The risk I feel you're overlooking here is that kids at these young ages will mimic stuff they see, because they don't yet have the depth of understanding required to determine which actions are dangerous.
It's not the possibly-immoral-or-disagreeable things that people are concerned about. It would be the video that shows someone stabbing or harming themselves, or eating poisonous things (hello tide-pods!) that cause the outrage. On their own, the kid might not think to try this, but once they see someone else doing it, you can bet it'll move to the top of their todo list.
There are some really good reasons to shelter children of certain ages from certain things...
Where did I say that there weren't many negatives? I'm curious. What I said was is that there wouldn't be the commensurate benefits to the female pill.
Ah, true. I (mis)interpreted your sentence as downplaying the number of side-effects associated with the female pill. The list of potential negative side-effects is horrendously long... enough that it's little comfort that the existing female pill might have a few potential benefits some women might experience from the side-effects (i.e., ignoring the primary reason for taking this for most women).
Among them being significantly less acne, suppression of cramps/bleeding, statistically significant suppression of migrane headaches and several other bells and whistles.
But just as long as we're clear, this is for *some* people, and for many others it can have an opposite effect. I.e., the female pill is not a net win at all... it's just a gamble women/society are willing to try in the quest for personal agency. I'm not trying to make a judgement call about whether the trade-off is good or bad (after all, I'm not the main target of the medication)... but I have found that many people don't appreciate how hit and miss the pill side-effects can be. If you're not in that category, that's excellent, and I'm merely preaching to the choir:-)
As for my source, that would be the study on the injectable version of the therapy that was shut down by independent scientific advisory boards 2 years ago. Which showed, among other things, a 45% incidence of INCREASED acne, 17% incidence of "adverse emotional reactions" which is either massively unstable mood swings or even classic roid rage but specifics are unknown as the study refused to specify, and two participants which made suicide attempts with one succeeding. But hey, there was also 39% incidence of increased libido. Course, the same effect occurs with multiple other testosterone therapies and has jack fucking all to do with the fertility suppression aspect. So worst case scenario you end up with uglier pock ridden unstable sex maniacs who go on to commit suicide running around. I'm pretty sure I saw a Rick and Morty episode about that.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the fact that one of the participants has still not recovered their fertility and multiple other participants took over a year to recover. Considering that this was not a study monitoring long term effects that's really bad.
Ostensibly it will allow men the same choice as women regarding birth control. This is patently false of course since women derive many other benefits from hormonal birth control that men do not, and either the same negatives or similar ones are almost certainly still there.
What were your sources of information for this statement?
There is a *lot* of negative side effects possible for the pill, and there are a surprisingly large number of people who have adverse reactions to the pill. You just don't read about it much in the mainstream, because women generally just switch to alternative contraception forms.
This doesn't even go into the fact that testosterone added to the body has long term semi-permanent effects on the body's ability to generate it, unlike estrogen.
Studies have been done that showed women taking the pill do undergo permanent hormone changes. The problem is the same for both genders.
The technical issue is that the bill requires no throttling of consumers in California, no matter where their data is traveling from. The last mile isn't hard, but if the site the user requests is hosted overseas, the ISP needs every switch it owns in the request & response chains to realise that that this is traffic is not legally allowed to be treated any different from any other traffic destined for California. So, either the packets need to be marked to indicate this, or an isolated net neutral (CA-only) network could potentially be required to ensure the traffic is handled in a legal fashion.
Don't get me wrong... I like what CA is doing here for sure, and will have my popcorn ready for the battle... but it does seem to me that there is some truth to the technical difficulty of implementing this feature.
I must admit... I'm kind of puzzled as to why you think a $79 battery replacement is cheap and completely acceptable.
Your key argument, repeated all over the place here, is that Apple is being generous for such a cheap price-tag to replace a part that *everyone* knows needs regular replacement. I can replace the battery in my non-Apple phone, using *genuine* parts no less, for under $15.
Though your moniker guarantees you are incapable of doing so, you really ought to face the fact that Apple has (once again) put good looks ahead of good engineering, and the end result is their customers get fleeced by practices such as this. I wonder what people would do if they were told up front that this phone would cost them so much to maintain in working order, compared to non-Apple phones?
Oh please. The Internet grew just fine from 1987 when I first got access to it until the new rules were passed in 2015.
This is a fallacious point.
Up until circa 2006, the majority of ISP industry understood that their customers pay them for access to the whole internet. And that their role was to ship those bytes to the customers as fast as possible.
