I think your above statement is the heart of the issue. For me, she's not a hypocrite, but/obviously/ -- not rightfully -- biased.
HOW can letting you kill both sides make this a better idea?
It's more fair. It might even be slightly more realistic.
Why is it hard for you people to see the difference between this and past conflicts?
It's more agreeable to dramatize past conflicts mostly because of our ignorance. The stereotypes are in place, it's already a game, so turning it into a video game doesn't change a thing. The decision of what you should feel in each occasion has already been made.
My point is, turning past wars into video games are in essence as disrespectful and insensitive -- the player just doesn't acknowledge it. Don't do it at all, or just be a little bit more honest and do it for the present conflicts as well. It's much healthier.
Even if you were selling it to a completely uninvolved market, it is blatantly disrespectful.
the US government could release "leaked" "Iranian" papers on their "nuclear weapons plans" to WikiLeaks.
It's almost impossible to fake such a leak as there are too many people with knowledge and power who don't have conflicts with Iran (I'd guess especially within the reach of WikiLeaks guys), so the real news would possibly be that "some people tried to fake intelligence on Iranian nuclear weapons program" or such.
They could as well try to take over WikiLeaks.:-) Replace them with CIA agents, silently, over a couple of years.
Also, if confronted with such a "leak", I would count on the fact that there are a huge number of organizations with too many dissimilar multidimensional interests. You can usually read the truth, not from a single source, but through views of multiple agents.
So, all in all, I don't think this kind of strategy would work. But who knows...
So, you're saying that the U.S. military helicopters have the right to kill random people on the ground with guns, without any identified threat, without warning. I don't have any problem with that, as long as you don't resort to the moral rhetoric as the justification of this war. This is an ordinary aggression of a power to subdue its opponents.
The "no identified threat" part isn't true though. They, ahem, identified a threat to the 'copter -- the camera equipment (so you're either wrong or go back to the above paragraph). An honest mistake. Until you start killing the civilians who try to help the injured, that is.
We were able to see this, because it has been recorded. And because a reporter to a western agency was killed. And because the agency wasn't content with the excuses given and didn't give up the case. And because somebody had the courage to risk this much to leak the video.
Can you guess, going backwards through this list, multiplying the possibilities, how much cruelty must have been done? (This came to me when I first saw the leaked Abu Gharib abuse pics.)
I just place this autoinstaller in a dozen locations on the web and change the payload url of an existing worm out with this. Imagine how overwhelmed the thugs in ICE would be if 10,000 Tor Relays popped up overnight.
If you want to help them create a case against on-line privacy and anonymity, fine. Otherwise, just, don't.
However, you could start a "run an exit node from your grandma's apartment" campaign.
To say it more concisely, what Assange was saying was essentially "if you don't comply with my demands, these innocent people will die." Wow. He should be shot with Bin Laden.
You could make this analogy as well: he got hold of memoirs of a criminal, but before publishing, out of courtesy to people who might be innocent, asked him to help erase the names of his collaborators.
These analogies don't work, because in the end it all depends on whether their demand (redaction) AND their action (publishing) is the moral thing to do. And apparently, this in turn depends on where your loyalties lie.
There is understandably a bias towards U.S. here. But, I, for instance, don't have a concrete opinion on the importance of protecting these informants. They might have been morally obliged to become spies, but may also have been coerced, deceived or enticed. In the end, it's pretty certain that they caused suffering to the other side. However, I know that I have a clear bias against any kind of military invasion.
Wikileaks decided to stay impartial on this particular "informants" issue and tried at least to conceal the names. Nevertheless, if you are not loyal to any side in this war, and are trying to maximize basic humanistic values, the suffering the invasion has caused might easily overwhelm other concerns. It's also fact versus speculation.
So I don't think Wikileaks would, or should have, sit on those documents because lives of some informants are in danger. Even if you don't think that the informants themselves signed up for it, the responsibility is still on who recruited them and then couldn't protect these documents.
Someone who's not on either side can not be held accountable for the lives of people who are actively involved in the conflict.
The Russians and Chinese would hunt them down and kill them.
And maybe also because neither Russia nor China is the most hated state (and maybe even country) of the world. U.S.' soft power creates this adverse side effect of people actually caring about its downfall.
