Meanwhile, the socioeconomic evolution of the US is progressing in almost exactly the fashion predicted by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto...
Sorry, but that's just not true. Up until about 1945, things were looking pretty good for Marx's theories: increasing alienation and exploitation of the urban proletariat, a falling rate of profit, militant mass movements among the working class; but since 1945 we've seen a series of developments in capitalism that Marx failed to predict. That's not so say that Marx was an idiot, or that his methods were wrong - clearly, many of his predictions were correct - but if Marxist economics wants to call itself a science, it needs to accept that some of its predictions were wrong and that its theories need to be revised.
Here are some of the things a modern Marxist economic theory needs to deal with:
Consumer capitalism. Since 1945, American and European workers have played a dual role in the economy: they're not just producers but consumers. The entire world economy is now dependent on the creation of artificial demand through advertising. Production is no longer the only important economic force.
The managerial class. There's no longer a clear distinction between capitalists, who own capital goods such as machinery and run businesses, and workers, who sell their labour power to capitalists. There's now a third class: managers, who sell their labour power like workers, but whose job is to run businesses on behalf of capitalists. This renders the traditional struggle between workers and bosses increasingly meaningless in Marxist terms, because it's no longer a struggle between a wage-earning class and a property-owning class: it's a struggle within the wage-earning class.
Small investors. The line between capitalists and workers is further blurred by the rise of small investors, who are typically workers in one business and capitalists in another. This doesn't mean, however, that workers now own the means of production: the structure of the stock market is such that one can be just as badly exploited by a million shareholders as by a single shareholder, while simultaneously being responsible for one millionth of someone else's exploitation. This split between worker and capitalist within the individual has grave implications for the idea of class consciousness.
Globalisation. Factories haven't ceased to exist: they've just moved abroad. People in advanced industrial countries, who now have the collective political power to challenge capitalism, no longer see its ugly face. They're increasingly employed either in clerical jobs within international businesses, or in service jobs, making life comfortable for other clerical and service employees, as well as capitalists and managers, with whom they share a culture, a language, and a national identity. The idea that these people might side with the foreign proletariat in a revolution against their own neighbours seems increasingly remote.
The welfare state. Another factor working against the kind of revolutionary explosion Marx predicted is the mitigation of some of the worst effects of capitalism by the state. This hasn't happened only in European "socialist" countries. Whether you see this as a safety valve instituted by capitalism or a series of hard-won victories by working class movements, the fact remains that between 1900 and 2000, the life of the average worker in the United States became a lot safer.
Financialisation. Some capitalists believe they can escape the problem of the falling rate of profit by investing, not in productive industries, but in derivatives of other investments. We've recently seen the kind of economic instability this can cause. The questions now facing us are whether, and how, financial speculation can be controlled, and more broadly, what impact the increasing separation of profit from material production will have in human terms, and in terms of economic analysis.
The difference there is that your relatively small key holds the potential for everything on your page.
Yes, that's intentional. In cryptography it's known as Kerchoff's principle: only the key should be secret, everything else (the encrypted data, the system design, the source code) should be assumed to be known to an attacker. That approach leads to strong designs because the designers can't rely on handwavy arguments like "Oh, nobody's likely to hack the Facebook servers" and "Facebook's thousands of employees are all trustworthy".
And how long before key collecting viruses run rampant and phone home to a black market provider's server where all Diaspora data is cached?
The same argument applies to Facebook passwords, except that with Facebook, the black market provider doesn't even need a server. Viruses are a problem, but they're just as relevant to client-server systems as P2P systems.
I understand how asymmetric key encryption works in PGP but that requires that you have a single person you are sending the message to... do you need to build a PGP public/private key for each of your friends?
No; you only need to generate one public/private keypair, regardless of how many people you want to communicate with. But PGP's probably not the best model for a P2P social network - something like Tahoe is a lot closer (I hope the Diaspora guys have the sense to use it rather than reinventing it).
Then I guess my next question is where does this decryption take place? Obviously it has to take place on your friend's box otherwise the people in the middle would have your key and your unencrypted data. So your friend logs on to check out your picture on Facebook... but he's on his netbook so he has to wait to get the encrypted data then decrypt the data on a possibly low CPU intensive device.
