Re:What's the point of these Q&A sessions?
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Sid Meier Responds
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That method's certainly worth a try, but the problem I forsee is that some interviewees have a distinct "tilt" to what they want to talk about. Sometimes this is because they just want to advertise for their book/movie/software, so they'll pick the questions that let them glorify themselves as much as possible. Sometimes they're just really excited or focused on one particular aspect, so they'll just pick all the questions that let them prattle on about that topic.
I mean, it's true that we want to hear what the interviewee has to say, but in general we want to hear what they have to say about a broad range of issues (not just the one thing they're really into), some of which they might prefer not to have been asked.
I don't think anyone (except them) would claim that their excuses are a fair justification for stealing from gullible, often not-so wealthy americans, but that doesn't mean we should ignore them.
Understanding the social and economic context that this sort of crime takes place in is important, especially if we want to combat it. Poverty and lack of education, while certainly not justifications for crime, are often part of the cause.
Much like muslim terrorists, I think it's always better to have an understanding of what's going on with the people who try to screw us over so hard, instead of just imagining them as mustachio twirling villains who are out to get us because, well, they're the bad guys.
It's actually an interesting business model, because it mirrors that of other open source businesses. Yeah, maybe you can get a copy of the code itself, but what you really need is the support agreement. When an attacker buys a commercial rootkit from the Hacker Defender folks, they agree to update his or her rootkit to keep it undetectable from malware-scanners for a given amount of time.
If the attacker were to freely distribute the code they got, it would show up on Norton's radar pretty quick, and become worthless to everyone who used it. The money is not so much for the code as it is for the service of providing an attacker with a cutomized, up to date, undetectable rootkit.
Actually, the free version of the Hacker Defender rootkit mentioned in the article is open source. GPL, I'm not sure about, but it still surprised me. It actually makes a lot of sense, because it allows attackers to customize and recompile the rootkit, probably creating a new binary that malware-detectors are unaware of.
I'll be the first to admit that racism can be funny in certain contexts, but come on. Clumsy remarks like that are not only unfunny, they make it seem like you're looking for every excuse to associate an entire race of people with terrorism.
I really don't mean to start a flame thread, though, so don't take it too personally.
The purpose of wikipedia moderators is not to decide what is fact or not, it's to help organize efforts and oversee conflict resolution. The problem with appointing people to make official rulings on articles is that there's no good way to establish whether they're qualified to make a judgement about a particular issue. Someone who has contributed nothing but rich, objective, researched information to the Feudal European Castles pages is not neccessarily qualified to make a reliable ruling on the accuracy of an article on Russian satellites. For that matter, they may not be qualified to make a ruling on feudal religious artists, if that's an area their knowledge isn't concentrated in.
I suspect that the problem you'd run into when implementing a system like you suggested is that really only the individual themselves knows whether they're qualified to revise or approve of a particular article. As we've seen through Wikipedia, folks sometimes have distorted estimations of their own knowledge of a given topic. Unless you want to elect "experts" individually for each page, you're always going to get people who think they know best, but don't really. The way Wikipedia deals with this is by refusing to give anyone special power or the ability to impose their estimation of the truth on everyone else, effectively requiring everyone to come to a reasonable consensus.
That said, Wikipedia's approach is just one out of many, and I would be very interested to see how an encyclopedia using a method like you proposed turns out. After all, experimentation is what it's all about, right?
I think that a major point of Wikipedia is that it's very methodology is skeptical of the validity of supposed "experts". In a conventional encyclopedia, or even a newspaper, having a fancy degree or a seat on some NGO's board is enough to get your statements taken for truth. Wikipedia is a reaction to the mentality that the number of papers you've published, degrees you've earned, or famous positions you've held determines how correct you are.
It's true that Wikipedia might gain some quality-related benefits by adopting Britannica-style methods, but I think that's missing the point of Wikipedia. Just because Wikipedia calls itself an encyclopedia doesn't mean they're in direct competition with Brittanica. Just because they say they aspire to have articles of "Britannica quality or better", doesn't mean that they want to be Encyclopedia Britannica.
Basically, I think Wikipedia is an experiment with a new standard for knowledge sharing, so it's a new type of encyclopedia. If you expect to get exactly what you get from Britannica from Wikipedia, of course you'll be disappointed. And, judging from the other posts here, angry, too.
