This comment reminds me of the people that insist it was a major scandal that Obama didn't call Benghazi an act of "terror" (he did, but that doesn't stop people insisting on it.)
I wouldn't say "flawed" is a synonym for "reasonable". In fact, I'd say the opposite. However, use of the word "evil" requires an assumption about the motives of the NSA, that I don't think you're willing to address, and I see no evidence, quite honestly, that the NSA has the wrong motives. Everything's it's done is in line with the concept of an organization that gathers intelligence to help protect national security. What it's done is cross the line, and in some cases done so terribly.
For all Its faults, the NSA is more of a flawed character than an evil one. It does have a particular job to do, the job it's supposed to do is a worthwhile one, and for the most part "our"* criticism of it has to do with its methods, not its mandate. We do, actually, want to know what foreign governments are up to, especially in terms of what those governments might be planning that severely affects America's interests. We do, actually, want our government to know what terrorists are up to, as part of a combined good faith effort to counter-act them.
We also, of course, want a lot of other things, but just as the most pacifist of us would stop short of demanding an end to the US military - at least, while other governments have one - few would demand an intelligence gathering organization cease to exist simply because of privacy issues. In both cases we might want to rein in the excesses, but we don't want to do away with them altogether.
So no, I don't see it as completely unreasonable that the NSA would recruit from the nerd communities, leaving aside the somewhat inconvenient fact that they kinda need our skills these days...
Would I take a job there? Probably not, largely because (post Snowden) I'd be concerned I'd be put in a position whether I have to choose between betraying my principles or betraying my promises. But others may feel much more comfortable with the possible boundaries the job has.
* as left wing nerds - teahadists can pretend you're against it too, but be honest, you supported the darkest of Cheney's fantasies, we don't believe your sudden opposition to the NSA to be anything other than related to who's in the White House.
He doesn't, but he does know that the City of San Francisco needs the passwords, and if he'd forgotten, the person contacting him would have been reminding him in the process.
So, like I said, if he'd chosen not to be a dick about it, the right approach would have been to say "Sure! I'll be over there in five minutes, meet you at City Hall", rather than "No, because I don't know for sure you are authorized and I'm going to argue about this until the MAYOR meets me in person."
It's not just support costs. There's a very real sense amongst most people that "gadget can't do X without complex work" == "gadget can't do X".
To give a very relevent example appropriate to this audience: People's sense that GNU/Linux requires oodles of work just to install, and then a job like "taking a video from a video camera, editing it, and putting it up on YouTube" requires far more work than it does on Windows or Mac (which is unfair and untrue these days, but that's the perception) is why this free, powerful, increadible operating system isn't being bundled for free by most PC manufacturers. It's not just that people "know how Windows works", it's that they've seen someone 10 years ago demonstrate how they were able to edit a video (using ffmpeg), or picture (using ImageMagik), or whatever, and just felt that in practice, they wouldn't be able to use that system.
I hope it's not run by the same people, otherwise if you eat there you'll have to go there the next day to make a bowel movement, or else pay a late fee.
Anything not installed in Windows by default needs someone to install it. Given the number of people who need their hands held setting up a printer (you know, I'm a computer expert, and I've had to call for help on occasion doing this - 64 bit Windows trying to access printers on a network can be a surprisingly interesting experience...) I suspect most manufacturers do not want to add this extra step.
As far as Terry Childs go, I think it's more that a lot of people have forgotten what actually happened, but vaguely remember there was something reasonable - or perhaps a better term would be "not evil" - about his actions. From memory, the timeline went something like this:
1. Childs was fired
2. Former boss demands Childs email him passwords (or something like that.)
3. Childs explains he's not sure Boss is right person to receive password and in any case emailing (or whatever method it was) is insecure.
4. San Francisco government throws a fit (not unreasonably.)
5. Childs makes it clear he's totally willing to give password as long as it's in person (ie not over insecure link) and it's to a person clearly authorized to have it.
