I agree, but that doesn't mean it ain't bullshit that the big media companies are trying to shut down the peer-to-peer nature of the internet... and if you think that isn't about keeping you glued to the tube, they've already eaten your brain.
... have been drawn, and at this point is seems stupendously clear that it's radical, fundamentalist Islam against the rest of humanity --- including millions of Muslims who don't subscribe to their medieval rhetoric of religious war against everyone else. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, the war has been declared. After watching the whole thing out my window yesterday, I personally don't give a fuck whether it was Taliban, Bin Laden, or Hussein, I'd be happy to see all of them sent back to the stone age they so desperately wish to live in.
And in one year, he'll be legally able to smoke --- cigarettes --- and join the army and kill people. He still won't be able to drink in most parts of the US, though. Go figure.
The people who complain about the violence here are the same ones who turn a blind eye or say "what're ya gonna do?" when teens use real violence on real people.
I look forward to teaching my kid programming with competetive elements to add fun. They don't all have to be violent. Imagine a large field with nuggets and seams of gold hidden here and there, a sensory API for "detecting" gold, and robots in competition to gather all they can.
Sure, you gotta lower #, but I've been reading./ for three years (ok, 2.5), and it's always been something like it is now... full of advocates and trolls, but with useful information and intelligent discussion when you come across it.
Frankly, I'm surprised that you harsh on./ editorial staff while ignoring the frequent technical disruptions that plague it. To me, they are both like watching a certain bartender at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge cough in his hand and then use the same hand to haul ice out of a tub into a glass that will shortly hold a drink. It's distasteful and horrible to look at, but if you are a regular, you can sense the goatse and you stick to the bottled beverages.
ZD has wrung a lot out of saying things just to be inflammatory to the./ crowd to drive traffic... Obviously they'd like to be the tech journo's FoxNews... While MSNBC publishes the most withering (and accurate) articles about Microsoft I've seen anywhere... The Daily Show has been a fantastic source of parody for this stuff recently.
But overall, this was a great article, and I liked realitycheck's comment that./ is a forum, not journalism, while the guilty parties actually pretend to be journalists, which doesn't make them stupid, although it does make them whores.
Then again, I like vehement opinions delivered accurately and with both eloquence and profanity.
I figure it like this; the answer to the current copyright imbroglio is a distribution model that reflects reality, not one that reflects pre-printing press 16th century.
I don't know what it is either---and I'm not placing my bets on MojoNation---but past failures are a pretty terrible reason to doubt the future success of almost anything. Look behind anything that actually did succeed, and you'll doubtless find a battlefield full of corpses, a few dozen skeletons in closets, a handful of really interesting Before-Their-Times, and small city's head of also-rans.
If you really believe that there is no place for micropayment schemes, you should campaign to eliminate all coins as enabling payments too small to be financially significant. Something like it *will* succeed, though you probably won't admit it until long after it happens.
Uh, what I forgot to say was that ironically, China is right now experiencing a real economic boom - proving, perhaps, that Asian-style ostrich behavior (market? no, it's a people's direct actino incentive) is superior to a Soviet-style "let's give all the money to the criminals" privitization. But this new wealth is felt primarily in the cities, and is creating a whole new generation of urban affluence.
So, ironically, even in one of the last Communist holdouts, the real laws of economics hold true; progress may not be easy or clean, but it's better than stagnation.
No one (intelligent or sane) ever said the Industrial Revolution is easy. When the Industrial Revolution swept England, there were tens of thousands of little kids working in horribly dangerous conditions. I don't think you'd find many people (outside of England) willing to subscribe to the notion that the English are a downtrodden people. It's a rough transition, but then and now, people living before the transition are demonstrably worse off than those who pass through it.
As computing and the Internet begins to show it's real effects, doubtless there will be many who lose their jobs (aside from boom/bust effects). Eventually, most of them will get better, less grueling jobs - or do you really wish you were an 18th century weaver?
I actually agre with you... although Gay and Lesbian clubs, Satan Rules clubs, and the rest should be permitted as well.
Frankly, the reason that such clubs are not permitted is that so many so-called conservatives tried for so long to pass laws that enforce the legitimacy of school prayer, which was a huge ethical, moral, and constitutional quagmire. These laws would have done nothing but make it legal for schools to provide a forum for one religion (Christianity) at the expense of others (and atheism IS a religion). Had said conservatives really wanted nothing more than to encourage prayer among the faithful and defend freedom of religion, they would have pushed the kind of "let's you and me pray and stick up for ourselves if anyone tries to stop us" prayer that's come into vogue in the last year or so. And they would have spared us 20 years of assaults on the Constitution.
