Practically speaking, state governments seem to screw up more than the federal government. There seem to be a greater variety of idiots on the national level who cancel each other out better.
Of course it's conjecture, unless the company tells us exactly what it does with the data. Are you happy with a company having extremely intimate information about you as long as you don't positively know it can be misused?
Anonymizing data turns out to be more difficult than it seems. Individual people can often be tracked down even without what is usually considered personally identifying information.
People who are likely to be harmed, maybe killed, for what other people think of them tend not to live without fear. The rest of your post seems to get specific about how things are in your fantasy world, and I'm not really interested.
The 747, which you use as an example, is considerably less complex than a large software system because it's got a lot more locality and simple redundancy. Half the parts are fasteners, and fasteners have a local effect. It's easy to put redundant fasteners nearby so that the failure of one will not cause additional problems. It's a lot harder to do similar things in software. The 747 first flew in 1969, doing pretty much what it does now, and there's been a lot of development over more than forty-five years. I'd expect software that's been developed for forty-five years while not having functionality creep to be pretty solid, also.
Most of the big splashy headaches about IT failures have to do with failures when attacked. Heartbleed was only significant because people deliberately found a vulnerability and exploited it. If a SAM brings down a 747, we don't blame Boeing. There's glitches in software, but then there's glitches in flight operations. Most of the rest are about really large projects that get mismanaged. (The ACA website was actually more successful than typical projects of its size, since it could be fixed into usefulness fairly quickly.) Really large mismanaged projects are not unique to software.
The price-to-quality tradeoff is not made by software people, but rather by decision makers higher up. It may be that we aren't drawing the line in the right place, but the line is a result of thousands of individual management decisions.
There have been cases of occupations that left stable governments. In general, there was no need to build a nation, and the nation had some taste of democracy. Both Germany and Japan were established nations going into WWII, and had had at least semi-democratic periods.
You left out the flying cars. I still don't have a flying car.
In most US cities, the train and bus service is woefully inadequate, and cars are often necessities. Lots of people would be very happy to get a car they don't have to drive, so they can rest on their commute, or have their kids taken to and from school and/or day care.
If you're in some states in the US, the ACLU has an iOS or Android app for you that will stream your video to ACLU servers when you think the police might take your phone.
You seem to think that continued US occupation makes things better than they were before. I think that, in many cases, US occupation makes things worse over time. It prevents the development of a good democratic government. It encourages the existing government to ignore the wishes of the people, because the US will keep them in puppet power.
The fundamental problem with benevolent despotism is that it prevents any better type of government from forming, ever. When the despot steps down or goes home, there isn't a functioning government, and the one that gets established and winds up ruling is typically brutal and undemocratic.
Part of the idea behind a UBI is that it reduces Federal decision-making. The government decides how much the UBI is, and how to pay for it, and you collect it and go off and do what you like. This is a whole lot more efficient than current welfare systems, which have very high administration costs, due to one set of people not wanting a single person to get what they don't rate and another set of people working hard to get in on the money.
Despair is a bad thing. Take it from someone who's still under treatment for clinical depression. If you're pro-despair, either you don't know what you're talking about or you're evil. Revolutions are frequently bad things. Typically, things wind up worse when they settle down. Old-fashioned right wingers tended to be conservatives, and understood this well. Many of the newer right wingers have lost that connection to reality.
As a leftist, I want everyone to have access to good health care and a decent income. Why is that so difficult to understand?
If you go to a movie when it comes out, you will be disappointed sometimes for various reasons, and the movie not being as much like the trailer as you wanted is just one possibility. If you want to make sure you get the movie you want for your money, you can wait for reviews. I'm not seeing any reason to sue here.
The movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was released in 1988, nearly thirty years ago. Its trailer was specially shot to be a trailer, and the trailer scenes were never intended to be in the movie. I heard no complaints of false advertising.
Global warming means the surface of the planet is overall warming up. It causes climate change, which can have freaky local effects, including cooling things down because we're mucking with how heat is transferred around the planetary surface.
