This is true also. places like HomeDepot, who have a lot of money that's "doing nothing" overnight literally invest it for the 8 hours they're not open, then take it back again, with profit. A small amount of money from a lot of people sitting in your account for even a short time can turn quite a tidy profit- a profit they make because they are able to reliably gate, through the device of manipulating the user interface people have to use to get their money out, just how many people take out their money.
The poor have no representation in our government. None.
Please don't tell me these organizations aren't stocked to the gills, from head to tail with sociopaths. It's long past time we stop spending money to bail them out, undo the damage in other people's lives they've done, and in this case spend time writing new legislation to stop them from doing something they know perfectly well they should not be doing - exploiting the lowest paid workers in society for everything they can , until the Congress gets around to making it illegal.
It's so outrageous and such an egregious evacuation of all moral responsibility you have to ask yourself is it just a money grab until Congress acts or is it deliberately designed to provoke the legislation-reaction and designed to be used as a bargaining chip, something their political allies in Congress can use to bargain in exchange for some other , less immediately outrageous but more systemically poisonous , "deregulation".
The whole issue is virtually made-for-Democratiuc moral outrage and gives the Republican something to "trade away", something for the Democrats to parade around as a victory and all the while Wells Fargo, Goddamn Sachs and Bunch of Assholes are gorging themselves in their box seats watching their favorite blood-sport, raping the poor and defenseless.
Don't doubt for a minute is the META level the 1% thinks at, this is exactly what preoccupies them. When what you personally decide to do or not do results in legislation, then that's something worth considering the implications of. Of course, you and I don't spend time doing that because what we decide to do this morning doesn't result in legislation, but if for some reason it did, it wouldn't be long until you understood that you have the power to create horses for the horse-trading bazaar Congress ultimately is.
That is, when Congress is working at all.
I would go further and say that instituting these fees is an example of collusive signalling between banks. One does it and the others see. Each knows internally it's going to be legislatively forbidden soon enough. They recognize in it a Congressional bargaining chip, as do members of both political parties who know how to hit a softball when one is lobbed at them.
No one has to say anything explicit to anyone. Someone makes a move and everyone else follows on. From a certain, naive perspective, it's market based response, a decision to enter a profitable market on the part of competing players.
In reality it's an play to influence legislation on another, much more potentially profitable issue . No one can prove anything. There was no collusion to be proved (and we all know what high standards for proof the DoJ has for the coke snorting class ) and no one is coordinating to do anything.
I don't buy it. This goes well beyond the mere presumed sociopathy of Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon and their henchmen. I smell a too-stinky rat. Far far too stinky.
This is what you get when you think you know so much more and so much more deeply than Joe and Jane Average and feel like it's your privilege to unilaterally impose on them your secret interpretation of law....and then they find out.
If you had asked , if you had been forthright and made your case honestly in the court of public opinion, supposing that people were convinced by your reasoning, these kinds of problems wouldn't be burying on you now.
In the event they weren't so convinced, then maybe that's telling you something, like, perhaps you're wrong in a direction and a magnitude that is a function of your unique job stresses.
If you had a little faith in the post -enlightenment, fuck that , the post Magna Carta view that the majority of people people have a right to due process and their understanding of complicated issues deserves to be addressed then the use of encrypted email and encrypted surfing wouldn't be skyrocketing right now, creating logistical and computing headaches even for you.
I have heard Snowden causally called "narcissistic" by commentators on TV who apparently barely grasp what that concept refers to. In fact, if there's a narcissist in the house, I humbly suggest to the individuals within your organization who have gilded themselves in this secrecy and who have sought for and found ways to deceive the American public "for their own good" that those individuals look in the mirror.
Because assuming you are inherently more competent, in fact uniquely and solely competent, to decide how these issues before us ought to be handled (the merely pro-forma, rubber-stamping flotilla of conservative cronies in the FISA court notwithstanding ) is pretty symptomatic of narcissistic personality disorder.
And deciding unilaterally that other people whose lives you effect have no right to know how you might effect them, whose highly personal information you gather and analyze and flag and then , with the blessing of same FISA court peer into are beneath a frank, thorough and truthful discussion of the wheres and hows and whys of same, well, deciding those things unilaterally and being dismissive of input from other sources is pretty symptomatic of narcissistic personality disorder.
And when asked about any of this, stonewalling and lying and attacking the truth tellers amongst us who point out what you're doing- when it comes right down to it, doing outside of the view of democratic process you're sworn to defend - is pretty symptomatic of narcissistic personality disorder.
I used to defend you, but even I am deciding you've erred; you've gone off the tracks at the very least, by attempting to unilaterally force down people's throats that which is necessary, without first making a case for it and worse, believing they could never understand.
You've failed utterly to engage the people whose consent you ultimately need, if not according to your secret interpretation of law, then in fact, in reality.
Whoever told you that to ask for forgiveness is a lot easier than to ask for permission lied to you.There may be no forgiveness in the hearts of people if "trust" is taken as the relevant form forgiveness in this case. Now THAT is serious and long-lasting damage to national security.
And what is all this costing you? And what is that going to cost you going forward? And what is that going to cost us all going forward?
I share your frustration about people. A lot people are reality-denying idiots, and sworn to it to the bitter end. But no democracy can survive acting as though the majority of the public is such.
