Furthermore, many things that would be considered pornography are the subject of legitimate study in the arts, social sciences, and media studies. Hell, there are social psych courses that have involved the use of deliberately explicit pornography to produce "shock reactions". There's really very little you can get away with censoring at a university, because almost any information in the world is being researched about and analyzed by someone.
You've gotta do both. Get a skilled group of security-minded developers to design the code, and then get a seperate group of wily hackers to try to poke holes in it.
The west doesn't provide foriegn aid/intervention out of the infinite goodness of our charitable heart - we do it for relatively practical reasons. We want to help the economies of undeveloped nations grow and become more stable, so that first world countries (via transnational corps) have better access to the potential natural resources and cheap labor.
However, poverty, corruption, and strife are so endemic in many parts of Africa that the financial and political investment needed to stabilize and repair the developing nations is far higher than would be "practical" from a business standpoint. Since we can't easily fix the situation, the best alternative is to ignore it as much as possible, and hope that nobody notices this inconsistency in our supposedly humanitarian Western policies.
So, yes, while preventing millions of deaths a year and bringing entire societies out of the dark ages might seem like the "right" thing to do, it really isn't, when you think like a politician or a CEO.
As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, I don't agree that the cure is worse than the disease.[1]
The disease is that innocent people are getting hurt or killed.
I'm sorry about the Holocaust - there are many small things that could have been done to stop it, and it's a shame we didn't see them at the time. That said, your concept of free speech is totally off base - it actually most reminiscent of utilitarian facism.
If a society treats freedom as merely a tool to keep people from getting hurt or killed, it will inevitably end up signing away it's freedom for an increased sense of security at every turn.
People get hurt and killed, free speech or not. While a certain number of them could be saved through censorship, there is a cost. Everytime we invoke censorship, we strengthen the autocratic power of the censors (usually government or big businesses), and their ability to lie, cheat, and yes, hurt and kill people without any consequences.
People shouldn't be free because it will keep them safe, happy, and comfortable. They should be free because it is an unconditional and absolute right.
Yeah, and a couple of guys telling young Hitler that all Jews should be killed were completely inefective, right?
Yes, ideas are incredibly powerful. In fact, ideas are more powerful than any organized force on the planet - they have the power to inspire and agitate revolution or genocide, enlightenment or chaos.
But that doesn't mean that we should regulate ideas. Ideas are simultaneously our greatest enemy and our only hope. To allow a small group of elite government officials, businessmen, or clerics to filter and police our ideas is to doom our entire society.
You can only be arrested if you say that AND your speech has the effect of creating an imminent danger
Even further than that, you have to have the intention or reasonable expectation that your speech will have the effect of creating an imminent danger. You can't get in trouble just because you said something fairly innocuous that unintentionally started a riot or murderous rampage (for example, airing the Rodney King tape). I can call my friend up and say "Could you kill my boss for me?", and it's only illegal if I (or the court) could reasonably expect that my friend was seriously prepared to go out an assassinate whoever I told him to.
those who know what they are talking about and know what they are doing rarely get certification and generally don't need them.
I dunno, it seems like if you submitted a resume that said:
"I'm new to the computer industry, but I'm such a totally confident, skilled, and versatile programmer that I didn't go to college or even bother to get any certifications!"
That wouldn't fly too well. Employers usually want some kind of third-party verification that an applicant knows what they're doing. A cert can provide that whiff of legitimacy that persuades the employer to take an applicant seriously, or at least do an independent test of his/her knowledge. And of course, if you really are skilled, confident, etc. that's all you need - your "big break" as it were.
I think that many people are hostile towards this kind of system not because of what it is (basically a computer indexed newsmedia database), but who has control over it - and more importantly, who doesn't.
Imagine the web without search engines, just a bunch of sites connected by links. Then, imagine that the CIA created a massively expensive and elaborate project (call it project GOOGLE) to index, cache, and analyze all the content on the web, and make it searchable. Of course, project GOOGLE would be highly guarded and only government officials could use it, leaving everyone else to wonder uneasily what the government was learning about them through their database.
That would be creepy, because it would mean the government would have an effectively God-like view of all activity on the web, while everyone else would be in the dark. Make such a project publically available and transparent (like the real Google), and it's accepted almost universally. Of course, you could argue that people should build their own AI-driven newsmedia uber-database, but the reality is that the US government is probably one of the few entities with the massive resources and will needed to create something like this, which means that by definition the rest of us will be left in the dark.
