The problem is that everyone has a mother, a father and a loved one. Who is not just a statistic of population growth but a person they love and they would want to have around longer.
My previous post, by the way, was sarcastic. I didn't really want his parents to come to my lab so we can give them heart attacks, Naloxone and other stuff. It was just a response to the "let people die -- it will promote the survival of the fittest" comment, so I wanted to see how willing he will be to part with his parents.
How do you describe "quality" of life. Is you "quality" the same as my "quality"? Isn't all life "quality"? Or should we just euthanize a handicapped person cause lord knows, they don't have as much "quality" as the healthy young lawyer across the street?
I am not advicating keeping brain dead people alive on respirators for decades, but I also don't go this "quality" of life argument, sorry.
That and a bunch of other things. You know, my father has smoked since he was 12. And I won't be surprized if he will get some disease connected to his smoking that will put his life in danger well before if he just aged without smoking. But it is my father, I won't say, we'll "he did it to himself, let him die!". I love him, I don't agree with his smoking, but I would want him to live. If there is a drug that would prevent lung cancer or heart failure -- I would give it to him. The best way to deal with such diseases is to prevent and to promote a healthy living. Don't let kids dring sodas, no fast food, encourage them to exercise, hike, jog, don't feed them sugar laden crap as todlers ( most finger food is full of sugar and carbs that spikes the blood sugar) then expect them as teenagers to like fruits and vegetables.
If that is the case, you wouldn't have a problem sending your mother and father to my lab. We'll gladly experiment on them instead of mice. They are older and probably won't have any more children, so why bother keeping them around to waste fresh water, food and gas on them. If they retire they'll just be a burden for everyone. If you happen to have a disabled relative, we'll put their heart to good use too, send them over too. We'll be waiting for them at my lab tomorrow! See you then!
We'll get the drugs and the anaesthesia ready. See you then. Word of warning, there have been very few studies about opiods and heart attack and use of the specific opiod recepter blocker drug we have. We will induce a heart attack, then try to see how our drug works to help your heart recover. So, yearh, see you tomorrow (might want to write a will first, just in case, you know...)
Someone in my lab has a poster of some radical animal rights protesters yelling, all nakes with painted whiskers, distorted faces and all and the caption said -- saving these people from heart attack since 1992.
Not to conduct such research on mice and let hundreds of thousands of people die of heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Mice in-vivo and in-vitro tissue models are invalueble to heart, diabetes and cancer research. They are mammals, they breed fast and a lot is already know about them.
I work in a heart research lab where we cut the hearts out of the mice and attach them to a working heart machine and pump a blood subsitute through it. Then we test various drugs and load conditions on it. The question is would you like to volunteer so that we test the drugs first on you, or your older family members, instead of the mice so as to spare their lives? Or would you rather be assured that in hundreds of mamalian tests the durgs performed as they are supposed to and the effects are clear and reproducible.
We abide by the rules and anaesthesize the mice carefully, we don't torture them and try to do the best we can to minimize their suffering. Personally I wish we didn't have to do this, I don't like to kill things -- animals or people, but in this case it is worth it to save many human lives.
In a sense you are saying this:
1) Upload to Google
2) Google indexes it
3) Google compresses it
4) Google encrypts it => Google has the key.
After this is done ask yourself, how is your data now more secure against the government looking at it and against other party looking at it, than if you skipped #4 and didn't encrypt. What happens next is this:
1) FBI/NSA/Whatever1984Agency asks Google for you info
2) Google decrypts it
3) Google hands it over it Uncle Sam
4) You have pictures there of you family at Disney World
5) By accident a large trashcan appears in one of the shots
6) Uncle Sam assumes you are scouting for places to hide a dirty bomb
7) You get arrested and detained for 5 months in some unknown prison
So how about the updated procedure to avoid the unpleasand Uncle Sam encounter:
1) Encrypt using a long passphrase that only you will know
2) Upload
3) End
This would work only if everyone would be doing it. Otherwise, as someone has mentioned above, if you are the only one of 10000 people who encrypts his stuff, you will look suspicious and they'll find a why to get the key from you to look what you got in there.
Why would Google encrypt the data? If they encrypt it and they keep it, then they can decrypt it if they want it, they can show it to the government, look at it themselves, mine it, sell it to another company etc. The idea was to allow individuals to encrypt their own files before sending them down the wire anywhere (Google drive, email, upload to a friend's FTP etc.). The intent was such that only the user and a party that has the user's permission should be able to see the real contents of the files...
