But more interestingly to most, probably, is to ponder this phenomenon you describe. People do indeed feel that there is a standard to be lived up to. People are indeed troubled if they don't see themselves living up to it.
Yes and no. The point is that everyoe basically has a different standard and judges himself. There is no one standard that everyone strives for. Some people want to be a teenage rebel, some people want to be a l33t h4ck3r, some people want to be a warrior, some people want to be an insidious grey eminence, etc. Heck, some even strive to be a perfect psychopathic asshole. Each one tries to be something different.
Heck, TFA presents someone who, basically, wants to be a "rock fan". It has nothing to do with religion or morals or whatever. He just wants to define himself as strongly biased towards rock music. God knows why, but he does. And ends up doing all sorts of silly tricks, like resetting the play count, to maintain that illusion for himself.
People do indeed feel as though they are being watched and judged from without, even when they are apparently not.
Umm, nope, that wasn't really the point. Most people basically watch and judge themselves.
So, why is that? Maybe this Christian thing is worth looking into after all...
That may well be, but that's completely irrelevant to the point here. Unless you're trying to tell me that Christianity is why that guy defined himself as a "rock fan". But I don't remember the Bible saying anything along the lines of "thou shalt buy all Black Sabbath records", really.
I encourage you to learn more about Christians and about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Being a Christian means accepting the fact that WITHOUT CHRIST you will go to hell no matter how you act or what you may do in this world. A Christian is supposed to accept the fact that people, by nature, are full of sin.
I know all about being a Christian. I was one, I have relatives which are, basically, fundies, I've read and memorized the bible, etc. Heck, my aunts were so big on this Christ thing, I grew up basically imaginning what I'd look like with wings. Yeah, it's sick to get a kid aged 6 to think of _death_ to that extent, but hey, that's how it works. At any rate, I'm not that much of a stranger to the Bible, you know?
A Christian is supposed to accept the fact that people, by nature, are full of sin. Once you accept Christ into your life, it means you will try everything that is possible to live without sin. If you do sin, which you will, you acknowledge that you have sinned, and pray for forgiveness.
Very true and insightful and all, but my point stands: people like to imagine themselves as having commited a lot less sins than they actually did. They'll pray for forgiveness for some, but quickly forget it, and remember the good stuff they did instead.
Or like to imagine that a lot of _their_ own sins really had an acceptable excuse, and really don't count as sins. That "thou shalt not kill" intrinsically includes "unless it's an arab or other sort of heathen." That in that context it's not just not a sin, but outright a virtue. That "thou shalt not commit adultery" really means "unless she's a willing hottie with DD cup breasts." That "love thy neighbour" really means "as long as he's your friend, but you can hate him if you think he's an asshole", and that "turn the other cheek" means "for now, until you can pay it back."
You will begin to understand. I know you said that you weren't picking on Christians
And indeed I'm not. I'm "picking" on the whole human species. Christianity may have even hammered some good ideas into some humans, but on the whole it can only do so much. Humans will be humans, in the end.
Well, not even really "picking" as such. That's how it works. There's no use either rebelling against it, or looking down at it. It's no more use than rebelling against gravity. Might as well accept it as it is, really.
This is Slashdot, so most people like to read books
Well,as I was saying, I've read the Bible already. And the Khoran, for that matter. And a bit on the history of other religions.
Those people who conveniently forgot about past sins only called themselves Christians.
True enough, I suppose, but in the end they're the majority. That's really all I was saying. That's how humans tend to work. And indeed that was really the whole point. It's not about Christians or Christianity, it's about humans. Well, most humans, anyway. Christian, Buddhists, Hindu, Muslim, whatever. The vast majority don't actually live to their ideal, but basically pad their resume for the benefit of their own conscience.
And it applies to non-religious stuff too. TFA, for example, is an example of someone who resets his own playlists and statistics so he can still think of itself as a "rock fan". So he resets the statistics of anything which isn't rock, so he doesn't have the counter-evidence right before his own eyes in the player. Go figure. But that's how humans tend to work.
Actually, read some books on anthropology and you'll discover that it's more common and pervasive than you'd think. It's, in fact, so pervasive, that any poll asking people anything about themselves will basically get a bunch of more socially-acceptable lies, rather than the truth.
Actually, let me rephrase that: it's also not about consciously deciding to tell a lie, or actually being paranoid that someone will rummage through your computer. It's that humans have their own ideal of "what I _should_ be like", and from there use selective confirmation to "filter" the real "I" into fitting that ideal. It's not even as much for the benefit of others, as for one's own benefit. People need to believe that they're, basically, better than they really are.
If you will, it's sorta how every good Christian believes that someone else will go to Hell, but noone believes that he'll personally go there. If someone defines himself as a good Christian, he will distort his perception and memories to see himself actually fitting that ideal. He'll remember the time when he did something good and in line with God's commandments, but conveniently forget the times when he did nasty stuff that goes right against those commandments.
And I'm not just picking on Christians there, as the same applies to everyone and everything else. Good citizen, upstanding pillar of the community, patriot, charitable, top-notch computer expert, l33t h4xxx0r, teen rebel, good parent, whatever. If you define yourself as X, you'll distort your perception and memory to see yourself fitting the X ideal more than you actually do.
And, just for your entertainment or enlightenment (whichever you choose), here are some RL examples picked by anthropologists:
E.g., when asked to define themeselves, most members of a tribal community all claimed to be hunters and warriors. In reality, they had in the meantime turned mostly into peaceful agricultors. (Civilization can creep up on someone like that.) Extremely had actually used a weapon in years, or even owned one any more. But their culture was so biased towards hunters/warriors, that everyone basically kept viewing themselves as one even long past the point where it had become a lie.
E.g., a community defined itself as a shiny-happy model of cooperation where people help each other all the time, even help each other build a house and work together in the fields and everything. And everyone would cheefully tell you that they're still like that, and help each other all the time. The only problem is that the last time anyone helped another build a house was IIRC in the 50's, and they weren't helping each other work the fields any more either. But somehow kept believing that they do.
E.g., during a crisis where meat prices went up, they polled the people in some communities about what will they do. And everyone said basically "screw this, I'm not paying this much. I'll eat less meat until prices come back down to normal." The problem? According to both the sales data _and_ sifting through people's thrash to see what packaging they're throwing away (yes, they actually did that), people were buying _more_ meat than before. Go figure.
It may seem illogical to you (and maybe even is), but that's what humans do and how human society functions. In other words, welcome to the real world.
The problem with blind tests is that they are done with music people aren't familar with. Take a group of audiophiles and their favorite track and then perform the test, and they'll get it every time.
So basically you're proposing to eliminate the whole "blind" out of "double blind". Let's bring back the Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon, shall we?
Unfortunately, the "blind" part is there for a very good reason, which again basically boils down to the Emperor's New Clothes. If you get people thinking they're somehow superior (smarter, audiophile ear, whatever) if they see or hear something, they _will_ convince themselves that they actually see or hear what's not even there at all. There's no limit to the idiocies people will convince themselves that they actually see or hear if their self-esteem depends on it.
E.g., literally, there was a thread on Hardware Central where someone fought to the bitter end with his claim that he hears the subtle sound differences in MP3's based on... the hard drive they're played off. No, really, I'm not making it up. Once he's got it in his head that the recording on a HDD is magnetic, same as on a cassette, and different kinds of analogue cassettes and cassette players had different fluctuations and distortions... nothing could stop him any more from hearing the same different fluctuations and distortions when the same MP3 is played off a Maxtor instead of a Seagate. Any explanations of digital sound, or that an MP3 is played from RAM not directly off the magnetic medium, etc, just went right over his head. He had found such belief that his audiophile ear can spot the differences between a Maxtor and a Seagate, that nothing could snap him out of it any more.
E.g., literally, see people who can testify that a certain audiophile power cord makes their music sounds better. Once you get them in an Emperor's New Clothes scenario, namely that only superior beings (e.g., real audiophiles) can spot the difference... guess what? They want to be superior beings too. They'll believe with all their mind and soul that a $600 power cable actually makes the sound richer and lets them hear more frequencies.
A CD samples the original analog signal, where as a record will contain nearly all of it (actually more, with artifacts and what not, but I'd rather have more than less, even if they are "flaws".)
1. A distortion is a distortion is a distortion. If it differs from the original signal, that's that. You can't just hand-wave that differences on an LP are somehow good, while differences on a CD is bad. There is no such thing as one being inherently "more" and the other being inherently "less". Both are just deviation from the original signal, and both can be equally defined as "more" than the original (e.g., hey, the CD too has "more" of certail harmonics due to sampling, even if they are way above the range your ear can hear) or as "less" than the origina (e.g., "more" artefacts means "less" fidelity for LPs too.)
2. There's a reason we gave up on analog stuff, and that's because each step along an analog chain introduces more distortions. E.g., the recording on tape of the original performance, the reading of that performance from tape to make the LP master, the writing on the master, the transfer of the master to the actual pressed LP, etc, all the way to the physical properties of your turntable reading the LP. Add some more mastering steps in between, actually. Each step along that chain introduces more inaccuracies and deviations from the original signal.
By comparison, a digital signal can be copied with exactly 0 (ZERO) further distortions any number of times, because a 1 is always a 1 and a 0 is always a 0. Whatever differences the digitization itself introduced, that's the _only_ distortion in that chain. It can be copied and re-copied a thousand times and it won't lose anything more in the process.
3. Or 2b, if you wish: playing the same CD repeatedly won't make
I'm not saying you shouldn't sue someone that did only minor changes to your patent, of course. If just changing the number of teeth on a cog or the concentration of a substance let one bypass a patent, that would defeat the whole idea of patents too.
What I'm saying is that they shouldn't be generic blanket ideas. E.g., the patent on an antibiotic is ok, but IMHO letting people patent something as generic as "using a chemical that kills bacteria" or "using a substance that interferes with protein production in bacteria" (which is how a lot of antibiotics work) is stupid. I'm using that example because patenting "a layer that reflects one beam but lets enough of the other pass through" is really that generic. Patenting, say, Erithromycin (an antibiotic) still let, and in fact stimulated, other people come up with, say, Tetracyclin (another antibiotic) which isn't just a modification, but a whole different class of antibiotics. One is beta-lactam based, one isn't, and can target beta-lactam resistant bacteria.
_That_ is the kind of innovation that patents used to stimulate. Way X to solve a problem is now barred by a patent, go research another way to solve it. Patenting just the generic idea of solving that problem is IMHO idiotic and prevents such innovation. If someone had just patented the generic idea of an antibiotic, it would have just halted pharmaceutical research for 20 years and done us all a dis-service.
Probably because, in decending order of importance,
1. A battery doesn't need drivers or transfer data in any form or shape. So basically noone figured out how to make a battery that installs a rootkit. That may well change, though, once trusted computing gets accepted. I'm sure someone will figure out a reason why it's vital to authenticate the battery.
2. A battery can't get copied or ripped to MP3, and you can't upload it on P2P networks. So it's hard to justify -- either to the users or to your own accounting department -- why you'd need an expensive rootkit as copy protection.
3. Who needs rootkits when you can have an incendiary bomb? Already an (IIRC) USPS transport airplane is suspected to have crashed because of a Dell laptop with a Sony battery that caught fire in the hold. We also know of at least one truck that was totally destroyed by such a fire. And god knows what else. Look up the price of an airplane, and it's just entirely unnecessary to install rootkits when you can cause _that_ kinda damage by just being there in the cargo hold. Whatever damage a rootkit can cause, it's small change compared to _that_.
