Look, this guy may be an out of touch jackass, but what he should have said was "These people are not my constituents, and they did not elect me". Look people, I don't call and harass elected representatives from YOUR state and district. He is accountable first to his constituents (the people who voted for him to be precise), THEN to his state, THEN to the nation. remember, his vote on a bill is supposed to be his district's vote. and let's be honest, we don't know how many of them feel the way we do.
Call YOUR representatives in Congress, and let THEM know how you feel about the bill. That is the appropriate and fair thing to do in this case.
Yes, somebody reporting a crime is at fault for the criminal committing more crimes in retaliation. Are you high?
Dude... I can't imagine how you managed to interpret what I wrote as being equivelant to your paraphrased version. You misinterpret what I say and then call that interpretation ridiculous (which it is), and then you turn around to call me ridiculous? Wouldn't it have been more constructive to ask if that's what I meant in the first place? Or did you purposefully go crazy on me just to get my post modded down?
Yea, I noticed a lot of that happening, too. I blocked a lot of those requests across all my security software (from browser to hosts) unfortunately at the sacrifice of breaking Slashdot's dynamic content features. For example, I can't "Load more comments" and when I click to see "hiddent comments" nothing happens. It just says "Working" forever. Those layered pop ups that black the page? Well the page just goes black and nothing ever happens. So my option is to give up my privacy or to use Slashdot in a crippled manner. *sigh* Did your blocking break Slashdot in anyway?
I also remember when the troll was conceived as a person who plays a game of intellectual manipulation to triumph in argument; usually, the troll's does not adhere to the views he expresses. But the features of trolling were often sophistry (for the serious troll), fallacies (for the trolls who don't know better), but most impotantly, the necessary feature is a polemic (i.e. argumet). These weren't flame wars and did not appear as such, and between usenet and oldschool web forum communities a good troll could keep it up for days, weeks, even months. Most often the troll is outed after someone discovers the user in concurrent or prior participation in other troll-like threads there and elsewhere (trolls often used the same handles and accounts across sites and services). These people I am now forced to call Original Trolls, or OT, to distinguish from what people call trolls now. Sure, some nominal trolls pulled off similar pranks, like the markov text people, always good for a chuckle.
But then came the forum ninjas, those guys who start off as OT's might - with sincere comments - and quickly abandon the discussions they've started. But then someone started calling these people trolls, and then it was open season: You were a troll if you caused any kind of dischord, intended or not. How many times have we seen a thread start out innocent enough, only to go up in flames, and people almost always accuse the OP instead of the person in the thread who lit the matches? Yea, people really don't care to be discerning about who is a troll these days.
The worst kind of troll, if you ask me, is the troll crier. This is the user who casually labels other users as a troll, without justification. And once the name sticks, it is hard to shake, as there is no recourse for the accused to defend himself as not a troll. Meanwhile the troll crier, like one who cries witch, can point to anything as evidence for his claim. Bad crops means a witch, right? So what makes a troll? Anything, the troll crier doesn't even care, not that he needs to prove his point. And that's just the kind of thing a troll might do. Hmm. Something to think about the next time you find yourself dismissing users because of your local troll crier.
I really don't think deadly force action by police OR by response from the target is the danger we should be discussing. Believe it or not, police try to make an effort to ascertain the veracity of their intel before making a move like you've imagined.
Besides, statistically speaking, THAT scenario is not why there are strict penalties for fraudulent crime reports. The scenario I've already mentioned is why: the police are unable to respond to actual crimes when they are occupied with unreal crimes/emergencies. The danger is not for the police and their target, but for the heart attack victim across town who has to wait an extra 5 minutes for emergency responders. How is that for insightful.
Props to Krebs for appropriately calling the events kinds of a "deadly prank". When Law enforcement deploys assets to faux crimes they lose resources to deal with actual crimes, and that is the threat implied here. Ethical choice for Krebs is clear, if this happens again, he needs to stop chucking rocks at that bee hive unless he can immediately contain it, because otherwise he becomes responsible for the potentially deadly circumstances created by those pranks.
