I would say that their published results are much more important in judging their efforts and motives than whatever they claimed to be primarily focusing on. That said, I don't necessarily agree that they are being terribly biased here. And I just did a quick skim and I don't even see where in this article they were claiming to be focused mainly on public institutions. My point here is primarily against the people who are inexplicably trying to shut down discussion about other private universities.
He said that they concentrated on public institutions because they could not implement "speech" restrictions in the way that private institutions could.
Well, he's wrong (or a bunch of Wikipedia editors are wrong) because it looks like 7 out of 10 of the colleges the article lists are private.
"That is why" what? That's why they're not allowed to be brought into this conversation?
From TFA:
* University of Tulsa: Private
* Wesleyan University: Private
* Colorado College: Private
* Marquette University: Private
* University of Oklahoma: Public
* Saint Mary's University of Minnesota: Private
* University of California, San Diego: Public
* Louisiana State University: Public
* Northwestern University: Private
* Mount St. Mary's University: Private
So, it looks like a 7 out of 10 were private universities.
Besides, chispito didn't say anything about funding. His implicit thesis is that because students and faculty are forced to sign something when they enroll / are hired, we're apparently not supposed to talk about these totalitarian hellholes at all.
This sounds an awful lot like that weird hyper-capitalism argument used to shut down debate about anything. "Don't like Microsoft? Just don't buy their products!"
This is a very strange but often successful attempt to shut down a conversation. There's usually an implication that the person making the original observation was suggesting that something should be illegal; there is no such implication here that I'm aware of. The point is that the anti-freedom perils of ultra-conservative universities might be worth mentioning alongside the anti-freedom perils of ultra-progressive universities. Granted, the former wears its heart on its sleeve much more prominently, but I'm concerned about young people growing up in either environment.
True, however it IS bigoted and irrational to blame the entire religion for the actions of some.
After all, I'm sure the Christians in the US wouldn't like us to start treating them like Westboro Baptists.
I think you have that backwards--it's only bigoted to blame and discriminate against individuals (not "the entire religion") based on their religious identity. Your second sentence about Westboro, if slightly rephrased, is an example of this.
But it is entirely fair and rational to criticize "the entire religion"... not in the sense of criticizing every individual Christian or Muslim, but in the sense of criticizing the religion's canonical foundation and common beliefs. It is not at all bigoted to criticize the canon (Bible, Quran, Hadith) and the factual wrongness of and harmfulness of certain overarching principles, such as a belief in the afterlife. And it is also fair to criticize the religion as a whole as being a net evil in the world. I'm not necessarily saying that this is an easy argument to win, but having an opinion that a religion has had an overall negative affect does not make one a bigot any more than it would be bigoted to say that one is against the Republican party. This by definition would be a criticism of most Republicans, but that criticism is not indicative of bigotry as long as you make an effort to notice and respond to what an individual Republican says and does. "I dislike the Republican party because it is against gay marriage" is not a bigoted thing to say, even though some members of the Republican party are not against gay marriage.
Stop lying. It's not standard practice for Tibetan Buddhists, currently under brutal occupation by the Chinese. It's not standard practice for Jains, who advocate extreme nonviolence. It's not standard practice for the Amish, who rely on nonviolent shunning (and they also tend to do things like reaching out and comfort the non-Amish wife of a man who murdered a bunch of Amish schoolgirls.)
There's always a kernel of unpredictable danger in any dogma that insists you believe the impossible, but it is just slander to insist that all religions are equally violent at all points in time. The danger from Christianity is far from over, but at this point in time any Christian equivalent of ISIS or Saudi Arabia would be pretty much unthinkable. If you looked hard enough, the worst you could come up with would probably be some isolated witch trial stuff in Africa, persecution of gays in Jamaica, or perhaps some of the war crimes committed in the Balkans 20 years ago. These are awful atrocities, but to equate them to the worst Islamic theocracies is ridiculous. You cannot find a true equivalence unless you build yourself a time machine.
It's not irrational or bigoted to notice which ideology is the most dangerous at the moment. And it's certainly not bigoted or irrational to notice how obviously false and cynical the "religion of peace" meme is, especially when it is used to describe how it is commonly practiced in the world today. Islam means submission, which (as any martial arts enthusiast could tell you) is not a peaceful word. Jihad is not a peaceful word. Muhammad was not, on the whole, a particularly peaceful man.
And it should be possible to talk about Islam in the world today without having lengthy disclaimers and digressions condemning either modern Christian politics or the Inquisition.
Why is this still such a big deal? The whitelist can be opted out of. Click one checkbox and you opt-out of the ad whitelisting and everything is blocked. Simple.
You could argue this should be opt-in instead of opt-out, but this is a browser plugin we're talking about, not deeply troubling shenanigans being played with core features of your OS (like Microsoft's recent stunts.) If they ever remove the option to opt-out of the whitelist, you can just use one of their many competitors but in the meantime, the existence of this whitelist encourages advertisers to make less-obnoxious ads. Isn't that a good thing? Isn't this an extremely good thing... giving advertisers an actual incentive to be civilized and unobtrusive ?
