By expecting something more than piss-poor quality, you have harmed the Sacred Cow (tm). You wil now be modded into oblivion, despite the fact that you are absolutely right. I'm not sure if they will use "Offtopic" or "Flamebait". Maybe I should flip a coin, although I'm guessing the fact that you are commenting ABOUT THE ARTICLE won't stop them from using "Offtopic".
Mediocrity has become the norm, and the many people who don't understand that excellence is its own reward, or that doing something at all means you should make an effort to do it well shall vent their rage at you for pointing this out. Since they lack any real power or influence, and certainly can't use reason to support their viewpoint, they will mod you down! Mwa hahaha, that'll teach you.
USA spends several times more on defense than the second most heavily defended nation. Therefore: either your question is invalid, or it's more valid than what you had in mind.
The 'open source attitude' is supposed to be about choice and sharing, not about elitism.
Choice alone isn't very useful unless you make an effort to make good choices.
............
Sure, the default settings on Linux are more secure than on Windows. Linux is also not designed with the common man in mind. You shouldn't be surprised, especially IT guys, with how much of the problems with Windows are because of the marketing department rather than the actual coders.
To the attacker trying to break into your systems, it really doesn't matter whether the security weaknesses were caused by marketing, the coders, or whatever, so I am not sure what your point is. What I can say is that what it looks like is a weak apology for Microsoft's poor security history. At any rate, as you indicated, marketing departments do not security make. You just gave a good reason why Windows would be a poor choice in a context where, presumably, security really matters. Therefore, the two are not on equal ground in this case. It is certainly not "elitist" to say that Linux would have been a superior choice (though probably OpenBSD would have been better still). Especially not when professional IT staff are not the "common man".
Even if the client machines must use Windows, the servers hosting the sensitive data certainly do not need to use it. The wrong tool was used for the job; there is nothing "elitist" about it.
You specifically asked for the reaction. IMO anyone who ends a post with "yes, I have karma to burn" in an effort to save themselves should be modded as a troll. In any event, what you posted was off-topic philosophical ramblings, and no one has a more inflated sense of their value to the rest of the world than Philosophers.
Actually I said that because I knew that insecure people who end up with even the slightest bit of authority (be it mod points, a promotion at work, or even public office) have a deep-seated negative reaction to anyone who questions things at more than the most superficial of levels. This is an irrational reaction, and so it has absolutely nothing to do with the merit or validity of what was said. I'll spell that out for you -- I could be absolutely right or I could be dead wrong, and this one reaction (from those who react this way) would be the same in both cases. I really do have karma to burn, so I was reminding such people that their abuse of the moderation system isn't going to bully me into appeasing their petty insecurities -- insecurities which tend to manifest when they have both an unwillingness to accept what I said and the inability to rebut it. In other words, they're cowards, and I refuse to be influenced by them.
Thus, it wasn't an effort to "save myself" at all -- you don't thumb your nose at petty insecure people and tell them that you refuse to conform to them without catching flak for it, not in this world. The fact that this abuse was corrected and my post went from -1 to +5 tells me that my real message did not go unheard.
And I don't understand your characterization of philosophers either. Maybe you haven't noticed, but this world values cleverness only, not wisdom. Cleverness finds new and creative ways to continue down the path that we are on. Wisdom, among many other things, can often suggest that the path we are on (and have invested in) is dead wrong and demands the courage to face this possibility. Therefore, a true philosopher who really questions and challenges things that most people just go along with has to be one of the least appreciated individuals in the world. It should be obvious that it's not something that you do because you need the praise and petty admiration of other people but then, I have always believed that no truly healthy person needs such things.
Who learns of their house being robbed, their mothers house being burned, etc from the news media?
Thoreau's point is the people who don't already know these things don't need to know them. That's why he refers to it as "Gossip".
Thank you. Someone who gets it is a great thing to see.
Furthermore, if it IS your brother robbed, or your mother's house burned, or your cow that was run down... do you really want that to be a public spectacle, just entertainment for the masses? Do you not see how dehumanizing that is? In your moment of grief, do you want a reporter from the national news media sticking a camera and a microphone in your face to get a soundbite from you?
Personally I think there's something rather sick about that and about how readily we "consume" such stories. I can't come up with one valid reason why a healthy (physically, mentally, emotionally/spiritually) individual who is content with his/her own life would want to wallow in the misery of others. What does that accomplish when you have no intention of taking action to ease the pain of the people who are suffering? "Gossip" is a rather mild term for it.
Ah well, there are always people like ScentCone who are so eager to get offended about something that they will miss the entire point and respond emotionally to their own misinterpretation of what was said. I hope for him/her that the self-righteous feeling of "yeah I set that guy straight!" was its own reward, but I get the funny feeling that it wasn't.
Ah yes, typical Slashdot. Apparently you must only respond to the text within the story and within the summary, because we have this nice neat little box for you to think in. You may NOT question the merit of the story, why, that is...... offtopic to the story, somehow. No, it doesn't make sense to me either.
Let's recap. I saw the story, and I honestly thought it was rather pointless. I replied to the story, not just to say that I believed it was pointless but to explain why and included a quote that I believe illustrated the point more eloquently than I was likely to do. You see, all of this is about the story. Someone give me a calm, rational explanation for how this is offtopic, please (that you didn't like what I said does not automatically make it offtopic). Because what this really looks like is "you like and agree with the story or you shut the fuck up, otherwise we mod you into oblivion" which is an insult to every decent non-trigger-happy mod out there. Apparently some of you forget that questioning decisions and questioning "the way things are" from time to time is generally a healthy thing, even if the answers are not readily available or are not what you wish them to be.
I'm fully expecting this to be modded to -1 as well. Now, occasionally people do surprise me, but really most of you are reactive (and not terribly proactive) and therefore rather predictable. To mods who mod this down, you aren't proving anything (except maybe my description of you), you aren't surprising me in the slightest, and I have plenty of karma to burn so you aren't damaging me in the slightest. What you are doing is losing by forfeit my tiny little challenge that you explain how a comment about a story is not on-topic to that story.
Is there some merit to this story other than "your sterotypes can be wrong", which is itself cliche enough to be considered a stereotype in its own right? I like Henry David Thoreau's explanation of such trivia:
And I am sure that I never read any
memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or
murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel
wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the
Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers
in the winter -- we never need read of another. One is enough. If
you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad
instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is
called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over
their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was
such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn
the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of
plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the
pressure -- news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a
twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy.
