"we'd be using our 1200bps modems connecting to the local BBS and swapping email over fido."
exactly what I did in the old days. As long as computers are around, people will find a way to connect them and connect themselves to each other using them. I suspect that while dial up might not be answer people run to these days I could see people setting up wireless networks within their own neighborhoods, and extending them into WANs that cover a good part of their city.
This has already been worked out. It has a tremendous advantage, too: it would be more difficult for a company or government to either shut it down or personally identify individual users.
It is a filesystem, available in (Open)Solaris and at least FreeBSD, possibly other BSDs as well. It has some interesting features, which you can check out here. I have heard it claimed that ZFS has good performance, but I have not evaluated any of those claims.
It's a complete and total coincidence, but I just remembered a humorous Web site.
I then opened it in a text editor. Maybe I am missing something, so I refuse to positively say that there is no malware and no "attack" in it. What I can say is that I was unable to find anything remotely suspicious. I suppose it's possible that there are advertisements on the index page and that those are the source of any malware, because I would not see those when looking at the index.html text. But in my mind, I'd like to see a lot more substantiation of any claims about maliciousness.
False positives are not the only reason I disagree with this kind of blacklisting. I wish all of the effort that has ever been invested in malware filters, antispyware products, and blacklists were instead put towards securing Windows and educating its users. Then we might have something better than a useless arms race..
Your brain will try to keep your decisions consistent with previous decisions you have made.
People tend to forget that logic is just a set of rules. If you load it up with bad data, especially data that is driven by pure emotions, you'll rationalize yourself into neat, coherent clusterfuck. The difference between wisdom and intelligence is that the former is an a priori mental filter for bad data, the latter is just raw capacity. That's why a wise person need not follow a life based on reason alone to generally make good decisions.
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able
rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
I was clearly trolling with a topical claim, but, since you want a serious discussion (or, appear to), let's have one:
I can do things lightheartedly that might appear quite serious. I mean that in the sense that I really don't care if people disagree with me or want to think I'm motivated by a sense of jealousy. I do, however, enjoy the discourse. I like Slashdot because the quality of conversation here is really very good, trolls and everything.
I'll address your next paragraph in two parts.
I feel like you are underestimating the role of entertainers in our culture; certainly we live in a world where their importance has been inflated beyond belief, but the claim that news related to them is irrelevant and wasteful is flat-out wrong; the people who spend time watching it and absorbing it are not asocial and do not form asymmetric relationships, as you seem to be predicting
I only claimed that one type of relationship is asymmetric. That is the relationship between a famous entertainer and his or her average fan. The average fan might learn all about that entertainer's life, strengths and weaknesses, beliefs, and personal relationships. Meanwhile the entertainer is unlikely to even know the name of that average fan. If this is not asymmetric, if it is not the antithesis of mutual exchange, then I would be hard-pressed to name something that is.
the people who spend time watching it and absorbing it are not asocial and do not form asymmetric relationships, as you seem to be predicting, but rather use that knowledge they gather to foster their relationships with other people. Knowledge of popular culture actually helps people socialize and form relationships with other people.
I suspect that if this were true, then the divorce rate would not be so high, but then, actors have not been the best role models for this one. I also draw a distinction between superficial acquaintences who talk about the weather and pop culture versus real friends who share everything and are deeply involved in each other's lives. The asymmetric relationship between the fan and the entertainer is a terrible model for the latter type.
While I can't argue that their time would not be better spent educating themselves, I do posit that our own view of how valuable education is comes at least partially from the culture most Slashdot users come from; we are a community mostly consisting of people that actually like to learn things, which is a trait that doesn't appear in everybody. To the people it doesn't appear in, educating themselves is not going to make their life better, it's more or less going to be worthless.
It's funny that so many people don't seem to recognize a connection between an educational system based on rote memorization instead of curiosity and discovery, and a general population that is turned off to learning and often views it as a terrible burden (have you ever worked a tech support line?). To quote Samuel Clemens, I believe that the Slashdot crowd never allowed their schooling to interfere with their education. For that reason, they have a natural appreciation of knowledge and discovery. I believe that all people are born with this (just consider how many "why" questions small children constantly ask about the world) but often lose by the time they go through the meat-grinder known as public schooling.
So I agree with you that most people undervalue learning and education. I just see that as a product of artificial conditioning and do not view it as the way human beings inherently are. That means it is not set in stone, that people who are this way are not doomed to remain this way for their entire lives. It means it's a matter of what we value, which is something that can change, especially if enough concerned people are willing to speak about it. To think otherwise would be a defeatist attitude.
Studies have shown that 80-90% of everything that humans talk about is gossip. When you think about this from an evolutionary perspective it makes sense. We're highly social animals and our biggest competitors are other humans. Sharing information about the members of tribe is a HUGE advantage. Unfortunately, today we have the same brains that our tribal ancestors did and these brains seem to include celebrities in our tribes, so we eat up gossip about them. The implementation isn't terrible, it's just legacy:)
That makes a lot of sense to me. Before technology allowed anything other than face-to-face communication, such a tendency might have been valuable. You can, after all, be greatly affected by the decisions of those closest to you. However, it seems to break down due to telecommunications. Telecommunications and mass media mean that this mechanism is being used for strangers that the individual will probably never meet. Due to that, it loses the meaningful function of "staying in touch" that it once served.
I don't know if "instinct" is the correct word here, but I'll use it knowing that there may be a better one. I have always felt that human beings don't have to be slaves to their instincts. Their instincts are strong influences; they are not absolute masters. Wise/enlightened individuals can recognize when following an instinct in a certain way no longer serves their interests. They can find healther and more fulfilling ("higher") ways to take care of the same needs. In this case, they can choose to become more involved in their family and community life instead of adoring strangers who don't even know that they exist. This would, however, require a mindful awareness of the situation and the willingness to perform a little self-examination, what you might call the ability to be in the driver's seat of your own life. These are traits that superficial people are not known for having, which may explain why celebrity-worship is most often associated with people who are childish and easily impressed.
