One, perhaps new products are reaching the point of diminishing returns, where it takes more and more effort for a seemingly incremental bit of progress, simply because the bar is already so high and we're already so close to the limits of what existing technologies can provide. Two, maybe Cook isn't the tyrant / asshole that Jobs is reputed to have been? If so, then it's a refreshing change from the 'at any cost' bullshit mentality that is sucking our souls dry and robbing our descendants of their chance at a good life here on Earth.
My point is, government isn't _nearly_ as wasteful as you think it is. It sounds crazy when the government wastes $1 billion until you realize that's just not a lot of money to a country of 350 million people with a $57k per capita GDP
I don't think the government here in Canada is particularly wasteful - I've argued that point for years - and I suspect the same is true in your country. Rather, from my point of view the US government spends money fairly efficiently on the wrong things. First example - drug enforcement. Second example - having people spend major time in prison for minor crimes, many of which aren't crimes at all in other first-world jurisdictions. (Not to mention LEO's whose budgets are inflated by the need to fight those 'crimes'). Third example - a military and an intelligence apparatus whose primary focus is furthering US economic interests, by force and/or subterfuge, in other countries. (I think of that as 'indirect corporate welfare'). Fourth example - expenditures to clean up the messes left behind by the third example. I'm sure there are many others.
can be more easily manipulated and controlled. It's now impossible for us to stuff the 'big data' genie back in the bottle, so we need to start finding ways to either poison the data en masse or find ways of using it to our advantage. I hate the rape of our privacy that is now pretty much taken for granted, but the thing I hate more is that there is no reciprocity and therefore there's nothing even close to a level playing field. The concentration of huge masses of personal data in a few hands, both parallels and reinforces the concentration of wealth in those same hands, and it's past time we started finding ways of de-concentrating both data and wealth.
The government spends money on wars, prisons, corporate welfare, and subsidies for a bloated and wasteful healthcare system.
I prefer that Google keeps as much money as they can.
You've made a mostly-insightful comment which I mostly agree with. Unfortunately, it contains a rather glaring contradiction. Surely Google, (along with other corporations), being allowed to keep "as much money as they can", represents a major portion of "corporate welfare"?
Governments need a very loud wake-up call when it comes to their budgetary priorities, but letting companies like Google dodge taxes is not the appropriate solution. We simply need better governments making better decisions, doing a better job of enforcing corporate taxation. To do that we need to realize that the 'military-industrial complex' that Eisenhower warned about, has either morphed into, or expanded to include, the 'corporate-governmental' complex. Then we need to set about dismantling that whole structure and making sure that the constituent entities remain separate and opposed, aka 'balanced'. Citizens need to organize in the way that unions have. I don't love unions, but they are necessary and they came into being for valid and important reasons. It's time for a national 'Citizens' Union', with various locals organizing campaign contributions and voting blocs at Federal, State, and local levels. I see numerous flaws in my suggestion, but I have yet to hear of any better alternatives, and at this point I think that a Citizens' Union would be much better for many more people than the status quo is.
The average American's headlong rush to have their every step, tic, twitch, friend, activity, and Web search monitored by big corporations, is going to make it so that NOBODY can get health insurance without signing up for 24/7 monitoring of every fart, belch, heart flutter, and midnight snack. Stick a fork in Privacy's ass and turn it over, 'cause it's falling-off-the-bone done, courtesy of folks who are too stupid to have a clue of where their own TRUE self-interest resides. Fuck me gently with a chainsaw - it'd be kinder than seeing myself sold down the river by a bunch of bleating sheep masquerading as humans. Christ, even the button I'm about to click on is telling me to Submit!
If I was a full-time conspiracy theorist instead of just a part-timer, I'd say that the recent destruction of Net Neutrality in America was accomplished with this Disney acquisition in mind. As it is, I'll limit myself to noting that the timing is at least a little bit suspicious.
