The interesting thing is... if you treated copyright infringement much like we treat marijuana here in Australia, things would get a lot better.
A little bit of weed doesn't do a lot of damage and is kinda fun every now and then. A lot of weed is pretty bad, but as long as you're only using it yourself, eh... not a huge issue, but clearly you should cop a fine for it.
But deliberately growing warehouses full of weed, for the express purposes of selling it is pretty bad since it's usually tied to organized crime. Even worse, deliberately manufacturing *cocaine*, a much worse drug, is clearly bad and should be punished heavily.
So we understand that there are "less bad" and "more bad" scales on these things. But now, what if the cops (or vigilante groups with huge congressional power posing as cops) are mass-producing cocaine? Surely they should be fallen upon from a great height and made an example of, right?
That's just the top two results on a quick Google search. Other examples exist, I'm sure of it.
Now, the MPAA in both cases didn't just download an illegal copy of Photoshop. They stripped out the licencing and branding, rebranded it as their own, and then used it an profit making enterprise as though they themselves wrote it. THAT is the kind of copyright infringement that SHOULD be punished- it's literally taking someone else's work, pretending it's yours, then making money from it. They didn't just shoplift a copy of Photoshop from a store, they claimed they wrote it themselves.
And yes, they should be punished far worse than any individual. They pretend to be the ultimate authority on copyright enforcement, and treat it extremely gravely- Jamie was sued into bankruptcy for downloading mp3's for personal use. Surely their own actions, however, which are so much more malicious in nature, and so much more damaging to a society as a whole (and again given their position as de-facto "copyright cops") should be treated far more harshly. An individual who is busted for speeding gets a fine, a police officer who is busted for speeding can lose their job. And these particular police officers aren't even cops, more like shopping mall Rent-A-Cops arresting 13 year old kids for possessing a bit of weed while simultaneously running a commercial grade meth lab in their basement.
Yes, the MPAA's incidents are not nearly as numerous as the huge amount of copyright infringement that goes on everyday, but their actions are so much *worse* given their circumstances. They should be punished accordingly. If anyone should understand copyright infringement and copyright law, it should be the MPAA.
So, given this, I propose the MPAA and all its affiliatories, sister companies, shell companies, parent companies, CEOs (present, former and past) and anything to do with them should be purged utterly from the internet to make an example of them.
And once again Apple's knee-jerk restrictionist, bizarre App Store(tm) policy comes around to bite ANOTHER innocent developer who most definitely wasn't engaged in any unethical behaviour at all.
Shame on you, Apple. Shame on you. This is a prime example of why everyone should buy Android devices, because the bits just want to be free, man. Open your mind!...
Internet dickery aside, seriously, these apps deserved to be pulled for a number of reasons and Google did the right thing. But people should be under no illusions... speaking as a huge Google fanboy here (who uses an iPhone 4, lol, go figure) just because it's Google instead of Apple who control the gates of the garden doesn't mean the walls still aren't there... they just protect against different things and have different interests at heart.
In Australia, Defamation is an interesting complication, though.
For example, while you could say "Ryan Giggs had an extra-marital affair with Imogen Thomas", yes, it just means you could say it privately, or in the context of, say, the media. If I were to erect a giant billboard outside their house saying the same, while completely true, would be defamation.
I want to publish both a novel and an iPhone RPG under a fan-fiction friendly license. Essentially what I want is to sell stories and games on the App Store, but allow my readers/players to, legally and safely, create Creative Commons, Share Alike, Non-Commercial original stories using the characters and settings I've created.
Note, original. I would rather not see the whole book reproduced on the web, but I would love to see, say, the whole story retold and rewritten from another character's perspective. Or for a prequel, or a side story, or a 'dark and gritty re-imagining', etc.
The intention here is to allow other writers to create original stories using the characters I've created (AKA fan fiction), and to publish such as they wish, safe from legal threats. Yes, safe even from ME, so if I go mad with wealth/power/poverty and decide to sue everyone, those who have created fan fiction using my stories can tell me to suck it and die.
