If as you say it's common knowledge that all governments spy on all other governments, then it shouldn't have done much harm to have what we already knew confirmed.
But that's not true, not all governments engage in this behavior, and not all that do take it as far as the US. Tapping the private phone of an allied head of state is out of bounds. It's not the kind of thing we should be doing. It's the kind of thing that causes an embarrassing international incident when it is revealed. Imagine our own government's reaction if the tables were turned.
Also, Snowden released the information to reputable journalists who have been selecting what to release. He didn't just dump it on a website for all to see. Those journalists have been reviewing the material and redacting anything that would actually put lives at risk. Snowden carried this off in the most responsible, most honorable, fashion possible.
Yeah, because THAT'S what's keeping him from being elected. It's not that a good percentage of the country has bought into the line that he's a communist traitor who has put American lives at risk, handed over secret documents to the "enemy", and was acting out of a desire to harm the United States. None of those things are true, mind, but that's not stopping people from demanding we send SEAL Team 6 into Russia.
The anger directed toward this man was so quick to start, so widespread, and so homogenous in tone and intent that it makes me suspect an NSA influence operation using internet sockpuppet accounts, and the already completely dominated mainstream cable channels (I won't use the word "news" to describe what they are). We actually know the government does this, we even knew before the Snowden documents, so it's not that much of a stretch in my mind. But on the other hand, I know quite a few living, breathing, people who really are that intellectually retarded. They're vociferously and sincerely calling for blood. He wouldn't live to see his name on the ballot if he comes back here. Our government has spoken: he's a traitor aiding foreign powers. We kill people for that.
At its lowest level, the hardware we use today to store data is prone to errors. Your HDD functions perfectly well misreading data hundreds of times a second. You don't even notice until it becomes especially bad; when the errors overwhelm the ability to check and correct the data. A certain amount of errors are expected, and correctable. The simplest method is a simple checksum. Report the intended length of the message you're sending and the receipient then checks to make sure at least the length is correct. Then you can build in redundancy and error correction through more sophisticated means. These problems have largely been solved in the abstract, so they're not dependent on any particular media.
I've worked in health care biling. Here's what's happening. EMR (electronic medical records) allow doctors to easily bill for all the services they should always have been billing. Before, with paper forms, it was a huge hassle and lots of things were just written off and not followed up on, or got lost in the shuffle. Now that it it's automatic, there's no reason not to take every dollar you're entitled to by law. Solution: change the law.
Enterprise customers still need millions of new workstation traditional desktops/laptops every few years. They're especially big in the medical and education markets where tablets and smart phones don't make sense.
If anything, it's MS with their abhorred Windows 8 that's threatening Dell's traditional business success. Luckily, Windows 7 will be around until 2020.
No, that they voted unanimously against it indicates they were playing politics, it's what politicians do. The individual mandate was a Republican idea, but they weren't going to support it if they weren't going to get credit for it like they would have in the 90s when they were the party putting it forward. Now that it has a Democrats name prominently attached to it (Obamacare) they had to look like they hated it to remain popular with their constituencies. The Tea Party wing of the GOP held the rest of the party hostage, and there's not the political will to defy them and risk a primary challenge or fracturing of the party.
They can't even support ideas they like! The idea, the individual mandate, came from the Republican party. Then once the Democrats started supporting it, the Republicans were against it. Now, this is mostly because the GOP has changed so much since the 90s. Republican leadership can't control the Tea Party wing. There are a few sane, moderate, Republicans but they are terrified of primary challenges and breaking ranks. So you end up with, as the GP elegantly put it, a reactionary party which can't actually propose any idea because their core belief (really just the core belief of a small minority holding the rest of the party hostage) is that anything the government does is by definition wrong.
This might come as a shock to you, since you've probably never strayed far beyond the cornfields surrounding your town, but other countries don't just let you move there. And, really, gonna try the welfare queen angle again? This was tired, overplayed, and simply wrong back when Reagan invented the lie and it's even more groan inducing now.