Do you not read a thread before you post in it? You might have missed the +0 AC post; there's no way you missed my +3 response if you looked at all. As I have already explained, to say that people who trusted Microsoft should have known better and to say that Microsoft should be held accountable for any false advertising are not mutually exclusive. Thus, when I say they should have known better and that people seriously need to learn how to inform themselves, you are contributing nothing and in fact are merely pointing out the obvious by saying "but that doesn't mean that Microsoft should lie!" They are two separate issues.
If anything, this serves a good overall purpose if people are reminded from time to time that large corporations are not their friends and they will lie if they think they can get away with it. For these sales to take place, two things had to both happen: Microsoft had to misrepresent the hardware needed (that's one) and the customer had to believe this lie without ever doing any cross-checking (that's two). Take any one of those things out of the equation and the event in question cannot happen. Now, I for one cannot stop Microsoft or anyone else from lying if they choose to lie; that's what regulators and court systems are for. What I can do is inform myself (oh no, that might mean actually doing some reading! the horror!!) and not automatically believe what they claim just because they claim it. In other words, I can conduct a $500 or a $1500 purchase less casually and in less of an impulse-buy fashion than the way I would buy a pack of gum. If I refused to do this and blindly trusted an entity with a long history of arguments against blind trust, then I failed to perform due diligence and I am also part of the problem. I can't possibly make this any simpler for you.
You wonder why the world is in such turmoil right now?
Anyone who wonders this is ignorant of history; the world has been in such "turmoil" since the beginning of recorded history. There have been small pockets of relative peace and prosperity in one place or another over time, but the general history of the world is one of war, oppression, and chaos.
This is where a single word becomes a stumbling block and you get caught up on that one word and so miss the entire meaning of what I was saying. Just because I say the world is in turmoil right now is not the same as saying that it has never been in such a state or never will be. In fact since devaluing and dehumanizing the individual (treating him/her as just a cog in the machine of society) is not at all new, you would expect to have seen these problems throughout history and this is exactly the case.
In the past we've built our society on the same idea. If it wasn't the elected government, it was the king, or the warlord, etc. Thus we've continued to have the same problems because we've continued to use the same idea. You know, the Slashdot crowd seriously needs an exercise in basic logic and critical thought. Perhaps then, they would not highlight the obvious or attack claims I was not making (in this case, I was not making the claim that this was something new, only that we are experiencing an iteration of it right now). I can't anticipate and preempt every silly way that someone might misinterpret what I have plainly said, or assume I intended what I did not say. You want another good example of this? Read this thread and see the AC who responds to what I was very explicitly not saying, then see a logged-in user who failed to read my response to that and then he does the exact same thing. Don't be another of these, please, for they are a dime a dozen.
My point (of the post to which you were responding) was that the conventional approach of explaining the current problems in terms of $political_issue_of_the_day is superficial at best. The particular issues change; so do the particular problems associated with them. The common threads are much more useful, and what I pointed out has consistently been one of them. That was all I was claiming, nothing more.
I don't really believe in a "collective" in the political sense Then what is good for the individual is good for the individual, not good for the "collective." I agree with you that it's a construct, but you used the term first and I felt obligated to stay within that term instead of causing unwanted confusion. I really liked the last paragraph, though. Very Discordian.
What I was saying is that a group (be it a nation, etc) of free, empowered individuals who are subjects of no one, with the right to do anything they please so long as they don't harm another person or interfere with another person's freedoms in any way, is the best sort of "collective" I could imagine. This of course would bear little or no resemblence to the "all march to the beat of one drummer" that constitutes what is usually thought of as a "collective." FYI, I did not use the term first; see the post to which I was replying.
Indeed. I wish people would figure out that what's good for the individual is good for the collective. If not, the collective is fatally flawed and needs to be disregarded or disposed of.
Having said that, I don't really believe in a "collective" in the political sense (although I am without doubt that there is such a thing in the natural and spiritual sense). You can speak of it as though it were a real thing, but it's not. It's more of a construct, an illusion; it's something that politicians find very convenient. I almost never hear the terms "collective" or "greater good" or "for the benefit of the nation" etc used for any purpose other than justifying the subservience of the individual to the state.
Corporations don't have intelligence, or emotions, or souls, or any sort of life. Nor do governments. Such hierarchies are just inanimate objects, tools utilized by people to achieve their goals. The idea that a sentient, sapient human being should submit to an inanimate object to preserve someone's political power is a direct insult against what it means to be human. You wonder why the world is in such turmoil right now? I say it's because a way of life built on such a fatally flawed idea is destined to crumble, sooner or later.
"The conservative government, led by the Liberal Democratic Party"
There's something a little odd about that name, don't you think?
Sounds like the USA to me. "Liberal" and "Conservative", yet no matter which is elected the government expands in size and power. Clever, isn't it? That there might be no real difference between them is a fact about which we are more honest when it comes to other countries, apparently.
A truism: "When somebody says 'this isn't about free speech', it almost certainly is".
Yes, usually what they really mean is "don't let those pesky human rights concerns get in the way of what I want to accomplish." For some reason, we put up with people like that. It's rather pathetic really.
Oh don't be bloody stupid. It's got zero to do with personal responsibility or being painful to hear and everything to do with providing fraudulently incorrect information to consumers.
You are responding to something I did not say. As mentioned in my original post, this is a strawman I anticipated (try surprising me, it's much less boring that way). You see, the belief that people who got burned by Microsoft should have seen it coming and the belief that Microsoft should be held accountable for any false information provided are not mutually exclusive. I even explicitly said that I was not commenting on whether Microsoft should lie or whether anyone should be stopping them if they do (I presumed the answers to both of those were rather obvious).
I was saying that some due diligence on the part of the buyer can prevent most or all of this kind of shit and that buyers who don't understand this are "enablers" of the phenomenon. I'm not so quick to make excuses for them.
The rest of your statement merely proves that you are way way way out of touch with the vast majority of PC buyers.
Again, way to miss the point. I know very well what the majority of PC buyers are like; in fact I think the way they are is the single biggest problem with this industry, the one thing that allows everything else I dislike about it. I also believe human beings are not slaves/automatons by nature, so it follows that they are this way because they choose to be. Thus, this is very much about personal responsibility. When it is that easy to come up with three simple methods of avoiding such a situation (asking a tech, searching google, checking ratings) that require no special technical skill to accomplish, it means that there is not even a cost-benefit argument against informing yourself.