Ideally, if possible, I would also like a canonization clause. If someone writes fan fiction that I quite like, with their approval, I may integrate elements of their story into a sequel, side story, etc. This requires the author's express, written permission and they are more than entitled to say "no thanks".
It was the worst natural disaster in Japan's history, one that was the perfect storm of conditions, all affecting an ancient design of plant which was NOT designed to handle such disasters, and yet despite this- still to this very day- has not had a substantial meltdown (some radiation leakage is not crowd on the beach in Melbourne)... and you're *complaining*?
Inevitable car analogy is as follows. If I own a regular Toyota Prius, there's a reasonable expectation that if I get into a fender bender I won't die. It's engineered to tolerate that. The car may be a write off, but I'm fairly safe.
But if a TANK shoots my Prius? Well, then I'm fucked. I'll die and it's *not Toyota's fault*, much less the fault of the automotive industry at a whole. You accept that, right? You accept that anything built by anyone, ever, is built to a limited amount of tolerance, and beyond that failure is not the fault of the manufacturer, let alone the whole industry?
In this metaphore, a tank shot my Prius in the engine block... and to the astonishment of most the Prius fucking TOOK IT. That armour-piercing tank shell bounced off like a motherfucker, leaving a huge dent, and shaking the car so I wacked my head, but hey. I'm alive and whole. I walked away after the worst imaginable thing happened, far beyond the design specifications of the vehicle. Yeah, there was a little blood-slash-radiation leakage from my head, but it's not that bad. I could have a concussion. I should probably get checked out, but it could have been MUCH worse. Furthermore, I am astounded on how this Prius is eating tank shells. That's some serious engineering work right there. Damn, dog...... and yet, people are still like, "Oh, but I'm bruised a little bit, it didn't protect me completely. Priuses are so unreliable!"
Seriously.
Tank.
Prius.
Tepco might be incompetent lying morons, but the reason why the old plant was still around was in no small part because of anti-nuclear fear-mongering ("Not in MY backyard!"). That's the reason that newer, far more safter, reactors are not everywhere. Because constructing new nuke reactors is verboten, like we're still in the 70's or some shit.
If we treated nuclear power with the respect it deserves, keeping the technology up to date and learning from our mistakes... then we can progress.
A very good point well made. Of course, I expect that at some point, if he's putting up a determined fight (and, presumably, aims to kill himself before being caught) capturing him alive just isn't going to happen.
What the article is unclear about and what nobody knows at this stage, is if he indeed went down fighting, or the US troops burst in and riddled him full of holes. Unfortunately, my faith in the ethical behavior of the US military over the last decade has been substantively eroded to the point where I just assume that's what happened until explicitly proven otherwise.
Even then, the target was extraordinarily important, high profile, and a known location (which was, granted, quite the defensible site). Someone who presumably had a great deal of military intelligence to give. Siege him in. Surround the place with snipers and pick off his guards one by one. Tear gas the place, for hours if necessary, until he comes out. Use knockout gas if you think he's going to off himself. Cut the power and wait until they starve. Play extraordinarily loud music (175db) all hours of the day and night, punctuated by the occasional grenade and low-altitude F-22 flyby, until he surrenders. That's just all off the top of my head.
There are ways to get people out of houses without storming it.
Very true. But the point I was trying to make was that there were not only moral and ethical considerations here, which but smart military ones too. He claimed he did it. Let's investigate that. Find out what he knows. Who he knows.
Instead, he's now a martyr and the military knows nothing.
Yeah, and open the opportunity for kidnappings and more acts of terrorism under the demands that we release him.
So now we're letting fear of terrorism dictate our actions?
Osama may be dead, but his cause seems like it won. It's like if Hilter was dead, but so were every single one of the homosexuals, political prisoners, jews, undesirables and Nazi Germany had all the 'elbow room' it could ask for.
I'd rather Osama be alive and we have our liberties and sense of reason back.
If he shot himself to avoid capture, that's a different story.
