> People who are abusing their powers will suffer. People who do dirty deeds and want clean hands will suffer. People who believe that their position protects them from personal responsibility will suffer.
And war could start in Korea, as China's position to us (that they are ready to support reunification) could make the dictator over their upset in a way which undermines China's negotiating power with Korea at a time when that power could prevent a shooting war. For example.
I wonder if some of these touchier releases come from having Harold Koh as legal counsel to State, or whether he wrote his note refusing to identify specific areas that could cost lives under protest.
> We hire politicians to be upfront and honest. We don't hire them to be two faced.
Here, we're talking about diplomats, not politicians. Diplomats have to be political, but they're not what we think of as politicians in the US, because we think of politicians as presidents and Congressmen.
And presidents and Congressmen don't get elected based on statesmanship, truth-telling, or even (directly) political connections sufficient to get an appointment (like ambassadors).
Presidents and Congressment get elected on the basis, primarily, of being able to avoid saying anything substantive--if you can avoid saying anything substantive, then it is harder to attack you. And attack ads are the most effective kind. It's a horrible fact, one that does much to defeat the ideals of democracy at the heart of our government, but it is a fact.
Fortunately, a lot of Congressmen (and the President) are decent people, even if one disagrees with them. They are decent people, but that's not what they get elected for.
> Why should a diplomat's views on the quality of leadership of another country become public info?
There are only two scenarios that come to mind. (1) the later of Fifty years after the event or one year after the diplomat's death, or (2) when those views seriously inform the government on a position which later becomes an area of national controversy where there is legitimate reason to believe the government is deceiving or has deceived its people.
In the first case, releasing the information preserves history. Our history books are wrong--all it takes is one look at witness's statements in a crime and one look at what actually happened, or one listen to pro-Palestine and pro-Israel folks on the same peace treaty, to realize that everything is greatly colored by one's point of view. The more information we have about an event--especially the kind of event considered in these cables--the better we know what our world has been.
In the second case, the government is attempting to hoodwink its people. The people's first defense should be, if they already have evidence to show a government cover-up, some kind of legal action for the equivalent of discovery, but more carefully regulated.
Any competent government that doesn't want US info on its dirty laundry aired? The US warned India, for example, that something embarassing might get out; do you really think India couldn't DDoS Wikileaks without pausing for a snack-break?
> I remember in high school, all of the "honors" students would sit around at lunch swapping homework and copying answers. Many of them cheated on tests as well. I don't think any of those "good kids" who took a bunch of AP tests and had a >3.6 GPA didn't constantly cheat.
Funny. I remember honors students, for the most part, being fairly bright people who were, on average, better in class. They didn't have to cheat and the complex part about high school was the social stuff, not the work.
> When was it that the US got involved in the war? Oh yeah. After pearl harbor.
That was when the US began to get directly involved, yes. The response of most people I know who were alive at the time and not US Citizens was "Thank God. We have a chance at winning."
Our production capacity was a large portion of what won the war. Soviet lives was another large portion of what won the war. We had a lot of people die too, but where we could, of course we armed other countries and let them fight Hitler. Plus, the soviets had more men, and Stalin cared less about their lives.
Soil for a hundred years is nothing compared to the value of lend-lease. It's also unclear what you mean by economical spionage. Do you mean economic or corporate espionage? Or cost-effective espionage? And what do dishes have to do with it? Are you talking about intelligence intercepts?
> Or maybe people in those countries don't send Wikileaks stuff to publish? They're not an investigation organization, they just publish them protecting the identity of the source.
Good point.
They may also have better information security than we do. The very *idea* of having so many diplomatic communiques accessible enough that [presumably] one person can copy so many speaks to a massive technical security failure.
The Third rule of network design, for a moral being, is to consider the moral, ethical, and legal consequences of any atypical changes you make to your behavior.
Why the Third rule?
Because the first rule is to figure out what on earth is going on--not just in theory, but in fact. Code for the OSI model is ugly, perhaps by necessity (it has to be very fast), but it's code that is very, very easy to get wrong. It involves a lot of interacting pieces working on different levels of abstraction with other players that you don't have code control over.
