Email via Mozilla Thunderbird + Enigmail should give gnupg encryption good enough for most mail users. Can't find too many social media systems that offer gnupg as an option...
Usually the purpose of encryption is to keep communications private. That's difficult when getting lots of attention is mostly the point.
The country that was initially settled by religious nutjobs, which Europe was glad to get rid of?
Indeed, my theory is that they could have stopped the Puritans from making the voyage, but... why would they?
I can picture them now. "Heh, let THEM get upset over any future exposed nipples!" And long before there was television or a Super Bowl. That's some real foresight.
Seems like it's most likely to be branded "hate speech" when it is true.
"Hate speech" is just like the false accusations of "racism" and so on. It's a way to try to shut down the discussion at the point where it'd be appropriate to acknowledge that a valid point has been made. It's a cowardly escape route. It's for childish people who think that disagreeing with somoene makes them THE ENEMY and so admitting when THE ENEMY has made a good point and dealing with it like a mature adult (which, oh my god, might involve changing your own point of view) would mean aiding and abetting THE ENEMY. So clearly that can't be done.
Some kind of character attack must be made instead, of course with no corresponding burden of proof. I mean "racist" is a pretty damned serious accusation. It's like calling someone a thief -- you better have evidence. But the goal is not to fulfill a burden of proof. It is to shut down the conversation.
I don't know how it happened but a lot of two-year-olds somehow ended up in adult bodies. Perhaps our scientists should look into this.
When I decided to learn linux I knew no better; and started with gentoo. Mind you, they lacked an installer at the time, and I decided to start from boot strap. Again, I knew no better. But jesus did I learn about linux and computers in general. Gentoo has (had?) one of the most amazing communities I've ever encountered.
Later on I switched to ubuntu, and played around with various flavors like knoppix and mint. But these days I pretty much stick with centos - and prefer OSX merely for bash.
I sometimes search and read through the Gentoo forums even when the system in question is another distro. If you find your answer there, you will actually understand the issue and be able to adapt it to whatever other distro you're using.
When I discovered Gentoo some years ago, I knew I wanted to keep it.
With your installation experience, you may agree that what they once said about Slackware is true of Gentoo. "If you use another distro, you will learn that distro. If you use Gentoo, you will learn Linux."
Ran sw first in the mid 90's... ran away for quite a few years... then landed on Debian about 2006 or so... then Ubuntu, and now on Mint for the last 2 years. See, its not about increasing complexity, but less...
I've been using Gentoo on my desktop system for years now because I love to customize.
When I got a netbook, I put Mint on it. This replaced the Windows 7 Starter with which it came. For Windows, Win7 was pretty good and I didn't have too many complaints, but I'm not fond of Windows. I'm especially not fond of no central package manager, the constant threat of malware, and the general difficulty of scripting/automation when compared to *nix.
So I went with Mint. It was a more appropriate choice for a more modest computer, and it just seemed to be a very clean, solid distro. It doesn't have the strange quirks (usually audio-related) and hiccups that I've experienced more than once on vanilla Ubuntu/Kubuntu. The defaults were reasonable and many of them didn't need changing. The repositories have all the software I wanted, which is notable when you're used to the large number of ebuilds Gentoo provides. It was also most convenient that installing proprietary codecs was not the minor hassle it can be on most other Debian-derived distros.
Prior to Gentoo I have also tried Red Hat (years and years ago), Slackware, and Debian. I've also set up friends with Fedora and OpenSuse. Mint remains one of the best binary distros I have ever had the pleasure of using. I would recommend it to anyone who's after a nice desktop experience.
How many businesses do you know of that encourage customers purchase less of their product?
During the launch of a new highly anticipated gadget, such as a game console or a tablet computer, the manufacturer may place limits on the number of units that each customer can buy so as to discourage scalpers.
Just curious: if I am a company, why would I care about scalpers?
The only thing I can think of would be items like a game console, where the console itself is not very profitable and may even be a loss-leader. In that case, you want as many different customers to own one as possible so you can make the money on games, streaming media and other services. But then, scalpers want to make money too, so pricing themselves above what the market will bear isn't in their interests either.
So other than a "maybe", I can't think of a good reason why companies care about scalpers. Could you explain?
Oh, those poor oppressed rich people. Don't they benefit enough from the political and economic structure that enables them to earn vastly more than the average honest hard working laborer?
