Musk needs to get on the reverse commute side of things. Works great for me in Silicon Valley. Everyone is stuck in traffic *going the other way* on my way to work. Ditto in the evening.
I am really in a state of not knowing WRT to genetically engineered crops. I wish I could get clear on this issue.
On the one hand, it's a fact that all crops have been deliberately genetically engineered in the Mendelian sense over a longish (or even less longish) period of time. So we're all eating that and doing pretty well.
On the other it seems entirely possible that ADM or Monsanto could create a mutation or otherwise genetically altered crop whose unique dangers we would not find out about until it was too late for a very very large number of people, perhaps everyone. Asserting the opposite seems like the grossest hubris to me.
" 'The Internet has enabled copyright owners to make available their works to consumers around the world, but has also enabled others to do so without any compensation for copyright owners"
I think we all know where this is going. Total extinction of any notion of "fair use" so that every image you ever did a right click-->save to file on will be an independent criminal act punishable by not more than 5 years in jail and a $50,000 fine.
Let me tell you what this industry fears the most. Let me tell you what makes the execs in this industry shit their pants and drink too much after work. The idea that you will chose to do something else with your time. The notion that you will choose to spend the half million of so waking hours you have over the course of your life doing something else.
If they can't get those away from you because your attention was directed elsewhere, doing something more engaging, then they're fucked. You want one of my precious hours to look at your Desperate Housewives / Jarhead crap ? You should be so lucky.
I used to just think that people who did mass downloading when they *could* have bought the stuff were total assholes who would just cheat any and all the systems of civil society which make things tolerable for everyone. I still sort of think that, but what I don't think is this represents a good application of our justice system and my tax dollars -
What I think is this is a sado-system designed to turn even the meekest and most law abiding of our citizens, the ones that get up every morning to got to their underpaid , dead end jobs just to keep their noses and their children's noses slightly above water, into criminals.
This is a system run by the financial elite solely for their benefit . Elites whose mega-crimes go completely unpunished no matter how globally catastrophic their effects and how many people's lives are completely destroyed by their criminal actions. This is a system whose prosecutors look and look at those crimes but can't find anything but reasonable doubt, while the ordinary citizen can be assured they will be punished beyond any definition of reason and beyond all any definition justice for the even the meekest and most innocuous of infractions.
To the publishing houses and record companies and entertainment business and especially to Mickey Mouse and all the diseased and dysfunctional special interest politics he has come to represent to my generation I say this- we're going to take yoru out. We're going to decimate your industry and leave you with nothing- no customers, no interest, no money, and no power.
There's exactly nothing you can do to stop it, counter it, co-opt it or benefit from it. The future in no way includes you irrespective of how broadly you interpret the word "includes". You're all walking dead men, grotesque corpses staggering around, wailing for blood but finding none.
If companies didn't hire brogrammers and fire anyone over 35-50, as they do, then half of Silicon Valley companies would go bankrupt tomorrow. Their entire business model is dependent on H1Bs living five to an apt. and having nothing to do but work.
Oh and about the assholes. The assholes are already there from the top of management on down. Assholes inevitably hire assholes because they unconsciously recognize each other (assholes are a generalization of narcissists, who like themselves a lot) and because there's nothing an asshole has more contempt for than someone showing obvious signs of having a, you know, conscience.
So what you end up with in all these companies is a two tiered caste system of brogrammers and their asshole overseers. Brogrammers are disposable, assholes are inviolate and the whole thing is run on the model of a pirate ship.
And these are the blue chip NASDAQ companies we're talking about. (been there, done that) Beneath that level , the startups it's likely to be the same dynamic but maybe the asshole tier is populated by a runaway-H1B or three.
American business's go-to model is always exploitation of anyone stupid enough to send in their application, ingenuousness in its dealings with its partners and customers and tax evasion to the limit of the law and beyond.
It's the American mindset and it has been around at least since the days of the building of the railroads.
In Germany and Scandinavia and other more, you know, evolved nations it's very different . There's just not the default assumption that the only / best way to get ahead is through exploitation and as much criminality as you think you can get away with or will still be profitable once you're caught.
There they''re more concerned with building quality products and letting the consumer make their choices.
This is what capitalism is supposed to be about, but the US regulatory structure is deliberately kept too weak to enforce anything like what's needed for a a "free market" to flourish for labor or services or anything else.
It's one of the ironies that people can't get past. A strongly regulated environment is the freest. Employees who work fewer hours and have meaningful time for things like vacations, families and maintaining an interest in the broader culture in which they live are just more productive.
Americans are just not that smart. It really sort of comes down to that basic fact. And I say this as an American.
We cannot pass a law that would permit people to know how data about them is being used because the companies who are using that data would be liable for what they are doing.
So if companies start breaking the law early and often, we're obligated to protect them so they can go on doing the same and prevented from stopping them.
Jesus fucking christ.
I'm sorry. I can't help but think that Google is incapable of stopping sucking on the money spurting cock long enough to think about ANYTHING else.
You really can't represent to end users how their data is being used without implicating yourself in criminal and or civil wrong doing?
You have no way of communicating that information at all without also being crushed under the weight of viable lawsuits by scammer attorneys and their *wounded clients*?
Because I think I could do that. I think I could do that in such a way as to make any scammer attorney and their "aggrieved clients " realize they're going to lose and lose big time. I think I could launch an sympathetic educational / PR campaign to virtually all potential jurors which would 1) tell the truth and 2) prevent almost all lawsuit abuse.
That is, if I wasn't doing anything against the law.
Hey Google. Privacy is a thing of the past- get over it. If you're doing something online you don't want people to know about, then maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
HTML5 interfaces will always suck just the way javascript HTML 4 interfaces suck- you can't take a server hit every time you want to react to a mouse movement or process a keystroke.
For a large number of apps, this actually doesn't matter but for people who really do creative work with their computer , the UI and a very large amount of processing of local data will have to take place on the local machine.
