I can't tell if you're trolling or not. The worth of all forms of money has always come from people being willing to trade goods and services for it. Do you think the Sumerian clay tokens representing sheep and cows had intrinsic value? No, they were worth the sheep or cow someone had agreed to trade for them.
It's the difference between a fiat currency and a representative currency. The worth of the representative currency is determined by the amount of a real physical asset that is available.
The real difference is that there is a way fiat currency is commonly abused that doesn't happen with representative currency.
There is a built-in unsustainability caused by the private companies that issue fiat currency, like the Federal Reserve. When they create fiat money out of nothing, they loan it to the US Government in exchange for what is basically an IOU from the US Government. But they attach interest to each dollar they create. That means there are not enough total dollars in the system to pay back all of the debt. Therefore, the US Government cannot possibly pay back its debt. It can't ever do that, not even if the total federal budget were less than the tax revenues, because the money is loaned at interest the moment it's created.
The US Government has to borrow more money from the Fed, at interest, to make payments on the existing interest. Therefore, not only can it never get out of debt, the debt must also continue to increase.
Thus, fiat currency dollars don't represent wealth. They represent debt. If all debts were somehow paid off then there would be no money in circulation.
Even money backed by gold and silver, and gold and silver themselves, are valued more highly than their intrinsic worth: they are demanded as media of exchange far above the demand for them for use in jewelry, electronics, et cetera, and the market bears a price for them far higher than if they were only valued for their intrinsic properties, in exactly the same way the market bears a higher price for US dollars than for the paper and ink that dollar bills are printed with.
The difference is that representative currency dollars directly represent a specified amount of a tangible asset. They can be redeemed for that amount of that asset at any time. Their value cannot be lower than the value of that tangible asset. They represent wealth, not debt. If all debts were paid off under that system, you'd just have a lot of happy creditors. It's an inherently stable and sustainable system that doesn't require large amounts of built-in debt.
Unless some alchemists find an easy, dirt-cheap way to transmute worthless materials to gold, silver, or whatever the currency represents, then it has a value that can't suddenly disappear the way fiat currencies can (and have, several times throughout history).
The SEC regulations for offering shares to US investors are a lot stricter than for non-US. My guess is that they cannot meet the requirements, which I would take as a big red flag that Facebook is severely overvalued right now.
This is an explanation that makes sense. Thank you.
I suppose I'm not proud of it, but am I the only one who felt a sense of glee at the idea of Facebook investors getting screwed? Granted, ripping people off is wrong... yet I can't seem to find any real injustice when a site designed to separate fools from their privacy by dangling convenience in front of them also manages to separate fools from their money by dangling promises of easy wealth in front of them. The whole thing seems like water seeking its own level.
If my assessment is correct, I want to say it will give people something to reconsider the next time they want to stumble over themselves in order to pile up on the next trendy bandwagon, but I have to admit that's not correct. For both the users and investors, these are people who get caught up in the excitement of an "everybody else is doing it" trend.
A little evaluation would have told them that Facebook is another one of those that will struggle mightily to have any sort of long-term viability (even if it's somehow not overvalued right now). They didn't want to perform even that little bit of dispassionate inquiry. I'd like to think that getting stung badly would give them a new willingness to do that, but I've seen too many other scenarios where this didn't happen. What happens instead is that a victim mentality sets in, it's entirely someone else's fault (i.e. it's a blame game) and the cause-and-effect between one's decision-making and the outcome one experiences is vehemently denied. Then the next momentary trend is sought. Like I said, water seeks its own level.
No, they're saying they won't sell to US investors because of legal issues arising from the massive amounts of media coverage involved with their own investment in Facebook.
They think this move won't get media coverage? They think that in the age of the Internet, that any media covering any company that large is only national or regional? That doesn't sound like a solid reason to me, though I admit I've witnessed large organizations doing crazier things.
I think they're a bunch of scumbags but I don't think they're stupid. I think this move is designed to avoid SEC scrutiny as others have said. How they can do that when both they and Facebook are US companies is the only part I'm missing. My guess is that the SEC has jurisdictional problems when the victim of a scam is overseas but I really have no idea how that works and I am not a lawyer.
...oddly enough, diminishing our military presence somewhat would dramatically reduce our deficit, and probably improve relations with more than a few foreign powers.
Not using the flimsiest of intelligence to justify fighting aggressive, offensive foreign wars against nations which are not a threat to us would be a drastic improvement, yes. It'd also make us look a lot less like the thugs of the world.
Note: There is a difference between "scaling back our military somewhat" and "disbanding the military."
The people who need to have that pointed out to them because they immediately knee-jerk and reach for an extreme interpretation of what you said... well, they weren't worth reaching anyway in my opinion. They are not exactly lovers of reason and tend to lower the quality of any discussion in which they participate.
They assume you're stupid and they're not stupid -- that's why they will never experience the following thought: "what he wrote seems completely absurd and extreme in a really obvious way that I can point out with a one-liner... hey, maybe that means I have not correctly understood what he was saying."
Do you realize how retarded it makes you look to use multiple accounts to rail against people for hiding behind pseudonymity?
You understand that nobody takes you seriously, right?
What he fails to recognize is the hypocrisy of a) claiming to give out your true name and address because you're "not cowering" and b) creating many accounts to (unsuccessfully) hide from bad karma and a starting post score of -1.
As the saying goes, there are none so blind as those who refuse to see. I guess now that the user "twitter" with all his sockpuppet accounts is no longer active, someone else thought they needed to fill the void. At least "twitter" made some attempt to pretend that they were not sockpuppet accounts.
What if you remove the quotes around "friends"? A lot of people on facebook have real friends, and on first signing up years ago, they were led to believe that Facebook would respect privacy settings (not reset them to fully open, or suddenly remove some privacy settings, like the profile pics, home-town info, likes, etc), and would only use the data internally for marketing within Facebook, not sell it to other companies.
If it were merely "led to believe" then they'd abandon Facebook at the very first sign of failing to respect their privacy. There have been many such signs and they steadily increase in both number and severity. Thus, "led to believe" is a misnomer; this is more like "religiously insist on believing in the face of contrary evidence". That's the problem.
Increasingly, ordinary people are finding it to be unacceptable.
After a while "ordinary" starts to mean "after having touched the hot stove for the 100th time and received a burn for the 100th time, begins to suspect that touching a hot stove is a bad idea and that this is a predictable outcome." That's the problem.
If it was up to me, as King of the World, IE would've complied in the early days. It didn't happen then, and it's not happening now.
It's not happening now precisely because of the apathy you advocate. No one wants to lift a finger against it the second that might mean a little discomfort. Microsoft is a very shrewd marketing company -- they understand this. It is what they count on.
What I don't think you appreciate is that if most people decided that they'd never tolerate the kind of shit Microsoft likes to pull, no matter what the cost, Microsoft would respond by not trying to pull that shit in the first place. The unwillingness to put up with it is the strongest deterrent. If it's genuine enough, you'll almost never have to actually prove it. A savvy company like Microsoft would wet their finger, hold it up towards the wind, and quickly decide that taking an action most people will resist is not a good business strategy.
By not playing along with The Great Evil, you just cut off users, and when you're trying to create a social networking site, that's insane.
Anyone who thinks you're going to resist or even just undermine anything remotely "evil", let alone a "Great Evil", without ever suffering any kind of discomfort or lack of luxury has, very simply, never struggled for anything worthy in his life. It's one thing to be a bit lazy. It's quite another to have no principles for which you are willing to take a stand, to be so thoroughly compromised and dominated by convenience that you prioritize it above all else.
