Re: "Because certain people think that socialists and liberals are using climate change to force their ideals on people against their will." -- Wow, that's a loaded statement! Do you mean ALL socialists and liberals? How would you define them? Who would fall into this category and how many people do you suppose that is? And how do they propose to " force their ideals on people against their will" and how does this differ from any other politically oriented group?
Looks like "... was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual..." is going to be a new meme. First George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, now Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451.
Let's face it, how can anyone reasonably claim to be sceptical about man made climate change? The evidence is there for all to see and the energy companies have done their best, with their unlimited resources, to pick it apart. Looks like a pretty strong hypothesis to me. If anything, they're probably being way too conservative about their predictions.
BTW, Prof. Mike Lockwood has explicitly stated that he things man made CO2 emissions are the main driver of climate change. In one statement, he says that solar activity is linked with variability (and it's not even conclusive because apparently sometimes they seem to go in opposite directions), not overall climate change, which is a big difference.
I've heard a lot of students talk about Adderall helping them to study. If all you have to do is memorise stuff, then why not? Also learning some simple memorisation techniques will help. Check out books by magicians and mentalists, they're the real pros at that kind of thing; there have been some recent studies by neuroscientists (Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez Conde at Barrow Neurological Institute (BNI) in Phoenix, Arizona) and apparently they genuinely work.
On the other hand, if all the course has to offer is a front-loaded information dump as an excuse for a curriculum (Do they make you sit through hour-long PPT presentations?), you may want to consider studying elsewhere if that's possible. It may be that your brain is rejecting it because it's too damn boring.
One of the more significant parts of FDR's new deal was that he encouraged and supported unionisation. That was followed by one of the most prosperous periods in American history and, for a few decades, the US economy was freed from the boom and bust of the previous decades leading up to the great depression. For once, the majority of the people had a share in the prosperity.
After that came the Ronald Reagan administration who famously busted unions, and eroded workers' rights and bargaining power. Part of that union busting included a co-ordinated PR campaign to vilify unions and workers, which continues to this day. That was followed by wage stagnation and economic decline.
Why are you arguing for your pay and benefits to be cut?
OK, that's a deliberately controversial subject line. Do any other OECD countries have anything like SNAP? AFAIK, the poor and unemployed get income assistance of some kind. They trust their unfortunate citizens to make their own decisions and take responsibility for their actions. On the whole, it works about pretty well; most people are responsible and conscientious and do the best they can with what they have and what they know.
Also... deliberately divisive arguments like labelling groups "deserving poor" and "undeserving poor" are simply to distract us from the real problems. The same goes for "bootstrap" arguments. If you want less poverty, raise the minimum wage and give workers the effective right to organise and bargain collectively. This alone would go a long way towards making the US prosperous again. The simplest way to put the rationale behind this is that the 99% spend and circulate money thereby generating economic activity (so called "multiplier effects" described in Keynesian economics). The 1% hoard money thereby taking it out of the system (and into the casinos... ahem... Wall Street) thereby depressing the economy. FDR knew what he was doing with his top bracket tax rates.
When large numbers of people get disproportionately poor, start looking for who's getting disproportionately richer and then follow the money trail. I doubt where it leads will come as any surprise to most people.
We've had (free) public libraries for decades and very useful they've been. However, they've only ever been a substitute for education for a small minority of "autodidacts." The rest of us need teachers and organised curricula.
What's missing from MOOCs is effective mediation: The majority of learners need guidance, support, and a sense of belonging to a community in order to learn effectively. MOOCs don't provide any of this effectively. That could partly explain the high rates of learner attrition, but AFAIK, none of the MOOCs are collecting qualitative data from case studies or measuring learning gains with pre-, post-, and delayed post-assessments. Anyone would think they didn't care about the learning outcomes;)
Used insecure proprietary software; got pwned. If the software has pretty GUIs and simple tools, that makes it nicer and easier for the hackers to pwn you.
Private US subcontractors have been developing dragnet surveillance products and services from their experiences of dealing with the NSA and selling them on the global market. Now most countries' security agencies have these technologies and systems and are using them on their own populations.
We are all suspects. We are all subject to warrantless search and seizure. We have no right privacy. We have no right to political dissent. We must obey and comply or risk being labelled thought criminals. Donating to legitimate charities that security agencies don't approve of has become thought crime, e.g. helping to alleviate poverty in Gaza. Just keep your heads down and don't complain or they're come after you.
