Surely the Streisand effect would have already happened - some percentage of people (especially Slashdot readers) would have read that and immediately searched for "pressure cooker backpacks" - and we'd hear about hundreds/thousands of people suddenly gone missing or being detained for questioning.
I mean come on, there's legit concern, there's paranoia, and there's all out tin-foil-nutjob behavior with layered conspiracies hiding deeper multi-level conspiracies. The story about the employer reporting his employee for searching at work sounds 100% legit. Employer is probably engaging the CYA, something corporations have no problem throwing puppies under the bus to do.
Which is what I don't understand. Why is that necessary? Is the existence of blatantly unconstitutional practices not harm enough for them, or do they like giving the government yet another reason to keep everything secret? Oh, who am I kidding? The answer is obvious...
I'm not a lawyer, but I remember this from civics class. You have to have standing/harm in order to bring a lawsuit, otherwise anybody could sue anybody for anything just because they feel like it or don't like a law and seek to change it. For the latter, work through the legislature to change it.
I'm on FeedWrangler - $19 a year, minimalist display, and it even has mobile apps available. Charging a small fee for service - that's a sustainable business model.
I tried out a few sites after Google Reader's announcement, but settled on NetVibes. They are decent but their interface is more than I need, plus that weird text on their login about agency subscribing for $499... I kept searching all the while I used NetVibes. FeedWrangler won out!
Sure, not every XKCD comic is brilliant, but plenty are funny, appealing to a tough demographic for subject material.
I think his various infographics are fantastic (money, radiation) and a handful of info comics are similarly amazing (gravity wells, ocean depths, movie plots). His "What If?" series is also extremely interesting.
Sites that feed off the "XKCD is overrated" vibe come across as pathetic calls for attention from people too lame and stupid to produce their own work. Basically some members of the geek community have this bizarre calling to drop their pants and publicly poop all over whatever they think is overrated. The fact is their sum total contribution to the world is being a shit stain on the fabric of the web.
Most people have no use for a tablet. It is a device that is an inbetween that they don't need.... But for most home users, they are a gadget without a purpose.
And I think what your concept of "most home users" actually do with their computers is very out of touch. And since most households have kids, I think you have it flipped around, for home home users a desktop/notebook is the device without a purpose, or technically, is the device that is massively overpowered with complicated upkeep/installs for their needs.
I've got several friends, regular people in a running club so yes, an actual non-computer cross section of humanity, and these people are all computer savvy, but not into computers as a hobby. 95% of typical usage can all be covered by tablets. One of them opted up replace her ~6 year old notebook with a current gen tablet. Email, web surfing, kindle app, that's like 80% of the usage pattern. Another 3 or 4, all they do is that plus facebook/meetup and pic uploading.
That may be true, but then Apple, as a private corporation, gets to set the terms for using their App Store infrastructure. I don't see a problem with how this went down. VLC wanted to distribute an iOS version via the App Store; they modified their code to be acceptable.
Did you hear of Bill Clinton before the Democratic Convention back in the 90's? Did you hear of Jimmy Carter before the Democratic Convention back in the 70's?
Yes... because the shipping company doesn't worry at all about overloaded containers or ships at all.
We'll just ignore the massive costs should go something go wrong that they are oblivious to in your world.
Why would they worry? They're insured, plus maybe they stand to make more money not worry about weight (letting more cargo on and charging extra fees versus a *chance* the ship breaks apart and dealing with the loss).
And if you're reasonably good a math, you can probably find a better paying job doing something other than teach. Especially at the elementary school level, where kids can easily get turned off math. Who winds up teaching 3rd graders math? People who, generally speaking, aren't going into that field because they love math and want to teach it to elementary school kids.
This man has actually accomplished a great deal in his life. Maybe he IS an idiot, but doesn't that make his accomplishments all that more impressive. Particularly compared to you - what have you done?
He also had major family connections, got bailed out of failed business ventures, etc. It isn't like he rowed to shore penniless and fought for everything he got.
He graduated Yale.... yeah well a regular person with his academic *ahem* prowess wouldn't have even been admitted.
If you can't see that, well you're a pretty big dumbass too.
Your argument is still a logical fallacy of attributing a group ("feds") the actions of a few ("those at the top" and "those who have chosen" - your own words). So it is willful ignorance or hypocrisy that you think your sweeping generalization is correct but someone else's sweeping generalization is trivial, obvious, and wrong.
