i don't like the fact that they added an Assert keyword but I don't get to make the decisions.
Dude, read up. There is an excellent discussion of the reasoning behind their design decisions. They give a very good justification for adding a keyword; in fact, it's one of the FAQ questions:
2. Why does this facility justify a language change, as opposed to a library solution?
We recognize that a language change is a serious effort, not to be undertaken lightly. The library approach was considered. It was, however, deemed essential that the runtime cost of assertions be negligible if they are disabled. In order to achieve this with a library, the programmer is forced to hard-code each assertion as an if statement. Many programmers would not do this. Either they would omit the if statement and performance would suffer, or they would ignore the facility entirely.
Unlike a lot of other languages (C++ and C# spring to mind), the Java designers have been very tight about letting multitudes of constructs into the language. Java's minimality and internal consistency is one of the reasons it's been so successful, and its designers know this. They are very intelligent people who are making decisions very carefully -- and they're not going to add something to the language unless they have a very good reason.
Google doesn't cache images, and they're what choke web servers, since they generally consume both more bandwidth and more hits than the pages themselves. If you look at the Google cache of a page with six images, you still generate six hits on the actual server. So basically, this would generate a lot of no-revenue traffic for Google without helping the small sites survive Slashdotting much at all.
But no one listens to me but the network admin, and his hands are a bit tied by the school board and the teachers unions. Damn politics.
Well, politics are everywhere -- and working through or around them is always a part of getting reasonable things done. The politics of the public schools are especially, almost intractably, thorny since it's such a small pie of money and everyone has to share it.
But there are a lot of extraordinary people making the schools succeed in spite of this. I had some pretty amazing teachers in my K-12 years, who were succeeding in spite of so many things it makes my head spin. So fighting the good fight to get students and teachers involved with the technology is not a lost cause.
problem is that the schools want to pay about the same that McDonalds or burger King pay's for someone to say "you want fries with that?" but expect 15 years expierience
K-12 schools are invariably on a completely unworkable budget. Thus the "bitter irony" of Microsoft's school donation plan, and so many other technology grants: how much good can it do to plop machines the middle of a school when the facilities are in disrepair, the administration is understaffed, the classes are large, and teachers are underpaid?
It's true, both K-12 schools and their donor often fail to understand the true costs of technology.
Problem is that many teachers unions also BLOCK hiring of these tech people or impose insane restrictions.(and the salary is part of that too!)
Thus the last item in my list -- "for heaven's sake, pay the teachers a decent salary". When the salary pool is way too small, there will be bitter battles over it, and you end up with these silly things that teachers' unions do. Have you ever heard of a programmers' union imposing a restriction like this on the salaries of sysadmins?;)
It seems like almost all of these lackluster "tech in education" ideas are focused on hardware -- and totally miss the point, not only of technology in the classroom, but of how all learning works. While it is a disgrace that so many schools have such out-of-date technology, it's much more a disgrace that so much technology, so costly to schools, is essentially useless.
At colleges and universities, hardware has a clear purpose: students need to do research and write papers. There's a very high demand for that, even if technology isn't playing a direct role in education. And even there, it's often the case that hardware-focused programs waste money.
But in K-12 education, this problem is huge. It's one of the many bitter jokes behind Microsoft's school donation proposal: you can't just plop a lot of hardware in the middle of a school and expect magic.
Guess what? Computers do not magically make learning happen. Students aren't going to get anything out of computers unless either (1) they have an engaged, tech-savvy teacher who finds ways to use computers effectively as a teaching tool, or (2) they have the opportunity to experiment on their own, without having the computers locked off, crippled, or kept off limits for unstructured learning. For hardware to be useful, students need available expertise and, above all, access.
So, I'd suggest spending tech dollars on people. I'm thinking mostly of K-12 here:
Hire non-paranoid sysadmins who know enough about security to open up computers for student use. If technology is inaccessible, due to either technological or physical controls, it's a waste. Students need to be able to experiment to learn.
Give teachers technology training (if they want it -- don't shove it down their throats).
