I get +5 Insightful, and you get a lousy +2 for all your effort. Anyway, thanks for an informative post. What's interesting is the initial point you make about email obviously being insecure and that there should be no expectation of privacy.
It is very obvious to me (and most others here) that unencrypted email is unsecure. It seems a reversal of the normal situation for a court to be ruling on something that is clear to many tech-people but that conflicts the general public's understanding. Most stories on/. are precisely the other way around.
However, email being unsecure is not synonymous with no expectation of privacy. I think too many/. 's are too cynical and think that if something isn't prevented, then it has a natural right to happen. This is not the case. Of course this guy can peer into the emails that pass through his service, but it still takes active effort on his part to do so and that is wrong. I would hope that this falls foul of at least some law, even if not the wire-tapping one. I would imagine that the same applies to any ISP or other email provider.
To rule otherwise is to blame the victim for the actions of the criminal because not enough effort was made to stop him.
I've started creating 'Idiot Discs.' This contains install exe's for a decent firewall, Firefox, Thunderbird and a virus scanner. The install is pretty painless. A step-by-step guide to what to press pops up when they start up. It's not perfect yet, but I'm working on it. GPG is on my list as soon as I figure out a way of automating setting it up.
I also have a domain that I allocate email addresses on for my friends for free (when they can be persuaded). It's an uphill struggle, but it's a step towards putting the power back in their hands.
"Why encrypt my email? I have nothing to hide!"
I get this all the time and it infuriates me. I see it as just a lack of community spirit on their part. 'Think of all the people that do have something to hide,' I explain to them, 'and who are exposed because people like you do nothing to help camouflage their encryption use.'
Really, I'd just like to see encryption become a standard for the sake ensuring its continued availability in the future. Many people lack the historical perspective to realize what a blip our current state of freedom is, and consequently don't seem to believe that they could lose it.
We don't need to say that this is like opening postal mail, or that RAM holding the email temporarily is like a modem caching the data. We don't need to compare this to anything to explain it.
Yep. It certainly is. And so is mine. I see society working by the law of the jungle. At what point does a lack of effort to stop someone seizing power (or holding on to huge wealth), become 'letting' them do it. It could shift according to mood. And 'we' shift too. Are 'we' the lowest income groups that certainly don't 'let' the super-rich be super-rich, but merely lack the power to grab a share, or the middle-classes who sort-of let them, or the upper-classes and politicians who do let them(selves).
Gah! You are right, but it still sounds funny when you magnanamously declare that we will let Bill Gates keep his wealth.;)
Oh, and Weishaupt dead? That's just what THEY want you to think, Fnord.
Obviously, you aren't going to benefit from technology because you are lazy.
Hah! No need to get personal (and personally speaking innacurate).
Median incomes may have risen, but Lies, Damn Lies and all that, it's a good point, but not the whole point. Two issues I'd like to raise are:
1. The division between rich and poor has risen at the same time as the rising median income. This is a very significant measure of society's well-being. A smaller slice of a larger pie can actually be worse.
2. Median incomes have risen compared to what?
Firstly, I'm assuming that your figures are already inflation-adjusted, but how do they compare with cost-of-living, real purchasing power, percentage of the GDP that year? Especially the last one.
And finally, the argument was about the distribution of the rewards of innovation. The median incomes would be higher if it were more evenly distributed, unless you are arguing that more even distribution would (very) significantly lower the GDP. What I (as OP) was NOT arguing against was technology. That would be pretty silly for someone with my years and ability in programming.
Is there a better example of someone who can sit back, without producing, and continuously earn money?
There are other examples, certainly, remember that what I'm really concerned with is stock-holders and employees. But I'll stick with my tenant-landlord example as I like it. I think you overstate the costs to a landlord. If the rent is covering the mortgage and the upkeep then he's getting free money. I'm going to overlook a little bookkeeping. And furthermore, when you are paying off a mortgage, that is not money that is vanishing, you are getting valuable property in return for it, culminating in ownership of your property. And I think you also overestimate the number of landlords who haven't long-since reached this stage.
And just because you took a mortgage on one house, it doesn't mean you don't already own a whole string of others.
Anyway, this analogy has long since served its purpose in illustrating what I meant in my original post. It is not the thing itself, just a likeness. Better to discuss the actual economics if you want to get into this much detail.
This is why we let people have ludicrous amounts of wealth. So they can do things that wouldn't otherwise be done.
