I believe you'll find Anonymous is breaking the social contract because governments have already done so.
You've completely missed the part where the GP said:
"Agreement among the members of a society or between a society and its rulers about the rights and duties of each." The U.K. and the U.S. authorities have broken this agreement so badly in so many different ways that the future is not looking very good.
I find it difficult to disagree with the notion that the governments have already broken the social contract, and Anonymous is a reaction to that.
I don't necessarily agree with everything Anonymous does -- but I sure as hell understand the reason for them existing. When your rulers are unjust, you have little recourse except to break the social contract as well.
That those same unjust governments decide that gives them free reign to continue to be unjust is just more of the same.
Things we aren't allowed to do they can say they're doing for Perfectly Good Reasons.
Essentially they get to give themselves a free pass and do this kind of stuff.
Increasingly, law enforcement everywhere in the so-called 'free world' is deciding that the rule of law is too inconvenient and skirt around it if it suits them.
So, you suggest you can drive dangerously in a school zone, pass illegally, and do all sorts of things... and until you actually kill someone there's no crime?
Sorry, but the reason we have drivers licenses and laws for drivers is because enough drivers have demonstrated themselves to be incompetent that the default position has to be "you may believe you can do this, but statistics say you can't, and you'll end up killing someone, so before that happens we've made it illegal".
The assertion you should be able to drive however you like right up to the point you actually kill someone is basically saying "waah, but I'm special and can do it safely". And as soon as you get demonstrated to be wrong, someone else ends up dead, and everyone remembers why we had the law in the first place.
How, someone is going magically create a separate ISP in areas where the cable-coms essentially have a monopoly? Where they'll sue the city if they try to set up free wifi they get sued?
Sorry, but from what I can tell the major ISPs often have no competition, and enjoy the use of public easements nobody could compete against.
As long as the cable companies can simply decide what they want to carry and what they don't, there can't be network neutrality.
These things need to be deemed common carriers so they no longer have loopholes to say "nice internet, shame if something were to happen to it".
And, really, since we've see stories lately about just who is responsible if a self driving car crashes (not the people who control the automation part)... I just don't see self-driving cars operating in anything other than a legal gray area.
If the rules becomes technically, you're behind the wheel and therefore responsible when the auto-pilot suddenly decides it has no idea of what is going on, then WTF would people want these for?
Either I'm in control of the car (and therefore driving), or I'm not in control of the car and don't want any liability (or to even get in one).
To me, if we're talking about what we'll do to benefit the self-driving cars, I think there's a lot of legal issues to be resolved, as well as the practical issues of just who is going to be travelling in these things.
This is just futurist technology with no meaningful application yet.
And, yes, if we're still discussing human drivers, then unless this is in every car on the road, the utility of it drops off to the point of being worthless. And having nothing but self-driving cars is so far into the future as to be meaningless.
You're telling me that if there are 2 self-driving cars on the road with 20 old non-network cars, there is no benefit for those 2 cars to coordinate?
I'm saying that if 90% of the other cars don't have this, the benefit to those 10% is minimal, and the potential is high for those 10% to 'assume' things are safe instead of driving their car like they're responsible for it.
Essentially you'll get an early warning system for the people with new cars, and the rest of the drivers will help demonstrate how little benefit you're really getting out of this system.
So, yeah, I'll stick with worthless until the numbers in your scenario are reversed.
We need to stop coddling people and let them find out the hard way why rules of the road and safe driving methods exist.
So when someone who is obeying the rules of the road gets killed by some idiot who isn't, are you suggesting your right to be a moron extends to the point where you could cause harm to someone else?
Your 'right' to drive how you see fit ends where the potential for you to damage me begins.
Your right of free expression ends at my nose. And your right to drive like an asshole ends at the point where there are other people on the road who could harmed by your stupidity.
You want an unrestricted right to drive that way? Drive on your own damned property. Once you're out on public roads with other people, you do NOT have the right to just drive however you like.
And, since as you point out in your subject, the reams of older cars without this in it is going to more or less negate the benefits of it.
So you'll get a small number of cars on the road networked and keeping track of each other, and a larger number of completely random entities.
They won't be able to make all cars retroactively do this, and unless all cars are using this the system is essentially worthless.
If people start to assume they'll get a beep if there's suddenly a car where there wasn't one, then they'll stop using their mirrors. And, as you say, that will definitely lead to worse driving and more accidents.
Sorry, but the copyright lobby has more or less assured that the Public Domain is essentially dead.
They've managed to get laws passed which more or less say "if any commercial entity has ever made money off it, the exclusive right to do so is theirs in perpetuity".
They can afford to throw far more money into the pockets of politicians, and the US has more or less staked its future on IP. There's just no way in hell you'll see things going into the public domain ever faster, because I fear the way things are, things will never again go into the public domain -- unless it means a company can claim your stuff was in the public domain and then assert ownership of it.
