I'm certain that watching the state sneeringly auction off his personal effects on the internet from his cage for the amusement of the crowd will serve as a devastating rebuke to his thesis that technology inevitably tightens its grip on the individual and drives them to ever shallower and more inauthentic attempts at activity.
I find the guy's terrorist activities deeply distasteful, and he certainly deserves to rot in jail for them; but as a theorist of the sociology of technological advance, he is actually pretty underrated...
I'm not sure if my transmitter is correctly tuned to reach the twilight zone; but I'll try:
The press writes articles about stuff. Sometimes, those articles cast actors and organizations in a less than positive light. If this is what they deserve, the press is performing one of the more socially vital functions around. If it is undeserved, they can be be taken to court for libel. "Trademark" is intended to protect a company's distinctive marks from being used deceptively in the marketplace, not to give an entity the legal right to insist that its nose be kept clean, no matter how dirty it might be.
Use of trademarks as a graphical shorthand or accent to make the reader immediately aware of who you are writing about is perfectly valid, and indeed quite logical. If what you are writing about happens to be bad behavior on the part of the trademark holder, perhaps they ought to try behaving better.
This isn't about somebody going after "Nokla" brand phones, this is about the NYSE using spurious trademark claims in an attempt to gag the press.
As we all know, "The Internet Is For Porn." Like any large organism, the internet has a sort of immune system that rejects dangerous or invasive entities attempting to disrupt its homeostasis. That is why the facebook page in question was brought down, and why a thick "network cyst, preventing packets from spreading further into the network" is growing around locations like China and Iran.
Did anything that I said contradict that? Obviously he can do as he likes. My point was that, for Microsoft, emphasizing Gate's philanthropy would be a lousy PR move. PR and marketing are all about making yourself and your products look better. Emphasizing the wealth your executives have acquired, is lousy PR because it is a reminder that all that money(no matter how legitimately made by Gates) is money that didn't go into making Microsoft products better or cheaper.
To be fair, he was a Diebold employee. He probably assumed that there was no fraud sufficiently blatant to be punished for.
More realistically, he was probably an opportunist, possibly with a newfound need for fast cash, and good counterfeit currency, while certainly not impossible to make or obtain, is not something you can just get ahold of in a moment. Were a sophisticated counterfeiting operation looking for a dispersal method, an ATM service dude might be a useful 'hire'. A random ATM service dude probably doesn't know how to just look up the local counterfeiters...
I suspect that their problem with just going stable(aside from ego-driven bullshittery) is that they know that playing defense is hard.
After all, they took their (abjectly sucky; but cheap) desktop OS, grew a bunch of marketshare during the desktop boom, and then had the momentum and resources to build essentially an entirely new OS(NT) and, through a mixture of interface familiarity and tie-ins to the desktop, begin assaults on both the server side and the handheld side(the former fairly effective, even not-primarily-windows shops are likely to have at least a couple of domain controllers and maybe an Exchange server, and they've even managed to produce offerings that aren't utterly laughable in web-serving and compute... Handheld, er, not quite as much...)
For a company that has done that, watching Google build an email system that everybody likes, then start tacking on some crude word-processing features, or Apple build a phone that is highly popular, likely reminds them of the look in IBM's eyes back when "IBM PC" started turning into "Wintel".
Obviously, just as MS never successfully attacked some of the legacy UNIX and mainframe installations, MS's competitors will likely never crack some hardcore microsoftie corporations; but Microsoft has real room to worry as you get further away from those.
The question is whether he is just narcissistically obsessed with universal dominance, or if he is keenly aware of how powerful little things like network effects and legacy install bases are...
Much of Microsoft's history is, arguably, a demonstration of how useful it is to have an exclusive platform large enough to lure developers, platform continuity long enough to allow people to get away with running almost whatever crap they want, and using people's dependence on one part of your product line to extend into other areas.
I don't think that such an association would be helpful: Philanthropists score higher(outside of hardcore randroid demographics) than do grasping plutocrats with gigantic yachts or whatever; but both are symbols of a company's success in extracting money from its customers...
If you are a customer, having your money extracted and then used to fight malaria is, arguably, nicer than having it extracted and used to build a 15th mansion; but philanthropy and plutocratic excess are, equally, signals of money that isn't being invested in R&D or being left in customers' hands with lower prices, or employee's hands with higher wages.
