I am NOT saying Tolkien invented all of those things. I am saying, in the context of the fantasy genre, in which all of these things co-exist and have a specific relationship with one another... that template is 100% based on Tolkien.
At which point, people will write scenarios which are kind of mostly similar to what Tolkien wrote.. or they consciously reject Tolkien and then go against what he laid out.
But if you write something which has humans, elves, dwarves, wizards and these other elements... you do it either in homage to (ie being consistent with), or in opposition to (ie being explicitly different to) what Tolkien wrote.
What you can't do is whip up a story involving these elements without Tolkien being an underlying influence -- either as something you accept or reject.
But what we consider the modern fantasy genre simply cannot exist without Tolkien as a reference point. Because it was the first time these things all existed together.
Tolkien most assuredly did not invent literature, or the epic saga, or many many other things. What he did do it put together a coherent world in which all of these creatures and things coexist... and thereafter all things which are rooted in this kind of world are all forever judged as being relative to Tolkien.
Or, alternatively, because I think people saying LoTR was about socialism, or the left/right, or whatever -- to be largely bullshit by academics making claims about Tolkien which may or may not be founded in reality.
It's like art people sitting around discussing the metaphysical and cultural significance of a can of shit. I find most of this stuff to be something you could generate by algorithm, which means I tend to view it as meaningless drivel and fluff.
Hmmm.. it isn't not not true because we can't not retroactively make it not untrue by leveraging bad grammar and sophistry to decree that it was true when it may well have not have been at the time we said it wasn't?
You shouldn't not don't write sentences which aren't like that, unless you don't not want people to not understand you.;-)
Honesty, the nerd tendency to reject the statement "but at the end of the day we know we're rationalizing it" is sad, pathetic, hilarious, and fascinating.
This is collective hand-wringing about the mechanics of the good guys and the bad guys, and how to make everything self consistent.
The collective wedgie which seems required by this scenario would be completely epic.
Please, do carry on. This shit is funny. All I can think of is Comic Book Guy saying "it clearly shows here that the fell beasts are autonomous, and capable of performing mayhem without oversight, and your lack of understanding demonstrated you clearly haven't fully read Smith's treatise on the metaphysical nature of non-Elven magic".
Do the ladies swoon over this stuff? Because my wife won't stop laughing at me.;-)
The reality is, most OSS developers aren't making a product.
They're working with a piece of software as a hobby. If it was a product you'd likely be legally required to implement these features.
Which is one of the many many reasons OSS doesn't always get taken seriously in business -- because the attitude of "just RTFM", or "figure it out for yourself" generally means "some guy bodged together something and can't understand why you won't give up commercially supported software to use it".
As long as the attitude of "I don't care if you need this feature" exists, the corresponding attitude of "why would I run software written by unaccountable, whiny punks?" will continue.
You don't have a product. You have a collection of parts left as an exercise for the reader.
Spoken like a true drooling idiot who has lost all critical thinking skills.
Look, I drank the Ayn Rand Koolaid for a while. Which means I'm now good at spotting the lies and bullshit associated with it. If you want to continue to be an idiot who falls back to ad hominem attacks when people disagree with you... go ahead. But fuck off and leave me alone.
Don't fucking pretend it's because you have some natural laws and facts on your side.
I say again, Capitalism is NOT a law of nature, and Uber deciding laws don't apply to them is nothing more than a corporation deciding they should play by different rules. But Capitalism isn't a law of physics, it's a school of economics -- or more accurately, it's an observation that "people own stuff".
Yes, choice is a strong aspect of the market. But if you think the market achieves perfect outcomes in the long run just simply because it's the market... you're delusional.
Pure capitalism is based on as much fantasy and bullshit as pure communism -- neither can exist on their own as claimed, and neither ever will. Both of these systems of though assume perfect outcomes will happen once everyone is forced to follow the irrational claims laid out in them. Oooh, the magic unicorns on my side say this must be true so it is.
Such bullshit.
If you think removing all government regulations will produce anything except anarchy, you really need to step back and look at reality, and what the actual evidence is for your ideology, instead of just thinking your ideology is 100% complete and infallible.
