No, hope would be to imagine that Trump is nothing like the person he has been pretending to be for the last 40 years. Kind of hard to ignore all the evidence in all the books where he keeps getting mentioned in the most surprising places. Mind you that all of these books were published at least a few years ago, so the authors couldn't have been pandering for his favor or possible boons if he becomes president.
In my desperate fantasy, Trump has noticed that the American 2-party system is broken to the point of national dysfunction, reaching the point where the nation is ready to collapse. The Democratic Party has become even more dysfunctional than usual, which is hard to believe when you start from Will Rogers accurate description of it as the lack of an organized party. Meanwhile, the demographically challenged so-called Republican Party has substituted extreme party discipline for the ideological shreds of Abe Lincoln's progressive Republican Party and the remains of the pragmatic governing GOP of Ike or Teddy. In that desperate fantasy Trump actually understands that the American electoral system is winner-take-all, so the only stable situations are two balanced parties or one permanent ruling party. He would therefore understand why third parties can only succeed when one of the two main parties has been destroyed (most often by political suicide) and has decided the Democratic Party is mostly harmless but the so-called Republican Party needs to be replaced. In that fantasy, he's actually planning to implode his own campaign at some time after the convention--but looking at his campaign so far, it would be really hard to tell what had happened.
I'm really wondering how people can sustain such strong negative emotions towards Hillary. Maybe I'm just too cold blooded, but she seems to be a pretty typical lawyer of the political sort. The only difference is that she's been targeted by the most negative propaganda, but I have to discount the so-called Republican Party's propaganda these days because they have clearly crossed the line and are now putting party politics ahead of everything else.
Looking at it from a historical perspective, there are plenty of comparisons to be made. For example, the previous leaders in party discipline were Lenin's Bolsheviks. I think Trump's personal insecurities should be compared with Stalin's. Lots of people have expressed concern about Bernie's extreme supporters, but they are irrelevant now, and it actually seems likely that the most extreme ones may wind up with Trump's extremists, who are already reminding me of early supporters of the Nazi Party...
By the way, did you know that Trump spent an estimated $80,000 calling for the death penalty for some teenagers who were convicted of the rape and murder of a Central Park jogger in 1989. If the Donald had gotten his way, they may well have been executed before the actual murderer was identified in 2002.
Obvious that the google can decide this election, but it has nothing to do with Hillary.
With the personal information that they collect and a smidgen more abuse, the google can easily spot the Trump voters.
Then threaten to expose them if Trump wins. Shame will do the rest.
I'm not saying that ALL Trump voters would be too shamed to be publicly identified as such, but plenty would be, led by the smart cowards who can see the train wreck coming and are afraid of being blamed for it.
Actually the google could do much more with what they know, both the carrots and the sticks. We just have to pray that they stay focused on the money and stay with their motto: "All your attention are belong to us, the google."
In my fuzzy recollection of years gone by, I think slashdot comments were rather more insightful. Also funny, etc.
In the example of this article, the higher level topic that seems basically ignored is why the economic model of KeePass has failed so badly. Even if he wasn't sincere about maximizing security, he has to be aware of the sincerity of the potential users of his software. Can you imagine that a security program is going to attract many new users after a debacle like this?
Maybe the old slashdot would have even considered some constructive solutions? I think the best one would be a financial model tab on the App download page. In this case, it would reveal the developer was driven by ads and he could (if he was smart) have directly addressed the security ramifications of maximizing advertisement-based revenue. This is also a case where the hosting website (Apple's or Google's) would be able to add useful annotations about the standard business model. In general we should know where the money is coming from to assess the integrity of software, but most especially in the case of security-critical software.
Now we get to the question of whether or not any of the old slashdot trolls were thought provoking? The current crop are certainly a sack of Sad Sacks, but I can't really say I miss the old ones.
Forgot one important item and one minor point. There could be healthy competition between competing networks of wireless access points, whereas fiber to the home is a natural monopoly. That leads to the perhaps minor point of whether or not any person or even family needs an entire fiber. I don't think so, but if it turns out that I'm wrong at some point, then that is actually an additional argument for the wireless last mile. Easier to add more bundles of fibers feeding the access points, whereas running bundles of fibers to individual houses is getting ridiculous.
In a technically rational world, the last mile would be almost entirely wireless, with P2P cache support for highly popular viral content. The fiber backbones would only run to broadcast distances, though most of the mobile devices would use variable power transmitters so that local wireless bandwidth would remain constant even as device density increased.
We can't have that for several reasons:
1. Governments want to control the distribution of all information and such wireless networks would be hard to control or censor.
