Yeah. An educated populace is always difficult to rule, but an uneducated populace is periodically DANGEROUS to rule.
I'd rather have a constant bit of semi-civilized chaos than periodic anarchy.
However, politicians are just people, like the rest of us. They can be stupid, short-sighted, and blinded by ideology just as easily as the rest of us. Maybe moreso, since that third item tends to lead you to a career in politics...
>It only seems stupid if you're not bright enough to see the actual motive.
Nope. Some of us know that motives don't make actions wise or unwise. There's even folk wisdom related to this - "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions".
It doesn't matter how well-intentioned this idea's advocates are, it's a stupid idea.
>Encryption wouldn't be needed, but signing would be important.
Encryption's not my strong suit. Is that significantly different from using a private key to encrypt and publishing the decryption key? It's not like you're trying to protect the stream against decryption, you're just trying to prove who is sending the data.
The US military already encrypts GPS for themselves - it can still be jammed, but it can't be spoofed.
Maybe it's time encryption was applied to civilian GPS as well. It's not like consumer electronics don't have the capability to handle the decryption, and it's not like you'd have to use the same keys as military GPS.
It's actually not difficult to man-in-the-middle cell phones in this manner. Law enforcement already has and uses the tools required.
A much simpler solution would be to put four or more mini towers around the prison, using highly directional antennas aimed at the ground on the far side of the facility. Cells will use the strongest available signal by design, so any call from within the facility will go through your logged and recorded lines (and cell towers can already be used to do triangulation, you'd probably just improve the automated reporting a bit).
Then you can do things like white list your employee's phones - with them understanding that all use will be recorded and logged, so taking a bribe to share with an inmate is a bad idea.
Still, you won't have solved the problem, because if a phone can be smuggled in, it can be smuggled out... so you could still get a phone, take some photos, record a video, and then get it out to your friend on the outside who would send the media (and threats / communications) to the ultimate recipient. You'd be slowing them down, not stopping them.
>"We have no ads, no tracking, no user profiling and we don't collect or share any user data with anyone
Two things will happen if the site survives a significant length of time:
1) Whoever is funding it will become a dictator, deleting posts and banning posters with whom they disagree, without admitting they're doing it and in fact doing their best to keep the fact a secret.
2) When the money runs out, they'll convince themselves that 'just a little bit of advertising is OK', and slowly sell out.
> Meanwhile, the US remains free almost 250 years later.
Gays, blacks, women, and aboriginal peoples may disagree about that '250' number. Hispanics, Muslims, and women may currently be wondering if it will last.
With a bonus that it's remote so you're forced to deal with a tenuous supply and evac route. Nowhere near Mars-like, but still far worse than being in Dubai.
>and the willingness of anyplace to have an incoming object like this
Given that pretty much the only thing with a similar flight profile is a nuclear-tipped ICBM... yeah, I can see a fair amount of resistance to the idea of filling the sky with suborbital transports with end points located in your highest value civilian targets.
If the flight path has to end somewhere a detonation (of any kind) is essentially harmless and thus pointless... you're going to be far enough away from populated areas to make the flight itself pointless.
>Can't you do everything from your digital wallet on your computer, except convert to real cash ?
In theory. However, any anonymous trading between the crypto and something else (even another crypto) will require a trusted middleman. Of course, the middlemen in the crypto space are pretty much never trustworthy.
> Sorry, I never got on the cryptocurrency bandwagon.
Buy scratch-and-win tickets at your corner store or gas bar. On average, you'll do better and still get the same rush from gambling in hopes of getting filthy rich for little effort. All the rest is overly complicated window dressing.
>Do you include the many thousands/millions that didn't die from invading Japan?
Of course not... they weren't killed. I'm not a revisionist who wants to paint those bombs as unnecessary, or who thinks that during war the enemy soldier's lives are equally valuable. It's simply that when counting kills, potential savings of life isn't relevant.
>A real Martian colony would use a cave, not a dome
Lava tubes are useful. I like the idea of digging in to bottom of the north wall of Valles Marineris, since the lower you go the more of that feeble air pressure you get to help you out (you can get up to a little over 1% of standard pressure at Mars' lowest points...).
