Yeah, standardization is just a Satanic conspiracy.
Like that one time, Satan decided that all railroad tracks should be the same distance apart, so that every train could work on every track, so people would ride around on the trains, which sucked out their immortal souls.
Oh, and then they standardized screws and bolts, so that you didn't need to carry around one screwdriver for each screw manufacturer, which put some screwdriver makers out of business. Their children were thrown out to starve in the streets. Satan watched, and he laughed.
And home power standardized on 120V AC, so that everyone could plug their computers in anywhere, allowing Satan to tempt everyone with porn.
Don't even get me started on what Satan thinks of the USB 2.0 interface.
There's no contradiction. It's perfectly possible to believe that lots of bad things happen, and still smell the sweet odor of urban legend on a particular "A friend of one of my students' best friends" story. If I admit that people sometimes hire dangerously irresponsible babysitters, am I expected to buy that one story about the stoned babysitter cooking a baby in the oven? I hope not.
Understand that by mentioning any of this, you're opening yourself up to the armchair quarterbacking of thousands of geeks, most of whom have never raised anything more complicated than a goldfish.
Including me.
There should be no such thing as offensive language. That would imply that the words and the order in which they are strung together somehow carry more power than the ideas the combination of words conveys. The idea that a simple utteration--a mere string of syllables--should have some inherent moral value is magical thinking to me. This is why it's so hard to get a small child to stop saying the "naughty" word he's just learned: it's a power word, one which causes strange and unmistakable reactions in adults. Ultimately, the value of any communication is in the idea being conveyed, and I don't see how any current filter can make that sort of judgment.
Having said that, I wouldn't mind seeing a few examples of this "offensive language" you wanted to protect your daughter from. URLs to myspace accounts will suffice. If half of the sites were being blocked, and you seem to generally agree with the filter's criteria, it shouldn't take you long to find examples.
Now, I may be jumping to conclusions, but it doesn't sound like you actually sat down with your daughter, explained that you were worried about all the time she was spending on myspace, and explained that you were blocking her access. If you blocked the site behind her back, without explaining anything, it shows a worrisome lack of trust between you two. For any given parenting decision, I generally see "lying to your kid" as the wrong choice.
Finally, you don't need to run your own DNS server to do this. Windows and Linux both have a 'hosts' file that could be tweaked.
Well, I thought it was clever at the time. At the time I didn't realize I wasn't the only one making the association, though I probably heard it from somebody else.
Funny you should bring up food, since the current economy for providing that food requires oil to ship it, oil to create pesticides to grow it, oil to create fertilizer, and oil to deep fry it. Most of our increase in food productivity depends on our ability to throw fertilizer and pesticides at land that otherwise wouldn't produce nearly as much.
Oh, wait. Those wouldn't much help you make your point, would they? In fact, they make socialism seem harmless and quaint. No, you need to tie socialism to mass murder and gulags, not an obsession with hockey and a weird desire to dip french fries in gravy.
What also doesn't fit is the idea that every policy pursued by the Nazi Party must be evil or unsuccessful. The Autobahn wasn't just a jobs program. It was a very successful infrastructure project that benefitted the German economy for decades afterward.
You were asked to show that Nazi Germany was a socialist country. After your great proof was shown to be nothing more than "totalitarian fascism plus a policy of taking property from Jews", all you've got to show for your assertion is one lousy public works project, and a highly successful one that their government was smart to pursue.
Nazi Germany wasn't defined by socialist ideals, but by totalitarian government joined at the hip to big business. If the Autobahn makes Nazi Germany a socialist/communist utopia (ignoring the masses of evidence regarding Hitler's actual opinion of communism and socialism), then the Interstate System makes Dwight Eisenhower a Trotskyite.
You're living in your own world. The drive to end slavery was indeed fueled by "religious types", but not the ones liberals like to mock. You seem to think that we deride all religious viewpoints equally, which is absurd. What we scorn is the sort of people who think:
* that God loves gun rights more than helping the poor. * that science is inherently anti-religious, and that modern scientific understanding is somehow antithetical to their religion. * that it was God telling our president to invade a country, killing tens of thousands of civilians, in a quest to stop Saddam's WMD program... I mean, fight the terrorists... I mean, promote democracy around the world... but absolutely not to give the U.S. a military staging point in the Middle East or secure oil supplies, you commie traitor! * that God gave us dominion over the Earth, and Jesus will come back shortly, so environmentalists should go stuff themselves while we drill the ANWR.
