Has it occurred to the author that people don't want a central government to take the place of their parents? Parents are parents and government is government. Does government get its authority from the consent of the governed or not?
..to put the genie back in the bottle. Stross is complaining about the Titanic's navigation system after it hit the iceberg. If the politurds from around the world had not trashed their own currency systems, bitcoin would have never taken root. If the fiat currency systems were sound and could garner the confidence of citizens, the value of BTC against them would not be rising. In a sense, Volker, Greenspan, Bernanke and their ilk are the force behind the creation of bitcoin. If BTC is taking us to hell on a rail, they are the ones who laid the track.
..you too can own a Tesla. The reality is that most taxpayers who subsidized Tesla will never be able to afford one (without a second mortgage). This is just a company who succeeded in getting crony capital so that, if it failed, it could socialize its losses on to the taxpayer.
Government putting up money for basic research is one thing. Government 'investing' in business is just capitalism, something we need to eradicate...badly.
Oracle Corp gives the users a choice. I think most people in the org use Thunderbird basically because it's the best client available to them.
I'm not sure why, but Oracle actually hacked up an Outlook plugin to their non-Exchange servers, but it's so buggy that people hate it (I know I did). The Oracle internal web-mail looks like a summer intern project gone bad. Thunderbird wins by default.
1. Religion deals with matters that science cannot prove or disprove. Thus being a scientist and being religious are not in conflict with one another.
I hate to be blunt, but this is plainly untrue. If this were true, theh why is it that religious people get all excited every time a TV special claims to have found the "real" Noah's Ark? Or why does their heart rise in their chest when some National Geographic special says that the Shroud of Turin really does date back to the first century CE? If researchers were to find bones in an ossuary that had DNA that could be proven to match the DNA of Jesus of Nazareth, would religious people say "Oh, we don't care about that. Our faith is not in the domain of science." Not a chance.
All of this "separate by equal magisteria" is wishful thinking advocated by the late Stephen Jay Gould (may God rest his soul). It works about as well as "separate but equal" did in the Old South.
Mandak, With all due respect, you're behind the times, my man. I work for a company who's whole business is software-as-a-service and we host so many terra-bytes of data we've lost count. You might be thinking that our customer list is a bunch of small fish, but you'd be wrong. Here's a partial customer list: Merril Lynch, Sun Trust Bank, Cisco Systems, ADP (the company that handles most everyone's paycheck), and Dun and Bradstreet. We're hosting some of their most sensitive data and they seem to like it just fine.
Did we have to prove ourselves and our security mechanisms to them? Absolutely, but once we we convinced them, they were in like flint. And word began to spread.
Sherri, You make a good general point, but I think it is a bit misdirected in the overall conversation. I don't need tenuous scientific conclusions and the irrefutable conclusions of a majority of scientists to tell me that it's not a good idea to pollute the atmosphere or dump billions of tons of toxic waste into the ocean. It's almost as if there is religious zeal behind the "man is the main cause of global warming" position. The earth has gone through many global warmings and coolings over its billions of years in existence, the majority happened long before industrialization. Why does the "man is the cause" side insist on wasting their time arguing this, when the problem could be handled on grounds that most everyone can agree on: pumping crap into the air and water isn't a good long-term strategy for anyone.
On another point, Exxon employees are as welcome as anyone to discuss the issue. Do you really want/. to be an echo chamber? Fight bad ideas with good ideas not with censorship.
...the American Enterprise Institute group, which apparently has numerous ties to the Bush administration..
Notice the use of the word 'apparent'. Saying group A has "apparent ties" to group B is just a way of smearing group A by association without taking any responsibility if those "apparent ties" turn out not to be "actual ties". Guilt by "apparent" association. Orginal Poster you can do better than that.
I this is actually a great argument for the banks to choose option 1) Deny claims for phishing losses.
As a customer, this would assure me that they weren't upping my fees to pay for another person's foolishness.
For the bank, in the long run, they'll end up with smarter, more profitable customers instead the customers who would fall for scams and then cut into the banks profits by suing it.
I'm sorry, I just see trying to force banks to pay for phishing as an extension of the "never my fault" culture that has evolved over the last few generations. Remember all the lawsuits filed against Audi for "sudden acceleration syndrome"? There was an extensive investigation done but not before Audi had paid out millions. The conclusion of the study: people were stepping on the accelerator instead of the brake.
