Maybe that's where we disagree. I believe the government, ISPs should not have the ability by law nor technical means, regardless of how easy or complex it is to implement, to censor any traffic on the Internet. (Of course, some internal ISP admin will always be able to cause damage, but he will then be committing a crime, like any other cracker).
Furthermore, I vehemently oppose any moral judgment, moral policing, and censorship. The pixels on my screen do not inconvenience anybody, so I should be free to color them whatever way I please.
Finally, I believe so called decency laws is the hubris of a free society. If naked skin or people holding hands, kissing (regardless of gender) offends anybody, they are free to look the other way. On the Internet, I don't even have to do that, I can simply avoid the sites I don't like. And if anybody wants to "protect the children" from seeing skin-tone pixels, I'm sure there's an app for that. Protecting people from actual violent crime should not start with censorship.
The slippery slope here is not that people will stop thinking, observing, or even protesting. Rather, it's that with the laws and infrastructure in place, it becomes very easy to block more pages. So rather than a uncontrolled "slippery slope", maybe it should just be called a "first step" or sure tell-tale sign.
That idea is not based on some illogical extrapolation into the future, but on a number of examples from the past: Many European countries have already followed this pattern, some of which you'd think be among the most liberal: Holland, Denmark, France, Germany, UK. Take UK as a prime example: First they put in place the infrastructure because of child porn. Then it's used against "hate speech" or "terrorism". Next violent porn, BDSM. After that, file sharing sites, The Pirate Bay. Next, political party sites like The Pirate Party, and the Chaos Computer Club. The latter two have already been "mistakenly" blocked in multiple countries.
Now, many people believe the state should not be in the business of policing the Internet. So in the UK, they've made the brilliant move of making it "voluntarily". All the major ISPs now have personal filters controlled by their customers. Of course, it'd be a bit naive to think that those settings could not be used against you: If you ever find yourself in a sexual abuse case, Child Protection Services case, background check / government security clearance, you'd better have those settings in the right position.
At least this makes it obvious that fingerprint databases are ripe for abuse. I guess we can only hope this will lower the popularity of collecting it in the first place.
I recommend the book "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces" by Radley Balko. It goes into detail on why and how we got the police we have today. It's not a coincidence and it's not about "a few bad apples".
Since the 1960s, there has been a systematic top-down development towards a more violent, heavier armed and more excessive police force. This has been achieved through government grants, incentives, and case-law favoring and encouraging the police behavior we see today. No-knock raids gone wrong where innocent people get hurt is now a regular occurrence. Forfeiture without a court charge is a major source of income for all law agencies, to the tune of billions a year. The wars on abstracts (drugs, crime, terror) has made our society more violent and less safe.
If we continue down this path, the next step will be the people having to defend themselves against their government and police.
Although it is true that power corrupts, and that "the new boss is the same as the old", there are just as many or more examples throughout history where resistance and revolution did change things in a positive direction. To take a few examples close to home: the American revolution and later the civil war, universal suffrage, black's rights, gay's rights. The list goes on.
If you lean back, hide, and let the powerful get what they want then they will corrupt. That will most certainly lead to a net negative for society as a whole. You might live a comfortable life, but you will die a coward.
Besides the eternal class struggle you mentioned, today's fight is about a free society vs. total corporate and government power, and there are many fronts. Some examples, in random order: Never-ending wars on abstracts (drugs, crime, terrorism); excessive military spending; Internet communication, privacy and freedom of expression; copyright vs. cultural heritage; government transparency vs. secrecy; police abuse, cops-gone-bad, no-knock raids.
It is of course ironic how the latter problem is more or less the same as where we started, with "writs of assistance" before the Revolution. So yes, I guess it's moving slowing, but overall we are moving in a positive direction.
But does it run Linux? Last year, when I tried a basic Ubuntu install on the X1 Carbon, it didn't survive the first suspend / hibernate. Maybe things have improved since then.
Like the other guy said, you're talking about art forms here. And if you go by the mainstream opinion on art, you'll get average stuff. It's simple really, if something has to appeal to everybody, it cannot be very special or left-field, rather it becomes repetitive and cliché.
Talk to people who are actually into a particular form of art, like movies, and you'll most likely get a different opinion than the mainstream. On the original Terminator: Great movie, and actually very well done effects for a (relatively) low budget production. It's been 31 years, and it has aged surprisingly well.