And we cease to be a democracy when our officials not just mutter that amongst themselves in contempt disgust and frustration, but start to act on it.
I have. It sucks. It's not actually a city, it's more like a long series of 80s era malls which have been reworked to house Trader Joes and suchlike.
The grocery stores are like, C- grade, the place is sprawled out all over and the downtown, which is largely irrelevant to what's know as Silicon Valley- Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, is unremarkable , dull and smallish. The housing it of course through the roof in price while being only mediocre , find-it-anywhere 80s and 90s style apartments.
The houses are just ordinary ranch houses albeit with 750k price tags. really, the whole place was better, just *better* before Fairchild Semi-conductor started it on the path that is now Silicon Valley.
I was only too happy to get out of there. Nearly any place whose name you know, SF, Portland, Austin, etc has more to offer someone looking for something to do on a weekend never mind NY NY or Boston or San Diego or even Kansas City has more to offer young, single people...
Step right up and get yer patent because the PURPOSE to which data is put , the semantic intention of the consumers of the data is now a distinguishing factor which permits another, new, patent to be applied.
I'd write more but I am getting a patent on capturing the data stream of people looking for a information used in job searches...
Fuck, the Dewey Decimal system of categorization is loaded with potential patents one for each topic when people search on. We've barely begun to mine the gold in them yar hills.
Oh hell yeah sign me up I want M$ to have a detailed records of my moods over a span of years so it can
1) be used against me in a court of law somehow (are you prone to anger? are you moody ? Mr. Maykabuck , are you an expert in mood disorders and what can you tell us about the defendant from this record? )
2) be used to deny me a job, without me ever knowing !
3) used to compromise me in some other way I am not creative enough to think of..
Naww.. what am I worry about....M$ would never do that....
The officials who oversaw this debacle should be relieved of office by the taxpayers. Enough is enough. If you can't parse reality, if you can't understand multi-syllabic words like "hyperbole" then please do the taxpayers of Texas a favor and find a job for yourself that doesn't require you to.
Can you link me to a relevant explanation of Bitcoin technology? I haven't followed it so closely on a technical level. It has to be a series of hashes, the running accumulation of which, should any of them be changed, be detectable. IS this what Bitcoin is?
I think this has to do with the future. In the future, criminals will be worse, as in, technology will deliver to them the ability to do much worse with much less, just as it will deliver to you the ability to do much more with much less. That's what technology does.
The thing is, in the history of warfare, the ability to inflict damage long ago exceeded the ability to withstand that damage. It's no longer even a contest. If you want to survive, you can't let the enemy get the first shot off. You have to act preemptively because the level of destruction is so great relative to armor or protection available , offense has an overwhelming advantage. This is only going to get truer in the future, and not just truer, but truer of smaller and smaller groups of individuals. It's about the dynamics which will be present in the near future.
What I am taking away from this is, the world of security: FBI, CIA NSA MI6 etc. don't believe they can explain that fact to their civilian populations. They can't say "we're tracking everyone because of this good reason.. we know this is going to happen" because they don't believe people will follow their logic. It's just not in the realm of most imaginations to think in this way and take it seriously as a reason for action today.
We can't even get people signed onto climate change, a fact about the climate and pollution, despite the pronouncements of the world's civilian scientists. What is a politically significant proportion of people's reaction? It's a conspiracy. Who is conspiring? The scientists. For what reason? Money. What money? Grant money....
With THAT as your baseline, you can see what quandary they find themselves in.
It's their job to defend America. Americans are provably incapable of processing distressing facts about future reality.
But it's still their job to defend America.
Telling Americans "yes, we're tracking everything, and we will shortly be recording all telephone calls and everything else and yes, that's why we're building out in Utah, plus we have storage technology you don't even know exists..." and then trying to tell them that the reason they're doing this is because DIY genetic sequencing and DIY bioinformatics and DIY fab machines and less-than-state-actors getting a hold of nano technology is going to potentially put so much capability for such destructive offense into such small groups' hands that knowing everything everyone is doing all the time is basically the only way we're even going to have a fighting chance of preserving civilization.
Yeah, Americans will understand that. Not. Americans will insist, as people on slashdot do everyday, that the REAL reason is fascism and a lust for power.
Worse yet, considering all angles of this is that this technology being developed to protect us actually may lead to fascism just because it is so powerful. People with a lust for power, or as history calls them ideologues convinced of their own world view.... Hitler Pol Pot, Stalin, David Kordesh, Jim Jones , are in no short supply at any given moment in any given organization.
So you see what's happening. We are being lied to, but not for nefarious reasons,at least those reasons aren't nefarious yet. The world is actually becoming less safe, far less safe far faster than people understand or would accept.
The intelligence agencies have to react to the threats they know are real. They have to also accept what Americans are telling them indirectly about their limited ability to process reality. It's a no win / must lie situation for them.
It's also true that in the darkness those lies create, there's room for the realization of the most paranoid American's fears about their government.
We have to bring everything out of the dark, starting with our fellow American and their rejection of science and reality. It's an aspect of human nature to reject unpleasant facts and even to frame those facts as the lies of conspirators. We have to overcome this aspect of our psy
Yeah I agree something like this. An independent auditor . It';s not even necessary for the auditor to have access tot he semantics, just the hash. Can these hashes be defeated? This is expert territory, at least more expert than me.