You know how we can figure out whether the planet corrects for greenhouse gas output? We can measure the concentration of gasses in the air. If the concentration of CO2 goes up steadily, it's a pretty good bet that we're beyond the ability of the planet to correct. It has been. We don't need to theorize to figure out whether we're putting more CO2 in the atmosphere than the correction mechanisms can deal with. We can observe that we had 280ppm CO2 in 1850 and we're up to 400m now. We can measure how fast the CO2 concentration is going up.
Science doesn't necessarily require experimentation. Astronomy doesn't. We can't make stars in the lab and observe them for a few billion years, and yet by observation and doing science we know a lot about stellar formation and what happens to them over time.
Science needs to have objective observations under varying circumstances. Experiments with control groups are very efficient at generating these observations, but they aren't the only way.
Also, even if we buy into "as we see fit", we have to consider what we see fit. We've only got one Earth. No matter how badly we trash it, it will be by far the most hospitable body in the Solar System. People born on Earth are pretty much stuck here: even if we get practical ways to move lots of people to other planets and have them thrive there, we're not going to get that many people off-planet. Therefore, it's a good idea not to trash the place too much.
Some places have been running out of water, such as California for a few years. Desalinization plants tend to be at sea level, and there may be water shortages at considerably higher elevations. Moving water uphill costs money and energy, which has to be taken into account.
My first iPhone was life-enhancing, and at the time there was no comparable alternative. I don't know that Apple's going to come up with anything as revolutionary as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad again, with Jobs dead, but they have introduced more than their share of innovation.
Very likely someone with budgetary authority sees 27K PCs running just fine, and doesn't want to allocate the money to upgrade them. Security is usually an easy thing to disregard when making plans, because it's unlikely to bite the decision maker very soon. In cases like this, it might not bite the decision maker at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Practically speaking, state governments seem to screw up more than the federal government. There seem to be a greater variety of idiots on the national level who cancel each other out better.
Of course it's conjecture, unless the company tells us exactly what it does with the data. Are you happy with a company having extremely intimate information about you as long as you don't positively know it can be misused?
Anonymizing data turns out to be more difficult than it seems. Individual people can often be tracked down even without what is usually considered personally identifying information.
People who are likely to be harmed, maybe killed, for what other people think of them tend not to live without fear. The rest of your post seems to get specific about how things are in your fantasy world, and I'm not really interested.
The 747, which you use as an example, is considerably less complex than a large software system because it's got a lot more locality and simple redundancy. Half the parts are fasteners, and fasteners have a local effect. It's easy to put redundant fasteners nearby so that the failure of one will not cause additional problems. It's a lot harder to do similar things in software. The 747 first flew in 1969, doing pretty much what it does now, and there's been a lot of development over more than forty-five years. I'd expect software that's been developed for forty-five years while not having functionality creep to be pretty solid, also.
Most of the big splashy headaches about IT failures have to do with failures when attacked. Heartbleed was only significant because people deliberately found a vulnerability and exploited it. If a SAM brings down a 747, we don't blame Boeing. There's glitches in software, but then there's glitches in flight operations. Most of the rest are about really large projects that get mismanaged. (The ACA website was actually more successful than typical projects of its size, since it could be fixed into usefulness fairly quickly.) Really large mismanaged projects are not unique to software.
The price-to-quality tradeoff is not made by software people, but rather by decision makers higher up. It may be that we aren't drawing the line in the right place, but the line is a result of thousands of individual management decisions.
In which case it would help to make that distinction. The thread title specifically mentions the NSA, and you're clearly talking about the CIA.
There have been cases of occupations that left stable governments. In general, there was no need to build a nation, and the nation had some taste of democracy. Both Germany and Japan were established nations going into WWII, and had had at least semi-democratic periods.
You left out the flying cars. I still don't have a flying car.
In most US cities, the train and bus service is woefully inadequate, and cars are often necessities. Lots of people would be very happy to get a car they don't have to drive, so they can rest on their commute, or have their kids taken to and from school and/or day care.
