There's a continuum from human germ cells (sperm and ovum), to a baby who can survive outside the womb. A blastocyst is different from an embryo is different from a fetus. Where do you want to draw the line? Some people want to draw it back at the level of sperm, and say that male masturbation is essentially murder. Others draw it at birth itself.
If you want to criminalize the removal of a blastocyst or an embryo, then you might as well criminalize all non-reproductive uses of semen. Biologically, blastocysts and embryos are much closer to germ cells than they are to a living, breathing baby.
Having had children and miscarriages myself, the idea of abortion nauseates me, but I am also aware that pregnancy is too heavy a burden to be borne unconsenting.
I have supported friends who discovered that their much-wanted children had defects incompatible with life. People in such a terrible situation need all their medical options on the table, including late termination. If you discover your child has anencephaly or Potter's syndrome and that there's nothing ahead for them outside the womb except pain and death, you don't need anyone telling you what to do. You need compassion so that you can make the best decision for your family, including a late termination if that seems least awful for all involved.
The state should keep its snout out of our private lives, and there is no aspect of our lives more private than reproductive health care.
We should own our personal data, too. Using it without our consent violates our inherent intellectual property rights in ourselves.
Roe Vs Wade wasn't a 4th amendment case; it was a 9th amendment case. The right to privacy is fundamental, and one that stretches back to the common law the underlies the Constitution. Reproductive and medical decisions are fundamental to human beings, and the state has no business inserting itself in the process. The Roe vs Wade decision protects a lot more than a woman's right to make reproductive choices; it also protects our rights to make other family and medical decisions.
You parked your car in my garage, where posted signs clearly say that all car parts become the property of the garage owner and can be disposed of as I see fit. By parking here, you agreed to my business practices and to foot the bill for any hauling services required to get the bits I don't want off my property.
Clear as day, right there in 2-point font in a poorly lit supply closet behind the ducts. You owe me $1249.73 for hauling away the unusable portions of your Tesla.
Facebook presented themselves as an advertising company, not a personal data vendor. It was supposed to be tv -- you get content and engagement in return for viewing ads. Still not a great deal, but a far better one than what they actually rolled out.
Yeah, despite our fancy college degrees, we don't know enough actual technical words to describe what we're doing logically. Our only possible option is to resort to name-calling and put-downs.
Like 5-year-olds.
In a professional workplace, people focus on technical issues and try to solve technical problems using reason, logic, and common sense. They look at how the code functions and address issues with details that allow other human beings to see what the issues are and choose good solutions. They address disagreements with logic, diagnostics, and test suites. They don't engage in verbal pissing contests. They don't threaten or belittle co-workers; they keep their comments about the code rather than personalities.
But fuck all this shit. It's a whole fucking lot more fun to just let the fuck flag fly than it is to fucking talk about what's fucking things up and why to other fucking engineers.
Did your CS degree cover locating, interviewing, documenting, and protecting sources? Did it teach you how to get into and out of a war zone safely and do effective coverage while you're there? Did it teach you how to investigate a situation that smells funny? Did it teach you how to cover your tracks and avoid government and corporate censorship?
Let's turn that around and see what that disrespect feels like pointed at us:
"Why team with programmers? Programmers don't know anything, can't do anything, and don't bring anything useful to the table. In fact, if anything, they taint your work and your message with their biases and ideologies. Programmers used to be a necessary evil as gatekeepers to a costly, limited bandwidth distribution medium (computers), but that function has been made obsolete. And programmers work for for-profit corporations that turn your knowledge into their profits. They get something out of teaming with you, you don't get anything out of teaming with them."
Oh, okay, that' s pretty much how social media companies operate.
There are all kinds of journalists out there, and they have their own areas of expertise of which programmers know nothing. Many of them put themselves out there in war zones, disaster areas, and other dangerous situations. They poke under rocks with their sticks and tell us what they find.
Journalists have always been hated by people who don't want us to see what's under those rocks. And sure, there is a lot of sloppy journalism, and editors have always shaped their reports to fit the narrative they want to tell.
If you hate and revile the press indiscriminately, though, you run the danger of destroying one of the pillars of liberty.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech." It says nothing about private companies like Facebook, Twitter, or Google making policies about the type of speech they want to allow on their platforms. "Free speech" does belong in quotes when what people mean is that a private concern declines to provide a platform for a particular type of speech. It's like crying censorship because a bookstore declines to carry a particular magazine. You might not like the policies of the bookstore or the social media company, but they're not abridging anyone's rights by refusing to spread certain content.