I agree with most of what you say, although I have a hard time following some of it: For example, even on Windows, you can use basic tools like ssh and rsync, I believe. Set up a crontab'ed rsync from an external machine like you say, and you're good. One-way public key authentication. That's (relatively) easy and inexpensive.
Which leads me to the cost of such a system. In my case, I have two decommissioned laptops (even a Raspberry Pi 2 would do the job) bought for $50 in two separate locations from my house. Each has a 3 TB external USB disk, bought about three years ago. I do incremental of/home very day, and full back up twice a month. Never deleted anything. DSLR pictures comes extra (one time is enough; don't need redundant unchanged incrementals), and I don't find it necessary to back up porn and piratebay downloads. I'm currently at 30% free space left, so will probably buy a new pair of 6-8 TB disk in a year or so. Average cost per year is at around $100-150, I guess.
Granted, this is not for everybody. Then I again, this system covers my family, including parents. So yeah, not a business, if that is what you meant. However, scaling this up is not going to go exponential. Randomly picked server hosting I could find is at $1000 / year; there's probably many cheaper options out there. If that covers a business of 5 - 10 people, the cost per head is about the same.
You are mixing random concepts here, applying the same label to them, and concluding that there is no privacy. Sounds like a straw man argument to me. But let's dissect it.
The first problem is comparing privacy from your family members to society as a whole. Sorry, but there is little power to be gained from peeking through the window of your older brother. And it will definitely not affect anybody else on your block. Now, if somebody were to drive down the street with a camera, film everybody and everything and put it on the Internet, that would be a whole different story. Google tried, and they had to blur faces, lower their cameras or stop altogether in different countries. The key difference is the scale of the operation, and number of people affected.
The second problem with your argument, is comparing police, state and government surveillance with private data collection. You might think Google, Microsoft, Facebook are evil, and should not hold your private data. You're probably right. However, none of these companies will kick down your door and shoot your dog. The very purpose of government surveillance is to retain power and control. That has always been the case, and the Internet and computers didn't change it. It has just made the rulers' job so much easier.
The beauty of total government surveillance is that it doesn't have to be total in order to achieve its goal. It is enough if most people merely believe they are watched most of the time, just like you describe. We start to self-censor. We'll be more careful about what we write, what we criticize, who we associate with. It fences our thoughts and ideas, and limits our ability to seek alternatives, which is precisely its purpose. The opposite is not privacy, it is freedom and liberty.
Monitors did get a lot better, and with higher resolution, though. With 4k (3840 x 2160 or 4096 x 2160), or even 8k (7680×4320) you don't have to zoom out to a fraction of the original size any more. In fact, with your S3 of some 6 MP, you can see the picture in 100%. It means details like noise, camera shake will be more apparent.
Most people seem to fall into the trap of associating the crime with the marketplace and payment system, and as an extension demand that those third parties be responsible. Furthermore, the crime drives hysteria, and similar to the "think of the children" line of reasoning, it's used by dishonest people to drive their agenda. The fact is, the severity of the crime is completely irrelevant to the question of responsibility here.
If she had paid with Foursquare, Visa or MasterCard, clearly those companies would not have been sued. And if she found the cab service through Bing or Google, no sane person would cry for them to vet their advertisers and links. Replace the crime with a hair in the soup at a restaurant, and suing any of those third parties would be just as ridiculous.
Last time I took a "normal" taxi in India, the driver demanded 100 USD, although I knew the price was around 800 rupees (~13 USD). The final transaction was made in cash, so who should I lodge my complaint with? The Reserve Bank of India or the US Federal Reserve? The patentable absurdity of the original case is starting to become apparent.
Finally, regarding those "normal" state and city taxi monopolies: They need to fall. In virtually any country I've been, they offer a poor service at an extortionate price. They abuse their monopoly by only having the number of drivers available they see fit and benefit from, while ignoring peek demand on weekends and other busy days and nights. And as for safety; crimes also happened in taxis before the Internet.
Any this is why we cannot have nice things. Any attempt at improvements and progress is immediately attacked by those who seek egoistical gain or cry for an ever bigger nanny-state, or as in this case both.
Blaming somebody's crime on Uber because they used the app is as absurd as blaming Tinder for failing to screen and monitor its users. (Although, I'm sure somebody will eventually sue for that as well).
> Apple hardware has an unparalleled build quality
You haven't tried Lenovo's T-series business laptops, have you? The common saying is, that you could kill a man with one of them, and write his obituary with it afterwards. They also support most GNU/Linux distributions well.
