The problem is you seem to think all Muslims are like Osama. They are not. And from the fact that you keep posting these Islamophobic rants in just about any/. story, as is obvious from your post history, makes me think it's pathological.
I'm sorry, but not really sure what your point is. Clearly I'm not saying fossil fuel winning is safe. You cite good examples of its dangers. I also remember some suboptimal outcome for BP in the Gulf of Mexico.
But I was arguing that nuclear energy has potential risks which are huge relative to things like tidal/hydro, solar and wind. For example,
The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles.[2] The official Soviet casualty count of 31 deaths has been disputed, and long-term effects such as cancers and deformities are still being accounted for.
Lets just switch to nuclear power and be done with it. After all, it's the only realistic way to become a Type I civilization...
Yes, because there are zero downsides to nuclear power... Compared to fossil fuel it is sort of clean, to be sure, but the byproducts have to be managed for decades or more and if something does go wrong it tends to go wrong rather badly. So yes, it may be not quite as obviously horrible as fossil fuel.
Personally, I would rather current research focus more on solar, wind, tidal, geothermal -- rather than to continue to rely nuclear power.
Oh, and while they make a show of "green research" it's probably not such a great good idea to rely on the current suppliers of oil, gas, coal, etc. to actually do this. For instance, imagine my complete lack of surprise that they would much prefer hydrogen-fueled cars over battery-powered. There may actually be valid arguments for this, but from their point of view it is just too convenient that they already own all infrastructure for distribution and supply of gas/liquids to vehicles whereas they typically have no stake in the electrity grid.
1. If by "buying favour" you just mean spending money to communicate a message, then it shouldn't be censored. Speech should never be censored without a really good reason.
No, I'm pretty sure I meant what I said, spending money to buy politicians, aka corruption.
2. Here in the USA we spell it "favor".
Good for you, I guess. I'm not a native English speaker and have a British spell checker apparently. Let's sidestep this thorny dispute and call it corruption.
3. The idea that corporations are people is not disastrous, it is simply true. Corporations are neither owned nor run by robots. You seem to be trying to make corporations be run and de-facto owned by the government, which is more worthy of Cuba or Venezuela than the USA.
It's simply "true"? I'm not even sure what that means. That they're not robots doesn't mean they are people. I'm not suggesting that governments run corporations, rather I'm suggesting that the opposite seems to be happening.
4. Mr. Goodlatte is not an IBM executive, he is actually a member of Congress....A-a-a-and you have egg on your face.
Ah, yes, my bad, as they say. I was sloppy in reading TFS. Still it was the IBM guy speaking of opposing the bill.
5. What's wrong with opposing bills even when you're not a member of Congress? Are we not supposed to have opinions? Are we supposed to shut up about our opinions? Seriously, what in the world were you thinking in saying that only Congress may oppose bills?
Opposing, as in voting against? I'm not sure I quite understand your indignation at my remark... Probably I'm using the wrong word?
SCOTUS decided that 1) campaign contributions are free speech and must be protected (not limited) and 2) corporations in this regard, as in many others, are considered to have the same protection as individual citizens.
The idea of limiting contributions is to prevent corruption, the buying of influence in the political process. In a democracy (democratic republic) worthy of the name, representation should be proportional to head count, not bank account or family name. Otherwise it is a plutocracy or aristocracy, respectively (amounting to the same thing mostly). You seem to be arguing that buying favour is no problem, perhaps even natural and just... Or do I misunderstand?
The idea that corporations are people is especially disastrous when it comes to their influence on democratic processes, because they are some if the most undemocratic structures around. Now the board, say a dozen or so individuals, get to wield amounts of "speech" which are way out of any proportion to their number.
This is why folks such as this IBM exec say things, deadpan, like "we will oppose this bill". Congress opposes bills, not you, Mr. Goodlatte (cool name though).
Too bad your otherwise reasonable post, much though I disagree, had to end with a mock definition and partisan cliche falsehood.
Federalism is not Anarchism, you've got that right. Federalist is something a *state* can be, or not, if I grok the article you linked.