Then it just becomes an appeal to higher authority, and exactly like any other religion -- full of zealots who just keep repeating things they don't comprehend as if it's magic.
The free market as moral ideal is as full of shit as Karl Marx ever was. Which means between those two extremes might be some truth in both camps.
Taken to their extremes, both of these ideologies collapse under their own crap. Neither is, in fact, an innate and natural fact.
Or, alternately, Lew Rockwell and others are poncy, pretentious literati who deem themselves the arbiters of what it and isn't true, and nobody gives a shit what they think?
Tolkien himself said:
I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history â" true or feignedâ" with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.
So, maybe the people who are saying "it is or it isn't this" are largely full of shit?
(Which, I think, is what you said in your last paragraph before the quote).
LOL... heresy!! Turn in your nerd badge!! Burn the witch!
Honestly though, you don't have to like Tolkien, but you also can't say anything about the modern fantasy genre without in some way referencing him... wizards, elves, dwarves, hobbits, and dragons... you either have these things in the idiom of Tolkien, or you consciously have them not in the idiom of Tolkien.
But you can't have any of these things without either following his roadmap, or explicitly rejecting it. You certainly can't have those things independent of what he did.
So, from D&D to Skyrim, and pretty much everything in between -- none of it happens without in some way referencing Tolkien.
In that regards, the significance of his work is impossible to underestimate. The quality as literature at this point is overshadowed by it's significance as literature.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and Uber is filling that vacuum.
Look, you're way abusing that metaphor.
See, "the market" isn't "nature", and "undercutting competition by ignoring laws and regulations" isn't a vacuum. That is a complete lie.
Capitalism isn't a natural law of the universe. It's a belief system which came out of observations about how things were structured. This whole crap about "yarg, let teh companies do as they please" is basically being stupid and ignoring all of the reasons why we have these laws in the first place.
And we have those laws because in the past greedy, shady douchebags with little regard for the welfare of others have decided to act like greedy, shady douchebags. And this whole crap of "people are free to not buy from greedy, shay douchebags" is so so much garbage it isn't funny.
In the same way that melamine laced baby formula in China (and pet food in North America) wasn't a choice where someone could say "hey, gee, I know, I'll save a few bucks and buy the toxic stuff". By the time people know about the corners greedy, shady douchebags have cut... it's simply too damned late, and people can die to pad the profits of greedy, shay douchebags.
The notion that the market works because people have access to information is a complete lie... because the people in that market will always be trying to figure out how to fuck over their customers.
The 'market' is an abstraction. It sure as hell isn't some noble construct which achieves perfect outcomes in the long run. The 'market' is amoral, and doesn't give a sweet damn if people die.
Because in the long run it devolves to scams, fraud, collusions and cartels.
Your previous 'market' is a complete lie which has never existed, cannot exist, and will never achieve the perfect outcomes you blindly believe it will.
The rest of us don't want to live in a world where all of the advantages are in the hands of greedy, shady douchebags. And we certainly don't want to live in one predicated on the bullshit lie of consumers making "choices" among lying bastards giving them false information.
Honestly, you have so little understanding of the real world if you really think crap like safety regulations come down to consumer choice and intrusive government. You're romanticizing something which has never existed as you imagine it to be, and which simply can't exist as you imagine it.
Sorry, but you can't run a society on the fucking Ferengi Rules of Acquisition -- which is what the laissez faire capitalists think we should have.
The free market is bloody lie, and especially all of those wonderful outcomes people attribute to it. The market is the collective behavior of a bunch of sociopaths, that's it.
Yeah, I have seen far too many people who want to run as root/admin because it's more convenient.
And I have seen far too many people staring at a screen with that "oh, shit, what do I do now?" look because they just royally fsck'd their system.
In fact, I've known several admins who I subsequently came to realize were mostly faking it after several instances of completely hosing a system because they just thought it was easier to stay logged in as root/admin "just in case".