However, that doesn't necessarily get you near the other resources you need. It might be worth living closer to the poles, or near a major deposit of a useful mineral or a place where the perchlorate concentrations are lower for some reason. Mars doesn't have a coherent magnetic field, but it does have some magnetic bubbles... maybe there's a semi-stable one and it'd be worth living there for the extra shielding.
There ARE proposals to build small domes and cover them with Martian regolith as radiation shielding, or even to build bricks out of it to save even more on construction materials hauled from Earth.
>Does it follow that Europe's nasty record of being the number one killer in the world was a result of free speech?
Didn't the USA take the title when it dropped nukes on the Japanese?
>To be blunt, I'm convinced the opposite is true. The minority needs it's say. A group might expend their anger, or they might simply get themselves in trouble when they advocate violence or perform that violence. Active suppression can feed the anger, and simply drive it underground.
Believe it or not, I agree. But you can't just let people build up hate groups until they're so large they're difficult to control, either.
>Calling for violence will get the authorities very interested in you here in old knot-twisted 'Murrica. Specific threats against specific people are not covered under free speech, and are covered under the heading of "terroristic threats"
Our threshold is a little lower. Sometimes that looks an awful 'slippery slope / censorshipy' and sometimes it's stopping inciting to violence. As I said, I'm happy with Canada's balance, more or less.
>The concept of crush the speech, crush the problem, is something some groups get wrong. In many cases, it makes the group being crushed stronger, as a validation to the disenfranchised that they are being actively suppressed.
Again, I agree. But it also makes organization (and thus organized growth) more difficult, and it gives you legal grounds to lock them up when you catch them. And - if applied in concordance with community standards - tends to reinforce the "That's unacceptable" opinion which further impairs the growth of a hate group.
>In addition, there is no better way to keep track of people in the internet age than allowing them to vent, then swoop down upon them when they cross a line.
You only catch the very stupid ones that way. The smarter ones teach the moderately stupid ones how to avoid crossing the line in ways that cause legal trouble.
All I'm saying is we're reasonably happy up here and we don't have groups like the Westboro Baptists OR feel like we're particularly oppressed for thought crime. (We do have the same cyclical issue with liberal political correctness gone mad, though)
Pretty much every aspect of your life is subject to the collective will of the society in which you live. You cry, 'Freedom of speech!', and they're saying, 'Stop the spread of dangerous hate!'. Since they have a lot more experience with domestic terror groups than Americans do, I understand why they're going that way.
Right now, you're probably right. But when groups of malcontents are allowed to fester unchecked, they eventually cross the line from being bitter to being violent... and that's when the EU approach suddenly looks better.
So far as I know, nobody has figured out how to balance the two concerns in a way that makes everyone (or even most people) happy.
I'm usually reasonably happy with Canada's position, which is something like 'free speech until you're advocating harming people'. That tends to get Americans twisted up in knots, but it works for us, and we (as much as I can speak for all Canadians) don't feel like we're living under the constant surveillance of Big Brother's telescreens.
>Wow, I love how you assume these new immigrants will be horrific and destructive to their host cultures.
There is usually a difference between migrants and refugees - the former are choosing to move and have a vested interest in conforming to some degree to succeed. Refugees are leaving their homes because they have no choice, and they're nowhere near as likely to want to adapt their culture to co-exist. Many of them may be incapable (I don't think I could adapt to a severe cultural change plus a language barrier, and I don't think I'm particularly stupid).
Now imagine those refugees are coming from a country with strict cultural conventions that other countries find revolting. Slavery. Religious intolerance. Dress codes. And imagine they come in numbers great enough that they more or less form their own self-sustaining colonies wherever they go.
I'm Canadian. Diversity's done pretty well for us so far, but I still would not open my arms to a mass wave of refugees from the Middle East, nor would I blame anyone else for the same attitude.
> Eventually, we will get to where we were 5 years ago!
I'd like to go further back, honestly. You don't need all the crap that goes into most web pages today.
There's nothing wrong with a title bar, a side menu bar, and buttons that look like buttons. I'm even somewhat nostalgic for frames, but I'm sure there are technical reasons why it's better to handle that functionality in other ways.
I think at some point we collectively decided the average MySpace page was on the right track, and we took that turd and polished it.