Anarchism is the idea (as a very crude summary of quite a varied spectrum of ideas) that a state, as we currently know it, is too large a unit to effectively respond to the needs of individuals (and typically too intrusive at that).
Some of my friends call themselves anarchists and their idea of loosely associated networks of small, self-sustaining communities is probably most aptly called anarcho-syndicalism.
What they have in Somalia or Congo is often called "anarchy" but all I started out arguing here is that this is quite detached from the philosophy of Anarchism. In fact, I would guess that taking "anarchy" to simply mean "lawless chaos" started as a caricature, designed to discredit it. It seems that worked out as planned, then. Of course it didn't help that there were (and are) some violent fringes within the much movement.
Not wanting to downplay such violent fringes at all, but this article about those Black Banner cadres says
The typical age of the Chernoznamentsy was nineteen or twenty, and some of the most active adherents were as young as fifteen years old.
Which kind of reads like juvenile "watch it burn" adherents which I alluded to earlier.
I don't think we're actually in any significant disagreement here. I just regret the fact that the word "anarchy" has come to mean what you emphasize it now does, whereas the more mature aspects of the eponymous philosphy remain largely unknown.
People should read about Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and so on -- they actually had some valuable things to say.
Thanks for replying. I think I see what you mean, I just disagree that those situations are anything like what anarchists would strive for. Which was your point, I suppose. But this sense of the word "anarchy", as in lawless chaos, has very little to do with the political / social philosophy called Anarchism, which was my point.
GGP was painting a picture of a post-apocalyptic wasteland somehow being the anarchists' wet dream. Since that never actually happened, I am not at all sure what you are trying to say with "How it always happens". Could you elaborate?
"Self-sustaining communities" is just another phrase for "isolated",...
Not at all. It means that you prefer to minimize external influences on essentials like food, water, energy, security. This has very little to do with being isolated (although you could probably find some communes which prefer isolation for its own merits). It's not about being cut off from everybody else, but about being independent. Not nearly the same thing.
... and isolated communities are almost never healthy, happy, places.
See above. But even if we assume that independent and isolated are the same thing, I would still argue that more or less isolated communities can in fact be healthy, happy, places.
I realize the word Anarchy has, perhaps even more than Socialism or Communism, been succesfully divorced from its actual meaning, especially in far-right USA.
There are quite a few schools of thought within Anarchism other than the juvenile "watch it burn" style. Believing that there are better ways to run society than what we currently know as "the state" does not necessarily imply lawlessness and Mad Max dystopia. For one thing, most people I know who style themselves anarchists would prefer small, more or less self-sustaining communities and networks of lose association.
Funny how "on a computer" works wonders for government (no expectation of privacy) and corporations (ditto plus magic patents) but has the opposite effect on common individuals, where downloading by script (violation of TOU, not even actually stealing) may well land you in more trouble than, say, jacking a car.
Yeah, it is really nice to have DDG out there. It is my default search box. However, it still happens quite regularly that it doesn't return a result which I absolutely expected. And in those cases Goggle usually does show that result.
And even if I attempt to help DDG, say by including a few more terms that I actually *copy* from the site I'm hoping to find, still nothing most of the time. It's as if their index just doesn't cover nearly as many pages.
Would be great if it improves, and for now I'll just keep trying DDG first.
Well then, they'll just have to wait until the North Pole melts and/or the US implodes. Both have been predicted, eh?
Seriously though, is it possible (I can't be bothered to RTFA just now) that Canada is the only one in this group who actually thinks for itself? Or dares oppose the more outlandish US proposals? Profits trumping health sounds distinctly Uncanadian, for one thing.
As with everything, there's a level of third party trust (the certificate authorities) or shoe-leather (exchanging keys in person) that's required regardless of the ciphers you end up using. That's a whole different discussion though.
You're of course right in pointing out the distinction between the transfer protocol and the encryption.
I don't believe Yahoo (or any other big player) facilitate the shoe-leather alternative though, it's third party certification or nothing.
