Am I the only person who read this, then remembering the decision of how to store the retiring shuttles, put two and two together? Perhaps even with one or more volunteers traveling some initial portion of the final leg, perhaps aimed for a swing around mars and a cargo bay full of food and water? Seriously??
Let's try to come up with better examples that make people actually care please?
Oh wait I've got a fun one......snip... If the company does absolutely nothing with its proof of illegal activity, and later the guy gets caught (camera, whatever) then exactly how liable is the company or its agents as a co-conspirator?
Sadly, I'd guess no liability at all. I wouldn't have said that until the infamous gang rape (viriginia?) within the last couple years where dozens of spectators at the school dance(?) watched, some of them cheering on. I recall the news later said that by the letter of the law, there is no legal duty to make an attempt to report a rape (or presumably any other crime) in progress or after the fact. If you combine that, with the foundation of police undercover work including what used to be called illegal entrapment,... and then throw in the post-9/11 fudge factor on traditional ethics... I guess I'd just recommend that anyone and everyone assume that the law-enforcers and companies, are not going to be the ones sweating to protect _your_ ass from crimes they are watching in progress or committing themselves. If you are lucky, they'll allow crimes to happen to you, and a greater good will be served when a 'bigger fish' is caught.
I'd cry about 'moral hazard' and how ineffective such a legal system would seem to be both in theory and practice, but I guess that's just the way it is. The whole idea of 'moral hazard' kind of went out the window in my book with the bank bailouts and gitmo remaining open.
Though perhaps in your narrow scope of crimes of state secrets, there are other laws at play. Maybe even secret ones for all I don't know. But as you can see, the wider point of 'no legal duty to report an in-progress rape' and its relation to your point, kind of set off my disgust with our current legal system.
+1, my gut reaction as well, with the addition that there is a multiplication effect as the added violation of rights increases terrorist recruitment and motivation, with a corresponding increase in the amount of drivel and non-drivel entering your intelligence channels.
It's the prisoner's dilemna as clear as day. If you don't start with trust and have a system that encourages more trust/liberty/privacy and the benefits of such, you don't end up with anywhere near the optimal outcome.
Coincidentally enough, this state of affairs has been in place for 6 months, but this slashdot/lwn note comes the morning after I discovered the fact myself while trying (still as yet unsuccessfully) to rebuild the kernel with support for one odd driver enabled instead of disabled.
What strikes me as missing from the current set of comments, is how this move by RH seems at odds with their laudable history of 'upstream upstream upstream'. I.e., it seems to me that each of those hundred(s) of patches will now be significantly less likely to be adopted upstream, because of the added complexity of not knowing the details of - the mother of all deployments - of those patches. Details meaning, what other changes does it depend on, and happen to be shipped with in its stable and vast commercial deployment.
The other tinfoil-hat/security consideration is- if RH is as in bed with the NSA/CIA as it seems to me to have been for a very long time, and if the NSA/CIA did want to hide backdoors or backdoor enabling faults in the kernel, this is precisely the kind of move that would make those sorts of things orders of magnitudes more difficult for the traditional 'many eyes' effect to detect.
But of course, the bottom line is that what they are doing is quite legal, and from traditional business perspectives, quite ethical, and probably practical as well. But to the commenter who said there are 'no downsides' to this- No, there are downsides.
The part I find most amusing is the irony that Watson's speed on the buzzer seems directly attributable to the handicap it was given vis-a-vis not having to do the audio-speech and visual-text AI recognition that its human opponents had to do. The irony being that those two allegedly mature areas of AI research are ones in which IBM has been shipping commercial products for years. I suspect that if Watson had to do such processing, it would have been slaughtered just as bad as it slaughtered its opponents, if for no other reason than an extra couple tenths of a second of delay before it could decide to click its buzzer. I'm sure this may handicap may no longer be necessary in a few more months or years, but even in the Nova episode, they seemed to gloss over that.
It's not at all that those watching the watchers are asleep. In fact, you are replying to an article that proves the exact opposite. No, what my life in the US has taught me, is the utter, utter, utter idiocy of the argument that as long as the watchers are watched, the widespread watching can be an acceptable thing in the name of security.
I mean seriously, reading slashdot for the last 10 years. The watchers are thoroughly watched. We may only know 10% of what they've done, but we can easily guess the rest (notice the utter, utter lack of public debate and discussion over the ability and legality of widespread use of cell/mobilephones as always on eavesdropping devices? The silence and lack of discussion about that makes me _positive_ it is being done on a widespread scale.) But even if we know all there is to know, and the watchers have been 100% exposed, what we've seen is enough by the standards we were brought up to believe in vis a vis the 4th ammendment, the geneva conventions, etc. Watching the watchers invade our privacy, and encourage extremism instead of spending their intellect ability and time contributing positively to the social fabric... Makes me want to blow myself up in one of the watchers buildings.
