"Trust" is an overused concept, I think. The only person you can really consider "trusting" completely is yourself. As for other relationships, there are two possibilities:
Your opinions coincide sufficiently with the other party that you can "trust" they won't deviate from what you want them to do;
You "trust" the other party to willingly go against their beliefs in order to accommodate what you want.
Since neither will apply except in the unhealthiest relationships of control (via physical restriction / scaremongering / propaganda), you must expect that everyone is going to go in some way against your wishes. This is why monitoring happens and is especially in demand by modern Western governments and the modern Western parents who both want to efficiently give the impressions of freedom.
Wait, what? Even if most people disagreed with it, that wouldn't necessarily mean that they'd protest it. In fact, more often than not, people do absolutely nothing.
This is a matter for philosophical debate, but I consider going along with something when there are many alternatives as agreeing with it in every meaningful sense.
There are various ways you can not go along with government monitoring other than by mass civil disobedience - for example, you could refuse to get a passport; you can refuse to drive; you can avoid use of credit cards; you can accept payment in cash and not open bank accounts; you can walk around with a basic disguise; you can encrypt all communication and try to obscure source/destination (not just on the Internet); etc. But if at any point you say, "OK doing all this is too much of a hassle - I want a proper job so I can have a more comfortable place to live and that means accepting the whole tax/bank account thing," you are agreeing that the government's offer is better than the alternatives.
Read this essay. Rulers don't exist through a small minority of force, but through a majority of consent. And taking away that consent would very quickly cause the power to crumble.
Living through your children is not psychologically healthy -- not for you, and certainly not for your children.
Living through your children is the very reason for having your own children, by definition: it's what you do when you pass on your genes. If your interest was merely to pass on love and support and promote independence, but you weren't interested in creating a variant of a miniature you, you'd choose to adopt.
OK, but what if they apply "actual parenting" and monitor their kids' behaviour? Sort of like current Western governments give you a fair deal of freedom (yes, they still do) but watch you closely anyway.
You could argue that it's not actual parenting/freedom if the monitoring is included in the package. But this is a thoroughly minority opinion, because people don't see that as a restriction or potential restriction (clearly, otherwise everyone would be lying in the streets in a mass exercise of civil disobedience).
All parents observe their children at varying levels of distance and will end up engaging in an arms race with any child who wants more privacy than the parent is willing to provide. This isn't something new to computers.
The policeman here is simply selling to the parents' side because the technology he's hawking coincides with his own interests.
...saying "OH BUT WHAT ABOUT TRUSTING YOUR CHILD / INVASION OF PRIVACY".
OK, how about this: if people didn't want to create another human in their image, they wouldn't have their own children. But since they did, it means they want to keep an eye on their kid to make sure they turn out as they wish, and everyone external to their little genetic collective is regarded as the enemy - preadator or otherwise.
A bunch of childless geeks and fringe case parents who only want their children to be like them in some ways can whine all they want, but this is what parents want. It's as inevitable as human nature.
If you're really so good at making sites that serve billions of page views per month
Creating a routine site which "serves billions of page views per month" is a routine IT skill. Hell, creating a routine site which serves millions of page views requires no expertise at all, and is something I'm sure lots of enthusiasts posting here have done before the days of point-and-click blogs and social networking sites. So, is Facebook routine?
has fairly low latency across the globe despite the huge volume
Fifteen years ago called. They want your cutting edge content delivery network research.
has marketed itself successfully to half a billion active users worldwide
No disagreement here. Facebook knows how to sell itself.
interface with hundreds of thousands of third party apps
Have you actually used the Facebook API? While this is the only "engineered" component of Facebook, it's (i.e. the Graph API is) basically a frontend to tables of personal information and junction/link tables between them. Again, the skill here is the routine deployment of an SQL database.
work on a range of mobile devices.
Well, not on mine, but I think what you meant was: at least vaguely tested on the devices commonly used by their employees with remaining complaints perhaps fixed eventually, and with a translation API suiting the native language of a few of the more common mobile platforms.
nd no matter how crude and low-tech the front-end UI may feel to the end user, IT WORKS.
Nonsense. It's in a perpetual state of beta, and if you haven't seen it not working it's because you haven't used it often enough to be targeted for testing - at which point something on the site will break for a while and will get fixed only because enough people whine.