The second rule is to realize when the first rule means that you shouldn't touch the stuff. Google and Microsoft have the engineering competence to mess with it--MSFT even should be messing with it, in terms of looking for ways to improve their behavior in a community-friendly way. Because they write the code that handles a huge portion of connections, and let's face it, TCP/IP just isn't designed for lots of things: AJAX or broadband, for example.
The third rule is to consider the moral and ethical and legal consequences of changes.
Only after at least these three steps should someone make changes that involve connections that go beyond the computers they control.
This was entirely predictable. It's not easy to convince people to let other people--strangers of the same gender--touch them intimately as a form of protest.
It was also predictable that the media would spin it as a failure.
In fact, it probably helped speed security clearances on one of the busiest travel days of the year, because the TSA planned for a larger disruption. At least, that is what I would do, to be safe, and I'd imagine they did it.
I tend to think these shouldn't be a problem. Nobody can take over a plane with a Swiss Army knife, not today. Other passengers wouldn't allow it--and good luck getting into the cockpit.
I walked into a high-profile building in DC with a pocketknife last year, by accident. The guys with the X-ray machine did the old Boy Scout test of not-wider-than-a-man's-palm and gave it back to me, fairly confident I wouldn't go about stabbing Congressmen.
If we had a bit more good sense, we would have more security and fewer annoyances. Security and convenience are typically thought of as diametrically opposed, but it seems there are things we could do that would improve both. One simple example is cockpit doors that need clearance from the ground to open in mid-flight, instead of heightened security scans at checkpoints.
> Equally, it makes sense to fine the company an amount that discourages them from repeating the action. Problem is, for an amount to have any effect at all on a company, it'll be large enough to be life changing for a normal person. Give the actual damages to the plaintiff, and use the punitive damages to pay for public services.
Yes, with a slight modification: punitive damages should have some kind of copay. Take enough from the company to discourage them from breaking the law, and give enough to the plaintiff to make it worth his time to add it to his complaint.
> TFA claims the basis for the case is a Minnesota state statute, but the case was argued in federal court. How does that work?
Those cases where diversity jurisdiction applies can also usually be argued in state court. Which court the case is in isn't supposed to make any substantive difference (i.e. you still use the state's laws), but it makes both procedural and political differences that can be substantial. (The politics varies.)
> Texting is a lot more silent if a criminal is nearby and might hear you, also a lot of people are idiots.
The regulation also has privacy implications:... We seek comment on a number of issues initially raised in the Location Accuracy NPRM, including: Whether we should consider more stringent location parameters,... the format in which accuracy data should be automatically provided to PSAPs; how to address location accuracy while roaming; how location information and accuracy can be improved in more challenging environments; and whether location accuracy standards should include an elevation (Z-axis) component.
4. In the NOI, we request comment on whether we should require interconnected VoIP service providers to automatically identify the geographic location of a customer without the customer's active cooperation. We also seek comment on what E911 obligations, if any, should apply to VoIP services that are not fully interconnected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Additionally, we seek comment on the impact of NG911 developments on location accuracy and automatic location identification (ALI)....
> Practically no one ever considers themselves "the bad guy" even guys like saddam hussein, idi amin and the khmer rouge all rationalized their actions as somehow being for the greater good.
We all rationalize many of our actions. But I'd say a lot of people also do consider themselves "the bad guy." Some people shrug off their crimes; but Othello killed himself because he couldn't, and countless tens of thousands suffer every day thinking themselves bad. Sometimes its the angst of having hurt a loved one; sometimes it's the knowledge of having caved to a position you don't believe in and fought against one's principles, or more likely having not lived up to them; sometimes it's suffering through domestic violence or modern-day slavery, convinced by an abusing "husband" or a "girlfriend" or a pimp that you're not worth anything.
The people who consider themselves the bad guys aren't the ones I'm afraid of: they're the ones who need help, after all. We don't see many bad guys on the world stage, because being a bad guy is a very private thing, and a thing rarely fits with being both effective and power-hungry. We do see a lot of "Bottom-dwellers" to quote one of the former UN war crime prosecutors. Warlords.