I thought Return of the Jedi was worthy as well, it has everything a good SW story needs... could have done without the damn Ewoks though.
Exactly. That's why I always say "there have only been two-and-a-half good Star Wars movies". The Ewoks were pissing me off even as I was enjoying other aspects of the film.
The problem here is cultural. What's on Facebook is just one symptom of many issues in the culture today.
The concept that Facebook is at fault is as absurd as is Facebook's purported "fix". Anyway, I don't believe Facebook really cares about anything but avoiding bad PR. They are on a quest for profit, any profit, and good PR is but one of the means to get there.
I tend to agree with you - Facebook arose from mainstream culture and is now flourishing in it, so if FB is fucked, then our culture is, by definition, also fucked. On the other hand, it really is a very long chain of 'chicken and egg' events - so long that I can easily argue for culture having been thoroughly fucked from around the time we shifted from nomadism to agrarianism. We gained a lot - both good AND bad - when we adopted strongly hierarchical social structures and invented systems not only to store wealth, but to abstract it as well.
All we are simply doing is putting engineers and entrepreneurs, instead of bureaucrats and lawyers, back in charge of the internet...
In the first place, how many engineers are "in charge" of the Internet? The vast, vast majority of them answer to the MBA's and other assorted bankster wonks who ultimately answer to the CEO, who ultimately answers to the board and the shareholders. Secondly, calling the likes of AT+T, Verizon, etc. "entrepreneurs" tells me that you are either a liar, (which I already knew), or stupid, (which I've long suspected). While you're busy metaphorically sucking the metaphorical dicks of the evil men who own your soul, please at least try to disengage your vocal cords and refrain from making stupid noises about how all is well. Piss off mate - nobody believes your bullshit.
For millenials it is their life, since most of them don't see to have a real one, at least not from a social point of view. A rather pitiable generation really.
Assuming for the moment that your view of millennials is accurate, the question then becomes 'how did they get that way'? A whole generation of people doesn't just develop some critical flaw - it had to have been programmed in by the society in which they grew up. So rather than criticizing them, it might be better to ask ourselves about the things we did, and the things we failed to do, that set them up for a life of sucking on the (Fibre) Glass Teat that is the Internet.
Wouldn't the ability to process incoming information in a thoughtful, rational way trump the effects of social media's dark side?
No, it wouldn't necessarily trump those effects. It can be pretty easy to bypass those critical filters. Apologies in advance for Godwinning this discussion, but I'm sure many of the people who got behind the Nazis had the ability to "process incoming information in a thoughtful, rational way". Then the Nuremberg rallies mesmerized them, and the zeitgeist took hold in their psyches.
Believing that one is proof against sociological / psychological influences, (social media, advertising, propagandistic plots in Prime Time TV, etc), simply makes one both more likely to fall for them and less likely to realize the fact.
"Most of Mozilla's money comes from partnerships with search engines like Google...".
So they get a lot of money from Google - probably the lion's share. And Google gets most of their money from advertising.
"(A)nd now it's fighting the same battle again against Google's Chrome".
So how long is Google, (an advertising company whose browser is a core part of its advertising strategy), going to keep funding a company whose stated aim is to "keep the internet open and a place where you aren't in the thrall of tech giants"?
I've never really understood Google's support of Mozilla. Might it be that Google expects a company with both a growing war chest and a shrinking user base to implode more rapidly when funding is suddenly withdrawn? If not that or something like it, then the reasons for Google's support are a mystery to me. Can anyone here explain it?
... it's becoming very clear the app is where all the bad stuff is happening...
Plenty of bad stuff is happening on Facebook in your browser too, unless your browser is running on read-only media and you access the Web only via a VPN. As the AC below said, "just say no".
When discussing arc flash and upstream breaker fault clearing times with them, for example, I get that blank stare much more often than not.
If they don't understand arc flash then they should damned well sue their schools / instructors / mentors. Without that awareness they probably stand facing a breaker as they're pulling the lever to open it, and could be burned, blinded, or killed if there's a fault. Number One Rule - stand BESIDE the breaker with your face turned away before you pull the switch!