Same with all of the crap software on Windows which says "oh, just disable UAC or this software to work". or "this software needs to run as root/admin". Yeah, sorry, but no. If you're software insists I disable sane security on my system, your software sucks, and you were too damned lazy to write better code. Hell, I saw one thing years ago which said "the admin user should have a blank password for this software to work"... and it didn't get installed.
The problem is people get into that period where they think "I'm a big boy admin now, I don't need safeguards because I'm that good". Those people are generally dangerous and reckless fools.
Honestly though, you're clearly not who Ubuntu us going after.
I'm running 14.something in a VM because I was curious about it.
As far as I can tell, there is no root account I could log into directly, the system seems to be set up to cater to desktop users who don't know or care what systemd and gnome 3 even are.
It seems a decent enough desktop platform, but I'd hardly call it a nerd hobbyists platform.
In which case, chances are the people who this is targeted at simply don't care about the collective nerd angst about how Ubuntu isn't pure enough, or geeky enough.
This sounds like complaining that building blocks don't adhere to the best practices of structural engineering. It's kind of missing the point.
Basically law enforcement doesn't want to have to abide by the law. They want to be able to use any tool they can find, without oversight, and they don't want it challenged in courts.
Basically they want a blank check to do anything they want.
They want to be able to say "your honor, he's guilty because we say he's guilty, and pay no attention to the evidence we're hiding about how we arrived at this conclusion".
Needing warrants and adhering to the law has apparently become too inconvenient. Because the police are either corrupt, lazy, or incompetent.
Isn't that attack another proof that fanaticism == stupidity?
One might argue that there were two sets of fanatics with their own brands of stupidity at play here.
Would these same 'Christians' be outraged if someone staged a "burn the baby jeezus in effigy" rally?
I strongly suspect they would. In which case, they're not defending free speech as an abstract principle. They're defending their own rights to be assholes, and nothing more.
I'm betting these same damned Christians would show up carrying guns if people held a "Jeezus has a Tiny Penis, and God is For Idiots" rally.
And somehow they'd claim it's entirely different.
All I see if one screeching band of religious people successfully bating another band of screeching religious people.
And I'm betting you could rile up the Texans with something similarly inflammatory.
"Officials said they don't want to reveal so much that it gives criminals clues about how to defeat the devices. Law-enforcement officials also don't want to reveal information that would give new ammunition to defense lawyers in prosecutions where warrants weren't used, according to officials involved in the discussions."
If we reveal the extent to which we're actually breaking the law, the lawyers might be able to argue that by bypassing the law the shit we've done is in admissible in court.
And, once again, the police have decided it's far more convenient if they can simply lie or conceal what they actually do, so they don't have to be under scrutiny.
Sorry, but no. Either you use this technology legally, with warrants as legally required.. or you fuck the hell off and don't use it.
This is no better than the National Police Perjury Program best known as parallel construction -- in which we encourage law enforcement to lie about how they did things to deny you a valid legal defense.
If this is what the police want, fuck 'em. When the police no longer believe the law applies to them, they've become a whole new problem.
Complaining that defense lawyers being able to challenge an illegal wire tap means law enforcement is either corrupt or incompetent.
The trouble with impounding cars is that those aren't the people who are behind it all.
Within the first week of Uber showing up in a city, you can hear quite plainly how this is an illegal cab, frequently operating with improper licensing and insurance, and which is in violation of the law.
At which point, you are either a gullible fool who thinks he is going to 'fight the power'. Or you have willfully said "fuck it, I'll keep being an illegal cab and make some money".
What you can't argue is that poor little you had no idea you were breaking the law.
And then that becomes your damned problem, and you don't get to claim to be an innocent victim. Because you knew damned well what you were doing was illegal.
You've made yourself a patsy so a tech startup who doesn't give a crap about you can continue their self created mythology of being the underdog fighting for the little guy.
But at the end of the day, it's the people driving the cars who are breaking the law.
Got talked into thinking you were doing this out of some sense of nobility? Bummer dude.
I'm betting Uber isn't paying anybody's legal bills or fines. Because even Uber knows that the suckers on the front lines are expendable to them.