Such a good point. Political correctness has become the luminerfous ether in which we live. The truth is that Google and the Library Association want you to read the "banned" books that _they_ think are just dandy now. They don't need to burn the real the "banned" books, they simply pretend that they don't exist.
The poster says that competition between snakes and our ancestors "triggered the development of improved vision and large brains in primates". I think we need to be careful with the terms here. It didn't really trigger anything, it's just that, according to the theory, improved vision and large brains increased the survival probability of those portions of the species that had these traits and thus the traits were passed on.
Blue Security's user database has _not_ been cracked. I have several email addresses protected by Blue Security and this @ss4at's message has only gotten to 2 of them. What this means is that these addresses were already on his spam list and he has simply used Blue Security's encrypted database which contains both valid and honeypot addresses to make an inference.
Again, the database has not been cracked and the technique the spammer is using doesn't matter. If your email was on his list, it's still on his list and he's not going to remove it unless forced to do so. Those in the Blue Community hope to be able to persuade them it is in their best interest to do so. And there have been some notable successes.
Lum, I don't mean any offense by this, but you're advocating defeatism. The alcoholic will never stop drinking; what's the use? The abuser will never stop abusing; why try? Taking a stand against the Chinese is useless... One man pissing into the wind may not mean much, but one billion men pissing on the Chinese gov't can yellow up the Yalu in a hurry.
One person: Ghandi. One person: Martin Luther King. One person: Bonhoeffer. Sometimes it just starts with one person with the courage to be.
Why, when the Chinese government ask for information to enforce a law, is it wrong but when the American, or other Weston governments ask for information it isn't?
The fact that this post was modded up and that/. is supposed to be a place where smart people discuss things really worries me.
You make no distinction between a just law and an unjust law? Did you know that there was such a distinction? Example: Law against murder - just law. Law against using the "whites only" restroom - unjust law.
Human beings (and by extension companies run by human beings) have a human duty to resist unjust laws.
As much as I love free speech, we must remember that the US Constitution, and all that is wonderful about it, does not exist in China.
Forget the damn US Constitution. What about the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Isn't China a signatory to that document? And if so, why aren't all companies and peoples obliged to demand that China live up to its commitments?
Right and there is no such thing as a "just" law versus an "unjust" law, right? As long as some tin-horn dictator or other makes a law that makes it right, and we all need to bow before it, is that your position?
Has anyone ever heard of civil disobedience around here? How about the ethical obligation of human beings to resist unjust laws?
On the one hand, the US wants Google to roll over and give them what they want to stop something the US considers "bad", namely child porn. In the same breath, they want those same companies to stand up against foreign governments who are trying to prosecute something they consider "bad".
You are obviously misinformed. The US Gov't did not ask Google to hand do anything to help them stop anything. They asked for anonymous search statistics to help them figure out the scope of the child obscenity problem in the US. Now the fact that Google could thumb their nose at the gov't request and go on with business as usual the next day says it all when it comes to comparing China and the US.
Right. If they don't tell me what the gas chamber knob does when I pull it and I don't ask. They can't possibly hold me liable. I mean what reasonable person would ask about the consequences of the actions someone is ordering them to take?
Maybe we should take a step back and realise our beliefs aren't everyone's elses
Oh, dear God, not the "it may be true for you but not for me" argument. As if the only difference in those who believe that suppression of unpopular speech, murder and child rape are wrong and those who don't is a mere difference in taste. Neither is right and neither is wrong; it's all just a difference of opinion, right? Funny how this argument seems to evaporate when the subject is your speech, your life or your children.
...the one they ran in the 1930s about how of course companies like IBM should do business with the Germans. Engagement, without question, is the only policy with any chance to positively influence an oppressive regime.
I think that people don't see this as a big deal because there has been some distance between Tianenmen Square and the present day.
The Demcracy Project points out something that I think would be considered more thoughtfully had Tianenmen Square happened yesterday:
"If this were 60-years ago, would Google be agreeing to censor out news of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in order to have access to Nazi Germany's Europe?"
But the overall opinion is unified through scholars: your point is bunk;)
"Oh, dear Lord, if scholars are unified against me, I'd better retract my point and run away."
Galileo, circa 1600.
Well, maybe the back-wood fundamentalist would disagree with me, but most mainline scholars actually agree that the death of Jesus was a moral atrocity and that the notion that he planned it that way all along and the attribution of a deeper meaning to his death by his disciples was a post-Easter occurrence.
