Unfortunately, the USA doesn't care about inconveniences like sovereignty of a foreign nation. And you better not complain, or we'll bring Democracy to your country too. We've been very busy creating new treaties to expand DMCA-like law to other countries, building up extradition, and creating extrajudicial process to punish people who commit acts considered criminal in our country but not theirs. At the same time, we've been withdrawing from treaties that restrict the diplomatic rights and sovereignties of others, for the benefit of our military-industrialist complex. Ask Julian Assange how that works sometime... that is, if you can get him out of his new permanent jail in the Ecudorian apartme--er, embassy.
Some valid points, but we already have socialized medicine and have for decades. It's called Medicare/Medicaid and a large segment does understand. Just try taking away those two programs from seniors and the AARP will be down on any politician that tries.
True, but the same logic that prevents us from throwing 4 year olds in jail for life for stealing candy bars (something that can and has happened in California to adults) also prevents us from packing old people into railroad box cars and disappearing them; There's simply no way we can rationalize it. We can't tell them to just "get a job", because, well... they can't work. It's obvious they can't work. It simply can't be denied. So, for those people whom we can't rationalize away their healthcare... we grudgingly give it to them. But only enough to keep them alive, not enough to be comfortable. I know many elderly who are in substantial pain. You think they're cranky because they're old? Not exactly -- They're cranky because they have a long list of medical problems, and only a short list of medical answers.
There was a guy recently who found out he had cancer -- a semi-famous member of the open source community (I disrecall the name). He was already disabled and on SSDI, but he made too much money to be on medicaid and wasn't old enough to get it automatically. He didn't have enough money for the surgery, which he needed in a matter of weeks. If he got it in time, his chance of survival with complete recovery was around 85%. Wait any longer, and he dies a slow, agonizing death. The government told him they wouldn't cover the surgery or any health care costs...
At least, not until he was declared terminally ill. Then they would pay for health care. That, sir, is the system we have today. There is nothing dignified about it, and most countries would consider such treatment not only barbaric, but a violation of basic human rights. It's not socialist medicine if the only reason its offered at all is because the alternative would result in social chaos and unrest costing more than the service offered. It's barbarism.
Koenkk makes the case that his project has always complied with the GPL.
Many moons ago, when the internet was young and fresh, and wild UNIX admins roamed freely, there was a thing called Usenet, and on this thing called Usenet, was a relatively new problem called Spam. And much of this Spam came from a particular ISP. And as Usenet back in those days was a community-run entity, there was much discussion about how to resolve this problem. E-mails sent to the ISP were met with silence, or with "not our problem." And the Spam continued. One day, after there had been a much-heated debate, a vote was held, and it was declared the ISP (AT&T), would be given the ultimate punishment: The Usenet death sentence.
It was rarely carried out, and even the elders recall only a handful of times when an ISP had earned its place amongst the killfiles of the wild UNIX admins of old. And so the call went out: At midnight, the killfiles would be updated, and AT&T would be purged henceforth from the world of Usenet. And word of this spread, and yet the giant still slumbered, refusing to do anything. And it was seen that the death sentence was good, and so all waited for it to come to pass.
Suddenly, in the final minutes of the final hour, an e-mail appeared from the beligerant ISP! It read, simply, "We do not have a problem, and we are working as quickly as possible to fix it." And thus was it seen for the first time on the internet how corporations deal with these sorts of problems. And ever since, whensoever a cry went up in an internet community that called for the end of access for a corporation, thus has been the response... by tradition, only uttered in the final minutes, of the final hour.
You need to find yourself a new job if you think IT is about the latest and greatest.
Well, you're right, it isn't. In the business world, it's all about improving the business process, either by quality control, efficiency, cost, etc. Generally, the latest and greatest also has the most to offer in those areas; If you're buying into it now. If you already have an infrastructure built up, then you have to weigh the costs and benefits. It's sorta like how we're constantly finding new metal alloys and concrete mixtures which make buildings, bridges, and roads stronger, last longer, etc. We don't tear down everything and start over with each incremental advance, but we do build new stuff with those advances.
So in a sense, IT is about the latest and greatest... it's just that is only part of the picture, not the whole.
Saying that Android won't gain much market share is not only foolish, it's entirely false.
The latest numbers disagree with your assessment: Apple is gaining faster than Android is. And let's not forget profit per unit, where Apple is kicking the crap out of Android. But what about growth of the market itself? Well, that isn't looking too hot either. In fact, the latest numbers suggest that Android's biggest problem isn't Apple at all, but Microsoft.
If Google can step their game up and fix some the glaring issues such as inconsistent updates from manufacturers, they'll be well on their way to take the dominant position.
They obtained the dominant position some time ago, in terms of per unit sales. It's highly unlikely they'll ever achieve parity with per unit profit compared to other offerings. It's arguable that the only thing keeping Android alive is the Google brand identity; The support is shit and the platform is fragmenting. By most business metrics, the Android platform's golden age is drawing to an end. Google hasn't "stepped up their game" at any point, and they can't... because the entire Android model is a free for all. They have no control over what apps get loaded, they can't possibly test all possible combinations of hardware and software, and in fact most vendors have to work rather closely with Google to get a shipping product. Oh, and it's not cheap maintaining 20 different hardware platforms for the vendor... which is why so few stand behind their product for any length of time.
