Yes. Not many know this, but the orignal Socratric dialogues were written in Greek hx0r and the g00d city would have been ruled by the l33t. So, clearly, down moderating some pissant malcontent on/. is morally equivalent to killing Socrates.
That's just the thing: they too thought that Socrates was a pissant malcontent. A pretty annoying and disruptive one too. And he was teaching their children to be pissant malcontents too.
There is a big difference between critiquing an idea or conception about the world, and critiquing a person directly.
Rather than saying that Gallieo flamed the pope, I would say he was going after the official church vision of the world. The Pope decided to take that challenge as a threat to the church. I would say that the Pope overreacted in this case.
Dude, read that again: the pope had actually _encouraged_ him to publish his new theory.
There _have_ been narrow-minded officials of the church (e.g., Cardinal Bellarmine who had forbidden him in 1616 to defend heliocentrism), and even popes. So I'm not saying that the Church as a whole was all scientific or anything. But Pope Urban VIII was not one of them. He was actually pretty open-minded renaissance kind of guy (well, in as much as possible for a church official.) Plus, he was a friend and admirer of Galileo's (well, until he got flamed, anyway.) Previously, while still only Cardinal Barberini, he had actually supported Galileo in 1616 and opposed Bellarmine.
And how Galileo repaid that, well, I've already written that, read that paragraph again. It wasn't just attacking Geocentrism (which, as mentioned, the pope had actually allowed him to.) He literally made fun of the pope, by mis-representing his position, distorting his words, and putting them into the mouth of a ridiculous character called The Stupid. No matter how I want to look at it, that's not about science, it's a personal attack. He _was_ attacking the person, not just the Geocentrism idea.
The only thing I'll agree with is that Pope _did_ overreact, and did a bit of abuse of power and of justice in the process too. They had a screwed-up idea of separating the powers, back then, mostly because the various monarchs had reacted very unfavourably (and sometimes violently) when the popes had tried to dominate them on secular maters too. So the church had jurisdiction _only_ over matters of faith. The pope did an 180 degree turn and made Galileo's position a matter of faith, just so he could drag him before his own judges _and_ forbid the offensive book internationally. Otherwise he would have had to leave it to the secular authorities.
But, anyway, seriously, imagine if I were to pull a Galileo maneuver on your message. Quote your sentences prefixed by, say, "Stupid Guy says:". Distort them as I see fit. Ridicule them as some retarded thing that can't even follow elementary logic. Regardless of what scientific or historical message I'd promote with that maneuver, it still doesn't excuse that kind of flamebait, and it still doesn't make it anything else than flaming.
Well, that's sorta the whole point: they're not the same thing, so _think_ before reaching for the handy-dandy categorization.
To us, Socrates sounds certainly like a smart guy who was just trying to make them think. To them his asking people uncomfortable question was just disruptive. Both to society, and to (the established socially-acceptable forms of) dialogue. They seemed to think he fits your "troll" definition to the letter.
They had their own acceptable ways to hold a debate, and for example sophistry was the norm. The aim wasn't even remotely to be _right_ or to determine the truth. It was to get people to nod at your string of fallacies and emotionally charged metaphors. Socrates's insisting on _truth_ and virtue was actively disruptive to their kind of dialogue. His rejection of might-makes-right and tradition-makes-right arguments were disrupting and rejecting about 90% of the political and philosophical debate in Athens at the time.
Was he right? Probably. Did they think he's disruptive and getting in the way of a civilized dialogue? Hell yeah.
And without even getting into something as complex as Socrates's problem, you can see false categorizations in the present day, every day. The most common being that if you disagree with me or point out flaws in anything I've said or done, then most certainly:
- you're just a troll, or
- you're some kind of enemy, or
- you're trying to bully me, or
- you're a shill for the opposition, or
- you're in denial and secretly loving what you openly criticize, or
- you're too stupid to realize I'm right, or about a dozen equally unflattering escape routes.
Especially questioning anything that is already the base of some cognitive dissonance, is a sure way to not provoke much more thought than "auugh, this guy is the enemy and is trying to hurt me."
But you can see the same applied to things as unimportant as games (if you don't like the _exact_ same games I do, then you're probably in denial, a troll or a shill), bug reports (see the recent "how do you deal with bullies? some guy reported _two_ bugs in my software, so he's clearly trying to bully me!" case on Ask Slashdot), fashion, and the Gods know what else. Probably right as we speak, about a million people on the Internet are making just that kind of an inferrence.
So basically that's what I'm trying to say: they are quite different things, so _think_ before reaching for the comfortable hand-waved explanation. What seems like a clear cut case of trolling, _might_ be someone who actually has a point.
I don't see any inherent contradiction to reconcile.
As long as you're aware that it's just a game (and everyone over an IQ of 50 is), either sex or violence doesn't matter, essentially.
Outside of the game or the movie, the concerns and attitudes of some societies and cultures _are_ weird. It's funny to see people demonizing sex, as some uber-danger to society and uber-deadly-sin, while at the same time lionizing murder and murderers. It seems to me like some priorities are awfully screwed up there, if you care more about some guy going down on his wife (if I'm not mistaken, it's still a crime in a couple of counties in USA) more than about his killing a perfect stranger, whose only fault is being of another race, religion, or sexual orientation.
It starts from school, where we essentially learn that:
- any king/consul/emperor/pharaoh who waged wars of aggression is a _great_ monarch, while anyone who minded his own business is a weak "roi faineant" (do-nothing king)
- anyone who centralized the power in his own hand, and stripped his nobles and citizens of rights and power, is a _great_ monarch, anyone who as little as delegated is seen as some weak king that helped his country go to heck
Etc.
It's not just whether it's censored or not in a movie or game. It's the mentality behind asking for it to be censored, or conversely asking for more of it. That's what worries me.
And I'll particularly single out the mentality, reflected in movies and games too, that one must somehow "prove he's a Man" or "prove he has Balls" by being an aggressive retard. There is nothing to prove. Look down in your pants, and that proves it if you have balls or not. Have a feel if still not convinced. That's it. Proving one is a Man, well, if you want to prove it beyond all doubt, get a blood sample and a microscope. If you see Y chromosomes in those cells, it's most definitely male, if you see only X chromosomes, then most definitely not. It's that simple.
I joke partially. The issue is that whole cultures are centered around the idea that a male _must_ be somehow aggressive. Yes, testosterone, brain wiring, etc. We know. But before all else, a human is a very programmable machine and reactions and behaviours are more determined by that programming ("enculturation") than anything biological. If that guy ends up an aggressive idiot, it'll be more because society told him that that's what he must be, than all chemical reactions inside combined.
Again, I'm not harping against movies and games, I'm complaining about the culture in which they happen.
So, yes, if we all were to change anything, then maybe we should be more concerned about violence than about sex. And _if_ we all decide that we must censor _something_, well, then maybe again we should start with the violence. Not because the censorship itself will do anything, but maybe an acknowledgement that yes, that's the bigger problem, and no, we don't find that kind of role models and gender roles to be cool any more. Not because the game or movie itself is teaching junior to be an aggressive idiot, but because maybe it'll hammer the message in everyone else's head to stop teaching him that that's what's cool.
Well, if you want to think about history, Socrates was essentially executed for trolling. He kept saying things that challenged the status quo and accepted behaviours, and made his countrymen uneasy. So they executed him.
Later we had people like, say, Galileo. What nowadays is turned into Science-vs-Religion, was actually largely an issue of flaming a totalitarian monarch. The pope was originally Galileo's friend, and encouraged him to write his book. He just asked that he writes about both his system and the new one, and shows what the old one doesn't explain and his does. Pretty much in line with today's scientific method and what we now call Occam's Razor. But Galileo was the stereotypical self-important socially-inept nerd and obviously didn't deal well with the pope's not immediately seeing that he's right and everyone else is wrong. The book took the pope's words, distorted them and put them in the mouth of a character called Simplicius (basically: The Stupid). And that character lives up to his name, by being unable to use even elementary logic right, and getting tripped by his own fallacies. It also incidentally painted the pope as the uber-defender of a model, where he actually was very neutral at the time. (What we today call a strawman.)
In other words: Galileo flamed the pope in public.
What followed was not as much science vs religion, as just abuse of power. The pope didn't took lightly to the thorough flaming, and actually did make the heliocentric model official church position just so he can prosecute Galileo.
I propose to have Galileo sanctified as patron saint of socially inept nerds and flame warriors;)
But it does kinda illustrate another point I'm trying to make: one man's flaming or trolling, is another man's valuable (if mis-guided) contribution.
Galileo was actually right about his heliocentric model and about the moons of planets, even if his way of presenting it was flawed and annoying.
Socrates, if we're to believe his disciple and biographer, actually did have a point about his contemporary culture. But those who mindlessly adhered to it, felt trolled by someone questioning what they do. (And funnily enough, pulled one of the first "think of the children!" maneuvers in the process. One of the main accusations against Socrates was that he poisoned the minds of the young with his teaching them to question the status quo.)
And you can see the phenomenon in modern times too. You can see people flying off the hook and going into "OMG, I'm being flamed/cyber-bullied/whatever" mode, if you as little as point out a bug in their software or web site. Or since NYT mentions asking newbie questions as a troll tactic, I'll ask the reverse: how many genuine newbies got flamed for asking a newbie question?
Or you can see the phenomenon on Slashdot too. There's plenty of using -1 Troll or -1 Flamebait or -1 Overrated as, basically, "I don't like that idea and want to censor it." Or occasionally, as some comically impotent revenge for not agreeing with someone in a whole other thread. I've even seen quotes from physics textbooks modded as one of the three.
Actually, if you want the real black sheep of that series, try Sim City Societies, a.k.a., Sim City V. It was kinda the opposite: over-simplified to the point of being absurd and meaningless.
It wasn't just a numbers game, it was a _totals_ game. You needed X points creativity to place one artsy-town house. That's ok, you just need to place Y graffiti walls for those, but it doesn't actually matter where. It can be in a bunker under the ocean floor, for all those people care. Ditto for just about anything else. You need X1 police-state points for a secret police HQ, if you go for oppressive totalitarian town. You need X2 wealth points to build a bank.
The whole thing is just a game of producers and consumers, and the only condition is that you must produce more than you consume. But even there the relationships are actually weird. A secret police HQ for example, actually consumes police state points, so logically it makes your city less oppressive. A bank actually consumes wealth points, so logically it would make your town poorer. Etc.
Worse yet, because the game actually encourages you to stick with one theme, you'll likely need to manage _one_ number. Yay.
Ok, there is one more number: workers vs work-places. Even that's screwed up. Shops don't actually have employees. Buildings are divided hard into:
- houses: they provide workers
- service buildings, like shops: they neither add nor use workers, but they satisfy some need
- industry: they provide employment, but otherwise have no influence on morale
The division is weird at times. E.g., banks are industry: they provide employment, but otherwise are of no use to your citizens. It gets worse: there are even kinds of _shops_ which are categorized as industry, so they don't actually sell anything. And viceversa.
Things like education quotient, happiness factors, pollution, etc, are gone too. E.g., placing a school doesn't really do anything for your city's education, it just makes kids happy (I'm guessing the designer doesn't have kids of school age;), provides some kinds of points, and subtracts other kinds of points. So basically it's again at most needed for the totals to build something else. Ditto for, say, slum or police state themes. They don't actually make the citizens unhappier or anything, they just provide or consume some points.
