Well, also don't forget that the businessman or doctor that get elected is also in that hated 1%, so half the people don't care what experience or knowledge they can bring to the table.
Doctors and other people who's income comes primarily from their own work aren't in the 1%, that's purely the domain of businessmen. And they don't usually stop being businessmen when they become politicians, which leads to conflicts of interest when talking about economics, which in turn causes problems with trustworthiness.
Let's stop subsidizing nuclear power accident liability costs: either you manage to design it to be safe enough to be privately insureable, or it's not safe enough to get built.
Sure thing. We'll just build a few coal plants instead. They're privately insurable despite killing people and destroying the environment when operating normally, since unlike nuclear no one expects them to pay for their externalities. Or we could build a hundred large solar plants, which together equal about one reactor as long as sun shines from cloudless skies. That shouldn't require any subsidies, and if it does, it's okay because it's not nuclear. Of course, they'll still need those coal plants for backup, but that's okay because dying from microparticle-induced cancer is a lot better than dying from radiation-induced cancer, amirite?
Exactly... as the price of books go down, the demand for books increase. This is basic Econ 101. By setting a price floor, you are limiting the ability to reach customers who would otherwise want to buy more books.
No matter how cheap books are, you are still only able to read one or two per day. Therefore the demand is capped. On the other hand, two books are not inerchangeable unless they're copies of the same book; even if Amazon was giving books away for free, it might still be worse deal than keeping lots of small bookstores in business and thus ensuring that a single seller doesn't have a total power to determine what books and authors get on the market.
Maybe you should take a few more Econ classes.
If I have Ã100 in my pocket how many books am I going to walk out the store with?
Start with these. If it's sheer quantity you want, that should set you up for life.
A vote which is both unequal - some people have more money to vote with, after all - and by definition corrupt - every single dollar vote you cast has a direct financial impact on you, after all. It's a fine tool for managing logistics, but completely unfit for making decisions that have long-term effects.
One justification for keeping the physical stores around Paris might be tourism but when you put it that way - i.e they are charging the taxpayers to decorate the city with bookstores - it does seem kinda silly. It's really just a preference of the ruling elite.
It's a preference of the elected representatives. And letting money decide everything is a preference of those who have it. Why should anyone who isn't rich follow an idelogy which disenfranchises them? Besides indoctrination, that is.
The right to keep and bear arms is the defining difference between a free man and a slave.
No. The difference between a free man and a slave is that a free man can live without obeying anyone. That requires means to defend yourself, for which a gun may or may not qualify, but it also means some way to get food without serving a master. You don't have that, you don't have freedom.
Meh. Paper books are heavy and take up a lot of space. Good riddance. Protecting paper book sellers is like protecting buggy whip makers when everyone is buying automobiles. How long can you try to hold off progress?
You comparison fails, because paper books are superior in many ways:
1) I can read them without electricity or a reading device.
2) I can read them without requiring permission from a licensing agency.
3) I can resell them.
4) Most are still readable after decades or even centuries.
Electronic books are fragile, by their very nature dependent on a lot of infrastructure, both technical and social. Paper books are robust and require nothing but a relatively simple skill from the user. It would be foolish to risk losing access to knowledge following a breakdown, especially as future seems increasingly uncertain.
People and politicians have very little imagination. They can't believe a society can flourish with universal knowledge for all. So they have to be shown, first that the world isn't going to be destroyed if knowledge is free, and second that the benefits to society outweigh the benefits to a few corporate leeches of keeping knowledge locked up.
Politicians don't really care if a society can flourish. They sought power either because they have some kind of ideology they want to ram down everyone's throats, or because they saw corruption and wanted a piece of the action - or both. Leeches won't every prioritize common good over their leeching, obviously, and ideological fundamentalists don't want the society to flourish, they want it to follow their ideology, and if anything things improving will make it harder to accomplish that ("if we let people get used to Obamacare, we'll never get rid of it"). So does an educated population, for that matter, so they have an even greater incentive to try and censor whenever they can.
That said, bypassing official controls and making universal knowledge a reality is certainly a good idea. It won't change the minds of politicians, but it'll make them powerless to stop it, which is good enough.
