... better get on this to make sure that this technology can't be used in the U.S. otherwise costs might go down. Similar to how we can't import drugs: medically, if it's cheap, it's dangerous.
Yes but the trendy growth area for Big Pharma these days is the use of common diseases that are usually just a nuisance to scare everyone into vaccination. Consider the language used here, concerning the individual decision to accept or reject a vaccination for common influenza:
"Now no one should say 'Should I or shouldn't I?'" said CDC flu specialist Anthony Fiore.
That's absolutely dripping with "we know what's good for you". Was that statement the result of a new medical breakthrough or discovery? No. It was the result of a panel of bureaucrats holding a vote. I'm sure they have our best interests at heart and are not at all influenced by the large, well-financed pharmaceutical industry. This part is also telling:
In the past, the advisory committee has been reluctant to recommend universal vaccination for fear that it might produce vaccine shortages that place members of higher risk groups in danger. Yet even with current recommendations, only 33 percent of the public gets vaccinated every year, leaving millions of doses to be disposed of.
How inconvenient. They have over-produced this vaccine and its finite shelf life will result in tremendous losses for them unless they can suddenly create demand for it. The fact that universal vaccination for this specific disease is now being pushed is completely unrelated to that, I am sure </sarcasm>. This is actually unusually blatant for them. They usually rely more strongly on the "don't question our motives, we are the experts" priesthood of the medical establishment that doesn't make it so simple to follow the money.
Plus I think they can fast-track the FDA approval process and simultaneously remove much of their liability if every little disease like the swine flu is now a big scary pandemic. The bothersome thing is that when the next real threat to life and limb comes along, the sensationalism that surrounded SARS, hoof-and-mouth, swine flu, West Nile, and bird flu will have created quite the boy-who-cried-wolf situation. If it has little or no chance of killing or crippling a healthy adult then I really don't want to hear words like "pandemic" -- is that such an unreasonable thing to ask?
I agree that they certainly don't want competition from foreign pharmaceuticals. They especially wouldn't want that from countries with weaker patent protections for drugs than the USA. It's just that this particular deck has been stacked in their favor for so long now that it is not a growth area for them.
Believe it or not I think the War on (some) Drugs set the stage for much of this. That's where the idea was legitimized that a citizen is not sovereign over his or her own body and does not get the final say on what may or may not be ingested into it. That's why we have a situation where it's "the FDA has not yet approved this substance, or does not consider its imported version to be safe, therefore we will use police power to make sure you may not have it at all" instead of "the FDA has not yet approved this substance, or does not consider its imported version to be safe, therefore you consume it at your own risk."
The first thing there is to understand about pharmaceutical companies is that they cannot make money from healthy people. The second thing to understand about them is that they make less money from sick people who are allowed to shop around in multiple markets.
Nietzche calls Plato decadent, and attributes to him everything we think Socrates said. For him, Plato was to blame for the Dark Ages, and the lack of intellectual advancement for a thousand years. A bit extreme... but a valid opinion.
It's extreme and also obtuse, and I'm reluctant to say that about someone like Nietzche. One man cannot possibly retard intellectual advancement for a thousand years except that legions of other men play follow-the-leader and imitate him like little robots instead of finding their own way. So let's say for argument's sake that Plato's contributions were entirely negative and unworthy (something I do not believe); Plato could only harm himself with that if people had any real self-hood. If they do not, this is not Plato's doing.
I never once said you shouldn't express yourself. I said if you fear retribution, then don't engage in an activity which could bring retribution to your doorstep. Like an analogy I used earlier in this thread, if you don't want to risk being splattered on rocks, don't go bungee jumping.
That analogy is fatally flawed. The risk involved in bungee jumping comes from gravity, a natural force. Gravity doesn't discriminate against political views and it isn't "out to get you". It affects everyone equally. The possibility of a failure leading to injury or death is an inherent part of bungee jumping.
Unlike bungee jumping, signing your name to a piece of paper is not an inherently dangerous action. It is made artificially dangerous by those who break the law in order to use violence and threats against those who sign the "wrong" document. Unlike gravity, those thugs do discriminate because they have an agenda and they are "out to get" anyone who disagrees with them.
For bungee jumping, only the people actually doing the bungee jump are assuming any risk. By contrast, thugs who don't like your political views might not target only the petition signer; they might also threaten his family, his friends, or his employer. That might include people who don't even agree with his views but can be used to intimidate him because he cares about what happens to them. Such thugs are enabled by ready access to a list of people who hold political views they dislike. Why enable them?
Call this opinion if you like but you are advocating a course of action with real consequences for real people. When thugs show up at someone's door talking about how much of a shame it would be if "something were to happen" to the place, they are not discussing abstract philosophy or opinion.
I recognize that my opinions are generally not agreeable with most people, which is why I would never run for office.::shrug:: Again, sorry for not being honest. I've responded to one of your other posts (specifically this one. That should answer any question as to why I feel this way.
Again, let me reiterate: I recognize that this is merely my opinion, and in no way should, in reality, apply to everyone else. It's the way I think though, so it's what I express.::shrug::
"Honesty" is "the truth and the whole truth". Therefore, honesty would include giving me a real answer as to why you continue to adhere to this belief after it's been shown through critical thinking that it can only lead to the very worst people obtaining political power. Or it might include telling me why I have this all wrong, like pointing out that I have contradicted myself or committed a logical fallacy.
Either way, the agreeability or disagreeability of your beliefs or whether you'd run for office was never the subject of my comments. That makes it less-than-honest to respond as though I were asking about those things, for that's just a distraction technique whether intentional or otherwise.
Honestly I expected little else. If I understand your beliefs there correctly, you are OK with them as I described them and don't care about the undesirable outcome they would produce. It's not possible to believe in something harmful like that and also have a willingness to look at it objectively, for that would be a recipe for inner conflict. I am asking you to look at it objectively so you needed a distraction.
Really? That's funny, because I support legalizing drugs, abolishing the PATRIOT act, i FULLY support the second amendment, and reducing government intervention in state and local problems (unless they caused the problem in the first place.)
You and I have a lot of common ground there.
I'm a registered Independent, because I think operating under the assumption that one side or the other has all the answers is ludicrous.
I've always felt that political parties and party platforms are the very worst thing that ever happened to politics. Parties should be abolished entirely and all candidates should run as independent individuals. They should do so with an overample supply of public money for conducting their campaigns and then any and all campaign contributions of any sort should be outlawed as bribery and punished severely. Mandatory term limits wouldn't be a bad idea either.
Sorry for the double post but I wanted to respond to this part specifically:
If you want to voice your opinion, then voice it. If you fear retribution for certain views, then keep them to yourself.
That is actually a claim that the person voicing the opinion is the problem and that the person who would bring retribution is A-OK. Have you thought this through and realized what it leads to?
I'll keep this simple. There are people who can tolerate opinions and other speech with which they strongly disagree. They might not like what you say, they might think you're nuts for saying it, but they will honor the concept that you have the right to say it. Let's call them Category A.
