as fast and as angrily as possible into these little unforgiving textboxes and gloat and sneer and mock. I know I am my smallest self. That's just what internet forums and ID s are for sometimes. Still, in all seriousness, if no one beats
What's the difference? There is no difference. Someone revealed that crimes were being committed by the government. At great personal and professional cost. That person is a hero. This is as stupid simple as morality gets.
It's nothing more than the path of least resistance and highest convenience for researchers who are forced to show up at least a few times a year but whose interests are just elsewhere. That's why it is the way it is.
Trying going to university and changing the way they do things, putting courses online or REALLY being innovative about how people learn and interact.
I did in 1999. They took me apart- kicked me out of labs, literally hounded me out of school. My sin? I wanted to pout all my major's courses online so that profs wouldn't have to teach them over and over again and people could spend classrom time asking custom questions, which themselves would be recorded for posterity. And that was just the start.
I now realized the more i enthusiastically revealed plans for this independent study, the more the prof I was doing it with was determined to see me thrown out of first the lab with the computers and then school, something they did with much skullduggery and practical violence to might be referred to as the "social contract " assumed to exist between universities and their students.
They don't want any of this to happen in the worst way. They'll break the law to see it not happen. I am sure they'd kill to see it not happen if they thought they could get away with it. Maybe they have, who really knows? We're talking about a trillion dollar industry here that employs tens of millions of people and is well connected throughout the highest levels of society and the national security apparatus. Who knows how far they'd go if they feel mortally threatened, I can give you a baseline as to what they'd do and it's not pretty.....
The important thing is it's going to happen anyway. The university as we know it- everyone go away someplace at great expense for 6 years- is going to go away and there's nothing they can do to stop it, channel it, make it work for them or any other such thing. You can fuck with individual lives, especially when those individuals have no real power and you're basically an egomaninical, sociopathic steroidial monster . But that's not the last word in history is it now? No it's not. Not by a long shot.
but privacy is the culprit here. The NSA can go rogue because they have way too much privacy of a certain type, the "it never happened" type privacy, not the "no one knows what we are now talking about " privacy.
They can plan and plot in a dark so dark no one can ever know what was said. That has to go. Every single they do, speak, write , everywhere they go, every access to every computer system anyone there ever avails themselves of has to be memorialized into an incorruptible audit trail which can "replayed" and otherwise analyzed by investigative authorities given the proper authorization to do so.
To start with the premise that "we don't need this surveillance" is to concede the argument before it's even begun.
You can't win an argument starting with a false picture of reality. We DO need this level of surveillance. We DO need these systems and we will need them even more going forward. That is a highly unpleasant fact about reality. We need new thinking here.
So how do we stop an agency with that much assymetrical information from leveraging it into domestic political or global economic power and thus consuming on the one had our democracy and on the other our legitimacy as a world power?
The answer is to make it impossible to abuse the system AND ALSO get away with it, both.
The people in charge there now need to be moved out. People like Binney and Drake and Snowden - all true patriots- who KNOW how this technology can and is abused need to be put into positions of power. The old guard would never ever permit that , even to the point of staging a coup d'tat . Obama needs his own, legitimate, Sunday Night Massacre (Nixon 1973) there and he needs to move all at once and very suddenly with a clear vision of how that agency is going to be going forward.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need the NSA and what it does. We need more of the same from the NSA in fact. But we need the contingency of ironclad transparency into the organization also.
If you take the long view, it was predictable even obvious that the individuals who "came of age" in the NSA during the digital revolution would attempt to leverage their newly invented and secret powers into an position of untouchability and engage in lawlessness. These guys have a god complex the size of a mountain, and they can have and will continue to demonize, including in their own minds, anyone who opposes their personal vision of what their careers and lives are all about, what their mission is and the best way to achieve that mission.
No point in picking their psychology apart, the point is they need to be relieved of duty and also we need to implement totalitarian-level of accounting within the organization that any lawbreaker will fear, even as we continue to spy as we have been, pushing the technological limits of what can be uncovered on our very real enemies.
Right. The fact that they used the power of the state, specifically the justice dept. to go after people who had done nothing wrong is proof that they control that state power. This is the problem with secret access to secret information. Everything they have everything they do every conversation they have every access by everyone to every system at any time should be memorialized and subject to meaningful audit by truly independent citizens. It's the only way for us to both collect the information we need to protect ourselves and prevent the kind of abuse they meted out to Binney and Drake, which was the whole reason they produced a Snowden in the first place.
Facebook and other social media highly deceptive and manipulative personal information brokers who have no moral code other purpose other than their own bottom elicit, compile, memorialize and sell excruciatingly detailed and ruinous personal information dossiers to the highest bidder including but not limited to all your future employers !
There is nothing to what you say. HE clearly was talking about the same programs Snowden has leaked.
Anyway, having spent some small time studying in the general area yo're talking about, brainwaves etc there's really no chance of this yet, Like, none. It might come to pass but that is even farther off than threats from nanotechnology.