By "Iranians", I meant the Iranian population. It's not like they don't have a say in governance, Iran is not a dictatorship. The people who sat doing nothing while the election was stolen are the real power there, and they won't sit and wait when their own well-being is in danger.
I said "that makes sense", but tried to move towards the conclusion that there will always be an excuse that makes sense if the rulers had no chance but to use nukes. I don't think Iran's regime is more powerful than Israel's. It's very hard to imagine a helpless Israel, but let's try. Without U.S. and Europe backing them, imagine that the rulers had no chance but to surrender to a new regime dictated by Islamic countries. Now, even though the population wouldn't be in direct danger, I pretty much assume that the chance that they'd resort to MAD would be the same as Iran in the same situation. The key is, if this weren't so, having nukes would not have an advantage.
Because they're messianic, they may seek to bring on the next stage of redemption (as they see it) through a cataclysm.
That makes sense, I admit, but the way I see it, the ulema isn't so different from any group of politicians (the Pope isn't delusional himself either). They might resort to this kind of thing if threatened, but no more than other people in power. And it still would be a pretty hard move with the Iranians, which are a wise bunch. Saddam, for instance, could pull it off if he had the nukes, even though he was a pretty secular sob (though US wouldn't/invade/ if he had WMD's in the first place).
It will be almost impossible to meddle with their regime from the outside, though, once they get a nuke. Just as it should be.
Iran might be a messianic theocracy, but it doesn't follow that it's more probable for them to commit mass murder. Statistically, they've been pretty peaceful for a long time. Make a comparison to the atrocities your democratic alliance has committed after WWII and how much suffering the West as a whole has caused throughout the world for the last few centuries. Put the numbers down and think about why your reasoning just doesn't work.
Yeah, you've killed a few million but it was all for the greater good. And if those Persian bastards get their hands on a nuclear weapon, they will immediately hurtle it towards an enemy of the prophet, regardless of the certainty of their own demise.
I used to brew Kombucha tea, and this looks exactly like (and probably is) the dried form of the culture that forms on the surface. I used it to write stuff on, feels really like papyrus.
I find it hard to believe they've synthesized a high-protein cell that can beat cellulose for structural strength and permanence.
For instance, one of the most resilient materials we use in our daily lives (not me though) is leather. Now, I'm not so sure about why keeping this thing alive could be regarded sustainable but other than that, it could evolve into a more useful concept involving a combination of strong bone (remember dinosaurs?) and fur, which is treated postmortem to avoid infestations. OTOH it's very hard to find an advantage of this over more conventional methods.
How many nodes or super-nodes would you need to control to compromise Freenet's security?
It shouldn't matter if you will just insert a leaked document and leave (change node id + IP). If your document is huge, and most of your connections are compromised, then it could be a problem. If you are so paranoid, insert it from a public wi-fi spot for extra security. My idea is that, if you have 20 connections from 10 different countries, it's highly unlikely that they are after you.
It's also possible to make some darknet connections with a few friends (it's hard to find enough of them if you're an ordinary nerd), even better if they're overseas. Then you don't have to worry about compromised opennet nodes (which I doubt would be more than a few).
I think the comparison is faulty. Publishing on a freesite is as secure as it gets, since it will be propagated by people who are totally unaware of you. The only part you're involved is the insertion process, which can be done in multiple sessions if the data is too large, and is not suspect until you publish the keys somewhere. Wait a few days before you post them to a board then... The worst that can happen is that your leak is so lame that nobody shows interest and it falls of the freenet.
Yet another example showing that the Islamic world is still in the Dark Ages that most of the rest of the world emerged from sometime in the 13th century.
It's a relief that the crusades weren't a total waste...
Unfortunately, as Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea have demonstrated, they ARE stupid enough, and really don't care if they die for Allah or Kim or whoever.
How? When did North Korea die for Kim? What/is/ Afghanistan?
And Iran? What did Iran do? Or any Iranian for that matter... Just how arrogant can you be?
