The amount of media coverage of Game of Thrones was a touch too much this summer, but this ranking of the political strategies of the main players in season seven by Zack Beauchamp was both entertaining and informative. I mean:

To understand Cersei’s success, we need to reach back to the classic work of Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz.

Before looking at the list, I’d assumed Jon Snow would get lower marks (he left the North vulnerable and cratered his coalition’s chances at a truce with Cersei), but Beauchamp makes a good case here.

I’ve argued before that the best way to think about the White Walkers, from the human point of view, is as a threat akin to climate change — a massive collective threat that humans were ignoring in favor of petty internal squabbling. Jon, to his immense credit, is the only leader who recognized the enormity of the threat early enough to try to rally others to stop it. He’s kind of a Westerosi Al Gore, only he succeeded in getting to run a country.

So the best way to think about Jon’s mission is through the lens of environmental diplomacy: He needed to convince the world’s leading powers to abandon the internecine struggle over the throne and refocus on the White Walker threat. He didn’t have a ton to work with: The North is a distinctly third-tier power, weaker militarily than both the Targaryen and Lannister alliances and the country most vulnerable to the White Walkers.

Jon may have failed to rally Cersei to his cause, but he succeeded in bringing on Daenerys. And that’s by far the most important, mostly because her dragons and cache of dragonglass represent the only chance humanity has at fending off the White Walker threat. If it weren’t for Jon, humanity would be fundamentally doomed.

Somebody on Quora asked, What is the social justification of privacy? adding, I am trying to ask about why individual privacy is important to society. Obviously it is preferable to individuals for a variety of reasons. But society seems to gain more from transparency.

Rather than leave my answer buried there, I thought I’d share it here as well:

Society is comprised of individuals, and is thick with practices and customs that respect individual needs. Privacy is one of those. Only Among these is privacy. All but those of us who live naked outdoors without clothing and shelter can do without privacy. The rest of us all have ways outdoors and walk around naked have a need for clothing and shelter, both of which are means of expressing and guarding spaces we call “private” — and that others respect as well.

Private spaces are virtual as well as physical. Society would not exist without well-established norms for expressing and respecting each others’ boundaries. “Good fences make good neighbors,” says Robert Frost.

“private.”

One would hardly ask to justify the need for privacy before the Internet came along; but it is a question now because the virtual world, now, because the Internet, like nature in the physical one, world, doesn’t come with privacy. By nature we are naked We are naked by nature in both. The difference is that we’ve had many millennia to work out privacy in the physical world, and approximately two decades to do the same in the virtual one. That’s not enough time.

In the physical world we get privacy primarily from clothing and shelter, plus respect for each others’ boundaries, which are established by mutual understandings of and respect for it from a complex system of trust that others won’t either invade our private spaces, or disrespect our clear intentions regarding what’s private and what’s not. All of these are both complex and subtle. Clothing, for example, customarily Privacy in the physical world is largely a matter of concealment. Clothing and shelter provide that. Among other things, clothing covers what we (in English vernacular at least) call our “privates,” but also allow us selectively to expose parts of our bodies, in various ways and degrees, depending on social setting, weather and other conditions. Privacy in our sheltered spaces is also modulated by “privates.” We also get degrees of concealment with walls, windows, doors, shutters, locks, blinds and curtains. How these signal intentions differs by culture and setting, but within each culture, but within every culture the signals are well

understood, and boundaries are respected. Some of these are expressed in law as well as custom. In sum they comprise civilized life.

Yet life online is not yet civilized. We still lack sufficient means for expressing and guarding private spaces, for putting up boundaries, for signaling intentions to each other, and for signaling back respect for those signals. In the absence of those we also lack sufficient custom and law. Worse, laws created in the physical world do not all comprehend a virtual one in which all of us, everywhere in the world, are by design zero distance apart — and at costs that yearn toward zero as well. This is still very new to human experience.

In the absence of restricting customs and laws it is easy for understood.In the online world, there is an assumption by

those with the power means to penetrate our private spaces (such as our browsers and email clients) to do so. This is why our private spaces online today are infected with tracking files that report our activities back to others we have never met and don’t know. These practices and plant tracking beacons, that behaving in ways that would never be sanctioned in the physical world, but in the uncivilized virtual world they are easy to rationalize: Hey, world is okay in the virtual one because, hey, it’s easy to do, everybody does it, and it’s normative now, transparency is a Good Thing, it helps fund “free” sites and services, nobody is really harmed, and so on. the “free” commercial sphere on the Web, etc. etc.

