You are clearly engaged in unauthorized and non-conformist thinking. Seeking solutions to novel facts is not the objective. The objective is to change discourage inappropriate acceptance of fact and to promote submissive participation in the system as ordained by those in power. A reeducation officer will be with you shortly. COMPLY
Local election boards are struggling to find ways to recover any of the cost of the machines,
Gee - if only there were some way for a customer who is sold a product which is unfit for its intended purpose to recover the money that was swindled from them.
Oh - wait! That would mean holding some corporations that give lots of money to campaigns accountable for their bad practices. I mean - how could they have known (other than listening to the thousands of information scientists, including some of the most prominent security analysts in academia and private practice, who said this would happen) that this would happen?
And if it really is more profitable, then that means the public - the customer - doesn't actually have a problem with it, and you have placed both profit and the princples that matter - the customers principles - ahead of your own principles.
You are operating under a flawed assumption. The efficiency of capitalism presumes perfect information and perfect competition. Frequently the most profitable course is to misinform or to inhibit competition. It is a fundamental misunderstanding to state that profit implies efficient capitalism. Oligarchy creates more profit for the oligopolist, but that does not make oligarchy more efficient than capitalism.
I was in a situation like this recently, where my principles potentially conflicted with a project my company wanted to do. I had a relatively open schedule and I had mentioned I had an interest in the general technology that would be used. And so the project was first offered to me. I had to explain to my boss that I was not sure that I was comfortable with it. He wanted me to explain myself, and we discussed it at some length. He made a moderate attempt to change my perspective, but ultimately respected the fact that there are some matters on which my principles are not in line with his. And he respected my decision and passed the project on to another developer.
That is the way it should be. We as a nation (assuming you are in the US, and this may be true elsewhere) do a poor job of placing principles ahead of profit. It is unhealthy for the economy, I believe, because it leads to shoddy products and consumer hostile practices. It is detrimental to employee morale, which I think is a significant underlying component of the general malaise and lack of consumer confidence. Being pressured to compromise one's principles makes it harder for one to trust others (politicians, corporations, whatever), because we see that principles are under attack. Finally, seeing others compromise their principles leads one to feel that his or her principles should be subject to compromise. These last two pieces lead to our general lackadaisical approach to enforcing the law when it comes to people in positions of power (again, politicians, corporations, etc.).
Principles matter. If you cannot be true to yourself, everything else pales. That does not mean that you must actively block the behavior you question, but it does mean you have to decide if this issue is a principle for you. If it is, you should not participate in the infraction of that principle. Respectfully, and with an appropriate apology (not for having principles, but for the fact that your principles do not allow you to participate), but refuse you must. This nation grew strong because the founders decided to stand on principle. And it is growing weak because so many are being corrupted by greed. Our economic system was founded on the principle of creating economic wealth rather than harvesting financial wealth, and it blew the doors off all competitors because of that principle. And it is faltering now because the harvesting of financial wealth is leading us to sacrifice the creation of economic wealth. The first step in ending this corruption is to be not corrupted. The decision each person must make is whether there are lines that cannot be crossed. Those who have those lines are men of honor. Those who do not are sociopaths or cowards, but not men of honor. You may be fired and you may face criticism, but that is a small sacrifice to make to be able to call yourself - knowing that it holds rare truth when you say it - a man of honor, a patriot, and a capitalist.
It's not about the language. It's about the libraries.
I dunno, I'm a Java pro and genuinely like the language, but Obj-C is really nice. Smalltalk-like true messaging with default handlers? Drop to C (or most of C++) whenever you feel like it? Infix notation? The libraries may rock, but the language is also on a higher level.
I'm not bashing Java - I love me some Java, but Obj-C is truly a thing of beauty.
hehehe - here's a thought; I'm guessing I'm not the only circuit hacker here. I figure with $50 worth of parts from Mouser I can make one of these that will store to an SD card. If you have a cop that stops at the local coffee shop regularly, and drives the same car, stick on on his car and pick it up a couple days later. It's no different than trailing the officer around all day, after all.
Who's with me?
OK, now here's the real question; if we are afraid to track the government - even just the local public enforcement officials - at the same level as they are tracking us, do we not have a very serious problem?
"Does the government fear us? Or do we fear the government? When the people fear the government, tyranny has found victory. The federal government is our servant, not our master!" -Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson spent years contemplating these issues, and debating them with many of the period's other great minds. Have you spent enough time researching it to disagree? If not, you should not blindly accept his statement - but you should spend the time studying. This great experiment is worth it. See Common Sense and The Federalist Papers if you need a starting point.
