Bad example. Silicone is safe. Only shysters have muddied the waters and created enough fear to cause millions of unnecessary surgeries and frightened stupid people.
The lawyers are the bad guys in that story. No doubt they are killing people (that many unnecessary surgeries and someone sure to die) to make a euro.
Possibly so. It's still a good example because the testing lab would probably have meant that the implants were "safe" according to whatever the practical standard is, so the lawyers wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Even if that had failed, they would still be able to test and rate the danger. This is not just about things being made safe. It's also about things being seen to be made safe.
Think about how much cheaper for everybody it would have been to have one small government testing lab verifying medical implants that it is going to be having to replace all of the breast implants in France / UK etc. etc. Think how much compulsory insurance is going to cost.
This is typical of the corporate welfare attitude that small people have to pay for the mistakes of big companies but no big company has to pay for anything.
Well, if you don't demand that somebody audits their code you are pretty stupid. Unaudited code and code which is proprietary and never shared with outside bodies (this doesn't have to mean the public; just at least someone external) just doesn't have a place in any critical parts of our infrastructure. It is as irresponsible as it would be if Boeing didn't have to hand over the mechanical specifications of their planes, which of course they do. However, If you had read the article you would have seen this quote:
Regulatory authorities don't see or review the software either.
She simply has to trust that the vendor is telling the truth and doing things right.
I think you will find that aircraft software, whilst it isn't open source and available to everyone, gets a bit more review than that.
Apart from that, the plane code isn't part of you and is, as a passenger, something you just visit for a short time. I think people have a right to understand fully, to the level of their own ability, things that are made part of their body.
NOTE: You may choose to validate assertions on your own server. While a bit more complicated you can reduce your dependencies on others. Refer to the specification and the source for the reference validator.
It seems to me that there is currently a centralised server, but that that is just for temporary convenience. Did I misunderstand?
A DOS is the internet equivalent of a sit-in.
Or rather, sit-ins are pre-internet denial of service attacks.
No they aren't. The key part of the sit-in is the media event. You show up in place. You make it visible you are there. You show the police arresting you; hopefully in a way which looks brutal in the media but doesn't leave any permanent damage.
A DOS attack fails because the public can't see videos of the person actually standing up for what they believe in. Also because download and run is too easy, compared to actually having to show up in a physical place.
The fact is that it is (or was) illegal to hold one person legally responsible for the actions of others
I'm going to have to call bullshit on this. If you pay a hitman to kill someone, you also go down for a crime; sometimes murder; sometimes conspiracy. If you go along on a crime in the US (e.g. a housebreaking) where someone gets killed, even if you weren't directly involved, then they charge you with murder. If you are a mafia boss and they prove you ordered a drugs transport, they do you as a drugs dealer.
In this particular case, the police seem to have made very sure that they have evidence of inducement; there are tape recordings of the megaupload people discussing that they want to encourage copyright infringement. There is evidence of the people at megaupload using database searches for copyright material etc. etc. Now, I don't take what the police say at 100% face value, but you should be very aware that it's likely that they have deliberately made sure that they have proof of every stage needed to make you look very foolish. They have laid a trap and claiming that these people are innocent becuase they can't prove inducement to unlicensed copying is falling into that trap.
The members of Megaupload are innocent for another reason. The majority of the copyrights broken belong to members of the MPAA or RIAA. These groups have been deliberately attempting to reduce the public domain. As such, they are acting contrary to the constitutional aim of copyright and their copyrights should be invalid. Given that they have had several chances to act against it and have failed in their constitutional duty, the members of the supreme court should be impeached for allowing this kind of situation to continue. Unfortunately judicial immunity makes that a bit difficult.
Don't confuse "you can't prove it" which is a simple factual matter with "this should be allowed" which is a moral matter. Also don't confuse that with "this is legal" which is often decided in practice by judges who don't understand the issue in the first place. By mixing these things up you give arguments to your enemies.
Problem is they all bask in this zero effort activism and then will ignore it when SOPA has a name change and is passed attached to the "its bad to smash puppies and kittens with a club" Act of 2012
This is, I think the plan B that the guys who pushed SOPA were counting on. This seems to be going wrong; Reddit have started to campaign against politicians who are staying neutral (which mostly means, following the money but keeping quite about it). This is beginning to get some traction and a number of them are coming out and declaring against SOPA and PIPA. With this kind of trend, not just this particular bill, but it's proponents and any future versions can become toxic.
