I say, live within your means in other respects (don't buy ridiculous cars, houses, motorcycles, boozes, home theater systems etc) and if you're the average American, you'll be able to buy almost any computer you want. Think about it: spending $2 grand per year gets you a hell of a lot of computer and software, and that works out to 6% of the average American's income. I dunno about you, but I spend a lot more than 6% of my time on my computer, so it's money well spent.
What you are missing is the absolute flood of people that open immigration would result in. It would very quickly distort both the economy and social structure.
Yes, just as immigration distorted the US economy and social structure during the 19th and early 20th century, transforming the US from a backwater agrarian hinterland into the most powerful center of industry and technology the world had ever seen. I fail to see the problem.
While we can't take the huge tidal wave of people an open policy would bring
You make a clear case for the benefits and moral obligation of immigration, but your description the cost is a flimsy raft tied together with untested assumptions.
This is not a programming language, it's pseudocode, intended to be read by humans who can infer the obvious intended meaning. Unfortunately Slashdot isn't a good place for that.
I'm sick and tired of Slashdot editors blindly reposting everything that comes down the firehose without stopping to check whether articles are dupes, PR volleys, or just plain wrong.
Look at it this way. Anyone in the chain of publication of the original story, from the orginal commenter on Engadget to Engadget's editors to the anonymous coward who submitted to Slashdot to the Slashdot editor who approved it, could have done what I did: "ping thepiratebay.org" from work, and find it was down outside of Comcastland too. Then they would have had a *real* headline: "Comcast falsely accused of jamming ThePirateBay."
I hear that investigative journalism is too expensive for major news outlets to handle these days, so it's up to bloggers and websites to do the journalism. But when nobody can be bothered to type a 1-line bash command, what's left of the Fourth Estate is in deep shit.
Every single one of those posts merely suggests that the phones will appeal to someone.
And if you click through to the authors' profile page to look at their other comments, they're pretty typical slashdot posters. They comment on space exploration, file sharing, Lord of the Rings Online, and liberal vs conservative politics. If these are shills, they're doing a lot of random blabbing on company time, and not much actual shilling.
There should be a law against this. Something to enforce your right to control copies of your creative work, and maybe something to make sure nobody uses your unique names, logos, and marks to steal your business trade. We could call it a "copyright and trademark law".
I realize that supporting copyright and trademark law is heresy on Slashdot, but this is *exactly* the sort of situation it was designed to help with. The service provider has the right to shut you down if they want, but if you have trademarked "zephoria" -- a unique identifying phrase which is eminently trademarkable -- they can't re-purpose it without your express permission.
As someone up-thread posted, odds are good that the U.S. called up Pakistan and said "Oh by the way, we're sending in some choppers, don't even think of shooting them down", but did so *after* they had boots on the ground inside the compound.
Given that a single phone call could blow this mission, absolute stealth and secrecy was required, but once the gunfire starts, there's no need to be subtle.
Fair? No. But diplomatic relations aren't always fair. And "give us back our chopper pieces or you don't get your $1.5 billion/year in military aid" has a certain persuasiveness to it.
That was a really good article. I had noticed that the tail rotor photos from the news showed blades that seemed unevenly spaced. I figured some of them had broken off, but from that article:
Since the acoustic frequencies associated with the rotating blades are directly related to the blade spacing, intuitively the use of unevenly spaced blades holds the potential of lower sound levels and less perceptibility.
That's not a useful diversion. Any American choppers in the vicinity will spook Al Qaeda, even if they're not landing on Osama's house. No, I agree with the grandparent: send in your stealth choppers first, hold back the noisy Chinooks until you've already got guns on the ground.
To be fair (okay, not to be fair at all), they were such shitty lies that the only people who believed them were those who'd already drunk the Kool-Aid. The root problem was blind patriotism and equating mistrust of government with treason. The lies were almost superfluous. George Bush could have told the American public that the War Against Terror required us to invade Canada, and just over half of us would have immediately started to march on the border.
I'm guessing they found nothing of interest. If they did find any leads, they need to act on them *before* the suspects find out, or the suspects will bolt and the info will be useless. Which means that announcing that you've captured data is the last thing you want to do.
But if you've got nothing, you can *say* you've got the "motherlode", and watch and wait for people to panic and catch 'em as they flee.
You day to day activities will be assaulted constantly for circumstantial evidence that could be used to convict you of a crime you didn't commit. Jury's will believe anything an expert witness tells them.
