They are.. leaking.. supposedly.. restricted information/Shatner. This will always be considered "ethically questionable" - to those who wouldn't have wanted the leaks. Also, how do you think information in general is leaked?
1. Information at some point gets into the hands of some person A who is prepared to do with it other than what the information "owner" B intended.
2. A redistributes that information somehow, usually without B's initial knowledge.
If people exchange unencrypted stuff over Tor - i.e. they're consciously setting up a non-mainsteam network tool then consciously distributing valuable unencrypted information to unknown third parties - what exactly is "ethically questionable" about calling foul when you get your hands on that information? If you found a document lying around describing some corruption you believe it is very much in the public interest to distribute, do you think, "Oh, well, obviously that document wasn't put there for me to read, so it'd be WRONG for me to do anything about it!" If so, you're part of the problem, because you're respecting the "rights" that a criminal does not have.
Your only excuse for not making the public aware is that you're a coward - it obviously takes a lot of courage to help in publishing that sort of thing.
And this article, like many recent Wikileaks articles, is an attempt to discredit it. Why would there possibly be a stream of articles attempting to discredit a site which publishes various leaks? Yes, they ask for donations too much. Yes, they seem to be technically incompetent when it comes to keeping their site up. So tackle those problems specifically.
The religious faithful are to self-appointed scientists(*) as paedophiles are to tabloids or Muslim terrorists to western governments.
Here's a definition for ID: the intelligent creation of the laws of physics and the beginning of the universe such that, by chance, everything would end up evolving pretty much as it has. Potentially provable? To a degree. Potentially disprovable? Certainly not. Scientific hypothesis? No. Believed by many, before and now? Yes. Relevant to history? Yes. Relevant to religion? Yes. Relevant to science, as the most obvious illustration of what cannot be disproven by science? Yes.
Exercise: try stating any scientific theory and asking, "why?" repeatedly to it until you can go no further. No matter how far you go, you will always stop after a finite number of "why"s. Science is an activity performed by humans, who are mortal. It involves making an observation, writing a specific hypothesis, and providing evidence which supports (or refutes) that hypothesis. That is all. It won't reveal the secrets of the whole universe. It will never reveal the absolute origin of everything (even if some God appears, where did he come from? and so on).
ID vs evolution, Christians vs Muslims, commies vs capitalists, and any number of idealistic debates tend to depend on some assumption you have made that the opposite party has not made. Meanwhile, the pragmatists continue not caring, getting rich and increasing their control of today's world.
(*) It's rarely the practicing scientists... often those who have sipped from the Pierian spring and believe they're experts on philosophy of science.
Afaict, it's an optional feature - certainly to have FIS-based switching would require controller support, though I guess you could emulate something akin to command-based with a driver if your controller doesn't support that either. And I can't see anyone wanting the latter, as it means transfers by the slower device are the bottleneck.
In Silicon Valley, we don't fall for all the Redmond brainwashing and we know what Apple has accomplished and how useful and productive their tools are.
I guess a Googler wouldn't have been employed in the first place if he didn't think like the founders, i.e. have falled for all the Jobs brainwashing. IME, Googlers are a worryingly homogeneous crowd, and it goes some way to explaining why Google remain unimpressive beyond their core search service.
It's fortunate that most firms don't fall for the Google brainwashing either: there is no reason to host your slow, feature-starved office app and valuable data half way across the continent when you could make use of the free CPU cycles a few centimetres from your fingers and performant local collaboration tools. I'm sad to say that I'm not even sure Googlers are aware of what they're accomplishing. It's like being sent up to Oxbridge: you have it pounded into you from the initial open day that you're at an elite institution and you will be made into someone with the skills to pioneer advancement in your field. If you are easily flattered, you start to believe it: "But I'm great! I know I'm great or I wouldn't be here, so surely I'm doing the right thing." The illogic of your goal doesn't cross your mind.
Google search is great, the product of two stellar minds fulfilling their potential in a humble academic environment. Google Apps is borne of arrogance.
If the hadn't been forced to upgrade accountants would still be using the DOS version of Lotus 1-2-3.
