In other words, these are data mining centers, designed to organize and classify the information obtained via unconstitutional surveillance and data sharing programs, in addition to the myriad of legal sources. There, FBI personnel will work hard to ensure that nobody who orders pizza at 11:43PM, while purchasing a copy of "Diary of Anne Frank" online, gets away with the undoubtedly terrorist activities they might be planning (they may not even know it themselves, but that's just because the data mining is so good).
Here's a curious anecdote, that I feel is appropriate to the joke.
I was looking for some clinical experience between the first and second years of med school, so I shadowed a surgeon, who specialized in breast tumors, and wound up spending lots of time in a "breast clinic" (screening and followup) for about a month and a half. While I probably saw some great breasts, I never felt aroused. Given that I am a very sexually-active heterosexual man, I was amazed at how my mindset was able to adjust itself, and how I was able to strip away my sexuality while I was with my patients. Not that I intended to abuse my position, but I expected that I would have to contend with a distraction, and braced my willpower for the battle. Yet in the end, it turned out that I had no problems being professional... and the only distraction I had to deal with, was a voice in my head, screaming in panic: "shouldn't a resident be doing this?"
I hope you're being sarcastic, because if you're not, you're deeply deluded.
The statements you made seem to be operating on an assumption that people are ENTITLED to automatically receive profits for whatever work they choose to do. Yet I couldn't imagine a judgment that is more ridiculous than that. Why is it that you claim that people are "supposed to make a living offering products and services like online email, apps, mapping, etc?"
"do you actually realize you are just part of a modern mega-Advertising Machine?"
So fucking what? Is it better to be a part of a modern mega-Car-making Machine?.. or a modern mega-Paper-pushing Machine?
At its utmost core, advertising is doing a very important job - connecting people who would like to buy something, with the sellers who are offering something for sale. Like it or not, but advertising, in whatever form, is an integral part of a market economy. The fact that advertising is obtrusive and annoying, is not any more an inherent property of advertising, than killing innocent people is an inherent property of a sword (I was going to say "gun", but realized where I was).
If anything, you should be PRAISING Google for furthering the idea that advertising can be profitable WITHOUT being intrusive, and disruptive. As opposed to spamming you with images or sounds hawking products you're not interested in, Google politely shows you products that their software thinks you might be interested in (to the best of their ability to determine this).
Only communist-pipe-dream hippie would think something wrong of such an approach, or would think it shameful to work at such a company. Ultimately, everything is relative, and I'd rather have Google than many of its competitors.
This would be useful for determining who's on the end of the cable line, using bittorrent. The FBI can then go ahead and break their doors in, during an early-morning no-knock raid.
They can then go ahead and develop technology to determine who's watching the commercials and who isn't... and then apply a flat per-minute fee for not watching advertisements.
Alternatively, they can charge a per-viewer fee for pay-per-view events. After all, if you crap 20 people around your HDTV to watch a $40 boxing event, isn't it logical that you should pay extra for every extra person who's watching it?
Heck, there's all kinds of useful things a company could do with this information.
OO is free and runs on Linux. MSO is not free and doesn't. My choice of OS has thus limited my choice of Office applications. What is there not to understand?
I am interested in the Standard Deviation, SEM, and a one- or two-tailed T-test. As a molecular immunologist, that's about all I need for 99% of my data analysis.. and I usually use a spreadsheet for it. Perhaps in other fields, more advanced applications are required, and perhaps for analyzing large sets of data from high-throughput screens I would need something far more sophisticated, but for now what I got suffices.
But if you can suggest a good data analysis application that runs on Linux, I will listen, and will surely try it.
Superior is a term that I find to be overly broad. For ME personally, Ubuntu Linux is the OS I prefer to Microsoft Windows. I find it more responsive, the UI more intuitive, and the user control far more prolific, which allowed me to customize it to an extent I didn't find possible with Windows, even as a relatively expert user. Furthermore, I find that the system UI and various applications allow me to be more productive. I use OpenOffice, because that's the best developed Office suite that I can use on the OS of my choosing. But even on Windows, I have encountered circumstances where I preferred OpenOffice to MSOffice.
You may have a different opinion, and that's OK, because that's exactly the kind of CHOICE that the open source community praises - the CHOICE to use some Open Source, all Open Source, or none, at will... a choice that a complete monopoly of one company would not allow.
Sure, if you installed a pirated copy of Office 2007, on a pirated copy of Windows, and you're happy with the functionality of both, you won't see any advantage. But for those who do not want to go down that road, the options are to purchase a $100 copy of Windows and fork over another $150-300 for the Office suite (depending on pricing).