For them, yes, they rationalize--when they bother to do anything. More likely they send someone to give lip-service to rationalization according to international norms, while they threaten to cut off the fingers of any election observers who dare to try to monitor the elections in Darfur.
Yes and no. Leaving aside the rather massive issue of where rights come from, there is still a little more nuance here.
First, clearly there are times when information can't or shouldn't be publicly disseminated. Perhaps the name of a teen who was raped should be withheld from the local papers; perhaps prosecutors should not tell the media everything they know about an investigation so that they will not contaminate a jury pool; perhaps police officers should withhold a lurid detail from the description of a crime so as to tell the real criminal from a copycat or imposter.
There are more controversial areas of secrecy: the placement of agents within foreign governments or industry; cryptanalysis techniques developed at NSA that make cracking certain codes easier, or the mere fact that an old code has been cracked; the exact position of every defensive emplacement in Korea; the technology used in the F-22. The public dissemination of this information at the time it is acquired will, to some extent, compromise our ability to predict or respond to threats to the nation.
That being said, I agree that the government should not be able to keep any secret indefinitely, and that in the meantime, all government secrets should be subject to civilian oversight. Anyone who legitimately encounters classified information should also be able to bring an action against the government arguing that the information should be public, if they believe it is being classified erroneously, negligently, or with reckless disregard of the people's interest in knowing the information. A jury should be used, and the procedure should be sealed unless the claimant wins, or after a default period of several decades. Some other procedural safeguards should also be employed.
"Need" is not the word I would have chosen, but being in the dialogue, I accepted it as a proxy for the question of why heroes are good to have.
I am surrounded by heroes. I see people who spend their lives working to make the world better. It gives me hope, and it gives me something both to aspire to in my own way and to support intellectually, politically, or financially.
Hundreds of thousands of kids in the US are at high risk for being forced into slavery each year. And slavery is a problem around the world, too, with the worldwide slave population in the high tens of millions. Genocide remains a problem in Darfur, after Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and didn't they just discover new mass graves in Columbia? Nelson Mandela and Ghandi and King worked to change parts of the world that needed changing. With the Global Health Initiatives, we're making a huge difference in hundreds of millions of African lives.
There's a lot of good going on in the world, if you stop to look. And there are a lot of heroes.
Do we "need" heroes? If "we" are those of us lucky enough that we have time to be talking on slashdot, chances are we'll survive without them. But the world needs them, and they make us the better for knowing them.
> The thriving market for fake AV scams simply means people are too cheap to pay full price for a commercial AV scanner, or too stupid to find a legit free one. Computers are appliances to 90% of the world's population, and no other appliance requires expensive upgrades to determine if it's being misused. Even without a car alarm, you'll notice if your car isn't where you parked it, but a most infected computers don't advertise as such. People know they need an AV scanner, and hey, the computer just offered them one, "Score! No need to go shopping for one!" All viruses (that aren't autonomous worms) spread based on misplaced trust or greed, and getting a cheap AV scanner appeals to both instincts.
No, that's not how they work--they don't advertise themselves as being a cheap competitor and people find them somewhere, they advertise by taking control of your computer and popping up a warning saying you have a billion infections and would you like to pay for their service to uninstall them. To someone who doesn't know the three hundred programs their computer is preinstalled with or how any of them work, that's potentially believable because they don't know any better. It's like following a road, being stopped and paying a toll, and only finding out later that the toll was a fake. If you've never driven the road before, how do you know the difference?
> The first time a black person uses the machine and gets offered a Pepsi, Al Sharpton will organize a boycott against automated racial profiling.
What? As a white person who drinks Pepsi, I am confused by that remark.
Okay, I drink whatever's cheaper, if I'm going to drink either. Pepsi tastes slightly better. Coke has better market share and a much better brand presence. They are also almost never sold out of the same location, much less the same vending machine.
> Although the US has long held a dominant position in the list things now seem to be shifting, with two of the top spots held by China, one by Japan, and one by the US.
