The various governments already do that and already have laws in place. It is just that these tech companies are now going to start enforcing local laws.
One example as a guest worker in a European country, I was not allowed to criticize the government and I had to sign a form agreeing to that when I had to do the various paperwork.
A friend of mine who is a closeted gay man was required ("strongly suggested") by his company that if he really wanted to get further sponsorship on his Greencard application to the US, it might be wise to have a girlfriend and show that type of normalcy. Was this in Iran? No, just Florida. He was a database programmer in the IT for a Christian college, and homosexuality (or bisexuality, or any non-totally-hetero behavior) was listed in the employment contract as grounds for termination. But getting terminated by them would have halted his green card application and forced him to leave the country, so he toiled away in silence. After his green card came through, he didn't quite care as much if they fired him, and immediately started looking for other employment opportunities.
Not the original user, but it seems to me that there is really only one good use for caching anymore -- video. Every other website I've seen in the last several years is entirely dynamically generated and personalized and cannot be cached. You can't even cache Netflix and other large video providers due to piracy concerns, they have to do the actual caching at ISPs that let them in.
That, and no one outside of my bank, even Slashdot, seems capable of putting together an https website that doesn't trip the security alarms of every web browser. Whether it's self-signed certificates, expired certificates, or certs that aren't valid because a server changed hosts or whatnot, big or small, https is broken everywhere. I'm not sure if making it mandatory would really fix the problem.
If you think any of these companies you're putting your trust (and your data) in are your "friend", you've been misled and/or are delusional.
Yes, misled by the generations before them. Those who were so braindead as to consider internet security as an afterthought in its design (favoring speed over encryption), that created "the cloud", that insisted on the use of webmail, that favoured proprietary spyware like Flash over open standards (because they were too slow to create a capable open standard), that capitulated to a proprietary desktop OS monopoly and that have run spying programs that exploited all of this. You handed them a fucked up system that you created.
The problem is, there were always good reasons to do the above.
Webmail came about for many reasons, one being that it was not tied to a capricious ISP that could cancel your email at time. Move, get another ISP, you don't have to change the address that you used to sign up to web sites. It also worked great for "burner" email addresses so you didn't have to give a service your own personal email. And finally, those webmail services, gmail in particular, have far far better spam filtering and sorting than any email client, and any ISP. Email would have died entirely due to the spam problem if it weren't for the webmail services.
Speed over encryption? Especially earlier, encryption wasn't even a possibility. When you're talking about 10-to-1 speedup of encryption versus non-encryption, then unless you're dealing with sensitive financial documents, encryption isn't a realistic possibility.
"that favoured proprietary spyware like Flash over open standards." Yup, Flash happened for a reason, one of which being that the "open" video standards were terrible, and most of the ones that called themselves open were patent-encumbered. Therefore, you couldn't have a totally open standard. You needed a standard that had the player as part of it, because asking everyone to download an addon is nonsense. HTML5 is replacing Flash for video, and that has come with even worse problems -- it's far far harder to block HTML5 video, for one.
And why did MS grow so big? Mostly developers and users were sick of the "10 different operating systems and platforms" situation we have in the early 1980s. Can you imagine a AAA game studio today developing one enormous game and porting it to the TI/994a, C64, C128, Amiga, Atari 800, Atari 400, Vic 20, IBM PC, Apple IIc and Apple II GS, and Tandy PC? I'm sure I'm missing a number of others, but over time, someone had to win. Most people don't want to spend hours and hours and hours and hours learning about their computer, much as you might not want to spend the same amount of time learning about your car's ICE or stock trading, or urban planning (unless that's your job). They want a computer as a dumb tool, something that launches the applications they want.
We have a bunch of bad situations, but for the most part they got the way they are because they were the best option most people had available to them at the time, and because inertia is hard to fight against.
