Google and other web services better enjoy their ability to control your experience while it lasts, because the days of such control are numbered. Various technologies exist, though most in their infancy, to allow the user to customize their own experience and override the decisions made by the original providers.
In fact, ultimately, when providers decide to change their interface from something standardized, it will be merely perceived by the user as broken. Your home page may have elements of Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Slashdot, et. al., merged into the experience controlled by YOU, not by the content providers.
What's problematic about this is that these providers are supported by advertising, which most likely won't make it to the eyeballs under such a system. It is a problem, one that the providers are *already* beset with, as many of us currently do not see these ads.
I predict that what will happen eventually, is the ad revenue will have to either 1) be satisfied with access to only users of low sophistication who haven't bothered to reconfigure their experience, or 2) find ways of incorporating advertising into the content they provide [just let me put down this can of New Mango-Strawberry Coke so I can finish typing this...:-)]. More and more users will gain sophistication, and new capabilities will arise making it easier to customize your experience. As the subset of sophisticated users increases, the demand for standardized interfaces to available content will increase. Providers who insist on maintaining control of the presentation of their content will eventually end up marginalized-- "for dumb users only," or at least sandboxed or quarantined, cordoned off into an area reserved for rogue applications.
Even those who "own the phone" (iPhone, GPhone), are on borrowed time in that regard. Fully open phone systems are on their way, and will not be restricted as to what kind of applications they can run.
Many of you may whine "but these guys are supported by advertising! They'll go out of business, (blah blah woof woof)..." To that I say fine. Any company that thinks that I should give up my eyeballs so they can survive has another thing coming. They couldn't pay me enough to want to watch their ads. I've found ways to screen most advertising out of my life, and that's the way I like it. Take away a service, and I'll just find something else to do with my time. It's not like there's a shortage of things to do out there...
Somehow I have a hard time believing that a monkey who's trying to figure out why he's half-paralyzed would be even remotely interested in "playing video games."
This seems to me to be an experiment that's pushing the bounds of ethics.
A friend of mine happened to work in the Primate dept. at Santa Cruz in the 1960s when they inherited the Harry Harlow rhesus monkeys used in the famous 1950s isolation experiments. They were totally psychologically screwed up for as long as they lived. While I'm not an animal rights extremist, the sort of experiment described in the OP makes me uncomfortable. If humans were involved in such an experiment, they'd be able to know what was happening to them. But monkeys being "temporarily paralyzed," while it may not harm them physically, seems likely to have some psychological effects that I think could justifiably be called cruel.
Whats funny is that at least what is posted is not MS ethics. Those are Federal laws. They can call them ethics if they want, but not paying off foreign officials is not an ethical question. Its a legal one.
It's nice to encounter someone who realizes that ethics have absolutely nothing do to with what's legally right and wrong. You see, there's this persistent myth running around...
If you have to pay a phalanx of QA engineers to find bugs post-facto ("just as important as our development department"), you're doing it wrong. The bugs shouldn't have been there to begin with.
You laugh about this, but Microsoft either actually believed this for quite some time, or was simply oblivious-- according to a historical account written by one of the NT developers (Barbarians led by Bill Gates), they didn't even have a QA department until about the time NT was being developed.
All I do know is it really couldn't get much worse.
Please don't tempt fate.
Yeah, back in 2000 I could see that 1) things had to get worse before they would get better, and 2) Bush was just what the Dr. ordered for that. What I didn't realize is just how much worse things have to get, and that they still haven't reached that point. That was clear when in 2004 Bush was reelected-- the realization that 50% of those who voted still thought that moron was something other than a complete screwup accident looking for a place to happen. And now the Republicans have essentially trashed the economy in the process-- but just wait, the Dems about to get elected are going to get their screwups in too. What's unfortunate is they may not mess up quite as bad as Bush has, and unless they DO mess up at least as bad, the general voting public is still going to be playing red-team or blue-team next time around.
What may be more interesting is to what extent these screwups will actually frustrate corporate leaders-- since they're the actual rulers of the state, it'll be interesting to see what they do if the economy gets so screwed that they can't make the big money they've become accustomed to. THEN we may actually see some changes, but I'm skeptical that such changes would be for the better...
Which is exactly how I am left without anyone to vote for in the presidential election. No McCain (Military Commissiona Act of 2006), No Obama (FISA Amendments Act of 2008), No Bob Barr (*shudder*).
Now a Perl lover will jump in and say that you can write Perl so that it's maintainable, and you can write Python or Ruby so that it's unreadable. It's true, but both are hard to do.
If you're spending that much time concerned with how effective your program languages are at prohibiting your programmers from producing unreadable or unmaintainable code, I'd say you should look to hire some better programmers.
In case no one has noticed, the TV media is now clearly showing their complete lack of credibility on the bailout issue, as all the stories (at least that I've seen so far) have been totally pro bailout-- with essentially, "it's necessary, we know better but can't really muster a cogent argument, but those who oppose it are ignorant morons," treatment.
I think it's REALLY nice to see that the public just isn't buying it, despite the media pulling out all the stops.
I think we should all remember this, and not hold ONLY the Congress' feet to the fire in November, but remember the media's role in the matter.
Education is definitely not enough because people just don't care. They want to do what they want to do and the computer should magically understand that and play along. There's little respect for the complexity of general purpose computers and any possible learning curve needed to use them properly.
