Correct title is "Bush Administration Intensifies War on Web Privacy, Uses Child Porn as Excuse."
Don't let the bastards frame the terms of debate. If the history of Bush's presidency has taught us anything, it's that they constantly lie about their motives. Look at the results, not the ever-shifting rationales.
Mod partent up. The whole region-encoding mechanism is a way of enabling geographically-based price discrimination and preventing free global trade (what the producers call a "grey market") in DVD's. There is no purpose for this besides extracting the maximum amount of money from each segment of consumers.
The problem that the content middlemen face is the same as that of the oil companies: where to set their monopolistic price point in order to maximize revenue.
The fact that these monopolies are now granted for periods far exceeding an artist's lifetime, is a sign that the system is corrupt. It is certainly of no benefit to the artists, who get only a minuscule percentage of the revenue streams generated by media sales. There is no reason to accept the legitimacy of this legislation for hire. The toxic effect on our culture of the content-distribution oligopolies is reason enough to enforce draconian anti-trust laws on the bastards: say, nobody can own a combined total of more than 1% of all media distribution channels combined. If Congress operated in the public interest, they would be doing this. Since they are not, the only reasons to comply are an instinctive servility or a mystical belief that laws, no matter how unjust, must be obeyed. Since, in this law-bound era, much progress has only come through civil disobedience, I don't see how our actions should honor unjust laws. And the behavior of an oligopoly that maintains its position through corruption is not of primary interest to me: what I'm interested in is seeing justice done to creators and consumers. The middlemen are overhead. They're entitled to what they can scrounge, and nothing more. The world would be no worse off if they were employed somewhere more productive, such as pounding farts out of shirttails in a laundry.
This guy makes a great point. BSD, for example, came up with many of the features that are found in Linux.
One way the article showed bias was that it used Linux rather than original work like Apache, BIND, Perl or Python as the example. The open-source Unix derivatives replicate a standard (more or less) and so can be accused of lack of innovation. The same can be said about the BSD's. It's an oversimplification, since much of the innovation is in the implementation itself, but at least I can understand where the Economist writer got the idea. But there are many other open-source projects where innovation is part of the effort and the absurdity of the accusation is even more evident. So in the general case, the accusation of lack of innovation in open source is so much bullshit.
Another point the author seemed too obtuse to notice is that the textual contributions to Wikipedia are open content, not open source. This is a distinction that matters. With source, there's a pretty well-understood testing protocol that can be used to validate the product. A critical bug is not usually a debatable feature. With content, validation is far more subjective. The two models just are not the same, and therefore the same methods of collaboration won't necessarily work in both.
Then come the mental justifications and excuses such as "I don't have time" or "well it really isn't my problem - it's waaaayyy over there".
"I don't have time" is often the truth. I am politically active. I also work, on average, 70 hours per week and have a family. The sad reality is that my activism is constrained by available time, and there are a lot of enthusiastic, underworked idiots who devote far more time to politics than I can. That's (for example) how school boards get taken over by creationists: it's the most important thing in the zealots' lives but the balanced, sane people have other priorities. One of the reasons for those different priorities is that the US economic system is such that there is strong pressure to work more hours than is healthy.
Instead, I've found it's better to encourage people to simply question everything - especially motivation.
No matter how much your friends question it, other people's motivation is generally unknowable. For all that I can truthfully say, George W Bush may be a sincere man striving to do good for the American people. But if so, it doesn't matter, since the objective result of his actions is no different than if he were a dimwitted, vainglorious popinjay surrounded by unscrupulous cronies (a possibility that is far from unlikely). For this reason, questioning motives does little but drives people into unproductive ad hominem namecalling. Better instead to question the consequences, and the difference between the stated rationale for an action and what will happen if it's carried out. Whether those differences are because of hypocrisy, lack of foresight or a disciplined but faulty analysis process are of no consequence.
Asking who benefits and who suffers from a decision is another good line of inquiry. Sometimes that will provide strong circumstantial evidence of motivation, but never discount the role of "useful fools" in history.
Centrist and right-wing Democrats have to cover their sagging collective asses. So they've got to distract attention. They voted for the war. They voted for the Patriot Act. They can't attack the Republicans on corruption because their snouts are in many of the same troughs. So they've got to find some way to differentiate themselves without addressing any of the real issues.