But it’s not okay. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done, or that it’s the right thing to do. make it right. Nor is it right because it is, for now,

normative, or because everybody seems to put up with it. The only reason people continue to put up with it is because they have little choice — so far.

Study after study show that people are highly concerned about their privacy online, and vexed by their limited ability to do anything about its absence. For example —

• Pew reports that “93% of adults say that being in control of who can get information about them is important,” that “90% say that controlling what information is collected about them is important,” that 93% “also value having the ability to share confidential matters with another trusted person,” that “88% say it is important that they not have someone watch or listen to them without their permission,” and that 63% “feel it is important to be able to “go around in public without always being identified.”
• Ipsos, on behalf of TRUSTe, reports that “92% of U.S. Internet users worry about their privacy online,” that “91% of U.S. Internet users say they avoid companies that do not protect their privacy,” “22% don’t trust anyone to protect their online privacy,” that “45% think online privacy is more important than national security,” that 91% “avoid doing business with companies who I do not believe protect my privacy online,” that “77% have moderated their online activity in the last year due to privacy concerns,” and that, in sum, “Consumers want transparency, notice and choice in exchange for trust.”
• Customer Commons reports that “A large percentage of individuals employ artful dodges to avoid giving out requested personal information online when they believe at least some of that information is not required.” Specifically, “Only 8.45% of respondents reported that they always accurately disclose personal information that is requested of them. The remaining 91.55% reported that they are less than fully disclosing.”
• The Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania reports that “a majority of Americans are resigned to giving up their data—and that is why many appear to be engaging in tradeoffs.” Specifically, “91% disagree (77% of them strongly) that ‘If companies give me a discount, it is a fair exchange for them to collect information about me without my knowing.'” And “71% disagree (53% of them strongly) that ‘It’s fair for an online or physical store to monitor what I’m doing online when I’m there, in exchange for letting me use the store’s wireless internet, or Wi-Fi, without charge.'”

There are both policy and market responses to these findings. On the policy side, Europe has laws protecting personal data that go back to the Data Protection Directive of 1995. Australia has similar laws going back to 1988. On the market side, Apple now has a strong pro-privacy stance, posted Privacy – Apple, taking the form an open letter to the world from CEO Tim Cook. One excerpt:

“Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t ‘monetize’ the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.”

But we also need tools that serve us as personally as do our own clothes. And we’ll get them. The collection of developers listed here by ProjectVRM are all working on tools that give individuals ways of operating privately in the networked world. The most successful of those today are the ad normative.Privacy norms should apply to the online world as well as they do to the offline one. And they will, soon enough, because we have advertising

and tracking blockers

listed under Privacy Protection. According to the latest PageFair/Adobe study, the population of persons blocking ads online passed 200 million in June of 2015, with a 42% annual increase in the U.S. and an 82% rate in the U.K. alone.These tools

now. These help create and guard private spaces in our online lives by giving us ways to set boundaries and exclude unwanted intrusions. lives, by leaving unwanted ads and tracking files outside. These are primitive systems, so far, but they do work and are sure to evolve. As they do, expect the online world to become as civilized as the offline one — eventually.

For more about all of this, visit my see my Adblock War Series: The Adblock War Series.

From photographer Richard Silver, vertical panoramic photos of churches that emphasize their often incredible ceilings. (via ignant)

We’ve come across a new service called Notifyrthat, in short, makes your iOS Device notifications automatically simultaniously appear as notifications on your Mac. The service is a pair of applications: a $3.99 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch applicationfrom the App Store and a free companion Mac app. Using native Bluetooth low-energy technology on supported Macs and iOS Devices, any iOS notification can appear on your Mac just like any other Mac Notification Center alert…

We’ve tested this with several functions, such as phone calls, Facebook Messages, iMessages, and SMS messages, and it worked seamlessly. The phone app integration even shows missed call and voicemail alerts on your Mac. The setup process was a standard Bluetooth connection setup: a code shows up your Mac, and you type in that code on your iOS device to verify.

While you need the Mac and iOS apps installed, the Mac application lives as a toggle in System Preferences so you do not have to be bothered by it. The Mac app allows you to mute certain iOS apps from showing notifications on your Mac. As for the iOS app, you need to leave it installed and running on your iOS device, but it does not need to be open to work. The entire process seems very well, and it’s interesting that a third-party developer’s implementation seems more seamless than what Apple promised for cross-platform notifications with OS X Mavericks/iOS 7 last fall.

