" it allows them to vent their issues and opinions. "
You say "allow" I say "empower." Same concept.
I'm under no illusion that we can fix society, because it's full of fucked up people who are essentially raised to be mean, bigoted assholes by their parents (who are generally mean, bigoted assholes).
Allowing the borderline assholes to explore these tendencies and gain confidence in their ability to emotionally torture others will not fix them. Allowing full-on assholes to do the same is no better.
"Anonymity actually empowers society to see the underlying issues within when they are small and addressable" I would disagree. Society is not a user interface on a computer database; not even close. And simply showing that there are assholes among us is no closer to a solution. We know they're there. All this does is reinforce their belief that being an asshole is perfectly acceptable, because there are no consequences for doing so.
If you went to class every day and called your professor an ugly cunt that should be beaten every day, how would that affect your relationship with that professor? If you said your professor was a dick and should have someone sodomize him with a baseball bat during the Q&A portion of a lecture, would that help or hurt your grade in the class? What if you could do it anonymously? Which of those two cases would produce a better societal outcome for you, personally? Which one would produce a better outcome for the class as a whole?
The anonymous platform does not benefit society in these cases, only the speaker. Most of Yik Yak is innocuous. The subset we're talking about is, imho, abusive.
In general, yes - as I stated in the first five words of my post.
To the topic of discussion, though, Yik Yak is not a platform for whistleblowers. And there are far more borderline assholes who are unleashed on Yik Yak than there are whistleblowers who would change the world or amend great wrongs with a platform like Yik Yak.
Not that Yik Yak is bad, or should necessarily be eliminated - but the right to unlimited assholeness is not guaranteed when it targets someone. Your freedom to yell "gang bang" does not exist any more than yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.
Quoting a politician when discussing science is usually a bad idea, no matter which side it is. Then again, listening to zealots (again, on both sides) instead of scientists is just as bad.
"The law approved by the senate on 12 June [2012] banned scientists in state agencies from using exponential extrapolation to predict sea-level rise, requiring instead that they stick to linear projections based on historical data."
No need to limit talking in NC, they just pass legislation which limits sea rise. Science through legislation. Done and done.
Not in general mind you, but most people who have their name/reputation tied to what they say to others are rarely* inflammatory, belligerent, or insulting because it has social consequences for the speaker. But anonymous speech, where it has no consequences for you and only consequences for a target, is specifically the case where people become assholes.
Now, they may have been assholes all their lives, but anonymous services empower them. Are you really in favor of empowering assholes?
*since many on/. seem so to be pissed all the time, I mean "rarely" in the sense of the number of mean spirited comments compared to all comments made in the world, not the number of mean spirited comments *you* come up with among your friends or when you're pissed at someone/something.
"We have to pass it and THEN find out what's in it."
How stupid a sheeple do you have to be to be to believe that drivel? Every single word was written in plain English in a bill that had been largely published for years, and then amended with language which *by law* is read aloud to the congressmen (they don't even have to know how to read) as long as they are actually at their workplace during business hours and don't decline the reading. Every. Single. Word.
You are a fucking moron for believing what you hear from the people who decided - 10 years after they drafted the bullet points of this plan themselves - they didn't like it.
Each agency has a set of rules and procedures for releasing information. Just because one group allow the release doesn't mean a different one - with a different mission - has the same rules.
Think of it as a set of NDAs. Your CFO may have given proprietary information to investors, but that doesn't mean you can talk about it at the cocktail party after work. Not even to said investors.
The Department of Motor Vehicles will still exist. You still need to register and insure your vehicle. The "highway patrol" will still exist for non-autonomous vehicles, and will be serviced by the same law enforcement officers who chase bad guys and eat donuts. Accidents will still occur as no system is perfect. Proving who you are will still matter for a wide variety of non-social control scenarios, mostly involving payments, promises, and other contracts.
As there are more autonomous cars, there will be fewer "accidents" and fewer human drivers capable of operating a manual vehicle. How many people today can effectively ride a horse or turn a plow compared to 200 years ago, and is that a bad thing?
