There are plenty of other sources of free (decent) content available on the internet, at least of similar quality. Obviously, we'll see what the market thinks of all this.
Of course, I'm sure it will be trivial to game the website anyhow.
Regarding "gaming the website", why scheme to illegitimately obtain what you can legitimately obtain for free? It's not like news is difficult to obtain. If the NY Times had anything like a monopoly on news sources, this move would make a lot more sense. As it is, it seems their goal is to enrich the advertising revenues of competitors who offer no-charge news sites with ads.
The government does not exist to shape the world the way you'd like it to be.
I think you just rejected most of modern politics.
Don't get me wrong, though. I'm with you on that one. The purpose of government is to safeguard the rights of the citizens. I just can't help but notice that very little of our politics center around this legitimate purpose. Usually it deviates because of some misguided notion of "fariness" or, a just plain desire to socially engineer society.
One question seems to be largely unanswered: of what value is months-old data
I don't think that's largely unanswered actually - you see, month-old data is "important" to higher-ups. Being able to see data and trends makes them understand what does and does not work from a marketing perspective, and drives their decision about where to go next. Do we keep these surveys? Do we change ad providers? How can we better reach our market? This information is invaluable, and coupled with the fact that it is readily FREE is incentive to mine it and try to discover trends and correlation that can lead to more people clicking a banner, following a link, signing up for an offer, etc.
I guess what I don't understand is that aggregate, non-identifiable data should be able to fulfill the needs you mention. Now, I admit I am no statistician and could certainly be wrong about that, but I've yet to see the case made that they really need personally identifiable information to fulfill those needs.
Why is it that advertisers can do what the courts must allow police to do and thats to spy on us. Police need a court order to spy on what we do.Advertisers can spy on us in the names of making a profit for there shareholders. And if they copy the IP addresses its not anonymous,that ip address will point to a very real human unless ofcouser they ip address changes daily,but i would guess its isps like AOL that change the ip address all the time. My ip address hasn't changed in over a year. Anonuious means they cant tell if your a male,female,where you live,they know nothing about the person and it cant be guessed.
Because we don't really believe in the principles to which we give lip service. The Constitution guarantees freedom of speech? Oh, well, that only applies to the government, your employer can still tell you what you may or may not say and punish you accordingly because we don't really believe in freedom of expression as a virtue in its own right, not in any real sense. If we did, then we'd expect adults to be able to handle and tolerate speech they dislike, perhaps countering it with speech of their own, instead of coddling their supposed right to never be offended. But we found a technicality by which the scope of the otherwise sound principle may be limited, and eager to limit it we are.
It's the same thing for privacy and the analogy to warrants that you have made.
Who is this we you speak of? Your average internet user really doesn't seem to give a damn as long as they can get what they want quickly and easily. Just look at the success of some of these games on social networking sites. Like Mafia Wars for instance; basically nothing more than a database with a shitty HTML front end that offers no real game play or player interactions yet people eat it up, allowing companies like Zynga to scrap profile data or serve them "customer surveys" or "trail offers" and "free products"... People fill that crap out trading their privacy for an increase in an arbitrary value in some shitty "app".
One question seems to be largely unanswered: of what value is months-old data, especially when many of the IP addresses contained therein are dynamic and therefore no longer tied to a specific user or machine? What is this data worth to them that there is any difficulty in convincing them to let it go? If they sent these logs straight to/dev/null, what harm would it do to their business? Or, for a less extreme scenario, if they did whatever statistical analysis they care to do and then securely wiped those logs in say, one week, how would that harm them in any way?
What?! But how can that be?! The WHO published data and mortality figures that unequivocally showed the swine flu would be more deadly than even the Spanish Flu, killing millions of people all around the globe!
Are you saying that we can't trust government organizations designed to prevent the common citizen from having to actually read statistical reports on mortality?
Er, I feel obliged to make a minor correction: the World Health Organization (WHO) is an arm of the United Nations. I myself am disinclined to call the U.N. a "government". YMMV.
Whether they actually rule over a nation or not, they are cut from the same cloth. These are "organization" types, i.e. bureaucrats, who believe in the top-down method. They're the kind of people who know what's best for you and that's probably the most dangerous thing about them. They're the kind of people who run governments. They love prestige, cameras, influence, and positions of power even if they are mostly symbolic or otherwise don't have many real enforcement powers. They're not concerned with things like truth or efficacy and if you pointed out a glaring flaw in their principles they would be angry with you instead of grateful. It's no surprise to me at all that this kind of public fear-mongering would come from such an organization. It's how they assert their own relevance.