Ah, but Uber's story only works if they can basically re-define what the local law is according to their own wishes.
Uber likes to hide behind their lie about only being a tech company, and they love to stress this whole "little guy fighting for the underdog".
The problem is they have to deal with reality, and the Libertarian notion of subverting regulations making you a noble and better person isn't an argument which is accepted in most places. In fact, it will simply get you arrested or fined.
The regulations exist. You are subject to those regulations. Your own perceived nobility in deciding those regulations don't apply to you is your damned problem, but it doesn't make it fact.
And the fact is, in places which have regulations around the licensing and operations of commercial vehicles -- you don't simply get to decree that the law doesn't apply to you because you stepped in unicorn poop.
I figure the people who run Uber are either collectively delusional, or collectively lying bastards. What they aren't is magically exempt from laws and regulations because they claim to be.
And if they don't like it... that's really too damned bad for them. And, like a child throwing a temper tantrum, it doesn't change a damned thing.
Uber isn't some magical entity which exists outside of laws and regulations, no matter what its owners keep trying to tell us.
Uber has basically said "why, no, we're special because we say so, and we don't give a crap about your laws", and then they go on to say "we're not a transport company, we're a tech company, who happens to behave like a transport company".
I have precisely zero sympathy for Uber, and I think more places should be impounding cars and arresting people who have basically decided "fuck you, I'm going to run a commercial car service and keep saying loudly how I'm not a commercial car service".
This bullshit about "Long-term, established transportation companies with powerful lobbying arms or the newcomer making use of disruptive technology?" is exactly that... it's bullshit. It's how Uber tells their underdog story, but it's a complete lie.
This has nothing to do with established players with powerful lobbying arms. This has everything to do with how governments have regulated commercial vehicles, and Uber using their bullshit story to sound like the plucky underdog.
Uber is a tech startup, acting like a spoiled child, and decreeing they aren't subject to laws.
The whole underdog thing makes for great PR copy, but is otherwise a complete fucking lie.
Honestly, though, giving web designers access to scripting on the client side has produced a LOT of shit code and security holes.
So, if you're in the business of letting all the guys know, can you tell them to stop being so incompetent at security?
Because the average web developer seems to be pretty stupid and useless when it comes to writing code which doesn't want to become a gaping security hole.
No, the founding fathers had seen some pretty bad behavior from kings and tyrants, and were people who understood the big picture.
They certainly didn't anticipate everything, but they sure as hell tried to lay the groundwork for trying to formulate how to prevent this crap.
And then people got all scared and lost their shot and decided "oh, fuck all those constitutional protections, we're scared".
The problem with the FBI is they moronically believe that if they poke holes in crypto that it would still have any value. Because they're too fucking concerned about getting this information they can't stop to think that if there are holes for them, there's holes for anybody else to use.
What the FBI et al are basically saying amounts to "everybody should leave their house unlocked in case we need to go in, and we will go 'la la la' and pretend that nobody else will do this".
The FBI are either collectively too fucking stupid, or too fucking fascist to comprehend that crypto only really works if you don't punch holes in it.
But, hey, between law enforcement hiding how often they use that Stingray thing, and the "manaul of institutional perjury" which is parallel construction -- maybe it's time we stopped treating them as anything but a corrupt organization which needs a serious culling?
Fire 'em, arrest 'em, hang 'em -- it doesn't matter. These clowns have decided the law doesn't apply to them, so they don't deserve to be treated like the good guys.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not understanding what I am saying.
I am NOT saying Tolkien invented all of those things. I am saying, in the context of the fantasy genre, in which all of these things co-exist and have a specific relationship with one another ... that template is 100% based on Tolkien.
At which point, people will write scenarios which are kind of mostly similar to what Tolkien wrote .. or they consciously reject Tolkien and then go against what he laid out.
But if you write something which has humans, elves, dwarves, wizards and these other elements ... you do it either in homage to (ie being consistent with), or in opposition to (ie being explicitly different to) what Tolkien wrote.