Do the police require a warrant if they want to follow me around for the day?
If they do it for very long I'm betting you'd have a harassment case.
what's the diff except it costs much less and is more discrete.
Well, at the risk of repeating you, it costs less, which means there is no natural inhibition to them doing it on a large scale, and it's more discrete, which means the public is unable to connect with it as an issue for discussion.
The cost / large scale surveillance issue is ultimately an extension of reasonable expectation of privacy. While a person does not have a reasonable expectation to never be seen when out driving around, they do (at least IMO) have a reasonable expectation to not have their entire route history recorded.
The public awareness issue is a simple matter of who is watching the watchers. The public should know how many of these things are in use and (after a blackout period to allow temporary covert surveillance) who they are being used on. The reason is accountability; if the people decide they don't want this, their wishes must be obeyed. But the people cannot express an informed opinion about that which they cannot see.
A black & white following a car around is a public statement, "We are watching you." A GPS device with no warrant is also a statement, "We don't want you to know how much we're watching you." I don't trust a "Democracy" that doesn't want me to know what it is doing (after a reasonable black-op period of course, maybe maxing out at something like a year or two) in my name.
"The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted." - James Madison
I figure Madison was a pretty sharp guy, and he spent literally years discussing and forming his concepts with other heroes of our history. You can study the causes for his views in such pieces as Common Sense and The Federalist Papers, or you can just respect his credentials. But if you haven't spent a few years studying the topic, you should beware that the risks he wanted to avoid are not just hypothetical.
This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation.
I find it troubling that hobbyists are less trusted than corporations (assuming that these same experiments, performed by a corporation, would pose no problem - which I think the above quote pretty clearly implies). First, it is a really stupid idea from the American economy standpoint - we've made a lot of hay in this country's history on garage hackers (think: personal computer, for example). Second, what exactly makes corporations (which are made up of individuals) more trustworthy than non-corporate individuals? Timothy McVeigh? USAMRIID Anthrax. This is utterly stupid, and clearly the result of a panic'd mind more concerned with a pretense of safety than with the success of this great nation.
Is this not simple economics? Everyone needs an operating system, so that gets the most love. Most companies and lots of people need a web server, and the existing options blew, so that gets a huge amount of attention. Very few people need a CAD application, so QCAD, while excellent, is no AutoCAD.
It makes sense, I think, from a hybrid economy standpoint. Mass market stuff is where the most economic efficiency can be derived from a solid open source solution. OpenOffice means we don't have to pay for a suite of applications that nearly every desktop in every office in the country needs. That makes our businesses more cost efficient. AutoCAD is a specialized application that very few need, but it offers massive productivity gains in its niche, so those who need it are willing to pay a great deal of money for it. While AutoCAD doesn't have as many people itching for an Open Source replacement, the big ticket price means that the relatively small number of companies that need it can directly fund its development by buying licenses. Open Source makes sense for the mass market, and closed source makes sense for niche markets. I may be an Open Source zealot, but I can also see that Open Source is not a silver bullet for every problem.
Over time, Open Source is spreading into narrower niches, and that is good. But the major benefit, and the majority of itches needing scratching, are in mainstream applications.
I can't believe how low we have fallen. Why is the current threat any different from the old threat from the IRA that we faced.
Simple: Marketing. Your fascist pricks in the 70s didn't go to the same cut-throat business schools as our fascist pricks in the 00's. Our modern fascists are vastly more educated in the art of enhancing and capitalizing on irrational fear.
One way to help mitigate this risk is to decentralize aggregated services. If there were five hundred different equivalents to Hushmail, one of them going down would be less of a threat, and many of them going down would be impossible to keep quiet.
The main problem I can come up with is market differentiation; Mom & Pops work in meatspace because physical proximity matters. With the Internet, when a product (like encrypted email) is difficult to differentiate, it is hard for more than a handful of competitors to gain traction.
A solution to that is to make end-user tools easier to use and more common. For example, everyone could use a GPG plugin for their email client without the risk associated with one of the handful of major providers being breached.
Which leads, I think, to the conclusion that one very good thing one could do to support free speech would be to promote GPG and personal asymmetric keys. You might do this by helping develop the tools, or even just by using GPG to sign your own emails, and adding a.sig that explains what you're doing.
