Sortition has a lot going for it and certainly encourages participation far beyond our current democratic engagement. I'd like to see it start to appear on a small scale, beyond Juries, in modern democratic states.
There's an interesting EconTalk discussing the Ancient Greek economy where Russ Roberts asks his guest: "We certainly romanticize Greece as this great democracy; but it wasn't much like the United States, tell us about it"
But after Josiah Ober describes Athenian democracy it ends up sounding like what we call modern democracy is a very poor imitation.
I had a similar situation where I switched a 50 person charity to Google Apps. They had a 30 day trial period and during that time the CEO's credit card was stolen and replaced. I changed the information but the Apps interface said 'No valid payment information stored' so I called their support and they assured me the new card was stored and everything would be fine.
Surprise, surprise on the day the account totally shut down. I called in a panic and after a lot of fiddling about (and reassuring me that they had recorded that I thought there might be a problem) they got it back up with everyone's mail after almost a whole day of downtime.
To add insult to injury Google don't run a charity program in the UK despite the non-profit laws being a lot stricter than the US and it being easy to validate a charity - so they're paying full rate for Google Apps for Business.
That last part is not entirely accurate. I did some IT volunteer work for a charity very recently, and they definitely had a free Google Apps for Business setup. This is in addition to a reasonably generous grant in the form of AdWords credit.
If you could ask someone involved in that charity how they got free Google Apps I'd appreciate it as I work for a number of charities and the costs of Google Apps are a significant admin overhead. I've tried calling the sales people and they say it's coming soon but they've been saying that for over 5 years now.
Would you have any idea who we're able to contact about this? I'm involved in a registered UK charity and we were looking to use Google Apps before, but can't justify the monthly cost of $5 per account.
I asked the organisation, and found out that it's not an official programme in the UK. The only one they have here is Google Grants for AdWords - http://www.google.co.uk/grants/.
Basically, an enterprising IT volunteer had set them up with vanilla Google Apps back when it was still free for small business and had a 50 user limit, and they just got grandfathered in to the new Apps for Business. They've never had any problems with the user or space limit since they just use the setup for email, analytics and AdWords campaigns and only have about 4-6 people "working" there.
Ah. The offering used to be called Google Apps for Domains back when users could still sign up for free 100/50/10-user-limit accounts. Google Apps for Business, in some of our minds, is the post-December 2012 paid service.
A lot of the early programmers were women all the way back to Lovelace [1]. People seem to have thought of the hardware as masculine and the software as secretarial and therefore feminine. Then when it turned out there was money it men took over programming.
People seem very bad at recognising cultural programming, friends tell me their 3 year old boy just prefers train sets and their girl prefers to pretend to cook without recognising the millions of cultural signals they've received by that point. Actually cooking is another good example - look at the top chefs and how male skewed they are. A lot of it is about telling boys it's ok to be aggressive and acquisitive while telling girls it's better to stay in the background and adopt a supporting role.
It is actually well documented that males, independent of environmental influences, prefer "masculine" toys, such as trucks, while girls prefer dolls. While it's nice to think about nurture instead of nature, there are innate traits of each gender. Don't make the huge mistake in thinking that lead to David Reimer's suicide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
If women really aren't naturally more comfortable in settings that society has dictated to them, why were those positions dictated to them in the first place?
If men aren't naturally disposed to be stronger and more aggressive then how were they able to develop that position?
> If women really aren't naturally more comfortable in settings that society has dictated to them, why were those positions dictated to them in the first place?
The context in which women live now is not the same as when the roles emerged; so, even if one assumes that there was a very good reason for the roles in the context in which they emerged, that doesn't imply that one must believe that reason continues to hold in the present context.
So why is computer programming such a male profession today, seeing as it requires attention to detail, language skills, and ability to sit and type rather than strength or aggression?
> There's simply no way Googlers would tolerate something like secretly sending user data to the NSA
It doesn't matter if employees would tolerate it: phone company employees wouldn't tolerate it either but the cell phone and location records of every American were too much for the authorities to resist - the great majority of phone company employees have no idea about the data that is handed over to government.
Google has a very deliberate policy of building a comprehensive record of searches, websites visited, comments, articles, private documents written, people collaborated with and communications - all linked to your real name and phone number. It doesn't matter that employees wouldn't tolerate giving it out, sooner or later some governments will pass laws giving them access to the data. The fact that Google is building the records is enough.
Google employees already object - look at Vint Cerf's confusion when asked about the real names policy.
To paraphrase Chris Morris: But who's to say a government with an authoritarian streak in a time of national crisis will pass a law giving the secret services access to those records?
The point is, Google as a company opposes giving the data, it fights it tooth and nail. It does not have a policy of cuddling up to governments to curry favor by handing over data, and most of the NSA conspiracy theories are completely unfounded.
Sure, the government can use kangaroo courts and send goons to get the data, but there is nothing special about Google in this regard. They can also send G-Men to get your bank accounts, school records, health records, telephone records, safeway history, DMV records, IRS tax records, credit card accounts, library or blockbuster rentals, and tons of vital information about your behavior that Google does not have.
Nothing has changed, so if you want to stop this from happening, demand better government. Sitting around whining about Google, and then when push comes to shove, not doing your duty as a citizen, is not going to change anything.
