That's a good point, but it also disproves your argument that gun control has failed to reduce crime rates. The fact is, it's too early to tell either way - let's continue this thread in five years.;-)
I know a lot of things suck in the US, but, you can for the most part...say or publish most any idea you wish....even if it is distasteful to many others.
In theory that's true, and I hope it's true in practice. But I have a feeling that if you published a book called "The Glorious Jihad", with a big picture of the Twin Towers on the front and some Anarchist Cookbook-style bomb-making instructions inside but no direct incitement, you'd be imprisoned or lynched before you could say "Allahu Akbar". That's how sensitive America has got after three thousand deaths. Now imagine how sensitive France and Germany are about a war that killed 70 million people.
I'm not saying it's right to censor hate speech - it isn't. But there are few if any governments in the world that are prepared to defend their citizens' rights to poke at wounds that tender.
At the risk of Godwin-ing this post, Hitler was originally elected by popular vote.
Actually, Hitler was appointed by President Hindenburg to avoid a threatened coup. The Nazi party was elected by popular vote, but only after a long campaign of intimidation, vigilante violence and obstruction of democratic processes.
The figure of 69% comes from a YouGov poll and is therefore pretty much meaningless. According to Wikipedia, "YouGov's methodology is to obtain responses from an invited group of Internet users, and then to filter these responses in line with demographic information." Participants are paid or offered prizes in return for completing surveys. That might be an acceptable way of canvassing public opinion about competing brands of margarine, but it's hardly a substitute for the ballot box when it comes to issues of civil liberties and public safety.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that the Venn diagram of Pirate Bay users and marijuana users is not a pair of concentric circles, with the Pirate Bay circle very much on the inside?
If the Insurgents were not there before and they mostly are not Iraqis then where did they come from?
Where did you get the idea that most of the insurgents are not Iraqis?
Iraqis have no reason to be angry with the US since they elected their own government.
Here's a thought experiment: imagine that in the future the US becomes a dictatorship. Life under the dictator is hard and you long for democracy to be restored, but the regime has spies everywhere and revolution seems impossible. Then the German army invades the US. German planes destroy most of the country's infrastructure and tens of thousands of civilians are killed. Everyone you know has lost a friend or relative. The Germans fire everyone with a government job, from the police to the postal service, and try to run the country with soldiers. But their soldiers aren't trained for civilian work - they don't even speak English. Misunderstandings often lead to shootings, and the soldiers are rarely punished. Resentment grows. Many of your friends join local militias. Some are killed, others tortured - some just disappear without a trace.
Eventually the Germans set up a new government and hold elections, but many people refuse to vote because they don't consider the new government to be legitimate. The killings and disappearances continue. Then, after five years of occupation and with no end in sight, a German tells you that you have no reason to be angry - in fact you should be grateful. What's your reaction?
Hussein and Hitler did about the same things, both invaded other countries, both killed their own citizens, etc.
Saddam Hussein had American support when he killed his own people and invaded Iran, because America's policy was to maintain the balance of power between Iraq and Iran. He retained American support until he invaded Kuwait, which would have upset the balance of power. All that stuff about Iraqi troops unplugging Kuwaiti baby incubators was just propaganda - it might have been true or it might not, but it certainly wasn't the cause of the Gulf War.
America has been quite happy to support dictatorships (Iraq and Chile in the 1980s; Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Egypt and many others in the present), to overthrow democratic governments (Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in the 1980s), to look the other way when its allies invaded other countries (Israel in 1967, Indonesia in 1975, Iraq in 1980), and even to invade other countries itself (Cuba in 1961, Cambodia in 1970, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Haiti in 1994, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003). To pretend that American foreign policy is based on how well other governments treat their neighbours and citizens is naive at best and dishonest at worst.
Where in the Constitution does it enumerate a right to privacy?
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Persons, houses, papers, and effects... sounds to me like a right to privacy.
Sorry, but when the feedback loop involves "the media covers them and whips up a firestorm of panic" and "hopefully the government will advise the police/CPS not to do this in future", I think the phrase "checks and balances" is a little too complimentary. As you alluded to in your remark about sympathetic juries, such a system only protects people who express popular views. The point of free speech laws is to protect those who express unpopular views. Real, codified checks and balances, like those in the US, are designed to resist the kind of media manipulation and executive interference you described - the courts have to uphold the First Amendment, no matter how unpopular the views being expressed, and in theory it's impossible for the legislative or executive branches to influence them.
They want to conquer the world and convert it to Islam, even if it takes a thousand years.
