Re:Have they fixed their "Firefox" problem yet?
on
Debian Turns 20
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's too bad Ubuntu went full retard back when they released Unity, and then just threw the oars out of the boat entirely with the Amazon spyware fiasco. Thankfully there's still sane derivative distros like Xubuntu and Mint that can leverage the useful work Canonical is doing.
Have they fixed their "Firefox" problem yet?
on
Debian Turns 20
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Can I install Firfox with a simple apt-get command immediately after install? Or am I still stuck with the idiotic IceWeasel fork or a tedious install process involving adding new repos and keys for a totally different distro?
Would it be so hard to at least include it in their repo for people who want it even if it's not installed by default?
Or they could give up the moronic habit of watching roided out grown men more athletic than themselves play a children's game. It's always amazing to me that a country so obese can be so obsessed with sports. Televised sports are the most idiotic reason to stick with a company and a business model that is downright abusive to its customers.
But almost the entire party fought the civil rights movement.
There was an ideological transition that occurred because of this. Anyone against the civil rights movement fled the Democratic party, drawn to the Republicans by Nixon's Southern strategy of courting bible belt racists. It's disingenuous to apply contemporary labels across vast periods of history. Names and labels change. This is the same reason why it's fallacious for contemporary Republicans to claim to be the party of Lincoln. If Lincoln were alive today, it's not safe to say he'd be a Democrat, but he'd certainly NOT be a Republican.
I should note I'm not a Democrat or a Republican. I vote Green Party.
Why do I keep seeing this meme repeated all over a tech site of all places? Windows (including 7 and 8) has been completely cracked and broken to the point where pirate copies are indistinguishable even to Microsoft. They couldn't cut off the pirate copies even if they wanted to. The pirate copies are actually EASIER to activate and keep updated since it's all automatic, no messing with keys.
I have Java on my machine but it's not exposed to the web. Javascript is enabled on a site by site basis with the default setting being to deny all scripts. Usually sites will at least render well enough to read an article even if the layout is garbled. I can still get the content so that's good enough. None of their ad/tracking scripts get to run, ever. Sites like Slashdot get to run Javascript but right now I look and there are four domains on this page which have their scripts blocked: google-analytics.com, googleadservices.com, rpxnow.com, and doubleclick.com. Three of those are outright blacklisted across the entire internet in my browser.
I'm worried that one day they'll start running ad/tracking scripts from the same domain, then it'll become much harder to allow only some scripts on a page and deny malicious ones (I consider the activity of advertising to be malicious by its nature).
Flash gets to run, but I have a click to play plugin so flash objects don't run by default except on a few sites like Youtube.
If you're doing that much heavy lifting you need to offload some of it to a dedicated server and remote into it. If you need to take all that power with you, then you have to sacrifice portability and battery life. The MBA isn't for you. You need a MacBook Pro, or a similar PC, with maxed out specs. You're going to pay for it with having to lug around a huge machine, and several extra batteries (if you go PC). So what matters more to you?
Before anyone smugly proclaims that this proves humans aren't responsible for climate change, remember that it's possible for some phenomenon to have multiple causes. It's entirely possible for there to be both natural and man-made causes for variations in climate. Giving examples of natural causes doesn't do anything to weaken the argument against anthropogenic climate change in this epoch.
If climate change is currently man-made, or partially man-made, or being made worse by human activity, then it's still worth bending every effort to slow or reverse it.
[America] has a very small productive economy and thrives exclusively on plunder.
We are still the number one manufacturer in the world, representing a full 1/5 of all production output on the planet. It's just that the things we produce are not typical consumer goods, and so the picture you're average American gets is that we don't make anything. Your typical American doesn't use Caterpillar heavy construction equipment, Boeing or Lockheed aircraft (other than maybe flying in them), GE turbines, oil rigs, mining drills, spacecraft, or the bulk of the free world's military equipment.
Yeah, all our clothes and cheap plastic stuff is made in China, and our consumer electronics are made in Japan and Taiwan; but heavy industry, military hardware, construction equipment, resource extraction tools all over the world are stamped MADE IN USA.
If Mayer really wanted to skate to where the puck is going, she'd make a massive push to retool Yahoo into a privacy-centric company.