Since when did you have to be "an experienced electrician" to know that Mylar blocks a device's GPS radio?
When it comes to RF, straight-up Mylar doesn't block shit, at least not until you get into much, much higher frequencies than GPS. Metallized Mylar, on the other hand, will cause some serious signal attenuation.
Same thing with chicken. For a long time during my 30's I had the impression that chicken didn't taste like it used to, but I dismissed it as the 'good old days' syndrome. Then I visited a town on the savannas in Guyana and ate free-range chickens that didn't look as though they'd been cross-bred with beach balls. Wings, legs, and breasts were much smaller than I'd grown used to, but they tasted wonderful - just like I remember chicken tasting in my early years.
The real problem is the tens to hundreds of millions to run the last mile fiber, the red tape around it, and the man-hours to install and support such a network. General rule of thumb is 97-99% of the cost of a medium or larger ISP is support.
The real technical and financial problem may be the last mile - but with enough demand and opportunity, that can be solved. OTOH, the real social and political problem is that the incumbent providers will simply make alternatives illegal. If you don't believe that, just talk to those Floridians who would use solar panels to go off-grid if it hadn't been made illegal through Florida Power and Lighting's lobbying efforts.
In short, time and brain power can overcome the technical hurdles; but the political / corporate obstacles can probably be removed only by bloody revolution, and likely not even then.
This will allow ISP's to increase their revenue and use that money to improve and expand their infrastructure.
I'm actually for reduced latency and increased bandwidth, unlike many here it seems.
Since I don't have any mod points now to downmod you as a troll, I'll take the bait instead. Dude! Do you really think AT&T, Comcast, and their like, really NEED more money in order to "improve and expand"? They're swimming in cash right now, and they still take, and make, every possible opportunity to charge more for less. And what good are "reduced latency and increased bandwidth" if you can only take advantage of them when connecting to the sites and services your provider has climbed into bed with, and when other traffic is artificially throttled just to encourage you to drink their particular brand of Kool-Aid? Fer chrissake, they're turning what should be considered public infrastructure into a series of private toll roads - are you seriously OK with that?
if the outcome would have been the same had the firm in question been American rather than Australian. I have the impression that US courts are much more likely to condemn such overreaches when they are foreign than when they are domestic.
and all of those mob scene stories on the news, how will the rest of the world know that the Thanksmas season, (or is it Christgiving? I can never remember), has started in the US?
Anyway, it's a Necessary Evil that I live with since the people who are swayed by ads like that are the people that keep the economy going.
And why, pray tell, do we need to 'keep the economy going'? I'm being serious here - why do you think we need an economy that encourages people to waste the irreplaceable time of their irreplaceable lives making and buying buying useless and ultimately unfulfilling junk, the manufacture of which depletes resources that future generations will need even as it poisons the planet and stokes global warming? We all need to just stop pretending that a growth-unlimited no-holds-barred economy is even a necessary, (never mind sufficient), condition for human happiness and well-being. 'The economy' in its current manifestation is a cancer, and it is literally killing the human race.
The difference is that the Internet makes it much easier to make the propaganda seem to originate from within a country.
I think the more important difference is that the Internet can make propaganda seem to originate from average citizens. A skilful astro-turfing campaign can be difficult to detect, even by people who know what to look for - and when the noise coming from that campaign is further anonymized by the 'net and amplified in various other echo chambers, it can start to sound like consensus. When it reaches that point, it can actually become consensus. Chomsky and Herman identified 'manufacturing consent' when the Internet was still in its infancy. Now, three decades later, consent is a family of widgets churned out in large numbers on countless mass production lines.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices failed to cry out in terror as they were slowly deprived of their freedom. I fear something terrible is happening.
