This is more directed toward someone reading the parent's post as opposed to the parent himself:
Despite the BSA's claims, the traditional Scout approach to religion (from what I have read) is a weak pantheistic or deist stance, not explicit endorsement of organized religion as the BSA does today. Furthermore, most Scouting organizations are officially secular (including the Girl Scouts of America) and leave in "loopholes", for instance Scouts Canada creating a substitute for its Religion in Life badge which anyone, atheist or otherwise, can qualify for (it's mostly related to cultural tolerance and ethics). In general, it makes much more sense to have it due to people whose religious belief is simply not categorized by a single organization, such as the Catholic Church. It discourages territorialism and clannish behaviour, something religious groups are almost absurdly inclined to partake in.
The BSA, on the other hand, stands alone in more or less forcing members to be a member of an officially-approved organized religion (and, yes, unapproved ones are banned, meaning that Unitarian Universalists are discriminated against). Anyone within the non-religious spectrum of belief/non-belief is simply ignored. This is almost unique and is representative of the BSA being thoroughly taken over by fundamentalist Baptists and Mormons. Many groups are explicitly run by churches and discrimination is intense.
The BSA's stances in general are unique -- gender segregation, for instance, is really only upheld by the BSA and a few officially Muslim Scouting organizations run in backwards places like Indonesia, which perfectly characterizes the BSA's rule by social regressives.
If you live in the USA, do not join the Boy Scouts of America. It is a hateful and discriminatory organization which forces swearing of religious fealty and allegiance to a pre-approved religious group. If you do not live in the USA, investigate your local Scouting organization -- some are more moderate than others. If you live in Europe or Canada, it's a pretty safe bet it's fine. Asia is a crapshoot and in Africa groups are mostly run by missionaries.
One of the annoying things about this "issue" is that "TV" is treated as a single, discrete entity, when it is really three things: a) the device, b) the programming, c) the delivery system (e.g. cable, satellite). Many people in their 30s and above think of them as insepar
For when you really need to dress something up as dangerous, the type of thing that would star a team of, perhaps, eleven big-name actors and a casino.
Well, some of these treatments really can kill you, if the "treatment" is bad enough. Most are simply bad by fault of removing something that is good, like getting people to stop taking their medicine so that a faith healer can wave his hands and pray over them.
the whole "_____ world" system is abhorrent and it's good that it's being abandoned, since it basically only existed to put the USSR and friends in a secondary category ("second world") below the USA and friends.
Indeed. I would say there is a high potential of tampering, which means people need to step lightly. It is also difficult practically, for textbooks, because professors and instructors are used to changing their course to reflect a particular edition of a book, which is virtually impossible if that book is always changing. However, revising the book without forcing people to pay for a redundant "384th edition" is good.
The books-as-a-service (which is all I can describe this as) problem could be mitigated by the ability to take "snapshots" and/or the publisher keeping an archive of old versions available. Those could be tampered with as well, but the more difficult it is to pull tampering off, the less likely it is that they will do it. Snapshots would be a good idea for archival purposes alone, since how else could you see how the book evolved? If all you have is the end result, you have no idea how you got there.
There are several differences. First, while it's as effectively a non-option to turn off WiFi just the way it is to turn off your cell phone, you can control what information goes out to a much greater degree. Second, what goes out is the SSID and the MAC, which are personal characteristics... of your router. Compare and contrast cell phone information, which can potentially hold a lot more important information. Third, it's a question of what can potentially be compromised. If they know your SSID? Not much. If they can personally identify you based on behaviour and timing (e.g. a security camera records you entering and leaving the building, that syncs up with the cell phone tracking and they can pinpoint your movements), they can do things like find out what routes you took, what shops you went to and how long you spent there. Within a few years, if not already, market-droids will try to connect that behaviour tracking to your demographics in an attempt to try to brainwash people even more effectively. There is both the ability and the incentive, which means it is virtually inevitable.