I believe your bitterness towards those who might be gaming the system is distorting your judgment here. I didn't say any of that because my heart bleeds for some billionaire and his fleet of private jets. I said it because allowing one group to systematically become a tyrant to any other group is the death of the nation. If you destroy the nation this way, everyone is worse off, rich and poor alike. As a matter of fact, the rich can relocate to another country easily enough, so really it is the poor who have the most to lose from this scenario.
If you want people to pay taxes, pay them enough so that they can pay taxes without taking food from their mouths. If you object to class warfare, stop the rich from waging class warfare on the rest of us.
Only a small subset of the rich are originating class warfare: the politicians. Most rich people don't want this to happen. Think about it. The more class warfare there is, the more hated the rich become.
The only reason the politicians are doing this is because it appeals to the base nature of people, the anger, envy, hatred, and the visceral satisfaction of taking somebody else down a peg or two. The purpose of that is to shut down reason and logic. That's what emotional appeals do. Class warfare and this obsession with group identity are highly effective emotional appeals.
A wiser, more emotionally mature populace recognizes this type of emotional appeal for what it is: a manipulation. They would respond not by focusing on the provided object of hatred, but by heavily scrutinizing the politicians who use such tactics. Most people don't like to be manipulated, but first they have to see with their own eyes that it is being done to them.
Let's compromise. Everyone should pay taxes. We'll have the poor pay a "token" gesture, while the rich can go back to the 92% tax rate they had under Eisenhower and FDR.
Personally, I don't hate them. In many cases, I would not want to be them. I believe that in my existence, which is materially modest but highly spiritual, I have more meaning and more of a life than someone who worries about his money 14 hours a day. I do not envy them because they have more stuff than I do. That would only make me a petty, spiteful person and would say nothing about them.
If you really want to do something for this country, take whatever steps are necessary to a) produce energy domestically and b) restore our manufacturing capability. Sustainable self-sufficiency should be a primary goal, with international trade relegated to a luxury that we enjoy but do not require. That's how you produce a rising tide that raises everyone's boat.
On the other hand, that's a very Western perspective.
I doubt very much that the girls who have their genitals mutilated - typically without anesthesia - against their will feel like their lack of consent is merely a Western idea.
I suspect a lot of people in China would argue that political dissidents victimize the entire nation and culture, which is a great deal worse than victimizing one person.
It takes a very cowardly, insecure person to feel so threatened by the mere presence of a different opinion and perspective. Cowardly, insecure people often try to compensate for this by acting quite fierce. Only a secure person can truly adhere to a "live and let live" philosophy. What is true for the person is also true for the group and the nation.
That's how I look at it -- but I have lived my entire life in America, so you would rather _expect_ me to see it that way. Most Westerners do, because Westerners value diversity of thought and a variety of different ways of looking at things much more than we value conformity and groupthink.
Just as you might say that Nation X is more technologically advanced than Nation Y, it's perfectly fine to say that one nation is more socially advanced than another. A country where peacefully expressing a dissenting opinion could get you imprisoned, physically harmed, or even killed is a backwards country. I tire of the ridiculous levels of relativism where everything is equally valid all the time, just "different". I doubt very much that the peaceful Falun Gong practitoners who were arrested, beaten, and worse (i.e. Tiananmen Square) felt that their oppressors were simply different. I very much believe they felt it was injustice. They didn't have to live in the USA to acquire that point of view.
Incidentally I think you overrate Western individualism. The only thing most people seem to do with it is to surrender it for the sake of conformity based on whatever is popular. We just have a wide variety of groups to which it can be surrendered.
I believe groupthink is worse when the members of the group falsely believe that they are extremely individualistic. In much of America, individualism is something to which we give lip service but actually being much different from the group is a great way to find out how petty and small-minded many people actually are.
It goes to ridiculous lengths in its expression. Did anyone else notice that suddenly, almost overnight, people started making mistakes like writing "loose" instead of "lose", where this was a very rare sight a few years ago? Of all the typos one could make while fingers move across keyboards, consider the likelihood that large numbers of people would all make this particular mistake. It's just an example, and not even a terribly good one, but when people cannot even make their own mistakes anymore, individuality is very much in question.
Or better yet, consider obesity. How do such large numbers of people all decide (not deciding IS a decision) to eat more calories than they burn all at once? There is no central coordinator and no formal conspiracy. They merely mimic each other. I mean, to become morbidly obese you first must become slightly obese, then moderately obese, then finally morbidly obese, over time. At any one point the person could say "you know, I keep doing the same thing and I keep getting the same result. If I continue along this course, I will continue to get the same result: gaining weight. Perhaps I should change something?" but they don't. After all, no one else is.
