The DNS system as it is now, in the not too distant future, I suspect will be viewed as little more than a Racket. Domain registration should be effectively free. There is no justification for the current registration fees (let alone the BLATANT racketeering fees for xxx and toplevel domains).
Darknets are the future. Ditch your ISPs DNS server as your primary authority (what timewarner does to unresolvable domains, injecting their advertising makes me want to puke).
mod parent up. I've got a mod point left, but had to add my own longwinded comment below, that is perhaps better expressed via the parent comment. I.e. yeah, forcing new software on ISPs and unexplained how its going to be written and deployed is a bad idea. But making lazy ISPs, or rather, ISPs that don't want to scare away their consumers, tell the customer when existing software they are running has detected a known malware traffic pattern, seems like a really good idea. And forcing DNSSec support on ISPs... Ok, I guess my superficial reaction was positive on that one, but upon deeper reflection I don't see how any kind of DNS should be mandated by ISPs, when the job is better done by customer's own OSs and the myriad of global servers they are talking with.
There seem to be a lot of negative comments about this, and perhaps some with subtle good reason. But I really like the idea, if it's implemented as opt-in, and boils down to "if any existing software run by the ISP believes that my computer is running known malware based on known traffic patterns, send mail to either or both of the email address and physicial address I registered during the opt-in process". To me this sounds analagous to the security breach notification laws corporations are subject to in some jurisdictions, and I believe those are generally a good thing as well. Without them, you get the status quo, which is things like Nortel knowing they were compromised for years, and just not caring. I actually think this is likely the status quo at all major organizations. I mean really, do you think if microsoft/google/etc found out that major fractions of their internal infrastructures had been owned by foreign government X for the last 5 years, that without laws they would ever _do anything about it_ if the attackers were friendly enough to just be sucking data about their engineering and customers, and not actually impacting the day to day monetary business? I'm pretty sure what would happen in such a case would be some management screaming at some overworked internal security folks. And then the internal security folks would either brush the problem under the rug, or get fired when they explained exactly how many resources it would take to remotely adequetely stop the espionage threat from government X. Bottom line- forcing by law companies to notify their customers when existing software discovers exploits seems like a really good idea to me. Yes, there will be some resulting pressure to just turn off their internal checks, but honestly, that doesn't bother me at all if when those internal checks were finding things, they weren't going to bother telling the customers anyway. In fact, my optimistic hope, which I think is quite reasonable, is that when the actual scope of these things is forced into the public view, that the horrendous security practices responsible, will actually get remedied in the right ways. I truly don't get why there is so much resistence here to this idea- fundamentally (as I described above, i.e. not mandating new software be run, but just that if existing software already running thinks a customer is owned by hackers, that they take the trouble of notifying the customer.
""I don't regard [Brandt] as a valid source about anything at all..." - Jimbo Wales"
That sounds like a cut and dry +5 perspective. But being the same sort of person as Daniel Brandt (or at least, I presume the same slashdot commenters calling him a looney would call me one as well), I decided to use non-google search engines, and results not already posted here, to try and make a real evaluation of D.B. I found a long thread he participated in, that was remarkably coherent, and intelligent, about his experiments reverse engineering how google works. Say what you will, but technically, on subjects he is passionate about, he comes off very well. In fact, he's so clever, all he had to do was throw in a bizarre offhand comment such as 'tighter than a bikini on a Bomis babe', and it inspired me to google that, and get this wired article, which IMO should negate the +5 of the parent comment. Jimmy Wales does not come off looking like such a valid source , after reading this- http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/12/69880
"Public edit logs reveal that Wales has changed his own Wikipedia bio 18 times, deleting phrases describing former Wikipedia employee Larry Sanger as a co-founder of the site.
Wales has also repeatedly revised the description of a search site he founded called Bomis, which included a section with adult photos called "Bomis Babes.""
"but if we lived in an inconsistent universe there would be no "truth" to speak of -- things would be true and false at the same time, and any claim that could be made would be true."
Really? What does it even mean to say 'living in an inconsistent universe'. Do we live in an inconsistent universe just because one can travel to different locations on the earth, or simply sit and twiddle their thumbs in the same location on earth, as the earth itself moves to a different location in space, and in either case, the result causes very sensitive experiments to show 'inconsistent' results?
I would say that the only 'inconsistency' you tend to find is that you discover the reality of where you live turns out to be more complex than your original occam's razor based theories postulated. And I think many spiritual/religious people just believe, based on what they've personally experienced, that the actual reality is rather more complicated than the simplest models that scientists currently think about. I.e, take a sci-fi theory such as that posited in the rather popular film 'the matrix'. I.e. most of the people inside the matrix, are pretty happy with their worldviews that don't encompass and factor in the existence of the matrix. Because that simple but incorrect view works for them. Likewise, newtons laws for a long time were 'enough' for most scientists. Until of course they started discovering cases where that simple model of the physics of the universe was not enough. Basically Occam's Razor doesn't say that the the simplest explanation is *always* the right explanation, it just says that it *tends to be* the right explanation. And certainly if you hypothesize the existence of God, or Matrix Overlords, it is not hard to imagine that we might be living in an environment where the simplest explanation we see, is not infact the correct one.
To a child, believing in Santa Claus is a very scientific thing to do, because with the totality of what you have been taught by your parents, believing them is clearly scientifically/life-wise advantageous. But of course, when you get older, you see that on occasion you are lied to by authority figures. Now, I'm not saying that God planted a bunch of dinosaur fossils to screw with our heads, I'm just saying, wipe off your third eye and look under your chairs...
Also, my $0.02 on the China government apologists- it's all about the free speech/press. Without that, any corporate working condition reporting lacks credibility. I.e. the above comment 'now how about random inspections over a period of 6 months'. Though I went to the trouble of posting the fixed link because that piece covers that issue pretty well (see aluminum dust explosion issue).
