MS certainly isn't winning over any of the open source community with that move. It really drives the wedge deeper and give more people more reason to not use Windows.
Well, it certainly makes me move one step closer to giving MS the heave ho. I have already gotten rid of my Microsoft Office Installation and solely use OpenOffice. It was a good move. Now just need to get rid of this pesky OS. I think when the next version of Windows comes out, then it is time to finally cut loose.
Who wants to buy a product a company that won't let you use the product that you have paid for? It would be like buying a Ford Mustang which is limited to 30 MPH. They better be charging less for it.
Mobile phones for example do *not* have public IPs and never should do - there is no legitimate reason for wanting to access a mobile phone remotely.
How about to make a phone call? To tranfer a data file? Does everything in your world have to go through an intemediary to do some sort of address translation? What if you just want to communicate directly?
This "server" argument is foolish and arbitrary. The Internet is a communication medium, not a broadcast medium. There is no logical distinction between a client and a server. When you want to send an IM or a file or talk directly, the most efficient way to do so would be to communicate directly by using the actual address of the device. Also, if you are going to perpetually rely on commercial third parties for address translation, then just to connect to someone else you are going to pay a "tax" above what you are paying just to have access. If I want to make a phone call over VOIP why shouldn't I just be able to connect directly if I know the IP address, or if it is already aliased with a DNS entry?
There is no real depth to security that just obscures your connectivity. But there is real benefit to end-to-end communicati available. IPv6 isn't really about the mobile devices, since IPv6 doesn't provide a mechanism of efficient routing off the wired network, what it is about is openning up the marketplace to new applications that rely on a peer-to-peer communication model. Applications in gaming, file sharing, direct IM. And applications we have yet to think about.
There is no good reason to continue to live in a IPv4 NAT'd world. It is analogous to telling everyone to get a PO Box, just so they don't have to tell other people their real postal street address. Sure some people might have that legitamite security concern and it would be worth the extra effort, but paying extra for a PO Box and making the extra effort to pick up your mail just isn't worth it to most people.
This is a really outstanding result and leads to some interesting new territory. It would seem that there may well be two (or more?) discrete cognitive processes mediating reality for mind. Another blow to the idea of a comprehensive, unitary consciousness and the corresponding myth of a radical alterity labelled unconscious.
What?! Next you are going to say something about there being no tooth fairy or easter bunny? Thanks, but no thanks.
because Google has a great track record, but I don't think Google is the right company to get all excited about when we find they're working on Linux. IBM, yes, as they have extensive knowledge and experience working with both hardware and OSes.
IBM has been an important supporter of Linux in the enterprise for servers, but they haven't done much for linux on the desktop. And it is no wonder, IBM is built around enterprise consulting, big systems integrations and such. Google has been all about making it simple for people since the beginning. Like Apple, they excel because of their minimalist design philosophy which has made for some great very usable software.
Also, it is distinctly in Google's interest to undercut Microsoft's bread and butter OS sales with a good Linux desktop, so it will keep them focused. They don't need to make money on Linux to be successful, they just have to make Microsoft make less money on their core sales. This can be seen as a purely defensive move to take some of the wind out of microsoft's sails.
Ummm, no it doesn't work. It works for a few things, and breaks a whole lot of other things. You are arbitrarily limiting a whole set of end-to-end applications simply because you have no imagination. The simple fact is that I can, with my static IP, do a hell of a lot more than you can with some short leased DHCP IP behind a NAT.
Once the punishments get too harsh and the laws too many to avoid, then it is as if there are no laws. Chaos can only be avoided with a just and reasonable system of laws with a series of escalating punishments with regard to the severity of the crime. The punishments for rape should be less than murder. The punishment for physical assault with a weapon should be more than for fraud. The punishment for possession of child pornography should be less than distribution, and should be much less than the punishment for the one that coerces the child in the first place.