It is rather difficult to trust a group of people with a long history of lies, abuses, manipulation, and little or no accountability. This is one of those hard facts that doesn't just go away. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to restore broken trust, especially when it has been repeatedly broken with little or no consequence to the perpetrators.
So the thing to do is to boot all gov't employees? I think there is a fallacy here, that 100% of feds are working on surveillance technology. NSA implemented SELinux - what if those types of security researchers want to go? Just screw 'em?
I looked at the input/output files for the 2011 and 2012 contests. The biggest files I found were on the order of 10Mb. That's not a huge dataset in my mind, not by a long shot. I'd bet that most, if not all of the submitted solutions would fail if given datasets on the order of gigabytes, or not run in any reasonable amount of time. Makes sense, they don't have to. But that's real world scale.
File size isn't a good metric when many of the challenge problems boil down to graph theory, e.g. 2013 problem C. And as far as running in reasonable time - in 2013 each problem had an associated solution run time limit, in the low seconds. Final scoring included a penalty for aggregate time, etc.
Where were you seeing ebooks being sold for more than the regular book? I've seen many accusations of that on Amazon and here, and every single time they were simply unsupported assertions or misunderstandings.
EVERY single time I've seen this complaint on Amazon, it has been because someone was comparing the current ebook price to the price of the PRE-ORDER of the paperback, which is silly.
These electronic books, I'm lost. What do I own? Where's the the secondhand market? If I want to buy the 16 year old book, Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, a secondhand paperback from amazon is $0.01 plus shipping (media mail should be cheap).
Man this is hilarious! In the same paragraph you complain about there not being a secondhand market for ebooks, you also point out 16 year old physical books are $0.01. Um, that's not a secondhand market either, at those prices (or for the amount of value the physical retains over the years), a whopping penny, you are better off recycling them. If you literally get rid of a physical book immediately after reading it, you'd be better off using a library.
Why would a highly trusted company employ a foreign national (let's assume he stays in Austria and gets some kind of work permit) that has shown to abuse sysadmin powers and grab data? I could understand if he has world class skills, basically if he were the Linus Torvalds of sysadmins, but I don't see that in this case.
How does interest to the general public translate to profits for a corporation? They going to market they hired him but then hastily assure companies he won't be working on their info? I think most companies would look over his resume and throw it away unless they literally can't find anybody better among local job seekers. I dont' see what he's done as setting himself apart from his peers, at least in a way that a IT security companies would want to use.
Technially, the Supreme Court is the body with the authority to interpret laws and render a decision on Constitutionality or not. Everyone else is of course free to read, decide for themselves, bloviate online; but that's all meaningless. If you ACTUALLY wanted to change things, and follow the Constitution, file suit against the gov't and get it escalated.
The reason expensive undetectable guns haven't materialized is lack of demand. Spy agencies aren't going to pay for a million dollar weapon since if their agent is caught, having an exotic expensive weapon is a giant neon glowing sign that says "state sponsored assassin". Besides, 20 years ago the suicide bomber wasn't a thing. Now it is, folks that seriously want to kill judges, politicians, and airplane pilots take everyone else down with them.
And the race to the bottom ends with everywhere in the world having a real middle class - hardly a dystopia.
That's not the bottom. The bottom is working poor everywhere; people barely making enough to meet their basic life needs but spending all their time working for it.
Yeah so the further split hairs corporate McDonald's is a real estate holding company that makes its money off leases from franchisees. Oddly, despite having technically nothing to do with anything at an individual restaurant, they actually control everything, from appearance to menu pricing; otherwise you're in violation of the lease. So gigantic heaps of bullshit they can't prevent their franchisee from pulling this payroll stunt.
You know, I know the argument tends to reach fever pitches of hysterics on both sides, but the core reasons for not undertaking government sponsored health-care is because ultimately it makes promises that the government won't be able to deliver on in the long run.
How is this any different than private corporations running the insurance? They'll make the same promises and just declare bankruptcy when they can't meet the obligations. They'll prescreen their population to ensure profitability (i.e. no pre-existing conditions, jacked up rates for the elderly, etc.) so enter government regulations... and if the government has to regulate to ensure fairness, why not let them administer the program? It seems to work (so far) in basically every other country in the world.
Fundamentally, health care (and education for that matter) aren't "market" products. Everybody needs them, and that is something the "free market" doesn't handle well in the case where some portion of the customer base cannot afford them.