Move as much of Yahoo out of the USA as possible so they can speak to their users freely. Very publicly and loudly proclaim that they will not play ball with government spy agencies, and back it up with real and demonstrable steps toward that end. Encrypt everything. Set up their services to make it cryptographically impossible for them to turn over plaintext to anyone. Keep the absolute minimum logs required by law. Don't collect any information that isn't absolutely necessary. Alert everyone to all government requests for data whenever possible, and give every user a status in their account which says, "Your information has NOT been requested by a government or intelligence agency" which disappears when this statement is no longer true. Provide a deadman's switch to automatically delete data according to some user-defined criteria. Open their infrastructure to community audits from trusted security experts. Have bug bounties for security flaws. Do all this and more. These are all legal and many could be implemented immediately.
Done sincerely, this could earn them respect, users, customers, and profits. They'd keep their old users of course (if they're still with Yahoo nothing is going to get them to budge) but they'd be set up to grow into a huge new sector. Privacy is going to be big in the coming years, and the technology exists to nearly completely, and legally, nullify most of the efforts of the surveillance state. They could steal all of the users who are wary of Google and Microsoft but don't see any decent alternatives. The companies which set themselves in this direction now are going to be the leaders that everyone else is chasing in 5-10 years. Kim Dotcom's Mega was arguably the first, putting privacy as the number one priority in their mission statement. Yahoo has the resources to be a big player in the this space.
What else can they do to save a dying brand? What better way to really set themselves apart? So much of what the NSA et al do is predicated on the complacency and collusion of private enterprise. Yahoo could stand head and shoulders above the rest by saying no when they come asking. Sorry, come back with a warrant. Got a warrant? OK, here's your encrypted pseudo-random noise--and its in dead-tree format. We are still at the point where government needs private business to cooperate. Business still has a choice in a lot of this. They can still choose to be on the side of privacy and liberty, and they could be greatly rewarded for it.
More and more; robots and computers. There's already a glut of completely unskilled labor in the West. Unless you're leveraging relative strength of the dollar with your home currency there's no incentive to work a minimum wage job in the USA. That's why illegal immigrants are willing to work for below minimum wage here. When they send their money back home it's still more than they would be able to make otherwise.
We have another 20-30 years before we have to really face the facts: it's not possible for a person of average intelligence to survive by selling their labor. And they're not going to lay down and starve peacefully. We better come up with a plan, and soon. The ownership class is going to face a choice very soon: give up most of your wealth in exchange for the assurance you can keep the rest of it in security, or lose it all like everyone else in the conflagration to come.
We are fairly sure now that inequality really is bad, even just relative inequality in a world where everyone's basic needs are met. This is a scientific question about human well-being, and it's answerable in principle if not in practice. Just existing in an unequal society puts mental stress on human beings which correlates to significant negative health outcomes both physically and mentally. If you could instantly inflate the US economy ten fold, but following the same trend of inequality growth, you'd actually be doing a terrible thing. Everyone would have more wealth in an absolute sense, but the massive increase in inequality would make the majority of people demonstrably less happy. You would have greatly added to the human misery of the world.
This isn't intuitive, but there are a lot of true concept that aren't intuitive to humans. Certain types of people even find this idea quite repugnant, to the point where they simply reject it outright. Sadly, wishing it to go away won't change reality. You might be able to stake out some defensible territory around the proposition that SOME level of inequality is indispensable as a motivator, but that doesn't give you license to ignore the negatives that come with it. And if there can be too little inequality there can also be too much. When society becomes too unequal then inequality ceases to be a motivator, since it becomes clear to everyone that the struggle for improvement is virtually hopeless.
Inequality in itself IS bad. The single minded pursuit of ending all inequality is also bad (and impossible to achieve anyway). Our current society has reached an absurd level of unbalanced wealth distribution. It isn't sustainable, and it isn't optimizing human well being or potential. We can do a lot better.
What free-marketeers mean when they say they want deregulation and an end to these programs is that the moral cost of providing these services through subsidies is higher than the practical cost of denying people access to these services. When one of your highest values is ideological purity you end up doing a lot of things which hurt you, and hurt everyone, just so your extremist philosophy can remain consistent. It's like a religion for some people.
Who says EVs are limited to batteries? That's just our current best effort. Won't always be true. Super-capacitors still count as EV. Fuel cells are still EV. Meanwhile the laws of physics put a cap on how efficient an ICE can ever be.