In a nutshell, it's no longer a city simulator, it's a fancy drawing program with some elementary maths attached. It lets you paint a city in a certain theme, but not much more, and not in a much more interesting way than doing it in Gimp. (In fact, maybe less. Wrestling Gimp's interface can be a challenge and game by itself;)
So to cut this rant short(er) and get to the actual point: well, I see your point about too _much_ depth and micro-management. But I hope the next one will have at least _some_ depth and complexity. Something as shallow as a puddle on the sidewalk, can be even less fun to play.
Well, I'll go ahead and say I have only skimmed RTFA, but it seems to me that:
1. I'm not sure if the biggest problem is mental. I mean, if she can blog from that bed, it seems to me like there's plenty you can do with a computer to keep yourself entertained. And in a space capsule/station/colony-ship, I'd assume there is stuff to do.
2. She complains about actual physical problems resulting from staying in that position for days. In her own words:
was lucky to have only a few, namely the BACKACHE on days 2-3. Everyone responds differently, but lower back pain is a constant. It's tempting to stick with shallow breaths, because deep, diaphragmatic breathing... HURTS. Curling foetally helps us get to sleep when we need to, and we can have Tylenol at this stage. Rolling from side to side alleviates it for short periods, but the days seemed slooow. My new best friend was my heating pad -- in fact, if anyone had tried to take it from me, they'd have lost a hand. I've heard stories of some extreme cases of past subjects having bad acid reflux or vomiting, so I'm eating slowly and chewing more, since I definitely don't want either of those. With the feet higher than the head, digestion is distinctly altered, so the dieticians drop our caloric intake.
Those sound like real and very painful problems, not something you can just meditate away. Learning to live in the present is good and fine, but the pain and damage to your body are real.
I mean, geesh, reading that even breathing hurts, doesn't sound like fun at all.
Anyway, generally, when it comes to pain, learning to just live with it (by will power, meditation, or taking a ton of painkillers) is just about the dumbest thing one can do. Pain is body telling you that something is awfully wrong, and (potentially serious) damage may occur. Ignoring that warning isn't something you'll thank yourself about later.
If your back says it hurts more in this or that position, then move right away, don't just ignore it. Some shifted vertebrae or disks because you ignored it, can get you anywhere between a looong time of pain later and outright severed nerves and paralysis.
There are, of course, exceptions, but as a fallible rule of thumb, it's a good start. If it hurts, don't ignore it, don't just learn to live with it.
3. If you want a personal anecdote about what I read there, bad acid reflux is painful by itself. And can even put a nasty wound in your esophagus if it's constantly subjected to acid. Remember, your stomach is made to deal with having acid in it, the rest of your body is just the kind of flesh that that acid is supposed to dissolve and break up.
But pray that it never goes up your esophagus, and back down the other pipe, to your lungs. I've had the personal mis-fortune of experiencing that once, and it's a very very horrible experience.
So, again, it's something I'd take very seriously, not learn to live with the present.
Now that's at least somewhat less likely to happen if their head is lower than their lungs (again, according to TFA) but I'm not sure it's outright impossible. But other problems are just as possible, and some even due to that position.
Anyway, again, you don't want to be at peace with whatever happens to you, in a passive way. You want to react to it when and where it happens. You'll want to wake up when you feel an acid reflux, and be at least partially in control over which way it goes.
Good luck with that "false dilemma" stuff in court. And citing Wikipedia as a credible source.
If you even make that kind of argument about basic formal logic, heh, it says a lot. It's pretty elementary logic stuff, you know. At any rate, if you need more credible sources, feel free to type "false dilemma fallacy" in google and pick your own better sources. At any rate, your ignorance of formal logic doesn't make it any less of a fallacy.
Look, I did not set out that only two shades of privacy exist. I clearly asserted that by establishing that the owners had allowed others to use that road -- for any purpose -- or that they had received direct or indirect public support for the road, that Google would weaken the owners claim to absolute privacy.
Ah, more fallacies. Why am I not surprised? The whole quote above is a string of fallacies from beginning to end.
- you "did not set out that only two shades of privacy exist"... but act as if that's the case anyway, and still harp later on the ridiculous idea of somehow needing "absolute privacy" being even relevant at all here. In fact, let's get right on to that.
- "Google would weaken the owners claim to absolute privacy" There is no requirement of "absolute privacy" to keep someone off your private property. If I want to, I can even say that everyone _except_ _you_ is allowed in my living room. It's that simple. If it's private property, I have the right to allow or disallow access to whoever I see fit, no matter how arbitrary.
- "I clearly asserted that by establishing that the owners had allowed others to use that road -- for any purpose --" is, at best, fully irrelevant. I can allow ten thousand people on my property, but disallow _you_. The fact that I allowed someone else to use it, does not weaken my ownership of it in any form or shape. Feel free to pout, but the fact that someone else got allowed, doesn't mean you're allowed too. The same applies to Google.
- "or that they had received direct or indirect public support for the road" is fully irrelevant too. E.g., houses with solar cells on the roof receive public support too, but that doesn't make them public property. The fact that that house received public support for those solar cells, does not give you the right to go right in. E.g., any farmer or rancher in the western world receives public support for their farm or ranch, but it's still private property, and they still can forbid you to trespass. Etc. The same here. Whether or not they received and subsidies (most likely not, since it's just their private driveway), does not change the fact that it's private property.
So let's move on:
In addition, a sign that reads "Private Road" clearly does not read "No Trespassing".
Heh. It was actually marked as 'Private Property', according to their lawyer. At any rate, that's clear enough for all legal and practical purposes. I don't have to put "you're forbidden to enter" on my house door too. If you or google are too stupid to understand what 'Private Property' means, well, that's not my problem. I see no need to engage in further bullshit word-meaning games on this topic.
The two phrases have different meanings and it would be left to a court to decide if members of the public should be held liable for failing to interpret "Private Road" to mean "No Trespassing".
Of course it'll get solved in a court of law, that's a truism. But don't set your hopes too high. The concept of private property isn't exactly as new and unknown to the public, as you seem to think. The concept that you're not supposed to be without permission on someone else's private property is at least as old as Roman Law, but most likely even earlier. If you think it's that open for debate whether you should have known to respec
Google's submission discussed "complete privacy", not mere "privacy".
Google is just doing a False Dilemma (a.k.a., false dichotomy) fallacy there. The black-and-white thinking or perfect solution fallacy kind, to be precise.
The whole handwaved bullshit depends on accepting essentially that the situation is a black-or-white dichotomy. Either you have _complete_ privacy, or you have no privacy at all.
That's essentially why they pretend that satellite photos are even relevant to a situation where Google's car drove in someone's clearly marked private property, up their driveway, and took photos from in front of their garage. The whole handwaving depends on accepting that privacy is either _complete_, as in, you can make your house invisible to satellites too, or none at all and any yahoo in your car can drive through it and take pics.
And it just isn't that kind of a dichotomy. The whole rest of the world has no problem with shades like that while (A) you can't forbid an airplane to pass above your property, but at the same time (B) forbid someone on foot or in a car from trespassing on it.
And, if I was Google, I'd look into the degree to which that "private road" and that property receive any kind of public support. Are police allowed on it to provide protection? The fire department?
More false dichotomies, eh?
The fact that the police or fire department can enter my property, does _not_ mean that anyone else may. The police or fire men can, under certain circumstances, even break down your door and get into your house, but that doesn't apply to anyone else.
Again: it's not that kind of dichotomy, and in fact not a dichotomy at all. There is nothing that says that (A) either something is 100% a bunker and fights off even police and firemen, or (B) it's free for everyone.
Are there beneficial tax consequences involved for someone maintaining a private road? Are any public monies used in any way in relation to that road?
No, and no. Any other fabricated bullshit you feel like producing in defense of Google? Oh, right:
And, can the road's owners prove that they have maintained their privacy claim by prohibiting all others from using the road?
This, however, crosses the border from mere stupidity to outright lunacy. I don't know where you even got _that_ monumentally retarded idea.
_Nowhere_ in any definition of private property, does it say that you _must_ prove you kept everyone else off. Private property means it's yours to use as you see fit, as long as it doesn't break other laws.
If it's my house, it means I can choose, at my discretion, who I let in and who I don't. I can invite neighbour X in, but forbid neighnbour Y from entering it. It's mine. I invite who I want. if I don't want Y in my house, it's my sole choice. Period. There is no dichotomy, and I don't have to prove anything about who else was permited or forbidden access. Just the fact that I gave my GF a key, doesn't entitle you too to one.
The same applies to my car, my garden, my driveway, anything else. There is _no_ provision anywhere that it's a strict exclusive or between noone allowed, and everyone allowed. I can allow my mom in my car, but not allow you in it. I don't have to prove anything. It's mine any you have no excuse to be in it without my permission. Period.
BTW, a driveway with a "no trespassing" sign is not the same as a "private road" with no such sign. You may call the police and your lawyer, but asserting a privacy claim is not the same as proving it.
I know it's too much to ask to RTFA, but at least read the fucking summary, lemming. The road was clearly marked as private, Google ignored it. Same as they seem to ignore everything else these days. (E.g., recently they parked on a parking space clearl
Basically what you're arguing there is that because so many people can violate your privacy, then you don't have any expectation of privacy in the first place. And that your only recourse if you want "true privacy" is to never be in a situation where someone else can rape it for you. Which seems to me like complete bullshit.
Let's apply that kind of reasoning to other kinds of interactions:
- everyone can bash in your door and steal your computer, so you don't have any expectations against breaking and entering. If you want to have any, build a bunker under a mountain.
- anyone can shoot you, so you don't have a right to life. If you want it, well, see the bunker idea above and wear a bullet proof vest with titanium plates when you have to go outside.
- you _could_ get shipped to Guantanamo or, in one case, Syria for a bit of waterboarding and such, for something you said. So you might as well get over the ideas of rights like "freedom of speech" or "habeas corpus". If you don't like it, well, just make sure you never say or do anything that your government dislikes.
Etc.
I hope you can see the problem.
We already have a bunch of laws granting you various rights, precisely _because_ it's so easy for others to violate them. You have a granted freedom of speech precisely _because_ it would be trivial for someone to restrict it for you. You have the "habeas corpus" right, precisely _because_ it would be trivial for someone to lock you up with no formal accusation or judgment or any chance to defend yourself. (And indeed it was the norm in the middle ages and it still is in some parts of the world.) Precisely _because_ it would be trivial for someone to kill you, we have laws against murder. Etc.
So it seems to me pretty stupid to argue that, because an ISP or bank can and often will rape your privacy when you use their services, you have no expectation of privacy there. And/or that if you want any, you should live in a bunker without Internet or banking. We didn't apply that kind of free-for-all every-man-for-himself approach in any other domain. Why _would_ privacy be that readily given up just because someone else can violate it?
Well, I'm an atheist (ok, more agnostic) and swift to blame religion myself. Butm to be entirely fair, I'm not sure why you blame the church there.
1. The early Franks were pretty proud that they're warriors, not scribes. They're not the only ones.
Charlemagne was the first monarch there who even tried to learn to write. Very late in life and, while he must be commended for his real efforts and time dedicated, it seems to have gone nowhere.
