Anyone remember The Troubles? Big long extended problem Ireland had with terrorism? Probably not; it's been over for more than a decade now, and people's memories tend not to be that long, especially when politics are involved.
But one of the most interesting things about The Troubles is how it ended. Various times during the 1990s, the government brokered a cease-fire with the IRA, (the terrorist group behind most of it,) and every time, they quickly started blowing stuff up again. (That terrorists would behave this way should surprise exactly nobody.) But then in the early 2000s one thing happened, far from Ireland, that put an end to The Troubles almost overnight: a bunch of Muslim terrorists hijacked several airplanes in the eastern US and turned them into bombs.
I know what you're thinking: what does 9/11 have to do with terrorism in Ireland? Then answer, surprisingly enough, is money. There are a whole lot of Irish-Americans in the eastern USA, and nationalist sentiment on their part had been responsible for the bulk of IRA funding. When terrorism very abruptly lost a lot of its glamour, that revenue stream dried up, and the IRA very quickly found themselves unable to continue operations.
But what does all that have to do with Syria? Well, it's kind of an open secret that the bulk of Islamic terror groups' funding also comes from the USA and our allies, in the form of oil money. So what's the lesson we can learn from The Troubles?
If we really want to shut down Al Qaeda, ISIS, and whoever else, the best strategy would be to withdraw completely (seriously, over there it's our enemies fighting our enemies, so why not just stand back and let them?) and take all that money we're spending on military operations and invest it in energy research. Solar power is right near "the tipping point" of mainstream adoption, and electric vehicles are just a little further behind. Push them over the edge, share the technology freely, worldwide, make oil energy obsolete and petroleum worthless, and we cut Islamic terror off at the knees.
Of course, it's not like we're ever going to do something like that. It would make too much sense. But a guy can dream, no?
2023? Wow. That's less than 10 years away! That seems like an incredibly optimistic timeframe for a colonization attempt, since the best of Martian surface conditions are similar to living in Antarctica and (as far as I know at least) we've done no terraforming to prepare the way for cultivation of food, and without that, how can any colony ever hope to survive?
Re: Re: I am outraged something I don't really understand changed for a small sub-population that probably doesn't include me!
(Yeah, that was me. Somehow I got signed out while writing that comment.)
Guarantee all you want. If other people don't agree with something, and the thing in question is a matter of objective fact rather than a matter of opinion, then who agrees and who doesn't is irrelevant to the facts of the matter.
I'm a professional software developer who's been out of college for years now. I've lived all over the US and on another continent, and visited a third, and I've studied history, motivation, and human behavior pretty extensively, and the more I see, the more clear it becomes that modern radical ideas about alternative morality are neither modern, radical, nor alternative; to a one they're retreads of things that have been tried in ancient times, frequently went mainstream for a while, and then failed. Some of the ones that failed badly enough to get people killed or bring down entire civilizations with them ended up getting taboos and "thou shalt nots" attached to them.
What we call "traditional morality" today is what works, the distilled aggregate lab notes of thousands of years of experimentation in human civilization.
I suppose you think you have some "right to be forgotten" by Facebook and any other internet site out there, amiright?
I think that if it's wrong for a government spy agency to build secret dossiers and profiles on me, then it's equally wrong for a corporate spy agency to do so. It's really that simple.
Re: Re: I am outraged something I don't really understand changed for a small sub-population that probably doesn't include me!
...and as if by clockwork, out comes the tired old Objectivist scare trope about "punishing success."
Look, I know Libertarians aren't exactly what the rest of us would call "in touch with reality," but isn't that one seriously pushing things just a little too far? Attributing it to a vast faceless enemy like "The Government" is one thing, but do you actually personally know any real human being--even one--who believes that success is a thing that should be punished?
What does need to be punished is not becoming big and successful, but becoming big and abusive. I have no problem with a large and powerful entity existing and using its powers for good; it's simply that I have no evidence that Facebook is such an entity, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Same with Microsoft, especially 90s Microsoft!
Being big and abusive does need to be punished, it does need to be regulated. That's the American way; it says so right in our oldest and most fundamental document, the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men
In other words, smacking down abusive entities who interfere with our rights to life, liberty and happiness is explicitly what governments are supposed to do, and I would welcome the current one doing so to Facebook.