Sure' they'd love to effectively read minds, even more so from a undetectable and vantage point with a wide view of subjects, as space based satellites would afford. But there's just no way. The signals are way way too weak. No one even knows if specific thoughts correlate to specific detectable electrical activity. No one can even particularly correlate any brain activity with "a thought" which is itself a very slippery eel, even though you think your thoughts are things with clear boundaries and specific content.
There's so many thing wrong with the idea that you can read thoughts at all. Maybe a general state of agitation or anger maybe from small distance maybe. But controlling people's minds and thoughts and knowing what they're thinking ala MKULTRA forget it; Really. Just forget it. They can't do it, they're not going to be doing it in our lifetimes, the barrier to doing is simply mountains of basic science which yet to be done or even conceived of.
Just in case you're really worrying about this or worse actually conducting your actions in the real world based on some idea that this is true, know that really, it's just not. Whatever else you have to worry about, both known and unknown to you, you absolutely don't have to worry about this.
This just means that their assurances that the data won't be abused because it's under some form of protected access with an audit trail are false. Obviously.
This is predictable. Once secret information with secret dossiers exists, they will be abused because no one knows it exists in the first place; of course no one can get caught abusing a system that doesn't exist, or at least it's unlikely that anyone will get caught.
There needs to be some kind of radical transparency whereby everything everywhere is recorded but it's impossible to abuse and not be caught having abused it.
We need this information to be collected like it or not, but the way it's being done now is provably inept and open to abuse in a million ways. This is because the whole system \is a product of a group of people who are not visionaries, as of course most of us aren't, imbued with an oppositional mindset towards not just terrorists but to any type of transparency at all by anyone .
What needed is something strongly counter intuitive. A repository of secret information, means, methods and procedures which nevertheless yield to an on demand , arbitrarily scoped, irrefutable correct and transparent accounting chain of who did or accessed what when where under whose authority for any given action taken.
1) I am willing to accept 8,000 murdered through conventional means people and still not have any kind of surveillance . That's 1/5 of the number of people who die in auto accidents per anum. After that, perhaps some stepped up surveillance might be warranted, depending on it's exact nature. This is my personal tolerance and it's approximate.
All above is saying is that *ordinary* means of killing people are relatively ineffective and don't actually pose a threat to our way of life. Extra-ordinary means are entirely another matter. These means will become available to smaller and smaller groups of people over time. Listening to you accuse me of plundering sci fi to produce imaginary threats is amusing, especially on a technology forum, especially given the past 30- years of technological progress, a thing, it is best to remember whose rapidity builds on itself.
Extraordinary means are coming to a well funded band of sociopaths / religious headcases near you within your life time. It's the scenario that is driving all thinking about security. No one really knows what to do about it.
2) your just enunciating the classic perspective of American isolationists. Thanks to them we got into WWII almost too late to do anything. Isolationism was rejected as a foreign policy option thereafter. Thus Vietnam which our involvement in which was a failure of intelligence and leadership but not a vindication of isolationism.
As far as Afghanistan goes, we did nothing to the Talban. We helped them drive the Soviets out then, against a lot of people's better judgement left them alone, as you prescribe, to run their country as they saw fit. The rest is history. Their thank you, America came on 9-11. Charlie Wilson's War implies heavily that it was John McCain who advocated for America just walking away from Afghanistan after the Soviets were driven out.Other people wanted to stay and "nation build" McCain (or whoever) won. The fact is they told us why they attacked us- bin Laden wanted to establish a world wide caliphate. It actually started in Egypt with the assassination of Sadat in a bid to establish an Islamic regime there. bin Laden wanted the US out of S. A. because HE wanted to be it's "protector" and once so established (openly) planned to overthrow the Saudi regime and establish a Taliban -like regime implementing Sharia Law. It's not even a secret, he talked openly about his desire to do that.
The reason they attacked us is because we ran interference on his plan. If you want to know what we would have had to have done to stop him, he told us. We would have to live under Sharia Law. This is not a conservative fantasy , although they have taken to some hallucinatory position that such a threat is coming from within the US, but I think we can agree that the right is basically insane in this country right now and leave it at that.
We are in total agreement that one sided pan-surveillance poses a more than hypothetical threat to democracy , in fact, it's a virtual certainty over time, as I understand history at least, that it will subvert democracy. Given the same technological forces which make doomsday scenarios emanating from small bands of religio-sociopathic groups, the ensuing totalitarian regime would be nigh well impossible to overthrow. Something like a miniature version of this is being acted out in North Korea as we speak. THAT is the way it goes with a totalitarian state empowered by technology.
The most distressing part of your post is this:
"Second, doomsday microbes/viruses? Really? Anyone anywhere could just start doing this? Today? Are you fucking with me? "
This is on par with Bill Gates' famous quote about no one needing more than a ^$) kilobytes of memory. I could replicate such quotes ad nauseum in every age for every technology and worse, by the many of the people who ostensibly understand that technology the best. that technology.
The poster underneath your post has it right. The coming threats will happen so fast, we won't have prepare
Get real. How else is this national conversation supposed to proceed ? OK so he got petulant- that is if we accept the editors editorializing on the facts- but so what? So the fuck what? This THIS is the back and forth we are desperately looking for and which we desperately, desperately need. Here it is. The director of the NSA openly soliciting for alternative ways to be effective and what does he get? A pile on of cynical snarky comments.
