Not documenting is a more or less conscious technique developers and projects use to increase their market value. In those projects where the business model is consulting , you better believe that unless it's a public API , it's got zero documentation.
I know this is true. If software developers wanted to , they could write a nice book about how their source code works (as opposed to how their program works or how to write a plugin for their program).
They don't. This is not merely a case of being rushed for time or whatever. They don't want anyone else to understand it really. You control what only you understand- every developer knows this intuitively. Going to great pains to write a book-style learning aid to your actual code so that *just anyone* could take your place.. well... do I really need to finish that sentence?
Devs (don't) do it to so they can get some job security. Companies (don't ) do it to get consulting gigs. No one will admit that this is what's going on, but it is. I can hear the rebuttals already.. I can see the down-modding about to happen... go ahead.. flamebait me down... knock yourself out.
The closet analogy I can think of is magicians guarding their secrets. That worked very well for a long long time. The incentive was the same. If you give this away, if you make it understandable, you're going to be out of work. Slightly different dynamic, but you get the idea.
This is one of the product spaces we want to move into, but as you might imagine we have come to the conclusion that we have to move carefully, and even obliquely.
This is not exclusive to software engineering either. I know for a fact - which means i have multiple, full confessions, that mathematics teachers are far less clear than they could be wit their students. Some have said they do it to winnow out the weak. Others have admitted they do it to classes to students they don't like. They know it makes a huge difference, how you explain something- and that no one can accuse them of anything. That's basically a kind of power or force you can wield against and for people who please you or displease you.
It's not true. American citizens can't just be taken off the street and detained without probably cause or charges, although Gonzales and Cheney and Bush and Addington and Yoo *tried* to establish that as law. They failed. Outcomes when the system works has to mean something too.
What the US does to other people in other countries is another matter, ranging from droning people we can't otherwise reach to the Gitmo.
As far as GITMO goes, what we have going on there are people , only some of whom WERE dangerous when we picked them up but many of whom ARE NOW dangerous (uh..duh.) and therefore are being detained. It's truly Kafakaesque but then that's what fascists like the above listed names inevitably create in their wake.
As an American citizen, the government is not going to disappear you (anymore) without charges. Your point is not moot however because for a while , they DID do that and would HAVE continued to do that if the the ACLU et al. had not filed suit and the courts had not intervened.
As far as other governments go, I don't know which ones think it's their privilege to disappear people, whether it's their own or another nation's citizen.
"Many federal departments and offices Energy and NASA to name just two, have become defacto contract management agencies devoting upwards of 80% of their budgets to contractors"
-Biobbit "Terror and Consent" page 90.
which has had the counter-intended effect of driving up costs while removing any focused purpose from the projects:
"People forget or did not know that once upon a time The Learning Channel was founded in 1972 by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and NASA as an informative/instructional network focused on providing real education through the medium of TV; it was distributed at no cost by NASA satellite.
Then it was privatized in 1980 (Reaganism) and was then named the Appalachian Community Service Network. In November 1980 this name was changed to âoeThe Learning Channelâ, which was subsequently shortened to âoeTLC.â From then on we have a sad decline to the abomination of child and poverty exploitation of the TLCâ(TM)s current hit freak show âoeHere Comes Honey Boo Booâ.
So it's no wonder that people who grew up with dreams of finding some way for space exploration to benefit humanity are exiting.
Pushing updates means your phone or apps break, just one day for no apparent reason. It's why I don't have a smartphone. My SOs sucks so bad we had to buy her a tablet just so she could use her apps and read her books.
My dumbphone is good enough . I look forward to Ubuntu tablets and phones.
Fuck you to anyone brushing this off . Apparently you haven't been keeping current with the analyses done that show just exactly what information meta-data can reveal.
No one supposed that ALL DOMESTIC CALLS' meta data was being recorded for and kept forever. What can be inferred about the activities of political candidates, corporate activities, activists of every persuasion, etc etc is incredible. This is what's been happening since the 80s? Really?
There is a ocean of difference between asking for so called pen -register data on a person under investigation and then as a result having such data start to be collected and CONSTANTLY COLLECTING AND PERSISTING ALL SUCH DATA ON EVERYONE from the mid 80s onwards. A motherfucking OCEAN of difference.
Since all this meta data is "public" Can I get it? Please put it online and let me download it. What? No I can't get it? But who HAS gotten, because *anyone* can since it's been ruled to be a public record.
From NBC news:
"Telephone calls were the first technology to attack the notion. Are calls passing through wires inside or outside your home? Back in 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court clarified this issue and ruled that information about telephone calls â" such as numbers dialed, or the length of phone calls â" was distinct from the content of phone calls, and thus was not protected by the Fourth Amendment. "...
"The Supreme Court explained its pen register vs. wiretap distinction in 1979 by calling on the "third-party doctrine." Americans lose their expectation of privacy, the court reasoned, whenever they voluntarily give information to a third party, such as a phone company. Telling the phone company who you call by dialing a number is enough to surrender your expectation of privacy that you are contacting that person, the court held."
So for decades we've been effectively spied on by persons or groups unknown to us.
Does that explain anything about how history in this country has taken a hard right turn along every dimension? How labor has been decimated and unable to counter the 1%'s machinations? How attempts to organize against off-shoring and to fight against NAFTA and the rapid rise of the right wing since 1980 ?
I mean, this is public information - no one has a right to expect privacy , except.. except... it's funny public information isn't it? You and I can't get it, just the people the phone companies want to give it to can have it.
So the telcos have done very well for themselves since 1980 I notice,.. I notice that cable in this country 1) sucks ass and 2) is a duopoly where I live and oh by the way where you live too.
I also notice that despite these incredibly invasive powers we're losing the war on drugs and have been every year since 1980. But this is supposed to help us win that fight, right? That's its stated purpose right? So why is it so useless?
Uh, maybe it's not really for that purpose. Maybe it's being used an instrument of political control because THAT has been going very well indeed for the 1%.
This is a joke. If anyone had suggested that all data on all Americans would be logged , analyzed and made available to private actors forever, then the courts would NOT have decided the way they did because people wouldn't have stood for it.
I don't want my kids growing up in this country. I don't want them manipulated and marginalized and thwarted at every turn by an unseen class of people who have unique and private access to their activities and use that information to undermine their lives, their aspirations, their political activities, their attempts to implement change in this nation.
This is a joke. This is what people were afraid the NSA would BECOME- a gigantic spy machine for the purpose of political control by a privileged political class with privileged access to secret "public" information.
This is far far far far far far far worse than anything the NSA did. This is a BIG FUCKING DEAL PEOPLE.
I dunno about this. I read part of the indictment, He isn't being prosecuted for disseminating information, which would be problematical. He's being charged with knowingly assisting people in providing false information to the authorities, approx. hard to see how this is an example of an overreaching Federal govt since there are tons of things you could do to be charged with that crime, if it is indeed a crime.
