That there are no alternative time sources currently deployed that would work as a backup for GPS strikes me as being a little too optimistic about the situation. Simply knowing that such solutions could be put to work does nothing to bring the level of optimism down to a realistic range.
I suggest that in addition to brushing off the ancient ways of doing things, a little more pessimism needs to be injected into the system.
According to another fine article I saw yesterday (don't recall where but googling yesterday's news should turn it up), when GPS goes down or gets jammed, cell phones stop working. Apparently they use GPS time signals to synchronize hand-offs between towers or something. Also ATMs stop working (they rely on GPS time stamps for transaction codes, and may use encryption dependent on timestamps obtained by GPS). Also entire electric grids can be brought to their knees (GPS time is used to synchronize phase between different grid segments).
I guess I'll now read TFA to see if it mentions any of this stuff that AFA talked about....
It seems like he is referring to something much more powerful than a causal relationship. He seems to be suggesting that Wikileaks and its ilk, and the recent revolutions and protests, are part of the same pattern.
We really need to get a mathematician to take a serious look at human history. It appears to be fractal: it not only repeats itself, but the same patterns show up on different scales as if there were a great deal of self-similarity.
This is troll food, probably, but it might get some people thinking.
From what we know of the regolith and presence of water on the Moon, one of the first commercially viable industries will be the construction and launching of Earth satellites, built with the ferro-concrete technology we perfected some 70 years ago. The Portland cement comes from cooking sorted and graded regolith in solar ovens, in vacuum; the process will have quite an interesting set of by products, including, I believe, oxygen. The relatively small amount of iron can be obtained from the 3+ billion year accumulation of iron meteors. The regolith can be used as it is for the aggregate.
Principle advantages:
launching from a low gravity well into a deep gravity well is going to be very much cheaper than putting anything into Earth orbit from Earth itself;
a satellite shielded by a concrete shell a couple of meters thick is immune to micrometeorites, and if it is chipped, it could be repaired in orbit by a visiting cement truck.
There would also be advantages with thermal regulation, shielding from ion storms, and so on.
The future of interplanetary construction is probably going to belong to the ferro-concrete engineers.
It looks to me like the judge's refusal to address critical points in Assange's arguments guarantees an appeal. The judge appears to have taken care to do the minimum needed to assure that appeal would be accepted by the higher court and not remanded back down to his level because of some inadequacy in following procedure.
The judge has put forward the interpretation that the alledged offenses under Swedish law would also be offenses under British law, but on the face of it, that interpretation is not based on any precedent. It is one judge's opinion, and does not have the full weight of the law behind it.
The rest of parent post is very confusing. My understanding of what constitutes "common law" is what was originally established by William the Conqueror to handle situations that his written laws did not cover, and has been inherited by English based systems of law since that time. If I am right about this, then Sweden is not a common law country. So I do not see how references to common law apply here.
Of course the subject is the computer talking back at you, not you talking to the computer.
This does seem to work pretty well in turn by turn GPS navigation systems.
I think a problem with Jeopardy! type responses is that there is an audio "uncanny valley" similar to the one that animation artists have been talking about for some time. In the first Shrek movie, they found in the early screen tests that they had made the girl Shrek rescued too realistic and it turned people off; people thought she was creepy. They had to make her more cartoony for her to be acceptable. The same thing seems to apply to audio: an obviously mechanical voice is acceptable, but until the computer is definitely a sentient being, a voice that sounds too life-like will seem like an underhanded attempt to fake intelligence and will put people off.
Many turn by turn GPS navigation systems offer a selection of voices that include some that are obviously artificial. I wonder how often those are chosen?
Please remember that Assange has yet to even be charged with a crime.
Sweden is demanding the extradition to question him about a possible crime, but he has not been charged. He has offered to answer those questions in Britain, using any of several accepted means of deposition, but Sweden is saying that just isn't good enough; he has to be physically present in Sweden. This alone sounds bogus. Why would his answers be more valid in Sweden than anywhere else? Do the Swedes believe that Wonder Woman has cast her Rope of Truth around their borders?
The whole thing stinks. Including the law that the Swedes are trying to hang him with. A law that is not recognized anywhere else in Western culture, probably not in the world. A law that is an abject failure where the success rate of prosecutions is abysmal; whose dismal efforts to enforce it costs Sweden too much in both money and damage to society. A law that allows one gender to withdraw consent from an activity after having committed to that activity; that provides that gender with a legal form of entrapment. This is not the way to protect womens' rights, nor to control STDs. It is a law that needs to be either modified to make it realistic or just rescinded.