As far as entering false information, sure but there are issues with that involving contradicting other parts of reality that make it hard. It's hard (I think) to isolate a certain part of reality away from every other part so you can manipulate it without creating a contradiction in the record, or at least, a very unlikely and suspicious circumstance. It's just another form of lying. Lies spin out of out of control for just this reason.
This is a thing. This is something we should be actively floating around as a serious issue. This should be taken up by people with the platforms and reputations to make it a thing, a discussion point, something they can't ignore.
I actually think that most of the people involved with intelligence work would welcome this, excepting the people we have to worry about in the first place. Their work product is to know reality, to know the truth and relay it to policy makers. If people are manipulating the input, then they're manipulating them also. If you dig around a little in history you'll see that there's been this kind of tension between analysts and policy makers on more than one occasion; we have to suppose it bubbles up to the surface less often than it occurs in reality. There's probably skirmishes like this at the departmental levels and between factions and personalities often. Just extrapolating my own civilian organization experience here.
Contempt for untruth , for non-reality has to be grounding principle in intelligence circles, along with doing nothing to hurt the nation and lose reputation with the public. Absent any of those, and organizational effectiveness is massively compromised.
People should talk about this. This should be a meme.
If you believe, as I do (and even if you don't ) , that we can't do law enforcement without databases like this, then I submit we have an engineering challenge here.
We need stores of data which are designed to be "evidential" or "purely factual" in nature and once an entry is written, it can't be changed at a later time to have another value. I am using the word database here but I am pretty sure it's more like a "store" .
Is there a one way, write-once technology which is provably tamper proof? Can one be designed?
The scenario I am trying to prevent is the most obvious one where a malefactor, at some possibly distant date after information about their target has been recorded, attempts to change that information to produce a perception or suspicion or even proof of "guilt".
It's not just a theoretical worry. It's not much different than what the Texas legislature attempted to do with its own record yesterday. Seen in a certain way, they attempted to "frame" Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, as having not begun her filibuster in time.
This is benign compared to what a Dick Cheney or Richard Pearle or Donald Rumsfeld type could / would do with some career analysts' whereabouts, phone records etc. etc. who displeased them ala Valerie Plame. Sure, Scooter Libby went to jail for the crime, but I think we all know who he was protecting.
It's not even slightly far fetched and the consequences couldn't be more corrosive to democracy. In fact, just the potential for this kind of manipulation could under the right circumstances lead to a widespread loss of faith in all law enforcement on the part of the general public. That itself is unacceptably corrosive and dangerous to the republic.
So how do we solve this problem so it can't be "unsolved" by some domestic Axis Of Evil ? A running, recorded one way hash on the totality of input seems unworkable , but I am not an expert.....
It's true. But some of the dirtiest have been grandfathered in. They're counted as a prexisting condition and permitted to continue operating. With this change in policy, those will be forced offline.
Tying the Keystone XL to emissions is clever. Sure the tar sands are amongst the filthiest forms of oil , but if emissions are limited, it really doesn't matter since emissions is the point of the sword that kills and everything else is, in the final analysis irrelevant.
If XL is not built, there is nothing stopping the oil from coming in on rail and it's not clear how punishing that would be to the industry.
Emissions are the business end of all policy. Going after emissions is exactly the right thing to do. It creates the environment where innovative technologies that cut emissions are differentially rewarded by the marketplace. Nothing like enlisting greed in your cause.
If big oil and coal want to develop a zero emission technology then they can light this shit on fire until there's none left and it wouldn't matter one bit.
Another great thing about this policy is it will force the retirement of some of the dirtiest fucking coal plants around the country and stop the creation of new dirty ones since investors aren't going to invest in them if they're never going to see the light of day.
This is exactly the right message to send. Make carbon emission expensive and prohibit the worst of it. Spend big on R and D.
The question is - is a secret interpretation of a law legal?
Is a secret interpretation of a law which differs radically from that law legal?
Is something legal until a court or Congress explicitly says it's not?
Snowden thinks not and a lot of slashdotters think it's not.
The whole concept of a secret interpretation is fairly creepy. I am not a legal expert, so I sure would like to here this vigorously debated. Secret interpretation of a law which departs significantly from the presumed interpretation just sounds like an invitation to law breaking, whatever the intentions of the people involved.
One of the things I take from this is the national security apparatus has collectively come to the conclusion that Americans can't handle the truth. They think they've seen so far into the future that Americans just wouldn't follow them, would agree with them, even if they explained it to them.
It may be true. You have to entertain the possibility that that is indeed the case or you're not taking giving sides of the argument their due weight.
It may not be true. They were mistaken in Vietnam. They were NOT mistaken in the run up to the Iraq War, but Cheney and Team-B falsified intelligence and fed it to Powell and Tenent went along with it. Then Cheney and Rumsfeld and Fife and Wolfowitz and Pearle and all the rest of the neocons blamed the CIA. Now people believe it was faulty intelligence when it wasn't. Cheny et. al. defied the CIA analysts.
It's important to keep history straight.