First , is it a crime to attempt to device a lie detector test and if not, to otherwise provide false information to the govt. during screening for employment or as a parolee? Anyone know the answer to either of those questions?
Secondly, if either of the above are true, can tax attorneys (or anyone else) lawfully guide their clients in how to unlawfully avoid taxes ?
I understand that merely giving information to someone on how they might commit a crime should not itself be a crime. That's going too far and criminalizing speech and knowledge. If we let that be the standard then there's nothing the government can't criminalize.
OTOH is that all this guy was doing? Isn't he directly implicated here? Didn't he lay out the plans for how the casino security works to people he knew were thieves? Is he not a knowing part of the heist?
I am up in the air I guess. I can see both sides. Clearly, this guy has a resentment of the government (not a crime, thank you) and a willingness to see its necessary functions impeded. But that's not a crime either.
Huh. I am stumped. I see a lot of flamey posts and arguments but not much light.
I think it hinges on what the implications are for 1st amendment rights. He wasn't a govt. ermployee. He wasn't violating an oath overseen by law. Sure, he's filth, but it's not about him, it's about all of us and what we might be charged with by some future DA with a reputation to make for himself.
I see he plead guilty. That could just mean the prosecutors brought so much pressure in the form of other charges (over charging) that he decided to cut a deal (they are asking for the least amount of time).
So you overthrow the feds. And then what? Now you're beholden to your local authorities which are far worse, far more small minded, far more despotic. Overthrowing the govt is not going to result in the small-power libertarian utopia you think it will. It's going to result in a feudalistic system composed of arbitrary overlords. Read the history of England and see how it goes. The fifedoms which predated the nation state we call England were no where a libertarian wanted to be.
If you want to change things, then repeal the immunity from prosecution prosecutors enjoy. Ditto Congress. As it stands, they have zero fear because voting to defacto take away your rights isn't anything they're every going to be called to account for.
Ditto prosecutors who engage in phenomenal overreach, over charging, subornation of perjury, hiding of of exculpatory evidence as just SOP in nearly all cases, not to mention the incredible expansion of criminal laws into every aspect of life so that nearly everyone is guilty of something even if they don't know it combined with the rolling back of statute of limitations which makes it impossible to mount any kind of effective defense basically ensures that most of the population is properly intimated all the time.
The system is corrupt, but the corruption comes from a total lack of fear of consequence. If Congress had to worry that a future Congress or electorate would find them guilty of gross dereliction of duty, if the people in the TLA organizations actually had some level of fear that their actions would be subject to citizen overview if the prosecutors were forced to keep video documentation of every interaction they had over the course of developing cases and the police likewise then there'd be some sort of hesitation. As it is we ambitious sociopaths like Carmen Orttiz going snarling hog wild against our kids.
Overthrowing the government is a losers gambit because even if it's successful, you haven't done jack shit about the forces that caused the corruption in the first place. They just reconstitute themselves because in reality you're fighting some very ugly aspects of human nature - sociopaths as you termed them, which is about right.
What we have is a system that is broken but when your car is broken, you don't smash it then start with reinventing the wheel. you just fix it because that's better than starting all over again.
Remove the immunity from prosecution that Congress enjoys for the laws they pass. Remove the immunity Carmen Ortiz enjoys and which enables her to use her office to abuse due process. What controls sociopaths is fear combined with the high certainty of getting caught. Video tape everything that happens everywhere in the criminal justice system from the courts to the lawyers offices to the jails to the cops. Make that available to citizens investigatory efforts. Ditto Congress. If we're to live under TIA, then guess what comes next- so are they. We actually have a more compelling case to videotape absolutely everything they do since the potential consequences for abuse look like Aaron Schwartz. Give them no place to hide and we'll see big changes, fast.
"my god, he was a criminal mastermind. Who knew?" Brilliant. Simply brilliant!".
Desired subtext:
"This is not a real flaw in our security folks. We were undone by a brilliant criminal mastermind. You can understand how that would happen. We've patched that little loophole and now everything is safe. It's NOT the case that the system is easily exploitable by high school drop outs. It's not the case that any of our sysadmins could do what he did and may have for all we know. "
World to NSA- you have no cred. You just don't. "Leaks' by "unnamed officials" are just more damage control, not facts. The way forward is not going to be found by consulting with damage control experts. The way forward is going to be forged by a public, honest, searching , thorough and skeptical examination about the why where when what and who surrounding surveillance. Everything you do, like this, to try to just ride out the upsettness people are feeling only makes you less credible.
I am saying this as one of the apparently few around here who consider that you perform a desperately needed function and have a clearly legitimate need to engage in the activities you have engaged in.
Now, if that's what I think and this is how you're coming across to me, imagine what everyone else is thinking.
Tor is great to stop your neighbor from spying on your people-dressed-as-cows porn fetish, since it's trivial for someone who lives close to you to sniff your packets (a fact confirmed to me by my ISP btw). SO it's great for privacy from nosy./ curious / thrill seeking neighbors or defending yourself against common cyber criminals. If you're hoping to position yourself AS a criminal using Tor, for-gheeda-bow-tit.
Just saying this so no one makes the youthful mistake of thinking they can, for instance, order molly from the silkroad and never have that fact traced back to them. Criminals are going to do what they do and Tor isn't going to protect them and that's between those people and law enforcement. What we don't want is young people whose brains and judgement aren't fully developed yet , but whose taste for adventure is, being caught in the meat-grinder of an incarceration-for-profit system complete with mandatory minimum sentences because they were severely misled on technical matters.
Do you know what the cost of owning (statistically , virtually) ALL of the exit nodes and most of the intermediate nodes of Tor is? It's effectively zero to the collective financial and technical resources of the "five eyes", that's what it is.
Oh but WoofyGoofy I use a VPN and encrypt everything !!!! And therefore what do you think follows? When you also own both ends of the connections and every major ISP etc etc How hard is it to attach unique identifying packets to your packets as they pass back into the network and then track them through it? Or a little Bayesian analysis based on just the time and size of your packets? Tor is based on the idea that most nodes are not pwned. That assumption is almost certainly false. Remember this also- law enforcement only needs a subpoena for your online activities and email if it's recent- 18 months. When the information you generated is older than that- and Google et.al. keep it FOR-EVAH-AH - that's forever to the phonically challenged- law enforcement can look at it without even so much as a warrant- just ask and ye shall receive, and yes, that includes the CONTENT of your emails etc. Look it up.
There are a lot of dangers to the total information awareness that's been set up. The one people focus in on is J Edgar Hoover style political repression.
Another one is that we're creating a generation of people who get caught for *absolutely* *every* transgression. Call them "generation busted".
People didn't evolve to be either perfectly compliant nor perfectly spied on all the time, everywhere and and norms of society didn't evolve with that as a fact either. Young people whose judgment is not in effect are a potential gold mine for people who make money off things like parole and incarceration and they will push to increase their revenue flow just like any other corporation would.
After all, who do you THINK lobbied for mandatory minimum sentencing? Who do you think pushes for three strike laws for what are basically non-violent offenders- stealing pizza, shit like that? This is a real danger.