It doesn't matter whether Assange thinks he might be victimized by the USA or not.
What matters is that significant voices in USA politics have been publicly calling for the USA government to go after Assange. His lawyers have introduced that as evidence. The British court system has to accept that evidence or reject it on some evidentiary basis; it cannot be rejected because it sounds too far-fetched to be true.
I think the action of this lower court is appropriate. Since it knows that Assange has the means and the desire to appeal, it has taken this route to kick a thorny set of legal questions up the stairs, where a court with more appropriate authority can rule on the amount of risk that McCain, Palin, Beck, Limbaugh and others represent to Assange's rights under British law.
The same applies to whether the arguments that: 1) he should not be extradited before he is charged with a crime, and 2) that he should not be extradited for behavior that is not recognized as criminal in any EU country other than Sweden. These are all heady matters that deserve the attention of a higher court, and the appropriate way to make that happen is through appeal.
Drones can be built to handle worse weather than a human pilot could. Drones don't have the squishy-body limitation on sudden accelerations. You could do things like kick in a rocket engine for 2 seconds and do a 20 gee ballistic exit from a death spiral, etc.
Drones are cheap to fly. One vision of their use is to have the USCG maintain 24/7 patrols of the coast, with the drone on patrol and the rescue helicopter both dispatched to the scene when a mayday is received. The drone would usually arrive first and begin searching for survivors, and its findings would direct the helicopter to the point(s) of rescue.
A 24/7 drone patrol could also help with several other USCG responsibilities, such as preventing poaching in no fishing zones or by foreign fishing boats, actions against smugglers, actions against illegal dumping or pollution of coastal waters. Perhaps even monitoring whales and threatened shore birds, depending on how much sophistication can be brought to the data analysis.
Seems like a fleet of drones operating from a ship would be one way of dealing with the Somali pirate problem. Drones are cheap enough to operate that 24/7 high altitude surveillance of the pirate coast is possible, with other surveillance drones dispatched as needed to track any potential pirate boats. Armed drones could intercept a possible pirate boat that was approaching another vessel, and could sink the damn thing if it began to fire on its victim.
The drone pilots could be hired at cheap wages and trained at low cost-- there are more than enough kids out there who would jump at getting paid for their flight simulator skills. An obsolete air craft carrier could handle enough drones to patrol all of NE Africa and SW Asia. One ship with perhaps 100 drones in the air 24/7, a couple hundred spares in the hold, 300 civilian contractor flitesym "pilots" working 8 hour shifts, a dozen Air Force specialists to fly the only drones that carry ordinance, Command/Control personnel, and mechanics and support personnel. So a ship's complement of around 500.
A fairly cheap investment as these things go, and the more so as it should be possible to strong arm^W^W persuade insurance companies to help meet the costs. Ideally this would be done under the UN flag to pussyfoot around sovereignity issues in international waters. As I believe the USA is the major source of drones right now, there would be an immediate economic benefit to a country that is sorely in need of such things if the world's economies are to stabilize any time soon.
I rather like the idea of baiting Phelps and his cult into tilting at an Anonymous windmill. I would rather have them do that than doing their psychic vampire[1] thing at the funerals of American war dead.
[1] Does English have a succinct term for persons who feed their egos on the anger and loathing they generate in their victims? Like vampires, these persons are parasites. That the life force they suck out of others is not corporeal like blood does not diminish the damage they do to their victims.
For a time it might direct their praying energy toward getting their sky wizard to smite a group of evil doers that doesn't really exist. That might give their usual prey (persons who are burying some kid who died in the SE Asia wars) a bit of respite. I'm rather for that. Fight fire with fire, and weird hate-filled fantasy cults with fictitious anarchists.
Parent post does not know what it is talking about. And it sounds like astroturf FUD.
Public domain code may easily be "'taken away from you'" or from anyone else simply by making trivial modifications to it as it is mixed into development and not making those changes public. There is no requirement that the result be made public; there are no requirements at all on public domain material. Microsoft has done this back in the days of DOS, GeeWhiz BASIC, and woodburning computers. There is no reason to believe the practice has changed.
FOSS under GPL or similar viral licenses requires that any changes have to be made public if the product is going to be distributed (as opposed to strictly in house use). To do otherwise is to violate the expressed provisions of the license: a violation of copyright law. That is the advantage of FOSS: there is the legal guarantee that any FOSS app you purchase or otherwise obtain through a public means will have all of its source code available to you if you ever need to use it.