Actually, from what I understand, this is just one of those idea patents that we all love to hate. Most people around seem to assume that somehow vague idea patents are equivalent with software patents, but this is one of the proofs that it's not quite so.
Basically what their patent says is "you know, if you could put a layer in between that reflects wavelenght X but is transparent to wavelenght Y, you could have one laser type (hence drive) read one layer and the other laser type read the other one." Which is squarely in the "bloody obvious" category for anyone with even grade school knowledge of physics, or who ever had a black CD, or whatever. What it doesn't say is _what_ material should one put there, and which actually does that.
Basically it doesn't actually tell you "ok, mix material X with material Y, press at Z degrees, and there you go." It doesn't give you a recipe to actually make one of those dual-standard DVDs. Which, frankly, was the whole purpose of patents. It's just the idiotic kind of modern-day patent that patents a vague _idea_ and then waits to sue anyone who figures out how to implement it.
It used to be that, say, the patent for the sewing machine involved the _exact_ mechanism and needle used to make a working one. (And got invalidated when someone showed samples of such needles produced centuries ago.) Nowadays it would just involve the generic idea of a machine that sews, without actually knowing how to make one. And you'd just sue anyone who actually figured out how to make one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against patents. I know what role they (were supposed to) serve. But such idea patents are idiotic and defeating the whole purpose. The idea was to foster innovation and encourage people to study new ways to do something (or do something new.) Blanket generic idea patents just forbid everyone from even trying to compete. E.g., if you let people patent the generic idea of a machine that sews, you just discouraged everyone from inventing a different kind, that does it in a completely different (and maybe better) way. If you let people patent generic stuff like "using any substance that reflects just one wavelength", you just discouraged everyone from researching a (maybe better or cheaper) such material. It's not a research stimulus, it's a grant to be a monopoly. But I digress.
At any rate, don't expect to see DVDs phased out just yet, because someone still has to invent that material.
These are not fruitcake organizations that you find in the United States, although I'm sure the Chinese have plenty of fruitcakes in the Communist Party.
Actually, I somehow doubt that China or any other country is 100% composed of 100% sane and wise people, who'd _never_ be fooled by a cooky New Age cult. It's the kind of "in the Orient they're wise and do _everything_ better" idea that got us saddled with cooky pseudo-oriental cults in the west in the first place.
People are people everywhere. Some people are disillusioned and at a "well, _is_ there a higher meaning to this shit?" point, and thus easy prey to anyone who wants to sell them some fruitcake meaning to it all. And there are plenty, ranging from ruthless sociopaths with no scruples to forward their own goals (be it wealth, glory, or seeing how many people can they convince to commit suicide) to genuine schizophrenic fruitcakes, who'll come up with such a "meaning to it all" to sell them.
And if you study the history of religions in Asia, they have _millenia_ of ridiculous religions behind them. It's not all Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Hinduism in their past. They had murderous cults, sex-obsessed-to-the-extreme cults, etc, just like the rest of the world.
And in some parts of Asia they still do. There are recent events like some Indian peasant family torturing and murdering a neighbour's child and IIRC drinking his blood, just because some tantric guru told them that that it's required for some magic spell that will make them finally have a child of their own. How's that for a cooky religion you wouldn't want in your back yard?
(No, I'm not saying that India as a whole is like that, or anything racist. Just that, as I was saying, people are people everywhere. They have their gullible idiots too, just like Europe or America have theirs.)
So, basically, yes, I fully convinced that China too must have a bunch of cooky cults too. They're not the ones that make the headlines (Falun Gong is more covered in western media than some new age cult with 12 members total). It probably isn't even the reason why China persecutes all "unauthorized religions" indiscriminately. Etc. But I do believe that they too must have their new age fruitcakes. They're just humans, that's all I'm saying.
I don't think it's as much offering China any carrots, as just bending over backwards to please the local big corporations. Wouldn't want to let ethical considerations get in the way of big campaign contributions, now would we? The US policy and politics of the new millenium have dropped any coherent planning or pretense of pursuing the interest of the country as a whole, and just focused on giving corporations anything they wish, even if it means shafting society as a whole to do that.
What I'm assuming is that if a company offer _only_ various kinds of astroturfing services, then that says something about the interntions of whoever hires them. I don't know, and frankly don't care, if they'll do something good in the future. What they do here and now, the _only_ thing they offer, the _only_ thing that they ever proved, is highly unethical stuff. And that kinda gives a hint into the intentions of whoever hired them.
You can assume that if I hire an highly expensive assassin, maybe I really want a gardener, or maybe I just want a bodyguard. Because that's what all the "maybe Google hired them for something good" arguments boil down to. But that's not how the RL tends to work. If I need a good gardener, I hire someone whose credentials say just that: gardening. If I need a good bodyguard, I go to someone or to an agency specializing in that. If, of all possible people and credentials, I chose to hire someone whose only credentials are being a hitman expert, that should at least make you wonder. There's a damn good probability there that that's what I'm actually looking for.
And the same applies to Google. Sure, we can speculate that maybe they only wanted a honest to God PR campaign (as if such thing even exists), or maybe they wanted a marketting expert, or maybe they just wanted legal counsel, or whatever. In a purely theoretical world, that may even be possible, but in the real world that's not how it tends to work. In the real world, if you want a normal PR campaign, you go to some agency whose credentials and portfolio say they're PR experts. If you want honest marketting, you go to an agency which already proved its skill in honest marketting. If you want legal advice, you go to a lawyer company with a good reputation in that field. Etc. You don't go to someone whose _only_ credentials are astroturfing, and hope that they, incidentally, are secretly even better in an unrelated domain.
And if someone hires someone whose only credentials say "expert astroturfer", I don't know, it should make you at least wonder. Because regardless of theoretical possibilities, in the real world there's a damn good probability that that's exactly what they're looking for.
The argument that it's just for defense doesn't hold much water either. Defense, how?
By recognizing an astroturfing campaign? That's pretty easy to spot on your own, if you're the leading search engine and suddenly a lot of supposedly normal people start swearing loudly that MSN is the best and only.
By fighting astroturfing with astroturfing? As Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye will just make everyone blind." Fighting evil with evil does not a moral high ground make. Fighting terrorists by indiscriminate terror just makes one a terrorist too. Fighting a gangster with gangster tactics (intimidating civilians, extortion, cement shoe executions, etc) just makes one another gangster too. Fighting a liar by saturating everyone with one's own lies, just makes one a liar too. And fighting astroturfing by doing one's own astroturfing only makes one just another astroturfer.
Noone said that people can only do evil things once they start on a certain path, and I'm pretty sure that I had the example with Al Capone's soup kitchens in the message you answer to. So I'm not exactly sure where that came from, because it certainly didn't come from me.
The point is:
1. that Google's promise and motto is "do no evil". It's not "make up later if we do some evil stuff". I don't know if they'll do more good stuff later, maybe even make up for it, etc. It may even happen. But that's not the point. That's not what I was arguing. What they promised is to not do evil stuff in the first place. They better stick to that. I don't want them to make up for it later, I want them to not break it in the first place.
2. that simply paying to get some bad deed done doesn't absolve one of the moral responsibility for it.
If I were to go and get someone beat up, it doesn't matter if I do it personally or if I hire a pro to beat him up. If it's my decision, I fully bear the blame and the responsibility for it. At least from a moral perspective, I wouldn't be able to claim the moral high ground just because I paid someone to do it.
And the same applies to Google. "Do no evil" does include "don't pay others to do evil." You can't claim the moral high ground by just paying a pro to do your astroturfing.
This isn't about campaign contributions to parties, this is about hiring a company of professional astroturfers and generally dirty-tricks experts. You know, people who _are_ the evil kind that Google supposedly distanced itself from.
You can't balance _that_ like that, or not so easily. This isn't D&D. You can't say, basically, "oh, I've done 3 good deeds this month, for 4 'good' alignment points total, so I'm entitled to gut two orphans for 2 'evil' points each." RL doesn't work that way. Al Capone's kitchen soups, very good deeds as they may be, don't simply balance out that he was an evil psychopath the rest of the time.
But more importantly, Google's motto doesn't work that way. It says "do no evil", _not_ "keep the balance by doing as much evil as good stuff". So exactly how and what are they, in your opinion, balancing there? Surely not their motto and promise.
I don't care if it's for Google itself or for some political party or whatever. Evil is evil. Evil done to "balance" something else is still evil by any definition. And hiring evil people to do evil for you, is still doing evil.
We have a long history of laws and precedents, in both criminal and military justice, saying just that: you're personally responsible for the people you paid or commanded. We've had plenty of Mafia Dons trying to claim basically, "see, I never hurt a fly. It was my subordinates that shot people and threw people in lakes with cement shoes. But me? I never personally even slapped anyone." And society eventually decided that, no, it doesn't work your way. If _your_ goons did evil stuff, _you_ are responsible for that.
Or we had military commanders willing to claim basically, "nah, I never shot a civillian. It was my soldiers that shot and raped civillians. I was just standing there and watching them." And again, society decided that it doesn't work that way. If they're your subordinates, you're responsible for them. It's your duty to stop them if they do something evil.
So, ok, astroturfing isn't subject to criminal laws or anything, but from a moral standpoint it's the same thing: if Google pays to get action X done, Google is morally responsible for it. You can't claim the moral high ground by just paying others to do your evil stuff.
See, when you're paid to cry wolf, you cry wolf. Lots. Invent gazillions of imaginary wolves all over the place.
The BSA is paid to cry wolf. That's what it does for a living. It's there just to paint a bleak image where poor starving software developpers like MS or Oracle or Autodesk are losing trillions to piracy. It's there to take every single 3D Studio Max copy that some chinese kid downloaded to model a ship or skin for free mod for a $30 game, and present it as $6000 stolen from the poor starving software developpers. As a copy that would 100% surely be bought if that kid couldn't pirate it. (Never mind that that's 6 years' average salary down there, and frankly noone pays _that_ kind of money just to make a free mod.)
But even that kind of crying wolf has at least _some_ minimum touch with reality. After all, a copy pirated _is_ a copy pirated. So at some point the BSA figured out they can do better than that. Nowadays what they do is count the PCs sold and apply some bogus "for every X PCs, a copy of program Y should have been sold." E.g., for each PC, an OS should have been sold. For, say, every other PC, a copy of MS office should have been sold. Etc. Anything that ends up under their expected numbers, is taken 1-to-1 to mean money lost to piracy.
So, yeah, I wouldn't be too surprised if these PCs end up counted like that too: What, 1 million MIPS PCs sold and no MIPS OS sold? Damn pirates! That's 1 million copies of IRIX and NT 3.5 for MIPS that are pirated down there! That's billions of dollars lost by the industry and hundreds of thousands of jobs lost! Oh the humanity! Someone do something! Quick, the government do something against it!
Yes, privacy is generally important. But, no, that doesn't mean you have to be a complete tinfoil nutcase about it.
E.g., I'd be hard pressed to see anything bad in what I buy on Amazon. If a prosecutor with a search warrant wants to see that this month I've preordered Neverwinter Nights 2 on Amazon, by all means, be my guest.
Mind you, I don't see any use in Amazon's recommendations either. But if anyone finds them useful, it's bloody stupid to ask -- nay, _demand_ -- that they give that up in the name of privacy. It's just asking to give up something useful (for them), in return for zero actual benefit.
E.g., I actually _want_ FilePlanet to keep knowing it's me, so I can download through the non-queue servers I subscribed to. I _don't_ want some idiotic piece of "privacy protection" software to keep confusing the site into thinking I'm not even logged in all the time. (Don't laugh, MacAffee did exactly that.) And, yes, if any prosecutor wants to find out that I've downloaded some UT mods and levels, by all means, knock yourself out.