Honestly, if they just hint that my wife/parents/children just might end up in an "accident", it would be enogh for me to shut up. If they could capture a German citizen (El Masri), put a diaper on him, drug him and fly him God knows where for harsh interrogations, then release him in the middle of Albania five month later, then I wouldn't hold it above them to harm my family to get me to shut up... I am surprized that guy even had enough guts to talk about it. I am sure you've heard about him, here is a link on the ACLU website about his case.
Of course, to NSA/FBI/CIA your encrypted GDrive that holds tax documents and family photos will look like it holds al Qaeda training manuals. So when the CIA takes you to Egypt for some fun interrogation and put a knife to your neck, you'll happily give them your passphrase so they can see what's on your GDrive.
Remember, the idea of a honest executive branch that will got to a court to get a permission to spy on you, or that you will get a speedy trial, or even a lawyer is history. Through fear we have allowed the government to become what it is now, blame the neo-conservatives for that if you want. Watch the "Power Of Nightmares" movie, I just saw it two days ago, quite enlightening, not totally objective but nevertheless it was worth my time (3 hours).
Nope, this is not the same. Here is the patched version of your analogy.
...If you're climbing a garden fence they grab you, you tell them it is a mistake, you just locked yourself out, they don't listen. They throw you in prison, label you a member of a terrorist sleeper cell and fly you to Egypt for some harsh CIA interrogation.
If you have some time watch the "Power Of Nightmares" documentary film. I just saw it yesterday. There is an interview in the 3rd chapter that talks about how there is a fundamental shift in the government's approach. Now they will detain and hold people for very long time just because they "think" the person will commit a crime in the future. It is nice and comforting at first to know that you government is there to protect you against the evil al Qaeda, until one day, they detain you for paying off a large dept with you mastercard.
hundreds of millions of citizens under a microscope at all times,
In 1984 it might have been tough, in 2006 it is not. There are tons of research papers out there in the database research, distributed AI and economics professional journals that focus on algorithms to detect money laundering transaction patterns, as well as a way to have banks share _patters_ of transactions without fully revealing all the details.Thus having the ability to have a 3rd company mine this huge distributed database but in such a way that the banks could safely share the data.
Exactly, today the Government can detain you without evidence of a crime, they just have to think that you might commit a crime in the future. Watch the "Power Of Nightmares" movie -- free download, if you have some time. I just saw it yesterday , it is quite enlightening and educational. Warning: it is a 3 hour thing!
Sometimes, if you register at local state university for some summer basket weaving class you might get access to the state-wide library book borrowing system, tons and tons of PDFs of otherwise expensive professional journals, tons of media and other stuff, sometimes you can get free access to athletic facilities (swimming pool, weights, treadmills etc.) -- just an outside gym membership for 3 months might cost you more than the 2 credit our class!
Good point. I wish there was a way to moderate stories. Go below 1, and "bye-bye" -- story is gone from the front page.
And what is so wrong with reporting how many times the browser has been downloaded? There is obviously some correlation between the number of downloads and the number of users using it. One way to get people to try something is to tell them that a million other people just like them, already did it. It shows that the product works. Criticism (and self criticism) is useful only when it is meaningful and not just "OMG, teh Firef0x people iz s000 imature! We n33d to b3 teh profeshin5l like B1ll Gat3z!!!!!"
In UI design, too many options and menus is considered sometimes a "bad thing". I didn't believe that when I heard it in class, I always wanted all the options I could get to configure the hell out of my applications and system. That is until one day I wanted to change some window behavior in KDE, it took me over half an hour of looking through the Kontrol Center and help files to get it to do what I wanted. In the meantime, I tried other options that I forgot to reset, now I had gotten the behavior I wanted but other stuff got messed, so I gave up. I logged out and selected GNOME as my desktop and have been using that ever since.
The same thing has happened to me with both the latest MS Office and latest OO. I know it is impossible to have less menus and options but have all the functionality all the time. But there is a way! -- Organize menus hierarchically according to user proficiency. I think xine does that and a few other programs. It means, that the user should be asked first how advanced they are, then perhaps ask them a couple more question to set some defaults (like will you printing labels a lot?, will you use a database as a source? will you export to HTML often? etc.) This will make sure that people like my Mom won't have to see options like "Data Source" or "Conditional Formatting" and options like that like that, but will only see stuff like "change the color to pretty blue" or "make it bold", "underline" etc. This applies to both OO and MS Office...