Importantly, though, other politicians aren't declaring. These guys make great targets. This is a really good chance to flex a bit of political muscle and make sure that where those politicians have an opponent who has declared against both pieces of legislation, that candidate has full support. Politicians who are voted out do not get political "donations". Groups which manage to make that happen get remembered and left alone at all times in future from the point where they have proven an ability to do that at will.
What's now needed:
A list of politicians who have not declared against PIPA and/or SOPA to campaign against.
An ordered list of donors to those politicians as secondary targets.
A list of opponents to support.
Does anyone have a place to get that information? This can make the difference between a campaign which achieves nothing and one which is remembered with horror in the minds of the politicians who supported SOPA.
Now, what could we reasonably ask for that people like the sponsors of SOPA wouldn't like? here's a shopping list of ideas, some of which I don't even agree with myself, but which might give people inspiration.
break up News International and Time Warner as dangerously large anti-free market threats to free speech.
copyright terms reduced to 5 years or the lifetime of the author + 2 years; whichever is shorter.
reinstate the need give a copy of a work to a "copyright library" for copyright protection of any work delivered in more than 5000 separate sales
a product may be protected with either copyright or patent protection; not both.
DRM not allowed on TV broadcasts
copyright not valid on DRM protected works.
no more than one TV station or newspaper per company (not both)
no TV station to cover more than one state
source code for all proprietary software to be put into escrow on release
massive strengthening of US anti-monopoly legislation and anti-monopoly law enforcement
automatic loss of IP protection for any company attempting to enforce anti-grey import laws anywhere in the world
automatic patent licenses for open standards and all other standards treated as illegal cartels
If these clauses start turning up as amendments to future copyright bills, suddenly political action will become much less popular with the groups which currently support SOPA and/or PIPA.
I don't normally respond to posts like this, but really? A four-paragraph post that happens to share a couple of links I used in a previous reply to an RMS article is cutting-and-pasting....
The text of the entire paragraph was also the same. You are being disingenuous.
...with minor rewrites and no addressing of the topic?
It's telling that you deleted the sentence where I made it clear why. Our topic of discussion was the lack of women in "open source". You started discussing not "open source", but rather the a person who quite specifically says he has nothing to do with open source. You discussed not the women or their environment; but very specifically a single person involved. This has the same value, no more, no less, than showing videos of Steve "monkey boy" Ballmer and his aggressively macho culture. Let's just restore my text to remember what I said:
[..] this entire discussion is about "open source" which is something that RMS would likely disown anyway, making him completely irrelevant to the debate
Your entire posting history shows that you act like a politician; you answer the question you wish was asked, not the one that is being discussed. As I said before; your post should have been modded down.
That bonch posts get anything other than -1 redundant/flamebait/off topic, let alone that he regularly gets moderated +5 within seconds of posting is pretty clear evidence that the moderation power of the shills in the moderating system.
Oh, quit whining.
Why? Does it upset you? Don't like it pointed out that you are cheating 'cos you're afraid that if enough people start to notice that you are being allowed to abuse the mod system you will have to stop?
I'm not sure I'd agree. Turn on Discovery channel or Animal Planet and look at animal behavior. Many wild animals have a level of male dominance that is pretty extreme - PARTICULARLY among our fellow primates.
And many animals have female dominance, including some primates. There have also been female dominant human societies.
I'd argue that not only is sexism not wholly cultural, but the fight against sexism is mostly cultural.
Providing pissoir's for men only is not sexist because there are real biological differences which make women less keen on their version. Providing maternity wards for women only is not sexist. Sexism is, almost by definition, exactly the bit that's left over after you take out the biological element. That means sexism is cultural 100%.
I still have yet to see a rational explanation of why we should expect to see uniform involvement of people with characteristic X across all activities Y.
Nobody is.
Put another way: just because the general population has a makeup of a certain distribution, why do we assume some activity Y with a distribution different to that global distribution indicates some kind of undesirable situation?
Variety and balance of viewpoints gives more chance to get things right. We are talking about a situation where the involvement of women in proprietary software is pretty minimal in many places; that it's worse in OSS is undesirable but only in the sense that it would be better if more of them were involved.
I do agree that in some cases the difference is due to some kind of discriminatory behavior, but in others its just simply due to differences in interest. Has either situation been confirmed in this case?
Women tend to have a better ability in various fields related to computing (N.B. statistically significant average variations but below the level where it should influence your assessment of any particular given person). Women were dominant in various fields of computing through to about the 1980s with 40% of people involved being women then (this is the Wikipedia number though it matches my memory). There are pretty clear studies which show that when computing began being taught in school women were put off, especially through reduced access to the computers.