But some of us prefer Linux to Windows or MacOS, and many others have problems with Office 07. For us, this is big and exciting news.
I understand that as long as it works for you, you don't give a damn about anyone else, but if that's the case, please choose not to care a little further, and refrain from posting.
I am happy that after something like 5 years of suffering, the scientists finally get what they really need - definable range for error bars. Cause really, having to use Gnumeric for analyzing data, because OO 2.X was missing such a vital function was pretty sad.
Kudos to the development team for implementing these changes, and allowing me to further propagate open source software within the academic community.
I find fault with your logic, because you're assuming that one's beliefs and principles override one's requirement to work in order to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their families.
The idea of a bat-like creature is probably a concern because fixed wing designs will attract more attention.
Basically, they want something that'll look like a bird, fly like a bird, and would be able to engage in surveillance without anyone noticing. The next logical step would be to make a pigeon-like creature, that would be unnoticeable in an urban environment. A few thousand of those in a large city could make enforcing "free speech zones" much easier.
I disagree with your judgment of "ethical boundaries". You must be buying too much either into the media coverage of science, or the religious propaganda against it. Let me avail you of your fears. As a biomedical scientist, I can tell you that now, the ethical restrictions that the scientific community has imposed upon itself, are far stricter than ever before in history. If you don't realize, perhaps you should consider that B.F. Skinner experimented on his daughter.
In the end, we have to either trust the entire scientific community, which possesses an understanding of the research, to impose ethical boundaries upon its own members, or continue letting the politicians, catering to the fears of the population, spurred by scaremongering of the media and the religious groups, continue contradicting science, both ethically, and directly.
You ask where Americans learn such a distorted premise of privacy?
Let me make it easy for you: "24". Certainly, it's not the only place, but it's a good example. There, we learn that regardless of what we're told, everything is being watched and monitored, whether for our safety, or our oppression. But the cause does not matter. What matters is that we're repeatedly hammered with the concept that for better or worse, there is nothing we can do to prevent our government from abusing its power. In the media, we are repeatedly treated to scenes of torture and humiliation of "innocent till proven guilty" people, at the hands of law enforcement. As a whole, these images promote habituation to ongoing abuses of our civil rights... not through fear or ignorance... but rather apathy.
Of course, media does not bear the sole blame, nor actually does it bear the bulk of it. You know who bears the blame? US!
We are the ones who are the chief architects of our own oppression and the nearly inevitable even greater oppression of our children. Why you ask? Because we are too busy, or don't care enough, to educate our children, both in terms of general education to develop their innate intelligence, and specifically historical knowledge that is absolutely required for them to even realize when their rights are being violated. Our current generation has grown complacent, arrogant, and stupid... and their parents largely don't seem to care. Sadly, the small, isolated, pockets of parents that actually do their job, to push their offspring to develop, matter little, as they drown in the sea of materialistic arrogance.
For the love of whatever deity, please mod parent "Insightful", for it appears that American society has deteriorated a great deal in the last 50 years, when it comes to public perception of science and technology. You know, science used to be a prestigious profession, and used to be respected. Now, the only persistent emotions I see towards science and technology is spite. Our youth has become fat and lazy... complacent and arrogant. We are allowing subsequent generations to grow dumber than the next!
Didn't Mythbusters beat a bunch of fingerprint readers a couple of seasons ago? I seem to recall them using printed pictures of fingerprints with great success.
It's no more a job of the ISP to prevent piracy, than it is the job of highway builders/maintainers to make sure that their road isn't used to ship stolen goods.
P.S. If I get modded down for using the word "stolen" as a part of my analogy, I will join the other side.
A. Let's go ahead and tag it "sometimesyouwanttogowhereeverybodyknowsyourname"
B. Google certainly can show me my name in the ad. Certainly it knows which gmail account I use, and the name on that. It also knows what billing name I used for my Google Checkout purchases. Similar ways of identifying users apply to the other companies. What worries me, is seeing my name on an ad served by somebody I did NOT share my name with.
This is merely par for the course... and the observations made in the TFA are not new either. I encounter them every day on Slashdot!
HIV not causing AIDS conspiracy, Fluoride in the water conspiracy, Cancer being cured but evil corporations in league with all scientists not releasing the cure... I have to endure this every single day.