Prior to starting Slack, Stewart Butterfield worked on a social-engineering-project-masquerading-as-a-game called Glitch. He was trying to figure out how to encourage pro-social behavior among players, and he did a pretty good job of it. Ellen Pao thinks that social networking companies should do something similar -- figure out how to promote community-building behavior on their platforms. Mailing list and forum moderators have often tried to encourage practices that build good online communities. Why shouldn't they? If you're going to devote your time and energy into an online community, you want it to be one you're going to enjoy.
Online platforms are never going to be value neutral. Like it or not, social media platforms encourage some forms of behavior and discourage others. Social engineering is very much part of the puzzle.
Most of the web runs on layers of open source software. If Linus' Law was more than an open source marketing point, the web would be a poster child for secure computing.
Even back in the 90s, open source software wasn't more robust or secure than proprietary software, and that continues to be the case despite numerous assertions to the contrary. Sure, there are more eyeballs on the code, but few delve deeply into it, and fewer still delve deeply into it looking for flaws or vulnerabilities. A lot of open source software is built on a shoestring. There aren't the resources to get the features the code needs, let alone the programmer hours to make it bulletproof.
Moreover, open source software is as vulnerable to players with evil intent as any other kind of software. If a programmer wants to introduce a backdoor, all they need to do is make themselves an expert on some ugly low-level area that no one else wants to get into. The vulnerabilities are hidden by the complexity of the code and the time cost of digging through the ugly code. Bonus points if the programmer is backed by government or industry.
What would you do if you were the NSA? What would you do if you were a private entity that wanted access to all the data everywhere? Do you think they're not actively doing all that and more?
Now add the fact that different layers and components are built by different groups who likely don't coordinate with one another. If one layer or component is well-built, well-audited, and secure, bad players can just move their mischief elsewhere.
The commentator's rant is perfectly self-referential: an apt example of everything he's complaining about. I can't decide if he's a complete genius or utterly clueless, but in either event, his rant is a work of art.
Also, can we just stop patting tech people on the back for being brilliant? There's little evidence of that these days. A lot of tech people now are highly trained performers who are skilled at the one thing they actually do, but maybe not overall the brightest crayons in the box. Tech hiring practices emphasize jumping through hoops to the exclusion of creativity or the ability to think about problems from multiple angles.
If someone had told me in the 80s that we'd be using our pocket supercomputers to play Angry Birds and watch cat videos, I might have become a plant physiologist or dropped out of college and gone off to Japan to study shibori.
I'm an iOS programmer now, creating apps that run solely on the phone and don't serve ads. Phones are plenty powerful to do complex computing chores, but very few developers use the phones as more than a delivery device. When recruiters call me about a potential job, it's almost always a thin app with a hefty cloud backend so the company, not the user, controls the experience and the data.
Smart phones have dumbed-down tech. Once you get under the flash, there's not much there. Some apps that do useful things, and a lot of apps that are designed to keep the user engaged and online so that the data collectors can track their movements and serve them lots of ads.
Teenagers are smart people. Most of what goes on in their lives is designed to keep them busy so they don't get into either mischief or the marketplace. Their phones are just another piece of that. They have a lot of energy, and they want to do things that are real and worthwhile, but they're told they need a college degree first.
My 18-year-old son recently told me that he's considering slowing down the college process (he started at age 16) so he can take a job doing lighting for the college theatre. Cutting gels and crawling around on wire mesh to hang lights gives him joy and a sense of accomplishment. A couple years of that will give him real skills and knowledge that the always-on-their-phones cohort won't have.
AI could be our friend if that's what its owners/creators want it to do.
So far, it looks like they want it to corner markets, deploy advertising, create addictions, shape public opinion, and subvert democracy.
The big tech companies aren't even trying to solve the big problems that face humanity. They're not even trying to solve the big problems created by their huge campuses (housing, transportation). Where's the money in that?
You're right that cell phones aren't usually propped up so they can see the bed, but some people put their phones in charging cradles or stands to keep them upright.
There are documented cases of people remotely activating laptop cameras to spy on people. School officials have spied on students in their bedrooms via school-issued laptops.
