There's also DuckDuckGo.com. Despite the name, it's actually quite decent, and the "related" non-boolean search lands on top.
The difference is, DuckDuckGo is headquartered in Paoli, Pennsylvania. You have to dig through their site a while to find that; try the Hiring section. That means they are subject to US fed/state data retention laws and government requests.
Ixquick is headquartered in The Netherlands and (understandably) boasts about not having provided one byte of data to the US government. They've won EU awards because those governments actually recognize the value of privacy. Please see this page for a reference.
Don't get me wrong, DuckDuckGo sounds good. Sounds like they certainly don't actively track you. But I don't see them bragging that they "keep no data to hand over in the first place" and I would be truly surprised if that is entirely an option for them. Certainly they can't tell the US government to piss up a flagpole if and when fishing expeditions come in.
The simple fact is that we cannot ever trust companies to actually honor the social contract of subscription models. Since they cannot stick to the rules, the only option is for end-users endure the constant ads, since at least in this case we don't have to pay subscription costs.
Which is why I have no qualms whatsoever about blocking ads and taking multiple technological measures to make myself difficult to track. Let them cry a river about it. The real problem is: what little trust may have been there has been thoroughly eroded by an advertising industry showing time and again that it, as an industry, is completely incapable of being reasonable or otherwise regulating itself.
It's too bad for the marketing majors that they want to offer a "service" I do not need and do not want and have chosen to provide endless examples of "offering" (shoving it down throats) it in the most sleazy and underhanded ways. They'll get along without me, somehow.
My intuition is that I'd be just fine with the only content available being content that did not seek a revenue stream. I thought the internet was better back then anyway.
The geek always thinks that way
Because way back then the Internet was his personal playground. He was the both content provider and consumer. I haven't forgiven him yet for the multitude of user-unfriendly clients he devised for communication over the snail slow connections of the dial-up modem days.
Yeah. Currently we're working hard on the problem of operating rooms being doctors' personal playgrounds. Anyone who complains about that, points out that doctors have the expertise, or produces any "practical" reason why surgical procedures were designed that way is, of course, advocating for the evil stranglehold doctors have on performing surgery. The doctors always think that way, you know.
I've been using bing for years mostly because I didn't want there to be only one search engine. Try them out. They have boolean searches. I know... the evil microsoft... but the search engine is good.
I've been using Startpage for years now. They perform a Google search on your behalf while guarding your privacy. They don't even log your IP address. They're the same company that runs Ixquick.com if you want a truly independent search engine to go with the privacy features (their own indexer, no dependency on Google). Personally I enjoy the idea of getting Google results without the Google tracking for which I never signed an agreement.
Sure you fucking can. Anything defined in such a way as to exclude other possible definitions can have the latter definitions be proven in the negative just as surely as the former definition can be in the positive.
3 != 4.
A triangle is not a square.
Red is not blue.
Hydrogen is not helium.
A dog is not a cat.
If the coin landed heads-up, the coin did not land tails-up.
If someone was in location A at time T, they could not have been in location B at time T committing crime C.
You are not smart.
In your examples you are not actually proving a negative (that something didn't happen). You are proving that something is not possible or could not have happened.
Possible or not possible are easy by comparison. Proving a negative means, "take this thing that really could have possibly happened, and prove that it didn't happen". A shape cannot both be a triangle and a square. A pure color at a single wavelength cannot both be red and blue. You are drastically underestimating the scope of how difficult it is to prove a negative. "This couldn't have happened because it is impossible" is actually a positive claim and as such, can be proven.
There's no reason the populace cannot both a) harden against as many security vulnerabilities as you reasonably can, and b) take back the political power from the ruling elite and institute oversight against massive surveillance and other governmental abuses, including severe criminal penalties against officials supporting them.
All you need a ethernet firmware that speaks to the CPU over DMA and reads out memory allowing the NSA to attack any OS running on top of that router.
Buy a non-router based piece of hardware and use that. You seriously cannot trust what you'll find inside a Linksys router people. The bug is below the software level so your fancy firmware does *nothing*.
There certainly are countermeasures you can (and should) take, but generally, applying technical solutions to political and social problems doesn't work long-term.
Real reporters and the jury actually noticed that the accused had an iPhone 4 at the time, which DOES NOT support accessing Siri [unless jailbroken, of which there was no evidence supplied to indicate it was], AND that all the prosecution introduced was a screen-shot of the Siri request.
Look, just because the guy was allegedly willing to kill someone in cold blood, that doesn't also mean he's willing to do something as drastic as infringe on anyone's intellectual property rights. I mean, let's be fair! There's no need to jump to such extreme conclusions.
libertarians are all about personal property, until it conflicts with another of their interests (often big business, but not always).
it's a quick way to tell what they really want. there's no really fundamental libertarian reason to not protect personal data as property; it's just that the vogue in pop-libertarianism right now is to strip consumer rights in favor of tech companies. why? well, maybe because pop-libertarians are techies, and they want that shit.