But here it looks like , if the face value of this narrative is to be believed, that the intelligence agencies have essentially decided that what they're afraid of is to a large degree the American people. They have something gamed out whereby the nation is threatened from within.
As everyone has said, only idiot-terrorists use the internet to plan etc. Maybe they do try to slip one by, but at any rate THEY know we're at least machine reading everything they write ; only Americans didn't know that.
So what are they afraid of?
One idea is that the trajectory of the level of destructive power capable of being wielded by a very small group or worse, one person is going to be so great that the only way to protect ourselves and society is a panopticon of a type.
Another idea is - global warming. They know it's going to cause massive social upheaval (because hey! it's real and we're doing nothing about it) . Do they foresee the day when a significant part of the American-denier public attempts to either secede or otherwise use violence? Do they see the collapse of the eco-system as inherently destabilizing and they need to target the leaders of the various radical movements which will inevitably arise?
It's hard to say what's going on here. It's hard to say if the whole thing is not a dog and pony show designed to get Americans debating this and other programs like it, because we weren't doing it before Snowden that's for sure.
Are they themselves afraid of the power a program like this gives people.. some future set of people like Cheney and like Rumsfeld and like Fife and like Wolfowitz.. barely submerged sociopaths who will do absolutely anything to gain and hold power.
Do they want the American public to rise up and reject it for that reason- because it is a threat to any democracy?
Or are they looking for approval from Americans.. to clear the air once and for all and get this and other programs like it officially stamped CLEARED so they're not hiding behind "secret interpretations of laws"?
It's hard to say. How Snowden shakes out is something to watch. Whether Americans and Congress take action to limit these programs is another. How forcefully the intelligence community reacts is another.
I would be slow to assume I knew what exactly was happening and who was trying to achieve what.
I accidentally forgot to put in quotes the person I was quoting. You might want read my post again. I understand that global warming is a real emergency. The poster I was replying to doesn't.
I can prove what you're saying in a fucking test tube filled with CO2, as stopper and little sunshine. We've known this since the 19th century at least. Greenhouse gases is the reason Venus is hotter than Mercury, despite Mercury being close to the Sun by far.
Here's how to not get tired of repeating the same facts over and over again.
Someone reading what you're saying to rebut some asshole denier is encountering these facts for the very first time. To them, they're new and significant. Arguing with denier trolls is therefore just a platform, another great opportunity to get new, thinking people headed towards the facts after which they'll take over the controls.
Climate Change has little direct relationship to carbon emissions from human industry. It's not within our control.
Let's see that's the glib throw-off comment and lay opinion one anonymous non-scientist on slashdot vs. the collective opinions of the world's PhDs who have spent their lives studying this problem.
Yeah the more you vote third party the further away from your goal you get. So if your goal matters to you , then you'll think things through.
It is a material fact about the United States that baring dramatic, unforeseen events which cause an equally dramatic exodus from one or both parties, voting third party means taking your vote away from the candidate you otherwise would have voted for.
(In the case such defection does occur, no one will miss it and you'll be just one of hundreds of millions doing the same.)
If enough others had done what you're proposing to do last election and Romney had been elected , we would not be looking at anyone saying or doing anything at all on climate change.
And would a problem of special significance. Unlike the demands for publicly funded elections, or gay marriage, or patent reform, or universal health care, or even action on pollution and saving the environment , endangered species and first growth forests etc , acting on climate change is acting to diffuse a quite literal, if unconventional, ticking time bomb for which the timer is now saying..10..09...08...07...06.
If it were anything else with a different dynamic- a longer time frame, say, or only personal or even national scale misfortune with ultimately reversible or at least recoverable consequences, then I'd be with you and your effort would have merit.
Unfortunately, the time frame in which to act on global warming is now virtually "yesterday or before" and the scale of the disaster is literally global and the end product is the permanent extinction of civilization.
Conservatives and the Republican party have told you time and time again they they intend to do nothing about global warming because, variously, it's not caused by man, or it will be too expensive, or it isn't really happening , or it's going to be great for everyone.
Since it's progress in no way causally related to the time frame needed to change American politics, and since it's going overachieve in making all your worst nightmares for the environment come true, I humbly suggest to you that your plan is one of the worst possible plans you could come up with.
If we survive, it will because we continue to bring all the political pressure to this problem that we can, because while the solution is scientific and technical, the problem is political. The thus far intractable problem itself resides inside the mind of your fellow American.
We could, right now, implement an affordable solution. The reason we're not doing that is 100% political.
Putting down your sword when you reach the field of battle is a good way to achieve nothing except of course get yourself and everyone who's depending on you killed.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true also. places like HomeDepot, who have a lot of money that's "doing nothing" overnight literally invest it for the 8 hours they're not open, then take it back again, with profit. A small amount of money from a lot of people sitting in your account for even a short time can turn quite a tidy profit- a profit they make because they are able to reliably gate, through the device of manipulating the user interface people have to use to get their money out, just how many people take out their money.
The poor have no representation in our government. None.
Please don't tell me these organizations aren't stocked to the gills, from head to tail with sociopaths. It's long past time we stop spending money to bail them out, undo the damage in other people's lives they've done, and in this case spend time writing new legislation to stop them from doing something they know perfectly well they should not be doing - exploiting the lowest paid workers in society for everything they can , until the Congress gets around to making it illegal.