Self driving, by your definition, already exists to a limited extent. Aircraft autopilot is little more than cruise control with lane observance which has already been implemented. Automatic lane maintenance, speed control, automatic braking, and even automatic parking are already in use. Fully autonomous is really limited by interactions with normally human-readable controls - traffic control lights, signage and the like. Avoidance of stationary and moving objects is mostly solved with sensors that are far more accurate and responsive than humans.
There are, indeed, many "interesting" conditions where human interaction is far easier to implement than software evaluation, but the number of cases in which it is necessary is dropping rapidly. Your scenario of a remote operator for OTR transport probably is the next step for a lot of traditional deliveries (and odd conditions), though I would anticipate large vendors (WalMart comes to mind, as well as cooperation between Amazon and UPS/FedEx shipping hubs) as building in additional site features which allow fully autonomous warehouse entry and docking functions.
Have you never heard of faulty brakes, faulty accelerators, faulty [insert car part here] which have resulted in human deaths, and both human and property injuries?
Those things don't change with a driverless car. Liability still exists. And just as an "accidental" fatal impact with a human by a human driver becomes primarily a financial burden (usu. involuntary manslaughter, suspended or limited sentence for otherwise "good" person), the financial implications to a automotive manufacturer are significant.
When a driver hits someone, the car is reviewed in excruciating detail to determine if any failure of the automotive systems caused or contributed to an accident. The driver is also scrutinized. The victim is also scrutinized and if they have a car their car is evaluated for faults. A driverless car removes the ambiguity of the driver from the fault path.
Plus, as the sibling poster points out, the systems in a driverless car are going to be engineered with additional fail-safe mechanisms which reduce the overall performance/utility in favor of safety in the case you posit.
I like driving too, but I only get to drive for pleasure a handful of times during the year. I often have to sit for extended periods - sometime stretching to hours - unable to do anything else productive (or entertaining) while travelling between destinations.
To be honest, I don't own a car which is a pleasure to drive. I own a minivan for transportation of equipment and people, and a truck for hauling things and for when my van breaks down. If could drop in a self-driving option in the van, I'd do it yesterday - there is no pleasure in that vehicle. Maybe I could even get more work done while on the road and make enough to buy a car I could drive for pleasure.
Sure. It will work similarly to the way it does today. In order to have a valid vehicle registration you will need to provide proof of insurance on the car. In the event of a collision or other incident which causes damage, law enforecement will record information about the incident, lawyers will argue fault, and a judge will determine the outcome. In the case of an autonomous incident, the carmaker will almost certainly be listed as a defendant, and will have a staff lawyer as part of the defense team. Or, as more likely happens, the lawyers for the insurance companies will get together and decide the outcome out of court.
Car makers already have insurance for legal problems (and/or are self-insured). Every manufacturer does. It's part of the modern landscape.
"And then what? Go on welfare? Be homeless? Beg on the street?"
At some point in your life you should learn not to be an asshole. If you made it to college without learning that shitting on other people is wrong, maybe a couple years of having someone else shit on you is a good place to start.
You are already guaranteed a right to a fair trial. It's not something that the AG can "add to" or deny. Compare a trial in the US to a trial in, say, North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, or the territories controlled by ISIS/ISIL. Even some of the most egregious examples of non-impartial trials in the US seem fair in comparison to treatment of suspected anti-government persons in those states.
The problem is that Snowden's version of "Fair" and the general standard of "Fair" in the US are still probably fairly widely separated. He would probably like whistleblower status for everything, ignoring the parts of classified documents he released which were sensitive but not necessary to indicate the underlying problems he wanted to expose. He would probably like the damage he did to the US relationship with its allies to be inadmissible, along with the potential tactical advantage gained by other states as a result of the massive, unfiltered release of classified US intelligence documents.
I think he should really spend his effort working on his Russian and praying that Putin never grown tired of him.
What part of "releasing classified documents" doesn't he understand? It's pretty obvious he violated US law. Fair and impartial won't change that outcome.