Most Apple laptops are so thin and fragile, carrying one by a corner might be enough to bend it, or break the fragile electronics inside. Granted the edeges are usally very thin, so maybe you could slice somebody's throat with it. However, it would probably malfunction due to liquid damage.
To be fair, when your desktop runs Ubuntu and has an uptime of more than five years, you can be forgiven for forgetting what the "Windows" (aka reboot) button looks like.
It is sad to see that years of propaganda and fear-mongering by the government, politicians and police have actually worked out so well for them. Twenty years ago, the response to a peer-to-peer hosting network would have been "give me some of that". Today, it's "imagine how the police could fuck you over if they wanted to".
How much more will it take to admit to ourselves that most Western nations are now police states?
> How long can you sustain these kinds of I/O rates before burning the thing out?
If you were to sustain 1550 MByte/s write for 1 year, you'd write a total of 48 PB. (1550*60*60*24*365/1000/1000/1000), or 0.13 PB/day. In Techreport's endurance test, only two drives made it past 1.5 PB. So, if that is the bar, the drive would last only 11 days.
However, that would give you no time to read the data you'd written. Since you're not likely to write at max speed 24/7, the drive should last considerably longer.
How about because they are part of the MPAA cartel? Suing grandmas and kids all over the world. But yeah, their dubious "family members" (aka Sony Music, Sony Computer Entertainment) doesn't really contribute to their reputation, whether Sony Pictures have control over them or not.
Watching Sony bleed has really been the greatest xmas gift of this year.
Businesses that have gone through as many rounds of acquisitions and mergers as this one have are a bit Frankensteinish, so it's hard to say what is new or old or mashed up together.
Sort of like how Nokia used to be an old lumberjack and milling company, then produced rubber and car tires, then mobile phones, and finally went on to become a brothel for Microsoft executives who fetishize pale Finnish developers, developers, developers...
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe that's where we disagree. I believe the government, ISPs should not have the ability by law nor technical means, regardless of how easy or complex it is to implement, to censor any traffic on the Internet. (Of course, some internal ISP admin will always be able to cause damage, but he will then be committing a crime, like any other cracker).
Furthermore, I vehemently oppose any moral judgment, moral policing, and censorship. The pixels on my screen do not inconvenience anybody, so I should be free to color them whatever way I please.
Finally, I believe so called decency laws is the hubris of a free society. If naked skin or people holding hands, kissing (regardless of gender) offends anybody, they are free to look the other way. On the Internet, I don't even have to do that, I can simply avoid the sites I don't like. And if anybody wants to "protect the children" from seeing skin-tone pixels, I'm sure there's an app for that. Protecting people from actual violent crime should not start with censorship.
The slippery slope here is not that people will stop thinking, observing, or even protesting. Rather, it's that with the laws and infrastructure in place, it becomes very easy to block more pages. So rather than a uncontrolled "slippery slope", maybe it should just be called a "first step" or sure tell-tale sign.
That idea is not based on some illogical extrapolation into the future, but on a number of examples from the past: Many European countries have already followed this pattern, some of which you'd think be among the most liberal: Holland, Denmark, France, Germany, UK. Take UK as a prime example: First they put in place the infrastructure because of child porn. Then it's used against "hate speech" or "terrorism". Next violent porn, BDSM. After that, file sharing sites, The Pirate Bay. Next, political party sites like The Pirate Party, and the Chaos Computer Club. The latter two have already been "mistakenly" blocked in multiple countries.
Now, many people believe the state should not be in the business of policing the Internet. So in the UK, they've made the brilliant move of making it "voluntarily". All the major ISPs now have personal filters controlled by their customers. Of course, it'd be a bit naive to think that those settings could not be used against you: If you ever find yourself in a sexual abuse case, Child Protection Services case, background check / government security clearance, you'd better have those settings in the right position.
Well, the rise and fall of public interest in Google+ was all within 2 months of its launch. So yes, you're excused for missing it.
Fingerprints can't be reissued
No shit sherlock.
At least this makes it obvious that fingerprint databases are ripe for abuse. I guess we can only hope this will lower the popularity of collecting it in the first place.
I recommend the book "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces" by Radley Balko. It goes into detail on why and how we got the police we have today. It's not a coincidence and it's not about "a few bad apples".
Since the 1960s, there has been a systematic top-down development towards a more violent, heavier armed and more excessive police force. This has been achieved through government grants, incentives, and case-law favoring and encouraging the police behavior we see today. No-knock raids gone wrong where innocent people get hurt is now a regular occurrence. Forfeiture without a court charge is a major source of income for all law agencies, to the tune of billions a year. The wars on abstracts (drugs, crime, terror) has made our society more violent and less safe.