No, I don't think they're on their way to a dominant position: I think they're on their way to the shit can if they can't sort out some very real structural (read: management) problems in the overall Android platform.
While all iOS devices are Apple phones/tablets/media players and the iOS 6 update is available for all of them made within the past couple of years.
Apple has auto-update enabled and often forced on their products and their target audience is not the technically adept. The average person doesn't go into options or configuration menus often, if ever. A lot of techies disable auto-update for a number of reasons, including hacking their phones so that leaving auto-update enabled could cause accidental bricking. As well, Apple's product line is, as you mentioned, rather exclusive: iOS only runs on one company's hardware. Android runs on dozens.
Anyway, let's be honest about one other issue: vendor support. Android may run on more devices, have more features, and be considerably more complex and open than iOS, but when it comes to the phone manufacturer standing behind their product, they give a resounding "Fuck you" to the customer. Apple products are still supported and actively maintained for several years after launch. Samsung, HPC, etc., might make one, maybe two updates for your phone. Ever. Six months from now, they'll be releasing another $600 retail phone to much fanfare, and your phone, which they promised upgrades for years, is forgotten.
Which is probably why even if tomorrow Google released a version of Android which gave the user orgasms with the push of a button, they still wouldn't gain much market share... in six months, there'd be "Orgasm with cigarette and cheesecake" released and Orgasm 1.0 would develop some horrible security flaw that would render you sterile and break out in boils, and the vendor would tell you they plan a fix... eventually... but hey, in the mean time, have you checked our our commercials for the next version?
There is an entire field of mathematics dedicating to filling in the blank when that happens. Sometimes the absence of information says more than its presence... ask any police officer. And as for it not being collected -- remember the TSA body screener fiasco? Anything with a microprocessor, a sensor, and programmable logic can be modified to collect information, and most probably without your knowledge, even if it says it doesn't on the tin. And the other thing, which many slashdot readers can attest to, is debugging. Almost every device has some diagnostic mode, factory mode, engineering mode, etc., which allows a 3rd party to examine its inputs and outputs for the purposes of quality assurance. Even Google got screwed on this one recently with their capturing of wifi packets... They had no business reason to do it, few people knew about it, the data was (to the best of anyone's knowledge) not used, but there it was, sitting on hundreds of harddrives, getting backed up, and the word is it was all because of one engineer who forgot to disable logging.
It's better to just assume everything is being logged and recorded; And then pass laws limiting its use -- that way, it'll never become widespread or systematic. I don't see any way of reasonably preventing information collection -- it's intrinsic to the function of most information systems.
*grabs some popcorn* I'm sure a lot of people will immediately jump all over this company for sharing the data, even collecting it, and long rants about the usefulness, ethicality, or lawfulness, of said activity. None of that really matters terribly much though. Computers record information, and computers are becoming a part of everything that requires electricity. There's microprocessors now in toasters. The question isn't whether or not information can or should be collected, but how it's used.
Knowledge of how it could be used or abused isn't sufficient to cause social change, and the life of the law has never been wisdom, but experience. In other words, the only way we learn not to do something as a society is by running headlong into the problem. It's like climate change. The science is not in dispute; But until large sections of the Earth are desert and millions are dying every day from starvation, hunger, pestilence, etc., nothing will ever be done about it. That's how society works (or doesn't).
The belief that an enhanced understanding of a problem will stir people to action is one of mankind's oldest delusions. We only learn one way: By fucking it up.
You Yanks fear the word "socialist" so much you spend far more to get rid of it!
You're parroting a commonly held misconception about how politics in the United States works. Firstly, your elected representatives come from more than two parties; Your voters have a wider diversity of candidates to choose from, and are less apt to vote along party lines. This also spreads out the concentration of money paid to your elected representatives by private interests. Put more simply, it's harder to buy legislation in your country. As well, the disparity between the rich and poor is far less pronounced. This results in your legislators being more likely to represent the actual will of the people, rather than the apparent or manufacturered will.
It's also no small matter that the UK has the BBC. It's more important than you guys give it credit for: The licensing fees you pay are amply repaid not just in terms of quality programming, but also unbiased programming. The BBC can't be co-opted with a corporate buyout. In our country, the media is largely controlled by a few dozen men like Murdock. An informed voter is a voter that can't easily be duped; And the BBC provides a mechanism to prevent your media from becoming too biased towards any one political view. Compare the US section of the BBC with any major news network here -- stories that make front page there, or are internationally relevant, simply don't make it. They aren't reported. It's not just that there's bias in what is reported, there's also things that the public simply isn't told about. You can probably deduce what this means for the political landscape.
