You are right to be surprised... Even though the US just recently voiced their opinion on the great firewall and middle eastern nations filtering the Internet as 'serious restriction of freedom'. But the fact that the US condemns something just means that it's bad if someone else is doing it, let's look at some history of things the US condemns:
- Torture and other severe human rights violations
- Not adhering to international rules of armed conflict
- Attacking other nations without declaration of war
- Killing unarmed civilians
- Cooperating with terrorists
- Restricting people's freedom to move
- Spying on your own citizens
- Religious nutjobs screaming for blood in government
- Military missions on friendly sovereign soil
- Restricting freedom of speech
- Filtering the Internet
As you can see by the US own standards *they* are 'the bad guys'... these were real condemnations made by the US (and sometimes reason to invade countries and prosecute people). I have literally seen news broadcasts where the US condemns another state for restricting the Internet and freedom and in another newsitem in the same broadcast I see the announcement of these new laws restricting the Internet in the US... talk about a double standard!
Search engine over HTTPS without logs of any kind (like Duckduckgo). This way they can't prove the search engine sent the user to the "worst of the worst" site... You still need alternate DNS and/or proxy/VPN to get to the site, but at least sites can still be found with search engines.
What surprises me here is that they want to block the "worst of the worst" and they haven't even mentioned the tired old kiddie porn angle... that is certainly worse than anything! The only way they could surprise me more is by being so honest as naming the future targets: all sites opposing corporations in any way and all sites that spread generic 'anti-american' messages (a.k.a. terrorists). Wikileaks will be one of the first of the sites we know that will be blocked like this... all such sites after that will not even be known to anyone when they are blocked, not listed in searches and not mentioned in media.
If I were you I wouldn't let these little buggers anywhere near a coffee machine or you'll soon have an office plague on your hands... But at least being quarantined together with the coffee machine beats being quarantined without access to coffee at all!
Flat tax on taxable income leaves room for gradation. If for example the taxable income in your net income - X thousand threshold... It's elementary math and makes for a smoother gradient than tax boxes...
You are way too easy with your 'right' wing / 'left' wing nonsense labeling, it's sad really... People are right wing extremist communist atheist terrorist hippies just because you *think* they are not on 'your' side.
Funny how you point out it's unfair to the poor, and someone else points out it's unfair to the rich... When this is implemented properly no particular *group* should be negatively impacted, the same can't be said for a particular *person* though...
An example of a flat tax that is fair to poor is a flat tax with a lower bound deduction or even the negative income tax which insures a minimum income. Read more about flat tax on wikipedia.
Every tax or tax break is somehow related to the income or size of transaction. The problem stated is that there is too much complexity that needs to be optimized. The natural progression of an optimizing algorithm would stop at the end-state I suggested, it's the only state of optimization that still taxes people based on income (the basic premise of current tax law) and can't be simplified anymore. Once you state that it's desirable for the algorithm to reduce complexity from 10000 laws to 9999 it is only logical that when you iterate this enough you will end at 1.
This has nothing to do with fairness in the sense that you describe (although I assume that the savings from flat tax alone will insure that to get the same X billion income at least 99% of the people can pay less taxes so most people will think this is a pretty fair deal). You could state that the optimization would be unfair if the change in tax deviates more than a certain percentage from the original tax, in that case that percentage would need to be an extra bound for the algorithm. Your suggestion that the system is unfairly biased against the rich is disingenuous at the least, but I suppose you are just playing devils advocate...
Scientific data on this subject is just around the corner! This is being studied on a large scale for the first time in Amsterdam. I am involved in a project that followed the development of children since birth for several years (more information here: ABCD Study). It's the most comprehensive study of a wide range of effects on health of children (36 published papers on a range of subjects).
A new part of the study they are just starting is the effect of electromagnetic radiation on the development of small children. For this purpose they calculated a complete 3D map of all the cell towers in the city of Amsterdam and the radiation exposure the children should have received based on the place they live and go to school. Beside that they ask the parents to fill out a questionnaire about other contributing factors like wifi, dect etc. and some extra information about the childs health. When they have the results for a couple thousand children they can finally calculate the real-life effects of electromagnetic radiation on children. I am very interested if they will find strong correlations between increased exposure and health problems...
