No, no, no, no,no. While it's true that there is a certain mob mentality in every society, American society is saturated with it. Indeed, I would almost say that American society is at this point defined by its mob mentality. I can't think of any other country where reactions and measures taken are so extreme, and so disproportionate and above all so quick to occur.
It's like there's a nation of 300 million people, wound up like steel springs, ready to snap at the most minor event. Things like Guantanamo Bay, the Iraq War, this TSA bullshit and countless others simply do not happen in other countries. The Brits has to fight an uphill battle when they tried to curtail freedoms. In America, the population was crying out for more oppression.
Preservation of order, discipline and safety in public schools is simply not the domain of the Constitution
The thing is, he's right. More to the point, the legality or otherwise of strip searches on students in public schools is not a topic that is present on any level in the American constitution. Your constitution does not protect your children against any level of unreasonable search when you hand them over to public servants acting in loco parentis. The laws might, but there don't seem to be any in this case. Another shock example of how a 240 year old constitution can become a little out of date.
Justice Clarence has strong views on the power and rights of American schools over their students. Essentially, he believes that once children attend a school, that school becomes a kind of quasi-parent, with concrete rights over that childs entire upbringing, at least in so far as behavior and discipline is concerned.
As far as I can tell, Justice Clarence's view, outrageous as it is, reflects the de facto relationship between schools and their students. American schools have frightingly broad powers over their student's lives.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Repeating this mantra is not going to make the growing censorship of the internet go away. back in the days when the internet was solely the province of the technically minded, this may have been true. But in the days of a global, universal internet, this mantra is slowly but surely becoming hollow.
Governments of the world are not, NOT, going to put up with a medium in which anyone whatsoever can read or publish anything they wish, at any time, on a global scale, without any government control. More importantly, the public is not going to put up with it. This simply isn't the way human societies work. People want censorship.
If you doubt this, poll your friends and neighbors. Ask the plain question; "Do you think their should be government supervision of the internet?". The overwhelming majority of people will answer, "Yes". And they will not mean supervision over "extreme" material like child pornography and snuff sites. They will mean supervision over anorexia boards, neo-nazi sites, "obscene materials", fringe persons and political groups, atheists/creationists, and in general censorship of anyone that they do not like.
This increasing government interest in internet censorship is not coming out of nowhere. It's a natural progression of the general will of human society; to repress views they disagree with. If you can find enough people who dislike a thing, you can get it banned. That's what's happening to the internet, and that's why its getting so much support.
In the future, the current internet era (or more appropriately the one ten years ago), will be looked back on as we now look back on the late nineteenth century drug era, in which cocaine, cannabis and even heroin could be bought, sold and taken quite legally. People had rights to drugs in those days, but, slowly but surely, disapproval of those liberties lead to their restriction. The same thing is going to happen to the internet.
Eventually, you will need a license to publish material on the web, or at least to host a site, and all sites will be fully regulated by vast, probably international, government offices created for the purpose. This is coming and there is going to be no way to route around such a mortal wound to the free web.
You may very well be correct, it's just that basing it on genetics is far more likely to have some sort of meaningful accuracy.
Meaningful accuracy? The genomes of racial groups differ by less than one tenth of one percent or less(0.001). I'm sure that even cranial measurements, despite their crudeness, could probably pass this level of difference between selected groups.
Your faith in the objectiveness and reliability of genetic studies is just that. Faith. And rather blind faith at that. Just because a study or proposal or experiment has the adjective "genetic" attached to it does not mean that it is any more likely to deliver "deeper" or more accurate insights.
This study has, almost certainly arbitrarily (google clustering methods), divided humanity into three groups based on "objective" measurements. White, Black and Asian. And what is the reason for this division? Look at a map. The Sahara desert, the Siberian wilderness, the Tibetan plateau along with various oceans explain it. If the study had decided to increase the number of clusters or performed some more statistical hocus-pocus, perhaps they could have inferred the existence of the Straights of Gibraltar or Isthmus of Panama.
But they didn't. They inferred the existence of three "races". Races which conveniently correspond to some biblical notion of thee sons of Noah. A notion which, by the sheer number of comments discussing it seems to be quite a popular one among Americans. And lo! Which university does this study hail from? The University of Chicago. Chicago, Illinois.
To be frank, this study has all the hallmarks of being the end result of a long effort by an American researcher to confirm an antiquated religious view of the races in the world. While it is not quite as obtuse as studies done by young earth creationists and the like, I have little doubt that it hails from, if not the same stock of researcher, then at least from one of the same sympathies.
