rolux

You may want to read the actual article. It says pretty much exactly that.

> In the decades since, many Americans have come to believe that the wall fell thanks to President Ronald Reagan’s direct, personal intervention. In a 1987 speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate in a divided Berlin, he told Soviet leaders to “tear down this wall” — and so, we’ve been told, they did.

> This misreading of the actual fall of the wall is, at best, incomplete; at worst, it’s dangerous, contributing to the belief that American leaders can go “from Berlin to Baghdad,” shaping world events while ignoring the complex realities of the locals.

Yes. My objection though was that in reality, in the overwhelming majority of cases, it's the wife, not the husband, who gives up her autonomy for "no good reason".

Excellent article. This paragraph strikes me as a bit odd though:

> When you aren't your own master, the rest of the personhood contract breaks down. This is true, but to a lesser extent, among e.g. husbands who are "whipped" by their wives. A group of men who want to stay out late playing poker can't reason with their whipped buddy; all of their reasons fall on deaf ears. And thus he loses a bit of personhood within that community.

Wouldn't the more obvious example be wives who are "whipped" by their husbands? And wouldn't that example be better at explaining why in most societies, women feel like they're only half a person?

Maybe take a look at OxDoc: http://oxjs.org/#examples/oxdoc_tutorial

I disagree. After more than a decade of "good vs. evil" and "either with us or with the enemy" propaganda, what the audience needs is the precise opposite of this type of chart.

Either way, congratulations to Slate for reducing politics in the Middle East to three types of smileys. Their readers must love that kind of stuff.

> I'm not sure why you cited...

Because such leaks will be used selectively, against anyone the data collecting agencies see as a worthwhile target.

And no, blanket recording of all phone calls is not the "valid and good purpose" of the security apparatus, even if it occasionally exposes political corruption.

> Your trivial counterexample requires blackmail on a large scale.

Definitely not. See https://www.google.com/search?q=poland+recording+scandal for another trivial counterexample.

(Other than that, the argument that the NSA collecting data is less dangerous because in the U.S. political debate, facts don't matter anyway, doesn't sound too convincing to me.)

> However, the danger is really only to people outside the safe herd majority who might draw the wrong sort of attention. So I don't see it being a huge danger.

Unfortunately, you're wrong here. The first trivial counterexample that comes to mind: You cannot have a democratic society if a government agency secretly records the phone calls of all (current and prospective) political representatives.

> It makes me think that eventually there will be illicit torrents of all the worlds music, plus the index, plus the metadata, and plus the interface/app for browsing it.

It seems to me that the a-grade private torrent trackers are exactly that. Larger catalogue, more comprehensive metadata, and better interface than any commercial service.

> In other words, people would not only pirate individual songs or movies, they would download their own complete copies of Spotify / Netflix. It isn't feasible now but it could be sometime in the next 5-15 years, depending bandwidth speeds.

If you have the infrastructure, and are really dedicated, you can definitely do it today.

Ironically, with version 7, Inform itself switched to natural language syntax. The following is valid Inform 7 source code:

`The iron-barred gate is a door. It is north of the Drawbridge and south of the Entrance Hall. It is closed and openable. Before entering the castle, try entering the gate instead. Before going inside in the Drawbridge, try going north instead. Understand "door" as the gate.`

However, what makes a command like "examine sword, then take it and give it to the wizard" complex is not the parsing, but the world model. What if examining the sword reveals an engraving saying "Never hand this to a wizard"? What happens to giving if taking fails? What if the wizard himself is holding the sword? What if he attacks anyone holding a weapon? Etc.

Writing a natural language command line interface seems a lot more straightforward.

Can you provide some evidence that he does that?

I'm pretty certain that Döpfner composed his critique of privacy violations (with a strange emphasis on cookies) while being logged in to Google+, Facebook and whatnot -- but using Google analytics for his online properties would put him on a completely different level of hypocrisy.

EDIT: You're correct. Here's the link: http://www.axelspringer.de/artikel/Hinweise-zum-Datenschutz_...

Yes, you got the essence of it.

I understand more than 3 words of German, and the money quote, by Döpfner, appears at the 6 minute mark:

"What I would hope... that we do not try now to play from now on the cliché of a super cool Silicon Valley guy [laughter]. Let's really keep some sort of decent German spiessertum."

The term "Spiessertum", and the German "Spiessbürger", refer to people with a particularly narrow-minded mindset, determined by extreme conformism and opposition to change.

Very good point.

Döpfner's position is truly schizophrenic. He admires Google's success as a business, states that his news sites depend on the traffic Google provides (for free), but still wants the European Commission to regulate the fairness of their search results, and has lobbied the German Government to make Google pay for links to his content (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leistungsschutzrecht). With BILD, the flagship product of his publishing house, he is in charge of the most hateful, sensationalist and ignorant mainstream news outlet in Germany, however, he claims to be concerned about the future of journalism. He likens Google's position to former state monopolists Deutsche Telekom and Deutsche Post, yet his company has never contributed to the criticism of the monopoly power of those German companies. And finally, he's worried about privacy, while violating people's privacy has been, for decades, BILD's core journalistic principle.

Döpfner's publishing house striving to become Europe's leading digital media company is a hilarious, sad and frightening thing to imagine.

Thanks for providing that link.

In addition, especially if you don't speak German, I'd strongly recommend to consult the English Wikipedia article about Bild, the Springer publishing house's flagship tabloid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild, some quotes below). For anyone familiar with their history, the idea that all of a sudden it's "journalism" that their CEO sets out to defend must sound outright absurd.