So, my ass, which is highly tuned for laziness, or "the path of least resistance" says good luck to Diaspora by cutting off potential users in the early beta phase. Might as well make a lynx based social network.
Actually if that meant Diaspora users tend to have enough of a conscience to be aware of the network effects of their actions, and therefore would not use IE on principle alone because of its harmful effects on the standardized Web, that would be a major plus for Diaspora. It would be a unique feature qualitatively distinguishing it from all other social networks.
Actually I used to have my contact info in my profile because I trust my friends
My friends already know my name, address, phone number, e-mail address, where I work, etc...... There would be no need to ever put it on Facebook.
This is one of the most seldom-appreciated aspects of Facebook and you nailed it.
Facebook is not terribly useful for communicating with people who really are close friends of yours. Y'know, people you actually know well, who know you well, with whom you spend time face-to-face and are involved in each other's lives. In this capacity it's redundant.
Facebook is "useful" for having a lot of extremely superficial relationships often involving people with whom you will spend little or no actual quality time. The reason you would have to supply personal contact information to your "friends" is because they're not friends; they're acquaintences at best.
That's why Facebook tends to encourage behaviors that are not geared towards meaningful, close interaction. It caters to those who really want the attention of people they hardly know or don't know at all. That's why so many of its users don't value their privacy and are willing to surrender it. It's why so many apologists will show up in these discussions denying, rationalizing, and minimizing any abuses related to privacy or any questions about whether the users are acting in their own interests.
They have to. Without a steady supply of superficial attention from casual strangers and acquaintences, they'd be forced to perform some introspection and understand why they so badly crave attention and recognition, why they crave those things from relationships that are so superficial and fungible as to be disposable.
Because Facebook still provides a useful service with no real competitor.
I propose that non-use is a competitor.
I choose non-use over use of FB. simply not necessary at all for anyone. its like soda, it really performs NO useful function but somehow they convince people they 'need' to have soda with their meal instead of just water, for example.
FB is important only to those so self-involved. its almost 'cute' in a way, that those users think the world really revolves around them.
those of us who never joined see how silly the whole give-away concept is.
Those of us who never joined quickly see another thing too: the futility of trying to explain that to anyone who doesn't already understand it.
I suppose addicts of hard drugs have more denials and rationalizations than the merely egotistical and self-indulgent, but not by much.
The mentality can be summarized thusly: "but but but, it performs some trivial and transient convenience that's not really necessary -- clearly that outweighs every principled objection!" Sometimes there are shades of "you're a big meanie for finding fault with my new Shiny!"
It seem not jut your information, but also you friends.
I noticed this for some apps:
Access my friends' information
Birthdays, Religious and political views, Family members and relationship statuses, Significant others and relationship details, Home towns, Current locations, Likes, music, TV, movies, books, quotes, Activities, Interests, Education history, Work history, Online presence, Websites, Groups, Events, Notes, Photos, Videos, Photos and videos of them, 'About me' details and Facebook statuses
Why on earth would Facebook want to give this information to third parties, and worse to ones you have not given permission to, but your friend has.
Because you cannot sell what nobody want's to buy, information is what they can sell, the real question is why do people want to buy this information.
Because producing a truly useful product/service that people really want is not part of their business model.
No, they are marketers. Their goal is to get you to spend money in order to solve problems you didn't even know you had. For that, they need to know a lot about you. They especially need to know your tastes and preferences. They also like to know whether you are impulsive, whether you live beyond your means, whether you have irrationally strong emotions for particular subjects that can be manipulated to get you to identify with a brand, or have any other exploitable character flaws I've not listed here.
"get a real browser" message when you try to use IE is asinine.
Microsoft's refusal to produce a browser that will correctly render sites that work in every other major browser is what's asinine. What you're complaining about is merely a reaction to it. If you really want to identify problems, start with their source.
As Microsoft has plenty of wealth, resources, and talent it is reasonable to assume that its refusal to make a truly standards-compliant browser is deliberate. They are certainly capable of doing it; therefore if they don't, it is because they are choosing not to.
I used to be a web developing minion and I don't use IE but I sure spent tons of time optimizing sites for IE because that's what the majority of people use.
You were one Web developer who had to perform extra work to make your sites work in IE. How many Web developers exist worldwide? How many otherwise unnecessary hours have they collectively spent over the years just to accommodate this one browser? What is the total cost of all of this to the businesses that hire and employ those Web developers? Let's call this cost $BIG_FIGURE. Morally and/or ethically, how do you justify Microsoft deliberately and knowingly inflicting a cost of $BIG_FIGURE on an entire industry just so it can play games with IE's marketshare figures?
I'd be happy with two outcomes, myself. Scenario one: all affected businesses and individual developers can collect their portion of $BIG_FIGURE from Microsoft as a civil tort, to compensate them for the extra expenses they incurred due to Microsoft's parasitic decision-making. That would definitely end the problem, as I believe $BIG_FIGURE is so large it more than outweighs any gains Microsoft enjoyed from playing compatibility games.
Scenario two: more and more Web developers refuse to accommodate IE. Instead, they pick any three standards-complaint browsers, make sure the site correctly renders in them, and inform any IE users with problems that they are using a browser which deliberately breaks compatibility and that they should contact Microsoft with any further questions. That wouldn't work if only a few sites did it, but if it were a commonplace practice it would definitely end the problem. It would also encourage users to think more carefully about the vendors they choose to support.
No, the "high and mighty" route, as you put it, is the way Microsoft wants to knowingly cause problems for many other people for the sake of their own enrichment and then expects those people to do nothing about it. People who refuse to put up with this and take available actions against it are not high and mighty; they are merely sane and interested in ending a problem that should never have existed.
If there is one thing Microsoft has been doing well in the last decade is game libraries
Well, yeah. If they didn't do that then developers might create/use/improve cross-platform game libraries instead, and that's definitely not in Microsoft's interests. Games are one major area where it's far easier to just use Windows. Microsoft is more than smart enough to realize that this might change if they fail to cater to game developers. To them, furtherance of vendor lock-in is more than worth whatever money and resources they have to invest in development of DirectX.
It's the kind of thing that helps keep Windows from having to compete on its merits on a level playing field where migration to another platform is easy and relatively painless. A world where no one uses Windows unless they really do prefer it over other platforms is something they will struggle mightily to avoid. Easy cross-platform compatibility has never been in their interests.
I, too, see the irony in the "dual-use" nature of technology in general, but I do have a perspective different than one thing you said though:
Here, the general concept is that most useful tools can also be abused for malicious purposes.
I've been to a bunch of hacker cons in the last couple of years and met a bunch of people in the infosec community. There are a lot of people using password guessing and other security auditing tools.
My impression is that, by far, the biggest users of these tools are organizations auditing their own security or contracting with outside parties to do so. Security auditing tools is a burgeoning industry and professional pentesters are in high demand. There are still a lot of black-tshirt-wearing hackers at the cons these days but if you talk to them most of them are in industry or government:-).
It's simply not correct to equate password-cracking tools with malicious purposes.
Sure, just like a claw hammer could be misused as a murder weapon, yet the vast majority of people using claw hammers are only interested in driving nails. That's about how I would summarize the situation with password cracking tools. Note I never claimed they are primarily used for malicious purposes, only that overreacting to their potential malicious uses is unwise.
If the media treated claw hammers the same way they treat anything related to computers and networks, then every time some psychopath bludgeoned someone to death with a claw hammer there'd be big discussions about whether hammers need to be banned, or whether you should have to present ID to purchase one, or whether hammer manufacturers have a responsibility. The double standard and the phony shock at discovering that yet another tool can be abused is what I find absurd.
