Lets rant about how culpable the 12 year old bully was for bullying other students. Because we all know 12 year old bullies (girl or boy) are capable of handing things like an adult should, in your perfect world.
While I understand that it's bad, I also have a VERY VERY hard time condoning the punishment of essentially free speech.
I WILL NOT stand by and allow someone to be punished for speaking something that I find offensive. I don't care if it offends you, it's not your right to avoid offense.
Surely, you understand this important distinction, as the prosecution of protected speech has so many social negatives.
At what point do you propose that speech transitions into a felony akin to armed robbery? How do you make that distinction?
What is the edge case? I want to point out that in an average grade 7 glass, there are 30 students, 10 of whom are probably doing a bit of bullying and 5 of whom are probably targets.
Do you toss 10 of them in prison? How does the "crime" of bullying change when exactly the same behavior causes a suicide in one particularly vulnerable kid, but doesn't in the other 18,450 classrooms in the country? Are the other 75,000-some bullies less liable for their behavior?
I am generally opposed to handing out sentences that are not justified other than by the idea of "sending a message" because studies and numerous social experiments have shown that this has almost no effect on other similar offenders, and only serves to spend lots of money and destroy more lives.
The point the GP was making wasn't that bullying was OK, it's that prosecuting bullies (who are maybe 10%-20% of the school population, on some level) is asinine, and having the severity of the punishment depend so much on the outcome, rather than the actual behavior is problematic (although not entirely unjustified).
It's worth pointing out that attempted murder is prosecuted with about 30% of the severity of murder.
If bullying-leads-to-suicide is a crime that justifies 5 years, does bullying-without-suicide justifies 1.5 years?
I have a question for you. What if he had the gaul to go into the FireFox code and bury this functionality within the browser.
He could call it the "BookFaceFox Browser"
Is he now still in violation of the TOS? What if he puts in the feature list "does not allow websites to override the functionality of the Enter key" and "stops stupid web designers from making non-scrolling text boxes", etc?:-D
In the case of rivers, a substantial portion of the pollution is unidentifiable after the fact.
Unless you are, as a part of civil discovery, going to hire an expert to conduct a pollution impact assessment of the past 15-20 years of inputs on the river system (which may cover multiple states and dozens of municipalities), you will not succeed with the lawsuit.
In addition, since the effect is certainly cumulative, the lawsuit might resemble The Municipality of Elmwood Park vs 185 companies, including 30 multinationals, 85 who are currently out of business, 154 individuals and a multitude of upstream regional governments. The "discovery" phase of the trial, including environmental impacts would be disputed into oblivion and would cost billions to conduct, where it was even possible to determine the source of the pollution. There are about 80 other conditions that would make PROVING someone was a culprit absolutely impossible.
So sure, in some small fraction of cases (the Exxon Valdez, for example), there is a clear liability case, but in many cases, there is not. Besides, resolving liabilities through settlements is much more often done, and appears cheaper to the board members who are liable for quarterly earnings calls with stockholders, even if they are aware there is a billion dollar liability 50 years in the future, and even if fixing the problem is cheaper than said liability, simply because the time horizon is greater than they are liable to budget for (which is seldom beyond 5 years in modern public companies). For example, the cost of liabilities and cleanup from extra oil spill every other year may have been cheaper than the double-hull ships that are now used, but the environmental impact of those extra oil spills could be catastrophic to fisheries, logging, tourism or any number of other industries, in addition to the irreparable environmental impact and long-term biosphere damage. Not to mention that "cleanup" efforts are incomplete and often don't account for the cumulitive effect on larger species, and the interplay between various issues on longer time scales (the destruction of the Caspian sea being another great example of this).
All said, threat of civil is a reasonable approach for liabilities that are immediate, direct liabilities within a 3-5 year time horizon, but are a TERRIBLE means of controlling externalities that may be cumulative from multiple sources, are indeterminate in origin (difficult to cite/identify individual sources, especially after the fact) and those that have time horizons of decades, rather than years (as most pollution does).
