That wasn't my point, jackass. What you did is called hyperbole. It is rarely an effective argument.
What I was saying is that THIS year there was this thing called a drought. Now, if you're not sure, a drought is when it doesn't rain for a really long time. Like more than days, totally more.
Think desert, only shorter-term, and with less brown-people.
What I was saying is that it turns out that fucking subsidies aren't the main cause of higher corn prices right now. RIGHT NOW, the main cause of high prices is the fact that no one's corn did well.
Do you know any farmers? I would suggest you drive to the country, find a farmer, and ask him/her to tell you how his corn did this year.
That's a true statement - the hay one. I live in a northern(ish) midwestern state that usually only sells hay for 60-70 dollars a bale, and usually only locally. This year? 100-120 a bale, and I've sold to as far away as Texas this year. It's crazy.
I keep telling people in my day job that they need to prepare for ridiculously high food prices, but they don't believe me. Yet.
You do realize there was a drought this year, right? Fields that usually yield 150-250 bu/acre are producing 2-30 bu/acre this year. Yes. Two. Subsidized, unsubsidized, it doesn't matter. That is going to make for high prices and alternate sources of feed.
This is over on HN right now, there's some pretty decent discussion related to the history of Pc's, and how we've seen the 'end' of hardware twice at least so far.
I agree with that - there will always be a market for high-end electronics. Always. Someone will want it. Will it be as large as we've seen? Probably not. But, this article is about turning hardware (cheap tablets actually) into a commodity instead of a luxury.
What will happen, instead of death, is that we'll see a bottom-floor cheap ass price structure for cheaply made items, and a high-end, expensive price structure for people with expensive tastes, or expensive requirements. Look at the PC - I can get one for $300. Does it do what I want? Nope. So, I spend $2000, and build one that will.
I can get a tablet for $45, great - I will, and I'll use it for super simple projects - like household automation. But I will also look for the $500 top of the line model that does every-freaking-thing I want it to, to use as my go-to device.
I've never actually thought about that before - that the MPAA and RIAA consider only two types of people - those that buy something because they want it, and those that pirate it because they don't want to pay for it.
It's a false black-and-white that is, like most things, mostly made up of gray. This might be a dumb question, but have there been any "contact us" or any sort of "are you a pirate and why" surveys, that can be taken anonymously of course, put out by the content owners? If not, why not?
This is all your personal definition of beauty. My personal definition of beauty is unspoiled woodlands. Believe it or not, there are people who like silence, green-spaces, and to see as few traces of humanity as possible. That was OP's main point.
HOW DARE YOU TRY TO MAKE THE AC CITE A VERY POSSIBLY FAKE CONVERSATION. You obviously know nothing, NOTHING I SAY!
Everyone knows there's layers of proof - starting from the most credible to least (yes, that's accurate): (1) A conversation my friend had with a guy who talked to this guy who works with those things, (2) A conversation I had with a guy who works with those things, (3) Research based on what my mom told me to do, (4) peer-reviewed science and statistics.
Only FOOLS, VIRGINS and the CLINICALLY INSANE need anything more than second-hand anecdotal evidence.
I'd be interested to see a side-by-side comparison of China (economically, socially, etc) today and the US of the late 1800's into the first thirty years of the 1900's. Does that exist?
But the main difference is that those US internships come with humane working conditions - FTA - 7 hours on a production line with no breaks. This is not the same as an intern in the US who (maybe underpaid) gets regular breaks and time off of work.
American colleges require internships to help a student find careers, make connections and secure a job. If you've ever had an internship - no one in the company is making millions off of your labor - usually you're nothing more than a gopher or paperwork bitch. From what I can tell, this type of Chinese internship exists to pad a few people's pockets with the labor of many.
To use a comparison: American Internship is to Chinese internship as Apples are to Getting punched in the head.
