You are right in the fact that the democracy is not a word that magically make everything perfect. It's only a component that help if implemented with a lot of others features. The devil are in the details.
Saying that the citizens have not the time is certainly not a excuse to not allowing the information to be available. There is a lot of different interest in the population that cover a very large range of subjects. Many times a subject is raised to the media by a few people. This could be enough to spread an information to the vast majority of the population. This is how the focus of many of us is influenced by the media. Now the difference at this point is: is the information public or secret when the subject catch the focus of a bug chunk of the population ? The status of the information is essential, even if not see as so useful when published. Because of the focus, the quantity of the information is not really a problem. An information might gain importance many years after the fact.
But the really big question is why a information is secret: to protect the interest of the population or to protect the interest of a few that abuse the population at the highest level ? In that matter I think that a proportional representation up to the top of the government might help to prevent the second case in some situations. It's not a perfect workaround, but it has substantial effects. We have observed that in a few scandal in Switzerland: the Federal Council can't keep a secret for long so there better have to act as if the information will be public in the future.
Now try to change some decision of the USA government and come back here when you have succeeded... In the mean time you might experiment some trouble regarding your privacy that maybe will make you abandon the goal. I believe that this is this aspect of the privacy that was the concern of PJ.
Yes I do the mirror trick when I have no other solution and I can grant to you that this process is really time consuming, and not always reliable. Submitting a patches is not the most difficult part. Maintaining it a few months, while improving it and rebasing it, can be far more challenging if you are not comfortable with the tool.
There no question about the fact that Switzerland is spying for some purpose, like in every counties. The scale of this activity is nothing compared to the scale of what the NSA do. The P-26 scandal have raised the privacy concern at his time and are still in the memory of many peoples. But what's more important is the fact that the government is representative, making it very difficult to agree on a politic repression.
Regarding the voting, there is recent examples of vote against the government recommendation. The limitation of excessive and abusive remuneration is the last I remember: http://www.tax-news.com/news/Swiss_Business_Federation_Comments_on_Executive_Pay_Vote____60019.html The banning of the minaret was probably the vote against the government recommendation that was the most seen is the international medias at his time. The fact that the citizens have to vote many time per year certainly encourage to discuss more about politic than in countries where citizens can only take notice of what there government do.
Not "the best" overall, but Switzerland have a interesting political system that Swiss peoples are proud of. If you have a free moment, I suggest that you take a look at it. I can maybe inspire others countries to take some useful tools.
In a geek language, the democracy was a good political patch. Back in 1848, after a civil war, Swiss peoples applied some innovative patches to it. Seem to have prevented a bunch of deadlock on some loads that are still observable in other political system. Maybe time to do a constructive critic of this experiment and to integrate some valuable parts.
Obviously the internet backbone in Switzerland is the same as anywhere else. As Pamela Jones indicate, the difference is in the laws, not in the technical implementation. He don't detail his research, nor the critters he looked at, so it's difficult to figure out the basis of his view about Switzerland laws.
What I can say is that the Swiss political system don't let the government take to much power. Direct democracy, representative executive, popular referendum, and popular initiative are some tools that bring back the power to the citizens. I think this is why the law in Switzerland are more oriented in a way to protect the citizens.
A single people can have a bright idea endorsed by a majority.
It's the fact in all societies that a minority of peoples try to change the rules that apply to all peoples. Regarding this very precise aspect, top of the government, passionate leaders, and extremists activists, all of this positions fall in the same category. But there are different in there support from the majority of others citizens: do there serve there own interest, or serve the common interest of there society ? The history is full of story where peoples have moved form one position to an other. Classic example is the move from leader of the opposition to the government, and maybe back to the opposition. Move to/from extremist position in hopefully more rare but not hard to find in the history. So basically the 3 positions (there can be others as well, just keeping this short) can naturally exists in a given society, basically because not all have the same view or interest. I like to define the politic system of a country by the way those 3 positions will live together and influence the rules to all peoples.
There is a lot of bad politic systems that "solve the problem" by using the force to get a single way of thinking. The democracy is a good improvement but many details on how it is used can make a hug difference in practice. For example voting for a president that have a lot of power inevitably create a situation with near half of the population support him and the other near half don't support him. If you think about this, you can realize that this result is logical: a single person cannot represent the diversity that exist in a population. There will always be a important chunk of frustrated peoples that feel to be manipulated by others. A way to improve this is to have a representative government up to the top. For example in Switzerland the top executive of the government is not a single person, but seven persons that are representative of the different political orientation that have support from the population. The seven act as a college: there have to agree on all decisions, no matter what. The net effect is that virtually anyone in the population have some representation anywhere in the government. There is no more opposition like in others countries, but peoples with different political orientation that talk each to the other trying to find a common and acceptable solution.