I'm certainly guilty of being a Foxconn/Apple hater, and agree that propogandists like myself are only singling that pair out due to the predicted higher effectiveness of that tactic, versus going after clothing companies, that people gave up caring much about long long ago. But with apple's high profile ipad success, and Jon Stewart's highlighting the Foxconn suicide net issue repeatedly, and it is clear that as unfairly unrepresentative as this example is, it is the one that is resonating with the public the best. To be honest, it's probably all about the Foxconn suicide nets. Nothing makes one look as evil as a slaver, as putting suicide nets outside your factory. Argue your bizarre, and perhaps even correct ethics you want, but that's not going to let up, until I suspect they take down the suicide nets, perhaps after more fully securing all the windows and roof access.
"And above all, no lies. No propaganda. Just the truth, detailing what we do know, what we do not know, and where any potential problems may be."
That is a good sentiment for the long term. But I live on this planet called Earth. And here, we do a lot of lying, a lot of propogandizing, a lot of glossing over what we don't know, and a lot of ignoring problems that can't be solved without sacrificing short term comforts.
My hope, is that the major religions of the world, will go far beyond the roman catholic pope's recent easing of dogmas related to birth control. Such that it becomes politically feasible for richer countries to provide as much contraceptive aid as they do food aid. And that as a result of both of those things, the world population decreases, such that we need less energy, and produce less dangerous nuclear waste (yeah, you could throw something at me for that 'propaganda', but recent history suggests a departure from the safety that scientists can design on paper, and what actually happens in reality (think back to my first paragraph- there is the ideal, and then there is planet earth).
It seems too much to me, that when it comes to energy production and global society, that we are just building up a ponzi scheme, that will come crashing down. And it's all about the desire to have nice, biologically rewarding large families, living with all the modern comforts that cheap energy provides. But the same basic thing is I suspect at play with a heroine addict, preferring the pleasures of the moment, to the long term best interests of those they care about.
I mentioned Invisible Hand, because, yes, I am versed in the theory, though some of the more important writings I may have most recently read 20 years ago in college. Without much certainty, I suspect that if I reviewed the classic texts, that I'd find most express what you expressed, though squarely in the realm where the various actors you mention, are all playing on a level capitalistic/legal field. When you start talking about international trade with key players that still call themselves communist, and actually do run very efficient factories with clearly not so rewarded workers (i.e. call it halfway from the 1st ammendment to slave labor)... then it becomes a different equation. Hence the subject of my comment- that the emphasis on the calculous at hand should be the rules of the playing field, and not the choices made within the rules by any particular players.
Fair labor practices are not something that takes care of itself via an Invisible Hand, be it that of Capitalism or of God. So long as the playing field tells the players that they can outsource slave labor, or even just significantly unfair labor (folks with nothing like 1st ammendment rights), then all players that chose not to do so will quickly lose and cease to exist. The only way to solve the problem (that I'm thinking of right now in full on rhetoric mode) is to have better national standards of who we do business with in the global international trade community. Put standards in place, and make it profitable for international actors to meet the improved standards. But as can be evidenced by opening your eyes in the morning and looking at the world, there will be a lot of political pressure against that path. But hopefully one day the incessant light - fueled by real freedom of speech and the press- shining on exploitive employers/slavers, will cause things to move in the right direction. I hope.
For me it was the Nintendo-DS. Probably the newton came earlier, but I still think the DS w/ 802.11 and enough 3D to do mario64 on a mobile device with all the hardware needed for open source encrypted VoiP calls... But sadly for both of us they are effectively walled software gardens that did not reach their potentials. Both Nintendo and Apple have done ammazingly efficient jobs of stifling the homebrew/end-user-software-developer communities.
The real problem being that memory is faulty. You've heard the statement "if you aren't a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you aren't a conservative at 50, you have no head" (or any of the variations thereof)? People's opinions change over time, and they'll rectify that retroactively in their heads
Thanks for reminding me of the quote, but I don't think it significantly applies to my thinking in this case (though I certainly considered it for a minute). To the extent there is wisdom in that quote, I would say that it shines a light on our societies failure to produce a crop of 18 year olds that are capable of what 36 year olds (like myself) would consider 'fully informed consent'. And while at 36, I consider myself to have a significant respect for conservatives and conservatism (in the mainstream, actual reality, not idealist sense), for precisely the reason your quote has wisdom in it. But at the same time, I blame that traditional mainstream conservatism in healthy part (always keeping in mind myself and the others have more than enough remove for self-improvement)- for this global cultural failure in producing 18 year olds that in my mind are fully capable of giving 'fully informed consent' for sex/prostitution/pornography/new-car/student-loan/etc serious life decisions.
I guess one way to sum it up for me, is that 18 years ago when I was 18, I think I bought into that "The US does not torture" political BS line. 18 years later, after seeing just how much of our global socioeconomic infrastructure is still entrenched with the realities highlighted by the final debate scene in 'the great debaters', and how those themes of dominance and exploitation trickles down into even the typical mundane arena of ordinary mainstream sexual socialization... Well, I don't think my position (not that I've really expressed a clear one) on this issue boils down to the proverb you quoted. I guess I'll throw this old russian one back at you- "Everything our leaders told us about communism was a lie. Everything they told us about capitalism was the truth."
I think you've reduced your end of this nuanced important discussion of ethics to useless oversimplification. But hey, we were modded the same. The world we live in I guess.
If they can consent to having sex with another child around their own age, then why not with an adult?