So, what you're saying is, you're jealous of the ability of an entertainer to entertain, and because you once arbitrarily used the defense that what you do is more worthwhile than what they do in order to get a false sense of superiority, your brain keeps doing it to stay internally consistent?
You remind me of those people who call others "racist" because they disagree with Barack Obama on matters of public policy. Just like them, I am sure that you do it knowing that no one can rationally argue against something so absurd. For one thing, it would require them to prove a negative. That's why you never feel that before making such statements, you have a burden of proof to establish a) that jealousy of entertainers is the only possible reason to suggest that maybe there is something wrong with obsessing over strangers, or b) that the reasoning I openly explained is fatally flawed and that you know how it may be corrected.
Your failure to address or even to recognize that such a burden of proof goes along with your claim, combined with your insistence on making this into a personal matter instead of giving your counter-argument, can be taken as evidence that you are reacting emotionally, perhaps because I offended you. There was nothing malicious in what I said, so your offense is your own and it begins and ends with you. Therefore, you get to deal with it and will receive no relief from me.
I'll give you a free tip for the future: try these tactics on people who are unable to see right through them. You'll be much more "successful" if you really want to call it that.
I disagree. I find watching E-Daily, or Entertainment Tonight, or any other celebrity show physically nauseating. It's literally an assault on my brain.
That's because such trivia is designed for children who never really grew up. Y'know, the ones who have adult bodies. That's why they think someone else's personal life is so much more fascinating than their own, merely because that person can sing or dance or act. They don't seem to notice that the truly famous entertainers are some of the most out-of-touch people who are least worthy of this kind of adoration. The doctor who finally cures cancer will be an anonymous, unknown figure by comparison.
They're impressed with the entertainer's ability to entertain and that's their only real criteria; any critical thinking or other evaluation shuts down at that point. Their appetite for the superficial and insignificant is absolutely endless, even though those same mental faculties could be put towards educating themselves, establishing deep and meaningful connections with people like their neighbors, and finding real purpose and meaning in their own lives. They see nothing wrong with this or the waste that it represents.
It's an assault on your brain because the underlying message is "it's okay to devote so much time and energy to something completely devoid of any real meaning." There's also the implication that it's okay to form grossly asymmetric relationships instead of mutual relationships, that there is anything healthy or nurturing about this, like when a person learns all about the personal and romantic life of an actor when that actor doesn't even know that he or she exists. The message is that you should eagerly do such things merely because it's encouraged by the industry that was built around it. If you have any understanding whatsoever, how could you do anything but reject this notion?
Is it? Even wise people are ignorant out of their area of expertise.
You have entirely missed my point. Wisdom is not about categories of factual knowledge. It's about knowing and understanding yourself. Our society so thoroughly fails to appreciate wisdom and so greatly overvalues cleverness and so few people are independent learners that I am actually having to explain this.
It's a mundane, lower-level interpretation of what I said, and it fails to capture the full essence of it, but it could be rephrased this way: wise people know when they are not informed enough to make a good decision. So if it isn't their "area of expertise" (even if they DO subscribe to such a self-imposed limitation) then they know they are ignorant and they know that they need to correct their ignorance before making a decision. That's because wise people know themselves and appreciate both their strengths and their weaknesses, both their capabilities and their limitations.
Fools, by contrast, assume that they know more than they actually do. This is usually because of what you might call arrogance but also happens because of plain old poor judgment (which is itself a weakness that can be remedied). Because they recklessly and haphazardly overestimate their understanding, they get screwed by such scams.
Note that fools can otherwise be very clever, in that "high IQ" sense. They can accumulate vast amounts of memorized factual and procedural knowledge. They can even be the foremost experts in a specialized field. This alone does not cause them to make good decisions. To see the surprise that people show when smart people do stupid things, you'd think that this were some big mystery rather than the simple and self-evident observation that it actually is. Unfortunately, this is another thing that I would not have to explain if the difference between wisdom and cleverness were more widely appreciated in our society. The result is that we as a people are very good at complicating simple matters.
So before responding, the wise might research that person e-mailing them and take steps to find out whether he is in fact the Nigerian prince that he claims to be. They might do a Google search and see if other people have also received similar unsolicited e-mails, which would quickly inform them about the nature of the scam. What they would not do is respond from a position of ignorance to an unknown third party about a financial matter without first performing some due diligence. Furthermore, the truly wise are honest people and for that reason, they do not expect to earn vast amounts of money for little or no work on their part and are rightfully suspicious of such offers instead of titillated by them.
Now I know that's a rather dry response, but the beautiful simplicity (by comparison) of my original statement gets lost in even the best of explanations.
I like what you're saying, but the "smart" ones recognize its strength and work to exploit it (i.e. by scamming) to the max. Greed produces both winners and losers.
If the scammers truly knew themselves, they would lose their desire for ill-gotten gain. So yes, it does work both ways.
The "victims" of these scams aren't as stupid as they are greedy. Combine the two, and you'll understand how Wall Street works.
The implication is that if you're greedy to a fault, it's because you're stupid. Otherwise, you'd see that greed as a problem and would work to change it, and in the meantime, would recognize the weakness of it and carefully guard against its exploitation (i.e. by scammers). In other words, "Know Thyself." The failure to do that is the real stupidity.
BTW I don't blame all of this on Obama. Our last three presidents all deserve "credit" for this debacle.
Take that just one step further. Do a bit of reserach. Then see for yourself that the very same financial and political interests funded the elections of all three. In many cases, they supported BOTH the Democrat candidate AND the Republican candidate... why it's almost as though they don't care who wins. Notice that, and the bigger picture is within sight.
