301–310 of 417 posts
Anyone remembers this? > Barack Obama: NSA is not rifling through ordinary people's emails. US president is confident intelligence services have 'struck appropriate balance', he tells journalists in Berlin edit: link fixed https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/19/barack-obama-n...
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I don't buy this argue...Open Whisper Systems managed to not roll over and they are only less than half a dozen people...
It's easy to say with confidence "These 6 people that I know well and represent are OK losing their jobs when you fine my company out of existence". It's much harder to say "I will defy you and in the process cost 10k+ people their jobs without them having any say or knowledge of this".
There's no way the govt. would do anything more than skewer (or attempt to) a few sacrificial lambs for violating a gag order. There's no political win otherwise.
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> I always encourage those in the future resisting police states to make sure whatever they do is beyond doubt A Good Thing But A Good Thing would easily be destroyed by simply fabricating a case against the enemy, wouldn't it? Like rape, child porn, the usual.
It's possible. So far, they're just using what's already there.
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> Maximizing shareholder value is like a death grip that squeezes any public corporation into not making financial gambles on ethical grounds. Will this meme never die on HN? There is an obvious counter-example: Apple, a public corporation who publicly fought a similar request. The idea that "maximizing shareholder value" is some sort of inescapable Faustian bargain is just not supported by the facts. People who run…
> Apple, a public corporation who publicly fought a similar request. The FBI went public with the case, not Apple... and the warrant was signed by a public criminal courts judge not a FISA court. That's a critical difference. There are no examples of successful challenges to NSLs, don't downplay the seriousness of doing so. "Going public" is not really an option for the stuff we're talking about (as the Yahoo case I…
Scary indeed
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Responding with an ad hominem - whether at the author of the quote or the poster of it by association - is both an ineffective response (the appeal to emotion signals an inability to argue rationally) and lowers the quality of discussion (by taking it away from the point, into emotional territory). Constant appeals to emotion and resorting to a wide array of fallacies allows for strongmen to build tribes which follow…
I suggest you read Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" which, though it was written with no knowledge of Ayn Rand (it predates all of her published works), anticipates her work (through a philosophy Heinlein introduces, called "Functionalism") and proceeds to demolish it on basic economic and common-sense grounds.
What I am reading in your comment is an implication:
- that by attacking the use of a quote to ridicule those who have read Ayn Rand and attempt to present her ideas, I am myself promoting Ayn Rand's ideas,
- and that the other ideas of Ayn Rand's (beyond those illustrated by the metaphors used in Atlas Shrugged that lead to this quote, which is very specifically about government use of bad laws for manipulation) are relevant to this discussion.
This would lead for a need for a response to Ayn Rand's body of ideas as relates to "economic and common-sense grounds" (which I assume is not related to the quote by the grandparent), as opposed to specifically the original post or the direction I have put the thread in.
Is this the correct interpretation?
If so, I disagree that Ayn Rand's entire body of ideas is relevant to the discussion of the specific case put forward by her metaphor and narrative in the context of this quote and discussion.
An example of this kind of association fallacy: Heinlein promoted incest in his later novels (e.g. Lazarus Long's relationship with his mother post time travel). Incest has negative connotations in modern society. It would be possible to use an appeal to emotion: "Heinlein promotes incest! You like Heinlein, so I can't listen to your argument, since you promote incest." It would, however, be manipulation to do so. A similar line of argument is used to attack certain religions today (I've even seen some French politicians try to paint Muslims as barbarians by pointing out a few incidents of goats slaughtered ritually in the bath tubs of social housing projects).
Every writer, every body of work has flaws. The beauty of discussing ideas is to hash out a better set of values and ideas to better model and understand the world we live in. There are even valid uses of appeal to emotion, when emotion is used to transmit higher information content than can be done via contextual awareness and shared culture, or to transmit complex ideas quickly. You could even argue that's a large reason for the existence of art (much of which is paid propaganda, other propaganda of the artist's ideas spread using appeal to emotion).
To use a writer's flaws to censor their work out of discussion is a subtler, more powerful version of Orwell's 1984 book censorship. I hold that all books should be discussed, even the "unpalatable" ones.
In China and Russia, it is well known that all oligarchs are corrupt. However, not all of them will go to prison -- only those who cross the politicians will ever be tried and convicted.
It's common everywhere!
Anyone remembers this? > Barack Obama: NSA is not rifling through ordinary people's emails. US president is confident intelligence services have 'struck appropriate balance', he tells journalists in Berlin edit: link fixed https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/19/barack-obama-n...
Well, technically he's right because the NSA isn't rifling through your emails, Yahoo is.
"The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events."
Your theory is that Yahoo scanned hundreds of millions of accounts for the NSA, but the NSA isn't doing / hasn't done anything with those billions of emails. Your premise requires that the NSA come into possession of a truly massive load of data and then never touches it at all. That's absurd.
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How do you slip something like this past a corporate security team? Stamos and @bcrypt never struck me as individuals that were "asleep at the wheel". Surely there was evidence somewhere? If Stamos wasn't briefed as to the situation and a security engineer found the rootkit on their own how could they be bound by the terms of an NSL / gag order?
Add it to the spam filter? The security team probably reviews the spam filter code, but perhaps not the particular weights and measures it uses on a daily basis. So you set up a parallel filter for "arabic spam" that generally looks like regular filter, just tuned a little differently.
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Ah, yes, you'd like more reasoned, rational debate. Which is why you turn to Scott Adams, who is of course a paragon of that, as he is a paragon of every field of study and endeavor of all of humanity, or can quickly become so, according to himself.
Why, again, attack the man instead of the argument? It's especially grating when the entire thread is about ad hominems. Saying that Scott Adams has been known to be irrational is at best tangential to the example he gives to qualify whether the Trump and Clinton campaigns are using emotional manipulation, especially ad hominem attacks, to achieve their respective goals. It's an appeal to emotion built upon an ad hom…
It is perfectly fair to say "Scott Adams makes claims about himself which cannot charitably be interpreted as rational or reasonable, therefore appealing to Scott Adams (hint: appeal to authority!) when talking about a desire for more rational and reasoned and impersonal debate does not lend credibility to your argument".
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I suggest you read Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" which, though it was written with no knowledge of Ayn Rand (it predates all of her published works), anticipates her work (through a philosophy Heinlein introduces, called "Functionalism") and proceeds to demolish it on basic economic and common-sense grounds.
Whilst I appreciate the recommendation, I do not understand its relevance in the context of this thread. What I am reading in your comment is an implication: - that by attacking the use of a quote to ridicule those who have read Ayn Rand and attempt to present her ideas, I am myself promoting Ayn Rand's ideas, - and that the other ideas of Ayn Rand's (beyond those illustrated by the metaphors used in Atlas Shrugged t…