"What about twister for Windows? Mac? iPhone?
The current twister’s proof-of-concept implementation was entirely developed in Linux and I have successfully ported it to Android. Because the UI is just HTML5/Javascript, porting it to other platforms is only a matter of recompiling the daemon. Windows, Mac and iPhone are certainly possible but I have no resources myself to do it.
Another more interesting long-term goal though is to move all cryptography code into browser’s Javascript UI. This way users would be able to access twister from any client platform they use, choosing any third party server they want, while still keeping their private keys safe."
According to Brian Krebbs, browser-based Javascript encryption is highly vulnerable to attacks and shouldn't be trusted. I've also seen Javascript security threats top some of the more popular anti-virus threat league tables. How about more secure native clients? Why not hook it into GPG? It's built into most distros of Linux and easily installable on Windows (http://www.gpg4win.org/).
Mmm... social networking and telecommunications on a decentralised network with no way of inserting advertising, profiling users, and no easy way of monitoring their communications (Yeah, that was meant for you, NSA, GCHQ, et al). Let's hope it'll work over Tor. And may it be the first of many...
Hopefully, it'll use interoperable messaging and encryption protocols so that other projects can join the same network easily... and an easy way to generate and exchange public keys. If encryption is controlled by the user, then 3rd parties or service providers (That one's for you Facebook) can't change your privacy settings; you have control. Clients for all operating systems would be cool too.
As the British journalist Claud Cockburn famously put it, "Believe nothing until it has been officially denied." We need those responsible to testify under oath on public record. We need their exact words. We need to hear how they deliberately mislead the public and congress with semantic games and outright lies... caught it the act, as it were.
But then our political leaders do the exact same thing all the time and usually get away with it too. So much for exemplary leadership and governance. I think Armando Iannucci "gets it" better than any comedian at the moment. Check out "The Thick of It" (UK TV show), "In The Loop" (film), and "Veep" (US TV show).
Good points...
When corporations get to a large enough size, e.g. the big financial corporations, big pharma, agribusiness, and defence contractors, they become effectively indistinguishable from government. They corrupt the democratic processes and manipulate them to their own advantage, changing laws, giving themselves more powers and access to the levers of power. In effect, it's as if the US government is in the process of privatising itself. Yes, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Viacomm, AT&T, et al are building the infrastructure for mass surveillance but the government are happy to let them do so because they want to "piggy-back" on all the systems. It's a great way of getting people to want and pay for the subversion/destruction of their own societies.
It's not exactly what George Orwell predicted but the underlying principles are still there: constant surveillance, dissolving the concept of privacy, impoverished masses, continual war, rewriting history (and/or ignoring it all together), extreme state sanctions against "thought criminals", etc.
And who fact checks these days? Most people (the proles?) still get their news and form their opinions from the TV which mostly means Fox News and other News International outlets and almost every other outlet follows along with the same formulae. Have you seen the news on TV lately?
We don't need to pay any attention to those silly, inconvenient "fact" thingies. Hey look! Miley Cyrus twerking!
Yet another nail in the coffin for personal privacy. Please read George Orwell's "Nineteen Eight-four." Please look at how countries like N. Korea and the former German Democratic Republic used dissolving the concept of personal privacy to implement the most oppressive and hated regimes in human history (there are many other examples). Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, et al, are helping governments around the world to build the infrastructure that can allow the most oppressive, totalitarian regimes the world has ever seen come into existence.
Here's Christopher Hitchen's attempt to get across the idea of the dissolution of personal privacy from his own and others' experiences of despotic regimes (also find out why chess is banned in Iran): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-rTT8TPcck (Fora.tv, running time: 01:00:52).
How about we allow them in public when every executive administrator of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, et al, and the CIA, NSA, FBI, DEA, Homeland Security, Congress, and the Senate (federal and local, which would include meetings and lunches with lobbyists and special interests) agree to wear them all the time while they're working and all those video and audio streams are openly available to US citizens?
ownCloud.org is free and open source software (PHP) that you can install on your server or shared hosting account. It's compatible with a lot of calendar formats and web browser based. I've synced Thunderbird with it (very easy) and it's supposed to work with Outlook, Google, Apple, etc. It's also recently introduced basic support for OpenOffice/LibreOffice document editing, it plays audio and video files online, and is great for secure file sharing.