Unlike the Nefarious 'Great Firewall of China', a hated symbol of communist repression, the "PROTECT-IP" act will be entirely in English, and promises to be a tool of crony-capitalist repression!
The storage and bandwidth obviously aren't free, so they presumably take a nonzero(on average, might be negative on some products, exorbitant on others) cut; but there doesn't appear to be a defined "cut" across the board.
The main differentiation between Amazon and Apple, in this case, appears to be that Apple has tight integration with the OS and itunes payment system, plus an update mechanism; but demands relatively strict compliance with their standards. Amazon, on the other hand, uses the amazon payment mechanism, and is willing to offer for download pretty much whatever installer you were already slapping in cardboard boxes.
Barring a swift move to iOS-ize OSX, Apple will likely scoop up most of the crossover iOS devs, and the indies, while Amazon will serve as an easy "sure, we offer that by download as well" sale outlet for companies more comfortable with shipping boxed software and/or not using Apple's revelation-of-the-month coding and API standards.
In the short run, I'd be damned surprised: Disk players have been shoehorning 'value-add' features in at least since the first DVD player or video-CD player made a vague attempt at decoding a data disk full of JPEGs with an interface that wasn't wholly unusable. Such pack-in features have largely been appallingly badly executed and(since they aren't the primary advertised features, and models change all the time) there wasn't much in the way of informed-consumer pressure to make them better. I'd be rather surprised if blu-ray players with streamer pack-ins do too much better.
Long run? Umm, sure, why not? Once time works out enough of the rough edges of something, it becomes a commodity and you can save money by integrating it into the box/motherboard/chipset/whatever. Hell, if it weren't for the various DRM bullshittery being bandied about by cable outfits, TVs would probably be well on their way to devouring STBs entirely...
It would be nice if the control was a lot more fine grained within each access type e.g. Do you want to allow the app internet access to a specific URL (for example for high scores) and block any other internet access.
It unnerves me a little to see most apps requesting access to your contacts, internet etc without a more detailed explanation why.
I'd like to see the possibilities go one better: Lying.
Imagine a sort of "chroot" for application data: a contained environment, controlled by the actual root environment, in which exists a set of files sufficiently complete to allow the enclosed process(es) to do their thing as though they were the rulers of all they survey; but without actually giving them that power. When creating a chroot, you can either populate it with a relatively complete clone of the real root, or a specially crafted one for a specific purpose.
Being able to granularly confirm/deny individual requests by an application is a good start; but it means a significant risk that an application with break(or chose to take its ball and go home) if denied certain permissions. However, if one could define multiple(presumably hierarchically namespaced, just for neatness' sake) "data chroots" to which one could grant access(all of which would look like data roots, to the application with access) this could be avoided. Such data chroots could be constructed whole cloth, simply by manual or automatically installed definition files, or by "filters" applied to real data.
Got an application that wants your contacts for no good reason? "Grant it access" to a ficticious one consisting of generic but plausible contacts. Social Yelpcoupon 2.0ster wants your precise location data? Give it access to a filtered data chroot that only allows for city-level precision; but is based off the real location data, so that you get offers relevant to your general area.
Obviously, team google would never, in a million years, endorse such a scheme; but it would be architecturally workable enough, and give an extra weapon to those fighting pushy apps.
It is somewhat interesting to see an image format brought to the table without something basic like support for EXIF storage of some kind, or some feature(however crudely hacked on) that makes it clearly superior to JPEG(like an Alpha channel).
I can understand that somebody the size of Google probably gets real worked up about how to shove more images through slightly less bandwidth; but that actually seems like kind of a niche concern: For icon/branding/graphic design purposes, much of the heavy lifting is done by lossless(for clean, non-crunchy look); but small because of limited color palettes, broad areas of flat color, etc. images. That's mostly GIF and PNG, with some Flash and SVG.
For everyone from people who barely care to people who care how it will look as an 8*10 or a desktop background, you have JPEGs of various sizes and compression levels. On the low end, people will put up with some seriously grain-tastic shit, so long as it loads fast. Anybody who is too good for JPEG entirely is probably either slamming around some fancy print-ready flavor of TIFF, or storing whatever flavor of RAW their preferred camera back spits out.
Typically, the "workstation" card makes you pay out the nose per unit silicon(though, at the same time, the top of the "workstation" range is going to be the only place to find the maximum RAM available to that generation, along with genlock and similar); but the "gamer" card will probably skimp on things like double-precision math and drivers that don't suck for anything other than playing Metal of Duty Crysis Evolved.