The difference is that information about where you have been and when is both harder to obtain without modern technology and potentially more damaging. It could be misused by stalkers, it could be used to try to condemn people by association (e.g. he drove through a street full of prostitutes, that makes him a potential suspect as a john), and it can be used to bamboozle and mislead people even more effectively than now. It puts the marketers and cops and others in the position of knowing as much about you as someone you trust, without you even knowing who they are. It is an asymmetric relationship -- nothing you can do could hurt them, but they could do anything to hurt you if your movement patterns became anything other than completely innocuous. There was a very good Cory Doctorow story related to this which was published not long ago: "Scroogled". It helps to convey the magnitude of what someone could do with enough personal information and the incentive to abuse that knowledge (or power).
By giving someone knowledge about you, you are giving them power over you. If it is a friend or a spouse, there is the fundamental assumption of reciprocity -- that you will know roughly as much which is potentially compromising about them as they do about you. But in an asymmetric relationship, with you on one end and a marketer, cop, or some kind of bureaucrat on the other, there is no reciprocity; they can do anything to hurt you and you can't return the favour, so to speak. This kind of unevenness is begging to be abused and as this kind of tracking becomes more common, it almost certainly will be if it hasn't been abused already. We have little recourse to stop the abuse because of the lack of accountability for it, the lack of real awareness of what information is being collected and who it is passed along to, and the lack of real alternatives (a Do Not Track option? Anything?)
Remember that it is less obvious now who is literate and who isn't. Someone might use a laptop to spend a day on Facebook or they might have 100,000 ebooks on it... or both.
The internet is not and should not be a business, and regardless of who "invented" it, it is now something that has become more international and egalitarian. Furthermore, you talk about European censorship or about the UN? What about US censorship? While it is difficult to generalize about Europe, certain parts (Denmark, Sweden, etc.) are more democratic than the USA. Finally, anti-competitive? TLDs by their nature are monopolistic -- trying to run a TLD for-profit simply leads to high domain name prices... but this not about money, this is about fairness. If you mean that intellectual property and trademark law are bad, then I agree -- but I would advise you to look at which country is strong-arming other countries into signing international treaties related to it. Hint: it isn't a European country.
My point is simply that you seem to be under the impression that the USA should have a right to operate the way it does, that the Web is about business, or that anyone should flout or manipulate international law or ignore what is fair and right just to make money.
Finally -- imperialism? Colonialism? The USA is the only country selfishly squatting on general-subject TLDs like.org... that seems pretty imperialist to me.
It doesn't matter if you pay for something -- sometimes, you just don't deserve it. What if I paid $1000 to be the UN secretary-general? Would that be fair? My point is that by having the US singled out as "special", we help to sustain a Web where the US controls a vast number of domain names (other than just *.us), and unfairly so. In the interests of treating countries fairly (that is, that countries like the USA don't get special privileges they have abused and will abuse again in the future), we should modernize certain TLDs. That is all.
I hesitate to quote myself, but since you obviously didn't read it...
The only arguments I have ever heard are "because they got there first" and "because they can", neither of which are remotely valid.
The question we are talking about is moral rights, not capitalism. Regardless of what money the USA has paid for something, does it have the moral right to put itself on a pedestal online? I do not think so.
This is a bit less bad than it seems -- the summary cherry-picked certain companies and groups. Mozilla and Twitter are also signatories to the "letter". I agree that Facebook and Zynga are stereotypical "bad guys" -- however, you don't always need to agree 100% with your allies.
Because the ad is aimed less at politicians are more at people in general. If the new media companies were going to try to appeal to politicians directly, they wouldn't use a newspaper ad. It would be lunacy to try to, since the **AAs have far deeper hooks into US politics than Google and co. So instead, they are trying to increase public awareness in a gambit to create a public backlash against SOPA.
Of course, the USA having control over general domains like.edu could be debated -- do they have the right to provide American universities with a TLD, then force non-American universities to fend for themselves? Why do they have a similar monopoly over domains like.gov? Why, indeed, do domains like gov exist? A better approach would be *.gov.us for US government sites. The only arguments I have ever heard are "because they got there first" and "because they can", neither of which are remotely valid.
Just visiting InfoWorld safely seems to require a battery of Firefox addons, including NoScript and AdBlock Plus. I shudder to imagine what it would be like unprotected.