I'm pretty well educated in on-line security, and my critical thinking skills have taught me how to avoid the bad people. I made a conscious choice to look at the things I do on-line, and realized that even if I'm being tracked, all 'they' are going to see is one really bored human who browses weird things. So, in my life, the inconvenience of many steps is outweighs the benefits for privacy (For example, I have a stupidly low bandwidth cap and obscenely high latency with my satellite internet connection, so a VPN is right out). I've been mulling this over for a week now, and I'll bite -
1. Why do you do that?
2. What type of people do you do that for?
3. What are the programs and in what order do they load (unless you get paid to do that. . . . then I understand if you don't want to list them off).
4. And again, what's the goal? Is it user safety for people you know? Clients? Family (to avoid the inevitable 'my computer's running slow, I bet it's that foxfire thing you put on there' conversation)? Why do you do these things?
And it also seems to me that decentralization is also an interesting way to remove one layer of anonymity (in the individual sense - not anonymity in the I want to hide from massive corporations standpoint - because in my opinion, if I wanted to hide from corporations or the gov't, I wouldn't use social networking in the first place) from the situation. Should you know my real name, you would play hell finding me on facebook. There are around 800 of me. Decentralize that, and I become much more easily traceable as an individual.
My biggest concern, though, is that with decentralization, we have many, many, many points of possible entry to my information, instead of just one. I don't know about you, but I would rather fight one burglar, not fifteen.
Well, I'm talking about the marketing and sale of higher education.. It's a business like any other, and scandals abound. And organized crime plays no small part, especially in the sports arena. Big money is poison.
I just don't buy that. Higher education is not a business like any other. Higher education is closer to the government. Big, slow-moving, slow-thinking, awkward and usually ugly. It's not predatory, maybe inept, but generally not predatory. Until you can show me proof of this, I remain unconvinced. A theory is not proof, and a conspiracy theory is worse.
I certainly don’t see anything wrong with teachers assembling custom coursepacks of materials for their classes (sometimes it can even save students’ money if it replaces a costly textbook).
This article is an example of poor funding on the back-end, passed onto the students incorrectly. Ideally, the system is used to replace expensive books with coursepacks form the instructor. In this instance, though, it's being used for evil. This is called an outlier, and is generally not accepted in statistical analysis.
Second Article:
Professor Williams has more than 200 good reasons. That's how many students he can cram into one of his lectures.
even though virtually the same book is available on the internet
"textbook adoption was never a requirement for the program."
I hesitate to trust the big media corporations, and CBS is on that list. My experience has taught me that they tend to tell you just enough to elicit an emotional response, but no more. I have to read into this a bit, and I may be a bit trusting, but here goes: Virtually the same book does not equal the same book; who decided that it was similar, and how was that decided? Also, I assume that textbook adoption was never part of the program. -I assume that instructors were supposed to use it for one semester to see if they liked it. It's called sales. Book companies sell things. If I give you a sample of my product the idea is that you're going to like it and come back for more. That's basic. The company using cash to give instructors an incentive might be a bit far (a very large bit), but it's still an incentive. If someone (book company) is performing research on how X (their book) performs in my life compared to Y (past books), I expect to get paid for my time. Having it directly tied to textbook adoption is wrong, and having it tied to sampling their books is slightly less wrong. But, given the world we live in, how is this a surprise? We are taught, from the very beginning of our lives, that morality only comes into play on our death bed. Other than that, if it's not expressly forbidden by law, go for it. Is that right? Nope. Is it true? Absolutely.
Third Article:
I have no good quotes here because this is a fluff article used to pull out an emotional response.
There's no substance to this. It says that he alleges that this happened. He alleges that this is why he didn't get tenure. There is no talk of how the case came out, and I can't find anything in my googles that tells me how it came out. I have to assume that it's still being tried. This is not proof, only allegations by a pissed-off employee.
Last Article:
There's no good quotes here, either, but it's not fluff.
This last one. This last one is good, except that it's an isolated person on the campus. HE was indicted, HE was forced to pay money back to the institution, so this isn't necessarily proof of wide-spread use. Had it been wide-spread, he wouldn't have been persecuted by his employer. Other than that, though, this is a pretty good example, and you got me. I have to hope that it's another one of those outliers.
