While the source being open is pretty important, the really important thing is that anybody can host a Diaspora node and link to anybody hosted on any other Diaspora node. And Diaspora will also include ways to link to people on things like Facebook. The idea is that just because all your friends are using X, you can still be linked to them effectively without using X.
I think both parties would be much happier that way. The Bush administration wanted me to believe that it was perfectly OK for them to slap people in jail for an arbitrary length of time without any evidence beyond the wrong skin color or having happened to be on the wrong road at the wrong time.
And the Obama administration has done little to reverse this while also telling me that being fined for not having health insurance is the way to save the health care system in this country.
Yes and no. Yes, competitors complained about them, and that started the investigation. And it was numerous competitors who were largely unconnected with each other, not a small group who's financial health were intertwined. And they all complained about similar behavior spread out over a long period of time.
But no, that wasn't what got them convicted. What got them convicted was a clear and obvious intent to use a monopoly in a different market, and their use of their monopoly position to create false barriers to entry to another. The findings of fact were painfully clear on that point.
They wanted to kill Netscape, not compete with, but destroy utterly, and not by making a better browser, but by using their control over Windows to make sure Netscape would not be installed anywhere regardless of whether or not people liked it better.
And they made it nearly impossible to buy Intel hardware that ran anything other than Windows by penalizing companies that sold anything other than Windows on their hardware.
The only monopoly position where Google exercises a great deal of exploitable control is over ads on the Internet. Their acquisition of Doubleclick concerned me.
Only a complete idiot of a search company would ever use search results as an anti-competitive tool. They would lose consumer trust nearly instantly, and that's what keeps Google in business. In fact, the main reason I don't use Bing is because I suspect Microsoft would be that stupid.
I see this complaint as a cynical ploy by a company that thinks antitrust shouldn't have ever been applied to it. A ploy to both knock consumer confidence, and possibly manage to get Google in the same kind of trouble Microsoft thought it got into.
That is stupid. Antitrust is not about your competitors complaining about you. Antitrust is when you are so economically powerful that you can destroy the free market and create a situation in which you economically destroy anybody who competes with you.
'What goes around comes around.' reveals a mindset in which antitrust is all part of the normal give-and-take of companies competing against each other. It isn't. Somebody has to engage in a specific set of behaviors deemed anticompetitive for it to be considered an antitrust problem. It's a market distortion, and companies accused of it aren't playing by rules in which capitalism can function properly.
It's possible this accusation against Google is true. But I suspect it's just smoke. If it is true, I will consider Google to have done something truly evil and deserving of this investigation. And it will not be a case of 'what goes around comes around'. It will be a case of a company doing something wrong that should be punished severely.
The lesson they took away from the antitrust trial was "Antitrust is a way for competitors to use the government to interfere with your business." not "We were being evil and wrong and got into trouble for it.". The wrong lesson. They got off way too lightly and too many people were sympathetic.
Since they took that lesson away, now they think they can do the same thing to Google. They might be right, but I hope not. Though if their allegation has merit (which I strongly suspect it doesn't) I will stop trusting Google and be pretty angry at them.
While I think this dilution of meaning has been a little less in this case, I would generally agree with you. Our politics are poisoned by the two party system. It's nearly impossible to actually have a reasoned discourse on anything anymore.
Are you talking Sean Hannity? *shudder* I just watched when he interviewed Jesse Ventura, and it was kind of funny.
Jesse was the best thing to happen to MN for a long time. He isn't much of a fan of government, but he's also a big believer in pragmatism and using the tool that's there. Minneapolis has a fantastically successful light rail line because of Jesse. One it needed for years, but nobody had the gumption to put in.
I'm reluctant to call myself a small 'l' libertarian anymore. I do think government needs to be vastly smaller. But I also think it needs to be much more effective at its job. I think the free market can frequently fail because large companies wield so much power. And I also think it can fall into local minima and need a kick in the pants in order to jump out and find even more efficient solutions, for example reliance on non-renewable energy sources. And I think the environment is an unrealized externality in so much of our economic activity and that needs to change in a big way.
I would like a government that's much smaller, and regulates by tweaking free market forces into pushing companies towards desired behavior instead of trying to forbid or regulate it directly.