It's also key that he's cutting and pasting the same post with minor rewrites and doing it without addressing the topic on hand in any serious way. Hell; this entire discussion is about "open source" which is something that RMS would likely disown anyway, making him completely irrelevant to the debate.
That bonch posts get anything other than -1 redundant/flamebait/off topic, let alone that he regularly gets moderated +5 within seconds of posting is pretty clear evidence that the moderation power of the shills in the moderating system.
Really? Because I see a whole bunch of new phones at CES. Do you have any evidence that innovation is being held back, or is this just a gut "but it must be so" feeling?
Given that "innovation" is defined as delivering new inventions to end customers, this becomes, in a sense a stupid question. Blocking innovation is exactly what patents are designed to do. The Magsafe connector is a really neat idea. By now, if it were possible, at least one PC manufacturer would have an equivalent. The reason they don't is because Apple has a patent and they can use that patent to block innovation. This extends simply to include all of the Apple lawsuits against Samsung which held back innovation in the new phones from being delivered to Samsung's customers. In other words;
patents just do block innovation; that's their job; if your patent attorney isn't blocking your competitors innovation, fire him.
Where does the idea that patents "further the arts" etc. come from then? Well, one aim of patents is that inventors should record their innovations so that the ideas wouldn't be lost when they die. Also the idea is that whilst patents block innovation in one area, they further it in other related areas by forcing competitors to come up with different inventions which achieve the same thing in a different way. Thus patent supporters would predict for example:
There should be many magsafe competitors on the market using, e.g. mechanical connectors like old Nokia headphones or other methods of attachment - there aren't
The magsafe patent should tell you things about making a magsafe connector which you could never work out by just looking at one - it doesn't
It should reasonably easy to work around the magsafe patent by finding another different device which does the same thing - nobody has done this yet
That in its self is "evidence", but you might claim it's just a one off. It's definitely true that a number of innovations that nobody would hear of otherwise end up recorded in patents, for example very obscure and different kinds of mousetraps are continually invented even though it's not clear that actually drives innovation.
The patent apologist would answer that by claiming that "yes, in situation a, b and c the patent got in the way of innovation, but overall, taking into account all the different patents, the situation is better than it would be otherwise". It's almost impossible to answer that. Almost but not quite impossible.
Firstly we can compare places with weaker patents with those with stronger patents; we would expect to see innovation in the USA accellerating, due to it's broad patent protection, whilst China should be losing ground since patents are regularly ignored there. In fact we see the opposite.
Now, I'd like to separate out "software patents" from patents in general. I believe that if the system was reverted back to more narrow patents and lifetimes were more limited, patents on physical devices would be justified. Physical devices develop more slowly; have higher duplication costs against which patent costs are more easily justified and tend to have a much lower number of patents per device. Software patents are another issue.
As a second part of our statistical evidence there have been a bunch of different academic studies. AN EMPIRICAL LOOK AT SOFTWARE PATENTS from Besson et al does a good examination of the effect of software patents. The conclusion is fairly clearly that software patents damage innovation. Another example of this academic research A GENERATION OF SOFTWARE PATENTS ends it's abst
It was written by the lobbyists for the healtcare insurance industry. Do you really think they woulda written in little booby-traps to kill off the corporations that sign their paychecks? Be real.
Your belief in the honesty of lobbyists is really touching. Kind of like a politician who stays bought I guess?
[..] We enforce the laws against piracy (physical theft of physical objects that once you take them, they are gone) Digital copying is not piracy, it is only copying - like taking a photograph of a painting, it's not stealing the painting.
Piracy is an old term which has existed for hundreds of years; I prefer "unlicensed copying", but I really don't see the difference between a photocopy and a digital copy from the point of view of the law. The laws that are being enforced are copyright related and pretty clearly apply here. What's wrong is that they have gone far beyond their original aims.
My suggestion, line up everyone who's party to them (ie board members, ceos of member corporations, anyone getting a pay-check from them who isn't a content creator), and ship them off to gitmo, forcing them to labor to pay for their meals until dead, then bury them in a mass grave somewhere sealed in concrete 30 feet thick. It's either that or nuke em from orbit. They're like cock-roaches, have to be sure.
Now that's what I call a positive suggestion. Furthermore, I believe that, as long as he first accuses them of "terroristic copyright protection" then congress has just given him full authorisation to do this with no need for new legislation (though he might need to trick them into going abroad first for things to go fully smoothly). You should post it up on a web site and then send it off; do remember to put up President Obama's reaction in full.:-)
What's right is to get the lawyers and politicians out of the job of trying to define how the internet should work.
