Paying cash is totally fine - but it supports what I've been saying. If you want the benefits of credit card there's no practical way to restrict your private info. It's not just technology, the credit cards needs that info for billing - which is essentially a social issue (since we don't just trust each other to bill the right amount - we want records). And if you don't like people having that info you can pay in cash. Just like if you find small town atmosphere oppressive - you can move to the woods or a big city.
Rather than responding to everything else point by point it comes down to this: information is power. Data is useless, but data organized is information. Modern tech allows data to be organized and analyzed and mined as never before. So we have new sources of power as never before. Power is neither inherently good nor bad. A biometric database could save countless lives by alerting physicians and pharmacists to dangerous drug interactions. Also - imagine how much we could learn about health care if we knew what drugs everyone was taking, when they went to the hospital, what their family records were, etc. The potential for good is awesome. So is the potential for evil.
In my opinion the problem is not so much related to the information - the power - but in ensuring that that power is not used for evil.
And this is where you and I part ways. I don't buy into your "gov't is evil" nonsense. The gov't is people like you and me. It's not a monolithic institution, a single entity. So we should not treat it as some grand empire of shadow - it's just as inept as any other institution.
But more importantly you think that gov't should be kep from having this power because it can use the power to restrict our rights. I, on the other hand, think that to the extent the gov't restricts our rights it's our fault. We live in a representative republic - and yet fewer than 50% of us vote every year. And those that do are woefully uninformed. Gov't has only as much power as we let it have.
So I'm in favor of increasing the power and information of the gov't and keeping it in check by increasing openness of public discourse about the gov't.
In America we have no excuse for saying "the gov't abuses us". We ARE the gov't. And if we've let it grow out of control it is not due to technology, information, or any other excuse. It is due to public inatention and apathy. I find those things far more dangerous than information or even gov't itself.
If you're going to use terms in narrow or specialized ways, you shoule really give the definition up front and not wait for someone to use the broadly accepted definition and then act as though they're wrong. It's both disingenous and unhelpful.
In this case in the broad sense it's reasonable to say that I own my own body - even though in fact I can not sell myself legally in this country (or even certain parts thereof - like organs).
So I maintain that in a broad sense a store does "own" the data about a given transaction - including whatever data you choose to give them. Whether or not they can sell or transmit that data is obviously a seperate issue.
And as for your bit about America being founded on hopeless idealism you could not possibly be more wrong. Some of the founders, like Jefferson, were extremely idealistic - but if Jefferson had been the only one involved in the revolution we would have never won. It took George Washington and his much more pragmatic side (eg Hamilton) to actually give life to the common ideals. If Jefferson had been president instead of Washington - the nation would have fallen apart. Similarly the first American gov't failed because the federal gov't lacked enough power to sustain itself. Why? Because it was designed by those with not enough apprehension of the way power and economics work in the real life.
I'm not arguing against idealism in general, I'm just pointing out the obvious danger of being idealistic to the extent where you totally ignore the real facts before you. That type of idealism was related to the failures, and not the successs, of early US history.
Right, and I'm not sure if the NSA case abridges due process or not. I think that's for the lawyers to get into. But my take on things is that automated monitoring doesn't abridge rights. If they want to use sophisticated statistical algorithms that have been rigorously and scientifically proven to indicate a greater chance of illegal activity to monitor communication to foreign countries and then use that as a basis to target specific individuals, I have no problem with that.
I'm not saying that this means the NSA case is OK or not. I want a few thigns in place, mostly oversight by the legislative branch. It's necessary to keep the specifics of the program secret. In fact, it would have been better to keep the whole program secret. As long as it's within the bounds of the Constitution and has Congressional oversight, I'm OK with it.
And I'm still not sure where you're going with this "guilt by association" thing. Again, if I have been emailing a scam artist, and het gets taken down, and they want to find his entire scam ring, than I expect to be investigated. That's not guily by association - that's just good investigation. Of course there should be a limit. If all I've done is talk to the guy on the street once there's not enough there in my opinion to search my house. But the principle is that associating with a suspect is not enough to make you a suspect but may be enough to get you searched as well.
Oh yeah - one more thing. It's childish to say that something is dangerous based on how many people it has killed.
1 - Terrorism has killed only a couple thousand americans so far, but how many could it kill if they got a nuke or a biological weapon?
2 - Sure, only a few thousand are killed - but how many lives in the Middle East and other regions are lived in fear, poverty, and without basic human rights because of terrorism? The POINT of terrorism is to have a greater impact than the body count would indicate. That's like saying "torture isn't a problem because people don't die from it very often". The point of both isn't to kill so much as to terrorize.
3 - Less people die from child molestation, child prostituion, and human trafficking than from car crashes. Which do you find to be a bigger problem?
It's not nice to destroy people's fragiley constructed rose-glass images of the world, but sometimes it's necessary. This is just such a case.
The freedoms of the American nation are all conditional. This may be a shock to you, but it's true. Even the core ones - "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" can not be abridged "without due process". That means they CAN be abridged. Believe it or not, this is not a change of the Bush presidency - that's how the document was written.
Anyone that thinks you can never legally abridge a right from the US Constitution needs to just excuse themselves from the discussion now because there's a chance the rest of us might like to have a discussion about what the Consitution actually does or does not say and how this relates to events happening in the real world.
it IS an erosion of civil liberties, because the Bill of Rights specifically grants me freedom from government intrusion of my life unless they have probable cause to believe I committed a crime. The doctrine is innocent UNTIL proven guilty. The NSA wiretapping is guilty by association until proven innocent.
This is possibly the single worst mangling of American law that I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. How the Hell do you conflate "probably cause" with "guilty until proven innocent"? If you understood the words you just wrote you'd realize that you're arguing against yourself.
The Bill of Rights does NOT say we have a freedom from gov't intrusion "until proven guilty". That would make it really damn hard to prove someone guilty wouldn't it? You'd have to prove guilt before you could get a warrant. Nice legal system you're imagining for yourself there.