It's a federal crime to look in someone else's mail box. In fact, although USPS (and by extension the federal government) is responsible for delivering your mail to you, it is illegal for them to spy on its contents without permission from a judge (although I admit, I'm not sure how the PATRIOT Act may have softened this requirement).
I think you misunderstood my previous point. The problem is not that the government can find out your bank account details, criminal record, etc. from your legal name - as you said, your legal name is found in all sorts of places. The problem is that this "yellow dot" printing system links a deliberately anonymous document, possibly containing protected speech (such as an anonymous letter to the editor or a political flyer) to the legal name of the author, and therefore to all the other details about the author which are available to the government. This can be said to have a "chilling effect" on the ability of citizens to exercise their right to freedom of speech, since they will have to fear reprisal from the government and/or private interests with influence over government institutions.
Again, if you want to argue that people are not entitled to privacy when writing letters or circulating political propaganda, that's a separate issue. But you've got to admit that these printers render anything you print with them effectively non-anonymous, without your knowledge or permission.
They aren't recording your social security number, your bank records, or your subscriptions to magazines of questionable taste.
When discussing privacy, there's a concept called one's "identity". If performing a particular act produces information which can connect the actor with his/her identity, they have lost their privacy.
The information that is recorded on the pages of these printers is sufficient to determine who purchased the printer, which is in turn sufficient to determine the social security number, bank records, etc of that person. Even if that person didn't do the printing, it is likely that the purchaser will be able to narrow the pool of possible "targets" from millions to a handful of people, which constitutes an effective loss of privacy.
If you want to debate whether people are entitled to privacy when engaging in legal political speech (which I sense you do), that's another discussion, but it's pretty unarguable that this system eliminates privacy.
God bless the PATRIOT Act, which among many other things, grants law enforcement agencies broad privileges to private corporate information in the name of investigating "terrorism". Fact is, neither the FBI nor Xerox would have to (or in Xerox's case, be allowed to) tell you that they had shared their serial number database with the government.
I hear the argument over and over again that "just because they're allowed to, the government doesn't have time to spy on little old you, so quit being paranoid". This is true, and the government realizes it, which is why they are striving for "Total Information Awareness". The idea is that all the information the feds could ever desire is already collected in outrageous detail by private organizations like the phone company, ISPs, bookstores, etc. - so why not just pass laws granting the Feds unrestricted, secret access to this info? That way, the government doesn't have to have been spying on you your whole life. The moment you get caught up in some "suspicious" incident like looking around too much on the subway or criticizing the American government while in an American airport, your whole history is at the government's fingertips (including, now, what documents you printed!), and believe me, they'll find reasons for suspicion.
The article doesn't mention anything about being able to, use the web or other internet services using your DS, only to play games using Nintendo's proprietary internet gaming servers. So, while I don't know if they will, McDonalds certainly could implement an extremely restrictive firewall that only allowed communication through ports 8483 and 10554 (for example), and also restricted outgoing traffic to a handful of DS gaming servers.
of course, if they've got the technical capacity to provide free wifi for all devices, it certainly seems like a worthwhile "value-added" service to offer, so who knows?
I know that Azeurus happily opens up a few ports on my router every time that I start it up. Whether this is a good idea security wise is another story...
NAT is not a security tool.
NAT is not a security tool.
NAT is not a security tool.
Network Address Translation was never intended to function as a firewall or a packet filter, it was designed exclusively to allow multiple computers to share the same IP at once. That's it. The fact that NAT has some side effects which are similar to a firewall has been a big problem for network security, because it leads users and even administrators to believe that their network does not need a firewall because they use a NAT system.
We are finally, after many years, starting to see real firewall use become commonplace, and a XP even has an automatic software firewall now, but if it hadn't been for NAT, I bet people would've been implementing real, security-focused firewalls a lot earlier.
And thus we reach the inevitable conclusion that this entire discussion seems to have been tiptoeing around:
Capitalism and democracy are incompatible.
The right to express one's views with as much freedom as the next guy is impossible for a government guarantee if they also guarantee that the people who own printing presses and radio stations are absolutely entitled to their right to own and control their own property however they see fit.
