If there was some sort of massive sifting of google terms by local law enforcement, or the NSA were passing on every single combination of "pressure cooker + backpack", there wouldn't be an isolated incident, there would be tens of thousands of these investigations. How many other terms would get similar scrutiny? Would local police act on all of the millions of searches that would throw up a red flag?
The police might be increasingly militarized, but they aren't limitless in either manpower or funding, as much as they would have you believe otherwise.
What I'd like to know from all this is why the police are now so frequently travelling around in armed units just to conduct inquiries.
The police are increasingly regarded with fear and distrust, which insulates them from the community they work in, which makes their behaviour in turn more aggressive and antagonistic. This widens the gap to the point where the police are not a part of a community, but something that oppresses it.
History has proven that a lot of people are happy to mistreat or kill or torture others, assuming they see the other as an "enemy".
The Warrior Cop seems to me to be not just a result of militarisation, but politicalisation. Cops are told again and again they are fighting wars against drugs, or terrorism, or crime, and unsurprisingly they turn into a war making institution. Not only that, but an institution that sees everyone as an enemy.
This seems to me a result of consistently electing lawmakers who are too fucking stupid for words.
I'm not going to take a high ground against these people, I could understand how they might feel.
I have the same sympathy as the (thread!) parent. I feel in some ways we live in an age where traditional societal pressures about who one "should" be as an adult are deteriorating, and I'm personally glad for it. For some people of both sexes never moving out from under the wing of their parents and not engaging with society is something they would want themselves.
It's easy to sneer and call them losers and say it's a societal issue, but at the end of the day who are they harming? I really don't see the problem.
He's a moron. He doesn't understand the business AT ALL. Plus, he's obnoxious as hell.
He doesn't really have to be at that level, all he has to do is be an alpha male, leader of the pack. Look at the developers thing on Youtube and you can see it perfectly clearly. He bounces around and screams and veins are popping out on his head like he wants to kick the shit out of something. It's the angry red faced jock mentality that got him to where he is, it wasn't despite it.
Often company directors don't get to where they are by being exceptionally capable or understanding their business, but because they're wired to be willing to bully and cajole and throw as much shit as is necessary to advance their careers.
It is unrealistic to assume that complex new technologies will have a significantly better experience.
I might be wrong, but I was of the understanding that the 1970's generation of nuclear reactors were mostly based on designs proven a decade or more earlier. Is the article suggesting that in fifty years there has been little progress in making them more economical to build and run? This seems hard to believe.
Nuclear power, for good or ill, strikes me as one of the few ways to lever ourselves out of the hole we dug mining fossil fuels. It boggles the mind that in Europe despite having the potential for clean, cheap and abundent energy in nuclear power we're still building fucking gas fired power stations.
If we were to lose our capacity to build preeminently smart machines, that would be a very dark situation, because machines can serve as weapons.
Oh no, think of all the lovely new weapons we won't have to kill each other with if we don't jump into this field of research! Oh, the humanity!
Seriously though, we could be looking into this with a view to helping solve economic problems, improving quality of living, eventually looking towards machines that do our labour for us. Instead, no, the first thing that always pops into their heads is fucking weapons.
Timothy Leary beat the author to some of these ideas by about forty years with his 8 circuit model. Nonetheless, it's worth reiterating as often as possible by different authors.
Reality seems to be a meshing of "out there" and what model your brain makes of "out there". A reality tunnel is a term Leary came up with to describe an individual's models and maps and beliefs about the world, based on imprinting from various stages of our lives.
In the same way the menu isn't the same as the meal, our reality tunnel isn't reality, it's only our perception of reality. We only take in so much information about the world around us, usually in accordance with our tunnels.
A lot of problems, especially with politicians and the devoutly religious, seem to come from the attitude that their reality tunnel is somehow more "true", more objective, accurate and morally superior to everyone else's. Listen to a political speech and you'll notice everything is in aristotellian, moral terms. They are absolutely certain of the infallibility of their chosen reality tunnel and the values it contains. This usually also explains why they make such appalling decisions.
Learning more about the basic fallibility and malleability of our reality tunnels as well as being able to modify them is an incredible valuable.
