In your examples you are not actually proving a negative (that something didn't happen). You are proving that something is not possible or could not have happened.


Possible or not possible are easy by comparison. Proving a negative means, "take this thing that really could have possibly happened, and prove that it didn't happen". A shape cannot both be a triangle and a square. A pure color at a single wavelength cannot both be red and blue. You are drastically underestimating the scope of how difficult it is to prove a negative. "This couldn't have happened because it is impossible" is actually a positive claim and as such, can be proven.

There's no reason the populace cannot both a) harden against as many security vulnerabilities as you reasonably can, and b) take back the political power from the ruling elite and institute oversight against massive surveillance and other governmental abuses, including severe criminal penalties against officials supporting them.

There certainly are countermeasures you can (and should) take, but generally, applying technical solutions to political and social problems doesn't work long-term.

Look, just because the guy was allegedly willing to kill someone in cold blood, that doesn't also mean he's willing to do something as drastic as infringe on anyone's intellectual property rights. I mean, let's be fair! There's no need to jump to such extreme conclusions.

Signed,
-- The RIAA/MPAA

What I call the genuine form of libertarianism (small 'l') is about maximizing personal freedom, in the "life, liberty, and property" sense. The basic idea is that my right to swing my hand ends at the tip of your nose. Adult people should be able to do whatever they want that does not infringe on the rights of others, and then reap the consequences. For example: if you can manage to responsibly use any drugs you like, you should be able to; if you drive impaired because you refuse to do it responsibly, society has a legitimate reason to apprehend and punish you. Someone else who thinks drug use is always a horrible practice is free to practice that belief by not doing it themselves, but has no legitimate justification for persecuting a responsible user.

Privacy should be this way: your choice. I'm in favor of strong privacy protections in law because right now there is not much choice in the matter. If I want the Googles of the world to have my information, it should be because I knowingly, personally, actively, and deliberately gave it to them myself. Anything less is an infringement of my privacy rights. There is a clear intent behind burying such things in Page Y of a legalese EULA and that intent is to make it as difficult as possible to exercise this choice. A device that transfers my data to someone else on my behalf, by default, without my actively configuring it that way, shows the same intent.

There is a movement or an effort, more prominent and vocal the last several years, to deliberately misrepresent that all libertarian thought is the same thing as anarcho-capitalism. Observe carefully and you'll find that most any idea that, if popular, would threaten the status quo has multitudes of deceptive propaganda-technique-using PR efforts directed against it, the goal of which is to tarnish that idea in the popular mind. Most liberterian philosophies have a concept of inalienable human rights and include the desire for a government, the main purpose of which is to protect those rights. Regulation of business is necessary because otherwise, corporations will use their intense concentrations of wealth, market power, and political clout to infringe on the rights of individuals. This is legitimate and not some kind of control-freak idea or Puritannical fantasy of telling others how to live. Anyone who is against it and represents themselves as the only libertarians in existence (and not a particularly extreme form) is lying to you, it's as simple as that.

Like the author Jeffrey Grupp explains, corporatism (as Mussolini called it) is the idea that the government, the major corporations, and the military function as one entity. It's always been this way since the kings of old; read up on the East India Company sometime. Eisenhower focused on the military and defense contract aspects and referred to it as the military-industrial complex. Sometimes it's called the military-industrial-media complex (so how 'bout those scary WMDs Iraq was supposedly threatening us with?). To focus on "government being evil" or "evil corporation" is a form of tunnel vision that denies the scope of the problem. It's one of those "pet causes" people get caught up in while nothing changes.

The problem with the marketing datamining is that many of these organizations are in bed with the government. There's a definite double standard here. If you hired someone to perform an illegal act on your behalf, both you and your hireling would be guilty of a crime. Yet somehow the government can pay companies for data that would be illegal for the government to directly collect itself and this is legal.

So if it were merely about trying to sell you "adult diapers" versus the regular kind, it would be more benign. At least in G. Gordon Liddy's day, surveillance was expensive, required a certain determination and commitment of resources, and consequently would only be done on targets considered important enough. With modern tech, the idea that "obviously I'm not interesting enough to spy on" is obsolete. This didn't happen though without plenty of support from government, media, marketers, and various other corporations all working towards their own common interests.

There is such a concept as aiding and abetting, or being an accessory to, a crime. Many people have been tried and convicted who themselves did not directly commit a crime.

If you don't believe that concept is applicable here, I'd like to know why. If someone else believes it does apply, I'd like to know their reasoning as well. I don't see how "liberal" or "conservative" has anything to do with it. It's a question of ethical responsibility, not political ideology. By failing to understand that, you're handwaving and dismissing a valid and worthy question about the nature of pervasive advertising and its effect on the population.