Spy agencies are still not allowed to share most intelligence information arbitrarily, whether the subject is domestic or not. These roadblocks ensure the safety and reliability of each agency's intel, and provide confidence in policy decisions based on that intel (legislative, military, etc).
But spy agencies already could look at your financial information, independently. That is not a concern to me. Smart citizens already know Obomacare provides a stipulation that states, payments made electronically to health providers constitutes a waiver for the federal government to examine that individual's financial accounts from the bank who disbursed to the health provider. (So you have to pay in cash if you don't want the feds digging into your financial records because of a sore throat.)
What is a concern is that the intel each agency now has the access to that financial information regardless. And this concerns me because it can easily be used against a citizen. Say, you're behind on your student loans, the government can check your bank account, determine that you have funds to pay a monthly minimum they've decided you ought to pay, then they can order your physician not to provide health care to prevent you from spending that money on the doctor,... basically they won't LET you get your health care until you've paid your other dues...
Another cause for concern is that, well, the agencies are using the same intel. that's a bad paradigm. In the intel world, redundancy and duplication of data is a good thing. Unlike in computer science land, in intel, that kind of thing actually encourages data accuracy and confidence, it reduces the possibility of tampering, and is a specific tactical tool in international anti-intel. (Think about it like this: Texas Hold 'Em wouldn't be an easier game to beat if all the players didn't share a deck and also share a hand. And if an attacker manipulates the deck, all players are equally affected.)
So I'm wondering. What is the priority my government has to monitor my financial data? And why is it so important that all spy agencies need to share that data, from one single source, when they already were allowed to collect that data independently as their investigation warranted? Is this about stopping crime or is it about providing means to extract every cent from every citizen? If the government was having trouble tracking drug cartel finances before, how is this supposed to help? The cartels were already beating the system. So it affects the bad guys zero, and the good guys by one. Really, what is the priority here?
Were you elected to make laws? Oh, so you're NOT part of the legislative branch. So then wtf are you doing with this ruling? If you have a problem with what the legislatures have done, you need a better reason than "it's a scam". Oh, I don't know, like say, it's something that conflicts with current law or the state's constitution. Well, I see that you've made that claim. So the legislators and/or police would have to appeal, which would cost quite a bit of money and risk their own jobs next election season. And since you're from a state where your job depends on you being elected as well, it's no surprise you do something that resonates with the popular vote. Yea, sounds like you're the scam to me.
Scientists have no rational basis to distinguish between "ethically right" and "that which benefits the organism". Thus conventionally immoral things like lying, cheating, stealing, are not a moral concern for a scientist (aside from arbitrary preference). Why shouldn't they plagiarize?
The sad, pathetic fact is you need to mine the data to find relevant information. Humans themselves don't have the time or patience to do this type of research manually, and it's an unrealistic burden that we should all be equipped with data mining and analytical tools just so we can use google's otherwise useless map of the web to find out, for example, whether prednisone can cause intense suicidal ideation when given in combination with fluoxetine. (Which is semi-standard FDA packaging warning for prednisone, but good luck finding official citations to this fact among your first three google search results pages...) if your results were like mine you got a dozen auto-gen'ed pagecopies full of chat bots in floating div's. The other dozen results, google lists strong matches in its page summary, but text containing the match is nowhere to be found on the linked result. How productive!
Trying to use google to do your own drug interaction homework is a total nightmare.
I predicted in a thought out post here on/. that the White house petition system was a joke, and that the White house is not the legislative body of the U.S. government and could do nothing of itself to affect the requested legal changes. I got modded down, as I recall. For being uninformative, ignorant, flamebait, what was it? Nevermind, now I'm vindicated. Wow. And I was so ignorant before.... so I wonder how many days I'll be "sitting in the corner" for having THIS opinion on/.
And it shows, after all, N. Korea is exemplary in this world for civil rights, civil liberties, and its committment to freedom is simply outstanding. So you go, you pirates; you stalwarts of intellectual freedom; you go with N. Korea, and show the world what personal freedom really means.
I know Linchpin theory is a lame reference, but this story does suggest its validity.
tldr: The Riot program can be used for social engineering, but social engineering can be used to render its inferences invalid and therefore dangerously unreliable.