Tor was blocked by China. They've since added bridges intended to bypass the firewall. It's always been a cat and mouse game with China. Always will be. But right now, Tor works in China. Tomorrow, who knows.
The scary part is that they may intentionally allow it (after a token cat & mouse game) in order to perform ISP-wide deep packet inspection. Then they find out who's using Tor, assume they're trying to bypass censorship, and charge them with crimes.
Because that invites reciprocation of that attitude from other countries. Most people tend to get angry when foreigners from anywhere come into their country and intentionally disrespect the local cultural mores and laws.
I'll give you an easy, hyperbolic example:
By that same argument, how do you feel about Sudanese refugees performing female genital mutilation just down the street from where you live? How do you feel about them snorting in contempt at you when you show outrage, saying: "If a country doesn't respect my cultural norms, then why respect it at all?"
Etc. Etc.
While I don't generally oppose the point you are making (and I agree that the original poster's idea is a bad one), there is a flaw in your illustration.
Female genital mutilation has a victim. Accessing a forbidden Web site that is censored by insecure governments for political reasons does not. The two crimes are not in the same league. When law enforcement stops the former, they are protecting human rights. When law enforcement stops the latter, they are infringing human rights.
“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
Ah, a very ironic statement, considering there is hardly anything moral about accessing the internet these days...something tells me this statement was for a far loftier purpose than ensuring that porn habits are fed while traveling.
Porn is much, MUCH loftier than the desire to censor it.
Oh NO! The government is trying to figure out the numbers in demographics, so it can help form policy.
Is there a reason you cannot form policy by treating all people equally, without prying into what they do behind closed doors?
For example, are a particular groups of people located in a particular area where they can be better served with State or City services, vs the large overhead of a Feds.
In the long run, all people are better served when federal resources are used only when that's the only way to get the job done. For example, only the federal government can fight a foreign war. Yes I realize that big tax purse held by the feds can look mighty tempting, but you wind up creating a monster in the long term (just look at the current US government versus what the Founders had in mind).
What part of that 48 percent that doesn't pay taxes are actually low life free loaders, and what percentage are people really trying to make a difference in the world.
Everyone should pay *something*, even if it's two cents a year. Since so many have been programmed to think in terms of class warfare, let me note here and now that I am not rich, not by any stretch of the word. I'm not waxing my yacht; I'm trying to make ends meet. Yes, I should pay something, even if it's just a token gesture.
The problem is when the percentage who pay no taxes exceeds 50%, they become a tyranny to the minority who do and the result is the decline and destruction of the nation. The situation can be exploited to attain easy victories in elections. That's what class warfare is all about. That's why politicians do it. They pour that much energy and spend that much time talking about something not to help you and me, but to get elected again.
Do we even bother measuring if a polity that is in place is working or not? Do we bother setting a metric of saying a policy is considered a success if it reaches this goal vs not.
Apparently not. We still have a War on (some) Drugs that clearly isn't working, has never worked, is not going to work. Do you really believe the main problem is that we haven't yet found out how many of the drug dealers are gay? Do you think that will make a failed idea suddenly start working? The War on (some) Drugs is a failure to understand human nature, not some demographic.
The Canadian politicians are merely watching how US politicians get elected again and again by rabble-rousing tactics like class warfare when it comes to income disparities, and old-fashioned divide-and-conquer when it comes to ethnic, religious and racial minorities. They too would like something that gets them elected again and again while drowning out with noise many legitimate criticisms against them.
I've been waiting 3 hours for lubuntu-desktop to install dozens of unnecessary packages for me and now it's failed and refuses to give me LXDE.
Really? It hardly takes me that long to build KDE - from source - on Gentoo. And I don't just mean kwin, I mean ALL packages provided by the KDE team, including games, utilities, etc. Gentoo calls the package kde-meta (a meta package depending on all the KDE software). That's on my modest desktop machine. KDE is quite a bit larger than LXDE. You seem to be doing something wrong.
On my significantly more modest netbook, I went with Linux Mint. On my 3mbit DLS connection installing KDE took about 15-20 minutes. Of course, these were binary packages, but like before, I went with the full-blown KDE install. KDE is quite a bit larger than LXDE. I assume (since you did not specify) that you were not building from source, so this is a fair comparison: binary packages to binary packages. 15-20 minutes and success, compared to 3 hours and failure. You seem to be doing something wrong.
Honestly you sound like a drunk driver who wants to blame Ford for making a crashable car. Oh, and the fact you haven't cited a single error message that you received is noted.