I think the more interesting subject to explore, is the psychology of why people are so eager to believe the improbable, and far more likely to accept an outrageous exaggeration, a halftruth, or an outright lie, merely to spite the establishment. As a scientist, that's a subject that interests me the most, because I would like to locate the part of the brain that will believe that the herbs in "Airborne" will miraculously prevent you from getting a disease, but will refuse to accept scientific principles and facts that have held firm under scrutiny for decades.
Perhaps I am a cynic, but it seems to me that this is merely to be expected.
Stazi couldn't keep constant surveillance over all of the citizens of East Germany because the technology did not exist to obtain, process, store, and organize this data. Yet they tried, and got fairly close to being able to track anyone who even remotely questioned the regime.
Now we're getting close to the point where total surveillance of the citizenry is actually feasible. To expect that bureaucracy will go ahead with such a project is awfully optimistic. The goal of any political system is the preservation of status quo, and total surveillance is a very important step to ensure that no perturbations to the system can result from any member of the population that chooses to think for themselves.
Whether or not we're willing to tolerate this, is the question, because there is no doubt in my mind that it will happen.
Perhaps we should start with re-examining the concept of privacy, and decide precisely the level of privacy we're comfortable with.
Well, we have appraisers (my gf is one) that can assign value to personal property based on past sales, market conditions, etc... etc... I really don't see why that cannot be done with ideas. And just like tangible properties, this value may change.
For instance, to claim a copyright over an essay you write on slashdot, may cost you $0.01, based on how much ad-based revenue can be expected from reading a web-page containing it. If you then proceed to publish this essay in a personal blog, you'd need to pay $0.10 to claim copyright. If it gets published in NY Times, you'd need to pay $100/year to keep it. (all the prices, of course, are purely arbitrary)
Guidelines can be made that would allow people who generate content, to pay for blanket copyright of similar kinds of content... while especially valuable objects would need to be individually appraised. This would work the same way that property insurance works - your insurance will cover anything in your house up to a certain value... but any objects that are over that, have to be declared individually.
Maybe if Disney had to pay a few million $ per year to maintain copyright of Mickey... and BMG had to lay out a hundred thousand for every album they'd like to keep out of the public domain, we'd have a much more balanced system.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, these are data mining centers, designed to organize and classify the information obtained via unconstitutional surveillance and data sharing programs, in addition to the myriad of legal sources. There, FBI personnel will work hard to ensure that nobody who orders pizza at 11:43PM, while purchasing a copy of "Diary of Anne Frank" online, gets away with the undoubtedly terrorist activities they might be planning (they may not even know it themselves, but that's just because the data mining is so good).
Here's a curious anecdote, that I feel is appropriate to the joke.
I was looking for some clinical experience between the first and second years of med school, so I shadowed a surgeon, who specialized in breast tumors, and wound up spending lots of time in a "breast clinic" (screening and followup) for about a month and a half. While I probably saw some great breasts, I never felt aroused. Given that I am a very sexually-active heterosexual man, I was amazed at how my mindset was able to adjust itself, and how I was able to strip away my sexuality while I was with my patients. Not that I intended to abuse my position, but I expected that I would have to contend with a distraction, and braced my willpower for the battle. Yet in the end, it turned out that I had no problems being professional... and the only distraction I had to deal with, was a voice in my head, screaming in panic: "shouldn't a resident be doing this?"
I hope you're being sarcastic, because if you're not, you're deeply deluded.
The statements you made seem to be operating on an assumption that people are ENTITLED to automatically receive profits for whatever work they choose to do. Yet I couldn't imagine a judgment that is more ridiculous than that. Why is it that you claim that people are "supposed to make a living offering products and services like online email, apps, mapping, etc?"
"do you actually realize you are just part of a modern mega-Advertising Machine?"
So fucking what? Is it better to be a part of a modern mega-Car-making Machine?.. or a modern mega-Paper-pushing Machine?
At its utmost core, advertising is doing a very important job - connecting people who would like to buy something, with the sellers who are offering something for sale. Like it or not, but advertising, in whatever form, is an integral part of a market economy. The fact that advertising is obtrusive and annoying, is not any more an inherent property of advertising, than killing innocent people is an inherent property of a sword (I was going to say "gun", but realized where I was).
If anything, you should be PRAISING Google for furthering the idea that advertising can be profitable WITHOUT being intrusive, and disruptive. As opposed to spamming you with images or sounds hawking products you're not interested in, Google politely shows you products that their software thinks you might be interested in (to the best of their ability to determine this).
Only communist-pipe-dream hippie would think something wrong of such an approach, or would think it shameful to work at such a company. Ultimately, everything is relative, and I'd rather have Google than many of its competitors.
