Well this is only true if you're supporting multiple "platforms". One of the things this guy complained about was PHP frameworks; for that, there's only one platform, which is "web browsers" (though perhaps you need to make sure it looks the same on all browsers). Yes, if you're developing a native application, and deciding between Qt and some other framework, then you definitely need to worry about whether that framework will be supported in the future because you're not going to want to port it to newer platforms (like Win8) after the framework development is abandoned by its original authors. But this shouldn't be the case with web-development abstraction layers, at least not nearly to the same extent.
Most folks who want to use a framework have no interest in forking or taking over the project. They want something that works that they can use to save them time.
Right, but if that framework gets dropped later, you're going to spend a LOT more time trying to switch to another framework than you ever saved by adopting the framework in the first place. So maybe you shouldn't even bother with the framework unless it's a sure thing.
Finally, even if an open-source framework gets dropped, that doesn't stop you from using it. You can keep using the most-recent release of it, indefinitely, or until you're ready to make a change to something better. You can also maintain it yourself (which would only consist of bug-fixes), which again is surely less time than you'd need to invest to switch to something altogether different.
Finally, this guy's big problem wasn't with a framework per se, it was in adopting Adobe Flash (not Flex; they just needed that to create Flash sites). That's quite different from frameworks because it relies on clients/customers/visitors to have Adobe's Flash plug-in installed on their system, which of course is a problem on Linux systems (which apparently is very important for his business for some reason). Anyone should have seen this coming; you can't rely on a proprietary client program on Linux for web browsing, and Flash on Linux has always been a giant problem. Yes, HTML5 wasn't ready at the time, but that just means you have to make do with less or be happy with a site that doesn't have so much "flash". It's no different than targeting Active-X; you're at the mercy of MS there to keep supporting it for everyone's client system, something that obviously didn't happen and is causing massive problems with web apps developed with Active-X.
When you want something to have real longevity, you can't target the cutting edge; you have to target the lowest common denominator, and stay farther behind in technology.
If that were the case here, then the guy would have been arrested. He hasn't been, ergo there was no "serious crime" involved. He just made unflattering remarks about people in the administration and other political people.
If you're dumb enough to use your employer's equipment and network connection to communicate, then yes, they can discover you that way rightfully. If you use some other method to communicate (cellphone, internet connection at home), then no, they have no right. Presumably, this guy was not stupid enough to use government systems to make his tweets (otherwise he probably would have been found out much earlier).
And as someone else said, no, the identities behind twitter feeds are NOT public info. If they can figure you out based on the text in your tweets, that's acceptable, but that's not what happened here. Again, there doesn't seem to be any indication that this guy was stupid enough to give himself away so easily.
Yes. I expect that everyone has an right to privacy in their personal lives, regardless of the job they do. Lots and lots of people have high-level security clearances; that doesn't mean their lives should be an open book for those in power to see, unless there's a valid suspicion of wrongdoing. Tweeting unflattering remarks about people is not a valid suspicion of wrongdoing, this was just a witch-hunt for someone who wasn't a yes-man.
Getting a Top Secret clearance is (or at least used to be, I don't know about these days with the Stasi running things now) not that complicated a process, and mainly involves checking an individual's finances (to make sure he's not a compulsive gambler or in big debt, things that might make him susceptible to money bribes), background (to see if he might be involved in terrorist/anti-government groups etc.), sending someone to talk with his neighbors and family and make sure he isn't suspicious, etc. It doesn't (or at least didn't use to) involve spying on someone's every private communication; you need a warrant for that, and a suspicion of a crime having been committed. Again, tweeting unflattering remarks does not constitute a crime, unless you live in a totalitarian society.
No, it isn't. The government is a monopoly, so it should never be allowed to fire employees who are critical of it. You sound just like a Tea Party Republican.
If you get caught because you screwed up somehow, that's perfectly understandable. But if you get caught because the country is spying on all its citizens with a program that would make the Stasi proud, then there's much bigger problems, for everyone.