Because when they're deliberately connecting people together that they believe are a bad match, doesn't it stand to reason that the chance of that is significantly higher?
1. Australia faces a serious and ongoing terrorist threat. The escalating terrorist situation in Iraq and Syria poses an increasing threat to the security of all Australians both here and overseas.
Wow. Just... wow.
I can understand people saying something like that in America, what with 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing, and various other incidents, but when was the last time Australia was the victim of an Islamic terrorist attack? (Or any terrorist attack, for that matter.) Have there been some and they just didn't make the news on this side of the Pacific? Because I can't think of a single incident.
Re: Re: I am outraged something I don't really understand changed for a small sub-population that probably doesn't include me!
If people don't like it, they can leave.
People like to trot out lines like this to excuse bad behavior by corporations. "Oh, it's not like they're the Government or anything; you can simply choose not to do business with them." But with Facebook, that's simply not true. Whether you've joined the system or not, you're still part of the system. (And you say "you can leave," but have you ever tried to close a Facebook account?)
"They're a private business" is not and never should be an excuse to not have to follow basic codes of conduct and ethics.
Besides, isn't it a little disturbing that a person in power on one side of the traditional political spectrum shrugs off the government putting someone at the other end of that spectrum on a terrorist watchlist?
20 years ago, it would have been. Today, it's just business as usual. Sometimes I wonder if Tom Clancy didn't have the right idea about the US political system...
Re: I am outraged something I don't really understand changed for a small sub-population that probably doesn't include me!
First, you really ought to look at the alt text to that comic, which puts it in a new perspective.
Second, I think that it has an invalid premise to begin with. Facebook shouldn't be choosing what to show users, period. The whole point of a social network is that the content comes from other users in the network; the platform is just a platform.
What does domestic violence have to do with this? I genuinely don't see the connection.
Have you had a mostly happy life?
It has to do with when relationships go wrong. It's pretty much always bad, but how bad it is really varies. At the light end, there's emotional distress. Somewhere in the middle you get stuff like stalking, rape, domestic violence and murder. But the really bad effects are far worse: when you mix an abusive relationship and families with children, you get cycles of abuse and domestic problems that continue causing harm to innocents for generations.
If OKCupid's "experiment" contributed to the formation of even one of those, which unfortunately is a very real possibility, everyone involved deserves the proverbial "lock 'em up and throw away the key" treatment.
I don't see it as overstating the situation, not at all.
In Facebook's case, a trusted news source (and yes, it was trusted by its users, whether or not it should have been) deliberately fed bad news to its lab ra... ahem, sorry, to its users to measure the negative emotional impact it would have on them. And they also did the opposite--trying to manipulate people with good news and distort their emotions in a positive direction and measure its effectiveness--which may appear less creepy on the surface but is possibly even worse; do you want powerful entities knowing how to pacify you by inducing happiness when something is going wrong that you should be agitated about? This is stuff straight out of a dystopian fiction novel, becoming real before our eyes.
And OKCupid's experiment, setting people up with dates they "would probably hate" is, if anything, even more reprehensible. Relationships gone wrong are emotionally distressing pretty much by default, at the very least, and the harm done only goes up from there. The people who ran that experiment ought to be thrown in prison, and anybody with a happy sheltered life who's never experienced domestic violence has no right to tell me otherwise. Period.
There are some lines that should never be crossed, and Facebook and OKCupid crossed a couple of them, and I sincerely do want to see some very heavy-handed criminal prosecution for it.
I dunno. The parade of horribles mentioned here seems like a distraction. What OKCupid and Facebook did was nothing like UI testing or a taste test, for a few simple reasons: participants know that they're participating in research (especially in a taste test) and even in UI testing when the "study subjects" may be unaware, the test is, as a general rule of thumb, not designed to actively be detrimental to the study subjects' well-being.
But there's a very good chance that an average, reasonably well-informed layperson would look at both of these corporate "studies" and conclude that that is exactly what they are: actively designed to inflict harm and emotional distress and measure the results.
The appropriate question to ask in a situation like this isn't "should this be considered legal under a particular interpretation of a particular state law or not?" It's "should people who do stuff like this be prosecuted for crimes against humanity or not?"