If we continue down this path, the next step will be the people having to defend themselves against their government and police.
Although it is true that power corrupts, and that "the new boss is the same as the old", there are just as many or more examples throughout history where resistance and revolution did change things in a positive direction. To take a few examples close to home: the American revolution and later the civil war, universal suffrage, black's rights, gay's rights. The list goes on.
If you lean back, hide, and let the powerful get what they want then they will corrupt. That will most certainly lead to a net negative for society as a whole. You might live a comfortable life, but you will die a coward.
Besides the eternal class struggle you mentioned, today's fight is about a free society vs. total corporate and government power, and there are many fronts. Some examples, in random order: Never-ending wars on abstracts (drugs, crime, terrorism); excessive military spending; Internet communication, privacy and freedom of expression; copyright vs. cultural heritage; government transparency vs. secrecy; police abuse, cops-gone-bad, no-knock raids.
It is of course ironic how the latter problem is more or less the same as where we started, with "writs of assistance" before the Revolution. So yes, I guess it's moving slowing, but overall we are moving in a positive direction.
Thanks. At least somebody understands basic business models.
It's a shame Lenovo cares so little about Linux, despite their laptops being very popular with that customer group.
But does it run Linux? Last year, when I tried a basic Ubuntu install on the X1 Carbon, it didn't survive the first suspend / hibernate. Maybe things have improved since then.
Like the other guy said, you're talking about art forms here. And if you go by the mainstream opinion on art, you'll get average stuff. It's simple really, if something has to appeal to everybody, it cannot be very special or left-field, rather it becomes repetitive and cliché.
Talk to people who are actually into a particular form of art, like movies, and you'll most likely get a different opinion than the mainstream. On the original Terminator: Great movie, and actually very well done effects for a (relatively) low budget production. It's been 31 years, and it has aged surprisingly well.
I agree with most of what you say, although I have a hard time following some of it: For example, even on Windows, you can use basic tools like ssh and rsync, I believe. Set up a crontab'ed rsync from an external machine like you say, and you're good. One-way public key authentication. That's (relatively) easy and inexpensive.
/home very day, and full back up twice a month. Never deleted anything. DSLR pictures comes extra (one time is enough; don't need redundant unchanged incrementals), and I don't find it necessary to back up porn and piratebay downloads. I'm currently at 30% free space left, so will probably buy a new pair of 6-8 TB disk in a year or so. Average cost per year is at around $100-150, I guess.
Which leads me to the cost of such a system. In my case, I have two decommissioned laptops (even a Raspberry Pi 2 would do the job) bought for $50 in two separate locations from my house. Each has a 3 TB external USB disk, bought about three years ago. I do incremental of
Granted, this is not for everybody. Then I again, this system covers my family, including parents. So yeah, not a business, if that is what you meant. However, scaling this up is not going to go exponential. Randomly picked server hosting I could find is at $1000 / year; there's probably many cheaper options out there. If that covers a business of 5 - 10 people, the cost per head is about the same.
Stallman was right. Although in his story, it was about books, not babies or cars.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
In a few years, maybe they will follow the 2D printer business model: Sell the printer for $100, but the filament for the price of gold per gram.
> If they called the cops for every one of those, we'd have to move the classes to prison.
The moved the cops into the schools long time ago, so we're pretty much there already:
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
That's not how it will work. It will be more like this:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
"Oh, you were fired from your last job? Well, there's 100 M others in the pool of wage slaves to pick from. Good bye".
You are mixing random concepts here, applying the same label to them, and concluding that there is no privacy. Sounds like a straw man argument to me. But let's dissect it.
The first problem is comparing privacy from your family members to society as a whole. Sorry, but there is little power to be gained from peeking through the window of your older brother. And it will definitely not affect anybody else on your block. Now, if somebody were to drive down the street with a camera, film everybody and everything and put it on the Internet, that would be a whole different story. Google tried, and they had to blur faces, lower their cameras or stop altogether in different countries. The key difference is the scale of the operation, and number of people affected.
The second problem with your argument, is comparing police, state and government surveillance with private data collection. You might think Google, Microsoft, Facebook are evil, and should not hold your private data. You're probably right. However, none of these companies will kick down your door and shoot your dog. The very purpose of government surveillance is to retain power and control. That has always been the case, and the Internet and computers didn't change it. It has just made the rulers' job so much easier.