Just look at how "social justice" supporters savagely attacked Brendan Eich just because he supported traditional marriage
Funny how you mentioned this, on the other side against your argument, it's the folks that Brendan Eich has fought against who had the most to lose from a loss of privacy. Until very recently, a full loss of personal privacy would also mean a loss of their lives.
We will always need privacy. We will always be different from each other, and we will always persecute people who have different values because we feel they are inferior. This is human nature. It's not going to change, tribalism is encoded into our genetic makeup, just as wolves banding together in packs is part of their makeup. Privacy will always be necessary because there will always be religion, there will always be conservatism and liberalism, there will always be differences.
Public WiFi is faster than going home and doing things on a secure wired connection.
I think the distinction is that Public WiFi is usually not faster, and is often orders of magnitude slower, and worse, more prone to service dropouts than your carrier's 4G.
If price was the only thing people shopped on, we wouldn't eat so much meat in the first place. Meat is extremely expensive since it just takes a lot more resources to create a pound of beef than it does a pound of carrots.
As a follow up... I just drove 175 miles on interstate highway and bridges this week, and it was miserable: out of date signs, crumbling pavement, terrible water management, the same bridge repairs under way for three years with virtually no progress, damaged and missing signals at ramps/exchanges, and so on.
That's what you get when you want to "starve the beast."
What I'm saying is that the workstation changes in RHEL 7 are so radical, such a departure from RHEL 6.. I'm not sure where even to begin. systemd is easy.. EASY to manage and configure and deal with compared to some of the other changes that run through the operating system, especially in the interface. Hell, converting our old rc scripts into something a bit more systemd-friendly wasn't a problem. It's everything else.
I strongly suspect RedHat has a shitload of paying customers who have told them in no uncertain terms that if RH drops RHEL6 and goes systemd-only, they'll be moving to a non-systemd distro.
I can assure you, systemd would be far, FAR down the list of reasons for RHEL's paying customers to not switch from 6 to 7.
Based on family history, that would mean that I will have to live about 30 years as an "elderly person".
Yes, exactly, which is the big problem we face now with our ability to extend life and let people live longer. It's not the healthy part of life that's being extended.
Sure -- but how many times has your computer been out-of-commission as it's updating itself/botched update (= sick days), your device (ahem, Google...) been completely orphaned (= I quit), or your device been broken outside of warranty (= needs insurance)?
SHUSH!!!!
You're not supposed to ask such questions, you're supposed to take at face value the promises of technology and automation. Maintenance? The machines not being as flexible as you need? Software bugs that you can't fix? The makes and technologists only want you to think of the upsides.
After all, everyone loves calling a support number and getting a phone menu rather than a person they can to, right?
So, what's the big issue? This guy saw an opportunity to attack an opponent albeit in the shadows.
"Attack the enemy where they are not" - Art of War
Well for one, it flies in the face of Libertarian ideology that Thiel likes to promote, that government power used against private individuals and businesses is the root of much of the evil in our society. It seems like he's more of an Objectivist, where any means are acceptable as long as you're the one who comes ahead.
Entitlement? Yes she is entitled if that means deciding how her creation should be distributed.
There are, and should be limitations on that entitlement. After all, that entitlement is a limitation on our natural ability to speak, express, and yes, copy. It's a radical move that we've just come to see as normal, and to justify any of that type of legal protection would require a compelling reason. The US Constitution gives the justification, that a temporary limitation is accepted because the public will benefit from more works. However, what many rights holders don't seem to believe is that this is supposed to be a balance, while in the last 50 years copyright holders have strongly tried to push the idea of copyrighted works as being "property," property rights that never expire. I don't agree with copyright being a property right.
It's laughable for Google to claim that they can't identify copyright violations
They do. They have a whole system for it; ContentID. Register for it, and Youtube will start scanning uploads against the works you provide. It is, however, not their legal duty to proactively check every upload to be certain that the user who uploaded it hasn't uploaded something that's unauthorized. You're asking them to do a lot of work for free at that point. It's only their duty to take down an upload when a copyright holder flags it.
