I'm pretty sure they can and China has given them a decent enough test-bed to follow.
You and I may not like it, but we're a drowned-out voice amid a sea of government, officials, and sheep. Frankly, life is too fucking short to give a god damn anymore by wasting all of our time and energy fighting the inevitable. We'll be dead soon enough and the next generation of sheep can suffer the consequences of the sheep that came before them.
Not to mention, companies already offer these services. Free for the most part, or for a small fee if you want the encryption FOB. Lastpass, for example. Fuck, even Blizzard offers them. There is absolutely no need for a government organization or any kind of regulation of this. There is already a market catering to the demand of this service, without any of the icky and creepy government involvement.
I'm sure Bulgaria has absolutely no political corruption and that everyone in the government is absolutely trustworthy and that there is and was absolutely nothing shady about the selection of the private entity (yay, another government utility monopoly!) to provide the services and that there are absolutely no questionable connections between government officials and the selected company, just like there are no relations in America between officials and the selection of companies like Haliburton, L-3, and various FDA fast-tracks, either.
I don't know a lot about Bulgaria, but Americans and Brits tend not to like to be identified and monitored, though their government and the stupider sheep among the population constantly do everything they can to undermine this desire. It's abhorrent enough that our SS# has gone from being something you ONLY provide to your employer to set aside SS tax in your account and to the government when you're ready to withdraw and has instead come to be used to get a driver's license, create a cell phone account, cable account, internet account, bank account, blockbuster rental account, etc.
Let's either value privacy and autonomy or throw up our hands and quit this charade and go full bore into fully complying with all wishes and desire of the motherland.
Are you kidding? Government officials are all about profit motive. Not the profit of giving you a secure, reliable, and safe service. The profit of exploiting and manipulating your information and security for companies that lobby to them or otherwise offer benefits in or out of the shadows. Further, there's little you can do that is stupider than trusting the government to be secure about anything. They are constantly leaking masses of DMV records, social security records, medical records. They can't even seem to safeguard their own private communications.
Not to mention, you know . . . the whole creepiness of relinquishing ANYTHING to the jurisdiction or purview of the fucking GOVERNMENT. Are you going to hand over your biometrics to acquire these IDs? Do you think the government wouldn't really have a master-key? Piss someone off? You don't have any access to your money. Choose not to participate in the program? Ooooh, sorry, we've finally decided that you must have a registered ID if you want to receive any government benefits, civil service benefits, or file your taxes. It's totally optional, though! You can always choose not to file your taxes. Or not to receive your social security and other benefits. Or not to get a driver's license!
Who else is going to do it? I'd rather be the customer of a private entity who makes their money by offering me a secure and robust service and their success is determined by their ability to cater to me than some government effort who has no interest in providing me with anything and is only best served by manipulating and exploiting me. When Company A screws me over, I can use a competitor. When my government screws me over, I just have to keep taking it.
The only time I see horsepower becoming important is in a post-apocalyptic society, when I need to be able to out-run the other guy and also put a cow-guard on my car and drive through another guy's vehicle, cutting it in half.
The only thing I care about is automation. Until I can type in a desired destination and take a nap or read a book until I get there, I don't care about any other innovations.
In the US, people who think rationally and value knowledge and critical thinking are considered "elitists" and derided. Just talking properly will probably get the occasional "what are you, a homo?!" thrown at you. Then there's the whole typical US rationality (which is probably more global, but what do I know?) of things like "I can't imagine a world where god doesn't exist; therefore, god exists".
Also, I remember finally being so thoroughly depressed by high school that I just gave up. The specific cause in question was that my freshman science curriculum was the same "Earth Science" book that we had used in fifth grade.
Anyway, in this country, we have a saying - "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."