So while I agree with parent post about the facts of the difference between PD and FOSS, I very much regret that author of parent post either has not yet been able to think through the profound implications of that difference, or he is deliberately spewing FUD upon slashdot.
A viable business strategy for Microsoft is to factor its OS into core, file system, windowing system, etc. Then become a Linux distro by replacing the core and file system with FOSS Linux code, while selling their old windowing system and all the ooh shiny things as a proprietary library on top of the Linux base. There is no legal reason why this could not be done, it would bring Microsoft's development overhead closer to being in line with its competitors, and it is probably what Microsoft will end up doing, unless it manages to beat itself to death first with a business model that is 50 years or more out of date.
While parent post seems to have all the facts, that is a really weird spin that's been put on it.
The value of open source, and what today is most commonly meant by "open source" is the GPL and other viral licenses. What parent post appears to be describing is Microsoft's use of source that has been put in the public domain, without any copyright restrictions. Of course Microsoft uses that.
Public domain is not the same as open source. Open source comes with a guarantee that no matter what happens to the user's direct provider of the application, he can continue with its use (switch to a different provider, as many are doing in switching from OOo to Libre Office, or even take on the burden of support and development oneself). Public domain is worthless with respect to assuring that your investment in applications will still be of use to you a decade from now. Only open source with its viral licensing assures that.
FOSS generally requires that the source be available, but MS can meet that requirement with a link to the appropriate SourceForge page, etc. They are not obligated to provide it directly. Copyright issues on content is a different problem that the MS store has to face no matter what its policy on FOSS is.
This seems like just another try by MS to stuff the open source genie back in its bottle. And not a very well thought out effort. But I think what will happen is that MS is going to find that alienating an increasing number of potential customers who are already dabbling with FOSS a little bit is not good for market share, or the bottom line.
My pet theory is that it was bankrolled by the Saudis, constructed in Bahrain, with the USA, possibly with help from China or Russia, developing the code and Israel's Mossad handing the initial distribution. I base this on the incredible care that was taken to avoid any collateral damage, especially to world financial systems, and the remarkably successful deployment.
I still wonder what other malware may be at work in Iran. Whoever put together stuxnet, I doubt that they did it as a one-time thing. There are probably other arrows in their quiver, and I'm thinking that some of those may already be working their way through Iranian missile command / control systems, and so on.
Anonymous has all the markings of a vigilante group. Which means its "membership" changes each time it is called upon to act, and some effective number of persons responds to that call. Anonymous' capabilities change with its changing membership, just like the vigilante posses of the Old West changed, depending on whether only the farmers and cowboys were in the group, or some of the veterans of Civil War battles were riding along this time.
Vigilante groups have never been stopped by trying to eliminate the leaders.
The only sure way to stop vigilante groups is to bring law into the frontier area in which they are active. But Anonymous is active on the emerging frontier of new technologies, and it is going to be a long while before any law can be forged that could be applied to this area. Extensions of existing laws do not work. We found that when bicycles and then automobiles became common, the existing laws for horses and carriages where so inadequate that entirely new sets of traffic laws had to be developed. What is happening with the Internet is like that: our patent laws, copyright laws, and laws regarding secrecy and privacy have no more value today than the laws that said where you could tie up your horse were useful after everyone was pedaling or driving about town.
Was Robin Hood a bad guy? Should he have submitted peacefully to the evil Sheriff?
In a place where there is no law, all actions are lawless. There is no way to judge who wears the white hats and who wears the black ones. These corners of the Internet (Twitter, Facebook, 4chan, WikiLeaks, etc) have come into existence so quickly, and are evolving so rapidly, that no established laws can be applied to them. And yet they are now becoming the dominant factors driving world politics (Egypt, Tunisia).
However the persons who are forging these new areas, the pioneers, are also forging codes of behavior, outlaw codes to guide outlaw actions in a region that is outside the law. We can see that these codes are enforced by bannings and blacklists, and now with the recent Anonymous activity we see vigilante actions. Which tend to be harsher than the sanctions of law, but in those areas where there are not yet laws, then only vigilante activity can protect the nascent societies from the predations of assholes who are out to grab whatever fortune they can wrest from the work of others.
I have no use for HBGary Federal. I believe that the CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, or whatever above-the-law agency of the USA that is bankrolling them no longer has any use for them either. I hope the USA has not wasted a lot of money on this broken puppet that probably never worked right from the beginning. I hate to see my taxes wasted on such crap.