"Bild has been described as 'notorious for its mix of gossip, inflammatory language, and sensationalism' and as having a huge influence on German politicians."

"According to The Guardian, for 28 years from 1984 to 2012, Bild had topless girls featuring on its first page; the paper published more than 5,000 topless pictures."

"It is argued Bild's thirst for sensationalism results in the terrorizing of prominent celebrities and stories are frequently based on the most dubious evidence. The journalistic standards of Bild, or the lack thereof, are the subject of frequent criticism by German intellectuals and media observers."

"In 1977 investigative journalist Günter Wallraff worked for four months as an editor for the Bild tabloid in Hanover, giving himself the pseudonym of 'Hans Esser'. In his books Der Aufmacher ('Lead Story') and Zeugen der Anklage ('Witnesses for the Prosecution') he portrays his experiences on the editorial staff of the paper and the journalism which he encountered there. The staff commonly displayed contempt for humanity, a lack of respect for the privacy of ordinary people and widespread conduct of unethical research and editing techniques."

"By the 1st century B.C.E., the Roman calendar had become hopelessly confused."

At least one can treat the years in that period as numbers. For why Roman years before 300 B.C.E. have to be handled as names, not numbers, and should never be used in arithmetic operations, see Peter Paul Koch's excellent essay "Making <time> safe for historians": http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/04/making_time_...

There are huge safety margins in aviation.

Ascending to 45,000 ft or above is an aerodynamics issue, not a pressurization issue. Pressurization ("cabin altitude") will adjust automatically.

Add to that list:

- A depressurization event, either as a result of an accident or a botched hijacking (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522)

- Pilot suicide, with a somewhat unexpected signature (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990)

Pretty much anything is possible, indeed. However, I'd recommend this post on airliners.net for a comprehensive sanity check: http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...

This theory keeps coming up, but it doesn't make much sense.

If your goal is to acquire a working Boeing 777, on a secret airfield somewhere in Western China or Eastern Kazakhstan (see this map for orientation: http://www.airliners.net/uf/109874/phpnIOEWi.jpeg), then you don't have to be particularly smart or rational to realize that hijacking a commercial flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, with 240 people on board, and then attempting to stealthily cross both India and Pakistan, as proposed in the OP, is not your best option.

> But you should use data that you would have that an attacker would not. First and Last Name as stored in your system, User ID (like 128912) and User Creation date are good choices.

These two statements contradict each other.

Maybe, but that ship has sailed. No-one is going to reform this.

There are many problems with time (see http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/04/making_time_...), but the number of hours per day or the number of days per week or month are none of them.

Indeed:

"In 2012, [the Corrections Corporations of America] sent a letter to 'prison officials in 48 states offering to buy prisons from these states in exchange for a 20-year management contract and a guaranteed occupancy rate of 90%.'"

(http://www.annarbor.com/news/opinion/passing-house-bill-will...)

Yes, but as stated further up, that CPU could anyway just write arbitrary data to the memory that holds your entropy pool, if you use RDRAND or not.

That critique of Foucault is much too cheap. To any halfway competent theory hacker, it will sound like "But Python uses significant whitespace, and Guido van Rossum's knowledge of language design is dubious at best." It's hard to base a serious discussion on that type of argument.

To me, one of the major takeaways from Foucault is his renouncement of the "repression hypothesis". In a nutshell, he proposes to understand power not as a binary relation between oppressors and the oppressed, but as a much more molecular system that spans all sectors of society, and whose modus operandi is not primarily repression, but rather motivation (making someone speak, articulate desires, etc).

Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control", (https://files.nyu.edu/dnm232/public/deleuze_postcript.pdf, also linked a bit further down), written in the late 1980s, can serve as a very lucid short introduction to (and escalation of) that idea. Worth the read, it's really just five pages.

At the same time, you can argue the exact opposite: Having to know all these libraries and frameworks makes programming substantially harder.

When I was growing up, in the 1980s, I saw 10-years-olds around me code in assembler. They were not geniuses, they just wanted to draw sprites on a screen. I don't think that, say, learning CSS would have been equally attractive.

I don't think it's about skill as such, rather about increased productivity.

People are generally expected to be able to drive, and for many, this ability comes with benefits. I don't see why basic programming (file system, lists, loops, conditionals) should be any harder, or less useful.

Just like the "prescribed foreign language course in middle school", a bit of programming practice may widen your horizon, and help demystify these seemingly opaque machines and networks.

It's about practice, not "knowledge" per se. Basic tasks, like: I have a folder full of files, how do I get the filenames into a text file or e-mail? Five-liners in high-level languages, the equivalent of asking for directions in a foreign tongue.

Of course, that idea comes from a time when one would own a universal computer, and own one's own data. You can argue that for many people, the filenames and text files I'm talking about are already a thing of the past, that it's all pinch and swipe, plus cloud storage.

> MMO's are packed with possible communication channels in addition to chat. Ever wonder if that annoying gnome in the auction hall is jumping in morse code? Could signals be sent with bids? Could a character's inventory contents be arranged to leave a message to someone else who shares the login info? Is that nonsense coming from what you presume to be a bot-controlled gold-farming crew really nonsense?

Precisely. WOW itself is the first level of steganography ("I'm not communicating, I'm gaming"), but one can think of many more, inside and outside of MMOs.

Given proper use of steganography, small groups will always be able to communicate with low risk of detection. But for obvious reasons, you will always have to roll your own scheme, and may end up overlooking aspects that render it insecure.

These two comments on theguadian.com sum it up rather aptly:

> > This is beyond farcical. Does any working at GCHQ or NSA actually have a fully functioning brain?

> Yes they do, and recognize a well paid cushy job when they see one.