Microsoft can take Apache software and embrace and enhance, providing their own versions of the project's software with engineered incompatibility and no available source, just as they forced incompatibility into the Web by installing IE with every Windows upgrade.
Right on, that's cool. That's the purpose of the ASL. It is written such that commercial entities can extend it in unanticipated directions. That's what makes it different from GPL-like licenses, and it is totally OK. Some people (like myself) prefer to release under GPL-style licenses because we want to prevent commercial proprietary extension, and that's OK too.
Also, Bruce's commentary is fine. He's using an active case-in-point to demonstrate a behavior that some may view as a downside associated with using a liberal license, and which will help new joiners to the Open Source community to make their personal choice.
Or, in short, there's no need for yet another GPL versus BSD flamewar. We can all do what we like with our code, and that's good.
This code sucks and people that develop it suck as well. They are people that do not believe rules are for them. Why don't they just go write ther own Open source versions of WoW and play with themselves. I want to play the game WITHOUT having to resort to cheat.
Completely agreed.
And Larry Flynt is (IMO) a total sleazebag.
But neither Flynt nor MDY (IMO) broke the law. Flynt won in The Supreme Court because what he did is protected by The Constitution. Similarly, section 117 is supposed to provide a defense for incidental copies, and EULAs (which are non-negotiable and offer no consideration) should not enable a party to extend the privileges granted by copyright beyond their original bounds. Blizzard and the court are suggesting that 117 does not apply if there is a violation of the EULA, and that the normal operation copies required to run software are no longer authorized copies if the EULA is violated. That means EULA violations (violations of a contract which is non-negotiable and offers no consideration, hence, not a binding contract) now carry the full weight of copyright law, in the opinion of this mistaken judge and the Blizz lawyers.
It's not about whether MDY did a good thing. They are bad actors, IMO. But they didn't break the law any more than did Larry Flynt.
When we rally the people let's leave off the Kalithresh reference.
It's a point I've been mulling. When the hippies were trying to steer the nation, they referenced their cultural icons. When the yuppies were trying to steer, they referenced theirs. Why should the information generation not reference our cultural icons?
Old people don't like video games now, and the didn't like rock'n'roll back then. But the icons are not for them - they are for us.
Not saying I completely disagree with you, but I think it deserves more thought than "Oh, that's just a gaming reference, it's stupid." Games are as large a part of our culture as rock and roll was a part of our parents' culture. And it is not for nothing; computer games are a big part of our culture for the same reason that we have more power than our parents - because of the computer and our and the next generation's mastery of it.
I'm done with party politics. The leadership of both political parties have shown that they are willing to trade the legal principals of our founding fathers for short-term political gain. The parties have acted to retain their own power and authority at the expense of our Bill of Rights. This is simply unacceptable.
But the solution cannot be found in insular political organization. That is, organized liberals cannot fix this. Nor can organized conservatives. The only solution here is for the population of liberals and conservatives to realize they have a greater sense of purpose by opposing the GOP/DNC lock on national politics. Political enemies must become friends in order to oust the real enemy of freedom. And they have a lock on all the power the state can muster.
Hear Hear! Why must they limit scores to 5? There should be special dispensation for posts like this. Very well said, and I could not agree more.
I sadly believe that our republic has already fallen, and the "great experiment" is now over.
Put a muzzle on that shit. No defeat, no fear, no surrender. This great experiment is worth more than a few years of what have been (at least on my part) relatively anemic efforts to date. Now is not the time to resign. Now is the time to get upset. Now is the time to rally the people. We are the ones who are thinking about this stuff, and so like it or not, we are the defenders. We can do this. We have at our command the greatest communications system ever conceived. We can do this. And when we do, generations to come will see us as the protectors of what the founders built. But we must not surrender to hopelessness. We can save this great nation.
Or, in the words of Kalithresh, "This is not nearly over!"
Much ado is made about the violation of the 4th amendment embodied in the passage of the FISA bill. While I find that to be more than sufficient to find the passage of that bill to be a violation of the oath to defend The Constitution, I believe the violation of the 1st is more troubling.
The 1st Amendment documents fact that our right to petition the government for redress of grievances cannot be infringed. Bringing a civil suit is exactly what it is talking about. The judicial is the branch of government that has the authority to grant redress. It is the sole prerogative of the judicial to decide whether a law has been infringed. Congress can change the laws going forward, but once a petition for redress reaches the court, it is out of the hands of the legislative.
