Bertrand Russell coined the term agnostic (in the context of religious belief) as a way of making it clear that his atheism included a willingness to consider evidence. But I just call myself an atheist for the reasons stated. I have no reason to believe in a deity. If such a reason presented itself, I'd rethink my beliefs. But for now, from my perspective, the evidence is no more compelling for YHWH than for the FSM.
The problem with Fundamentalists is that they interpret the Bible literally.
The problem with Fundamentalists is that they interpret selected parts of the Bible literally. And they have poor reading comprehension.
I don't see them getting all literal about the parable about camels, eyes of needles, and rich men entering into the kingdom of Heaven, for example. And they don't seem to regard greed, gluttony or violence against their fellow humans as being prohibitions to be taken as seriously as those against (say) fornication. And they ignore the part about the New Testament superseding the Old. On the whole they're more attracted to the vengeful, jealous God than to the forgiving Lamb.
Fundamentalism is the descendant of Puritanism through several generations of cousin marriage.
I'm not one of those people who think Jesus was some kind of pacifist. Too much talk of swords and chasing moneychangers out of temples with whips. But if Jesus came back, the Fundamentalists would be the ones trying to kill him again.
For every 1 stereotypical jackass I knew in the military, there were at least 5 experts in difficult tech fields.
I completely agree. I worked with the military as a civilian contractor for many years, on foreign bases in some fairly unpleasant locations. I met a few idiots, but mainly a lot of good people doing tough jobs in harsh conditions. I didn't always agree with their politics, but I can't fault their intelligence or character.
The meatheads are in Washington. People in the military are willing to risk their lives, and this patriotism is being abused by cynical, power-mad politicos who treat them as pawns. It is also a disservice to our military to put them in harm's way to achieve unnecessary or ill-defined aims, and without proper planning. Not to mention consideration as to whether the war is even in the national interest.
It's a leadership problem, not a military problem.
Rumsfeld doesn't "tell it like it is", he uses condescension and (indirect) insults to avoid answering questions he doesn't like. *That* is why people don't like him.
What's really unlikeable about him is that his character is a lethal combination of jaw-jutting arrogance and incompetence. An interesting case study in what Mussolini might have been like had he been a Midwesterner. It's a sign of a major defect in the system that he was ever allowed anywhere near a position of authority.
Here we are again. Another organization makes some claim relating to the damages caused by piracy. As always, the elephant in the room (that piracy is substantial and deserves attention, if only because society has collectively devleoped a bargain where creators of intellectual property are entitled to reasonable protection of their works but that protection is being circumvented in massive quantities) is ignored.
This line of reasoning is wrong for a number of reasons.
1. There is a strong ethical case for non-compliance with unjust law.
2. Legislation that was purchased by industry lobby groups, which the DMCA was, has no legitimacy.
3. The assertion of financial damage by a privileged group is not the same as proof of actual financial damage. It's nothing more than someone powerful seeing money in someone else's pocket and saying "Mine!" The effect of infringement of the current copyright laws on music industry revenues is unknown. And even if the group can prove financial damage, that does not mean that the net effect on all of society is harmful. If the few benefit, but cause greater harm to the many, everyone's better off even if someone loses their ill-gotten gains.
4. Anyway, the evidence that a law is not complied with is not evidence of a wrong being committted. For example, I have performed cunnilingus in a state where it is unlawful. As best I could discern at the time, nobody was harmed. On a less personal level, in my lifetime I recall laws being violated when people sat in the front of buses and drank from certain water fountains. While copyright reform is less of an immediately pressing moral issue than civil rights, I heard the same legalistic arguments against nonviolent refusal to comply with the law during that struggle. And in the long term, the existing legal regime will damage both our culture (what little there is that's worthy of the name) and our competitiveness, so there are sound reasons to consider the option of disobedience. Furthermore, if the RIAA and similar groups were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, it is not at all clear that society would be worse off. It's more likely that the net effect would be beneficial: the body politic must occasionally rid itself of parasites.
5. "Piracy" is a propaganda term used by an interest group attempting to frame the debate in a manner favorable to them. "Distribution in defiance of unconsionable claims of ownership" or "not obeying the current, unjust and unenforceable copyright laws" are more correct terms.