I support ABP for the very reason that so many other people trash them: their (completely optional) whitelist, which encourages advertisers to play nice. If they ever remove the ability to opt-out of the whitelist or start whitelisting lots of obnoxious crap then sure, I'll tell them to go jump in a lake and start recommending alternatives, but in the meantime I really think they're doing a fantastic thing here, and a lot of people fail to see this because of the (admittedly somewhat concerning) fact that they are making some money doing it.
You need a different word, then, because here on Earth love doesn't involve taking great pains hiding your presence and then torturing the object of your love (for all eternity) if he or she can't manage to suspend disbelief in order to acknowledge your existence, acknowledge your love and then reciprocate that love.
Love does not and cannot be used to describe such abject deception and subsequent torture. You should find another word.
"Yeah! God loves you so much that he'll torture forever if you don't love him back."
...The problem is that it misrepresents Christianity completely...
Unless you are arguing against the existence of hell (which is in mainstream Christianity and has been for a very long time), I fail to see how it is a misrepresentation of anything. At best, it's simply misunderstanding how you have appropriated and redefined love to mean something that (John 3:16 notwithstanding) has very little to do selflessness, altruism, or empathy.
If God loved me, he would either provide proof of His existence that my mind could accept or he would not damn me to hellfire for being completely unable to suspend disbelief (including my disbelief in the divinity of Jesus.) If he won't do either of those things then he really, really doesn't love me in any fair or reasonable sense of the word. Simple as that.
Putting aside the weakness of your analogy, I can intellectually understand and accept what you're driving at, at least for the sake of argument. There are subjective things in the world that aren't provable or directly communicable. Sure. Let's run with that for a moment.
With traditional interpretations of Christanity, a person who is "colorblind" is either damned as unbeliever even though it's not his/her fault (Calvinism), or that person is a liar ("you know there's a god trying to speak to you. You've just chosen to reject him") and they are doing to be damned for those lies. Can you see how odious both of these interpretations are to someone who truly is "godblind"?
And can you see how odious it is to insist that a "godblind" homosexual (or at least godblind to the extent that he doesn't perceive any harm in his sexual activities) should repress his primal urges or even give up on the love of his life, on the basis of some moral color he cannot perceive? Under your analogy, it would be like insisting that all colorblind people should, under penalty of law, be prevented from dressing in garish outfits that look just fine through their eyes.
Subjective differences in how we perceive reality cannot be respected when it comes to the law and group morality. If you're the kind of Christian who doesn't preach hellfire or let it influence your politics, good for you, but the rest of us are not required to mince words to avoid hurting your feelings when we strongly perceive a different color of the god of Abraham--one who is obviously man-made and frequently used to justify inflicting misery on others. And yes, there are obvious (to us) psychological and sociological reasons that explain the popularity of Abrahamic religion, just as there are (admittedly more rigorous and less debatable) scientific explanations for the existence of color and color-perceiving cones in our eyes, so I'm afraid an appeal to subjectivity isn't going to cut it. Rational objective arguments do exist in this area, and the stakes couldn't possibly be higher.
Nonsense. I'm not a fan of his flight to Russia, but self-flagellation is an optional component of civil disobedience, not a mandatory one. In a situation where a secret trial and very lengthy prison sentence seems not-unlikely, there's a strong argument for doing whatever it takes to remain free and freely communicating with the public instead of quietly falling on your sword and no one ever hearing from you ever again.
If Gandhi had been facing a sentence of 30+ years in solitary confinement after a secret trial, he would have been a moron and a traitor to his cause to not attempt to evade capture.
I've never really understood the hate for Christianity.
Imagine your tax dollars were used to support Wahabbi Islamic efforts to stamp out evils like pork and beer and compound interest and popular music, and also to teach children about the magical beings called genies (or "djinn") who live in the desert and could be the solution to our energy crisis if we could only establish contact. Oh, but these Muslims in the government who are stealing your hard earned money are feeding the hungry too, so there's absolutely no reason to get mad about any of it. I certainly wouldn't want our social welfare policies and customs to be anything like that barbaric, crime-infested, atheistic cesspool that is modern Japan. I hear you can't walk two steps in Tokyo without tripping over a pile of starving toddlers.
I haven't seen many 'society of atheists' running soup kitchens, or micro finance banks, or free surgery ships, or child sponsorship programs, or crisis counseling centers, or refugee support programs.
There are about forty-seven additional valid responses to this shibboleth: incorrectly implied causation, having a 2000 year old monopoly on charities, atheism being a way of life to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby, etc.
Perhaps it's simply that atheists who do donate their time tend to not be self-absorbed dicks about it. From what I've seen, most freethinkers simply don't feel it's a good use of their time to hand out free copies of The God Delusion with each bowl of soup. Doctors Without Borders simply gets on with the business of healing people; it doesn't feel the need to exclude anyone or offer unsolicited opinions regarding the proper use of one's penis (other than to point out the different ways in which this might cause disease or pregnancy, and to advise the patient how either might be prevented.) I think you'll find that most don't feel the need to promote atheism in everything we do here on Earth any more than we feel the need to promote the heliocentric model of the solar system.