I sat on a jury last year that acquitted a guy because we thought the DNA evidence against him, supported by expert testimony and a parade of cops swearing on a stack of bibles, was shitty. If you think juries are full of sheep who blindly trust the state, you're wrong.
The costs of law enforcement grow exponentially with population growth,
how many more years until the value of an artificial intelligence which makes law enforcement technologically irrelevant is greater than the GDP of a third world country?
Science fiction aside, as I said earlier, your problem is not a Facebook problem. It's a problem with the federal government. Fight that. (And if you believe US citizens have totally lost all control over their government, you're fucked whether you post to Facebook or not, and the proper response is to take up arms and march on Washington rather than living like an Internet hermit.)
I don't think so, but then the naive never do. As I see it, your goal is to avoid any information at all about you to be available to anyone anyhow. That's pretty much impossible unless you live in a cave: those of us who live in the real world accept that every interaction we have with anyone leaves traces of our presence, whether it's website browsing data or just "hey, I remember that guy, he buys lunch here a couple times a week."
The advantage of online interactions is that you have some control over who knows what about you. I can't tell the clerk at the local Border's to forget my face after I buy a copy of The Stoner's Guide to Bong Making, but I can buy stuff from borders.com in a way that obscures my identity from the kind of datamining you're worried about. Digital presence makes the authorities' job easier, but it also makes my life richer in what I hope is a fair tradeoff.
An all-powerful police state with infinite resources can, if they like, use things like Facebook or Slashdot to learn about you. But the problem isn't Facebook or Slashdot: it's the all-powerful police state. So let's fight against that.
Every website that has a "facebook login" is allowing facebook to read your cookies including the referring website. Facebook now knows what websites you are browsing. What news stories you are interested in.
No it doesn't. I've turned off third-party cookies on my browser. As I said, I control the information I provide to every site I'm a member of, including crap they do behind my back. I keep an especially untrusting eye on Facebook, because they've got a shitty track record in this department, but I've decided not to shun it completely.
So the question is, am I in fact naive? The proof's in the pudding. Someone down-thread already posted a link to what he thought was my work page, but he's got the wrong guy, and even if I *was* that guy, there's nothing there I care to hide.
Ain't nothin' on my Facebook but my name, my friends, and my random attempts at being witty. I don't care if the gov't sees any of it. If I did, it wouldn't be on Facebook. The problem isn't Facebook, it's that people -- including Assange, actually -- have a binary idea of security and trust. They think something is either totally secret and revealing it would be a huge betrayal, or it's all out there in the wind open to everyone. If you think Facebook is a privacy threat, you don't have to stop using it: just stop posting private stuff to it.
Trust is multilayered. I have stuff I only tell my close friends. I have stuff I only tell my Warcraft guild. I have stuff I only tell my wife. I have stuff I keep entirely inside my head. And none of that stuff goes on Facebook. Facebook is fine for some sorts of privacy -- for instance, as a college professor, I don't Facebook friend my students, so I don't have to worry about saying something unbecoming of a professor. For other sorts of things, I use other sorts of communications.
But I've been living in this sort of multilayered online privacy world for two decades now. Hopefully someday soon the rest of the planet will figure out how it works, so I don't have to deal with Assange's paranoid ranting, or college students who can't get a job because they're naked and/or vomiting on their profile page.
this is the type of thinking that is keeping us in Afghanistan.
But the question was about the type of thinking that *got us into* Afghanistan in the first place. Before 9/11, the scary elements of the Pakistani government were pretty enthusiastic about destroying India and controlling Afghanistan, but I don't think they gave a damn about the U.S. so long as the military aid checks kept rolling in every year.
*Now*, after we shot their Afghan allies and blew things up inside Pakistan, they care about us enough to be a threat. But in 2000, they only threatened to their neighbors.
By longstanding western military tradition, followed by the US on countless occasions, you don't have to try enemy military leaders. You can just shoot at them or drop bombs on their heads until they're dead or they surrender.
I don't have a big problem with declaring Al Qaeda leaders a foreign military force and shooting them on sight. I also have no problem with declaring them domestic criminals in exile, and arresting them for trial. The problem comes when you (like the Bush administration) decide that they're neither, denying them both military and civilian rights protections. One set of laws or the other must apply to everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the age I'm talking about, but the brand. My post is a stealth Macintosh ad.