There are also people who will intimidate, blackmail, assault, and even kill others merely for expressing an opinion they dislike. Call them thugs, criminals, whatever you want. I will call them Category B.
People in Category B can say whatever they wish, knowing that the folks in Category A who believe in free speech are not going to use violence and threats to stop them. People in Category A are not so free. If they speak out, they face death threats, intimidation, threats to their families, physical assaults, sometimes even murder committed by people in Category B.
So what happens, over time, when there is no anonymity to protect Category A from Category B? Pretty soon, no one speaks out or shows political support for anything except for the lowest thugs among us. Those thugs now have all the political power and support laws, decisions, and candidates favorable to thugs. When those thugs control everything and stack the deck in their favor now that they've got the power, you lose all the freedoms and protections of your society.
This is what your wish leads to. It's what it grows and evolves towards, what it is becoming once put into place. This is its most perfect expression if allowed to fully develop itself and realize its principles. And for what? To avoid saying that the person who uses violence and intimidation is wrong and should be stopped? Why such "sympathy for the devil" and what does it hope to accomplish?
He's not going to give you anything of substance. Pojut is basically against all the ideals of a free society.
He ended up being honest about that first part. Whether he is against the ideals of a free society is not something I have enough data to discern, though it does look that way.
Here's the thing I don't understand: if you want to live in a restricted society where violence and intimidation are how things get done, there are many countries you could move to that would be happy to accommodate you. Why stay in this one and try to convert it away from its roots? Personally I'd rather repair the tremendous damage that has been done to freedom in this country and let people move to less free countries if that doesn't suit them.
If you'd like to actually support or demonstrate the flaw in anything I actually argued, feel free. Most of the time that I make that request, the other person will ramble on and on and repeat themselves without ever making a single good counterpoint. Maybe you'll be the exception, maybe you won't.
There is no flaw in what you said, which is why I did nothing to attempt to contradict it.
You keep wanting to make this "just my opinion" and "YMMV" but there are factual reasons to back up my position.
And I never once claimed you were wrong. I merely stated what I thought. Since when did facts get in the way of an opinion?:-)
Like I said in another post, if you want to talk of cowards: Anonymous ballots and anonymous petitions are not protection for cowards; they are protection from cowards. Few things are more cowardly than hating or harming someone merely because they hold a different belief. Anonymous petitions and ballots make it more difficult for those cowards to inflict their cowardice on others.
True, but again, going back to my point, I personallythink that is irrelevant. If you want to voice your opinion, then voice it. If you fear retribution for certain views, then keep them to yourself.
I'm not questioning your reasoning (which is sound), I'm not saying you're wrong (which you aren't), and I'm not saying you're being misleading (which, again, you aren't)...I'm saying that your specific points are irrelevant to my opinion.
So you admit then that that my position is backed by facts, sound reasoning, and that there are no flaws in either. You further admit that your position is based in opinion only.
It follows that when determining public policy, the factual position with sound reason should trump the opinion. Thank you for saving us a lot of time.
Except for the part where there is an independent verification body that certifies election results, and where voting elects people the positions of power while petition signing is part of the nominally open and public process of political debate.
So yeah, other that that, the secret ballot is a great analogy for this petition. But including that, the secret ballot is such a terrible analogy for this petition that it's incredible anyone would bring it up if they have any clue whatsoever as to how secret ballots actually work, and how much effort is made to verify that people in secret ballot situations don't vote twice, and their identity matches who they say they are, and they are actually legally allowed to vote.
For all we know the names on this petition are "Donald Duck" repeated 100,000 times, or the names of closet gays (also known as Bible Believing Christians) and their minor children.
Publishing the names serves the good and useful purpose of validating that the signers are who they say they are, and that they are adults living in the State of Washington, as opposed to shills from out of state, minors, or fictional characters. Anyone who wants their voice to be taken seriously in public debate--which is what this petition is part of--would be strongly in favour of having their name known.
It's an analogy in terms of purpose (avoiding intimidation and harassment), not in terms of mechanism of implementation. Therefore, if the analogy (concerning purpose only) is valid, it amounts to calling for anonymous petitions to be handled in much the same way secret ballots are handled, i.e. "whatever it takes to make this happen" now that we've established that it should happen for similar reasons.
It's a more than valid analogy. Let's be realistic: I seriously doubt that the thugs who would do violence against anyone who signed the "wrong" petition are concerned about whether the standards for signing a petition are as stringent as those for casting a ballot.
Anyone who decides that their name should be known and believes that attaching their name to their statements is important can always withdraw his or her own anonymity.
Ever heard of the secret ballot? There are some very good reasons why we have one. It was created as a response to the coercion and intimidation that went on before one's suffrage could be exercised anonymously. It makes a good analogy for this petition. I'll add that "coward" is a judgment against the character of a person you have never met. Having described that, I feel no need to respond to it or the emotional nature behind it. Instead, I'd like to ask you a factual question.
I view signing a petition as serving the same purpose as holding up a picket sign.
If the signatures remain anonymous, the signers have a measure of protection against harassment. Someone gains from that scenario and I can't think of anything it does to harm anyone else. The list of signatures can still be checked to make sure there are no duplicates etc.; the list and whether there are duplicates is just not a matter of public record.
And if I had four wheels, I'd be a wagon.
If the signatures are published publically, who gains or who benefits from this? For the opponents of the petition who did not wish to sign it, does it enhance their lives or further their cause in any way to know that John Smith from another city signed this petition? What good or useful purpose does it serve? Does that purpose outweigh the very real possibility of harassment?
Bottom line: if you feel strongly enough about something to declare your support for it with a fucking signature, you should be man (or woman) enough to own up to it and deal with whatever consequences that may include. If you don't want people to know you feel a certain way about something, or if you fear retribution for your opinion, then you should just shut up and not express it.
Just my opinion, YMMV, etc.
So you restated the GP post, including the character judgment of cowardice, without addressing a single factual point I made. Great.
If you'd like to actually support or demonstrate the flaw in anything I actually argued, feel free. Most of the time that I make that request, the other person will ramble on and on and repeat themselves without ever making a single good counterpoint. Maybe you'll be the exception, maybe you won't.
I'll add that the consequences of signing a petition should be limited to the influence that petition will have on the government. To say that exercising one's right as a citizen and signing a petition to redress a grievance with your government should open you up to harassment, death threats, intimidation, and other illegal actions is not sane. It's a rejection of peaceful democratic processes and an embracing of "might makes right", mob rule, rule by fear and intimidation, "whoever can hire the most thugs wins", whatever you want to call it.
Judges will invalidate and throw out a contract that was signed under duress, and with good reason. If anyone fears retribution for expressing an opinion on a petition, how is that petition any more valid or representative of what the people want than a contract signed under duress?
You keep wanting to make this "just my opinion" and "YMMV" but there are factual reasons to back up my position. If you have some of your own I'd like to hear them. Otherwise you are patting yourself on the back with your talk about how big of a man you are that you always own up to everything while failing to give a single good reason why anonymous petitions are a bad idea and also failing to address a single point I've made.
