No. Delegation of your work does not relieve you of responsibility. If Snowden delegates to journalists the screening of releases for info that will aid the enemy (say al-Queda) and they fail, as Oliver also points out they in fact did, then Snowden bears some responsibility too. He decided to make the info public. He chose who to release it and trust with such screening. Similar story if the message is not effectively communicated. Contrary to popular myth, geeks can effectively communicate with non-geeks. It just takes a lot of work and effort. Most geeks merely choose not to make the effort.
Unless I'm reading the statistics incorrectly, that's a difference of nearly $1.4 billion dollars in Q4 of last year alone.
Unless one raises the price of the iPhone by $35, then it costs nothing. Switchers due to domestic ethical manufacturing would probably outnumber those who couldn't afford the extra $35. So it may be a benefit.
Clang/LLVM receives finance and contribution (and therefore an element of control) from Apple. Its also BSD licensed. These are not bad things at all, but its great that GCC, which GNU licensed, is an alternative.
Corporations guide the development of GPL licensed projects too. Take Linux for example, the main contributors are corporate sponsored/subsidized/etc so therefore the work is directed by corporate needs as well.
Plus there are indirect effects too. As a corporate sponsored project like Clang/LLVM becomes highly competitive or surpasses a project like GCC then a fire gets lit under GCC to make a little progress, and possibly to add comparable features that were corporate sponsored in Clang/LLVM. So corps get to indirectly influence GCC as it strives to be competitive.
Tim Cook is NOT a hypocrite on that issue The worst that can be said is that Tim Cook has a "double standard" when it comes to advocating for gay rights in the USofA vs other countries.
No. One can also say Cook chooses profits over gay rights. If he can save $35 on the manufacture of an iPhone by manufacturing in a country that is hostile to gays he will do it. That seems hypocrisy not double standard, he is materially benefitting from his silence and/or lack of action.
$35 is the estimated increase in manufacturing costs for making iPhones in the USA where gays have rights.
I think we can believe that the gay man may actually believe in gay rights.
That is not the debate. The debate is what does he believe in more, saving $35 on the manufacture of an iPhone or gay rights. So far saving the $35 seems more important.
$35 being the estimated increased cost of building an iPhone in the US where gays have rights.
Bitcoin is backed by the goods and services available in exchange of it
No, its not. The quantity of a particular good or service equating to a bitcoin can vary wildly in a very short period of time.
Bitcoin, like other currencies, it backed by faith. And a lot of that faith has to do with speculation not commerce.
Bitcoin is not a currency, it currently fails as a store of value. Could that change, possibly, but unlikely in the short term.
Bitcoin is a speculative instrument.
Bitcoin's real use is as a payment system. During payment processing bitcoins are generally not held by the recipient so the store of value problem isn't an issue. Advocates make much of the vendors who accept bitcoins but in truth most never touch a bitcoin. A bitcoin exchange is used to actually collect the coins and convert them to fiat currency immediately. And what does this demonstrate, a lack of faith.
... SpaceX will become very, very expensive when required to comply with govt contracting law...
Actually ULA will become much more expensive as they will have to include fixed costs (infrastructure, etc) into their launch pricing. Currently they do not. They seem to have a separate contract purely for infrastructure and other related fixed costs, this contract is separate from launch contracts. Short story: ULA launch contracts don't have to include such costs since they are paid for elsewhere, SpaceX launch contracts includes all such costs and they are still far less expensive.
The USAF got caught cheating to hop on the Musk bandwagon, and the consequences will be very, very expensive.
I think recent news stories demonstrated the opposite, the USAF overstepped its bounds and began dictating design changes and corporate reorganizations.
The only difference between the new 'commercial space' guys and Boeing and LM, etc are the rules. How is it fair to the established space industry that was forced to play the government game to lose business because SpaceX doesn't have to.
Actually ULA (boeing, lm, etc) gets sweetheart contracts too. For example their launch contracts don't include fixed costs like launch facilities and many other parts of the "infrastructure". ULA gets a separate contract to pay for all the fixed costs. That may be a good idea to make sure this infrastructure is ready and available independently of what the launch schedule may be but the fact remains that SpaceX includes such infrastructure costs into their launch contracts. And SpaceX launch contracts are still far less expensive than ULA.
All others are perpetually above $100 which is too expensive for a Facebook wonder do-nothing PC with a pentium 4th edition and 4GB of RAM.
Why use an SSD in such a do-nothing PC? If you can't go with a regular HD try a hybrid SSD-HD. Last I looked a hybrid with 1 TB HD and 8 GB SSD was under $80.
Easily disproven? You're speculating here, not providing actual evidence. You can't disprove something with speculation.