If all these are just "routine IT skills" for you - ok, great, just show me where you're on the Forbes list and I'll definitely pay my respects.
Ah, the nerd of 2011, whose skill is measured by "where you're on the Forbes list".
Facebook is successful because it successfully preys on the social weaknesses of the average human. As an engineering feat, it is almost completely uninteresting.
Wait, what? Are you suggesting that anyone who "uses" your name online should have some sort of injunction taken out against them? Are you suggesting that it would even be possible to identify them in the general case, let alone stop them?
I have one not-me who I can at least vaguely monitor. It could be argued that I am being more responsible than average by muddying the waters, making it harder for anyone to succeed in building a coherent false impression of me.
Having decided that I have no interest in Facebook, and being around when someone else wanted to create an account to mess around a bit, I suggested that they open it in my name. They've since started using it to follow a few organisations of interest to them and to enter (and occasionally win) competitions.
If you search for my name, maybe you'll find this account. Someone who knows me might assume it's me because some of the interests overlap with mine... but other things I would clearly not associate with. To take a trivial example: the user enjoys meat but I am vegan. So it's possible that the user might do something on Facebook which suggests the eating of a tasty steak, something I haven't done for a good decade.
So what would you, dear unlikely prospective employer, do if you found this account?
Maybe this isn't how driver training works in the US, or maybe people just forget what they learnt when learning to drive... but you're absolutely correct. Most of the time, "it was an accident" is another way of saying, "I was driving unsafely and certainly not defensively so I could not react in a timely manner to a hazard."
Unfortunately England has a "pedestrian shouldn't have been there anyway" get-out clause to protect drivers: in most cases the guy without 2 tonnes of weapon gets right of way. On a plus note, this means there's no notion of "jaywalking" (except on crossings) and you can cross where you fucking please except on a motorway, irritating drivers to the extent you feel appropriate.
Nope, SEO outfits are doing a fine job of that already - mostly because PageRank is (imho) a fucking awful and easily exploitable way of judging usefulness.
You're not very good at this. "Computer hardware" is such a vague, overarching term that it's embarrassing you propose a market for "computer hardware". You need to do it like this:
Market for general purpose CPU: Intel, ARM, (AMD).
Market for desktop operating systems: Microsoft, Apple.
Market for search engines: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft.
Market for smart mobile phone operating systems (much newer market - this still varies quite a bit): Google, Apple, Nokia, Blackberry.
If you think even half a dozen competitors in a world of almost 7 billion people is impressive, you're missing the point entirely.
No employee at "bring information to everyone" Google has decided that freedom of information is more important than the risk of being sued. IOW, none has simply released Google source, knowing full well that no amount of legal force would reverse the effect on the marketplace. This says so much about the homogeneity of the working environment at Google.
Also copyright. Google shouldn't be allowed to hoard all its search code, since it's the commercialisation of an open academic effort and its systems build on so many millennia of scientific progress.
Indeed. The tipping point is when the number of revolutionaries reaches the number of reactionaries, although you need enough manpower in the first place to effect change (whence the suggested limit of 1/3 neutral). This observations is anathema to the US, which has spent the last 65 years thinking people "need freeing".
You're describing the beginning of the process. The end result in any market is a few dominant players, often cooperating, to satisfy the vast majority. It is possible for a few irrelevant small businesses to struggle along temporarily ("successful" is rose-tinting it), all vigorously defending the system because each dreams to become a big player.
No, I'm not saying anyone "deserves" a dictator - I'm saying that the existence of a dictator/regime implies popular support for the dictator/regime. This doesn't mean the whole country supports the dictator; it may even be that the majority would prefer something different if it were presented to them but lack the imagination to think it up themselves (this is why propaganda is such an effective tool, both from within and without).
Unfortunately so. Just as today, capitalism is the will of the majority (sell what enough people want), and poverty is the method of purging the undesirables - whether by keeping them wage slaves or simply letting them die off through lack of good security and healthcare. It's not that there are alternatives - the outcome is inevitable, whatever label you put on your political or economic system.
Slashdot Mirror
"Trust" is an overused concept, I think. The only person you can really consider "trusting" completely is yourself. As for other relationships, there are two possibilities:
Since neither will apply except in the unhealthiest relationships of control (via physical restriction / scaremongering / propaganda), you must expect that everyone is going to go in some way against your wishes. This is why monitoring happens and is especially in demand by modern Western governments and the modern Western parents who both want to efficiently give the impressions of freedom.