Any chance this system can be used to trigger events, like, say, riots? Think about it. It's easy to observe social network and make statistical inferences about group behavior afk or not.
But that behavior is affected by the very data being measured; it is a dependent variable, so shouldn't it be possible to manipulate the data, and therefore determine with some choice the value of that variable?
Just like a flamewar on a message board can be ignited intentionally by a single calculated comment (c.f. oldschool troll, or the Real Original Troll), so intelligence agencies may replicate that phenomenon, giving them the power to stop riots before they happen, to disrupt them as they are happening, or more important, to cause them. And it can be used effectively to manipulate anything from political attitudes, voting trends, personal values, you name it.
FTA:
"We know where Nick's going, we know what Nick looks like," Urch explains, "now we want to try to predict where he may be in the future."... The video shows that Nick, who posts his location regularly on Foursquare, visits a gym frequently at 6am early each week. Urch quips: "So if you ever did want to try to get hold of Nick, or maybe get hold of his laptop, you might want to visit the gym at 6am on a Monday."
They act like they are neutral observers. Is it inconceivable they can provoke Nick to tend toward behavior they determine? That's how marketing works, that's how the past two U.S. presidential campaigns worked. Does Nick post politics at 9pm after a few drinks with friends at a bar? Does he check in Foursquare at 7pm at the bar? So present to him some political advert around 7pm, and see if that influences his 9pm rants. Make sure he and his friends discuss the exact political issue you want them to discuss. And nothing you don't want them to discuss.
That being said, it shouldn't be too difficult to thwart the system. Nick could use deceit tactics and cause Riot to make the wrong predictions. A terrorist or drug cartel would surely understand the importance of this possibility. Any government relying on the software is liable to deceit. Hell, a foreign government like China or North Korea could just enslave citizens to create deceitful social network data, observe how the intelligence and/or military agencies of State XYZ reacts, and use that to model the information process of State XYZ for future exploitation.
It seems like a powerful tool for social engineering, but I wonder what degree of confidence they can prove to justify using the tool for security purposes. I guess those details and the math behind it are classified.
People are still making references to the mythical Great Catholic Altar Boy Molestation Conspiracy Project? Mildly amusing at best. In 2004. This post is unnecessarily inflammatory and factually inaccurate, how did this get rated Funny?
Screenshots comparing Bing search results with Google search results. Who will be the first to find the complete lyrics for the late post-goth rock band The Altar? Hint: Album is "Prozac anthems". No cheat: no songmeanings, JUST SEARCH ENGINES. To quantify: The number of false links. The number of correct links and the frequency they occur in the first five pages of search results. The number of search results per page. The total number of search results in five pages. etc. etc. The liklihood of either search engine getting it right in the first two page results. To qualify: Each data set corresponds to the search criteria, e.g. with quotes, without quotes, with certain lyrics entered, without certain lyrics entered, with certain song names, etc.. This is science people, let's go!
/Can't find shit with either search engine, really. Can you believe how hard it is to find As I Lay Dying lyrics?
Jesus christ, last year it was all the crap about how awesome Obama is for his campaign team's electoral power (nevermind the privacy invasions in that case, whereas MS got slag for enabling privacy by default and Google got the Slashdot crowd greenlight for its privacy mining workshops...) now I'm seeing on Slashdot about how Fox mangles the news??
First, stop treating my posts like trolling and start treating them like legitimate complaints as they are. THIS feed, THIS news does not belong here. THIS news is not informative on any intellectual level. THIS news only tells us that Fox got facts wrong. THIS news only tells us to distrust Fox reporting. What has that got to do with being a nerd? Nothing. Media makes mistakes all the time. Fox is the one highlighted here, though!
This reporting has nothing to do with real unbiased science -- the context is clear that the "facts" are juxtaposed against Fox "facts": Fox got them wrong, science got them right. Hence, Fox is not scientific. That is the focus of THIS news. But the important information -- why does the U.S. invest less in solar -- is left to the imagination. You could have achieved a better story without mentioning conservative media WTFs, and got all the good info out there. But no, you did not. THIS is political. It is not nerds, not geeks, and it is not news. It is politics plain and simple.