Of course there is that threat, but if they had that kind of technology, why on Earth would they be investing in a private company to do something like this?
I can think of two immediate reasons. One, to provoke the very question that you asked. In other words, to encourage people to underestimate them, which is good strategy. George W. Bush followed a similar strategy, appearing to be a bumbling fool most of the time when in public yet ruthlessly and quite cleverly arranging things behind the scenes.
Two, for the same reason that you wouldn't hire an 18-wheeler to haul ten pounds of cargo. A regular passenger automobile will do the job. I would be shocked and amazed if someone could prove beyond all doubt that the CIA does not have some highly classified, extremely sophisticated machines. I would be a little less shocked to learn that they use those highly classified systems to do work that is quite ordinary and can easily be done with commodity hardware available to anyone. So if they know better than to swat at a fly with a sledgehammer, that wouldn't surprise me, but it doesn't mean they have no sledgehammers.
There are certain things that just don't need to be known by all. If this was some nefarious plot, I think they would probably be more under wraps, at least about who did the investing.
I never claimed that this was a nefarious plot, only that it's a step in the wrong direction. I can think of many uses for such fine-grained monitoring of influence and public opinion, and none of them are good or desirable. Quite simply, knowledge is power.
About secrecy, I'm with JFK on this one. To quote him:
The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society. And we are, as a people, inherently and historically opposed to secret societies,
to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far
outweigh the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its
arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it.
I know it is easy to think of the CIA, FBI, and other top secret government agencies as nefarious entities with their own agenda, but when it comes down to it, they are other American people just like us. They have agendas, sure, but not all are nefarious, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. We have no reason to believe that there are bad plans being made to silence/censor/reeducate the American people.
No, but it wouldn't take a very sophisticated fool to understand that the American people would be quite vulnerable to something like "re-education" if it were implemented. It's not like we believe in timeless principles anymore, and it's not like we love freedom so much that we're willing to suffer inconvenience for its sake anymore. It's not like we are a tough-minded people who think critically and understand the importance of questioning authority, and demand real answers to those questions. Perhaps one of my ancestors remembers an America like that, but I've never had the privilege of seeing it.
A re-education campaign would be frighteningly successful. Therefore, the stakes are very high. When the stakes are very high, small/unlikely risks aren't so small anymore. All I would like to see is this: that the government has no such capabilities. I like that better than knowing that they have such capabilities and then trying to trust them not to abuse them.
Probably the latter because people love being lied to.
Only because they are not honest people themselves, or not honest enough. So they know the politicians are lying to them, in fact they expect it. Then those people feel flattered that the politicians think they are so important that they bend even the truth to say whatever they want to hear. Weak and compromised people have a desperate need to feel important or significant, to feel like they are somebody. So when they vote for liars, they are getting something in exchange for it whether they are aware of it or not.
Look at Barak Obama. I've yet to see him significantly and fundamentally reform government, or otherwise to make either the USA or the world a better place. Yet, look at the devotion. Many people don't just think he's a decent guy, or a good President, or agree with his politics. They take it a step further and they make something of a savior out of him. This is a mistake whether it's a Democrat or a Republican or anyone else. This is a mistake even if the President really is a great guy who really does do a lot of good.
So why do they do it? Because he gives them a sense of worth. The same sense of worth that they would find within themselves, that no one would ever have to give to them, if they were healthy and whole and valued things that truly matter. Instead they are compromised, fearful, panicky, petty, selfish, less-than-honest, and capricious. They are much more impressed by slick marketing than adherence to sound principle. They are empty and don't feel that their lives have deep and significant meaning beyond the issue-of-the-week. Though they superficially look ordinary and "normal" enough, this society that was once composed of strong, independent, tough-minded, freedom-loving people has decayed into just the sort of rabble that demands a charismatic leader. And that's a real shame.
The problem is access to the Internet is not any of elementary human rights or constitution-granted freedoms.
The government may regulate, restrict and forbid access to it in any arbitrary way just like they may regulate sales of tobacco or speed limits on roads. They don't need a court sentence, they don't even need suspicion. They are allowed to pass a bill that says you need a special government-issued permit to access the Internet and any government clerk may revoke it on discretionary basis, and they aren't breaking any fundamental laws, because there weren't any laws granting you access to the Internet in the first place.
... because arbitrary power with no due process and little or no burden of proof on the accuser has always worked out so well in the past.
Yes, just like the railroads in the 19th century that were paid for by the government. There's a reason we called the people who then refused to give any money back to the government or listen to government legislation about the railroads "robber barons." Fun fact: When this was going on, one of the strongest opponents of the robber barons was Ambrose Bierce whom you may know as the writer of an "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "The Devil's Dictionary." If he were alive today he would likely be railing against this sort of poor treatment of net neutrality.
I am not fond of putting it this way, but it happens to be the truth. The robber-barons were successful for one reason and one reason alone: the government and the citizens didn't have the balls to do whatever it took to hold them accountable. They caved and they kow-towed. So the robber-barons were enriched, no one liked it, and no one did a damned thing about it.
Had the government instead revoked their corporate charters and sold all their assets at public auction for failure to comply with the legislation, we would all be telling a very different story. Even more so, if this had been accompanied by a widespread boycott of all rail services, with the intention not of reforming them, but of driving them into bankruptcy. I am not fond of it and I don't like it, but every now and then a message along the lines of "don't fuck with us" needs to be delivered. This seems perfectly acceptable when corporations take minors to court over copyright. I see no reason why the citizens should hold back and refuse to take every lawful action available to them to keep the corporations in check.
From a libertarian standpoint (yours, I'm assuming, from prior discussions), why not just get rid of health insurance altogether? That's the only way to ensure that everyone pays their "fair" costs into the system. That seems to be what you're getting at, so why mince words?