> She sent classified email in plain unencrypted text
Why the wall of text about somebody who isn't POTUS? Hillary's irrelevant to whether or not there are sufficient grounds to investigate wrongdoing by Trump.
>Either there is clear evidence that Nikoli Polityetski purchased an add that linked back to an account with the Bank of Moscow, or there isn't.
How difficult do you think it is to have a Russian purchase ads through a proxy so the cash appears to come from an American source and the customer name on the invoice is an American individual or company?
The method for tagging the ads as 'Russian-purchased' needs to be examined. Personally, I believe it's far more likely than not. I also believe that doesn't necessarily mean Trump or his team was behind it, so that too needs to be proven.
It's just another nail for the coffin, though. If you look at the meetings taken, the admissions and backing documentation that there was an attempt to break American election laws (with the odd defense that "It's OK, we only attempted to break the law, we didn't succeed"... as if 'attempted' isn't enough legally as many find out after an attempted murder or assault).
Back in the day it was a free-for-all of lying, but in more recent history in democratic nations it's been the culture to avoid getting caught in a lie - so you get politicians who very carefully phrase what they say so they always have plausible deniability - they can say, "No, I didn't say that". And it's been newsworthy when they're presented with proof they did, and sometimes serious affected their careers.
Trump - starting with the inauguration crowd size (though you could also argue back to the birther stuff, I suppose) and not stopping since - doesn't seem to care at all, and will tell a lie with the proof it's a lie being held up in front of him, and then slander the person presenting the proof. It's a different order magnitude of political sleaze.
Trump will shamelessly sling mud without any regard to truth at anyone or thing he sees as a threat.
Obviously, he sees the release of the information regarding a Russian campaign to influence the election as a threat. The information is being released by Facebook, therefore he slings mud at Facebook in an attempt to get people to discredit the evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
That's "Unfit Donald". Seems fair if he speaks of other people with that level of respect that he receives it in kind.
Yeah. An educated populace is always difficult to rule, but an uneducated populace is periodically DANGEROUS to rule.
I'd rather have a constant bit of semi-civilized chaos than periodic anarchy.
However, politicians are just people, like the rest of us. They can be stupid, short-sighted, and blinded by ideology just as easily as the rest of us. Maybe moreso, since that third item tends to lead you to a career in politics...
>It only seems stupid if you're not bright enough to see the actual motive.
Nope. Some of us know that motives don't make actions wise or unwise. There's even folk wisdom related to this - "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions".
It doesn't matter how well-intentioned this idea's advocates are, it's a stupid idea.
Assuming the summary is a correct and concise one.
You can't learn about terrorism without reading about it. Not reading about it leaves you ignorant. Being ignorant removes the tools for combating it.
This is just a dumb, knee-jerk reaction idea from the start.
The worse the economy, the easier it is for the government to start a ditch-digging program.
Because the English thought sending you to a Canada was too cruel, probably because our winters scared the shit out of them.
>Encryption wouldn't be needed, but signing would be important.
Encryption's not my strong suit. Is that significantly different from using a private key to encrypt and publishing the decryption key? It's not like you're trying to protect the stream against decryption, you're just trying to prove who is sending the data.
The US military already encrypts GPS for themselves - it can still be jammed, but it can't be spoofed.
Maybe it's time encryption was applied to civilian GPS as well. It's not like consumer electronics don't have the capability to handle the decryption, and it's not like you'd have to use the same keys as military GPS.
It's actually not difficult to man-in-the-middle cell phones in this manner. Law enforcement already has and uses the tools required.
A much simpler solution would be to put four or more mini towers around the prison, using highly directional antennas aimed at the ground on the far side of the facility. Cells will use the strongest available signal by design, so any call from within the facility will go through your logged and recorded lines (and cell towers can already be used to do triangulation, you'd probably just improve the automated reporting a bit).
Then you can do things like white list your employee's phones - with them understanding that all use will be recorded and logged, so taking a bribe to share with an inmate is a bad idea.
Still, you won't have solved the problem, because if a phone can be smuggled in, it can be smuggled out... so you could still get a phone, take some photos, record a video, and then get it out to your friend on the outside who would send the media (and threats / communications) to the ultimate recipient. You'd be slowing them down, not stopping them.