You're the one making special exceptions for use of language. When discussing healthcare, when someone says "free" the assumed parlance is that there's an unspoken phrase "at point of service" included. You're being intentionally obtuse. The rest of your delusional, psychotic, rantings are further proof that you're not a reasonable adult, and hence don't get a seat at the table to discuss this issue. Grow up, or you'll continue to have decisions be made for you.
Pick almost almost any random article, something not too obscure. Look for some cumbersome or inelegant prose and clean it up. Don't even change anything factual, just make the article objectively clearer. This isn't even very hard to do, since many articles are written by technical-types who aren't very proficient at communicating. You see this sort of thing with engineers especially; the kind of people who resented having to take English classes.
Now wait about five minutes. Your edit will automatically be reverted by a bot squatting on the article. And after a few seconds you'll receive an automated message, usually beginning with an insincere and condescending, "Welcome to Wikipedia! I've automatically reverted your edit because...".
You can try to start an edit war, but the entrenched editors of most articles have more seniority than you, they're "experts", and it's really not worth the hassle just to make small changes. So you end up with a lot of articles which seem like they have been written by people with Aspergers, or a tenuous grasp of English. I can't speak to the editing climate in other languages.
I don't have a comprehensive solution to this problem, but it probably has something to do with getting rid of the automated bots which protect pages. That'd be a decent start.
I'm not sure what precisely "can't be held responsible/accountable" means practically.
In the lecture I linked to, Sam Harris describes a hypothetical situation where a man is wounded by a crocodile. He points out that we don't waste any time hating the crocodile. We don't try to make it suffer as payback. But if instead you get attacked by a person, there's a desire for some sort of retribution. The difference is we attribute free will to the person, not the crocodile. We'd certainly be in the right to seperate both of those creatures from society, but in both cases it's pointless to go beyond that. Actually, the human might be able to be rehabilitated. We're more reprogrammable than most animals. But we shouldn't punish the person anymore than we should punish an animal for committing some act that would be a crime if done by a human. The person doesn't "deserve" to be punished the way we shouldn't catch the croc and cause it pain to teach it a lesson.
Most people can make that leap of understanding when it comes to non-human animals, but don't seem to apply the same idea to our own species. It's the illusion of free will which causes this hang up. It's a powerful illusion, and one we all have direct access to, and you can see the hateful response that often comes about when you challenge it. The assumption of free will runs through almost every aspect of human culture, and it's seen as necessary. Challenge free will and you'll be attacked by most people on religious, poltiical, philosophical, economic, judicial, reasons, and probably more. Anyone who cares at all about any one of those spheres probably has a reason to rise to the defense of free will.
Watch the lecture. Invoking quantum weirdness might save you from hard determinism, but you don't squeeze free will out of it. If your thoughts are unpredictable, you can't be in conscious control of them. And what would it even mean to be the conscious author of your own thoughts? You would essentially have to think your thoughts before you think them and then choose. You still wouldn't be able to explain why you chose one thought over any other. The entire idea of free will falls apart when you start scrutinizing it.
Sam Harris has delivered a presentation which, as far as I can tell, essentially closes the book on this issue. We don't have free will. Our actions either regress to prior causes and we are ultimately not responsible for them (you didn't control the circumstances of your birth or upbringing), or randomness inherent in a chaotic system; and we can't be held accountable for randomness either. You can't get free will out of any combination of randomness and prior causes. Harris also easily demonstrates how free will isn't even subjectively true once you pay close attention to your own consciousness.
And he beautifully cuts through any ethical objections people have to abandoning free will, exposing the fallacy that free will is the only basis for a fair system of justice. Punitive justice is no longer a coherent idea when people aren't responsible for their actions, but we still have complete justification for locking people up if they are dangerous. We would no longer feel that people need to "suffer" for their crimes. Justice becomes what it should always have been, protecting society from harm, without the infliction of suffering for its own sake to "purify" wrongdoers.