But if the subject does come up...
evolution science makes up a minuscule part of the sciences but seems to cause a reaction way out of proportion to its practical significance.
Evolution is a keystone of modern biology. An entirely new method of classifying organisms based on shared ancestors (cladistics) has rapidly eclipsed the old naive method based only on observed phenotype, and these less obvious relationships directly hint at where researchers should be looking next (for instance, hinting that certain vestigial biochemical pathways are likely to be present.)
Evolutionary game theory models (be they complex computer simulations or simple thought experiments like Dawkin's "green beard gene") have yielded useful results time and time again in such "practically insignificant" areas such as assessing the likelihood of worsening antimicrobial and pesticide resistance.
Detailed analysis of the human genome, an ongoing effort that is surely one of the most important scientific endeavors of all time, would be profoundly mystifying without an understanding of evolution. Or perhaps you have a compelling alternative explanation for for the vestigial centriole in human chromosome #2 ?
Notice how you're in a slashdot thread about public acceptance of evolution. Notice how you're not in a church, being harassed while you're simply trying to pray in peace. And for the love of God, please notice just how ridiculous it was for you to say that evolution was a minuscule detail.
Have you ever seen a US politician call for a sixteen year old girl to be executed once she admitted (after being tortured) that she had committed the crime of being raped by a fifty year old?
I just double-checked and according to the BBC, the conviction that led to her death sentence was simply "crimes against chastity".
Were actually you under some sort of impression that it was just Texas-sans-beer over there?
Though more frequently used in other contexts (controversies involving Islam), I believe the new term "regressive left" is apt. These are people who exaggerate anti-bigotry ideals to the point where they end up contradicting the very foundations of liberalism: liberty, individualism and tolerance.
It's a handy way of pointing out that progressivism can be taken to the point of self-contradiction, without necessarily damning the very ideal of progressivism. On the other hand, "SJW" as a pejorative can carry an ambiguous implication that the speaker disapproves of the entire (admittedly ill-defined) concept of social justice.
Add in cell tower location data and it can be much bigger.
I forgot to respond to this point. You could enumerate all of the towers in America with what, 18 bits? Even if you listed latitude and longitude compressed with PPM and some kind of last-known journal, it wouldn't be nearly as big you'd think (given that most people don't travel a lot.) And cell tower based pseudo-GPS can get you close enough for a street address most of the time. At the end of the day with all optimizations applied I'm still reasonably confident we're well under 24 bytes on average, on a number of calls per day that we care about that's probably whittled down to something closer to 300 million.
I can be wrong on some of the details but the bottom line is we're still talking about something that would cost, worst case, something on the order of ten thousand dollars (taken from a yearly general budget in the billions) that could be easily transported by a single person, with no significant consequences if the NSA were caught trying to preserve it.
Hmm. Yes, I should have looked that up and crunched the numbers before giving any out-of-my-ass estimates. I'd no idea it was on the order of three billion calls per day. But how big would that number be once the high volume callers (telemarketers, customer service, etc.) were vetted and either eliminated or stored in a separate low-interest database? I suspect you'd lose an order of magnitude there. Perhaps several.
Also, 64 bytes is far too big for a decent tailor-made algorithm. There's no need for a timestamp to be attached to each record. You could have a stream of timestamps in the compressed file and in-between them would be pairs of ID numbers representing the source and destination phone numbers. Four bytes gives you 4.29 billion unique phone numbers, so with this very basic scheme you're looking at barely over 16 bytes per call. This does not include any form of PPM, which for starters would allow you to truncate the destination ID in the vast majority of cases. You could also recover several bits from the ID numbers since you surely don't need a direct index of 4.29 billion numbers for optimal compression.
I admit the written transcripts are probably significantly larger than my off the cuff estimation, but you have to realize that the vast majority of those phone calls are brief (and you first have to remove the ones that are automated, unanswered, busy signal, etc.) It's still peanuts compared to the total budget of the NSA. I suspect It's something that could be very easily concealed without a thorough independent audit.
How much space would fourteen years' worth of compressed metadata take up? I strongly suspect a regular thumb drive would be up to the task. How much space would fourteen years' worth of speech-to-text (or manually transcribed, for higher priority targets) call transcripts compressed with language-specific PPM algorithms require? Doable on a four digit budget, I'm sure. Perhaps three.
Now, when is the last time anyone in the intelligence community was given criminal or civil penalties (or even lost their job) for violating citizens' constitutional rights or for lying to Congress under oath?
Um, this isn't exactly an "ex-girlfriend dumped me for a biker" situation.
1. Maybe some women could be legitimately attracted to intelligence and (whether you agree with them or not) a strong commitment to one's principles? Perhaps not enough to fly to Russia but at least to the extent of flirting with the guy to cheer him up.
2. I, for one, look forward to the day when women can send naked pictures to whomever they damn well please without it being a 'poor decision'. Who cares? And before you answer that, why should we care that they care?
3. I, for one, particularly look forward to the day when women prefer to direct their naked fan mail to computer geeks who won't shut up about politics.