Politicians and legislation never leads worthwhile social change. Instead, at best, it reluctantly lags. The driver for non-corrupt change to any unjust law is that the law is either widely ignored or actively defied.
Incidentally, I only use free software. In my case, opting out is a viable choice. But your argument that others should do the same would have more force if the producers of proprietary software were not corruptly influencing the political process to eliminate that alternative.
So it may be that society will collapse unless we have a draconian IP regime. But there are many other scenarios with the opposite outcome. And it's up to those who enjoy special privileges granted them by the government to justify their continuation.
I'm not hip on hanging him. But that's the Iraqi perogative.
What's it got to do with the Iraqis? Surely you're not implying that they've got sovereignty in any meaningful sense? Last I checked, they were under occupation.
I'm opposed to the death penalty, even for a hyena like Saddam who is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iraqis. I'm even opposed to the death penalty for the madmen in the Bush junta, who are responsible for a hudredfold more Iraqi civilian deaths. But any leader who wages a war of aggression should be held accountable. And the doctrine of preemptive war is nothing but a figleaf for attacking anybody we want whenever we want. Crimes against humanity should be treated the same.
The trial and execution of Saddam will be seen as nothing but victor's justice, and the greater criminals who sustained him in power will almost certainly go free. The correct course for Saddam would have been to detain him until the US troops leave, then try him.
And we've got our own house to put in order, and our own torturers and war criminals to dispense justice to.
Code-checking is a good thing, and provably correct code is especially good, though what's provable is still narrower than the range of behaviors of any interesting system I've seen.
But the most difficult part of any complex system development project is getting valid requirements and then implementing a process of systematically and iteratively confirming that the delivered system is what the users need, not what some bunch of managers or analysts asked for on their behalf. This is not to minimize the value of technical correctness, just to remember that the systems are for a purpose, and that's a big determinant of project success. It's the old systems engineering cliche: you not only have to build the system right, you have to build the right system.
So yeah... lint but better. Another useful tool that will doubtless be over-hyped by bonehead IT managers and be wrongly dragged into disrepute.
Why would a company roll out something like this WITHOUT telling its support people and without letting customers know in advance? Why do they not have an opt out option?
Earthlink's support has deteriorated drastically in the past couple of years, to the point where they're just another pool of shaved apes with email and phone connectivity. It would be a waste of time telling them anything.
I don't know what's happening to the senior management of Earthlink but they really seem to have lost focus on good service lately.
Reminds me of mp3.com which was quite neat back in the day and made a few unknown bands rather rich.
I was in one of the unknown bands who didn't get rather rich. Not that I mind at all.
The one person who really got rich from mp3.com was Michael Robertson. And whatever you think of him and his business practices (he went on to mastermind Lindows, 'nuff said), with myspace it's on a different scale entirely since we are talking about the slimy, utterly unscrupulous, Fox-owning Murdoch empire. In other words, one of the worst of the same faceless scumbag corporate-media exploitative firms that IUMA and mp3.com were purported to provide an escape route from. They are no more likely to loosen the grip of the RIAA than they are to begin opposing the Iraq war which their constant barrage of flagrant lies helped to start.
Even though it's all based on bullshit, the pedophile scare about myspace is a good thing if it drives traffic away and hits the bottom line of NewsCorp. Compared to Murdoch, the RIAA is positively benign... OK, maybe more like a grapefruit-sized benign tumor on the scrotum, but still not as threatening as the malignant melanoma that is NewsCorp.
They could always be counted on to vote Elephant in the hopes that they'll get a theocracy, we'd throw 'em a bone...
King Abdulaziz ibn Saud (founder of the Saudi kingdom) made a similar deal with the Wahhabi sect. In exchange for their support for the monarchy, they got control of the schools in the Kingdom, and Saud's heirs kept throwing money at them to placate them. They then took their show on the road, establishing mosques where their beliefs were taught in other countries. Hence the Taliban, the idiots who run Sudan, the Salafi madrasas in Pakistan, and to a significant extent, Al-Qaida (not only through Binladen but also through Egyptian Islamic Jihad).
Same goes with the Republican pandering to the knuckle-dragging hypocrites in the US.
The only strategy that works with those bastards is marginalization and disempowerment, along with close monitoring to be sure they're not cooking up explosives out behind that old clapboard church.