Switzerland also have the right for any citizen to start a popular initiative. If it reach a minimal number of supporters (100'000 actually) all the citizens have to vote on it. If the initiative is adopted, the constitution is changed, even against the will of the government. There have been recently 3 examples of single persons, were two of them was completely unknown from the medias, that successfully have changed the constitution against the government recommendation. Here the population really have the biggest power. The person involved into the politic have to be careful to respect the citizens, because there is tools to workaround in case of abuse.
Sadly the Switzerland is the only country with that system right now. It was not easy to put this system in place. Switzerland was in civil ware just before it get elaborated and adopted. At the end the system is really good, and I hope that more countries will get a political system like this one.
Slashdot is not the only forum in the world. Thanks for my English, but I certainly make a lot of mistake. Far more than in my native French. As for the multinational corporation, comparatively to his size, the Switzerland have a valuable amount of there HQ located here.
I am a strong supporter of heterogeneity, this is the basis of the creativity and to the evolution. In Switzerland, the federal government is relatively low in power. The 26 cantons have the biggest power, making an obligation to find acceptable solution for all. Here we have 4 officials languages for example.
Actually there is so many peoples coming in Switzerland that the price of the houses and apartments are going very high. This is probably a temporary situation, but this is the trend for the last 10 years.
The banning of minaret was interesting to move away the subject from the government to the people. The fact is that a minority of extremist want to show there power by building big symbols.There perfectly known that the purpose is to make trouble on the conservative peoples. There goal is to raise the subject to the highest level, where international critics will make there cause favorable, in the hope to have new laws supporting there actions. It's just insane how much this method work well, even is Switzerland. The net result is an increasing frustration from the majority of the citizens. The feeling is that extremists can enter in a foreign country and impose there law without citizen vote, only by making pressure to the government. The banning of minaret was a clear signal to stop this method. It was a technical trick to let the majority of peoples saying, ok you can have your religion, but don't abuse the system as we can do this as well and you will certainly lose at this game. If you make some search about the reactions you will clearly notice that most of the government issued statement against the decision, but if you search a bit more, you will find a massive support from many citizens from adjacent countries that have the same problem but no direct democracy tools as in Switzerland to show there power. In most of countries extremists only have to pressure a few peoples in the government to get what there wants. Switzerland have some useful political tools that can be used to workaround government power in case something go wrong. This make the life of the Swiss politic interestingly different from what you can find in most others countries. I really hope that more and more countries will endorse similar political tools. Voting for peoples is a tool, but this is not enough.
As you might notice from recent news, banking secret in Switzerland in now almost history. You can find bank in Delaware where you can do more anonymous transaction than anywhere in Switzerland, and not counting some tiny islands around the world with high financial business.
Anyway, my initial post was not about the banking secret but about citizen privacy, witch is not exactly the same.
First there is really big difference between countries about the privacy question. For example in Switzerland (where I live) the privacy question is far more mature than in the USA. It's not a government vs peoples fight, but a normal subject where change have to be voted by all citizens. In the USA the government is so powerful that it can do almost anything, especially using his agencies, without strong opposition.
Secondly, the USA is by far the country that have the most used his massive commercial and political influence to impose to others countries to destroy the privacy rights of there citizens. Many non-USA peoples are upset about that, really. This is not an hazard if now the USA is considered an evil county about privacy and that some others non-USA country is now regarded as more free than the "used to be free" USA.
For many peoples, USA was the way to go until the end of the 20 century. Recent release of documents have show that the USA success was based on one of the most massive manipulation of information and manipulation of others governments. It's normal that there is a reaction about that, internally and externally. I really don't known how the USA will evolve from that point. Regarding everyone as a suspect is certainly not a way to build a bright future.
* If you have to integrate the source code into a bigger project. Some specific features might touch more than a single project to be complete (typical case is driver+lib+binding). Keeping trace of all the change is far more easy if there uses a common SCM tool.
* Submit a clean patch to a project where you are not a regular contributor (typical case is a bug on a specific load) is a time consuming task. Each project have his set of rules about the coding style, and how to submit the patches. Usually this require to split the patches in a set of smaller patches. And most of the time the maintainers of the project ask for modification before accepting your work. The response might not be immediate and you have to continue your regular work until you get some feedback. Managing all of this is far more easier if you can use the standard tool that you use everyday.
Open Source project have to be easy to contribute to gain new contributors. There are not payed, so don't vast there time. I am curious to known what can retain the Python project from switching from Mercurial to Git.