2. Companies want to create monopoly profits no matter what the technology can deliver.
3. No one else matters.
As it applies in Japan, NTT has designed an excellent LTE wireless solution that could support wireless last mile, but they don't sell it that way primarily to push fire to the home, which for most homes is just crazy. What NTT chooses to sell is 7 GB per month, which would be exhausted in a few minutes if you actually use the bandwidth LTE offers. For the sake of profit maximization, the other big players agree to play by NTT's rules, and the government has no interest in breaking up the scam.
I need a tattoo on my forehead: Additional detailed suggestions available upon polite request.
Apparently none of the direct replies to my comment were based on what what I wrote, so I'm ignoring them, but I feel like I should agree with the person who commented on targeting google as the publicity agent for bad information. My point was the bad information should be the target, not google, even though google is doing plenty of EVIL stuff these days.
As regards google not having direct 'ownership' of the personal data, that person apparently doesn't know how google works and also ignores the question of caches. My suggestion would actually make it much harder for google to update its indexes.
The root of this problem is the death of privacy. Especially amusing as the chief killers of personal privacy are most prominently self-proclaimed "conservatives" trying to conserve the profits of large companies. They profit by treating us a mindless sheep following the carrots of our personal interests and even strengths.
If our personal information was OUR property, then we should be entitled to store it where WE want to keep it, even if that was a place that the google could not conveniently copy. The legal default should be NO ownership of other people's personal information. The only exception I can think of is where several people are involved, in which case each of them should properly have a copy of the transaction AMONG themselves.
If you start from that perspective, then the entire situation looks very different. If owning another person's personal information without their permission was a crime, then you don't have to create a bizarre right to be forgotten (which is fundamentally impossible because you have to remember what to forget) and you can just go after the criminal who is publicizing your STOLEN personal information.
So what is the chance of fixing the problem? ZERO. The google profits are just fine the way things are and they are NOT going to allow any major changes.
Remember, "All your attention are belong to us [the google]."
P.S. I'm aware of the sticks of negative personal information, but it is quite obvious and gets plenty of discussion. The carrots are actually more dangerous.
Workers Struggle to Find Employers Who Don't Require Drug Tests
Fixed that for you.
Seriously speaking, the war on drugs has made our society sick. Personally I don't use any recreational drugs, and I'm fortunate enough to already have a job, but the notion of submitting to a drug test if I want to eat based on my own honest efforts is just wrong.
There are a couple of exceptional cases where routine-and-with-no-cause-for-suspicion drug testing might be justified, but they should be extremely rare exceptions in a healthy society.
You didn't say anything about the business model of Proton Mail. There needs to be some foundation under it. While I am not saying that I like ads, various business models involving advertising do make sense.
I'm just so sick and tired of problems without solutions, and the google's abuse of YOUR privacy is an ENORMOUS problem, and it's only getting worse. However, there is an obvious solution, if only the google weren't so EVIL and would consider implementing it. Remember the google's new motto: "All your attention belong to us", but...
The solution would be an option to invert email storage while still supporting ads. Here is one obvious way to implement it:
The email is stored on your computer and analyzed on your computer. Candidate ads are available and your computer decides which ads to download in accord with YOUR preferences, not the google's.
That's just a short elevator-speech summary, but there are lots of options that could be added, and by clever use of the defaults, I'm sure that the google will still control us anyway. Notwithstanding, by offering the options, at least the google could defend itself from the lawsuit.
Let me give a pie-in-the-sky configuration that I would like: All my email would be copied to each of my computers that is large enough to hold it, but all encryption and decryption for the syncing would be done on my computers, and the google would only handle the message exchanges. If one of my computers (such as a smartphone) is too small, then the latest (or whitelisted) email would be stored on that device and I would be able to choose where that device would get older email if it needs to. I might want to leave one of my larger computers on line for that purpose, or I might choose to let google hold the email (with or without encryption), or I might choose to put the email database on an independent server that I trust (and in a country that I also trust, which would certainly NOT be Donald Trump's America).
The next optional improvement would fix the in-your-face model of advertising by auctioning a SMALL amount of my time for ads, but the google is way too EVIL to go there. Why would the google risk changing the game they are already winning? I think we have to pray for the google's destruction at this point... That seems to be the only real solution to the cancerous monster the google has become.
Actually, there are three ways that the 'charity share brokerage' I am suggesting would be more resistant to this kind of fraud.
(1) They would accumulate experience from evaluating past projects, so they would be able to learn for warning signs that something is suspicious based on comparing the patterns of projects that had had similar problems. As it stands now, Kickstarter simply disclaims any interest in results.