Monsanto's litigation tactics remind me of the RIAA and its ilk. Both try desperately to stop easily duplication of their "IP", but in Monsanto's case they're fighting against the four and a half billion year old tactics of nature.
They can sue as many farmers as they like, their precious seeds will propagate out of their control eventually.
The article fails to mention the treatment given to David Nutt by the last Labour government in 2009. At the time, he worked on the Advisory Council on the Misuse Of Drugs, which was meant to be independent of government. Based on their findings, Nutt pushed for the classification of illegal drugs based on actual harm, rather than arbitrarily as it still is now. The ACMD also published about the relative harmlessness of ecstasy and cannabis.
For this heinous crime he was sacked by the then Home Secretary, who said "he was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy."
Not long later, Cannabis was back to being a class B drug after only a few years at class C.
It seems that all governments are anti-scientific when the science contradicts their ridiculous ideologies, especially when it comes to drug policy.
An an aside, I remember the Prime Minister at the time, Gordon Brown, went on a morning talk show and said, with a straight face, that some strains of cannabis killed people.
The most important thing for us to be spending our money on is trying to avoid that 9 billion.
People have been saying there's going to be a population crisis since Malthus, and that was nearly 2 centuries ago.
That isn't to say that we have infinite potential for population growth, just that we shouldn't be getting hung up on any particular number as "the limit".
My preferred solution (to this and many other problems) is for humanity to get off this planet and into space colonies around the solar system. To be perfectly honest, I see this as more feasible than trying to stop population growth, which I can't see happening without (or even with) unacceptable coercion.
At the minute, they're locked into a futile game of whack-a-mole. It makes me laugh sometimes; the BPI have more or less veto power over the major ISPs in the UK and all they can do is flail around blocking a few sites and proxies. I imagine some bitter, humourless executive in the bowels of the BPI shaking his fist and screaming "CURSE YOU INTERNET!"
I say they're lucky, as I suspect in five years time they won't even be able to play whack-a-mole. What with censorship by various states, the NSA revelations and increasing authoritarianism, I think the next "generation" of P2P, web and messenger services are going to be anonymous. Tor we all know about, and I notice I2P shows a lot of promise. File sharing will likely be the first breakthrough anonymous application, but I2P supports far more than that and other services will quickly follow.
I think encrypted, anonymous services will essentially be game over for censorship.
The fact that this stuff hasn't led to protesting in the streets really reflects just how complacent the US population is. Or how afraid of the government we really are.
I personally think this whole scenario instead proves just how afraid governments are of us.
It somehow reminds me of the Soviet Union, which was so out of touch and terrified of its populace that it used to jail poets and painters. Now the US government is so afraid of its populace that its mining people's fucking Facebook logs and mobile phone conversations.
Your article reminds me of the Randi prize for proof of the paranormal; it really doesn't matter what I say, you sure as fuck aren't going to pay out. I suppose this makes me "SUPERFAIL" (seriously?) in your eyes.
The first thing that popped into my mind was the Miranda warning, specifically:
Anything you say or do may be used against you in a court of law.
Note the use of the word against. There is no mention of anything you say being used in your favor. The criminal justice system is adversarial, not co-operative. The state prosecution in a court is there to convict you, it's not there to find out "the truth" and set you free. This works in a sense because eventually in such a scenario guilt or innocence can be proven.
Imagine that person A has been arrested on suspicion of murder. A policeman is currently interviewing him:
Cop: Were you at home after 6pm on April 15th?
Person A: I refuse to answer the question.
Now, in court, *beyond a reasonable doubt* where was Person A? Does it prove he wasn't at home? Of course not.
Without the 5th amendment and the protection it gives, the state would say Person A's refusal to answer the question would indicate he wasn't at home. But that assumption is by no means *beyond a reasonable doubt*. The refusal to answer the question could be used as evidence against you, like it is in some other countries. Yet that provides no information as to your actual whereabouts! It pisses on the burden of proof completely.
The founders of the United States weren't stupid by any means. They wanted to remove the possibility of guilt by mere inference and replace it with guilt based on actual evidence. I'm confused as to why anyone would consider that "unnecessary".
