Nuance who believe we simply never want to talk to a real human again, preferring the clipped, efficient tones of its Nina virtual assistant.
I don't think that's it. I like lilt in a voice. I don't need a human for simple procedures, like checking in to a hotel, as some have noted.
Here's another dimension, though: Dumbness. For things more complicated than a simple checkin, like checking out at the grocery store with produce, or finding out the details of the data plan on a possible cell phone purchase, what I care about is dumbness. I'm looking for the least dumb inteface, which usually goes in this priority order: Smart human, smart computer, average human, average computer, dumb human, dumb computer.
The reason I avoid the human interface is because the corporations are hiring the cheapest idiots they can find, and their computer interfaces are average. So checking out with produce at my local grocery is painful at the computers, but a nightmare with the human. The human -- looking bedraggled from working the night shift at the meth lab -- asking questions like, "What is this?" "It's asparagus." "Is that a fruit or a vegetable?" "Argh. You're a vegetable."
My ideal case, including RoI considerations, is to use an average computer most of the time, and have a token service fee for using a human ($5 or 5%, something on that order) -- but that human should be skilled and have both the knowledge and authority to complete the transaction, answer my questions, etc. I'm thinking they're getting paid $15 - $30/hour, and bringing in $30 - $50/hr in "enhanced service" fees (average including downtime).
Obviously the details would change from context to context, and it doesn't work in all cases (like the Home Depot people wandering the aisles). Where it works, though, it would turn skilled human service people into a profit center instead of a cost center.
If you don't like their microtransactions, don't spend money on them. It's that simple.
Some, maybe most, are bitching and paying because they are tools. But some, myself included, don't do microtransctions, and dislike them because they are being abused in the economic efficiency sense.
The free market is not perfectly efficient. Consumers are not perfectly informed, they don't fully amortize long run versus short run, markets aren't perfectly competitive, etc. Microtransactions may be an economic distortion, particularly in the competition and long-run v. short run sense. They shift the cost from the short run gate to the long run captive audience. That has a tendency to distort market price upward from what would otherwise be equilibrium. It also has some benefits, like inexpensive test driving -- but we are already way past, "It's that simple."
It is not that simple for everyone. Some people are playing a deeper game. Some people want our system to become stronger over time, so we can all become more productive in the long run. Those people think about system stocks, flows, forces, and feedback, and do not believe the economy can be reduced to trite platitudes.
People who are satisfied with the status quo -- people who see a picture of Bill Clinton or Will.I.Am and think, "yeah, we're celebrating the right things" -- are not the kind of people who become passionate programmers. The best programmers the world has known have all looked at what we have and said, "This is lame, and I'm going to fix it no matter how many times my computer says, 'You coded it wrong.'" A dystopian view of the present is what drives people to run the compiler one more time, one more time, one more time, one more time, until at 3 AM they say, "FUCK YEAH, BITCH, I WIN!"
So unless that front page is trying to inspire kids by making them think, "I am going to learn enough so I can destroy asshat hairstyles like this," I think they've missed the mark.
The bill is designed to particularly have a chilling effect on 'shotgun' litigation tactics by NPEs, in which they sue numerous defendants on a patent with only a vague case for infringement.
So to achieve that, instead of addressing shotgun litigation by any litigant, they create an inhibition to all NPEs. That would include things like the The Open Invention Network, and would exempt practicing entities like SCO. Does that sound right?
This legislation would create unequal patent protection for big corps versus independent inventors. Once a patent is sold by its original inventor, it can only subsequently be sold to big corps or it loses some of its power. This means big corps will have an advantage compared to independent inventors, who will have less ability to market their inventions.
If the problem is shotgun patent enforcement, regulate shotgun patent enforcement. If the problem is overbroad patents, narrow the allowed scope of patents. Address the real problem with equal treatment for all litigants under the law. Don't create a preferred class for big incumbent corps and inhibit independent competition.
This is nothing more than another land grab by big incumbents who use our government to inhibit free market competition.
"... the ISPs have no right to decide what you can and can not download."
But the government does, right?
No.
"The internet has become an essential part of living in the 21st century, it uses public infrastructure and it is time we treat it as a public utility."
Isn't it convenient how politicians use this situation to exert more control over the Internet? (And now watch as thousands of geeks who have otherwise been staunchly against the government regulating the Internet line up behind this guy.)
He is not implying regulation of the Internet. He is implying regulation of the Internet service providers (to prohibit them from regulating the Internet).