You wrote: "NO ONE wants this. NO CUSTOMER wants this." The capitalization is your emphasis. You assumed the customer is the user, I demonstrated that this is not so. Only one counterexample is necessary to disprove a claim such as yours. The existence of an employer who does not want to let employees disable secureboot is something far beyond speculation. There are already companies out there that try to lock down configuration for security and compliance reasons. I've known people who work in environments where their PCs netboot for such reasons.
But there is every reason to expect that I will no longer be able to choose from all laptops on the market and then just install linux on it like I have been doing for the last 15 years (much easier these days...everything just works TM);
No, there is actually every reason to believe that well funded Linux distros like Red Hat and Ubuntu will work with hardware vendors to make sure they are not locked out.
next year or the year after when I want to upgrade my laptop I will have to spend significantly longer looking to see which vendors supply an unlocked boot loader. If there is one available at all.
Yes, that is annoying. But there is a tradeoff here. Possibly inconveniencing users of smaller Linux distros unable to work with hardware vendors and people who want to compile their system code (been there) versus strengthening security on the Windows boxes used by the overwhelming majority of users. Its not unreasonable for companies who are selling dedicated Windows boxes with no promise of the ability to repurpose as Linux boxes to get on board such a tradeoff.
Are the days of trying a new OS for the weekend gone? (get spare HDD, load OS and test drive for the weekend, back to main OS HDD on Sunday night).
Germany has similar laws already (albeit locally, I believe), and skylights are all over the place. It simply states that the roof area should be covered by plants or solar panels, and not what features the roof can have (such as skylights, water slides, helipads, etc.). Your faux outrage isn't becoming;)
What outrage? Its a simple question and skylights are recognized as a green technology. If anyone is being faux it is the person equating skylights with water slides.
Then the owner places a password protection on the BIOS and that prevents disabling secureboot, if that is their desire.
The owner may prefer not spending the time to do so, it being far more convenient to just buy a factory locked down box. Plus BIOS passwords can be worked around, jumpers, batteries, etc.
>"The owner may not want to spend the time setting the password"
Freedom has a cost. It is not free, and it is not necessarily convenient.
The real point is that for some owner perspectives the feature is a vulnerability not a freedom.
And using your own logic, freedom has a cost and is not necessarily convenient, that's also true in the sense that people who want the feature would need to do a little research before buying a box or motherboard.
... horrible trash that are unusable for anything but email and office productivity software...
Actually a MacBook Air is just fine for software development. At least for iOS and Android development. For Mac OS and Windows app development it would depend on the app. To be honest I normally use a MacBook Pro but on the road I've occasionally used a colleague's MacBook Air. I was pleasantly surprised. For a couple colleagues it is their normal dev system. External monitors and keyboards/mice used at home and their office; used with internal display, keyboard and trackpad on the road and at client's.
This portion of the gov't does not work on a market model, it works on a revenue generation model. What generates more revenue, having staff go after mega corporations that can afford to defend themselves or much smaller businesses that can not?
So many problem in business and government exist because the incentives/rewards are screwed up. In business school there is a recurring lesson that shows up in many varied topics. You don't get what you ask for. You don't get what everyone agrees is right. You get what you reward. So if you reward a gov't bureaucrat based on win/loss ratio and/or fines generated you will not get justice, you will get wins and fines.
I realize it is currently trendy to believe that fascism is somehow related to corporate control but it is not. Fascism is an odd combination of far right *and* far left ideas. With respect to industry its actually socialistic. Fascism promotes control of industry by syndicates of workers *not* control by corporations.
Yes the federal employee will be paid win or lose. But the goal is for the federal employee to generate revenue, to bring in money. Their time is "better spent" going after some mom-and-pop shop that can't afford to defend themselves and will just pay the fine.
The owner may not want to spend the time setting the password and prefer to just order it from the factory locked down. Besides the time, a cryptographic key sounds more secure than a password.
There is absolutely no good reason secure boot should be locked on.
One counterexample: The user of a computer is not necessarily the owner of a computer. For example a business may not want to allow an employee to disable secureboot.
And what about any individual user, even one who uses Red Hat or Ubuntu, who has the audacity to actually want to exercise his rights under the GPL and recompile his kernel?
Then buy a machine that was not built to be a dedicated Windows box. Motherboard vendors will continue to make boards where secureboot is absent or configurable. They already cater to the build-your-own and tweaking segments.
More importantly its not Dell's or HP's or whoever's mission to promote and support the GPL. Free Software advocates can donate their own time and money to open hardware projects, support other vendors who cater to the Linux community, etc.
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No. Delegation of your work does not relieve you of responsibility. If Snowden delegates to journalists the screening of releases for info that will aid the enemy (say al-Queda) and they fail, as Oliver also points out they in fact did, then Snowden bears some responsibility too. He decided to make the info public. He chose who to release it and trust with such screening. Similar story if the message is not effectively communicated. Contrary to popular myth, geeks can effectively communicate with non-geeks. It just takes a lot of work and effort. Most geeks merely choose not to make the effort.