Wouldn't it be easier to simply grant anybody any patent they want, and then revoke it if another party produces evidence of obviousness or prior art?
We already have its worst-case scenario - ridiculous patents, virtually the same one granted to several different parties, and the parties suing each other over their "portfolios".
Might as well skip the years of up-front research that do nobody any good, and cut straight to the lawsuits.
Yeah that'll be just great for individual inventors and startups. Can't afford millions of dollars and years of time in massive legal battles? Hah well too bad, effectively no patent protection for you!
The word 'privacy' is quite loaded and is used in a lot of other contexts. The PUA CG is proposed to have a narrow scope so it can efficiently address the privacy of the web browser state. The W3C already has other forums to develop other areas of privacy and they are welcome to it.
The second and third sentences go together. The first has nothing to do with them.
Anyone who reads that summary and comprehended what they read would know that no claim to solve ALL privary issues of every sort was made. Only a particular subset of a particular nature is being claimed.
If they did not comprehend what they read, the actual writing needs to cater to those who did. Only under these circumstances does the person who did not understand change into the person who does. Dumbing everything down means they can comfortably avoid learning anything new. They can do that without even the tiniest inconvenience of skipping this particular story. That's too much.
With the number of things we need to worry about these days, smart metering is absolutely at the bottom. There are a million ways to fool it, and the information isn't all that interesting any way (unless you get really excited about when people use hair dryers and air con).
So you are willfully neglecting the principle, merely because you see no current significance to its presently immediate applications?
Most of these "things to worry about" boil down to a few major philosophical ideas. You can understand that and focus on the major ideas. You can also fail to understand that and see millions of "issues" that you'd never have time for because you are unable to grasp how they are interrelated and proceed from the same root. Life is full of choices.
I work for a smart meter company (not these douches in question) and your making it sound like we have this god like power, when there is a lot less data there than you think which can be very easily masked by a number of things.
I appreciate what you're saying, though you must understand that you are not the most unbiased source of information.
That you wouldn't abuse what power can be had, does not mean Origin is the only one who will. They are proving that it takes much, much less than "god-like power" to hassle me and betray my trust. I do not hire an electric utility to rat me out to debt collectors. I hire them to provide electricity. I give them money, they give me units of electricity, and our relationship should end there.
Until we really do solve this gigantic social problem of "I can't just live my life and let other people live theirs, with a policy of non-interference based on respecting that anything you choose not to actively share is none of my fucking business, because that would be too easy" then we're going to keep playing whack-a-mole with each new opportunity to spy on your neighbor and approve or disapprove of how he/she lives.
Until the problem is really solved and people start realizing that if you care so much about how other people live, it means you are a pathetic nobody who is not living your own life (as a side-effect this would destroy the entire tabloid/paparazzi industry), then privacy is the only reasonable way to go. The only really effective way to do that is on a need-to-know basis. What with current database and retention capabilities, what seems harmless now could bite you in the future. People who were denied employment because of legal yet slightly-not-politically-correct Facebook posts discovered that the hard way.
I never asked the world to work this way. In fact, I have repeatedly spoken out against the course it's on. So long as the world insists on doing it this way, I will do whatever is necessary to avoid getting caught up in it. You think that's an argument against the potential benefits of smart meters, or the benevolence of the average employee? That's a very single-minded position. It could only come from taking it too personally merely because you work in the industry. That's what I mean about bias. What I am actually talking about is far greater than you, me, or any single company.
it and php can require the very things it needs to bring you an good game, jsut as the evil corporate use tracks the website urls...., there should be a separation somehow.....
The root of the problem is externally-directed people who will buy something because they're told in kiss-your-ass language that it would be a great idea. There is no short-term solution to that, now that it's become so common and well-established. So, this is only a partial solution, but Adblock Plus (with Privacy lists) + NoScript + Redirect Remover + a good/etc/hosts file, maybe also RequestPolicy works quite well. Once you get these things set up, you can more or less forget about them.
It's also nice to use StartPage.com instead of directly using Google.com.
Slashdot Mirror
Email via Mozilla Thunderbird + Enigmail should give gnupg encryption good enough for most mail users. Can't find too many social media systems that offer gnupg as an option...
Usually the purpose of encryption is to keep communications private. That's difficult when getting lots of attention is mostly the point.
You wouldn't encrypt a billboard, would you?
The country that was initially settled by religious nutjobs, which Europe was glad to get rid of?
Indeed, my theory is that they could have stopped the Puritans from making the voyage, but ... why would they?
