My cable company keeps sending me crap for home monitoring whereby you can control your alarm from your smartphone -- and I wouldn't trust that.
My energy company wants me to sign up for a smart thermostat where they can remotely change my temperature if they decide I should be using less energy -- and I sure as hell wouldn't want that.
Opening up access to these things from outside of your home sounds like it might be convenient, but it's a gaping security hold waiting to happen.
No way, no how would I want things like this. Because I have zero confidence that the people writing this give a shit about my security, just getting a product to market.
Leave the word marriage to the churches. or other groups. in other words, make "civil union" the legal definition of marriage as far as the government is concerned
No, that's just pandering to the churches and religious groups and telling them they get to 'own' the word marriage.
If people still are not happy with that, that just tells me there ar eother motives behind them.
No, it means that trying to make a separate class of something to keep the religious people happy isn't moving towards equality, it's saying "if we give you something else and you leave us alone and shut up we'll call that equal".
Allow me to go with a blatantly offensive example (and I will apologize to anyone taking offense, this is for purposes of illustration, and is intended to be extreme to demonstrate a point).
The dreaded N-word. Imagine someone tried to pass a law which read "it shall be legal for persons and niggers to do this". You're not enshrining 'equality', you're writing into law how these groups are supposed to be equal but we'll class them under a different term, and whenever you see an old law that says "a person may/may not" you should read that like it says "a person or a nigger may/may not do this".
So, it's not equality when you define it as a different term. It's equality when you say "a person is herein defined to be a human of any race/creed/whatever", and a "marriage is herein defined as a union between two consenting adults". It's not equality when we say "a person is anyone of a white skin complexion of mostly European descent and a nigger is everyone else (except Asians, which we'll mostly class as people) but for purposes of discussion they're equal". If they were equal you wouldn't need another word for it.
The solution you're proposing is the one where we call it something else in order than one group can still discriminate against the other and call it ok.
The last thing we need is "God Approved Marriage" and "Union of Two Faggots" -- pretending those are somehow equal is bullshit. It also would validate bigots and assholes who say "well, we're married, and you're just a union of two faggots so we're better".
If you think that there are 'other' motives, you're right -- but those aren't the motives of those pushing for equality, those are the motives of people looking to legally enshrine discrimination.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go feel some guilt over using a word I've expunged from my vocabulary for the last 30 years.
as I said, I want equality for all... it almost seems as if equal rights are not what is sought after when you can offer the same exact thing with a different name and it isnt good enough.
So, you want different but equal? This group can legally join as a couple and we'll call it one thing, but this group will do the exact same thing and we'll call it something else to appease the first group?
That's just keeping the other group as second class citizens. That's not equality, that's still saying "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". Equality is treating it all the same, not classing it as something different.
As long as people can get married in a civil ceremony not involving a church, pretending that marriage is a religious institution is inherently dishonest. And as long as two people who are too old to have kids can get married, you can't pretend that marriage is solely for a union to create children.
This act was solely about propping up a religious definition of marriage which has no bearing on how marriage works as a civil institution.
I for one want the government out of marriage. Let the churches deal with "marriage"
Horse shit. You can get married at city hall without involving a church; there is no reason to involve a 'church' at all. Atheists get married all the time, and don't require the blessing of a church. You can get married by a justice of the peace or a ship's captain without ever once invoking god.
There's marriage as a religious institution, and marriage as a legally recognized civil institution. This decision is ruling on the civil aspects of marriage.
The civil institution of marriage confers legal rights to people, and this was basically about denying those same rights to another group of people.
If marriage only affected religious aspects of your life, it would be one thing. But it affects taxes, property rights, and all sorts of things which have nothing whatsoever to do with a church.
So, no, as long as there are rights granted to people on the basis of being married, this is not an issue for the churches. Marriage has long since ceased to be a purely religious institution, and that's what this ruling is addressing.
Yes! This! A thousand times this! PLEASE let me never have to deal with anyone who thinks some contrived term someone pulled out of their bottom to create the tools to describe an invented social-philosophical-literary issue is as worthy as a differential equation again.