What does that say? It says you have no idea how to help him do his job. You've got the inflammatory rhetoric and taking offense bases well covered but when it comes down to someone actually doing what you claim you want - solicit the public for input- *tap tap* you're found to be a little thin.
Imagine his job. Anyone anywhere including malcontents in this nation (the US) could start putting together a doomsday microbe or nanobot or virus or whatever and anyone claiming that those things are possibilities either literally have no idea what they're talking about or have no grasp of the velocity of technology.
All of human civilization has a problem that's completely sui generis to our times in both magnitude and difficulty. It's that the ascending vector of technological capability and the descending vector representing the number of people it takes to wield that technology in completely arbitrary ways are whizzing past each other with frightening magnitude.
What are we going to do when all it takes to effect millions of billions of people is five or six like minded people? When the normal instinct for self preservation is absent in those five or six people? What happens when that describes the world ? How do we defend ourselves against that?
The world , if humans and mammals generally are going to continue to exist on it, is going to have to radically reorg itself with respect to the Big Issues of security, privacy and liberty. Going forward as we always have is a prescription for self-annihilation.
You may *think* the NSA is doing what it's doing because it's power mad and seeking fascist control over everyone - and that actually IS a danger , is just as Snowden termed it- "turnkey fascism" but in fact we have no evidence that they've involved themselves in running interference in the mundane affairs of making money and political freedoms excepting where they thought it intersected in national security , i.e. Wikileaks - an affair in which I think they took a very wrong turn BTW.
No the reality is that whatever very real and very dangerous potential for turnkey fascism is implicit in the uber-surveillance they've implemented, it hasn't been realized and that's not their intention. Their intention is to keep very very very bad things from happening.
So now you have the director of the NSA openly asking for assistance- whatever his tone (which you can imagine is rightly or wrongly likely semi-sarcastic just as your tone would be if some amateurs one day presumed to start telling you how to do your very complicated job) and what ideas do you have that aren't a form of pure rhetoric and which directly address the near-future calamity of Shiva-style power being accessible to any small group of lunatics.
What we consider our privacy is its present form is not going to survive this century. That's a fact. Either we have some king of incredible transparency on demand for everyone everywhere including the government or we take seriously the notion that we need to change what human beings are and what they're inclined to.
Neither of those really leaves much room for your freedom and liberty and self-determination and privacy as you understand them today.
People in the Middle Ages never would have accepted modernity if through some miracle it were thrust upon them suddenly and en toto. They would have gladly died fighting against it. We moderns feel differently about things because we have a concept of our selves and our freedoms and responsibilities . What we have to realize is that w
The perspective given on this story is crazy. People cannot operate as dependable one-person defacto mints. The "tamper-proof " claim is worthless . People exchange cash for the claimed value of the coins. They do not have that value. This isn't baseball cards where you want the thing for its intrinsic value. It's more like a car , where you want the thing to safely transport you from point A to point B or stock certificates or things whose value is instrumental. It has to actually have the advertised value.
Let them eat the consequences of their choices. If only we coudl arrange for THAT to happen, this argument and the one about global warming and vaccinations and stem cell research and evolution would be over within one generation.
First, this is obviously a disinformation / smear campaign.
More importantly this scenario is one of the truly terrifying scenarios involving a super-power entity with unlimited control over the web. Such an entity could, at will, create guilt on the part of anyone merely through creating false access and activity logs and creating then smuggling in electronic "evidence' that they later "discover".
This level of control and aggression against citizens who are clearly not terrorists is part of the slippery slope to world-wide fascism that the NSA refuses to acknowledge they've created or, if they have, the nation would ever slide down. Yet in all likelihood, here we are; evidence creation and planting against anyone who resists the will of a government.
I personally would not have done what Manning did, oh OK maybe if I was 21 I might have , but in all events Assange is not the person who did it.
When he received the information he tried - repeatedly and with great risk to himself- to vet the documents WITH the governments involved. Their attitude was- "fuck you, we don't have to deal with you. Publish them and face prosecution" .
This kind of attack is something every single Large Enitity Displeaser could be subject to and, yes, that includes you dear reader.
Remember why Assange is holed up in the embassy in the first place- it's ostensibly NOT because of Wikileaks . A woman with whom he had had sex with the night before has accused him of sticking it in a second time in the morning without permission. The charge is rape.
You can imagine that such a case might be seen by some as weak.
You can also imagine that the people who want to throw him into a black hole forever whilst reporting to the public about the tragic airplane accident he was killed in whilst being flown over Poland would prefer to have something stronger to charge him with.
Not to mention framing him with respect to one the nations which might actually give him asylum has to have a devastating psychological effect on him in the short term, even if Iceland eventually sees through the ruse.
That is, if the deciders in Iceland haven't themselves all been compromised through similar means and this story is the cover they requested from the Large Entity as reason to public announce that they will not be granting asylum, but in fact quite the opposite.
Don't kid yourself, this is espionage 101, the simplest stuff on the shelves any first year can handle. This the real doings which have as their product the headlines you consume .