You may argue that the law is bad, or that the purpose of his actions was noble. That same may be said of killing [insert bad guy]. It doesn't make the murder legal, it may only lessen the sentence. I'm not sure when facing the death penalty, that life without parole in a federal penitentiary is going to be that much more appealing if your goal is to live out your life in the United States without constantly being under the thumb of the government.
Wait...TWO icons in one? How the fuck are users going to parse that? A picture and a gear - does that mean it automatically opens the file? A picture and a hamburger? A picture and a small bird? A document and two lines with a dot between them?
Users will screw things up no matter how you do it because there is no common language for executable, text file, picture, slide, pdf, rich text, etc. And with the propensity for UI designers to change the look of icons just to be "new and hip" with every other OS release (ex: settings icons), the users will never "catch up" before accidentally "executing" what they think is a picture file.
Segregated emails annoying? Are you kidding me? I go out of my way to keep personal and business emails separate, to the point of having a stock"bounce" email I send to people who accidentally send to the wrong email address. Same with phone numbers - one personal, one business.
She's either lazy or evil. Given it's Hillary, I'm going to split the difference and call it both. Too lazy to have two emails, just evil enough to know that if she says something awful she can at least delete it from her end. (I mean, every email goes somewhere so it's not like you can delete all of the copies yourself.)
As a (mostly) Democrat, I sincerely hope she doesn't run for President. While I think she has been vilified by the right beyond her actual failings, I'm not a fan of her in general. More importantly, I might get stuck voting for her as a result of some nutjob who makes it through the GOP primaries. Either that or I'll have to write in Bill 'n' Opus.
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" it allows them to vent their issues and opinions. "
You say "allow" I say "empower." Same concept.
I'm under no illusion that we can fix society, because it's full of fucked up people who are essentially raised to be mean, bigoted assholes by their parents (who are generally mean, bigoted assholes).
Allowing the borderline assholes to explore these tendencies and gain confidence in their ability to emotionally torture others will not fix them. Allowing full-on assholes to do the same is no better.
"Anonymity actually empowers society to see the underlying issues within when they are small and addressable"
I would disagree. Society is not a user interface on a computer database; not even close. And simply showing that there are assholes among us is no closer to a solution. We know they're there. All this does is reinforce their belief that being an asshole is perfectly acceptable, because there are no consequences for doing so.
If you went to class every day and called your professor an ugly cunt that should be beaten every day, how would that affect your relationship with that professor? If you said your professor was a dick and should have someone sodomize him with a baseball bat during the Q&A portion of a lecture, would that help or hurt your grade in the class? What if you could do it anonymously? Which of those two cases would produce a better societal outcome for you, personally? Which one would produce a better outcome for the class as a whole?
The anonymous platform does not benefit society in these cases, only the speaker. Most of Yik Yak is innocuous. The subset we're talking about is, imho, abusive.
In general, yes - as I stated in the first five words of my post.
To the topic of discussion, though, Yik Yak is not a platform for whistleblowers. And there are far more borderline assholes who are unleashed on Yik Yak than there are whistleblowers who would change the world or amend great wrongs with a platform like Yik Yak.
Not that Yik Yak is bad, or should necessarily be eliminated - but the right to unlimited assholeness is not guaranteed when it targets someone. Your freedom to yell "gang bang" does not exist any more than yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.
Quoting a politician when discussing science is usually a bad idea, no matter which side it is. Then again, listening to zealots (again, on both sides) instead of scientists is just as bad.
"The law approved by the senate on 12 June [2012] banned scientists in state agencies from using exponential extrapolation to predict sea-level rise, requiring instead that they stick to linear projections based on historical data."
No need to limit talking in NC, they just pass legislation which limits sea rise. Science through legislation. Done and done.
http://www.scientificamerican....
Not in general mind you, but most people who have their name/reputation tied to what they say to others are rarely* inflammatory, belligerent, or insulting because it has social consequences for the speaker. But anonymous speech, where it has no consequences for you and only consequences for a target, is specifically the case where people become assholes.