I know it's not a popular point to make in a crowd of libertarians, but I think it needs to be addressed.
And which government officials shall we appoint to decide what is and is not an "appropriate" live debate? The reason the first ammendment is so simple is that the more complicated you make it, the more meaningless it becomes. There's a difference between disagreeing with the style of political advertising (which I do, very strongly), and asserting that it should be illegalized.
I think your analogy made a far better case against your argument than for it. You take away the soil and water from colombian peasants (as is often done by US-funded paramilities) and you can be pretty certain that they won't be contributing to the cocaine "epidemic" in the US. Of course, they also won't be able to grow anything useful or legitimate, like, say, food for their family. Ironically enough, the resulting poverty is sometimes what drives peasants to become low-level flunkies for the cartels, since there are few other opportunities for a farmer without viable land.
Bringing it back to the botnets, if you forcefully lock down user environments to the point where you can be certain that they won't be botted, you're very likely to make the machine unusable for useful, legitimate purposes, like, say, surfing pr0n. Ironically enough, the unsophisticated user is likely to deliberately disable the security functions of such an environment, and disregard security warnings, since the risk of getting botted is preferable at that point to dealing with the myriad hassles and limited functionality of a locked-down environment.
Slavery itself, that is, the practice of forcing humans to work for you without pay, was common in many societies, it's true. Some would argue that slavery still technically exists even in the US and other first world countries. The difference, however, is that nowhere in recent history was the slave trade practiced on such a massive, industrialized scale. We're talking about 14 million african slaves over the course of the trade. And that doesn't even count the frequently 1/4 to 1/3 of each massive slave ship's population who died before they even got to be slaves.
With regard to the fact that Europeans sometimes bought slaves from Africans, that was exactly my point in the original post - Europeans knowingly used some African groups to violently oppress and dominate others, because it resulted in the Europeans getting to buy slaves. And don't try to tell me that the Africans would have taken anywhere even approaching the scale of 14 million slaves if the Europeans hadn't been employing them. And then people shake their heads and wonder why African culture is so fragmented and war-like.
Like I said before, every society in history has taken some shit and given some shit. But when the atrocities committed against Africans are so incredibly off the map compared to other contemporary atrocities, it's time to admit that the African continent has recently had a significantly rougher time than the rest of the world.
It seems like what you're saying is that since people from different geographic areas have different physical characteristics, some of them are inevitably more evolutionarily fit than others. This is unarguable, however the controversial implication of this is that we can tell who is most fit by looking at who is on top in our social structure.
We have developed a society where it is perfectly possible for someone with severe genetic defects (for example, predisposition to cancer) to become president of the US - meaning that someone who is very obviously not fit can attain vast power, and the ability to perpetuate their genetic material. The reason I bring this up is because it's proof that the behavior and success of civilized groups is so far removed from evolutionary genetics as to be unrelated and often contradictory. The trends of civilizations are on a completely, entirely, wholly different time-scale than the trends of species - I can not stress enough that these things are utterly different worlds.
So basically, when asking who is really the most "evolved", your answer depends entirely on the scale you're looking at. In my experience, the main reason people decide that evolution should apply to civilization is that they're on the (currently) winning side, and they want a manifest-destiny sort of justification for genocide.
This is known as "Social Darwinism", and was a popular theory in the early 20th century because it allowed wealthy robber barons and aristocrats to justify the fact that they had millions of dollars and mansions while droves of poor people starved every day.
It differs from actual darwinism, or the theory of evolution, in that it claims that although all people are made of the same basic genetic code, and are therefore the same species, some of them are more "evolved" socioeconomically, and are therefore a higher order of being. Accepting this premise, it is therefore right and just that the more evolved humans should thrive, while the clearly less evolved lower classes should toil fruitlessly and die.
This concept has been widely discredited today, primarily because of the contradictory nature of defining the "fittest" people, that is, the ones who deserved to survive. If you were rich, it was because you were fit, and therefore deserved to be rich. If you were fit, this would be evidenced by your wealth. If you were poor, you were clearly unfit because of your inability to get rich. Essentially, Social Darwinism states that if you are rich, you deserve everything you've got, and if you are poor, well, you deserve everything you've got, too.