Anyway, if you use behavioral sriteria rather than labels to make the classification, Lieberman is a Republican. Hillary... well, she's just an opportunist with poor judgement.
Basically our Government completely failed us and now it wants more power. People should have been asking why they weren't using the power they had effectively in the first place -- instead of why they need more.
Look at the bright side: at least they've proved conclusively that incompetence and corrupt, mendacious brutality are not mutually exclusive.
However ignoring demands and dealy harshly with the IRA would seem to contradict what you are saying here. What really started working with the IRA was discussion and resolution(after Maggie "we do not deal with terrorists" Thatcher left). It hasnt been always smooth and a perfect prcess... but there are a lot less bombs going off in London these days.
There may be another cause too. What difference does it make if your local legislature sits in Dublin or Stormont or London if all the real decision-making happens in Brussels?
Most of the conflicts cited in the other posts have to do with nation-states. When supranational bodies matter more, membership in nation-states becomes as empty as whether you live in Washington or Oregon. Yeah, there are differences, but not ones most people would attack someone over.
After terrorists attack our ports through infiltrating the royal United Arab Emirates corporation that just got handed the ports management contracts, I expect Congress will pass a law that says that "no one could have anticipated that the ports would be infiltrated through their foreign managers".
Why do you assume that this company is at such risk of infiltration? Because the word "Arab" is in their name? The Emirates are very commercially-oriented and so far have shown little inclination to the fanaticism that plagues some of their neighbors.
Terrorists could just as readily infiltrate any US-based multinational. So I suppose you are opposed to them too. Or perhaps only to foreign ownership of important US assets? Then fine, cut off foreign investment. That'll really help.
As for Bush's "get out of jail free" card: I doubt if Bush and his gang will ever be held accountable for any of the crimes they have committed while in office. That's because the Democrats are too morally bankrupt (and complicit) to hold war crimes investigations as soon as the Republicans are driven from office. Assuming, that is, that they ever are.
If they're trying to prevent Google from supporting a corrupt, repressive government that spies on its own people, they'd better keep them from operating in the US too.
That's pretty much what I tried. The down side is when the boss asks, "OK, so if it's free, how do the people who build the distro make money?"
The same way the people who build Apache, Bind, and other key parts of the Internet make money. That's not a pointy-haired question, it's just incompetent. Nobody in a position of responsibility over IT staff should be asking a question like that. Even five years ago, it was barely excusable. Now it's as sure a sign of clinical brain death as a flat EEG.
Update your resume. When you get an offer, talk to the pinhead's supervisor and make it very clear why you're leaving. You'll be doing the next guy a favor.
This is not a flame, but try reading some Popper or Kuhn.
Then think critically about what you've read, since neither Popper nor Kuhn were scientists themselves (both are philosophers) and where I've seen science done, the scientists gave both (and particularly Kuhn) short shrift. There is also a great difference between Popper's view and Kuhn's.
This is not meant to be a flame either. But I think it's dangerous to apply some philosopher's definition of science to something like ID, since it could also be used to show that much bona fide science is "not science." This is especially true of Popper's falsifiability criterion, which has problematic application to many branches of science. As for Kuhn, a mischievous interpretation of his incommensurability argument could be used to support the teaching of ID in schools, since Kuhn's approach rejects the notion that any explanation purporting to be scientific is intrinsically more correct or valid than any other.
You might also want to have a look at Carnap.
My own view is that prople doing science should have their work judged by their peers, and a philosopher's assertion that "that's not science" should be looked at with great suspicion. And we should exercise great care before using that stick to beat ID, however richly it deserves to be driven out of our schools and its supporters removed from public office.
There is no tradeoff between privacy and security, so there is no need to "balance" them. An individual is not secure if their privacy is being routinely violated.
The tradeoff is between privacy and totalitarianism. Solutions that attempt to split the difference are not helpful.
Do you job. Don't waste the student's time telling them America is a corrupt regime of facists and that GWB should be impeached for stealing the last 3 elections, and being AWOL, and Katrina, and Plame, and Iraq, and the 9/11 was inside job, yadda fucking yadda.
Yeah. I'll save the profs the trouble and tell you all that for free. Except that 9/11 was an inside job. More likely they just used it after the fact to justify their pre-existing agenda. I don't think they were able to orchestrate it. Evil and cynical enough, yes. Competent enough, no.