$0.02. The watchers are not asleep, just utterly innefectual. Quote of the day from aclu.org's factsheet on extraordinary rendition - "In the words of former CIA agent Robert Baer: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear -- never to see them again -- you send them to Egypt." "
ff 3.6.13, problem exhibits because I have a minimum font size set to 20. problem does not exhibit with no minimum font size set. (I'm not the original poster of the problem, but his description matches my first complaint)
More dangerous than riding around with a tank of explosive liquid?
You've been watching too much (or some) action fiction on tv and in the movies, and not enough mythbusters. It's basically near impossible to get a tank of gasoline to explode. I'm pretty sure it took actual explosives for the MB crew to get that to happen.
I don't think you are really disagreeing with what I said, though highlighting that there is a subtle issue with 'encryption wrapped inside an http login page'. I.e, whether the real issue is exactly as you described (https utilzed after redirection from http), or an alternate scenario that seems plausible- some custom encryption implemented with javascript within an http page, the problem is the same, and the solution is still just as I described- disallow any login via an http page. If you had carried your description of things through to a proposed solution, I don't see any other alternative than only having https login pages.
Note, when you go to facebook.com (i.e. www.facebook.com, i.e. http://www.facebook.com/ you are presented with a login page with user and password text entry. There is no redirection to an https login page involved.)
Agreed, but this part of the article had me intrigued:
It wasn't a totally perfect solution. Most specifically, ISPs can force a downgrade of https to http, but Sullivan said that Facebook had not seen that happen.
I do not know the ins and outs of internet routing well enough to understand this, but I was alarmed by it. Does anyone with more technical expertise in the area have any insight?
Not like I've RTFA or anything, or even an expert, but my guess is simply the issue of- facebook _allows_ http logins, so all a nefarious government/network need do is break https for the site. I.e. the solution is to not have an unencrypted option, such that if a gov/net breaks https, instead of falling back to an insecure login, people get pissed that they can't use the site at all, and thus it becomes a high profile news story, etc.
For those of you unfamiliar with the 'Camden 28', a good example of a US Agent Provocateur can be found in this story-
camden28.org (film shown on PBS independent lens from time to time)
" In the early-morning hours of Sunday, August 22, 1971, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell announced that FBI agents had arrested 20 antiwar activists in and near a draft board office in Camden, New Jersey....
They also asked the jury to acquit on the grounds that the raid would not have taken place without the help of a self-admitted FBI informer and provocateur. The defendants emphasized that they had given up their plan, for lack of a practical means, until the informer-provocateur had resurrected it and provided them with the encouragement and tools to carry it out. "
If you believe that the previous Iraq war document release was 'nothing', then it is because you, like so many of us, are completely numb to things like this-
"According to the Iraq Body Count project, a sample of the deaths found in about 800 logs, extrapolated to the full set of records, shows around 15,000 civilian deaths that had not been previously admitted by the US government. 66,000 civilians were reported dead in the logs, out of 109,000 deaths in total."
And of course the reason we are numb to statistics like this, is also for the same reason that Brian Williams as he reported this on NBC nightly news also casually threw out the existing belief that deaths have been so underreported that a significant number of respectable investigators believe that the total number of deaths due to the war exceeds a million.
During the last 10 years, we have all been subjected to so much _blatant_ disinformation about this war, that as a society, we can be exposed to the above quote in the news, and still months later, not consider people like you insane for having the impression that nothing newsworthy was exposed in that leak. But if you could somehow relate the above quote to an average pre-9/11 american, they would probably expect that it would have been a huge news story. But after a decade of GITMO, there really isn't a lot that will leave an impact anymore. The world is truely numb. And it's sad. We went from pre-9/11 ignorance, to this new level of numb, and it's just really sad.
For fun I'll record in the slashdb record how I surprised myself and managed to correctly multiply 357 by 289 in my head. I don't have a history of being able to do such things, and it did take me a couple minutes, but I was pretty surprised to see bc confirm my answer.
I went with the route of breaking it down to 357 * 300 - 11 * 357. 357 * 300 is 35700 * 3. Even that is pretty hard so I figured 35700 * 2 = 71400, then + 35700 .... 57 + 14 is 71 thus 1071, then add those 2 0's back on to get 107100. Then throw that pesky round 100K off to the side to be remembered later, and we have 7100 - 11 * 357. Which is 7100 - (10 + 1) * 357, so 7100 - 3570. Since half of 7100 is clearly 3550, then 3530 is the partial. now 1 more 357 to subtract from that. I went with 3530 - 400 is 3130, but have to add back the 43 to get 3173. Now just add back that big ol round 100K and we have 103173.