Then, a particular moron in the US uttered the immortal phrase "the internet is a series of tubes", and all hell started breaking loose. Soon, we had customers finding themselves unable to use services on the links they paid for, including BitTorrent, Netflix, etc. From this point on, ISPs seemed to start throttling whatever the hell they wanted, and started attempting to extort additional money out of the companies producing the content being demanded by the ISPs' customers.
This brings us to the present. The ISPs have seen the huge amounts of money to be made off the network, and seem to believe they are entitled to more money above and beyond what their customers are paying them for access. Without competition, there is no natural "free market" economy that will force good behaviour on these huge companies, thus net neutrality is required to avoid the Cable-isation of the internet (i.e., avoid the Facebook + Video Streaming package, or the Slashdot + Netflix streaming bundle).
The internet survived up until the laws were passed purely based on the inexperience of the telecom companies in exploiting their stranglehold. The amount of lobbying effort they are putting into getting these laws repealed should tell you everything you need to know about their intentions moving forward...
Sure.. overturn the law. But that's not what the dad was doing. He was just violating copyright and whining when his son (correctly) called him on it.
Rosa Parks this dad ain't
It seems you judge this behaviour as not civil disobedience. Why is that? The best explanation I can come up with is that you are comparing the law the dad is protesting to the law Rosa Parks protested, and judging the father's actions as not sufficiently important? I don't really understand your point there to be honest...
Care to explain what Rosa Parks has to do with anything...?
I feel a bit like you've bought into this whole copyright protection racket, hook, line & sinker.
Rather than looking at the holistic intent of copyright and it's relationship with society (i.e., to increase creativity by allowing authors a guaranteed income stream for a specific amount of time), you're view the thing as if it is absolutely and irrefutably defined and controlled by the current, pretty one-sided licenses being attached to things by aggressive multinationals.
We as a group chose to allow and enforce copyright on our population because we saw it as important for allowing creative types to live. Is that still happening, when the majority of the money you pay for an item now go to the gatekeeping distributors and channels, rather than the individuals producing the actual content you consume?
Something that has gotten lost in Hollywood's attempts to build a sustainable business out of rehashing the same IP forever is that it is a PRIVILEGE to have your copyright & license enforced by society. Copyright was never a guarantee to be able to live off a single release forever. In fact, it was originally designed to NOT encourage that... you want great artists to still have incentive to produced great art, which they don't have if they are set for life off a single item.
Finally, it is a very naive to imagine that simply not buying something is still an effective form of protest today, when your taxes get fed into increasing the regulatory capture these companies have achieved. I don't agree with straight-out piracy... but I am vehemently against the idea that it's reasonable for someone to sell you a for a piece of music or literature and have any say about how you use that privately.
The question is, was Netflix faster because they paid your ISP more money, or because your ISP anticipated that this would please the majority of it's customer-base?
The problem with a non-neutral network is that the balance of power shifts from ISPs trying to please the customers (who pay them the most money), to ISPs trying to shake down large content providers for access to their customer network. I agree that in throttling or QoS, someone has to lose if the network is insufficient to support capacity. However, I'd prefer the choice about who and how to throttle to be led by customer preferences.
The hard part for legislation is that it's difficult to cut allowance for QoS that can't be easily abused to also throttle competitor or content providers in ways that are highly anti-competitive and undesirable for customers. I do agree we need to be careful what we wish for here though, as QoS is not bad conceptually... it's just unfortunate that it's such an easily abused power.
I can address your first (and repeated) point upfront: I have no "team" as far as politics are concerned. Like you, I'm also concerned by the rather two-faced nature of Obama's presidency (hello Patriot Act!), and in no way believe the leaks and reductions in civil liberties under his reign are somehow excused due to his party affiliation.
Now, the bit I'm unsure about (perhaps I've mis-read your original quip incorrectly) is exactly what position you're advocating. You seemed to be decrying the hysteria, when in reality, it sounds like we both agree that this action was not acceptable, and what you are decrying is hypocrisy.
In this particular instance, in the best case, it was a government screw-up, in a fairly ironic fashion, that serves to demonstrate that the government is not fit to handle the voting data it's requesting. After all, they've just proven they're fundamentally incapable of properly protecting the privacy of said data.
In the worst case, the government has taken punitive action against individuals who clearly value their privacy enough to write emails. Now, I don't believe this is the case, but... it's still a possibility.