Dunno anything about that Ghandi guy, but Gandhi was successful because he was dealing with a group (the British imperial government) that didn't have any particular desire to hurt him or the members of his movement. They only wanted the people's voluntary cooperation with their onerous rule.
That's a self-serving myth promulgated by the British after the fact. A more plausible explanation is that they were war-weary, their resources were depleted after WW2, and they weren't willing to suffer casualties in a colonial war. So they didn't have the will or the means to fight. Far different than the assertion that they were in some way paralyzed by a moral repugnance towards Empire.
And although Gandhi practised nonviolence, Subhash Chandra Bose and others in the Indian independence movement were quite willing to fight. A good argument could be made that the Brits preferred to deal with Gandhi than with a popular armed insurgency. They had committed atrocities in India for generations, as did most colonial powers in their respective colonies, and there is no reason to assume that by some magic coincidence they had suddenly acquired morality and human decency immediately before Gandhi arrived on the scene.
My conclusion as an anti-militarist but not quite a pacifist, is that there are conditions under which nonviolent means of resistance can succeed, but that an assessment of military readiness (will to fight and the means to fight) is a better predictor pf the success of such an effort than fundamentally racist (and probably unfalsifiable) assertions about abstractions such as the decency of everyday Englishmen.
And back to the long-lost topic of a non-military-use variant of the GPL: seems like a good idea. I doubt that the military will honor the license, but non-cooperation is a good start, and I can understand why a principled person would withhold consent from the military machine. Especially since imperialist wars are sadly not a thing of the past, as Iraq shows.
But if the PP is really on the right track after all, I wonder: is the US in its present state "sufficiently civilized" that nonviolent means will effect change?
Anyway, I don't necessarily believe them when they say they cracked the case using wiretapping. They may well be preserving operational security by saying they got the plotters by a different method than they really used. Or perhaps they're just lying like they have so many times before.
In short, there is no new information based on this bust.
If instead they said they caught them by sneak-and-peek, would that mean that you would no longer want protection against unreasonable search and seizure?
If we as a country valued safety above all else in the 1700s...
There is not a tradeoff between liberty and security. It's a false dichotomy used to justify repression. We gain nothing by giving up our freedom, except our safety from malicious acts by the government.
The tradeoff is between incompetent government, injustice and insecurity versus competency, rule of law and security. Loss of freedom is just another sign of government brutality and incompetency. Sadly, as the Bush administration (and many governments before it) demonstrates, these are not mutually exclusive.
It is unlikely that the way to defend your freedom is by surrendering it to a government with a proven track record of malice, corruption, failure, ineptitude and disregard for human rights.
Given that a lot of torrents are copyrighted content...
I think I know what you're trying to say, but free and open-source software and content that's distributed over BitTorrent is also copyrighted content. I think you're trying to say "Copyrighted content distributed without the owner's consent" or something like that.
I don't like to see the notion reinforced that "copyright" == "RIAA/MPAA bait."
Looks like real journalists will need to start practicing OPSEC: Operational Security.
Randomized behavior, encryption, phony meetings with non-sources along with the real meetings with sources, avoiding phone and email for any important information.
Crappy spy novels with reasonably realistic depictions of tradecraft should be part of journalist school in place of the sanctimonious preening over the importance of the role of the press in a free society.
We may still not think it's a good idea, of course, but the fact that it's being implemented by private individuals makes a big difference--
I'm more oppressed by private entities these days than by our (increasingly oppressive) government. Nosy employers, sinister, lying HMOs (the "M" stands for "denial"), unaccountable credit-rating agencies, telcos colluding with illegal eavesdropping. Not that the distinction between business and government is all that meaningful anymore.
I don't really care whether the boot on the back of my neck is public or private. I just want to get it off me. And the so-called market is rigged, so don't give me that "don't like your electric company/HMO/Baby Bell? Go to the competition" silliness.
Patent trolls either exist or you get rid of the whole system.
Well, that makes it an easy choice. So my only remaining question is the minor tactical detail of how to dismantle the whole stinking system.
I still think that there are other ways of moderating the patent system. One would be to establish a patent quota. Only the best 100 or 1000 ("best" determined via some peer-reviewed process?) get out the door. The sheer volume of patents that are granted makes it impossible to know if you're infringing and creates unmanageable risk to any innovator.