(2) The brokerage would have a vested interest in actively pursuing such criminals (and would also acquire experience in ways to do so). They can't guarantee that any particular project will succeed, but they need to show that they care about success. One possible approach might be to set up a subcontractor relationship with the primary contributors working on the project. Near as I can tell, all Kickstarter does is take their cut, send the money, and say bye bye.
(3) In the course of evaluating the budget and resources, the brokerage would get a better understanding of the economics underlying the entire proposal to make sure that it makes sense to deliver the goods. Not possible in every case because it depends on the kind of project, but still way better than Kickstarter's naive broadcast approach.
I think I need to reiterate that I don't think the Kickstarter people (either website operators or donors) are acting on bad intentions. However, their economic model has flaws and they are responding to those flaws in the natural ways...
Let me try to reword it as Adam Smith's contemporary David Ricardo might put it. Ricardo basically proved mathematically that specialization is a good thing. If you're an expert at making widgets while I'm an expert at making woojits, we're both better off if each of us stays focused on our specialties and exchange our surpluses. We both wind up with more widgets and woojits than if we wasted some of our time working as amateurs.
As it applies in the specific example here, there is a specialty of making a printer, and there is a separate specialty of preparing a good project proposal. I'm suggesting that the proposal preparation specialty be treated separately, and in this case that would have included checking the required resources, in particular whether or not this person actually had the special capabilities of making the printer. (I think the specialty of evaluating results is also important, but in the example of this article, there were no printer-related results ot evaluate.)
As it too often works on Kickstarter, the only specialty that really counts is the ability to write an interesting proposal. Innovative and weird proposals often "succeed" merely base on their novelty value, but the success is just a chunk of money and Kickstarter is happy to take a cut.
Not saying you're a troll or whatever, but that's because I don't care that much about you, at least based upon that "response".
I don't feel like apologizing for writing about complicated topics. If I were a serious author then at least I would care about simplifying my writing or motivating readers to make sufficient efforts to understand them, eh?
So I'll follow your lead and change the topic. My new topic is the moderation system. There should be several orthogonal dimensions with plus and minus scoring. On the "polite" dimension, your reply deserves a negative mod point. I think there should also be a dimension for "thought provoking", though I don't like that particular label, and that is the dimension where I would like to earn the most positive mod points. There should also be a dimension for "sincere", and I would like to earn positive mod points there, too, but I'm mentioning it here because I think the ability to award negative mod points should be related to your own received mod points, and in this example, someone with a net negative sincerity would not be able to award negative mod points for sincerity. (I think the real trolls would have large negative scores for politeness and sincerity, but that's just a research hypothesis.)
Still hate typos (and I did Preview carefully). Near the end, "They system" should be "The system" or even "Gmail" specifically.
Looking over the other comments, I'm rather astounded by the defenses of loan sharks. Obviously paid shills or actual sharks, but it reminds me to wish that slashdot had some reputation-based options. My own simpleminded setting would probably be to hide any account that is not old enough. Not sure if two months would be long enough, but the setting should be tweakable by the user.
This is just a token gesture by the google trying to convince us "Don't be evil" is still relevant, when now the actual motto is "All your attention are belong to google".
Oh yes. It also persuades me that the payday lender ads were not particularly profitable, so the token gesture was cheap enough.
Here are a couple of suggestions that the google could implement if they actually cared about being less evil:
1. Stop supporting scammers in Google Play by exposing the business models. They don't have to force the developers to reveal every detail of their business model, but they could provide a "financial model" tab and let the developer have his say, in many cases followed by supporting commentary for the parts the google can actually check on. It would also be a natural place for google to report on any complaints against the developer, but the basic idea is to give us sufficient information to make informed choices about which apps to install. (Obviously it should be linked to the permissions page so we could assess such things as whether the developer's business model for a flashlight app actually justifies permission to read our Contacts.)
2. Stop supporting spammers dropboxes for the suckers (especially for 419 scams). Seems like a no-brainer, but evidently google can't figure out a way to shut the spammers down quickly enough to discourage them. Hey, google. Why don't you let us help you? I'd be glad to flag the dropbox so you can nuke it before the spammer can harvest the suckers. (Same approach can be expanded to ALL email harvesting with a simple convention: If some other email service is slow about nuking the spammers' dropboxes, then Gmail can become slow for ALL of the email to and from that email service.)
3. Stop supporting wholesale pwning on YouTube. This one is especially amazing in terms of the brazenness of the criminal enterprise and the many years it has gone on. The same obvious searches will still produce pages of fresh pwn-your-computer results that could again be dealt with. Obviously google is profiting from supporting these criminals and their zombot networks, though I can't imagine how. It seems like they are just supporting competitors for stealing attention.