Like I said in another post, if you want to talk of cowards: Anonymous ballots and anonymous petitions are not protection for cowards; they are protection from cowards. Few things are more cowardly than hating or harming someone merely because they hold a different belief. Anonymous petitions and ballots make it more difficult for those cowards to inflict their cowardice on others.
Signing a petition is very much like grabbing a sign and picketing. On the flip side it is similar to casting a ballot. I don't know which side to agree with on this one.
I can resolve your indecision. The relevant question is: does it violate anyone's civil rights in any material, demonstrable way for the picketers or the petition-signers to remain anonymous? If not, then there is no good reason not to let them choose whether they wish to remain anonymous.
Any law that tells citizens that they are not allowed to do something must exist only because that something would violate the rights of others if it were allowed to continue. Anything else amounts to abusing law as a tool to force your morality and lifestyle on others. Because gossip and voyerism are not civil rights, your rights are not violated in any way from not knowing whether your neighbors signed a petition, just like your rights are not violated from not knowing whether they read the newspaper this morning.
I agree with you about the man up and stand for your beliefs, however history has shown that standing for something unpopular had a nasty tendency to get you dead or injured.
In a case like this, anonymity is not a protection for cowards. It's a protection from cowards. There are few things more cowardly and insecure than hating someone and wishing to harm them because they do not believe as you do.
...if you feel about something so strongly that you are willing to sign a petition about it, you shouldn't be hiding your name. Stop being a coward, and own up to your opinions/decisions.
Ever heard of the secret ballot? There are some very good reasons why we have one. It was created as a response to the coercion and intimidation that went on before one's suffrage could be exercised anonymously. It makes a good analogy for this petition. I'll add that "coward" is a judgment against the character of a person you have never met. Having described that, I feel no need to respond to it or the emotional nature behind it. Instead, I'd like to ask you a factual question.
If the signatures remain anonymous, the signers have a measure of protection against harassment. Someone gains from that scenario and I can't think of anything it does to harm anyone else. The list of signatures can still be checked to make sure there are no duplicates etc.; the list and whether there are duplicates is just not a matter of public record.
If the signatures are published publically, who gains or who benefits from this? For the opponents of the petition who did not wish to sign it, does it enhance their lives or further their cause in any way to know that John Smith from another city signed this petition? What good or useful purpose does it serve? Does that purpose outweigh the very real possibility of harassment?
Well, you can't prove anything is a slippery slope until you've found yourself at the bottom. Even deducing that NY's action will result in genocide could end up being true, although it's not logically necessary.
Some people won't ever believe anything that doesn't already fit into their accepted worldview until and unless it's bleedin' obvious and completely undeniable. Their lives are filled with surprises, mostly unpleasant and mostly preventable.
Personally, my own concern is not whether it's a perfect slippery slope and whether we are already at the bottom. My concern is what it would take to get from here to there, and whether the current action is a step in that direction. I prefer to say it thusly: you can know where a path leads long before the destination is reached.
The problem is that most of the general public does not realize or does not appreciate the concept that all political developments are heading in a direction along a path according to a philosophy. News media certainly won't highlight this fact because events which are predictable and unsurprising are not dramatic and sensational.
It's a bit like the subject of online privacy. The shallow among us who don't understand these things believe it to be entirely about pragmatic convenience, not about principles. Therefore they have no concerns about privacy and defend every potential threat to it until one negatively, materially, and measurably makes them suffer in some way. They don't realize that before that point was reached, it was not reached instantly; steps were made in that direction that set the stage for it.
This DNA collection trend is like that. It seems harmless enough and it's in the name of fighting crime so it automatically has some kind of aura of virtue from that holy name. What's missing is evidence that this actually will lower the crime rate, that it's the very best option available to us among all the things we could do about crime. What's really missing is a thorough understanding of all the ways DNA information can be abused, both from a "criminal justice" standpoint and from a "medical records" perspective. The most sorely missing factor of all: what the NY government will propose next after passing this law and still finding that places like NYC are crime-ridden.
If this happens, what will follow is a crackdown on jaywalking and other everybody crimes so that the database becomes universal. They'll be taking DNA at traffic stops.
That's quite predictable but a lot of (naive) people will be very surprised when it happens. Maybe they can get over their surprise long enough to consider what this tells them about the nature and intentions of the people who are pushing for these kinds of laws. This whole scenario reminds me of an entry from my quotations file:
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive
laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
-- H. L. Mencken
This is a bit like the War on (some) Drugs. Observation: a government has very little power over those who break no laws. Therefore, if you want to expand the police power of government, you need more laws. If there aren't enough criminals, you make crimes of things that are not crimes to produce some more. If there are plenty of criminals, or if that option isn't realistic, then you increasingly treat very minor crimes the same way you handle serious crimes. It seems New York is going with that latter option.
Google managed to provide Google Earth and also managed to be a profitable, successful company before it decided to gather and record Wi-Fi data. Therefore, it has already been demonstrated that gathering and recording Wi-Fi data is not necessary for the provision of Google Earth, Google Search, and all other Google services.
Ergo, your argument that making apologies (apologia, i.e. "defense") for the gathering and recording of Wi-Fi data does anything to enhance your online experience is lacking evidence. Indeed, the paragraph above points out that there is evidence against it. Therefore, it's intellectually dishonest to claim that you benefit from this practice of surveillance because that has never been established. It follows that the conditions of my original statement of "it can either fail to benefit you or it can do harm to you" remain satisfied. When a condition is satisfied by the facts of the matter and has never been falsified it is erroneous to call it a "straw man".
That's the objective portion of this discussion. Your personal feelings about targeted ads are subjective opinions and therefore not a valid subject of reasoned argumentation. That's no less true now than when I mentioned it before.
You are at least trying this time, I'll grant you that. I thought it was a bit cute that you seemed to have no knowledge of what a "straw man" was until I mentioned it and gave you a reference for it, then you proceeded to use the term incorrectly. If you intended to give the impression that you are skilled at formal argumentation and knew about such fallacies all along, you have not succeeded. If you did not know about it before and decided to use it now that I have introduced you to the concept, you should know that it's a losing game to be the effect of someone else's cause.
Seriously. Google the word "Trivial". It doesn't mean what you think it means.
The second you want to argue semantics in the face of positive points I have made and backed up is the moment you admit to having a weak position. But since it seems unduly important to you, I am proceeding from this definition of "trivial" from dictionary.reference.com:
1. of very little importance or value; insignificant: Don't bother me with trivial matters.
A bug that is insignificant has that status because it's easily corrected.
Now, if you're about done using straw men, arguing semantics (uselessly, I might add), and pulling other very weak tactics that consist of something other than refuting my logic or disputing a single point I've made, maybe you can stop with the very easily deflected non-objections and make your case. If you have one, that is. Furthermore, I notice you do not disagree with my observation that you attempted to use a straw-man fallacy and must assume you aren't disputing that because you know this to be the truth.
I note you seem careful not to dispute me in an active conversation with an audience of others. You seem to cherry-pick old discussions in which most users are no longer participating. That's wise, though in a devious sort of way, for I am not alone in recognizing the weakness of the tactics you are choosing to use. It seems to be your silent acknowledgement that you'd only humiliate yourself. It's providing amusement for me but has no value otherwise.
