Specifically on this issue too. Obama said he wouldn't spend federal funds fighting state's medical marijuana laws, yet his government has raided more dispensaries in states with medical marijuana laws than Bush's. source.
I don't regret voting for him in the general elections, but I do regret not giving money or volunteering for a better candidate in the primaries.
I'd argue that the laws should be decided on their merits or problems, not something purely artificial like "This seems like a good number of laws."
If we told the government it could do ten things and only ten things, the first thing it would do would be to try to increase the number. The second would be to define however many things it was doing as ten. The third would be taxes. The fourth would be NSA spying. They'd argue about the remaining six slots, and after heated yelling matches on cable news, it would be announced that education, healthcare, and several other services you might actually use sadly could not be included on the list of ten.
Cancer is evolution on a cellular level, without any foresight into whether it's a good idea long term.
Apple evolved with the loss of Jobs. Remember that evolution doesn't imply change toward something we like, just a change to better fit the current situation. Apple seems to have evolved away from the tactics that made it so successful. I expect that this evolution will end up damaging Apple, possibly killing it, though that's likely wishful thinking on my part because I don't like the walled garden approach.
It could be that Apple evolved in a bad direction because a cell in Steve Jobs' liver evolved in a bad direction.
I agree, same thing with music, movies, and probably anything. You remember the highlights, not the mundane, average, everyday shit. For every Woodward and Bernstein uncovering watergates, you have ten thousand reporters dutifully transcribing whatever it is the press secretary or other spokesperson tells them and handing that propaganda over to the consumers. We remember the great ones who stand out, the rest are forgotten. That can be misinterpreted as assuming that all the past reporters were good. Same thing if you look back on the movies of yesteryear, you only keep the ones that are good, it can be tempting to compare the classics to the shit currently in theaters and conclude that only good movies were made decades ago and only shitty movies are made now.
The good news is, it's ALWAYS happened, so it's not like civilization is crumbing. Journalism has pretty much always been this shitty, so we're not heading into a dark age. At least, not because of that. Also with the internet, that's something that actually can change journalism and is. So it's not getting worse, and it could get better.
I'm very optimistic, and I think I have good reason for that. For example, before the internet this story would have stood on its own. Rumsfeld making a blatantly hypocritical statement, without the "journalist" bothering to note Rumsfelds hypocrisy, would have been just out there for people to read without any crosstalk. The comments on it point out that problem, and perhaps the article will get updated or corrected. Not likely, but more likely than it would have been 20 years ago.
Snowden's info was of no use...and we didn't need any of this to have a "national conversation about privacy"
We didn't NEED it, no, but we weren't doing it beforehand. I don't NEED to have a heart attack to start eating healthy and working out, but here I am eating italian food and totally not working out. I'll tell myself that I'm going to jog to the subway station today, but everyone in the conversation knows it's a dirty lie.
Anyway, we need several Snowdens, since we're too dumb, lazy, and paranoid about foreign threats to cut back government's powers. There are activists, yes, but shit, that's been going on for a decade and hasn't worked yet. It's insane to suggest that we were going to do anything effective without some new event. It's overly optimistic to hope that we're on the path now to curbing big brother, but Snowden sure as hell didn't turn us AWAY from that path.
Snowden raises two issues for the NSA. He exposed their crimes, and he also made them look really bad. br.
By saying he was "brilliant," they deal with the second one. "What? No, this isn't a security lapse. This is a supervillain spy hacker genius! We've dealt with him, there's no one else out there who can penetrate our defenses. You're safe. Ask no more questions, there are no monsters under your bed, save for the ones you pay us to protect you from."
They discuss this in the article and point out that.
Their point is that more versatility in tools is a good thing. Perhaps a situation arises where you for some reason need to do something funky. Maybe you're reporting on a situation and want to send a still image back to your newspaper/website/network immediately when you get to a wifi spot.
Maybe you have rented this camera for a one-time use and have a limited budget and someone else is using the computer.
Their philosophy seems to be "We made it, you use the features of it that you need."