YouTube is guilty of the same "criminal" acts that Megaupload is currently accused of
Well, she managed to get one thing right.
I don't think it's that great a comparison, Google has a lot more money to defend itself and is US-based (so it has a lot of US politicians ready to fight for it), and it's been good about getting politicians on its side (unlike Microsoft in the 90s).
Slashdotters are geniuses </sarcasm> at coming up with dozens of good-sounding (to them, only) arguments that have nothing to do with the issue at stake, which is: does Google have the right to make hundreds of millions of ad money revenue from the works of musicians without securing permission?
Copyright law is clear: If Google uploads the copyrighted video, it's on the hook for penalties. If a user uploads a copyrighted video to a generic video service, then the user is on the hook. If Google refuses to take down the video or drags its feet when they are notified about an infringing video, then they are liable. They are not advertising that they're a service to get copyrighted videos.
Google loves to talk about how much they're made G+ separate and non-mandatory, while constantly tricking the user into converting their account to Google Plus (Hello Youtube), and/or making it extremely difficult to extricate themselves from Google Plus.
They would be in Paris with a bomb, but choose to go through all the airport security and the risks associated with it just to blow up a plane filled with mostly Egyptians in Egyptian airspace?
Jihadis do not see Egyptians as their allies. ISIS in particular hates liberal and moderate Muslims more than they hate Westerners and non-Muslims. A Muslim who doesn't agree with their caliphate is considered a traitor to Islam, and that's a far worse crime than never joining Islam in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The various governments already do that and already have laws in place. It is just that these tech companies are now going to start enforcing local laws.
One example as a guest worker in a European country, I was not allowed to criticize the government and I had to sign a form agreeing to that when I had to do the various paperwork.
A friend of mine who is a closeted gay man was required ("strongly suggested") by his company that if he really wanted to get further sponsorship on his Greencard application to the US, it might be wise to have a girlfriend and show that type of normalcy. Was this in Iran? No, just Florida. He was a database programmer in the IT for a Christian college, and homosexuality (or bisexuality, or any non-totally-hetero behavior) was listed in the employment contract as grounds for termination. But getting terminated by them would have halted his green card application and forced him to leave the country, so he toiled away in silence. After his green card came through, he didn't quite care as much if they fired him, and immediately started looking for other employment opportunities.
Not the original user, but it seems to me that there is really only one good use for caching anymore -- video. Every other website I've seen in the last several years is entirely dynamically generated and personalized and cannot be cached. You can't even cache Netflix and other large video providers due to piracy concerns, they have to do the actual caching at ISPs that let them in.
That, and no one outside of my bank, even Slashdot, seems capable of putting together an https website that doesn't trip the security alarms of every web browser. Whether it's self-signed certificates, expired certificates, or certs that aren't valid because a server changed hosts or whatnot, big or small, https is broken everywhere. I'm not sure if making it mandatory would really fix the problem.
If you think any of these companies you're putting your trust (and your data) in are your "friend", you've been misled and/or are delusional.
Yes, misled by the generations before them. Those who were so braindead as to consider internet security as an afterthought in its design (favoring speed over encryption), that created "the cloud", that insisted on the use of webmail, that favoured proprietary spyware like Flash over open standards (because they were too slow to create a capable open standard), that capitulated to a proprietary desktop OS monopoly and that have run spying programs that exploited all of this. You handed them a fucked up system that you created.
The problem is, there were always good reasons to do the above.
Webmail came about for many reasons, one being that it was not tied to a capricious ISP that could cancel your email at time. Move, get another ISP, you don't have to change the address that you used to sign up to web sites. It also worked great for "burner" email addresses so you didn't have to give a service your own personal email. And finally, those webmail services, gmail in particular, have far far better spam filtering and sorting than any email client, and any ISP. Email would have died entirely due to the spam problem if it weren't for the webmail services.