The Internet is not their hardware, it is our network that we pay them to provision.
the economy is basically just a dynamic balance between produced energy and consumed energy
It is a really good perspective to consider for the way it makes you think about production, but it is not broadly generalizable. It is very true for commodities -- particularly if they are energy intensive goods, like rubber, copper, or meat -- but not for goods and services which are differentiated by skill or creativity. It takes the same amount of energy to write a bestseller as to write a book noone buys. It takes far more energy to shingle a roof than to transplant a kidney (even if you amortize the energy consumed in med school).
The initial response from the online advertising industry is unsurprisingly hostile and blustering, calling the move 'a nuclear first strike.'
This is a completely justified nuclear response. The nuclear first strike was when the advertising industry started stalking people everywhere they go without informed consent or even an easy way for average people to opt out, and with no way to purge your history. If you had only used cookies in the public interest, the browser that cares about its users would not have to respond to your hostile behavior.
But please: point to a SINGLE THING that the stupid "petition" website has started, stopped, or otherwise changed?*
Marijuana policy. We put up a bunch of petitions in favor of decriminalization and legalization of marijuana, and the Obama admistration changed its policies. Some will argue, I'm sure, that the change was the opposite of what we were asking for. That instead of reducing penalties they increased enforcement to its highest level ever, shutting down more state authorized businesses in California than even GWB had done. And that is true.
Heck, the acts themselves are illegal even if nobody actually ever even does them.
If it never happens, an illegal act has not occurred. The actions of an entity that never occur are not illegal, and the entity is not illegal. That is the sense of illegal originally used -- real world actions, not hypothetical examples that cannot reflect the entire context of any real event.
If you want to get technical, you can't even really *know* that they broke the law even *WITH* due process...
True. "The law has been broken" is a transient belief that is only ever the result of due process and us mutable upon review.
Sure, in some cases a not-guilty verdict might rule that no law had been actually been broken, but that's still pretty far from the universal case.
Doesn't have to be the universal case. If it happens once, that is enough to prove that you cannot objectively know that a law has been broken without due process. Objective truth cannot change.
Whether or not an act itself is criminal is typically codified into the law itself.
The law codifies a set of actions which, if believed to have occurred and in isolation of mitigating factors, would be illegal. Whether a particular real world action in context is a violation of law is determined by due process.
A person can be found guilty by due process without actually having broken any law if the evidence is sufficiently incriminating
You cannot know that they did not break the law without due process. Whether they violated the law is a matter of judgment for the courts, not some divine truth we can ascertain without due process.
and a person can potentially break a law without ever being found guilty.
You cannot determine that they broke a law without due process. You can have evidence, you can believe it, but the question of whether a law has been broken can only be determined through due process, not by individual decree.
I don't know if you are trying to deliberately be obtuse by taking points out of context or if you genuinely do not understand.
I understand your belief that objective legality can be known; I merely do not accept it. I am doing my best to explain my view that our legal system is designed to tolerate the inability to know truth, and that the question of legality is fundamentally a question of the legal system, though my explanation may inadvertently appear obtuse.
Surely that last paragraph could not have been constructed by a fool. I shall continue not to question your intelligence or sincerity, though my baser instincts gnaw at me. We should not be wasting our time on barbs (unless you want to practice barbs, but then let's decouple it from this story and get more analytical about it).
Actions that are criminal are illegal.
Due process is the method we use to determine whether an action is criminal, which is a subset of whether it is illegal.
The point of a criminal trial is generally to ascertain the status of guilt of a suspect, not whether or not the action was ever actually legal (because if were legal before they were brought to trial, then there would be no reason to bring the person to criminal court in the first place, since the person would not have done anything wrong).
We put people on trial when we suspect that they have committed a crime. One aspect is what they did, another is whether the action violated the law. Due process is the method we use to discover the answer to both questions.
Civil court can sometimes decide on issues governing whether or not something was legal, but that's not criminal court.
Criminal courts are not civil courts, and civil courts sometimes decide whether something is legal. It does not follow from those two facts alone that criminal courts do not judge whether an action is legal. (and that is good, because they do)
[Are you saying that these events] were all legal acts?
No, I am saying we do not know, and cannot know, in the absence of due process. We cannot be certain whether the judicial process will find an event to be legal without running the process.