Think about it: In America, 90% of people claim to believe in God. 48% voted for the Democratic presidential candidate last time around. So even if every atheist were also a Democrat, that still means 38% of the country is both religious and leftish. If you're not willing to accept that there are deeply religious people on the left side of the political spectrum, and want to keep spouting your more-persecuted-than-thou tripe about how the political left hates God, then you're really just being a twit.
The drive to end slavery was led by the same style of religiously-motivated social reformers who are promoting environmentalism and living wage laws, and preaching acceptance and tolerance today.
I'm amazed at the sort of intellectual and moral bankruptcy that would allow someone to think that conservation is useless unless our ecological footprint is as small as a Maori tribesman's. It's like saying there's no reason to donate $100 to a homeless shelter, because at the end of the day you'll still be wealthier than the people they serve. It's like saying you may as well toss your child out on the street if you're not reading to her every night like you're supposed to. It's like quitting watching sports the first time your favorite team loses. It's like deciding you'll never be as perfect as that Jesus fella, and that it's therefore perfectly fine to embark on a career as a serial killer.
Why does this sort of specious "if you can't do everything, then why not do nothing" logic inspire you when applied to resource conservation, when you could see what a load of crap it is if you tried applying it to any other part of your life? Apparently, it's because you and the parent poster are looking for any reason to avoid making any tough lifestyle compromises.
Frankly, yes, the "modern lifestyle" is wasteful. Despite your accusations of hypocrisy, there is no shame in me regretting that fact, even though I'm not going to join a tribal society to "solve" the problem. It's not a solution at all, because the world could never support six billion hunter gatherers. As long as we choose to have that many people about, we need modern infrastructure to fill their needs. So your entire argument boils down to "shut the hell up and let me drive my Hummer, because your Prius is just as bad." Which it isn't.
Your first point is a bit specious. You can't set up a software development team with the assumption that everyone gets paid "in a year or two". Even if I had enough in the bank to do that, I wouldn't. A year or two of effort with a potential $0 payout? You just won't find people who will do that.
Now, if you want to tack a huge honkin' bonus onto a successful contract, that might provide the incentives you're looking for.
I'd love to read the study, but the way it sounds, the subjects were given pre-built statements, an order to "be serious" or "be sarcastic", and told to send their pre-built statements to their partner while either "meaning" or "not meaning" it. If that's really the way it went down, then they're not testing for conveyance of emotion, they're testing for ESP. Given the fact that the recipients did "no better than chance" (the wording from the article) indicates to me that that's the actual methodology. Even with the brevity of the statements and the lack of context, I think they would have had at least a little success if the people sending the message had some control over the message they sent.
For example, if I'm told "Type 'the food is great here'", I would have to do precisely that. However, if they leave it open, and instruct me to "Use sarcasm in complaining about the food", I'd have a chance to do something like this:
"The food here is superb! Outstanding! One culinary masterpiece after another! While those fat, sweaty cooks may not strictly follow the hand-washing or hairnet policies, the end result is something I would definitely recommend to somebody I didn't want to see again. I particularly recommend the Gristle Surprise they serve on Tuesday, the Leftover Gristle Surprise they serve on Wednesday, and the Dessert Substance they serve on Thursday, which is a heavenly mixture of flour, water, possibly some sugar, and whatever Gristle Surprise they couldn't unload the two days before." Not profound humor, but certainly hard to mistake for serious accolades.
I've been misunderstood many times, but I'm sure my tone is conveyed more often than not. The most serious misunderstanding I've ever had came from my participation in a small social network made primarily of real-life friends, with a couple of people who were pretty inactive in the group. One of those was a very beautiful girl I'd met on a couple of occasions, but never really gotten to know. So, charmer that I was, I fired off a message that said how much I hoped to see everyone at an upcoming party, except for that girl, given that we were mortal enemies. I figured, "It's funny because we're not really mortal enemies," but that's not how she took it. It took a couple of apologetic e-mails to calm her down, and I never did see her again.
Bonus points for anyone who can figure out whether I was using the phrase "charmer that I was" in a serious or sarcastic sense.
That sort of miscommunication is an exception. Mostly, we have context that guides us in finding sarcasm. For example, we know the person, their likes and dislikes, etc. We might know something about what they're doing at the time they're writing it ("The food is great" can be taken one way if we know our correspondent is writing from a cruise ship, rather than a wilderness survival class). Etcetera, etcetera.
The interesting thing about the study was the confidence of the recipients. That does worry me.