No, the Bill of Rights says you need "probable cause" which is a lower standard than "until proven guilty". This means that the Bill of Rights INTENDED to allow the gov't to intrude in the live of innocent Americans. It was just providing a framework for when the gov't could intrude on the liberties of American citizens - regardless of guilt or innocence. So it ALLOWS that intrusion. Get that through your thick skull. Probable cause will not always lead to "proven guilty". Sometimes probable cause will result in "just a coincidence". Sometimes it will result in "guilty as hell, but we can't prove it", sometimes it will lead to "obviously innocent". Sometimes it will lead to "innocent, but proven guilty anyway" - the justice system is not perfect. Sometimes the gov't will get a warrant, break down the door in the middle of the night and drag some poor guy to jail, and it'll turn out he's innocent. This doesn't mean the gov't violated his rights. If they had probably cause they were justified and it was legal - even if unfortunate. This may shock you, but the government is made up of people like you and I, and it is not God and we can't expect it to get everything right all the time.
So the question is: does calling a terrorist and then making international calls give probable cause to listen in on what you say? I'd say yes. And try to keep in mind that even without probable cause the gov't can still intrude on personal liberties for other reasons - like public safety. If you have ebola they sure as hell have the right to quarantine you even though you're innocent of any crime. It's not nice, but it's real life. You should try living their some time.
Now gettig to your quotes.
No tyrannical society can long exist when it cannot control the flow of information.
And...? The NSA leak proves that the US is not tyrannical then.
There is no such thing as a good war or a bad peace
Bullshit. And I don't care who said it. Would you have preferred the US sit out WW2? Or would it have been better to have entered the war earlier and tried to save the lives of a few million innocent jews, chinese, koreans, etc? If we'd sat back and allowed Nazis to overrun Europe that would have been a bad peace in my opinion. The thing with war, as in all violence, is that it only takes 1 person to start it, and you can't make all parties stop - in some cases - without resorting to the same tactics. The fact that you're too idealistic to realize this is a good indication that you shouldn't be trusted with politics. You'd hve protested the American Revolution under this rhetoric (kind of makes you a hypocrite for quoting it now). It's self-righteous and self-serving and you can sit on your moral high ground all you like, but in the real world sometimes you have to get a little dirty (like declare war on a couple of nations at the same time) to get a greater good done - and those who will never act except when they sure of their moral superiority have neither moral superiority nor a mandate to lead.
I think you're on a quixotic quest. Consider that the surveillance camera is not a camera - it's someone who recognized you. Do you have the right to keep them from testifying unless you want to should you ever be on trial? No - information about your whereabouts in a public place is in the public domain. The problem is in the past you had to rely on random chance to find someone who would recognize you. Now, however, the information "out there" can be stored, replicated, and collated.
There are a lot of troubling concerns here. In a cash economy your purchases can't be tracked without intrusion. In a credit card economy your purchases are tracked by definition. You seem to want to have the benefits of technology and yet the benefits of no technology at the same time. My real point is that some of this loss of private information is utterly inseperable from the advances that we have in technology.
If you live alone in the woods, no one can know where are you are at a given time. If you live in a big city lots of people know, but they don't talk so it remains disconnected data, not actionable information. If you live in a small town less people know, but they tend to talk, and so everyone actually has information on your whereabouts - not just data. There's no law or technology acting in any of these cases, but your level of privacy fluctuates based on the nature of the society in which you live. Technology is changing our society - thus it will change our level of privacy.
There are pros and cons to this. You list bad examples - reasons you want your information private. And they are valid. But consider medical emergencies. I'm allergic to morphine, but I have no PCP right now. If I were injured and taken to a hospital and they were able to scan my fingerprints and access my medical records they would know not to give me morphine. As it is - they're going to have to find out the hard way I'm allergic. If it was a fatal allergy (it's not) that would suck for me.
So in response to your "private information is mine" ideology I reply: no it's not and it never was. It has nothing to do with government or technology - it started the moment there were three or more thinking human beings on the planet. You have to dump the utterly unrealistic notion that you can somehow stop people from talking about you - and that's essentially what everything from surveillance cameras to credit card tracking is.
If you do that, then you can start to grapple with the actual implementations. I'm not saying we can't do anything about the fact that our private information is becoming rapidly more available. We can influence what is legal and what is not, what is allowed and what is not, and we should. But in order to be a part of the discussion you have to realize that *some* change is utterly inevitable. If you don't like big city anonymity - don't live in a big city. If you don't like small town gossip - don't live in a small town. Very few people are going to sympathize with someone who says "I love the small town feel, but I just hate that everyone knows what I'm doing". At least, not to the point where they would be willing to help you try to change it. The gossip is part and parcel with the small town feel - the two are inseperable. To somem extent, a digital trail is inseperable from a digital life in the same way.
Right - like I said I'm no friend of the Patriot Act. I'm just pointing out that it's stupid to decry EVERY infringement of civil liberty. That just demonstrates that the person in question is a partisan.
My best friend is from Iran. I've known him since middle school, and we're still close. We run a small business together. Do I sometimes get worried about what would happen if they picked him up and shipped him, his father, or his mother (or all 3) to guananamo? I do worry - and that's why I wish we had some greater oversight of Bush's actions.
But at the same time, do you suggest we treat terrorists by civil law? But if we treat them according to the rules of combat they all deserve to get shot without a trial (enemy combatant w/out uniform = spy). Clearly we can't do that either since we're not sure we have the right guys.
Again, I'm not writing a polemic to tell people how it is. These are complex issues. What I'm saying is that as complex and serious issues they deserve honest discussion - not partisan bickering.
That's a nice, pat theory. I'd like to hear a lawyer inform us as to how much of it has any reflection whatsoever in case law.
Personally, however, I think information laws are bit more complex in reality. For example if you buy some fertilizer at Store A and they have your credit card # (your personal ID) and then you go blow something up with a bomb made from that fertilizer and the FBI comes calling - do they have the right or responsibility to transmit the data they have on you?
So let's not be hopelessly idealistic. If you buy something from a store w/ a check or a credit card - they DO have your info. It's silly to say they "don't own it". They have it - the question is what can they do with it? And the answer, from the above, is obviously not "nothing ever under any circumstances".
