(What is this article of which you speak? I barely skimmed the summary.)
It seems to me that just about any web page I visit can (given the right software vulnerabilities) snoop on my computer's microphone. So that seems like a much larger vulnerability than the ground potential. Maybe for some people in more public places it might be different.
This makes me re-think the push toward quiet, fanless computers. Now I am thinking that I want a white[/some other color] noise generator to add privacy to my personal computing.
Well, OK, but actually it turns out that computers are really well suited to finding "good enough" solutions to NP-Complete problems such as traveling salesman and real world equivalents like optimized circuit printing. So to my mind you still haven't described a situation where crowdsourcing with wetware can improve on a targeted silicon approach.
I actually clicked the link and read the brief writeup. Too lazy to go further, and hoping somebody can tell me this:
How can you make a game out of this? It seems to me that the game can tell when the user wins/loses, then there's no reason to create the game at all -- just make the win/lose logic do the error checking directly. So what's the point of the game?
Or is it the case that their games are not able to tell you when you win or lose, and the player has to determine that himself or herself? That would make sense to me, but seems like it would be really hard to make "fun" for the masses.
Making immoral actions legal is not an ability a majority in America has.
That obviously depends on whom you ask. Many people consider the right to life debate the most important civil rights issue today -- in some places it's legal to kill late term babies.
Even if you disagree on the abortion issue, I suspect that you can see that "constitutional" doesn't equate with "moral" if you look at where we've been in America with slavery and so forth.
Observe the Goddess of Funny Jokes command 'er keen sense of humor in a direction far away from this terrible thread, and meditate with rage on how to be avenged on these blasphemous slashdotters.
I also find it delightfully ironic that you don't consider it "censorship" for the government to order the NYT to stop publishing political editorials written by their staff. Really, that's more than ironic, it's positively Orwellian.
So you are actually in favor of censoring newspapers from publishing editorial sections written by their own staff on political subjects. Fascinating. Well, at least you're consistent on this.
I think I'm done here, if you are. And I agree with what you said earlier that this is a pipe dream for you that will never happen. (For one thing, I guarantee you that the NYT would publish an absolutely scathing series of political editorials if their political editorials were ever threatened with being censored by a new law.)
One last question for you -- should the New York Times company (which is a business and not a single individual) endorse presidential candidates, or engage in political editorial writing? The NYT has been active in promoting political views for hundreds of years. You think they should stop?
Why shouldn't it apply? Why should one person (the talented graphic designer) have a bigger voice than another person (random Joe from a bar)? It's your logic, not mine. You said that it's unfair for one person to have a greater voice than another, and the fair thing to do is chop down the bigger person to be the same size as the smaller person.
You want to make business owners the scapegoat, but your logic as you stated it can be applied wider than that. If the government can censor business owners from using their property as they please for political speech, then it can go after somebody else next. The First Amendment, man!!!!
OK, it sounds like we agree. We should always, 100%, allow people freedom of speech to express political views. But we should never let businesses express political views without the involvement of people, that is without involvement of human beings. As long as a human being is doing the speaking or writing, though, then it will be OK. Or if a person is speaking on behalf of another person, that will be OK, too. Fair enough? "No robots allowed to speak on political issues!" Let's get some cardboard and crayons and we'll march with some signs. I for one do not welcome our new political-meddling robotic overlords.
You may think I'm being trivial and avoiding the point, but actually it really is this simple. Here's an example to test your views on: Newspapers are profit-making companies, and their editorial pages have been endorsing candidates and embracing or opposing political causes for hundreds of years. Do you really think newspapers shouldn't be allowed to express political views? Don't you see that by stopping the company (let's say the New York Times) from political speech, you are actually stopping multiple persons (the editors and owners of the NYT for example) from engaging in political speech? Who cares if they do it as the voice of their company or not? That's nobody's business but the owners of the company.
Taking away rich people's money has well established precedent today, but taking away their freedom of speech has (thankfully) not gotten a firm foothold in our legal system.
There is not real way to amplify the little people. I want to de-amplify the large. Then they wont drown out others.
1. A mute person and a person with a healthy voice both (legally speaking) have equal freedom of speech, until you tell the healthy person to stop talking so you can "level the playing field" with the mute person.