My attitude to a society tends towards the rough and ready. I'll chance a few greedy power-mongers for the sake of the occasional mad visionary, but...
This is why we let people have ludicrous amounts of wealth.
Heh! That made me laugh... unless that's you Mr. Weishaupt. 8)
Certainly can't argue with your understanding of means and medians, and don't want to -what's to disagree with?
I would like to add a comment about median wage though, which is that although the addition of the high figures wont skew the median, it does affect other aspects of society, for example it would (and does) skew the cost of living and (especially) of non-essential goods and services. It's the relationship of the median income with this cost of living that matters most.
Although Micheal Moore is a "documentary maker", his documentaries don't stand up to tough analysis.
Sadly true. I've yet to see this film, but I've read two of his books and seen BfC.
He echoes a lot of my own beliefs, but I just don't see how he arrived at them. I regard him in the same way a physicist might regard someone who kept telling people about Schroedinger's Cat. He's saying things that are true, but I know he just read it in a book somewhere without really grasping the math.
Well I'm afraid that in my attempt to avoid writing a huge treatise on economics, I used some pretty clumsy definitions.
The distinction I was trying to draw was between those who have to keep running to stay where they are, and those who can sit back and watch the money coming in. A small scale example would be landlords and tennants. Some pay rent, and some recieve it. In a very broad sense (but a real one also) we are all landlords or tennants within society. the factories and the farms are owned by groups that are small in comparison to the size of society as a whole.
And they then use that money to purchase and own things
The distinction is between buying a new pair of shoes, or investing in property or a company. Someone doing the former wasn't what I meant. Someone doing the latter is clawing their way out of the worker category and into the owner category. Although this example shows that the groups are not clear definitions that an actual person has to fall into or out of. I'm just modelling how society works at a higher level.
When you say that efficiencies benefit the owners, therefore the workers and therefore society, I disagree.
Benefiting society? Yes - you need another society to compare it with, but between one that has cars and one that has horses, you can see the disparity of power. (Of course you should consider things like quality of life etc.)
But workers? Messier. The benefit is traditionally the falling cost of goods. Plot that benefit on one line. the negative is the lowering reward for a worker's time. Plot that on another line. See where they cross? Now at what point does the balance become a bad one for the 'worker?'
I say that this point has been reached for the average person.
Property rights as important as they are, become a form of colonial hostile government in such a condition.
Oooh, you communist you.
I agree with you for the reason that almost everything you said is logically derived from what we can see around us. What I have to add though, has to do with this:
I don't want to hear the ignorant claims of some Libertarian or Conservative or Liberal who takes on their partizan line here.
Society is dividing up quite unpleasantly into different groups. Tout what you're saying and logically derived though it is, someone will just say 'socialism.' and whole segments of society will immediately become deaf to you. I'm increasingly hearing the words, Liberal, Conservative, etc, thrown around and I still don't realy understand what they mean.
Okay, I'm being willfully ignorant about them, as I know what people mean by it, but I don't think the meaning is remotely self-coherent. Can we really lump lots of complex ideas into a small number of camps and say that we cannot mix and match?
You are calling for a well-thought out, pragmatic approach and I can hear you, but the biggest obstacle is that people will slap a label on you and that will hamstring you in getting people to listen. A lot of good ideas have been tarnished by the failure of groups that promoted them and where there is overlap, you'll have problems.
That said, times are getting more desperate and it's now that new ideas can most take hold. So good luck.
Problem is that we have a social model that requires the vast majority to work full-time to survive. And since growing food has dropped from employing the vast majority of people to a tiny percentage, there's very little that really needs to be done. So, to preserve this model, people need to be employed making countless plastic toys (or in the service industry)
Until that social model changes, we are trapped in a cycle of mas-consumerism. When politicians tell you that it's your patriotic duty to buy buy buy, well they're kind of right. But only within thier own paradigm. If everyone benefited from innovation, instead of just factory owners and stock-holders, then things would change. You'd start to see people working fewer hours, taking more time for education or recreation, etc. Which is what you might have expected when the tractor was invented, or factories were automated. Unfortunately the social-economic model wouldn't allow that.
As this process continues, expect the pressure to get worse until the revolution. 8)
Stop your whining and adapt. It's fucking pathetic
I'll bite.
Broadly speaking, we have a society that is divided into those who 'own' and those who don't. For the majority of society, that is not the owners, life is structured around working to survive.