See, no sweat:) Of course I expect other people may have more digit storage memory than I do, and thus can just do it the standard simple way...
To whoever modded me down as a Troll... OK, I can't say it wasn't to be expected. But it was not a troll. It was an honest, angstful statement born of thirty five years exposure to culture in the US, particularly including the absolute sick irony of Abu Ghraib's 'rape rooms' not being allowed to be torn to rubble by the 'liberated' Iraqi people, and instead becoming housing to new US torturers. And no, I really don't buy the 'night shift' defense.
And then Gitmo, followed by the first non-white-male president of the US making a _day one signed pledge_ to shut it down, broken, after nearly two years.
So again, yes, you were within reason to mod me a troll. But my animosity was 100% sincere, and I think my social commentary valid and meaningful addition to the conversation about sending a 23 year old 'kid' to the places that receive references to their tacitly accepted and encouraged rapes hundreds of times in mainstream television programs every week of every year on just about every channel.
Welcome kid, to the socially accepted and socially encouraged rape rooms of the new leaders of Iraq. Don't fuck with the republicans, because they will fuck you, and fuck you hard.
mod parent up. ipod was not innovation, but a company with vast resources waiting for the right time to walk into a market and ensure that the actual innovators did not end up with the lions share of the market. Same thing with the ipad. I know the silicon valley attitude from much firsthand personal experience. The attitude is not to innovate, or place a high value on groundbreaking ideas, but instead to understand that to cash in, you wait to leverage other advantages when the time is best to cash in on someone elses innovation. This is precisely the attitude of Jobs-2.0 as opposed to the attitude of Jobs-1.0 who got sorely bested commercially until he adopted the Gates strategy.
"The software is designed to not only enable enterprises to monitor the conversations of their customers but to engage those that require service, Cisco says"
I think to get the creepiness quotient expressed properly, 'service' should be in special quotes there.
I honestly mean this with no offense but- you just don't get it. I wasn't being cryptic. To try and maintain a sense of privacy, while debating why privacy is important to you, you have to use contrived non-real examples. Seriously, if what I offerred is still not enough to explain to you why people like myself get 'creeped out' by advertisements targetted based on 'private' communications, you just never will (from this style argument).
I feel I understand generally where you are coming from. And as mentioned, I truly, with all my heart and soul hope that I am the outlyer. The delusional paranoid schizophrenic to whom no amount of practical implementation of ethics will help. Because if I'm wrong, and you are right, then all is good (for everyone but me, or my super-minority).
You want one real example? Many years ago, visiting my 70 year old mother and seeing her yahoo mail email account. I used the same yahoo email account. But I had never seen the ad that seemed to be on her page 50% of the time, with an elderly woman, as wrinkled as anybody you had ever seen, morphing into a wrinkle-free young woman. It made me sick that that morph was looping endlessly as she read and responded to email. But there is no way to argue this. You don't me, my mother, or the specifics of my situation. And when you pull out perfectly reasonable counterarguments that that ad was probably based on personal information inputted instead of the present debate about communication content scraping... There's no point. You either get that there is a real issue that merits laws, or you don't. You don't. I hope that in the big picture, you are right and that the benefits of holding your views outweigh any detriments.
I mean bla bla bla bla, you can use noscript and encryption and bla bla bla bla. You're right, I can't argue against you. You win. You'll humble yourself and admit I have some point but that I'm wrong here and there and bla bla bla bla. You are a troll, nothing more and nothing less, and the fact that you got modded insightful sickens me more than the fact that I got modded insightful flatters me. You are just so full of shit, claiming you need help understanding why Google's data mining advertising business crossover with its voice and email communication business creeps some subset of people out. You know precisely why it does, you just think it doesn't matter, and shouldn't matter to us. I wish something you could say, some perfect argument of libertarian logic (I was a randroid for much of my youth), could make me not be creeped out.
A hypothetical 7 year old girl would say it best about someone reading her message passed to a friend - "I don't want you reading it, because it is none of your beeswax". It is not more complicated than that. Really, its not. My communications intended for a single other person, should not be used in any way, or exposed in any way to anyone else, because my words, are NONE OF THEIR GOD-DAMNED BUSINESS. End of story. End of debate.
"Maybe it's simply a matter of trust I have that no humans are bothering to look at pictures of just one more baby, which others do not share. Maybe I don't actually do anything I shouldn't be doing, as Schmidt said, or anything I'm ashamed of and don't want told about to my face. I've never heard an actual reason for why people think it's "creepy" and bothers them. If someone can elaborate, I'd like to see what you have to say."
