IsThisObvious

To quote (or paraphrase) a military commander: technology is a force multiplier.

What we're actually seeing is the cusp of a very important transition, where currently governments can afford to do all these kinds of things (and large corporations are quickly getting in on the game), but in 10-15 years, we'll be able to do it /at home/.

I think society will change - will have to change - with the massive distribution of computing power that's likely to occur. We're not even outside the realm of where a motivated citizen could build a cluster at home, scan through all the publicly available documents, and profile government (and related contractors) in the same way they're doing to the public.

It simply hasn't entered the public awareness yet that we're living in that age.

If you really freeze out everyone of conscience (and motivation), do you really think they'll just go "ho hum" and do nothing with their time? That they'd just accept being thrown to the side of major political affairs and take no follow up?

I think it's far more likely they'd reach out to technology, and take matters in to their own hands.

It's this access to technology that really scares the government, people in power, etc. They just have no idea how to constructively deal with the change.

> I'm open to suggestions for specific action items. I'm extremely unsure of what I can do to help cause change.

I'd argue that everything we're seeing is largely a symptom of the poor government structure in general, which has let two large parties entrench themselves and rig the electoral process, to make themselves virtually immune to any consequence to their actions.

The solution is changing voting policy in two ways: changing it to something besides the winner-takes-all system we have now; forcing voting districts to be concave polygons (with some algorithmic properties about minimizing area/edge length relative to certain other properties).

These two changes would a) break up the two parties by making it possible for others to compete and then essential to form coalitions and b) break up gerrymandering allowing the vote to actually reflect how the public felt.

More interesting if you could make a mechanical one that would remove one envelope and forward the letter.

Then each data facility could reasonably process a few thousand letters a day, batching them for the postal service. After a few rounds of mixing, if there was significant facility-to-facility traffic, it would become impractical to find any specific letter's path.

Time for real world implementations of our high-latency packet routing algorithms?

He shouldn't be.

The real reaction of the American public isn't the talking that happens now. Or the next month. Or the next year.

It's that people like me, who are young and have decades of time we're going to put in to society - working on infrastructure, working in the military, working in civil service jobs, etc - have this information and have someone like that as a counter point to the obvious corruption happening in government.

I'd wager the biggest effect of Snowden - because anyone watching suspected much of this anyway - is going to be the legacy of someone who stood up and said something about it, screw the cost.

Rolemodels like that are important, especially amid a context of massive social and governmental breakdown.

> The only problems I can see is that the two lines will very quickly become "pink or ponies for girls" and "dark or soldiers for boys.

Just so I'm clear, I'm entirely against this.

What I /do/ support is one set of city-scape sets that focus on internal details and the characters involved, and a second that focuses on the building and external set details.

I think that this hits a legitimate play-style difference that happens to be mostly, but isn't entirely, along gender lines.

I'm against the knee-jerk reaction that we're absolutely equal, and everyone gets the same!

We accept, routinely, that there are behavioral differences that are statistically significant (because of genetics, exposure in the womb, hormones, etc) within a gender, but there seems to be a class of people who categorically insist that there is no such trend between genders.

This isn't to say every little girl wants to play the same way, but that there are statistical biases to the genders which might be intrinsic, not societal constructs.

"Equal before the law" and "equal member of society" does not mean "the same in every way", and trying to enforce the last of these can be harmful rather than helpful.

> But critics wonder, would it be so hard for Lego to develop — even market — toys for girls and boys to enjoy together?

The article cites that Lego itself has noticed, through empirical testing, that the two groups (statistically speaking), use the sets differently.

The critics, through virtue of their assumptions about how gender equality should work, seem to imply that this distinction isn't there and everyone should be happy with the same set.

So let me ask this: if there really is a difference in play styles (exterior versus interior focus on the set, for instance), why wouldn't you as a toy maker design two lines of sets - one with a focus on interior details and one with a focus on exterior ones?

If you try to combine it, for the price point, the toy is going to be slightly weaker for each segment of the population - effectively raising the price on both groups to have the toy they actually want by mandating we must have one toy in the name of "equality".

Seriously, can someone explain what's wrong with two lines of toys if Lego (through testing, no less) has found that there are two distinct groups of wants?

No one would suggest that if it were boys split in half in their interest of interior versus exterior, Lego would be remiss in offering two product lines, so it strikes me as incredibly... insecure about gender equality, to the point of pathologically insisting there be no differences, to say that we shouldn't have two lines because of the divide happening mostly along gender lines.