I'll have the bravery--which Americans used to pride themselves on--to state that I'd rather there be another attack than live with the current NSA abuses. I'd rather die with my liberty than live without it. And it's a false choice anyway, like you said. This won't make us safer, it won't prevent another attack. We're not trading away liberty for safety. We are giving away liberty, getting no extra safety, and becoming a police state. It's lose-lose-lose. There's no trade off. There's no balance. It's the ever tightening ratchet of fascism.
Please explain how a legitimate business, which has to answer to the court of public opinion, not to mention the real courts, would be able to monetize blackmail (an illegal activity).
It's even more laughable than that. You can simply take a screenshot and it'll be saved permanently. In iOS, press the home button and the lock button at the same time. I'm sure it's easy with Android, too.
There's precedent for the FLOSS community not giving a fuck about software patents. They're not enforceable globally and the internet is still mostly borderless, at least in the "free" world. How many open source media players are out there that technically violate the patents on MP3, Windows and Apple codecs, et al? There's no trouble distributing those.
The number of people who think along those lines, and who are reasonably informed, morally competent, and not shilling for the NSA, is precisely zero. If you are against Snowden and what he did, you are defective in one of the aforementioned ways.
YOUR feminism doesn't sound like mainstream feminism. YOUR feminism doesn't sound like feminism at all. It sounds like you're an egalitarian who mistakenly wandered into the feminist camp and picked up their lingo. Here's a tip you'll be thankful, get rid of that label. Stop calling yourself a feminist, because when you really examine what they stand for, you'll find that's not what you want to be.
Do you know what you call a mainstream feminist in 2013? An egalitarian. Those who choose to differentiate themselves by adopting the feminist monicker are either true believers of female-supremacy or ignorant of the core beliefs to which they're hitching their wagon. If you consider yourself a feminist, you're importing a great deal of positions and ideas which you might not be proud of when exposed to the light of day.
There's an undercurrent of hatred for men in most feminist theory. The current strain lusts after the idealized future when men will be exterminated; made exiguous through biological and genetic science as the human race becomes a species entirely composed of females.
If you want to get away from that implication of hatred, you have to drop the label of "feminist". There's no other choice. If you choose to use the feminist label, you're choosing to stand and be counted with those people who want all male babies to be castrated.
Feminist thought doesn't need to be caricatured to be ridiculed. It's ridiculous enough all on its own. These are the "all heterosexual sex is rape" crowd. These are the people who believe, and this is mainstream feminist doctrine, that women are unable to commit rape; and that the accusation of rape (by a woman against a man, only) constitutes proof of the crime.
We already have a perfectly good word and social movement promoting real equality. It's called egalitarianism. Feminism excludes half the population from concern right in the statement of its name. Feminism is not the solution to my problems as a man, and I will not stand to have it said otherwise. I refuse to be talked to in that tone of voice.
You really, really, really, don't want a "free" market anyway. A "free" market leads to Somalia. What you want is a fair market, and a fair market requires government intervention to stop one company from becoming so dominant that they can dictate all the terms. This naturally happens from time to time and requires government to force the company to break up so the market can be "reset" and healthy competition restored.
It's also possible for the mechanism of government intervention to be captured and used for the opposite of its intended purpose. That's what's happening here with AT&T. But this is not inevitable or uncorrectable, and it is not a knock-down argument against ever using government intervention to make the market fair. It can work effectively and provide better outcomes, it has worked in the past, it will work in the future.
Decades of absurd protectionism is how they achieved those margins. It's their only viable business model at this point. They are terrified of becoming a provider of a commodity product, a dumb pipe for bits that anyone can compete with. There's no easy way for a business to justify readjusting to lower (realistic) profits after raking in unreasonable amounts of money for so long. It'll look like a huge loss to their investors, and not what it really is; a return to sane market equilibrium and healthy competition. Investors will consider the leadership to have failed massively, and they'll be held accountable. So the leaders are doing what they can to stop it. It's a perverse system.
If you're just reading an article, the body text is usually still legible. That's all I need, usually. I ignore the site's protestations that it's intended to work only with javascript.
Try out Self-destructing Cookies. It allows cookies to be set, but once you close the tab they are deleted, or deleted on a timer, or both. You can whitelist sites with a toolbar button. Then set Firefox to always reject 3rd party cookies and you're safe as far as cookies go.
The vast complexity of the universe, down to the delicate balance of our solar system and how that makes the earth habitable.