Lastly, the UK was bombed into near-nothingness. The US never has been. The closest we've come to having to reassess economically was the Great Depression. Because we never had to rebuild from scratch, we never learned the social lessons that an experience like that offers -- specifically, we never really developed a cultural center of "We're all in this together". American culture has long been based on individualism -- which during times of material prosperity is great, but during economic trouble, it creates a "blame the victim" mentality. You are poor because you want to be poor, not because some bad shit just happened to drop on your head. The American Dream has become a political crucible -- maintaining our collective ego has forced us into social policies that are ultimately harmful and destructive to our way of life. It's a societal-scale version of the Just World phenomenon.
It's not socialism per-se that we're afraid of -- it's the idea that we aren't in control of our own fate. That we aren't individuals, but actually part of something more than ourselves, and that our success is determined only in part on our own choices, rather than entirely by it. It's ego protection, individually and collectively. And when you read anti-socialist opinions in our media, they may use the same words you know and understand, but they don't mean the same things. It all goes back to the cold war, the super power stuff, and that collective ego I mentioned earlier.
For us, socialism is a sign of weakness; It's a sign that we've become like the russians, the iranians, and all the other boogie men we've bomed the hell out of. So even when it would be good and proper for us to adopt socialist social policies, we don't... we'd rather go on maintaining the notion that We're Number One. America is on a path of self-destruction because it simply can't acknowledge, individually or collectively, that we need help and we need to work together. Our problems are world problems too -- but until that fact ingrains itself into our culture, it's pointless to expect change. America, as an idea and as a culture, would rather die than admit defeat.
Just like the British did at the height of their empire. It's a phase we'll outgrow eventually, just like you guys did. But it won't happen quickly, or easily, or gracefully.
I have no doubts that everything you said was true. We live in a litigous society, and the law is sufficiently complex that nobody, yourself included, can possibly anticipate what may or may not be illegal. It's a crap shoot. That said, what you're describing sounds like a civil, not criminal matter, to the best of my understanding. It's not a crime to take those pictures. It's trespass (a crime) if you don't leave after you do it and they ask you to leave.
First, beer surviving the holocaust is not something I see as a useful way to spend my tax dollars. Preventing the holocaust is. Second... duh? We irradiate our food to ensure its safety. Radiation is not a threat to food... at least not once its been picked or killed. Radioactive material is, of course.
A lot of businesses consider legislation to be innovative. Some of them are in the news right now for suing their competitors to keep their products out of the marketplace. Others are being sued or investigated by various governments for anticompetitive practices that consist of making their product incompatible with a competitors', and then using the law to keep them from reverse engineering compatibility back in.
A large number of lawyers is now as important as a large number of engineers these days; That is, if you don't want to go out of business. So maybe businesses created the problem, but government allowed it, and government supports it now. It doesn't matter whether the chicken came first or the egg, the problem is that corporations and businesses cooperate in furthering the status quo. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses. There is only one government: It seems clear where the change needs to come from.
Actually, the larger the valuation for the industry, the worse it is, since the size of the industry is what gives you an idea of how much is being bled off from sectors that wouldn't be better off if set on fire.
Hey, I'm not saying advertising doesn't have its place. I'm not even saying companies shouldn't be allowed to spend as much as they want on it. I happen to believe in freedom of speech, even speech I disagree with. But I also have the right to ignore others' speech, or to respond with speech of my own. Legislating away that choice is wrong -- and that's what this guy is advocating. Well, fuck him. His position isn't just unethical, it's unamerican. Nobody has a right to shove their own beliefs down other people's throats and that statement doesn't change because money is involved, even a lot of money.
If people hang a "no soliciting" sign on the door of their home or business, it should be respected. In many jurisdictions, there's a penalty if you don't. If you add your phone number to the "do not call" list, that also has to be respected. It's even required by law in cases where the other party is owed money. The right to free speech doesn't include the right to be heard: I can walk away. That doesn't change just because the speech is digital instead.
So what? It could be a three hundred quintillion dollar industry. It doesn't change the ethics, morals, or the fact that most people don't want it. Advertising has been shoved down people's throats. It's been put in places where it was promised not to appear. It eats away at our culture, it deadens people's nerves, and it saturates everything it comes in contact with. It is a plague -- and it needs reform. It is an industry without regulation, without controls, and with an insatiable appetite.
And not a one of them are for reasonable controls. It was only recently, and after fighting tooth and nail, that we even got them to stop screwing with the volume on our TVs. Fuck them -- when they learn to be responsible, then maybe I'll learn to give a damn whether they get thrown under a bus or not. But probably not.
I suppose the natural solution then would be to ban the app, possibly ban android phones with NFC capability, and/or threaten the security researchers with jail time. That's usually what legislators and law enforcement does... rather than, I don't know, fix the problem with the cards?
. If a reasonable person would consider the house not to be a place of public accommodation, then opening the door and walking in is sufficient for a B&E charge. The defendant can offer a defense by claiming he is an invitee or that he had reason to believe such, but he has the burden of proof if the act itself is not in dispute.