Slashdot Mirror
One, perhaps new products are reaching the point of diminishing returns, where it takes more and more effort for a seemingly incremental bit of progress, simply because the bar is already so high and we're already so close to the limits of what existing technologies can provide. Two, maybe Cook isn't the tyrant / asshole that Jobs is reputed to have been? If so, then it's a refreshing change from the 'at any cost' bullshit mentality that is sucking our souls dry and robbing our descendants of their chance at a good life here on Earth.
It's not immediately clear exactly why Google is building a new operating system ...
All the better to spy on you, my dear!
My point is, government isn't _nearly_ as wasteful as you think it is. It sounds crazy when the government wastes $1 billion until you realize that's just not a lot of money to a country of 350 million people with a $57k per capita GDP
I don't think the government here in Canada is particularly wasteful - I've argued that point for years - and I suspect the same is true in your country. Rather, from my point of view the US government spends money fairly efficiently on the wrong things. First example - drug enforcement. Second example - having people spend major time in prison for minor crimes, many of which aren't crimes at all in other first-world jurisdictions. (Not to mention LEO's whose budgets are inflated by the need to fight those 'crimes'). Third example - a military and an intelligence apparatus whose primary focus is furthering US economic interests, by force and/or subterfuge, in other countries. (I think of that as 'indirect corporate welfare'). Fourth example - expenditures to clean up the messes left behind by the third example. I'm sure there are many others.
can be more easily manipulated and controlled. It's now impossible for us to stuff the 'big data' genie back in the bottle, so we need to start finding ways to either poison the data en masse or find ways of using it to our advantage. I hate the rape of our privacy that is now pretty much taken for granted, but the thing I hate more is that there is no reciprocity and therefore there's nothing even close to a level playing field. The concentration of huge masses of personal data in a few hands, both parallels and reinforces the concentration of wealth in those same hands, and it's past time we started finding ways of de-concentrating both data and wealth.
The government spends money on wars, prisons, corporate welfare, and subsidies for a bloated and wasteful healthcare system.
I prefer that Google keeps as much money as they can.
You've made a mostly-insightful comment which I mostly agree with. Unfortunately, it contains a rather glaring contradiction. Surely Google, (along with other corporations), being allowed to keep "as much money as they can", represents a major portion of "corporate welfare"?
Governments need a very loud wake-up call when it comes to their budgetary priorities, but letting companies like Google dodge taxes is not the appropriate solution. We simply need better governments making better decisions, doing a better job of enforcing corporate taxation. To do that we need to realize that the 'military-industrial complex' that Eisenhower warned about, has either morphed into, or expanded to include, the 'corporate-governmental' complex. Then we need to set about dismantling that whole structure and making sure that the constituent entities remain separate and opposed, aka 'balanced'. Citizens need to organize in the way that unions have. I don't love unions, but they are necessary and they came into being for valid and important reasons. It's time for a national 'Citizens' Union', with various locals organizing campaign contributions and voting blocs at Federal, State, and local levels. I see numerous flaws in my suggestion, but I have yet to hear of any better alternatives, and at this point I think that a Citizens' Union would be much better for many more people than the status quo is.
The average American's headlong rush to have their every step, tic, twitch, friend, activity, and Web search monitored by big corporations, is going to make it so that NOBODY can get health insurance without signing up for 24/7 monitoring of every fart, belch, heart flutter, and midnight snack. Stick a fork in Privacy's ass and turn it over, 'cause it's falling-off-the-bone done, courtesy of folks who are too stupid to have a clue of where their own TRUE self-interest resides. Fuck me gently with a chainsaw - it'd be kinder than seeing myself sold down the river by a bunch of bleating sheep masquerading as humans. Christ, even the button I'm about to click on is telling me to Submit!
Maybe include a short phrase that looks good with a hash tag.
You mean something like "Covfefe"?
If I was a full-time conspiracy theorist instead of just a part-timer, I'd say that the recent destruction of Net Neutrality in America was accomplished with this Disney acquisition in mind. As it is, I'll limit myself to noting that the timing is at least a little bit suspicious.
