Re: [Sursound] [OT] FB etc. (was: Re: Trans-Dimensional Portal)
Hm... On 8 Oct 2012, at 23:19, Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote: Very much off topic is what follows. Just as a point of information, I think Hitler's election did not depend on fraud. I think he actually did have a lot of popular support at one point . Why is a complex question, but I believe he did, though of course he was not above fraud if fraud was needed. Yes, when my children used to come home from 'ra-ra' civics classes, I used to pose the question: In 1945, of Churchill, Hitler, Stalin and Truman, which were elected as leader in a democratic election? Well, I'm not sure where and how you take the idea that I said his election was a fraud. When I wrote about flaws in election laws then the fact that there was no minimum number of votes a party needed to get representation. As a result the parliament was split up among dozens of parties, allowing one strong party, the one with the strongest faction, to form the goverment without a proper majority. Also other laws e.g. the ability to dismiss the parliament, etc. weren't written with abuses in mind. But laws should always be written that they anticipate abuse and prevent it, they shouldn't be fair weather laws that are good only as long as the government itself is good and honorable. I only mentioned him as an example of laws and government power that is seen to be good to be turned into the opposite when things go bad, and that therefore the power of the government, and particularly its access to information about the people must be severely curtailed. For the same reasons I'm against the data vacuuming on the internet I'm against income taxes: it gives the government too much information about individuals. Things like sales tax are anonymous, and they fund the government just as well, without the government having what amounts to a personality profile and dossier for each person alive within its claimed jurisdiction. However, as for Hitler: he did have a bunch of support, but in the only free election in which one could vote for him and others, he got only about 30% of the vote, and of these a lot were what in todays terminology would be protest votes similar to people casting a vote for Ross Perot or Ralph Nader, because they were fed up with the bickering and inability of the established parties to get things done. These 30% made him the strongest faction, which is why he got to form the government, but he was far from EVER having the majority of Germans behind him. He was however to surprisingly quickly consolidate his power by all sorts of means, psychological, legitimate and illegitimate, but all effective, and thus quickly became the undisputed Führer, a dictator that had free reign, and thus elections after that point were the same farce as elections in Syria today, or Russia under Stalin. It's these elections that gave the impression that all Germans were Nazis, but that's just as little true as that 98% of Syrians support Assad... The idea that even a majority of Germans were for Hitler is a myth that doesn't want to die that is partially old war propaganda and part bad history lessons. The point here is not personal anecdote but that the corruption of the search engines is attached to the commercial world. When one gets to something outside the commercial realm things work quite well. In the same way if you search for complex domains , my book with Kim and Krantz on the subject also pops right up. Because there is NO MONEY attached! (or only a pittance!). What has happened is not I think political corruption(yet) but just commercial promotion. It tends to creep in everywhere and it drowns other things-- when there is a simultaneous occurence of the commercial and noncommercial. Agreed. The thing however is, that if there's any potentially commercial interpretation of the query, that drowns out any answer that doesn't have a commercial interest attached to it. As a result, for many things I used to hunt for on google, I now search on Wikipedia, but that narrows the breadth of the results considerably. Shameless plug : There is something called the WWW Virtual Library that aims to give expert overviews of particular subjects on the Web. (It actually started (by TBL) as a catalogue of the whole Web (e.g. http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html).) Finding volunteers (and fighting off the commercialisation attempts) is though increasingly difficult ;-( I will have to give this a try. Sounds interesting... Ronald ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] [OT] FB etc. (was: Re: Trans-Dimensional Portal)
Very much off topic is what follows. Just as a point of information, I think Hitler's election did not depend on fraud. I think he actually did have a lot of popular support at one point . Why is a complex question, but I believe he did, though of course he was not above fraud if fraud was needed. As to the privacy issues, I agree. Big trouble And it is quite true that the search engines, for all their remarkable power, do not promote in -depth study of things or issues. Too much piffle comes up too easily--if commercial interests are invovled But sometimes things work if there is no commercial component. Search for my beloved (late) dog Freja Greene on google and there she is, right up top! Even her picture shows up! I did not do this on purpose, choose an unusual name. I named her Freja (which is a common Danish name, but is seldom combined with Greene!) because I got her for my late first wife, who was Danish, and wanted to name her something Danish and at the same time something Wagnerian--her sisters were named