As we've learned from recent events, in this world to ensure greatest accuracy, it's best to let your imagination rip as best you are able,. That way, you have some chance of approximating what 's really going on.
Yeah but if scientists don't stem this, then who's going to? Science is as scientists do to a large degree; they're the talent without which there is no science. They're MORE than mere employees and their commitment has to be something greater than "keeping your job" . At some point, they need to take raise collective consciousness and take responsibility for the forces that are effecting their lives and the process of doing science.
Ads aren't there for you to click on, they're there to "raise awareness" of their product. If and when you ever decide that yo're interested in that "kind" of thing they sell, their name is already in your mind. I never drink Mountain Dew. But I know about it and if I ever was motivated to start drinking soda (why??!!!) , it's one of the one's I'd have a mind to try. That's advertising.
Another alternative is word of mouth which works for some things some times. Another alternative is *no one knows your product exists*. The fear of THAT is what keeps companies advertising budgets full.
You already know this. If you're a single gal, then you know you dress to impress. To be seen. To stand out in some good way or at least not the opposite. Similarly men display their status and wealth. You have to be known to exist for good things (money, love) to come to you.
Sorry I don't have the links, but I recall reading studies which showed that far and away the kids most despised by both their peers and teachers alike in high school are the ones that are very high in intelligence and very high in creativity, both.
You can be very creative and people will tolerate you (you're artsy, alternative weird whatever..or very intelligent - you're serious or the class president or a nerd - but not both.
I want to see my profile. I want to know who they think I am (my real identity) and how they characterize me and what information they have. How can I do this? If it's for sale, can I buy it?
This guy is a personal hero of mine. He's one of those people "out there" you hope somehow never dies but just is always there, like a star.
For people interested in giving your kids an experience which will ground them as rational, free thinking individuals he runs a summer camp which teaches self reliance, and a respect for science and facts.
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Jesus. Sorry for you. I actually had not just permission but a contract that this would be my independent senior project. Then, one day, out of the blue for no reason given they kicked me out of the only lab capable (in those days) of processing video. The lab was "private" (they said) and if one of the PIs didn't want you there, they agreed the person was out. I never met or interacted with the PI who I was told didn't want me there. No reason was given. Nice huh? "Private" entities (a couple guys) using public money and rooms and equipment and rescinding access to people they've never met. It didn't make any sense but I am uh, make that was nothing if not a go along to get along kind of guy. Was. Was. Of course, it was all a lie, as I found out later.
At that same time they did some really despicable things which were very very highly illegal. Highly illegal, never mind bendy stretchy rules. If anyone ever tells you, or you naturally think as I did, that you aren't and couldn't be worth any individual sustained and negative and even criminal attention of a large entity because hey, you're nobody in the large scheme of things and comparatively unremarkable at any rate, you may want to consider that not everyone shares your opinion of yourself if they see you as a threat to their established revenue stream. Apparently also there are people sitting around waiting to justify their substantive paychecks who have nothing better to do than spend some quality time fucking over your life, You just never know when you've stepped on an highly sensitive, if hidden, organizational nerve .
Suffice it to say that whatever happened, I had no idea it was happening or why and I found out later only because a prof who was then only loosely associated with the school was SO disgusted with it told me in some detail. In the moment I was so stunned I couldn't even think to ask the really important questions, it seemed surreal and I wasn't sure he wasn't making it up. Only much later when the moment was gone did I think of the important questions I wanted answers to.
Believe me they've been systematically fighting this for 15 years, not less. Higher education isn't a just a bubble, it's a criminal organization intent on sustaining itself in its present form no matter what and intensely worried about it's position. There are seriously scary and completely amoral people serving as public employees in these large universities just like the ones you'd expect to find in the worst-of-the-worst corporations. We're talking The Firm style just lawlessness. No kidding. Where do you think these authors get their stuff from in the first place? An aside, sort of- the writers for Damages, it seems, based their lead character Patty Hewes on a real life attorney whose name is *just barely* different from the imaginary character and whose firm was *really* investigated by the Feds where the charges involved over 30 (!) years of corruption, kickbacks, bribery, witness tampering ob.of j., perjury and a host of other things and THOSE are the things they could prove sufficiently to b=work into the plea deal, with much worse things still strongly suspected but unproven. This is a real world highly respected law firm we're talking about with partners pleading guilty to horrendous things. This is the world of big money big egos and big institutions and you're in it whether you meant to be - or want to be- or not. Take it seriously, because they're going to take you seriously.
I think i know what's going on with your post.. The prison part and rotation and all that.
It's OK to be gay. Hear me? We're not going to hate you for it. Some of my best friends are gay. It' s ok to be gay. Just come out of that closet and you'll stop projecting your rabid hatred of Real Men who have Done Things That Matter in The World and you're afraid make you look girly by comparison. No one cares that you're girly. It's OK to be girly. Just, come on, come out of the closet. You'll feel better about everything. We'll all be better off.
It does make me feel better, but- and here I am being extremely personal and not at all objective- those are MY ideas MY insight . When I saw Khan academy I just thought *what took you so long* but also *is that it? *
There's so so so much more that could be done. I am doing it. Maybe someone will get there before me but given that I've left school, had a full career, and finally turned back on what is STILL a blank space for whatever reason I think I just have to do this because surprisingly things obvious to me aren't obvious to everyone.