I had some data in heavily scratched CD-R's from 1996 I had tossed in a box, which I was able to recover in 2007 -- I'm quite sure they still work. OTOH I have CD-R's from 2009 that are barely readable. I guess if you have a well-thought error correction strategy (e.g. distributing recovery data to different types of media), you'd be safe.
the ban on youtube is NOT from the opposing camp. there has been dozens of court orders to ban youtube
Sorry but there's no smokescreen here. Youtube was banned because some Greeks put videos insulting Ataturk, and Youtube didn't agree to take them down. This was backed by the most aggressively secular Kemalist organizations, since they're also nationalistic by definition.
That's why the government never liked it and they actively used this as a proof of how liberal they actually are. It's fair to say that AKP government benefited from this issue immensely.
I'm not saying the religious side doesn't ban web sites. This just isn't true for this specific case.
Trying to tax Google is an abuse of technicality, which, in a place like Turkey, happens all the time. There are no religious motives behind it, and AKP government is seemingly not supporting it, at the very least because they don't like bad press.
Are they benevolent? Absolutely not. But blaming Islamism for something that seculars are more involved in is just damaging. People see this kind of spin and then go vote for AKP. Many AKP voters in Turkey I conversed with weren't even religious themselves.
... have been modded up, just because you're blaming religious governance.
As you have already stated, the ban on YouTube came from the OPPOSING camp. AKP government has always been critical about it, to the extent that the PM told the press that he himself had been watching YouTube despite the ban.
So, what's your argument? Are they using the taxation excuse to justify the ban (which doesn't conform with the above fact) or are they using the ban as an excuse to impose taxes? What does religion have to do with it? This isn't even about the government, but the State.
Sorry, I'm an atheist myself, but everything isn't about religion either. Sometimes you should have to consider that the easiest explanation might not be the right one.
Well, if it's distributed, and open-source, and popular enough, at some point they should lose all/direct/ control over it. If this is not likely from the beginning, there's no point in using it, though I suspect the goal is just that.
If it works, we nerds would start using it out of curiosity. If it proves helpful, it could grow.
It might sound surprising, but I _know_ I could go and read the Stern Review. Considering how old it is, I'd be surprised if most people here haven't read parts of it, and its criticisms. OTOH, it's hard to find it conclusive, at least regarding the points I mentioned. I'd be inclined to go and read it thoroughly, but it's where some heuristics kicks in, causing me to believe that I'd be more harshly criticized and accused of being ignorant if I did criticize specific points in that report.
Therefore, I think the main dispute here is about heuristics, more than misinformation. Also, it's not about the Internet. Let me give you an example... I mostly encounter the "go and read a book" argument when discussing about religion, Marxism or nationalism. It's like "go and read Das Kapital!"; "Erm, yeah, I/have/ read it, and here's the quote supporting what I had said."; "You ignorant bastard, it's more complicated than you think. You have to read thousands of more pages and educate yourself!"; and so on... There's a pattern there, so I inevitably match it to your reply. These heuristics we base on prior experience can be wrong, but it's how we live our lives. On the other side of the picture, there are people already convinced, for whom spending more time digging the old issues is a waste of time. From this, IMO, it's obvious that these people shouldn't reply to these threads.
Also, sorry, but this doesn't happen when you ask for an "explanation of physics" on Slashdot... Or anywhere... At least if you're not questioning a well-established doctrine. Even then it's rare.
For example, a sea level rise of one meter will cause hundreds of millions of people to have to relocate, at a cost of trillions of dollars.
Please take the time to understand what you're arguing against -- this is the main problem of the so-called "skeptics". They don't even know what they're skeptical of!
OK, help me find out what I'm skeptical of... Related to your comment and point #4 of OP:
What's the value of $(trillions of dollars) in the century time-scale? No, this is a serious question.
What do we know about the difficulties humanity will face, when the earth has warmed, 50-100 years from now? What are your predictions about the future technology and global economy? What is the degree of certainty here?
I'm not trying to make a point here, but it's also worth noting how pessimistic we've become, in just half a decade, from dreaming how to conquer the solar system to trying hard NOT to dream about the future of local habitation.
Slashdot Mirror
*Sigh* Another wise comment modded down.
She is rightfully biased, and not a hypocrite.
I think your above statement is the heart of the issue. For me, she's not a hypocrite, but /obviously/ -- not rightfully -- biased.
HOW can letting you kill both sides make this a better idea?
