I can understand the resistance to let go of of the easy who fucked who on the latest Big Brother mentality, but you people on here really should be smarter than this. So someone conducted a poll of random people about what they think of Snowden, and that is not a diversion to you? If it's not, you're a fucking idiot. Yeah, we should care what happens to him, but not at the expense of the actual issue he's uncovered.
In politics, when someone goes after the messenger instead of the message, that is a smear campaign - a diversion. Every fucking word in the media spent on him is a word not spent covering the actual scandal. Wake the fuck up.
Oh the irony, how she bites. You're just as much a part of the problem, you and your retarded post is one in a sea of redundant drivel flooding the internet. You're helping them obscure the issues of GOVERNMENT OPPRESSION in at least three different nations so far. So take the fucking buttplug out of your ass, and warm up that armchair warrior keyboard of yours and get to focusing on the real issue here. Bob.
Snowden is an attention whore, I've said so from the very get go of this thing. It's not what we think of him that is the big failure here, but that we even have a discussion of the opinion on him at all. Stop focusing on him or his' girlfriend's tits and start debating the issues he exposed. Oh, nobody cares about Snowdem? cry me a fucking river, how about we discuss the citizens of the nations that have been exposed as borderline police states?
Discussions pro/con Snowden have way too much room around here, and the internet in general, and who do you think pushed this agenda? Who would have a motive to focus the discussion on him rather than his proof. In cases like these, it really doesn't matter whether we talk good or bad about him, what matters is that we talk of him instead of the documents.
Don't get me wrong, we need to discuss Snowden too and keep an eye on how his saga ends, because that has the potential to be yet another Bradley Manning story, but we really, really need to keep focus on the actual issue. I'm willing to bet that even more nations will be exposes as hypocritical fucktwats soon, and sitting around yelling at each other about Snowden's dick size is going to hurt us all in the end.
Re:I love bricks and mortar bookstores, but...
on
The Price of Amazon
·
· Score: 1
their day is done, since they can't or won't compete with the Internet.
I suspect they can't unless their business model devolves into "sure, let me Amazon that for you", or start offering services that the digital retailers still aren't good at, like good advice or recommendations. The place where book stores have dropped the ball is their costumer service, and the one place where Amazon is still way behind. All Amazon can do is rely on generic algorithms to offer a "what others are also buying" kind of recommendation, and in no way a match for an actual human being's experience.
If book stores wish to survive, the shopping experience needs to resemble a specialty store more than a pop culture outlet, they need to be able to offer insightful advice. This is true of any physical retail store, you need to beat the digital retailers where they can't compete yet: recommendation algorithms and intelligence.
L. Sha, R. Rajkumar, and J. P. Lehoczky. Priority Inheritance Protocols: An Approach to Real-Time Synchronization. In IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 39, pp. 1175-1185, Sep. 1990.
Right now, facebook
wants me to save 15% on my vacation (no thanks),
also offers to save me 40% on my vacation (are you fucking deaf?),
has determined that i need a harness for falling protection (huh?),
thinks that I would probably like a pulled pork burger (yuck!),
and wants me to test my smarts on some trade school's website (something to do on my 40% off vacation?).
Targeted ads are a joke, and this from a company that probably has the best vantage point in the whole goddamn world to shove ads in my face.
Making and supporting a web site takes time and money.
Yes it does, and if you can't break even with it by asking for donations, you either accept that it's a hobby and you're not skilled enough to run it professionally, or your shove ads in people's faces. If we remove the latter option, I assert that the web will be a better place for it.
However, the main focus of the creator is the discrimination, that the information she is jumbling enables, like higher prices for certain groups of people. That we can sweep the legs from under advertisers too with her tool/game is just sweet, sweet payback for defacating in our beautiful playground.
but the basic layout is the same, so if you are an Englishman going to work in Germany, it won't be too hard to adapt.
That's not entirely true. The keyboard I use right now is a danish keyboard, with 3 extra letter keys that are local to danish. The problem is that the designers, back in the dark ages of computing, thought it wise to completely jumble the control combinations aswell (the onse to reach special characters, like slashes). This probably seemed quite smart at the time, but as a programmer I have to hit some weird combinations to achieve the same things my en-us counterparts can reach with a single key. The [ char for instance is located behind AltGr+7, lots of really common control characters in languages of the C family are two key combos for me.
There is no technical difference between public, public-private or private - only the implementation detail of how the money winds up in campaign donors' pockets.