Honestly, I am very suspicious of this question, but perhaps because I am a very suspicious person in general. I guess I just find it hard to believe that someone who can write as thorough an opinion on the subject as you did, truly needs an explanation as to why some people (enough to mod my opinion insightful) think it is 'creepy'. Just sit, and spend a couple minutes excercising your sense of imagination and empathy.
Ok, now just to overkill answer a question that shouldn't need answering-
First, the anecdote. Suppose I am HIV positive. It would be reasonable that I might want to discuss this situation with friends via private telephone conversations as well as private email conversations. Do you really find it so hard to understand how I might feel both the desire, and the expectation, that the companies I entrust those channels of communication to, should feel an ethical obligation to respect the privacy of the communication, and not use that communication in _any_ way?
A simple example, might be an advertisement for HIV treatment, or even a gay lifestyle website popping up on my personal email screen. Now, it's a personal email screen, but while I may feel 'safe' having a 'private' email in a 10 point font on that screen in a workplace, or library, I might be embarrassed if a recognizable advertisement appears next to it, readable from 20 feet away, for an HIV treatment, or gay lifestyle website.
That is just one contrived example, which I'm very surprised that anyone such as yourself should need spelled out for you.
But lets move on. The fourth ammendment to the constitution, demands that invasions of privacy only occur in very extreme (non routine) circumstances. I.e. when there is probable cause and/or warrants involved. I myself, have this sense of desired privacy. I don't know, perhaps there is a genetic as well as nurtured component to it, that many, or even most of my fellow humans don't share as strongly. To the point, where I tend to assume that the motivations behind the fourth ammendment were not just based on physical inconvenience, but on the intrinsic value of privacy. I.e. there is some motivation to avoid searches because they are physically inconveniencing to people, but there is also a large part of it due to the value of privacy in and of itself. Please note, I understand the difference between government and commercial aspects of this debate. Right now I am just trying to explain that 'creepy' feeling to you that you have such trouble understanding.
Perhaps the canonical example is- say you are a teenager and have a 'big brother'. Say that big brother goes through your room. You may totally like and respect that big brother, and even believe that for the most part, he has your best interests at heart. And perhaps you don't have any horrendously dark secrets. But still, having someone, even that close a family member, intrude upon your personal effects, necessarily having side effects on their and perhaps others behaviour towards you in the future, really can feel quite 'creepy'.
The point I was trying to highlight in my original post, was that I grew up believing that my parents generation, had placed special legal restrictions on the content of communcation through the telephone system, due to a value of privacy, and an understanding of how 'creepy' it can feel for quite a large portion of our society, to know that information about their 'private' communications is being utilized in any way shape or form that will have an impact on their lives, or society in general, beyond the intended aspect of the
"Does Google 'track you' any more than a telco does?"
Last I heard your telco wasn't using the _content_ of your communications to choose which ads to serve you. I'm a total privacy zealot, and despite following all the news, was really rather surprised just this past week to see a news article say that gmail actually scrapes the content of your mail for targetted advertising. I myself find that beyond creepy in and of itself, let alone the more disturbing (though fundamentally no different) situation of a telco selling the words of a private conversation to advertisers in order for them to better psychologically profile you and thus serve you a more persuasive advertisement.
Of course, we all know that becoming a telco is every companies wet dream, especially Google's.
+1 (more). Software development to me at least, on my own projects, is a vast complexity with the key aspects being sprints, roadblocks, parallelism(mental multitasking), and continuous learning.
For more than 10 years now, twitching out to slashdot or a google search of some random technical thought, has been an integral part of my routine. These 10 years of osmotic educational soundbites, are what I believe enables me to be about 100X more efficient than a fresh grad, at producing solutions for really difficult problems.
So I'll often hit nuisance roadblocks that thwart my productivity for a while (maybe a week even). And during those times, I'll start exploring and researching other aspects of other problems. Maybe some project that I know is vaguely on my - down the road in 3 months radar. Then, after several education tangents like that, and a dozen or two slashdot/googlenews twitches, even a few nights of sporadic electrochemical semi-random brain firing, I'll hit upon the solution to the roadblock. Or maybe I'll circle around the roadblock like a predator stalking its prey, maybe making a few false starts before actually making the successful kill strike. Then, having gotten past the roadblock, and having filled my brain with a weeks worth of fresh ideas and education, I'll make a 16 hour or 3 day sprint, that feels as if it is more an accomplishment than many entire months of work.
Dunno. I'm not all that successful money wise and employment wise, but I'm extremely happy with my open source accomplishments. But that's just me, I have no idea if I'm the norm or the exception.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only person who read this, then remembering the decision of how to store the retiring shuttles, put two and two together? Perhaps even with one or more volunteers traveling some initial portion of the final leg, perhaps aimed for a swing around mars and a cargo bay full of food and water? Seriously??