Now, they may have been assholes all their lives, but anonymous services empower them. Are you really in favor of empowering assholes?
*since many on /. seem so to be pissed all the time, I mean "rarely" in the sense of the number of mean spirited comments compared to all comments made in the world, not the number of mean spirited comments *you* come up with among your friends or when you're pissed at someone/something.
Not all speech is protected.
The linked article give it a C. That's quite a bit higher than Kenneth Turan implies in his review: http://www.npr.org/2015/03/06/...
I mean, if there's ever an appropriate place for the term, it would probably be here.
"We have to pass it and THEN find out what's in it."
How stupid a sheeple do you have to be to be to believe that drivel? Every single word was written in plain English in a bill that had been largely published for years, and then amended with language which *by law* is read aloud to the congressmen (they don't even have to know how to read) as long as they are actually at their workplace during business hours and don't decline the reading. Every. Single. Word.
You are a fucking moron for believing what you hear from the people who decided - 10 years after they drafted the bullet points of this plan themselves - they didn't like it.
Each agency has a set of rules and procedures for releasing information. Just because one group allow the release doesn't mean a different one - with a different mission - has the same rules.
Think of it as a set of NDAs. Your CFO may have given proprietary information to investors, but that doesn't mean you can talk about it at the cocktail party after work. Not even to said investors.
The Department of Motor Vehicles will still exist. You still need to register and insure your vehicle. The "highway patrol" will still exist for non-autonomous vehicles, and will be serviced by the same law enforcement officers who chase bad guys and eat donuts. Accidents will still occur as no system is perfect. Proving who you are will still matter for a wide variety of non-social control scenarios, mostly involving payments, promises, and other contracts.
As there are more autonomous cars, there will be fewer "accidents" and fewer human drivers capable of operating a manual vehicle. How many people today can effectively ride a horse or turn a plow compared to 200 years ago, and is that a bad thing?
Self driving, by your definition, already exists to a limited extent. Aircraft autopilot is little more than cruise control with lane observance which has already been implemented. Automatic lane maintenance, speed control, automatic braking, and even automatic parking are already in use. Fully autonomous is really limited by interactions with normally human-readable controls - traffic control lights, signage and the like. Avoidance of stationary and moving objects is mostly solved with sensors that are far more accurate and responsive than humans.
There are, indeed, many "interesting" conditions where human interaction is far easier to implement than software evaluation, but the number of cases in which it is necessary is dropping rapidly. Your scenario of a remote operator for OTR transport probably is the next step for a lot of traditional deliveries (and odd conditions), though I would anticipate large vendors (WalMart comes to mind, as well as cooperation between Amazon and UPS/FedEx shipping hubs) as building in additional site features which allow fully autonomous warehouse entry and docking functions.
Have you never heard of faulty brakes, faulty accelerators, faulty [insert car part here] which have resulted in human deaths, and both human and property injuries?
Those things don't change with a driverless car. Liability still exists. And just as an "accidental" fatal impact with a human by a human driver becomes primarily a financial burden (usu. involuntary manslaughter, suspended or limited sentence for otherwise "good" person), the financial implications to a automotive manufacturer are significant.
When a driver hits someone, the car is reviewed in excruciating detail to determine if any failure of the automotive systems caused or contributed to an accident. The driver is also scrutinized. The victim is also scrutinized and if they have a car their car is evaluated for faults. A driverless car removes the ambiguity of the driver from the fault path.
Plus, as the sibling poster points out, the systems in a driverless car are going to be engineered with additional fail-safe mechanisms which reduce the overall performance/utility in favor of safety in the case you posit.
I like driving too, but I only get to drive for pleasure a handful of times during the year. I often have to sit for extended periods - sometime stretching to hours - unable to do anything else productive (or entertaining) while travelling between destinations.
To be honest, I don't own a car which is a pleasure to drive. I own a minivan for transportation of equipment and people, and a truck for hauling things and for when my van breaks down. If could drop in a self-driving option in the van, I'd do it yesterday - there is no pleasure in that vehicle. Maybe I could even get more work done while on the road and make enough to buy a car I could drive for pleasure.