I can picture them now. "Heh, let THEM get upset over any future exposed nipples!" And long before there was television or a Super Bowl. That's some real foresight.
It's pretty disgusting that you can monetize images of someone's brain. I wonder how Einstein would feel about that.
Well, he DID work at the patent office...
It's only hate speech if it's not true.
Seems like it's most likely to be branded "hate speech" when it is true.
"Hate speech" is just like the false accusations of "racism" and so on. It's a way to try to shut down the discussion at the point where it'd be appropriate to acknowledge that a valid point has been made. It's a cowardly escape route. It's for childish people who think that disagreeing with somoene makes them THE ENEMY and so admitting when THE ENEMY has made a good point and dealing with it like a mature adult (which, oh my god, might involve changing your own point of view) would mean aiding and abetting THE ENEMY. So clearly that can't be done.
Some kind of character attack must be made instead, of course with no corresponding burden of proof. I mean "racist" is a pretty damned serious accusation. It's like calling someone a thief -- you better have evidence. But the goal is not to fulfill a burden of proof. It is to shut down the conversation.
I don't know how it happened but a lot of two-year-olds somehow ended up in adult bodies. Perhaps our scientists should look into this.
When I decided to learn linux I knew no better; and started with gentoo. Mind you, they lacked an installer at the time, and I decided to start from boot strap. Again, I knew no better. But jesus did I learn about linux and computers in general. Gentoo has (had?) one of the most amazing communities I've ever encountered. Later on I switched to ubuntu, and played around with various flavors like knoppix and mint. But these days I pretty much stick with centos - and prefer OSX merely for bash.
I sometimes search and read through the Gentoo forums even when the system in question is another distro. If you find your answer there, you will actually understand the issue and be able to adapt it to whatever other distro you're using.
When I discovered Gentoo some years ago, I knew I wanted to keep it.
With your installation experience, you may agree that what they once said about Slackware is true of Gentoo. "If you use another distro, you will learn that distro. If you use Gentoo, you will learn Linux."
I was funrollooping the fuck out of that shit, bro.
Haha. Ricer!
Slackware covers all your needs...
Ran sw first in the mid 90's... ran away for quite a few years... then landed on Debian about 2006 or so... then Ubuntu, and now on Mint for the last 2 years. See, its not about increasing complexity, but less...
I've been using Gentoo on my desktop system for years now because I love to customize.
When I got a netbook, I put Mint on it. This replaced the Windows 7 Starter with which it came. For Windows, Win7 was pretty good and I didn't have too many complaints, but I'm not fond of Windows. I'm especially not fond of no central package manager, the constant threat of malware, and the general difficulty of scripting/automation when compared to *nix.
So I went with Mint. It was a more appropriate choice for a more modest computer, and it just seemed to be a very clean, solid distro. It doesn't have the strange quirks (usually audio-related) and hiccups that I've experienced more than once on vanilla Ubuntu/Kubuntu. The defaults were reasonable and many of them didn't need changing. The repositories have all the software I wanted, which is notable when you're used to the large number of ebuilds Gentoo provides. It was also most convenient that installing proprietary codecs was not the minor hassle it can be on most other Debian-derived distros.
Prior to Gentoo I have also tried Red Hat (years and years ago), Slackware, and Debian. I've also set up friends with Fedora and OpenSuse. Mint remains one of the best binary distros I have ever had the pleasure of using. I would recommend it to anyone who's after a nice desktop experience.
How many businesses do you know of that encourage customers purchase less of their product?
During the launch of a new highly anticipated gadget, such as a game console or a tablet computer, the manufacturer may place limits on the number of units that each customer can buy so as to discourage scalpers.
Just curious: if I am a company, why would I care about scalpers?
The only thing I can think of would be items like a game console, where the console itself is not very profitable and may even be a loss-leader. In that case, you want as many different customers to own one as possible so you can make the money on games, streaming media and other services. But then, scalpers want to make money too, so pricing themselves above what the market will bear isn't in their interests either.
So other than a "maybe", I can't think of a good reason why companies care about scalpers. Could you explain?
Oh, those poor oppressed rich people. Don't they benefit enough from the political and economic structure that enables them to earn vastly more than the average honest hard working laborer?
I believe your bitterness towards those who might be gaming the system is distorting your judgment here. I didn't say any of that because my heart bleeds for some billionaire and his fleet of private jets. I said it because allowing one group to systematically become a tyrant to any other group is the death of the nation. If you destroy the nation this way, everyone is worse off, rich and poor alike. As a matter of fact, the rich can relocate to another country easily enough, so really it is the poor who have the most to lose from this scenario.
