(2) and (3) are not desirable outcomes. Why do you then even create a situation where they are possible? To compare, if the boss has a stern but private talk to the employee, the employee only has the following options:
1) You learn from it, and never make the same stupid mistake again.
2) You fail to learn from it and make a similar mistake again.
If you do (2) here you will be fired. But the workgroup that you belong to will not be involved, their activities will not be disrupted. And it's not their business, after all, to discuss other people's problems - it's the manager's burden.
Guess what, options 2 and 3 only show how big a fucking loser you are.
You can respect the man and hate his mistake. Haven't you had such a situation? It only means that you, the manager, put the person in a position for which he is not competent enough. Whose fault is that? Should you be screaming at the mirror?
Screaming at someone means (rightly or wrongly) two things: aggression and lack of respect. You can take both and keep working. But most people instinctively strike back when they are attacked; the process becomes more important than the cause. Most people also don't like to be treated as dirt and called names. This is a volunteer project. People can agree to contribute their work, but it'd be too much to also ask them to lose their dignity, their face - even when they are wrong. If a person is wrong once, perhaps he had a singular bad day and made a one-off mistake. Point the mistake out, politely (it can be done even on a public list if it does not denigrate the guilty party.) If a person is consistently wrong, find another work for him. Screaming at a person is not going to make him smarter.
If he makes a true "enemy" then the enemy will quit the project, and that's the end of it. There are few consequences for him.
There are negative social consequences if a good developer quits. What would you say if *all* major contributors to Linux quit? How much time would you need to train a green userland developer to become a kernel hacker? How many would even want to do so? What would that do to the position of Linux on the market?
At least with Linus's style the recipient is aware that the attack is happening. In a corporate environment, it's knives in the dark.
You are ignoring the timing. A developer wakes up one fine morning, drinks a cup of coffee, fires up his computer... and discovers that he'd been called names all morning, and LKML is aflame. The original cause of the problem - that should be calmly and logically discussed - is quickly forgotten; the developer is in shock. What happens next is dependent on the person.
This doesn't happen in "polite" environments, where personal conflicts develop for a long time. People that are involved have many opportunities to make amends before the situation dangerously escalates.
Sometimes it's good to have enemies humiliated, you know.
News to me. Normally you want your enemies gone from your life. Humiliating them is only fueling the fire. Do you want your enemy to go postal on you? They will, if you hurt them enough. What's the purpose even in inflicting punishment on your enemy? Sadism?
Somebody that's trying to litter your source code with their shitty pawns and demand that YOU fix the damn mess is not your friend.
Linus is not required to accept patches from those guys. He receives patches from subsystem maintainers. Linus is not even required to read emails from people on his personal blacklist. Or, perhaps, Linus so technologically backward that he can't setup a blacklist? He should install Outlook then, it has filters:-)
The only response is to ban them, or tell them harshly to go away unless they have something of substance to contribute.
That'd be the fallacy of False Choice. A reasonable person would privately email the troublemaker and say this:
Dear $username,
I'm glad that you are interested in Linux and are willing to contribute. Unfortunately, you are not yet sufficiently proficient to offer something that we can use. This is obvious to many developers on the list, but I chose to email you privately so that you, perhaps, decide to moderate your contributions, for a while at least.
If you choose to continue proposing to rewrite the kernel in ALGOL 60, as it was one of your latest ideas,then I'm afraid you will get banned from LKML; you are probably already banned by personal filters of many LKML readers.
I wish you luck in your studies; if you want to continue contributing to Linux you, perhaps, can start working on smaller projects first. There are many to choose from.
Respectfully,
$the_sender
Such a missive would do the trick, and it can be a form letter too. Much easier to prepare and send, and you won't be poisoning the atmosphere on LKML with a personal quarrel. The unwanted contributor is just gone - hopefully on his own, but if the warning doesn't work then he gets banned.
People who make mistakes who dont have huge overinflated egos will take the content of the critism for what it is and move on.
Let's imagine that you made a mistake - say, accidentally drove your car onto my lawn once. Would you consider it a criticism if I walk up to you and hit you in the teeth? Would you be able to take that "criticism" in stride and move on? Will it feel better if you, theoretically, could hit me back at some other time when I make a mistake of my own? How would you call a society when minor disagreements end up in assault? Would you call it civilized? Would you call it fair to people who are unable or unwilling take such punishment and to deal it to others? I would call such a society barbaric.
And here comes the nut of the issue: how many time does Linus tell somebody that "made a stupid fucking mistake" and it resulted that in the end it was not a stupid fucking mistake?
You do not correct other people's mistakes by publicly humiliating them. That's how you make enemies.
this way, if you're relatively well behaved, you will never get screamed at.
And who is the judge of that "relatively good behavior?" Can you question the judgement? Can you prove your innocence, or lesser guilt? Those options are open to you if your boss calls you up, closes the door, and says that you underperform. You can together review your actions and you can explain why the boss is wrong. It may or may not work, but you are not accused of something without a warning. If you have to be fired for the mistake, this will not impact your standing among your peers. You may be unhappy, but you will (most likely) not develop hatred toward your accusers.