Bravo. Any free market libertarian should not be using any type of insurance. Afterall, insurance is a form of wealth redistribution.
Many others have corrected you in basic terms of what insurance actually is, and when the redistribution of wealth is undesirable (i.e. when it's done by force).
I wanted to add one thing. Insurance of any kind is based on the principle of indemnity. This is a fundamental concept behind all forms of insurance. To summarize indemnity, it means restoring you to where you were (i.e. after a loss). It means that a policyholder does not profit from filing an insurance claim. If your car takes $5000 in damages from an accident, and your insurance company pays $5000 for your car, X dollars to cover your rental vehicle while your car is being repaired, etc., your net gain is zero. You are only paid because you incurred a covered loss, and are only paid the amount that the covered loss has cost you. That's indemnity.
The "sophisticated machines" you are speaking of just scrape a site and parse the contents. It looks for certain keywords and follows logic to determine the tone of the statement. That is nothing compared to tracing out who someone is.
Do you know why it would sort out specific keywords? Let's say they are interested in information that only a tiny percentage of the population would talk about. That could be anything from non-mainstream political ideologies all the way up to communication among terrorist groups or worse. The keywords let them focus their manpower on the tiny percentage they are after. They then have the resources to find out who these people are.
Over time, I would expect this system to become more and more accurate. In fact I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they have multiple systems: highly classified, extremely expensive systems with capabilities that far exceed the scope of this project, and projects like this for their "light work" that they are willing to let the public know about.
The problem is not one of capability or determination. The problem is one of trust. Do you trust this unaccountable agency to only go after things like terrorist cells and foreign threats to our security? Or does it cross your mind that any one group with this much power might abuse that power and that this is particularly a concern when the public isn't even allowed to know about everything they do, let alone exercise oversight over it?
The only problem I see with that analogy is that you are saying it is someone watching everything I do, and only me. While monitoring the blogs can lead to that, I would see this as a van that drives through my neighborhood everyday, taken pictures of the houses. While still a little unsettling, all they are really going to see is what I put out for them to see.
So surveillence is only bad when it's personal? I can't get behind that. There is no principle in it, there is only the consideration of whether you alone will have to bear the burden of it. While it may make you feel more equal to know that everyone else is being treated the same shitty way that you are, with no regard for their privacy, it's still no excuse to treat people that way.
To me, the idea that the CIA can personally spy on you and only you is bothersome. The idea that it's just as easy for them to spy on many people at once is even worse. It's not an improvement, not if you don't wish to see intelligence agencies engaging in domestic spying and data mining. If you love freedom and understand a thing or two about how it is compromised, then there are two concerns here. One is that such a system can target individuals.
The other concern is that it indicates a government agency that is able and willing to overstep its bounds. Your comfort that they are not personally targetting you does not help with this one. These are not people who respect the limitations under which they are expected to work or the liberties those are designed to safeguard. Rather, they view those limitations as obstacles or challenges, to be disposed of as soon as possible and by any means necessary. Any excuse will do; "safety" is a popular one.
While it is easy for them to see who lives in a particular house based on the address, it is a completely different scenario to know that all around, and still have any meaningful information. The amount of manpower it would take to tie a real 'meatspace' individual to their cyberspace id is pretty high and would take a considerable amount of time to do it for everyone they monitor.
Yes, it would take a lot of manpower. So they are doing their best to automate the process, to offload as much of that effort onto sophisticated machines as they possibly can. Such as the ones this firm is using. In other words, the CIA seems to agree with you and is obviously doing everything it can about the "problem" of how difficult it is to spy on everyone.
[Now, the issue of whether it's illegal from the CIA to use the information because of the -CIA's- restrictions on domestic spying is another issue, though I could theorize that using publicly available information is not spying... but certainly that's debateable.]
I have an idea. Hopefully we can agree that when the CIA looks at your social network pages, they can correlate information and find facts and draw conclusions that would never occur to the average citizen who visits your page. Why not regard that as a type of search? They do, after all, work very hard to have such capabilities. It's not a stretch of the imagination to suggest that their capabilities are likely to be above and beyond what the individual actually intended to make publically available. Since this is a US government entity gathering data that ultimately came from US citizens, then why not regard this search as any other and have all of the rules apply that would normally apply to any police search?
This is data that people freely post to be read by all anyway. All this seems to do is aggregate it. If you post it in a public forum, you shouldn't care who uses it or how. Unless the sites being scraped have policies against said scraping, who cares? I see it as a very valuable tool for sales departments.
Besides, I am sure the signal to noise ratio for this system is incredibly low, so one has to wonder how much usable information is retrieved.
The only problem I have with this is that my tax dollars are going to fund it.
I'll explain that with a hypothetical analogy. There's nothing wrong with a person who can see your house from the public street. You knew it was a public road before you built a house near it, after all. However, you might find it a bit unsettling if the same van is always parked on that road and its occupant is always watching your house day and night. You might find it downright alarming if you noticed that he was videotaping your premises and taking notes about your daily activities. You might wonder what he plans to do with that information. You might be unable to come up with any good or desirable uses, but able to see a ton of abuse potential for it. But by your logic above, that should be okay because you had no expectation of privacy for anything you make visible from a public street, right?
In meatspace we do tend to draw a line between someone who happens to drive on that road and happens to glance at your premises, and someone who acts like a malicious stalker. There's a very good reason for that. The reason is not dictated by the special needs of meatspace; it is not the result of the law of gravity or the law of magnetism. No, the reason is rooted in sound principle. Principle is an abstract thing that applies equally to the streets and the Internet. I realize it's trendy for officials and such to act like we've never faced any of these questions before merely because a computer is involved, but it's not necessary.
