An Oracle executive, sales manager and human resources manager walk into a court room...
Oh! I know this one...
...suddenly a crazed gunman on trail in the next room escapes and takes them all hostage. He threatens to kill the hostages one by one over the next 10 minutes unless his demands are met.
This crowd is merely giving us another entry in the rather long list of isomorphic systems that differ only in their terminology.
Hey, if it gives the marketing folks a way to keep themselves busy, while I get to keep doing things the same way as always, it sounds like a win for everyone.
So you kicked out everyone who couldn't get a 3.0 for whatever reason, and then evince surprise that a school made up of only achievers worked out well?
What happened to the 60-80% of the kids left out of this new wonderschool of yours? How did their education fare?
It doesn't sound to me like this is any kind of solution to the problem, unless you define "the problem" as "all those subpar students we don't give a crap about are holding our top 40%-20% back. How can we ditch them?"
I hate to break it to you all, but we (the USA at least) have had smart bombs and missiles for decades. Longer if you count heat-seeking missiles, which automatically target the nearest heat source in front of them, and torpedoes used in WWII that did similarly with sound. But the modern missiles and bombs have their own target selection and guidance logic on board.
I (a software engineer. No hardware at all) got a job offer from TI in Dallas almost 20 years ago to work at their bomb design facility. So I know two decades ago they were putting AI in their bombs. If you think the state of the art hasn't advanced much since, you're an utter fool.
Nothing against the folks who work there; everyone's got to follow their own moral compass. I can justify working on a lot of military jobs as actually saving our own soldier's lives, but I just wasn't down with using some of my limited time on this earth making bombs. One bridge to far for me.
There's absolutely nothing suprising in any of this. Here's a Republican complaining about Congress and his own party's behavior today:
difficulties within the executive branch were nothing compared with the pain of dealing with Congress.... I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned, and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.
"...an insurgent outlier -- ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition"
..and yet even more of these clowns got sent to Congress weeks later. There's another Congressional election coming up later this year, and most predictions currently are that there will be even more of these ideological fundamentalists and their more reasonable but still Republican allies in Congress next year, primarily due to voters who don't like them not caring enough to go vote. They might even take over the Senate too.
Huge issue here. In fact, doing this will get rid of the top three reasons you'd want to create a "guest" account anyway. The only remaining issue is folks messing with your desktop. Well, that and one regular guest who likes to hit that damn "mute" button I didn't even know my keyboard had..
Yes, and that's a Good Thing. Real-time virus scanning is an active menace to anyone who actually uses their computer to do anything intensive. It causes no end of unnecessary trouble on my development machine at work, and I flat out won't allow it to be installed on my system at home.
Presumably the manager who was told to suspend the guy was about to be fired too. You have to wonder what would have happened if they had agreed, then "forgot" to actually carry out the suspension. By the time corporate figured out the guy hadn't actually been suspended, both he and the manager would probably have been fired already anyway.
Or better yet, this situation is crying out for a work-to-rule. "Sure, I'll go start the official suspension process immediately. Hmm...now where are those forms policy says I have to use...?"
I think you're not grasping that the whole idea of this is that the identity is verified by some process that is difficult or nearly impossible to fake.
No, I think you're not grasping that someone with no scruples and enough motivation has no trouble whatsoever creating fake online accounts. For instance, the actual implementation we are talking about here in TFA is just asking for a Google account ID, which is a process that is trivial to fake. Sure, you have to lie on Google's application, but once you get over the moral taboo of lying, how hard is that? Every kid in the world who got an Android cellphone at age 12 or under (which er...might have.. included two of my three when their Grandparents got them phones) faked part of the application (12 is Google's official age minimum).
You have to realize that Trolls aren't normal users. Normal users care when the identity they use for everything gets a bad name, or gets banned. Normal users don't want to go through the trouble of managing multiple online identities. Normal users don't like lying when filling out forms, or to authorities in general. Normal users would feel bad about taking online disputes offline (calling employers to demand firings, digging up and posting addresses and phone numbers, filing false reports with the cops, credit agencies, the IRS, etc.)
Trolls don't have any trouble with any of those things. So tying all kinds of real-world info to one user account is a huge boon to Trolls, without harming them in the slightest.
