But it's really not that expensive. It only seems expensive to you. Enough money has been spent to equip everybody with anything they could possibly need; the reason that nothing much got done is because the money was spent in crisis mode, so nobody was looking much at substance, so much as volume of money spent and paperwork filled in.
I've worked in companies working around the edges of various issues that have become "national emergencies". There's always people doing yeoman work in those areas who could work miracles with a marginal increase in funding. But they never get a marginal increase in funding.
What happens is that once the politicians decide there is an emergency, there is a deluge of cash. Often, the people who've been doing the work all along never see this as people closer to the budgeting process divert the money into crash programs run by people who have no knowledge or interest in what as actually bee done. Other times, they end up with vast quantities of cash that they have to spend right away; the emergency becomes spending all the money before anybody accuses you of dragging your feet. I've seen cases where agencies have literally paid millions of dollars to have a web site with a email backed fill in form that could have been done (by several competent and independent evaluations) for around $50K. The reason was that they never had anything like two million dollars in the kitty before, and had no idea of how to spend it. If they had had a $100K windfall, they could have spent it very well indeed, but they didn't even know where to begin to spend the money they'd been given; certainly not fast enough.
So they turned to a company that specialized in absorbing lots of cash on federal contracts quickly.
I'll let you in on a dirty little secret about government contracting. All those rules that supposedly keep Uncle Sam from being fleeced actually make it easier for somebody with political connections to take him to the cleaner. The reason is that the only way to absorb the money generated by the federal government in a "national emergency", and comply with all the accounting rules, is to have a company or a subsidiary that specializes in absorbing federal money and filling out all the paperwork. The government doesn't buy what it needs in an emergency on the open market, but by outfits starting with Halliburton and all the way down to small time operations that eat up a few millions here and there.
I was amazed and appalled the degree to which you could hire a lobbyist and make a quick buck on a shoeshine and a shell product, provided you were dealing with something "important".
It's the kernel of truth in the geek stereotype. Most geeks are normal in most respects other than their interests and aptitudes. But quite a few fancy themselves John Galt. It's easy when, in certain contexts, you are accustomed to being right to assume the reason you aren't ruling the half-wits around you is that people of vision and talent and wisdom like yourself are being oppressed. It's all warmed over Nietzsche; Nietzsche was a dreamer of adolescent power fantasies, albeit a brilliant one.
It is true, as Thoreau says, that a person more right than his neighbors is a majority of one. But being able to design a computer or organize a computer network, while indicating you have valuable intellectual talents, doesn't qualify you as philosopher king. Geeks who are honest with themselves know that the realm in which their intellectual superiority is extreme is rather narrow.
But it's a pleasant fantasy, one which absolves us of any of our own personal failings. Some brands of sci-fi certainly cater to this fantasy; but it isn't the source. The fantasy ready made with every generation of youthful overconfidence. Personally, I'm rather a fan of Terry Pratchett. He writes about extremely powerful characters, but the one thing they all have in common is that they realize they can't get what they want by wielding power. It's a good lesson for people who have power, whether it's authority, or simple brain power.
If it were me, I'd not only have a backup, but I'd take the drives out, carefully label and inventory them, and store them in a highly secure safe.
The drive, and the information on it, does not belong to my department, nor does it belong to the user or the administration. It belongs to the people of the United States. If there were a possibility the people would lose control of it, if foreign troops were marching on Washington, sure, I'd destroy them. But none of the arguments that the executive branch needs privacy to make decisions efficiently applies to posterity, especially posterity in the form of a subpoena. If Congress issues a constitutionally valid subpoena, say during the course of an impeachment, then they should get the information on the drives. If the next administration wants to read those drives, out they come. If they want to erase those drives, then sorry sir, I can't do that. You're the President, not a friggen' dictator. You've got no right to stand in the way of the law, or to tie the hands of your successors, or even keep things from the public because somebody might be emarassed. Or prosecuted. Especially prosecuted.