Convert them to US dollars, just about the single most Bitcoin-legitimizing action I can imagine...
Which might actually be a good move. US dollar is going to undergo hyperinflation when the petrodollar scheme collapses and all those bucks return home, so by moving as much of the economy as possible to alternatives helps minimize the damage. At the far extreme, if the entire US economy uses something else than the dollar the Fed is free to treat it as monopoly money and simply laugh as its debt dissolves. And Bitcoin is a good substitute - it's not controlled by any (other) country, it's designed for the Interent economy, it's impossible to forge, all transactions are public knowledge...
I doubt the US government has such foresight and capacity for long-term planning, but an agency leader might.
Would you trust, for example, a VPN service that has accepted payments from the FBI?
Is there some reason to not to? The FBI can simply order a VPN to betray its customers, it doesn't need to bribe them.
Hold on, she was the victim here. SHe doesn't need to do encryption because at one point thre was this thing called the constitution.
She needs encryption because not needing it depends on the very entity she's investigating for breaking the law following it.
You're making like a rape case. "Come on, she shouldn't have worn that dress, she was inviting it".
No, but if you suspect someone of being a serial rapist and agree to meet with them on an empty place without taking precautions, you're a moron. And if you send someone else to meet them without backup, you certainly deserve to be held responsible for your negligence.
Nintendo also found a way to appeal to old people and fairly infirm people. Nintendo was the first to make a practical break from the up-down-left-right-a-b controller to something that worked without needing to push buttons, depending on the game.
I'm pretty sure infirm people would prefer a control scheme that can be used by moving a finger than one that requires moving your whole arm. Also, pointing a remote without a pistol grip for extended periods of time will make you infirm, at least on the wrist.
People act like the US is the only country to have ever spied, when really, in this case, they just got caught. How do you know that others wouldn't be doing the same sort of monitoring? How do you know that they're not already?
Everyone's doing it, and if they aren't, that just means they've not been caught yet, and if they really aren't, they might. They're only treating you like a paranoid lunatic because they're all hypocrites.
Still, congratulations for resisting the urge to suggest that everyone but you is secretly a terrorist.
the us invented it, did most of the work developing and deploying it, and funds most of the upkeep.
But more importantly, for example Finland - where F-Secure is based - couldn't host Slashdot, because by law forums must record their users' real names and must actively moderate offensive posts. So Hypponen could do more to change this with the ballot box than soap box, since it's less about the US and more about Finland - and, presumably, other European countries.
I'd say it's more a matter of people being HUMAN. Humans have a whole range of emotions too, which often prove detrimental or at least reduce efficiency at attaining the desired outcome in a particular situation. Should we just eliminate all those pesky feelings too and become strictly logical?
No, it's not a matter of being HUMAN, it's a matter of being immature and ill-trained. The problem is not having emotions, the problem is having insufficient training in using them - basically, you are letting them react to a fantasy ("I'm a better than average driver, and can avoid a crash no matter what") rather than reality ("I'm an average driver, and the computer is a better driver than me"). Consequently, they end up giving bad recommendations, leading to seemingly irrational behaviour. Garbage in, garbage out.
Delusions of grandieur are like beer of the soul: they're tasty and make you feel good, but also unhealthy, addictive and impair judgement. They'll kill you if you overindulge. And if you combine them with driving, you're a threat to everyone on the road.
So no, we shouldn't eliminate "all those pesky feelings", but rather learn to query them about the actual logical consequences of our choices. Life isn't Star Trek; being logical in no way conflicts with having emotions. And irrationality - being bad at achieving your goals - is by defintion never a virtue, altough I suppose it could be a good thing for other people, depending on what those goals are.
But passively sitting in some machine that takes a person there won't involve any of the joys of operating the vehicle anymore. That's going to be a big downside for people who went through the whole process of learning to drive, achieving a license to do so, and investing years in what they probably believe made them a better and more skilled driver with all the practice.
And not having to drive anymore is going to be a big upside for those of us who invested all that time simply because we need to get from point A to point B at will, and are rational enough to recognize sunk cost fallacy as such.
This is not a lifestyle I want to live. I can't imagine a future population truly being happy with this either.
