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If you want to know whether Facebook is getting revenue from the government, look at their financial returns. I'm sure you will find that most of their revenue

If you want to know whether Facebook is getting revenue from the government, look at their financial returns. I'm sure you will find that most of their revenue comes from advertising, and they are not bidding on federal government contracts. Given that programs like PRISM are done in secret, perhaps we shouldn't necessarily assume Facebook's public financial returns are sharing the whole story. Ie- money may be changing hands behind closed doors. This, aside from the blatant invasion of privacy, should be our biggest concern about the recent NSA revaluations. As participants in a free-market economy it's important we know who is cheating. Ie- those who subvert the free-market via secret gov/intel/military deals.

martinlandau 13y ago
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/06/widening-the-experiential-jaron-lanier-explains-virtual-reality.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/06/widening-th... Here was a VR pioneer, Jaron Lanier, talking about how our new communities online are really only serving the interests of a few at the cost of the rest of us. I had friends in the USAF who got off facebook years ago and told me to do the same because they knew what was going on behind the scenes. There are a lot of good people, meaning to do well with these Palantir type programs. I voted for Obama because he promised "transparency" and I am not against good programs that can help us all, but when you lose "transparency" perhaps that concentrates far too much power into far too few hands. I recently watched Dreamscape about VR dreamworlds, and the CIA guy tries to assassinate the president when he won't play ball on nuclear weapons. Reminded me of JFK's last speech about secret government that he was going to expose right before he was assassinated. The NSA types say they have to have their secrets, or the terrorists will maybe blow up a city with a suitcase nuke. That would be a tremendous loss of life, how do we balance that against losing massive amounts of liberty where power and control are concentrated into a very few hands that have the right security clearances? When I was a kid I watched this movie with martin landau called Access Code, where the CIA and NSA types built all kinds of secret technologies and systems, and then the AI programs came in and took it over, and all of mankind was made the slave to the AI. That is the real fear I have going forward, these non transparent systems being taken over in the future by AI that are beyond the control of any human being. That is a reason to make them totally transparent and remove power from the NSA or CIA.

martinlandau 13y ago

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/06/widening-the-experiential-jaron-lanier-explains-virtual-reality.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/06/widening-th... Here was a VR pioneer, Jaron Lanier, talking about how our new communities online are really only serving the interests of a few at the cost of the rest of us. I had friends in the USAF who got off facebook years ago and told me to do the same because they knew what was going on behind the scenes. There are a lot of good people, meaning to do well with these Palantir type programs. I voted for Obama because he promised "transparency" and I am not against good programs that can help us all, but when you lose "transparency" perhaps that concentrates far too much power into far too few hands. I recently watched Dreamscape about VR dreamworlds, and the CIA guy tries to assassinate the president when he won't play ball on nuclear weapons. Reminded me of JFK's last speech about secret government that he was going to expose right before he was assassinated. The NSA types say they have to have their secrets, or the terrorists will maybe blow up a city with a suitcase nuke. That would be a tremendous loss of life, how do we balance that against losing massive amounts of liberty where power and control are concentrated into a very few hands that have the right security clearances? When I was a kid I watched this movie with martin landau called Access Code, where the CIA and NSA types built all kinds of secret technologies and systems, and then the AI programs came in and took it over, and all of mankind was made the slave to the AI. That is the real fear I have going forward, these non transparent systems being taken over in the future by AI that are beyond the control of any human being. That is a reason to make them totally transparent and remove power from the NSA or CIA.