Electricity sources are fungible. The car doesn't care where the electricity came from. ICE needs oil pumped from the ground and transported to a refinery, then it has to be refined into petrol, then it has to be transported to where the cars are. It's dirty at every step, scarce and getting scarcer, dangerous, and politically harmful. There's plenty of non-productive land you can put any number and kind of power production facilities. There's a nuke plant right down the road from me and I've never even seen it because it's tucked away on otherwise useless land.
Even if ALL of the electricity to power EVs was generated from the dirtiest coal plants, it would STILL be cleaner than every single car carrying around its own heavy, petrol burning, ICE. Also you have the benefits of localizing pollution somewhere less populated. This smells like a big oil hit piece.
Now, there is a separate conversation about other forms of transportation being even better than personal automobiles. Trains and even airplanes might be better in some scenarios than everyone racing around pell-mell with their own car, but that's a different issue. If we, as a society, have decided that everyone will be driving their own vehicle, the question is how to make that scenario least damaging; and the answer is electric vehicles.
Is that a joke? Islam systematically infringes on the rights of non-Muslims and women all the time. They either explain this away as some sort of god-intended hierarchy; the rights of Muslims come first, and then everyone else is considered if it doesn't inconvenience Muslims--or it's good old fashioned sexism that was endemic to the entire world when their religion was founded. They've never had a reformation period to bring their faith in line with modernity like Christianity and Judaism have gone through. And certain features of Islam, the Arabic language, and middle-Eastern culture, make such a reformation very unlikely.
There's another option. Accept the fact that you will never be truly safe, and live with the possibility that any moment could be your last from a terrible accident or crime. While you are alive, however, live your life as freely as possible, harming and infringing on the rights of others as little as you can while still participating in a modern, thriving, society.
I'd rather a 9/11 size attack happen every generation than suffer through the insults to my dignity and liberty required to prevent it--and in reality you'll never be able to prevent them all anyway. Might as well be free and unsafe, than enslaved and still unsafe.
We are not at war. Terrorism is a law-enforcement problem. Terrorism is a tactic used by the desperate, the marginalized, and the disaffected. We have a lot of angry people in the world and some of that anger occasionally gets directed at us, rightly or wrongly. If all the post-9/11 security theatre just stopped, completely stopped, how much more danger would we face? What threats would endanger us over and above what is normal in everyday life on a human time scale? The biggest killers would still be car accidents, heart attacks, and tobacco. Yet our civil liberties would enjoy a great boost. Our mail and correspondences would not be intercepted or monitored as a matter of course. Our movements wouldn't be tracked. Our financial records wouldn't be collated and analyzed above the normal level to detect fraud and tax evasion. Our library records wouldn't be flagged. We wouldn't be irradiated at the airport or sexually assaulted by TSA goons. We wouldn't suffer the myriad small insults to our privacy and dignity which have crept into life the last 12 years.
I would rather suffer a 9-11 size terrorist attack once every 50 years than suffer through the loss of freedom required to prevent it. And I'd rather force you to live in such a society too, if you couldn't be convinced that my freedom is more important than your safety. You will never be perfectly safe, but you can be perfectly enslaved; it's happened before.
We face a lot of problems but none of them have as a solution a massive military industrial complex backed up by a pervasive and omnipresent surveillance apparatus. Promote free trade, peace, cooperation, fair economic development, education for women, reduction in arms especially nuclear, transparency of government, and elevate a humanist ethic based on science and rationalism above superstition.
That last one is especially important, because no one wants to say it but Islam is a problem even more than religion in general. There are features unique to Islam which make its danger level rise above the baseline. Among these features are the complete lack of separation between church and state, the glorification of martyrdom and death, the celebration of obsequiousness to religious authorities, the promotion and continuation of ancient tribal and cultural schisms, the elevation of the rights of Muslims and Islam above that of other peoples and religions. Most religions have all or some of the traits, but they've reached their furious apotheosis in Islam. There's also the problem that Islam is a relatively young religion, and has not yet had a period of great reformation through which its beliefs can be reconciled with modernity. If humanity is to survive ourselves, religion needs to go, and Islam needs to go first. It needs to be replaced with a humanist spirituality, respect for reason and evidence, and a desire for personal growth in all facets of life as the highest virtue.
In short, I'm not convinced I'm in any danger from terrorists. I'm more worried about driving to work every morning, and yet I still get in my car, try to drive as safely as I can, and always wear my seat-belt. It's not acceptable to ask me to give up even a small amount of privacy (and in truth you're asking for a lot more) to gain an infinitesimal increase in safety from something that was never a real threat to begin with.