I get what edX doesn't. I understand where the defensible part of this business model is, and defensible by force of nature and not by fiat , and I take up my position there.
And not because I originally had that as an insight- I just knew what it was like to be an engaged learner and what the blocking issues were- but because being forcibly excluded from this whole thing, from the fun parts, I was forced back on the most basic parts of it. If someone tries this, how do they eat? How can I create actual value? What is value, exactly, precisely, abstracted away from all specifics and high minded economic ideas, what is value?
Once we've found that, what does a system of value creation built around it necessarily look like? What is it we do when we educate and how can that be served in a bare bones way that is hardened and unassailable from people with a lot of money and political clout, with the power to make laws and declare things illegal and declare things mandatory?
How can education *go out of control* so that there's no getting it back under control no matter who tries with what means?
I spent a lot of unhurried, unpressured, truth-only- please, time reading widely and getting my head around these answers since I left uni. My natural forte, my special thing is understanding what it's like to be a not-knower, to have to move molecules to learn. My personal contribution will be two fold . One part is the creation of tools that are spectacularly isomorphic to a student's actual needs, to what it's like to be a frog, as it were.
The other is a cockroach attack on the higher education model for *many* things - enough to starve the beast of customers and cash and finally bring it down. That is if it hasn't already imploded , with much hand wringing and NY Times ink being spilled you imagine .
I consider myself more or less unstoppable at this point. I grasp of unbiased reality. I have the skills to make it happen. I have the truth and I have nothing to lose. I don't care about higher education, or what happens to it or all the fine people employed by it That's a sea change for me.
In the long term I think the whole thing is going just where history is going to take it, no matter who stands in the way. It's not just fiat, historical accident and tradition driving things anymore. *It's* *all* *over* I don't know why it took ten years after the internet was full on for Khan's Academy to happen. Is at least this little bit, this smallest part not 100% obvious? I think part of the reason is the same reason I had my cord pulled at uni - anyone who could do it or is likely to do it is also strongly motivated not to do it or even see it happen. It's just no-go territory in their minds, in their imaginations. Out of the corner of their eye they get a little glimpse, and shudder.
I follow all this shit. They're trying to recreate what they have in a different form. This is Harvard and Stanford trying to preserve Harvard and Stanford as they are, nothing more. It doesn't work. They're going to burn through a bunch of money and in the end be left with nothing remarkable. They're fucking fucked, and I'm glad of it.
I know I am a troll when I show up to these stories and type as fast and as angrily as possible into these little unforgiving textboxes and gloat and sneer and mock. I know I am my smallest self. That's just what internet forums and ID s are for sometimes. Still, in all seriousness, if no one beats
What's the difference? There is no difference. Someone revealed that crimes were being committed by the government. At great personal and professional cost. That person is a hero. This is as stupid simple as morality gets.
Investors demand that edX vacate the higher educational "market" and focus exclusively on corporate training in five... four... three... two....
As far as anyone can tell, edX is surviving on investment money
It's called "VC fumes".
Classroom learning == "sage on the stage".
It's nothing more than the path of least resistance and highest convenience for researchers who are forced to show up at least a few times a year but whose interests are just elsewhere. That's why it is the way it is.
Trying going to university and changing the way they do things, putting courses online or REALLY being innovative about how people learn and interact.
I did in 1999. They took me apart- kicked me out of labs, literally hounded me out of school. My sin? I wanted to pout all my major's courses online so that profs wouldn't have to teach them over and over again and people could spend classrom time asking custom questions, which themselves would be recorded for posterity. And that was just the start.
I now realized the more i enthusiastically revealed plans for this independent study, the more the prof I was doing it with was determined to see me thrown out of first the lab with the computers and then school, something they did with much skullduggery and practical violence to might be referred to as the "social contract " assumed to exist between universities and their students.
They don't want any of this to happen in the worst way. They'll break the law to see it not happen. I am sure they'd kill to see it not happen if they thought they could get away with it. Maybe they have, who really knows? We're talking about a trillion dollar industry here that employs tens of millions of people and is well connected throughout the highest levels of society and the national security apparatus. Who knows how far they'd go if they feel mortally threatened, I can give you a baseline as to what they'd do and it's not pretty. ....
The important thing is it's going to happen anyway. The university as we know it- everyone go away someplace at great expense for 6 years- is going to go away and there's nothing they can do to stop it, channel it, make it work for them or any other such thing. You can fuck with individual lives, especially when those individuals have no real power and you're basically an egomaninical, sociopathic steroidial monster . But that's not the last word in history is it now? No it's not. Not by a long shot.
but privacy is the culprit here. The NSA can go rogue because they have way too much privacy of a certain type, the "it never happened" type privacy, not the "no one knows what we are now talking about " privacy.
They can plan and plot in a dark so dark no one can ever know what was said. That has to go. Every single they do, speak, write , everywhere they go, every access to every computer system anyone there ever avails themselves of has to be memorialized into an incorruptible audit trail which can "replayed" and otherwise analyzed by investigative authorities given the proper authorization to do so.