Probably every single hard drive used by a white house staffer could fit into a single large walk in safe. Backups for the everything is peanuts compared to what the President will be spending on his Presidential Library. Is the monument to his ego more important than the information that goes into it?
That's not really a good example, because the stickers aren't there to protect the user from the product. They're there to protect the vendor from the users.
In fact, the proliferation of warning stickers is a disservice to user safety, because it teaches them to become functionally blind to caution notices.
Getting back to this issue of deleting files, I think that the problem is one of metaphors. In some ways, the trash can metaphor is a particularly good one, because it reproduces the same characteristics of its real world counterpart, down to the aspects people don't think about enough. Anybody can easily fish a document out of a trash can, real or virtual. Once the trash has been "taken away", all bets are off; you can't count on getting any of it back, nor can you count on somebody with enough determination and knowledge of the trash processing system being unable to retrieve part or all of the document. Taking your credit card bills out to the curb in a recycling bin doesn't keep an identity thief from recovering them. Nor should you count on being able to get them back if you want to dispute a charge.
In as sense, what is missing is a "shredder". Of course the physical process of shredding a paper document is just an encumbrance to the computer file user: you don't want to shred a document then put it in the trash. But this carries over the bit of the process that is essential to the user: you shred things you want to be unrecoverable, not just "thrown away".
This points out, I think, the reason that documentation has to make up for insufficient design. Distinguishing "shredding" from "trashing" would communicate the notion that trashing is less secure. On the other hand, it is true that some users will take the unintended message that deleted files can always be recovered. This is unfortunate, but you can't shield people from every folly they might commit. You are responsible to make clear where your metaphors are flawed, either in documentation or in notification; you can't be faulted for when your metaphors actually work the way they are supposed to. If you find you needs lots of explanations for why your metaphors don't work, then your metaphors are not being helpful, and maybe you need new ones.
The problem is that paper based elections are no more secure
Oh, come now.
Statements like this only confuse the issue, because security is no more a property of any individual element of a system than temperature is the property of a single molecule of gas.
Also -- "secure" is a lot like "hot"; it's a relative term. Hot enough to fry an egg is not hot enough to forge a horseshoe. Dogmatic pronouncements like "paper based elections are no more secure" are based on the assumption that "security" is something you either have completely or lack utterly. This is why public officials get hoodwinked into thinking vendors who make ATMs know how to make perfectly secure systems. They don't realize that ATMs are not very secure at all, just that adding enough security to them to prevent $1 of theft would cost the banks more than $1. It's highly unlikely that the standards of "secure enough" in that situation apply at all to elections.
The sophisticated way of framing the issue is this: "given the expense, effort and time we are willing to put into an election, can we achieve an acceptable level of confidence that we have achieved an acceptable level of security in a paper-free system?"
Now, I am not so dogmatic that I'd rule out the possibility of achieving an acceptable level of security in a paper free system. However, I'm pretty sure I'd never be confident that a paper free system is secure enough, and I don't flatter myself when I say that I know a hell of a lot more about this sort of thing than the average secretary of state or election district procurement officer.
The thing that makes paperless voting systems a really, really bad idea is that the people accepting them are never going to be qualified to evaluate them. Any confidence they may have in the system is bound to be derived from a considerable degree of wishful thinking. This is not a theoretical possibilty, it's been proven by the insanely insecure systems these people have signed off on. And, sadly, delegating the evaluation of what is "secure enough" to an industry consortium does not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. It's not that they are going to collude in stealing elections, it's that their incentives are all wrong. They'll want the standard that is most profitable to sell, which may or may not have any useful bearing on being secure enough to trust with our national destiny.
Now, let's ask the next question: "given the expense, effort and time we are willing to put into an election, can we achieve an acceptable level of confidence that we have achieved an acceptable level of security in a system with a paper audit trail?"
I think the answer is yes. Not absolute security, but acceptable security. Every government agency, indeed every large entity, employs people who have a lot of experience in preventing and detecting fraud using a paper audit trail. They're called accountants. Of course, financial fraud is still very widespread, but it is not for lack of expertise in stopping it, but will. You can still use the rarefied skills of high end computer security experts in evaluating a system if available to you, but you can also use much more commonly available skills in the design of tamper protection and fraud detection if you introduce a paper trail.