Wait, what? Even if most people disagreed with it, that wouldn't necessarily mean that they'd protest it. In fact, more often than not, people do absolutely nothing.
This is a matter for philosophical debate, but I consider going along with something when there are many alternatives as agreeing with it in every meaningful sense.
There are various ways you can not go along with government monitoring other than by mass civil disobedience - for example, you could refuse to get a passport; you can refuse to drive; you can avoid use of credit cards; you can accept payment in cash and not open bank accounts; you can walk around with a basic disguise; you can encrypt all communication and try to obscure source/destination (not just on the Internet); etc. But if at any point you say, "OK doing all this is too much of a hassle - I want a proper job so I can have a more comfortable place to live and that means accepting the whole tax/bank account thing," you are agreeing that the government's offer is better than the alternatives.
Read this essay. Rulers don't exist through a small minority of force, but through a majority of consent. And taking away that consent would very quickly cause the power to crumble.
Living through your children is not psychologically healthy -- not for you, and certainly not for your children.
Living through your children is the very reason for having your own children, by definition: it's what you do when you pass on your genes. If your interest was merely to pass on love and support and promote independence, but you weren't interested in creating a variant of a miniature you, you'd choose to adopt.
OK, but what if they apply "actual parenting" and monitor their kids' behaviour? Sort of like current Western governments give you a fair deal of freedom (yes, they still do) but watch you closely anyway.
You could argue that it's not actual parenting/freedom if the monitoring is included in the package. But this is a thoroughly minority opinion, because people don't see that as a restriction or potential restriction (clearly, otherwise everyone would be lying in the streets in a mass exercise of civil disobedience).
All parents observe their children at varying levels of distance and will end up engaging in an arms race with any child who wants more privacy than the parent is willing to provide. This isn't something new to computers.
The policeman here is simply selling to the parents' side because the technology he's hawking coincides with his own interests.
...saying "OH BUT WHAT ABOUT TRUSTING YOUR CHILD / INVASION OF PRIVACY".
OK, how about this: if people didn't want to create another human in their image, they wouldn't have their own children. But since they did, it means they want to keep an eye on their kid to make sure they turn out as they wish, and everyone external to their little genetic collective is regarded as the enemy - preadator or otherwise.
A bunch of childless geeks and fringe case parents who only want their children to be like them in some ways can whine all they want, but this is what parents want. It's as inevitable as human nature.
If you're really so good at making sites that serve billions of page views per month
Creating a routine site which "serves billions of page views per month" is a routine IT skill. Hell, creating a routine site which serves millions of page views requires no expertise at all, and is something I'm sure lots of enthusiasts posting here have done before the days of point-and-click blogs and social networking sites. So, is Facebook routine?
has fairly low latency across the globe despite the huge volume
Fifteen years ago called. They want your cutting edge content delivery network research.
has marketed itself successfully to half a billion active users worldwide
No disagreement here. Facebook knows how to sell itself.
interface with hundreds of thousands of third party apps
Have you actually used the Facebook API? While this is the only "engineered" component of Facebook, it's (i.e. the Graph API is) basically a frontend to tables of personal information and junction/link tables between them. Again, the skill here is the routine deployment of an SQL database.
work on a range of mobile devices.
Well, not on mine, but I think what you meant was: at least vaguely tested on the devices commonly used by their employees with remaining complaints perhaps fixed eventually, and with a translation API suiting the native language of a few of the more common mobile platforms.
nd no matter how crude and low-tech the front-end UI may feel to the end user, IT WORKS.
Nonsense. It's in a perpetual state of beta, and if you haven't seen it not working it's because you haven't used it often enough to be targeted for testing - at which point something on the site will break for a while and will get fixed only because enough people whine.
If all these are just "routine IT skills" for you - ok, great, just show me where you're on the Forbes list and I'll definitely pay my respects.
Ah, the nerd of 2011, whose skill is measured by "where you're on the Forbes list".
Facebook is successful because it successfully preys on the social weaknesses of the average human. As an engineering feat, it is almost completely uninteresting.
complexity where? what is new in fb?
Google does some cool engineering but much of its work involves only routine IT skills.
Sanitary engineers? Advertising consultants? What engineering does fb do???
