15-years seems pretty excessive for involuntary manslaughter. Also, I find the phrase "[getting] what they deserve" quite objectionable. It has a connotation of meting out justice. But putting some dumb kid (or dumb adult) in jail for a decade and a half does not bring back the dead, nor does it somehow compensate for the loss of a life.
Quite right. Someone stupid or selfish enough to text or be drunk while driving, and then kill someone should forfeit the rest of their life in prison, at least. Such a person is simply too stupid and/or self-centered to live in society any longer.
Have you ever had to look at your dash to change the air conditioner or flip radio stations? God forbid if you drove into a new area and needed to scan for a new station. I know you've never tried to read billboards or MapQuest routes or try to find that one street sign you're looking for.
Radios now have "Scan" buttons precisely to allow people to pay attention to driving. People looking for street signs are generally a) driving slowly, and b) at least looking at the damn road. And as far as the A/C goes, that should be something you adjust before you set out on your trip.
And all of that ignores the one central fact: Texting while driving is more cognitively taxing than all of them.
Fixed that for you corrections in bold
The same arguments applies for and against this.
The argument sort of works at an international level, but it doesn't work as well. How many non-American sites do you think Americans visit? And how many non-American connections do you think there are to American sites? In fact, the Internet is already set up largely along national lines. Amazon has to set up one site for the U.S., and another site for Germany, and it's not just a matter of language or currency. There are items that are legal to sell in the U.S. that aren't legal to sell in Germany (Nazi paraphernalia is the example I'm thinking of at the moment.)
In some sense the idea that the Internet represents a new renaissance of freedom of speech is a fallacy. Nations simply take the Internet and impose their national customs on it. At a national level, it's (mostly) enforceable. Can people find ways around it? Yeah. But most don't, and that's the idea.
Texas may not be able to secede, but they can divide into five states.
I don't know the legalities involved, but I'm fairly certain a state can't create new states on its own. That kind of asshattery would make a mockery of the U.S. legislative branch. What happens when California decides to divide into 25 states to pad their power in Congress?
That's not how it works for the phone system, which is very similar to the internet (connections of wires for transferring communications over many miles). The phone system is controlled by the U.S. FCC but *only* if the company in question is interstate. If the company exists wholly and completely within a state (say, California) then the U.S. has no authority to regulate that company. Only the CA legislature has jurisdiction per the Communications Act of 1934.
The trouble is, when you're talking about a network attack (rather than, say, what a company charges its customers), a local response (and in this discussion, the state level is essentially "local", for our purposes) means nothing. An Internet attack is, by its very nature, national. You can't have hundreds of thousands of computers in one state run one way, and hundreds of thousands in each other state run some other way during a crisis. And even local ISPs have to, by their very nature, have interstate connections. Without interstate authority over those connections, what good is state-level control going to do?
I live in NJ. There's a regional newspaper here called the Courier-News. To get to that paper's site, my traffic has to go through several NY servers.
I just don't see how you're going to stop an Internet attack by working on the local level and handing off responsibility at state lines. It's got to be coordinated at a higher level than that.
I can't wait till my state Texas succeeds from the union. I will also support any other state that wishes to do the same.
States don't have the right to seceed from the Union. That little controversy was settled around 1865 or so.
As to the topic at hand: If the government was to regulate the Internet (above what they do presently), then the 9th or 10th ammendments won't come into play. State-level control of the Internet isn't an idea even worthy of laughing at. It's got to be controlled on the national level, if it's to be controlled at all.
But this isn't really about controlling the Internet, anyway. It's about taking control of a private network that's been compromised.
It'd be great if the government could trust private companies to take care of the problem without getting them involved, but if you think about the physical analogy, you'll see why that's impossible.
If a band of terrorists, guns blazing, busted into a facility that controlled electricity for the Eastern seaboard and took control of the place, would you really want the government reaction to be, "Well, they can take care of it themselves. None of our business."?
"Is it okay to mistreat Germans now? No. Of course not. Anyone born after WWII in Germany has no moral culpability for what happened then. I'm not even saying it should have happened that way. What I'm saying is this: After WWII, anything contemporary Germans got, they had coming to them, in spades, and sounds more like justice, rather than an atrocity."
German descendants in today's Namibia were put in camps by the British (South West Africa, as it was known back then, was administered by them), they lost many family members during the war that had no allegation to the ideas of Nazism, they just went to fight for their country (German nationality has traditionally acquired by blood, irrespective of your birthplace).
I think I clearly stated that I don't agree with the mistreatment of contemporary (to our time) Germans.
Women of all ages were raped by the Russians when Berlin fell, if you are suggesting that such actions are justice, I frankly want nothing to do with your notions of what is fair or not.
If you think that I agree with such actions, you haven't been paying attention to what I wrote. I clearly stated (several times, in several places in this thread) that the treatment of German women and children by the Russian army was unjust. If you missed that, I'm saying it now.
Justice has to do with a civilized institution in which your alleged crimes are judged in accordance to fair laws.
That, I can't agree with. Frequently, justice has nothing to do with laws. I'm not advocating vigilante justice here (because that, too, is unjust, when the wrong person is targeted), but the fact that someone is pronounced "guilty", and punished under the applicable law, or pronounced innocent, and released in accordance with that same law, does not, in any way, mean that "justice" has been done. Justice is the right person being punished for the given crime, and the guilty party being punished in a way proportional to the crime. Guilty people frequently get acquitted, and innocent people get convicted. That's the inverse of justice.
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What you are advocating is not justice, it is just a different form of fascism.
I'm not sure my original post was "advocating" anything at all. I was merely making an observation. Namely, that human nature being what it is, and given what the democratically-elected German government did to the rest of Europe, and the German government's stated rationale for doing so, moving Germans into the boundaries of Germany proper was a fairly obvious thing to do.
Consider this: If the Germans hadn't been moved into Germany after the war, and the citizens of those European countries had taken it upon themselves to drive the Germans out, would that have been better? The other factor you have to keep in mind is this: German nationals had been fed a steady diet of pseudo-scientific (to put it kindly) ethnophobic bullshit by the Nazis which didn't particularly make them good neighbors in multicultural societies. That was another reason to make sure Germans were (mostly, although not by any means entirely) within Germany.
You can't wipe human nature out of existence merely because it can sometimes be unjust. Instead, you have to work around it, going for the best solution you can, out of a list of bad options.
Is it okay to mistreat Germans now? No. Of course not.
But had things went the way you wanted them to go, there would be no Germans today.
I didn't say that. Allow me to clarify: After what happened, anything that happened to them, they had coming. I don't support the Soviet army's abuse of the German women (rapes, etc.), but the mere movement of Germans to areas inside Germany? Yeah, I think that was only prudent. The logistical problems associated with it were terrible, of course, but that was not intentional, as far as I can tell, and there needs to be some degree of volition to call it an atrocity.
So, guilt by association? Are all Americans therefore responsible for what happened during Bush Administration? Or does that privilege only extend to WW2-era Germans? Also, if all Germans were guilty, does that mean that people like Von Stauffenberg are guilty as well? How about Erwin Rommel?
I figured that question was coming. Glad you asked.
The easiest case to answer is Stauffenberg. He recognized what Hitler's regime was, and tried to put a stop to it. Did he do it belatedly? Of course. But the fact of the matter is, the man did have a conscience, and eventually paid with his life for it. Seems to me a pretty clear case of a person doing their penance.
The same could be said of Rommel. While he participated in the war, he refused to commmit war crimes, and actively opposed Hitler when he saw who Hitler was.
I don't think either Rommel or Stauffenberg can be completely absolved of their involvement in Hitler's regime, simply because they knew what the Nazi party was about better than most. However, unlike the vast majority of their countrymen (inside and outside of the military) they stood up to it. In addition, they understood what honor in the military service meant, which was one of the reasons they opposed Hitler, in the end. They weren't just mindless drones going along to get along. And in the end, they paid for their support of Hitler with their lives, so their culpability was paid for, to the extent it could be.
Now, on to the United States under the Bush administration.