First off, the stuff they quoted in the summary was mostly from the intro paragraph. Not going in the details of the matter of law in an intro is no huge deal.
I did notice a bit further in as the decision went more into the pre-911 intelligence a bit of a historical error. The official 911 report actually showed that there was intelligence flagging the terrorists. As one example, one of the local FBI field offices flagged the fact that a lot of Middle-east nationals were taking flight training classes, and were showing no interest in learning how to land. The main problem the official report flagged was lack of communication between agencies, not lack of data (which is why its main recommendation was to combine all the intel agencies, NOT to gather more intel). So anyone who says the government didn't have enough data is arguing directly against the government's own 911 findings.
Historical misinterpretations aside, what is the legal argument? Reading through the body, it appears to be the following:
Constitutionally the government has much more latitude to collect information for national defense than it does for criminal investigation. (Keith decision from 1972)
The gathering that was going on was within the letter of the laws authorized by Congress since then.
In other words, the logic is that the (unanimous) Keith decision in 1972 established that the government could write much more aggressive laws for national defense intelligence gathering than it can for criminal cases, and subsequent laws have done so. So at the moment its is both constitutional and legal. I'll let folks who know constitutional law comment on how kosher this interpretation of things is.
Not true. Getting banned is only a serious inconvenience if you are the kind of person who follows societal rules and cares about your reputation. If you are an unhinged person who wants to create strife in any way possible and don't feel bad about lying to web forms, getting banned is hardly even a speed-bump. Better yet, its a great cudgel to use against others in your trolling. Harass them until they lose their temper, then get *them* banned.
In a way, trolls are like Archibald Tuttle from Gilliam's Brazil: Their lack of concern for following the rules makes them practically untouchable by a bureaucracy that assumes everyone tries to follow the rules. However, everyone around them who do try to follow the rules gets screwed.
Whatever the solution to trolls is, it is clearly not imposing more rules on everyone. Bureaucracy just makes them stronger.. User moderation is the most effective solution I've seen.
6. Lack of Anonymity doesn't actually get rid of trolls. Mentally unhinged people are certain they are in the right at all times, and frankly don't care if the world knows who they are or not. That's why restraining orders exist (and why they are routinely violated by the harassers). Getting rid of anonymity in fact helps the trolls, rather than hindering them.
If I don't recognize a face, what good would it do me to also show me a name I don't know?
I suppose if you database backed it, you could come up with some interesting applications. For instance, you could hook it to the sex offender registry, the state's list of folks with restraining orders, the list of folks arrested for solicitation, or dontdatehim.com. Still, for your typical unexceptional person, I don't see what good it would do me to have my computer "recognize" them.
Except that I wouldn't. I don't believe it's right for anyone to castrate anyone against their will, criminal or not.
That's just you. Not everyone is like that. For instance, it appears that a majority of the voters in Oklahoma have no big problem with sterilizing people against their will, since that's exactly what their junior Senator admitted doing regularly, and not only is he not in jail or had his license revoked, but they've reelected him twice.
The thing that bugs me about this is that all you fuckers on the band wagon saying he should be pardoned in 2013 would be the first to call for his castration if you had been living in the UK in 1950.
Well, I wasn't around in 1950. But it happens I'm old enough that I was around in the 1970's, which was also an appallingly sexist, racist, and homophobic time. I can remember a time when the "N-word" was a common word in conversation amongst white folk, even when addressing black people. Having slowly watched things evolve since, there's no doubt in my mind things are much better now. If you think things aren't far better today, I kind of envy you your ignorance. You just have no idea what things were like, and that's a good thing.
You are quite correct that there are still folks out there who are aggressively intolerant and authoritarian (the "Archie Bunkers"), but there are also still the poor schleps clumsily fighting for a better world (the "Meatheads"). Having the privilege of watching these two groups over the last 40 years, I know which evolved into which, and I can assure you the Archie Bunkers by and large can be found enjoying themselves ranting on talk radio and Fox News, and the Meatheads can now be found in places like here complaining in whiny voices about the treatment of folks like Alan Turing. So the folks who were "first to call for his castration" can still be found, but if you are looking here, you are looking in the wrong place.