Sure. It will work similarly to the way it does today. In order to have a valid vehicle registration you will need to provide proof of insurance on the car. In the event of a collision or other incident which causes damage, law enforecement will record information about the incident, lawyers will argue fault, and a judge will determine the outcome. In the case of an autonomous incident, the carmaker will almost certainly be listed as a defendant, and will have a staff lawyer as part of the defense team. Or, as more likely happens, the lawyers for the insurance companies will get together and decide the outcome out of court.
Car makers already have insurance for legal problems (and/or are self-insured). Every manufacturer does. It's part of the modern landscape.
Given the results of the government's most recent attempt to build a working website, I'm not sure a complete system could be built for any price.
But none of them actually died within their lifetime!
"And then what? Go on welfare? Be homeless? Beg on the street?"
At some point in your life you should learn not to be an asshole. If you made it to college without learning that shitting on other people is wrong, maybe a couple years of having someone else shit on you is a good place to start.
I didn't say killing. I said murder. There's a difference.
Publishing documents may or may not be legal. Espionage is always illegal. See the difference?
"As long as it would be inconvenient to prosecute anybody else, they will kill the messenger if they can get a hold of him."
Well, to be fair, the act of being the messenger is what makes espionage illegal.
You are already guaranteed a right to a fair trial. It's not something that the AG can "add to" or deny. Compare a trial in the US to a trial in, say, North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, or the territories controlled by ISIS/ISIL. Even some of the most egregious examples of non-impartial trials in the US seem fair in comparison to treatment of suspected anti-government persons in those states.
The problem is that Snowden's version of "Fair" and the general standard of "Fair" in the US are still probably fairly widely separated. He would probably like whistleblower status for everything, ignoring the parts of classified documents he released which were sensitive but not necessary to indicate the underlying problems he wanted to expose. He would probably like the damage he did to the US relationship with its allies to be inadmissible, along with the potential tactical advantage gained by other states as a result of the massive, unfiltered release of classified US intelligence documents.
I think he should really spend his effort working on his Russian and praying that Putin never grown tired of him.
What part of "releasing classified documents" doesn't he understand? It's pretty obvious he violated US law. Fair and impartial won't change that outcome.
You may argue that the law is bad, or that the purpose of his actions was noble. That same may be said of killing [insert bad guy]. It doesn't make the murder legal, it may only lessen the sentence. I'm not sure when facing the death penalty, that life without parole in a federal penitentiary is going to be that much more appealing if your goal is to live out your life in the United States without constantly being under the thumb of the government.
Must be after 4.4.2, because I have access to AppOps on my device. Still, it would be a shame to lose this if I move to v5.
Wait...TWO icons in one? How the fuck are users going to parse that? A picture and a gear - does that mean it automatically opens the file? A picture and a hamburger? A picture and a small bird? A document and two lines with a dot between them?
Users will screw things up no matter how you do it because there is no common language for executable, text file, picture, slide, pdf, rich text, etc. And with the propensity for UI designers to change the look of icons just to be "new and hip" with every other OS release (ex: settings icons), the users will never "catch up" before accidentally "executing" what they think is a picture file.
Segregated emails annoying? Are you kidding me? I go out of my way to keep personal and business emails separate, to the point of having a stock"bounce" email I send to people who accidentally send to the wrong email address. Same with phone numbers - one personal, one business.
She's either lazy or evil. Given it's Hillary, I'm going to split the difference and call it both. Too lazy to have two emails, just evil enough to know that if she says something awful she can at least delete it from her end. (I mean, every email goes somewhere so it's not like you can delete all of the copies yourself.)
As a (mostly) Democrat, I sincerely hope she doesn't run for President. While I think she has been vilified by the right beyond her actual failings, I'm not a fan of her in general. More importantly, I might get stuck voting for her as a result of some nutjob who makes it through the GOP primaries. Either that or I'll have to write in Bill 'n' Opus.