Well, Ubuntu isn't exactly great when it comes to things common laptop sound cards, or certain popular USB wi-fi adapters. If you're lucky, it just works, but the same goes for Vista. But Ubuntu is not particularly good among Linux ditros when it comes to hardware support. I can attest this from personal experience.
Vista's problem appears to be that drivers often don't exist for "legacy" devices -- that is to say devices that aren't currently being sold but were being sold last week. Ubuntu's problem is that they ship drivers that don't work with their kernel modifications. The solution to most device problems seems to be either to get source for an updated driver and compile it against the Ubuntu headers, or to replace the Ubuntu kernel with a stock Debian kernel. That is, that is the solution if you are lucky.
I hardly think Ubuntu deserves to be held up as an example of hardware compatibility, if they ship drivers with their distro that doesn't work with their kernel modifications. Microsoft, at least, can justly claim they don't have access to the driver source.
If you have a couple of different problems with Ubuntu and hardware, and search the net for solutions, you hear the same stories over and over again. The Ubuntu upgrade broke some piece of hardware, but some people had good luck getting the source and compiling it against Ubuntu's headers; others have luck replacing the Ubuntu kernel with the stock Debian kernel. Then you have a smattering of things that people tried and worked for some reason they can't fathom, then there are instructions of the jump-down-turn-around-pick-a-bale-of-cotton variety which might work but nobody real expects them to. Then you have a few lonely voices saying they tried every suggestion and nothing and worked, and does anybody please, please have any ideas of what to try next? Sometimes they get an answer, which is that this sort of thing should be much less common in the next major release, contrary to experience with every prior release since the project's inception.
Still, I'm using Ubuntu, not because it's perfect, but because it's better for what I need it for. I use virtual machines extensively, and they run more smoothly under Ubuntu X86_64 than under Ubuntu 32 bit or Vista. I can live without sound, although I miss playing music while I work.
Next time around I'm definitely going back to Debian. They may be slow to get the latest versions of everything out, but when they do it works better. I'd go back to Debian now, but I've spent way more than my budgeted time screwing around with the operating system, and its well past the "educational" stage where you do things like read the ACPI specs to figure out how things work, and into the stage of being a plain old PITA.
Clearly, Linux is a better operating system in this sense: given that it's mere fantasy that "things just work", it's better to have a single device fail than to have the entire OS unusable. Not that a bad device driver can't cause a kernel panic, but when the source to a driver is available, it's much less likely to make it into a distribution doing something that will bring the entire system down. It might not work -- that takes having the actual hardware in question available for testing.
I'm not saying Ubuntu is a bad distro. It'd be a great distro if it didn't fiddle with the kernel, then ship that kernel with drivers that don't work with its changes. If there is somebody else taking care of this for you, fine. I think Dell sells machines with Ubuntu preinstalled. But I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anybody who didn't have somebody supporting them who was comfortable doing things like installing custom kernels and the like.
Having worked in the field, I have a slightly different perspective.
It was never the case that slow hardware plagued Microsoft's PDA offerings. The problem is that the use-case models (if there were any) for the Pocket PC user interface were absurd. They have a kind of "desktop replacement" mentality; yet to the degree something is convenient to carry in your pocket, it is awkward as a general purpose computing device (with an interface mimicking a desktop no less). And vice versa.
It is the badness of the Windows Mobile interfaces, coupled with the excessive bulk of the early WinCE PDAs that made them crap. It was a cascade of bad consequences, all starting with the attempt to be good at everything: to give a desktop-y kind of experience, you needed lots of pixels, and those pixels had to be color and they had to come cheap, so you ended up with a large device with a big honking battery to drive the backlight through the cheap lcd. It's the hi-res displays and the high capacity batteries that make modern Windows Mobile PDAs tolerable. Not the CPU speed.
