ferdo

Most of the "terror" I've seen in the US in the past 12 years comes from the government and the media scaring the hell out of people.

Facebook should give him a job. The current security team appears to need some help.

Just watching as an interested outsider for all these years and partly based on the paper quoted above, much of Google's early energy and innovation was based on the simple idea of extending and applying knowledge of the new field in service to users.

When that focus shifted to exactly what Page and Brin had criticized themselves in 1998, we can clearly see that it's not the interests of the users being served anymore.

The decline of 20% time appears to go hand in hand with this shift from the focus on the user to focus on the advertiser and other interests first. I'm not claiming direct correlation but it's not a stretch to say there might be some connection.

My post in fewer words: Page and Brin have wandered from their roots.

That's not "anti-Google propaganda". That's honest criticism from an old geek.

More like shadowy Western intel group attacks outbrain, blames shadowy Middle Eastern group.

I'd point out that Page and Brin predicted the course of their own search engine, and perhaps their own company, in 1998:

“The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.”

“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”

"Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who “deserves” to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed.”

“We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.”

“Search engines have migrated from the academic domain to the commercial. Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented. With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm.”

> http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

"Libertarian" used to be the opposite of "authoritarian":

"The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." -George Orwell, 1948

Because of the debasement of language, "libertarian" can now mean "creepy rightwingy person" or "antigovernment nutjob", depending on which flavor of Statism one prefers.

> There is zero competition of ideas in political science.

It's hard to compete when the government claims a monopoly on violence and will use it against non-violent citizens.

"I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who, on pretence of managing the public, only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill-acquired, and then, that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please; and if they can but prevail to get these contrivances established by the show of public authority, which is considered as the representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws."

-Sir Thomas More, "Utopia", 1517

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words." -1984

Many thanks to the mods for improving on my title shortening.

"Calling it your job don't make it right, Boss."

People affected is my bigness metric, in this instance.

Nixon got outed for spying on a hotel room. The Executive Branch just got outed spying on pretty much everyone.

Watergate was also in a time when people were, by and large, a little more literate about the supposed balance that's supposed to exist between the government and the individual. I was a teenager during Watergate and recall more than one adult being outraged that the president would spy on anyone and shared their outrage.

Today, the almost absolute apathy about being spied on is as disturbing to me as the surveillance itself. It doesn't bode well for the American political future.

Wow. Not any old committee either, but the Senate Committee on Homeland Security.

We live in days of high weirdness.

Prosecutors have power to prosecute, not the "right" to prosecute. The evolving history of individual rights is a response to the even longer history of abuses of those powers by little people that get big jobs.

Ortiz and Heymann abused their power and abused Aaron's rights. They should be in jail, not getting a paycheck from taxpayers.

The NSA spying on all of us is a bigger crime and a bigger scandal than Watergate. I don't see any groundswell for impeachment.

The message seems to be, "If you assert your rights or your innocence, we'll make life very difficult for you. Comply."

Pure mobster mentality.

What funds the NSA and the entire Military-Industrial Complex? If we changed the underlying financial structure that supports it, the upper dependencies would have to change or cease to exist also.

It's taken four or five generations to build this beast. It will take generations to change it again. But in the meantime, I hope a small percentage of people will take measures to defend themselves from the coup.

> “systems governed by bad policies and motivated by incentives will produce bad outcomes."

This can be applied to the entire US government, not just the police.

Takeaway:

> "This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."

It's kind of fitting. The nation that spawned the internet is the nation that's killing the internet biz on its own turf.

I love neocities. Kyle is my new favorite geek.

They can't really regulate Bitcoin but they can regulate the people that want to do biz with it in public.

> They invented a very clever peer-to-peer payment system that also happens to enable fraud, tax avoidance, drug dealing and other sordid pursuits that governments won't abide for much longer.

This sounds like cash. What's the problem?

The status quo is annoyed because Cash 2.0 is better than the swill they're handing out at banks.

> "We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that."

It takes a large soul to admit, in public, that you've been wrong about something that has to do with your profession.

And he's right, Americans have been misled about hemp and its products:

http://cannabis.neocities.org/

To be honest, I find it hard to take your opinion seriously after you equated your choices for lunch with the exercise of government power.

I very much doubt Paine would be in favor of what's passing for government at the moment.

> To me, it's a step below invoking the Illuminati,

Ignoring or rationalizing the abuses of government while invoking the Illuminati is no way to go through life, son.

Thomas Paine was no friend to taxes:

"War is the common harvest of all those who participate in the division and expenditure of public money, in all countries. It is the art of conquering at home; the object of it is an increase of revenue; and as revenue cannot be increased without taxes, a pretence must be made for expenditure. In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes."

Rights of Man

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/paine/thomas/p147r/complete....

Then why do so many people connected to government commit crimes with impunity while those with little to no connection to government get reamed by the legal system?