I thought it was obvious, but the majority of congress critters were unaware of how pervasive NSA spying is. A number of them were shocked to learn how powerful NSA has grown. It's not even really clear that the committee members responsible for national security understood.
I have no idea is they understood or not. Certainly what they say publicly doesn't mean anything either way.
Some of those shocked congress critters are, indeed, exploring avenues to reign in the intel communities. Ineffectively exploring, for sure, but they are doing what their feeble little minds are capable of.
If I am not mistaken though, their feeble little minds are mostly coming up with proposals to further delegitimize and undermine the whistleblower stature as safeguard against criminal overreach. It'd be uplifting to learn about more constructive legislation, however; have any links?
But, there is a danger here, that we should all be aware of. Any congress critter who makes to much noise may be targeted by the NSA, and quietly blackmailed to shut the hell up. I really don't think the Secret Service can protect a congress person from the NSA and the rest of the intel apparatus. There is really no telling what has happened behind the scenes. Does kristallnacht ring any bells?
Might want to look that last one up before you throw it around on the Interwebs. I get the police state vibe, but this comparison is just so inaccurate it does your argument no favours IMHO.
IANAL either, nor even an American. But for some reason I figured this quote
The challenge hinged on the idea that the FISC had gone outside of its authority in granting the order.
explains why they went (had to go?) straight to SCOTUS because the special nature, ahem, of the foreign intelligence court places it sort of outside the conventional framework of appeals and so on. Where do you suggest they might otherwise have started?
The famous Swiss banking privacy isn't what it used to be.
The US Gov. (and others) has had teams of people working on special "Switzerland policies" for decades.
Which, as I understood it, might be part of the reason they apparently want to branch out from banking. Still backed by some of the same strict privacy laws which allowed anonymous banking to flourish, even if that is now drying up slightly, they might well succeed in setting up what amounts to a data haven.
Of course it won't be very long until the various spooks will try and eventually no doubt succeed at infiltrating and subverting that in the same they have been doing to Swiss banks.
It was one of these operations (CIA, I believe, getting a banker drunk behind the wheel with the aim of blackmail) that appalled Snowden in particular while he was stationed thereabouts.
In a weird way we'll have come full circle if one result of all this would be a data haven in Switzerland.
Again Snowdens bullshit, isn't anything the world and a few people already knew or figured out. He has yet to release anything that exposes the full extent of the US's spying network
Yeah I remember when we used to have stories about a Echelon and Carnivore etc. The apologists would usually show up with charges of "conspiracy theory" and basically paint those of us who worried about this in the past as paranoid crackpots.
Since Snowden this is no longer possible (although some predictably still attempt it). Big difference.
Homomorphic encryption might work for some applications. Still I'm always going to expect NSA et al, depriving academia as they do of some of the best an brightest in the relevant fields of math and CS, to subvert that approach as well.
If you want large companies to not perform surveillance, move them to a country where the government cant secretly compel them to do what every they want.
There was a story recently on/. about Switzerland wanting to become such an alternative. They've had some of the strictest privacy policies for a long, long time. For the wrong reasons of course (it is basically what allowed their secret banking sector to attract untold billions from tax dodgers and worse) but who knows, maybe that is actually a decent idea.
My hope is that, I've said it before, when this whole Stasi fetish starts to really hit the bottom line of some big campaign contributors, perhaps their influence might succeed where public outrage largely failed to materialize (and what there is of it can easily be ignored).
Ugh, we seem to be cross-replying to one another at various points in this thread. So yeah, I wrote GP of this one before you provided a link, and in response to an AC not you directly. Thanks for that, I'll make to sure to have a closer look when I find more time, I already mentioned elsewhere though my initial reaction is not being very impressed by it. I am sorry to have to leave this discussion though -- it's way past my bedtime, natch. We'll probably get a chance to do this again some time.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is you seem to think all Muslims are like Osama. They are not. And from the fact that you keep posting these Islamophobic rants in just about any /. story, as is obvious from your post history, makes me think it's pathological.