Not everyone masturbates over new tech for its own sake. Imagine a computing environment driven by need rather than the desire for hardware and software companies to sell you increasingly bloated software and increasingly hot hardware to run it.
Google's job beyond its main search tool is to convince you, without reason, that you need control taken from your hands and put in theirs. And, if you're actually using Office 2007 to its full potential, you find that Google's apps are delivered with the feature set of a toilet brush, the reliability of a 419 scammer and the UI of a pregnant sow. I have met hundreds who spend their life in MS Office but not one company with an employee who would even spend one eight-hour day in Google Apps - you have nothing to gain but trouble.
If the simple, fast (on modern hardware), non-distracting, stable Lotus 123 works for someone, let them use Lotus 123. If you're not importing the format properly into your package, that's your fault for singing the praises of new things for their own sake rather than maintaining compatibility for people who use computers as tools rather than toys.
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.
You are one of about three people with that straw man.
No-one disagrees that broadcasting an SSID is advertising the existence of the station, but it doesn't follow that broadcasting the SSID is advertising a service for the public. It's the difference between "here's my house, it's called XYZ" and "here's my house, it's called XYZ, please feel free to come in and use it".
Perhaps you could take some time to think of reasons why you might want to make everyone aware of the existence of something in the vicinity without implying that it's there for anyone to use.
if you would kindly give me your address, cowardly Anonymous Coward, I shall be following you around and recording you for the next six months of your life whenever you are on public property, also recording you in your home as far as those light/infrared/etc waves are being broadcast out to public property. I shall be putting out all this information on the Internet.
If you don't want anyone to know about your life, lock yourself up in your home in a Faraday cage.
If you take $99/year to distribute a product which is routinely governed by rules on re-distribution, force a convoluted review process, sell from your storefront, and take a 30% cut of what you're selling, it most certainly is your responsibility to check the origin. Otherwise you've just provided a get-out clause to all fences in history: "How was I supposed to know it was stolen!? He told me he found it washed up on the beach! Would jewelry ever be stolen?"
Was it actually hardware-accelerated? People keep pointing this out...
The W3C's dodgy corporatism has really got to you;-).
It was pointed out ages ago that its implementation runs on top of DirectX/OpenGL, which means it is as hardware accelerated as they are on your platform.
Sorry, what?
The GPU can do more processing, so there's no need to create an ultra-efficient binary for acceptable 3D performance where the CPU may take up the slack.
And yes, source matters. That way, if there's any ambiguity in the spec, or question about how to implement something, I can look at what appears to be a compliant implementation and see how it's done.
There is no such W3C user agent either - Amaya is a less than compliant testbed, not a reference implementation. We are welcome to look at the source for Firefox and for WebKit, find out that they've implemented things differently,... and be none the wiser.
This being said, if you ever have to consult the code then there is a problem with the specification and an erratum needs to be issued. OSS is fraught with "consult the code" fallbacks to poor documentation which hamper reusability as people end up making assumptions beyond what might have been intended.
On top of all of this, Flash is patent-encumbered -- HTML itself is not.
What exactly does this mean? HTML may be encumbered by patents on certain proecesses, but W3C contributors have agreed on royalty-free licensing; anyone else might point out a feature in HTML they think is covered by one of their patents (e.g. BT). Similarly, Adobe has agreed to royalty-free licensing on anything they may have a patent for in the Flash spec.
Adobe doesn't seem to release everything (DRM in particular)
DRM's inherent broken-ness means its implementation cannot be released. Maybe if Flash dies providers will move to forcing you to download a DRM binary native plug-in, or at least try and fail to issue obfuscated Javascript (don't imagine for a moment that content providers will "oh well, never mind!" and remove DRM). Either way, the core Flash platform is open - the extensions which people interested in openness wouldn't want to use anyway are not.
It really does seem like this is the reason Gnash and others haven't caught up
I would say that it is lack of interest. There is one fairly good working implementation which works on the majority of desktops, and one slower implementation (Mac) which works on most of the rest. It is hard to monetise the development of an alternative Flash player, whereas it is easy to do so with web browsers via sponsored searches (everyone), proprietary extensions (esp. Microsoft) and (ultimately - esp. Apple) influencing the standard.