4. Stop stealing our personal information. Okay, that one isn't practical given the nature of the monster the google has become, but at least they could give us some options to make the theft less obvious. Take Gmail as an example. They system could be inverted (as an option, perhaps a paid option) with all of my email stored on MY computer and the analysis and search requests (for the same ads) could be run locally on my end.
What we REALLY need is an economic system that would let a non-EVIL company compete effectively against the google by offering such anti-EVIL services and options.
My own motto these years is "Additional detailed suggestions available upon polite request, but I'm not holding my breath."
Love the idea of Kickstarter because most people are nice and want to do nice, but... The lack of accountability is a FATAL flaw in the implementation.
So here's a constructive suggestion for a solution I call the "charity share brokerage":
The brokerage will earn a commission on the funded projects based on providing IMPORTANT supporting services for proposal preparation and evaluation of the results. In particular, the brokerage will make sure that EACH proposal has:
1. A realistic schedule 2. An adequate budget 3. The critical resources (including the people) and all of them are available 4. No gaps (such as insufficient testing for a software-related project) 5. SUCCESS CRITERIA
The projects should NOT be over-pledged, which is the critical flaw in Kickstarter's business model (and the other such websites I've studied). They allow over-pledging because they take a flat percentage and more money in the project is more money for them. Instead, when the project is funded, that's it. They earn their percentage for "meta-expertise" in preparing project proposals and evaluating project results.
After the project has been completed, the brokerage applies the success criteria and reports the results to all of the donors and to any websites that were linked to supporting the project proposal.
My new motto is "More detailed suggestions available upon polite request, but I'm not holding my breath." After all, everything is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
Abe Lincoln: "Government of the people, by the people, for the people" is a good thing that should "not perish from the earth".
Teddy and Ike: Accepted that 'government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1%' was a pretty good thing, but they expressed certain reservations.
Trump: "Elect me for government of the Donald, by the Donald, for the Donald."
NOT trolling. Just stating what is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer of American history, though I am unable to see how Thiel plans to profit from the resulting mess. Maybe he's just so bored with money that he wants to get rid of the entire concept?
Obviously President Obama did a terrible job because he couldn't clean up the mess left behind by Dubya and the big dick Cheney.
The ability to blame OTHER people for their mistakes and incompetence is one of the trademarks of today's so-called Republican Party. NOT to be confused with Abe Lincoln's party that accepted "government of the people, by the people, for the people" as a good thing. Later on the GOP shifted to "government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1%", but at least Teddy and Ike expressed some reservations.
Now we have Trump, who may bring us "government of the Donald, by the Donald, for the Donald".
Not trolling. Just stating what is "intuitively obvious to the most casual observer" of American political history.
By the way, as regards the original article, I have concluded that we were not really experimenting when we dropped the bombs. From our test we knew it was a bad thing. Mostly we wanted to send a very clear message to everyone, but especially to the Soviet Union.
My belief is that if we had really wanted to end the war ASAP, then we would have dropped the first one on Mount Fuji, and the second one would have been the first and probably only city. No one in Hiroshima could figure out what had happened. There was only one physicist close enough to the city to see it, know what it was, and survive. If we had hit Fuji first, then ALL the physicists in Tokyo would have known EXACTLY what it was, and the second bomb would have made it absolutely clear that it wasn't a one-off.
Second disclaimer: I live in Japan now. While I think my views are consistent, they have evolved somewhat over the years since I walked through the Enola Gay during its brief exhibition in the Smithsonian.
How come I never get any mod points to spend? I'd have given it a funny.
Well, actually I can imagine a good reason for black links--but no evidence so far that there was anything like this motivating this particular experiment.
How about if black links indicated safe ones? Default blue links, and dangerous links in red? To earn the black color a link would have to be special, perhaps without JavaScript or Flash at the target end and stable for some period of time. Perhaps a size limit, too?
P.S. I think I need to add a disclaimer that I am NOT a fan of today's google. I used to trust the company and even believed the "Don't be evil" thing, but now the google motto is obviously "All your attention are belong to us." How many ads can they stuff in my face? What personal information have they collected about me? How much profit are they making by selling it, and to whom? Perhaps most importantly, WHY is the google so supportive of criminals, spammers, and scammers? What's in it for them? Perhaps the new google thinks "reputation" is a zero sum game?
Slashdot Mirror
No, hope would be to imagine that Trump is nothing like the person he has been pretending to be for the last 40 years. Kind of hard to ignore all the evidence in all the books where he keeps getting mentioned in the most surprising places. Mind you that all of these books were published at least a few years ago, so the authors couldn't have been pandering for his favor or possible boons if he becomes president.
