There's no shortage of fiction portraying dystopian futures. Somehow though there seems to be a disconnect between what people have been warned about and were scared of in fiction, and are willing to accept in real life.
Most of the dystopian future genre won't age well though as it all seems run of the mill today, and will look positively mild in comparison to reality in a few years.
Those against libertarianism often cherry pick which regulations libertarians are supposed to be "against" in such a way as to leave any regulation that would cause a problem, but abolish any regulations that fix it.
In the libertarian ideal though, the ones that cause the problems would be abolished, and then nobody would ever need the ones that fix them. It's just so hard for people who've grown up indoctrinated in the big government ways to even imagine a situation where people and businesses are allowed to succeed or fail on their own merits without any interference, so they just assume there must be some interference from government, and assume it's only the fixes that would be removed.
I'm constantly told that I'm a hypocrite for asking government to fix a problem they caused, because I was originally against them causing it in the first place. People seem to think that if I didn't want the government to interfere and cause a problem, I shouldn't ask them to interfere to fix it after it goes exactly the way everyone predicted. That's not hypocrisy, that's being proven right!
I don't think you understand what libertarians want. Deregulation in the libertarian way, would mean that banks wouldn't be interfered with by the government, but they also wouldn't be propped up by it, or forced to take risks by it. Let's see how risky a loan the bank would make if there was no federal insurance covering it, and no law forcing it. Remember that the government dictated that banks had to, by law, devote a certain percentage of their loans to low income borrowers who otherwise wouldn't qualify. The banks were given government loans and incentives to make people who couldn't qualify for a mortgage in to homeowners.
If anything, the crisis in 2008 is a textbook example of "well meaning" government intervention causing a crisis and proves exactly why libertarians want less government interference. The whole thing was caused by government meddling in the banking sector "to try to increase home ownership", and it failed miserably.
Those against libertarianism often cherry pick which regulations libertarians are supposed to be "against" in such a way as to leave the regulations that would cause a problem, but abolish the ones that fix it. In the libertarian ideal though, we abolish the ones that cause the problem, and then never need the ones that fix it.
Do you really believe that switching parties in power will make any difference at all? You do realize that both parties have had their chance recently and both have been keen to expand this sort of thing and clamp down on "freedom" as much as they possibly can.
And if you truly believe a majority of Americans can be convinced to vote third party... well... good luck with that.
The second amendment people are delusional. Their guns do not in any way protect them against the government. The military has weaponry, and armour, far beyond anything available to these people.
If the military is against you, your handful of small arms won't save you. If the military is with you, your handful of small arms won't be needed. In either case the person most likely to be killed by, or due to, your small arms is you.
Now if you want to talk about "a good guy with a gun" vs "a bad guy with a gun", at least you'd theoretically have a point (though all studies and statistics show otherwise). But the protection from the government angle is pure lunacy.
But that state is incredibly adept as making sure you think that things would be completely different if the other undifferentiated group was in power. It's that illusion of choice and difference that keeps people thinking that the power still lies with the people.
The American spirit of the 1700s? or the American spirit of today? Because I haven't seen any other nation so enamoured with its authority figures as the modern USA.
There's no problem with a company offering you additional features and functionality after purchase, however there is a problem if they force a change to the item that makes it less suitable for your use case.
Unfortunately the normal way this works is that security updates, bug fixes, and new features are all rolled together, so you don't have the option to pick and choose which you get. Assuming you have the option to opt out of updates at all (not always the case), this gives some people the very difficult choice of running a device with known security vulnerabilities, or having a device in their home that they're no longer comfortable being around.
As this is slashdot, let's do a car analogy (not sure why, but they seem mandatory around here): Your car has an active recall for a safety defect that could lead to death in certain circumstances. You take your car to the dealer to get it fixed, and when you come to pick it up after the work you notice a new camera and microphone peering at you from the middle of the steering wheel. You learn that the car company is has added an "assistant" feature along with your recall, but you suspect they're really going to be monitoring everything that happens in the car from now on. It's hard to say that it's "no big deal" because after all, you agreed to the update. You had the choice of driving a known unsafe vehicle, or having them spy on you. You never would have bought the car if you'd known about the camera and microphone, but now what choice do you have?