Bring in full- or part-time experts in technology fields to teach technology subjects: programming, graphic design, desktop publishing, system administration. Bring them into the rest of the curriculum, so that (for example) if students are publishing a magazine, they have access to the desktop publishing person.
Such experts are often (obviously) expensive. But there are many decent people who are willing to volunteer part-time. Hire a technology volunteer coordinator, and give them a budget they can do something with.
And, for heaven's sake, pay teachers a decent salary.
I think that's a very unfair reading of Nasar's writing.
She makes it clear throughout the book that many of Nash's colleagues were also geniuses, and that there were all very different from him and from each other. Some were also assholes; some were extraordinarily generous. She gives them their credit both as being geniuses and as not all fitting the same "genius" mold.
Nasar does make the argument that Nash's particular genius and his particular personality were tied together, which is almost certainly true. Certainly Nash was a driven, competitive, egotistical fellow -- and that had a great deal to do with what problems he chose to tackle (usually the ones that would grab the most attention if solved), and how he tackled them (angrily, obsessively, jealous of others working on the same problem).
I didn't read that as anything other than a description of Nash. It is one model of one genius, and certainly Nasar does not present it as a model for all geniuses everywhere. I think your reaction may be based on a (very reasonable!) general irritation with the myth of the genius, and what you read into the book based on that irritation.
As for the movie, I haven't seen it and can't comment on it.
Re:Actually, if you read the book...
on
A Beautiful Mind
·
· Score: 2
The problem was not that his presentation was not well done-- the content of what he was talking about was not very insightful at all.
Right -- the point is that even at the time he was generating these ideas, his talks gave the impression he had no insight, or no idea what he was talking about at all, or even that he was a crackpot. There are some quotes on this from the book (which I don't have here at work; sorry) from people who were excited about hearing something he was reputedly solving, went to hear his talk, and went away completely unimpressed and disappointed.
It is possible that he's lost some of his mental sharpness, but to know that, we'd have to look somewhere other than his talks, since they never displayed that sharpness to begin with.
Actually, if you read the book...
on
A Beautiful Mind
·
· Score: 4, Informative
His presentations were pretty much always like that, even before the schizophrenia. He was a terrible speaker, disorganized and unclear, who gave the impression of babbling nonsense off the top of his head. He was also a terrible teacher, who bored his students out of their skulls. His presentations always made other mathematicians skeptical that he was actually generating any valid ideas at all -- until he managed to get them down on paper, and proved himself a genius.
So I'm not sure that a bumbling presentation now is a sign that "his mind has gone".
Review is right on target
on
A Beautiful Mind
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Indeed, it is an excellent biography, and this review is right on target: the Nash of the book is far more multidimensional and interesting than any Hollywood creation could be.
Something the book draws out wonderfully is the tension between Nash's tremendous virtue as a thinker, and the fact that he was a really dislikable person for much of his life. His attitude generally seemed to be that his intelligence was the sole measure of his merit as a human being, and should open the doors of the world to him regardless of whether or not he was a pleasant or decent person. The places where he was right and wrong about this -- and how that changed during the "lost years" of schizophrenia -- is a fascinating cautionary tale for all of us fringy geeky types, whether fighting mental illness or not.
I'm posting this though a Visi account now (in Minnesota!). They are superb -- reliable, and reasonably priced, no bullshit... and as a bonus I get shell access and a little web space on a Solaris box.
Unforunately, I still have to go through Qwest for my DSL line and modem. When I signed up for the service, which they installed about 6 weeks late, they (oops!) accidentally charged me $600 for the DSL modem, and it took them months to get the charges off my bill. Is lack of competition hurting consumers? Well, let me ask you this: If Qwest had real competition, would they get away with this shit?
Every piece of software installed present a potential threat. Did it come from a reliable source? Does it have security flaws? Obviously, there has a be a reasonable balance between maintaining security and giving users the flexibility they need to do their jobs. I get very irritated when a company won't let me install software I need -- or just want! -- on my desktop at work.