I know one friend's son who is constantly in trouble with the law over shit like smoking ladies soap bubbles and petty shoplifting and such shit. Basically, it's like watching a lamb being fed to the wolves piece by piece. Soon enough he'll have enough of a record that they'll lock him up, making him permanently unemployable and then wait for him to commit a robbery or suchlike. It's sickening. The kid has severe mental health issues, probably was born that way and should be on some form of permanent public assistance. There exist people like that. It's cheaper than locking him up. Let him smoke dope, watch TV play games and just exist in whatever way makes sense to him. People are born who are just like this for reasons we don't understand, it's not anyone's fault, least of all his.
Just as bad is kids who are transgressive as a kind of experimentation, like, oh I don't know our coke snorting (he admits to it) President. Go to a
Yeah just don't go.Financially, it makes absolutely no sense. You're in wage competition with people who have zero debt from other nations. Guess who wins? Your,student loans are 100% unbankruptable and the price for college is set by the amount of money lenders will lend, which is basically everything you'll earn over your lifetime, since, as I said, the debt is unbankruptable.
Universities take that money and hire another level of administrators, give them all raises, build golden palaces for them to work in, build 5 star shopping malls / food courts, erect modernist pieces of architecture to house privately run research facilities and of course spend lavishly on their athletic programs , including more state of the art construction , high six digit salaries for everyone etc. etc.
This is what your student loans pay for. This is what the lifetime of debt you pay for goes to fund. This is the system the US has lying in wait for people who are, as Matthew Tabbi put it, people who are barely not children. An amount of debt that will push you into a life of literal indentured servitude before you even start of f in life.
This is purely predatory and the fact that the predation is by seasoned adults who understand the system and upon naive children who have been told since birth by the people they trust the most, most recently by Obama himself , that "college is the best investment you can make." , the fact that that is the predator -prey relationship says everything you need to know about higher education in America and America itself. From the housing crisis to the student loan bubble to the credit default swap to the savings and loans bailouts, it's a series of traps into which the naive are lured and pushed for the benefit of the sophisticated, the rule writers, the rich.
Don't go. You'll have incredible freedom. There is nothing at university you'll learn that you can't learn for free online. You and your friends can make your own way in the world if you don't have crushing debt waiting to seize everything every time you get ahead even a little. If you're not forcibly chained to an slave oar of a job that takes everything you have to give and leaves you with nothing to put into your own life at the end of the day.
There are a million ways for young people to arrange themselves in this world , a million ways waiting to be invented discovered, tried and iterated upon in order to gain knowledge, have access to resources, advance themselves and establish their market value that don't involve college and the unbankruptable crushing debt. Just do it. Everyone. Just invent it. Just try it. No opportunity is passing you by by trying until you get it right. You have nothing to lose. Nothing at all.
1) People who Have So Much Money That Nothing Can Hurt Them like Huffington should consider what happens to people in the REAL world if they voice opinions unpopular with their co-workers, employers, neighbors or government. Where my wife works it's THIS far from a liberal/conservative political food fight on some days and if her REAL opinions ever became known, she'd be out of her job at the machinations of her co-workers, without a doubt.
So I guess Rich Bitch Huffy is telling my wife that she's not welcome to post at Huffpo. Atta' way to shut people up once and for all on just those topics- controversial ones- in which the polity presumably needs access to the widest opinions possible.
Oh and by the way, my wife NEEDS her job and isn't going to find another one like it somewhere else. Enough said.
Not to mention that if people ever were known for publicly supporting activities which were illegal - like smoking dope or same sex marriage - then they wouldn't come out in support of such things since even supporting them, back int he day, was basically a job/neighbor/family death sentence. So on THOSE topics there would be even less discussion, even fewer people relating real experiences. What we would have left to read would be the jingoistic tropes of the day and the crassest forms of majoritarianism
This "if you believe in what you're saying, then you'll sign your name to it" bullshit are just manipulative ploys used by elites to try to shame people whose speech they don't like,
I think that we can now also add to that traditional motivation another one- the motivation to increase your profit from your website. By being able to assure buyers of your sites' REAL product, the sentiment analysis, consumer analytics and personality dossiers you sell- that you know the real, actual names attached to those products, you can command a higher price than aggregated, mass statistics and genericized profiles can command.
Let's face it. Employers really want to know who's going to work 80 hours a wek for peanuts, never complain, keep their mouths shut about law breaking they see and never ask for a raise. They want to know who the bitches are and who the OTHER ones are who think they deserve, you know, a life, a raise, some vacation, some decent treatment If Huffpo can deliver those first names to them and also deliver to them the names of the people who must be kept unemployed, then Huffpo has finally found a business model other than selling itself to yet richer owners and cashing out the current ones.
As far as moderation goes, Slashdot has it just right. Give random, people limited ability to mod posts. Let people post AC if they see fit. Don't let people disappear other people's thoughts under any circumstances. Don't reward higher usage with special and increasing god powers - this is the mistake StackExchange made- because it attracts losers with power issues like flies to shit and basically you've got a Survivor-style dynamic on your hands where alliances form and favors are passed around and it all gets very personal and petty very fast.
One thing that always good is if you can elect to never see posts form someone again. Trolls go on talking , but only to themselves. Salon had this and it was great. The user experience improved because you didn't have to deal with the trolls who spent all their time there picking fights and being obnoxious. You never saw their posts. Nice. Then Salon went "must log in , no anonymous speech " and I left and never wen back.
Anonymous speech is completely foundational to truth telling , to speaking truth to power, to organizing and to broad societal change. Elites have always called it the mark of cowardice. If you ever find yourself holding that opinion, pat yourself on the back because while you may be a piece of shit, you've nevertheless made it in America.
Interesting. My first thought (aside from interesting...) was that high priced durable goods are not bought in this manner. Maybe marketing types know better, but then there's always states with so called buyer's remorse clauses....
. A big part of the expense in solar is installation and labour, and there are some interesting developments going on that will make that part of the bill a lot lower.
Sniff sniff.. I smell a company being run on VC vapors...a concerns for numbers that have to keep going by hook or by crook lest the actual valuation of the business-plan-free enterprise all come tumbling down..
What does LinkedIn sell and to whom and for how much and how often? How much is any of our data even worth with every cloud-based social-web search-engine new media play all running the same analytics on the same user base? A dollar? A buck fifty? Once? I'm worth a 1000 times that to Starbucks and they have only to plop down another green fish-girl sign on some block that doesn't already have one to start minting fresh people just like me.
There has to be a limit to the amount of money that can change hands for binders filled with women's likely shopping preferences and how many times you can sell this information to sellers. People aren't just aren't born and don't die that fast. Once you know someone is a liberal Subaru driving lesbian with a soft spot for abused animals, a keen interest in Sara Maclaughlin and a $1500.00 a year wardrobe budget where is there to go for the next 50 years with this person ?