You know, the rest of the world has shockingly little interest in dealing with some arrogant douchebag who believes that people who didn't take differential equations are a lesser form of life. Take it from an older geek on this one.
So, it's your choice, spend the rest of your life being thought of as a smug little elitist prick, or make some effort to be able to relate to people who aren't in pure science.
You might actually find it rewarding to expand your horizons a little. And, you might actually find that what they're talking about has just as much value as a differential equation in some contexts.
Oh, and to put things into terms which might be more helpful to Slashdotters...
If you plan on getting laid in your lifetime, that cute chick with the dreads and the awesome tattoos isn't going to be interested in your pure geekiness. And that really nice major isn't going to give you the time of day if you act like all forms of literature are a waste of time and the human condition is irrelevant.
You stand a far better chance of happier human interactions if you can talk about more than just pure technology. We as a group have a collective reputation for being surly, standoff-ish, and not very good at relating to others -- nobody is gonna want to rub up against you if you are like that.
If you only do it to get laid, at least you're on the right track. If you don't make any attempt at all... well, enjoy your mom's basement and video games. Hell, you might actually find some of this stuff is interesting and fun for you.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in the humanities, and a lot of modern academic research comes out of the cross-overs between science and humanities as people realize they're talking about the same thing.
Scientists should take courses on Rational Thinking.
What they're talking about here is what has traditionally been referred to as a 'classical education'.
You teach people to be well rounded people with more than one perspective, and to question what they see. Way too many of us in STEM get out into the world, and see the world through a very narrow tunnel defined by that, and can only see the world in a specific way -- one that isn't always useful to those around you.
In my experience, those who have taken a few side trips into the humanities have a broader sense of the world around them those with a pure science background are often lacking. Because you can see the world a little too rigidly as black or white, or have a tendency to be a smug dismissive prick who doesn't think what anybody else does has value.
Getting some exposure to these things can go a long way both in terms of being able to understand and relate to other people, as well as being able to deal with other viewpoints. You might find a little exposure to the arts and humanities makes you a much more well rounded and better adjusted person.
When I was in university, I didn't much see the point -- but as I get a little older and look back, I'm glad I was both forced to (in some cases) and chose to (in other cases) be exposed to some of this stuff.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
And to me, without faster than light travel, dragging our meat bags around to 'nearby stars' does not seem practical.
Dude, I never said it was practical, or that we'd be doing it.
This is an article about astronomers discovering new planets. In their parlance, they are 'nearby'.
Nobody is saying "close enough to get there", they're saying "holy crap, on a galactic scale, that's pretty damned close".
The insurmountableness of the distance isn't what's the point, because nobody is yet talking about surmounting it. The cool part is that they've found it, 3 of them in fact, a 'mere' 22 light years away, all of which could be in the zone where liquid water could exist.
The universe must simply be teeming with planets which have the potential to have life as we know it (or at least chemically similar enough that we can postulate its existence).
We may not get there, but at this moment light from Sol which left in 1991 is reaching these planets.
What was that about no recognition of format shifting? I didn't even have to do the shifting, Amazon did it for me.
It was several years ago, and I don't know the current state of their bullshit legal theories... theycertainlymadeclaims that ripping is in fact illegal.
If they could outlaw it, they would. Because in their mind, anything other than how they envision things should be illegal.
Right now it doesn't matter if it were 1.5 light seconds away. We can't get there.
Ummm, the moon is 1.5 light seconds away, and Mars is 4 light minutes away. We can, and have, send stuff to both of those, so 1.5 light seconds isn't this intractable distance you think it is... if you were walking it would essentially be infinitely far away. But with rockets from the 60's it was more like a few days.
I'm not suggesting we're going to reach these any time soon, but you have to remember that relative to the scales we're talking about, 22 light years in astronomical terms is a very close distance.
I haven't bought a ticket, but you need to re-think your concept of what is 'infinite' and what kind of distances are truly insurmountable.