In answer I'll give a thought from a 36 year old on the issue of prostitution that I didn't consider when I was 18. I think of all women(people really), if you polled their opinions at age 36, as to whether or not the average 18 year old is likely to be maturely educated enough to deal fairly intellegently, and with sufficient basis in knowledge and experience, of life and death issues (such as those with the possible undesired/unintended consequence of the creation of a new life), I'd guess many would say- you know, even 18 year olds it's pretty sketchy as to how wise it is to act as if their consent is the same as what we mean in the ideal when we say 'fully informed consent'. And the same goes with the angle of the serious financial transactions of one's life. I.e. I, and I don't think I'm that unusual in this regard, consider myself to have been extremely naive about the fabric of the global economy at even the age of 18. All I'm really saying with this long winded comment is to take the next steps of your hypothetical journey into kids(or even naive young 'adults') consenting when there is significant $$ changing hands during the same event.
In necrophilic sex coercion is the default unless there was some manner of written contract that the deceased actually gave permission.
This is the real reason I bothered to reply. Kudos for make me laugh, at a scenario that my hypothetical ex-libertarian but still philosophizing mind hadn't ever considered.
Keep in mind that in order to stop child pornography completely, you're looking at having to stop such things as TOR. This is actually a nice new hot topic in The Netherlands due to an investigative reporter going on TOR, finding plenty of child porn traders, and busting a guy who actively sought out children to pretty much abuse.
Good for that guy getting the bad guy, but seriously this is hardly a new topic. This is just the pedophilia/privacy/anonymouscommunication/terrorism debate that has been squarely on the table in clear current TOR-level terms for a decade. What happened was the governments and cultures have seemed to just ignore it, with things like warrantless data dragnets and the USA PATRIOT Act, de-facto stating the global unwritten rules of the game. I.e. governments don't believe in citizens right to secure communications with the internet. Or that's how I see it.
If they are aware, however, then I very much believe they're participating in the crime by virtue of helping to sustain a market for the materials in question.
And this pretty much has to be dictated by law, and it is another of these elephants in the room that have at the same time both been ignored and acknowledged in some inexplicably orwellian way. I.e. the expectation of culpability for running an open 802.11b router connected to your home ISP. I.e. clearly you are not culpable for the content, unless you monitor and become aware of it. But we see the slashdot trickle of laws trying to outlaw that. I'm torn between thinking it's the undecided issue of our age, or if the infrastructural power structures in place just decided it long ago, and any public democratic debate is so obviously unenforceable against the wishes of the elite establishment, that the mainstream hasn't bothered to have the debate. Eh... But I quoted your point because, if the public debate was to happen, and to matter, that is a core decision point (and yes, I know about common carrier laws in the US, but just like journalistic laws, we are in an undefined place where overnight, each individual on the planet has nearly been empowered to be both a journalist and a common carrier, and thwarting that causes a lot of people with a lot of power, to keep their power longer).
What do you think the Muslims would do if Israel cut off access to the "Dome of the Rock"? Would you blame them? When they attack Israel, would you call it "among the most evil human undertakings ever"?
Yes, I'd blame them. That's a perfect example of the harmful influence of religion. If it weren't for ridiculous superstitions that scrap of desert would be as worthless as any other scrap of desert. If you're willing to kill people because of ancient mythology, then absolutely I'm willing to call it evil. Most evil ever? Depends on the scale of the atrocity.
But doesn't the problem also include the Israeli's religious attachment to the same lands? If the Israeli's, the victims of the hypothetical acts you characterize as evil, believed the acts were evil for the same reasons you do, would simply pack their things, and move somewhere else. In the scheme of places with religious significance to humans, I think that particular acre, and surrounds, pretty much rank at the top. The only reason a sane tribe would try to live in that particular spot, is _due to the religious significance_. That, or one hell of a penchant for trolling other religious believers.
I'm a christian, though one without tremendous faith in my ability to interpret, or even be informed correctly about such geo-spatial correlations subject to translational errors and bitrot as those in question here. I.e. I'm pretty sure the LDS folks have radically different beliefs about those geo-spatial correlations. As such, I'm really pretty content that, amongst our global ecosystem of dog-eat-dog humanity, that the people with such religious passion and fervor have a kind of arena over there to duke it out. I suppose that's got the same flavor of cynicism as the belief that after 9/11, there was no way a U.S. leader could have possibly controlled the irrational backlash of domestic vengeance against a strategically disasterous amount of collateral damage in the middle east. I.e, God only knows what the gitmo and abu ghraib perpetrators would have done domestically if the wars hadn't been started. I dunno, random thoughts that have been percolating in one Christian's head for a decade. Maybe more access to street fighter 4, and other virtual combat might be enough to vent the rage to kill that I suspect all of us have burning within us, in a world where we haven't a choice but to fight and kill for food, and sadly, other material items.
"The Hero tortures the Heroine to get her on his side in the grand fight? And he's the good guy?... V for Vendetta is a stupid movie."
Mod parent up. I'm quite glad to see someone bring this up in this thread. I assumed when I saw that piece of shit that the only reason it was made, was to strap liberal dissenters against the Cheney torture policies in a chair, so that the fascists could monitor the brainwave/pulse/liedetectorstats of the subject, at the moment that train switch is pulled in the end, to see if the subject needed more 'treatment' to get in line with the fascists of the day (my only evidence that they were fascists is that they weren't impeached for any of dozens of valid worthy reasons.
In fact, my conspiracy theory is that 90% of the torture we saw in the mainstream entertainment of the time was written for that purpose. V was a stupid piece of shit movie, just like Basic Instinct. Wipe off your third eye folks, and look under your chairs.