But they didn't do that. They spend 20 years trying to sneak in de facto state endorsement of religion; their aims were not honest, and their methods (stealth candidates) and agendas (school-led prayer; an answer to a problem that no one had) gave the lie to their alleged goals. Now they are paying the price in a backlash against anything that resembles their tactics, even when, as in the case of student bible clubs, there is no good reason to forbid them.
So you should really be complaining to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, et al..
My 10 yo bro already has something like this... It's not a full fledged laptop, it's a smalling thing with some flash memory, can hold a bunch of pages, syncs with a real computer via usb..
The point is, it's a VERY GOOD IDEA when done right. Some kids have played enough video games that they can find their way around application menus in about 10 minutes, while most adults I know who haven't been exposed to computers much keep 1000000000 files on their desktop because that's the only way they can remember where they are. Early, continuous, and repeated exposure to computing does allow kids to turn these skills into something that's second nature by the time they've graduated from high school, so they won't have to get their first job with some kind of lie that sounds like "Uh, yeah, well, I've *used* computers, and, um, I'm a real quick learner." Kids with this kind of experience will have a kind of computer literacy that I find shockingly absent in most "professional" adults these days; the kind who instantly call tech support if someone unplugs their monitor before they come in to work (although it is fun to unplug their monitors;-)
There is also real value is in learning a skill that can take years, but which is really essential these days; learning to type. And without making kids take some dopey typing course constructed 50 years ago and targeted exclusively at the lower 3rd of the class.
Try reading the article, too, and understanding these things before you troll again.
Obviously you've never met a lawyer. The DMCA states that infringing material must be brought down upon notice. TimeWarner can't do jack shit about stuff on a newsgroup, and they are unlikely to have the ability to block specific ports to specific subscribers (and it would be a serious network downgrade if they started that kind of stuff), so their lawyers make the following decision: risk large fines fighting the major movie studios arguing the letter of the law against the spirit, or risk $39.95 fucking over some poor schlub by taking his service away, when we know that it will take, at a bare minimum, dozens of hours for him to fight it. Guess who wins? It isn't we the people.
So apparently you are also unfamiliar with the law of unintended consequences and its relationship to the law.
Were it not for the DMCA, they would have no employees slated to respond to infringement requests. I know what I'm talking about; I used to work in the billing department of an ISP and I ended up being the guy to handle Customs department requests looking for dialup records on alleged child pornographers. I had no ability and no authority to get the correct customer records, and I don't doubt that despite my attempts to comply, fully 90% of such requests got blackholed. Under the DMCA, this sort of laxity is no longer the case as ISPs have personnel dedicated to responding to takedown requests, which means that if a request comes in, someone will take something down, whether it makes any kind of sense whatsoever. I'm glad to know that you favor robbery as long as its a corporation stealing from their defenseless customers.
As to your second point, if the city council authorizes your assrape, I'll remember to remind you to vote. You can always go live somewhere else. You clearly have never actually met a local politician if you think they have the inclination or ability to play hardball with a giant corporation like time warner. There are a lot of success stories fighting city hall; name one fighting ma bell! Go live in some south american shithole where selling out the public interest is accepted practice, you'll have more opportunities for mindless toadying there. And I won't have to throw a boatload of cable modems in the river.
Wrong, they can make TimeWarner roll over. RTFA, and read the DMCA, and get up to speed before you speak.
This is also a cable account, not dial-up. There are few places that I know of where multiple choices for broadband exist, so, no, you aren't free to choose service elsewhere. There are very few places that have more than two, so what's the guy supposed to do next time someone misaligns their spreadsheet or the next time some numb fuck at TWC forgets that they use DHCP and, oh, before we steal this guy's money by taking his service away while charging for it, let's check to see that he actually had that IP at the time of the infraction?
The problem is that monpolistically run services are free to screw paying consumers any time they choose with no controls or consequences, at the behest of an unsupervised private interest who needs provide no proof whatsoever that the customer has done anything wrong.
That's fine if your standards of justice are on the level of, say, Mexican police, Soviet mafia, or corrupt local governors in rural China, but for a wealthy, stable country it shows that whoever is supposed to protect citizens against arbitrary harm is asleep at the wheel.
