This, as well as a lot of the open WiFi "trespassing" cases lately, makes me wonder how long it will be before someone is arrested/sued for accessing a world-readable web page just because the publisher didn't really want it to be public, but they didn't know how to lock it down.
Free trade and society works on the principle that the best ideas come about as a natural result of better and more efficient ideas being preferable to worse ones, and by popular preference the better ideas will gain "share" and prosper. By contrast, having a single central source of opinion may not let the best ideas prosper-- that central authority may reject a new idea by inertial resistance, or foolishly reject an old one by novelty or misrepresentation.
By applying a "sin tax" to a practice, it unnaturally weights that practice to become a "worse idea" than unencumbered choice may deem it to be. It's "Central Control Lite", giving the effect of an outright ban, without having to come off as dictatorial.
Of course, this is the idealist theory-- I realize that many people are illogical-- personally self-destructive tendencies, psychological factors (read: people are idiots), and lack (or infeasibility) of long-term thinking mean that sometimes the unpalatable practice of central control may need to be taken in everyone's interest, but it should at least remain unpalatable (and thus scrutinized), so "deviant behavior" doesn't become punished just as severely by the tax law in lieu of the criminal law. (And they can say you're still technically free to do whatever it is, because there's no law against it.)
If the government needs more taxes, the taxes should be levied generally, not on the basis of behavior. (I could see an exception for things like gasoline taxes for road improvements-- the need for that money is directly and rather uniquely connected to the practice of driving.)
You're just another one of those shits who think that wealth is God's way of showing approval of your thieving ways and that poverty is His way of showing disapproval of their unambitious ways.
Actually, it's more like "Wealth is other people's way of showing approval of your valuable activities or resources, and poverty is their way of... well... not."
There might be injustice in the fact that some people are born, raised, or lucky enough to be spontaneously more valuable than others, or that people may use trickery or schemes to inflate their value, but money is, by and large, a reflection of your value to other people.
It could be solved, however, by raising price via a tiered-rate system, with negating incentives for people that use the power-savers. Have residential cost-per-kWH stay low for reasonable or basic use, then go up once you reach one or more luxury thresholds, and offer price breaks to the people who install equipment or follow usage patterns that save power and ease demand.
I'm wondering if this would be more feasible on a substation or neighborhood basis-- you could use larger and uglier, but cheaper, centrally specified/maintained, and more efficient power storage.
Your credit rating is your modern "honor". It's just been codified. Unaided reputation has given way to stored statistics, as is necessary in a world when you might trade or interact with people you never will personally meet, in places across the world.
Then there's the problem of enforcement, especially when the profit is worth some more expensive evasion techniques. You don't have the force of much IRL law, and you can't completely reliably ban or punish a physical person when they can get a new CC#, a new IP address, or many other evasive measures, and just set up shop again. I suppose you could take their L$, but it's still much simpler to get money shuffling around among multiple "people" than in the physical world.
So then what we're talking about here is two conflicting rights: Right to freedom of speech vs economic rights/well being of employer.
That depends on what you mean by "freedom of speech". The freedom of speech enshrined in the Constitution of the U.S. is a freedom from government retaliation for speech. This freedom takes into account that government retaliation is overarching and, in a sense, monopolistic. Private entity retaliation (as allowed by the law-- in the form of boycotting or social ostracization), however, is neither inherently overarching nor monopolistic. Although your opinions may find you socially or economically alienated within a large number of people, you are still free seek out and interact with people who are similarly inclined, and your idea can succeed or fail based upon the merits of its popularity (among other factors).
Although the ability to discriminate based upon ideological factors may seem to have harsh consequences, it is pretty much the "teeth" of free speech, without which free speech itself would be much less useful. Without a free person's ability to act upon their reactions to ideas, there is none of the evolutionary natural selection that allows better ideas to rise to the top and worse ideas to fall.
Does anybody really want to make the case that some employer's bottom line is more important than freedom of speech?
It's not about the employer's bottom line, as much as the employer's freedom to act upon their own ideologies.
The real problem is, when most western democracies were writing constitutions, the modern "corporation" as we know it didn't exist. So people like the US founding fathers didn't see the need to enshrine protection against oppression by corporations in the constitution.