In my desperate fantasy, Trump has noticed that the American 2-party system is broken to the point of national dysfunction, reaching the point where the nation is ready to collapse. The Democratic Party has become even more dysfunctional than usual, which is hard to believe when you start from Will Rogers accurate description of it as the lack of an organized party. Meanwhile, the demographically challenged so-called Republican Party has substituted extreme party discipline for the ideological shreds of Abe Lincoln's progressive Republican Party and the remains of the pragmatic governing GOP of Ike or Teddy. In that desperate fantasy Trump actually understands that the American electoral system is winner-take-all, so the only stable situations are two balanced parties or one permanent ruling party. He would therefore understand why third parties can only succeed when one of the two main parties has been destroyed (most often by political suicide) and has decided the Democratic Party is mostly harmless but the so-called Republican Party needs to be replaced. In that fantasy, he's actually planning to implode his own campaign at some time after the convention--but looking at his campaign so far, it would be really hard to tell what had happened.
I'm really wondering how people can sustain such strong negative emotions towards Hillary. Maybe I'm just too cold blooded, but she seems to be a pretty typical lawyer of the political sort. The only difference is that she's been targeted by the most negative propaganda, but I have to discount the so-called Republican Party's propaganda these days because they have clearly crossed the line and are now putting party politics ahead of everything else.
Looking at it from a historical perspective, there are plenty of comparisons to be made. For example, the previous leaders in party discipline were Lenin's Bolsheviks. I think Trump's personal insecurities should be compared with Stalin's. Lots of people have expressed concern about Bernie's extreme supporters, but they are irrelevant now, and it actually seems likely that the most extreme ones may wind up with Trump's extremists, who are already reminding me of early supporters of the Nazi Party...
By the way, did you know that Trump spent an estimated $80,000 calling for the death penalty for some teenagers who were convicted of the rape and murder of a Central Park jogger in 1989. If the Donald had gotten his way, they may well have been executed before the actual murderer was identified in 2002.
Obvious that the google can decide this election, but it has nothing to do with Hillary.
With the personal information that they collect and a smidgen more abuse, the google can easily spot the Trump voters.
Then threaten to expose them if Trump wins. Shame will do the rest.
I'm not saying that ALL Trump voters would be too shamed to be publicly identified as such, but plenty would be, led by the smart cowards who can see the train wreck coming and are afraid of being blamed for it.
Actually the google could do much more with what they know, both the carrots and the sticks. We just have to pray that they stay focused on the money and stay with their motto: "All your attention are belong to us, the google."
In my fuzzy recollection of years gone by, I think slashdot comments were rather more insightful. Also funny, etc.
In the example of this article, the higher level topic that seems basically ignored is why the economic model of KeePass has failed so badly. Even if he wasn't sincere about maximizing security, he has to be aware of the sincerity of the potential users of his software. Can you imagine that a security program is going to attract many new users after a debacle like this?
Maybe the old slashdot would have even considered some constructive solutions? I think the best one would be a financial model tab on the App download page. In this case, it would reveal the developer was driven by ads and he could (if he was smart) have directly addressed the security ramifications of maximizing advertisement-based revenue. This is also a case where the hosting website (Apple's or Google's) would be able to add useful annotations about the standard business model. In general we should know where the money is coming from to assess the integrity of software, but most especially in the case of security-critical software.
Now we get to the question of whether or not any of the old slashdot trolls were thought provoking? The current crop are certainly a sack of Sad Sacks, but I can't really say I miss the old ones.
So Snowden helped fix the problem. "Thanks, but you're still a criminal."
Nothing to see here. Problem fixed!
And as soon as we get ahold of Snowden, you'll never see him again, too.
So which will be worse as "supreme leader"? Donald Stalin or Donald Gorbachev?
Only your Trump knows for sure, but he keeps contradicting himself. Snowden has nothing to fear but a promise of amnesty from the Donald.
Forgot one important item and one minor point. There could be healthy competition between competing networks of wireless access points, whereas fiber to the home is a natural monopoly. That leads to the perhaps minor point of whether or not any person or even family needs an entire fiber. I don't think so, but if it turns out that I'm wrong at some point, then that is actually an additional argument for the wireless last mile. Easier to add more bundles of fibers feeding the access points, whereas running bundles of fibers to individual houses is getting ridiculous.
In a technically rational world, the last mile would be almost entirely wireless, with P2P cache support for highly popular viral content. The fiber backbones would only run to broadcast distances, though most of the mobile devices would use variable power transmitters so that local wireless bandwidth would remain constant even as device density increased.
We can't have that for several reasons:
1. Governments want to control the distribution of all information and such wireless networks would be hard to control or censor.