Mod parent up. The ability to boot a different OS will become a feature for "serious users" that costs thousands of dollars. The days of installing Linux on older desktop systems for hobby purposes will be over unless someone cracks this stuff.
PDF is about the only document format that hits all the checkboxes of being standardized, more open than the alternatives, preserves formatting, wide support in word processing, LaTeX, etc., wide OS support, and supports more advanced formatting.
Or, alternatively, militias were made obsolete by modern professional armies and are now rather quaint. The time when a war could be fought with the weapons and combat experience any given citizen had is long past. The only purpose this would serve would be to give random people combat training, even ones who do not want it. As well, arguing that the USA needs much of a military for self-defense is laughable -- the USA's military is used almost entirely in other countries, with the exclusion of the National Guard. There is simply no need for a military in self-defense, which is why, for much of its history, the USA more or less had none other than its navy.
You missed my point entirely. If people care about an issue, but not as much as other issues, then that issue will get neglected because only a handful of issues will be prioritized in politics at any given time. The result is that people who get elected don't get elected based on their stance toward minor issues, only major ones. This is a systemic problem which leads to minor issues (no matter what they are) getting neglected.
But the problem is that people will vote primarily based on other issues. When choosing between candidates, there's no option to pick and choose which issues to support -- you would need a multitude of candidates. Instead, people vote based on a few issues that are the most important to them, then grudgingly compromise on issues that are more minor to them, which means that they tend to get screwed over on many issues like this one. It's not an ideal system where people will vote out lawmakers who do things they don't like -- lawmakers can do things they don't like as well as do things they do like and people will vote for them based on the things they like rather than the things they don't. Which means a few issues are strongly favoured democratically, while the rest are left to slide. Since politicians know some issues aren't considered hugely critical, they will largely side with whichever group or individual has lots of money to give, because choosing the populist option probably won't net them any more votes and will lead to a major money supply being cut off.
My point is lawmakers making laws independent of the wishes of the people, then justifying sustaining the laws against public pressure as "it's the law", essentially arguing that the law is immutable.
Slashdot Mirror
This is more directed toward someone reading the parent's post as opposed to the parent himself:
Despite the BSA's claims, the traditional Scout approach to religion (from what I have read) is a weak pantheistic or deist stance, not explicit endorsement of organized religion as the BSA does today. Furthermore, most Scouting organizations are officially secular (including the Girl Scouts of America) and leave in "loopholes", for instance Scouts Canada creating a substitute for its Religion in Life badge which anyone, atheist or otherwise, can qualify for (it's mostly related to cultural tolerance and ethics). In general, it makes much more sense to have it due to people whose religious belief is simply not categorized by a single organization, such as the Catholic Church. It discourages territorialism and clannish behaviour, something religious groups are almost absurdly inclined to partake in.
The BSA, on the other hand, stands alone in more or less forcing members to be a member of an officially-approved organized religion (and, yes, unapproved ones are banned, meaning that Unitarian Universalists are discriminated against). Anyone within the non-religious spectrum of belief/non-belief is simply ignored. This is almost unique and is representative of the BSA being thoroughly taken over by fundamentalist Baptists and Mormons. Many groups are explicitly run by churches and discrimination is intense.
The BSA's stances in general are unique -- gender segregation, for instance, is really only upheld by the BSA and a few officially Muslim Scouting organizations run in backwards places like Indonesia, which perfectly characterizes the BSA's rule by social regressives.
If you live in the USA, do not join the Boy Scouts of America. It is a hateful and discriminatory organization which forces swearing of religious fealty and allegiance to a pre-approved religious group. If you do not live in the USA, investigate your local Scouting organization -- some are more moderate than others. If you live in Europe or Canada, it's a pretty safe bet it's fine. Asia is a crapshoot and in Africa groups are mostly run by missionaries.
One of the annoying things about this "issue" is that "TV" is treated as a single, discrete entity, when it is really three things: a) the device, b) the programming, c) the delivery system (e.g. cable, satellite). Many people in their 30s and above think of them as insepar
For when you really need to dress something up as dangerous, the type of thing that would star a team of, perhaps, eleven big-name actors and a casino.
So it all becomes the world's largest distributed seedbox?