The problem with screaming is that it is perceived (correctly) as an attack - and it then triggers defensive responses. Many words, and actions, were taken in haste during such arguments. This is why *modern* management does not use verbal aggression as a management tool. It's still used in places that are stuck in stone age, though, or where defensive reactions and anger are intentionally cultivated (in the army, or on the Dark Side of the Force.) Any logically thinking person can analyze his mistakes far better without a dose of adrenaline running in his blood. If the person is not logically thinking, you don't need them as a developer anyway.
His methodology ensures he gets only experienced developers.
No, his methodology ensures that he gets experienced developers who don't mind an abusive boss. I consider myself experienced, but I would never work for a boss who dares to scream at me. I'd be out of the door before the echoes subside.
They talk to me about people who would rather pay a thousand in gates and wannabe cops rather then spend a 100 in extra taxes for real cops.
I used to rent an apartment in some sort of gated thing, but there were no cops of any type around. I have no personal opinion on the subject.
But if you think logically, local wannabe cops are preferrable because (a) they are here and (b) they have incentive to keep the criminals away. When I listen on the radio I often hear this type of a dialog:
"6 Lincoln 47, 459A"
"6 Lincoln 47"
"6 Lincoln 47, 459A at 21173 Faraway, three miles from Nowhere, garage motion sensor."
"6 Lincoln 47, in twenty."
Now, a burglar has twenty minutes to do what he wants, and there is nobody around to stop him. This happens not just because the police is underfunded. The problem is geographical. This is a large country. If you want a cop within five minutes from any location, how many cops (on a regular grid) do you need if they can travel at 30 mph on average? Then add resources to deal with concurrent calls, and with cops being busy at the scene. In the end, we'd need ten cops per hundred citizens, and they'd be idle most of the time. There is no way to have that many cops. That's why self-policing is of interest - you are always first on scene of a crime against you.
Why is aggression against LEOs more illegal than aggression against other citizens?
There are many reasons. For one, the LEO is doing his job. He has no choice in whether to go into the meth lab or to stay at home and watch football. The society wants the LEO to do this job because someone has to do it. In return, the society promises to protect the LEO in case the hoodlums strike back. The society does not want hoodlums to strike anyone, but if they strike LEOs then it would be hard to find anyone to work as an LEO. Would *you* want to work as GZ if in return for your policing you'd be aggressively and cheerfully tried as GZ was? Would you take the deal where if all is well you are paid a kingly sum of $75K/yr but if in the course of your duties you have to shoot a criminal (who is killing you!) then your boss will destroy you and your family, to the point of chasing you out of the country? Of course not, and that's not what happens with LEOs who shoot people for a reason. (If they shoot without a good reason then they are tried and convicted, usually - there were examples upthread.) LEOs are not free to shoot anyone. Many work for decades without ever drawing their guns - their experience keeps them safe, and their readiness to use the weapon keeps the suspect docile.
Yet another reason is that the LEO represents the state. An attack against the LEO is an attack against the state, and that is more dangerous than an attack against some Joe Blow. The state is only mildly concerned about Joe, and if he and Bill clean each other's clocks after too many beers, it's the problem of Joe, Bill, and their dentists. However if Jack the Ripper starts walking the streets and killing every night, this becomes a bigger problem.
Some reasons are less objective. For example, it is presumed that an LEO has training, and if he had to fire a weapon he had really good reasons to do so. It's not a given, and each case of use of deadly force is investigated. But an officer usually has a more believable story, primarily because an LEO gets randomly sent to various places. Still, it's possible that an LEO meets his enemy one day on one of those calls, and he murders him. Not likely, though - hard to conceal evidence of prior conflict. An ideal crime is one that nobody even recognizes as a crime. Anyhow, when an LEO testifies in court it is often believed that he tells the truth simply because he has no dog in this fight. If he says that he saw Bill hitting Joe, that's probably what happened - if he has no reason to favor one or the other. LEOs are perceived as independent arbiters. Often they are, unless they are having a bad day.
In this case if it was an LEO who followed TM, got attacked, and had to shoot the attacker, he'd still be investigated. LEOs killed unarmed teens before, as they were running away. It's rare, but it happens. They saw a suspect going for their waistband - what a reasonable person would think they do that for, in a ghetto, at night - to pull out a ticket to the opera, or perhaps to get a gun? Who can even tell what they saw - it's dark. But the police had no choice to stay in their vehicles - they are paid to chase suspects, and sometimes those suspects shoot back. If a shootout happens, the taxpayers who sent those cops to that chase are willing to share the blame for loss of life by being a bit more lenient. Still, the job of a cop is dangerous to that cop just because he carries loaded death on his duty belt. He'd better be very careful with that.
The fact that The 911 Operators told him to stop following martin, yet he persisted ?
He said "OK" and complied. That is evidence, part of the trial, cast in stone and confirmed by various witnesses, and by the timeline. If GZ was lying, the state would have discovered that - they left no stone unturned.