I don't believe in creationism, and I think evolution is unquestionably the way life developed on earth, but you have to understand that "natural" evolution takes place over millions of years, involves genetic material, and is not neccesarily a good basis for a system of morality or social structure.
For example, if we really wanted to promote "survival of the fittest", in order to weed out the weak members of the human race, we could simply remove all laws. Or better yet, remove all laws and destroy all supermarkets. I would, of course have a lot of food, because I looted my neighbors pantries right away. Of course, by the logic of social darwinism, I am inherently superior to my neighbors due to the fact that I took all their food, and therefore I am entitled to the food and they, being unable to defend their food against such a superior being, are wholly undeserving of it.
Basically, the application of Darwinism to society is a clever, intellectual way of saying "I'm stronger, so I can do whatever I want". It may be attractive when you're the strongest, but the rest of the time it's just plain unfair.
I agree with your premise that education is infinitely more useful than charity, as it gives the poor/disadvantaged actual tools to control their own fate, instead of depending on reluctant handouts from the wealthy.
However, it's important also to realize that while giving one poor kid the "keys to a PhD" will help him better his situation immensely, it can't be applied on a broad scale. If you gave all poor folks PhDs, there would no longer be anyone to mop our floors, flip our burgers, or pick up our trash. Our society is mostly capitalist, and highly consumerist (not a value judgement, but it's true), and for this reason it needs an underclass to do the shit work.
Thinking about it more, though, I guess if the number of educated people willing to be lawyers, plastic surgeons, and stock brokers went up while the number of uneducated people willing to wait your table went down, it would result in decreased wages for "professional" jobs and increased wages for the now-in-greater-demand "shit" jobs. So that might at least keep the runaway CEO salaries in check.
It's easy to shift the blame entirely on to poor Africans themselves, and to a certain extent, I agree that they are not totally without responsibility in the effort to make their own societies more livable.
However, looking at the historical treatment of the African continent, it seems that perhaps the folks there are entitled to some help. I mean, we're talking about an entire continent, filled with mostly technologically unadvanced, tribal societies, that was chopped up into arbitrary territories and colonized by European nations. Now, I know that every society has been subjugated at some point in the past, and probably done their share of subjugating as well, and it's a slipery slope, blah, blah, but the scale of that subjugation is rivaled in recent history only by the near total destruction of the native in north and south america, and you can see how the victims of that colonization turned out - dead.
Heap on top of that the not-so-trivial slave trade, in which American and European traders deliberately turned African societies against each other in order to capture the most slaves...I don't think you have to be a bleeding heart to see that a society subjected to this sort of treatment might not be so healthy afterwards.
So, if you agree that Africa has seriously gotten the shaft in the past, which seems pretty unarguable, it's hard to justify expecting them to just fix everything themselves. It's like breaking your dog's legs and then refusing to feed him until he runs as fast as the other dogs. Good luck.
It's my guess that attitudes like this stem from a genuine misunderstanding. People who have either been well-off their whole lives or fortunate enough to rise from a lower class to a higher one tend not to realize how difficult it is for the vast majority of people to improve their economic status. And honestly, why would we? I've never been very interested in earning money, getting a career, or any of the things needed to sustain an upper-middle-class lifestyle, and yet with a small and entirely reasonable effort I find myself an employed professional. The only reason I'm aware that not everyone can do that is I frequently come in contact with lower class people, and I see them trying to better their situation all the time, usually without much luck.
What if you're heavily in debt? What if you're a single parent? What if you have to work two full time jobs just to keep from getting evicted? That's a lot more common than you might imagine, and it doesn't leave much time for going to seminars, job fairs, or certification classes, does it? Add to this the mental abuse of being constantly treated like a total idiot, a worthless servant, or a nobody walmart employee, and maybe you can see how these sorts of jobs can unintentionally become life occupations.
I'm not saying that there's nothing one can do to better oneself, just that it's incredibly cold-hearted and ignorant to assume that life is as easy for everyone as it is for you.
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That method's certainly worth a try, but the problem I forsee is that some interviewees have a distinct "tilt" to what they want to talk about. Sometimes this is because they just want to advertise for their book/movie/software, so they'll pick the questions that let them glorify themselves as much as possible. Sometimes they're just really excited or focused on one particular aspect, so they'll just pick all the questions that let them prattle on about that topic.