And kill all software and business method patents. It's odd how people complain about the courts making law when they assert individual rights, but they don't get called on decisions that create monstrosities like software and business-method patents.
Meanwhile I plan to abandon computing for a less troll-ridden environment such as selling bags of oranges by freeway on-ramps. Or has there been a business method patent on "a method for vending citrus at traffic-optimized locations"?
...for having the "death penalty" for corporations. I'd start by shutting down any firm that collaborates with repression. Phone companies selling their customers out to the NSA, RFID scumbags, anyone who so much as shook hands with Poindexter. Not to mention the firms that sell equipment used for tortures and executions.
To paraphrase a certain Russian, they're selling us the rope that they're going to hang us with. These are criminal enterprises. Their shareholders should be left holding the bag and their management should do hard time. Until corporations are held accountable, they'll lobby and bribe their way to their services becoming part of government contracts. And we'll all suffer for it.
Once again illustrating the divide between theory and practice.
Linguistics is a post-hoc analysis of language, so the example of learning French versus French grammar is not an informative one. In programming, the language was designed, not grown (though some might argue with that in some cases-- hard to imagine anyone actually having designed VB for example). And in a deep technical discipline, practice uninformed by theory is just incompetence.
The prerequisite to doing non-trivial work in IT is to know how to think clearly, with a minimum of clutter. In my case I've found discrete mathematics less immediately useful than understanding of statistics and experimental design. Studied both at graduate level prior to going into software. A lot of annoying design and debugging problems are much more soluble if you can set up meaningful tests. Some people have an aptitude for this and can do it without formal training. Some people can never learn it regardless of how much coursework or self-study they do. But the ability to think abstractly and reason rigorously is essential. Any unforgiving technical or scientific discipline will teach some of this.
On to IT specifics: I keep running into coders who don't know anything about data structures. This almost inevitably leads to crap code and weird behavior under system load.
It's useful to understand functional programming concepts. You don't necessarily need to learn LISP to do this. Python or Ruby can give you a taste. I've seen huge amounts of effort devoted to badly reinventing some of the FP wheels. Like knowledge of data structures, understanding FP gives you some powerful tools for getting the job done in a cleaner, more robust way. I'm assuming you already know some procedural programming.
Learn basic concepts of usability. No point optimizing something on the back end if you later find that the users didn't want or need it in the first place. And the original poster mentioned AJAX. Well, it's nice to have richer interaction on the client, but again, some of the most interesting questions have to do with determining which interactions are the right ones in a given set of circumstances. Any asshole can learn to write code; many do; some even do it well. But without an understanding of the formal systems that underpin IT, you'll never be more than a handyman.
I don't get why consersatives who don't trust the gov't to guide the economy *do* trust it to manage private info well.
Because messing up the economy disproportionately impacts the rich. Intrusive surveillance and interference in private lives mainly impacts the rest of us who don't live in fortified compounds with layers of private security.
See, it's only a contradiction if you think conservatives have principles besides the main one of making the rich richer.
Bureaucracy is the problem. Hand anything to the government and they'll botch the job...sometimes in their buddy's favor. Evidence is all around; see also the $600 toilet seat.
It was a contractor who billed the government for that. So the fault lies not just with the government, but with the process that enabled that collusion. I have had to deal a lot with HMOs and insurance companies recently, and believe me, uncaring, sneering, parasitic wastefulness is not unique to the public sector. In fact it can be worse when there is a financial incentive to give bad service, avoid accountability or overbill.
Anyway, conservatives are inconsistent about whether government is always incompetent. When regulating business, they say it is. When spying on us or invading another country, suddenly it's nothing to worry about. So the real debate isn't about efficiency at all. It's about what the government should and should not do.
And the other people finally "delegate" this complication to IT people, like in "the program must verify that the interface transferred all the data to SAP correctly". And why doesn't the user check it himself? Or even define how the program should do the verification?
Because most IT people reading this will immediately see the following: it's a requirement to make the transfer transactional, and use of a checksum will give good confidence that the information's integrity was not compromised. The last thing you want is users checking things like this. Not reproducible. The occasional audit, yes. But the main path, no.
