I never said you were born knowing C, that's daft, but the idea that quick learning is entirely down to passion is ludicrous. Lots of folks seem not to be able to learn to program at all, and some folks are certainly much better at it than others. Hell at the most basic level, some people are just plain smarter than others.
That's not to denigrate hard work or passion, but lots of people are passionate and work hard at things they still royally suck at.
Why on earth is it so simple to see that being born 7' tall makes it easier to be a professional basketball player but whenever someone suggests that traits may make you better at some academic pursuit they get shouted down?
I hate to tell you this, but life isn't fair, you can work as hard as you damned well want to, be as passionate as you like, but some people are always going to be better than you. Some of them will even work far less hard and be far less passionate. Life sucks, get a helmet.
Talent isn't a myth, but it isn't what people think it is.
Being talented doesn't make you a phenomenal programmer because you still have to learn to program. Being talented however allows you to understand what it is you are doing in a way that makes becoming a phenomenal programmer vastly easier. This makes talented people look like better programmers when in fact what they are actually better at is understanding and learning programming, or music, or whatever else it might be. That's really only a semantic difference though because at equal levels of skill(and particularly at close to zero skill) talent shows up in the results.
Does that mean skill and hard work don't matter? Of course not. It does however mean that if you want to perform as well as someone who is much more talented than you, you will have to work significantly harder than them.
The guardian stories I read had him talking about actually going there and showing them things. I don't know what it was he showed them, but it was from his own mouth as I recall. Even that is probably enough to at least convict him of some minor offenses.
Mind you, the paranoid part of my mind says Snowden is actually still an NSA agent because in the end what he's actually provided is a really neat way for the US government to reveal that it's been spying on people without actually getting in any serious trouble. I realise that the more likely explanation is that he's just a paranoid low level drone with libertarian political views who saw some legitimately shady stuff and blew it up into the sky is falling. The evidence I've seen from Snowden matches a lot more closely with what the government has admitted than what he's claimed so far and if he's got something seriously big that we really need to see then he should release it instead of sitting on it as some sort of dead man's switch.
Poor idiot is between a rock and a hard place at the moment, he's fallen for the typical crazy dream that the countries which don't cooperate with America are somehow resisting the police state as opposed to far far worse places. The Russians have him now and they're not going to let him go anywhere except straight back to their offices to give them everything he has or back to the USA and even that's only because they'd have a hard time explaining why not.
As an important note for junior anarchists everywhere. Russia, Ecuador, Venezuela, etc are not strongholds of free speech, democracy and freedom, they are dictatorships or borderline dictatorships where taking a hard line against the US is politically advantageous. Ecuador has prosecuted journalists for a lot less than Julian Assange ever did and continues to do so, their president just wins votes by cocking a snoot to the US government.
Well we know he met with Universities and other agencies in Hong Kong to tell them how they were being spied on. I know that technically Hong Kong isn't exactly the same as China, but they aren't anything close to a democracy and the final say so still goes to Beijing. Whether he shared anything directly with the Chinese government(or offered anything to the Russians) is largely immaterial as the organisations he shared with in Hong Kong are run directly by the Chinese state.
The fact that they were spying on them is not a surprise, the how is what's interesting to them.
Well, he should probably face his sexual assault charges in Sweden, at least IMO, but as far as the US government is concerned, unless they have evidence of wrong doing we don't, it's extremely unlikely they'd get any conviction at all in a civilian court and even less likely they'd get one which would stand up on appeal. He's certainly pissed some people off, but given it would be astronomically embarrassing to drag him over to the US and then lose, I doubt anyone is even seriously considering it.
Not to mention the fact that if he were actually facing charges in the US the Australian government would actually become more seriously involved. For sexual assault he gets the same as any other Australian which isn't really all that much as the government doesn't give a flying fuck about saving people from sexual assault charges.
No one I know of denies Al Qaeda exists, lots of people don't believe that it exists as some sort of centralised organisation with agents operating towards an organised goal, but I've never seen anyone deny it exists. Those are two very different things, and understanding the difference is important, both in terms of how we justify what we do, but also in terms of what we do. We can't get Al Qaeda to surrender the way we could a foreign government, we can't just nuke it's HQ and hope it'll fall apart, we can't break in and steal its secret plans so we can stop them. In essence while there is an Al Qaida, there are also hundreds of other organisations which might, depending on your perspective be defined as terrorist organisations which may or may not be affiliated with Al Qaeda in any way or who if they are affiliated may have varying degrees of affiliation.