Damn, I feel like Britain after WW2.
Hey, does this mean US accents are going to seem sexy soon?
> thanks to a faster (1GHz) CPU, more RAM, and revamped cube-solving algorithms.
I love how a few hundred million math operations per second is no longer enough for our phones, while most information in the human voice is under 8Mhz, IIRC.
It feels a little like the math we teach our children is teaching them how to play with rocks in a cave. But they will never, ever, do what the computer is able to do already.
Which is, in and of itself, an interesting dichotomy. To what extent should the law protect those who don't protect themselves? That's an issue comes up in false advertising cases, in tort cases, in welfare issues, in tax policy, and generally throughout society, as soon as you decide there will be rule of law. Do we defend someone against malicious speech? Against the elements? Do we care if they could have diffused a situation with a kind word and instead chose to be belligerent and got punched in the nose? Do we feel differently if the nose hit belongs to a woman or a man or a child or a dog? A multimillionaire should be able to protect himself, but then, if it's inherited, he may have no nose for it. Or if he's only used to dealing with reputable companies, he may be hoodwinked.
> If Google violated a contract, take them to court. If not, then there is no room for complaint.
It doesn't work like that in the US. Here, we only go to court if the transaction costs associated with the trial, together with the risk of loss, do not exceed the expected benefit.
That calculus is thrown off by the fact that lawyers almost always estimate their chances as higher than they are. Note that I am including harm and benefit to reputation in "transaction costs."
Slashdot Mirror
> People who are abusing their powers will suffer. People who do dirty deeds and want clean hands will suffer. People who believe that their position protects them from personal responsibility will suffer.
And war could start in Korea, as China's position to us (that they are ready to support reunification) could make the dictator over their upset in a way which undermines China's negotiating power with Korea at a time when that power could prevent a shooting war. For example.
I wonder if some of these touchier releases come from having Harold Koh as legal counsel to State, or whether he wrote his note refusing to identify specific areas that could cost lives under protest.
> We hire politicians to be upfront and honest. We don't hire them to be two faced.
Here, we're talking about diplomats, not politicians. Diplomats have to be political, but they're not what we think of as politicians in the US, because we think of politicians as presidents and Congressmen.
And presidents and Congressmen don't get elected based on statesmanship, truth-telling, or even (directly) political connections sufficient to get an appointment (like ambassadors).
Presidents and Congressment get elected on the basis, primarily, of being able to avoid saying anything substantive--if you can avoid saying anything substantive, then it is harder to attack you. And attack ads are the most effective kind. It's a horrible fact, one that does much to defeat the ideals of democracy at the heart of our government, but it is a fact.
Fortunately, a lot of Congressmen (and the President) are decent people, even if one disagrees with them. They are decent people, but that's not what they get elected for.
> Why should a diplomat's views on the quality of leadership of another country become public info?
There are only two scenarios that come to mind. (1) the later of Fifty years after the event or one year after the diplomat's death, or (2) when those views seriously inform the government on a position which later becomes an area of national controversy where there is legitimate reason to believe the government is deceiving or has deceived its people.
In the first case, releasing the information preserves history. Our history books are wrong--all it takes is one look at witness's statements in a crime and one look at what actually happened, or one listen to pro-Palestine and pro-Israel folks on the same peace treaty, to realize that everything is greatly colored by one's point of view. The more information we have about an event--especially the kind of event considered in these cables--the better we know what our world has been.
In the second case, the government is attempting to hoodwink its people. The people's first defense should be, if they already have evidence to show a government cover-up, some kind of legal action for the equivalent of discovery, but more carefully regulated.
Any competent government that doesn't want US info on its dirty laundry aired? The US warned India, for example, that something embarassing might get out; do you really think India couldn't DDoS Wikileaks without pausing for a snack-break?
> I remember in high school, all of the "honors" students would sit around at lunch swapping homework and copying answers. Many of them cheated on tests as well. I don't think any of those "good kids" who took a bunch of AP tests and had a >3.6 GPA didn't constantly cheat.