There's no reason that Google couldn't include rules like "No DRM" or "Upgrades must be allowed." That would certainly make it more open.
But they didn't do that.
Because it is technically impossible - in the general case - to impose the "Upgrades must be allowed" - it would be akin to ask "Run Linux kernel 2.6 and latest XWindows on a x486 with 16 MB RAM" only because Linux (can't recall the version) used to run quite nicely on such a machine back in 1993-ish.
However, given the many competing device manufacturers, I believe the balance between the rights of vendors and the rights of consumers will stabilize on a more normal situation in time.
For the time being, I think Android is a young platform (younger than iPhone and Blackberry anyway), we are seeing "transient" regimes ("growth pains" rather than "artritis pains").
This is one of those rare posts that made me see the situation differently. Thank you for that.
The only thing I would add is that vendors like Samsung should still have an obligation to at least backport security fixes. If noncommercial Linux distributions like Debian can summon up the skill and time to do that, so can the wireless carriers. They can then balance the expense of backporting security fixes versus the expense of determining whether an upgrade really breaks anything and whether that can be mitigated.
It is funny you mention that since I believe Microsoft managed to negotiate terms for their new WP7 phones so that the carriers couldn't block an update for more than one update cycle. They've also been more aggressive about ensuring the manufacturers meet some minimal hardware specification.
The truth of the matter is that Google probably doesn't care. They just want a phone out their that's making Google searches and serving up Google ads through apps. They don't care if it's a 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, or 2.3 Android phone. They just wanted to ensure that they couldn't be cut out of the new mobile market that was starting to take off. Google is only as open as serves their own interests. They're perfectly willing to make Android entirely open so that manufacturers will adopt it instead of something else like Windows Phone 7, but it will be a cold day in hell before Google open sources their search algorithms.
Unfortunately I think you're right.
Say what you will about Microsoft... and for the record, I really don't like them. At all. I refuse to use their products with the exception of a keyboard and mouse that were both gifts. Yet I'll readily credit them for one thing: they understand the concept of long-term strategy. That is why they're such a giant in the IT industry.
If Google only cares about serving up Google ads through apps, as you say, that's short-term thinking. That'll do spendidly for the next quarter. It leaves the more distant future unaddressed. In the future, if problems like this issue with Samsung are not resolved in a consistent, predictable manner, it will mean a foothold for WP7 and other platforms.
You stopped short of explicitly spelling this out, but I will: I think Google is a bit of a hypocrite here. They are all for openness when it works for them, as you say. Yet they will not open up the bread-and-butter of their business. That tells me they don't really believe in openness or the philosophy behind it, or, they are aware of glaring flaws in their search algorithms and are afraid to open them, preferring to hide behind a "security through obscurity" model. One way or another, it doesn't look right to me.
I generally like Google but I am wary of them. I don't see them as some kind of angel the way the fanboys do. I make efforts to avoid their tracking and marketing devices. My best assurance that they will "do no evil" to me is to make sure they don't track me. I have no reason to believe that they wouldn't become the next dominant, bullying, monopolistic Microsoft given half the chance. That's more or less what every corporation would love to do within its industry. It's an inherent part of the publically-traded corporate model that any good that is done is a veneer designed to put a positive spin on the interests of the shareholders.
Some positive spins are more genuine than others, but when billions of dollars are at stake, all are suspect until demonstrated otherwise.
Most vendors would never allow that. Not necessarily out of malice, but because it would remove their control of a phone which the customers ultimately will blame them for if it stops working. They would also risk getting in some unwanted crossfire regarding "no DRM". When you get down to it, you have to acknowledge that they're just a business and not necessarily the guardian of your personal opinion about how it should be.
If by "your personal opinion" you mean "the market demand of their paying customers" then okay.
Most businesses that ignore the "personal opinions" of significant segments of their markets don't do so well. That's because most businesses in most industries have real competition combined with the relatively easy ability to switch over to a competitor. There's a lack of both with wireless carriers.
To approach it from a different angle... I might upgrade Firefox but I wouldn't reasonably expect that to make my Web browsing "stop working". Likewise, I should be able to update the software on my phone without worrying about whether it's going to make my phone "stop working". If that's the case anyway, all it tells us is that the mobile phone industry is fundamentally flawed and fails to meet even a minimum level of quality. I mean, think about it. A cross-platform browser like Firefox runs on a number of different platforms, which run on different hardware, which connect to many different servers, all of which supply arbitrary input over an untrusted network. By comparison, a mobile phone is a much more specific, controlled, locked-down platform with fewer possible combinations.
They can't get that right? I have to conclude that they're not trying.
I find that I'm free to install whatever I want on my Nexus One. I suppose it depends which vendor you decide to get into bed with.
The real way to solve this problem is simple: financially. These are corporations after all.
What we need is a law or even just a precedent to be set. If a vendor deliberately and knowingly delays an already-existing software upgrade for the purpose of attempting to sell new hardware, make them legally liable for any malfunctions or security issues that the upgrade would have mitigated. So if the new version of Android would have fixed a security bug, and Samsung actively prevents that upgrade, they get to pay for any and all damages caused to any customer who gets exploited by that security bug.
Then let the vendors decide if they still think it's worthwhile to pull this shit.
For those who have trouble with basic reading comprehension, I am not suggesting that any vendor should be obligated to supply any such upgrades. What I am advocating would only take place if they deliberately and knowingly take action to interfere with their customers' ability to independently obtain and apply such upgrades. They are depriving their customers of the ability to make a decision; therefore they are making a decision for said customers; therefore they should bear the consequences.
They probably stop them altogether - it's against their ToS to use the services for unlawful purposes.
The automakers who can slow down a car involved in a high-speed chase is not unreasonable to me. That's because it would occur at the direct request of the police. That request, in turn, would happen only because a crime has been committed (attempting to elude police). What I would consider unreasonable would be if the police slowed down or stopped random vehicles with no probable cause or direct knowledge of a crime in progress.
If Amazon only scrutinized users at the request of the police, and only when there is good reason to believe that a crime has been committed, I'd consider that reasonable. It would just be an online extension of the way police already operate off-line. What I consider completely unreasonable is Amazon conducting surveillance on every customer and effectively regarding all of them as potential criminals, respecting the privacy of none, merely because a few people might be malicious. The latter scenario would serve only to magnify the damage that criminals already do.
Unless it's a truly obvious and egregious case -- such as a user openly bragging about breaking the law -- I don't want Amazon to try and determine what is or is not an "unlawful purpose". Example: someone is brute-forcing a piece of encrypted data -- maybe that's in connection with a crime and maybe it isn't. We have courts for that, and they're in a much better position to settle such questions. The only thing I expect Amazon to do would be to comply with a lawful court order that is made in good faith.
I still can't tell if this is a keyword placement-piece for EC2 or if somebody really does think this is novel research.
A lot of people have a very hard time with inductive reasoning, so they don't easily arrive at a general concept. Here, the general concept is that most useful tools can also be abused for malicious purposes. Each instance of this general concept makes news headlines for some reason. Usually it then splits into the usual "us vs. them" set of two camps: one calling for something to be banned or restricted or monitored, the other explaining why this is a generally unwise policy that amounts to a knee-jerk response to news that should not surprise anyone.
Henry David Thoreau explained it quite well (emphasis added):
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, -- we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after gossip.