I'm not so sure: Obviously, assorted sinister TLAs are happy to exploit available holes; but all but the really stupid ones have to realize that they don't exactly live in a unipolar world when it comes to writing viruses, and that the US(and its assorted western buddies) have a lot to lose in an atmosphere of general SCADA-smashing.
If all SCADA systems become deeply vulnerable, who loses more? Industrial or post-industrial societies with high levels of complexity that could be on the edge of collapse with a few days of supply chain disruption, or the dusty low-GDP countries of the world where disenfranchised hackers, cheap laptops(and/or exploits provided by friendly powers using them as proxies) are still easily available?
While publicly traded corporations, and their friends, love to cry about sarbox and similar, to say that those created the situation is so misleading as to constitute a lie. The concern for natural persons is the fact that things like Gmail are socially pretty much the same as personal mail; but have none of the 4th amendment jurisprudence protecting them.
Work email, and records, since those are already widely understood to be an open book as far as the employer is concerned, are already not usefully private, even if the state didn't exist. The fact that your boss can read them any time he pleases, with even less oversight than the most sinister three-letter-intelligence agency, basically ensures that.
(now, as the IT department, having to do document retention annoys me as much as anybody; but conflating requirements that corporations voluntarily bring upon themselves as a condition of being publicly traded, limited liability entities(a very valuable status...) with the novel privacy problems encountered by services that are treated as "personal" but run as outsourced hosted services is either confused or dishonest.)
In practice, not very. Legally, the right to "be secure in one's person, papers, and effects" has generally been regarded as providing relatively strong protection to one's domicile and property stored therein(exceptions, of course, exist, because drugs are scary and terrorists are scary); but has not been regarded as being particularly relevant to some bits floating around somebody else's datacenter(that, depending on the ToS may or may not even be 'yours').
It would be nice to see offsite-stored "papers and effects" get some 4th amendment love. Unfortunately, as long as the 'terrorism and intelligence' loophole exists, the present bill is sort of a waste of effort.
This is going to be one to watch: The US is supposed to be all against repression and lovey-dovey about religious freedom and stuff; but there is No Fucking Way that they would let the precedent be set that corporate quislings executing illegal state activities are in any way culpable(see also retroactive telco immunity...) because that would cut into their own ability to wiretap whatever they want with the full connivance of basically anybody who is anybody.
It's sort of a bipartite thing: All those projectionists who are, in fact, a guild of skilled artisans were priced out and either fired or went indy. Their replacements are whichever of the convenience-store clerks who remain to sell tickets and popcorn seem least likely to damage anything important, with perhaps an outside contract call if something is simply too fucked up to ignore.
Well, with the newest iMacs, there is in fact magic fairy dust sprinkled on the hard drives: They have a custom power connector and firmware that also handles temperature sensor reporting to the SMU. If you swap the drive for another(even one of the same model; but without the Apple blessing) the system goes into full thermal freakout mode.
That is actually the main concern: Americium 241, in the trivial quantities that smoke detectors contain, is virtually harmless just sitting out and about. Almost all its radioactive output is alpha, which won't even reach your outer keratin layer unless you are in a fairly hard vacuum(a known health risk in itself). Ingest it, though, and the Litvinenko experience may be in your future...
Probably the bigger problem is that(outside of relatively few, exotic, situations where the ionizing radiation is sufficiently intense to have you puking out your guts by lunchtime) the bigger question is often whether you are merely being exposed to radiation(modest uptick in longterm cancer risk, risk stops accruing when you leave, basically only x, gamma, and the more can-do beta rays need apply) or radioactive particles(alpha emitters get to come to the party, many radioactive materials are also chemically toxic, or chemically very similar to biologically active compounds and can persist for years in the body after exposure.)
I would classify assassinating civil servants(particularly high-level architect/leadership guys) who work on evil projects as similar to punishing criminals: you don't do it because you have any realistic expectation that bagging a suit or jailing some perp is going to overthrow the government or put an end to crime, you do it just because they deserve it.
While I applaud the spirit of the shoe thrower, his target got off far too lightly. Some people really just need to trip and hit their head on a bullet.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm certain that watching the state sneeringly auction off his personal effects on the internet from his cage for the amusement of the crowd will serve as a devastating rebuke to his thesis that technology inevitably tightens its grip on the individual and drives them to ever shallower and more inauthentic attempts at activity.