Now I _might_ want to hide some other stuff, even if it's not criminal. E.g., I don't want my parents to find out my IM number, because, frankly, they're the kind of smothering intrusive idiots that would be all over me 24 hours a day if they could. In fact, they actually did before, on the old number. (And I'm in the mid-30, living on my own, half a country aws.)
Basically there are two _very_ distinct kinds of data: that which I'd rather keep secret, and that which, for all I'm concerned, I actually _want_ the web site to know. There are also two very different kinds of web-sites: those I'd rather be anonymous on, and those which, by all means, I _want_ them to know it's me. They're very distinct, and it's up to me to decide which is which. And for whom.
The view that it's either-or, that either you're against the very principle of privacy _or_ you're anonymous all the time, is such an OCPD view that it's not even funny. The real world has more nuances and special cases there. (Or in any other problem.)
And I do believe that what TFA discovered is that currently the available software makes it a pain in the butt to actually deal with those nuances and special cases. A lot of software (and not only privacy software) is based, basically, on a black-and-white all-or-nothing OCPD view of the world, and/or needs more work than it's worth (to a non-geek) to configure all the exceptions and special cases.
Oh, right, that's how the advertising bubble (driving the dot-com bubble) worked. Let's subject the user to hundreds of thousands of different, but still untargetted, ads, and surely he'll end up buying everything. Right? Heck, instead of having just 1 ad on the main page, let's have a dozen different ads on each page. It's good if the user gets a lot of product information, right?
Needless to say, it didn't work that way. Being bombarded by a lot of untargetted stuff just got people to mentally filter those out. Whereas in the days of 1 (and always the same) banner on the main page, people actually clicked on them, nowadays most of us don't even notice them any more.
Plus, you know what kind of a downward slope that started, as each generation of untargetted ads had to be more obtrussive and in-your-face to be noticed at all. Pop-ups, full-page ads, layers on top of the actual page, became actually necessary because that bombardment actually desensitized people to the point where a normal banner isn't even noticed any more.
So, I dunno, it may be that the privacy advocates _are_ right there. Whether you're worried about the privacy or not, the problem still is that it's for naught. It's a rehash of an idiotic idea we've already seen before, and which _didn't_ actually provide any actual benefit. Not for the ad providers, not for the web masters, not for the users. I can even understand risking your privacy and a slippery slope in return for some actual benefit, but it seems stupid to me to just give it up when there are no benefits whatsoever.
Actually, if I understand it right, all this would do is make sure you get to see more ads (by reducing the probability to see the same one again), not actually target them to you. The system won't even know you're a guy, in fact, but just whether it detected your bluetooth device before, and during which ads.
So it won't necessarily mean you get " Lean Mean Fat-grilling Machine" infomercials. It might as well mean that instead of seeing a Tampax ad 10 times, you'll see ads for Tampax, OB, SlimFast, WonderBra and some epilation machine, 2 times each.
That said, it's not a question of whether the adjectives used are 'complimentary' or not, but rather the generalization across an entire race that offends (some) people. They feel that racial generalizations (aka stereotypes) are unhelpful and inaccurate, and have a major history of abuse.
Judging by the quote in TFA, it doesn't even try to peg them in any particular category/skill/whatever-abusable, so I'm still at a loss as to how that stereotype is bad. He just says that Cubans and Puerto-Ricans are "hot". Which, unless I'm missing some vital context information there, is just a personal impression/preference/whatever.
It may surprise you, but different people like different things. And some have some fetish/preference/whatever for a certain race, appearance, trait, whatever. Some people have a fetish about asian women, for example, and think they're "hot". (Even some which most other people would consider at best average-looking or downright homely.) Some like blacks. Some like redheads. Whatever.
It's just a personal fetish or preference, and doesn't actually peg them in any job/skill/category. It's not even anything like, "blacks are good at basketball". It doesn't actually say what they're good at, nor what they're bad at.
Plus, some things are said in private that are just making conversation, not some bigotted dogma. E.g., I might say to a Swede that I like Swedes and admire their history (and to some extent I do), but that doesn't mean I'm actually fixated on it, nor that I'd go nazi-like and start discriminating against against people who aren't of nordic descent, tall and blonde. It's just something which seems like a compliment at the time (and not even a good one at that, but, hey, I'm a nerd), but the rest of the time it's at best a mild idle interest. I don't go and hang posters of viking warriors on the walls of my room or anything.
Heck, even stuff which would count as borderline discrimination in a general context can be used as a compliment in a private conversation, if you're willing to risk that the other one might be offended instead. E.g., saying to a Russian coleague who is a mathematician that Russia sure produces a lot of good mathematicians, might even count as a compliment. Not even necessarily to his "race", but to his culture and the system that, for its other deffects and brutal oppression, did invest in education and in convincing people that academic achievements are _good_ and a thing to be proud of. Yes, it's technically splitting people into categories, but it's (A) meant as just a private compliment, and (B) not something that's anywhere near being dogma or reason for prejudice and discrimination the rest of the time. I can assure you that I can admire a good mathematician regardless of their country of origin.
And it seems to me like the governor's comment there fully fits this category too. It was said in private (or at least not intended for the public anyway), to someone who _is_ in the category he talks about, and, most importantly, that someone did take it as a compliment.
And frankly, I don't see any greater good coming to society if we get to the point where you can't even say what you like, in a private conversation, without offending someone. I mean, seriously, what next? Should I be affraid of saying that I find redheads sexy, for fear of offending blondes and brunettes? (Or even discovering that some redhead is offended too.) Or what? Exactly how does that help us all?
I've seen big corporation programming consultants for which changing a URL was an unheard of concept, so I'm less surprised that a layperson considers it elite hacking.
Seriously. Being as generic as I can for NDA reasons, let's just say that the corporation I work for paid good bucks to a BIG corporation's consultants to write a web application for them. Well, not even the whole app, but think more or less just the part where you register and set your data and preferences, with a bit of a hierarchy thrown in. (Some users could be, basically, managing others and giving or revoking rights to them.)
The thing ended up years overdue, and needing a whole server farm just to support a modest number of users. (The joys of clueless Buzzword Driven Architecture at its finest, really.) They had to be started and shutdown in a given sequence too, as the modules on one machine depended on those on a second, which depended on those on a third, and so on. As a result, shutting down and restarting the whole system (e.g., for maintenance) took almost a whole day. But that's not the important part. The important part were the endless security issues, such as:
1. yes, failure to account for URL editing. Rights were checked when generating the URLs on a page (e.g., which products, messages, whatever, you can click on), but not when actually accessing the linked page. So you could literally access any data in the database by just typing in its ID in one of those URLs.
2. rights escalation. Did I mention editing URLs? The same went for the "change your password" page. You could just type in another user's id, change their password, and log in as that user. The "super-user" had id 0. 'Nuff said.
3. wide open to cross-site scripting exploits. They hadn't figured out how to quote strings when displaying them on a web page. (Then when they "fixed" that, it encoded them twice and displayed them broken. So they disabled the fix again and tried to downplay the risks of anyone injecting JavaScript.)
4. had obviously never heard of non-repudiation. (Security isn't just about who you let in, but also making reasonably sure who signed that contract or generally did what.) While in the old system a deleted user was just, basically, flagged as disabled, their clever system just deleted the user and his data. And because of foreign key constraints, it cascaded through the tables and erased any data connected to that user. Messages they posted or sent, contracts they signed, everything. Users could delete themselves too. (If anyone has trouble understanding why this is dangerous, think what you could do if your bank had something like that. Take a big loan, move the money somewhere else, delete your user.)
And so on, and so forth.
So, well, if "experts" hadn't heard of such elementary stuff, I can't be that surprised that the governor or a couple of journalists consider them advanced hacking.
1. The same things could be said and _have_ been said before.
E.g., a Pope actually considered the crossbow to be such a devastating new weapon that he forbade, upon penalty of excommunication, the use against fellow christians. I'm sure someone somewhere was feverishly praying that people have the mental agility and cultural perspective to not use such a destructive new weapon wrong.
E.g., someone thought that the Armageddon is nigh if the good Christians don't appease God by freeing His tomb from the infidels' occupation. It proved quite a popular idea too, as the exodus of people to join the first Crusade showed. I'm sure a lot of people prayed that others have the wisdom and cultural perspective to do the right thing there... i.e., take arms and prevent the end of the world at the hands of a pissed-off God.
Sometimes they were even right too. The consequences, for example, of greed to get the wares out of a ship before the quarantine ended, has caused a Black Death outbreak in Marseille that wiped out some 75% of the city and the whole county it was in. So, yeah, consequences for bad judgment could be dire in old times too.
Humanity has somehow survived anyway.
2. Again, the "connecting the dots" has been before, at least for the last 3000 years. Probably longer, but that's how long we have written records about it. Someone felt the dots connecting when starting from all sorts of other stuff. E.g., there's been quite some heavy-duty dot-connecting that caused the aforementioned Crusades. Don't take it as an insult. Connecting dots is, after all, a human trait and one of the big advantage the species has. But then again, in this particular domain it's invariably been wrong before, so I'm still not too concerned.
You know, this has got to be said, but for most of the human history, "kids" just stopped being kids at various ages between 12 and 16.
E.g., in ancient Egypt, the age of marriage was 12 for girls and 15 for boys. That's it. That was the age when you'd be supposed to be mature enough to care for your own family, not just for an iPod. Forget having your mom pack you lunch and watch you playing with dolls. At age 12 as a girl you'd be supposed to cook lunch for your husband, and raise your own real kids, not dolls.
And you can find examples where even more responsibility was bestowed upon people at such ages. Ivan The Terrible IIRC became tzar at the age of 16. (Although that's just the age when he took a new title. He was Grand Duke of Muskowy earlier.) At 16 years old Alexander The Great was left a regent, i.e., someone with the full powers of a King, as his father went abroad to war. Etc. There are plenty of generals and kings and admirals that got their power and shaped the destiny of nations even earlier than that, a lot of them as early as 12 or 13.
So basically what I'm saying is that:
1. If all that consumer electronics do is getting some people to act like adults in their teen years... GOOD! Biologically the _are_ adults, and have the brain and body of an adult. (It's not even a human-only thing. Any other species of mammal is the same: the age at which the body becomes fertile is the age when the brain and body have evolved, and the animal is perfectly capable of fending for itself and raising its own offspring.) Forcing someone to keep behaving and thinking like a kid at that age, is more detrimental than having them start acting like an adult.
2. If all the evil adult stuff there is that they get to watch TV and listen to music on an iPod... GOOD! Compared to what humans had to do in their teen years for _millions_ of years, that's still a pampered existence.
The modern aberration of artifficially forcing someone to be a kid until their 20's, is just a speck at the scale of human existence. Even looking back only 10,000 years, to the time of the first cities, a century of redefined "childhood" barely covers 1% of that time. For the other 99% of that time interval, that "kid" would be at the age where he gets to raise his own family, work in the fields, and occasionally take arms and fight for his country. Not just mock combat with toy swords, but real combat with sharp steel swords. Deadly stuff. So if all the dangers of the modern era are an iPod, a cell phone, and a Nintendo DS, heh, I don't see that much harm coming from that.