The moment your creative output is collected, tagged, and studied, you become an object of study. It's a rather demeaning status when it's done for no good reason and occurs against your will, and by people who frankly don't give a damn about you. I see one major use of this system and it's not a good one.
In a truly representative government, the government changes over time to meet the changing needs of the people. The nature of that change depends on the people themselves and in this way it's a natural change, not an engineered one. Predicting it, for example to capitalize on it, always has some element of chance. This is a "problem" for people who think they should be holding the reins.
So they come up with systems like this one. Now they can quantify things like political influence and find out, with fine precision, where it comes from and who possesses it. What would have taken a massive propaganda effort in the past can now be done with just a little "push" at just the right place. Do some of you ever wonder where the restrictions came from that prohibit the CIA from spying on Americans? Do you imagine they are a product of chance? This is, after all, a method of circumventing those restrictions.
The Russian Federation's experiences with ex-spooks (former KGB officers) tells us that if you fire them, they'll just go underground as criminals. Russian Mafia, anybody?
So we should learn something from the ronin, perhaps. Nothing like history repeating itself...
Slashdot Mirror
"we'd be using our 1200bps modems connecting to the local BBS and swapping email over fido."
exactly what I did in the old days. As long as computers are around, people will find a way to connect them and connect themselves to each other using them. I suspect that while dial up might not be answer people run to these days I could see people setting up wireless networks within their own neighborhoods, and extending them into WANs that cover a good part of their city.
This has already been worked out. It has a tremendous advantage, too: it would be more difficult for a company or government to either shut it down or personally identify individual users.
Hmm... no internet, no stupid people using stupid memes. Sounds like a deal to me. I for one welcome our internet-stopping overlords.
Thanks to the advertising and PR industries, the stupid meme predates the Internet. By a long shot.
THIS is an example of what deserves to get a "+1, Funny" mod, not the ten thousandth retelling of an "in Soviet Russia" joke or some other tired meme.
Of course, there's also no better way to prove his point than to get offended by it.
God forbid the summary tell us what ZFS is
It is a filesystem, available in (Open)Solaris and at least FreeBSD, possibly other BSDs as well. It has some interesting features, which you can check out here. I have heard it claimed that ZFS has good performance, but I have not evaluated any of those claims.
It's a complete and total coincidence, but I just remembered a humorous Web site.
Firefox warning; apparently www.sparc.org/index.html has been reported as an attack site. Nice.
That's very funny. I downloaded a copy of the index page like so:
# wget http://www.sparc.org/index.html
I then opened it in a text editor. Maybe I am missing something, so I refuse to positively say that there is no malware and no "attack" in it. What I can say is that I was unable to find anything remotely suspicious. I suppose it's possible that there are advertisements on the index page and that those are the source of any malware, because I would not see those when looking at the index.html text. But in my mind, I'd like to see a lot more substantiation of any claims about maliciousness.
False positives are not the only reason I disagree with this kind of blacklisting. I wish all of the effort that has ever been invested in malware filters, antispyware products, and blacklists were instead put towards securing Windows and educating its users. Then we might have something better than a useless arms race..
People tend to forget that logic is just a set of rules. If you load it up with bad data, especially data that is driven by pure emotions, you'll rationalize yourself into neat, coherent clusterfuck. The difference between wisdom and intelligence is that the former is an a priori mental filter for bad data, the latter is just raw capacity. That's why a wise person need not follow a life based on reason alone to generally make good decisions.
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage
I can do things lightheartedly that might appear quite serious. I mean that in the sense that I really don't care if people disagree with me or want to think I'm motivated by a sense of jealousy. I do, however, enjoy the discourse. I like Slashdot because the quality of conversation here is really very good, trolls and everything.
I'll address your next paragraph in two parts.
I only claimed that one type of relationship is asymmetric. That is the relationship between a famous entertainer and his or her average fan. The average fan might learn all about that entertainer's life, strengths and weaknesses, beliefs, and personal relationships. Meanwhile the entertainer is unlikely to even know the name of that average fan. If this is not asymmetric, if it is not the antithesis of mutual exchange, then I would be hard-pressed to name something that is.
I suspect that if this were true, then the divorce rate would not be so high, but then, actors have not been the best role models for this one. I also draw a distinction between superficial acquaintences who talk about the weather and pop culture versus real friends who share everything and are deeply involved in each other's lives. The asymmetric relationship between the fan and the entertainer is a terrible model for the latter type.
It's funny that so many people don't seem to recognize a connection between an educational system based on rote memorization instead of curiosity and discovery, and a general population that is turned off to learning and often views it as a terrible burden (have you ever worked a tech support line?). To quote Samuel Clemens, I believe that the Slashdot crowd never allowed their schooling to interfere with their education. For that reason, they have a natural appreciation of knowledge and discovery. I believe that all people are born with this (just consider how many "why" questions small children constantly ask about the world) but often lose by the time they go through the meat-grinder known as public schooling.
So I agree with you that most people undervalue learning and education. I just see that as a product of artificial conditioning and do not view it as the way human beings inherently are. That means it is not set in stone, that people who are this way are not doomed to remain this way for their entire lives. It means it's a matter of what we value, which is something that can change, especially if enough concerned people are willing to speak about it. To think otherwise would be a defeatist attitude.
Studies have shown that 80-90% of everything that humans talk about is gossip. When you think about this from an evolutionary perspective it makes sense. We're highly social animals and our biggest competitors are other humans. Sharing information about the members of tribe is a HUGE advantage. Unfortunately, today we have the same brains that our tribal ancestors did and these brains seem to include celebrities in our tribes, so we eat up gossip about them. The implementation isn't terrible, it's just legacy :)
That makes a lot of sense to me. Before technology allowed anything other than face-to-face communication, such a tendency might have been valuable. You can, after all, be greatly affected by the decisions of those closest to you. However, it seems to break down due to telecommunications. Telecommunications and mass media mean that this mechanism is being used for strangers that the individual will probably never meet. Due to that, it loses the meaningful function of "staying in touch" that it once served.