Current scientific knowledge is very limited, with maximum radiation levels often based on scary stories about 'potential dangers' calling for bans on one extreme and the measured increase of heat in a bag of water (representing a human) on the other extreme. This is a groundbreaking study that will finally shed some light on this subject with reliable scientific data from a large pool of subjects followed over several years.
The outcome of a good algorithm can be predicted already: a flat tax that is the same for everyone (that is after enough iterations of reduced redundancy). The algorithm won't care for the promises to voters, only about a fair optimum where the people pay as little tax as possible and the taxation costs the state as little as possible netting the highest 'bang for your buck'. The problem is for every 1000 people that will need to pay less and have less paperwork there is always one specific example of some person that does not profit from this optimization. And one of these people will find the spotlight and become a 'representative' (a la Joe the plumber) of a specific group of voters... and the game of adding layers of complexity starts all over again. At the very least this group of disadvantaged will include all the unneeded accountants and IRS personnel, so the tax code needs to stay complex for their job security!
And exactly because of this 'discrimination' they will legally be required to do this in reverse... Everyone will pay the same fee, but the valuable team players get a discount... I think this can be a good thing! When you get good at a game you can play for free or even earn some free stuff. And I'm fairly sure that even people with Asperger can manage to be great team players that contribute to the game... And as to loners, who do you think are the top ranked players in most shooters? It's not the guys with the most active social lives!!!:)
A CSRF can perform an unwanted action, but to post content back to the attacker another method needs to be used (the attacker might request the contact list in the IFRAME but will have a hard time to read it since modern browsers prohibit this). When the attacker has the ability to execute arbitrary JavaScript by means of a XSS exploit this becomes much easier, so this would basically be a CSRF with a XSS to get the result from the request forgery.
When you are logged in or have auto-login enabled for Yahoo it is more likely some smart XSS exploit that loads Yahoo in a hidden IFRAME and posts the address book to their servers by means of the XSS payload. Typically this works with all mayor browsers and does not require your address book to be stored locally or your memory to be read directly.
Thank you very much! The RAR archive (9.2Mb, password 'zeus') contains the Zeus source code alright (almost 60 KLOC of C++ and PHP with 10 KLOC of Russian comments). Interesting to see how the different parts work, I hope someone does an English translation for all non-Russian-speaking security researchers...
Indeed not all competition is created equal, but the situation you describe is typical for competition under capitalism. While competition in theory benefits the consumer the problem with price competition under capitalism is that the monetary value is the only cost that is considered (or deemed important). The non-monetary costs in other areas (of which you already gave a few examples) is ignored... But when you take those costs into account and get the real 'price' of the product competition should not be a negative thing (then price competition becomes closer to the ideal theoretical capitalism where competition helps improve technology to produce products cheaper = using less resources).
Competition under capitalism clearly does not work optimally for consumers, humankind or our planet...
600-odd days is really good for MySQL! If you want better stability go for PostgreSQL next time (also quirky, but in my experience much more stable when using more complex queries).
Competition as opposed to monopolies is a good thing. Coexisting diversity sounds great but it can't exists without some competition (money/peope/limited resources) otherwise it would be a cartel (with price fixing etc.). Corporations are entities that come and go (which isn't a bad thing) in never ending change. There are only two situations where mayor changes stop: monopoly and cartels. These two 'deadlock' situation make it very hard for new change to occur in that market... so they are both very much unwanted (from a consumer perspective obviously).
You warn all the people wanting [platform X] to win (causing a monopoly), but we can warn you just the same for wanting coexisting diversity (causing a cartel). Both are unwanted and should be avoided.
I think it's rational to distrust sources that repeatedly lied to you. It's irrational to just believe any source that disagrees with sources you distrust... The problem is that some conspiracies seem fairly rational and have no obvious facts that contradict it. When conspiracies become better and better and regular news outlets become worse and worse there will be a point where you can't distinguish fact from fiction anymore... It's like a news variant of Poe's law!
Yeah, it's a bit of both... We are being lied to by media / governments and by our self delusion online... Neither is the full story. The problem is distinguishing the lie from the truth is becoming more and more impossible for people...
What? Saddam Hussein got his trial before his harsh and swift execution? This is news for me... It appears to me both these men were considered a sticky mess of dangerous information they would rather silence as quickly as possible than really bring to justice... And Osama was 'buried at sea'? Fuck that shit, it's a much too convenient closed case... They never had any intention of gaining intel leading to the financiers and masterminds of the terrorist network.