So most constitutions don't have much to say about interactions between you and your employer, they tend to address interactions between you and your government.
Incorporation has little to do with it. Even without the limited-liability construction that is a corporation, the people at the top of non-incorporated businesses could still choose their hiring and firing practices with an eye toward ideology.
The annoying part, though, is if you have blabbermouth friends or share a name with a seedy character. That's one of the things that does bug me about this "Google 'em first" tendency.
As for me, I've maintained an open, but rather positive online face. My name comes back with mostly USENET postings where I'm asking legitimate questions or helping people. Personally, my stance is not so much to be secretive, as to do things you'd be proud of and be proud of what you do. Even unpopular ideas, well explained and defended, can give you sympathy to enough people. If you can't proudly defend the things you say, perhaps you should reevaluate them-- this isn't stifling free speech, it's part of distilling sound ideas.
It depends on the business, its size, the publicity of its corporate culture (how quickly someone could make a hypocrite and a fool out of the company if they had the information). Of course, not all companies are this strict, and potential employees should take that into account when choosing a job. If a company is so strict that it's going to delve into your off-time... you either clean up your off-time if it's worth it to you, or you take your employment somewhere else.
Commerce involves humans-- social beings who have real reactions to opinions-- and is, in part, a social interaction. By tying objectionable ideas to you/your company/your product, people are less likely to do business with you, and you will reap less of the fruits of commerce. As long as customers (and vendors, partners, etc.) can and do avoid companies they find objectionable, publicly displaying objectionable ideas can lead to economic hardship.
This effect is based on customers' (and vendors, etc.) ability to make an informed choice about their commercial partners. The only real way to strip the economic consequences from speech or stance is to strip either customers' information or choice, and thus restrict their freedom.
Capitalism isn't free speech, but it is a freedom (free market/enterprise) that carries weight when comparing peoples' relative freedoms. The GG-something-poster above me said that there should be no economic hardship suffered for expressing ideas. I say that this would remove far too many of other people's freedoms-- not necessarily speech freedoms, but freedoms nonetheless-- to implement.
There's no harm, per se, in allowing speech without sanctions. There is, however, no way to create an environment where this is the case, without restricting the commerce-choice freedoms of others. People naturally do not want to interact or do business with people they find objectionable. If the objectionable person is part of a market with reasonable alternatives, oftentimes people will choose to do business with those they find least objectionable.
Commerce is partially a social interaction, and economic prosperity is largely dependent upon successful commerce. If you repulse your potential customers (or other such profitable interactors) by way of your public speech or stances, you will be less able or likely to commit successful commercial transactions, and will find yourself economically disadvantaged. That's just the fact of a free market.
If you are an employee, depending on your role and its visibility, your advancement may be based on how well you sympathize with and reflect the important values of your employer. After all, a group of people who are all ideologically opposed but supposedly working together is a recipe for failure. Luckily, since free enterprise is legal, and you cannot be outrightly prohibited from changing your job, field, or marketing strategy (depending on who or what you are), you can take your free-speakin' self into the free market and see how well your ideologically-charged business flies among more sympathetic souls. (Granted, this is a less-than-perfect rendition in real life, given that there are monopolies and barriers-to-entry to some fields... call it "implementation hurdles")
"I was surprised to hear that the top bosses also found the company to be one big, sick joke. Unfortunately, now they're suing me under the noncompete clause."
In the long run, though, would you rather (still) be working long-term for an employer who can't stand to hire a part-time stand-up comedian who might be (gasp!) raunchy? Save the stress and let the self-selecting process run its course.
In order to effectively restrict economic retaliation against free speech, you would have to remove most all freedom from commerce (Yes, you must buy the soup made by Nazi-commie Satanist Pedophiles, because they have the freedom to be that way.), and that ends up stifling a whole lot more freedom of a whole lot more people. A large part of the concept of free speech is that better ideas will rise to the top. Although the currents they rise (or sink) on are not centrally, governmentally controlled-- they are free from absolute censorship-- certain forces-- economic and social-- still do (and should) exist to raise and lower ideas, in order to raise the ideas that are worthy, and to deflate the ones that are crackpot.