Lots of men were charged with these insane laws. Why aren't they all pardoned?
That would be an awesome next step. What they did to the man who saved their country was about as unforgivable as it comes. Certainly far more than a couple of "whoops, our bad." gestures is called for. A great start would be making the same gestures to the scores of powerless non-famous people hit by the same hammer, people they don't have to make any gestures for. Show some true contrition, beyond the meer "Wow, that story looks kinda bad on this famous guy's Wikipedia entry, doesn't it? What can we do to fix that?" level.
All looking at the source code would tell you is that they implemented Dual_EC_DRBG; exactly the same as looking at the OpenSSL source code will tell you. I doubt there would be a handy comment saying "/* Implemented a known-weak method on behalf of the NSA. */" around it.
Perhaps, but I suspect the comments on the rollback merges from the Git repository from when well-meaning developers tried to fix the flawed algorithm. would be quite enlightening.
Probably mostly a difference in exchange rate. As of this morning, a Euro is worth about 1.4 dollars. Looking at things this morning, I can get a cheap off-brand "60W equivalent" LED for about $16 each, but I wouldn't trust it or its advertised specs. I don't have time to do the research now, but a quality one will probably run me at least $20 each.
The problem is that is under ideal conditions. I found that I've got a few sockets in my house that have a nasty habit of killing light bulbs. For those, I'm much better off sticking the cheapest bulbs in the house in them (or leaving them bare, if I can get away with it). Then I have a few more that aren't that bad, but no CFL I've stuck in them ever seemed to last more than a year or so. I've lived in this house 15 years, and replacing a single bulb 15 times with the most expensive (iow: "efficient") bulb on the market starts to add up to real money.
When bulbs were $1 each, nobody cared that much. Now its such an investment that I wouldn't be surprised to see richer folks calling in electricians to debug "unlucky" sockets. Engineers would need to work up spreadsheets of socket BTBF's for the whole living space to figure out which bulbs to use in which sockets. Poorer folks will just start mapping out which sockets in their living spaces its best leave empty.
...not because they are superior, but because at least half of the USA is living paycheck-to-paycheck, and they are cheaper. When you need a lightbulb right now, and your kids get to eat with whatever is left, you're most likely going to pick the cheapest one, not the one that should give you the cheapest electricity bill over the next 20 years (particularly if you're liable to move in 1-5 years, leaving your lightbulb "investment" behind before it has paid off).
Hell, I'm better off than most folks, but in my own house I've instituted a rule that we buy no more than 1 expensive LED bulb a month (at last check we had 8 burned out awaiting replacement). I wanna hug trees and all that, but there's a lot better way to spend hundreds of dollars this week than on light bulbs.
So expecting "the market" to fix this in a healthy way all by itself any time soon is unreasonable. This is the exact kind of thing we have government for. Otherwise the streets would be full of trash and sewage (cheapest way to dispose of it, after all! Who's the government to tell me how to dispose of my Snickers wrappers?)
..he'd get bounced out of that school by the local school-board so fast, he wouldn't have time to get the "ler" in "Hitler" out of his lips. No parent wants their kid taught by a dangerous nut, no matter what a contract or a Union may say on the matter. We actually used to have deniers pop up in schools in the USA every now and then in the 70's and early 80's, but nobody who tries that crap today lasts long enough to make it to the news.
You may find our bottom-up method of social ostracization a bit messy, but in this case it at east it works really well.
I see a lot of fellow Americans making long posts on this without knowing the background behind it. As a USA Spurs fan, perhaps I can help translate.
Tottenham is a northern London suburb/neighborhood that has its own football team (Tottenham Hotspur). Historically this neighborhood has been heavily Jewish. Fans of rival teams took to "insulting" Spurs fans by calling them "Yids" (short for Yiddish, aka: Jews). There's no good way to fight "insults" like this without hurting your actual Jewish fans, so instead Spurs fans have adopted this moniker as their own. A Spurs fan is a proud Yid (no matter what their religion is).
Everybody in the US knows that if your rival is the Texas Longhorns ("Hook 'em Horns"), there's a good chance you're going to be seen driving around town with at "Cook 'em Horns" bumper sticker. The problem is that when you apply this principle to Yids, what you end up with is a lot of really nauseating WWII Hitler/Gas Chamber references.