Some people are worried that global warming will trigger a methyl hydrate apocalypse in which the vast stores of methyl hydrate locked into ice at the bottom of many bodies of water begins to boil and release all the methane into the atmosphere causing a greenhouse effect that's much, much worse than the CO2 one we're causing for ourselves now.
I suppose that having the methyl hydrate mined and turned into CO2 is better than having it released as methane. But that is somehow little comfort.
That's an interesting observation, but I suspect that if anything like that did happen with something more mainstream that it wouldn't be nearly as notable and nobody would be spinning conspiracy theories about it.
Or, how about this: The girls are members of a political group in Sweden that would like to discredit Assange and hatched the idea of accusing him themselves.
Your attempt to use Occam's Razor in this case could easily apply to anybody accused of any crime ever. Somehow I don't think this is a reasonable tool to use to discern fact from fiction in this case.
The choice is not between 'car' and 'rail'. The choice is between 'rail' and 'airplane'.
There is a nice Amtrak route from Seattle, WA to Portland, OR. It takes about 3 hours, and a plane flight is less than an hour. At least, until you factor in getting to the airport (way outside of town, and the Amtrak station is right downtown), going through security, the cramped seating, and the overall icky stupidity of the entire process of air travel nowadays. Then the Amtrak starts looking a heck of a lot more attractive than a plane flight.
I also travel to San Francisco from Seattle sometimes. My current choice is to take a plane. If there were a high-speed rail corridor to San Francisco that took less than 5 or 6 hours, I might well choose it instead. Sure, it's an hour or two longer than even the total time spent to travel there by air. But it's an hour or two of comfort, not an hour or two of not-quite uncomfortable enough to be unbearable that air travel is.
Despite that, I seem to recall hearing stories of various encryption ideas the NSA developed in the '70s and '80s which weren't developed in the open until the late '90s and early 2000s (sorry, no citation).
Of course, the late 90s and early 2000s were also when the serious speed and ease of communication issues were really addressed for the majority of researchers. So this fact, if anything, decreases the probability that a major player has managed a serious breakthrough that it's successfully kept hidden.
It won't be armageddon. Slowly parts of the Internet will be become unavailable and inaccessible to you as some sites become IPv6 only since they can't even get a valid IPv4 address. It won't be a disaster, it will be a slow loss of connectivity to the Internet as a whole.
Turning it off is horrible advice. You won't notice much of a difference right away, not until you start getting hits in search results that you can't actually fetch when you click on them. Talking to the entirety of the rest of the human race isn't a killer app exactly, but it is what the Interent is for, and by turning off IPv6 you are cutting yourself off from this benefit. Currently in a small way, but in an ever increasing way over time.
And you're wrong because you think wrong is right.
And here you infer an opinion that isn't directly supported by the text of my post. It may or may not be an opinion I have, given your definition of wrong, but it isn't supported by the text of my post.
I just had a question. Why, precisely, are people who think that Wikileaks is perfectly in the right wrong? What moral principle did they violate?
"It's illegal." isn't a moral principle. Whether or not its even true, it's just a statement of a government's opinion of the activity.
That government does not represent me, and hasn't for possibly as long as I've been alive. It makes decisions at the highest level that are consistently nearly the opposite of what I think is just, fair and honorable, then tries to prevent me of learning of those decisions through blatantly deceiving me. If it governs me, it is without my consent and I do not condone its actions.
So, I repeat, why are people who think that Wikileaks has acted appropriately wrong? What set of principles can you bring to bear to justify this opinion?
The kid who leaked the material is in jail. Wikieleaks should be in the next cell, listening to him cry.
I think the kid who leaked the material should be in jail. He violated the agreement he made when he received his security clearance. While I admire his willingness to engage in that level of civil disobedience, I still think that he should be in jail. I don't think Assange is guilty of anything, and I don't think he should be in jail.
When talking of the actions of government, using the word 'criminal' is quite problematic. Governments are the entities that have the power to classify some actions as 'criminal' and some not. Whenever I see someone use that word to condemn someone's actions with regards to a government, I see someone using a circular self-justification. "It's wrong because the government said it's wrong!"
Personally, I place a lot more stock in arguments grounded in something anybody can judge for themselves without reliance on an authority. After all, the whole reason we have a system of law is the hope that public laws which anybody might judge will end up being more moral than the arbitrary dictates of an authority like a king.