Hate itself is completely eroded, it's no longer a meaningful concept to apply to your fellow man. I think this is one of the most important and profound ideas humanity has developed, and could do real work to improve all of our lives if widely adopted. We are all discovering, moment to moment, what it is to be ourselves.
Tor (and Tor hidden services) can no longer be considered completely secure. It's much better than nothing, but if you become a target, the NSA and other government agencies can and have used methods to track people down who use Tor. The FBI has shown that they are willing to actively attack the Tor network by infecting innocent bystanders with malware. The NSA are making a big push on the Tor network, as revealed by recently released Snowden files. We need to rapidly develop and migrate to a new generation of anonymizing networks.
Right, because Europe doesn't have any prestigious academic institutions doing prize winning research. And I'm sure being in a perpetual state of war on their own soil just does wonders for the Israeli economy and ability to fund fripperies like science and technology.
We could do with some real socialism here, instead of the crony-capitalist half-measures we get from our system of compromises.
I'm sure that ad listed all their competitors prices too, right? And all the other brands that might be even better or cheaper, or both? You probably could have done better going on Amazon. Even if you're completely right in this instance, I'm still right in the generality. You'll always be able to find cases where the advertiser's needs happen to mesh with yours. That's incidental. It wasn't their intention. Don't take it to mean they had your best interest in mind.
Like comparing a gambler to a non-gambler; the non-gambler may be worse off on any one day compared to a gamblers who happened to get lucky, but over his life the gambler will be down and the non-gambler, simply by opting out, will end up ahead. In the long run, you'd be better off ignoring ads, and doing your own research when you need something. If you've made a habit of acting the way you describe, you're definitely down more than the $150 you saved on that one item.
Here's just one example. I know someone who works in the produce department of a grocery store. When they need to move a specific product quickly they put up a sign saying "temporary price reduction" and sales go up every time. They don't actually change the price. Some stores even mark up "sale" items, and people still fall for it.
We also allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients on television. That's fucking insanity, but everyone just thinks nothing of it. I feel like I'm living in the movie They Live sometimes.
Your definition for advertising is so broad as to be meaningless. Advertising can be more narrowly defined as corporate speech intended to persuade potential consumers into taking some sort of economic action, usually the purchasing of a product or service. The keyword there is persuade. They have no intention or incentive to be truthful, or to take the consumer's needs into account. Advertisers can and do use every trick and psychological hack available to sell products. It doesn't matter if the consumer really needs it. It doesn't matter if it's harmful. It doesn't matter if better alternatives exist. If some communication is giving you that information, it's not an ad, it's an informative communication usually by a third party (think Consumer Reports or Amazon product reviews).
Advertising is harmful because it is by its very nature deceptive, dishonest, and serves the needs of the advertiser, not the consumer.
"Child" in this situation is used in the sense of the word describing a person's relationship to other persons. I will always be the child of my mother and father in the sense that I came from their genetic material. No matter how old I am, I will always be their child in that sense. I will not always be a child in the sense of a "young person".
Maybe English isn't your first language? Keep at it, it's hard even for natives sometimes.
That's the only way for a libertarian to be internally consistent and intellectually honest, and I'm actually always impressed when I see people own up and speak the truth about it. He has to give that answer, or else do some embarrassingly inadequate handwaving while making noises about private charity picking up the slack.
If I have a "universal fabricator" which can make virtually any consumer good I want, then the only thing I need is raw materials and land. So I trade my raw materials with other owners. Anyone who doesn't own land or raw materials doesn't get to play; and that's the overwhelming mass of humanity.
I'm sure they'll all just die quietly, accepting the fact that they lost the game. Right?
Slashdot Mirror
If as you say it's common knowledge that all governments spy on all other governments, then it shouldn't have done much harm to have what we already knew confirmed.