What you can't do is whip up a story involving these elements without Tolkien being an underlying influence -- either as something you accept or reject.
But what we consider the modern fantasy genre simply cannot exist without Tolkien as a reference point. Because it was the first time these things all existed together.
Tolkien most assuredly did not invent literature, or the epic saga, or many many other things. What he did do it put together a coherent world in which all of these creatures and things coexist ... and thereafter all things which are rooted in this kind of world are all forever judged as being relative to Tolkien.
Or, alternatively, because I think people saying LoTR was about socialism, or the left/right, or whatever -- to be largely bullshit by academics making claims about Tolkien which may or may not be founded in reality.
It's like art people sitting around discussing the metaphysical and cultural significance of a can of shit. I find most of this stuff to be something you could generate by algorithm, which means I tend to view it as meaningless drivel and fluff.
Hmmm .. it isn't not not true because we can't not retroactively make it not untrue by leveraging bad grammar and sophistry to decree that it was true when it may well have not have been at the time we said it wasn't?
You shouldn't not don't write sentences which aren't like that, unless you don't not want people to not understand you. ;-)
Honesty, the nerd tendency to reject the statement "but at the end of the day we know we're rationalizing it" is sad, pathetic, hilarious, and fascinating.
This is collective hand-wringing about the mechanics of the good guys and the bad guys, and how to make everything self consistent.
The collective wedgie which seems required by this scenario would be completely epic.
Please, do carry on. This shit is funny. All I can think of is Comic Book Guy saying "it clearly shows here that the fell beasts are autonomous, and capable of performing mayhem without oversight, and your lack of understanding demonstrated you clearly haven't fully read Smith's treatise on the metaphysical nature of non-Elven magic".
Do the ladies swoon over this stuff? Because my wife won't stop laughing at me. ;-)
Well, yeah, because it's largely a marketing term latched onto by the press.
It's not used by people in the tech industry.
The reality is, most OSS developers aren't making a product.
They're working with a piece of software as a hobby. If it was a product you'd likely be legally required to implement these features.
Which is one of the many many reasons OSS doesn't always get taken seriously in business -- because the attitude of "just RTFM", or "figure it out for yourself" generally means "some guy bodged together something and can't understand why you won't give up commercially supported software to use it".
As long as the attitude of "I don't care if you need this feature" exists, the corresponding attitude of "why would I run software written by unaccountable, whiny punks?" will continue.
You don't have a product. You have a collection of parts left as an exercise for the reader.
Spoken like a true drooling idiot who has lost all critical thinking skills.
Look, I drank the Ayn Rand Koolaid for a while. Which means I'm now good at spotting the lies and bullshit associated with it. If you want to continue to be an idiot who falls back to ad hominem attacks when people disagree with you ... go ahead. But fuck off and leave me alone.
Don't fucking pretend it's because you have some natural laws and facts on your side.
I say again, Capitalism is NOT a law of nature, and Uber deciding laws don't apply to them is nothing more than a corporation deciding they should play by different rules. But Capitalism isn't a law of physics, it's a school of economics -- or more accurately, it's an observation that "people own stuff".
Yes, choice is a strong aspect of the market. But if you think the market achieves perfect outcomes in the long run just simply because it's the market ... you're delusional.
Pure capitalism is based on as much fantasy and bullshit as pure communism -- neither can exist on their own as claimed, and neither ever will. Both of these systems of though assume perfect outcomes will happen once everyone is forced to follow the irrational claims laid out in them. Oooh, the magic unicorns on my side say this must be true so it is.
Such bullshit.
If you think removing all government regulations will produce anything except anarchy, you really need to step back and look at reality, and what the actual evidence is for your ideology, instead of just thinking your ideology is 100% complete and infallible.
Then it just becomes an appeal to higher authority, and exactly like any other religion -- full of zealots who just keep repeating things they don't comprehend as if it's magic.
The free market as moral ideal is as full of shit as Karl Marx ever was. Which means between those two extremes might be some truth in both camps.
Taken to their extremes, both of these ideologies collapse under their own crap. Neither is, in fact, an innate and natural fact.