As for the zealots taking down professor's names, it's just another instance of the informer society that the authoritarian right wants to promote. Since they can't win arguments by rational debate, blackmail and intimidation are the only tools that are left for them. I'm sure they'll have no objection when the names of the snitches get published too.
There's this expectation in our society that everything should be traceable, but as far as I know (IANAL) it's not based on any solid legal ground.
It would really set the cat among the pigeons to agitate for a constitutional amendment that clearly spells out that individuals have a right to anonymity that can only be breached when very strong evidence of crime is presented. I'm thinking a standard like "probable cause." If you can't convince a magistrate it's a criminal matter, you don't get to snoop.
I would also like to see it made clear that corporations, as a condition of their being allowed to operate, have no such right.
It would be interesting to see if a "structurally" anonymous ISP would actually be allowed to operate. There has been pressure on ISPs, and collusion between telcos and the government, to allow taps. But, to my knowledge, there has so far been no legislation forbidding the protection of your customers' privacy through technical means.
If anyone in/.land knows different, I'd like to see chapter and verse.
The renewal was killed originally because the Democrats showed something resembling backbone by threatening a filibuster. Then, what? a couple weeks later, the same bill is being extended, and not a peep from the gutless idiots. So it was all posturing. They want it just as bad as the Republicans do, but they want to be seen to be reluctant.
The Senate Democrats showed themselves to be toothless watchdogs when they joined the 98-1 vote in favor of the original Patriot Act. It was later disclosed that most Senators joining in the vote didn't even read the legislation. And they slavishly voted in favor of the resolutions leading to the Iraq war with just as little questioning of the administration (with a very small number of honorable exceptions). Later, they trot out lame excuses: that they were deceived, they didn't know what they were voting for, they were just supporting the president in time of need, etc. This is what is wrong with the Democratic Party. They'll whine a litte, try to mitigate some effects, but they're part of the same rotten system, and are part of a herd mentality that afflicts the entire power elite in Washington. If the Republicans adovated the genocide of ten million, the Dems would offer a counter-proposal of five million, and fret about getting a Presidential assurance that only humane killing methods would be used.
No - it is NOT a theory. A defining characteristic of a theory is that it must be falsifiable. ID is NOT falsifiable - so it can not be described as a "theory".
That's Karl Popper's definition of a theory. It's relatively modern and is not universally accepted. Popper's criteria for what constitutes a science would disqualify just about anything outside the physical sciences, and possibly cosmology too.
But I agree that ID is not science, and would add that it is piss-poor philosophy and reflects a shallow and stunted theology.
Government is the problem. Many people advocate that the bandits set up false terrorist attacks, to solidify their power. Some of these people are certainly kooks, but following the general principle of 'where there's smoke, there's fire', there has to be something to the claims of a grand conspiracy.
No need to assume conspiracy. In a process analogous to the "invisible hand," aligned interests can produce emergent, correlated behavior without the need for the parties to actually communicate.
And as for the role of government, I prefer William McNeill's theory of government as macroparasite in his book Plagues and Peoples. Google on "government macroparasitism" for more details.
And my belief is that there was no golden age where government was benign, then taken over by the bad guys. It emerged as a protection racket from the get-go and continues to function as one. The only difference is the virulence at different times and places. It has already been demonstrated that every once in a while it will flare up and kill its hosts. My pessimistic view is that the best we can hope for is to live with government in the same way as some people can live with HIV.
The fact that they did this without even consulting the FISA court is completely illegal, and bypasses the checks and balances of our government. I don't think anything will happen to the prez, but this is really just disgusting.
My theory is that it's a matter of principle. Clearly it can't be expediency, since all signs are that the FISA courts aren't a particularly high hurdle. Bush and his junta are simply reasserting the divine right of kings. They don't accept judicial oversight. "Because the President says so" is considered by them sufficient justification for any action, including violations of the Constitution and war crimes.
Kudos for doing something different and cool, but I'd just like to point out that the housing bubble (at least the one here) is certainly not caused by regulation. It's caused by sellers setting the prices super-high because they know they can find suckers to pay that much.
It's almost tautological to say that prices are high because someone can be found who will pay those prices. But it doesn't explain anything.
