Forgot your password?

typodupeerror

Comment: Re:Really object to emergency information ? (Score 1) 198

by perpenso (#44030667) Attached to: AT&T Rolls Out iPhone Wireless Emergency Alerts

Seriously? In a large scale disaster (hurricane, earthquake, etc) you would be irritated by getting a free text telling you...[whatever]

Why should he need to explain his reasons to you (or to anyone)? If he doesn't want to receive such a message on his phone, why shouldn't he be able to block or reject it? You'd rather force the message on him because you think it's a good idea, even if he doesn't?

How is asking "why?" forcing anyone to do anything?

Comment: Re:Really object to emergency information ? (Score 1) 198

by perpenso (#44025163) Attached to: AT&T Rolls Out iPhone Wireless Emergency Alerts

In a large scale disaster (hurricane, earthquake, etc) you would be irritated by getting a free text telling you where emergency relief (shelter, blankets, food, water) may be found?

They generally don't tell you that. You have to watch the news and listen to other radio programming to find where the shelters are.

Its a new system that is inherently a highly localized broadcast (cell tower to phone). Its a bit of an assumption to assume that it will provide no more info than legacy systems. Especially given that in the previous upgrade (EBS to EAS ?) they seem to have tried to add county based localization, as you point out. I think there is a fair chance at finer grained localization given the technologies involved.

Comment: Re:Really object to emergency information ? (Score 1) 198

by perpenso (#44025121) Attached to: AT&T Rolls Out iPhone Wireless Emergency Alerts

I missed the part where the delete button was disabled, and there was a quiz to determine that you had in fact read the text message prior to deletion. :-)

Excellent reply to anyone complaining about spam in general. Viagra ads can be perfectly justified, because there's still a delete button :)

We are discussing a mechanism by which a text message can be sent during a Presidentially recognized state of emergency. That seems a little different from from standard email. When the President starts sending out Viagra ads I'll give your point more credence. :-)

Comment: Re:"Corporations are people" ... (Score 2) 297

Sure it doesn't, that's in the law:

the words âoepersonâ and âoewhoeverâ include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals;

(1 U.S.C. Â1)

You left out the part that says "In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise".

In short, this is a mechanism by which organizations are subject to the same laws and regulations that individuals are. The qualification of "context" is quite important here. With respect to rights context would determine what would also apply to organizations and would would exclusively apply to individuals. Speech is merely an activity that by context applies to both individuals and organizations.

Comment: Really object to emergency information ? (Score 1) 198

by perpenso (#44022923) Attached to: AT&T Rolls Out iPhone Wireless Emergency Alerts

I, for one, do not care for this ...

Seriously? In a large scale disaster (hurricane, earthquake, etc) you would be irritated by getting a free text telling you where emergency relief (shelter, blankets, food, water) may be found? In tornado country you would be irritated by getting a free text warning you of weather conditions that may indicate tornado formation?

Comment: "Corporations are people" ... (Score 2) 297

People keep saying " look at the Monsanto Protection legislation," but pretty much no one actually looks at it.

What they really mean to say is look at this particular proponent's / opponent's spin on the legislation. I have not read the Monsanto legislation, I'm quite open to it being a travesty, but I did read (well much of it, skimmed some) the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. Nowhere did it say that corporations are people, that phrase was coined by the opponents of the decision as a wonderfully successful attempt at framing, manufacturing a narrative. What the decision actually said was that groups of people have the same speech rights as an individual person and it does not matter if that group is a corporation, a labor union, an advocacy group, an activist group, etc.

Comment: Corps have the ethics of its leadership ... (Score 1) 297

Well, I tend to think people go overboard with the whole private enterprise / government debate ... because corporations have no ethics or morals other than the profit motive - all other things and people are secondary

You just went overboard. Corporations have the ethics and morals of its leadership. Some are both ethical and moral, not purely guided by the profit motive. In my personal experience where I witnessed such leadership the company (a publicly traded company with billions in revenue) was still run by its founders, not by professional management installed by venture capital. I suspect this is a major contributing factor.

And if you notice, a lot of the whining coming from the corporate class is about too much regulation. Not a coincidence.

That is clearly not the case. Have you spent a significant amount of time around small business? Admittedly I don't consider small business owners to be "corporate class", I think my exclusion is fair.

Comment: Re:As usual, Woz proves to be the guy who knows. (Score 1) 548

by perpenso (#44003303) Attached to: Woz Compares the Cloud and PRISM To Communist Russia

Been to a protest? Lots of people's free speech rights are impinged upon. In at least one case, a few busloads worth.

5 buses let through. 13 diverted to an alternate location two miles away. Yep that is certainly on par with being sent to a Siberian gulag for political dissent.