In some sense you are right. Unfortunately that's just not the way the world works, and the people who are spreading the idea that it could work that way are basically tricking you into being passive and being walked over. There's always going to be someone who doesn't like something. That person is always is always going to claim that whatever you want to do is the spawn of the devil and causes cancer (not to mention the risk to the children). There will always be some politician somewhere who either becomes convinced or just sees the issue as a way to be different and/or get publicity.
The only way to handle this; the right way to handle this; is to have multiple sides on the debate and your own politicians in there. Even if their point of view is very similar to the NRA's point of view; there should be no restrictions on the use of internet systems whatsoever; they can be very effective.
It didn't need fixing. It needs to be driven by technology, not by politics.
Politics are simply the way that people deal with the allocation of resources on a large scale. Once the internet becomes worth money then it can no longer exist in a vacuum. The decision to protect internet connectivity centres means the decision to let people get raped and murdered elsewhere since the police officers used for protecting the internet centres aren't available for other work. The decision not to sales tax Amazon whilst taxing local businesses means a transformation of local economies. The decision to let things be driven by technology is politics. It's good politics; probably; but it's still politics. Until we technologists accept that we will always be at the mercy of the "military-industrial" complex which fully 100% understands politics.
* As the OP put it, there are major security reasons to do this, as well as anticompetative[sic*]. Nobody outside of MS can honestly say which is the priority reason.
At the time you made your shill post there were already multiple posts pointing out that you can do this security and still allow boot loader unlocking. In other words; if this was done in a way that allowed unlocking but didn't allow running Windows in normal mode after unlocking, we might not know Microsoft's intentions. We know exactly what Microsoft's intention was when they decided to that there should be no way to unlock the boot loader at all. You knew those posts were there but basically believe that if you repeat the lies often enough the truth will be drowned out.
* an interesting spelling slip; I guess the idea of a new FTC or EU investigation for anticompetitive behaviour really makes the MS people nervous.
When it's a case of a GPL violation, the violators who feel entitled to the free labor of strangers are childish and entitled.
The reason for the existence of copyright owners is to increase the pool of work available to the public (see; e.g. the US constitution). Copyright exists because it is believed that without it people would create fewer works and that would limit the benefit to the public. GPL authors are directly, though their license, putting out works which the public can use for free and with no usage restriction and copying and distribution restrictions limited only to a lack of restriction. You cannot make a direct comparison.
This is absolutely right. It's not enough to be negative. We have to clearly state a future in which the rights of copyright owners are much more limited and are determined by their duty to increase the public domain.
This is very simple to deal with; if it happens one time or two times to the same person then you assume that it was a simple mistake. The movement of earnings is small. If it happens a few more times, you insist on that person taking active measures and putting documented procedures in place for handling copyrights. If it happens after that time, you investigate the documentation and if it doesn't show the right procedures being followed then you start to give that person big fines.
These are very standard things that work everywhere. If copyright requires us to change all our legal systems to be much more draconian as it's advocates seem to think it does, then copyright is dangerous and should be reduced or got rid of.
7) Must be fully understood by and explained to all of the people responsible for running the election, including all of it's basic security implications.
8) those people must have the full capability to monitor and verify all of it's functions whilst at the same time not being able to actually see who has voted for what.
Elections are mostly run by retired people and, to some extent the unemployed, who are responsible for defending against, identifying and mitigating fraud. There is no way to guarantee that these people have CS degrees. At the same time, if a novel attack happens in their particular area, they are likely to be the only people who have the ability to intervene at the right moment.
Imagine, for example, an attack where someone makes it seem like a particular machine has been overvoted on. A person comes along and manages to advance the voting tab by several hundred votes. In a physical situation it is reasonably obvious what to do: lock the ballot box away; when opening it preserve the order of the ballots; attempt to look for fingerprints etc. In an electronic situation there is a high risk that the people will do the wrong thing (e.g. reset the machine or take it out of the count). Until the less computer skilled members of the community can be trusted to do computer forensics; at the very least evidence preservation; voting machines are always going to have serious risks to contend with.
I agree that legacy technology should not be forgotten, because newer is not always better. But I have to believe that the voting machines would be secure and reliable if they had been designed correctly, and that there are a number of human beings on the planet capable of getting it done today.