While I completely agree that the infringement of the 4th in the name of the war on terror is wrong, it is not a clear attempt to usurp the sovereign power of the American people to control the powers of government. The violation of the 1st amendment's right to petition for redress is the most egregious portion of the FISA bill.
As an aside; one can also see the attempted shift in the balance of power with the newly merged PRO-IP/PIRATE acts. The way it has worked (in all cases, as far as I know), is that government cases against the people were criminal, and required proof beyond a reasonable doubt. People's cases against the government or agents of government are civil, requiring preponderance of evidence. Some are holding hope for the possibility of criminal action, but even so, with the FISA bill, we lost the right to preponderance of evidence. With PRO-IP/PIRATE, the government is taking preponderance in place of beyond reasonable doubt. It is extremely telling and disturbing to me that the government is simultaneously saying that the people cannot be trusted with preponderance, and that the government need not be limited to beyond reasonable doubt.
>> * Google is really bad for Silicon Valley. Too much of the top talent in the area is now working for Google, doing almost completely useless stuff, and it's not healthy for the industry. I predict that when Google comes crashing down (and it will - anyone who has seen the ridiculous excess of the Google campus cannot help but realize this)
> So I guess they didn't accept your job application, uh?
That, or he is a middle manager at Yahoo/eBay/Sun/Cisco and can't hire anyone decent because he's offering compensation packages that are stuck at 2002 post-crash prices (except for middle managers, of course).
There are legal risks that aren't illegal. The risk is in civil form based on some nut jobs opinion.
From my OP: "Well, that either means the laws are too strict, or... How much effort does your company make to get the laws fixed, or..."
First, civil law is law, violations of civil law are what result in court judgment to pay restitution, and civil law is what compels you to respond or face summary judgment. Second, see the two quoted statements about how companies that feel our civil laws are screwed up should respond as good citizens.
Reading comprehension is important when responding to written statements.
What do Slashdot readers suggest for a large company that needs to balance legal risks against the daily information and communication needs of its staff?
Here's a completely unrealistic thought: Stop breaking the law. Fire everyone who sends email suggesting that the company break the law.
I know, I know - no company of any reasonable size can really be expected to not break the law. Well, that either means the laws are too strict, or that hiring scofflaws has become acceptable as long as they bring cashflow in the door, or the competition are all breaking the law and so you have to in order to stay alive. (I'd say it's some of all three) So, tell me: How much effort does your company make to get the laws fixed, or to change the attitude that nothing is wrong if it makes money (aka sociopathy/psychopathy), or to make the competition stop breaking the law? What is your company doing to save our nation from this problem?
It's not their job? Bullshit. If they want to operate in my nation, share in the staggering abundance that we are capable of achieving, they better goddam well start thinking that advancing the nation is part of their core mission. Show a little respect for the environment that makes it possible for them to operate. I'm not telling them which way to solve the problem, that's for the company to decide - but they can't just abdicate the responsibility. We are losing the nation and it is the fault of this "it's not my problem" attitude. Fuck that.
OK, I admit it - I'm being a little facetious; but isn't there a bigger problem here than figuring out how to make sure you don't get caught? Isn't there some sense to what I just said? We've got to start somewhere; we're losing it.
Overlords charged with verifying the aforementioned changes have requested that the little people be provided with a new file editor that will track changes made to a file (as a word processor does).
Apparently your Overlords' heads have some fault code and need to be debugged.
Revision tracking is accomplished with revision tracking software.
You may think it is easier to just do what they are telling you to do, but in the long run it is not. They need to understand the difference between editing and revision tracking. If they do not, they will not be getting what they are looking for.
There are a variety of methods for tracking revisions, from diff files to Subversion. Word processors store delta histories in the document, which is a poor place to store such things because it is insecure and liable to corruption.
Then again, if you're doing hand edits to 32M text files, you probably are working in a company with less comprehension of information science than the City of San Francisco (alas, my beloved home city, but boy do they have their heads up their nether regions).
Seriously - you may not like this answer, but it is the only correct one. Fix their understanding of revision tracking.
Slashdot Mirror
You are clearly engaged in unauthorized and non-conformist thinking. Seeking solutions to novel facts is not the objective. The objective is to change discourage inappropriate acceptance of fact and to promote submissive participation in the system as ordained by those in power. A reeducation officer will be with you shortly. COMPLY
Local election boards are struggling to find ways to recover any of the cost of the machines,
Gee - if only there were some way for a customer who is sold a product which is unfit for its intended purpose to recover the money that was swindled from them.
