meows

Police can still intercept communications, including mail, phone calls, etc., with classic investigative techniques like bugging a person's home. Then you can see all their passwords, all their emails, their off-line conversations, and so on. Bugging somebody probably reveals more information than security backdoors.

The one big difference between bugging someone's home vs. encryption backdoor is one of scale, and I don't think citizens should so substantially yield their security so that the state can save money.

I think the natural inclination of voters isn't relevant just yet because privacy and encryption are so far down the list of topics of national salience, or topics to organize voters, that it doesn't register on anyone's political radar. If encryption or security backdoors are mentioned on the national stage, it will be entirely as a subtopic of only terrorism.

I think that exaggeration of the dangers of a drug can lead to an excessively strong counter-narrative. Unfortunately it is part of political play for major nations to state any case on anything to its weakest or strongest form, and not anywhere inbetween -- as if adversaries are going to negotiate the truth down to the middle, so we mind as well start at the extremes.

Children should hear a realistic profile of effects for different substances, among other things.

I think the most interesting actions are those which organize. In a large democracy, organizing votes is magnitudes more interesting than voting itself, and it is on this organization game that I think the masses will lose, time and time again.

Signing petitions => will this translate to well-targeted get-out-to-vote drives for contentious districts?

Discussion on forums => will this translate to well-targeted get-out-to-vote drives for contentious districts?

Installing browser extensions and using Linux => will this translate to mass-market behavior?

Organization is the truly interesting game, and those in power have had their eye on the ball from the start. I also don't see how Brexit is a beacon of hope for collective action.

Brexit showed that democracies don't really deliberate things, and instead just vote Yea/Nay with 0 attempt for common consensus. Popular disagreement is democracy at its worst, especially when there are 0 effective deliberative processes, because it means a nearly maximally displeasurable voting outcome. In the case of Brexit, that meant that 48% of the nation is displeased. Brexit is absolutely not a lesson of grassroots power, or the kind of things small people can do against large powers.

Why discipline the officer? The officer is just a cog in a political machine. The people who exist at the top of that machine take almost all profits from the high-status victory. And after that officer has been penalized, the DA, mayor, police chief, whatever, are going to be the faces that removed a rich villain in a popular way.

Also, the officer who violates will be penalized, and after they fall out of public awareness, they will be brought back for their fine contribution to somebody's political resume.

3 years sounds too aggressive of an estimate. I would experientially expect a Macbook Pro to last 5 years. Prior to SSD's, the HDD was the most common reason for laptop failure, but nowadays Macbook Pros come with SSD options, so now I would expect a substantial portion of the most recent Macbook Pro populations to hit the 5 year mark.

In terms of software requirements, I think most people don't play heavy requirement games, and for basic personal and office tasks, the 2/4 threaded CPU's of the past few years have been up to the task of browsing, office suites (with responsive spreadsheets), and media.

Why exactly do people need the bible? Why is it that Christians are so skeptical of actual communication via prayer, that anyone who strongly professes to hear the divine might be suspiciously regarded as mentally ill?

Why are there no more prophets, judges, or anointed kings? Why are there no more miracles? Why do people need a book translated into English to reach the divine? I am so baffled by how Christians are okay with such a distal relationship, as if the closest relationship to God is a textual one, followed by emotions of a vague relationship to the divine.

If one were to look at the severe intimacy that Jews and the first Christians experienced with the sacred, a natural thought is to think that Christians have been excommunicated from all spiritual reality. Not even the Accuser will have his intellectual sparring with God anymore, raining hellish miracles down to earth. There are no more court magicians. This world is an excommunicated world, and people are left talking of an invisible gardener, and the feelings they experience when they engage in textual analysis with varying lenses, such as a historical lens on Hebrew life conditions... this is modern spirituality.

How can this be a spiritual relationship with the Father to all things? How can that be a profession of a connection to spiritual reality?

I think your discussion plays exactly into what the thread author was thinking. That the bible is a collection of books bound to their time, but whatever the thread author expected, whether the bible was a collection guided by divine power, or directly authored by divine power, it reeks of severely bounded humanity, it reeks of minds locked in their time.

I think people wanted timelessness. Transcendence. Even something that is not perfectly transcendent and timeless, like an artifact of space travel technology would strike the world into awe, the kind of awe that technologically primitive cultures must feel when they bump by the edge of an severely alien human flying on a helicopter -- a suggestion of an ocean beyond your faculties. A feeling of a turtle in a well.