Grats on your sob story, you may have a chance at winning Americas Next Top Model. Aside from completely missing the point AND restating your narrow minded racist world views, do you have anything to add?
For the love of all that is unholy, how the fuck did this go to +2 Insightful? France has a huge population of pretty much any ethnicity you can think of, thanks to aggressive emperialistic aspirations for hundreds of years (Hello, Vietnam war). You're gonna have to either start sharing those 'shrooms you've been gulping, or take it down a notch, you're gonna have a stroke.
Well, that was my point. You can't really tinker slightly with the current system and come out with a better one. Most democracies across the first world are, to some extent, rotten. I would have thought that readers of/. would be more open to a discussion about where to take democracy next, rather then jump up on the fence for a system that is clearly not working as intended.
In the time of Plato they also used show of hands for voting, and counted by eye - in a gathering of up to 6000 people. To be eligible for voting, you had to be present - a tall order in those days, and effectively shutting out anyone not living in Athens. Plato did not have the means nor the imagination to define democracy for thousands of years to come, and hitching your argument on his writings makes you part of the problem. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that the founding fathers knew of Plato's writings, and took them into account. The US constitution was a solution to 18th century problems in a colony, they were very much concerned with avoiding the dangers of their time.
Fast forward 200 years; what you have now is a tyranny of the minority, where money buys votes. You might think you have some say on how your country is run, on your behalf, but in reality a few thousand very rich people are calling the shots. The core of that problem is the representative model, because that means that money only has to be put into a few pockets in order to buy millions of votes. And as many replies below have pointed out, the republic does not protect against tyranny of the majority, the constitution does that.
That is why you would rely on a standard interface, like Bluetooth or USB, for connecting devices. Don't replicate what you think people want, give them a way to put what they actually want on the screen, job done!
The problem isn't as much voting either R or D, but that those are the only two choices. Both parties have a vested interest in making you believe that voting anything else is a wasted vote, since, by that logic, if you don't vote R, then D wins. This is only true if both R and D refuse to corporate with a hypothetical third party.
Instead of calling for voters and representatives to change how they operate within the system now, how about calling for a change in the system itself? It is a little bit depressing to see so many tech savvy people completely ignore that the system is built on logic 200 years old, patched up to meet the standards from 50 years ago. Democracy needs a reboot, representative democracy is a solution to a problem we no longer have: speed of communication. What if you could vote on any issue, at any time via an app? Why would you need a representative then?
That is a pretty extraordinary claim and I don't see any extraordinary evidence to back it up.
Well, I guess that the act of leaking is evidence enough that he was willing to forfeit his life, at the very least accept exile, it's not like Bradley Manning's fate is any kind of secret, nor Assange's.
When I first heard of this case, the media portrayed it as if the leak had already happened, and then Snowden outed himself, as in two distinct events. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but something smells fishy in all of this. Allegedly, Snowden is a very smart guy, but since the leaks he's made a series of very poor decisions. Even for an ordinary guy, that's unusual, and if we take into account that he has one of Wikileaks' lawyers with him, it makes it all the more fishy.
I think we're a little bit too eager to accept Snowden is who he, and the NSA, says he is - I can't quite put my finger on it, but something is off in this whole thing. Why would two, presumably smart people, make a series of outright stupid decisions? It doesn't make sense that he would choose to fly, and Moscow as a destination makes even less sense. He could have rented a car, a boat or a new pair of sneakers and be almost untraceable. Why choose to fly, and why to Moscow? And as I mentioned earlier, why out himself when there's no reason to? Even if he wanted to make the leaks more credible, he could have done so from a much safer haven than Hong Kong.
The documents Snowden leaked did not need a sender for them to be credible. He could have leaked the documents in a number of creative ways without giving away his identity, instead he opted for the "look at me, I'm important" approach. That is the act of "whoring for attention" I was talking about, not the leaking on its own.
And, while talking of being foolish, the guy is applying for asylum in something like 20 different countries, and the official statements all around are "if he's not on our soil, he's not our problem". Most of the countries he's applied to won't even consider his application. This bit of fact should not have come as a surprise to a defector, it's not like the cold war didn't produce ample precedent on the art of defecting. Had he done his homework properly, he would be sitting in a lawn chair on some Ecuadorian coke farm, smoking his pipe and reading the Guardian.