I'll wager most of us, upon hearing about smartphones, thought "Why would I need all that in a phone when I have a computer?"
Laziness and cowardice. People don't want to have to try to assess how good a person is at making informed decisions, so instead they look at whether they've already done a similar job. Doesn't seem to matter whether they were awesome or sucked donkey balls at it. On top of that, they only get dinged for picking a bad CEO, they personally don't get much for picking a stellar CEO, or at least they're not looking that far in advance.
It's not limited to the top position either, it's everywhere. This is why entry-level jobs suck so bad, and every job worth having requires experience. HR wants to cover its ass. If they hire a kid fresh out of college who is amazing, the kid gets the credit. If the kid is terrible, HR is afraid they'll be asked "Why would you hire someone with no experience!" and it's on them.
As to the senate race, she was able to buy her way in at the top level. And something similar is at work with voters anyway. The vast majority of voters don't even PRETEND to look into the quality of a politician, they vote for names they remember. Have you ever tried researching candidates in anything besides big elections? All that comes up with a google search for candidates names in most elections is polling data. It's damn near impossible to find anything of substance, let alone how good a decisionmaker that candidate is going to be.
So it's because it's difficult to figure out who has a good head on their shoulders and who is simply good at schmoozing, and because usually they're only looking to avoid a BAD choice, not necessarily pick a good choice.
CNN taught me that it's when a woman bounces her ass up and down.
Wiki also notes, with a citation "Twerking carries both gendered and racialized connotations." Which seems about as idiotic to me as saying round corners are something associated exclusively with iphones.
Who stands to benefit from such a physical war exactly? Another war with no exit strategy and no real allies. I don't think it's been long enough to where enough people have forgotten how bad that worked the previous two times.
Now the cyber security industry wanting more money to be thrown their way, that sounds a lot more likely.
This is just speculation, but I think the boston bombers did it because they wanted to be famous. That and some religious bullshit.
An actual country who has hired cyber-mercenaries on the other hand, it makes no sense. Unless you're suggesting Syria is doing this for attention?
Now, if the "syrian electronic army" actually has nothing to do with Syria, then that's a reasonable explanation, but without something suggesting it's just a bunch of domestic suburban juveniles, I'm not sure it holds much water.
I temporarily was unable to know what was going on with Miley Cyrus. I freaked out and lost consciousness. When I came to, I had already written a letter to Obama demanding we surrender to Assad.
Any metric is going to have flaws. Not to say we can't get a BETTER metric, just know that every way we judge scientists has pitfalls. People will game the system no matter what. And we're obviously not going to bother trying to understand each scientist's body of research. That would be too hard!
Definitely true in science. Some scientists act as if telling someone their preliminary results will cause someone else to steal the data and publish first. More likely, sharing results before they're published will result in better networking and valuable collaborations. At a minimum, if someone else IS working on the exact same thing, you can coordinate and publish at the same time so neither lab gets the scoop on the other, and the papers make a bigger splash together.
I'm no senior enough to say ALWAYS blab about your data, but my thesis adviser was, and she said in her 25 years, she had always been open with unpublished data.
I'm guessing that's the cause of the redesign. Seems to me like changing the design of a popular product is a sure-fire way to kill it. Or in the case of facebook and MS, test how much you can piss off your users without them actually leaving.
There's also the doublespeak that being a strong leader means dropping bombs at every excuse. Not to mention showing your support for the troops by putting them in dangerous situations.
The military industrial complex is also cheering us on to use those bombs they sold us. They've already made the replacements.
Hmm... maybe we should move to a leasing system for the weapons rather than buying them. Then we won't have to blow people up or accumulate even bigger stockpiles of weapons in order for them to get paid.
I think history has shown for thousands of years that they will always make corruption secret. I'd say no, we should just conclude that government types are genetically incapable of being trustworthy. Lets err on the other side for once: no more secrets for politicians ever. Seriously, when have we ever tried THAT experiment? Every single government seems to have tried to used secrecy for it's own sins. I went to school in America, so my grasp of history is pretty terrible, but has there EVER been a government where historians said "Yeah, they really didn't keep enough secret, that was their problem."