If you don't put on price on energy usage then there's no incentive for appliances and lights to become more efficient. Sure you pay more, but Germany is proof of what can be achieved with solar and wind. BTW Germany's economy is the best in the EU; they were last seeing bailing out the rest of Europe.
Don't ask how much something costs without also asking what you get for your money. Germany gets closer to energy self-sufficiency , creates a proof not of concept but of implementation for the rest of the world to benefit from which can and will offset more climate change which saves Germany and everyone else the astronomical, nation destroying costs - which will ultimately fail after they bankrupt us- involved with trying merely counteract climate change.
So what is the financial cost? It's negative, because the very people paying higher electricity costs today will be spared having to fork over the all the rest of their money to battle climate change later.
Don't ask how much something is, that's a brain-dead question. Ask what are you're getting for your money, and set the horizon for analysis to be the rest of your life, at least, or even your children's lives if you're the sort of person who is capable of being about something other than just yourself.
Every underdog movement since the 1st century AD has made alliances with parties and groups they otherwise despise. If this were not a fair tactic, the overdog would never get displaced. Being outraged at this is thew mark of a total naive and frankly, a historically illiterate. It is important to read about history or at least watch some shows on TV or something so you don't end up looking like a dope when you speak.
Your anonymous post is actually a very typical Right Wing Authoritarian response to a RWA being exposed , as Dr. Altrermeyer details in the book I linked to.
The whole enterprise of AI is underwritten by the notion that it's possible to re-create human intelligence in something less complex than a human. It may not be true in any significant way.
Take for instance Romeo and Juliet. The reasons the things they do make sense to us is because the things they do are implicitly motivated by the evolutionary quirks and mandates of human sexual reproduction. We share and intuitively understand those mandates- no one spells them out to us.
The fact that Juliet only produces so many eggs in her lifetime and of those only perhaps a dozen will give her the opportunity to pass on her and her family's means that her family has a big investment in her and jealously guard her reproduction as the extension of their own genetic fitness that it is.
Men can go out whoring and no one cares since there's always more sperm at the ready. Women get treated differently.
These are just quirks of evolution. Worms are bisexual, and can play the role of both male and female on demand. They have a different version of Romeo and Juliet.
This is just one aspect of human courtship, of what it means to be human and why it is that way and not some other way. There are tons of others most of which are the stuff of future discoveries. Beyond that, we do more things than court sexual partners.
Each of those things is also shot through with the quirks mode that the particular evolutionary process we underwent- a thing which itself could have been different given a slightly different environment or even different chance encounter at a crucial moment.
So now you're setting out to program a computer to imitate human "reasoning and behavior" or at least understand it, under all circumstances which are of concern to humans.
The fact is, you're NOT going to be able to do that because the "logic" of human decision making and the 'logic" of human understanding of what any given situation "means" and what is "important" to the human and therefore how a human will act is deeply fused with their unique biology which itself is a product of the arbitrary course they took through evolution.
Without actually sharing that all that biology, without being the end product of that evolutionary pathway, you're probably not going to be able to recreate the decisions and perceptions and values it is responsible for in a disembodied series of 1s and 0s.
It's not that it's theoretically impossible- maybe the universe IS just information (...man...tttttFFT!) .
It's that by the time you succeeded, what you'd have to have done is create a kind of artificial biology, possibly arrived at through real natural selection. In other words, created a biological human through other means, because something as complex as a human is more or less its own simplest model.
1) because these same people know that there are technologies on the very very near horizon which are much better than current lie detectors which is little more than a GSR reader.
2) because of 1), it's merely a stalking horse for general the desire to enshrine into law the sequestration of general knowledge or facts about the general world they wish people didn't know.
3) establishing 2) above would lead to contempt and,disrespect for the government, the widespread perception of illegitimacy of the government by the governed. This is THE ONLY way terrorists can actually destroy this nation. Even a biological attack isn't going to make the nation actually end. Dissolution and disunion will be self-inflicted.
We didn't evolve to accept intellectual feudalism or some kind of knowledge Forest Law in any form.
There it is. The classic, all time, full bore, scientifically confirmed explanation of what authoritarianism is.
Everyone has a little authoritarian in them, especially at the point of being "fed up" with others, where ever that is. Therefore, everyone needs to check themselves against it. True civil libertarians (non-Ron Paul types) excel us all in this capability and this makes them what they are.
Maybe there are very extreme circumstances in which some aspects of the civil society's foundations work against civil society. Lincoln thought he found some.
One thing we know, The doings of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden and Walter Binney and John Kiriakou and Walter Drake and all the rest of the people who acted in accordance with the values all Americans and the Founding Fathers were inculcated with do not represent those circumstances.
It's amazing to me how unsophisticated the response has been from the administration and by proxy the NSA itself. Presumably they have multiple, best-course-of-action for any eventuality all analyzed beforehand and mapped out. Is THIS response what they have on the books? IS this the best unlimited access to the nations best social and cultural thinkers can produce?
Maybe Assange acted with disregard to national security, he claims to have tried to vet the documents with the NSA and CIA and State Dept but they refused to engage him the way they would have WaPo or the Times. Who knows? Anyways, there's a lot conceptual space between THAT and being a drone worthy terrorist or a traitor. Ditto on down the line.
What's the lesson for us in this specific incident? For the sake of your career, don't drink and Twitter ? Read The Authoritarians at least once a year ? Perform a thorough, searching, honest and skeptical self examination of your values and actions at least as often as you get a haircut?
Best book I ever read about employment. You know corporations and HR personnel conspire against employees and what's more it's institutionalized but you probably don't know the gory details. Well, there they are.
I would say always give notice because you effectively have no power in the workplace whatever the law says.
Workplaces are effectively like 17th century pirate ships, where you are a member of a pirate crew and you work and get paid according to your terms but there's nothing like "justice" on that pirate ship. The captains and ranking mates are, if facts were known, probably some form of criminal and you wouldn't think of going against the larger group for any reason at all.
Employers have ways around law-breaking, employment-killing slander including but not limited to grapevines, coded speech "is she eligible for rehire?", and even tone of voice . Good luck busting them for any of that.
If you want a meaningful workplace then the American solution is to work for yourself. that is to say, for your customers or the market. It's amazing to me that after a few years working virtually any job in America , all employees aren't giving this a shot.
Oh wait, that's what H1-Bs are for - they don't have that option. I think those ships are called "slave" ships.
OK then, what does that imply for you ? It's in the current nature of Bitcoin that all your Bitcoins ARE in one basket and you should disaster plan accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
Not documenting is a more or less conscious technique developers and projects use to increase their market value. In those projects where the business model is consulting , you better believe that unless it's a public API , it's got zero documentation.
I know this is true. If software developers wanted to , they could write a nice book about how their source code works (as opposed to how their program works or how to write a plugin for their program).
They don't. This is not merely a case of being rushed for time or whatever. They don't want anyone else to understand it really. You control what only you understand- every developer knows this intuitively. Going to great pains to write a book-style learning aid to your actual code so that *just anyone* could take your place.. well... do I really need to finish that sentence?