Right, because anyone who has a problem with potentially/allegedly ill-gotten gain can only be motivated by jealousy. A good thing like an objection to unscrupulous or at least questionable business methods can only come from a bad, petty thing like envy of someone else's money.
That's completely false, of course. However, that's really how a lot of people think. I suppose their own lust for money makes them think that everyone else operates as they do.
Great way of shifting the blame. I mean it's pretty obvious that companies like GSK have an incentive for overplaying the threat. BUT institutions like the WHO must also justify their existence all the time thus having a similiar incentive, too. It is not just big pharma that is guilty in this case. Since the WHO (IMHO) overplayed the avian flu I've been taking their announcements with a grain of salt.
Swine flu, avian flu, West Nile, SARS, hoof-and-mouth... I'm sure I am leaving something out, but that's what I can easily recall. The public has a short, short memory. Meanwhile, fear has the well-known effect of shutting down things like rational evaluation and higher reason. At least, it has this effect on the cowardly and there seem to be plenty of them these days.
Though it's a crude analogy, I sometimes explain it this way: I don't have to fear heights to understand that falling off a cliff is not in my best interests. So, I need not panic or cringe or shake in my boots; I only need to watch my step when I'm near the edge. I can do that calmly, in fact it's more effective that way. The fear is a useless hinderance when there is a sufficiently developed understanding to replace it. As a nation the general public needs to grok that, otherwise we will always be the kind of suckers who fall for such fear-mongering.
"If all the news channels are saying the same thing, and all the people they refer to have credentials, then everything they say must be the whole truth with genuinely good intentions, right? Because they'd never lie to us and take advantage of us like that, right?" Yeah, right.
Lol. I never could understand why people bought into the swine flu hysteria nonsense. If you looked at the numbers for how many people actually got sick and how many died from it, IT'S JUST THE FREAKING FLU! Jeesh. I wonder what the next fear-fad will be? I'm rooting for alien invasions.
Actually that's incorrect. "Just the flu" is far deadlier each year than the swine flu has ever been in sum total. Therefore, it's even more of a non-issue to me than the regular "feel like shit for a while and get over it" influenza. The only problem, and it isn't my problem, is that it's hard to sell vaccines to people who feel this way.
Even if it blew a lot of government money. We were hit and hit hard by astroturfing and government fear mongering. Now that this information is becoming public this will become an annual event because government can never admit it was wrong.
I have said from the beginning, here and elsewhere, that this whole thing was blown completely out of proportion and never deserved the "panic" status it received. It's amazing how much disbelief I encountered, especially in the form of ad-hominems. I suppose that now, some of those people think I just made a lucky guess. Sometimes I wonder how many times must events like this happen before more people wake up a bit and learn to recognize the patterns. The only thing that's unusual or surprising about this iteration is that there's at least a perfunctory investigation. Otherwise, the average person's tolerance for that nagging sense of "something's not right about this" seems nearly endless at times whether it's the swine flu or any other public scare.
Very insightful. I used to be very critical of Charlotte Iserbyt (author of "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America"), because I thought her title and viewpoint were overly inflammatory, that, yes, there was too much incompetence and bad ideas in the educational system and our outcomes were falling behind those of other countries. But I've changed my mind lately. I'm convinced that it is deliberate. So my apologies for statements I made about Charlotte Iserbyt in the past.
The thing about the "conspiracy nuts" is that their ideas would never get so much traction if 100% of what they say is false. There is an absence of clear and credible answers, too many inconsistencies in the official stories, and not enough real information. So all kinds of crazy ideas spring out of that.
The problem with Sunstein's plan is that he wants to create infiltrators that parrot the official story, not just to shut down the crazy theories, but to get rid of the questions. And questioning government is vital to a democracy. When government has control of every side of the message, then, yes, all conspiracy theories go away, but so do any questions about what they are doing. And that's bad.
Anyone who honestly and thoroughly researches the topic and has enough guts to go wherever the facts may lead them will ultimately be forced to come to the same conclusion. The really funny thing is, the deliberate nature of it is almost obvious, provided one has the skill of totally disregarding anything that is said and instead examining the sum total of the actions that are taken. That's easier said than done and your first obstacle is the fact that you'd rather not believe it (this is one reason it takes some guts). Still, it's not well-hidden at all, it's hidden in plain sight. In the past, the designers of forced government schooling were much more open about their intentions.
For all of this, I know of no better reference than John Taylor Gatto. He has an essay here and a full book, available for free online in its entirety, located here.
It's the same thing that happens when the right suddenly cares about being fiscally conservative... when they don't control the purse strings.
Anyone who votes R or D is a fucking moron, period. Even if a particular candidate is good, you're still feeding two machines that are hell bent on eroding individual liberty so pad their own pocketbooks. It's that simple. It's the reason I could never really get behind Ron Paul. I agree with a lot of his views, particularly on the Fed, but so long as he's a Republican, he's still part of the problem.