Oh - wait! That would mean holding some corporations that give lots of money to campaigns accountable for their bad practices. I mean - how could they have known (other than listening to the thousands of information scientists, including some of the most prominent security analysts in academia and private practice, who said this would happen) that this would happen?
And if it really is more profitable, then that means the public - the customer - doesn't actually have a problem with it, and you have placed both profit and the princples that matter - the customers principles - ahead of your own principles.
You are operating under a flawed assumption. The efficiency of capitalism presumes perfect information and perfect competition. Frequently the most profitable course is to misinform or to inhibit competition. It is a fundamental misunderstanding to state that profit implies efficient capitalism. Oligarchy creates more profit for the oligopolist, but that does not make oligarchy more efficient than capitalism.
I was in a situation like this recently, where my principles potentially conflicted with a project my company wanted to do. I had a relatively open schedule and I had mentioned I had an interest in the general technology that would be used. And so the project was first offered to me. I had to explain to my boss that I was not sure that I was comfortable with it. He wanted me to explain myself, and we discussed it at some length. He made a moderate attempt to change my perspective, but ultimately respected the fact that there are some matters on which my principles are not in line with his. And he respected my decision and passed the project on to another developer.
That is the way it should be. We as a nation (assuming you are in the US, and this may be true elsewhere) do a poor job of placing principles ahead of profit. It is unhealthy for the economy, I believe, because it leads to shoddy products and consumer hostile practices. It is detrimental to employee morale, which I think is a significant underlying component of the general malaise and lack of consumer confidence. Being pressured to compromise one's principles makes it harder for one to trust others (politicians, corporations, whatever), because we see that principles are under attack. Finally, seeing others compromise their principles leads one to feel that his or her principles should be subject to compromise. These last two pieces lead to our general lackadaisical approach to enforcing the law when it comes to people in positions of power (again, politicians, corporations, etc.).
Principles matter. If you cannot be true to yourself, everything else pales. That does not mean that you must actively block the behavior you question, but it does mean you have to decide if this issue is a principle for you. If it is, you should not participate in the infraction of that principle. Respectfully, and with an appropriate apology (not for having principles, but for the fact that your principles do not allow you to participate), but refuse you must. This nation grew strong because the founders decided to stand on principle. And it is growing weak because so many are being corrupted by greed. Our economic system was founded on the principle of creating economic wealth rather than harvesting financial wealth, and it blew the doors off all competitors because of that principle. And it is faltering now because the harvesting of financial wealth is leading us to sacrifice the creation of economic wealth. The first step in ending this corruption is to be not corrupted. The decision each person must make is whether there are lines that cannot be crossed. Those who have those lines are men of honor. Those who do not are sociopaths or cowards, but not men of honor. You may be fired and you may face criticism, but that is a small sacrifice to make to be able to call yourself - knowing that it holds rare truth when you say it - a man of honor, a patriot, and a capitalist.
It's not about the language. It's about the libraries.
I dunno, I'm a Java pro and genuinely like the language, but Obj-C is really nice. Smalltalk-like true messaging with default handlers? Drop to C (or most of C++) whenever you feel like it? Infix notation? The libraries may rock, but the language is also on a higher level.
I'm not bashing Java - I love me some Java, but Obj-C is truly a thing of beauty.
hehehe - here's a thought; I'm guessing I'm not the only circuit hacker here. I figure with $50 worth of parts from Mouser I can make one of these that will store to an SD card. If you have a cop that stops at the local coffee shop regularly, and drives the same car, stick on on his car and pick it up a couple days later. It's no different than trailing the officer around all day, after all.
Who's with me?
OK, now here's the real question; if we are afraid to track the government - even just the local public enforcement officials - at the same level as they are tracking us, do we not have a very serious problem?
"Does the government fear us? Or do we fear the government? When the people fear the government, tyranny has found victory. The federal government is our servant, not our master!" -Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson spent years contemplating these issues, and debating them with many of the period's other great minds. Have you spent enough time researching it to disagree? If not, you should not blindly accept his statement - but you should spend the time studying. This great experiment is worth it. See Common Sense and The Federalist Papers if you need a starting point.
Do the police require a warrant if they want to follow me around for the day?
If they do it for very long I'm betting you'd have a harassment case.
what's the diff except it costs much less and is more discrete.