Why so? In context of just how freakin' big a galaxy or the entire universe is, 22 light years is pretty damned close. The Milky-way alone is > 100,000 light years across.
Not even 25 years ago the prevailing belief was that there wouldn't be that many stars with planets, and now we're finding them pretty much constantly.
One of the terms of Drake's equation is how many stars have planets, and that proportion has been steadily climbing.
So if we're finding this many planets in an astronomically-relative 'nearby', then throughout the rest of the galaxy we have to assume there's just vast amounts of them. Start factoring in the sheer number of galaxies, and even if we'll never meet them, it seems probable that somewhere else would likely have evolved life by now.
Is Google Voice Doomed To Be 2nd-Class Messaging System?
At this point, I pretty much have to assume it already is.
I've added the Google Voice plug-in to a couple of browsers over the years, but this weekend when playing around with my new Nexus tablet, I couldn't find anything written by Google which provided this. Well, I did find it, but I was told it wasn't available in my country.
And I wasn't about to entrust my login credentials to any of the applications which offer to give me this functionality.
So, since Google hasn't made this readily available to me, I pretty much have to assume this is already a second class messaging system.
that's not what I meant. I meant they can't check if it's legally ripped or not.
Oh, sorry about that.
But, really, as far as the media companies are concerned, there is no 'legally ripped' as they don't recognize your right to format shift music you have purchased. So from their perspective, the border folks should be charging you with violating the DMCA.
Cynically, I wouldn't be surprised if the *AAs have been trying to make it illegal to be in possession of DRM-free MP3s and movies under the assumption you must have broken the law to have them.
Now China will suspect every US IT product of having a backdoor.
Well, quite frankly, how could they not?
If all of these companies are helping with this, and allowing them to spy on global communications, how can we believe they aren't complicit?
The US government can force you to add in back doors and not tell anybody due to secrecy laws, and looking at the scope of this spying issue, you pretty much have to assume there's a good chance that those products do have a backdoor.
How could China (or any other country) trust that this gear hasn't been written in such a way as to enable this kind of spying any more than the US believed this Chinese made gear?
The US has more or less said "for our security it's our right to spy on everybody", which means we should also assume that every other country has decided they should be able to do the same damned thing.
Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Cisco... if you've been named as part of this, the assumption simply has to be that, as an entity, you aren't safe to trust. It also means you should assume those same entities will be forced to help every other damned country carry out the same level of spying.
It's not like they could claim they aren't willing to help government spying, because they've already been doing it. At which point, saying 'yes' to the US government and 'no' to any other country is an untenable position.
When you get your corporations involved in spying, it's a natural conclusion that your corporations might be involved in spying.
Since ICE is under DHS, and they've basically said they can search your laptops... it falls within the mandate of ICE to now police copyright.
I can entirely believe that (if not now, soon), they might start saying that if you've got ripped media you can get detained. Once your border folks are an extension of policing copyright for industry, this is an entirely plausible scenario.
If you know you're going to go, why do people train their offshore replacements. Just get it over with.
Well, I can't speak for IBM, but I've been through layoffs before.
If they tell you you're being laid off, but you still need to do the training of your replacements, you likely only get any severance package they're giving you if you comply.
If you tell them to fuck off and train themselves, they might say "OK, you quit so you get no severance package".
So, if your choice is do it and get your severance, or not do it and get nothing at all, most people would choose the former. If you're in a position to go for the moral satisfaction of telling them to screw themselves, well, go ahead.
In my case, they were laying off an entire team which maintained a product. They kept me on a little longer to do the knowledge transfer and shut off the lights, but on my next-to-last day we got a big panic from a salesman who said there were critical bugs to be fixed and a few new features to be added, and there was a multi-million dollar sale on the line.
That, unfortunately, required that I remind them that if they had that much business on the line, then why were they cutting the entire development team? I'll help you do the knowledge transfer if my severance on the line, but suddenly realizing that you needed me to do more than the winding down process to support sales was a little much, and I was only willing to go so far.
