flumbaps

The kickstarter response implies that there is a market for this thing. You personally are not part of that market, but I'm not sure why you are complaining about that.

Maybe he paid for the part that wasn't access? Did you think of that? :)

The US will become an authoritarian police state when it starts silencing all opposition to the state as a matter of course. That isn't the case yet. However, the processes, institutions and technology available to the US government already seem quite capable of facilitating authoritarian control. Personally, I suspect that it's just a matter of time. All the things you talk about have happened, but they happen rarely. With the right leadership in power, they could easily start to become commonplace. The thing is, anyone who says something that doesn't conform to state ideology can be said to be aiding terrorists, by spreading an "extremist" message and implicitly encouraging others towards terrorism. The general public seem quite happy with whatever treatment "terrorists" get, so I can't see there being much standing in the way.

Yeah, and it also feeds into a very narrow idea of what success means. If you're not naturally an asshole, then having the same life goals as an asshole is really fucking stupid. Most people would be better off adopting the goals of Mr Rogers than this sociopath - at least he lived a happy life and people loved him.

I think that's an over-use of the word sociopath. I think sociopaths lack empathy in general, but there might be a lot of reasons why normal people in leadership roles end up not caring for their followers. Rich and powerful people might feel disgusted by the poor, for example. The strong might be disgusted by the weak. Or within powerful circles a close in-group mentality might develop, so members feel little empathy for those who aren't in their group. Powerful people might even be insulated from reality, becoming emotionally detached from the consequences of their actions, and unable to equate the abstract information and statistics they receive with genuine human suffering. Maybe some even stop feeling empathy as a coping mechanism to lighten the burden of responsibility.

More like "think for yourself". Sadly it doesn't come with the good advice to sort out your priorities first. I mean seriously, if the only thing you're able get out of a party is snack food, then you're doing social interaction wrong.

This is really stupid. You don't have to be sociopathic to disregard convention and think things through for yourself. Much better to seek enlightenment and self awareness, and then make rational choices about which emotions you indulge and which you discard. Disregarding all empathy is only useful for obtaining material things, the desire for which is itself irrational and self-defeating for non-sociopaths.

To give an example, I personally don't say prepared anecdotes and eat extra food at parties. I have fun at parties and engage people in enjoyable conversations. When I meet new people I'm warm and friendly and I make an effort to form genuine connections. As a consequence, people like me and I have close friends who love me and enjoy my company. You can't look at all the fun and laughter and human warmth I have in my life and tell me I should trade it all in for some snack food and a more calculated image. That is completely stupid. Only someone who cannot enjoy human company should think like that, and those people should be pitied not admired.

Our Internet access is being censored in secret because of entrenched interests in big media companies. The desire to prevent piracy is not childish in and of itself, but this is a doomed approach with considerable collateral damage. Successful digital content delivery services have proved the viability of alternative business models that actually benefit consumers. So, a better analogy would be asking whether you'd have been upset at losing a job making horse drawn carriages when the car got invented. Probably yes, no-one likes losing their job - but you'd have to be pretty selfish to lobby for a blanket ban on automobiles.

Free markets don't solve every problem. There is such a thing as the price of anarchy. I agree that Crony capitalism is bad too, but free markets aren't the only way to introduce accountability into a system. The problem with healthcare is the large number of inherent perverse incentives.

For example, if you don't regulate the quality of healthcare, then it is quite easy to make money selling bad quality services. Many people are gullible and some die needlessly from being sold "cures" that do nothing. People with cancer are a great target, because the real treatments are so unpleasant.

Medical research requires a lot of expensive equipment. You could have a lot of government funding research - but academia has its problems. Academic research isn't always very focused and efficient, it doesn't always bridge the gap between theoretical and practical. Otherwise you have to provide incentives, which usually means patents. However, if you have patents on new drugs, then that grants a de facto monopoly on that treatment. The drug company that is the sole supplier of the medication that can save your life has an unsettling amount of market power. How do you solve this problem? Do you think in a truly free market, groups of people who were sick would band together and fund research into their cure? That would be a very slow process. The capital to find a cure should raised as quickly as possible to save as many lives as possible. To do that, you have to have expected future returns from people who aren't sick yet.

Regarding the question of who gets to open hospitals and operating rooms - I can easily believe there is crony capitalism going on. However, this is something that should be regulated and controlled. Having hospitals open and close like regular businesses is not a good thing. If a restaurant is poorly managed, customers realise it from the quality of the food and the business fails because they lose customers. If a hospital is poorly managed, people can die. The negative market pressures in healthcare involve actual human suffering and death. It's not going to be much comfort if your dying act is posting a poor review of a hospital that lost your paperwork, misdiagnosed you or did the wrong surgery.

In the UK, if you don't pay your taxes, you get into trouble, just like every other country. In that way the NHS is as much a tyranny as any of the other things we pay taxes for, like roads, schools and emergency services. People here in the UK like having the NHS. The US system, where unlucky people get a choice between bankruptcy or death, sounds pretty horrible to us. When I see people get upset because their taxes are going to subsidise the healthcare of others, I don't understand it at all. It seems short sighted and selfish to me. Personally, I gladly pay to keep my country healthy. This is Britain, not some backwater third world country where poor people are left to fester and rot on the streets.

We do have private health insurance here in the UK, but I'm sure there are restrictions on who can do business and where and when. I think that is unavoidable. There are obvious difficult trade-offs when legislating this kind of thing. Not everyone can be made happy. However, the freedom to operate a medical business without government interference is not as important as ensuring that everyone has access to adequate healthcare. If your rights as a business owner get trampled on at the cost of saving human lives, well, frankly that's just too bad. There are plenty of other lines of work you can get into where there aren't quite so many dangerous and perverse monetary incentives.