In the specific case of Ron Paul, running as a Republican seemed to be necessary. He's the sort of person who wants to change things from the inside, and the political reality is that if you want to be on the inside, you have to affiliate yourself with one of the two major parties. He's a Republican in name only, as evidenced by the fact that most mainstream Republicans have no intention of supporting him or his policies. It was actually a shrewd move on his part to run as a Republican, otherwise he'd be such an anonymous figure that none of us would be talking about him here.
Liberals are maniacally pro-government and want a hugely powerful entity capable of forcing everyone to live the way they want them to live because they believe they are enlightened intellectuals.
Yeah, cause it was that hugely liberal president and Congress that overwhelmingly passed the Patriot Act that has been the progenitor of all of these stupid policies to follow. Oh wait, you mean it was a Republican president and Republic-controlled House and Senate that passed such policies?
The term that can avoid all of these petty disputes between people who are otherwise fundamentally correct (like yourself and the GP) is "statist." The type of liberal he describes is a statist, and so is the President and Congress who supported the Patriot Act. All of the rest is the time-worn technique of the two parties taking turns blaming each other for all problems, meanwhile both keep getting put back into power, i.e. business-as-usual. If you get caught up in that and don't see it for what it is, then we as individuals become engaged in the same petty bickering that guarantees nothing ever changes.
Yes, it's quite horrible that people spreading mistruth to the public would have their lies exposed and debunked. Oh the horror!
The fact that they take it so seriously and treat it like such a threat makes me wonder if it's "mistruth". It makes me wonder that far more so than anything the "conspiracy nuts" themselves could have said.
Let's just say that everything the "conspiracy nuts" say is 100% false. Let's say further that too many (whatever that means) people are believing these conspiracy theories. The correct way to deal with that is to teach critical thinking, logic, rhetoric, and argumentation as mandatory basic courses in all public schools. Make these classes tough so that no one graduates without knowing how to deconstruct an argument. Except they'd rather not do that, because such a tough-minded populace would demand higher-quality legislators (they'd probably call them malcontents). Dumb people with a group mentality are so much easier to control than staunch individualists who can think for themselves.
The URL appending when cutting and pasting is easily defeated by pasting using the middle mouse button. That script still sends selection information, though. Can anybody tell me what this data is collected for? I don't see any value in it.
And the ability for most slashdotters to think beyond their own heads is made blindingly apparent yet again. Having some idea of what specific text people are highlighting or cutting/pasting from any given page is imminently useful. Hell, it can even be useful for a Linux HOWTO site -- the site owner could see that 10 out of every 15 people that visit the HOWTO always select the same block of text, which means that there are a shitload of people out there looking for that very specific piece of information. You could then move that block of text somewhere where it's more prominent, or add it to the FAQ, or whatever. I'm not saying they should be using this Tyntcrap to do it, but I'm merely pointing out how your failure to "see any value in it" is exactly that -- a failure of imagination on your part.
A failure of imagination... or a recognition of the ease with which I can press CTRL-F and find the text on the page whether it's prominently in the first paragraph or not... Sorry, but it sounds like a solution for sheeple for whom a few seconds of effort is too much active involvement. I'd rather have my privacy, thanks.
until i find a subscribable whitelist (ala AdblockPlus's blacklist) I won't use it.
I don't want to go through the trouble of adding every known benign site to my white list.
The number of benign sites I use is much greater than the number of benign sites that won't work without Javascript. Even if there were an exact 1:1 correspondence, I'd consider the couple of mouse clicks of effort to be more than worth my while to obtain a browsing experience that is under my control and happens the way I want it to happen. Once added to the (non-temporary) whitelist, a site stays on that list until and unless I remove it, so It's not like I have to do this more than once for any particular site. I consider it a very small price to pay, especially when you think about the potential abuses that we don't yet know about because they have not yet made headlines.
Somebody's been insulted by the story. Half the replies to this story have been down-modded as Troll.
Make note, meta-mods!
Unfortunately meta-moderation is quite useless these days. It mattered when it produced a "fairness" score for moderators and whether they received points was affected accordingly. Now it just meta-moderates posts and not moderators, which completely defeats the useful original purpose. Anyone who's been on this site for a decent length of time has noticed the increase in low-quality moderation that has happened ever since this decision was made.
"you certainly would lack discipline if you used your car to travel 200 feet" To me, walking is a matter of inclination and timeliness, not (self) discipline.