Snowden is in a shit pile of his own making, not for leaking documents (because I applaud anyone who shines a light onto secretive agencies) but for seeking the spotlight before he had a safe haven. Had he not stood up, we would have had a lot longer to focus on the documents without him as a distraction, because that is what he ultimately is. What this debate needs is for Assange and Snowden to shut the fuck up, so we can get back to focusing on the contents and not the scapegoats.
That being said, it's tough luck for Snowden, and I think any politician anywhere should take a long hard look at themselves when they reject his asylum request, because had Snowden been named Chiang, and been born in China, they'd be lining up from here to Rome (quite a distance) offering him asylum.
Snowden could have just as easily entered Ecuador, and then blown his whistle, instead of whoring for attention. Had he stayed anonymous after leaking, he could quite conceivably have had a few days of, mostly unrestricted, safe travel before his identity was found out. If he is even half as smart as everyone seems to think he is, why the fuck didn't he wait until he had safe ground beneath his feet?
To deem him not a whistleblower seems like a rather harsh interpretation of the term. He is exposing, what he believes to be, unlawful practises, that seems to me to be exactly what a whistleblower does.
Many on/. seem to be overlooking that the ball is still rolling on this, the US government is not just collecting data on american citizens, but actively carrying out espionage missions against allies. Nobody around here (Europe) gives two flying fucks about Snowden or his fate, nor the laws NSA allegedly follows. The media here is much more concerned with the bugging of EU offices. The pictures most prominent on TVs across Europe is Obama trying to explain that little turd, all the while coming off as a complete idiot trying to explain 1+1 to a 4 year old, it really is not very pretty. And in case you havn't been paying attention the last couple of decades, what the media cares about, John Doe general public cares about.
The statement, that the ire of the world would turn to Russia if they granted Asylum to Snowden, smells very much like a "everybody probably thinks like me" fallacy, it's a projection based on the assumption that the rest of the world are americans.
Everyone's ire is directed at the US, and it will stay that way regardless of which country, if any, eventually grants him asylum. Ultimately, Snowden's fate is completely irrelevant to the rest of the World, it will only affect the potential whistleblowers who come after him. Setting an example with his case is strictly an internal US affair.
Slashdot Mirror
I can understand the resistance to let go of of the easy who fucked who on the latest Big Brother mentality, but you people on here really should be smarter than this. So someone conducted a poll of random people about what they think of Snowden, and that is not a diversion to you? If it's not, you're a fucking idiot. Yeah, we should care what happens to him, but not at the expense of the actual issue he's uncovered.
In politics, when someone goes after the messenger instead of the message, that is a smear campaign - a diversion. Every fucking word in the media spent on him is a word not spent covering the actual scandal. Wake the fuck up.
Snowden this, Snowden that. Who gives a fuck? It's not his person that is of interest in all this, it is the fucking spy scandal.
Oh the irony, how she bites. You're just as much a part of the problem, you and your retarded post is one in a sea of redundant drivel flooding the internet. You're helping them obscure the issues of GOVERNMENT OPPRESSION in at least three different nations so far. So take the fucking buttplug out of your ass, and warm up that armchair warrior keyboard of yours and get to focusing on the real issue here. Bob.
Snowden is an attention whore, I've said so from the very get go of this thing. It's not what we think of him that is the big failure here, but that we even have a discussion of the opinion on him at all. Stop focusing on him or his' girlfriend's tits and start debating the issues he exposed. Oh, nobody cares about Snowdem? cry me a fucking river, how about we discuss the citizens of the nations that have been exposed as borderline police states?
Discussions pro/con Snowden have way too much room around here, and the internet in general, and who do you think pushed this agenda? Who would have a motive to focus the discussion on him rather than his proof. In cases like these, it really doesn't matter whether we talk good or bad about him, what matters is that we talk of him instead of the documents.
Don't get me wrong, we need to discuss Snowden too and keep an eye on how his saga ends, because that has the potential to be yet another Bradley Manning story, but we really, really need to keep focus on the actual issue. I'm willing to bet that even more nations will be exposes as hypocritical fucktwats soon, and sitting around yelling at each other about Snowden's dick size is going to hurt us all in the end.
their day is done, since they can't or won't compete with the Internet.
I suspect they can't unless their business model devolves into "sure, let me Amazon that for you", or start offering services that the digital retailers still aren't good at, like good advice or recommendations. The place where book stores have dropped the ball is their costumer service, and the one place where Amazon is still way behind. All Amazon can do is rely on generic algorithms to offer a "what others are also buying" kind of recommendation, and in no way a match for an actual human being's experience.