Smear has the connotation that what is being said is either not true, or exaggerated beyond the point. That is not the case. Fucking/. I realize you have to hate MS because you just have to, but do you have to deliver biased reporting? What good is it for you to call MS out for being reckless with the truth when your own treatment of MS is guilty of the same invalid scrutiny? Is this a news site or isn't it?
I thought pirates were good, ethical people, with an organic set of humanistic, good-willed principles that precluded. And people surely motivated by that philosophy to share unlicensed programs and movies (sorry, I mean information) would not exploit security features of the site that could compromise the security of visitors to that site. Right? Right guys? Copyright holders are bad and pirates are ethically superior, right??
No, no, I'm not trolling. More like making a sarcastic observation. 1000 threads at/. about the self-righteous "information is free" movement, it's amazing how many anyone can adopt that attitude or moral pride without shame given events such as this.
I realized with horror this bug was to occur. The professor reassured me that by that time, mankind will have advanced so much that we will have replaced all the hardware and all the software in the world where this might be a problem. He said Unix itself probably will be replaced. He didn't mean that alternatives would be available, i.e. a different OS users COULD install, or different hardware users COULD use. He meant that man would have taken the effort, such that no person could go out in the world and find hardware/software where this would be a problem (except maybe a museum). I really, really don't see that happening. Maybe critical infrastructure like nuclear plants, military, power grid, water, etc. will fix the problem at great expense to the government, but no way will the rest of the world. And it's not mom and pop stores and small public libraries that will shut down. It's going to be a big problem for a lot of things that daily affect each of us.
"We'll fix it later" should not really ever be the philosophy of any OS.
Here's the thing: You can claim justice for hacktivism all you like, but when someone takes down your site or disrupts your system, you will not approve. Just like a thief has no moral conscience when taking things, will still call the police when someone breaks into his house. The question isn't whether it's laudable (not all civil disobedience qualifies as acts of heroism) it's about whether you want this done to you. The government has an interest in keeping social order and so it makes sense to categorize hacktivism as a crime.
The petition was insane, and so is the Administration's policy that it will respond to all petitions having a certain amount of signatures. It gives the U.S. citizen the illusion that this is a right (see the wording of the Constitution, fx, "to petition the government"); however, the right is easily exercised in other manners. More importantly, it deceives the citizen into believing that the White House is the primary and appropriate channel, and perhaps the very source of fiscal, policy and legislative matters. This deceit can be exploited against the citizen. Observe.
tldr: It is a political tactic used to influence citizens to vote straight ticket and under erroneous beliefs about the function of the President. This is not anti-Obama or anti-DNC.
(1) A President signs a bill into law, and assumes sole credit for its positive outcomes, because the people already assume the President was the source of power.
The rammifications here are (a) Voters for a presidential candidate or party line are obtained by campaign promises from the candidate which really should only be achieved by legislative or judicial action. (b) The candidate can focus his campaign around those false promises (What he will do) and not around the realities: What he will sign into law, if Congress gets the bill to his desk. (c) It allows the candidate to neglect the more important function of the President which is what he will not sign into law.
(2) It directs attention away from our legislative representatives. They are first and foremost responsible to the voters. They are the ones to be petitioned. They are the ones to introduce bills to Congress. All this petitioning the President distracts the citizen from the fact that ultimately a handful of committee members are determining the course of the country. This petition policy of the White House discourages people to spend their time and effort by calling upon their state or district reps. The White House prefers us to think the demands of 100,000 people from 50 different states is how decisions ought to be made, not 500 people from a single district (the way it has been done until now). I.e. it's majority rule, no state lines, no representative in the equation, except the President.
(3) It encourages the President to blame Congress when he cannot mandate a petition the administration perhaps does accept. In other words, "Yes, we like your petition. Now balance Congress to my party line, voter, and it may or may not happen." (It doesn't mean the petition will ever enter consideration by the House, but that message can have a strong effect at the polls) It turns ordinary voters into single issue, straight ticket voters whether they realize it or not.