In a nutshell, I think the crux of the issue is that folks don't trust the US government, so every time the government proposes a new way to expand their power, people immediately jump on the ways that it could be abused. This, I believe, is as it should be.
Here's what I don't understand: why would a record company pay for DRM that's already been broken, when they can release their music without DRM for free?
The idea is that Sony or someone wants to sell their music directly to iPod owners through www.sony.com, instead of having to go through the iTunes store and pay Apple for the privilege.
But there's no way they'll just sell plain MP3s, because they want to keep people from sharing the songs. So they want to wrap their MP3s in DRM, but Sony-brand DRM won't play on iPods, therefore they need some way to wrap their files in an iPod-compatible DRM without having to pay Apple. Enter DVD Jon.
In my opinon, it's a fairly neutral contribution to the fight against unfair DRM. Yes, I guess it harms Apple's monopoly on the iPod, but mostly it just increases the ability of companies to apply DRM-restrictions to your music.
Okay, so maybe the parent is a troll, posting AC and all, but in case you're not, my AC friend, I'd just like to make a request:
In the future, please make an argument against the issue or the facts presented, not simply against the supposed motivations of the presenter of the information. Because even if you're right, and this article is coming straight from DNC headquarters, that has no bearing on whether it's true or not, or whether the criticisms leveled in the article are valid.
If she were a male American of Japanese ancestry, she would have been fired on the spot.
I find it simultaneously ironically funny and disturbing that the primary complaint against Condi Rice is that she's the beneficiary of affirmative action. This is one of the key promoters and advocates of the USAPATROIT Act, the Iraq war, and the insane and deadly war on terror, this is someone whose actions have led to thousands upon thousands of innocent deaths...but the part we really find objectionable is that she only got to do all that because she's a black woman?
There's no way to deny that she got the job because she's a black woman, and maybe she did, but as far as I can see, her incompetence is not being treated any different from anybody else in Washington who Bush favors.
She would not be fired if she was a white male, because we've seen white men like Cheney or Rumsfeld get grilled far worse in the press, and stay in power. The US doesn't give a crap about incompetence, or we'd have had another revolution years ago.
Slashdotters are eventually going to have to face this reality. There is more proof of effect caused by video games in children than there is in global warming
You're probably right that violent video games have a statistically noticeable effect on kids' violent behavior. But I think the issue here is a lot bigger than whether video games make people more prone to violence, or even whether companies are responsible for the behavior of their customers.
It has to do with the 1st Ammendment, plain and simple. There are plenty of forms of speech and expression that cause a statistically noticeable effect on people's tendency to be violent.
When the US government announced that muslim extremists were behind the 9/11 attacks, many people who would not ordinarily have done so went out and lynched middle-easterners. Should that announcement have been suppressed because we could reasonably have expected that it would encourage violence? Should whoever made that announcement be held responsible for all the resulting deaths?
The likelihood that speech will cause violence is not a criteria in deciding whether it is protected or not. Granted, speech which is specifically intended to incite violence can be repressed (like rounding up a mob and telling them to burn down black churches), but video games obviously don't fall into this category.
To paraphrase everybody's pal Mao Tse-Tung, "Power grows out of the barrel of a gun"
Wealth is a form of power, specifically it's the economic power gained from owning lots of stuff.
But ownership is not a law of nature, it must be enforced by some armed group, like the cops or the military, or else the things you felt you "owned" could be taken by anyone who wanted them.
This armed group is the arbiter of who owns what, and therefore how wealthy each person is. So, they are quite literally the creators of wealth.
You're right that when people call $thing "gay", they usually don't mean that $thing is attracted to things of it's own gender. But, they almost always mean that $thing is stupid, wimpy, obnoxious, or otherwise bad.
Like, let's say we decided to use the term "Thansal" as an insult. If we got fragged due to lag, we'd say our internet connection was "acting like Thansal". Of course, if you got offended, we'd argue that we of course don't literally mean that our internet connection was acting like you...it's just an expression with it's own meaning. But the fact that we chose your name to represent bad shit that we hate...well, that could be seen as pretty disrespectful.
Maybe you personally wouldn't care, and I might not either, but I can understand why people might be pissed that a word describing a sensitive part of their identity is used in such a negative way.