Because if it's a question of whether a crime has been committed, we already have trained professionals who specialize in dealing with this exact scenario: we call them police. They have restrictions on when and how they can gather evidence for some really, really good reasons. Amazon doesn't belong in the law enforcement business.
Shouldn't companies try and protect the environment they do business in? Companies have higher obligations than to just make money.
They should protect the environment in which they do business when they engage in activities that could ruin that environment for others. A factory that causes pollution of a river that affects everyone downstream is a good example.
Granted, I doubt there is anything they could do, much as there's nothing Ford can do to stop their cars being used in heists. But if they can, they should.
There's only one thing they can do. They can place everyone who does business with them under suspicion. They can closely monitor every single activity performed by their customers. If anything remotely looks like it might be related to cracking a password, they can assume it must be an illegal activity and not merely someone's recovery of their own data or security research and notify the authorities accordingly. Is that what you want?
It would accomplish three things. First, it would mean that Amazon takes on some or all of the investigative responsibility that rightly belongs to police, only without the restrictions that are wisely applied to police. I'm sure you'd waive all rights to privacy as part of the agreement attached to using the service and of course you'd trust them to never abuse this privilege. Any cost associated with all of this monitoring would of course be passed on to the customer. Second, it would result in many reports submitted to police that turn out to be legitimate, legal activity, with the cost passed on to the taxpayer. Third, it will make the real criminals respond by either using false credentials (like stolen IDs) or by using other forms of distributed computation, such as botnets, thus raising the profit other criminals make by operating such botnets.
Like most feel-good measures it would make little or no difference to the real criminals while causing more surveillance, inconvenience, and cost to the average user. It would also erode the concept of a presumption of innocence. All of that, just to avoid telling people that if you really need it to be secure, use sufficiently strong encryption with a sufficiently strong key.
The whole problem with the USA is that half of our laws are like this. I see why you'd find it a logical extension of the way we already do things, but I think that's because you haven't seriously examined the way we already do things.
Because as we all know, the human species is genetically split into two completely non-inter-breeding subraces, the Victims and the Criminals, so all comparisons based on the Discovery Channel are completely valid.
No. The human species enjoys a unique ability to make a choice. For humans, it's more like a role that can be changed.
The choice is: you can roll over and beg the bully not to hurt you even though you know he will, or, you can prove to him that there are easier targets. Nature affords the gazelle no such choice.
I am starting to get the unpleasant and distasteful idea that the vast majority of Slashdotters have never stood up to a bully or witnessed someone standing up to a bully. If you had, you'd understand how quickly they lose their aggression once they know they are about to encounter determined (not half-hearted) opposition.
This happens even when the bully has a decent chance of winning -- they just don't want to actually have to fight for anything, much like their favorite targets. They'd rather have a submissive, cowardly, easily intimidated target any day. That's what they think is fun. The possibility of them getting hurt, they don't think that's so fun. Most of the time just the willingness will work and it never actually gets physical. But you cannot fake the willingness.
Overall your post was comical but sadly fails to grasp what really should be common knowledge.
You mean states like Bavaria in Germany or Flanders in Belgium? They not only have no 'conceal-carry' law, but have lower murder rates then any state in the US.
That's correlation but not causation.
The fact of the matter is, precisely what causes a human being to want to bring unprovoked (keyword: unprovoked) violence upon another human being is an age-old question. I'm not aware of any final answer on the subject. Poverty, a culture which glorifies violence, poor parenting, childhood abuse, etc. are all factors, but it's very much a question that defies a final ultimate answer. It's like asking why there is evil in the world.
In other words, precisely why Bavaria or Flanders have so little lethal violence is an open question. They don't have the problem for which conceal-carry is a solution. Just as you presumably wouldn't use a crescent wrench to saw a plank of wood in half, it makes no sense to act surprised that places with inherently low murder rates haven't felt a need to enable conceal-carry laws.
And when talking about states, we could also extend to who countries.
So to get peace in Afghanistan and Iraq, all we have to do is to allow conceal-carry and not take away their weapons?
And on a bigger scale, we should have applauded Iraq if they actually HAD concealed weapons of mass destruction.
Or might it be that things are a bit more complex?
It seems so complex because you are making extremely flawed comparisons. You're doing that based on emotion and reactivity, not based on a spirit of genuine inquiry.
First, conceal-carry is a strictly civilian matter of law. To compare that to places which are literally warzones and have little or no rule of law is not intellectually honest. It's comparing an apple to an orange and acting surprised when they taste different. These are not civilians fighting in those warzones. These are one army of combatants against another army of combatants. These are not peaceful civilians against street thugs, which is the problem conceal-carry is designed to answer.
If you really insist on distorting the issue to talk about state actors, the correct analogy would be the policy of MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction - that existed between the USA and the Soviets. The USA had nukes and the USSR had nukes. The very real threat of mutual destruction was an effective deterrent against nuclear aggression. Likewise, with civilian conceal-carry, the criminals have guns and now the law-abiding citizens have guns. The very real threat of ending up in a gunfight against an equally armed citizen has proven to be an effective deterrent against violent criminal aggression.
Arming the target ships is the best way to deal with this problem. It's also the one we consistently refuse to try.
It's not that we refuse to try it. It's that we look at the times when there weren't any restrictions on what you brought into port, and we see how that turned out. You know, it's the whole not-forgetting-history thing. We already did try it.
Would arming commercial ships decrease piracy? Obviously. The reason we haven't isn't because of an unwillingness to try something new, it's because we look back at why those laws were made in the first place. Maybe it's time to revisit those laws, maybe our advances in communication, aircraft, satellites, radar, etc have lessened the danger caused by potentially hostile armed ships.
Just don't act like it hasn't been tried before...
Was there a Somalian piracy problem when those laws were made? No.
It hasn't been tried before under these circumstances. I didn't claim that we have never tried the concept of equipping seagoing vessels with weapons. The existence and long history of the U.S. Navy would be a glaring flaw in that claim. Considering that, your tone is a bit mysterious to me.
What I claimed is that we refuse to try arming seagoing vessels that are at risk from these pirates as a direct response to the piracy.
Of all the seagoing merchant ships worldwide, what fraction of them ever enter waters where Somalian pirates are known to operate? To re-phrase the question, how far is a 6-meter boat going to travel from the Somalian mainland and how big is the ocean in comparison? The problem is limited to a minority of at-risk ships. That means it's managable without taking the black-and-white approach and completely throwing out the port restrictions you mention.
It could be managed by a law allowing for a special exemption or license for which vessels not at-risk would be ineligible. Then the relevant authorities would know who they are, would have a process for verifying this, and would be able to enforce whatever controls they think are necessary (such as dismantling, locking up, and declaring any weapons when approaching a port). The parallels to civilian conceal-carry laws concerning handguns are immense and that means we already have a generic model.
All of this could be done. It's a matter of having the will to do it. You know what else one can learn from history? That appeasing an unreasonable bully never works and only serves to embolden them. Right or wrong, they perceive it as weakness because that's how they think. You can expect this problem to get worse and eventually come to a (very violent) head if we keep rolling over and telling the merchants that it's wrong to defend yourself. If and when that happens, a lot of people will act surprised and that's the part that bothers me.
You really don't need some kind of Super-Terminator here. All you need are targets which are difficult enough that piracy is more risky and less profitable. That's well within the boundaries of feasibility.
That's not a a valid analogy. Prior to 9/11 hijackings were operating under an informal agreement between the hijacker and the passengers. Namely that if they agreed to cooperate, the hijackers would leave them completely unharmed, albeit usually in Cuba or Libya.