Many alternative Flash authoring tools exist and are used, so the spec is clearly readable.
Of course, we could also consider the fact that the Flash specs and Flash player are produced by exactly one company, while HTML is a collaborative process.
Agreed. It's just not nearly as "collaborative" right now as the W3C's adherents would have you believe.
If minimum wage was actually sufficient for survival in the modern society,
You are so drunk on your Champagne Socialism that you aren't even reading what I said: did I mention a statutory minimum wage, or did I twice say "the minimum wage required to survive"?
Actually I don't get paid "market wage" for the work on my level.
Do you get paid the minimum wage required to survive? If not, you are using your market value as a developer of open source software to bargain a better financial deal for yourself.
Plenty of worse programmers get paid the same salary, though they also are more stressed out, and do work that often goes against anything even remotely resembling ethics.
What a crass display of plumage! So the reason those "worse programmers" get paid the same as you isn't even (as your incoherent philosophy might suggest) because you don't demand the best possible wage; it's because, unlike you, they are unethical.
One doesn't have to work for a nonprofit to make something useful for everyone.
This was not in question. The matter was whether your primary motivation is one of enriching the world or enriching yourself (via your employer). Because you consider yourself a reasonable and honest programmer, you have the option to work for nonprofits with a primary motivation to improve the world. You have chosen not to do that.
I can assure you, if my priorities were wrong, I would notice it without help from inferior minds.
I am trying to interpret that sentence in a non-vacuous way. If your priorities were wrong, you would notice it without help from ABC... so, if your priorities were wrong, you would notice it... on your own... eventually? Or if you come to notice it with help, you are certain that it will be with the help of a superior/equal mind?
I have learned so far that you judge certain people as having inferior minds to your own, and conclude that nothing from them can contribute towards significant decisions. That's the sort of pigeonholing brought to us by feudalism!
The principle is outdated in the same way that the Constitution is outdated: if you don't understand your country, you are condemned to reinvent it poorly.
Everything you said about tracking and people's surprise may be true, but it's nothing in the technology itself which is inherently a violation of privacy: the violation is in the particular processing and storage of data consciously (or occasionally recklessly) performed by various corporations.
You can, if you want, pretend that a social problem is technological and speak against certain forms of technology... this is the road you might want to go down if you are representing the mpaa. Or you could speak against the abuse of technology. Similarly, you can condemn/attach punishment to merely hearing the wrong information ("someone might tell you, but then I'd have to xyz you..."), or you can limit your condemnation to someone who chooses to use information in a particular way. One paves the way for data protection legislation, and the other heralds a police state.
It is appropriate to note that European Union Data Protection law is mostly based on what you can and cannot store, process and disseminate, not what you can and cannot hear.
So what you are saying is that the current Adobe way of doing it is correct: implement, specify, analyse, enhance, repeat.
And the problem... is that Adobe makes a good enough closed source implementation which no-one has bothered to compete with? So we should all stick to HTML/JavaScript/CSS, the user agents for which are full of non-standard extensions and don't fully implement previous years' standards either? Familiar?
The only thing going for the W3C is that certain members are large enough that they can buy out some proprietary codec and dump it on the market to push out the competition. It's reasonable, non-discriminatory, and worked great for Microsoft in the late '90s, right?
But... but... that would be SVG, and Apple doesn't want that; it wants Canvas. Better a third-rate Flash replacement which doesn't integrate with the DOM and pushes people to writing native iApps!
What I was trying to get at is that "the concept of" the referrer header is not a privacy violation... you are on tenuous thought crime ground if you target the ability to perceive information. A privacy violation occurs only when you store or distribute information in some inappropriate manner.
Consider it an extension of the traditional (and sadly superseded) US principle of wireless that you're allowed to hear any information which appears on the airwaves but you're not necessarily allowed to act freely upon it.
The client creates the referrer header... it's a privacy invasion in the same way that it would be a privacy invasion to tell you that I have a spoon fetish then complain because you heard me tell you.
Of course, how you process that information can and will be regulated, and it is possible to store/use the information in a way that will violate my privacy. But it's not your fault that you heard it, and I can't blame you if you don't forget it providing you don't choose to write it down.