I stopped at a Burger King in Portland, once, which had a pretty messy bathroom. By "messy", I mean that the toilet was full of shit. And by full, I don't mean "oh no, someone used this and didn't flush". I mean, it was literally full of shit. Up to the rim and then beyond. The shit piled high into a sort of "pyramid" about six inches above the rim. And there was more shit on the floor. I'm grateful that I needed to use the restroom before eating, so I stopped in before we ordered. Just as I entered, an employee was walking out. It wasn't being cleaned up, so I guess the guy just used the bathroom and was going back to cook or something. Yeah, we walked out and never returned. Ever. Fucking disgusting. Of course, this is the same Burger King where we ordered "extra pickles" and they gave us "paper bags", instead (WTF?).
If FB becomes the Net's SSO, it better have the following features, or else people are betting their privacy and reputation on something quite unproven:
I'd hardly call it unproven. Facebook's services have been thoroughly proven to be unreliable, shady, and unconcerned with the privacy and personal control of your data.
Yep. When I see a site littered with facebook garbage -- an entire column showing facebook friends, facebook-only-discussion/forum, facebook-required-sign-on... I just don't bother. I do have an account (just to stake claim to my name), but I don't use it and certainly am not interested in feeding them a stream of my entire internet activity. Or, simply, any of my mindshare. Shame on sites that can't be bothered to do their own sign-in system or use an open SSO solution or use their own discussion forums.
No, these rapture nuts are eagerly awaiting (practically jerking off in anticipation) of seeing everything end. They don't want to off themselves. They want to take the whole world with them. Kind of makes you feel safe that these kind of people are the ones who have their hands on the big red button and determine our diplomatic discourse, huh?
Problem is, I think the list loses all credibility based on two accounts:
1) They say 2012 is the worst. How is it even in consideration? It's not a science fiction flick. It's a disaster flick. They might as well be saying that Towering Inferno is a sci-fi flick, then.
2) Contact is on the "best" list. Seriously? Look, I love Sagan, but Contact is more of a super-natural movie than a sci-fi movie. It's one of those films that is solid all the way through . . . until the final quarter of it, when it becomes completely stupid and undermines the rest of itself.
Anyway, this is just more evidence that we need to start funding these guys and get back into the "we explore, because we're human" mentality and stop sticking our heads in the sand. Of course, in a country where half the people believe in creationism, I can't expect there to be some national value for science, exploration, human achievement, etc. Until that changes, I guess the guys still employed at the agency have to find something to do, like making top ten lists for facebook quizzes or something.
No, if you're utilizing an application to determine your diet and you eat accordingly, you're choosing to make use of tools likely developed by those who have spent their life specializing in something (nutrition, dietary needs, etc) that you likely have not and therefore have accepted the benefit of their expertise through the piece of software. The same way I use a piece of software to help me file my taxes every year, because I am a software engineer and not an economist or tax advisor or a CPA.
Of course, being forced into some big brother situation is evil and abhorrent. Having the choice to use something or not or to stop using it is hardly a significant concern.
You could argue that I have no assurance that such a program would be developed by anyone who has a clue what they're doing, but that's the reason I use things like Turbo Tax and not "Bob's Tax Stuff".
It has? Please show me this spreadsheet that shows most of that 7-14 trillion dollars we spent during the whole "the world's gonna end if we don't bail everyone out!" period of time being repaid. As far as I'm aware of, only the actual TARP funds have been repaid, which is a very trivial part of those trillions of dollars we were screwed on. Fuck, we're still stuck with a company or two, now. You know we're in the car selling business and all, now.
Yay! Next time, make even bigger bad speculative investments! There's no risk to speculation, anymore, because you can rely on the tax payer to save your ass. This will totally in no way perpetrate greater damage on the economy and society by generating a false economy based on a mix of tax-payer-fail-safes and unchecked speculation. What could ever go wrong?!
First, bullshit. In total, the government handed out more than seven trillion dollars in emergency spending/bailouts (and in some estimates, as much as 9, 11, or even 15 trillion). TARP, which was repaid, was only a very small portion of it. And with that, the amount repaid wouldn't even cover inflation.