I mean, it's true that we want to hear what the interviewee has to say, but in general we want to hear what they have to say about a broad range of issues (not just the one thing they're really into), some of which they might prefer not to have been asked.
I don't think anyone (except them) would claim that their excuses are a fair justification for stealing from gullible, often not-so wealthy americans, but that doesn't mean we should ignore them.
Understanding the social and economic context that this sort of crime takes place in is important, especially if we want to combat it. Poverty and lack of education, while certainly not justifications for crime, are often part of the cause.
Much like muslim terrorists, I think it's always better to have an understanding of what's going on with the people who try to screw us over so hard, instead of just imagining them as mustachio twirling villains who are out to get us because, well, they're the bad guys.
It's actually an interesting business model, because it mirrors that of other open source businesses. Yeah, maybe you can get a copy of the code itself, but what you really need is the support agreement. When an attacker buys a commercial rootkit from the Hacker Defender folks, they agree to update his or her rootkit to keep it undetectable from malware-scanners for a given amount of time.
If the attacker were to freely distribute the code they got, it would show up on Norton's radar pretty quick, and become worthless to everyone who used it. The money is not so much for the code as it is for the service of providing an attacker with a cutomized, up to date, undetectable rootkit.
Actually, the free version of the Hacker Defender rootkit mentioned in the article is open source. GPL, I'm not sure about, but it still surprised me. It actually makes a lot of sense, because it allows attackers to customize and recompile the rootkit, probably creating a new binary that malware-detectors are unaware of.
I'll be the first to admit that racism can be funny in certain contexts, but come on. Clumsy remarks like that are not only unfunny, they make it seem like you're looking for every excuse to associate an entire race of people with terrorism.
I really don't mean to start a flame thread, though, so don't take it too personally.
The purpose of wikipedia moderators is not to decide what is fact or not, it's to help organize efforts and oversee conflict resolution. The problem with appointing people to make official rulings on articles is that there's no good way to establish whether they're qualified to make a judgement about a particular issue. Someone who has contributed nothing but rich, objective, researched information to the Feudal European Castles pages is not neccessarily qualified to make a reliable ruling on the accuracy of an article on Russian satellites. For that matter, they may not be qualified to make a ruling on feudal religious artists, if that's an area their knowledge isn't concentrated in.
I suspect that the problem you'd run into when implementing a system like you suggested is that really only the individual themselves knows whether they're qualified to revise or approve of a particular article. As we've seen through Wikipedia, folks sometimes have distorted estimations of their own knowledge of a given topic. Unless you want to elect "experts" individually for each page, you're always going to get people who think they know best, but don't really. The way Wikipedia deals with this is by refusing to give anyone special power or the ability to impose their estimation of the truth on everyone else, effectively requiring everyone to come to a reasonable consensus.
That said, Wikipedia's approach is just one out of many, and I would be very interested to see how an encyclopedia using a method like you proposed turns out. After all, experimentation is what it's all about, right?
I think that a major point of Wikipedia is that it's very methodology is skeptical of the validity of supposed "experts". In a conventional encyclopedia, or even a newspaper, having a fancy degree or a seat on some NGO's board is enough to get your statements taken for truth. Wikipedia is a reaction to the mentality that the number of papers you've published, degrees you've earned, or famous positions you've held determines how correct you are.
It's true that Wikipedia might gain some quality-related benefits by adopting Britannica-style methods, but I think that's missing the point of Wikipedia. Just because Wikipedia calls itself an encyclopedia doesn't mean they're in direct competition with Brittanica. Just because they say they aspire to have articles of "Britannica quality or better", doesn't mean that they want to be Encyclopedia Britannica.
Basically, I think Wikipedia is an experiment with a new standard for knowledge sharing, so it's a new type of encyclopedia. If you expect to get exactly what you get from Britannica from Wikipedia, of course you'll be disappointed. And, judging from the other posts here, angry, too.
It's a federal crime to look in someone else's mail box. In fact, although USPS (and by extension the federal government) is responsible for delivering your mail to you, it is illegal for them to spy on its contents without permission from a judge (although I admit, I'm not sure how the PATRIOT Act may have softened this requirement).