While I generally agree that taking the law into your own hands is inexcusable criminal activity, I also understand that under certain circumstances, vigilante actions may be excusable. This is as true today as it was in the American Far West back in the days following the Civil War, when roaming bands of outlaws with cavalry training and deadly-crazy cases of PTSD were preying on isolated farms and ranches a day's hard ride or more from the nearest lawman.
Vigilante activity may be excusable when
The processes of law cannot be brought to bear quickly enough to prevent a major escalation of the problem;
The core integrity of a nascent and tenuous social structure is directly threatened.
There is a widely held belief that these conditions exist on today's Internet. Something new in the way people relate to each other is definitely happening there, and the law is definitely too far behind the technological advances to be able to do anything useful. The people who are spending time forging things like Tunisia and Egypt on these new and lawless fringes of society have to protect themselves and what they are trying to build, because the law is not yet capable of doing that.
Now whether this argument holds in the specific case of Anonymous' attack on HBGary Federal is something that historians will argue over after the dust is settled. I certainly won't venture a guess. The thing is unfolding now, and there is no way to judge who is right and who is wrong, under laws that do not yet even exist.
I cannot understand why people want to ban games without even presenting credible evidence that games cause any harm.
It is a scape-goat thing. Persons who are convinced that the games are to blame do not have to exert the effort to look for any other cause.
This is a pure example of evil at work. These persons in their righteous indignation will actively get in the way of others who are using more reasoned or even scientific approaches to finding causes and effecting solutions. These persons do not want a solution; they want to be part of a Crusade. Because Crusaders are never wrong, and the comfort of not being wrong is worth the cost of giving up one's capacity to reason things out.
Snap a photo of the problem and the app sends it, with GPS info, etc, to the appropriate city department. Good for potholes, dead street lights, trash in the bike lane, etc.
But I am thinking that all taxi cabs, delivery trucks, and city vehicles maybe should be required to have a GPS with accelerometer constantly reporting to a central database. This would be a great way to monitor traffic conditions, useful in dispatching emergency vehicles, planning improvements, and finding out which donut shops the police prefer. Do it so John Q Public could opt in if he wanted to, but no need to require that.
And irony is that cold weight chained to your ankles before you are tossed overboard into the hyperbolean maelstrom that is the sea of metaphorical verbiage.
So far as I know, none of these prisoners have yet been killed without a trial. English has several verb forms to use when describing hypothetical situations and I presume that doing s/shows/would have shown/ or something like that would be more in keeping with what you intended to say.
I agree with your sentiments, by the way. It is a shame that we as a nation did not somehow put a stop to the unlawful and immoral acts that were committed by Bush and Cheney in our name. But we did not, and now we have the Gitmo mess (as well as the Katrina mess and a lot of other messes) that needs to be dealt with, somehow, even though every moral and lawful means to handle this thing properly was irreparably broken more than three years ago.
The remaining prisoners at Gitmo were put there through unlawful means. Under USA law, if they were to be brought to a fair trial the judge would have to let them walk. The evidence is that badly tainted by fucked up procedures that it would not be admissible.
Bush and Cheney could have done a final solution to these problematic prisoners while they were in office; do it under the cover of the emergency provisions they granted themselves, or just do it under cover: move all the prisoners to a detention barge in Guantanamo Bay and then do like the battleship Maine... oh so sorry, what could have caused that bang? But Bush and Cheney lacked the political guts to finish what they had started, and now we have a mess that is impossible to clean up.
Guantanamo has not been closed yet because the persons remaining there cannot be prosecuted successfully under USA law, because their rights were so badly abused when they were taken prisoner that even with conclusive evidence that they have killed USA citizens, they would have to be allowed to walk.
Guantanamo is a legacy cesspool created by a total disregard for law, constitutional rights, and international rights before Obama came on the scene. We are going to be stuck with its stench for a long time... Or we could just let the remaining scum go, with the understanding that they will be devoting their lives to killing more USA citizens.
The unfortunate truth is that prominent spokespersons for what from Europe probably looks like a major USA political faction have publicly called for Assange's imprisonment or even death. Not to just bring him to trial, but to send him directly to jail or eliminate him.
While this may have been hyperbole, it is very much in the public record and Assange's defense has good reason to point to it as a realistic threat. The British courts would have a hard time proving that it is not a realistic threat, what with the recent USA history of black ops. Remember, in the British court system judgment cannot be based on what feels right. It has to be based on the factual written record, which in this case shows that the USA has recently done similar things to others who oppose its interests, and that powerful political elements in the USA have been threatening to do the same to Assange.