Additionally, classified secrets are much like trade secrets. Once the cat is out of the bag, they are no longer considered secrets. So I believe your interpretation of the law is in error as well.
So basically, your argument boils down to "It's wrong because I think it's wrong!", not even "It's wrong because the government said it's wrong!".
Lastly, I think your balance between collateral damage to civilians vs. damage to civilians from retaliatory murder is a little off. I suspect the number of civilian casualties numbers in the thousands or 10s of thousands at a minimum. So if you wish a numerical calculus of death, then clearly the civilian casualties as 'collateral damage' form a much greater number and more moral culpability.
They're threatening to commit a crime if the feds don't stop applying the law to them. So even if they were innocent of the crime the feds want to try them for, the feds now have them dead to rights for extortion.
Releasing classified information when you don't have a security clearance is not illegal and it's not breaking a law. Also, nobody even knows what's in that file, so you can't accuse them of threatening to break a law by releasing the decryption key regardless of whether releasing classified information is breaking a law or not.
Well, MADD isn't a government organization, but politician's response to MADD is a prime example of the problem the grandparent is talking about. I think drunk driving should be a crime, but I don't know that lowering the limit to 0.08% was necessarily justified, and I think MADD has also been responsible for some of the outrageous penalties leveled for underage drinking and the raising of the legal age for alcohol consumption to 21.
No, real journalists aren't breaking the law by publishing classified information. I think there's more integrity in not breaking the law and protecting national security than by being an attention whore.
Unfortunately, your statement is based on a completely false premise. Publishing classified information is not a crime for anybody who hasn't been given a security clearance. There is significant case law to back up this view of things. You might try Googling "The Pentagon Papers".
And all journalists are attention whores, almost by definition. A significant part of our society's (more successful than I'm at all happy with) attempt to control journalists has been redirecting that drive in ways more profitable for advertisers. Complaining about it is basically saying that journalists shouldn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
While the source being open is pretty important, the really important thing is that anybody can host a Diaspora node and link to anybody hosted on any other Diaspora node. And Diaspora will also include ways to link to people on things like Facebook. The idea is that just because all your friends are using X, you can still be linked to them effectively without using X.
I think both parties would be much happier that way. The Bush administration wanted me to believe that it was perfectly OK for them to slap people in jail for an arbitrary length of time without any evidence beyond the wrong skin color or having happened to be on the wrong road at the wrong time.
And the Obama administration has done little to reverse this while also telling me that being fined for not having health insurance is the way to save the health care system in this country.
Yes and no. Yes, competitors complained about them, and that started the investigation. And it was numerous competitors who were largely unconnected with each other, not a small group who's financial health were intertwined. And they all complained about similar behavior spread out over a long period of time.
But no, that wasn't what got them convicted. What got them convicted was a clear and obvious intent to use a monopoly in a different market, and their use of their monopoly position to create false barriers to entry to another. The findings of fact were painfully clear on that point.
They wanted to kill Netscape, not compete with, but destroy utterly, and not by making a better browser, but by using their control over Windows to make sure Netscape would not be installed anywhere regardless of whether or not people liked it better.
And they made it nearly impossible to buy Intel hardware that ran anything other than Windows by penalizing companies that sold anything other than Windows on their hardware.
The only monopoly position where Google exercises a great deal of exploitable control is over ads on the Internet. Their acquisition of Doubleclick concerned me.
Only a complete idiot of a search company would ever use search results as an anti-competitive tool. They would lose consumer trust nearly instantly, and that's what keeps Google in business. In fact, the main reason I don't use Bing is because I suspect Microsoft would be that stupid.
I see this complaint as a cynical ploy by a company that thinks antitrust shouldn't have ever been applied to it. A ploy to both knock consumer confidence, and possibly manage to get Google in the same kind of trouble Microsoft thought it got into.
That is stupid. Antitrust is not about your competitors complaining about you. Antitrust is when you are so economically powerful that you can destroy the free market and create a situation in which you economically destroy anybody who competes with you.
'What goes around comes around.' reveals a mindset in which antitrust is all part of the normal give-and-take of companies competing against each other. It isn't. Somebody has to engage in a specific set of behaviors deemed anticompetitive for it to be considered an antitrust problem. It's a market distortion, and companies accused of it aren't playing by rules in which capitalism can function properly.