I suppose their are entities out there actively plotting the end of personal general purpose PC but to say that they somehow control what direction the world will go is paranoiac to the well-known Kaczinsky Limit.
Benefit, productivity, competitive advantage, goodness, fun whatever gets maximized when the cloud/server/web / whatever is utilized for what its good for - communication and distribution of content and the processing of truly HUGE data sets or data from a very large number of data sources. .
On that last point, even there the necessity of the cloud is challenged by distributed applications of the SETI type.
I think Adam Smith pretty well had this down with the idea of relative competitive advantage. Servers should not try to do UIs or make believable promises WRT to the security needed for very critical data. Local PCs are easily connected to a wide range of other-generated / other processed data via the web and servers.
" both of whom have had immeasurable impact on issues surrounding technology over recent years.""
Eric Schmidt is just some guy the VC suits FORCED on Larry and Sergei when Google was trying to get funding. Larry and Sergei DRAGGED THEIR FEET and delayed capitulating to this "adult supervision" requirement as long as they could. Since Eric Schmidt is basically just a stand issue schmuck without insight, without vision, they figured they'd be able to "get along" with him - read: roll over him on all important decisions, and they were right.
Schmidt spent his time cheating on his wife ( who is well compensated and probably a little relieved) and chasing after 10s of the sort that had ignored him in high school, but now needed help with their coke addictions, taking them to Burning Man, playing the role of Dr. Strangelove then paying for their rehab
Schmidt is the guy with a knack for the anti-quote - things Google would wish he'd never said, oh like
"With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches [...] We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about."
and
""If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
and
" "most people don't want Google to answer their questions. . . . They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
and
"One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that."
Even the curated collection of things which appear on quotes pages like this one and presumably are intended to show him in his best light merely range from the pedestrian:
" Success is really about being ready for the good opportunities that come before you. It's not to have a detailed plan of everything that you're going to do. You can't plan innovation or inspiration, but you can be ready for it, and when you see it, you can jump on it. "
and
"We have an opportunity for everyone in the world to have access to all the world's information. This has never before been possible. Why is ubiquitous information so profound? It's a tremendous equalizer. Information is power. "
to the weird:
"A mind set in its ways is wasted. Don't do it. "
"If you forgo your plan, you also have to forgo fear. "
to the creepy:
"In a world where everything is remembered and everything is kept forever, you need to live for the future and things you really care about."
This guy and the pile of money that's been shoved under him is the ultimate expression of the American elites' fear of everything which is not mediocre, not "regular" , not tame and predictable. They couldn't have the brains of Google also presume to be the captains of Google because who knows what kind of idealistic fantasies they might become obsessed with and worse, actually realize.
You can read all about how Eric "Lucky" Schmidt washed up on the shore of Tropical Paradise Google and all the other details in Ken Auletta's book . It's just as I described.
" both of whom have had immeasurable impact on issues surrounding technology over recent years.""
Eric Schmidt is just some guy the VC suits FORCED on Larry and Sergei when Google was trying to get funding. Larry and Sergei DRAGGED THEIR FEET and delayed capitulating to this "adult supervision" requirement as long as they could. Since Eric Schmidt is basically just a stand issue schmuck without insight, without vision, they figured they'd be able to "get along" with him - read: roll over him on all important decisions, and they were right.
Schmidt spent his time cheating on his wife ( who is well compensated and probably a little relieved) and chasing after 10s of the sort that had ignored him in high school, but now needed help with their coke addictions, taking them to Burning Man, playing the role of Dr. Strangelove then paying for their rehab
No, seriously.
http://gawker.com/5475332/http://gawker.kinja.com/5499121/photos-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-at-burning-man-with-his-ex+mistress
Schmidt is the guy with a knack for the anti-quote - things Google would wish he'd never said, oh like
"With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches [...] We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about."
and
""If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
and
" "most people don't want Google to answer their questions. . . . They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
and
"One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that."
Even the curated collection of things which appear on quotes pages like this one and presumably are intended to show him in his best light merely range from the pedestrian:
" Success is really about being ready for the good opportunities that come before you. It's not to have a detailed plan of everything that you're going to do. You can't plan innovation or inspiration, but you can be ready for it, and when you see it, you can jump on it. "
and
"We have an opportunity for everyone in the world to have access to all the world's information. This has never before been possible. Why is ubiquitous information so profound? It's a tremendous equalizer. Information is power. "
to the weird:
"A mind set in its ways is wasted. Don't do it. "
"If you forgo your plan, you also have to forgo fear. "
to the creepy:
"In a world where everything is remembered and everything is kept forever, you need to live for the future and things you really care about."
This guy and the pile of money that's been shoved under him is the ultimate expression of the American elites' fear of everything which is not mediocre, not "regular" , not tame and predictable. They couldn't have the brains of Google also presume to be the captains of Google because who knows what kind of idealistic fantasies they might become obsessed with and worse, actually realize.
You can read all about how Eric "Lucky" Schmidt washed up on the shore of Tropical Paradise Google and all the other details in Ken Auletta's book . It's just as I described.
http://www.amazon.com/Googled-End-World-As-Know/dp/0143118048
Look for a profit motive, right? Multiply the number of students by the profit they stood to make off of each student so classified. Someone close enough with enough knowledge of the processes and consequences of being misclassified to put these two things together has to do this.
Just the idea that you'd let a company like this supply AND measure students is a BIG mistake. If there's a chance to screw with the collection and/or processing of the data and one road takes you to greater profit and the other road takes you to lesser profit then you have a built in motivation to make "mistakes".
We're talking about a school text book company, a member in good standing of one of the most exploitative, manipulative RICO-ready industries in existence. One whose hands are filthy with the blood of the next bubble implosion - the trillion of so dollars of unserviceable student loan debt needed to cover, in measure, the massively inflated book prices that benefit not just the coke snorters at the top of this industry's corporate hierarchy but also the universities themselves.
The universities get a cut of cover price and believe me that total is a very, very BIG number. Thus the innumerable new 'versions" of textbooks which come out each year for the sole purpose of destroying the after-market for used text books. The company store was always a profitable idea but this one is astronomically profitable to all conspirators.