But even were he not to comply, that still wouldn't be "badgering" of TM because TM was nowhere in sight - GZ lost him. How would one badger TM if he doesn't know where the badgeree is? How would you follow someone if you don't see that someone? Besides, how do you know that someone is following you personally, and not just walking in the same direction? TM walked away and GZ did not follow; this means that GZ minded his own business. GZ would never have seen TM again, if only TM hasn't decided to confront his disrespecter.
We are talking statistics here. Every single day police officers detain thousands of suspects in the country. In virtually all cases the suspects are NOT killed. This is possible because the LEO are trained to safely take control of the situation. Just today I was listening to the scanner. A Sheriff's Deputy, one of two units dispatched, arrived first, made contact with the victim and established that the suspect is inside a dwelling. What do you think he did then? He waited for the backup. That's what he did. As result, nobody was killed there - a single suspect is not as likely to fight against two LEOs who are trained to protect each other in exactly these situations.
There are rare situations when LEOs make a wrong decision and kill suspects (who sometimes end up being innocent victims.) Those are very rare occurrences. In your example, both men made mistakes. The carver was wrong handling a weapon-like knife in public - just as GZ was wrong in following strangers around. It was legal, but it was not a good idea. The LEO was wrong in positioning himself in such a way that he was within reach of a knife-holding suspect. Just add a few yards, and he wouldn't need to shoot.
Both errors are grave. Arguably, having more criminals go free, increases the rate of crime on the streets.
Let's presume there is 1% of criminals and 99% of innocents. If you want to eliminate crime, why then don't you kill everyone who is ever arrested? Eventually 1% of criminals would be whittled down to about zero, and that would devastate the criminal world. But the losses among innocents would be leass than 1% (innocents rarely get arrested,) which is barely perceptible.
This strategy is known as "kill them both; God will know his own." For some strange reason no society on Earth uses it. Why would that be? It's a pretty effective strategy, after all... Perhaps it's because the society values life of an innocent person far more than it values death of a criminal?
IMO, GZ was only guilty of pushing his luck. While laws permit a non-LEO person to patrol territory and talk to people, this is not all that wise - GZ presented lots of evidence to that; it may be that his ordeal is not over yet, unless he leaves for Peru on the first airplane.
A LEO in the same position wouldn't need to explain why he was there, following potential burglars - it's his job. A LEO would be in real time radio contact with his partners and managers. A LEO would not need to shoot because he'd never allow a suspect to come behind him and so close. If it came down to blows, a LEO would be strong enough to defeat TM without killing him; an LEO carries a baton, and Taser, and handcuffs, and pepper spray in addition to the firearm. On top of that, any aggression of TM against the LEO would be illegal, short of some major violation of TM's civil rights.
This means that GZ should have left the policing to the police officers. They are better prepared, and their hands are less tied, and if they do kill a perp then they, barring an obvious crime, won't be facing the DA. This is the only thing, IMO, that GZ did wrong. Perhaps that gun under his belt made GZ feel protected, invulnerable. Such feelings are known to occur. An unarmed man will seek to avoid confrontation; an armed one may just barge in and have it all - just as this case illustrates.
This means that if you carry a firearm, your duty to avoid conflicts only gets stronger because it can easily escalate into a homicide. If you are wise and logical, like Spock, you may do good if you carry; but at every point make sure that your actions are not only legal, but also safe. For example, do not leave your car to go where you don't really belong (after strangers who, in your own opinion, are on drugs and up to no good.) However if a criminal tries to carjack you, or to break into your home, a gun will help because in these situations you have no other options - neither short term, nor long term.
Some lament that bad boyz need to be shot and killed by vigilantes, as it was common a few centuries ago. But the fact of life is that the laws do not permit that. The laws explicitly say that you shall fear criminals, and you shall avoid them. In some way it is wise because you do not know who is and who isn't a criminal. Only when someone breaks into your home you could be reasonably safe; but still check - it could be SWAT, after having house numbers mixed up again. The cost of shooting a person is very high; one might say that after shooting someone you might just as well shoot yourself, all things considered. GZ was this far ->.<- from getting an effective death sentence.
That's great as long as they believe you. If they don't, well, that's a wrenchin'.
Give them the login and password for the server, so that they can see the cron job themselves. It's just a shame that the key was stored on a tiny partition, and it was being overwritten non-stop, about a million times by now, with/dev/urandom.
They can always say that "you have that key stashed somewhere else," but it won't fly in the court if the evidence supports your story. Even if you had a copy on some other server, you won't need it anymore. The key can be a hash of a long passage from your favorite book, which means you can recreate the key at any time. It'd be impossible to prove even if they have the key; hashes are not reversible, and the forward search would be, I'd say, impractical.
You don't need to install a keylogger, it already has one built in; the ribbon.
It's a known vulnerability, and as such it is trivial to defeat. Just keep the used but still good ribbon in a safe, along with the originals and other secret documents. A worn out ribbon will be incinerated. On top of that, keep the equipment in a locked room, under guard. Those are simple technical measures that can be easily understood and implemented, as opposed to dealing a custom virus that may be embedded in one of the reference documents that you cut and paste.