The problem isn't in advertising hardware that doesn't work yet. The problem is in promising features or timelines and then failing to meet them. Tesla didn't get in trouble for putting hardware on it's cars that wasn't used yet. It got in trouble for selling a feature as imminent when it wasn't, and for advertising capabilities that were never delivered. There's a big difference.
There's nothing wrong with listing in the specs: "microphone (disabled at present, reserved for future firmware features)"
There IS something wrong with listing "Full control of all features through voice commands coming in the next few weeks through a firmware update" and then over a year later releasing a feature that uses the microphone to control one minor feature with a very specific keywords.
The problem doesn't arise from having future features that haven't launched yet. The problem arises from over promising and under delivering.
Not everyone is a skilled coder. Some people just want to use the internet without being a victim. Telling them to build their own browser isn't exactly helpful.
As pointed out earlier by another poster, that's getting harder and harder as well.
More programs *cough*Chrome*cough* are using their own internal resolvers instead of the system one, and running those over HTTPS specifically to bypass local domain blocks. IP blocks are also difficult with today's CDNs with large numbers of ever changing IPs, and domain based virtual hosts.
Sure, you can get around all this for now, but I'm not sure that long term you'll be able to.
Why do idealistic engineers always fail to account for human nature?
The security aspects of this are not technically difficult in the slightest, and yet instead the system was designed to trust everyone. Imagine designing a large corporate network that way: "I get root, you get root, he gets root, everybody gets root!", and that's also a place where bad actors are easily detected and "disconnected", yet no company would ever allow their admin to do that. Any system that gives full authority to every user WILL be abused, if not now, then later.
The summary states that some companies are already in compliance, and he's threatening the others with regulation. That tells me that it should be easy enough to see which companies are paying him. It's the ones who are already in compliance and just want to make sure their competitors are hit with more cost.
Spoofing isn't the problem. Unauthenticated spoofing is the problem. The CID needs to be taken out of the hands of the businesses, and put in to the hands of the telecoms. They can then work with the companies to present the appropriate CID. It would be no problem for a company to register their main number, and say "calls from all these other numbers should appear to come from this one, here's proof we own this one" It's that proof part that we're skipping.
It always surprises me how quickly idealistic engineers design systems that fail to include ANY security/authentication system, and expect that humans will play nice. We know that simply doesn't work, it's been proven repeatedly for pretty much as long as humans have existed. It's not hard to authenticate ownership of the main number, phone it! There's no reason why the end user needs to be able to spoof any number they please without proving first that they own that number.
1) An externally funded trial funneling money from overseas to some people within an area. Sure, that proves that UBI can work, if money doesnt' have to come from somewhere. 2) the same trial, another nearly identical one, 3) The first trial, and a bunch of means-tested, or geographically limited trials
Nope, still not showing me a study that has shown UBI on a large scale to be viable.
Now it's all data is wrong, only the models are right. You can always adjust the data to fit the model, but you never adjust the model to fit the data!
Point to even a single time that UBI has been trialled. It hasn't happened. Every trial to date has been either means tested, geographically limited, or both. As such none of them address any of the issues that are known to exist with the concept.
As for my "expertise", I didn't claim any. I just pointed to well understood economics which have been trialled in the real world for as long as the human race has existed.
If an actual UBI trial proves that all of human history was wrong, then great, we can do it. But so far all the evidence ever collected on the subject shows reasons it won't work, and none of the evidence ever collected shows how it could.
I'd love to be proven wrong. But to do that would require an actual study of UBI (which even the ardent proponents have never managed to do) and would require everything that we know about economics from thousands of years of history to be wrong. I'm not willing to take that bet.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no shortage of fiction portraying dystopian futures. Somehow though there seems to be a disconnect between what people have been warned about and were scared of in fiction, and are willing to accept in real life.
Most of the dystopian future genre won't age well though as it all seems run of the mill today, and will look positively mild in comparison to reality in a few years.
This just in: The US census now requires a DNA swab and fingerprints.