Why are you pretending that you have expertise in an area you provably do not- climatology- and making dramatic pronouncements which are directly counter to what people who DO have the requisite educational and research specialization are making? It's great that you have cultivated an impish, child-like , authority-resistant public persona, but science is not really interested in any of that. Science is science and this is a branch of science over which you have no legitimate claim of expertise. So are you planning on at least just stopping talking about climate change?
They're declining because programmers are failing to write programs which can take advantage of the processing power and memory available. My machine is practically as fast as any machine anyone can get with less than US 5000 to spend and it has the practical maximum memory limit, given available MBs, of 32 G. It's not anywhere near fast enough and I run out of memory all the time.
What do I do that taxes my machine? Write code using the popular tools. Search is slow, points-to analysis and all it's kin, the various forms of dependency analysis, are slow and run my machine out of memory all the time.
The build is slow . Everything is slow and I am compromised everywhere.
I could (am now taking a break from ) writing tools to greatly improve my experience of writing code. I could apply those same techniques to a lot of things and it would all productively use- that is not get involved with NP hard computations- three times the memory and three times the computing power I have today, yielding for the user a truly different, better experience.
Programmers are wetting themselves over Android and Apple "apps" right now. That's where all the "innovation" is going right now- to the creation of apps that leverage some combination of geo / picto/friend graph analysis / rate-n-share all aimed at the 12-year old demographic and their intellectual and emotional peers.
At some point the "selling of collected personal data to market researchers as a business model" is going to be oversubscribed / over supplied and the apps and services living on those specific VC fumes will all come down and then this particular moment in programming substance-free app development will be seen for what it was - a lot of fluff with, yes, some stuff. Then programmers will once again start to write programs for categories other than "diversion-enhancement" , not that entertainment is going to go away or is itself necessarily all fluff even when it's surface appearance is quite fluffy .
That's easy: Imagine all men are rapists, all secrets incite terrorism. It's easy if you try. There's no need to determine which threats are real or what level of destruction will occur.
The point is that it's precisely the fact that all men don't HAVE to be dangerous in order to have a civilization-ending terrorist threat. Only a handful. That is a new fact about the world which has no correlate in the past.
The point is precisely that ALL secrets don't have to be nuke how-tos in order to have one be such and for that one secret to fuck us all. That is a new fact about the world which has no correlate in the past.
Where is the battlefield in the 'war on drugs'? As a patriot you need the police to fight this war in your kitchen and your car.
Your literal interpretation of the idea of "war" and concomitant demand to be shown the location of this *war* is not a standard you hold yourself to, yet you mock me for not locating the war I am describing. *Where* is the war on your civil liberties? Where is the battleground? Indeed, where are you civil liberties anyway?
"Point to one", says a hypothetical despot, "and I'll see that it's well guarded."
If you're too literal minded to understand what was a very clear point (I re-read it again to be sure) then you're too literal minded to participate in your democracy and too literal minded for anyone to care what your opinion is.
That's always been the case (since such weapons were built). It's just become possible for anyone to do this. How does government ensure everyone is an obedient patriot?
No, how do WE ensure that no one uses these weapons. We, who want to go on living in a free society, where both "living" and "free" are equally important.
You're doing exactly what I said - you're describing an old threat and saying that the old system handled the old threat. We have a new threat which is sui generis and which requires fundamental change in society just because the fact that the vast majority of people are good DOES NOT suffice to maintain security anymore.
I follow this closely. It's true. It's unfortunate because natural gas has the potential to be key player in reducing CO2 emissions. See this for how we can leverage today's, existing technology into an effective response to global warming.
We need to speak with ONE voice- "fracking" needs to be the most tightly regulated industry in the history of humankind- all but nationalized in fact. No secret formulas. No fracking without studies on everything from earth quakes to CO2 emissions to groundwater contamination and constant detail monitoring. The companies will make their profit, but there is NO room for laissez-faire jack shit.
If you're into exciting unregulated industries with 1000% profit margins, fuck you, go invest in next year's Xmas toy fad. This industry needs to have all the excitement of a yearly WD-40 shareholder stock dividend event.
There's some good, even essential, baby in that bathwater - don't throw it out; regulate the holy fuck out of the entire industry.
OK so a lot of the posts here seem to be coming from the POV that the govt. has no *real* *good* reason to be doing this. It's an easy road to take, but is it right? How do we know when we don't know the nature of the threats we face? Entertain a thought experiment where actually, in reality, the world has come to the point that this law is necessary.
Imagine that it all just gets down to logisitics and time constraints of law enforcement facing off against the leverage bio-terrorism, nano-terrorism and computing power give the Bad Guys.
I am not claiming I know this to be true in reality, just asking you pretend, to be flexible and go there in your mind.
Probably, it's *going* to be true at some point in the future because offensive destructive capability always outpaces and out muscles defensive capability. Always. It's just easier to find a way to impose huge amounts of entropy on the world than to defend against that imposition. Think nuclear bombs. Think grey goo.
So pretend the shape of things to come has arrived. How can we geeks, leverage computers and technology to design a legislative/ judicial / law enforcement / social system so that we can do what we need to do to defend ourselves and still retain and even enhance our Fourth Amendment rights?
There has to be a way to defend not against a nuclear bomb but against losing what makes America America while it defends itself against a nuclear bomb, or looks for the plans for a suitcase nuke or bio-weapon or whatever on someone's computer.
There has to be a way to meet this challenge on the battlefield that *it* has chosen, where the war is *actually* taking place. What everyone 's complaints amount to a kind of griping about the battleground reality has chosen to fight on. You're *insisting* that the battle be fought *over here* on the territory you know well. That's just not the way war works. The enemy in this case is the reality of bio-terrorism and nano--terrorism and nuclear terrorism and ALSO the way that forces law enforcement's hand and ALSO what that in turn means to us. That's the battleground that reality has chosen; either you show up to the fight or you lose it.