It's not that hard for hackers to remotely seize control of computer cameras and microphones, and that would include the type of computer you carry in your pocket. Apps often have access to the camera and microphone and can listen in even if they're in the background. You can forbid access, but that only works with apps that are following the rules.
You can't know who is watching and/or listening to you at any time through any of these devices: large corporations, government entities, criminal organizations. If they care to do so, they can.
I cover cameras on my devices when I'm not using them. I don't know any sure way to turn off the built-in microphones so that hackers can't use them to spy on me.
Well, let's see. Anyone who has a smartphone, tablet, or computer in their bedroom is already providing surveillance equipment for anyone who can hack their way in. I don't see how the Echo Spot is appreciably different.
To me, the creepy thing about the whole connected house and voice-activated digital assistants is that they're always listening. I don't care so much if someone ogles me in the altogether or watches me having sex (they might learn something!), but I don't like the idea of people listening to my private conversations.
I had the typical ignorant disdain of COBOL until I actually worked with some. Over a short period of time, I developed respect for the language and for the disciplined, methodical programmers who wielded it. We could learn much from reading old COBOL programs, particularly for web forms, where a modern form of COBOL would be a lot more readable and maintainable than the krufty PHP and JS that infests the web.
One small example is the COBOL institution of edit masks, which were invaluable for handling form input and output of things like phone numbers and credit card numbers. COBOL's edit masks were simple to use, readable and understandable, and powerful enough to cover common business cases. No modern web language has anything that approaches COBOL's elegance in this area, which is why entering your credit card on a web site is slow and tedious.
When I lived in Alaska, I never heard anyone call it anything else. Denali is its name (no Mt. in front of it). Only imbeciles from the Lower 48 think it should be referred to any other way. Living up there gives you a different view of the country, that's for sure. Seattle is the capitol of the world, Texas exists to be used as the butt of size jokes, and inhabitants of the Lower 48 are wimpy and clueless.
I've been behind a Google self-driving car in traffic. They have a big camera (or cameras) mounted on top that spin really fast. It's a distraction when you're behind them in traffic,. The spinning camera keeps grabbing your attention. The camera feels more important than the brake lights, both because it's moving really fast and also because it's located in the same place as the flashing lights on an emergency vehicle.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a continuum from human germ cells (sperm and ovum), to a baby who can survive outside the womb. A blastocyst is different from an embryo is different from a fetus. Where do you want to draw the line? Some people want to draw it back at the level of sperm, and say that male masturbation is essentially murder. Others draw it at birth itself.
If you want to criminalize the removal of a blastocyst or an embryo, then you might as well criminalize all non-reproductive uses of semen. Biologically, blastocysts and embryos are much closer to germ cells than they are to a living, breathing baby.
Having had children and miscarriages myself, the idea of abortion nauseates me, but I am also aware that pregnancy is too heavy a burden to be borne unconsenting.
I have supported friends who discovered that their much-wanted children had defects incompatible with life. People in such a terrible situation need all their medical options on the table, including late termination. If you discover your child has anencephaly or Potter's syndrome and that there's nothing ahead for them outside the womb except pain and death, you don't need anyone telling you what to do. You need compassion so that you can make the best decision for your family, including a late termination if that seems least awful for all involved.
The state should keep its snout out of our private lives, and there is no aspect of our lives more private than reproductive health care.
We should own our personal data, too. Using it without our consent violates our inherent intellectual property rights in ourselves.
Roe Vs Wade wasn't a 4th amendment case; it was a 9th amendment case. The right to privacy is fundamental, and one that stretches back to the common law the underlies the Constitution. Reproductive and medical decisions are fundamental to human beings, and the state has no business inserting itself in the process. The Roe vs Wade decision protects a lot more than a woman's right to make reproductive choices; it also protects our rights to make other family and medical decisions.
You parked your car in my garage, where posted signs clearly say that all car parts become the property of the garage owner and can be disposed of as I see fit. By parking here, you agreed to my business practices and to foot the bill for any hauling services required to get the bits I don't want off my property.
Clear as day, right there in 2-point font in a poorly lit supply closet behind the ducts. You owe me $1249.73 for hauling away the unusable portions of your Tesla.
Facebook presented themselves as an advertising company, not a personal data vendor. It was supposed to be tv -- you get content and engagement in return for viewing ads. Still not a great deal, but a far better one than what they actually rolled out.