Look, in every single time of national crisis or war the executive branch has taken on additional emergency powers. We have recovered those civil liberties every single time. Some of those powers have been used correcctly - WW2 drafts and rationing, some questionably - Vietnam drafts - and some manifestly incorrectly - WW2 Japanese internment camps.
Anyone who kicks and screams that the erosion of civil liberties is automatically a bad thing just reveals their own stupidity and historical ignorance.
This is a different situation because, unlike Vietnam, WW2, the 70s gas crisis, etc, it's hard to determine what the criteria for the crisis ending would be. This means that there is the potential for the executive branch to extend the usual encroachment of civil liberties to a semi-permenant or permenant status. Furthermore, it's harder to determine who the "enemy" is, and finally there is a the question of how to handle this crisis at all - heavy-handed tactics may alienate allies and aid enemy recruitment.
What we have before us is a minefield - and to navigate it we need two things that you lack: subtelty and restraint. We don't need a bunch of idiots applauding that an NSA program that may or may not have been illegal and almost undoubtedly rewarded valuable intelligence and possibly saved American lives has been outed for the public - and the terrorists to see. r c Vietnamese leaders have stated that one of the reasons they were able to keep fighting during the war despite overwhelming American military firepower was the New York Times. The New York Times, student protests, anti-war activists all showed them that they didn't need to beat American forces to win, only to cow the American public. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of that war American sent a message - our military is unrivalled but our populace has no stomach for fighting. We might as well have stuck a big "kick me" sign on our own back.
So I'm getting pretty damn tired of partisans who are obviously thrilled at another chance to take Bush down a peg or two. This thing is bigger than party politics and it requires people with a longer view and little less of an immediate agenda.
We keep this up, and we're still going to be debating stem cell research when the terrorists reduce NYC or D.C. or Puntuky to ashes, or a ghost town. Let's let our defense institutions and executive branches to their job to defend the US and find non-hysterical ways to ensure that our civil liberties are not permenanty curtailed. If you think that they are not going to be curtailed at all, then you simply don't understand either the changes in modern information technology or the current political situation in the world well enough to have anything worthwhile to say anyway.
What the Hell is wrong with this scenario? Look, if I order up my favorite Iranian takeout and it turns out the owner is part of a terrorist cell being investigated by the NSA, and then I make a couple of overseas phone calls I WANT them to monitor them.
1. If they can't monitor my phone calls than they can't monitor the terrorist buddy who also calls him. If it's a question of wrongfully monitor a couple of Americans or turn a blind eye to formenting terrorist plots, which do you pick?
2. This is NOT an erosion of my civil liberties. I'm not trading freedom for safety. If you make phone calls to a guy who turns out to be a drug dealer or a mobster and he gets taken down - you best believe they are going to want to know what you talked about. And they (FBI, police, whatever) would have every right to investigate ESPECIALLY if that investigation was limited to your phone calls to the guy in question and other superficially suspicous communications. It's not like NSA was doing warrantless searches of your hard drive (just because I support some police power doesn't mean I think the entire Patriot Act was a good idea). It's not even like the NSA puts a wiretap on you if you call a terrorist - they only monitor your calls outside the US.
Sure, there is the potential for fear mongering to be used as an excuse to erode civil lliberties. But that doesn't make terrorists stop existing. They are out there, they do want to kill us, we have foiled plots since 9/11, and we need to allow prudent and reasonable additional powers to our defense institutions now just as we have in every single war or national crisis in our history.
First off thanks for the great responses. This is an excellent reason for why i like the slashdot discussions. Instead of just getting into pointless bashing all the time - I actually can learn a lot.
You seem to think it strange to extrapolate from my "mundane experiences" to the rest of the world - but I think that it's rationally more sound than the alternative. If we disregard our own experiences doesn't that make us completely credulous?
So I'm still somewhat skeptical. In my experience I've always felt that fundamentally people are people. This means they all operate on some relatively similar principles, but that they are all similarly irreducibly complex. To some extent what you say about great leaders holds true, but on the other hand we will never know how many Alexander the Greats or Napoleons never saw an army, or how many Einsteins spent their lives in manual labor. I'm willing to accept that there are extraordinary people - but at the same time I think that heroes and villians are largely products of the human attempt to impose narrative on our history. We need antagonists and protagonists - they are an essential element of the human experience even if they are not an essential element of objective reality.
But I'm eager to look into your references, and I appreciate them.
You state the the assumption that there are many people who could do what Steve is doing is plainly incorrect because the US can not find a compelling candidate for president. That's flawed logic - the problem may be with the system we use for selecting candidates and not with the pool of candidates. I believe that to be the case. I think there are many men and women who could make a very good president - certainly far better than either Bush or Kerry.
I'm also not willing to follow your logic that Steve Jobs is a giant among insects - which seems to be your claim.
Finally if the influence of personality of the CEO on the organization as a whole is well documented than I am generally interesed in reading more about it. I'm not interested in hearing people try to tell me that Bill Gates is a tyrant out for world domination - especially if those same people are telling me that deep down Steve Jobs just wants to deliver quality products. Those are not people - those are caricatures.
In my day to day experience the people I meet are neither angels nor demons - and I could not categorize myself or anyone I know accurately in a short one or two line synopsis. And yet people continue to act as though public personalities - about whom we know the least - are some how fundamentally easier to know and understand than our own neighbors and co-workers.
Lives and people and the world in general are more complex than that.
Isn't that really the direction we're headed in? I mean of course there will always be the need for physical media. But in the past the media was pretty much the same as the content. The seperation started when we could copy our own music. Now the schism is almost complete. As a result it's not going to really matter. I don't think it's necessary to have HDDVD or Blu Ray win out. We'll be storing movies on hard drives, external hard drives, and accessing them via the net or on-demand service so much that the physical media is going to be increasingly irrelevent.
That's a perfect example of how Steve handles things differently than the typical CEO, thanks. I'm not trying to argue here that Steve doesn't deserve the fame he gets, I'm just skeptical until and unless I read stuff like this that (albeit unconfirmed) lends credence to the idea that Stever really is different.