(4) It is a waste of resources, man hours, and staff time. It's just bad business. But apparently it is amazing marketing, I mean politics. It's not like even 1% the voting population will realize what I've said above.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, this guy may be an out of touch jackass, but what he should have said was "These people are not my constituents, and they did not elect me". Look people, I don't call and harass elected representatives from YOUR state and district. He is accountable first to his constituents (the people who voted for him to be precise), THEN to his state, THEN to the nation. remember, his vote on a bill is supposed to be his district's vote. and let's be honest, we don't know how many of them feel the way we do. Call YOUR representatives in Congress, and let THEM know how you feel about the bill. That is the appropriate and fair thing to do in this case.
Dude... I can't imagine how you managed to interpret what I wrote as being equivelant to your paraphrased version. You misinterpret what I say and then call that interpretation ridiculous (which it is), and then you turn around to call me ridiculous? Wouldn't it have been more constructive to ask if that's what I meant in the first place? Or did you purposefully go crazy on me just to get my post modded down?
Yea, I noticed a lot of that happening, too. I blocked a lot of those requests across all my security software (from browser to hosts) unfortunately at the sacrifice of breaking Slashdot's dynamic content features. For example, I can't "Load more comments" and when I click to see "hiddent comments" nothing happens. It just says "Working" forever. Those layered pop ups that black the page? Well the page just goes black and nothing ever happens. So my option is to give up my privacy or to use Slashdot in a crippled manner. *sigh* Did your blocking break Slashdot in anyway?
I also remember when the troll was conceived as a person who plays a game of intellectual manipulation to triumph in argument; usually, the troll's does not adhere to the views he expresses. But the features of trolling were often sophistry (for the serious troll), fallacies (for the trolls who don't know better), but most impotantly, the necessary feature is a polemic (i.e. argumet). These weren't flame wars and did not appear as such, and between usenet and oldschool web forum communities a good troll could keep it up for days, weeks, even months. Most often the troll is outed after someone discovers the user in concurrent or prior participation in other troll-like threads there and elsewhere (trolls often used the same handles and accounts across sites and services). These people I am now forced to call Original Trolls, or OT, to distinguish from what people call trolls now. Sure, some nominal trolls pulled off similar pranks, like the markov text people, always good for a chuckle.
But then came the forum ninjas, those guys who start off as OT's might - with sincere comments - and quickly abandon the discussions they've started. But then someone started calling these people trolls, and then it was open season: You were a troll if you caused any kind of dischord, intended or not. How many times have we seen a thread start out innocent enough, only to go up in flames, and people almost always accuse the OP instead of the person in the thread who lit the matches? Yea, people really don't care to be discerning about who is a troll these days.
The worst kind of troll, if you ask me, is the troll crier. This is the user who casually labels other users as a troll, without justification. And once the name sticks, it is hard to shake, as there is no recourse for the accused to defend himself as not a troll. Meanwhile the troll crier, like one who cries witch, can point to anything as evidence for his claim. Bad crops means a witch, right? So what makes a troll? Anything, the troll crier doesn't even care, not that he needs to prove his point. And that's just the kind of thing a troll might do. Hmm. Something to think about the next time you find yourself dismissing users because of your local troll crier.
I really don't think deadly force action by police OR by response from the target is the danger we should be discussing. Believe it or not, police try to make an effort to ascertain the veracity of their intel before making a move like you've imagined.
Besides, statistically speaking, THAT scenario is not why there are strict penalties for fraudulent crime reports. The scenario I've already mentioned is why: the police are unable to respond to actual crimes when they are occupied with unreal crimes/emergencies. The danger is not for the police and their target, but for the heart attack victim across town who has to wait an extra 5 minutes for emergency responders. How is that for insightful.
Props to Krebs for appropriately calling the events kinds of a "deadly prank". When Law enforcement deploys assets to faux crimes they lose resources to deal with actual crimes, and that is the threat implied here. Ethical choice for Krebs is clear, if this happens again, he needs to stop chucking rocks at that bee hive unless he can immediately contain it, because otherwise he becomes responsible for the potentially deadly circumstances created by those pranks.
They do all the work so you don't have to!