Total non-sequitur red-herringed cop-out, with a bit of straw man thrown in to keep the crows off.
You describe your question "Don't corporations have an obligation to obey the law in countries they operate in?" as an "interesting" one, when in fact it's rhetorical (which is quite the opposite). Now, for me it's an interesting question, because it brings up pointed questions about civil disobedience, the legitimacy of government, and the importance of the rule of law. For you, the question seems very settled: no.
The question isn't whether Google should be trying to break the law in foreign countries, but whether they should be willing to operate in countries where they have to do something morally repugnant (censoring) in order to stay on the fair side of that country's laws. I'm conflicted on the question. But there is the additional question of what sort of pressure these companies should be trying to put on the Chinese government. Should Google have held out for a better deal, or perhaps used their position to try and persuade the government that censorship is bad?
Like it or not, the government can and does dictate where its citizens do business. We can't trade with Cuba. We can't legally go to Thailand and have sex with eleven year old prostitutes. We have to pay tariffs on goods to and from many countries. The seventh grade civics version of this is that our Constitution empowers the government to decide how this country interacts with foreign countries. The only reason you can leave the country at all is because our government and the other governments of the world agreed on the rules.
1) Nobody is asking to shut down Craigslist. The plaintiffs are asking for Craigslist to install filters that (the defendants correctly argue) will probably just make things worse.
2) The Fair Housing Act is a minimal burden on any person's ability to "to conduct business and commerce", and that small burden is worth the ability to combat systemic unfairness that can poison a society.
3) Craigslist will win this case handily, and probably at minimal cost.
4) Quit your persecuted snivelling, and go live your life. Man, and they say liberals are a bunch of whiners.
A lot of the examples they cite are specifically of the sort that HUD refuses to pursue (shared housing environments, use of a church as a landmark for directions, etc.)
I don't think this case has much of a chance. I think Craigslist protests too much when they complain that there isn't any way to have a person read through every listing looking for potential violations (there's a lot you can do with some basic natural language processing). But as someone who considers Craigslist wonderful, and is kind of toying with the idea of a Craigslist-ish site, I'd prefer to see this suit go down in flames.
Here in Utah, when you're looking at postings for apartments, you often see "LDS standards" as a qualification. I don't know where such a phrase stands legally, but it's usually interpreted as "no smoking, no drinking, no swearing, no carnal relations." Most of the time, I see it on ads for shared housing situations, which probably makes it safe. But if anyone ever took the phrase to court, I'm sure they'd argue that the phrase was specifying a standard of behavior, not a religious preference.
I'm just wondering how well that would hold up in court.
The FHA specifically exempts people who are going to be sharing living quarters with their renters. If you don't want to share your house with somebody of a given religion, gender, sexual orientation, or color, you don't have to. This guy is propping up an enormous strawman that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
Basically, the FHA has an exemption for people who will be sharing living quarters with the people they rent to. If you're renting out your basement, or looking for a roommate, the FHA doesn't apply.
The scare quotes aren't there to question Verizon's ownership of its lines. The scare quotes are there to mock the laughable "rights" Verizon apparently believes that ownership conveys. Google pays out the wazoo for bandwidth, and Verizon believes that just because Google is able to use that resource in a way that makes money, their ownership entitles them to a cut of those profits.
I saw nothing socialistic in the story. But when faced with such a plain display of corporate greed, it's not surprising that a capitalist ideologue might get a bit touchy.
Man in the middle doesn't work against Public Key Crypto.
Alice wants to send an encrypted message to Bob, so she encrypts her message with Bob's public key. Thereafter, the only way to decrypt the message is using Bob's private key. Since the private key never gets exchanged, the ISP never sees it, and therefore cannot decrypt the message. When Bob wants to send Alice a response, he encrypts it with her public key, which makes the message decryptable only with Alice's private key (which she never sent).
In PK, there is no "key exchange" in the usual sense of the term, because in standard crypto algorithms, the exchange needs to be made without the key falling into the hands of those who shouldn't be listening in. What actually happens is more akin to "key publishing," because the public key can be made available to anyone. All they can use it for is to create messages that only you can decrypt.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, standardization is just a Satanic conspiracy.
Like that one time, Satan decided that all railroad tracks should be the same distance apart, so that every train could work on every track, so people would ride around on the trains, which sucked out their immortal souls.