6. SF sees this, not unreasonably, as stalling and being pissy for the sake of being pissy
7. Finally, Mayor steps in, agrees to meet Childs personally, and gets password.
Was Childs right? Hell no. In that situation you say something like "Ah, email's a little secure, I'll be over in five minutes, can you also make sure that ${new sysadmin} is there too?" if you really, really, really, want to be bureaucraticly correct about it. But, still, geeks saw someone trying to play by the rules, and of course, government is government and is always bad, so...
Reiser: yeah, geeks routing for a geek. Never did understand it. Particularly as anyone who's seen "Columbo" knew this was a text book "murder by someone who thinks he's smarter than a disheveled detective" case...
Assange: nothing to do with geeks, I think it's just a bunch of suspicious co-incidences coupled with incidents of government over-reach that tickles the conspiracy theorist in all of us.
Kim Dotcom: yep, pretty much got it in one. The guy's an obvious asshole, but as long as he's on the MPAA's shitlist he'll have a massive fanbase here at the dot.
...which is why you probably shouldn't have written the rest of your comment. While Twitter makes its t.co URL shortener compulsory, it doesn't hide the destinations. t.co URLs are expanded in tweets, with a length-controlled version shown in the Tweet itself (eg "Interesting story: _bbc.com/news/man-..._"), and the full destination URL shown when you mouse over the URL.
Additionally, if you expand the Tweet, then if Twitter understands the HTML at the destination (I assume it's using standard Metadata from the HEAD section, but it might be site specific), it'll show a brief summary, eg:
Mr. S. Quiggleslash
@squiggleslash
Interesting story: _bbc.com/news/man-..._
_Hide Summary_ _Reply_ _Favorate_ _Retweet_
BBC News
Man bites Dog
A man bit a hot dog today, having bought it from a vendor in...
_View on web_
So no, t.co is not a way to disguise links. From an end user perspective, the major problems are the potential for tracking, and the annoying "t.co to nytm.es to www.nytimes.com" bounce that makes pages take longer to load.
I'm pretty sure the GP does understand how people use Office, which is why he doesn't think a smartphone app is in any way a challenge to a desktop office suite.
Quite honestly, the only value I've ever seen in smartphone and tablet office apps is viewing content or making absolutely minor modifications. And quite honestly, I'd say even that is a minority concern, most people lose interest the moment they install a "free office suite" and find out, in practice, how much of a PITA the touch UI is for creating content.
that is, state governments are forbidden from creating barriers to interstate trade
Correct.
That is the sole domain of the Federal government, and is the sole reason for the Commerce Clause
Which is what we're talking about. And why it would be constitutional for the Federal government to impose a sales tax on interstate commerce.
Taxing out-of-state purchases is completely unconstitutional
It is entirely constitutional for the Federal government to tax interstate commerce. Out-of-state purchases are, by definition, interstate commerce. It is entirely constitutional for the Federal government to tax out of state purchases.
or one who has never read The Constitution of The United States of America
Good luck on tax protestor prison, which is where you'll go if you try to convince a Federal judge that a Federal tax on an out-of-state transaction is unconstitional and somehow not covered by the Federal government's right to regulate interstate commerce.
I once read a long pointless diatribe against standard time demanding that we make Daylight Saving's Time permanent - that's an hour of my life I'll never get back...
According to this site there is a definition from the US Army but from context it's not like something you'd actually see as a major policy point, required to recite, or anything like that.
On a seperate note, why do gun advocacy sites always have HTML styling that looks like the bastard child of Geocities and every single website created during the 1990s?
A national sales tax will not happen - it is unconstitutional and a right reserved for state
Actually if the sales tax is strictly limited to being imposed on interstate commerce (which, uh, it is, at least, I don't see anyone proposing it needs to be for anything more than that, it certainly isn't being proposed as an alternative to local taxation) then it's 100% constitution. As in there's even a clause in the constitution specifically authorizing the Federal government with powers in this aea.