2. Antiquity itself wasn't that much more literate. Yes, in the middle ages only the rich learned to read and write. Guess what? The Hellots of Sparta and the poor of Rome, but especially _outside_ Rome weren't much richer and nobody taught them to read and write. And even in Egypt, while for the rich it was a thing of _pride_ to be literate (and addressing a letter "to your scribe" was a form of flattery, meaning, "I know you're your own scribe"), don't think that the poor working the fields had time to go to school.
We have a somewhat distorted view of Greece and Rome, in that basically we have a distorted tunnel view of it. We see the greatness of Athens at its peak, or Sparta... which were populated only with rich slave owners, whose only job was to be soldiers and philosophers. Athens additionally had managed to cheat the other Greek states, who had joined as _allies_ against Persia, with Athens as merely heading and organizing the army and funds, but found themselves actually turned into vassals of Athens and paying tribute as... well, more like a form of paying for protection. And not against the Persians, if you know what I mean.
So, yeah, the Athenians of Pericle could build great statues and temples, and sit around debating politics and philosophy, on the money of the whole rest of Greece and on the work of countless slaves. They _were_ the rich guys, and yeah, they could read and write. Big improvement over the Dark Ages, where also the rich guys could read and write, eh?
Ditto in Rome. We look mainly at what happened inside Rome itself, and the great democracy they had, but forget about the whole regions where they reduced the peasants to utter poverty by confiscating the lands and distributing the lands of a whole bloody province to half a dozen rich families. Again, we see the rich and maybe also middle classes this time, getting an education and living in nice cities. And a few slaves used as personal clerks. But forget about the 80% of the population, who was working the fields outside the cities, and who lived a heck of a lot worse and nobody educated those. Don't think that anyone educated the slaves in Sicily, which are documented to have been borderline starved and sometimes outright starved, so their masters could sell more grain to Rome. Or don't think that the slaves in the mines, which was little more than a slow death sentence, got educated first.
Ancient times were a lot shittier than some people assume. Maybe a little better than the darkest of the Dark Ages, but for most of the poor people, not by much or not at all.
3. Romans insisted on your learning Roman or Greek too, so...
4. What we inherited as the idea of the Dark Ages is, well, partially (though not totally) just the eternal circle of nihilism. Each time people go disillusioned, it seems to be a common reaction to go basically "OMG, our contemporary culture is nothing, we're living in the (new) Dark Ages" and "somewhere else / somewhere in the past, now that was Teh Golden Age, and the land of milk and honey!"
So back then, someone thought Rome was all that. Funnily enough, Rome at various points had thought Greece had been all that. And Greece had thought that their Mycaenean ancestors had been all that. And if you go forward in time instead, you find a disillusioned 19'th century England thinking that the middle ages had been such a golden age of chivalry. Some still do.
Others look with nostalgia at the peak of the age of disease, social injustice, broken social contracts, nobles _and_ cities plundering the former common lands
1. First of all, the very thought that someone might abuse the ambulance as a fucked-up substitute for social life, while someone else might die because the ambulance didn't get there in time... makes me _angry_.
There are situations where every minute counts, e.g., shock. (Which includes due to blood loss in an accident.) In shock, not only each extra minute is an extra chance to die, but it gets your body and inner organs worn and aged very fast. The body essentially reduces or outright cuts off blood supply to muscles and inner organs, in a desperate attempt to keep the brain alive as long as possible. Even if technically an ambulance did come before it got fatal, extra waiting means extra internal damage and valuable years robbed from your life.
So, geesh, just the thought that someone might find themselves in that situation, because some other creting was bored enough to waste the ambulance service's time and budget... robs me of any sympathy or empathy there. I want to see them flogged in a public square.
I mean, geesh, I already find it bad taste when such a geezer keeps 10 persons waiting in line while he/she tries to chat up the cashier. You can see that he has no other problem than boredom, and if he has to inconvenience a dozen others (including the cashier) to get some social interaction, he's perfectly fine with that. But actually pranking the ambulance for that? That's low. Real low.
(And if someone has to point out that I'm heartless and lacking empathy there: yes, and yes. I believe that it's a two way street. Someone who showed that much lack of consideration for the other guys in the line, or for the people who might actually need an ambulance at that time, well, gets about as much from me in return.)
2. But, anyway, here's what I don't get: why don't they fucking solve their own problem already? Why must it be someone else, or society as a whole, who must come and make sure that the grandpa/grandma doesn't get bored?
There seems to be no shortage of bored old people. Why don't they just talk to each other? No, seriously.
I don't expect society to drop by and solve all my problems. I solve my own problems. Probably so do you. Right? Why can't these guys do the same? You'd think it would be easier to find a circle of like-minded old people, than to wait for the whole society to reorganize itself to solve their problem.
Except it's still a trait of the brain, and it's not even just a human trait.
E.g., your dog is treating you as a bigger and stronger dog, and essentially only follows you because you're the alpha dog. Males around the age of 2 even get ideas about challenging you for who's going to be alpha. And apparently don't bother wondering what _would_ they do if thee roles were really reversed, with you as the pet and him as the master (really, alpha.) But essentially he sees you as a dog, and expects that you'd follow the dog rules there.
E.g., your cat almost invariably just accepts you as the alpha cat of the colony, and unlike dogs it's even realistic enough to not challenge someone 10 times its weight to a fight for alpha status. Mind you, alpha status in a cat colony doesn't actually mean they have to follow or obey. It just gives you dibs on food and the right to bully your underlings a bit, but not too much. If it's an apartment cat, well, it's your food in the first place, so having dibs on it doesn't really do anything. But anyway, there are plenty of signs that you're largely simplified to a big cat in a lot of aspects.
I'd call it anthropomorphising, but that's actually the wrong word there, because of the "anthropos"="human" root. You're just mentally assimilated to one of their own.
Mind you, both seem to realize you're not 100% a dog or a cat, but then humans anthropomorphising animals doesn't go to 100% either.
Both cats and dogs seem to basically treat inanimate objects as, at the very least, living. You can see it in, say, dogs instinct to chase off cars, or occasionally doing stuff like barking menacingly at some object which hurt them in some way.
So basically you can get all snotty and derisive about it, or you could realize that (A) that's how we're wired, as mammals, and spend less time pretending you're something else than human, and (B) it doesn't matter anyway, since none of us are that stupid as to really believe the computer is human or even alive. We might cuss at it or use some fucked-up metaphor like "my computer hates me", but, here's the important part, none of us actually takes either literally. We don't expect the computer to react to that cussing, nor to have its crashes really influenced more by "hate" than by its drivers.
So it's no more retarded than any other metaphor. We also talk about stuff like:
- the crack of dawn (yes, we _know_ that nothing actually gets cracked there)
- taking the piss, getting pissed, or pissing against the wind (no actual urine is involved in either)
- jumping the shark (no actual fish involved)
- burning one's bridges (it doesn't literally involve a bridge and fire)
Etc, etc, etc.
So unless you're against any non-literal kind of speech as a whole, I fail to see while you'd single out anthropomorphism. Again, trust me, nobody takes it any more literally than they take the above expressions. So what is the problem, really?
Are we giving sentience to our cell phones and laptops now? They are not just "misprogrammed" or "wrong"...they are actively lying to us now? Are you implying that they all got together at the factory during the worker's break period and conspired to give false information to their human overlords?
Well, actually it's a fancy way of saying that some humans decided to lie to you, because it was cheaper.
Suppose I were the great shaman Watta Sucka, and you came to me with a cold. You want it treated, and maybe some way to know how long it'll last. I have no clue how to tell you either. So I chant some incantations, smoke the holy hemp, and then tell you, "Oh, yes, the great spirits said that to be rid of your demons, you must journey on foot to the sacred lake behind the power company's dam, along the highway to the east, and wash yourself with the holy waters. And the closer to the lake you are, the better you will feel, as its great magic repels the demons of your illness. And for only $499 you can also buy the sacred ancestral GPS device, showing the progress of your illness in km to the lake. But, remember, you must travel on foot."
Basically I'd bet that a cold goes away in a week, walking to the lake takes about a week, and you'll probably start feeling better along the way. And even gave you a sort of a meter from sick to healthy, in the form of that GPS device.
Except it's bogus. It's a lie. I don't really know what's wrong with you and really how long it will take, and the GPS device doesn't either. Maybe it'll go away faster, maybe it's bird flu and you'll be dead by tomorrow, or maybe it's a pneumonia and you've earned yourself a lot of hurt and complications by trecking through the wilderness for a week instead of taking antibiotics and resting. But at any rate, it's a lie. The "meter" I gave you, doesn't measure what I claim. It measures distance, which may or may not correlate with how sick you still are, but it still just measures distance. It's a different variable.
One way to put it metaphorically is to say that that GPS device lies to you. But in practice, it was me, the great shaman Watta Sucka that really lied to you.
A lot of tech devices and meters and gizmos are really the same kind of lie, and whether its makers even realize it or not, they decided to lie to you. Really measuring X (whether that's battery life, or whatever) is often more complicated than they can bother to do, or costs more and thus would cut into their margins. So they decide to lie you instead, by putting a bogus meter there. It's the same kind of lie as my sacred GPS device.
And you might have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those pesky kids... from marketing and sales.
Honestly, I don't know about government, but it most other places it seems to invariably be some sales or marketing guy who's lost a hard drive full of SSN's and contract data and whatnot. I guess it's simply a tale of greed. The prospect of selling an extra copy/insurance/account/contract is tempting enough to override all other concerns. So when you try saying that Mr Marketing GOD can't take all that data with him, guess who wins? Remember also that he's the guy who knows how to sell stuff to people, including his side of the story, while you're probably the security nerd that doesn't even speak management.
To go on a roundabout tangent towards how _I_ would fix it: the funny thing is that the market can work in funny ways too. In a "bad money drives good money off the market" way. It applies to more than that. E.g.,
- if some people can get away with tax evasion or corruption, they undercut and drive off the market the honest merchants. (See most of the ex-Communist Bloc.)
- if some people can get away with monopolistic behaviour, they drive off the market those who don't. (See MS.)
- and if some people can make a few extra bucks or save some costs by wiping their ass with your privacy, they gain an avantage over those who don't, and may eventually even drive them off the market one way or another.
Etc.
The thing is, the free market is just an optimization algorithm. It takes a given set of constraints, and eventually moves the economy towards a more optimal state. Optimal for those constraints. But like any optimization algorithm, you must make sure you set the constraints you need, or the solution may be something else than you expected. Bad behaviours can (and usually are) more "optimal" than good behaviours, if left unregulated. And eventually those who weren't destructive, either get the clue when the others are eating their lunch, or get to get bankrupt/bought/whatever.
So basically what I'm saying is that nothing will really get fixed as long as there _is_ an economic advantage in ignoring privacy and security, and just giving the salesmen anything they want. The only way to fix it is if there was some kind of a negative feedback in the loop. When they'll stand to lose more money by losing your data, than anything they could gain by mis-using it, _then_ they'll start taking it seriously. Until then, nope.
And it's not just a matter of personal principles and doing the right thing, regardless of what everyone else is doing. You're not isolated from the rest of the economy. If anyone wanted to be the "good" guy there, will find that the "bad" guys have an advantage over him. If he doesn't care, maybe his boss does, or maybe the shareholders just get rid of those shares and reward the bad guys instead.