I live in a county with a median house price approaching $1M. One of the reasons for it is that over the past thirty years or more, the county has had extremely stringent development controls. That has kept the population density low and constrained the supply of housing. It has also limited the environmental degradation that we've seen in other nearby counties. All these factors have indisputably shifted the balance of supply and demand. So I'd say that regulation can certainly contribute to, if not be the sole cause, of housing prices. And I'm several hundred kbucks better off (on paper) as a consequence. I'm not denying that high housing prices have a downside; only that they have several causes that can be better explained than by the "bigger sucker" theory.
And I totally commend the trailer-park ISP guy. There are times when moving down the housing-price gradient makes a lot of sense. One of those is to find liquidity for a business venture. The only risk is that, if housing continues to go up, it'll be hard to get back on the escalator later.
In the medicine world, we have excessive regulations, and prices have climbed beyond inflation.
Actually, the regulated and public medical providers are the most efficient ones in the system; it's the private insurance companies that are driving up costs further and further, not because of regulation, but because of a lack of regulation.
Kinda. I agree with what the parent's trying to say, but I think in the medical insurance case it's a more complex phenomenon. The insurance companies and HMOs (an odd acronym for what should be called "health benefit denial organizations") exist in their present form almost entirely because of government regulation, which in turn is due to special interests having purchased the legislation, in collusion with legislators who lacked the backbone to implement a working public-funded healthcare system.
As other posters have noted, in the real world, almost all markets (and all those of non-trivial scale) operate within legal and regulatory contexts. "Laisser-faire" approaches inevitably fail because one of the things that can be purchased, once the amount of money in play is high enough, is government coercion. Politicians and officials have always had stong incentives to work in the interests of the wealthy. That feeds a to a positive feedback process whereby "to he who has, it shall be given."
So that leaves the real world, where regulation exists. The problem in the US is that regulation is very often subverted to benefit the incumbents within a market. Some say that this is how the system is supposed to work, but to me it looks more like a form of corruption.
There are a couple conclusions I draw from all this: first, that bureaucratic repression is just as odious when it is practiced by private as by public entities, and should be resisted just as firmly; and second, that there will come a time (and I hope it is soon) where human rights are asserted not only against government, but against businesses.
So (and I think this was also the parent's point) regulation is not intrinsically bad, but regulation must be constantly monitored to prevent its being hijacked by the producer's lobby.
The only way you can be sure that this data won't be used improperly (either by the government using it inappropriately or by its falling into the wrong hands) is if it is never collected in the first place.
Perhaps it is time to start agitating for a right to anonymity?
There is no honour in fighting, there is no glory. There is no good fight.
Reminds me of something one of my karate teachers (a wonderful old Cockney gentleman) said to us: "Always fight fair. And by fair fight I mean one in which you don't get hurt."
With all due respect to the EFF, though, they are fighting a legal rearguard action. The problem is that the legislation they're opposing is meant to be crooked. The courts will ony go so far in opposing the will of Congress and the executive branch. The end goal needs to be repeal of the idiotic laws and regulations that throw away the fundamental rights of the majority in order to keep a dying revenue stream alive a little bit longer.
And by the way, Snoutintrough is a satirical column.
Open document formats are a wonderful thing, as are platform and OS-independent data formats. But the value of content lies not only in itself, but in its semantics. And semantics are often embodied in the code, not just in the data. After all, that's why we use objects: because it in so many cases it just doesn't make sense to separate classes from their behaviors.
This is dead-on correct. If the software is being developed in order for you to achieve competitive advantage, keep the the development process as close to you as you can. At very least, the core team should be on the payroll.
If you're looking to do "commodity" IT work, look at outsourcing partners (maybe offshore, maybe not). Examples are setting up back-end systems, package configuration (SAP, Siebel, etc), Oracle apps for the beancounters. There's value in these being as standard as you can make them. But if you're doing something unique, this is not the way to proceed since such arrangements lack agility.
As for IBM Global Services (and the Big 5, for that matter), they're generally competent but can be prohibitively expensive. It's worth knowing that their margins are massive-- their middleman's slice is huge. And you'll need to be very familiar with how they work, because you will get what you asked for, which may or may not be what you need. Generally, "boutique" consulting firms are much cheaper, but the same words of caution apply there. I've seen some of them who are good at agile development and really work with you. That may be a better choice than setting up the dev team from scratch. But you really should find a good solutions architect and a good development team lead. They may be the same person if you're fortunate, but they often are not since one is more strategic and the other is more tactically minded. Hire them. Your firm needs to own the vision and the framework for project execution. Outsourcing those means that you'll experience constant changes of direction, different working norms, weird integration snags, and buck-passing among vendors, and there will be nobody in your firm who can raise the bullshit flag. This is a very risky situation to be in.