Encryption is cheap. Seriously, it's cheaper than water. Once you've established a shared key with your friend, which only has to happen once when you first friend each other, all the rest of the encryption is symmetric. Again, PGP's not the best model here because it does asymmetric crypto for every message. Think about HTTPS web browsing or a GSM phone call instead; mobile devices have no trouble handling those.
And then when people start posting unlicensed songs and movies to their pages you'll have the MPAA and RIAA trying to sue the crap out of everyone ever connected to it and then they'll start caching as a Diaspora node... and wait for legal action to get a potential file sharer's key by court order...
That's still a lot more secure than Facebook, where copyright holders can get stuff pulled from your page by sending a DMCA takedown email with no court oversight at all, and you're subject to arbitrary censorship by Facebook itself.
People seed on bittorrent because they can use the files that they're seeding but they're not going to be able to use my encrypted files that people might want when I'm offline nor will I be able with a netbook to help them out with hosting their files.
Yup, downtime and mobility are major challenges for P2P networks. The most likely solution I see is a little fanless Linux device that sits beside your cable or ADSL modem and participates in the P2P network 24/7, trading some of its storage with other devices so your data stays available during its occasional periods of downtime. Another possibility is that if you can't run a node yourself, you rent or borrow a share of someone else's node, just like you do with email servers. That's more like a federation than true P2P, but, crucially, like email and unlike Facebook, there's no single party providing accounts to everyone, and you're always free to change providers.
Not only is a trade "directly" linked to the true value of a stock (or whatever is being traded) but it defines the true value of the thing being traded. The true value is what the buyer and seller agree to.
No, that's the price. If you can't see that something's price can diverge from its true value then you're living in a bubble.;-)
I completely agree that you need to make an effort to keep a friendship going, and time together in person is worth a thousand times more than Facebook - but that doesn't mean everyone's good at making the effort, especially when Facebook keeps pushing the right buttons to keep them interested in their Facebook-using friends. Not having a Facebook account has had an impact on some of my friendships - claiming otherwise would just be wishful thinking. I'm prepared to pay that price because I hate the game Facebook's playing, but I sympathise with people who don't weigh things up in the same way.
What is troubling is the complete willingness of people to give away their private information, and when you ask them why they tolerate a company acting like that, they say "Who cares?"
Nobody I've talked to about this has ever said "Who cares?". The most common reaction is "Yeah, I don't like it either, but all my friends are on Facebook." And that doesn't mean people are mindlessly imitating their friends - "All my friends are on Facebook" means "All my friendships depend, in part, on Facebook."
It's easy to call that shallow, but the fact is that even in solid, long-lasting friendships, visibility matters. Willingly cutting yourself off from contact with your friends for the sake of privacy is seen by many people as a snub, just as it would be if you went into your room and shut the door instead of hanging out in the living room. If people don't see you on Facebook, their first thought isn't likely to be, "Oh, he's probably making a stand against intrusive corporate surveillance. What a great guy. I'll write him a letter instead." In fact their first thought isn't likely to be about you at all, because you just made yourself invisible.
So no, the problem isn't the users. The problem is the marketers who've realised they can use our need to keep in touch with our friends as a lever to extract information we'd never normally reveal to a stranger. The people who deliberately manipulate and exploit us are the ones we should be blaming, not each other.
You can (if an ISP chooses to share the data) tie an IP down to a physical address and a time. That doesn't tie it to a person by itself.
Another recent paper by the same research group shows that it's often possible to identify an individual using BitTorrent through Tor, because the BitTorrent protocol leaks their true IP address, and their other traffic (such as webmail) passes through the same Tor tunnel as their BitTorrent traffic.
The US doesn't rely on mercenaries to fight the wars. They are used as defense after the "war" was won.
You put the scare quotes round the wrong three-letter word - declaring Mission Accomplished allowed the profiteers to move in, but the war was far from "won" at that point.
As for using mercenaries as defense - Fallujah could be called defense only in the sense used in the name of the eponymous Department. It certainly wasn't a defensive action.