This balance tips increasingly in favor of security as if installation is (1) on a server, (2) on a production server, (3) on a lot of machines. Maintaining that balance is a sysadmin's job. And this guy was definitely not doing his job.
All that said, aren't criminal charges just a little out of line? He should just have been professionally reprimanded, or maybe fired. But a lawsuit?
You can't copyright facts. One of the necessary qualifications for copyrightable material is that it be "original", and facts fail this test. For example, if you copyright a map (of a real place, that is), it covers the coloring, symbols, etc., but not the actual factual meaning of the map (locations of things).
This was the subject of a lawsuit over phone books. One phone book produced sued another for copying the contents of the book, claiming copyright infringement. The court dismissed the suit, saying that the names and numbers in a phone book are factual in nature, and thus not copyrightable. If there were some novelty to the ordering, organization, or selection of the names -- some piece of "original" work -- then it would be copyrightable. But alphabetic ordering certainly fails this test.
Your name, address and personal data are all factual. So your idea doesn't really work. Cute, though.
A standalone executable can always do something malicious -- and that seems to be the issue with the Flash player as well. The reason I brought up applets is that they're supposed to run inside a high-security sandbox, which limits what the code can do. An applet, for example, would through a security exception if you tried to feed it an example like yours with System.exec().
Has there ever been a Java applet virus? Java's very nice security / permissions model should theoretically make this impossible. However, considering that (1) that's only in theory, and (2) just about every browser implementation of Java is complete shit... well, it could happen. Has it?
It still reads like a math equation, there is simply no way to simplify it for the common person to be able to read.
That's completely beside the point. Comprehensibility is not a criterion for first amendment protection. The courts have upheld publishing of the details of making nuclear weapons as protected by the first adendment, even though such descriptions inevitable read like science and are incomprehensible to the layperson.
The simple fact that it is human language, clearly expressing ideas and not merely implementing them, is what needs to be proved to a judge. The fundamental question: is code a machine, or is code speech? The answer, of course, is "both" -- and we need to help judges wrap their brains around that fact.
It seems like a lot of judges who face abstract technology questions -- code as speech, DMCA, etc. -- just don't get it. And can we really blame them? Technology is complicated; can we expect every judge to be an uberhacker?
Perhaps it would be helpful to have some bright programmers set up some concrete examples for judges to consider, which clarify the problems we all see, and help judges refine their intuitions about code and digital information.
For example, to further the "code is protected speech" cause, we could create a full-fledged programming language which reads as plain English, then use it to implement a copy protection circumvention program (DeCSS or the like). This raises all sort of interesting questions: it's English and code; is it protected under the first amendment? Presumably it was before it could be run as a program, so does my inventing a programming language change the status of existing speech? If it's protected as only source code, is an interpreter for that language illegal? Is bundling the English script with the interpreter illegal? And so forth....
...but that's a very thorny example. Are there examples of this kind that we programmers should be producing -- software that makes these theoretical arguments more concrete? Is there anything in this spirit that won't just confuse and/or piss off a judge? What examples do our causes need? We're ready to implement them!
It seems to me that the hypothesis of the gift culture and the findings of this study are entirely compatible. This research does not show, as it author seems to be suggesting, that "scratching an itch" is not the primary motivation for free software development. Rather, it shows that this motivation does not trump traditional economics.
How many people do you know who would work on projects X, Y, and Z... if only they had a bit more time, or wouldn't be giving up tremendous potential income if they did...? How many times have you thought that yourself?
I once heard Oliver Sacks talk about somebody who had been blind their whole life (due to completely opaque cataracts, I believe). A new surgery technique restored the fellow's sight. But when he woke up from surgery, all he could see was an overwhelming mass of incomprehensible color. He couldn't distinguish faces, object, or even simple shapes.
His eyes, it turned out, were functioning perfectly. But because he has been blind during infancy, the visual parts of his brain had never developed -- he had never learned to see.
He did slowly learn, but it was agonizing for him. His newfound sight was overwhelming and sent his brain into chaos. After a long time, with tremendous effort, he could shave for a minute or two in front of the mirror -- but it was absolutely exhausting, and had to finish with the lights off.