You'd be amazed how many bills have specific exemptions for politicians. It's somewhat scary.
Those against libertarianism often cherry pick which regulations libertarians are supposed to be "against" in such a way as to leave any regulation that would cause a problem, but abolish any regulations that fix it.
In the libertarian ideal though, the ones that cause the problems would be abolished, and then nobody would ever need the ones that fix them. It's just so hard for people who've grown up indoctrinated in the big government ways to even imagine a situation where people and businesses are allowed to succeed or fail on their own merits without any interference, so they just assume there must be some interference from government, and assume it's only the fixes that would be removed.
I'm constantly told that I'm a hypocrite for asking government to fix a problem they caused, because I was originally against them causing it in the first place. People seem to think that if I didn't want the government to interfere and cause a problem, I shouldn't ask them to interfere to fix it after it goes exactly the way everyone predicted. That's not hypocrisy, that's being proven right!
I don't think you understand what libertarians want. Deregulation in the libertarian way, would mean that banks wouldn't be interfered with by the government, but they also wouldn't be propped up by it, or forced to take risks by it. Let's see how risky a loan the bank would make if there was no federal insurance covering it, and no law forcing it. Remember that the government dictated that banks had to, by law, devote a certain percentage of their loans to low income borrowers who otherwise wouldn't qualify. The banks were given government loans and incentives to make people who couldn't qualify for a mortgage in to homeowners.
If anything, the crisis in 2008 is a textbook example of "well meaning" government intervention causing a crisis and proves exactly why libertarians want less government interference. The whole thing was caused by government meddling in the banking sector "to try to increase home ownership", and it failed miserably.
Those against libertarianism often cherry pick which regulations libertarians are supposed to be "against" in such a way as to leave the regulations that would cause a problem, but abolish the ones that fix it. In the libertarian ideal though, we abolish the ones that cause the problem, and then never need the ones that fix it.
Do you really believe that switching parties in power will make any difference at all? You do realize that both parties have had their chance recently and both have been keen to expand this sort of thing and clamp down on "freedom" as much as they possibly can.
And if you truly believe a majority of Americans can be convinced to vote third party... well... good luck with that.
The second amendment people are delusional. Their guns do not in any way protect them against the government. The military has weaponry, and armour, far beyond anything available to these people.
If the military is against you, your handful of small arms won't save you. If the military is with you, your handful of small arms won't be needed. In either case the person most likely to be killed by, or due to, your small arms is you.
Now if you want to talk about "a good guy with a gun" vs "a bad guy with a gun", at least you'd theoretically have a point (though all studies and statistics show otherwise). But the protection from the government angle is pure lunacy.
The key is "entire staff" and that's highly unlikely.
But that state is incredibly adept as making sure you think that things would be completely different if the other undifferentiated group was in power. It's that illusion of choice and difference that keeps people thinking that the power still lies with the people.
The American spirit of the 1700s? or the American spirit of today? Because I haven't seen any other nation so enamoured with its authority figures as the modern USA.
Might work in Europe where they have the concept of consumer protection, but I doubt you'd get far trying that in North America.
These days? it might be prudent....
Depends if the update is optional.
There's no problem with a company offering you additional features and functionality after purchase, however there is a problem if they force a change to the item that makes it less suitable for your use case.
Unfortunately the normal way this works is that security updates, bug fixes, and new features are all rolled together, so you don't have the option to pick and choose which you get. Assuming you have the option to opt out of updates at all (not always the case), this gives some people the very difficult choice of running a device with known security vulnerabilities, or having a device in their home that they're no longer comfortable being around.
As this is slashdot, let's do a car analogy (not sure why, but they seem mandatory around here):
Your car has an active recall for a safety defect that could lead to death in certain circumstances. You take your car to the dealer to get it fixed, and when you come to pick it up after the work you notice a new camera and microphone peering at you from the middle of the steering wheel. You learn that the car company is has added an "assistant" feature along with your recall, but you suspect they're really going to be monitoring everything that happens in the car from now on. It's hard to say that it's "no big deal" because after all, you agreed to the update. You had the choice of driving a known unsafe vehicle, or having them spy on you. You never would have bought the car if you'd known about the camera and microphone, but now what choice do you have?