Yes, and thanks to ubiquitous NSA spying, they were able to catch this dastardly man and put a stop to his treacherous activities. Aren't you glad Obama has the NSA to find out anyone who criticizes him?
The difference is that a normal employer would have no reasonable way of discovering the employee's identity. But with the NSA, Obama can find anyone in his staff who complains, and deal with them harshly, privacy be damned.
If an employer fired an employee for something like this, I think the employee would have major grounds to sue, not for wrongful termination, but for spying and violation of privacy. Employers don't go to the kind of trouble the Obama Administration went to to discover this guy's identity. From the article: "After a probe that included an investigation into Joseph’s travel and shopping patterns – parsed from over 2,000 tweets..." So they spied on the guy's shopping habits? How'd they do that exactly? If an employer somehow got your bank or Visa/Mastercard to give them access to your shopping information, and also somehow tracked your travel patterns, there'd be hell to pay. But Obama does it and it's just fine apparently. It's highly disturbing that this guy was found out at all; obviously he wasn't intending to divulge his identity, so there had to be some kind of illegal or unethical breach of privacy protections in order to discover his identity.
Laws don't always make sense from a big-picture perspective.
As for gas, it doesn't matter where it's used. It's just like sales tax on food or other goods; it doesn't matter if you take that food or other goods out of the state; you're just taxed at the point-of-sale.
It's not illegal now because they're taxing the gas, not your mileage. There is no tax currently for mileage, that's what you people don't seem to understand. A gas tax is not the same thing as a mileage tax.
If they tax the mileage, they can't legally tax you on miles driven out-of-state. Only the Federal government is allowed to do that.
Have fun with all the tampering fines they slap on you when the data from your GPS is bad. You don't really think they're going to buy your excuses, do you?
Oh and Australia has a much more populated Indonesia next door (on the global map it is almost touching) as the Mexican equivalent
There's a slight problem: there's a big body of water separating the two. You can't exactly walk between Indonesia and Australia (and it's too far to swim while carrying a bunch of contraband on your back). Yes, you can use boats, but the Australian Navy is very active in patrolling their EEZ waters, largely to discourage illegal fishers (usually from other neighboring countries), but also to prevent smuggling. By contrast, the border with Mexico is about 2000 miles long, mostly on land (or a puny little creek called a river in parts), and largely wide-open which is why there's so much drug and human smuggling into the US from Mexico.
Australia and UK both. However, both Australia and the UK share a giant difference with the US: they're islands. The US is not; it shares borders with other countries (really long borders too). It's a lot easier to prevent smuggling on an island.
Also, Australia has a tiny fraction of the US's population.
There are real differences between red states and blue states in terms of personal freedoms. Liquor laws for example are a hallmark of those fucking bible-thumpers.
BS. I live in New Jersey, a "blue state", and we have blue laws (liquor laws) here too: can't buy liquor on Sundays, can't buy it from regular grocery stores, etc.
Or how about marijuana? Arizona, a famously "red state", has legalized medical marijuana. New York, a stalwart "blue state", has kept it strictly illegal.
No, you're paying the gas tax for your usage of gasoline as a fuel. You're not paying by the mile. Yes, it just so happens that the more miles you drive, the more fuel you consume, but you also use more fuel if you have a bigger/more-guzzling vehicle, and there's no explicit tax on EPA mileage ratings either. For them to institute a per-mile tax inside a state for public roads, they have to track you so they know how many miles you've driven on public roads inside the state.
neither does the proposed mileage meters; you can't tell where the car is being driven without being able to track where the car is.
Did you read the article, or any of the other news about these proposals? Yes, they CAN tell where the car is being driven; that's the whole point. They're going to put a GPS unit in your car so they can record where exactly it's been driven, because they can't legally tax you for mileage out-of-state, or on private roads, so they need GPS to tell when you're actually driving on public roads in-state.
FreedomOffice would have been even worse in that regard, since clueless Americans are always throwing that word around even though they're not much more free than the East Germans were.