If we had millions in the pipeline and you've now laid off the entire development team -- well, you need to be making smarter decisions. If the accountants decide to lay off your business critical people, then you have a problem with your accountants. Having the sales guys in a big panic was just insult to injury -- I don't care that your commission is at risk, because that's not my problem anymore.
and the questionable reasons some things require prescriptions at all (basic antibiotics
Are you mad? We over use antibiotics now, and people don't always take the full dose, which just leads to more resistant strains.
If you could walk into a store and buy an antibiotic, the usefulness of them would probably be wiped out in a few years because people would use them wrong.
Thankfully, you need to be a doctor to write prescriptions for drugs. Though, I'm sure if big pharma had their way, 'consumers' would be free to buy any drug for any disease they think they have, then they could go straight to marketing it and not worrying about anything else (like making sure it's actually safe before releasing it).
In theory, they could use this in their Terms of Service and deny you service on those grounds.
In theory, they can shove it up their asses.
Until I see a legally binding court decision which compels me to allow this, I'm going to assume my right to tune them out and not listen still holds true.
If a website wants to sue me for blocking their ads, and 3rd party advertiser thinks I'm breaking some kind of law by blocking this, then I will refer them to Arkell v Pressdram.
Even if we call advertising 'speech', your right to free speech in no way compels me to listen or enable you to speak to me. I consider advertising to be in the same class the Jehova's Witnesses who come to my door -- your desire to tell me something is trumped by the fact that I Don't Give A Fucking Shit. And like I will shoo these people from my front door, I will continue to block the advertisers and other crap in my browser.
Their desire to be heard doesn't mean I'm required to listen or allow them onto my property.
I seem to remember reading a rule about that. Golden something-or-other...
And by rule, you mean trite saying?
Do you honestly think corporations are interested in that? They're interested in maximizing profits, and they don't give a shit about you... which is why the more we have stuff which blocks these guys, the more we can not need to rely on them to not "screw unto others".
Well, since it involves transmission from MY computer, or pulling down from their servers (again, from MY computer)... until someone tells me I'm legally obliged to allow this to happen, I'm perfectly free to block it. So, I am well within my rights to not participate. It's also my right to tell a telemarketer to fuck off, and to set my phone to block calls with unknown caller id (because if I was supposed to care who you are, you should identify yourself to me).
I'm not interested in their marketing crap, and I will tune it out as much as possible -- which includes not cooperating with their data gathering, and actively blocking it on my side as much as possible. Pretty much same if someone in a store asked me to fill out a survey or give them my email address -- the real world response and the digital response are the same, and that's a firm 'piss off'.
Can you cite some 'declaration of corporate rights' which says I'm required by law to allow all of these web beacons and cookies? Because unless someone is standing over my shoulder forcing me to accept cookies under threat... they can suck it.
But, as I said, having these companies know every web site you visit is a terrible idea. And since I control how my browser and firewall are configured (you know, my right), you can bet your ass it's might right to block this crap.
So until the lobbyists convince the law makers that it should be illegal for me to block their advertising attempts, I will continue to do so. And any lawmaker which agreed to that should be shot.
Google even went to try to circumvent Safari's user privacy settings to be able to track users. Apple quickly followed with a fix.
I'm not convinced that's true.. because if you set Safari to block 3rd party cookies, and go to a web site, you still get 3rd party cookies.
So, whatever 'fix' Apple did seems pretty useless to me. Which is why Safari for me is used only to host Facebook -- I don't trust either of them, and if the browser never visits any other sites, there's no other information to be gleaned.
âoeThere are billions and billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs at stake in this supply chain,â
You know what Mr Rothenberg, we don't give a shit.
Because also at stake is our privacy, and our right to not have some douchebag advertising company know every detail of our lives.
I don't want doubleclick, quantserve, google analytics, scorecard research, and all of these other assholes to get a phone-home beacon on every page I visit -- which is why between my firewall and various things like NoScript/ScriptSafe, these sites are blocked.