Devs (don't) do it to so they can get some job security. Companies (don't ) do it to get consulting gigs. No one will admit that this is what's going on, but it is. I can hear the rebuttals already.. I can see the down-modding about to happen... go ahead.. flamebait me down. .. knock yourself out.
The closet analogy I can think of is magicians guarding their secrets. That worked very well for a long long time. The incentive was the same. If you give this away, if you make it understandable, you're going to be out of work. Slightly different dynamic, but you get the idea.
This is one of the product spaces we want to move into, but as you might imagine we have come to the conclusion that we have to move carefully, and even obliquely.
This is not exclusive to software engineering either. I know for a fact - which means i have multiple, full confessions, that mathematics teachers are far less clear than they could be wit their students. Some have said they do it to winnow out the weak. Others have admitted they do it to classes to students they don't like. They know it makes a huge difference, how you explain something- and that no one can accuse them of anything. That's basically a kind of power or force you can wield against and for people who please you or displease you.
Just sharing what I know.
It's not true. American citizens can't just be taken off the street and detained without probably cause or charges, although Gonzales and Cheney and Bush and Addington and Yoo *tried* to establish that as law. They failed. Outcomes when the system works has to mean something too.
What the US does to other people in other countries is another matter, ranging from droning people we can't otherwise reach to the Gitmo.
As far as GITMO goes, what we have going on there are people , only some of whom WERE dangerous when we picked them up but many of whom ARE NOW dangerous (uh..duh.) and therefore are being detained. It's truly Kafakaesque but then that's what fascists like the above listed names inevitably create in their wake.
As an American citizen, the government is not going to disappear you (anymore) without charges. Your point is not moot however because for a while , they DID do that and would HAVE continued to do that if the the ACLU et al. had not filed suit and the courts had not intervened.
As far as other governments go, I don't know which ones think it's their privilege to disappear people, whether it's their own or another nation's citizen.
NASA has been mostly privatized for a while now:
"Many federal departments and offices Energy and NASA to name just two, have become defacto contract management agencies devoting upwards of 80% of their budgets to contractors"
-Biobbit "Terror and Consent" page 90.
which has had the counter-intended effect of driving up costs while removing any focused purpose from the projects:
from http://joelhousman.com/2012/10/08/how-privatization-of-nasas-the-learning-channel-tlc-devolved-into-a-for-profit-child-exploitation-channel-pushing-honey-boo-boo/
"People forget or did not know that once upon a time The Learning Channel was founded in 1972 by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and NASA as an informative/instructional network focused on providing real education through the medium of TV; it was distributed at no cost by NASA satellite.
Then it was privatized in 1980 (Reaganism) and was then named the Appalachian Community Service Network. In November 1980 this name was changed to âoeThe Learning Channelâ, which was subsequently shortened to âoeTLC.â From then on we have a sad decline to the abomination of child and poverty exploitation of the TLCâ(TM)s current hit freak show âoeHere Comes Honey Boo Booâ.
So it's no wonder that people who grew up with dreams of finding some way for space exploration to benefit humanity are exiting.
Pushing updates means your phone or apps break, just one day for no apparent reason. It's why I don't have a smartphone. My SOs sucks so bad we had to buy her a tablet just so she could use her apps and read her books.
My dumbphone is good enough . I look forward to Ubuntu tablets and phones.
Fuck you to anyone brushing this off . Apparently you haven't been keeping current with the analyses done that show just exactly what information meta-data can reveal.
No one supposed that ALL DOMESTIC CALLS' meta data was being recorded for and kept forever. What can be inferred about the activities of political candidates, corporate activities, activists of every persuasion, etc etc is incredible. This is what's been happening since the 80s? Really?
There is a ocean of difference between asking for so called pen -register data on a person under investigation and then as a result having such data start to be collected and CONSTANTLY COLLECTING AND PERSISTING ALL SUCH DATA ON EVERYONE from the mid 80s onwards. A motherfucking OCEAN of difference.
Since all this meta data is "public" Can I get it? Please put it online and let me download it. What? No I can't get it? But who HAS gotten, because *anyone* can since it's been ruled to be a public record.
From NBC news:
"Telephone calls were the first technology to attack the notion. Are calls passing through wires inside or outside your home? Back in 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court clarified this issue and ruled that information about telephone calls â" such as numbers dialed, or the length of phone calls â" was distinct from the content of phone calls, and thus was not protected by the Fourth Amendment. " ...
"The Supreme Court explained its pen register vs. wiretap distinction in 1979 by calling on the "third-party doctrine." Americans lose their expectation of privacy, the court reasoned, whenever they voluntarily give information to a third party, such as a phone company. Telling the phone company who you call by dialing a number is enough to surrender your expectation of privacy that you are contacting that person, the court held."
So for decades we've been effectively spied on by persons or groups unknown to us.
Does that explain anything about how history in this country has taken a hard right turn along every dimension? How labor has been decimated and unable to counter the 1%'s machinations? How attempts to organize against off-shoring and to fight against NAFTA and the rapid rise of the right wing since 1980 ?
I mean, this is public information - no one has a right to expect privacy , except .. except ... it's funny public information isn't it? You and I can't get it, just the people the phone companies want to give it to can have it.
So the telcos have done very well for themselves since 1980 I notice, .. I notice that cable in this country
1) sucks ass and
2) is a duopoly where I live and oh by the way where you live too.
I also notice that despite these incredibly invasive powers we're losing the war on drugs and have been every year since 1980. But this is supposed to help us win that fight, right? That's its stated purpose right? So why is it so useless?
Uh, maybe it's not really for that purpose. Maybe it's being used an instrument of political control because THAT has been going very well indeed for the 1%.
This is a joke. If anyone had suggested that all data on all Americans would be logged , analyzed and made available to private actors forever, then the courts would NOT have decided the way they did because people wouldn't have stood for it.
I don't want my kids growing up in this country. I don't want them manipulated and marginalized and thwarted at every turn by an unseen class of people who have unique and private access to their activities and use that information to undermine their lives, their aspirations, their political activities, their attempts to implement change in this nation.
This is a joke. This is what people were afraid the NSA would BECOME- a gigantic spy machine for the purpose of political control by a privileged political class with privileged access to secret "public" information.
This is far far far far far far far worse than anything the NSA did. This is a BIG FUCKING DEAL PEOPLE.
I dunno about this. I read part of the indictment, He isn't being prosecuted for disseminating information, which would be problematical. He's being charged with knowingly assisting people in providing false information to the authorities, approx. hard to see how this is an example of an overreaching Federal govt since there are tons of things you could do to be charged with that crime, if it is indeed a crime.
First , is it a crime to attempt to device a lie detector test and if not, to otherwise provide false information to the govt. during screening for employment or as a parolee? Anyone know the answer to either of those questions?
Secondly, if either of the above are true, can tax attorneys (or anyone else) lawfully guide their clients in how to unlawfully avoid taxes ?