Well, I used to work for a company that made a popular CAD/CAE/CAM program in the late 90s, here in US, and we had that clause as part of the license/agreement. I suspect it was mostly geared towards our competitors. CAD and especially CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) is a very tight market, there are only about 3 or 4 major players who produce such software and there are multi-million dollar deals with some major automotive, space and defense companies. So industrial espionage is taken very seriously. Reverse engineering is one way to figure out what algorithms the competing company might be using, or might be a way to find a bug in a competitor's product, which can be used for PR and marketing
So I am wondering if after this, in US, Skype would introduce such "anti reverse engineering" clause in the agreements.
A lot of companies have a clause in the EUA that the user may not reverse compile or reverse engineer the binaries. I wonder if Skype will now add one of those then install a new block in a different section of the code, and close watch the IRC/Usenet/Bittorent/P2P nets etc. to catch those who claim they made patch, and slap them with a lawsuit.
Makes sense. I was just living in a dream world, where large companies like Google just donate to me a 2+ GB of email space accessible worldwide, with a nice interface and without those one-line ads at the end of my messages from that account.
It is funny you mentioned the IBM census machines, that was brought up in my other/. discussion on Google. The machines known as the Hollerith tabulators didn't do any evil, they couldn't -- they don't have a concept of it. But there is evidence that IBM specifically tailored and helped automate prisoner record keeping. In other words Germany didn't just say "we'll buy some census machines please, we just _really_ want count our population", instead it seems that IBM knew what the machines were used for. They had service centers and proxy companies in Germany that used to go to places like Auschwitz to mentain the machines. IBM refuses to open its document and paperwork archives from that era to people studying this. And I think they do that because they know they have got stuff to hide in there. Those machines couldn't just be bought like one would buy a pocket calcultor. One would need to buy a service plan for it, employees would need to be trained, there would be a constant need to ship new parts. IBM probably consulted the Nazis on optimizing the processing of prisoners and such.
Here is one site that talks more in detail about it. link
The soviets tried to do that. There was documentary of Discovery or PBS about it. There was dolphin with a holes in its skull with electrodes sticking out -- but supposedly that line of researched went nowere and just resulted in killing a bunch of dolphins.
But how much more do you trust Google, or Yahoo or others. Everyone has their emails, mostly personal, stored at all these companies servers: Microsoft's Hotmail, Google's Gmail, Yahoo Mail and such. People think their email is theirs and they can say whatever they want in there, but these companies will be willing to share all of that with the Government, or even worse sell it.
What "woke me up" was when I had an email conversation about subcloning and plasmids with my friend. I went the second day to check my email and Gmail displayed 2 adds regarding subcloning technologies. That means that my personal stuff is being actively searched and observed by Google, it doesn't just passively sit in some database, safe and protected.
I don't think Google or Yahoo will be more honest or better than Microsoft. We just perceive Google as better because Microsoft didn't make "being nice" and "do no evil" as part of their marketing and development (yet?). Google did. And besides technology that is what helped them rise to the top so fast. They will go to great lengths to protect that image since that as is what keeps the loyal customers coming back. Remember, after the deal with China, they first responded with "Oh, we just wanted to go in first, infiltrate and _then_ we'll eventually help bring democracy there.", some believed but their image was still tarnished, so what do they do? Weeks later we find out how Google all of the sudden wants to "give back" and they have $1.1bn to spend of "poor and needy" -- "DING! Google is the good guy again!"
Slashdot Mirror
My previous post, by the way, was sarcastic. I didn't really want his parents to come to my lab so we can give them heart attacks, Naloxone and other stuff. It was just a response to the "let people die -- it will promote the survival of the fittest" comment, so I wanted to see how willing he will be to part with his parents.
How do you describe "quality" of life. Is you "quality" the same as my "quality"? Isn't all life "quality"? Or should we just euthanize a handicapped person cause lord knows, they don't have as much "quality" as the healthy young lawyer across the street?
I am not advicating keeping brain dead people alive on respirators for decades, but I also don't go this "quality" of life argument, sorry.