Your employer hired you because your work is good enough yet you showed no indication of working for free. Your employer is paying you above the minimum wage required to survive because you showed no indication of working for the minimum wage required to survive.
As long as you continue to selfishly and capitalistically demand a market wage for your employment, you are redirecting resources which could be used toward improving open source software for the world. As long as you work on a software project for a firm which ultimately exists to make money rather than a non-profit which ultimately exists to improve open source software for the world, you are redirecting resources which could be used toward improving open source software for the world.
You might want to think your priorities over. Either admit to yourself why you are employed where you are, or show some consistency and quit your job today. Many men have lived their lives in denial; don't be another.
Given the resources required to run Pacman and ignoring the Idle priority suggestion, it certainly shouldn't make any difference. You have just been conditioned to accept horrific bloat combined with poor scheduling algorithms.
what the WC3 ACTUALLY is again, you have much to learn. It is a consortium to build (open) standards.
No, that is what it claims to be... all political parties also exist because a few honourable, idealistic individuals want to make life better for you.
It's interesting that you should give the example of Adobe releasing its implementations before it releases its specifications (true), because that's exactly what happens with W3C: the major corporate sponsors of W3C create proprietary extensions such as canvas then push for them to be included as part of the next specification. So the implementation comes before the standard.
This is one of the reasons why while the video tags have been introduced as a standard, there is no standard codec
If only there was some sort of market system in which people could compete to offer different codecs. Clients and servers could implement a subset of those codecs, negotiating to choose the best available on both sides.
Slashdot Mirror
They are.. leaking.. supposedly.. restricted information /Shatner. This will always be considered "ethically questionable" - to those who wouldn't have wanted the leaks. Also, how do you think information in general is leaked?
1. Information at some point gets into the hands of some person A who is prepared to do with it other than what the information "owner" B intended.
2. A redistributes that information somehow, usually without B's initial knowledge.
If people exchange unencrypted stuff over Tor - i.e. they're consciously setting up a non-mainsteam network tool then consciously distributing valuable unencrypted information to unknown third parties - what exactly is "ethically questionable" about calling foul when you get your hands on that information? If you found a document lying around describing some corruption you believe it is very much in the public interest to distribute, do you think, "Oh, well, obviously that document wasn't put there for me to read, so it'd be WRONG for me to do anything about it!" If so, you're part of the problem, because you're respecting the "rights" that a criminal does not have.
Your only excuse for not making the public aware is that you're a coward - it obviously takes a lot of courage to help in publishing that sort of thing.
And this article, like many recent Wikileaks articles, is an attempt to discredit it. Why would there possibly be a stream of articles attempting to discredit a site which publishes various leaks? Yes, they ask for donations too much. Yes, they seem to be technically incompetent when it comes to keeping their site up. So tackle those problems specifically.
The religious faithful are to self-appointed scientists(*) as paedophiles are to tabloids or Muslim terrorists to western governments.
Here's a definition for ID: the intelligent creation of the laws of physics and the beginning of the universe such that, by chance, everything would end up evolving pretty much as it has. Potentially provable? To a degree. Potentially disprovable? Certainly not. Scientific hypothesis? No. Believed by many, before and now? Yes. Relevant to history? Yes. Relevant to religion? Yes. Relevant to science, as the most obvious illustration of what cannot be disproven by science? Yes.
Exercise: try stating any scientific theory and asking, "why?" repeatedly to it until you can go no further. No matter how far you go, you will always stop after a finite number of "why"s. Science is an activity performed by humans, who are mortal. It involves making an observation, writing a specific hypothesis, and providing evidence which supports (or refutes) that hypothesis. That is all. It won't reveal the secrets of the whole universe. It will never reveal the absolute origin of everything (even if some God appears, where did he come from? and so on).
ID vs evolution, Christians vs Muslims, commies vs capitalists, and any number of idealistic debates tend to depend on some assumption you have made that the opposite party has not made. Meanwhile, the pragmatists continue not caring, getting rich and increasing their control of today's world.