It's so outrageous and such an egregious evacuation of all moral responsibility you have to ask yourself is it just a money grab until Congress acts or is it deliberately designed to provoke the legislation-reaction and designed to be used as a bargaining chip, something their political allies in Congress can use to bargain in exchange for some other , less immediately outrageous but more systemically poisonous , "deregulation".
The whole issue is virtually made-for-Democratiuc moral outrage and gives the Republican something to "trade away", something for the Democrats to parade around as a victory and all the while Wells Fargo, Goddamn Sachs and Bunch of Assholes are gorging themselves in their box seats watching their favorite blood-sport, raping the poor and defenseless.
Don't doubt for a minute is the META level the 1% thinks at, this is exactly what preoccupies them. When what you personally decide to do or not do results in legislation, then that's something worth considering the implications of. Of course, you and I don't spend time doing that because what we decide to do this morning doesn't result in legislation, but if for some reason it did, it wouldn't be long until you understood that you have the power to create horses for the horse-trading bazaar Congress ultimately is.
That is, when Congress is working at all.
I would go further and say that instituting these fees is an example of collusive signalling between banks. One does it and the others see. Each knows internally it's going to be legislatively forbidden soon enough. They recognize in it a Congressional bargaining chip, as do members of both political parties who know how to hit a softball when one is lobbed at them.
No one has to say anything explicit to anyone. Someone makes a move and everyone else follows on. From a certain, naive perspective, it's market based response, a decision to enter a profitable market on the part of competing players.
In reality it's an play to influence legislation on another, much more potentially profitable issue . No one can prove anything. There was no collusion to be proved (and we all know what high standards for proof the DoJ has for the coke snorting class ) and no one is coordinating to do anything.
I don't buy it. This goes well beyond the mere presumed sociopathy of Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon and their henchmen. I smell a too-stinky rat. Far far too stinky.
Dear NSA,
This is what you get when you think you know so much more and so much more deeply than Joe and Jane Average and feel like it's your privilege to unilaterally impose on them your secret interpretation of law ....and then they find out.
If you had asked , if you had been forthright and made your case honestly in the court of public opinion, supposing that people were convinced by your reasoning, these kinds of problems wouldn't be burying on you now.
In the event they weren't so convinced, then maybe that's telling you something, like, perhaps you're wrong in a direction and a magnitude that is a function of your unique job stresses.
If you had a little faith in the post -enlightenment, fuck that , the post Magna Carta view that the majority of people people have a right to due process and their understanding of complicated issues deserves to be addressed then the use of encrypted email and encrypted surfing wouldn't be skyrocketing right now, creating logistical and computing headaches even for you.
I have heard Snowden causally called "narcissistic" by commentators on TV who apparently barely grasp what that concept refers to. In fact, if there's a narcissist in the house, I humbly suggest to the individuals within your organization who have gilded themselves in this secrecy and who have sought for and found ways to deceive the American public "for their own good" that those individuals look in the mirror.
Because assuming you are inherently more competent, in fact uniquely and solely competent, to decide how these issues before us ought to be handled (the merely pro-forma, rubber-stamping flotilla of conservative cronies in the FISA court notwithstanding ) is pretty symptomatic of narcissistic personality disorder.
And deciding unilaterally that other people whose lives you effect have no right to know how you might effect them, whose highly personal information you gather and analyze and flag and then , with the blessing of same FISA court peer into are beneath a frank, thorough and truthful discussion of the wheres and hows and whys of same, well, deciding those things unilaterally and being dismissive of input from other sources is pretty symptomatic of narcissistic personality disorder.
And when asked about any of this, stonewalling and lying and attacking the truth tellers amongst us who point out what you're doing- when it comes right down to it, doing outside of the view of democratic process you're sworn to defend - is pretty symptomatic of narcissistic personality disorder.
I used to defend you, but even I am deciding you've erred; you've gone off the tracks at the very least, by attempting to unilaterally force down people's throats that which is necessary, without first making a case for it and worse, believing they could never understand.
You've failed utterly to engage the people whose consent you ultimately need, if not according to your secret interpretation of law, then in fact, in reality.
Whoever told you that to ask for forgiveness is a lot easier than to ask for permission lied to you .There may be no forgiveness in the hearts of people if "trust" is taken as the relevant form forgiveness in this case. Now THAT is serious and long-lasting damage to national security.
And what is all this costing you? And what is that going to cost you going forward? And what is that going to cost us all going forward?
I share your frustration about people. A lot people are reality-denying idiots, and sworn to it to the bitter end. But no democracy can survive acting as though the majority of the public is such.
And we cease to be a democracy when our officials not just mutter that amongst themselves in contempt disgust and frustration, but start to act on it.
I have. It sucks. It's not actually a city, it's more like a long series of 80s era malls which have been reworked to house Trader Joes and suchlike.
The grocery stores are like, C- grade, the place is sprawled out all over and the downtown, which is largely irrelevant to what's know as Silicon Valley- Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, is unremarkable , dull and smallish. The housing it of course through the roof in price while being only mediocre , find-it-anywhere 80s and 90s style apartments.