See my reply to your other post. The NRO is publicly known for doing RF signal analysis using terrestrial equipment. If you cannot see how this would obviously dovetail with being able to conduct internet surveillance or remote exploits... I would say you are the one who is "not really thinking about this."
The NSA and NRO both predate the internet. The NSA expanded its role to include internet surveillance. The NRO obviously did the same, but it doesn't appear to be as widely known or admitted to the general public. There are a variety of reasons for this, not all of which I am willing to get into here. But if you still aren't convinced read my other reply, and educate yourself a little more about the NRO's budget shenanigans. If satellites are as expensive as you say, why did the NRO have such massive unreported surpluses? Why are NASA's scientific satellites apparently cheaper by at least an order of magnitude? And why is their budget structure so vaguely described?
Which is a special case of the inner platform effect. But this isn't always a bad thing. If the plugins are all built using the same language, libraries, and hooks then by mastering one platform you've theoretically mastered the ability to customize, automate, or chain together anything that runs on that platform. It's an appealing thought: a GUI version of a shell with powered by a much more expressive (if parentheses-heavy) language... but the learning curve is fairly steep and (as with most projects that have been around for many decades) its need for backwards compatibility and lack of novel coolness to attract fresh blood means it's not yet compatible with a lot of commonly used stuff.
This is certainly a big step in the right direction, but I hope it isn't too little, too late. We'll know they're on the right track if and when people finally let the old jokes die and start referring to emacs as a platform instead of a text editor with extensions.
Interesting. I hadn't quite got that far in my own research yet; I had assumed that PVH was just some kind of halfassed hybrid stopgap until a full PV solution for the guest in question could be created. But no, you're absolutely correct... it looks like the reason why paravirtualization is so much faster than vanilla HVM in practice is because of all the kernel routines and drivers in the guest OS that were replaced with special calls to the hypervisor (which I knew), but some of the context switching is still significantly slower than HVM (which I did not know.)
It's too bad none of the terminology is standardized across different virtualization solutions platforms. I could do what I previously did and use VT-x as a synonym for HV but as you highlight that's not entirely fair to poor old AMD (or VIA, if they're still around.) Even if we stay within the Xen universe, it's more complicated than that because they've gone at it from two opposite directions: PVHVM ("Hey, you spilled some PV in my HVM!") and PVH ("Hey, you spilled some HV in my PVM!")... and it seems like the phrase "PV on HVM" can refer to either depending on the speaker.
Let's try to stick to the essentials this time. It would take too long to dissect all of your misunderstandings.
1.The NRO does signals intelligence (SIGINT). You have repeatedly implied that they do nothing but take pictures. Go look up SIGINT if you don't understand what all that entails. It will be important later on in this reply, but I wanted to highlight it right away as a massive misunderstanding on your part, particularly in the light of your "take pictures of telephone lines" joke. The NRO does a hell of a lot more than take pictures. Spend thirty seconds on Google if you don't believe me.
2. I'm not merely observing that the NRO has a big budget. I said that the CIA discovered that the NRO had hidden over $1.5 billion dollars, presumably for black projects of some sort. I'm not making this up. It was in mainstream newspapers. Go look it up. They did a very bad job of hiding the money that time. Subsequently it would be very easy to hide it better by simply by inflating costs and hiring fictitious contractors (they hire a LOT of contractors, by the way.) To my knowledge, there have been no audits to determine if they were doing such things. We take them at their word.
3. You have not seen any official document limiting the NRO's purview to spy satellites only. You are making all of this up, whole cloth. You are simply asserting "the NRO is limited!" and expecting people to accept you're an expert with inside knowledge into this highly secretive organization (despite the fact that you apparently didn't know that the NRO did SIGINT in addition to their photographing duties.)
4. Let me repeat and expand: The NRO does SIGINT and is not limited to satellites when it comes to SIGINT. Why should they be? There are special concerns when it comes to communicating with satellites, but they spent decades vacuuming up some of the best RF talent in the nation, inventing all kinds of awesome hardware, much of which is still classified years later. A large portion of their work was applicable to terrestrial RF as well. There are references all over the place to the terrestrial work done by the NRO, including ground bases and airplane-based SIGINT.
Now, what is an interesting source of RF signals these days? What's a common source? What's a source of RF that jihadists might use to coordinate an attack?
I really hope you are pausing and staring off in the distance right now, deep in thought. I hope you're not belligerently naive enough to continue to argue for a limitation you plucked out of thin air, in a field where restrictions are routinely flouted anyway. I hope you won't try to argue that the NRO's massive RF surveillance apparatus would never and will never be trained on cell phones and 802.11[blah] networks. Because why? Because they have a picture of a satellite in their logo? Because the newspapers don't report on the NRO's internet monitoring activities? Because they weren't stupid enough to hire someone like Edward Snowden?
I am genuinely curious how and why you could be taking this attitude in the face of all common sense and evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say that their published results are much more important in judging their efforts and motives than whatever they claimed to be primarily focusing on. That said, I don't necessarily agree that they are being terribly biased here. And I just did a quick skim and I don't even see where in this article they were claiming to be focused mainly on public institutions. My point here is primarily against the people who are inexplicably trying to shut down discussion about other private universities.