Get used to it-- they shouldn't have to care, and aren't going to care. I've been a professional computer programmer for 25 years, and even I refuse to be dictated to by a computer program, and novice users who did not choose to be computer professionals certainly aren't going to put up with it. In fact, I'm undoubtedly even LESS likely to be dictated to by a computer program than an novice user will.
I use ProcessGuard on XP, and any processes that I don't recognize are summarily prohibited. If they persist, they often get flagged to prohibit execution permanently. Period. I terminate programs with impunity, and if the OS won't shutdown quickly enough I power it down anyway. Just now I found that the Epson scanner software had some kind of monitor service for some feature I've never used and it's now toast. Software does not get to do whatever the f*** it feels like on my machine. Stuff that runs all the time, uses the network behind the scenes, or wakes up on a timer, gets BLOCKED.
I also use a proxy ad blocker and Noscript while browsing, as internet pages don't get to do whatever the f** they want either. I'm in control of what I do on a computer, NOT THE PROGRAMS. So far I've yet to crash the system or lose data, but I do backup and I know what I can usually get away with and can't. If in doubt, I research what the program is before deciding to abort it, prohibit it, or otherwise disable or uninstall it.
Routine packages that come with hardware devices that seem to think they can run on my system 24/7 are offensive and really poor programming practice in my opinion. The quickest way to get on my sh** list is to try to install a service or startup program (and I've got plenty of monitors that'll inform me if they try).
And you know what? My system runs pretty darn fast, because all that useless crap isn't sucking up resources.
Commercial programs better get with it-- that's one thing that tends to be better with open source, there's not as much funny business going on, at least so far. Novice user systems accumulate all this extra crap until they start to bog down and become unusable-- I know, as I support some of them and see what kind of messes they've gotten the system into. I'm constantly removing startup programs for features they've never used.
Seems to me, the real purpose to this is so that you can continue to hire minimum wage morons to do screening and feed most of the huge anti-terrorism budgets into contracts and purchases where it's easiest to produce kickbacks.
Yeah, let's let the computer observe and think for them, so that all the "warm body" need do is look for the red flashing lights. What a joke...
If a terrorist accidentally called me and other people I frequently called that would be called a pattern and I would hope it would be investigated. I don't care if keeping secrets from people will cause them to not trust the government. There are going to always be people who will find one reason or another to not trust it.
Such faith you have in government. I remember when Reagan was all on about getting government off the backs of the people. Ah, those were the good old days.
It is?? No, another area you are just wrong on. The jury came back 6 years and 11 days ago on 9/12 the verdict was that there will be more attacks. There is no question in anyone's mind that has really been paying attention to the way these people work that they have and will continue to work toward killing people in this country.
I didn't say they weren't-- my point was, to give Bush credit for the fact we haven't seen any new ones is premature. We don't know why there haven't been any new ones, it may be simply because we haven't waited long enough and in the meantime Bush has been tilting at windmills.
So, as I understand this, you're really saying you don't believe getting rid of a dictator that undeniably was responsible for causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own people, tortured, mutilated and raped countless others was not a worthwhile endeavor?
Not considering what it's costing us, no. It's not our job to fix what's wrong with the world, and it looks that in this case we likely made it worse instead of better. Powell saw it coming, so did Shinseki. I wish Powell had made president instead of Bush, someone who had some idea what getting into a war was like, and someone more like Ike, honorable and willing to admit mistakes. If you really think we are getting out if Iraq, I have a bridge ot sell you-- looks to me that the Republicans just need to undermine Obama's tendency to promise a pullout, as the timing is just a little too perfect, just before the debates. I also think that if Obama does get in and yank the plug on things, it looks like instability time to me-- we'll either be back in almost immedately as things degrade, or will watch things turn so nasty that the nostalgia for "good ol' boy" Saddam will abound in spades, both over there and over here. But call me a skeptic.
WWII was a little different, we knew Japan was responsible, when all the evidence shows that Saddam was not connected to 9/11, despite all the Republican breast-beating apologetics. As I said, I think Afghanistan was justified, but not Iraq, and justified or not one still has to ask it if was advisable, again, I think Afghanistan probably was but is pretty clear to me Iraq was not.
Too bad that's not how it really works, we are allowed to vote in our representatives and can give or take majority with our votes. It's unfortunate for the either side when the opposition has both the presidency and the congress tied up because they don't feel they are represented but, it isn't the fault of the government, it's how our distrustful forefathers designed the system that allows it to be so. So, when the opposition's 'extreme' views are put into law then the other side stomps and stamps and huffs and puffs and then they try to fix the laws they don't like the next time they have majority in congress and the presidency.
And you were talking about efficiency? Rather than waiting for consensus, we have one side passing a bunch of laws their way, having a couple of years to mess things up with them, the the other side taking it all back and undoing much of all that and starting the process in another direction. That is exactly why I prefer gridlock, it gums up that process. It's working right now if you hadn't noticed, Bush hasn't had the opportunity to do quite as much in his second term.
You're stance has been that we should just give up or severely limit our ability to covertly detect and prevent terrorist attacks ba
Transparency is fine when you're talking about operating procedures in departments like the GAO, The Fed or FEMA. I would say transparency of operating procedures even for the CIA or FBI may be fine as well. However, transparency between operating procedures and national security programs are two vastly different concepts.