Just brings up an unpleasant point, which has always been true (since the dawn of dial-up, at least), and always will be; if you really depend on it, have more than one way to connect to the Internet. Sure, it might suck to pay for dial-up on top of paying for DSL (and if you do, make sure to get them from different providers), but in a pinch, it might help you find out why your shitbox minirouter doesn't work.
Refunds for not providing internet access...
on
Code Red Refunds?
·
· Score: 2
If they won't unblock the port, they should be prosecuted for fraud. If they are blocking ports, they are not offering internet access at all. They are offering "download access", but not Internet access, and you've been sold a false bill of goods.
It's important to note that Internet access is fundamentally, essentially, and always peer-to-peer. If you don't allow peer-to-peer access, you can call it "client-server" access or something else, but it's a lie to call it Internet access.
Anyone who wants to limit service in this way is incompetent to boot, since the Right Way to prevent abuse is not port blocking, but bandwidth capping. At a time when AT&T cable access is such a takeover target, it makes you wonder what the hell they are thinking.
Worse, by getting away with such a deceptive, unfair, and unnecessary abuse of their relationship with the customer, they are only paving the way to battle the Internet back into the traditional broadcast mode, where a few big companies have a voice, and individuals have none. I'm sure DisneyTimeWarnerNbcABCBSViaColumbialetric would love that, but you should hate that unless you also hate freedom. Like I said, if that's the service they want to offer, let them, but they can't claim that it's "Internet access" without ripping you off.
I did read the article. It's not what you say; the article appears to refer to initial login passwords. Granted, you shouldn't be doing that for machines you log into frequently; you should be using keys. Still, there's no valid reason for the protocol to send one password key at a time. I've never actually checked whether the login password is sent one key at a time, but you can bet that I'll check via tcpdump (if you aren't talking out of your ass you should have put up a dump). There's no good reason for it to do so, and this is totally different than analysis of what you do DURING the session.
As for inter-key timing during normal typing (how long does it take you to type "su" vs "of"), it would be surprising and interesting---and more related to ergonomics than to computing---if keys typed were that easy to decode from timing alone. And the article is woefully short on detail there. I don't doubt it's possible, but I do doubt it's easy, and probably requires a good amount of data and intuition to really work.
Intentionally open 802.11b nets are cool. Unintentionally open ones might be fun, too.
But the more people use the "open" ones, the more problems crop up, so that alone won't ensure 802.11b. Get an unfriendly visit from the cops investigating a hack-in that took place through your network, and I bet you'll close that sucker fast.
In fact, given 802's security problems with weak encryption, it's likely to be replaced in a few years with something stronger. Which doesn't mean that free bootleg connections and a semi-anonymous, always-on world aren't coming anyway.
Sysadmins had plenty of time to deal with this. By the time Full Disclosure was doing its "horrible, horrible, avoidable damage", the exploit was already circulating. So what are you recommending, keeping the news secret
And the slashback gets it wrong on smith, he's whingeing that news should be kept 'leet until the fixes are out there. How the hoi polloi are supposed to install fixes for bugs that they think don't affect them is beyond me, but, please "could have saved big companies a lot of money"???!!!! WTF!?!?!?!?! So we should keep information secret so that the big boys get their asses covered while admins of smaller sites get no information and get victimized? Fuck off and die, now, you brownosing crybaby.
And tell stileproject to read bugtraq. I saw the 'sploit, i verified that it worked, i upgraded my machine toot sweet even tho i don't run telnet. Boo hoo for them.
Full disclosure is good, but the reality is full disclosure is where the majority of break-ins and virii occur
No, the reality is that full disclosure is where the majority of the DETECTED and UNDERSTOOD break-ins occur. There aren't many folks out there who have security procedures capable of revealing crackers who rootkit a machine well and don't announce their presence. The tools are there, but people don't use them, just like they don't apply patches that they should. The reason your argument is really, really wrong is that most break-ins happen months or years after the vendor announces the problem and supplies a fix. Disclosure is simply not an issue most of the time.
Here's the real question; do you, as an administrator, want to be able to stop break-ins, or do you want to just hide in the herd, take your chances and hope that you aren't victimized? Your answer will tell whether you would rather have an excuse or a solution. Having solutions depends on disclosure; having excuses depends on lack of information.
When was God trademarked? About the time someone said not to use his name in vain.
Here and now? Wat? What fucking point is that? I got about 1 suicide bomber and 10 dead jews a week as evidence that faith in going to heaven make some folks more likely to do things that hurt themselves and others. Meanwhile, there are plenty of people focused on the quality of what's in front of them; and guess what? consequence-free pleasure-seeking isn't their philosophy or agenda. But you get your answers from what others tell you, not from reality, so what the fuck do you care?