FIRE concentrating on large public institutions makes perfect sense
Except they didn't. The majority of universities listed are private.
He said that they concentrated on public institutions because they could not implement "speech" restrictions in the way that private institutions could.
Well, he's wrong (or a bunch of Wikipedia editors are wrong) because it looks like 7 out of 10 of the colleges the article lists are private.
Which words in your "dialect" did she take issue with?
I'm not taking her side; I just think the story might be more interesting if you fleshed it out a bit.
"That is why" what? That's why they're not allowed to be brought into this conversation?
From TFA:
* University of Tulsa: Private
* Wesleyan University: Private
* Colorado College: Private
* Marquette University: Private
* University of Oklahoma: Public
* Saint Mary's University of Minnesota: Private
* University of California, San Diego: Public
* Louisiana State University: Public
* Northwestern University: Private
* Mount St. Mary's University: Private
So, it looks like a 7 out of 10 were private universities.
Besides, chispito didn't say anything about funding. His implicit thesis is that because students and faculty are forced to sign something when they enroll / are hired, we're apparently not supposed to talk about these totalitarian hellholes at all.
This sounds an awful lot like that weird hyper-capitalism argument used to shut down debate about anything. "Don't like Microsoft? Just don't buy their products!"
This is a very strange but often successful attempt to shut down a conversation. There's usually an implication that the person making the original observation was suggesting that something should be illegal; there is no such implication here that I'm aware of. The point is that the anti-freedom perils of ultra-conservative universities might be worth mentioning alongside the anti-freedom perils of ultra-progressive universities. Granted, the former wears its heart on its sleeve much more prominently, but I'm concerned about young people growing up in either environment.
True, however it IS bigoted and irrational to blame the entire religion for the actions of some.
After all, I'm sure the Christians in the US wouldn't like us to start treating them like Westboro Baptists.
I think you have that backwards--it's only bigoted to blame and discriminate against individuals (not "the entire religion") based on their religious identity. Your second sentence about Westboro, if slightly rephrased, is an example of this.
But it is entirely fair and rational to criticize "the entire religion"... not in the sense of criticizing every individual Christian or Muslim, but in the sense of criticizing the religion's canonical foundation and common beliefs. It is not at all bigoted to criticize the canon (Bible, Quran, Hadith) and the factual wrongness of and harmfulness of certain overarching principles, such as a belief in the afterlife. And it is also fair to criticize the religion as a whole as being a net evil in the world. I'm not necessarily saying that this is an easy argument to win, but having an opinion that a religion has had an overall negative affect does not make one a bigot any more than it would be bigoted to say that one is against the Republican party. This by definition would be a criticism of most Republicans, but that criticism is not indicative of bigotry as long as you make an effort to notice and respond to what an individual Republican says and does. "I dislike the Republican party because it is against gay marriage" is not a bigoted thing to say, even though some members of the Republican party are not against gay marriage.
Stop lying. It's not standard practice for Tibetan Buddhists, currently under brutal occupation by the Chinese. It's not standard practice for Jains, who advocate extreme nonviolence. It's not standard practice for the Amish, who rely on nonviolent shunning (and they also tend to do things like reaching out and comfort the non-Amish wife of a man who murdered a bunch of Amish schoolgirls.)
There's always a kernel of unpredictable danger in any dogma that insists you believe the impossible, but it is just slander to insist that all religions are equally violent at all points in time. The danger from Christianity is far from over, but at this point in time any Christian equivalent of ISIS or Saudi Arabia would be pretty much unthinkable. If you looked hard enough, the worst you could come up with would probably be some isolated witch trial stuff in Africa, persecution of gays in Jamaica, or perhaps some of the war crimes committed in the Balkans 20 years ago. These are awful atrocities, but to equate them to the worst Islamic theocracies is ridiculous. You cannot find a true equivalence unless you build yourself a time machine.
It's not irrational or bigoted to notice which ideology is the most dangerous at the moment. And it's certainly not bigoted or irrational to notice how obviously false and cynical the "religion of peace" meme is, especially when it is used to describe how it is commonly practiced in the world today. Islam means submission, which (as any martial arts enthusiast could tell you) is not a peaceful word. Jihad is not a peaceful word. Muhammad was not, on the whole, a particularly peaceful man.
And it should be possible to talk about Islam in the world today without having lengthy disclaimers and digressions condemning either modern Christian politics or the Inquisition.
Why is this still such a big deal? The whitelist can be opted out of. Click one checkbox and you opt-out of the ad whitelisting and everything is blocked. Simple.
You could argue this should be opt-in instead of opt-out, but this is a browser plugin we're talking about, not deeply troubling shenanigans being played with core features of your OS (like Microsoft's recent stunts.) If they ever remove the option to opt-out of the whitelist, you can just use one of their many competitors but in the meantime, the existence of this whitelist encourages advertisers to make less-obnoxious ads. Isn't that a good thing? Isn't this an extremely good thing... giving advertisers an actual incentive to be civilized and unobtrusive ?