What I call the genuine form of libertarianism (small 'l') is about maximizing personal freedom, in the "life, liberty, and property" sense. The basic idea is that my right to swing my hand ends at the tip of your nose. Adult people should be able to do whatever they want that does not infringe on the rights of others, and then reap the consequences. For example: if you can manage to responsibly use any drugs you like, you should be able to; if you drive impaired because you refuse to do it responsibly, society has a legitimate reason to apprehend and punish you. Someone else who thinks drug use is always a horrible practice is free to practice that belief by not doing it themselves, but has no legitimate justification for persecuting a responsible user.
Privacy should be this way: your choice. I'm in favor of strong privacy protections in law because right now there is not much choice in the matter. If I want the Googles of the world to have my information, it should be because I knowingly, personally, actively, and deliberately gave it to them myself. Anything less is an infringement of my privacy rights. There is a clear intent behind burying such things in Page Y of a legalese EULA and that intent is to make it as difficult as possible to exercise this choice. A device that transfers my data to someone else on my behalf, by default, without my actively configuring it that way, shows the same intent.
There is a movement or an effort, more prominent and vocal the last several years, to deliberately misrepresent that all libertarian thought is the same thing as anarcho-capitalism. Observe carefully and you'll find that most any idea that, if popular, would threaten the status quo has multitudes of deceptive propaganda-technique-using PR efforts directed against it, the goal of which is to tarnish that idea in the popular mind. Most liberterian philosophies have a concept of inalienable human rights and include the desire for a government, the main purpose of which is to protect those rights. Regulation of business is necessary because otherwise, corporations will use their intense concentrations of wealth, market power, and political clout to infringe on the rights of individuals. This is legitimate and not some kind of control-freak idea or Puritannical fantasy of telling others how to live. Anyone who is against it and represents themselves as the only libertarians in existence (and not a particularly extreme form) is lying to you, it's as simple as that.
Like the author Jeffrey Grupp explains, corporatism (as Mussolini called it) is the idea that the government, the major corporations, and the military function as one entity. It's always been this way since the kings of old; read up on the East India Company sometime. Eisenhower focused on the military and defense contract aspects and referred to it as the military-industrial complex. Sometimes it's called the military-industrial-media complex (so how 'bout those scary WMDs Iraq was supposedly threatening us with?). To focus on "government being evil" or "evil corporation" is a form of tunnel vision that denies the scope of the problem. It's one of those "pet causes" people get caught up in while nothing changes.
The problem with the marketing datamining is that many of these organizations are in bed with the government. There's a definite double standard here. If you hired someone to perform an illegal act on your behalf, both you and your hireling would be guilty of a crime. Yet somehow the government can pay companies for data that would be illegal for the government to directly collect itself and this is legal.
So if it were merely about trying to sell you "adult diapers" versus the regular kind, it would be more benign. At least in G. Gordon Liddy's day, surveillance was expensive, required a certain determination and commitment of resources, and consequently would only be done on targets considered important enough. With modern tech, the idea that "obviously I'm not interesting enough to spy on" is obsolete. This didn't happen though without plenty of support from government, media, marketers, and various other corporations all working towards their own common interests.
Instead of holding the people who commit crimes responsible for their crimes, you blame advertising for making them want to commit crimes. Typical liberal bullshit.
There is such a concept as aiding and abetting, or being an accessory to, a crime. Many people have been tried and convicted who themselves did not directly commit a crime.
If you don't believe that concept is applicable here, I'd like to know why. If someone else believes it does apply, I'd like to know their reasoning as well. I don't see how "liberal" or "conservative" has anything to do with it. It's a question of ethical responsibility, not political ideology. By failing to understand that, you're handwaving and dismissing a valid and worthy question about the nature of pervasive advertising and its effect on the population.
But the real problem is this impression that you have to be born 80% as smart as Einstein to get into this field, and that the learning curve is impossible for regular people. That's totally wrong. Average intelligence plus persistence is all you need.
What you really need is to deal with this anti-intellectualism that's so popular in the culture today, and replace it with genuine curiosity, a joy of discovery, and a delight at learning new things.
Do that, and the rest will naturally follow, and not just in software development.
in some cases they're no better than gambling (ie: buy tokens to feed into this jackpot like system to win a random digital item!)
Not that I disagree with you, but what part of the gaming industry isn't preying off of exactly the same neurons as gambling? Nearly every game, be you buying the game itself, in-game purchases, or DLC, is getting its revenue almost entirely due to exploiting pleasure-seeking behavior.
Gaming typically relies on skill, not chance. If you play most games long enough, you'll be able to consistently beat certain levels. If you win at the roulette wheel, you're no more likely than before to win again. That's the difference. Otherwise, "exploiting pleasure-seeking behavior" could be stretched to describe every last industry in existence beyond the sales of food, water, shelter, and basic utilities.