All these arguments about the Fourth Amendment are a form of not showing up to the fight, of insisting the battle be fought on your familiar turf.
Science has taken us here, and now we are here. Reality is not going to unwind itself to preserve your idea of privacy or liberty or the Constitution or anything else. That means you have adapt to reality creatively if you want to preserve those things.
The terrorists know they have to dynamically adapt - nothing is EVER easy for them. The government knows it has to react effectively also. We're the sticks in the mud. We're the unchanging old farts who are dug in and refusing to acknowledge change. Our play in this, our imperative, is to conceive of a way to leverage technology in our affairs so that after we've done everything we need to do or can do to protect ourselves , we also can say -"Yes. I am satisfied and secure that I am protected against unreasonable search and seizure, invasion of my privacy and I *know* that my "papers" are not spied upon, the value they represent not stolen from me, or used against me in any way at all that could be characterized as "unfair" by the government. It can't be built on pure trust, on legislative fiat, because no one trusts that all people, current and future, will honor the law . It has to be built on some ground level facts about reality the way cryptography is built around some ground level facts about factoring numbers and multiplicative inverses. Trust and secrecy are bit players in public key crypto compared to what went on before with secret codes and messages. There has to be a way we can devise a system that gives law enforcement the latitude it knows or believes it needs and still unarguably preserves our way of life. We're just not being creative enough here.
We build lots of things all day long. The internet itself is so far away from anything even conceivable to our forefathers, it's effectively realized magic. There *has* to be a way we can build something that can achieve both these ends. We *have* to be that clever.
But look at all the countless people in previous generations who suffered things far far worse than the targeted neutralization of a apocalypse-inducing POV. People in the feudal China or under Stalin or in the Middle Ages, people who lived under despots, were tortured, saw their loved ones tortured then killed, people who reside in some 3rd world hell hole prison tonight because, say, one of their neighbors carried a grudge, or was jealous, and had the political savvy and pull to put them there.
None of the people who came before us chose death over those circumstances; they soldiered on, and we are the beneficiaries of that soldiering on. When things get so bad some part of your brain is telling you it's not worth going on, then you start to live not for yourself but for future generations who will get THIS / this pathological hatred of a rational interpretation of reality right the way we moderns got polio right. There's a reason these people are the way they are, but we don't know what it is. One day, we will know. One day soon, we'll decide that knowing is a top priority for humanity.
One thing is sure- conservatism and civilization are incompatible. In the battle between secular humanism which posits that human (and other) welfare and an egalitarian system of governance is the measure of what is Good and exactly what produces that Good is an ongoing journey of discovery and religious conservatism which posits that what is important is to serve an invisible Santa God and what defines Good was written down in texts once and for all by sheepherders who lived in the Bronze Age, there can be only one winner because of just this circumstance and all that will follow it.
From stem cell research to evolution to global warming , the religious conservative mind which seeks to conserve the old way and the old world views cannot by definition deal with the new world science has birthed and is birthing , faster and faster, deeper and deeper into everything we know about ourselves and understand as ourselves. There is no place of the Jesus / Allah people in the genetic revolution except to play the role of "the party of no " and terrorists who would sooner blow up the world and everything in it than see their cherished belief systems be rejected by the bulk of humanity, decay and finally perish from the face of the earth.
I would love to see substantiation of the last sentence in your post. The only correlation that's ever been shown between climate change denial and anything else is political affiliation and whether or not you identify as a conservative.
You have a no cost, remote way to claim ownership of something for some amount of time and profit from it and the only "undo" available to your victims involves a lengthy process which itself is only initiated after they've noticed that one of the things they created at some point in their careers which was somewhere on the net has had a DCMA takedown notice applied to it.
It's a scammer's paradise, the moreso since this is India which, with a billion people, we can say with utter confidence that even if you represent the top 0.00001% of depraved, shameless and sociopathic scammers, there's still a million other people just like you.
Retribution from the aggrieved authors can only occur at the end of a time consuming and prohibitively costly trial which itself can only commence once the international disputants are located and brought to court, which in this case turns out to be a country whose system of jurisprudence takes place mostly in fantastically over-crowded, dimly lit, smoky "courtrooms" which most closely resemble a wild west saloon, where sweaty irritable and underpaid judges, prosecutors, defendants and plaintiffs have to literally scream at the top of their lungs just to be heard, or even identify each other, and where you may not even be able to hear the disposition of your case amongst all the chaos, which disposition itself often takes all of 90 seconds, despite which fact this same courtroom has a docket that extends years and possibly even decades into the past.
What can possible go wrong with a system like that?
It's not that we need to assassinate them, it's that we need to turn the power of the government against them and their credibility.
Is that democratic? Is it "fair"? Are we interfering with their Constitutional rights somehow, someway a lawyer could identify ? Probably.
But about anything we have to ask, what are the alternatives and their respective outcomes.? I compare this to the drone program. It's not perfect, but it's what we have now and our hand has been forced into action. We have to use the tools we have, not wait for advent of hypothetical tools which have no unwanted side effects and about which we can all feel good.
That's the justification for the drone program and it's the justification for the government unilaterally acting against the machinery of deniers. I am not saying drone the deniers. I am saying bring the power of the state against them in whatever way is necessary to stop them without reserve. for the purpose of undermining their influence. legitimacy and mind share.
"[a] strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means
Slashdot Mirror
Musk needs to get on the reverse commute side of things. Works great for me in Silicon Valley. Everyone is stuck in traffic *going the other way* on my way to work. Ditto in the evening.
I am really in a state of not knowing WRT to genetically engineered crops. I wish I could get clear on this issue.
On the one hand, it's a fact that all crops have been deliberately genetically engineered in the Mendelian sense over a longish (or even less longish) period of time. So we're all eating that and doing pretty well.
On the other it seems entirely possible that ADM or Monsanto could create a mutation or otherwise genetically altered crop whose unique dangers we would not find out about until it was too late for a very very large number of people, perhaps everyone. Asserting the opposite seems like the grossest hubris to me.