When something is done in a new and more efficient way then in a sense, society benefits. However, those who really benefit are 'owning' segment of the population, not the 'workers.'
New technology has repeatedly caused a great deal of suffering as it makes people redundant. So when you say,
Let's do everything manually, there's more jobs that way.
Well that's exactly true. The problem is not that society is not benefitted by new technology but that the benefit is not shared around.
Modern Western society has long since passed the point where everyone is required to work the majority of their time to survive. The model of people doing this has long since collapsed in terms of essentials and it's only kept going by mass-consumption of goods we don't really need (mostly status oriented) and services.
Nor is this progression at an end. It should be especially obvious to the/. crowd that the standard for what is difficult to automate will continue to rise quickly for the forseeable future.
Of course, we can't hold back progress for the sake of mass employment. The only good solution is for the profits of innovation to be shared out more easily.
But in the spirit of ending this negativity, which I fully agree with, it seems to me like society might be adapting. Perhaps not in terms of the skills which you meant, but in terms of how people work. For example, people are increasingly opting for less financial rewards in their jobs, such as greater flexibility and increased holiday, and this is a great plus because it means sharing the work out wider. Many more people are working in education too, which is a plus.
I hope to live to see the three-day week become an accepted standard.;)
I once saw in a factory in Sweden an elevator system like this.
It's called a patternoster. We had one at a place I worked (UK) and each 'box' held two people. Coming back from lunch one time, I found a queue of 12/13 people waiting to ride up - solution, I stepped into the one that was just disappearing into the ground. Two boxes later, I rise up in front of the still 8/9 people queuing.
I don't know why but it was incredibly funny. I'm probably just childish.:p
I'm going to patent making jokes about patenting patenting; and while my patent on patenting patenting is pending, you'd best make the most of them, because patenting patenting jokes are getting patently unfunny and I (and my patent) shall soon be putting a stop to them.
I don't think I can even see the topic from here anymore, but what the Hell,
How often they leave things to immigrant nurses
I used to go out with a eastern european nurse. She was very intelligent and very compasionate. There is nothing wrong with foreign medical practitioners. The point that is RARELY considered however, is what effect it has on the country of origin that is unable to compete with the USA and UK and finds it's qualified medical staff leaving en masse.
Great for 'us,' very bad for them.
Now to bring this back on-topic: This is a really stupid patent.
Re:It's Gone Beyond Science Fiction into Mainstrea
on
Open Source Life?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The problem is that this GMO has defects and liabilities that are unknown,
One that is known, is that it is homogenous. If the topic of the article is about someone engineering a virus, bacteria or pest that would wipe out a nation's entire food crop, then at least the first two are made massively easier by having genetically identical crops.
Consider the Irish Potato famine. One blight that affected the few imported strains of potatoes on which the nation depended caused a famine. Few people in the modern Western world really understand what is meant by that word.
'Closed-Source' might be possible in a legal sense with food, but considering the companies want to grow it everywhere and sell it to everyone, it can hardly be secure through obscurity. So is it dangerous? YES!
I'm probably missing a few more reasons here too but the point is they aren't always as obvious as we would think.
I can think of an obvious one: Making money by selling flawed technology to CEOs who don't understand it.
Don't assume omniscience on the part of the music industry execs. You may think they're big fish, but there are smaller and smarter fish ready to scavenge from their kills.;)
Somwhere, somebody has made a lot of money from selling copy protection software, whether it works or not.
It is what I was getting at in an oblique way - they are developing weapons that can be used more casually so that the range of acceptable targets can be widened. Acceptable in this case will usually mean using it on someone who isn't threatening enough to endanger your life or health. And if you're not endangered then the reason for using your weapons is likely to be dubious, e.g. it's politically conveniant.
I too would probably rather be shot with a Taser than an M16. There may be valid uses for this technology (or at least as in comparison to uses of M16's), but there are a couple of points to bear in mind.
Firstly, to all those who are arguing how much better it is for Liberating Soldiers(tm), police and other assorted "good guys" to be armed with these rather than with firearms: This particular weapon currently has a range of about 20'/6m. There is no way that non-lethal weaponry like this is going to be issued for situations that are really dangerous. It will almost always be inferior to an enemy with lethal weaponry.
Which brings us to the second point, their target is therefore those that are not a threat. Note also, that this weapon's big selling point is that it can incapacitate large numbers of people. They may be a threat to economic or political interests, but they are not an enemy force. Weaponry is inappropriate.