Certainly there are things, like the nuclear launch codes, and locations of nuclear weapons that should be kept secret. Battlefield communications and tactical planning. But surveillance is an area that needs extraordinary care and oversight, especially when done on US soil, and when the technology now affords us the ability to theoretically at least, screen all the telephone calls in the country for keywords and phrases, and to match up every person who's been called by who. Suppose someone being watched who's masterminding a terrorist cell, years ago happened to misdial and get your phone number? Or any of the people that you routinely call? And you end up on a suspect list. I really don't see the necessity of such things, and we musn't forget the associated cost-- "secrecy" is a tradeoff, it trades off against trust. For every additional secret you have, some amount of trust is lost-- in essence, a secret says either "we don't trust you with this information," or "we've got something to hide." It seems to me that "national security" has become a large rock that the cockroaches have all crawled under. I think secrecy must be something used very sparingly, not with the kind of broad brush the Bush administration seems to like to apply. And surveillance within the US is another-- again, it says, "we're watching you, because we don't trust you." Such suspicions foster similar suspicion in response-- "if you say you can't trust me, why should I trust you?"
Again, I think this comes down to a matter of fundamental trust or distrust of the institutions of government. While I agree that left unchecked it would be quite simple for government to become overtly corrupt, I don't believe that we are constantly on the brink of that being the case especially considering the number of built in checks that already exist within the government.
The problem is, we just don't know. And we're knowing less and less over time.
While I also agree there should be oversight for national security projects, and there is just not the open public type you would advocate, many or most these projects would do nobody any good if the general public and then our enemies knew about them.
So instead, enemys just suspect we have capabilities and programs that maybe we don't even have. Some may think that acts as a deterrent-- Perhaps Osama Bin Laden instructs everyone to talk in light whispers all the time because he fears the CIA has satellites that can eavesdrop on conversations from orbit, and it's made him extremely paranoid. Great, BUT-- it comes at a cost, several actually. At the cost of enemies getting more paranoid than necessary and deciding to strike when they might have chosen diplomacy instead if they knew the capabilities we actually were applying rather than imagining the capabilities we might have. At the cost of confidence of a populace in a government that seems hell-bent on keeping things secret, and as scandals appear we realize that many of those secrets have nothing to do with national security but are corruptions of the system that are going on unbeknownst to the populace. If AT&T has been illegally turning over call records to the NSA, just what else has who been doing under the rubrick of "national security," and who does it benefit? Secrecy is a really great way to undermine the trust of a government by its populace, IMHO...
Your example of an open source approach to government is simply astounding, even if you have an algorithm you believe is impossible to break why in the world would you tip your hand?
Why not? Better to show yourself unquestionably to be in a position of strength if that's where
And how would you propose setting up this new bureaucracy to monitor the monitors? Would that be a civilian group with super secret clearance or just our good old trustworthy politicians? But, then who would watch the watchers? Really, lets bog down the government even further so that federal law enforcement can be even less efficient than it already is, great idea.
It's quite simple. It's called transparency. Secrecy in goverment is counterproductive and unnecessary in my view, and is something that should belong only to the people for basic things like keeping your credit card number and certain abusable personal information secret. Government is a public institution, and must remain unerringly so. The real problem with secrecy, is when you get in the habit of hiding things, you develop a reputation for hiding things and not being straight with people. You lose credibility and trust, something that a government seriously needs to sustain the support of the people. And people who would be on your side are ignorant of what you are doing and cannot help. An abuse or scandal comes to light, and it is seen as "just the tip of the iceberg." "What else have you been hiding?" You have to remember that what the government does must set a good example to the populace, else they really have no right to complain (at least no moral right) if the people then imitate them when they find the opportunity to abuse or scandalize in their own self interest. The government isn't seen as doing the proper job, or the job at all because it's all "secret." "Trust us" is not a good mantra for a government, and especially one that has themselves argued the idea of "trust but verify" with other governments. Just why should we trust the US government any more than we trust any other? I think the answer to that should be transparency, but unfortunately it's not right now.
Very few secrets stay secret forever. I think that when a government sees secrecy as a valuable tool, what is really the case is they have just gotten lazy, not bothered to explore other ideas-- but in America there really is no shortage of ideas, and I think some good ones could be found that would be far better than "stealth." Just like the better encryption algorithm is one that even if a potential invader knows the algorithm it is robust enough to withstand attack, I think there can be found methods that work even if the opponent knows what they are. I'm for an open source approach to government and law enforcement I guess you could say. In a free country, it is important to find and use such methods, and not rely so heavily on stealth and high-tech weaponry. I think the government's undoing will be its deference to secrecy, and it looks to me we've been seeing that played out in glorious Technicolor and Panavision in the Bush administration.
Another important factor is consensus. It might be worthwhile to recall that the founders of this country themselves did not trust the government, even the one they were constructing-- that is why they came up with the "separation of powers." For me, I prefer it when one party is in the White House and the other in Congress- in a government I want gridlock. When either party gets all their way they mess things up in spades, and I'd rather see things hamstrung. The government was designed to be inefficient, because it's not very trustworthy, and consequently efficiency just gets you into trouble that much faster if that's where you are headed. As Thoreau said, "The government that governs best, governs least."
Oh, I'm not crazy about anybody reading anyone else's emails, read my original comment. My point was, to see the administration get in a huff about it when it happens to one of their own, after they went to great lengths to hide and then justify that very sort of capability for themselves, is the height of hypocrisy and hubris.