And if we can get Pluto designated a planet once again we'll be back to normal. :-)
Unless I'm reading the statistics incorrectly, that's a difference of nearly $1.4 billion dollars in Q4 of last year alone.
Unless one raises the price of the iPhone by $35, then it costs nothing. Switchers due to domestic ethical manufacturing would probably outnumber those who couldn't afford the extra $35. So it may be a benefit.
Clang/LLVM receives finance and contribution (and therefore an element of control) from Apple. Its also BSD licensed. These are not bad things at all, but its great that GCC, which GNU licensed, is an alternative.
Corporations guide the development of GPL licensed projects too. Take Linux for example, the main contributors are corporate sponsored/subsidized/etc so therefore the work is directed by corporate needs as well.
Plus there are indirect effects too. As a corporate sponsored project like Clang/LLVM becomes highly competitive or surpasses a project like GCC then a fire gets lit under GCC to make a little progress, and possibly to add comparable features that were corporate sponsored in Clang/LLVM. So corps get to indirectly influence GCC as it strives to be competitive.
Tim Cook is NOT a hypocrite on that issue The worst that can be said is that Tim Cook has a "double standard" when it comes to advocating for gay rights in the USofA vs other countries.
No. One can also say Cook chooses profits over gay rights. If he can save $35 on the manufacture of an iPhone by manufacturing in a country that is hostile to gays he will do it. That seems hypocrisy not double standard, he is materially benefitting from his silence and/or lack of action.
$35 is the estimated increase in manufacturing costs for making iPhones in the USA where gays have rights.
I think we can believe that the gay man may actually believe in gay rights.
That is not the debate. The debate is what does he believe in more, saving $35 on the manufacture of an iPhone or gay rights. So far saving the $35 seems more important.
$35 being the estimated increased cost of building an iPhone in the US where gays have rights.
Bitcoin is backed by the goods and services available in exchange of it
No, its not. The quantity of a particular good or service equating to a bitcoin can vary wildly in a very short period of time.
Bitcoin, like other currencies, it backed by faith. And a lot of that faith has to do with speculation not commerce.
Bitcoin is not a currency, it currently fails as a store of value. Could that change, possibly, but unlikely in the short term.
Bitcoin is a speculative instrument.
Bitcoin's real use is as a payment system. During payment processing bitcoins are generally not held by the recipient so the store of value problem isn't an issue. Advocates make much of the vendors who accept bitcoins but in truth most never touch a bitcoin. A bitcoin exchange is used to actually collect the coins and convert them to fiat currency immediately. And what does this demonstrate, a lack of faith.
... SpaceX will become very, very expensive when required to comply with govt contracting law ...
Actually ULA will become much more expensive as they will have to include fixed costs (infrastructure, etc) into their launch pricing. Currently they do not. They seem to have a separate contract purely for infrastructure and other related fixed costs, this contract is separate from launch contracts. Short story: ULA launch contracts don't have to include such costs since they are paid for elsewhere, SpaceX launch contracts includes all such costs and they are still far less expensive.
The USAF got caught cheating to hop on the Musk bandwagon, and the consequences will be very, very expensive.
I think recent news stories demonstrated the opposite, the USAF overstepped its bounds and began dictating design changes and corporate reorganizations.
The only difference between the new 'commercial space' guys and Boeing and LM, etc are the rules. How is it fair to the established space industry that was forced to play the government game to lose business because SpaceX doesn't have to.
Actually ULA (boeing, lm, etc) gets sweetheart contracts too. For example their launch contracts don't include fixed costs like launch facilities and many other parts of the "infrastructure". ULA gets a separate contract to pay for all the fixed costs. That may be a good idea to make sure this infrastructure is ready and available independently of what the launch schedule may be but the fact remains that SpaceX includes such infrastructure costs into their launch contracts. And SpaceX launch contracts are still far less expensive than ULA.
All others are perpetually above $100 which is too expensive for a Facebook wonder do-nothing PC with a pentium 4th edition and 4GB of RAM.
Why use an SSD in such a do-nothing PC? If you can't go with a regular HD try a hybrid SSD-HD. Last I looked a hybrid with 1 TB HD and 8 GB SSD was under $80.
Easily disproven? You're speculating here, not providing actual evidence. You can't disprove something with speculation.
You wrote: "NO ONE wants this. NO CUSTOMER wants this." The capitalization is your emphasis. You assumed the customer is the user, I demonstrated that this is not so. Only one counterexample is necessary to disprove a claim such as yours. The existence of an employer who does not want to let employees disable secureboot is something far beyond speculation. There are already companies out there that try to lock down configuration for security and compliance reasons. I've known people who work in environments where their PCs netboot for such reasons.