Which brings us to the second point - why is it inappropriate? The legitimate use of the police force is to protect society from a criminal minority. The illegitimate use of a police force is for a minority to exert an excessive control over a majority. When this happens, you realize that the interests of the many are not being represented. Weaponry such as this is not attempt to rectify this situation, it is just giving [some] people a means to violate others with (far) fewer legal consequences.
Demonstrators at a protest in the United Kingdom were seen running around with lengths of copper wire trailing across the ground from their trouser-legs.
Heh! That's pretty funny. But if there were such a simple way of countering 'taser' weapons like this, would it be outlawed? There would likely be some legislation against anything that could specically protect you against crowd control.
"You are hereby charged with conspiracy to resist arrest."
Crowd control weapons seem more sinister than 'regular' weapons to me. Odd, but then what are the legitimage uses of them? Guns, etc, are used against enemy combabants and armed criminals, but who is the intended target of weapons like this? Protestors, passive resistance, people who occupy buildings or access roads?
It just seems to me that creating new technology to control crowds is to miss the real problem; and a little anti-democratic, eh?
To what extent will the citizens feel safer, and how much safer will they actually be?
Here in the UK where there is a great deal of surveillance, the jury is still out. (Links will follow).
The general impression I have as someone who is interested in this subject, is that, yes, they are reducing crime at present. Some research shows that the effect wears off though, so a large part of this may just be shock of the new.
Note that one of the main uses of CCTV is not crime prevention, but aiding in conviction rates.
Particular concerns about CCTV are that it doesn't so much prevent crime as it does displace it elsewhere. As the CCTV cameras are being placed firstly in more affluent areas, this has an even more negative effect on nearby deprived areas.
Sadly, rather fewer people are objecting on the grounds of how much power this gives authorities over people. This might be a grave error in the longer term (my opinion).
My own feeling is that although it seems (to me) to reduce crime a little and increase convictions, it's doing nothing to solve the problems that lead to crime. In my experience, most criminals, whatever their bravado, are driven to be criminals. Tightening the lid on the boiler may hide the problem for a while but it is not the solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Ooh! Thanks, that's looks useful!
I get +5 Insightful, and you get a lousy +2 for all your effort. Anyway, thanks for an informative post. What's interesting is the initial point you make about email obviously being insecure and that there should be no expectation of privacy.
It is very obvious to me (and most others here) that unencrypted email is unsecure. It seems a reversal of the normal situation for a court to be ruling on something that is clear to many tech-people but that conflicts the general public's understanding. Most stories on
However, email being unsecure is not synonymous with no expectation of privacy. I think too many
To rule otherwise is to blame the victim for the actions of the criminal because not enough effort was made to stop him.
I've started creating 'Idiot Discs.' This contains install exe's for a decent firewall, Firefox, Thunderbird and a virus scanner. The install is pretty painless. A step-by-step guide to what to press pops up when they start up. It's not perfect yet, but I'm working on it. GPG is on my list as soon as I figure out a way of automating setting it up.
I also have a domain that I allocate email addresses on for my friends for free (when they can be persuaded). It's an uphill struggle, but it's a step towards putting the power back in their hands.
"Why encrypt my email? I have nothing to hide!"
I get this all the time and it infuriates me. I see it as just a lack of community spirit on their part. 'Think of all the people that do have something to hide,' I explain to them, 'and who are exposed because people like you do nothing to help camouflage their encryption use.'
Really, I'd just like to see encryption become a standard for the sake ensuring its continued availability in the future. Many people lack the historical perspective to realize what a blip our current state of freedom is, and consequently don't seem to believe that they could lose it.
We don't need to say that this is like opening postal mail, or that RAM holding the email temporarily is like a modem caching the data. We don't need to compare this to anything to explain it.
It is plainly and utterly stupid and wrong.
Enough said.
But my statement is true.
Yep. It certainly is. And so is mine. I see society working by the law of the jungle. At what point does a lack of effort to stop someone seizing power (or holding on to huge wealth), become 'letting' them do it. It could shift according to mood. And 'we' shift too. Are 'we' the lowest income groups that certainly don't 'let' the super-rich be super-rich, but merely lack the power to grab a share, or the middle-classes who sort-of let them, or the upper-classes and politicians who do let them(selves).
Gah! You are right, but it still sounds funny when you magnanamously declare that we will let Bill Gates keep his wealth.