I do wonder if this document is authentic. It looks like it was created by a teenager. Look at the PRISM logo, for example, which looks like it was made on MS Paint. Why are the list of companies bizarrely represented on a graph with one axis?
Also, what about the cost? $20 million a year is nothing. In government, that's probably the total cost to buy a laser printer. I can't imagine a massive data mining operation costing less than a few hundred million a year.
Before anyone jumps down my throat, I'm not blindly saying it isn't authentic either. I'm saying it *may* not be authentic. Since we don't really know anything except for newspaper reports based on one very sloppy looking document, I think some skepticism is healthy.
It could also be NSA disinformation of course. Or disinformation from another agency or country! It could be a legit program presented as an unauthentic looking document to spread skepticism!
If it is true, the question is how to stop the bastards from doing it. If it is true, I hope they're as woeful at gathering data as they are at displaying it in Powerpoint presentations.
This doesn't really address the whole issue, but remember that the war on drugs has stopped scientists from being able to conduct research for decades. LSD and Ecstasy both had incredibly promising properties in treating some illnesses, especially in the area of mental health. This was until research was banned by governments around the world. I wonder what sort of illnesses, diseases and conditions we'd have cured today if they hadn't banned it.
It pays to remember that through drug prohibition governments are not just waging a war against the individual's rights, but waging a war against scientific research.
As far as I understand it, the ones that make the real money are hideously rare, like the Nintendo World Championship gold cartridge for the NES.
A full collection makes money because it contains a lot of rare games in among the big sellers. Old console games are inherently collectable as well which helps.
The way to make money out of it would be to identify which games may become collectors items and start buying them up before a real collectors scene for the console starts to appear. The risky bit is they might not rise in value at all - it all depends on how strong the collector market is 10 years in the future.
The author seems quite intent on blaming individuals for what is a structural malaise.
There's money in the kinds of fields the author talks about, and it seems a bit harsh to criticize people for trying to make a living. Agreed, Angry Birds isn't pushing the boundaries of human evolution towards a fairer, more peaceful world, but this isn't the 50's - the teet of government research is drying up through constant cuts and marginalisation. Academia and the public sector doesn't seem to have the clout it used to, and as a result long term humanitarian projects are dying off. The death of the public sector is the real reason we've never gone back to the moon. That's neoliberalism for you.
As for the "underclass" (a word I despise), I've been wondering recently whether we're witnessing the technological trend futurists warned us about; persistently lowering labour requirements. Figures certainly seem to point that way.
Outside of tech and Wall Street, making a living is quickly becoming harder and harder. There simply isn't the amount of work there was forty years ago. We're looking at genuine human tragedy if the situation is not resolved.
I feel the only cure is a guaranteed minimum income. Let us solve all these problems at once, forever.
Microsoft is losing market share to tablets and smartphones, but these are shut tighter than the PC platform ever was.
Agreed, It's essentially a Phyrric victory. We didn't get all worked up about Microsoft back in the day just because it was Microsoft, but because their monopoly threatened the open nature of the PC platform. Now we have a mobile platform with two major players, one of which is closed in a way that Microsoft could only dream of.
Agile assumes you have smart, talented, dedicated individuals doing the work.
And, I would wager, reasonable, patient, even handed clients (which will be the government, and not the ridiculous assertion as stated in the article that it's the taxpayers). I challenge anyone to look at the Victorian dinosaurs in power in the UK and assume any of those qualities.
That was just a cheap shot at the government, I admit it.
I imagine whatever will run UC on a technical level will just be another government collossus. Their minds are incapable of conceiving or implementing anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
If there was some sort of massive sifting of google terms by local law enforcement, or the NSA were passing on every single combination of "pressure cooker + backpack", there wouldn't be an isolated incident, there would be tens of thousands of these investigations. How many other terms would get similar scrutiny? Would local police act on all of the millions of searches that would throw up a red flag?
The police might be increasingly militarized, but they aren't limitless in either manpower or funding, as much as they would have you believe otherwise.