They also have links to companies that provide hosted/managed versions for organisations and individuals. Would that work for you?
BTW, I have no affiliation with them, I just like the software.
When we talk to each other, we speak very differently to when we're recording ourselves into a microphone or talking to a speech to text algorithm. Computers aren't at the point where they can interpret communicative intent and so they are unable to transcribe what you mean to say as opposed to the sounds that came out of your mouth.
Even when people talk to their speech to text phones, we often see some very strange interpretations. Just check out the regular and frequent postings on Fail Blog.
Competent spies can do it without you noticing. Perhaps "they" are getting sloppy? Maybe "they" subcontracted it out to a 3rd party private security agency? Maybe it was deliberately sloppy and intended to send a message to Appelbaum?
Or maybe it was aliens? We can speculate about this all week if we want to;)
Christopher Hitchens, in his inimitable style, tried to get across what makes states like North Korea, Iran, and Iraq (under the Ba'ath party) so... well... indescribably unpleasant to live in. One of the cornerstones of such states is that they eradicate privacy and private life (a core theme of Orwell's 1984). Here's Hitch's attempt to describe it on Fora.tv: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-rTT8TPcck (Running time 1:00:52).
The USA is assembling the infrastructure for the mother of all totalitarian states. They can do it better than anyone else in history,...ever.
Whenever you hear about stopping crime and protecting citizens it often turns out to be some other motive in the longer term - usually some "command and control" mentality from law enforcement or govt. agencies. They probably want to be able to prevent participants of an uprising from co-ordinating themselves effectively. Sounds paranoid but they pay people to sit around in rooms seeing who can come up with the scariest feasible scenarios and then ways to address them. I expect what the occupy protests "inspired" in them were very scary.
Slashdot Mirror
Re: "Because certain people think that socialists and liberals are using climate change to force their ideals on people against their will." -- Wow, that's a loaded statement! Do you mean ALL socialists and liberals? How would you define them? Who would fall into this category and how many people do you suppose that is? And how do they propose to " force their ideals on people against their will" and how does this differ from any other politically oriented group?
Awaiting your informed response.
Looks like "... was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual..." is going to be a new meme. First George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, now Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451.
Down the memory hole!
Worked out OK for the Simpsons at Itchy & Scratchy Land: Their best family vacation ever.
Just FUD:
Let's face it, how can anyone reasonably claim to be sceptical about man made climate change? The evidence is there for all to see and the energy companies have done their best, with their unlimited resources, to pick it apart. Looks like a pretty strong hypothesis to me. If anything, they're probably being way too conservative about their predictions.
BTW, Prof. Mike Lockwood has explicitly stated that he things man made CO2 emissions are the main driver of climate change. In one statement, he says that solar activity is linked with variability (and it's not even conclusive because apparently sometimes they seem to go in opposite directions), not overall climate change, which is a big difference.
I want to patent patent-trolling. There's gotta be some money in that ;)
I've heard a lot of students talk about Adderall helping them to study. If all you have to do is memorise stuff, then why not? Also learning some simple memorisation techniques will help. Check out books by magicians and mentalists, they're the real pros at that kind of thing; there have been some recent studies by neuroscientists (Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez Conde at Barrow Neurological Institute (BNI) in Phoenix, Arizona) and apparently they genuinely work.
On the other hand, if all the course has to offer is a front-loaded information dump as an excuse for a curriculum (Do they make you sit through hour-long PPT presentations?), you may want to consider studying elsewhere if that's possible. It may be that your brain is rejecting it because it's too damn boring.
..this was its reaction: http://i.imgur.com/M6SDzGZ.gif
One of the more significant parts of FDR's new deal was that he encouraged and supported unionisation. That was followed by one of the most prosperous periods in American history and, for a few decades, the US economy was freed from the boom and bust of the previous decades leading up to the great depression. For once, the majority of the people had a share in the prosperity.
After that came the Ronald Reagan administration who famously busted unions, and eroded workers' rights and bargaining power. Part of that union busting included a co-ordinated PR campaign to vilify unions and workers, which continues to this day. That was followed by wage stagnation and economic decline.
Why are you arguing for your pay and benefits to be cut?
What part of full spectrum corporate domination don't you get? It's oligarchies all the way!