I think you misunderstood my previous point. The problem is not that the government can find out your bank account details, criminal record, etc. from your legal name - as you said, your legal name is found in all sorts of places. The problem is that this "yellow dot" printing system links a deliberately anonymous document, possibly containing protected speech (such as an anonymous letter to the editor or a political flyer) to the legal name of the author, and therefore to all the other details about the author which are available to the government. This can be said to have a "chilling effect" on the ability of citizens to exercise their right to freedom of speech, since they will have to fear reprisal from the government and/or private interests with influence over government institutions.
Again, if you want to argue that people are not entitled to privacy when writing letters or circulating political propaganda, that's a separate issue. But you've got to admit that these printers render anything you print with them effectively non-anonymous, without your knowledge or permission.
They aren't recording your social security number, your bank records, or your subscriptions to magazines of questionable taste.
When discussing privacy, there's a concept called one's "identity". If performing a particular act produces information which can connect the actor with his/her identity, they have lost their privacy.
The information that is recorded on the pages of these printers is sufficient to determine who purchased the printer, which is in turn sufficient to determine the social security number, bank records, etc of that person. Even if that person didn't do the printing, it is likely that the purchaser will be able to narrow the pool of possible "targets" from millions to a handful of people, which constitutes an effective loss of privacy.
If you want to debate whether people are entitled to privacy when engaging in legal political speech (which I sense you do), that's another discussion, but it's pretty unarguable that this system eliminates privacy.
God bless the PATRIOT Act, which among many other things, grants law enforcement agencies broad privileges to private corporate information in the name of investigating "terrorism". Fact is, neither the FBI nor Xerox would have to (or in Xerox's case, be allowed to) tell you that they had shared their serial number database with the government.
I hear the argument over and over again that "just because they're allowed to, the government doesn't have time to spy on little old you, so quit being paranoid". This is true, and the government realizes it, which is why they are striving for "Total Information Awareness". The idea is that all the information the feds could ever desire is already collected in outrageous detail by private organizations like the phone company, ISPs, bookstores, etc. - so why not just pass laws granting the Feds unrestricted, secret access to this info? That way, the government doesn't have to have been spying on you your whole life. The moment you get caught up in some "suspicious" incident like looking around too much on the subway or criticizing the American government while in an American airport, your whole history is at the government's fingertips (including, now, what documents you printed!), and believe me, they'll find reasons for suspicion.
God bless the PATRIOT Act, my friend.
The article doesn't mention anything about being able to, use the web or other internet services using your DS, only to play games using Nintendo's proprietary internet gaming servers. So, while I don't know if they will, McDonalds certainly could implement an extremely restrictive firewall that only allowed communication through ports 8483 and 10554 (for example), and also restricted outgoing traffic to a handful of DS gaming servers.
of course, if they've got the technical capacity to provide free wifi for all devices, it certainly seems like a worthwhile "value-added" service to offer, so who knows?
I know that Azeurus happily opens up a few ports on my router every time that I start it up. Whether this is a good idea security wise is another story...
NAT is not a security tool.
NAT is not a security tool.
NAT is not a security tool.
Network Address Translation was never intended to function as a firewall or a packet filter, it was designed exclusively to allow multiple computers to share the same IP at once. That's it.
The fact that NAT has some side effects which are similar to a firewall has been a big problem for network security, because it leads users and even administrators to believe that their network does not need a firewall because they use a NAT system.
We are finally, after many years, starting to see real firewall use become commonplace, and a XP even has an automatic software firewall now, but if it hadn't been for NAT, I bet people would've been implementing real, security-focused firewalls a lot earlier.
And thus we reach the inevitable conclusion that this entire discussion seems to have been tiptoeing around:
Capitalism and democracy are incompatible.
The right to express one's views with as much freedom as the next guy is impossible for a government guarantee if they also guarantee that the people who own printing presses and radio stations are absolutely entitled to their right to own and control their own property however they see fit.
I know it's not a popular point to make in a crowd of libertarians, but I think it needs to be addressed.
And which government officials shall we appoint to decide what is and is not an "appropriate" live debate?