It's possible I'm wronging good researchers here, who have some to honest conclusions. But I doubt it. Americans, as a culture, are hopelessly mired in Abrahamic mythologies. Including those who profess atheism or are otherwise less religious. Just look at the topic in the first major thread in this story. Look at the sheer amount of comments taking the connection quite seriously. I don't think I've ever heard of Shem, Ham, and Japheth before, but I'm willing to bet that a large proportion of Americans, including the researchers who conducted this study, have heard and remembered a good deal.
So each music track, which you can estimate, generously, as being around 10MB in size, was worth on average about $6800. That's a lot of money for something which takes up so little space, and which is so easy to copy.
An American thinks his local usage is just "the default" for everyone. Light switches, for instance in Australia, are up for off and down for on. (Cue Simpsons jokes).
Woah! Woah! Are you telling me that some countries have standards for light switch positions? Such enlightenment!
On the other hand, support from *individual Americans*, that's completely different.
Is this like support from *individual Mormons* in the Proposition 8 campaign, because I don't think that kind of support will go down well with the Iranians either.
I disagree. Seems like you're claiming that (1-p/2)^n is asymptotically equal to (1-p)^n.
You are correct to disagree. The two terms are not asymptotically equal in n or anywhere close to it. They diverge quite significantly for large n. The proof is straightforward.
Since p is a probability 0<p<1. Let a=1-p/2 and let b=1-p. Then, 1>a>b>0. Therefore a/b > 1 .
Since a/b > 1, (a/b)^n=K grows without bound as n increases.
So (1-p/2)^n/(1-p)^n = K => (1-p/2)^n = K (1-p)^n
So (1-p/2)^n is K times (1-p)^n. And K grows without bound as n increases. The two terms are not asymptotic as n goes to infinity. In fact, the two terms are wildly divergent.
p/2 can be replaced by r*p for any 0r1, and this proof will still hold. Reducing the probability of an event even slightly, pays off as the number of events rises.
It should be noted, this mathematical proof makes no mention of the ethical or practical rationals for interfering with infants genitals.
it's a public place where anyone can see what is going on at any point in time. there is no infringement of privacy if this is a public area, and with cameras being visible, there is no deception in the intent.
I wonder about that. I really do.
Why is it that photographs and videos taken of models need copyright consent forms in order to be used, but my images can be snapped by thousands of cameras and copied about servers until doomsday without me even being informed?
Why is it that if I followed someone around every day, taking pictures and recording their movements, I would be convicted or stalking or have a restraining order put on me, yet it's OK for any old group to set up a nationwide system of cameras to track and record forever the movements of every single person in the state?
Why is it OK for them to record me, but it's not OK for me to see the footage?
I think Jack Bauer's comment really says it all. This system is not about protecting people. It's about intimidating them. It's about instilling fear. It's about the watchers gaining power over the watched. That is the systems primary purpose.
Who do you think will be manning these cameras? College students and libertarians? Not a chance. Think prudes and gossips, closet authoritarians and morality police, the perpetually offended and those who long for a society in which people know their place. And that place will be certainly be on camera instead of behind it.
Surveillance systems like this are getting implemented, everywhere, and their effect on society will be colossal. I believe it will be uniformly negative. We will move from the freedom and anonymity of urban society right back into the parochial, scrutinized and regulated mores of rural society. It's coming. In many ways, it's already here. You're only hope is that such systems have legal restrictions placed on them before they run completely rampant.
Like it or not, IE8 does include a lot of security features that other browsers do not, or do not to the same degree.
Do these security features include being secure. If not, then perhaps you begin to see the nature of my complaint.
I'm using Firefox right now; please point to me where the private browsing feature is. I don't see one.
Take your pick. Installing and running any of these add ons is only marginally more complex than using InPrivacy, and far more useful and effective to boot.
Are they valid test cases? If so, it's not a lie.
They are not valid test cases because there are no tests. There is a "Pre-Alpha" suite of tests which the IE team have crammed solid with their own tailored submissions, and which have not been vetted by anyone.(Indeed with so many, they probably never will).
So unless you accept such unofficial an unvetted submissions as proper impartial tests (whilst simultaneously ignoring the legitimacy of addons), and ignore the universally know, documented and lamented inability of IE to render properly coded web pages correctly, the no, IE does "draw even" if a Web standards comparision. THAT is the lie.
You've allowed yourself to become distracted by "facts" presented to you without stopping to asses the reality. IE is less secure, offers less privacy protections and is far less compliant to web standards than BOTH Firefox and Chrome, not to mention Opera and Safari, conveniently excluded from this thorough presentation of the "facts".