Eventually, an unrelated optical infection threatened to take his sight, and he chose to let it run its course. Returning to blindness was a tremendous relief.
I haven't been keeping up with this, and (I admit it) I'm too lazy to read the article carefully. What is the Liberty Alliance's stance on centralization? I certainly don't want Microsoft holding all my info on a centralized server, but I don't trust any of these folks all that much more. I'd really rather have it on my own machine, encrypted, with very specific as-needed permissions for releasing individual details. This should work in such a way that a malicious third party finds it difficult to cross-reference, say, my e-mail account and my medical records having retrieved each individually.
So where does the Liberty Alliance stand on this? Are my wishes way beyond the scope of this project -- is it a question of "which faceless corporation's basket do you trust with all your eggs"?
I don't care if you have a flag decal on your car, if you believe that the United States stands for censorship, bullying, military tribunals, and people being dragged away secretly because of their religious beliefs, you are no patriot, you are a traitor.
Amen to that. I would like to think that, as W keeps saying, America stands for Freedom. I don't want to be "anti-American" or "anti-Freedom". But if they are at odds, and if I have to choose one... then I will stand for Freedom, thank you very much.
I saw a long article on the cover of one of the news rags (Time or Newsweek; can't remember) asking "Why do they hate us?" They had a long, fairly historically informed argument about the breakup of the Ottoman empire, the controversy of the Israeli state, and the rise of fundamentalism. It was a pretty good analysis, but its basic undertone was "the Muslim world is angry and backward".
There's a shorter answer to "Why do they hate us?" in this article about Somalia. I don't care how much our intelligence services swear that the ISP was run by terrorists -- it's just impossible not to read this as, "You primitive black people don't need the internet, and now we're smacking you down to size." When the US has "severely restricted international telephone lines and shut down vitally needed money transfer facilities", that sure sounds like an act of economic terrorism to me -- justified or not.
Remember that when the US bombed that "nerve gas factory" in Somalia, we were never able to present any hard post-hoc evidence that it was not, as the Somalis claim, a medicine factory. Eventually, the Pentagon mostly kind of sort of admitted it was full of shit. "Oops, sorry! We'll be more careful next time!"
"Why do they hate us?" Because we're a bunch of self-righteous bastards who think we can do whatever we want to the rest of the world.
When we cut off the Somalis' access to medicine, phones, internet, and money transfer because of suspected terrorism, we have a responsibility to step in and make sure that those services get provided somehow -- otherwise we are not punishing terrorists, but creating them.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, read up. There is an excellent discussion of the reasoning behind their design decisions. They give a very good justification for adding a keyword; in fact, it's one of the FAQ questions:
Unlike a lot of other languages (C++ and C# spring to mind), the Java designers have been very tight about letting multitudes of constructs into the language. Java's minimality and internal consistency is one of the reasons it's been so successful, and its designers know this. They are very intelligent people who are making decisions very carefully -- and they're not going to add something to the language unless they have a very good reason.
In this case, they have a very good reason.
Google doesn't cache images, and they're what choke web servers, since they generally consume both more bandwidth and more hits than the pages themselves. If you look at the Google cache of a page with six images, you still generate six hits on the actual server. So basically, this would generate a lot of no-revenue traffic for Google without helping the small sites survive Slashdotting much at all.
Charming idea, though.
But no one listens to me but the network admin, and his hands are a bit tied by the school board and the teachers unions. Damn politics.
Well, politics are everywhere -- and working through or around them is always a part of getting reasonable things done. The politics of the public schools are especially, almost intractably, thorny since it's such a small pie of money and everyone has to share it.
But there are a lot of extraordinary people making the schools succeed in spite of this. I had some pretty amazing teachers in my K-12 years, who were succeeding in spite of so many things it makes my head spin. So fighting the good fight to get students and teachers involved with the technology is not a lost cause.
problem is that the schools want to pay about the same that McDonalds or burger King pay's for someone to say "you want fries with that?" but expect 15 years expierience
;)
K-12 schools are invariably on a completely unworkable budget. Thus the "bitter irony" of Microsoft's school donation plan, and so many other technology grants: how much good can it do to plop machines the middle of a school when the facilities are in disrepair, the administration is understaffed, the classes are large, and teachers are underpaid?