The reason the first ammendment is so simple is that the more complicated you make it, the more meaningless it becomes. There's a difference between disagreeing with the style of political advertising (which I do, very strongly), and asserting that it should be illegalized.
I think your analogy made a far better case against your argument than for it.
You take away the soil and water from colombian peasants (as is often done by US-funded paramilities) and you can be pretty certain that they won't be contributing to the cocaine "epidemic" in the US. Of course, they also won't be able to grow anything useful or legitimate, like, say, food for their family. Ironically enough, the resulting poverty is sometimes what drives peasants to become low-level flunkies for the cartels, since there are few other opportunities for a farmer without viable land.
Bringing it back to the botnets, if you forcefully lock down user environments to the point where you can be certain that they won't be botted, you're very likely to make the machine unusable for useful, legitimate purposes, like, say, surfing pr0n. Ironically enough, the unsophisticated user is likely to deliberately disable the security functions of such an environment, and disregard security warnings, since the risk of getting botted is preferable at that point to dealing with the myriad hassles and limited functionality of a locked-down environment.
I dunno if it'll catch on - it just makes me think of Voltron...who come to think of it could probably launch some really badass DDoS attacks.
Slavery itself, that is, the practice of forcing humans to work for you without pay, was common in many societies, it's true. Some would argue that slavery still technically exists even in the US and other first world countries. The difference, however, is that nowhere in recent history was the slave trade practiced on such a massive, industrialized scale. We're talking about 14 million african slaves over the course of the trade. And that doesn't even count the frequently 1/4 to 1/3 of each massive slave ship's population who died before they even got to be slaves.
With regard to the fact that Europeans sometimes bought slaves from Africans, that was exactly my point in the original post - Europeans knowingly used some African groups to violently oppress and dominate others, because it resulted in the Europeans getting to buy slaves. And don't try to tell me that the Africans would have taken anywhere even approaching the scale of 14 million slaves if the Europeans hadn't been employing them. And then people shake their heads and wonder why African culture is so fragmented and war-like.
Like I said before, every society in history has taken some shit and given some shit. But when the atrocities committed against Africans are so incredibly off the map compared to other contemporary atrocities, it's time to admit that the African continent has recently had a significantly rougher time than the rest of the world.
It seems like what you're saying is that since people from different geographic areas have different physical characteristics, some of them are inevitably more evolutionarily fit than others. This is unarguable, however the controversial implication of this is that we can tell who is most fit by looking at who is on top in our social structure.
We have developed a society where it is perfectly possible for someone with severe genetic defects (for example, predisposition to cancer) to become president of the US - meaning that someone who is very obviously not fit can attain vast power, and the ability to perpetuate their genetic material. The reason I bring this up is because it's proof that the behavior and success of civilized groups is so far removed from evolutionary genetics as to be unrelated and often contradictory. The trends of civilizations are on a completely, entirely, wholly different time-scale than the trends of species - I can not stress enough that these things are utterly different worlds.
So basically, when asking who is really the most "evolved", your answer depends entirely on the scale you're looking at. In my experience, the main reason people decide that evolution should apply to civilization is that they're on the (currently) winning side, and they want a manifest-destiny sort of justification for genocide.
KB??? You had KB? Boy, we thanked our lucky stars if we had a couple B back in my day!
And when we didn't, we made do with A!
This is known as "Social Darwinism", and was a popular theory in the early 20th century because it allowed wealthy robber barons and aristocrats to justify the fact that they had millions of dollars and mansions while droves of poor people starved every day.
It differs from actual darwinism, or the theory of evolution, in that it claims that although all people are made of the same basic genetic code, and are therefore the same species, some of them are more "evolved" socioeconomically, and are therefore a higher order of being. Accepting this premise, it is therefore right and just that the more evolved humans should thrive, while the clearly less evolved lower classes should toil fruitlessly and die.
This concept has been widely discredited today, primarily because of the contradictory nature of defining the "fittest" people, that is, the ones who deserved to survive. If you were rich, it was because you were fit, and therefore deserved to be rich. If you were fit, this would be evidenced by your wealth. If you were poor, you were clearly unfit because of your inability to get rich. Essentially, Social Darwinism states that if you are rich, you deserve everything you've got, and if you are poor, well, you deserve everything you've got, too.