What you're proposing is changing the deal so that there isn't any sort of assurance that the pirates will let the crew go unharmed. And that's stupid, especially when there are lesser alternatives available.
As it stands now, pirates expect that the crew won't be packing huge amounts of weaponry that would make a "hunting" trip with the Terminator and Rambo look piddly in comparison.
These pirates have a lot more in common with regular street thugs than the sort of organized criminals who can pull off something like an airplane hijacking.
Let's face it. There's another reason that past hijackers did not harm the passengers: they're extremely outnumbered. I don't care what kind of gun a hijacker has, if 200 people close by all decide to rush him at once, he might take a couple of them but he is definitely going down. The incentive not to try that is simple: you might be one of the couple he can take before he goes down, which is a risk, when you could just cooperate and remain unharmed, which is no risk.
All of that went out the window the moment hijackers started killing everyone aboard in big fiery crashes. Now in the event of a hijacking it's reasonable to assume that the perpetrators are trying to kill everyone anyway, so the passengers have nothing to lose. They may as well fight and have a chance of winning. I think this has more to do with how few attacks there have been since 9/11 than anything the TSA ever did.
The shoe bomber got the living crap kicked out of him and was tied up with seatbelts and cords. The TSA didn't do that, the passengers did. The message sent was clear.
Slashdot Mirror
nigoola is the only excuse! This fanfiction fuck!
So Jik, tell us please: what does "nigoola" excuse? I couldn't find it in your other troll posts.
It's the difference between a fiat currency and a representative currency. The worth of the representative currency is determined by the amount of a real physical asset that is available.
The real difference is that there is a way fiat currency is commonly abused that doesn't happen with representative currency.
There is a built-in unsustainability caused by the private companies that issue fiat currency, like the Federal Reserve. When they create fiat money out of nothing, they loan it to the US Government in exchange for what is basically an IOU from the US Government. But they attach interest to each dollar they create. That means there are not enough total dollars in the system to pay back all of the debt. Therefore, the US Government cannot possibly pay back its debt. It can't ever do that, not even if the total federal budget were less than the tax revenues, because the money is loaned at interest the moment it's created.
The US Government has to borrow more money from the Fed, at interest, to make payments on the existing interest. Therefore, not only can it never get out of debt, the debt must also continue to increase.
Thus, fiat currency dollars don't represent wealth. They represent debt. If all debts were somehow paid off then there would be no money in circulation.
The difference is that representative currency dollars directly represent a specified amount of a tangible asset. They can be redeemed for that amount of that asset at any time. Their value cannot be lower than the value of that tangible asset. They represent wealth, not debt. If all debts were paid off under that system, you'd just have a lot of happy creditors. It's an inherently stable and sustainable system that doesn't require large amounts of built-in debt.
Unless some alchemists find an easy, dirt-cheap way to transmute worthless materials to gold, silver, or whatever the currency represents, then it has a value that can't suddenly disappear the way fiat currencies can (and have, several times throughout history).
The SEC regulations for offering shares to US investors are a lot stricter than for non-US. My guess is that they cannot meet the requirements, which I would take as a big red flag that Facebook is severely overvalued right now.
This is an explanation that makes sense. Thank you.
... yet I can't seem to find any real injustice when a site designed to separate fools from their privacy by dangling convenience in front of them also manages to separate fools from their money by dangling promises of easy wealth in front of them. The whole thing seems like water seeking its own level.
I suppose I'm not proud of it, but am I the only one who felt a sense of glee at the idea of Facebook investors getting screwed? Granted, ripping people off is wrong
If my assessment is correct, I want to say it will give people something to reconsider the next time they want to stumble over themselves in order to pile up on the next trendy bandwagon, but I have to admit that's not correct. For both the users and investors, these are people who get caught up in the excitement of an "everybody else is doing it" trend.
A little evaluation would have told them that Facebook is another one of those that will struggle mightily to have any sort of long-term viability (even if it's somehow not overvalued right now). They didn't want to perform even that little bit of dispassionate inquiry. I'd like to think that getting stung badly would give them a new willingness to do that, but I've seen too many other scenarios where this didn't happen. What happens instead is that a victim mentality sets in, it's entirely someone else's fault (i.e. it's a blame game) and the cause-and-effect between one's decision-making and the outcome one experiences is vehemently denied. Then the next momentary trend is sought. Like I said, water seeks its own level.
No, they're saying they won't sell to US investors because of legal issues arising from the massive amounts of media coverage involved with their own investment in Facebook.
They think this move won't get media coverage? They think that in the age of the Internet, that any media covering any company that large is only national or regional? That doesn't sound like a solid reason to me, though I admit I've witnessed large organizations doing crazier things.
I think they're a bunch of scumbags but I don't think they're stupid. I think this move is designed to avoid SEC scrutiny as others have said. How they can do that when both they and Facebook are US companies is the only part I'm missing. My guess is that the SEC has jurisdictional problems when the victim of a scam is overseas but I really have no idea how that works and I am not a lawyer.
Not using the flimsiest of intelligence to justify fighting aggressive, offensive foreign wars against nations which are not a threat to us would be a drastic improvement, yes. It'd also make us look a lot less like the thugs of the world.
The people who need to have that pointed out to them because they immediately knee-jerk and reach for an extreme interpretation of what you said ... well, they weren't worth reaching anyway in my opinion. They are not exactly lovers of reason and tend to lower the quality of any discussion in which they participate.
... hey, maybe that means I have not correctly understood what he was saying."
They assume you're stupid and they're not stupid -- that's why they will never experience the following thought: "what he wrote seems completely absurd and extreme in a really obvious way that I can point out with a one-liner
Do you realize how retarded it makes you look to use multiple accounts to rail against people for hiding behind pseudonymity?
You understand that nobody takes you seriously, right?
What he fails to recognize is the hypocrisy of a) claiming to give out your true name and address because you're "not cowering" and b) creating many accounts to (unsuccessfully) hide from bad karma and a starting post score of -1.
As the saying goes, there are none so blind as those who refuse to see. I guess now that the user "twitter" with all his sockpuppet accounts is no longer active, someone else thought they needed to fill the void. At least "twitter" made some attempt to pretend that they were not sockpuppet accounts.
If it were merely "led to believe" then they'd abandon Facebook at the very first sign of failing to respect their privacy. There have been many such signs and they steadily increase in both number and severity. Thus, "led to believe" is a misnomer; this is more like "religiously insist on believing in the face of contrary evidence". That's the problem.
After a while "ordinary" starts to mean "after having touched the hot stove for the 100th time and received a burn for the 100th time, begins to suspect that touching a hot stove is a bad idea and that this is a predictable outcome." That's the problem.
It's not happening now precisely because of the apathy you advocate. No one wants to lift a finger against it the second that might mean a little discomfort. Microsoft is a very shrewd marketing company -- they understand this. It is what they count on.
What I don't think you appreciate is that if most people decided that they'd never tolerate the kind of shit Microsoft likes to pull, no matter what the cost, Microsoft would respond by not trying to pull that shit in the first place. The unwillingness to put up with it is the strongest deterrent. If it's genuine enough, you'll almost never have to actually prove it. A savvy company like Microsoft would wet their finger, hold it up towards the wind, and quickly decide that taking an action most people will resist is not a good business strategy.
Anyone who thinks you're going to resist or even just undermine anything remotely "evil", let alone a "Great Evil", without ever suffering any kind of discomfort or lack of luxury has, very simply, never struggled for anything worthy in his life. It's one thing to be a bit lazy. It's quite another to have no principles for which you are willing to take a stand, to be so thoroughly compromised and dominated by convenience that you prioritize it above all else.