So... yes, I think it's a terrible idea you just presented and only works for a small fraction of cases, and even if those fraction of cases, may not help the issue (might just spread money around, with only superficial benefit).:-)
The government exists to control externalities. Things like the intrinsic social cost of pollution is borne by everyone (and unequally, by those downriver/downwind), but the person "dumping" waste bears no cost, unless it is enforced upon them by the government. In many cases, it is economically cheaper to proceed doing some business or personal activity without adequate pollution controls. However, cleaning up pollution eventually gets paid for by, for example, a municipality who has a vested interest in having clean beaches, or vibrant wildlife. This company/individual who is polluting, is then "externalizing" their costs to this third party, without consequence. In the same vein, if there is no interested party, the pollution may simply cause biosphere collapse, as happened in several river systems in the United States during the 20th century. The Cuyahoga River is a famous example, where, in the early 18th century, the river is being described as one of the richest rivers in the world, where fish can be found by simply dipping a net over the side of a boat. By the mid 20th century, the number of species of living thing in the river numbered.... one... a pollution-eating algae. The river caught fire a number of times between 1950 and the late 1960s, when the EPA was created to enforce pollution controls in such areas.
I mention this particular component, because "outlawing the EPA" is one of the more common rallying cries of libertarian political candidates in the USA. Pollution is one isolated example, but it represents a very obvious and easy to illustrate example.
This is the root of the OPs discussion. So actually, far from being a straw-man, it clearly and accurate criticizes the mainstream view of the majority of libertarians in the USA (at least those associated with the major parties/groups and/or mainstream ideologies.
P3: I don't understand herd immunity, but it's complicated (psst... read about the effect it had on Polio and then make your decision)
P4: Some viruses don't vaccinate well (because they mutate rapidly). I don't understand how they work!! Woah! Biology!
P5: Science is awesome, but it ain't perfect (duh)
P6: So yeah, random rant about not funding research enough, and a nonsensical question about the reduction in infectious diseases.
You're aware that smallpox killed over 400,000 Europeans per year in the 18th century (approximately 1% of the population)? Our "research" isn't perfect, but it has made an ENORMOUS dent in worldwide mortality rates.
I was reading that the TOR attacks against the browser bundle executed by the FBI recently were specifically targeted at Windows users, because not enough people doing illegal crap are sophisticated (or paranoid) enough to run something other than what was pre-installed on their system. That may change now, but it probably wasn't the case before these leaks and other events.
Hulu doesn't allow connections for anyone outside the US. They have copyright holders with a gun to their head so they have to be extreme dicks about blocking non-US access, including all proxies they know of...
Listen, I've read the analysis and I've read all the available documentation. I agree with Schneider's analysis, but you're exaggerating.
1. They can identify anyone using TOR by looking at the encrypted traffic. Doesn't matter what you're running.
Maybe. But they do this by injecting cookies and then trying to find those cookies later on the unencrypted Internet, once you've turned off Tor. This doesn't work so well if you're using the browser bundle, or some sort of Live CD, but it may work on
2. Using their privileged position on the internet backbone, they can perform MitM attacks by responding faster than the real servers, so they server you their malware package while serving the original content. Doesn't matter what you're running.
The race-condition man-on-the-side capability of the NSA was never doubted, though nobody was really sure until recently how/where/if it was deployed and how often it was used. It looks like it's a rather common thing they use these days. In that vein, they can probably intercept the traffic between the exit node and the hosted content, unless, of course, you're using a.onion site, in which case, they most certainly cannot (unless they own the exit node, which they will only sometimes do).
3. The NSA has 0-days for everything, so now you're rooted. Doesn't matter what you're running. And likely de-anonymized at this point.
If you're rooted, you are also de-anonymized. That's almost a sure bet. Avoiding getting rooted is the key.
4. If you're using a live CD, you might stop being rooted when you power down. Unless the NSA has a 0-day for your BIOS, which is certainly possible, in which case even that didn't help.
Doing a blind root on a BIOS is pretty unlikely. In fact, rooting someone who doesn't have a browser/OS combination that has a pre-built exploit make is much less likely. Especially even moreso if you spoof the user agent.
Regardless, the tone of your post is a bit over the top, and doesn't match the evidence- just figured I would point that out.
Right on. Over the last 30 years in the US, the mean inflation adjusted salary has increased, while the median of the same thing has decreased. That's disturbing.
Inflation is primariliy measured by changes to the CPI.