I find the guy's terrorist activities deeply distasteful, and he certainly deserves to rot in jail for them; but as a theorist of the sociology of technological advance, he is actually pretty underrated...
I'm not sure if my transmitter is correctly tuned to reach the twilight zone; but I'll try:
The press writes articles about stuff. Sometimes, those articles cast actors and organizations in a less than positive light. If this is what they deserve, the press is performing one of the more socially vital functions around. If it is undeserved, they can be be taken to court for libel. "Trademark" is intended to protect a company's distinctive marks from being used deceptively in the marketplace, not to give an entity the legal right to insist that its nose be kept clean, no matter how dirty it might be.
Use of trademarks as a graphical shorthand or accent to make the reader immediately aware of who you are writing about is perfectly valid, and indeed quite logical. If what you are writing about happens to be bad behavior on the part of the trademark holder, perhaps they ought to try behaving better.
This isn't about somebody going after "Nokla" brand phones, this is about the NYSE using spurious trademark claims in an attempt to gag the press.
As we all know, "The Internet Is For Porn." Like any large organism, the internet has a sort of immune system that rejects dangerous or invasive entities attempting to disrupt its homeostasis. That is why the facebook page in question was brought down, and why a thick "network cyst, preventing packets from spreading further into the network" is growing around locations like China and Iran.
Did anything that I said contradict that? Obviously he can do as he likes. My point was that, for Microsoft, emphasizing Gate's philanthropy would be a lousy PR move. PR and marketing are all about making yourself and your products look better. Emphasizing the wealth your executives have acquired, is lousy PR because it is a reminder that all that money(no matter how legitimately made by Gates) is money that didn't go into making Microsoft products better or cheaper.
To be fair, he was a Diebold employee. He probably assumed that there was no fraud sufficiently blatant to be punished for.
More realistically, he was probably an opportunist, possibly with a newfound need for fast cash, and good counterfeit currency, while certainly not impossible to make or obtain, is not something you can just get ahold of in a moment. Were a sophisticated counterfeiting operation looking for a dispersal method, an ATM service dude might be a useful 'hire'. A random ATM service dude probably doesn't know how to just look up the local counterfeiters...
I suspect that their problem with just going stable(aside from ego-driven bullshittery) is that they know that playing defense is hard.
After all, they took their (abjectly sucky; but cheap) desktop OS, grew a bunch of marketshare during the desktop boom, and then had the momentum and resources to build essentially an entirely new OS(NT) and, through a mixture of interface familiarity and tie-ins to the desktop, begin assaults on both the server side and the handheld side(the former fairly effective, even not-primarily-windows shops are likely to have at least a couple of domain controllers and maybe an Exchange server, and they've even managed to produce offerings that aren't utterly laughable in web-serving and compute... Handheld, er, not quite as much...)
For a company that has done that, watching Google build an email system that everybody likes, then start tacking on some crude word-processing features, or Apple build a phone that is highly popular, likely reminds them of the look in IBM's eyes back when "IBM PC" started turning into "Wintel".
Obviously, just as MS never successfully attacked some of the legacy UNIX and mainframe installations, MS's competitors will likely never crack some hardcore microsoftie corporations; but Microsoft has real room to worry as you get further away from those.
The question is whether he is just narcissistically obsessed with universal dominance, or if he is keenly aware of how powerful little things like network effects and legacy install bases are...
Much of Microsoft's history is, arguably, a demonstration of how useful it is to have an exclusive platform large enough to lure developers, platform continuity long enough to allow people to get away with running almost whatever crap they want, and using people's dependence on one part of your product line to extend into other areas.
I don't think that such an association would be helpful: Philanthropists score higher(outside of hardcore randroid demographics) than do grasping plutocrats with gigantic yachts or whatever; but both are symbols of a company's success in extracting money from its customers...
If you are a customer, having your money extracted and then used to fight malaria is, arguably, nicer than having it extracted and used to build a 15th mansion; but philanthropy and plutocratic excess are, equally, signals of money that isn't being invested in R&D or being left in customers' hands with lower prices, or employee's hands with higher wages.
Unlike the Nefarious 'Great Firewall of China', a hated symbol of communist repression, the "PROTECT-IP" act will be entirely in English, and promises to be a tool of crony-capitalist repression!