I say, live within your means in other respects (don't buy ridiculous cars, houses, motorcycles, boozes, home theater systems etc) and if you're the average American, you'll be able to buy almost any computer you want. Think about it: spending $2 grand per year gets you a hell of a lot of computer and software, and that works out to 6% of the average American's income. I dunno about you, but I spend a lot more than 6% of my time on my computer, so it's money well spent.
Yes, just as immigration distorted the US economy and social structure during the 19th and early 20th century, transforming the US from a backwater agrarian hinterland into the most powerful center of industry and technology the world had ever seen. I fail to see the problem.
You make a clear case for the benefits and moral obligation of immigration, but your description the cost is a flimsy raft tied together with untested assumptions.
This is not a programming language, it's pseudocode, intended to be read by humans who can infer the obvious intended meaning. Unfortunately Slashdot isn't a good place for that.
Yes, the algorithm for choosing green card recipients is flawed. It should be:
if (applicant.wanted_for_crime = false) then
grant_green_card(applicant);
else
human_review(applicant)
end
On a more serious note, does anyone know what the error was?
Pinging TPB from outside Comcast didn't work for me when I read the article a few minutes after it was posted here.
I'm sick and tired of Slashdot editors blindly reposting everything that comes down the firehose without stopping to check whether articles are dupes, PR volleys, or just plain wrong.
Look at it this way. Anyone in the chain of publication of the original story, from the orginal commenter on Engadget to Engadget's editors to the anonymous coward who submitted to Slashdot to the Slashdot editor who approved it, could have done what I did: "ping thepiratebay.org" from work, and find it was down outside of Comcastland too. Then they would have had a *real* headline: "Comcast falsely accused of jamming ThePirateBay."
I hear that investigative journalism is too expensive for major news outlets to handle these days, so it's up to bloggers and websites to do the journalism. But when nobody can be bothered to type a 1-line bash command, what's left of the Fourth Estate is in deep shit.
And if you click through to the authors' profile page to look at their other comments, they're pretty typical slashdot posters. They comment on space exploration, file sharing, Lord of the Rings Online, and liberal vs conservative politics. If these are shills, they're doing a lot of random blabbing on company time, and not much actual shilling.
There should be a law against this. Something to enforce your right to control copies of your creative work, and maybe something to make sure nobody uses your unique names, logos, and marks to steal your business trade. We could call it a "copyright and trademark law".
I realize that supporting copyright and trademark law is heresy on Slashdot, but this is *exactly* the sort of situation it was designed to help with. The service provider has the right to shut you down if they want, but if you have trademarked "zephoria" -- a unique identifying phrase which is eminently trademarkable -- they can't re-purpose it without your express permission.
As someone up-thread posted, odds are good that the U.S. called up Pakistan and said "Oh by the way, we're sending in some choppers, don't even think of shooting them down", but did so *after* they had boots on the ground inside the compound.
Given that a single phone call could blow this mission, absolute stealth and secrecy was required, but once the gunfire starts, there's no need to be subtle.
Fair? No. But diplomatic relations aren't always fair. And "give us back our chopper pieces or you don't get your $1.5 billion/year in military aid" has a certain persuasiveness to it.
That was a really good article. I had noticed that the tail rotor photos from the news showed blades that seemed unevenly spaced. I figured some of them had broken off, but from that article:
That's not a useful diversion. Any American choppers in the vicinity will spook Al Qaeda, even if they're not landing on Osama's house. No, I agree with the grandparent: send in your stealth choppers first, hold back the noisy Chinooks until you've already got guns on the ground.
Fixed that for you. They did it this way to be sure they'd got the right guy, not so much for the intel.
To be fair (okay, not to be fair at all), they were such shitty lies that the only people who believed them were those who'd already drunk the Kool-Aid. The root problem was blind patriotism and equating mistrust of government with treason. The lies were almost superfluous. George Bush could have told the American public that the War Against Terror required us to invade Canada, and just over half of us would have immediately started to march on the border.
I'm guessing they found nothing of interest. If they did find any leads, they need to act on them *before* the suspects find out, or the suspects will bolt and the info will be useless. Which means that announcing that you've captured data is the last thing you want to do.
But if you've got nothing, you can *say* you've got the "motherlode", and watch and wait for people to panic and catch 'em as they flee.