To start with the premise that "we don't need this surveillance" is to concede the argument before it's even begun.
You can't win an argument starting with a false picture of reality. We DO need this level of surveillance. We DO need these systems and we will need them even more going forward. That is a highly unpleasant fact about reality. We need new thinking here.
So how do we stop an agency with that much assymetrical information from leveraging it into domestic political or global economic power and thus consuming on the one had our democracy and on the other our legitimacy as a world power?
The answer is to make it impossible to abuse the system AND ALSO get away with it, both.
The people in charge there now need to be moved out. People like Binney and Drake and Snowden - all true patriots- who KNOW how this technology can and is abused need to be put into positions of power. The old guard would never ever permit that , even to the point of staging a coup d'tat . Obama needs his own, legitimate, Sunday Night Massacre (Nixon 1973) there and he needs to move all at once and very suddenly with a clear vision of how that agency is going to be going forward.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need the NSA and what it does. We need more of the same from the NSA in fact. But we need the contingency of ironclad transparency into the organization also.
If you take the long view, it was predictable even obvious that the individuals who "came of age" in the NSA during the digital revolution would attempt to leverage their newly invented and secret powers into an position of untouchability and engage in lawlessness. These guys have a god complex the size of a mountain, and they can have and will continue to demonize, including in their own minds, anyone who opposes their personal vision of what their careers and lives are all about, what their mission is and the best way to achieve that mission.
No point in picking their psychology apart, the point is they need to be relieved of duty and also we need to implement totalitarian-level of accounting within the organization that any lawbreaker will fear, even as we continue to spy as we have been, pushing the technological limits of what can be uncovered on our very real enemies.
Right. The fact that they used the power of the state, specifically the justice dept. to go after people who had done nothing wrong is proof that they control that state power. This is the problem with secret access to secret information. Everything they have everything they do every conversation they have every access by everyone to every system at any time should be memorialized and subject to meaningful audit by truly independent citizens. It's the only way for us to both collect the information we need to protect ourselves and prevent the kind of abuse they meted out to Binney and Drake, which was the whole reason they produced a Snowden in the first place.
Facebook and other social media highly deceptive and manipulative personal information brokers who have no moral code other purpose other than their own bottom elicit, compile, memorialize and sell excruciatingly detailed and ruinous personal information dossiers to the highest bidder including but not limited to all your future employers !
Ha ha. Gotcha, sucker.
LOL "here" shoudl have been the wiki article under his name
You can read about Tice here.
There is nothing to what you say. HE clearly was talking about the same programs Snowden has leaked.
Anyway, having spent some small time studying in the general area yo're talking about, brainwaves etc there's really no chance of this yet, Like, none. It might come to pass but that is even farther off than threats from nanotechnology.
Sure' they'd love to effectively read minds, even more so from a undetectable and vantage point with a wide view of subjects, as space based satellites would afford. But there's just no way. The signals are way way too weak. No one even knows if specific thoughts correlate to specific detectable electrical activity. No one can even particularly correlate any brain activity with "a thought" which is itself a very slippery eel, even though you think your thoughts are things with clear boundaries and specific content.
There's so many thing wrong with the idea that you can read thoughts at all. Maybe a general state of agitation or anger maybe from small distance maybe. But controlling people's minds and thoughts and knowing what they're thinking ala MKULTRA forget it; Really. Just forget it. They can't do it, they're not going to be doing it in our lifetimes, the barrier to doing is simply mountains of basic science which yet to be done or even conceived of.
Just in case you're really worrying about this or worse actually conducting your actions in the real world based on some idea that this is true, know that really, it's just not. Whatever else you have to worry about, both known and unknown to you, you absolutely don't have to worry about this.
Peace.
This just means that their assurances that the data won't be abused because it's under some form of protected access with an audit trail are false. Obviously.
This is predictable. Once secret information with secret dossiers exists, they will be abused because no one knows it exists in the first place; of course no one can get caught abusing a system that doesn't exist, or at least it's unlikely that anyone will get caught.
There needs to be some kind of radical transparency whereby everything everywhere is recorded but it's impossible to abuse and not be caught having abused it.
We need this information to be collected like it or not, but the way it's being done now is provably inept and open to abuse in a million ways. This is because the whole system \is a product of a group of people who are not visionaries, as of course most of us aren't, imbued with an oppositional mindset towards not just terrorists but to any type of transparency at all by anyone .
What needed is something strongly counter intuitive. A repository of secret information, means, methods and procedures which nevertheless yield to an on demand , arbitrarily scoped, irrefutable correct and transparent accounting chain of who did or accessed what when where under whose authority for any given action taken.
1) I am willing to accept 8,000 murdered through conventional means people and still not have any kind of surveillance . That's 1/5 of the number of people who die in auto accidents per anum. After that, perhaps some stepped up surveillance might be warranted, depending on it's exact nature. This is my personal tolerance and it's approximate.