Yes they do. But without Western intervention in the Middle East and Afghanistan, they'd just be another bunch of religious nutcases with no mainstream support. That's not to say that violence by Western governments justifies violence against Western civilians - it doesn't - but as long as some people believe it does, there will be a causal link, however unjust, between Western war and anti-Western terrorism. And of course nobody denies the causal link between anti-Western terrorism and Western war, which completes the cycle. The only way to break the cycle is for the rational majority, in the West and in Islam, to withdraw support from terrorists and warmakers alike.
"Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests."
Either you didn't understand what you read or you deliberately misrepresented it. Marx and Engels aren't advocating the abolition of morality, they're complaining that under capitalism morality is used as a smokescreen for the interests of the bourgeoisie, and thus the workers stop believing in it.
"Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society."
This does not imply the extermination of the bourgeoisie as individuals, but rather the elimination of the class distinction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which is a distinction based on property: the bourgeoisie own the means of production while the proletariat own nothing but their labour power. Marx and Engels claim that class conflict can only be resolved by eliminating class distinctions, through common ownership of the means of production. (I don't happen to agree, but that's beside the point.)
We also do not have cameras everywhere - I can't think of a single one in the area of London that I live in.
Then you aren't looking very hard. In the last ten years I've lived in North, South, East, West and central London; there were cameras everywhere. Maybe not on every residential street, but at every major junction, on every bus, at every station, on the sides and roofs of public and private buildings, in shops and pubs, even in children's playgrounds. At one point I was planning to make a surveillance camera diary, photographing every CCTV camera I saw in a 24-hour period, but I realised I'd have to spend the whole day taking pictures... and I'd probably get arrested for behaving suspiciously.
The meaning of the structure of networks is a stupid idea. The purpose maybe, the philosophy behind the structure maybe. But the meaning of?
In the context of the research (using known parts of a network's structure to predict unknown parts), I don't think the word "meaning" is out of place at all. A hierarchical clustering algorithm will extract some kind of hierarchy from any network you throw at it - but does that hierarchy mean anything? Does it contain information? This new research suggests that, for certain kinds of network, the extracted hierarchy is meaningful, because it allows us to make predictions about unknown parts of the network that we could not make without first extracting the hierarchy.
That's actually quite a profound discovery, because in the last ten years, complex networks (especially small-world and scale-free networks) have been held up as models of natural decentralisation and non-hierarchical self-organisation in many fields, from ecology to politics to communications to epidemiology. If such networks turn out to contain meaningful hierarchies (i.e. hierarchies that actually tell us something about how they function) then much of the rhetoric about complex systems will be turned on its head.
Is there a limitation of common webcams that makes it impossible to use PGP to encrypt the audio and video sent over the wire?
It's not impossible, but it's complicated enough that a prudent lawyer shouldn't risk it. For a lawyer to experiment with encryption during a terrorism investigation is as rash as for a geek to experiment with novel legal defences during a murder trial.
Wow, a comment that long must have burned at least one millipedia (or 0.14 kilogilligans, if you prefer the old units).;-)
1. As others already pointed out, you _can't_ do mental work for 16 hours a day and still be top-productivity.
I don't think anyone's suggesting that everyone will, or should, spend 40 hours a week editing Wikipedia - but if one person in ten spends half an hour a week on some collaborative project, that adds up to enough time for some truly massive projects.
2. It's also a matter of interests. You're the most productive for the things that keep you at least a bit interested and maybe even entertained.
Right, that's exactly why amateur collaborative projects work so well - by choosing the projects that interest them and ignoring the projects that don't, contributors maximise their own productivity.
3. Singling out TV is freaking stupid. For as long as we have a recorded history, and even from the primitive tribes we found, people have _some_ time where they just relax and/or are entertained.
OK, this is Clay Shirky we're talking about, he didn't get famous by presenting all sides of the argument. But his side does have some merit. You're right to point out that TV isn't the first non-participatory medium, but I'd argue that in the last 50 years people have spent more of their time enjoying non-participatory media than ever before. Most people don't get together to play instruments and sing - they listen to recorded music. Most people don't sit round the fire telling stories - they watch TV. Now I'm not claiming that the internet will cause a renaissance of folk culture and transform every couch potato into a bard, but I think there's a lot of latent creativity out there, and if you offer people a way to express it - at a time and in a manner of their choosing - a few of them will have something valuable to contribute.
Good point about running your own Tor node. Tor and Freenet both have configurable bandwidth limits, but if you're on a really slow connection I guess there comes a point where you're not contributing much value to the network...
If your in darknet mode isnt that the same as a private tracker?
Not really - with a private tracker, the other users (including the tracker) know what you're uploading and downloading. That's not the case in Freenet. Also, any user of a private tracker can invite their friends, who can also see what you're uploading and downloading, so the network becomes less private as it grows. Freenet becomes more private as it grows, because there are more users who might have initiated any given request.