No one knows they have a Linux-based smartphone in their pocket; they just think it's "Android", and considering that for a huge number of them it's the low-cost choice and they use them because the carriers are giving them away and they can't afford iPhones, it's still not a great association. It doesn't help that Android phones are plagued with all kinds of problems because the carriers and handset makers do such a shitty job supporting them, rolling out updates, polishing the software on them, etc. (Which is why CyanogenMod exists, and even Google's been thinking about taking away some of the control of Android from the other parties because they've done such a miserable job.) Not that many people (except for geeks) get Android phones because they really want them in preference to iPhones.
As for Facebook and Google, everyone knows those are ad-supported, and supported by a huge company. Open/LibreOffice is not (OO was supported by Oracle which most people haven't heard of, but is no longer).
FreeOffice sucks because English speakers (Americans in particular) will think it sounds worthless, since they don't understand the difference between libre and gratis and equate "free" with "not very good".
OpenSuite actually sounds like a good possibility.
"Bundled Collection of Office Applications" is ridiculously wordy and completely uninspired, and sounds like a name Microsoft would come up with.
But you're right that dumb Americans won't know how to pronounce "Libre". I wonder what the nationalities were of the people who picked the name.
The idiots who renamed Open Office should all be smacked.
Do you have a better suggestion for a name? I'm sure they all sat around agonizing over what to name the thing when this happened, and LibreOffice was probably the best they could come up with that didn't sound completely stupid.
Well you can blame that whole debacle on Oracle. As another responder said, they were going to close-source OpenOffice and only have some shitty "lite" version for Free, and as a result, all the devs quit and forked the project. This isn't a bad thing, it's one of the big strengths of open-source software: if some shithead gets control of the project (e.g., Oracle or David Dawes) and does something unacceptable, other interested parties can fork the code and continue development instead of having to start from scratch. The only downside is they can't forcibly take over the name, so they have to come up with a new name, which may or may not be as catchy or memorable. "LibreOffice" is a little odd-sounding to the ears of an English speaker, but can you come up with anything better?
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Well this is only true if you're supporting multiple "platforms". One of the things this guy complained about was PHP frameworks; for that, there's only one platform, which is "web browsers" (though perhaps you need to make sure it looks the same on all browsers). Yes, if you're developing a native application, and deciding between Qt and some other framework, then you definitely need to worry about whether that framework will be supported in the future because you're not going to want to port it to newer platforms (like Win8) after the framework development is abandoned by its original authors. But this shouldn't be the case with web-development abstraction layers, at least not nearly to the same extent.
Most folks who want to use a framework have no interest in forking or taking over the project. They want something that works that they can use to save them time.
Right, but if that framework gets dropped later, you're going to spend a LOT more time trying to switch to another framework than you ever saved by adopting the framework in the first place. So maybe you shouldn't even bother with the framework unless it's a sure thing.
Finally, even if an open-source framework gets dropped, that doesn't stop you from using it. You can keep using the most-recent release of it, indefinitely, or until you're ready to make a change to something better. You can also maintain it yourself (which would only consist of bug-fixes), which again is surely less time than you'd need to invest to switch to something altogether different.
Finally, this guy's big problem wasn't with a framework per se, it was in adopting Adobe Flash (not Flex; they just needed that to create Flash sites). That's quite different from frameworks because it relies on clients/customers/visitors to have Adobe's Flash plug-in installed on their system, which of course is a problem on Linux systems (which apparently is very important for his business for some reason). Anyone should have seen this coming; you can't rely on a proprietary client program on Linux for web browsing, and Flash on Linux has always been a giant problem. Yes, HTML5 wasn't ready at the time, but that just means you have to make do with less or be happy with a site that doesn't have so much "flash". It's no different than targeting Active-X; you're at the mercy of MS there to keep supporting it for everyone's client system, something that obviously didn't happen and is causing massive problems with web apps developed with Active-X.
When you want something to have real longevity, you can't target the cutting edge; you have to target the lowest common denominator, and stay farther behind in technology.
If that were the case here, then the guy would have been arrested. He hasn't been, ergo there was no "serious crime" involved. He just made unflattering remarks about people in the administration and other political people.