Second, you're missing the point that speculation is supposed to be just that. Speculation. If we're backing investments with tax payer money, it's no longer speculation and we're even more prone to further abuses where speculators run up ridiculous valuations in the market to get rich and when it all goes tits up, nobody really has to supper except the tax-payers who, again, will rescue everyone again.
To say that the trillions we were stuck handing out were somehow actually repaid is misleading and disingenuous.
PE really is a joke. I think that sports and physical "play time" isn't the role of school -- especially not when we're strapped for meaningful educational time and resources as it is. However, I recall back when I was in school and PE was an absolute joke. They did things like play dodgeball (which I guess they don't do anymore?). Or a game where you sat on a little square boar with tiny wheels and scooted your ass around the gym on it, playing some sissy nerf ball game. Or, at its most strenuous, playing games of HORSE.
PE is filler. When the school can't afford or doesn't care to provide students with more actual education (of infinitely greater value), they fill it with PE. Kind of the same way video game developers pad short games with lots of "collect 800 flags for an achievement!" filler.
Kids should have a chance to grow up healthy so when they become an adult, they aren't already at a great disadvantage in life. No doubt about that. But schools should be about EDUCATION. Who the fuck cares if you can play HORSE or skip rope, if you can't name the first ten amendments to the constitution and you only know David Copperfield as a magician who dates some model?
They need to stop wasting precious education resources and time on things that have nothing to do with being educated. If the point of school was to "produce a well rounded human being", they they would stress things like critical thinking and true civics comprehensions and teach kids about things like taxes. Since we have limited resources, how about we focus on things that will matter to producing productive human beings? I'm getting up there in my age and I can assure you that while I wrestled for a dozen years (outside of school, mind you), at no point in my life did anything from PE class ever have any remote bearing on my life even the tiniest fucking bit. At no point in my entire career (or my life, for that matter), has the experience of sitting on a tiny little square scotter with four wheels on it in the gym and tossing a soft nerf ball back and forth or playing HORSE ever given me any sort of advantage whatsoever.
It's a cheap class to staff which fills up some time so they can bill the state for having your ass in class. It's a lot cheaper to find and afford someone who teaches kids how to play with a frisbee for an hour than it is to find a qualified history, civics, science, or math teacher and offer additional *EDUCATIONAL* opportunities to students.
If your phone or laptop posed ANY risk whatsoever, they wouldn't let you bring them on the fucking plane at all. If you can't bring four ounces of water on or a pair of nail-clippers, is there any chance that they're going to let you bring a device onboard that could cause interference with control and flight of the fucking plane and just trust the passengers on the "honor system"? Of course not.
The logic behind all of it is the same logic behind groping you at the security checkpoint and shouting at you like you're being processed through some sort of concentration camp entrance. It's all about making you obey. About adjusting your mindset. Shut up and do what you're told. Don't think about it. Just shut the fuck up and do it.
Only the American tax-payer is the fool, here. This is a can't-lose wager, for everyone else. You invest and get rich or you invest and get re-imbursed by the American tax-payer next time the government decides to save the speculators by handing them a few trillion.
Remember, the current president and last president decided that speculation should no longer have any risk and backed that up with seven or eight trillion dollars in handouts. Hurrah!
I think we are increasingly moving toward a model where people will subscribe to sources of information/entertainment if they don't want to see the ads, or they will get a free version that includes ads (and possibly presents other limitations in format or content).
Wouldn't surprise me to see Wikipedia go this way.
Honestly, I would expect them to stay just the way they are, if they want to badly enough. Think about it: They're already the fifth most popular website. They are unlikely to become substantially more popular than that, which means that their operation costs are already close to their peak level.
Not to mention, "subscribe to remove ads" in absolutely no way addresses the real problem. If you have included, censored, removed, or otherwise modified some piece of content to appease a sponsor (either by sense of obligation or direct demand), then the damage is already done. Whether or not there is also a banner ad from the company along side it -- or it has been removed because I gave you cash -- is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure they can and China has given them a decent enough test-bed to follow.