The beauty of total government surveillance is that it doesn't have to be total in order to achieve its goal. It is enough if most people merely believe they are watched most of the time, just like you describe. We start to self-censor. We'll be more careful about what we write, what we criticize, who we associate with. It fences our thoughts and ideas, and limits our ability to seek alternatives, which is precisely its purpose. The opposite is not privacy, it is freedom and liberty.
Monitors did get a lot better, and with higher resolution, though. With 4k (3840 x 2160 or 4096 x 2160), or even 8k (7680×4320) you don't have to zoom out to a fraction of the original size any more. In fact, with your S3 of some 6 MP, you can see the picture in 100%. It means details like noise, camera shake will be more apparent.
> free copy
;-)
Let's talk about that word, "free", shall we?
Most people seem to fall into the trap of associating the crime with the marketplace and payment system, and as an extension demand that those third parties be responsible. Furthermore, the crime drives hysteria, and similar to the "think of the children" line of reasoning, it's used by dishonest people to drive their agenda. The fact is, the severity of the crime is completely irrelevant to the question of responsibility here.
If she had paid with Foursquare, Visa or MasterCard, clearly those companies would not have been sued. And if she found the cab service through Bing or Google, no sane person would cry for them to vet their advertisers and links. Replace the crime with a hair in the soup at a restaurant, and suing any of those third parties would be just as ridiculous.
Last time I took a "normal" taxi in India, the driver demanded 100 USD, although I knew the price was around 800 rupees (~13 USD). The final transaction was made in cash, so who should I lodge my complaint with? The Reserve Bank of India or the US Federal Reserve? The patentable absurdity of the original case is starting to become apparent.
Finally, regarding those "normal" state and city taxi monopolies: They need to fall. In virtually any country I've been, they offer a poor service at an extortionate price. They abuse their monopoly by only having the number of drivers available they see fit and benefit from, while ignoring peek demand on weekends and other busy days and nights. And as for safety; crimes also happened in taxis before the Internet.
Any this is why we cannot have nice things. Any attempt at improvements and progress is immediately attacked by those who seek egoistical gain or cry for an ever bigger nanny-state, or as in this case both.
Blaming somebody's crime on Uber because they used the app is as absurd as blaming Tinder for failing to screen and monitor its users. (Although, I'm sure somebody will eventually sue for that as well).
> Apple hardware has an unparalleled build quality
You haven't tried Lenovo's T-series business laptops, have you? The common saying is, that you could kill a man with one of them, and write his obituary with it afterwards. They also support most GNU/Linux distributions well.
Most Apple laptops are so thin and fragile, carrying one by a corner might be enough to bend it, or break the fragile electronics inside. Granted the edeges are usally very thin, so maybe you could slice somebody's throat with it. However, it would probably malfunction due to liquid damage.
To be fair, when your desktop runs Ubuntu and has an uptime of more than five years, you can be forgiven for forgetting what the "Windows" (aka reboot) button looks like.
* ducks *
It is sad to see that years of propaganda and fear-mongering by the government, politicians and police have actually worked out so well for them. Twenty years ago, the response to a peer-to-peer hosting network would have been "give me some of that". Today, it's "imagine how the police could fuck you over if they wanted to".
How much more will it take to admit to ourselves that most Western nations are now police states?
> How long can you sustain these kinds of I/O rates before burning the thing out?
If you were to sustain 1550 MByte/s write for 1 year, you'd write a total of 48 PB. (1550*60*60*24*365/1000/1000/1000), or 0.13 PB/day. In Techreport's endurance test, only two drives made it past 1.5 PB. So, if that is the bar, the drive would last only 11 days.
However, that would give you no time to read the data you'd written. Since you're not likely to write at max speed 24/7, the drive should last considerably longer.
http://techreport.com/review/2...
How about because they are part of the MPAA cartel? Suing grandmas and kids all over the world. But yeah, their dubious "family members" (aka Sony Music, Sony Computer Entertainment) doesn't really contribute to their reputation, whether Sony Pictures have control over them or not.
Watching Sony bleed has really been the greatest xmas gift of this year.
Businesses that have gone through as many rounds of acquisitions and mergers as this one have are a bit Frankensteinish, so it's hard to say what is new or old or mashed up together.
Sort of like how Nokia used to be an old lumberjack and milling company, then produced rubber and car tires, then mobile phones, and finally went on to become a brothel for Microsoft executives who fetishize pale Finnish developers, developers, developers...