mcpie

Really nice, though the 'my marks' and 'tags' boxes don't load for me, meking it impossible to find back my cute little efforts at office procrastination :(

Truth and accuracy aside, why would her experience not be the center piece? I think the personal experience of 'everyday citizens' is enormously important in understanding issues of privacy and (self-)censorship.

In fact, highlighting the consequences for 'regular people' arguably contributes more to that understanding than the zillionth story about 'exceptions' like Assange/Snowden/RandomIranianBlogger. In the end those are (seen as) edge-cases.

Hackernews and other websites latching on to the 'technical' part of the story is understandable, but whether it was the quinoa or the pressure cooker or her husband's business dealings isn't the real subject of this story - the real insight provided by this story is the fact that she was left in a state of distress, leading to her questioning her every day communications/searches...

... because the government is one person, unable of accomplishing multiple tasks at the same time?

Nobody is claiming all news is objective. I also think that the constant claims about 'msm' 'ignoring' important stories is annoying, incorrect and in fact distracting from the proper discussion to be had.

There is in fact a very distinct difference between opinion articles and 'proper' news articles. You see, journalism is not a claim to objective truth, but a procedure aimed at achieving a minimum level of validity where it comes to events. When you read a news article, you should (to some extent) be able to trust its contents on the merits of the journalistic method. Whereas with an opinion piece, it's not bound by this procedure. Note - nobody is arguing 'absolute objectivity' here. It's a matter of trust in a procedure. Of course, it's fine to distrust the journalistic method, to not see it as absolute truth, but to deny or entirely dismiss the distinction is annoyingly daft.

Also, afaik, this story is still everywhere. If you want it to remain that way, start working for change - newspapers report on events, not 'the truth'. Make events happen, and it stays in the cycle.

The Telegraaf has had a pretty public beef with the intelligence agencies over source protection and phone taps.

They're actually quite decent when it comes to investigative news into the police, justice and the AIVD.

You need an NSA and CIA simply by virtue of the fact that every other country has one.

Secrecy is also an essential part of negotiations - you can't reach middle ground if all your concessions are made public. There's a balance to be struck, though we're clearly far from achieving that atm.

A little secrecy by itself is not an issue, as long as the process built around it is as transparent as possible. That's the issue you're facing with this whole PRISM thing, lack of accountability and transparency.

That is not a mere thought, it is an actual thing called UKUSA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukusa

Nothing was 'given up'. Something was traded. European intelligence agencies regularly 'launder' intercepts through foreign governments ('hey NSA, we'll trade you some info, if you can get us some info on one of our own...').

Paxman's 'grilling' is as much an opportunity as it is a challenge to the interviewee. Dismissing it as an obnoxious, premeditated takedown underestimates Paxman's skill and as an interviewer. It's also a well known shtick of his.

You misunderstood the argument.

Finland has a merit-based system just like Singapore. And Singapore has, just like Finland, made a concerted effort to provide equal access to education to all its citizens.

The argument is not to drop merit-based tests and chances based on merit. Nobody is arguing that.

The argument is that society as a whole should focus on providing equal access and chance to citizens (in this context children that go to school/university).

So whilst Singaporean education certainly is far more focussed on rote learning and the typical 'Asian Tiger' approach to labor, the system built around those approaches is very 'euro-socialist', if you will: equal access for everyone.

Finland has a very quirky school system, it's nigh impossible to apply in other countries. It's also a matter of a concerted PR effort - the paper reality often looks better than what actually happens in schools. While it's very interesting and certainly still a role model, many educational professionals are slowly dropping the 'Be Finland' chorus and are starting to look elsewhere.

New Zealand seems to be the new hype.

The "working class" has absolutely no choice in this matter, so blaming it on them by saying 'they need to realize x or y' is quite besides the point. Skill sets and education are largely besides the point too. While it is nice to shuffle around people's skill sets and adapt them to other professions in the short term, in the long run many of those 'skilled' professions will largely be automated too. Even if those workers were capable of acquiring the fabled 'transversal skills' necessary to do the surviving jobs (which many of them most definitely are not), the increase in labor surplus will mean more people will stay permanently jobless.

Hence, a more collective ownership of the (automated) means of production is what counts. That sounds awfully marxist though, so good luck trying to convince people of that.