Seriously? You need 1000 to 2000 liters of water to get your shower hot? Thats 264 to 528 gallons for the English unit people out there.
Well, as I was telling the other AC, ok, on second thought that was probably way over-estimated. I suppose I should actually measure sometimes. Still, you get my drift. Even if it were only a few tens of litres, it's still essentially wasted water _in_ _addition_ to wasted energy to heat it at the source, only to have it go cold in the pipes overnight.
Wow, you waste 1000 to 2000 liters of water every day?
What can I say? I've been trying to bait Captain Planet with that for years, but the bugger somehow never shows up;)
Well, more seriously, thinking a bit more about it, that's probably way overestimated, but I'd still guess somewhere in the range of tens to maybe hundreds of litres of water just before it finally comes out hot. Daily. So, yes, it's still massive waste. I'm thinking that converting it to electricity first, and then using a heater on my side, might actually waste less. Of course, I haven't actually done the maths. But as gut feelings go, I'd bet on not actually gaining anything by pumping hot water from a power plant many miles away. Of course, I could be wrong.
The Internet today is worth anything because of the hundreds of other bits and protocols that were tacked on top of it. E.g., probably Tim Berners-Lee's WWW concept was _the_ one thing that took the Interent from the ivory tower of academic curiosities and made it useful for the common man. Or Gopher, that made for a nice boost while WWW was still in its infancy. Etc.
_Technically_ the Internet may mean just the network layers that allow connecting different networks, but that's not what you interact with, and it's not what the ISPs' marketing sells to Joe Average. What makes it _the_ Internet isn't just the underlying TCP/IP protocol, but the whole eidifice of applications and protocols on top of them. You know, the things you can actually _use_ without a C compiler and sockets.
At any rate, what Gore championed wasn't that. It was ARPANET, a toy for the military. It didn't include much of a vision of anything that later made it _the_ Internet. It was just a way for a general in Washington to be reasonably confident that he can reach a missile base in California, all the way across the continent, and tell them to launch the missiles. That's it.
Even so, the result was technically impressive, but really failed to deliver anything it had promised. It just wasn't of much use for the army, so it got declassified. Not because Gore was teh uber-champion of Internet for the common man, but merely because he fucked up and didn't deliver to the army what he promised. That's it.
It was from there that other people took that failure, and added the bits and pieces that turned it into a success and into a tool for Joe Average.
So basically it's a bit like crediting Karl Benz with inventing the tank. You know, 'cause he made a car, and later someone else added a bigger engine, treads, armour and gun(s) and got a tank. But, hey, if you want to, you can still see it as just Karl Benz's car.
Regardless of whether he "invented" the Internet or not, his taking credit for it is still highly misleading and a bit bullshit.
Well, no, not necessarily. VOIP, or for that matter any kind of a packet-switched phone network, is also useful for the military. In fact, the very idea of a packet switched network came from a very military problem, back in the 60's.
Remember, it was the the nuclear scare era. The threat that half your missile silos might be cut off and not know if they should shoot or not, was a major fear. Mutually assured destruction only works if it is mutually _assured_. What do you do if a nuke or two took out a comms hub, and the rest of the army is suddenly cut off from all communication?
The Russians, for example, dealt with it by instructing all officers that if they're unable to contact the higher echelons, they should assume that the nuclear war has begun and shoot all missiles immediately. When the USA learned about that, well, now that was an even bigger scare. In theory it would only take one good earthquake to start a nuclear war. (I say in theory, because the Russian officers did prove repeatedly that they're very reluctant to start Armageddon over a technical glitch.)
A lot of the motivation in researching packet switched comms was, don't laugh, the hope that the Russians would steal that and thus end the above-mentioned threat.
So basically, VOIP was tested because VOIP was what the military needed. No more, no less. It doesn't prove that either it, r the underlying network, were meant as something for the masses or not.
Dunno, it seems to me more like good old, capitalistic smelling when you can fleece someone. Just like, say, buying stuff on an airport might be more expensive than at the mall down the road.
Basically, those journalists don't have many other choices, since their readers and viewers expect coverage of those events. So as long as you price it just high enough so it's not worth it to find some other way, they'll pay.
Plus, it might come as a shock to some people, but some resources do cost more in other countries. I'll take a guess that China's broadband infrastructure is _probably_ in an even worse state than the USA's. So to give a few thousands of journalists 512 MB/s full time, no throttling, they have to throttle the already poor connections of a few million other people. It will cost you.
Gallium is vastly superior to silicon, in much the same way as it is as a semiconductor. Cost is a problem
The problem, though, is that we don't have much gallium. Definitely not enough to build whole square miles worth of solar panels.
Gallium is only found in trace amounts in Zinc and Bauxite ores. There is no gallium-high ore. Mostly we get a little of it as side effects of producing aluminium. It's enough for silicon doping and leds, but that's about it.
Even at the rate at which we're already using it, there's an estimate that the (easily accessible) reserves will be depleted by 2017. Can you imagine the rate we'd use it up for solar panels? Not to mention we'd need to dig out and process a _heck_ of a lot more bauxite than we currently do, to get that much of it.
So it seems to me that that plan is dead right there. There is no obvious way how to get lots of it, and the price will likely only go up from here.
. At present, solar technology that converts light into heat (solar heaters, solar stoves) are much more efficient than devices that convert light into electricity. Since heating and cooking consume enormous amounts of power, there may be ways to use this type of implementation to reduce the demand for electricity in the first place, rather than to inefficiently provide for that demand.
Err, not really. You can use steam to produce electricity. Nuclear power goes the same route, btw. IIRC some 80% of the world's electricity is produced by steam turbines.
So, I don't know... any particular reason why we _can_ use heated water to produce electricity, if we heat it with coal or a nuclear reactor, but not if it was heated by the sun? It's the same process and with the same efficiency.
Plus, it seems to me that, from a pragmatic point of view,
1. A significant part of the world would rather have convenience, rather than sacrifice themselves for the greater good. I'd rather have a small stove in the kitchen, rather than a huge solar contraption. Plus, I'd rather cook when I want to, not just when it's sunny outside.
2. The world seems to have decided already that it wants solar-produced electricity.
3. We're actually pretty good at producing electricity from steam in the meantime. The big power plants get about 40-45% of the energy out of the fuel and converted into electricty. That's good enough.
But more importantly, it's better than what even the best uber-expensive prototypes of solar panels can do. So I'm kind of wondering, dunno, what's with the obsession with solar panels?
4. Transporting hot steam or hot water is pretty wasteful too. _Storing_ it, even more so. It needs a lot of insulation, and even so there are losses.
And it's done already, btw. I live in a town where the power plants also provide the hot water.
Let me tell you, when I want to take a shower in the morning, I first have to waste some cubic metre or two of water (no, seriously) just so I actually get hot water. Everything that was past the big insulated pipes, comes out as cold water first.
Well, I guess PR can occasionally be a two edged sword, and we're kinda seeing the back edge of it now.
Apple's PR machine is telling everyone that only Steve Jobs matters. X got finished only because The Great Man Steve Jobs yelled at the engineers to get it done already. (Apparently the lazy louts weren't getting anywhere without Him personally throwing tantrums;) Y was tested personally by The Great Man, and because He said where the buttons should go or how loud the volume should go. (Obviously, nobody else figured out usability around those parts;) Z happened only because The Great Man _didn't_ yell at the engineers for a change, and just scared them with his iciest stare. (No, seriously, apparently they weren't getting anywhere before that, and suddenly all was on track afterwards.) Etc.
The message the ouside world is fed, repeatedly, is that he's the big genius there and everything only happens because of him.
So, you know, I would worry too if (A) I'd actually believe that, and (B) had any Apple shares.
It's a bit, you know, like betting a bunch of money on the Sixtine Chapel back then, and then hearing half-way through that Michelangelo is terminally ill. Damn right you'd worry.
Or a bit as if the Catholic Church announced that God is fed up and everyone up there is moving to another universe as their next project. I'm sure the question would come, "well, without Him, what's the point of staying with this church any more?";)
1. what MS's PR/propaganda machine does to the outside world, and
2. what MS does internally.
I remember the story linked to on Slashdot, where basically to get any new product and technology done at MS, you had to go in front of Bill Gates, hear him say that it's the dumbest thing he ever heard, then tell him that he's wrong and you're sure of it. Pretty much everything that was done at MS past some point, was done by people who told Bill Gates to his face that he's wrong or made a mistake.
It's not Apple, where everything is supposedly done because of The Great Man Steve Jobs, and everything is because of The Great Man's vision, and He is never wrong. At MS everything was done _in_ _spite_ of Bill Gates's vision to the contrary. Or at least so went that little game internally.
Their invasion of the Internet, going with DirectX instead of OpenGL, etc, etc, etc, were done by people who went in front of Bill Gates and told him that he's wrong.
And there were enough cases where they switched directions in mid-flight, instead of ploughing ahead to the hilt. E.g., they weren't going to do any Internet support, they wanted to make their own proprietary network. Some ex-Borland guy went to Bill and told him that it's a mistake, and the rest is history.
Heck, from the very beginning there's the story of the new guy who went to Bill Gates to tell him that the flood-fill function in MS Basic is crap and needs to be rewritten. So he got asked to write a better one then. Turns out that that function was written by Bill himself.
Now the PR bullshit they spew on the outside world, is a whole different story. And the kind of PR stunt in TFA _is_ probably their work. Though even that one occasionally admits that an older product had bad parts. E.g., see the Clippy spiel when they finally got rid of that annoyance.
Or you'll notice that there are more dumb ideas than that, which got silently discontinued. E.g., MS Bob. Now that was a fuckup. I don't see them still pushing it instead of admitting that it didn't work.
Now mind you, I'm not saying that MS is anywhere near perfect or ideal in any form or shape or aspect. But they do realize that sometimes things don't work as formerly planned, and some are just mistakes. You don't get to be a mega-corporation that size by being keeping doing a mistake just to not admit it.
But again, admitting it to the outside world, now that's a whole other problem. Of course they're not going to say Vista is crap, as long as they don't have a replacement. But they _are_ already working on Windows 7 and on the SP1 for Vista, and I'd be surprised if they didn't include some of the lessons learned in the design of both.
Let me point out that a criminal is still a citizen of the US regardless of the crime, and is entitled to basic rights. It can be reasonably argued that that is cruel and unusual punishment
Can it? That's just the thing I'm disputing.
Look, I'm not for cruel or unusual punishments. If a point can be made that those people there are being put through something particularly cruel or degrading or horrifying, fine, then it should stop. No doubt about it.
I'm just saying that what the GGP post described, doesn't sound particularly horrible. At the very least, it's not worse than the _normal_ prisons, which are accepted everywhere as _not_ counting as cruel and unusual punishments, as defined in that convention.
I'll also point out that the conventions on the topic are pretty clear, not just some philosophical concept. What counts as cruel and unusual is rather extreme stuff like torture, mutilation, simulated execution (waterboarding is usually accepted to fit that category too, btw, since it creates the impression of being killed, and the extreme psychological trauma associated with it.) It's not about inconveniences like that you don't like sharing the room with other people. You can't just think up your own ideal treatment standards, and proclaim anything else as cruel punishment.