I've worked in private industry, and I've done consultant work with government -- and any non-US government or large industry using Microsoft cloud services is opening themselves up for problems.
The entire world that isn't the US should avoid any of Microsoft's cloud services. So, if you're an American entity, go ahead and use them. If you're not, and you use them, you're an idiot and your data will be potentially used illegally with neither your knowledge or consent.
So the easiest solution is to not use the service at all.
Because storing your private/confidential information in a cloud is a stupid idea, because you don't really have control over your data.
Anything you store in Microsoft's cloud is subject to the PATRIOT Act and can be demanded with a secret warrant.
And, as much as Microsoft likes to talk about Scroogling, you can bet your ass they are doing the exact same thing, and if they say otherwise they're lying to you.
Lots of people love heroin too, that doesn't make it good for you.
The opportunity ahead will require us to reimagine a lot of what we have done in the past for a mobile and cloud-first world, and do new things
In other words, Microsoft is going to proceed with a vision which may or may not be of interest to consumers, and once again tell us what we want instead of listening to us.
So now the same idiot who was in charge of XBox being an always on-line nuisance is going to ram this philosophy through the rest of the product lines.
You get to face your accuser for the crime for which you are facing prosecution
Except in this case, the crime for which you may be facing prosecution came about as part of other kinds of activity and likely would not have been discovered through means which would be admissible in court.
This is using trumped up charges to hide the actual source of the information, and then pretending like the first source never happened. When there would be no evidence against you (or even reason to look) without this other thing, then the whole thing is essentially a poisoned well.
If you really believe that the secret spy apparatus should be able to concoct a legal case on the basis of secret evidence, and then construct an evidence chain which excludes that -- well, then welcome to your new world, comrade.
This is essentially a modern form of the Stazi and other nefarious agencies. That they have a manual on how to hide the original source of this information basically means they're doing a complete end-run around the law. Or they're using that information to set you up in such a way that a "routine and unrelated" police action catches you doing something they couldn't otherwise prove to know anything about -- they're fabricating a scenario in which it can be made to look like they didn't have other secret information they'd never have been able to use in court.
The only reason your right to face your accusers doesn't apply here is they've carefully concealed who your actual accusers are.
Papers please comrade, if we want to charge you with something, we will. If we can't get a warrant for something, or if we obtained it illegally, no problem... we'll just make sure you get identified from an indirect way we can deny ever was connected to your case.
So they'll use evidence which wouldn't hold up in court, to concoct a situation in which they can 'find' this evidence, and then reconstruct the evidence chain to make it look legit.
If that doesn't scare the hell out of you, then you don't understand the issue very well.
If this is what America has come it, America is fucked.
Maybe they should have hired actual coders to do the job.
Do you really believe they didn't?
My guess, the people running the project on the government side did a piss poor job of running the project, had no idea of what they were building, and provided the contractor with conflicting and confusing information, and probably kept changing their priorities as they went.
I'm skeptical the change in who is implementing it will address any of these issues. Because the people overseeing it will likely still be inept and the biggest barrier to success.
When your client is a confused mess, so are the results.
I've seen several instances where someone throws together a proof-of-concept and then says "see, solved problem, the rest is an exercise for the reader". In fact, I once got something thrown at me by a VP who had knocked something together with some cheap hacks, string and tin-foil. In practice, what he'd done worked on a single demo system but couldn't remotely be made to work in a real system.
Then you get into the problem and discover that so many naive assumptions have been made that it's not really possible to do it as envisioned. Essentially whoever did it ignored all of the real considerations as not important, and then just punts it to someone else to discover all of the underlying flaws.
So, while it's possible the developer realized it was a turd and wanted to get out from under it -- it's also possible it was seen as well-defined enough to be an app for a contract coder to finalize.
We once had a developer who could crank out reams of unintelligible, un-maintainable code as a demo/customization for a customer... but which was brittle, sketchy, and completely not robust. Someone then asked that it be turned into a general solution, only to discover that it barely handled the specific solution because it made unsupportable assumptions, and completely neglected all of the other issues you needed to consider.
Never underestimate how much trouble can be caused by someone who merely believes they've come up with something brilliant, but which on closer inspection is blatantly garbage.
It blows my mind that people get excited about them.
Historically, there have been some pretty damned cool and clever commercials during Super Bowl.
And since I saw one Bud Light commercial, and one Budweiser commercial (because they cut to local ones) I can only assume there were a bunch of quite cool ones I missed.
This is one of the few things where you expect to see some good ones, but we never actually see them.
Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Flash has been a security hole for at least 10 years now.
That people still use it (or install it) boggles the mind.
I won't even install it on my machines.
I believe you'll find Anonymous is breaking the social contract because governments have already done so.