It's true, both K-12 schools and their donor often fail to understand the true costs of technology.
Problem is that many teachers unions also BLOCK hiring of these tech people or impose insane restrictions.(and the salary is part of that too!)
Thus the last item in my list -- "for heaven's sake, pay the teachers a decent salary". When the salary pool is way too small, there will be bitter battles over it, and you end up with these silly things that teachers' unions do. Have you ever heard of a programmers' union imposing a restriction like this on the salaries of sysadmins?
At colleges and universities, hardware has a clear purpose: students need to do research and write papers. There's a very high demand for that, even if technology isn't playing a direct role in education. And even there, it's often the case that hardware-focused programs waste money.
But in K-12 education, this problem is huge. It's one of the many bitter jokes behind Microsoft's school donation proposal: you can't just plop a lot of hardware in the middle of a school and expect magic.
Guess what? Computers do not magically make learning happen. Students aren't going to get anything out of computers unless either (1) they have an engaged, tech-savvy teacher who finds ways to use computers effectively as a teaching tool, or (2) they have the opportunity to experiment on their own, without having the computers locked off, crippled, or kept off limits for unstructured learning. For hardware to be useful, students need available expertise and, above all, access.
So, I'd suggest spending tech dollars on people. I'm thinking mostly of K-12 here:
I think that's a very unfair reading of Nasar's writing.
She makes it clear throughout the book that many of Nash's colleagues were also geniuses, and that there were all very different from him and from each other. Some were also assholes; some were extraordinarily generous. She gives them their credit both as being geniuses and as not all fitting the same "genius" mold.
Nasar does make the argument that Nash's particular genius and his particular personality were tied together, which is almost certainly true. Certainly Nash was a driven, competitive, egotistical fellow -- and that had a great deal to do with what problems he chose to tackle (usually the ones that would grab the most attention if solved), and how he tackled them (angrily, obsessively, jealous of others working on the same problem).
I didn't read that as anything other than a description of Nash. It is one model of one genius, and certainly Nasar does not present it as a model for all geniuses everywhere. I think your reaction may be based on a (very reasonable!) general irritation with the myth of the genius, and what you read into the book based on that irritation.
As for the movie, I haven't seen it and can't comment on it.
The problem was not that his presentation was not well done-- the content of what he was talking about was not very insightful at all.
Right -- the point is that even at the time he was generating these ideas, his talks gave the impression he had no insight, or no idea what he was talking about at all, or even that he was a crackpot. There are some quotes on this from the book (which I don't have here at work; sorry) from people who were excited about hearing something he was reputedly solving, went to hear his talk, and went away completely unimpressed and disappointed.
It is possible that he's lost some of his mental sharpness, but to know that, we'd have to look somewhere other than his talks, since they never displayed that sharpness to begin with.
His presentations were pretty much always like that, even before the schizophrenia. He was a terrible speaker, disorganized and unclear, who gave the impression of babbling nonsense off the top of his head. He was also a terrible teacher, who bored his students out of their skulls. His presentations always made other mathematicians skeptical that he was actually generating any valid ideas at all -- until he managed to get them down on paper, and proved himself a genius.
So I'm not sure that a bumbling presentation now is a sign that "his mind has gone".
Indeed, it is an excellent biography, and this review is right on target: the Nash of the book is far more multidimensional and interesting than any Hollywood creation could be.
Something the book draws out wonderfully is the tension between Nash's tremendous virtue as a thinker, and the fact that he was a really dislikable person for much of his life. His attitude generally seemed to be that his intelligence was the sole measure of his merit as a human being, and should open the doors of the world to him regardless of whether or not he was a pleasant or decent person. The places where he was right and wrong about this -- and how that changed during the "lost years" of schizophrenia -- is a fascinating cautionary tale for all of us fringy geeky types, whether fighting mental illness or not.