(*) It's rarely the practicing scientists... often those who have sipped from the Pierian spring and believe they're experts on philosophy of science.
Afaict, it's an optional feature - certainly to have FIS-based switching would require controller support, though I guess you could emulate something akin to command-based with a driver if your controller doesn't support that either. And I can't see anyone wanting the latter, as it means transfers by the slower device are the bottleneck.
One SATA port, two devices - does the SATA spec even support this?
In Silicon Valley, we don't fall for all the Redmond brainwashing and we know what Apple has accomplished and how useful and productive their tools are.
I guess a Googler wouldn't have been employed in the first place if he didn't think like the founders, i.e. have falled for all the Jobs brainwashing. IME, Googlers are a worryingly homogeneous crowd, and it goes some way to explaining why Google remain unimpressive beyond their core search service.
It's fortunate that most firms don't fall for the Google brainwashing either: there is no reason to host your slow, feature-starved office app and valuable data half way across the continent when you could make use of the free CPU cycles a few centimetres from your fingers and performant local collaboration tools. I'm sad to say that I'm not even sure Googlers are aware of what they're accomplishing. It's like being sent up to Oxbridge: you have it pounded into you from the initial open day that you're at an elite institution and you will be made into someone with the skills to pioneer advancement in your field. If you are easily flattered, you start to believe it: "But I'm great! I know I'm great or I wouldn't be here, so surely I'm doing the right thing." The illogic of your goal doesn't cross your mind.
Google search is great, the product of two stellar minds fulfilling their potential in a humble academic environment. Google Apps is borne of arrogance.
If the hadn't been forced to upgrade accountants would still be using the DOS version of Lotus 1-2-3.
Not everyone masturbates over new tech for its own sake. Imagine a computing environment driven by need rather than the desire for hardware and software companies to sell you increasingly bloated software and increasingly hot hardware to run it.
Google's job beyond its main search tool is to convince you, without reason, that you need control taken from your hands and put in theirs. And, if you're actually using Office 2007 to its full potential, you find that Google's apps are delivered with the feature set of a toilet brush, the reliability of a 419 scammer and the UI of a pregnant sow. I have met hundreds who spend their life in MS Office but not one company with an employee who would even spend one eight-hour day in Google Apps - you have nothing to gain but trouble.
If the simple, fast (on modern hardware), non-distracting, stable Lotus 123 works for someone, let them use Lotus 123. If you're not importing the format properly into your package, that's your fault for singing the praises of new things for their own sake rather than maintaining compatibility for people who use computers as tools rather than toys.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
You are one of about three people with that straw man.
No-one disagrees that broadcasting an SSID is advertising the existence of the station, but it doesn't follow that broadcasting the SSID is advertising a service for the public. It's the difference between "here's my house, it's called XYZ" and "here's my house, it's called XYZ, please feel free to come in and use it".
Perhaps you could take some time to think of reasons why you might want to make everyone aware of the existence of something in the vicinity without implying that it's there for anyone to use.
You do realise that sending an SSID over the airwaves is not an implicit offer to "the public" that you "advertise a service", yes?
I mean, if I put a sign in front of my house giving the name of my house, am I telling you that you can come in and use it at your whim?
if you would kindly give me your address, cowardly Anonymous Coward, I shall be following you around and recording you for the next six months of your life whenever you are on public property, also recording you in your home as far as those light/infrared/etc waves are being broadcast out to public property. I shall be putting out all this information on the Internet.
If you don't want anyone to know about your life, lock yourself up in your home in a Faraday cage.
Eh? Compulsory purchase of government service = tax.
Except by this method your tax is taken from net rather than gross income, so you can add another 30% to the "funded cost" if you want...
Atom 3: It appears I have gained that electron :-(.
Atom 1: Don't be so negative about it!
* * *
Prima: Do you have AIDS?
Secunda: No.
Prima: Are you positive?
Secunda: Yes!
Prima: ...
If you take $99/year to distribute a product which is routinely governed by rules on re-distribution, force a convoluted review process, sell from your storefront, and take a 30% cut of what you're selling, it most certainly is your responsibility to check the origin. Otherwise you've just provided a get-out clause to all fences in history: "How was I supposed to know it was stolen!? He told me he found it washed up on the beach! Would jewelry ever be stolen?"