Actually if that meant Diaspora users tend to have enough of a conscience to be aware of the network effects of their actions, and therefore would not use IE on principle alone because of its harmful effects on the standardized Web, that would be a major plus for Diaspora. It would be a unique feature qualitatively distinguishing it from all other social networks.
Actually I used to have my contact info in my profile because I trust my friends
My friends already know my name, address, phone number, e-mail address, where I work, etc...... There would be no need to ever put it on Facebook.
This is one of the most seldom-appreciated aspects of Facebook and you nailed it.
Facebook is not terribly useful for communicating with people who really are close friends of yours. Y'know, people you actually know well, who know you well, with whom you spend time face-to-face and are involved in each other's lives. In this capacity it's redundant.
Facebook is "useful" for having a lot of extremely superficial relationships often involving people with whom you will spend little or no actual quality time. The reason you would have to supply personal contact information to your "friends" is because they're not friends; they're acquaintences at best.
That's why Facebook tends to encourage behaviors that are not geared towards meaningful, close interaction. It caters to those who really want the attention of people they hardly know or don't know at all. That's why so many of its users don't value their privacy and are willing to surrender it. It's why so many apologists will show up in these discussions denying, rationalizing, and minimizing any abuses related to privacy or any questions about whether the users are acting in their own interests.
They have to. Without a steady supply of superficial attention from casual strangers and acquaintences, they'd be forced to perform some introspection and understand why they so badly crave attention and recognition, why they crave those things from relationships that are so superficial and fungible as to be disposable.
Because Facebook still provides a useful service with no real competitor.
I propose that non-use is a competitor.
I choose non-use over use of FB. simply not necessary at all for anyone. its like soda, it really performs NO useful function but somehow they convince people they 'need' to have soda with their meal instead of just water, for example.
FB is important only to those so self-involved. its almost 'cute' in a way, that those users think the world really revolves around them.
those of us who never joined see how silly the whole give-away concept is.
Those of us who never joined quickly see another thing too: the futility of trying to explain that to anyone who doesn't already understand it.
I suppose addicts of hard drugs have more denials and rationalizations than the merely egotistical and self-indulgent, but not by much.
The mentality can be summarized thusly: "but but but, it performs some trivial and transient convenience that's not really necessary -- clearly that outweighs every principled objection!" Sometimes there are shades of "you're a big meanie for finding fault with my new Shiny!"
It seem not jut your information, but also you friends.
I noticed this for some apps:
Access my friends' information Birthdays, Religious and political views, Family members and relationship statuses, Significant others and relationship details, Home towns, Current locations, Likes, music, TV, movies, books, quotes, Activities, Interests, Education history, Work history, Online presence, Websites, Groups, Events, Notes, Photos, Videos, Photos and videos of them, 'About me' details and Facebook statuses
Why on earth would Facebook want to give this information to third parties, and worse to ones you have not given permission to, but your friend has.
Because you cannot sell what nobody want's to buy, information is what they can sell, the real question is why do people want to buy this information.
Because producing a truly useful product/service that people really want is not part of their business model.
No, they are marketers. Their goal is to get you to spend money in order to solve problems you didn't even know you had. For that, they need to know a lot about you. They especially need to know your tastes and preferences. They also like to know whether you are impulsive, whether you live beyond your means, whether you have irrationally strong emotions for particular subjects that can be manipulated to get you to identify with a brand, or have any other exploitable character flaws I've not listed here.
Microsoft's refusal to produce a browser that will correctly render sites that work in every other major browser is what's asinine. What you're complaining about is merely a reaction to it. If you really want to identify problems, start with their source.
As Microsoft has plenty of wealth, resources, and talent it is reasonable to assume that its refusal to make a truly standards-compliant browser is deliberate. They are certainly capable of doing it; therefore if they don't, it is because they are choosing not to.
You were one Web developer who had to perform extra work to make your sites work in IE. How many Web developers exist worldwide? How many otherwise unnecessary hours have they collectively spent over the years just to accommodate this one browser? What is the total cost of all of this to the businesses that hire and employ those Web developers? Let's call this cost $BIG_FIGURE. Morally and/or ethically, how do you justify Microsoft deliberately and knowingly inflicting a cost of $BIG_FIGURE on an entire industry just so it can play games with IE's marketshare figures?
I'd be happy with two outcomes, myself. Scenario one: all affected businesses and individual developers can collect their portion of $BIG_FIGURE from Microsoft as a civil tort, to compensate them for the extra expenses they incurred due to Microsoft's parasitic decision-making. That would definitely end the problem, as I believe $BIG_FIGURE is so large it more than outweighs any gains Microsoft enjoyed from playing compatibility games.
Scenario two: more and more Web developers refuse to accommodate IE. Instead, they pick any three standards-complaint browsers, make sure the site correctly renders in them, and inform any IE users with problems that they are using a browser which deliberately breaks compatibility and that they should contact Microsoft with any further questions. That wouldn't work if only a few sites did it, but if it were a commonplace practice it would definitely end the problem. It would also encourage users to think more carefully about the vendors they choose to support.
No, the "high and mighty" route, as you put it, is the way Microsoft wants to knowingly cause problems for many other people for the sake of their own enrichment and then expects those people to do nothing about it. People who refuse to put up with this and take available actions against it are not high and mighty; they are merely sane and interested in ending a problem that should never have existed.
Well, yeah. If they didn't do that then developers might create/use/improve cross-platform game libraries instead, and that's definitely not in Microsoft's interests. Games are one major area where it's far easier to just use Windows. Microsoft is more than smart enough to realize that this might change if they fail to cater to game developers. To them, furtherance of vendor lock-in is more than worth whatever money and resources they have to invest in development of DirectX.
It's the kind of thing that helps keep Windows from having to compete on its merits on a level playing field where migration to another platform is easy and relatively painless. A world where no one uses Windows unless they really do prefer it over other platforms is something they will struggle mightily to avoid. Easy cross-platform compatibility has never been in their interests.
Interesting comparison.
I, too, see the irony in the "dual-use" nature of technology in general, but I do have a perspective different than one thing you said though:
I've been to a bunch of hacker cons in the last couple of years and met a bunch of people in the infosec community. There are a lot of people using password guessing and other security auditing tools.
My impression is that, by far, the biggest users of these tools are organizations auditing their own security or contracting with outside parties to do so. Security auditing tools is a burgeoning industry and professional pentesters are in high demand. There are still a lot of black-tshirt-wearing hackers at the cons these days but if you talk to them most of them are in industry or government :-).
It's simply not correct to equate password-cracking tools with malicious purposes.
Sure, just like a claw hammer could be misused as a murder weapon, yet the vast majority of people using claw hammers are only interested in driving nails. That's about how I would summarize the situation with password cracking tools. Note I never claimed they are primarily used for malicious purposes, only that overreacting to their potential malicious uses is unwise.
If the media treated claw hammers the same way they treat anything related to computers and networks, then every time some psychopath bludgeoned someone to death with a claw hammer there'd be big discussions about whether hammers need to be banned, or whether you should have to present ID to purchase one, or whether hammer manufacturers have a responsibility. The double standard and the phony shock at discovering that yet another tool can be abused is what I find absurd.
There's no reason that Google couldn't include rules like "No DRM" or "Upgrades must be allowed." That would certainly make it more open.
But they didn't do that.