In fact the quality of the here and now is the best reason to make the here and now better, not some arbitrary externality. "Do unto others" was meant to illustrate that feedback loop, but just because you claim to have faith doesn't mean you have eyes to see or ears to hear.
If you want to knock evolution, you better start knocking all the OBSERVED cases of evolution that occurred during modern, observed and recorded scientific history. If you want to embarrass a nation by being a backwards dumbass savage fuck, go move to afghanistan where your kind is welcome, and do it soon, before the godless and god-fearing but scientific asians walk all over your medieval ass.
Well, you asked, so I'll correct you. You are wrong.
First of all, there are many reasons that one might
have job-related needs to view material that gets filtered
by all sorts of filtering mechanisms. Without even counting
the piss-poor job that filters do, and considering only
things that you would "want" to block, any judicial case involving hookers, pornography, the Internet, streaming services (which you ignorantly claim can only mean porn; lots of news broadcasts can be seen on the web these days, which you might know if you stopped surfing pron for a few), etc, etc, etc. So you are, in fact, proposing a situation where judicial decisions are being made in ignorance. Even if the system only tracks usage, not blocks it, what judge wants a black mark on his file for just doing his job properly? I know an ABC News producer who was grilled over her pron surfing at work: never mind that she was doing a story on internet pornography, how's THAT for a chilling effect?
What the non-tech-savvy judges are finally grasping (and you have yet to understand), is that the entire
range of surveillance activities that employers perpetrate may, in fact, be illegal. The reasoning is simple and obvious; it's illegal to fuck with the mail or tap people's phones, outside of narrow exceptions, so there is an obvious conflict between the law
and the frighteningly common view that mere ownership of equipment by an employer abrogates all rights
of citizens of this once free country.
Slashdot Mirror
Close enough. Don't fuck with mountain folk.
True enough, but remember what part of the world gave us the word "assassin." The original "assassins" were supposedly whacked on hashish.
I agree, but that doesn't mean it ain't bullshit that the big media companies are trying to shut down the peer-to-peer nature of the internet... and if you think that isn't about keeping you glued to the tube, they've already eaten your brain.
Damn, I was just going to patch up some servers on a job today, and it looks like they've already been hit.
... have been drawn, and at this point is seems stupendously clear that it's radical, fundamentalist Islam against the rest of humanity --- including millions of Muslims who don't subscribe to their medieval rhetoric of religious war against everyone else. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, the war has been declared. After watching the whole thing out my window yesterday, I personally don't give a fuck whether it was Taliban, Bin Laden, or Hussein, I'd be happy to see all of them sent back to the stone age they so desperately wish to live in.
The people who complain about the violence here are the same ones who turn a blind eye or say "what're ya gonna do?" when teens use real violence on real people.
I look forward to teaching my kid programming with competetive elements to add fun. They don't all have to be violent. Imagine a large field with nuggets and seams of gold hidden here and there, a sensory API for "detecting" gold, and robots in competition to gather all they can.
Frankly, I'm surprised that you harsh on ./ editorial staff while ignoring the frequent technical disruptions that plague it. To me, they are both like watching a certain bartender at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge cough in his hand and then use the same hand to haul ice out of a tub into a glass that will shortly hold a drink. It's distasteful and horrible to look at, but if you are a regular, you can sense the goatse and you stick to the bottled beverages.
But overall, this was a great article, and I liked realitycheck's comment that ./ is a forum, not journalism, while the guilty parties actually pretend to be journalists, which doesn't make them stupid, although it does make them whores.
Then again, I like vehement opinions delivered accurately and with both eloquence and profanity.
I don't know what it is either---and I'm not placing my bets on MojoNation---but past failures are a pretty terrible reason to doubt the future success of almost anything. Look behind anything that actually did succeed, and you'll doubtless find a battlefield full of corpses, a few dozen skeletons in closets, a handful of really interesting Before-Their-Times, and small city's head of also-rans.
If you really believe that there is no place for micropayment schemes, you should campaign to eliminate all coins as enabling payments too small to be financially significant. Something like it *will* succeed, though you probably won't admit it until long after it happens.
Wenn Sie dass auf gueten Deutsch sagen koennte, haetten Sie was zu sagen. Bis dann, halt's maul.