You and I may not like it, but we're a drowned-out voice amid a sea of government, officials, and sheep. Frankly, life is too fucking short to give a god damn anymore by wasting all of our time and energy fighting the inevitable. We'll be dead soon enough and the next generation of sheep can suffer the consequences of the sheep that came before them.
Not to mention, companies already offer these services. Free for the most part, or for a small fee if you want the encryption FOB. Lastpass, for example. Fuck, even Blizzard offers them. There is absolutely no need for a government organization or any kind of regulation of this. There is already a market catering to the demand of this service, without any of the icky and creepy government involvement.
I'm sure Bulgaria has absolutely no political corruption and that everyone in the government is absolutely trustworthy and that there is and was absolutely nothing shady about the selection of the private entity (yay, another government utility monopoly!) to provide the services and that there are absolutely no questionable connections between government officials and the selected company, just like there are no relations in America between officials and the selection of companies like Haliburton, L-3, and various FDA fast-tracks, either.
I don't know a lot about Bulgaria, but Americans and Brits tend not to like to be identified and monitored, though their government and the stupider sheep among the population constantly do everything they can to undermine this desire. It's abhorrent enough that our SS# has gone from being something you ONLY provide to your employer to set aside SS tax in your account and to the government when you're ready to withdraw and has instead come to be used to get a driver's license, create a cell phone account, cable account, internet account, bank account, blockbuster rental account, etc.
Let's either value privacy and autonomy or throw up our hands and quit this charade and go full bore into fully complying with all wishes and desire of the motherland.
Are you kidding? Government officials are all about profit motive. Not the profit of giving you a secure, reliable, and safe service. The profit of exploiting and manipulating your information and security for companies that lobby to them or otherwise offer benefits in or out of the shadows. Further, there's little you can do that is stupider than trusting the government to be secure about anything. They are constantly leaking masses of DMV records, social security records, medical records. They can't even seem to safeguard their own private communications.
Not to mention, you know . . . the whole creepiness of relinquishing ANYTHING to the jurisdiction or purview of the fucking GOVERNMENT. Are you going to hand over your biometrics to acquire these IDs? Do you think the government wouldn't really have a master-key? Piss someone off? You don't have any access to your money. Choose not to participate in the program? Ooooh, sorry, we've finally decided that you must have a registered ID if you want to receive any government benefits, civil service benefits, or file your taxes. It's totally optional, though! You can always choose not to file your taxes. Or not to receive your social security and other benefits. Or not to get a driver's license!
Who else is going to do it? I'd rather be the customer of a private entity who makes their money by offering me a secure and robust service and their success is determined by their ability to cater to me than some government effort who has no interest in providing me with anything and is only best served by manipulating and exploiting me. When Company A screws me over, I can use a competitor. When my government screws me over, I just have to keep taking it.
The only time I see horsepower becoming important is in a post-apocalyptic society, when I need to be able to out-run the other guy and also put a cow-guard on my car and drive through another guy's vehicle, cutting it in half.
The only thing I care about is automation. Until I can type in a desired destination and take a nap or read a book until I get there, I don't care about any other innovations.
Government has learned that teaching you to think critically doesn't help them, but teaching you the joys of obeying authority figures does.
In the US, people who think rationally and value knowledge and critical thinking are considered "elitists" and derided. Just talking properly will probably get the occasional "what are you, a homo?!" thrown at you. Then there's the whole typical US rationality (which is probably more global, but what do I know?) of things like "I can't imagine a world where god doesn't exist; therefore, god exists".
Also, I remember finally being so thoroughly depressed by high school that I just gave up. The specific cause in question was that my freshman science curriculum was the same "Earth Science" book that we had used in fifth grade.
Anyway, in this country, we have a saying - "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."
