Voice 1: "Hi, this is your local or federal law enforcement agency, and we want data on the following user."
Voice 2: "What if I say 'no'?"
Voice 1: "Then we confiscate all of your equipment as evidence and hope your business doesn't go bankrupt, not that it matters if it does."
Voice 2: "Okay, here's all the stuff."
Voice 1: "Great. We'll be calling you whenever we need anything. In exchange, we'll give you a heads up of four hours whenever we catch someone who uses the service."
Well, you see, there's this queasy feeling that somehow life has gone off the rails, that our civilization is not a source of goodness, and that our future is in the hands of incompetents or sadists or maybe both. We have no expectation that we are part of something that makes us feel good to be alive, and are merely corporate stooges waiting out our days so that we can briefly entertain ourselves before passing into oblivion. PKD noticed this -- along with the other writers of his generation and the few before -- but by now, our society is so deeply in denial that we cannot even articulate what he saw. Instead, we just say that it makes us feel unsettled, as if we ate one too many Big Macs during our Soviet-style mandated 52-minute lunch at our mandatory jobs doing unimportant things so that we can all claim we are good workers contributing to the future, tovarisch.
Underneath all of our fancy gadgets, clothing, titles, money, and neurosis, we are still giggling monkeys in the bush, lighting our farts and hoping that the resulting glee will somehow diminish the pain of eternal darkness after death. No wonder our society is so neurotic.
Courts can order you to unlock your phone, which means that the FBI is talking about investigations, not prosecutions. I suppose it depends on the investigation; if the phone contains the location someone in North America of a nuclear device set to explode in the next hour, then it might be great if the device got unlocked. Google et al. just cooperate with law enforcement; Apple has opted not to give itself a back door so it does not have to deal with the drama. Public opinion might change after the mushroom cloud however.
When you have many groups in a nation, and many of them hate each other, you will have massive instability. Add technology into the mix and you have a surveillance state. Before this nifty new tech, it would have simply been an informant state as in the Soviet Union: turn in a coworker and get twice as many beets in your soup this week.
We all want to be with people like us. That means living near, hiring, being hired by, buying from, selling to, dating, marrying, breeding with, befriending, having them as our law enforcement officers and judges, seeing them daily, and having shared cultural standards and mores with them.
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings....Putnam claims the US has experienced a pronounced decline in "social capital," a term he helped popularize. Social capital refers to the social networks -- whether friendships or religious congregations or neighborhood associations -- that he says are key indicators of civic well-being. When social capital is high, says Putnam, communities are better places to live. Neighborhoods are safer; people are healthier; and more citizens vote....In more diverse communities, he says, there were neither great bonds formed across group lines nor heightened ethnic tensions, but a general civic malaise. And in perhaps the most surprising result of all, levels of trust were not only lower between groups in more diverse settings, but even among members of the same group.
We're balkanized. We're not Americans. We're White Americans. Black Americans. Gay Americans. Christian Americans. But we're not Americans.
I agree. It turns out that every person acts in the interests of their tribe. Some of those are racial/ethnic, some religious, some sexual, and some based in class, region, or caste. But we are not united. America is a giant shopping mall with mall cops and a welfare system. It has fallen apart.
Genocided by those currently called the 'Native Americans,' who also wiped out whole major species in the Americas, including hunting to extinction the horses on N. America without figuring out how to ride them.
The same group of violent, primitive Asians who later invaded most of the known world, only to have their rule collapse within two generations? No wonder people called them "savages."
many white supremacists get when they read their ancestry.com results and find out what manner of mongrel they really are
Apparently it is news to people that the Irish have Semitic and North African admixture, that Slavs are a quarter Asian, and that all of Southern Europe is shot through with Mediterranean outliers.
No one trusts our governments anymore. Because they are unstable like third world dictatorships -- this is considered a "success" in democracy -- we have trouble placing our faith in their currencies. All it takes it for another insane program like Obamacare to pass and the currency will lose 40% of its buying power again. Some day, people might actually notice the link between entitlement programs and inflation, but that's too much to hope for.
Court: "OK, so your chip turned out to have a flaw, the company took extra time to investigate, and now your computer is slower sometimes. How is that different than the average Microsoft or Apple update?"
Intel's lawyers will delay this until the hype is forgotten, and either kill it in court or settle for some absurdly low sum, so that all of the plaintiffs get checks for $0.64 if they remember to sign up at IntelProcessorSlowdownLawsuit.com before December 31, 2019.