So, ironically, even in one of the last Communist holdouts, the real laws of economics hold true; progress may not be easy or clean, but it's better than stagnation.
As computing and the Internet begins to show it's real effects, doubtless there will be many who lose their jobs (aside from boom/bust effects). Eventually, most of them will get better, less grueling jobs - or do you really wish you were an 18th century weaver?
I actually agre with you... although Gay and Lesbian clubs, Satan Rules clubs, and the rest should be permitted as well.
Frankly, the reason that such clubs are not permitted is that so many so-called conservatives tried for so long to pass laws that enforce the legitimacy of school prayer, which was a huge ethical, moral, and constitutional quagmire. These laws would have done nothing but make it legal for schools to provide a forum for one religion (Christianity) at the expense of others (and atheism IS a religion). Had said conservatives really wanted nothing more than to encourage prayer among the faithful and defend freedom of religion, they would have pushed the kind of "let's you and me pray and stick up for ourselves if anyone tries to stop us" prayer that's come into vogue in the last year or so. And they would have spared us 20 years of assaults on the Constitution.
But they didn't do that. They spend 20 years trying to sneak in de facto state endorsement of religion; their aims were not honest, and their methods (stealth candidates) and agendas (school-led prayer; an answer to a problem that no one had) gave the lie to their alleged goals. Now they are paying the price in a backlash against anything that resembles their tactics, even when, as in the case of student bible clubs, there is no good reason to forbid them.
So you should really be complaining to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, et al..
The point is, it's a VERY GOOD IDEA when done right. Some kids have played enough video games that they can find their way around application menus in about 10 minutes, while most adults I know who haven't been exposed to computers much keep 1000000000 files on their desktop because that's the only way they can remember where they are. Early, continuous, and repeated exposure to computing does allow kids to turn these skills into something that's second nature by the time they've graduated from high school, so they won't have to get their first job with some kind of lie that sounds like "Uh, yeah, well, I've *used* computers, and, um, I'm a real quick learner." Kids with this kind of experience will have a kind of computer literacy that I find shockingly absent in most "professional" adults these days; the kind who instantly call tech support if someone unplugs their monitor before they come in to work (although it is fun to unplug their monitors ;-)
There is also real value is in learning a skill that can take years, but which is really essential these days; learning to type. And without making kids take some dopey typing course constructed 50 years ago and targeted exclusively at the lower 3rd of the class.
Obviously you've never met a lawyer. The DMCA states that infringing material must be brought down upon notice. TimeWarner can't do jack shit about stuff on a newsgroup, and they are unlikely to have the ability to block specific ports to specific subscribers (and it would be a serious network downgrade if they started that kind of stuff), so their lawyers make the following decision: risk large fines fighting the major movie studios arguing the letter of the law against the spirit, or risk $39.95 fucking over some poor schlub by taking his service away, when we know that it will take, at a bare minimum, dozens of hours for him to fight it. Guess who wins? It isn't we the people.
So apparently you are also unfamiliar with the law of unintended consequences and its relationship to the law.
Were it not for the DMCA, they would have no employees slated to respond to infringement requests. I know what I'm talking about; I used to work in the billing department of an ISP and I ended up being the guy to handle Customs department requests looking for dialup records on alleged child pornographers. I had no ability and no authority to get the correct customer records, and I don't doubt that despite my attempts to comply, fully 90% of such requests got blackholed. Under the DMCA, this sort of laxity is no longer the case as ISPs have personnel dedicated to responding to takedown requests, which means that if a request comes in, someone will take something down, whether it makes any kind of sense whatsoever. I'm glad to know that you favor robbery as long as its a corporation stealing from their defenseless customers.
As to your second point, if the city council authorizes your assrape, I'll remember to remind you to vote. You can always go live somewhere else. You clearly have never actually met a local politician if you think they have the inclination or ability to play hardball with a giant corporation like time warner. There are a lot of success stories fighting city hall; name one fighting ma bell! Go live in some south american shithole where selling out the public interest is accepted practice, you'll have more opportunities for mindless toadying there. And I won't have to throw a boatload of cable modems in the river.
This is also a cable account, not dial-up. There are few places that I know of where multiple choices for broadband exist, so, no, you aren't free to choose service elsewhere. There are very few places that have more than two, so what's the guy supposed to do next time someone misaligns their spreadsheet or the next time some numb fuck at TWC forgets that they use DHCP and, oh, before we steal this guy's money by taking his service away while charging for it, let's check to see that he actually had that IP at the time of the infraction?