From the teaser: Critics say the administration could conduct such surveillance while still getting prior court approval, as spelled out in a 1978 law intended to guard against governmental abuses.
It is funny how many times I hear this misleading part about needing to get prior approval. Under FISA, they don't even need "prior" approval to conduct such survellance. As you say "The FISA court has a provision that allows court approval to be obtained after the fact."
In fact they have 72 hours after the fact to get one of the special FISA court judges who are available 24 hours a day to approve the secret warrant. That is 3 whole 24 hour days for them to justify the surveilance! The only reason they would need to go around FISA is if they were conducting mass surveillance based upon loose affiliations. There is no reasonable way to explain this as targeted, there is no reasonable way to explain this as needing to expedite the start of the monitoring. This is pure and simple about automated surveilance based upon monitoring anyone within an arbitrary degree of seperation with terrorists.
How many degrees of seperation before you are considered a "terrorist affiliate" or "associate"? Before saying hello to a random person at the coffee shop makes you a suspect too.
Regardless of who controls the big television news outlets, I think it's extremely valuable to have a broad range of methods for politicians to reach constituents.
And far more valuable to have a broad range of methods for constituents to reach politicians.
Straight to DVD has worked for some movies for some time. It would also allow more freedom from censorship by staying away from broadcast. I'd be interested in a downloadable series, maybe also in HD too. Really the only question would be because it is largely untried distribution method, if they can get the millions of dollars in funding to make it happen. Also, contract wise I wonder how this might already be covered.
Remember, the problem isn't so much the change in temperature, but the resulting change in geographic distribution of certain things like arable land, habitable land, disease, etc. Basically we will need some combination of migration, new construction, etc. to mitigate the changing environment. I don't think any one of those things is necessarily bad. The problem is, humans typically don't handle change well and will just end up fighting each other.
When the change is that suddenly me and my family have nothing to eat and your family does... you are either going to share or else we are going to fight. It can get very simple very fast.
The more novel thing (to me) would be discovering the ruins of ancient (chronologically speaking) civilization on a planet like that.
And even more interesting than that would be to discover that the planet was still inhabited, by beautiful amazonian women, and that they had sent a space ship to come get me.
Short of that, however, I'll take it as very exciting that it might be possible to use this same technique to discover more earth sized planets around other stars in the near future. So that we can use the information to target those solar system for further observation. Then maybe we can start talking about finding another civilization and planets full of sexy alien women and such.
Not for translation, but for just speach recocgnition? ScanSoft Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 Preferred is in the top 30 for software sales through amazon, so obviously some people find this useful.
Are they telling you that they are being forced to censor what you read? Seems there is a real line between going along quietly with oppression and telling you directly who you need to talk to in order to stop the thuggery.
It is an age old question, when is doing nothing better than doing something you disagree with under the threat of force? I think the morality of the situation depends on how much you can effect the outcome and if there is anything immoral that is done that couldn't be done without your participation. In this case, if they are truly telling people that search results are being omitted and the reason they are being omitted, then I think this is the bet they could hope to accomplish.
In this way Google is not misleading people like other search engines might by simply omitting the results and pretending that they are giving you complete results.
But the devil is in the details and this sounds like a slippery slope, to use the cliche, in order to remain "not evil" google would have to be willing to stop doing business in china or any other country that saught to use google itself more directly to mislead.
Yes, I think if it clearly benefits the company more, such as supporting a legacy system or learning to support a short lived or highly specialized system, then clearly the company should be picking up the bill for any training. Otherwise, if it isn't really required training, but more of an "enriching" nature or will further the person's career, then it seems reasonable that a company would not want to pay or would want to have the employee pick up a portion of the expense. Most companies have limited ability to advance within a company, so training that isn't specific to a task or project could only serve to make the employee more expensive or more likely to choose another company. Of course, the person might choose to go to another company because they offer educational opportunities, so it really is a mixed bag for the company.