2. A highly skilled graphic designer can create political visualizations that get virally forwarded around the internet and significantly advance a political cause in comparison to doofuses like myself that just argue on Slashdot for a political cause and largely go unnoticed. I should petition the government to shut down political graphic designers from doing their thing. We need to "level the playing field" so I can have an equal voice with those graphic designers.
3. A gifted writer or orator can motivate crowds to follow a particular political cause. We need to "level the playing field" so random Joe's in the bar have equal weight for their ideas. So the government should clamp down on speakers/writers perceived to be highly gifted in that way.
Do you see what I'm saying? You want to make things more fair and "level the playing field", but all it amounts to is that the "have-nots" are jealous of the "haves" and want the government to take things away from them, including in this case freedom of speech. My point is that freedom of speech means the government NEVER tells people to stop talking. Some people are richer, some people are more talented, some people have natural charisma that people follow. It is unwise (and unconstitutional under the First Amendment) to try to solve that problem by chopping the big people down.
"Here, you're an expert, so fix our website. By the way, you can't make any decisions."
I think there are too many layers of dysfunctional bureaucracy. It doesn't really matter how good the designated website fixer is if they don't have the power to actually make stuff work.
If you're telling any person that some of the political speech they want to engage in is illegal, then that is censorship. I suggest you embrace the term and not try to call it by another name. My business belongs to me.
Shouldn't it be about what is good for the country, what is right, rather than who had funding?
The problem is that you're not propping people up, but rather cutting people down. You're not amplifying the little people, but censoring the big people. We can't know who will ultimately be the voice proposing what's good for the country, whether that will come from a business (e.g. your SOPA example). We can't know whether the people at large will propose good ideas (frequently democratic majorities oppress minorities in nasty ways). But one thing the law needs to stay very clear on, and that is never censoring people from engaging in political speech however the heck they want to engage in it.
No, democracy depends on everybody having the same freedoms as everybody else, including unrestrained freedom of speech. Somebody who is a gifted communicator or a clever graphic designer may have a greater voice than others in a sense, because they can craft a really compelling statement of their opinions and convince a bunch of people of their view. Whereas nobody cares what Joe Blow in the bar has to say, because he's a flunkie. Should the government take steps to reduce the voice of the gifted communicator or the graphic designer? No. It doesn't hurt Joe Blow that others are better communicators than he is. He has less of a voice because he just happens to. The government isn't censoring him just because somebody else is better at communicating.
If you agree with the above, then you've already conceded the argument, whether you know it or not. You just have to make the jump to realizing that somebody with more money has more power of communication than a poor person. While that may not seem fair, having the government censor rich/gifted people is the wrong place to try and equalize it.
As far as your point about convincing the general public, I strongly agree. We need strong laws in place against bribery of public representatives. However, you may be unaware that this debate is not restricted to political donations, but also inclues questions like whether a company can publish a political documentary, or whether the government should censor that. Such censorship of political speech is absolutely intolerable in my view under the First Amendment.
Let's make this personal. I am an independent software developer and publisher. What I'm describing here is true; this is not a drill.:) I use the resources of my business to engage in free speech activities of a political nature. For example, I contact my local representative to complain about our screwed up patent laws, or about copyright or privacy issues. My business belongs to me. My telephone belongs to me. I pay for the internet service so I can send emails. I send emails from my business address
Are you saying that I should have to go home and use my non-business resources to contact my representative? You want me to spend my home money, not my business money on that? If so, then why? What's the difference? Both belong to me, and I should get to make the decision about where and when I spend my own money to whine to my representatives in Washington, DC. To my view, if I go to jail for using my company address to write to my representative, then the government is censoring my freedom of speech. If I can't put up an anti-patent-troll message on my website, then the government is censoring my freedom of speech.
Freedom of political speech is really fundamental. You don't censor it, ever. (At least, I can't think of when it would be justified.)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think there should be a comma after the "5" in your post.
She opened the gift before Christmas. What's up with that?
Moving back to fan computers won't help so you can keep your ultra quiet fans. Read The Fine Article:
*sigh* ... yes, I was aware of that. That was why in the next sentence I suggested adding a random/colored noise generator.
(What is this article of which you speak? I barely skimmed the summary.)