Oh wow, it's almost like Google Docs, only a little late to the party!
I have MSO2010 (hardly ever need it, but still) but for online collaborative editing I always use Google Docs. Both are 'free' and look OK, but I trust Google to do a better job at their search integrates with GMail so I can find relevant files in the bulk fast.
I'm willing to pay for good entertainment but on my terms. If I spend 100 euro this month on movies and series I think that's fair, but they will probably not be satisfied until I pay 100 times as much for all the other stuff I downloaded. I already pay double for TV and DVDs (with the same content), I pay tax on blank media, I pay for cinema (although I believe that is a truly separate thing I'm willing to pay for), and they also want people to pay for each new format so playing a DVD on your PSP/MP4/mobile would mean paying again (good thing that fair use is still upheld, but it illustrates how far they are trying to go). They made it illegal (via DMCA) to modify any hardware or software you own that can potentially be used to copy media (which I believe infringes on my right to do whatever they fuck I want with what I own). Furthermore it's sickening that downloading few movies can cause a lawsuit against you with a verdict that will essentially bankrupt you while those same movies can be streamed for 3 euro, the damage done to peoples lives is in absolutely no relation to their losses. And last but not least they force their commercials and other crap on you when you just want to watch what you paid for (see this chart).
Slashdotters generally care about their privacy and like to use simple tools that do one thing good so that's why I link this site here.
I agree their regular results are not always the very best, but the box at the top is for 50% of my searches what I need if I type something into the search bar... And I love the !bang syntax!
No, Google does just does not really qualify as 'simple' anymore. Once too many features are added it is not the #1 simple search by de-factor elimitation. I did not claim duckduckgo is the new #1, because that is a personal preference and clearly not decided by any majority like you point out. It's just that the thing that made Google great is exactly what it sucks at now... they may still have a huge search volume (and so does Bing), but that is beside the point. People who want a basic search and get to the best results fast are looking for the next Google...
Slashdot Mirror
You are right to be surprised... Even though the US just recently voiced their opinion on the great firewall and middle eastern nations filtering the Internet as 'serious restriction of freedom'. But the fact that the US condemns something just means that it's bad if someone else is doing it, let's look at some history of things the US condemns:
- Torture and other severe human rights violations
- Not adhering to international rules of armed conflict
- Attacking other nations without declaration of war
- Killing unarmed civilians
- Cooperating with terrorists
- Restricting people's freedom to move
- Spying on your own citizens
- Religious nutjobs screaming for blood in government
- Military missions on friendly sovereign soil
- Restricting freedom of speech
- Filtering the Internet
As you can see by the US own standards *they* are 'the bad guys'... these were real condemnations made by the US (and sometimes reason to invade countries and prosecute people). I have literally seen news broadcasts where the US condemns another state for restricting the Internet and freedom and in another newsitem in the same broadcast I see the announcement of these new laws restricting the Internet in the US... talk about a double standard!
Oh land of the free, how deep you have fallen...
Search engine over HTTPS without logs of any kind (like Duckduckgo). This way they can't prove the search engine sent the user to the "worst of the worst" site... You still need alternate DNS and/or proxy/VPN to get to the site, but at least sites can still be found with search engines.
What surprises me here is that they want to block the "worst of the worst" and they haven't even mentioned the tired old kiddie porn angle... that is certainly worse than anything! The only way they could surprise me more is by being so honest as naming the future targets: all sites opposing corporations in any way and all sites that spread generic 'anti-american' messages (a.k.a. terrorists). Wikileaks will be one of the first of the sites we know that will be blocked like this... all such sites after that will not even be known to anyone when they are blocked, not listed in searches and not mentioned in media.
Doubleplus goodmove Minitrue!!!
If I were you I wouldn't let these little buggers anywhere near a coffee machine or you'll soon have an office plague on your hands... But at least being quarantined together with the coffee machine beats being quarantined without access to coffee at all!
Ban everything from orbit!
Flat tax on taxable income leaves room for gradation. If for example the taxable income in your net income - X thousand threshold... It's elementary math and makes for a smoother gradient than tax boxes...
You are way too easy with your 'right' wing / 'left' wing nonsense labeling, it's sad really... People are right wing extremist communist atheist terrorist hippies just because you *think* they are not on 'your' side.