I think companies should take a more wholistic approach and once they reach a certain size just bite the bullet and start offering more generaous training and education opportunities. Sure the person might end up leaving before turning that knowledge back into something useful for the company, but if all companies are doing it, then that education and training will serve to create a better overall workforce for all companies to draw from. So, companies shouldn't think defensively when offering education benefits.
Of course, a company could just pay it employees a better salary and expect them to invest some of that money back into themselves rather than micromanaging employee self improvement.
The patents HAVE been granted and the courts are obligated to protect them.
The courts are obligated to consider all the relevant facts including the validity, scope and enforceability of the patent when there is a dispute. The courts acting as a rubber stamp for the patent office is just aas bad as the patent office acting as a rubber stamp for the patents in the first place.
I have trouble understanding why so many people seem to condone simply *taking* it... and then playing the 'Evil industry' card on the rightholders to boot! Seems a bit incongruous to me. There's such a thing as free music: download stuff that bands put online for your enjoyment or make some of your own, already.
It is probably because most people see very little value in music. For years the "industry" has been giving away music over the radio and making all its money on concerts and recordings. Sure a lot of people made recordings of their own of the over the air broadcasts and it may have been illegal (though that is highly questionable because they were being taxed with the presumption that people would make recordings on blank cassettes and such), but they were of lower sound quality usually, so demand for higher quality recordings made by the studios remained strong.
Then all of a sudden digital copies could more easily be made which were as good or nearly as good as the original recording. Thing is that people never felt they were paying for the content, but rather the quality of the recording and the means to play it whenever they wanted. Now that people can do that on their own with their own devices, people rightly feel that the middleman is in the way. Sure, people will still pay for concerts, but how much will they pay others for when they have already paid to have the means to do it themselves.
I think people will willfully pay a $1 or so for a song that they really like, but they see no value in paying someone who adds no value (the middlemen) for filler. And when people see no value being provided they aren't going to consider it wrong to copy a few data files.
So, if they see no value then why do they do it. That is because in aggregate there is value. Some noise to fill the day, a little beat to work out to, but very little value except in aggregate.
The radio model was a good one, where people listening did not pay directly, and it was only in aggregate that the stations paid for the music.
Sure some people have to have an album and will play it to death. But how much of past revenue was based on frivolous purchases that got played once or twice? Mosty of that "expected revenue" was transitory and the studios should have known it.
Yes, thanks Google for standing up for us all. All Google had to do was refuse to give their money to someone else. Let's think this situation through before applauding Google's altruistic nature.
Yes, let's think a little about it. Google could easily pay, then once enough content providers signed on and it wouldn't piss off the customers (that are the ones actually paying for the networks), then ISPs would start blocking or degrading the service of those that couldn't or wouldn't pay. Smaller content providers could not pay... So, Google could force smaller content providers out of the market by simply paying ISPs.
This of course is not Google's business model, which relies on more people providing content than it could possibly provide on its own, but think of all those other companies that want to keep you on their website and get everything you need from them and through them: AOL, Yahoo, MSN.
When the network carriers start charging both ends of communication for access, each bit of data that is transmitted, and the quality of service (ie how fast they transmit the data) then the phone company will again be in a position to play us against eachother and charge according to the value to the customer of the the data that is transmitted (value that the ISP has no part in creating) rather than the cost of maintaining the networks with a reasonable profit margin.
Sure google is serving its own long term self interest, but it is also in this case serving ours.
I would say that unwillingness to communicate because you work in a political, petty or cutthroat environment could rightly be termed a communication problem. But you are right, what are described as communication problems are almost never a result of a lack of the means to communicate.
There are privacy issues that I don't think are covered here. Mostly it relates to the fact that a person's papers and effects are protected, but papers or effects that belong to another but relate to that person are not effected.