Spy agencies are still not allowed to share most intelligence information arbitrarily, whether the subject is domestic or not. These roadblocks ensure the safety and reliability of each agency's intel, and provide confidence in policy decisions based on that intel (legislative, military, etc).
But spy agencies already could look at your financial information, independently. That is not a concern to me. Smart citizens already know Obomacare provides a stipulation that states, payments made electronically to health providers constitutes a waiver for the federal government to examine that individual's financial accounts from the bank who disbursed to the health provider. (So you have to pay in cash if you don't want the feds digging into your financial records because of a sore throat.)
What is a concern is that the intel each agency now has the access to that financial information regardless. And this concerns me because it can easily be used against a citizen. Say, you're behind on your student loans, the government can check your bank account, determine that you have funds to pay a monthly minimum they've decided you ought to pay, then they can order your physician not to provide health care to prevent you from spending that money on the doctor, ... basically they won't LET you get your health care until you've paid your other dues...
Another cause for concern is that, well, the agencies are using the same intel. that's a bad paradigm. In the intel world, redundancy and duplication of data is a good thing. Unlike in computer science land, in intel, that kind of thing actually encourages data accuracy and confidence, it reduces the possibility of tampering, and is a specific tactical tool in international anti-intel. (Think about it like this: Texas Hold 'Em wouldn't be an easier game to beat if all the players didn't share a deck and also share a hand. And if an attacker manipulates the deck, all players are equally affected.)
So I'm wondering. What is the priority my government has to monitor my financial data? And why is it so important that all spy agencies need to share that data, from one single source, when they already were allowed to collect that data independently as their investigation warranted? Is this about stopping crime or is it about providing means to extract every cent from every citizen? If the government was having trouble tracking drug cartel finances before, how is this supposed to help? The cartels were already beating the system. So it affects the bad guys zero, and the good guys by one. Really, what is the priority here?
Were you elected to make laws? Oh, so you're NOT part of the legislative branch. So then wtf are you doing with this ruling? If you have a problem with what the legislatures have done, you need a better reason than "it's a scam". Oh, I don't know, like say, it's something that conflicts with current law or the state's constitution. Well, I see that you've made that claim. So the legislators and/or police would have to appeal, which would cost quite a bit of money and risk their own jobs next election season. And since you're from a state where your job depends on you being elected as well, it's no surprise you do something that resonates with the popular vote. Yea, sounds like you're the scam to me.
Scientists have no rational basis to distinguish between "ethically right" and "that which benefits the organism". Thus conventionally immoral things like lying, cheating, stealing, are not a moral concern for a scientist (aside from arbitrary preference). Why shouldn't they plagiarize?
"You wouldn't punch a guy with glasses on would you?"
This is the kind of story that brings me to /.
Less politics, more nerd stuff
The sad, pathetic fact is you need to mine the data to find relevant information. Humans themselves don't have the time or patience to do this type of research manually, and it's an unrealistic burden that we should all be equipped with data mining and analytical tools just so we can use google's otherwise useless map of the web to find out, for example, whether prednisone can cause intense suicidal ideation when given in combination with fluoxetine. (Which is semi-standard FDA packaging warning for prednisone, but good luck finding official citations to this fact among your first three google search results pages...) if your results were like mine you got a dozen auto-gen'ed pagecopies full of chat bots in floating div's. The other dozen results, google lists strong matches in its page summary, but text containing the match is nowhere to be found on the linked result. How productive!
Trying to use google to do your own drug interaction homework is a total nightmare.
I predicted in a thought out post here on /. that the White house petition system was a joke, and that the White house is not the legislative body of the U.S. government and could do nothing of itself to affect the requested legal changes. I got modded down, as I recall. For being uninformative, ignorant, flamebait, what was it? Nevermind, now I'm vindicated. Wow. And I was so ignorant before. ... so I wonder how many days I'll be "sitting in the corner" for having THIS opinion on /.
And it shows, after all, N. Korea is exemplary in this world for civil rights, civil liberties, and its committment to freedom is simply outstanding. So you go, you pirates; you stalwarts of intellectual freedom; you go with N. Korea, and show the world what personal freedom really means.