IDC is simply ordered by the last non-UNIX OS (Windows) owner (Microsoft) to redact some PR to distort the reality. There solution is to count only the past generation of UNIX and to ignore all the new generation of UNIX, like all the Linux distributions, all IOS, all Android, almost all top supercomputer on the planet, the vast majority of routers, the vast majority of recent TV, the majority of web servers and data centers, and a lot of more specific applications and embedded systems.
The Git distributed version control system is today the most used for the OSS projects. This was not the case back to the day when the Python project selected Mercurial to store hi source code. After all, at this time the mass of users of a specific SCM was not a important parameter for the decision since a bunch of a new generation of SCM was relatively new. Now, several years later, the Git audience is several order of magnitude bigger than the Mercurial audience. It has also proved to be appropriate for a lot of project of the size of Python. When will Python source code migrate to Git ?
Targeted espionage for economic-industrial advantage is NOT a 'War On Terror.'
Yes. The problem here is that the agencies build with the excuse of the "war on terror" in now used to ruin the allies. Don't expect graceful reaction from them.
I would expect American intelligence agencies to be spying on every foreign government.
Allies has until now tolerate that the USA print astonish amount of money out of nothing because there expected positive outcome of the situation. Now allies understand that the USA use that money to finance the biggest economic war in the history and the USA target is the EU. This vastly change the meaning of the "allies" word. What the USA will look like if there have to pay there debt right now ?
Another new technology claimed to be totally safe and absolutely under control that yield a new unknown and unexpected effect. The human race will probably not survive long enough to his own errors to reach the level where his global conscience and individual action are compatible with the ecosystem of the Earth.
Simply put: human fail miserably to manage process that span longer than a his own lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
"For open source systems, the person or persons who inserted the weak code should be identified and kicked off the project."
Learning by errors also apply to security-critical areas if you known a little about the history. The NSA just hit this fact right now...
Open source code can be audited by any expert. This is certainly an advantage over closed source project.
You are right in the fact that the democracy is not a word that magically make everything perfect. It's only a component that help if implemented with a lot of others features. The devil are in the details.
Saying that the citizens have not the time is certainly not a excuse to not allowing the information to be available. There is a lot of different interest in the population that cover a very large range of subjects. Many times a subject is raised to the media by a few people. This could be enough to spread an information to the vast majority of the population. This is how the focus of many of us is influenced by the media. Now the difference at this point is: is the information public or secret when the subject catch the focus of a bug chunk of the population ? The status of the information is essential, even if not see as so useful when published. Because of the focus, the quantity of the information is not really a problem. An information might gain importance many years after the fact.
But the really big question is why a information is secret: to protect the interest of the population or to protect the interest of a few that abuse the population at the highest level ? In that matter I think that a proportional representation up to the top of the government might help to prevent the second case in some situations. It's not a perfect workaround, but it has substantial effects. We have observed that in a few scandal in Switzerland: the Federal Council can't keep a secret for long so there better have to act as if the information will be public in the future.
Your are perfectly right in your examples.
Now try to change some decision of the USA government and come back here when you have succeeded... In the mean time you might experiment some trouble regarding your privacy that maybe will make you abandon the goal. I believe that this is this aspect of the privacy that was the concern of PJ.
Yes I do the mirror trick when I have no other solution and I can grant to you that this process is really time consuming, and not always reliable. Submitting a patches is not the most difficult part. Maintaining it a few months, while improving it and rebasing it, can be far more challenging if you are not comfortable with the tool.
There no question about the fact that Switzerland is spying for some purpose, like in every counties. The scale of this activity is nothing compared to the scale of what the NSA do. The P-26 scandal have raised the privacy concern at his time and are still in the memory of many peoples. But what's more important is the fact that the government is representative, making it very difficult to agree on a politic repression.
Regarding the voting, there is recent examples of vote against the government recommendation. The limitation of excessive and abusive remuneration is the last I remember: http://www.tax-news.com/news/Swiss_Business_Federation_Comments_on_Executive_Pay_Vote____60019.html The banning of the minaret was probably the vote against the government recommendation that was the most seen is the international medias at his time. The fact that the citizens have to vote many time per year certainly encourage to discuss more about politic than in countries where citizens can only take notice of what there government do.
Thanks for the correction. I do my best to write in something close to English.
Not "the best" overall, but Switzerland have a interesting political system that Swiss peoples are proud of. If you have a free moment, I suggest that you take a look at it. I can maybe inspire others countries to take some useful tools.