Assange's defense should win on this one, if the courts get around to evaluating it. But since his defense that he would face a secret trial in Sweden for something that is not a crime under British law is a stronger and simpler claim, the court might decide in his favor based on that and not have to deal with the international politics issue.
Slashdot Mirror
That there are no alternative time sources currently deployed that would work as a backup for GPS strikes me as being a little too optimistic about the situation. Simply knowing that such solutions could be put to work does nothing to bring the level of optimism down to a realistic range.
I suggest that in addition to brushing off the ancient ways of doing things, a little more pessimism needs to be injected into the system.
And remember that Murphy was an optimist.
According to another fine article I saw yesterday (don't recall where but googling yesterday's news should turn it up), when GPS goes down or gets jammed, cell phones stop working. Apparently they use GPS time signals to synchronize hand-offs between towers or something. Also ATMs stop working (they rely on GPS time stamps for transaction codes, and may use encryption dependent on timestamps obtained by GPS). Also entire electric grids can be brought to their knees (GPS time is used to synchronize phase between different grid segments).
I guess I'll now read TFA to see if it mentions any of this stuff that AFA talked about....
It seems like he is referring to something much more powerful than a causal relationship. He seems to be suggesting that Wikileaks and its ilk, and the recent revolutions and protests, are part of the same pattern.
We really need to get a mathematician to take a serious look at human history. It appears to be fractal: it not only repeats itself, but the same patterns show up on different scales as if there were a great deal of self-similarity.
This is troll food, probably, but it might get some people thinking.
From what we know of the regolith and presence of water on the Moon, one of the first commercially viable industries will be the construction and launching of Earth satellites, built with the ferro-concrete technology we perfected some 70 years ago. The Portland cement comes from cooking sorted and graded regolith in solar ovens, in vacuum; the process will have quite an interesting set of by products, including, I believe, oxygen. The relatively small amount of iron can be obtained from the 3+ billion year accumulation of iron meteors. The regolith can be used as it is for the aggregate.
Principle advantages:
The future of interplanetary construction is probably going to belong to the ferro-concrete engineers.
It looks to me like the judge's refusal to address critical points in Assange's arguments guarantees an appeal. The judge appears to have taken care to do the minimum needed to assure that appeal would be accepted by the higher court and not remanded back down to his level because of some inadequacy in following procedure.
The judge has put forward the interpretation that the alledged offenses under Swedish law would also be offenses under British law, but on the face of it, that interpretation is not based on any precedent. It is one judge's opinion, and does not have the full weight of the law behind it.
The rest of parent post is very confusing. My understanding of what constitutes "common law" is what was originally established by William the Conqueror to handle situations that his written laws did not cover, and has been inherited by English based systems of law since that time. If I am right about this, then Sweden is not a common law country. So I do not see how references to common law apply here.
Of course the subject is the computer talking back at you, not you talking to the computer.
This does seem to work pretty well in turn by turn GPS navigation systems.
I think a problem with Jeopardy! type responses is that there is an audio "uncanny valley" similar to the one that animation artists have been talking about for some time. In the first Shrek movie, they found in the early screen tests that they had made the girl Shrek rescued too realistic and it turned people off; people thought she was creepy. They had to make her more cartoony for her to be acceptable. The same thing seems to apply to audio: an obviously mechanical voice is acceptable, but until the computer is definitely a sentient being, a voice that sounds too life-like will seem like an underhanded attempt to fake intelligence and will put people off.
Many turn by turn GPS navigation systems offer a selection of voices that include some that are obviously artificial. I wonder how often those are chosen?
Please remember that Assange has yet to even be charged with a crime.
Sweden is demanding the extradition to question him about a possible crime, but he has not been charged. He has offered to answer those questions in Britain, using any of several accepted means of deposition, but Sweden is saying that just isn't good enough; he has to be physically present in Sweden. This alone sounds bogus. Why would his answers be more valid in Sweden than anywhere else? Do the Swedes believe that Wonder Woman has cast her Rope of Truth around their borders?
The whole thing stinks. Including the law that the Swedes are trying to hang him with. A law that is not recognized anywhere else in Western culture, probably not in the world. A law that is an abject failure where the success rate of prosecutions is abysmal; whose dismal efforts to enforce it costs Sweden too much in both money and damage to society. A law that allows one gender to withdraw consent from an activity after having committed to that activity; that provides that gender with a legal form of entrapment. This is not the way to protect womens' rights, nor to control STDs. It is a law that needs to be either modified to make it realistic or just rescinded.
It doesn't matter whether Assange thinks he might be victimized by the USA or not.