If you're in some states in the US, the ACLU has an iOS or Android app for you that will stream your video to ACLU servers when you think the police might take your phone.
You seem to think that continued US occupation makes things better than they were before. I think that, in many cases, US occupation makes things worse over time. It prevents the development of a good democratic government. It encourages the existing government to ignore the wishes of the people, because the US will keep them in puppet power.
The fundamental problem with benevolent despotism is that it prevents any better type of government from forming, ever. When the despot steps down or goes home, there isn't a functioning government, and the one that gets established and winds up ruling is typically brutal and undemocratic.
Part of the idea behind a UBI is that it reduces Federal decision-making. The government decides how much the UBI is, and how to pay for it, and you collect it and go off and do what you like. This is a whole lot more efficient than current welfare systems, which have very high administration costs, due to one set of people not wanting a single person to get what they don't rate and another set of people working hard to get in on the money.
Despair is a bad thing. Take it from someone who's still under treatment for clinical depression. If you're pro-despair, either you don't know what you're talking about or you're evil. Revolutions are frequently bad things. Typically, things wind up worse when they settle down. Old-fashioned right wingers tended to be conservatives, and understood this well. Many of the newer right wingers have lost that connection to reality.
As a leftist, I want everyone to have access to good health care and a decent income. Why is that so difficult to understand?
What happens when a urologist has to be tried by a jury of his or her peers?
If you go to a movie when it comes out, you will be disappointed sometimes for various reasons, and the movie not being as much like the trailer as you wanted is just one possibility. If you want to make sure you get the movie you want for your money, you can wait for reviews. I'm not seeing any reason to sue here.
The movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was released in 1988, nearly thirty years ago. Its trailer was specially shot to be a trailer, and the trailer scenes were never intended to be in the movie. I heard no complaints of false advertising.
Man, that would drive Miller Light sales down. Have you seen me in a bikini?
Global warming means the surface of the planet is overall warming up. It causes climate change, which can have freaky local effects, including cooling things down because we're mucking with how heat is transferred around the planetary surface.
You know how we can figure out whether the planet corrects for greenhouse gas output? We can measure the concentration of gasses in the air. If the concentration of CO2 goes up steadily, it's a pretty good bet that we're beyond the ability of the planet to correct. It has been. We don't need to theorize to figure out whether we're putting more CO2 in the atmosphere than the correction mechanisms can deal with. We can observe that we had 280ppm CO2 in 1850 and we're up to 400m now. We can measure how fast the CO2 concentration is going up.
Science doesn't necessarily require experimentation. Astronomy doesn't. We can't make stars in the lab and observe them for a few billion years, and yet by observation and doing science we know a lot about stellar formation and what happens to them over time.
Science needs to have objective observations under varying circumstances. Experiments with control groups are very efficient at generating these observations, but they aren't the only way.
Also, even if we buy into "as we see fit", we have to consider what we see fit. We've only got one Earth. No matter how badly we trash it, it will be by far the most hospitable body in the Solar System. People born on Earth are pretty much stuck here: even if we get practical ways to move lots of people to other planets and have them thrive there, we're not going to get that many people off-planet. Therefore, it's a good idea not to trash the place too much.
Some places have been running out of water, such as California for a few years. Desalinization plants tend to be at sea level, and there may be water shortages at considerably higher elevations. Moving water uphill costs money and energy, which has to be taken into account.
My first iPhone was life-enhancing, and at the time there was no comparable alternative. I don't know that Apple's going to come up with anything as revolutionary as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad again, with Jobs dead, but they have introduced more than their share of innovation.
The perfectly good open technologies that some of my friends don't use? I choose my friends on bases other than how they like to communicate.
The important thing seems to be that not using FB enables you to feel smug.
They also may be using scripts from off-site, in which case figuring which domains to block becomes difficult to impossible.
Very likely someone with budgetary authority sees 27K PCs running just fine, and doesn't want to allocate the money to upgrade them. Security is usually an easy thing to disregard when making plans, because it's unlikely to bite the decision maker very soon. In cases like this, it might not bite the decision maker at all.