Speed over encryption? Especially earlier, encryption wasn't even a possibility. When you're talking about 10-to-1 speedup of encryption versus non-encryption, then unless you're dealing with sensitive financial documents, encryption isn't a realistic possibility.
"that favoured proprietary spyware like Flash over open standards." Yup, Flash happened for a reason, one of which being that the "open" video standards were terrible, and most of the ones that called themselves open were patent-encumbered. Therefore, you couldn't have a totally open standard. You needed a standard that had the player as part of it, because asking everyone to download an addon is nonsense. HTML5 is replacing Flash for video, and that has come with even worse problems -- it's far far harder to block HTML5 video, for one.
And why did MS grow so big? Mostly developers and users were sick of the "10 different operating systems and platforms" situation we have in the early 1980s. Can you imagine a AAA game studio today developing one enormous game and porting it to the TI/994a, C64, C128, Amiga, Atari 800, Atari 400, Vic 20, IBM PC, Apple IIc and Apple II GS, and Tandy PC? I'm sure I'm missing a number of others, but over time, someone had to win. Most people don't want to spend hours and hours and hours and hours learning about their computer, much as you might not want to spend the same amount of time learning about your car's ICE or stock trading, or urban planning (unless that's your job). They want a computer as a dumb tool, something that launches the applications they want.
We have a bunch of bad situations, but for the most part they got the way they are because they were the best option most people had available to them at the time, and because inertia is hard to fight against.
Just look at how "social justice" supporters savagely attacked Brendan Eich just because he supported traditional marriage
Funny how you mentioned this, on the other side against your argument, it's the folks that Brendan Eich has fought against who had the most to lose from a loss of privacy. Until very recently, a full loss of personal privacy would also mean a loss of their lives.
We will always need privacy. We will always be different from each other, and we will always persecute people who have different values because we feel they are inferior. This is human nature. It's not going to change, tribalism is encoded into our genetic makeup, just as wolves banding together in packs is part of their makeup. Privacy will always be necessary because there will always be religion, there will always be conservatism and liberalism, there will always be differences.
Public WiFi is faster than going home and doing things on a secure wired connection.
I think the distinction is that Public WiFi is usually not faster, and is often orders of magnitude slower, and worse, more prone to service dropouts than your carrier's 4G.
If price was the only thing people shopped on, we wouldn't eat so much meat in the first place. Meat is extremely expensive since it just takes a lot more resources to create a pound of beef than it does a pound of carrots.
As a follow up ... I just drove 175 miles on interstate highway and bridges this week, and it was miserable: out of date signs, crumbling pavement, terrible water management, the same bridge repairs under way for three years with virtually no progress, damaged and missing signals at ramps/exchanges, and so on.
That's what you get when you want to "starve the beast."
Hold on, buddy! That 20x is just theoretical. The end customers won't see anything that great.
What I'm saying is that the workstation changes in RHEL 7 are so radical, such a departure from RHEL 6.. I'm not sure where even to begin.
systemd is easy.. EASY to manage and configure and deal with compared to some of the other changes that run through the operating system, especially in the interface. Hell, converting our old rc scripts into something a bit more systemd-friendly wasn't a problem. It's everything else.
I strongly suspect RedHat has a shitload of paying customers who have told them in no uncertain terms that if RH drops RHEL6 and goes systemd-only, they'll be moving to a non-systemd distro.
I can assure you, systemd would be far, FAR down the list of reasons for RHEL's paying customers to not switch from 6 to 7.
Damn good thinking!!! I like that. Characters outside normal scope. I didn't know they would work.
Most services I sign up for have really stupid restrictions on what characters can be put in a password. No spaces, oftentimes even no punctuation.
Based on family history, that would mean that I will have to live about 30 years as an "elderly person".
Yes, exactly, which is the big problem we face now with our ability to extend life and let people live longer. It's not the healthy part of life that's being extended.