Convicting someone of a crime requires three elements: Intent, knowledge, and the act. All three ordinarily have to be proven before someone is guilty. If you were taking prescription drugs, for example, and experienced memory loss and confusion as a result, and through no fault of your own walked into the wrong building... there's no intent. No crime was committed. Then there's knowledge; Say you did intend to enter the building, but didn't know it was private or off limits (for example, at the mall you're looking for a bathroom and open an unmarked door into a private "secure" area. You're caught by a security guard. You intended to enter, but you couldn't have known it was wrong to do so. No crime was committed. And then there's the act of entering itself -- self-explanatory.
So that covers the three main elements of a crime: You have to prove all three for someone to be guilty. Now, let's say you've managed to prove all three elements. Good for you! Now we ge to discuss defenses and excuses. A defense is something where the act itself would normally be considered criminal, but the circumstances make it justified. For example, normally punching someone in the face is assault, but if you had reason to believe you were in imminent danger (whether or not this is true), you can (in most jurisdictions) strike first. You had no choice, you had to respond. An excuse is when you had a choice not to commit a criminal act, did so anyway, but the response was socially justified. For example, if you saw a child being attacked by an adult: You have no obligation to intervene, but most people would. What you did was socially acceptable then.
Now that we've finished my Really Condensed Intro To Criminal Law, let's discuss your assertion: Mere presence in someone's (unlocked) house is breaking and entering. Breaking and entering is not a crime of strict liability. Strict liability crimes are ones where only the act itself has to be proved; For example possession of stolen property. It requires intent -- intent in this case is the breaking part.
In some jurisdictions the use of force can be as simple as pushing open a door, in others it needs to be prying open a window or picking a lock, etc. It can also be threatening someone; The definition varies, but you get the idea. Typically, however, the room itself can't have been open to enter; a door without a lock mechanism, or a door left open, or a door left unlocked, in some jurisdictions it doesn't constitute a use of force to open it and enter.
Secondly, there has to be knowledge that the residence is used primarily for habitation -- not occasionally. There are many buildings you'd consider a home that people don't live in. Executives and CEOs often have houses that are used only to host parties, and are built as such. They are zoned residential, but that's not the purpose of the house. To constitute breaking and entering (also known as burglary), you have to been able to reasonably conclude it was primarily used for habitation. And then there's that pesky issue of it being unoccupied... and that in some jurisdictions it has to take place outside regular business hours.
All of those conditions have to be met for the act itself to be considered burglary; Otherwise, it's a different crime (or no crime at all).
If there was a sign saying "Private property", or "Authorized personnel only", or "By invitation only", then you'd be correct. But most people's homes have no such sign. It's just a building; And there's no way someone could know ahead of time the intent of the owner, or even whether it was public or private property
My question for the Slashdot community is: in the case of single developer (for now), multiple machines, and a small-ish user base, what would be your suggestions for code versioning and deployment, considering that there are no real test environments and most code just goes into production ?
The simple answer is, "Whatever works best for you." You're the only developer for these projects. Unless your manager is giving you direction on a specific process or requirements, it's your ball game. You know how you work best -- pick your tools accordingly.
It's a bit harder to defend breaking into your luggage than randomly dialing phone numbers and entering what is widely considered a "default" password in to get access. In the former case, it's reasonable to conclude that, regardless of password, if your luggage has a lock on it, it's meant to be private. In the digital world, however, access control mechanisms frequently are assigned a default password because the access mechanism itself is integral to the system -- ie, you can choose not to put a pad lock on a door, you can't disable the login screen. In the minds of a lot of people, assigning a password of "password", "1234" (or variant), "letmein", or "admin", is equivalent to not putting a pad lock on a door.
In other words, it's not breaking and entering if you leave the door to your house unlocked. It's simple trespass and there are numerous legal defenses and excuses for that. The French court merely (and correctly, IMO) said there is an electronic analogue to this legal reasoning. That said, change your luggage combo dude, or I'm klepto'ing that hawaiian shirt you love so much.:P
Businesses need a way of quickly, transparently and broadly sharing information that also allows you to not see information you don't need/want. The conflict between these requirements, plus human nature (tagging could solve it, if people would/could consistently and informatively tag), is sufficient to make this kind of model unlikely in a business.
I'm not sure whether you're saying politics doesn't play a role in any environment (a statement I strongly disagree with), or just some environments (I can work with that). But you do make a good additional point: A lot of business process in many companies is too specialized to make collaboration/social networking practical. Whether this is for legitimate business reasons or *cough* job security is a discussion for another day, but I do think you're right.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't mean shit outside the USA. Thank God.
Unfortunately, the USA doesn't care about inconveniences like sovereignty of a foreign nation. And you better not complain, or we'll bring Democracy to your country too. We've been very busy creating new treaties to expand DMCA-like law to other countries, building up extradition, and creating extrajudicial process to punish people who commit acts considered criminal in our country but not theirs. At the same time, we've been withdrawing from treaties that restrict the diplomatic rights and sovereignties of others, for the benefit of our military-industrialist complex. Ask Julian Assange how that works sometime... that is, if you can get him out of his new permanent jail in the Ecudorian apartme--er, embassy.