The free market handles car sales and stuff like that great - prices float, lots of competition, but ultimately if you can't afford one you can do without. Maybe its inconvenient, but that's entirely different that say you with the congenital heart defect, who cannot afford the health care you need to stay alive.
Now the free market would simply say "fuck you" to those people and let them die. Can't afford the service = you don't get the service. After all, they were selected by random biology to suck up more resources to screw them, right?
The rest of us in the modern world, with the richest country in the history of the known universe, find this outcome simply unacceptable. In fact, rather than piss away the resources of the country on random bullshit to benefit the wealthy, how about investing some into the actual literal welfare of the population. You know, one of those functions government is supposed to provide for its people?
Your nightmare scenario about the failure of government health care leading to chaos is exactly balanced by the same failure of the private insurance/medical industry causing the same chaos. People get sick and have their retirements wiped out. A car accident through no fault of their own tosses the family into poverty. Debts mount people simply can't handle. Etc. Sorry but this is a time when government reliance is the only answer, that being: too goddamn bad medical industry, we're imposing a ceiling on the profits you're allowed to make. That's what it all revolves around, capping fees and controlling costs, versus private industry exercising monopoly situations to extract maximum profit of people's suffering.
In all honestly I think we can defend ourselves perfectly well without spying on Britain and hacking their computers.
It's not about morals, it's that at some point, the threat from having a dark, hidden organization inside the government, operating away from the light of disclosure, becomes greater than the threat of foreign countries invading. It's been a long time since Britain attacked us.
That wouldn't be the point of spying on Britain. If it happens (probably, but I don't really know) it would be for diplomatic advantage or information. Can we count on them to back us in some action we're going to take (e.g. invade Iraq)? Are they leaning one way or the other, and how can we tip it our direction? That is, what's really going on in their internal discussions, not what they are telling us is going on.
So no, we aren't trying to rip off their military plan for reconquering the American colonies. It's probably all about economic/political info. And they'd do the same. And so does every other country.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but in Russia, if the government requests info and you shut the whole service down, you probably wind up in jail without much of a trial.
Surely the Streisand effect would have already happened - some percentage of people (especially Slashdot readers) would have read that and immediately searched for "pressure cooker backpacks" - and we'd hear about hundreds/thousands of people suddenly gone missing or being detained for questioning.
I mean come on, there's legit concern, there's paranoia, and there's all out tin-foil-nutjob behavior with layered conspiracies hiding deeper multi-level conspiracies. The story about the employer reporting his employee for searching at work sounds 100% legit. Employer is probably engaging the CYA, something corporations have no problem throwing puppies under the bus to do.
they have a hard time showing actual harm.
Which is what I don't understand. Why is that necessary? Is the existence of blatantly unconstitutional practices not harm enough for them, or do they like giving the government yet another reason to keep everything secret? Oh, who am I kidding? The answer is obvious...
I'm not a lawyer, but I remember this from civics class. You have to have standing/harm in order to bring a lawsuit, otherwise anybody could sue anybody for anything just because they feel like it or don't like a law and seek to change it. For the latter, work through the legislature to change it.
If you're talking about 9-11, the gov't presented Bush with a report "Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S."
Bush ignored it.
That's not really the fault of these agencies and isn't really them missing it completely.
I'm on FeedWrangler - $19 a year, minimalist display, and it even has mobile apps available. Charging a small fee for service - that's a sustainable business model.
I tried out a few sites after Google Reader's announcement, but settled on NetVibes. They are decent but their interface is more than I need, plus that weird text on their login about agency subscribing for $499... I kept searching all the while I used NetVibes. FeedWrangler won out!
Exactly!
Sure, not every XKCD comic is brilliant, but plenty are funny, appealing to a tough demographic for subject material.
I think his various infographics are fantastic (money, radiation) and a handful of info comics are similarly amazing (gravity wells, ocean depths, movie plots). His "What If?" series is also extremely interesting.
Sites that feed off the "XKCD is overrated" vibe come across as pathetic calls for attention from people too lame and stupid to produce their own work. Basically some members of the geek community have this bizarre calling to drop their pants and publicly poop all over whatever they think is overrated. The fact is their sum total contribution to the world is being a shit stain on the fabric of the web.
Most people have no use for a tablet. It is a device that is an inbetween that they don't need. ... But for most home users, they are a gadget without a purpose.
And I think what your concept of "most home users" actually do with their computers is very out of touch. And since most households have kids, I think you have it flipped around, for home home users a desktop/notebook is the device without a purpose, or technically, is the device that is massively overpowered with complicated upkeep/installs for their needs.