I thought Return of the Jedi was worthy as well, it has everything a good SW story needs... could have done without the damn Ewoks though.
Exactly. That's why I always say "there have only been two-and-a-half good Star Wars movies". The Ewoks were pissing me off even as I was enjoying other aspects of the film.
The problem here is cultural. What's on Facebook is just one symptom of many issues in the culture today.
The concept that Facebook is at fault is as absurd as is Facebook's purported "fix". Anyway, I don't believe Facebook really cares about anything but avoiding bad PR. They are on a quest for profit, any profit, and good PR is but one of the means to get there.
I tend to agree with you - Facebook arose from mainstream culture and is now flourishing in it, so if FB is fucked, then our culture is, by definition, also fucked. On the other hand, it really is a very long chain of 'chicken and egg' events - so long that I can easily argue for culture having been thoroughly fucked from around the time we shifted from nomadism to agrarianism. We gained a lot - both good AND bad - when we adopted strongly hierarchical social structures and invented systems not only to store wealth, but to abstract it as well.
All we are simply doing is putting engineers and entrepreneurs, instead of bureaucrats and lawyers, back in charge of the internet...
In the first place, how many engineers are "in charge" of the Internet? The vast, vast majority of them answer to the MBA's and other assorted bankster wonks who ultimately answer to the CEO, who ultimately answers to the board and the shareholders. Secondly, calling the likes of AT+T, Verizon, etc. "entrepreneurs" tells me that you are either a liar, (which I already knew), or stupid, (which I've long suspected). While you're busy metaphorically sucking the metaphorical dicks of the evil men who own your soul, please at least try to disengage your vocal cords and refrain from making stupid noises about how all is well. Piss off mate - nobody believes your bullshit.
For millenials it is their life, since most of them don't see to have a real one, at least not from a social point of view. A rather pitiable generation really.
Assuming for the moment that your view of millennials is accurate, the question then becomes 'how did they get that way'? A whole generation of people doesn't just develop some critical flaw - it had to have been programmed in by the society in which they grew up. So rather than criticizing them, it might be better to ask ourselves about the things we did, and the things we failed to do, that set them up for a life of sucking on the (Fibre) Glass Teat that is the Internet.
Wouldn't the ability to process incoming information in a thoughtful, rational way trump the effects of social media's dark side?
No, it wouldn't necessarily trump those effects. It can be pretty easy to bypass those critical filters. Apologies in advance for Godwinning this discussion, but I'm sure many of the people who got behind the Nazis had the ability to "process incoming information in a thoughtful, rational way". Then the Nuremberg rallies mesmerized them, and the zeitgeist took hold in their psyches.
Believing that one is proof against sociological / psychological influences, (social media, advertising, propagandistic plots in Prime Time TV, etc), simply makes one both more likely to fall for them and less likely to realize the fact.
"Most of Mozilla's money comes from partnerships with search engines like Google...".
So they get a lot of money from Google - probably the lion's share. And Google gets most of their money from advertising.
"(A)nd now it's fighting the same battle again against Google's Chrome".
So how long is Google, (an advertising company whose browser is a core part of its advertising strategy), going to keep funding a company whose stated aim is to "keep the internet open and a place where you aren't in the thrall of tech giants"?
I've never really understood Google's support of Mozilla. Might it be that Google expects a company with both a growing war chest and a shrinking user base to implode more rapidly when funding is suddenly withdrawn? If not that or something like it, then the reasons for Google's support are a mystery to me. Can anyone here explain it?
... it's becoming very clear the app is where all the bad stuff is happening ...
Plenty of bad stuff is happening on Facebook in your browser too, unless your browser is running on read-only media and you access the Web only via a VPN. As the AC below said, "just say no".
When discussing arc flash and upstream breaker fault clearing times with them, for example, I get that blank stare much more often than not.