Comment: Re:As usual, Woz proves to be the guy who knows. (Score 1) 548

by perpenso (#44003021) Attached to: Woz Compares the Cloud and PRISM To Communist Russia

the U.S. was nothing like the Soviets, not even close, not even now

That would mean that the soviet system wasn't monitoring every move a citizen made, clamping down on whistle blowers and repressing free speech.

The Soviets would have listened to the phone calls, reportedly the NSA is not doing so.

Repressing free speech? Who has been sent to an Alaskan gulag over the content of their phone call?

Comment: Re:As usual, Woz proves to be the guy who knows. (Score 5, Interesting) 548

by perpenso (#44002851) Attached to: Woz Compares the Cloud and PRISM To Communist Russia

For all its flaws and mistakes the U.S. was nothing like the Soviets, not even close, not even now.

Can you provide an example of something that the Soviets did that the United States has not done?

Read up on the Stalin era. Even later Soviet leaders were disgusted.

While you're formulating your answer, consider that the United States is the only country to nuke another country.

And in the odd perverse mathematics of war may have saved lives compared to blockade and starvation or invasion and mass casualties by conventional weapons. The simple fact was that Truman was expecting 500,000 American dead and 5 million Japanese dead if the war continued through conventional means. The atomic bombings were a tragedy, the problem is that the other options may have been far worse. A classic negative-negative decision, all your likely options are bad.

The casualties from mass fire bombings in Tokyo were comparable to an atomic bombing. Read Eugene Sledge's "With The Old Breed" for an account of the fighting on Okinawa. President Truman had such accounts in his mind when he made the decision. Also note that civilian casualties on Okinawa were comparable to an atomic bombing. I realize it is popular today to say that Japan was going to surrender anyway but the historical facts are that the surrender after the atomic bombings and after the emperor's decision nearly failed when a military coup was attempted. The plotter's had to "rescue" the emperor from the bad advice his ministers were providing and prevent his surrender message from going out. We have no idea what would have happened without the atomic bombings, imminent surrender is hardly a foregone conclusion. Again, Truman faced a negative-negative decision, he had no good option, rather one option that may produce fewer casualties (military and civilian) than the others.

We used our own prisoners and citizens as guinnea pigs to conduct experiments in nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare.

Agreed, terrible.

We engaged in propaganda in the extreme, rewriting our pledge of allegiance to include "under god" and printed the same on our money as a propaganda war against "godless communism."

Seriously? This is some great and terrible crime?

We engaged in witch hunts, like McCarthy appearing before Congress to say he "held in his hands" a list of known communist co-conspirators.

McCarthy was a buffoon. The anti-communist witch hunts wrong. But you are making my point for me. These witch hunts were nothing like those under the Soviets. Read up on Soviet gulags.

We publicly executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953, and it wasn't until just a few years ago, in 2008, that the transcripts from a court case widely panned at the time as a "witch hunt" revealed major inconsistencies in the testimony of key witnesses against them.

Decoded 1944 Soviet cables confirmed Julius worked for the Soviets. Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that they helped accelerate the Soviet atomic bomb program. Various Soviet officials eventually confirmed that Julius was a wartime spy.

They had only passed on low value information that was already duplicated elsewhere... mostly hand-drawn sketches.

Primary source or merely a secondary confirmatory source, large contribution or small contribution, its still wartime espionage. Was the penalty excessive, perhaps, but executing a wartime spy is hardly in the same category as executing those who disagree with a government policy, as we saw in large scale during the Stalin era. Again, you are merely confirming the US and Soviet governments were nothing alike. No one is claiming the US government was without flaws and mistakes, just nowhere near the Soviet level. Enlightened leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev were the exception not the rule.

Comment: Re:As usual, Woz proves to be the guy who knows. (Score 1) 548

by perpenso (#44002207) Attached to: Woz Compares the Cloud and PRISM To Communist Russia

Furthermore, having lived both under the Soviets and in the west they would seem to have a more informed opinion than someone who only lived in the west or never lived in the west.

There was a great Russian writer, who emigrated from the Soviet Union, who used to say: 'Communists I hate the most. But the ones which I hate even more are the anti-communists'.

Karl Marx would probably not have considered the Soviet state to be a Communist state. Dictators and zealots come in both far left and far right flavors, merely different sides of the same coin.

Comment: Re:As usual, Woz proves to be the guy who knows. (Score 1) 548

by perpenso (#44001953) Attached to: Woz Compares the Cloud and PRISM To Communist Russia

I certainly agree with your point. But if the former Soviets you know don't live there anymore, it is a self-selected sample of people who disliked it enough to leave.

Good point. However given the disparity between the number of people who desired to leave the Soviet system for the west and the number of people who desired to leave the west for the Soviet system, I'd say the above group represents a valid appraisal. Furthermore, having lived both under the Soviets and in the west they would seem to have a more informed opinion than someone who only lived in the west or never lived in the west.

I'm still waiting for the advent of the computer science groupie.

Working...