With the model of directly purchasing the game itself (and no in-game purchases, like standard PC/console gaming) you can at least read about the game and have a reasonable expectation about what you are paying for. The real problem with in-game purchases is that the game is "free" or low-cost in the most technical sense, but after you invest many hours advancing the game you find that you can't really prosper without making additional purchases. It could be construed as a form of bait-and-switch.
The other problem would be that many of these games are aimed at children who make purchases the parents later get stuck with, but this problem begins in the home and should be solved within the home by actual parenting. That's not as convenient as using the tablet like a cheap babysitter but it would certainly be more worthwhile. If you wanted to solve this by government action, that's simple too: declare that these purchases are contractual in nature (the parent agreed to pay charges made to the phone bill or whatever) and that minors who make them cannot be held to a contract, therefore the companies cannot collect money when children make them. *Poof* - end of shitty business model.
Once every couple of years, I see a post that needs to be +6 or higher. This was one of them.
Your words are calm, clear, rational, logical, and point out the real issue.
Thank you for sharing.
Reading your kind words is humbling, sir. You honor yourself by being one of the minority who read something like that and try to understand where it is coming from and how it could work, rather than playing the hostile audience and trying your best to tear it down because it opposes a common notion.
I don't care if you drink yourself to an early grave.
I don't care if you smoke yourself to an early grave.
I don't care if you eat yourself to an early grave.
"I don't care if you live or die..."
This is all about more gov control, taxes, regulation to protect us from ourselves.
"...but I do think you should listen to my opinion."
Well, at least you gave us fair warning! Antisocial people are, paradoxically, the first to give their opinion on how the world should be run.
There's nothing more profoundly anti-social than trying to control other people and force them to live only the way that you want them to.
Perhaps you've just heard of this thing called society. It has been all about conforming to social norms with punishments for doing tabboo things for thousands of years now. The only real changes have been what is a norm and what is a tabboo.
Rather than patronizingly talking down to me like this, try to understand where I'm coming from. I'm not talking about crimes that have victims here, like robbery and murder. Preventing those is legitimately within the purpose of having a government and a society. I'm talking about the wrong of trying to dictate lifestyles, of trying to micromanage the way others live based not on crimes but on approval. It's not terribly different from dictating to people what they may read, listen to, watch, and discuss.
American tyranny is what they call a soft tyranny. It's not so much jack-booted thugs waving guns around, demanding compliance. That's hard tyranny. Soft tyranny is when you no longer treat adult people like responsible adults because "you know what's good for them". The only way to have a healthy, long-term viable society is to expect adults to be responsible, to make their own decisions in any instance that does not involve a crime with a victim, and then (importantly) to accept the consequences of those decisions. Any effort to circumvent this will eventually destroy the very society itself.
This is just another instance of him saying "trust us, we're google, give us all your private information, what could possibly go wrong".
Yes, at some point it's quite rational to decide "this one entity has enough power". He's really very smooth, though. I'll hand him that:
By "these things," he means privacy concerns and fear that the data might be misused. But he also pointed to Street View as a case where privacy concerns mostly melted away after people used it and found it helpful. "In the early days of Street View, this was a huge issue, but it's not really a huge issue now. People understand it now and it's very useful. And it doesn't really change your privacy that much. A lot of these things are like that."
That's a very diplomatic way to go about it. People often mistake that for honesty and openness in fact. It's basically a highly polished way of saying, "if you were educated you would agree with me."
I don't care if you drink yourself to an early grave.
I don't care if you smoke yourself to an early grave.
I don't care if you eat yourself to an early grave.
"I don't care if you live or die..."
This is all about more gov control, taxes, regulation to protect us from ourselves.
"...but I do think you should listen to my opinion."
Well, at least you gave us fair warning! Antisocial people are, paradoxically, the first to give their opinion on how the world should be run.
There's nothing more profoundly anti-social than trying to control other people and force them to live only the way that you want them to.
GP has the right idea. "I don't care if you... " means "I don't care to force my will on you". If you want advice from someone, you're free to ask.
I am not making any statement on gun control (not derailing an article about drinking deaths) other than that there isn't a comparison that's both simple and reasonable between gun control and prohibition.
The one thing they both have absolutely in common: the implicit assumption that inanimate objects are the cause of social problems, and the belief that controlling those inanimate objects will magically make social problems go away. Perhaps you can see how childish this viewpoint is?
The way I see it, the underlying cause of the social problems is a form of energy. It doesn't ever really go away, it just changes form. Guns and booze happen to be powerful, readily available tools allowing this energy to express itself. It can't be done, but if you somehow could make absolutely 100% of all guns and booze disappear overnight, you would find that this energy will move on to the next most convenient methods of expressing itself. Perhaps stabbings and abuse of some other drug would rise. Perhaps some other, unforeseen methods would emerge.