So you found one thing to support the idea that _this_ generation of kids is in trouble. But that's actually the whole funny thing: so did the previous generations. Every single generation had their own bogeyman they waved around as the downfall of the next generations. Every single generation found some X that they didn't have and the new generation has, and latched onto it as _the_ thing that will doom us all. Pretty much no matter how far you could go in time, you'd find generation N-2 whining, bitching and moaning about generation N. And if you went two more generations back, you'd find the N-2 generation presented as the decadent and doomed ones by generation N-4. And so on.
So you think that this one is certainly _the_ one that finally is a real threat. Funny thing is, so did they. They were invariably wrong. What makes you so sure, then, that your bogeyman is any different?
Even your argument that "Basically, the standard of living for most of modern western society is now so high that most of us are living like (or better than) the aristrocracy of the not very distant past." isn't actually that new. The same could be said at any point in time before. And probably some old fart at the time actually said it.
I can think of a _lot_ of inventions and changes in the past (starting with the fire, the wheel, pottery, animal husbandry, irrigation, etc, all the way to modern stuff like antibiotics) which had exactly the effect you describe: the resulting standard of living was better than even aristocracy lived before that.
In fact, most of those had bigger effects on the standard of living back then than consumer electronics have now. E.g., I bet that the effects of a tribe's discovering the fire were a lot bigger than the effects of the iPod. We're not just talking "it kept them warm", but cooking also allowed them to eat a _lot_ more vegetables than ever before. In a nutshell, yes, in one fell swoop, it raised the standard of living to a point that their grandfathers couldn't have even imagined before.
So it's happened before. And it's a safe complaint that someone has voiced the same complaint at the time. "Bla, bla, bla, people have it too easy these days, they're growing weak, flacid, weak-minded, obese, etc." I can just imagine an old caveman bitching all day about how these young hoodlums staying warm and cooking vegetables on fire lack the mental stimulation of _having_ to track an antelope through the snow. Uphill both ways. And we liked it that way. How the whole civilization will grow weak and stupid because of relying on fire instead of solving problems the old fashioned ways. How people will become loners and unable to function in society because they can just sleep near the fire instead of having to huddle together to stay warm in winter. Etc.
Or take weaponry. _Millions_ of years the primitive hominids had to basically play a game of stealth, and figure out ingenious ways to get a dead gazelle from the sabertooth tiger without becoming the second course for the tiger. Just because they had no natural weapons to actually kill either the tiger or the gazelle. And then suddenly one of them goes and invents a stone-tipped spear or knife, and everyone has all the meat they can hunt _and_ a means of self-defense, with no mental challenge whatsoever involved. Just hold the blunt end and thrust the pointy end at the prey or tiger. Gee, surely that will make the next generations stupid and weak.
But, again, the funny thing is that all that never actually happened. There have been bigger changes, bigger jumps in the life standard, and none of them actually made humanity become weak and stupid. In fact, some of the things I've mentioned (fire, stone tools, etc), we actually have evidence that they resulted in a _higher_ brain capacity. What makes you so sure that yours will be any different?
You know what's funny, though? Especially if you read the PDF that he linked to, it becomes even more obviously unenlightened. According to that PDF, the peak of the scientific innovation curve is at 35.4 years old. The median is slightly higher. So putting an "under 35" exclusion, actually excludes more than half the major scientific breakthroughs. (And looking at the curves they have for musicians, painters and authors, it excludes anywhere between 66% and 75% of the best creations in those domains.)
Mind you, I'd take that "study" with a bucket of salt anyway, since it's mostly hand-waving and mostly following the structure of a political speech (irrelevant truth, truisms to build momentum, and then sailing clean over an unsupported conclusion and hoping the people got used to nodding to everything you say by now) than anything resembling science. It also doesn't actually say anything about the sample, it makes correlations between curves that peak at fundamentally different ages (i.e., in which people of the same age actually behave fundamentally different), etc. But even if we make a leap of faith and take it at face value, what it _really_ says is that a 35 age of exclusion is as stupid as it gets.
What's productivity got to do with innovation?
One's quantity and the other's quality.
Yup, but that linked PDF actually makes that confusion in reverse, so it sorta evens out. (In an idiotic way.) The only things they actually do show some data for are inventions (i.e., innovations) and painters, Jazz musicians and authors (i.e., creativity.) The supposed _productivity_ drop is by and large just handwaved in, without any actual data to support that assertion.
The problems with that article are basically as follows:
1. It doesn't say what you seem to think it does. For that matter, it contradicts its own quotes and anecdotes given in support of that idea. If you look at what it does say, it says that the peak of the curve is at 35.4 years old and most inventions are made in a 12 year interval around that. I.e., roughly between 29 and 41.
I.e., pay attention: the actual data says that someone aged 25 is _less_ likely to innovate than someone aged 35 or 40.
In other domains it gets even funnier. If you look at the "age-genius" curve in painters and Jazz musicians, it peaks at 40. For authors it peaks at 50. In fact, if you look at the authors curve, someone aged 25 is about as likely to be a creative genius as someone aged 75.
So it seems to me utter bullshit to take that as evidence that "only the young are innovative/creative/whatever." At best what it says is, basically, "middle-aged people are more creative". I mean, seriously, by what criterion _do_ you define 50 (the peak of creative genius for authors) as "young"? Or take the upper half of the curve there and you get something like 30 to 70 years old when the best novels are written. How _can_ one define that as "young" or supportive of the idea that young people are more creative, is simply mind-boggling.
2. Treating it as "innovators can _only_ be young" is bullshit anyway. Even going by their graphs, they have data going all the way to 90 years old. So even someone that age, yes, _can_ and occasionally did make scientiffic breakthroughs, wrote excellent novels or composed great music.
3. I'm suspicious of studies where they hand-wave in conclusions and explanations unsupported by _any_ data.
E.g., take blaming the decline on marriage and kids. You'd think that most people are married (legally or de-facto by having a stable girlfriend) long before reaching the age of 50. Most authors I can think of were married. Ok, that's just anecdote, but so is their inferrence. That is actually the whole point: where is the data to support that kind of assertion? Where are the graphs correlating marriage/kids/whatever to inventions? If they're going to make that correlation, then show me the data, not just a bogus assertions pulled out of the ass.
Ditto for postulating that it's because of some anti-social tendencies in the teens and 20's, when the peak is anywhere between 35 and 50 depending on the curve, is simply idiotic. Given the age interval where that actually happens, at best you could blame it on mid-life crisis, if anything. But at any rate, if they're going to correlate genius to anti-social tendencies, again: show me the data. See how many of those people got parking tickets, jaywalking fines, speeding tickets, got reprimanded at work, etc. If there actually was an anti-social rebellious tendency driving them, then it can't have been 100% channeled into science or art.
Plus, it's important to know such things. If anti-social rebellious attitudes actually correlate with creativity and genius, then maybe we can simply stop demanding conformity and ties. Encourage them to be non-conformists for longer. Stuff like that. Is it really age, or can you encourage that attitude to stay alive and kicking longer? You can't just handwave it in, handwave in a corelation to age, and have your neatly packed conclusion. Where's the data?
4. It skips over other very important factors. E.g., life expectancy, diseases, etc. If you're going to plot the curve all the way to the 90, then I can tell you that most people would be dead by then, and a lot would be senile by then. So does that tappering of the number of great inventions/songs/novels in the 60's and 70's happen because people lose their creativity _or_ simply because people start to die off? The only way such a graph would be meaningful is if they compensated for that. But they don't do that. Bullshit pseudo-science at its finest, really.
5. It's just one article, and other than the pretty graphs, it's very light on data. E.g., there is no mention of who _are_ the 280 scientists they plot there, and by what criterion were they picked. You can argue or correlate whatever you want, if you can cherry-pick your sample to support it.
I live in Germany and there are lots of new business being started each year. Some companies are created, some go bankrupt, same as in the USA, and looking at the numbers (including unemployment levels), I can't really notice any evidence that the sistem down here works any worse. I keep hearing about those kinds of theoretical problems, but they're invariably either (A) based on false assumptions, or (B) not like that in practice.
E.g., let me assure you that you _can_ fire people. I don't know what America's propaganda machine may have told you, but people are hired and fired every day, in all jobs I can think of. Heck, I had coleagues who got fired. Social protection _doesn't_ mean "you can't fire anyone", and it never did. You may have to give them some notice in advance, so they have time to find another job, but that's it. (They'll get unemployment money if they don't, but you're not stuck with them.)
And even that isn't as scary as it may sound. Most people get a few months of a "trial period" at the beginning of their job, during which they can be fired instantly, if you so wish. But to keep things fair, in that time they too can leave you without giving you any notice, so most employers actually prefer to keep that interval reasonably short. So in your restaurant example, you'd get plenty of time to find out if that cook is too slow for your restaurant. If he is, just fire him and get another.
So basically that whole story is just the kind of mis-information I was talking about. The USA corporate PR machine makes it sound like here all sorts of evil anti-business stuff happens, when in practice none of that is true. And then otherwise smart people believe that and argue based on some axioms that are just false and just propaganda bull.
Additionally, here's a small problem with the much used "it creates employment" argument: look at unemployment over here, and you may notice that it's not much more of a problem than in the USA. So I'm open to the possibility that the laws here put some kind of hurdles in the way of creating employment, but, well, then they can't be too big hurdles, because exactly as much employment is created as we need. So the problem is?
Additionally, while IANAL, and don't know exactly what your friend was talking about, I can assure you that there are _plenty_ of accountants for hire to do your taxes (personal or as a small business). I don't know how much harder it is to start something like that, but it can't be too horribly hard, since all those people did it.
It may be that they need a lawyer at one point or another -- and it's a good idea anyway, even in the USA -- but I don't think it means you need them as your full-time employee. Same as in the USA when someone says "get a lawyer" or "I need to talk to my lawyer", they don't mean "my" as in they hired one full-time 8-hour a day lawyer that doesn't do anything else. It just means they're paying for a lawyer's time and counsel, as needed.
It's sorta funny seeing all the "having any responsibility/regulations/protection/etc would KILL the economy, cause huge costs for the consumers, bla, bla, bla" scare theories coming from the USA, because for most of them can easily be disproved by just casting your eyes over the Atlantic.
Privacy laws? Check. Companies around here have to be responsible with user data and are explicitly forbidden from selling it around. Guess what? It didn't really cause much of an economic impact. Chances are I can get a cell phone contract down here cheaper than you can get it in the USA, and get a better deal (coverage, service, etc) too. Forbidding the telcos from raping the user's privacy for a quick buck didn't actually do that much to the prices.
Emissions controls? Check. Nope, it didn't kill industry at all to put a filter and be responsible with the crap they dump in the atmosphere. Look around you how many cars come from Germany or Japan which _did_ sign the Kyoto treaty on CO2 emissions for example, and then how many more are from former US car manufacturers that are now owned by a German corporation. The folks with the emission controlls not only didn't go bankrupt, but actually did better. Go figure.
Real social security and employee/union rights? Check. Nope, it _didn't_ bankrupt the economy, it _didn't_ push whole countries into corruption and poverty, and it _didn't_ cause half the country to give up work and mooch off social security. Go figure. We still have unemployment and inflation where we want them even after, what? 60+ years of real social security? (Yes, inflation and unemployment are actually wanted, even in the USA. The two are linked, so pushing one down makes the other rise. So any government can only pick a point that looks acceptable on that curve, and try to keep the economy there.) As a nice side-effect, it tends to keep criminality low too (at least on mainland Europe), since if you don't push people under the poverty limit, they have a helluva lot less incentive to go mug someone for money. So it actually made Europe a pretty damn nice place to live in.
Consumer rights? Check. The economy keeps working just as well even if you don't need to battle in court all the time to keep yourself from being shafted by the corporations. Not only it didn't hurt the industry and commerce, it actually helped them, since it also put a cork on blatantly frivolous lawsuits.