That's incredibly sloppy logic that is obviously flawed. Not all billionair heiresses are famous: as in have their own TV shows and are household names. Sure it helped that Paris is an heiress to billions, but that's not sufficient to explain her fame. In fact, a lot of billionaires work rather hard to keep their families out of the limelight and away from fame.
So no, Paris is not famous for being a billionaire heiress.
I'm not exactly saying Jobs is just a pretty face - I just think that perhaps we credit CEOs and executives too much in general. I mean Enron is one thing, that really WAS the management's direct decisions at work. But the general success or failure of a company in the market place seems to me to be too complex a question to come down to being one person's fault or not.
You're missing the point. I'm talking about awareness of him in the general public - not among industry insiders, VCs and other specialists. I'm sure that there are dozens of CEO-types (possibly just as talented as Jobs) that aren't really a part of my general consciousness or the consciusness of the public at large even though they are closely watched by investors who make it their business to track such minutia. Jobs is different because now he's mainstream - a lot of non-business people know who he is.
You had me convinced at first, but then you bring in the statistics. If Apple people say "things have been different since Steve came, and it has directly influenced the quality of my contribution to the work" than maybe Steve really does deserve many of his accolades.
But if his contribution is 5% direct and then having an "influence" on the other 95%, then skepticism again rules the day. He'd have to have an "influence" of greater than 50% to be the real "leader" (in the sense of being more than 50% responsible for the decisions being made). Otherwise he's just a substantial contributor who's efforts at Apple are still overshadowed by the efforts of everybody else (and yet there are many articles on Steve for any one article you might find on other Apple employees or Apple employees as a whole).
Steve Jobs was likely just about as brilliant, full of leadership, etc. in the 1980s as he is now. I'm sure he's grown and changed some, but for the sake of argument let's say he's roughly the same person. Yet in the 1980s very few people knew who Stever Jobs was. Now a lot of people know who he is. Clearly, then, to a large degree his fame is not a result of who he is.
So the second possibility is that the fame is a result not of who he is, but of what he has done. Clearly Apple is more successful (in terms of public perception) than NeXT. Fine, but the question is why? I'd say there are two problems. 1 - I'm skeptical that Steve's influence on Apple is that pervasive. Do you think that if you were an engineer you'd go from creating something like the Rio to something like the iPod just because Steve was now your boss's boss's boss's boss? 2 - Even if Steve was responsible for development of the creation of the specific products (which I doubt) the fact that those products are so important to our society now and at this time is something entirely out of Steve's control. He didn't invent MP3s, he didn't influence America's deeply materialistic culture, etc. etc.
What this all demonstrates is that there is a whole barrage of reasons for Steve Jobs fame that have nothing to do with who he is or what he specifically did. And yet we attribute the success of Apple to him anyway because he's the man in front. And we, as people, like to have things clear cut. We like to be able to blame the incredibly complex system that goes into a major corporation on the behavior, quality, and decisions of men and women that we'll never even meet in person for 5 minutes.
What does this have to do with Paris? People like celebrity in and of itself, not just celebrity for something. People like to turn individuals into icons. Sometimes a buzz becomes self-sustaining (nothing draws a crowd like a crowd). All of these factors, I believe, have a lot more to do with what we think of Steve than Steve himself personally does.
I'm extremely uncomfortable in this akward position of defending Bill Gates - but since I value the method of thinking about any given thought I'm going to do it.
In my opinion, Bill Gates is to be blamed... They are the result of Bill making money the center of his whole life. They are the result of his sneaky aggressive behavior.
Money is clearly not the center of Bill Gates life. If it was, he wouldn't be the biggest philanthropist of all time. This doesn't make him a saint (he may be in it for fame and ego) but it does indicate that money isn't his only idol. You quick assertion that it is indicates to me that you - like many of us - are quick to oversimplify and lay far more blame than can really be laid at the foot of corporate figureheads.
Note that Bill Gates suffers from depression. This is exactly what you would expect of a man who has spent his entire adult life acting out sneaky aggression. It's all fun and games to paint demonic horns and a tail on Bill, but in all seriousness you continue to indicate this desire - universal to humans - to live in a universe that is neat and tidy. Things happen because they are someone's fault, people's actions can be explained by their character - which is itself simple and comprehensible.
The points I'm questioning are bigger than either Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. It has to do with the way that we manufacture celebrity for celebrity's sake - just as we manufacture notoriety for notoriety's sake.
The truth is that sometimes things happen not "just because", but for a variety of reasons that are so complex that there's really no better explanation. A multi-billion dollar business is an incredibly complex structural organization. Of course a CEO can set the tone - it's about leadership. Steve Jobs appears to be a leader. But how much do you think that leadership translates directly into "cool new products?"
I think that there's a ton of luck that goes into it as well. I imagine there are probably many people who could do what Steve is doing, but who will never be in that position (and probably suck in whatever position they are in now because they don't have the temperment for it).
The example may have been extreme, but I didn't say he was like Paris in general, but that he was like Paris in a specific way: self-sustaining buzz has more to do with his fame than whatever started the buzz in the first place.
Your quote: I would think being the CEO of the company putting out the iPod, iMacs, and so on would be famous further substantiates this hypothesis. If anyone who was the CEO of such a company would be famous, than it is in fact true that Steve's fame is not a result of Steve's actions or attributes. You're really just begging the question, was it something remarkable about Steve that led to these products? To some extent of course it was, but I think we tend to overstate both the blame and the credit we give to CEOs because it's human nature to want to find a specific, concrete cause for success and failure.
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Paying cash is totally fine - but it supports what I've been saying. If you want the benefits of credit card there's no practical way to restrict your private info. It's not just technology, the credit cards needs that info for billing - which is essentially a social issue (since we don't just trust each other to bill the right amount - we want records). And if you don't like people having that info you can pay in cash. Just like if you find small town atmosphere oppressive - you can move to the woods or a big city.