Oh, and then they standardized screws and bolts, so that you didn't need to carry around one screwdriver for each screw manufacturer, which put some screwdriver makers out of business. Their children were thrown out to starve in the streets. Satan watched, and he laughed.
And home power standardized on 120V AC, so that everyone could plug their computers in anywhere, allowing Satan to tempt everyone with porn.
Don't even get me started on what Satan thinks of the USB 2.0 interface.
There's no contradiction. It's perfectly possible to believe that lots of bad things happen, and still smell the sweet odor of urban legend on a particular "A friend of one of my students' best friends" story. If I admit that people sometimes hire dangerously irresponsible babysitters, am I expected to buy that one story about the stoned babysitter cooking a baby in the oven? I hope not.
Understand that by mentioning any of this, you're opening yourself up to the armchair quarterbacking of thousands of geeks, most of whom have never raised anything more complicated than a goldfish.
Including me.
There should be no such thing as offensive language. That would imply that the words and the order in which they are strung together somehow carry more power than the ideas the combination of words conveys. The idea that a simple utteration--a mere string of syllables--should have some inherent moral value is magical thinking to me. This is why it's so hard to get a small child to stop saying the "naughty" word he's just learned: it's a power word, one which causes strange and unmistakable reactions in adults. Ultimately, the value of any communication is in the idea being conveyed, and I don't see how any current filter can make that sort of judgment.
Having said that, I wouldn't mind seeing a few examples of this "offensive language" you wanted to protect your daughter from. URLs to myspace accounts will suffice. If half of the sites were being blocked, and you seem to generally agree with the filter's criteria, it shouldn't take you long to find examples.
Now, I may be jumping to conclusions, but it doesn't sound like you actually sat down with your daughter, explained that you were worried about all the time she was spending on myspace, and explained that you were blocking her access. If you blocked the site behind her back, without explaining anything, it shows a worrisome lack of trust between you two. For any given parenting decision, I generally see "lying to your kid" as the wrong choice.
Finally, you don't need to run your own DNS server to do this. Windows and Linux both have a 'hosts' file that could be tweaked.
Apropos nothing, my myspace URL is http://www.myspace.com/is_the_new_geocities.
Well, I thought it was clever at the time. At the time I didn't realize I wasn't the only one making the association, though I probably heard it from somebody else.
Who wouldn't want a laptop that floats?
Actually, if it were well designed, I think a wooden laptop would be fun.
Funny you should bring up food, since the current economy for providing that food requires oil to ship it, oil to create pesticides to grow it, oil to create fertilizer, and oil to deep fry it. Most of our increase in food productivity depends on our ability to throw fertilizer and pesticides at land that otherwise wouldn't produce nearly as much.
Also: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Canada...
Oh, wait. Those wouldn't much help you make your point, would they? In fact, they make socialism seem harmless and quaint. No, you need to tie socialism to mass murder and gulags, not an obsession with hockey and a weird desire to dip french fries in gravy.
It doesn't fit.
What also doesn't fit is the idea that every policy pursued by the Nazi Party must be evil or unsuccessful. The Autobahn wasn't just a jobs program. It was a very successful infrastructure project that benefitted the German economy for decades afterward.
You were asked to show that Nazi Germany was a socialist country. After your great proof was shown to be nothing more than "totalitarian fascism plus a policy of taking property from Jews", all you've got to show for your assertion is one lousy public works project, and a highly successful one that their government was smart to pursue.
Nazi Germany wasn't defined by socialist ideals, but by totalitarian government joined at the hip to big business. If the Autobahn makes Nazi Germany a socialist/communist utopia (ignoring the masses of evidence regarding Hitler's actual opinion of communism and socialism), then the Interstate System makes Dwight Eisenhower a Trotskyite.
You're living in your own world. The drive to end slavery was indeed fueled by "religious types", but not the ones liberals like to mock. You seem to think that we deride all religious viewpoints equally, which is absurd. What we scorn is the sort of people who think:
* that God loves gun rights more than helping the poor.
* that science is inherently anti-religious, and that modern scientific understanding is somehow antithetical to their religion.
* that it was God telling our president to invade a country, killing tens of thousands of civilians, in a quest to stop Saddam's WMD program... I mean, fight the terrorists... I mean, promote democracy around the world... but absolutely not to give the U.S. a military staging point in the Middle East or secure oil supplies, you commie traitor!
* that God gave us dominion over the Earth, and Jesus will come back shortly, so environmentalists should go stuff themselves while we drill the ANWR.