Have you ever seen exploit code? Are you familiar with the low-level details of a stack-smashing attack? For most of the bugs that Microsoft fixes, it requires quite a bit of skill to make them manifest. There's a reason the programmers did not notice them prior to releasing it as production code despite fuzz-testing and other forms of tests and audits. It's because they are non-obvious and non-trivial.
Unfortunately, once someone with that level of skill produces exploit code and releases it, any unskilled person can re-use that code to compromise vulnerable machines. Those are called "script kiddies" because they have little or no skill of their own. But that's another discussion. The point is that actually discovering and manifesting that class of bugs is not easy at all.
By comparison, intercepting and recording many times more data than you intended is a very trivial mistake. Any amount of testing against Google-owned Wi-Fi systems (y'know, before deploying this code on a large scale against public systems) would have quickly made this obvious. It's not some terribly complex bug that can remain hidden despite vast efforts to find it. The slightest effort to check whether their code does as it is intended to do would have caught this one. It's either intentional or an instance of incompetence, and while that latter option is possible, Google is not generally known for incompetence.
When I point out with good reason that this is an extremely trivial and easily recognized mistake, you try to make that sound like I am demanding 100% perfection in all things. No, that isn't going to work. It's a failure of reasoning. You don't sound inclined to take my word for that, so please review this reference:
A subfallacy of Strawman is to take an extreme version of a person's position and attack it. According to Fallacy Files (see references below), this is called a Strawdemon.
Mom: The doctor says that these exercises will help you recover more quickly.
Son: Aw, Mom! Do I have to look like Arnold Schwarzsnegger?
I'll take this to mean you are unable to refute my logic. In all likelihood you were wise not to even try as it is quite sound. Yet you were unwise to continue reiterating your position (already known to me) without addressing my direct and explicit reason-based challenge to it or refuting my accusation of having pulled a straw man.
I like and appreciate your tenacity. Indeed, many opponents will be overwhelmed by that alone and unable to match it. Your logic and argumentation skills need some work however.
I know this will be modded offtopic, but I really need to know. Why has Slashdot done away with the D2 comment threshold bar entirely? There is literally no way to change threshold or get more than the standard 50( mostly collapsed )comments anymore.
Is this their not-so-subtle way of forcing everyone to register accounts? The site is basically 100% unusable for comment browsing as it is.
If it helps you, I think Slashdot fucked something up today. Despite using the AJAX interface, and having my account preferences set to do so, Slashdot is reverting back to the (very) old behavior today. As in, clicking "Reply to This" to write this post took me off of the discussion page and into a new page rather than doing everything in-line. Additionally there is no "quote parent" button. If I turned off Javascript entirely I doubt I would notice a difference.
That threshold bar is JS driven and part of the new AJAX interface, so far as I know. I don't believe this is an intentional change but it'd be nice if Slashdot admin would have some little notice somewhere saying "yeah we know about this and are working on it" or something to that effect to avoid the confusion you're having.
The fact that celebrities must make an active effort to conceal themselves in order to be left alone is part of my point. What's changing is that you no longer need to be a celebrity to have problems like this. What made this change? It used to be that conducting surveillance on someone was difficult (i.e. required effort) and expensive, so only the more high-profile people would be targeted. Now with modern database technology as employed by corporations like Google, it's economically feasible to conduct surveillance on many people at once. Just ask yourself why celebrities would hide from paparazzi if the paparazzi's attentions were welcome and enhanced their lives in any way. After all, the celebrity was in a public place, right?
Yeah, people once said "what is anyone going to do with it that could harm me" about Facebook and MySpace pages. They said that right up until employers started using this information to decide whom to hire and fire. "Is that a picture of our employee at a wild frat party holding a beer and a bong? Yeah, we don't need him anymore." The people who didn't care about privacy in that case and happily made such information public record also ignored and dismissed the pro-privacy advocates.
Please refute my logic if you can: if something cannot possibly benefit you but could possibly harm you (and maybe in unanticipated ways), clearly it is not in your interests to support that thing or to actively participate in it; furthermore, doing something that is not in your interests amounts to poor decision-making. Now, if that statement contradicts itself or displays any logical fallacy, feel free to let me know.
I'm quite confident that it is sound logic, and as evidence I present your less-than-subtle attempt to steer this conversation away from logic and towards whether you personally approve of a mild form of exhibitionism. You obviously need to resort to such weak tactics as pretending that I spoke about a matter of opinion, since after all one cannot possibly refute a personal taste, preference, or opinion. If you care to edify yourself, what you're doing there is known as a straw man and it will only work on those who are naive and easily distracted.
Now, if you can handle addressing my reasoning with reasoning of your own, I'd like to hear from you.
I think your selective reading of what I wrote caused you to mentally omit the word "trivial" from "trivial mistake." Yes, Microsoft has bugs in its code. They tend to be security issues that require several different conditions to be present before the bug can be demonstrated and are therefore non-trivial in nature. By contrast, gathering several times more data than you intended to obtain and store (the full Wi-Fi headers + much larger data payload, as opposed to only the headers) is trivial in nature and easier for someone to notice. To give an analogy, it's like intending to copy 20GB of data and finding that you have copied one terabyte. That's easy to notice, especially with the talent Google possesses.
Since I never made a claim that depends on Microsoft or anyone else writing perfectly bug-free code, do you care to revise your response?
Looking through windows is different because the windows are obscuring the contents of the house, making it reasonable to assume that those contents are private.
Ummm, excuse me? Windows are obscuring the contents of the house? I think you may have them confused with walls or perhaps curtains. The primary function of windows is to let light, i.e. radiation, i.e. signal, travel through them. By your lights anyone with windows who doesn't keep blinds constantly drawn (in which case what's the point of the windows) or have frosted/tinted/mirrored/etc. treatments is inviting people to look into their homes and publicise what they have in the home (and this - publication - is a major point which seems to be getting lost). Not knowing the access point name is like not knowing the brand of leather couch they see through the window. In either case they have still determined you have the couch/AP. And then they pass on that info to anyone who cares to know. No thank you sir.
I bet there are a lot of countries where it could be a problem for people if the government were able to simply query Google and see who has wireless AP's.
Privacy in society is being lost at breakneck speed and once it's gone it's gone. We should be guarding our privacy not allowing it to more easily be taken.
Anytime there is a decently large-scale violation of either freedom, privacy, or both, there are always legions of useful idiots who will make excuses and justifications for it. It's a necessary component of any such violation. It gives the illusion that there is legitimate debate about the ethics of deploying clever and/or novel ways to conduct surveillance on people. It's a convincing illusion for the rather unenlightened who believe that privacy is about convenience and not about fundamental rights.
Note that "useful idiots" can otherwise be intelligent; the idiocy is the failure to recognize that they are supporting and defending what is not actually in their interests. No one outside of Google benefits from the gathering of this data. If you are a member of Google, you are worthy of dismissal as a baised reference with a vested interest. If you are not a member of Google, then this activity will either do nothing for you or it will harm you by reducing your privacy. A thing that cannot benefit you in any significant way is, by definition, not in your interests.