Why is this modded "Troll"? Is someone who advocates personal responsibility really such a painful thing for you guys to hear? Knowing what you are buying before you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a machine is simply good sense. It's the prudent thing to do. If you yourself are not knowledgable about computers, it's not difficult to ask someone who is, to do a Google search, or to pick up a publication like PC Magazine or Consumer Reports and see whether the item you had in mind is highly rated. Honestly I can't believe people think that blindly trusting labels, packaging, or other advertising is the best way to make a good purchase.
If you disagree with the parent poster, implying that you really believe that looking out for your own best interests is a task that shouldn't involve you, a task that should only be up to the government or honest advertising... well, I don't think this is a rational belief at all, but if you feel that way then how about posting a reply to explain your reasoning? Modding someone "troll" because you strongly disagree with them is the kind of cheap, childish shit that makes Slashdot a worse place.
And no, I am not saying that Microsoft should blatently lie, or that government regulators should do nothing about it if they do (save the strawman arguments, please). I am saying that depending on politicians or corporations to look out for you is naive at best, blatently stupid at worst. What is "troll" about pointing out that there is no substitute for due diligence? Or, what's "troll" about pointing out that uninformed decisions tend to get bad results?
Thank you for pointing that out, it helps me to put the current format war in perspective. I do remember that these occurred but for some reason (I'm open to this being a "grass is greener" fallacy on my part) they seem to have been relatively minor squabbles compared to the current HD-DVD v. Blu-Ray deal. For example, DivX had a built-in time-limit (a rather short one, too) that effectively "expired" any discs rented in that format which made it rather unpopular; it also required that the player had a phone line so it could literally phone-home and approve many actions. For these and other reasons I don't remember it having ever been a serious contender for DVD. The last such format war I remember seeing or hearing about that was on the scale of the current one was VHS v. Betamax.
Either way, I am grateful to see someone use genuinely constructive criticism. It's great when someone can make me go back and question what I said, since I usually learn something from that. Congratulations for having the class to do that without a single insult or ad-hominem attack.
This is why I'd like to see all such format wars result in both sides losing a lot of money.
Really now, which of these two scenarios sounds better?
Scenario 1: a format war with two major camps. Camp A and Camp B duke it out in the marketplace until one side eventually loses. If Camp A wins out, all customers who went with Camp B lose because they invested in a now-obsolete standard and vice-versa. Meanwhile, the uptake of new technology suffers since the wiser, more patient customers prudently decide to wait it out until there is a clear winner before they purchase anything. Those customers who purchased early and happened to choose the one that eventually won still suffer because a slower uptake of new technology means that fewer titles are available and the cost per player is more expensive than it would have been since this scenario doesn't take full advantage of economy of scale (that is, if the companies involved could have sold 10x the number of players, the cost per unit could have been lower).
Scenario 2: all companies involved decide that no one really wins a format war (particularly the end-users) and come up with an open standard, like we had with DVDs and CDs. Customers can now be confident that they won't be left holding the bag, so they more rapidly adopt the new technology. Customers get to choose based on things like which company/brand they prefer and who offers superior price/performance. More rapid uptake of the new format means more titles available.
Now, someone tell me why companies who decide to participate in Scenario 1 deserve to have that decision rewarded in any way? I wish we could send a clear message to all corporations that engaging in silly format wars like this is financial suicide, since that seems to be about the only way to discourage this kind of bullshit.
My problem with Islam is that when a person is externally forced to behave well, that might make the streets safer if done effectively, but that person is still not a good person. The evil within them is just biding its time, waiting for an opportunity. And no external enforcement by human beings is perfect. There will always be loopholes and opportunities to do evil.
Indeed, it will fail just as every previous attempt to legislate morality has failed. Like every victimless-crime law in the USA, it would require a complete and total surveillance state/police state to enforce, and you can be assured that the kind of people who want to create such a police state and rule over it are not good people who care about your best interests. There is something seriously wrong with any individual or group who wants to have that kind of power and their acquisition of it is far more dangerous than whatever it was they were supposedly going to protect us from -- with no exceptions. This kind of fanatical approach to "removing evil" or "protecting you from yourself" is evil in and of itself.
What such attempts can and have done is to take "evil" behavior (be it drugs, prostitution, gambling, whatever) and drive it underground. A completely unregulated, illegal market for such things has always made them more dangerous. Additionally, I wonder if the proponents of Prohibition were willing to have the deaths of everyone who was killed by the likes of Al Capone on their conscience? That pesky Law of Unintended Consequences is something from which people repeatedly refuse to learn.
I wish we could evolve past this silly notion that good and evil are nothing more than sufficiently-comprehensive lists of "do's" and "dont's", as I think this is where the idea that "forced to behave a certain way = good person" comes from. The whole thing really is a denial of the spiritual nature of human beings and the moral struggles that occur within each person that the outside world never sees. I find it quite ironic that such denials typically come from major religions.
I apologize to any *individual* who may have been hit hard by these 'sploits.
I don't feel sorry for them in the slightest. It's not like IE/ActiveX's security track record is some big secret that would take a great deal of effort to find out about. People are voluntarily using a program with an unusually poor security history and are having security problems -- where is the surprise?
You could argue from the victim mentality and say "but they don't know any better", to which I would ask, do you think it's reasonable to work with what you do not understand and expect a good result? I'm growing tired of this fallacy that Microsoft or Norton or anyone else is going to do a good job of looking out for your interests; we've been operating under that idea for a long time now and it fails routinely (perhaps because software vendors don't have product liability like any other company would, but protecting yourself is much easier than changing that). To paraphrase a quote I once saw on here, some people learn by study, some learn from the mistakes of others, while some must figure things out the hard way. Lighting a fire under the asses of that third crowd can only end up being a good thing.
But if they're forcing better security on those sites, and hitting IE hard, I say Good For The "Criminals"!
I'm not sure how important it is that those sites become more secure because two specific (albeit high-traffic) sites is a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. I consider it a great thing that they're hitting IE hard, however, since that one continues to be the common denominator in most of these attacks. Really though, if your browser is secure and does not trust remote content, then the site you visit is one of the least important parts of this equation. Having said that, I am forced to agree with your "good for the criminals" sentiment, since that seems to be about the only way that anything related to IE ever improves. Certainly, good design principles or an idea of "the right thing to do" hasn't produced a proactive, prevantative approach to security (as demonstrated by OpenBSD); at least the reactive "well now that this is being exploited, perhaps we should fix that" approach is better than nothing. With the resources at Microsoft's disposal, however, they could do with a Web browser what the much smaller, less-funded OpenBSD team has done with an operating system. To the people who are exploited by this, I wonder how it feels to know that Microsoft could have done a better job but couldn't be bothered.