I can see the tough spot for the company, though. If they can get info on their employees, so can their competitors, their customers, the media, disgruntled folks with a bone to pick... Although it might not right, and it might not be overtly expressed, a company could conceivably lose work or customers due to something widely seen as objectionable. An employer taking the high road might be stuck taking the battering of their association with drunkards, preverts, druggies, by a public who has much less responsibility to be fair and upstanding.
I'm not saying that the companies are justified in disciplining workers for off-job activities, but that it's a much stickier situation than just "corporate fascist bastards bringin' me down".
I see your point-- everyone knew about the lock-ins before they bought. However, just saying that the thing is going to be locked-down and adversarial in the support materials does not excuse it from criticism of being locked down and adversarial.
Although locking the thing down does help preserve the "Apple seamless experience", it still reeks of ulterior motives or at least a simple cop-out. A few obvious disclaimers, an installer that made it clear that you were running non-core software, some sandboxing limitations, and a reasonable attention to stability, and their beloved PR image would be intact.
How does that account, though, for things that aren't interesting or "fun" enough to attract sufficient desire? Many jobs that suck (and are driven primarily by promise of pay) are nonetheless important to the current and future standard of living, and allow people to pursue their hobbies on their own time in far greater comfort and accommodation.
Are you sure on that? AFAIK, "javascript:" links are a common and accepted way to interface between JavaScript and Flash. I've used it on one or two things and it worked without any problems. (Granted, this was building in Flash MX, but the scripts played fine on modern Flash Player implementations).
Unless the Reg article is being misleading, it doesn't look like much more than "XSS is possible in Flash apps". If that's the case, it's less a case of a "vulnerability" as Flash giving developers a hammer, and the devs bashing in their own fingers with it. As in JavaScript, as in PHP, as in CGI, as in any language that accepts input from outside-- never trust the input!
Even if and when you get it running on a non-Apple system, though, you'd still be violating the license, which specifies that it only be run on Apple-badged hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
This, as well as a lot of the open WiFi "trespassing" cases lately, makes me wonder how long it will be before someone is arrested/sued for accessing a world-readable web page just because the publisher didn't really want it to be public, but they didn't know how to lock it down.
Free trade and society works on the principle that the best ideas come about as a natural result of better and more efficient ideas being preferable to worse ones, and by popular preference the better ideas will gain "share" and prosper. By contrast, having a single central source of opinion may not let the best ideas prosper-- that central authority may reject a new idea by inertial resistance, or foolishly reject an old one by novelty or misrepresentation.
By applying a "sin tax" to a practice, it unnaturally weights that practice to become a "worse idea" than unencumbered choice may deem it to be. It's "Central Control Lite", giving the effect of an outright ban, without having to come off as dictatorial.
Of course, this is the idealist theory-- I realize that many people are illogical-- personally self-destructive tendencies, psychological factors (read: people are idiots), and lack (or infeasibility) of long-term thinking mean that sometimes the unpalatable practice of central control may need to be taken in everyone's interest, but it should at least remain unpalatable (and thus scrutinized), so "deviant behavior" doesn't become punished just as severely by the tax law in lieu of the criminal law. (And they can say you're still technically free to do whatever it is, because there's no law against it.)
If the government needs more taxes, the taxes should be levied generally, not on the basis of behavior. (I could see an exception for things like gasoline taxes for road improvements-- the need for that money is directly and rather uniquely connected to the practice of driving.)
You're just another one of those shits who think that wealth is God's way of showing approval of your thieving ways and that poverty is His way of showing disapproval of their unambitious ways.
Actually, it's more like "Wealth is other people's way of showing approval of your valuable activities or resources, and poverty is their way of... well... not."
There might be injustice in the fact that some people are born, raised, or lucky enough to be spontaneously more valuable than others, or that people may use trickery or schemes to inflate their value, but money is, by and large, a reflection of your value to other people.
It could be solved, however, by raising price via a tiered-rate system, with negating incentives for people that use the power-savers. Have residential cost-per-kWH stay low for reasonable or basic use, then go up once you reach one or more luxury thresholds, and offer price breaks to the people who install equipment or follow usage patterns that save power and ease demand.
I'm wondering if this would be more feasible on a substation or neighborhood basis-- you could use larger and uglier, but cheaper, centrally specified/maintained, and more efficient power storage.