These are not facts. They are "anti-facts". Half truths and distortions devised to sweep away real facts and present a totally false version of reality. Their purpose is make a lie appear true. Apparently they've succeeded. And, they always will with people who shut their eyes and senses to everything except what is literally put before them.
Lockhart's essay is an interesting read, really, but on some level it boils down to "Those unworthy schlubs treating Mathematics as a tool don't deserve it. It belongs to the artists, the dreamers, the purists!"
Basically. While mathematics can indeed be an art form, a certain amount of slogging through the basics is required of anyone who wishes to learn it. Euclid reputedly said that there was no Royal Road to geometry(mathematics), and that is as true today as it was in Euclid's time. Mathematics requires effort.
I remember the algebra problems of secondary school.
Simplify: (x+2x^2+3)(x^3+2(x+1)^2+2)+3x^2 +2x+1
I did sums like this and dozens like it. Hundreds, and that's just in algebra. Doing those sums over and over, making mistakes, finding patterns all added to my knowledge and abilities in manipulating symbols which I use to this day. Yes it was slog work. Yes it was boring. Yes it was "pointless". But I did it and I'm better at algebra for it. The same is true for most things in mathematics, right down all the way to basic arithmetic(times tables anyone?) and all the way up to graduate school(Prove any distribution is the limit of a sequence of functions!).
It's true, mathematics can be made easier to learn though more engaging, and more systematic presentations. But you cannot completely exorcise exercises from the curriculum, no mater how pointless students think they are. Learning anything is not something that can be done easily, for anyone. It takes effort. I am reminded of Mr. Miagi's "Wax on, wax off", itself a variation of the thousands of repetitive and "pointless" motions that young martial arts students must perform over and over before they can proceed to "real" training.
You really do have to get the basics right before you move on to the advanced techniques. This doesn't mean that learning the basics can't be interesting, but it does mean that you will have to learn them!
They can get away with it because all the statements are sufficiently subjective and non-quantifiable to fall under any sort of false advertisement.
I fundamentally disagree with this interpretation. In virtually every claim made on the article page, the statement is quantifiable and objective. On the matters of security, privacy, and web standards objective tests will show that the claims being made are false, and are indeed, lies.
Yet, it makes no difference. In a sense, we have become too accustomed, too inculcated, by the lies thrown at us every day by advertisements, newspapers, press releases and not-a-denial-denials that are throw at us every day by people who profess to be telling the truth. Indeed, it is a far rarer thing to hear a genuinely true claim from a corporation or organisation than it is to hear a lie or gross exaggeration. To obtain the truth, it is necessary to read between the lines and examine the distorted, yet objective, context and come to only a subjective conclusion. But this subjective conclusion can contain more truth than all the objective falsehoods.
Its easy for Microsoft and others to get away with this kind of thing because we live in a culture where such lies are not only permitted, but permitted to stand unopposed. With the increasing sophistication of marketers, PR departments and spin doctors of all kinds, it has become all but impossible for anyone to challenge these packs of lies. The only people who can, the news media, have consciously chosen not to. Indeed, the modern news media is at the forefront of the industry of disinformation, and indeed is often then instrument and chief instigator of its content.
In such an environment, ordinary people must either assume that every message they read is true, or every one is false. May have chosen the latter. A friend of mine recently expressed genuine surprise that a cheaper dishwasher powered he purchased gave inferior results. He assumed, as many do, that messages proclaiming higher quality in more expensive brands were simply lies, and that equal quality could be obtained with cheaper products. He assumed this because most of the time, they are lies.
Such cynicism in the general public explains why so many higher quality brands fail in the face of a glut of cheap, low quality produce from China and elsewhere. People assume that protestations of quality are a lie, and turn to the only metric they can objectively assess with certainty; Price. Western marketing is slowly killing its own products, one lie at a time.
If you live in a culture of lies, then anything subjective, anything at all, becomes totally suspect. "Quality of Goods", "Quality of Service", "Experience", "Loyalty", "Competence", "Leadership", "Trust". All become swamped in doubt. Only objective, bottom-line numbers can be trusted any more. Price, productivity, age, wages, profit/loss. And as companies begin to manipulate those, what are we going to be left with in the end?
The story is, quite simply, that it is appallingly easy of companies to shamelessly and flagrantly lie, to produce the most obvious falsehoods, and for absolutely no one whatsoever to bother stating the obvious fact; that they are appalling liars.
It's not even deceptive wording, or qualified phrases we're talking about here. Most companies and organisations just come right out an lie nowadays. Some choice selections from the article. Note that the tick marks in the article next to browsers are replaced by stars here.