People should not be able to make insurance claims for crimes where nobody is ever convicted
I think this one actually comes up more often than you are implying with your incredulity. When an insurance company doesn't believe your story about a robbery, it may not pay. The claimant then has to decide whether they will fight it in court. If it goes that far, it once again becomes a matter of judicial process.
If would be highly illogical to say that never being captured for a murder you committed means that what you did was legal. It wasn't, it was illegal.
It would be highly illogical to say that you committed a murder without due process. If you have not been tried and found guilty, you only suspect you have committed a murder. Your memory could be flawed, particularly if you were in the midst of a situation that ended with someone's death.
The video footage objectively *PROVES* that the law was actually broken,
If we later find that the video was a fabrication, then the new perceived reality would be that the holdup did not happen. The objective truth of the matter cannot change, so it must be that the perception of reality changed. Evidence alone does not objectively prove that the law was broken.
again, the very notion of which is a contradition, since if no law was broken, there would be no reason to try the person in the first place
We do not try people for being guilty of crimes. We try them for being suspected of crimes.
As the topic in this particular thread is "Not Illegal Until Found Guilty", and you were the one who started the thread, with that exact headline,
Their actions cannot be determined to be legal or illegal without due process. There is no objective truth of legality, it can only be determined by due process.
You can often know that a crime has been committed even before you know who has done it
No, you can't. There is no such thing as a violation of law without due process. Law is a process, not objective edict. There is suspicion. You might have a suspect in custody. You might really really really believe he is guilty. But without due process, you cannot know that he is guilty, or that any law has been broken.
You realize that this is the same thing as saying that it's entirely legal to do things like kill people and rob banks, as long as you don't get caught, right?
Yes, in the sense I implied. These companies are claimng that their refusal to process otherwise legitimate transactions is justified because the actions are illegal. That is not the case without due process. The fact that you claim that a person robbed a bank, or that these corporations claim that a website is illegal, does not make it so.
You may have seen a person running out of the bank with a suitcase because he had to catch a train to the airport. You may have seen someone kill in self defense. Your perception of the events does not -- in itself -- make them illegal.
Google is in discussions with payment companies including Visa, MasterCard and PayPal to put illegal download websites out of existence by cutting off their funding.
A person's actions are not illegal until they are found guilty. That is a cornerstone principle of our law; presumption of innocence. A few corporations proclaiming something illegal does not make it so. Having our monetary system in the hands of a few relatively unregulated oligarchs is perilous.
[Obama] describes patent trolls as "a classic example," of the problem, and that "they don't actually produce anything themselves."
Whether a bad patent is wielded by a producer or a holding company does not change the fact that it should never have been granted. If we kill the trolls, we will still be left with the runaway, wasteful patent litigation over bad patents by companies that do produce things.
The problem is not production. The "patent troll" hobgoblin is misdirecting the patent backlash that should be directed at a patent system that is too powerful. We are getting bad patents because we grant them too easily and give too much enforcement power to those who hold them. That is every bit as true of the mobile patent wars between producers as with the network service patent wars of the trolls.
The "patent troll" misdirection is harming our ability to fix the actual problem.
My problem with wikileaks is its heavy anti-american bias. It seems like he wants to embarrass the U.S. just for the sake of embarrassment, and not to make the world "a more just society".
How could we possibly be embarrassed by our actions? We are a just society, and so it cannot possibly embarrass us for our actions to be published. If we are not guilty, we have nothing to hide.
On a more serious note, have you actually looked at, for example, the diplomatic cables? They mostly show the US attempting to protect the interest of its major lobbies, as we would expect. But it shows a lot of foreign diplomats selling out their citizens to our lobbies. We look like a bully, those foreign diplomats look like grovelling dogs.
You can see the effect by looking at EU copyright developments. The US is still doing what we've been doing, strong-arming people at the bidding of a few big K-street clients. But the EU diplomats have been chastened, and are not simply rolling over and hoping to get their bellies scratched.
I haven't looked at the rest, but as for the diplomatic cables, they are much more embarrassing to our puppet states than to us.
Slashdot Mirror
Nuance who believe we simply never want to talk to a real human again, preferring the clipped, efficient tones of its Nina virtual assistant.
I don't think that's it. I like lilt in a voice. I don't need a human for simple procedures, like checking in to a hotel, as some have noted.
Here's another dimension, though: Dumbness. For things more complicated than a simple checkin, like checking out at the grocery store with produce, or finding out the details of the data plan on a possible cell phone purchase, what I care about is dumbness. I'm looking for the least dumb inteface, which usually goes in this priority order: Smart human, smart computer, average human, average computer, dumb human, dumb computer.