Well, at the risk of repeating you, it costs less, which means there is no natural inhibition to them doing it on a large scale, and it's more discrete, which means the public is unable to connect with it as an issue for discussion.
The cost / large scale surveillance issue is ultimately an extension of reasonable expectation of privacy. While a person does not have a reasonable expectation to never be seen when out driving around, they do (at least IMO) have a reasonable expectation to not have their entire route history recorded.
The public awareness issue is a simple matter of who is watching the watchers. The public should know how many of these things are in use and (after a blackout period to allow temporary covert surveillance) who they are being used on. The reason is accountability; if the people decide they don't want this, their wishes must be obeyed. But the people cannot express an informed opinion about that which they cannot see.
A black & white following a car around is a public statement, "We are watching you." A GPS device with no warrant is also a statement, "We don't want you to know how much we're watching you." I don't trust a "Democracy" that doesn't want me to know what it is doing (after a reasonable black-op period of course, maybe maxing out at something like a year or two) in my name.
"The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted." - James Madison
I figure Madison was a pretty sharp guy, and he spent literally years discussing and forming his concepts with other heroes of our history. You can study the causes for his views in such pieces as Common Sense and The Federalist Papers, or you can just respect his credentials. But if you haven't spent a few years studying the topic, you should beware that the risks he wanted to avoid are not just hypothetical.
This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation.
I find it troubling that hobbyists are less trusted than corporations (assuming that these same experiments, performed by a corporation, would pose no problem - which I think the above quote pretty clearly implies). First, it is a really stupid idea from the American economy standpoint - we've made a lot of hay in this country's history on garage hackers (think: personal computer, for example). Second, what exactly makes corporations (which are made up of individuals) more trustworthy than non-corporate individuals? Timothy McVeigh? USAMRIID Anthrax. This is utterly stupid, and clearly the result of a panic'd mind more concerned with a pretense of safety than with the success of this great nation.
the lack of industry-specific open source apps.
Is this not simple economics? Everyone needs an operating system, so that gets the most love. Most companies and lots of people need a web server, and the existing options blew, so that gets a huge amount of attention. Very few people need a CAD application, so QCAD, while excellent, is no AutoCAD.
It makes sense, I think, from a hybrid economy standpoint. Mass market stuff is where the most economic efficiency can be derived from a solid open source solution. OpenOffice means we don't have to pay for a suite of applications that nearly every desktop in every office in the country needs. That makes our businesses more cost efficient. AutoCAD is a specialized application that very few need, but it offers massive productivity gains in its niche, so those who need it are willing to pay a great deal of money for it. While AutoCAD doesn't have as many people itching for an Open Source replacement, the big ticket price means that the relatively small number of companies that need it can directly fund its development by buying licenses. Open Source makes sense for the mass market, and closed source makes sense for niche markets. I may be an Open Source zealot, but I can also see that Open Source is not a silver bullet for every problem.
Over time, Open Source is spreading into narrower niches, and that is good. But the major benefit, and the majority of itches needing scratching, are in mainstream applications.
I can't believe how low we have fallen. Why is the current threat any different from the old threat from the IRA that we faced.
Simple: Marketing. Your fascist pricks in the 70s didn't go to the same cut-throat business schools as our fascist pricks in the 00's. Our modern fascists are vastly more educated in the art of enhancing and capitalizing on irrational fear.
Excellent, though-provoking post. Thank you.
hahahaha - excellent post
(please pardon this superfluous one)
One way to help mitigate this risk is to decentralize aggregated services. If there were five hundred different equivalents to Hushmail, one of them going down would be less of a threat, and many of them going down would be impossible to keep quiet.
The main problem I can come up with is market differentiation; Mom & Pops work in meatspace because physical proximity matters. With the Internet, when a product (like encrypted email) is difficult to differentiate, it is hard for more than a handful of competitors to gain traction.
A solution to that is to make end-user tools easier to use and more common. For example, everyone could use a GPG plugin for their email client without the risk associated with one of the handful of major providers being breached.
Which leads, I think, to the conclusion that one very good thing one could do to support free speech would be to promote GPG and personal asymmetric keys. You might do this by helping develop the tools, or even just by using GPG to sign your own emails, and adding a .sig that explains what you're doing.
Just thinking out loud...
Microsoft can take Apache software and embrace and enhance, providing their own versions of the project's software with engineered incompatibility and no available source, just as they forced incompatibility into the Web by installing IE with every Windows upgrade.