If book stores wish to survive, the shopping experience needs to resemble a specialty store more than a pop culture outlet, they need to be able to offer insightful advice. This is true of any physical retail store, you need to beat the digital retailers where they can't compete yet: recommendation algorithms and intelligence.
Reading TFA to the rescue:
L. Sha, R. Rajkumar, and J. P. Lehoczky. Priority Inheritance Protocols: An Approach to Real-Time Synchronization. In IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 39, pp. 1175-1185, Sep. 1990.
Right now, facebook
wants me to save 15% on my vacation (no thanks),
also offers to save me 40% on my vacation (are you fucking deaf?),
has determined that i need a harness for falling protection (huh?),
thinks that I would probably like a pulled pork burger (yuck!),
and wants me to test my smarts on some trade school's website (something to do on my 40% off vacation?).
Targeted ads are a joke, and this from a company that probably has the best vantage point in the whole goddamn world to shove ads in my face.
Making and supporting a web site takes time and money.
Yes it does, and if you can't break even with it by asking for donations, you either accept that it's a hobby and you're not skilled enough to run it professionally, or your shove ads in people's faces. If we remove the latter option, I assert that the web will be a better place for it.
However, the main focus of the creator is the discrimination, that the information she is jumbling enables, like higher prices for certain groups of people. That we can sweep the legs from under advertisers too with her tool/game is just sweet, sweet payback for defacating in our beautiful playground.
+1 for using the word slut in a sentence, we don't see enough of that here.
+1 for being factually correct, sorta.
but the basic layout is the same, so if you are an Englishman going to work in Germany, it won't be too hard to adapt.
That's not entirely true. The keyboard I use right now is a danish keyboard, with 3 extra letter keys that are local to danish. The problem is that the designers, back in the dark ages of computing, thought it wise to completely jumble the control combinations aswell (the onse to reach special characters, like slashes). This probably seemed quite smart at the time, but as a programmer I have to hit some weird combinations to achieve the same things my en-us counterparts can reach with a single key. The [ char for instance is located behind AltGr+7, lots of really common control characters in languages of the C family are two key combos for me.
There is no technical difference between public, public-private or private - only the implementation detail of how the money winds up in campaign donors' pockets.
My great grandparents were mistreated themselves
Grats on your sob story, you may have a chance at winning Americas Next Top Model. Aside from completely missing the point AND restating your narrow minded racist world views, do you have anything to add?
For the love of all that is unholy, how the fuck did this go to +2 Insightful? France has a huge population of pretty much any ethnicity you can think of, thanks to aggressive emperialistic aspirations for hundreds of years (Hello, Vietnam war). You're gonna have to either start sharing those 'shrooms you've been gulping, or take it down a notch, you're gonna have a stroke.
109:24 Thou shalst forevermore post religious drivel on tech sites, so says I, YOUR LORD
Well, that was my point. You can't really tinker slightly with the current system and come out with a better one. Most democracies across the first world are, to some extent, rotten. I would have thought that readers of /. would be more open to a discussion about where to take democracy next, rather then jump up on the fence for a system that is clearly not working as intended.
In the time of Plato they also used show of hands for voting, and counted by eye - in a gathering of up to 6000 people. To be eligible for voting, you had to be present - a tall order in those days, and effectively shutting out anyone not living in Athens. Plato did not have the means nor the imagination to define democracy for thousands of years to come, and hitching your argument on his writings makes you part of the problem. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that the founding fathers knew of Plato's writings, and took them into account. The US constitution was a solution to 18th century problems in a colony, they were very much concerned with avoiding the dangers of their time.
Fast forward 200 years; what you have now is a tyranny of the minority, where money buys votes. You might think you have some say on how your country is run, on your behalf, but in reality a few thousand very rich people are calling the shots. The core of that problem is the representative model, because that means that money only has to be put into a few pockets in order to buy millions of votes. And as many replies below have pointed out, the republic does not protect against tyranny of the majority, the constitution does that.
That is why you would rely on a standard interface, like Bluetooth or USB, for connecting devices. Don't replicate what you think people want, give them a way to put what they actually want on the screen, job done!
The problem isn't as much voting either R or D, but that those are the only two choices. Both parties have a vested interest in making you believe that voting anything else is a wasted vote, since, by that logic, if you don't vote R, then D wins. This is only true if both R and D refuse to corporate with a hypothetical third party.