Maybe the submitter is British. The legal definition in Britain doesn't involve malice, simply that the statement damages the reputation of the plaintiff. In some cases, the statement's truth doesn't even come into it (though often in unexpected ways, I recall one libel case being dismissed because a former politician who'd been accused, unjustly, of rape, was so infamous for being corrupt the judge felt the accusation didn't actually cause any more damage their reputation...)
2. (The current) Because Twitter doesn't let you post direct links any more. If you type a URL into a Tweet, it'll shorten it for you. Which, annoyingly, often leaves you with chains of redirects if a tweet whose URL you're clicking on was posted using a legacy Twitter feed manager that shortens URLs before adding them.
There is no way to post links without Twitter changing them to t.co/ links underneath at this stage. It's not a matter of people hiding behind link shortening services. It's a forced "feature".
I forgot that's what they were trying to do. So if you see some online books with completely absurd words in them, you can blame me. You see, when I get a CAPTCHA, I always make a good faith attempt to solve it on the first go.
On the second, I figure that if they're going to screw me around by not accepting a reasonable interpretation of their CAPTCHA, I'll do the same thing: the generated part I try to guess. The photo part, well, for that I'll enter something completely ridiculous.
Which probably makes me an asshole. But from day 1, the CAPTCHA system has been completely flawed and a waste of most people's time. At the very least, the creators of the various systems out there seem to have paid no thought to making sure humans can, actually, solve them, not even picking fonts that would allow users to easily see if the sequence of random characters has a 1, a lowercase l, an uppercase I, or a randomly drawn line designed, supposedly, to fool robots but that almost certainly only ever fools humans.
I don't know if this one will be better. Google seems to be producing a lot of crap these days, and has lost sight of the fact that most people use its tools because it was making tools people want to use, rather than tools Google wants people to use. So we'll see, and hopefully it'll be an improvement.
The real difference is more likely to be that Italians don't have to fly everywhere as they have a functional rail system and a relatively small country. So it's probable that at any one time, most haven't (yet.)
My experience is that people who "dress up" to fly either have to, because they're flight attendants (or whatever - I feel for you), or they're unfamiliar with flying, how uncomfortable it is, and think it's realistically portrayed in commercials as some kind of high living sorta-good-taste-in-a-Donald-Trump-would-say-its-classy-way activity epytomized by the term "jet set".
Americans, thanks to the destruction of the rail network in the 1950s and 1960s, really don't have any alternatives, so most Americans have flown at least once, so most Americans know you wear loose or stretchy clothing, comfortable footwear, and leave the uncomfortable suits at home.
The TSA's security checkpoints really haven't made much difference to anything. I flew in the 1990s. I flew after 9/11. There always were security lines. They're just worse - more invasive, with nastier consequences for being suspicious - than they were then.
Unfortunately, your list of experiments (and worse) demonstrates the opposite. That people mindlessly go along with abusive authoritarianism as a matter of human nature.
The experiments such as Stanford Prison didn't suggest that people are voluntarily sadistic, it suggested that, dropped into a suitable social framework, people find it difficult not to be. To actually observe yourself dropping into a state where you consider maltreatment of others requires a certain amount of positive effort and logical detachment that isn't going to come naturally except through luck.
How you overcome this is a great question that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been answered yet. Perhaps because those with authority will never want it answered.
That may or may not be true, but TFA does not, in any way, substantiate that view of events, even if the summary claims it does. I think that's what the grandparent (the post before yours, not the WW II Veteran...) was getting at.
The vast majority of developers, including those who work on free software, are compensated for their work using a model that's unrelated to software sales.
Yes, it sucks to be Microsoft or EA in a post-Stallmanized world, but most programmers don't work for software houses, and copies of the software they make isn't sold.
If you mean the proposed HTML5 DRM "standard", the major problem with it is not that Stallman doesn't like it, it's that it's not a standard. The proposed "standard" requires proprietary plug-ins that are CPU, browser, and operating system dependent. It'll encourage, not discourage, fragmentation at precisely the time we were supposed to be moving away from fragmentation.
I believe only 9% of users have navigated to websites that use the French language in the last month too, so we should probably discontinue support for French unicode characters.