I would say that making the statement that Unethical behavior in higher education is a prerequisite for success is a bit detached from reality. Do you actually know any college professors? Most are more interested in their current research, their classes, and their students than they are with advancement (unless it's advancing the number of letters that either precede or follow their names). The ones who are unethical are the ones who would be unethical in any work-place. The ones who are unethical are generally driven to do so by administration. NOT ALWAYS, but generally.
And I would say that professors who are interested in profit are few and far between. Administration, on the other hand, while NOT driven by profit, ARE driven by how to balance the budget. And I would say that kick-backs from book companies, while completely inappropriate, are a product of our world. You don't want to pay taxes to fund education? Then you pay for it in other ways. Nothing in life is free. Ever. Is it wrong that schools are taking that route? Absolutely - it is morally reprehensible, and I would never condone this activity. Is it wrong that the state school where I work ----and that part is important ---STATE SCHOOL--- receives less than 10% of its funding from the state, while still being forced to jump through the same hoops to get that money as we did when it was 50% of our budget? You're fucking right it is.
Anyway, what my original message was, was that, because the original poster said that there is ALWAYS a kick-back, I know that exact statement to be false, because every professor I know receives 0 kick-backs from the books they use. Don't speak in absolutes. Ever.
This, of all the options I've seen, is the closest to what could be called a kick-back.
But, I hate to tell you, if your college-level instructors have made their assignments so dumb that they can be automagically graded, you are in shitty classes. I've seen these e-sites. They offer few features. They offer time saving ONLY in seminar courses that hold 2-300 people. For any class where you're going to actually learn, they're functionally useless.
Is it wrong that those seminar classes exist? Maybe, but that's not the question. The question is whether those e-sites can be classed as kick-backs. For good instructors, no, no they are not. For lazy-ass instructors who just want to throw a multiple choice assignment at you, yes. They are huge kick-backs.
But that's more of an individual problem than a systematic one. I don't use those things. I teach. I was simply calling attention to the fact that speaking in absolutes, as the OP did, is a bad idea.
Do you have proof? Or is this just tin-foil hat happy hour? I receive 0 kick-back from text-book manufacturers for the college courses I teach. I know 0 instructors on a 13,000-14,000 student campus who receive kick-backs.
I've found that in most cases, the instructor isn't the one to blame, it's the university/college. In my experience, the instructors genuinely want to keep costs down, but an administrator has AN EXCITING NEW PROGRAM for your students to try. So, they mandate that all intro-level X classes use Y book with Z code. Now, obviously this doesn't stand in your higher level courses, but I have yet to see a higher level course that uses these codes.
I wasn't trying to be condescending. I do apologize - the intertweb does not lend itself to tone interpretation. What I was implying is that when folks get busted, they are surprised. When a malware/spyware/happy-fun-go-go-timeware is discovered that has the ability to spy on you, people are surprised. What I was trying to say is that most people, reporters, rebels, dissidents, Joe down the street, VASTLY underestimate what is possible. For some reason most people WANT to believe that this is possible, but most DON'T actually believe it.
You are correct, staying truly anonymous and maintaining that anonymity is fucking hard. Staying clean in the Wild-Wild-Web is also fucking hard if you have to frequent bad-guy hangouts. BUT, if you have dirt, and I mean world-changing, put your ass in jail forever/disappear you in the night style dirt, it would be in your best interest to start learning those tools of the trade, or to find someone who already knows.
I apologize, the tone was lighthearted, I assure you. My message wasn't that it is easy. My message is simply that many people who are found out, and prosecuted for their on-line activities are rarely able to say that they did all they could to stay anonymous.
The moral of the story is this: dissidents should airgap any system they use for sensitive/secret material.
I genuinely do not understand how people don't get this. You want to push against the big boys? Assume they have tools you've never even imagined. It's just like sterilization in medicine. You don't know what the patient has, so you treat everything they touch like it's covered in plague. Diligence, children, diligence is the key to anonymity.
Is it wrong that this exists? Probably. Are you naive for believing that these types of tools aren't used every day? Absolutely.
I won't say that it's a dumbed down education system that is causing this, but I will say that our education system is suffering. I don't know where along the way we decided to value hedge fund managers, investment bankers and stock traders over the people who teach our children, clean our streets and put out fires, but we're there.