Anything that Bush said he was going to do during the election, anyone who voted for him is responsible for. (If you didn't vote for him, then you're not culpable, but I would suggest you should look at the election results from the 1933 German election. While the NSDP didn't get a majority, no hanging chads came into play. The support of the German National People's Party put them over the top.) If he didn't say he was going to do it, anyone who voted for him can't be held responsible for those actions directly. (They're responsible in the sense that they did vote for him, of course, but it's not the same kind of direct moral responsibility as if you knew what he was going to do.) So, in certain respects, it's not a black-and-white thing, because in the case of Bush, there was some amount of "playing to the middle" involved, where an American politician doesn't usually shout it from the rooftops if his positions would be conisdered far-left or far-right.
Hitler's NSDP party had no such subtlety. If you were paying any kind of attention at all to their platform and their 25 points, you knew what you were in for, in broad form, when you voted for him. The 25 points of the NSDP party basically called Jews enemies of the state, declared it illegal for Jews to engaged in many activities, and declared that the penalty for crimes should be death. They didn't directly call for the death of the Jews, but all the dots were connected, if you read their platform. So voting for Hitler was quite a different thing for voting for any modern president. In order to make a comparison to Americna history, you'd probably have to compare it to voting for John C. Breckenridge in the election of 1860.
We aren't taking about the German people. We're talking about people of German ancestry living in other countries. What did they do? Did they elect Hitler?
We are talking about Germans living inside of Germany. Or did I miss the part where Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria invaded themselves? The issue isn't that the Germans in the other countries did anything (other than offer no support to their adopted countries when they were being invaded). The issue is the motivation this gave Germans living inside Germany to claim that territory. That's what moving Germans into (post-WWII) German territory was supposed to prevent.
It would strike me as the height of idiocy not to make sure you didn't have Germans in your borders.
Then the Americans are idiots, the French are idiots, the Belgians are idiots and so are the British. The latter even have one as their head of state. Windsor my arse, her real surname is Von Hohenstollen Schleswig-Holstein-Pilsner or something like that.
You have noticed the passage of 60 some-odd years, as well as the strong anti-Nazi laws now in place in Germany, haven't you? Not to mention the whole breakup-unification cycle that's gone on since then? Back when the relocation of the German refugees was taking place, none of that was in existence. You had anti-Nazi sentiment, naturally enough, but it was nothing like it is today, where "Nazi" and "evil" are essentially synonymous. That took the full uncovering of the Holocaust and the publicity of the Neuremberg trials to accomplish. You might also take notice of the fact that the Allied powers involved all looked at German reunification as a something fraught with danger for Europe and the rest of the world.
Oh, and about the queen of Great Britain? Her German ancestry goes back hundreds of years. The Queen Mother actually was intensely anti-Nazi during the war.
The Russians are doing it now. I'd say the fault lies with megalomaniac leaders, not with ordinary people who happen to find themselves on the wrong side of an arbitrary line on a map, but then I'm not a racist crackpot who believes in collective punishment like you.
Three points:
1) Who enables these leaders to do what they do?
2) Again, "German" isn't a race, so even if I was against all Germans (which I'm not), "racism" wouldn't apply here.
3) While the results of the movement were disastrous for the people involved, the expulsions were not "collective punishment" in any real sense. Germans were moved back into Germany (albeit, into the new borders) to avoid a repeat of what had happened before. Poland, in particular, had been fighting "Germany" (in one form or another) centuries before there even was a unified Germany. Making sure the Germans stayed in Germany was meant to prevent the kind of bloodshed that having such ethnic pockets in other countries promoted.
Most of the Germans we are talking about here were living within the German borders before the war. Two of the largest criminals of the 20th century (Hitler and Stalin) teamed up to divide Poland amongst Germany and the Soviet Union. Since the Soviet Union won the war, they got to keep (mostly) their part of the deal. Instead (and to get rid of the Polish population living there) Poland got new territory from Germany. This is why suddenly so many Germans lived "within the borders of other countries". Yes, I know there are other cases, like the Germans living in Czechoslovakia...
I'll agree that Stalin, in a perfect (or even better than average) world wouldn't have gotten as much out of the deal at Potsdam as he did. However, on balance, the Cold War between the U.S. and then-Soviet Union was a better result for the world than a Cold War between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, which would have left many more dead in its wake than WWII eventually did (e.g., finishing off the Jews entirely, to start with). I simply don't see how the Allies could have taken on Hitler entirely alone. It was the suicidal mission against Russia that eventually led to the German defeat.
Me neither. This is why I wrote about the dangers of racism *and* nationalism. Both of which played a big role in WWII. I also have no problem with being anti-Nazi-Germany. But one should not forget that people have their nationality rather independently from the current politics of their country.
18. We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, Schieber and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.
It's not the worst thing that happened. And it clearly can only be judged in the historic context. But even then, it is something that should not have happened. A large scale annexation and expulsion of millions of people is a crime. And, in the grand scheme of things, we are not talking about some spontaneous actions by people traumatized by suffering from the German invasion and occupation. We are talking about an operation planned and orchestrated by politicians/leaders, most of all Stalin, who also used other opportunities to prove that his valuation of human life and dignity was not much further developed than that of the Nazis.
Clearly, Stalin rates right up there with Hitler as one of the 20th century's greatest scumbags. No argument there. And I won't defend the behavior of the Soviet army. But do you really see a rational way for this to have gone down other than the German expulsion from areas outside of what became Germany after the war? Again, how safe could one possibly feel with a large German population in one's borders, given what had just gone on? Does that mean I support wholesale slaughter? No. But the simple movement (coerced or not) of Germans to within Germany's new borders (again, leaving aside the activities of the Soviet army against the populace) barely rates a mention when compared to the acts of inhumanity committed during that war.
No, it's not. Race transcends national borders. The Spansih are not a different "race" than the Portuguese. The English aren't a different "race" than the French or Germans. The real genetic divergence (small as it is to begin with) begins when you start looking at Europeans vs. Asians vs. Africans. Then you can start talking about "race" in a meaningful way.
2) The Expulsion was an atrocity. As was the relocation of poland. As was all the shit that happened during WWII. Saying that, or saying one of them was, without mentioning the other, makes the other nothing less than that.
Not everything that happened during WWII was an atrocity. The problem is that equating these events makes them both less meaningful. I don't really comprehend how one could equate them and say they both have to be brought to the same level. I'd much rather be forced to move than exterminated outright, wouldn't you?
3) Do you know which one where sympathizers and which weren't? Which had active roles and which didn't? Saying all Germans deserved everything, what could have been done to them, is as racist as you could get.
First, active vs. passive acceptance of Hitler is a fairly meaningless distinction. He was elected and kept in power precisely because he had the support of the majority of Germans, without which he couldn't have done what he did. Was there a German resistance? Sure. But not one that survived the war. Hitler's response to the July 20th plot assured that. And the failure of the July 20th plot itself demonstrates the support Hitler had.
German Guy: [after getting swallowed by Blob-Homer] What did we Germans ever do to deserve this?
[gets an angry look from his friend]
German Guy: Oh, right.
4) The GGGP, you where answering to, gave a specific example of poles driving a group out. Nothing more, nothing less. Your "But they deserved it!" was completely offtopic Your "And they could all have been killed instead" even worse.
What I actually said was, "After the shit the Germans pulled, they were lucky they were allowed to live -- period." It was an acknowledgement of reality and of human nature, not a statment of what they "deserved". There are many conditions under which one might say, "Wow! You were lucky you weren't killed!", without actually wishing that on the person. Why? Because one could reasonably make an argument for the elimination of Germany as a nation (i.e., without "East" or "West", and for mass executions of Nazi supporters (which was not without Allied support)). And let's not forget: Obliterating one's vanquished foes is exactly how this kind of thing was handled in days gone by. And even how it was handled by the Germans themselves, on a regional level. (How do you think Britain would've fared, if Germany's invasion was successful?)