The CPI is calculated by taking a "basket of goods" that a consumer would buy.
This includes things like... a pint of milk, a loaf of bread, a gallon of gasoline, a pound of beef, a 600sqft apartment in downtown of several cities, a 1200sqft house in the suburbs of several cities.
Then you average it out and see if it changes over time.
How is that not cost of living?
Here is the actual basket and weighting from Canada:
It took approximately 65 engineers 2-3 years to design a major line of industrial engineering robot to build infrastructure (say... steel girders), and maybe another 100 full time jobs to build, market and deliver the product.
This line of industrial engineering robot displaced 18,000 low-skilled jobs and replaced them with around 200 high-skilled jobs (maintenance techs).
Those other 17,200 went into the service industry or construction (based on the boom-bust cycle) and are now highly dependent on local fluctuations of the economy.
So, what happened here was an increase in productivity and profits for every business involved - a substantial decrease in salary costs, and a notable decrease in workforce, across the board.
What it does is stratify society. There are 17,000 people struggling to re-train and find low-level jobs, and 300 very well paid engineers and technicians paying them to do menial work.
Then again, perhaps their factory work was menial in the first place, but it is worth pointing out that the massive economic growth of the last 80 years was primarily based on those factory jobs being "middle class".
A lot of people cite the democratizing power of "open access" and "crowd sourcing". I feel this is an example of the same principle at work.
On one hand, it is easier for those that are not entrenched within the bastions of power to be heard, but on the other hand, all data received from these sources must be treated much more cautiously.
In the past "being published" was a big deal, as it required a fairly high bar of factual accuracy, and that is still the case of many prestigious journals, but in the rush to Twitter-ize research and accept as many publishable details as rapidly as possible in the name of profit and prestige, the barriers to entry have eroded.
In much the same way that hard investigative journalism with strong ethical guidelines, verifiable sources and solid editing will always have a place in my heart, these reputable journals can serve to establish a foundation of trust in the scientific arena. And now, in much the same way that one should treat any writing within the "blogosphere" as suspect until verified, many open access journals must now be treated with the same level of suspicion until it is proven otherwise that they hold themselves to a higher standard.
Normally I would scoff at Snowden being included on a list like this. I was a bit put off by Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize before actually doing anything, and a bit put off at Assange being nominated for something simliar, because both seemed like self-serving political statements to me, but on reflection, what Snowden has done was controlled, targeted and highly effective, in my opinion. It was far from the uncontrolled dump that Bradley Manning did, or the barely-controlled shitstorm that Assange supervised.
In the same vein, the leak, while angering many Americans, should be a huge benefit for citizens of every country, both outside the US, but also inside. A great gain for Europeans, as far as awareness of human rights issues.
Mr Obama's opponent in the presidential race (ahem... Romney)...
Yeah, he rolled out the same plan in one of the larger states in the Union.
It cut health care costs notably without impacting business investment substantially.
He adopted the plan because it was basically a republican think-tank plan from the mid-1990s and was championed by several republican presidential nominees, including Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney.
They own several billion in buildings, patents, factories, etc.
Even if they liquidate tomorrow, they don't lose that much.
Plus, Blackberry actually owns a few really important patents, for example, a critical patent on eliptic curve cryptography, which is the foundation off the next generation of cryptosystems.
Slashdot Mirror
Great point. +1 Parenting
While it was a bit stupid, he's making a point.
How does bullying fall into the "serious crime" level, and when?
If I call someone ugly and they're already so down that it tips them over the edge and they kill themselves on the spot, am I liable?
When do I become liable? What if they are being abused at home, and that causes their poor mental state? Am I liable for "tipping the scale"?
Hmmm... think about it.
I work with computers and I disagree, but I'm not gonna call you names :-)
Lets rant about how culpable the 12 year old bully was for bullying other students. Because we all know 12 year old bullies (girl or boy) are capable of handing things like an adult should, in your perfect world.
For comparison.
While I understand that it's bad, I also have a VERY VERY hard time condoning the punishment of essentially free speech.
I WILL NOT stand by and allow someone to be punished for speaking something that I find offensive. I don't care if it offends you, it's not your right to avoid offense.
Surely, you understand this important distinction, as the prosecution of protected speech has so many social negatives.