I can't really imagine the mindset of considering driving a "lifestyle", but I'll take your word for it. Take mine when I say that I would love to let a computer take care of what's ultimately a boring, mechanical task while I daydream, watch scenery or browse the net.
No matter what the soccer mom associations running western society, today say, there's much more to life than safety and convenience, especially when it comes to control over mental state and physical location/transportation.
Oh yes, let's not forget the freedom to meditate or use mind-altering substances.
Can you imagine a home device capable of the precision of the size of a virus? How much would that cost?
Yes. They're called hard drives and manufacture magnetic structures in the picometer (sub-viral) scale. Cost is around 100 euros.
Obviously, it would require a lot of work to turn a hard drive to a manfucaturing plant; but if you made the platter from some material who's optical properties change with magnetism, you could prepare it with the head and use it as a reflector to get things started. Or we could adapt DVD recording technology - just make the spiral so tight the dots in successive layers overlap, and you can make contiguous chemically altered areas, which can then be altered further with chemical baths.
In a purely rational sense, as distasteful or immoral as some find it, there is an important place for execution in the criminal justice system.
Rationality means taking the option that has the highest expected utility. Justice system doing something distasteful or immoral has negative utility, since it serves to undermine respect for law, thus making enforcement impossible (see copyright wars for an example). Saving money has positive utility, however it is unlikely to exceed the negative utility of law coming into disrespect. Therefore, it is likely irrational for the justice system to choose saving money through immorality (also known as corruption) over staying respectable.
tl;dr Learn what rationality means before speaking about it.
Well most non-sociopaths dont want to kill people, therefore we either find sociopaths who have not illegally killed people to do it and hope it does not trigger it a murder binge or we get normal people to do it and try to minimize the trauma to them.
Or you could just let murderers rot in jail, thus avoiding both trauma and the rather unfortunate idea that life is a privilege that is subject to revocation by the state at its will. It's not like death penalty serves any practical purpose anyway, besides keeping the idea that violence is justice alive and kicking.
Coming to think of it, I wonder if this is one of the reasons why the US has constant problems with mass shootings and serial killers: if it's okay for the state to do it...
Uh, no. If that argument worked then we would have no rights - no right to life because of capital punishment, no right to vote because most states don't let prisoners vote and some don't let ex-cons vote, etc, etc.
Well, yes: once you accept that the state can revoke your right to live, vote, or anything, it follows that it was never a right but a mere privilege granted by said state. All that remains is debating over the proper procedure: for example, do you need to convince some random blokes that you deserve to die or can the president confirm that with an executi(ve/on) order?
In much of the civilized world, you have a right to life; in the US, you have a state-granted privilege to it.
"No one is fat because computer implants run on bodyfat" had me rolling my eyes pretty hard.
Then again, assuming 100% efficient power conversion, a typical desktop processor with a TDP of 100 watts would burn over 2000 kilocalories per day, according to aqua-calc.
My brief description here is not intended as a fully fleshed out proposal, but a general concept that, if adopted, would render spamming botnets basically useless.
And it fails at that, since the botnet will simply send the spam from the accounts of pwned users.
The reconstructed signal can then operate at near the noise floor, and without knowing the PRNG seed, you will only get a lot of multiple-source noise -- there's no way to separate out individual very low power emissions and source them out.
Does this still work when the source is stationary? Or is this a new use for small autonomous drones? Or should we go all out and build a drone-sneakernet?
Would you really be happier if no ISPs ever oversold their services and they sold you exactly how much you would get?
Yes. If you absolutely must let critical infrastructure be subject to the market's whims, at least force the suppliers to compete on who can deliver the most bang for the buck, not on who tells the biggest lies.
There is nothing preventing governments from being efficient and they sometimes are.
Half the members of the US government are actively trying to sabotage it for ideological reasons, the budget drama being the latest example of this. That's a pretty large obstacle to effectiveness.
The problem is that there also isn't anything keeping the government from being inefficient. Companies that are run horribly inefficiently tend not to last too long because they can go out of business (obviously doesn't apply to government enforced monopolies). If the government is horribly inefficient the general punishment is that they get more funding. To summarize, natural selection operates more in a capitalist market than it does in a government.