In a sense that's a fairly simple experimental question. One of those people should build a machine and then, when they are sure it is "secure" they should hand it over for analysis. This won't 100% prove what you say is true, but it will go a long way and it will definitely make the statement falsifiable.
The problem is, that every single person who has claimed to be one of those people so far has built a machine which turned out not to be secure. This isn't proof that a secure machine is impossible, but it's a definite suggestion that it might be and more importantly that we shouldn't put too much effort into buying those machines until the state of the art has advanced considerably. Instead, we should be putting lots of effort into validating computer security generally and making illegal products (n.b. specifically products: things sold for money; as opposed to code given for development reasons) which fail to implement proper security. Once we get more experience with security generally then, in a generation or two, it might be a good idea to come back to the idea of voting machines.
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Bad example. Silicone is safe. Only shysters have muddied the waters and created enough fear to cause millions of unnecessary surgeries and frightened stupid people.
The lawyers are the bad guys in that story. No doubt they are killing people (that many unnecessary surgeries and someone sure to die) to make a euro.
Possibly so. It's still a good example because the testing lab would probably have meant that the implants were "safe" according to whatever the practical standard is, so the lawyers wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Even if that had failed, they would still be able to test and rate the danger. This is not just about things being made safe. It's also about things being seen to be made safe.
Thanks; I had almost, but not quite, fully understood that. Now I do.
No, they don't need to peek inside.
Think about how much cheaper for everybody it would have been to have one small government testing lab verifying medical implants that it is going to be having to replace all of the breast implants in France / UK etc. etc. Think how much compulsory insurance is going to cost.
This is typical of the corporate welfare attitude that small people have to pay for the mistakes of big companies but no big company has to pay for anything.
Yet I don't demand to audit their code.
Well, if you don't demand that somebody audits their code you are pretty stupid. Unaudited code and code which is proprietary and never shared with outside bodies (this doesn't have to mean the public; just at least someone external) just doesn't have a place in any critical parts of our infrastructure. It is as irresponsible as it would be if Boeing didn't have to hand over the mechanical specifications of their planes, which of course they do. However, If you had read the article you would have seen this quote:
I think you will find that aircraft software, whilst it isn't open source and available to everyone, gets a bit more review than that.
Apart from that, the plane code isn't part of you and is, as a passenger, something you just visit for a short time. I think people have a right to understand fully, to the level of their own ability, things that are made part of their body.
It seems to me that there is currently a centralised server, but that that is just for temporary convenience. Did I misunderstand?
A DOS is the internet equivalent of a sit-in. Or rather, sit-ins are pre-internet denial of service attacks.
No they aren't. The key part of the sit-in is the media event. You show up in place. You make it visible you are there. You show the police arresting you; hopefully in a way which looks brutal in the media but doesn't leave any permanent damage.
A DOS attack fails because the public can't see videos of the person actually standing up for what they believe in. Also because download and run is too easy, compared to actually having to show up in a physical place.
The fact is that it is (or was) illegal to hold one person legally responsible for the actions of others
I'm going to have to call bullshit on this. If you pay a hitman to kill someone, you also go down for a crime; sometimes murder; sometimes conspiracy. If you go along on a crime in the US (e.g. a housebreaking) where someone gets killed, even if you weren't directly involved, then they charge you with murder. If you are a mafia boss and they prove you ordered a drugs transport, they do you as a drugs dealer.
In this particular case, the police seem to have made very sure that they have evidence of inducement; there are tape recordings of the megaupload people discussing that they want to encourage copyright infringement. There is evidence of the people at megaupload using database searches for copyright material etc. etc. Now, I don't take what the police say at 100% face value, but you should be very aware that it's likely that they have deliberately made sure that they have proof of every stage needed to make you look very foolish. They have laid a trap and claiming that these people are innocent becuase they can't prove inducement to unlicensed copying is falling into that trap.
The members of Megaupload are innocent for another reason. The majority of the copyrights broken belong to members of the MPAA or RIAA. These groups have been deliberately attempting to reduce the public domain. As such, they are acting contrary to the constitutional aim of copyright and their copyrights should be invalid. Given that they have had several chances to act against it and have failed in their constitutional duty, the members of the supreme court should be impeached for allowing this kind of situation to continue. Unfortunately judicial immunity makes that a bit difficult.
Don't confuse "you can't prove it" which is a simple factual matter with "this should be allowed" which is a moral matter. Also don't confuse that with "this is legal" which is often decided in practice by judges who don't understand the issue in the first place. By mixing these things up you give arguments to your enemies.