The state of total surveillance is achieved when you can no longer tell where you are observed and where you are not. This means you have to presume the worst all the time. The actual surveillance may or may not be possible or ongoing at any given time and place. But you do not know that. How many ceiling cameras in a supermarket are fakes? Which ones?
Obviously, there is no way to achieve technically total surveillance without brain implants. But you can get so close that the difference is insignificant.
We have faced worse before and advanced out of it.
Every change has reasons. Best reasons are objective ones, such as those that depend not on human mind but on physics, economy and math. There are very few reasons for properly conditioned people to object to status quo. Outliers can be always placed into psychiatric care, just like they did in USSR, before they become significant enough to cause trouble.
I can't insist that the North Korean model is the future of the world. But it is not impossible either, especially the NK model with western bling on it.
is surveillance like time, in that it moves only in the forward direction?
Yes, because the more you have it the more you need it to keep your gains. This applies to all kinds of oppression, official or not. Militarization of the police is just one example. It would be pretty hard to find someone who came in as a bloody dictator but left as a democrat and humanist of Gandhi's caliber. The rule of thumb that violence begets violence is a very good initial guess.
can we ever admit that we crossed a line and are going back to how things used to be, privacy-wise?
No, it is not possible because people who are in charge of the message don't want you to hear that message. But even if MSM weren't under such iron rule, people still get old and die, and nobody remembers Sheriff Andy Taylor anymore. The new generation only knows those LEOs that are contemporary, and everything else is dismissed as "old folks' stuff." Those LEOs shoot your dog and taser you, and the justice system will imprison you forever for "resisting arrest" if you do not bow quickly enough. The older people get their blood pressure elevated, but nobody cares. Schools, with their "zero tolerance," are even more oppressive - they can dispense punishments for "crimes" that are not in the Penal Code; why to bother, they write their own laws, they are the masters of children's Universe! Can you imagine that an adult would be searched by her garden variety employer because someone said she has Aspirin in her underpants? This way the new generation had been conditioned for obedience. And you are asking why they don't question the reality? Hell, they are trying to survive in it. They are not asking for tar, feathers and a few sturdy rails just because they have never seen anything else. You can bet they won't see anything else either, unless it's even worse.
Those are already happening; when finally mature, why would you use the cloud?
I'd say, even old MFM and RLL HDDs were mature enough for the needs of the day. I had no need for cloud then, and I have no need for cloud now. We need abstract data exchange between parties, but that's not "cloud." The term covers "paid data exchange between separate instances of you." I guess there are cases when it makes sense, but I am not involved with any of those, and my data is kept away from the Internet except what I choose to publish.
There is one more interesting factor. Data exchange on your LAN is inherently parallel. Alice, Bob and Charlie can send terabytes of data on their personal LANs, and they don't interfere. Alice can even run ten parallel networks at her business if she wants to (some do, for various reasons.) However data exchange with a certain cloud provider has to share the same bottleneck(s) somewhere, especially if done over the wireless link. The capacity of wireless channels is limited by physics; you can jump up and down all you want, but you have to go for wider channels if you want more data... and then you are hit with shorter range of communication. At 60 GHz you are limited by just a few meters. It's amazingly wasteful to do that to a shared, finite (but, fortunately, instantly renewable) resource.
The complexity of sending a team of people to covertly copy the encrypted HDD and then install a keylogger to intercept your passphrase (or, even worse, your key or an exchange with a dedicated crypto device) is not comparable with just calling a CEO of Droppants and ordering him to deliver the data, on his storage, by the door of your office tomorrow.
There is a well known xkcd, of course, on that subject. However one can easily store a key on a remote server, and arrange for a cron job to delete that key if you failed to log in for a while. It would be a plausible explanation why the $5 wrench is not delivering the expected results. Not all the data that we store is precious and irrecoverable; most of it is just handy to have locally, but if need be you know where to get a copy. The simplest variation of this method is to get a couple friends in foreign countries, and give them parts of the key with instructions to not reveal them if you are in trouble. They cannot be forced to do anything, even if their identities are known (a big if.)
Anyone who uses cloud services in the society of total surveillance is not valuing confidentiality of his data. In other words, they can only intercept data that they don't need to intercept.
From a country that used to be proud of its defense of human rights the path to the bottom was pretty fast.
There is a big difference between being proud of its defense of human rights and actually defending those rights.
For example, the USA had no plans to defend human rights of victims of Luis Posada Carriles, or of Branch Davidians, or of Vicky Weaver who wasn't accused of anything to begin with, and of Sammy Weaver who was shot in the back and also killed. All that talk about "defense of human rights" is just hypocrisy used as weapon in big politics. Domestically, you have no inherent human rights whatsoever, and your life isn't even worth a drop gun. Your rights are only defined by who you are, who you know, and who you are up against.
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(2) and (3) are not desirable outcomes. Why do you then even create a situation where they are possible? To compare, if the boss has a stern but private talk to the employee, the employee only has the following options:
1) You learn from it, and never make the same stupid mistake again.