I'm sorry, but not really sure what your point is. Clearly I'm not saying fossil fuel winning is safe. You cite good examples of its dangers. I also remember some suboptimal outcome for BP in the Gulf of Mexico.
But I was arguing that nuclear energy has potential risks which are huge relative to things like tidal/hydro, solar and wind. For example,
The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles.[2] The official Soviet casualty count of 31 deaths has been disputed, and long-term effects such as cancers and deformities are still being accounted for.
source
There was also a little mishap in Japan which made the news.
Lets just switch to nuclear power and be done with it. After all, it's the only realistic way to become a Type I civilization...
Yes, because there are zero downsides to nuclear power... Compared to fossil fuel it is sort of clean, to be sure, but the byproducts have to be managed for decades or more and if something does go wrong it tends to go wrong rather badly. So yes, it may be not quite as obviously horrible as fossil fuel.
Personally, I would rather current research focus more on solar, wind, tidal, geothermal -- rather than to continue to rely nuclear power.
Oh, and while they make a show of "green research" it's probably not such a great good idea to rely on the current suppliers of oil, gas, coal, etc. to actually do this. For instance, imagine my complete lack of surprise that they would much prefer hydrogen-fueled cars over battery-powered. There may actually be valid arguments for this, but from their point of view it is just too convenient that they already own all infrastructure for distribution and supply of gas/liquids to vehicles whereas they typically have no stake in the electrity grid.
Ah, yes: +5, Informative. This is the /. I know and love.
I fart in your general direction!
1. If by "buying favour" you just mean spending money to communicate a message, then it shouldn't be censored. Speech should never be censored without a really good reason.
No, I'm pretty sure I meant what I said, spending money to buy politicians, aka corruption.
2. Here in the USA we spell it "favor".
Good for you, I guess. I'm not a native English speaker and have a British spell checker apparently. Let's sidestep this thorny dispute and call it corruption.
3. The idea that corporations are people is not disastrous, it is simply true. Corporations are neither owned nor run by robots. You seem to be trying to make corporations be run and de-facto owned by the government, which is more worthy of Cuba or Venezuela than the USA.
It's simply "true"? I'm not even sure what that means. That they're not robots doesn't mean they are people. I'm not suggesting that governments run corporations, rather I'm suggesting that the opposite seems to be happening.
4. Mr. Goodlatte is not an IBM executive, he is actually a member of Congress. ...A-a-a-and you have egg on your face.
Ah, yes, my bad, as they say. I was sloppy in reading TFS. Still it was the IBM guy speaking of opposing the bill.
5. What's wrong with opposing bills even when you're not a member of Congress? Are we not supposed to have opinions? Are we supposed to shut up about our opinions? Seriously, what in the world were you thinking in saying that only Congress may oppose bills?
Opposing, as in voting against? I'm not sure I quite understand your indignation at my remark... Probably I'm using the wrong word?
SCOTUS decided that 1) campaign contributions are free speech and must be protected (not limited) and 2) corporations in this regard, as in many others, are considered to have the same protection as individual citizens.
The idea of limiting contributions is to prevent corruption, the buying of influence in the political process. In a democracy (democratic republic) worthy of the name, representation should be proportional to head count, not bank account or family name. Otherwise it is a plutocracy or aristocracy, respectively (amounting to the same thing mostly). You seem to be arguing that buying favour is no problem, perhaps even natural and just... Or do I misunderstand?
The idea that corporations are people is especially disastrous when it comes to their influence on democratic processes, because they are some if the most undemocratic structures around. Now the board, say a dozen or so individuals, get to wield amounts of "speech" which are way out of any proportion to their number.
This is why folks such as this IBM exec say things, deadpan, like "we will oppose this bill". Congress opposes bills, not you, Mr. Goodlatte (cool name though).
Too bad your otherwise reasonable post, much though I disagree, had to end with a mock definition and partisan cliche falsehood.
Federalism is not Anarchism, you've got that right. Federalist is something a *state* can be, or not, if I grok the article you linked.