I respect your desire to remain free from authoritarian communism, and I would never ask you to surrender your freedom to such a government, because I despise any government that would seek to restrict people's right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.
I similarly ask that you respect other people's desire to remain free from the overbearing authority of international mega-corporations with no respect for our lives, liberty, or happiness.
Are you saying that you think that government-run tool factories would never have created an environmental disaster?
No, actually I'm really, really not saying that. Many people on Slashdot tend to conflate criticism of the private sector with a blind endorsement of the government. I think this "public institution vs. private institution" dichotomy is a false one.
You should know that I hate the government. I'd like to see it not just downsized, but eventually completely phased out. I believe that as a rule, governments are oppressive. However, I am not so naive as to think that government is the only type of institution that can be oppressive. Any centralized institution that gets it's hands on enough power, be it political, economic, or military, is going to abuse that power by screwing over the powerless.
I think that the only way to have a truly free society is to break down those centralized institutions and spread that power as evenly as possible. This is not a utopian prescription, just a general rule about the nature of institutions. Power corrupts, so it's best to keep the power in as many different hands as possible, lest one president, CEO, or general decide he wants to be king.
it was not near any cows or roads, and ended up shutting down. Those kinds of mistakes are much more rare in the private sector, because there is accountabillity and control.
Ever heard of the Bhopal disaster? It was one of the most deadly industrial accidents ever, and it was due to the negligence of Union Carbide employees (a US corporation). How about the Exxon Valdez? Yet another vast catastrophe caused by irresponsible employees of a US corporation. Or hey, a little closer to geek-home - how about when MasterCard allowed 40 million credit card numbers to be stolen (the largest such leak ever reported) due to poor software design?
The funny thing about these incidents of corporate irresponsibility is that not only did these companies have totally stupid policies that were very likely to result in danger, once disaster struck they were totally unaccountable for the damage they caused.
It would be moronic to claim that the government knows best, or that massive bureaucracy is an effective way to make decisions, but this song and dance about how profit-driven instutitions magically become the most efficient and responsible is absurd.
In many countries, investors are more than happy to build factories, roads, mines, infrastructure, and the jobs that go with them.
Yes, those factories are often sweatshops. Those roads often damage delicate environment which is needed for eco-tourism, scientific research, or agriculture. Those mines can be unregulated death-traps for miners in addition to causing toxic runoff pollution of local water supplies. None of these problems concern the investor, just the local population. In short, the "infrastructure" eagerly pushed by foriegn investors really isn't infrastructure for the improvement of the country or it's people so much as infrastructure for the improvement of the investor's bottom line. Sure, some officials are just corrupt fucks, but has it ever occured to you that there might be good reasons to try to restrict, regulate, and/or tax foreign companies trying to exploit your sovereign nation?
I agree with the sentiment that people need to be given the freedom to take care of themselves, but I don't think that empowering and depending on exploitive investors and multinational conglomerates is the way to give people that freedom.
You're lucky to be so comfortable with having your private life made public, and there's nothing wrong with that attitude. What's worrisome is when people decide that since they would be happy giving up their privacy, everyone else should have to as well. It's kind of like conservative christians saying "Everyone/I/ know gets along just fine without sex toys, therefore they should be illegal." People are different, and many of them do have compelling reasons to desire privacy.
Privacy doesn't have to be mandatory - it can be "opt-out", but government and other large institutions must have a default policy of respecting privacy.
:) Your commitment to researching and criticizing my personal situation is remarkable - and a bit creepy. While I can assure you that everything I have written on Slashdot is honest, suddenly I'm not really interested in providing more personal details of my life to someone who is evidently only interested in making fun of me. If you choose to believe that I therefore have something to hide, I guess there's nothing I can do about it.
What "big waves" are you talking about? What is the response you're talking about? Unless you can provide some specifics, your rant is that of a paranoiac.
The reason there are no specifics in my previous explanation is that government repression could apply to any number of situations, in any number of countries. If you believe that the US government has never violated citizen's right to free speech, I really don't have time to tell you all the ways you're wrong. If you're interested in learning, I'd encourage you to do some research on your own, maybe with COINTELPRO as a starting point. I'm not aware of anyone in the US being persecuted for either accessing or hosting Tor servers, so you're right about that. But if the US government is willing to shut down 20 anti-war websites and peek at all the log files, it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch to think that it would be valuable to use an anonymizing service both when hosting and accessing this kind of content.