I don't know if "instinct" is the correct word here, but I'll use it knowing that there may be a better one. I have always felt that human beings don't have to be slaves to their instincts. Their instincts are strong influences; they are not absolute masters. Wise/enlightened individuals can recognize when following an instinct in a certain way no longer serves their interests. They can find healther and more fulfilling ("higher") ways to take care of the same needs. In this case, they can choose to become more involved in their family and community life instead of adoring strangers who don't even know that they exist. This would, however, require a mindful awareness of the situation and the willingness to perform a little self-examination, what you might call the ability to be in the driver's seat of your own life. These are traits that superficial people are not known for having, which may explain why celebrity-worship is most often associated with people who are childish and easily impressed.
So, what you're saying is, you're jealous of the ability of an entertainer to entertain, and because you once arbitrarily used the defense that what you do is more worthwhile than what they do in order to get a false sense of superiority, your brain keeps doing it to stay internally consistent?
You remind me of those people who call others "racist" because they disagree with Barack Obama on matters of public policy. Just like them, I am sure that you do it knowing that no one can rationally argue against something so absurd. For one thing, it would require them to prove a negative. That's why you never feel that before making such statements, you have a burden of proof to establish a) that jealousy of entertainers is the only possible reason to suggest that maybe there is something wrong with obsessing over strangers, or b) that the reasoning I openly explained is fatally flawed and that you know how it may be corrected.
Your failure to address or even to recognize that such a burden of proof goes along with your claim, combined with your insistence on making this into a personal matter instead of giving your counter-argument, can be taken as evidence that you are reacting emotionally, perhaps because I offended you. There was nothing malicious in what I said, so your offense is your own and it begins and ends with you. Therefore, you get to deal with it and will receive no relief from me.
I'll give you a free tip for the future: try these tactics on people who are unable to see right through them. You'll be much more "successful" if you really want to call it that.
I disagree. I find watching E-Daily, or Entertainment Tonight, or any other celebrity show physically nauseating. It's literally an assault on my brain.
That's because such trivia is designed for children who never really grew up. Y'know, the ones who have adult bodies. That's why they think someone else's personal life is so much more fascinating than their own, merely because that person can sing or dance or act. They don't seem to notice that the truly famous entertainers are some of the most out-of-touch people who are least worthy of this kind of adoration. The doctor who finally cures cancer will be an anonymous, unknown figure by comparison.
They're impressed with the entertainer's ability to entertain and that's their only real criteria; any critical thinking or other evaluation shuts down at that point. Their appetite for the superficial and insignificant is absolutely endless, even though those same mental faculties could be put towards educating themselves, establishing deep and meaningful connections with people like their neighbors, and finding real purpose and meaning in their own lives. They see nothing wrong with this or the waste that it represents.
It's an assault on your brain because the underlying message is "it's okay to devote so much time and energy to something completely devoid of any real meaning." There's also the implication that it's okay to form grossly asymmetric relationships instead of mutual relationships, that there is anything healthy or nurturing about this, like when a person learns all about the personal and romantic life of an actor when that actor doesn't even know that he or she exists. The message is that you should eagerly do such things merely because it's encouraged by the industry that was built around it. If you have any understanding whatsoever, how could you do anything but reject this notion?
Is it? Even wise people are ignorant out of their area of expertise.
You have entirely missed my point. Wisdom is not about categories of factual knowledge. It's about knowing and understanding yourself. Our society so thoroughly fails to appreciate wisdom and so greatly overvalues cleverness and so few people are independent learners that I am actually having to explain this.
It's a mundane, lower-level interpretation of what I said, and it fails to capture the full essence of it, but it could be rephrased this way: wise people know when they are not informed enough to make a good decision. So if it isn't their "area of expertise" (even if they DO subscribe to such a self-imposed limitation) then they know they are ignorant and they know that they need to correct their ignorance before making a decision. That's because wise people know themselves and appreciate both their strengths and their weaknesses, both their capabilities and their limitations.
Fools, by contrast, assume that they know more than they actually do. This is usually because of what you might call arrogance but also happens because of plain old poor judgment (which is itself a weakness that can be remedied). Because they recklessly and haphazardly overestimate their understanding, they get screwed by such scams.
Note that fools can otherwise be very clever, in that "high IQ" sense. They can accumulate vast amounts of memorized factual and procedural knowledge. They can even be the foremost experts in a specialized field. This alone does not cause them to make good decisions. To see the surprise that people show when smart people do stupid things, you'd think that this were some big mystery rather than the simple and self-evident observation that it actually is. Unfortunately, this is another thing that I would not have to explain if the difference between wisdom and cleverness were more widely appreciated in our society. The result is that we as a people are very good at complicating simple matters.
So before responding, the wise might research that person e-mailing them and take steps to find out whether he is in fact the Nigerian prince that he claims to be. They might do a Google search and see if other people have also received similar unsolicited e-mails, which would quickly inform them about the nature of the scam. What they would not do is respond from a position of ignorance to an unknown third party about a financial matter without first performing some due diligence. Furthermore, the truly wise are honest people and for that reason, they do not expect to earn vast amounts of money for little or no work on their part and are rightfully suspicious of such offers instead of titillated by them.
Now I know that's a rather dry response, but the beautiful simplicity (by comparison) of my original statement gets lost in even the best of explanations.
I like what you're saying, but the "smart" ones recognize its strength and work to exploit it (i.e. by scamming) to the max. Greed produces both winners and losers.
If the scammers truly knew themselves, they would lose their desire for ill-gotten gain. So yes, it does work both ways.