Why so many line up to defend this action is encompassed by one word: fanboyism. I think it's religious in nature because it certainly has no rational basis. Any mention of the fact that anyone with a sufficient antenna can easily and legally intercept this data misses the point entirely, for that falls under how Google is able to do so and completely fails to address whether this is in our interests. Reading the posts in this discussion, that's the one point that the fanboys refuse to acknowledge or understand.
Slashdot Mirror
... better get on this to make sure that this technology can't be used in the U.S. otherwise costs might go down. Similar to how we can't import drugs: medically, if it's cheap, it's dangerous.
Yes but the trendy growth area for Big Pharma these days is the use of common diseases that are usually just a nuisance to scare everyone into vaccination. Consider the language used here, concerning the individual decision to accept or reject a vaccination for common influenza:
"Now no one should say 'Should I or shouldn't I?'" said CDC flu specialist Anthony Fiore.
That's absolutely dripping with "we know what's good for you". Was that statement the result of a new medical breakthrough or discovery? No. It was the result of a panel of bureaucrats holding a vote. I'm sure they have our best interests at heart and are not at all influenced by the large, well-financed pharmaceutical industry. This part is also telling:
In the past, the advisory committee has been reluctant to recommend universal vaccination for fear that it might produce vaccine shortages that place members of higher risk groups in danger. Yet even with current recommendations, only 33 percent of the public gets vaccinated every year, leaving millions of doses to be disposed of.
How inconvenient. They have over-produced this vaccine and its finite shelf life will result in tremendous losses for them unless they can suddenly create demand for it. The fact that universal vaccination for this specific disease is now being pushed is completely unrelated to that, I am sure </sarcasm>. This is actually unusually blatant for them. They usually rely more strongly on the "don't question our motives, we are the experts" priesthood of the medical establishment that doesn't make it so simple to follow the money.
Plus I think they can fast-track the FDA approval process and simultaneously remove much of their liability if every little disease like the swine flu is now a big scary pandemic. The bothersome thing is that when the next real threat to life and limb comes along, the sensationalism that surrounded SARS, hoof-and-mouth, swine flu, West Nile, and bird flu will have created quite the boy-who-cried-wolf situation. If it has little or no chance of killing or crippling a healthy adult then I really don't want to hear words like "pandemic" -- is that such an unreasonable thing to ask?
I agree that they certainly don't want competition from foreign pharmaceuticals. They especially wouldn't want that from countries with weaker patent protections for drugs than the USA. It's just that this particular deck has been stacked in their favor for so long now that it is not a growth area for them.
Believe it or not I think the War on (some) Drugs set the stage for much of this. That's where the idea was legitimized that a citizen is not sovereign over his or her own body and does not get the final say on what may or may not be ingested into it. That's why we have a situation where it's "the FDA has not yet approved this substance, or does not consider its imported version to be safe, therefore we will use police power to make sure you may not have it at all" instead of "the FDA has not yet approved this substance, or does not consider its imported version to be safe, therefore you consume it at your own risk."
The first thing there is to understand about pharmaceutical companies is that they cannot make money from healthy people. The second thing to understand about them is that they make less money from sick people who are allowed to shop around in multiple markets.
It's extreme and also obtuse, and I'm reluctant to say that about someone like Nietzche. One man cannot possibly retard intellectual advancement for a thousand years except that legions of other men play follow-the-leader and imitate him like little robots instead of finding their own way. So let's say for argument's sake that Plato's contributions were entirely negative and unworthy (something I do not believe); Plato could only harm himself with that if people had any real self-hood. If they do not, this is not Plato's doing.
That analogy is fatally flawed. The risk involved in bungee jumping comes from gravity, a natural force. Gravity doesn't discriminate against political views and it isn't "out to get you". It affects everyone equally. The possibility of a failure leading to injury or death is an inherent part of bungee jumping.
Unlike bungee jumping, signing your name to a piece of paper is not an inherently dangerous action. It is made artificially dangerous by those who break the law in order to use violence and threats against those who sign the "wrong" document. Unlike gravity, those thugs do discriminate because they have an agenda and they are "out to get" anyone who disagrees with them.
For bungee jumping, only the people actually doing the bungee jump are assuming any risk. By contrast, thugs who don't like your political views might not target only the petition signer; they might also threaten his family, his friends, or his employer. That might include people who don't even agree with his views but can be used to intimidate him because he cares about what happens to them. Such thugs are enabled by ready access to a list of people who hold political views they dislike. Why enable them?
Call this opinion if you like but you are advocating a course of action with real consequences for real people. When thugs show up at someone's door talking about how much of a shame it would be if "something were to happen" to the place, they are not discussing abstract philosophy or opinion.
I recognize that my opinions are generally not agreeable with most people, which is why I would never run for office. ::shrug:: Again, sorry for not being honest. I've responded to one of your other posts (specifically this one. That should answer any question as to why I feel this way.
Again, let me reiterate: I recognize that this is merely my opinion, and in no way should, in reality, apply to everyone else. It's the way I think though, so it's what I express. ::shrug::
"Honesty" is "the truth and the whole truth". Therefore, honesty would include giving me a real answer as to why you continue to adhere to this belief after it's been shown through critical thinking that it can only lead to the very worst people obtaining political power. Or it might include telling me why I have this all wrong, like pointing out that I have contradicted myself or committed a logical fallacy.
Either way, the agreeability or disagreeability of your beliefs or whether you'd run for office was never the subject of my comments. That makes it less-than-honest to respond as though I were asking about those things, for that's just a distraction technique whether intentional or otherwise.
Honestly I expected little else. If I understand your beliefs there correctly, you are OK with them as I described them and don't care about the undesirable outcome they would produce. It's not possible to believe in something harmful like that and also have a willingness to look at it objectively, for that would be a recipe for inner conflict. I am asking you to look at it objectively so you needed a distraction.
You and I have a lot of common ground there.
I've always felt that political parties and party platforms are the very worst thing that ever happened to politics. Parties should be abolished entirely and all candidates should run as independent individuals. They should do so with an overample supply of public money for conducting their campaigns and then any and all campaign contributions of any sort should be outlawed as bribery and punished severely. Mandatory term limits wouldn't be a bad idea either.
That is actually a claim that the person voicing the opinion is the problem and that the person who would bring retribution is A-OK. Have you thought this through and realized what it leads to?
I'll keep this simple. There are people who can tolerate opinions and other speech with which they strongly disagree. They might not like what you say, they might think you're nuts for saying it, but they will honor the concept that you have the right to say it. Let's call them Category A.
There are also people who will intimidate, blackmail, assault, and even kill others merely for expressing an opinion they dislike. Call them thugs, criminals, whatever you want. I will call them Category B.
People in Category B can say whatever they wish, knowing that the folks in Category A who believe in free speech are not going to use violence and threats to stop them. People in Category A are not so free. If they speak out, they face death threats, intimidation, threats to their families, physical assaults, sometimes even murder committed by people in Category B.