2. Companies want to create monopoly profits no matter what the technology can deliver.
3. No one else matters.
As it applies in Japan, NTT has designed an excellent LTE wireless solution that could support wireless last mile, but they don't sell it that way primarily to push fire to the home, which for most homes is just crazy. What NTT chooses to sell is 7 GB per month, which would be exhausted in a few minutes if you actually use the bandwidth LTE offers. For the sake of profit maximization, the other big players agree to play by NTT's rules, and the government has no interest in breaking up the scam.
I need a tattoo on my forehead: Additional detailed suggestions available upon polite request.
With 168 comments when I arrived.
Broke that for you.
Ballsy is the correct word for the title. Confronting Romney doesn't require any intestinal fortitude.
Apparently none of the direct replies to my comment were based on what what I wrote, so I'm ignoring them, but I feel like I should agree with the person who commented on targeting google as the publicity agent for bad information. My point was the bad information should be the target, not google, even though google is doing plenty of EVIL stuff these days.
As regards google not having direct 'ownership' of the personal data, that person apparently doesn't know how google works and also ignores the question of caches. My suggestion would actually make it much harder for google to update its indexes.
The root of this problem is the death of privacy. Especially amusing as the chief killers of personal privacy are most prominently self-proclaimed "conservatives" trying to conserve the profits of large companies. They profit by treating us a mindless sheep following the carrots of our personal interests and even strengths.
If our personal information was OUR property, then we should be entitled to store it where WE want to keep it, even if that was a place that the google could not conveniently copy. The legal default should be NO ownership of other people's personal information. The only exception I can think of is where several people are involved, in which case each of them should properly have a copy of the transaction AMONG themselves.
If you start from that perspective, then the entire situation looks very different. If owning another person's personal information without their permission was a crime, then you don't have to create a bizarre right to be forgotten (which is fundamentally impossible because you have to remember what to forget) and you can just go after the criminal who is publicizing your STOLEN personal information.
So what is the chance of fixing the problem? ZERO. The google profits are just fine the way things are and they are NOT going to allow any major changes.
Remember, "All your attention are belong to us [the google]."
P.S. I'm aware of the sticks of negative personal information, but it is quite obvious and gets plenty of discussion. The carrots are actually more dangerous.
Alcoholic trolls struggle to everything.
Fixed that for you.
Workers Struggle to Find Employers Who Don't Require Drug Tests
Fixed that for you.
Seriously speaking, the war on drugs has made our society sick. Personally I don't use any recreational drugs, and I'm fortunate enough to already have a job, but the notion of submitting to a drug test if I want to eat based on my own honest efforts is just wrong.
There are a couple of exceptional cases where routine-and-with-no-cause-for-suspicion drug testing might be justified, but they should be extremely rare exceptions in a healthy society.
You didn't say anything about the business model of Proton Mail. There needs to be some foundation under it. While I am not saying that I like ads, various business models involving advertising do make sense.
I'm just so sick and tired of problems without solutions, and the google's abuse of YOUR privacy is an ENORMOUS problem, and it's only getting worse. However, there is an obvious solution, if only the google weren't so EVIL and would consider implementing it. Remember the google's new motto: "All your attention belong to us", but...
The solution would be an option to invert email storage while still supporting ads. Here is one obvious way to implement it:
The email is stored on your computer and analyzed on your computer. Candidate ads are available and your computer decides which ads to download in accord with YOUR preferences, not the google's.
That's just a short elevator-speech summary, but there are lots of options that could be added, and by clever use of the defaults, I'm sure that the google will still control us anyway. Notwithstanding, by offering the options, at least the google could defend itself from the lawsuit.
Let me give a pie-in-the-sky configuration that I would like: All my email would be copied to each of my computers that is large enough to hold it, but all encryption and decryption for the syncing would be done on my computers, and the google would only handle the message exchanges. If one of my computers (such as a smartphone) is too small, then the latest (or whitelisted) email would be stored on that device and I would be able to choose where that device would get older email if it needs to. I might want to leave one of my larger computers on line for that purpose, or I might choose to let google hold the email (with or without encryption), or I might choose to put the email database on an independent server that I trust (and in a country that I also trust, which would certainly NOT be Donald Trump's America).
The next optional improvement would fix the in-your-face model of advertising by auctioning a SMALL amount of my time for ads, but the google is way too EVIL to go there. Why would the google risk changing the game they are already winning? I think we have to pray for the google's destruction at this point... That seems to be the only real solution to the cancerous monster the google has become.
Are lightbulb jokes, but they're all obsolete. Does anyone have any good LED lightbulb jokes?
And I still regard google as EVIL ever since they changed their motto to "All your attention are belong to us."
Actually, there are three ways that the 'charity share brokerage' I am suggesting would be more resistant to this kind of fraud.