Security - IE8: * FF: CR: - Internet Explorer 8 takes the cake with better phishing and malware protection, as well as protection from emerging threats.
A lie.
Privacy - IE8: * FF: CR: - InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering help Internet Explorer 8 claim privacy victory.
A falsehood.
Web Standards - IE8: * FF: CR: * - It's a tie. Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the World Wide Web Consortium's CSS 2.1 test cases than any other browser, but Firefox 3 has more support for some evolving standards.
Perhaps some would argue that these are merely exaggerations or omissions, not lies. I beg to differ. Taking these statements as truths would lead one to believe that IE has less exploits, less chance of exposing private data and a higher or equal chance of rendering web pages correctly that either Firefox or Chrome. All three conclusions are false. These are lies.
Some will believe them, but even sadder, more will not accept them as lies.
P.S. My reply text is being squashed into a 25 character wide column to the right of a mass of grey. It would be great if Slashdot rendered properly these days. P.P.S. Perhaps I'll try it in IE8!
I still see very few people who are willing to openly discuss their private or sexual lives with others
If you started talking to other people about your sex life, do you not realise that they would probably then begin to talk to you about about their sex lives? Try looking before you leap.
Slashcode has been acting up for at least a month. I'm encountering css errors everywhere on the old index in Firefox 3. I suspect that the old index is being quietly ignored by the developers. I don't care. I'm not using that Ajax monstrosity to read comments.
Dependant Relative: Yes it IS!! It even says I'm connected with eye-pee-vee-six now. But now none of my programs work!! The man from Comcast said it was an upgrade from than eye-pee-vee-four. I thought six was better than four!? Is it because I'm using Windows 7? Do I need to get Windows 6? And my internet is explorer 8? Can I still get emails? And the computer is really slow! Can you come over?... etc. etc.
Why is it that people always assume that governments are meddling with their privacy, freedom of speech and freedom of choice when it's the same governments provide a blanket of protection?
It seems to me possible that if people select their offspring intentionally based on genetic information, then we will tend to have less diversity of outcomes, which will impact evolution,
CORRECTAMUNDO!!!
Evolution is defined as natural selection of random mutations. It's surprising just how many geeks, who should be very familiar with what "random" means, will still advocate the idea of genetic selection and manipulation of offspring. I personally think it's from reading too many sci-fi novels in which "genetic manipulation" results in supermen or the like.
Once our society begins selecting and/or rejecting offspring based on their genes, or we begin manipulating our genetic codes, evolution stops. We won't have moved into another kind of evolution. We won't be make our evolution more efficient. We'll have stopped evolving altogether, at least in the only way we understand the evolution of organism.
In technical terms, we will have moved humanity from a local random search to a heuristics based local search. The difference cannot be emphasized enough. Here we have a local random search for better organisms that has delivered incredible(literally to some) results over millions of years. Yet people are proposing replacing that system with heuristics that have no other qualification other than certain people think they will lead to improvement. Genetic manipulation advocates fail Optimisation 101.
Some will argue that parents have the right to procreate in any way they choose. But as I've advocated before, rights do not scale up. Just because it seems right that one person should be able to do something, you cannot just inductively apply that logic to the entire population. And when you grant a right, that's exactly who you grant it to. Everybody.
I'd liken genetic manipulation to interbreeding. Some people think it should be moral to marry your cousin or even sibling. They can even make a good case for why they should be entitled to do so. But if you scaled that right up to the entire populations, we'd all end up inbred, sickly and probably mentally retarded within a hundred or so years. Genetic selection promises much the same outcome, except genetic homogeneity will occur on a population wide scale.
Inductively scaling procreation rights up can easily lead us to a tall, trim, blue eyed, blond haired, heap of flu-ridden corpses. The very fact that this clinic offered such frivolities as eye and hair colour screening shows that this is exactly what will happen if we replace proven randomness with such vapid heuristics.
You know, I like to help you here guy. I'm sympathetic, I really am. But you've got to understand my position. It's just not possible to recognize motorcycles as legitimate road vehicles.
I mean sure, no ones got a problem with big Harley's. But lets think for a moment about where this is leading us. Plastic exteriors motorbikes, dirt bikes, scooters?! Jesus! Sooner or later, someone is going to stand up and argue that electric bikes be allowed on public roads and form there it's one small step to honest to Gods pedal powered bicycles! This is how slippery the slope is right here.