Yesterday's hardware at tomorrow's prices, just so you can claim you like the kindergarten-level operating system with all the useful internals obscured. And then, it's a walled garden, and you have few hardware options. Just lubricate your anus before you walk into the Apple store, because you will be sodomized financially and spiritually by this runaway virus of a company.
In the modern parlance, "hate" simply means one group criticizing another. Trying to ban it is a dog-chasing-its-tail type scenario that just exacerbates the enmity. Focus on not being a creepy, intrusive, greedy, manipulative, and socially irresponsible company instead!
Seven billion humans. The smart populations are shrinking as they weed out those among them who are unable to cope. Quality over quantity is going to win out in the future. We could have had eugenics, but instead we will have a vast lumpenproletariat ruled over by cynical and merciless overlords. Good work, democracy!
Perhaps google is merely rolling their eyes and patiently nodding while courts whack-a-mole in obedience to the media companies, which in turn are probably being led on by advisors/consultants who pocket money while pretending to be accomplishing a lot re: the courts.
Based on my experience of humanity, this view is most likely correct. The problem is insoluble, barring some kind of absurd digital panopticon, so executives are making a public show of taking action for their shareholders, consultants are making big drama out of little, and in the meantime, everyone is sharing torrent links through Discord.
This childlike tendency to focus on people instead of ideas reveals a herd mentality. Then again, that is typical of democracy.
If you cannot beat him in the realm of ideas, no amount of protests, slogans, and stunts will help.
You need a better argument for net neutrality than "they might charge me extra for midget porn." You need to address the fact that "fast lanes," by prioritizing traffic, have done -- using our knowledge of relativity here -- the same thing as slowing down all other traffic, especially as infrastructure improves.
Ajit Pai is just the figurehead. Very few people have looked into the issues underlying this issue, and so they are relying on masses of warm bodies to make the argument for them with a heckler's veto. That sets a precedent that benefits no one.
"Net neutrality" became impossible when we made a military/educational network into a commercial one; what is needed is more competition, which is always thwarted by government regulation. The proposed "net neutrality" regulation merely helps the big guys, while giving government a means to make an accusation that will shut down a business, which allows them backdoor censorship;
Slashdot Mirror
https://www.theguardian.com/uk...
http://volokh.com/2013/05/03/l...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-eng...
https://www.theguardian.com/la...
https://www.cnet.com/news/lond...
https://www.amren.com/news/201...
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
https://www.thenewamerican.com...
Sounds familiar. Dissenting opinions can be punished by the state, or the herd, but either way, the outcome is the same.
A coupe is a car.
A coup is the death knell of an old order and regime change.
Neither end up being what their aficionados see in them. The coupe is a mid-life crisis; the coup usually means a society moving into senescence.
Hypercard was far ahead of its time. Unfortunately, most of these friendly languages are not very effective at hardcore tasks.
Voice 1: "Hi, this is your local or federal law enforcement agency, and we want data on the following user."
Voice 2: "What if I say 'no'?"
Voice 1: "Then we confiscate all of your equipment as evidence and hope your business doesn't go bankrupt, not that it matters if it does."
Voice 2: "Okay, here's all the stuff."
Voice 1: "Great. We'll be calling you whenever we need anything. In exchange, we'll give you a heads up of four hours whenever we catch someone who uses the service."
Voice 2: "Great doing business with you."
Well, you see, there's this queasy feeling that somehow life has gone off the rails, that our civilization is not a source of goodness, and that our future is in the hands of incompetents or sadists or maybe both. We have no expectation that we are part of something that makes us feel good to be alive, and are merely corporate stooges waiting out our days so that we can briefly entertain ourselves before passing into oblivion. PKD noticed this -- along with the other writers of his generation and the few before -- but by now, our society is so deeply in denial that we cannot even articulate what he saw. Instead, we just say that it makes us feel unsettled, as if we ate one too many Big Macs during our Soviet-style mandated 52-minute lunch at our mandatory jobs doing unimportant things so that we can all claim we are good workers contributing to the future, tovarisch.
Underneath all of our fancy gadgets, clothing, titles, money, and neurosis, we are still giggling monkeys in the bush, lighting our farts and hoping that the resulting glee will somehow diminish the pain of eternal darkness after death. No wonder our society is so neurotic.