Slashdot Mirror
This comment reminds me of the people that insist it was a major scandal that Obama didn't call Benghazi an act of "terror" (he did, but that doesn't stop people insisting on it.)
I wouldn't say "flawed" is a synonym for "reasonable". In fact, I'd say the opposite. However, use of the word "evil" requires an assumption about the motives of the NSA, that I don't think you're willing to address, and I see no evidence, quite honestly, that the NSA has the wrong motives. Everything's it's done is in line with the concept of an organization that gathers intelligence to help protect national security. What it's done is cross the line, and in some cases done so terribly.
For all Its faults, the NSA is more of a flawed character than an evil one. It does have a particular job to do, the job it's supposed to do is a worthwhile one, and for the most part "our"* criticism of it has to do with its methods, not its mandate. We do, actually, want to know what foreign governments are up to, especially in terms of what those governments might be planning that severely affects America's interests. We do, actually, want our government to know what terrorists are up to, as part of a combined good faith effort to counter-act them.
We also, of course, want a lot of other things, but just as the most pacifist of us would stop short of demanding an end to the US military - at least, while other governments have one - few would demand an intelligence gathering organization cease to exist simply because of privacy issues. In both cases we might want to rein in the excesses, but we don't want to do away with them altogether.
So no, I don't see it as completely unreasonable that the NSA would recruit from the nerd communities, leaving aside the somewhat inconvenient fact that they kinda need our skills these days...
Would I take a job there? Probably not, largely because (post Snowden) I'd be concerned I'd be put in a position whether I have to choose between betraying my principles or betraying my promises. But others may feel much more comfortable with the possible boundaries the job has.
* as left wing nerds - teahadists can pretend you're against it too, but be honest, you supported the darkest of Cheney's fantasies, we don't believe your sudden opposition to the NSA to be anything other than related to who's in the White House.
He doesn't, but he does know that the City of San Francisco needs the passwords, and if he'd forgotten, the person contacting him would have been reminding him in the process.
So, like I said, if he'd chosen not to be a dick about it, the right approach would have been to say "Sure! I'll be over there in five minutes, meet you at City Hall", rather than "No, because I don't know for sure you are authorized and I'm going to argue about this until the MAYOR meets me in person."
It's not just support costs. There's a very real sense amongst most people that "gadget can't do X without complex work" == "gadget can't do X".
To give a very relevent example appropriate to this audience: People's sense that GNU/Linux requires oodles of work just to install, and then a job like "taking a video from a video camera, editing it, and putting it up on YouTube" requires far more work than it does on Windows or Mac (which is unfair and untrue these days, but that's the perception) is why this free, powerful, increadible operating system isn't being bundled for free by most PC manufacturers. It's not just that people "know how Windows works", it's that they've seen someone 10 years ago demonstrate how they were able to edit a video (using ffmpeg), or picture (using ImageMagik), or whatever, and just felt that in practice, they wouldn't be able to use that system.
I hope it's not run by the same people, otherwise if you eat there you'll have to go there the next day to make a bowel movement, or else pay a late fee.
Anything not installed in Windows by default needs someone to install it. Given the number of people who need their hands held setting up a printer (you know, I'm a computer expert, and I've had to call for help on occasion doing this - 64 bit Windows trying to access printers on a network can be a surprisingly interesting experience...) I suspect most manufacturers do not want to add this extra step.
Well, we know 'e' is the most frequently used letter in the English language, now, what's the most frequent character in the password list...
[Hey, it beats a double-ROT13 joke]
As far as Terry Childs go, I think it's more that a lot of people have forgotten what actually happened, but vaguely remember there was something reasonable - or perhaps a better term would be "not evil" - about his actions. From memory, the timeline went something like this:
1. Childs was fired
2. Former boss demands Childs email him passwords (or something like that.)
3. Childs explains he's not sure Boss is right person to receive password and in any case emailing (or whatever method it was) is insecure.
