Sorry for totally offtopic, replying to own post... Could it be that posting anonymously does not in fact preserve mods, but just undoes them silently? Cause the posts I moderated show no sign of it now. I just assumed it would work because I see quite often lines like "anon to preserve mods".
Actually it's probably a good thing. A warning would be nice though, waste of perfectly good modpoints.
It's not a social problem. It's problem of power abuse. Making it harder to abuse can help contain the problem. If everyone uses end-to-end encryption, then centralized ubiquitous surveillance is impossible.
Until they outlaw encryption.
Or until they break the currently perceived "safe" encryption algorithm, for going key sizes. Assuming they haven't already done so, or at least not to the extent that they can routinely decrypt reasonable quantities as good as live.
Or better yet, solve it more fundamentally by some revolutioniary technique for factoring large integers. Certainly they've got some top boffins at their disposal, much to everybody else's detriment.
Not saying you shouldn't encrypt. I mostly agree with your post. But really, we have only the slightest tangential glimpse of a shadow cast by the stuff NSA et al are actually capable of.
Frail? Wait until you hear the man curse. "The thick of it" is essentially the original bbc show that has since branched out to the US as Veep. It is pretty hilarious and Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker is unforgettable in every sense.
Check out this compilation but be warned of strong language. My favorite quote at 5:20.
Yeah well it's one thing to say that "everybody does it", though I haven't seen nearly as many reports on other countries as I have about the US. Maybe they are just less incompetent, rather than less morally corrupt.
But even so, given that the US spends about as much on defense (sic) as the rest of the world combined, the picture isn't really very symmetric, now is it? To the extent that figures are even known, that is -- under Rumsfeld the DOD became officially unaccountable, if I remember correctly. So even if it's true that everybody does it, it is nowhere near the same scale.
Besides, if everybody takes the lowest common denominator for their moral compass, we'll just have a race to the bottom -- which of course nobody wins.
I was wondering about the relationship between NSA and academia, only the other way around. It's probable that they've got their eye on relevant courses (math, cs) and must by now employ a significant number of top-shelf scientists -- whose insights are not likely shared academically, certainly not in a timely fashion.
This seems to me quite detrimental to scientific progress in these areas.
Hate to reply to self, but it occurred to me that if Snowden means to produce a final trump card (before disappearing, for better or worse) the most damaging might be evidence that (parts of) US government is itself a target of these programs. He did, after all, say something like "I could have tapped POTUS". Hints of Hoover, Edgar J., but with less individual eccentricity and more institutional ruthlessness.
Yesterday, 217 congressmen decided that their own personal phone calls are relevant to a terrorist investigation, since they apparently can't even trust themselves.
Well, given that NSA has had all this time to monitor their personal phone calls, etcetera, at the time these congressmen voted. But no, I'm sure they're all clean as a whistle and immune from blackmail. Although, it probably wouldn't even really have to come to blackmail -- the mere possibility is enough of a threat.
In fact, to an outside observer, it would almost seem as if the parties achieve bipartisan support for legislation in exactly those cases where opposition from the public at large is (relatively) strong. Perhaps these would be the best examples to bring up if one were inclined to argue that neither party, in fact, represents the People.
Your examples are not so much untrue as they are selective. In fact, they are mostly about a single incident, and the echoes of that event -- which included some predictable attempts by some opportunistic politicians, and hence the mainstream media, to frame it as a debate about ethnicity, race, religion and the Greatness of Our Heritage. Populist far right, that is, who seem to have moved on since to Eurobashing.
Obviously the murder of Theo Van Gogh was a terrible crime, and yes his murderer claims to have acted on religious impulse -- van Gogh was a buffoon who insulted people for his own amusement, and found an especially rewarding response when insulting Islam so he really went to town. I shouldn't have to point out that this doesn't warrant his death, and fortunately the culprit was tried and convicted.
But you'd be wrong, in my opinion, to say that this one guy represents his religion, whether he himself claims to or not. In the same way, I don't consider Protestants represented by some anti-abortion terrorists, the Catholics by some pedophile priests or the Jews by some murderous settlers.
It's just that, in his mind, "defending my group" is less dishonorable than the blind undirected rage that affected him as an individual. If not Van Gogh, this guy would have found some other victim and possibly some other non-justification. The more likely real reasons for such rage, in this case and certain others, is the fact that this huge part of the population in our major cities have long suffered injustice.