Courts can order you to unlock your phone, which means that the FBI is talking about investigations, not prosecutions. I suppose it depends on the investigation; if the phone contains the location someone in North America of a nuclear device set to explode in the next hour, then it might be great if the device got unlocked. Google et al. just cooperate with law enforcement; Apple has opted not to give itself a back door so it does not have to deal with the drama. Public opinion might change after the mushroom cloud however.
When you have many groups in a nation, and many of them hate each other, you will have massive instability. Add technology into the mix and you have a surveillance state. Before this nifty new tech, it would have simply been an informant state as in the Soviet Union: turn in a coworker and get twice as many beets in your soup this week.
We all want to be with people like us. That means living near, hiring, being hired by, buying from, selling to, dating, marrying, breeding with, befriending, having them as our law enforcement officers and judges, seeing them daily, and having shared cultural standards and mores with them.
Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone) had some convincing research on the failure of diversity which explains our balkanized and atomized state:
I agree. It turns out that every person acts in the interests of their tribe. Some of those are racial/ethnic, some religious, some sexual, and some based in class, region, or caste. But we are not united. America is a giant shopping mall with mall cops and a welfare system. It has fallen apart.
I have enjoyed Billy Roper's writings on balkanization in America.
The promise of the internet: decentralized information.
The reality: 90% of the traffic goes to FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) monopolists.
The only solution: get away from a single source of access, and to one where we can route around the herd and its chosen megacorps.
The same group of violent, primitive Asians who later invaded most of the known world, only to have their rule collapse within two generations? No wonder people called them "savages."
Apparently it is news to people that the Irish have Semitic and North African admixture, that Slavs are a quarter Asian, and that all of Southern Europe is shot through with Mediterranean outliers.
No one trusts our governments anymore. Because they are unstable like third world dictatorships -- this is considered a "success" in democracy -- we have trouble placing our faith in their currencies. All it takes it for another insane program like Obamacare to pass and the currency will lose 40% of its buying power again. Some day, people might actually notice the link between entitlement programs and inflation, but that's too much to hope for.
Court: "OK, so your chip turned out to have a flaw, the company took extra time to investigate, and now your computer is slower sometimes. How is that different than the average Microsoft or Apple update?"
Intel's lawyers will delay this until the hype is forgotten, and either kill it in court or settle for some absurdly low sum, so that all of the plaintiffs get checks for $0.64 if they remember to sign up at IntelProcessorSlowdownLawsuit.com before December 31, 2019.
That's Apple's consumer base. Compare the average IQ of iPhone users to that of the people on the Mayflower and you will see how far we have fallen.
Yesterday's hardware at tomorrow's prices, just so you can claim you like the kindergarten-level operating system with all the useful internals obscured. And then, it's a walled garden, and you have few hardware options. Just lubricate your anus before you walk into the Apple store, because you will be sodomized financially and spiritually by this runaway virus of a company.
In the modern parlance, "hate" simply means one group criticizing another. Trying to ban it is a dog-chasing-its-tail type scenario that just exacerbates the enmity. Focus on not being a creepy, intrusive, greedy, manipulative, and socially irresponsible company instead!
Seven billion humans. The smart populations are shrinking as they weed out those among them who are unable to cope. Quality over quantity is going to win out in the future. We could have had eugenics, but instead we will have a vast lumpenproletariat ruled over by cynical and merciless overlords. Good work, democracy!
Did everyone miss the movie reference?
Based on my experience of humanity, this view is most likely correct. The problem is insoluble, barring some kind of absurd digital panopticon, so executives are making a public show of taking action for their shareholders, consultants are making big drama out of little, and in the meantime, everyone is sharing torrent links through Discord.
This childlike tendency to focus on people instead of ideas reveals a herd mentality. Then again, that is typical of democracy.
If you cannot beat him in the realm of ideas, no amount of protests, slogans, and stunts will help.
You need a better argument for net neutrality than "they might charge me extra for midget porn." You need to address the fact that "fast lanes," by prioritizing traffic, have done -- using our knowledge of relativity here -- the same thing as slowing down all other traffic, especially as infrastructure improves.
Ajit Pai is just the figurehead. Very few people have looked into the issues underlying this issue, and so they are relying on masses of warm bodies to make the argument for them with a heckler's veto. That sets a precedent that benefits no one.
From /r/askaconservative:
The Public: Twitter seems full of bullies, jihadis, pedophiles, and trolls.
YouTube: Great! We'll crack down on Right-wing content!