I understand that merely giving information to someone on how they might commit a crime should not itself be a crime. That's going too far and criminalizing speech and knowledge. If we let that be the standard then there's nothing the government can't criminalize.
OTOH is that all this guy was doing? Isn't he directly implicated here? Didn't he lay out the plans for how the casino security works to people he knew were thieves? Is he not a knowing part of the heist?
I am up in the air I guess. I can see both sides. Clearly, this guy has a resentment of the government (not a crime, thank you) and a willingness to see its necessary functions impeded. But that's not a crime either.
Huh. I am stumped. I see a lot of flamey posts and arguments but not much light.
I think it hinges on what the implications are for 1st amendment rights. He wasn't a govt. ermployee. He wasn't violating an oath overseen by law. Sure, he's filth, but it's not about him, it's about all of us and what we might be charged with by some future DA with a reputation to make for himself.
I see he plead guilty. That could just mean the prosecutors brought so much pressure in the form of other charges (over charging) that he decided to cut a deal (they are asking for the least amount of time).
Just... dunno. Hung jury.
So you overthrow the feds. And then what? Now you're beholden to your local authorities which are far worse, far more small minded, far more despotic. Overthrowing the govt is not going to result in the small-power libertarian utopia you think it will. It's going to result in a feudalistic system composed of arbitrary overlords. Read the history of England and see how it goes. The fifedoms which predated the nation state we call England were no where a libertarian wanted to be.
If you want to change things, then repeal the immunity from prosecution prosecutors enjoy. Ditto Congress. As it stands, they have zero fear because voting to defacto take away your rights isn't anything they're every going to be called to account for.
Ditto prosecutors who engage in phenomenal overreach, over charging, subornation of perjury, hiding of of exculpatory evidence as just SOP in nearly all cases, not to mention the incredible expansion of criminal laws into every aspect of life so that nearly everyone is guilty of something even if they don't know it combined with the rolling back of statute of limitations which makes it impossible to mount any kind of effective defense basically ensures that most of the population is properly intimated all the time.
The system is corrupt, but the corruption comes from a total lack of fear of consequence. If Congress had to worry that a future Congress or electorate would find them guilty of gross dereliction of duty, if the people in the TLA organizations actually had some level of fear that their actions would be subject to citizen overview if the prosecutors were forced to keep video documentation of every interaction they had over the course of developing cases and the police likewise then there'd be some sort of hesitation. As it is we ambitious sociopaths like Carmen Orttiz going snarling hog wild against our kids.
Overthrowing the government is a losers gambit because even if it's successful, you haven't done jack shit about the forces that caused the corruption in the first place. They just reconstitute themselves because in reality you're fighting some very ugly aspects of human nature - sociopaths as you termed them, which is about right.
What we have is a system that is broken but when your car is broken, you don't smash it then start with reinventing the wheel. you just fix it because that's better than starting all over again.
Remove the immunity from prosecution that Congress enjoys for the laws they pass. Remove the immunity Carmen Ortiz enjoys and which enables her to use her office to abuse due process. What controls sociopaths is fear combined with the high certainty of getting caught. Video tape everything that happens everywhere in the criminal justice system from the courts to the lawyers offices to the jails to the cops. Make that available to citizens investigatory efforts. Ditto Congress. If we're to live under TIA, then guess what comes next- so are they. We actually have a more compelling case to videotape absolutely everything they do since the potential consequences for abuse look like Aaron Schwartz. Give them no place to hide and we'll see big changes, fast.
Now The Story is:
"my god, he was a criminal mastermind. Who knew?" Brilliant. Simply brilliant!".
Desired subtext:
"This is not a real flaw in our security folks. We were undone by a brilliant criminal mastermind. You can understand how that would happen. We've patched that little loophole and now everything is safe. It's NOT the case that the system is easily exploitable by high school drop outs. It's not the case that any of our sysadmins could do what he did and may have for all we know. "
World to NSA- you have no cred. You just don't. "Leaks' by "unnamed officials" are just more damage control, not facts. The way forward is not going to be found by consulting with damage control experts. The way forward is going to be forged by a public, honest, searching , thorough and skeptical examination about the why where when what and who surrounding surveillance. Everything you do, like this, to try to just ride out the upsettness people are feeling only makes you less credible.
I am saying this as one of the apparently few around here who consider that you perform a desperately needed function and have a clearly legitimate need to engage in the activities you have engaged in.
Now, if that's what I think and this is how you're coming across to me, imagine what everyone else is thinking.
Tor is great to stop your neighbor from spying on your people-dressed-as-cows porn fetish, since it's trivial for someone who lives close to you to sniff your packets (a fact confirmed to me by my ISP btw). SO it's great for privacy from nosy ./ curious / thrill seeking neighbors or defending yourself against common cyber criminals. If you're hoping to position yourself AS a criminal using Tor, for-gheeda-bow-tit.
Just saying this so no one makes the youthful mistake of thinking they can, for instance, order molly from the silkroad and never have that fact traced back to them. Criminals are going to do what they do and Tor isn't going to protect them and that's between those people and law enforcement. What we don't want is young people whose brains and judgement aren't fully developed yet , but whose taste for adventure is, being caught in the meat-grinder of an incarceration-for-profit system complete with mandatory minimum sentences because they were severely misled on technical matters.
Do you know what the cost of owning (statistically , virtually) ALL of the exit nodes and most of the intermediate nodes of Tor is? It's effectively zero to the collective financial and technical resources of the "five eyes", that's what it is.
Oh but WoofyGoofy I use a VPN and encrypt everything !!!! And therefore what do you think follows? When you also own both ends of the connections and every major ISP etc etc How hard is it to attach unique identifying packets to your packets as they pass back into the network and then track them through it? Or a little Bayesian analysis based on just the time and size of your packets? Tor is based on the idea that most nodes are not pwned. That assumption is almost certainly false. Remember this also- law enforcement only needs a subpoena for your online activities and email if it's recent- 18 months. When the information you generated is older than that- and Google et.al. keep it FOR-EVAH-AH - that's forever to the phonically challenged- law enforcement can look at it without even so much as a warrant- just ask and ye shall receive, and yes, that includes the CONTENT of your emails etc. Look it up.
There are a lot of dangers to the total information awareness that's been set up. The one people focus in on is J Edgar Hoover style political repression.
Another one is that we're creating a generation of people who get caught for *absolutely* *every* transgression. Call them "generation busted".
People didn't evolve to be either perfectly compliant nor perfectly spied on all the time, everywhere and and norms of society didn't evolve with that as a fact either. Young people whose judgment is not in effect are a potential gold mine for people who make money off things like parole and incarceration and they will push to increase their revenue flow just like any other corporation would.
After all, who do you THINK lobbied for mandatory minimum sentencing? Who do you think pushes for three strike laws for what are basically non-violent offenders- stealing pizza, shit like that? This is a real danger.