Let's try to come up with better examples that make people actually care please?
Oh wait I've got a fun one... ...snip... If the company does absolutely nothing with its proof of illegal activity, and later the guy gets caught (camera, whatever) then exactly how liable is the company or its agents as a co-conspirator?
Sadly, I'd guess no liability at all. I wouldn't have said that until the infamous gang rape (viriginia?) within the last couple years where dozens of spectators at the school dance(?) watched, some of them cheering on. I recall the news later said that by the letter of the law, there is no legal duty to make an attempt to report a rape (or presumably any other crime) in progress or after the fact. If you combine that, with the foundation of police undercover work including what used to be called illegal entrapment, ... and then throw in the post-9/11 fudge factor on traditional ethics ... I guess I'd just recommend that anyone and everyone assume that the law-enforcers and companies, are not going to be the ones sweating to protect _your_ ass from crimes they are watching in progress or committing themselves. If you are lucky, they'll allow crimes to happen to you, and a greater good will be served when a 'bigger fish' is caught.
I'd cry about 'moral hazard' and how ineffective such a legal system would seem to be both in theory and practice, but I guess that's just the way it is. The whole idea of 'moral hazard' kind of went out the window in my book with the bank bailouts and gitmo remaining open.
Though perhaps in your narrow scope of crimes of state secrets, there are other laws at play. Maybe even secret ones for all I don't know. But as you can see, the wider point of 'no legal duty to report an in-progress rape' and its relation to your point, kind of set off my disgust with our current legal system.
There's a great fictional story about this- pick up a copy of Vinge's 'Rainbows End' at your local libr... oops.
+1, my gut reaction as well, with the addition that there is a multiplication effect as the added violation of rights increases terrorist recruitment and motivation, with a corresponding increase in the amount of drivel and non-drivel entering your intelligence channels.
It's the prisoner's dilemna as clear as day. If you don't start with trust and have a system that encourages more trust/liberty/privacy and the benefits of such, you don't end up with anywhere near the optimal outcome.
Coincidentally enough, this state of affairs has been in place for 6 months, but this slashdot/lwn note comes the morning after I discovered the fact myself while trying (still as yet unsuccessfully) to rebuild the kernel with support for one odd driver enabled instead of disabled.
What strikes me as missing from the current set of comments, is how this move by RH seems at odds with their laudable history of 'upstream upstream upstream'. I.e., it seems to me that each of those hundred(s) of patches will now be significantly less likely to be adopted upstream, because of the added complexity of not knowing the details of - the mother of all deployments - of those patches. Details meaning, what other changes does it depend on, and happen to be shipped with in its stable and vast commercial deployment.
The other tinfoil-hat/security consideration is- if RH is as in bed with the NSA/CIA as it seems to me to have been for a very long time, and if the NSA/CIA did want to hide backdoors or backdoor enabling faults in the kernel, this is precisely the kind of move that would make those sorts of things orders of magnitudes more difficult for the traditional 'many eyes' effect to detect.
But of course, the bottom line is that what they are doing is quite legal, and from traditional business perspectives, quite ethical, and probably practical as well. But to the commenter who said there are 'no downsides' to this- No, there are downsides.
The part I find most amusing is the irony that Watson's speed on the buzzer seems directly attributable to the handicap it was given vis-a-vis not having to do the audio-speech and visual-text AI recognition that its human opponents had to do. The irony being that those two allegedly mature areas of AI research are ones in which IBM has been shipping commercial products for years. I suspect that if Watson had to do such processing, it would have been slaughtered just as bad as it slaughtered its opponents, if for no other reason than an extra couple tenths of a second of delay before it could decide to click its buzzer. I'm sure this may handicap may no longer be necessary in a few more months or years, but even in the Nova episode, they seemed to gloss over that.
To correct you- your comment, like mine, was pedantic, but not obligatory.
It's not at all that those watching the watchers are asleep. In fact, you are replying to an article that proves the exact opposite. No, what my life in the US has taught me, is the utter, utter, utter idiocy of the argument that as long as the watchers are watched, the widespread watching can be an acceptable thing in the name of security.
I mean seriously, reading slashdot for the last 10 years. The watchers are thoroughly watched. We may only know 10% of what they've done, but we can easily guess the rest (notice the utter, utter lack of public debate and discussion over the ability and legality of widespread use of cell/mobilephones as always on eavesdropping devices? The silence and lack of discussion about that makes me _positive_ it is being done on a widespread scale.) But even if we know all there is to know, and the watchers have been 100% exposed, what we've seen is enough by the standards we were brought up to believe in vis a vis the 4th ammendment, the geneva conventions, etc. Watching the watchers invade our privacy, and encourage extremism instead of spending their intellect ability and time contributing positively to the social fabric... Makes me want to blow myself up in one of the watchers buildings.