Well, some of these treatments really can kill you, if the "treatment" is bad enough. Most are simply bad by fault of removing something that is good, like getting people to stop taking their medicine so that a faith healer can wave his hands and pray over them.
the whole "_____ world" system is abhorrent and it's good that it's being abandoned, since it basically only existed to put the USSR and friends in a secondary category ("second world") below the USA and friends.
Indeed. I would say there is a high potential of tampering, which means people need to step lightly. It is also difficult practically, for textbooks, because professors and instructors are used to changing their course to reflect a particular edition of a book, which is virtually impossible if that book is always changing. However, revising the book without forcing people to pay for a redundant "384th edition" is good.
The books-as-a-service (which is all I can describe this as) problem could be mitigated by the ability to take "snapshots" and/or the publisher keeping an archive of old versions available. Those could be tampered with as well, but the more difficult it is to pull tampering off, the less likely it is that they will do it. Snapshots would be a good idea for archival purposes alone, since how else could you see how the book evolved? If all you have is the end result, you have no idea how you got there.
There are several differences. First, while it's as effectively a non-option to turn off WiFi just the way it is to turn off your cell phone, you can control what information goes out to a much greater degree. Second, what goes out is the SSID and the MAC, which are personal characteristics ... of your router. Compare and contrast cell phone information, which can potentially hold a lot more important information. Third, it's a question of what can potentially be compromised. If they know your SSID? Not much. If they can personally identify you based on behaviour and timing (e.g. a security camera records you entering and leaving the building, that syncs up with the cell phone tracking and they can pinpoint your movements), they can do things like find out what routes you took, what shops you went to and how long you spent there. Within a few years, if not already, market-droids will try to connect that behaviour tracking to your demographics in an attempt to try to brainwash people even more effectively. There is both the ability and the incentive, which means it is virtually inevitable.
The difference is that information about where you have been and when is both harder to obtain without modern technology and potentially more damaging. It could be misused by stalkers, it could be used to try to condemn people by association (e.g. he drove through a street full of prostitutes, that makes him a potential suspect as a john), and it can be used to bamboozle and mislead people even more effectively than now. It puts the marketers and cops and others in the position of knowing as much about you as someone you trust, without you even knowing who they are. It is an asymmetric relationship -- nothing you can do could hurt them, but they could do anything to hurt you if your movement patterns became anything other than completely innocuous. There was a very good Cory Doctorow story related to this which was published not long ago: "Scroogled". It helps to convey the magnitude of what someone could do with enough personal information and the incentive to abuse that knowledge (or power).
By giving someone knowledge about you, you are giving them power over you. If it is a friend or a spouse, there is the fundamental assumption of reciprocity -- that you will know roughly as much which is potentially compromising about them as they do about you. But in an asymmetric relationship, with you on one end and a marketer, cop, or some kind of bureaucrat on the other, there is no reciprocity; they can do anything to hurt you and you can't return the favour, so to speak. This kind of unevenness is begging to be abused and as this kind of tracking becomes more common, it almost certainly will be if it hasn't been abused already. We have little recourse to stop the abuse because of the lack of accountability for it, the lack of real awareness of what information is being collected and who it is passed along to, and the lack of real alternatives (a Do Not Track option? Anything?)
Remember that it is less obvious now who is literate and who isn't. Someone might use a laptop to spend a day on Facebook or they might have 100,000 ebooks on it ... or both.
The internet is not and should not be a business, and regardless of who "invented" it, it is now something that has become more international and egalitarian. Furthermore, you talk about European censorship or about the UN? What about US censorship? While it is difficult to generalize about Europe, certain parts (Denmark, Sweden, etc.) are more democratic than the USA. Finally, anti-competitive? TLDs by their nature are monopolistic -- trying to run a TLD for-profit simply leads to high domain name prices... but this not about money, this is about fairness. If you mean that intellectual property and trademark law are bad, then I agree -- but I would advise you to look at which country is strong-arming other countries into signing international treaties related to it. Hint: it isn't a European country.
.org... that seems pretty imperialist to me.