What I'd like to know from all this is why the police are now so frequently travelling around in armed units just to conduct inquiries.
Some ridiculous, flag waving drivel written by some speech writer somewhere for a monarch in the event of a war that didn't actually happen?
Come on editors, this is stretching News For Nerds a bit, don't you think?
That's just like the X41 tablet. You know, the one IBM released in 2005.
Shame you can no longer build a ThinkPad worthy of the name, eh Lenovo?
Let me know when they find UB 40 ...
Let me know when they sink UB 40.
The police are increasingly regarded with fear and distrust, which insulates them from the community they work in, which makes their behaviour in turn more aggressive and antagonistic. This widens the gap to the point where the police are not a part of a community, but something that oppresses it.
History has proven that a lot of people are happy to mistreat or kill or torture others, assuming they see the other as an "enemy".
The Warrior Cop seems to me to be not just a result of militarisation, but politicalisation. Cops are told again and again they are fighting wars against drugs, or terrorism, or crime, and unsurprisingly they turn into a war making institution. Not only that, but an institution that sees everyone as an enemy.
This seems to me a result of consistently electing lawmakers who are too fucking stupid for words.
I'm not going to take a high ground against these people, I could understand how they might feel.
I have the same sympathy as the (thread!) parent. I feel in some ways we live in an age where traditional societal pressures about who one "should" be as an adult are deteriorating, and I'm personally glad for it. For some people of both sexes never moving out from under the wing of their parents and not engaging with society is something they would want themselves.
It's easy to sneer and call them losers and say it's a societal issue, but at the end of the day who are they harming? I really don't see the problem.
He's a moron. He doesn't understand the business AT ALL. Plus, he's obnoxious as hell.
He doesn't really have to be at that level, all he has to do is be an alpha male, leader of the pack. Look at the developers thing on Youtube and you can see it perfectly clearly. He bounces around and screams and veins are popping out on his head like he wants to kick the shit out of something. It's the angry red faced jock mentality that got him to where he is, it wasn't despite it.
Often company directors don't get to where they are by being exceptionally capable or understanding their business, but because they're wired to be willing to bully and cajole and throw as much shit as is necessary to advance their careers.
All we need is two of those engines, a spherical cockpit, and two large solar panels attached to each side.
Quoth TFA:
It is unrealistic to assume that complex new technologies will have a significantly better experience.
I might be wrong, but I was of the understanding that the 1970's generation of nuclear reactors were mostly based on designs proven a decade or more earlier. Is the article suggesting that in fifty years there has been little progress in making them more economical to build and run? This seems hard to believe.
Nuclear power, for good or ill, strikes me as one of the few ways to lever ourselves out of the hole we dug mining fossil fuels. It boggles the mind that in Europe despite having the potential for clean, cheap and abundent energy in nuclear power we're still building fucking gas fired power stations.
If we were to lose our capacity to build preeminently smart machines, that would be a very dark situation, because machines can serve as weapons.
Oh no, think of all the lovely new weapons we won't have to kill each other with if we don't jump into this field of research! Oh, the humanity!
Seriously though, we could be looking into this with a view to helping solve economic problems, improving quality of living, eventually looking towards machines that do our labour for us. Instead, no, the first thing that always pops into their heads is fucking weapons.
It's so utterly pathetic.
Timothy Leary beat the author to some of these ideas by about forty years with his 8 circuit model. Nonetheless, it's worth reiterating as often as possible by different authors.
Reality seems to be a meshing of "out there" and what model your brain makes of "out there". A reality tunnel is a term Leary came up with to describe an individual's models and maps and beliefs about the world, based on imprinting from various stages of our lives.
In the same way the menu isn't the same as the meal, our reality tunnel isn't reality, it's only our perception of reality. We only take in so much information about the world around us, usually in accordance with our tunnels.
A lot of problems, especially with politicians and the devoutly religious, seem to come from the attitude that their reality tunnel is somehow more "true", more objective, accurate and morally superior to everyone else's. Listen to a political speech and you'll notice everything is in aristotellian, moral terms. They are absolutely certain of the infallibility of their chosen reality tunnel and the values it contains. This usually also explains why they make such appalling decisions.