The "victims" of these scams aren't as stupid as they are greedy. Combine the two, and you'll understand how Wall Street works.
The implication is that if you're greedy to a fault, it's because you're stupid. Otherwise, you'd see that greed as a problem and would work to change it, and in the meantime, would recognize the weakness of it and carefully guard against its exploitation (i.e. by scammers). In other words, "Know Thyself." The failure to do that is the real stupidity.
That's the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
Take that just one step further. Do a bit of reserach. Then see for yourself that the very same financial and political interests funded the elections of all three. In many cases, they supported BOTH the Democrat candidate AND the Republican candidate... why it's almost as though they don't care who wins. Notice that, and the bigger picture is within sight.
I can think of two immediate reasons. One, to provoke the very question that you asked. In other words, to encourage people to underestimate them, which is good strategy. George W. Bush followed a similar strategy, appearing to be a bumbling fool most of the time when in public yet ruthlessly and quite cleverly arranging things behind the scenes.
Two, for the same reason that you wouldn't hire an 18-wheeler to haul ten pounds of cargo. A regular passenger automobile will do the job. I would be shocked and amazed if someone could prove beyond all doubt that the CIA does not have some highly classified, extremely sophisticated machines. I would be a little less shocked to learn that they use those highly classified systems to do work that is quite ordinary and can easily be done with commodity hardware available to anyone. So if they know better than to swat at a fly with a sledgehammer, that wouldn't surprise me, but it doesn't mean they have no sledgehammers.
I never claimed that this was a nefarious plot, only that it's a step in the wrong direction. I can think of many uses for such fine-grained monitoring of influence and public opinion, and none of them are good or desirable. Quite simply, knowledge is power.
About secrecy, I'm with JFK on this one. To quote him:
The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society. And we are, as a people, inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweigh the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it.
No, but it wouldn't take a very sophisticated fool to understand that the American people would be quite vulnerable to something like "re-education" if it were implemented. It's not like we believe in timeless principles anymore, and it's not like we love freedom so much that we're willing to suffer inconvenience for its sake anymore. It's not like we are a tough-minded people who think critically and understand the importance of questioning authority, and demand real answers to those questions. Perhaps one of my ancestors remembers an America like that, but I've never had the privilege of seeing it.
A re-education campaign would be frighteningly successful. Therefore, the stakes are very high. When the stakes are very high, small/unlikely risks aren't so small anymore. All I would like to see is this: that the government has no such capabilities. I like that better than knowing that they have such capabilities and then trying to trust them not to abuse them.
Only because they are not honest people themselves, or not honest enough. So they know the politicians are lying to them, in fact they expect it. Then those people feel flattered that the politicians think they are so important that they bend even the truth to say whatever they want to hear. Weak and compromised people have a desperate need to feel important or significant, to feel like they are somebody. So when they vote for liars, they are getting something in exchange for it whether they are aware of it or not.
Look at Barak Obama. I've yet to see him significantly and fundamentally reform government, or otherwise to make either the USA or the world a better place. Yet, look at the devotion. Many people don't just think he's a decent guy, or a good President, or agree with his politics. They take it a step further and they make something of a savior out of him. This is a mistake whether it's a Democrat or a Republican or anyone else. This is a mistake even if the President really is a great guy who really does do a lot of good.
So why do they do it? Because he gives them a sense of worth. The same sense of worth that they would find within themselves, that no one would ever have to give to them, if they were healthy and whole and valued things that truly matter. Instead they are compromised, fearful, panicky, petty, selfish, less-than-honest, and capricious. They are much more impressed by slick marketing than adherence to sound principle. They are empty and don't feel that their lives have deep and significant meaning beyond the issue-of-the-week. Though they superficially look ordinary and "normal" enough, this society that was once composed of strong, independent, tough-minded, freedom-loving people has decayed into just the sort of rabble that demands a charismatic leader. And that's a real shame.
The problem is access to the Internet is not any of elementary human rights or constitution-granted freedoms. The government may regulate, restrict and forbid access to it in any arbitrary way just like they may regulate sales of tobacco or speed limits on roads. They don't need a court sentence, they don't even need suspicion. They are allowed to pass a bill that says you need a special government-issued permit to access the Internet and any government clerk may revoke it on discretionary basis, and they aren't breaking any fundamental laws, because there weren't any laws granting you access to the Internet in the first place.
... because arbitrary power with no due process and little or no burden of proof on the accuser has always worked out so well in the past.
Yes, just like the railroads in the 19th century that were paid for by the government. There's a reason we called the people who then refused to give any money back to the government or listen to government legislation about the railroads "robber barons." Fun fact: When this was going on, one of the strongest opponents of the robber barons was Ambrose Bierce whom you may know as the writer of an "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "The Devil's Dictionary." If he were alive today he would likely be railing against this sort of poor treatment of net neutrality.
I am not fond of putting it this way, but it happens to be the truth. The robber-barons were successful for one reason and one reason alone: the government and the citizens didn't have the balls to do whatever it took to hold them accountable. They caved and they kow-towed. So the robber-barons were enriched, no one liked it, and no one did a damned thing about it.
Had the government instead revoked their corporate charters and sold all their assets at public auction for failure to comply with the legislation, we would all be telling a very different story. Even more so, if this had been accompanied by a widespread boycott of all rail services, with the intention not of reforming them, but of driving them into bankruptcy. I am not fond of it and I don't like it, but every now and then a message along the lines of "don't fuck with us" needs to be delivered. This seems perfectly acceptable when corporations take minors to court over copyright. I see no reason why the citizens should hold back and refuse to take every lawful action available to them to keep the corporations in check.
From a libertarian standpoint (yours, I'm assuming, from prior discussions), why not just get rid of health insurance altogether? That's the only way to ensure that everyone pays their "fair" costs into the system. That seems to be what you're getting at, so why mince words?