You're quite right to say that the US military is better at crushing things than policing them - and the same seems to be true of its contractors. I guess the question facing the US government is which of those actions constitutes victory in the modern world.
The question of the reality of good and evil becomes more complicated, though, when a state depends in part on public opinion (at home or abroad) to remain powerful. For example, to secure allies for its foreign wars, the US must be seen to respect human rights and uphold democratic principles (if not democratic principals) - it must be "good" in order to be strong. I suppose that could be seen as a conflict between Machiavellian realism and the Platonic/Straussian realism of the noble lie.
But perhaps the conflict can be resolved with sufficiently good public relations machinery.
The point of this is that believe it or not, every single president in the US or leader elsewhere has read that book.
Perhaps not every single one. About ten years ago I borrowed The Prince from a girlfriend who was studying politics; half the book is devoted to warnings against relying on mercenaries in foreign wars, and I remember asking myself, "What contemporary leader would be stupid enough to do that?"
It's more like setting up a site called streetaddresses.com where people post addresses of many places.
Well... it's more like setting up a site called drugdealerbay.org where people could, in theory, post addresses of many places, then pretending to be surprised when they only post addresses of drug dealers.
It's fortunate ARPANET switched from parallel to series a few months later, or imagine how thick the cable would have to be by now.
Mind you, parallel has its advantages: with serial transmission, it only takes a single oversize bit to clog the tube, whereas a parallel network treats clogging as damage and routes around it.
Because if you let people use it as a proxy to surf porn they will consume all of the available resources/bandwidth and it will become as useless as TOR currently is?
...and the best solution to that problem is to ban the word "ass" rather than, say, limiting the resources each user can consume (not possible for Tor but eminently possible for FOE)?
Additionally, one of their main design goals was to make Wave conversations embeddable into web pages. They would like this to be used for CMS, to replace forums, to replace blog comments, essentially they wish people to mash up Wave content with their own web pages.
Which in turn will make it easier to extract semantic information from blogs and forums (like who replied to what, when), making web searches more powerful... there are some smart people at that company.:-)
And no one chats over 'console games'. First of all, it requires everyone to be at their game console at the same time. (I'm assuming that there's some sort of global chat for newer systems that operates independent of games, and in all games...if not this is even stupider, as they'd have to be in the same game.)
I'm guessing he meant handheld consoles with wifi or bluetooth, which unlike SMS would be free. But, like the CEOs and fund managers who apparently pounced on this report as though it were a recipe for turning lead into gold, I don't have a console, a Twitter account or even a Facebook page, so my best chance of working out what the hell the author meant is probably to ask a 15-year-old.
It was printed in the SUN. Dunno about you, but I've made up my mind about the fact checking abilities of their reporters...
That's a dreadful and potentially libelous thing to say. Every article in The Sun is rigorously checked for facts by a highly skilled editorial team, and if any are found they're removed before publication.
Funny, because most of the westerners I know that read/love/collect comics are in their late 20s early 30s. I think the whole "comic are for kids" thing died out years ago.
Most of the things people in their late 20s and early 30s spend their money on are either designed for kids, derived from things we enjoyed as kids, or befuddle our brains so we act like kids. We're the generation that decided that instead of growing up and having kids, we'd carry on being kids for as long as we can get away with it. That suits the people who make Converse, Star Wars toys, Mario games, X-Men comics and MD 20/20 just fine - they can keep selling us the same shit they've been selling us for the last 20-odd years, but with a higher price tag now that we've got a bit more money in our pockets.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm bidding on a mint condition 1990 "Eat My Shorts" t-shirt on eBay...
Almost everyone convicted of a violent crime in the US is religious. Worldwide, every single major terrorist incident was committed by religious people.
We have a saying here on Slashdot... well, we have it in Texas, I'm sure you folks have it on Slashdot too... "correlation is not causation". Perhaps religious belief and violent behaviour are two symptoms of the same underlying problem: an inability to appreciate the inherent value of other living beings. If that's the case, banning religion won't do anything to solve the problem - if anything it will only make it worse, by encouraging religious people to see themselves as martyrs.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but that's just not true. Up until about 1945, things were looking pretty good for Marx's theories: increasing alienation and exploitation of the urban proletariat, a falling rate of profit, militant mass movements among the working class; but since 1945 we've seen a series of developments in capitalism that Marx failed to predict. That's not so say that Marx was an idiot, or that his methods were wrong - clearly, many of his predictions were correct - but if Marxist economics wants to call itself a science, it needs to accept that some of its predictions were wrong and that its theories need to be revised.