It's more fair. It might even be slightly more realistic.
Why is it hard for you people to see the difference between this and past conflicts?
It's more agreeable to dramatize past conflicts mostly because of our ignorance. The stereotypes are in place, it's already a game, so turning it into a video game doesn't change a thing. The decision of what you should feel in each occasion has already been made.
My point is, turning past wars into video games are in essence as disrespectful and insensitive -- the player just doesn't acknowledge it. Don't do it at all, or just be a little bit more honest and do it for the present conflicts as well. It's much healthier.
Even if you were selling it to a completely uninvolved market, it is blatantly disrespectful.
Disrespectful to whom?
the US government could release "leaked" "Iranian" papers on their "nuclear weapons plans" to WikiLeaks.
It's almost impossible to fake such a leak as there are too many people with knowledge and power who don't have conflicts with Iran (I'd guess especially within the reach of WikiLeaks guys), so the real news would possibly be that "some people tried to fake intelligence on Iranian nuclear weapons program" or such.
They could as well try to take over WikiLeaks. :-) Replace them with CIA agents, silently, over a couple of years.
Also, if confronted with such a "leak", I would count on the fact that there are a huge number of organizations with too many dissimilar multidimensional interests. You can usually read the truth, not from a single source, but through views of multiple agents.
So, all in all, I don't think this kind of strategy would work. But who knows...
So, you're saying that the U.S. military helicopters have the right to kill random people on the ground with guns, without any identified threat, without warning. I don't have any problem with that, as long as you don't resort to the moral rhetoric as the justification of this war. This is an ordinary aggression of a power to subdue its opponents.
The "no identified threat" part isn't true though. They, ahem, identified a threat to the 'copter -- the camera equipment (so you're either wrong or go back to the above paragraph). An honest mistake. Until you start killing the civilians who try to help the injured, that is.
We were able to see this, because it has been recorded. And because a reporter to a western agency was killed. And because the agency wasn't content with the excuses given and didn't give up the case. And because somebody had the courage to risk this much to leak the video.
Can you guess, going backwards through this list, multiplying the possibilities, how much cruelty must have been done? (This came to me when I first saw the leaked Abu Gharib abuse pics.)
I just place this autoinstaller in a dozen locations on the web and change the payload url of an existing worm out with this. Imagine how overwhelmed the thugs in ICE would be if 10,000 Tor Relays popped up overnight.
If you want to help them create a case against on-line privacy and anonymity, fine. Otherwise, just, don't.
However, you could start a "run an exit node from your grandma's apartment" campaign.
To say it more concisely, what Assange was saying was essentially "if you don't comply with my demands, these innocent people will die." Wow. He should be shot with Bin Laden.
You could make this analogy as well: he got hold of memoirs of a criminal, but before publishing, out of courtesy to people who might be innocent, asked him to help erase the names of his collaborators.
These analogies don't work, because in the end it all depends on whether their demand (redaction) AND their action (publishing) is the moral thing to do. And apparently, this in turn depends on where your loyalties lie.
There is understandably a bias towards U.S. here. But, I, for instance, don't have a concrete opinion on the importance of protecting these informants. They might have been morally obliged to become spies, but may also have been coerced, deceived or enticed. In the end, it's pretty certain that they caused suffering to the other side. However, I know that I have a clear bias against any kind of military invasion.
Wikileaks decided to stay impartial on this particular "informants" issue and tried at least to conceal the names. Nevertheless, if you are not loyal to any side in this war, and are trying to maximize basic humanistic values, the suffering the invasion has caused might easily overwhelm other concerns. It's also fact versus speculation.
So I don't think Wikileaks would, or should have, sit on those documents because lives of some informants are in danger. Even if you don't think that the informants themselves signed up for it, the responsibility is still on who recruited them and then couldn't protect these documents.
Someone who's not on either side can not be held accountable for the lives of people who are actively involved in the conflict.
The Russians and Chinese would hunt them down and kill them.
And maybe also because neither Russia nor China is the most hated state (and maybe even country) of the world. U.S.' soft power creates this adverse side effect of people actually caring about its downfall.