Because it is technically impossible - in the general case - to impose the "Upgrades must be allowed" - it would be akin to ask "Run Linux kernel 2.6 and latest XWindows on a x486 with 16 MB RAM" only because Linux (can't recall the version) used to run quite nicely on such a machine back in 1993-ish.
However, given the many competing device manufacturers, I believe the balance between the rights of vendors and the rights of consumers will stabilize on a more normal situation in time. For the time being, I think Android is a young platform (younger than iPhone and Blackberry anyway), we are seeing "transient" regimes ("growth pains" rather than "artritis pains").
This is one of those rare posts that made me see the situation differently. Thank you for that.
The only thing I would add is that vendors like Samsung should still have an obligation to at least backport security fixes. If noncommercial Linux distributions like Debian can summon up the skill and time to do that, so can the wireless carriers. They can then balance the expense of backporting security fixes versus the expense of determining whether an upgrade really breaks anything and whether that can be mitigated.
It is funny you mention that since I believe Microsoft managed to negotiate terms for their new WP7 phones so that the carriers couldn't block an update for more than one update cycle. They've also been more aggressive about ensuring the manufacturers meet some minimal hardware specification. The truth of the matter is that Google probably doesn't care. They just want a phone out their that's making Google searches and serving up Google ads through apps. They don't care if it's a 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, or 2.3 Android phone. They just wanted to ensure that they couldn't be cut out of the new mobile market that was starting to take off. Google is only as open as serves their own interests. They're perfectly willing to make Android entirely open so that manufacturers will adopt it instead of something else like Windows Phone 7, but it will be a cold day in hell before Google open sources their search algorithms.
Unfortunately I think you're right.
Say what you will about Microsoft... and for the record, I really don't like them. At all. I refuse to use their products with the exception of a keyboard and mouse that were both gifts. Yet I'll readily credit them for one thing: they understand the concept of long-term strategy. That is why they're such a giant in the IT industry.
If Google only cares about serving up Google ads through apps, as you say, that's short-term thinking. That'll do spendidly for the next quarter. It leaves the more distant future unaddressed. In the future, if problems like this issue with Samsung are not resolved in a consistent, predictable manner, it will mean a foothold for WP7 and other platforms.
You stopped short of explicitly spelling this out, but I will: I think Google is a bit of a hypocrite here. They are all for openness when it works for them, as you say. Yet they will not open up the bread-and-butter of their business. That tells me they don't really believe in openness or the philosophy behind it, or, they are aware of glaring flaws in their search algorithms and are afraid to open them, preferring to hide behind a "security through obscurity" model. One way or another, it doesn't look right to me.
I generally like Google but I am wary of them. I don't see them as some kind of angel the way the fanboys do. I make efforts to avoid their tracking and marketing devices. My best assurance that they will "do no evil" to me is to make sure they don't track me. I have no reason to believe that they wouldn't become the next dominant, bullying, monopolistic Microsoft given half the chance. That's more or less what every corporation would love to do within its industry. It's an inherent part of the publically-traded corporate model that any good that is done is a veneer designed to put a positive spin on the interests of the shareholders.
Some positive spins are more genuine than others, but when billions of dollars are at stake, all are suspect until demonstrated otherwise.
Most vendors would never allow that. Not necessarily out of malice, but because it would remove their control of a phone which the customers ultimately will blame them for if it stops working. They would also risk getting in some unwanted crossfire regarding "no DRM". When you get down to it, you have to acknowledge that they're just a business and not necessarily the guardian of your personal opinion about how it should be.
If by "your personal opinion" you mean "the market demand of their paying customers" then okay.
Most businesses that ignore the "personal opinions" of significant segments of their markets don't do so well. That's because most businesses in most industries have real competition combined with the relatively easy ability to switch over to a competitor. There's a lack of both with wireless carriers.
To approach it from a different angle... I might upgrade Firefox but I wouldn't reasonably expect that to make my Web browsing "stop working". Likewise, I should be able to update the software on my phone without worrying about whether it's going to make my phone "stop working". If that's the case anyway, all it tells us is that the mobile phone industry is fundamentally flawed and fails to meet even a minimum level of quality. I mean, think about it. A cross-platform browser like Firefox runs on a number of different platforms, which run on different hardware, which connect to many different servers, all of which supply arbitrary input over an untrusted network. By comparison, a mobile phone is a much more specific, controlled, locked-down platform with fewer possible combinations.
They can't get that right? I have to conclude that they're not trying.
I find that I'm free to install whatever I want on my Nexus One. I suppose it depends which vendor you decide to get into bed with.
The real way to solve this problem is simple: financially. These are corporations after all.
What we need is a law or even just a precedent to be set. If a vendor deliberately and knowingly delays an already-existing software upgrade for the purpose of attempting to sell new hardware, make them legally liable for any malfunctions or security issues that the upgrade would have mitigated. So if the new version of Android would have fixed a security bug, and Samsung actively prevents that upgrade, they get to pay for any and all damages caused to any customer who gets exploited by that security bug.
Then let the vendors decide if they still think it's worthwhile to pull this shit.
For those who have trouble with basic reading comprehension, I am not suggesting that any vendor should be obligated to supply any such upgrades. What I am advocating would only take place if they deliberately and knowingly take action to interfere with their customers' ability to independently obtain and apply such upgrades. They are depriving their customers of the ability to make a decision; therefore they are making a decision for said customers; therefore they should bear the consequences.
They probably stop them altogether - it's against their ToS to use the services for unlawful purposes.
The automakers who can slow down a car involved in a high-speed chase is not unreasonable to me. That's because it would occur at the direct request of the police. That request, in turn, would happen only because a crime has been committed (attempting to elude police). What I would consider unreasonable would be if the police slowed down or stopped random vehicles with no probable cause or direct knowledge of a crime in progress.
If Amazon only scrutinized users at the request of the police, and only when there is good reason to believe that a crime has been committed, I'd consider that reasonable. It would just be an online extension of the way police already operate off-line. What I consider completely unreasonable is Amazon conducting surveillance on every customer and effectively regarding all of them as potential criminals, respecting the privacy of none, merely because a few people might be malicious. The latter scenario would serve only to magnify the damage that criminals already do.
Unless it's a truly obvious and egregious case -- such as a user openly bragging about breaking the law -- I don't want Amazon to try and determine what is or is not an "unlawful purpose". Example: someone is brute-forcing a piece of encrypted data -- maybe that's in connection with a crime and maybe it isn't. We have courts for that, and they're in a much better position to settle such questions. The only thing I expect Amazon to do would be to comply with a lawful court order that is made in good faith.
A lot of people have a very hard time with inductive reasoning, so they don't easily arrive at a general concept. Here, the general concept is that most useful tools can also be abused for malicious purposes. Each instance of this general concept makes news headlines for some reason. Usually it then splits into the usual "us vs. them" set of two camps: one calling for something to be banned or restricted or monitored, the other explaining why this is a generally unwise policy that amounts to a knee-jerk response to news that should not surprise anyone.
Henry David Thoreau explained it quite well (emphasis added):
And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, -- we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after gossip.
Because if it's a question of whether a crime has been committed, we already have trained professionals who specialize in dealing with this exact scenario: we call them police. They have restrictions on when and how they can gather evidence for some really, really good reasons. Amazon doesn't belong in the law enforcement business.
They should protect the environment in which they do business when they engage in activities that could ruin that environment for others. A factory that causes pollution of a river that affects everyone downstream is a good example.