Real anti-trust regulation, enforced systematically? (As opposed to the shameful farce that MS's anti-trust trial was in the USA.) Check. Yep, the economy still works just as well. Even without the governments bending over and taking it up the ass to please corporations.
Etc.
In practice, the economy adapted graciously to all that, and more. All the doom and gloom that supposedly would befall us all if we put any limits on CEOs, somehow never actually happened. Some of it has had more than 60 years to happen, and strangely enough, it never did so far. Go figure.
Basically it sorta cracks me up when I hear the kind of "giving us any responsibilities or limiting our power in any way would ruin the economy" bullshit that comes from the USA's corporate psychopaths and their apologists. It's like watching a kid arguing why he should get a lollypop, and what doom and gloom will befall everyone if he doesn't get one. It's really that disconnected from reality.
But at least those I can understand. What's sad is seeing otherwise intelligent people from over there actually believing that crap.
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Yes and no. The point is that everyoe basically has a different standard and judges himself. There is no one standard that everyone strives for. Some people want to be a teenage rebel, some people want to be a l33t h4ck3r, some people want to be a warrior, some people want to be an insidious grey eminence, etc. Heck, some even strive to be a perfect psychopathic asshole. Each one tries to be something different.
Heck, TFA presents someone who, basically, wants to be a "rock fan". It has nothing to do with religion or morals or whatever. He just wants to define himself as strongly biased towards rock music. God knows why, but he does. And ends up doing all sorts of silly tricks, like resetting the play count, to maintain that illusion for himself.
Umm, nope, that wasn't really the point. Most people basically watch and judge themselves.
That may well be, but that's completely irrelevant to the point here. Unless you're trying to tell me that Christianity is why that guy defined himself as a "rock fan". But I don't remember the Bible saying anything along the lines of "thou shalt buy all Black Sabbath records", really.
I know all about being a Christian. I was one, I have relatives which are, basically, fundies, I've read and memorized the bible, etc. Heck, my aunts were so big on this Christ thing, I grew up basically imaginning what I'd look like with wings. Yeah, it's sick to get a kid aged 6 to think of _death_ to that extent, but hey, that's how it works. At any rate, I'm not that much of a stranger to the Bible, you know?
Very true and insightful and all, but my point stands: people like to imagine themselves as having commited a lot less sins than they actually did. They'll pray for forgiveness for some, but quickly forget it, and remember the good stuff they did instead.
Or like to imagine that a lot of _their_ own sins really had an acceptable excuse, and really don't count as sins. That "thou shalt not kill" intrinsically includes "unless it's an arab or other sort of heathen." That in that context it's not just not a sin, but outright a virtue. That "thou shalt not commit adultery" really means "unless she's a willing hottie with DD cup breasts." That "love thy neighbour" really means "as long as he's your friend, but you can hate him if you think he's an asshole", and that "turn the other cheek" means "for now, until you can pay it back."
And indeed I'm not. I'm "picking" on the whole human species. Christianity may have even hammered some good ideas into some humans, but on the whole it can only do so much. Humans will be humans, in the end.
Well, not even really "picking" as such. That's how it works. There's no use either rebelling against it, or looking down at it. It's no more use than rebelling against gravity. Might as well accept it as it is, really.
Well,as I was saying, I've read the Bible already. And the Khoran, for that matter. And a bit on the history of other religions.
True enough, I suppose, but in the end they're the majority. That's really all I was saying. That's how humans tend to work. And indeed that was really the whole point. It's not about Christians or Christianity, it's about humans. Well, most humans, anyway. Christian, Buddhists, Hindu, Muslim, whatever. The vast majority don't actually live to their ideal, but basically pad their resume for the benefit of their own conscience.
And it applies to non-religious stuff too. TFA, for example, is an example of someone who resets his own playlists and statistics so he can still think of itself as a "rock fan". So he resets the statistics of anything which isn't rock, so he doesn't have the counter-evidence right before his own eyes in the player. Go figure. But that's how humans tend to work.
Actually, read some books on anthropology and you'll discover that it's more common and pervasive than you'd think. It's, in fact, so pervasive, that any poll asking people anything about themselves will basically get a bunch of more socially-acceptable lies, rather than the truth.
Actually, let me rephrase that: it's also not about consciously deciding to tell a lie, or actually being paranoid that someone will rummage through your computer. It's that humans have their own ideal of "what I _should_ be like", and from there use selective confirmation to "filter" the real "I" into fitting that ideal. It's not even as much for the benefit of others, as for one's own benefit. People need to believe that they're, basically, better than they really are.
If you will, it's sorta how every good Christian believes that someone else will go to Hell, but noone believes that he'll personally go there. If someone defines himself as a good Christian, he will distort his perception and memories to see himself actually fitting that ideal. He'll remember the time when he did something good and in line with God's commandments, but conveniently forget the times when he did nasty stuff that goes right against those commandments.
And I'm not just picking on Christians there, as the same applies to everyone and everything else. Good citizen, upstanding pillar of the community, patriot, charitable, top-notch computer expert, l33t h4xxx0r, teen rebel, good parent, whatever. If you define yourself as X, you'll distort your perception and memory to see yourself fitting the X ideal more than you actually do.
And, just for your entertainment or enlightenment (whichever you choose), here are some RL examples picked by anthropologists:
E.g., when asked to define themeselves, most members of a tribal community all claimed to be hunters and warriors. In reality, they had in the meantime turned mostly into peaceful agricultors. (Civilization can creep up on someone like that.) Extremely had actually used a weapon in years, or even owned one any more. But their culture was so biased towards hunters/warriors, that everyone basically kept viewing themselves as one even long past the point where it had become a lie.
E.g., a community defined itself as a shiny-happy model of cooperation where people help each other all the time, even help each other build a house and work together in the fields and everything. And everyone would cheefully tell you that they're still like that, and help each other all the time. The only problem is that the last time anyone helped another build a house was IIRC in the 50's, and they weren't helping each other work the fields any more either. But somehow kept believing that they do.
E.g., during a crisis where meat prices went up, they polled the people in some communities about what will they do. And everyone said basically "screw this, I'm not paying this much. I'll eat less meat until prices come back down to normal." The problem? According to both the sales data _and_ sifting through people's thrash to see what packaging they're throwing away (yes, they actually did that), people were buying _more_ meat than before. Go figure.
It may seem illogical to you (and maybe even is), but that's what humans do and how human society functions. In other words, welcome to the real world.
So basically you're proposing to eliminate the whole "blind" out of "double blind". Let's bring back the Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon, shall we?
Unfortunately, the "blind" part is there for a very good reason, which again basically boils down to the Emperor's New Clothes. If you get people thinking they're somehow superior (smarter, audiophile ear, whatever) if they see or hear something, they _will_ convince themselves that they actually see or hear what's not even there at all. There's no limit to the idiocies people will convince themselves that they actually see or hear if their self-esteem depends on it.
E.g., literally, there was a thread on Hardware Central where someone fought to the bitter end with his claim that he hears the subtle sound differences in MP3's based on... the hard drive they're played off. No, really, I'm not making it up. Once he's got it in his head that the recording on a HDD is magnetic, same as on a cassette, and different kinds of analogue cassettes and cassette players had different fluctuations and distortions... nothing could stop him any more from hearing the same different fluctuations and distortions when the same MP3 is played off a Maxtor instead of a Seagate. Any explanations of digital sound, or that an MP3 is played from RAM not directly off the magnetic medium, etc, just went right over his head. He had found such belief that his audiophile ear can spot the differences between a Maxtor and a Seagate, that nothing could snap him out of it any more.
E.g., literally, see people who can testify that a certain audiophile power cord makes their music sounds better. Once you get them in an Emperor's New Clothes scenario, namely that only superior beings (e.g., real audiophiles) can spot the difference... guess what? They want to be superior beings too. They'll believe with all their mind and soul that a $600 power cable actually makes the sound richer and lets them hear more frequencies.
1. A distortion is a distortion is a distortion. If it differs from the original signal, that's that. You can't just hand-wave that differences on an LP are somehow good, while differences on a CD is bad. There is no such thing as one being inherently "more" and the other being inherently "less". Both are just deviation from the original signal, and both can be equally defined as "more" than the original (e.g., hey, the CD too has "more" of certail harmonics due to sampling, even if they are way above the range your ear can hear) or as "less" than the origina (e.g., "more" artefacts means "less" fidelity for LPs too.)
2. There's a reason we gave up on analog stuff, and that's because each step along an analog chain introduces more distortions. E.g., the recording on tape of the original performance, the reading of that performance from tape to make the LP master, the writing on the master, the transfer of the master to the actual pressed LP, etc, all the way to the physical properties of your turntable reading the LP. Add some more mastering steps in between, actually. Each step along that chain introduces more inaccuracies and deviations from the original signal.
By comparison, a digital signal can be copied with exactly 0 (ZERO) further distortions any number of times, because a 1 is always a 1 and a 0 is always a 0. Whatever differences the digitization itself introduced, that's the _only_ distortion in that chain. It can be copied and re-copied a thousand times and it won't lose anything more in the process.
3. Or 2b, if you wish: playing the same CD repeatedly won't make
I'm not saying you shouldn't sue someone that did only minor changes to your patent, of course. If just changing the number of teeth on a cog or the concentration of a substance let one bypass a patent, that would defeat the whole idea of patents too.
What I'm saying is that they shouldn't be generic blanket ideas. E.g., the patent on an antibiotic is ok, but IMHO letting people patent something as generic as "using a chemical that kills bacteria" or "using a substance that interferes with protein production in bacteria" (which is how a lot of antibiotics work) is stupid. I'm using that example because patenting "a layer that reflects one beam but lets enough of the other pass through" is really that generic. Patenting, say, Erithromycin (an antibiotic) still let, and in fact stimulated, other people come up with, say, Tetracyclin (another antibiotic) which isn't just a modification, but a whole different class of antibiotics. One is beta-lactam based, one isn't, and can target beta-lactam resistant bacteria.
_That_ is the kind of innovation that patents used to stimulate. Way X to solve a problem is now barred by a patent, go research another way to solve it. Patenting just the generic idea of solving that problem is IMHO idiotic and prevents such innovation. If someone had just patented the generic idea of an antibiotic, it would have just halted pharmaceutical research for 20 years and done us all a dis-service.
Probably because, in decending order of importance,
1. A battery doesn't need drivers or transfer data in any form or shape. So basically noone figured out how to make a battery that installs a rootkit. That may well change, though, once trusted computing gets accepted. I'm sure someone will figure out a reason why it's vital to authenticate the battery.
2. A battery can't get copied or ripped to MP3, and you can't upload it on P2P networks. So it's hard to justify -- either to the users or to your own accounting department -- why you'd need an expensive rootkit as copy protection.
3. Who needs rootkits when you can have an incendiary bomb? Already an (IIRC) USPS transport airplane is suspected to have crashed because of a Dell laptop with a Sony battery that caught fire in the hold. We also know of at least one truck that was totally destroyed by such a fire. And god knows what else. Look up the price of an airplane, and it's just entirely unnecessary to install rootkits when you can cause _that_ kinda damage by just being there in the cargo hold. Whatever damage a rootkit can cause, it's small change compared to _that_.
Actually, from what I understand, this is just one of those idea patents that we all love to hate. Most people around seem to assume that somehow vague idea patents are equivalent with software patents, but this is one of the proofs that it's not quite so.