Actually, for me, it didn't take long to discover that putlocker was actually a better host for the 'pirated' mythbusters episodes I was watching than megavideo was (on my given hardware/OS/browser-stack platform). The process of working around megavideo's demise also led me back to bugmenot.com which I had forgotten about, to get premium file downloads from videoweed (whose non-registration video player was worse than megavideo's for my setup, but like I said, putlocker is better than both).
tv-links.eu -> mythbusters -> putlocker
I certainly grant the argument that until places like tv-links.eu get shut down, shutting down megavideo only serves the purpose (entirely useful) of stopping one particular group of assholes from profiting from something we should all be doing with a p2p network and no advertisers or profiteers ___ to empower our FAIR USE RIGHTS TO EDUCATIONAL AND ARTISTIC USES OF THE COPYABLE ARTISTIC AND INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTS OF HUMAN ENDEAVOR.
How is this 'insightful'? To me, from what you describe, I see "File sharing" and "File publishing" as entirely synonymous. You certainly aren't sharing your local file unless you are using a multi-seat system (even then temporary copies might be made within the system).
The emperor has no clothes. There IS NO DIFFERENCE. The unproductive elements within our power authority heirarchies want the essence of FTP, and even the cp/copy commands to be under their control. They don't want encrypted smtp email going between 2 people, they want a corporation like facebook/gmail to sit in the middle and enable them to control such data transfers.
Or not, maybe thats just paranoid rambling. The main point was that your distinction between synonymous 'sharing' and 'publishing' was even less of an insightful comment than my rant.
"The iPod won because Apple took a niche technological gadget,"
That is the key point of our disagreement I think. What you describe them doing to what you describe as a 'niche tech gadget', I would alternately call the blazing obvious happening to the blazing obvious mainstream device. There was nobody who in y2000 and much earlier, did not see that computer memory and processing devices were shrinking, and that as you could now have a music system in a PC size device, that eventually you would have one in a walkman size device and smaller. And that when that inevitably happened, all of the 'innovations' you ascribe to apple, would obviously happen. Its just predictable device shrinkage. Apple timed their entry into market extremely skillfully, leveraging their basic talented workforce, and basic large corporate economic and establishment resources. Then, in the machiavellian land of mega-multinationals, they somehow held their own against the likes of sony and microsoft. All well and grand achievements to be lauded. But if a terrorist had somehow assassinated every last apple employee in 1995, or 2000, I assert that the digital media player landscape today would look _pretty much exactly the same as it does now_. Because device shrinkage and market timing and big corporate politics, are not significant(eureka worthy)_innovation_.
"As an Archos Jukebrick fan myself, the innovative part that the iPod brought was bringing the technology to a functional level of convenience. The iPod was the first one that fit in your pocket."
I owned a rio800 in 2001. Not much longer or thicker than its power source, a AA or AAA battery (I think the former, but thats still smaller than a deck of playing cards, and probably half the weight). I still would prefer to be able to carry bog standard extra power cells like a AAA to power my player, though my current sansa clip+ running rockbox is pretty awesome. And from where I stand, apples innovation had absolutely nothing to do with the utility I get from my sansa clip+. Tell me, exactly which of their key innovations bridged the jump from the rio800 to the sansa clip+. I don't see any. I just see another brand, that yes, was quite usable. Good for them. But calling that "the first one that fit in your pocket". No. They were good, they put a lot of money and marketing into it, and the coherence of apple 'rounded edges' polished design. I actually don't even see any huge innovation by any one player. I would point to Archos amongst a select few if I really had to. Just because they clearly loved it, and wanted it so bad, they were willing to put some just-beyond-the-threshold-of-really-being-cool-and-usefull sized bricks out there. I owned one. But I couldn't jog with it. The rio800, I think I may still have the armband it came with. No, apple was just a brand and a lot of smart hardworking people. But there were lots of groups of those, and it wasn't about excellence of engineering innovation, it was about the fact that they could buy smaller competitors out without blinking twice.
+1. The C.S.-101 catchphrase would be 'what is old is new again'. In a related vein, the computer developer in me was hit by Steve Jobs death, regardless of the fact that much of his modern fame involved not the main innovations, but rather polishing and driving them to market with a coherent vision (and the power that a deep bank account provides didn't hurt his odds either). I.e. the ipod was a brand of mp3 player, not a music playing device invention. Likewise this latest google gadget is a brand of console over network sharing solution, not the real enabling innovation itself. Though with google's drive, polish, and deep pockets, it may be the brand people remember for this solution space 20 years from now. Until some new innovator sees that they can glue bash+ssh+vnc together into whatever other thing to provide the same functionality, and if on a new enough platform, convince people that it is more innovation, than just 'what is old is new again'.
I agree, any law enforcement agencies spending attention on my comment do have problems. Also, for the record, I left out a couple words from my quote- "If Obama, with this new influx of political capital, fails to close Gitmo...".
Respectfully circletimessquare, this hasn't just been about the people who died on September 11th, 2001, in a very, very, very long time. On that day, and those that immediately followed, it absolutely was all about them. But it became something that engulfed the world, and claimed ten times, if not a hundred times as many lives since. Beyond the lives it claimed, it claimed the lifestyle of the US, my homeland. Whether that was a great lifestyle or not, well, since then I've come to believe more in more shades of gray and jumbles of color. This is my second net comment on the issue. My first on facebook stated that if Obama fails to close Gitmo with a year, that I advocate sending a team of special forces to take his ass out. Closure is nice. Lessons may or may not have been learned. EndQuote. This may be political posturing, and I may not have lost a life close to me on that day. The world is political, and it is not a game. The stakes are lives that include mine. One that due to the institutionalized acceptance of torture, I have found very painful for the last 10 years. And you're damn right, that is nothing compared to the worse pains felt by millions the world around related to this 'long war'. Good riddance to bin laden, despite our politics, on that we agree.
Slashdot Mirror
The DNS system as it is now, in the not too distant future, I suspect will be viewed as little more than a Racket. Domain registration should be effectively free. There is no justification for the current registration fees (let alone the BLATANT racketeering fees for xxx and toplevel domains).