Funny. I remember honors students, for the most part, being fairly bright people who were, on average, better in class. They didn't have to cheat and the complex part about high school was the social stuff, not the work.
But there are different kinds of communities.
> When was it that the US got involved in the war? Oh yeah. After pearl harbor.
That was when the US began to get directly involved, yes. The response of most people I know who were alive at the time and not US Citizens was "Thank God. We have a chance at winning."
Our production capacity was a large portion of what won the war. Soviet lives was another large portion of what won the war. We had a lot of people die too, but where we could, of course we armed other countries and let them fight Hitler. Plus, the soviets had more men, and Stalin cared less about their lives.
Soil for a hundred years is nothing compared to the value of lend-lease. It's also unclear what you mean by economical spionage. Do you mean economic or corporate espionage? Or cost-effective espionage? And what do dishes have to do with it? Are you talking about intelligence intercepts?
> Or maybe people in those countries don't send Wikileaks stuff to publish? They're not an investigation organization, they just publish them protecting the identity of the source.
Good point.
They may also have better information security than we do. The very *idea* of having so many diplomatic communiques accessible enough that [presumably] one person can copy so many speaks to a massive technical security failure.
The Third rule of network design, for a moral being, is to consider the moral, ethical, and legal consequences of any atypical changes you make to your behavior.
Why the Third rule?
Because the first rule is to figure out what on earth is going on--not just in theory, but in fact. Code for the OSI model is ugly, perhaps by necessity (it has to be very fast), but it's code that is very, very easy to get wrong. It involves a lot of interacting pieces working on different levels of abstraction with other players that you don't have code control over.
The second rule is to realize when the first rule means that you shouldn't touch the stuff. Google and Microsoft have the engineering competence to mess with it--MSFT even should be messing with it, in terms of looking for ways to improve their behavior in a community-friendly way. Because they write the code that handles a huge portion of connections, and let's face it, TCP/IP just isn't designed for lots of things: AJAX or broadband, for example.
The third rule is to consider the moral and ethical and legal consequences of changes.
Only after at least these three steps should someone make changes that involve connections that go beyond the computers they control.
This was entirely predictable. It's not easy to convince people to let other people--strangers of the same gender--touch them intimately as a form of protest.
It was also predictable that the media would spin it as a failure.
In fact, it probably helped speed security clearances on one of the busiest travel days of the year, because the TSA planned for a larger disruption. At least, that is what I would do, to be safe, and I'd imagine they did it.
The major media covers the story by repeating the TSA talking point that the majority of Americans support the scans. They base this on a Washington Post/ABC poll: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postpoll_11222010.html?sid=ST2009122902788
I do think you'd get different numbers if you polled at the airport.
> 1. Swiss army knife in carry on.
I tend to think these shouldn't be a problem. Nobody can take over a plane with a Swiss Army knife, not today. Other passengers wouldn't allow it--and good luck getting into the cockpit.
I walked into a high-profile building in DC with a pocketknife last year, by accident. The guys with the X-ray machine did the old Boy Scout test of not-wider-than-a-man's-palm and gave it back to me, fairly confident I wouldn't go about stabbing Congressmen.
If we had a bit more good sense, we would have more security and fewer annoyances. Security and convenience are typically thought of as diametrically opposed, but it seems there are things we could do that would improve both. One simple example is cockpit doors that need clearance from the ground to open in mid-flight, instead of heightened security scans at checkpoints.
> Equally, it makes sense to fine the company an amount that discourages them from repeating the action. Problem is, for an amount to have any effect at all on a company, it'll be large enough to be life changing for a normal person. Give the actual damages to the plaintiff, and use the punitive damages to pay for public services.
Yes, with a slight modification: punitive damages should have some kind of copay. Take enough from the company to discourage them from breaking the law, and give enough to the plaintiff to make it worth his time to add it to his complaint.
> TFA claims the basis for the case is a Minnesota state statute, but the case was argued in federal court. How does that work?