This would be useful for determining who's on the end of the cable line, using bittorrent. The FBI can then go ahead and break their doors in, during an early-morning no-knock raid.
They can then go ahead and develop technology to determine who's watching the commercials and who isn't... and then apply a flat per-minute fee for not watching advertisements.
Alternatively, they can charge a per-viewer fee for pay-per-view events. After all, if you crap 20 people around your HDTV to watch a $40 boxing event, isn't it logical that you should pay extra for every extra person who's watching it?
Heck, there's all kinds of useful things a company could do with this information.
I think after this exchange, the singular appropriate response is:
fuck off.
"So, what is the advantage of OO.o - not linux?"
OO is free and runs on Linux. MSO is not free and doesn't. My choice of OS has thus limited my choice of Office applications. What is there not to understand?
Or are you simply trolling?
I am interested in the Standard Deviation, SEM, and a one- or two-tailed T-test. As a molecular immunologist, that's about all I need for 99% of my data analysis.. and I usually use a spreadsheet for it. Perhaps in other fields, more advanced applications are required, and perhaps for analyzing large sets of data from high-throughput screens I would need something far more sophisticated, but for now what I got suffices.
But if you can suggest a good data analysis application that runs on Linux, I will listen, and will surely try it.
Superior is a term that I find to be overly broad. For ME personally, Ubuntu Linux is the OS I prefer to Microsoft Windows. I find it more responsive, the UI more intuitive, and the user control far more prolific, which allowed me to customize it to an extent I didn't find possible with Windows, even as a relatively expert user. Furthermore, I find that the system UI and various applications allow me to be more productive. I use OpenOffice, because that's the best developed Office suite that I can use on the OS of my choosing. But even on Windows, I have encountered circumstances where I preferred OpenOffice to MSOffice.
You may have a different opinion, and that's OK, because that's exactly the kind of CHOICE that the open source community praises - the CHOICE to use some Open Source, all Open Source, or none, at will... a choice that a complete monopoly of one company would not allow.
Sure, if you installed a pirated copy of Office 2007, on a pirated copy of Windows, and you're happy with the functionality of both, you won't see any advantage. But for those who do not want to go down that road, the options are to purchase a $100 copy of Windows and fork over another $150-300 for the Office suite (depending on pricing).
But some of us prefer Linux to Windows or MacOS, and many others have problems with Office 07. For us, this is big and exciting news.
I understand that as long as it works for you, you don't give a damn about anyone else, but if that's the case, please choose not to care a little further, and refrain from posting.
I am happy that after something like 5 years of suffering, the scientists finally get what they really need - definable range for error bars. Cause really, having to use Gnumeric for analyzing data, because OO 2.X was missing such a vital function was pretty sad.
Kudos to the development team for implementing these changes, and allowing me to further propagate open source software within the academic community.
So is this evolution, or intelligent design?
I find fault with your logic, because you're assuming that one's beliefs and principles override one's requirement to work in order to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their families.
The idea of a bat-like creature is probably a concern because fixed wing designs will attract more attention.
Basically, they want something that'll look like a bird, fly like a bird, and would be able to engage in surveillance without anyone noticing. The next logical step would be to make a pigeon-like creature, that would be unnoticeable in an urban environment. A few thousand of those in a large city could make enforcing "free speech zones" much easier.
I disagree with your judgment of "ethical boundaries". You must be buying too much either into the media coverage of science, or the religious propaganda against it. Let me avail you of your fears. As a biomedical scientist, I can tell you that now, the ethical restrictions that the scientific community has imposed upon itself, are far stricter than ever before in history. If you don't realize, perhaps you should consider that B.F. Skinner experimented on his daughter.
In the end, we have to either trust the entire scientific community, which possesses an understanding of the research, to impose ethical boundaries upon its own members, or continue letting the politicians, catering to the fears of the population, spurred by scaremongering of the media and the religious groups, continue contradicting science, both ethically, and directly.
You ask where Americans learn such a distorted premise of privacy?
Let me make it easy for you: "24". Certainly, it's not the only place, but it's a good example. There, we learn that regardless of what we're told, everything is being watched and monitored, whether for our safety, or our oppression. But the cause does not matter. What matters is that we're repeatedly hammered with the concept that for better or worse, there is nothing we can do to prevent our government from abusing its power. In the media, we are repeatedly treated to scenes of torture and humiliation of "innocent till proven guilty" people, at the hands of law enforcement. As a whole, these images promote habituation to ongoing abuses of our civil rights... not through fear or ignorance... but rather apathy.