But that's not true, not all governments engage in this behavior, and not all that do take it as far as the US. Tapping the private phone of an allied head of state is out of bounds. It's not the kind of thing we should be doing. It's the kind of thing that causes an embarrassing international incident when it is revealed. Imagine our own government's reaction if the tables were turned.
Also, Snowden released the information to reputable journalists who have been selecting what to release. He didn't just dump it on a website for all to see. Those journalists have been reviewing the material and redacting anything that would actually put lives at risk. Snowden carried this off in the most responsible, most honorable, fashion possible.
Yeah, because THAT'S what's keeping him from being elected. It's not that a good percentage of the country has bought into the line that he's a communist traitor who has put American lives at risk, handed over secret documents to the "enemy", and was acting out of a desire to harm the United States. None of those things are true, mind, but that's not stopping people from demanding we send SEAL Team 6 into Russia.
The anger directed toward this man was so quick to start, so widespread, and so homogenous in tone and intent that it makes me suspect an NSA influence operation using internet sockpuppet accounts, and the already completely dominated mainstream cable channels (I won't use the word "news" to describe what they are). We actually know the government does this, we even knew before the Snowden documents, so it's not that much of a stretch in my mind. But on the other hand, I know quite a few living, breathing, people who really are that intellectually retarded. They're vociferously and sincerely calling for blood. He wouldn't live to see his name on the ballot if he comes back here. Our government has spoken: he's a traitor aiding foreign powers. We kill people for that.
At its lowest level, the hardware we use today to store data is prone to errors. Your HDD functions perfectly well misreading data hundreds of times a second. You don't even notice until it becomes especially bad; when the errors overwhelm the ability to check and correct the data. A certain amount of errors are expected, and correctable. The simplest method is a simple checksum. Report the intended length of the message you're sending and the receipient then checks to make sure at least the length is correct. Then you can build in redundancy and error correction through more sophisticated means. These problems have largely been solved in the abstract, so they're not dependent on any particular media.
I've worked in health care biling. Here's what's happening. EMR (electronic medical records) allow doctors to easily bill for all the services they should always have been billing. Before, with paper forms, it was a huge hassle and lots of things were just written off and not followed up on, or got lost in the shuffle. Now that it it's automatic, there's no reason not to take every dollar you're entitled to by law. Solution: change the law.
Enterprise customers still need millions of new workstation traditional desktops/laptops every few years. They're especially big in the medical and education markets where tablets and smart phones don't make sense.
If anything, it's MS with their abhorred Windows 8 that's threatening Dell's traditional business success. Luckily, Windows 7 will be around until 2020.
Yup, probably a lot of the same feelings and motivations there. You're not going to upset me by attacking the Democrats. I'm a Green.
I can think of someone more deserving.
No, that they voted unanimously against it indicates they were playing politics, it's what politicians do. The individual mandate was a Republican idea, but they weren't going to support it if they weren't going to get credit for it like they would have in the 90s when they were the party putting it forward. Now that it has a Democrats name prominently attached to it (Obamacare) they had to look like they hated it to remain popular with their constituencies. The Tea Party wing of the GOP held the rest of the party hostage, and there's not the political will to defy them and risk a primary challenge or fracturing of the party.
Come and take it.
I think we'll leave that to the IRS.
They can't even support ideas they like! The idea, the individual mandate, came from the Republican party. Then once the Democrats started supporting it, the Republicans were against it. Now, this is mostly because the GOP has changed so much since the 90s. Republican leadership can't control the Tea Party wing. There are a few sane, moderate, Republicans but they are terrified of primary challenges and breaking ranks. So you end up with, as the GP elegantly put it, a reactionary party which can't actually propose any idea because their core belief (really just the core belief of a small minority holding the rest of the party hostage) is that anything the government does is by definition wrong.
This might come as a shock to you, since you've probably never strayed far beyond the cornfields surrounding your town, but other countries don't just let you move there. And, really, gonna try the welfare queen angle again? This was tired, overplayed, and simply wrong back when Reagan invented the lie and it's even more groan inducing now.