By "Iranians", I meant the Iranian population. It's not like they don't have a say in governance, Iran is not a dictatorship. The people who sat doing nothing while the election was stolen are the real power there, and they won't sit and wait when their own well-being is in danger.
I said "that makes sense", but tried to move towards the conclusion that there will always be an excuse that makes sense if the rulers had no chance but to use nukes. I don't think Iran's regime is more powerful than Israel's. It's very hard to imagine a helpless Israel, but let's try. Without U.S. and Europe backing them, imagine that the rulers had no chance but to surrender to a new regime dictated by Islamic countries. Now, even though the population wouldn't be in direct danger, I pretty much assume that the chance that they'd resort to MAD would be the same as Iran in the same situation. The key is, if this weren't so, having nukes would not have an advantage.
Because they're messianic, they may seek to bring on the next stage of redemption (as they see it) through a cataclysm.
That makes sense, I admit, but the way I see it, the ulema isn't so different from any group of politicians (the Pope isn't delusional himself either). They might resort to this kind of thing if threatened, but no more than other people in power. And it still would be a pretty hard move with the Iranians, which are a wise bunch. Saddam, for instance, could pull it off if he had the nukes, even though he was a pretty secular sob (though US wouldn't /invade/ if he had WMD's in the first place).
It will be almost impossible to meddle with their regime from the outside, though, once they get a nuke. Just as it should be.
Iran might be a messianic theocracy, but it doesn't follow that it's more probable for them to commit mass murder. Statistically, they've been pretty peaceful for a long time. Make a comparison to the atrocities your democratic alliance has committed after WWII and how much suffering the West as a whole has caused throughout the world for the last few centuries. Put the numbers down and think about why your reasoning just doesn't work.
Yeah, you've killed a few million but it was all for the greater good. And if those Persian bastards get their hands on a nuclear weapon, they will immediately hurtle it towards an enemy of the prophet, regardless of the certainty of their own demise.
The earth is a complex non-linear dynamic system, if we go too far down this road we may never find our way back.
I thought complexity meant that there's never a way back.
I used to brew Kombucha tea, and this looks exactly like (and probably is) the dried form of the culture that forms on the surface. I used it to write stuff on, feels really like papyrus.
I find it hard to believe they've synthesized a high-protein cell that can beat cellulose for structural strength and permanence.
For instance, one of the most resilient materials we use in our daily lives (not me though) is leather. Now, I'm not so sure about why keeping this thing alive could be regarded sustainable but other than that, it could evolve into a more useful concept involving a combination of strong bone (remember dinosaurs?) and fur, which is treated postmortem to avoid infestations. OTOH it's very hard to find an advantage of this over more conventional methods.
I wouldn't mind if it dumped all the world's infections on my stick.
Just saying...
How many nodes or super-nodes would you need to control to compromise Freenet's security?
It shouldn't matter if you will just insert a leaked document and leave (change node id + IP). If your document is huge, and most of your connections are compromised, then it could be a problem. If you are so paranoid, insert it from a public wi-fi spot for extra security. My idea is that, if you have 20 connections from 10 different countries, it's highly unlikely that they are after you.
It's also possible to make some darknet connections with a few friends (it's hard to find enough of them if you're an ordinary nerd), even better if they're overseas. Then you don't have to worry about compromised opennet nodes (which I doubt would be more than a few).
I think the comparison is faulty. Publishing on a freesite is as secure as it gets, since it will be propagated by people who are totally unaware of you. The only part you're involved is the insertion process, which can be done in multiple sessions if the data is too large, and is not suspect until you publish the keys somewhere. Wait a few days before you post them to a board then... The worst that can happen is that your leak is so lame that nobody shows interest and it falls of the freenet.
Yet another example showing that the Islamic world is still in the Dark Ages that most of the rest of the world emerged from sometime in the 13th century.
It's a relief that the crusades weren't a total waste...
Unfortunately, as Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea have demonstrated, they ARE stupid enough, and really don't care if they die for Allah or Kim or whoever.
How? When did North Korea die for Kim? What /is/ Afghanistan?
And Iran? What did Iran do? Or any Iranian for that matter... Just how arrogant can you be?