OK, that's a deliberately controversial subject line. Do any other OECD countries have anything like SNAP? AFAIK, the poor and unemployed get income assistance of some kind. They trust their unfortunate citizens to make their own decisions and take responsibility for their actions. On the whole, it works about pretty well; most people are responsible and conscientious and do the best they can with what they have and what they know.
Also... deliberately divisive arguments like labelling groups "deserving poor" and "undeserving poor" are simply to distract us from the real problems. The same goes for "bootstrap" arguments. If you want less poverty, raise the minimum wage and give workers the effective right to organise and bargain collectively. This alone would go a long way towards making the US prosperous again. The simplest way to put the rationale behind this is that the 99% spend and circulate money thereby generating economic activity (so called "multiplier effects" described in Keynesian economics). The 1% hoard money thereby taking it out of the system (and into the casinos... ahem... Wall Street) thereby depressing the economy. FDR knew what he was doing with his top bracket tax rates.
When large numbers of people get disproportionately poor, start looking for who's getting disproportionately richer and then follow the money trail. I doubt where it leads will come as any surprise to most people.
We've had (free) public libraries for decades and very useful they've been. However, they've only ever been a substitute for education for a small minority of "autodidacts." The rest of us need teachers and organised curricula.
;)
What's missing from MOOCs is effective mediation: The majority of learners need guidance, support, and a sense of belonging to a community in order to learn effectively. MOOCs don't provide any of this effectively. That could partly explain the high rates of learner attrition, but AFAIK, none of the MOOCs are collecting qualitative data from case studies or measuring learning gains with pre-, post-, and delayed post-assessments. Anyone would think they didn't care about the learning outcomes
Used insecure proprietary software; got pwned. If the software has pretty GUIs and simple tools, that makes it nicer and easier for the hackers to pwn you.
Best tool for the job? Not if its security sucks.
France is just as bad if not worse than the US: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/04/france-electronic-spying-operation-nsa
Private US subcontractors have been developing dragnet surveillance products and services from their experiences of dealing with the NSA and selling them on the global market. Now most countries' security agencies have these technologies and systems and are using them on their own populations.
We are all suspects. We are all subject to warrantless search and seizure. We have no right privacy. We have no right to political dissent. We must obey and comply or risk being labelled thought criminals. Donating to legitimate charities that security agencies don't approve of has become thought crime, e.g. helping to alleviate poverty in Gaza. Just keep your heads down and don't complain or they're come after you.
Thanks for clarifying that Adam.
I also noticed this at the end,
"What about twister for Windows? Mac? iPhone?
The current twister’s proof-of-concept implementation was entirely developed in Linux and I have successfully ported it to Android. Because the UI is just HTML5/Javascript, porting it to other platforms is only a matter of recompiling the daemon. Windows, Mac and iPhone are certainly possible but I have no resources myself to do it.
Another more interesting long-term goal though is to move all cryptography code into browser’s Javascript UI. This way users would be able to access twister from any client platform they use, choosing any third party server they want, while still keeping their private keys safe."
According to Brian Krebbs, browser-based Javascript encryption is highly vulnerable to attacks and shouldn't be trusted. I've also seen Javascript security threats top some of the more popular anti-virus threat league tables. How about more secure native clients? Why not hook it into GPG? It's built into most distros of Linux and easily installable on Windows (http://www.gpg4win.org/).
Mmm... social networking and telecommunications on a decentralised network with no way of inserting advertising, profiling users, and no easy way of monitoring their communications (Yeah, that was meant for you, NSA, GCHQ, et al). Let's hope it'll work over Tor. And may it be the first of many...
Hopefully, it'll use interoperable messaging and encryption protocols so that other projects can join the same network easily... and an easy way to generate and exchange public keys. If encryption is controlled by the user, then 3rd parties or service providers (That one's for you Facebook) can't change your privacy settings; you have control. Clients for all operating systems would be cool too.
Does this have support from EFF? Anyone else?
As the British journalist Claud Cockburn famously put it, "Believe nothing until it has been officially denied." We need those responsible to testify under oath on public record. We need their exact words. We need to hear how they deliberately mislead the public and congress with semantic games and outright lies... caught it the act, as it were.
But then our political leaders do the exact same thing all the time and usually get away with it too. So much for exemplary leadership and governance. I think Armando Iannucci "gets it" better than any comedian at the moment. Check out "The Thick of It" (UK TV show), "In The Loop" (film), and "Veep" (US TV show).