2) You fail to learn from it and make a similar mistake again.
If you do (2) here you will be fired. But the workgroup that you belong to will not be involved, their activities will not be disrupted. And it's not their business, after all, to discuss other people's problems - it's the manager's burden.
Guess what, options 2 and 3 only show how big a fucking loser you are.
You can respect the man and hate his mistake. Haven't you had such a situation? It only means that you, the manager, put the person in a position for which he is not competent enough. Whose fault is that? Should you be screaming at the mirror?
Screaming at someone means (rightly or wrongly) two things: aggression and lack of respect. You can take both and keep working. But most people instinctively strike back when they are attacked; the process becomes more important than the cause. Most people also don't like to be treated as dirt and called names. This is a volunteer project. People can agree to contribute their work, but it'd be too much to also ask them to lose their dignity, their face - even when they are wrong. If a person is wrong once, perhaps he had a singular bad day and made a one-off mistake. Point the mistake out, politely (it can be done even on a public list if it does not denigrate the guilty party.) If a person is consistently wrong, find another work for him. Screaming at a person is not going to make him smarter.
If he makes a true "enemy" then the enemy will quit the project, and that's the end of it. There are few consequences for him.
There are negative social consequences if a good developer quits. What would you say if *all* major contributors to Linux quit? How much time would you need to train a green userland developer to become a kernel hacker? How many would even want to do so? What would that do to the position of Linux on the market?
At least with Linus's style the recipient is aware that the attack is happening. In a corporate environment, it's knives in the dark.
You are ignoring the timing. A developer wakes up one fine morning, drinks a cup of coffee, fires up his computer... and discovers that he'd been called names all morning, and LKML is aflame. The original cause of the problem - that should be calmly and logically discussed - is quickly forgotten; the developer is in shock. What happens next is dependent on the person.
This doesn't happen in "polite" environments, where personal conflicts develop for a long time. People that are involved have many opportunities to make amends before the situation dangerously escalates.
Sometimes it's good to have enemies humiliated, you know.
News to me. Normally you want your enemies gone from your life. Humiliating them is only fueling the fire. Do you want your enemy to go postal on you? They will, if you hurt them enough. What's the purpose even in inflicting punishment on your enemy? Sadism?
Somebody that's trying to litter your source code with their shitty pawns and demand that YOU fix the damn mess is not your friend.
Linus is not required to accept patches from those guys. He receives patches from subsystem maintainers. Linus is not even required to read emails from people on his personal blacklist. Or, perhaps, Linus so technologically backward that he can't setup a blacklist? He should install Outlook then, it has filters :-)
The only response is to ban them, or tell them harshly to go away unless they have something of substance to contribute.
That'd be the fallacy of False Choice. A reasonable person would privately email the troublemaker and say this:
Dear $username,
I'm glad that you are interested in Linux and are willing to contribute. Unfortunately, you are not yet sufficiently proficient to offer something that we can use. This is obvious to many developers on the list, but I chose to email you privately so that you, perhaps, decide to moderate your contributions, for a while at least.
If you choose to continue proposing to rewrite the kernel in ALGOL 60, as it was one of your latest ideas,then I'm afraid you will get banned from LKML; you are probably already banned by personal filters of many LKML readers.
I wish you luck in your studies; if you want to continue contributing to Linux you, perhaps, can start working on smaller projects first. There are many to choose from.
Respectfully,
$the_sender
Such a missive would do the trick, and it can be a form letter too. Much easier to prepare and send, and you won't be poisoning the atmosphere on LKML with a personal quarrel. The unwanted contributor is just gone - hopefully on his own, but if the warning doesn't work then he gets banned.
People who make mistakes who dont have huge overinflated egos will take the content of the critism for what it is and move on.
Let's imagine that you made a mistake - say, accidentally drove your car onto my lawn once. Would you consider it a criticism if I walk up to you and hit you in the teeth? Would you be able to take that "criticism" in stride and move on? Will it feel better if you, theoretically, could hit me back at some other time when I make a mistake of my own? How would you call a society when minor disagreements end up in assault? Would you call it civilized? Would you call it fair to people who are unable or unwilling take such punishment and to deal it to others? I would call such a society barbaric.
I understand. I wish you luck, but I will not travel with you. Perhaps someone else will.
And here comes the nut of the issue: how many time does Linus tell somebody that "made a stupid fucking mistake" and it resulted that in the end it was not a stupid fucking mistake?
You do not correct other people's mistakes by publicly humiliating them. That's how you make enemies.
this way, if you're relatively well behaved, you will never get screamed at.
And who is the judge of that "relatively good behavior?" Can you question the judgement? Can you prove your innocence, or lesser guilt? Those options are open to you if your boss calls you up, closes the door, and says that you underperform. You can together review your actions and you can explain why the boss is wrong. It may or may not work, but you are not accused of something without a warning. If you have to be fired for the mistake, this will not impact your standing among your peers. You may be unhappy, but you will (most likely) not develop hatred toward your accusers.