Anarchism is the idea (as a very crude summary of quite a varied spectrum of ideas) that a state, as we currently know it, is too large a unit to effectively respond to the needs of individuals (and typically too intrusive at that).
Some of my friends call themselves anarchists and their idea of loosely associated networks of small, self-sustaining communities is probably most aptly called anarcho-syndicalism.
What they have in Somalia or Congo is often called "anarchy" but all I started out arguing here is that this is quite detached from the philosophy of Anarchism. In fact, I would guess that taking "anarchy" to simply mean "lawless chaos" started as a caricature, designed to discredit it. It seems that worked out as planned, then. Of course it didn't help that there were (and are) some violent fringes within the much movement.
Not wanting to downplay such violent fringes at all, but this article about those Black Banner cadres says
The typical age of the Chernoznamentsy was nineteen or twenty, and some of the most active adherents were as young as fifteen years old.
Which kind of reads like juvenile "watch it burn" adherents which I alluded to earlier.
I don't think we're actually in any significant disagreement here. I just regret the fact that the word "anarchy" has come to mean what you emphasize it now does, whereas the more mature aspects of the eponymous philosphy remain largely unknown.
People should read about Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and so on -- they actually had some valuable things to say.
Thanks for replying. I think I see what you mean, I just disagree that those situations are anything like what anarchists would strive for. Which was your point, I suppose. But this sense of the word "anarchy", as in lawless chaos, has very little to do with the political / social philosophy called Anarchism, which was my point.
GGP was painting a picture of a post-apocalyptic wasteland somehow being the anarchists' wet dream. Since that never actually happened, I am not at all sure what you are trying to say with "How it always happens". Could you elaborate?
"Self-sustaining communities" is just another phrase for "isolated", ...
Not at all. It means that you prefer to minimize external influences on essentials like food, water, energy, security. This has very little to do with being isolated (although you could probably find some communes which prefer isolation for its own merits). It's not about being cut off from everybody else, but about being independent. Not nearly the same thing.
... and isolated communities are almost never healthy, happy, places.
See above. But even if we assume that independent and isolated are the same thing, I would still argue that more or less isolated communities can in fact be healthy, happy, places.
I realize the word Anarchy has, perhaps even more than Socialism or Communism, been succesfully divorced from its actual meaning, especially in far-right USA.
There are quite a few schools of thought within Anarchism other than the juvenile "watch it burn" style. Believing that there are better ways to run society than what we currently know as "the state" does not necessarily imply lawlessness and Mad Max dystopia. For one thing, most people I know who style themselves anarchists would prefer small, more or less self-sustaining communities and networks of lose association.
See here
Funny how "on a computer" works wonders for government (no expectation of privacy) and corporations (ditto plus magic patents) but has the opposite effect on common individuals, where downloading by script (violation of TOU, not even actually stealing) may well land you in more trouble than, say, jacking a car.
Yeah, it is really nice to have DDG out there. It is my default search box. However, it still happens quite regularly that it doesn't return a result which I absolutely expected. And in those cases Goggle usually does show that result.
And even if I attempt to help DDG, say by including a few more terms that I actually *copy* from the site I'm hoping to find, still nothing most of the time. It's as if their index just doesn't cover nearly as many pages.
Would be great if it improves, and for now I'll just keep trying DDG first.
Well then, they'll just have to wait until the North Pole melts and/or the US implodes. Both have been predicted, eh?
Seriously though, is it possible (I can't be bothered to RTFA just now) that Canada is the only one in this group who actually thinks for itself? Or dares oppose the more outlandish US proposals? Profits trumping health sounds distinctly Uncanadian, for one thing.
As with everything, there's a level of third party trust (the certificate authorities) or shoe-leather (exchanging keys in person) that's required regardless of the ciphers you end up using. That's a whole different discussion though.
You're of course right in pointing out the distinction between the transfer protocol and the encryption.
I don't believe Yahoo (or any other big player) facilitate the shoe-leather alternative though, it's third party certification or nothing.
I thought it was obvious, but the majority of congress critters were unaware of how pervasive NSA spying is. A number of them were shocked to learn how powerful NSA has grown. It's not even really clear that the committee members responsible for national security understood.