Learning more about the basic fallibility and malleability of our reality tunnels as well as being able to modify them is an incredible valuable.
Monsanto's litigation tactics remind me of the RIAA and its ilk. Both try desperately to stop easily duplication of their "IP", but in Monsanto's case they're fighting against the four and a half billion year old tactics of nature.
They can sue as many farmers as they like, their precious seeds will propagate out of their control eventually.
The article fails to mention the treatment given to David Nutt by the last Labour government in 2009. At the time, he worked on the Advisory Council on the Misuse Of Drugs, which was meant to be independent of government. Based on their findings, Nutt pushed for the classification of illegal drugs based on actual harm, rather than arbitrarily as it still is now. The ACMD also published about the relative harmlessness of ecstasy and cannabis.
For this heinous crime he was sacked by the then Home Secretary, who said "he was asked to go because he cannot be both a government adviser and a campaigner against government policy."
Not long later, Cannabis was back to being a class B drug after only a few years at class C.
It seems that all governments are anti-scientific when the science contradicts their ridiculous ideologies, especially when it comes to drug policy.
An an aside, I remember the Prime Minister at the time, Gordon Brown, went on a morning talk show and said, with a straight face, that some strains of cannabis killed people.
The most important thing for us to be spending our money on is trying to avoid that 9 billion.
People have been saying there's going to be a population crisis since Malthus, and that was nearly 2 centuries ago.
That isn't to say that we have infinite potential for population growth, just that we shouldn't be getting hung up on any particular number as "the limit".
My preferred solution (to this and many other problems) is for humanity to get off this planet and into space colonies around the solar system. To be perfectly honest, I see this as more feasible than trying to stop population growth, which I can't see happening without (or even with) unacceptable coercion.
At the minute, they're locked into a futile game of whack-a-mole. It makes me laugh sometimes; the BPI have more or less veto power over the major ISPs in the UK and all they can do is flail around blocking a few sites and proxies. I imagine some bitter, humourless executive in the bowels of the BPI shaking his fist and screaming "CURSE YOU INTERNET!"
I say they're lucky, as I suspect in five years time they won't even be able to play whack-a-mole. What with censorship by various states, the NSA revelations and increasing authoritarianism, I think the next "generation" of P2P, web and messenger services are going to be anonymous. Tor we all know about, and I notice I2P shows a lot of promise. File sharing will likely be the first breakthrough anonymous application, but I2P supports far more than that and other services will quickly follow.
I think encrypted, anonymous services will essentially be game over for censorship.
The fact that this stuff hasn't led to protesting in the streets really reflects just how complacent the US population is. Or how afraid of the government we really are.
I personally think this whole scenario instead proves just how afraid governments are of us.
It somehow reminds me of the Soviet Union, which was so out of touch and terrified of its populace that it used to jail poets and painters. Now the US government is so afraid of its populace that its mining people's fucking Facebook logs and mobile phone conversations.
Your article reminds me of the Randi prize for proof of the paranormal; it really doesn't matter what I say, you sure as fuck aren't going to pay out. I suppose this makes me "SUPERFAIL" (seriously?) in your eyes.
The first thing that popped into my mind was the Miranda warning, specifically:
Anything you say or do may be used against you in a court of law.
Note the use of the word against. There is no mention of anything you say being used in your favor. The criminal justice system is adversarial, not co-operative. The state prosecution in a court is there to convict you, it's not there to find out "the truth" and set you free. This works in a sense because eventually in such a scenario guilt or innocence can be proven.
Imagine that person A has been arrested on suspicion of murder. A policeman is currently interviewing him:
Cop: Were you at home after 6pm on April 15th?
Person A: I refuse to answer the question.
Now, in court, *beyond a reasonable doubt* where was Person A? Does it prove he wasn't at home? Of course not.
Without the 5th amendment and the protection it gives, the state would say Person A's refusal to answer the question would indicate he wasn't at home. But that assumption is by no means *beyond a reasonable doubt*. The refusal to answer the question could be used as evidence against you, like it is in some other countries. Yet that provides no information as to your actual whereabouts! It pisses on the burden of proof completely.