You've completely missed the part where the GP said:
I find it difficult to disagree with the notion that the governments have already broken the social contract, and Anonymous is a reaction to that.
I don't necessarily agree with everything Anonymous does -- but I sure as hell understand the reason for them existing. When your rulers are unjust, you have little recourse except to break the social contract as well.
That those same unjust governments decide that gives them free reign to continue to be unjust is just more of the same.
Fascism and the police state.
We all lose.
Annoyingly, laws apply to us, and not them.
Things we aren't allowed to do they can say they're doing for Perfectly Good Reasons.
Essentially they get to give themselves a free pass and do this kind of stuff.
Increasingly, law enforcement everywhere in the so-called 'free world' is deciding that the rule of law is too inconvenient and skirt around it if it suits them.
So, you suggest you can drive dangerously in a school zone, pass illegally, and do all sorts of things ... and until you actually kill someone there's no crime?
Sorry, but the reason we have drivers licenses and laws for drivers is because enough drivers have demonstrated themselves to be incompetent that the default position has to be "you may believe you can do this, but statistics say you can't, and you'll end up killing someone, so before that happens we've made it illegal".
The assertion you should be able to drive however you like right up to the point you actually kill someone is basically saying "waah, but I'm special and can do it safely". And as soon as you get demonstrated to be wrong, someone else ends up dead, and everyone remembers why we had the law in the first place.
How, someone is going magically create a separate ISP in areas where the cable-coms essentially have a monopoly? Where they'll sue the city if they try to set up free wifi they get sued?
Sorry, but from what I can tell the major ISPs often have no competition, and enjoy the use of public easements nobody could compete against.
As long as the cable companies can simply decide what they want to carry and what they don't, there can't be network neutrality.
These things need to be deemed common carriers so they no longer have loopholes to say "nice internet, shame if something were to happen to it".
I sincerely hope these are optional and not going to get rammed down our throats so Mozilla can collect more ad revenue.
Because, quite frankly, I have no interest in having my web browser trying to integrate with social media.
And, really, since we've see stories lately about just who is responsible if a self driving car crashes (not the people who control the automation part) ... I just don't see self-driving cars operating in anything other than a legal gray area.
If the rules becomes technically, you're behind the wheel and therefore responsible when the auto-pilot suddenly decides it has no idea of what is going on, then WTF would people want these for?
Either I'm in control of the car (and therefore driving), or I'm not in control of the car and don't want any liability (or to even get in one).
To me, if we're talking about what we'll do to benefit the self-driving cars, I think there's a lot of legal issues to be resolved, as well as the practical issues of just who is going to be travelling in these things.
This is just futurist technology with no meaningful application yet.
And, yes, if we're still discussing human drivers, then unless this is in every car on the road, the utility of it drops off to the point of being worthless. And having nothing but self-driving cars is so far into the future as to be meaningless.
I'm saying that if 90% of the other cars don't have this, the benefit to those 10% is minimal, and the potential is high for those 10% to 'assume' things are safe instead of driving their car like they're responsible for it.
Essentially you'll get an early warning system for the people with new cars, and the rest of the drivers will help demonstrate how little benefit you're really getting out of this system.
So, yeah, I'll stick with worthless until the numbers in your scenario are reversed.
So when someone who is obeying the rules of the road gets killed by some idiot who isn't, are you suggesting your right to be a moron extends to the point where you could cause harm to someone else?
Your 'right' to drive how you see fit ends where the potential for you to damage me begins.
Your right of free expression ends at my nose. And your right to drive like an asshole ends at the point where there are other people on the road who could harmed by your stupidity.
You want an unrestricted right to drive that way? Drive on your own damned property. Once you're out on public roads with other people, you do NOT have the right to just drive however you like.
And, since as you point out in your subject, the reams of older cars without this in it is going to more or less negate the benefits of it.
So you'll get a small number of cars on the road networked and keeping track of each other, and a larger number of completely random entities.
They won't be able to make all cars retroactively do this, and unless all cars are using this the system is essentially worthless.
If people start to assume they'll get a beep if there's suddenly a car where there wasn't one, then they'll stop using their mirrors. And, as you say, that will definitely lead to worse driving and more accidents.
It's not going to be just a driving dystopia ... we're hurtling towards the worst form of Cyberpunk dystopian future in all aspects of our lives.
Pervasive spying, lack of privacy, and everything around you is reporting what you do to advertisers who then 'own' the data about your life.
It's far far more than just cars.
Sorry, but the copyright lobby has more or less assured that the Public Domain is essentially dead.
They've managed to get laws passed which more or less say "if any commercial entity has ever made money off it, the exclusive right to do so is theirs in perpetuity".
They can afford to throw far more money into the pockets of politicians, and the US has more or less staked its future on IP. There's just no way in hell you'll see things going into the public domain ever faster, because I fear the way things are, things will never again go into the public domain -- unless it means a company can claim your stuff was in the public domain and then assert ownership of it.