Natural selection operates between countries too, and in a far more brutal fashion than in the marketplace. See the entire history of the world for examples.
You may be right about the "make work" projects but that doesn't make it not exceedingly stupid.
Back in the medieval times people had to justify their existence through piety and religious observance. In modern mythology, they need to do so through hard work, unless they're part of the modern clergy (shareowners and such). But what happens when economic turmoil means there simply isn't useful work to be had? You make penance programs that let people partake in the ritual of working despite not doing anything useful. This ritualistic sacrifice then earns them the right to eat, just like the ritual of eucharist earns churchs members a place in their society.
Of course it's stupid, since we have so much food available that obesity is a major health concern, we pay farmers to let their fields lay fallow, and plenty of it still simply rots away, but theocracies aren't exactly known for their rationality. And at least it's better than the fundamentalist born-again true believers who think anyone not blessed by the Invisible Hand should simply die. Also, capitalism is still pretty young, as far as belief systems are concerned; it'll evolve less wasteful and pointlessly burdensome rituals eventually.
A free market solution would be to offer more options.
A free market solution is to go with the cheapest immediate option and ignore long-term costs. He who ignores future gets bonuses today, and by tomorrow some other sucker is left holding the now-worthless shares.
Automatic, universal encryption or digital signatures applied to everything genuine would be a legitimate solution to spam, and everything else gets dropped by your server.
Unless you're trying to imply that spam filtering is illegal, "legitimate" is not a correct term here. That aside, not only does verifying those "genuine" signatures require off-band distribution of corresponding public keys, but it also does nothing to stop botnets from sending spam.
There are some minor obstacles, but if every mail server also serves the keys for the accounts it holds, it would be a simple matter to verify what current keys to accept at the recieving end.
And what would this accomplish, exactly speaking? That the server that just handed you the message really wants you to have it?
You seem to be a prime example. That entire post is all about what you want without any consideration for the people you're talking to.
Demanding that I get to control my time and attention is different than demanding I get to control your time and attention. Also, the whole point of being able to use the wearable compute unnoticed is to avoid offending people who think the world revolves around them while also avoiding letting them control me. Finally, you can't be bothered to make a Slashdot account for yourself so who are you to talk about consideration to people you're talking to?
And still you wonder why everybody hates you.
When you say you'll hate me for not making you the center of my attention forsaking all else whenever you desire, I'm reminded of that guy who threw acid on the face of a girl who spurned his advances.
Social interaction is all about making your conversation partner feel important, welcome, loved.
And if I don't treats yours as the most important thing in the world, you'll hate me. That sounds more like a power game to me.
Exchanging information is secondary.
To you, maybe. But what right do you have to demand everyone else treats it as such?
Slashdot Mirror
Doctors and other people who's income comes primarily from their own work aren't in the 1%, that's purely the domain of businessmen. And they don't usually stop being businessmen when they become politicians, which leads to conflicts of interest when talking about economics, which in turn causes problems with trustworthiness.
Sure thing. We'll just build a few coal plants instead. They're privately insurable despite killing people and destroying the environment when operating normally, since unlike nuclear no one expects them to pay for their externalities. Or we could build a hundred large solar plants, which together equal about one reactor as long as sun shines from cloudless skies. That shouldn't require any subsidies, and if it does, it's okay because it's not nuclear. Of course, they'll still need those coal plants for backup, but that's okay because dying from microparticle-induced cancer is a lot better than dying from radiation-induced cancer, amirite?
No matter how cheap books are, you are still only able to read one or two per day. Therefore the demand is capped. On the other hand, two books are not inerchangeable unless they're copies of the same book; even if Amazon was giving books away for free, it might still be worse deal than keeping lots of small bookstores in business and thus ensuring that a single seller doesn't have a total power to determine what books and authors get on the market.
Maybe you should take a few more Econ classes.
Start with these. If it's sheer quantity you want, that should set you up for life.
A vote which is both unequal - some people have more money to vote with, after all - and by definition corrupt - every single dollar vote you cast has a direct financial impact on you, after all. It's a fine tool for managing logistics, but completely unfit for making decisions that have long-term effects.