At what point do you propose that speech transitions into a felony akin to armed robbery? How do you make that distinction?
What is the edge case? I want to point out that in an average grade 7 glass, there are 30 students, 10 of whom are probably doing a bit of bullying and 5 of whom are probably targets.
Do you toss 10 of them in prison? How does the "crime" of bullying change when exactly the same behavior causes a suicide in one particularly vulnerable kid, but doesn't in the other 18,450 classrooms in the country? Are the other 75,000-some bullies less liable for their behavior?
I am generally opposed to handing out sentences that are not justified other than by the idea of "sending a message" because studies and numerous social experiments have shown that this has almost no effect on other similar offenders, and only serves to spend lots of money and destroy more lives.
The point the GP was making wasn't that bullying was OK, it's that prosecuting bullies (who are maybe 10%-20% of the school population, on some level) is asinine, and having the severity of the punishment depend so much on the outcome, rather than the actual behavior is problematic (although not entirely unjustified).
It's worth pointing out that attempted murder is prosecuted with about 30% of the severity of murder.
If bullying-leads-to-suicide is a crime that justifies 5 years, does bullying-without-suicide justifies 1.5 years?
I think not.
This is a BROWSER EXTENSION.
I have a question for you. What if he had the gaul to go into the FireFox code and bury this functionality within the browser.
He could call it the "BookFaceFox Browser"
Is he now still in violation of the TOS? What if he puts in the feature list "does not allow websites to override the functionality of the Enter key" and "stops stupid web designers from making non-scrolling text boxes", etc? :-D
In the case of rivers, a substantial portion of the pollution is unidentifiable after the fact.
Unless you are, as a part of civil discovery, going to hire an expert to conduct a pollution impact assessment of the past 15-20 years of inputs on the river system (which may cover multiple states and dozens of municipalities), you will not succeed with the lawsuit.
In addition, since the effect is certainly cumulative, the lawsuit might resemble The Municipality of Elmwood Park vs 185 companies, including 30 multinationals, 85 who are currently out of business, 154 individuals and a multitude of upstream regional governments. The "discovery" phase of the trial, including environmental impacts would be disputed into oblivion and would cost billions to conduct, where it was even possible to determine the source of the pollution. There are about 80 other conditions that would make PROVING someone was a culprit absolutely impossible.
So sure, in some small fraction of cases (the Exxon Valdez, for example), there is a clear liability case, but in many cases, there is not. Besides, resolving liabilities through settlements is much more often done, and appears cheaper to the board members who are liable for quarterly earnings calls with stockholders, even if they are aware there is a billion dollar liability 50 years in the future, and even if fixing the problem is cheaper than said liability, simply because the time horizon is greater than they are liable to budget for (which is seldom beyond 5 years in modern public companies). For example, the cost of liabilities and cleanup from extra oil spill every other year may have been cheaper than the double-hull ships that are now used, but the environmental impact of those extra oil spills could be catastrophic to fisheries, logging, tourism or any number of other industries, in addition to the irreparable environmental impact and long-term biosphere damage. Not to mention that "cleanup" efforts are incomplete and often don't account for the cumulitive effect on larger species, and the interplay between various issues on longer time scales (the destruction of the Caspian sea being another great example of this).
All said, threat of civil is a reasonable approach for liabilities that are immediate, direct liabilities within a 3-5 year time horizon, but are a TERRIBLE means of controlling externalities that may be cumulative from multiple sources, are indeterminate in origin (difficult to cite/identify individual sources, especially after the fact) and those that have time horizons of decades, rather than years (as most pollution does).
So... yes, I think it's a terrible idea you just presented and only works for a small fraction of cases, and even if those fraction of cases, may not help the issue (might just spread money around, with only superficial benefit). :-)
The government exists to control externalities. Things like the intrinsic social cost of pollution is borne by everyone (and unequally, by those downriver/downwind), but the person "dumping" waste bears no cost, unless it is enforced upon them by the government. In many cases, it is economically cheaper to proceed doing some business or personal activity without adequate pollution controls. However, cleaning up pollution eventually gets paid for by, for example, a municipality who has a vested interest in having clean beaches, or vibrant wildlife. This company/individual who is polluting, is then "externalizing" their costs to this third party, without consequence. In the same vein, if there is no interested party, the pollution may simply cause biosphere collapse, as happened in several river systems in the United States during the 20th century. The Cuyahoga River is a famous example, where, in the early 18th century, the river is being described as one of the richest rivers in the world, where fish can be found by simply dipping a net over the side of a boat. By the mid 20th century, the number of species of living thing in the river numbered.... one... a pollution-eating algae. The river caught fire a number of times between 1950 and the late 1960s, when the EPA was created to enforce pollution controls in such areas.