Good points... When corporations get to a large enough size, e.g. the big financial corporations, big pharma, agribusiness, and defence contractors, they become effectively indistinguishable from government. They corrupt the democratic processes and manipulate them to their own advantage, changing laws, giving themselves more powers and access to the levers of power. In effect, it's as if the US government is in the process of privatising itself. Yes, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Viacomm, AT&T, et al are building the infrastructure for mass surveillance but the government are happy to let them do so because they want to "piggy-back" on all the systems. It's a great way of getting people to want and pay for the subversion/destruction of their own societies.
It's not exactly what George Orwell predicted but the underlying principles are still there: constant surveillance, dissolving the concept of privacy, impoverished masses, continual war, rewriting history (and/or ignoring it all together), extreme state sanctions against "thought criminals", etc.
And who fact checks these days? Most people (the proles?) still get their news and form their opinions from the TV which mostly means Fox News and other News International outlets and almost every other outlet follows along with the same formulae. Have you seen the news on TV lately?
We don't need to pay any attention to those silly, inconvenient "fact" thingies. Hey look! Miley Cyrus twerking!
Yet another nail in the coffin for personal privacy. Please read George Orwell's "Nineteen Eight-four." Please look at how countries like N. Korea and the former German Democratic Republic used dissolving the concept of personal privacy to implement the most oppressive and hated regimes in human history (there are many other examples). Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, et al, are helping governments around the world to build the infrastructure that can allow the most oppressive, totalitarian regimes the world has ever seen come into existence.
Here's Christopher Hitchen's attempt to get across the idea of the dissolution of personal privacy from his own and others' experiences of despotic regimes (also find out why chess is banned in Iran): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-rTT8TPcck (Fora.tv, running time: 01:00:52).
How about we allow them in public when every executive administrator of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, et al, and the CIA, NSA, FBI, DEA, Homeland Security, Congress, and the Senate (federal and local, which would include meetings and lunches with lobbyists and special interests) agree to wear them all the time while they're working and all those video and audio streams are openly available to US citizens?
I guess we're all thought criminals and that's doubleplusgood.
Once more, Jacob Appelbaum blows our minds with what he's found in Snowden's leaked documents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA
Nothing's safe.
ownCloud.org is free and open source software (PHP) that you can install on your server or shared hosting account. It's compatible with a lot of calendar formats and web browser based. I've synced Thunderbird with it (very easy) and it's supposed to work with Outlook, Google, Apple, etc. It's also recently introduced basic support for OpenOffice/LibreOffice document editing, it plays audio and video files online, and is great for secure file sharing.
They also have links to companies that provide hosted/managed versions for organisations and individuals. Would that work for you?
BTW, I have no affiliation with them, I just like the software.
When we talk to each other, we speak very differently to when we're recording ourselves into a microphone or talking to a speech to text algorithm. Computers aren't at the point where they can interpret communicative intent and so they are unable to transcribe what you mean to say as opposed to the sounds that came out of your mouth. Even when people talk to their speech to text phones, we often see some very strange interpretations. Just check out the regular and frequent postings on Fail Blog.
Competent spies can do it without you noticing. Perhaps "they" are getting sloppy? Maybe "they" subcontracted it out to a 3rd party private security agency? Maybe it was deliberately sloppy and intended to send a message to Appelbaum? Or maybe it was aliens? We can speculate about this all week if we want to ;)
Christopher Hitchens, in his inimitable style, tried to get across what makes states like North Korea, Iran, and Iraq (under the Ba'ath party) so... well... indescribably unpleasant to live in. One of the cornerstones of such states is that they eradicate privacy and private life (a core theme of Orwell's 1984). Here's Hitch's attempt to describe it on Fora.tv: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-rTT8TPcck (Running time 1:00:52). The USA is assembling the infrastructure for the mother of all totalitarian states. They can do it better than anyone else in history, ...ever.
Whenever you hear about stopping crime and protecting citizens it often turns out to be some other motive in the longer term - usually some "command and control" mentality from law enforcement or govt. agencies. They probably want to be able to prevent participants of an uprising from co-ordinating themselves effectively. Sounds paranoid but they pay people to sit around in rooms seeing who can come up with the scariest feasible scenarios and then ways to address them. I expect what the occupy protests "inspired" in them were very scary.