Again, in the grand scheme of things, expelling people from a region is a far cry from the kinds of atrocities perpetrated by the Germans. I will say that there's never a justification of the rape of women. But insofar as the expulsion itself? Not really either a surprise or an atrocity, as far as I can tell.
Of course it was an atrocity. Surely one that happened at the end of a chain of events that was started by the Germans, but nevertheless. Kicking out millions of people from their homes is an atrocity, as are the conditions under which all that happened. Of course one main person to blame for this would be Stalin, who wanted to shift Poland westward to enhance his "empire". But also blaming him alone would be too easy.
It was a very fucked up time back then, and nothing can be undone (from any side). But what is really sad are people like you, who more than 60 years later seem to not have learned anything from history about the dangers of racism and nationalism and think that events like the ones described above are OK as long as they happen to people with the right (or should I say "wrong") nationality.
Given what had just happened, and the fact that a German leader used the presence of Germans within the borders of other countries as a pretext for invading them, if you were the leader of a European country, would you want large numbers of Germans there?
Incidentally, "German" isn't a race (despite what the Germans of the day might have thought), so I fail to see how being anti-WWII German is "racism".
To be clear: I don't have a beef with modern Germans or Germany. What I'm saying is that the Germans of the time fucked it up so badly that I think expulsion from their homes -- as harsh as it is by normal standards -- is mild by comparison. In the context of what was going on at the time, I'm not sure the word atrocity fits.
He's presumably referring to civilians of German ancestry (some of whom had been there a long toime), not the Wermacht & Waffen SS.
Neither was I referring to the Wermacht or Waffen SS. It's not like the German people bore no responsibility for what happened in WWII. Yes, it sucks for the people who had been there for a long time prior to the war. But it is what it is. After WWII, should anyone be surprised that a country recently invaded by Germany wouldn't want a sizable German population in their borders? It would strike me as the height of idiocy not to make sure you didn't have Germans in your borders. Hitler used German populations in other countries (e.g., Austria) as a pretense for invading them in the first place.
I have no desire to make excuses for the atrocities that Nazis committed in Poland during WW2. I was merely answering the question regarding expulsion of Germans from Poland, which did happen.
And it should also be noted that most of the Germans were expelled from areas that used to be part of Germany, not areas that Germany conquered from Poland during the war.
Also, atrocity is an atrocity. Driving people from their homes through threats (and sometimes more than just threats) of violence is an atrocity that should be condemned. Yes, Poland went through hell and back during the war. Does that make it OK for them to mistreat others in return? Is it OK to mistreat Germans because some other Germans did some shitty things?
Is it okay to mistreat Germans now? No. Of course not. Anyone born after WWII in Germany has no moral culpability for what happened then. I'm not even saying it should have happened that way. What I'm saying is this: After WWII, anything contemporary Germans got, they had coming to them, in spades, and sounds more like justice, rather than an atrocity.
After the Holocaust and WWII in general, you could make a decent argument that the German language should only live on in Hell.
No you could not. Or are you saying that we would be better off today, had Germans been exterminated during and after WW2? To me it seems that modern Germany makes a positive contribution to the World, a contribution that we would lack, had history taken the course you desire. And how exactly would the Allied been one bit better than Nazis were, had they started killing surrendered Germans in their millions?
2) What happened in Germany wasn't some aberration of history, and Hitler wasn't that good a manipulator.
It's become acceptable to pretend that the German people themselves had no part in what happened during WWII, but they certainly did.
I'm not saying that all Germans should have been exterminated, but I did feel the need to react to the equivalency that was being made between the expulsion of Germans from Poland and the actual atrocities of WWII.
Sorry, but after WWII, I can't really see getting all weepy about the fate of the Germans outside of Germany in Europe.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but I do think it has to be said, if we're going to start calling the expulsion of Germans from Poland (and other parts of Europe) an "atrocity".
After the shit the Germans pulled, they were lucky they were allowed to live -- period. After the Holocaust and WWII in general, you could make a decent argument that the German language should only live on in Hell.
First, "limit what types of information your friends can see about you through applications" is mind-numbingly obvious. If friend (check) tries to see (check) my information (check) through an application (check), it will work: No (button).
You might think that it's mind-numbingly obvious, but because of what's classified as an "application" under Facebook, it isn't, necessarily.
Here are some of the things classified as "applications":
Photos
Links
Video
Notes
That's a lot of information that "friends" would expect to have access to. It's very unlikely that someone would intentionally block their friends from access to this information intentionally.
Again, e-mails, IM profiles, web sites... any other time you give information to people, their applications could disclose it. Because, wait for it, APPLICATIONS RUN WITH THEIR PRIVILEGES.
You're still missing it. When Alice runs Charlie's application, it sends information to both Alice and Charlie, not just to Alice. That's the issue. Obviously, if Bob gave Alice friend status, Bob wants Alice to see the profile information, but that doesn't mean that Charlie should have that information, as well. And here's the distinction: Bob's information isn't in Alice's account. It's in Bob's. The fact that Alice and Bob are friends is in Alice's account, but Bob's information is still on the page attached to Bob's Facebook account. It's irrelevant that Alice is running the application with her own user prviileges to Bob's account. The issue is that Alice is, by proxy, granting Charlie access into Bob's information, rather than Bob. Charlie should not be getting such access, because the application is running on Alice's computer, as Alice, not on Bob's. Bob is the only one who should be able to grant access to his own account information. The only way Alice should be able to let Charlie see anything on Bob's account directly is if Alice and Charlie were sitting toegether at her monitor.
The problem is that such an app should not be able to see everything that user's friends have designated as private, because that app is not anyone's "friend".
Again, unlike real applications. Where the application gets all the access of the running user.
Again, you're missing the point. The app isn't the user him/herself. It's an application, and one being run from outside the friend's account, no less. "Only friends can see your profile" should mean "only friends can see your profile", not "Only friends and any apps those friends happen to run can see your profile."
To put this in its simplest terms: I might be able to FTP into a friend's machine with the proper credentials, but that doesn't mean the machine should automatically run any programs as if I was my friend. I shouldn't be able to get into their Gmail account, for example. It's just lax security, and there's no excuse for it.
The Facebook apps shouldn't get higher privileges than actual human beings.
I see no indication that this particular piece of paranoia is true. Please point me to evidence that a friend's application can ever have more access than the friend does.
Have you been paying attention? Let me explain it really clearly:
1) Being someone's "friend" on Facebook only gives you access to their information. If their other friends have the right privacy in place, it doesn't give you access to theirs. (There are several people I know on Facebook who have friends whose profile information I can't see.)
2) A Facebook app does see this private information, regardless of your privacy settings. That's the whole point of the article: You can have your privacy settings set up correctly, and you're still vulnerable if one of your friends runs one of these apps, because you can opt them in to the data gathering by proxy. Not only that, but application privacy settings are separate from profile settings, so just because your profile settings say "Only show my profile information to friends", this means nothing to applications.
Facebook does have a page where you can fine-tune what your friends see through applications, but it's not at all clear from the explanation on the page whether you're hiding the information from your friends (which most people wouldn't want to do) or from your friends' applications (which a lot of people would want to do):
You can use the controls on this page to limit what types of information your friends can see about you through applications. Please note that this is only for applications you do not use yourself:
For all intents and purposes, then, in order to hide information from applications, you also have to hide that information from your friends. Which, not coincidentally, makes the whole exercise pointless.
Basically, your argument could be rephrased as, "Well, of course that botnet software can infect your machine. What did you think was going to happen, when you let your friend e-mail you? Why would you ever give your friend your e-mail address?" The fact that I gave someone a "friend" designation shouldn't mean that any application they run should be able to data mine my information without my permission -- particularly if I've already denied that permission to anyone who isn't my friend (who, it's most likely, the application developer is not).
Now, a developer has written a Linux 'Utility' based on the Facebook paranoia, which graphically illustrates all the information a normal application can get its grubby little hands on. It opens your e-mail, and prints out all the stuff your friends have sent you. Then it opens your IM program, and prints out all your friends' profiles. And their web sites. And, like, OMG, the links to their favorite games they sent you!