I said 200 feet because I consider that an insignificant, negligible distance to walk. Though, I enjoy hiking and walking 5-7 miles is not unusual for me. Perhaps 20 feet would have made the point more clear to you? Maybe 2 feet? Six inches? A point is reached where it's neither timely nor economical to get in your car, fire up the engine, drive, and park. You are capable of seeing my point whether or not you want to dispute that 200 feet was a good figure to use.
"The observation that patience and self-discipline are virtues is not a rejection of technology." The way you seem to define patience and self discipline make me believe that for you they require a rejection of technology. To most of us, the various technologies merely provide short cuts to desired outcomes.
You think I require a rejection of technology, despite the fact that I explicitly said otherwise? You realize that you're living in a fantasy land, right? Maybe a fictitious "causality" that exists only in your mind has told you to reject technology. Meanwhile, the real causality (the one you can quote above) just said that we don't have to reject technology, we basically just have to give a damn. It's really amazing how people on this site sometimes think they know my own mind better than I do, that I must not have meant what I explicitly and obviously stated. Which leads us to the next point...
"What this boils down to is that many people are lazy and immature." or else self righteous?
No, for I lament the fact that the average person is this way (particularly the immaturity and the superficial society it leads to). If I were happy about this because it makes me look better, that would be self-righteous. Truth is, if it were up to me, people wouldn't be this way. It's like what Bill Hicks said, this country is at about an eighth-grade emotional level, and it shows. It particularly shows when someone comes along and tells me I didn't really say what I obviously just said, merely because he doesn't like what I said. It's pretty weak to try and mischaracterize something because you're unable to either dispute or admit it.
Now, if you want to make the case that I am self-righteous, first you'll have to dispute the fact that many people are lazy and immature. Once you show that this is false (good luck), you can then propose an ulterior motive for why I said so, such as self-righteousness. If you cannot do that, then you are just calling me names for merely speaking the truth. Otherwise, you can run your mouth all you like, say whatever you want, and it'll be just as empty and meaningless as any other unsubstantiated claim.
Play an old text-based RPG sometime and you'll appreciate being able to just click on something to interact with your environment.
Copyright laws (blech) require some skill and patience to circumvent.
They require the skill and patience of one person to break whatever copy protection exists. After that, everyone else can click an HTTP link to a.torrent file.
Horse was better than foot, car better than horse. Do I lack self discipline because I use a car?
Assuming you are able-bodied, you certainly would lack discipline if you used your car to travel 200 feet. This directly compares to people who get all impatient and bent out of shape over not instantly receiving an item or a piece of information that's not really urgent.
Scientists wouldn't know a problem if it bit them.
The article read more like an editorial to me, like someone's opinion. It did not seem to be a scientific work. If it was supposed to be scientific, they omitted a great deal of data and mentioned nothing of experiments or peer review.
I am not saying you are a particular example of it, but I am amazed at the black-and-white view people are revealing here. The observation that patience and self-discipline are virtues is not a rejection of technology. Keep your car because it is indeed better than a horse or your feet, but recognize that discipline is a good thing whether or not you have to walk 20 miles. Likewise, it's possible to have high technology and instant-nearly-everything without getting upset about having to occasionally wait for something.
What this boils down to is that many people are lazy and immature. Because of that, they won't cultivate a strong character or patient endurance unless the situations of their lives force them to do so. If they are deprived of anything, it's the ability to willingly value such things for their own sake and not just for immediately pragmatic reasons. It makes them little more than products of their environment with little self-determination. Some of us recognize that a human being can be quite a bit more than this and lament the way this realization is underappreciated.
"Not really, just because a large number of people are idiots, doesn't mean that privacy is outdated. "
I think privacy as we knew it is outdated due to our technology. We are essentially living in a small town where everybody knows all about everybody else. Except that most people think they are anonymous to those outside of their circle.
It's not because of our technology. It's because of how carelessly many people use it without a full understanding of its implications. If they really wanted to, they could demand stringent privacy safeguards, both legal and technical. We often lack those things because the demand is so low.
I know you probably meant that as a joke, but the fact is that the epicycle model fit observable data quite nicely. A physical model may be incorrect, but a mathematical model, which is what actually makes testable hypotheses, that fits the data can only ever be incomplete.
That particular mathematical model assumed a geocentric solar system. That's a testable hypothesis. It has failed every test to which it has been subjected.
Part of the problem with science is that the emphasis on mathematics has removed it from its roots in natural philosophy. You can have a wrong model that gives the right answers -- eclipses happen when the model says they will, planets appear in the positions it predicts, etc. Yet it leads to a completely false understanding of the system it models. When that happens, it takes us a while to get over it. Copernicus was persecuted not so much for outright claiming that we have a heliocentric solar system, but for saying that if one assumes the Sun is the center, all of these calculations become far simpler (i.e. Occam's Razor).