Good food, like fresh fruit and vegetables can be rather pricey. McDonalds is one of the cheaper alternatives. Just don't order soda.
Sure -- but how many times has your computer been out-of-commission as it's updating itself/botched update (= sick days), your device (ahem, Google...) been completely orphaned (= I quit), or your device been broken outside of warranty (= needs insurance)?
SHUSH!!!!
You're not supposed to ask such questions, you're supposed to take at face value the promises of technology and automation. Maintenance? The machines not being as flexible as you need? Software bugs that you can't fix? The makes and technologists only want you to think of the upsides.
After all, everyone loves calling a support number and getting a phone menu rather than a person they can to, right?
So, what's the big issue? This guy saw an opportunity to attack an opponent albeit in the shadows.
"Attack the enemy where they are not" - Art of War
Well for one, it flies in the face of Libertarian ideology that Thiel likes to promote, that government power used against private individuals and businesses is the root of much of the evil in our society. It seems like he's more of an Objectivist, where any means are acceptable as long as you're the one who comes ahead.
Entitlement? Yes she is entitled if that means deciding how her creation should be distributed.
There are, and should be limitations on that entitlement. After all, that entitlement is a limitation on our natural ability to speak, express, and yes, copy. It's a radical move that we've just come to see as normal, and to justify any of that type of legal protection would require a compelling reason. The US Constitution gives the justification, that a temporary limitation is accepted because the public will benefit from more works. However, what many rights holders don't seem to believe is that this is supposed to be a balance, while in the last 50 years copyright holders have strongly tried to push the idea of copyrighted works as being "property," property rights that never expire. I don't agree with copyright being a property right.
It's laughable for Google to claim that they can't identify copyright violations
They do. They have a whole system for it; ContentID. Register for it, and Youtube will start scanning uploads against the works you provide. It is, however, not their legal duty to proactively check every upload to be certain that the user who uploaded it hasn't uploaded something that's unauthorized. You're asking them to do a lot of work for free at that point. It's only their duty to take down an upload when a copyright holder flags it.
YouTube is guilty of the same "criminal" acts that Megaupload is currently accused of
Well, she managed to get one thing right.
I don't think it's that great a comparison, Google has a lot more money to defend itself and is US-based (so it has a lot of US politicians ready to fight for it), and it's been good about getting politicians on its side (unlike Microsoft in the 90s).
Slashdotters are geniuses </sarcasm> at coming up with dozens of good-sounding (to them, only) arguments that have nothing to do with the issue at stake, which is: does Google have the right to make hundreds of millions of ad money revenue from the works of musicians without securing permission?
Copyright law is clear: If Google uploads the copyrighted video, it's on the hook for penalties. If a user uploads a copyrighted video to a generic video service, then the user is on the hook. If Google refuses to take down the video or drags its feet when they are notified about an infringing video, then they are liable. They are not advertising that they're a service to get copyrighted videos.
Google loves to talk about how much they're made G+ separate and non-mandatory, while constantly tricking the user into converting their account to Google Plus (Hello Youtube), and/or making it extremely difficult to extricate themselves from Google Plus.
While riding a bear. Shirtless.
Wow, I love this. The amount of crazy just intensifies as the comment goes on!
The weird point about PI reminds me of the Timecube website.
According to the timeline that CNN posted:
1:48am: Last voice contact with plane.
2:27am: Air traffic control attempts to contact plane, no response.
2:29am: Aircraft signal lost.
They would be in Paris with a bomb, but choose to go through all the airport security and the risks associated with it just to blow up a plane filled with mostly Egyptians in Egyptian airspace?
Jihadis do not see Egyptians as their allies. ISIS in particular hates liberal and moderate Muslims more than they hate Westerners and non-Muslims. A Muslim who doesn't agree with their caliphate is considered a traitor to Islam, and that's a far worse crime than never joining Islam in the first place.