The other problem is that disasters are actually really, really uncommon and there are legitimate questions about how effective all this extra security is at thwarting them. We really and honestly have to take a look at the cost of having something like 9/11 happen with great rarity vs the cost of the actions we are taking to prevent it, especially if we aren't actually doing much to prevent it. I've seen government officials justifying Prism by evoking the memory of the Boston Bombings which happened while Prism was operational. If we're throwing away our liberties, our international reputation and perhaps more importantly the values for which we stand and for which our soldiers have and continue to die in order to reduce the likelihood of an already unlikely event is it worth it? What if what we're doing isn't reducing that risk at all? What if it is, as some believe, actually making things worse?
The bad thing Snowden did was go to China and explain to the Chinese how we spy on them. He also told other world governments about how the UK spied on them. This is a distinct event from telling US citizens how the US spied on them which should probably have whistleblower protections.
You're confusing an unjust law with exigent circumstances. Whistle Blower laws are exceptions to the law which are granted under certain exigent circumstances because it is believed that breaking the law is better for society than following it.
No one sane believes that it is inappropriate to keep some details of current military exercises secret at the very least from the opposing side whoever that may be. No one sane believes that the government isn't allowed to keep at least a few secrets for some period of time. That is to say, laws against aiding the enemy or revealing secret information are perfectly just, reasonable, and given that the penalty of death for treason is actually written explicitly into the constitution, I'd hazard a guess that the founding fathers largely agreed with it.
The question in this case is, should Manning and Snowden be forgiven some or all of their legitimate crimes because, in essence, the American people had a right to know. This is not a simple question to answer in either case as the protection isn't an all or nothing thing. Either man could potentially be a legitimate whistle blower and a traitor simultaneously if some of the information revealed shouldn't have been. Personally I think that, on the evidence available, Bradly Manning made a reasonable effort to not reveal information which might endanger people when he revealed the Iraq War Log information and that that information was something that the American people had a right to know. Cablegate is a bit more complicated, there was less need to know and more potential harm, but I'd give a pass on that as well.
Snowden on the other hand has apparently revealed details of surveillance to legitimate targets of surveillance directly and with intent, so I'm not sure if he's quite so protected. He might not precisely fall into the traitor category yet, but he's leaning that way and will almost certainly end up there to save his own skin before this is over.
Life isn't black and white. Everything you do has positive and negative consequences, and the same is true for every government, there are ripples and if we decided we never wanted to do any evil we'd have to sit locked up in a basement somewhere and even then we'd be doing evil by inaction.
The problem with "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" is that they are a furphy. Their proponents tap into the fact that most of us would find them justified in the action movie case. That is to say if you had a man who you 100% knew had information which would allow you to save thousands or millions of lives and that man was directly responsible for the harm about to befall those people, most people would torture him to get that information even if they disagreed with torture. They might feel really shitty about it afterwards, but you, and I, and probably nearly everyone else would probably do it if we ran out of other options.
That's not what happens though, we don't torture people who are guilty to stop plots we know about and save known victims, we torture people who might know something about plots they may or may not be directly involved in, which might or might not exist, in order to save an unknown number of people from a possibly nonexistent danger. Then after we do it the interrogators go home and feel they've served their country honorably.
Given that if you torture someone long enough they'll admit to whatever it is you want, if you're not in the action movie scenario not only are your means fairly abhorrent, but your ends are at best seriously questionable. You can certainly justify certain the means by the ends, but the benefit of the ends has to outweigh the cost of the means. When the means you're talking about are torturing another human being, you need some pretty damned fantastic ends, the movie scenario probably just scrapes by, but I have doubts that anything so clear cut ever occurs in real life.
Apparently that's been slightly misrepresented and he was much more discerning than he's given credit for. Apparently he leaked only historic stuff and deliberately avoided humint material, seemingly the government even agreed this happened as they amended the charges.