Think about it: In America, 90% of people claim to believe in God. 48% voted for the Democratic presidential candidate last time around. So even if every atheist were also a Democrat, that still means 38% of the country is both religious and leftish. If you're not willing to accept that there are deeply religious people on the left side of the political spectrum, and want to keep spouting your more-persecuted-than-thou tripe about how the political left hates God, then you're really just being a twit.
The drive to end slavery was led by the same style of religiously-motivated social reformers who are promoting environmentalism and living wage laws, and preaching acceptance and tolerance today.
I'm amazed at the sort of intellectual and moral bankruptcy that would allow someone to think that conservation is useless unless our ecological footprint is as small as a Maori tribesman's. It's like saying there's no reason to donate $100 to a homeless shelter, because at the end of the day you'll still be wealthier than the people they serve. It's like saying you may as well toss your child out on the street if you're not reading to her every night like you're supposed to. It's like quitting watching sports the first time your favorite team loses. It's like deciding you'll never be as perfect as that Jesus fella, and that it's therefore perfectly fine to embark on a career as a serial killer.
Why does this sort of specious "if you can't do everything, then why not do nothing" logic inspire you when applied to resource conservation, when you could see what a load of crap it is if you tried applying it to any other part of your life? Apparently, it's because you and the parent poster are looking for any reason to avoid making any tough lifestyle compromises.
Frankly, yes, the "modern lifestyle" is wasteful. Despite your accusations of hypocrisy, there is no shame in me regretting that fact, even though I'm not going to join a tribal society to "solve" the problem. It's not a solution at all, because the world could never support six billion hunter gatherers. As long as we choose to have that many people about, we need modern infrastructure to fill their needs. So your entire argument boils down to "shut the hell up and let me drive my Hummer, because your Prius is just as bad." Which it isn't.
Your first point is a bit specious. You can't set up a software development team with the assumption that everyone gets paid "in a year or two". Even if I had enough in the bank to do that, I wouldn't. A year or two of effort with a potential $0 payout? You just won't find people who will do that.
Now, if you want to tack a huge honkin' bonus onto a successful contract, that might provide the incentives you're looking for.
Er, are you being sarcastic? I can't tell.
I agree, mod parent up.
I'd love to read the study, but the way it sounds, the subjects were given pre-built statements, an order to "be serious" or "be sarcastic", and told to send their pre-built statements to their partner while either "meaning" or "not meaning" it. If that's really the way it went down, then they're not testing for conveyance of emotion, they're testing for ESP. Given the fact that the recipients did "no better than chance" (the wording from the article) indicates to me that that's the actual methodology. Even with the brevity of the statements and the lack of context, I think they would have had at least a little success if the people sending the message had some control over the message they sent.
For example, if I'm told "Type 'the food is great here'", I would have to do precisely that. However, if they leave it open, and instruct me to "Use sarcasm in complaining about the food", I'd have a chance to do something like this:
"The food here is superb! Outstanding! One culinary masterpiece after another! While those fat, sweaty cooks may not strictly follow the hand-washing or hairnet policies, the end result is something I would definitely recommend to somebody I didn't want to see again. I particularly recommend the Gristle Surprise they serve on Tuesday, the Leftover Gristle Surprise they serve on Wednesday, and the Dessert Substance they serve on Thursday, which is a heavenly mixture of flour, water, possibly some sugar, and whatever Gristle Surprise they couldn't unload the two days before." Not profound humor, but certainly hard to mistake for serious accolades.
I've been misunderstood many times, but I'm sure my tone is conveyed more often than not. The most serious misunderstanding I've ever had came from my participation in a small social network made primarily of real-life friends, with a couple of people who were pretty inactive in the group. One of those was a very beautiful girl I'd met on a couple of occasions, but never really gotten to know. So, charmer that I was, I fired off a message that said how much I hoped to see everyone at an upcoming party, except for that girl, given that we were mortal enemies. I figured, "It's funny because we're not really mortal enemies," but that's not how she took it. It took a couple of apologetic e-mails to calm her down, and I never did see her again.
Bonus points for anyone who can figure out whether I was using the phrase "charmer that I was" in a serious or sarcastic sense.
That sort of miscommunication is an exception. Mostly, we have context that guides us in finding sarcasm. For example, we know the person, their likes and dislikes, etc. We might know something about what they're doing at the time they're writing it ("The food is great" can be taken one way if we know our correspondent is writing from a cruise ship, rather than a wilderness survival class). Etcetera, etcetera.