What you really need is to deal with this anti-intellectualism that's so popular in the culture today, and replace it with genuine curiosity, a joy of discovery, and a delight at learning new things.

Do that, and the rest will naturally follow, and not just in software development.

Gaming typically relies on skill, not chance. If you play most games long enough, you'll be able to consistently beat certain levels. If you win at the roulette wheel, you're no more likely than before to win again. That's the difference. Otherwise, "exploiting pleasure-seeking behavior" could be stretched to describe every last industry in existence beyond the sales of food, water, shelter, and basic utilities.

With the model of directly purchasing the game itself (and no in-game purchases, like standard PC/console gaming) you can at least read about the game and have a reasonable expectation about what you are paying for. The real problem with in-game purchases is that the game is "free" or low-cost in the most technical sense, but after you invest many hours advancing the game you find that you can't really prosper without making additional purchases. It could be construed as a form of bait-and-switch.

The other problem would be that many of these games are aimed at children who make purchases the parents later get stuck with, but this problem begins in the home and should be solved within the home by actual parenting. That's not as convenient as using the tablet like a cheap babysitter but it would certainly be more worthwhile. If you wanted to solve this by government action, that's simple too: declare that these purchases are contractual in nature (the parent agreed to pay charges made to the phone bill or whatever) and that minors who make them cannot be held to a contract, therefore the companies cannot collect money when children make them. *Poof* - end of shitty business model.

Reading your kind words is humbling, sir. You honor yourself by being one of the minority who read something like that and try to understand where it is coming from and how it could work, rather than playing the hostile audience and trying your best to tear it down because it opposes a common notion.

Rather than patronizingly talking down to me like this, try to understand where I'm coming from. I'm not talking about crimes that have victims here, like robbery and murder. Preventing those is legitimately within the purpose of having a government and a society. I'm talking about the wrong of trying to dictate lifestyles, of trying to micromanage the way others live based not on crimes but on approval. It's not terribly different from dictating to people what they may read, listen to, watch, and discuss.

American tyranny is what they call a soft tyranny. It's not so much jack-booted thugs waving guns around, demanding compliance. That's hard tyranny. Soft tyranny is when you no longer treat adult people like responsible adults because "you know what's good for them". The only way to have a healthy, long-term viable society is to expect adults to be responsible, to make their own decisions in any instance that does not involve a crime with a victim, and then (importantly) to accept the consequences of those decisions. Any effort to circumvent this will eventually destroy the very society itself.

Yes, at some point it's quite rational to decide "this one entity has enough power". He's really very smooth, though. I'll hand him that:

That's a very diplomatic way to go about it. People often mistake that for honesty and openness in fact. It's basically a highly polished way of saying, "if you were educated you would agree with me."

There's nothing more profoundly anti-social than trying to control other people and force them to live only the way that you want them to.

GP has the right idea. "I don't care if you ... " means "I don't care to force my will on you". If you want advice from someone, you're free to ask.

The one thing they both have absolutely in common: the implicit assumption that inanimate objects are the cause of social problems, and the belief that controlling those inanimate objects will magically make social problems go away. Perhaps you can see how childish this viewpoint is?

The way I see it, the underlying cause of the social problems is a form of energy. It doesn't ever really go away, it just changes form. Guns and booze happen to be powerful, readily available tools allowing this energy to express itself. It can't be done, but if you somehow could make absolutely 100% of all guns and booze disappear overnight, you would find that this energy will move on to the next most convenient methods of expressing itself. Perhaps stabbings and abuse of some other drug would rise. Perhaps some other, unforeseen methods would emerge.

What no one really seems interested in doing is really understanding the underlying causes for why people want to abuse alcohol instead of using it responsibly, why people want to shoot either themselves or others absent provocation, and what can be done to transform this energy into something better. Actually understanding and beginning to change this would start with a complete restructuring of governments, corporations, educational institutions, and other institutions to make them adhere to their true purposes and to treat people like human beings rather than automatons. Where it would end, I couldn't tell you.

The real obstacle is that no one with the power to move in that direction has any incentive to do it: the current model is too profitable for them. But blaming our problems on objects that have no volition and no desire of their own certainly makes for a great distraction! It lets us waste time debating frivolous non-solutions with no hope of convincing "the opposition" of anything, meanwhile we avoid all these uncomfortable questions about the way we live, whom that serves, and precisely how we were taught to live that way.

The amount of regulation and consideration is driven by who can write the best, most emotional propaganda and purchase the finest access to mass media while operating through various PR firms and front groups to make it less obvious that they are doing so.

Fixed that for you. It's been that way for a long time, ever since Sigmund Freud's nephew decided that calling propaganda "public relations" was much more euphemistic than Woodrow Wilson and Walter Lippmann's term for it which was "manufactured consent".