If the SEALs went in with the express purpose of giving him two in the chest and one in the head, then my post applies. It's early days, but... call me skeptical, but somehow I'm inclined to lean towards the latter. Probably to fire up feelings of vindication and nationalism in US citizens (disclaimer: I am not.)
I wasn't saying I believe him to be innocent. Not at all. What I'm saying is that rule of law trumps righteous revenge. I know it feels bad when someone does something horrible to you and your country, killing thousands, then taunts you about it for decades- then you finally get to shoot the mother fucker- but the problem is that our society doesn't work that way.
Even complete monsters get a trial. This shouldn't have been a "kill op", it should have been a "capture op".
This was an extremely high value, high profile target who was stationary in a known location. It wasn't as though a single lone agent bumped into him on the street and had one shot at taking him out- this was an operation that should have been planned and executed with the sole purpose of taking him alive, using every varied means at their disposal to do so.
It's possible they did this, but he shot himself. Or one of his guards did. Who knows.
Again, if you plead guilty you still get a trial where the plea is tended to the court. Additionally, making the analogue equivalent of a YouTube video claiming something is not a guilty plea in a court of law. Many people have claimed to have committed crimes when they really did not, and Osama Bin Laden had plenty of reason to claim he masterminded September 11th.
He's probably regretting that right at this moment though.
174 comments and nobody's mentioned this, but what happened to the presumption of innocence?
I mean, a guy arrested at the scene of a mass shooting, covered in blood and holding an assault rifle, screaming about how the aliens in his head told him to murder all of mankind... still gets a trial. Timothy McVeigh (the second biggest terrorist to attack US soil) got a trial. People who systematically abduct and rape hundreds of little girls and hide their bodies in barrels get a trial.
If absolutely nothing else, now we'll never truly know if he really did it. Who the power behind him was. Who was sponsoring him, who was protecting him (aside from the obvious: Pakistan), who were his allies. Think of all he could know.
Action movies lie to you. Dead guys give zero intel and create martyrs. Killing him was, by a huge long away, out and out the worst way to handle it. Bring him in alive. See what he knows. Then put him in prison for the rest of his days.
I'm Australian and I was chatting to some friends of mine regarding the A-10. It's the perfect plane for us. All we do is bomb things anyway, they are perfect for our rough climate, and they are CHEAP. JSF is $150 million each or so, A-10 is $10 million. As a ground attack aircraft (RAAF's primary mission since Vietnam) the A-10 is vastly superior.
And it has air-to-air capability too! No, it won't beat a JSF, but for the same price you can get fifteen of them. The JSF can't carry that many missiles.
Australia should be flying A-10's for the next 75 years.
Honestly, now, let's just play the devil's advocate here.
Everyone knows now that RIM allows middle eastern governments to read whatever. Maybe that admission isn't such a bad thing- I mean, it's disclosure and it's honest. They're being open and honest about potential issues with their service, therefore allowing their customers to make an informed choice.
I mean, who would you rather trust? Company A, who says "Yes, with proper warrants and the like, your government- the one you chose either by democratic process or by inaction against tyranny- can read whatever they want. They have to ask us to provide it and we do. This means if you're planning to assassinate the King of Unspecifiedistan, it's probably not a good idea to SMS it to your friend, since you'll go to prison in short order."
Or Company B, who says, "Nope! Our stuff is 100% secure. Completely safe. No security holes exist now, nor will they ever. Your secrets are safe from the government if you give them to us! If you wanna shoot the King of Unspecifiedistan, this is the place to yak on about it!"
Let's be real about this for just one second. RIM is a very (very) large company with a huge legal team and a vested interest in their customers privacy, yet the governments in question still got to them.
Do you honestly think that other (smaller) companies haven't got equally bad, or worse, backdoors in their systems?
And if you acknowledge that fact... where would you rather make sensitive communications? On a very crowded, very busy, large network which presumably has millions of messages to filter- where one single message might slip through the cracks, or be accidentally labelled a false positive... or a much smaller network without such a (presumably) unwieldy system?