I do honestly believe that it has quite a bit to do with the undying stereotype of the bookworm. In recent months there has been quite a bit of coverage on the presidential race (obviously). In multiple stories, multiple individuals have stated that the various candidates from the Republican party have been trying hard not to seem too "bookish". To me, being "bookish" isn't an insult. To me, being well-read, well-researched, and well-prepared is a good thing.
I'm not saying this is entirely a republican view either, but they seem to be getting most of the coverage.
I believe that the root cause of all of this is media. Media wants a good story. Good almost always equates to painful, sad, or stupid. So, we get coverage of the jackasses who protest soldier's funerals. We get 24/7 coverage of murder, rape and despair. We get 24/7 coverage of religious whackos being proud in their ignorance, forcing their views on everyone in the name of 'freedom of expression' or 'freedom of religion', and giving normal, rational and intelligent religious folks across the nation a bad name.
I honestly believe that mass media is to blame for how we view most social problems. I honestly believe that there's money to be made in stereotyping people on welfare and printing that story, which then will inadvertently lead to a generation of folks brought up believing that message. I'm not saying that the choices to cover inane, idiotic, painful and sad stories were made in a dark room by billionaires. I do not believe that. What I believe is that stupid sells. People want to escape the mundane aspect of their lives, so stupid stories, sad stories, murder and mayhem sell easily.
This then creates a generation of children brought up on these dumbass stories. These children see less-harm in that type of media, and get bored with it. Therefore, media outlets have to amp up their stories. Then more children. Then worse stories.
Science, no matter how you frame it, is inherently un-sexy. Engineering, believe it or not, doesn't turn that many people's knobs.
You know what does? Snooky.
Does that taste like ashes in your mouth? It should.
Slashdot Mirror
That wasn't my point, jackass. What you did is called hyperbole. It is rarely an effective argument.
What I was saying is that THIS year there was this thing called a drought. Now, if you're not sure, a drought is when it doesn't rain for a really long time. Like more than days, totally more.
Think desert, only shorter-term, and with less brown-people.
What I was saying is that it turns out that fucking subsidies aren't the main cause of higher corn prices right now. RIGHT NOW, the main cause of high prices is the fact that no one's corn did well.
Do you know any farmers? I would suggest you drive to the country, find a farmer, and ask him/her to tell you how his corn did this year.
That's a true statement - the hay one. I live in a northern(ish) midwestern state that usually only sells hay for 60-70 dollars a bale, and usually only locally. This year? 100-120 a bale, and I've sold to as far away as Texas this year. It's crazy.
I keep telling people in my day job that they need to prepare for ridiculously high food prices, but they don't believe me. Yet.
You do realize there was a drought this year, right? Fields that usually yield 150-250 bu/acre are producing 2-30 bu/acre this year. Yes. Two. Subsidized, unsubsidized, it doesn't matter. That is going to make for high prices and alternate sources of feed.
Like this? That seems like it would be easy enough to do.
Actually, technically, I believe we're all currently doing that.
OH GREAT. Now we'll have scans to get to the lines for the scanners.
Nope, it's actually easier than that. Simply ban all items that can be used as weapons.
Like staplers, picture frames, computer monitors, file folders, pens, pencils, paper clips, cell phones, coffee mugs, notebooks, binders, keyboards, cats, hammers, squirrels, water buffalo, car tires, lugnuts, eight sided stars, six sided stars, one sided stars (whoa), asphalt, poles, sticks, trees, crowbars, nails, screws, condoms, pregnancy tests, candy, plastic bags, corn nuts, potatoes, pesticides, garden rakes, trowels, towels, boats, hair ties, jackets, gum, highlighters, guns, earrings, necklaces.
You know what, you get the idea.
I agree with that - there will always be a market for high-end electronics. Always. Someone will want it. Will it be as large as we've seen? Probably not. But, this article is about turning hardware (cheap tablets actually) into a commodity instead of a luxury.
What will happen, instead of death, is that we'll see a bottom-floor cheap ass price structure for cheaply made items, and a high-end, expensive price structure for people with expensive tastes, or expensive requirements. Look at the PC - I can get one for $300. Does it do what I want? Nope. So, I spend $2000, and build one that will.