The problem isn't in advertising hardware that doesn't work yet. The problem is in promising features or timelines and then failing to meet them. Tesla didn't get in trouble for putting hardware on it's cars that wasn't used yet. It got in trouble for selling a feature as imminent when it wasn't, and for advertising capabilities that were never delivered. There's a big difference.
There's nothing wrong with listing in the specs: "microphone (disabled at present, reserved for future firmware features)"
There IS something wrong with listing "Full control of all features through voice commands coming in the next few weeks through a firmware update" and then over a year later releasing a feature that uses the microphone to control one minor feature with a very specific keywords.
The problem doesn't arise from having future features that haven't launched yet. The problem arises from over promising and under delivering.
Navigator? c'mon, real men use lynx!
Not everyone is a skilled coder. Some people just want to use the internet without being a victim. Telling them to build their own browser isn't exactly helpful.
As pointed out earlier by another poster, that's getting harder and harder as well.
More programs *cough*Chrome*cough* are using their own internal resolvers instead of the system one, and running those over HTTPS specifically to bypass local domain blocks. IP blocks are also difficult with today's CDNs with large numbers of ever changing IPs, and domain based virtual hosts.
Sure, you can get around all this for now, but I'm not sure that long term you'll be able to.
Why do idealistic engineers always fail to account for human nature?
The security aspects of this are not technically difficult in the slightest, and yet instead the system was designed to trust everyone. Imagine designing a large corporate network that way: "I get root, you get root, he gets root, everybody gets root!", and that's also a place where bad actors are easily detected and "disconnected", yet no company would ever allow their admin to do that. Any system that gives full authority to every user WILL be abused, if not now, then later.
The summary states that some companies are already in compliance, and he's threatening the others with regulation. That tells me that it should be easy enough to see which companies are paying him. It's the ones who are already in compliance and just want to make sure their competitors are hit with more cost.
Spoofing isn't the problem. Unauthenticated spoofing is the problem. The CID needs to be taken out of the hands of the businesses, and put in to the hands of the telecoms. They can then work with the companies to present the appropriate CID. It would be no problem for a company to register their main number, and say "calls from all these other numbers should appear to come from this one, here's proof we own this one" It's that proof part that we're skipping.
It always surprises me how quickly idealistic engineers design systems that fail to include ANY security/authentication system, and expect that humans will play nice. We know that simply doesn't work, it's been proven repeatedly for pretty much as long as humans have existed. It's not hard to authenticate ownership of the main number, phone it! There's no reason why the end user needs to be able to spoof any number they please without proving first that they own that number.
1) An externally funded trial funneling money from overseas to some people within an area. Sure, that proves that UBI can work, if money doesnt' have to come from somewhere.
2) the same trial, another nearly identical one,
3) The first trial, and a bunch of means-tested, or geographically limited trials
Nope, still not showing me a study that has shown UBI on a large scale to be viable.
Are you too f___ing lazy to read the comment you are replying to?
You point to a list of trials that are all either means tested, geographically limited, or both. And even most of those proved unaffordable.
It gets harder and harder to convince people your consensus is right when your doomsday predictions are in the past and haven't come true.
Now it's all data is wrong, only the models are right. You can always adjust the data to fit the model, but you never adjust the model to fit the data!
Point to even a single time that UBI has been trialled. It hasn't happened. Every trial to date has been either means tested, geographically limited, or both. As such none of them address any of the issues that are known to exist with the concept.
As for my "expertise", I didn't claim any. I just pointed to well understood economics which have been trialled in the real world for as long as the human race has existed.
If an actual UBI trial proves that all of human history was wrong, then great, we can do it. But so far all the evidence ever collected on the subject shows reasons it won't work, and none of the evidence ever collected shows how it could.
I'd love to be proven wrong. But to do that would require an actual study of UBI (which even the ardent proponents have never managed to do) and would require everything that we know about economics from thousands of years of history to be wrong. I'm not willing to take that bet.