If Google disappeared tomorrow, you'd face the same privacy issues, because simply living in a civilization creates a public paper trail, it is unavoidable. All that's different is that it's digital now, and we're networked.
Chances are you make phone calls over unencrypted mobile. The NSA could, at their perogative, intercept and transcribe every phone conversation you have. They don't even need Google. People need to fight to restore civil libertarian protections by rolling back the Patriot Act, NSLs, NDAA, and other stuff that's happened since 9/11. Trying to demonize Google will be ineffectual to the root cause.
My point about Google culture is that any attempt to put a Carnivore-style tap on a Google data center would run a very high risk of whistleblowers making it public. AT&T isn't exactly known for their Googley culture, but Mark Klein blew the whistle on the NSA/SBC/AT&T firehose tap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
> The point is, Google as a company opposes giving the data
That's great and much better than some of the other tech companies who silently hand it over.
However Google doesn't oppose collecting the data, it doesn't seem to worry about the implications of that for oppressive regimes or future radical laws enacted after the next big terrorist attack. Are there real objections within the company to the real name policy? Is it addressed by management?
Demanding better government is, of course, important. I spend a lot of time and money doing it - working with citizen lobbying groups, contacting my representatives and attending meetings. But you can't demand better government and ignore how one of the biggest corporate collectors of personal data is acting, and changing.
"A single unified beautiful product" - linked to your real identity (to set a positive tone "like when a restaurant doesn't allow people who aren't wearing shirts to enter") - and one that doesn't interoperate with other products because they're "milking off of just one company for their own benefit".
That seems to be the core of Google these days and it's very different from the company many Googlers joined.
> It doesn't matter if employees would tolerate it: phone company employees wouldn't tolerate it either but the cell phone and location records of every American were too much for the authorities to resist - the great majority of phone company employees have no idea about the data that is handed over to government.
Some of them do, but shut up about it. It is a fact that AMDOCS (an Israeli owned company with alleged Mossad links) does outsourced billing for most major telcos in the US and many in Europe.
What I don't get is: it is theoretically possible to build at least some technologies that offer anonymity together with personalization. Google don't seem to do it.
Is it because they tend to support the government position that we need this data to fight terrorism? Or because they think that I'd they'll use such technology, the government will change the rules forcing them to use the less private tech? Or just plain profit maximizing - do the easiest thing that will bring the most money?
I'm trying to find out info on how long that will be true.
Having trouble finding a crediable source, but various news outlets are saying Nikhyl Singhal says xmpp is going away. That will screw over Trillian as well as several other clients.
I'm getting "Hangouts has not been enabled for your account". I'm guessing this is because my work account has Google+ disabled. So are you going to have to be on Google+ to use their messaging product now? Will they shut off Google Talk for regular gmail users?
Tried it with a few more accounts - if you try to use it with a regular gmail account it says "Authentication error: Google+ is required".
It's a little off that Larry Page was complaining about Microsoft not using open standards but then they go and introduce a totally new closed system within their closed social network.
Hangouts on Android does not need a Google+ account as far as I know. Not sure about iOS. On Gmail, you can definitely use it without a G+ account, but photo sharing and group video calls will not work. Also, Google Talk will not be shut down, you have to opt in to the Hangouts experience in Gmail.
Do you have a citation for that? The legislation doesn't seem to make the distinction[1]. If you can provide evidence for the 2 points you made that would be awesome. Thanks!
It's right there at the start of the law you cite in A.1.:
It is unlawful for an operator of a website or
*online service directed to children*, or any operator
that has *actual knowledge that it is collecting
personal information from a child*, to collect personal
information from a child in a manner that violates the
regulations prescribed under subsection (b) of this section.
So either:
* service directed to children (LEGO, Disney etc)
* actual knowledge that it is collecting information from a child (birthdate, age etc)
My understanding was from internal legal guidance at a previous company I consulted for but I haven't worked on COPPA projects for a few years so I don't know if there have been any major cases.
In any event Path specifically asked for birthdates and then allowed children to carry on and use the service with no changes which is a violation that should have been spotted by anyone with some understanding of COPPA.
1000 beats in a day, 0 is midnight at UTC+1 but it doesn't adjust for time zones. It never took off and I think they scrapped it but it would be useful for coordinating between time zones. I'm sure people would fairly quickly adjust to it for their longitude but it'd be very confusing when you were travelling.
Yeah, I couldn't figure out what Gruber meant by that. I guess it means that it's like Google Voice, except you have to pay for it, and it's not run by a big company that you can count on to stay in business for a long time.
More importantly, your voicemails are being used to process speech-text (Google's transcription service), and train Google's speech recognition algorithm.
If you're going to write an article like this you have to cite some evidence - if Dwight Lundell really believes what he's saying he should apply to the Atkins Foundation and do some research - instead he's selling his self help book and dietary supplements:
There's an interesting EconTalk discussing the Ancient Greek economy where Russ Roberts asks his guest: "We certainly romanticize Greece as this great democracy; but it wasn't much like the United States, tell us about it"
But after Josiah Ober describes Athenian democracy it ends up sounding like what we call modern democracy is a very poor imitation.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/08/ober_on_the_anc.htm...