There's the time and money put into getting that far into the process.
You're identity is the only thing that can never be stolen from you.
Ahh, but consider dismemberment, or even vaporization...
Your credit rating is your modern "honor". It's just been codified. Unaided reputation has given way to stored statistics, as is necessary in a world when you might trade or interact with people you never will personally meet, in places across the world.
Then there's the problem of enforcement, especially when the profit is worth some more expensive evasion techniques. You don't have the force of much IRL law, and you can't completely reliably ban or punish a physical person when they can get a new CC#, a new IP address, or many other evasive measures, and just set up shop again. I suppose you could take their L$, but it's still much simpler to get money shuffling around among multiple "people" than in the physical world.
So then what we're talking about here is two conflicting rights: Right to freedom of speech vs economic rights/well being of employer.
That depends on what you mean by "freedom of speech". The freedom of speech enshrined in the Constitution of the U.S. is a freedom from government retaliation for speech. This freedom takes into account that government retaliation is overarching and, in a sense, monopolistic. Private entity retaliation (as allowed by the law-- in the form of boycotting or social ostracization), however, is neither inherently overarching nor monopolistic. Although your opinions may find you socially or economically alienated within a large number of people, you are still free seek out and interact with people who are similarly inclined, and your idea can succeed or fail based upon the merits of its popularity (among other factors).
Although the ability to discriminate based upon ideological factors may seem to have harsh consequences, it is pretty much the "teeth" of free speech, without which free speech itself would be much less useful. Without a free person's ability to act upon their reactions to ideas, there is none of the evolutionary natural selection that allows better ideas to rise to the top and worse ideas to fall.
Does anybody really want to make the case that some employer's bottom line is more important than freedom of speech?
It's not about the employer's bottom line, as much as the employer's freedom to act upon their own ideologies.
The real problem is, when most western democracies were writing constitutions, the modern "corporation" as we know it didn't exist. So people like the US founding fathers didn't see the need to enshrine protection against oppression by corporations in the constitution.
So most constitutions don't have much to say about interactions between you and your employer, they tend to address interactions between you and your government.
Incorporation has little to do with it. Even without the limited-liability construction that is a corporation, the people at the top of non-incorporated businesses could still choose their hiring and firing practices with an eye toward ideology.
The annoying part, though, is if you have blabbermouth friends or share a name with a seedy character. That's one of the things that does bug me about this "Google 'em first" tendency.
As for me, I've maintained an open, but rather positive online face. My name comes back with mostly USENET postings where I'm asking legitimate questions or helping people. Personally, my stance is not so much to be secretive, as to do things you'd be proud of and be proud of what you do. Even unpopular ideas, well explained and defended, can give you sympathy to enough people. If you can't proudly defend the things you say, perhaps you should reevaluate them-- this isn't stifling free speech, it's part of distilling sound ideas.
It depends on the business, its size, the publicity of its corporate culture (how quickly someone could make a hypocrite and a fool out of the company if they had the information). Of course, not all companies are this strict, and potential employees should take that into account when choosing a job. If a company is so strict that it's going to delve into your off-time... you either clean up your off-time if it's worth it to you, or you take your employment somewhere else.
Commerce involves humans-- social beings who have real reactions to opinions-- and is, in part, a social interaction. By tying objectionable ideas to you/your company/your product, people are less likely to do business with you, and you will reap less of the fruits of commerce. As long as customers (and vendors, partners, etc.) can and do avoid companies they find objectionable, publicly displaying objectionable ideas can lead to economic hardship.
This effect is based on customers' (and vendors, etc.) ability to make an informed choice about their commercial partners. The only real way to strip the economic consequences from speech or stance is to strip either customers' information or choice, and thus restrict their freedom.
Capitalism isn't free speech, but it is a freedom (free market/enterprise) that carries weight when comparing peoples' relative freedoms. The GG-something-poster above me said that there should be no economic hardship suffered for expressing ideas. I say that this would remove far too many of other people's freedoms-- not necessarily speech freedoms, but freedoms nonetheless-- to implement.