Of course, media does not bear the sole blame, nor actually does it bear the bulk of it. You know who bears the blame? US!
We are the ones who are the chief architects of our own oppression and the nearly inevitable even greater oppression of our children. Why you ask? Because we are too busy, or don't care enough, to educate our children, both in terms of general education to develop their innate intelligence, and specifically historical knowledge that is absolutely required for them to even realize when their rights are being violated. Our current generation has grown complacent, arrogant, and stupid... and their parents largely don't seem to care. Sadly, the small, isolated, pockets of parents that actually do their job, to push their offspring to develop, matter little, as they drown in the sea of materialistic arrogance.
For the love of whatever deity, please mod parent "Insightful", for it appears that American society has deteriorated a great deal in the last 50 years, when it comes to public perception of science and technology. You know, science used to be a prestigious profession, and used to be respected. Now, the only persistent emotions I see towards science and technology is spite. Our youth has become fat and lazy... complacent and arrogant. We are allowing subsequent generations to grow dumber than the next!
Didn't Mythbusters beat a bunch of fingerprint readers a couple of seasons ago? I seem to recall them using printed pictures of fingerprints with great success.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXyFmieZjiE
It's no more a job of the ISP to prevent piracy, than it is the job of highway builders/maintainers to make sure that their road isn't used to ship stolen goods.
P.S. If I get modded down for using the word "stolen" as a part of my analogy, I will join the other side.
So I guess the solution to Sony's dilemma is to remove the movie-playing function from the PS3, and then offer it as a $100-$200 option.
A. Let's go ahead and tag it "sometimesyouwanttogowhereeverybodyknowsyourname"
B. Google certainly can show me my name in the ad. Certainly it knows which gmail account I use, and the name on that. It also knows what billing name I used for my Google Checkout purchases. Similar ways of identifying users apply to the other companies. What worries me, is seeing my name on an ad served by somebody I did NOT share my name with.
This is merely par for the course... and the observations made in the TFA are not new either. I encounter them every day on Slashdot!
HIV not causing AIDS conspiracy, Fluoride in the water conspiracy, Cancer being cured but evil corporations in league with all scientists not releasing the cure... I have to endure this every single day.
I think the more interesting subject to explore, is the psychology of why people are so eager to believe the improbable, and far more likely to accept an outrageous exaggeration, a halftruth, or an outright lie, merely to spite the establishment. As a scientist, that's a subject that interests me the most, because I would like to locate the part of the brain that will believe that the herbs in "Airborne" will miraculously prevent you from getting a disease, but will refuse to accept scientific principles and facts that have held firm under scrutiny for decades.
Perhaps I am a cynic, but it seems to me that this is merely to be expected.
Stazi couldn't keep constant surveillance over all of the citizens of East Germany because the technology did not exist to obtain, process, store, and organize this data. Yet they tried, and got fairly close to being able to track anyone who even remotely questioned the regime.
Now we're getting close to the point where total surveillance of the citizenry is actually feasible. To expect that bureaucracy will go ahead with such a project is awfully optimistic. The goal of any political system is the preservation of status quo, and total surveillance is a very important step to ensure that no perturbations to the system can result from any member of the population that chooses to think for themselves.
Whether or not we're willing to tolerate this, is the question, because there is no doubt in my mind that it will happen.
Perhaps we should start with re-examining the concept of privacy, and decide precisely the level of privacy we're comfortable with.
Well, we have appraisers (my gf is one) that can assign value to personal property based on past sales, market conditions, etc... etc... I really don't see why that cannot be done with ideas. And just like tangible properties, this value may change.
For instance, to claim a copyright over an essay you write on slashdot, may cost you $0.01, based on how much ad-based revenue can be expected from reading a web-page containing it. If you then proceed to publish this essay in a personal blog, you'd need to pay $0.10 to claim copyright. If it gets published in NY Times, you'd need to pay $100/year to keep it. (all the prices, of course, are purely arbitrary)
Guidelines can be made that would allow people who generate content, to pay for blanket copyright of similar kinds of content... while especially valuable objects would need to be individually appraised. This would work the same way that property insurance works - your insurance will cover anything in your house up to a certain value... but any objects that are over that, have to be declared individually.
Maybe if Disney had to pay a few million $ per year to maintain copyright of Mickey... and BMG had to lay out a hundred thousand for every album they'd like to keep out of the public domain, we'd have a much more balanced system.
Would that mean that unless my business is profitable, I don't have to pay property taxes on the warehouse, factory, or store?
Does that also mean that if I own an unoccupied residence I don't have to pay property taxes on that?