So, I think we've both made our points, possibly more than once. I'm done with this thread, so if you want to have the last word, go for it!
WHY IS ANYONE IN THEIR RIGHT MINDS USING A BLOODY COMPUTER TO DO THIS?
Come on, everyone knows computers are infallible! I mean, didn't you see 2001: A Space Odyssey or Superman III? What have computers ever done to lose your trust?
By definition if a GE crop cannot breed, it will not pass its genes to future generations so it is a non issue.
It's true that the risk to ecosystems is radically reduced by this method, but the damage to farmers and their livelihoods is pretty terrible.
For example, say Monsanto creates an insect-resistant tomato that's also extra big and super red. Almost all of the farmers in your town jump on board, anticipating bigger profits, but you decide to stick with what's always worked in the past.
At first, buyers pay a premium for the GMO tomatoes, but so many people have started growing them that the price stabilizes about where it used to be for low-tech tomatoes. Meanwhile, the price for your low-tech tomatoes is at rock-bottom.
Furthermore, since insects are repelled from the GMO tomatoes, all tomato pests in the area migrate to your fields, where they enjoy destroying some of the only crops around they can eat. Your crops are decimated, and what's left is worth less than it used to be. There's only one solution: order some of those Monsanto seeds.
From that day on, you're essentially dependent on a monopolistic, IP-hoarding corporation for your livelihood, and you'll pay pretty much whatever they ask for the next batch of seeds.
It's a myth that people are starving because they don't have sufficiently magical crops to grow. There is far more than enough arable land to feed everyone in the world fully. What's lacking is the infrastructure, education, and technology to create and manage good farms. These things cannot be genetically engineered, and they don't need to be.
As long as the third world is being actively exploited by first world nations, multinational corps, and corrupt local governments, there will be starvation - with or without GMOs. The GMO debate is just a convenient way to distract people from the fact that we have had the capability to feed the entire world easily for decades now, and choose not to.
Although GMOs will not solve world hunger, they do have a fair possibility of exacerbating it, by destabilizing ecosystems. Introduce any crop radically different from what normally grows in an area, whether it's genetically engineered or even just a natural crop from a different continent, and you're setting yourself up for potentially disastrous trouble.
you know, when you're not flipping burgers or whatever the hell it is you do to pay rent
I don't have a paying job, I'm a full-time volunteer political activist. I don't pay rent, either. I squat.
until you figure out how to "go off the grid" and stick it to The Man
I consider myself fairly "off the grid" already (perhaps not completely, since I live in the first world), since I spend essentially no money. I scavenge (dumpster) and grow my own food, I only use free internet (at the library or wherever it's available), and get virtually all my material goods from other people's excess. People tend to use the phrase "stick it to The Man" sarcastically, but I truly believe that it's everyone's duty to actively oppose corrupt governments and other oppressive institutions that seek to erode our rights. If that makes me a naive sucker, then so be it.
Step 2: Respond to actual arguments
SURPRISE! What did you think they'd do, sit there and take it?
You're right, it isn't a surprise at all that a powerful entity would act violently and illegally to protect itself. That was basically the point I was trying to make in my original post. It's to be expected that even a supposedly democratic and free society with a centralized government might at some point decide to turn against some of it's citizens if said citizens were making big waves. In almost all situations, I'd say a government that breaks it's own laws or principles to oppress it's citizens is in the wrong, and should be stopped.
The part that is missing from your Master Plan to Play Antisocial Badass [...] is how to cope with the consequences of your actions.
Well, see that's where Tor comes into the discussion. Tor, and other efforts like it, are excellent tools to cope with the consequences of a successful socio-political movement. If we acknowledge that governments will probably want to censor us whenever we start making their lives difficult (even if they're choosing not to do it now), that allows us to create tools to preempt censorship.
So basically, even though Tor may not be needed now in the "free world" (since, let's face it, we aren't making very big waves), it is important to develop and implement it now in preparation for a situation where it may be absolutely vital.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, many things that would be considered pornography are the subject of legitimate study in the arts, social sciences, and media studies. Hell, there are social psych courses that have involved the use of deliberately explicit pornography to produce "shock reactions". There's really very little you can get away with censoring at a university, because almost any information in the world is being researched about and analyzed by someone.