4. San Francisco government throws a fit (not unreasonably.)
5. Childs makes it clear he's totally willing to give password as long as it's in person (ie not over insecure link) and it's to a person clearly authorized to have it.
6. SF sees this, not unreasonably, as stalling and being pissy for the sake of being pissy
7. Finally, Mayor steps in, agrees to meet Childs personally, and gets password.
Was Childs right? Hell no. In that situation you say something like "Ah, email's a little secure, I'll be over in five minutes, can you also make sure that ${new sysadmin} is there too?" if you really, really, really, want to be bureaucraticly correct about it. But, still, geeks saw someone trying to play by the rules, and of course, government is government and is always bad, so...
Reiser: yeah, geeks routing for a geek. Never did understand it. Particularly as anyone who's seen "Columbo" knew this was a text book "murder by someone who thinks he's smarter than a disheveled detective" case...
Assange: nothing to do with geeks, I think it's just a bunch of suspicious co-incidences coupled with incidents of government over-reach that tickles the conspiracy theorist in all of us.
Kim Dotcom: yep, pretty much got it in one. The guy's an obvious asshole, but as long as he's on the MPAA's shitlist he'll have a massive fanbase here at the dot.
Additionally, if you expand the Tweet, then if Twitter understands the HTML at the destination (I assume it's using standard Metadata from the HEAD section, but it might be site specific), it'll show a brief summary, eg:
So no, t.co is not a way to disguise links. From an end user perspective, the major problems are the potential for tracking, and the annoying "t.co to nytm.es to www.nytimes.com" bounce that makes pages take longer to load.
I'm pretty sure the GP does understand how people use Office, which is why he doesn't think a smartphone app is in any way a challenge to a desktop office suite.
Quite honestly, the only value I've ever seen in smartphone and tablet office apps is viewing content or making absolutely minor modifications. And quite honestly, I'd say even that is a minority concern, most people lose interest the moment they install a "free office suite" and find out, in practice, how much of a PITA the touch UI is for creating content.
No, I mean interstate.
Correct.
Which is what we're talking about. And why it would be constitutional for the Federal government to impose a sales tax on interstate commerce.
It is entirely constitutional for the Federal government to tax interstate commerce. Out-of-state purchases are, by definition, interstate commerce. It is entirely constitutional for the Federal government to tax out of state purchases.
Good luck on tax protestor prison, which is where you'll go if you try to convince a Federal judge that a Federal tax on an out-of-state transaction is unconstitional and somehow not covered by the Federal government's right to regulate interstate commerce.
I once read a long pointless diatribe against standard time demanding that we make Daylight Saving's Time permanent - that's an hour of my life I'll never get back...
(Rimshot)
According to this site there is a definition from the US Army but from context it's not like something you'd actually see as a major policy point, required to recite, or anything like that.
On a seperate note, why do gun advocacy sites always have HTML styling that looks like the bastard child of Geocities and every single website created during the 1990s?
Actually if the sales tax is strictly limited to being imposed on interstate commerce (which, uh, it is, at least, I don't see anyone proposing it needs to be for anything more than that, it certainly isn't being proposed as an alternative to local taxation) then it's 100% constitution. As in there's even a clause in the constitution specifically authorizing the Federal government with powers in this aea.
"We never said ${FAMOUS_LITIGEOUS_CELEBRITY} murdered all those people, we're just saying he potentially might have done so."
Good luck with that.
Maybe the submitter is British. The legal definition in Britain doesn't involve malice, simply that the statement damages the reputation of the plaintiff. In some cases, the statement's truth doesn't even come into it (though often in unexpected ways, I recall one libel case being dismissed because a former politician who'd been accused, unjustly, of rape, was so infamous for being corrupt the judge felt the accusation didn't actually cause any more damage their reputation...)
So, I guess you haven't used Twitter.
People "use" Link shortening services on Twitter for two reasons:
1. (The original) Because they only have 140 characters to use, and "Reply to fuzzyfuzzyfungus's ridiculous comment about shortening URLs here: https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4403123&op=Reply&threshold=2&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=45299555" does not actually fit in 140 characters.