This is the home of the brave, you need to start acting like it because you're embarrassing the rest of us.
This could be done in such a way that it would be cryptographically impossible for anyone other than the customer, or holder of the destruct code, to brick the device. Will it be done this way? Of course not. Too many actors in the chain want that power, and customers are at the bottom of the totem pole. Being able to instantly deactivate phones is a dream of dictators and tyrants. We've already seen the government use available means to achieve this in the USA! They turned off cell stations in the mass transit stations during riots.
My thoughts exactly. This guy is a useful idiot for the police state. He already knows what the answer "should" be, and the parallel to creationist challenges issued to proponents of the truth of evolution is incredibly apropos. They too "know" the answer ahead of time, their minds are made up and you can bet that any forum where they control the discourse with an arcane set of rules is intended to fluster the other side and make their position appear weak in the eyes of the audience. Neither the creationists nor this fellow are operating in good faith. You win by refusing to play by their specialized set of house rules and instead follow the laws of logic and humanist ethics.
The real rebuttal, which flies right over his ditzy rules and "fails" is self-evident to anyone who thinks about the issue for more than a moment. The burden of proof is on the State to prove a crime has been committed. You're assumed innocent from the start, so why should an innocent person be compelled to testify against himself?
Furthermore, it is a greater injustice for an innocent person to be punished, than for a guilty person to go unpunished. Justice always has a chance of being applied some time *in the future*, the wrong-doer's crimes may eventually catch up to him, but you can't give back a person's life spent wrongly imprisoned. Take the most extreme example of the death penalty. You can't un-execute an innocent person.
Into the router, or if the router doesn't have a printer port or isn't conveniently located you just run a normal ethernet cable to the printer or connect it to your wireless network. Hardly anyone connects printers directly to machines anymore, it's a huge hassle and way less practical since to share the printer the computer has to be on.
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It's too bad Ubuntu went full retard back when they released Unity, and then just threw the oars out of the boat entirely with the Amazon spyware fiasco. Thankfully there's still sane derivative distros like Xubuntu and Mint that can leverage the useful work Canonical is doing.
Can I install Firfox with a simple apt-get command immediately after install? Or am I still stuck with the idiotic IceWeasel fork or a tedious install process involving adding new repos and keys for a totally different distro?
Would it be so hard to at least include it in their repo for people who want it even if it's not installed by default?
Or they could give up the moronic habit of watching roided out grown men more athletic than themselves play a children's game. It's always amazing to me that a country so obese can be so obsessed with sports. Televised sports are the most idiotic reason to stick with a company and a business model that is downright abusive to its customers.
But almost the entire party fought the civil rights movement.
There was an ideological transition that occurred because of this. Anyone against the civil rights movement fled the Democratic party, drawn to the Republicans by Nixon's Southern strategy of courting bible belt racists. It's disingenuous to apply contemporary labels across vast periods of history. Names and labels change. This is the same reason why it's fallacious for contemporary Republicans to claim to be the party of Lincoln. If Lincoln were alive today, it's not safe to say he'd be a Democrat, but he'd certainly NOT be a Republican.
I should note I'm not a Democrat or a Republican. I vote Green Party.
Why do I keep seeing this meme repeated all over a tech site of all places? Windows (including 7 and 8) has been completely cracked and broken to the point where pirate copies are indistinguishable even to Microsoft. They couldn't cut off the pirate copies even if they wanted to. The pirate copies are actually EASIER to activate and keep updated since it's all automatic, no messing with keys.
I have Java on my machine but it's not exposed to the web. Javascript is enabled on a site by site basis with the default setting being to deny all scripts. Usually sites will at least render well enough to read an article even if the layout is garbled. I can still get the content so that's good enough. None of their ad/tracking scripts get to run, ever. Sites like Slashdot get to run Javascript but right now I look and there are four domains on this page which have their scripts blocked: google-analytics.com, googleadservices.com, rpxnow.com, and doubleclick.com. Three of those are outright blacklisted across the entire internet in my browser.
I'm worried that one day they'll start running ad/tracking scripts from the same domain, then it'll become much harder to allow only some scripts on a page and deny malicious ones (I consider the activity of advertising to be malicious by its nature).