Stop pretending otherwise.
Or, alternately, Lew Rockwell and others are poncy, pretentious literati who deem themselves the arbiters of what it and isn't true, and nobody gives a shit what they think?
Tolkien himself said:
So, maybe the people who are saying "it is or it isn't this" are largely full of shit?
(Which, I think, is what you said in your last paragraph before the quote).
LOL ... heresy!! Turn in your nerd badge!! Burn the witch!
Honestly though, you don't have to like Tolkien, but you also can't say anything about the modern fantasy genre without in some way referencing him ... wizards, elves, dwarves, hobbits, and dragons ... you either have these things in the idiom of Tolkien, or you consciously have them not in the idiom of Tolkien.
But you can't have any of these things without either following his roadmap, or explicitly rejecting it. You certainly can't have those things independent of what he did.
So, from D&D to Skyrim, and pretty much everything in between -- none of it happens without in some way referencing Tolkien.
In that regards, the significance of his work is impossible to underestimate. The quality as literature at this point is overshadowed by it's significance as literature.
So, nerds like nerdy things, then? And such nerdyness leads to an affinity for nerdy things?
Well, I'm totally shocked I tell you.
This sounds like a fluff piece written to appeal to neither scientists nor nerds, and passed off as some great insight.
Look, you're way abusing that metaphor.
See, "the market" isn't "nature", and "undercutting competition by ignoring laws and regulations" isn't a vacuum. That is a complete lie.
Capitalism isn't a natural law of the universe. It's a belief system which came out of observations about how things were structured. This whole crap about "yarg, let teh companies do as they please" is basically being stupid and ignoring all of the reasons why we have these laws in the first place.
And we have those laws because in the past greedy, shady douchebags with little regard for the welfare of others have decided to act like greedy, shady douchebags. And this whole crap of "people are free to not buy from greedy, shay douchebags" is so so much garbage it isn't funny.
In the same way that melamine laced baby formula in China (and pet food in North America) wasn't a choice where someone could say "hey, gee, I know, I'll save a few bucks and buy the toxic stuff". By the time people know about the corners greedy, shady douchebags have cut ... it's simply too damned late, and people can die to pad the profits of greedy, shay douchebags.
The notion that the market works because people have access to information is a complete lie ... because the people in that market will always be trying to figure out how to fuck over their customers.
The 'market' is an abstraction. It sure as hell isn't some noble construct which achieves perfect outcomes in the long run. The 'market' is amoral, and doesn't give a sweet damn if people die.
Because in the long run it devolves to scams, fraud, collusions and cartels.
Your previous 'market' is a complete lie which has never existed, cannot exist, and will never achieve the perfect outcomes you blindly believe it will.
The rest of us don't want to live in a world where all of the advantages are in the hands of greedy, shady douchebags. And we certainly don't want to live in one predicated on the bullshit lie of consumers making "choices" among lying bastards giving them false information.
Honestly, you have so little understanding of the real world if you really think crap like safety regulations come down to consumer choice and intrusive government. You're romanticizing something which has never existed as you imagine it to be, and which simply can't exist as you imagine it.
Sorry, but you can't run a society on the fucking Ferengi Rules of Acquisition -- which is what the laissez faire capitalists think we should have.
The free market is bloody lie, and especially all of those wonderful outcomes people attribute to it. The market is the collective behavior of a bunch of sociopaths, that's it.
Yeah, I have seen far too many people who want to run as root/admin because it's more convenient.
And I have seen far too many people staring at a screen with that "oh, shit, what do I do now?" look because they just royally fsck'd their system.
In fact, I've known several admins who I subsequently came to realize were mostly faking it after several instances of completely hosing a system because they just thought it was easier to stay logged in as root/admin "just in case".
Same with all of the crap software on Windows which says "oh, just disable UAC or this software to work". or "this software needs to run as root/admin". Yeah, sorry, but no. If you're software insists I disable sane security on my system, your software sucks, and you were too damned lazy to write better code. Hell, I saw one thing years ago which said "the admin user should have a blank password for this software to work" ... and it didn't get installed.