Copyright infringement is not piracy. This woman, known as the Lion of Brittany, was a pirate. I doubt she had many MP3s, although she did have three ships, seven children and a very successful thirteen year career as a pirate where she took great delight in personally executing French noblemen with an axe and tossing their bodies overboard.
Put into perspective, copyright infringement- even deliberate, for-profit, commercial piracy- pales in comparison. Really, now. They might as well call it "rape", from the Latin "raptus", meaning to seize by force and carry away.
... although maybe I shouldn't give them ideas. Next we'll see 13 year old kids being accused of "Multimedia Rape" for downloading a Beiber MP3, when the correct term for downloading a Beiber MP3 is "Aural Rape".
Was this story submitted by RMS? What's with the '!opensource' tag?
Whoever wrote that has obviously never used any open source products, because if that person is under the flat-out delusion that all open source products such as Android and Ubuntu are mysteriously free of strange rarely-occurring or one-time bugs... wow. I want some of whatever she's smoking.
It's snippy, egotistical little things that really piss me off about the open source movement. The benefits of open source isn't a bug free program- it's a program that anyone can change and distribute as they see fit, within the bounds of the licence. (technically, closed source fits the exact same description, except the bounds of the licence are usually extremely tight or completely restrictive).
That kind of attitude only harms the open source movement by making us look (even more) like elitist snobs.
Seriously, who cares. It's a fully open source package on a fully open source operating system. If you don't like the package, don't install it... or modify it so it only returns the information you want.
And anyway. It's just a ping. Seriously. It's not a serious threat and if you're the kind of person that cares about simply pinging a server once a day, you can easily firewall it off or just cut out the package.
Canonical is not Facebook. They aren't evil. They don't have the Evil package installed in Synaptic yet. When they do, we can worry.
Okay, okay. There are TECHNICALLY some privacy concerns, but the package is fully open source. If you're the kind of person who cares about tiny little things like what servers your computer is pinging to, then you're almost certainly technically savvy enough to open up the package source and find out what exactly what the package is doing.
Canonical is not going to become the next Facebook, tracking your movements constantly and keeping them forever (by and large). That's not saying I trust them unconditionally- that's just silly- but trust them I do. I trust them enough to install their operating system without checking even a tiny bit of its source (aside from the parts I do read for other, unrelated reasons).
Ultimately, in order for computers to be useful *they have to do things*. In this case, the whole OS (at least, a default install) is completely open source, so IF you want to you can check and verify everything- or pay someone to do so.
This is a total non-story. I'll be installing the census package because I don't care about a few pings. Seriously. Go out and have fun! Scoot!
Australian here- It's pretty simple really. (Disclaimer: I've posted this before, but it bears repeating)
We have a political system where, instead of directly voting for a prime minister, we instead vote for our local representative; the party with the most seats gets to elect the prime minister. Essentially.
The problem comes when the two main political parties own almost equal seats, but many seats are "safe" seats. Think Texas. Is a Democrat ever going to be elected in a landslide in Texas? Nah. Is a Republican going to take San Fransisco in a landslide? Nah.
So, politicians focus on the marginal seats. Think Florida, which could go either way.
It just so happens a number of those seats are, currently, in and around areas which have a higher than average population of religious constituents. So, politicians on all sides of the political spectrum are metaphorically sucking our version of the Bible Belt's dick in order to get those precious one or two seats, which means they can keep/gain government respectively.
Which means our current administration is pushing through knee-jerk think-of-the-children legislation while the opposition is basically screaming "US TOO BUT BIGGER, BETTER, MORE KNEE-JERKY."
It's pure horseshit and doesn't represent the will of the Australian people at all.
Another idea seemingly ripped straight from Star Trek and made into reality. As someone who just recently ordered their custom tailored Star Trek uniform (grey shoulders/coloured neck style), I heartily approve of this trend! Let's have replicators next, please.
*Disclaimer: Yes, I know that lots of tiny needs are not how hyposprays work, but please. The end result is close enough.
Slashdot Mirror
The interesting thing is... if you treated copyright infringement much like we treat marijuana here in Australia, things would get a lot better.