I can get a tablet for $45, great - I will, and I'll use it for super simple projects - like household automation. But I will also look for the $500 top of the line model that does every-freaking-thing I want it to, to use as my go-to device.
I've never actually thought about that before - that the MPAA and RIAA consider only two types of people - those that buy something because they want it, and those that pirate it because they don't want to pay for it.
It's a false black-and-white that is, like most things, mostly made up of gray. This might be a dumb question, but have there been any "contact us" or any sort of "are you a pirate and why" surveys, that can be taken anonymously of course, put out by the content owners? If not, why not?
This is all your personal definition of beauty. My personal definition of beauty is unspoiled woodlands. Believe it or not, there are people who like silence, green-spaces, and to see as few traces of humanity as possible. That was OP's main point.
HOW DARE YOU TRY TO MAKE THE AC CITE A VERY POSSIBLY FAKE CONVERSATION. You obviously know nothing, NOTHING I SAY!
Everyone knows there's layers of proof - starting from the most credible to least (yes, that's accurate): (1) A conversation my friend had with a guy who talked to this guy who works with those things, (2) A conversation I had with a guy who works with those things, (3) Research based on what my mom told me to do, (4) peer-reviewed science and statistics.
Only FOOLS, VIRGINS and the CLINICALLY INSANE need anything more than second-hand anecdotal evidence.
I'd be interested to see a side-by-side comparison of China (economically, socially, etc) today and the US of the late 1800's into the first thirty years of the 1900's. Does that exist?
But the main difference is that those US internships come with humane working conditions - FTA - 7 hours on a production line with no breaks. This is not the same as an intern in the US who (maybe underpaid) gets regular breaks and time off of work.
American colleges require internships to help a student find careers, make connections and secure a job. If you've ever had an internship - no one in the company is making millions off of your labor - usually you're nothing more than a gopher or paperwork bitch. From what I can tell, this type of Chinese internship exists to pad a few people's pockets with the labor of many.
To use a comparison: American Internship is to Chinese internship as Apples are to Getting punched in the head.
I'm pretty well educated in on-line security, and my critical thinking skills have taught me how to avoid the bad people. I made a conscious choice to look at the things I do on-line, and realized that even if I'm being tracked, all 'they' are going to see is one really bored human who browses weird things. So, in my life, the inconvenience of many steps is outweighs the benefits for privacy (For example, I have a stupidly low bandwidth cap and obscenely high latency with my satellite internet connection, so a VPN is right out). I've been mulling this over for a week now, and I'll bite -
1. Why do you do that?
2. What type of people do you do that for?
3. What are the programs and in what order do they load (unless you get paid to do that. . . . then I understand if you don't want to list them off).
4. And again, what's the goal? Is it user safety for people you know? Clients? Family (to avoid the inevitable 'my computer's running slow, I bet it's that foxfire thing you put on there' conversation)? Why do you do these things?
And it also seems to me that decentralization is also an interesting way to remove one layer of anonymity (in the individual sense - not anonymity in the I want to hide from massive corporations standpoint - because in my opinion, if I wanted to hide from corporations or the gov't, I wouldn't use social networking in the first place) from the situation. Should you know my real name, you would play hell finding me on facebook. There are around 800 of me. Decentralize that, and I become much more easily traceable as an individual.
My biggest concern, though, is that with decentralization, we have many, many, many points of possible entry to my information, instead of just one. I don't know about you, but I would rather fight one burglar, not fifteen.
Unless I had a sword. Then all bets are off.
Well, I'm talking about the marketing and sale of higher education.. It's a business like any other, and scandals abound. And organized crime plays no small part, especially in the sports arena. Big money is poison.
I just don't buy that. Higher education is not a business like any other. Higher education is closer to the government. Big, slow-moving, slow-thinking, awkward and usually ugly. It's not predatory, maybe inept, but generally not predatory. Until you can show me proof of this, I remain unconvinced. A theory is not proof, and a conspiracy theory is worse.