But what really takes this far far over the line is how (English) football fans behave at games. In the USA football fans go to the game, and they cheer, and they yell random things and may make a lot of noise. If some of what is said is offensive, its generally just one or two drunk guys here and there who can easily be ignored (or in extreme cases, bounced out of the stadium). However, in England fans are organized. They have songs and cheers that the whole stadium sings in unison. Picture tens of thousands of fans singing about sending Yids to the gas chambers, in unison, while actual opposing fans are sitting there (some in obviously jewish garb). Now you might have a grasp of the problem. It is indeed a horrible, serious problem, and needs to be stopped.
Are the authorities handling all this properly? Of course not, silly! Tweets are not the problem at all. Still this is a vast improvement over their first attempt a month ago, which was, hold on now... arresting Spurs fans for pro-"Yid" cheers. Yup, don't just blame the victim, arrest them! For a bit more background, here's an open letter from a Jewish Spurs fan that lays out the issue nicely.
I have to say, that hasn't been my experience with the Muslims I've known. Admittedly my sample size is only about (quick inventory here) 8 or so. But still, I know one guy in particular who used to have long conversations about the Koran and the Bible with another Christian friend of mine. Even convinced him to try fasting for Ramadan (incidentally convinced me to try a traditional Lenten fast too).
The only topics I've found that can be really touchy with my Muslim friends are Jews and Muslims of the opposite sect (Shiia for Sunnis and Sunnis for Shiia). They can have some really nasty ideas about them, very reminiscent of the kind of stuff you hear a lot of Christians say about Muslims, and can be impervious to reason on the subject. Even that isn't universal though. One of my friends was raised Shiia in Iraq, but is proudly atheist and loves having long conversations with a Jewish (Israeli) friend about it. Those are fun.
Slashdot Mirror
An Oracle executive, sales manager and human resources manager walk into a court room...
Oh! I know this one...
...suddenly a crazed gunman on trail in the next room escapes and takes them all hostage. He threatens to kill the hostages one by one over the next 10 minutes unless his demands are met.
What kind of sandwich do you go make yourself?
end of life for Nest products, citing low advertising revenue from the platform
Advertising on my thermostat? There's a scary thought.
Nest: 72 too cold for you? Here's some ads for Seniors dating sites.
Me: Noooooo! Where's the mind-bleach?
This crowd is merely giving us another entry in the rather long list of isomorphic systems that differ only in their terminology.
Hey, if it gives the marketing folks a way to keep themselves busy, while I get to keep doing things the same way as always, it sounds like a win for everyone.
Students had to have a B average to get in...
So you kicked out everyone who couldn't get a 3.0 for whatever reason, and then evince surprise that a school made up of only achievers worked out well?
What happened to the 60-80% of the kids left out of this new wonderschool of yours? How did their education fare?
It doesn't sound to me like this is any kind of solution to the problem, unless you define "the problem" as "all those subpar students we don't give a crap about are holding our top 40%-20% back. How can we ditch them?"
I hate to break it to you all, but we (the USA at least) have had smart bombs and missiles for decades. Longer if you count heat-seeking missiles, which automatically target the nearest heat source in front of them, and torpedoes used in WWII that did similarly with sound. But the modern missiles and bombs have their own target selection and guidance logic on board.
I (a software engineer. No hardware at all) got a job offer from TI in Dallas almost 20 years ago to work at their bomb design facility. So I know two decades ago they were putting AI in their bombs. If you think the state of the art hasn't advanced much since, you're an utter fool.
Nothing against the folks who work there; everyone's got to follow their own moral compass. I can justify working on a lot of military jobs as actually saving our own soldier's lives, but I just wasn't down with using some of my limited time on this earth making bombs. One bridge to far for me.
difficulties within the executive branch were nothing compared with the pain of dealing with Congress. ... I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned, and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.