Because the software requires Bluetooth LE, you’ll need a recently launched iOS device (an iPhone 4S or newer) and a new Mac. Supported Macs include: MacBook Air (2011 or newer), MacBook Pro (2012 or newer), Mac mini (2011 or newer), iMac (2012 or newer), and the Mac Pro (2013).

Visit 9to5Mac to find more special coverage of AAPL Company.

What do you think? Discuss "New Notifyr app seamlessly makes your iOS notifications appear on your Mac" with our community.

“Hey, take our picture!”

It was about 10:30 at night on a Friday, and I was taking pictures of the fountain outside the Park Street MBTA station. Oh, what a crummy, crappy scene! A poorly-lit, dark bronze fountain, with a brightly-illuminated, gilded State House in the background. Yes, I was trying to see how well this camera works in a

despicable worst-case scenario. The lighting is almost beyond the limitations of sensor technology in general.So why shoot it? Well,

These two gentlemen called out from the sidewalk behind me.When strangers ask you to take their photo and it’s late on a Friday night, it’s clearly a Yellow Alert situation. Eventually, I was able to relax and conclude that they were just two sober, affable men having a lovely evening out, but only after I carefully considered alternate theories such as “they’re drunks and capable of damned near anything” and “they’re going to make a grab for my camera.”

(The worst-case scenario would have been “They’re filming some sort of reality show.” “Take my wallet and my camera,” I would say, thrusting these at the men. “Just please don’t try to draw me into your fake argument about how accurate a stripper’s Swedish Chef costume must be before it, quote, ‘stops being sexy’.”)

I should point out that they didn’t recognize me from my writings or podcasts or anything. They didn’t ask me to send them a copy of the photo, nor did they ask for any information from me which they could use to find this photo on Flickr or whatever.

They were just out and having a great time together. They seemed to simply like the idea of a photo of this Great Time existing in the aether somewhere.

I like that a whole lot. I hope they find this photo.

Photo notes: not a bad shot. Remember that low-light photos are often deceptive. There was a lot less light in the scene than it appears. Really, just some path lighting a dozen yards away. No direct lighting of any kind. Plus, I was still a little bit wary of the whole situation, so I didn’t bother to readjust my settings. The camera was still set to underexpose by a full stop.

I spent months choosing this camera. I imagine that the Nikon D7100 (a conventional “bigass SLR” with a large. DX-format image sensor; it was one of my finalists) could have shot this with less ISO noise. But: this scene is the sort of hopeless shooting situation in which only a full-frame camera (like the Canon 5D III or the Nikon D800) can deliver a truly clean image.

“A camera that works great inevery shooting situation” isn’t within reach of the average consumer. That’s the definition of a pro camera. You can only have one of those if money and size are truly no object. Would I love to own a camera that can take clean photos late at night even when there’s no direct lighting? You betcha. Would I be willing to spend about $5000 for one? Holycats, no. A $5000 camera is so laughably out of my sphere of reality thatI don’t even need to come up with a colorful response to the “Am I also willing to lug around a camera and lens that doesn’t fit in any of my day-to-day bags?” question.

There’s a “Zeno’s Paradox” sort of thing in effect when you’re hunting for the best camera, anyway. We chase after “perfection, every time” even though that’s just not in the cards. Any camera (even the one in a cheap phone) can take great photos in 50% of all possible photographic scenarios. Want to try to make it to the 100% mark? A good point-and-shoot camera works great 75% of the time. A consumer-level SLR: 87% of the time. Enthusiast-level: 94%. Pro: 98%. Every level up closes half of the remaining gap.

But the gap is getting smaller each time, and each time, the cost of the hardware at the next level doubles. Whatever shooting scenarios are in that 4%, they’d better be pretty damned important to justify thousands of dollars in additional cost. And no matter how much money you throw at the problem, you’ll never get to 100%, will you? You still need to have the wits to ask these two guys to move a few steps and turn around, to face a streetlamp.

This shot does spotlight one annoyance of the E-M1: no built-in flash. It comes with a tiny external flash unit that slides into the camera’s flash shoe and accessory port. But you can’t quickly slide it on and go, and of course you need to have remembered to bring it with you in the first place. If I’d already had it on the camera, I certainly would have used it here. This is the one thing about the E-M1 that makes me long for my little Panasonic.

Final note: some day I should try to whack up the courage to take pictures of people on the street. I’m a big fan of Brandon Stanton’s “Humans Of New York” photo project. He isn’t sneaky or creepy. He approaches people and asks. He engages with them. And he takes a rather nifty portrait that any of these folks would be very grateful to have.