Some valid points, but we already have socialized medicine and have for decades. It's called Medicare/Medicaid and a large segment does understand. Just try taking away those two programs from seniors and the AARP will be down on any politician that tries.
True, but the same logic that prevents us from throwing 4 year olds in jail for life for stealing candy bars (something that can and has happened in California to adults) also prevents us from packing old people into railroad box cars and disappearing them; There's simply no way we can rationalize it. We can't tell them to just "get a job", because, well... they can't work. It's obvious they can't work. It simply can't be denied. So, for those people whom we can't rationalize away their healthcare... we grudgingly give it to them. But only enough to keep them alive, not enough to be comfortable. I know many elderly who are in substantial pain. You think they're cranky because they're old? Not exactly -- They're cranky because they have a long list of medical problems, and only a short list of medical answers.
There was a guy recently who found out he had cancer -- a semi-famous member of the open source community (I disrecall the name). He was already disabled and on SSDI, but he made too much money to be on medicaid and wasn't old enough to get it automatically. He didn't have enough money for the surgery, which he needed in a matter of weeks. If he got it in time, his chance of survival with complete recovery was around 85%. Wait any longer, and he dies a slow, agonizing death. The government told him they wouldn't cover the surgery or any health care costs...
At least, not until he was declared terminally ill. Then they would pay for health care. That, sir, is the system we have today. There is nothing dignified about it, and most countries would consider such treatment not only barbaric, but a violation of basic human rights. It's not socialist medicine if the only reason its offered at all is because the alternative would result in social chaos and unrest costing more than the service offered. It's barbarism.
Koenkk makes the case that his project has always complied with the GPL.
Many moons ago, when the internet was young and fresh, and wild UNIX admins roamed freely, there was a thing called Usenet, and on this thing called Usenet, was a relatively new problem called Spam. And much of this Spam came from a particular ISP. And as Usenet back in those days was a community-run entity, there was much discussion about how to resolve this problem. E-mails sent to the ISP were met with silence, or with "not our problem." And the Spam continued. One day, after there had been a much-heated debate, a vote was held, and it was declared the ISP (AT&T), would be given the ultimate punishment: The Usenet death sentence.
It was rarely carried out, and even the elders recall only a handful of times when an ISP had earned its place amongst the killfiles of the wild UNIX admins of old. And so the call went out: At midnight, the killfiles would be updated, and AT&T would be purged henceforth from the world of Usenet. And word of this spread, and yet the giant still slumbered, refusing to do anything. And it was seen that the death sentence was good, and so all waited for it to come to pass.
Suddenly, in the final minutes of the final hour, an e-mail appeared from the beligerant ISP! It read, simply, "We do not have a problem, and we are working as quickly as possible to fix it." And thus was it seen for the first time on the internet how corporations deal with these sorts of problems. And ever since, whensoever a cry went up in an internet community that called for the end of access for a corporation, thus has been the response... by tradition, only uttered in the final minutes, of the final hour.
You need to find yourself a new job if you think IT is about the latest and greatest.
Well, you're right, it isn't. In the business world, it's all about improving the business process, either by quality control, efficiency, cost, etc. Generally, the latest and greatest also has the most to offer in those areas; If you're buying into it now. If you already have an infrastructure built up, then you have to weigh the costs and benefits. It's sorta like how we're constantly finding new metal alloys and concrete mixtures which make buildings, bridges, and roads stronger, last longer, etc. We don't tear down everything and start over with each incremental advance, but we do build new stuff with those advances.
So in a sense, IT is about the latest and greatest... it's just that is only part of the picture, not the whole.
Saying that Android won't gain much market share is not only foolish, it's entirely false.
The latest numbers disagree with your assessment: Apple is gaining faster than Android is. And let's not forget profit per unit, where Apple is kicking the crap out of Android. But what about growth of the market itself? Well, that isn't looking too hot either. In fact, the latest numbers suggest that Android's biggest problem isn't Apple at all, but Microsoft.
If Google can step their game up and fix some the glaring issues such as inconsistent updates from manufacturers, they'll be well on their way to take the dominant position.
They obtained the dominant position some time ago, in terms of per unit sales. It's highly unlikely they'll ever achieve parity with per unit profit compared to other offerings. It's arguable that the only thing keeping Android alive is the Google brand identity; The support is shit and the platform is fragmenting. By most business metrics, the Android platform's golden age is drawing to an end. Google hasn't "stepped up their game" at any point, and they can't... because the entire Android model is a free for all. They have no control over what apps get loaded, they can't possibly test all possible combinations of hardware and software, and in fact most vendors have to work rather closely with Google to get a shipping product. Oh, and it's not cheap maintaining 20 different hardware platforms for the vendor... which is why so few stand behind their product for any length of time.
No, I don't think they're on their way to a dominant position: I think they're on their way to the shit can if they can't sort out some very real structural (read: management) problems in the overall Android platform.