..and here's a Republican complaining about Congress and his own party just prior to the last election:
"...an insurgent outlier -- ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition"
..and yet even more of these clowns got sent to Congress weeks later. There's another Congressional election coming up later this year, and most predictions currently are that there will be even more of these ideological fundamentalists and their more reasonable but still Republican allies in Congress next year, primarily due to voters who don't like them not caring enough to go vote. They might even take over the Senate too.
Huge issue here. In fact, doing this will get rid of the top three reasons you'd want to create a "guest" account anyway. The only remaining issue is folks messing with your desktop. Well, that and one regular guest who likes to hit that damn "mute" button I didn't even know my keyboard had..
Yes, and that's a Good Thing. Real-time virus scanning is an active menace to anyone who actually uses their computer to do anything intensive. It causes no end of unnecessary trouble on my development machine at work, and I flat out won't allow it to be installed on my system at home.
Presumably the manager who was told to suspend the guy was about to be fired too. You have to wonder what would have happened if they had agreed, then "forgot" to actually carry out the suspension. By the time corporate figured out the guy hadn't actually been suspended, both he and the manager would probably have been fired already anyway.
Or better yet, this situation is crying out for a work-to-rule. "Sure, I'll go start the official suspension process immediately. Hmm...now where are those forms policy says I have to use...?"
I think you're not grasping that the whole idea of this is that the identity is verified by some process that is difficult or nearly impossible to fake.
No, I think you're not grasping that someone with no scruples and enough motivation has no trouble whatsoever creating fake online accounts. For instance, the actual implementation we are talking about here in TFA is just asking for a Google account ID, which is a process that is trivial to fake. Sure, you have to lie on Google's application, but once you get over the moral taboo of lying, how hard is that? Every kid in the world who got an Android cellphone at age 12 or under (which er...might have.. included two of my three when their Grandparents got them phones) faked part of the application (12 is Google's official age minimum).
You have to realize that Trolls aren't normal users. Normal users care when the identity they use for everything gets a bad name, or gets banned. Normal users don't want to go through the trouble of managing multiple online identities. Normal users don't like lying when filling out forms, or to authorities in general. Normal users would feel bad about taking online disputes offline (calling employers to demand firings, digging up and posting addresses and phone numbers, filing false reports with the cops, credit agencies, the IRS, etc.)
Trolls don't have any trouble with any of those things. So tying all kinds of real-world info to one user account is a huge boon to Trolls, without harming them in the slightest.
Well, perhaps it would be a good idea to read the actual opinion then?
First off, the stuff they quoted in the summary was mostly from the intro paragraph. Not going in the details of the matter of law in an intro is no huge deal.
I did notice a bit further in as the decision went more into the pre-911 intelligence a bit of a historical error. The official 911 report actually showed that there was intelligence flagging the terrorists. As one example, one of the local FBI field offices flagged the fact that a lot of Middle-east nationals were taking flight training classes, and were showing no interest in learning how to land. The main problem the official report flagged was lack of communication between agencies, not lack of data (which is why its main recommendation was to combine all the intel agencies, NOT to gather more intel). So anyone who says the government didn't have enough data is arguing directly against the government's own 911 findings.
Historical misinterpretations aside, what is the legal argument? Reading through the body, it appears to be the following:
In other words, the logic is that the (unanimous) Keith decision in 1972 established that the government could write much more aggressive laws for national defense intelligence gathering than it can for criminal cases, and subsequent laws have done so. So at the moment its is both constitutional and legal. I'll let folks who know constitutional law comment on how kosher this interpretation of things is.
Not true. Getting banned is only a serious inconvenience if you are the kind of person who follows societal rules and cares about your reputation. If you are an unhinged person who wants to create strife in any way possible and don't feel bad about lying to web forms, getting banned is hardly even a speed-bump. Better yet, its a great cudgel to use against others in your trolling. Harass them until they lose their temper, then get *them* banned.
In a way, trolls are like Archibald Tuttle from Gilliam's Brazil: Their lack of concern for following the rules makes them practically untouchable by a bureaucracy that assumes everyone tries to follow the rules. However, everyone around them who do try to follow the rules gets screwed.
Whatever the solution to trolls is, it is clearly not imposing more rules on everyone. Bureaucracy just makes them stronger.. User moderation is the most effective solution I've seen.