And by the way, it's true that partners in consulting firms of any size will sometimes try to upsell you. That's why the word "No" is in your vocabulary. The key to dealing with contractors is scope control, and if you don't have a very clear idea of your requirements, you are getting out of the "sweet spot" for using contractors.
PS. I work for a medium-sized business/IT consulting firm. We generally won't pursue business with anyone doing under $100M a year gross revenue, because firms smaller than that generally don't get value from a full-service consulting firm. For bigger businesses, the way we work makes a lot better economic sense. There are consulting firms that will work with start-ups, and some who specialize in it. But above all, you need to make clear what your expectations are up front, and be aware that one size does not fit all.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct title is "Bush Administration Intensifies War on Web Privacy, Uses Child Porn as Excuse."
Don't let the bastards frame the terms of debate. If the history of Bush's presidency has taught us anything, it's that they constantly lie about their motives. Look at the results, not the ever-shifting rationales.
Mod partent up. The whole region-encoding mechanism is a way of enabling geographically-based price discrimination and preventing free global trade (what the producers call a "grey market") in DVD's. There is no purpose for this besides extracting the maximum amount of money from each segment of consumers.
The problem that the content middlemen face is the same as that of the oil companies: where to set their monopolistic price point in order to maximize revenue.
The fact that these monopolies are now granted for periods far exceeding an artist's lifetime, is a sign that the system is corrupt. It is certainly of no benefit to the artists, who get only a minuscule percentage of the revenue streams generated by media sales. There is no reason to accept the legitimacy of this legislation for hire. The toxic effect on our culture of the content-distribution oligopolies is reason enough to enforce draconian anti-trust laws on the bastards: say, nobody can own a combined total of more than 1% of all media distribution channels combined. If Congress operated in the public interest, they would be doing this. Since they are not, the only reasons to comply are an instinctive servility or a mystical belief that laws, no matter how unjust, must be obeyed. Since, in this law-bound era, much progress has only come through civil disobedience, I don't see how our actions should honor unjust laws. And the behavior of an oligopoly that maintains its position through corruption is not of primary interest to me: what I'm interested in is seeing justice done to creators and consumers. The middlemen are overhead. They're entitled to what they can scrounge, and nothing more. The world would be no worse off if they were employed somewhere more productive, such as pounding farts out of shirttails in a laundry.
Another point the author seemed too obtuse to notice is that the textual contributions to Wikipedia are open content, not open source. This is a distinction that matters. With source, there's a pretty well-understood testing protocol that can be used to validate the product. A critical bug is not usually a debatable feature. With content, validation is far more subjective. The two models just are not the same, and therefore the same methods of collaboration won't necessarily work in both.
No matter how much your friends question it, other people's motivation is generally unknowable. For all that I can truthfully say, George W Bush may be a sincere man striving to do good for the American people. But if so, it doesn't matter, since the objective result of his actions is no different than if he were a dimwitted, vainglorious popinjay surrounded by unscrupulous cronies (a possibility that is far from unlikely). For this reason, questioning motives does little but drives people into unproductive ad hominem namecalling. Better instead to question the consequences, and the difference between the stated rationale for an action and what will happen if it's carried out. Whether those differences are because of hypocrisy, lack of foresight or a disciplined but faulty analysis process are of no consequence.
Asking who benefits and who suffers from a decision is another good line of inquiry. Sometimes that will provide strong circumstantial evidence of motivation, but never discount the role of "useful fools" in history.
Centrist and right-wing Democrats have to cover their sagging collective asses. So they've got to distract attention. They voted for the war. They voted for the Patriot Act. They can't attack the Republicans on corruption because their snouts are in many of the same troughs. So they've got to find some way to differentiate themselves without addressing any of the real issues.
Anyway, if you use behavioral sriteria rather than labels to make the classification, Lieberman is a Republican. Hillary... well, she's just an opportunist with poor judgement.
Most of the conflicts cited in the other posts have to do with nation-states. When supranational bodies matter more, membership in nation-states becomes as empty as whether you live in Washington or Oregon. Yeah, there are differences, but not ones most people would attack someone over.