It's a preference of the elected representatives. And letting money decide everything is a preference of those who have it. Why should anyone who isn't rich follow an idelogy which disenfranchises them? Besides indoctrination, that is.
No. The difference between a free man and a slave is that a free man can live without obeying anyone. That requires means to defend yourself, for which a gun may or may not qualify, but it also means some way to get food without serving a master. You don't have that, you don't have freedom.
You comparison fails, because paper books are superior in many ways:
Electronic books are fragile, by their very nature dependent on a lot of infrastructure, both technical and social. Paper books are robust and require nothing but a relatively simple skill from the user. It would be foolish to risk losing access to knowledge following a breakdown, especially as future seems increasingly uncertain.
Politicians don't really care if a society can flourish. They sought power either because they have some kind of ideology they want to ram down everyone's throats, or because they saw corruption and wanted a piece of the action - or both. Leeches won't every prioritize common good over their leeching, obviously, and ideological fundamentalists don't want the society to flourish, they want it to follow their ideology, and if anything things improving will make it harder to accomplish that ("if we let people get used to Obamacare, we'll never get rid of it"). So does an educated population, for that matter, so they have an even greater incentive to try and censor whenever they can.
That said, bypassing official controls and making universal knowledge a reality is certainly a good idea. It won't change the minds of politicians, but it'll make them powerless to stop it, which is good enough.
Which might actually be a good move. US dollar is going to undergo hyperinflation when the petrodollar scheme collapses and all those bucks return home, so by moving as much of the economy as possible to alternatives helps minimize the damage. At the far extreme, if the entire US economy uses something else than the dollar the Fed is free to treat it as monopoly money and simply laugh as its debt dissolves. And Bitcoin is a good substitute - it's not controlled by any (other) country, it's designed for the Interent economy, it's impossible to forge, all transactions are public knowledge...
I doubt the US government has such foresight and capacity for long-term planning, but an agency leader might.
Is there some reason to not to? The FBI can simply order a VPN to betray its customers, it doesn't need to bribe them.
She needs encryption because not needing it depends on the very entity she's investigating for breaking the law following it.
No, but if you suspect someone of being a serial rapist and agree to meet with them on an empty place without taking precautions, you're a moron. And if you send someone else to meet them without backup, you certainly deserve to be held responsible for your negligence.
I'm pretty sure infirm people would prefer a control scheme that can be used by moving a finger than one that requires moving your whole arm. Also, pointing a remote without a pistol grip for extended periods of time will make you infirm, at least on the wrist.
Everyone's doing it, and if they aren't, that just means they've not been caught yet, and if they really aren't, they might. They're only treating you like a paranoid lunatic because they're all hypocrites.
Still, congratulations for resisting the urge to suggest that everyone but you is secretly a terrorist.
But more importantly, for example Finland - where F-Secure is based - couldn't host Slashdot, because by law forums must record their users' real names and must actively moderate offensive posts. So Hypponen could do more to change this with the ballot box than soap box, since it's less about the US and more about Finland - and, presumably, other European countries.
No, it's not a matter of being HUMAN, it's a matter of being immature and ill-trained. The problem is not having emotions, the problem is having insufficient training in using them - basically, you are letting them react to a fantasy ("I'm a better than average driver, and can avoid a crash no matter what") rather than reality ("I'm an average driver, and the computer is a better driver than me"). Consequently, they end up giving bad recommendations, leading to seemingly irrational behaviour. Garbage in, garbage out.
Delusions of grandieur are like beer of the soul: they're tasty and make you feel good, but also unhealthy, addictive and impair judgement. They'll kill you if you overindulge. And if you combine them with driving, you're a threat to everyone on the road.
So no, we shouldn't eliminate "all those pesky feelings", but rather learn to query them about the actual logical consequences of our choices. Life isn't Star Trek; being logical in no way conflicts with having emotions. And irrationality - being bad at achieving your goals - is by defintion never a virtue, altough I suppose it could be a good thing for other people, depending on what those goals are.
And not having to drive anymore is going to be a big upside for those of us who invested all that time simply because we need to get from point A to point B at will, and are rational enough to recognize sunk cost fallacy as such.