So what happens, over time, when there is no anonymity to protect Category A from Category B? Pretty soon, no one speaks out or shows political support for anything except for the lowest thugs among us. Those thugs now have all the political power and support laws, decisions, and candidates favorable to thugs. When those thugs control everything and stack the deck in their favor now that they've got the power, you lose all the freedoms and protections of your society.
This is what your wish leads to. It's what it grows and evolves towards, what it is becoming once put into place. This is its most perfect expression if allowed to fully develop itself and realize its principles. And for what? To avoid saying that the person who uses violence and intimidation is wrong and should be stopped? Why such "sympathy for the devil" and what does it hope to accomplish?
He's not going to give you anything of substance. Pojut is basically against all the ideals of a free society.
He ended up being honest about that first part. Whether he is against the ideals of a free society is not something I have enough data to discern, though it does look that way.
Here's the thing I don't understand: if you want to live in a restricted society where violence and intimidation are how things get done, there are many countries you could move to that would be happy to accommodate you. Why stay in this one and try to convert it away from its roots? Personally I'd rather repair the tremendous damage that has been done to freedom in this country and let people move to less free countries if that doesn't suit them.
If you'd like to actually support or demonstrate the flaw in anything I actually argued, feel free. Most of the time that I make that request, the other person will ramble on and on and repeat themselves without ever making a single good counterpoint. Maybe you'll be the exception, maybe you won't.
There is no flaw in what you said, which is why I did nothing to attempt to contradict it.
You keep wanting to make this "just my opinion" and "YMMV" but there are factual reasons to back up my position.
And I never once claimed you were wrong. I merely stated what I thought. Since when did facts get in the way of an opinion? :-)
Like I said in another post, if you want to talk of cowards: Anonymous ballots and anonymous petitions are not protection for cowards; they are protection from cowards. Few things are more cowardly than hating or harming someone merely because they hold a different belief. Anonymous petitions and ballots make it more difficult for those cowards to inflict their cowardice on others.
True, but again, going back to my point, I personallythink that is irrelevant. If you want to voice your opinion, then voice it. If you fear retribution for certain views, then keep them to yourself.
I'm not questioning your reasoning (which is sound), I'm not saying you're wrong (which you aren't), and I'm not saying you're being misleading (which, again, you aren't)...I'm saying that your specific points are irrelevant to my opinion.
So you admit then that that my position is backed by facts, sound reasoning, and that there are no flaws in either. You further admit that your position is based in opinion only.
It follows that when determining public policy, the factual position with sound reason should trump the opinion. Thank you for saving us a lot of time.
It makes a good analogy for this petition.
Except for the part where there is an independent verification body that certifies election results, and where voting elects people the positions of power while petition signing is part of the nominally open and public process of political debate.
So yeah, other that that, the secret ballot is a great analogy for this petition. But including that, the secret ballot is such a terrible analogy for this petition that it's incredible anyone would bring it up if they have any clue whatsoever as to how secret ballots actually work, and how much effort is made to verify that people in secret ballot situations don't vote twice, and their identity matches who they say they are, and they are actually legally allowed to vote.
For all we know the names on this petition are "Donald Duck" repeated 100,000 times, or the names of closet gays (also known as Bible Believing Christians) and their minor children.
Publishing the names serves the good and useful purpose of validating that the signers are who they say they are, and that they are adults living in the State of Washington, as opposed to shills from out of state, minors, or fictional characters. Anyone who wants their voice to be taken seriously in public debate--which is what this petition is part of--would be strongly in favour of having their name known.
It's an analogy in terms of purpose (avoiding intimidation and harassment), not in terms of mechanism of implementation. Therefore, if the analogy (concerning purpose only) is valid, it amounts to calling for anonymous petitions to be handled in much the same way secret ballots are handled, i.e. "whatever it takes to make this happen" now that we've established that it should happen for similar reasons.
It's a more than valid analogy. Let's be realistic: I seriously doubt that the thugs who would do violence against anyone who signed the "wrong" petition are concerned about whether the standards for signing a petition are as stringent as those for casting a ballot.
Anyone who decides that their name should be known and believes that attaching their name to their statements is important can always withdraw his or her own anonymity.
Ever heard of the secret ballot? There are some very good reasons why we have one. It was created as a response to the coercion and intimidation that went on before one's suffrage could be exercised anonymously. It makes a good analogy for this petition. I'll add that "coward" is a judgment against the character of a person you have never met. Having described that, I feel no need to respond to it or the emotional nature behind it. Instead, I'd like to ask you a factual question.
I view signing a petition as serving the same purpose as holding up a picket sign.
If the signatures remain anonymous, the signers have a measure of protection against harassment. Someone gains from that scenario and I can't think of anything it does to harm anyone else. The list of signatures can still be checked to make sure there are no duplicates etc.; the list and whether there are duplicates is just not a matter of public record.
And if I had four wheels, I'd be a wagon.
If the signatures are published publically, who gains or who benefits from this? For the opponents of the petition who did not wish to sign it, does it enhance their lives or further their cause in any way to know that John Smith from another city signed this petition? What good or useful purpose does it serve? Does that purpose outweigh the very real possibility of harassment?
Bottom line: if you feel strongly enough about something to declare your support for it with a fucking signature, you should be man (or woman) enough to own up to it and deal with whatever consequences that may include. If you don't want people to know you feel a certain way about something, or if you fear retribution for your opinion, then you should just shut up and not express it.
Just my opinion, YMMV, etc.
So you restated the GP post, including the character judgment of cowardice, without addressing a single factual point I made. Great.
If you'd like to actually support or demonstrate the flaw in anything I actually argued, feel free. Most of the time that I make that request, the other person will ramble on and on and repeat themselves without ever making a single good counterpoint. Maybe you'll be the exception, maybe you won't.
I'll add that the consequences of signing a petition should be limited to the influence that petition will have on the government. To say that exercising one's right as a citizen and signing a petition to redress a grievance with your government should open you up to harassment, death threats, intimidation, and other illegal actions is not sane. It's a rejection of peaceful democratic processes and an embracing of "might makes right", mob rule, rule by fear and intimidation, "whoever can hire the most thugs wins", whatever you want to call it.
Judges will invalidate and throw out a contract that was signed under duress, and with good reason. If anyone fears retribution for expressing an opinion on a petition, how is that petition any more valid or representative of what the people want than a contract signed under duress?
You keep wanting to make this "just my opinion" and "YMMV" but there are factual reasons to back up my position. If you have some of your own I'd like to hear them. Otherwise you are patting yourself on the back with your talk about how big of a man you are that you always own up to everything while failing to give a single good reason why anonymous petitions are a bad idea and also failing to address a single point I've made.
Like I said in another post, if you want to talk of cowards: Anonymous ballots and anonymous petitions are not protection for cowards; they are protection from cowards. Few things are more cowardly than hating or harming someone merely because they hold a different belief. Anonymous petitions and ballots make it more difficult for those cowards to inflict their cowardice on others.