I have no idea is they understood or not. Certainly what they say publicly doesn't mean anything either way.
Some of those shocked congress critters are, indeed, exploring avenues to reign in the intel communities. Ineffectively exploring, for sure, but they are doing what their feeble little minds are capable of.
If I am not mistaken though, their feeble little minds are mostly coming up with proposals to further delegitimize and undermine the whistleblower stature as safeguard against criminal overreach. It'd be uplifting to learn about more constructive legislation, however; have any links?
But, there is a danger here, that we should all be aware of. Any congress critter who makes to much noise may be targeted by the NSA, and quietly blackmailed to shut the hell up. I really don't think the Secret Service can protect a congress person from the NSA and the rest of the intel apparatus. There is really no telling what has happened behind the scenes. Does kristallnacht ring any bells?
Might want to look that last one up before you throw it around on the Interwebs. I get the police state vibe, but this comparison is just so inaccurate it does your argument no favours IMHO.
IANAL either, nor even an American. But for some reason I figured this quote
The challenge hinged on the idea that the FISC had gone outside of its authority in granting the order.
explains why they went (had to go?) straight to SCOTUS because the special nature, ahem, of the foreign intelligence court places it sort of outside the conventional framework of appeals and so on. Where do you suggest they might otherwise have started?
Sounds like we're going to need a reliable supplier of pitchforks soon.
Well, they've got pitchchopsticks over there I guess. But that'll do just fine, once you get the hang of it.
Instead of pauses, recognize them for what they are: markers to show where sections of text were omitted for brevity or clarity.
So what is Shatner omitting? Inquisitive minds want to know!
The famous Swiss banking privacy isn't what it used to be.
The US Gov. (and others) has had teams of people working on special "Switzerland policies" for decades.
Which, as I understood it, might be part of the reason they apparently want to branch out from banking. Still backed by some of the same strict privacy laws which allowed anonymous banking to flourish, even if that is now drying up slightly, they might well succeed in setting up what amounts to a data haven.
Of course it won't be very long until the various spooks will try and eventually no doubt succeed at infiltrating and subverting that in the same they have been doing to Swiss banks.
It was one of these operations (CIA, I believe, getting a banker drunk behind the wheel with the aim of blackmail) that appalled Snowden in particular while he was stationed thereabouts.
In a weird way we'll have come full circle if one result of all this would be a data haven in Switzerland.
Again Snowdens bullshit, isn't anything the world and a few people already knew or figured out. He has yet to release anything that exposes the full extent of the US's spying network
Yeah I remember when we used to have stories about a Echelon and Carnivore etc. The apologists would usually show up with charges of "conspiracy theory" and basically paint those of us who worried about this in the past as paranoid crackpots.
Since Snowden this is no longer possible (although some predictably still attempt it). Big difference.
Homomorphic encryption might work for some applications. Still I'm always going to expect NSA et al, depriving academia as they do of some of the best an brightest in the relevant fields of math and CS, to subvert that approach as well.
If you want large companies to not perform surveillance, move them to a country where the government cant secretly compel them to do what every they want.
There was a story recently on /. about Switzerland wanting to become such an alternative. They've had some of the strictest privacy policies for a long, long time. For the wrong reasons of course (it is basically what allowed their secret banking sector to attract untold billions from tax dodgers and worse) but who knows, maybe that is actually a decent idea.
My hope is that, I've said it before, when this whole Stasi fetish starts to really hit the bottom line of some big campaign contributors, perhaps their influence might succeed where public outrage largely failed to materialize (and what there is of it can easily be ignored).
Ugh, we seem to be cross-replying to one another at various points in this thread. So yeah, I wrote GP of this one before you provided a link, and in response to an AC not you directly. Thanks for that, I'll make to sure to have a closer look when I find more time, I already mentioned elsewhere though my initial reaction is not being very impressed by it. I am sorry to have to leave this discussion though -- it's way past my bedtime, natch. We'll probably get a chance to do this again some time.