The problem is people get into that period where they think "I'm a big boy admin now, I don't need safeguards because I'm that good". Those people are generally dangerous and reckless fools.
You're 100% correct.
My bias is that I'm tired of listening to the bullshit from various religions about how awesome they are, and how evil everyone else is.
My bias is you should be free to have your own religion, but generally shut the fuck up and don't make it the problem of the rest of the world.
One set of simpering, drooling morons is the same as another.
Guess what, Skippy, I've been running Linux since Slackware 0.99 on a gazillion floppies in 1993
I've been a UNIX developer and Admin.
I know how to run Linux, and I even know how to use sudo. But Ubuntu isn't set up to *want* you to use root.
Ubuntu has said "there is a user who owns the system, and we'll use something like UAC to get permissions on demand".
Ubuntu isn't targeting people who need to feel like "teh lunix exparts".
And, really, that's OK. Because Ubuntu isn't going for smarmy assholes like you who need to log into root and wave around their penis.
Why why don't you either man up and post without being an AC, or shut the fuck up and stop acting like a whiny little punk?
Honestly though, you're clearly not who Ubuntu us going after.
I'm running 14.something in a VM because I was curious about it.
As far as I can tell, there is no root account I could log into directly, the system seems to be set up to cater to desktop users who don't know or care what systemd and gnome 3 even are.
It seems a decent enough desktop platform, but I'd hardly call it a nerd hobbyists platform.
In which case, chances are the people who this is targeted at simply don't care about the collective nerd angst about how Ubuntu isn't pure enough, or geeky enough.
This sounds like complaining that building blocks don't adhere to the best practices of structural engineering. It's kind of missing the point.
Basically law enforcement doesn't want to have to abide by the law. They want to be able to use any tool they can find, without oversight, and they don't want it challenged in courts.
Basically they want a blank check to do anything they want.
They want to be able to say "your honor, he's guilty because we say he's guilty, and pay no attention to the evidence we're hiding about how we arrived at this conclusion".
Needing warrants and adhering to the law has apparently become too inconvenient. Because the police are either corrupt, lazy, or incompetent.
But, we already knew that.
One might argue that there were two sets of fanatics with their own brands of stupidity at play here.
Would these same 'Christians' be outraged if someone staged a "burn the baby jeezus in effigy" rally?
I strongly suspect they would. In which case, they're not defending free speech as an abstract principle. They're defending their own rights to be assholes, and nothing more.
I'm betting these same damned Christians would show up carrying guns if people held a "Jeezus has a Tiny Penis, and God is For Idiots" rally.
And somehow they'd claim it's entirely different.
All I see if one screeching band of religious people successfully bating another band of screeching religious people.
And I'm betting you could rile up the Texans with something similarly inflammatory.
If we reveal the extent to which we're actually breaking the law, the lawyers might be able to argue that by bypassing the law the shit we've done is in admissible in court.
And, once again, the police have decided it's far more convenient if they can simply lie or conceal what they actually do, so they don't have to be under scrutiny.
Sorry, but no. Either you use this technology legally, with warrants as legally required .. or you fuck the hell off and don't use it.
This is no better than the National Police Perjury Program best known as parallel construction -- in which we encourage law enforcement to lie about how they did things to deny you a valid legal defense.
If this is what the police want, fuck 'em. When the police no longer believe the law applies to them, they've become a whole new problem.
Complaining that defense lawyers being able to challenge an illegal wire tap means law enforcement is either corrupt or incompetent.
Lying bastards.
Within the first week of Uber showing up in a city, you can hear quite plainly how this is an illegal cab, frequently operating with improper licensing and insurance, and which is in violation of the law.
At which point, you are either a gullible fool who thinks he is going to 'fight the power'. Or you have willfully said "fuck it, I'll keep being an illegal cab and make some money".
What you can't argue is that poor little you had no idea you were breaking the law.
And then that becomes your damned problem, and you don't get to claim to be an innocent victim. Because you knew damned well what you were doing was illegal.
