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Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

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Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#81

Post by xerophyte12932 »

rms_returns wrote: post #68
gypsy_boots wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most non-Reddit users I know say they've tried looking at it, but just could not figure out the layout. Anecdotally, it took me a while to understand the layout/navigation. Now that's not to say that once people do figure out how to navigate, they're turned off by the culture. However, I do think the UI has something to do with more people not joining.

I think the biggest plus of Reddit is its simplicity and minimalism with regards to content. For people for whom the written word is enough to understand and work with things, Reddit is an ideal platform. In case of the other platforms, the platform has to reach out to the user by including stuff like flashy animations, banners, embedded images, ajax, etc. which is always slow and unnecessary.

I am one of those people who feel the reddit UI sucks and needs a make over. I really appreciate simplicity and minimalism but I don't feel reddit gets it right. For example, HN is extremely minimal, but it's also extremely clean. It's very intuitive.

Personally, I feel even 4chan is much cleaner than reddit (yes I know 4chan uses linear threads while reddit supports branching. Hence the HN example)

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#82

Post by tptacek »

nickik wrote: post #78
tptacek wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possible, but unlikely. According to a recent study, the majority of offenders are sentenced for violent offenses, and the majority of those sentenced for violent offenses have never been convicted of a drug crime.

Its tricky to say, seems to me that prior conviction is not a very good metric. However I don't know any better way to figure this out either.

You can take the analysis further and observe, as that study did, that the set of people incarcerated for violent offenses is almost entirely disjoint from the set of people incarcerated for drug offenses. There is very little overlap, not just in the current prison population but over time as well.

We should end the war on drugs, of course, but we more urgently need to end what Ta-Nahisi Coates calls "the carceral state", and that will require much stiffer medicine than drug legalization.

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#83

Post by rayiner »

nickik wrote: post #69
rayiner wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of crime is not government invented. The majority of prisoners in prison are not there for any of the crimes you list: http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0... Besides that, the crime rate has been falling during a period coincident with aggressive policing, more incarceration, and more legal measures (RICO) to fight organized crime. While people have alternative theories for that…

First many of those crime cartels could not exist without the banning of drugs, prostitution and gambling. The same goes for violent crimes in general. Large numbers of violent crimes are done by people involved in drug dealing or consuming. If drugs were legal you would not put so many people in these situations. Falling crime rates is happing all over the first world. Most countries have know-where near the policy…

> First many of those crime cartels could not exist without the banning of drugs, prostitution and gambling.

That doesn't mean that it's an "invented crime." It's undeniable that drugs, gambling, and prostitution have real social costs and harms. The people are entitled to regulate commerce in their society generally, but trade in harmful things especially. When people uses organized violence to circumvent that regulation, in the pursuit of profit, that is actual crime, not invented crime.

> Large numbers of violent crimes are done by people involved in drug dealing or consuming.

You're presupposing a direction of causation here. Your average street gang does not exist because of drug dealing or consumption (and indeed, violent street gangs long predate any restrictions on drugs or alcohol). They deal in drugs because it's easy money, but arise for other reasons.

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#84

Post by mineshaftgap »

jessaustin wrote: post #56
rayiner wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of crime is not government invented. The majority of prisoners in prison are not there for any of the crimes you list: http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0... Besides that, the crime rate has been falling during a period coincident with aggressive policing, more incarceration, and more legal measures (RICO) to fight organized crime. While people have alternative theories for that…

In fairness, one could consider the "public order" "crimes" listed there to also be inventions of the state. Are legislative or prosecutorial inventiveness implicated in the increase of those from 1.9% to 13.8% of the total in less than 40 years? Over a period during which violent crime dropped precipitously, they had to do something to justify the constant construction of new prisons.

It is hilarious to see the contortions that people will engage in to pretend that there aren't any criminals. You have to be quite sheltered to be that naïve.

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#85

Post by mineshaftgap »

tptacek wrote: post #82
nickik wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its tricky to say, seems to me that prior conviction is not a very good metric. However I don't know any better way to figure this out either.