Yeah, despite our fancy college degrees, we don't know enough actual technical words to describe what we're doing logically. Our only possible option is to resort to name-calling and put-downs.
Like 5-year-olds.
In a professional workplace, people focus on technical issues and try to solve technical problems using reason, logic, and common sense. They look at how the code functions and address issues with details that allow other human beings to see what the issues are and choose good solutions. They address disagreements with logic, diagnostics, and test suites. They don't engage in verbal pissing contests. They don't threaten or belittle co-workers; they keep their comments about the code rather than personalities.
But fuck all this shit. It's a whole fucking lot more fun to just let the fuck flag fly than it is to fucking talk about what's fucking things up and why to other fucking engineers.
Did your CS degree cover locating, interviewing, documenting, and protecting sources? Did it teach you how to get into and out of a war zone safely and do effective coverage while you're there? Did it teach you how to investigate a situation that smells funny? Did it teach you how to cover your tracks and avoid government and corporate censorship?
Let's turn that around and see what that disrespect feels like pointed at us:
"Why team with programmers? Programmers don't know anything, can't do anything, and don't bring anything useful to the table. In fact, if anything, they taint your work and your message with their biases and ideologies. Programmers used to be a necessary evil as gatekeepers to a costly, limited bandwidth distribution medium (computers), but that function has been made obsolete. And programmers work for for-profit corporations that turn your knowledge into their profits. They get something out of teaming with you, you don't get anything out of teaming with them."
Oh, okay, that' s pretty much how social media companies operate.
There are all kinds of journalists out there, and they have their own areas of expertise of which programmers know nothing. Many of them put themselves out there in war zones, disaster areas, and other dangerous situations. They poke under rocks with their sticks and tell us what they find.
Journalists have always been hated by people who don't want us to see what's under those rocks. And sure, there is a lot of sloppy journalism, and editors have always shaped their reports to fit the narrative they want to tell.
If you hate and revile the press indiscriminately, though, you run the danger of destroying one of the pillars of liberty.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech." It says nothing about private companies like Facebook, Twitter, or Google making policies about the type of speech they want to allow on their platforms. "Free speech" does belong in quotes when what people mean is that a private concern declines to provide a platform for a particular type of speech. It's like crying censorship because a bookstore declines to carry a particular magazine. You might not like the policies of the bookstore or the social media company, but they're not abridging anyone's rights by refusing to spread certain content.
Prior to starting Slack, Stewart Butterfield worked on a social-engineering-project-masquerading-as-a-game called Glitch. He was trying to figure out how to encourage pro-social behavior among players, and he did a pretty good job of it. Ellen Pao thinks that social networking companies should do something similar -- figure out how to promote community-building behavior on their platforms. Mailing list and forum moderators have often tried to encourage practices that build good online communities. Why shouldn't they? If you're going to devote your time and energy into an online community, you want it to be one you're going to enjoy.
Online platforms are never going to be value neutral. Like it or not, social media platforms encourage some forms of behavior and discourage others. Social engineering is very much part of the puzzle.
Most of the web runs on layers of open source software. If Linus' Law was more than an open source marketing point, the web would be a poster child for secure computing.
Even back in the 90s, open source software wasn't more robust or secure than proprietary software, and that continues to be the case despite numerous assertions to the contrary. Sure, there are more eyeballs on the code, but few delve deeply into it, and fewer still delve deeply into it looking for flaws or vulnerabilities. A lot of open source software is built on a shoestring. There aren't the resources to get the features the code needs, let alone the programmer hours to make it bulletproof.
Moreover, open source software is as vulnerable to players with evil intent as any other kind of software. If a programmer wants to introduce a backdoor, all they need to do is make themselves an expert on some ugly low-level area that no one else wants to get into. The vulnerabilities are hidden by the complexity of the code and the time cost of digging through the ugly code. Bonus points if the programmer is backed by government or industry.
What would you do if you were the NSA? What would you do if you were a private entity that wanted access to all the data everywhere? Do you think they're not actively doing all that and more?
Now add the fact that different layers and components are built by different groups who likely don't coordinate with one another. If one layer or component is well-built, well-audited, and secure, bad players can just move their mischief elsewhere.
The commentator's rant is perfectly self-referential: an apt example of everything he's complaining about. I can't decide if he's a complete genius or utterly clueless, but in either event, his rant is a work of art.
