The premise of the article is misleading. The NSA is usually presented as this govt. monolith in that shiny blue glass building in the middle of a parking lot. 80% of the NSA's work is done by private subcontractors. There are 1,000's of them and, as Edward Snowden has pointed out, their security systems and auditing don't have much oversight, e.g. look at what happened to Stratfor and how easy it was for Snowden to get all that data and cover his tracks until he was ready to go to the press. The NSA still don't know what he took.
The NSA almost certainly offers its services and software to corporations and regimes around the world, regardless of their human rights records.
There's fewer obstacles to pursuing more complex, coherent, longer-term policies and strategies when you have your own, in-house team of bean counters who answer to you. Wall Street are a group of short-sighted, ignorant, knee-jerk reactionary, hubris-driven bean counters that nobody should be forced to work for.
Re: "snowden was not whistle blowing on google" -- Actually, he did. Google are responsible for collecting people's data in the first place and the NSA, CIA, DEA, etc. just piggy-back on them. Google hate Snowden as much as the NSA but they can't say it out loud in public. That's bad PR.
Disregard any claims that there's no conflict of interest here; "He who pays the piper calls the tune." There's no need for Google to explicitly state what they want in return. Stanford's bean counters understand that Google are a publicly traded corporation, not philanthropists. Just as the Koch Industries (fossil fuels and hard-line neo-liberal capitalism) partly fund Florida State University and dozens of other colleges on the understanding that all economics teaching staff and syllabi must adhere strictly to neo-liberal capitalist principles. They also get to veto any potential new faculty hires. This is pretty much what has already happened to the US political, regulatory, and governance systems and it was only a matter of time before it hit academia. The most shameful thing is how little money politicians and academics sell themselves out for. Google et al make massive returns on their investments.
More than promote their brand, they want as big a slice of the public education budget as they can get. They want to be THE IT provider to education systems worldwide and are working towards that end as we speak.
On the crowdfunding front, having public education and curriculum policy decisions made by consumerist popularity polls, PR, and marketing couldn't possibly go wrong, could it? I mean, our democratic electoral systems are doing just fine right now, aren't they? There's no problem with corporations' money distorting the public political discourse, is there? I don't think Google and Pearson Education would try to influence such a system to their advantage, do you?
An independent Scotland would already be in the EU, the message from Brussels was yes, they can, and the Euro or the Pound would work fine. The London-centric media is intensely unionist and propagated blatantly untrue FUD, backed by Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Microsoft, Accenture, IBM, Bayer, Daimler, EON Energy, Thyssen, XL Group, Alliance Trust, Bilfinger, and BMW, to scare Scottish voters into voting no. I'm English and have no particular affiliation to Scotland but it was shamefull how the English media, corporations, and Westminster politicians behaved during the referendum. Because of the hysteria, exaggerations, and lies implying increased crime and disorder as a consequence of the Independence Referendum, at one point Brian Docherty, Chairman of the Scottish Police Federation felt that they had to make the following public announcement:
“The Police Service of Scotland and the men and women who work in it should not be used as a political football at any time and especially so in these last few hours of the referendum campaign.
As I have previously stated the referendum debate has been robust but overwhelmingly good natured.
It was inevitable that the closer we came to the 18th of September passions would increase but that does not justify the exaggerated rhetoric that is being deployed with increased frequency. Any neutral observer could be led to believe Scotland is on the verge of societal disintegration yet nothing could be further from the truth.
Scotland’s citizens are overwhelmingly law abiding and tolerant and it is preposterous to imply that by placing a cross in a box, our citizens will suddenly abandon the personal virtues and values held dear to them all.
At this time it is more important than ever that individuals be they politicians, journalists or whoever should carefully consider their words, maintain level heads and act with respect. Respect is not demonstrated by suggesting a minority of mindless idiots are representative of anything. One of the many joys of this campaign has been how it has awakened political awareness across almost every single section of society. The success enjoyed by the many should not be sullied by the actions of the few.