I agree we shouldn't let Obama get away with being treated like an angel, but are you actually advocating that has any impact on whether this should be ignored or not? I'd suggest that the most balanced view ought to treat these events with equal concern, as a symptom of the underlying rot at present within politics and the government. This is not the end of things... but it's certainly not a step in a direction the government ought to take. And it's certainly not behaviour we ought to be excusing.
The primary focus here is that missives expressing privacy concerns (i.e., NOT the voting records) were reproduced, in full, including contact information, on the White House website. It was voluntary to send the message, but there was no expectation that these would be released online in the fashion they were.
The other one you are referring to (Trump's demands for voter information), is a different case altogether. But... you are tying together voting with the act of getting your voting preferences released and scruitinsed by others. The big question you need to ask yourself is: was this what the voters were expecting to have happen? If not, then the request by Trump is inappropriate, and this is nothing like a phonebook, as one party is surprised by who has access to their details.
Please, apply your critical thinking skills to that and see what you come up with...
The fundamental requirement for a free market to function, is it has to be free.
There is a large problem in the US that this is blatantly not the case. As a consumer, you don't get much choice to churn ISPs if the one you're with now isn't providing good value for you by arranging good peering agreements. This is unlike Netflix or Google, where I can simply not visit their site if they don't offer a compelling reason. The reason for legislative protection is to try and counteract the monopoly that consumer ISPs have.
I'd be willing to drop the net neutrality requirements if we can also drop all municipal / council regs that prevent local-grown broadband from being developed, and force ISP transparency around how and where interlink congestion occurs.
Considering I could just say "I quit" and do the same thing, yes.
Your contract covers this scenario however. That is, both parties agree that you quitting is an acceptable outcome. Most places will require a minimum of X weeks notice (some as many as 3 months in very senior roles) to aid the handover of responsibilities and find replacements. There is a distinct difference when the termination is a surprise, and not a result of breaking the contract. If an employee does something in violation of their contract, sure, instant dismissal is expected, and there is an assumption the employee either knew or was at fault for not realising they were breaking contract.
Most countries have laws about company-initiated termination because in the average work environment the business has greater power in the relationship than the worker. The laws are there to ensure companies (which have no inherently moral outlook... in my experience, often the opposite) can't abuse their position in this negotiation. The cost to dump an employee helps force companies to prefer to upskill and re-allocate individuals, rather than wholesale firing cycles.
Your argument is interesting, but fails badly on a single point:
Someone producing THEIR OWN VERSION of your chair might be fine... but someone re-using your chair? The concept of copying music, as performed by someone else, has no analogous situation in the physical world examples you're using. You aren't reproducing your own version of the song... you're simply distributing someone else's song for free.
Copyright is a sane concept as it means people who invest into great works can earn a living. But... it's current implementation and associated industries isn't so great...
derivative: something which is based on another source.
If it's a modified Ubuntu, it's a derivative. You can still make modified Ubuntu distributions. You just can't re-use the TRADEMARK when advertising your derivative. That is, you can use the source code exactly how you want. You cannot use the Ubuntu name to advertise your resulting distro, unless you meet minimum guidelines.
You cannot use Debian trademarks in any way that suggests an affiliation with or endorsement by the Debian project or community, if the same is not true.
To summarise: You can still create modified distributions of Ubuntu... you just can't call them "Allo's Ubuntu"
Mozilla does the same and gets the same criticism. Debian doesn't prevent people from make "debian derivatives".
You keep repeating "prevent people from make [...] derivatives", but that is explicitly NOT what's going on here.
You can make as many derivatives as you want... you just can't call them "Allo's Ubuntu", unless you pass Canonical's criteria for using the trademark.
They're not preventing people from making derivatives. They're preventing the derivatives from mentioning the Ubuntu system underpinning it, because Canonical believes (with a decent amount of proof) that this is tarnishing the Ubuntu brand name.
Canonical is not the first, nor will they be the last, to do this. Mozilla, Debian, RedHat... all these major distros enforce the same rules.
Again, the cloud providers *can* make their own versions/distros based on Ubuntu... they just can't advertise this fact unless the quality of their VM image meets a certain bar.
How does this situation lead you to that conclusion?
Are you saying Canonical should just allow Ubuntu's trademark to be used, even when it's clear the underlying VM image has been badly compromised by the cloud provider?
Uhhh... I'm not entirely clear where your logic follows from.
Canonical isn't saying "don't modify and use Ubuntu"... they're saying "don't break Ubuntu in stupid ways, but then still plaster the Ubuntu trademark all over your sales material". This seems like a perfectly reasonable request to me.