The storage and bandwidth obviously aren't free, so they presumably take a nonzero(on average, might be negative on some products, exorbitant on others) cut; but there doesn't appear to be a defined "cut" across the board.
The main differentiation between Amazon and Apple, in this case, appears to be that Apple has tight integration with the OS and itunes payment system, plus an update mechanism; but demands relatively strict compliance with their standards. Amazon, on the other hand, uses the amazon payment mechanism, and is willing to offer for download pretty much whatever installer you were already slapping in cardboard boxes.
Barring a swift move to iOS-ize OSX, Apple will likely scoop up most of the crossover iOS devs, and the indies, while Amazon will serve as an easy "sure, we offer that by download as well" sale outlet for companies more comfortable with shipping boxed software and/or not using Apple's revelation-of-the-month coding and API standards.
In the short run, I'd be damned surprised: Disk players have been shoehorning 'value-add' features in at least since the first DVD player or video-CD player made a vague attempt at decoding a data disk full of JPEGs with an interface that wasn't wholly unusable. Such pack-in features have largely been appallingly badly executed and(since they aren't the primary advertised features, and models change all the time) there wasn't much in the way of informed-consumer pressure to make them better. I'd be rather surprised if blu-ray players with streamer pack-ins do too much better.
Long run? Umm, sure, why not? Once time works out enough of the rough edges of something, it becomes a commodity and you can save money by integrating it into the box/motherboard/chipset/whatever. Hell, if it weren't for the various DRM bullshittery being bandied about by cable outfits, TVs would probably be well on their way to devouring STBs entirely...
It would be nice if the control was a lot more fine grained within each access type e.g. Do you want to allow the app internet access to a specific URL (for example for high scores) and block any other internet access.
It unnerves me a little to see most apps requesting access to your contacts, internet etc without a more detailed explanation why.
I'd like to see the possibilities go one better: Lying.
Imagine a sort of "chroot" for application data: a contained environment, controlled by the actual root environment, in which exists a set of files sufficiently complete to allow the enclosed process(es) to do their thing as though they were the rulers of all they survey; but without actually giving them that power. When creating a chroot, you can either populate it with a relatively complete clone of the real root, or a specially crafted one for a specific purpose.
Being able to granularly confirm/deny individual requests by an application is a good start; but it means a significant risk that an application with break(or chose to take its ball and go home) if denied certain permissions. However, if one could define multiple(presumably hierarchically namespaced, just for neatness' sake) "data chroots" to which one could grant access(all of which would look like data roots, to the application with access) this could be avoided. Such data chroots could be constructed whole cloth, simply by manual or automatically installed definition files, or by "filters" applied to real data.
Got an application that wants your contacts for no good reason? "Grant it access" to a ficticious one consisting of generic but plausible contacts. Social Yelpcoupon 2.0ster wants your precise location data? Give it access to a filtered data chroot that only allows for city-level precision; but is based off the real location data, so that you get offers relevant to your general area.
Obviously, team google would never, in a million years, endorse such a scheme; but it would be architecturally workable enough, and give an extra weapon to those fighting pushy apps.
It is somewhat interesting to see an image format brought to the table without something basic like support for EXIF storage of some kind, or some feature(however crudely hacked on) that makes it clearly superior to JPEG(like an Alpha channel).
I can understand that somebody the size of Google probably gets real worked up about how to shove more images through slightly less bandwidth; but that actually seems like kind of a niche concern: For icon/branding/graphic design purposes, much of the heavy lifting is done by lossless(for clean, non-crunchy look); but small because of limited color palettes, broad areas of flat color, etc. images. That's mostly GIF and PNG, with some Flash and SVG.
For everyone from people who barely care to people who care how it will look as an 8*10 or a desktop background, you have JPEGs of various sizes and compression levels. On the low end, people will put up with some seriously grain-tastic shit, so long as it loads fast. Anybody who is too good for JPEG entirely is probably either slamming around some fancy print-ready flavor of TIFF, or storing whatever flavor of RAW their preferred camera back spits out.
I'm just not seeing the under-served niche here.
Unfortunately that one is a "Steam for PSN Live" exclusive release.
Typically, the "workstation" card makes you pay out the nose per unit silicon(though, at the same time, the top of the "workstation" range is going to be the only place to find the maximum RAM available to that generation, along with genlock and similar); but the "gamer" card will probably skimp on things like double-precision math and drivers that don't suck for anything other than playing Metal of Duty Crysis Evolved.