In a geek language, the democracy was a good political patch. Back in 1848, after a civil war, Swiss peoples applied some innovative patches to it. Seem to have prevented a bunch of deadlock on some loads that are still observable in other political system. Maybe time to do a constructive critic of this experiment and to integrate some valuable parts.
Obviously the internet backbone in Switzerland is the same as anywhere else. As Pamela Jones indicate, the difference is in the laws, not in the technical implementation. He don't detail his research, nor the critters he looked at, so it's difficult to figure out the basis of his view about Switzerland laws.
What I can say is that the Swiss political system don't let the government take to much power. Direct democracy, representative executive, popular referendum, and popular initiative are some tools that bring back the power to the citizens. I think this is why the law in Switzerland are more oriented in a way to protect the citizens.
A single people can have a bright idea endorsed by a majority.
It's the fact in all societies that a minority of peoples try to change the rules that apply to all peoples. Regarding this very precise aspect, top of the government, passionate leaders, and extremists activists, all of this positions fall in the same category. But there are different in there support from the majority of others citizens: do there serve there own interest, or serve the common interest of there society ? The history is full of story where peoples have moved form one position to an other. Classic example is the move from leader of the opposition to the government, and maybe back to the opposition. Move to/from extremist position in hopefully more rare but not hard to find in the history. So basically the 3 positions (there can be others as well, just keeping this short) can naturally exists in a given society, basically because not all have the same view or interest. I like to define the politic system of a country by the way those 3 positions will live together and influence the rules to all peoples.
There is a lot of bad politic systems that "solve the problem" by using the force to get a single way of thinking. The democracy is a good improvement but many details on how it is used can make a hug difference in practice. For example voting for a president that have a lot of power inevitably create a situation with near half of the population support him and the other near half don't support him. If you think about this, you can realize that this result is logical: a single person cannot represent the diversity that exist in a population. There will always be a important chunk of frustrated peoples that feel to be manipulated by others. A way to improve this is to have a representative government up to the top. For example in Switzerland the top executive of the government is not a single person, but seven persons that are representative of the different political orientation that have support from the population. The seven act as a college: there have to agree on all decisions, no matter what. The net effect is that virtually anyone in the population have some representation anywhere in the government. There is no more opposition like in others countries, but peoples with different political orientation that talk each to the other trying to find a common and acceptable solution.
Switzerland also have the right for any citizen to start a popular initiative. If it reach a minimal number of supporters (100'000 actually) all the citizens have to vote on it. If the initiative is adopted, the constitution is changed, even against the will of the government. There have been recently 3 examples of single persons, were two of them was completely unknown from the medias, that successfully have changed the constitution against the government recommendation. Here the population really have the biggest power. The person involved into the politic have to be careful to respect the citizens, because there is tools to workaround in case of abuse.
Sadly the Switzerland is the only country with that system right now. It was not easy to put this system in place. Switzerland was in civil ware just before it get elaborated and adopted. At the end the system is really good, and I hope that more countries will get a political system like this one.
Won what game ?
Slashdot is not the only forum in the world. Thanks for my English, but I certainly make a lot of mistake. Far more than in my native French. As for the multinational corporation, comparatively to his size, the Switzerland have a valuable amount of there HQ located here.
I am a strong supporter of heterogeneity, this is the basis of the creativity and to the evolution. In Switzerland, the federal government is relatively low in power. The 26 cantons have the biggest power, making an obligation to find acceptable solution for all. Here we have 4 officials languages for example.
Actually there is so many peoples coming in Switzerland that the price of the houses and apartments are going very high. This is probably a temporary situation, but this is the trend for the last 10 years.
The banning of minaret was interesting to move away the subject from the government to the people. The fact is that a minority of extremist want to show there power by building big symbols.There perfectly known that the purpose is to make trouble on the conservative peoples. There goal is to raise the subject to the highest level, where international critics will make there cause favorable, in the hope to have new laws supporting there actions. It's just insane how much this method work well, even is Switzerland. The net result is an increasing frustration from the majority of the citizens. The feeling is that extremists can enter in a foreign country and impose there law without citizen vote, only by making pressure to the government. The banning of minaret was a clear signal to stop this method. It was a technical trick to let the majority of peoples saying, ok you can have your religion, but don't abuse the system as we can do this as well and you will certainly lose at this game. If you make some search about the reactions you will clearly notice that most of the government issued statement against the decision, but if you search a bit more, you will find a massive support from many citizens from adjacent countries that have the same problem but no direct democracy tools as in Switzerland to show there power. In most of countries extremists only have to pressure a few peoples in the government to get what there wants. Switzerland have some useful political tools that can be used to workaround government power in case something go wrong. This make the life of the Swiss politic interestingly different from what you can find in most others countries. I really hope that more and more countries will endorse similar political tools. Voting for peoples is a tool, but this is not enough.