You've gotta do both. Get a skilled group of security-minded developers to design the code, and then get a seperate group of wily hackers to try to poke holes in it.
The west doesn't provide foriegn aid/intervention out of the infinite goodness of our charitable heart - we do it for relatively practical reasons. We want to help the economies of undeveloped nations grow and become more stable, so that first world countries (via transnational corps) have better access to the potential natural resources and cheap labor.
However, poverty, corruption, and strife are so endemic in many parts of Africa that the financial and political investment needed to stabilize and repair the developing nations is far higher than would be "practical" from a business standpoint. Since we can't easily fix the situation, the best alternative is to ignore it as much as possible, and hope that nobody notices this inconsistency in our supposedly humanitarian Western policies.
So, yes, while preventing millions of deaths a year and bringing entire societies out of the dark ages might seem like the "right" thing to do, it really isn't, when you think like a politician or a CEO.
As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, I don't agree that the cure is worse than the disease.[1]
The disease is that innocent people are getting hurt or killed.
I'm sorry about the Holocaust - there are many small things that could have been done to stop it, and it's a shame we didn't see them at the time. That said, your concept of free speech is totally off base - it actually most reminiscent of utilitarian facism.
If a society treats freedom as merely a tool to keep people from getting hurt or killed, it will inevitably end up signing away it's freedom for an increased sense of security at every turn.
People get hurt and killed, free speech or not. While a certain number of them could be saved through censorship, there is a cost. Everytime we invoke censorship, we strengthen the autocratic power of the censors (usually government or big businesses), and their ability to lie, cheat, and yes, hurt and kill people without any consequences.
People shouldn't be free because it will keep them safe, happy, and comfortable. They should be free because it is an unconditional and absolute right.
Yeah, and a couple of guys telling young Hitler that all Jews should be killed were completely inefective, right?
Yes, ideas are incredibly powerful. In fact, ideas are more powerful than any organized force on the planet - they have the power to inspire and agitate revolution or genocide, enlightenment or chaos.
But that doesn't mean that we should regulate ideas. Ideas are simultaneously our greatest enemy and our only hope. To allow a small group of elite government officials, businessmen, or clerics to filter and police our ideas is to doom our entire society.
You can only be arrested if you say that AND your speech has the effect of creating an imminent danger
Even further than that, you have to have the intention or reasonable expectation that your speech will have the effect of creating an imminent danger. You can't get in trouble just because you said something fairly innocuous that unintentionally started a riot or murderous rampage (for example, airing the Rodney King tape). I can call my friend up and say "Could you kill my boss for me?", and it's only illegal if I (or the court) could reasonably expect that my friend was seriously prepared to go out an assassinate whoever I told him to.
those who know what they are talking about and know what they are doing rarely get certification and generally don't need them.
I dunno, it seems like if you submitted a resume that said:
"I'm new to the computer industry, but I'm such a totally confident, skilled, and versatile programmer that I didn't go to college or even bother to get any certifications!"
That wouldn't fly too well. Employers usually want some kind of third-party verification that an applicant knows what they're doing. A cert can provide that whiff of legitimacy that persuades the employer to take an applicant seriously, or at least do an independent test of his/her knowledge. And of course, if you really are skilled, confident, etc. that's all you need - your "big break" as it were.
I think that many people are hostile towards this kind of system not because of what it is (basically a computer indexed newsmedia database), but who has control over it - and more importantly, who doesn't.
Imagine the web without search engines, just a bunch of sites connected by links. Then, imagine that the CIA created a massively expensive and elaborate project (call it project GOOGLE) to index, cache, and analyze all the content on the web, and make it searchable. Of course, project GOOGLE would be highly guarded and only government officials could use it, leaving everyone else to wonder uneasily what the government was learning about them through their database.
That would be creepy, because it would mean the government would have an effectively God-like view of all activity on the web, while everyone else would be in the dark. Make such a project publically available and transparent (like the real Google), and it's accepted almost universally. Of course, you could argue that people should build their own AI-driven newsmedia uber-database, but the reality is that the US government is probably one of the few entities with the massive resources and will needed to create something like this, which means that by definition the rest of us will be left in the dark.