Don't speak in absolutes. Ever.
:-) Word...
I thought you'd enjoy that.
In order:
First article:
I certainly don’t see anything wrong with teachers assembling custom coursepacks of materials for their classes (sometimes it can even save students’ money if it replaces a costly textbook).
This article is an example of poor funding on the back-end, passed onto the students incorrectly. Ideally, the system is used to replace expensive books with coursepacks form the instructor. In this instance, though, it's being used for evil. This is called an outlier, and is generally not accepted in statistical analysis.
Second Article:
Professor Williams has more than 200 good reasons. That's how many students he can cram into one of his lectures.
even though virtually the same book is available on the internet
"textbook adoption was never a requirement for the program."
I hesitate to trust the big media corporations, and CBS is on that list. My experience has taught me that they tend to tell you just enough to elicit an emotional response, but no more. I have to read into this a bit, and I may be a bit trusting, but here goes: Virtually the same book does not equal the same book; who decided that it was similar, and how was that decided? Also, I assume that textbook adoption was never part of the program. -I assume that instructors were supposed to use it for one semester to see if they liked it. It's called sales. Book companies sell things. If I give you a sample of my product the idea is that you're going to like it and come back for more. That's basic. The company using cash to give instructors an incentive might be a bit far (a very large bit), but it's still an incentive. If someone (book company) is performing research on how X (their book) performs in my life compared to Y (past books), I expect to get paid for my time. Having it directly tied to textbook adoption is wrong, and having it tied to sampling their books is slightly less wrong. But, given the world we live in, how is this a surprise? We are taught, from the very beginning of our lives, that morality only comes into play on our death bed. Other than that, if it's not expressly forbidden by law, go for it. Is that right? Nope. Is it true? Absolutely.
Third Article:
I have no good quotes here because this is a fluff article used to pull out an emotional response.
There's no substance to this. It says that he alleges that this happened. He alleges that this is why he didn't get tenure. There is no talk of how the case came out, and I can't find anything in my googles that tells me how it came out. I have to assume that it's still being tried. This is not proof, only allegations by a pissed-off employee.
Last Article:
There's no good quotes here, either, but it's not fluff.
This last one. This last one is good, except that it's an isolated person on the campus. HE was indicted, HE was forced to pay money back to the institution, so this isn't necessarily proof of wide-spread use. Had it been wide-spread, he wouldn't have been persecuted by his employer. Other than that, though, this is a pretty good example, and you got me. I have to hope that it's another one of those outliers.
I would say that making the statement that Unethical behavior in higher education is a prerequisite for success is a bit detached from reality. Do you actually know any college professors? Most are more interested in their current research, their classes, and their students than they are with advancement (unless it's advancing the number of letters that either precede or follow their names). The ones who are unethical are the ones who would be unethical in any work-place. The ones who are unethical are generally driven to do so by administration. NOT ALWAYS, but generally.
And I would say that professors who are interested in profit are few and far between. Administration, on the other hand, while NOT driven by profit, ARE driven by how to balance the budget. And I would say that kick-backs from book companies, while completely inappropriate, are a product of our world. You don't want to pay taxes to fund education? Then you pay for it in other ways. Nothing in life is free. Ever. Is it wrong that schools are taking that route? Absolutely - it is morally reprehensible, and I would never condone this activity. Is it wrong that the state school where I work ----and that part is important ---STATE SCHOOL--- receives less than 10% of its funding from the state, while still being forced to jump through the same hoops to get that money as we did when it was 50% of our budget? You're fucking right it is.
Anyway, what my original message was, was that, because the original poster said that there is ALWAYS a kick-back, I know that exact statement to be false, because every professor I know receives 0 kick-backs from the books they use. Don't speak in absolutes. Ever.
Be merciless, there is always a kickback on deals like this.
In this case, my anecdotal evidence invalidates the original argument. I didn't say that it did NOT happen, just that it doesn't ALWAYS happen.
But, I hate to tell you, if your college-level instructors have made their assignments so dumb that they can be automagically graded, you are in shitty classes. I've seen these e-sites. They offer few features. They offer time saving ONLY in seminar courses that hold 2-300 people. For any class where you're going to actually learn, they're functionally useless.