I don't see this as a matter of privacy. Yes it is being popularized that way in the press, but really that is correctly termed confidentiality. And like I said before, that should be handled by agreements and custom, or perhaps even put into statute. Information about a person, may have been information that was private, but once you give it away it is no longer. A secret is not a secret unless you have agreement from those you tell that they will keep it a secret. This is simply not a fundamental issue of privacy, but one of agreement and custom.
Privacy should not be an opinion that depnds on interpreting layers of precedent and implication of precedent - it should be an issue for public debate and input. Hence, my call for an ammendment to clarify just what we mean by privacy (and therefore a debate to come to a decision on that matter).
Well, you start by saying we need an ammendment, what would it say beyond protecting a person, their home letters and effects from un warranted searches and seizures? Any ammendment defining what types of things would be considered private information would be completely innappropriate. The 4th ammendment strikes the right balance.
If you want something to be private, then keep it to yourself.
You don't need to be a lawyer to have an opinion on the law. But I do think you should use a constitution sparingly to as concisely as possible define the scope of government authority. Unlike other "declarations of rights" the US constitution doesn't set out the rights of individuals, such documents provide no real authority. Rather it enumerates rights only to show how government authority should be limited with respect to those rights. "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." It is not a definition of rights, especially it is not a listing of those natural Rights endowed by our Creator.
List out those things regarding privacy that you feel are not specifically addressed by the 4th ammendment and I will show you how they are either already addressed by the 4th ammendment or how they are really not matters of privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
MS certainly isn't winning over any of the open source community with that move. It really drives the wedge deeper and give more people more reason to not use Windows.
Well, it certainly makes me move one step closer to giving MS the heave ho. I have already gotten rid of my Microsoft Office Installation and solely use OpenOffice. It was a good move. Now just need to get rid of this pesky OS. I think when the next version of Windows comes out, then it is time to finally cut loose.
Who wants to buy a product a company that won't let you use the product that you have paid for? It would be like buying a Ford Mustang which is limited to 30 MPH. They better be charging less for it.
Mobile phones for example do *not* have public IPs and never should do - there is no legitimate reason for wanting to access a mobile phone remotely.
How about to make a phone call? To tranfer a data file? Does everything in your world have to go through an intemediary to do some sort of address translation? What if you just want to communicate directly?
This "server" argument is foolish and arbitrary. The Internet is a communication medium, not a broadcast medium. There is no logical distinction between a client and a server. When you want to send an IM or a file or talk directly, the most efficient way to do so would be to communicate directly by using the actual address of the device. Also, if you are going to perpetually rely on commercial third parties for address translation, then just to connect to someone else you are going to pay a "tax" above what you are paying just to have access. If I want to make a phone call over VOIP why shouldn't I just be able to connect directly if I know the IP address, or if it is already aliased with a DNS entry?
There is no real depth to security that just obscures your connectivity. But there is real benefit to end-to-end communicati available. IPv6 isn't really about the mobile devices, since IPv6 doesn't provide a mechanism of efficient routing off the wired network, what it is about is openning up the marketplace to new applications that rely on a peer-to-peer communication model. Applications in gaming, file sharing, direct IM. And applications we have yet to think about.
There is no good reason to continue to live in a IPv4 NAT'd world. It is analogous to telling everyone to get a PO Box, just so they don't have to tell other people their real postal street address. Sure some people might have that legitamite security concern and it would be worth the extra effort, but paying extra for a PO Box and making the extra effort to pick up your mail just isn't worth it to most people.
This is a really outstanding result and leads to some interesting new territory. It would seem that there may well be two (or more?) discrete cognitive processes mediating reality for mind. Another blow to the idea of a comprehensive, unitary consciousness and the corresponding myth of a radical alterity labelled unconscious.
What?! Next you are going to say something about there being no tooth fairy or easter bunny? Thanks, but no thanks.
Yes, GOTO programming is alive and well in the IRS tax forms.
