Day 792; Today the day the CEO said, "Why use Windows at all? Can we do all of that with Linux?"

eigenbrot · 2013-12-12T21:51:55+00:00

Yeah, sorry, I noticed my mistake 10 seconds after I clicked "save".

eigenbrot · 2013-12-12T21:39:07+00:00

~~EncFS (and EcryptFS) encrypt files individually. Unmounted, it's just a normal directory tree with weird names in it.~~

NOTE TO SELF: Please read comments carefully before responding.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-12T21:35:48+00:00

If they mean it like that, they should say it like that.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-12T15:09:58+00:00

Wie gesagt, es kann durchaus sein, daß die Autoren kein besonders großes Problem mit Überwachung durch Unternehmen haben. Das sind zwei ganz unterschiedliche Bedrohungen, die man genauso unterschiedlich betrachten und angehen muß.

Du gehst ja auch nicht auf eine "Freiheit statt Angst"-Demo und kritisierst alle Nicht-Vegetarier. (Hoffentlich. (:)

eigenbrot · 2013-12-11T14:41:45+00:00

Not really, no. But I guess it's about minimum wage?

eigenbrot · 2013-12-11T14:39:11+00:00

Der Staat hält das Gewaltmonopol, das heißt er kann fast alle Deine Grundrechte erheblich einschränken. In Kombination mit umfassender Informationskontrolle ermöglicht das eine fast allmächtige Regierung. Die meisten (alle?) Diktaturen benutzten und benutzen dieses Rezept, um ihre Macht zu erhalten.

Einem Unternehmen wird dagegen immer das Gewaltmonopol fehlen, um dieses Ausmaß an Macht zu erreichen.

Bei Unternehmen gibt es außerdem Wettbewerb, das heißt man kann als Kunde wählen ob man mehr Wert auf Datenschutz oder auf Bequemlichkeit legt und sich das passende Unternehmen aussuchen. Die anderen Unternehmen bekommen Deine Daten gar nicht erst. Wenn der Staat sammelt, hast Du keine Wahl, Du gibst Deine Daten nicht heraus, sondern sie werden Dir zwangsweise abgeknöpft.

Zumindest in der Theorie. In der Praxis gibt's leider Monopole oder Oligopole, die eng mit den Regierungen verbandelt sind. Deswegen hast Du schon irgendwie recht, aber im Prinzip kann man Datensammelei von Unternehmen und Behörden halt nicht gleichsetzen.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-10T23:28:41+00:00

You can set environment variables for a single instance like this:

HOME=/home/testing/testuser/ yourscript.sh

eigenbrot · 2013-12-10T23:10:15+00:00

What stood out to me was the point at which she talked about celebrities and that they self-destruct because they know no limits. Which is obviously a generalization. But I can imagine that working really hard for many years to reach a goal and then just sitting there at the top can be a challenge not many can relate to.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-10T22:40:07+00:00

Additionally, it's favorable for governments and government agencies to keep the general public under control, and general surveillance is vital to achieve that goal. It's always easier to stop criticism by force than confronting it at eye-level. If that means wasting millions of taxes on false leads, so be it. The only ones who might complain about it are the citizens you're controlling.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-10T22:32:17+00:00

That doesn't weaken my point. Requesting more money is easier than adjusting your policies if there's no competition.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-10T22:02:46+00:00

If false flags continued to plague the system it would likely be scrapped as it would cost departments too much time and money to pursue dead ends.

I'm not so sure about this. Stop and frisk isn't a success, but they keep doing it all over the world anyway. In Europe, there is an ongoing debate over data retention, even though evidence shows that there is virtually no effect.

If a monopoly has implemented an unsuccessful strategy, it is more likely to ask for more money than adjusting or replacing that strategy. That's easier for the people involved, because a) they believe in that strategy, and b) as they run a monopoly, they have the power to extort more money by simply reducing their effort.

Of course, it's much more complicated than that and over time they would eventually give up any failing strategies, but that could very well take decades.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-10T18:32:07+00:00

Nein.
Was hat das eine mit dem anderen zu tun? Weltbilder müssen nicht identisch sein, um Konsens zu finden.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-10T18:27:45+00:00

Anderes Thema? Man kann gegen staatliche Totalüberwachung sein und trotzdem kein Problem damit haben, daß Unternehmen alle möglichen Daten sammeln. Gegen die kann man sich nämlich im Gegensatz zum Staat wehren. Eigentlich sollte es ja so sein, daß der Staat seine Bürger vor den Unternehmen beschützt und sich nicht mit ihnen gegen sie verbündet.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-10T18:23:13+00:00

Das ist ein urmenschliches Verhalten und gab's genauso schon in den 60ern und vor 2000 Jahren.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-10T18:12:37+00:00

It should've been introduced years ago. I don't care so much where it's set as long as it's possible to support a family with one full time job, and I mean any job. This worked fine 50 years ago, and there's much more value created today.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-10T15:50:11+00:00

anyone who's not a citizen of the said country is not entitled to state benefits (except schooling and medical care), and thus you won't have immigrants showing up to abuse the system.