In a nutshell, I think the crux of the issue is that folks don't trust the US government, so every time the government proposes a new way to expand their power, people immediately jump on the ways that it could be abused. This, I believe, is as it should be.
A friend of mine is within 1800 points of the possible maximum
Congratulations! Your friend is the new Moon Master! You must help defeat the Gorgatron!
Here's what I don't understand: why would a record company pay for DRM that's already been broken, when they can release their music without DRM for free?
The idea is that Sony or someone wants to sell their music directly to iPod owners through www.sony.com, instead of having to go through the iTunes store and pay Apple for the privilege.
But there's no way they'll just sell plain MP3s, because they want to keep people from sharing the songs. So they want to wrap their MP3s in DRM, but Sony-brand DRM won't play on iPods, therefore they need some way to wrap their files in an iPod-compatible DRM without having to pay Apple. Enter DVD Jon.
In my opinon, it's a fairly neutral contribution to the fight against unfair DRM. Yes, I guess it harms Apple's monopoly on the iPod, but mostly it just increases the ability of companies to apply DRM-restrictions to your music.
Okay, so maybe the parent is a troll, posting AC and all, but in case you're not, my AC friend, I'd just like to make a request:
In the future, please make an argument against the issue or the facts presented, not simply against the supposed motivations of the presenter of the information. Because even if you're right, and this article is coming straight from DNC headquarters, that has no bearing on whether it's true or not, or whether the criticisms leveled in the article are valid.
kthx!
If she were a male American of Japanese ancestry, she would have been fired on the spot.
I find it simultaneously ironically funny and disturbing that the primary complaint against Condi Rice is that she's the beneficiary of affirmative action. This is one of the key promoters and advocates of the USAPATROIT Act, the Iraq war, and the insane and deadly war on terror, this is someone whose actions have led to thousands upon thousands of innocent deaths...but the part we really find objectionable is that she only got to do all that because she's a black woman?
There's no way to deny that she got the job because she's a black woman, and maybe she did, but as far as I can see, her incompetence is not being treated any different from anybody else in Washington who Bush favors.
She would not be fired if she was a white male, because we've seen white men like Cheney or Rumsfeld get grilled far worse in the press, and stay in power. The US doesn't give a crap about incompetence, or we'd have had another revolution years ago.
Slashdotters are eventually going to have to face this reality. There is more proof of effect caused by video games in children than there is in global warming
You're probably right that violent video games have a statistically noticeable effect on kids' violent behavior. But I think the issue here is a lot bigger than whether video games make people more prone to violence, or even whether companies are responsible for the behavior of their customers.
It has to do with the 1st Ammendment, plain and simple. There are plenty of forms of speech and expression that cause a statistically noticeable effect on people's tendency to be violent.
When the US government announced that muslim extremists were behind the 9/11 attacks, many people who would not ordinarily have done so went out and lynched middle-easterners. Should that announcement have been suppressed because we could reasonably have expected that it would encourage violence? Should whoever made that announcement be held responsible for all the resulting deaths?
The likelihood that speech will cause violence is not a criteria in deciding whether it is protected or not. Granted, speech which is specifically intended to incite violence can be repressed (like rounding up a mob and telling them to burn down black churches), but video games obviously don't fall into this category.
To paraphrase everybody's pal Mao Tse-Tung, "Power grows out of the barrel of a gun"
Wealth is a form of power, specifically it's the economic power gained from owning lots of stuff.
But ownership is not a law of nature, it must be enforced by some armed group, like the cops or the military, or else the things you felt you "owned" could be taken by anyone who wanted them.
This armed group is the arbiter of who owns what, and therefore how wealthy each person is. So, they are quite literally the creators of wealth.
You're right that when people call $thing "gay", they usually don't mean that $thing is attracted to things of it's own gender. But, they almost always mean that $thing is stupid, wimpy, obnoxious, or otherwise bad.
Like, let's say we decided to use the term "Thansal" as an insult. If we got fragged due to lag, we'd say our internet connection was "acting like Thansal". Of course, if you got offended, we'd argue that we of course don't literally mean that our internet connection was acting like you...it's just an expression with it's own meaning. But the fact that we chose your name to represent bad shit that we hate...well, that could be seen as pretty disrespectful.
Maybe you personally wouldn't care, and I might not either, but I can understand why people might be pissed that a word describing a sensitive part of their identity is used in such a negative way.