My point is simply that you seem to be under the impression that the USA should have a right to operate the way it does, that the Web is about business, or that anyone should flout or manipulate international law or ignore what is fair and right just to make money.
Finally -- imperialism? Colonialism? The USA is the only country selfishly squatting on general-subject TLDs like
It doesn't matter if you pay for something -- sometimes, you just don't deserve it. What if I paid $1000 to be the UN secretary-general? Would that be fair? My point is that by having the US singled out as "special", we help to sustain a Web where the US controls a vast number of domain names (other than just *.us), and unfairly so. In the interests of treating countries fairly (that is, that countries like the USA don't get special privileges they have abused and will abuse again in the future), we should modernize certain TLDs. That is all.
PS: I'm not European.
The only arguments I have ever heard are "because they got there first" and "because they can", neither of which are remotely valid.
The question we are talking about is moral rights, not capitalism. Regardless of what money the USA has paid for something, does it have the moral right to put itself on a pedestal online? I do not think so.
Regardless, it is unfairly US-centric.
This is a bit less bad than it seems -- the summary cherry-picked certain companies and groups. Mozilla and Twitter are also signatories to the "letter". I agree that Facebook and Zynga are stereotypical "bad guys" -- however, you don't always need to agree 100% with your allies.
Because the ad is aimed less at politicians are more at people in general. If the new media companies were going to try to appeal to politicians directly, they wouldn't use a newspaper ad. It would be lunacy to try to, since the **AAs have far deeper hooks into US politics than Google and co. So instead, they are trying to increase public awareness in a gambit to create a public backlash against SOPA.
Of course, the USA having control over general domains like .edu could be debated -- do they have the right to provide American universities with a TLD, then force non-American universities to fend for themselves? Why do they have a similar monopoly over domains like .gov? Why, indeed, do domains like gov exist? A better approach would be *.gov.us for US government sites. The only arguments I have ever heard are "because they got there first" and "because they can", neither of which are remotely valid.
The solution to that problem is to avoid DRM.
Just visiting InfoWorld safely seems to require a battery of Firefox addons, including NoScript and AdBlock Plus. I shudder to imagine what it would be like unprotected.
I'm curious, which parties did what?
Mod parent up. The ability to boot a different OS will become a feature for "serious users" that costs thousands of dollars. The days of installing Linux on older desktop systems for hobby purposes will be over unless someone cracks this stuff.
PDF is about the only document format that hits all the checkboxes of being standardized, more open than the alternatives, preserves formatting, wide support in word processing, LaTeX, etc., wide OS support, and supports more advanced formatting.
Or, alternatively, militias were made obsolete by modern professional armies and are now rather quaint. The time when a war could be fought with the weapons and combat experience any given citizen had is long past. The only purpose this would serve would be to give random people combat training, even ones who do not want it. As well, arguing that the USA needs much of a military for self-defense is laughable -- the USA's military is used almost entirely in other countries, with the exclusion of the National Guard. There is simply no need for a military in self-defense, which is why, for much of its history, the USA more or less had none other than its navy.
You missed my point entirely. If people care about an issue, but not as much as other issues, then that issue will get neglected because only a handful of issues will be prioritized in politics at any given time. The result is that people who get elected don't get elected based on their stance toward minor issues, only major ones. This is a systemic problem which leads to minor issues (no matter what they are) getting neglected.
But the problem is that people will vote primarily based on other issues. When choosing between candidates, there's no option to pick and choose which issues to support -- you would need a multitude of candidates. Instead, people vote based on a few issues that are the most important to them, then grudgingly compromise on issues that are more minor to them, which means that they tend to get screwed over on many issues like this one. It's not an ideal system where people will vote out lawmakers who do things they don't like -- lawmakers can do things they don't like as well as do things they do like and people will vote for them based on the things they like rather than the things they don't. Which means a few issues are strongly favoured democratically, while the rest are left to slide. Since politicians know some issues aren't considered hugely critical, they will largely side with whichever group or individual has lots of money to give, because choosing the populist option probably won't net them any more votes and will lead to a major money supply being cut off.
My point is lawmakers making laws independent of the wishes of the people, then justifying sustaining the laws against public pressure as "it's the law", essentially arguing that the law is immutable.