That and a bunch of other things. You know, my father has smoked since he was 12. And I won't be surprized if he will get some disease connected to his smoking that will put his life in danger well before if he just aged without smoking. But it is my father, I won't say, we'll "he did it to himself, let him die!". I love him, I don't agree with his smoking, but I would want him to live. If there is a drug that would prevent lung cancer or heart failure -- I would give it to him. The best way to deal with such diseases is to prevent and to promote a healthy living. Don't let kids dring sodas, no fast food, encourage them to exercise, hike, jog, don't feed them sugar laden crap as todlers ( most finger food is full of sugar and carbs that spikes the blood sugar) then expect them as teenagers to like fruits and vegetables.
If that is the case, you wouldn't have a problem sending your mother and father to my lab. We'll gladly experiment on them instead of mice. They are older and probably won't have any more children, so why bother keeping them around to waste fresh water, food and gas on them. If they retire they'll just be a burden for everyone. If you happen to have a disabled relative, we'll put their heart to good use too, send them over too. We'll be waiting for them at my lab tomorrow! See you then!
We'll get the drugs and the anaesthesia ready. See you then. Word of warning, there have been very few studies about opiods and heart attack and use of the specific opiod recepter blocker drug we have. We will induce a heart attack, then try to see how our drug works to help your heart recover. So, yearh, see you tomorrow (might want to write a will first, just in case, you know...)
Someone in my lab has a poster of some radical animal rights protesters yelling, all nakes with painted whiskers, distorted faces and all and the caption said -- saving these people from heart attack since 1992.
I work in a heart research lab where we cut the hearts out of the mice and attach them to a working heart machine and pump a blood subsitute through it. Then we test various drugs and load conditions on it. The question is would you like to volunteer so that we test the drugs first on you, or your older family members, instead of the mice so as to spare their lives? Or would you rather be assured that in hundreds of mamalian tests the durgs performed as they are supposed to and the effects are clear and reproducible.
We abide by the rules and anaesthesize the mice carefully, we don't torture them and try to do the best we can to minimize their suffering. Personally I wish we didn't have to do this, I don't like to kill things -- animals or people, but in this case it is worth it to save many human lives.
1) Upload to Google
2) Google indexes it
3) Google compresses it
4) Google encrypts it => Google has the key.
After this is done ask yourself, how is your data now more secure against the government looking at it and against other party looking at it, than if you skipped #4 and didn't encrypt. What happens next is this:
1) FBI/NSA/Whatever1984Agency asks Google for you info
2) Google decrypts it
3) Google hands it over it Uncle Sam
4) You have pictures there of you family at Disney World
5) By accident a large trashcan appears in one of the shots
6) Uncle Sam assumes you are scouting for places to hide a dirty bomb
7) You get arrested and detained for 5 months in some unknown prison
So how about the updated procedure to avoid the unpleasand Uncle Sam encounter:
1) Encrypt using a long passphrase that only you will know
2) Upload
3) End
This would work only if everyone would be doing it. Otherwise, as someone has mentioned above, if you are the only one of 10000 people who encrypts his stuff, you will look suspicious and they'll find a why to get the key from you to look what you got in there.
How was this moderated "Offtopic"? It was a response to a parent thread about the government tactics. The moderating system is worthless
Why would Google encrypt the data? If they encrypt it and they keep it, then they can decrypt it if they want it, they can show it to the government, look at it themselves, mine it, sell it to another company etc. The idea was to allow individuals to encrypt their own files before sending them down the wire anywhere (Google drive, email, upload to a friend's FTP etc.). The intent was such that only the user and a party that has the user's permission should be able to see the real contents of the files...
Honestly, if they just hint that my wife/parents/children just might end up in an "accident", it would be enogh for me to shut up. If they could capture a German citizen (El Masri), put a diaper on him, drug him and fly him God knows where for harsh interrogations, then release him in the middle of Albania five month later, then I wouldn't hold it above them to harm my family to get me to shut up... I am surprized that guy even had enough guts to talk about it. I am sure you've heard about him, here is a link on the ACLU website about his case.
Remember, the idea of a honest executive branch that will got to a court to get a permission to spy on you, or that you will get a speedy trial, or even a lawyer is history. Through fear we have allowed the government to become what it is now, blame the neo-conservatives for that if you want. Watch the "Power Of Nightmares" movie, I just saw it two days ago, quite enlightening, not totally objective but nevertheless it was worth my time (3 hours).