Oh, and Weishaupt dead? That's just what THEY want you to think, Fnord.
Obviously, you aren't going to benefit from technology because you are lazy.
Hah! No need to get personal (and personally speaking innacurate).
Median incomes may have risen, but Lies, Damn Lies and all that, it's a good point, but not the whole point. Two issues I'd like to raise are:
1. The division between rich and poor has risen at the same time as the rising median income. This is a very significant measure of society's well-being. A smaller slice of a larger pie can actually be worse.
2. Median incomes have risen compared to what?
Firstly, I'm assuming that your figures are already inflation-adjusted, but how do they compare with cost-of-living, real purchasing power, percentage of the GDP that year? Especially the last one.
And finally, the argument was about the distribution of the rewards of innovation. The median incomes would be higher if it were more evenly distributed, unless you are arguing that more even distribution would (very) significantly lower the GDP. What I (as OP) was NOT arguing against was technology. That would be pretty silly for someone with my years and ability in programming.
Is there a better example of someone who can sit back, without producing, and continuously earn money?
There are other examples, certainly, remember that what I'm really concerned with is stock-holders and employees. But I'll stick with my tenant-landlord example as I like it. I think you overstate the costs to a landlord. If the rent is covering the mortgage and the upkeep then he's getting free money. I'm going to overlook a little bookkeeping. And furthermore, when you are paying off a mortgage, that is not money that is vanishing, you are getting valuable property in return for it, culminating in ownership of your property. And I think you also overestimate the number of landlords who haven't long-since reached this stage.
And just because you took a mortgage on one house, it doesn't mean you don't already own a whole string of others.
Anyway, this analogy has long since served its purpose in illustrating what I meant in my original post. It is not the thing itself, just a likeness. Better to discuss the actual economics if you want to get into this much detail.
This is why we let people have ludicrous amounts of wealth. So they can do things that wouldn't otherwise be done.
My attitude to a society tends towards the rough and ready. I'll chance a few greedy power-mongers for the sake of the occasional mad visionary, but...
This is why we let people have ludicrous amounts of wealth.
Heh! That made me laugh... unless that's you Mr. Weishaupt. 8)
Certainly can't argue with your understanding of means and medians, and don't want to -what's to disagree with?
I would like to add a comment about median wage though, which is that although the addition of the high figures wont skew the median, it does affect other aspects of society, for example it would (and does) skew the cost of living and (especially) of non-essential goods and services. It's the relationship of the median income with this cost of living that matters most.
Although Micheal Moore is a "documentary maker", his documentaries don't stand up to tough analysis.
Sadly true. I've yet to see this film, but I've read two of his books and seen BfC.
He echoes a lot of my own beliefs, but I just don't see how he arrived at them. I regard him in the same way a physicist might regard someone who kept telling people about Schroedinger's Cat. He's saying things that are true, but I know he just read it in a book somewhere without really grasping the math.
I'm not sure that distinction really exists
Well I'm afraid that in my attempt to avoid writing a huge treatise on economics, I used some pretty clumsy definitions.
The distinction I was trying to draw was between those who have to keep running to stay where they are, and those who can sit back and watch the money coming in. A small scale example would be landlords and tennants. Some pay rent, and some recieve it. In a very broad sense (but a real one also) we are all landlords or tennants within society. the factories and the farms are owned by groups that are small in comparison to the size of society as a whole.
And they then use that money to purchase and own things
The distinction is between buying a new pair of shoes, or investing in property or a company. Someone doing the former wasn't what I meant. Someone doing the latter is clawing their way out of the worker category and into the owner category. Although this example shows that the groups are not clear definitions that an actual person has to fall into or out of. I'm just modelling how society works at a higher level.
When you say that efficiencies benefit the owners, therefore the workers and therefore society, I disagree.
Benefiting society? Yes - you need another society to compare it with, but between one that has cars and one that has horses, you can see the disparity of power. (Of course you should consider things like quality of life etc.)
But workers? Messier. The benefit is traditionally the falling cost of goods. Plot that benefit on one line. the negative is the lowering reward for a worker's time. Plot that on another line. See where they cross? Now at what point does the balance become a bad one for the 'worker?'
I say that this point has been reached for the average person.
Property rights as important as they are, become a form of colonial hostile government in such a condition.
Oooh, you communist you.