Seriously folks. We're getting riled up over the idea that applications run with the privileges of their users? And that they can access the same data their users can? That this is somehow novel because it involves a few web services?
Stop. Please.
That whizzing sound you just heard is the point of the uproar flying right by you.
The point is, Facebook represents to users that they can set privacy levels, and that, at certain levels, only those friends they designate can see the information on their profiles. It's obvious to anyone who thinks about it for 10 seconds that an application that runs with a user's privileges can see everything that user has in his/her account. The problem is that such an app should not be able to see everything that user's friends have designated as private, because that app is not anyone's "friend". If you "friend" someone on Facebook, you don't automatically get to see all the information in the profile of all their friends. The Facebook apps shouldn't get higher privileges than actual human beings. Is that really so hard to grok?
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your email communication.
That's only true in a business setting, and only in relation to your employer, on your employer's mail server.
Your employer has the right to read your email. You work for them, your email is basically your work product, and they can do whatever they want with it.
Your personal email account is another matter entirely. Your email can be subpoenaed, but that requires a court's intervention. Your ISP can't just post your email on a public web page and expect to get away with it. They can access your email because it's on their servers, and they have to comply with law enforcement requests that have court orders behnid them, but if a private investigator working for your wife wants to get information from your email about your infidelity (assuming you were stupid enough to email your paramour), they wouldn't legally be able to hand over the information.
Facebook and its apps work exactly as advertised. It is a site that's ALL ABOUT SHARING INFORMATION, and guess what, that's what it does. When you take a quiz or use an app, it tells you you're granting it access to lots of stuff. I forget the exact wording, but none of this is a surprise. It takes all of a few minutes looking through the developer docs to see that if you write an app, you get access to, well, yeah, everything.
The problem here is that some people sign up on a site that exists to share personal information, run apps that give away personal information and tell you they're doing it, and are then surprised.
No, that's not the problem. The problem is that when Facebook creates a privacy setting that says "Only Friends" can view the information, that's exactly what should happen: Only friends should be able to see it. It's true that the applications all have a disclaimer saying that they can see and use friends' information, but one can easily understand the cognitive dissonance created when Facebook, on the one hand, tells you that you can designate information as private, and on the other, allows applications to violate that privacy without your giving it that permission. It's one thing if an app can access the "private" information of the person taking the quiz. It's quite another when it gets access to the personal information of people who didn't take the quiz, didn't give the app in question the rights to the "private" information, and thought they were dong "all the right things" by restricting their private information to only their friends.
I've no clue what the Men in the Black Helicopters want with a bajillion pictures of people in semi-compromising situations and a ton of half-thought out wall posts and other such drivel, but there we are.
I took the quiz, and posted it to my profile. Mostly, I took it because I do have friends who will take each and every quiz presented to them, ad nauseum, and I wanted to to get the point across that maybe this isn't such a good idea.
I've got mixed feelings about how serious this is, though. I think that Facebook gives people a false sense of security when they promote "privacy" settings that any of their Facebook "friends" can override by taking a quiz. On the other hand, when you start a quiz (or add any application), Facebook immediately pops up a box making you aware that the application can see your information and all your friends' information. So it's not exactly like Facebook is doing it without the user's permission.
The problem I have with the quizzes, though, is that they access this information at all. The only information a Facebook app should really need from a user is:
1) their answers to the quiz
2) their list of friends (to see how their friends answered the quiz)
What possible reason could an app have for needing all of the other information that Facebook apps can apparently harvest?
And I think the "never put online that which you wouldn't want the whole world to have access to" is outdated. I don't want the whole world to have access to my bank account or credit card information. Does that mean I should reject online banking? You need to be careful where you put your information online, and be very aware of where you're granted privacy and where you're not, but that doesn't mean that a website that pretends to keep your information private can then turn around and say, "Well, WTF did you expect?! If you don't want your information public, you shouldn't have posted it!"
As for the value of the information itself: I doubt the information is valuable on an individual basis. Where it could become valuable is in the aggregate. Get enough people to take the quiz, and the data mining implications become...interesting. You start to be able to answer questions like, "How many Facebook users between the ages of 18 and 30 read Dan Brown novels and have seen a movie in the past year? How do they vote? Where do they live? What products do they like?"
Facebook gives apps that kind of demographic information. The bigger Facebook becomes, the more valuable that data becomes, and the more accurately it models trends and habits.
Umm, isn't this simply the Palm Profile feature that backs up your device every night OTA? You're asked if you wish to use the service when you first start your phone, and it can be disabled and rescheduled any time you wish.
That's a good point. A lot of people have taken Palm to task for keeping a list of apps that a customer uses, but with the Pre's backup and restore functionality, I would think that it would be relatively important for Palm to know when the apps crashed, so that the appropriate data can be restored to the phone. Without knowing what crashed when, how do you restore the backup to the appropriate point?
Well, here's your problems.
1) access to 3rd party software though a driver or otherwise has to be licenced or approved. Access to the OS is one thing, that's part of the standard. How an application further uses the data provided by a standards based driver is not the concern of Palm.
I think you've got it a little mixed up here. Access to hardware doesn't have to be "approved" by an application through a license. Last time I checked, Logitech didn't have to license access to Microsoft Word.
2) the device CAN work without this driver, it simply can;t work NATIVELY with iTunes without this hack.
The issue is that there's nothing in iTunes but this VID check that prevents a USB device from working "natively" with iTunes. It's Apple's attempt to convince users that iPods/iPHones are super-duper magical, when in reality, the only reason other players don't work "natively" is because Apple prevents it. (Note: I'm not saying Apple has to allow it, necessarily. All I'm pointing out is that they're using a particularly bad way of excluding other players, and that this exclusion is not based on any real hardware necessity.)
MANY devices sync music from iTunes libraries, they simply access the XML database directly, which Apple fully permits, using their OWN software, or they connect through a licensed plug-in. Palm chose to cheat and avoid writing their own code.
The XML library allows programs to see what's in iTunes. It doesn't have anything directly to do with syncing. And Apple is none too pleased that RIM is using their own software to sync with the iTunes library.
The issue Apple has with Palm isn't really the use of the VID. It's the use of iTunes in general. Apple would prefer none of its competitors use iTunes. The VID was just a way of limiting the functionality of other players with the application.
3) Apple check this USB code for more than "validating the device ID", they not only sync with an app on the device as Palm is attempting to do, but it also MANAGES the device, including firmware updates, software patches, and more; IMPORTS licensed data from the device that were not imported from iTunes directly (introducing the possibility of you loading songs on your Pre from another PC and using iTunes to sync them in to yours); they manage the disk space on iPods that support being used as portable disk devices, including formatting that space; and MUCH more.
By Palm bypassing Apple's cross check of the device, Apple is subject to the burden of code maintenance to account for how to handle the Pre should iTunes identify it as an iPod, and how to handle errors when the Pre either reports an invalid, non-existant Apple firmware ID, or fails to report one at all.
All Palm had to do was either 1) pay the licensing fees and work with Apple to build compatabiltiy, or 2) use any number of freely available apps they could have partnered with cheaper that already took full advantage of the iTunes XML database natively. This is simply bad business, and it's going to end badly for Palm. As it is, they've only moved 200,000 devices since launch day, and their market share, even with a HIGHLY advertised shiny new device shrunk this quarter again.
This may finally break them completely.
This is actually a much more substantial objection, but I still think you're not really understanding how the VID is being used and how the Pre is identifying itself.
In Media Sync mode (which is where the Pre uses the Apple VID), the Pre doesn't identify itself as an iPod. It identifies itself, rather, as an Apple product (which currently could be an iPod, an iPhone, or an AppleTV. The way that the Pre identifies itself isn't device-specific, so iTunes can't feed firmware to the Pre. iTunes has no idea what's actually attached to it, specifically. (iTunes could guess what was attached to it, I suppose, a
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Damn well said.
15-years seems pretty excessive for involuntary manslaughter. Also, I find the phrase "[getting] what they deserve" quite objectionable. It has a connotation of meting out justice. But putting some dumb kid (or dumb adult) in jail for a decade and a half does not bring back the dead, nor does it somehow compensate for the loss of a life.