Rather than responding to everything else point by point it comes down to this: information is power. Data is useless, but data organized is information. Modern tech allows data to be organized and analyzed and mined as never before. So we have new sources of power as never before. Power is neither inherently good nor bad. A biometric database could save countless lives by alerting physicians and pharmacists to dangerous drug interactions. Also - imagine how much we could learn about health care if we knew what drugs everyone was taking, when they went to the hospital, what their family records were, etc. The potential for good is awesome. So is the potential for evil.
In my opinion the problem is not so much related to the information - the power - but in ensuring that that power is not used for evil.
And this is where you and I part ways. I don't buy into your "gov't is evil" nonsense. The gov't is people like you and me. It's not a monolithic institution, a single entity. So we should not treat it as some grand empire of shadow - it's just as inept as any other institution.
But more importantly you think that gov't should be kep from having this power because it can use the power to restrict our rights. I, on the other hand, think that to the extent the gov't restricts our rights it's our fault. We live in a representative republic - and yet fewer than 50% of us vote every year. And those that do are woefully uninformed. Gov't has only as much power as we let it have.
So I'm in favor of increasing the power and information of the gov't and keeping it in check by increasing openness of public discourse about the gov't.
In America we have no excuse for saying "the gov't abuses us". We ARE the gov't. And if we've let it grow out of control it is not due to technology, information, or any other excuse. It is due to public inatention and apathy. I find those things far more dangerous than information or even gov't itself.
-stormin
If you're going to use terms in narrow or specialized ways, you shoule really give the definition up front and not wait for someone to use the broadly accepted definition and then act as though they're wrong. It's both disingenous and unhelpful.
In this case in the broad sense it's reasonable to say that I own my own body - even though in fact I can not sell myself legally in this country (or even certain parts thereof - like organs).
So I maintain that in a broad sense a store does "own" the data about a given transaction - including whatever data you choose to give them. Whether or not they can sell or transmit that data is obviously a seperate issue.
And as for your bit about America being founded on hopeless idealism you could not possibly be more wrong. Some of the founders, like Jefferson, were extremely idealistic - but if Jefferson had been the only one involved in the revolution we would have never won. It took George Washington and his much more pragmatic side (eg Hamilton) to actually give life to the common ideals. If Jefferson had been president instead of Washington - the nation would have fallen apart. Similarly the first American gov't failed because the federal gov't lacked enough power to sustain itself. Why? Because it was designed by those with not enough apprehension of the way power and economics work in the real life.
I'm not arguing against idealism in general, I'm just pointing out the obvious danger of being idealistic to the extent where you totally ignore the real facts before you. That type of idealism was related to the failures, and not the successs, of early US history.
-stormin
Right, and I'm not sure if the NSA case abridges due process or not. I think that's for the lawyers to get into. But my take on things is that automated monitoring doesn't abridge rights. If they want to use sophisticated statistical algorithms that have been rigorously and scientifically proven to indicate a greater chance of illegal activity to monitor communication to foreign countries and then use that as a basis to target specific individuals, I have no problem with that.
I'm not saying that this means the NSA case is OK or not. I want a few thigns in place, mostly oversight by the legislative branch. It's necessary to keep the specifics of the program secret. In fact, it would have been better to keep the whole program secret. As long as it's within the bounds of the Constitution and has Congressional oversight, I'm OK with it.
And I'm still not sure where you're going with this "guilt by association" thing. Again, if I have been emailing a scam artist, and het gets taken down, and they want to find his entire scam ring, than I expect to be investigated. That's not guily by association - that's just good investigation. Of course there should be a limit. If all I've done is talk to the guy on the street once there's not enough there in my opinion to search my house. But the principle is that associating with a suspect is not enough to make you a suspect but may be enough to get you searched as well.
-stormin
Oh yeah - one more thing. It's childish to say that something is dangerous based on how many people it has killed.
1 - Terrorism has killed only a couple thousand americans so far, but how many could it kill if they got a nuke or a biological weapon?
2 - Sure, only a few thousand are killed - but how many lives in the Middle East and other regions are lived in fear, poverty, and without basic human rights because of terrorism? The POINT of terrorism is to have a greater impact than the body count would indicate. That's like saying "torture isn't a problem because people don't die from it very often". The point of both isn't to kill so much as to terrorize.
3 - Less people die from child molestation, child prostituion, and human trafficking than from car crashes. Which do you find to be a bigger problem?
-stormin
It's not nice to destroy people's fragiley constructed rose-glass images of the world, but sometimes it's necessary. This is just such a case.
The freedoms of the American nation are all conditional. This may be a shock to you, but it's true. Even the core ones - "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" can not be abridged "without due process". That means they CAN be abridged. Believe it or not, this is not a change of the Bush presidency - that's how the document was written.
Anyone that thinks you can never legally abridge a right from the US Constitution needs to just excuse themselves from the discussion now because there's a chance the rest of us might like to have a discussion about what the Consitution actually does or does not say and how this relates to events happening in the real world.
-stormin
it IS an erosion of civil liberties, because the Bill of Rights specifically grants me freedom from government intrusion of my life unless they have probable cause to believe I committed a crime. The doctrine is innocent UNTIL proven guilty. The NSA wiretapping is guilty by association until proven innocent.
This is possibly the single worst mangling of American law that I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. How the Hell do you conflate "probably cause" with "guilty until proven innocent"? If you understood the words you just wrote you'd realize that you're arguing against yourself.
The Bill of Rights does NOT say we have a freedom from gov't intrusion "until proven guilty". That would make it really damn hard to prove someone guilty wouldn't it? You'd have to prove guilt before you could get a warrant. Nice legal system you're imagining for yourself there.