The GP was saying that this could have a serious downside. Reminding us of the advantages (i.e. "how it will be sold") does not magically negate this disadvantage. Unfortunately, most people are passive enough that they won't consider this downside until something undesirable happens, like the situation with Myspace/Facebook/etc where suddenly employers became interested in that information. Better to foresee such a possibility ahead of time.
Personally, I think "Identity 2.0" is a solution in search of a problem. I've yet to ever do anything online that made me feel like such a capability was missing, or that it would really improve my experience. I've yet to feel a need to build a "reputation" across multiple sites -- either what I write stands on its own merit, or it doesn't, and I'm satisfied with that. A reputation based on a consistent name is something I would compare to an appeal to authority ("his other posts on sites X, Y, Z were great, so we don't have to think about whether this one has merit!) or to a brand name. None of this appeals to me, but then my writings are not a product and I don't share this "pop-culture" (for lack of a better description, as it reminds me of celebrity-worshippers) need to have the approval/love/adoration/recognition of a bunch of strangers.
You really believe that they are, in fact, two separate parties who want to compete with each other? Why do you believe that? Because they claim to be? To quote Bill Hicks:
"They're all the same! I'll show you politics in America; here it is right here."
"I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs."
"I think the puppet on the Left is more to my liking.... hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holdin' up both puppets!"
"SHUT UP! Go back to bed, America, your government is in control. Here's 'Love Connection', watch this and get fat and stupid."
Pay attention and what you'll find is that the kinds of issues on which Democrats and Republicans oppose each other have a common property. Note, this is different from the tactic of finding a different method to get the same result but justfied by a different reason. The common thread is that none of the solutions proposed by either party have the effect of significantly altering the balance of power between the people and the government. So, you have the appearance (real or otherwise) of a constant fluctuation in the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans and it seems very effective at distracting from the steady trend of shifting power towards the government. When a duopoly controls a market, they can corrupt, manipulate and effectively control that market to the detriment of everyone else. Why do we have this silly idea that a duopoly controlling political power is somehow less prone to using these tactics than a duopoly controlling money alone?
What I used to say is that you can vote for a Republican and they will expand the size and power of government at the expense of personal liberty or you could vote for a Democrat and they will expand the size and power of government at the expense economic liberty. Or I would say that you could vote Republican to expand government in the name of the stock market and economic freedom, or you could vote Democrat to expand government in the name of saving the poor people and the environment. Over time the given reasons change, of course; now it's Iraq etc. but there will always be an $ISSUE_OF_THE_DAY that can fit this formula. The result is that if what you want is less government size and less government authority, you're effectively disenfranchised. If I really wanted to live in an eventual police state, I would consider this a work of genius.
I'll preface this comment by saying that I think I understand what you want. I too would enjoy an open world where people trust and respect their neighbors and have no real need to keep secrets etc. For that matter, I would enjoy a world where people don't need government, advertising, and panels of experts to tell them what to do or how to live, a world where people think for themselves and don't need to have their morality legislated to them. As the philosopher once said (I believe this was Socrates but could be wrong), "I do because of philosophy what others do only from fear of the law". That's what I want. But we aren't there yet. Most people are not ready for this and the level of personal responsibility it would require. I am forced to deal with the world the way it currently is, in the hopes that I can use persuasion and influence to try and change it. In this real world, there are lots of dishonest people with bad intentions and worse justifications who will happily try to live your life for you in any way that they can. Some of them are deliberate about it, while many of them have good intentions and a poor understanding of the Law of Unintented Consequences. Regardless, privacy is one of the few things that keeps such people in check.
Regarding your post, I'll give a simple analogy that should demonstrate why what you just said is a non-issue. If you want to give away all of your money, you're free to do so. I might have an opinion about that, but I will do nothing to stop you, nor will I advocate that anyone else should try to stop you. However, this does not mean that you are obligated to give away all of your money, nor does it mean that my refusal to give away my money is doing anything at all to interfere with your ability to do so.
Likewise, feel free to publish the details of your life if you want to. I have my opinions about that, but I will not try to stop you (that would be silly), nor will I advocate that anyone else should try to stop you (that would also be silly). However, this does not obligate me to do the same thing. If you are truly secure in your beliefs about how you should live your life, then you are happy with what you do. If what you want isn't good enough for you unless the other guy does the same, then you're another insecure bastard who wants to force his will on everyone else and that's the part I have a problem with. Note, there's nothing wrong with trying to persuade people to see things your way, but there is something very wrong with any failure to recognize that they have the right to choose how they want to live their lives just like you do.
If we take the protect-privacy route, antiprivacy folk are forced to alter their behaviour to accept a notion foreign to them, and if the take the antiprivacy route, private people routinely feel violated. If going one way or the other is arrogant, there is no way to avoid being cast as arrogant.
Why would an antiprivacy person such as yourself feel forced to do anything? If you want to publish your entire life on the Internet (about most public place imaginable), no one is stopping you. I do not understand your objection here. Are you complaining that you have to go through a little effort to publish this information? Are you upset that there is not an automated system that publishes everything for you? I would call that a minor inconvenience (at worst) compared to how it feels to desire privacy and then have someone violate that right. That is why the reasonable default is "lots of privacy" and then someone can be more open than that if they please. It's just a fact that it's far easier to waive a right that you have than it is to reclaim a right that you have lost. Therefore, the two positions are not on equal ground. There is a superior choice, a reasonable default.
For the same reasons, I greatly prefer "opt in" advertising to "opt out" advertising. The people who opt in want what they are receiving; the people
I believe the original poster was asking how to convince his associates to become very private people. I'm suggesting that there are many of us who are pleased not to be private people in the way he's envisioning.
The point is, not everyone wants to be so open as you have chosen to be and they should not be forced to do so. That is all. To disagree with me on this subject means that either a) you think that everyone does want to be as open are you are, or b) you think that people who don't want to be so open should be forced to do so anyway. The point is, what you want for your own life and whether or not you can understand why somebody wants something different is completely irrelevant, and the attitude of "what's good enough for me should be good enough for everybody" hints at a certain arrogance, especially when you think this is about whether or not information can be owned. It's not necessary for information to be owned to respect when people want to be left alone and to recognize their right to make that choice.