Quite right. Someone stupid or selfish enough to text or be drunk while driving, and then kill someone should forfeit the rest of their life in prison, at least. Such a person is simply too stupid and/or self-centered to live in society any longer.
Have you ever had to look at your dash to change the air conditioner or flip radio stations? God forbid if you drove into a new area and needed to scan for a new station. I know you've never tried to read billboards or MapQuest routes or try to find that one street sign you're looking for.
Radios now have "Scan" buttons precisely to allow people to pay attention to driving. People looking for street signs are generally a) driving slowly, and b) at least looking at the damn road. And as far as the A/C goes, that should be something you adjust before you set out on your trip.
And all of that ignores the one central fact: Texting while driving is more cognitively taxing than all of them.
Fixed that for you corrections in bold The same arguments applies for and against this.
The argument sort of works at an international level, but it doesn't work as well. How many non-American sites do you think Americans visit? And how many non-American connections do you think there are to American sites? In fact, the Internet is already set up largely along national lines. Amazon has to set up one site for the U.S., and another site for Germany, and it's not just a matter of language or currency. There are items that are legal to sell in the U.S. that aren't legal to sell in Germany (Nazi paraphernalia is the example I'm thinking of at the moment.)
In some sense the idea that the Internet represents a new renaissance of freedom of speech is a fallacy. Nations simply take the Internet and impose their national customs on it. At a national level, it's (mostly) enforceable. Can people find ways around it? Yeah. But most don't, and that's the idea.
Texas may not be able to secede, but they can divide into five states.
I don't know the legalities involved, but I'm fairly certain a state can't create new states on its own. That kind of asshattery would make a mockery of the U.S. legislative branch. What happens when California decides to divide into 25 states to pad their power in Congress?
That's not how it works for the phone system, which is very similar to the internet (connections of wires for transferring communications over many miles). The phone system is controlled by the U.S. FCC but *only* if the company in question is interstate. If the company exists wholly and completely within a state (say, California) then the U.S. has no authority to regulate that company. Only the CA legislature has jurisdiction per the Communications Act of 1934.
The trouble is, when you're talking about a network attack (rather than, say, what a company charges its customers), a local response (and in this discussion, the state level is essentially "local", for our purposes) means nothing. An Internet attack is, by its very nature, national. You can't have hundreds of thousands of computers in one state run one way, and hundreds of thousands in each other state run some other way during a crisis. And even local ISPs have to, by their very nature, have interstate connections. Without interstate authority over those connections, what good is state-level control going to do?
I live in NJ. There's a regional newspaper here called the Courier-News. To get to that paper's site, my traffic has to go through several NY servers.
I just don't see how you're going to stop an Internet attack by working on the local level and handing off responsibility at state lines. It's got to be coordinated at a higher level than that.
I can't wait till my state Texas succeeds from the union. I will also support any other state that wishes to do the same.
States don't have the right to seceed from the Union. That little controversy was settled around 1865 or so.
As to the topic at hand: If the government was to regulate the Internet (above what they do presently), then the 9th or 10th ammendments won't come into play. State-level control of the Internet isn't an idea even worthy of laughing at. It's got to be controlled on the national level, if it's to be controlled at all.
But this isn't really about controlling the Internet, anyway. It's about taking control of a private network that's been compromised.
It'd be great if the government could trust private companies to take care of the problem without getting them involved, but if you think about the physical analogy, you'll see why that's impossible.
If a band of terrorists, guns blazing, busted into a facility that controlled electricity for the Eastern seaboard and took control of the place, would you really want the government reaction to be, "Well, they can take care of it themselves. None of our business."?
"Is it okay to mistreat Germans now? No. Of course not. Anyone born after WWII in Germany has no moral culpability for what happened then. I'm not even saying it should have happened that way. What I'm saying is this: After WWII, anything contemporary Germans got, they had coming to them, in spades, and sounds more like justice, rather than an atrocity."
German descendants in today's Namibia were put in camps by the British (South West Africa, as it was known back then, was administered by them), they lost many family members during the war that had no allegation to the ideas of Nazism, they just went to fight for their country (German nationality has traditionally acquired by blood, irrespective of your birthplace).
I think I clearly stated that I don't agree with the mistreatment of contemporary (to our time) Germans.
Women of all ages were raped by the Russians when Berlin fell, if you are suggesting that such actions are justice, I frankly want nothing to do with your notions of what is fair or not.
If you think that I agree with such actions, you haven't been paying attention to what I wrote. I clearly stated (several times, in several places in this thread) that the treatment of German women and children by the Russian army was unjust. If you missed that, I'm saying it now.
Justice has to do with a civilized institution in which your alleged crimes are judged in accordance to fair laws.
That, I can't agree with. Frequently, justice has nothing to do with laws. I'm not advocating vigilante justice here (because that, too, is unjust, when the wrong person is targeted), but the fact that someone is pronounced "guilty", and punished under the applicable law, or pronounced innocent, and released in accordance with that same law, does not, in any way, mean that "justice" has been done. Justice is the right person being punished for the given crime, and the guilty party being punished in a way proportional to the crime. Guilty people frequently get acquitted, and innocent people get convicted. That's the inverse of justice.
>
What you are advocating is not justice, it is just a different form of fascism.
I'm not sure my original post was "advocating" anything at all. I was merely making an observation. Namely, that human nature being what it is, and given what the democratically-elected German government did to the rest of Europe, and the German government's stated rationale for doing so, moving Germans into the boundaries of Germany proper was a fairly obvious thing to do.
Consider this: If the Germans hadn't been moved into Germany after the war, and the citizens of those European countries had taken it upon themselves to drive the Germans out, would that have been better? The other factor you have to keep in mind is this: German nationals had been fed a steady diet of pseudo-scientific (to put it kindly) ethnophobic bullshit by the Nazis which didn't particularly make them good neighbors in multicultural societies. That was another reason to make sure Germans were (mostly, although not by any means entirely) within Germany.
You can't wipe human nature out of existence merely because it can sometimes be unjust. Instead, you have to work around it, going for the best solution you can, out of a list of bad options.
Is it okay to mistreat Germans now? No. Of course not.
But had things went the way you wanted them to go, there would be no Germans today.
I didn't say that. Allow me to clarify: After what happened, anything that happened to them, they had coming. I don't support the Soviet army's abuse of the German women (rapes, etc.), but the mere movement of Germans to areas inside Germany? Yeah, I think that was only prudent. The logistical problems associated with it were terrible, of course, but that was not intentional, as far as I can tell, and there needs to be some degree of volition to call it an atrocity.
So, guilt by association? Are all Americans therefore responsible for what happened during Bush Administration? Or does that privilege only extend to WW2-era Germans? Also, if all Germans were guilty, does that mean that people like Von Stauffenberg are guilty as well? How about Erwin Rommel?
I figured that question was coming. Glad you asked.
The easiest case to answer is Stauffenberg. He recognized what Hitler's regime was, and tried to put a stop to it. Did he do it belatedly? Of course. But the fact of the matter is, the man did have a conscience, and eventually paid with his life for it. Seems to me a pretty clear case of a person doing their penance.
The same could be said of Rommel. While he participated in the war, he refused to commmit war crimes, and actively opposed Hitler when he saw who Hitler was.
I don't think either Rommel or Stauffenberg can be completely absolved of their involvement in Hitler's regime, simply because they knew what the Nazi party was about better than most. However, unlike the vast majority of their countrymen (inside and outside of the military) they stood up to it. In addition, they understood what honor in the military service meant, which was one of the reasons they opposed Hitler, in the end. They weren't just mindless drones going along to get along. And in the end, they paid for their support of Hitler with their lives, so their culpability was paid for, to the extent it could be.
Now, on to the United States under the Bush administration.