Except you are the computer and errors in your memory will cause heart pounding letters from the IRS.
because Google has a great track record, but I don't think Google is the right company to get all excited about when we find they're working on Linux. IBM, yes, as they have extensive knowledge and experience working with both hardware and OSes.
IBM has been an important supporter of Linux in the enterprise for servers, but they haven't done much for linux on the desktop. And it is no wonder, IBM is built around enterprise consulting, big systems integrations and such. Google has been all about making it simple for people since the beginning. Like Apple, they excel because of their minimalist design philosophy which has made for some great very usable software.
Also, it is distinctly in Google's interest to undercut Microsoft's bread and butter OS sales with a good Linux desktop, so it will keep them focused. They don't need to make money on Linux to be successful, they just have to make Microsoft make less money on their core sales. This can be seen as a purely defensive move to take some of the wind out of microsoft's sails.
Mark Twain was a writer of impeccable character who would be proud that we take our stories so seriously these days.
I hear he too might be coming out with an autobiography.
big deal. It works
Ummm, no it doesn't work. It works for a few things, and breaks a whole lot of other things. You are arbitrarily limiting a whole set of end-to-end applications simply because you have no imagination. The simple fact is that I can, with my static IP, do a hell of a lot more than you can with some short leased DHCP IP behind a NAT.
Thank you for your Insightful comment.
Once the punishments get too harsh and the laws too many to avoid, then it is as if there are no laws. Chaos can only be avoided with a just and reasonable system of laws with a series of escalating punishments with regard to the severity of the crime. The punishments for rape should be less than murder. The punishment for physical assault with a weapon should be more than for fraud. The punishment for possession of child pornography should be less than distribution, and should be much less than the punishment for the one that coerces the child in the first place.
From the teaser: Critics say the administration could conduct such surveillance while still getting prior court approval, as spelled out in a 1978 law intended to guard against governmental abuses.
a tion
It is funny how many times I hear this misleading part about needing to get prior approval. Under FISA, they don't even need "prior" approval to conduct such survellance. As you say "The FISA court has a provision that allows court approval to be obtained after the fact."
In fact they have 72 hours after the fact to get one of the special FISA court judges who are available 24 hours a day to approve the secret warrant. That is 3 whole 24 hour days for them to justify the surveilance! The only reason they would need to go around FISA is if they were conducting mass surveillance based upon loose affiliations. There is no reasonable way to explain this as targeted, there is no reasonable way to explain this as needing to expedite the start of the monitoring. This is pure and simple about automated surveilance based upon monitoring anyone within an arbitrary degree of seperation with terrorists.
Remember the idea of 6 degrees of seperation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separ
How many degrees of seperation before you are considered a "terrorist affiliate" or "associate"? Before saying hello to a random person at the coffee shop makes you a suspect too.
Regardless of who controls the big television news outlets, I think it's extremely valuable to have a broad range of methods for politicians to reach constituents.
And far more valuable to have a broad range of methods for constituents to reach politicians.
Straight to DVD has worked for some movies for some time. It would also allow more freedom from censorship by staying away from broadcast. I'd be interested in a downloadable series, maybe also in HD too. Really the only question would be because it is largely untried distribution method, if they can get the millions of dollars in funding to make it happen. Also, contract wise I wonder how this might already be covered.
Remember, the problem isn't so much the change in temperature, but the resulting change in geographic distribution of certain things like arable land, habitable land, disease, etc. Basically we will need some combination of migration, new construction, etc. to mitigate the changing environment. I don't think any one of those things is necessarily bad. The problem is, humans typically don't handle change well and will just end up fighting each other.
When the change is that suddenly me and my family have nothing to eat and your family does... you are either going to share or else we are going to fight. It can get very simple very fast.
The more novel thing (to me) would be discovering the ruins of ancient (chronologically speaking) civilization on a planet like that.
And even more interesting than that would be to discover that the planet was still inhabited, by beautiful amazonian women, and that they had sent a space ship to come get me.