Bravo. Any free market libertarian should not be using any type of insurance. Afterall, insurance is a form of wealth redistribution.
Many others have corrected you in basic terms of what insurance actually is, and when the redistribution of wealth is undesirable (i.e. when it's done by force).
I wanted to add one thing. Insurance of any kind is based on the principle of indemnity. This is a fundamental concept behind all forms of insurance. To summarize indemnity, it means restoring you to where you were (i.e. after a loss). It means that a policyholder does not profit from filing an insurance claim. If your car takes $5000 in damages from an accident, and your insurance company pays $5000 for your car, X dollars to cover your rental vehicle while your car is being repaired, etc., your net gain is zero. You are only paid because you incurred a covered loss, and are only paid the amount that the covered loss has cost you. That's indemnity.
Do you know why it would sort out specific keywords? Let's say they are interested in information that only a tiny percentage of the population would talk about. That could be anything from non-mainstream political ideologies all the way up to communication among terrorist groups or worse. The keywords let them focus their manpower on the tiny percentage they are after. They then have the resources to find out who these people are.
Over time, I would expect this system to become more and more accurate. In fact I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they have multiple systems: highly classified, extremely expensive systems with capabilities that far exceed the scope of this project, and projects like this for their "light work" that they are willing to let the public know about.
The problem is not one of capability or determination. The problem is one of trust. Do you trust this unaccountable agency to only go after things like terrorist cells and foreign threats to our security? Or does it cross your mind that any one group with this much power might abuse that power and that this is particularly a concern when the public isn't even allowed to know about everything they do, let alone exercise oversight over it?
So surveillence is only bad when it's personal? I can't get behind that. There is no principle in it, there is only the consideration of whether you alone will have to bear the burden of it. While it may make you feel more equal to know that everyone else is being treated the same shitty way that you are, with no regard for their privacy, it's still no excuse to treat people that way.
To me, the idea that the CIA can personally spy on you and only you is bothersome. The idea that it's just as easy for them to spy on many people at once is even worse. It's not an improvement, not if you don't wish to see intelligence agencies engaging in domestic spying and data mining. If you love freedom and understand a thing or two about how it is compromised, then there are two concerns here. One is that such a system can target individuals.
The other concern is that it indicates a government agency that is able and willing to overstep its bounds. Your comfort that they are not personally targetting you does not help with this one. These are not people who respect the limitations under which they are expected to work or the liberties those are designed to safeguard. Rather, they view those limitations as obstacles or challenges, to be disposed of as soon as possible and by any means necessary. Any excuse will do; "safety" is a popular one.
Yes, it would take a lot of manpower. So they are doing their best to automate the process, to offload as much of that effort onto sophisticated machines as they possibly can. Such as the ones this firm is using. In other words, the CIA seems to agree with you and is obviously doing everything it can about the "problem" of how difficult it is to spy on everyone.
What, did you think they would just give up?
I have an idea. Hopefully we can agree that when the CIA looks at your social network pages, they can correlate information and find facts and draw conclusions that would never occur to the average citizen who visits your page. Why not regard that as a type of search? They do, after all, work very hard to have such capabilities. It's not a stretch of the imagination to suggest that their capabilities are likely to be above and beyond what the individual actually intended to make publically available. Since this is a US government entity gathering data that ultimately came from US citizens, then why not regard this search as any other and have all of the rules apply that would normally apply to any police search?
This is data that people freely post to be read by all anyway. All this seems to do is aggregate it. If you post it in a public forum, you shouldn't care who uses it or how. Unless the sites being scraped have policies against said scraping, who cares? I see it as a very valuable tool for sales departments.
Besides, I am sure the signal to noise ratio for this system is incredibly low, so one has to wonder how much usable information is retrieved.
The only problem I have with this is that my tax dollars are going to fund it.
I'll explain that with a hypothetical analogy. There's nothing wrong with a person who can see your house from the public street. You knew it was a public road before you built a house near it, after all. However, you might find it a bit unsettling if the same van is always parked on that road and its occupant is always watching your house day and night. You might find it downright alarming if you noticed that he was videotaping your premises and taking notes about your daily activities. You might wonder what he plans to do with that information. You might be unable to come up with any good or desirable uses, but able to see a ton of abuse potential for it. But by your logic above, that should be okay because you had no expectation of privacy for anything you make visible from a public street, right?
In meatspace we do tend to draw a line between someone who happens to drive on that road and happens to glance at your premises, and someone who acts like a malicious stalker. There's a very good reason for that. The reason is not dictated by the special needs of meatspace; it is not the result of the law of gravity or the law of magnetism. No, the reason is rooted in sound principle. Principle is an abstract thing that applies equally to the streets and the Internet. I realize it's trendy for officials and such to act like we've never faced any of these questions before merely because a computer is involved, but it's not necessary.
The moment your creative output is collected, tagged, and studied, you become an object of study. It's a rather demeaning status when it's done for no good reason and occurs against your will, and by people who frankly don't give a damn about you. I see one major use of this system and it's not a good one.
In a truly representative government, the government changes over time to meet the changing needs of the people. The nature of that change depends on the people themselves and in this way it's a natural change, not an engineered one. Predicting it, for example to capitalize on it, always has some element of chance. This is a "problem" for people who think they should be holding the reins.
So they come up with systems like this one. Now they can quantify things like political influence and find out, with fine precision, where it comes from and who possesses it. What would have taken a massive propaganda effort in the past can now be done with just a little "push" at just the right place. Do some of you ever wonder where the restrictions came from that prohibit the CIA from spying on Americans? Do you imagine they are a product of chance? This is, after all, a method of circumventing those restrictions.
So we should learn something from the ronin, perhaps. Nothing like history repeating itself...