Let's say you made a brand of beer, let's call it allo's ale, and you start giving this away to local pubs to serve to customers. Then, one local pub decides to mix your beer with their leftover coffee dregs (hipsters, I tell ya'), but still under the name allo's ale. Don't you see the problem? You (allo) didn't make this beer, it's now been completely corrupted beyond recognition, yet, this pub is still claiming it's your beer. These patrons who buy your ale from the coffee-dregs-place will now tell all their friends your beer sucks, and before you know it, everyone now just assumes you made the crappy tasting beer.
This is the same problem Canonical are fighting against here. The cloud provider(s) have modified Ubuntu in such a way as to fundamentally break the security and functionality of the system. If they don't put a stop to this, people who use these corrupted images will assume *Canonical* and *Ubuntu* are responsible for their bad experiences... not the cloud provider who seems to be mixing the coffee dregs into the VM image they serve.
One of the genuine beliefs of pastafarians is that religious belief should not get special privileges. One might argue that they believe this "religiously". It is indeed satire, so I think the judge is correct there. I think where the judge is wrong is arbitrarily deciding that any form of satire is necessarily disqualified as a religion.
We're in agreement that satire doesn't necessarily disqualify something from being a religion. But, holding an idea "religiously" does not make that idea the basis for a religion.
*In general*, I agree religions are hard to pin down. For concrete instances though, it's less gray than people generally wish to believe as you really can take into account your best understanding of the proponent's intent.
Again, to restate... the question here isn't whether religions are special or deserve any special treatment. The question here is whether FSM and it's proponents are doing anything other than trying to cynically game the system. The judge seems believe that the answer is a resounding no. If it was a different religion, the outcome would also likely have been different too.
This is analogous to how members of other religions may not believe in every literal claim their religion makes. Some christians don't even believe that Jesus was anything more than a normal human being with some good ideas.
I struggle to agree with this, because FSM deliberately and consciously espouses things they ALL don't believe in. This seems blatantly different to the situation where there's internal debate within a religion (e.g., your Jesus example is a good one). Find me a FSM practitioner who actually believes their stories, and I'll happily reconsider:-)
Either way... I've enjoyed the discussion with you!
That's not true. One of the core beliefs of Pastafarians is the power of mocking other people. And their traditional way of doing this is through outfits and worship.
And this is a religious activity? I mean, that sounds like something people do when discussing football, or politics, or work colleagues. In effect, you're proving precisely the judge's point though. It's an arbitrary set of actions, made up by an arbitrary group and branded as religion as a point of satire.
A satire-of-a-religion is *not* a religion, and should not be treated as such. Any attempts reframe it as a *genuine* religion is a blatant troll... because FSM doesn't see itself as anything other than satire.
("But what if the other religions are also satire?"... even if we imagine for a moment that religions somehow started as satire, the majority of them are now genuinely held beliefs. FSM is still openly satire.
Pastafarians absolutely have real beliefs, they are just different than their professed beliefs. Part of pastafarianism is to profess certain ridiculous beliefs even if you don't really believe them (i.e. like Catholics and transubstantiation).
Oh... unquestionably Pastafarians believe in *something*... but those beliefs have 0 correlation to the demands being made by the prisoners. The demands for outfits and worship (two things FSM openly mocks) make as much sense as your local Buddhist trying to get a religious grant for their Ferrari...
There are a lot of worshippers who don't believe the literal meaning of their literature. For example, many Catholics don't believe in transsubstantiation, i.e. that the host (wafer) turns into the flesh and the wine turns into the blood of Jesus during communion. [...]
There's a difference though, between disagreement about the details (every religion has this), vs. deliberate unbelief in the professed religion. The judge recognises that FSM initiated as a satirical belief, and is basically calling BS on the claim by these individuals that they *actually* believe and care about this satire-as-religion.
I know we're knee-deep in the whole "but who are you to question others' belief" era... but really, all proponents of FSM that I know are merely being anti-religious. I.e., if someone asked them to list the top 5 most important things in their life, FSM wouldn't make the list, I can assure you. Nor would they have even stumbled into FSM without there being a Muslim/Christian/?? group nearby to push and rile against.
On the upside, the judge has now granted these FSM believers a chance to prove themselves as genuinely religious. It seems that religions only fully develop under rejection and oppression by the current system... so the FSM folk should really be thanking this judge and embracing their opportunity!
Slashdot Mirror
The risk I feel you're overlooking here is that kids at these young ages will mimic stuff they see, because they don't yet have the depth of understanding required to determine which actions are dangerous.
