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I think the cause of the malaise is much simpler. Think back to when you were a kid skipping down the street. You were happy for no particular reason. In fact it was your default state of mind. Adults smiled to see you skipping along so care free.
Then one day as you skipped along you encountered a tall man in a gray suit with gray felt hat. He gave you such a disgusted look. You slow down in reaction. Then the gray man says "You are tool old to be skipping" all mean and nasty.
From that day on your life sucked. You worried about things that never bothered you before. Well I'm here to tell you that was no accident. The gray man is no ordinary person. He's a time traveler and his mission is to conduct hostile psychological operations against the middle class people of The United States.
Being from the future he could see that it was only necessary to spoil the childhoods of the middle class kids to generate the impetus for all the wars, famines, depressions, inflationary periods etc that sapped the resources of the middle class.
The only way to turn back the clock on the downfall of the middle class is to go back in time and skip down the street no matter what anyone thinks or says about it!-MilesAhead (August 04, 2014, 08:20 AM)
He's a time traveler and his mission is to conduct hostile psychological operations against the middle class people of The United States.
REGULATE
It should be illegal to collect and permanently store most kinds of behavioral data.
Ross Ulbricht’s defence team has filed a new pre-trial motion calling on the court to dismiss charges in the Silk Road case on the grounds of Fourth Amendment privacy protections.
Van Eck would be proud...-Edvard (August 05, 2014, 01:37 AM)
Hamish the house-builder.-IainB (August 04, 2014, 06:06 PM)
Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass.
In other experiments, they extracted useful audio signals from videos of aluminum foil, the surface of a glass of water, and even the leaves of a potted plant. The researchers will present their findings in a paper at this year’s Siggraph, the premier computer graphics conference.
“When sound hits an object, it causes the object to vibrate,” says Abe Davis, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and first author on the new paper. “The motion of this vibration creates a very subtle visual signal that’s usually invisible to the naked eye. People didn’t realize that this information was there.”
In a pre-trial motion filed in the case late Friday night, Ulbricht’s lawyers laid out a series of arguments to dismiss all charges in the case based on Ulbricht’s fourth amendment protections against warrantless searches of his digital property. As early as the FBI’s initial discovery of servers in Iceland hosting the site on the Tor anonymity network—seemingly without obtaining a search warrant from a judge—Ulbricht argues that law enforcement violated his constitutional right to privacy, tainting all further evidence against him dug up in the investigation that followed.
“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.” - Richard Feynman, 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics winner.
I don’t believe anymore that the answer lies in more or better tech
Again: This is not a technical problem. It is a people problem. People problems can't be fixed by simply applying some technology.-40hz (August 03, 2014, 07:59 AM)
And even if somebody doesn't find a way to crack it, there's always that little issue with the hardware we all use...
I suspect that if something like Bleep really does prove to be more than a nuisance to those it's pointed at, it will only be a matter of time before chip manufacturers are required to secretly incorporate mechanisms into their firmware and silicon to deal with it - assuming they're not in there already. And since fabricating a modern CPU is beyond the capabilities of even the best funded Kickstarter or Indigogo campaign, that should give the surveillance gnomes another fifteen or twenty years worth of unchallenged omniscience to wallow in...
Here's the real problem as I see it: we are running programs on machines engineered and built by the largest "in bed with the government" corporations in the world; 90% of which are running an operating system known to be compromised; on a network controlled by the governments of the world; over wired connections and radio waves monitored by the governments of the world (and their corporate allies).-40hz (August 03, 2014, 07:59 AM)
It's not the governments and the corporations that are playing Whack-a-Mole when it comes to stuff like this.
We are.-40hz (August 03, 2014, 07:59 AM)
IMHO, things like Bleep mainly serve as a distraction to keep us from dealing with the real problem.-40hz (August 03, 2014, 07:59 AM)
Y'know...if I were in power, I'd probably covertly be encouraging efforts like Bleep and Tor. And the more, the better. It defuses some of the geek outrage - and ties up some very smart and dedicated people (and money) who might otherwise be causing all kinds of problems for me. So let all these brainy types (most of whom will do anything to avoid dealing with an actual person) code to their heart's content. Because in this scenario, the only thing better than my opposition not having a good solution, is having them put their trust in a broken one...-40hz (August 03, 2014, 07:59 AM)
Once you go down that rabbit hole of self-referential accusations and 'proofs' you might as well ask which strand of "the spider's web" 40hz represents for merely posting such a link? (Since there's every chance he didn't "merely" post it.)-40hz (August 03, 2014, 07:27 AM)
I enjoy most jokes about religion that do not make a person or a class of person an undeserving butt of their humour, and making jokes about religion can be a valid form of criticism of a religion or its religio-political ideology anyway.-IainB (July 30, 2014, 03:52 AM)
Cool!
But if there's no central server, how does the client know where to find other peers?-Deozaan (August 02, 2014, 02:27 PM)
After reading the story earlier, though, an evil thought popped into my head - I know, hard to believe. I'm sure all of Scholastic's executives own homes. Since sale can equal rental, whoever sold them their houses should be allowed to change their mind and take them back without any repayment.
I'm not saying it's reasonable, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be fair.-Vurbal (August 01, 2014, 04:54 PM)
You mean like when a bank forecloses? Yeah, you don't actually own your home until you have finished paying the bank for it, plus interest. In essence, as long as you still have a mortgage, you are renting the house from the bank, who is the real owner.-app103 (August 01, 2014, 08:25 PM)
Are we heading for the endgame?
Read the full article here.-40hz (August 02, 2014, 04:09 PM)