Troop locations are one of the few valid secrets I can see keeping, but that seems to be no longer secret anyway with cell phones, twitter, etc. Plan accordingly: avoid putting troops in positions where secrecy is the only thing protecting them.
I'm not sure why you blame the internet. Had I had one of these things and no internet to bring me this story, I probably would have just sworn never to buy anything by google again. What you are objecting to seems to be human nature.
The NSA likes the US copper and and hybrid fiber-coaxial last gen slow. Too fast and they have to upgrade their local backhaul too.
But it's tax dollars, so that isn't really much of a negative for them. I'm guessing the NSA isn't facing much threat of a budget cut. The attempts by the few good legislators to cut their budget isn't going to go anywhere, and even if it did, they'd receive any "emergency funds" they needed to keep spying on us.
It's only unimportant programs like biomedical research, education, and making sure poor kids get enough to eat that have problems like "limited budgets."
I suppose when there's a powerful interest in suppressing videos and enough material to convince the public it's something they need to be afraid of. I doubt it will happen. About nine people a day die as a result of cell phones and driving, which is about nine more people a day than die from pot, yet we don't have a "war on cell phones." It's because the cell phone companies beat back the "WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN!" response, and no one really stands to make a ton of money from banning cell phones.
I don't think anyone stands to gain a bunch of money from banning videos. I think it's safe.
Unique? Perhaps unique for a private corporation, but I'm more worried about the NSA's ability to see everything I do, so I'm suggesting we take care of the bigger threat first.
If that's too pro-google for you, then I'd suggest you're too concerned about corporate branding and need to care more about big government.
Slashdot Mirror
Specifically on this issue too. Obama said he wouldn't spend federal funds fighting state's medical marijuana laws, yet his government has raided more dispensaries in states with medical marijuana laws than Bush's. source.
I don't regret voting for him in the general elections, but I do regret not giving money or volunteering for a better candidate in the primaries.
I'd argue that the laws should be decided on their merits or problems, not something purely artificial like "This seems like a good number of laws."
If we told the government it could do ten things and only ten things, the first thing it would do would be to try to increase the number. The second would be to define however many things it was doing as ten. The third would be taxes. The fourth would be NSA spying. They'd argue about the remaining six slots, and after heated yelling matches on cable news, it would be announced that education, healthcare, and several other services you might actually use sadly could not be included on the list of ten.
Cancer is evolution on a cellular level, without any foresight into whether it's a good idea long term.
Apple evolved with the loss of Jobs. Remember that evolution doesn't imply change toward something we like, just a change to better fit the current situation. Apple seems to have evolved away from the tactics that made it so successful. I expect that this evolution will end up damaging Apple, possibly killing it, though that's likely wishful thinking on my part because I don't like the walled garden approach.
It could be that Apple evolved in a bad direction because a cell in Steve Jobs' liver evolved in a bad direction.
I swear, I haven't been smoking pot recently!
I agree, same thing with music, movies, and probably anything. You remember the highlights, not the mundane, average, everyday shit. For every Woodward and Bernstein uncovering watergates, you have ten thousand reporters dutifully transcribing whatever it is the press secretary or other spokesperson tells them and handing that propaganda over to the consumers. We remember the great ones who stand out, the rest are forgotten. That can be misinterpreted as assuming that all the past reporters were good. Same thing if you look back on the movies of yesteryear, you only keep the ones that are good, it can be tempting to compare the classics to the shit currently in theaters and conclude that only good movies were made decades ago and only shitty movies are made now.
The good news is, it's ALWAYS happened, so it's not like civilization is crumbing. Journalism has pretty much always been this shitty, so we're not heading into a dark age. At least, not because of that. Also with the internet, that's something that actually can change journalism and is. So it's not getting worse, and it could get better.