Anyway, when you write your functional requirements, it's your responsibility to prove to the business that your approach will meet the need. That's what validation is. It's not their job to tell you how to do it. I've been down that road, and you don't have to travel far on it before you encounter madness.
If any of the big oil companies were to sneeze, the whole economy would get a cold.
Sometimes you need to run a fever to rid yourself of a disease. I'm sure the abolition of slavery had some short-term economic impact too. The whole 401-based society is a transparent attempt to turn middle-class voters into miicro-tycoons who cynically vote for their economic interests rather than for justice.
Sometimes doing the right thing has negative financial consequences. Anyone who only votes with their wallet is a slimebag who is unfit to even be considered part of society.
Anyway, it's an exaggerated impact. Mutual funds, by their nature, are diversified, and also it's quite possible that more competition and less corruption will fuel economic growth in the medium and long-term. For one reason, the current competition is for access to politicians, not for operational efficiency or to serve customers. The increased margins oil companies have proudly showed off in their balance sheets are evidence of less competition, not more.
So your argument basically boils down to this: there are firms that benefit from the status quo, and a change will harm them. What your argument omits is that there are other firms, and society, that may well benefit even more from change. So even using the crass argument of utilitarianism, the greatest benefit for the greatest number may result from getting rid of the oil oligopoly in its present form.
I agree, by the way, that gas was too cheap in the US and we have behaved irresponsibly as a result. Look at energy use per unit GDP for the US compared to just about anywhere else. What that tells me is that we are wasting most of that energy simply because we can.
In the case of Enron, the corrupt behavior wasn't in the interests of their shareholders either. It was only in the interests of some (possibly most, but that's not clear yet) senior management. So in some cases there's an alignment of interest.
But yes, it should be possible to withdraw a corporation's charter if it does not operate in the public interest. Examples of "corporate death penalty" offenses should include collaboration with war criminals and human-rights abusers, high-level corruption, environmental destruction, and attempting in any way to influence the legislative process. "Free speech rights for corporations" are a fig leaf for the legislation-for-hire ordering process and should be stopped. Supporting criminal activity by the government such as warrantless eavesdropping would be another good category. Based on this, quite a lot of the oil companies, telcos and defense firms would be on the auction block for knockdown prices.
Would shareholders get burned by this? Goddamn right they would. And that's a prerequisite if they're ever to take responsibility for their firms behaving as part of civil society rather than as a protected form of criminal enterprise.
Slashdot Mirror
Bertrand Russell coined the term agnostic (in the context of religious belief) as a way of making it clear that his atheism included a willingness to consider evidence. But I just call myself an atheist for the reasons stated. I have no reason to believe in a deity. If such a reason presented itself, I'd rethink my beliefs. But for now, from my perspective, the evidence is no more compelling for YHWH than for the FSM.
I don't see them getting all literal about the parable about camels, eyes of needles, and rich men entering into the kingdom of Heaven, for example. And they don't seem to regard greed, gluttony or violence against their fellow humans as being prohibitions to be taken as seriously as those against (say) fornication. And they ignore the part about the New Testament superseding the Old. On the whole they're more attracted to the vengeful, jealous God than to the forgiving Lamb.
Fundamentalism is the descendant of Puritanism through several generations of cousin marriage.
I'm not one of those people who think Jesus was some kind of pacifist. Too much talk of swords and chasing moneychangers out of temples with whips. But if Jesus came back, the Fundamentalists would be the ones trying to kill him again.
Dark Satanic mills indeed.
The meatheads are in Washington. People in the military are willing to risk their lives, and this patriotism is being abused by cynical, power-mad politicos who treat them as pawns. It is also a disservice to our military to put them in harm's way to achieve unnecessary or ill-defined aims, and without proper planning. Not to mention consideration as to whether the war is even in the national interest.
It's a leadership problem, not a military problem.
1. There is a strong ethical case for non-compliance with unjust law.
2. Legislation that was purchased by industry lobby groups, which the DMCA was, has no legitimacy.
3. The assertion of financial damage by a privileged group is not the same as proof of actual financial damage. It's nothing more than someone powerful seeing money in someone else's pocket and saying "Mine!" The effect of infringement of the current copyright laws on music industry revenues is unknown. And even if the group can prove financial damage, that does not mean that the net effect on all of society is harmful. If the few benefit, but cause greater harm to the many, everyone's better off even if someone loses their ill-gotten gains.