But there is every reason to expect that I will no longer be able to choose from all laptops on the market and then just install linux on it like I have been doing for the last 15 years (much easier these days...everything just works TM);
No, there is actually every reason to believe that well funded Linux distros like Red Hat and Ubuntu will work with hardware vendors to make sure they are not locked out.
next year or the year after when I want to upgrade my laptop I will have to spend significantly longer looking to see which vendors supply an unlocked boot loader. If there is one available at all.
Yes, that is annoying. But there is a tradeoff here. Possibly inconveniencing users of smaller Linux distros unable to work with hardware vendors and people who want to compile their system code (been there) versus strengthening security on the Windows boxes used by the overwhelming majority of users. Its not unreasonable for companies who are selling dedicated Windows boxes with no promise of the ability to repurpose as Linux boxes to get on board such a tradeoff.
Are the days of trying a new OS for the weekend gone? (get spare HDD, load OS and test drive for the weekend, back to main OS HDD on Sunday night).
No, run the OS in a VM.
Germany has similar laws already (albeit locally, I believe), and skylights are all over the place. It simply states that the roof area should be covered by plants or solar panels, and not what features the roof can have (such as skylights, water slides, helipads, etc.). Your faux outrage isn't becoming ;)
What outrage? Its a simple question and skylights are recognized as a green technology. If anyone is being faux it is the person equating skylights with water slides.
Please name a "mom and pop shop" that has been investigated for anti-trust behaviour, just one will do.
This thread begins with "the efficient use of government resources trumps justice". That is a general statement not exclusive to anti-trust.
Then the owner places a password protection on the BIOS and that prevents disabling secureboot, if that is their desire.
The owner may prefer not spending the time to do so, it being far more convenient to just buy a factory locked down box. Plus BIOS passwords can be worked around, jumpers, batteries, etc.
>"The owner may not want to spend the time setting the password"
Freedom has a cost. It is not free, and it is not necessarily convenient.
The real point is that for some owner perspectives the feature is a vulnerability not a freedom.
And using your own logic, freedom has a cost and is not necessarily convenient, that's also true in the sense that people who want the feature would need to do a little research before buying a box or motherboard.
... horrible trash that are unusable for anything but email and office productivity software ...
Actually a MacBook Air is just fine for software development. At least for iOS and Android development. For Mac OS and Windows app development it would depend on the app. To be honest I normally use a MacBook Pro but on the road I've occasionally used a colleague's MacBook Air. I was pleasantly surprised. For a couple colleagues it is their normal dev system. External monitors and keyboards/mice used at home and their office; used with internal display, keyboard and trackpad on the road and at client's.
This portion of the gov't does not work on a market model, it works on a revenue generation model. What generates more revenue, having staff go after mega corporations that can afford to defend themselves or much smaller businesses that can not?
So many problem in business and government exist because the incentives/rewards are screwed up. In business school there is a recurring lesson that shows up in many varied topics. You don't get what you ask for. You don't get what everyone agrees is right. You get what you reward. So if you reward a gov't bureaucrat based on win/loss ratio and/or fines generated you will not get justice, you will get wins and fines.
One step closer to fascism.
I realize it is currently trendy to believe that fascism is somehow related to corporate control but it is not. Fascism is an odd combination of far right *and* far left ideas. With respect to industry its actually socialistic. Fascism promotes control of industry by syndicates of workers *not* control by corporations.
Yes the federal employee will be paid win or lose. But the goal is for the federal employee to generate revenue, to bring in money. Their time is "better spent" going after some mom-and-pop shop that can't afford to defend themselves and will just pay the fine.
The owner may not want to spend the time setting the password and prefer to just order it from the factory locked down. Besides the time, a cryptographic key sounds more secure than a password.
There is absolutely no good reason secure boot should be locked on.
One counterexample: The user of a computer is not necessarily the owner of a computer. For example a business may not want to allow an employee to disable secureboot.
And what about any individual user, even one who uses Red Hat or Ubuntu, who has the audacity to actually want to exercise his rights under the GPL and recompile his kernel?
Then buy a machine that was not built to be a dedicated Windows box. Motherboard vendors will continue to make boards where secureboot is absent or configurable. They already cater to the build-your-own and tweaking segments.
More importantly its not Dell's or HP's or whoever's mission to promote and support the GPL. Free Software advocates can donate their own time and money to open hardware projects, support other vendors who cater to the Linux community, etc.
Some people will want the factory lockdown to enhance security.
No. NO ONE wants this. NO CUSTOMER wants this.
Easily disproven. Owners and users are not necessarily the same people. A company may not want to let its employees disable secureboot.
The owner of the hardware does have the right to do as they wish
And consider that the owner is not necessarily the user. In a business environment the company may not want users to disable secureboot.