The problem with screaming is that it is perceived (correctly) as an attack - and it then triggers defensive responses. Many words, and actions, were taken in haste during such arguments. This is why *modern* management does not use verbal aggression as a management tool. It's still used in places that are stuck in stone age, though, or where defensive reactions and anger are intentionally cultivated (in the army, or on the Dark Side of the Force.) Any logically thinking person can analyze his mistakes far better without a dose of adrenaline running in his blood. If the person is not logically thinking, you don't need them as a developer anyway.
His methodology ensures he gets only experienced developers.
No, his methodology ensures that he gets experienced developers who don't mind an abusive boss. I consider myself experienced, but I would never work for a boss who dares to scream at me. I'd be out of the door before the echoes subside.
They talk to me about people who would rather pay a thousand in gates and wannabe cops rather then spend a 100 in extra taxes for real cops.
I used to rent an apartment in some sort of gated thing, but there were no cops of any type around. I have no personal opinion on the subject.
But if you think logically, local wannabe cops are preferrable because (a) they are here and (b) they have incentive to keep the criminals away. When I listen on the radio I often hear this type of a dialog:
"6 Lincoln 47, 459A"
"6 Lincoln 47"
"6 Lincoln 47, 459A at 21173 Faraway, three miles from Nowhere, garage motion sensor."
"6 Lincoln 47, in twenty."
Now, a burglar has twenty minutes to do what he wants, and there is nobody around to stop him. This happens not just because the police is underfunded. The problem is geographical. This is a large country. If you want a cop within five minutes from any location, how many cops (on a regular grid) do you need if they can travel at 30 mph on average? Then add resources to deal with concurrent calls, and with cops being busy at the scene. In the end, we'd need ten cops per hundred citizens, and they'd be idle most of the time. There is no way to have that many cops. That's why self-policing is of interest - you are always first on scene of a crime against you.
Why is aggression against LEOs more illegal than aggression against other citizens?
There are many reasons. For one, the LEO is doing his job. He has no choice in whether to go into the meth lab or to stay at home and watch football. The society wants the LEO to do this job because someone has to do it. In return, the society promises to protect the LEO in case the hoodlums strike back. The society does not want hoodlums to strike anyone, but if they strike LEOs then it would be hard to find anyone to work as an LEO. Would *you* want to work as GZ if in return for your policing you'd be aggressively and cheerfully tried as GZ was? Would you take the deal where if all is well you are paid a kingly sum of $75K/yr but if in the course of your duties you have to shoot a criminal (who is killing you!) then your boss will destroy you and your family, to the point of chasing you out of the country? Of course not, and that's not what happens with LEOs who shoot people for a reason. (If they shoot without a good reason then they are tried and convicted, usually - there were examples upthread.) LEOs are not free to shoot anyone. Many work for decades without ever drawing their guns - their experience keeps them safe, and their readiness to use the weapon keeps the suspect docile.
Yet another reason is that the LEO represents the state. An attack against the LEO is an attack against the state, and that is more dangerous than an attack against some Joe Blow. The state is only mildly concerned about Joe, and if he and Bill clean each other's clocks after too many beers, it's the problem of Joe, Bill, and their dentists. However if Jack the Ripper starts walking the streets and killing every night, this becomes a bigger problem.
Some reasons are less objective. For example, it is presumed that an LEO has training, and if he had to fire a weapon he had really good reasons to do so. It's not a given, and each case of use of deadly force is investigated. But an officer usually has a more believable story, primarily because an LEO gets randomly sent to various places. Still, it's possible that an LEO meets his enemy one day on one of those calls, and he murders him. Not likely, though - hard to conceal evidence of prior conflict. An ideal crime is one that nobody even recognizes as a crime. Anyhow, when an LEO testifies in court it is often believed that he tells the truth simply because he has no dog in this fight. If he says that he saw Bill hitting Joe, that's probably what happened - if he has no reason to favor one or the other. LEOs are perceived as independent arbiters. Often they are, unless they are having a bad day.
In this case if it was an LEO who followed TM, got attacked, and had to shoot the attacker, he'd still be investigated. LEOs killed unarmed teens before, as they were running away. It's rare, but it happens. They saw a suspect going for their waistband - what a reasonable person would think they do that for, in a ghetto, at night - to pull out a ticket to the opera, or perhaps to get a gun? Who can even tell what they saw - it's dark. But the police had no choice to stay in their vehicles - they are paid to chase suspects, and sometimes those suspects shoot back. If a shootout happens, the taxpayers who sent those cops to that chase are willing to share the blame for loss of life by being a bit more lenient. Still, the job of a cop is dangerous to that cop just because he carries loaded death on his duty belt. He'd better be very careful with that.
The fact that The 911 Operators told him to stop following martin, yet he persisted ?
He said "OK" and complied. That is evidence, part of the trial, cast in stone and confirmed by various witnesses, and by the timeline. If GZ was lying, the state would have discovered that - they left no stone unturned.