Terrorists could just as readily infiltrate any US-based multinational. So I suppose you are opposed to them too. Or perhaps only to foreign ownership of important US assets? Then fine, cut off foreign investment. That'll really help.
As for Bush's "get out of jail free" card: I doubt if Bush and his gang will ever be held accountable for any of the crimes they have committed while in office. That's because the Democrats are too morally bankrupt (and complicit) to hold war crimes investigations as soon as the Republicans are driven from office. Assuming, that is, that they ever are.
If they're trying to prevent Google from supporting a corrupt, repressive government that spies on its own people, they'd better keep them from operating in the US too.
Update your resume. When you get an offer, talk to the pinhead's supervisor and make it very clear why you're leaving. You'll be doing the next guy a favor.
This is not meant to be a flame either. But I think it's dangerous to apply some philosopher's definition of science to something like ID, since it could also be used to show that much bona fide science is "not science." This is especially true of Popper's falsifiability criterion, which has problematic application to many branches of science. As for Kuhn, a mischievous interpretation of his incommensurability argument could be used to support the teaching of ID in schools, since Kuhn's approach rejects the notion that any explanation purporting to be scientific is intrinsically more correct or valid than any other.
You might also want to have a look at Carnap.
My own view is that prople doing science should have their work judged by their peers, and a philosopher's assertion that "that's not science" should be looked at with great suspicion. And we should exercise great care before using that stick to beat ID, however richly it deserves to be driven out of our schools and its supporters removed from public office.
There is no tradeoff between privacy and security, so there is no need to "balance" them. An individual is not secure if their privacy is being routinely violated.
The tradeoff is between privacy and totalitarianism. Solutions that attempt to split the difference are not helpful.
As for the zealots taking down professor's names, it's just another instance of the informer society that the authoritarian right wants to promote. Since they can't win arguments by rational debate, blackmail and intimidation are the only tools that are left for them. I'm sure they'll have no objection when the names of the snitches get published too.
I would also like to see it made clear that corporations, as a condition of their being allowed to operate, have no such right.
It would be interesting to see if a "structurally" anonymous ISP would actually be allowed to operate. There has been pressure on ISPs, and collusion between telcos and the government, to allow taps. But, to my knowledge, there has so far been no legislation forbidding the protection of your customers' privacy through technical means.
If anyone in
The renewal was killed originally because the Democrats showed something resembling backbone by threatening a filibuster. Then, what? a couple weeks later, the same bill is being extended, and not a peep from the gutless idiots. So it was all posturing. They want it just as bad as the Republicans do, but they want to be seen to be reluctant.
The Senate Democrats showed themselves to be toothless watchdogs when they joined the 98-1 vote in favor of the original Patriot Act. It was later disclosed that most Senators joining in the vote didn't even read the legislation. And they slavishly voted in favor of the resolutions leading to the Iraq war with just as little questioning of the administration (with a very small number of honorable exceptions). Later, they trot out lame excuses: that they were deceived, they didn't know what they were voting for, they were just supporting the president in time of need, etc. This is what is wrong with the Democratic Party. They'll whine a litte, try to mitigate some effects, but they're part of the same rotten system, and are part of a herd mentality that afflicts the entire power elite in Washington. If the Republicans adovated the genocide of ten million, the Dems would offer a counter-proposal of five million, and fret about getting a Presidential assurance that only humane killing methods would be used.
They don't WANT the soap on a rope.
But I agree that ID is not science, and would add that it is piss-poor philosophy and reflects a shallow and stunted theology.
And as for the role of government, I prefer William McNeill's theory of government as macroparasite in his book Plagues and Peoples. Google on "government macroparasitism" for more details.
And my belief is that there was no golden age where government was benign, then taken over by the bad guys. It emerged as a protection racket from the get-go and continues to function as one. The only difference is the virulence at different times and places. It has already been demonstrated that every once in a while it will flare up and kill its hosts. My pessimistic view is that the best we can hope for is to live with government in the same way as some people can live with HIV.
I live in a county with a median house price approaching $1M. One of the reasons for it is that over the past thirty years or more, the county has had extremely stringent development controls. That has kept the population density low and constrained the supply of housing. It has also limited the environmental degradation that we've seen in other nearby counties. All these factors have indisputably shifted the balance of supply and demand. So I'd say that regulation can certainly contribute to, if not be the sole cause, of housing prices. And I'm several hundred kbucks better off (on paper) as a consequence. I'm not denying that high housing prices have a downside; only that they have several causes that can be better explained than by the "bigger sucker" theory.