4. Anyway, the evidence that a law is not complied with is not evidence of a wrong being committted. For example, I have performed cunnilingus in a state where it is unlawful. As best I could discern at the time, nobody was harmed. On a less personal level, in my lifetime I recall laws being violated when people sat in the front of buses and drank from certain water fountains. While copyright reform is less of an immediately pressing moral issue than civil rights, I heard the same legalistic arguments against nonviolent refusal to comply with the law during that struggle. And in the long term, the existing legal regime will damage both our culture (what little there is that's worthy of the name) and our competitiveness, so there are sound reasons to consider the option of disobedience. Furthermore, if the RIAA and similar groups were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, it is not at all clear that society would be worse off. It's more likely that the net effect would be beneficial: the body politic must occasionally rid itself of parasites.
5. "Piracy" is a propaganda term used by an interest group attempting to frame the debate in a manner favorable to them. "Distribution in defiance of unconsionable claims of ownership" or "not obeying the current, unjust and unenforceable copyright laws" are more correct terms.
Politicians and legislation never leads worthwhile social change. Instead, at best, it reluctantly lags. The driver for non-corrupt change to any unjust law is that the law is either widely ignored or actively defied.
Incidentally, I only use free software. In my case, opting out is a viable choice. But your argument that others should do the same would have more force if the producers of proprietary software were not corruptly influencing the political process to eliminate that alternative.
So it may be that society will collapse unless we have a draconian IP regime. But there are many other scenarios with the opposite outcome. And it's up to those who enjoy special privileges granted them by the government to justify their continuation.
I'm opposed to the death penalty, even for a hyena like Saddam who is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Iraqis. I'm even opposed to the death penalty for the madmen in the Bush junta, who are responsible for a hudredfold more Iraqi civilian deaths. But any leader who wages a war of aggression should be held accountable. And the doctrine of preemptive war is nothing but a figleaf for attacking anybody we want whenever we want. Crimes against humanity should be treated the same.
The trial and execution of Saddam will be seen as nothing but victor's justice, and the greater criminals who sustained him in power will almost certainly go free. The correct course for Saddam would have been to detain him until the US troops leave, then try him.
And we've got our own house to put in order, and our own torturers and war criminals to dispense justice to.
Mod parent way up.
Code-checking is a good thing, and provably correct code is especially good, though what's provable is still narrower than the range of behaviors of any interesting system I've seen.
But the most difficult part of any complex system development project is getting valid requirements and then implementing a process of systematically and iteratively confirming that the delivered system is what the users need, not what some bunch of managers or analysts asked for on their behalf. This is not to minimize the value of technical correctness, just to remember that the systems are for a purpose, and that's a big determinant of project success. It's the old systems engineering cliche: you not only have to build the system right, you have to build the right system.
So yeah... lint but better. Another useful tool that will doubtless be over-hyped by bonehead IT managers and be wrongly dragged into disrepute.
I don't know what's happening to the senior management of Earthlink but they really seem to have lost focus on good service lately.
The one person who really got rich from mp3.com was Michael Robertson. And whatever you think of him and his business practices (he went on to mastermind Lindows, 'nuff said), with myspace it's on a different scale entirely since we are talking about the slimy, utterly unscrupulous, Fox-owning Murdoch empire. In other words, one of the worst of the same faceless scumbag corporate-media exploitative firms that IUMA and mp3.com were purported to provide an escape route from. They are no more likely to loosen the grip of the RIAA than they are to begin opposing the Iraq war which their constant barrage of flagrant lies helped to start.
Even though it's all based on bullshit, the pedophile scare about myspace is a good thing if it drives traffic away and hits the bottom line of NewsCorp. Compared to Murdoch, the RIAA is positively benign... OK, maybe more like a grapefruit-sized benign tumor on the scrotum, but still not as threatening as the malignant melanoma that is NewsCorp.
Same goes with the Republican pandering to the knuckle-dragging hypocrites in the US.
The only strategy that works with those bastards is marginalization and disempowerment, along with close monitoring to be sure they're not cooking up explosives out behind that old clapboard church.