No, the Bill of Rights says you need "probable cause" which is a lower standard than "until proven guilty". This means that the Bill of Rights INTENDED to allow the gov't to intrude in the live of innocent Americans. It was just providing a framework for when the gov't could intrude on the liberties of American citizens - regardless of guilt or innocence. So it ALLOWS that intrusion. Get that through your thick skull. Probable cause will not always lead to "proven guilty". Sometimes probable cause will result in "just a coincidence". Sometimes it will result in "guilty as hell, but we can't prove it", sometimes it will lead to "obviously innocent". Sometimes it will lead to "innocent, but proven guilty anyway" - the justice system is not perfect. Sometimes the gov't will get a warrant, break down the door in the middle of the night and drag some poor guy to jail, and it'll turn out he's innocent. This doesn't mean the gov't violated his rights. If they had probably cause they were justified and it was legal - even if unfortunate. This may shock you, but the government is made up of people like you and I, and it is not God and we can't expect it to get everything right all the time.
So the question is: does calling a terrorist and then making international calls give probable cause to listen in on what you say? I'd say yes. And try to keep in mind that even without probable cause the gov't can still intrude on personal liberties for other reasons - like public safety. If you have ebola they sure as hell have the right to quarantine you even though you're innocent of any crime. It's not nice, but it's real life. You should try living their some time.
Now gettig to your quotes.
No tyrannical society can long exist when it cannot control the flow of information.
And...? The NSA leak proves that the US is not tyrannical then.
There is no such thing as a good war or a bad peace
Bullshit. And I don't care who said it. Would you have preferred the US sit out WW2? Or would it have been better to have entered the war earlier and tried to save the lives of a few million innocent jews, chinese, koreans, etc? If we'd sat back and allowed Nazis to overrun Europe that would have been a bad peace in my opinion. The thing with war, as in all violence, is that it only takes 1 person to start it, and you can't make all parties stop - in some cases - without resorting to the same tactics. The fact that you're too idealistic to realize this is a good indication that you shouldn't be trusted with politics. You'd hve protested the American Revolution under this rhetoric (kind of makes you a hypocrite for quoting it now). It's self-righteous and self-serving and you can sit on your moral high ground all you like, but in the real world sometimes you have to get a little dirty (like declare war on a couple of nations at the same time) to get a greater good done - and those who will never act except when they sure of their moral superiority have neither moral superiority nor a mandate to lead.
Whate'ers begun in anger ends in shame.
? I don't see t
I think you're on a quixotic quest. Consider that the surveillance camera is not a camera - it's someone who recognized you. Do you have the right to keep them from testifying unless you want to should you ever be on trial? No - information about your whereabouts in a public place is in the public domain. The problem is in the past you had to rely on random chance to find someone who would recognize you. Now, however, the information "out there" can be stored, replicated, and collated.
There are a lot of troubling concerns here. In a cash economy your purchases can't be tracked without intrusion. In a credit card economy your purchases are tracked by definition. You seem to want to have the benefits of technology and yet the benefits of no technology at the same time. My real point is that some of this loss of private information is utterly inseperable from the advances that we have in technology.
If you live alone in the woods, no one can know where are you are at a given time. If you live in a big city lots of people know, but they don't talk so it remains disconnected data, not actionable information. If you live in a small town less people know, but they tend to talk, and so everyone actually has information on your whereabouts - not just data. There's no law or technology acting in any of these cases, but your level of privacy fluctuates based on the nature of the society in which you live. Technology is changing our society - thus it will change our level of privacy.
There are pros and cons to this. You list bad examples - reasons you want your information private. And they are valid. But consider medical emergencies. I'm allergic to morphine, but I have no PCP right now. If I were injured and taken to a hospital and they were able to scan my fingerprints and access my medical records they would know not to give me morphine. As it is - they're going to have to find out the hard way I'm allergic. If it was a fatal allergy (it's not) that would suck for me.
So in response to your "private information is mine" ideology I reply: no it's not and it never was. It has nothing to do with government or technology - it started the moment there were three or more thinking human beings on the planet. You have to dump the utterly unrealistic notion that you can somehow stop people from talking about you - and that's essentially what everything from surveillance cameras to credit card tracking is.
If you do that, then you can start to grapple with the actual implementations. I'm not saying we can't do anything about the fact that our private information is becoming rapidly more available. We can influence what is legal and what is not, what is allowed and what is not, and we should. But in order to be a part of the discussion you have to realize that *some* change is utterly inevitable. If you don't like big city anonymity - don't live in a big city. If you don't like small town gossip - don't live in a small town. Very few people are going to sympathize with someone who says "I love the small town feel, but I just hate that everyone knows what I'm doing". At least, not to the point where they would be willing to help you try to change it. The gossip is part and parcel with the small town feel - the two are inseperable. To somem extent, a digital trail is inseperable from a digital life in the same way.
You can't always have your cake and eat it too.
-stormin
Right - like I said I'm no friend of the Patriot Act. I'm just pointing out that it's stupid to decry EVERY infringement of civil liberty. That just demonstrates that the person in question is a partisan.
My best friend is from Iran. I've known him since middle school, and we're still close. We run a small business together. Do I sometimes get worried about what would happen if they picked him up and shipped him, his father, or his mother (or all 3) to guananamo? I do worry - and that's why I wish we had some greater oversight of Bush's actions.
But at the same time, do you suggest we treat terrorists by civil law? But if we treat them according to the rules of combat they all deserve to get shot without a trial (enemy combatant w/out uniform = spy). Clearly we can't do that either since we're not sure we have the right guys.
Again, I'm not writing a polemic to tell people how it is. These are complex issues. What I'm saying is that as complex and serious issues they deserve honest discussion - not partisan bickering.
-stormin
That's a nice, pat theory. I'd like to hear a lawyer inform us as to how much of it has any reflection whatsoever in case law.
Personally, however, I think information laws are bit more complex in reality. For example if you buy some fertilizer at Store A and they have your credit card # (your personal ID) and then you go blow something up with a bomb made from that fertilizer and the FBI comes calling - do they have the right or responsibility to transmit the data they have on you?
So let's not be hopelessly idealistic. If you buy something from a store w/ a check or a credit card - they DO have your info. It's silly to say they "don't own it". They have it - the question is what can they do with it? And the answer, from the above, is obviously not "nothing ever under any circumstances".
-stormin
And this is similar how?