I don't believe in creationism, and I think evolution is unquestionably the way life developed on earth, but you have to understand that "natural" evolution takes place over millions of years, involves genetic material, and is not neccesarily a good basis for a system of morality or social structure.
For example, if we really wanted to promote "survival of the fittest", in order to weed out the weak members of the human race, we could simply remove all laws. Or better yet, remove all laws and destroy all supermarkets. I would, of course have a lot of food, because I looted my neighbors pantries right away. Of course, by the logic of social darwinism, I am inherently superior to my neighbors due to the fact that I took all their food, and therefore I am entitled to the food and they, being unable to defend their food against such a superior being, are wholly undeserving of it.
Basically, the application of Darwinism to society is a clever, intellectual way of saying "I'm stronger, so I can do whatever I want". It may be attractive when you're the strongest, but the rest of the time it's just plain unfair.
Well, I can't say I've ever heard the US described as a "turd-world" country, but your description is quite accurate. Maybe the name will catch on!
Land of the little clique of rich individuals, home of the turd!
I agree with your premise that education is infinitely more useful than charity, as it gives the poor/disadvantaged actual tools to control their own fate, instead of depending on reluctant handouts from the wealthy.
However, it's important also to realize that while giving one poor kid the "keys to a PhD" will help him better his situation immensely, it can't be applied on a broad scale. If you gave all poor folks PhDs, there would no longer be anyone to mop our floors, flip our burgers, or pick up our trash. Our society is mostly capitalist, and highly consumerist (not a value judgement, but it's true), and for this reason it needs an underclass to do the shit work.
Thinking about it more, though, I guess if the number of educated people willing to be lawyers, plastic surgeons, and stock brokers went up while the number of uneducated people willing to wait your table went down, it would result in decreased wages for "professional" jobs and increased wages for the now-in-greater-demand "shit" jobs. So that might at least keep the runaway CEO salaries in check.
It's easy to shift the blame entirely on to poor Africans themselves, and to a certain extent, I agree that they are not totally without responsibility in the effort to make their own societies more livable.
However, looking at the historical treatment of the African continent, it seems that perhaps the folks there are entitled to some help. I mean, we're talking about an entire continent, filled with mostly technologically unadvanced, tribal societies, that was chopped up into arbitrary territories and colonized by European nations. Now, I know that every society has been subjugated at some point in the past, and probably done their share of subjugating as well, and it's a slipery slope, blah, blah, but the scale of that subjugation is rivaled in recent history only by the near total destruction of the native in north and south america, and you can see how the victims of that colonization turned out - dead.
Heap on top of that the not-so-trivial slave trade, in which American and European traders deliberately turned African societies against each other in order to capture the most slaves...I don't think you have to be a bleeding heart to see that a society subjected to this sort of treatment might not be so healthy afterwards.
So, if you agree that Africa has seriously gotten the shaft in the past, which seems pretty unarguable, it's hard to justify expecting them to just fix everything themselves. It's like breaking your dog's legs and then refusing to feed him until he runs as fast as the other dogs. Good luck.
There's a whole lot of meanings for the word "own"
Indeed. For example, in Soviet Russia, code owns YOU!
It's my guess that attitudes like this stem from a genuine misunderstanding. People who have either been well-off their whole lives or fortunate enough to rise from a lower class to a higher one tend not to realize how difficult it is for the vast majority of people to improve their economic status. And honestly, why would we? I've never been very interested in earning money, getting a career, or any of the things needed to sustain an upper-middle-class lifestyle, and yet with a small and entirely reasonable effort I find myself an employed professional. The only reason I'm aware that not everyone can do that is I frequently come in contact with lower class people, and I see them trying to better their situation all the time, usually without much luck.
What if you're heavily in debt? What if you're a single parent? What if you have to work two full time jobs just to keep from getting evicted? That's a lot more common than you might imagine, and it doesn't leave much time for going to seminars, job fairs, or certification classes, does it? Add to this the mental abuse of being constantly treated like a total idiot, a worthless servant, or a nobody walmart employee, and maybe you can see how these sorts of jobs can unintentionally become life occupations.
I'm not saying that there's nothing one can do to better oneself, just that it's incredibly cold-hearted and ignorant to assume that life is as easy for everyone as it is for you.