I stopped at a Burger King in Portland, once, which had a pretty messy bathroom. By "messy", I mean that the toilet was full of shit. And by full, I don't mean "oh no, someone used this and didn't flush". I mean, it was literally full of shit. Up to the rim and then beyond. The shit piled high into a sort of "pyramid" about six inches above the rim. And there was more shit on the floor. I'm grateful that I needed to use the restroom before eating, so I stopped in before we ordered. Just as I entered, an employee was walking out. It wasn't being cleaned up, so I guess the guy just used the bathroom and was going back to cook or something. Yeah, we walked out and never returned. Ever. Fucking disgusting. Of course, this is the same Burger King where we ordered "extra pickles" and they gave us "paper bags", instead (WTF?).
I have prior art on this as I've been playing with my Wii in public restrooms for years.
If FB becomes the Net's SSO, it better have the following features, or else people are betting their privacy and reputation on something quite unproven:
I'd hardly call it unproven. Facebook's services have been thoroughly proven to be unreliable, shady, and unconcerned with the privacy and personal control of your data.
Yep. When I see a site littered with facebook garbage -- an entire column showing facebook friends, facebook-only-discussion/forum, facebook-required-sign-on... I just don't bother. I do have an account (just to stake claim to my name), but I don't use it and certainly am not interested in feeding them a stream of my entire internet activity. Or, simply, any of my mindshare. Shame on sites that can't be bothered to do their own sign-in system or use an open SSO solution or use their own discussion forums.
No, these rapture nuts are eagerly awaiting (practically jerking off in anticipation) of seeing everything end. They don't want to off themselves. They want to take the whole world with them. Kind of makes you feel safe that these kind of people are the ones who have their hands on the big red button and determine our diplomatic discourse, huh?
Problem is, I think the list loses all credibility based on two accounts:
1) They say 2012 is the worst. How is it even in consideration? It's not a science fiction flick. It's a disaster flick. They might as well be saying that Towering Inferno is a sci-fi flick, then.
2) Contact is on the "best" list. Seriously? Look, I love Sagan, but Contact is more of a super-natural movie than a sci-fi movie. It's one of those films that is solid all the way through . . . until the final quarter of it, when it becomes completely stupid and undermines the rest of itself.
Anyway, this is just more evidence that we need to start funding these guys and get back into the "we explore, because we're human" mentality and stop sticking our heads in the sand. Of course, in a country where half the people believe in creationism, I can't expect there to be some national value for science, exploration, human achievement, etc. Until that changes, I guess the guys still employed at the agency have to find something to do, like making top ten lists for facebook quizzes or something.
No, if you're utilizing an application to determine your diet and you eat accordingly, you're choosing to make use of tools likely developed by those who have spent their life specializing in something (nutrition, dietary needs, etc) that you likely have not and therefore have accepted the benefit of their expertise through the piece of software. The same way I use a piece of software to help me file my taxes every year, because I am a software engineer and not an economist or tax advisor or a CPA.
Of course, being forced into some big brother situation is evil and abhorrent. Having the choice to use something or not or to stop using it is hardly a significant concern.
You could argue that I have no assurance that such a program would be developed by anyone who has a clue what they're doing, but that's the reason I use things like Turbo Tax and not "Bob's Tax Stuff".
Have we entered an era in which electronics serve as mother, cop and coach because we can't manage our own desires?
If you're the one setting up these utilities for yourself, then you are managing your own desires.
It has? Please show me this spreadsheet that shows most of that 7-14 trillion dollars we spent during the whole "the world's gonna end if we don't bail everyone out!" period of time being repaid. As far as I'm aware of, only the actual TARP funds have been repaid, which is a very trivial part of those trillions of dollars we were screwed on. Fuck, we're still stuck with a company or two, now. You know we're in the car selling business and all, now.
Yay! Next time, make even bigger bad speculative investments! There's no risk to speculation, anymore, because you can rely on the tax payer to save your ass. This will totally in no way perpetrate greater damage on the economy and society by generating a false economy based on a mix of tax-payer-fail-safes and unchecked speculation. What could ever go wrong?!
First, bullshit. In total, the government handed out more than seven trillion dollars in emergency spending/bailouts (and in some estimates, as much as 9, 11, or even 15 trillion). TARP, which was repaid, was only a very small portion of it. And with that, the amount repaid wouldn't even cover inflation.