Police officers must be kept free from the distractions of rhetoric better suited to the playground that the political stump. If crime has been committed it will be investigated and dealt with appropriately but quite simply police officers have better things to do than officiate in spats on social media and respond to baseless speculation of the potential for disorder on and following polling day”
Take the subsidy money collected from the public and use to provide high-speed, high quality municipal internet services. It's the easiest, most doable, and cost-effective way to provide competition to the ISP monopolies, and to boot, if they start with impoverished neibourhoods, the corporate ISPs would look really bad if they opposed it. Sure some municipalities would resist at first but hopefully popularity and success in others would put them under overwhelming pressure to provide it.
Making net neutrality a little bit "not neutral" sounds an awful ot like they want to make your sister a little bit pregnant. it's either neutral, i.e. it treats all traffic and all content equally, or it's not neutral, i.e. some content is more equal than others. I don't want my favourite alternative content getting marginalised because it got out-voted by NetFlix consumers. It's the weird and wonderful stuff that people put out there "just because" that makes the internet more interesting, culturally valuable, and worthwhile than TV.
And your logical fallacy is... tu quoque! Literally translating as 'you too' this fallacy is also known as the appeal to hypocrisy. It is commonly employed as an effective red herring because it takes the heat off someone having to defend their argument, and instead shifts the focus back on to the person making the criticism. Example: Nicole identified that Hannah had committed a logical fallacy, but instead of addressing the substance of her claim, Hannah accused Nicole of committing a fallacy earlier on in the conversation. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...
However, how we test dictates how we teach. You can give students a liberal arts education in the classroom but if the tests are CCSS, there's little or no incentive for them to participate in class. In effect, the tests directly inform students what's expected of them in class. If they can fool around and misbehave in class and then just cram a few hours/days/weeks before a big test and still get good grades, guess what'll tend to happen? For more info, look up John Biggs' SOLO taxonomy and the idea of Constructive Alignment.
Yes, with this technology, you can also detect if a woman's pregnant, find out if she's a virgin, find buried treasure, expell evil spirits, and pleasure the gods until they make it rain. People have told me it works in all of these cases so it must be true.
Creative Commons licensed university course books. You mean like these? http://aupress.ca/ You can download and print the whole book, or chapter by chapter as you study. How long do you think it'll take for Duke to catch up with Athabasca University?
Geo-engineering to counter the effects of CO2 is like someone taking sleeping pills to counter the effects of habitually doing amphetamines at an alarmingly increasing rate. If that doesn't convince you, how about listening to a well-informed 3rd party who isn't chasing research funding for their pet geo-engineering project: Can Geo-Engineering Save the Planet? - Christopher Williams on Reality Asserts Itself http://therealnews.com/t2/comp...
I'm not surprised that these scams work. People will readily give their bank and credit card details to random strangers in the street, with clipboards, and wearing colourful vests with logos on, who claim to be collecting subscriptions for charities. How do you find out if they're legit?
I think all these phones should come with a copy of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four and a copy of the US constitution... for irony's sake. They should also be made suscpetible to packet injection so that the authorities can alter the information that people receive through them. Down the memory hole!
Does this mean that the terminators of the future will be modelled on cats in shark suits riding vaccuum cleaners? Is THIS how we'll all meet our demise?
I reckon "inclement weather" will turn out to be the most disruptive force on electricity production and supply. Firstly, drought will starve coal, gas, and nuclear power stations of the huge amounts of water they need to run at all. Secondly, warmer water in water sources may make cooling less efficient for nuclear power stations (and possibly a danger in some cases). Thirdly there's a higher and growing risk of extreme weather events; floods, flash floods, droughts, tornados, hurricanes, and ice-storms. Just think of the more recent extreme weather events but more extreme and more frequent.