What guts! I’m terrified that I’ll approach, and ask, and be confronted with a sensible question that I can’t answer, like “How do I know that you’re not some creep who’ll take this photo and use it for God-knows what?” I suppose one solution is to print up Moo cards with the URL of my Flickr feed. Then they’d think “He might be a creep, but at least he’s a creep who planned ahead. And who has a funny squirrel photo on his card.”

This is why I love shooting cosplayers at cons; they’re keen to be photographed and I know they’re receptive to the request.

<iframe src=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/andyi/9461459336/player/” width=”640″ height=”480″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe>

I don’t think I’d ever be comfortable as one of those jackasses who feel as though their pursuit of Art gives them license to jeopardize someone’s feelings of privacy and safety. I saw the gallery of one proud street photographer that included a shot of a woman blocking her face from the camera’s view. Christ, man. Brandon’s project reminds me that there’s a way to do street portraits that ends positively for everybody.

I realize that this is a kind of photography that I admire but don’t do because I can’t imagine how one would go about it and I’m a little scared to try it. That’s usually a good reason to learn anything.

View 802 Monday, December 16, 2013

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

Christians to Beirut. Alawites to the grave.

Syrian Freedom Fighters

What we have now is all we will ever have.

Conservationist motto

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes

\

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum. Cogito,

Ambrose Bierce

One observation I can confirm: for many of us, getting old does not result in a lot of time on our hands, because the simpler routine tasks we all have to do become more time consuming and eat all our time and energy. That is certainly happening to me. That’s what has happened to me this weekend; nothing big or difficult, just making some appointments and attempting to deal with the County Court system over Jury Duty, and stuff like that as well as Christmas; but I find that dealing with people on the telephone can be frustrating. I can’t hear them, and they seldom talk into the telephone, and they seem to up the speech rate and shout which is not quite the way to get me to understand.

One of the appointments I made is with the audiologists, after which I will pursue an expensive but said to be effective hearing device. Maybe that will make some of the more routine stuff easier to do and less draining of energy. We can hope so.

I am now about the oldest person I know. I must know some who are older, but I don’t interact with them often, so it is safe to say I am the oldest person I communicate with regularly, which means that I am sailing unpiloted into this dark sea. It sure beats the alternative.

There is more background to the views of the Holy Father on Capitalism than most of his detractors are aware of; and it must always be remembered that he is a spiritual leader, whom many believe to be the Vicar of Christ on Earth, and thus has no choice whatever about what he advocates regarding the plain duty of those possessing this world’s goods toward the poor and downtrodden. He must advocate obedience to the powers that be, but he must act for those not protected by those powers. He must be an advocate for the poor and helpless. How could he be otherwise.?

His Holiness speaks for and to the world’s Catholics. Many, both Catholic and non-Catholic, would say that others would do well to listen to him, and one of his duties is evangelism in the non-Catholic world, but his primary duty is to speak to the Faithful.

He is also but a man. When he says that he is not a Marxist but there are things worth considering in Marxism he speaks as a public man as many of us do, and many would agree with him. Marx predicted that capitalism would result in greater and greater concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. It seems clear enough to me that left to itself, unrestricted capitalism does result in greater concentrations of wealth, which leads to greater temptation to those of power to take that wealth. Sometimes it is done in the name of national unity and the wealth is directed rather than confiscated, as opposed to direct confiscation in the name of the people.

Marxism specifies that class warfare is inevitable and will destroy society; the only remedy is to eliminate class warfare by eliminating classes. Once the victory of the proletariat is achieved through public ownership of the means of production the class war ceases, and all that is left is for government itself to wither away since there is nothing left to fight about. To achieve that result the Communist must be patient enough to allow all the situation to develop, to allow the Capitalists to concentrate their power and eliminate the middle class, otherwise class warfare will continue. Others claim to be true Marxists but have other interpretations. Among those were the followers of Trotsky who saw the development of the Regime in the USSR as merely building a new class – what Djilas called The New Class – which would rule and oppress the people. Some of the followers of Trotsky in the United States mutated into what is now called neo-conservatism.

Fascism accepted much of Marx and his economic science, but did not accept the premise that the only solution to class warfare was elimination of the bourgeoisie, and some would argue that Marx himself never accepted that. Do note that Mussolini died shouting the praise of Socialism, and never claimed to be anything but a good Marxist Socialist. He did not write consistent essays on the theory of Fascism, but others including his son in law did, and the main theory of Fascism was that the only way to end class warfare was not to end the existences of classes – that is counterproductive because it is impossible — but to required the classes to work together. The legislature consists of representatives of the institutions – Church, Labor, Shop Keepers, Land Owners, Manufacturers, Educators, the Military, and other indispensible organizations – who try to work out procedures which advance the people, who are the State; and to be sure that they work together, the Leader is empowered to require them to work together for the good of all.