I mean, the dangers of the road are bad enough. People cutting you off, lane changing, bodywork scratches, stop signs, pedestrians just throwing themselves under the wheels, spilled coffee, etc. Now you're asking be to accept those heathens on their clacking, greasy, hell spawned bare metal contraptions as legitimate road users?! You expect me to slam on the brakes so I can have the privilege of crawling along behind these slugs for five miles until they get another puncture? Because I sure as hell can't pass their wobbling asses without another "incident" occurring where their either wobble off the embankment and I get a ticket or else their spoked hate mobiles eviscerate my paintjob and get irreparably tanged up in the undercarriage. I swear the assholes just do it on purpose.
No. No, I'm sorry. I'm not going back to that. Never again. My hands are tied. I'm sympathetic, I really am, but my hands are tied.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand. Why would you use those words together like that.
No, no, no, no ,no. While it's true that there is a certain mob mentality in every society, American society is saturated with it. Indeed, I would almost say that American society is at this point defined by its mob mentality. I can't think of any other country where reactions and measures taken are so extreme, and so disproportionate and above all so quick to occur.
It's like there's a nation of 300 million people, wound up like steel springs, ready to snap at the most minor event. Things like Guantanamo Bay, the Iraq War, this TSA bullshit and countless others simply do not happen in other countries. The Brits has to fight an uphill battle when they tried to curtail freedoms. In America, the population was crying out for more oppression.
Read what the judge actually wrote.
The thing is, he's right. More to the point, the legality or otherwise of strip searches on students in public schools is not a topic that is present on any level in the American constitution. Your constitution does not protect your children against any level of unreasonable search when you hand them over to public servants acting in loco parentis. The laws might, but there don't seem to be any in this case. Another shock example of how a 240 year old constitution can become a little out of date.
Justice Clarence has strong views on the power and rights of American schools over their students. Essentially, he believes that once children attend a school, that school becomes a kind of quasi-parent, with concrete rights over that childs entire upbringing, at least in so far as behavior and discipline is concerned.
As far as I can tell, Justice Clarence's view, outrageous as it is, reflects the de facto relationship between schools and their students. American schools have frightingly broad powers over their student's lives.
Say; What are the names of all your children's teachers?
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Repeating this mantra is not going to make the growing censorship of the internet go away. back in the days when the internet was solely the province of the technically minded, this may have been true. But in the days of a global, universal internet, this mantra is slowly but surely becoming hollow.
Governments of the world are not, NOT, going to put up with a medium in which anyone whatsoever can read or publish anything they wish, at any time, on a global scale, without any government control. More importantly, the public is not going to put up with it. This simply isn't the way human societies work. People want censorship.
If you doubt this, poll your friends and neighbors. Ask the plain question; "Do you think their should be government supervision of the internet?". The overwhelming majority of people will answer, "Yes". And they will not mean supervision over "extreme" material like child pornography and snuff sites. They will mean supervision over anorexia boards, neo-nazi sites, "obscene materials", fringe persons and political groups, atheists/creationists, and in general censorship of anyone that they do not like.
This increasing government interest in internet censorship is not coming out of nowhere. It's a natural progression of the general will of human society; to repress views they disagree with. If you can find enough people who dislike a thing, you can get it banned. That's what's happening to the internet, and that's why its getting so much support.
In the future, the current internet era (or more appropriately the one ten years ago), will be looked back on as we now look back on the late nineteenth century drug era, in which cocaine, cannabis and even heroin could be bought, sold and taken quite legally. People had rights to drugs in those days, but, slowly but surely, disapproval of those liberties lead to their restriction. The same thing is going to happen to the internet.
Eventually, you will need a license to publish material on the web, or at least to host a site, and all sites will be fully regulated by vast, probably international, government offices created for the purpose. This is coming and there is going to be no way to route around such a mortal wound to the free web.
Meaningful accuracy? The genomes of racial groups differ by less than one tenth of one percent or less(0.001). I'm sure that even cranial measurements, despite their crudeness, could probably pass this level of difference between selected groups.
Your faith in the objectiveness and reliability of genetic studies is just that. Faith. And rather blind faith at that. Just because a study or proposal or experiment has the adjective "genetic" attached to it does not mean that it is any more likely to deliver "deeper" or more accurate insights.
This study has, almost certainly arbitrarily (google clustering methods), divided humanity into three groups based on "objective" measurements. White, Black and Asian. And what is the reason for this division? Look at a map. The Sahara desert, the Siberian wilderness, the Tibetan plateau along with various oceans explain it. If the study had decided to increase the number of clusters or performed some more statistical hocus-pocus, perhaps they could have inferred the existence of the Straights of Gibraltar or Isthmus of Panama.
But they didn't. They inferred the existence of three "races". Races which conveniently correspond to some biblical notion of thee sons of Noah. A notion which, by the sheer number of comments discussing it seems to be quite a popular one among Americans. And lo! Which university does this study hail from? The University of Chicago. Chicago, Illinois.