Re: "you'd already be sleeping on a bed made of money" -- Simply not true. Having worked in the music business, I can tell you that it's anything but meritocratic. I have friends and colleagues who were signed up, promoted, had moderate success, and some had hits (Top tip: Getting a distribution deal is the only thing worth having. It means that they have to invest substantial funds into promoting you so that they don't make a loss on all that distribution. This stops them from signing you up simply to shut you up and to stop you from competing with another band/artist they've already signed and are planning to promote). They all ended up owing their record labels money. It's a sad fact that even a successful recording band/artist doesn't see any money until their 3rd successful album. It's a nest of vipers, a tank of sharks, whatever metaphor you want to use. Nobody survives for very long by playing fair and keeping things ethical and above board. With a few rare exceptions, i.e. the longer-term stars that we see on TV, the only people who make decent money out of music are the ones who don't play instruments. If you're wondering why more bands and artists don't go public with this, read a recording contract.
The question is why? What do they hope to achieve with this kind of censorship. I can understand wanting to censor sites that promote and enable illegal activities. I can understand K-12 schools trying to censor porn and violence (doesn't work but at least trying keep parents happy, BTW). So what do they hope to achieve with blocking Wikipedia and other sites? What's their intended outcome? And if they're blocking individual pages, who's combing through the entire internet and deciding what to allow and disallow and how are they deciding it? (Abviously not volunteers from Westboro Baptist Church).
BTW, are they also blocking TOR and encrypted proxies? Are they preventing students from using their own mobile connections? Can't see how this will achieve anything other than generating suspicion ill-will and contempt for the university's leadership.
AFAIK, the UK doesn't actually have the authority or capability to launch Trident missiles unilaterally. The UK are basically "caretakers" to the US nuclear deterrent. In effect, the UK taxpayer is subsidising the US military. Britain and Scotland would be better off without it. Scotland would probably be better off with more autonomy and responsibility. The Tory govt. and the BBC have been pursuing an overt and shameless propaganda campaign, complete with misinformation and misdirection at every turn, against Scottish independence. With this in mind, I can't see how London has the Scottish people's best interests at heart: If they have rational, evidence-based reasons for Scotland not gaining independence then let's hear them instead of this nonsensical propaganda. (BTW, I'm English, not Scottish).
Re: "Much like minimum wage, the only thing you'll accomplish is raising the cost of living" -- An example of another fallacy promoted by the neo-liberal, free market, faith-based (faith in the invisible hand, that is) end of the spectrum. How many studies and examples in the real world does it take to put this one to rest? Check: https://search.disconnect.me/s...
If you phase out corporate wage subsidies from the govt., corporations will have no choice but to pay their workers a living wage. Add to that manditory, single payer health insurance and the costs for both employers and employees go down dramatically. Raise the minimum wage and workers get a bigger share of corporate profits which goes back into the consumer economy boosting demand for consumer goods and the economy as a whole. Everyone wins. We're continuing to push all the money up to the 1% and they aren't spending it in the real economy. They aren't creating any substantial demand and demand is what drives consumer economies.
Don't confuse revenue with cost. By the author's calculations, the internet in the UK generates £140 revenue on average per user. That's not what it costs to run the internet, which is substantially lower or else the companies selling services and ads wouldn't make any profit. What proportion of that £140 goes to Google as pure profit, tax free? And how much money are addThis.com et al making by selling your details and metadata on to loan sharks, online gambling, aggressive opportunistic sales agencies (AKA con men), etc.? Should we include that in the price it costs to "run the internet"?
Better have a moratorium on building construction too: "An estimated 300 million to 1 billion birds die each year from collisions with glass on buildings, from skyscrapers to homes. Birds simply can’t tell reflection from reality. Even if a bird flies away after striking a window, it may die elsewhere as a result of the collision." Source: http://www.abcbirds.org/abcpro...
More data on deaths from collisions with wind turbines, towers, power lines, roads and vehicles, urban lights, and glass here: http://goldengateaudubon.org/c... Looks like glass on buildings, roads, and vehicles are more deadly to birds.