A little bit of weed doesn't do a lot of damage and is kinda fun every now and then. A lot of weed is pretty bad, but as long as you're only using it yourself, eh... not a huge issue, but clearly you should cop a fine for it.
But deliberately growing warehouses full of weed, for the express purposes of selling it is pretty bad since it's usually tied to organized crime. Even worse, deliberately manufacturing *cocaine*, a much worse drug, is clearly bad and should be punished heavily.
So we understand that there are "less bad" and "more bad" scales on these things. But now, what if the cops (or vigilante groups with huge congressional power posing as cops) are mass-producing cocaine? Surely they should be fallen upon from a great height and made an example of, right?
http://gizmodo.com/329648/mpaas-university-toolkit-taken-down-for-violating-copyright
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-steals-code-violates-linkware-license/
That's just the top two results on a quick Google search. Other examples exist, I'm sure of it.
Now, the MPAA in both cases didn't just download an illegal copy of Photoshop. They stripped out the licencing and branding, rebranded it as their own, and then used it an profit making enterprise as though they themselves wrote it. THAT is the kind of copyright infringement that SHOULD be punished- it's literally taking someone else's work, pretending it's yours, then making money from it. They didn't just shoplift a copy of Photoshop from a store, they claimed they wrote it themselves.
And yes, they should be punished far worse than any individual. They pretend to be the ultimate authority on copyright enforcement, and treat it extremely gravely- Jamie was sued into bankruptcy for downloading mp3's for personal use. Surely their own actions, however, which are so much more malicious in nature, and so much more damaging to a society as a whole (and again given their position as de-facto "copyright cops") should be treated far more harshly. An individual who is busted for speeding gets a fine, a police officer who is busted for speeding can lose their job. And these particular police officers aren't even cops, more like shopping mall Rent-A-Cops arresting 13 year old kids for possessing a bit of weed while simultaneously running a commercial grade meth lab in their basement.
Yes, the MPAA's incidents are not nearly as numerous as the huge amount of copyright infringement that goes on everyday, but their actions are so much *worse* given their circumstances. They should be punished accordingly. If anyone should understand copyright infringement and copyright law, it should be the MPAA.
So, given this, I propose the MPAA and all its affiliatories, sister companies, shell companies, parent companies, CEOs (present, former and past) and anything to do with them should be purged utterly from the internet to make an example of them.
And once again Apple's knee-jerk restrictionist, bizarre App Store(tm) policy comes around to bite ANOTHER innocent developer who most definitely wasn't engaged in any unethical behaviour at all.
Shame on you, Apple. Shame on you. This is a prime example of why everyone should buy Android devices, because the bits just want to be free, man. Open your mind! ...
Internet dickery aside, seriously, these apps deserved to be pulled for a number of reasons and Google did the right thing. But people should be under no illusions... speaking as a huge Google fanboy here (who uses an iPhone 4, lol, go figure) just because it's Google instead of Apple who control the gates of the garden doesn't mean the walls still aren't there... they just protect against different things and have different interests at heart.
(I am not a lawyer...)
In Australia, Defamation is an interesting complication, though.
For example, while you could say "Ryan Giggs had an extra-marital affair with Imogen Thomas", yes, it just means you could say it privately, or in the context of, say, the media. If I were to erect a giant billboard outside their house saying the same, while completely true, would be defamation.
This is by far and away the most helpful comment so far.
Thank you very much. If I can't find a better way I will do exactly this.
No documentation? Huh. Well, what about fiction?
I want to publish both a novel and an iPhone RPG under a fan-fiction friendly license. Essentially what I want is to sell stories and games on the App Store, but allow my readers/players to, legally and safely, create Creative Commons, Share Alike, Non-Commercial original stories using the characters and settings I've created.
Note, original. I would rather not see the whole book reproduced on the web, but I would love to see, say, the whole story retold and rewritten from another character's perspective. Or for a prequel, or a side story, or a 'dark and gritty re-imagining', etc.
The intention here is to allow other writers to create original stories using the characters I've created (AKA fan fiction), and to publish such as they wish, safe from legal threats. Yes, safe even from ME, so if I go mad with wealth/power/poverty and decide to sue everyone, those who have created fan fiction using my stories can tell me to suck it and die.