$0.02. The watchers are not asleep, just utterly innefectual. Quote of the day from aclu.org's factsheet on extraordinary rendition - "In the words of former CIA agent Robert Baer: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear -- never to see them again -- you send them to Egypt." "
ff 3.6.13, problem exhibits because I have a minimum font size set to 20. problem does not exhibit with no minimum font size set. (I'm not the original poster of the problem, but his description matches my first complaint)
More dangerous than riding around with a tank of explosive liquid?
You've been watching too much (or some) action fiction on tv and in the movies, and not enough mythbusters. It's basically near impossible to get a tank of gasoline to explode. I'm pretty sure it took actual explosives for the MB crew to get that to happen.
I don't think you are really disagreeing with what I said, though highlighting that there is a subtle issue with 'encryption wrapped inside an http login page'. I.e, whether the real issue is exactly as you described (https utilzed after redirection from http), or an alternate scenario that seems plausible- some custom encryption implemented with javascript within an http page, the problem is the same, and the solution is still just as I described- disallow any login via an http page. If you had carried your description of things through to a proposed solution, I don't see any other alternative than only having https login pages.
Note, when you go to facebook.com (i.e. www.facebook.com, i.e. http://www.facebook.com/ you are presented with a login page with user and password text entry. There is no redirection to an https login page involved.)
Agreed, but this part of the article had me intrigued:
I do not know the ins and outs of internet routing well enough to understand this, but I was alarmed by it. Does anyone with more technical expertise in the area have any insight?
Not like I've RTFA or anything, or even an expert, but my guess is simply the issue of- facebook _allows_ http logins, so all a nefarious government/network need do is break https for the site. I.e. the solution is to not have an unencrypted option, such that if a gov/net breaks https, instead of falling back to an insecure login, people get pissed that they can't use the site at all, and thus it becomes a high profile news story, etc.
For those of you unfamiliar with the 'Camden 28', a good example of a US Agent Provocateur can be found in this story-
camden28.org (film shown on PBS independent lens from time to time)
" ...
In the early-morning hours of Sunday, August 22, 1971, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell announced that FBI agents had arrested 20 antiwar activists in and near a draft board office in Camden, New Jersey.
They also asked the jury to acquit on the grounds that the raid would not have taken place without the help of a self-admitted FBI informer and provocateur. The defendants emphasized that they had given up their plan, for lack of a practical means, until the informer-provocateur had resurrected it and provided them with the encouragement and tools to carry it out.
"
If you believe that the previous Iraq war document release was 'nothing', then it is because you, like so many of us, are completely numb to things like this-
"According to the Iraq Body Count project, a sample of the deaths found in about 800 logs, extrapolated to the full set of records, shows around 15,000 civilian deaths that had not been previously admitted by the US government. 66,000 civilians were reported dead in the logs, out of 109,000 deaths in total."
And of course the reason we are numb to statistics like this, is also for the same reason that Brian Williams as he reported this on NBC nightly news also casually threw out the existing belief that deaths have been so underreported that a significant number of respectable investigators believe that the total number of deaths due to the war exceeds a million.
During the last 10 years, we have all been subjected to so much _blatant_ disinformation about this war, that as a society, we can be exposed to the above quote in the news, and still months later, not consider people like you insane for having the impression that nothing newsworthy was exposed in that leak. But if you could somehow relate the above quote to an average pre-9/11 american, they would probably expect that it would have been a huge news story. But after a decade of GITMO, there really isn't a lot that will leave an impact anymore. The world is truely numb. And it's sad. We went from pre-9/11 ignorance, to this new level of numb, and it's just really sad.
For fun I'll record in the slashdb record how I surprised myself and managed to correctly multiply 357 by 289 in my head. I don't have a history of being able to do such things, and it did take me a couple minutes, but I was pretty surprised to see bc confirm my answer.
... 57 + 14 is 71 thus 1071, then add those 2 0's back on to get 107100. Then throw that pesky round 100K off to the side to be remembered later, and we have 7100 - 11 * 357. Which is 7100 - (10 + 1) * 357, so 7100 - 3570. Since half of 7100 is clearly 3550, then 3530 is the partial. now 1 more 357 to subtract from that. I went with 3530 - 400 is 3130, but have to add back the 43 to get 3173. Now just add back that big ol round 100K and we have 103173.
:) Of course I expect other people may have more digit storage memory than I do, and thus can just do it the standard simple way...