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of other sources of free (decent) content available on the internet, at least of similar quality. Obviously, we'll see what the market thinks of all this.
Of course, I'm sure it will be trivial to game the website anyhow.
Regarding "gaming the website", why scheme to illegitimately obtain what you can legitimately obtain for free? It's not like news is difficult to obtain. If the NY Times had anything like a monopoly on news sources, this move would make a lot more sense. As it is, it seems their goal is to enrich the advertising revenues of competitors who offer no-charge news sites with ads.
I think you just rejected most of modern politics.
Don't get me wrong, though. I'm with you on that one. The purpose of government is to safeguard the rights of the citizens. I just can't help but notice that very little of our politics center around this legitimate purpose. Usually it deviates because of some misguided notion of "fariness" or, a just plain desire to socially engineer society.
I don't think that's largely unanswered actually - you see, month-old data is "important" to higher-ups. Being able to see data and trends makes them understand what does and does not work from a marketing perspective, and drives their decision about where to go next. Do we keep these surveys? Do we change ad providers? How can we better reach our market? This information is invaluable, and coupled with the fact that it is readily FREE is incentive to mine it and try to discover trends and correlation that can lead to more people clicking a banner, following a link, signing up for an offer, etc.
I guess what I don't understand is that aggregate, non-identifiable data should be able to fulfill the needs you mention. Now, I admit I am no statistician and could certainly be wrong about that, but I've yet to see the case made that they really need personally identifiable information to fulfill those needs.
Why is it that advertisers can do what the courts must allow police to do and thats to spy on us. Police need a court order to spy on what we do.Advertisers can spy on us in the names of making a profit for there shareholders. And if they copy the IP addresses its not anonymous,that ip address will point to a very real human unless ofcouser they ip address changes daily,but i would guess its isps like AOL that change the ip address all the time. My ip address hasn't changed in over a year. Anonuious means they cant tell if your a male,female,where you live,they know nothing about the person and it cant be guessed.
Because we don't really believe in the principles to which we give lip service. The Constitution guarantees freedom of speech? Oh, well, that only applies to the government, your employer can still tell you what you may or may not say and punish you accordingly because we don't really believe in freedom of expression as a virtue in its own right, not in any real sense. If we did, then we'd expect adults to be able to handle and tolerate speech they dislike, perhaps countering it with speech of their own, instead of coddling their supposed right to never be offended. But we found a technicality by which the scope of the otherwise sound principle may be limited, and eager to limit it we are.
It's the same thing for privacy and the analogy to warrants that you have made.
We want privacy - give it to us.
Who is this we you speak of? Your average internet user really doesn't seem to give a damn as long as they can get what they want quickly and easily. Just look at the success of some of these games on social networking sites. Like Mafia Wars for instance; basically nothing more than a database with a shitty HTML front end that offers no real game play or player interactions yet people eat it up, allowing companies like Zynga to scrap profile data or serve them "customer surveys" or "trail offers" and "free products"... People fill that crap out trading their privacy for an increase in an arbitrary value in some shitty "app".
One question seems to be largely unanswered: of what value is months-old data, especially when many of the IP addresses contained therein are dynamic and therefore no longer tied to a specific user or machine? What is this data worth to them that there is any difficulty in convincing them to let it go? If they sent these logs straight to /dev/null, what harm would it do to their business? Or, for a less extreme scenario, if they did whatever statistical analysis they care to do and then securely wiped those logs in say, one week, how would that harm them in any way?
What?! But how can that be?! The WHO published data and mortality figures that unequivocally showed the swine flu would be more deadly than even the Spanish Flu, killing millions of people all around the globe!
Are you saying that we can't trust government organizations designed to prevent the common citizen from having to actually read statistical reports on mortality?
Er, I feel obliged to make a minor correction: the World Health Organization (WHO) is an arm of the United Nations. I myself am disinclined to call the U.N. a "government". YMMV.
Whether they actually rule over a nation or not, they are cut from the same cloth. These are "organization" types, i.e. bureaucrats, who believe in the top-down method. They're the kind of people who know what's best for you and that's probably the most dangerous thing about them. They're the kind of people who run governments. They love prestige, cameras, influence, and positions of power even if they are mostly symbolic or otherwise don't have many real enforcement powers. They're not concerned with things like truth or efficacy and if you pointed out a glaring flaw in their principles they would be angry with you instead of grateful. It's no surprise to me at all that this kind of public fear-mongering would come from such an organization. It's how they assert their own relevance.
Jealous much?