But even were he not to comply, that still wouldn't be "badgering" of TM because TM was nowhere in sight - GZ lost him. How would one badger TM if he doesn't know where the badgeree is? How would you follow someone if you don't see that someone? Besides, how do you know that someone is following you personally, and not just walking in the same direction? TM walked away and GZ did not follow; this means that GZ minded his own business. GZ would never have seen TM again, if only TM hasn't decided to confront his disrespecter.
We are talking statistics here. Every single day police officers detain thousands of suspects in the country. In virtually all cases the suspects are NOT killed. This is possible because the LEO are trained to safely take control of the situation. Just today I was listening to the scanner. A Sheriff's Deputy, one of two units dispatched, arrived first, made contact with the victim and established that the suspect is inside a dwelling. What do you think he did then? He waited for the backup. That's what he did. As result, nobody was killed there - a single suspect is not as likely to fight against two LEOs who are trained to protect each other in exactly these situations.
There are rare situations when LEOs make a wrong decision and kill suspects (who sometimes end up being innocent victims.) Those are very rare occurrences. In your example, both men made mistakes. The carver was wrong handling a weapon-like knife in public - just as GZ was wrong in following strangers around. It was legal, but it was not a good idea. The LEO was wrong in positioning himself in such a way that he was within reach of a knife-holding suspect. Just add a few yards, and he wouldn't need to shoot.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Both errors are grave. Arguably, having more criminals go free, increases the rate of crime on the streets.
Let's presume there is 1% of criminals and 99% of innocents. If you want to eliminate crime, why then don't you kill everyone who is ever arrested? Eventually 1% of criminals would be whittled down to about zero, and that would devastate the criminal world. But the losses among innocents would be leass than 1% (innocents rarely get arrested,) which is barely perceptible.
This strategy is known as "kill them both; God will know his own." For some strange reason no society on Earth uses it. Why would that be? It's a pretty effective strategy, after all... Perhaps it's because the society values life of an innocent person far more than it values death of a criminal?
IMO, GZ was only guilty of pushing his luck. While laws permit a non-LEO person to patrol territory and talk to people, this is not all that wise - GZ presented lots of evidence to that; it may be that his ordeal is not over yet, unless he leaves for Peru on the first airplane.
A LEO in the same position wouldn't need to explain why he was there, following potential burglars - it's his job. A LEO would be in real time radio contact with his partners and managers. A LEO would not need to shoot because he'd never allow a suspect to come behind him and so close. If it came down to blows, a LEO would be strong enough to defeat TM without killing him; an LEO carries a baton, and Taser, and handcuffs, and pepper spray in addition to the firearm. On top of that, any aggression of TM against the LEO would be illegal, short of some major violation of TM's civil rights.
This means that GZ should have left the policing to the police officers. They are better prepared, and their hands are less tied, and if they do kill a perp then they, barring an obvious crime, won't be facing the DA. This is the only thing, IMO, that GZ did wrong. Perhaps that gun under his belt made GZ feel protected, invulnerable. Such feelings are known to occur. An unarmed man will seek to avoid confrontation; an armed one may just barge in and have it all - just as this case illustrates.
This means that if you carry a firearm, your duty to avoid conflicts only gets stronger because it can easily escalate into a homicide. If you are wise and logical, like Spock, you may do good if you carry; but at every point make sure that your actions are not only legal, but also safe. For example, do not leave your car to go where you don't really belong (after strangers who, in your own opinion, are on drugs and up to no good.) However if a criminal tries to carjack you, or to break into your home, a gun will help because in these situations you have no other options - neither short term, nor long term.
Some lament that bad boyz need to be shot and killed by vigilantes, as it was common a few centuries ago. But the fact of life is that the laws do not permit that. The laws explicitly say that you shall fear criminals, and you shall avoid them. In some way it is wise because you do not know who is and who isn't a criminal. Only when someone breaks into your home you could be reasonably safe; but still check - it could be SWAT, after having house numbers mixed up again. The cost of shooting a person is very high; one might say that after shooting someone you might just as well shoot yourself, all things considered. GZ was this far ->.<- from getting an effective death sentence.
That's great as long as they believe you. If they don't, well, that's a wrenchin'.
Give them the login and password for the server, so that they can see the cron job themselves. It's just a shame that the key was stored on a tiny partition, and it was being overwritten non-stop, about a million times by now, with /dev/urandom.
They can always say that "you have that key stashed somewhere else," but it won't fly in the court if the evidence supports your story. Even if you had a copy on some other server, you won't need it anymore. The key can be a hash of a long passage from your favorite book, which means you can recreate the key at any time. It'd be impossible to prove even if they have the key; hashes are not reversible, and the forward search would be, I'd say, impractical.
You don't need to install a keylogger, it already has one built in; the ribbon.
It's a known vulnerability, and as such it is trivial to defeat. Just keep the used but still good ribbon in a safe, along with the originals and other secret documents. A worn out ribbon will be incinerated. On top of that, keep the equipment in a locked room, under guard. Those are simple technical measures that can be easily understood and implemented, as opposed to dealing a custom virus that may be embedded in one of the reference documents that you cut and paste.