Signing a petition is very much like grabbing a sign and picketing. On the flip side it is similar to casting a ballot. I don't know which side to agree with on this one.
I can resolve your indecision. The relevant question is: does it violate anyone's civil rights in any material, demonstrable way for the picketers or the petition-signers to remain anonymous? If not, then there is no good reason not to let them choose whether they wish to remain anonymous.
Any law that tells citizens that they are not allowed to do something must exist only because that something would violate the rights of others if it were allowed to continue. Anything else amounts to abusing law as a tool to force your morality and lifestyle on others. Because gossip and voyerism are not civil rights, your rights are not violated in any way from not knowing whether your neighbors signed a petition, just like your rights are not violated from not knowing whether they read the newspaper this morning.
I agree with you about the man up and stand for your beliefs, however history has shown that standing for something unpopular had a nasty tendency to get you dead or injured.
In a case like this, anonymity is not a protection for cowards. It's a protection from cowards. There are few things more cowardly and insecure than hating someone and wishing to harm them because they do not believe as you do.
...if you feel about something so strongly that you are willing to sign a petition about it, you shouldn't be hiding your name. Stop being a coward, and own up to your opinions/decisions.
Ever heard of the secret ballot? There are some very good reasons why we have one. It was created as a response to the coercion and intimidation that went on before one's suffrage could be exercised anonymously. It makes a good analogy for this petition. I'll add that "coward" is a judgment against the character of a person you have never met. Having described that, I feel no need to respond to it or the emotional nature behind it. Instead, I'd like to ask you a factual question.
If the signatures remain anonymous, the signers have a measure of protection against harassment. Someone gains from that scenario and I can't think of anything it does to harm anyone else. The list of signatures can still be checked to make sure there are no duplicates etc.; the list and whether there are duplicates is just not a matter of public record.
If the signatures are published publically, who gains or who benefits from this? For the opponents of the petition who did not wish to sign it, does it enhance their lives or further their cause in any way to know that John Smith from another city signed this petition? What good or useful purpose does it serve? Does that purpose outweigh the very real possibility of harassment?
That reminds me of another good one:
In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
What a counterpoint to the naivete and misplaced trust and exaggerated belief in coincidence that passes for political understanding these days.
Well, you can't prove anything is a slippery slope until you've found yourself at the bottom. Even deducing that NY's action will result in genocide could end up being true, although it's not logically necessary.
Some people won't ever believe anything that doesn't already fit into their accepted worldview until and unless it's bleedin' obvious and completely undeniable. Their lives are filled with surprises, mostly unpleasant and mostly preventable.
Personally, my own concern is not whether it's a perfect slippery slope and whether we are already at the bottom. My concern is what it would take to get from here to there, and whether the current action is a step in that direction. I prefer to say it thusly: you can know where a path leads long before the destination is reached.
The problem is that most of the general public does not realize or does not appreciate the concept that all political developments are heading in a direction along a path according to a philosophy. News media certainly won't highlight this fact because events which are predictable and unsurprising are not dramatic and sensational.
It's a bit like the subject of online privacy. The shallow among us who don't understand these things believe it to be entirely about pragmatic convenience, not about principles. Therefore they have no concerns about privacy and defend every potential threat to it until one negatively, materially, and measurably makes them suffer in some way. They don't realize that before that point was reached, it was not reached instantly; steps were made in that direction that set the stage for it.
This DNA collection trend is like that. It seems harmless enough and it's in the name of fighting crime so it automatically has some kind of aura of virtue from that holy name. What's missing is evidence that this actually will lower the crime rate, that it's the very best option available to us among all the things we could do about crime. What's really missing is a thorough understanding of all the ways DNA information can be abused, both from a "criminal justice" standpoint and from a "medical records" perspective. The most sorely missing factor of all: what the NY government will propose next after passing this law and still finding that places like NYC are crime-ridden.
If this happens, what will follow is a crackdown on jaywalking and other everybody crimes so that the database becomes universal. They'll be taking DNA at traffic stops.
That's quite predictable but a lot of (naive) people will be very surprised when it happens. Maybe they can get over their surprise long enough to consider what this tells them about the nature and intentions of the people who are pushing for these kinds of laws. This whole scenario reminds me of an entry from my quotations file:
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
-- H. L. Mencken
This is a bit like the War on (some) Drugs. Observation: a government has very little power over those who break no laws. Therefore, if you want to expand the police power of government, you need more laws. If there aren't enough criminals, you make crimes of things that are not crimes to produce some more. If there are plenty of criminals, or if that option isn't realistic, then you increasingly treat very minor crimes the same way you handle serious crimes. It seems New York is going with that latter option.
Google managed to provide Google Earth and also managed to be a profitable, successful company before it decided to gather and record Wi-Fi data. Therefore, it has already been demonstrated that gathering and recording Wi-Fi data is not necessary for the provision of Google Earth, Google Search, and all other Google services.
Ergo, your argument that making apologies (apologia, i.e. "defense") for the gathering and recording of Wi-Fi data does anything to enhance your online experience is lacking evidence. Indeed, the paragraph above points out that there is evidence against it. Therefore, it's intellectually dishonest to claim that you benefit from this practice of surveillance because that has never been established. It follows that the conditions of my original statement of "it can either fail to benefit you or it can do harm to you" remain satisfied. When a condition is satisfied by the facts of the matter and has never been falsified it is erroneous to call it a "straw man".
That's the objective portion of this discussion. Your personal feelings about targeted ads are subjective opinions and therefore not a valid subject of reasoned argumentation. That's no less true now than when I mentioned it before.
You are at least trying this time, I'll grant you that. I thought it was a bit cute that you seemed to have no knowledge of what a "straw man" was until I mentioned it and gave you a reference for it, then you proceeded to use the term incorrectly. If you intended to give the impression that you are skilled at formal argumentation and knew about such fallacies all along, you have not succeeded. If you did not know about it before and decided to use it now that I have introduced you to the concept, you should know that it's a losing game to be the effect of someone else's cause.
Seriously. Google the word "Trivial". It doesn't mean what you think it means.
The second you want to argue semantics in the face of positive points I have made and backed up is the moment you admit to having a weak position. But since it seems unduly important to you, I am proceeding from this definition of "trivial" from dictionary.reference.com:
1. of very little importance or value; insignificant: Don't bother me with trivial matters.
A bug that is insignificant has that status because it's easily corrected.
Now, if you're about done using straw men, arguing semantics (uselessly, I might add), and pulling other very weak tactics that consist of something other than refuting my logic or disputing a single point I've made, maybe you can stop with the very easily deflected non-objections and make your case. If you have one, that is. Furthermore, I notice you do not disagree with my observation that you attempted to use a straw-man fallacy and must assume you aren't disputing that because you know this to be the truth.
I note you seem careful not to dispute me in an active conversation with an audience of others. You seem to cherry-pick old discussions in which most users are no longer participating. That's wise, though in a devious sort of way, for I am not alone in recognizing the weakness of the tactics you are choosing to use. It seems to be your silent acknowledgement that you'd only humiliate yourself. It's providing amusement for me but has no value otherwise.