Personally, I have yet to ever receive a single benefit of any kind from a stranger who knew (or thought they knew) anything about me that I did not personally disclose to them. If you feel that this has benefitted you, then goody for you; I for one feel fulfilled in my life without the recognition and admiration of a bunch of complete strangers, most of whom I will never meet, and I really question the motives of someone who thinks they need that kind of attention. Personally, I think there's something unhealthy about it, and most people I have met who needed the admiration of strangers were terrified of real, personal intimacy due to various insecurities (most were children of divorce). If you don't have this need for attention from strangers, then you gain nothing from having everyone know your business and now it will either accomplish nothing or will make it much easier for someone with ill intent to cause damage. I consider it unwise for me to do something that has no chance of benefitting me and does have a chance of harming me. Simple.
It's interesting, btw, when you have circles of friends who include some private folk and some exhibitionist folk - I've occasionally run into issues with my blog wrt mentioning the private folk, as for me events I attend and everyone there are part of my life and possibly worth mentioning, while for them it's not fun to be named as being somewhere. The privacy folk tend to be proprietary with the information and regard it as property (as your "yours" language suggests), while for many of the rest of us, information cannot be owned and independent of our easing its flow we don't believe rights can be asserted regarding other people's use of it.
"Proprietary" is a mischaracterization really, as I never claimed information could be owned in the same sense that you can own a car. That some of your friends feel that way is great; don't lump me with them because our beliefs sound superficially similar. This isn't isolated information for the sake of truth; it's about my life (which most certainly is mine) and whether random people have a legitimate claim to it. That the claim in question is informational in nature is irrelevant to this idea; on the same basis and for the same reasons, I would oppose anyone who thought they could help themselves to my time or my labor against my will (that's the key here) as well.
What I am saying is really a simple thing. If I want you to know something about me, I will tell you. If you don't like that I haven't told you something about me and you take it upon yourself to pry into my business against my will (again that's the key here), then I'm going to treat you like any other intruder and within the limits of the law, I am going to find a way to stop you. Consider it from the opposite viewpoint: if someone wants you to leave them alone and stay out of their affairs, as evidenced by the fact that either t
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By expecting something more than piss-poor quality, you have harmed the Sacred Cow (tm). You wil now be modded into oblivion, despite the fact that you are absolutely right. I'm not sure if they will use "Offtopic" or "Flamebait". Maybe I should flip a coin, although I'm guessing the fact that you are commenting ABOUT THE ARTICLE won't stop them from using "Offtopic".
Mediocrity has become the norm, and the many people who don't understand that excellence is its own reward, or that doing something at all means you should make an effort to do it well shall vent their rage at you for pointing this out. Since they lack any real power or influence, and certainly can't use reason to support their viewpoint, they will mod you down! Mwa hahaha, that'll teach you.
USA spends several times more on defense than the second most heavily defended nation. Therefore: either your question is invalid, or it's more valid than what you had in mind.
Choice alone isn't very useful unless you make an effort to make good choices.
To the attacker trying to break into your systems, it really doesn't matter whether the security weaknesses were caused by marketing, the coders, or whatever, so I am not sure what your point is. What I can say is that what it looks like is a weak apology for Microsoft's poor security history. At any rate, as you indicated, marketing departments do not security make. You just gave a good reason why Windows would be a poor choice in a context where, presumably, security really matters. Therefore, the two are not on equal ground in this case. It is certainly not "elitist" to say that Linux would have been a superior choice (though probably OpenBSD would have been better still). Especially not when professional IT staff are not the "common man".
Even if the client machines must use Windows, the servers hosting the sensitive data certainly do not need to use it. The wrong tool was used for the job; there is nothing "elitist" about it.
Actually I said that because I knew that insecure people who end up with even the slightest bit of authority (be it mod points, a promotion at work, or even public office) have a deep-seated negative reaction to anyone who questions things at more than the most superficial of levels. This is an irrational reaction, and so it has absolutely nothing to do with the merit or validity of what was said. I'll spell that out for you -- I could be absolutely right or I could be dead wrong, and this one reaction (from those who react this way) would be the same in both cases. I really do have karma to burn, so I was reminding such people that their abuse of the moderation system isn't going to bully me into appeasing their petty insecurities -- insecurities which tend to manifest when they have both an unwillingness to accept what I said and the inability to rebut it. In other words, they're cowards, and I refuse to be influenced by them.
Thus, it wasn't an effort to "save myself" at all -- you don't thumb your nose at petty insecure people and tell them that you refuse to conform to them without catching flak for it, not in this world. The fact that this abuse was corrected and my post went from -1 to +5 tells me that my real message did not go unheard.
And I don't understand your characterization of philosophers either. Maybe you haven't noticed, but this world values cleverness only, not wisdom. Cleverness finds new and creative ways to continue down the path that we are on. Wisdom, among many other things, can often suggest that the path we are on (and have invested in) is dead wrong and demands the courage to face this possibility. Therefore, a true philosopher who really questions and challenges things that most people just go along with has to be one of the least appreciated individuals in the world. It should be obvious that it's not something that you do because you need the praise and petty admiration of other people but then, I have always believed that no truly healthy person needs such things.
Thank you. Someone who gets it is a great thing to see.
Furthermore, if it IS your brother robbed, or your mother's house burned, or your cow that was run down
Personally I think there's something rather sick about that and about how readily we "consume" such stories. I can't come up with one valid reason why a healthy (physically, mentally, emotionally/spiritually) individual who is content with his/her own life would want to wallow in the misery of others. What does that accomplish when you have no intention of taking action to ease the pain of the people who are suffering? "Gossip" is a rather mild term for it.
Ah well, there are always people like ScentCone who are so eager to get offended about something that they will miss the entire point and respond emotionally to their own misinterpretation of what was said. I hope for him/her that the self-righteous feeling of "yeah I set that guy straight!" was its own reward, but I get the funny feeling that it wasn't.
Ah yes, typical Slashdot. Apparently you must only respond to the text within the story and within the summary, because we have this nice neat little box for you to think in. You may NOT question the merit of the story, why, that is ...... offtopic to the story, somehow. No, it doesn't make sense to me either.
Let's recap. I saw the story, and I honestly thought it was rather pointless. I replied to the story, not just to say that I believed it was pointless but to explain why and included a quote that I believe illustrated the point more eloquently than I was likely to do. You see, all of this is about the story. Someone give me a calm, rational explanation for how this is offtopic, please (that you didn't like what I said does not automatically make it offtopic). Because what this really looks like is "you like and agree with the story or you shut the fuck up, otherwise we mod you into oblivion" which is an insult to every decent non-trigger-happy mod out there. Apparently some of you forget that questioning decisions and questioning "the way things are" from time to time is generally a healthy thing, even if the answers are not readily available or are not what you wish them to be.