The first generation were proactively recruited from the lower to zero educated ranks of remote rural areas of (disproportionally) Turkey and Morocco, to leave their homes and lands and to do our shitiest jobs for peanuts. Hardly any attempts were made at integration. As long as you had a single guy per crew who knew five Dutch words you were good to go. Now everybody is surprised that their kids don't magically all graduate from universities and, in stead, feel marginalized and frustrated.
I don't expect, or even wish, for everyone in my country to share all my values. I expect to live in a country where systems are in place to determine some common denomination of all our values. And I still believe the Netherlands is such a place. Despite a very few, but in compensation vocal and and hysterical, voices to the contrary.
So really, everyday life in my country is not at all adequately described by the links you posted.
Ah yes, mr Fjord has found a hit in his database of links to make his point, and is now posting the results, repeatedly. Clearly everyone should be scared shitless, like he is, of those evil Muslims. They are gaining way too much influence in "our" western countries, even though "we" would never ever dream of interfering in theirs. Take it from a Dutch guy: you are wrong.
Really? Care to give examples? Because I thought that torture will only get people to tell you what they think you want to hear. Truth doesn't figure into it.
Unless the aim of torture of one guy is actually to frighten and discourage a bunch of other guys not yet residing in your secret lair dungeons. Maybe that would work. But that would be, you know, terrorism.
1) One of these fellows is supposedly a KKK member (or, rather, posed as one when soliciting funds from another (real) KKK dude 2) They were pro-Israel and claimed to want to target "enemies of Israel"
Yet you seem unwilling to accept that any such thing as a non-Muslim terrorist might exist, so you take (1) at face value and then use that to argue that (2) is unlikely to be true and surely they are really actually anti-semites like terrists are suppose to be.
This argument is silly. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch, I know.
Thanks for replying! Yes we tried some of the more obvious workarounds, but couldn't prevent clicks from sometimes being synthesized "after the fact". So for example we would do a page transition in response to a touchstart event, but if those same X,Y coordinates on the new page would cover a clickable item, THAT would receive a spurious event.
By this time we had to get some apps out the door and we went native. To my regret, as I was just getting excited about HTML5. Then, later, I ran across this document by some google guys. Sounds like it might help resolve this major annoyance.
We used to develop mobile apps using jQueryMobile and Cordova (formerly PhoneGap)... Combined with HTML5 application cache the performance was actually pretty good, with one nasty exception; There is a delay of several hundred milliseconds before the framework receives touch events -- from what I understand this is not actually something jQM can do much about, it comes from the way the underlying layers distinguish swipes, taps, etc. But it utterly kills the experience. So much so that we have since moved on to developing native apps.
But I've read about some approach (some google guys, can't be bothered to find the link just now) to getting around this issue, and if that works out I'd gladly go back to JQM.
The shah is a good example, yes. Of a western backed brutal regime, without which it might not have been possible for fundamentalist tendencies to take hold as they did. Similar story for similar places though, some to this day. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Quwait, Egypt, Pakistan.
Now again, I'm not in any way defending these horrible acts. But the idea that they are purely religious acts, as some suggest/believe, is plainly and obviously mistaken.
It would be damn hard to motivate anyone against "the west" in those places purely for religious reasons. If you honestly believe that "hatred of the west" in the middle east is unrelated to various, shall we say, interventions, you are as misguided as they are.
Even though the following is apparently *not* due to John Cleese -- as I thought before I g**gled it just now -- I would submit to you the following:
You should stop playing American football. There is only one kind of football. What you refer to as American football is not a very good game. The 2.15% of you who are aware that there is a world outside your borders may have noticed that no one else plays American football. You will no longer be allowed to play it, and should instead play proper football. Initially, it would be best if you played with the girls. It is a difficult game. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which is similar to American "football", but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like nancies). We are hoping to get together at least a US Rugby sevens side by 2005. You should stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the 'World Series' for a game which is not played outside of America. Since only 2.15% of you are aware that there is a world beyond your borders,your error is understandable. Instead of baseball, you will be allowed to play a girls' game called rounders, which is baseball without fancy team strip, oversized gloves, collector cards or hotdogs.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry for totally offtopic, replying to own post... Could it be that posting anonymously does not in fact preserve mods, but just undoes them silently? Cause the posts I moderated show no sign of it now. I just assumed it would work because I see quite often lines like "anon to preserve mods".
Actually it's probably a good thing. A warning would be nice though, waste of perfectly good modpoints.