Have you ever seen exploit code? Are you familiar with the low-level details of a stack-smashing attack? For most of the bugs that Microsoft fixes, it requires quite a bit of skill to make them manifest. There's a reason the programmers did not notice them prior to releasing it as production code despite fuzz-testing and other forms of tests and audits. It's because they are non-obvious and non-trivial.
Unfortunately, once someone with that level of skill produces exploit code and releases it, any unskilled person can re-use that code to compromise vulnerable machines. Those are called "script kiddies" because they have little or no skill of their own. But that's another discussion. The point is that actually discovering and manifesting that class of bugs is not easy at all.
By comparison, intercepting and recording many times more data than you intended is a very trivial mistake. Any amount of testing against Google-owned Wi-Fi systems (y'know, before deploying this code on a large scale against public systems) would have quickly made this obvious. It's not some terribly complex bug that can remain hidden despite vast efforts to find it. The slightest effort to check whether their code does as it is intended to do would have caught this one. It's either intentional or an instance of incompetence, and while that latter option is possible, Google is not generally known for incompetence.
When I point out with good reason that this is an extremely trivial and easily recognized mistake, you try to make that sound like I am demanding 100% perfection in all things. No, that isn't going to work. It's a failure of reasoning. You don't sound inclined to take my word for that, so please review this reference:
A subfallacy of Strawman is to take an extreme version of a person's position and attack it. According to Fallacy Files (see references below), this is called a Strawdemon.
Mom: The doctor says that these exercises will help you recover more quickly.
Son: Aw, Mom! Do I have to look like Arnold Schwarzsnegger?
I'll take this to mean you are unable to refute my logic. In all likelihood you were wise not to even try as it is quite sound. Yet you were unwise to continue reiterating your position (already known to me) without addressing my direct and explicit reason-based challenge to it or refuting my accusation of having pulled a straw man.
I like and appreciate your tenacity. Indeed, many opponents will be overwhelmed by that alone and unable to match it. Your logic and argumentation skills need some work however.
If it helps you, I think Slashdot fucked something up today. Despite using the AJAX interface, and having my account preferences set to do so, Slashdot is reverting back to the (very) old behavior today. As in, clicking "Reply to This" to write this post took me off of the discussion page and into a new page rather than doing everything in-line. Additionally there is no "quote parent" button. If I turned off Javascript entirely I doubt I would notice a difference.
That threshold bar is JS driven and part of the new AJAX interface, so far as I know. I don't believe this is an intentional change but it'd be nice if Slashdot admin would have some little notice somewhere saying "yeah we know about this and are working on it" or something to that effect to avoid the confusion you're having.
The fact that celebrities must make an active effort to conceal themselves in order to be left alone is part of my point. What's changing is that you no longer need to be a celebrity to have problems like this. What made this change? It used to be that conducting surveillance on someone was difficult (i.e. required effort) and expensive, so only the more high-profile people would be targeted. Now with modern database technology as employed by corporations like Google, it's economically feasible to conduct surveillance on many people at once. Just ask yourself why celebrities would hide from paparazzi if the paparazzi's attentions were welcome and enhanced their lives in any way. After all, the celebrity was in a public place, right?
Yeah, people once said "what is anyone going to do with it that could harm me" about Facebook and MySpace pages. They said that right up until employers started using this information to decide whom to hire and fire. "Is that a picture of our employee at a wild frat party holding a beer and a bong? Yeah, we don't need him anymore." The people who didn't care about privacy in that case and happily made such information public record also ignored and dismissed the pro-privacy advocates.
Please refute my logic if you can: if something cannot possibly benefit you but could possibly harm you (and maybe in unanticipated ways), clearly it is not in your interests to support that thing or to actively participate in it; furthermore, doing something that is not in your interests amounts to poor decision-making. Now, if that statement contradicts itself or displays any logical fallacy, feel free to let me know.
I'm quite confident that it is sound logic, and as evidence I present your less-than-subtle attempt to steer this conversation away from logic and towards whether you personally approve of a mild form of exhibitionism. You obviously need to resort to such weak tactics as pretending that I spoke about a matter of opinion, since after all one cannot possibly refute a personal taste, preference, or opinion. If you care to edify yourself, what you're doing there is known as a straw man and it will only work on those who are naive and easily distracted.
Now, if you can handle addressing my reasoning with reasoning of your own, I'd like to hear from you.
I think your selective reading of what I wrote caused you to mentally omit the word "trivial" from "trivial mistake." Yes, Microsoft has bugs in its code. They tend to be security issues that require several different conditions to be present before the bug can be demonstrated and are therefore non-trivial in nature. By contrast, gathering several times more data than you intended to obtain and store (the full Wi-Fi headers + much larger data payload, as opposed to only the headers) is trivial in nature and easier for someone to notice. To give an analogy, it's like intending to copy 20GB of data and finding that you have copied one terabyte. That's easy to notice, especially with the talent Google possesses.
Since I never made a claim that depends on Microsoft or anyone else writing perfectly bug-free code, do you care to revise your response?
Ummm, excuse me? Windows are obscuring the contents of the house? I think you may have them confused with walls or perhaps curtains. The primary function of windows is to let light, i.e. radiation, i.e. signal, travel through them. By your lights anyone with windows who doesn't keep blinds constantly drawn (in which case what's the point of the windows) or have frosted/tinted/mirrored/etc. treatments is inviting people to look into their homes and publicise what they have in the home (and this - publication - is a major point which seems to be getting lost). Not knowing the access point name is like not knowing the brand of leather couch they see through the window. In either case they have still determined you have the couch/AP. And then they pass on that info to anyone who cares to know. No thank you sir.
I bet there are a lot of countries where it could be a problem for people if the government were able to simply query Google and see who has wireless AP's.
Privacy in society is being lost at breakneck speed and once it's gone it's gone. We should be guarding our privacy not allowing it to more easily be taken.
Anytime there is a decently large-scale violation of either freedom, privacy, or both, there are always legions of useful idiots who will make excuses and justifications for it. It's a necessary component of any such violation. It gives the illusion that there is legitimate debate about the ethics of deploying clever and/or novel ways to conduct surveillance on people. It's a convincing illusion for the rather unenlightened who believe that privacy is about convenience and not about fundamental rights.
Note that "useful idiots" can otherwise be intelligent; the idiocy is the failure to recognize that they are supporting and defending what is not actually in their interests. No one outside of Google benefits from the gathering of this data. If you are a member of Google, you are worthy of dismissal as a baised reference with a vested interest. If you are not a member of Google, then this activity will either do nothing for you or it will harm you by reducing your privacy. A thing that cannot benefit you in any significant way is, by definition, not in your interests.
Why so many line up to defend this action is encompassed by one word: fanboyism. I think it's religious in nature because it certainly has no rational basis. Any mention of the fact that anyone with a sufficient antenna can easily and legally intercept this data misses the point entirely, for that falls under how Google is able to do so and completely fails to address whether this is in our interests. Reading the posts in this discussion, that's the one point that the fanboys refuse to acknowledge or understand.