Right, because anyone who has a problem with potentially/allegedly ill-gotten gain can only be motivated by jealousy. A good thing like an objection to unscrupulous or at least questionable business methods can only come from a bad, petty thing like envy of someone else's money.
That's completely false, of course. However, that's really how a lot of people think. I suppose their own lust for money makes them think that everyone else operates as they do.
Great way of shifting the blame. I mean it's pretty obvious that companies like GSK have an incentive for overplaying the threat. BUT institutions like the WHO must also justify their existence all the time thus having a similiar incentive, too. It is not just big pharma that is guilty in this case. Since the WHO (IMHO) overplayed the avian flu I've been taking their announcements with a grain of salt.
Swine flu, avian flu, West Nile, SARS, hoof-and-mouth ... I'm sure I am leaving something out, but that's what I can easily recall. The public has a short, short memory. Meanwhile, fear has the well-known effect of shutting down things like rational evaluation and higher reason. At least, it has this effect on the cowardly and there seem to be plenty of them these days.
Though it's a crude analogy, I sometimes explain it this way: I don't have to fear heights to understand that falling off a cliff is not in my best interests. So, I need not panic or cringe or shake in my boots; I only need to watch my step when I'm near the edge. I can do that calmly, in fact it's more effective that way. The fear is a useless hinderance when there is a sufficiently developed understanding to replace it. As a nation the general public needs to grok that, otherwise we will always be the kind of suckers who fall for such fear-mongering.
"If all the news channels are saying the same thing, and all the people they refer to have credentials, then everything they say must be the whole truth with genuinely good intentions, right? Because they'd never lie to us and take advantage of us like that, right?" Yeah, right.
Lol. I never could understand why people bought into the swine flu hysteria nonsense. If you looked at the numbers for how many people actually got sick and how many died from it, IT'S JUST THE FREAKING FLU! Jeesh. I wonder what the next fear-fad will be? I'm rooting for alien invasions.
Actually that's incorrect. "Just the flu" is far deadlier each year than the swine flu has ever been in sum total. Therefore, it's even more of a non-issue to me than the regular "feel like shit for a while and get over it" influenza. The only problem, and it isn't my problem, is that it's hard to sell vaccines to people who feel this way.
Even if it blew a lot of government money. We were hit and hit hard by astroturfing and government fear mongering. Now that this information is becoming public this will become an annual event because government can never admit it was wrong.
I have said from the beginning, here and elsewhere, that this whole thing was blown completely out of proportion and never deserved the "panic" status it received. It's amazing how much disbelief I encountered, especially in the form of ad-hominems. I suppose that now, some of those people think I just made a lucky guess. Sometimes I wonder how many times must events like this happen before more people wake up a bit and learn to recognize the patterns. The only thing that's unusual or surprising about this iteration is that there's at least a perfunctory investigation. Otherwise, the average person's tolerance for that nagging sense of "something's not right about this" seems nearly endless at times whether it's the swine flu or any other public scare.
MOD PARENT UP!
Very insightful. I used to be very critical of Charlotte Iserbyt (author of "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America"), because I thought her title and viewpoint were overly inflammatory, that, yes, there was too much incompetence and bad ideas in the educational system and our outcomes were falling behind those of other countries. But I've changed my mind lately. I'm convinced that it is deliberate. So my apologies for statements I made about Charlotte Iserbyt in the past.
The thing about the "conspiracy nuts" is that their ideas would never get so much traction if 100% of what they say is false. There is an absence of clear and credible answers, too many inconsistencies in the official stories, and not enough real information. So all kinds of crazy ideas spring out of that.
The problem with Sunstein's plan is that he wants to create infiltrators that parrot the official story, not just to shut down the crazy theories, but to get rid of the questions. And questioning government is vital to a democracy. When government has control of every side of the message, then, yes, all conspiracy theories go away, but so do any questions about what they are doing. And that's bad.
Anyone who honestly and thoroughly researches the topic and has enough guts to go wherever the facts may lead them will ultimately be forced to come to the same conclusion. The really funny thing is, the deliberate nature of it is almost obvious, provided one has the skill of totally disregarding anything that is said and instead examining the sum total of the actions that are taken. That's easier said than done and your first obstacle is the fact that you'd rather not believe it (this is one reason it takes some guts). Still, it's not well-hidden at all, it's hidden in plain sight. In the past, the designers of forced government schooling were much more open about their intentions.
For all of this, I know of no better reference than John Taylor Gatto. He has an essay here and a full book, available for free online in its entirety, located here.
It's the same thing that happens when the right suddenly cares about being fiscally conservative... when they don't control the purse strings.