What matters is that significant voices in USA politics have been publicly calling for the USA government to go after Assange. His lawyers have introduced that as evidence. The British court system has to accept that evidence or reject it on some evidentiary basis; it cannot be rejected because it sounds too far-fetched to be true.
I think the action of this lower court is appropriate. Since it knows that Assange has the means and the desire to appeal, it has taken this route to kick a thorny set of legal questions up the stairs, where a court with more appropriate authority can rule on the amount of risk that McCain, Palin, Beck, Limbaugh and others represent to Assange's rights under British law.
The same applies to whether the arguments that: 1) he should not be extradited before he is charged with a crime, and 2) that he should not be extradited for behavior that is not recognized as criminal in any EU country other than Sweden. These are all heady matters that deserve the attention of a higher court, and the appropriate way to make that happen is through appeal.
Drones can be built to handle worse weather than a human pilot could. Drones don't have the squishy-body limitation on sudden accelerations. You could do things like kick in a rocket engine for 2 seconds and do a 20 gee ballistic exit from a death spiral, etc.
Drones are cheap to fly. One vision of their use is to have the USCG maintain 24/7 patrols of the coast, with the drone on patrol and the rescue helicopter both dispatched to the scene when a mayday is received. The drone would usually arrive first and begin searching for survivors, and its findings would direct the helicopter to the point(s) of rescue.
A 24/7 drone patrol could also help with several other USCG responsibilities, such as preventing poaching in no fishing zones or by foreign fishing boats, actions against smugglers, actions against illegal dumping or pollution of coastal waters. Perhaps even monitoring whales and threatened shore birds, depending on how much sophistication can be brought to the data analysis.
Send in the drones!
Seems like a fleet of drones operating from a ship would be one way of dealing with the Somali pirate problem. Drones are cheap enough to operate that 24/7 high altitude surveillance of the pirate coast is possible, with other surveillance drones dispatched as needed to track any potential pirate boats. Armed drones could intercept a possible pirate boat that was approaching another vessel, and could sink the damn thing if it began to fire on its victim.
The drone pilots could be hired at cheap wages and trained at low cost-- there are more than enough kids out there who would jump at getting paid for their flight simulator skills. An obsolete air craft carrier could handle enough drones to patrol all of NE Africa and SW Asia. One ship with perhaps 100 drones in the air 24/7, a couple hundred spares in the hold, 300 civilian contractor flitesym "pilots" working 8 hour shifts, a dozen Air Force specialists to fly the only drones that carry ordinance, Command/Control personnel, and mechanics and support personnel. So a ship's complement of around 500.
A fairly cheap investment as these things go, and the more so as it should be possible to strong arm^W^W persuade insurance companies to help meet the costs. Ideally this would be done under the UN flag to pussyfoot around sovereignity issues in international waters. As I believe the USA is the major source of drones right now, there would be an immediate economic benefit to a country that is sorely in need of such things if the world's economies are to stabilize any time soon.
I rather like the idea of baiting Phelps and his cult into tilting at an Anonymous windmill. I would rather have them do that than doing their psychic vampire[1] thing at the funerals of American war dead.
[1] Does English have a succinct term for persons who feed their egos on the anger and loathing they generate in their victims? Like vampires, these persons are parasites. That the life force they suck out of others is not corporeal like blood does not diminish the damage they do to their victims.
For a time it might direct their praying energy toward getting their sky wizard to smite a group of evil doers that doesn't really exist. That might give their usual prey (persons who are burying some kid who died in the SE Asia wars) a bit of respite. I'm rather for that. Fight fire with fire, and weird hate-filled fantasy cults with fictitious anarchists.
Parent post does not know what it is talking about. And it sounds like astroturf FUD.
Public domain code may easily be "'taken away from you'" or from anyone else simply by making trivial modifications to it as it is mixed into development and not making those changes public. There is no requirement that the result be made public; there are no requirements at all on public domain material. Microsoft has done this back in the days of DOS, GeeWhiz BASIC, and woodburning computers. There is no reason to believe the practice has changed.
FOSS under GPL or similar viral licenses requires that any changes have to be made public if the product is going to be distributed (as opposed to strictly in house use). To do otherwise is to violate the expressed provisions of the license: a violation of copyright law. That is the advantage of FOSS: there is the legal guarantee that any FOSS app you purchase or otherwise obtain through a public means will have all of its source code available to you if you ever need to use it.
So while I agree with parent post about the facts of the difference between PD and FOSS, I very much regret that author of parent post either has not yet been able to think through the profound implications of that difference, or he is deliberately spewing FUD upon slashdot.