What no one really seems interested in doing is really understanding the underlying causes for why people want to abuse alcohol instead of using it responsibly, why people want to shoot either themselves or others absent provocation, and what can be done to transform this energy into something better. Actually understanding and beginning to change this would start with a complete restructuring of governments, corporations, educational institutions, and other institutions to make them adhere to their true purposes and to treat people like human beings rather than automatons. Where it would end, I couldn't tell you.
The real obstacle is that no one with the power to move in that direction has any incentive to do it: the current model is too profitable for them. But blaming our problems on objects that have no volition and no desire of their own certainly makes for a great distraction! It lets us waste time debating frivolous non-solutions with no hope of convincing "the opposition" of anything, meanwhile we avoid all these uncomfortable questions about the way we live, whom that serves, and precisely how we were taught to live that way.
The amount of regulation and consideration is driven by who can write the best, most emotional propaganda and purchase the finest access to mass media while operating through various PR firms and front groups to make it less obvious that they are doing so.
Fixed that for you. It's been that way for a long time, ever since Sigmund Freud's nephew decided that calling propaganda "public relations" was much more euphemistic than Woodrow Wilson and Walter Lippmann's term for it which was "manufactured consent".
Such a coincidence, just today I read this:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...
"10 Facts About The SWATification Of America That Everyone Should Know"
"The number of SWAT team raids in the United States every year is now more than 25 times higher than it was back in 1980."
The best way to change that is to legalize all personal drug use. If the War on Drugs was successful at accomplishing any of its stated goals then we could have a
debate about this, but it isn't, and no honest person who looks into the matter would conclude otherwise. Anyone who wants to do drugs can easily obtain them.
The only things we can control are whether criminal gangs or legitimate businesses will profit from this, and whether law enforcement gets to keep its single biggest excuse for militarizing itself. The idea that we can stop people who want drugs from using them is a dangerous fantasy with staggering social costs and always has been.
If you really want to minimize the impact of the portion of drug users who are irresponsible, a small fraction of what we spend now could be put towards treating it as a public medical/mental health issue, not a criminal/law-enforcement issue. Treatment can be offered to those who need it. Legal drugs would be cheap, plentiful and unadulterated, making their use safer and removing the incentive for the worst of addicts to rob and steal to obtain them. It would also go a long way towards creating the expectation that people should be responsible adults who do not need to be told how to live by a paternalistic government that parasitically profits from their problems.
Is there some reason that you cannot spell liberal correctly?
I can't speak for that poster but I can guess why he spelled it that way. "Liberal" used to mean something more like "libertarian" before its meaning was perverted and distorted from "liberal exercise of civil rights" to mean "liberal imposition of government power". Sometimes the term "Classical Liberal" is used in an attempt to reverse this deliberate and underhanded confusion.
Even "libertarian" itself has been deliberately distorted from "advocates a small government limited to a) public works, b) national defense, and c) law enforcement and those things only, imposing only those restrictions which are truly necessary for a healthy society" to its new co-opted meaning of "anarcho-capitalist who wants even police to be private security that not all can afford". The intent there is obvious: change it from something hard to really argue against to something easily demonized that most people will learn to dismiss without thought or examination.
You'll find that the more an ideal threatens the use and expansion of power, the more propaganda is applied to change the meaning of words until they finally represent the very opposite of what they once stood for. It's the real-life equivalent of George Orwell's Newspeak. The "languages evolve so absolutely every change is totally legitimate and should never be resisted!" crowd are more or less Satan's little helpers here. Like most of Satan's little helpers, they think they're doing a good thing and would be horrified to see the money changing hands, the intentional authors of propaganda (called "PR"), and the concept of "manufactured consent" that established itself in this nation during the days of Woodrow Wilson.
So anyway, I read that to mean "ill-liberal" as in "not liberal" and certainly not "Classical Liberal" like what that word once meant.
That's generally a bug, not a feature. You seem to like this show so you are probably inclined to tell us how they got it right, but still. This aspect is rarely done well in any show.
As libertarian when I hear public private partnership I know to be truly scared; to they point where a new public agency sounds like a better alternative.
This. It's an aristocracy of pull; if you have pull in federal/regional/municipal government, you get immunity from law. These "partnerships" are precisely the sorts of "corporations" whose bosses were the villains, not the heroes, of Atlas Shrugged.
But to comprehend that, people would have to actually read and understand something before deciding to be against it...
Yeah yeah, it's always America's fault. Never any need for being responsible for one's own actions. Sure.
With a few rare medical exceptions, people who can take responsibility for their own actions generally don't get fat in the first place. If they do at all, it's only a little, then they say "oh guess I need to correct this" and it never becomes a real problem.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also DuckDuckGo.com. Despite the name, it's actually quite decent, and the "related" non-boolean search lands on top.