>"We have no ads, no tracking, no user profiling and we don't collect or share any user data with anyone
Two things will happen if the site survives a significant length of time:
1) Whoever is funding it will become a dictator, deleting posts and banning posters with whom they disagree, without admitting they're doing it and in fact doing their best to keep the fact a secret.
2) When the money runs out, they'll convince themselves that 'just a little bit of advertising is OK', and slowly sell out.
> Meanwhile, the US remains free almost 250 years later.
Gays, blacks, women, and aboriginal peoples may disagree about that '250' number. Hispanics, Muslims, and women may currently be wondering if it will last.
With a bonus that it's remote so you're forced to deal with a tenuous supply and evac route. Nowhere near Mars-like, but still far worse than being in Dubai.
>and the willingness of anyplace to have an incoming object like this
Given that pretty much the only thing with a similar flight profile is a nuclear-tipped ICBM... yeah, I can see a fair amount of resistance to the idea of filling the sky with suborbital transports with end points located in your highest value civilian targets.
If the flight path has to end somewhere a detonation (of any kind) is essentially harmless and thus pointless... you're going to be far enough away from populated areas to make the flight itself pointless.
>Can't you do everything from your digital wallet on your computer, except convert to real cash ?
In theory. However, any anonymous trading between the crypto and something else (even another crypto) will require a trusted middleman. Of course, the middlemen in the crypto space are pretty much never trustworthy.
> Sorry, I never got on the cryptocurrency bandwagon.
Buy scratch-and-win tickets at your corner store or gas bar. On average, you'll do better and still get the same rush from gambling in hopes of getting filthy rich for little effort. All the rest is overly complicated window dressing.
>Do you include the many thousands/millions that didn't die from invading Japan?
Of course not... they weren't killed. I'm not a revisionist who wants to paint those bombs as unnecessary, or who thinks that during war the enemy soldier's lives are equally valuable. It's simply that when counting kills, potential savings of life isn't relevant.
>A real Martian colony would use a cave, not a dome
Lava tubes are useful. I like the idea of digging in to bottom of the north wall of Valles Marineris, since the lower you go the more of that feeble air pressure you get to help you out (you can get up to a little over 1% of standard pressure at Mars' lowest points...).
However, that doesn't necessarily get you near the other resources you need. It might be worth living closer to the poles, or near a major deposit of a useful mineral or a place where the perchlorate concentrations are lower for some reason. Mars doesn't have a coherent magnetic field, but it does have some magnetic bubbles... maybe there's a semi-stable one and it'd be worth living there for the extra shielding.
There ARE proposals to build small domes and cover them with Martian regolith as radiation shielding, or even to build bricks out of it to save even more on construction materials hauled from Earth.
>Does it follow that Europe's nasty record of being the number one killer in the world was a result of free speech?
Didn't the USA take the title when it dropped nukes on the Japanese?
>To be blunt, I'm convinced the opposite is true. The minority needs it's say. A group might expend their anger, or they might simply get themselves in trouble when they advocate violence or perform that violence. Active suppression can feed the anger, and simply drive it underground.
Believe it or not, I agree. But you can't just let people build up hate groups until they're so large they're difficult to control, either.
>Calling for violence will get the authorities very interested in you here in old knot-twisted 'Murrica. Specific threats against specific people are not covered under free speech, and are covered under the heading of "terroristic threats"
Our threshold is a little lower. Sometimes that looks an awful 'slippery slope / censorshipy' and sometimes it's stopping inciting to violence. As I said, I'm happy with Canada's balance, more or less.
>The concept of crush the speech, crush the problem, is something some groups get wrong. In many cases, it makes the group being crushed stronger, as a validation to the disenfranchised that they are being actively suppressed.
Again, I agree. But it also makes organization (and thus organized growth) more difficult, and it gives you legal grounds to lock them up when you catch them. And - if applied in concordance with community standards - tends to reinforce the "That's unacceptable" opinion which further impairs the growth of a hate group.
>In addition, there is no better way to keep track of people in the internet age than allowing them to vent, then swoop down upon them when they cross a line.
You only catch the very stupid ones that way. The smarter ones teach the moderately stupid ones how to avoid crossing the line in ways that cause legal trouble.