Those cases where diversity jurisdiction applies can also usually be argued in state court. Which court the case is in isn't supposed to make any substantive difference (i.e. you still use the state's laws), but it makes both procedural and political differences that can be substantial. (The politics varies.)
> Texting is a lot more silent if a criminal is nearby and might hear you, also a lot of people are idiots.
The regulation also has privacy implications: ... ... the format in which accuracy data should be automatically provided to PSAPs; how to address location accuracy while roaming; how location information and accuracy can be improved in more challenging environments; and whether location accuracy standards should include an elevation (Z-axis) component. ...
We seek comment on a number of issues initially raised in the Location Accuracy NPRM, including: Whether we should consider more stringent location parameters,
4. In the NOI, we request comment on whether we should require interconnected VoIP service providers to automatically identify the geographic location of a customer without the customer's active cooperation. We also seek comment on what E911 obligations, if any, should apply to VoIP services that are not fully interconnected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Additionally, we seek comment on the impact of NG911 developments on location accuracy and automatic location identification (ALI).
> It's not theft. It's breach of trust.
According to the press release (also linked above), it's theft of trade secrets:
http://www.justice.gov/usao/mie/press/2010/2010-11-17_xyu.pdf
I assume it's also a breach of his employment contract. (Which would be relevant to a civil case by Ford against him.)
> Practically no one ever considers themselves "the bad guy" even guys like saddam hussein, idi amin and the khmer rouge all rationalized their actions as somehow being for the greater good.
We all rationalize many of our actions. But I'd say a lot of people also do consider themselves "the bad guy." Some people shrug off their crimes; but Othello killed himself because he couldn't, and countless tens of thousands suffer every day thinking themselves bad. Sometimes its the angst of having hurt a loved one; sometimes it's the knowledge of having caved to a position you don't believe in and fought against one's principles, or more likely having not lived up to them; sometimes it's suffering through domestic violence or modern-day slavery, convinced by an abusing "husband" or a "girlfriend" or a pimp that you're not worth anything.
The people who consider themselves the bad guys aren't the ones I'm afraid of: they're the ones who need help, after all. We don't see many bad guys on the world stage, because being a bad guy is a very private thing, and a thing rarely fits with being both effective and power-hungry. We do see a lot of "Bottom-dwellers" to quote one of the former UN war crime prosecutors. Warlords.
For them, yes, they rationalize--when they bother to do anything. More likely they send someone to give lip-service to rationalization according to international norms, while they threaten to cut off the fingers of any election observers who dare to try to monitor the elections in Darfur.
> The government has no right to keep secrets.
Yes and no. Leaving aside the rather massive issue of where rights come from, there is still a little more nuance here.
First, clearly there are times when information can't or shouldn't be publicly disseminated. Perhaps the name of a teen who was raped should be withheld from the local papers; perhaps prosecutors should not tell the media everything they know about an investigation so that they will not contaminate a jury pool; perhaps police officers should withhold a lurid detail from the description of a crime so as to tell the real criminal from a copycat or imposter.
There are more controversial areas of secrecy: the placement of agents within foreign governments or industry; cryptanalysis techniques developed at NSA that make cracking certain codes easier, or the mere fact that an old code has been cracked; the exact position of every defensive emplacement in Korea; the technology used in the F-22. The public dissemination of this information at the time it is acquired will, to some extent, compromise our ability to predict or respond to threats to the nation.
That being said, I agree that the government should not be able to keep any secret indefinitely, and that in the meantime, all government secrets should be subject to civilian oversight. Anyone who legitimately encounters classified information should also be able to bring an action against the government arguing that the information should be public, if they believe it is being classified erroneously, negligently, or with reckless disregard of the people's interest in knowing the information. A jury should be used, and the procedure should be sealed unless the claimant wins, or after a default period of several decades. Some other procedural safeguards should also be employed.
"Need" is not the word I would have chosen, but being in the dialogue, I accepted it as a proxy for the question of why heroes are good to have.
I am surrounded by heroes. I see people who spend their lives working to make the world better. It gives me hope, and it gives me something both to aspire to in my own way and to support intellectually, politically, or financially.