I mention this particular component, because "outlawing the EPA" is one of the more common rallying cries of libertarian political candidates in the USA. Pollution is one isolated example, but it represents a very obvious and easy to illustrate example.
This is the root of the OPs discussion. So actually, far from being a straw-man, it clearly and accurate criticizes the mainstream view of the majority of libertarians in the USA (at least those associated with the major parties/groups and/or mainstream ideologies.
Pointless post.
Summary by paragraph:
P1: I don't know much, but I have an opinion
P2: Fund more research - is good (duh)
P3: I don't understand herd immunity, but it's complicated (psst... read about the effect it had on Polio and then make your decision)
P4: Some viruses don't vaccinate well (because they mutate rapidly). I don't understand how they work!! Woah! Biology!
P5: Science is awesome, but it ain't perfect (duh)
P6: So yeah, random rant about not funding research enough, and a nonsensical question about the reduction in infectious diseases.
You're aware that smallpox killed over 400,000 Europeans per year in the 18th century (approximately 1% of the population)? Our "research" isn't perfect, but it has made an ENORMOUS dent in worldwide mortality rates.
And/or to simply report "hey, look, I won with 79%"
Does it really matter what the cryptographically secure vote tabulation machine says?
Nope. Despot owns media. Despot owns vote machines. Despot has guns. Despot wins.
I was reading that the TOR attacks against the browser bundle executed by the FBI recently were specifically targeted at Windows users, because not enough people doing illegal crap are sophisticated (or paranoid) enough to run something other than what was pre-installed on their system. That may change now, but it probably wasn't the case before these leaks and other events.
The Patriot Act begs to differ...
Hulu doesn't allow connections for anyone outside the US. They have copyright holders with a gun to their head so they have to be extreme dicks about blocking non-US access, including all proxies they know of...
This is absurd.
Listen, I've read the analysis and I've read all the available documentation. I agree with Schneider's analysis, but you're exaggerating.
1. They can identify anyone using TOR by looking at the encrypted traffic. Doesn't matter what you're running.
Maybe. But they do this by injecting cookies and then trying to find those cookies later on the unencrypted Internet, once you've turned off Tor. This doesn't work so well if you're using the browser bundle, or some sort of Live CD, but it may work on
2. Using their privileged position on the internet backbone, they can perform MitM attacks by responding faster than the real servers, so they server you their malware package while serving the original content. Doesn't matter what you're running.
The race-condition man-on-the-side capability of the NSA was never doubted, though nobody was really sure until recently how/where/if it was deployed and how often it was used. It looks like it's a rather common thing they use these days. In that vein, they can probably intercept the traffic between the exit node and the hosted content, unless, of course, you're using a .onion site, in which case, they most certainly cannot (unless they own the exit node, which they will only sometimes do).
3. The NSA has 0-days for everything, so now you're rooted. Doesn't matter what you're running. And likely de-anonymized at this point.
If you're rooted, you are also de-anonymized. That's almost a sure bet. Avoiding getting rooted is the key.
4. If you're using a live CD, you might stop being rooted when you power down. Unless the NSA has a 0-day for your BIOS, which is certainly possible, in which case even that didn't help.
Doing a blind root on a BIOS is pretty unlikely. In fact, rooting someone who doesn't have a browser/OS combination that has a pre-built exploit make is much less likely. Especially even moreso if you spoof the user agent.
Regardless, the tone of your post is a bit over the top, and doesn't match the evidence- just figured I would point that out.
The powerpoint specifically states that they have considered it but regard it a questionable action both for policy reasons as well as technical ones.
Right on. Over the last 30 years in the US, the mean inflation adjusted salary has increased, while the median of the same thing has decreased. That's disturbing.
Option 3 - The overlords use the robots to kill all the "useless" meat sacks.