Darknets are the future. Ditch your ISPs DNS server as your primary authority (what timewarner does to unresolvable domains, injecting their advertising makes me want to puke).
"It is designed to work with pluggable modules that implement the actual decryption mechanisms."
Pluggable Module == Binary Blob == content providers PWN your computer. They won't be content with anything short of that.
mod parent up. I've got a mod point left, but had to add my own longwinded comment below, that is perhaps better expressed via the parent comment. I.e. yeah, forcing new software on ISPs and unexplained how its going to be written and deployed is a bad idea. But making lazy ISPs, or rather, ISPs that don't want to scare away their consumers, tell the customer when existing software they are running has detected a known malware traffic pattern, seems like a really good idea. And forcing DNSSec support on ISPs... Ok, I guess my superficial reaction was positive on that one, but upon deeper reflection I don't see how any kind of DNS should be mandated by ISPs, when the job is better done by customer's own OSs and the myriad of global servers they are talking with.
There seem to be a lot of negative comments about this, and perhaps some with subtle good reason. But I really like the idea, if it's implemented as opt-in, and boils down to "if any existing software run by the ISP believes that my computer is running known malware based on known traffic patterns, send mail to either or both of the email address and physicial address I registered during the opt-in process". To me this sounds analagous to the security breach notification laws corporations are subject to in some jurisdictions, and I believe those are generally a good thing as well. Without them, you get the status quo, which is things like Nortel knowing they were compromised for years, and just not caring. I actually think this is likely the status quo at all major organizations. I mean really, do you think if microsoft/google/etc found out that major fractions of their internal infrastructures had been owned by foreign government X for the last 5 years, that without laws they would ever _do anything about it_ if the attackers were friendly enough to just be sucking data about their engineering and customers, and not actually impacting the day to day monetary business? I'm pretty sure what would happen in such a case would be some management screaming at some overworked internal security folks. And then the internal security folks would either brush the problem under the rug, or get fired when they explained exactly how many resources it would take to remotely adequetely stop the espionage threat from government X. Bottom line- forcing by law companies to notify their customers when existing software discovers exploits seems like a really good idea to me. Yes, there will be some resulting pressure to just turn off their internal checks, but honestly, that doesn't bother me at all if when those internal checks were finding things, they weren't going to bother telling the customers anyway. In fact, my optimistic hope, which I think is quite reasonable, is that when the actual scope of these things is forced into the public view, that the horrendous security practices responsible, will actually get remedied in the right ways. I truly don't get why there is so much resistence here to this idea- fundamentally (as I described above, i.e. not mandating new software be run, but just that if existing software already running thinks a customer is owned by hackers, that they take the trouble of notifying the customer.
""I don't regard [Brandt] as a valid source about anything at all..." - Jimbo Wales"
That sounds like a cut and dry +5 perspective. But being the same sort of person as Daniel Brandt (or at least, I presume the same slashdot commenters calling him a looney would call me one as well), I decided to use non-google search engines, and results not already posted here, to try and make a real evaluation of D.B. I found a long thread he participated in, that was remarkably coherent, and intelligent, about his experiments reverse engineering how google works. Say what you will, but technically, on subjects he is passionate about, he comes off very well. In fact, he's so clever, all he had to do was throw in a bizarre offhand comment such as 'tighter than a bikini on a Bomis babe', and it inspired me to google that, and get this wired article, which IMO should negate the +5 of the parent comment. Jimmy Wales does not come off looking like such a valid source , after reading this- http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/12/69880
"Public edit logs reveal that Wales has changed his own Wikipedia bio 18 times, deleting phrases describing former Wikipedia employee Larry Sanger as a co-founder of the site.
Wales has also repeatedly revised the description of a search site he founded called Bomis, which included a section with adult photos called "Bomis Babes.""
"but if we lived in an inconsistent universe there would be no "truth" to speak of -- things would be true and false at the same time, and any claim that could be made would be true."
Really? What does it even mean to say 'living in an inconsistent universe'. Do we live in an inconsistent universe just because one can travel to different locations on the earth, or simply sit and twiddle their thumbs in the same location on earth, as the earth itself moves to a different location in space, and in either case, the result causes very sensitive experiments to show 'inconsistent' results?
I would say that the only 'inconsistency' you tend to find is that you discover the reality of where you live turns out to be more complex than your original occam's razor based theories postulated. And I think many spiritual/religious people just believe, based on what they've personally experienced, that the actual reality is rather more complicated than the simplest models that scientists currently think about. I.e, take a sci-fi theory such as that posited in the rather popular film 'the matrix'. I.e. most of the people inside the matrix, are pretty happy with their worldviews that don't encompass and factor in the existence of the matrix. Because that simple but incorrect view works for them. Likewise, newtons laws for a long time were 'enough' for most scientists. Until of course they started discovering cases where that simple model of the physics of the universe was not enough. Basically Occam's Razor doesn't say that the the simplest explanation is *always* the right explanation, it just says that it *tends to be* the right explanation. And certainly if you hypothesize the existence of God, or Matrix Overlords, it is not hard to imagine that we might be living in an environment where the simplest explanation we see, is not infact the correct one.
To a child, believing in Santa Claus is a very scientific thing to do, because with the totality of what you have been taught by your parents, believing them is clearly scientifically/life-wise advantageous. But of course, when you get older, you see that on occasion you are lied to by authority figures. Now, I'm not saying that God planted a bunch of dinosaur fossils to screw with our heads, I'm just saying, wipe off your third eye and look under your chairs...
if you do a search for the phrase "a multi-billion dollar web advertising company with a history of privacy violations", you'll discover ...
the part of my brain that contains my sense of irony just melted...
this link might work better-
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/17/opinion/nova-apple-foxconn/
Also, my $0.02 on the China government apologists- it's all about the free speech/press. Without that, any corporate working condition reporting lacks credibility. I.e. the above comment 'now how about random inspections over a period of 6 months'. Though I went to the trouble of posting the fixed link because that piece covers that issue pretty well (see aluminum dust explosion issue).