If the subject is a liver then in what sense is it remarkable that they're kept alive?
" 'The Internet has enabled copyright owners to make available their works to consumers around the world, but has also enabled others to do so without any compensation for copyright owners"
I think we all know where this is going. Total extinction of any notion of "fair use" so that every image you ever did a right click-->save to file on will be an independent criminal act punishable by not more than 5 years in jail and a $50,000 fine.
Let me tell you what this industry fears the most. Let me tell you what makes the execs in this industry shit their pants and drink too much after work. The idea that you will chose to do something else with your time. The notion that you will choose to spend the half million of so waking hours you have over the course of your life doing something else.
If they can't get those away from you because your attention was directed elsewhere, doing something more engaging, then they're fucked. You want one of my precious hours to look at your Desperate Housewives / Jarhead crap ? You should be so lucky.
I used to just think that people who did mass downloading when they *could* have bought the stuff were total assholes who would just cheat any and all the systems of civil society which make things tolerable for everyone. I still sort of think that, but what I don't think is this represents a good application of our justice system and my tax dollars -
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/18/downloading-case-cant-pay/1997127/
What I think is this is a sado-system designed to turn even the meekest and most law abiding of our citizens, the ones that get up every morning to got to their underpaid , dead end jobs just to keep their noses and their children's noses slightly above water, into criminals.
This is a system run by the financial elite solely for their benefit . Elites whose mega-crimes go completely unpunished no matter how globally catastrophic their effects and how many people's lives are completely destroyed by their criminal actions. This is a system whose prosecutors look and look at those crimes but can't find anything but reasonable doubt, while the ordinary citizen can be assured they will be punished beyond any definition of reason and beyond all any definition justice for the even the meekest and most innocuous of infractions.
To the publishing houses and record companies and entertainment business and especially to Mickey Mouse and all the diseased and dysfunctional special interest politics he has come to represent to my generation I say this- we're going to take yoru out. We're going to decimate your industry and leave you with nothing- no customers, no interest, no money, and no power.
There's exactly nothing you can do to stop it, counter it, co-opt it or benefit from it. The future in no way includes you irrespective of how broadly you interpret the word "includes". You're all walking dead men, grotesque corpses staggering around, wailing for blood but finding none.
This is 100% accurate, Guaranteed.
1) Make best estimate.
2) Multiply by 10.
Done and done right.
If companies didn't hire brogrammers and fire anyone over 35-50, as they do, then half of Silicon Valley companies would go bankrupt tomorrow. Their entire business model is dependent on H1Bs living five to an apt. and having nothing to do but work.
Oh and about the assholes. The assholes are already there from the top of management on down. Assholes inevitably hire assholes because they unconsciously recognize each other (assholes are a generalization of narcissists, who like themselves a lot) and because there's nothing an asshole has more contempt for than someone showing obvious signs of having a, you know, conscience.
So what you end up with in all these companies is a two tiered caste system of brogrammers and their asshole overseers. Brogrammers are disposable, assholes are inviolate and the whole thing is run on the model of a pirate ship.
And these are the blue chip NASDAQ companies we're talking about. (been there, done that) Beneath that level , the startups it's likely to be the same dynamic but maybe the asshole tier is populated by a runaway-H1B or three.
American business's go-to model is always exploitation of anyone stupid enough to send in their application, ingenuousness in its dealings with its partners and customers and tax evasion to the limit of the law and beyond.
It's the American mindset and it has been around at least since the days of the building of the railroads.
In Germany and Scandinavia and other more, you know, evolved nations it's very different . There's just not the default assumption that the only / best way to get ahead is through exploitation and as much criminality as you think you can get away with or will still be profitable once you're caught.
There they''re more concerned with building quality products and letting the consumer make their choices.
This is what capitalism is supposed to be about, but the US regulatory structure is deliberately kept too weak to enforce anything like what's needed for a a "free market" to flourish for labor or services or anything else.
It's one of the ironies that people can't get past. A strongly regulated environment is the freest. Employees who work fewer hours and have meaningful time for things like vacations, families and maintaining an interest in the broader culture in which they live are just more productive.
Americans are just not that smart. It really sort of comes down to that basic fact. And I say this as an American.
We cannot pass a law that would permit people to know how data about them is being used because the companies who are using that data would be liable for what they are doing.
So if companies start breaking the law early and often, we're obligated to protect them so they can go on doing the same and prevented from stopping them.
Jesus fucking christ.
I'm sorry. I can't help but think that Google is incapable of stopping sucking on the money spurting cock long enough to think about ANYTHING else.
You really can't represent to end users how their data is being used without implicating yourself in criminal and or civil wrong doing?
You have no way of communicating that information at all without also being crushed under the weight of viable lawsuits by scammer attorneys and their *wounded clients*?
Because I think I could do that. I think I could do that in such a way as to make any scammer attorney and their "aggrieved clients " realize they're going to lose and lose big time. I think I could launch an sympathetic educational / PR campaign to virtually all potential jurors which would 1) tell the truth and 2) prevent almost all lawsuit abuse.
That is, if I wasn't doing anything against the law.
Hey Google. Privacy is a thing of the past- get over it. If you're doing something online you don't want people to know about, then maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
HTML5 interfaces will always suck just the way javascript HTML 4 interfaces suck- you can't take a server hit every time you want to react to a mouse movement or process a keystroke.
For a large number of apps, this actually doesn't matter but for people who really do creative work with their computer , the UI and a very large amount of processing of local data will have to take place on the local machine.
I suppose their are entities out there actively plotting the end of personal general purpose PC but to say that they somehow control what direction the world will go is paranoiac to the well-known Kaczinsky Limit.
Benefit, productivity, competitive advantage, goodness, fun whatever gets maximized when the cloud/server/web / whatever is utilized for what its good for - communication and distribution of content and the processing of truly HUGE data sets or data from a very large number of data sources. .
On that last point, even there the necessity of the cloud is challenged by distributed applications of the SETI type.