I'm fully expecting this to be modded to -1 as well. Now, occasionally people do surprise me, but really most of you are reactive (and not terribly proactive) and therefore rather predictable. To mods who mod this down, you aren't proving anything (except maybe my description of you), you aren't surprising me in the slightest, and I have plenty of karma to burn so you aren't damaging me in the slightest. What you are doing is losing by forfeit my tiny little challenge that you explain how a comment about a story is not on-topic to that story.
And yes, I have karma to burn. Yes I do.
Do you not read a thread before you post in it? You might have missed the +0 AC post; there's no way you missed my +3 response if you looked at all. As I have already explained, to say that people who trusted Microsoft should have known better and to say that Microsoft should be held accountable for any false advertising are not mutually exclusive. Thus, when I say they should have known better and that people seriously need to learn how to inform themselves, you are contributing nothing and in fact are merely pointing out the obvious by saying "but that doesn't mean that Microsoft should lie!" They are two separate issues.
If anything, this serves a good overall purpose if people are reminded from time to time that large corporations are not their friends and they will lie if they think they can get away with it. For these sales to take place, two things had to both happen: Microsoft had to misrepresent the hardware needed (that's one) and the customer had to believe this lie without ever doing any cross-checking (that's two). Take any one of those things out of the equation and the event in question cannot happen. Now, I for one cannot stop Microsoft or anyone else from lying if they choose to lie; that's what regulators and court systems are for. What I can do is inform myself (oh no, that might mean actually doing some reading! the horror!!) and not automatically believe what they claim just because they claim it. In other words, I can conduct a $500 or a $1500 purchase less casually and in less of an impulse-buy fashion than the way I would buy a pack of gum. If I refused to do this and blindly trusted an entity with a long history of arguments against blind trust, then I failed to perform due diligence and I am also part of the problem. I can't possibly make this any simpler for you.
This is where a single word becomes a stumbling block and you get caught up on that one word and so miss the entire meaning of what I was saying. Just because I say the world is in turmoil right now is not the same as saying that it has never been in such a state or never will be. In fact since devaluing and dehumanizing the individual (treating him/her as just a cog in the machine of society) is not at all new, you would expect to have seen these problems throughout history and this is exactly the case.
In the past we've built our society on the same idea. If it wasn't the elected government, it was the king, or the warlord, etc. Thus we've continued to have the same problems because we've continued to use the same idea. You know, the Slashdot crowd seriously needs an exercise in basic logic and critical thought. Perhaps then, they would not highlight the obvious or attack claims I was not making (in this case, I was not making the claim that this was something new, only that we are experiencing an iteration of it right now). I can't anticipate and preempt every silly way that someone might misinterpret what I have plainly said, or assume I intended what I did not say. You want another good example of this? Read this thread and see the AC who responds to what I was very explicitly not saying, then see a logged-in user who failed to read my response to that and then he does the exact same thing. Don't be another of these, please, for they are a dime a dozen.
My point (of the post to which you were responding) was that the conventional approach of explaining the current problems in terms of $political_issue_of_the_day is superficial at best. The particular issues change; so do the particular problems associated with them. The common threads are much more useful, and what I pointed out has consistently been one of them. That was all I was claiming, nothing more.
What I was saying is that a group (be it a nation, etc) of free, empowered individuals who are subjects of no one, with the right to do anything they please so long as they don't harm another person or interfere with another person's freedoms in any way, is the best sort of "collective" I could imagine. This of course would bear little or no resemblence to the "all march to the beat of one drummer" that constitutes what is usually thought of as a "collective." FYI, I did not use the term first; see the post to which I was replying.
Indeed. I wish people would figure out that what's good for the individual is good for the collective. If not, the collective is fatally flawed and needs to be disregarded or disposed of.
Having said that, I don't really believe in a "collective" in the political sense (although I am without doubt that there is such a thing in the natural and spiritual sense). You can speak of it as though it were a real thing, but it's not. It's more of a construct, an illusion; it's something that politicians find very convenient. I almost never hear the terms "collective" or "greater good" or "for the benefit of the nation" etc used for any purpose other than justifying the subservience of the individual to the state.
Corporations don't have intelligence, or emotions, or souls, or any sort of life. Nor do governments. Such hierarchies are just inanimate objects, tools utilized by people to achieve their goals. The idea that a sentient, sapient human being should submit to an inanimate object to preserve someone's political power is a direct insult against what it means to be human. You wonder why the world is in such turmoil right now? I say it's because a way of life built on such a fatally flawed idea is destined to crumble, sooner or later.
Sounds like the USA to me. "Liberal" and "Conservative", yet no matter which is elected the government expands in size and power. Clever, isn't it? That there might be no real difference between them is a fact about which we are more honest when it comes to other countries, apparently.
Yes, usually what they really mean is "don't let those pesky human rights concerns get in the way of what I want to accomplish." For some reason, we put up with people like that. It's rather pathetic really.
You are responding to something I did not say. As mentioned in my original post, this is a strawman I anticipated (try surprising me, it's much less boring that way). You see, the belief that people who got burned by Microsoft should have seen it coming and the belief that Microsoft should be held accountable for any false information provided are not mutually exclusive. I even explicitly said that I was not commenting on whether Microsoft should lie or whether anyone should be stopping them if they do (I presumed the answers to both of those were rather obvious).
I was saying that some due diligence on the part of the buyer can prevent most or all of this kind of shit and that buyers who don't understand this are "enablers" of the phenomenon. I'm not so quick to make excuses for them.
Again, way to miss the point. I know very well what the majority of PC buyers are like; in fact I think the way they are is the single biggest problem with this industry, the one thing that allows everything else I dislike about it. I also believe human beings are not slaves/automatons by nature, so it follows that they are this way because they choose to be. Thus, this is very much about personal responsibility. When it is that easy to come up with three simple methods of avoiding such a situation (asking a tech, searching google, checking ratings) that require no special technical skill to accomplish, it means that there is not even a cost-benefit argument against informing yourself.