I'm certainly guilty of being a Foxconn/Apple hater, and agree that propogandists like myself are only singling that pair out due to the predicted higher effectiveness of that tactic, versus going after clothing companies, that people gave up caring much about long long ago. But with apple's high profile ipad success, and Jon Stewart's highlighting the Foxconn suicide net issue repeatedly, and it is clear that as unfairly unrepresentative as this example is, it is the one that is resonating with the public the best. To be honest, it's probably all about the Foxconn suicide nets. Nothing makes one look as evil as a slaver, as putting suicide nets outside your factory. Argue your bizarre, and perhaps even correct ethics you want, but that's not going to let up, until I suspect they take down the suicide nets, perhaps after more fully securing all the windows and roof access.
"And above all, no lies. No propaganda. Just the truth, detailing what we do know, what we do not know, and where any potential problems may be."
That is a good sentiment for the long term. But I live on this planet called Earth. And here, we do a lot of lying, a lot of propogandizing, a lot of glossing over what we don't know, and a lot of ignoring problems that can't be solved without sacrificing short term comforts.
My hope, is that the major religions of the world, will go far beyond the roman catholic pope's recent easing of dogmas related to birth control. Such that it becomes politically feasible for richer countries to provide as much contraceptive aid as they do food aid. And that as a result of both of those things, the world population decreases, such that we need less energy, and produce less dangerous nuclear waste (yeah, you could throw something at me for that 'propaganda', but recent history suggests a departure from the safety that scientists can design on paper, and what actually happens in reality (think back to my first paragraph- there is the ideal, and then there is planet earth).
It seems too much to me, that when it comes to energy production and global society, that we are just building up a ponzi scheme, that will come crashing down. And it's all about the desire to have nice, biologically rewarding large families, living with all the modern comforts that cheap energy provides. But the same basic thing is I suspect at play with a heroine addict, preferring the pleasures of the moment, to the long term best interests of those they care about.
I mentioned Invisible Hand, because, yes, I am versed in the theory, though some of the more important writings I may have most recently read 20 years ago in college. Without much certainty, I suspect that if I reviewed the classic texts, that I'd find most express what you expressed, though squarely in the realm where the various actors you mention, are all playing on a level capitalistic/legal field. When you start talking about international trade with key players that still call themselves communist, and actually do run very efficient factories with clearly not so rewarded workers (i.e. call it halfway from the 1st ammendment to slave labor)... then it becomes a different equation. Hence the subject of my comment- that the emphasis on the calculous at hand should be the rules of the playing field, and not the choices made within the rules by any particular players.
Fair labor practices are not something that takes care of itself via an Invisible Hand, be it that of Capitalism or of God. So long as the playing field tells the players that they can outsource slave labor, or even just significantly unfair labor (folks with nothing like 1st ammendment rights), then all players that chose not to do so will quickly lose and cease to exist. The only way to solve the problem (that I'm thinking of right now in full on rhetoric mode) is to have better national standards of who we do business with in the global international trade community. Put standards in place, and make it profitable for international actors to meet the improved standards. But as can be evidenced by opening your eyes in the morning and looking at the world, there will be a lot of political pressure against that path. But hopefully one day the incessant light - fueled by real freedom of speech and the press- shining on exploitive employers/slavers, will cause things to move in the right direction. I hope.
For me it was the Nintendo-DS. Probably the newton came earlier, but I still think the DS w/ 802.11 and enough 3D to do mario64 on a mobile device with all the hardware needed for open source encrypted VoiP calls... But sadly for both of us they are effectively walled software gardens that did not reach their potentials. Both Nintendo and Apple have done ammazingly efficient jobs of stifling the homebrew/end-user-software-developer communities.
The real problem being that memory is faulty. You've heard the statement "if you aren't a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you aren't a conservative at 50, you have no head" (or any of the variations thereof)? People's opinions change over time, and they'll rectify that retroactively in their heads
Thanks for reminding me of the quote, but I don't think it significantly applies to my thinking in this case (though I certainly considered it for a minute). To the extent there is wisdom in that quote, I would say that it shines a light on our societies failure to produce a crop of 18 year olds that are capable of what 36 year olds (like myself) would consider 'fully informed consent'. And while at 36, I consider myself to have a significant respect for conservatives and conservatism (in the mainstream, actual reality, not idealist sense), for precisely the reason your quote has wisdom in it. But at the same time, I blame that traditional mainstream conservatism in healthy part (always keeping in mind myself and the others have more than enough remove for self-improvement)- for this global cultural failure in producing 18 year olds that in my mind are fully capable of giving 'fully informed consent' for sex/prostitution/pornography/new-car/student-loan/etc serious life decisions.
I guess one way to sum it up for me, is that 18 years ago when I was 18, I think I bought into that "The US does not torture" political BS line. 18 years later, after seeing just how much of our global socioeconomic infrastructure is still entrenched with the realities highlighted by the final debate scene in 'the great debaters', and how those themes of dominance and exploitation trickles down into even the typical mundane arena of ordinary mainstream sexual socialization... Well, I don't think my position (not that I've really expressed a clear one) on this issue boils down to the proverb you quoted. I guess I'll throw this old russian one back at you- "Everything our leaders told us about communism was a lie. Everything they told us about capitalism was the truth."
I think you've reduced your end of this nuanced important discussion of ethics to useless oversimplification. But hey, we were modded the same. The world we live in I guess.
If they can consent to having sex with another child around their own age, then why not with an adult?