I think Adam Smith pretty well had this down with the idea of relative competitive advantage. Servers should not try to do UIs or make believable promises WRT to the security needed for very critical data. Local PCs are easily connected to a wide range of other-generated / other processed data via the web and servers.
" both of whom have had immeasurable impact on issues surrounding technology over recent years.""
Eric Schmidt is just some guy the VC suits FORCED on Larry and Sergei when Google was trying to get funding. Larry and Sergei DRAGGED THEIR FEET and delayed capitulating to this "adult supervision" requirement as long as they could. Since Eric Schmidt is basically just a stand issue schmuck without insight, without vision, they figured they'd be able to "get along" with him - read: roll over him on all important decisions, and they were right.
Schmidt spent his time cheating on his wife ( who is well compensated and probably a little relieved) and chasing after 10s of the sort that had ignored him in high school, but now needed help with their coke addictions, taking them to Burning Man, playing the role of Dr. Strangelove then paying for their rehab
No, seriously.
http://gawker.com/5475332/
http://gawker.kinja.com/5499121/photos-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-at-burning-man-with-his-ex+mistress
Schmidt is the guy with a knack for the anti-quote - things Google would wish he'd never said, oh like
"With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches [...] We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about."
and
""If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
and
" "most people don't want Google to answer their questions. . . . They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
and
"One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that."
Even the curated collection of things which appear on quotes pages like this one and presumably are intended to show him in his best light merely range from the pedestrian:
" Success is really about being ready for the good opportunities that come before you. It's not to have a detailed plan of everything that you're going to do. You can't plan innovation or inspiration, but you can be ready for it, and when you see it, you can jump on it. "
and
"We have an opportunity for everyone in the world to have access to all the world's information. This has never before been possible. Why is ubiquitous information so profound? It's a tremendous equalizer. Information is power. "
to the weird:
"A mind set in its ways is wasted. Don't do it. "
"If you forgo your plan, you also have to forgo fear. "
to the creepy:
"In a world where everything is remembered and everything is kept forever, you need to live for the future and things you really care about."
This guy and the pile of money that's been shoved under him is the ultimate expression of the American elites' fear of everything which is not mediocre, not "regular" , not tame and predictable. They couldn't have the brains of Google also presume to be the captains of Google because who knows what kind of idealistic fantasies they might become obsessed with and worse, actually realize.
You can read all about how Eric "Lucky" Schmidt washed up on the shore of Tropical Paradise Google and all the other details in Ken Auletta's book . It's just as I described.
http://www.amazon.com/Googled-End-World-As-Know/dp/0143118048
" both of whom have had immeasurable impact on issues surrounding technology over recent years."" Eric Schmidt is just some guy the VC suits FORCED on Larry and Sergei when Google was trying to get funding. Larry and Sergei DRAGGED THEIR FEET and delayed capitulating to this "adult supervision" requirement as long as they could. Since Eric Schmidt is basically just a stand issue schmuck without insight, without vision, they figured they'd be able to "get along" with him - read: roll over him on all important decisions, and they were right. Schmidt spent his time cheating on his wife ( who is well compensated and probably a little relieved) and chasing after 10s of the sort that had ignored him in high school, but now needed help with their coke addictions, taking them to Burning Man, playing the role of Dr. Strangelove then paying for their rehab No, seriously. http://gawker.com/5475332/ http://gawker.kinja.com/5499121/photos-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-at-burning-man-with-his-ex+mistress Schmidt is the guy with a knack for the anti-quote - things Google would wish he'd never said, oh like "With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches [...] We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about." and ""If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." and " "most people don't want Google to answer their questions. . . . They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." and "One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that." Even the curated collection of things which appear on quotes pages like this one and presumably are intended to show him in his best light merely range from the pedestrian: " Success is really about being ready for the good opportunities that come before you. It's not to have a detailed plan of everything that you're going to do. You can't plan innovation or inspiration, but you can be ready for it, and when you see it, you can jump on it. " and "We have an opportunity for everyone in the world to have access to all the world's information. This has never before been possible. Why is ubiquitous information so profound? It's a tremendous equalizer. Information is power. " to the weird: "A mind set in its ways is wasted. Don't do it. " "If you forgo your plan, you also have to forgo fear. " to the creepy: "In a world where everything is remembered and everything is kept forever, you need to live for the future and things you really care about." This guy and the pile of money that's been shoved under him is the ultimate expression of the American elites' fear of everything which is not mediocre, not "regular" , not tame and predictable. They couldn't have the brains of Google also presume to be the captains of Google because who knows what kind of idealistic fantasies they might become obsessed with and worse, actually realize. You can read all about how Eric "Lucky" Schmidt washed up on the shore of Tropical Paradise Google and all the other details in Ken Auletta's book . It's just as I described. http://www.amazon.com/Googled-End-World-As-Know/dp/0143118048
Look for a profit motive, right? Multiply the number of students by the profit they stood to make off of each student so classified. Someone close enough with enough knowledge of the processes and consequences of being misclassified to put these two things together has to do this.
Just the idea that you'd let a company like this supply AND measure students is a BIG mistake. If there's a chance to screw with the collection and/or processing of the data and one road takes you to greater profit and the other road takes you to lesser profit then you have a built in motivation to make "mistakes".
We're talking about a school text book company, a member in good standing of one of the most exploitative, manipulative RICO-ready industries in existence. One whose hands are filthy with the blood of the next bubble implosion - the trillion of so dollars of unserviceable student loan debt needed to cover, in measure, the massively inflated book prices that benefit not just the coke snorters at the top of this industry's corporate hierarchy but also the universities themselves.
The universities get a cut of cover price and believe me that total is a very, very BIG number. Thus the innumerable new 'versions" of textbooks which come out each year for the sole purpose of destroying the after-market for used text books. The company store was always a profitable idea but this one is astronomically profitable to all conspirators.