(1) They would accumulate experience from evaluating past projects, so they would be able to learn for warning signs that something is suspicious based on comparing the patterns of projects that had had similar problems. As it stands now, Kickstarter simply disclaims any interest in results.
(2) The brokerage would have a vested interest in actively pursuing such criminals (and would also acquire experience in ways to do so). They can't guarantee that any particular project will succeed, but they need to show that they care about success. One possible approach might be to set up a subcontractor relationship with the primary contributors working on the project. Near as I can tell, all Kickstarter does is take their cut, send the money, and say bye bye.
(3) In the course of evaluating the budget and resources, the brokerage would get a better understanding of the economics underlying the entire proposal to make sure that it makes sense to deliver the goods. Not possible in every case because it depends on the kind of project, but still way better than Kickstarter's naive broadcast approach.
I think I need to reiterate that I don't think the Kickstarter people (either website operators or donors) are acting on bad intentions. However, their economic model has flaws and they are responding to those flaws in the natural ways...
Let me try to reword it as Adam Smith's contemporary David Ricardo might put it. Ricardo basically proved mathematically that specialization is a good thing. If you're an expert at making widgets while I'm an expert at making woojits, we're both better off if each of us stays focused on our specialties and exchange our surpluses. We both wind up with more widgets and woojits than if we wasted some of our time working as amateurs.
As it applies in the specific example here, there is a specialty of making a printer, and there is a separate specialty of preparing a good project proposal. I'm suggesting that the proposal preparation specialty be treated separately, and in this case that would have included checking the required resources, in particular whether or not this person actually had the special capabilities of making the printer. (I think the specialty of evaluating results is also important, but in the example of this article, there were no printer-related results ot evaluate.)
As it too often works on Kickstarter, the only specialty that really counts is the ability to write an interesting proposal. Innovative and weird proposals often "succeed" merely base on their novelty value, but the success is just a chunk of money and Kickstarter is happy to take a cut.
Not "polite request".
Not saying you're a troll or whatever, but that's because I don't care that much about you, at least based upon that "response".
I don't feel like apologizing for writing about complicated topics. If I were a serious author then at least I would care about simplifying my writing or motivating readers to make sufficient efforts to understand them, eh?
So I'll follow your lead and change the topic. My new topic is the moderation system. There should be several orthogonal dimensions with plus and minus scoring. On the "polite" dimension, your reply deserves a negative mod point. I think there should also be a dimension for "thought provoking", though I don't like that particular label, and that is the dimension where I would like to earn the most positive mod points. There should also be a dimension for "sincere", and I would like to earn positive mod points there, too, but I'm mentioning it here because I think the ability to award negative mod points should be related to your own received mod points, and in this example, someone with a net negative sincerity would not be able to award negative mod points for sincerity. (I think the real trolls would have large negative scores for politeness and sincerity, but that's just a research hypothesis.)
Still hate typos (and I did Preview carefully). Near the end, "They system" should be "The system" or even "Gmail" specifically.
Looking over the other comments, I'm rather astounded by the defenses of loan sharks. Obviously paid shills or actual sharks, but it reminds me to wish that slashdot had some reputation-based options. My own simpleminded setting would probably be to hide any account that is not old enough. Not sure if two months would be long enough, but the setting should be tweakable by the user.
Ditto motto.
This is just a token gesture by the google trying to convince us "Don't be evil" is still relevant, when now the actual motto is "All your attention are belong to google".
Oh yes. It also persuades me that the payday lender ads were not particularly profitable, so the token gesture was cheap enough.
Here are a couple of suggestions that the google could implement if they actually cared about being less evil:
1. Stop supporting scammers in Google Play by exposing the business models. They don't have to force the developers to reveal every detail of their business model, but they could provide a "financial model" tab and let the developer have his say, in many cases followed by supporting commentary for the parts the google can actually check on. It would also be a natural place for google to report on any complaints against the developer, but the basic idea is to give us sufficient information to make informed choices about which apps to install. (Obviously it should be linked to the permissions page so we could assess such things as whether the developer's business model for a flashlight app actually justifies permission to read our Contacts.)
2. Stop supporting spammers dropboxes for the suckers (especially for 419 scams). Seems like a no-brainer, but evidently google can't figure out a way to shut the spammers down quickly enough to discourage them. Hey, google. Why don't you let us help you? I'd be glad to flag the dropbox so you can nuke it before the spammer can harvest the suckers. (Same approach can be expanded to ALL email harvesting with a simple convention: If some other email service is slow about nuking the spammers' dropboxes, then Gmail can become slow for ALL of the email to and from that email service.)