Funny how you point out it's unfair to the poor, and someone else points out it's unfair to the rich... When this is implemented properly no particular *group* should be negatively impacted, the same can't be said for a particular *person* though...
An example of a flat tax that is fair to poor is a flat tax with a lower bound deduction or even the negative income tax which insures a minimum income. Read more about flat tax on wikipedia.
Every tax or tax break is somehow related to the income or size of transaction. The problem stated is that there is too much complexity that needs to be optimized. The natural progression of an optimizing algorithm would stop at the end-state I suggested, it's the only state of optimization that still taxes people based on income (the basic premise of current tax law) and can't be simplified anymore. Once you state that it's desirable for the algorithm to reduce complexity from 10000 laws to 9999 it is only logical that when you iterate this enough you will end at 1.
This has nothing to do with fairness in the sense that you describe (although I assume that the savings from flat tax alone will insure that to get the same X billion income at least 99% of the people can pay less taxes so most people will think this is a pretty fair deal). You could state that the optimization would be unfair if the change in tax deviates more than a certain percentage from the original tax, in that case that percentage would need to be an extra bound for the algorithm. Your suggestion that the system is unfairly biased against the rich is disingenuous at the least, but I suppose you are just playing devils advocate...
Scientific data on this subject is just around the corner! This is being studied on a large scale for the first time in Amsterdam. I am involved in a project that followed the development of children since birth for several years (more information here: ABCD Study). It's the most comprehensive study of a wide range of effects on health of children (36 published papers on a range of subjects).
A new part of the study they are just starting is the effect of electromagnetic radiation on the development of small children. For this purpose they calculated a complete 3D map of all the cell towers in the city of Amsterdam and the radiation exposure the children should have received based on the place they live and go to school. Beside that they ask the parents to fill out a questionnaire about other contributing factors like wifi, dect etc. and some extra information about the childs health. When they have the results for a couple thousand children they can finally calculate the real-life effects of electromagnetic radiation on children. I am very interested if they will find strong correlations between increased exposure and health problems...
Current scientific knowledge is very limited, with maximum radiation levels often based on scary stories about 'potential dangers' calling for bans on one extreme and the measured increase of heat in a bag of water (representing a human) on the other extreme. This is a groundbreaking study that will finally shed some light on this subject with reliable scientific data from a large pool of subjects followed over several years.
The outcome of a good algorithm can be predicted already: a flat tax that is the same for everyone (that is after enough iterations of reduced redundancy). The algorithm won't care for the promises to voters, only about a fair optimum where the people pay as little tax as possible and the taxation costs the state as little as possible netting the highest 'bang for your buck'. The problem is for every 1000 people that will need to pay less and have less paperwork there is always one specific example of some person that does not profit from this optimization. And one of these people will find the spotlight and become a 'representative' (a la Joe the plumber) of a specific group of voters... and the game of adding layers of complexity starts all over again. At the very least this group of disadvantaged will include all the unneeded accountants and IRS personnel, so the tax code needs to stay complex for their job security!
And exactly because of this 'discrimination' they will legally be required to do this in reverse... Everyone will pay the same fee, but the valuable team players get a discount... I think this can be a good thing! When you get good at a game you can play for free or even earn some free stuff. And I'm fairly sure that even people with Asperger can manage to be great team players that contribute to the game... And as to loners, who do you think are the top ranked players in most shooters? It's not the guys with the most active social lives!!! :)
A CSRF can perform an unwanted action, but to post content back to the attacker another method needs to be used (the attacker might request the contact list in the IFRAME but will have a hard time to read it since modern browsers prohibit this). When the attacker has the ability to execute arbitrary JavaScript by means of a XSS exploit this becomes much easier, so this would basically be a CSRF with a XSS to get the result from the request forgery.
When you are logged in or have auto-login enabled for Yahoo it is more likely some smart XSS exploit that loads Yahoo in a hidden IFRAME and posts the address book to their servers by means of the XSS payload. Typically this works with all mayor browsers and does not require your address book to be stored locally or your memory to be read directly.
Thank you very much! The RAR archive (9.2Mb, password 'zeus') contains the Zeus source code alright (almost 60 KLOC of C++ and PHP with 10 KLOC of Russian comments). Interesting to see how the different parts work, I hope someone does an English translation for all non-Russian-speaking security researchers...