Basically what their patent says is "you know, if you could put a layer in between that reflects wavelenght X but is transparent to wavelenght Y, you could have one laser type (hence drive) read one layer and the other laser type read the other one." Which is squarely in the "bloody obvious" category for anyone with even grade school knowledge of physics, or who ever had a black CD, or whatever. What it doesn't say is _what_ material should one put there, and which actually does that.
Basically it doesn't actually tell you "ok, mix material X with material Y, press at Z degrees, and there you go." It doesn't give you a recipe to actually make one of those dual-standard DVDs. Which, frankly, was the whole purpose of patents. It's just the idiotic kind of modern-day patent that patents a vague _idea_ and then waits to sue anyone who figures out how to implement it.
It used to be that, say, the patent for the sewing machine involved the _exact_ mechanism and needle used to make a working one. (And got invalidated when someone showed samples of such needles produced centuries ago.) Nowadays it would just involve the generic idea of a machine that sews, without actually knowing how to make one. And you'd just sue anyone who actually figured out how to make one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against patents. I know what role they (were supposed to) serve. But such idea patents are idiotic and defeating the whole purpose. The idea was to foster innovation and encourage people to study new ways to do something (or do something new.) Blanket generic idea patents just forbid everyone from even trying to compete. E.g., if you let people patent the generic idea of a machine that sews, you just discouraged everyone from inventing a different kind, that does it in a completely different (and maybe better) way. If you let people patent generic stuff like "using any substance that reflects just one wavelength", you just discouraged everyone from researching a (maybe better or cheaper) such material. It's not a research stimulus, it's a grant to be a monopoly. But I digress.
At any rate, don't expect to see DVDs phased out just yet, because someone still has to invent that material.
Actually, I somehow doubt that China or any other country is 100% composed of 100% sane and wise people, who'd _never_ be fooled by a cooky New Age cult. It's the kind of "in the Orient they're wise and do _everything_ better" idea that got us saddled with cooky pseudo-oriental cults in the west in the first place.
People are people everywhere. Some people are disillusioned and at a "well, _is_ there a higher meaning to this shit?" point, and thus easy prey to anyone who wants to sell them some fruitcake meaning to it all. And there are plenty, ranging from ruthless sociopaths with no scruples to forward their own goals (be it wealth, glory, or seeing how many people can they convince to commit suicide) to genuine schizophrenic fruitcakes, who'll come up with such a "meaning to it all" to sell them.
And if you study the history of religions in Asia, they have _millenia_ of ridiculous religions behind them. It's not all Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Hinduism in their past. They had murderous cults, sex-obsessed-to-the-extreme cults, etc, just like the rest of the world.
And in some parts of Asia they still do. There are recent events like some Indian peasant family torturing and murdering a neighbour's child and IIRC drinking his blood, just because some tantric guru told them that that it's required for some magic spell that will make them finally have a child of their own. How's that for a cooky religion you wouldn't want in your back yard?
(No, I'm not saying that India as a whole is like that, or anything racist. Just that, as I was saying, people are people everywhere. They have their gullible idiots too, just like Europe or America have theirs.)
So, basically, yes, I fully convinced that China too must have a bunch of cooky cults too. They're not the ones that make the headlines (Falun Gong is more covered in western media than some new age cult with 12 members total). It probably isn't even the reason why China persecutes all "unauthorized religions" indiscriminately. Etc. But I do believe that they too must have their new age fruitcakes. They're just humans, that's all I'm saying.
I don't think it's as much offering China any carrots, as just bending over backwards to please the local big corporations. Wouldn't want to let ethical considerations get in the way of big campaign contributions, now would we? The US policy and politics of the new millenium have dropped any coherent planning or pretense of pursuing the interest of the country as a whole, and just focused on giving corporations anything they wish, even if it means shafting society as a whole to do that.
What I'm assuming is that if a company offer _only_ various kinds of astroturfing services, then that says something about the interntions of whoever hires them. I don't know, and frankly don't care, if they'll do something good in the future. What they do here and now, the _only_ thing they offer, the _only_ thing that they ever proved, is highly unethical stuff. And that kinda gives a hint into the intentions of whoever hired them.
You can assume that if I hire an highly expensive assassin, maybe I really want a gardener, or maybe I just want a bodyguard. Because that's what all the "maybe Google hired them for something good" arguments boil down to. But that's not how the RL tends to work. If I need a good gardener, I hire someone whose credentials say just that: gardening. If I need a good bodyguard, I go to someone or to an agency specializing in that. If, of all possible people and credentials, I chose to hire someone whose only credentials are being a hitman expert, that should at least make you wonder. There's a damn good probability there that that's what I'm actually looking for.
And the same applies to Google. Sure, we can speculate that maybe they only wanted a honest to God PR campaign (as if such thing even exists), or maybe they wanted a marketting expert, or maybe they just wanted legal counsel, or whatever. In a purely theoretical world, that may even be possible, but in the real world that's not how it tends to work. In the real world, if you want a normal PR campaign, you go to some agency whose credentials and portfolio say they're PR experts. If you want honest marketting, you go to an agency which already proved its skill in honest marketting. If you want legal advice, you go to a lawyer company with a good reputation in that field. Etc. You don't go to someone whose _only_ credentials are astroturfing, and hope that they, incidentally, are secretly even better in an unrelated domain.
And if someone hires someone whose only credentials say "expert astroturfer", I don't know, it should make you at least wonder. Because regardless of theoretical possibilities, in the real world there's a damn good probability that that's exactly what they're looking for.
The argument that it's just for defense doesn't hold much water either. Defense, how?
By recognizing an astroturfing campaign? That's pretty easy to spot on your own, if you're the leading search engine and suddenly a lot of supposedly normal people start swearing loudly that MSN is the best and only.
By fighting astroturfing with astroturfing? As Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye will just make everyone blind." Fighting evil with evil does not a moral high ground make. Fighting terrorists by indiscriminate terror just makes one a terrorist too. Fighting a gangster with gangster tactics (intimidating civilians, extortion, cement shoe executions, etc) just makes one another gangster too. Fighting a liar by saturating everyone with one's own lies, just makes one a liar too. And fighting astroturfing by doing one's own astroturfing only makes one just another astroturfer.
Noone said that people can only do evil things once they start on a certain path, and I'm pretty sure that I had the example with Al Capone's soup kitchens in the message you answer to. So I'm not exactly sure where that came from, because it certainly didn't come from me.
The point is:
1. that Google's promise and motto is "do no evil". It's not "make up later if we do some evil stuff". I don't know if they'll do more good stuff later, maybe even make up for it, etc. It may even happen. But that's not the point. That's not what I was arguing. What they promised is to not do evil stuff in the first place. They better stick to that. I don't want them to make up for it later, I want them to not break it in the first place.
2. that simply paying to get some bad deed done doesn't absolve one of the moral responsibility for it.
If I were to go and get someone beat up, it doesn't matter if I do it personally or if I hire a pro to beat him up. If it's my decision, I fully bear the blame and the responsibility for it. At least from a moral perspective, I wouldn't be able to claim the moral high ground just because I paid someone to do it.
And the same applies to Google. "Do no evil" does include "don't pay others to do evil." You can't claim the moral high ground by just paying a pro to do your astroturfing.
This isn't about campaign contributions to parties, this is about hiring a company of professional astroturfers and generally dirty-tricks experts. You know, people who _are_ the evil kind that Google supposedly distanced itself from.
You can't balance _that_ like that, or not so easily. This isn't D&D. You can't say, basically, "oh, I've done 3 good deeds this month, for 4 'good' alignment points total, so I'm entitled to gut two orphans for 2 'evil' points each." RL doesn't work that way. Al Capone's kitchen soups, very good deeds as they may be, don't simply balance out that he was an evil psychopath the rest of the time.
But more importantly, Google's motto doesn't work that way. It says "do no evil", _not_ "keep the balance by doing as much evil as good stuff". So exactly how and what are they, in your opinion, balancing there? Surely not their motto and promise.
I don't care if it's for Google itself or for some political party or whatever. Evil is evil. Evil done to "balance" something else is still evil by any definition. And hiring evil people to do evil for you, is still doing evil.
We have a long history of laws and precedents, in both criminal and military justice, saying just that: you're personally responsible for the people you paid or commanded. We've had plenty of Mafia Dons trying to claim basically, "see, I never hurt a fly. It was my subordinates that shot people and threw people in lakes with cement shoes. But me? I never personally even slapped anyone." And society eventually decided that, no, it doesn't work your way. If _your_ goons did evil stuff, _you_ are responsible for that.
Or we had military commanders willing to claim basically, "nah, I never shot a civillian. It was my soldiers that shot and raped civillians. I was just standing there and watching them." And again, society decided that it doesn't work that way. If they're your subordinates, you're responsible for them. It's your duty to stop them if they do something evil.
So, ok, astroturfing isn't subject to criminal laws or anything, but from a moral standpoint it's the same thing: if Google pays to get action X done, Google is morally responsible for it. You can't claim the moral high ground by just paying others to do your evil stuff.
See, when you're paid to cry wolf, you cry wolf. Lots. Invent gazillions of imaginary wolves all over the place.
The BSA is paid to cry wolf. That's what it does for a living. It's there just to paint a bleak image where poor starving software developpers like MS or Oracle or Autodesk are losing trillions to piracy. It's there to take every single 3D Studio Max copy that some chinese kid downloaded to model a ship or skin for free mod for a $30 game, and present it as $6000 stolen from the poor starving software developpers. As a copy that would 100% surely be bought if that kid couldn't pirate it. (Never mind that that's 6 years' average salary down there, and frankly noone pays _that_ kind of money just to make a free mod.)
But even that kind of crying wolf has at least _some_ minimum touch with reality. After all, a copy pirated _is_ a copy pirated. So at some point the BSA figured out they can do better than that. Nowadays what they do is count the PCs sold and apply some bogus "for every X PCs, a copy of program Y should have been sold." E.g., for each PC, an OS should have been sold. For, say, every other PC, a copy of MS office should have been sold. Etc. Anything that ends up under their expected numbers, is taken 1-to-1 to mean money lost to piracy.
So, yeah, I wouldn't be too surprised if these PCs end up counted like that too: What, 1 million MIPS PCs sold and no MIPS OS sold? Damn pirates! That's 1 million copies of IRIX and NT 3.5 for MIPS that are pirated down there! That's billions of dollars lost by the industry and hundreds of thousands of jobs lost! Oh the humanity! Someone do something! Quick, the government do something against it!
Yes, privacy is generally important. But, no, that doesn't mean you have to be a complete tinfoil nutcase about it.
E.g., I'd be hard pressed to see anything bad in what I buy on Amazon. If a prosecutor with a search warrant wants to see that this month I've preordered Neverwinter Nights 2 on Amazon, by all means, be my guest.
Mind you, I don't see any use in Amazon's recommendations either. But if anyone finds them useful, it's bloody stupid to ask -- nay, _demand_ -- that they give that up in the name of privacy. It's just asking to give up something useful (for them), in return for zero actual benefit.
E.g., I actually _want_ FilePlanet to keep knowing it's me, so I can download through the non-queue servers I subscribed to. I _don't_ want some idiotic piece of "privacy protection" software to keep confusing the site into thinking I'm not even logged in all the time. (Don't laugh, MacAffee did exactly that.) And, yes, if any prosecutor wants to find out that I've downloaded some UT mods and levels, by all means, knock yourself out.
Now I _might_ want to hide some other stuff, even if it's not criminal. E.g., I don't want my parents to find out my IM number, because, frankly, they're the kind of smothering intrusive idiots that would be all over me 24 hours a day if they could. In fact, they actually did before, on the old number. (And I'm in the mid-30, living on my own, half a country aws.)