False. No iOS products even have an "auto-update" ability.
Giggle. whatever you say.
While all iOS devices are Apple phones/tablets/media players and the iOS 6 update is available for all of them made within the past couple of years.
Apple has auto-update enabled and often forced on their products and their target audience is not the technically adept. The average person doesn't go into options or configuration menus often, if ever. A lot of techies disable auto-update for a number of reasons, including hacking their phones so that leaving auto-update enabled could cause accidental bricking. As well, Apple's product line is, as you mentioned, rather exclusive: iOS only runs on one company's hardware. Android runs on dozens.
Anyway, let's be honest about one other issue: vendor support. Android may run on more devices, have more features, and be considerably more complex and open than iOS, but when it comes to the phone manufacturer standing behind their product, they give a resounding "Fuck you" to the customer. Apple products are still supported and actively maintained for several years after launch. Samsung, HPC, etc., might make one, maybe two updates for your phone. Ever. Six months from now, they'll be releasing another $600 retail phone to much fanfare, and your phone, which they promised upgrades for years, is forgotten.
Which is probably why even if tomorrow Google released a version of Android which gave the user orgasms with the push of a button, they still wouldn't gain much market share... in six months, there'd be "Orgasm with cigarette and cheesecake" released and Orgasm 1.0 would develop some horrible security flaw that would render you sterile and break out in boils, and the vendor would tell you they plan a fix... eventually... but hey, in the mean time, have you checked our our commercials for the next version?
It's an internet cliche, but still applicable:
And Nothing Of Value Was Lost
Information that isn't collected can't be abused.
There is an entire field of mathematics dedicating to filling in the blank when that happens. Sometimes the absence of information says more than its presence... ask any police officer. And as for it not being collected -- remember the TSA body screener fiasco? Anything with a microprocessor, a sensor, and programmable logic can be modified to collect information, and most probably without your knowledge, even if it says it doesn't on the tin. And the other thing, which many slashdot readers can attest to, is debugging. Almost every device has some diagnostic mode, factory mode, engineering mode, etc., which allows a 3rd party to examine its inputs and outputs for the purposes of quality assurance. Even Google got screwed on this one recently with their capturing of wifi packets... They had no business reason to do it, few people knew about it, the data was (to the best of anyone's knowledge) not used, but there it was, sitting on hundreds of harddrives, getting backed up, and the word is it was all because of one engineer who forgot to disable logging.
It's better to just assume everything is being logged and recorded; And then pass laws limiting its use -- that way, it'll never become widespread or systematic. I don't see any way of reasonably preventing information collection -- it's intrinsic to the function of most information systems.
I do see ways of limiting abuse...
*grabs some popcorn* I'm sure a lot of people will immediately jump all over this company for sharing the data, even collecting it, and long rants about the usefulness, ethicality, or lawfulness, of said activity. None of that really matters terribly much though. Computers record information, and computers are becoming a part of everything that requires electricity. There's microprocessors now in toasters. The question isn't whether or not information can or should be collected, but how it's used.
Knowledge of how it could be used or abused isn't sufficient to cause social change, and the life of the law has never been wisdom, but experience. In other words, the only way we learn not to do something as a society is by running headlong into the problem. It's like climate change. The science is not in dispute; But until large sections of the Earth are desert and millions are dying every day from starvation, hunger, pestilence, etc., nothing will ever be done about it. That's how society works (or doesn't).
The belief that an enhanced understanding of a problem will stir people to action is one of mankind's oldest delusions. We only learn one way: By fucking it up.
What is such insightful and well reasoned opinion doing in slashdot? You ma'am must be new here.
Sorry. It was the weekend, and I was bored. It won't happen again, honest officer Anonymous.
You Yanks fear the word "socialist" so much you spend far more to get rid of it!
You're parroting a commonly held misconception about how politics in the United States works. Firstly, your elected representatives come from more than two parties; Your voters have a wider diversity of candidates to choose from, and are less apt to vote along party lines. This also spreads out the concentration of money paid to your elected representatives by private interests. Put more simply, it's harder to buy legislation in your country. As well, the disparity between the rich and poor is far less pronounced. This results in your legislators being more likely to represent the actual will of the people, rather than the apparent or manufacturered will.
It's also no small matter that the UK has the BBC. It's more important than you guys give it credit for: The licensing fees you pay are amply repaid not just in terms of quality programming, but also unbiased programming. The BBC can't be co-opted with a corporate buyout. In our country, the media is largely controlled by a few dozen men like Murdock. An informed voter is a voter that can't easily be duped; And the BBC provides a mechanism to prevent your media from becoming too biased towards any one political view. Compare the US section of the BBC with any major news network here -- stories that make front page there, or are internationally relevant, simply don't make it. They aren't reported. It's not just that there's bias in what is reported, there's also things that the public simply isn't told about. You can probably deduce what this means for the political landscape.