I don't owe you marketing data, and I'm not interested in your product. Don't act like it's your right for me to provide you this data, because it isn't.
The advertising companies who do this are the oligopolies, Mozilla is just putting some more freedom in the hands of their consumers... or maybe you don't like it when consumers exercise their right to be not interested in what you're selling and your just a corporate mouthpiece who is only interested in corporate freedom?
I don't have any more sympathy for advertisers than I do for telemarketers. They can both go eat shit and die.
Slashdot Mirror
My cable company keeps sending me crap for home monitoring whereby you can control your alarm from your smartphone -- and I wouldn't trust that.
My energy company wants me to sign up for a smart thermostat where they can remotely change my temperature if they decide I should be using less energy -- and I sure as hell wouldn't want that.
Opening up access to these things from outside of your home sounds like it might be convenient, but it's a gaping security hold waiting to happen.
No way, no how would I want things like this. Because I have zero confidence that the people writing this give a shit about my security, just getting a product to market.
No, that's just pandering to the churches and religious groups and telling them they get to 'own' the word marriage.
No, it means that trying to make a separate class of something to keep the religious people happy isn't moving towards equality, it's saying "if we give you something else and you leave us alone and shut up we'll call that equal".
Allow me to go with a blatantly offensive example (and I will apologize to anyone taking offense, this is for purposes of illustration, and is intended to be extreme to demonstrate a point).
The dreaded N-word. Imagine someone tried to pass a law which read "it shall be legal for persons and niggers to do this". You're not enshrining 'equality', you're writing into law how these groups are supposed to be equal but we'll class them under a different term, and whenever you see an old law that says "a person may/may not" you should read that like it says "a person or a nigger may/may not do this".
So, it's not equality when you define it as a different term. It's equality when you say "a person is herein defined to be a human of any race/creed/whatever", and a "marriage is herein defined as a union between two consenting adults". It's not equality when we say "a person is anyone of a white skin complexion of mostly European descent and a nigger is everyone else (except Asians, which we'll mostly class as people) but for purposes of discussion they're equal". If they were equal you wouldn't need another word for it.
The solution you're proposing is the one where we call it something else in order than one group can still discriminate against the other and call it ok.
The last thing we need is "God Approved Marriage" and "Union of Two Faggots" -- pretending those are somehow equal is bullshit. It also would validate bigots and assholes who say "well, we're married, and you're just a union of two faggots so we're better".
If you think that there are 'other' motives, you're right -- but those aren't the motives of those pushing for equality, those are the motives of people looking to legally enshrine discrimination.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go feel some guilt over using a word I've expunged from my vocabulary for the last 30 years.
So, you want different but equal? This group can legally join as a couple and we'll call it one thing, but this group will do the exact same thing and we'll call it something else to appease the first group?
That's just keeping the other group as second class citizens. That's not equality, that's still saying "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". Equality is treating it all the same, not classing it as something different.
As long as people can get married in a civil ceremony not involving a church, pretending that marriage is a religious institution is inherently dishonest. And as long as two people who are too old to have kids can get married, you can't pretend that marriage is solely for a union to create children.
This act was solely about propping up a religious definition of marriage which has no bearing on how marriage works as a civil institution.
Horse shit. You can get married at city hall without involving a church; there is no reason to involve a 'church' at all. Atheists get married all the time, and don't require the blessing of a church. You can get married by a justice of the peace or a ship's captain without ever once invoking god.
There's marriage as a religious institution, and marriage as a legally recognized civil institution. This decision is ruling on the civil aspects of marriage.
The civil institution of marriage confers legal rights to people, and this was basically about denying those same rights to another group of people.
If marriage only affected religious aspects of your life, it would be one thing. But it affects taxes, property rights, and all sorts of things which have nothing whatsoever to do with a church.
So, no, as long as there are rights granted to people on the basis of being married, this is not an issue for the churches. Marriage has long since ceased to be a purely religious institution, and that's what this ruling is addressing.