Also, it doesn't just apply to US citizens, but it's an international treaty and applies to any human being automatically. If the US Army were doing something to its soldiers that fit the bill, it would be a violation nevertheless.
Hmmm, I wonder why the US penal system turns people into hardened criminals.
Does it? Last I heard of a test being administered, the vast majority of people in jail score already anywhere between borderline sociopathic and outright psychopath. You know, from the start. So I just have to wonder which is cause and which is effect. Does prison turn them into heartless criminals, or is it what got them into prison in the first place? And do they land back in prison afterwards because the first term in prison did something to them, or merely because they're still the criminal kind of sociopaths?
We don't actually know of a way to turn normal adult people into sociopaths, nor a way to cure sociopathy. We have some hints as to what sometimes causes a child to start exhibiting sociopathic behavious. (Hint: disproportionately harsh and cruel punishments applied arbitrarily and inconsistently, seem to help. Drives the point home very early that a lie is better than getting punished.) But even there it's not guaranteed. And nobody knows how to treat it, especially not in adults. Psychotherapy doesn't actually work on sociopaths, it just often convinces/trains them to hide it better.
It's not just the US. Nobody else knows how to create or cure sociopaths either. We all, humanity on the whole, really haven't figured out anything short of (A) putting them away for a while, if they do anything criminal, and (B) making crime not too tempting.
Well, ok, we sorta know how to do some brainwashing, although that's hit and miss and traumatic. It pretty much involves getting the person to completely cave in under stress, and you can reprogram him from there, with various degrees of success. It's cruel, traumatic, and leaves deep scars on someone's mind. I think that on the whole prison is less cruel than that, at least in most of the western world.
So, seriously, if you have any hard data that you can cure those people by other means, we're all very very interested. Please do publish that stuff, and we'll all give up on prisons in a jiffy. Seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just the thing: they too thought that Socrates was a pissant malcontent. A pretty annoying and disruptive one too. And he was teaching their children to be pissant malcontents too.
Dude, read that again: the pope had actually _encouraged_ him to publish his new theory.
There _have_ been narrow-minded officials of the church (e.g., Cardinal Bellarmine who had forbidden him in 1616 to defend heliocentrism), and even popes. So I'm not saying that the Church as a whole was all scientific or anything. But Pope Urban VIII was not one of them. He was actually pretty open-minded renaissance kind of guy (well, in as much as possible for a church official.) Plus, he was a friend and admirer of Galileo's (well, until he got flamed, anyway.) Previously, while still only Cardinal Barberini, he had actually supported Galileo in 1616 and opposed Bellarmine.
And how Galileo repaid that, well, I've already written that, read that paragraph again. It wasn't just attacking Geocentrism (which, as mentioned, the pope had actually allowed him to.) He literally made fun of the pope, by mis-representing his position, distorting his words, and putting them into the mouth of a ridiculous character called The Stupid. No matter how I want to look at it, that's not about science, it's a personal attack. He _was_ attacking the person, not just the Geocentrism idea.
The only thing I'll agree with is that Pope _did_ overreact, and did a bit of abuse of power and of justice in the process too. They had a screwed-up idea of separating the powers, back then, mostly because the various monarchs had reacted very unfavourably (and sometimes violently) when the popes had tried to dominate them on secular maters too. So the church had jurisdiction _only_ over matters of faith. The pope did an 180 degree turn and made Galileo's position a matter of faith, just so he could drag him before his own judges _and_ forbid the offensive book internationally. Otherwise he would have had to leave it to the secular authorities.
But, anyway, seriously, imagine if I were to pull a Galileo maneuver on your message. Quote your sentences prefixed by, say, "Stupid Guy says:". Distort them as I see fit. Ridicule them as some retarded thing that can't even follow elementary logic. Regardless of what scientific or historical message I'd promote with that maneuver, it still doesn't excuse that kind of flamebait, and it still doesn't make it anything else than flaming.
Well, that's sorta the whole point: they're not the same thing, so _think_ before reaching for the handy-dandy categorization.
To us, Socrates sounds certainly like a smart guy who was just trying to make them think. To them his asking people uncomfortable question was just disruptive. Both to society, and to (the established socially-acceptable forms of) dialogue. They seemed to think he fits your "troll" definition to the letter.
They had their own acceptable ways to hold a debate, and for example sophistry was the norm. The aim wasn't even remotely to be _right_ or to determine the truth. It was to get people to nod at your string of fallacies and emotionally charged metaphors. Socrates's insisting on _truth_ and virtue was actively disruptive to their kind of dialogue. His rejection of might-makes-right and tradition-makes-right arguments were disrupting and rejecting about 90% of the political and philosophical debate in Athens at the time.
Was he right? Probably. Did they think he's disruptive and getting in the way of a civilized dialogue? Hell yeah.
And without even getting into something as complex as Socrates's problem, you can see false categorizations in the present day, every day. The most common being that if you disagree with me or point out flaws in anything I've said or done, then most certainly:
- you're just a troll, or
- you're some kind of enemy, or
- you're trying to bully me, or
- you're a shill for the opposition, or
- you're in denial and secretly loving what you openly criticize, or
- you're too stupid to realize I'm right, or about a dozen equally unflattering escape routes.
Especially questioning anything that is already the base of some cognitive dissonance, is a sure way to not provoke much more thought than "auugh, this guy is the enemy and is trying to hurt me."
But you can see the same applied to things as unimportant as games (if you don't like the _exact_ same games I do, then you're probably in denial, a troll or a shill), bug reports (see the recent "how do you deal with bullies? some guy reported _two_ bugs in my software, so he's clearly trying to bully me!" case on Ask Slashdot), fashion, and the Gods know what else. Probably right as we speak, about a million people on the Internet are making just that kind of an inferrence.
So basically that's what I'm trying to say: they are quite different things, so _think_ before reaching for the comfortable hand-waved explanation. What seems like a clear cut case of trolling, _might_ be someone who actually has a point.
I don't see any inherent contradiction to reconcile.
As long as you're aware that it's just a game (and everyone over an IQ of 50 is), either sex or violence doesn't matter, essentially.
Outside of the game or the movie, the concerns and attitudes of some societies and cultures _are_ weird. It's funny to see people demonizing sex, as some uber-danger to society and uber-deadly-sin, while at the same time lionizing murder and murderers. It seems to me like some priorities are awfully screwed up there, if you care more about some guy going down on his wife (if I'm not mistaken, it's still a crime in a couple of counties in USA) more than about his killing a perfect stranger, whose only fault is being of another race, religion, or sexual orientation.
It starts from school, where we essentially learn that:
- any king/consul/emperor/pharaoh who waged wars of aggression is a _great_ monarch, while anyone who minded his own business is a weak "roi faineant" (do-nothing king)
- anyone who centralized the power in his own hand, and stripped his nobles and citizens of rights and power, is a _great_ monarch, anyone who as little as delegated is seen as some weak king that helped his country go to heck
Etc.
It's not just whether it's censored or not in a movie or game. It's the mentality behind asking for it to be censored, or conversely asking for more of it. That's what worries me.
And I'll particularly single out the mentality, reflected in movies and games too, that one must somehow "prove he's a Man" or "prove he has Balls" by being an aggressive retard. There is nothing to prove. Look down in your pants, and that proves it if you have balls or not. Have a feel if still not convinced. That's it. Proving one is a Man, well, if you want to prove it beyond all doubt, get a blood sample and a microscope. If you see Y chromosomes in those cells, it's most definitely male, if you see only X chromosomes, then most definitely not. It's that simple.
I joke partially. The issue is that whole cultures are centered around the idea that a male _must_ be somehow aggressive. Yes, testosterone, brain wiring, etc. We know. But before all else, a human is a very programmable machine and reactions and behaviours are more determined by that programming ("enculturation") than anything biological. If that guy ends up an aggressive idiot, it'll be more because society told him that that's what he must be, than all chemical reactions inside combined.
Again, I'm not harping against movies and games, I'm complaining about the culture in which they happen.
So, yes, if we all were to change anything, then maybe we should be more concerned about violence than about sex. And _if_ we all decide that we must censor _something_, well, then maybe again we should start with the violence. Not because the censorship itself will do anything, but maybe an acknowledgement that yes, that's the bigger problem, and no, we don't find that kind of role models and gender roles to be cool any more. Not because the game or movie itself is teaching junior to be an aggressive idiot, but because maybe it'll hammer the message in everyone else's head to stop teaching him that that's what's cool.
Well, if you want to think about history, Socrates was essentially executed for trolling. He kept saying things that challenged the status quo and accepted behaviours, and made his countrymen uneasy. So they executed him.
Later we had people like, say, Galileo. What nowadays is turned into Science-vs-Religion, was actually largely an issue of flaming a totalitarian monarch. The pope was originally Galileo's friend, and encouraged him to write his book. He just asked that he writes about both his system and the new one, and shows what the old one doesn't explain and his does. Pretty much in line with today's scientific method and what we now call Occam's Razor. But Galileo was the stereotypical self-important socially-inept nerd and obviously didn't deal well with the pope's not immediately seeing that he's right and everyone else is wrong. The book took the pope's words, distorted them and put them in the mouth of a character called Simplicius (basically: The Stupid). And that character lives up to his name, by being unable to use even elementary logic right, and getting tripped by his own fallacies. It also incidentally painted the pope as the uber-defender of a model, where he actually was very neutral at the time. (What we today call a strawman.)
In other words: Galileo flamed the pope in public.
What followed was not as much science vs religion, as just abuse of power. The pope didn't took lightly to the thorough flaming, and actually did make the heliocentric model official church position just so he can prosecute Galileo.
I propose to have Galileo sanctified as patron saint of socially inept nerds and flame warriors ;)
But it does kinda illustrate another point I'm trying to make: one man's flaming or trolling, is another man's valuable (if mis-guided) contribution.
Galileo was actually right about his heliocentric model and about the moons of planets, even if his way of presenting it was flawed and annoying.
Socrates, if we're to believe his disciple and biographer, actually did have a point about his contemporary culture. But those who mindlessly adhered to it, felt trolled by someone questioning what they do. (And funnily enough, pulled one of the first "think of the children!" maneuvers in the process. One of the main accusations against Socrates was that he poisoned the minds of the young with his teaching them to question the status quo.)
And you can see the phenomenon in modern times too. You can see people flying off the hook and going into "OMG, I'm being flamed/cyber-bullied/whatever" mode, if you as little as point out a bug in their software or web site. Or since NYT mentions asking newbie questions as a troll tactic, I'll ask the reverse: how many genuine newbies got flamed for asking a newbie question?
Or you can see the phenomenon on Slashdot too. There's plenty of using -1 Troll or -1 Flamebait or -1 Overrated as, basically, "I don't like that idea and want to censor it." Or occasionally, as some comically impotent revenge for not agreeing with someone in a whole other thread. I've even seen quotes from physics textbooks modded as one of the three.
Just something to think about.
Actually, if you want the real black sheep of that series, try Sim City Societies, a.k.a., Sim City V. It was kinda the opposite: over-simplified to the point of being absurd and meaningless.