Look, in every single time of national crisis or war the executive branch has taken on additional emergency powers. We have recovered those civil liberties every single time. Some of those powers have been used correcctly - WW2 drafts and rationing, some questionably - Vietnam drafts - and some manifestly incorrectly - WW2 Japanese internment camps.
Anyone who kicks and screams that the erosion of civil liberties is automatically a bad thing just reveals their own stupidity and historical ignorance.
This is a different situation because, unlike Vietnam, WW2, the 70s gas crisis, etc, it's hard to determine what the criteria for the crisis ending would be. This means that there is the potential for the executive branch to extend the usual encroachment of civil liberties to a semi-permenant or permenant status. Furthermore, it's harder to determine who the "enemy" is, and finally there is a the question of how to handle this crisis at all - heavy-handed tactics may alienate allies and aid enemy recruitment.
What we have before us is a minefield - and to navigate it we need two things that you lack: subtelty and restraint. We don't need a bunch of idiots applauding that an NSA program that may or may not have been illegal and almost undoubtedly rewarded valuable intelligence and possibly saved American lives has been outed for the public - and the terrorists to see.
r c
Vietnamese leaders have stated that one of the reasons they were able to keep fighting during the war despite overwhelming American military firepower was the New York Times. The New York Times, student protests, anti-war activists all showed them that they didn't need to beat American forces to win, only to cow the American public. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of that war American sent a message - our military is unrivalled but our populace has no stomach for fighting. We might as well have stuck a big "kick me" sign on our own back.
So I'm getting pretty damn tired of partisans who are obviously thrilled at another chance to take Bush down a peg or two. This thing is bigger than party politics and it requires people with a longer view and little less of an immediate agenda.
We keep this up, and we're still going to be debating stem cell research when the terrorists reduce NYC or D.C. or Puntuky to ashes, or a ghost town. Let's let our defense institutions and executive branches to their job to defend the US and find non-hysterical ways to ensure that our civil liberties are not permenanty curtailed. If you think that they are not going to be curtailed at all, then you simply don't understand either the changes in modern information technology or the current political situation in the world well enough to have anything worthwhile to say anyway.
-stormin
What the Hell is wrong with this scenario? Look, if I order up my favorite Iranian takeout and it turns out the owner is part of a terrorist cell being investigated by the NSA, and then I make a couple of overseas phone calls I WANT them to monitor them.
1. If they can't monitor my phone calls than they can't monitor the terrorist buddy who also calls him. If it's a question of wrongfully monitor a couple of Americans or turn a blind eye to formenting terrorist plots, which do you pick?
2. This is NOT an erosion of my civil liberties. I'm not trading freedom for safety. If you make phone calls to a guy who turns out to be a drug dealer or a mobster and he gets taken down - you best believe they are going to want to know what you talked about. And they (FBI, police, whatever) would have every right to investigate ESPECIALLY if that investigation was limited to your phone calls to the guy in question and other superficially suspicous communications. It's not like NSA was doing warrantless searches of your hard drive (just because I support some police power doesn't mean I think the entire Patriot Act was a good idea). It's not even like the NSA puts a wiretap on you if you call a terrorist - they only monitor your calls outside the US.
Sure, there is the potential for fear mongering to be used as an excuse to erode civil lliberties. But that doesn't make terrorists stop existing. They are out there, they do want to kill us, we have foiled plots since 9/11, and we need to allow prudent and reasonable additional powers to our defense institutions now just as we have in every single war or national crisis in our history.
We are becoming our own worst enemy.
-stormin
First off thanks for the great responses. This is an excellent reason for why i like the slashdot discussions. Instead of just getting into pointless bashing all the time - I actually can learn a lot.
You seem to think it strange to extrapolate from my "mundane experiences" to the rest of the world - but I think that it's rationally more sound than the alternative. If we disregard our own experiences doesn't that make us completely credulous?
So I'm still somewhat skeptical. In my experience I've always felt that fundamentally people are people. This means they all operate on some relatively similar principles, but that they are all similarly irreducibly complex. To some extent what you say about great leaders holds true, but on the other hand we will never know how many Alexander the Greats or Napoleons never saw an army, or how many Einsteins spent their lives in manual labor. I'm willing to accept that there are extraordinary people - but at the same time I think that heroes and villians are largely products of the human attempt to impose narrative on our history. We need antagonists and protagonists - they are an essential element of the human experience even if they are not an essential element of objective reality.
But I'm eager to look into your references, and I appreciate them.
-stormin
You state the the assumption that there are many people who could do what Steve is doing is plainly incorrect because the US can not find a compelling candidate for president. That's flawed logic - the problem may be with the system we use for selecting candidates and not with the pool of candidates. I believe that to be the case. I think there are many men and women who could make a very good president - certainly far better than either Bush or Kerry.
I'm also not willing to follow your logic that Steve Jobs is a giant among insects - which seems to be your claim.
Finally if the influence of personality of the CEO on the organization as a whole is well documented than I am generally interesed in reading more about it. I'm not interested in hearing people try to tell me that Bill Gates is a tyrant out for world domination - especially if those same people are telling me that deep down Steve Jobs just wants to deliver quality products. Those are not people - those are caricatures.
In my day to day experience the people I meet are neither angels nor demons - and I could not categorize myself or anyone I know accurately in a short one or two line synopsis. And yet people continue to act as though public personalities - about whom we know the least - are some how fundamentally easier to know and understand than our own neighbors and co-workers.
Lives and people and the world in general are more complex than that.
-stormin
Isn't that really the direction we're headed in? I mean of course there will always be the need for physical media. But in the past the media was pretty much the same as the content. The seperation started when we could copy our own music. Now the schism is almost complete. As a result it's not going to really matter. I don't think it's necessary to have HDDVD or Blu Ray win out. We'll be storing movies on hard drives, external hard drives, and accessing them via the net or on-demand service so much that the physical media is going to be increasingly irrelevent.
-stormin
That's a perfect example of how Steve handles things differently than the typical CEO, thanks. I'm not trying to argue here that Steve doesn't deserve the fame he gets, I'm just skeptical until and unless I read stuff like this that (albeit unconfirmed) lends credence to the idea that Stever really is different.