Right on, that's cool. That's the purpose of the ASL. It is written such that commercial entities can extend it in unanticipated directions. That's what makes it different from GPL-like licenses, and it is totally OK. Some people (like myself) prefer to release under GPL-style licenses because we want to prevent commercial proprietary extension, and that's OK too.
Also, Bruce's commentary is fine. He's using an active case-in-point to demonstrate a behavior that some may view as a downside associated with using a liberal license, and which will help new joiners to the Open Source community to make their personal choice.
Or, in short, there's no need for yet another GPL versus BSD flamewar. We can all do what we like with our code, and that's good.
This code sucks and people that develop it suck as well. They are people that do not believe rules are for them. Why don't they just go write ther own Open source versions of WoW and play with themselves. I want to play the game WITHOUT having to resort to cheat.
Completely agreed.
And Larry Flynt is (IMO) a total sleazebag.
But neither Flynt nor MDY (IMO) broke the law. Flynt won in The Supreme Court because what he did is protected by The Constitution. Similarly, section 117 is supposed to provide a defense for incidental copies, and EULAs (which are non-negotiable and offer no consideration) should not enable a party to extend the privileges granted by copyright beyond their original bounds. Blizzard and the court are suggesting that 117 does not apply if there is a violation of the EULA, and that the normal operation copies required to run software are no longer authorized copies if the EULA is violated. That means EULA violations (violations of a contract which is non-negotiable and offers no consideration, hence, not a binding contract) now carry the full weight of copyright law, in the opinion of this mistaken judge and the Blizz lawyers.
It's not about whether MDY did a good thing. They are bad actors, IMO. But they didn't break the law any more than did Larry Flynt.
Here's what I'm saying: Anyone with the power to ruin your life just by their word against yours should not be trusted.
You are clearly a radical, showing utmost contempt for your government.
"The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty" - John Adams
Just like John Adams.
When we rally the people let's leave off the Kalithresh reference.
It's a point I've been mulling. When the hippies were trying to steer the nation, they referenced their cultural icons. When the yuppies were trying to steer, they referenced theirs. Why should the information generation not reference our cultural icons?
Old people don't like video games now, and the didn't like rock'n'roll back then. But the icons are not for them - they are for us.
Not saying I completely disagree with you, but I think it deserves more thought than "Oh, that's just a gaming reference, it's stupid." Games are as large a part of our culture as rock and roll was a part of our parents' culture. And it is not for nothing; computer games are a big part of our culture for the same reason that we have more power than our parents - because of the computer and our and the next generation's mastery of it.
Brilliant! Very well ranted. I largely agree and found every point interesting and worthy of consideration. Thanks! :)
I'm done with party politics. The leadership of both political parties have shown that they are willing to trade the legal principals of our founding fathers for short-term political gain. The parties have acted to retain their own power and authority at the expense of our Bill of Rights. This is simply unacceptable.
But the solution cannot be found in insular political organization. That is, organized liberals cannot fix this. Nor can organized conservatives. The only solution here is for the population of liberals and conservatives to realize they have a greater sense of purpose by opposing the GOP/DNC lock on national politics. Political enemies must become friends in order to oust the real enemy of freedom. And they have a lock on all the power the state can muster.
Hear Hear! Why must they limit scores to 5? There should be special dispensation for posts like this. Very well said, and I could not agree more.
I sadly believe that our republic has already fallen, and the "great experiment" is now over.
Put a muzzle on that shit. No defeat, no fear, no surrender. This great experiment is worth more than a few years of what have been (at least on my part) relatively anemic efforts to date. Now is not the time to resign. Now is the time to get upset. Now is the time to rally the people. We are the ones who are thinking about this stuff, and so like it or not, we are the defenders. We can do this. We have at our command the greatest communications system ever conceived. We can do this. And when we do, generations to come will see us as the protectors of what the founders built. But we must not surrender to hopelessness. We can save this great nation.
Or, in the words of Kalithresh, "This is not nearly over!"
Much ado is made about the violation of the 4th amendment embodied in the passage of the FISA bill. While I find that to be more than sufficient to find the passage of that bill to be a violation of the oath to defend The Constitution, I believe the violation of the 1st is more troubling.
The 1st Amendment documents fact that our right to petition the government for redress of grievances cannot be infringed. Bringing a civil suit is exactly what it is talking about. The judicial is the branch of government that has the authority to grant redress. It is the sole prerogative of the judicial to decide whether a law has been infringed. Congress can change the laws going forward, but once a petition for redress reaches the court, it is out of the hands of the legislative.