I believe this particular ruling only covers DOMA ... they are supposed to release other decisions which might weigh in on individual state bans.
You know, the rest of the world has shockingly little interest in dealing with some arrogant douchebag who believes that people who didn't take differential equations are a lesser form of life. Take it from an older geek on this one.
So, it's your choice, spend the rest of your life being thought of as a smug little elitist prick, or make some effort to be able to relate to people who aren't in pure science.
You might actually find it rewarding to expand your horizons a little. And, you might actually find that what they're talking about has just as much value as a differential equation in some contexts.
Oh, and to put things into terms which might be more helpful to Slashdotters ...
If you plan on getting laid in your lifetime, that cute chick with the dreads and the awesome tattoos isn't going to be interested in your pure geekiness. And that really nice major isn't going to give you the time of day if you act like all forms of literature are a waste of time and the human condition is irrelevant.
You stand a far better chance of happier human interactions if you can talk about more than just pure technology. We as a group have a collective reputation for being surly, standoff-ish, and not very good at relating to others -- nobody is gonna want to rub up against you if you are like that.
If you only do it to get laid, at least you're on the right track. If you don't make any attempt at all ... well, enjoy your mom's basement and video games. Hell, you might actually find some of this stuff is interesting and fun for you.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in the humanities, and a lot of modern academic research comes out of the cross-overs between science and humanities as people realize they're talking about the same thing.
What they're talking about here is what has traditionally been referred to as a 'classical education'.
You teach people to be well rounded people with more than one perspective, and to question what they see. Way too many of us in STEM get out into the world, and see the world through a very narrow tunnel defined by that, and can only see the world in a specific way -- one that isn't always useful to those around you.
In my experience, those who have taken a few side trips into the humanities have a broader sense of the world around them those with a pure science background are often lacking. Because you can see the world a little too rigidly as black or white, or have a tendency to be a smug dismissive prick who doesn't think what anybody else does has value.
Getting some exposure to these things can go a long way both in terms of being able to understand and relate to other people, as well as being able to deal with other viewpoints. You might find a little exposure to the arts and humanities makes you a much more well rounded and better adjusted person.
When I was in university, I didn't much see the point -- but as I get a little older and look back, I'm glad I was both forced to (in some cases) and chose to (in other cases) be exposed to some of this stuff.
Dude, I never said it was practical, or that we'd be doing it.
This is an article about astronomers discovering new planets. In their parlance, they are 'nearby'.
Nobody is saying "close enough to get there", they're saying "holy crap, on a galactic scale, that's pretty damned close".
The insurmountableness of the distance isn't what's the point, because nobody is yet talking about surmounting it. The cool part is that they've found it, 3 of them in fact, a 'mere' 22 light years away, all of which could be in the zone where liquid water could exist.
The universe must simply be teeming with planets which have the potential to have life as we know it (or at least chemically similar enough that we can postulate its existence).
We may not get there, but at this moment light from Sol which left in 1991 is reaching these planets.
That, my friend, is some heavy shit.
It was several years ago, and I don't know the current state of their bullshit legal theories ... they certainly made claims that ripping is in fact illegal.
If they could outlaw it, they would. Because in their mind, anything other than how they envision things should be illegal.
Ummm, the moon is 1.5 light seconds away, and Mars is 4 light minutes away. We can, and have, send stuff to both of those, so 1.5 light seconds isn't this intractable distance you think it is ... if you were walking it would essentially be infinitely far away. But with rockets from the 60's it was more like a few days.
I'm not suggesting we're going to reach these any time soon, but you have to remember that relative to the scales we're talking about, 22 light years in astronomical terms is a very close distance.
I haven't bought a ticket, but you need to re-think your concept of what is 'infinite' and what kind of distances are truly insurmountable.
Why so? In context of just how freakin' big a galaxy or the entire universe is, 22 light years is pretty damned close. The Milky-way alone is > 100,000 light years across.