I see a few stories about accounts frozen on accident because they run afoul of fraud prevention algorithms, and then getting fixed quickly once attention is called to it. There's a huge difference between that and "stealing their clients' money."
You mean the company that was infuriated when they found the NSA spying on them and immediately went to HTTPS everywhere to slam the door in their faces? That Google?
I’m writing this post on a couple of my computers that run versions of Microsoft Windows. Unsurprisingly, Apple can’t decrypt the data on these computers either. That this operating system software is from Microsoft rather than Apple is beside the point. The fact is that Apple can’t decrypt the data on these computers is because I’ve chosen to use software that doesn’t allow them to. The same would be true if I was posting from my iPhone. That Apple wrote the software doesn’t change my decision to encrypt.
He really should have picked a better example. This argument basically boils down to "I own my device and therefore I have the right to use it as I wish." And as sensible a position as that is, and as much as I agree with it, Apple, specifically, has made it painfully clear from Day 1 that that is not the case. You may have purchased it, but you do not have anything resembling traditional rights of control over your own property; Apple does. That's what their "walled garden" is all about: your property is not your property, you pay for it but Apple still controls it and dictates what you can and cannot do with it.
If you choose to encrypt your iPhone, you do so at Apple's sufferance. Do you really believe that they don't have a way in, their claims notwithstanding?
What’s oversold? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor connection, nor any other part Belonging to a ISP. O! be some other name: What’s in a name? that which we call a fraud, selling something you do not have and cannot provide By any other name would smell as dishonest.
Not at all. True Net Neutrality simply means if the customers pay for a 10 meg/sec connection, then they have 10 meg/sec of bandwidth to use however they want, whether on this or something else, and the ISP doesn't get to make that choice for them.
If it swamps their network, then the ISP is engaged in fraud, selling something they cannot provide, and needs to either upgrade their network very quickly, offer refunds and equitable remedies to their consumers very quickly, or face the legal consequences of defrauding their consumers.
There's nothing scary or harmful in the least about any of this... unless you're an ISP that's making money hand over fist by defrauding customers of course. Then it looks like the end of the world.
On the post: White House Says Its Rules Limiting Drone Attacks To Avoid Civilians Don't Apply In Syria
Re: Re:
On the post: White House Says Its Rules Limiting Drone Attacks To Avoid Civilians Don't Apply In Syria
But one of the most interesting things about The Troubles is how it ended. Various times during the 1990s, the government brokered a cease-fire with the IRA, (the terrorist group behind most of it,) and every time, they quickly started blowing stuff up again. (That terrorists would behave this way should surprise exactly nobody.) But then in the early 2000s one thing happened, far from Ireland, that put an end to The Troubles almost overnight: a bunch of Muslim terrorists hijacked several airplanes in the eastern US and turned them into bombs.
I know what you're thinking: what does 9/11 have to do with terrorism in Ireland? Then answer, surprisingly enough, is money. There are a whole lot of Irish-Americans in the eastern USA, and nationalist sentiment on their part had been responsible for the bulk of IRA funding. When terrorism very abruptly lost a lot of its glamour, that revenue stream dried up, and the IRA very quickly found themselves unable to continue operations.
But what does all that have to do with Syria? Well, it's kind of an open secret that the bulk of Islamic terror groups' funding also comes from the USA and our allies, in the form of oil money. So what's the lesson we can learn from The Troubles?
If we really want to shut down Al Qaeda, ISIS, and whoever else, the best strategy would be to withdraw completely (seriously, over there it's our enemies fighting our enemies, so why not just stand back and let them?) and take all that money we're spending on military operations and invest it in energy research. Solar power is right near "the tipping point" of mainstream adoption, and electric vehicles are just a little further behind. Push them over the edge, share the technology freely, worldwide, make oil energy obsolete and petroleum worthless, and we cut Islamic terror off at the knees.
Of course, it's not like we're ever going to do something like that. It would make too much sense. But a guy can dream, no?