It's possible this accusation against Google is true. But I suspect it's just smoke. If it is true, I will consider Google to have done something truly evil and deserving of this investigation. And it will not be a case of 'what goes around comes around'. It will be a case of a company doing something wrong that should be punished severely.
The lesson they took away from the antitrust trial was "Antitrust is a way for competitors to use the government to interfere with your business." not "We were being evil and wrong and got into trouble for it.". The wrong lesson. They got off way too lightly and too many people were sympathetic.
Since they took that lesson away, now they think they can do the same thing to Google. They might be right, but I hope not. Though if their allegation has merit (which I strongly suspect it doesn't) I will stop trusting Google and be pretty angry at them.
Well, yes, there is that as well. :-)
While I think this dilution of meaning has been a little less in this case, I would generally agree with you. Our politics are poisoned by the two party system. It's nearly impossible to actually have a reasoned discourse on anything anymore.
'Conversative' has lost it's meaning an US politics and has become another name for a political party. The conversatives aren't conservative.
Are you talking Sean Hannity? *shudder* I just watched when he interviewed Jesse Ventura, and it was kind of funny.
Jesse was the best thing to happen to MN for a long time. He isn't much of a fan of government, but he's also a big believer in pragmatism and using the tool that's there. Minneapolis has a fantastically successful light rail line because of Jesse. One it needed for years, but nobody had the gumption to put in.
I'm reluctant to call myself a small 'l' libertarian anymore. I do think government needs to be vastly smaller. But I also think it needs to be much more effective at its job. I think the free market can frequently fail because large companies wield so much power. And I also think it can fall into local minima and need a kick in the pants in order to jump out and find even more efficient solutions, for example reliance on non-renewable energy sources. And I think the environment is an unrealized externality in so much of our economic activity and that needs to change in a big way.
I would like a government that's much smaller, and regulates by tweaking free market forces into pushing companies towards desired behavior instead of trying to forbid or regulate it directly.
Some people are worried that global warming will trigger a methyl hydrate apocalypse in which the vast stores of methyl hydrate locked into ice at the bottom of many bodies of water begins to boil and release all the methane into the atmosphere causing a greenhouse effect that's much, much worse than the CO2 one we're causing for ourselves now.
I suppose that having the methyl hydrate mined and turned into CO2 is better than having it released as methane. But that is somehow little comfort.
That's an interesting observation, but I suspect that if anything like that did happen with something more mainstream that it wouldn't be nearly as notable and nobody would be spinning conspiracy theories about it.
Women are taught to lie, men are taught to bluster and threaten as ways to get a situation to go the way they want by force.
Or, how about this: The girls are members of a political group in Sweden that would like to discredit Assange and hatched the idea of accusing him themselves.
Your attempt to use Occam's Razor in this case could easily apply to anybody accused of any crime ever. Somehow I don't think this is a reasonable tool to use to discern fact from fiction in this case.
The choice is not between 'car' and 'rail'. The choice is between 'rail' and 'airplane'.
There is a nice Amtrak route from Seattle, WA to Portland, OR. It takes about 3 hours, and a plane flight is less than an hour. At least, until you factor in getting to the airport (way outside of town, and the Amtrak station is right downtown), going through security, the cramped seating, and the overall icky stupidity of the entire process of air travel nowadays. Then the Amtrak starts looking a heck of a lot more attractive than a plane flight.
I also travel to San Francisco from Seattle sometimes. My current choice is to take a plane. If there were a high-speed rail corridor to San Francisco that took less than 5 or 6 hours, I might well choose it instead. Sure, it's an hour or two longer than even the total time spent to travel there by air. But it's an hour or two of comfort, not an hour or two of not-quite uncomfortable enough to be unbearable that air travel is.
Despite that, I seem to recall hearing stories of various encryption ideas the NSA developed in the '70s and '80s which weren't developed in the open until the late '90s and early 2000s (sorry, no citation).
Of course, the late 90s and early 2000s were also when the serious speed and ease of communication issues were really addressed for the majority of researchers. So this fact, if anything, decreases the probability that a major player has managed a serious breakthrough that it's successfully kept hidden.
It won't be armageddon. Slowly parts of the Internet will be become unavailable and inaccessible to you as some sites become IPv6 only since they can't even get a valid IPv4 address. It won't be a disaster, it will be a slow loss of connectivity to the Internet as a whole.