Simply not going to happen.
But it doesn't work if it's not tight. :-P
I've worked in private industry, and I've done consultant work with government -- and any non-US government or large industry using Microsoft cloud services is opening themselves up for problems.
The entire world that isn't the US should avoid any of Microsoft's cloud services. So, if you're an American entity, go ahead and use them. If you're not, and you use them, you're an idiot and your data will be potentially used illegally with neither your knowledge or consent.
So the easiest solution is to not use the service at all.
Because storing your private/confidential information in a cloud is a stupid idea, because you don't really have control over your data.
Anything you store in Microsoft's cloud is subject to the PATRIOT Act and can be demanded with a secret warrant.
And, as much as Microsoft likes to talk about Scroogling, you can bet your ass they are doing the exact same thing, and if they say otherwise they're lying to you.
Lots of people love heroin too, that doesn't make it good for you.
In other words, Microsoft is going to proceed with a vision which may or may not be of interest to consumers, and once again tell us what we want instead of listening to us.
So now the same idiot who was in charge of XBox being an always on-line nuisance is going to ram this philosophy through the rest of the product lines.
They might find this to their detriment.
Except in this case, the crime for which you may be facing prosecution came about as part of other kinds of activity and likely would not have been discovered through means which would be admissible in court.
This is using trumped up charges to hide the actual source of the information, and then pretending like the first source never happened. When there would be no evidence against you (or even reason to look) without this other thing, then the whole thing is essentially a poisoned well.
If you really believe that the secret spy apparatus should be able to concoct a legal case on the basis of secret evidence, and then construct an evidence chain which excludes that -- well, then welcome to your new world, comrade.
This is essentially a modern form of the Stazi and other nefarious agencies. That they have a manual on how to hide the original source of this information basically means they're doing a complete end-run around the law. Or they're using that information to set you up in such a way that a "routine and unrelated" police action catches you doing something they couldn't otherwise prove to know anything about -- they're fabricating a scenario in which it can be made to look like they didn't have other secret information they'd never have been able to use in court.
The only reason your right to face your accusers doesn't apply here is they've carefully concealed who your actual accusers are.
Papers please comrade, if we want to charge you with something, we will. If we can't get a warrant for something, or if we obtained it illegally, no problem ... we'll just make sure you get identified from an indirect way we can deny ever was connected to your case.
So they'll use evidence which wouldn't hold up in court, to concoct a situation in which they can 'find' this evidence, and then reconstruct the evidence chain to make it look legit.
If that doesn't scare the hell out of you, then you don't understand the issue very well.
If this is what America has come it, America is fucked.
Do you really believe they didn't?
My guess, the people running the project on the government side did a piss poor job of running the project, had no idea of what they were building, and provided the contractor with conflicting and confusing information, and probably kept changing their priorities as they went.
I'm skeptical the change in who is implementing it will address any of these issues. Because the people overseeing it will likely still be inept and the biggest barrier to success.
When your client is a confused mess, so are the results.
Good thing they were Slovenian.
Wow, so the range is enough to cover the golf-courses and steak houses? I'm impressed.
Or, like many new technologies, maybe we're using it wrong.
Maybe they just need to remodulate the phase inducers and polarize the deflector dish. :-P
Unless the act of trying to find out changes the answer, of course.
Maybe it simultaneously both is and isn't a Quantum computer? :-P
You know, I question if that's the case.
I've seen several instances where someone throws together a proof-of-concept and then says "see, solved problem, the rest is an exercise for the reader". In fact, I once got something thrown at me by a VP who had knocked something together with some cheap hacks, string and tin-foil. In practice, what he'd done worked on a single demo system but couldn't remotely be made to work in a real system.
Then you get into the problem and discover that so many naive assumptions have been made that it's not really possible to do it as envisioned. Essentially whoever did it ignored all of the real considerations as not important, and then just punts it to someone else to discover all of the underlying flaws.
So, while it's possible the developer realized it was a turd and wanted to get out from under it -- it's also possible it was seen as well-defined enough to be an app for a contract coder to finalize.
We once had a developer who could crank out reams of unintelligible, un-maintainable code as a demo/customization for a customer ... but which was brittle, sketchy, and completely not robust. Someone then asked that it be turned into a general solution, only to discover that it barely handled the specific solution because it made unsupportable assumptions, and completely neglected all of the other issues you needed to consider.
Never underestimate how much trouble can be caused by someone who merely believes they've come up with something brilliant, but which on closer inspection is blatantly garbage.
Historically, there have been some pretty damned cool and clever commercials during Super Bowl.
And since I saw one Bud Light commercial, and one Budweiser commercial (because they cut to local ones) I can only assume there were a bunch of quite cool ones I missed.
This is one of the few things where you expect to see some good ones, but we never actually see them.