The state of total surveillance is achieved when you can no longer tell where you are observed and where you are not. This means you have to presume the worst all the time. The actual surveillance may or may not be possible or ongoing at any given time and place. But you do not know that. How many ceiling cameras in a supermarket are fakes? Which ones?
Obviously, there is no way to achieve technically total surveillance without brain implants. But you can get so close that the difference is insignificant.
Devices have existed for decades which reflect a laser beam off of a glass window to pick up vibrations.
That's probably why a SCIF has no windows. Look at the Pentagon. Most of the rooms are inside the building.
We have faced worse before and advanced out of it.
Every change has reasons. Best reasons are objective ones, such as those that depend not on human mind but on physics, economy and math. There are very few reasons for properly conditioned people to object to status quo. Outliers can be always placed into psychiatric care, just like they did in USSR, before they become significant enough to cause trouble.
I can't insist that the North Korean model is the future of the world. But it is not impossible either, especially the NK model with western bling on it.
is surveillance like time, in that it moves only in the forward direction?
Yes, because the more you have it the more you need it to keep your gains. This applies to all kinds of oppression, official or not. Militarization of the police is just one example. It would be pretty hard to find someone who came in as a bloody dictator but left as a democrat and humanist of Gandhi's caliber. The rule of thumb that violence begets violence is a very good initial guess.
can we ever admit that we crossed a line and are going back to how things used to be, privacy-wise?
No, it is not possible because people who are in charge of the message don't want you to hear that message. But even if MSM weren't under such iron rule, people still get old and die, and nobody remembers Sheriff Andy Taylor anymore. The new generation only knows those LEOs that are contemporary, and everything else is dismissed as "old folks' stuff." Those LEOs shoot your dog and taser you, and the justice system will imprison you forever for "resisting arrest" if you do not bow quickly enough. The older people get their blood pressure elevated, but nobody cares. Schools, with their "zero tolerance," are even more oppressive - they can dispense punishments for "crimes" that are not in the Penal Code; why to bother, they write their own laws, they are the masters of children's Universe! Can you imagine that an adult would be searched by her garden variety employer because someone said she has Aspirin in her underpants? This way the new generation had been conditioned for obedience. And you are asking why they don't question the reality? Hell, they are trying to survive in it. They are not asking for tar, feathers and a few sturdy rails just because they have never seen anything else. You can bet they won't see anything else either, unless it's even worse.
Those are already happening; when finally mature, why would you use the cloud?
I'd say, even old MFM and RLL HDDs were mature enough for the needs of the day. I had no need for cloud then, and I have no need for cloud now. We need abstract data exchange between parties, but that's not "cloud." The term covers "paid data exchange between separate instances of you." I guess there are cases when it makes sense, but I am not involved with any of those, and my data is kept away from the Internet except what I choose to publish.
There is one more interesting factor. Data exchange on your LAN is inherently parallel. Alice, Bob and Charlie can send terabytes of data on their personal LANs, and they don't interfere. Alice can even run ten parallel networks at her business if she wants to (some do, for various reasons.) However data exchange with a certain cloud provider has to share the same bottleneck(s) somewhere, especially if done over the wireless link. The capacity of wireless channels is limited by physics; you can jump up and down all you want, but you have to go for wider channels if you want more data... and then you are hit with shorter range of communication. At 60 GHz you are limited by just a few meters. It's amazingly wasteful to do that to a shared, finite (but, fortunately, instantly renewable) resource.
The complexity of sending a team of people to covertly copy the encrypted HDD and then install a keylogger to intercept your passphrase (or, even worse, your key or an exchange with a dedicated crypto device) is not comparable with just calling a CEO of Droppants and ordering him to deliver the data, on his storage, by the door of your office tomorrow.
There is a well known xkcd, of course, on that subject. However one can easily store a key on a remote server, and arrange for a cron job to delete that key if you failed to log in for a while. It would be a plausible explanation why the $5 wrench is not delivering the expected results. Not all the data that we store is precious and irrecoverable; most of it is just handy to have locally, but if need be you know where to get a copy. The simplest variation of this method is to get a couple friends in foreign countries, and give them parts of the key with instructions to not reveal them if you are in trouble. They cannot be forced to do anything, even if their identities are known (a big if.)
Anyone who uses cloud services in the society of total surveillance is not valuing confidentiality of his data. In other words, they can only intercept data that they don't need to intercept.
From a country that used to be proud of its defense of human rights the path to the bottom was pretty fast.
There is a big difference between being proud of its defense of human rights and actually defending those rights.
For example, the USA had no plans to defend human rights of victims of Luis Posada Carriles, or of Branch Davidians, or of Vicky Weaver who wasn't accused of anything to begin with, and of Sammy Weaver who was shot in the back and also killed. All that talk about "defense of human rights" is just hypocrisy used as weapon in big politics. Domestically, you have no inherent human rights whatsoever, and your life isn't even worth a drop gun. Your rights are only defined by who you are, who you know, and who you are up against.