On the post: Analysis Suggests More Than Half Of Google & Microsoft's Patents Likely Invalid Thanks To The Supreme Court
Re: Sounds good
On the post: DailyDirt: Making It To Mars
On the post: Law Professor Claims Any Internet Company 'Research' On Users Without Review Board Approval Is Illegal
Re: Re: I am outraged something I don't really understand changed for a small sub-population that probably doesn't include me!
Guarantee all you want. If other people don't agree with something, and the thing in question is a matter of objective fact rather than a matter of opinion, then who agrees and who doesn't is irrelevant to the facts of the matter.
I'm a professional software developer who's been out of college for years now. I've lived all over the US and on another continent, and visited a third, and I've studied history, motivation, and human behavior pretty extensively, and the more I see, the more clear it becomes that modern radical ideas about alternative morality are neither modern, radical, nor alternative; to a one they're retreads of things that have been tried in ancient times, frequently went mainstream for a while, and then failed. Some of the ones that failed badly enough to get people killed or bring down entire civilizations with them ended up getting taboos and "thou shalt nots" attached to them.
What we call "traditional morality" today is what works, the distilled aggregate lab notes of thousands of years of experimentation in human civilization.
I think that if it's wrong for a government spy agency to build secret dossiers and profiles on me, then it's equally wrong for a corporate spy agency to do so. It's really that simple.
On the post: Law Professor Claims Any Internet Company 'Research' On Users Without Review Board Approval Is Illegal
Re: Re: I am outraged something I don't really understand changed for a small sub-population that probably doesn't include me!
Look, I know Libertarians aren't exactly what the rest of us would call "in touch with reality," but isn't that one seriously pushing things just a little too far? Attributing it to a vast faceless enemy like "The Government" is one thing, but do you actually personally know any real human being--even one--who believes that success is a thing that should be punished?
What does need to be punished is not becoming big and successful, but becoming big and abusive. I have no problem with a large and powerful entity existing and using its powers for good; it's simply that I have no evidence that Facebook is such an entity, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Same with Microsoft, especially 90s Microsoft!
Being big and abusive does need to be punished, it does need to be regulated. That's the American way; it says so right in our oldest and most fundamental document, the Declaration of Independence:
In other words, smacking down abusive entities who interfere with our rights to life, liberty and happiness is explicitly what governments are supposed to do, and I would welcome the current one doing so to Facebook.
On the post: Law Professor Claims Any Internet Company 'Research' On Users Without Review Board Approval Is Illegal
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Proposed Terror Law Would Allow Australia's Entire Internet To Be Monitored With Just One Warrant
Wow. Just... wow.
I can understand people saying something like that in America, what with 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing, and various other incidents, but when was the last time Australia was the victim of an Islamic terrorist attack? (Or any terrorist attack, for that matter.) Have there been some and they just didn't make the news on this side of the Pacific? Because I can't think of a single incident.
On the post: Law Professor Claims Any Internet Company 'Research' On Users Without Review Board Approval Is Illegal
Re: Re: I am outraged something I don't really understand changed for a small sub-population that probably doesn't include me!
People like to trot out lines like this to excuse bad behavior by corporations. "Oh, it's not like they're the Government or anything; you can simply choose not to do business with them." But with Facebook, that's simply not true. Whether you've joined the system or not, you're still part of the system. (And you say "you can leave," but have you ever tried to close a Facebook account?)
"They're a private business" is not and never should be an excuse to not have to follow basic codes of conduct and ethics.
On the post: Cheney Biographer, Fox News Contributor Put On DHS Terrorist Watchlist; Harry Reid's Spokesperson Says It's No Big Deal
20 years ago, it would have been. Today, it's just business as usual. Sometimes I wonder if Tom Clancy didn't have the right idea about the US political system...
On the post: Law Professor Claims Any Internet Company 'Research' On Users Without Review Board Approval Is Illegal
Re: I am outraged something I don't really understand changed for a small sub-population that probably doesn't include me!
Second, I think that it has an invalid premise to begin with. Facebook shouldn't be choosing what to show users, period. The whole point of a social network is that the content comes from other users in the network; the platform is just a platform.
But then again, this is Facebook we're talking about. "Don't even bother trying to pretend to not be evil."
On the post: Law Professor Claims Any Internet Company 'Research' On Users Without Review Board Approval Is Illegal
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Have you had a mostly happy life?