If your not in darknet mode arnt you just as exposed as BT?
No, requests travel for multiple hops through the network, so if you receive a request from an opennet peer it doesn't mean that peer initiated the request - it might be forwarding the request on behalf of another peer.
If you want to carry out conversations, then i suppose BT isnt a good medium, But isnt that what public/private mailing lists are for?
Mailing lists aren't much good if you need to be anonymous. You could use Tor to set up a webmail account, but then the webmail provider can read your email, so you have anonymity but not privacy. You could use Tor andGnuPGand webmail, but by that point it's probably easier to install Freenet.
Another disadvantage of Tor is that even though your traffic is encrypted, it's easy for someone monitoring your network connection to tell when you're using Tor. If they can correlate the times you connect to Tor with the times a certain webmail account is active then your anonymity is broken. By running a Freenet node 24/7 you make it much harder for an eavesdropper to link your activity patterns to anonymous or pseudonymous messages, because your node is always sending and receiving encrypted packets regardless of whether you're active.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like September is finally coming to an end...
That's a good point, but it also disproves your argument that gun control has failed to reduce crime rates. The fact is, it's too early to tell either way - let's continue this thread in five years. ;-)
Yes it has. Crime in New York has fallen every single year since 1990. Violent crime is the lowest it's been for forty years.
In theory that's true, and I hope it's true in practice. But I have a feeling that if you published a book called "The Glorious Jihad", with a big picture of the Twin Towers on the front and some Anarchist Cookbook-style bomb-making instructions inside but no direct incitement, you'd be imprisoned or lynched before you could say "Allahu Akbar". That's how sensitive America has got after three thousand deaths. Now imagine how sensitive France and Germany are about a war that killed 70 million people.
I'm not saying it's right to censor hate speech - it isn't. But there are few if any governments in the world that are prepared to defend their citizens' rights to poke at wounds that tender.
Actually, Hitler was appointed by President Hindenburg to avoid a threatened coup. The Nazi party was elected by popular vote, but only after a long campaign of intimidation, vigilante violence and obstruction of democratic processes.
The figure of 69% comes from a YouGov poll and is therefore pretty much meaningless. According to Wikipedia, "YouGov's methodology is to obtain responses from an invited group of Internet users, and then to filter these responses in line with demographic information." Participants are paid or offered prizes in return for completing surveys. That might be an acceptable way of canvassing public opinion about competing brands of margarine, but it's hardly a substitute for the ballot box when it comes to issues of civil liberties and public safety.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that the Venn diagram of Pirate Bay users and marijuana users is not a pair of concentric circles, with the Pirate Bay circle very much on the inside?
Not at all, please do!
Where did you get the idea that most of the insurgents are not Iraqis?
Here's a thought experiment: imagine that in the future the US becomes a dictatorship. Life under the dictator is hard and you long for democracy to be restored, but the regime has spies everywhere and revolution seems impossible. Then the German army invades the US. German planes destroy most of the country's infrastructure and tens of thousands of civilians are killed. Everyone you know has lost a friend or relative. The Germans fire everyone with a government job, from the police to the postal service, and try to run the country with soldiers. But their soldiers aren't trained for civilian work - they don't even speak English. Misunderstandings often lead to shootings, and the soldiers are rarely punished. Resentment grows. Many of your friends join local militias. Some are killed, others tortured - some just disappear without a trace.
Eventually the Germans set up a new government and hold elections, but many people refuse to vote because they don't consider the new government to be legitimate. The killings and disappearances continue. Then, after five years of occupation and with no end in sight, a German tells you that you have no reason to be angry - in fact you should be grateful. What's your reaction?
Saddam Hussein had American support when he killed his own people and invaded Iran, because America's policy was to maintain the balance of power between Iraq and Iran. He retained American support until he invaded Kuwait, which would have upset the balance of power. All that stuff about Iraqi troops unplugging Kuwaiti baby incubators was just propaganda - it might have been true or it might not, but it certainly wasn't the cause of the Gulf War.
America has been quite happy to support dictatorships (Iraq and Chile in the 1980s; Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Egypt and many others in the present), to overthrow democratic governments (Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in the 1980s), to look the other way when its allies invaded other countries (Israel in 1967, Indonesia in 1975, Iraq in 1980), and even to invade other countries itself (Cuba in 1961, Cambodia in 1970, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Haiti in 1994, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003). To pretend that American foreign policy is based on how well other governments treat their neighbours and citizens is naive at best and dishonest at worst.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Persons, houses, papers, and effects... sounds to me like a right to privacy.