Palm, in its heyday, created a niche product that was convenient to carry, and performed in a few limited roles very well. Think about this: that very same description also fits Apple's iPod. Now, there were people like me who exploited the fact that Palm was a platform, and made a nice living off it for a while. We could define new roles for the device.
It is true Palm made some mistakes, but the idea that they failed to make a spiffy enough OS is a myth. The real problem is that the PDA niche became unprofitable as prices dropped. Most who had a Palm V would probably be happy with one today -- if it cost about $35. But that's not the kind of thing Palm sells; they sell stuff in the 200-$500 range. So, they began to add spiffiness to their products, spiffiness that their users neither needed, nor wanted, but was mandated by the price range they wanted to occupy. So they blurred the distinction between PalmOS and PocketPC by becoming more PocketPC like.
In the end, it was not so much a case of Palm moving too slowly, as not having a very good place to move towards, other than into smart phones.
In smart phones, business friendliness continues to be a weak spot for Palm and a marketing strength for Microsoft. But Microsoft isn't as dominant as people here seem to think. It is the carriers rule the smart phone market, not Microsoft. I see the smart phone as only an interim solution, not because PDA functions need to be liberated from a phone, but vice versa. We're in a state of incredible flux at present, with categories of mobile devices multiplying rapidly, and the boundaries of those categories being very fuzzy.
Actually, Paul Allen of Microsoft did something very much like this; he took the vast fortune he made and created a set of complex financial instruments that made it independent of any future actions by Microsoft management. The story that is told about this is that he contracted cancer, and overheard Gates and Ballmer scheming to get his shares back after he died.
Now I've had that kind of stockholder discussion, although never after the fact of somebody contracting a potentially fatal illness, and never behind their back. It's the kind of discussion you have to have, but when your partners are doing it on the sly is a bad sign. Evidently Allen didn't trust Microsoft management with his financial destiny after that. It was perfectly ethical in his case, which was about a situation that applied specifically to him.
But I disagree that this kind of thing is ethical in every case. It's one thing for a former CEO or a pre-IPO employee to do this after his term of service. It's another thing for a current senior manager to do it while he has access to information that other investors do not.
CEOs get massive compensation packages based on the theory that they'll work harder if their financial future is tied to a company. Personally, I think that theory is self-serving rubbish, and the truth is that too many CEOs sit on each others' compensation committees. However, it is unethical to negotiate a compensation package in which you agree to yoke your financial future to the company, and then exploit a loophole to obtain value from your inside knowledge that other investors can't.
Well, that's OK because the rules describe precisely the same set.
Let L and R be two sets of rational numbers, such that for every number a in L, a < 1 and for every number c in R, c >= 1, and every rational number is either in L or R. Let b be a real number such that for any a in L and c in R, a < b < c.
Let G be the set of geek humor, and let f(x) mapping from any member x of G to R be the funniness of x, and g(x) mapping from any member x of G be the cleverness of x.
Actually, American versions of Pilsners, while evolving towards lightness, didn't become insipid until after Prohibition. When Prohibition was repealed, Americans were ready to drink anything. Only a few breweries left, which had survived selling malt for malted milk and root beer, provided a thirsty nation with beer that you could drink a lot of, very quickly.
I've done a bit of home brewing, and the funny thing is that an American style beer is actually an extremely difficult style of beer to make. Replacing much of the malt with rice means that you end up with a very light flavor. The tiniest off flavor is immediately detectable. Get anything wrong with the fermentation, or the water, or the storage and it tastes really bad.
In contrast, I've made Russian Imperial Stouts that have a starting specific gravity so dense the hydrometer wouldn't go into the wort, it just sat on top. Practically speaking, the wort was syrup. While the recipe is complicated in that it has lots of stuff in it, it's actually quite easy to succeed with. You could probably brew it with swamp water, and the three types of malt plus roasted buckwheat would beat the swamp muck taste into a mere "peaty overtone".