All above is saying is that *ordinary* means of killing people are relatively ineffective and don't actually pose a threat to our way of life. Extra-ordinary means are entirely another matter. These means will become available to smaller and smaller groups of people over time. Listening to you accuse me of plundering sci fi to produce imaginary threats is amusing, especially on a technology forum, especially given the past 30- years of technological progress, a thing, it is best to remember whose rapidity builds on itself .
Extraordinary means are coming to a well funded band of sociopaths / religious headcases near you within your life time. It's the scenario that is driving all thinking about security. No one really knows what to do about it.
2) your just enunciating the classic perspective of American isolationists. Thanks to them we got into WWII almost too late to do anything. Isolationism was rejected as a foreign policy option thereafter. Thus Vietnam which our involvement in which was a failure of intelligence and leadership but not a vindication of isolationism.
As far as Afghanistan goes, we did nothing to the Talban. We helped them drive the Soviets out then, against a lot of people's better judgement left them alone, as you prescribe, to run their country as they saw fit. The rest is history. Their thank you, America came on 9-11. Charlie Wilson's War implies heavily that it was John McCain who advocated for America just walking away from Afghanistan after the Soviets were driven out.Other people wanted to stay and "nation build" McCain (or whoever) won. The fact is they told us why they attacked us- bin Laden wanted to establish a world wide caliphate. It actually started in Egypt with the assassination of Sadat in a bid to establish an Islamic regime there. bin Laden wanted the US out of S. A. because HE wanted to be it's "protector" and once so established (openly) planned to overthrow the Saudi regime and establish a Taliban -like regime implementing Sharia Law. It's not even a secret, he talked openly about his desire to do that.
The reason they attacked us is because we ran interference on his plan. If you want to know what we would have had to have done to stop him, he told us. We would have to live under Sharia Law. This is not a conservative fantasy , although they have taken to some hallucinatory position that such a threat is coming from within the US, but I think we can agree that the right is basically insane in this country right now and leave it at that.
We are in total agreement that one sided pan-surveillance poses a more than hypothetical threat to democracy , in fact, it's a virtual certainty over time, as I understand history at least, that it will subvert democracy. Given the same technological forces which make doomsday scenarios emanating from small bands of religio-sociopathic groups, the ensuing totalitarian regime would be nigh well impossible to overthrow. Something like a miniature version of this is being acted out in North Korea as we speak. THAT is the way it goes with a totalitarian state empowered by technology.
The most distressing part of your post is this:
"Second, doomsday microbes/viruses? Really? Anyone anywhere could just start doing this? Today? Are you fucking with me? "
This is on par with Bill Gates' famous quote about no one needing more than a ^$) kilobytes of memory. I could replicate such quotes ad nauseum in every age for every technology and worse, by the many of the people who ostensibly understand that technology the best. that technology .
The poster underneath your post has it right. The coming threats will happen so fast, we won't have prepare
That should have been "kind.. KIND of incredible transparency"... and other typos should be read as expected semantics indicate.
Get real. How else is this national conversation supposed to proceed ? OK so he got petulant- that is if we accept the editors editorializing on the facts- but so what? So the fuck what? This THIS is the back and forth we are desperately looking for and which we desperately, desperately need. Here it is. The director of the NSA openly soliciting for alternative ways to be effective and what does he get? A pile on of cynical snarky comments.
What does that say? It says you have no idea how to help him do his job. You've got the inflammatory rhetoric and taking offense bases well covered but when it comes down to someone actually doing what you claim you want - solicit the public for input- *tap tap* you're found to be a little thin.
Imagine his job. Anyone anywhere including malcontents in this nation (the US) could start putting together a doomsday microbe or nanobot or virus or whatever and anyone claiming that those things are possibilities either literally have no idea what they're talking about or have no grasp of the velocity of technology.
All of human civilization has a problem that's completely sui generis to our times in both magnitude and difficulty. It's that the ascending vector of technological capability and the descending vector representing the number of people it takes to wield that technology in completely arbitrary ways are whizzing past each other with frightening magnitude.
What are we going to do when all it takes to effect millions of billions of people is five or six like minded people? When the normal instinct for self preservation is absent in those five or six people? What happens when that describes the world ? How do we defend ourselves against that?
The world , if humans and mammals generally are going to continue to exist on it, is going to have to radically reorg itself with respect to the Big Issues of security, privacy and liberty. Going forward as we always have is a prescription for self-annihilation.
You may *think* the NSA is doing what it's doing because it's power mad and seeking fascist control over everyone - and that actually IS a danger , is just as Snowden termed it- "turnkey fascism" but in fact we have no evidence that they've involved themselves in running interference in the mundane affairs of making money and political freedoms excepting where they thought it intersected in national security , i.e. Wikileaks - an affair in which I think they took a very wrong turn BTW.
No the reality is that whatever very real and very dangerous potential for turnkey fascism is implicit in the uber-surveillance they've implemented, it hasn't been realized and that's not their intention. Their intention is to keep very very very bad things from happening.
So now you have the director of the NSA openly asking for assistance- whatever his tone (which you can imagine is rightly or wrongly likely semi-sarcastic just as your tone would be if some amateurs one day presumed to start telling you how to do your very complicated job) and what ideas do you have that aren't a form of pure rhetoric and which directly address the near-future calamity of Shiva-style power being accessible to any small group of lunatics.