Anything that Bush said he was going to do during the election, anyone who voted for him is responsible for. (If you didn't vote for him, then you're not culpable, but I would suggest you should look at the election results from the 1933 German election. While the NSDP didn't get a majority, no hanging chads came into play. The support of the German National People's Party put them over the top.) If he didn't say he was going to do it, anyone who voted for him can't be held responsible for those actions directly. (They're responsible in the sense that they did vote for him, of course, but it's not the same kind of direct moral responsibility as if you knew what he was going to do.) So, in certain respects, it's not a black-and-white thing, because in the case of Bush, there was some amount of "playing to the middle" involved, where an American politician doesn't usually shout it from the rooftops if his positions would be conisdered far-left or far-right.
Hitler's NSDP party had no such subtlety. If you were paying any kind of attention at all to their platform and their 25 points, you knew what you were in for, in broad form, when you voted for him. The 25 points of the NSDP party basically called Jews enemies of the state, declared it illegal for Jews to engaged in many activities, and declared that the penalty for crimes should be death. They didn't directly call for the death of the Jews, but all the dots were connected, if you read their platform. So voting for Hitler was quite a different thing for voting for any modern president. In order to make a comparison to Americna history, you'd probably have to compare it to voting for John C. Breckenridge in the election of 1860.
We aren't taking about the German people. We're talking about people of German ancestry living in other countries. What did they do? Did they elect Hitler?
We are talking about Germans living inside of Germany. Or did I miss the part where Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria invaded themselves? The issue isn't that the Germans in the other countries did anything (other than offer no support to their adopted countries when they were being invaded). The issue is the motivation this gave Germans living inside Germany to claim that territory. That's what moving Germans into (post-WWII) German territory was supposed to prevent.
Then the Americans are idiots, the French are idiots, the Belgians are idiots and so are the British. The latter even have one as their head of state. Windsor my arse, her real surname is Von Hohenstollen Schleswig-Holstein-Pilsner or something like that.
You have noticed the passage of 60 some-odd years, as well as the strong anti-Nazi laws now in place in Germany, haven't you? Not to mention the whole breakup-unification cycle that's gone on since then? Back when the relocation of the German refugees was taking place, none of that was in existence. You had anti-Nazi sentiment, naturally enough, but it was nothing like it is today, where "Nazi" and "evil" are essentially synonymous. That took the full uncovering of the Holocaust and the publicity of the Neuremberg trials to accomplish. You might also take notice of the fact that the Allied powers involved all looked at German reunification as a something fraught with danger for Europe and the rest of the world.
Oh, and about the queen of Great Britain? Her German ancestry goes back hundreds of years. The Queen Mother actually was intensely anti-Nazi during the war.
The Russians are doing it now. I'd say the fault lies with megalomaniac leaders, not with ordinary people who happen to find themselves on the wrong side of an arbitrary line on a map, but then I'm not a racist crackpot who believes in collective punishment like you.
Three points:
1) Who enables these leaders to do what they do?
2) Again, "German" isn't a race, so even if I was against all Germans (which I'm not), "racism" wouldn't apply here.
3) While the results of the movement were disastrous for the people involved, the expulsions were not "collective punishment" in any real sense. Germans were moved back into Germany (albeit, into the new borders) to avoid a repeat of what had happened before. Poland, in particular, had been fighting "Germany" (in one form or another) centuries before there even was a unified Germany. Making sure the Germans stayed in Germany was meant to prevent the kind of bloodshed that having such ethnic pockets in other countries promoted.
Most of the Germans we are talking about here were living within the German borders before the war. Two of the largest criminals of the 20th century (Hitler and Stalin) teamed up to divide Poland amongst Germany and the Soviet Union. Since the Soviet Union won the war, they got to keep (mostly) their part of the deal. Instead (and to get rid of the Polish population living there) Poland got new territory from Germany. This is why suddenly so many Germans lived "within the borders of other countries". Yes, I know there are other cases, like the Germans living in Czechoslovakia...
I'll agree that Stalin, in a perfect (or even better than average) world wouldn't have gotten as much out of the deal at Potsdam as he did. However, on balance, the Cold War between the U.S. and then-Soviet Union was a better result for the world than a Cold War between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, which would have left many more dead in its wake than WWII eventually did (e.g., finishing off the Jews entirely, to start with). I simply don't see how the Allies could have taken on Hitler entirely alone. It was the suicidal mission against Russia that eventually led to the German defeat.
Me neither. This is why I wrote about the dangers of racism *and* nationalism. Both of which played a big role in WWII. I also have no problem with being anti-Nazi-Germany. But one should not forget that people have their nationality rather independently from the current politics of their country.
Under most circumstances, I'd buy that, except for the fact that the Nazi party had absolutely no subtlety concerning its goals during its rise to power. This isn't a case where people were duped by a deceptive smooth talker. They were who would be persecuted, and those groups were persecuted. The 25 Points don't mention executions for Jews explicitly, but check out #18, keeping in mind all the new restrictions the 25 Points lay out for Jews:
18. We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, Schieber and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.
It's not the worst thing that happened. And it clearly can only be judged in the historic context. But even then, it is something that should not have happened. A large scale annexation and expulsion of millions of people is a crime. And, in the grand scheme of things, we are not talking about some spontaneous actions by people traumatized by suffering from the German invasion and occupation. We are talking about an operation planned and orchestrated by politicians/leaders, most of all Stalin, who also used other opportunities to prove that his valuation of human life and dignity was not much further developed than that of the Nazis.
Clearly, Stalin rates right up there with Hitler as one of the 20th century's greatest scumbags. No argument there. And I won't defend the behavior of the Soviet army. But do you really see a rational way for this to have gone down other than the German expulsion from areas outside of what became Germany after the war? Again, how safe could one possibly feel with a large German population in one's borders, given what had just gone on? Does that mean I support wholesale slaughter? No. But the simple movement (coerced or not) of Germans to within Germany's new borders (again, leaving aside the activities of the Soviet army against the populace) barely rates a mention when compared to the acts of inhumanity committed during that war.
1) Nationality is also a part of 'race'
No, it's not. Race transcends national borders. The Spansih are not a different "race" than the Portuguese. The English aren't a different "race" than the French or Germans. The real genetic divergence (small as it is to begin with) begins when you start looking at Europeans vs. Asians vs. Africans. Then you can start talking about "race" in a meaningful way.
2) The Expulsion was an atrocity. As was the relocation of poland. As was all the shit that happened during WWII. Saying that, or saying one of them was, without mentioning the other, makes the other nothing less than that.
Not everything that happened during WWII was an atrocity. The problem is that equating these events makes them both less meaningful. I don't really comprehend how one could equate them and say they both have to be brought to the same level. I'd much rather be forced to move than exterminated outright, wouldn't you?
3) Do you know which one where sympathizers and which weren't? Which had active roles and which didn't? Saying all Germans deserved everything, what could have been done to them, is as racist as you could get.
First, active vs. passive acceptance of Hitler is a fairly meaningless distinction. He was elected and kept in power precisely because he had the support of the majority of Germans, without which he couldn't have done what he did. Was there a German resistance? Sure. But not one that survived the war. Hitler's response to the July 20th plot assured that. And the failure of the July 20th plot itself demonstrates the support Hitler had.
German Guy: [after getting swallowed by Blob-Homer] What did we Germans ever do to deserve this?
[gets an angry look from his friend]
German Guy: Oh, right.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0831240/quotes
4) The GGGP, you where answering to, gave a specific example of poles driving a group out. Nothing more, nothing less. Your "But they deserved it!" was completely offtopic Your "And they could all have been killed instead" even worse.
What I actually said was, "After the shit the Germans pulled, they were lucky they were allowed to live -- period." It was an acknowledgement of reality and of human nature, not a statment of what they "deserved". There are many conditions under which one might say, "Wow! You were lucky you weren't killed!", without actually wishing that on the person. Why? Because one could reasonably make an argument for the elimination of Germany as a nation (i.e., without "East" or "West", and for mass executions of Nazi supporters (which was not without Allied support)). And let's not forget: Obliterating one's vanquished foes is exactly how this kind of thing was handled in days gone by. And even how it was handled by the Germans themselves, on a regional level. (How do you think Britain would've fared, if Germany's invasion was successful?)