If you have some time watch the "Power Of Nightmares" documentary film. I just saw it yesterday. There is an interview in the 3rd chapter that talks about how there is a fundamental shift in the government's approach. Now they will detain and hold people for very long time just because they "think" the person will commit a crime in the future. It is nice and comforting at first to know that you government is there to protect you against the evil al Qaeda, until one day, they detain you for paying off a large dept with you mastercard.
In 1984 it might have been tough, in 2006 it is not. There are tons of research papers out there in the database research, distributed AI and economics professional journals that focus on algorithms to detect money laundering transaction patterns, as well as a way to have banks share _patters_ of transactions without fully revealing all the details.Thus having the ability to have a 3rd company mine this huge distributed database but in such a way that the banks could safely share the data.
Exactly, today the Government can detain you without evidence of a crime, they just have to think that you might commit a crime in the future. Watch the "Power Of Nightmares" movie -- free download, if you have some time. I just saw it yesterday , it is quite enlightening and educational. Warning: it is a 3 hour thing!
Sometimes, if you register at local state university for some summer basket weaving class you might get access to the state-wide library book borrowing system, tons and tons of PDFs of otherwise expensive professional journals, tons of media and other stuff, sometimes you can get free access to athletic facilities (swimming pool, weights, treadmills etc.) -- just an outside gym membership for 3 months might cost you more than the 2 credit our class!
And what is so wrong with reporting how many times the browser has been downloaded? There is obviously some correlation between the number of downloads and the number of users using it. One way to get people to try something is to tell them that a million other people just like them, already did it. It shows that the product works. Criticism (and self criticism) is useful only when it is meaningful and not just "OMG, teh Firef0x people iz s000 imature! We n33d to b3 teh profeshin5l like B1ll Gat3z!!!!!"
You might find some public domain old classics on http://www.archive.org/details/movies
Netflix might also be an option...
The local library and the university library where I live has some good classics and they are free.
The same thing has happened to me with both the latest MS Office and latest OO. I know it is impossible to have less menus and options but have all the functionality all the time. But there is a way! -- Organize menus hierarchically according to user proficiency. I think xine does that and a few other programs. It means, that the user should be asked first how advanced they are, then perhaps ask them a couple more question to set some defaults (like will you printing labels a lot?, will you use a database as a source? will you export to HTML often? etc.) This will make sure that people like my Mom won't have to see options like "Data Source" or "Conditional Formatting" and options like that like that, but will only see stuff like "change the color to pretty blue" or "make it bold", "underline" etc. This applies to both OO and MS Office...
So I am wondering if after this, in US, Skype would introduce such "anti reverse engineering" clause in the agreements.
A lot of companies have a clause in the EUA that the user may not reverse compile or reverse engineer the binaries. I wonder if Skype will now add one of those then install a new block in a different section of the code, and close watch the IRC/Usenet/Bittorent/P2P nets etc. to catch those who claim they made patch, and slap them with a lawsuit.
Makes sense. I was just living in a dream world, where large companies like Google just donate to me a 2+ GB of email space accessible worldwide, with a nice interface and without those one-line ads at the end of my messages from that account.
Here is one site that talks more in detail about it. link
The soviets tried to do that. There was documentary of Discovery or PBS about it. There was dolphin with a holes in its skull with electrodes sticking out -- but supposedly that line of researched went nowere and just resulted in killing a bunch of dolphins.
What "woke me up" was when I had an email conversation about subcloning and plasmids with my friend. I went the second day to check my email and Gmail displayed 2 adds regarding subcloning technologies. That means that my personal stuff is being actively searched and observed by Google, it doesn't just passively sit in some database, safe and protected.
I don't think Google or Yahoo will be more honest or better than Microsoft. We just perceive Google as better because Microsoft didn't make "being nice" and "do no evil" as part of their marketing and development (yet?). Google did. And besides technology that is what helped them rise to the top so fast. They will go to great lengths to protect that image since that as is what keeps the loyal customers coming back. Remember, after the deal with China, they first responded with "Oh, we just wanted to go in first, infiltrate and _then_ we'll eventually help bring democracy there.", some believed but their image was still tarnished, so what do they do? Weeks later we find out how Google all of the sudden wants to "give back" and they have $1.1bn to spend of "poor and needy" -- "DING! Google is the good guy again!"