If you want people to pay taxes, pay them enough so that they can pay taxes without taking food from their mouths. If you object to class warfare, stop the rich from waging class warfare on the rest of us.
Only a small subset of the rich are originating class warfare: the politicians. Most rich people don't want this to happen. Think about it. The more class warfare there is, the more hated the rich become.
The only reason the politicians are doing this is because it appeals to the base nature of people, the anger, envy, hatred, and the visceral satisfaction of taking somebody else down a peg or two. The purpose of that is to shut down reason and logic. That's what emotional appeals do. Class warfare and this obsession with group identity are highly effective emotional appeals.
A wiser, more emotionally mature populace recognizes this type of emotional appeal for what it is: a manipulation. They would respond not by focusing on the provided object of hatred, but by heavily scrutinizing the politicians who use such tactics. Most people don't like to be manipulated, but first they have to see with their own eyes that it is being done to them.
Let's compromise. Everyone should pay taxes. We'll have the poor pay a "token" gesture, while the rich can go back to the 92% tax rate they had under Eisenhower and FDR.
Personally, I don't hate them. In many cases, I would not want to be them. I believe that in my existence, which is materially modest but highly spiritual, I have more meaning and more of a life than someone who worries about his money 14 hours a day. I do not envy them because they have more stuff than I do. That would only make me a petty, spiteful person and would say nothing about them.
If you really want to do something for this country, take whatever steps are necessary to a) produce energy domestically and b) restore our manufacturing capability. Sustainable self-sufficiency should be a primary goal, with international trade relegated to a luxury that we enjoy but do not require. That's how you produce a rising tide that raises everyone's boat.
Gah, slashdot ate my formatting.
It's the Preview button's fault!
On the other hand, that's a very Western perspective.
I doubt very much that the girls who have their genitals mutilated - typically without anesthesia - against their will feel like their lack of consent is merely a Western idea.
I suspect a lot of people in China would argue that political dissidents victimize the entire nation and culture, which is a great deal worse than victimizing one person.
It takes a very cowardly, insecure person to feel so threatened by the mere presence of a different opinion and perspective. Cowardly, insecure people often try to compensate for this by acting quite fierce. Only a secure person can truly adhere to a "live and let live" philosophy. What is true for the person is also true for the group and the nation.
That's how I look at it -- but I have lived my entire life in America, so you would rather _expect_ me to see it that way. Most Westerners do, because Westerners value diversity of thought and a variety of different ways of looking at things much more than we value conformity and groupthink.
Just as you might say that Nation X is more technologically advanced than Nation Y, it's perfectly fine to say that one nation is more socially advanced than another. A country where peacefully expressing a dissenting opinion could get you imprisoned, physically harmed, or even killed is a backwards country. I tire of the ridiculous levels of relativism where everything is equally valid all the time, just "different". I doubt very much that the peaceful Falun Gong practitoners who were arrested, beaten, and worse (i.e. Tiananmen Square) felt that their oppressors were simply different. I very much believe they felt it was injustice. They didn't have to live in the USA to acquire that point of view.
Incidentally I think you overrate Western individualism. The only thing most people seem to do with it is to surrender it for the sake of conformity based on whatever is popular. We just have a wide variety of groups to which it can be surrendered.
I believe groupthink is worse when the members of the group falsely believe that they are extremely individualistic. In much of America, individualism is something to which we give lip service but actually being much different from the group is a great way to find out how petty and small-minded many people actually are.
It goes to ridiculous lengths in its expression. Did anyone else notice that suddenly, almost overnight, people started making mistakes like writing "loose" instead of "lose", where this was a very rare sight a few years ago? Of all the typos one could make while fingers move across keyboards, consider the likelihood that large numbers of people would all make this particular mistake. It's just an example, and not even a terribly good one, but when people cannot even make their own mistakes anymore, individuality is very much in question.
Or better yet, consider obesity. How do such large numbers of people all decide (not deciding IS a decision) to eat more calories than they burn all at once? There is no central coordinator and no formal conspiracy. They merely mimic each other. I mean, to become morbidly obese you first must become slightly obese, then moderately obese, then finally morbidly obese, over time. At any one point the person could say "you know, I keep doing the same thing and I keep getting the same result. If I continue along this course, I will continue to get the same result: gaining weight. Perhaps I should change something?" but they don't. After all, no one else is.
Breaking unjust laws is not distasteful. It is a moral imperative.
That's one half of civil disobedience.
The other half? It's also imperative that you be willing to suffer the consequences of the crime.