That's not to say that everything Bradly Manning released should have been released. A lot of the stuff in the diplomatic cables was the sort of stuff that everyone already knew but no one had actually said, and for all too human reasons sometimes it's important that there be a distinction between what is known and what is said. Most everyone knows that Putin is at best straddling the line between president and not so benevolent dictatorship, but we still have to have a diplomatic relationship with him, so we don't say that out loud. Everyone knows that Netanyahu has been testing the patience of his western allies something fierce, but again, we don't actually say that. On the other hand though there is some validity to the argument that finding out the US couldn't stand their dictators either helped foster some of the Arab spring which for all that it hasn't magically transformed the Middle East into Candy Land has at least been an important step.
This thing certainly won't replace art, but that doesn't mean it won't make life difficult for at least some artists.
The reason being is that there's a big difference between "art" and what most artists actually do to pay their bills, if they're lucky enough to actually be able to pay their bills without having a day job. For a very specific example, a lot of photographers pay the bills doing stuff like weddings and glamour shots. Art it really isn't, but it's something folks are actually willing to pay cash money for to keep the lights on.
For painters, this equivalent is basically portraits and wall filler for people who think, exactly as you have done, that a painting looks nicer. I would suggest that if a machine can make something that looks hand painted, especially if it can do it from a photo, it may eventually replace a lot of average painters. It's not there yet obviously, but given machine color mixing is a solved problem, I'd suggest that it would be far from impossible to make this into a commercial product. It may of course never be made into one because now that the researchers have done their thing they'll move onto the next thing(no one becomes an AI researcher to deal with all the bother of making actual marketable products).
I never said we were at the precipice of culture's death. I said that free to air tv is paid for by ads and if people don't watch them, broadcasters won't broadcast. There will of course still be shows, but they'll come from an expensive subscription service. You can feel free to cherry pick crappy tv shows (though Jersey Shore is a cable show, not broadcast) and pretend there's nothing worthwhile on tv, but that doesn't make it so.
My point is that the exchange that the broadcasters make for being able to use public airwaves is in the form of licensing fees paid to the public's elected representatives. This allows the government to pay for essential services without taxing you John Q Citizen. They may also, in accordance with the contract granting them access, have other responsibilities, however, that contract is between the broadcaster and your government. To you personally a broadcasting company owes absolutely nothing. If the terms of their license allow, they can piss their money up against the wall and broadcast dead air all day if they want to. If you're unhappy with the terms of their license, contact your federal representatives and/or the FCC and let them know, maybe if you make good suggestions which have broad appeal they'll include your changes into the contracts. If they don't, you're of course free to vote for someone else or to run for office yourself, that's the beauty of a democracy.
Of course, as broadcasters have absolutely no obligation to sign those contracts or license the airwaves at all, you're still stuck if you want them to provide you with free contact with no revenue stream.
Well of course nothing guarantees them a profit, but the fact that they use public airwaves doesn't mean you own the content they broadcast, nor are they obligated to run at a loss. My point was more that advertising is part of the covenant we have with broadcasters in exchange for "free" content. You're perfectly welcome to believe ads have become intrusive, but if you decide to skip them, don't expect broadcasters to keep providing the content.
Except you see that's total bullshit. The "exchange" for using the public airwaves is billions in licensing fees paid to the government, not providing you with content for free. They don't owe you jack.
Second, if you take away their revenue stream(ie ads), then they will stop paying for those airwaves and stop producing content.
I just wish Snowden would clarify what the hell he's saying. I've read Q & A with him and I still can't work out exactly what people are looking at, how they're getting it, whether the looking has to be actively initiated or is passive, or anything else. We need more damned details, not more hyperbole. I'm by no means diminishing the value of his bringing PRISM to light, even if it turns out to be a much lesser problem than he seems to believe, but I don't really give a shit whether he believes it's the greatest assault on privacy in history, I want to know exactly what's been happening so I can decide whether I believe that it is or not. For a man whose goal was supposedly the open discussion of this thing, he's doing a pretty piss poor job of initiating one.
Unless RSA has a backdoor or weakness we don't know about, a sufficiently long key cannot be cracked with current technology. All the computing power in the world couldn't brute force a decent length key in the period of your lifetime. The NSA could of course have a backdoor to RSA or know a weakness that no one else knows, but if they do, then this whole conversation is pointless as they can intercept anything you do no matter what you do so you may as well not bother.
No, the OP is just a paranoid douche bag. He thinks the NSA is out to get him (which they very well could be), but then wants someone to give him an off the shelf product to magically make his source NSA safe. He complains about Microsoft sharing zero days with the NSA and then wants an open source solution which by design will share zero days with everyone, including the NSA.