I'm posting this though a Visi account now (in Minnesota!). They are superb -- reliable, and reasonably priced, no bullshit ... and as a bonus I get shell access and a little web space on a Solaris box.
Unforunately, I still have to go through Qwest for my DSL line and modem. When I signed up for the service, which they installed about 6 weeks late, they (oops!) accidentally charged me $600 for the DSL modem, and it took them months to get the charges off my bill. Is lack of competition hurting consumers? Well, let me ask you this: If Qwest had real competition, would they get away with this shit?
...as far as I understand these things, anyway.
Production systems are controlled environments - last thing you need is some unaudited, unexpected and unauthorised changes messing them up.
...or opening up a security hole.
Every piece of software installed present a potential threat. Did it come from a reliable source? Does it have security flaws? Obviously, there has a be a reasonable balance between maintaining security and giving users the flexibility they need to do their jobs. I get very irritated when a company won't let me install software I need -- or just want! -- on my desktop at work.
This balance tips increasingly in favor of security as if installation is (1) on a server, (2) on a production server, (3) on a lot of machines. Maintaining that balance is a sysadmin's job. And this guy was definitely not doing his job.
All that said, aren't criminal charges just a little out of line? He should just have been professionally reprimanded, or maybe fired. But a lawsuit?
You can't copyright facts. One of the necessary qualifications for copyrightable material is that it be "original", and facts fail this test. For example, if you copyright a map (of a real place, that is), it covers the coloring, symbols, etc., but not the actual factual meaning of the map (locations of things).
This was the subject of a lawsuit over phone books. One phone book produced sued another for copying the contents of the book, claiming copyright infringement. The court dismissed the suit, saying that the names and numbers in a phone book are factual in nature, and thus not copyrightable. If there were some novelty to the ordering, organization, or selection of the names -- some piece of "original" work -- then it would be copyrightable. But alphabetic ordering certainly fails this test.
Your name, address and personal data are all factual. So your idea doesn't really work. Cute, though.
A standalone executable can always do something malicious -- and that seems to be the issue with the Flash player as well. The reason I brought up applets is that they're supposed to run inside a high-security sandbox, which limits what the code can do. An applet, for example, would through a security exception if you tried to feed it an example like yours with System.exec().
Has there ever been a Java applet virus? Java's very nice security / permissions model should theoretically make this impossible. However, considering that (1) that's only in theory, and (2) just about every browser implementation of Java is complete shit ... well, it could happen. Has it?
So basically, you're asking Slashdot how ethically principled you are?
Sorry, man, but you're the only person who can make that call.
It still reads like a math equation, there is simply no way to simplify it for the common person to be able to read.
That's completely beside the point. Comprehensibility is not a criterion for first amendment protection. The courts have upheld publishing of the details of making nuclear weapons as protected by the first adendment, even though such descriptions inevitable read like science and are incomprehensible to the layperson.
The simple fact that it is human language, clearly expressing ideas and not merely implementing them, is what needs to be proved to a judge. The fundamental question: is code a machine, or is code speech? The answer, of course, is "both" -- and we need to help judges wrap their brains around that fact.
It seems like a lot of judges who face abstract technology questions -- code as speech, DMCA, etc. -- just don't get it. And can we really blame them? Technology is complicated; can we expect every judge to be an uberhacker?
Perhaps it would be helpful to have some bright programmers set up some concrete examples for judges to consider, which clarify the problems we all see, and help judges refine their intuitions about code and digital information.
For example, to further the "code is protected speech" cause, we could create a full-fledged programming language which reads as plain English, then use it to implement a copy protection circumvention program (DeCSS or the like). This raises all sort of interesting questions: it's English and code; is it protected under the first amendment? Presumably it was before it could be run as a program, so does my inventing a programming language change the status of existing speech? If it's protected as only source code, is an interpreter for that language illegal? Is bundling the English script with the interpreter illegal? And so forth....