I support ABP for the very reason that so many other people trash them: their (completely optional) whitelist, which encourages advertisers to play nice. If they ever remove the ability to opt-out of the whitelist or start whitelisting lots of obnoxious crap then sure, I'll tell them to go jump in a lake and start recommending alternatives, but in the meantime I really think they're doing a fantastic thing here, and a lot of people fail to see this because of the (admittedly somewhat concerning) fact that they are making some money doing it.
Love does not and cannot be used to describe such abject deception and subsequent torture. You should find another word.
"Yeah! God loves you so much that he'll torture forever if you don't love him back."
...The problem is that it misrepresents Christianity completely...
Unless you are arguing against the existence of hell (which is in mainstream Christianity and has been for a very long time), I fail to see how it is a misrepresentation of anything. At best, it's simply misunderstanding how you have appropriated and redefined love to mean something that (John 3:16 notwithstanding) has very little to do selflessness, altruism, or empathy.
If God loved me, he would either provide proof of His existence that my mind could accept or he would not damn me to hellfire for being completely unable to suspend disbelief (including my disbelief in the divinity of Jesus.) If he won't do either of those things then he really, really doesn't love me in any fair or reasonable sense of the word. Simple as that.
Putting aside the weakness of your analogy, I can intellectually understand and accept what you're driving at, at least for the sake of argument. There are subjective things in the world that aren't provable or directly communicable. Sure. Let's run with that for a moment.
With traditional interpretations of Christanity, a person who is "colorblind" is either damned as unbeliever even though it's not his/her fault (Calvinism), or that person is a liar ("you know there's a god trying to speak to you. You've just chosen to reject him") and they are doing to be damned for those lies. Can you see how odious both of these interpretations are to someone who truly is "godblind"?
And can you see how odious it is to insist that a "godblind" homosexual (or at least godblind to the extent that he doesn't perceive any harm in his sexual activities) should repress his primal urges or even give up on the love of his life, on the basis of some moral color he cannot perceive? Under your analogy, it would be like insisting that all colorblind people should, under penalty of law, be prevented from dressing in garish outfits that look just fine through their eyes.
Subjective differences in how we perceive reality cannot be respected when it comes to the law and group morality. If you're the kind of Christian who doesn't preach hellfire or let it influence your politics, good for you, but the rest of us are not required to mince words to avoid hurting your feelings when we strongly perceive a different color of the god of Abraham--one who is obviously man-made and frequently used to justify inflicting misery on others. And yes, there are obvious (to us) psychological and sociological reasons that explain the popularity of Abrahamic religion, just as there are (admittedly more rigorous and less debatable) scientific explanations for the existence of color and color-perceiving cones in our eyes, so I'm afraid an appeal to subjectivity isn't going to cut it. Rational objective arguments do exist in this area, and the stakes couldn't possibly be higher.
Nonsense. I'm not a fan of his flight to Russia, but self-flagellation is an optional component of civil disobedience, not a mandatory one. In a situation where a secret trial and very lengthy prison sentence seems not-unlikely, there's a strong argument for doing whatever it takes to remain free and freely communicating with the public instead of quietly falling on your sword and no one ever hearing from you ever again.
If Gandhi had been facing a sentence of 30+ years in solitary confinement after a secret trial, he would have been a moron and a traitor to his cause to not attempt to evade capture.
I've never really understood the hate for Christianity.
Imagine your tax dollars were used to support Wahabbi Islamic efforts to stamp out evils like pork and beer and compound interest and popular music, and also to teach children about the magical beings called genies (or "djinn") who live in the desert and could be the solution to our energy crisis if we could only establish contact. Oh, but these Muslims in the government who are stealing your hard earned money are feeding the hungry too, so there's absolutely no reason to get mad about any of it. I certainly wouldn't want our social welfare policies and customs to be anything like that barbaric, crime-infested, atheistic cesspool that is modern Japan. I hear you can't walk two steps in Tokyo without tripping over a pile of starving toddlers.
I haven't seen many 'society of atheists' running soup kitchens, or micro finance banks, or free surgery ships, or child sponsorship programs, or crisis counseling centers, or refugee support programs.
There are about forty-seven additional valid responses to this shibboleth: incorrectly implied causation, having a 2000 year old monopoly on charities, atheism being a way of life to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby, etc.
Perhaps it's simply that atheists who do donate their time tend to not be self-absorbed dicks about it. From what I've seen, most freethinkers simply don't feel it's a good use of their time to hand out free copies of The God Delusion with each bowl of soup. Doctors Without Borders simply gets on with the business of healing people; it doesn't feel the need to exclude anyone or offer unsolicited opinions regarding the proper use of one's penis (other than to point out the different ways in which this might cause disease or pregnancy, and to advise the patient how either might be prevented.) I think you'll find that most don't feel the need to promote atheism in everything we do here on Earth any more than we feel the need to promote the heliocentric model of the solar system.
But if the subject does come up...
evolution science makes up a minuscule part of the sciences but seems to cause a reaction way out of proportion to its practical significance.