The interesting thing about the study was the confidence of the recipients. That does worry me.
Total non-sequitur red-herringed cop-out, with a bit of straw man thrown in to keep the crows off.
You describe your question "Don't corporations have an obligation to obey the law in countries they operate in?" as an "interesting" one, when in fact it's rhetorical (which is quite the opposite). Now, for me it's an interesting question, because it brings up pointed questions about civil disobedience, the legitimacy of government, and the importance of the rule of law. For you, the question seems very settled: no.
The question isn't whether Google should be trying to break the law in foreign countries, but whether they should be willing to operate in countries where they have to do something morally repugnant (censoring) in order to stay on the fair side of that country's laws. I'm conflicted on the question. But there is the additional question of what sort of pressure these companies should be trying to put on the Chinese government. Should Google have held out for a better deal, or perhaps used their position to try and persuade the government that censorship is bad?
Like it or not, the government can and does dictate where its citizens do business. We can't trade with Cuba. We can't legally go to Thailand and have sex with eleven year old prostitutes. We have to pay tariffs on goods to and from many countries. The seventh grade civics version of this is that our Constitution empowers the government to decide how this country interacts with foreign countries. The only reason you can leave the country at all is because our government and the other governments of the world agreed on the rules.
The President can't protect us with regular laws. In order to effectively combat the terrorist threat, he needs war laws!
See my previous comment. Especially #3. None of your conclusions make any sense unless this suit goes to trial and the plaintiffs win.
1) Nobody is asking to shut down Craigslist. The plaintiffs are asking for Craigslist to install filters that (the defendants correctly argue) will probably just make things worse.
2) The Fair Housing Act is a minimal burden on any person's ability to "to conduct business and commerce", and that small burden is worth the ability to combat systemic unfairness that can poison a society.
3) Craigslist will win this case handily, and probably at minimal cost.
4) Quit your persecuted snivelling, and go live your life. Man, and they say liberals are a bunch of whiners.
Cool.
A lot of the examples they cite are specifically of the sort that HUD refuses to pursue (shared housing environments, use of a church as a landmark for directions, etc.)
I don't think this case has much of a chance. I think Craigslist protests too much when they complain that there isn't any way to have a person read through every listing looking for potential violations (there's a lot you can do with some basic natural language processing). But as someone who considers Craigslist wonderful, and is kind of toying with the idea of a Craigslist-ish site, I'd prefer to see this suit go down in flames.
Here in Utah, when you're looking at postings for apartments, you often see "LDS standards" as a qualification. I don't know where such a phrase stands legally, but it's usually interpreted as "no smoking, no drinking, no swearing, no carnal relations." Most of the time, I see it on ads for shared housing situations, which probably makes it safe. But if anyone ever took the phrase to court, I'm sure they'd argue that the phrase was specifying a standard of behavior, not a religious preference.
I'm just wondering how well that would hold up in court.
The FHA specifically exempts people who are going to be sharing living quarters with their renters. If you don't want to share your house with somebody of a given religion, gender, sexual orientation, or color, you don't have to. This guy is propping up an enormous strawman that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
Basically, the FHA has an exemption for people who will be sharing living quarters with the people they rent to. If you're renting out your basement, or looking for a roommate, the FHA doesn't apply.
The scare quotes aren't there to question Verizon's ownership of its lines. The scare quotes are there to mock the laughable "rights" Verizon apparently believes that ownership conveys. Google pays out the wazoo for bandwidth, and Verizon believes that just because Google is able to use that resource in a way that makes money, their ownership entitles them to a cut of those profits.
I saw nothing socialistic in the story. But when faced with such a plain display of corporate greed, it's not surprising that a capitalist ideologue might get a bit touchy.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
As dry as it is out there, why don't people just use swamp coolers?
Man in the middle doesn't work against Public Key Crypto.
Alice wants to send an encrypted message to Bob, so she encrypts her message with Bob's public key. Thereafter, the only way to decrypt the message is using Bob's private key. Since the private key never gets exchanged, the ISP never sees it, and therefore cannot decrypt the message. When Bob wants to send Alice a response, he encrypts it with her public key, which makes the message decryptable only with Alice's private key (which she never sent).
In PK, there is no "key exchange" in the usual sense of the term, because in standard crypto algorithms, the exchange needs to be made without the key falling into the hands of those who shouldn't be listening in. What actually happens is more akin to "key publishing," because the public key can be made available to anyone. All they can use it for is to create messages that only you can decrypt.