If we do in fact need the ability of surveillance dragnets in fishing for terror cells, we no less need the ability of surveillance dragnets in fishing for government abuse. Given the track record, it seems to me we're far more vulnerable to the latter. When the microscope finally does get pointed in the other direction, it is such a rare occurrence that my first thought is that at least someone is doing it, because I see no evidence it's being done by the agencies that one would think are supposed to. The problem is, there's a conflict of interest-- the heads of these agencies are appointed by the very people that we the people most need insight into. So when our privacy is violated by overzealous overprotective agencies, it's business as usual, but when their privacy is violated, it's a horrible crime.
Even in cases that are deemed to be of imminent need to gain access for wire tapping a field warrant must be submitted and reviewed by a judge to ensure the process followed standards set in place for proceeding with such action.
What standards? FISA? If they were all just "doin' their jobs," why was it necessary to amend it and provide immunity for the telcoms? An amendment I might add, considered unconstitutional by many, something that hasn't yet been determined by the courts. You're just telling me here what's supposed to happen. That would be great, but it falls somewhat short of reality:
Yes, there is an approval procedure, too bad the Bush administration saw fit to bypass it (something they only admitted to doing after being caught at it, BTW). Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald states it thus:
Congress passed a law in 1978 making it a criminal offense to eavesdrop on Americans without judicial oversight. Nobody of any significance ever claimed that that law was unconstitutional. The Administration not only never claimed it was unconstitutional, but Bush expressly asked for changes to the law in the aftermath of 9/11, thereafter praised the law, and misled Congress and the American people into believing that they were complying with the law. In reality, the Administration was secretly breaking the law, and then pleaded with The New York Times not to reveal this. Once caught, the Administration claimed it has the right to break the law and will continue to do so.
_ _ _
(back to your regularly scheduled response:)
Guantanamo is no different than any other prison run by the military in a time of war. As a matter of fact, prisoners held in American military prisons are treated better than those held by any other country in the world. The majority of the people there were actually captured on the battlefield actively trying to kill our soldiers. Several who have been released were subsequently killed or recaptured on the battlefields of Iraq or Afghanistan.
Oh, I'm sure the camp is very nice. Of course, the "war" we are referring to here, is a never ending war on a methodology, rather than one on a nation that could actually come to an "end" at some point. So presumably, these guys are going to be there until they die. And since even some who are tried, don't get released because of a "security threat," one ponders the actual relevance of trials in the process. If some of these detainees were not actually involved in terrorist or violent acts against our soldiers, how would they prove it? Perhaps you would like to cite Hamdan vs Rumsfeld as an example of how the "system works," because subsequently Hamdan and Khadr were released?
And, there's the distinct possibility that some who have been released have been inspired to subsequently join our opposition because of the way they were treated by the US in the process. Find it hard to buy that? Now you know how I feel about your claim that Saddam "might" have buried some WMDs or passed them to Syria. (Why do you think they call it apologetics?)
But I would be willing to accept that Guantanamo is "no different than any other prison run by the military in a time of war." One thing that is different though is the amount of visibility such things have in the modern information age, which in my opinion, is a good thing. It's harder to keep abuses hidden now, th
If you think there is some pattern of abusive behavior then report it to your congressmen and stop lamenting about how horrible it is that terrorist might have their e-mail or phone conversations listened to.
The thing is, we have no way anymore of finding out if the behavior is abusive or if it is only terrorists that are monitored. Except that is, for hackers and whistle blowers who give these invisible processes a taste of their own medicine. Some people are content just to "trust the government," but sorry, I'm not one of those.
While you're being so concerned about the encroachment of terrorists, some of the rest of us are also concerned about the encroachment of a government that is becoming more and more Orwellian, sort of like the old Soviet Union that we used to like to differentiate ourselves from. If warrantless wiretapping was an isolated incident, perhaps it would be less concerning, but when you look at the behavior in Guantanamo, Abu Grabe, defining "enemy combatant" out of the blue, and the total incompetence regarding WMD, it's obvious that the government has embarked on a clumsy and fear-induced (terror-induced) pattern of throwing our American principles right out the window.
When our government summarily ignores what the Constitution has to say about "unreasonable search and seizure," I take it seriously-- that is one of the protections we are supposed to be fighting the terrorists to keep, and specifically what out government is supposed to be defending. When we, out of fear (terror), feel the need to excuse unmonitored warrantless surveillance by our government, it's pretty clear that the "terrorists" have won some of the ground they were after. Whenever we act out of fear of "terrorism", we are playing into their hands-- that is the goal of terrorism, after all, to instill fear.
Well, well. So VP candidates don't like being spied on any more than the general populace does. To bad *we* don't have the Secret Service to defend our privacy rights.
Ignore the monitor AND the HMD glasses, I want it with a PROJECTOR. I can get it now with two projectors & polarizing filters, but it also requires a screen that doesn't scramble the polarization. Shuttered glasses with a single projector could allow a room full of people to view at the same time and is a little more flexible regarding the screen I would think. And with battery powered IR synced shuttered glasses, there's no wires.
Slashdot Mirror
Google and other web services better enjoy their ability to control your experience while it lasts, because the days of such control are numbered. Various technologies exist, though most in their infancy, to allow the user to customize their own experience and override the decisions made by the original providers.
In fact, ultimately, when providers decide to change their interface from something standardized, it will be merely perceived by the user as broken. Your home page may have elements of Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Slashdot, et. al., merged into the experience controlled by YOU, not by the content providers.