A viable business strategy for Microsoft is to factor its OS into core, file system, windowing system, etc. Then become a Linux distro by replacing the core and file system with FOSS Linux code, while selling their old windowing system and all the ooh shiny things as a proprietary library on top of the Linux base. There is no legal reason why this could not be done, it would bring Microsoft's development overhead closer to being in line with its competitors, and it is probably what Microsoft will end up doing, unless it manages to beat itself to death first with a business model that is 50 years or more out of date.
While parent post seems to have all the facts, that is a really weird spin that's been put on it.
The value of open source, and what today is most commonly meant by "open source" is the GPL and other viral licenses. What parent post appears to be describing is Microsoft's use of source that has been put in the public domain, without any copyright restrictions. Of course Microsoft uses that.
Public domain is not the same as open source. Open source comes with a guarantee that no matter what happens to the user's direct provider of the application, he can continue with its use (switch to a different provider, as many are doing in switching from OOo to Libre Office, or even take on the burden of support and development oneself). Public domain is worthless with respect to assuring that your investment in applications will still be of use to you a decade from now. Only open source with its viral licensing assures that.
I don't get it.
FOSS generally requires that the source be available, but MS can meet that requirement with a link to the appropriate SourceForge page, etc. They are not obligated to provide it directly. Copyright issues on content is a different problem that the MS store has to face no matter what its policy on FOSS is.
This seems like just another try by MS to stuff the open source genie back in its bottle. And not a very well thought out effort. But I think what will happen is that MS is going to find that alienating an increasing number of potential customers who are already dabbling with FOSS a little bit is not good for market share, or the bottom line.
My pet theory is that it was bankrolled by the Saudis, constructed in Bahrain, with the USA, possibly with help from China or Russia, developing the code and Israel's Mossad handing the initial distribution. I base this on the incredible care that was taken to avoid any collateral damage, especially to world financial systems, and the remarkably successful deployment.
I still wonder what other malware may be at work in Iran. Whoever put together stuxnet, I doubt that they did it as a one-time thing. There are probably other arrows in their quiver, and I'm thinking that some of those may already be working their way through Iranian missile command / control systems, and so on.
Anonymous has all the markings of a vigilante group. Which means its "membership" changes each time it is called upon to act, and some effective number of persons responds to that call. Anonymous' capabilities change with its changing membership, just like the vigilante posses of the Old West changed, depending on whether only the farmers and cowboys were in the group, or some of the veterans of Civil War battles were riding along this time.
Vigilante groups have never been stopped by trying to eliminate the leaders.
The only sure way to stop vigilante groups is to bring law into the frontier area in which they are active. But Anonymous is active on the emerging frontier of new technologies, and it is going to be a long while before any law can be forged that could be applied to this area. Extensions of existing laws do not work. We found that when bicycles and then automobiles became common, the existing laws for horses and carriages where so inadequate that entirely new sets of traffic laws had to be developed. What is happening with the Internet is like that: our patent laws, copyright laws, and laws regarding secrecy and privacy have no more value today than the laws that said where you could tie up your horse were useful after everyone was pedaling or driving about town.
Who are the bad guys in this situation?
Was Robin Hood a bad guy? Should he have submitted peacefully to the evil Sheriff?
In a place where there is no law, all actions are lawless. There is no way to judge who wears the white hats and who wears the black ones. These corners of the Internet (Twitter, Facebook, 4chan, WikiLeaks, etc) have come into existence so quickly, and are evolving so rapidly, that no established laws can be applied to them. And yet they are now becoming the dominant factors driving world politics (Egypt, Tunisia).
However the persons who are forging these new areas, the pioneers, are also forging codes of behavior, outlaw codes to guide outlaw actions in a region that is outside the law. We can see that these codes are enforced by bannings and blacklists, and now with the recent Anonymous activity we see vigilante actions. Which tend to be harsher than the sanctions of law, but in those areas where there are not yet laws, then only vigilante activity can protect the nascent societies from the predations of assholes who are out to grab whatever fortune they can wrest from the work of others.
I have no use for HBGary Federal. I believe that the CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, or whatever above-the-law agency of the USA that is bankrolling them no longer has any use for them either. I hope the USA has not wasted a lot of money on this broken puppet that probably never worked right from the beginning. I hate to see my taxes wasted on such crap.
While I generally agree that taking the law into your own hands is inexcusable criminal activity, I also understand that under certain circumstances, vigilante actions may be excusable. This is as true today as it was in the American Far West back in the days following the Civil War, when roaming bands of outlaws with cavalry training and deadly-crazy cases of PTSD were preying on isolated farms and ranches a day's hard ride or more from the nearest lawman.