Option 4 - The robots turn on the meat sacks and wipe them out. :-)
Hell Mr Marx, nice to see you're back.
Good luck with that revolution of yours, I heard the last one didn't go so well. :-)
Yes, what you just said is the core ideal of Marxism.
Not that it's bad... just maybe not realistic, given human nature to horde.
Inflation is primariliy measured by changes to the CPI.
The CPI is calculated by taking a "basket of goods" that a consumer would buy.
This includes things like... a pint of milk, a loaf of bread, a gallon of gasoline, a pound of beef, a 600sqft apartment in downtown of several cities, a 1200sqft house in the suburbs of several cities.
Then you average it out and see if it changes over time.
How is that not cost of living?
Here is the actual basket and weighting from Canada:
http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb-bmdi/document/2301_D48_T9_V2-eng.htm
If instead you pay a little more, you can hold onto those good workers and have maybe 20% of the head count you had before and increase profitability.
Seriously, show me a call center where you can eliminate 4/5 of the employees and still keep up with call volume?
Really?!
Do you think management is that incompetent? I know most middle-management in a call center is a tad slow, but 4/5? You're completely full of it.
It took approximately 65 engineers 2-3 years to design a major line of industrial engineering robot to build infrastructure (say... steel girders), and maybe another 100 full time jobs to build, market and deliver the product.
This line of industrial engineering robot displaced 18,000 low-skilled jobs and replaced them with around 200 high-skilled jobs (maintenance techs).
Those other 17,200 went into the service industry or construction (based on the boom-bust cycle) and are now highly dependent on local fluctuations of the economy.
So, what happened here was an increase in productivity and profits for every business involved - a substantial decrease in salary costs, and a notable decrease in workforce, across the board.
What it does is stratify society. There are 17,000 people struggling to re-train and find low-level jobs, and 300 very well paid engineers and technicians paying them to do menial work.
Then again, perhaps their factory work was menial in the first place, but it is worth pointing out that the massive economic growth of the last 80 years was primarily based on those factory jobs being "middle class".
A lot of people cite the democratizing power of "open access" and "crowd sourcing". I feel this is an example of the same principle at work.
On one hand, it is easier for those that are not entrenched within the bastions of power to be heard, but on the other hand, all data received from these sources must be treated much more cautiously.
In the past "being published" was a big deal, as it required a fairly high bar of factual accuracy, and that is still the case of many prestigious journals, but in the rush to Twitter-ize research and accept as many publishable details as rapidly as possible in the name of profit and prestige, the barriers to entry have eroded.
In much the same way that hard investigative journalism with strong ethical guidelines, verifiable sources and solid editing will always have a place in my heart, these reputable journals can serve to establish a foundation of trust in the scientific arena. And now, in much the same way that one should treat any writing within the "blogosphere" as suspect until verified, many open access journals must now be treated with the same level of suspicion until it is proven otherwise that they hold themselves to a higher standard.
TLDR: Democratization is not always a good thing.
Agreed.
Normally I would scoff at Snowden being included on a list like this. I was a bit put off by Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize before actually doing anything, and a bit put off at Assange being nominated for something simliar, because both seemed like self-serving political statements to me, but on reflection, what Snowden has done was controlled, targeted and highly effective, in my opinion. It was far from the uncontrolled dump that Bradley Manning did, or the barely-controlled shitstorm that Assange supervised.
In the same vein, the leak, while angering many Americans, should be a huge benefit for citizens of every country, both outside the US, but also inside. A great gain for Europeans, as far as awareness of human rights issues.
LOL!!
LOLOL!!
Really?
Mr Obama's opponent in the presidential race (ahem... Romney)...
Yeah, he rolled out the same plan in one of the larger states in the Union.
It cut health care costs notably without impacting business investment substantially.
He adopted the plan because it was basically a republican think-tank plan from the mid-1990s and was championed by several republican presidential nominees, including Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney.
Did you KNOW this? LOL
They own several billion in buildings, patents, factories, etc.
Even if they liquidate tomorrow, they don't lose that much.
Plus, Blackberry actually owns a few really important patents, for example, a critical patent on eliptic curve cryptography, which is the foundation off the next generation of cryptosystems.
Interesting, to say the least.