Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment "I've got nothing to hide" (Score 1) 520

Companies like Facebook base their income on the information they collect from you, and are therefore in a continuous arms race with you to lure you into giving out more information. I admire your absolute understanding of privacy choices on every level and nuance imaginable, but most of the other people in this world are less aware and more easily tricked... and even if they are rather smart, they make mistakes.

Is it therefore fair to put the onus on the person who has a Facebook profile to protect their privacy? Especially when the founder of Facebook has been on record a few times, stating that privacy is on a slippery slope anyway, and they'll just go with the flow? Especially when the "I've got nothing to hide" argument has been thoroughly debunked, because just about any information can be (selectively) used to incriminate you, even when you're entirely innocent?

As much as I am a fan of individual responsibility, I do believe that this tit-for-tat game of deception between social networking sites and their users is rather immoral on the side of the social networking sites, and that it is a cop out to say that the user is being stupid. This is where Assange draws the line, which is not paranoid, but realistic. They really are after eroding our privacy.

Science

Submission + - Isaac Newton, Alchemist (nytimes.com)

Pickens writes: "It wasn't easy being Isaac Newton because he didn't like wasting time: Newton didn't play sports or a musical instrument, gamble at whist or gambol on a horse. Newton was unmarried, had no known romantic liaisons and may well have died, at the age of 85, with his virginity intact. But, as Natalie Angier writes in the NY Times, it is now becoming clear that Newton had time to spend night upon dawn for three decades of his life slaving over a stygian furnace in search of the power to transmute one chemical element into another. "How could the ultimate scientist have been seemingly hornswoggled by a totemic psuedoscience like alchemy, which in its commonest rendering is described as the desire to transform lead into gold," writes Angier. Now new historical research describes how alchemy yielded a bounty of valuable spinoffs, including new drugs, brighter paints, stronger soaps and better booze. "Alchemy was synonymous with chemistry," says Dr. William Newman, "and chemistry was much bigger than transmutation." Newman adds that Newton's alchemical investigations helped yield one of his fundamental breakthroughs in physics: his discovery that white light is a mixture of colored rays that can be recombined with a lens. “I would go so far as to say that alchemy was crucial to Newton’s breakthroughs in optics,” says Newman. “He’s not just passing light through a prism — he’s resynthesizing it.”"

Slashdot Top Deals

Happiness is twin floppies.

Working...