The houses are just ordinary ranch houses albeit with 750k price tags. really, the whole place was better, just *better* before Fairchild Semi-conductor started it on the path that is now Silicon Valley.
I was only too happy to get out of there. Nearly any place whose name you know, SF, Portland, Austin, etc has more to offer someone looking for something to do on a weekend never mind NY NY or Boston or San Diego or even Kansas City has more to offer young, single people ...
Maybe it has great grade schools...
Step right up and get yer patent because the PURPOSE to which data is put , the semantic intention of the consumers of the data is now a distinguishing factor which permits another, new, patent to be applied.
I'd write more but I am getting a patent on capturing the data stream of people looking for a information used in job searches...
Fuck, the Dewey Decimal system of categorization is loaded with potential patents one for each topic when people search on. We've barely begun to mine the gold in them yar hills.
yeeeeeeHAW !!!!
And this will force me to buy a product no one wants....
The harder you squeeze the rebel alliance, the more they they slip through your fingers. .....
Oh hell yeah sign me up I want M$ to have a detailed records of my moods over a span of years so it can
1) be used against me in a court of law somehow (are you prone to anger? are you moody ? Mr. Maykabuck , are you an expert in mood disorders and what can you tell us about the defendant from this record? )
2) be used to deny me a job, without me ever knowing !
3) used to compromise me in some other way I am not creative enough to think of..
Naww.. what am I worry about....M$ would never do that....
The officials who oversaw this debacle should be relieved of office by the taxpayers. Enough is enough. If you can't parse reality, if you can't understand multi-syllabic words like "hyperbole" then please do the taxpayers of Texas a favor and find a job for yourself that doesn't require you to.
Perhaps become a Sunday morning commentator.
Can you link me to a relevant explanation of Bitcoin technology? I haven't followed it so closely on a technical level. It has to be a series of hashes, the running accumulation of which, should any of them be changed, be detectable. IS this what Bitcoin is?
I think this has to do with the future. In the future, criminals will be worse, as in, technology will deliver to them the ability to do much worse with much less, just as it will deliver to you the ability to do much more with much less. That's what technology does.
The thing is, in the history of warfare, the ability to inflict damage long ago exceeded the ability to withstand that damage. It's no longer even a contest. If you want to survive, you can't let the enemy get the first shot off. You have to act preemptively because the level of destruction is so great relative to armor or protection available , offense has an overwhelming advantage. This is only going to get truer in the future, and not just truer, but truer of smaller and smaller groups of individuals. It's about the dynamics which will be present in the near future.
What I am taking away from this is, the world of security: FBI, CIA NSA MI6 etc. don't believe they can explain that fact to their civilian populations. They can't say "we're tracking everyone because of this good reason.. we know this is going to happen" because they don't believe people will follow their logic. It's just not in the realm of most imaginations to think in this way and take it seriously as a reason for action today.
We can't even get people signed onto climate change, a fact about the climate and pollution, despite the pronouncements of the world's civilian scientists. What is a politically significant proportion of people's reaction? It's a conspiracy. Who is conspiring? The scientists. For what reason? Money. What money? Grant money....
With THAT as your baseline, you can see what quandary they find themselves in.
It's their job to defend America. Americans are provably incapable of processing distressing facts about future reality.
But it's still their job to defend America.
Telling Americans "yes, we're tracking everything, and we will shortly be recording all telephone calls and everything else and yes, that's why we're building out in Utah, plus we have storage technology you don't even know exists..." and then trying to tell them that the reason they're doing this is because DIY genetic sequencing and DIY bioinformatics and DIY fab machines and less-than-state-actors getting a hold of nano technology is going to potentially put so much capability for such destructive offense into such small groups' hands that knowing everything everyone is doing all the time is basically the only way we're even going to have a fighting chance of preserving civilization.
Yeah, Americans will understand that. Not. Americans will insist, as people on slashdot do everyday, that the REAL reason is fascism and a lust for power.
Worse yet, considering all angles of this is that this technology being developed to protect us actually may lead to fascism just because it is so powerful. People with a lust for power, or as history calls them ideologues convinced of their own world view.... Hitler Pol Pot, Stalin, David Kordesh, Jim Jones , are in no short supply at any given moment in any given organization.
So you see what's happening. We are being lied to, but not for nefarious reasons ,at least those reasons aren't nefarious yet. The world is actually becoming less safe, far less safe far faster than people understand or would accept.
The intelligence agencies have to react to the threats they know are real. They have to also accept what Americans are telling them indirectly about their limited ability to process reality. It's a no win / must lie situation for them.
It's also true that in the darkness those lies create, there's room for the realization of the most paranoid American's fears about their government.
We have to bring everything out of the dark, starting with our fellow American and their rejection of science and reality. It's an aspect of human nature to reject unpleasant facts and even to frame those facts as the lies of conspirators. We have to overcome this aspect of our psy
Yeah I agree something like this. An independent auditor . It';s not even necessary for the auditor to have access tot he semantics, just the hash. Can these hashes be defeated? This is expert territory, at least more expert than me.
As far as entering false information, sure but there are issues with that involving contradicting other parts of reality that make it hard. It's hard (I think) to isolate a certain part of reality away from every other part so you can manipulate it without creating a contradiction in the record, or at least, a very unlikely and suspicious circumstance. It's just another form of lying. Lies spin out of out of control for just this reason.