Now, back to business:
Good God, man, don't you know a joke when you see one?
Let me spell it out: the point is not about theology or Jesus - the point is about people rationalizing and justifying their acquiescence to evil by appealing to some "higher good" as Google is doing now. Why can't they just say "We are an amoral, conscienceless entity known as a "corporation" and we will make any and all decisions based on how much profit or potential profit is in it for us."? I could respect them a lot more if they would just come out and admit the obvious.
In terms of net evil, of the options available, this is the least evil option. To remove themselves entirely from the Chinese market (the Great Firewall is effective and Google would likely not do well working around it) would be no better.
Make no mistake. Leaving the Chinese people high and dry would not be more effective or less evil. Especially when substituting a willing Microsoft or Yahoo. Ignoring a bad situation is evil. Making the best of it isn't.
Roman Military Contractor in First Century Palestine: "The Romans have just asked me to help them nail this Jesus guy to the cross, but everything that I have heard about him is that he a good and decent man guilty of no crime. But, you know, I do have a family to feed and a plans to retire to Tuscany. And, hey, if I don't do it, then that Brutus guy will probably get the job and he won't drive the nails in as gently and humanely as I will. So, I guess I just have to make the best of it!"
the party which brought us the Patriot Act is advocating the it.
1. What tripe. Let's look at the Senate vote on the Patriot Act and what do we see? Every single Democratic Senator present except one (Feingold) voted for the Patriot Act. The vote was 98-1-1. Now who was it that brought us the Patriot Act again?
2. The reason that Democrats want to restrict political spending on the Internet is not because the Republicans have more soft money to spend on Internet ads than the Democrats. (McCain-Feingold places no restrictions on "hard money" contributions). As the vast Right-Wing conspiracy bastion Slate.com has reported, the Democrats raise more soft money than Republicans. The reason that Democrats want to quash paid political blogging is that the Republicans are undisputably much more effective at it than Democrats. Anyone care to look at the hit statistics for The Drudge Report, Powerline or Little Green Footballs vs. The Daily KOS or any other liberal blog?
Slashdot Mirror
Look up: Obi202. It's a small box that allows you to use Google Voice not just as "call forwarder" but as your primary phone number via VOIP.
Has it occurred to the author that people don't want a central government to take the place of their parents? Parents are parents and government is government. Does government get its authority from the consent of the governed or not?
..to put the genie back in the bottle. Stross is complaining about the Titanic's navigation system after it hit the iceberg. If the politurds from around the world had not trashed their own currency systems, bitcoin would have never taken root. If the fiat currency systems were sound and could garner the confidence of citizens, the value of BTC against them would not be rising. In a sense, Volker, Greenspan, Bernanke and their ilk are the force behind the creation of bitcoin. If BTC is taking us to hell on a rail, they are the ones who laid the track.
..you too can own a Tesla. The reality is that most taxpayers who subsidized Tesla will never be able to afford one (without a second mortgage). This is just a company who succeeded in getting crony capital so that, if it failed, it could socialize its losses on to the taxpayer.
Government putting up money for basic research is one thing. Government 'investing' in business is just capitalism, something we need to eradicate...badly.
Oracle Corp gives the users a choice. I think most people in the org use Thunderbird basically because it's the best client available to them.
I'm not sure why, but Oracle actually hacked up an Outlook plugin to their non-Exchange servers, but it's so buggy that people hate it (I know I did). The Oracle internal web-mail looks like a summer intern project gone bad. Thunderbird wins by default.
1. Religion deals with matters that science cannot prove or disprove. Thus being a scientist and being religious are not in conflict with one another.
I hate to be blunt, but this is plainly untrue. If this were true, theh why is it that religious people get all excited every time a TV special claims to have found the "real" Noah's Ark? Or why does their heart rise in their chest when some National Geographic special says that the Shroud of Turin really does date back to the first century CE?
If researchers were to find bones in an ossuary that had DNA that could be proven to match the DNA of Jesus of Nazareth, would religious people say "Oh, we don't care about that. Our faith is not in the domain of science." Not a chance.
All of this "separate by equal magisteria" is wishful thinking advocated by the late Stephen Jay Gould (may God rest his soul). It works about as well as "separate but equal" did in the Old South.