Lastly, the UK was bombed into near-nothingness. The US never has been. The closest we've come to having to reassess economically was the Great Depression. Because we never had to rebuild from scratch, we never learned the social lessons that an experience like that offers -- specifically, we never really developed a cultural center of "We're all in this together". American culture has long been based on individualism -- which during times of material prosperity is great, but during economic trouble, it creates a "blame the victim" mentality. You are poor because you want to be poor, not because some bad shit just happened to drop on your head. The American Dream has become a political crucible -- maintaining our collective ego has forced us into social policies that are ultimately harmful and destructive to our way of life. It's a societal-scale version of the Just World phenomenon.
It's not socialism per-se that we're afraid of -- it's the idea that we aren't in control of our own fate. That we aren't individuals, but actually part of something more than ourselves, and that our success is determined only in part on our own choices, rather than entirely by it. It's ego protection, individually and collectively. And when you read anti-socialist opinions in our media, they may use the same words you know and understand, but they don't mean the same things. It all goes back to the cold war, the super power stuff, and that collective ego I mentioned earlier.
For us, socialism is a sign of weakness; It's a sign that we've become like the russians, the iranians, and all the other boogie men we've bomed the hell out of. So even when it would be good and proper for us to adopt socialist social policies, we don't... we'd rather go on maintaining the notion that We're Number One. America is on a path of self-destruction because it simply can't acknowledge, individually or collectively, that we need help and we need to work together. Our problems are world problems too -- but until that fact ingrains itself into our culture, it's pointless to expect change. America, as an idea and as a culture, would rather die than admit defeat.
Just like the British did at the height of their empire. It's a phase we'll outgrow eventually, just like you guys did. But it won't happen quickly, or easily, or gracefully.
I have no doubts that everything you said was true. We live in a litigous society, and the law is sufficiently complex that nobody, yourself included, can possibly anticipate what may or may not be illegal. It's a crap shoot. That said, what you're describing sounds like a civil, not criminal matter, to the best of my understanding. It's not a crime to take those pictures. It's trespass (a crime) if you don't leave after you do it and they ask you to leave.
You post history provides zero evidence that you are actually swearing-averse, so I conclude you must be an advertiser.
For a limited time only, my bullshit is 20% off regular price...
You made this naked assertion. Prove it.
Jesus couldn't -- that's why the Jews are still waiting. I'm not sure what this has to do with NFC vulnerabilities though...
Fuck. You.
I'm trying to figure out why swearing is considered insightful... but I got nothin'.
First, beer surviving the holocaust is not something I see as a useful way to spend my tax dollars. Preventing the holocaust is. Second... duh? We irradiate our food to ensure its safety. Radiation is not a threat to food... at least not once its been picked or killed. Radioactive material is, of course.
If you cannot innovate; legislate.
A lot of businesses consider legislation to be innovative. Some of them are in the news right now for suing their competitors to keep their products out of the marketplace. Others are being sued or investigated by various governments for anticompetitive practices that consist of making their product incompatible with a competitors', and then using the law to keep them from reverse engineering compatibility back in.
A large number of lawyers is now as important as a large number of engineers these days; That is, if you don't want to go out of business. So maybe businesses created the problem, but government allowed it, and government supports it now. It doesn't matter whether the chicken came first or the egg, the problem is that corporations and businesses cooperate in furthering the status quo. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses. There is only one government: It seems clear where the change needs to come from.
Actually, the larger the valuation for the industry, the worse it is, since the size of the industry is what gives you an idea of how much is being bled off from sectors that wouldn't be better off if set on fire.
Hey, I'm not saying advertising doesn't have its place. I'm not even saying companies shouldn't be allowed to spend as much as they want on it. I happen to believe in freedom of speech, even speech I disagree with. But I also have the right to ignore others' speech, or to respond with speech of my own. Legislating away that choice is wrong -- and that's what this guy is advocating. Well, fuck him. His position isn't just unethical, it's unamerican. Nobody has a right to shove their own beliefs down other people's throats and that statement doesn't change because money is involved, even a lot of money.
If people hang a "no soliciting" sign on the door of their home or business, it should be respected. In many jurisdictions, there's a penalty if you don't. If you add your phone number to the "do not call" list, that also has to be respected. It's even required by law in cases where the other party is owed money. The right to free speech doesn't include the right to be heard: I can walk away. That doesn't change just because the speech is digital instead.
So what? It could be a three hundred quintillion dollar industry. It doesn't change the ethics, morals, or the fact that most people don't want it. Advertising has been shoved down people's throats. It's been put in places where it was promised not to appear. It eats away at our culture, it deadens people's nerves, and it saturates everything it comes in contact with. It is a plague -- and it needs reform. It is an industry without regulation, without controls, and with an insatiable appetite.
And not a one of them are for reasonable controls. It was only recently, and after fighting tooth and nail, that we even got them to stop screwing with the volume on our TVs. Fuck them -- when they learn to be responsible, then maybe I'll learn to give a damn whether they get thrown under a bus or not. But probably not.