In answer I'll give a thought from a 36 year old on the issue of prostitution that I didn't consider when I was 18. I think of all women(people really), if you polled their opinions at age 36, as to whether or not the average 18 year old is likely to be maturely educated enough to deal fairly intellegently, and with sufficient basis in knowledge and experience, of life and death issues (such as those with the possible undesired/unintended consequence of the creation of a new life), I'd guess many would say- you know, even 18 year olds it's pretty sketchy as to how wise it is to act as if their consent is the same as what we mean in the ideal when we say 'fully informed consent'. And the same goes with the angle of the serious financial transactions of one's life. I.e. I, and I don't think I'm that unusual in this regard, consider myself to have been extremely naive about the fabric of the global economy at even the age of 18. All I'm really saying with this long winded comment is to take the next steps of your hypothetical journey into kids(or even naive young 'adults') consenting when there is significant $$ changing hands during the same event.
In necrophilic sex coercion is the default unless there was some manner of written contract that the deceased actually gave permission.
This is the real reason I bothered to reply. Kudos for make me laugh, at a scenario that my hypothetical ex-libertarian but still philosophizing mind hadn't ever considered.
Keep in mind that in order to stop child pornography completely, you're looking at having to stop such things as TOR. This is actually a nice new hot topic in The Netherlands due to an investigative reporter going on TOR, finding plenty of child porn traders, and busting a guy who actively sought out children to pretty much abuse.
Good for that guy getting the bad guy, but seriously this is hardly a new topic. This is just the pedophilia/privacy/anonymouscommunication/terrorism debate that has been squarely on the table in clear current TOR-level terms for a decade. What happened was the governments and cultures have seemed to just ignore it, with things like warrantless data dragnets and the USA PATRIOT Act, de-facto stating the global unwritten rules of the game. I.e. governments don't believe in citizens right to secure communications with the internet. Or that's how I see it.
If they are aware, however, then I very much believe they're participating in the crime by virtue of helping to sustain a market for the materials in question.
And this pretty much has to be dictated by law, and it is another of these elephants in the room that have at the same time both been ignored and acknowledged in some inexplicably orwellian way. I.e. the expectation of culpability for running an open 802.11b router connected to your home ISP. I.e. clearly you are not culpable for the content, unless you monitor and become aware of it. But we see the slashdot trickle of laws trying to outlaw that. I'm torn between thinking it's the undecided issue of our age, or if the infrastructural power structures in place just decided it long ago, and any public democratic debate is so obviously unenforceable against the wishes of the elite establishment, that the mainstream hasn't bothered to have the debate. Eh... But I quoted your point because, if the public debate was to happen, and to matter, that is a core decision point (and yes, I know about common carrier laws in the US, but just like journalistic laws, we are in an undefined place where overnight, each individual on the planet has nearly been empowered to be both a journalist and a common carrier, and thwarting that causes a lot of people with a lot of power, to keep their power longer).
What do you think the Muslims would do if Israel cut off access to the "Dome of the Rock"? Would you blame them? When they attack Israel, would you call it "among the most evil human undertakings ever"?
Yes, I'd blame them. That's a perfect example of the harmful influence of religion. If it weren't for ridiculous superstitions that scrap of desert would be as worthless as any other scrap of desert. If you're willing to kill people because of ancient mythology, then absolutely I'm willing to call it evil. Most evil ever? Depends on the scale of the atrocity.
But doesn't the problem also include the Israeli's religious attachment to the same lands? If the Israeli's, the victims of the hypothetical acts you characterize as evil, believed the acts were evil for the same reasons you do, would simply pack their things, and move somewhere else. In the scheme of places with religious significance to humans, I think that particular acre, and surrounds, pretty much rank at the top. The only reason a sane tribe would try to live in that particular spot, is _due to the religious significance_. That, or one hell of a penchant for trolling other religious believers.
I'm a christian, though one without tremendous faith in my ability to interpret, or even be informed correctly about such geo-spatial correlations subject to translational errors and bitrot as those in question here. I.e. I'm pretty sure the LDS folks have radically different beliefs about those geo-spatial correlations. As such, I'm really pretty content that, amongst our global ecosystem of dog-eat-dog humanity, that the people with such religious passion and fervor have a kind of arena over there to duke it out. I suppose that's got the same flavor of cynicism as the belief that after 9/11, there was no way a U.S. leader could have possibly controlled the irrational backlash of domestic vengeance against a strategically disasterous amount of collateral damage in the middle east. I.e, God only knows what the gitmo and abu ghraib perpetrators would have done domestically if the wars hadn't been started. I dunno, random thoughts that have been percolating in one Christian's head for a decade. Maybe more access to street fighter 4, and other virtual combat might be enough to vent the rage to kill that I suspect all of us have burning within us, in a world where we haven't a choice but to fight and kill for food, and sadly, other material items.
"The Hero tortures the Heroine to get her on his side in the grand fight? And he's the good guy? ...
V for Vendetta is a stupid movie."
Mod parent up. I'm quite glad to see someone bring this up in this thread. I assumed when I saw that piece of shit that the only reason it was made, was to strap liberal dissenters against the Cheney torture policies in a chair, so that the fascists could monitor the brainwave/pulse/liedetectorstats of the subject, at the moment that train switch is pulled in the end, to see if the subject needed more 'treatment' to get in line with the fascists of the day (my only evidence that they were fascists is that they weren't impeached for any of dozens of valid worthy reasons.
In fact, my conspiracy theory is that 90% of the torture we saw in the mainstream entertainment of the time was written for that purpose. V was a stupid piece of shit movie, just like Basic Instinct. Wipe off your third eye folks, and look under your chairs.