It wasn't just a numbers game, it was a _totals_ game. You needed X points creativity to place one artsy-town house. That's ok, you just need to place Y graffiti walls for those, but it doesn't actually matter where. It can be in a bunker under the ocean floor, for all those people care. Ditto for just about anything else. You need X1 police-state points for a secret police HQ, if you go for oppressive totalitarian town. You need X2 wealth points to build a bank.
The whole thing is just a game of producers and consumers, and the only condition is that you must produce more than you consume. But even there the relationships are actually weird. A secret police HQ for example, actually consumes police state points, so logically it makes your city less oppressive. A bank actually consumes wealth points, so logically it would make your town poorer. Etc.
Worse yet, because the game actually encourages you to stick with one theme, you'll likely need to manage _one_ number. Yay.
Ok, there is one more number: workers vs work-places. Even that's screwed up. Shops don't actually have employees. Buildings are divided hard into:
- houses: they provide workers
- service buildings, like shops: they neither add nor use workers, but they satisfy some need
- industry: they provide employment, but otherwise have no influence on morale
The division is weird at times. E.g., banks are industry: they provide employment, but otherwise are of no use to your citizens. It gets worse: there are even kinds of _shops_ which are categorized as industry, so they don't actually sell anything. And viceversa.
Things like education quotient, happiness factors, pollution, etc, are gone too. E.g., placing a school doesn't really do anything for your city's education, it just makes kids happy (I'm guessing the designer doesn't have kids of school age;), provides some kinds of points, and subtracts other kinds of points. So basically it's again at most needed for the totals to build something else. Ditto for, say, slum or police state themes. They don't actually make the citizens unhappier or anything, they just provide or consume some points.
In a nutshell, it's no longer a city simulator, it's a fancy drawing program with some elementary maths attached. It lets you paint a city in a certain theme, but not much more, and not in a much more interesting way than doing it in Gimp. (In fact, maybe less. Wrestling Gimp's interface can be a challenge and game by itself;)
So to cut this rant short(er) and get to the actual point: well, I see your point about too _much_ depth and micro-management. But I hope the next one will have at least _some_ depth and complexity. Something as shallow as a puddle on the sidewalk, can be even less fun to play.
Well, I'll go ahead and say I have only skimmed RTFA, but it seems to me that:
1. I'm not sure if the biggest problem is mental. I mean, if she can blog from that bed, it seems to me like there's plenty you can do with a computer to keep yourself entertained. And in a space capsule/station/colony-ship, I'd assume there is stuff to do.
2. She complains about actual physical problems resulting from staying in that position for days. In her own words:
Those sound like real and very painful problems, not something you can just meditate away. Learning to live in the present is good and fine, but the pain and damage to your body are real.
I mean, geesh, reading that even breathing hurts, doesn't sound like fun at all.
Anyway, generally, when it comes to pain, learning to just live with it (by will power, meditation, or taking a ton of painkillers) is just about the dumbest thing one can do. Pain is body telling you that something is awfully wrong, and (potentially serious) damage may occur. Ignoring that warning isn't something you'll thank yourself about later.
If your back says it hurts more in this or that position, then move right away, don't just ignore it. Some shifted vertebrae or disks because you ignored it, can get you anywhere between a looong time of pain later and outright severed nerves and paralysis.
There are, of course, exceptions, but as a fallible rule of thumb, it's a good start. If it hurts, don't ignore it, don't just learn to live with it.
3. If you want a personal anecdote about what I read there, bad acid reflux is painful by itself. And can even put a nasty wound in your esophagus if it's constantly subjected to acid. Remember, your stomach is made to deal with having acid in it, the rest of your body is just the kind of flesh that that acid is supposed to dissolve and break up.
But pray that it never goes up your esophagus, and back down the other pipe, to your lungs. I've had the personal mis-fortune of experiencing that once, and it's a very very horrible experience.
So, again, it's something I'd take very seriously, not learn to live with the present.
Now that's at least somewhat less likely to happen if their head is lower than their lungs (again, according to TFA) but I'm not sure it's outright impossible. But other problems are just as possible, and some even due to that position.
Anyway, again, you don't want to be at peace with whatever happens to you, in a passive way. You want to react to it when and where it happens. You'll want to wake up when you feel an acid reflux, and be at least partially in control over which way it goes.
If you even make that kind of argument about basic formal logic, heh, it says a lot. It's pretty elementary logic stuff, you know. At any rate, if you need more credible sources, feel free to type "false dilemma fallacy" in google and pick your own better sources. At any rate, your ignorance of formal logic doesn't make it any less of a fallacy.
Ah, more fallacies. Why am I not surprised? The whole quote above is a string of fallacies from beginning to end.
- you "did not set out that only two shades of privacy exist"... but act as if that's the case anyway, and still harp later on the ridiculous idea of somehow needing "absolute privacy" being even relevant at all here. In fact, let's get right on to that.
- "Google would weaken the owners claim to absolute privacy" There is no requirement of "absolute privacy" to keep someone off your private property. If I want to, I can even say that everyone _except_ _you_ is allowed in my living room. It's that simple. If it's private property, I have the right to allow or disallow access to whoever I see fit, no matter how arbitrary.
- "I clearly asserted that by establishing that the owners had allowed others to use that road -- for any purpose --" is, at best, fully irrelevant. I can allow ten thousand people on my property, but disallow _you_. The fact that I allowed someone else to use it, does not weaken my ownership of it in any form or shape. Feel free to pout, but the fact that someone else got allowed, doesn't mean you're allowed too. The same applies to Google.
- "or that they had received direct or indirect public support for the road" is fully irrelevant too. E.g., houses with solar cells on the roof receive public support too, but that doesn't make them public property. The fact that that house received public support for those solar cells, does not give you the right to go right in. E.g., any farmer or rancher in the western world receives public support for their farm or ranch, but it's still private property, and they still can forbid you to trespass. Etc. The same here. Whether or not they received and subsidies (most likely not, since it's just their private driveway), does not change the fact that it's private property.
So let's move on:
Google is just doing a False Dilemma (a.k.a., false dichotomy) fallacy there. The black-and-white thinking or perfect solution fallacy kind, to be precise.
The whole handwaved bullshit depends on accepting essentially that the situation is a black-or-white dichotomy. Either you have _complete_ privacy, or you have no privacy at all.
That's essentially why they pretend that satellite photos are even relevant to a situation where Google's car drove in someone's clearly marked private property, up their driveway, and took photos from in front of their garage. The whole handwaving depends on accepting that privacy is either _complete_, as in, you can make your house invisible to satellites too, or none at all and any yahoo in your car can drive through it and take pics.
And it just isn't that kind of a dichotomy. The whole rest of the world has no problem with shades like that while (A) you can't forbid an airplane to pass above your property, but at the same time (B) forbid someone on foot or in a car from trespassing on it.
More false dichotomies, eh?
The fact that the police or fire department can enter my property, does _not_ mean that anyone else may. The police or fire men can, under certain circumstances, even break down your door and get into your house, but that doesn't apply to anyone else.
Again: it's not that kind of dichotomy, and in fact not a dichotomy at all. There is nothing that says that (A) either something is 100% a bunker and fights off even police and firemen, or (B) it's free for everyone.
No, and no. Any other fabricated bullshit you feel like producing in defense of Google? Oh, right:
This, however, crosses the border from mere stupidity to outright lunacy. I don't know where you even got _that_ monumentally retarded idea.
_Nowhere_ in any definition of private property, does it say that you _must_ prove you kept everyone else off. Private property means it's yours to use as you see fit, as long as it doesn't break other laws.
If it's my house, it means I can choose, at my discretion, who I let in and who I don't. I can invite neighbour X in, but forbid neighnbour Y from entering it. It's mine. I invite who I want. if I don't want Y in my house, it's my sole choice. Period. There is no dichotomy, and I don't have to prove anything about who else was permited or forbidden access. Just the fact that I gave my GF a key, doesn't entitle you too to one.
The same applies to my car, my garden, my driveway, anything else. There is _no_ provision anywhere that it's a strict exclusive or between noone allowed, and everyone allowed. I can allow my mom in my car, but not allow you in it. I don't have to prove anything. It's mine any you have no excuse to be in it without my permission. Period.
I know it's too much to ask to RTFA, but at least read the fucking summary, lemming. The road was clearly marked as private, Google ignored it. Same as they seem to ignore everything else these days. (E.g., recently they parked on a parking space clearl
Basically what you're arguing there is that because so many people can violate your privacy, then you don't have any expectation of privacy in the first place. And that your only recourse if you want "true privacy" is to never be in a situation where someone else can rape it for you. Which seems to me like complete bullshit.
Let's apply that kind of reasoning to other kinds of interactions:
- everyone can bash in your door and steal your computer, so you don't have any expectations against breaking and entering. If you want to have any, build a bunker under a mountain.
- anyone can shoot you, so you don't have a right to life. If you want it, well, see the bunker idea above and wear a bullet proof vest with titanium plates when you have to go outside.
- you _could_ get shipped to Guantanamo or, in one case, Syria for a bit of waterboarding and such, for something you said. So you might as well get over the ideas of rights like "freedom of speech" or "habeas corpus". If you don't like it, well, just make sure you never say or do anything that your government dislikes.
Etc.
I hope you can see the problem.
We already have a bunch of laws granting you various rights, precisely _because_ it's so easy for others to violate them. You have a granted freedom of speech precisely _because_ it would be trivial for someone to restrict it for you. You have the "habeas corpus" right, precisely _because_ it would be trivial for someone to lock you up with no formal accusation or judgment or any chance to defend yourself. (And indeed it was the norm in the middle ages and it still is in some parts of the world.) Precisely _because_ it would be trivial for someone to kill you, we have laws against murder. Etc.
So it seems to me pretty stupid to argue that, because an ISP or bank can and often will rape your privacy when you use their services, you have no expectation of privacy there. And/or that if you want any, you should live in a bunker without Internet or banking. We didn't apply that kind of free-for-all every-man-for-himself approach in any other domain. Why _would_ privacy be that readily given up just because someone else can violate it?
Well, I'm an atheist (ok, more agnostic) and swift to blame religion myself. Butm to be entirely fair, I'm not sure why you blame the church there.
1. The early Franks were pretty proud that they're warriors, not scribes. They're not the only ones.
Charlemagne was the first monarch there who even tried to learn to write. Very late in life and, while he must be commended for his real efforts and time dedicated, it seems to have gone nowhere.
2. Antiquity itself wasn't that much more literate. Yes, in the middle ages only the rich learned to read and write. Guess what? The Hellots of Sparta and the poor of Rome, but especially _outside_ Rome weren't much richer and nobody taught them to read and write. And even in Egypt, while for the rich it was a thing of _pride_ to be literate (and addressing a letter "to your scribe" was a form of flattery, meaning, "I know you're your own scribe"), don't think that the poor working the fields had time to go to school.
We have a somewhat distorted view of Greece and Rome, in that basically we have a distorted tunnel view of it. We see the greatness of Athens at its peak, or Sparta... which were populated only with rich slave owners, whose only job was to be soldiers and philosophers. Athens additionally had managed to cheat the other Greek states, who had joined as _allies_ against Persia, with Athens as merely heading and organizing the army and funds, but found themselves actually turned into vassals of Athens and paying tribute as... well, more like a form of paying for protection. And not against the Persians, if you know what I mean.