It seems to me that just about any web page I visit can (given the right software vulnerabilities) snoop on my computer's microphone. So that seems like a much larger vulnerability than the ground potential. Maybe for some people in more public places it might be different.
It's more awesome than that. The white noise generated by the fan doesn't matter at all.
Right, I mentioned the fan as one source of noise to act as a countermeasure (not a good one, of course, since you want something random).
This makes me re-think the push toward quiet, fanless computers. Now I am thinking that I want a white[/some other color] noise generator to add privacy to my personal computing.
Well, OK, but actually it turns out that computers are really well suited to finding "good enough" solutions to NP-Complete problems such as traveling salesman and real world equivalents like optimized circuit printing. So to my mind you still haven't described a situation where crowdsourcing with wetware can improve on a targeted silicon approach.
I actually clicked the link and read the brief writeup. Too lazy to go further, and hoping somebody can tell me this:
How can you make a game out of this? It seems to me that the game can tell when the user wins/loses, then there's no reason to create the game at all -- just make the win/lose logic do the error checking directly. So what's the point of the game?
Or is it the case that their games are not able to tell you when you win or lose, and the player has to determine that himself or herself? That would make sense to me, but seems like it would be really hard to make "fun" for the masses.
Making immoral actions legal is not an ability a majority in America has.
That obviously depends on whom you ask. Many people consider the right to life debate the most important civil rights issue today -- in some places it's legal to kill late term babies.
Even if you disagree on the abortion issue, I suspect that you can see that "constitutional" doesn't equate with "moral" if you look at where we've been in America with slavery and so forth.
Ach! You lice riffed on this long enough. Please stop now.
That's a truism. But on the other hand, they're not some kind of beneficence cult. All true "ism"s would attach other kinds of baggage to the favors.
Yes and no. Civilized people disobey grossly immoral laws. I suppose that Ayn Randians consider tax laws grossly immoral. :p
Observe the Goddess of Funny Jokes command 'er keen sense of humor in a direction far away from this terrible thread, and meditate with rage on how to be avenged on these blasphemous slashdotters.
Enjoyed the exchange, Duhavid. Cheers.
I also find it delightfully ironic that you don't consider it "censorship" for the government to order the NYT to stop publishing political editorials written by their staff. Really, that's more than ironic, it's positively Orwellian.
So you are actually in favor of censoring newspapers from publishing editorial sections written by their own staff on political subjects. Fascinating. Well, at least you're consistent on this.
I think I'm done here, if you are. And I agree with what you said earlier that this is a pipe dream for you that will never happen. (For one thing, I guarantee you that the NYT would publish an absolutely scathing series of political editorials if their political editorials were ever threatened with being censored by a new law.)
One last question for you -- should the New York Times company (which is a business and not a single individual) endorse presidential candidates, or engage in political editorial writing? The NYT has been active in promoting political views for hundreds of years. You think they should stop?
Why shouldn't it apply? Why should one person (the talented graphic designer) have a bigger voice than another person (random Joe from a bar)? It's your logic, not mine. You said that it's unfair for one person to have a greater voice than another, and the fair thing to do is chop down the bigger person to be the same size as the smaller person.
You want to make business owners the scapegoat, but your logic as you stated it can be applied wider than that. If the government can censor business owners from using their property as they please for political speech, then it can go after somebody else next. The First Amendment, man!!!!
OK, it sounds like we agree. We should always, 100%, allow people freedom of speech to express political views. But we should never let businesses express political views without the involvement of people, that is without involvement of human beings. As long as a human being is doing the speaking or writing, though, then it will be OK. Or if a person is speaking on behalf of another person, that will be OK, too. Fair enough? "No robots allowed to speak on political issues!" Let's get some cardboard and crayons and we'll march with some signs. I for one do not welcome our new political-meddling robotic overlords.
You may think I'm being trivial and avoiding the point, but actually it really is this simple. Here's an example to test your views on: Newspapers are profit-making companies, and their editorial pages have been endorsing candidates and embracing or opposing political causes for hundreds of years. Do you really think newspapers shouldn't be allowed to express political views? Don't you see that by stopping the company (let's say the New York Times) from political speech, you are actually stopping multiple persons (the editors and owners of the NYT for example) from engaging in political speech? Who cares if they do it as the voice of their company or not? That's nobody's business but the owners of the company.