Anyone who votes R or D is a fucking moron, period. Even if a particular candidate is good, you're still feeding two machines that are hell bent on eroding individual liberty so pad their own pocketbooks. It's that simple. It's the reason I could never really get behind Ron Paul. I agree with a lot of his views, particularly on the Fed, but so long as he's a Republican, he's still part of the problem.
In the specific case of Ron Paul, running as a Republican seemed to be necessary. He's the sort of person who wants to change things from the inside, and the political reality is that if you want to be on the inside, you have to affiliate yourself with one of the two major parties. He's a Republican in name only, as evidenced by the fact that most mainstream Republicans have no intention of supporting him or his policies. It was actually a shrewd move on his part to run as a Republican, otherwise he'd be such an anonymous figure that none of us would be talking about him here.
Liberals are maniacally pro-government and want a hugely powerful entity capable of forcing everyone to live the way they want them to live because they believe they are enlightened intellectuals.
Yeah, cause it was that hugely liberal president and Congress that overwhelmingly passed the Patriot Act that has been the progenitor of all of these stupid policies to follow. Oh wait, you mean it was a Republican president and Republic-controlled House and Senate that passed such policies?
The term that can avoid all of these petty disputes between people who are otherwise fundamentally correct (like yourself and the GP) is "statist." The type of liberal he describes is a statist, and so is the President and Congress who supported the Patriot Act. All of the rest is the time-worn technique of the two parties taking turns blaming each other for all problems, meanwhile both keep getting put back into power, i.e. business-as-usual. If you get caught up in that and don't see it for what it is, then we as individuals become engaged in the same petty bickering that guarantees nothing ever changes.
Yes, it's quite horrible that people spreading mistruth to the public would have their lies exposed and debunked. Oh the horror!
The fact that they take it so seriously and treat it like such a threat makes me wonder if it's "mistruth". It makes me wonder that far more so than anything the "conspiracy nuts" themselves could have said.
Let's just say that everything the "conspiracy nuts" say is 100% false. Let's say further that too many (whatever that means) people are believing these conspiracy theories. The correct way to deal with that is to teach critical thinking, logic, rhetoric, and argumentation as mandatory basic courses in all public schools. Make these classes tough so that no one graduates without knowing how to deconstruct an argument. Except they'd rather not do that, because such a tough-minded populace would demand higher-quality legislators (they'd probably call them malcontents). Dumb people with a group mentality are so much easier to control than staunch individualists who can think for themselves.
The URL appending when cutting and pasting is easily defeated by pasting using the middle mouse button. That script still sends selection information, though. Can anybody tell me what this data is collected for? I don't see any value in it. And the ability for most slashdotters to think beyond their own heads is made blindingly apparent yet again. Having some idea of what specific text people are highlighting or cutting/pasting from any given page is imminently useful. Hell, it can even be useful for a Linux HOWTO site -- the site owner could see that 10 out of every 15 people that visit the HOWTO always select the same block of text, which means that there are a shitload of people out there looking for that very specific piece of information. You could then move that block of text somewhere where it's more prominent, or add it to the FAQ, or whatever. I'm not saying they should be using this Tyntcrap to do it, but I'm merely pointing out how your failure to "see any value in it" is exactly that -- a failure of imagination on your part.
A failure of imagination... or a recognition of the ease with which I can press CTRL-F and find the text on the page whether it's prominently in the first paragraph or not... Sorry, but it sounds like a solution for sheeple for whom a few seconds of effort is too much active involvement. I'd rather have my privacy, thanks.
until i find a subscribable whitelist (ala AdblockPlus's blacklist) I won't use it.
I don't want to go through the trouble of adding every known benign site to my white list.
The number of benign sites I use is much greater than the number of benign sites that won't work without Javascript. Even if there were an exact 1:1 correspondence, I'd consider the couple of mouse clicks of effort to be more than worth my while to obtain a browsing experience that is under my control and happens the way I want it to happen. Once added to the (non-temporary) whitelist, a site stays on that list until and unless I remove it, so It's not like I have to do this more than once for any particular site. I consider it a very small price to pay, especially when you think about the potential abuses that we don't yet know about because they have not yet made headlines.
Somebody's been insulted by the story. Half the replies to this story have been down-modded as Troll.
Make note, meta-mods!
Unfortunately meta-moderation is quite useless these days. It mattered when it produced a "fairness" score for moderators and whether they received points was affected accordingly. Now it just meta-moderates posts and not moderators, which completely defeats the useful original purpose. Anyone who's been on this site for a decent length of time has noticed the increase in low-quality moderation that has happened ever since this decision was made.
I said 200 feet because I consider that an insignificant, negligible distance to walk. Though, I enjoy hiking and walking 5-7 miles is not unusual for me. Perhaps 20 feet would have made the point more clear to you? Maybe 2 feet? Six inches? A point is reached where it's neither timely nor economical to get in your car, fire up the engine, drive, and park. You are capable of seeing my point whether or not you want to dispute that 200 feet was a good figure to use.