It's not the possibly-immoral-or-disagreeable things that people are concerned about. It would be the video that shows someone stabbing or harming themselves, or eating poisonous things (hello tide-pods!) that cause the outrage. On their own, the kid might not think to try this, but once they see someone else doing it, you can bet it'll move to the top of their todo list.
There are some really good reasons to shelter children of certain ages from certain things...
Where did I say that there weren't many negatives? I'm curious. What I said was is that there wouldn't be the commensurate benefits to the female pill.
Ah, true. I (mis)interpreted your sentence as downplaying the number of side-effects associated with the female pill. The list of potential negative side-effects is horrendously long... enough that it's little comfort that the existing female pill might have a few potential benefits some women might experience from the side-effects (i.e., ignoring the primary reason for taking this for most women).
Among them being significantly less acne, suppression of cramps/bleeding, statistically significant suppression of migrane headaches and several other bells and whistles.
But just as long as we're clear, this is for *some* people, and for many others it can have an opposite effect. I.e., the female pill is not a net win at all... it's just a gamble women/society are willing to try in the quest for personal agency. I'm not trying to make a judgement call about whether the trade-off is good or bad (after all, I'm not the main target of the medication)... but I have found that many people don't appreciate how hit and miss the pill side-effects can be. If you're not in that category, that's excellent, and I'm merely preaching to the choir :-)
As for my source, that would be the study on the injectable version of the therapy that was shut down by independent scientific advisory boards 2 years ago. Which showed, among other things, a 45% incidence of INCREASED acne, 17% incidence of "adverse emotional reactions" which is either massively unstable mood swings or even classic roid rage but specifics are unknown as the study refused to specify, and two participants which made suicide attempts with one succeeding. But hey, there was also 39% incidence of increased libido. Course, the same effect occurs with multiple other testosterone therapies and has jack fucking all to do with the fertility suppression aspect. So worst case scenario you end up with uglier pock ridden unstable sex maniacs who go on to commit suicide running around. I'm pretty sure I saw a Rick and Morty episode about that.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the fact that one of the participants has still not recovered their fertility and multiple other participants took over a year to recover. Considering that this was not a study monitoring long term effects that's really bad.
Interesting stuff! Thanks for sharing this.
Ostensibly it will allow men the same choice as women regarding birth control. This is patently false of course since women derive many other benefits from hormonal birth control that men do not, and either the same negatives or similar ones are almost certainly still there.
What were your sources of information for this statement?
There is a *lot* of negative side effects possible for the pill, and there are a surprisingly large number of people who have adverse reactions to the pill. You just don't read about it much in the mainstream, because women generally just switch to alternative contraception forms.
This doesn't even go into the fact that testosterone added to the body has long term semi-permanent effects on the body's ability to generate it, unlike estrogen.
Studies have been done that showed women taking the pill do undergo permanent hormone changes. The problem is the same for both genders.
The technical issue is that the bill requires no throttling of consumers in California, no matter where their data is traveling from. The last mile isn't hard, but if the site the user requests is hosted overseas, the ISP needs every switch it owns in the request & response chains to realise that that this is traffic is not legally allowed to be treated any different from any other traffic destined for California. So, either the packets need to be marked to indicate this, or an isolated net neutral (CA-only) network could potentially be required to ensure the traffic is handled in a legal fashion.
Don't get me wrong... I like what CA is doing here for sure, and will have my popcorn ready for the battle... but it does seem to me that there is some truth to the technical difficulty of implementing this feature.
I must admit... I'm kind of puzzled as to why you think a $79 battery replacement is cheap and completely acceptable.
Your key argument, repeated all over the place here, is that Apple is being generous for such a cheap price-tag to replace a part that *everyone* knows needs regular replacement. I can replace the battery in my non-Apple phone, using *genuine* parts no less, for under $15.
Though your moniker guarantees you are incapable of doing so, you really ought to face the fact that Apple has (once again) put good looks ahead of good engineering, and the end result is their customers get fleeced by practices such as this. I wonder what people would do if they were told up front that this phone would cost them so much to maintain in working order, compared to non-Apple phones?
Oh please. The Internet grew just fine from 1987 when I first got access to it until the new rules were passed in 2015.
This is a fallacious point.
Up until circa 2006, the majority of ISP industry understood that their customers pay them for access to the whole internet. And that their role was to ship those bytes to the customers as fast as possible.
Then, a particular moron in the US uttered the immortal phrase "the internet is a series of tubes", and all hell started breaking loose. Soon, we had customers finding themselves unable to use services on the links they paid for, including BitTorrent, Netflix, etc. From this point on, ISPs seemed to start throttling whatever the hell they wanted, and started attempting to extort additional money out of the companies producing the content being demanded by the ISPs' customers.