In essence the only way to actually make this work if you really really really want to be NSA proof and still have your system externally accessible is as follows.
Create a local unhosted Git Repository
Put your source in said git repository.
Encrypt the git repository using a decent private key and not some bullshit from verisign which was useless before everyone knew the NSA was spying on them.
Host the repository wherever the fuck you like, you can stick it on a public web page title "NSA Come Get My Source Code" with no password if you want.to as there's no evidence that the NSA can actually break strong encryption.
Download the Encrypted Repository, Decrypt it and do your merges and whatnot. For bonus points air gap the system you download the repository on and the system which holds your decrypted source.
This will of course be a gigantic pain in the ass and remove nearly all the benefits of having a hosted solution in the first place, but what it will actually do, unlike any other option is actually work. You will have a "hosted" Git Repository which can be accessed by people who have the keys and no one else, at least until the bad guys get your keys.
Of course all of this is completely unnecessary and misses the entire point of the Prism exercise, but that's really beside the point.
The court case is over and the result wasn't actually all that bad. Sure Myriad and their stock holders would much rather have complete patent rights to the whole thing, but they kept the protections on their actual asset and the court case is now final and decided. Hell even if they'd lost completely their stock probably would have gone up because at least the risk was gone.
Well, when you consider that the Tesla engine isn't 100% efficient, that the charging process isn't 100% efficient, and the charging station is probably being powered by a 40 year old coal powered power station which is actually less efficient than an internal combustion engine in the first place, not to mention substantially dirtier(yes even coal power can be more efficient than your car, but only if you have a new plant and most places don't).
Car enthusiasts think every single one of the world's top selling cars are pokey boring machines and that doesn't matter the tiniest bit to anyone else. I can guarantee that most car enthusiasts would pan every car I've ever owned. No one gives a crap about the opinion of car enthusiasts. For that matter the primary issue that car enthusiasts have had with electric cars is that they're slow, which the Tesla still is(by car enthusiast standards anyway).
If Tesla wants to change the world, instead of targeting the dominance of the petrol powered sports car of which a few hundred thousand exist in the entire world, they should target the millions of family sedans, small vehicles and other perfectly ordinary cars. You know the ones regular folks use to drive at or below the speed limit on their short daily commutes which is the perfect market for what a Tesla can actually do. Of course then they'd have to try and sell the entire car for less than they currently charge for the battery pack, but if they stopped trying to make it do what it still can't do(be an electric Ferrari), it might actually be possible.
The bigger question is who on earth would be insane enough to drive from New York to LA in one of these things?
You can't really compare wikileaks and anonymous though.
I have my issues with the way wikileaks behaves, and I think Julian Assange is a egotistical coward with psychopathic tendencies, but at least the goal of wikileaks, freedom of information, is something that is noble. Anonymous is just the mob.
Anonymous' general philosophy isn't "help the little guy" it's "fuck the consequences".
Once they get in their head that someone has done something wrong, for instance in this case the South African Police, they'll attack them and who cares if anyone else is harmed.
I get that you can't really expect much more from a group of what are essentially script kiddies with no one telling them what not to do, but can we stop pretending that they're some bastion of justice and freedom and whatnot, they're the nerd rage of the mob, undirected,unfiltered, and they'll be the justification for a whole mess of laws the rest of us will have to live with.
Most of us are ill in one way or another, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing. Every one of us does things that are unhealthy every single day of our lives, we eat the wrong foods, drink, some smoke, the vast majority of us don't get enough exercise(and some get too much).
My point is that describing yourself as a "Brony" or a "Trekkie" or any for that matter any of the names I can't recall for teenage girl fans of being fans of any of the horrible drivel they listen to, or any of the names for fans of sports teams, is a warning sign. It's something that should maybe make you sit down for a minute and say "Hey, am I happy with this? Am I investing too much of my time, my money, or myself in this?" If when you get those answers you're happy with them, by all means go ahead, but realize that they are questions you have to ask because those labels and there are plenty of them outside the world of nerd pursuits.
And of course, if you're not an adult, ignore all of the above, it is perfectly normal for kids and teenagers to have unbalanced obsessions with things, pretty much everyone does at that age. If on the other hand you're 30 years old and your hobby is filling up your house, whatever that hobby might be, ask yourself if you're happy with that. You're well within your rights to be happy so long as you're not hurting anyone, but you should ask the question.