Indeed not all competition is created equal, but the situation you describe is typical for competition under capitalism. While competition in theory benefits the consumer the problem with price competition under capitalism is that the monetary value is the only cost that is considered (or deemed important). The non-monetary costs in other areas (of which you already gave a few examples) is ignored... But when you take those costs into account and get the real 'price' of the product competition should not be a negative thing (then price competition becomes closer to the ideal theoretical capitalism where competition helps improve technology to produce products cheaper = using less resources).
Competition under capitalism clearly does not work optimally for consumers, humankind or our planet...
600-odd days is really good for MySQL! If you want better stability go for PostgreSQL next time (also quirky, but in my experience much more stable when using more complex queries).
Competition as opposed to monopolies is a good thing. Coexisting diversity sounds great but it can't exists without some competition (money/peope/limited resources) otherwise it would be a cartel (with price fixing etc.). Corporations are entities that come and go (which isn't a bad thing) in never ending change. There are only two situations where mayor changes stop: monopoly and cartels. These two 'deadlock' situation make it very hard for new change to occur in that market... so they are both very much unwanted (from a consumer perspective obviously).
You warn all the people wanting [platform X] to win (causing a monopoly), but we can warn you just the same for wanting coexisting diversity (causing a cartel). Both are unwanted and should be avoided.
Competition = Good.
It gives us customers a better chance to finally get what we want!
I think it's rational to distrust sources that repeatedly lied to you. It's irrational to just believe any source that disagrees with sources you distrust... The problem is that some conspiracies seem fairly rational and have no obvious facts that contradict it. When conspiracies become better and better and regular news outlets become worse and worse there will be a point where you can't distinguish fact from fiction anymore... It's like a news variant of Poe's law!
Yeah, it's a bit of both... We are being lied to by media / governments and by our self delusion online... Neither is the full story. The problem is distinguishing the lie from the truth is becoming more and more impossible for people...
What? Saddam Hussein got his trial before his harsh and swift execution? This is news for me... It appears to me both these men were considered a sticky mess of dangerous information they would rather silence as quickly as possible than really bring to justice... And Osama was 'buried at sea'? Fuck that shit, it's a much too convenient closed case... They never had any intention of gaining intel leading to the financiers and masterminds of the terrorist network.
He got to fly around the world in his suit spending money!
He was Super-Lawyer???
Oh wow, it's almost like Google Docs, only a little late to the party!
I have MSO2010 (hardly ever need it, but still) but for online collaborative editing I always use Google Docs. Both are 'free' and look OK, but I trust Google to do a better job at their search integrates with GMail so I can find relevant files in the bulk fast.
I'm willing to pay for good entertainment but on my terms. If I spend 100 euro this month on movies and series I think that's fair, but they will probably not be satisfied until I pay 100 times as much for all the other stuff I downloaded. I already pay double for TV and DVDs (with the same content), I pay tax on blank media, I pay for cinema (although I believe that is a truly separate thing I'm willing to pay for), and they also want people to pay for each new format so playing a DVD on your PSP/MP4/mobile would mean paying again (good thing that fair use is still upheld, but it illustrates how far they are trying to go). They made it illegal (via DMCA) to modify any hardware or software you own that can potentially be used to copy media (which I believe infringes on my right to do whatever they fuck I want with what I own). Furthermore it's sickening that downloading few movies can cause a lawsuit against you with a verdict that will essentially bankrupt you while those same movies can be streamed for 3 euro, the damage done to peoples lives is in absolutely no relation to their losses. And last but not least they force their commercials and other crap on you when you just want to watch what you paid for (see this chart).
Slashdotters generally care about their privacy and like to use simple tools that do one thing good so that's why I link this site here.
I agree their regular results are not always the very best, but the box at the top is for 50% of my searches what I need if I type something into the search bar... And I love the !bang syntax!
No, Google does just does not really qualify as 'simple' anymore. Once too many features are added it is not the #1 simple search by de-factor elimitation. I did not claim duckduckgo is the new #1, because that is a personal preference and clearly not decided by any majority like you point out. It's just that the thing that made Google great is exactly what it sucks at now... they may still have a huge search volume (and so does Bing), but that is beside the point. People who want a basic search and get to the best results fast are looking for the next Google...