I can't really imagine the mindset of considering driving a "lifestyle", but I'll take your word for it. Take mine when I say that I would love to let a computer take care of what's ultimately a boring, mechanical task while I daydream, watch scenery or browse the net.
Oh yes, let's not forget the freedom to meditate or use mind-altering substances.
Yes. They're called hard drives and manufacture magnetic structures in the picometer (sub-viral) scale. Cost is around 100 euros.
Obviously, it would require a lot of work to turn a hard drive to a manfucaturing plant; but if you made the platter from some material who's optical properties change with magnetism, you could prepare it with the head and use it as a reflector to get things started. Or we could adapt DVD recording technology - just make the spiral so tight the dots in successive layers overlap, and you can make contiguous chemically altered areas, which can then be altered further with chemical baths.
Rationality means taking the option that has the highest expected utility. Justice system doing something distasteful or immoral has negative utility, since it serves to undermine respect for law, thus making enforcement impossible (see copyright wars for an example). Saving money has positive utility, however it is unlikely to exceed the negative utility of law coming into disrespect. Therefore, it is likely irrational for the justice system to choose saving money through immorality (also known as corruption) over staying respectable.
tl;dr Learn what rationality means before speaking about it.
Or you could just let murderers rot in jail, thus avoiding both trauma and the rather unfortunate idea that life is a privilege that is subject to revocation by the state at its will. It's not like death penalty serves any practical purpose anyway, besides keeping the idea that violence is justice alive and kicking.
Coming to think of it, I wonder if this is one of the reasons why the US has constant problems with mass shootings and serial killers: if it's okay for the state to do it...
Well, yes: once you accept that the state can revoke your right to live, vote, or anything, it follows that it was never a right but a mere privilege granted by said state. All that remains is debating over the proper procedure: for example, do you need to convince some random blokes that you deserve to die or can the president confirm that with an executi(ve/on) order?
In much of the civilized world, you have a right to life; in the US, you have a state-granted privilege to it.
Then again, assuming 100% efficient power conversion, a typical desktop processor with a TDP of 100 watts would burn over 2000 kilocalories per day, according to aqua-calc.
And it fails at that, since the botnet will simply send the spam from the accounts of pwned users.
Does this still work when the source is stationary? Or is this a new use for small autonomous drones? Or should we go all out and build a drone-sneakernet?
Yes. If you absolutely must let critical infrastructure be subject to the market's whims, at least force the suppliers to compete on who can deliver the most bang for the buck, not on who tells the biggest lies.
Half the members of the US government are actively trying to sabotage it for ideological reasons, the budget drama being the latest example of this. That's a pretty large obstacle to effectiveness.
Natural selection operates between countries too, and in a far more brutal fashion than in the marketplace. See the entire history of the world for examples.
Back in the medieval times people had to justify their existence through piety and religious observance. In modern mythology, they need to do so through hard work, unless they're part of the modern clergy (shareowners and such). But what happens when economic turmoil means there simply isn't useful work to be had? You make penance programs that let people partake in the ritual of working despite not doing anything useful. This ritualistic sacrifice then earns them the right to eat, just like the ritual of eucharist earns churchs members a place in their society.
Of course it's stupid, since we have so much food available that obesity is a major health concern, we pay farmers to let their fields lay fallow, and plenty of it still simply rots away, but theocracies aren't exactly known for their rationality. And at least it's better than the fundamentalist born-again true believers who think anyone not blessed by the Invisible Hand should simply die. Also, capitalism is still pretty young, as far as belief systems are concerned; it'll evolve less wasteful and pointlessly burdensome rituals eventually.
Demanding that I get to control my time and attention is different than demanding I get to control your time and attention. Also, the whole point of being able to use the wearable compute unnoticed is to avoid offending people who think the world revolves around them while also avoiding letting them control me. Finally, you can't be bothered to make a Slashdot account for yourself so who are you to talk about consideration to people you're talking to?
When you say you'll hate me for not making you the center of my attention forsaking all else whenever you desire, I'm reminded of that guy who threw acid on the face of a girl who spurned his advances.
And if I don't treats yours as the most important thing in the world, you'll hate me. That sounds more like a power game to me.
To you, maybe. But what right do you have to demand everyone else treats it as such?