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I never said you were born knowing C, that's daft, but the idea that quick learning is entirely down to passion is ludicrous. Lots of folks seem not to be able to learn to program at all, and some folks are certainly much better at it than others. Hell at the most basic level, some people are just plain smarter than others.
That's not to denigrate hard work or passion, but lots of people are passionate and work hard at things they still royally suck at.
Why on earth is it so simple to see that being born 7' tall makes it easier to be a professional basketball player but whenever someone suggests that traits may make you better at some academic pursuit they get shouted down?
I hate to tell you this, but life isn't fair, you can work as hard as you damned well want to, be as passionate as you like, but some people are always going to be better than you. Some of them will even work far less hard and be far less passionate. Life sucks, get a helmet.
Talent isn't a myth, but it isn't what people think it is.
Being talented doesn't make you a phenomenal programmer because you still have to learn to program. Being talented however allows you to understand what it is you are doing in a way that makes becoming a phenomenal programmer vastly easier. This makes talented people look like better programmers when in fact what they are actually better at is understanding and learning programming, or music, or whatever else it might be. That's really only a semantic difference though because at equal levels of skill(and particularly at close to zero skill) talent shows up in the results.
Does that mean skill and hard work don't matter? Of course not. It does however mean that if you want to perform as well as someone who is much more talented than you, you will have to work significantly harder than them.
The guardian stories I read had him talking about actually going there and showing them things. I don't know what it was he showed them, but it was from his own mouth as I recall. Even that is probably enough to at least convict him of some minor offenses.
Mind you, the paranoid part of my mind says Snowden is actually still an NSA agent because in the end what he's actually provided is a really neat way for the US government to reveal that it's been spying on people without actually getting in any serious trouble. I realise that the more likely explanation is that he's just a paranoid low level drone with libertarian political views who saw some legitimately shady stuff and blew it up into the sky is falling. The evidence I've seen from Snowden matches a lot more closely with what the government has admitted than what he's claimed so far and if he's got something seriously big that we really need to see then he should release it instead of sitting on it as some sort of dead man's switch.
Poor idiot is between a rock and a hard place at the moment, he's fallen for the typical crazy dream that the countries which don't cooperate with America are somehow resisting the police state as opposed to far far worse places. The Russians have him now and they're not going to let him go anywhere except straight back to their offices to give them everything he has or back to the USA and even that's only because they'd have a hard time explaining why not.
As an important note for junior anarchists everywhere. Russia, Ecuador, Venezuela, etc are not strongholds of free speech, democracy and freedom, they are dictatorships or borderline dictatorships where taking a hard line against the US is politically advantageous. Ecuador has prosecuted journalists for a lot less than Julian Assange ever did and continues to do so, their president just wins votes by cocking a snoot to the US government.
Well we know he met with Universities and other agencies in Hong Kong to tell them how they were being spied on. I know that technically Hong Kong isn't exactly the same as China, but they aren't anything close to a democracy and the final say so still goes to Beijing. Whether he shared anything directly with the Chinese government(or offered anything to the Russians) is largely immaterial as the organisations he shared with in Hong Kong are run directly by the Chinese state.
The fact that they were spying on them is not a surprise, the how is what's interesting to them.
Well, he should probably face his sexual assault charges in Sweden, at least IMO, but as far as the US government is concerned, unless they have evidence of wrong doing we don't, it's extremely unlikely they'd get any conviction at all in a civilian court and even less likely they'd get one which would stand up on appeal. He's certainly pissed some people off, but given it would be astronomically embarrassing to drag him over to the US and then lose, I doubt anyone is even seriously considering it.
Not to mention the fact that if he were actually facing charges in the US the Australian government would actually become more seriously involved. For sexual assault he gets the same as any other Australian which isn't really all that much as the government doesn't give a flying fuck about saving people from sexual assault charges.
No one I know of denies Al Qaeda exists, lots of people don't believe that it exists as some sort of centralised organisation with agents operating towards an organised goal, but I've never seen anyone deny it exists. Those are two very different things, and understanding the difference is important, both in terms of how we justify what we do, but also in terms of what we do. We can't get Al Qaeda to surrender the way we could a foreign government, we can't just nuke it's HQ and hope it'll fall apart, we can't break in and steal its secret plans so we can stop them. In essence while there is an Al Qaida, there are also hundreds of other organisations which might, depending on your perspective be defined as terrorist organisations which may or may not be affiliated with Al Qaeda in any way or who if they are affiliated may have varying degrees of affiliation.