Why is this modded "Troll"? Is someone who advocates personal responsibility really such a painful thing for you guys to hear? Knowing what you are buying before you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a machine is simply good sense. It's the prudent thing to do. If you yourself are not knowledgable about computers, it's not difficult to ask someone who is, to do a Google search, or to pick up a publication like PC Magazine or Consumer Reports and see whether the item you had in mind is highly rated. Honestly I can't believe people think that blindly trusting labels, packaging, or other advertising is the best way to make a good purchase.
... well, I don't think this is a rational belief at all, but if you feel that way then how about posting a reply to explain your reasoning? Modding someone "troll" because you strongly disagree with them is the kind of cheap, childish shit that makes Slashdot a worse place.
If you disagree with the parent poster, implying that you really believe that looking out for your own best interests is a task that shouldn't involve you, a task that should only be up to the government or honest advertising
And no, I am not saying that Microsoft should blatently lie, or that government regulators should do nothing about it if they do (save the strawman arguments, please). I am saying that depending on politicians or corporations to look out for you is naive at best, blatently stupid at worst. What is "troll" about pointing out that there is no substitute for due diligence? Or, what's "troll" about pointing out that uninformed decisions tend to get bad results?
Because there are too many knee-jerk idiot mods who don't consider context and can't be bothered to check facts.
At least when they mod me "Offtopic" they'll have done the job correctly.
Thank you for pointing that out, it helps me to put the current format war in perspective. I do remember that these occurred but for some reason (I'm open to this being a "grass is greener" fallacy on my part) they seem to have been relatively minor squabbles compared to the current HD-DVD v. Blu-Ray deal. For example, DivX had a built-in time-limit (a rather short one, too) that effectively "expired" any discs rented in that format which made it rather unpopular; it also required that the player had a phone line so it could literally phone-home and approve many actions. For these and other reasons I don't remember it having ever been a serious contender for DVD. The last such format war I remember seeing or hearing about that was on the scale of the current one was VHS v. Betamax.
Either way, I am grateful to see someone use genuinely constructive criticism. It's great when someone can make me go back and question what I said, since I usually learn something from that. Congratulations for having the class to do that without a single insult or ad-hominem attack.
This is why I'd like to see all such format wars result in both sides losing a lot of money.
Really now, which of these two scenarios sounds better?
Scenario 1: a format war with two major camps. Camp A and Camp B duke it out in the marketplace until one side eventually loses. If Camp A wins out, all customers who went with Camp B lose because they invested in a now-obsolete standard and vice-versa. Meanwhile, the uptake of new technology suffers since the wiser, more patient customers prudently decide to wait it out until there is a clear winner before they purchase anything. Those customers who purchased early and happened to choose the one that eventually won still suffer because a slower uptake of new technology means that fewer titles are available and the cost per player is more expensive than it would have been since this scenario doesn't take full advantage of economy of scale (that is, if the companies involved could have sold 10x the number of players, the cost per unit could have been lower).
Scenario 2: all companies involved decide that no one really wins a format war (particularly the end-users) and come up with an open standard, like we had with DVDs and CDs. Customers can now be confident that they won't be left holding the bag, so they more rapidly adopt the new technology. Customers get to choose based on things like which company/brand they prefer and who offers superior price/performance. More rapid uptake of the new format means more titles available.
Now, someone tell me why companies who decide to participate in Scenario 1 deserve to have that decision rewarded in any way? I wish we could send a clear message to all corporations that engaging in silly format wars like this is financial suicide, since that seems to be about the only way to discourage this kind of bullshit.
As the saying goes, "if you get into bed with Microsoft, you're going to get fucked."
Indeed, it will fail just as every previous attempt to legislate morality has failed. Like every victimless-crime law in the USA, it would require a complete and total surveillance state/police state to enforce, and you can be assured that the kind of people who want to create such a police state and rule over it are not good people who care about your best interests. There is something seriously wrong with any individual or group who wants to have that kind of power and their acquisition of it is far more dangerous than whatever it was they were supposedly going to protect us from -- with no exceptions. This kind of fanatical approach to "removing evil" or "protecting you from yourself" is evil in and of itself.
What such attempts can and have done is to take "evil" behavior (be it drugs, prostitution, gambling, whatever) and drive it underground. A completely unregulated, illegal market for such things has always made them more dangerous. Additionally, I wonder if the proponents of Prohibition were willing to have the deaths of everyone who was killed by the likes of Al Capone on their conscience? That pesky Law of Unintended Consequences is something from which people repeatedly refuse to learn.
I wish we could evolve past this silly notion that good and evil are nothing more than sufficiently-comprehensive lists of "do's" and "dont's", as I think this is where the idea that "forced to behave a certain way = good person" comes from. The whole thing really is a denial of the spiritual nature of human beings and the moral struggles that occur within each person that the outside world never sees. I find it quite ironic that such denials typically come from major religions.
I don't feel sorry for them in the slightest. It's not like IE/ActiveX's security track record is some big secret that would take a great deal of effort to find out about. People are voluntarily using a program with an unusually poor security history and are having security problems -- where is the surprise?
You could argue from the victim mentality and say "but they don't know any better", to which I would ask, do you think it's reasonable to work with what you do not understand and expect a good result? I'm growing tired of this fallacy that Microsoft or Norton or anyone else is going to do a good job of looking out for your interests; we've been operating under that idea for a long time now and it fails routinely (perhaps because software vendors don't have product liability like any other company would, but protecting yourself is much easier than changing that). To paraphrase a quote I once saw on here, some people learn by study, some learn from the mistakes of others, while some must figure things out the hard way. Lighting a fire under the asses of that third crowd can only end up being a good thing.
I'm not sure how important it is that those sites become more secure because two specific (albeit high-traffic) sites is a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. I consider it a great thing that they're hitting IE hard, however, since that one continues to be the common denominator in most of these attacks. Really though, if your browser is secure and does not trust remote content, then the site you visit is one of the least important parts of this equation. Having said that, I am forced to agree with your "good for the criminals" sentiment, since that seems to be about the only way that anything related to IE ever improves. Certainly, good design principles or an idea of "the right thing to do" hasn't produced a proactive, prevantative approach to security (as demonstrated by OpenBSD); at least the reactive "well now that this is being exploited, perhaps we should fix that" approach is better than nothing. With the resources at Microsoft's disposal, however, they could do with a Web browser what the much smaller, less-funded OpenBSD team has done with an operating system. To the people who are exploited by this, I wonder how it feels to know that Microsoft could have done a better job but couldn't be bothered.