I know one friend's son who is constantly in trouble with the law over shit like smoking ladies soap bubbles and petty shoplifting and such shit. Basically, it's like watching a lamb being fed to the wolves piece by piece. Soon enough he'll have enough of a record that they'll lock him up, making him permanently unemployable and then wait for him to commit a robbery or suchlike. It's sickening. The kid has severe mental health issues, probably was born that way and should be on some form of permanent public assistance. There exist people like that. It's cheaper than locking him up. Let him smoke dope, watch TV play games and just exist in whatever way makes sense to him. People are born who are just like this for reasons we don't understand, it's not anyone's fault, least of all his.
Just as bad is kids who are transgressive as a kind of experimentation, like, oh I don't know our coke snorting (he admits to it) President. Go to a
Next comes the oversight functions.
Yeah just don't go.Financially, it makes absolutely no sense. You're in wage competition with people who have zero debt from other nations. Guess who wins? Your ,student loans are 100% unbankruptable and the price for college is set by the amount of money lenders will lend, which is basically everything you'll earn over your lifetime, since, as I said, the debt is unbankruptable.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-america-the-college-loan-scandal-20130815
Universities take that money and hire another level of administrators, give them all raises, build golden palaces for them to work in, build 5 star shopping malls / food courts, erect modernist pieces of architecture to house privately run research facilities and of course spend lavishly on their athletic programs , including more state of the art construction , high six digit salaries for everyone etc. etc.
This is what your student loans pay for. This is what the lifetime of debt you pay for goes to fund. This is the system the US has lying in wait for people who are, as Matthew Tabbi put it, people who are barely not children. An amount of debt that will push you into a life of literal indentured servitude before you even start of f in life.
http://www.freep.com/article/20130822/BLOG25/308220135/student-loans-debt-rolling-stone
This is purely predatory and the fact that the predation is by seasoned adults who understand the system and upon naive children who have been told since birth by the people they trust the most, most recently by Obama himself , that "college is the best investment you can make." , the fact that that is the predator -prey relationship says everything you need to know about higher education in America and America itself. From the housing crisis to the student loan bubble to the credit default swap to the savings and loans bailouts, it's a series of traps into which the naive are lured and pushed for the benefit of the sophisticated, the rule writers, the rich.
Don't go. You'll have incredible freedom. There is nothing at university you'll learn that you can't learn for free online. You and your friends can make your own way in the world if you don't have crushing debt waiting to seize everything every time you get ahead even a little. If you're not forcibly chained to an slave oar of a job that takes everything you have to give and leaves you with nothing to put into your own life at the end of the day.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/20/matt_taibbi_us_student_loan_bubble
There are a million ways for young people to arrange themselves in this world , a million ways waiting to be invented discovered, tried and iterated upon in order to gain knowledge, have access to resources, advance themselves and establish their market value that don't involve college and the unbankruptable crushing debt. Just do it. Everyone. Just invent it. Just try it. No opportunity is passing you by by trying until you get it right. You have nothing to lose. Nothing at all.
1) People who Have So Much Money That Nothing Can Hurt Them like Huffington should consider what happens to people in the REAL world if they voice opinions unpopular with their co-workers, employers, neighbors or government. Where my wife works it's THIS far from a liberal/conservative political food fight on some days and if her REAL opinions ever became known, she'd be out of her job at the machinations of her co-workers, without a doubt.
So I guess Rich Bitch Huffy is telling my wife that she's not welcome to post at Huffpo. Atta' way to shut people up once and for all on just those topics- controversial ones- in which the polity presumably needs access to the widest opinions possible.
Oh and by the way, my wife NEEDS her job and isn't going to find another one like it somewhere else. Enough said.
Not to mention that if people ever were known for publicly supporting activities which were illegal - like smoking dope or same sex marriage - then they wouldn't come out in support of such things since even supporting them, back int he day, was basically a job/neighbor/family death sentence. So on THOSE topics there would be even less discussion, even fewer people relating real experiences. What we would have left to read would be the jingoistic tropes of the day and the crassest forms of majoritarianism
This "if you believe in what you're saying, then you'll sign your name to it" bullshit are just manipulative ploys used by elites to try to shame people whose speech they don't like,
I think that we can now also add to that traditional motivation another one- the motivation to increase your profit from your website. By being able to assure buyers of your sites' REAL product, the sentiment analysis, consumer analytics and personality dossiers you sell- that you know the real, actual names attached to those products, you can command a higher price than aggregated, mass statistics and genericized profiles can command.
Let's face it. Employers really want to know who's going to work 80 hours a wek for peanuts, never complain, keep their mouths shut about law breaking they see and never ask for a raise. They want to know who the bitches are and who the OTHER ones are who think they deserve, you know, a life, a raise, some vacation, some decent treatment If Huffpo can deliver those first names to them and also deliver to them the names of the people who must be kept unemployed, then Huffpo has finally found a business model other than selling itself to yet richer owners and cashing out the current ones.
As far as moderation goes, Slashdot has it just right. Give random, people limited ability to mod posts. Let people post AC if they see fit. Don't let people disappear other people's thoughts under any circumstances. Don't reward higher usage with special and increasing god powers - this is the mistake StackExchange made- because it attracts losers with power issues like flies to shit and basically you've got a Survivor-style dynamic on your hands where alliances form and favors are passed around and it all gets very personal and petty very fast.
One thing that always good is if you can elect to never see posts form someone again. Trolls go on talking , but only to themselves. Salon had this and it was great. The user experience improved because you didn't have to deal with the trolls who spent all their time there picking fights and being obnoxious. You never saw their posts. Nice. Then Salon went "must log in , no anonymous speech " and I left and never wen back.
Anonymous speech is completely foundational to truth telling , to speaking truth to power, to organizing and to broad societal change. Elites have always called it the mark of cowardice. If you ever find yourself holding that opinion, pat yourself on the back because while you may be a piece of shit, you've nevertheless made it in America.
Interesting. My first thought (aside from interesting...) was that high priced durable goods are not bought in this manner. Maybe marketing types know better, but then there's always states with so called buyer's remorse clauses....
. A big part of the expense in solar is installation and labour, and there are some interesting developments going on that will make that part of the bill a lot lower.
Do share.
Sniff sniff .. I smell a company being run on VC vapors...a concerns for numbers that have to keep going by hook or by crook lest the actual valuation of the business-plan-free enterprise all come tumbling down..
What does LinkedIn sell and to whom and for how much and how often? How much is any of our data even worth with every cloud-based social-web search-engine new media play all running the same analytics on the same user base? A dollar? A buck fifty? Once? I'm worth a 1000 times that to Starbucks and they have only to plop down another green fish-girl sign on some block that doesn't already have one to start minting fresh people just like me.
There has to be a limit to the amount of money that can change hands for binders filled with women's likely shopping preferences and how many times you can sell this information to sellers. People aren't just aren't born and don't die that fast. Once you know someone is a liberal Subaru driving lesbian with a soft spot for abused animals, a keen interest in Sara Maclaughlin and a $1500.00 a year wardrobe budget where is there to go for the next 50 years with this person ?