You can take the analysis further and observe, as that study did, that the set of people incarcerated for violent offenses is almost entirely disjoint from the set of people incarcerated for drug offenses. There is very little overlap, not just in the current prison population but over time as well. We should end the war on drugs, of course, but we more urgently need to end what Ta-Nahisi Coates calls "the carceral s…

http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/all/2015/09/debating-mass-i...

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#86

Post by aioprisan »

xyzzy4 wrote: post #55
known wrote: post #50

Apple complies with Chinese authorities and not US?

Maybe the Chinese authorities have broader power in China than the FBI has in the US.

Apple never complied to this type of request to Chinese authorities. Source?

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#87

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #77
nickik wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First many of those crime cartels could not exist without the banning of drugs, prostitution and gambling. The same goes for violent crimes in general. Large numbers of violent crimes are done by people involved in drug dealing or consuming. If drugs were legal you would not put so many people in these situations. Falling crime rates is happing all over the first world. Most countries have know-where near the policy…

Possible, but unlikely. According to a recent study, the majority of offenders are sentenced for violent offenses, and the majority of those sentenced for violent offenses have never been convicted of a drug crime.

[deleted]

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#88

Post by j1vms »

To be fair, the way Cook went to media with this is not at all an order of magnitude better than the way Pichai did.

Consider that if Cook had wanted to make the statement more official and tie his company to this stance, he could have very easily ordered investor-level press release and then linked it from the homepage for general public awareness. That would cause a much bigger shockwave.

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#89

Post by zaphar »

musha68k wrote: post #63

Lame but not unexpected comments from a company living off their users' data - it's quasi by definition that privacy isn't something GOOG is particularly interested in at all as the lack of it is at the very core of their own creepy business model. Each of us info-tech "professionals" downplaying this reality by falling for GOOG marketing are not merely cattle but sheep . Cool open-source projects count as successful…

So Google undoubtedly know a lot about you. This knowledge also powers a large number of highly useful features.

e.g.

* Remind me that it's time to leave for my meeting. Taking traffic and preferred method of travel into account.

* Alert me about that breaking news story that I'm really interested in following.

* Tell me what the weather is going to be like when my plane lands.

All of these are things I value and they are only possible if Google knows enough things about me to answer those questions. A phone can't power it you need software running in a datacenter somewhere. People want these features which is why Google is able to make money.

Everytime this topic comes up people rant about how Google is creepy but it's disingenuous because the tradeoff is Incredibly useful features vs user privacy.

It's a perfectly valid position to want governmental protections for one's data to provide some recourse for violations of your privacy while still enabling those same useful features.

Re: Sundar Pichai Responds to Apple and the FBI Hacking Request

#90

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

tptacek wrote: post #74
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Table 5 on page 17 http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14.pdf of this report from BJS shows that half of federal prison inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses. I'd accept the notion that some of those drug offenders may have been violent, but not all of them. I suspect the violent crime statistic from ProCon rests on the habit of police and prosecutors of escalating charges for suspects where drugs are found for…

The overwhelming majority of prisoners are in state prisons, where something like 17% of inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses. The majority of inmates are in fact incarcerated for violent crimes.

Yeah, I used the federal statistics because it's easier to find the data. Rayiner made a reasonable point about the difference in federal vs state inmates.

>where something like 17% of inmates are incarcerated for drug offenses.

I hope you don't mind if I use a single state, I know these thing will vary by state. The top drug crimes in Texas are different degrees of possession and manufacturing and distribution, and you're right, it's about 17%

>The majority of inmates are in fact incarcerated for violent crimes.

There are other crimes that aren't violent and aren't drug offenses, those appear to be about 43% (60% when you include drug offenses), and the violent ones about 40%, not a majority. Do you have a source for your "majority of inmates are in fact incarcerated for violent crimes" claim? The statistics I used are by offense, not by offender. I'm not sure how that will change if the statistics are broken down by offender.

https://www.texastribune.org/library/data/texas-prisons/crim...

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