Taking away rich people's money has well established precedent today, but taking away their freedom of speech has (thankfully) not gotten a firm foothold in our legal system.
There is not real way to amplify the little people. I want to de-amplify the large. Then they wont drown out others.
1. A mute person and a person with a healthy voice both (legally speaking) have equal freedom of speech, until you tell the healthy person to stop talking so you can "level the playing field" with the mute person.
2. A highly skilled graphic designer can create political visualizations that get virally forwarded around the internet and significantly advance a political cause in comparison to doofuses like myself that just argue on Slashdot for a political cause and largely go unnoticed. I should petition the government to shut down political graphic designers from doing their thing. We need to "level the playing field" so I can have an equal voice with those graphic designers.
3. A gifted writer or orator can motivate crowds to follow a particular political cause. We need to "level the playing field" so random Joe's in the bar have equal weight for their ideas. So the government should clamp down on speakers/writers perceived to be highly gifted in that way.
Do you see what I'm saying? You want to make things more fair and "level the playing field", but all it amounts to is that the "have-nots" are jealous of the "haves" and want the government to take things away from them, including in this case freedom of speech. My point is that freedom of speech means the government NEVER tells people to stop talking. Some people are richer, some people are more talented, some people have natural charisma that people follow. It is unwise (and unconstitutional under the First Amendment) to try to solve that problem by chopping the big people down.
"Here, you're an expert, so fix our website. By the way, you can't make any decisions."
I think there are too many layers of dysfunctional bureaucracy. It doesn't really matter how good the designated website fixer is if they don't have the power to actually make stuff work.
Shouldn't it be about what is good for the country, what is right, rather than who had funding?
The problem is that you're not propping people up, but rather cutting people down. You're not amplifying the little people, but censoring the big people. We can't know who will ultimately be the voice proposing what's good for the country, whether that will come from a business (e.g. your SOPA example). We can't know whether the people at large will propose good ideas (frequently democratic majorities oppress minorities in nasty ways). But one thing the law needs to stay very clear on, and that is never censoring people from engaging in political speech however the heck they want to engage in it.
No, democracy depends on everybody having the same freedoms as everybody else, including unrestrained freedom of speech. Somebody who is a gifted communicator or a clever graphic designer may have a greater voice than others in a sense, because they can craft a really compelling statement of their opinions and convince a bunch of people of their view. Whereas nobody cares what Joe Blow in the bar has to say, because he's a flunkie. Should the government take steps to reduce the voice of the gifted communicator or the graphic designer? No. It doesn't hurt Joe Blow that others are better communicators than he is. He has less of a voice because he just happens to. The government isn't censoring him just because somebody else is better at communicating.
If you agree with the above, then you've already conceded the argument, whether you know it or not. You just have to make the jump to realizing that somebody with more money has more power of communication than a poor person. While that may not seem fair, having the government censor rich/gifted people is the wrong place to try and equalize it.
As far as your point about convincing the general public, I strongly agree. We need strong laws in place against bribery of public representatives. However, you may be unaware that this debate is not restricted to political donations, but also inclues questions like whether a company can publish a political documentary, or whether the government should censor that. Such censorship of political speech is absolutely intolerable in my view under the First Amendment.
Let's make this personal. I am an independent software developer and publisher. What I'm describing here is true; this is not a drill. :) I use the resources of my business to engage in free speech activities of a political nature. For example, I contact my local representative to complain about our screwed up patent laws, or about copyright or privacy issues. My business belongs to me. My telephone belongs to me. I pay for the internet service so I can send emails. I send emails from my business address
Are you saying that I should have to go home and use my non-business resources to contact my representative? You want me to spend my home money, not my business money on that? If so, then why? What's the difference? Both belong to me, and I should get to make the decision about where and when I spend my own money to whine to my representatives in Washington, DC. To my view, if I go to jail for using my company address to write to my representative, then the government is censoring my freedom of speech. If I can't put up an anti-patent-troll message on my website, then the government is censoring my freedom of speech.
Freedom of political speech is really fundamental. You don't censor it, ever. (At least, I can't think of when it would be justified.)