You think I require a rejection of technology, despite the fact that I explicitly said otherwise? You realize that you're living in a fantasy land, right? Maybe a fictitious "causality" that exists only in your mind has told you to reject technology. Meanwhile, the real causality (the one you can quote above) just said that we don't have to reject technology, we basically just have to give a damn. It's really amazing how people on this site sometimes think they know my own mind better than I do, that I must not have meant what I explicitly and obviously stated. Which leads us to the next point...
No, for I lament the fact that the average person is this way (particularly the immaturity and the superficial society it leads to). If I were happy about this because it makes me look better, that would be self-righteous. Truth is, if it were up to me, people wouldn't be this way. It's like what Bill Hicks said, this country is at about an eighth-grade emotional level, and it shows. It particularly shows when someone comes along and tells me I didn't really say what I obviously just said, merely because he doesn't like what I said. It's pretty weak to try and mischaracterize something because you're unable to either dispute or admit it.
Now, if you want to make the case that I am self-righteous, first you'll have to dispute the fact that many people are lazy and immature. Once you show that this is false (good luck), you can then propose an ulterior motive for why I said so, such as self-righteousness. If you cannot do that, then you are just calling me names for merely speaking the truth. Otherwise, you can run your mouth all you like, say whatever you want, and it'll be just as empty and meaningless as any other unsubstantiated claim.
Play an old text-based RPG sometime and you'll appreciate being able to just click on something to interact with your environment.
They require the skill and patience of one person to break whatever copy protection exists. After that, everyone else can click an HTTP link to a .torrent file.
Assuming you are able-bodied, you certainly would lack discipline if you used your car to travel 200 feet. This directly compares to people who get all impatient and bent out of shape over not instantly receiving an item or a piece of information that's not really urgent.
The article read more like an editorial to me, like someone's opinion. It did not seem to be a scientific work. If it was supposed to be scientific, they omitted a great deal of data and mentioned nothing of experiments or peer review.
I am not saying you are a particular example of it, but I am amazed at the black-and-white view people are revealing here. The observation that patience and self-discipline are virtues is not a rejection of technology. Keep your car because it is indeed better than a horse or your feet, but recognize that discipline is a good thing whether or not you have to walk 20 miles. Likewise, it's possible to have high technology and instant-nearly-everything without getting upset about having to occasionally wait for something.
What this boils down to is that many people are lazy and immature. Because of that, they won't cultivate a strong character or patient endurance unless the situations of their lives force them to do so. If they are deprived of anything, it's the ability to willingly value such things for their own sake and not just for immediately pragmatic reasons. It makes them little more than products of their environment with little self-determination. Some of us recognize that a human being can be quite a bit more than this and lament the way this realization is underappreciated.
Maybe they do remember and that's why they don't have children?
I'm allergic to noisy babies and children who kick my seat-back. Where's my zone?
Sounds like you're allergic to irresponsible parents, at least in that latter example.
Humans are a virus!
Before the Matrix, there was Bill Hicks: "I'm tired of this back-slapping 'isn't humanity neat' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay?"
"Not really, just because a large number of people are idiots, doesn't mean that privacy is outdated. "
I think privacy as we knew it is outdated due to our technology. We are essentially living in a small town where everybody knows all about everybody else. Except that most people think they are anonymous to those outside of their circle.
It's not because of our technology. It's because of how carelessly many people use it without a full understanding of its implications. If they really wanted to, they could demand stringent privacy safeguards, both legal and technical. We often lack those things because the demand is so low.
"Do you think the average consumer even has a clue about this issue?" No. And they don't care, and can't be made to care.
... until something happens to them, personally. They just don't believe in prevention, that's all.
I know you probably meant that as a joke, but the fact is that the epicycle model fit observable data quite nicely. A physical model may be incorrect, but a mathematical model, which is what actually makes testable hypotheses, that fits the data can only ever be incomplete.
That particular mathematical model assumed a geocentric solar system. That's a testable hypothesis. It has failed every test to which it has been subjected.
Part of the problem with science is that the emphasis on mathematics has removed it from its roots in natural philosophy. You can have a wrong model that gives the right answers -- eclipses happen when the model says they will, planets appear in the positions it predicts, etc. Yet it leads to a completely false understanding of the system it models. When that happens, it takes us a while to get over it. Copernicus was persecuted not so much for outright claiming that we have a heliocentric solar system, but for saying that if one assumes the Sun is the center, all of these calculations become far simpler (i.e. Occam's Razor).