Instead of calling for voters and representatives to change how they operate within the system now, how about calling for a change in the system itself? It is a little bit depressing to see so many tech savvy people completely ignore that the system is built on logic 200 years old, patched up to meet the standards from 50 years ago. Democracy needs a reboot, representative democracy is a solution to a problem we no longer have: speed of communication. What if you could vote on any issue, at any time via an app? Why would you need a representative then?
Awww precious, did you get modded down spouting your favorite misconception again? That's so unfair.
That is a pretty extraordinary claim and I don't see any extraordinary evidence to back it up.
Well, I guess that the act of leaking is evidence enough that he was willing to forfeit his life, at the very least accept exile, it's not like Bradley Manning's fate is any kind of secret, nor Assange's.
When I first heard of this case, the media portrayed it as if the leak had already happened, and then Snowden outed himself, as in two distinct events. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but something smells fishy in all of this. Allegedly, Snowden is a very smart guy, but since the leaks he's made a series of very poor decisions. Even for an ordinary guy, that's unusual, and if we take into account that he has one of Wikileaks' lawyers with him, it makes it all the more fishy.
I think we're a little bit too eager to accept Snowden is who he, and the NSA, says he is - I can't quite put my finger on it, but something is off in this whole thing. Why would two, presumably smart people, make a series of outright stupid decisions? It doesn't make sense that he would choose to fly, and Moscow as a destination makes even less sense. He could have rented a car, a boat or a new pair of sneakers and be almost untraceable. Why choose to fly, and why to Moscow? And as I mentioned earlier, why out himself when there's no reason to? Even if he wanted to make the leaks more credible, he could have done so from a much safer haven than Hong Kong.
The documents Snowden leaked did not need a sender for them to be credible. He could have leaked the documents in a number of creative ways without giving away his identity, instead he opted for the "look at me, I'm important" approach. That is the act of "whoring for attention" I was talking about, not the leaking on its own.
And, while talking of being foolish, the guy is applying for asylum in something like 20 different countries, and the official statements all around are "if he's not on our soil, he's not our problem". Most of the countries he's applied to won't even consider his application. This bit of fact should not have come as a surprise to a defector, it's not like the cold war didn't produce ample precedent on the art of defecting. Had he done his homework properly, he would be sitting in a lawn chair on some Ecuadorian coke farm, smoking his pipe and reading the Guardian.
Snowden is in a shit pile of his own making, not for leaking documents (because I applaud anyone who shines a light onto secretive agencies) but for seeking the spotlight before he had a safe haven. Had he not stood up, we would have had a lot longer to focus on the documents without him as a distraction, because that is what he ultimately is. What this debate needs is for Assange and Snowden to shut the fuck up, so we can get back to focusing on the contents and not the scapegoats.
That being said, it's tough luck for Snowden, and I think any politician anywhere should take a long hard look at themselves when they reject his asylum request, because had Snowden been named Chiang, and been born in China, they'd be lining up from here to Rome (quite a distance) offering him asylum.
Snowden could have just as easily entered Ecuador, and then blown his whistle, instead of whoring for attention. Had he stayed anonymous after leaking, he could quite conceivably have had a few days of, mostly unrestricted, safe travel before his identity was found out. If he is even half as smart as everyone seems to think he is, why the fuck didn't he wait until he had safe ground beneath his feet?
To deem him not a whistleblower seems like a rather harsh interpretation of the term. He is exposing, what he believes to be, unlawful practises, that seems to me to be exactly what a whistleblower does.
Many on /. seem to be overlooking that the ball is still rolling on this, the US government is not just collecting data on american citizens, but actively carrying out espionage missions against allies. Nobody around here (Europe) gives two flying fucks about Snowden or his fate, nor the laws NSA allegedly follows. The media here is much more concerned with the bugging of EU offices. The pictures most prominent on TVs across Europe is Obama trying to explain that little turd, all the while coming off as a complete idiot trying to explain 1+1 to a 4 year old, it really is not very pretty. And in case you havn't been paying attention the last couple of decades, what the media cares about, John Doe general public cares about.
The statement, that the ire of the world would turn to Russia if they granted Asylum to Snowden, smells very much like a "everybody probably thinks like me" fallacy, it's a projection based on the assumption that the rest of the world are americans.
Everyone's ire is directed at the US, and it will stay that way regardless of which country, if any, eventually grants him asylum. Ultimately, Snowden's fate is completely irrelevant to the rest of the World, it will only affect the potential whistleblowers who come after him. Setting an example with his case is strictly an internal US affair.