The anthropic principle dispels this argument with a stroke, not by explaining the mystery, but by showing how there is no mystery to be explained. It would be very odd indeed to find ourselves living on a planet on which life could not exist. Also, you seem to suffer a failure of imagination. What sorts of life might be possible in differently configured universes, solar systems, or planets? It's very arrogant and solipsistic to say that our form of life is all that is possible, or could be possible.
started at some point in the past (which implies a creator)
It does no such thing, not at all, not even in principle let alone in practice. If you allow for a god capable of creation ex nihilo then from where came the creator? If you're willing to make the admirable leap that it's capable for some things to always exist and be self-caused then reduce the complexity of your claim and just posit a self-caused and eternal precursor to the universe without a creative force. Spare yourself the experience of falling into the trap of an infinite regression.
The existence of religion throughout the ages and almost universally in every culture, even those cultures with no outside contact.
Belief in something cannot possibly be used as evidence for its existence. This is just lazy and fallacious thinking, and it's beneath you. Religion is universal in man because the human traits of wish-thinking and imagination are universal. That's why our gods are so much like us, so numerous, and yet so familiar--and why they're so concerned with our tawdry earthly affairs.
You're making the incredibly arrogant and anthropocentric assumption that all a "lower" organism "wants" to do is evolve into something more "complex". None of those words actually make sense in an evolutionary context. Bacteria are doing quite well just the way they are, and in many ways it is they who have dominion over us. Evolution is not directed like an arrow from simple organisms to more complicated ones, although this has occurred and the evidence for it is overwhelming.
Short of shutting down the internet, or deploying auditors for everyone (and auditors for the auditors all the way down), there's nothing that can be done to "shut it down". Besides, I see Bitcoin as more a threat to Paypal than banks or the USD.
The Government did allow you to keep your plan. It's Aetna that decided to screw you over and try to get you to blame someone else. It seems to have worked, because instead of directing your ire at the insurance industry's thieving, scheming, middle-men, you're angry at the administration trying to reform a horribly broken system in a political climate where it's virtually impossible to get anything done even when you're willing to adopt ideas from the other side as a compromise.
And that's exactly what the individual mandate was--a huge compromise of liberal values to adopt a Republican idea. The fact that no Republican voted for it even then shows how spiteful and divisive they are.
If their new magic pixie dust is browser fingerprinting, then that's going to be ineffective in a few years also. That problem has already been solved. You can now configure your browser not to pass any extra info in its requests; no list of fonts, no list of add-ons, no plugin versions, no time zones, only a generic (and often deliberately inaccurate) useragent, etc. Flash cookies are blocked, too. Cache is disabled. Even first party cookies get deleted when the tab is closed.
What's left?
Granted this isn't default behavior and likely never will be, but it's certainly possible to not be tracked online by private companies. Even your IP can be hidden trivially.
For an individual. If the US Government seriously saw BTC as a threat and wanted to use technical means to take it out, all it would need is a massive amount of processing power; the NSA either has that already or could build it out since their budget is essentially unlimited within their operational mandates.
Just because others aspire to evil doesn't make it legitimate that we do so as well. That's not an excuse, that's sophistry. We are supposed to be BETTER than the Russians and the Chinese. We aren't supposed to cry like children that they had their hands in the cookie jar too, so it's OK if we did. No, that doesn't make it alright. We set ourselves apart. What is the USA? It's this: we hamstring ourselves, we restrain ourselves, we limit ourselves, in the restrictions and surveillance of our citizens AND THIS MAKES US FREE. THIS MAKES US OUT-COMPETE THE TYRANTS. The hawks have forgotten this. The hawks have forgotten that it is the step back from tyranny which gives you the room to breath the air of freedom; and it is the air of freedom which births prosperity.
Chase security, chase anti-terrorism, chase information awareness, but all you'll get is the opposite of what you're pursuing.
The NSA collect meta data. You can't deny this. They collect it indiscriminately. They just suck it all up, for everyone, all the time. This is now confirmed, right from the horse's mouth, the head of the NSA. This is unreasonable, thus a violation of the 4th Amendment. If you think it is reasonable, then you and I can't have a meaningful conversation with each other. We'll just have to stop here. You fundamentally accept a bigger and more onerous government than I do.
Put up or shut up. Show me something he blew the whistle on that wasn't wrong. He took documents over the course of months, selecting only the damning and illegal activity, and then in an abundance of caution gave them to journalists, and only journalists, who have so far done an honorable and commendable job disclosing only material which details the crimes of the NSA without putting any individual person in danger.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll have the bravery--which Americans used to pride themselves on--to state that I'd rather there be another attack than live with the current NSA abuses. I'd rather die with my liberty than live without it. And it's a false choice anyway, like you said. This won't make us safer, it won't prevent another attack. We're not trading away liberty for safety. We are giving away liberty, getting no extra safety, and becoming a police state. It's lose-lose-lose. There's no trade off. There's no balance. It's the ever tightening ratchet of fascism.