Wait, what? Are you suggesting that anyone who "uses" your name online should have some sort of injunction taken out against them? Are you suggesting that it would even be possible to identify them in the general case, let alone stop them?
I have one not-me who I can at least vaguely monitor. It could be argued that I am being more responsible than average by muddying the waters, making it harder for anyone to succeed in building a coherent false impression of me.
Having decided that I have no interest in Facebook, and being around when someone else wanted to create an account to mess around a bit, I suggested that they open it in my name. They've since started using it to follow a few organisations of interest to them and to enter (and occasionally win) competitions.
If you search for my name, maybe you'll find this account. Someone who knows me might assume it's me because some of the interests overlap with mine... but other things I would clearly not associate with. To take a trivial example: the user enjoys meat but I am vegan. So it's possible that the user might do something on Facebook which suggests the eating of a tasty steak, something I haven't done for a good decade.
So what would you, dear unlikely prospective employer, do if you found this account?
Maybe this isn't how driver training works in the US, or maybe people just forget what they learnt when learning to drive... but you're absolutely correct. Most of the time, "it was an accident" is another way of saying, "I was driving unsafely and certainly not defensively so I could not react in a timely manner to a hazard."
Unfortunately England has a "pedestrian shouldn't have been there anyway" get-out clause to protect drivers: in most cases the guy without 2 tonnes of weapon gets right of way. On a plus note, this means there's no notion of "jaywalking" (except on crossings) and you can cross where you fucking please except on a motorway, irritating drivers to the extent you feel appropriate.
Cellphone towers / networks are typically in rather tight sync, time-wise. NTP, base stations synchronized to one another, et al
The grammar nazi in me has made it impossible to continue reading after that horrible abuse of the already pompous "et al.".
Nope, SEO outfits are doing a fine job of that already - mostly because PageRank is (imho) a fucking awful and easily exploitable way of judging usefulness.
You're not very good at this. "Computer hardware" is such a vague, overarching term that it's embarrassing you propose a market for "computer hardware". You need to do it like this:
Market for general purpose CPU: Intel, ARM, (AMD).
Market for desktop operating systems: Microsoft, Apple.
Market for search engines: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft.
Market for smart mobile phone operating systems (much newer market - this still varies quite a bit): Google, Apple, Nokia, Blackberry.
If you think even half a dozen competitors in a world of almost 7 billion people is impressive, you're missing the point entirely.
"computing industry" is not a single market.
The world is full of martyrs. I fear most the institutions which lack them.
So you're only successful if you're a big, multinational corporation?
Relative to the big, multinational corporation, yes.
There are also plenty of huge businesses that are struggling.
Because they're either no longer popular or they've fucked up their management. Popularity is necessary for success (gov or com) but not sufficient.
No employee at "bring information to everyone" Google has decided that freedom of information is more important than the risk of being sued. IOW, none has simply released Google source, knowing full well that no amount of legal force would reverse the effect on the marketplace. This says so much about the homogeneity of the working environment at Google.
Also copyright. Google shouldn't be allowed to hoard all its search code, since it's the commercialisation of an open academic effort and its systems build on so many millennia of scientific progress.
Indeed. The tipping point is when the number of revolutionaries reaches the number of reactionaries, although you need enough manpower in the first place to effect change (whence the suggested limit of 1/3 neutral). This observations is anathema to the US, which has spent the last 65 years thinking people "need freeing".
You're describing the beginning of the process. The end result in any market is a few dominant players, often cooperating, to satisfy the vast majority. It is possible for a few irrelevant small businesses to struggle along temporarily ("successful" is rose-tinting it), all vigorously defending the system because each dreams to become a big player.
No, I'm not saying anyone "deserves" a dictator - I'm saying that the existence of a dictator/regime implies popular support for the dictator/regime. This doesn't mean the whole country supports the dictator; it may even be that the majority would prefer something different if it were presented to them but lack the imagination to think it up themselves (this is why propaganda is such an effective tool, both from within and without).
Unfortunately so. Just as today, capitalism is the will of the majority (sell what enough people want), and poverty is the method of purging the undesirables - whether by keeping them wage slaves or simply letting them die off through lack of good security and healthcare. It's not that there are alternatives - the outcome is inevitable, whatever label you put on your political or economic system.
A million can always act against one man. But no dictatorship is the rule of one man.
If a dictatorship is not overthrown then either support for the dictatorship is too great or those who do not support it are too apathetic.