Only if you can be punished for the copying that you did whilst it was still in the public domain.
How about you propose bills which;
These are all ways of reducing the government's power which will also annoy SOPA supporters.
This time round, I can say that I personally am opposed to some of the above... But you might find them a useful thing to start with..
Problem is they all bask in this zero effort activism and then will ignore it when SOPA has a name change and is passed attached to the "its bad to smash puppies and kittens with a club" Act of 2012
This is, I think the plan B that the guys who pushed SOPA were counting on. This seems to be going wrong; Reddit have started to campaign against politicians who are staying neutral (which mostly means, following the money but keeping quite about it). This is beginning to get some traction and a number of them are coming out and declaring against SOPA and PIPA. With this kind of trend, not just this particular bill, but it's proponents and any future versions can become toxic.
Importantly, though, other politicians aren't declaring. These guys make great targets. This is a really good chance to flex a bit of political muscle and make sure that where those politicians have an opponent who has declared against both pieces of legislation, that candidate has full support. Politicians who are voted out do not get political "donations". Groups which manage to make that happen get remembered and left alone at all times in future from the point where they have proven an ability to do that at will.
What's now needed:
Does anyone have a place to get that information? This can make the difference between a campaign which achieves nothing and one which is remembered with horror in the minds of the politicians who supported SOPA.
Now, what could we reasonably ask for that people like the sponsors of SOPA wouldn't like? here's a shopping list of ideas, some of which I don't even agree with myself, but which might give people inspiration.
If these clauses start turning up as amendments to future copyright bills, suddenly political action will become much less popular with the groups which currently support SOPA and/or PIPA.
You can do 2 with the profits from AC's number four and get them on the way up and down.
I don't normally respond to posts like this, but really? A four-paragraph post that happens to share a couple of links I used in a previous reply to an RMS article is cutting-and-pasting....
The text of the entire paragraph was also the same. You are being disingenuous.
...with minor rewrites and no addressing of the topic?
It's telling that you deleted the sentence where I made it clear why. Our topic of discussion was the lack of women in "open source". You started discussing not "open source", but rather the a person who quite specifically says he has nothing to do with open source. You discussed not the women or their environment; but very specifically a single person involved. This has the same value, no more, no less, than showing videos of Steve "monkey boy" Ballmer and his aggressively macho culture. Let's just restore my text to remember what I said:
Your entire posting history shows that you act like a politician; you answer the question you wish was asked, not the one that is being discussed. As I said before; your post should have been modded down.
Oh, quit whining.
Why? Does it upset you? Don't like it pointed out that you are cheating 'cos you're afraid that if enough people start to notice that you are being allowed to abuse the mod system you will have to stop?
I'm not sure I'd agree. Turn on Discovery channel or Animal Planet and look at animal behavior. Many wild animals have a level of male dominance that is pretty extreme - PARTICULARLY among our fellow primates.
And many animals have female dominance, including some primates. There have also been female dominant human societies.
I'd argue that not only is sexism not wholly cultural, but the fight against sexism is mostly cultural.
Providing pissoir's for men only is not sexist because there are real biological differences which make women less keen on their version. Providing maternity wards for women only is not sexist. Sexism is, almost by definition, exactly the bit that's left over after you take out the biological element. That means sexism is cultural 100%.
I still have yet to see a rational explanation of why we should expect to see uniform involvement of people with characteristic X across all activities Y.
Nobody is.
Put another way: just because the general population has a makeup of a certain distribution, why do we assume some activity Y with a distribution different to that global distribution indicates some kind of undesirable situation?
Variety and balance of viewpoints gives more chance to get things right. We are talking about a situation where the involvement of women in proprietary software is pretty minimal in many places; that it's worse in OSS is undesirable but only in the sense that it would be better if more of them were involved.
I do agree that in some cases the difference is due to some kind of discriminatory behavior, but in others its just simply due to differences in interest. Has either situation been confirmed in this case?
Women tend to have a better ability in various fields related to computing (N.B. statistically significant average variations but below the level where it should influence your assessment of any particular given person). Women were dominant in various fields of computing through to about the 1980s with 40% of people involved being women then (this is the Wikipedia number though it matches my memory). There are pretty clear studies which show that when computing began being taught in school women were put off, especially through reduced access to the computers.
It's also key that he's cutting and pasting the same post with minor rewrites and doing it without addressing the topic on hand in any serious way. Hell; this entire discussion is about "open source" which is something that RMS would likely disown anyway, making him completely irrelevant to the debate.