Basically there are two _very_ distinct kinds of data: that which I'd rather keep secret, and that which, for all I'm concerned, I actually _want_ the web site to know. There are also two very different kinds of web-sites: those I'd rather be anonymous on, and those which, by all means, I _want_ them to know it's me. They're very distinct, and it's up to me to decide which is which. And for whom.
The view that it's either-or, that either you're against the very principle of privacy _or_ you're anonymous all the time, is such an OCPD view that it's not even funny. The real world has more nuances and special cases there. (Or in any other problem.)
And I do believe that what TFA discovered is that currently the available software makes it a pain in the butt to actually deal with those nuances and special cases. A lot of software (and not only privacy software) is based, basically, on a black-and-white all-or-nothing OCPD view of the world, and/or needs more work than it's worth (to a non-geek) to configure all the exceptions and special cases.
Oh, right, that's how the advertising bubble (driving the dot-com bubble) worked. Let's subject the user to hundreds of thousands of different, but still untargetted, ads, and surely he'll end up buying everything. Right? Heck, instead of having just 1 ad on the main page, let's have a dozen different ads on each page. It's good if the user gets a lot of product information, right?
Needless to say, it didn't work that way. Being bombarded by a lot of untargetted stuff just got people to mentally filter those out. Whereas in the days of 1 (and always the same) banner on the main page, people actually clicked on them, nowadays most of us don't even notice them any more.
Plus, you know what kind of a downward slope that started, as each generation of untargetted ads had to be more obtrussive and in-your-face to be noticed at all. Pop-ups, full-page ads, layers on top of the actual page, became actually necessary because that bombardment actually desensitized people to the point where a normal banner isn't even noticed any more.
So, I dunno, it may be that the privacy advocates _are_ right there. Whether you're worried about the privacy or not, the problem still is that it's for naught. It's a rehash of an idiotic idea we've already seen before, and which _didn't_ actually provide any actual benefit. Not for the ad providers, not for the web masters, not for the users. I can even understand risking your privacy and a slippery slope in return for some actual benefit, but it seems stupid to me to just give it up when there are no benefits whatsoever.
Actually, if I understand it right, all this would do is make sure you get to see more ads (by reducing the probability to see the same one again), not actually target them to you. The system won't even know you're a guy, in fact, but just whether it detected your bluetooth device before, and during which ads.
So it won't necessarily mean you get " Lean Mean Fat-grilling Machine" infomercials. It might as well mean that instead of seeing a Tampax ad 10 times, you'll see ads for Tampax, OB, SlimFast, WonderBra and some epilation machine, 2 times each.
Judging by the quote in TFA, it doesn't even try to peg them in any particular category/skill/whatever-abusable, so I'm still at a loss as to how that stereotype is bad. He just says that Cubans and Puerto-Ricans are "hot". Which, unless I'm missing some vital context information there, is just a personal impression/preference/whatever.
It may surprise you, but different people like different things. And some have some fetish/preference/whatever for a certain race, appearance, trait, whatever. Some people have a fetish about asian women, for example, and think they're "hot". (Even some which most other people would consider at best average-looking or downright homely.) Some like blacks. Some like redheads. Whatever.
It's just a personal fetish or preference, and doesn't actually peg them in any job/skill/category. It's not even anything like, "blacks are good at basketball". It doesn't actually say what they're good at, nor what they're bad at.
Plus, some things are said in private that are just making conversation, not some bigotted dogma. E.g., I might say to a Swede that I like Swedes and admire their history (and to some extent I do), but that doesn't mean I'm actually fixated on it, nor that I'd go nazi-like and start discriminating against against people who aren't of nordic descent, tall and blonde. It's just something which seems like a compliment at the time (and not even a good one at that, but, hey, I'm a nerd), but the rest of the time it's at best a mild idle interest. I don't go and hang posters of viking warriors on the walls of my room or anything.
Heck, even stuff which would count as borderline discrimination in a general context can be used as a compliment in a private conversation, if you're willing to risk that the other one might be offended instead. E.g., saying to a Russian coleague who is a mathematician that Russia sure produces a lot of good mathematicians, might even count as a compliment. Not even necessarily to his "race", but to his culture and the system that, for its other deffects and brutal oppression, did invest in education and in convincing people that academic achievements are _good_ and a thing to be proud of. Yes, it's technically splitting people into categories, but it's (A) meant as just a private compliment, and (B) not something that's anywhere near being dogma or reason for prejudice and discrimination the rest of the time. I can assure you that I can admire a good mathematician regardless of their country of origin.
And it seems to me like the governor's comment there fully fits this category too. It was said in private (or at least not intended for the public anyway), to someone who _is_ in the category he talks about, and, most importantly, that someone did take it as a compliment.
And frankly, I don't see any greater good coming to society if we get to the point where you can't even say what you like, in a private conversation, without offending someone. I mean, seriously, what next? Should I be affraid of saying that I find redheads sexy, for fear of offending blondes and brunettes? (Or even discovering that some redhead is offended too.) Or what? Exactly how does that help us all?
I've seen big corporation programming consultants for which changing a URL was an unheard of concept, so I'm less surprised that a layperson considers it elite hacking.
Seriously. Being as generic as I can for NDA reasons, let's just say that the corporation I work for paid good bucks to a BIG corporation's consultants to write a web application for them. Well, not even the whole app, but think more or less just the part where you register and set your data and preferences, with a bit of a hierarchy thrown in. (Some users could be, basically, managing others and giving or revoking rights to them.)
The thing ended up years overdue, and needing a whole server farm just to support a modest number of users. (The joys of clueless Buzzword Driven Architecture at its finest, really.) They had to be started and shutdown in a given sequence too, as the modules on one machine depended on those on a second, which depended on those on a third, and so on. As a result, shutting down and restarting the whole system (e.g., for maintenance) took almost a whole day. But that's not the important part. The important part were the endless security issues, such as:
1. yes, failure to account for URL editing. Rights were checked when generating the URLs on a page (e.g., which products, messages, whatever, you can click on), but not when actually accessing the linked page. So you could literally access any data in the database by just typing in its ID in one of those URLs.
2. rights escalation. Did I mention editing URLs? The same went for the "change your password" page. You could just type in another user's id, change their password, and log in as that user. The "super-user" had id 0. 'Nuff said.
3. wide open to cross-site scripting exploits. They hadn't figured out how to quote strings when displaying them on a web page. (Then when they "fixed" that, it encoded them twice and displayed them broken. So they disabled the fix again and tried to downplay the risks of anyone injecting JavaScript.)
4. had obviously never heard of non-repudiation. (Security isn't just about who you let in, but also making reasonably sure who signed that contract or generally did what.) While in the old system a deleted user was just, basically, flagged as disabled, their clever system just deleted the user and his data. And because of foreign key constraints, it cascaded through the tables and erased any data connected to that user. Messages they posted or sent, contracts they signed, everything. Users could delete themselves too. (If anyone has trouble understanding why this is dangerous, think what you could do if your bank had something like that. Take a big loan, move the money somewhere else, delete your user.)
And so on, and so forth.
So, well, if "experts" hadn't heard of such elementary stuff, I can't be that surprised that the governor or a couple of journalists consider them advanced hacking.
... so it IS the same old complaint, then?
1. The same things could be said and _have_ been said before.
E.g., a Pope actually considered the crossbow to be such a devastating new weapon that he forbade, upon penalty of excommunication, the use against fellow christians. I'm sure someone somewhere was feverishly praying that people have the mental agility and cultural perspective to not use such a destructive new weapon wrong.
E.g., someone thought that the Armageddon is nigh if the good Christians don't appease God by freeing His tomb from the infidels' occupation. It proved quite a popular idea too, as the exodus of people to join the first Crusade showed. I'm sure a lot of people prayed that others have the wisdom and cultural perspective to do the right thing there... i.e., take arms and prevent the end of the world at the hands of a pissed-off God.
Sometimes they were even right too. The consequences, for example, of greed to get the wares out of a ship before the quarantine ended, has caused a Black Death outbreak in Marseille that wiped out some 75% of the city and the whole county it was in. So, yeah, consequences for bad judgment could be dire in old times too.
Humanity has somehow survived anyway.
2. Again, the "connecting the dots" has been before, at least for the last 3000 years. Probably longer, but that's how long we have written records about it. Someone felt the dots connecting when starting from all sorts of other stuff. E.g., there's been quite some heavy-duty dot-connecting that caused the aforementioned Crusades. Don't take it as an insult. Connecting dots is, after all, a human trait and one of the big advantage the species has. But then again, in this particular domain it's invariably been wrong before, so I'm still not too concerned.
You know, this has got to be said, but for most of the human history, "kids" just stopped being kids at various ages between 12 and 16.
E.g., in ancient Egypt, the age of marriage was 12 for girls and 15 for boys. That's it. That was the age when you'd be supposed to be mature enough to care for your own family, not just for an iPod. Forget having your mom pack you lunch and watch you playing with dolls. At age 12 as a girl you'd be supposed to cook lunch for your husband, and raise your own real kids, not dolls.
And you can find examples where even more responsibility was bestowed upon people at such ages. Ivan The Terrible IIRC became tzar at the age of 16. (Although that's just the age when he took a new title. He was Grand Duke of Muskowy earlier.) At 16 years old Alexander The Great was left a regent, i.e., someone with the full powers of a King, as his father went abroad to war. Etc. There are plenty of generals and kings and admirals that got their power and shaped the destiny of nations even earlier than that, a lot of them as early as 12 or 13.
So basically what I'm saying is that:
1. If all that consumer electronics do is getting some people to act like adults in their teen years... GOOD! Biologically the _are_ adults, and have the brain and body of an adult. (It's not even a human-only thing. Any other species of mammal is the same: the age at which the body becomes fertile is the age when the brain and body have evolved, and the animal is perfectly capable of fending for itself and raising its own offspring.) Forcing someone to keep behaving and thinking like a kid at that age, is more detrimental than having them start acting like an adult.
2. If all the evil adult stuff there is that they get to watch TV and listen to music on an iPod... GOOD! Compared to what humans had to do in their teen years for _millions_ of years, that's still a pampered existence.
The modern aberration of artifficially forcing someone to be a kid until their 20's, is just a speck at the scale of human existence. Even looking back only 10,000 years, to the time of the first cities, a century of redefined "childhood" barely covers 1% of that time. For the other 99% of that time interval, that "kid" would be at the age where he gets to raise his own family, work in the fields, and occasionally take arms and fight for his country. Not just mock combat with toy swords, but real combat with sharp steel swords. Deadly stuff. So if all the dangers of the modern era are an iPod, a cell phone, and a Nintendo DS, heh, I don't see that much harm coming from that.
Well, see, that's just the thing.
So you found one thing to support the idea that _this_ generation of kids is in trouble. But that's actually the whole funny thing: so did the previous generations. Every single generation had their own bogeyman they waved around as the downfall of the next generations. Every single generation found some X that they didn't have and the new generation has, and latched onto it as _the_ thing that will doom us all. Pretty much no matter how far you could go in time, you'd find generation N-2 whining, bitching and moaning about generation N. And if you went two more generations back, you'd find the N-2 generation presented as the decadent and doomed ones by generation N-4. And so on.
So you think that this one is certainly _the_ one that finally is a real threat. Funny thing is, so did they. They were invariably wrong. What makes you so sure, then, that your bogeyman is any different?