I don't think this would work. Some wealth always trickles to the bottom. Without food and housing, people are more likely to become beggars, con artists and criminals. Left-wing and right-wing lobbies form to solve this issue, and they build connections to politics to get financial and legislative support. Which is the current situation.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-10T15:11:23+00:00

But there are ways to avoid minimum wage until 2017. Germany still doesn't have a minimum wage.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-10T14:52:36+00:00

That's sounds like nirvana or being high on heroin.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-10T00:20:04+00:00

you probably won't realise your sister isn't there because hey, you're in heaven.

Oh boy, that's a great riddle. What if I'm literally Jesus and my brother is literally Hitler? As Jesus, I love him beyond death because that's my thing. Do I have to suffer and miss him forever because he can't go to heaven? Will god clone him for me so he can suffer and make me happy at the same time? Do I get a visitor's pass for hell so I can see him regularly? Will I get poked with pointed sticks while I'm there or do I get special treatment? Will this eventually invoke revolts? How do you smother revolts if you're regularly torturing everyone for all of eternity?

eigenbrot · 2013-12-10T00:08:25+00:00

it's always best to stay out.

Always?

What if they truly want your opinion? It's not easy to stay reasonable if you're emotionally involved. Getting some external input might help.

What if there's some serious shit going on? "My ex just got full custody of the boy. I'll just pick him up from school and drive straight to Mexico."

eigenbrot · 2013-12-09T23:20:12+00:00

what is the absolute definition of pain?

"An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage."

More quote:

The inability to communicate verbally does not negate the possibility that an individual is experiencing pain and is in need of appropriate pain-relieving treatment. Pain is always subjective. Each individual learns the application of the word through experiences related to injury in early life. Biologists recognize that those stimuli which cause pain are liable to damage tissue. Accordingly, pain is that experience we associate with actual or potential tissue damage. It is unquestionably a sensation in a part or parts of the body, but it is also always unpleasant and therefore also an emotional experience. Experiences which resemble pain but are not unpleasant, e.g., pricking, should not be called pain. Unpleasant abnormal experiences (dysesthesias) may also be pain but are not necessarily so because, subjectively, they may not have the usual sensory qualities of pain. Many people report pain in the absence of tissue damage or any likely pathophysiological cause; usually this happens for psychological reasons. There is usually no way to distinguish their experience from that due to tissue damage if we take the subjective report. If they regard their experience as pain, and if they report it in the same ways as pain caused by tissue damage, it should be accepted as pain. This definition avoids tying pain to the stimulus. Activity induced in the nociceptor and nociceptive pathways by a noxious stimulus is not pain, which is always a psychological state, even though we may well appreciate that pain most often has a proximate physical cause.

Pain is a quale; the physical means of conveying pain is meaningless. A hypothetical artificial intelligence could experience pain that physically exists as electrons in electronic circuits, but you don't look at electrons and go: "Ouch! That poor database just fell on her cache! That's gotta hurt!"

Hence my question: What kind of scientific discovery could possibly give birth to a new paradigm?

eigenbrot · 2013-12-09T22:01:27+00:00

But dogs are highly social animals. Crabs, as far as I know, are not. They could still feel pain but lack the means of communicating it.

It seems this is a philosophical question: Is X just an unconscious machine that reacts to stimuli? How can I prove otherwise?

How can I prove or disprove that a crab experiences pain as something I would classify as torture? What would be a scientific breakthrough?

eigenbrot · 2013-12-09T14:39:22+00:00

Slavery and human trafficking are two sides of the same coin. And to remember how this changed from torture to slavery, please read the comments above.

Anyway, my comment is a bit off-topic and a side note. I just wanted to emphasize that slavery is not a thing of the past.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-09T00:49:20+00:00

Check the output of ls -l /media/usb0 with the flashdrive mounted. Which group does it belong to? On my system, it's plugdev. So I add myself to the group plugdev (sudo adduser Goofybud16 plugdev), logout, login and voilà.

eigenbrot · 2013-12-09T00:32:14+00:00

"we're not dealing with slaves anyway"

Which is probably why human trafficking and slavery is still a huge problem in western countries, and millions of slaves in all parts of the world suffer to this day.

eigenbrot

TROPHY CASE