There's only one thing they can do. They can place everyone who does business with them under suspicion. They can closely monitor every single activity performed by their customers. If anything remotely looks like it might be related to cracking a password, they can assume it must be an illegal activity and not merely someone's recovery of their own data or security research and notify the authorities accordingly. Is that what you want?
It would accomplish three things. First, it would mean that Amazon takes on some or all of the investigative responsibility that rightly belongs to police, only without the restrictions that are wisely applied to police. I'm sure you'd waive all rights to privacy as part of the agreement attached to using the service and of course you'd trust them to never abuse this privilege. Any cost associated with all of this monitoring would of course be passed on to the customer. Second, it would result in many reports submitted to police that turn out to be legitimate, legal activity, with the cost passed on to the taxpayer. Third, it will make the real criminals respond by either using false credentials (like stolen IDs) or by using other forms of distributed computation, such as botnets, thus raising the profit other criminals make by operating such botnets.
Like most feel-good measures it would make little or no difference to the real criminals while causing more surveillance, inconvenience, and cost to the average user. It would also erode the concept of a presumption of innocence. All of that, just to avoid telling people that if you really need it to be secure, use sufficiently strong encryption with a sufficiently strong key.
The whole problem with the USA is that half of our laws are like this. I see why you'd find it a logical extension of the way we already do things, but I think that's because you haven't seriously examined the way we already do things.
No. The human species enjoys a unique ability to make a choice. For humans, it's more like a role that can be changed.
The choice is: you can roll over and beg the bully not to hurt you even though you know he will, or, you can prove to him that there are easier targets. Nature affords the gazelle no such choice.
I am starting to get the unpleasant and distasteful idea that the vast majority of Slashdotters have never stood up to a bully or witnessed someone standing up to a bully. If you had, you'd understand how quickly they lose their aggression once they know they are about to encounter determined (not half-hearted) opposition.
This happens even when the bully has a decent chance of winning -- they just don't want to actually have to fight for anything, much like their favorite targets. They'd rather have a submissive, cowardly, easily intimidated target any day. That's what they think is fun. The possibility of them getting hurt, they don't think that's so fun. Most of the time just the willingness will work and it never actually gets physical. But you cannot fake the willingness.
Overall your post was comical but sadly fails to grasp what really should be common knowledge.
That's correlation but not causation.
The fact of the matter is, precisely what causes a human being to want to bring unprovoked (keyword: unprovoked) violence upon another human being is an age-old question. I'm not aware of any final answer on the subject. Poverty, a culture which glorifies violence, poor parenting, childhood abuse, etc. are all factors, but it's very much a question that defies a final ultimate answer. It's like asking why there is evil in the world.
In other words, precisely why Bavaria or Flanders have so little lethal violence is an open question. They don't have the problem for which conceal-carry is a solution. Just as you presumably wouldn't use a crescent wrench to saw a plank of wood in half, it makes no sense to act surprised that places with inherently low murder rates haven't felt a need to enable conceal-carry laws.
It seems so complex because you are making extremely flawed comparisons. You're doing that based on emotion and reactivity, not based on a spirit of genuine inquiry.
First, conceal-carry is a strictly civilian matter of law. To compare that to places which are literally warzones and have little or no rule of law is not intellectually honest. It's comparing an apple to an orange and acting surprised when they taste different. These are not civilians fighting in those warzones. These are one army of combatants against another army of combatants. These are not peaceful civilians against street thugs, which is the problem conceal-carry is designed to answer.
If you really insist on distorting the issue to talk about state actors, the correct analogy would be the policy of MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction - that existed between the USA and the Soviets. The USA had nukes and the USSR had nukes. The very real threat of mutual destruction was an effective deterrent against nuclear aggression. Likewise, with civilian conceal-carry, the criminals have guns and now the law-abiding citizens have guns. The very real threat of ending up in a gunfight against an equally armed citizen has proven to be an effective deterrent against violent criminal aggression.
Arming the target ships is the best way to deal with this problem. It's also the one we consistently refuse to try.
It's not that we refuse to try it. It's that we look at the times when there weren't any restrictions on what you brought into port, and we see how that turned out. You know, it's the whole not-forgetting-history thing. We already did try it.
Would arming commercial ships decrease piracy? Obviously. The reason we haven't isn't because of an unwillingness to try something new, it's because we look back at why those laws were made in the first place. Maybe it's time to revisit those laws, maybe our advances in communication, aircraft, satellites, radar, etc have lessened the danger caused by potentially hostile armed ships.
Just don't act like it hasn't been tried before...
Was there a Somalian piracy problem when those laws were made? No.
It hasn't been tried before under these circumstances. I didn't claim that we have never tried the concept of equipping seagoing vessels with weapons. The existence and long history of the U.S. Navy would be a glaring flaw in that claim. Considering that, your tone is a bit mysterious to me.
What I claimed is that we refuse to try arming seagoing vessels that are at risk from these pirates as a direct response to the piracy.
Of all the seagoing merchant ships worldwide, what fraction of them ever enter waters where Somalian pirates are known to operate? To re-phrase the question, how far is a 6-meter boat going to travel from the Somalian mainland and how big is the ocean in comparison? The problem is limited to a minority of at-risk ships. That means it's managable without taking the black-and-white approach and completely throwing out the port restrictions you mention.
It could be managed by a law allowing for a special exemption or license for which vessels not at-risk would be ineligible. Then the relevant authorities would know who they are, would have a process for verifying this, and would be able to enforce whatever controls they think are necessary (such as dismantling, locking up, and declaring any weapons when approaching a port). The parallels to civilian conceal-carry laws concerning handguns are immense and that means we already have a generic model.
All of this could be done. It's a matter of having the will to do it. You know what else one can learn from history? That appeasing an unreasonable bully never works and only serves to embolden them. Right or wrong, they perceive it as weakness because that's how they think. You can expect this problem to get worse and eventually come to a (very violent) head if we keep rolling over and telling the merchants that it's wrong to defend yourself. If and when that happens, a lot of people will act surprised and that's the part that bothers me.
You really don't need some kind of Super-Terminator here. All you need are targets which are difficult enough that piracy is more risky and less profitable. That's well within the boundaries of feasibility.
That's not a a valid analogy. Prior to 9/11 hijackings were operating under an informal agreement between the hijacker and the passengers. Namely that if they agreed to cooperate, the hijackers would leave them completely unharmed, albeit usually in Cuba or Libya. What you're proposing is changing the deal so that there isn't any sort of assurance that the pirates will let the crew go unharmed. And that's stupid, especially when there are lesser alternatives available. As it stands now, pirates expect that the crew won't be packing huge amounts of weaponry that would make a "hunting" trip with the Terminator and Rambo look piddly in comparison.
These pirates have a lot more in common with regular street thugs than the sort of organized criminals who can pull off something like an airplane hijacking.
Let's face it. There's another reason that past hijackers did not harm the passengers: they're extremely outnumbered. I don't care what kind of gun a hijacker has, if 200 people close by all decide to rush him at once, he might take a couple of them but he is definitely going down. The incentive not to try that is simple: you might be one of the couple he can take before he goes down, which is a risk, when you could just cooperate and remain unharmed, which is no risk.
All of that went out the window the moment hijackers started killing everyone aboard in big fiery crashes. Now in the event of a hijacking it's reasonable to assume that the perpetrators are trying to kill everyone anyway, so the passengers have nothing to lose. They may as well fight and have a chance of winning. I think this has more to do with how few attacks there have been since 9/11 than anything the TSA ever did.
The shoe bomber got the living crap kicked out of him and was tied up with seatbelts and cords. The TSA didn't do that, the passengers did. The message sent was clear.