Don't forget NeoPets, which is essentially one big trojan ad campaign targeted at very young kids.
I respect your desire to remain free from authoritarian communism, and I would never ask you to surrender your freedom to such a government, because I despise any government that would seek to restrict people's right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.
I similarly ask that you respect other people's desire to remain free from the overbearing authority of international mega-corporations with no respect for our lives, liberty, or happiness.
Are you saying that you think that government-run tool factories would never have created an environmental disaster?
No, actually I'm really, really not saying that. Many people on Slashdot tend to conflate criticism of the private sector with a blind endorsement of the government. I think this "public institution vs. private institution" dichotomy is a false one.
You should know that I hate the government. I'd like to see it not just downsized, but eventually completely phased out. I believe that as a rule, governments are oppressive. However, I am not so naive as to think that government is the only type of institution that can be oppressive. Any centralized institution that gets it's hands on enough power, be it political, economic, or military, is going to abuse that power by screwing over the powerless.
I think that the only way to have a truly free society is to break down those centralized institutions and spread that power as evenly as possible. This is not a utopian prescription, just a general rule about the nature of institutions. Power corrupts, so it's best to keep the power in as many different hands as possible, lest one president, CEO, or general decide he wants to be king.
it was not near any cows or roads, and ended up shutting down. Those kinds of mistakes are much more rare in the private sector, because there is accountabillity and control.
Ever heard of the Bhopal disaster? It was one of the most deadly industrial accidents ever, and it was due to the negligence of Union Carbide employees (a US corporation). How about the Exxon Valdez? Yet another vast catastrophe caused by irresponsible employees of a US corporation. Or hey, a little closer to geek-home - how about when MasterCard allowed 40 million credit card numbers to be stolen (the largest such leak ever reported) due to poor software design?
The funny thing about these incidents of corporate irresponsibility is that not only did these companies have totally stupid policies that were very likely to result in danger, once disaster struck they were totally unaccountable for the damage they caused.
It would be moronic to claim that the government knows best, or that massive bureaucracy is an effective way to make decisions, but this song and dance about how profit-driven instutitions magically become the most efficient and responsible is absurd.
In many countries, investors are more than happy to build factories, roads, mines, infrastructure, and the jobs that go with them.
Yes, those factories are often sweatshops. Those roads often damage delicate environment which is needed for eco-tourism, scientific research, or agriculture. Those mines can be unregulated death-traps for miners in addition to causing toxic runoff pollution of local water supplies. None of these problems concern the investor, just the local population. In short, the "infrastructure" eagerly pushed by foriegn investors really isn't infrastructure for the improvement of the country or it's people so much as infrastructure for the improvement of the investor's bottom line. Sure, some officials are just corrupt fucks, but has it ever occured to you that there might be good reasons to try to restrict, regulate, and/or tax foreign companies trying to exploit your sovereign nation?
I agree with the sentiment that people need to be given the freedom to take care of themselves, but I don't think that empowering and depending on exploitive investors and multinational conglomerates is the way to give people that freedom.
You're lucky to be so comfortable with having your private life made public, and there's nothing wrong with that attitude. What's worrisome is when people decide that since they would be happy giving up their privacy, everyone else should have to as well. It's kind of like conservative christians saying "Everyone /I/ know gets along just fine without sex toys, therefore they should be illegal." People are different, and many of them do have compelling reasons to desire privacy.
Privacy doesn't have to be mandatory - it can be "opt-out", but government and other large institutions must have a default policy of respecting privacy.
:) Your commitment to researching and criticizing my personal situation is remarkable - and a bit creepy. While I can assure you that everything I have written on Slashdot is honest, suddenly I'm not really interested in providing more personal details of my life to someone who is evidently only interested in making fun of me. If you choose to believe that I therefore have something to hide, I guess there's nothing I can do about it.
What "big waves" are you talking about? What is the response you're talking about? Unless you can provide some specifics, your rant is that of a paranoiac.
The reason there are no specifics in my previous explanation is that government repression could apply to any number of situations, in any number of countries. If you believe that the US government has never violated citizen's right to free speech, I really don't have time to tell you all the ways you're wrong. If you're interested in learning, I'd encourage you to do some research on your own, maybe with COINTELPRO as a starting point. I'm not aware of anyone in the US being persecuted for either accessing or hosting Tor servers, so you're right about that. But if the US government is willing to shut down 20 anti-war websites and peek at all the log files, it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch to think that it would be valuable to use an anonymizing service both when hosting and accessing this kind of content.