...but that's a very thorny example. Are there examples of this kind that we programmers should be producing -- software that makes these theoretical arguments more concrete? Is there anything in this spirit that won't just confuse and/or piss off a judge? What examples do our causes need? We're ready to implement them!
It seems to me that the hypothesis of the gift culture and the findings of this study are entirely compatible. This research does not show, as it author seems to be suggesting, that "scratching an itch" is not the primary motivation for free software development. Rather, it shows that this motivation does not trump traditional economics.
... if only they had a bit more time, or wouldn't be giving up tremendous potential income if they did...? How many times have you thought that yourself?
How many people do you know who would work on projects X, Y, and Z
I once heard Oliver Sacks talk about somebody who had been blind their whole life (due to completely opaque cataracts, I believe). A new surgery technique restored the fellow's sight. But when he woke up from surgery, all he could see was an overwhelming mass of incomprehensible color. He couldn't distinguish faces, object, or even simple shapes.
His eyes, it turned out, were functioning perfectly. But because he has been blind during infancy, the visual parts of his brain had never developed -- he had never learned to see.
He did slowly learn, but it was agonizing for him. His newfound sight was overwhelming and sent his brain into chaos. After a long time, with tremendous effort, he could shave for a minute or two in front of the mirror -- but it was absolutely exhausting, and had to finish with the lights off.
Eventually, an unrelated optical infection threatened to take his sight, and he chose to let it run its course. Returning to blindness was a tremendous relief.
Perhaps slightly off-topic, but fascinating!
I haven't been keeping up with this, and (I admit it) I'm too lazy to read the article carefully. What is the Liberty Alliance's stance on centralization? I certainly don't want Microsoft holding all my info on a centralized server, but I don't trust any of these folks all that much more. I'd really rather have it on my own machine, encrypted, with very specific as-needed permissions for releasing individual details. This should work in such a way that a malicious third party finds it difficult to cross-reference, say, my e-mail account and my medical records having retrieved each individually.
So where does the Liberty Alliance stand on this? Are my wishes way beyond the scope of this project -- is it a question of "which faceless corporation's basket do you trust with all your eggs"?
Actually it was a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan not Somalia.
Duh -- right you are. It's so hard not to be a dumb American. <:)
I don't care if you have a flag decal on your car, if you believe that the United States stands for censorship, bullying, military tribunals, and people being dragged away secretly because of their religious beliefs, you are no patriot, you are a traitor.
... then I will stand for Freedom, thank you very much.
Amen to that. I would like to think that, as W keeps saying, America stands for Freedom. I don't want to be "anti-American" or "anti-Freedom". But if they are at odds, and if I have to choose one
Ha, right you are. Well, here I stand, a living example of US ignorance!
I saw a long article on the cover of one of the news rags (Time or Newsweek; can't remember) asking "Why do they hate us?" They had a long, fairly historically informed argument about the breakup of the Ottoman empire, the controversy of the Israeli state, and the rise of fundamentalism. It was a pretty good analysis, but its basic undertone was "the Muslim world is angry and backward".
There's a shorter answer to "Why do they hate us?" in this article about Somalia. I don't care how much our intelligence services swear that the ISP was run by terrorists -- it's just impossible not to read this as, "You primitive black people don't need the internet, and now we're smacking you down to size." When the US has "severely restricted international telephone lines and shut down vitally needed money transfer facilities", that sure sounds like an act of economic terrorism to me -- justified or not.
Remember that when the US bombed that "nerve gas factory" in Somalia, we were never able to present any hard post-hoc evidence that it was not, as the Somalis claim, a medicine factory. Eventually, the Pentagon mostly kind of sort of admitted it was full of shit. "Oops, sorry! We'll be more careful next time!"
"Why do they hate us?" Because we're a bunch of self-righteous bastards who think we can do whatever we want to the rest of the world.
When we cut off the Somalis' access to medicine, phones, internet, and money transfer because of suspected terrorism, we have a responsibility to step in and make sure that those services get provided somehow -- otherwise we are not punishing terrorists, but creating them.