Ideally, if possible, I would also like a canonization clause. If someone writes fan fiction that I quite like, with their approval, I may integrate elements of their story into a sequel, side story, etc. This requires the author's express, written permission and they are more than entitled to say "no thanks".
Is there any licencing model that covers that?
So what you're saying is:
It was the worst natural disaster in Japan's history, one that was the perfect storm of conditions, all affecting an ancient design of plant which was NOT designed to handle such disasters, and yet despite this- still to this very day- has not had a substantial meltdown (some radiation leakage is not crowd on the beach in Melbourne)... and you're *complaining*?
Inevitable car analogy is as follows. If I own a regular Toyota Prius, there's a reasonable expectation that if I get into a fender bender I won't die. It's engineered to tolerate that. The car may be a write off, but I'm fairly safe.
But if a TANK shoots my Prius? Well, then I'm fucked. I'll die and it's *not Toyota's fault*, much less the fault of the automotive industry at a whole. You accept that, right? You accept that anything built by anyone, ever, is built to a limited amount of tolerance, and beyond that failure is not the fault of the manufacturer, let alone the whole industry?
In this metaphore, a tank shot my Prius in the engine block... and to the astonishment of most the Prius fucking TOOK IT. That armour-piercing tank shell bounced off like a motherfucker, leaving a huge dent, and shaking the car so I wacked my head, but hey. I'm alive and whole. I walked away after the worst imaginable thing happened, far beyond the design specifications of the vehicle. Yeah, there was a little blood-slash-radiation leakage from my head, but it's not that bad. I could have a concussion. I should probably get checked out, but it could have been MUCH worse. Furthermore, I am astounded on how this Prius is eating tank shells. That's some serious engineering work right there. Damn, dog... ... and yet, people are still like, "Oh, but I'm bruised a little bit, it didn't protect me completely. Priuses are so unreliable!"
Seriously.
Tank.
Prius.
Tepco might be incompetent lying morons, but the reason why the old plant was still around was in no small part because of anti-nuclear fear-mongering ("Not in MY backyard!"). That's the reason that newer, far more safter, reactors are not everywhere. Because constructing new nuke reactors is verboten, like we're still in the 70's or some shit.
If we treated nuclear power with the respect it deserves, keeping the technology up to date and learning from our mistakes... then we can progress.
A very good point well made. Of course, I expect that at some point, if he's putting up a determined fight (and, presumably, aims to kill himself before being caught) capturing him alive just isn't going to happen.
What the article is unclear about and what nobody knows at this stage, is if he indeed went down fighting, or the US troops burst in and riddled him full of holes. Unfortunately, my faith in the ethical behavior of the US military over the last decade has been substantively eroded to the point where I just assume that's what happened until explicitly proven otherwise.
Even then, the target was extraordinarily important, high profile, and a known location (which was, granted, quite the defensible site). Someone who presumably had a great deal of military intelligence to give. Siege him in. Surround the place with snipers and pick off his guards one by one. Tear gas the place, for hours if necessary, until he comes out. Use knockout gas if you think he's going to off himself. Cut the power and wait until they starve. Play extraordinarily loud music (175db) all hours of the day and night, punctuated by the occasional grenade and low-altitude F-22 flyby, until he surrenders. That's just all off the top of my head.
There are ways to get people out of houses without storming it.
That was awesome. Thanks for sharing it!
Very true. But the point I was trying to make was that there were not only moral and ethical considerations here, which but smart military ones too. He claimed he did it. Let's investigate that. Find out what he knows. Who he knows.
Instead, he's now a martyr and the military knows nothing.
Yeah, and open the opportunity for kidnappings and more acts of terrorism under the demands that we release him.
So now we're letting fear of terrorism dictate our actions?
Osama may be dead, but his cause seems like it won. It's like if Hilter was dead, but so were every single one of the homosexuals, political prisoners, jews, undesirables and Nazi Germany had all the 'elbow room' it could ask for.
