The most important part of a universal basic income, in my opinion, is to not provide it for people under 18, otherwise, you're incentivizing people to have more children (which in many macro cases is a good thing, but in practice in the US would probably have immediate negative impacts).
To clarify, the scenario isn't that the Nazis just picked up existing technology-- They had to have direct dealings with IBM for the scope and implementation of the process, which was largely involved with sorting census data to figure out who the Jews and other targeted ethnicities were, shipping them to various concentration camps, and determining where and how to "exhaust" these resources. Just imagine being one of the programmers tasked with that.
The book details how Thomas Watson was directly involved in all this, and when the US made Nazi dealings illegal, he handed over direct control of his Nazi business to local branches instead of halting the relationship. After the war, those local branches all rejoined greater IBM.
It's kind of crazy to see how IBM has avoided scrutiny and continues to celebrate Watson through their naming conventions.
The etymology is important. Private vs. public is the difference between the individual and the group. What makes us individuals is that we exist independently from the public. If our actions, thoughts, opinions, and histories are public, we cease to be individuals. In practice, that means that differences between people will become a thing of the past either due to being "corrected" by the public or when we feel we must change ourselves to conform to fit in with the public.
It was criticized on academic and theoretical grounds. In his field (International Relations) there are hundreds if not thousands of people all producing a lot of dialogue and research relating to overarching models for how states interact. They've been at this for a very long time.
If you want a book deal, though, you ditch all of this work and just paint broad, easily-digestible strokes over everything. In this case, he's throwing social constructivist research into norms and sub/super-state influencers out the window and claiming the world runs on civilizations. You can probably think through how this might not be the case by considering the role of economics, individuals, and strategic alliances in international politics.
Confirmation bias is definitely in full effect... My comment was on the technical aspects of the story and specifically highlighted the non-technical evidence as substandard. Joe Random bloggers who I've seen repudiate the government have by and large been well-known security experts compared to the nameless hand-waving of the FBI. I think what it comes down to is the question of whether educated people, after Snowden, WMDs, torture, and so on are better off presuming the accuracy or inaccuracy of the government's statements.
I'm not sure how anything I said was anti-US. Is being at all reluctant to believe everything one hears anti-US to you? I'm wondering who is bringing discourse down here besides the person attacking commenters instead of discussing the content of their comments.
Could someone explain how they would know that the IP "used exclusively" by NK wasn't a proxied IP but in fact the "real" source IP?
Personally, I think just mentioning that part of the evidence came from the Behavioral Analysis Unit proves that NK's ties to this are definitely shaky.
I can't help your moral quandary, but the rationalization should really go both ways in that both technologies give the populous some measure of control against a possibly oppressive government (be it minuscule and ineffective or not). The right to bear arms in the constitution wasn't written for hunters-- it was written as another check and balance for the government.
I am really confused as to why the security community is obsessed with the term "nation state". Every single publication or quote from security researchers that wants to attribute some worm or attack to a country incorrectly calls it a nation state.
A nation state is a specific thing that is not just a pompous way of saying state or country.
If you're wondering, you can check the Wikipedia entry on it. There's nothing inherent about any type of technical attack that could connect to a nation state.
It's sort of a shibboleth of someone who is self-important and doesn't fact-check.
There's also the added bonus of timing, as the torture report seemed to only be gaining steam up until this.
Also, the concept of "cyber-terrorism" being a thing seemed kind of ubiquitous to me, but from what I've been hearing, it really wasn't on the minds of the populous until the 24 hour news networks started drumming it up in relation to the Sony hack.
I personally think there's a difference between substantial long-form content and the standardized "elongated-form" content that all starts out with something like "It was a cold December morning and the sparse streaks of light crept softly through...". That's purely for entertainment value over informational value, and I can see why the parent commenter could grow tired of it. As soon as I saw the first line of this article, I knew it was going to be a haystack I didn't feel like perusing for needles of information.
This sort of thing is pretty off-topic, but at least in the US, some states (like Florida) have laws requiring prisons offer kosher meals. Considering both diets are voluntary, it does seem unfortunate that certain ideologies are state sanctioned while others are not.
I can't help but think this offering is designed to make people not miss the Mini when it's discontinued in a year or two.
This article read really positive despite basically saying the Mini is a terrible purchase. If you want a toy Mac with no concern for performance, most models from the past few years will suit you if you can find a good deal on Craigslist.
I was on the fence because I really wanted a Mini and the new $700 version didn't seem terrible, but now with the knowledge that they put tamper-proof screws on it and bundled it with a 5400rpm HDD ($200 minimum to get an upgrade), I feel like they're not interested in customers like me.