If they don't understand arc flash then they should damned well sue their schools / instructors / mentors. Without that awareness they probably stand facing a breaker as they're pulling the lever to open it, and could be burned, blinded, or killed if there's a fault. Number One Rule - stand BESIDE the breaker with your face turned away before you pull the switch!
Since when did you have to be "an experienced electrician" to know that Mylar blocks a device's GPS radio?
When it comes to RF, straight-up Mylar doesn't block shit, at least not until you get into much, much higher frequencies than GPS. Metallized Mylar, on the other hand, will cause some serious signal attenuation.
Same thing with chicken. For a long time during my 30's I had the impression that chicken didn't taste like it used to, but I dismissed it as the 'good old days' syndrome. Then I visited a town on the savannas in Guyana and ate free-range chickens that didn't look as though they'd been cross-bred with beach balls. Wings, legs, and breasts were much smaller than I'd grown used to, but they tasted wonderful - just like I remember chicken tasting in my early years.
The real problem is the tens to hundreds of millions to run the last mile fiber, the red tape around it, and the man-hours to install and support such a network. General rule of thumb is 97-99% of the cost of a medium or larger ISP is support.
The real technical and financial problem may be the last mile - but with enough demand and opportunity, that can be solved. OTOH, the real social and political problem is that the incumbent providers will simply make alternatives illegal. If you don't believe that, just talk to those Floridians who would use solar panels to go off-grid if it hadn't been made illegal through Florida Power and Lighting's lobbying efforts.
In short, time and brain power can overcome the technical hurdles; but the political / corporate obstacles can probably be removed only by bloody revolution, and likely not even then.
This will allow ISP's to increase their revenue and use that money to improve and expand their infrastructure. I'm actually for reduced latency and increased bandwidth, unlike many here it seems.
Since I don't have any mod points now to downmod you as a troll, I'll take the bait instead. Dude! Do you really think AT&T, Comcast, and their like, really NEED more money in order to "improve and expand"? They're swimming in cash right now, and they still take, and make, every possible opportunity to charge more for less. And what good are "reduced latency and increased bandwidth" if you can only take advantage of them when connecting to the sites and services your provider has climbed into bed with, and when other traffic is artificially throttled just to encourage you to drink their particular brand of Kool-Aid? Fer chrissake, they're turning what should be considered public infrastructure into a series of private toll roads - are you seriously OK with that?
if the outcome would have been the same had the firm in question been American rather than Australian. I have the impression that US courts are much more likely to condemn such overreaches when they are foreign than when they are domestic.
and all of those mob scene stories on the news, how will the rest of the world know that the Thanksmas season, (or is it Christgiving? I can never remember), has started in the US?
Anyway, it's a Necessary Evil that I live with since the people who are swayed by ads like that are the people that keep the economy going.
And why, pray tell, do we need to 'keep the economy going'? I'm being serious here - why do you think we need an economy that encourages people to waste the irreplaceable time of their irreplaceable lives making and buying buying useless and ultimately unfulfilling junk, the manufacture of which depletes resources that future generations will need even as it poisons the planet and stokes global warming? We all need to just stop pretending that a growth-unlimited no-holds-barred economy is even a necessary, (never mind sufficient), condition for human happiness and well-being. 'The economy' in its current manifestation is a cancer, and it is literally killing the human race.
The difference is that the Internet makes it much easier to make the propaganda seem to originate from within a country.
I think the more important difference is that the Internet can make propaganda seem to originate from average citizens. A skilful astro-turfing campaign can be difficult to detect, even by people who know what to look for - and when the noise coming from that campaign is further anonymized by the 'net and amplified in various other echo chambers, it can start to sound like consensus. When it reaches that point, it can actually become consensus. Chomsky and Herman identified 'manufacturing consent' when the Internet was still in its infancy. Now, three decades later, consent is a family of widgets churned out in large numbers on countless mass production lines.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices failed to cry out in terror as they were slowly deprived of their freedom. I fear something terrible is happening.