I'd rather Osama be alive and we have our liberties and sense of reason back.
If he shot himself to avoid capture, that's a different story.
If the SEALs went in with the express purpose of giving him two in the chest and one in the head, then my post applies. It's early days, but... call me skeptical, but somehow I'm inclined to lean towards the latter. Probably to fire up feelings of vindication and nationalism in US citizens (disclaimer: I am not.)
You've misunderstood the nature of my post.
I wasn't saying I believe him to be innocent. Not at all. What I'm saying is that rule of law trumps righteous revenge. I know it feels bad when someone does something horrible to you and your country, killing thousands, then taunts you about it for decades- then you finally get to shoot the mother fucker- but the problem is that our society doesn't work that way.
Even complete monsters get a trial. This shouldn't have been a "kill op", it should have been a "capture op".
This was an extremely high value, high profile target who was stationary in a known location. It wasn't as though a single lone agent bumped into him on the street and had one shot at taking him out- this was an operation that should have been planned and executed with the sole purpose of taking him alive, using every varied means at their disposal to do so.
It's possible they did this, but he shot himself. Or one of his guards did. Who knows.
Again, if you plead guilty you still get a trial where the plea is tended to the court. Additionally, making the analogue equivalent of a YouTube video claiming something is not a guilty plea in a court of law. Many people have claimed to have committed crimes when they really did not, and Osama Bin Laden had plenty of reason to claim he masterminded September 11th.
He's probably regretting that right at this moment though.
174 comments and nobody's mentioned this, but what happened to the presumption of innocence?
I mean, a guy arrested at the scene of a mass shooting, covered in blood and holding an assault rifle, screaming about how the aliens in his head told him to murder all of mankind... still gets a trial. Timothy McVeigh (the second biggest terrorist to attack US soil) got a trial. People who systematically abduct and rape hundreds of little girls and hide their bodies in barrels get a trial.
If absolutely nothing else, now we'll never truly know if he really did it. Who the power behind him was. Who was sponsoring him, who was protecting him (aside from the obvious: Pakistan), who were his allies. Think of all he could know.
Action movies lie to you. Dead guys give zero intel and create martyrs. Killing him was, by a huge long away, out and out the worst way to handle it. Bring him in alive. See what he knows. Then put him in prison for the rest of his days.
This was a poor choice.
Exactly this.
I'm Australian and I was chatting to some friends of mine regarding the A-10. It's the perfect plane for us. All we do is bomb things anyway, they are perfect for our rough climate, and they are CHEAP. JSF is $150 million each or so, A-10 is $10 million. As a ground attack aircraft (RAAF's primary mission since Vietnam) the A-10 is vastly superior.
And it has air-to-air capability too! No, it won't beat a JSF, but for the same price you can get fifteen of them. The JSF can't carry that many missiles.
Australia should be flying A-10's for the next 75 years.
Honestly, now, let's just play the devil's advocate here.
Everyone knows now that RIM allows middle eastern governments to read whatever. Maybe that admission isn't such a bad thing- I mean, it's disclosure and it's honest. They're being open and honest about potential issues with their service, therefore allowing their customers to make an informed choice.
I mean, who would you rather trust? Company A, who says "Yes, with proper warrants and the like, your government- the one you chose either by democratic process or by inaction against tyranny- can read whatever they want. They have to ask us to provide it and we do. This means if you're planning to assassinate the King of Unspecifiedistan, it's probably not a good idea to SMS it to your friend, since you'll go to prison in short order."
Or Company B, who says, "Nope! Our stuff is 100% secure. Completely safe. No security holes exist now, nor will they ever. Your secrets are safe from the government if you give them to us! If you wanna shoot the King of Unspecifiedistan, this is the place to yak on about it!"
Let's be real about this for just one second. RIM is a very (very) large company with a huge legal team and a vested interest in their customers privacy, yet the governments in question still got to them.
Do you honestly think that other (smaller) companies haven't got equally bad, or worse, backdoors in their systems?