What's problematic about this is that these providers are supported by advertising, which most likely won't make it to the eyeballs under such a system. It is a problem, one that the providers are *already* beset with, as many of us currently do not see these ads.
I predict that what will happen eventually, is the ad revenue will have to either 1) be satisfied with access to only users of low sophistication who haven't bothered to reconfigure their experience, or 2) find ways of incorporating advertising into the content they provide [just let me put down this can of New Mango-Strawberry Coke so I can finish typing this...:-)]. More and more users will gain sophistication, and new capabilities will arise making it easier to customize your experience. As the subset of sophisticated users increases, the demand for standardized interfaces to available content will increase. Providers who insist on maintaining control of the presentation of their content will eventually end up marginalized-- "for dumb users only," or at least sandboxed or quarantined, cordoned off into an area reserved for rogue applications.
Even those who "own the phone" (iPhone, GPhone), are on borrowed time in that regard. Fully open phone systems are on their way, and will not be restricted as to what kind of applications they can run.
Many of you may whine "but these guys are supported by advertising! They'll go out of business, (blah blah woof woof)..." To that I say fine. Any company that thinks that I should give up my eyeballs so they can survive has another thing coming. They couldn't pay me enough to want to watch their ads. I've found ways to screen most advertising out of my life, and that's the way I like it. Take away a service, and I'll just find something else to do with my time. It's not like there's a shortage of things to do out there...
It means that 1) science is good at finding mistakes, and 2) we are learning a lot, as mistakes are the source of knowledge.
Somehow I have a hard time believing that a monkey who's trying to figure out why he's half-paralyzed would be even remotely interested in "playing video games."
This seems to me to be an experiment that's pushing the bounds of ethics.
A friend of mine happened to work in the Primate dept. at Santa Cruz in the 1960s when they inherited the Harry Harlow rhesus monkeys used in the famous 1950s isolation experiments. They were totally psychologically screwed up for as long as they lived. While I'm not an animal rights extremist, the sort of experiment described in the OP makes me uncomfortable. If humans were involved in such an experiment, they'd be able to know what was happening to them. But monkeys being "temporarily paralyzed," while it may not harm them physically, seems likely to have some psychological effects that I think could justifiably be called cruel.
Whats funny is that at least what is posted is not MS ethics. Those are Federal laws. They can call them ethics if they want, but not paying off foreign officials is not an ethical question. Its a legal one.
It's nice to encounter someone who realizes that ethics have absolutely nothing do to with what's legally right and wrong. You see, there's this persistent myth running around...
If you have to pay a phalanx of QA engineers to find bugs post-facto ("just as important as our development department"), you're doing it wrong. The bugs shouldn't have been there to begin with.
You laugh about this, but Microsoft either actually believed this for quite some time, or was simply oblivious-- according to a historical account written by one of the NT developers (Barbarians led by Bill Gates), they didn't even have a QA department until about the time NT was being developed.
All I do know is it really couldn't get much worse.
Please don't tempt fate.
Yeah, back in 2000 I could see that 1) things had to get worse before they would get better, and 2) Bush was just what the Dr. ordered for that. What I didn't realize is just how much worse things have to get, and that they still haven't reached that point. That was clear when in 2004 Bush was reelected-- the realization that 50% of those who voted still thought that moron was something other than a complete screwup accident looking for a place to happen. And now the Republicans have essentially trashed the economy in the process-- but just wait, the Dems about to get elected are going to get their screwups in too. What's unfortunate is they may not mess up quite as bad as Bush has, and unless they DO mess up at least as bad, the general voting public is still going to be playing red-team or blue-team next time around.
What may be more interesting is to what extent these screwups will actually frustrate corporate leaders-- since they're the actual rulers of the state, it'll be interesting to see what they do if the economy gets so screwed that they can't make the big money they've become accustomed to. THEN we may actually see some changes, but I'm skeptical that such changes would be for the better...
Which is exactly how I am left without anyone to vote for in the presidential election. No McCain (Military Commissiona Act of 2006), No Obama (FISA Amendments Act of 2008), No Bob Barr (*shudder*).
There are other options:
http://www.politics1.com/p2008.htm
Now a Perl lover will jump in and say that you can write Perl so that it's maintainable, and you can write Python or Ruby so that it's unreadable. It's true, but both are hard to do.
If you're spending that much time concerned with how effective your program languages are at prohibiting your programmers from producing unreadable or unmaintainable code, I'd say you should look to hire some better programmers.
Well, what's correct?
- A "herd" of mavericks? Well, maybe.
- A "gaggle" of maverics? No, that's for geese.
- A "murder" of maverics? No, that's for crows.
I suggest, an "oxymoron" of mavericks...
the system is VULNERABLE?
Perhaps RMS banks at First Mattress...
In case no one has noticed, the TV media is now clearly showing their complete lack of credibility on the bailout issue, as all the stories (at least that I've seen so far) have been totally pro bailout-- with essentially, "it's necessary, we know better but can't really muster a cogent argument, but those who oppose it are ignorant morons," treatment.
I think it's REALLY nice to see that the public just isn't buying it, despite the media pulling out all the stops.
I think we should all remember this, and not hold ONLY the Congress' feet to the fire in November, but remember the media's role in the matter.
Education is definitely not enough because people just don't care. They want to do what they want to do and the computer should magically understand that and play along. There's little respect for the complexity of general purpose computers and any possible learning curve needed to use them properly.