Slashdot Mirror
The premise of the article is misleading. The NSA is usually presented as this govt. monolith in that shiny blue glass building in the middle of a parking lot. 80% of the NSA's work is done by private subcontractors. There are 1,000's of them and, as Edward Snowden has pointed out, their security systems and auditing don't have much oversight, e.g. look at what happened to Stratfor and how easy it was for Snowden to get all that data and cover his tracks until he was ready to go to the press. The NSA still don't know what he took.
The NSA almost certainly offers its services and software to corporations and regimes around the world, regardless of their human rights records.
There's fewer obstacles to pursuing more complex, coherent, longer-term policies and strategies when you have your own, in-house team of bean counters who answer to you. Wall Street are a group of short-sighted, ignorant, knee-jerk reactionary, hubris-driven bean counters that nobody should be forced to work for.
Re: "snowden was not whistle blowing on google" -- Actually, he did. Google are responsible for collecting people's data in the first place and the NSA, CIA, DEA, etc. just piggy-back on them. Google hate Snowden as much as the NSA but they can't say it out loud in public. That's bad PR.
Disregard any claims that there's no conflict of interest here; "He who pays the piper calls the tune." There's no need for Google to explicitly state what they want in return. Stanford's bean counters understand that Google are a publicly traded corporation, not philanthropists. Just as the Koch Industries (fossil fuels and hard-line neo-liberal capitalism) partly fund Florida State University and dozens of other colleges on the understanding that all economics teaching staff and syllabi must adhere strictly to neo-liberal capitalist principles. They also get to veto any potential new faculty hires. This is pretty much what has already happened to the US political, regulatory, and governance systems and it was only a matter of time before it hit academia. The most shameful thing is how little money politicians and academics sell themselves out for. Google et al make massive returns on their investments.
More than promote their brand, they want as big a slice of the public education budget as they can get. They want to be THE IT provider to education systems worldwide and are working towards that end as we speak.
On the crowdfunding front, having public education and curriculum policy decisions made by consumerist popularity polls, PR, and marketing couldn't possibly go wrong, could it? I mean, our democratic electoral systems are doing just fine right now, aren't they? There's no problem with corporations' money distorting the public political discourse, is there? I don't think Google and Pearson Education would try to influence such a system to their advantage, do you?
An independent Scotland would already be in the EU, the message from Brussels was yes, they can, and the Euro or the Pound would work fine. The London-centric media is intensely unionist and propagated blatantly untrue FUD, backed by Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Microsoft, Accenture, IBM, Bayer, Daimler, EON Energy, Thyssen, XL Group, Alliance Trust, Bilfinger, and BMW, to scare Scottish voters into voting no. I'm English and have no particular affiliation to Scotland but it was shamefull how the English media, corporations, and Westminster politicians behaved during the referendum. Because of the hysteria, exaggerations, and lies implying increased crime and disorder as a consequence of the Independence Referendum, at one point Brian Docherty, Chairman of the Scottish Police Federation felt that they had to make the following public announcement:
“The Police Service of Scotland and the men and women who work in it should not be used as a political football at any time and especially so in these last few hours of the referendum campaign.
As I have previously stated the referendum debate has been robust but overwhelmingly good natured.
It was inevitable that the closer we came to the 18th of September passions would increase but that does not justify the exaggerated rhetoric that is being deployed with increased frequency. Any neutral observer could be led to believe Scotland is on the verge of societal disintegration yet nothing could be further from the truth.
Scotland’s citizens are overwhelmingly law abiding and tolerant and it is preposterous to imply that by placing a cross in a box, our citizens will suddenly abandon the personal virtues and values held dear to them all.
At this time it is more important than ever that individuals be they politicians, journalists or whoever should carefully consider their words, maintain level heads and act with respect. Respect is not demonstrated by suggesting a minority of mindless idiots are representative of anything. One of the many joys of this campaign has been how it has awakened political awareness across almost every single section of society. The success enjoyed by the many should not be sullied by the actions of the few.