Short of that, however, I'll take it as very exciting that it might be possible to use this same technique to discover more earth sized planets around other stars in the near future. So that we can use the information to target those solar system for further observation. Then maybe we can start talking about finding another civilization and planets full of sexy alien women and such.
Not for translation, but for just speach recocgnition? ScanSoft Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 Preferred is in the top 30 for software sales through amazon, so obviously some people find this useful.
What if this were Microsoft?
Would you be so willing to understand?
Ah yes... but it is Microsoft:
http://www.msn.com.cn/ and yahoo: http://www.yahoo.com.cn/
Are they telling you that they are being forced to censor what you read? Seems there is a real line between going along quietly with oppression and telling you directly who you need to talk to in order to stop the thuggery.
It is an age old question, when is doing nothing better than doing something you disagree with under the threat of force? I think the morality of the situation depends on how much you can effect the outcome and if there is anything immoral that is done that couldn't be done without your participation. In this case, if they are truly telling people that search results are being omitted and the reason they are being omitted, then I think this is the bet they could hope to accomplish.
In this way Google is not misleading people like other search engines might by simply omitting the results and pretending that they are giving you complete results.
But the devil is in the details and this sounds like a slippery slope, to use the cliche, in order to remain "not evil" google would have to be willing to stop doing business in china or any other country that saught to use google itself more directly to mislead.
Yes, I think if it clearly benefits the company more, such as supporting a legacy system or learning to support a short lived or highly specialized system, then clearly the company should be picking up the bill for any training. Otherwise, if it isn't really required training, but more of an "enriching" nature or will further the person's career, then it seems reasonable that a company would not want to pay or would want to have the employee pick up a portion of the expense. Most companies have limited ability to advance within a company, so training that isn't specific to a task or project could only serve to make the employee more expensive or more likely to choose another company. Of course, the person might choose to go to another company because they offer educational opportunities, so it really is a mixed bag for the company.
I think companies should take a more wholistic approach and once they reach a certain size just bite the bullet and start offering more generaous training and education opportunities. Sure the person might end up leaving before turning that knowledge back into something useful for the company, but if all companies are doing it, then that education and training will serve to create a better overall workforce for all companies to draw from. So, companies shouldn't think defensively when offering education benefits.
Of course, a company could just pay it employees a better salary and expect them to invest some of that money back into themselves rather than micromanaging employee self improvement.
The patents HAVE been granted and the courts are obligated to protect them.
The courts are obligated to consider all the relevant facts including the validity, scope and enforceability of the patent when there is a dispute. The courts acting as a rubber stamp for the patent office is just aas bad as the patent office acting as a rubber stamp for the patents in the first place.
I have trouble understanding why so many people seem to condone simply *taking* it... and then playing the 'Evil industry' card on the rightholders to boot! Seems a bit incongruous to me. There's such a thing as free music: download stuff that bands put online for your enjoyment or make some of your own, already.
It is probably because most people see very little value in music. For years the "industry" has been giving away music over the radio and making all its money on concerts and recordings. Sure a lot of people made recordings of their own of the over the air broadcasts and it may have been illegal (though that is highly questionable because they were being taxed with the presumption that people would make recordings on blank cassettes and such), but they were of lower sound quality usually, so demand for higher quality recordings made by the studios remained strong.
Then all of a sudden digital copies could more easily be made which were as good or nearly as good as the original recording. Thing is that people never felt they were paying for the content, but rather the quality of the recording and the means to play it whenever they wanted. Now that people can do that on their own with their own devices, people rightly feel that the middleman is in the way. Sure, people will still pay for concerts, but how much will they pay others for when they have already paid to have the means to do it themselves.
I think people will willfully pay a $1 or so for a song that they really like, but they see no value in paying someone who adds no value (the middlemen) for filler. And when people see no value being provided they aren't going to consider it wrong to copy a few data files.