The reason I avoid the human interface is because the corporations are hiring the cheapest idiots they can find, and their computer interfaces are average. So checking out with produce at my local grocery is painful at the computers, but a nightmare with the human. The human -- looking bedraggled from working the night shift at the meth lab -- asking questions like, "What is this?" "It's asparagus." "Is that a fruit or a vegetable?" "Argh. You're a vegetable."
My ideal case, including RoI considerations, is to use an average computer most of the time, and have a token service fee for using a human ($5 or 5%, something on that order) -- but that human should be skilled and have both the knowledge and authority to complete the transaction, answer my questions, etc. I'm thinking they're getting paid $15 - $30/hour, and bringing in $30 - $50/hr in "enhanced service" fees (average including downtime).
Obviously the details would change from context to context, and it doesn't work in all cases (like the Home Depot people wandering the aisles). Where it works, though, it would turn skilled human service people into a profit center instead of a cost center.
If you don't like their microtransactions, don't spend money on them. It's that simple.
Some, maybe most, are bitching and paying because they are tools. But some, myself included, don't do microtransctions, and dislike them because they are being abused in the economic efficiency sense.
The free market is not perfectly efficient. Consumers are not perfectly informed, they don't fully amortize long run versus short run, markets aren't perfectly competitive, etc. Microtransactions may be an economic distortion, particularly in the competition and long-run v. short run sense. They shift the cost from the short run gate to the long run captive audience. That has a tendency to distort market price upward from what would otherwise be equilibrium. It also has some benefits, like inexpensive test driving -- but we are already way past, "It's that simple."
It is not that simple for everyone. Some people are playing a deeper game. Some people want our system to become stronger over time, so we can all become more productive in the long run. Those people think about system stocks, flows, forces, and feedback, and do not believe the economy can be reduced to trite platitudes.
People who are satisfied with the status quo -- people who see a picture of Bill Clinton or Will.I.Am and think, "yeah, we're celebrating the right things" -- are not the kind of people who become passionate programmers. The best programmers the world has known have all looked at what we have and said, "This is lame, and I'm going to fix it no matter how many times my computer says, 'You coded it wrong.'" A dystopian view of the present is what drives people to run the compiler one more time, one more time, one more time, one more time, until at 3 AM they say, "FUCK YEAH, BITCH, I WIN!"
So unless that front page is trying to inspire kids by making them think, "I am going to learn enough so I can destroy asshat hairstyles like this," I think they've missed the mark.
The bill is designed to particularly have a chilling effect on 'shotgun' litigation tactics by NPEs, in which they sue numerous defendants on a patent with only a vague case for infringement.
So to achieve that, instead of addressing shotgun litigation by any litigant, they create an inhibition to all NPEs. That would include things like the The Open Invention Network, and would exempt practicing entities like SCO. Does that sound right?
This legislation would create unequal patent protection for big corps versus independent inventors. Once a patent is sold by its original inventor, it can only subsequently be sold to big corps or it loses some of its power. This means big corps will have an advantage compared to independent inventors, who will have less ability to market their inventions.
If the problem is shotgun patent enforcement, regulate shotgun patent enforcement. If the problem is overbroad patents, narrow the allowed scope of patents. Address the real problem with equal treatment for all litigants under the law. Don't create a preferred class for big incumbent corps and inhibit independent competition.
This is nothing more than another land grab by big incumbents who use our government to inhibit free market competition.
If I'm paying extra for a higher speed, how can they throttle my connection, based on an ALLEGED infringement..??
Sit down, shut up, and be thankful They are giving you anything, consumer.
"... the ISPs have no right to decide what you can and can not download."
But the government does, right?
No.
"The internet has become an essential part of living in the 21st century, it uses public infrastructure and it is time we treat it as a public utility."
Isn't it convenient how politicians use this situation to exert more control over the Internet? (And now watch as thousands of geeks who have otherwise been staunchly against the government regulating the Internet line up behind this guy.)
He is not implying regulation of the Internet. He is implying regulation of the Internet service providers (to prohibit them from regulating the Internet).
The Internet is not their hardware, it is our network that we pay them to provision.
the economy is basically just a dynamic balance between produced energy and consumed energy
It is a really good perspective to consider for the way it makes you think about production, but it is not broadly generalizable. It is very true for commodities -- particularly if they are energy intensive goods, like rubber, copper, or meat -- but not for goods and services which are differentiated by skill or creativity. It takes the same amount of energy to write a bestseller as to write a book noone buys. It takes far more energy to shingle a roof than to transplant a kidney (even if you amortize the energy consumed in med school).