It's not a social problem. It's problem of power abuse. Making it harder to abuse can help contain the problem. If everyone uses end-to-end encryption, then centralized ubiquitous surveillance is impossible.
Until they outlaw encryption.
Or until they break the currently perceived "safe" encryption algorithm, for going key sizes. Assuming they haven't already done so, or at least not to the extent that they can routinely decrypt reasonable quantities as good as live.
Or better yet, solve it more fundamentally by some revolutioniary technique for factoring large integers. Certainly they've got some top boffins at their disposal, much to everybody else's detriment.
Not saying you shouldn't encrypt. I mostly agree with your post. But really, we have only the slightest tangential glimpse of a shadow cast by the stuff NSA et al are actually capable of.
Frail? Wait until you hear the man curse. "The thick of it" is essentially the original bbc show that has since branched out to the US as Veep. It is pretty hilarious and Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker is unforgettable in every sense.
Check out this compilation but be warned of strong language. My favorite quote at 5:20.
Yeah well it's one thing to say that "everybody does it", though I haven't seen nearly as many reports on other countries as I have about the US. Maybe they are just less incompetent, rather than less morally corrupt.
But even so, given that the US spends about as much on defense (sic) as the rest of the world combined, the picture isn't really very symmetric, now is it? To the extent that figures are even known, that is -- under Rumsfeld the DOD became officially unaccountable, if I remember correctly. So even if it's true that everybody does it, it is nowhere near the same scale.
Besides, if everybody takes the lowest common denominator for their moral compass, we'll just have a race to the bottom -- which of course nobody wins.
True enough, you're paying for your own oppression.
I was wondering about the relationship between NSA and academia, only the other way around. It's probable that they've got their eye on relevant courses (math, cs) and must by now employ a significant number of top-shelf scientists -- whose insights are not likely shared academically, certainly not in a timely fashion.
This seems to me quite detrimental to scientific progress in these areas.
Hate to reply to self, but it occurred to me that if Snowden means to produce a final trump card (before disappearing, for better or worse) the most damaging might be evidence that (parts of) US government is itself a target of these programs. He did, after all, say something like "I could have tapped POTUS". Hints of Hoover, Edgar J., but with less individual eccentricity and more institutional ruthlessness.
Yesterday, 217 congressmen decided that their own personal phone calls are relevant to a terrorist investigation, since they apparently can't even trust themselves.
Well, given that NSA has had all this time to monitor their personal phone calls, etcetera, at the time these congressmen voted. But no, I'm sure they're all clean as a whistle and immune from blackmail. Although, it probably wouldn't even really have to come to blackmail -- the mere possibility is enough of a threat.
In fact, to an outside observer, it would almost seem as if the parties achieve bipartisan support for legislation in exactly those cases where opposition from the public at large is (relatively) strong. Perhaps these would be the best examples to bring up if one were inclined to argue that neither party, in fact, represents the People.
Replying to undo wrong mod. Should've been Informative but got Funny.
Your examples are not so much untrue as they are selective. In fact, they are mostly about a single incident, and the echoes of that event -- which included some predictable attempts by some opportunistic politicians, and hence the mainstream media, to frame it as a debate about ethnicity, race, religion and the Greatness of Our Heritage. Populist far right, that is, who seem to have moved on since to Eurobashing.
Obviously the murder of Theo Van Gogh was a terrible crime, and yes his murderer claims to have acted on religious impulse -- van Gogh was a buffoon who insulted people for his own amusement, and found an especially rewarding response when insulting Islam so he really went to town. I shouldn't have to point out that this doesn't warrant his death, and fortunately the culprit was tried and convicted.
But you'd be wrong, in my opinion, to say that this one guy represents his religion, whether he himself claims to or not. In the same way, I don't consider Protestants represented by some anti-abortion terrorists, the Catholics by some pedophile priests or the Jews by some murderous settlers.
It's just that, in his mind, "defending my group" is less dishonorable than the blind undirected rage that affected him as an individual. If not Van Gogh, this guy would have found some other victim and possibly some other non-justification. The more likely real reasons for such rage, in this case and certain others, is the fact that this huge part of the population in our major cities have long suffered injustice.
The first generation were proactively recruited from the lower to zero educated ranks of remote rural areas of (disproportionally) Turkey and Morocco, to leave their homes and lands and to do our shitiest jobs for peanuts. Hardly any attempts were made at integration. As long as you had a single guy per crew who knew five Dutch words you were good to go. Now everybody is surprised that their kids don't magically all graduate from universities and, in stead, feel marginalized and frustrated.