And I totally commend the trailer-park ISP guy. There are times when moving down the housing-price gradient makes a lot of sense. One of those is to find liquidity for a business venture. The only risk is that, if housing continues to go up, it'll be hard to get back on the escalator later.
As other posters have noted, in the real world, almost all markets (and all those of non-trivial scale) operate within legal and regulatory contexts. "Laisser-faire" approaches inevitably fail because one of the things that can be purchased, once the amount of money in play is high enough, is government coercion. Politicians and officials have always had stong incentives to work in the interests of the wealthy. That feeds a to a positive feedback process whereby "to he who has, it shall be given."
So that leaves the real world, where regulation exists. The problem in the US is that regulation is very often subverted to benefit the incumbents within a market. Some say that this is how the system is supposed to work, but to me it looks more like a form of corruption.
There are a couple conclusions I draw from all this: first, that bureaucratic repression is just as odious when it is practiced by private as by public entities, and should be resisted just as firmly; and second, that there will come a time (and I hope it is soon) where human rights are asserted not only against government, but against businesses.
So (and I think this was also the parent's point) regulation is not intrinsically bad, but regulation must be constantly monitored to prevent its being hijacked by the producer's lobby.
You've got to blind the cyclops or he'll eat you.
The only way you can be sure that this data won't be used improperly (either by the government using it inappropriately or by its falling into the wrong hands) is if it is never collected in the first place.
Perhaps it is time to start agitating for a right to anonymity?
With all due respect to the EFF, though, they are fighting a legal rearguard action. The problem is that the legislation they're opposing is meant to be crooked. The courts will ony go so far in opposing the will of Congress and the executive branch. The end goal needs to be repeal of the idiotic laws and regulations that throw away the fundamental rights of the majority in order to keep a dying revenue stream alive a little bit longer.
And by the way, Snoutintrough is a satirical column.
Open document formats are a wonderful thing, as are platform and OS-independent data formats. But the value of content lies not only in itself, but in its semantics. And semantics are often embodied in the code, not just in the data. After all, that's why we use objects: because it in so many cases it just doesn't make sense to separate classes from their behaviors.
So that's why I want to see source code too.
This is dead-on correct. If the software is being developed in order for you to achieve competitive advantage, keep the the development process as close to you as you can. At very least, the core team should be on the payroll.
If you're looking to do "commodity" IT work, look at outsourcing partners (maybe offshore, maybe not). Examples are setting up back-end systems, package configuration (SAP, Siebel, etc), Oracle apps for the beancounters. There's value in these being as standard as you can make them. But if you're doing something unique, this is not the way to proceed since such arrangements lack agility.
As for IBM Global Services (and the Big 5, for that matter), they're generally competent but can be prohibitively expensive. It's worth knowing that their margins are massive-- their middleman's slice is huge. And you'll need to be very familiar with how they work, because you will get what you asked for, which may or may not be what you need. Generally, "boutique" consulting firms are much cheaper, but the same words of caution apply there. I've seen some of them who are good at agile development and really work with you. That may be a better choice than setting up the dev team from scratch. But you really should find a good solutions architect and a good development team lead. They may be the same person if you're fortunate, but they often are not since one is more strategic and the other is more tactically minded. Hire them. Your firm needs to own the vision and the framework for project execution. Outsourcing those means that you'll experience constant changes of direction, different working norms, weird integration snags, and buck-passing among vendors, and there will be nobody in your firm who can raise the bullshit flag. This is a very risky situation to be in.
And by the way, it's true that partners in consulting firms of any size will sometimes try to upsell you. That's why the word "No" is in your vocabulary. The key to dealing with contractors is scope control, and if you don't have a very clear idea of your requirements, you are getting out of the "sweet spot" for using contractors.
PS. I work for a medium-sized business/IT consulting firm. We generally won't pursue business with anyone doing under $100M a year gross revenue, because firms smaller than that generally don't get value from a full-service consulting firm. For bigger businesses, the way we work makes a lot better economic sense. There are consulting firms that will work with start-ups, and some who specialize in it. But above all, you need to make clear what your expectations are up front, and be aware that one size does not fit all.