And although Gandhi practised nonviolence, Subhash Chandra Bose and others in the Indian independence movement were quite willing to fight. A good argument could be made that the Brits preferred to deal with Gandhi than with a popular armed insurgency. They had committed atrocities in India for generations, as did most colonial powers in their respective colonies, and there is no reason to assume that by some magic coincidence they had suddenly acquired morality and human decency immediately before Gandhi arrived on the scene.
My conclusion as an anti-militarist but not quite a pacifist, is that there are conditions under which nonviolent means of resistance can succeed, but that an assessment of military readiness (will to fight and the means to fight) is a better predictor pf the success of such an effort than fundamentally racist (and probably unfalsifiable) assertions about abstractions such as the decency of everyday Englishmen.
And back to the long-lost topic of a non-military-use variant of the GPL: seems like a good idea. I doubt that the military will honor the license, but non-cooperation is a good start, and I can understand why a principled person would withhold consent from the military machine. Especially since imperialist wars are sadly not a thing of the past, as Iraq shows.
But if the PP is really on the right track after all, I wonder: is the US in its present state "sufficiently civilized" that nonviolent means will effect change?
Yeah, I might trust them IF they have warrants.
Anyway, I don't necessarily believe them when they say they cracked the case using wiretapping. They may well be preserving operational security by saying they got the plotters by a different method than they really used. Or perhaps they're just lying like they have so many times before.
In short, there is no new information based on this bust.
If instead they said they caught them by sneak-and-peek, would that mean that you would no longer want protection against unreasonable search and seizure?
The tradeoff is between incompetent government, injustice and insecurity versus competency, rule of law and security. Loss of freedom is just another sign of government brutality and incompetency. Sadly, as the Bush administration (and many governments before it) demonstrates, these are not mutually exclusive.
It is unlikely that the way to defend your freedom is by surrendering it to a government with a proven track record of malice, corruption, failure, ineptitude and disregard for human rights.
I don't like to see the notion reinforced that "copyright" == "RIAA/MPAA bait."
Looks like real journalists will need to start practicing OPSEC: Operational Security.
Randomized behavior, encryption, phony meetings with non-sources along with the real meetings with sources, avoiding phone and email for any important information.
Crappy spy novels with reasonably realistic depictions of tradecraft should be part of journalist school in place of the sanctimonious preening over the importance of the role of the press in a free society.
I'm more oppressed by private entities these days than by our (increasingly oppressive) government. Nosy employers, sinister, lying HMOs (the "M" stands for "denial"), unaccountable credit-rating agencies, telcos colluding with illegal eavesdropping. Not that the distinction between business and government is all that meaningful anymore.
I don't really care whether the boot on the back of my neck is public or private. I just want to get it off me. And the so-called market is rigged, so don't give me that "don't like your electric company/HMO/Baby Bell? Go to the competition" silliness.
Well, that makes it an easy choice. So my only remaining question is the minor tactical detail of how to dismantle the whole stinking system.
I still think that there are other ways of moderating the patent system. One would be to establish a patent quota. Only the best 100 or 1000 ("best" determined via some peer-reviewed process?) get out the door. The sheer volume of patents that are granted makes it impossible to know if you're infringing and creates unmanageable risk to any innovator.
And kill all software and business method patents. It's odd how people complain about the courts making law when they assert individual rights, but they don't get called on decisions that create monstrosities like software and business-method patents.
Meanwhile I plan to abandon computing for a less troll-ridden environment such as selling bags of oranges by freeway on-ramps. Or has there been a business method patent on "a method for vending citrus at traffic-optimized locations"?
...for having the "death penalty" for corporations. I'd start by shutting down any firm that collaborates with repression. Phone companies selling their customers out to the NSA, RFID scumbags, anyone who so much as shook hands with Poindexter. Not to mention the firms that sell equipment used for tortures and executions.
To paraphrase a certain Russian, they're selling us the rope that they're going to hang us with. These are criminal enterprises. Their shareholders should be left holding the bag and their management should do hard time. Until corporations are held accountable, they'll lobby and bribe their way to their services becoming part of government contracts. And we'll all suffer for it.