If you don't put on price on energy usage then there's no incentive for appliances and lights to become more efficient. Sure you pay more, but Germany is proof of what can be achieved with solar and wind. BTW Germany's economy is the best in the EU; they were last seeing bailing out the rest of Europe.
Don't ask how much something costs without also asking what you get for your money. Germany gets closer to energy self-sufficiency , creates a proof not of concept but of implementation for the rest of the world to benefit from which can and will offset more climate change which saves Germany and everyone else the astronomical, nation destroying costs - which will ultimately fail after they bankrupt us- involved with trying merely counteract climate change.
So what is the financial cost? It's negative, because the very people paying higher electricity costs today will be spared having to fork over the all the rest of their money to battle climate change later.
Don't ask how much something is, that's a brain-dead question. Ask what are you're getting for your money, and set the horizon for analysis to be the rest of your life, at least, or even your children's lives if you're the sort of person who is capable of being about something other than just yourself.
Thanks Germany !
signed,
America.
Every underdog movement since the 1st century AD has made alliances with parties and groups they otherwise despise. If this were not a fair tactic, the overdog would never get displaced. Being outraged at this is thew mark of a total naive and frankly, a historically illiterate. It is important to read about history or at least watch some shows on TV or something so you don't end up looking like a dope when you speak.
This is just how change happens.
Your anonymous post is actually a very typical Right Wing Authoritarian response to a RWA being exposed , as Dr. Altrermeyer details in the book I linked to.
The whole enterprise of AI is underwritten by the notion that it's possible to re-create human intelligence in something less complex than a human. It may not be true in any significant way.
Take for instance Romeo and Juliet. The reasons the things they do make sense to us is because the things they do are implicitly motivated by the evolutionary quirks and mandates of human sexual reproduction. We share and intuitively understand those mandates- no one spells them out to us.
The fact that Juliet only produces so many eggs in her lifetime and of those only perhaps a dozen will give her the opportunity to pass on her and her family's means that her family has a big investment in her and jealously guard her reproduction as the extension of their own genetic fitness that it is.
Men can go out whoring and no one cares since there's always more sperm at the ready. Women get treated differently.
These are just quirks of evolution. Worms are bisexual, and can play the role of both male and female on demand. They have a different version of Romeo and Juliet.
This is just one aspect of human courtship, of what it means to be human and why it is that way and not some other way. There are tons of others most of which are the stuff of future discoveries. Beyond that, we do more things than court sexual partners.
Each of those things is also shot through with the quirks mode that the particular evolutionary process we underwent- a thing which itself could have been different given a slightly different environment or even different chance encounter at a crucial moment.
So now you're setting out to program a computer to imitate human "reasoning and behavior" or at least understand it, under all circumstances which are of concern to humans.
The fact is, you're NOT going to be able to do that because the "logic" of human decision making and the 'logic" of human understanding of what any given situation "means" and what is "important" to the human and therefore how a human will act is deeply fused with their unique biology which itself is a product of the arbitrary course they took through evolution.
Without actually sharing that all that biology, without being the end product of that evolutionary pathway, you're probably not going to be able to recreate the decisions and perceptions and values it is responsible for in a disembodied series of 1s and 0s.
It's not that it's theoretically impossible- maybe the universe IS just information (...man...tttttFFT!) .
It's that by the time you succeeded, what you'd have to have done is create a kind of artificial biology, possibly arrived at through real natural selection. In other words, created a biological human through other means, because something as complex as a human is more or less its own simplest model.
1) because these same people know that there are technologies on the very very near horizon which are much better than current lie detectors which is little more than a GSR reader.
2) because of 1), it's merely a stalking horse for general the desire to enshrine into law the sequestration of general knowledge or facts about the general world they wish people didn't know.
3) establishing 2) above would lead to contempt and ,disrespect for the government, the widespread perception of illegitimacy of the government by the governed. This is THE ONLY way terrorists can actually destroy this nation. Even a biological attack isn't going to make the nation actually end. Dissolution and disunion will be self-inflicted.
We didn't evolve to accept intellectual feudalism or some kind of knowledge Forest Law in any form.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
There it is. The classic, all time, full bore, scientifically confirmed explanation of what authoritarianism is.
Everyone has a little authoritarian in them, especially at the point of being "fed up" with others, where ever that is. Therefore, everyone needs to check themselves against it. True civil libertarians (non-Ron Paul types) excel us all in this capability and this makes them what they are.
Maybe there are very extreme circumstances in which some aspects of the civil society's foundations work against civil society. Lincoln thought he found some.
One thing we know, The doings of Julian Assange and Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden and Walter Binney and John Kiriakou and Walter Drake and all the rest of the people who acted in accordance with the values all Americans and the Founding Fathers were inculcated with do not represent those circumstances.
It's amazing to me how unsophisticated the response has been from the administration and by proxy the NSA itself. Presumably they have multiple, best-course-of-action for any eventuality all analyzed beforehand and mapped out. Is THIS response what they have on the books? IS this the best unlimited access to the nations best social and cultural thinkers can produce?
Maybe Assange acted with disregard to national security, he claims to have tried to vet the documents with the NSA and CIA and State Dept but they refused to engage him the way they would have WaPo or the Times. Who knows? Anyways, there's a lot conceptual space between THAT and being a drone worthy terrorist or a traitor. Ditto on down the line.
What's the lesson for us in this specific incident? For the sake of your career, don't drink and Twitter ? Read The Authoritarians at least once a year ? Perform a thorough, searching, honest and skeptical self examination of your values and actions at least as often as you get a haircut?
the FDCA does not apply to student loans.
http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Confidential-Secrets-Company-Know---/dp/0312337361/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376614268&sr=1-1
Best book I ever read about employment. You know corporations and HR personnel conspire against employees and what's more it's institutionalized but you probably don't know the gory details. Well, there they are.
I would say always give notice because you effectively have no power in the workplace whatever the law says.
Workplaces are effectively like 17th century pirate ships, where you are a member of a pirate crew and you work and get paid according to your terms but there's nothing like "justice" on that pirate ship. The captains and ranking mates are, if facts were known, probably some form of criminal and you wouldn't think of going against the larger group for any reason at all.
Employers have ways around law-breaking, employment-killing slander including but not limited to grapevines, coded speech "is she eligible for rehire?", and even tone of voice . Good luck busting them for any of that.
If you want a meaningful workplace then the American solution is to work for yourself. that is to say, for your customers or the market. It's amazing to me that after a few years working virtually any job in America , all employees aren't giving this a shot.
Oh wait, that's what H1-Bs are for - they don't have that option. I think those ships are called "slave" ships.
Just one.
OK then, what does that imply for you ? It's in the current nature of Bitcoin that all your Bitcoins ARE in one basket and you should disaster plan accordingly.
How about making Shakespeare less boring and NOT seeking a patent. I mean, you have all the money already.