The other problem is that disasters are actually really, really uncommon and there are legitimate questions about how effective all this extra security is at thwarting them. We really and honestly have to take a look at the cost of having something like 9/11 happen with great rarity vs the cost of the actions we are taking to prevent it, especially if we aren't actually doing much to prevent it. I've seen government officials justifying Prism by evoking the memory of the Boston Bombings which happened while Prism was operational. If we're throwing away our liberties, our international reputation and perhaps more importantly the values for which we stand and for which our soldiers have and continue to die in order to reduce the likelihood of an already unlikely event is it worth it? What if what we're doing isn't reducing that risk at all? What if it is, as some believe, actually making things worse?
The bad thing Snowden did was go to China and explain to the Chinese how we spy on them. He also told other world governments about how the UK spied on them. This is a distinct event from telling US citizens how the US spied on them which should probably have whistleblower protections.
You're confusing an unjust law with exigent circumstances. Whistle Blower laws are exceptions to the law which are granted under certain exigent circumstances because it is believed that breaking the law is better for society than following it.
No one sane believes that it is inappropriate to keep some details of current military exercises secret at the very least from the opposing side whoever that may be. No one sane believes that the government isn't allowed to keep at least a few secrets for some period of time. That is to say, laws against aiding the enemy or revealing secret information are perfectly just, reasonable, and given that the penalty of death for treason is actually written explicitly into the constitution, I'd hazard a guess that the founding fathers largely agreed with it.
The question in this case is, should Manning and Snowden be forgiven some or all of their legitimate crimes because, in essence, the American people had a right to know. This is not a simple question to answer in either case as the protection isn't an all or nothing thing. Either man could potentially be a legitimate whistle blower and a traitor simultaneously if some of the information revealed shouldn't have been. Personally I think that, on the evidence available, Bradly Manning made a reasonable effort to not reveal information which might endanger people when he revealed the Iraq War Log information and that that information was something that the American people had a right to know. Cablegate is a bit more complicated, there was less need to know and more potential harm, but I'd give a pass on that as well.
Snowden on the other hand has apparently revealed details of surveillance to legitimate targets of surveillance directly and with intent, so I'm not sure if he's quite so protected. He might not precisely fall into the traitor category yet, but he's leaning that way and will almost certainly end up there to save his own skin before this is over.
Life isn't black and white. Everything you do has positive and negative consequences, and the same is true for every government, there are ripples and if we decided we never wanted to do any evil we'd have to sit locked up in a basement somewhere and even then we'd be doing evil by inaction.
The problem with "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" is that they are a furphy. Their proponents tap into the fact that most of us would find them justified in the action movie case. That is to say if you had a man who you 100% knew had information which would allow you to save thousands or millions of lives and that man was directly responsible for the harm about to befall those people, most people would torture him to get that information even if they disagreed with torture. They might feel really shitty about it afterwards, but you, and I, and probably nearly everyone else would probably do it if we ran out of other options.
That's not what happens though, we don't torture people who are guilty to stop plots we know about and save known victims, we torture people who might know something about plots they may or may not be directly involved in, which might or might not exist, in order to save an unknown number of people from a possibly nonexistent danger. Then after we do it the interrogators go home and feel they've served their country honorably.
Given that if you torture someone long enough they'll admit to whatever it is you want, if you're not in the action movie scenario not only are your means fairly abhorrent, but your ends are at best seriously questionable. You can certainly justify certain the means by the ends, but the benefit of the ends has to outweigh the cost of the means. When the means you're talking about are torturing another human being, you need some pretty damned fantastic ends, the movie scenario probably just scrapes by, but I have doubts that anything so clear cut ever occurs in real life.
Apparently that's been slightly misrepresented and he was much more discerning than he's given credit for. Apparently he leaked only historic stuff and deliberately avoided humint material, seemingly the government even agreed this happened as they amended the charges.