Turning it off is horrible advice. You won't notice much of a difference right away, not until you start getting hits in search results that you can't actually fetch when you click on them. Talking to the entirety of the rest of the human race isn't a killer app exactly, but it is what the Interent is for, and by turning off IPv6 you are cutting yourself off from this benefit. Currently in a small way, but in an ever increasing way over time.
Stupid and ignorant are not the same thing. Confusing them is a common geek fallacy.
This deserves +5 funny if any comment on this thread does.
Thank you for the information. I will keep it in mind when posting in the future.
I have mixed feelings on whether or not this is the correct way to do things, regardless of whether or not its actually how things are done.
And you're wrong because you think wrong is right.
And here you infer an opinion that isn't directly supported by the text of my post. It may or may not be an opinion I have, given your definition of wrong, but it isn't supported by the text of my post.
I just had a question. Why, precisely, are people who think that Wikileaks is perfectly in the right wrong? What moral principle did they violate?
"It's illegal." isn't a moral principle. Whether or not its even true, it's just a statement of a government's opinion of the activity.
That government does not represent me, and hasn't for possibly as long as I've been alive. It makes decisions at the highest level that are consistently nearly the opposite of what I think is just, fair and honorable, then tries to prevent me of learning of those decisions through blatantly deceiving me. If it governs me, it is without my consent and I do not condone its actions.
So, I repeat, why are people who think that Wikileaks has acted appropriately wrong? What set of principles can you bring to bear to justify this opinion?
The kid who leaked the material is in jail. Wikieleaks should be in the next cell, listening to him cry.
I think the kid who leaked the material should be in jail. He violated the agreement he made when he received his security clearance. While I admire his willingness to engage in that level of civil disobedience, I still think that he should be in jail. I don't think Assange is guilty of anything, and I don't think he should be in jail.
When talking of the actions of government, using the word 'criminal' is quite problematic. Governments are the entities that have the power to classify some actions as 'criminal' and some not. Whenever I see someone use that word to condemn someone's actions with regards to a government, I see someone using a circular self-justification. "It's wrong because the government said it's wrong!"
Personally, I place a lot more stock in arguments grounded in something anybody can judge for themselves without reliance on an authority. After all, the whole reason we have a system of law is the hope that public laws which anybody might judge will end up being more moral than the arbitrary dictates of an authority like a king.
Additionally, classified secrets are much like trade secrets. Once the cat is out of the bag, they are no longer considered secrets. So I believe your interpretation of the law is in error as well.
So basically, your argument boils down to "It's wrong because I think it's wrong!", not even "It's wrong because the government said it's wrong!".
Lastly, I think your balance between collateral damage to civilians vs. damage to civilians from retaliatory murder is a little off. I suspect the number of civilian casualties numbers in the thousands or 10s of thousands at a minimum. So if you wish a numerical calculus of death, then clearly the civilian casualties as 'collateral damage' form a much greater number and more moral culpability.
CO2 can be easily cracked into oxygen and carbon. The process is called photosynthesis.
They're threatening to commit a crime if the feds don't stop applying the law to them. So even if they were innocent of the crime the feds want to try them for, the feds now have them dead to rights for extortion.
Releasing classified information when you don't have a security clearance is not illegal and it's not breaking a law. Also, nobody even knows what's in that file, so you can't accuse them of threatening to break a law by releasing the decryption key regardless of whether releasing classified information is breaking a law or not.
Well, MADD isn't a government organization, but politician's response to MADD is a prime example of the problem the grandparent is talking about. I think drunk driving should be a crime, but I don't know that lowering the limit to 0.08% was necessarily justified, and I think MADD has also been responsible for some of the outrageous penalties leveled for underage drinking and the raising of the legal age for alcohol consumption to 21.
No, real journalists aren't breaking the law by publishing classified information. I think there's more integrity in not breaking the law and protecting national security than by being an attention whore.
Unfortunately, your statement is based on a completely false premise. Publishing classified information is not a crime for anybody who hasn't been given a security clearance. There is significant case law to back up this view of things. You might try Googling "The Pentagon Papers".
And all journalists are attention whores, almost by definition. A significant part of our society's (more successful than I'm at all happy with) attempt to control journalists has been redirecting that drive in ways more profitable for advertisers. Complaining about it is basically saying that journalists shouldn't exist.