To be frank, this study has all the hallmarks of being the end result of a long effort by an American researcher to confirm an antiquated religious view of the races in the world. While it is not quite as obtuse as studies done by young earth creationists and the like, I have little doubt that it hails from, if not the same stock of researcher, then at least from one of the same sympathies.
It's possible I'm wronging good researchers here, who have some to honest conclusions. But I doubt it. Americans, as a culture, are hopelessly mired in Abrahamic mythologies. Including those who profess atheism or are otherwise less religious. Just look at the topic in the first major thread in this story. Look at the sheer amount of comments taking the connection quite seriously. I don't think I've ever heard of Shem, Ham, and Japheth before, but I'm willing to bet that a large proportion of Americans, including the researchers who conducted this study, have heard and remembered a good deal.
Always, always, always consider the source.
So each music track, which you can estimate, generously, as being around 10MB in size, was worth on average about $6800. That's a lot of money for something which takes up so little space, and which is so easy to copy.
I agree. The term is largely meaningless if you accept all works are derivative.
Seems its only use is as writer's equivalent of gorilla feces-pitching.
Fixed.
Woah! Woah! Are you telling me that some countries have standards for light switch positions? Such enlightenment!
Is this like support from *individual Mormons* in the Proposition 8 campaign, because I don't think that kind of support will go down well with the Iranians either.
You are correct to disagree. The two terms are not asymptotically equal in n or anywhere close to it. They diverge quite significantly for large n. The proof is straightforward.
Since p is a probability 0<p<1. Let a=1-p/2 and let b=1-p. Then, 1>a>b>0. Therefore a/b > 1 .
Since a/b > 1, (a/b)^n=K grows without bound as n increases.
So (1-p/2)^n/(1-p)^n = K
=> (1-p/2)^n = K (1-p)^n
So (1-p/2)^n is K times (1-p)^n. And K grows without bound as n increases. The two terms are not asymptotic as n goes to infinity. In fact, the two terms are wildly divergent.
p/2 can be replaced by r*p for any 0r1, and this proof will still hold. Reducing the probability of an event even slightly, pays off as the number of events rises.
It should be noted, this mathematical proof makes no mention of the ethical or practical rationals for interfering with infants genitals.
I wonder about that. I really do.
Why is it that photographs and videos taken of models need copyright consent forms in order to be used, but my images can be snapped by thousands of cameras and copied about servers until doomsday without me even being informed?
Why is it that if I followed someone around every day, taking pictures and recording their movements, I would be convicted or stalking or have a restraining order put on me, yet it's OK for any old group to set up a nationwide system of cameras to track and record forever the movements of every single person in the state?
Why is it OK for them to record me, but it's not OK for me to see the footage?
I think Jack Bauer's comment really says it all. This system is not about protecting people. It's about intimidating them. It's about instilling fear. It's about the watchers gaining power over the watched. That is the systems primary purpose.
Who do you think will be manning these cameras? College students and libertarians? Not a chance. Think prudes and gossips, closet authoritarians and morality police, the perpetually offended and those who long for a society in which people know their place. And that place will be certainly be on camera instead of behind it.
Surveillance systems like this are getting implemented, everywhere, and their effect on society will be colossal. I believe it will be uniformly negative. We will move from the freedom and anonymity of urban society right back into the parochial, scrutinized and regulated mores of rural society. It's coming. In many ways, it's already here. You're only hope is that such systems have legal restrictions placed on them before they run completely rampant.
Do these security features include being secure. If not, then perhaps you begin to see the nature of my complaint.
Take your pick. Installing and running any of these add ons is only marginally more complex than using InPrivacy, and far more useful and effective to boot.
They are not valid test cases because there are no tests. There is a "Pre-Alpha" suite of tests which the IE team have crammed solid with their own tailored submissions, and which have not been vetted by anyone.(Indeed with so many, they probably never will).
So unless you accept such unofficial an unvetted submissions as proper impartial tests (whilst simultaneously ignoring the legitimacy of addons), and ignore the universally know, documented and lamented inability of IE to render properly coded web pages correctly, the no, IE does "draw even" if a Web standards comparision. THAT is the lie.
You've allowed yourself to become distracted by "facts" presented to you without stopping to asses the reality. IE is less secure, offers less privacy protections and is far less compliant to web standards than BOTH Firefox and Chrome, not to mention Opera and Safari, conveniently excluded from this thorough presentation of the "facts".