Evolution is a keystone of modern biology. An entirely new method of classifying organisms based on shared ancestors (cladistics) has rapidly eclipsed the old naive method based only on observed phenotype, and these less obvious relationships directly hint at where researchers should be looking next (for instance, hinting that certain vestigial biochemical pathways are likely to be present.)
Evolutionary game theory models (be they complex computer simulations or simple thought experiments like Dawkin's "green beard gene") have yielded useful results time and time again in such "practically insignificant" areas such as assessing the likelihood of worsening antimicrobial and pesticide resistance.
Detailed analysis of the human genome, an ongoing effort that is surely one of the most important scientific endeavors of all time, would be profoundly mystifying without an understanding of evolution. Or perhaps you have a compelling alternative explanation for for the vestigial centriole in human chromosome #2 ?
Notice how you're in a slashdot thread about public acceptance of evolution. Notice how you're not in a church, being harassed while you're simply trying to pray in peace. And for the love of God, please notice just how ridiculous it was for you to say that evolution was a minuscule detail.
Have you ever seen a US politician call for a sixteen year old girl to be executed once she admitted (after being tortured) that she had committed the crime of being raped by a fifty year old?
I just double-checked and according to the BBC, the conviction that led to her death sentence was simply "crimes against chastity". Were actually you under some sort of impression that it was just Texas-sans-beer over there?
Though more frequently used in other contexts (controversies involving Islam), I believe the new term "regressive left" is apt. These are people who exaggerate anti-bigotry ideals to the point where they end up contradicting the very foundations of liberalism: liberty, individualism and tolerance.
It's a handy way of pointing out that progressivism can be taken to the point of self-contradiction, without necessarily damning the very ideal of progressivism. On the other hand, "SJW" as a pejorative can carry an ambiguous implication that the speaker disapproves of the entire (admittedly ill-defined) concept of social justice.
Add in cell tower location data and it can be much bigger.
I forgot to respond to this point. You could enumerate all of the towers in America with what, 18 bits? Even if you listed latitude and longitude compressed with PPM and some kind of last-known journal, it wouldn't be nearly as big you'd think (given that most people don't travel a lot.) And cell tower based pseudo-GPS can get you close enough for a street address most of the time. At the end of the day with all optimizations applied I'm still reasonably confident we're well under 24 bytes on average, on a number of calls per day that we care about that's probably whittled down to something closer to 300 million.
I can be wrong on some of the details but the bottom line is we're still talking about something that would cost, worst case, something on the order of ten thousand dollars (taken from a yearly general budget in the billions) that could be easily transported by a single person, with no significant consequences if the NSA were caught trying to preserve it.
Ergo, it will never be destroyed.
Hmm. Yes, I should have looked that up and crunched the numbers before giving any out-of-my-ass estimates. I'd no idea it was on the order of three billion calls per day. But how big would that number be once the high volume callers (telemarketers, customer service, etc.) were vetted and either eliminated or stored in a separate low-interest database? I suspect you'd lose an order of magnitude there. Perhaps several.
Also, 64 bytes is far too big for a decent tailor-made algorithm. There's no need for a timestamp to be attached to each record. You could have a stream of timestamps in the compressed file and in-between them would be pairs of ID numbers representing the source and destination phone numbers. Four bytes gives you 4.29 billion unique phone numbers, so with this very basic scheme you're looking at barely over 16 bytes per call. This does not include any form of PPM, which for starters would allow you to truncate the destination ID in the vast majority of cases. You could also recover several bits from the ID numbers since you surely don't need a direct index of 4.29 billion numbers for optimal compression.
I admit the written transcripts are probably significantly larger than my off the cuff estimation, but you have to realize that the vast majority of those phone calls are brief (and you first have to remove the ones that are automated, unanswered, busy signal, etc.) It's still peanuts compared to the total budget of the NSA. I suspect It's something that could be very easily concealed without a thorough independent audit.
How much space would fourteen years' worth of compressed metadata take up? I strongly suspect a regular thumb drive would be up to the task. How much space would fourteen years' worth of speech-to-text (or manually transcribed, for higher priority targets) call transcripts compressed with language-specific PPM algorithms require? Doable on a four digit budget, I'm sure. Perhaps three.
Now, when is the last time anyone in the intelligence community was given criminal or civil penalties (or even lost their job) for violating citizens' constitutional rights or for lying to Congress under oath?
There is zero motivation for compliance here.
Um, this isn't exactly an "ex-girlfriend dumped me for a biker" situation.
1. Maybe some women could be legitimately attracted to intelligence and (whether you agree with them or not) a strong commitment to one's principles? Perhaps not enough to fly to Russia but at least to the extent of flirting with the guy to cheer him up.
2. I, for one, look forward to the day when women can send naked pictures to whomever they damn well please without it being a 'poor decision'. Who cares? And before you answer that, why should we care that they care?
3. I, for one, particularly look forward to the day when women prefer to direct their naked fan mail to computer geeks who won't shut up about politics.
Empirically, HVM has been less secure than PV (that floppy driver ...).
Is that true even when using VT-d (or whatever AMD's equivalent is) ?