Why are you pretending that you have expertise in an area you provably do not- climatology- and making dramatic pronouncements which are directly counter to what people who DO have the requisite educational and research specialization are making? It's great that you have cultivated an impish, child-like , authority-resistant public persona, but science is not really interested in any of that. Science is science and this is a branch of science over which you have no legitimate claim of expertise. So are you planning on at least just stopping talking about climate change?
" the regulation to be harmful to the economy while offering no real improvement to online privacy and security problems"
Riiight this has zero benefit because, why? Because an informed person is a bad consumer , decision maker and general PITA ... to corporations...
They're declining because programmers are failing to write programs which can take advantage of the processing power and memory available. My machine is practically as fast as any machine anyone can get with less than US 5000 to spend and it has the practical maximum memory limit, given available MBs, of 32 G. It's not anywhere near fast enough and I run out of memory all the time.
What do I do that taxes my machine? Write code using the popular tools. Search is slow, points-to analysis and all it's kin, the various forms of dependency analysis, are slow and run my machine out of memory all the time.
The build is slow . Everything is slow and I am compromised everywhere.
I could (am now taking a break from ) writing tools to greatly improve my experience of writing code. I could apply those same techniques to a lot of things and it would all productively use- that is not get involved with NP hard computations- three times the memory and three times the computing power I have today, yielding for the user a truly different, better experience.
Programmers are wetting themselves over Android and Apple "apps" right now. That's where all the "innovation" is going right now- to the creation of apps that leverage some combination of geo / picto /friend graph analysis / rate-n-share all aimed at the 12-year old demographic and their intellectual and emotional peers .
At some point the "selling of collected personal data to market researchers as a business model" is going to be oversubscribed / over supplied and the apps and services living on those specific VC fumes will all come down and then this particular moment in programming substance-free app development will be seen for what it was - a lot of fluff with, yes, some stuff. Then programmers will once again start to write programs for categories other than "diversion-enhancement" , not that entertainment is going to go away or is itself necessarily all fluff even when it's surface appearance is quite fluffy .
That's easy: Imagine all men are rapists, all secrets incite terrorism. It's easy if you try. There's no need to determine which threats are real or what level of destruction will occur.
The point is that it's precisely the fact that all men don't HAVE to be dangerous in order to have a civilization-ending terrorist threat. Only a handful. That is a new fact about the world which has no correlate in the past.
The point is precisely that ALL secrets don't have to be nuke how-tos in order to have one be such and for that one secret to fuck us all. That is a new fact about the world which has no correlate in the past.
Where is the battlefield in the 'war on drugs'? As a patriot you need the police to fight this war in your kitchen and your car.
Your literal interpretation of the idea of "war" and concomitant demand to be shown the location of this *war* is not a standard you hold yourself to, yet you mock me for not locating the war I am describing. *Where* is the war on your civil liberties? Where is the battleground? Indeed, where are you civil liberties anyway?
"Point to one", says a hypothetical despot, "and I'll see that it's well guarded."
If you're too literal minded to understand what was a very clear point (I re-read it again to be sure) then you're too literal minded to participate in your democracy and too literal minded for anyone to care what your opinion is.
That's always been the case (since such weapons were built). It's just become possible for anyone to do this. How does government ensure everyone is an obedient patriot?
No, how do WE ensure that no one uses these weapons. We, who want to go on living in a free society, where both "living" and "free" are equally important.
You're doing exactly what I said - you're describing an old threat and saying that the old system handled the old threat. We have a new threat which is sui generis and which requires fundamental change in society just because the fact that the vast majority of people are good DOES NOT suffice to maintain security anymore.
for "rehabilitation"
https://gawker.com/5475332/the-google-ceo-and-his-mistress-the-tell+all-blog
Sucks to be p0wned, doesn't it Dr. Feelgood.. er, Eric?
The only thing more disgusting than Congress would be an image of Congress, nude.
If your command-in-chief ordered you to fire on American citizens, would you?" The higher ranks are already being purged of those who said no.
I defy you to substantiate this from something other than a right wing paranoid website.
Consider yourself called out, fraud. Fabulist. Spreader of paranoiac lies.
I follow this closely. It's true. It's unfortunate because natural gas has the potential to be key player in reducing CO2 emissions. See this for how we can leverage today's, existing technology into an effective response to global warming.
http://cmi.princeton.edu/wedges/
We need to speak with ONE voice- "fracking" needs to be the most tightly regulated industry in the history of humankind- all but nationalized in fact. No secret formulas. No fracking without studies on everything from earth quakes to CO2 emissions to groundwater contamination and constant detail monitoring. The companies will make their profit, but there is NO room for laissez-faire jack shit.
If you're into exciting unregulated industries with 1000% profit margins, fuck you, go invest in next year's Xmas toy fad. This industry needs to have all the excitement of a yearly WD-40 shareholder stock dividend event.
There's some good, even essential, baby in that bathwater - don't throw it out; regulate the holy fuck out of the entire industry.
OK so a lot of the posts here seem to be coming from the POV that the govt. has no *real* *good* reason to be doing this. It's an easy road to take, but is it right? How do we know when we don't know the nature of the threats we face? Entertain a thought experiment where actually, in reality, the world has come to the point that this law is necessary.
Imagine that it all just gets down to logisitics and time constraints of law enforcement facing off against the leverage bio-terrorism, nano-terrorism and computing power give the Bad Guys.
I am not claiming I know this to be true in reality, just asking you pretend, to be flexible and go there in your mind.
Probably, it's *going* to be true at some point in the future because offensive destructive capability always outpaces and out muscles defensive capability. Always. It's just easier to find a way to impose huge amounts of entropy on the world than to defend against that imposition. Think nuclear bombs. Think grey goo.
So pretend the shape of things to come has arrived. How can we geeks, leverage computers and technology to design a legislative/ judicial / law enforcement / social system so that we can do what we need to do to defend ourselves and still retain and even enhance our Fourth Amendment rights?
There has to be a way to defend not against a nuclear bomb but against losing what makes America America while it defends itself against a nuclear bomb, or looks for the plans for a suitcase nuke or bio-weapon or whatever on someone's computer.