These are not facts. They are "anti-facts". Half truths and distortions devised to sweep away real facts and present a totally false version of reality. Their purpose is make a lie appear true. Apparently they've succeeded. And, they always will with people who shut their eyes and senses to everything except what is literally put before them.
Basically. While mathematics can indeed be an art form, a certain amount of slogging through the basics is required of anyone who wishes to learn it. Euclid reputedly said that there was no Royal Road to geometry(mathematics), and that is as true today as it was in Euclid's time. Mathematics requires effort.
I remember the algebra problems of secondary school.
I did sums like this and dozens like it. Hundreds, and that's just in algebra. Doing those sums over and over, making mistakes, finding patterns all added to my knowledge and abilities in manipulating symbols which I use to this day. Yes it was slog work. Yes it was boring. Yes it was "pointless". But I did it and I'm better at algebra for it. The same is true for most things in mathematics, right down all the way to basic arithmetic(times tables anyone?) and all the way up to graduate school(Prove any distribution is the limit of a sequence of functions!).
It's true, mathematics can be made easier to learn though more engaging, and more systematic presentations. But you cannot completely exorcise exercises from the curriculum, no mater how pointless students think they are. Learning anything is not something that can be done easily, for anyone. It takes effort. I am reminded of Mr. Miagi's "Wax on, wax off", itself a variation of the thousands of repetitive and "pointless" motions that young martial arts students must perform over and over before they can proceed to "real" training.
You really do have to get the basics right before you move on to the advanced techniques. This doesn't mean that learning the basics can't be interesting, but it does mean that you will have to learn them!
You have just discovered the difference between philosophers and mathematicians.
Mathematicians find truths.
Philosophers "interpret" truths.
I fundamentally disagree with this interpretation. In virtually every claim made on the article page, the statement is quantifiable and objective. On the matters of security, privacy, and web standards objective tests will show that the claims being made are false, and are indeed, lies.
Yet, it makes no difference. In a sense, we have become too accustomed, too inculcated, by the lies thrown at us every day by advertisements, newspapers, press releases and not-a-denial-denials that are throw at us every day by people who profess to be telling the truth. Indeed, it is a far rarer thing to hear a genuinely true claim from a corporation or organisation than it is to hear a lie or gross exaggeration. To obtain the truth, it is necessary to read between the lines and examine the distorted, yet objective, context and come to only a subjective conclusion. But this subjective conclusion can contain more truth than all the objective falsehoods.
Its easy for Microsoft and others to get away with this kind of thing because we live in a culture where such lies are not only permitted, but permitted to stand unopposed. With the increasing sophistication of marketers, PR departments and spin doctors of all kinds, it has become all but impossible for anyone to challenge these packs of lies. The only people who can, the news media, have consciously chosen not to. Indeed, the modern news media is at the forefront of the industry of disinformation, and indeed is often then instrument and chief instigator of its content.
In such an environment, ordinary people must either assume that every message they read is true, or every one is false. May have chosen the latter. A friend of mine recently expressed genuine surprise that a cheaper dishwasher powered he purchased gave inferior results. He assumed, as many do, that messages proclaiming higher quality in more expensive brands were simply lies, and that equal quality could be obtained with cheaper products. He assumed this because most of the time, they are lies.
Such cynicism in the general public explains why so many higher quality brands fail in the face of a glut of cheap, low quality produce from China and elsewhere. People assume that protestations of quality are a lie, and turn to the only metric they can objectively assess with certainty; Price. Western marketing is slowly killing its own products, one lie at a time.
If you live in a culture of lies, then anything subjective, anything at all, becomes totally suspect. "Quality of Goods", "Quality of Service", "Experience", "Loyalty", "Competence", "Leadership", "Trust". All become swamped in doubt. Only objective, bottom-line numbers can be trusted any more. Price, productivity, age, wages, profit/loss. And as companies begin to manipulate those, what are we going to be left with in the end?
The story is, quite simply, that it is appallingly easy of companies to shamelessly and flagrantly lie, to produce the most obvious falsehoods, and for absolutely no one whatsoever to bother stating the obvious fact; that they are appalling liars.
It's not even deceptive wording, or qualified phrases we're talking about here. Most companies and organisations just come right out an lie nowadays. Some choice selections from the article. Note that the tick marks in the article next to browsers are replaced by stars here.
A lie.
A falsehood.
A barefaced, shameless, utterly false lie. For you see, there is no W3C CSS 2.1 test suite. There is a Pre-Alpha CSS 2.1 Test Suite, but upon further investigation it can be seen that the IE team themselves have submitted at least 3221 of the 3708 test cases, or at least that was the case last August 18th.