Capitalism insists that Marxism doesn’t work, and leads to economic disaster as well as the creation of a new ruling class; at one time identified as The Party, but later it was recognized that a much smaller group within the Party, the Nomenklatura, are the actual rulers. This group ends most of the factionalism and thus the blood purges; it emerged in strength after Stalin’s purges and basically took control of the USSR following the Hungarian Insurrection.

There have been many attempts to make a moral case for Capitalism, but they all founder on the historical trends: when capitalism is unrestricted, wealth multiplies, but it also concentrates, and the pressure is on to allow anything to be legal and sold in the market place. I have argued elsewhere that an inevitable result of unbridled capitalism is the sale of human flesh in the market place. And I think no one can argue that there is not a strong tendency to concentration of wealth.

Of course there is wealth. More wealth than any other system can produce. What His Holiness did not seem to notice is that in capitalist nations the definition of the poor, in terms of calories consumed, ability to travel, access to good water, health care, often exceeds the definition of wealth in much of the world. It is easy to be blinded by the concentration of wealth, and the great power of Goldman Sacks, Bill Gates, is easily seen, while the negative income taxes and “food” stamps credit cards are not seen. The poor are poor enough in these United States, but they are fairly wealthy compared to the normal condition of many I knew in Memphis in the 1930’s – and I didn’t know any really poor people. But I did know families who were grateful if I brought over a potato from the bushels we kept in our garage.

My point is that Pope Francis is correct when he reminds his people that we are not in this world primarily to acquire more and more wealth. He says no more than “What doth it profit a man though he gain the whole world but suffer the loss of his own soul?” He resents the concentration of wealth, but perhaps pays too little attention to the economic effects: the wealth is concentrated in many overtly Socialist dictatorships as well, but in those places the bourgeoisie such as it is is not appreciably wealthier than then the poor in the United States. But it is not the goal of Catholics to be the wealthiest corpse in the churchyard, and His Holiness is right to remind us so in this Advent season.

For more on Capitalism and Catholicism, see http://distributist.blogspot.com/2007/01/distributism-vs-socialism.html

I am not arguing the notion that a distributist society would be as productive as capitalism. I am suggesting that the original notion of a Nation of States would have allowed us a demonstration of the possibility; and in any event, Belloc and Chesterton are worth knowing about. As Burke says, for a man to love his country his country ought to be lovely; it is always worth discussing what this means. The United States have been blessed in this Millennium with remarkably restrained persons of enormous wealth; but it does not change the oddity of the growing discrepancy between wealth and poverty even as the wealth of the very poor rises as well.

Pope Francis is incorrect in saying nothing trickles down to the poor. He is not incorrect in reminding us all that wealth is not the only goal in life.

A session in the American Embassy to the Court of St. James:

Another picture of the far wall:

I do not know if that is standard in other embassies. It is of course quite standard to have a portrait or photograph of the President in those places, and generally one of George Washington.

A few interesting observations from readers. We may return to some of these subjects.

Jerry,

More of Mr. Niven’s legacy:

The US Air Force Band Flash Mob at the Smithsonian http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIoSga7tZPg&feature=youtu.be

Jerry

TED is touting this stretchy spacesuit as “a concept no one has seen before:”

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/12/10/mit-biosuit-system-dava-newman/

except in Analog and other places in the 1970’s.

Ed

And in dozens of my stories and papers…

“This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”

<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/health/the-selling-of-attention-deficit-disorder.html>

Roland Dobbins

‘It’s almost as if the non-consumer part of the Chinese economy had reverted to the 1930s, when each province issued its own legal tender.’

<http://thediplomat.com/2013/12/chinas-shadow-currency/?allpages=yes>

Roland Dobbins

Thuktun Flishithy spotted?

<http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/12/saturn-rings-peggy/>

Roland Dobbins

And I call your attention to this one:

Earth Was Warmer in Roman Times

http://dailycaller.com/2013/12/13/study-earth-was-warmer-in-roman-medieval-times/

and

http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/13/multiple-lines-of-evidence-suggest-global-cooling/

We all know this, but apparently it is finally becoming known outside a small circle of readers. There Here was very little man-made greenhouse gas in Roman times, or in Viking times for that matter, and even less in Holocene times when the temperature was 9 degrees C higher than it is at present. And the Earth hasn’t been getting warmer since 1997.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

© 2013, jerrypournelle. All rights reserved.