There has to be a way to meet this challenge on the battlefield that *it* has chosen, where the war is *actually* taking place. What everyone 's complaints amount to a kind of griping about the battleground reality has chosen to fight on. You're *insisting* that the battle be fought *over here* on the territory you know well. That's just not the way war works. The enemy in this case is the reality of bio-terrorism and nano--terrorism and nuclear terrorism and ALSO the way that forces law enforcement's hand and ALSO what that in turn means to us. That's the battleground that reality has chosen; either you show up to the fight or you lose it.
All these arguments about the Fourth Amendment are a form of not showing up to the fight, of insisting the battle be fought on your familiar turf.
Science has taken us here, and now we are here. Reality is not going to unwind itself to preserve your idea of privacy or liberty or the Constitution or anything else. That means you have adapt to reality creatively if you want to preserve those things.
The terrorists know they have to dynamically adapt - nothing is EVER easy for them. The government knows it has to react effectively also. We're the sticks in the mud. We're the unchanging old farts who are dug in and refusing to acknowledge change. Our play in this, our imperative, is to conceive of a way to leverage technology in our affairs so that after we've done everything we need to do or can do to protect ourselves , we also can say -"Yes. I am satisfied and secure that I am protected against unreasonable search and seizure, invasion of my privacy and I *know* that my "papers" are not spied upon, the value they represent not stolen from me, or used against me in any way at all that could be characterized as "unfair" by the government. It can't be built on pure trust, on legislative fiat, because no one trusts that all people, current and future, will honor the law . It has to be built on some ground level facts about reality the way cryptography is built around some ground level facts about factoring numbers and multiplicative inverses. Trust and secrecy are bit players in public key crypto compared to what went on before with secret codes and messages. There has to be a way we can devise a system that gives law enforcement the latitude it knows or believes it needs and still unarguably preserves our way of life. We're just not being creative enough here.
We build lots of things all day long. The internet itself is so far away from anything even conceivable to our forefathers, it's effectively realized magic. There *has* to be a way we can build something that can achieve both these ends. We *have* to be that clever.
But look at all the countless people in previous generations who suffered things far far worse than the targeted neutralization of a apocalypse-inducing POV. People in the feudal China or under Stalin or in the Middle Ages, people who lived under despots, were tortured, saw their loved ones tortured then killed, people who reside in some 3rd world hell hole prison tonight because, say, one of their neighbors carried a grudge, or was jealous, and had the political savvy and pull to put them there.
None of the people who came before us chose death over those circumstances; they soldiered on, and we are the beneficiaries of that soldiering on. When things get so bad some part of your brain is telling you it's not worth going on, then you start to live not for yourself but for future generations who will get THIS / this pathological hatred of a rational interpretation of reality right the way we moderns got polio right. There's a reason these people are the way they are, but we don't know what it is. One day, we will know. One day soon, we'll decide that knowing is a top priority for humanity.
One thing is sure- conservatism and civilization are incompatible. In the battle between secular humanism which posits that human (and other) welfare and an egalitarian system of governance is the measure of what is Good and exactly what produces that Good is an ongoing journey of discovery and religious conservatism which posits that what is important is to serve an invisible Santa God and what defines Good was written down in texts once and for all by sheepherders who lived in the Bronze Age, there can be only one winner because of just this circumstance and all that will follow it.
From stem cell research to evolution to global warming , the religious conservative mind which seeks to conserve the old way and the old world views cannot by definition deal with the new world science has birthed and is birthing , faster and faster, deeper and deeper into everything we know about ourselves and understand as ourselves. There is no place of the Jesus / Allah people in the genetic revolution except to play the role of "the party of no " and terrorists who would sooner blow up the world and everything in it than see their cherished belief systems be rejected by the bulk of humanity, decay and finally perish from the face of the earth.
I would love to see substantiation of the last sentence in your post. The only correlation that's ever been shown between climate change denial and anything else is political affiliation and whether or not you identify as a conservative.
at the offending company.
You have a no cost, remote way to claim ownership of something for some amount of time and profit from it and the only "undo" available to your victims involves a lengthy process which itself is only initiated after they've noticed that one of the things they created at some point in their careers which was somewhere on the net has had a DCMA takedown notice applied to it.
It's a scammer's paradise, the moreso since this is India which, with a billion people, we can say with utter confidence that even if you represent the top 0.00001% of depraved, shameless and sociopathic scammers, there's still a million other people just like you.
Retribution from the aggrieved authors can only occur at the end of a time consuming and prohibitively costly trial which itself can only commence once the international disputants are located and brought to court, which in this case turns out to be a country whose system of jurisprudence takes place mostly in fantastically over-crowded, dimly lit, smoky "courtrooms" which most closely resemble a wild west saloon, where sweaty irritable and underpaid judges, prosecutors, defendants and plaintiffs have to literally scream at the top of their lungs just to be heard, or even identify each other, and where you may not even be able to hear the disposition of your case amongst all the chaos, which disposition itself often takes all of 90 seconds, despite which fact this same courtroom has a docket that extends years and possibly even decades into the past.
What can possible go wrong with a system like that?
All hail copyright police's system of "just us".
It's not that we need to assassinate them, it's that we need to turn the power of the government against them and their credibility.
Is that democratic? Is it "fair"? Are we interfering with their Constitutional rights somehow, someway a lawyer could identify ? Probably.
But about anything we have to ask, what are the alternatives and their respective outcomes.? I compare this to the drone program. It's not perfect, but it's what we have now and our hand has been forced into action. We have to use the tools we have, not wait for advent of hypothetical tools which have no unwanted side effects and about which we can all feel good.
That's the justification for the drone program and it's the justification for the government unilaterally acting against the machinery of deniers. I am not saying drone the deniers. I am saying bring the power of the state against them in whatever way is necessary to stop them without reserve. for the purpose of undermining their influence. legitimacy and mind share.
"[a] strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means
-Thomas Jefferson