Anyone who doesn't already know these things probably isn't reading Slashdot.
I know Linchpin theory is a lame reference, but this story does suggest its validity.
tldr: The Riot program can be used for social engineering, but social engineering can be used to render its inferences invalid and therefore dangerously unreliable.
Any chance this system can be used to trigger events, like, say, riots? Think about it. It's easy to observe social network and make statistical inferences about group behavior afk or not.
But that behavior is affected by the very data being measured; it is a dependent variable, so shouldn't it be possible to manipulate the data, and therefore determine with some choice the value of that variable?
Just like a flamewar on a message board can be ignited intentionally by a single calculated comment (c.f. oldschool troll, or the Real Original Troll), so intelligence agencies may replicate that phenomenon, giving them the power to stop riots before they happen, to disrupt them as they are happening, or more important, to cause them. And it can be used effectively to manipulate anything from political attitudes, voting trends, personal values, you name it.
FTA:
They act like they are neutral observers. Is it inconceivable they can provoke Nick to tend toward behavior they determine? That's how marketing works, that's how the past two U.S. presidential campaigns worked. Does Nick post politics at 9pm after a few drinks with friends at a bar? Does he check in Foursquare at 7pm at the bar? So present to him some political advert around 7pm, and see if that influences his 9pm rants. Make sure he and his friends discuss the exact political issue you want them to discuss. And nothing you don't want them to discuss.
That being said, it shouldn't be too difficult to thwart the system. Nick could use deceit tactics and cause Riot to make the wrong predictions. A terrorist or drug cartel would surely understand the importance of this possibility. Any government relying on the software is liable to deceit. Hell, a foreign government like China or North Korea could just enslave citizens to create deceitful social network data, observe how the intelligence and/or military agencies of State XYZ reacts, and use that to model the information process of State XYZ for future exploitation.
It seems like a powerful tool for social engineering, but I wonder what degree of confidence they can prove to justify using the tool for security purposes. I guess those details and the math behind it are classified.
People are still making references to the mythical Great Catholic Altar Boy Molestation Conspiracy Project? Mildly amusing at best. In 2004. This post is unnecessarily inflammatory and factually inaccurate, how did this get rated Funny?
Screenshots comparing Bing search results with Google search results. Who will be the first to find the complete lyrics for the late post-goth rock band The Altar? Hint: Album is "Prozac anthems". No cheat: no songmeanings, JUST SEARCH ENGINES. To quantify: The number of false links. The number of correct links and the frequency they occur in the first five pages of search results. The number of search results per page. The total number of search results in five pages. etc. etc. The liklihood of either search engine getting it right in the first two page results. To qualify: Each data set corresponds to the search criteria, e.g. with quotes, without quotes, with certain lyrics entered, without certain lyrics entered, with certain song names, etc.. This is science people, let's go!
/Can't find shit with either search engine, really. Can you believe how hard it is to find As I Lay Dying lyrics?
Jesus christ, last year it was all the crap about how awesome Obama is for his campaign team's electoral power (nevermind the privacy invasions in that case, whereas MS got slag for enabling privacy by default and Google got the Slashdot crowd greenlight for its privacy mining workshops...) now I'm seeing on Slashdot about how Fox mangles the news??
/Stop downgrading my posts.
First, stop treating my posts like trolling and start treating them like legitimate complaints as they are. THIS feed, THIS news does not belong here. THIS news is not informative on any intellectual level. THIS news only tells us that Fox got facts wrong. THIS news only tells us to distrust Fox reporting. What has that got to do with being a nerd? Nothing. Media makes mistakes all the time. Fox is the one highlighted here, though!
This reporting has nothing to do with real unbiased science -- the context is clear that the "facts" are juxtaposed against Fox "facts": Fox got them wrong, science got them right. Hence, Fox is not scientific. That is the focus of THIS news. But the important information -- why does the U.S. invest less in solar -- is left to the imagination. You could have achieved a better story without mentioning conservative media WTFs, and got all the good info out there. But no, you did not. THIS is political. It is not nerds, not geeks, and it is not news. It is politics plain and simple.