I'm not so sure: Obviously, assorted sinister TLAs are happy to exploit available holes; but all but the really stupid ones have to realize that they don't exactly live in a unipolar world when it comes to writing viruses, and that the US(and its assorted western buddies) have a lot to lose in an atmosphere of general SCADA-smashing.
If all SCADA systems become deeply vulnerable, who loses more? Industrial or post-industrial societies with high levels of complexity that could be on the edge of collapse with a few days of supply chain disruption, or the dusty low-GDP countries of the world where disenfranchised hackers, cheap laptops(and/or exploits provided by friendly powers using them as proxies) are still easily available?
While publicly traded corporations, and their friends, love to cry about sarbox and similar, to say that those created the situation is so misleading as to constitute a lie. The concern for natural persons is the fact that things like Gmail are socially pretty much the same as personal mail; but have none of the 4th amendment jurisprudence protecting them.
Work email, and records, since those are already widely understood to be an open book as far as the employer is concerned, are already not usefully private, even if the state didn't exist. The fact that your boss can read them any time he pleases, with even less oversight than the most sinister three-letter-intelligence agency, basically ensures that.
(now, as the IT department, having to do document retention annoys me as much as anybody; but conflating requirements that corporations voluntarily bring upon themselves as a condition of being publicly traded, limited liability entities(a very valuable status...) with the novel privacy problems encountered by services that are treated as "personal" but run as outsourced hosted services is either confused or dishonest.)
In practice, not very. Legally, the right to "be secure in one's person, papers, and effects" has generally been regarded as providing relatively strong protection to one's domicile and property stored therein(exceptions, of course, exist, because drugs are scary and terrorists are scary); but has not been regarded as being particularly relevant to some bits floating around somebody else's datacenter(that, depending on the ToS may or may not even be 'yours').
It would be nice to see offsite-stored "papers and effects" get some 4th amendment love. Unfortunately, as long as the 'terrorism and intelligence' loophole exists, the present bill is sort of a waste of effort.
This is going to be one to watch: The US is supposed to be all against repression and lovey-dovey about religious freedom and stuff; but there is No Fucking Way that they would let the precedent be set that corporate quislings executing illegal state activities are in any way culpable(see also retroactive telco immunity...) because that would cut into their own ability to wiretap whatever they want with the full connivance of basically anybody who is anybody.
Awkward. Hopefully publicly so....
It's sort of a bipartite thing: All those projectionists who are, in fact, a guild of skilled artisans were priced out and either fired or went indy. Their replacements are whichever of the convenience-store clerks who remain to sell tickets and popcorn seem least likely to damage anything important, with perhaps an outside contract call if something is simply too fucked up to ignore.
Well, with the newest iMacs, there is in fact magic fairy dust sprinkled on the hard drives: They have a custom power connector and firmware that also handles temperature sensor reporting to the SMU. If you swap the drive for another(even one of the same model; but without the Apple blessing) the system goes into full thermal freakout mode.
>disassemble the can.
and ingest the contents,right?
That is actually the main concern: Americium 241, in the trivial quantities that smoke detectors contain, is virtually harmless just sitting out and about. Almost all its radioactive output is alpha, which won't even reach your outer keratin layer unless you are in a fairly hard vacuum(a known health risk in itself). Ingest it, though, and the Litvinenko experience may be in your future...
Probably the bigger problem is that(outside of relatively few, exotic, situations where the ionizing radiation is sufficiently intense to have you puking out your guts by lunchtime) the bigger question is often whether you are merely being exposed to radiation(modest uptick in longterm cancer risk, risk stops accruing when you leave, basically only x, gamma, and the more can-do beta rays need apply) or radioactive particles(alpha emitters get to come to the party, many radioactive materials are also chemically toxic, or chemically very similar to biologically active compounds and can persist for years in the body after exposure.)
I would classify assassinating civil servants(particularly high-level architect/leadership guys) who work on evil projects as similar to punishing criminals: you don't do it because you have any realistic expectation that bagging a suit or jailing some perp is going to overthrow the government or put an end to crime, you do it just because they deserve it.
While I applaud the spirit of the shoe thrower, his target got off far too lightly. Some people really just need to trip and hit their head on a bullet.