The prerequisite to doing non-trivial work in IT is to know how to think clearly, with a minimum of clutter. In my case I've found discrete mathematics less immediately useful than understanding of statistics and experimental design. Studied both at graduate level prior to going into software. A lot of annoying design and debugging problems are much more soluble if you can set up meaningful tests. Some people have an aptitude for this and can do it without formal training. Some people can never learn it regardless of how much coursework or self-study they do. But the ability to think abstractly and reason rigorously is essential. Any unforgiving technical or scientific discipline will teach some of this.
On to IT specifics: I keep running into coders who don't know anything about data structures. This almost inevitably leads to crap code and weird behavior under system load.
It's useful to understand functional programming concepts. You don't necessarily need to learn LISP to do this. Python or Ruby can give you a taste. I've seen huge amounts of effort devoted to badly reinventing some of the FP wheels. Like knowledge of data structures, understanding FP gives you some powerful tools for getting the job done in a cleaner, more robust way. I'm assuming you already know some procedural programming.
Learn basic concepts of usability. No point optimizing something on the back end if you later find that the users didn't want or need it in the first place. And the original poster mentioned AJAX. Well, it's nice to have richer interaction on the client, but again, some of the most interesting questions have to do with determining which interactions are the right ones in a given set of circumstances. Any asshole can learn to write code; many do; some even do it well. But without an understanding of the formal systems that underpin IT, you'll never be more than a handyman.
See, it's only a contradiction if you think conservatives have principles besides the main one of making the rich richer.
Bureaucracy is the problem. Hand anything to the government and they'll botch the job...sometimes in their buddy's favor. Evidence is all around; see also the $600 toilet seat.
It was a contractor who billed the government for that. So the fault lies not just with the government, but with the process that enabled that collusion. I have had to deal a lot with HMOs and insurance companies recently, and believe me, uncaring, sneering, parasitic wastefulness is not unique to the public sector. In fact it can be worse when there is a financial incentive to give bad service, avoid accountability or overbill.
Anyway, conservatives are inconsistent about whether government is always incompetent. When regulating business, they say it is. When spying on us or invading another country, suddenly it's nothing to worry about. So the real debate isn't about efficiency at all. It's about what the government should and should not do.
Anyway, when you write your functional requirements, it's your responsibility to prove to the business that your approach will meet the need. That's what validation is. It's not their job to tell you how to do it. I've been down that road, and you don't have to travel far on it before you encounter madness.
Sometimes doing the right thing has negative financial consequences. Anyone who only votes with their wallet is a slimebag who is unfit to even be considered part of society.
Anyway, it's an exaggerated impact. Mutual funds, by their nature, are diversified, and also it's quite possible that more competition and less corruption will fuel economic growth in the medium and long-term. For one reason, the current competition is for access to politicians, not for operational efficiency or to serve customers. The increased margins oil companies have proudly showed off in their balance sheets are evidence of less competition, not more.
So your argument basically boils down to this: there are firms that benefit from the status quo, and a change will harm them. What your argument omits is that there are other firms, and society, that may well benefit even more from change. So even using the crass argument of utilitarianism, the greatest benefit for the greatest number may result from getting rid of the oil oligopoly in its present form.
I agree, by the way, that gas was too cheap in the US and we have behaved irresponsibly as a result. Look at energy use per unit GDP for the US compared to just about anywhere else. What that tells me is that we are wasting most of that energy simply because we can.
In the case of Enron, the corrupt behavior wasn't in the interests of their shareholders either. It was only in the interests of some (possibly most, but that's not clear yet) senior management. So in some cases there's an alignment of interest.
But yes, it should be possible to withdraw a corporation's charter if it does not operate in the public interest. Examples of "corporate death penalty" offenses should include collaboration with war criminals and human-rights abusers, high-level corruption, environmental destruction, and attempting in any way to influence the legislative process. "Free speech rights for corporations" are a fig leaf for the legislation-for-hire ordering process and should be stopped. Supporting criminal activity by the government such as warrantless eavesdropping would be another good category. Based on this, quite a lot of the oil companies, telcos and defense firms would be on the auction block for knockdown prices.
Would shareholders get burned by this? Goddamn right they would. And that's a prerequisite if they're ever to take responsibility for their firms behaving as part of civil society rather than as a protected form of criminal enterprise.