Perhaps some would argue that these are merely exaggerations or omissions, not lies. I beg to differ. Taking these statements as truths would lead one to believe that IE has less exploits, less chance of exposing private data and a higher or equal chance of rendering web pages correctly that either Firefox or Chrome. All three conclusions are false. These are lies.
Some will believe them, but even sadder, more will not accept them as lies.
P.S.
My reply text is being squashed into a 25 character wide column to the right of a mass of grey. It would be great if Slashdot rendered properly these days.
P.P.S.
Perhaps I'll try it in IE8!
If you started talking to other people about your sex life, do you not realise that they would probably then begin to talk to you about about their sex lives? Try looking before you leap.
Slashcode has been acting up for at least a month. I'm encountering css errors everywhere on the old index in Firefox 3. I suspect that the old index is being quietly ignored by the developers. I don't care. I'm not using that Ajax monstrosity to read comments.
Passing laws in Parliament so you can say that you did all the above legally!
Bbrrrriiiing. Bbrrrriiiing.
You: Hello?
Dependant Relative: My internet isn't working!
You: Is the modem turned on?
Dependant Relative: Yes it IS!! It even says I'm connected with eye-pee-vee-six now. But now none of my programs work!! The man from Comcast said it was an upgrade from than eye-pee-vee-four. I thought six was better than four!? Is it because I'm using Windows 7? Do I need to get Windows 6? And my internet is explorer 8? Can I still get emails? And the computer is really slow! Can you come over? ... etc. etc.
You: Curse you Comcast. Curse you!!!
Blankets can smother you.
CORRECTAMUNDO!!!
Evolution is defined as natural selection of random mutations. It's surprising just how many geeks, who should be very familiar with what "random" means, will still advocate the idea of genetic selection and manipulation of offspring. I personally think it's from reading too many sci-fi novels in which "genetic manipulation" results in supermen or the like.
Once our society begins selecting and/or rejecting offspring based on their genes, or we begin manipulating our genetic codes, evolution stops. We won't have moved into another kind of evolution. We won't be make our evolution more efficient. We'll have stopped evolving altogether, at least in the only way we understand the evolution of organism.
In technical terms, we will have moved humanity from a local random search to a heuristics based local search. The difference cannot be emphasized enough. Here we have a local random search for better organisms that has delivered incredible(literally to some) results over millions of years. Yet people are proposing replacing that system with heuristics that have no other qualification other than certain people think they will lead to improvement. Genetic manipulation advocates fail Optimisation 101.
Some will argue that parents have the right to procreate in any way they choose. But as I've advocated before, rights do not scale up. Just because it seems right that one person should be able to do something, you cannot just inductively apply that logic to the entire population. And when you grant a right, that's exactly who you grant it to. Everybody.
I'd liken genetic manipulation to interbreeding. Some people think it should be moral to marry your cousin or even sibling. They can even make a good case for why they should be entitled to do so. But if you scaled that right up to the entire populations, we'd all end up inbred, sickly and probably mentally retarded within a hundred or so years. Genetic selection promises much the same outcome, except genetic homogeneity will occur on a population wide scale.
Inductively scaling procreation rights up can easily lead us to a tall, trim, blue eyed, blond haired, heap of flu-ridden corpses. The very fact that this clinic offered such frivolities as eye and hair colour screening shows that this is exactly what will happen if we replace proven randomness with such vapid heuristics.
You know, I like to help you here guy. I'm sympathetic, I really am. But you've got to understand my position. It's just not possible to recognize motorcycles as legitimate road vehicles.
I mean sure, no ones got a problem with big Harley's. But lets think for a moment about where this is leading us. Plastic exteriors motorbikes, dirt bikes, scooters ?! Jesus! Sooner or later, someone is going to stand up and argue that electric bikes be allowed on public roads and form there it's one small step to honest to Gods pedal powered bicycles! This is how slippery the slope is right here.
I mean, the dangers of the road are bad enough. People cutting you off, lane changing, bodywork scratches, stop signs, pedestrians just throwing themselves under the wheels, spilled coffee, etc. Now you're asking be to accept those heathens on their clacking, greasy, hell spawned bare metal contraptions as legitimate road users?! You expect me to slam on the brakes so I can have the privilege of crawling along behind these slugs for five miles until they get another puncture? Because I sure as hell can't pass their wobbling asses without another "incident" occurring where their either wobble off the embankment and I get a ticket or else their spoked hate mobiles eviscerate my paintjob and get irreparably tanged up in the undercarriage. I swear the assholes just do it on purpose.
No. No, I'm sorry. I'm not going back to that. Never again. My hands are tied. I'm sympathetic, I really am, but my hands are tied.