One more thing:
I sat on a jury last year that acquitted a guy because we thought the DNA evidence against him, supported by expert testimony and a parade of cops swearing on a stack of bibles, was shitty. If you think juries are full of sheep who blindly trust the state, you're wrong.
Factually wrong. California spends $871 per capita on law enforcement; Wyoming spends $837.
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s0341.pdf
Science fiction aside, as I said earlier, your problem is not a Facebook problem. It's a problem with the federal government. Fight that. (And if you believe US citizens have totally lost all control over their government, you're fucked whether you post to Facebook or not, and the proper response is to take up arms and march on Washington rather than living like an Internet hermit.)
I don't think so, but then the naive never do. As I see it, your goal is to avoid any information at all about you to be available to anyone anyhow. That's pretty much impossible unless you live in a cave: those of us who live in the real world accept that every interaction we have with anyone leaves traces of our presence, whether it's website browsing data or just "hey, I remember that guy, he buys lunch here a couple times a week."
The advantage of online interactions is that you have some control over who knows what about you. I can't tell the clerk at the local Border's to forget my face after I buy a copy of The Stoner's Guide to Bong Making, but I can buy stuff from borders.com in a way that obscures my identity from the kind of datamining you're worried about. Digital presence makes the authorities' job easier, but it also makes my life richer in what I hope is a fair tradeoff.
An all-powerful police state with infinite resources can, if they like, use things like Facebook or Slashdot to learn about you. But the problem isn't Facebook or Slashdot: it's the all-powerful police state. So let's fight against that.
No it doesn't. I've turned off third-party cookies on my browser. As I said, I control the information I provide to every site I'm a member of, including crap they do behind my back. I keep an especially untrusting eye on Facebook, because they've got a shitty track record in this department, but I've decided not to shun it completely.
So the question is, am I in fact naive? The proof's in the pudding. Someone down-thread already posted a link to what he thought was my work page, but he's got the wrong guy, and even if I *was* that guy, there's nothing there I care to hide.
Having a fairly common name also helps. You've got the wrong Prof. Goodman.
Ain't nothin' on my Facebook but my name, my friends, and my random attempts at being witty. I don't care if the gov't sees any of it. If I did, it wouldn't be on Facebook. The problem isn't Facebook, it's that people -- including Assange, actually -- have a binary idea of security and trust. They think something is either totally secret and revealing it would be a huge betrayal, or it's all out there in the wind open to everyone. If you think Facebook is a privacy threat, you don't have to stop using it: just stop posting private stuff to it.
Trust is multilayered. I have stuff I only tell my close friends. I have stuff I only tell my Warcraft guild. I have stuff I only tell my wife. I have stuff I keep entirely inside my head. And none of that stuff goes on Facebook. Facebook is fine for some sorts of privacy -- for instance, as a college professor, I don't Facebook friend my students, so I don't have to worry about saying something unbecoming of a professor. For other sorts of things, I use other sorts of communications.
But I've been living in this sort of multilayered online privacy world for two decades now. Hopefully someday soon the rest of the planet will figure out how it works, so I don't have to deal with Assange's paranoid ranting, or college students who can't get a job because they're naked and/or vomiting on their profile page.
But the question was about the type of thinking that *got us into* Afghanistan in the first place. Before 9/11, the scary elements of the Pakistani government were pretty enthusiastic about destroying India and controlling Afghanistan, but I don't think they gave a damn about the U.S. so long as the military aid checks kept rolling in every year.
*Now*, after we shot their Afghan allies and blew things up inside Pakistan, they care about us enough to be a threat. But in 2000, they only threatened to their neighbors.
Some might say we should try... Worst case scenario, we run out of lawyers before they run out of bullets.
By longstanding western military tradition, followed by the US on countless occasions, you don't have to try enemy military leaders. You can just shoot at them or drop bombs on their heads until they're dead or they surrender.
I don't have a big problem with declaring Al Qaeda leaders a foreign military force and shooting them on sight. I also have no problem with declaring them domestic criminals in exile, and arresting them for trial. The problem comes when you (like the Bush administration) decide that they're neither, denying them both military and civilian rights protections. One set of laws or the other must apply to everyone.
A writing system which Slashdot won't allow us to type in, unfortunately. I declare a fatwa on the infidel website!
Crackpot says: lunatic theory A, lunatic theory B, fact everyone knows, lunatic theory C.
Fact everyone knows turned out to be true! Therefore, crackpot was right!