Again, in the grand scheme of things, expelling people from a region is a far cry from the kinds of atrocities perpetrated by the Germans. I will say that there's never a justification of the rape of women. But insofar as the expulsion itself? Not really either a surprise or an atrocity, as far as I can tell.
Of course it was an atrocity. Surely one that happened at the end of a chain of events that was started by the Germans, but nevertheless. Kicking out millions of people from their homes is an atrocity, as are the conditions under which all that happened. Of course one main person to blame for this would be Stalin, who wanted to shift Poland westward to enhance his "empire". But also blaming him alone would be too easy.
It was a very fucked up time back then, and nothing can be undone (from any side). But what is really sad are people like you, who more than 60 years later seem to not have learned anything from history about the dangers of racism and nationalism and think that events like the ones described above are OK as long as they happen to people with the right (or should I say "wrong") nationality.
Given what had just happened, and the fact that a German leader used the presence of Germans within the borders of other countries as a pretext for invading them, if you were the leader of a European country, would you want large numbers of Germans there?
Incidentally, "German" isn't a race (despite what the Germans of the day might have thought), so I fail to see how being anti-WWII German is "racism".
To be clear: I don't have a beef with modern Germans or Germany. What I'm saying is that the Germans of the time fucked it up so badly that I think expulsion from their homes -- as harsh as it is by normal standards -- is mild by comparison. In the context of what was going on at the time, I'm not sure the word atrocity fits.
He's presumably referring to civilians of German ancestry (some of whom had been there a long toime), not the Wermacht & Waffen SS.
Neither was I referring to the Wermacht or Waffen SS. It's not like the German people bore no responsibility for what happened in WWII. Yes, it sucks for the people who had been there for a long time prior to the war. But it is what it is. After WWII, should anyone be surprised that a country recently invaded by Germany wouldn't want a sizable German population in their borders? It would strike me as the height of idiocy not to make sure you didn't have Germans in your borders. Hitler used German populations in other countries (e.g., Austria) as a pretense for invading them in the first place.
I have no desire to make excuses for the atrocities that Nazis committed in Poland during WW2. I was merely answering the question regarding expulsion of Germans from Poland, which did happen.
And it should also be noted that most of the Germans were expelled from areas that used to be part of Germany, not areas that Germany conquered from Poland during the war.
Also, atrocity is an atrocity. Driving people from their homes through threats (and sometimes more than just threats) of violence is an atrocity that should be condemned. Yes, Poland went through hell and back during the war. Does that make it OK for them to mistreat others in return? Is it OK to mistreat Germans because some other Germans did some shitty things?
Is it okay to mistreat Germans now? No. Of course not. Anyone born after WWII in Germany has no moral culpability for what happened then. I'm not even saying it should have happened that way. What I'm saying is this: After WWII, anything contemporary Germans got, they had coming to them, in spades, and sounds more like justice, rather than an atrocity.
After the Holocaust and WWII in general, you could make a decent argument that the German language should only live on in Hell.
No you could not. Or are you saying that we would be better off today, had Germans been exterminated during and after WW2? To me it seems that modern Germany makes a positive contribution to the World, a contribution that we would lack, had history taken the course you desire. And how exactly would the Allied been one bit better than Nazis were, had they started killing surrendered Germans in their millions?
1) "German" isn't a "race".
2) What happened in Germany wasn't some aberration of history, and Hitler wasn't that good a manipulator.
It's become acceptable to pretend that the German people themselves had no part in what happened during WWII, but they certainly did.
I'm not saying that all Germans should have been exterminated, but I did feel the need to react to the equivalency that was being made between the expulsion of Germans from Poland and the actual atrocities of WWII. Sorry, but after WWII, I can't really see getting all weepy about the fate of the Germans outside of Germany in Europe.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but I do think it has to be said, if we're going to start calling the expulsion of Germans from Poland (and other parts of Europe) an "atrocity". After the shit the Germans pulled, they were lucky they were allowed to live -- period. After the Holocaust and WWII in general, you could make a decent argument that the German language should only live on in Hell.
First, "limit what types of information your friends can see about you through applications" is mind-numbingly obvious. If friend (check) tries to see (check) my information (check) through an application (check), it will work: No (button).
You might think that it's mind-numbingly obvious, but because of what's classified as an "application" under Facebook, it isn't, necessarily.
Here are some of the things classified as "applications":
Photos
Links
Video
Notes
That's a lot of information that "friends" would expect to have access to. It's very unlikely that someone would intentionally block their friends from access to this information intentionally.
Again, e-mails, IM profiles, web sites... any other time you give information to people, their applications could disclose it. Because, wait for it, APPLICATIONS RUN WITH THEIR PRIVILEGES.
You're still missing it. When Alice runs Charlie's application, it sends information to both Alice and Charlie, not just to Alice. That's the issue. Obviously, if Bob gave Alice friend status, Bob wants Alice to see the profile information, but that doesn't mean that Charlie should have that information, as well. And here's the distinction: Bob's information isn't in Alice's account. It's in Bob's. The fact that Alice and Bob are friends is in Alice's account, but Bob's information is still on the page attached to Bob's Facebook account. It's irrelevant that Alice is running the application with her own user prviileges to Bob's account. The issue is that Alice is, by proxy, granting Charlie access into Bob's information, rather than Bob. Charlie should not be getting such access, because the application is running on Alice's computer, as Alice, not on Bob's. Bob is the only one who should be able to grant access to his own account information. The only way Alice should be able to let Charlie see anything on Bob's account directly is if Alice and Charlie were sitting toegether at her monitor.
The problem is that such an app should not be able to see everything that user's friends have designated as private, because that app is not anyone's "friend".
Again, unlike real applications. Where the application gets all the access of the running user.
Again, you're missing the point. The app isn't the user him/herself. It's an application, and one being run from outside the friend's account, no less. "Only friends can see your profile" should mean "only friends can see your profile", not "Only friends and any apps those friends happen to run can see your profile." To put this in its simplest terms: I might be able to FTP into a friend's machine with the proper credentials, but that doesn't mean the machine should automatically run any programs as if I was my friend. I shouldn't be able to get into their Gmail account, for example. It's just lax security, and there's no excuse for it.
The Facebook apps shouldn't get higher privileges than actual human beings.
I see no indication that this particular piece of paranoia is true. Please point me to evidence that a friend's application can ever have more access than the friend does.
Have you been paying attention? Let me explain it really clearly:
1) Being someone's "friend" on Facebook only gives you access to their information. If their other friends have the right privacy in place, it doesn't give you access to theirs. (There are several people I know on Facebook who have friends whose profile information I can't see.)
2) A Facebook app does see this private information, regardless of your privacy settings. That's the whole point of the article: You can have your privacy settings set up correctly, and you're still vulnerable if one of your friends runs one of these apps, because you can opt them in to the data gathering by proxy. Not only that, but application privacy settings are separate from profile settings, so just because your profile settings say "Only show my profile information to friends", this means nothing to applications.
Facebook does have a page where you can fine-tune what your friends see through applications, but it's not at all clear from the explanation on the page whether you're hiding the information from your friends (which most people wouldn't want to do) or from your friends' applications (which a lot of people would want to do):
You can use the controls on this page to limit what types of information your friends can see about you through applications. Please note that this is only for applications you do not use yourself:
For all intents and purposes, then, in order to hide information from applications, you also have to hide that information from your friends. Which, not coincidentally, makes the whole exercise pointless.
Basically, your argument could be rephrased as, "Well, of course that botnet software can infect your machine. What did you think was going to happen, when you let your friend e-mail you? Why would you ever give your friend your e-mail address?" The fact that I gave someone a "friend" designation shouldn't mean that any application they run should be able to data mine my information without my permission -- particularly if I've already denied that permission to anyone who isn't my friend (who, it's most likely, the application developer is not).
Got it now?
Now, a developer has written a Linux 'Utility' based on the Facebook paranoia, which graphically illustrates all the information a normal application can get its grubby little hands on. It opens your e-mail, and prints out all the stuff your friends have sent you. Then it opens your IM program, and prints out all your friends' profiles. And their web sites. And, like, OMG, the links to their favorite games they sent you!