Was it actually hardware-accelerated? People keep pointing this out...
The W3C's dodgy corporatism has really got to you ;-).
It was pointed out ages ago that its implementation runs on top of DirectX/OpenGL, which means it is as hardware accelerated as they are on your platform.
Sorry, what?
The GPU can do more processing, so there's no need to create an ultra-efficient binary for acceptable 3D performance where the CPU may take up the slack.
And yes, source matters. That way, if there's any ambiguity in the spec, or question about how to implement something, I can look at what appears to be a compliant implementation and see how it's done.
There is no such W3C user agent either - Amaya is a less than compliant testbed, not a reference implementation. We are welcome to look at the source for Firefox and for WebKit, find out that they've implemented things differently,... and be none the wiser.
This being said, if you ever have to consult the code then there is a problem with the specification and an erratum needs to be issued. OSS is fraught with "consult the code" fallbacks to poor documentation which hamper reusability as people end up making assumptions beyond what might have been intended.
On top of all of this, Flash is patent-encumbered -- HTML itself is not.
What exactly does this mean? HTML may be encumbered by patents on certain proecesses, but W3C contributors have agreed on royalty-free licensing; anyone else might point out a feature in HTML they think is covered by one of their patents (e.g. BT). Similarly, Adobe has agreed to royalty-free licensing on anything they may have a patent for in the Flash spec.
In general, the W3C's policy is to possibly accept licensing on RAND terms.
Adobe doesn't seem to release everything (DRM in particular)
DRM's inherent broken-ness means its implementation cannot be released. Maybe if Flash dies providers will move to forcing you to download a DRM binary native plug-in, or at least try and fail to issue obfuscated Javascript (don't imagine for a moment that content providers will "oh well, never mind!" and remove DRM). Either way, the core Flash platform is open - the extensions which people interested in openness wouldn't want to use anyway are not.
It really does seem like this is the reason Gnash and others haven't caught up
I would say that it is lack of interest. There is one fairly good working implementation which works on the majority of desktops, and one slower implementation (Mac) which works on most of the rest. It is hard to monetise the development of an alternative Flash player, whereas it is easy to do so with web browsers via sponsored searches (everyone), proprietary extensions (esp. Microsoft) and (ultimately - esp. Apple) influencing the standard.
Many alternative Flash authoring tools exist and are used, so the spec is clearly readable.
Of course, we could also consider the fact that the Flash specs and Flash player are produced by exactly one company, while HTML is a collaborative process.
Agreed. It's just not nearly as "collaborative" right now as the W3C's adherents would have you believe.
If minimum wage was actually sufficient for survival in the modern society,
You are so drunk on your Champagne Socialism that you aren't even reading what I said: did I mention a statutory minimum wage, or did I twice say "the minimum wage required to survive"?
Actually I don't get paid "market wage" for the work on my level.
Do you get paid the minimum wage required to survive? If not, you are using your market value as a developer of open source software to bargain a better financial deal for yourself.
Plenty of worse programmers get paid the same salary, though they also are more stressed out, and do work that often goes against anything even remotely resembling ethics.
What a crass display of plumage! So the reason those "worse programmers" get paid the same as you isn't even (as your incoherent philosophy might suggest) because you don't demand the best possible wage; it's because, unlike you, they are unethical.
One doesn't have to work for a nonprofit to make something useful for everyone.
This was not in question. The matter was whether your primary motivation is one of enriching the world or enriching yourself (via your employer). Because you consider yourself a reasonable and honest programmer, you have the option to work for nonprofits with a primary motivation to improve the world. You have chosen not to do that.
I can assure you, if my priorities were wrong, I would notice it without help from inferior minds.
I am trying to interpret that sentence in a non-vacuous way. If your priorities were wrong, you would notice it without help from ABC... so, if your priorities were wrong, you would notice it... on your own... eventually? Or if you come to notice it with help, you are certain that it will be with the help of a superior/equal mind?
I have learned so far that you judge certain people as having inferior minds to your own, and conclude that nothing from them can contribute towards significant decisions. That's the sort of pigeonholing brought to us by feudalism!