6. Lack of Anonymity doesn't actually get rid of trolls. Mentally unhinged people are certain they are in the right at all times, and frankly don't care if the world knows who they are or not. That's why restraining orders exist (and why they are routinely violated by the harassers). Getting rid of anonymity in fact helps the trolls, rather than hindering them.
If I don't recognize a face, what good would it do me to also show me a name I don't know?
I suppose if you database backed it, you could come up with some interesting applications. For instance, you could hook it to the sex offender registry, the state's list of folks with restraining orders, the list of folks arrested for solicitation, or dontdatehim.com. Still, for your typical unexceptional person, I don't see what good it would do me to have my computer "recognize" them.
Except that I wouldn't. I don't believe it's right for anyone to castrate anyone against their will, criminal or not.
That's just you. Not everyone is like that. For instance, it appears that a majority of the voters in Oklahoma have no big problem with sterilizing people against their will, since that's exactly what their junior Senator admitted doing regularly, and not only is he not in jail or had his license revoked, but they've reelected him twice.
The thing that bugs me about this is that all you fuckers on the band wagon saying he should be pardoned in 2013 would be the first to call for his castration if you had been living in the UK in 1950.
Well, I wasn't around in 1950. But it happens I'm old enough that I was around in the 1970's, which was also an appallingly sexist, racist, and homophobic time. I can remember a time when the "N-word" was a common word in conversation amongst white folk, even when addressing black people. Having slowly watched things evolve since, there's no doubt in my mind things are much better now. If you think things aren't far better today, I kind of envy you your ignorance. You just have no idea what things were like, and that's a good thing.
You are quite correct that there are still folks out there who are aggressively intolerant and authoritarian (the "Archie Bunkers"), but there are also still the poor schleps clumsily fighting for a better world (the "Meatheads"). Having the privilege of watching these two groups over the last 40 years, I know which evolved into which, and I can assure you the Archie Bunkers by and large can be found enjoying themselves ranting on talk radio and Fox News, and the Meatheads can now be found in places like here complaining in whiny voices about the treatment of folks like Alan Turing. So the folks who were "first to call for his castration" can still be found, but if you are looking here, you are looking in the wrong place.
Lots of men were charged with these insane laws. Why aren't they all pardoned?
That would be an awesome next step. What they did to the man who saved their country was about as unforgivable as it comes. Certainly far more than a couple of "whoops, our bad." gestures is called for. A great start would be making the same gestures to the scores of powerless non-famous people hit by the same hammer, people they don't have to make any gestures for. Show some true contrition, beyond the meer "Wow, that story looks kinda bad on this famous guy's Wikipedia entry, doesn't it? What can we do to fix that?" level.
To be fair, the passing of same-sex marriage legislation in England this year was a great step.
All looking at the source code would tell you is that they implemented Dual_EC_DRBG; exactly the same as looking at the OpenSSL source code will tell you. I doubt there would be a handy comment saying "/* Implemented a known-weak method on behalf of the NSA. */" around it.
Perhaps, but I suspect the comments on the rollback merges from the Git repository from when well-meaning developers tried to fix the flawed algorithm. would be quite enlightening.
Probably mostly a difference in exchange rate. As of this morning, a Euro is worth about 1.4 dollars. Looking at things this morning, I can get a cheap off-brand "60W equivalent" LED for about $16 each, but I wouldn't trust it or its advertised specs. I don't have time to do the research now, but a quality one will probably run me at least $20 each.
The problem is that is under ideal conditions. I found that I've got a few sockets in my house that have a nasty habit of killing light bulbs. For those, I'm much better off sticking the cheapest bulbs in the house in them (or leaving them bare, if I can get away with it). Then I have a few more that aren't that bad, but no CFL I've stuck in them ever seemed to last more than a year or so. I've lived in this house 15 years, and replacing a single bulb 15 times with the most expensive (iow: "efficient") bulb on the market starts to add up to real money.
When bulbs were $1 each, nobody cared that much. Now its such an investment that I wouldn't be surprised to see richer folks calling in electricians to debug "unlucky" sockets. Engineers would need to work up spreadsheets of socket BTBF's for the whole living space to figure out which bulbs to use in which sockets. Poorer folks will just start mapping out which sockets in their living spaces its best leave empty.