That's not to say that everything Bradly Manning released should have been released. A lot of the stuff in the diplomatic cables was the sort of stuff that everyone already knew but no one had actually said, and for all too human reasons sometimes it's important that there be a distinction between what is known and what is said. Most everyone knows that Putin is at best straddling the line between president and not so benevolent dictatorship, but we still have to have a diplomatic relationship with him, so we don't say that out loud. Everyone knows that Netanyahu has been testing the patience of his western allies something fierce, but again, we don't actually say that. On the other hand though there is some validity to the argument that finding out the US couldn't stand their dictators either helped foster some of the Arab spring which for all that it hasn't magically transformed the Middle East into Candy Land has at least been an important step.
This thing certainly won't replace art, but that doesn't mean it won't make life difficult for at least some artists.
The reason being is that there's a big difference between "art" and what most artists actually do to pay their bills, if they're lucky enough to actually be able to pay their bills without having a day job. For a very specific example, a lot of photographers pay the bills doing stuff like weddings and glamour shots. Art it really isn't, but it's something folks are actually willing to pay cash money for to keep the lights on.
For painters, this equivalent is basically portraits and wall filler for people who think, exactly as you have done, that a painting looks nicer. I would suggest that if a machine can make something that looks hand painted, especially if it can do it from a photo, it may eventually replace a lot of average painters. It's not there yet obviously, but given machine color mixing is a solved problem, I'd suggest that it would be far from impossible to make this into a commercial product. It may of course never be made into one because now that the researchers have done their thing they'll move onto the next thing(no one becomes an AI researcher to deal with all the bother of making actual marketable products).
I never said we were at the precipice of culture's death. I said that free to air tv is paid for by ads and if people don't watch them, broadcasters won't broadcast. There will of course still be shows, but they'll come from an expensive subscription service. You can feel free to cherry pick crappy tv shows (though Jersey Shore is a cable show, not broadcast) and pretend there's nothing worthwhile on tv, but that doesn't make it so.
I'm far from a follower of Rand.
My point is that the exchange that the broadcasters make for being able to use public airwaves is in the form of licensing fees paid to the public's elected representatives. This allows the government to pay for essential services without taxing you John Q Citizen. They may also, in accordance with the contract granting them access, have other responsibilities, however, that contract is between the broadcaster and your government. To you personally a broadcasting company owes absolutely nothing. If the terms of their license allow, they can piss their money up against the wall and broadcast dead air all day if they want to. If you're unhappy with the terms of their license, contact your federal representatives and/or the FCC and let them know, maybe if you make good suggestions which have broad appeal they'll include your changes into the contracts. If they don't, you're of course free to vote for someone else or to run for office yourself, that's the beauty of a democracy.
Of course, as broadcasters have absolutely no obligation to sign those contracts or license the airwaves at all, you're still stuck if you want them to provide you with free contact with no revenue stream.
Well of course nothing guarantees them a profit, but the fact that they use public airwaves doesn't mean you own the content they broadcast, nor are they obligated to run at a loss. My point was more that advertising is part of the covenant we have with broadcasters in exchange for "free" content. You're perfectly welcome to believe ads have become intrusive, but if you decide to skip them, don't expect broadcasters to keep providing the content.
Except you see that's total bullshit. The "exchange" for using the public airwaves is billions in licensing fees paid to the government, not providing you with content for free. They don't owe you jack.
Second, if you take away their revenue stream(ie ads), then they will stop paying for those airwaves and stop producing content.
if AI scanning were what the government was actually doing.
I just wish Snowden would clarify what the hell he's saying. I've read Q & A with him and I still can't work out exactly what people are looking at, how they're getting it, whether the looking has to be actively initiated or is passive, or anything else. We need more damned details, not more hyperbole. I'm by no means diminishing the value of his bringing PRISM to light, even if it turns out to be a much lesser problem than he seems to believe, but I don't really give a shit whether he believes it's the greatest assault on privacy in history, I want to know exactly what's been happening so I can decide whether I believe that it is or not. For a man whose goal was supposedly the open discussion of this thing, he's doing a pretty piss poor job of initiating one.
Unless RSA has a backdoor or weakness we don't know about, a sufficiently long key cannot be cracked with current technology. All the computing power in the world couldn't brute force a decent length key in the period of your lifetime. The NSA could of course have a backdoor to RSA or know a weakness that no one else knows, but if they do, then this whole conversation is pointless as they can intercept anything you do no matter what you do so you may as well not bother.