So, yeah, the Athenians of Pericle could build great statues and temples, and sit around debating politics and philosophy, on the money of the whole rest of Greece and on the work of countless slaves. They _were_ the rich guys, and yeah, they could read and write. Big improvement over the Dark Ages, where also the rich guys could read and write, eh?
Ditto in Rome. We look mainly at what happened inside Rome itself, and the great democracy they had, but forget about the whole regions where they reduced the peasants to utter poverty by confiscating the lands and distributing the lands of a whole bloody province to half a dozen rich families. Again, we see the rich and maybe also middle classes this time, getting an education and living in nice cities. And a few slaves used as personal clerks. But forget about the 80% of the population, who was working the fields outside the cities, and who lived a heck of a lot worse and nobody educated those. Don't think that anyone educated the slaves in Sicily, which are documented to have been borderline starved and sometimes outright starved, so their masters could sell more grain to Rome. Or don't think that the slaves in the mines, which was little more than a slow death sentence, got educated first.
Ancient times were a lot shittier than some people assume. Maybe a little better than the darkest of the Dark Ages, but for most of the poor people, not by much or not at all.
3. Romans insisted on your learning Roman or Greek too, so...
4. What we inherited as the idea of the Dark Ages is, well, partially (though not totally) just the eternal circle of nihilism. Each time people go disillusioned, it seems to be a common reaction to go basically "OMG, our contemporary culture is nothing, we're living in the (new) Dark Ages" and "somewhere else / somewhere in the past, now that was Teh Golden Age, and the land of milk and honey!"
So back then, someone thought Rome was all that. Funnily enough, Rome at various points had thought Greece had been all that. And Greece had thought that their Mycaenean ancestors had been all that. And if you go forward in time instead, you find a disillusioned 19'th century England thinking that the middle ages had been such a golden age of chivalry. Some still do.
Others look with nostalgia at the peak of the age of disease, social injustice, broken social contracts, nobles _and_ cities plundering the former common lands
1. First of all, the very thought that someone might abuse the ambulance as a fucked-up substitute for social life, while someone else might die because the ambulance didn't get there in time... makes me _angry_.
There are situations where every minute counts, e.g., shock. (Which includes due to blood loss in an accident.) In shock, not only each extra minute is an extra chance to die, but it gets your body and inner organs worn and aged very fast. The body essentially reduces or outright cuts off blood supply to muscles and inner organs, in a desperate attempt to keep the brain alive as long as possible. Even if technically an ambulance did come before it got fatal, extra waiting means extra internal damage and valuable years robbed from your life.
So, geesh, just the thought that someone might find themselves in that situation, because some other creting was bored enough to waste the ambulance service's time and budget... robs me of any sympathy or empathy there. I want to see them flogged in a public square.
I mean, geesh, I already find it bad taste when such a geezer keeps 10 persons waiting in line while he/she tries to chat up the cashier. You can see that he has no other problem than boredom, and if he has to inconvenience a dozen others (including the cashier) to get some social interaction, he's perfectly fine with that. But actually pranking the ambulance for that? That's low. Real low.
(And if someone has to point out that I'm heartless and lacking empathy there: yes, and yes. I believe that it's a two way street. Someone who showed that much lack of consideration for the other guys in the line, or for the people who might actually need an ambulance at that time, well, gets about as much from me in return.)
2. But, anyway, here's what I don't get: why don't they fucking solve their own problem already? Why must it be someone else, or society as a whole, who must come and make sure that the grandpa/grandma doesn't get bored?
There seems to be no shortage of bored old people. Why don't they just talk to each other? No, seriously.
I don't expect society to drop by and solve all my problems. I solve my own problems. Probably so do you. Right? Why can't these guys do the same? You'd think it would be easier to find a circle of like-minded old people, than to wait for the whole society to reorganize itself to solve their problem.
Except it's still a trait of the brain, and it's not even just a human trait.
E.g., your dog is treating you as a bigger and stronger dog, and essentially only follows you because you're the alpha dog. Males around the age of 2 even get ideas about challenging you for who's going to be alpha. And apparently don't bother wondering what _would_ they do if thee roles were really reversed, with you as the pet and him as the master (really, alpha.) But essentially he sees you as a dog, and expects that you'd follow the dog rules there.
E.g., your cat almost invariably just accepts you as the alpha cat of the colony, and unlike dogs it's even realistic enough to not challenge someone 10 times its weight to a fight for alpha status. Mind you, alpha status in a cat colony doesn't actually mean they have to follow or obey. It just gives you dibs on food and the right to bully your underlings a bit, but not too much. If it's an apartment cat, well, it's your food in the first place, so having dibs on it doesn't really do anything. But anyway, there are plenty of signs that you're largely simplified to a big cat in a lot of aspects.
I'd call it anthropomorphising, but that's actually the wrong word there, because of the "anthropos"="human" root. You're just mentally assimilated to one of their own.
Mind you, both seem to realize you're not 100% a dog or a cat, but then humans anthropomorphising animals doesn't go to 100% either.
Both cats and dogs seem to basically treat inanimate objects as, at the very least, living. You can see it in, say, dogs instinct to chase off cars, or occasionally doing stuff like barking menacingly at some object which hurt them in some way.
So basically you can get all snotty and derisive about it, or you could realize that (A) that's how we're wired, as mammals, and spend less time pretending you're something else than human, and (B) it doesn't matter anyway, since none of us are that stupid as to really believe the computer is human or even alive. We might cuss at it or use some fucked-up metaphor like "my computer hates me", but, here's the important part, none of us actually takes either literally. We don't expect the computer to react to that cussing, nor to have its crashes really influenced more by "hate" than by its drivers.
So it's no more retarded than any other metaphor. We also talk about stuff like:
- the crack of dawn (yes, we _know_ that nothing actually gets cracked there)
- taking the piss, getting pissed, or pissing against the wind (no actual urine is involved in either)
- jumping the shark (no actual fish involved)
- burning one's bridges (it doesn't literally involve a bridge and fire)
Etc, etc, etc.
So unless you're against any non-literal kind of speech as a whole, I fail to see while you'd single out anthropomorphism. Again, trust me, nobody takes it any more literally than they take the above expressions. So what is the problem, really?
Well, actually it's a fancy way of saying that some humans decided to lie to you, because it was cheaper.
Suppose I were the great shaman Watta Sucka, and you came to me with a cold. You want it treated, and maybe some way to know how long it'll last. I have no clue how to tell you either. So I chant some incantations, smoke the holy hemp, and then tell you, "Oh, yes, the great spirits said that to be rid of your demons, you must journey on foot to the sacred lake behind the power company's dam, along the highway to the east, and wash yourself with the holy waters. And the closer to the lake you are, the better you will feel, as its great magic repels the demons of your illness. And for only $499 you can also buy the sacred ancestral GPS device, showing the progress of your illness in km to the lake. But, remember, you must travel on foot."
Basically I'd bet that a cold goes away in a week, walking to the lake takes about a week, and you'll probably start feeling better along the way. And even gave you a sort of a meter from sick to healthy, in the form of that GPS device.
Except it's bogus. It's a lie. I don't really know what's wrong with you and really how long it will take, and the GPS device doesn't either. Maybe it'll go away faster, maybe it's bird flu and you'll be dead by tomorrow, or maybe it's a pneumonia and you've earned yourself a lot of hurt and complications by trecking through the wilderness for a week instead of taking antibiotics and resting. But at any rate, it's a lie. The "meter" I gave you, doesn't measure what I claim. It measures distance, which may or may not correlate with how sick you still are, but it still just measures distance. It's a different variable.
One way to put it metaphorically is to say that that GPS device lies to you. But in practice, it was me, the great shaman Watta Sucka that really lied to you.
A lot of tech devices and meters and gizmos are really the same kind of lie, and whether its makers even realize it or not, they decided to lie to you. Really measuring X (whether that's battery life, or whatever) is often more complicated than they can bother to do, or costs more and thus would cut into their margins. So they decide to lie you instead, by putting a bogus meter there. It's the same kind of lie as my sacred GPS device.
And you might have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those pesky kids... from marketing and sales.
Honestly, I don't know about government, but it most other places it seems to invariably be some sales or marketing guy who's lost a hard drive full of SSN's and contract data and whatnot. I guess it's simply a tale of greed. The prospect of selling an extra copy/insurance/account/contract is tempting enough to override all other concerns. So when you try saying that Mr Marketing GOD can't take all that data with him, guess who wins? Remember also that he's the guy who knows how to sell stuff to people, including his side of the story, while you're probably the security nerd that doesn't even speak management.
To go on a roundabout tangent towards how _I_ would fix it: the funny thing is that the market can work in funny ways too. In a "bad money drives good money off the market" way. It applies to more than that. E.g.,
- if some people can get away with tax evasion or corruption, they undercut and drive off the market the honest merchants. (See most of the ex-Communist Bloc.)
- if some people can get away with monopolistic behaviour, they drive off the market those who don't. (See MS.)
- and if some people can make a few extra bucks or save some costs by wiping their ass with your privacy, they gain an avantage over those who don't, and may eventually even drive them off the market one way or another.
Etc.
The thing is, the free market is just an optimization algorithm. It takes a given set of constraints, and eventually moves the economy towards a more optimal state. Optimal for those constraints. But like any optimization algorithm, you must make sure you set the constraints you need, or the solution may be something else than you expected. Bad behaviours can (and usually are) more "optimal" than good behaviours, if left unregulated. And eventually those who weren't destructive, either get the clue when the others are eating their lunch, or get to get bankrupt/bought/whatever.
So basically what I'm saying is that nothing will really get fixed as long as there _is_ an economic advantage in ignoring privacy and security, and just giving the salesmen anything they want. The only way to fix it is if there was some kind of a negative feedback in the loop. When they'll stand to lose more money by losing your data, than anything they could gain by mis-using it, _then_ they'll start taking it seriously. Until then, nope.
And it's not just a matter of personal principles and doing the right thing, regardless of what everyone else is doing. You're not isolated from the rest of the economy. If anyone wanted to be the "good" guy there, will find that the "bad" guys have an advantage over him. If he doesn't care, maybe his boss does, or maybe the shareholders just get rid of those shares and reward the bad guys instead.
Well, as I was telling the other AC, ok, on second thought that was probably way over-estimated. I suppose I should actually measure sometimes. Still, you get my drift. Even if it were only a few tens of litres, it's still essentially wasted water _in_ _addition_ to wasted energy to heat it at the source, only to have it go cold in the pipes overnight.
Entirely too much :P
Well, thanks for the correction. That's certainly interesting. I was only taking a wild and uninformed guess there.
What can I say? I've been trying to bait Captain Planet with that for years, but the bugger somehow never shows up ;)
Well, more seriously, thinking a bit more about it, that's probably way overestimated, but I'd still guess somewhere in the range of tens to maybe hundreds of litres of water just before it finally comes out hot. Daily. So, yes, it's still massive waste. I'm thinking that converting it to electricity first, and then using a heater on my side, might actually waste less. Of course, I haven't actually done the maths. But as gut feelings go, I'd bet on not actually gaining anything by pumping hot water from a power plant many miles away. Of course, I could be wrong.
Well, except it's still inaccurate.