I don't expect, or even wish, for everyone in my country to share all my values. I expect to live in a country where systems are in place to determine some common denomination of all our values. And I still believe the Netherlands is such a place. Despite a very few, but in compensation vocal and and hysterical, voices to the contrary.
So really, everyday life in my country is not at all adequately described by the links you posted.
Ah yes, mr Fjord has found a hit in his database of links to make his point, and is now posting the results, repeatedly. Clearly everyone should be scared shitless, like he is, of those evil Muslims. They are gaining way too much influence in "our" western countries, even though "we" would never ever dream of interfering in theirs. Take it from a Dutch guy: you are wrong.
Really? Care to give examples? Because I thought that torture will only get people to tell you what they think you want to hear. Truth doesn't figure into it.
Unless the aim of torture of one guy is actually to frighten and discourage a bunch of other guys not yet residing in your secret lair dungeons. Maybe that would work. But that would be, you know, terrorism.
So as I read it this report says two things:
1) One of these fellows is supposedly a KKK member (or, rather, posed as one when soliciting funds from another (real) KKK dude
2) They were pro-Israel and claimed to want to target "enemies of Israel"
Yet you seem unwilling to accept that any such thing as a non-Muslim terrorist might exist, so you take (1) at face value and then use that to argue that (2) is unlikely to be true and surely they are really actually anti-semites like terrists are suppose to be.
This argument is silly. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch, I know.
Wish I hadn't spent my mod points on trolls now...
Thanks for replying! Yes we tried some of the more obvious workarounds, but couldn't prevent clicks from sometimes being synthesized "after the fact". So for example we would do a page transition in response to a touchstart event, but if those same X,Y coordinates on the new page would cover a clickable item, THAT would receive a spurious event.
By this time we had to get some apps out the door and we went native. To my regret, as I was just getting excited about HTML5. Then, later, I ran across this document by some google guys. Sounds like it might help resolve this major annoyance.
We used to develop mobile apps using jQueryMobile and Cordova (formerly PhoneGap)... Combined with HTML5 application cache the performance was actually pretty good, with one nasty exception; There is a delay of several hundred milliseconds before the framework receives touch events -- from what I understand this is not actually something jQM can do much about, it comes from the way the underlying layers distinguish swipes, taps, etc. But it utterly kills the experience. So much so that we have since moved on to developing native apps.
But I've read about some approach (some google guys, can't be bothered to find the link just now) to getting around this issue, and if that works out I'd gladly go back to JQM.
(Sorry for late reply, afk)
The shah is a good example, yes. Of a western backed brutal regime, without which it might not have been possible for fundamentalist tendencies to take hold as they did. Similar story for similar places though, some to this day. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Quwait, Egypt, Pakistan.
Now again, I'm not in any way defending these horrible acts. But the idea that they are purely religious acts, as some suggest/believe, is plainly and obviously mistaken.
I'm not sure how you got the idea that I'm defending this. I'm just saying, to chrisq in this case, there's more to it than religious wingnuttery.
It would be damn hard to motivate anyone against "the west" in those places purely for religious reasons. If you honestly believe that "hatred of the west" in the middle east is unrelated to various, shall we say, interventions, you are as misguided as they are.
Seconded.
Still, may as well try to make the best of it. Joey Coumeau wrote some pretty funny job applications:
http://www.asofterworld.com/oqarchive.php
Even though the following is apparently *not* due to John Cleese -- as I thought before I g**gled it just now -- I would submit to you the following:
You should stop playing American football. There is only one kind of football. What you refer to as American football is not a very good game. The 2.15% of you who are aware that there is a world outside your borders may have noticed that no one else plays American football. You will no longer be allowed to play it, and should instead play proper football. Initially, it would be best if you played with the girls. It is a difficult game. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which is similar to American "football", but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like nancies). We are hoping to get together at least a US Rugby sevens side by 2005. You should stop playing baseball. It is not reasonable to host an event called the 'World Series' for a game which is not played outside of America. Since only 2.15% of you are aware that there is a world beyond your borders,your error is understandable. Instead of baseball, you will be allowed to play a girls' game called rounders, which is baseball without fancy team strip, oversized gloves, collector cards or hotdogs.
Heh, I was thinking the same.
... good should not always be exposed.
Except lots of stuff gets covered up (just) because it is, or looks, "bad".
"The biggest bomb ever detonated on earth" is a damn sight smaller than the biggest one ever built... Just sayin'.