Even your argument that "Basically, the standard of living for most of modern western society is now so high that most of us are living like (or better than) the aristrocracy of the not very distant past." isn't actually that new. The same could be said at any point in time before. And probably some old fart at the time actually said it.
I can think of a _lot_ of inventions and changes in the past (starting with the fire, the wheel, pottery, animal husbandry, irrigation, etc, all the way to modern stuff like antibiotics) which had exactly the effect you describe: the resulting standard of living was better than even aristocracy lived before that.
In fact, most of those had bigger effects on the standard of living back then than consumer electronics have now. E.g., I bet that the effects of a tribe's discovering the fire were a lot bigger than the effects of the iPod. We're not just talking "it kept them warm", but cooking also allowed them to eat a _lot_ more vegetables than ever before. In a nutshell, yes, in one fell swoop, it raised the standard of living to a point that their grandfathers couldn't have even imagined before.
So it's happened before. And it's a safe complaint that someone has voiced the same complaint at the time. "Bla, bla, bla, people have it too easy these days, they're growing weak, flacid, weak-minded, obese, etc." I can just imagine an old caveman bitching all day about how these young hoodlums staying warm and cooking vegetables on fire lack the mental stimulation of _having_ to track an antelope through the snow. Uphill both ways. And we liked it that way. How the whole civilization will grow weak and stupid because of relying on fire instead of solving problems the old fashioned ways. How people will become loners and unable to function in society because they can just sleep near the fire instead of having to huddle together to stay warm in winter. Etc.
Or take weaponry. _Millions_ of years the primitive hominids had to basically play a game of stealth, and figure out ingenious ways to get a dead gazelle from the sabertooth tiger without becoming the second course for the tiger. Just because they had no natural weapons to actually kill either the tiger or the gazelle. And then suddenly one of them goes and invents a stone-tipped spear or knife, and everyone has all the meat they can hunt _and_ a means of self-defense, with no mental challenge whatsoever involved. Just hold the blunt end and thrust the pointy end at the prey or tiger. Gee, surely that will make the next generations stupid and weak.
But, again, the funny thing is that all that never actually happened. There have been bigger changes, bigger jumps in the life standard, and none of them actually made humanity become weak and stupid. In fact, some of the things I've mentioned (fire, stone tools, etc), we actually have evidence that they resulted in a _higher_ brain capacity. What makes you so sure that yours will be any different?
Mind you, I'd take that "study" with a bucket of salt anyway, since it's mostly hand-waving and mostly following the structure of a political speech (irrelevant truth, truisms to build momentum, and then sailing clean over an unsupported conclusion and hoping the people got used to nodding to everything you say by now) than anything resembling science. It also doesn't actually say anything about the sample, it makes correlations between curves that peak at fundamentally different ages (i.e., in which people of the same age actually behave fundamentally different), etc. But even if we make a leap of faith and take it at face value, what it _really_ says is that a 35 age of exclusion is as stupid as it gets.
Yup, but that linked PDF actually makes that confusion in reverse, so it sorta evens out. (In an idiotic way.) The only things they actually do show some data for are inventions (i.e., innovations) and painters, Jazz musicians and authors (i.e., creativity.) The supposed _productivity_ drop is by and large just handwaved in, without any actual data to support that assertion.
The problems with that article are basically as follows:
1. It doesn't say what you seem to think it does. For that matter, it contradicts its own quotes and anecdotes given in support of that idea. If you look at what it does say, it says that the peak of the curve is at 35.4 years old and most inventions are made in a 12 year interval around that. I.e., roughly between 29 and 41.
I.e., pay attention: the actual data says that someone aged 25 is _less_ likely to innovate than someone aged 35 or 40.
In other domains it gets even funnier. If you look at the "age-genius" curve in painters and Jazz musicians, it peaks at 40. For authors it peaks at 50. In fact, if you look at the authors curve, someone aged 25 is about as likely to be a creative genius as someone aged 75.
So it seems to me utter bullshit to take that as evidence that "only the young are innovative/creative/whatever." At best what it says is, basically, "middle-aged people are more creative". I mean, seriously, by what criterion _do_ you define 50 (the peak of creative genius for authors) as "young"? Or take the upper half of the curve there and you get something like 30 to 70 years old when the best novels are written. How _can_ one define that as "young" or supportive of the idea that young people are more creative, is simply mind-boggling.
2. Treating it as "innovators can _only_ be young" is bullshit anyway. Even going by their graphs, they have data going all the way to 90 years old. So even someone that age, yes, _can_ and occasionally did make scientiffic breakthroughs, wrote excellent novels or composed great music.
3. I'm suspicious of studies where they hand-wave in conclusions and explanations unsupported by _any_ data.
E.g., take blaming the decline on marriage and kids. You'd think that most people are married (legally or de-facto by having a stable girlfriend) long before reaching the age of 50. Most authors I can think of were married. Ok, that's just anecdote, but so is their inferrence. That is actually the whole point: where is the data to support that kind of assertion? Where are the graphs correlating marriage/kids/whatever to inventions? If they're going to make that correlation, then show me the data, not just a bogus assertions pulled out of the ass.
Ditto for postulating that it's because of some anti-social tendencies in the teens and 20's, when the peak is anywhere between 35 and 50 depending on the curve, is simply idiotic. Given the age interval where that actually happens, at best you could blame it on mid-life crisis, if anything. But at any rate, if they're going to correlate genius to anti-social tendencies, again: show me the data. See how many of those people got parking tickets, jaywalking fines, speeding tickets, got reprimanded at work, etc. If there actually was an anti-social rebellious tendency driving them, then it can't have been 100% channeled into science or art.
Plus, it's important to know such things. If anti-social rebellious attitudes actually correlate with creativity and genius, then maybe we can simply stop demanding conformity and ties. Encourage them to be non-conformists for longer. Stuff like that. Is it really age, or can you encourage that attitude to stay alive and kicking longer? You can't just handwave it in, handwave in a corelation to age, and have your neatly packed conclusion. Where's the data?
4. It skips over other very important factors. E.g., life expectancy, diseases, etc. If you're going to plot the curve all the way to the 90, then I can tell you that most people would be dead by then, and a lot would be senile by then. So does that tappering of the number of great inventions/songs/novels in the 60's and 70's happen because people lose their creativity _or_ simply because people start to die off? The only way such a graph would be meaningful is if they compensated for that. But they don't do that. Bullshit pseudo-science at its finest, really.
5. It's just one article, and other than the pretty graphs, it's very light on data. E.g., there is no mention of who _are_ the 280 scientists they plot there, and by what criterion were they picked. You can argue or correlate whatever you want, if you can cherry-pick your sample to support it.
I live in Germany and there are lots of new business being started each year. Some companies are created, some go bankrupt, same as in the USA, and looking at the numbers (including unemployment levels), I can't really notice any evidence that the sistem down here works any worse. I keep hearing about those kinds of theoretical problems, but they're invariably either (A) based on false assumptions, or (B) not like that in practice.
E.g., let me assure you that you _can_ fire people. I don't know what America's propaganda machine may have told you, but people are hired and fired every day, in all jobs I can think of. Heck, I had coleagues who got fired. Social protection _doesn't_ mean "you can't fire anyone", and it never did. You may have to give them some notice in advance, so they have time to find another job, but that's it. (They'll get unemployment money if they don't, but you're not stuck with them.)
And even that isn't as scary as it may sound. Most people get a few months of a "trial period" at the beginning of their job, during which they can be fired instantly, if you so wish. But to keep things fair, in that time they too can leave you without giving you any notice, so most employers actually prefer to keep that interval reasonably short. So in your restaurant example, you'd get plenty of time to find out if that cook is too slow for your restaurant. If he is, just fire him and get another.
So basically that whole story is just the kind of mis-information I was talking about. The USA corporate PR machine makes it sound like here all sorts of evil anti-business stuff happens, when in practice none of that is true. And then otherwise smart people believe that and argue based on some axioms that are just false and just propaganda bull.
Additionally, here's a small problem with the much used "it creates employment" argument: look at unemployment over here, and you may notice that it's not much more of a problem than in the USA. So I'm open to the possibility that the laws here put some kind of hurdles in the way of creating employment, but, well, then they can't be too big hurdles, because exactly as much employment is created as we need. So the problem is?
Additionally, while IANAL, and don't know exactly what your friend was talking about, I can assure you that there are _plenty_ of accountants for hire to do your taxes (personal or as a small business). I don't know how much harder it is to start something like that, but it can't be too horribly hard, since all those people did it.
It may be that they need a lawyer at one point or another -- and it's a good idea anyway, even in the USA -- but I don't think it means you need them as your full-time employee. Same as in the USA when someone says "get a lawyer" or "I need to talk to my lawyer", they don't mean "my" as in they hired one full-time 8-hour a day lawyer that doesn't do anything else. It just means they're paying for a lawyer's time and counsel, as needed.
It's sorta funny seeing all the "having any responsibility/regulations/protection/etc would KILL the economy, cause huge costs for the consumers, bla, bla, bla" scare theories coming from the USA, because for most of them can easily be disproved by just casting your eyes over the Atlantic.
Privacy laws? Check. Companies around here have to be responsible with user data and are explicitly forbidden from selling it around. Guess what? It didn't really cause much of an economic impact. Chances are I can get a cell phone contract down here cheaper than you can get it in the USA, and get a better deal (coverage, service, etc) too. Forbidding the telcos from raping the user's privacy for a quick buck didn't actually do that much to the prices.
Emissions controls? Check. Nope, it didn't kill industry at all to put a filter and be responsible with the crap they dump in the atmosphere. Look around you how many cars come from Germany or Japan which _did_ sign the Kyoto treaty on CO2 emissions for example, and then how many more are from former US car manufacturers that are now owned by a German corporation. The folks with the emission controlls not only didn't go bankrupt, but actually did better. Go figure.
Real social security and employee/union rights? Check. Nope, it _didn't_ bankrupt the economy, it _didn't_ push whole countries into corruption and poverty, and it _didn't_ cause half the country to give up work and mooch off social security. Go figure. We still have unemployment and inflation where we want them even after, what? 60+ years of real social security? (Yes, inflation and unemployment are actually wanted, even in the USA. The two are linked, so pushing one down makes the other rise. So any government can only pick a point that looks acceptable on that curve, and try to keep the economy there.) As a nice side-effect, it tends to keep criminality low too (at least on mainland Europe), since if you don't push people under the poverty limit, they have a helluva lot less incentive to go mug someone for money. So it actually made Europe a pretty damn nice place to live in.
Consumer rights? Check. The economy keeps working just as well even if you don't need to battle in court all the time to keep yourself from being shafted by the corporations. Not only it didn't hurt the industry and commerce, it actually helped them, since it also put a cork on blatantly frivolous lawsuits.
Real anti-trust regulation, enforced systematically? (As opposed to the shameful farce that MS's anti-trust trial was in the USA.) Check. Yep, the economy still works just as well. Even without the governments bending over and taking it up the ass to please corporations.
Etc.
In practice, the economy adapted graciously to all that, and more. All the doom and gloom that supposedly would befall us all if we put any limits on CEOs, somehow never actually happened. Some of it has had more than 60 years to happen, and strangely enough, it never did so far. Go figure.
Basically it sorta cracks me up when I hear the kind of "giving us any responsibilities or limiting our power in any way would ruin the economy" bullshit that comes from the USA's corporate psychopaths and their apologists. It's like watching a kid arguing why he should get a lollypop, and what doom and gloom will befall everyone if he doesn't get one. It's really that disconnected from reality.
But at least those I can understand. What's sad is seeing otherwise intelligent people from over there actually believing that crap.