Not even 25 years ago the prevailing belief was that there wouldn't be that many stars with planets, and now we're finding them pretty much constantly.
One of the terms of Drake's equation is how many stars have planets, and that proportion has been steadily climbing.
So if we're finding this many planets in an astronomically-relative 'nearby', then throughout the rest of the galaxy we have to assume there's just vast amounts of them. Start factoring in the sheer number of galaxies, and even if we'll never meet them, it seems probable that somewhere else would likely have evolved life by now.
At this point, I pretty much have to assume it already is.
I've added the Google Voice plug-in to a couple of browsers over the years, but this weekend when playing around with my new Nexus tablet, I couldn't find anything written by Google which provided this. Well, I did find it, but I was told it wasn't available in my country.
And I wasn't about to entrust my login credentials to any of the applications which offer to give me this functionality.
So, since Google hasn't made this readily available to me, I pretty much have to assume this is already a second class messaging system.
Oh, sorry about that.
But, really, as far as the media companies are concerned, there is no 'legally ripped' as they don't recognize your right to format shift music you have purchased. So from their perspective, the border folks should be charging you with violating the DMCA.
Cynically, I wouldn't be surprised if the *AAs have been trying to make it illegal to be in possession of DRM-free MP3s and movies under the assumption you must have broken the law to have them.
Well, quite frankly, how could they not?
If all of these companies are helping with this, and allowing them to spy on global communications, how can we believe they aren't complicit?
The US government can force you to add in back doors and not tell anybody due to secrecy laws, and looking at the scope of this spying issue, you pretty much have to assume there's a good chance that those products do have a backdoor.
How could China (or any other country) trust that this gear hasn't been written in such a way as to enable this kind of spying any more than the US believed this Chinese made gear?
The US has more or less said "for our security it's our right to spy on everybody", which means we should also assume that every other country has decided they should be able to do the same damned thing.
Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Cisco ... if you've been named as part of this, the assumption simply has to be that, as an entity, you aren't safe to trust. It also means you should assume those same entities will be forced to help every other damned country carry out the same level of spying.
It's not like they could claim they aren't willing to help government spying, because they've already been doing it. At which point, saying 'yes' to the US government and 'no' to any other country is an untenable position.
When you get your corporations involved in spying, it's a natural conclusion that your corporations might be involved in spying.
I'm not convinced that's even remotely true.
Since ICE is under DHS, and they've basically said they can search your laptops ... it falls within the mandate of ICE to now police copyright.
I can entirely believe that (if not now, soon), they might start saying that if you've got ripped media you can get detained. Once your border folks are an extension of policing copyright for industry, this is an entirely plausible scenario.
Well, I can't speak for IBM, but I've been through layoffs before.
If they tell you you're being laid off, but you still need to do the training of your replacements, you likely only get any severance package they're giving you if you comply.
If you tell them to fuck off and train themselves, they might say "OK, you quit so you get no severance package".
So, if your choice is do it and get your severance, or not do it and get nothing at all, most people would choose the former. If you're in a position to go for the moral satisfaction of telling them to screw themselves, well, go ahead.
In my case, they were laying off an entire team which maintained a product. They kept me on a little longer to do the knowledge transfer and shut off the lights, but on my next-to-last day we got a big panic from a salesman who said there were critical bugs to be fixed and a few new features to be added, and there was a multi-million dollar sale on the line.
That, unfortunately, required that I remind them that if they had that much business on the line, then why were they cutting the entire development team? I'll help you do the knowledge transfer if my severance on the line, but suddenly realizing that you needed me to do more than the winding down process to support sales was a little much, and I was only willing to go so far.
If we had millions in the pipeline and you've now laid off the entire development team -- well, you need to be making smarter decisions. If the accountants decide to lay off your business critical people, then you have a problem with your accountants. Having the sales guys in a big panic was just insult to injury -- I don't care that your commission is at risk, because that's not my problem anymore.
Not if I don't have Flash installed on my machine it won't. I trust Flash about as much as I trust politicians -- which is to say not at all.