Flash gets to run, but I have a click to play plugin so flash objects don't run by default except on a few sites like Youtube.
You're violating the Butlarian Jihad to make this post!
If you're doing that much heavy lifting you need to offload some of it to a dedicated server and remote into it. If you need to take all that power with you, then you have to sacrifice portability and battery life. The MBA isn't for you. You need a MacBook Pro, or a similar PC, with maxed out specs. You're going to pay for it with having to lug around a huge machine, and several extra batteries (if you go PC). So what matters more to you?
Wrong. If continued emissions will result in a runaway green-house effect then ALL human life will be eradicated FOREVER.
Basically, this proves we shouldn't give you myopic sociopaths the keys to the car.
Before anyone smugly proclaims that this proves humans aren't responsible for climate change, remember that it's possible for some phenomenon to have multiple causes. It's entirely possible for there to be both natural and man-made causes for variations in climate. Giving examples of natural causes doesn't do anything to weaken the argument against anthropogenic climate change in this epoch.
If climate change is currently man-made, or partially man-made, or being made worse by human activity, then it's still worth bending every effort to slow or reverse it.
[America] has a very small productive economy and thrives exclusively on plunder.
We are still the number one manufacturer in the world, representing a full 1/5 of all production output on the planet. It's just that the things we produce are not typical consumer goods, and so the picture you're average American gets is that we don't make anything. Your typical American doesn't use Caterpillar heavy construction equipment, Boeing or Lockheed aircraft (other than maybe flying in them), GE turbines, oil rigs, mining drills, spacecraft, or the bulk of the free world's military equipment.
Yeah, all our clothes and cheap plastic stuff is made in China, and our consumer electronics are made in Japan and Taiwan; but heavy industry, military hardware, construction equipment, resource extraction tools all over the world are stamped MADE IN USA.
If Mayer really wanted to skate to where the puck is going, she'd make a massive push to retool Yahoo into a privacy-centric company.
Move as much of Yahoo out of the USA as possible so they can speak to their users freely. Very publicly and loudly proclaim that they will not play ball with government spy agencies, and back it up with real and demonstrable steps toward that end. Encrypt everything. Set up their services to make it cryptographically impossible for them to turn over plaintext to anyone. Keep the absolute minimum logs required by law. Don't collect any information that isn't absolutely necessary. Alert everyone to all government requests for data whenever possible, and give every user a status in their account which says, "Your information has NOT been requested by a government or intelligence agency" which disappears when this statement is no longer true. Provide a deadman's switch to automatically delete data according to some user-defined criteria. Open their infrastructure to community audits from trusted security experts. Have bug bounties for security flaws. Do all this and more. These are all legal and many could be implemented immediately.
Done sincerely, this could earn them respect, users, customers, and profits. They'd keep their old users of course (if they're still with Yahoo nothing is going to get them to budge) but they'd be set up to grow into a huge new sector. Privacy is going to be big in the coming years, and the technology exists to nearly completely, and legally, nullify most of the efforts of the surveillance state. They could steal all of the users who are wary of Google and Microsoft but don't see any decent alternatives. The companies which set themselves in this direction now are going to be the leaders that everyone else is chasing in 5-10 years. Kim Dotcom's Mega was arguably the first, putting privacy as the number one priority in their mission statement. Yahoo has the resources to be a big player in the this space.
What else can they do to save a dying brand? What better way to really set themselves apart? So much of what the NSA et al do is predicated on the complacency and collusion of private enterprise. Yahoo could stand head and shoulders above the rest by saying no when they come asking. Sorry, come back with a warrant. Got a warrant? OK, here's your encrypted pseudo-random noise--and its in dead-tree format. We are still at the point where government needs private business to cooperate. Business still has a choice in a lot of this. They can still choose to be on the side of privacy and liberty, and they could be greatly rewarded for it.
More and more; robots and computers. There's already a glut of completely unskilled labor in the West. Unless you're leveraging relative strength of the dollar with your home currency there's no incentive to work a minimum wage job in the USA. That's why illegal immigrants are willing to work for below minimum wage here. When they send their money back home it's still more than they would be able to make otherwise.
We have another 20-30 years before we have to really face the facts: it's not possible for a person of average intelligence to survive by selling their labor. And they're not going to lay down and starve peacefully. We better come up with a plan, and soon. The ownership class is going to face a choice very soon: give up most of your wealth in exchange for the assurance you can keep the rest of it in security, or lose it all like everyone else in the conflagration to come.