The initial response from the online advertising industry is unsurprisingly hostile and blustering, calling the move 'a nuclear first strike.'
This is a completely justified nuclear response. The nuclear first strike was when the advertising industry started stalking people everywhere they go without informed consent or even an easy way for average people to opt out, and with no way to purge your history. If you had only used cookies in the public interest, the browser that cares about its users would not have to respond to your hostile behavior.
But please: point to a SINGLE THING that the stupid "petition" website has started, stopped, or otherwise changed?*
Marijuana policy. We put up a bunch of petitions in favor of decriminalization and legalization of marijuana, and the Obama admistration changed its policies. Some will argue, I'm sure, that the change was the opposite of what we were asking for. That instead of reducing penalties they increased enforcement to its highest level ever, shutting down more state authorized businesses in California than even GWB had done. And that is true.
But you can't say it didn't change.
Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Utah
Hot, cold, vice, and virtue.
Heck, the acts themselves are illegal even if nobody actually ever even does them.
If it never happens, an illegal act has not occurred. The actions of an entity that never occur are not illegal, and the entity is not illegal. That is the sense of illegal originally used -- real world actions, not hypothetical examples that cannot reflect the entire context of any real event.
If you want to get technical, you can't even really *know* that they broke the law even *WITH* due process...
True. "The law has been broken" is a transient belief that is only ever the result of due process and us mutable upon review.
Sure, in some cases a not-guilty verdict might rule that no law had been actually been broken, but that's still pretty far from the universal case.
Doesn't have to be the universal case. If it happens once, that is enough to prove that you cannot objectively know that a law has been broken without due process. Objective truth cannot change.
Whether or not an act itself is criminal is typically codified into the law itself.
The law codifies a set of actions which, if believed to have occurred and in isolation of mitigating factors, would be illegal. Whether a particular real world action in context is a violation of law is determined by due process.
A person can be found guilty by due process without actually having broken any law if the evidence is sufficiently incriminating
You cannot know that they did not break the law without due process. Whether they violated the law is a matter of judgment for the courts, not some divine truth we can ascertain without due process.
and a person can potentially break a law without ever being found guilty.
You cannot determine that they broke a law without due process. You can have evidence, you can believe it, but the question of whether a law has been broken can only be determined through due process, not by individual decree.
I don't know if you are trying to deliberately be obtuse by taking points out of context or if you genuinely do not understand.
I understand your belief that objective legality can be known; I merely do not accept it. I am doing my best to explain my view that our legal system is designed to tolerate the inability to know truth, and that the question of legality is fundamentally a question of the legal system, though my explanation may inadvertently appear obtuse.
Surely that last paragraph could not have been constructed by a fool. I shall continue not to question your intelligence or sincerity, though my baser instincts gnaw at me. We should not be wasting our time on barbs (unless you want to practice barbs, but then let's decouple it from this story and get more analytical about it).
Actions that are criminal are illegal.
Due process is the method we use to determine whether an action is criminal, which is a subset of whether it is illegal.
The point of a criminal trial is generally to ascertain the status of guilt of a suspect, not whether or not the action was ever actually legal (because if were legal before they were brought to trial, then there would be no reason to bring the person to criminal court in the first place, since the person would not have done anything wrong).
We put people on trial when we suspect that they have committed a crime. One aspect is what they did, another is whether the action violated the law. Due process is the method we use to discover the answer to both questions.
Civil court can sometimes decide on issues governing whether or not something was legal, but that's not criminal court.
Criminal courts are not civil courts, and civil courts sometimes decide whether something is legal. It does not follow from those two facts alone that criminal courts do not judge whether an action is legal. (and that is good, because they do)
[Are you saying that these events] were all legal acts?
No, I am saying we do not know, and cannot know, in the absence of due process. We cannot be certain whether the judicial process will find an event to be legal without running the process.
People should not be able to make insurance claims for crimes where nobody is ever convicted
I think this one actually comes up more often than you are implying with your incredulity. When an insurance company doesn't believe your story about a robbery, it may not pay. The claimant then has to decide whether they will fight it in court. If it goes that far, it once again becomes a matter of judicial process.
If would be highly illogical to say that never being captured for a murder you committed means that what you did was legal. It wasn't, it was illegal.