Get used to it-- they shouldn't have to care, and aren't going to care. I've been a professional computer programmer for 25 years, and even I refuse to be dictated to by a computer program, and novice users who did not choose to be computer professionals certainly aren't going to put up with it. In fact, I'm undoubtedly even LESS likely to be dictated to by a computer program than an novice user will.
I use ProcessGuard on XP, and any processes that I don't recognize are summarily prohibited. If they persist, they often get flagged to prohibit execution permanently. Period. I terminate programs with impunity, and if the OS won't shutdown quickly enough I power it down anyway. Just now I found that the Epson scanner software had some kind of monitor service for some feature I've never used and it's now toast. Software does not get to do whatever the f*** it feels like on my machine. Stuff that runs all the time, uses the network behind the scenes, or wakes up on a timer, gets BLOCKED.
I also use a proxy ad blocker and Noscript while browsing, as internet pages don't get to do whatever the f** they want either. I'm in control of what I do on a computer, NOT THE PROGRAMS. So far I've yet to crash the system or lose data, but I do backup and I know what I can usually get away with and can't. If in doubt, I research what the program is before deciding to abort it, prohibit it, or otherwise disable or uninstall it.
Routine packages that come with hardware devices that seem to think they can run on my system 24/7 are offensive and really poor programming practice in my opinion. The quickest way to get on my sh** list is to try to install a service or startup program (and I've got plenty of monitors that'll inform me if they try).
And you know what? My system runs pretty darn fast, because all that useless crap isn't sucking up resources.
Commercial programs better get with it-- that's one thing that tends to be better with open source, there's not as much funny business going on, at least so far. Novice user systems accumulate all this extra crap until they start to bog down and become unusable-- I know, as I support some of them and see what kind of messes they've gotten the system into. I'm constantly removing startup programs for features they've never used.
Seems to me, the real purpose to this is so that you can continue to hire minimum wage morons to do screening and feed most of the huge anti-terrorism budgets into contracts and purchases where it's easiest to produce kickbacks.
Yeah, let's let the computer observe and think for them, so that all the "warm body" need do is look for the red flashing lights. What a joke...
If a terrorist accidentally called me and other people I frequently called that would be called a pattern and I would hope it would be investigated. I don't care if keeping secrets from people will cause them to not trust the government. There are going to always be people who will find one reason or another to not trust it.
Such faith you have in government. I remember when Reagan was all on about getting government off the backs of the people. Ah, those were the good old days.
It is?? No, another area you are just wrong on. The jury came back 6 years and 11 days ago on 9/12 the verdict was that there will be more attacks. There is no question in anyone's mind that has really been paying attention to the way these people work that they have and will continue to work toward killing people in this country.
I didn't say they weren't-- my point was, to give Bush credit for the fact we haven't seen any new ones is premature. We don't know why there haven't been any new ones, it may be simply because we haven't waited long enough and in the meantime Bush has been tilting at windmills.
So, as I understand this, you're really saying you don't believe getting rid of a dictator that undeniably was responsible for causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own people, tortured, mutilated and raped countless others was not a worthwhile endeavor?
Not considering what it's costing us, no. It's not our job to fix what's wrong with the world, and it looks that in this case we likely made it worse instead of better. Powell saw it coming, so did Shinseki. I wish Powell had made president instead of Bush, someone who had some idea what getting into a war was like, and someone more like Ike, honorable and willing to admit mistakes. If you really think we are getting out if Iraq, I have a bridge ot sell you-- looks to me that the Republicans just need to undermine Obama's tendency to promise a pullout, as the timing is just a little too perfect, just before the debates. I also think that if Obama does get in and yank the plug on things, it looks like instability time to me-- we'll either be back in almost immedately as things degrade, or will watch things turn so nasty that the nostalgia for "good ol' boy" Saddam will abound in spades, both over there and over here. But call me a skeptic.
WWII was a little different, we knew Japan was responsible, when all the evidence shows that Saddam was not connected to 9/11, despite all the Republican breast-beating apologetics. As I said, I think Afghanistan was justified, but not Iraq, and justified or not one still has to ask it if was advisable, again, I think Afghanistan probably was but is pretty clear to me Iraq was not.
Too bad that's not how it really works, we are allowed to vote in our representatives and can give or take majority with our votes. It's unfortunate for the either side when the opposition has both the presidency and the congress tied up because they don't feel they are represented but, it isn't the fault of the government, it's how our distrustful forefathers designed the system that allows it to be so. So, when the opposition's 'extreme' views are put into law then the other side stomps and stamps and huffs and puffs and then they try to fix the laws they don't like the next time they have majority in congress and the presidency.
And you were talking about efficiency? Rather than waiting for consensus, we have one side passing a bunch of laws their way, having a couple of years to mess things up with them, the the other side taking it all back and undoing much of all that and starting the process in another direction. That is exactly why I prefer gridlock, it gums up that process. It's working right now if you hadn't noticed, Bush hasn't had the opportunity to do quite as much in his second term.
You're stance has been that we should just give up or severely limit our ability to covertly detect and prevent terrorist attacks ba
Transparency is fine when you're talking about operating procedures in departments like the GAO, The Fed or FEMA. I would say transparency of operating procedures even for the CIA or FBI may be fine as well. However, transparency between operating procedures and national security programs are two vastly different concepts.