Mandak,
With all due respect, you're behind the times, my man. I work for a company who's whole business is software-as-a-service and we host so many terra-bytes of data we've lost count. You might be thinking that our customer list is a bunch of small fish, but you'd be wrong. Here's a partial customer list: Merril Lynch, Sun Trust Bank, Cisco Systems, ADP (the company that handles most everyone's paycheck), and Dun and Bradstreet. We're hosting some of their most sensitive data and they seem to like it just fine.
Did we have to prove ourselves and our security mechanisms to them? Absolutely, but once we we convinced them, they were in like flint. And word began to spread.
Sherri,
/. to be an echo chamber? Fight bad ideas with good ideas not with censorship.
You make a good general point, but I think it is a bit misdirected in the overall conversation. I don't need tenuous scientific conclusions and the irrefutable conclusions of a majority of scientists to tell me that it's not a good idea to pollute the atmosphere or dump billions of tons of toxic waste into the ocean. It's almost as if there is religious zeal behind the "man is the main cause of global warming" position. The earth has gone through many global warmings and coolings over its billions of years in existence, the majority happened long before industrialization. Why does the "man is the cause" side insist on wasting their time arguing this, when the problem could be handled on grounds that most everyone can agree on: pumping crap into the air and water isn't a good long-term strategy for anyone.
On another point, Exxon employees are as welcome as anyone to discuss the issue. Do you really want
...the American Enterprise Institute group, which apparently has numerous ties to the Bush administration.. Notice the use of the word 'apparent'. Saying group A has "apparent ties" to group B is just a way of smearing group A by association without taking any responsibility if those "apparent ties" turn out not to be "actual ties". Guilt by "apparent" association. Orginal Poster you can do better than that.
I this is actually a great argument for the banks to choose option 1) Deny claims for phishing losses.
As a customer, this would assure me that they weren't upping my fees to pay for another person's foolishness.
For the bank, in the long run, they'll end up with smarter, more profitable customers instead the customers who would fall for scams and then cut into the banks profits by suing it.
I'm sorry, I just see trying to force banks to pay for phishing as an extension of the "never my fault" culture that has evolved over the last few generations. Remember all the lawsuits filed against Audi for "sudden acceleration syndrome"? There was an extensive investigation done but not before Audi had paid out millions. The conclusion of the study: people were stepping on the accelerator instead of the brake.
Such a good point. Political correctness has become the luminerfous ether in which we live. The truth is that Google and the Library Association want you to read the "banned" books that _they_ think are just dandy now. They don't need to burn the real the "banned" books, they simply pretend that they don't exist.
The poster says that competition between snakes and our ancestors "triggered the development of improved vision and large brains in primates". I think we need to be careful with the terms here. It didn't really trigger anything, it's just that, according to the theory, improved vision and large brains increased the survival probability of those portions of the species that had these traits and thus the traits were passed on.
Blue Security's user database has _not_ been cracked. I have several email addresses protected by Blue Security and this @ss4at's message has only gotten to 2 of them. What this means is that these addresses were already on his spam list and he has simply used Blue Security's encrypted database which contains both valid and honeypot addresses to make an inference.
Again, the database has not been cracked and the technique the spammer is using doesn't matter. If your email was on his list, it's still on his list and he's not going to remove it unless forced to do so. Those in the Blue Community hope to be able to persuade them it is in their best interest to do so. And there have been some notable successes.
Lum,
I don't mean any offense by this, but you're advocating defeatism. The alcoholic will never stop drinking; what's the use? The abuser will never stop abusing; why try? Taking a stand against the Chinese is useless... One man pissing into the wind may not mean much, but one billion men pissing on the Chinese gov't can yellow up the Yalu in a hurry.
One person: Ghandi. One person: Martin Luther King. One person: Bonhoeffer. Sometimes it just starts with one person with the courage to be.
Why, when the Chinese government ask for information to enforce a law, is it wrong but when the American, or other Weston governments ask for information it isn't?
/. is supposed to be a place where smart people discuss things really worries me.
The fact that this post was modded up and that
You make no distinction between a just law and an unjust law? Did you know that there was such a distinction? Example: Law against murder - just law. Law against using the "whites only" restroom - unjust law.
Human beings (and by extension companies run by human beings) have a human duty to resist unjust laws.
As much as I love free speech, we must remember that the US Constitution, and all that is wonderful about it, does not exist in China.