The difference is, DuckDuckGo is headquartered in Paoli, Pennsylvania. You have to dig through their site a while to find that; try the Hiring section. That means they are subject to US fed/state data retention laws and government requests.
Ixquick is headquartered in The Netherlands and (understandably) boasts about not having provided one byte of data to the US government. They've won EU awards because those governments actually recognize the value of privacy. Please see this page for a reference.
Don't get me wrong, DuckDuckGo sounds good. Sounds like they certainly don't actively track you. But I don't see them bragging that they "keep no data to hand over in the first place" and I would be truly surprised if that is entirely an option for them. Certainly they can't tell the US government to piss up a flagpole if and when fishing expeditions come in.
2) it did not take into account the costs associated with the malware distributed by the various ad platforms.
That's not covered by the fee you paid to run Windows?
The simple fact is that we cannot ever trust companies to actually honor the social contract of subscription models. Since they cannot stick to the rules, the only option is for end-users endure the constant ads, since at least in this case we don't have to pay subscription costs.
Which is why I have no qualms whatsoever about blocking ads and taking multiple technological measures to make myself difficult to track. Let them cry a river about it. The real problem is: what little trust may have been there has been thoroughly eroded by an advertising industry showing time and again that it, as an industry, is completely incapable of being reasonable or otherwise regulating itself.
It's too bad for the marketing majors that they want to offer a "service" I do not need and do not want and have chosen to provide endless examples of "offering" (shoving it down throats) it in the most sleazy and underhanded ways. They'll get along without me, somehow.
My intuition is that I'd be just fine with the only content available being content that did not seek a revenue stream. I thought the internet was better back then anyway.
The geek always thinks that way
Because way back then the Internet was his personal playground. He was the both content provider and consumer. I haven't forgiven him yet for the multitude of user-unfriendly clients he devised for communication over the snail slow connections of the dial-up modem days.
Yeah. Currently we're working hard on the problem of operating rooms being doctors' personal playgrounds. Anyone who complains about that, points out that doctors have the expertise, or produces any "practical" reason why surgical procedures were designed that way is, of course, advocating for the evil stranglehold doctors have on performing surgery. The doctors always think that way, you know.
I've been using bing for years mostly because I didn't want there to be only one search engine. Try them out. They have boolean searches. I know... the evil microsoft... but the search engine is good.
I've been using Startpage for years now. They perform a Google search on your behalf while guarding your privacy. They don't even log your IP address. They're the same company that runs Ixquick.com if you want a truly independent search engine to go with the privacy features (their own indexer, no dependency on Google). Personally I enjoy the idea of getting Google results without the Google tracking for which I never signed an agreement.
You cannot prove a negative.
Sure you fucking can. Anything defined in such a way as to exclude other possible definitions can have the latter definitions be proven in the negative just as surely as the former definition can be in the positive.
3 != 4. A triangle is not a square. Red is not blue. Hydrogen is not helium. A dog is not a cat. If the coin landed heads-up, the coin did not land tails-up. If someone was in location A at time T, they could not have been in location B at time T committing crime C. You are not smart.
In your examples you are not actually proving a negative (that something didn't happen). You are proving that something is not possible or could not have happened.
Possible or not possible are easy by comparison. Proving a negative means, "take this thing that really could have possibly happened, and prove that it didn't happen". A shape cannot both be a triangle and a square. A pure color at a single wavelength cannot both be red and blue. You are drastically underestimating the scope of how difficult it is to prove a negative. "This couldn't have happened because it is impossible" is actually a positive claim and as such, can be proven.
There's no reason the populace cannot both a) harden against as many security vulnerabilities as you reasonably can, and b) take back the political power from the ruling elite and institute oversight against massive surveillance and other governmental abuses, including severe criminal penalties against officials supporting them.
All you need a ethernet firmware that speaks to the CPU over DMA and reads out memory allowing the NSA to attack any OS running on top of that router.
Buy a non-router based piece of hardware and use that. You seriously cannot trust what you'll find inside a Linksys router people. The bug is below the software level so your fancy firmware does *nothing*.
There certainly are countermeasures you can (and should) take, but generally, applying technical solutions to political and social problems doesn't work long-term.
Real reporters and the jury actually noticed that the accused had an iPhone 4 at the time, which DOES NOT support accessing Siri [unless jailbroken, of which there was no evidence supplied to indicate it was], AND that all the prosecution introduced was a screen-shot of the Siri request.
Look, just because the guy was allegedly willing to kill someone in cold blood, that doesn't also mean he's willing to do something as drastic as infringe on anyone's intellectual property rights. I mean, let's be fair! There's no need to jump to such extreme conclusions.