Vigilante activity may be excusable when
There is a widely held belief that these conditions exist on today's Internet. Something new in the way people relate to each other is definitely happening there, and the law is definitely too far behind the technological advances to be able to do anything useful. The people who are spending time forging things like Tunisia and Egypt on these new and lawless fringes of society have to protect themselves and what they are trying to build, because the law is not yet capable of doing that.
Now whether this argument holds in the specific case of Anonymous' attack on HBGary Federal is something that historians will argue over after the dust is settled. I certainly won't venture a guess. The thing is unfolding now, and there is no way to judge who is right and who is wrong, under laws that do not yet even exist.
I cannot understand why people want to ban games without even presenting credible evidence that games cause any harm.
It is a scape-goat thing. Persons who are convinced that the games are to blame do not have to exert the effort to look for any other cause.
This is a pure example of evil at work. These persons in their righteous indignation will actively get in the way of others who are using more reasoned or even scientific approaches to finding causes and effecting solutions. These persons do not want a solution; they want to be part of a Crusade. Because Crusaders are never wrong, and the comfort of not being wrong is worth the cost of giving up one's capacity to reason things out.
That is a purely evil bargain.
Portland, Oregonhas a better idea.
Snap a photo of the problem and the app sends it, with GPS info, etc, to the appropriate city department. Good for potholes, dead street lights, trash in the bike lane, etc.
But I am thinking that all taxi cabs, delivery trucks, and city vehicles maybe should be required to have a GPS with accelerometer constantly reporting to a central database. This would be a great way to monitor traffic conditions, useful in dispatching emergency vehicles, planning improvements, and finding out which donut shops the police prefer. Do it so John Q Public could opt in if he wanted to, but no need to require that.
And irony is that cold weight chained to your ankles before you are tossed overboard into the hyperbolean maelstrom that is the sea of metaphorical verbiage.
So far as I know, none of these prisoners have yet been killed without a trial. English has several verb forms to use when describing hypothetical situations and I presume that doing s/shows/would have shown/ or something like that would be more in keeping with what you intended to say.
I agree with your sentiments, by the way. It is a shame that we as a nation did not somehow put a stop to the unlawful and immoral acts that were committed by Bush and Cheney in our name. But we did not, and now we have the Gitmo mess (as well as the Katrina mess and a lot of other messes) that needs to be dealt with, somehow, even though every moral and lawful means to handle this thing properly was irreparably broken more than three years ago.
NIMBY is only a small part of it.
The remaining prisoners at Gitmo were put there through unlawful means. Under USA law, if they were to be brought to a fair trial the judge would have to let them walk. The evidence is that badly tainted by fucked up procedures that it would not be admissible.
Bush and Cheney could have done a final solution to these problematic prisoners while they were in office; do it under the cover of the emergency provisions they granted themselves, or just do it under cover: move all the prisoners to a detention barge in Guantanamo Bay and then do like the battleship Maine... oh so sorry, what could have caused that bang? But Bush and Cheney lacked the political guts to finish what they had started, and now we have a mess that is impossible to clean up.
Guantanamo has not been closed yet because the persons remaining there cannot be prosecuted successfully under USA law, because their rights were so badly abused when they were taken prisoner that even with conclusive evidence that they have killed USA citizens, they would have to be allowed to walk.
Guantanamo is a legacy cesspool created by a total disregard for law, constitutional rights, and international rights before Obama came on the scene. We are going to be stuck with its stench for a long time... Or we could just let the remaining scum go, with the understanding that they will be devoting their lives to killing more USA citizens.
The unfortunate truth is that prominent spokespersons for what from Europe probably looks like a major USA political faction have publicly called for Assange's imprisonment or even death. Not to just bring him to trial, but to send him directly to jail or eliminate him.
While this may have been hyperbole, it is very much in the public record and Assange's defense has good reason to point to it as a realistic threat. The British courts would have a hard time proving that it is not a realistic threat, what with the recent USA history of black ops. Remember, in the British court system judgment cannot be based on what feels right. It has to be based on the factual written record, which in this case shows that the USA has recently done similar things to others who oppose its interests, and that powerful political elements in the USA have been threatening to do the same to Assange.
Assange's defense should win on this one, if the courts get around to evaluating it. But since his defense that he would face a secret trial in Sweden for something that is not a crime under British law is a stronger and simpler claim, the court might decide in his favor based on that and not have to deal with the international politics issue.