Forget the damn US Constitution. What about the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Isn't China a signatory to that document? And if so, why aren't all companies and peoples obliged to demand that China live up to its commitments?
Right and there is no such thing as a "just" law versus an "unjust" law, right? As long as some tin-horn dictator or other makes a law that makes it right, and we all need to bow before it, is that your position?
Has anyone ever heard of civil disobedience around here? How about the ethical obligation of human beings to resist unjust laws?
On the one hand, the US wants Google to roll over and give them what they want to stop something the US considers "bad", namely child porn. In the same breath, they want those same companies to stand up against foreign governments who are trying to prosecute something they consider "bad".
You are obviously misinformed. The US Gov't did not ask Google to hand do anything to help them stop anything. They asked for anonymous search statistics to help them figure out the scope of the child obscenity problem in the US. Now the fact that Google could thumb their nose at the gov't request and go on with business as usual the next day says it all when it comes to comparing China and the US.
Right. If they don't tell me what the gas chamber knob does when I pull it and I don't ask. They can't possibly hold me liable. I mean what reasonable person would ask about the consequences of the actions someone is ordering them to take?
Maybe we should take a step back and realise our beliefs aren't everyone's elses
Oh, dear God, not the "it may be true for you but not for me" argument. As if the only difference in those who believe that suppression of unpopular speech, murder and child rape are wrong and those who don't is a mere difference in taste. Neither is right and neither is wrong; it's all just a difference of opinion, right? Funny how this argument seems to evaporate when the subject is your speech, your life or your children....the one they ran in the 1930s about how of course companies like IBM should do business with the Germans. Engagement, without question, is the only policy with any chance to positively influence an oppressive regime.
Phil, points well taken.
I think that people don't see this as a big deal because there has been some distance between Tianenmen Square and the present day. The Demcracy Project points out something that I think would be considered more thoughtfully had Tianenmen Square happened yesterday:
"If this were 60-years ago, would Google be agreeing to censor out news of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in order to have access to Nazi Germany's Europe?"
But the overall opinion is unified through scholars: your point is bunk ;)
"Oh, dear Lord, if scholars are unified against me, I'd better retract my point and run away." Galileo, circa 1600.
Well, maybe the back-wood fundamentalist would disagree with me, but most mainline scholars actually agree that the death of Jesus was a moral atrocity and that the notion that he planned it that way all along and the attribution of a deeper meaning to his death by his disciples was a post-Easter occurrence.
Now, back to business:
Good God, man, don't you know a joke when you see one?
Let me spell it out: the point is not about theology or Jesus - the point is about people rationalizing and justifying their acquiescence to evil by appealing to some "higher good" as Google is doing now. Why can't they just say "We are an amoral, conscienceless entity known as a "corporation" and we will make any and all decisions based on how much profit or potential profit is in it for us."? I could respect them a lot more if they would just come out and admit the obvious.
In terms of net evil, of the options available, this is the least evil option. To remove themselves entirely from the Chinese market (the Great Firewall is effective and Google would likely not do well working around it) would be no better. Make no mistake. Leaving the Chinese people high and dry would not be more effective or less evil. Especially when substituting a willing Microsoft or Yahoo. Ignoring a bad situation is evil. Making the best of it isn't.
Roman Military Contractor in First Century Palestine: "The Romans have just asked me to help them nail this Jesus guy to the cross, but everything that I have heard about him is that he a good and decent man guilty of no crime. But, you know, I do have a family to feed and a plans to retire to Tuscany. And, hey, if I don't do it, then that Brutus guy will probably get the job and he won't drive the nails in as gently and humanely as I will. So, I guess I just have to make the best of it!"
1. What tripe. Let's look at the Senate vote on the Patriot Act and what do we see? Every single Democratic Senator present except one (Feingold) voted for the Patriot Act. The vote was 98-1-1. Now who was it that brought us the Patriot Act again?
2. The reason that Democrats want to restrict political spending on the Internet is not because the Republicans have more soft money to spend on Internet ads than the Democrats. (McCain-Feingold places no restrictions on "hard money" contributions). As the vast Right-Wing conspiracy bastion Slate.com has reported, the Democrats raise more soft money than Republicans. The reason that Democrats want to quash paid political blogging is that the Republicans are undisputably much more effective at it than Democrats. Anyone care to look at the hit statistics for The Drudge Report, Powerline or Little Green Footballs vs. The Daily KOS or any other liberal blog?