Signed,
-- The RIAA/MPAA
libertarians are all about personal property, until it conflicts with another of their interests (often big business, but not always).
it's a quick way to tell what they really want. there's no really fundamental libertarian reason to not protect personal data as property; it's just that the vogue in pop-libertarianism right now is to strip consumer rights in favor of tech companies. why? well, maybe because pop-libertarians are techies, and they want that shit.
What I call the genuine form of libertarianism (small 'l') is about maximizing personal freedom, in the "life, liberty, and property" sense. The basic idea is that my right to swing my hand ends at the tip of your nose. Adult people should be able to do whatever they want that does not infringe on the rights of others, and then reap the consequences. For example: if you can manage to responsibly use any drugs you like, you should be able to; if you drive impaired because you refuse to do it responsibly, society has a legitimate reason to apprehend and punish you. Someone else who thinks drug use is always a horrible practice is free to practice that belief by not doing it themselves, but has no legitimate justification for persecuting a responsible user.
Privacy should be this way: your choice. I'm in favor of strong privacy protections in law because right now there is not much choice in the matter. If I want the Googles of the world to have my information, it should be because I knowingly, personally, actively, and deliberately gave it to them myself. Anything less is an infringement of my privacy rights. There is a clear intent behind burying such things in Page Y of a legalese EULA and that intent is to make it as difficult as possible to exercise this choice. A device that transfers my data to someone else on my behalf, by default, without my actively configuring it that way, shows the same intent.
There is a movement or an effort, more prominent and vocal the last several years, to deliberately misrepresent that all libertarian thought is the same thing as anarcho-capitalism. Observe carefully and you'll find that most any idea that, if popular, would threaten the status quo has multitudes of deceptive propaganda-technique-using PR efforts directed against it, the goal of which is to tarnish that idea in the popular mind. Most liberterian philosophies have a concept of inalienable human rights and include the desire for a government, the main purpose of which is to protect those rights. Regulation of business is necessary because otherwise, corporations will use their intense concentrations of wealth, market power, and political clout to infringe on the rights of individuals. This is legitimate and not some kind of control-freak idea or Puritannical fantasy of telling others how to live. Anyone who is against it and represents themselves as the only libertarians in existence (and not a particularly extreme form) is lying to you, it's as simple as that.
No, EVUL CORPORATION is a distractionary meme.
Like the author Jeffrey Grupp explains, corporatism (as Mussolini called it) is the idea that the government, the major corporations, and the military function as one entity. It's always been this way since the kings of old; read up on the East India Company sometime. Eisenhower focused on the military and defense contract aspects and referred to it as the military-industrial complex. Sometimes it's called the military-industrial-media complex (so how 'bout those scary WMDs Iraq was supposedly threatening us with?). To focus on "government being evil" or "evil corporation" is a form of tunnel vision that denies the scope of the problem. It's one of those "pet causes" people get caught up in while nothing changes.
The problem with the marketing datamining is that many of these organizations are in bed with the government. There's a definite double standard here. If you hired someone to perform an illegal act on your behalf, both you and your hireling would be guilty of a crime. Yet somehow the government can pay companies for data that would be illegal for the government to directly collect itself and this is legal.
So if it were merely about trying to sell you "adult diapers" versus the regular kind, it would be more benign. At least in G. Gordon Liddy's day, surveillance was expensive, required a certain determination and commitment of resources, and consequently would only be done on targets considered important enough. With modern tech, the idea that "obviously I'm not interesting enough to spy on" is obsolete. This didn't happen though without plenty of support from government, media, marketers, and various other corporations all working towards their own common interests.
Instead of holding the people who commit crimes responsible for their crimes, you blame advertising for making them want to commit crimes. Typical liberal bullshit.
There is such a concept as aiding and abetting, or being an accessory to, a crime. Many people have been tried and convicted who themselves did not directly commit a crime.
If you don't believe that concept is applicable here, I'd like to know why. If someone else believes it does apply, I'd like to know their reasoning as well. I don't see how "liberal" or "conservative" has anything to do with it. It's a question of ethical responsibility, not political ideology. By failing to understand that, you're handwaving and dismissing a valid and worthy question about the nature of pervasive advertising and its effect on the population.
But the real problem is this impression that you have to be born 80% as smart as Einstein to get into this field, and that the learning curve is impossible for regular people. That's totally wrong. Average intelligence plus persistence is all you need.
What you really need is to deal with this anti-intellectualism that's so popular in the culture today, and replace it with genuine curiosity, a joy of discovery, and a delight at learning new things.
Do that, and the rest will naturally follow, and not just in software development.
Not that I disagree with you, but what part of the gaming industry isn't preying off of exactly the same neurons as gambling? Nearly every game, be you buying the game itself, in-game purchases, or DLC, is getting its revenue almost entirely due to exploiting pleasure-seeking behavior.