This is a thing. This is something we should be actively floating around as a serious issue. This should be taken up by people with the platforms and reputations to make it a thing, a discussion point, something they can't ignore.
I actually think that most of the people involved with intelligence work would welcome this, excepting the people we have to worry about in the first place. Their work product is to know reality, to know the truth and relay it to policy makers. If people are manipulating the input, then they're manipulating them also. If you dig around a little in history you'll see that there's been this kind of tension between analysts and policy makers on more than one occasion; we have to suppose it bubbles up to the surface less often than it occurs in reality. There's probably skirmishes like this at the departmental levels and between factions and personalities often. Just extrapolating my own civilian organization experience here.
Contempt for untruth , for non-reality has to be grounding principle in intelligence circles, along with doing nothing to hurt the nation and lose reputation with the public. Absent any of those, and organizational effectiveness is massively compromised.
People should talk about this. This should be a meme.
All these databases are used as evidence during criminal investigations... this one... the NSA one etc. etc..
Any political operative with read / write access to these databases can fabricate evidence as they see fit. And it's not just theoretical :
http://www.ibtimes.com/changing-timestamp-mystery-continues-after-texas-abortion-bill-defeat-wendy-davis-filibuster-1324549
If you believe, as I do (and even if you don't ) , that we can't do law enforcement without databases like this, then I submit we have an engineering challenge here.
We need stores of data which are designed to be "evidential" or "purely factual" in nature and once an entry is written, it can't be changed at a later time to have another value. I am using the word database here but I am pretty sure it's more like a "store" .
Is there a one way, write-once technology which is provably tamper proof? Can one be designed?
The scenario I am trying to prevent is the most obvious one where a malefactor, at some possibly distant date after information about their target has been recorded, attempts to change that information to produce a perception or suspicion or even proof of "guilt".
It's not just a theoretical worry. It's not much different than what the Texas legislature attempted to do with its own record yesterday. Seen in a certain way, they attempted to "frame" Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, as having not begun her filibuster in time.
This is benign compared to what a Dick Cheney or Richard Pearle or Donald Rumsfeld type could / would do with some career analysts' whereabouts, phone records etc. etc. who displeased them ala Valerie Plame. Sure, Scooter Libby went to jail for the crime, but I think we all know who he was protecting.
It's not even slightly far fetched and the consequences couldn't be more corrosive to democracy. In fact, just the potential for this kind of manipulation could under the right circumstances lead to a widespread loss of faith in all law enforcement on the part of the general public. That itself is unacceptably corrosive and dangerous to the republic.
So how do we solve this problem so it can't be "unsolved" by some domestic Axis Of Evil ? A running, recorded one way hash on the totality of input seems unworkable , but I am not an expert.....
They're a criminal cult who has repeatedly engaged in activities which would have long ago brought down a RICO indictment on any other organization.
Germany gets this one quite right. Scientology is not a religion.
It's true. But some of the dirtiest have been grandfathered in. They're counted as a prexisting condition and permitted to continue operating. With this change in policy, those will be forced offline.
Tying the Keystone XL to emissions is clever. Sure the tar sands are amongst the filthiest forms of oil , but if emissions are limited, it really doesn't matter since emissions is the point of the sword that kills and everything else is, in the final analysis irrelevant.
If XL is not built, there is nothing stopping the oil from coming in on rail and it's not clear how punishing that would be to the industry.
Emissions are the business end of all policy. Going after emissions is exactly the right thing to do. It creates the environment where innovative technologies that cut emissions are differentially rewarded by the marketplace. Nothing like enlisting greed in your cause.
If big oil and coal want to develop a zero emission technology then they can light this shit on fire until there's none left and it wouldn't matter one bit.
Another great thing about this policy is it will force the retirement of some of the dirtiest fucking coal plants around the country and stop the creation of new dirty ones since investors aren't going to invest in them if they're never going to see the light of day.
This is exactly the right message to send. Make carbon emission expensive and prohibit the worst of it. Spend big on R and D.
Funny. Mod parent up.
The question is - is a secret interpretation of a law legal?
Is a secret interpretation of a law which differs radically from that law legal?
Is something legal until a court or Congress explicitly says it's not?
Snowden thinks not and a lot of slashdotters think it's not.
The whole concept of a secret interpretation is fairly creepy. I am not a legal expert, so I sure would like to here this vigorously debated. Secret interpretation of a law which departs significantly from the presumed interpretation just sounds like an invitation to law breaking, whatever the intentions of the people involved.
One of the things I take from this is the national security apparatus has collectively come to the conclusion that Americans can't handle the truth. They think they've seen so far into the future that Americans just wouldn't follow them, would agree with them, even if they explained it to them.
It may be true. You have to entertain the possibility that that is indeed the case or you're not taking giving sides of the argument their due weight.
It may not be true. They were mistaken in Vietnam. They were NOT mistaken in the run up to the Iraq War, but Cheney and Team-B falsified intelligence and fed it to Powell and Tenent went along with it. Then Cheney and Rumsfeld and Fife and Wolfowitz and Pearle and all the rest of the neocons blamed the CIA. Now people believe it was faulty intelligence when it wasn't. Cheny et. al. defied the CIA analysts.