There are trivial workarounds for both platforms.
Please explain how a legitimate business, which has to answer to the court of public opinion, not to mention the real courts, would be able to monetize blackmail (an illegal activity).
It's even more laughable than that. You can simply take a screenshot and it'll be saved permanently. In iOS, press the home button and the lock button at the same time. I'm sure it's easy with Android, too.
There's precedent for the FLOSS community not giving a fuck about software patents. They're not enforceable globally and the internet is still mostly borderless, at least in the "free" world. How many open source media players are out there that technically violate the patents on MP3, Windows and Apple codecs, et al? There's no trouble distributing those.
The number of people who think along those lines, and who are reasonably informed, morally competent, and not shilling for the NSA, is precisely zero. If you are against Snowden and what he did, you are defective in one of the aforementioned ways.
YOUR feminism doesn't sound like mainstream feminism. YOUR feminism doesn't sound like feminism at all. It sounds like you're an egalitarian who mistakenly wandered into the feminist camp and picked up their lingo. Here's a tip you'll be thankful, get rid of that label. Stop calling yourself a feminist, because when you really examine what they stand for, you'll find that's not what you want to be.
Do you know what you call a mainstream feminist in 2013? An egalitarian. Those who choose to differentiate themselves by adopting the feminist monicker are either true believers of female-supremacy or ignorant of the core beliefs to which they're hitching their wagon. If you consider yourself a feminist, you're importing a great deal of positions and ideas which you might not be proud of when exposed to the light of day.
There's an undercurrent of hatred for men in most feminist theory. The current strain lusts after the idealized future when men will be exterminated; made exiguous through biological and genetic science as the human race becomes a species entirely composed of females.
If you want to get away from that implication of hatred, you have to drop the label of "feminist". There's no other choice. If you choose to use the feminist label, you're choosing to stand and be counted with those people who want all male babies to be castrated.
Feminist thought doesn't need to be caricatured to be ridiculed. It's ridiculous enough all on its own. These are the "all heterosexual sex is rape" crowd. These are the people who believe, and this is mainstream feminist doctrine, that women are unable to commit rape; and that the accusation of rape (by a woman against a man, only) constitutes proof of the crime.
We already have a perfectly good word and social movement promoting real equality. It's called egalitarianism. Feminism excludes half the population from concern right in the statement of its name. Feminism is not the solution to my problems as a man, and I will not stand to have it said otherwise. I refuse to be talked to in that tone of voice.
You really, really, really, don't want a "free" market anyway. A "free" market leads to Somalia. What you want is a fair market, and a fair market requires government intervention to stop one company from becoming so dominant that they can dictate all the terms. This naturally happens from time to time and requires government to force the company to break up so the market can be "reset" and healthy competition restored.
It's also possible for the mechanism of government intervention to be captured and used for the opposite of its intended purpose. That's what's happening here with AT&T. But this is not inevitable or uncorrectable, and it is not a knock-down argument against ever using government intervention to make the market fair. It can work effectively and provide better outcomes, it has worked in the past, it will work in the future.
Decades of absurd protectionism is how they achieved those margins. It's their only viable business model at this point. They are terrified of becoming a provider of a commodity product, a dumb pipe for bits that anyone can compete with. There's no easy way for a business to justify readjusting to lower (realistic) profits after raking in unreasonable amounts of money for so long. It'll look like a huge loss to their investors, and not what it really is; a return to sane market equilibrium and healthy competition. Investors will consider the leadership to have failed massively, and they'll be held accountable. So the leaders are doing what they can to stop it. It's a perverse system.
If you're just reading an article, the body text is usually still legible. That's all I need, usually. I ignore the site's protestations that it's intended to work only with javascript.
Try out Self-destructing Cookies. It allows cookies to be set, but once you close the tab they are deleted, or deleted on a timer, or both. You can whitelist sites with a toolbar button. Then set Firefox to always reject 3rd party cookies and you're safe as far as cookies go.
The vast complexity of the universe, down to the delicate balance of our solar system and how that makes the earth habitable.