I've got several friends, regular people in a running club so yes, an actual non-computer cross section of humanity, and these people are all computer savvy, but not into computers as a hobby. 95% of typical usage can all be covered by tablets. One of them opted up replace her ~6 year old notebook with a current gen tablet. Email, web surfing, kindle app, that's like 80% of the usage pattern. Another 3 or 4, all they do is that plus facebook/meetup and pic uploading.
That may be true, but then Apple, as a private corporation, gets to set the terms for using their App Store infrastructure.
I don't see a problem with how this went down. VLC wanted to distribute an iOS version via the App Store; they modified their code to be acceptable.
I'm sure some people dismissed URL shorterners when they first appeared as well.
I think it's a cool service.
Did you hear of Bill Clinton before the Democratic Convention back in the 90's?
Did you hear of Jimmy Carter before the Democratic Convention back in the 70's?
Yes... because the shipping company doesn't worry at all about overloaded containers or ships at all.
We'll just ignore the massive costs should go something go wrong that they are oblivious to in your world.
Why would they worry? They're insured, plus maybe they stand to make more money not worry about weight (letting more cargo on and charging extra fees versus a *chance* the ship breaks apart and dealing with the loss).
Math is hard only when the teacher is bad.
And if you're reasonably good a math, you can probably find a better paying job doing something other than teach.
Especially at the elementary school level, where kids can easily get turned off math. Who winds up teaching 3rd graders math? People who, generally speaking, aren't going into that field because they love math and want to teach it to elementary school kids.
This man has actually accomplished a great deal in his life. Maybe he IS an idiot, but doesn't that make his accomplishments all that more impressive. Particularly compared to you - what have you done?
He also had major family connections, got bailed out of failed business ventures, etc. It isn't like he rowed to shore penniless and fought for everything he got.
He graduated Yale.... yeah well a regular person with his academic *ahem* prowess wouldn't have even been admitted.
If you can't see that, well you're a pretty big dumbass too.
Your argument is still a logical fallacy of attributing a group ("feds") the actions of a few ("those at the top" and "those who have chosen" - your own words). So it is willful ignorance or hypocrisy that you think your sweeping generalization is correct but someone else's sweeping generalization is trivial, obvious, and wrong.
It is rather difficult to trust a group of people with a long history of lies, abuses, manipulation, and little or no accountability. This is one of those hard facts that doesn't just go away. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to restore broken trust, especially when it has been repeatedly broken with little or no consequence to the perpetrators.
So the thing to do is to boot all gov't employees? I think there is a fallacy here, that 100% of feds are working on surveillance technology. NSA implemented SELinux - what if those types of security researchers want to go? Just screw 'em?
I looked at the input/output files for the 2011 and 2012 contests. The biggest files I found were on the order of 10Mb. That's not a huge dataset in my mind, not by a long shot. I'd bet that most, if not all of the submitted solutions would fail if given datasets on the order of gigabytes, or not run in any reasonable amount of time. Makes sense, they don't have to. But that's real world scale.
File size isn't a good metric when many of the challenge problems boil down to graph theory, e.g. 2013 problem C.
And as far as running in reasonable time - in 2013 each problem had an associated solution run time limit, in the low seconds. Final scoring included a penalty for aggregate time, etc.
Where were you seeing ebooks being sold for more than the regular book? I've seen many accusations of that on Amazon and here, and every single time they were simply unsupported assertions or misunderstandings.
EVERY single time I've seen this complaint on Amazon, it has been because someone was comparing the current ebook price to the price of the PRE-ORDER of the paperback, which is silly.
This happens on occasion... for example "Game of Thrones" is currently (at least for me) $6.81 for paperback, $9.99 for Kindle, $11.00 for paperback (probably trade paperback), etc.
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Thrones-Song-Fire-Book/dp/0553386794
These electronic books, I'm lost. What do I own? Where's the the secondhand market? If I want to buy the 16 year old book, Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, a secondhand paperback from amazon is $0.01 plus shipping (media mail should be cheap).
Man this is hilarious! In the same paragraph you complain about there not being a secondhand market for ebooks, you also point out 16 year old physical books are $0.01. Um, that's not a secondhand market either, at those prices (or for the amount of value the physical retains over the years), a whopping penny, you are better off recycling them. If you literally get rid of a physical book immediately after reading it, you'd be better off using a library.