The problem is that monpolistically run services are free to screw paying consumers any time they choose with no controls or consequences, at the behest of an unsupervised private interest who needs provide no proof whatsoever that the customer has done anything wrong.
That's fine if your standards of justice are on the level of, say, Mexican police, Soviet mafia, or corrupt local governors in rural China, but for a wealthy, stable country it shows that whoever is supposed to protect citizens against arbitrary harm is asleep at the wheel.
Just brings up an unpleasant point, which has always been true (since the dawn of dial-up, at least), and always will be; if you really depend on it, have more than one way to connect to the Internet. Sure, it might suck to pay for dial-up on top of paying for DSL (and if you do, make sure to get them from different providers), but in a pinch, it might help you find out why your shitbox minirouter doesn't work.
It's important to note that Internet access is fundamentally, essentially, and always peer-to-peer. If you don't allow peer-to-peer access, you can call it "client-server" access or something else, but it's a lie to call it Internet access.
Anyone who wants to limit service in this way is incompetent to boot, since the Right Way to prevent abuse is not port blocking, but bandwidth capping. At a time when AT&T cable access is such a takeover target, it makes you wonder what the hell they are thinking.
Worse, by getting away with such a deceptive, unfair, and unnecessary abuse of their relationship with the customer, they are only paving the way to battle the Internet back into the traditional broadcast mode, where a few big companies have a voice, and individuals have none. I'm sure DisneyTimeWarnerNbcABCBSViaColumbialetric would love that, but you should hate that unless you also hate freedom. Like I said, if that's the service they want to offer, let them, but they can't claim that it's "Internet access" without ripping you off.
As for inter-key timing during normal typing (how long does it take you to type "su" vs "of"), it would be surprising and interesting---and more related to ergonomics than to computing---if keys typed were that easy to decode from timing alone. And the article is woefully short on detail there. I don't doubt it's possible, but I do doubt it's easy, and probably requires a good amount of data and intuition to really work.
In fact, given 802's security problems with weak encryption, it's likely to be replaced in a few years with something stronger. Which doesn't mean that free bootleg connections and a semi-anonymous, always-on world aren't coming anyway.
Oh, come on. I bet only 35% of those were pornographic. You can't fault a researcher for having 600,000 porn pix, it's his job.
And the slashback gets it wrong on smith, he's whingeing that news should be kept 'leet until the fixes are out there. How the hoi polloi are supposed to install fixes for bugs that they think don't affect them is beyond me, but, please "could have saved big companies a lot of money"???!!!! WTF!?!?!?!?! So we should keep information secret so that the big boys get their asses covered while admins of smaller sites get no information and get victimized? Fuck off and die, now, you brownosing crybaby.
And tell stileproject to read bugtraq. I saw the 'sploit, i verified that it worked, i upgraded my machine toot sweet even tho i don't run telnet. Boo hoo for them.
Here's the real question; do you, as an administrator, want to be able to stop break-ins, or do you want to just hide in the herd, take your chances and hope that you aren't victimized? Your answer will tell whether you would rather have an excuse or a solution. Having solutions depends on disclosure; having excuses depends on lack of information.
Here and now? Wat? What fucking point is that? I got about 1 suicide bomber and 10 dead jews a week as evidence that faith in going to heaven make some folks more likely to do things that hurt themselves and others. Meanwhile, there are plenty of people focused on the quality of what's in front of them; and guess what? consequence-free pleasure-seeking isn't their philosophy or agenda. But you get your answers from what others tell you, not from reality, so what the fuck do you care?
In fact the quality of the here and now is the best reason to make the here and now better, not some arbitrary externality. "Do unto others" was meant to illustrate that feedback loop, but just because you claim to have faith doesn't mean you have eyes to see or ears to hear.
If you want to knock evolution, you better start knocking all the OBSERVED cases of evolution that occurred during modern, observed and recorded scientific history. If you want to embarrass a nation by being a backwards dumbass savage fuck, go move to afghanistan where your kind is welcome, and do it soon, before the godless and god-fearing but scientific asians walk all over your medieval ass.
What the non-tech-savvy judges are finally grasping (and you have yet to understand), is that the entire range of surveillance activities that employers perpetrate may, in fact, be illegal. The reasoning is simple and obvious; it's illegal to fuck with the mail or tap people's phones, outside of narrow exceptions, so there is an obvious conflict between the law and the frighteningly common view that mere ownership of equipment by an employer abrogates all rights of citizens of this once free country.
So there.