Actually, for me, it didn't take long to discover that putlocker was actually a better host for the 'pirated' mythbusters episodes I was watching than megavideo was (on my given hardware/OS/browser-stack platform). The process of working around megavideo's demise also led me back to bugmenot.com which I had forgotten about, to get premium file downloads from videoweed (whose non-registration video player was worse than megavideo's for my setup, but like I said, putlocker is better than both).
tv-links.eu -> mythbusters -> putlocker
I certainly grant the argument that until places like tv-links.eu get shut down, shutting down megavideo only serves the purpose (entirely useful) of stopping one particular group of assholes from profiting from something we should all be doing with a p2p network and no advertisers or profiteers ___ to empower our FAIR USE RIGHTS TO EDUCATIONAL AND ARTISTIC USES OF THE COPYABLE ARTISTIC AND INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTS OF HUMAN ENDEAVOR.
How is this 'insightful'? To me, from what you describe, I see "File sharing" and "File publishing" as entirely synonymous. You certainly aren't sharing your local file unless you are using a multi-seat system (even then temporary copies might be made within the system).
The emperor has no clothes. There IS NO DIFFERENCE. The unproductive elements within our power authority heirarchies want the essence of FTP, and even the cp/copy commands to be under their control. They don't want encrypted smtp email going between 2 people, they want a corporation like facebook/gmail to sit in the middle and enable them to control such data transfers.
Or not, maybe thats just paranoid rambling. The main point was that your distinction between synonymous 'sharing' and 'publishing' was even less of an insightful comment than my rant.
"The iPod won because Apple took a niche technological gadget,"
That is the key point of our disagreement I think. What you describe them doing to what you describe as a 'niche tech gadget', I would alternately call the blazing obvious happening to the blazing obvious mainstream device. There was nobody who in y2000 and much earlier, did not see that computer memory and processing devices were shrinking, and that as you could now have a music system in a PC size device, that eventually you would have one in a walkman size device and smaller. And that when that inevitably happened, all of the 'innovations' you ascribe to apple, would obviously happen. Its just predictable device shrinkage. Apple timed their entry into market extremely skillfully, leveraging their basic talented workforce, and basic large corporate economic and establishment resources. Then, in the machiavellian land of mega-multinationals, they somehow held their own against the likes of sony and microsoft. All well and grand achievements to be lauded. But if a terrorist had somehow assassinated every last apple employee in 1995, or 2000, I assert that the digital media player landscape today would look _pretty much exactly the same as it does now_. Because device shrinkage and market timing and big corporate politics, are not significant(eureka worthy)_innovation_.
"As an Archos Jukebrick fan myself, the innovative part that the iPod brought was bringing the technology to a functional level of convenience. The iPod was the first one that fit in your pocket."
I owned a rio800 in 2001. Not much longer or thicker than its power source, a AA or AAA battery (I think the former, but thats still smaller than a deck of playing cards, and probably half the weight). I still would prefer to be able to carry bog standard extra power cells like a AAA to power my player, though my current sansa clip+ running rockbox is pretty awesome. And from where I stand, apples innovation had absolutely nothing to do with the utility I get from my sansa clip+. Tell me, exactly which of their key innovations bridged the jump from the rio800 to the sansa clip+. I don't see any. I just see another brand, that yes, was quite usable. Good for them. But calling that "the first one that fit in your pocket". No. They were good, they put a lot of money and marketing into it, and the coherence of apple 'rounded edges' polished design. I actually don't even see any huge innovation by any one player. I would point to Archos amongst a select few if I really had to. Just because they clearly loved it, and wanted it so bad, they were willing to put some just-beyond-the-threshold-of-really-being-cool-and-usefull sized bricks out there. I owned one. But I couldn't jog with it. The rio800, I think I may still have the armband it came with. No, apple was just a brand and a lot of smart hardworking people. But there were lots of groups of those, and it wasn't about excellence of engineering innovation, it was about the fact that they could buy smaller competitors out without blinking twice.
+1. The C.S.-101 catchphrase would be 'what is old is new again'. In a related vein, the computer developer in me was hit by Steve Jobs death, regardless of the fact that much of his modern fame involved not the main innovations, but rather polishing and driving them to market with a coherent vision (and the power that a deep bank account provides didn't hurt his odds either). I.e. the ipod was a brand of mp3 player, not a music playing device invention. Likewise this latest google gadget is a brand of console over network sharing solution, not the real enabling innovation itself. Though with google's drive, polish, and deep pockets, it may be the brand people remember for this solution space 20 years from now. Until some new innovator sees that they can glue bash+ssh+vnc together into whatever other thing to provide the same functionality, and if on a new enough platform, convince people that it is more innovation, than just 'what is old is new again'.
...G...
I agree, any law enforcement agencies spending attention on my comment do have problems. Also, for the record, I left out a couple words from my quote- "If Obama, with this new influx of political capital, fails to close Gitmo...".
Respectfully circletimessquare, this hasn't just been about the people who died on September 11th, 2001, in a very, very, very long time. On that day, and those that immediately followed, it absolutely was all about them. But it became something that engulfed the world, and claimed ten times, if not a hundred times as many lives since. Beyond the lives it claimed, it claimed the lifestyle of the US, my homeland. Whether that was a great lifestyle or not, well, since then I've come to believe more in more shades of gray and jumbles of color. This is my second net comment on the issue. My first on facebook stated that if Obama fails to close Gitmo with a year, that I advocate sending a team of special forces to take his ass out. Closure is nice. Lessons may or may not have been learned. EndQuote. This may be political posturing, and I may not have lost a life close to me on that day. The world is political, and it is not a game. The stakes are lives that include mine. One that due to the institutionalized acceptance of torture, I have found very painful for the last 10 years. And you're damn right, that is nothing compared to the worse pains felt by millions the world around related to this 'long war'. Good riddance to bin laden, despite our politics, on that we agree.