This brings us to the present. The ISPs have seen the huge amounts of money to be made off the network, and seem to believe they are entitled to more money above and beyond what their customers are paying them for access. Without competition, there is no natural "free market" economy that will force good behaviour on these huge companies, thus net neutrality is required to avoid the Cable-isation of the internet (i.e., avoid the Facebook + Video Streaming package, or the Slashdot + Netflix streaming bundle).
The internet survived up until the laws were passed purely based on the inexperience of the telecom companies in exploiting their stranglehold. The amount of lobbying effort they are putting into getting these laws repealed should tell you everything you need to know about their intentions moving forward...
How the hell did you get that from what I wrote?!
See:
Sure.. overturn the law. But that's not what the dad was doing. He was just violating copyright and whining when his son (correctly) called him on it.
Rosa Parks this dad ain't
It seems you judge this behaviour as not civil disobedience. Why is that? The best explanation I can come up with is that you are comparing the law the dad is protesting to the law Rosa Parks protested, and judging the father's actions as not sufficiently important? I don't really understand your point there to be honest...
Care to explain what Rosa Parks has to do with anything...?
I feel a bit like you've bought into this whole copyright protection racket, hook, line & sinker.
Rather than looking at the holistic intent of copyright and it's relationship with society (i.e., to increase creativity by allowing authors a guaranteed income stream for a specific amount of time), you're view the thing as if it is absolutely and irrefutably defined and controlled by the current, pretty one-sided licenses being attached to things by aggressive multinationals.
We as a group chose to allow and enforce copyright on our population because we saw it as important for allowing creative types to live. Is that still happening, when the majority of the money you pay for an item now go to the gatekeeping distributors and channels, rather than the individuals producing the actual content you consume?
Something that has gotten lost in Hollywood's attempts to build a sustainable business out of rehashing the same IP forever is that it is a PRIVILEGE to have your copyright & license enforced by society. Copyright was never a guarantee to be able to live off a single release forever. In fact, it was originally designed to NOT encourage that... you want great artists to still have incentive to produced great art, which they don't have if they are set for life off a single item.
Finally, it is a very naive to imagine that simply not buying something is still an effective form of protest today, when your taxes get fed into increasing the regulatory capture these companies have achieved. I don't agree with straight-out piracy... but I am vehemently against the idea that it's reasonable for someone to sell you a for a piece of music or literature and have any say about how you use that privately.
So you have a threshold? The law must be at least X much unjust before you should disobey it?
The question is, was Netflix faster because they paid your ISP more money, or because your ISP anticipated that this would please the majority of it's customer-base?
The problem with a non-neutral network is that the balance of power shifts from ISPs trying to please the customers (who pay them the most money), to ISPs trying to shake down large content providers for access to their customer network. I agree that in throttling or QoS, someone has to lose if the network is insufficient to support capacity. However, I'd prefer the choice about who and how to throttle to be led by customer preferences.
The hard part for legislation is that it's difficult to cut allowance for QoS that can't be easily abused to also throttle competitor or content providers in ways that are highly anti-competitive and undesirable for customers. I do agree we need to be careful what we wish for here though, as QoS is not bad conceptually... it's just unfortunate that it's such an easily abused power.
I can address your first (and repeated) point upfront: I have no "team" as far as politics are concerned. Like you, I'm also concerned by the rather two-faced nature of Obama's presidency (hello Patriot Act!), and in no way believe the leaks and reductions in civil liberties under his reign are somehow excused due to his party affiliation.
Now, the bit I'm unsure about (perhaps I've mis-read your original quip incorrectly) is exactly what position you're advocating. You seemed to be decrying the hysteria, when in reality, it sounds like we both agree that this action was not acceptable, and what you are decrying is hypocrisy.
In this particular instance, in the best case, it was a government screw-up, in a fairly ironic fashion, that serves to demonstrate that the government is not fit to handle the voting data it's requesting. After all, they've just proven they're fundamentally incapable of properly protecting the privacy of said data.
In the worst case, the government has taken punitive action against individuals who clearly value their privacy enough to write emails. Now, I don't believe this is the case, but... it's still a possibility.
I agree we shouldn't let Obama get away with being treated like an angel, but are you actually advocating that has any impact on whether this should be ignored or not? I'd suggest that the most balanced view ought to treat these events with equal concern, as a symptom of the underlying rot at present within politics and the government. This is not the end of things... but it's certainly not a step in a direction the government ought to take. And it's certainly not behaviour we ought to be excusing.