That bonch posts get anything other than -1 redundant/flamebait/off topic, let alone that he regularly gets moderated +5 within seconds of posting is pretty clear evidence that the moderation power of the shills in the moderating system.
Really? Because I see a whole bunch of new phones at CES. Do you have any evidence that innovation is being held back, or is this just a gut "but it must be so" feeling?
Given that "innovation" is defined as delivering new inventions to end customers, this becomes, in a sense a stupid question. Blocking innovation is exactly what patents are designed to do. The Magsafe connector is a really neat idea. By now, if it were possible, at least one PC manufacturer would have an equivalent. The reason they don't is because Apple has a patent and they can use that patent to block innovation. This extends simply to include all of the Apple lawsuits against Samsung which held back innovation in the new phones from being delivered to Samsung's customers. In other words;
Where does the idea that patents "further the arts" etc. come from then? Well, one aim of patents is that inventors should record their innovations so that the ideas wouldn't be lost when they die. Also the idea is that whilst patents block innovation in one area, they further it in other related areas by forcing competitors to come up with different inventions which achieve the same thing in a different way. Thus patent supporters would predict for example:
That in its self is "evidence", but you might claim it's just a one off. It's definitely true that a number of innovations that nobody would hear of otherwise end up recorded in patents, for example very obscure and different kinds of mousetraps are continually invented even though it's not clear that actually drives innovation.
The patent apologist would answer that by claiming that "yes, in situation a, b and c the patent got in the way of innovation, but overall, taking into account all the different patents, the situation is better than it would be otherwise". It's almost impossible to answer that. Almost but not quite impossible.
Firstly we can compare places with weaker patents with those with stronger patents; we would expect to see innovation in the USA accellerating, due to it's broad patent protection, whilst China should be losing ground since patents are regularly ignored there. In fact we see the opposite.
Now, I'd like to separate out "software patents" from patents in general. I believe that if the system was reverted back to more narrow patents and lifetimes were more limited, patents on physical devices would be justified. Physical devices develop more slowly; have higher duplication costs against which patent costs are more easily justified and tend to have a much lower number of patents per device. Software patents are another issue.
As a second part of our statistical evidence there have been a bunch of different academic studies. AN EMPIRICAL LOOK AT SOFTWARE PATENTS from Besson et al does a good examination of the effect of software patents. The conclusion is fairly clearly that software patents damage innovation. Another example of this academic research A GENERATION OF SOFTWARE PATENTS ends it's abst
It was written by the lobbyists for the healtcare insurance industry. Do you really think they woulda written in little booby-traps to kill off the corporations that sign their paychecks? Be real.
Your belief in the honesty of lobbyists is really touching. Kind of like a politician who stays bought I guess?
[..] We enforce the laws against piracy (physical theft of physical objects that once you take them, they are gone) Digital copying is not piracy, it is only copying - like taking a photograph of a painting, it's not stealing the painting.
Piracy is an old term which has existed for hundreds of years; I prefer "unlicensed copying", but I really don't see the difference between a photocopy and a digital copy from the point of view of the law. The laws that are being enforced are copyright related and pretty clearly apply here. What's wrong is that they have gone far beyond their original aims.
My suggestion, line up everyone who's party to them (ie board members, ceos of member corporations, anyone getting a pay-check from them who isn't a content creator), and ship them off to gitmo, forcing them to labor to pay for their meals until dead, then bury them in a mass grave somewhere sealed in concrete 30 feet thick. It's either that or nuke em from orbit. They're like cock-roaches, have to be sure.
Now that's what I call a positive suggestion. Furthermore, I believe that, as long as he first accuses them of "terroristic copyright protection" then congress has just given him full authorisation to do this with no need for new legislation (though he might need to trick them into going abroad first for things to go fully smoothly). You should post it up on a web site and then send it off; do remember to put up President Obama's reaction in full. :-)
What's right is to get the lawyers and politicians out of the job of trying to define how the internet should work.
In some sense you are right. Unfortunately that's just not the way the world works, and the people who are spreading the idea that it could work that way are basically tricking you into being passive and being walked over. There's always going to be someone who doesn't like something. That person is always is always going to claim that whatever you want to do is the spawn of the devil and causes cancer (not to mention the risk to the children). There will always be some politician somewhere who either becomes convinced or just sees the issue as a way to be different and/or get publicity.
The only way to handle this; the right way to handle this; is to have multiple sides on the debate and your own politicians in there. Even if their point of view is very similar to the NRA's point of view; there should be no restrictions on the use of internet systems whatsoever; they can be very effective.