2. (The current) Because Twitter doesn't let you post direct links any more. If you type a URL into a Tweet, it'll shorten it for you. Which, annoyingly, often leaves you with chains of redirects if a tweet whose URL you're clicking on was posted using a legacy Twitter feed manager that shortens URLs before adding them.
There is no way to post links without Twitter changing them to t.co/ links underneath at this stage. It's not a matter of people hiding behind link shortening services. It's a forced "feature".
That's how stunningly accurate were his predictions. Nobody at the time could figure out why he choose that name, but a mere 7 years later...
I forgot that's what they were trying to do. So if you see some online books with completely absurd words in them, you can blame me. You see, when I get a CAPTCHA, I always make a good faith attempt to solve it on the first go.
On the second, I figure that if they're going to screw me around by not accepting a reasonable interpretation of their CAPTCHA, I'll do the same thing: the generated part I try to guess. The photo part, well, for that I'll enter something completely ridiculous.
Which probably makes me an asshole. But from day 1, the CAPTCHA system has been completely flawed and a waste of most people's time. At the very least, the creators of the various systems out there seem to have paid no thought to making sure humans can, actually, solve them, not even picking fonts that would allow users to easily see if the sequence of random characters has a 1, a lowercase l, an uppercase I, or a randomly drawn line designed, supposedly, to fool robots but that almost certainly only ever fools humans.
I don't know if this one will be better. Google seems to be producing a lot of crap these days, and has lost sight of the fact that most people use its tools because it was making tools people want to use, rather than tools Google wants people to use. So we'll see, and hopefully it'll be an improvement.
The real difference is more likely to be that Italians don't have to fly everywhere as they have a functional rail system and a relatively small country. So it's probable that at any one time, most haven't (yet.)
My experience is that people who "dress up" to fly either have to, because they're flight attendants (or whatever - I feel for you), or they're unfamiliar with flying, how uncomfortable it is, and think it's realistically portrayed in commercials as some kind of high living sorta-good-taste-in-a-Donald-Trump-would-say-its-classy-way activity epytomized by the term "jet set".
Americans, thanks to the destruction of the rail network in the 1950s and 1960s, really don't have any alternatives, so most Americans have flown at least once, so most Americans know you wear loose or stretchy clothing, comfortable footwear, and leave the uncomfortable suits at home.
The TSA's security checkpoints really haven't made much difference to anything. I flew in the 1990s. I flew after 9/11. There always were security lines. They're just worse - more invasive, with nastier consequences for being suspicious - than they were then.
Unfortunately, your list of experiments (and worse) demonstrates the opposite. That people mindlessly go along with abusive authoritarianism as a matter of human nature.
The experiments such as Stanford Prison didn't suggest that people are voluntarily sadistic, it suggested that, dropped into a suitable social framework, people find it difficult not to be. To actually observe yourself dropping into a state where you consider maltreatment of others requires a certain amount of positive effort and logical detachment that isn't going to come naturally except through luck.
How you overcome this is a great question that, to the best of my knowledge, has not been answered yet. Perhaps because those with authority will never want it answered.
That may or may not be true, but TFA does not, in any way, substantiate that view of events, even if the summary claims it does. I think that's what the grandparent (the post before yours, not the WW II Veteran...) was getting at.
The vast majority of developers, including those who work on free software, are compensated for their work using a model that's unrelated to software sales.
Yes, it sucks to be Microsoft or EA in a post-Stallmanized world, but most programmers don't work for software houses, and copies of the software they make isn't sold.
If you mean the proposed HTML5 DRM "standard", the major problem with it is not that Stallman doesn't like it, it's that it's not a standard. The proposed "standard" requires proprietary plug-ins that are CPU, browser, and operating system dependent. It'll encourage, not discourage, fragmentation at precisely the time we were supposed to be moving away from fragmentation.
I believe only 9% of users have navigated to websites that use the French language in the last month too, so we should probably discontinue support for French unicode characters.