I suppose the natural solution then would be to ban the app, possibly ban android phones with NFC capability, and/or threaten the security researchers with jail time. That's usually what legislators and law enforcement does... rather than, I don't know, fix the problem with the cards?
. If a reasonable person would consider the house not to be a place of public accommodation, then opening the door and walking in is sufficient for a B&E charge. The defendant can offer a defense by claiming he is an invitee or that he had reason to believe such, but he has the burden of proof if the act itself is not in dispute.
Convicting someone of a crime requires three elements: Intent, knowledge, and the act. All three ordinarily have to be proven before someone is guilty. If you were taking prescription drugs, for example, and experienced memory loss and confusion as a result, and through no fault of your own walked into the wrong building... there's no intent. No crime was committed. Then there's knowledge; Say you did intend to enter the building, but didn't know it was private or off limits (for example, at the mall you're looking for a bathroom and open an unmarked door into a private "secure" area. You're caught by a security guard. You intended to enter, but you couldn't have known it was wrong to do so. No crime was committed. And then there's the act of entering itself -- self-explanatory.
So that covers the three main elements of a crime: You have to prove all three for someone to be guilty. Now, let's say you've managed to prove all three elements. Good for you! Now we ge to discuss defenses and excuses. A defense is something where the act itself would normally be considered criminal, but the circumstances make it justified. For example, normally punching someone in the face is assault, but if you had reason to believe you were in imminent danger (whether or not this is true), you can (in most jurisdictions) strike first. You had no choice, you had to respond. An excuse is when you had a choice not to commit a criminal act, did so anyway, but the response was socially justified. For example, if you saw a child being attacked by an adult: You have no obligation to intervene, but most people would. What you did was socially acceptable then.
Now that we've finished my Really Condensed Intro To Criminal Law, let's discuss your assertion: Mere presence in someone's (unlocked) house is breaking and entering. Breaking and entering is not a crime of strict liability. Strict liability crimes are ones where only the act itself has to be proved; For example possession of stolen property. It requires intent -- intent in this case is the breaking part.
In some jurisdictions the use of force can be as simple as pushing open a door, in others it needs to be prying open a window or picking a lock, etc. It can also be threatening someone; The definition varies, but you get the idea. Typically, however, the room itself can't have been open to enter; a door without a lock mechanism, or a door left open, or a door left unlocked, in some jurisdictions it doesn't constitute a use of force to open it and enter.
Secondly, there has to be knowledge that the residence is used primarily for habitation -- not occasionally. There are many buildings you'd consider a home that people don't live in. Executives and CEOs often have houses that are used only to host parties, and are built as such. They are zoned residential, but that's not the purpose of the house. To constitute breaking and entering (also known as burglary), you have to been able to reasonably conclude it was primarily used for habitation. And then there's that pesky issue of it being unoccupied... and that in some jurisdictions it has to take place outside regular business hours.
All of those conditions have to be met for the act itself to be considered burglary; Otherwise, it's a different crime (or no crime at all).
If there was a sign saying "Private property", or "Authorized personnel only", or "By invitation only", then you'd be correct. But most people's homes have no such sign. It's just a building; And there's no way someone could know ahead of time the intent of the owner, or even whether it was public or private property
My question for the Slashdot community is: in the case of single developer (for now), multiple machines, and a small-ish user base, what would be your suggestions for code versioning and deployment, considering that there are no real test environments and most code just goes into production ?
The simple answer is, "Whatever works best for you." You're the only developer for these projects. Unless your manager is giving you direction on a specific process or requirements, it's your ball game. You know how you work best -- pick your tools accordingly.
i have the same combination on my luggage!
It's a bit harder to defend breaking into your luggage than randomly dialing phone numbers and entering what is widely considered a "default" password in to get access. In the former case, it's reasonable to conclude that, regardless of password, if your luggage has a lock on it, it's meant to be private. In the digital world, however, access control mechanisms frequently are assigned a default password because the access mechanism itself is integral to the system -- ie, you can choose not to put a pad lock on a door, you can't disable the login screen. In the minds of a lot of people, assigning a password of "password", "1234" (or variant), "letmein", or "admin", is equivalent to not putting a pad lock on a door.
In other words, it's not breaking and entering if you leave the door to your house unlocked. It's simple trespass and there are numerous legal defenses and excuses for that. The French court merely (and correctly, IMO) said there is an electronic analogue to this legal reasoning. That said, change your luggage combo dude, or I'm klepto'ing that hawaiian shirt you love so much. :P
Businesses need a way of quickly, transparently and broadly sharing information that also allows you to not see information you don't need/want. The conflict between these requirements, plus human nature (tagging could solve it, if people would/could consistently and informatively tag), is sufficient to make this kind of model unlikely in a business.
I'm not sure whether you're saying politics doesn't play a role in any environment (a statement I strongly disagree with), or just some environments (I can work with that). But you do make a good additional point: A lot of business process in many companies is too specialized to make collaboration/social networking practical. Whether this is for legitimate business reasons or *cough* job security is a discussion for another day, but I do think you're right.