The GP was saying that this could have a serious downside. Reminding us of the advantages (i.e. "how it will be sold") does not magically negate this disadvantage. Unfortunately, most people are passive enough that they won't consider this downside until something undesirable happens, like the situation with Myspace/Facebook/etc where suddenly employers became interested in that information. Better to foresee such a possibility ahead of time.
Personally, I think "Identity 2.0" is a solution in search of a problem. I've yet to ever do anything online that made me feel like such a capability was missing, or that it would really improve my experience. I've yet to feel a need to build a "reputation" across multiple sites -- either what I write stands on its own merit, or it doesn't, and I'm satisfied with that. A reputation based on a consistent name is something I would compare to an appeal to authority ("his other posts on sites X, Y, Z were great, so we don't have to think about whether this one has merit!) or to a brand name. None of this appeals to me, but then my writings are not a product and I don't share this "pop-culture" (for lack of a better description, as it reminds me of celebrity-worshippers) need to have the approval/love/adoration/recognition of a bunch of strangers.
You really believe that they are, in fact, two separate parties who want to compete with each other? Why do you believe that? Because they claim to be? To quote Bill Hicks:
"They're all the same! I'll show you politics in America; here it is right here."
"I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs."
"I think the puppet on the Left is more to my liking.... hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holdin' up both puppets!"
"SHUT UP! Go back to bed, America, your government is in control. Here's 'Love Connection', watch this and get fat and stupid."
Pay attention and what you'll find is that the kinds of issues on which Democrats and Republicans oppose each other have a common property. Note, this is different from the tactic of finding a different method to get the same result but justfied by a different reason. The common thread is that none of the solutions proposed by either party have the effect of significantly altering the balance of power between the people and the government. So, you have the appearance (real or otherwise) of a constant fluctuation in the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans and it seems very effective at distracting from the steady trend of shifting power towards the government. When a duopoly controls a market, they can corrupt, manipulate and effectively control that market to the detriment of everyone else. Why do we have this silly idea that a duopoly controlling political power is somehow less prone to using these tactics than a duopoly controlling money alone?
What I used to say is that you can vote for a Republican and they will expand the size and power of government at the expense of personal liberty or you could vote for a Democrat and they will expand the size and power of government at the expense economic liberty. Or I would say that you could vote Republican to expand government in the name of the stock market and economic freedom, or you could vote Democrat to expand government in the name of saving the poor people and the environment. Over time the given reasons change, of course; now it's Iraq etc. but there will always be an $ISSUE_OF_THE_DAY that can fit this formula. The result is that if what you want is less government size and less government authority, you're effectively disenfranchised. If I really wanted to live in an eventual police state, I would consider this a work of genius.
Regarding your post, I'll give a simple analogy that should demonstrate why what you just said is a non-issue. If you want to give away all of your money, you're free to do so. I might have an opinion about that, but I will do nothing to stop you, nor will I advocate that anyone else should try to stop you. However, this does not mean that you are obligated to give away all of your money, nor does it mean that my refusal to give away my money is doing anything at all to interfere with your ability to do so.
Likewise, feel free to publish the details of your life if you want to. I have my opinions about that, but I will not try to stop you (that would be silly), nor will I advocate that anyone else should try to stop you (that would also be silly). However, this does not obligate me to do the same thing. If you are truly secure in your beliefs about how you should live your life, then you are happy with what you do. If what you want isn't good enough for you unless the other guy does the same, then you're another insecure bastard who wants to force his will on everyone else and that's the part I have a problem with. Note, there's nothing wrong with trying to persuade people to see things your way, but there is something very wrong with any failure to recognize that they have the right to choose how they want to live their lives just like you do.
Why would an antiprivacy person such as yourself feel forced to do anything? If you want to publish your entire life on the Internet (about most public place imaginable), no one is stopping you. I do not understand your objection here. Are you complaining that you have to go through a little effort to publish this information? Are you upset that there is not an automated system that publishes everything for you? I would call that a minor inconvenience (at worst) compared to how it feels to desire privacy and then have someone violate that right. That is why the reasonable default is "lots of privacy" and then someone can be more open than that if they please. It's just a fact that it's far easier to waive a right that you have than it is to reclaim a right that you have lost. Therefore, the two positions are not on equal ground. There is a superior choice, a reasonable default.
For the same reasons, I greatly prefer "opt in" advertising to "opt out" advertising. The people who opt in want what they are receiving; the people
The point is, not everyone wants to be so open as you have chosen to be and they should not be forced to do so. That is all. To disagree with me on this subject means that either a) you think that everyone does want to be as open are you are, or b) you think that people who don't want to be so open should be forced to do so anyway. The point is, what you want for your own life and whether or not you can understand why somebody wants something different is completely irrelevant, and the attitude of "what's good enough for me should be good enough for everybody" hints at a certain arrogance, especially when you think this is about whether or not information can be owned. It's not necessary for information to be owned to respect when people want to be left alone and to recognize their right to make that choice.
Personally, I have yet to ever receive a single benefit of any kind from a stranger who knew (or thought they knew) anything about me that I did not personally disclose to them. If you feel that this has benefitted you, then goody for you; I for one feel fulfilled in my life without the recognition and admiration of a bunch of complete strangers, most of whom I will never meet, and I really question the motives of someone who thinks they need that kind of attention. Personally, I think there's something unhealthy about it, and most people I have met who needed the admiration of strangers were terrified of real, personal intimacy due to various insecurities (most were children of divorce). If you don't have this need for attention from strangers, then you gain nothing from having everyone know your business and now it will either accomplish nothing or will make it much easier for someone with ill intent to cause damage. I consider it unwise for me to do something that has no chance of benefitting me and does have a chance of harming me. Simple.
"Proprietary" is a mischaracterization really, as I never claimed information could be owned in the same sense that you can own a car. That some of your friends feel that way is great; don't lump me with them because our beliefs sound superficially similar. This isn't isolated information for the sake of truth; it's about my life (which most certainly is mine) and whether random people have a legitimate claim to it. That the claim in question is informational in nature is irrelevant to this idea; on the same basis and for the same reasons, I would oppose anyone who thought they could help themselves to my time or my labor against my will (that's the key here) as well.
What I am saying is really a simple thing. If I want you to know something about me, I will tell you. If you don't like that I haven't told you something about me and you take it upon yourself to pry into my business against my will (again that's the key here), then I'm going to treat you like any other intruder and within the limits of the law, I am going to find a way to stop you. Consider it from the opposite viewpoint: if someone wants you to leave them alone and stay out of their affairs, as evidenced by the fact that either t