Why would a highly trusted company employ a foreign national (let's assume he stays in Austria and gets some kind of work permit) that has shown to abuse sysadmin powers and grab data? I could understand if he has world class skills, basically if he were the Linus Torvalds of sysadmins, but I don't see that in this case.
How does interest to the general public translate to profits for a corporation? They going to market they hired him but then hastily assure companies he won't be working on their info? I think most companies would look over his resume and throw it away unless they literally can't find anybody better among local job seekers. I dont' see what he's done as setting himself apart from his peers, at least in a way that a IT security companies would want to use.
Technially, the Supreme Court is the body with the authority to interpret laws and render a decision on Constitutionality or not.
Everyone else is of course free to read, decide for themselves, bloviate online; but that's all meaningless.
If you ACTUALLY wanted to change things, and follow the Constitution, file suit against the gov't and get it escalated.
The reason expensive undetectable guns haven't materialized is lack of demand. Spy agencies aren't going to pay for a million dollar weapon since if their agent is caught, having an exotic expensive weapon is a giant neon glowing sign that says "state sponsored assassin". Besides, 20 years ago the suicide bomber wasn't a thing. Now it is, folks that seriously want to kill judges, politicians, and airplane pilots take everyone else down with them.
And the race to the bottom ends with everywhere in the world having a real middle class - hardly a dystopia.
That's not the bottom. The bottom is working poor everywhere; people barely making enough to meet their basic life needs but spending all their time working for it.
How do you figure the middle class is the bottom?
Yeah so the further split hairs corporate McDonald's is a real estate holding company that makes its money off leases from franchisees.
Oddly, despite having technically nothing to do with anything at an individual restaurant, they actually control everything, from appearance to menu pricing; otherwise you're in violation of the lease.
So gigantic heaps of bullshit they can't prevent their franchisee from pulling this payroll stunt.
You know, I know the argument tends to reach fever pitches of hysterics on both sides, but the core reasons for not undertaking government sponsored health-care is because ultimately it makes promises that the government won't be able to deliver on in the long run.
How is this any different than private corporations running the insurance? They'll make the same promises and just declare bankruptcy when they can't meet the obligations. They'll prescreen their population to ensure profitability (i.e. no pre-existing conditions, jacked up rates for the elderly, etc.) so enter government regulations... and if the government has to regulate to ensure fairness, why not let them administer the program? It seems to work (so far) in basically every other country in the world.
Fundamentally, health care (and education for that matter) aren't "market" products. Everybody needs them, and that is something the "free market" doesn't handle well in the case where some portion of the customer base cannot afford them.
The free market handles car sales and stuff like that great - prices float, lots of competition, but ultimately if you can't afford one you can do without. Maybe its inconvenient, but that's entirely different that say you with the congenital heart defect, who cannot afford the health care you need to stay alive.
Now the free market would simply say "fuck you" to those people and let them die. Can't afford the service = you don't get the service. After all, they were selected by random biology to suck up more resources to screw them, right?
The rest of us in the modern world, with the richest country in the history of the known universe, find this outcome simply unacceptable. In fact, rather than piss away the resources of the country on random bullshit to benefit the wealthy, how about investing some into the actual literal welfare of the population. You know, one of those functions government is supposed to provide for its people?
Your nightmare scenario about the failure of government health care leading to chaos is exactly balanced by the same failure of the private insurance/medical industry causing the same chaos. People get sick and have their retirements wiped out. A car accident through no fault of their own tosses the family into poverty. Debts mount people simply can't handle. Etc. Sorry but this is a time when government reliance is the only answer, that being: too goddamn bad medical industry, we're imposing a ceiling on the profits you're allowed to make. That's what it all revolves around, capping fees and controlling costs, versus private industry exercising monopoly situations to extract maximum profit of people's suffering.
In all honestly I think we can defend ourselves perfectly well without spying on Britain and hacking their computers.
It's not about morals, it's that at some point, the threat from having a dark, hidden organization inside the government, operating away from the light of disclosure, becomes greater than the threat of foreign countries invading. It's been a long time since Britain attacked us.
That wouldn't be the point of spying on Britain. If it happens (probably, but I don't really know) it would be for diplomatic advantage or information. Can we count on them to back us in some action we're going to take (e.g. invade Iraq)? Are they leaning one way or the other, and how can we tip it our direction? That is, what's really going on in their internal discussions, not what they are telling us is going on.
So no, we aren't trying to rip off their military plan for reconquering the American colonies. It's probably all about economic/political info. And they'd do the same. And so does every other country.