If you're dumb enough to use your employer's equipment and network connection to communicate, then yes, they can discover you that way rightfully. If you use some other method to communicate (cellphone, internet connection at home), then no, they have no right. Presumably, this guy was not stupid enough to use government systems to make his tweets (otherwise he probably would have been found out much earlier).
And as someone else said, no, the identities behind twitter feeds are NOT public info. If they can figure you out based on the text in your tweets, that's acceptable, but that's not what happened here. Again, there doesn't seem to be any indication that this guy was stupid enough to give himself away so easily.
Yes. I expect that everyone has an right to privacy in their personal lives, regardless of the job they do. Lots and lots of people have high-level security clearances; that doesn't mean their lives should be an open book for those in power to see, unless there's a valid suspicion of wrongdoing. Tweeting unflattering remarks about people is not a valid suspicion of wrongdoing, this was just a witch-hunt for someone who wasn't a yes-man.
Getting a Top Secret clearance is (or at least used to be, I don't know about these days with the Stasi running things now) not that complicated a process, and mainly involves checking an individual's finances (to make sure he's not a compulsive gambler or in big debt, things that might make him susceptible to money bribes), background (to see if he might be involved in terrorist/anti-government groups etc.), sending someone to talk with his neighbors and family and make sure he isn't suspicious, etc. It doesn't (or at least didn't use to) involve spying on someone's every private communication; you need a warrant for that, and a suspicion of a crime having been committed. Again, tweeting unflattering remarks does not constitute a crime, unless you live in a totalitarian society.
No, it isn't. The government is a monopoly, so it should never be allowed to fire employees who are critical of it. You sound just like a Tea Party Republican.
Mod up. This is something that doesn't get any attention at all.
If you get caught because you screwed up somehow, that's perfectly understandable. But if you get caught because the country is spying on all its citizens with a program that would make the Stasi proud, then there's much bigger problems, for everyone.
Yes, and thanks to ubiquitous NSA spying, they were able to catch this dastardly man and put a stop to his treacherous activities. Aren't you glad Obama has the NSA to find out anyone who criticizes him?
The difference is that a normal employer would have no reasonable way of discovering the employee's identity. But with the NSA, Obama can find anyone in his staff who complains, and deal with them harshly, privacy be damned.
If an employer fired an employee for something like this, I think the employee would have major grounds to sue, not for wrongful termination, but for spying and violation of privacy. Employers don't go to the kind of trouble the Obama Administration went to to discover this guy's identity. From the article: "After a probe that included an investigation into Joseph’s travel and shopping patterns – parsed from over 2,000 tweets..." So they spied on the guy's shopping habits? How'd they do that exactly? If an employer somehow got your bank or Visa/Mastercard to give them access to your shopping information, and also somehow tracked your travel patterns, there'd be hell to pay. But Obama does it and it's just fine apparently. It's highly disturbing that this guy was found out at all; obviously he wasn't intending to divulge his identity, so there had to be some kind of illegal or unethical breach of privacy protections in order to discover his identity.
Laws don't always make sense from a big-picture perspective.
As for gas, it doesn't matter where it's used. It's just like sales tax on food or other goods; it doesn't matter if you take that food or other goods out of the state; you're just taxed at the point-of-sale.
It's not illegal now because they're taxing the gas, not your mileage. There is no tax currently for mileage, that's what you people don't seem to understand. A gas tax is not the same thing as a mileage tax.
If they tax the mileage, they can't legally tax you on miles driven out-of-state. Only the Federal government is allowed to do that.
Have fun with all the tampering fines they slap on you when the data from your GPS is bad. You don't really think they're going to buy your excuses, do you?
Oh and Australia has a much more populated Indonesia next door (on the global map it is almost touching) as the Mexican equivalent
There's a slight problem: there's a big body of water separating the two. You can't exactly walk between Indonesia and Australia (and it's too far to swim while carrying a bunch of contraband on your back). Yes, you can use boats, but the Australian Navy is very active in patrolling their EEZ waters, largely to discourage illegal fishers (usually from other neighboring countries), but also to prevent smuggling. By contrast, the border with Mexico is about 2000 miles long, mostly on land (or a puny little creek called a river in parts), and largely wide-open which is why there's so much drug and human smuggling into the US from Mexico.