Sieglinde and Brunhilde . The point here is not personal anecdote but that the corruption of the search engines is attached to the commercial world. When one gets to something outside the commercial realm things work quite well. In the same way if you search for complex domains , my book with Kim and Krantz on the subject also pops right up. Because there is NO MONEY attached! (or only a pittance!). What has happened is not I think political corruption(yet) but just commercial promotion. It tends to creep in everywhere and it drowns other things-- when there is a simultaneous occurence of the commercial and noncommercial. Robert On Mon, 8 Oct 2012, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote: The problem with Google, FB, and to a degree Apple is not the advertising or lack of utility of the gadgets. Nobody is forced to buy anything. The problem is, that on the one hand we have a push to the cloud which only exists because ISPs and content providers have essentially successfully stalled a timely transition to IPv6, which made the disaster called NAT so prevalent, that nobody can run their own services, the way the internet was designed to work. You shouldn't need Google drive you should be able to access your own drive no matter where on the globe you are. The second problem is, that the increasing commercialization of search results makes these results increasingly meaningless. If I e.g. try to find properties of insulating glass, and all I get are links to replacement window makers, then that defeats the purpose of my search, because I want to learn about glass, so I can make an educated decision about what windows to buy, if I want to read window manufacturer's propaganda, I can just call them. The third, and biggest problem is, that while people were up in arms over intrusive government programs that went under the names of Echelon, Top Sail, TIA and other known and unknown acromyms, we now give private corporation that sort of total access to our private information that we wouldn't trust the government with. And not only can thanks to the deceptively named Patriot Act the government access all that information with little to no judicial oversight, the private companies can mine the data for whatever reason they see fit. The situation is so bad, that one has to wonder if some of that massive infrastructure these private companies built up wasn't ultimately funded by the black budget to bypass the government data gathering restrictions by allowing private companies to succeed where the government wasn't allowed to go. Whether you know it or not, you're naked already, and that's the scandal nobody wants to face. The idea, that I have nothing to hide is a stupid one. Everyone has everything to hide, the moment government goes bad. And government always goes bad, given enough time and opportunity. So you don't make laws for the government you do have, you make laws for the bad government you might have at some point in the future, because no matter how ethical and well-intentioned government may be today, that doesn't mean that tomorrow it's very different. German laws didn't exactly have Hitler in mind when they were written, but flaws in election laws, etc. did allow for something like Hitler to happen. It's the long-term perspective and what happens with our ability to maintain privacy that's deeply troubling about all these services that syphon every last bit of information out of you, directly or indirectly, e.g. with such harmless buttons as these ubiquitous like buttons, that keep track of what web sites you visit, not just which ones you like, because each of these buttons calls FB API, and allows FB cookies to track you wherever you go. A nice little video on the subject: http://wimp.com/mindreader/ Ronald On 8 Oct 2012, at 20:24, Robert Greene gre...@math.ucla.edu wrote: This is funny but it is of course wrong, I like facebook a lot, but I
Re: [Sursound] [OT] FB etc. (was: Re: Trans-Dimensional Portal)
At 22:19 08/10/2012, Robert Greene wrote: it is quite true that the search engines, for all their remarkable power, do not promote in -depth study of things or issues. Too much piffle comes up too easily--if commercial interests are invovled I have also found this to be a problem and use, eg, -Amazon.com when searching for pages about works of music. But are all search engines the same where this is concerned? (I only use Google.) David ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
Re: [Sursound] [OT] FB etc. (was: Re: Trans-Dimensional Portal)
Very much off topic is what follows. Just as a point of information, I think Hitler's election did not depend on fraud. I think he actually did have a lot of popular support at one point . Why is a complex question, but I believe he did, though of course he was not above fraud if fraud was needed. Yes, when my children used to come home from 'ra-ra' civics classes, I used to pose the question: In 1945, of Churchill, Hitler, Stalin and Truman, which were elected as leader in a democratic election? And it is quite true that the search engines, for all their remarkable power, do not promote in -depth study of things or issues. Too much piffle comes up too easily--if commercial interests are invovled Shameless plug : There is something called the WWW Virtual Library that aims to give expert overviews of particular subjects on the Web. (It actually started (by TBL) as a catalogue of the whole Web (e.g. http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html).) Finding volunteers (and fighting off the commercialisation attempts) is though increasingly difficult ;-( Michael ___ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