Police officers must be kept free from the distractions of rhetoric better suited to the playground that the political stump. If crime has been committed it will be investigated and dealt with appropriately but quite simply police officers have better things to do than officiate in spats on social media and respond to baseless speculation of the potential for disorder on and following polling day”
Take the subsidy money collected from the public and use to provide high-speed, high quality municipal internet services. It's the easiest, most doable, and cost-effective way to provide competition to the ISP monopolies, and to boot, if they start with impoverished neibourhoods, the corporate ISPs would look really bad if they opposed it. Sure some municipalities would resist at first but hopefully popularity and success in others would put them under overwhelming pressure to provide it.
Making net neutrality a little bit "not neutral" sounds an awful ot like they want to make your sister a little bit pregnant. it's either neutral, i.e. it treats all traffic and all content equally, or it's not neutral, i.e. some content is more equal than others. I don't want my favourite alternative content getting marginalised because it got out-voted by NetFlix consumers. It's the weird and wonderful stuff that people put out there "just because" that makes the internet more interesting, culturally valuable, and worthwhile than TV.
And your logical fallacy is... tu quoque! Literally translating as 'you too' this fallacy is also known as the appeal to hypocrisy. It is commonly employed as an effective red herring because it takes the heat off someone having to defend their argument, and instead shifts the focus back on to the person making the criticism. Example: Nicole identified that Hannah had committed a logical fallacy, but instead of addressing the substance of her claim, Hannah accused Nicole of committing a fallacy earlier on in the conversation. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...
My smartwatch does everything my smartphone does, plus I saved $199 - $299. Here's my swanky new smartwatch: https://matburyau.files.wordpr...
However, how we test dictates how we teach. You can give students a liberal arts education in the classroom but if the tests are CCSS, there's little or no incentive for them to participate in class. In effect, the tests directly inform students what's expected of them in class. If they can fool around and misbehave in class and then just cram a few hours/days/weeks before a big test and still get good grades, guess what'll tend to happen? For more info, look up John Biggs' SOLO taxonomy and the idea of Constructive Alignment.
Yes, with this technology, you can also detect if a woman's pregnant, find out if she's a virgin, find buried treasure, expell evil spirits, and pleasure the gods until they make it rain. People have told me it works in all of these cases so it must be true.
Creative Commons licensed university course books. You mean like these? http://aupress.ca/ You can download and print the whole book, or chapter by chapter as you study. How long do you think it'll take for Duke to catch up with Athabasca University?
Geo-engineering to counter the effects of CO2 is like someone taking sleeping pills to counter the effects of habitually doing amphetamines at an alarmingly increasing rate. If that doesn't convince you, how about listening to a well-informed 3rd party who isn't chasing research funding for their pet geo-engineering project: Can Geo-Engineering Save the Planet? - Christopher Williams on Reality Asserts Itself http://therealnews.com/t2/comp...
I'm not surprised that these scams work. People will readily give their bank and credit card details to random strangers in the street, with clipboards, and wearing colourful vests with logos on, who claim to be collecting subscriptions for charities. How do you find out if they're legit?
I think all these phones should come with a copy of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four and a copy of the US constitution... for irony's sake. They should also be made suscpetible to packet injection so that the authorities can alter the information that people receive through them. Down the memory hole!
Does this mean that the terminators of the future will be modelled on cats in shark suits riding vaccuum cleaners? Is THIS how we'll all meet our demise?
I reckon "inclement weather" will turn out to be the most disruptive force on electricity production and supply. Firstly, drought will starve coal, gas, and nuclear power stations of the huge amounts of water they need to run at all. Secondly, warmer water in water sources may make cooling less efficient for nuclear power stations (and possibly a danger in some cases). Thirdly there's a higher and growing risk of extreme weather events; floods, flash floods, droughts, tornados, hurricanes, and ice-storms. Just think of the more recent extreme weather events but more extreme and more frequent.