There's no harm, per se, in allowing speech without sanctions. There is, however, no way to create an environment where this is the case, without restricting the commerce-choice freedoms of others. People naturally do not want to interact or do business with people they find objectionable. If the objectionable person is part of a market with reasonable alternatives, oftentimes people will choose to do business with those they find least objectionable.
Commerce is partially a social interaction, and economic prosperity is largely dependent upon successful commerce. If you repulse your potential customers (or other such profitable interactors) by way of your public speech or stances, you will be less able or likely to commit successful commercial transactions, and will find yourself economically disadvantaged. That's just the fact of a free market.
If you are an employee, depending on your role and its visibility, your advancement may be based on how well you sympathize with and reflect the important values of your employer. After all, a group of people who are all ideologically opposed but supposedly working together is a recipe for failure. Luckily, since free enterprise is legal, and you cannot be outrightly prohibited from changing your job, field, or marketing strategy (depending on who or what you are), you can take your free-speakin' self into the free market and see how well your ideologically-charged business flies among more sympathetic souls. (Granted, this is a less-than-perfect rendition in real life, given that there are monopolies and barriers-to-entry to some fields... call it "implementation hurdles")
"I was surprised to hear that the top bosses also found the company to be one big, sick joke. Unfortunately, now they're suing me under the noncompete clause."
In the long run, though, would you rather (still) be working long-term for an employer who can't stand to hire a part-time stand-up comedian who might be (gasp!) raunchy? Save the stress and let the self-selecting process run its course.
Oh, you're clever. Come Monday morning, three or four people named Ed Zantolak are going to be meeting Security at the door.
In order to effectively restrict economic retaliation against free speech, you would have to remove most all freedom from commerce (Yes, you must buy the soup made by Nazi-commie Satanist Pedophiles, because they have the freedom to be that way.), and that ends up stifling a whole lot more freedom of a whole lot more people. A large part of the concept of free speech is that better ideas will rise to the top. Although the currents they rise (or sink) on are not centrally, governmentally controlled-- they are free from absolute censorship-- certain forces-- economic and social-- still do (and should) exist to raise and lower ideas, in order to raise the ideas that are worthy, and to deflate the ones that are crackpot.
I can see the tough spot for the company, though. If they can get info on their employees, so can their competitors, their customers, the media, disgruntled folks with a bone to pick... Although it might not right, and it might not be overtly expressed, a company could conceivably lose work or customers due to something widely seen as objectionable. An employer taking the high road might be stuck taking the battering of their association with drunkards, preverts, druggies, by a public who has much less responsibility to be fair and upstanding.
I'm not saying that the companies are justified in disciplining workers for off-job activities, but that it's a much stickier situation than just "corporate fascist bastards bringin' me down".
I see your point-- everyone knew about the lock-ins before they bought. However, just saying that the thing is going to be locked-down and adversarial in the support materials does not excuse it from criticism of being locked down and adversarial.
Although locking the thing down does help preserve the "Apple seamless experience", it still reeks of ulterior motives or at least a simple cop-out. A few obvious disclaimers, an installer that made it clear that you were running non-core software, some sandboxing limitations, and a reasonable attention to stability, and their beloved PR image would be intact.
How does that account, though, for things that aren't interesting or "fun" enough to attract sufficient desire? Many jobs that suck (and are driven primarily by promise of pay) are nonetheless important to the current and future standard of living, and allow people to pursue their hobbies on their own time in far greater comfort and accommodation.
Would that still work, though, if the Flash file was just a "loader", that downloaded/streamed the video file using Flash as opposed to the browser?
Are you sure on that? AFAIK, "javascript:" links are a common and accepted way to interface between JavaScript and Flash. I've used it on one or two things and it worked without any problems. (Granted, this was building in Flash MX, but the scripts played fine on modern Flash Player implementations).
Unless the Reg article is being misleading, it doesn't look like much more than "XSS is possible in Flash apps". If that's the case, it's less a case of a "vulnerability" as Flash giving developers a hammer, and the devs bashing in their own fingers with it. As in JavaScript, as in PHP, as in CGI, as in any language that accepts input from outside-- never trust the input!
Or am I missing something?
Even if and when you get it running on a non-Apple system, though, you'd still be violating the license, which specifies that it only be run on Apple-badged hardware.