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The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

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Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#501

Post by DanielBMarkham »

pnathan wrote: post #493
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I supported the FCC's move to assist with consumer privacy, although it was a tough call. I oppose what the Republican Congress is doing. Having said all of that, the FCC has no freaking business defining privacy. The system was terribly out of whack to have them do this in the first place. My support of their move and my opposition to what Congress is currently doing is simply because I'm trying to pick the lesser o…

Hi Daniel, I would agree that the remit of Congress is to govern the people, by the people, and privacy falls under that umbrella. The executive branch should not be operating as an independent law-making body, as it has been. I would gently suggest that when geeks look at politics, it's much like looking at a huge codebase written for decades - our reaction is that it's corrupt and needs a rewrite. I have learned th…

Thank you for your kind reply. As both a geek and a student of history and philosophy, it's nice to hear civility :)

I specialize in helping large organizations of people change and become better, so I've been quite fortunate to have hands-on experience with these kinds of things.

For a good political person who can work contacts, there's always value. I would humbly posit that the system as a whole has overall attributes. I really don't like waving my hands around and saying "we're all going to die", but sometimes the Titanic actually is sinking. I'm sure those guys in the band had a hoot playing those last few songs, though.

So I understand and respect your opinion. Hopefully I'm able to see the tactical as well as strategic situation. Maybe not, but that's what great conversations are for. :)

Thanks again.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#502

Post by eli_gottlieb »

defined wrote: post #292
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two-party? The American federal government is, de facto, a one -party state.

Yeah. The Janus party.

No, the Republican Party. Policy for the last decade has been that Democrats mustn't be allowed to win elections, and should they somehow manage to win elections, they mustn't be allowed to govern.

Of course, the Democrats have themselves totally acceded to this scheme.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#503

Post by state_less »

ClayShentrup wrote: post #473
nostrademons wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with approval voting is that game-theoretically it devolves to plurality voting once everyone understands the system. Approval voting violates the later-no-harm principle: indicating approval for secondary candidates can harm the chance that your primary candidate is elected. Knowing this, why would anyone approve of more than one candidate? http://www.fairvote.org/why-approval-voting-is-unworkable-in...

Absolutely false. Strategic Plurality Voting means NOT voting for your favorite, e.g. a Green voting Democrat. With Approval Voting, that same voter's best strategy is to vote Democrat AND Green. THAT is why you'd vote for more than one candidate. Later-no-harm is a silly "anti-criterion" that causes more harm than benefit. See explanation by a Princeton math PhD who co-founded the Center for Election Science. http:/…

Thanks for posting all this info. In the youtube video, I liked the end where you talked about an objective satisfaction measure for these systems. For someone who wants to be able to provide more preference information at the ballot, and is not married to any particular method, it does make you wonder, why not directly use the objective measure for voting? You'd get a 1-1 correspondence. Wouldn't that maximize satisfaction and the voting method objective function?

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#506

Post by dredmorbius »

SteveNuts wrote: post #59

Not that I'm necessarily OK with either, but what's the difference between this and the myriad of other sites that are collecting your browser habits/search history and selling it? I'm not for this at all vote at all, and I'm not sure why Trump supporters are, I'm just trying to come up with a good argument for why it's worse.

Bypassing your ISP or mobile provider is more challenging.

In theory you can opt out of FBGOOGZON tracking.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#507

Post by kirrent »

ClayShentrup wrote: post #472
kirrent wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My country has ranked voting. Compulsory ranked voting. No-one seems to have any difficulties with it. What's so hard to understand about rank the candidates in the order that you want them? I did get the chance to flick through a Californian voter information guide for this last election and it seems like if your goal is to make voting simpler then looking at ballot initiatives would be far more useful.

Most of your Australian countrymen want to get rid of ranked voting. http://scorevoting.net/WhatVotersWant Maybe they think it's too complicated.

The mentioned discussion by Antony Green: http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2011/02/more-australian-...

I think his points are pretty good ones. There was a lot of anger and unhappiness after the 2010 election and the role preferences played in it. I'm not going to change my mind entirely on one poll which hasn't ever been repeated when there are valid objections to the question and the signal isn't even that large. You could have polled people on if the electoral college should be gotten rid of after the last US election and you'd probably get a similar sort of polarised answer for the same reasons.

More importantly, I don't really care about what people prefer in their voting system. That probably sounds bad, and I think it's important that people trust it but it's a technical answer to the question of how we discover what people want. That's what I care about, which is why I support compulsory voting which ensures a more representative government at the cost of forcing everyone on the rolls to vote.

I'm also not some weird person who thinks we have it perfect here. Obviously optional preferential voting in all cases would be better, not just for the federal senate, and Hare-Clark nationwide would be even cooler than that. There's always improvements to be made.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#508

Post by dredmorbius »

gravity13 wrote: post #46
vhost- wrote: post #23

Doesn't this mean the government can basically buy user data through shell corps and bypass warrants all together?

Does this mean we can crowdsource and buy the private browsing history of our favorite representatives and post them online for everybody to see?

http://resistancereport.com/resistance/crowdfunding-lawmaker...

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#509

Post by dredmorbius »

st3v3r wrote: post #149
aero142 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a stab at it because I think it's a useful discussion. Allowing internet companies to make contractual arrangements with their customers will result in situations similar to Google. Google shows you ads for things you are interested in, and in return you get a really great search engine for free. Similarly, if ISPs are allowed to collect information about your browsing habits, and sell it to advertisers, th…

See, I don't buy the market based arguments. This is not something we want anyone doing, regardless of ISP. So why allow it to happen at all?

The "market" counterargument is to set an infinite price on the practice.

Or in other words: a taboo.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#510

Post by dredmorbius »

incongruity wrote: post #447
evoloution wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-topic: Always better to quote the earliest reference. Plato said practically the same think around 347BC. Maybe there was someone before him too when we had no written texts. History repeats itself.

Taking the bait: Why is it better ? If one is attempting to persuade, I would suggest using the attribution that most strongly connects with the audience's sense of expertise and/or power. So, given that, I'd wager that Einstein is better reference than Plato for many in the modern world. I get what you're saying, the idea is much older than Einstein but do you want to be right or do you want to be truthful and persu…

Credit for originality.

At least nod the prior. "As Einstein's improvement on Plato's dictum says, ...".

By comparison, I was reading a paper on an alternative fuels process and found that its citations were all to 1990s and subsequent work.

This actively obscured the fact that the underlying concepts and idea dated from the 1960s, and excluded considerable significant prior research.

It would be ... like a study of evolutionary biology failing to credit Charles Darwin, and giving the impression, say, that the entire field grew out of recombinant DNA efforts of the 1970s.

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