Sorry, but when the feedback loop involves "the media covers them and whips up a firestorm of panic" and "hopefully the government will advise the police/CPS not to do this in future", I think the phrase "checks and balances" is a little too complimentary. As you alluded to in your remark about sympathetic juries, such a system only protects people who express popular views. The point of free speech laws is to protect those who express unpopular views. Real, codified checks and balances, like those in the US, are designed to resist the kind of media manipulation and executive interference you described - the courts have to uphold the First Amendment, no matter how unpopular the views being expressed, and in theory it's impossible for the legislative or executive branches to influence them.
Then you aren't looking very hard. In the last ten years I've lived in North, South, East, West and central London; there were cameras everywhere. Maybe not on every residential street, but at every major junction, on every bus, at every station, on the sides and roofs of public and private buildings, in shops and pubs, even in children's playgrounds. At one point I was planning to make a surveillance camera diary, photographing every CCTV camera I saw in a 24-hour period, but I realised I'd have to spend the whole day taking pictures... and I'd probably get arrested for behaving suspiciously.
Depends on whether one interprets "you should comment" as "you should document" or "you should comment out", I guess. :-)
By the same argument, you're immortal because you haven't died yet.
Many other people have died - so will you. Many other species have become extinct - so will we. It's only a matter of time.
In the context of the research (using known parts of a network's structure to predict unknown parts), I don't think the word "meaning" is out of place at all. A hierarchical clustering algorithm will extract some kind of hierarchy from any network you throw at it - but does that hierarchy mean anything? Does it contain information? This new research suggests that, for certain kinds of network, the extracted hierarchy is meaningful, because it allows us to make predictions about unknown parts of the network that we could not make without first extracting the hierarchy.
That's actually quite a profound discovery, because in the last ten years, complex networks (especially small-world and scale-free networks) have been held up as models of natural decentralisation and non-hierarchical self-organisation in many fields, from ecology to politics to communications to epidemiology. If such networks turn out to contain meaningful hierarchies (i.e. hierarchies that actually tell us something about how they function) then much of the rhetoric about complex systems will be turned on its head.
It's not impossible, but it's complicated enough that a prudent lawyer shouldn't risk it. For a lawyer to experiment with encryption during a terrorism investigation is as rash as for a geek to experiment with novel legal defences during a murder trial.
Two methods: the sounds of keystrokes and the intervals between keystrokes.
On the contrary.
I don't think anyone's suggesting that everyone will, or should, spend 40 hours a week editing Wikipedia - but if one person in ten spends half an hour a week on some collaborative project, that adds up to enough time for some truly massive projects.
Right, that's exactly why amateur collaborative projects work so well - by choosing the projects that interest them and ignoring the projects that don't, contributors maximise their own productivity.
OK, this is Clay Shirky we're talking about, he didn't get famous by presenting all sides of the argument. But his side does have some merit. You're right to point out that TV isn't the first non-participatory medium, but I'd argue that in the last 50 years people have spent more of their time enjoying non-participatory media than ever before. Most people don't get together to play instruments and sing - they listen to recorded music. Most people don't sit round the fire telling stories - they watch TV. Now I'm not claiming that the internet will cause a renaissance of folk culture and transform every couch potato into a bard, but I think there's a lot of latent creativity out there, and if you offer people a way to express it - at a time and in a manner of their choosing - a few of them will have something valuable to contribute.
Good point about running your own Tor node. Tor and Freenet both have configurable bandwidth limits, but if you're on a really slow connection I guess there comes a point where you're not contributing much value to the network...
Not really - with a private tracker, the other users (including the tracker) know what you're uploading and downloading. That's not the case in Freenet. Also, any user of a private tracker can invite their friends, who can also see what you're uploading and downloading, so the network becomes less private as it grows. Freenet becomes more private as it grows, because there are more users who might have initiated any given request.
No, requests travel for multiple hops through the network, so if you receive a request from an opennet peer it doesn't mean that peer initiated the request - it might be forwarding the request on behalf of another peer.
Mailing lists aren't much good if you need to be anonymous. You could use Tor to set up a webmail account, but then the webmail provider can read your email, so you have anonymity but not privacy. You could use Tor and GnuPG and webmail, but by that point it's probably easier to install Freenet.
Another disadvantage of Tor is that even though your traffic is encrypted, it's easy for someone monitoring your network connection to tell when you're using Tor. If they can correlate the times you connect to Tor with the times a certain webmail account is active then your anonymity is broken. By running a Freenet node 24/7 you make it much harder for an eavesdropper to link your activity patterns to anonymous or pseudonymous messages, because your node is always sending and receiving encrypted packets regardless of whether you're active.
You're right, I didn't mean to come across as some kind of authoritarian - just trying to focus on one part of the problem at a time.