Second, you're missing the point that speculation is supposed to be just that. Speculation. If we're backing investments with tax payer money, it's no longer speculation and we're even more prone to further abuses where speculators run up ridiculous valuations in the market to get rich and when it all goes tits up, nobody really has to supper except the tax-payers who, again, will rescue everyone again.
To say that the trillions we were stuck handing out were somehow actually repaid is misleading and disingenuous.
PE really is a joke. I think that sports and physical "play time" isn't the role of school -- especially not when we're strapped for meaningful educational time and resources as it is. However, I recall back when I was in school and PE was an absolute joke. They did things like play dodgeball (which I guess they don't do anymore?). Or a game where you sat on a little square boar with tiny wheels and scooted your ass around the gym on it, playing some sissy nerf ball game. Or, at its most strenuous, playing games of HORSE.
PE is filler. When the school can't afford or doesn't care to provide students with more actual education (of infinitely greater value), they fill it with PE. Kind of the same way video game developers pad short games with lots of "collect 800 flags for an achievement!" filler.
Kids should have a chance to grow up healthy so when they become an adult, they aren't already at a great disadvantage in life. No doubt about that. But schools should be about EDUCATION. Who the fuck cares if you can play HORSE or skip rope, if you can't name the first ten amendments to the constitution and you only know David Copperfield as a magician who dates some model?
They need to stop wasting precious education resources and time on things that have nothing to do with being educated. If the point of school was to "produce a well rounded human being", they they would stress things like critical thinking and true civics comprehensions and teach kids about things like taxes. Since we have limited resources, how about we focus on things that will matter to producing productive human beings? I'm getting up there in my age and I can assure you that while I wrestled for a dozen years (outside of school, mind you), at no point in my life did anything from PE class ever have any remote bearing on my life even the tiniest fucking bit. At no point in my entire career (or my life, for that matter), has the experience of sitting on a tiny little square scotter with four wheels on it in the gym and tossing a soft nerf ball back and forth or playing HORSE ever given me any sort of advantage whatsoever.
It's a cheap class to staff which fills up some time so they can bill the state for having your ass in class. It's a lot cheaper to find and afford someone who teaches kids how to play with a frisbee for an hour than it is to find a qualified history, civics, science, or math teacher and offer additional *EDUCATIONAL* opportunities to students.
If your phone or laptop posed ANY risk whatsoever, they wouldn't let you bring them on the fucking plane at all. If you can't bring four ounces of water on or a pair of nail-clippers, is there any chance that they're going to let you bring a device onboard that could cause interference with control and flight of the fucking plane and just trust the passengers on the "honor system"? Of course not.
The logic behind all of it is the same logic behind groping you at the security checkpoint and shouting at you like you're being processed through some sort of concentration camp entrance. It's all about making you obey. About adjusting your mindset. Shut up and do what you're told. Don't think about it. Just shut the fuck up and do it.
Only the American tax-payer is the fool, here. This is a can't-lose wager, for everyone else. You invest and get rich or you invest and get re-imbursed by the American tax-payer next time the government decides to save the speculators by handing them a few trillion.
Remember, the current president and last president decided that speculation should no longer have any risk and backed that up with seven or eight trillion dollars in handouts. Hurrah!
I think we are increasingly moving toward a model where people will subscribe to sources of information/entertainment if they don't want to see the ads, or they will get a free version that includes ads (and possibly presents other limitations in format or content).
Wouldn't surprise me to see Wikipedia go this way.
Honestly, I would expect them to stay just the way they are, if they want to badly enough. Think about it: They're already the fifth most popular website. They are unlikely to become substantially more popular than that, which means that their operation costs are already close to their peak level.
Not to mention, "subscribe to remove ads" in absolutely no way addresses the real problem. If you have included, censored, removed, or otherwise modified some piece of content to appease a sponsor (either by sense of obligation or direct demand), then the damage is already done. Whether or not there is also a banner ad from the company along side it -- or it has been removed because I gave you cash -- is irrelevant.