It's important to keep history straight.
But here it looks like , if the face value of this narrative is to be believed, that the intelligence agencies have essentially decided that what they're afraid of is to a large degree the American people. They have something gamed out whereby the nation is threatened from within.
As everyone has said, only idiot-terrorists use the internet to plan etc. Maybe they do try to slip one by, but at any rate THEY know we're at least machine reading everything they write ; only Americans didn't know that.
So what are they afraid of?
One idea is that the trajectory of the level of destructive power capable of being wielded by a very small group or worse, one person is going to be so great that the only way to protect ourselves and society is a panopticon of a type.
Another idea is - global warming. They know it's going to cause massive social upheaval (because hey! it's real and we're doing nothing about it) . Do they foresee the day when a significant part of the American-denier public attempts to either secede or otherwise use violence? Do they see the collapse of the eco-system as inherently destabilizing and they need to target the leaders of the various radical movements which will inevitably arise?
It's hard to say what's going on here. It's hard to say if the whole thing is not a dog and pony show designed to get Americans debating this and other programs like it, because we weren't doing it before Snowden that's for sure.
Are they themselves afraid of the power a program like this gives people.. some future set of people like Cheney and like Rumsfeld and like Fife and like Wolfowitz.. barely submerged sociopaths who will do absolutely anything to gain and hold power.
Do they want the American public to rise up and reject it for that reason- because it is a threat to any democracy?
Or are they looking for approval from Americans.. to clear the air once and for all and get this and other programs like it officially stamped CLEARED so they're not hiding behind "secret interpretations of laws"?
It's hard to say. How Snowden shakes out is something to watch. Whether Americans and Congress take action to limit these programs is another. How forcefully the intelligence community reacts is another.
I would be slow to assume I knew what exactly was happening and who was trying to achieve what.
"I'm looking for a new engineering job. I'm in my early 30s.."
Stop. They hate you already.
shelved = "I'll be back"
I accidentally forgot to put in quotes the person I was quoting. You might want read my post again. I understand that global warming is a real emergency. The poster I was replying to doesn't.
"When did Ron Paul, for example, "avoid" an issue?"
UIh, being a denier and hiding your head up your ass pretty well qualifies as "avoiding an issue".
"Avoiding an issue" is not the same as "failing to shoot your ignorant mouth off about absolutely everything".
I can prove what you're saying in a fucking test tube filled with CO2, as stopper and little sunshine. We've known this since the 19th century at least. Greenhouse gases is the reason Venus is hotter than Mercury, despite Mercury being close to the Sun by far.
Here's how to not get tired of repeating the same facts over and over again.
Someone reading what you're saying to rebut some asshole denier is encountering these facts for the very first time. To them, they're new and significant. Arguing with denier trolls is therefore just a platform, another great opportunity to get new, thinking people headed towards the facts after which they'll take over the controls.
Semper Fiidelis.
If some, any, cancer were transmitted through bacteria , then it would produce a infectious footprint in the epidemiological record.
Where is that footprint?
Climate Change has little direct relationship to carbon emissions from human industry. It's not within our control.
Let's see that's the glib throw-off comment and lay opinion one anonymous non-scientist on slashdot vs. the collective opinions of the world's PhDs who have spent their lives studying this problem.
Whom to believe ... whom to believe ....
Yeah the more you vote third party the further away from your goal you get. So if your goal matters to you , then you'll think things through.
It is a material fact about the United States that baring dramatic, unforeseen events which cause an equally dramatic exodus from one or both parties, voting third party means taking your vote away from the candidate you otherwise would have voted for.
(In the case such defection does occur, no one will miss it and you'll be just one of hundreds of millions doing the same.)
If enough others had done what you're proposing to do last election and Romney had been elected , we would not be looking at anyone saying or doing anything at all on climate change.
And would a problem of special significance. Unlike the demands for publicly funded elections, or gay marriage, or patent reform, or universal health care, or even action on pollution and saving the environment , endangered species and first growth forests etc , acting on climate change is acting to diffuse a quite literal, if unconventional, ticking time bomb for which the timer is now saying ..10..09...08...07...06.
If it were anything else with a different dynamic- a longer time frame, say, or only personal or even national scale misfortune with ultimately reversible or at least recoverable consequences, then I'd be with you and your effort would have merit.
Unfortunately, the time frame in which to act on global warming is now virtually "yesterday or before" and the scale of the disaster is literally global and the end product is the permanent extinction of civilization.
Conservatives and the Republican party have told you time and time again they they intend to do nothing about global warming because, variously, it's not caused by man, or it will be too expensive, or it isn't really happening , or it's going to be great for everyone.
Since it's progress in no way causally related to the time frame needed to change American politics, and since it's going overachieve in making all your worst nightmares for the environment come true, I humbly suggest to you that your plan is one of the worst possible plans you could come up with.
If we survive, it will because we continue to bring all the political pressure to this problem that we can, because while the solution is scientific and technical, the problem is political. The thus far intractable problem itself resides inside the mind of your fellow American.
We could, right now, implement an affordable solution. The reason we're not doing that is 100% political.
Putting down your sword when you reach the field of battle is a good way to achieve nothing except of course get yourself and everyone who's depending on you killed.