I'm very optimistic, and I think I have good reason for that. For example, before the internet this story would have stood on its own. Rumsfeld making a blatantly hypocritical statement, without the "journalist" bothering to note Rumsfelds hypocrisy, would have been just out there for people to read without any crosstalk. The comments on it point out that problem, and perhaps the article will get updated or corrected. Not likely, but more likely than it would have been 20 years ago.
Snowden's info was of no use...and we didn't need any of this to have a "national conversation about privacy"
We didn't NEED it, no, but we weren't doing it beforehand. I don't NEED to have a heart attack to start eating healthy and working out, but here I am eating italian food and totally not working out. I'll tell myself that I'm going to jog to the subway station today, but everyone in the conversation knows it's a dirty lie.
Anyway, we need several Snowdens, since we're too dumb, lazy, and paranoid about foreign threats to cut back government's powers. There are activists, yes, but shit, that's been going on for a decade and hasn't worked yet. It's insane to suggest that we were going to do anything effective without some new event. It's overly optimistic to hope that we're on the path now to curbing big brother, but Snowden sure as hell didn't turn us AWAY from that path.
Snowden raises two issues for the NSA. He exposed their crimes, and he also made them look really bad.
br. By saying he was "brilliant," they deal with the second one. "What? No, this isn't a security lapse. This is a supervillain spy hacker genius! We've dealt with him, there's no one else out there who can penetrate our defenses. You're safe. Ask no more questions, there are no monsters under your bed, save for the ones you pay us to protect you from."
Right now I could go onto any number of pirate sites and download a very much watchable copy of "White House Down"
Yeah, I don't think any copy of that movie counts as watchable
(This has been the obligatory snarky comment about the quality of the movie you provided as an example. I actually think it looked kind of funny.)
They discuss this in the article and point out that.
Their point is that more versatility in tools is a good thing. Perhaps a situation arises where you for some reason need to do something funky. Maybe you're reporting on a situation and want to send a still image back to your newspaper/website/network immediately when you get to a wifi spot.
Maybe you have rented this camera for a one-time use and have a limited budget and someone else is using the computer.
Their philosophy seems to be "We made it, you use the features of it that you need."
I'll wager most of us, upon hearing about smartphones, thought "Why would I need all that in a phone when I have a computer?"
Laziness and cowardice. People don't want to have to try to assess how good a person is at making informed decisions, so instead they look at whether they've already done a similar job. Doesn't seem to matter whether they were awesome or sucked donkey balls at it. On top of that, they only get dinged for picking a bad CEO, they personally don't get much for picking a stellar CEO, or at least they're not looking that far in advance.
It's not limited to the top position either, it's everywhere. This is why entry-level jobs suck so bad, and every job worth having requires experience. HR wants to cover its ass. If they hire a kid fresh out of college who is amazing, the kid gets the credit. If the kid is terrible, HR is afraid they'll be asked "Why would you hire someone with no experience!" and it's on them.
As to the senate race, she was able to buy her way in at the top level. And something similar is at work with voters anyway. The vast majority of voters don't even PRETEND to look into the quality of a politician, they vote for names they remember. Have you ever tried researching candidates in anything besides big elections? All that comes up with a google search for candidates names in most elections is polling data. It's damn near impossible to find anything of substance, let alone how good a decisionmaker that candidate is going to be.
So it's because it's difficult to figure out who has a good head on their shoulders and who is simply good at schmoozing, and because usually they're only looking to avoid a BAD choice, not necessarily pick a good choice.
What environment? It's the god damned Moon. It's a lifeless near-vacuum
No one said it was a GOOD environment...
CNN taught me that it's when a woman bounces her ass up and down.
Wiki also notes, with a citation "Twerking carries both gendered and racialized connotations." Which seems about as idiotic to me as saying round corners are something associated exclusively with iphones.
Who stands to benefit from such a physical war exactly? Another war with no exit strategy and no real allies. I don't think it's been long enough to where enough people have forgotten how bad that worked the previous two times.
Now the cyber security industry wanting more money to be thrown their way, that sounds a lot more likely.
This is just speculation, but I think the boston bombers did it because they wanted to be famous. That and some religious bullshit.