Seriously folks. We're getting riled up over the idea that applications run with the privileges of their users? And that they can access the same data their users can? That this is somehow novel because it involves a few web services?
Stop. Please.
That whizzing sound you just heard is the point of the uproar flying right by you.
The point is, Facebook represents to users that they can set privacy levels, and that, at certain levels, only those friends they designate can see the information on their profiles. It's obvious to anyone who thinks about it for 10 seconds that an application that runs with a user's privileges can see everything that user has in his/her account. The problem is that such an app should not be able to see everything that user's friends have designated as private, because that app is not anyone's "friend". If you "friend" someone on Facebook, you don't automatically get to see all the information in the profile of all their friends. The Facebook apps shouldn't get higher privileges than actual human beings. Is that really so hard to grok?
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your email communication.
That's only true in a business setting, and only in relation to your employer, on your employer's mail server.
Your employer has the right to read your email. You work for them, your email is basically your work product, and they can do whatever they want with it.
Your personal email account is another matter entirely. Your email can be subpoenaed, but that requires a court's intervention. Your ISP can't just post your email on a public web page and expect to get away with it. They can access your email because it's on their servers, and they have to comply with law enforcement requests that have court orders behnid them, but if a private investigator working for your wife wants to get information from your email about your infidelity (assuming you were stupid enough to email your paramour), they wouldn't legally be able to hand over the information.
Facebook and its apps work exactly as advertised. It is a site that's ALL ABOUT SHARING INFORMATION, and guess what, that's what it does. When you take a quiz or use an app, it tells you you're granting it access to lots of stuff. I forget the exact wording, but none of this is a surprise. It takes all of a few minutes looking through the developer docs to see that if you write an app, you get access to, well, yeah, everything.
The problem here is that some people sign up on a site that exists to share personal information, run apps that give away personal information and tell you they're doing it, and are then surprised.
No, that's not the problem. The problem is that when Facebook creates a privacy setting that says "Only Friends" can view the information, that's exactly what should happen: Only friends should be able to see it. It's true that the applications all have a disclaimer saying that they can see and use friends' information, but one can easily understand the cognitive dissonance created when Facebook, on the one hand, tells you that you can designate information as private, and on the other, allows applications to violate that privacy without your giving it that permission. It's one thing if an app can access the "private" information of the person taking the quiz. It's quite another when it gets access to the personal information of people who didn't take the quiz, didn't give the app in question the rights to the "private" information, and thought they were dong "all the right things" by restricting their private information to only their friends.
The cornerstone of privacy is informed consent.
I've no clue what the Men in the Black Helicopters want with a bajillion pictures of people in semi-compromising situations and a ton of half-thought out wall posts and other such drivel, but there we are.
I took the quiz, and posted it to my profile. Mostly, I took it because I do have friends who will take each and every quiz presented to them, ad nauseum, and I wanted to to get the point across that maybe this isn't such a good idea.
I've got mixed feelings about how serious this is, though. I think that Facebook gives people a false sense of security when they promote "privacy" settings that any of their Facebook "friends" can override by taking a quiz. On the other hand, when you start a quiz (or add any application), Facebook immediately pops up a box making you aware that the application can see your information and all your friends' information. So it's not exactly like Facebook is doing it without the user's permission.
The problem I have with the quizzes, though, is that they access this information at all. The only information a Facebook app should really need from a user is:
1) their answers to the quiz
2) their list of friends (to see how their friends answered the quiz)
What possible reason could an app have for needing all of the other information that Facebook apps can apparently harvest?
And I think the "never put online that which you wouldn't want the whole world to have access to" is outdated. I don't want the whole world to have access to my bank account or credit card information. Does that mean I should reject online banking? You need to be careful where you put your information online, and be very aware of where you're granted privacy and where you're not, but that doesn't mean that a website that pretends to keep your information private can then turn around and say, "Well, WTF did you expect?! If you don't want your information public, you shouldn't have posted it!"
As for the value of the information itself: I doubt the information is valuable on an individual basis. Where it could become valuable is in the aggregate. Get enough people to take the quiz, and the data mining implications become...interesting. You start to be able to answer questions like, "How many Facebook users between the ages of 18 and 30 read Dan Brown novels and have seen a movie in the past year? How do they vote? Where do they live? What products do they like?"
Facebook gives apps that kind of demographic information. The bigger Facebook becomes, the more valuable that data becomes, and the more accurately it models trends and habits.
Umm, isn't this simply the Palm Profile feature that backs up your device every night OTA? You're asked if you wish to use the service when you first start your phone, and it can be disabled and rescheduled any time you wish.
That's a good point. A lot of people have taken Palm to task for keeping a list of apps that a customer uses, but with the Pre's backup and restore functionality, I would think that it would be relatively important for Palm to know when the apps crashed, so that the appropriate data can be restored to the phone. Without knowing what crashed when, how do you restore the backup to the appropriate point?
Well, here's your problems. 1) access to 3rd party software though a driver or otherwise has to be licenced or approved. Access to the OS is one thing, that's part of the standard. How an application further uses the data provided by a standards based driver is not the concern of Palm.
I think you've got it a little mixed up here. Access to hardware doesn't have to be "approved" by an application through a license. Last time I checked, Logitech didn't have to license access to Microsoft Word.
2) the device CAN work without this driver, it simply can;t work NATIVELY with iTunes without this hack.
The issue is that there's nothing in iTunes but this VID check that prevents a USB device from working "natively" with iTunes. It's Apple's attempt to convince users that iPods/iPHones are super-duper magical, when in reality, the only reason other players don't work "natively" is because Apple prevents it. (Note: I'm not saying Apple has to allow it, necessarily. All I'm pointing out is that they're using a particularly bad way of excluding other players, and that this exclusion is not based on any real hardware necessity.)
MANY devices sync music from iTunes libraries, they simply access the XML database directly, which Apple fully permits, using their OWN software, or they connect through a licensed plug-in. Palm chose to cheat and avoid writing their own code.
The XML library allows programs to see what's in iTunes. It doesn't have anything directly to do with syncing. And Apple is none too pleased that RIM is using their own software to sync with the iTunes library. The issue Apple has with Palm isn't really the use of the VID. It's the use of iTunes in general. Apple would prefer none of its competitors use iTunes. The VID was just a way of limiting the functionality of other players with the application.
3) Apple check this USB code for more than "validating the device ID", they not only sync with an app on the device as Palm is attempting to do, but it also MANAGES the device, including firmware updates, software patches, and more; IMPORTS licensed data from the device that were not imported from iTunes directly (introducing the possibility of you loading songs on your Pre from another PC and using iTunes to sync them in to yours); they manage the disk space on iPods that support being used as portable disk devices, including formatting that space; and MUCH more.
By Palm bypassing Apple's cross check of the device, Apple is subject to the burden of code maintenance to account for how to handle the Pre should iTunes identify it as an iPod, and how to handle errors when the Pre either reports an invalid, non-existant Apple firmware ID, or fails to report one at all.
All Palm had to do was either 1) pay the licensing fees and work with Apple to build compatabiltiy, or 2) use any number of freely available apps they could have partnered with cheaper that already took full advantage of the iTunes XML database natively. This is simply bad business, and it's going to end badly for Palm. As it is, they've only moved 200,000 devices since launch day, and their market share, even with a HIGHLY advertised shiny new device shrunk this quarter again.
This may finally break them completely.
This is actually a much more substantial objection, but I still think you're not really understanding how the VID is being used and how the Pre is identifying itself. In Media Sync mode (which is where the Pre uses the Apple VID), the Pre doesn't identify itself as an iPod. It identifies itself, rather, as an Apple product (which currently could be an iPod, an iPhone, or an AppleTV. The way that the Pre identifies itself isn't device-specific, so iTunes can't feed firmware to the Pre. iTunes has no idea what's actually attached to it, specifically. (iTunes could guess what was attached to it, I suppose, a