I personally would love to believe we're going to end up in a leisure society with a guaranteed minimum income supplemented by some tradeable activities we personally find meaningful (utopia, hooray), it seems more likely we're set for rentier capitalism with a large underclass of jobless vagrants though.

I personally feel the US has been doing a rather good job.

I also like that a free and open internet is in the US' interest - the de-facto 'control' over the internet by the US gives it enormous amounts of soft and technological power that they can subtly profit from.

We're basically all locked into the US-paradigm on the internet. That means it's in the US' national interest not to mess with the internet too much - far better to just coast along on the wave you've created yourself.

It also means that Russia and other states are strategically opposed to a free and open internet. Not just for national purposes (censoring speech critical of their autocrats), but also for strategic purposes an open internet is a threat to their international power. They're swimming against the US wave.

So, ideally speaking, yes, everybody should democratically have a say in how to run the internet. Realistically speaking, however, the current situation is a near-optimal solution.

Imagine this in a country with a lot of bike traffic... 10 ~ 20 flashy green bikes on the road would decrease safety, not increase it.

Perhaps your idea of knowledge is limited.Communication skills? Dealing with people different from yourself? Dealing with people you actively dislike? Conflict resolution? Dealing with a power hierarchy? Learning how to navigate complex administrative systems and bureaucracies? Learning how to learn? Learning self-discipline? And then there's the fact that self-schooling really is quite ineffective when compared to being tutored properly, and utterly dependent on the student being able to grasp difficult concepts without outside help...

Woz: Strawberry is more banana than apple

You do need language skills for the marketing :)

I won't make the horrors accessible. It will merely serve as a live propaganda feed mediating and obscuring the suffering happening on the ground.

That's not facebook's fault. You just handled it incompetently. The way you brought it up would turn anybody off, facebook or no facebook

Far too much work. The whole point of a facebook event is to be rid of the organizational administration and to be able to discover events your friends go to / invite you to in a central place.

The dependency on IE is also a result of Korean coders/designers relying on the quirks and bugs and specificities of IE6 for their websites. Even when it comes to non-e-commerce sites, many (most?) sites won't function properly if you don't use IE.

This is the end result of the encryption-thing, so getting rid of that would be a proper step forward, but wouldn't solve the problem itself. By now IE it's systemic :[

Ribbonfarm has an interesting counterpoint, based on a speech by Bruce Sterling, that essentially promotes buying 'the best' in a very limited amount of cases, and buying cheap in all other cases, with some actually interesting socio-political observations thrown in for good measure:

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/12/08/acting-dead-trading-up-...

It would be an interesting experiment to have a random selection of citizens formulate a hypothetical new constitution.

Pagination can in fact increase reading time. Most readers never finish an article. In fact, most readers drop out after the second paragraph. Not because the articles are shit, but because people have a short attention span.

By adding a 'next page' button, you create an incentive to keep reading. By spiking the curiosity of the reader to find out what's behind the bend, they linger instead of leaving.

Vedett, a Belgian beer brewery, has been doing something similar / doing it better. It prints user-uploaded pictures on all their bottles. It's pretty cool and has made the beer quite popular among the 'creative avant-garde' (or whatever we call 'em these days):

http://www.vedett.be/

It's not so much social training as it is the exposure time (which you also mentioned). Exposure time was so long that it was nearly impossible to smile in pictures. See for example the picture of the photographer himself at the stream - the running water in the river is a blur. I'm surprised the exposure time isn't that high in these pictures though. The shot of the workmen in the woodshop is distinctly modern by showing 'action'.

Not to mention they're competitors in most areas of trade... especially IT.

Firing people is fucking expensive.

The distinction you're making between private and public is hardly relevant. The gestapo, stasi and FBI are, for all intents and purposes, not very different from private companies trying to perpetuate their own success and maximize their power/profits. The only major difference is that governments own a monopoly on the use of force, making them slightly more dangerous in a physical sense - but not more dangerous in a general 'can cause us a lot of harm' sense (especially since governments are easier to topple than private companies).

Part of the answer is a conscious decision on the EU level to 'become the best at science'. That sounds awfully vague and usually is an empty promise in politics, but in this case there was broad support for such an effort (plenty of money was available, the USA seemed to be slacking off, CERN had proven its worth etc etc).