3. Stop supporting wholesale pwning on YouTube. This one is especially amazing in terms of the brazenness of the criminal enterprise and the many years it has gone on. The same obvious searches will still produce pages of fresh pwn-your-computer results that could again be dealt with. Obviously google is profiting from supporting these criminals and their zombot networks, though I can't imagine how. It seems like they are just supporting competitors for stealing attention.
4. Stop stealing our personal information. Okay, that one isn't practical given the nature of the monster the google has become, but at least they could give us some options to make the theft less obvious. Take Gmail as an example. They system could be inverted (as an option, perhaps a paid option) with all of my email stored on MY computer and the analysis and search requests (for the same ads) could be run locally on my end.
What we REALLY need is an economic system that would let a non-EVIL company compete effectively against the google by offering such anti-EVIL services and options.
My own motto these years is "Additional detailed suggestions available upon polite request, but I'm not holding my breath."
Love the idea of Kickstarter because most people are nice and want to do nice, but... The lack of accountability is a FATAL flaw in the implementation.
So here's a constructive suggestion for a solution I call the "charity share brokerage":
The brokerage will earn a commission on the funded projects based on providing IMPORTANT supporting services for proposal preparation and evaluation of the results. In particular, the brokerage will make sure that EACH proposal has:
1. A realistic schedule
2. An adequate budget
3. The critical resources (including the people) and all of them are available
4. No gaps (such as insufficient testing for a software-related project)
5. SUCCESS CRITERIA
The projects should NOT be over-pledged, which is the critical flaw in Kickstarter's business model (and the other such websites I've studied). They allow over-pledging because they take a flat percentage and more money in the project is more money for them. Instead, when the project is funded, that's it. They earn their percentage for "meta-expertise" in preparing project proposals and evaluating project results.
After the project has been completed, the brokerage applies the success criteria and reports the results to all of the donors and to any websites that were linked to supporting the project proposal.
My new motto is "More detailed suggestions available upon polite request, but I'm not holding my breath." After all, everything is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
Abe Lincoln: "Government of the people, by the people, for the people" is a good thing that should "not perish from the earth".
Teddy and Ike: Accepted that 'government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1%' was a pretty good thing, but they expressed certain reservations.
Trump: "Elect me for government of the Donald, by the Donald, for the Donald."
NOT trolling. Just stating what is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer of American history, though I am unable to see how Thiel plans to profit from the resulting mess. Maybe he's just so bored with money that he wants to get rid of the entire concept?
Obviously President Obama did a terrible job because he couldn't clean up the mess left behind by Dubya and the big dick Cheney.
The ability to blame OTHER people for their mistakes and incompetence is one of the trademarks of today's so-called Republican Party. NOT to be confused with Abe Lincoln's party that accepted "government of the people, by the people, for the people" as a good thing. Later on the GOP shifted to "government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1%", but at least Teddy and Ike expressed some reservations.
Now we have Trump, who may bring us "government of the Donald, by the Donald, for the Donald".
Not trolling. Just stating what is "intuitively obvious to the most casual observer" of American political history.
By the way, as regards the original article, I have concluded that we were not really experimenting when we dropped the bombs. From our test we knew it was a bad thing. Mostly we wanted to send a very clear message to everyone, but especially to the Soviet Union.
My belief is that if we had really wanted to end the war ASAP, then we would have dropped the first one on Mount Fuji, and the second one would have been the first and probably only city. No one in Hiroshima could figure out what had happened. There was only one physicist close enough to the city to see it, know what it was, and survive. If we had hit Fuji first, then ALL the physicists in Tokyo would have known EXACTLY what it was, and the second bomb would have made it absolutely clear that it wasn't a one-off.
Second disclaimer: I live in Japan now. While I think my views are consistent, they have evolved somewhat over the years since I walked through the Enola Gay during its brief exhibition in the Smithsonian.
How come I never get any mod points to spend? I'd have given it a funny.
Well, actually I can imagine a good reason for black links--but no evidence so far that there was anything like this motivating this particular experiment.
How about if black links indicated safe ones? Default blue links, and dangerous links in red? To earn the black color a link would have to be special, perhaps without JavaScript or Flash at the target end and stable for some period of time. Perhaps a size limit, too?
P.S. I think I need to add a disclaimer that I am NOT a fan of today's google. I used to trust the company and even believed the "Don't be evil" thing, but now the google motto is obviously "All your attention are belong to us." How many ads can they stuff in my face? What personal information have they collected about me? How much profit are they making by selling it, and to whom? Perhaps most importantly, WHY is the google so supportive of criminals, spammers, and scammers? What's in it for them? Perhaps the new google thinks "reputation" is a zero sum game?