Smear has the connotation that what is being said is either not true, or exaggerated beyond the point. That is not the case. Fucking /. I realize you have to hate MS because you just have to, but do you have to deliver biased reporting? What good is it for you to call MS out for being reckless with the truth when your own treatment of MS is guilty of the same invalid scrutiny? Is this a news site or isn't it?
I thought pirates were good, ethical people, with an organic set of humanistic, good-willed principles that precluded. And people surely motivated by that philosophy to share unlicensed programs and movies (sorry, I mean information) would not exploit security features of the site that could compromise the security of visitors to that site. Right? Right guys? Copyright holders are bad and pirates are ethically superior, right??
No, no, I'm not trolling. More like making a sarcastic observation. 1000 threads at /. about the self-righteous "information is free" movement, it's amazing how many anyone can adopt that attitude or moral pride without shame given events such as this.
I realized with horror this bug was to occur. The professor reassured me that by that time, mankind will have advanced so much that we will have replaced all the hardware and all the software in the world where this might be a problem. He said Unix itself probably will be replaced. He didn't mean that alternatives would be available, i.e. a different OS users COULD install, or different hardware users COULD use. He meant that man would have taken the effort, such that no person could go out in the world and find hardware/software where this would be a problem (except maybe a museum). I really, really don't see that happening. Maybe critical infrastructure like nuclear plants, military, power grid, water, etc. will fix the problem at great expense to the government, but no way will the rest of the world. And it's not mom and pop stores and small public libraries that will shut down. It's going to be a big problem for a lot of things that daily affect each of us.
"We'll fix it later" should not really ever be the philosophy of any OS.
Here's the thing: You can claim justice for hacktivism all you like, but when someone takes down your site or disrupts your system, you will not approve. Just like a thief has no moral conscience when taking things, will still call the police when someone breaks into his house. The question isn't whether it's laudable (not all civil disobedience qualifies as acts of heroism) it's about whether you want this done to you. The government has an interest in keeping social order and so it makes sense to categorize hacktivism as a crime.
The petition was insane, and so is the Administration's policy that it will respond to all petitions having a certain amount of signatures. It gives the U.S. citizen the illusion that this is a right (see the wording of the Constitution, fx, "to petition the government"); however, the right is easily exercised in other manners. More importantly, it deceives the citizen into believing that the White House is the primary and appropriate channel, and perhaps the very source of fiscal, policy and legislative matters. This deceit can be exploited against the citizen. Observe.
tldr: It is a political tactic used to influence citizens to vote straight ticket and under erroneous beliefs about the function of the President. This is not anti-Obama or anti-DNC.
(1) A President signs a bill into law, and assumes sole credit for its positive outcomes, because the people already assume the President was the source of power.
The rammifications here are (a) Voters for a presidential candidate or party line are obtained by campaign promises from the candidate which really should only be achieved by legislative or judicial action. (b) The candidate can focus his campaign around those false promises (What he will do) and not around the realities: What he will sign into law, if Congress gets the bill to his desk. (c) It allows the candidate to neglect the more important function of the President which is what he will not sign into law.
(2) It directs attention away from our legislative representatives. They are first and foremost responsible to the voters. They are the ones to be petitioned. They are the ones to introduce bills to Congress. All this petitioning the President distracts the citizen from the fact that ultimately a handful of committee members are determining the course of the country. This petition policy of the White House discourages people to spend their time and effort by calling upon their state or district reps. The White House prefers us to think the demands of 100,000 people from 50 different states is how decisions ought to be made, not 500 people from a single district (the way it has been done until now). I.e. it's majority rule, no state lines, no representative in the equation, except the President.
(3) It encourages the President to blame Congress when he cannot mandate a petition the administration perhaps does accept. In other words, "Yes, we like your petition. Now balance Congress to my party line, voter, and it may or may not happen." (It doesn't mean the petition will ever enter consideration by the House, but that message can have a strong effect at the polls) It turns ordinary voters into single issue, straight ticket voters whether they realize it or not.
(4) It is a waste of resources, man hours, and staff time. It's just bad business. But apparently it is amazing marketing, I mean politics. It's not like even 1% the voting population will realize what I've said above.