The Internet today is worth anything because of the hundreds of other bits and protocols that were tacked on top of it. E.g., probably Tim Berners-Lee's WWW concept was _the_ one thing that took the Interent from the ivory tower of academic curiosities and made it useful for the common man. Or Gopher, that made for a nice boost while WWW was still in its infancy. Etc.
_Technically_ the Internet may mean just the network layers that allow connecting different networks, but that's not what you interact with, and it's not what the ISPs' marketing sells to Joe Average. What makes it _the_ Internet isn't just the underlying TCP/IP protocol, but the whole eidifice of applications and protocols on top of them. You know, the things you can actually _use_ without a C compiler and sockets.
At any rate, what Gore championed wasn't that. It was ARPANET, a toy for the military. It didn't include much of a vision of anything that later made it _the_ Internet. It was just a way for a general in Washington to be reasonably confident that he can reach a missile base in California, all the way across the continent, and tell them to launch the missiles. That's it.
Even so, the result was technically impressive, but really failed to deliver anything it had promised. It just wasn't of much use for the army, so it got declassified. Not because Gore was teh uber-champion of Internet for the common man, but merely because he fucked up and didn't deliver to the army what he promised. That's it.
It was from there that other people took that failure, and added the bits and pieces that turned it into a success and into a tool for Joe Average.
So basically it's a bit like crediting Karl Benz with inventing the tank. You know, 'cause he made a car, and later someone else added a bigger engine, treads, armour and gun(s) and got a tank. But, hey, if you want to, you can still see it as just Karl Benz's car.
Regardless of whether he "invented" the Internet or not, his taking credit for it is still highly misleading and a bit bullshit.
Well, no, not necessarily. VOIP, or for that matter any kind of a packet-switched phone network, is also useful for the military. In fact, the very idea of a packet switched network came from a very military problem, back in the 60's.
Remember, it was the the nuclear scare era. The threat that half your missile silos might be cut off and not know if they should shoot or not, was a major fear. Mutually assured destruction only works if it is mutually _assured_. What do you do if a nuke or two took out a comms hub, and the rest of the army is suddenly cut off from all communication?
The Russians, for example, dealt with it by instructing all officers that if they're unable to contact the higher echelons, they should assume that the nuclear war has begun and shoot all missiles immediately. When the USA learned about that, well, now that was an even bigger scare. In theory it would only take one good earthquake to start a nuclear war. (I say in theory, because the Russian officers did prove repeatedly that they're very reluctant to start Armageddon over a technical glitch.)
A lot of the motivation in researching packet switched comms was, don't laugh, the hope that the Russians would steal that and thus end the above-mentioned threat.
So basically, VOIP was tested because VOIP was what the military needed. No more, no less. It doesn't prove that either it, r the underlying network, were meant as something for the masses or not.
Dunno, it seems to me more like good old, capitalistic smelling when you can fleece someone. Just like, say, buying stuff on an airport might be more expensive than at the mall down the road.
Basically, those journalists don't have many other choices, since their readers and viewers expect coverage of those events. So as long as you price it just high enough so it's not worth it to find some other way, they'll pay.
Plus, it might come as a shock to some people, but some resources do cost more in other countries. I'll take a guess that China's broadband infrastructure is _probably_ in an even worse state than the USA's. So to give a few thousands of journalists 512 MB/s full time, no throttling, they have to throttle the already poor connections of a few million other people. It will cost you.
The problem, though, is that we don't have much gallium. Definitely not enough to build whole square miles worth of solar panels.
Gallium is only found in trace amounts in Zinc and Bauxite ores. There is no gallium-high ore. Mostly we get a little of it as side effects of producing aluminium. It's enough for silicon doping and leds, but that's about it.
Even at the rate at which we're already using it, there's an estimate that the (easily accessible) reserves will be depleted by 2017. Can you imagine the rate we'd use it up for solar panels? Not to mention we'd need to dig out and process a _heck_ of a lot more bauxite than we currently do, to get that much of it.
So it seems to me that that plan is dead right there. There is no obvious way how to get lots of it, and the price will likely only go up from here.
Err, not really. You can use steam to produce electricity. Nuclear power goes the same route, btw. IIRC some 80% of the world's electricity is produced by steam turbines.
So, I don't know... any particular reason why we _can_ use heated water to produce electricity, if we heat it with coal or a nuclear reactor, but not if it was heated by the sun? It's the same process and with the same efficiency.
Plus, it seems to me that, from a pragmatic point of view,
1. A significant part of the world would rather have convenience, rather than sacrifice themselves for the greater good. I'd rather have a small stove in the kitchen, rather than a huge solar contraption. Plus, I'd rather cook when I want to, not just when it's sunny outside.
2. The world seems to have decided already that it wants solar-produced electricity.
3. We're actually pretty good at producing electricity from steam in the meantime. The big power plants get about 40-45% of the energy out of the fuel and converted into electricty. That's good enough.
But more importantly, it's better than what even the best uber-expensive prototypes of solar panels can do. So I'm kind of wondering, dunno, what's with the obsession with solar panels?
4. Transporting hot steam or hot water is pretty wasteful too. _Storing_ it, even more so. It needs a lot of insulation, and even so there are losses.
And it's done already, btw. I live in a town where the power plants also provide the hot water.
Let me tell you, when I want to take a shower in the morning, I first have to waste some cubic metre or two of water (no, seriously) just so I actually get hot water. Everything that was past the big insulated pipes, comes out as cold water first.
Well, I guess PR can occasionally be a two edged sword, and we're kinda seeing the back edge of it now.
Apple's PR machine is telling everyone that only Steve Jobs matters. X got finished only because The Great Man Steve Jobs yelled at the engineers to get it done already. (Apparently the lazy louts weren't getting anywhere without Him personally throwing tantrums;) Y was tested personally by The Great Man, and because He said where the buttons should go or how loud the volume should go. (Obviously, nobody else figured out usability around those parts;) Z happened only because The Great Man _didn't_ yell at the engineers for a change, and just scared them with his iciest stare. (No, seriously, apparently they weren't getting anywhere before that, and suddenly all was on track afterwards.) Etc.
The message the ouside world is fed, repeatedly, is that he's the big genius there and everything only happens because of him.
So, you know, I would worry too if (A) I'd actually believe that, and (B) had any Apple shares.
It's a bit, you know, like betting a bunch of money on the Sixtine Chapel back then, and then hearing half-way through that Michelangelo is terminally ill. Damn right you'd worry.
Or a bit as if the Catholic Church announced that God is fed up and everyone up there is moving to another universe as their next project. I'm sure the question would come, "well, without Him, what's the point of staying with this church any more?" ;)
Actually, you have to distinguish between
1. what MS's PR/propaganda machine does to the outside world, and
2. what MS does internally.
I remember the story linked to on Slashdot, where basically to get any new product and technology done at MS, you had to go in front of Bill Gates, hear him say that it's the dumbest thing he ever heard, then tell him that he's wrong and you're sure of it. Pretty much everything that was done at MS past some point, was done by people who told Bill Gates to his face that he's wrong or made a mistake.
It's not Apple, where everything is supposedly done because of The Great Man Steve Jobs, and everything is because of The Great Man's vision, and He is never wrong. At MS everything was done _in_ _spite_ of Bill Gates's vision to the contrary. Or at least so went that little game internally.
Their invasion of the Internet, going with DirectX instead of OpenGL, etc, etc, etc, were done by people who went in front of Bill Gates and told him that he's wrong.
And there were enough cases where they switched directions in mid-flight, instead of ploughing ahead to the hilt. E.g., they weren't going to do any Internet support, they wanted to make their own proprietary network. Some ex-Borland guy went to Bill and told him that it's a mistake, and the rest is history.
Heck, from the very beginning there's the story of the new guy who went to Bill Gates to tell him that the flood-fill function in MS Basic is crap and needs to be rewritten. So he got asked to write a better one then. Turns out that that function was written by Bill himself.
Now the PR bullshit they spew on the outside world, is a whole different story. And the kind of PR stunt in TFA _is_ probably their work. Though even that one occasionally admits that an older product had bad parts. E.g., see the Clippy spiel when they finally got rid of that annoyance.
Or you'll notice that there are more dumb ideas than that, which got silently discontinued. E.g., MS Bob. Now that was a fuckup. I don't see them still pushing it instead of admitting that it didn't work.
Now mind you, I'm not saying that MS is anywhere near perfect or ideal in any form or shape or aspect. But they do realize that sometimes things don't work as formerly planned, and some are just mistakes. You don't get to be a mega-corporation that size by being keeping doing a mistake just to not admit it.
But again, admitting it to the outside world, now that's a whole other problem. Of course they're not going to say Vista is crap, as long as they don't have a replacement. But they _are_ already working on Windows 7 and on the SP1 for Vista, and I'd be surprised if they didn't include some of the lessons learned in the design of both.
Can it? That's just the thing I'm disputing.
Look, I'm not for cruel or unusual punishments. If a point can be made that those people there are being put through something particularly cruel or degrading or horrifying, fine, then it should stop. No doubt about it.
I'm just saying that what the GGP post described, doesn't sound particularly horrible. At the very least, it's not worse than the _normal_ prisons, which are accepted everywhere as _not_ counting as cruel and unusual punishments, as defined in that convention.
I'll also point out that the conventions on the topic are pretty clear, not just some philosophical concept. What counts as cruel and unusual is rather extreme stuff like torture, mutilation, simulated execution (waterboarding is usually accepted to fit that category too, btw, since it creates the impression of being killed, and the extreme psychological trauma associated with it.) It's not about inconveniences like that you don't like sharing the room with other people. You can't just think up your own ideal treatment standards, and proclaim anything else as cruel punishment.
Also, it doesn't just apply to US citizens, but it's an international treaty and applies to any human being automatically. If the US Army were doing something to its soldiers that fit the bill, it would be a violation nevertheless.
Does it? Last I heard of a test being administered, the vast majority of people in jail score already anywhere between borderline sociopathic and outright psychopath. You know, from the start. So I just have to wonder which is cause and which is effect. Does prison turn them into heartless criminals, or is it what got them into prison in the first place? And do they land back in prison afterwards because the first term in prison did something to them, or merely because they're still the criminal kind of sociopaths?
We don't actually know of a way to turn normal adult people into sociopaths, nor a way to cure sociopathy. We have some hints as to what sometimes causes a child to start exhibiting sociopathic behavious. (Hint: disproportionately harsh and cruel punishments applied arbitrarily and inconsistently, seem to help. Drives the point home very early that a lie is better than getting punished.) But even there it's not guaranteed. And nobody knows how to treat it, especially not in adults. Psychotherapy doesn't actually work on sociopaths, it just often convinces/trains them to hide it better.
It's not just the US. Nobody else knows how to create or cure sociopaths either. We all, humanity on the whole, really haven't figured out anything short of (A) putting them away for a while, if they do anything criminal, and (B) making crime not too tempting.
Well, ok, we sorta know how to do some brainwashing, although that's hit and miss and traumatic. It pretty much involves getting the person to completely cave in under stress, and you can reprogram him from there, with various degrees of success. It's cruel, traumatic, and leaves deep scars on someone's mind. I think that on the whole prison is less cruel than that, at least in most of the western world.
So, seriously, if you have any hard data that you can cure those people by other means, we're all very very interested. Please do publish that stuff, and we'll all give up on prisons in a jiffy. Seriously.