Certainly there are things, like the nuclear launch codes, and locations of nuclear weapons that should be kept secret. Battlefield communications and tactical planning. But surveillance is an area that needs extraordinary care and oversight, especially when done on US soil, and when the technology now affords us the ability to theoretically at least, screen all the telephone calls in the country for keywords and phrases, and to match up every person who's been called by who. Suppose someone being watched who's masterminding a terrorist cell, years ago happened to misdial and get your phone number? Or any of the people that you routinely call? And you end up on a suspect list. I really don't see the necessity of such things, and we musn't forget the associated cost-- "secrecy" is a tradeoff, it trades off against trust. For every additional secret you have, some amount of trust is lost-- in essence, a secret says either "we don't trust you with this information," or "we've got something to hide." It seems to me that "national security" has become a large rock that the cockroaches have all crawled under. I think secrecy must be something used very sparingly, not with the kind of broad brush the Bush administration seems to like to apply. And surveillance within the US is another-- again, it says, "we're watching you, because we don't trust you." Such suspicions foster similar suspicion in response-- "if you say you can't trust me, why should I trust you?"
Again, I think this comes down to a matter of fundamental trust or distrust of the institutions of government. While I agree that left unchecked it would be quite simple for government to become overtly corrupt, I don't believe that we are constantly on the brink of that being the case especially considering the number of built in checks that already exist within the government.
The problem is, we just don't know. And we're knowing less and less over time.
While I also agree there should be oversight for national security projects, and there is just not the open public type you would advocate, many or most these projects would do nobody any good if the general public and then our enemies knew about them.
So instead, enemys just suspect we have capabilities and programs that maybe we don't even have. Some may think that acts as a deterrent-- Perhaps Osama Bin Laden instructs everyone to talk in light whispers all the time because he fears the CIA has satellites that can eavesdrop on conversations from orbit, and it's made him extremely paranoid. Great, BUT-- it comes at a cost, several actually. At the cost of enemies getting more paranoid than necessary and deciding to strike when they might have chosen diplomacy instead if they knew the capabilities we actually were applying rather than imagining the capabilities we might have. At the cost of confidence of a populace in a government that seems hell-bent on keeping things secret, and as scandals appear we realize that many of those secrets have nothing to do with national security but are corruptions of the system that are going on unbeknownst to the populace. If AT&T has been illegally turning over call records to the NSA, just what else has who been doing under the rubrick of "national security," and who does it benefit? Secrecy is a really great way to undermine the trust of a government by its populace, IMHO...
Your example of an open source approach to government is simply astounding, even if you have an algorithm you believe is impossible to break why in the world would you tip your hand?
Why not? Better to show yourself unquestionably to be in a position of strength if that's where
And how would you propose setting up this new bureaucracy to monitor the monitors? Would that be a civilian group with super secret clearance or just our good old trustworthy politicians? But, then who would watch the watchers? Really, lets bog down the government even further so that federal law enforcement can be even less efficient than it already is, great idea.
It's quite simple. It's called transparency. Secrecy in goverment is counterproductive and unnecessary in my view, and is something that should belong only to the people for basic things like keeping your credit card number and certain abusable personal information secret. Government is a public institution, and must remain unerringly so. The real problem with secrecy, is when you get in the habit of hiding things, you develop a reputation for hiding things and not being straight with people. You lose credibility and trust, something that a government seriously needs to sustain the support of the people. And people who would be on your side are ignorant of what you are doing and cannot help. An abuse or scandal comes to light, and it is seen as "just the tip of the iceberg." "What else have you been hiding?" You have to remember that what the government does must set a good example to the populace, else they really have no right to complain (at least no moral right) if the people then imitate them when they find the opportunity to abuse or scandalize in their own self interest. The government isn't seen as doing the proper job, or the job at all because it's all "secret." "Trust us" is not a good mantra for a government, and especially one that has themselves argued the idea of "trust but verify" with other governments. Just why should we trust the US government any more than we trust any other? I think the answer to that should be transparency, but unfortunately it's not right now.
Very few secrets stay secret forever. I think that when a government sees secrecy as a valuable tool, what is really the case is they have just gotten lazy, not bothered to explore other ideas-- but in America there really is no shortage of ideas, and I think some good ones could be found that would be far better than "stealth." Just like the better encryption algorithm is one that even if a potential invader knows the algorithm it is robust enough to withstand attack, I think there can be found methods that work even if the opponent knows what they are. I'm for an open source approach to government and law enforcement I guess you could say. In a free country, it is important to find and use such methods, and not rely so heavily on stealth and high-tech weaponry. I think the government's undoing will be its deference to secrecy, and it looks to me we've been seeing that played out in glorious Technicolor and Panavision in the Bush administration.
Another important factor is consensus. It might be worthwhile to recall that the founders of this country themselves did not trust the government, even the one they were constructing-- that is why they came up with the "separation of powers." For me, I prefer it when one party is in the White House and the other in Congress- in a government I want gridlock. When either party gets all their way they mess things up in spades, and I'd rather see things hamstrung. The government was designed to be inefficient, because it's not very trustworthy, and consequently efficiency just gets you into trouble that much faster if that's where you are headed. As Thoreau said, "The government that governs best, governs least."
Oh, I'm not crazy about anybody reading anyone else's emails, read my original comment. My point was, to see the administration get in a huff about it when it happens to one of their own, after they went to great lengths to hide and then justify that very sort of capability for themselves, is the height of hypocrisy and hubris.