Terrible troll. Apply yourself.
You're the one making special exceptions for use of language. When discussing healthcare, when someone says "free" the assumed parlance is that there's an unspoken phrase "at point of service" included. You're being intentionally obtuse. The rest of your delusional, psychotic, rantings are further proof that you're not a reasonable adult, and hence don't get a seat at the table to discuss this issue. Grow up, or you'll continue to have decisions be made for you.
Pick almost almost any random article, something not too obscure. Look for some cumbersome or inelegant prose and clean it up. Don't even change anything factual, just make the article objectively clearer. This isn't even very hard to do, since many articles are written by technical-types who aren't very proficient at communicating. You see this sort of thing with engineers especially; the kind of people who resented having to take English classes.
Now wait about five minutes. Your edit will automatically be reverted by a bot squatting on the article. And after a few seconds you'll receive an automated message, usually beginning with an insincere and condescending, "Welcome to Wikipedia! I've automatically reverted your edit because...".
You can try to start an edit war, but the entrenched editors of most articles have more seniority than you, they're "experts", and it's really not worth the hassle just to make small changes. So you end up with a lot of articles which seem like they have been written by people with Aspergers, or a tenuous grasp of English. I can't speak to the editing climate in other languages.
I don't have a comprehensive solution to this problem, but it probably has something to do with getting rid of the automated bots which protect pages. That'd be a decent start.
I'm not sure what precisely "can't be held responsible/accountable" means practically.
In the lecture I linked to, Sam Harris describes a hypothetical situation where a man is wounded by a crocodile. He points out that we don't waste any time hating the crocodile. We don't try to make it suffer as payback. But if instead you get attacked by a person, there's a desire for some sort of retribution. The difference is we attribute free will to the person, not the crocodile. We'd certainly be in the right to seperate both of those creatures from society, but in both cases it's pointless to go beyond that. Actually, the human might be able to be rehabilitated. We're more reprogrammable than most animals. But we shouldn't punish the person anymore than we should punish an animal for committing some act that would be a crime if done by a human. The person doesn't "deserve" to be punished the way we shouldn't catch the croc and cause it pain to teach it a lesson.
Most people can make that leap of understanding when it comes to non-human animals, but don't seem to apply the same idea to our own species. It's the illusion of free will which causes this hang up. It's a powerful illusion, and one we all have direct access to, and you can see the hateful response that often comes about when you challenge it. The assumption of free will runs through almost every aspect of human culture, and it's seen as necessary. Challenge free will and you'll be attacked by most people on religious, poltiical, philosophical, economic, judicial, reasons, and probably more. Anyone who cares at all about any one of those spheres probably has a reason to rise to the defense of free will.
But that doesn't make it true.
Watch the lecture. Invoking quantum weirdness might save you from hard determinism, but you don't squeeze free will out of it. If your thoughts are unpredictable, you can't be in conscious control of them. And what would it even mean to be the conscious author of your own thoughts? You would essentially have to think your thoughts before you think them and then choose. You still wouldn't be able to explain why you chose one thought over any other. The entire idea of free will falls apart when you start scrutinizing it.
Sam Harris has delivered a presentation which, as far as I can tell, essentially closes the book on this issue. We don't have free will. Our actions either regress to prior causes and we are ultimately not responsible for them (you didn't control the circumstances of your birth or upbringing), or randomness inherent in a chaotic system; and we can't be held accountable for randomness either. You can't get free will out of any combination of randomness and prior causes. Harris also easily demonstrates how free will isn't even subjectively true once you pay close attention to your own consciousness.
And he beautifully cuts through any ethical objections people have to abandoning free will, exposing the fallacy that free will is the only basis for a fair system of justice. Punitive justice is no longer a coherent idea when people aren't responsible for their actions, but we still have complete justification for locking people up if they are dangerous. We would no longer feel that people need to "suffer" for their crimes. Justice becomes what it should always have been, protecting society from harm, without the infliction of suffering for its own sake to "purify" wrongdoers.