While I completely agree that the infringement of the 4th in the name of the war on terror is wrong, it is not a clear attempt to usurp the sovereign power of the American people to control the powers of government. The violation of the 1st amendment's right to petition for redress is the most egregious portion of the FISA bill.
As an aside; one can also see the attempted shift in the balance of power with the newly merged PRO-IP/PIRATE acts. The way it has worked (in all cases, as far as I know), is that government cases against the people were criminal, and required proof beyond a reasonable doubt. People's cases against the government or agents of government are civil, requiring preponderance of evidence. Some are holding hope for the possibility of criminal action, but even so, with the FISA bill, we lost the right to preponderance of evidence. With PRO-IP/PIRATE, the government is taking preponderance in place of beyond reasonable doubt. It is extremely telling and disturbing to me that the government is simultaneously saying that the people cannot be trusted with preponderance, and that the government need not be limited to beyond reasonable doubt.
>> * Google is really bad for Silicon Valley. Too much of the top talent in the area is now working for Google, doing almost completely useless stuff, and it's not healthy for the industry. I predict that when Google comes crashing down (and it will - anyone who has seen the ridiculous excess of the Google campus cannot help but realize this)
> So I guess they didn't accept your job application, uh?
That, or he is a middle manager at Yahoo/eBay/Sun/Cisco and can't hire anyone decent because he's offering compensation packages that are stuck at 2002 post-crash prices (except for middle managers, of course).
He didn't say anything about breaking the law.
There are legal risks that aren't illegal.
The risk is in civil form based on some nut jobs opinion.
From my OP: ... How much effort does your company make to get the laws fixed, or ..."
"Well, that either means the laws are too strict, or
First, civil law is law, violations of civil law are what result in court judgment to pay restitution, and civil law is what compels you to respond or face summary judgment. Second, see the two quoted statements about how companies that feel our civil laws are screwed up should respond as good citizens.
Reading comprehension is important when responding to written statements.
What do Slashdot readers suggest for a large company that needs to balance legal risks against the daily information and communication needs of its staff?
Here's a completely unrealistic thought: Stop breaking the law. Fire everyone who sends email suggesting that the company break the law.
I know, I know - no company of any reasonable size can really be expected to not break the law. Well, that either means the laws are too strict, or that hiring scofflaws has become acceptable as long as they bring cashflow in the door, or the competition are all breaking the law and so you have to in order to stay alive. (I'd say it's some of all three) So, tell me: How much effort does your company make to get the laws fixed, or to change the attitude that nothing is wrong if it makes money (aka sociopathy/psychopathy), or to make the competition stop breaking the law? What is your company doing to save our nation from this problem?
It's not their job? Bullshit. If they want to operate in my nation, share in the staggering abundance that we are capable of achieving, they better goddam well start thinking that advancing the nation is part of their core mission. Show a little respect for the environment that makes it possible for them to operate. I'm not telling them which way to solve the problem, that's for the company to decide - but they can't just abdicate the responsibility. We are losing the nation and it is the fault of this "it's not my problem" attitude. Fuck that.
OK, I admit it - I'm being a little facetious; but isn't there a bigger problem here than figuring out how to make sure you don't get caught? Isn't there some sense to what I just said? We've got to start somewhere; we're losing it.
Overlords charged with verifying the aforementioned changes have requested that the little people be provided with a new file editor that will track changes made to a file (as a word processor does).
Apparently your Overlords' heads have some fault code and need to be debugged.
Revision tracking is accomplished with revision tracking software.
You may think it is easier to just do what they are telling you to do, but in the long run it is not. They need to understand the difference between editing and revision tracking. If they do not, they will not be getting what they are looking for.
There are a variety of methods for tracking revisions, from diff files to Subversion. Word processors store delta histories in the document, which is a poor place to store such things because it is insecure and liable to corruption.
Then again, if you're doing hand edits to 32M text files, you probably are working in a company with less comprehension of information science than the City of San Francisco (alas, my beloved home city, but boy do they have their heads up their nether regions).
Seriously - you may not like this answer, but it is the only correct one. Fix their understanding of revision tracking.
What's the best way to fight bad ideas? With good ideas.
What's the best tool ever devised to disseminate good ideas? The Internet.
So... what the problem is?