It has to do with when relationships go wrong. It's pretty much always bad, but how bad it is really varies. At the light end, there's emotional distress. Somewhere in the middle you get stuff like stalking, rape, domestic violence and murder. But the really bad effects are far worse: when you mix an abusive relationship and families with children, you get cycles of abuse and domestic problems that continue causing harm to innocents for generations.
If OKCupid's "experiment" contributed to the formation of even one of those, which unfortunately is a very real possibility, everyone involved deserves the proverbial "lock 'em up and throw away the key" treatment.
On the post: Law Professor Claims Any Internet Company 'Research' On Users Without Review Board Approval Is Illegal
Re: Re:
In Facebook's case, a trusted news source (and yes, it was trusted by its users, whether or not it should have been) deliberately fed bad news to its lab ra... ahem, sorry, to its users to measure the negative emotional impact it would have on them. And they also did the opposite--trying to manipulate people with good news and distort their emotions in a positive direction and measure its effectiveness--which may appear less creepy on the surface but is possibly even worse; do you want powerful entities knowing how to pacify you by inducing happiness when something is going wrong that you should be agitated about? This is stuff straight out of a dystopian fiction novel, becoming real before our eyes.
And OKCupid's experiment, setting people up with dates they "would probably hate" is, if anything, even more reprehensible. Relationships gone wrong are emotionally distressing pretty much by default, at the very least, and the harm done only goes up from there. The people who ran that experiment ought to be thrown in prison, and anybody with a happy sheltered life who's never experienced domestic violence has no right to tell me otherwise. Period.
There are some lines that should never be crossed, and Facebook and OKCupid crossed a couple of them, and I sincerely do want to see some very heavy-handed criminal prosecution for it.
On the post: Law Professor Claims Any Internet Company 'Research' On Users Without Review Board Approval Is Illegal
But there's a very good chance that an average, reasonably well-informed layperson would look at both of these corporate "studies" and conclude that that is exactly what they are: actively designed to inflict harm and emotional distress and measure the results.
The appropriate question to ask in a situation like this isn't "should this be considered legal under a particular interpretation of a particular state law or not?" It's "should people who do stuff like this be prosecuted for crimes against humanity or not?"
On the post: What's So Bad About Making Money Off Fan Fiction?
Re: Re: Re: You lost me with this...
On the post: What's So Bad About Making Money Off Fan Fiction?
Re: You lost me with this...
I've been using PayPal for over a decade, for many different types of financial transactions, and never had a single problem with them stealing money.
On the post: Law Enforcement Freaks Out Over Apple & Google's Decision To Encrypt Phone Info By Default
Re: Re:
On the post: Law Enforcement Freaks Out Over Apple & Google's Decision To Encrypt Phone Info By Default
He really should have picked a better example. This argument basically boils down to "I own my device and therefore I have the right to use it as I wish." And as sensible a position as that is, and as much as I agree with it, Apple, specifically, has made it painfully clear from Day 1 that that is not the case. You may have purchased it, but you do not have anything resembling traditional rights of control over your own property; Apple does. That's what their "walled garden" is all about: your property is not your property, you pay for it but Apple still controls it and dictates what you can and cannot do with it.
If you choose to encrypt your iPhone, you do so at Apple's sufferance. Do you really believe that they don't have a way in, their claims notwithstanding?
On the post: Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee Gets To The Core Of Net Neutrality Debate: You Need An Open Internet To Have A Free Market
Re: Re: Re: Nice but...
What’s oversold? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor connection, nor any other part
Belonging to a ISP. O! be some other name:
What’s in a name? that which we call a fraud, selling something you do not have and cannot provide
By any other name would smell as dishonest.
On the post: Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee Gets To The Core Of Net Neutrality Debate: You Need An Open Internet To Have A Free Market
Re: Nice but...
If it swamps their network, then the ISP is engaged in fraud, selling something they cannot provide, and needs to either upgrade their network very quickly, offer refunds and equitable remedies to their consumers very quickly, or face the legal consequences of defrauding their consumers.
There's nothing scary or harmful in the least about any of this... unless you're an ISP that's making money hand over fist by defrauding customers of course. Then it looks like the end of the world.
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