You seem to be conflating two issues together.
The primary focus here is that missives expressing privacy concerns (i.e., NOT the voting records) were reproduced, in full, including contact information, on the White House website. It was voluntary to send the message, but there was no expectation that these would be released online in the fashion they were.
The other one you are referring to (Trump's demands for voter information), is a different case altogether. But... you are tying together voting with the act of getting your voting preferences released and scruitinsed by others. The big question you need to ask yourself is: was this what the voters were expecting to have happen? If not, then the request by Trump is inappropriate, and this is nothing like a phonebook, as one party is surprised by who has access to their details.
Please, apply your critical thinking skills to that and see what you come up with...
Phonebook is voluntary... this was not.
If you can't see the difference, then I fear there's no hope left for you.
The fundamental requirement for a free market to function, is it has to be free.
There is a large problem in the US that this is blatantly not the case. As a consumer, you don't get much choice to churn ISPs if the one you're with now isn't providing good value for you by arranging good peering agreements. This is unlike Netflix or Google, where I can simply not visit their site if they don't offer a compelling reason. The reason for legislative protection is to try and counteract the monopoly that consumer ISPs have.
I'd be willing to drop the net neutrality requirements if we can also drop all municipal / council regs that prevent local-grown broadband from being developed, and force ISP transparency around how and where interlink congestion occurs.
Considering I could just say "I quit" and do the same thing, yes.
Your contract covers this scenario however. That is, both parties agree that you quitting is an acceptable outcome. Most places will require a minimum of X weeks notice (some as many as 3 months in very senior roles) to aid the handover of responsibilities and find replacements. There is a distinct difference when the termination is a surprise, and not a result of breaking the contract. If an employee does something in violation of their contract, sure, instant dismissal is expected, and there is an assumption the employee either knew or was at fault for not realising they were breaking contract.
Most countries have laws about company-initiated termination because in the average work environment the business has greater power in the relationship than the worker. The laws are there to ensure companies (which have no inherently moral outlook... in my experience, often the opposite) can't abuse their position in this negotiation. The cost to dump an employee helps force companies to prefer to upskill and re-allocate individuals, rather than wholesale firing cycles.
Your argument is interesting, but fails badly on a single point:
Someone producing THEIR OWN VERSION of your chair might be fine... but someone re-using your chair? The concept of copying music, as performed by someone else, has no analogous situation in the physical world examples you're using. You aren't reproducing your own version of the song... you're simply distributing someone else's song for free.
Copyright is a sane concept as it means people who invest into great works can earn a living. But... it's current implementation and associated industries isn't so great...
Quoting define:google just for clarity:
derivative: something which is based on another source.
If it's a modified Ubuntu, it's a derivative. You can still make modified Ubuntu distributions. You just can't re-use the TRADEMARK when advertising your derivative. That is, you can use the source code exactly how you want. You cannot use the Ubuntu name to advertise your resulting distro, unless you meet minimum guidelines.
Also, Debian does have protection around the use of it's name in things: https://www.debian.org/tradema...
Specifically:
You cannot use Debian trademarks in any way that suggests an affiliation with or endorsement by the Debian project or community, if the same is not true.
To summarise: You can still create modified distributions of Ubuntu... you just can't call them "Allo's Ubuntu"
Mozilla does the same and gets the same criticism. Debian doesn't prevent people from make "debian derivatives".
You keep repeating "prevent people from make [...] derivatives", but that is explicitly NOT what's going on here.
You can make as many derivatives as you want... you just can't call them "Allo's Ubuntu", unless you pass Canonical's criteria for using the trademark.
They're not preventing people from making derivatives. They're preventing the derivatives from mentioning the Ubuntu system underpinning it, because Canonical believes (with a decent amount of proof) that this is tarnishing the Ubuntu brand name.
Canonical is not the first, nor will they be the last, to do this. Mozilla, Debian, RedHat... all these major distros enforce the same rules.
Again, the cloud providers *can* make their own versions/distros based on Ubuntu... they just can't advertise this fact unless the quality of their VM image meets a certain bar.
How does this situation lead you to that conclusion?
Are you saying Canonical should just allow Ubuntu's trademark to be used, even when it's clear the underlying VM image has been badly compromised by the cloud provider?
Uhhh... I'm not entirely clear where your logic follows from.