If we do in fact need the ability of surveillance dragnets in fishing for terror cells, we no less need the ability of surveillance dragnets in fishing for government abuse. Given the track record, it seems to me we're far more vulnerable to the latter. When the microscope finally does get pointed in the other direction, it is such a rare occurrence that my first thought is that at least someone is doing it, because I see no evidence it's being done by the agencies that one would think are supposed to. The problem is, there's a conflict of interest-- the heads of these agencies are appointed by the very people that we the people most need insight into. So when our privacy is violated by overzealous overprotective agencies, it's business as usual, but when their privacy is violated, it's a horrible crime.
Even in cases that are deemed to be of imminent need to gain access for wire tapping a field warrant must be submitted and reviewed by a judge to ensure the process followed standards set in place for proceeding with such action.
What standards? FISA? If they were all just "doin' their jobs," why was it necessary to amend it and provide immunity for the telcoms? An amendment I might add, considered unconstitutional by many, something that hasn't yet been determined by the courts. You're just telling me here what's supposed to happen. That would be great, but it falls somewhat short of reality:
Domestic spying widespread
F.B.I. Data Mining Reached Beyond Initial Targets
Wiretap Whistle-Blower's Account
NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data
Yes, there is an approval procedure, too bad the Bush administration saw fit to bypass it (something they only admitted to doing after being caught at it, BTW). Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald states it thus:
Congress passed a law in 1978 making it a criminal offense to eavesdrop on Americans without judicial oversight. Nobody of any significance ever claimed that that law was unconstitutional. The Administration not only never claimed it was unconstitutional, but Bush expressly asked for changes to the law in the aftermath of 9/11, thereafter praised the law, and misled Congress and the American people into believing that they were complying with the law. In reality, the Administration was secretly breaking the law, and then pleaded with The New York Times not to reveal this. Once caught, the Administration claimed it has the right to break the law and will continue to do so.
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(back to your regularly scheduled response:)
Guantanamo is no different than any other prison run by the military in a time of war. As a matter of fact, prisoners held in American military prisons are treated better than those held by any other country in the world. The majority of the people there were actually captured on the battlefield actively trying to kill our soldiers. Several who have been released were subsequently killed or recaptured on the battlefields of Iraq or Afghanistan.
Oh, I'm sure the camp is very nice. Of course, the "war" we are referring to here, is a never ending war on a methodology, rather than one on a nation that could actually come to an "end" at some point. So presumably, these guys are going to be there until they die. And since even some who are tried, don't get released because of a "security threat," one ponders the actual relevance of trials in the process. If some of these detainees were not actually involved in terrorist or violent acts against our soldiers, how would they prove it? Perhaps you would like to cite Hamdan vs Rumsfeld as an example of how the "system works," because subsequently Hamdan and Khadr were released?
And, there's the distinct possibility that some who have been released have been inspired to subsequently join our opposition because of the way they were treated by the US in the process. Find it hard to buy that? Now you know how I feel about your claim that Saddam "might" have buried some WMDs or passed them to Syria. (Why do you think they call it apologetics?)
But I would be willing to accept that Guantanamo is "no different than any other prison run by the military in a time of war." One thing that is different though is the amount of visibility such things have in the modern information age, which in my opinion, is a good thing. It's harder to keep abuses hidden now, th
If you think there is some pattern of abusive behavior then report it to your congressmen and stop lamenting about how horrible it is that terrorist might have their e-mail or phone conversations listened to.
The thing is, we have no way anymore of finding out if the behavior is abusive or if it is only terrorists that are monitored. Except that is, for hackers and whistle blowers who give these invisible processes a taste of their own medicine. Some people are content just to "trust the government," but sorry, I'm not one of those.
While you're being so concerned about the encroachment of terrorists, some of the rest of us are also concerned about the encroachment of a government that is becoming more and more Orwellian, sort of like the old Soviet Union that we used to like to differentiate ourselves from. If warrantless wiretapping was an isolated incident, perhaps it would be less concerning, but when you look at the behavior in Guantanamo, Abu Grabe, defining "enemy combatant" out of the blue, and the total incompetence regarding WMD, it's obvious that the government has embarked on a clumsy and fear-induced (terror-induced) pattern of throwing our American principles right out the window.
When our government summarily ignores what the Constitution has to say about "unreasonable search and seizure," I take it seriously-- that is one of the protections we are supposed to be fighting the terrorists to keep, and specifically what out government is supposed to be defending. When we, out of fear (terror), feel the need to excuse unmonitored warrantless surveillance by our government, it's pretty clear that the "terrorists" have won some of the ground they were after. Whenever we act out of fear of "terrorism", we are playing into their hands-- that is the goal of terrorism, after all, to instill fear.
the FBI and SEC all will act on and investigate the same types of cases for the general public.
That is, of course, unless the offender has a name like AT&T. Then, they pass a law making their crime retroactively legal.
Well, at least we know that someone is better at shutting down websites than Scientologists are.
Well, well. So VP candidates don't like being spied on any more than the general populace does. To bad *we* don't have the Secret Service to defend our privacy rights.
Ignore the monitor AND the HMD glasses, I want it with a PROJECTOR. I can get it now with two projectors & polarizing filters, but it also requires a screen that doesn't scramble the polarization. Shuttered glasses with a single projector could allow a room full of people to view at the same time and is a little more flexible regarding the screen I would think. And with battery powered IR synced shuttered glasses, there's no wires.
But government likes it, because anecdotes make better PR for them than facts.