What we consider our privacy is its present form is not going to survive this century. That's a fact. Either we have some king of incredible transparency on demand for everyone everywhere including the government or we take seriously the notion that we need to change what human beings are and what they're inclined to.
Neither of those really leaves much room for your freedom and liberty and self-determination and privacy as you understand them today.
People in the Middle Ages never would have accepted modernity if through some miracle it were thrust upon them suddenly and en toto. They would have gladly died fighting against it. We moderns feel differently about things because we have a concept of our selves and our freedoms and responsibilities . What we have to realize is that w
The perspective given on this story is crazy. People cannot operate as dependable one-person defacto mints. The "tamper-proof " claim is worthless . People exchange cash for the claimed value of the coins. They do not have that value. This isn't baseball cards where you want the thing for its intrinsic value. It's more like a car , where you want the thing to safely transport you from point A to point B or stock certificates or things whose value is instrumental. It has to actually have the advertised value.
Let them eat the consequences of their choices. If only we coudl arrange for THAT to happen, this argument and the one about global warming and vaccinations and stem cell research and evolution would be over within one generation.
First, this is obviously a disinformation / smear campaign.
More importantly this scenario is one of the truly terrifying scenarios involving a super-power entity with unlimited control over the web. Such an entity could, at will, create guilt on the part of anyone merely through creating false access and activity logs and creating then smuggling in electronic "evidence' that they later "discover".
This level of control and aggression against citizens
who are clearly not terrorists is part of the slippery slope to world-wide fascism that the NSA refuses to acknowledge they've created or, if they have, the nation would ever slide down. Yet in all likelihood, here we are; evidence creation and planting against anyone who resists the will of a government.
I personally would not have done what Manning did, oh OK maybe if I was 21 I might have , but in all events Assange is not the person who did it.
When he received the information he tried - repeatedly and with great risk to himself- to vet the documents WITH the governments involved. Their attitude was- "fuck you, we don't have to deal with you. Publish them and face prosecution" .
This kind of attack is something every single Large Enitity Displeaser could be subject to and, yes, that includes you dear reader.
Remember why Assange is holed up in the embassy in the first place- it's ostensibly NOT because of Wikileaks . A woman with whom he had had sex with the night before has accused him of sticking it in a second time in the morning without permission. The charge is rape.
You can imagine that such a case might be seen by some as weak.
You can also imagine that the people who want to throw him into a black hole forever whilst reporting to the public about the tragic airplane accident he was killed in whilst being flown over Poland would prefer to have something stronger to charge him with.
Not to mention framing him with respect to one the nations which might actually give him asylum has to have a devastating psychological effect on him in the short term, even if Iceland eventually sees through the ruse.
That is, if the deciders in Iceland haven't themselves all been compromised through similar means and this story is the cover they requested from the Large Entity as reason to public announce that they will not be granting asylum, but in fact quite the opposite.
Don't kid yourself, this is espionage 101, the simplest stuff on the shelves any first year can handle. This the real doings which have as their product the headlines you consume .
As we've learned from recent events, in this world to ensure greatest accuracy, it's best to let your imagination rip as best you are able,. That way, you have some chance of approximating what 's really going on.
Yeah but if scientists don't stem this, then who's going to? Science is as scientists do to a large degree; they're the talent without which there is no science. They're MORE than mere employees and their commitment has to be something greater than "keeping your job" . At some point, they need to take raise collective consciousness and take responsibility for the forces that are effecting their lives and the process of doing science.
Ads aren't there for you to click on, they're there to "raise awareness" of their product. If and when you ever decide that yo're interested in that "kind" of thing they sell, their name is already in your mind. I never drink Mountain Dew. But I know about it and if I ever was motivated to start drinking soda (why??!!!) , it's one of the one's I'd have a mind to try. That's advertising.
Another alternative is word of mouth which works for some things some times. Another alternative is *no one knows your product exists*. The fear of THAT is what keeps companies advertising budgets full.
You already know this. If you're a single gal, then you know you dress to impress. To be seen. To stand out in some good way or at least not the opposite. Similarly men display their status and wealth. You have to be known to exist for good things (money, love) to come to you.
Sorry I don't have the links, but I recall reading studies which showed that far and away the kids most despised by both their peers and teachers alike in high school are the ones that are very high in intelligence and very high in creativity, both.
You can be very creative and people will tolerate you (you're artsy, alternative weird whatever..or very intelligent - you're serious or the class president or a nerd - but not both.
I want to see my profile. I want to know who they think I am (my real identity) and how they characterize me and what information they have. How can I do this? If it's for sale, can I buy it?
This guy is a personal hero of mine. He's one of those people "out there" you hope somehow never dies but just is always there, like a star.
For people interested in giving your kids an experience which will ground them as rational, free thinking individuals he runs a summer camp which teaches self reliance, and a respect for science and facts.
http://www.richarddawkins.net/news_articles/next_article?article=5214&category=&videos=
The main reasons for pulling the change logs was the fear of putting the software in a bad light ...
A lawyer got to them and told them they were exposing themselves to liability. Simple.