Tor was blocked by China. They've since added bridges intended to bypass the firewall. It's always been a cat and mouse game with China. Always will be. But right now, Tor works in China. Tomorrow, who knows.
The scary part is that they may intentionally allow it (after a token cat & mouse game) in order to perform ISP-wide deep packet inspection. Then they find out who's using Tor, assume they're trying to bypass censorship, and charge them with crimes.
Because that invites reciprocation of that attitude from other countries. Most people tend to get angry when foreigners from anywhere come into their country and intentionally disrespect the local cultural mores and laws.
I'll give you an easy, hyperbolic example:
By that same argument, how do you feel about Sudanese refugees performing female genital mutilation just down the street from where you live? How do you feel about them snorting in contempt at you when you show outrage, saying: "If a country doesn't respect my cultural norms, then why respect it at all?"
Etc. Etc.
While I don't generally oppose the point you are making (and I agree that the original poster's idea is a bad one), there is a flaw in your illustration.
Female genital mutilation has a victim. Accessing a forbidden Web site that is censored by insecure governments for political reasons does not. The two crimes are not in the same league. When law enforcement stops the former, they are protecting human rights. When law enforcement stops the latter, they are infringing human rights.
“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
Ah, a very ironic statement, considering there is hardly anything moral about accessing the internet these days...something tells me this statement was for a far loftier purpose than ensuring that porn habits are fed while traveling.
Porn is much, MUCH loftier than the desire to censor it.
(Anonymous users frequently sign on as "anonymous" and are asked for their email address as a password.)
Which is always root@the.ftp.server's.hostname.com, right?
Oh NO! The government is trying to figure out the numbers in demographics, so it can help form policy.
Is there a reason you cannot form policy by treating all people equally, without prying into what they do behind closed doors?
For example, are a particular groups of people located in a particular area where they can be better served with State or City services, vs the large overhead of a Feds.
In the long run, all people are better served when federal resources are used only when that's the only way to get the job done. For example, only the federal government can fight a foreign war. Yes I realize that big tax purse held by the feds can look mighty tempting, but you wind up creating a monster in the long term (just look at the current US government versus what the Founders had in mind).
What part of that 48 percent that doesn't pay taxes are actually low life free loaders, and what percentage are people really trying to make a difference in the world.
Everyone should pay *something*, even if it's two cents a year. Since so many have been programmed to think in terms of class warfare, let me note here and now that I am not rich, not by any stretch of the word. I'm not waxing my yacht; I'm trying to make ends meet. Yes, I should pay something, even if it's just a token gesture.
The problem is when the percentage who pay no taxes exceeds 50%, they become a tyranny to the minority who do and the result is the decline and destruction of the nation. The situation can be exploited to attain easy victories in elections. That's what class warfare is all about. That's why politicians do it. They pour that much energy and spend that much time talking about something not to help you and me, but to get elected again.
Do we even bother measuring if a polity that is in place is working or not? Do we bother setting a metric of saying a policy is considered a success if it reaches this goal vs not.
Apparently not. We still have a War on (some) Drugs that clearly isn't working, has never worked, is not going to work. Do you really believe the main problem is that we haven't yet found out how many of the drug dealers are gay? Do you think that will make a failed idea suddenly start working? The War on (some) Drugs is a failure to understand human nature, not some demographic.
The Canadian politicians are merely watching how US politicians get elected again and again by rabble-rousing tactics like class warfare when it comes to income disparities, and old-fashioned divide-and-conquer when it comes to ethnic, religious and racial minorities. They too would like something that gets them elected again and again while drowning out with noise many legitimate criticisms against them.
I guess prevention just isn't as sexy as overreaction?
And you might prevent the wrong things.
Likewise, the one tragedy that DOES unfortunately hurt/maim/kill someone could have been a one-time event.
So clearly, we should never do anything about anything. Right?
I've been waiting 3 hours for lubuntu-desktop to install dozens of unnecessary packages for me and now it's failed and refuses to give me LXDE.
Really? It hardly takes me that long to build KDE - from source - on Gentoo. And I don't just mean kwin, I mean ALL packages provided by the KDE team, including games, utilities, etc. Gentoo calls the package kde-meta (a meta package depending on all the KDE software). That's on my modest desktop machine. KDE is quite a bit larger than LXDE. You seem to be doing something wrong.