Hundreds of thousands of kids in the US are at high risk for being forced into slavery each year. And slavery is a problem around the world, too, with the worldwide slave population in the high tens of millions. Genocide remains a problem in Darfur, after Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and didn't they just discover new mass graves in Columbia? Nelson Mandela and Ghandi and King worked to change parts of the world that needed changing. With the Global Health Initiatives, we're making a huge difference in hundreds of millions of African lives.
There's a lot of good going on in the world, if you stop to look. And there are a lot of heroes.
Do we "need" heroes? If "we" are those of us lucky enough that we have time to be talking on slashdot, chances are we'll survive without them. But the world needs them, and they make us the better for knowing them.
> Maybe ask why he feels the need to have a hero?
Isn't that kind of like asking why you need to visit the moon?
Heroes inspire us to make ourselves better than we are.
> The thriving market for fake AV scams simply means people are too cheap to pay full price for a commercial AV scanner, or too stupid to find a legit free one. Computers are appliances to 90% of the world's population, and no other appliance requires expensive upgrades to determine if it's being misused. Even without a car alarm, you'll notice if your car isn't where you parked it, but a most infected computers don't advertise as such. People know they need an AV scanner, and hey, the computer just offered them one, "Score! No need to go shopping for one!" All viruses (that aren't autonomous worms) spread based on misplaced trust or greed, and getting a cheap AV scanner appeals to both instincts.
No, that's not how they work--they don't advertise themselves as being a cheap competitor and people find them somewhere, they advertise by taking control of your computer and popping up a warning saying you have a billion infections and would you like to pay for their service to uninstall them. To someone who doesn't know the three hundred programs their computer is preinstalled with or how any of them work, that's potentially believable because they don't know any better. It's like following a road, being stopped and paying a toll, and only finding out later that the toll was a fake. If you've never driven the road before, how do you know the difference?
> The first time a black person uses the machine and gets offered a Pepsi, Al Sharpton will organize a boycott against automated racial profiling.
What? As a white person who drinks Pepsi, I am confused by that remark.
Okay, I drink whatever's cheaper, if I'm going to drink either. Pepsi tastes slightly better. Coke has better market share and a much better brand presence. They are also almost never sold out of the same location, much less the same vending machine.
> Although the US has long held a dominant position in the list things now seem to be shifting, with two of the top spots held by China, one by Japan, and one by the US.
Damn, I feel like Britain after WW2.
Hey, does this mean US accents are going to seem sexy soon?
> thanks to a faster (1GHz) CPU, more RAM, and revamped cube-solving algorithms.
I love how a few hundred million math operations per second is no longer enough for our phones, while most information in the human voice is under 8Mhz, IIRC.
It feels a little like the math we teach our children is teaching them how to play with rocks in a cave. But they will never, ever, do what the computer is able to do already.
Though they will do other cool stuff.
> More of a stupid tax than a scam, really.
Which is, in and of itself, an interesting dichotomy. To what extent should the law protect those who don't protect themselves? That's an issue comes up in false advertising cases, in tort cases, in welfare issues, in tax policy, and generally throughout society, as soon as you decide there will be rule of law. Do we defend someone against malicious speech? Against the elements? Do we care if they could have diffused a situation with a kind word and instead chose to be belligerent and got punched in the nose? Do we feel differently if the nose hit belongs to a woman or a man or a child or a dog? A multimillionaire should be able to protect himself, but then, if it's inherited, he may have no nose for it. Or if he's only used to dealing with reputable companies, he may be hoodwinked.
> If Google violated a contract, take them to court. If not, then there is no room for complaint.
It doesn't work like that in the US. Here, we only go to court if the transaction costs associated with the trial, together with the risk of loss, do not exceed the expected benefit.
That calculus is thrown off by the fact that lawyers almost always estimate their chances as higher than they are. Note that I am including harm and benefit to reputation in "transaction costs."
> In china you can hire professional mourners for funerals
You can do that here too. I would totally be willing to mourn for $400/hr or so. And you could find people willing to do it for less.