So... thanks for that tidbit.
-stormin
You're saying that if you were an engineer you would design crap unless someone MADE you design better?
-stormin
That's incredibly sloppy logic that is obviously flawed. Not all billionair heiresses are famous: as in have their own TV shows and are household names. Sure it helped that Paris is an heiress to billions, but that's not sufficient to explain her fame. In fact, a lot of billionaires work rather hard to keep their families out of the limelight and away from fame.
So no, Paris is not famous for being a billionaire heiress.
-stormin
I'd be curious to hear where you got this from, examples, etc.
-stormin
I'm not exactly saying Jobs is just a pretty face - I just think that perhaps we credit CEOs and executives too much in general. I mean Enron is one thing, that really WAS the management's direct decisions at work. But the general success or failure of a company in the market place seems to me to be too complex a question to come down to being one person's fault or not.
-stormin
You're missing the point. I'm talking about awareness of him in the general public - not among industry insiders, VCs and other specialists. I'm sure that there are dozens of CEO-types (possibly just as talented as Jobs) that aren't really a part of my general consciousness or the consciusness of the public at large even though they are closely watched by investors who make it their business to track such minutia. Jobs is different because now he's mainstream - a lot of non-business people know who he is.
-stormin
Don't agree with what I say? Fine. Think I'm trolling? Say so. But how do you justify modding an un-rated post as "overrated"?
Someone's reality distortion field is in full force.
-stormin
You had me convinced at first, but then you bring in the statistics. If Apple people say "things have been different since Steve came, and it has directly influenced the quality of my contribution to the work" than maybe Steve really does deserve many of his accolades.
But if his contribution is 5% direct and then having an "influence" on the other 95%, then skepticism again rules the day. He'd have to have an "influence" of greater than 50% to be the real "leader" (in the sense of being more than 50% responsible for the decisions being made). Otherwise he's just a substantial contributor who's efforts at Apple are still overshadowed by the efforts of everybody else (and yet there are many articles on Steve for any one article you might find on other Apple employees or Apple employees as a whole).
-stormin
I'll try to clarify my point for you then.
Steve Jobs was likely just about as brilliant, full of leadership, etc. in the 1980s as he is now. I'm sure he's grown and changed some, but for the sake of argument let's say he's roughly the same person. Yet in the 1980s very few people knew who Stever Jobs was. Now a lot of people know who he is. Clearly, then, to a large degree his fame is not a result of who he is.
So the second possibility is that the fame is a result not of who he is, but of what he has done. Clearly Apple is more successful (in terms of public perception) than NeXT. Fine, but the question is why? I'd say there are two problems. 1 - I'm skeptical that Steve's influence on Apple is that pervasive. Do you think that if you were an engineer you'd go from creating something like the Rio to something like the iPod just because Steve was now your boss's boss's boss's boss? 2 - Even if Steve was responsible for development of the creation of the specific products (which I doubt) the fact that those products are so important to our society now and at this time is something entirely out of Steve's control. He didn't invent MP3s, he didn't influence America's deeply materialistic culture, etc. etc.
What this all demonstrates is that there is a whole barrage of reasons for Steve Jobs fame that have nothing to do with who he is or what he specifically did. And yet we attribute the success of Apple to him anyway because he's the man in front. And we, as people, like to have things clear cut. We like to be able to blame the incredibly complex system that goes into a major corporation on the behavior, quality, and decisions of men and women that we'll never even meet in person for 5 minutes.
What does this have to do with Paris? People like celebrity in and of itself, not just celebrity for something. People like to turn individuals into icons. Sometimes a buzz becomes self-sustaining (nothing draws a crowd like a crowd). All of these factors, I believe, have a lot more to do with what we think of Steve than Steve himself personally does.
-stormin
I'm extremely uncomfortable in this akward position of defending Bill Gates - but since I value the method of thinking about any given thought I'm going to do it.
In my opinion, Bill Gates is to be blamed... They are the result of Bill making money the center of his whole life. They are the result of his sneaky aggressive behavior.
Money is clearly not the center of Bill Gates life. If it was, he wouldn't be the biggest philanthropist of all time. This doesn't make him a saint (he may be in it for fame and ego) but it does indicate that money isn't his only idol. You quick assertion that it is indicates to me that you - like many of us - are quick to oversimplify and lay far more blame than can really be laid at the foot of corporate figureheads.
Note that Bill Gates suffers from depression. This is exactly what you would expect of a man who has spent his entire adult life acting out sneaky aggression. It's all fun and games to paint demonic horns and a tail on Bill, but in all seriousness you continue to indicate this desire - universal to humans - to live in a universe that is neat and tidy. Things happen because they are someone's fault, people's actions can be explained by their character - which is itself simple and comprehensible.
The points I'm questioning are bigger than either Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. It has to do with the way that we manufacture celebrity for celebrity's sake - just as we manufacture notoriety for notoriety's sake.
The truth is that sometimes things happen not "just because", but for a variety of reasons that are so complex that there's really no better explanation. A multi-billion dollar business is an incredibly complex structural organization. Of course a CEO can set the tone - it's about leadership. Steve Jobs appears to be a leader. But how much do you think that leadership translates directly into "cool new products?"
I think that there's a ton of luck that goes into it as well. I imagine there are probably many people who could do what Steve is doing, but who will never be in that position (and probably suck in whatever position they are in now because they don't have the temperment for it).
-stormin
The example may have been extreme, but I didn't say he was like Paris in general, but that he was like Paris in a specific way: self-sustaining buzz has more to do with his fame than whatever started the buzz in the first place.
Your quote: I would think being the CEO of the company putting out the iPod, iMacs, and so on would be famous further substantiates this hypothesis. If anyone who was the CEO of such a company would be famous, than it is in fact true that Steve's fame is not a result of Steve's actions or attributes. You're really just begging the question, was it something remarkable about Steve that led to these products? To some extent of course it was, but I think we tend to overstate both the blame and the credit we give to CEOs because it's human nature to want to find a specific, concrete cause for success and failure.
-stormin