So, I think we've both made our points, possibly more than once. I'm done with this thread, so if you want to have the last word, go for it!
WHY IS ANYONE IN THEIR RIGHT MINDS USING A BLOODY COMPUTER TO DO THIS?
Come on, everyone knows computers are infallible! I mean, didn't you see 2001: A Space Odyssey or Superman III? What have computers ever done to lose your trust?
By definition if a GE crop cannot breed, it will not pass its genes to future generations so it is a non issue.
It's true that the risk to ecosystems is radically reduced by this method, but the damage to farmers and their livelihoods is pretty terrible.
For example, say Monsanto creates an insect-resistant tomato that's also extra big and super red. Almost all of the farmers in your town jump on board, anticipating bigger profits, but you decide to stick with what's always worked in the past.
At first, buyers pay a premium for the GMO tomatoes, but so many people have started growing them that the price stabilizes about where it used to be for low-tech tomatoes. Meanwhile, the price for your low-tech tomatoes is at rock-bottom.
Furthermore, since insects are repelled from the GMO tomatoes, all tomato pests in the area migrate to your fields, where they enjoy destroying some of the only crops around they can eat. Your crops are decimated, and what's left is worth less than it used to be. There's only one solution: order some of those Monsanto seeds.
From that day on, you're essentially dependent on a monopolistic, IP-hoarding corporation for your livelihood, and you'll pay pretty much whatever they ask for the next batch of seeds.
Meanwhile, people all around the world are sick, malnourished, and dying.
Did you know that in the US, half of all the food we produce goes to waste?
It's a myth that people are starving because they don't have sufficiently magical crops to grow. There is far more than enough arable land to feed everyone in the world fully. What's lacking is the infrastructure, education, and technology to create and manage good farms. These things cannot be genetically engineered, and they don't need to be.
As long as the third world is being actively exploited by first world nations, multinational corps, and corrupt local governments, there will be starvation - with or without GMOs. The GMO debate is just a convenient way to distract people from the fact that we have had the capability to feed the entire world easily for decades now, and choose not to.
Although GMOs will not solve world hunger, they do have a fair possibility of exacerbating it, by destabilizing ecosystems. Introduce any crop radically different from what normally grows in an area, whether it's genetically engineered or even just a natural crop from a different continent, and you're setting yourself up for potentially disastrous trouble.
Step 1: Respond to character attacks
you know, when you're not flipping burgers or whatever the hell it is you do to pay rent
I don't have a paying job, I'm a full-time volunteer political activist. I don't pay rent, either. I squat.
until you figure out how to "go off the grid" and stick it to The Man
I consider myself fairly "off the grid" already (perhaps not completely, since I live in the first world), since I spend essentially no money. I scavenge (dumpster) and grow my own food, I only use free internet (at the library or wherever it's available), and get virtually all my material goods from other people's excess. People tend to use the phrase "stick it to The Man" sarcastically, but I truly believe that it's everyone's duty to actively oppose corrupt governments and other oppressive institutions that seek to erode our rights. If that makes me a naive sucker, then so be it.
Step 2: Respond to actual arguments
SURPRISE! What did you think they'd do, sit there and take it?
You're right, it isn't a surprise at all that a powerful entity would act violently and illegally to protect itself. That was basically the point I was trying to make in my original post. It's to be expected that even a supposedly democratic and free society with a centralized government might at some point decide to turn against some of it's citizens if said citizens were making big waves. In almost all situations, I'd say a government that breaks it's own laws or principles to oppress it's citizens is in the wrong, and should be stopped.
The part that is missing from your Master Plan to Play Antisocial Badass [...] is how to cope with the consequences of your actions.
Well, see that's where Tor comes into the discussion. Tor, and other efforts like it, are excellent tools to cope with the consequences of a successful socio-political movement. If we acknowledge that governments will probably want to censor us whenever we start making their lives difficult (even if they're choosing not to do it now), that allows us to create tools to preempt censorship.
So basically, even though Tor may not be needed now in the "free world" (since, let's face it, we aren't making very big waves), it is important to develop and implement it now in preparation for a situation where it may be absolutely vital.