As you might notice from recent news, banking secret in Switzerland in now almost history. You can find bank in Delaware where you can do more anonymous transaction than anywhere in Switzerland, and not counting some tiny islands around the world with high financial business.
Anyway, my initial post was not about the banking secret but about citizen privacy, witch is not exactly the same.
I disagree.
First there is really big difference between countries about the privacy question. For example in Switzerland (where I live) the privacy question is far more mature than in the USA. It's not a government vs peoples fight, but a normal subject where change have to be voted by all citizens. In the USA the government is so powerful that it can do almost anything, especially using his agencies, without strong opposition.
Secondly, the USA is by far the country that have the most used his massive commercial and political influence to impose to others countries to destroy the privacy rights of there citizens. Many non-USA peoples are upset about that, really. This is not an hazard if now the USA is considered an evil county about privacy and that some others non-USA country is now regarded as more free than the "used to be free" USA.
For many peoples, USA was the way to go until the end of the 20 century. Recent release of documents have show that the USA success was based on one of the most massive manipulation of information and manipulation of others governments. It's normal that there is a reaction about that, internally and externally. I really don't known how the USA will evolve from that point. Regarding everyone as a suspect is certainly not a way to build a bright future.
Yes, it make difference:
* If you have to integrate the source code into a bigger project. Some specific features might touch more than a single project to be complete (typical case is driver+lib+binding). Keeping trace of all the change is far more easy if there uses a common SCM tool.
* Submit a clean patch to a project where you are not a regular contributor (typical case is a bug on a specific load) is a time consuming task. Each project have his set of rules about the coding style, and how to submit the patches. Usually this require to split the patches in a set of smaller patches. And most of the time the maintainers of the project ask for modification before accepting your work. The response might not be immediate and you have to continue your regular work until you get some feedback. Managing all of this is far more easier if you can use the standard tool that you use everyday.
Open Source project have to be easy to contribute to gain new contributors. There are not payed, so don't vast there time. I am curious to known what can retain the Python project from switching from Mercurial to Git.
The last non-UNIX OS share is declining.
IDC is simply ordered by the last non-UNIX OS (Windows) owner (Microsoft) to redact some PR to distort the reality. There solution is to count only the past generation of UNIX and to ignore all the new generation of UNIX, like all the Linux distributions, all IOS, all Android, almost all top supercomputer on the planet, the vast majority of routers, the vast majority of recent TV, the majority of web servers and data centers, and a lot of more specific applications and embedded systems.
Hello,
The Git distributed version control system is today the most used for the OSS projects. This was not the case back to the day when the Python project selected Mercurial to store hi source code. After all, at this time the mass of users of a specific SCM was not a important parameter for the decision since a bunch of a new generation of SCM was relatively new. Now, several years later, the Git audience is several order of magnitude bigger than the Mercurial audience. It has also proved to be appropriate for a lot of project of the size of Python. When will Python source code migrate to Git ?
The best video of the failure I have found:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orOcOahNazk
Others good videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH3bY6-ObGg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSTVkkDv30k
Targeted espionage for economic-industrial advantage is NOT a 'War On Terror.'
Yes. The problem here is that the agencies build with the excuse of the "war on terror" in now used to ruin the allies. Don't expect graceful reaction from them.
Please mod parent up.
Too many people (including me) have discovered this fact the hard way and too late in there live.
I would expect American intelligence agencies to be spying on every foreign government.
Allies has until now tolerate that the USA print astonish amount of money out of nothing because there expected positive outcome of the situation. Now allies understand that the USA use that money to finance the biggest economic war in the history and the USA target is the EU. This vastly change the meaning of the "allies" word. What the USA will look like if there have to pay there debt right now ?
That would be spectacular, but probably pointless to the economic relationship witch is the real subject.
International sanction to forbid the USA to endlessly print unrealistic amount of money would be far stronger response.
You are right. The economic ware of the USA against the EU cover not only the food, but virtually any economic activity.
Another new technology claimed to be totally safe and absolutely under control that yield a new unknown and unexpected effect. The human race will probably not survive long enough to his own errors to reach the level where his global conscience and individual action are compatible with the ecosystem of the Earth.
Simply put: human fail miserably to manage process that span longer than a his own lifetime.
Of course you say "comma" when you write a comma, unlike in the parent post.
That's European syntax. Ten thousand point five would be 10.000,5
point == . != ,