We are fairly sure now that inequality really is bad, even just relative inequality in a world where everyone's basic needs are met. This is a scientific question about human well-being, and it's answerable in principle if not in practice. Just existing in an unequal society puts mental stress on human beings which correlates to significant negative health outcomes both physically and mentally. If you could instantly inflate the US economy ten fold, but following the same trend of inequality growth, you'd actually be doing a terrible thing. Everyone would have more wealth in an absolute sense, but the massive increase in inequality would make the majority of people demonstrably less happy. You would have greatly added to the human misery of the world.
This isn't intuitive, but there are a lot of true concept that aren't intuitive to humans. Certain types of people even find this idea quite repugnant, to the point where they simply reject it outright. Sadly, wishing it to go away won't change reality. You might be able to stake out some defensible territory around the proposition that SOME level of inequality is indispensable as a motivator, but that doesn't give you license to ignore the negatives that come with it. And if there can be too little inequality there can also be too much. When society becomes too unequal then inequality ceases to be a motivator, since it becomes clear to everyone that the struggle for improvement is virtually hopeless.
Inequality in itself IS bad. The single minded pursuit of ending all inequality is also bad (and impossible to achieve anyway). Our current society has reached an absurd level of unbalanced wealth distribution. It isn't sustainable, and it isn't optimizing human well being or potential. We can do a lot better.
What free-marketeers mean when they say they want deregulation and an end to these programs is that the moral cost of providing these services through subsidies is higher than the practical cost of denying people access to these services. When one of your highest values is ideological purity you end up doing a lot of things which hurt you, and hurt everyone, just so your extremist philosophy can remain consistent. It's like a religion for some people.
Who says EVs are limited to batteries? That's just our current best effort. Won't always be true. Super-capacitors still count as EV. Fuel cells are still EV. Meanwhile the laws of physics put a cap on how efficient an ICE can ever be.
Electricity sources are fungible. The car doesn't care where the electricity came from. ICE needs oil pumped from the ground and transported to a refinery, then it has to be refined into petrol, then it has to be transported to where the cars are. It's dirty at every step, scarce and getting scarcer, dangerous, and politically harmful. There's plenty of non-productive land you can put any number and kind of power production facilities. There's a nuke plant right down the road from me and I've never even seen it because it's tucked away on otherwise useless land.
Even if ALL of the electricity to power EVs was generated from the dirtiest coal plants, it would STILL be cleaner than every single car carrying around its own heavy, petrol burning, ICE. Also you have the benefits of localizing pollution somewhere less populated. This smells like a big oil hit piece.
Now, there is a separate conversation about other forms of transportation being even better than personal automobiles. Trains and even airplanes might be better in some scenarios than everyone racing around pell-mell with their own car, but that's a different issue. If we, as a society, have decided that everyone will be driving their own vehicle, the question is how to make that scenario least damaging; and the answer is electric vehicles.
Is that a joke? Islam systematically infringes on the rights of non-Muslims and women all the time. They either explain this away as some sort of god-intended hierarchy; the rights of Muslims come first, and then everyone else is considered if it doesn't inconvenience Muslims--or it's good old fashioned sexism that was endemic to the entire world when their religion was founded. They've never had a reformation period to bring their faith in line with modernity like Christianity and Judaism have gone through. And certain features of Islam, the Arabic language, and middle-Eastern culture, make such a reformation very unlikely.
There's another option. Accept the fact that you will never be truly safe, and live with the possibility that any moment could be your last from a terrible accident or crime. While you are alive, however, live your life as freely as possible, harming and infringing on the rights of others as little as you can while still participating in a modern, thriving, society.
I'd rather a 9/11 size attack happen every generation than suffer through the insults to my dignity and liberty required to prevent it--and in reality you'll never be able to prevent them all anyway. Might as well be free and unsafe, than enslaved and still unsafe.