I agree with you for the reason that almost everything you said is logically derived from what we can see around us. What I have to add though, has to do with this:
I don't want to hear the ignorant claims of some Libertarian or Conservative or Liberal who takes on their partizan line here.
Society is dividing up quite unpleasantly into different groups. Tout what you're saying and logically derived though it is, someone will just say 'socialism.' and whole segments of society will immediately become deaf to you. I'm increasingly hearing the words, Liberal, Conservative, etc, thrown around and I still don't realy understand what they mean.
Okay, I'm being willfully ignorant about them, as I know what people mean by it, but I don't think the meaning is remotely self-coherent. Can we really lump lots of complex ideas into a small number of camps and say that we cannot mix and match?
You are calling for a well-thought out, pragmatic approach and I can hear you, but the biggest obstacle is that people will slap a label on you and that will hamstring you in getting people to listen. A lot of good ideas have been tarnished by the failure of groups that promoted them and where there is overlap, you'll have problems.
That said, times are getting more desperate and it's now that new ideas can most take hold. So good luck.
countless millions of plastic toys
Problem is that we have a social model that requires the vast majority to work full-time to survive. And since growing food has dropped from employing the vast majority of people to a tiny percentage, there's very little that really needs to be done. So, to preserve this model, people need to be employed making countless plastic toys (or in the service industry)
Until that social model changes, we are trapped in a cycle of mas-consumerism. When politicians tell you that it's your patriotic duty to buy buy buy, well they're kind of right. But only within thier own paradigm. If everyone benefited from innovation, instead of just factory owners and stock-holders, then things would change. You'd start to see people working fewer hours, taking more time for education or recreation, etc. Which is what you might have expected when the tractor was invented, or factories were automated. Unfortunately the social-economic model wouldn't allow that.
As this process continues, expect the pressure to get worse until the revolution. 8)
Stop your whining and adapt. It's fucking pathetic
I'll bite.
Broadly speaking, we have a society that is divided into those who 'own' and those who don't. For the majority of society, that is not the owners, life is structured around working to survive.
When something is done in a new and more efficient way then in a sense, society benefits. However, those who really benefit are 'owning' segment of the population, not the 'workers.'
New technology has repeatedly caused a great deal of suffering as it makes people redundant. So when you say,
Let's do everything manually, there's more jobs that way.
Well that's exactly true. The problem is not that society is not benefitted by new technology but that the benefit is not shared around.
Modern Western society has long since passed the point where everyone is required to work the majority of their time to survive. The model of people doing this has long since collapsed in terms of essentials and it's only kept going by mass-consumption of goods we don't really need (mostly status oriented) and services.
Nor is this progression at an end. It should be especially obvious to the
Of course, we can't hold back progress for the sake of mass employment. The only good solution is for the profits of innovation to be shared out more easily.
But in the spirit of ending this negativity, which I fully agree with, it seems to me like society might be adapting. Perhaps not in terms of the skills which you meant, but in terms of how people work. For example, people are increasingly opting for less financial rewards in their jobs, such as greater flexibility and increased holiday, and this is a great plus because it means sharing the work out wider. Many more people are working in education too, which is a plus.
I hope to live to see the three-day week become an accepted standard.
I once saw in a factory in Sweden an elevator system like this.
:p
It's called a patternoster. We had one at a place I worked (UK) and each 'box' held two people. Coming back from lunch one time, I found a queue of 12/13 people waiting to ride up - solution, I stepped into the one that was just disappearing into the ground. Two boxes later, I rise up in front of the still 8/9 people queuing.
I don't know why but it was incredibly funny. I'm probably just childish.
I'm going to patent making jokes about patenting patenting; and while my patent on patenting patenting is pending, you'd best make the most of them, because patenting patenting jokes are getting patently unfunny and I (and my patent) shall soon be putting a stop to them.
So there!
I don't think I can even see the topic from here anymore, but what the Hell,
How often they leave things to immigrant nurses
I used to go out with a eastern european nurse. She was very intelligent and very compasionate. There is nothing wrong with foreign medical practitioners. The point that is RARELY considered however, is what effect it has on the country of origin that is unable to compete with the USA and UK and finds it's qualified medical staff leaving en masse.
Great for 'us,' very bad for them.
Now to bring this back on-topic: This is a really stupid patent.
We all know the iTunes Music store is a pimp for the iPod
:)
Sound like this?