That assumes that each of these properties exist in a vacuum, which is surely not the case. There's an obvious interaction between written and spoken language, and even without that, hundreds or thousands of years of differences in the written interactions and data transferred through reading within a culture could have immense impact on collective experiences and ways of thinking.
This article is interesting in that, while it's not the intention of the writer, it seems to point out some technical underpinnings for how language might impact culture. If a computer's handling of a language can vary so drastically, imagine how the human brain must deal with expressing or receiving complex thoughts through these.
I recall reading some discussion of this concept in the field of International Relations' Constructivist theory, but any salient links escape me now.
I've been waiting for about a year for this refresh and fully expected to buy one today, but after looking at the combination of price, default HDD, processors, and very weak integrated graphics, I just can't justify buying this. Compared to the relationship between the 2012 Mini and the 2012 computing ecosystem, the 2014 Mini is really not that impressive.
Let's not conflate the implications of this with prejudices against the victims.
If a startup had snagged one of these domains and had built a community or SEO with it, could you imagine that being taken away from them without any sort of due process?
If you simply sent the SMS as soon as someone enters their login credentials instead of requiring another button to be pressed, it would make your system a bit less annoying.
I think half of your advice is really good, and the other half not as much. We've all seen examples of seemingly useless things becoming very successful. Twitter, the Yo app, Let's Players, Beats by Dre, and so on. Your secondary advice of focusing on something and putting all your efforts into it is what separates toys from serious businesses. Most of our world runs on socially-fabricated needs and wants, so it's not surprising that things like yet-another-social-network or streaming yourself playing video games could be lucrative.
You could similarly just make a few accounts and run them off of a few different VPSs, since it only takes a handful of votes to get you on the front page. That strikes me as unethical, but I'm sure more and more interested parties will be doing that or getting large employee bases to accomplish the same thing as HN's user base increases.
I think this could pretty easily be solved if there was a somewhat small box on the frontpage with samples from posts from the last hour that haven't made it past /new yet. This puts the important stage of the democracy (the primaries, if you will) back in the average users' hands.
As the creator (and neglector) of one of the more popular bastions of people interested in just Show HNs (showinghn.com), I think this is a good move. If anyone has any ideas of what other sort of value I could provide with showinghn.com, feel free to let me know.
In terms of liberty, one crime doesn't excuse another, especially when they're not directly related. If I manufacture cigarettes and someone dies of lung cancer, I could be ethically liable but my liberty to make cigarettes shouldn't be impacted. If someone uses YouTube to upload copyrighted things, should YouTube have its domain stolen and its users unable to use the site any more?
That responsibility is not absolute, and could be interpreted differently in the frameworks of ethicality, legality, economics, and liberty.
Ethically, I think you're correct that it's their responsibility to do what they can.
Legally, the court in this situation thought it was somehow Microsoft's responsibility to fix it.
Economically, I'd say being held liable to what users do on your platform will hurt innovation and competition.
In terms of liberty, botnets and spam don't seem like they compare to an attack on someone's business, their users, and their freedom to operate independently.
I guess you can choose which perspective makes the most sense to you, personally.
I think some related arguments to your point are that you could say ISPs don't do enough to prevent pirated content from being transmitted on their networks or that Muslims don't do enough to prevent Islamist extremists in their communities. These claims might be true, but should companies or governments be stepping in to solve these situations? Who is mandating that they need to be "solved"? What are the consequences of solving things these ways? Could there be more nuanced implications than the solving of the thing they're trying to fix on the face of it?
The comments here are surprisingly pro-Microsoft. I'd personally rather deal with spam and botnets over a corporation legally being able to take over the DNS of other companies due to the actions of users of a service. Despite pretty clear slippery-slope arguments, I recognize this isn't a universal opinion. There are many people who would like to curb cyber-bullying at the expense of freedom of speech or curb terrorism at the expense of privacy and civil liberties. It takes all kinds, I guess.
This idea was similarly proposed by a couple people when I posted my voice-recognition resume/website (https://benwasser.com) to Hacker News. Glad to see it taking off.
Also, I didn't see it mentioned, but I found that I needed to use SSL to get Chrome to not re-ask for permission after a brief timeout of silence. I haven't had a chance to test out their implementation, but my guess is that SSL is a big unstated requirement for decent usage.
I've had this dream for a long time, too. A while ago I built a little text-based MUD kind of thing for this: http://deepship.com/ where you can have multiple people all controlling a ship in a little universe. There's not much gameplay and I've gotten a lot better at programming since this was made, so I'd still like to build out this kind of idea one day.