On my significantly more modest netbook, I went with Linux Mint. On my 3mbit DLS connection installing KDE took about 15-20 minutes. Of course, these were binary packages, but like before, I went with the full-blown KDE install. KDE is quite a bit larger than LXDE. I assume (since you did not specify) that you were not building from source, so this is a fair comparison: binary packages to binary packages. 15-20 minutes and success, compared to 3 hours and failure. You seem to be doing something wrong.
Honestly you sound like a drunk driver who wants to blame Ford for making a crashable car. Oh, and the fact you haven't cited a single error message that you received is noted.
Wouldn't it be easier to simply grant anybody any patent they want, and then revoke it if another party produces evidence of obviousness or prior art?
We already have its worst-case scenario - ridiculous patents, virtually the same one granted to several different parties, and the parties suing each other over their "portfolios".
Might as well skip the years of up-front research that do nobody any good, and cut straight to the lawsuits.
Yeah that'll be just great for individual inventors and startups. Can't afford millions of dollars and years of time in massive legal battles? Hah well too bad, effectively no patent protection for you!
The word 'privacy' is quite loaded and is used in a lot of other contexts. The PUA CG is proposed to have a narrow scope so it can efficiently address the privacy of the web browser state. The W3C already has other forums to develop other areas of privacy and they are welcome to it.
The second and third sentences go together. The first has nothing to do with them.
Anyone who reads that summary and comprehended what they read would know that no claim to solve ALL privary issues of every sort was made. Only a particular subset of a particular nature is being claimed.
If they did not comprehend what they read, the actual writing needs to cater to those who did. Only under these circumstances does the person who did not understand change into the person who does. Dumbing everything down means they can comfortably avoid learning anything new. They can do that without even the tiniest inconvenience of skipping this particular story. That's too much.
I think it might be better to have a shorter copyright term followed by a further copyleft term though.
That's a damned good idea. Can't say I have much more to add.
With the number of things we need to worry about these days, smart metering is absolutely at the bottom. There are a million ways to fool it, and the information isn't all that interesting any way (unless you get really excited about when people use hair dryers and air con).
So you are willfully neglecting the principle, merely because you see no current significance to its presently immediate applications?
Most of these "things to worry about" boil down to a few major philosophical ideas. You can understand that and focus on the major ideas. You can also fail to understand that and see millions of "issues" that you'd never have time for because you are unable to grasp how they are interrelated and proceed from the same root. Life is full of choices.
I work for a smart meter company (not these douches in question) and your making it sound like we have this god like power, when there is a lot less data there than you think which can be very easily masked by a number of things.
I appreciate what you're saying, though you must understand that you are not the most unbiased source of information.
That you wouldn't abuse what power can be had, does not mean Origin is the only one who will. They are proving that it takes much, much less than "god-like power" to hassle me and betray my trust. I do not hire an electric utility to rat me out to debt collectors. I hire them to provide electricity. I give them money, they give me units of electricity, and our relationship should end there.
Until we really do solve this gigantic social problem of "I can't just live my life and let other people live theirs, with a policy of non-interference based on respecting that anything you choose not to actively share is none of my fucking business, because that would be too easy" then we're going to keep playing whack-a-mole with each new opportunity to spy on your neighbor and approve or disapprove of how he/she lives.
Until the problem is really solved and people start realizing that if you care so much about how other people live, it means you are a pathetic nobody who is not living your own life (as a side-effect this would destroy the entire tabloid/paparazzi industry), then privacy is the only reasonable way to go. The only really effective way to do that is on a need-to-know basis. What with current database and retention capabilities, what seems harmless now could bite you in the future. People who were denied employment because of legal yet slightly-not-politically-correct Facebook posts discovered that the hard way.
I never asked the world to work this way. In fact, I have repeatedly spoken out against the course it's on. So long as the world insists on doing it this way, I will do whatever is necessary to avoid getting caught up in it. You think that's an argument against the potential benefits of smart meters, or the benevolence of the average employee? That's a very single-minded position. It could only come from taking it too personally merely because you work in the industry. That's what I mean about bias. What I am actually talking about is far greater than you, me, or any single company.
it and php can require the very things it needs to bring you an good game, jsut as the evil corporate use tracks the website urls...., there should be a separation somehow.....
The root of the problem is externally-directed people who will buy something because they're told in kiss-your-ass language that it would be a great idea. There is no short-term solution to that, now that it's become so common and well-established. So, this is only a partial solution, but Adblock Plus (with Privacy lists) + NoScript + Redirect Remover + a good /etc/hosts file, maybe also RequestPolicy works quite well. Once you get these things set up, you can more or less forget about them.
It's also nice to use StartPage.com instead of directly using Google.com.