So, if they see no value then why do they do it. That is because in aggregate there is value. Some noise to fill the day, a little beat to work out to, but very little value except in aggregate.
The radio model was a good one, where people listening did not pay directly, and it was only in aggregate that the stations paid for the music.
Sure some people have to have an album and will play it to death. But how much of past revenue was based on frivolous purchases that got played once or twice? Mosty of that "expected revenue" was transitory and the studios should have known it.
Yes, thanks Google for standing up for us all. All Google had to do was refuse to give their money to someone else. Let's think this situation through before applauding Google's altruistic nature.
Yes, let's think a little about it. Google could easily pay, then once enough content providers signed on and it wouldn't piss off the customers (that are the ones actually paying for the networks), then ISPs would start blocking or degrading the service of those that couldn't or wouldn't pay. Smaller content providers could not pay... So, Google could force smaller content providers out of the market by simply paying ISPs.
This of course is not Google's business model, which relies on more people providing content than it could possibly provide on its own, but think of all those other companies that want to keep you on their website and get everything you need from them and through them: AOL, Yahoo, MSN.
When the network carriers start charging both ends of communication for access, each bit of data that is transmitted, and the quality of service (ie how fast they transmit the data) then the phone company will again be in a position to play us against eachother and charge according to the value to the customer of the the data that is transmitted (value that the ISP has no part in creating) rather than the cost of maintaining the networks with a reasonable profit margin.
Sure google is serving its own long term self interest, but it is also in this case serving ours.
I find that MSN is used more often up here in Canada... any word on compatibility?
No, I don't think compatiblity with Canada is planned until release 6.2 on the roadmap.
Lawyers don't trust licenses which claim to have no limits.
Business decisions should be informed by lawyers, not made by them.
I would say that unwillingness to communicate because you work in a political, petty or cutthroat environment could rightly be termed a communication problem. But you are right, what are described as communication problems are almost never a result of a lack of the means to communicate.
"Just In Case I make My websites with Web 8.0. This should keep me good for at least 2 or 3 more months."
Web 8.0 is nothing compared to Web X, also known as the "porcelein kitty" web.
There are privacy issues that I don't think are covered here. Mostly it relates to the fact that a person's papers and effects are protected, but papers or effects that belong to another but relate to that person are not effected.
I don't see this as a matter of privacy. Yes it is being popularized that way in the press, but really that is correctly termed confidentiality. And like I said before, that should be handled by agreements and custom, or perhaps even put into statute. Information about a person, may have been information that was private, but once you give it away it is no longer. A secret is not a secret unless you have agreement from those you tell that they will keep it a secret. This is simply not a fundamental issue of privacy, but one of agreement and custom.
Privacy should not be an opinion that depnds on interpreting layers of precedent and implication of precedent - it should be an issue for public debate and input. Hence, my call for an ammendment to clarify just what we mean by privacy (and therefore a debate to come to a decision on that matter).
Well, you start by saying we need an ammendment, what would it say beyond protecting a person, their home letters and effects from un warranted searches and seizures? Any ammendment defining what types of things would be considered private information would be completely innappropriate. The 4th ammendment strikes the right balance.
If you want something to be private, then keep it to yourself.
You don't need to be a lawyer to have an opinion on the law. But I do think you should use a constitution sparingly to as concisely as possible define the scope of government authority. Unlike other "declarations of rights" the US constitution doesn't set out the rights of individuals, such documents provide no real authority. Rather it enumerates rights only to show how government authority should be limited with respect to those rights. "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." It is not a definition of rights, especially it is not a listing of those natural Rights endowed by our Creator.
List out those things regarding privacy that you feel are not specifically addressed by the 4th ammendment and I will show you how they are either already addressed by the 4th ammendment or how they are really not matters of privacy.
Third - That's pretty much standard operation procedure for big corporations
No, there was no reason to run an Open Source license through a special review process other than one used to evaluate any desktop or server software.