And if you acknowledge that fact... where would you rather make sensitive communications? On a very crowded, very busy, large network which presumably has millions of messages to filter- where one single message might slip through the cracks, or be accidentally labelled a false positive... or a much smaller network without such a (presumably) unwieldy system?
Minor correction- that's The LionESS of Brittany.
Copyright infringement is not piracy. This woman, known as the Lion of Brittany, was a pirate. I doubt she had many MP3s, although she did have three ships, seven children and a very successful thirteen year career as a pirate where she took great delight in personally executing French noblemen with an axe and tossing their bodies overboard.
Put into perspective, copyright infringement- even deliberate, for-profit, commercial piracy- pales in comparison. Really, now. They might as well call it "rape", from the Latin "raptus", meaning to seize by force and carry away.
Was this story submitted by RMS? What's with the '!opensource' tag?
Whoever wrote that has obviously never used any open source products, because if that person is under the flat-out delusion that all open source products such as Android and Ubuntu are mysteriously free of strange rarely-occurring or one-time bugs... wow. I want some of whatever she's smoking.
It's snippy, egotistical little things that really piss me off about the open source movement. The benefits of open source isn't a bug free program- it's a program that anyone can change and distribute as they see fit, within the bounds of the licence. (technically, closed source fits the exact same description, except the bounds of the licence are usually extremely tight or completely restrictive).
That kind of attitude only harms the open source movement by making us look (even more) like elitist snobs.
Seriously, who cares. It's a fully open source package on a fully open source operating system. If you don't like the package, don't install it... or modify it so it only returns the information you want.
And anyway. It's just a ping. Seriously. It's not a serious threat and if you're the kind of person that cares about simply pinging a server once a day, you can easily firewall it off or just cut out the package.
Canonical is not Facebook. They aren't evil. They don't have the Evil package installed in Synaptic yet. When they do, we can worry.
Who cares.
Okay, okay. There are TECHNICALLY some privacy concerns, but the package is fully open source. If you're the kind of person who cares about tiny little things like what servers your computer is pinging to, then you're almost certainly technically savvy enough to open up the package source and find out what exactly what the package is doing.
Canonical is not going to become the next Facebook, tracking your movements constantly and keeping them forever (by and large). That's not saying I trust them unconditionally- that's just silly- but trust them I do. I trust them enough to install their operating system without checking even a tiny bit of its source (aside from the parts I do read for other, unrelated reasons).
Ultimately, in order for computers to be useful *they have to do things*. In this case, the whole OS (at least, a default install) is completely open source, so IF you want to you can check and verify everything- or pay someone to do so.
This is a total non-story. I'll be installing the census package because I don't care about a few pings. Seriously. Go out and have fun! Scoot!
Australian here- It's pretty simple really. (Disclaimer: I've posted this before, but it bears repeating)
We have a political system where, instead of directly voting for a prime minister, we instead vote for our local representative; the party with the most seats gets to elect the prime minister. Essentially.
The problem comes when the two main political parties own almost equal seats, but many seats are "safe" seats. Think Texas. Is a Democrat ever going to be elected in a landslide in Texas? Nah. Is a Republican going to take San Fransisco in a landslide? Nah.
So, politicians focus on the marginal seats. Think Florida, which could go either way.
It just so happens a number of those seats are, currently, in and around areas which have a higher than average population of religious constituents. So, politicians on all sides of the political spectrum are metaphorically sucking our version of the Bible Belt's dick in order to get those precious one or two seats, which means they can keep/gain government respectively.
Which means our current administration is pushing through knee-jerk think-of-the-children legislation while the opposition is basically screaming "US TOO BUT BIGGER, BETTER, MORE KNEE-JERKY."
It's pure horseshit and doesn't represent the will of the Australian people at all.
*needles.
Another idea seemingly ripped straight from Star Trek and made into reality. As someone who just recently ordered their custom tailored Star Trek uniform (grey shoulders/coloured neck style), I heartily approve of this trend! Let's have replicators next, please.
*Disclaimer: Yes, I know that lots of tiny needs are not how hyposprays work, but please. The end result is close enough.