Are you mad? We over use antibiotics now, and people don't always take the full dose, which just leads to more resistant strains.
If you could walk into a store and buy an antibiotic, the usefulness of them would probably be wiped out in a few years because people would use them wrong.
Thankfully, you need to be a doctor to write prescriptions for drugs. Though, I'm sure if big pharma had their way, 'consumers' would be free to buy any drug for any disease they think they have, then they could go straight to marketing it and not worrying about anything else (like making sure it's actually safe before releasing it).
Because they believe that Google should be at the front line of essentially censoring the internet to only return things they feel are 'acceptable'.
The government can't censor you (yet), but if they can strong-arm a company into doing it for them, it must be OK, right?
In theory, they can shove it up their asses.
Until I see a legally binding court decision which compels me to allow this, I'm going to assume my right to tune them out and not listen still holds true.
If a website wants to sue me for blocking their ads, and 3rd party advertiser thinks I'm breaking some kind of law by blocking this, then I will refer them to Arkell v Pressdram.
Even if we call advertising 'speech', your right to free speech in no way compels me to listen or enable you to speak to me. I consider advertising to be in the same class the Jehova's Witnesses who come to my door -- your desire to tell me something is trumped by the fact that I Don't Give A Fucking Shit. And like I will shoo these people from my front door, I will continue to block the advertisers and other crap in my browser.
Their desire to be heard doesn't mean I'm required to listen or allow them onto my property.
And by rule, you mean trite saying?
Do you honestly think corporations are interested in that? They're interested in maximizing profits, and they don't give a shit about you ... which is why the more we have stuff which blocks these guys, the more we can not need to rely on them to not "screw unto others".
Well, since it involves transmission from MY computer, or pulling down from their servers (again, from MY computer)... until someone tells me I'm legally obliged to allow this to happen, I'm perfectly free to block it. So, I am well within my rights to not participate. It's also my right to tell a telemarketer to fuck off, and to set my phone to block calls with unknown caller id (because if I was supposed to care who you are, you should identify yourself to me).
I'm not interested in their marketing crap, and I will tune it out as much as possible -- which includes not cooperating with their data gathering, and actively blocking it on my side as much as possible. Pretty much same if someone in a store asked me to fill out a survey or give them my email address -- the real world response and the digital response are the same, and that's a firm 'piss off'.
Can you cite some 'declaration of corporate rights' which says I'm required by law to allow all of these web beacons and cookies? Because unless someone is standing over my shoulder forcing me to accept cookies under threat ... they can suck it.
But, as I said, having these companies know every web site you visit is a terrible idea. And since I control how my browser and firewall are configured (you know, my right), you can bet your ass it's might right to block this crap.
So until the lobbyists convince the law makers that it should be illegal for me to block their advertising attempts, I will continue to do so. And any lawmaker which agreed to that should be shot.
I'm not convinced that's true .. because if you set Safari to block 3rd party cookies, and go to a web site, you still get 3rd party cookies.
So, whatever 'fix' Apple did seems pretty useless to me. Which is why Safari for me is used only to host Facebook -- I don't trust either of them, and if the browser never visits any other sites, there's no other information to be gleaned.
You know what Mr Rothenberg, we don't give a shit.
Because also at stake is our privacy, and our right to not have some douchebag advertising company know every detail of our lives.
I don't want doubleclick, quantserve, google analytics, scorecard research, and all of these other assholes to get a phone-home beacon on every page I visit -- which is why between my firewall and various things like NoScript/ScriptSafe, these sites are blocked.
I don't owe you marketing data, and I'm not interested in your product. Don't act like it's your right for me to provide you this data, because it isn't.
The advertising companies who do this are the oligopolies, Mozilla is just putting some more freedom in the hands of their consumers ... or maybe you don't like it when consumers exercise their right to be not interested in what you're selling and your just a corporate mouthpiece who is only interested in corporate freedom?
I don't have any more sympathy for advertisers than I do for telemarketers. They can both go eat shit and die.