I had some data in heavily scratched CD-R's from 1996 I had tossed in a box, which I was able to recover in 2007 -- I'm quite sure they still work. OTOH I have CD-R's from 2009 that are barely readable. I guess if you have a well-thought error correction strategy (e.g. distributing recovery data to different types of media), you'd be safe.
the ban on youtube is NOT from the opposing camp. there has been dozens of court orders to ban youtube
Sorry but there's no smokescreen here. Youtube was banned because some Greeks put videos insulting Ataturk, and Youtube didn't agree to take them down. This was backed by the most aggressively secular Kemalist organizations, since they're also nationalistic by definition.
That's why the government never liked it and they actively used this as a proof of how liberal they actually are. It's fair to say that AKP government benefited from this issue immensely.
I'm not saying the religious side doesn't ban web sites. This just isn't true for this specific case.
Trying to tax Google is an abuse of technicality, which, in a place like Turkey, happens all the time. There are no religious motives behind it, and AKP government is seemingly not supporting it, at the very least because they don't like bad press.
Are they benevolent? Absolutely not. But blaming Islamism for something that seculars are more involved in is just damaging. People see this kind of spin and then go vote for AKP. Many AKP voters in Turkey I conversed with weren't even religious themselves.
... have been modded up, just because you're blaming religious governance.
As you have already stated, the ban on YouTube came from the OPPOSING camp. AKP government has always been critical about it, to the extent that the PM told the press that he himself had been watching YouTube despite the ban.
So, what's your argument? Are they using the taxation excuse to justify the ban (which doesn't conform with the above fact) or are they using the ban as an excuse to impose taxes? What does religion have to do with it? This isn't even about the government, but the State.
Sorry, I'm an atheist myself, but everything isn't about religion either. Sometimes you should have to consider that the easiest explanation might not be the right one.
I thought the same thing about my penis.
Admittedly, I can't share MP3s with it, like Google Wave, but other collaboration is a go...
Well, but you can.
Well, if it's distributed, and open-source, and popular enough, at some point they should lose all /direct/ control over it. If this is not likely from the beginning, there's no point in using it, though I suspect the goal is just that.
If it works, we nerds would start using it out of curiosity. If it proves helpful, it could grow.
It might sound surprising, but I _know_ I could go and read the Stern Review. Considering how old it is, I'd be surprised if most people here haven't read parts of it, and its criticisms. OTOH, it's hard to find it conclusive, at least regarding the points I mentioned. I'd be inclined to go and read it thoroughly, but it's where some heuristics kicks in, causing me to believe that I'd be more harshly criticized and accused of being ignorant if I did criticize specific points in that report.
Therefore, I think the main dispute here is about heuristics, more than misinformation. Also, it's not about the Internet. Let me give you an example... I mostly encounter the "go and read a book" argument when discussing about religion, Marxism or nationalism. It's like "go and read Das Kapital!"; "Erm, yeah, I /have/ read it, and here's the quote supporting what I had said."; "You ignorant bastard, it's more complicated than you think. You have to read thousands of more pages and educate yourself!"; and so on... There's a pattern there, so I inevitably match it to your reply. These heuristics we base on prior experience can be wrong, but it's how we live our lives. On the other side of the picture, there are people already convinced, for whom spending more time digging the old issues is a waste of time. From this, IMO, it's obvious that these people shouldn't reply to these threads.
Also, sorry, but this doesn't happen when you ask for an "explanation of physics" on Slashdot... Or anywhere... At least if you're not questioning a well-established doctrine. Even then it's rare.
For example, a sea level rise of one meter will cause hundreds of millions of people to have to relocate, at a cost of trillions of dollars.
Please take the time to understand what you're arguing against -- this is the main problem of the so-called "skeptics". They don't even know what they're skeptical of!
OK, help me find out what I'm skeptical of... Related to your comment and point #4 of OP:
What's the value of $(trillions of dollars) in the century time-scale? No, this is a serious question.
What do we know about the difficulties humanity will face, when the earth has warmed, 50-100 years from now? What are your predictions about the future technology and global economy? What is the degree of certainty here?
I'm not trying to make a point here, but it's also worth noting how pessimistic we've become, in just half a decade, from dreaming how to conquer the solar system to trying hard NOT to dream about the future of local habitation.
Looks like Lovelock himself thinks otherwise.