The anthropic principle dispels this argument with a stroke, not by explaining the mystery, but by showing how there is no mystery to be explained. It would be very odd indeed to find ourselves living on a planet on which life could not exist. Also, you seem to suffer a failure of imagination. What sorts of life might be possible in differently configured universes, solar systems, or planets? It's very arrogant and solipsistic to say that our form of life is all that is possible, or could be possible.
started at some point in the past (which implies a creator)
It does no such thing, not at all, not even in principle let alone in practice. If you allow for a god capable of creation ex nihilo then from where came the creator? If you're willing to make the admirable leap that it's capable for some things to always exist and be self-caused then reduce the complexity of your claim and just posit a self-caused and eternal precursor to the universe without a creative force. Spare yourself the experience of falling into the trap of an infinite regression.
The existence of religion throughout the ages and almost universally in every culture, even those cultures with no outside contact.
Belief in something cannot possibly be used as evidence for its existence. This is just lazy and fallacious thinking, and it's beneath you. Religion is universal in man because the human traits of wish-thinking and imagination are universal. That's why our gods are so much like us, so numerous, and yet so familiar--and why they're so concerned with our tawdry earthly affairs.
You're making the incredibly arrogant and anthropocentric assumption that all a "lower" organism "wants" to do is evolve into something more "complex". None of those words actually make sense in an evolutionary context. Bacteria are doing quite well just the way they are, and in many ways it is they who have dominion over us. Evolution is not directed like an arrow from simple organisms to more complicated ones, although this has occurred and the evidence for it is overwhelming.
I'm astounded that someone could be so credulous and so suspicious simultaneously.
Short of shutting down the internet, or deploying auditors for everyone (and auditors for the auditors all the way down), there's nothing that can be done to "shut it down". Besides, I see Bitcoin as more a threat to Paypal than banks or the USD.
The Government did allow you to keep your plan. It's Aetna that decided to screw you over and try to get you to blame someone else. It seems to have worked, because instead of directing your ire at the insurance industry's thieving, scheming, middle-men, you're angry at the administration trying to reform a horribly broken system in a political climate where it's virtually impossible to get anything done even when you're willing to adopt ideas from the other side as a compromise.
And that's exactly what the individual mandate was--a huge compromise of liberal values to adopt a Republican idea. The fact that no Republican voted for it even then shows how spiteful and divisive they are.
Genetics.
If their new magic pixie dust is browser fingerprinting, then that's going to be ineffective in a few years also. That problem has already been solved. You can now configure your browser not to pass any extra info in its requests; no list of fonts, no list of add-ons, no plugin versions, no time zones, only a generic (and often deliberately inaccurate) useragent, etc. Flash cookies are blocked, too. Cache is disabled. Even first party cookies get deleted when the tab is closed.
What's left?
Granted this isn't default behavior and likely never will be, but it's certainly possible to not be tracked online by private companies. Even your IP can be hidden trivially.
For an individual. If the US Government seriously saw BTC as a threat and wanted to use technical means to take it out, all it would need is a massive amount of processing power; the NSA either has that already or could build it out since their budget is essentially unlimited within their operational mandates.
It was wrong then, it's wrong now. It's always been wrong. Care to try again?
Just because others aspire to evil doesn't make it legitimate that we do so as well. That's not an excuse, that's sophistry. We are supposed to be BETTER than the Russians and the Chinese. We aren't supposed to cry like children that they had their hands in the cookie jar too, so it's OK if we did. No, that doesn't make it alright. We set ourselves apart. What is the USA? It's this: we hamstring ourselves, we restrain ourselves, we limit ourselves, in the restrictions and surveillance of our citizens AND THIS MAKES US FREE. THIS MAKES US OUT-COMPETE THE TYRANTS. The hawks have forgotten this. The hawks have forgotten that it is the step back from tyranny which gives you the room to breath the air of freedom; and it is the air of freedom which births prosperity.
Chase security, chase anti-terrorism, chase information awareness, but all you'll get is the opposite of what you're pursuing.
The NSA collect meta data. You can't deny this. They collect it indiscriminately. They just suck it all up, for everyone, all the time. This is now confirmed, right from the horse's mouth, the head of the NSA. This is unreasonable, thus a violation of the 4th Amendment. If you think it is reasonable, then you and I can't have a meaningful conversation with each other. We'll just have to stop here. You fundamentally accept a bigger and more onerous government than I do.
Put up or shut up. Show me something he blew the whistle on that wasn't wrong. He took documents over the course of months, selecting only the damning and illegal activity, and then in an abundance of caution gave them to journalists, and only journalists, who have so far done an honorable and commendable job disclosing only material which details the crimes of the NSA without putting any individual person in danger.