An actual country who has hired cyber-mercenaries on the other hand, it makes no sense. Unless you're suggesting Syria is doing this for attention?
Now, if the "syrian electronic army" actually has nothing to do with Syria, then that's a reasonable explanation, but without something suggesting it's just a bunch of domestic suburban juveniles, I'm not sure it holds much water.
I temporarily was unable to know what was going on with Miley Cyrus. I freaked out and lost consciousness. When I came to, I had already written a letter to Obama demanding we surrender to Assad.
Dirty, dirty doughnuts, and men in uniforms who love them.
Any metric is going to have flaws. Not to say we can't get a BETTER metric, just know that every way we judge scientists has pitfalls. People will game the system no matter what. And we're obviously not going to bother trying to understand each scientist's body of research. That would be too hard!
Definitely true in science. Some scientists act as if telling someone their preliminary results will cause someone else to steal the data and publish first. More likely, sharing results before they're published will result in better networking and valuable collaborations. At a minimum, if someone else IS working on the exact same thing, you can coordinate and publish at the same time so neither lab gets the scoop on the other, and the papers make a bigger splash together.
I'm no senior enough to say ALWAYS blab about your data, but my thesis adviser was, and she said in her 25 years, she had always been open with unpublished data.
Haha, that TOTALLY sounds like [insert any other location with elected representatives here].
I'm guessing that's the cause of the redesign. Seems to me like changing the design of a popular product is a sure-fire way to kill it. Or in the case of facebook and MS, test how much you can piss off your users without them actually leaving.
There's also the doublespeak that being a strong leader means dropping bombs at every excuse. Not to mention showing your support for the troops by putting them in dangerous situations.
The military industrial complex is also cheering us on to use those bombs they sold us. They've already made the replacements.
Hmm... maybe we should move to a leasing system for the weapons rather than buying them. Then we won't have to blow people up or accumulate even bigger stockpiles of weapons in order for them to get paid.
I think history has shown for thousands of years that they will always make corruption secret. I'd say no, we should just conclude that government types are genetically incapable of being trustworthy. Lets err on the other side for once: no more secrets for politicians ever. Seriously, when have we ever tried THAT experiment? Every single government seems to have tried to used secrecy for it's own sins. I went to school in America, so my grasp of history is pretty terrible, but has there EVER been a government where historians said "Yeah, they really didn't keep enough secret, that was their problem."
Troop locations are one of the few valid secrets I can see keeping, but that seems to be no longer secret anyway with cell phones, twitter, etc. Plan accordingly: avoid putting troops in positions where secrecy is the only thing protecting them.
I'm not sure why you blame the internet. Had I had one of these things and no internet to bring me this story, I probably would have just sworn never to buy anything by google again. What you are objecting to seems to be human nature.
The NSA likes the US copper and and hybrid fiber-coaxial last gen slow. Too fast and they have to upgrade their local backhaul too.
But it's tax dollars, so that isn't really much of a negative for them. I'm guessing the NSA isn't facing much threat of a budget cut. The attempts by the few good legislators to cut their budget isn't going to go anywhere, and even if it did, they'd receive any "emergency funds" they needed to keep spying on us.
It's only unimportant programs like biomedical research, education, and making sure poor kids get enough to eat that have problems like "limited budgets."
I suppose when there's a powerful interest in suppressing videos and enough material to convince the public it's something they need to be afraid of. I doubt it will happen. About nine people a day die as a result of cell phones and driving, which is about nine more people a day than die from pot, yet we don't have a "war on cell phones." It's because the cell phone companies beat back the "WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN!" response, and no one really stands to make a ton of money from banning cell phones.
I don't think anyone stands to gain a bunch of money from banning videos. I think it's safe.
Unique? Perhaps unique for a private corporation, but I'm more worried about the NSA's ability to see everything I do, so I'm suggesting we take care of the bigger threat first.
If that's too pro-google for you, then I'd suggest you're too concerned about corporate branding and need to care more about big government.