Also, can we just stop patting tech people on the back for being brilliant? There's little evidence of that these days. A lot of tech people now are highly trained performers who are skilled at the one thing they actually do, but maybe not overall the brightest crayons in the box. Tech hiring practices emphasize jumping through hoops to the exclusion of creativity or the ability to think about problems from multiple angles.
If someone had told me in the 80s that we'd be using our pocket supercomputers to play Angry Birds and watch cat videos, I might have become a plant physiologist or dropped out of college and gone off to Japan to study shibori.
I'm an iOS programmer now, creating apps that run solely on the phone and don't serve ads. Phones are plenty powerful to do complex computing chores, but very few developers use the phones as more than a delivery device. When recruiters call me about a potential job, it's almost always a thin app with a hefty cloud backend so the company, not the user, controls the experience and the data.
Smart phones have dumbed-down tech. Once you get under the flash, there's not much there. Some apps that do useful things, and a lot of apps that are designed to keep the user engaged and online so that the data collectors can track their movements and serve them lots of ads.
Teenagers are smart people. Most of what goes on in their lives is designed to keep them busy so they don't get into either mischief or the marketplace. Their phones are just another piece of that. They have a lot of energy, and they want to do things that are real and worthwhile, but they're told they need a college degree first.
My 18-year-old son recently told me that he's considering slowing down the college process (he started at age 16) so he can take a job doing lighting for the college theatre. Cutting gels and crawling around on wire mesh to hang lights gives him joy and a sense of accomplishment. A couple years of that will give him real skills and knowledge that the always-on-their-phones cohort won't have.
AI could be our friend if that's what its owners/creators want it to do.
So far, it looks like they want it to corner markets, deploy advertising, create addictions, shape public opinion, and subvert democracy.
The big tech companies aren't even trying to solve the big problems that face humanity. They're not even trying to solve the big problems created by their huge campuses (housing, transportation). Where's the money in that?
You're right that cell phones aren't usually propped up so they can see the bed, but some people put their phones in charging cradles or stands to keep them upright.
There are documented cases of people remotely activating laptop cameras to spy on people. School officials have spied on students in their bedrooms via school-issued laptops.
It's not that hard for hackers to remotely seize control of computer cameras and microphones, and that would include the type of computer you carry in your pocket. Apps often have access to the camera and microphone and can listen in even if they're in the background. You can forbid access, but that only works with apps that are following the rules.
You can't know who is watching and/or listening to you at any time through any of these devices: large corporations, government entities, criminal organizations. If they care to do so, they can.
I cover cameras on my devices when I'm not using them. I don't know any sure way to turn off the built-in microphones so that hackers can't use them to spy on me.
Well, let's see. Anyone who has a smartphone, tablet, or computer in their bedroom is already providing surveillance equipment for anyone who can hack their way in. I don't see how the Echo Spot is appreciably different.
To me, the creepy thing about the whole connected house and voice-activated digital assistants is that they're always listening. I don't care so much if someone ogles me in the altogether or watches me having sex (they might learn something!), but I don't like the idea of people listening to my private conversations.
I had the typical ignorant disdain of COBOL until I actually worked with some. Over a short period of time, I developed respect for the language and for the disciplined, methodical programmers who wielded it. We could learn much from reading old COBOL programs, particularly for web forms, where a modern form of COBOL would be a lot more readable and maintainable than the krufty PHP and JS that infests the web.
One small example is the COBOL institution of edit masks, which were invaluable for handling form input and output of things like phone numbers and credit card numbers. COBOL's edit masks were simple to use, readable and understandable, and powerful enough to cover common business cases. No modern web language has anything that approaches COBOL's elegance in this area, which is why entering your credit card on a web site is slow and tedious.
When I lived in Alaska, I never heard anyone call it anything else. Denali is its name (no Mt. in front of it). Only imbeciles from the Lower 48 think it should be referred to any other way. Living up there gives you a different view of the country, that's for sure. Seattle is the capitol of the world, Texas exists to be used as the butt of size jokes, and inhabitants of the Lower 48 are wimpy and clueless.
I've been behind a Google self-driving car in traffic. They have a big camera (or cameras) mounted on top that spin really fast. It's a distraction when you're behind them in traffic,. The spinning camera keeps grabbing your attention. The camera feels more important than the brake lights, both because it's moving really fast and also because it's located in the same place as the flashing lights on an emergency vehicle.