Canonical isn't saying "don't modify and use Ubuntu"... they're saying "don't break Ubuntu in stupid ways, but then still plaster the Ubuntu trademark all over your sales material". This seems like a perfectly reasonable request to me.
Let's say you made a brand of beer, let's call it allo's ale, and you start giving this away to local pubs to serve to customers. Then, one local pub decides to mix your beer with their leftover coffee dregs (hipsters, I tell ya'), but still under the name allo's ale. Don't you see the problem? You (allo) didn't make this beer, it's now been completely corrupted beyond recognition, yet, this pub is still claiming it's your beer. These patrons who buy your ale from the coffee-dregs-place will now tell all their friends your beer sucks, and before you know it, everyone now just assumes you made the crappy tasting beer.
This is the same problem Canonical are fighting against here. The cloud provider(s) have modified Ubuntu in such a way as to fundamentally break the security and functionality of the system. If they don't put a stop to this, people who use these corrupted images will assume *Canonical* and *Ubuntu* are responsible for their bad experiences... not the cloud provider who seems to be mixing the coffee dregs into the VM image they serve.
One of the genuine beliefs of pastafarians is that religious belief should not get special privileges. One might argue that they believe this "religiously". It is indeed satire, so I think the judge is correct there. I think where the judge is wrong is arbitrarily deciding that any form of satire is necessarily disqualified as a religion.
We're in agreement that satire doesn't necessarily disqualify something from being a religion. But, holding an idea "religiously" does not make that idea the basis for a religion.
*In general*, I agree religions are hard to pin down. For concrete instances though, it's less gray than people generally wish to believe as you really can take into account your best understanding of the proponent's intent.
Again, to restate... the question here isn't whether religions are special or deserve any special treatment. The question here is whether FSM and it's proponents are doing anything other than trying to cynically game the system. The judge seems believe that the answer is a resounding no. If it was a different religion, the outcome would also likely have been different too.
This is analogous to how members of other religions may not believe in every literal claim their religion makes. Some christians don't even believe that Jesus was anything more than a normal human being with some good ideas.
I struggle to agree with this, because FSM deliberately and consciously espouses things they ALL don't believe in. This seems blatantly different to the situation where there's internal debate within a religion (e.g., your Jesus example is a good one). Find me a FSM practitioner who actually believes their stories, and I'll happily reconsider :-)
Either way... I've enjoyed the discussion with you!
That's not true. One of the core beliefs of Pastafarians is the power of mocking other people. And their traditional way of doing this is through outfits and worship.
And this is a religious activity? I mean, that sounds like something people do when discussing football, or politics, or work colleagues. In effect, you're proving precisely the judge's point though. It's an arbitrary set of actions, made up by an arbitrary group and branded as religion as a point of satire.
A satire-of-a-religion is *not* a religion, and should not be treated as such. Any attempts reframe it as a *genuine* religion is a blatant troll... because FSM doesn't see itself as anything other than satire.
("But what if the other religions are also satire?"... even if we imagine for a moment that religions somehow started as satire, the majority of them are now genuinely held beliefs. FSM is still openly satire.
Pastafarians absolutely have real beliefs, they are just different than their professed beliefs. Part of pastafarianism is to profess certain ridiculous beliefs even if you don't really believe them (i.e. like Catholics and transubstantiation).
Oh... unquestionably Pastafarians believe in *something*... but those beliefs have 0 correlation to the demands being made by the prisoners. The demands for outfits and worship (two things FSM openly mocks) make as much sense as your local Buddhist trying to get a religious grant for their Ferrari...
There are a lot of worshippers who don't believe the literal meaning of their literature. For example, many Catholics don't believe in transsubstantiation, i.e. that the host (wafer) turns into the flesh and the wine turns into the blood of Jesus during communion. [...]
There's a difference though, between disagreement about the details (every religion has this), vs. deliberate unbelief in the professed religion. The judge recognises that FSM initiated as a satirical belief, and is basically calling BS on the claim by these individuals that they *actually* believe and care about this satire-as-religion.
I know we're knee-deep in the whole "but who are you to question others' belief" era... but really, all proponents of FSM that I know are merely being anti-religious. I.e., if someone asked them to list the top 5 most important things in their life, FSM wouldn't make the list, I can assure you. Nor would they have even stumbled into FSM without there being a Muslim/Christian/?? group nearby to push and rile against.
On the upside, the judge has now granted these FSM believers a chance to prove themselves as genuinely religious. It seems that religions only fully develop under rejection and oppression by the current system... so the FSM folk should really be thanking this judge and embracing their opportunity!