We are not at war. Terrorism is a law-enforcement problem. Terrorism is a tactic used by the desperate, the marginalized, and the disaffected. We have a lot of angry people in the world and some of that anger occasionally gets directed at us, rightly or wrongly. If all the post-9/11 security theatre just stopped, completely stopped, how much more danger would we face? What threats would endanger us over and above what is normal in everyday life on a human time scale? The biggest killers would still be car accidents, heart attacks, and tobacco. Yet our civil liberties would enjoy a great boost. Our mail and correspondences would not be intercepted or monitored as a matter of course. Our movements wouldn't be tracked. Our financial records wouldn't be collated and analyzed above the normal level to detect fraud and tax evasion. Our library records wouldn't be flagged. We wouldn't be irradiated at the airport or sexually assaulted by TSA goons. We wouldn't suffer the myriad small insults to our privacy and dignity which have crept into life the last 12 years.
I would rather suffer a 9-11 size terrorist attack once every 50 years than suffer through the loss of freedom required to prevent it. And I'd rather force you to live in such a society too, if you couldn't be convinced that my freedom is more important than your safety. You will never be perfectly safe, but you can be perfectly enslaved; it's happened before.
We face a lot of problems but none of them have as a solution a massive military industrial complex backed up by a pervasive and omnipresent surveillance apparatus. Promote free trade, peace, cooperation, fair economic development, education for women, reduction in arms especially nuclear, transparency of government, and elevate a humanist ethic based on science and rationalism above superstition.
That last one is especially important, because no one wants to say it but Islam is a problem even more than religion in general. There are features unique to Islam which make its danger level rise above the baseline. Among these features are the complete lack of separation between church and state, the glorification of martyrdom and death, the celebration of obsequiousness to religious authorities, the promotion and continuation of ancient tribal and cultural schisms, the elevation of the rights of Muslims and Islam above that of other peoples and religions. Most religions have all or some of the traits, but they've reached their furious apotheosis in Islam. There's also the problem that Islam is a relatively young religion, and has not yet had a period of great reformation through which its beliefs can be reconciled with modernity. If humanity is to survive ourselves, religion needs to go, and Islam needs to go first. It needs to be replaced with a humanist spirituality, respect for reason and evidence, and a desire for personal growth in all facets of life as the highest virtue.
In short, I'm not convinced I'm in any danger from terrorists. I'm more worried about driving to work every morning, and yet I still get in my car, try to drive as safely as I can, and always wear my seat-belt. It's not acceptable to ask me to give up even a small amount of privacy (and in truth you're asking for a lot more) to gain an infinitesimal increase in safety from something that was never a real threat to begin with.
This is the home of the brave, you need to start acting like it because you're embarrassing the rest of us.
He'll live out the rest of his days in relative comfort and obscurity in a more enlightened corner of the world. Iceland already said they'd take him.
...and weighs only 1.39 grams
Wow! It must be constructed from helium infused aero gels and space age nano-materials. Almost makes the horrible OS worth enduring. Almost.
This could be done in such a way that it would be cryptographically impossible for anyone other than the customer, or holder of the destruct code, to brick the device. Will it be done this way? Of course not. Too many actors in the chain want that power, and customers are at the bottom of the totem pole. Being able to instantly deactivate phones is a dream of dictators and tyrants. We've already seen the government use available means to achieve this in the USA! They turned off cell stations in the mass transit stations during riots.
My thoughts exactly. This guy is a useful idiot for the police state. He already knows what the answer "should" be, and the parallel to creationist challenges issued to proponents of the truth of evolution is incredibly apropos. They too "know" the answer ahead of time, their minds are made up and you can bet that any forum where they control the discourse with an arcane set of rules is intended to fluster the other side and make their position appear weak in the eyes of the audience. Neither the creationists nor this fellow are operating in good faith. You win by refusing to play by their specialized set of house rules and instead follow the laws of logic and humanist ethics.
The real rebuttal, which flies right over his ditzy rules and "fails" is self-evident to anyone who thinks about the issue for more than a moment. The burden of proof is on the State to prove a crime has been committed. You're assumed innocent from the start, so why should an innocent person be compelled to testify against himself?
Furthermore, it is a greater injustice for an innocent person to be punished, than for a guilty person to go unpunished. Justice always has a chance of being applied some time *in the future*, the wrong-doer's crimes may eventually catch up to him, but you can't give back a person's life spent wrongly imprisoned. Take the most extreme example of the death penalty. You can't un-execute an innocent person.
Into the router, or if the router doesn't have a printer port or isn't conveniently located you just run a normal ethernet cable to the printer or connect it to your wireless network. Hardly anyone connects printers directly to machines anymore, it's a huge hassle and way less practical since to share the printer the computer has to be on.