The founders of the United States weren't stupid by any means. They wanted to remove the possibility of guilt by mere inference and replace it with guilt based on actual evidence. I'm confused as to why anyone would consider that "unnecessary".
I do wonder if this document is authentic. It looks like it was created by a teenager. Look at the PRISM logo, for example, which looks like it was made on MS Paint. Why are the list of companies bizarrely represented on a graph with one axis?
Also, what about the cost? $20 million a year is nothing. In government, that's probably the total cost to buy a laser printer. I can't imagine a massive data mining operation costing less than a few hundred million a year.
Before anyone jumps down my throat, I'm not blindly saying it isn't authentic either. I'm saying it *may* not be authentic. Since we don't really know anything except for newspaper reports based on one very sloppy looking document, I think some skepticism is healthy.
It could also be NSA disinformation of course. Or disinformation from another agency or country! It could be a legit program presented as an unauthentic looking document to spread skepticism!
If it is true, the question is how to stop the bastards from doing it. If it is true, I hope they're as woeful at gathering data as they are at displaying it in Powerpoint presentations.
This doesn't really address the whole issue, but remember that the war on drugs has stopped scientists from being able to conduct research for decades. LSD and Ecstasy both had incredibly promising properties in treating some illnesses, especially in the area of mental health. This was until research was banned by governments around the world. I wonder what sort of illnesses, diseases and conditions we'd have cured today if they hadn't banned it.
It pays to remember that through drug prohibition governments are not just waging a war against the individual's rights, but waging a war against scientific research.
As far as I understand it, the ones that make the real money are hideously rare, like the Nintendo World Championship gold cartridge for the NES.
A full collection makes money because it contains a lot of rare games in among the big sellers. Old console games are inherently collectable as well which helps.
The way to make money out of it would be to identify which games may become collectors items and start buying them up before a real collectors scene for the console starts to appear. The risky bit is they might not rise in value at all - it all depends on how strong the collector market is 10 years in the future.
The author seems quite intent on blaming individuals for what is a structural malaise.
There's money in the kinds of fields the author talks about, and it seems a bit harsh to criticize people for trying to make a living. Agreed, Angry Birds isn't pushing the boundaries of human evolution towards a fairer, more peaceful world, but this isn't the 50's - the teet of government research is drying up through constant cuts and marginalisation. Academia and the public sector doesn't seem to have the clout it used to, and as a result long term humanitarian projects are dying off. The death of the public sector is the real reason we've never gone back to the moon. That's neoliberalism for you.
As for the "underclass" (a word I despise), I've been wondering recently whether we're witnessing the technological trend futurists warned us about; persistently lowering labour requirements. Figures certainly seem to point that way.
Outside of tech and Wall Street, making a living is quickly becoming harder and harder. There simply isn't the amount of work there was forty years ago. We're looking at genuine human tragedy if the situation is not resolved.
I feel the only cure is a guaranteed minimum income. Let us solve all these problems at once, forever.
Microsoft is losing market share to tablets and smartphones, but these are shut tighter than the PC platform ever was.
Agreed, It's essentially a Phyrric victory. We didn't get all worked up about Microsoft back in the day just because it was Microsoft, but because their monopoly threatened the open nature of the PC platform. Now we have a mobile platform with two major players, one of which is closed in a way that Microsoft could only dream of.
Yes but Governments these days asks themselves the important question of "What Would Nixon Do?"
Quick, get someone over to the Watergate!
Agile assumes you have smart, talented, dedicated individuals doing the work.
And, I would wager, reasonable, patient, even handed clients (which will be the government, and not the ridiculous assertion as stated in the article that it's the taxpayers). I challenge anyone to look at the Victorian dinosaurs in power in the UK and assume any of those qualities.
That was just a cheap shot at the government, I admit it.
I imagine whatever will run UC on a technical level will just be another government collossus. Their minds are incapable of conceiving or implementing anything else.
What sort of security measures would they have in place for systems whose job it is to poke every last probably-malware link that goes across skype?
I bet they run Linux.