...not because they are superior, but because at least half of the USA is living paycheck-to-paycheck, and they are cheaper. When you need a lightbulb right now, and your kids get to eat with whatever is left, you're most likely going to pick the cheapest one, not the one that should give you the cheapest electricity bill over the next 20 years (particularly if you're liable to move in 1-5 years, leaving your lightbulb "investment" behind before it has paid off).
Hell, I'm better off than most folks, but in my own house I've instituted a rule that we buy no more than 1 expensive LED bulb a month (at last check we had 8 burned out awaiting replacement). I wanna hug trees and all that, but there's a lot better way to spend hundreds of dollars this week than on light bulbs.
So expecting "the market" to fix this in a healthy way all by itself any time soon is unreasonable. This is the exact kind of thing we have government for. Otherwise the streets would be full of trash and sewage (cheapest way to dispose of it, after all! Who's the government to tell me how to dispose of my Snickers wrappers?)
The main problem with Go was, ironically, that it was ungoogleable.
If Keegstra pulled that stunt in the US ...
..he'd get bounced out of that school by the local school-board so fast, he wouldn't have time to get the "ler" in "Hitler" out of his lips. No parent wants their kid taught by a dangerous nut, no matter what a contract or a Union may say on the matter. We actually used to have deniers pop up in schools in the USA every now and then in the 70's and early 80's, but nobody who tries that crap today lasts long enough to make it to the news.
You may find our bottom-up method of social ostracization a bit messy, but in this case it at east it works really well.
I see a lot of fellow Americans making long posts on this without knowing the background behind it. As a USA Spurs fan, perhaps I can help translate.
Tottenham is a northern London suburb/neighborhood that has its own football team (Tottenham Hotspur). Historically this neighborhood has been heavily Jewish. Fans of rival teams took to "insulting" Spurs fans by calling them "Yids" (short for Yiddish, aka: Jews). There's no good way to fight "insults" like this without hurting your actual Jewish fans, so instead Spurs fans have adopted this moniker as their own. A Spurs fan is a proud Yid (no matter what their religion is).
Everybody in the US knows that if your rival is the Texas Longhorns ("Hook 'em Horns"), there's a good chance you're going to be seen driving around town with at "Cook 'em Horns" bumper sticker. The problem is that when you apply this principle to Yids, what you end up with is a lot of really nauseating WWII Hitler/Gas Chamber references.
But what really takes this far far over the line is how (English) football fans behave at games. In the USA football fans go to the game, and they cheer, and they yell random things and may make a lot of noise. If some of what is said is offensive, its generally just one or two drunk guys here and there who can easily be ignored (or in extreme cases, bounced out of the stadium). However, in England fans are organized. They have songs and cheers that the whole stadium sings in unison. Picture tens of thousands of fans singing about sending Yids to the gas chambers, in unison, while actual opposing fans are sitting there (some in obviously jewish garb). Now you might have a grasp of the problem. It is indeed a horrible, serious problem, and needs to be stopped.
Are the authorities handling all this properly? Of course not, silly! Tweets are not the problem at all. Still this is a vast improvement over their first attempt a month ago, which was, hold on now ... arresting Spurs fans for pro-"Yid" cheers. Yup, don't just blame the victim, arrest them! For a bit more background, here's an open letter from a Jewish Spurs fan that lays out the issue nicely.
I have to say, that hasn't been my experience with the Muslims I've known. Admittedly my sample size is only about (quick inventory here) 8 or so. But still, I know one guy in particular who used to have long conversations about the Koran and the Bible with another Christian friend of mine. Even convinced him to try fasting for Ramadan (incidentally convinced me to try a traditional Lenten fast too).
The only topics I've found that can be really touchy with my Muslim friends are Jews and Muslims of the opposite sect (Shiia for Sunnis and Sunnis for Shiia). They can have some really nasty ideas about them, very reminiscent of the kind of stuff you hear a lot of Christians say about Muslims, and can be impervious to reason on the subject. Even that isn't universal though. One of my friends was raised Shiia in Iraq, but is proudly atheist and loves having long conversations with a Jewish (Israeli) friend about it. Those are fun.