Here are some of the things a modern Marxist economic theory needs to deal with:
None of this should be read
Yes, that's intentional. In cryptography it's known as Kerchoff's principle: only the key should be secret, everything else (the encrypted data, the system design, the source code) should be assumed to be known to an attacker. That approach leads to strong designs because the designers can't rely on handwavy arguments like "Oh, nobody's likely to hack the Facebook servers" and "Facebook's thousands of employees are all trustworthy".
And how long before key collecting viruses run rampant and phone home to a black market provider's server where all Diaspora data is cached?
The same argument applies to Facebook passwords, except that with Facebook, the black market provider doesn't even need a server. Viruses are a problem, but they're just as relevant to client-server systems as P2P systems.
I understand how asymmetric key encryption works in PGP but that requires that you have a single person you are sending the message to ... do you need to build a PGP public/private key for each of your friends?
No; you only need to generate one public/private keypair, regardless of how many people you want to communicate with. But PGP's probably not the best model for a P2P social network - something like Tahoe is a lot closer (I hope the Diaspora guys have the sense to use it rather than reinventing it).
Then I guess my next question is where does this decryption take place? Obviously it has to take place on your friend's box otherwise the people in the middle would have your key and your unencrypted data. So your friend logs on to check out your picture on Facebook ... but he's on his netbook so he has to wait to get the encrypted data then decrypt the data on a possibly low CPU intensive device.
Encryption is cheap. Seriously, it's cheaper than water. Once you've established a shared key with your friend, which only has to happen once when you first friend each other, all the rest of the encryption is symmetric. Again, PGP's not the best model here because it does asymmetric crypto for every message. Think about HTTPS web browsing or a GSM phone call instead; mobile devices have no trouble handling those.
And then when people start posting unlicensed songs and movies to their pages you'll have the MPAA and RIAA trying to sue the crap out of everyone ever connected to it and then they'll start caching as a Diaspora node ... and wait for legal action to get a potential file sharer's key by court order ...
That's still a lot more secure than Facebook, where copyright holders can get stuff pulled from your page by sending a DMCA takedown email with no court oversight at all, and you're subject to arbitrary censorship by Facebook itself.
People seed on bittorrent because they can use the files that they're seeding but they're not going to be able to use my encrypted files that people might want when I'm offline nor will I be able with a netbook to help them out with hosting their files.
Yup, downtime and mobility are major challenges for P2P networks. The most likely solution I see is a little fanless Linux device that sits beside your cable or ADSL modem and participates in the P2P network 24/7, trading some of its storage with other devices so your data stays available during its occasional periods of downtime. Another possibility is that if you can't run a node yourself, you rent or borrow a share of someone else's node, just like you do with email servers. That's more like a federation than true P2P, but, crucially, like email and unlike Facebook, there's no single party providing accounts to everyone, and you're always free to change providers.
No, that's the price. If you can't see that something's price can diverge from its true value then you're living in a bubble. ;-)
I completely agree that you need to make an effort to keep a friendship going, and time together in person is worth a thousand times more than Facebook - but that doesn't mean everyone's good at making the effort, especially when Facebook keeps pushing the right buttons to keep them interested in their Facebook-using friends. Not having a Facebook account has had an impact on some of my friendships - claiming otherwise would just be wishful thinking. I'm prepared to pay that price because I hate the game Facebook's playing, but I sympathise with people who don't weigh things up in the same way.
Test your ideas through experiments.
Nobody I've talked to about this has ever said "Who cares?". The most common reaction is "Yeah, I don't like it either, but all my friends are on Facebook." And that doesn't mean people are mindlessly imitating their friends - "All my friends are on Facebook" means "All my friendships depend, in part, on Facebook."