It didn't need fixing. It needs to be driven by technology, not by politics.
Politics are simply the way that people deal with the allocation of resources on a large scale. Once the internet becomes worth money then it can no longer exist in a vacuum. The decision to protect internet connectivity centres means the decision to let people get raped and murdered elsewhere since the police officers used for protecting the internet centres aren't available for other work. The decision not to sales tax Amazon whilst taxing local businesses means a transformation of local economies. The decision to let things be driven by technology is politics. It's good politics; probably; but it's still politics. Until we technologists accept that we will always be at the mercy of the "military-industrial" complex which fully 100% understands politics.
* As the OP put it, there are major security reasons to do this, as well as anticompetative[sic*]. Nobody outside of MS can honestly say which is the priority reason.
At the time you made your shill post there were already multiple posts pointing out that you can do this security and still allow boot loader unlocking. In other words; if this was done in a way that allowed unlocking but didn't allow running Windows in normal mode after unlocking, we might not know Microsoft's intentions. We know exactly what Microsoft's intention was when they decided to that there should be no way to unlock the boot loader at all. You knew those posts were there but basically believe that if you repeat the lies often enough the truth will be drowned out.
* an interesting spelling slip; I guess the idea of a new FTC or EU investigation for anticompetitive behaviour really makes the MS people nervous.
When it's a case of a GPL violation, the violators who feel entitled to the free labor of strangers are childish and entitled.
The reason for the existence of copyright owners is to increase the pool of work available to the public (see; e.g. the US constitution). Copyright exists because it is believed that without it people would create fewer works and that would limit the benefit to the public. GPL authors are directly, though their license, putting out works which the public can use for free and with no usage restriction and copying and distribution restrictions limited only to a lack of restriction. You cannot make a direct comparison.
This is absolutely right. It's not enough to be negative. We have to clearly state a future in which the rights of copyright owners are much more limited and are determined by their duty to increase the public domain.
This is very simple to deal with; if it happens one time or two times to the same person then you assume that it was a simple mistake. The movement of earnings is small. If it happens a few more times, you insist on that person taking active measures and putting documented procedures in place for handling copyrights. If it happens after that time, you investigate the documentation and if it doesn't show the right procedures being followed then you start to give that person big fines.
These are very standard things that work everywhere. If copyright requires us to change all our legal systems to be much more draconian as it's advocates seem to think it does, then copyright is dangerous and should be reduced or got rid of.
I would suggest the following requirements
There's some things which you are missing:
7) Must be fully understood by and explained to all of the people responsible for running the election, including all of it's basic security implications.
8) those people must have the full capability to monitor and verify all of it's functions whilst at the same time not being able to actually see who has voted for what.
Elections are mostly run by retired people and, to some extent the unemployed, who are responsible for defending against, identifying and mitigating fraud. There is no way to guarantee that these people have CS degrees. At the same time, if a novel attack happens in their particular area, they are likely to be the only people who have the ability to intervene at the right moment.
Imagine, for example, an attack where someone makes it seem like a particular machine has been overvoted on. A person comes along and manages to advance the voting tab by several hundred votes. In a physical situation it is reasonably obvious what to do: lock the ballot box away; when opening it preserve the order of the ballots; attempt to look for fingerprints etc. In an electronic situation there is a high risk that the people will do the wrong thing (e.g. reset the machine or take it out of the count). Until the less computer skilled members of the community can be trusted to do computer forensics; at the very least evidence preservation; voting machines are always going to have serious risks to contend with.
I agree that legacy technology should not be forgotten, because newer is not always better. But I have to believe that the voting machines would be secure and reliable if they had been designed correctly, and that there are a number of human beings on the planet capable of getting it done today.
In a sense that's a fairly simple experimental question. One of those people should build a machine and then, when they are sure it is "secure" they should hand it over for analysis. This won't 100% prove what you say is true, but it will go a long way and it will definitely make the statement falsifiable.
The problem is, that every single person who has claimed to be one of those people so far has built a machine which turned out not to be secure. This isn't proof that a secure machine is impossible, but it's a definite suggestion that it might be and more importantly that we shouldn't put too much effort into buying those machines until the state of the art has advanced considerably. Instead, we should be putting lots of effort into validating computer security generally and making illegal products (n.b. specifically products: things sold for money; as opposed to code given for development reasons) which fail to implement proper security. Once we get more experience with security generally then, in a generation or two, it might be a good idea to come back to the idea of voting machines.