Honestly, I think if public nudity was common, no-one would care about it. When you go to the beach and see people in swimming costumes, there isn't really much left to the imagination. You can already pretty much figure out what they look like naked, but no-one cares, we're all used to it. Society just places a weird importance on nipples and genitals. But just women's nipples. Even though men's nipples kind of look the same anyway. You could take a swimsuit catalogue and cut the nipples off the men and glue them onto the women and turn it into porn.

If you think about it, we're just animals. It's really crazy that we can't just walk around in our natural state freely because we tend to feel really weird about looking at other members of our own species.

What if I've got it backwards and other animals are just as prudish? When a dog is barking at another dog, maybe he's really saying, "hey, check out this weirdo - he's naked! Get the hell out of here, you pervert!"

Well, I suppose the defence would be some argument that the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine doesn't apply, because there's nothing illegal about the NSA sharing information with other agencies, and there's no obligation to share every piece of evidence in an investigation. The prosecution is required to share all exculpatory evidence with the defence, but this wouldn't be exculpatory. There is an obligation to provide probable cause in order to justify each search, seizure, warrant, arrest, etc. but this obligation was met - that would be the purpose of the parallel construction. Cases were tried based on probable cause that was shared, and so that probable cause must have been sufficient. The investigators simply did not disclose ALL the probable cause they had, (because some of it was secret).

There will be some contention over whether investigators lied or simply didn't share all evidence. This will probably lead to some slippery wordplay. For example, in the case of a "random" traffic stop that was actually targeting an individual, the word "random" could be stretched to mean "without reason" - meaning that by saying it was a "random" traffic stop, investigators were really just not giving a reason for the stop. Since no reason is required for a random traffic stop (under this new definition), that's all fine.

Perhaps the real problem here isn't that the NSA was sharing information, but that it is easy to find probable cause when properly motivated.

- The argument that the government be 'monolithic' requires it to be both efficient and non-adversarial, neither is true.

I don't think this is what everyone is worried about. It's not that the entire US government is conspiring against us. It's more that each agency has evolved ideologies and practises that, when taken as a whole, form an oppressive machine. No-one designed that machine, and no-one group controls it. It simply is a function of the increased cooperation of individual agencies who each have their own set of norms and values that fail to align with the true interests of the populous. The US government is becoming more monolithic because of a systemic problem - that is, increased incentives for agencies to cooperate and share information.

- It also requires almost everyone to be amoral sociopaths, perfectly willing to go along with even the darkest and most depraved violations of civil liberties.

This argument assumes that the people who work in the US government have the same social norms and values as the rest of the population. It seems more likely to me that each agency forms its own little closed society, that has drifted away from mainstream society due to the unique freedoms and pressures that agency experiences. The "Blue Code of Silence" is an example of this within the police. Few people are amoral sociopaths, but the vast majority of people will accept the values and norms of their peers without question.

Large and complex systems can coordinate in a decentralised way to form a monolithic entity. Local interactions can lead to global convergence. Swallows in flight is a good example - each swallow only pays attention to the others nearby, yet the whole flock is coordinated. I'm not saying that is how it is in the US government. However, the closer the agencies work together, the more monolithic the government is likely to be (otherwise they wouldn't be able to cooperate).

No, not really, quantum physics could be simulated using symbolic computation. Digits are not a purely human concept. They belong to mathematics, which is something that humans uncover, not invent.

In the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case, the SCOTUS ruled that US citizens have the right to due process. So that ruling actually sets a precedent for this law being unconstitutional.

Why not just ask them not to commit?

You really shouldn't call people "fucking stupid" for making mistakes in code. They're clearly not stupid, they're writing complex computer code for a big project. Calling them "fucking stupid" is as much a lie as throwing out empty compliments, and just as counter productive. Smart people don't need to be beaten into shape, just like they don't need to be mollycoddled. If you're being abusive in the workplace, it's because of your own emotional needs, not the people you're being abusive to.

If someone commits code that is fucking stupid then by all means call the code fucking stupid. But then actually take the time to identify the cause for the mistake. Is that programmer following best practises? Are they being careless? Are they working on something they don't have the expertise for? Are they spread too thin? If you identify the problem you can try to fix it. Instead of abuse, you should be giving clear and direct instructions on how to not make mistakes like that ever again. If you call someone "fucking stupid" then you incorrectly identify the problem and, moreover, you're being abusive, which can be very harmful.

It's not that hard to give honest direct criticism without being abusive. Not knowing the difference indicates that you're a terrible leader. Belittling anyone who refuses to tolerate abuse as needing to "grow some balls" is utterly ridiculous. I wouldn't work for anyone with your attitudes.

Yes, a nuclear blast is a lot more visible than an ongoing mass surveillance program. However, I would say that it is extremely hard to keep something like PRISM secret forever. Even if there is only a tiny probability of the information leaking each year, over the years the chance of keeping it secret decreases geometrically. All it takes is one upload to wikileaks.

I agree that more transparency is a good idea. In fact, I think more transparency and less funding is a good idea for the intelligence agencies in general. We're living in a comparative time of peace, which means the incentives for these agencies (and the closely related private contractors) are to inflate their budgets and create work for themselves. Currently this seems to be driving an obsessive mission to monitor everything and everyone. This is bad enough of itself, but it could easily turn into creating enemies where none exist.

I would argue that although the advance of technology makes mass scale surveillance easier, it also makes it harder to hide. Secrets are harder to keep now, and that cuts in both directions. I think banning mass surveillance wouldn't necessarily be futile. With vigilance and enough political will, such a ban could be enforced and maintained.

Also, there are also other technologies that can affect whether or not mass surveillance is practical. Cryptographic tools like Tor and Bitmessage, represent another technological advance that can only be delayed.