I went with the route of breaking it down to 357 * 300 - 11 * 357. 357 * 300 is 35700 * 3. Even that is pretty hard so I figured 35700 * 2 = 71400, then + 35700 .
See, no sweat
To whoever modded me down as a Troll... OK, I can't say it wasn't to be expected. But it was not a troll. It was an honest, angstful statement born of thirty five years exposure to culture in the US, particularly including the absolute sick irony of Abu Ghraib's 'rape rooms' not being allowed to be torn to rubble by the 'liberated' Iraqi people, and instead becoming housing to new US torturers. And no, I really don't buy the 'night shift' defense.
And then Gitmo, followed by the first non-white-male president of the US making a _day one signed pledge_ to shut it down, broken, after nearly two years.
So again, yes, you were within reason to mod me a troll. But my animosity was 100% sincere, and I think my social commentary valid and meaningful addition to the conversation about sending a 23 year old 'kid' to the places that receive references to their tacitly accepted and encouraged rapes hundreds of times in mainstream television programs every week of every year on just about every channel.
Welcome kid, to the socially accepted and socially encouraged rape rooms of the new leaders of Iraq. Don't fuck with the republicans, because they will fuck you, and fuck you hard.
mod parent up. ipod was not innovation, but a company with vast resources waiting for the right time to walk into a market and ensure that the actual innovators did not end up with the lions share of the market. Same thing with the ipad. I know the silicon valley attitude from much firsthand personal experience. The attitude is not to innovate, or place a high value on groundbreaking ideas, but instead to understand that to cash in, you wait to leverage other advantages when the time is best to cash in on someone elses innovation. This is precisely the attitude of Jobs-2.0 as opposed to the attitude of Jobs-1.0 who got sorely bested commercially until he adopted the Gates strategy.
*cough* every other mobile phone on the market *cough*
"The software is designed to not only enable enterprises to monitor the conversations of their customers but to engage those that require service, Cisco says"
I think to get the creepiness quotient expressed properly, 'service' should be in special quotes there.
I honestly mean this with no offense but- you just don't get it. I wasn't being cryptic. To try and maintain a sense of privacy, while debating why privacy is important to you, you have to use contrived non-real examples. Seriously, if what I offerred is still not enough to explain to you why people like myself get 'creeped out' by advertisements targetted based on 'private' communications, you just never will (from this style argument).
I feel I understand generally where you are coming from. And as mentioned, I truly, with all my heart and soul hope that I am the outlyer. The delusional paranoid schizophrenic to whom no amount of practical implementation of ethics will help. Because if I'm wrong, and you are right, then all is good (for everyone but me, or my super-minority).
You want one real example? Many years ago, visiting my 70 year old mother and seeing her yahoo mail email account. I used the same yahoo email account. But I had never seen the ad that seemed to be on her page 50% of the time, with an elderly woman, as wrinkled as anybody you had ever seen, morphing into a wrinkle-free young woman. It made me sick that that morph was looping endlessly as she read and responded to email. But there is no way to argue this. You don't me, my mother, or the specifics of my situation. And when you pull out perfectly reasonable counterarguments that that ad was probably based on personal information inputted instead of the present debate about communication content scraping... There's no point. You either get that there is a real issue that merits laws, or you don't. You don't. I hope that in the big picture, you are right and that the benefits of holding your views outweigh any detriments.
I mean bla bla bla bla, you can use noscript and encryption and bla bla bla bla. You're right, I can't argue against you. You win. You'll humble yourself and admit I have some point but that I'm wrong here and there and bla bla bla bla. You are a troll, nothing more and nothing less, and the fact that you got modded insightful sickens me more than the fact that I got modded insightful flatters me. You are just so full of shit, claiming you need help understanding why Google's data mining advertising business crossover with its voice and email communication business creeps some subset of people out. You know precisely why it does, you just think it doesn't matter, and shouldn't matter to us. I wish something you could say, some perfect argument of libertarian logic (I was a randroid for much of my youth), could make me not be creeped out.
A hypothetical 7 year old girl would say it best about someone reading her message passed to a friend - "I don't want you reading it, because it is none of your beeswax". It is not more complicated than that. Really, its not. My communications intended for a single other person, should not be used in any way, or exposed in any way to anyone else, because my words, are NONE OF THEIR GOD-DAMNED BUSINESS. End of story. End of debate.
"Maybe it's simply a matter of trust I have that no humans are bothering to look at pictures of just one more baby, which others do not share. Maybe I don't actually do anything I shouldn't be doing, as Schmidt said, or anything I'm ashamed of and don't want told about to my face. I've never heard an actual reason for why people think it's "creepy" and bothers them. If someone can elaborate, I'd like to see what you have to say."