Hate itself is completely eroded, it's no longer a meaningful concept to apply to your fellow man. I think this is one of the most important and profound ideas humanity has developed, and could do real work to improve all of our lives if widely adopted. We are all discovering, moment to moment, what it is to be ourselves.
Tor (and Tor hidden services) can no longer be considered completely secure. It's much better than nothing, but if you become a target, the NSA and other government agencies can and have used methods to track people down who use Tor. The FBI has shown that they are willing to actively attack the Tor network by infecting innocent bystanders with malware. The NSA are making a big push on the Tor network, as revealed by recently released Snowden files. We need to rapidly develop and migrate to a new generation of anonymizing networks.
Right, because Europe doesn't have any prestigious academic institutions doing prize winning research. And I'm sure being in a perpetual state of war on their own soil just does wonders for the Israeli economy and ability to fund fripperies like science and technology.
We could do with some real socialism here, instead of the crony-capitalist half-measures we get from our system of compromises.
I'm sure that ad listed all their competitors prices too, right? And all the other brands that might be even better or cheaper, or both? You probably could have done better going on Amazon. Even if you're completely right in this instance, I'm still right in the generality. You'll always be able to find cases where the advertiser's needs happen to mesh with yours. That's incidental. It wasn't their intention. Don't take it to mean they had your best interest in mind.
Like comparing a gambler to a non-gambler; the non-gambler may be worse off on any one day compared to a gamblers who happened to get lucky, but over his life the gambler will be down and the non-gambler, simply by opting out, will end up ahead. In the long run, you'd be better off ignoring ads, and doing your own research when you need something. If you've made a habit of acting the way you describe, you're definitely down more than the $150 you saved on that one item.
Here's just one example. I know someone who works in the produce department of a grocery store. When they need to move a specific product quickly they put up a sign saying "temporary price reduction" and sales go up every time. They don't actually change the price. Some stores even mark up "sale" items, and people still fall for it.
We also allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients on television. That's fucking insanity, but everyone just thinks nothing of it. I feel like I'm living in the movie They Live sometimes.
Your definition for advertising is so broad as to be meaningless. Advertising can be more narrowly defined as corporate speech intended to persuade potential consumers into taking some sort of economic action, usually the purchasing of a product or service. The keyword there is persuade. They have no intention or incentive to be truthful, or to take the consumer's needs into account. Advertisers can and do use every trick and psychological hack available to sell products. It doesn't matter if the consumer really needs it. It doesn't matter if it's harmful. It doesn't matter if better alternatives exist. If some communication is giving you that information, it's not an ad, it's an informative communication usually by a third party (think Consumer Reports or Amazon product reviews).
Advertising is harmful because it is by its very nature deceptive, dishonest, and serves the needs of the advertiser, not the consumer.
"Child" in this situation is used in the sense of the word describing a person's relationship to other persons. I will always be the child of my mother and father in the sense that I came from their genetic material. No matter how old I am, I will always be their child in that sense. I will not always be a child in the sense of a "young person".
Maybe English isn't your first language? Keep at it, it's hard even for natives sometimes.
That's the only way for a libertarian to be internally consistent and intellectually honest, and I'm actually always impressed when I see people own up and speak the truth about it. He has to give that answer, or else do some embarrassingly inadequate handwaving while making noises about private charity picking up the slack.
If I have a "universal fabricator" which can make virtually any consumer good I want, then the only thing I need is raw materials and land. So I trade my raw materials with other owners. Anyone who doesn't own land or raw materials doesn't get to play; and that's the overwhelming mass of humanity.
I'm sure they'll all just die quietly, accepting the fact that they lost the game. Right?
It's a pretty big leap to say that because something doesn't exist now, that it will therefore never exist. We're talking long timelines here.