Re: "you'd already be sleeping on a bed made of money" -- Simply not true. Having worked in the music business, I can tell you that it's anything but meritocratic. I have friends and colleagues who were signed up, promoted, had moderate success, and some had hits (Top tip: Getting a distribution deal is the only thing worth having. It means that they have to invest substantial funds into promoting you so that they don't make a loss on all that distribution. This stops them from signing you up simply to shut you up and to stop you from competing with another band/artist they've already signed and are planning to promote). They all ended up owing their record labels money. It's a sad fact that even a successful recording band/artist doesn't see any money until their 3rd successful album. It's a nest of vipers, a tank of sharks, whatever metaphor you want to use. Nobody survives for very long by playing fair and keeping things ethical and above board. With a few rare exceptions, i.e. the longer-term stars that we see on TV, the only people who make decent money out of music are the ones who don't play instruments. If you're wondering why more bands and artists don't go public with this, read a recording contract.
The question is why? What do they hope to achieve with this kind of censorship. I can understand wanting to censor sites that promote and enable illegal activities. I can understand K-12 schools trying to censor porn and violence (doesn't work but at least trying keep parents happy, BTW). So what do they hope to achieve with blocking Wikipedia and other sites? What's their intended outcome? And if they're blocking individual pages, who's combing through the entire internet and deciding what to allow and disallow and how are they deciding it? (Abviously not volunteers from Westboro Baptist Church).
BTW, are they also blocking TOR and encrypted proxies? Are they preventing students from using their own mobile connections? Can't see how this will achieve anything other than generating suspicion ill-will and contempt for the university's leadership.
AFAIK, the UK doesn't actually have the authority or capability to launch Trident missiles unilaterally. The UK are basically "caretakers" to the US nuclear deterrent. In effect, the UK taxpayer is subsidising the US military. Britain and Scotland would be better off without it. Scotland would probably be better off with more autonomy and responsibility. The Tory govt. and the BBC have been pursuing an overt and shameless propaganda campaign, complete with misinformation and misdirection at every turn, against Scottish independence. With this in mind, I can't see how London has the Scottish people's best interests at heart: If they have rational, evidence-based reasons for Scotland not gaining independence then let's hear them instead of this nonsensical propaganda. (BTW, I'm English, not Scottish).
Re: "Much like minimum wage, the only thing you'll accomplish is raising the cost of living" -- An example of another fallacy promoted by the neo-liberal, free market, faith-based (faith in the invisible hand, that is) end of the spectrum. How many studies and examples in the real world does it take to put this one to rest? Check: https://search.disconnect.me/s...
If you phase out corporate wage subsidies from the govt., corporations will have no choice but to pay their workers a living wage. Add to that manditory, single payer health insurance and the costs for both employers and employees go down dramatically. Raise the minimum wage and workers get a bigger share of corporate profits which goes back into the consumer economy boosting demand for consumer goods and the economy as a whole. Everyone wins. We're continuing to push all the money up to the 1% and they aren't spending it in the real economy. They aren't creating any substantial demand and demand is what drives consumer economies.
Don't confuse revenue with cost. By the author's calculations, the internet in the UK generates £140 revenue on average per user. That's not what it costs to run the internet, which is substantially lower or else the companies selling services and ads wouldn't make any profit. What proportion of that £140 goes to Google as pure profit, tax free? And how much money are addThis.com et al making by selling your details and metadata on to loan sharks, online gambling, aggressive opportunistic sales agencies (AKA con men), etc.? Should we include that in the price it costs to "run the internet"?
I meant this stuff: http://www.wired.com/2011/09/u... and (same story) http://www.motherjones.com/moj... and http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Better have a moratorium on building construction too: "An estimated 300 million to 1 billion birds die each year from collisions with glass on buildings, from skyscrapers to homes. Birds simply can’t tell reflection from reality. Even if a bird flies away after striking a window, it may die elsewhere as a result of the collision." Source: http://www.abcbirds.org/abcpro...
More data on deaths from collisions with wind turbines, towers, power lines, roads and vehicles, urban lights, and glass here: http://goldengateaudubon.org/c... Looks like glass on buildings, roads, and vehicles are more deadly to birds.