Australia and UK both. However, both Australia and the UK share a giant difference with the US: they're islands. The US is not; it shares borders with other countries (really long borders too). It's a lot easier to prevent smuggling on an island.
Also, Australia has a tiny fraction of the US's population.
There are real differences between red states and blue states in terms of personal freedoms. Liquor laws for example are a hallmark of those fucking bible-thumpers.
BS. I live in New Jersey, a "blue state", and we have blue laws (liquor laws) here too: can't buy liquor on Sundays, can't buy it from regular grocery stores, etc.
Or how about marijuana? Arizona, a famously "red state", has legalized medical marijuana. New York, a stalwart "blue state", has kept it strictly illegal.
No, you're paying the gas tax for your usage of gasoline as a fuel. You're not paying by the mile. Yes, it just so happens that the more miles you drive, the more fuel you consume, but you also use more fuel if you have a bigger/more-guzzling vehicle, and there's no explicit tax on EPA mileage ratings either. For them to institute a per-mile tax inside a state for public roads, they have to track you so they know how many miles you've driven on public roads inside the state.
neither does the proposed mileage meters; you can't tell where the car is being driven without being able to track where the car is.
Did you read the article, or any of the other news about these proposals? Yes, they CAN tell where the car is being driven; that's the whole point. They're going to put a GPS unit in your car so they can record where exactly it's been driven, because they can't legally tax you for mileage out-of-state, or on private roads, so they need GPS to tell when you're actually driving on public roads in-state.
Because "Freedom Office" sounds like an idiotic jingoistic thing from America, and no one like America these days.
FreedomOffice would have been even worse in that regard, since clueless Americans are always throwing that word around even though they're not much more free than the East Germans were.
No one knows they have a Linux-based smartphone in their pocket; they just think it's "Android", and considering that for a huge number of them it's the low-cost choice and they use them because the carriers are giving them away and they can't afford iPhones, it's still not a great association. It doesn't help that Android phones are plagued with all kinds of problems because the carriers and handset makers do such a shitty job supporting them, rolling out updates, polishing the software on them, etc. (Which is why CyanogenMod exists, and even Google's been thinking about taking away some of the control of Android from the other parties because they've done such a miserable job.) Not that many people (except for geeks) get Android phones because they really want them in preference to iPhones.
As for Facebook and Google, everyone knows those are ad-supported, and supported by a huge company. Open/LibreOffice is not (OO was supported by Oracle which most people haven't heard of, but is no longer).
FreeOffice sucks because English speakers (Americans in particular) will think it sounds worthless, since they don't understand the difference between libre and gratis and equate "free" with "not very good".
OpenSuite actually sounds like a good possibility.
"Bundled Collection of Office Applications" is ridiculously wordy and completely uninspired, and sounds like a name Microsoft would come up with.
But you're right that dumb Americans won't know how to pronounce "Libre". I wonder what the nationalities were of the people who picked the name.
The idiots who renamed Open Office should all be smacked.
Do you have a better suggestion for a name? I'm sure they all sat around agonizing over what to name the thing when this happened, and LibreOffice was probably the best they could come up with that didn't sound completely stupid.
Well you can blame that whole debacle on Oracle. As another responder said, they were going to close-source OpenOffice and only have some shitty "lite" version for Free, and as a result, all the devs quit and forked the project. This isn't a bad thing, it's one of the big strengths of open-source software: if some shithead gets control of the project (e.g., Oracle or David Dawes) and does something unacceptable, other interested parties can fork the code and continue development instead of having to start from scratch. The only downside is they can't forcibly take over the name, so they have to come up with a new name, which may or may not be as catchy or memorable. "LibreOffice" is a little odd-sounding to the ears of an English speaker, but can you come up with anything better?