No, the OP is just a paranoid douche bag. He thinks the NSA is out to get him (which they very well could be), but then wants someone to give him an off the shelf product to magically make his source NSA safe. He complains about Microsoft sharing zero days with the NSA and then wants an open source solution which by design will share zero days with everyone, including the NSA.
In essence the only way to actually make this work if you really really really want to be NSA proof and still have your system externally accessible is as follows.
Host the repository wherever the fuck you like, you can stick it on a public web page title "NSA Come Get My Source Code" with no password if you want.to as there's no evidence that the NSA can actually break strong encryption.
This will of course be a gigantic pain in the ass and remove nearly all the benefits of having a hosted solution in the first place, but what it will actually do, unlike any other option is actually work. You will have a "hosted" Git Repository which can be accessed by people who have the keys and no one else, at least until the bad guys get your keys.
Of course all of this is completely unnecessary and misses the entire point of the Prism exercise, but that's really beside the point.
The court case is over and the result wasn't actually all that bad. Sure Myriad and their stock holders would much rather have complete patent rights to the whole thing, but they kept the protections on their actual asset and the court case is now final and decided. Hell even if they'd lost completely their stock probably would have gone up because at least the risk was gone.
Well, when you consider that the Tesla engine isn't 100% efficient, that the charging process isn't 100% efficient, and the charging station is probably being powered by a 40 year old coal powered power station which is actually less efficient than an internal combustion engine in the first place, not to mention substantially dirtier(yes even coal power can be more efficient than your car, but only if you have a new plant and most places don't).
Car enthusiasts think every single one of the world's top selling cars are pokey boring machines and that doesn't matter the tiniest bit to anyone else. I can guarantee that most car enthusiasts would pan every car I've ever owned. No one gives a crap about the opinion of car enthusiasts. For that matter the primary issue that car enthusiasts have had with electric cars is that they're slow, which the Tesla still is(by car enthusiast standards anyway).
If Tesla wants to change the world, instead of targeting the dominance of the petrol powered sports car of which a few hundred thousand exist in the entire world, they should target the millions of family sedans, small vehicles and other perfectly ordinary cars. You know the ones regular folks use to drive at or below the speed limit on their short daily commutes which is the perfect market for what a Tesla can actually do. Of course then they'd have to try and sell the entire car for less than they currently charge for the battery pack, but if they stopped trying to make it do what it still can't do(be an electric Ferrari), it might actually be possible.
The bigger question is who on earth would be insane enough to drive from New York to LA in one of these things?
You can't really compare wikileaks and anonymous though.
I have my issues with the way wikileaks behaves, and I think Julian Assange is a egotistical coward with psychopathic tendencies, but at least the goal of wikileaks, freedom of information, is something that is noble. Anonymous is just the mob.
Anonymous' general philosophy isn't "help the little guy" it's "fuck the consequences".
Once they get in their head that someone has done something wrong, for instance in this case the South African Police, they'll attack them and who cares if anyone else is harmed.
I get that you can't really expect much more from a group of what are essentially script kiddies with no one telling them what not to do, but can we stop pretending that they're some bastion of justice and freedom and whatnot, they're the nerd rage of the mob, undirected,unfiltered, and they'll be the justification for a whole mess of laws the rest of us will have to live with.
Most of us are ill in one way or another, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing. Every one of us does things that are unhealthy every single day of our lives, we eat the wrong foods, drink, some smoke, the vast majority of us don't get enough exercise(and some get too much).
My point is that describing yourself as a "Brony" or a "Trekkie" or any for that matter any of the names I can't recall for teenage girl fans of being fans of any of the horrible drivel they listen to, or any of the names for fans of sports teams, is a warning sign. It's something that should maybe make you sit down for a minute and say "Hey, am I happy with this? Am I investing too much of my time, my money, or myself in this?" If when you get those answers you're happy with them, by all means go ahead, but realize that they are questions you have to ask because those labels and there are plenty of them outside the world of nerd pursuits.
And of course, if you're not an adult, ignore all of the above, it is perfectly normal for kids and teenagers to have unbalanced obsessions with things, pretty much everyone does at that age. If on the other hand you're 30 years old and your hobby is filling up your house, whatever that hobby might be, ask yourself if you're happy with that. You're well within your rights to be happy so long as you're not hurting anyone, but you should ask the question.