Gaming typically relies on skill, not chance. If you play most games long enough, you'll be able to consistently beat certain levels. If you win at the roulette wheel, you're no more likely than before to win again. That's the difference. Otherwise, "exploiting pleasure-seeking behavior" could be stretched to describe every last industry in existence beyond the sales of food, water, shelter, and basic utilities.
With the model of directly purchasing the game itself (and no in-game purchases, like standard PC/console gaming) you can at least read about the game and have a reasonable expectation about what you are paying for. The real problem with in-game purchases is that the game is "free" or low-cost in the most technical sense, but after you invest many hours advancing the game you find that you can't really prosper without making additional purchases. It could be construed as a form of bait-and-switch.
The other problem would be that many of these games are aimed at children who make purchases the parents later get stuck with, but this problem begins in the home and should be solved within the home by actual parenting. That's not as convenient as using the tablet like a cheap babysitter but it would certainly be more worthwhile. If you wanted to solve this by government action, that's simple too: declare that these purchases are contractual in nature (the parent agreed to pay charges made to the phone bill or whatever) and that minors who make them cannot be held to a contract, therefore the companies cannot collect money when children make them. *Poof* - end of shitty business model.
Once every couple of years, I see a post that needs to be +6 or higher. This was one of them.
Your words are calm, clear, rational, logical, and point out the real issue.
Thank you for sharing.
Reading your kind words is humbling, sir. You honor yourself by being one of the minority who read something like that and try to understand where it is coming from and how it could work, rather than playing the hostile audience and trying your best to tear it down because it opposes a common notion.
I don't care if you drink yourself to an early grave. I don't care if you smoke yourself to an early grave. I don't care if you eat yourself to an early grave.
"I don't care if you live or die..."
This is all about more gov control, taxes, regulation to protect us from ourselves.
"...but I do think you should listen to my opinion."
Well, at least you gave us fair warning! Antisocial people are, paradoxically, the first to give their opinion on how the world should be run.
There's nothing more profoundly anti-social than trying to control other people and force them to live only the way that you want them to.
Perhaps you've just heard of this thing called society. It has been all about conforming to social norms with punishments for doing tabboo things for thousands of years now. The only real changes have been what is a norm and what is a tabboo.
Rather than patronizingly talking down to me like this, try to understand where I'm coming from. I'm not talking about crimes that have victims here, like robbery and murder. Preventing those is legitimately within the purpose of having a government and a society. I'm talking about the wrong of trying to dictate lifestyles, of trying to micromanage the way others live based not on crimes but on approval. It's not terribly different from dictating to people what they may read, listen to, watch, and discuss.
American tyranny is what they call a soft tyranny. It's not so much jack-booted thugs waving guns around, demanding compliance. That's hard tyranny. Soft tyranny is when you no longer treat adult people like responsible adults because "you know what's good for them". The only way to have a healthy, long-term viable society is to expect adults to be responsible, to make their own decisions in any instance that does not involve a crime with a victim, and then (importantly) to accept the consequences of those decisions. Any effort to circumvent this will eventually destroy the very society itself.
How many fingers am I holding up?
Screw you Google. "Do no evil" my ass.
This is just another instance of him saying "trust us, we're google, give us all your private information, what could possibly go wrong".
Yes, at some point it's quite rational to decide "this one entity has enough power". He's really very smooth, though. I'll hand him that:
By "these things," he means privacy concerns and fear that the data might be misused. But he also pointed to Street View as a case where privacy concerns mostly melted away after people used it and found it helpful. "In the early days of Street View, this was a huge issue, but it's not really a huge issue now. People understand it now and it's very useful. And it doesn't really change your privacy that much. A lot of these things are like that."
That's a very diplomatic way to go about it. People often mistake that for honesty and openness in fact. It's basically a highly polished way of saying, "if you were educated you would agree with me."
I don't care if you drink yourself to an early grave. I don't care if you smoke yourself to an early grave. I don't care if you eat yourself to an early grave.
"I don't care if you live or die..."
This is all about more gov control, taxes, regulation to protect us from ourselves.
"...but I do think you should listen to my opinion."
Well, at least you gave us fair warning! Antisocial people are, paradoxically, the first to give their opinion on how the world should be run.
There's nothing more profoundly anti-social than trying to control other people and force them to live only the way that you want them to.
... " means "I don't care to force my will on you". If you want advice from someone, you're free to ask.
GP has the right idea. "I don't care if you
I am not making any statement on gun control (not derailing an article about drinking deaths) other than that there isn't a comparison that's both simple and reasonable between gun control and prohibition.
The one thing they both have absolutely in common: the implicit assumption that inanimate objects are the cause of social problems, and the belief that controlling those inanimate objects will magically make social problems go away. Perhaps you can see how childish this viewpoint is?