It's easy to call that shallow, but the fact is that even in solid, long-lasting friendships, visibility matters. Willingly cutting yourself off from contact with your friends for the sake of privacy is seen by many people as a snub, just as it would be if you went into your room and shut the door instead of hanging out in the living room. If people don't see you on Facebook, their first thought isn't likely to be, "Oh, he's probably making a stand against intrusive corporate surveillance. What a great guy. I'll write him a letter instead." In fact their first thought isn't likely to be about you at all, because you just made yourself invisible.
So no, the problem isn't the users. The problem is the marketers who've realised they can use our need to keep in touch with our friends as a lever to extract information we'd never normally reveal to a stranger. The people who deliberately manipulate and exploit us are the ones we should be blaming, not each other.
Another recent paper by the same research group shows that it's often possible to identify an individual using BitTorrent through Tor, because the BitTorrent protocol leaks their true IP address, and their other traffic (such as webmail) passes through the same Tor tunnel as their BitTorrent traffic.
...policemen think YOU are looking younger!
So... you're saying that nothing's impossible? Or just that we ain't seen nothing yet?
You put the scare quotes round the wrong three-letter word - declaring Mission Accomplished allowed the profiteers to move in, but the war was far from "won" at that point.
As for using mercenaries as defense - Fallujah could be called defense only in the sense used in the name of the eponymous Department. It certainly wasn't a defensive action.
You're quite right to say that the US military is better at crushing things than policing them - and the same seems to be true of its contractors. I guess the question facing the US government is which of those actions constitutes victory in the modern world.
But perhaps the conflict can be resolved with sufficiently good public relations machinery.
Perhaps not every single one. About ten years ago I borrowed The Prince from a girlfriend who was studying politics; half the book is devoted to warnings against relying on mercenaries in foreign wars, and I remember asking myself, "What contemporary leader would be stupid enough to do that?"
Now I know.
Well... it's more like setting up a site called drugdealerbay.org where people could, in theory, post addresses of many places, then pretending to be surprised when they only post addresses of drug dealers.
Remind me, is moderately collosal larger or smaller than somewhat ginormous?
Including those being beaten by Pinkertons for trying to negotiate safe working conditions. Good times, good times.
It's fortunate ARPANET switched from parallel to series a few months later, or imagine how thick the cable would have to be by now.
Mind you, parallel has its advantages: with serial transmission, it only takes a single oversize bit to clog the tube, whereas a parallel network treats clogging as damage and routes around it.
Sure, help yourselves:
http://code.google.com/p/foe-project/
Signed,
The GPL
Which in turn will make it easier to extract semantic information from blogs and forums (like who replied to what, when), making web searches more powerful... there are some smart people at that company. :-)
I'm guessing he meant handheld consoles with wifi or bluetooth, which unlike SMS would be free. But, like the CEOs and fund managers who apparently pounced on this report as though it were a recipe for turning lead into gold, I don't have a console, a Twitter account or even a Facebook page, so my best chance of working out what the hell the author meant is probably to ask a 15-year-old.
That's a dreadful and potentially libelous thing to say. Every article in The Sun is rigorously checked for facts by a highly skilled editorial team, and if any are found they're removed before publication.
Most of the things people in their late 20s and early 30s spend their money on are either designed for kids, derived from things we enjoyed as kids, or befuddle our brains so we act like kids. We're the generation that decided that instead of growing up and having kids, we'd carry on being kids for as long as we can get away with it. That suits the people who make Converse, Star Wars toys, Mario games, X-Men comics and MD 20/20 just fine - they can keep selling us the same shit they've been selling us for the last 20-odd years, but with a higher price tag now that we've got a bit more money in our pockets.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm bidding on a mint condition 1990 "Eat My Shorts" t-shirt on eBay...
Nah, sooner or later that would get cheesy.
The trick to controlling a cat Hurd is pipes... lots of pipes.
We have a saying here on Slashdot... well, we have it in Texas, I'm sure you folks have it on Slashdot too... "correlation is not causation". Perhaps religious belief and violent behaviour are two symptoms of the same underlying problem: an inability to appreciate the inherent value of other living beings. If that's the case, banning religion won't do anything to solve the problem - if anything it will only make it worse, by encouraging religious people to see themselves as martyrs.