Volpe

> With China I think maybe you have to keep in mind what a scarring catastrophe Maoism was. Middle class people and values were systematically purged.

Maoism was a resounding success, it was the cultural revolution that replaced the middle class.

I think the lack of trust rises from the fact that the chinese middle class were very recently (< 1 generation) the poor/underclass. There concept of wealth is a lot more transient than the west's, they have a much greater fear of losing wealth (given it happened almost overnight during the cultural revolution). It generates what the west views as a "selfish" attitude, but is probably viewed by Chinese as "prudent".

Are you saying chinese are predominantly inbred?

I thought the german government immediately asked for the US government to "clarify" it's intelligence gathering in germany.

That's about as 'outraged' as they can get isn't it?

Personal phone calls make sense, when the spying is personal.

The Great Firewall does a lot more than that. It blocks new IPs by default (some are later re-enabled after being 'assessed' in some way).

It does some kind of automated crawling and blocking.

It has manual (as in human) blockers, who read content on Weibo and remove it.

It's still horribly crude, and fairly straight forward to route around but it's more complex than a simple static dns blacklist.

Sorry there seems to only have been one directed at the Chancellory [1]

Would you really equate unconfirmed word document files (which were denied by the government) with explicit phone tapping (which was all but admitted to by the government)?

[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/espionage-report-m...

Which incident was that?

This is an odd argument. Guns are technology too, are rifleman just murders roo?

Any weapon is technology, so swordsman too?

Martial arts could right be considered 'technology', so the only people who are warriors are untrained people who fight... So we are talking Bar brawlers...?

Every soldier in the US military is hiding behind a plethora of technology layers... they completely outclass their opponents... yet you draw the line at drone pilots? (how are they any different from fighter pilots?... it's not like the US has ever engaged anyone capable of shooting them down)

Not to get too involved in this. But "stealth edit" just means you edited without mentioning it.

The general etiquette seems to be to put an "EDIT: " with either an addendum or an explanation of edits you made within your comment.

There is no implied perniciousness or anything, it's called that because you are effectively changing what people have responded to after their response.

I'm not sure you can class it as "We are this good at it"... when it's being discussed publicly around the world, and the president is fielding calls from world leaders asking why they are being spied on.

Will all these defences of the NSA be repeated when we discover the Germans returning the favour?

There is this crazy concept in version control and open source in general called: Forking.

In github, you can fork, and then turn on issues! (I know, we live in the future right!?)

I doubt that, with Accurate gps and a mindstorm kit, I could build a "car" that follows any road. I don't see why it would need to be 'prepared'.

With sonar, infrared, sign reading, gps, rain sensor, traffic management integration, line reading... exactly what does the cpu not "know" that a driver does?

That was sarcasm (btw). And I was pointing out the article was pointing out the programmer was Russian for absolutely no reason. Why was it important for us to know his nationality?

Love the racial inclusion for no reason.

> What is really happening is risks are socialised, profits (if any) are privatised.

Well not quite, given companies pay tax too. Not only that, but large industries like Aerospace spend money on other stuff. I agree it's clumsy, but it isn't as simple as you put it.

Seems to me with the level of subsidy Boeing/Airbus/Bombardier receive, why aren't they just nationalised.

I hadn't seen that. What a horrible response from Rhinehart. His whole tone is of "I know better than you, and am more rational than you"... It made me wonder if he didn't know who Tim Ferriss was nor what experience he's had.

I'm neither For/Against Soylent, but after reading that I have a fairly negative view on Rhinehart.

As an extra: His response to 1-size-fits-all is laughable, is he forgetting about the 1000s of eating issues people have (gluten, lactose, allergies, diabetes)... Sorry ranting now.

I see your point. I agree.

People are concerned about the hype? Not the product?

So does it concern you that in McDonalds ads there are always attractive slim people, when in fact at most stores you see average looking obese people?

Are we arguing truth in advertising? Or Danger in food products?

Only if Time, Gas, and Electricity are free.

Do you ask for the same level of rigorousness when McDonalds release a new item on their menu? I'd hazard a guess that more people consume that new item than anyone will ever consume in Soylent.

Remember supersize me, that guy started having liver problems from eating McDonalds... Yet nothing changes and McDonalds keeps selling crap.

Food is a toy, and Soylent are very far down the scale of "bad food products I can buy"

Wi-fi networks aren't private, you can stop a "broadcast" of the SSID, otherwise you "broadcast" it (publicly).

It's the equivelant of the the Streetview car capturing 'public property', if you want 'privacy', put up a big fence and don't broadcast your SSID.

As for the NSA issue, I'm not going to defend google too much there, but you've seen what happens to providers who didn't comply... I would put that down to more a 'The US govt is pretty hostile to privacy' more than "Google is evil".

On the scale of 'evil shit' happening in the world. Google collecting my Wifi network name ranks about similarly to 'J-Walking'...

But once you are 100 miles out, everyone speaks mandarin in a similar way. (i.e. the problem is Beijinghua != Putonghua ;-)

By that definition, tagging an (original) poem is art?

How? You mean you intuitively understood, or you can prove it your solution without calculus?

Also note: Space is pretty black, why do things have to look like nature?

Wait, but 'install' means 'download' ? So if chrome was a single .py file, which I downloaded, and ran with python. Thats fine. But because it's a .exe, i need root... ?

I fail to see the difference. Sorry.

I realised I perhaps didn't provide much in the way of citation:

Hiroshima/Nagasaki: Upto 250,000 deaths [1]

Vietnam+Cambodia: 100,000 + 400,000 maimed or killed by agent orange + 500,000 children born with birth defects (also from agent orange [2]

Korean War: 1.5 million civilians killed (both sides (difficult to delineate), 20% of the north koreans population killed. [3]

Gulf War 1: 15000 civilians killed [4]

You then have Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan drone strikes. Paints a fairly compelling picture.

Those of you with the attitude of "That is just a fact of war, civilians die". Given you know this before a war, you therefore know you are going to kill civilians making the action ethically worse, than if you didn't know this "Fact of war".

This isn't even going into the blatant disregard for human life the US demonstrated with slavery (~10 million african slaves killed, admittedly western europe in general shares the blame for that)[5], trail of tears[6] (4000 cherokees killed), etc...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_an...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties#Deaths_c...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#Korean_...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#Coaliti...

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#European_c...

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears

> That's what gets me the most about this; how very apathetic the American public and American politicians have been about the mass slaughter of Iraqis (including thousands of civilians), torture, indefinite detention without trial in Guantanamo, extrajudicial assassination on US citizens, and so on and so forth. It's chilling to think that so few people care.

But 'they' (speaking in generalisations) never did care iraq is just the latest of a very long series of events where the US slaughters civilians, it's pretty much a consistent theme in US history and ALL of it's conflicts.

An interactive shell (like bash/python/irb) is untrusted code (i.e the user can type whatever the hell they like). But I don't/shouldn't need root to run it.

Yes you can. The United states are my go to example for this as well. There are a number of White Supremacist groups in the US, which (mostly due to rule of law) are contained from ruining multiculturalism as whole (they probably have significant local effect). But they still are free to hold their beliefs and practice them (amongst themselves).

And that good reason is?

EDIT: If I want to run/update something (Chrome) in Userland, why should an OS security model stop me? My guess is, Microsoft have successfully confused a common business requirement with a security one.