The problem is that this GMO has defects and liabilities that are unknown,
One that is known, is that it is homogenous. If the topic of the article is about someone engineering a virus, bacteria or pest that would wipe out a nation's entire food crop, then at least the first two are made massively easier by having genetically identical crops.
Consider the Irish Potato famine. One blight that affected the few imported strains of potatoes on which the nation depended caused a famine. Few people in the modern Western world really understand what is meant by that word.
'Closed-Source' might be possible in a legal sense with food, but considering the companies want to grow it everywhere and sell it to everyone, it can hardly be secure through obscurity. So is it dangerous? YES!
In a perfect world, a product would work as advertised and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Heh! Just this once I might be glad that it doesn't work as advertised... No doubt they would make it incompatible with Linux.
I'm probably missing a few more reasons here too but the point is they aren't always as obvious as we would think.
;)
I can think of an obvious one: Making money by selling flawed technology to CEOs who don't understand it.
Don't assume omniscience on the part of the music industry execs. You may think they're big fish, but there are smaller and smarter fish ready to scavenge from their kills.
Somwhere, somebody has made a lot of money from selling copy protection software, whether it works or not.
I think that's exactly his point
It is what I was getting at in an oblique way - they are developing weapons that can be used more casually so that the range of acceptable targets can be widened. Acceptable in this case will usually mean using it on someone who isn't threatening enough to endanger your life or health. And if you're not endangered then the reason for using your weapons is likely to be dubious, e.g. it's politically conveniant.
I too would probably rather be shot with a Taser than an M16. There may be valid uses for this technology (or at least as in comparison to uses of M16's), but there are a couple of points to bear in mind.
Firstly, to all those who are arguing how much better it is for Liberating Soldiers(tm), police and other assorted "good guys" to be armed with these rather than with firearms: This particular weapon currently has a range of about 20'/6m. There is no way that non-lethal weaponry like this is going to be issued for situations that are really dangerous. It will almost always be inferior to an enemy with lethal weaponry.
Which brings us to the second point, their target is therefore those that are not a threat. Note also, that this weapon's big selling point is that it can incapacitate large numbers of people. They may be a threat to economic or political interests, but they are not an enemy force. Weaponry is inappropriate.
Which brings us to the second point - why is it inappropriate? The legitimate use of the police force is to protect society from a criminal minority. The illegitimate use of a police force is for a minority to exert an excessive control over a majority. When this happens, you realize that the interests of the many are not being represented. Weaponry such as this is not attempt to rectify this situation, it is just giving [some] people a means to violate others with (far) fewer legal consequences.
Non-lethal my ass,
"Oh, my pace maker!"
And more importantly, does anyone know what this will do to my laptop?
Demonstrators at a protest in the United Kingdom were seen running around with lengths of copper wire trailing across the ground from their trouser-legs.
Heh! That's pretty funny. But if there were such a simple way of countering 'taser' weapons like this, would it be outlawed? There would likely be some legislation against anything that could specically protect you against crowd control.
"You are hereby charged with conspiracy to resist arrest."
Crowd control weapons seem more sinister than 'regular' weapons to me. Odd, but then what are the legitimage uses of them? Guns, etc, are used against enemy combabants and armed criminals, but who is the intended target of weapons like this? Protestors, passive resistance, people who occupy buildings or access roads?
It just seems to me that creating new technology to control crowds is to miss the real problem; and a little anti-democratic, eh?
To what extent will the citizens feel safer, and how much safer will they actually be?
Here in the UK where there is a great deal of surveillance, the jury is still out. (Links will follow). The general impression I have as someone who is interested in this subject, is that, yes, they are reducing crime at present. Some research shows that the effect wears off though, so a large part of this may just be shock of the new.
Note that one of the main uses of CCTV is not crime prevention, but aiding in conviction rates.
Particular concerns about CCTV are that it doesn't so much prevent crime as it does displace it elsewhere. As the CCTV cameras are being placed firstly in more affluent areas, this has an even more negative effect on nearby deprived areas.
Sadly, rather fewer people are objecting on the grounds of how much power this gives authorities over people. This might be a grave error in the longer term (my opinion).
My own feeling is that although it seems (to me) to reduce crime a little and increase convictions, it's doing nothing to solve the problems that lead to crime. In my experience, most criminals, whatever their bravado, are driven to be criminals. Tightening the lid on the boiler may hide the problem for a while but it is not the solution.
A few links are:
An 'official' report.
A government response and
a more cautious opinion.