It would be highly illogical to say that you committed a murder without due process. If you have not been tried and found guilty, you only suspect you have committed a murder. Your memory could be flawed, particularly if you were in the midst of a situation that ended with someone's death.
The video footage objectively *PROVES* that the law was actually broken,
If we later find that the video was a fabrication, then the new perceived reality would be that the holdup did not happen. The objective truth of the matter cannot change, so it must be that the perception of reality changed. Evidence alone does not objectively prove that the law was broken.
again, the very notion of which is a contradition, since if no law was broken, there would be no reason to try the person in the first place
We do not try people for being guilty of crimes. We try them for being suspected of crimes.
As the topic in this particular thread is "Not Illegal Until Found Guilty", and you were the one who started the thread, with that exact headline,
Their actions cannot be determined to be legal or illegal without due process. There is no objective truth of legality, it can only be determined by due process.
You can often know that a crime has been committed even before you know who has done it
No, you can't. There is no such thing as a violation of law without due process. Law is a process, not objective edict. There is suspicion. You might have a suspect in custody. You might really really really believe he is guilty. But without due process, you cannot know that he is guilty, or that any law has been broken.
My point is that a person's actions can very much be *ENTIRELY* illegal even before he has been tried
That is an interesting statement, but it is unrelated to the topic under discussion. Context matters.
One's perception of events does not make them illegal, but that doesn't mean that the actual actions themselves may not be.
"May" is a key word in that sentence. Google is saying that their perception is a sufficient finding of legality. That is not true.
You realize that this is the same thing as saying that it's entirely legal to do things like kill people and rob banks, as long as you don't get caught, right?
Yes, in the sense I implied. These companies are claimng that their refusal to process otherwise legitimate transactions is justified because the actions are illegal. That is not the case without due process. The fact that you claim that a person robbed a bank, or that these corporations claim that a website is illegal, does not make it so.
You may have seen a person running out of the bank with a suitcase because he had to catch a train to the airport. You may have seen someone kill in self defense. Your perception of the events does not -- in itself -- make them illegal.
Google is in discussions with payment companies including Visa, MasterCard and PayPal to put illegal download websites out of existence by cutting off their funding.
A person's actions are not illegal until they are found guilty. That is a cornerstone principle of our law; presumption of innocence. A few corporations proclaiming something illegal does not make it so. Having our monetary system in the hands of a few relatively unregulated oligarchs is perilous.
[Obama] describes patent trolls as "a classic example," of the problem, and that "they don't actually produce anything themselves."
Whether a bad patent is wielded by a producer or a holding company does not change the fact that it should never have been granted. If we kill the trolls, we will still be left with the runaway, wasteful patent litigation over bad patents by companies that do produce things.
The problem is not production. The "patent troll" hobgoblin is misdirecting the patent backlash that should be directed at a patent system that is too powerful. We are getting bad patents because we grant them too easily and give too much enforcement power to those who hold them. That is every bit as true of the mobile patent wars between producers as with the network service patent wars of the trolls.
The "patent troll" misdirection is harming our ability to fix the actual problem.
It is good that Hurd is a live project regardless of how much production use it sees. It explores kernel design theory; valuable work in itself.
Still, I can't help a little ribbing.
founded by Richard Stallman in 1983,
Duke Nukem? Feh. Only took 15 years to go gold. Hurd is 30 and they just started working on sound cards.
Libertarian masturbatory fantasies involving guns.
Also system theorist's tortured nighmares of an unavoidable path, repeated countless times in history.
My problem with wikileaks is its heavy anti-american bias. It seems like he wants to embarrass the U.S. just for the sake of embarrassment, and not to make the world "a more just society".
How could we possibly be embarrassed by our actions? We are a just society, and so it cannot possibly embarrass us for our actions to be published. If we are not guilty, we have nothing to hide.
On a more serious note, have you actually looked at, for example, the diplomatic cables? They mostly show the US attempting to protect the interest of its major lobbies, as we would expect. But it shows a lot of foreign diplomats selling out their citizens to our lobbies. We look like a bully, those foreign diplomats look like grovelling dogs.
You can see the effect by looking at EU copyright developments. The US is still doing what we've been doing, strong-arming people at the bidding of a few big K-street clients. But the EU diplomats have been chastened, and are not simply rolling over and hoping to get their bellies scratched.
I haven't looked at the rest, but as for the diplomatic cables, they are much more embarrassing to our puppet states than to us.