All I'm saying is we're reasonably happy up here and we don't have groups like the Westboro Baptists OR feel like we're particularly oppressed for thought crime. (We do have the same cyclical issue with liberal political correctness gone mad, though)
Pretty much every aspect of your life is subject to the collective will of the society in which you live. You cry, 'Freedom of speech!', and they're saying, 'Stop the spread of dangerous hate!'. Since they have a lot more experience with domestic terror groups than Americans do, I understand why they're going that way.
Right now, you're probably right. But when groups of malcontents are allowed to fester unchecked, they eventually cross the line from being bitter to being violent... and that's when the EU approach suddenly looks better.
So far as I know, nobody has figured out how to balance the two concerns in a way that makes everyone (or even most people) happy.
I'm usually reasonably happy with Canada's position, which is something like 'free speech until you're advocating harming people'. That tends to get Americans twisted up in knots, but it works for us, and we (as much as I can speak for all Canadians) don't feel like we're living under the constant surveillance of Big Brother's telescreens.
One of the BioSphere projects, and it was not (specifically) a Mars simulation, just a closed artificial ecosystem test.
And they messed up very badly in how they handled the failure, too.
>Wow, I love how you assume these new immigrants will be horrific and destructive to their host cultures.
There is usually a difference between migrants and refugees - the former are choosing to move and have a vested interest in conforming to some degree to succeed. Refugees are leaving their homes because they have no choice, and they're nowhere near as likely to want to adapt their culture to co-exist. Many of them may be incapable (I don't think I could adapt to a severe cultural change plus a language barrier, and I don't think I'm particularly stupid).
Now imagine those refugees are coming from a country with strict cultural conventions that other countries find revolting. Slavery. Religious intolerance. Dress codes. And imagine they come in numbers great enough that they more or less form their own self-sustaining colonies wherever they go.
I'm Canadian. Diversity's done pretty well for us so far, but I still would not open my arms to a mass wave of refugees from the Middle East, nor would I blame anyone else for the same attitude.
> Eventually, we will get to where we were 5 years ago!
I'd like to go further back, honestly. You don't need all the crap that goes into most web pages today.
There's nothing wrong with a title bar, a side menu bar, and buttons that look like buttons. I'm even somewhat nostalgic for frames, but I'm sure there are technical reasons why it's better to handle that functionality in other ways.
I think at some point we collectively decided the average MySpace page was on the right track, and we took that turd and polished it.
> She sent classified email in plain unencrypted text
Why the wall of text about somebody who isn't POTUS? Hillary's irrelevant to whether or not there are sufficient grounds to investigate wrongdoing by Trump.
>Either there is clear evidence that Nikoli Polityetski purchased an add that linked back to an account with the Bank of Moscow, or there isn't.
How difficult do you think it is to have a Russian purchase ads through a proxy so the cash appears to come from an American source and the customer name on the invoice is an American individual or company?
The method for tagging the ads as 'Russian-purchased' needs to be examined. Personally, I believe it's far more likely than not. I also believe that doesn't necessarily mean Trump or his team was behind it, so that too needs to be proven.
It's just another nail for the coffin, though. If you look at the meetings taken, the admissions and backing documentation that there was an attempt to break American election laws (with the odd defense that "It's OK, we only attempted to break the law, we didn't succeed"... as if 'attempted' isn't enough legally as many find out after an attempted murder or assault).
Back in the day it was a free-for-all of lying, but in more recent history in democratic nations it's been the culture to avoid getting caught in a lie - so you get politicians who very carefully phrase what they say so they always have plausible deniability - they can say, "No, I didn't say that". And it's been newsworthy when they're presented with proof they did, and sometimes serious affected their careers.
Trump - starting with the inauguration crowd size (though you could also argue back to the birther stuff, I suppose) and not stopping since - doesn't seem to care at all, and will tell a lie with the proof it's a lie being held up in front of him, and then slander the person presenting the proof. It's a different order magnitude of political sleaze.
Trump will shamelessly sling mud without any regard to truth at anyone or thing he sees as a threat.
Obviously, he sees the release of the information regarding a Russian campaign to influence the election as a threat. The information is being released by Facebook, therefore he slings mud at Facebook in an attempt to get people to discredit the evidence.