Is it wrong that those seminar classes exist? Maybe, but that's not the question. The question is whether those e-sites can be classed as kick-backs. For good instructors, no, no they are not. For lazy-ass instructors who just want to throw a multiple choice assignment at you, yes. They are huge kick-backs.
But that's more of an individual problem than a systematic one. I don't use those things. I teach. I was simply calling attention to the fact that speaking in absolutes, as the OP did, is a bad idea.
Do you have proof? Or is this just tin-foil hat happy hour? I receive 0 kick-back from text-book manufacturers for the college courses I teach. I know 0 instructors on a 13,000-14,000 student campus who receive kick-backs.
I've found that in most cases, the instructor isn't the one to blame, it's the university/college. In my experience, the instructors genuinely want to keep costs down, but an administrator has AN EXCITING NEW PROGRAM for your students to try. So, they mandate that all intro-level X classes use Y book with Z code. Now, obviously this doesn't stand in your higher level courses, but I have yet to see a higher level course that uses these codes.
You are correct, staying truly anonymous and maintaining that anonymity is fucking hard. Staying clean in the Wild-Wild-Web is also fucking hard if you have to frequent bad-guy hangouts. BUT, if you have dirt, and I mean world-changing, put your ass in jail forever/disappear you in the night style dirt, it would be in your best interest to start learning those tools of the trade, or to find someone who already knows.
I apologize, the tone was lighthearted, I assure you. My message wasn't that it is easy. My message is simply that many people who are found out, and prosecuted for their on-line activities are rarely able to say that they did all they could to stay anonymous.
The moral of the story is this: dissidents should airgap any system they use for sensitive/secret material.
I genuinely do not understand how people don't get this. You want to push against the big boys? Assume they have tools you've never even imagined. It's just like sterilization in medicine. You don't know what the patient has, so you treat everything they touch like it's covered in plague. Diligence, children, diligence is the key to anonymity.
Is it wrong that this exists? Probably. Are you naive for believing that these types of tools aren't used every day? Absolutely.
I won't say that it's a dumbed down education system that is causing this, but I will say that our education system is suffering. I don't know where along the way we decided to value hedge fund managers, investment bankers and stock traders over the people who teach our children, clean our streets and put out fires, but we're there.
I do honestly believe that it has quite a bit to do with the undying stereotype of the bookworm. In recent months there has been quite a bit of coverage on the presidential race (obviously). In multiple stories, multiple individuals have stated that the various candidates from the Republican party have been trying hard not to seem too "bookish". To me, being "bookish" isn't an insult. To me, being well-read, well-researched, and well-prepared is a good thing.
I'm not saying this is entirely a republican view either, but they seem to be getting most of the coverage.
I believe that the root cause of all of this is media. Media wants a good story. Good almost always equates to painful, sad, or stupid. So, we get coverage of the jackasses who protest soldier's funerals. We get 24/7 coverage of murder, rape and despair. We get 24/7 coverage of religious whackos being proud in their ignorance, forcing their views on everyone in the name of 'freedom of expression' or 'freedom of religion', and giving normal, rational and intelligent religious folks across the nation a bad name.
I honestly believe that mass media is to blame for how we view most social problems. I honestly believe that there's money to be made in stereotyping people on welfare and printing that story, which then will inadvertently lead to a generation of folks brought up believing that message. I'm not saying that the choices to cover inane, idiotic, painful and sad stories were made in a dark room by billionaires. I do not believe that. What I believe is that stupid sells. People want to escape the mundane aspect of their lives, so stupid stories, sad stories, murder and mayhem sell easily.
This then creates a generation of children brought up on these dumbass stories. These children see less-harm in that type of media, and get bored with it. Therefore, media outlets have to amp up their stories. Then more children. Then worse stories.
Science, no matter how you frame it, is inherently un-sexy. Engineering, believe it or not, doesn't turn that many people's knobs.
You know what does? Snooky.
Does that taste like ashes in your mouth? It should.
And lose the "made in the almighty US label*? Oh, the horror!
*Label Made in China