Honestly, I am very suspicious of this question, but perhaps because I am a very suspicious person in general. I guess I just find it hard to believe that someone who can write as thorough an opinion on the subject as you did, truly needs an explanation as to why some people (enough to mod my opinion insightful) think it is 'creepy'. Just sit, and spend a couple minutes excercising your sense of imagination and empathy.
Ok, now just to overkill answer a question that shouldn't need answering-
First, the anecdote. Suppose I am HIV positive. It would be reasonable that I might want to discuss this situation with friends via private telephone conversations as well as private email conversations. Do you really find it so hard to understand how I might feel both the desire, and the expectation, that the companies I entrust those channels of communication to, should feel an ethical obligation to respect the privacy of the communication, and not use that communication in _any_ way?
A simple example, might be an advertisement for HIV treatment, or even a gay lifestyle website popping up on my personal email screen. Now, it's a personal email screen, but while I may feel 'safe' having a 'private' email in a 10 point font on that screen in a workplace, or library, I might be embarrassed if a recognizable advertisement appears next to it, readable from 20 feet away, for an HIV treatment, or gay lifestyle website.
That is just one contrived example, which I'm very surprised that anyone such as yourself should need spelled out for you.
But lets move on. The fourth ammendment to the constitution, demands that invasions of privacy only occur in very extreme (non routine) circumstances. I.e. when there is probable cause and/or warrants involved. I myself, have this sense of desired privacy. I don't know, perhaps there is a genetic as well as nurtured component to it, that many, or even most of my fellow humans don't share as strongly. To the point, where I tend to assume that the motivations behind the fourth ammendment were not just based on physical inconvenience, but on the intrinsic value of privacy. I.e. there is some motivation to avoid searches because they are physically inconveniencing to people, but there is also a large part of it due to the value of privacy in and of itself. Please note, I understand the difference between government and commercial aspects of this debate. Right now I am just trying to explain that 'creepy' feeling to you that you have such trouble understanding.
Perhaps the canonical example is- say you are a teenager and have a 'big brother'. Say that big brother goes through your room. You may totally like and respect that big brother, and even believe that for the most part, he has your best interests at heart. And perhaps you don't have any horrendously dark secrets. But still, having someone, even that close a family member, intrude upon your personal effects, necessarily having side effects on their and perhaps others behaviour towards you in the future, really can feel quite 'creepy'.
The point I was trying to highlight in my original post, was that I grew up believing that my parents generation, had placed special legal restrictions on the content of communcation through the telephone system, due to a value of privacy, and an understanding of how 'creepy' it can feel for quite a large portion of our society, to know that information about their 'private' communications is being utilized in any way shape or form that will have an impact on their lives, or society in general, beyond the intended aspect of the
"Does Google 'track you' any more than a telco does?"
Last I heard your telco wasn't using the _content_ of your communications to choose which ads to serve you. I'm a total privacy zealot, and despite following all the news, was really rather surprised just this past week to see a news article say that gmail actually scrapes the content of your mail for targetted advertising. I myself find that beyond creepy in and of itself, let alone the more disturbing (though fundamentally no different) situation of a telco selling the words of a private conversation to advertisers in order for them to better psychologically profile you and thus serve you a more persuasive advertisement.
Of course, we all know that becoming a telco is every companies wet dream, especially Google's.
Seems like this might just be the government spies being jealous of the data the search engines (*cough* advertisers) have been collecting for years.
+1 (more). Software development to me at least, on my own projects, is a vast complexity with the key aspects being sprints, roadblocks, parallelism(mental multitasking), and continuous learning.
For more than 10 years now, twitching out to slashdot or a google search of some random technical thought, has been an integral part of my routine. These 10 years of osmotic educational soundbites, are what I believe enables me to be about 100X more efficient than a fresh grad, at producing solutions for really difficult problems.
So I'll often hit nuisance roadblocks that thwart my productivity for a while (maybe a week even). And during those times, I'll start exploring and researching other aspects of other problems. Maybe some project that I know is vaguely on my - down the road in 3 months radar. Then, after several education tangents like that, and a dozen or two slashdot/googlenews twitches, even a few nights of sporadic electrochemical semi-random brain firing, I'll hit upon the solution to the roadblock. Or maybe I'll circle around the roadblock like a predator stalking its prey, maybe making a few false starts before actually making the successful kill strike. Then, having gotten past the roadblock, and having filled my brain with a weeks worth of fresh ideas and education, I'll make a 16 hour or 3 day sprint, that feels as if it is more an accomplishment than many entire months of work.
Dunno. I'm not all that successful money wise and employment wise, but I'm extremely happy with my open source accomplishments. But that's just me, I have no idea if I'm the norm or the exception.