See my reply to your other post. The NRO is publicly known for doing RF signal analysis using terrestrial equipment. If you cannot see how this would obviously dovetail with being able to conduct internet surveillance or remote exploits... I would say you are the one who is "not really thinking about this."
The NSA and NRO both predate the internet. The NSA expanded its role to include internet surveillance. The NRO obviously did the same, but it doesn't appear to be as widely known or admitted to the general public. There are a variety of reasons for this, not all of which I am willing to get into here. But if you still aren't convinced read my other reply, and educate yourself a little more about the NRO's budget shenanigans. If satellites are as expensive as you say, why did the NRO have such massive unreported surpluses? Why are NASA's scientific satellites apparently cheaper by at least an order of magnitude? And why is their budget structure so vaguely described?
Which is a special case of the inner platform effect. But this isn't always a bad thing. If the plugins are all built using the same language, libraries, and hooks then by mastering one platform you've theoretically mastered the ability to customize, automate, or chain together anything that runs on that platform. It's an appealing thought: a GUI version of a shell with powered by a much more expressive (if parentheses-heavy) language... but the learning curve is fairly steep and (as with most projects that have been around for many decades) its need for backwards compatibility and lack of novel coolness to attract fresh blood means it's not yet compatible with a lot of commonly used stuff.
This is certainly a big step in the right direction, but I hope it isn't too little, too late. We'll know they're on the right track if and when people finally let the old jokes die and start referring to emacs as a platform instead of a text editor with extensions.
Interesting. I hadn't quite got that far in my own research yet; I had assumed that PVH was just some kind of halfassed hybrid stopgap until a full PV solution for the guest in question could be created. But no, you're absolutely correct... it looks like the reason why paravirtualization is so much faster than vanilla HVM in practice is because of all the kernel routines and drivers in the guest OS that were replaced with special calls to the hypervisor (which I knew), but some of the context switching is still significantly slower than HVM (which I did not know.)
It's too bad none of the terminology is standardized across different virtualization solutions platforms. I could do what I previously did and use VT-x as a synonym for HV but as you highlight that's not entirely fair to poor old AMD (or VIA, if they're still around.) Even if we stay within the Xen universe, it's more complicated than that because they've gone at it from two opposite directions: PVHVM ("Hey, you spilled some PV in my HVM!") and PVH ("Hey, you spilled some HV in my PVM!")... and it seems like the phrase "PV on HVM" can refer to either depending on the speaker.
Let's try to stick to the essentials this time. It would take too long to dissect all of your misunderstandings.
1.The NRO does signals intelligence (SIGINT). You have repeatedly implied that they do nothing but take pictures. Go look up SIGINT if you don't understand what all that entails. It will be important later on in this reply, but I wanted to highlight it right away as a massive misunderstanding on your part, particularly in the light of your "take pictures of telephone lines" joke. The NRO does a hell of a lot more than take pictures. Spend thirty seconds on Google if you don't believe me.
2. I'm not merely observing that the NRO has a big budget. I said that the CIA discovered that the NRO had hidden over $1.5 billion dollars, presumably for black projects of some sort. I'm not making this up. It was in mainstream newspapers. Go look it up. They did a very bad job of hiding the money that time. Subsequently it would be very easy to hide it better by simply by inflating costs and hiring fictitious contractors (they hire a LOT of contractors, by the way.) To my knowledge, there have been no audits to determine if they were doing such things. We take them at their word.
3. You have not seen any official document limiting the NRO's purview to spy satellites only. You are making all of this up, whole cloth. You are simply asserting "the NRO is limited!" and expecting people to accept you're an expert with inside knowledge into this highly secretive organization (despite the fact that you apparently didn't know that the NRO did SIGINT in addition to their photographing duties.) 4. Let me repeat and expand: The NRO does SIGINT and is not limited to satellites when it comes to SIGINT. Why should they be? There are special concerns when it comes to communicating with satellites, but they spent decades vacuuming up some of the best RF talent in the nation, inventing all kinds of awesome hardware, much of which is still classified years later. A large portion of their work was applicable to terrestrial RF as well. There are references all over the place to the terrestrial work done by the NRO, including ground bases and airplane-based SIGINT.
Now, what is an interesting source of RF signals these days? What's a common source? What's a source of RF that jihadists might use to coordinate an attack?
I really hope you are pausing and staring off in the distance right now, deep in thought. I hope you're not belligerently naive enough to continue to argue for a limitation you plucked out of thin air, in a field where restrictions are routinely flouted anyway. I hope you won't try to argue that the NRO's massive RF surveillance apparatus would never and will never be trained on cell phones and 802.11[blah] networks. Because why? Because they have a picture of a satellite in their logo? Because the newspapers don't report on the NRO's internet monitoring activities? Because they weren't stupid enough to hire someone like Edward Snowden?
I am genuinely curious how and why you could be taking this attitude in the face of all common sense and evidence.
I don't doubt it. There should be a mandatory "Reinventing the Wheel" course for all CS majors. Chapter 1, The Amiga. Chapter 2, Lisp. Etcetera.