The way I see it, the underlying cause of the social problems is a form of energy. It doesn't ever really go away, it just changes form. Guns and booze happen to be powerful, readily available tools allowing this energy to express itself. It can't be done, but if you somehow could make absolutely 100% of all guns and booze disappear overnight, you would find that this energy will move on to the next most convenient methods of expressing itself. Perhaps stabbings and abuse of some other drug would rise. Perhaps some other, unforeseen methods would emerge.
What no one really seems interested in doing is really understanding the underlying causes for why people want to abuse alcohol instead of using it responsibly, why people want to shoot either themselves or others absent provocation, and what can be done to transform this energy into something better. Actually understanding and beginning to change this would start with a complete restructuring of governments, corporations, educational institutions, and other institutions to make them adhere to their true purposes and to treat people like human beings rather than automatons. Where it would end, I couldn't tell you.
The real obstacle is that no one with the power to move in that direction has any incentive to do it: the current model is too profitable for them. But blaming our problems on objects that have no volition and no desire of their own certainly makes for a great distraction! It lets us waste time debating frivolous non-solutions with no hope of convincing "the opposition" of anything, meanwhile we avoid all these uncomfortable questions about the way we live, whom that serves, and precisely how we were taught to live that way.
The amount of regulation and consideration is driven by who can write the best, most emotional propaganda and purchase the finest access to mass media while operating through various PR firms and front groups to make it less obvious that they are doing so.
Fixed that for you. It's been that way for a long time, ever since Sigmund Freud's nephew decided that calling propaganda "public relations" was much more euphemistic than Woodrow Wilson and Walter Lippmann's term for it which was "manufactured consent".
Such a coincidence, just today I read this: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... "10 Facts About The SWATification Of America That Everyone Should Know" "The number of SWAT team raids in the United States every year is now more than 25 times higher than it was back in 1980."
The best way to change that is to legalize all personal drug use. If the War on Drugs was successful at accomplishing any of its stated goals then we could have a debate about this, but it isn't, and no honest person who looks into the matter would conclude otherwise. Anyone who wants to do drugs can easily obtain them.
The only things we can control are whether criminal gangs or legitimate businesses will profit from this, and whether law enforcement gets to keep its single biggest excuse for militarizing itself. The idea that we can stop people who want drugs from using them is a dangerous fantasy with staggering social costs and always has been.
If you really want to minimize the impact of the portion of drug users who are irresponsible, a small fraction of what we spend now could be put towards treating it as a public medical/mental health issue, not a criminal/law-enforcement issue. Treatment can be offered to those who need it. Legal drugs would be cheap, plentiful and unadulterated, making their use safer and removing the incentive for the worst of addicts to rob and steal to obtain them. It would also go a long way towards creating the expectation that people should be responsible adults who do not need to be told how to live by a paternalistic government that parasitically profits from their problems.
Is there some reason that you cannot spell liberal correctly?
I can't speak for that poster but I can guess why he spelled it that way. "Liberal" used to mean something more like "libertarian" before its meaning was perverted and distorted from "liberal exercise of civil rights" to mean "liberal imposition of government power". Sometimes the term "Classical Liberal" is used in an attempt to reverse this deliberate and underhanded confusion.
Even "libertarian" itself has been deliberately distorted from "advocates a small government limited to a) public works, b) national defense, and c) law enforcement and those things only, imposing only those restrictions which are truly necessary for a healthy society" to its new co-opted meaning of "anarcho-capitalist who wants even police to be private security that not all can afford". The intent there is obvious: change it from something hard to really argue against to something easily demonized that most people will learn to dismiss without thought or examination.
You'll find that the more an ideal threatens the use and expansion of power, the more propaganda is applied to change the meaning of words until they finally represent the very opposite of what they once stood for. It's the real-life equivalent of George Orwell's Newspeak. The "languages evolve so absolutely every change is totally legitimate and should never be resisted!" crowd are more or less Satan's little helpers here. Like most of Satan's little helpers, they think they're doing a good thing and would be horrified to see the money changing hands, the intentional authors of propaganda (called "PR"), and the concept of "manufactured consent" that established itself in this nation during the days of Woodrow Wilson.
So anyway, I read that to mean "ill-liberal" as in "not liberal" and certainly not "Classical Liberal" like what that word once meant.
plus it has time-travel
That's generally a bug, not a feature. You seem to like this show so you are probably inclined to tell us how they got it right, but still. This aspect is rarely done well in any show.
This. It's an aristocracy of pull; if you have pull in federal/regional/municipal government, you get immunity from law. These "partnerships" are precisely the sorts of "corporations" whose bosses were the villains, not the heroes, of Atlas Shrugged.
But to comprehend that, people would have to actually read and understand something before deciding to be against it ...
Yeah yeah, it's always America's fault. Never any need for being responsible for one's own actions. Sure.
With a few rare medical exceptions, people who can take responsibility for their own actions generally don't get fat in the first place. If they do at all, it's only a little, then they say "oh guess I need to correct this" and it never becomes a real problem.