You've made yourself a patsy so a tech startup who doesn't give a crap about you can continue their self created mythology of being the underdog fighting for the little guy.
But at the end of the day, it's the people driving the cars who are breaking the law.
Got talked into thinking you were doing this out of some sense of nobility? Bummer dude.
I'm betting Uber isn't paying anybody's legal bills or fines. Because even Uber knows that the suckers on the front lines are expendable to them.
Ah, but Uber's story only works if they can basically re-define what the local law is according to their own wishes.
Uber likes to hide behind their lie about only being a tech company, and they love to stress this whole "little guy fighting for the underdog".
The problem is they have to deal with reality, and the Libertarian notion of subverting regulations making you a noble and better person isn't an argument which is accepted in most places. In fact, it will simply get you arrested or fined.
The regulations exist. You are subject to those regulations. Your own perceived nobility in deciding those regulations don't apply to you is your damned problem, but it doesn't make it fact.
And the fact is, in places which have regulations around the licensing and operations of commercial vehicles -- you don't simply get to decree that the law doesn't apply to you because you stepped in unicorn poop.
I figure the people who run Uber are either collectively delusional, or collectively lying bastards. What they aren't is magically exempt from laws and regulations because they claim to be.
And if they don't like it ... that's really too damned bad for them. And, like a child throwing a temper tantrum, it doesn't change a damned thing.
Uber isn't some magical entity which exists outside of laws and regulations, no matter what its owners keep trying to tell us.
Uber has basically said "why, no, we're special because we say so, and we don't give a crap about your laws", and then they go on to say "we're not a transport company, we're a tech company, who happens to behave like a transport company".
I have precisely zero sympathy for Uber, and I think more places should be impounding cars and arresting people who have basically decided "fuck you, I'm going to run a commercial car service and keep saying loudly how I'm not a commercial car service".
This bullshit about "Long-term, established transportation companies with powerful lobbying arms or the newcomer making use of disruptive technology?" is exactly that ... it's bullshit. It's how Uber tells their underdog story, but it's a complete lie.
This has nothing to do with established players with powerful lobbying arms. This has everything to do with how governments have regulated commercial vehicles, and Uber using their bullshit story to sound like the plucky underdog.
Uber is a tech startup, acting like a spoiled child, and decreeing they aren't subject to laws.
The whole underdog thing makes for great PR copy, but is otherwise a complete fucking lie.
Honestly, though, giving web designers access to scripting on the client side has produced a LOT of shit code and security holes.
So, if you're in the business of letting all the guys know, can you tell them to stop being so incompetent at security?
Because the average web developer seems to be pretty stupid and useless when it comes to writing code which doesn't want to become a gaping security hole.
kthanksby.
Sorry, but all patent reviewers are incompetent. That's the job description these days.
They don't give a fuck as long as the check clears.
Hypothesis: Super Powers would be awesome.
Conclusion: Hell yeah!
No, the founding fathers had seen some pretty bad behavior from kings and tyrants, and were people who understood the big picture.
They certainly didn't anticipate everything, but they sure as hell tried to lay the groundwork for trying to formulate how to prevent this crap.
And then people got all scared and lost their shot and decided "oh, fuck all those constitutional protections, we're scared".
The problem with the FBI is they moronically believe that if they poke holes in crypto that it would still have any value. Because they're too fucking concerned about getting this information they can't stop to think that if there are holes for them, there's holes for anybody else to use.
What the FBI et al are basically saying amounts to "everybody should leave their house unlocked in case we need to go in, and we will go 'la la la' and pretend that nobody else will do this".
The FBI are either collectively too fucking stupid, or too fucking fascist to comprehend that crypto only really works if you don't punch holes in it.
But, hey, between law enforcement hiding how often they use that Stingray thing, and the "manaul of institutional perjury" which is parallel construction -- maybe it's time we stopped treating them as anything but a corrupt organization which needs a serious culling?
Fire 'em, arrest 'em, hang 'em -- it doesn't matter. These clowns have decided the law doesn't apply to them, so they don't deserve to be treated like the good guys.