The principle is outdated in the same way that the Constitution is outdated: if you don't understand your country, you are condemned to reinvent it poorly.
Everything you said about tracking and people's surprise may be true, but it's nothing in the technology itself which is inherently a violation of privacy: the violation is in the particular processing and storage of data consciously (or occasionally recklessly) performed by various corporations.
You can, if you want, pretend that a social problem is technological and speak against certain forms of technology... this is the road you might want to go down if you are representing the mpaa. Or you could speak against the abuse of technology. Similarly, you can condemn/attach punishment to merely hearing the wrong information ("someone might tell you, but then I'd have to xyz you..."), or you can limit your condemnation to someone who chooses to use information in a particular way. One paves the way for data protection legislation, and the other heralds a police state.
It is appropriate to note that European Union Data Protection law is mostly based on what you can and cannot store, process and disseminate, not what you can and cannot hear.
So what you are saying is that the current Adobe way of doing it is correct: implement, specify, analyse, enhance, repeat.
And the problem... is that Adobe makes a good enough closed source implementation which no-one has bothered to compete with? So we should all stick to HTML/JavaScript/CSS, the user agents for which are full of non-standard extensions and don't fully implement previous years' standards either? Familiar?
The only thing going for the W3C is that certain members are large enough that they can buy out some proprietary codec and dump it on the market to push out the competition. It's reasonable, non-discriminatory, and worked great for Microsoft in the late '90s, right?
But... but... that would be SVG, and Apple doesn't want that; it wants Canvas. Better a third-rate Flash replacement which doesn't integrate with the DOM and pushes people to writing native iApps!
What I was trying to get at is that "the concept of" the referrer header is not a privacy violation... you are on tenuous thought crime ground if you target the ability to perceive information. A privacy violation occurs only when you store or distribute information in some inappropriate manner.
Consider it an extension of the traditional (and sadly superseded) US principle of wireless that you're allowed to hear any information which appears on the airwaves but you're not necessarily allowed to act freely upon it.
The client creates the referrer header... it's a privacy invasion in the same way that it would be a privacy invasion to tell you that I have a spoon fetish then complain because you heard me tell you.
Of course, how you process that information can and will be regulated, and it is possible to store/use the information in a way that will violate my privacy. But it's not your fault that you heard it, and I can't blame you if you don't forget it providing you don't choose to write it down.
Your employer hired you because your work is good enough yet you showed no indication of working for free. Your employer is paying you above the minimum wage required to survive because you showed no indication of working for the minimum wage required to survive.
As long as you continue to selfishly and capitalistically demand a market wage for your employment, you are redirecting resources which could be used toward improving open source software for the world. As long as you work on a software project for a firm which ultimately exists to make money rather than a non-profit which ultimately exists to improve open source software for the world, you are redirecting resources which could be used toward improving open source software for the world.
You might want to think your priorities over. Either admit to yourself why you are employed where you are, or show some consistency and quit your job today. Many men have lived their lives in denial; don't be another.
Given the resources required to run Pacman and ignoring the Idle priority suggestion, it certainly shouldn't make any difference. You have just been conditioned to accept horrific bloat combined with poor scheduling algorithms.
what the WC3 ACTUALLY is again, you have much to learn. It is a consortium to build (open) standards.
No, that is what it claims to be... all political parties also exist because a few honourable, idealistic individuals want to make life better for you.
It's interesting that you should give the example of Adobe releasing its implementations before it releases its specifications (true), because that's exactly what happens with W3C: the major corporate sponsors of W3C create proprietary extensions such as canvas then push for them to be included as part of the next specification. So the implementation comes before the standard.
This is one of the reasons why while the video tags have been introduced as a standard, there is no standard codec
If only there was some sort of market system in which people could compete to offer different codecs. Clients and servers could implement a subset of those codecs, negotiating to choose the best available on both sides.
No. Open specifications, licensing restrictions, and royalty fees. Perhaps you're thinking of third-party codecs (up to the third party)? Or perhaps you're thinking of people who actually want to distribute Adobe's player (royalty free)?