When I started homebrewing, wife was afraid I was going to turn into an alcoholic, but in fact there are easier ways to get drunk than spending a day mixing sticky ingredients in carefully sterilized equipment then nursing a yeast culture for weeks before you get something minimally drinkable. I got interested in brewing for its chemistry-set aspects; I'd been mucking around with sour dough and yogurt, and moved onto brewing as a logical next step.
The thing is, I still don't drink very much, and I give away most of what I make. For myself, I'd bottle my beer in six ounce bottles if I could, since I'm more interested in the flavor and feel of the beer than its effects. But I do know a lot more about what is a good beer and what is a bad beer than before. And American "Pilsners" are not bad beers, they're just uninteresting beers (and they certainly aren't the same thing as "real" Czech style pilsners). Since, when I am thirsty, I prefer water to beer, and when I am drinking beer, I prefer complex to simple, I don't bother with beers like Bud. But they have their place; I've heard them called "lawnmower beers".
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Actually, reality is a subset of the set you identified. Unfortunately, mass delusions share precisely the same property.
For that matter so do social conventions, like social status, wealth, property, and law. These things have a kind of belief bootstrapped existence; the law is the law precisely because people agree that is so. A rational person doesn't have to accept these these things as valid, only that others believe them to be so.
It can be argued, as Thoreau did, that "a person more right than his neighbors is a majority of one."
This is the same American people who still think that we found WMD in Iraq? Or that Sadaam orchestrated the 9/11 attacks?
It's not that the American people are stupid, as peoples go. It's that we're as vulnerable to fuzzy thinking and misinformation as anybody else.
The problem isn't that there is proof that the Executive branch has been spying on Americans -- at least if we're not counting the by now well documented fact of FBI use of national security letters; or the fact that NSA domestic surveillance program which supposedly was launched in response to the 9/11 attacks actually started the previous February. You also have to discount the now well documented fact that the NSA has a data mining program that tracks every number you dial, or are called from, and how long you talk. Let's stipulate for the moment that these sorts of things only concern the "tinfoil hat" crowd -- your open minded way of asserting people who disagree with you must be mentally deficient.
The problem is that "take our word for it" isn't a good enough answer in a constitutional system. It's certainly not the way our Constitution was written. We may or may not like this, depending on who is in power in each branch, but the Executive Branch's powers are supposed to be exercised with Congressional oversight. Even his war fighting powers -- or perhaps especially his war fighting powers.
Putting restraints on executive power isn't something done out of theoretical view of what unrestrained governments could hypothetically do. It's based on hard won,real world experience of what people with power do when nobody can restrain them. The outliers -- who may at times be admittedly a bit paranoid -- play an important role in our society. You may lose patience with them; and they may get attention at times for all the wrong reasons. But if they didn't get attention for the wrong reasons, they'd never get attention for the right one either, which is that nobody is supposed to have unlimited authority to decide for the American people what is in their best interest. Every decision, even if it is not of a nature that is publishable in the short term, is supposed to be subject to independent scrutiny.
With respect to C is for Cookie, you have to understand that song in its proper cultural context. The typical "pop culture" monster song on Sesame Street is Elmo's Song. You know:" La la la la! La la la la! Elmo's song!" In the Sesame Street context, C is for Cookie is their cultural equivalent of Mozart's Mass in C Minor. Of course, we all know Cookie Monster is Sesame Street's leading intellectual, and not only gustatory matters. Under his Alistair Cookie nom de plume, he serves as their doyen of cultural, literary and performance criticism.
Yet desite his high culture credentials, Cookie has the common touch: one never feels condescended to, or that he is slumming in popular culture.
It is rare gift, to steer between the Scylla of pop-culture imposture and Charybdis of high culture pandering. It is no accident, therefore, that the song he is most associated with is, in relative terms, a masterpiece, yet still something of a toe-tapper.
Well, if you read the history books, a major factor in military campaigns was getting fodder for your animals. You either limit your offensives to summer, or you expend huge amounts of energy transporting fodder (by draft animals who run on -- fodder), stockpiling it, and guarding it. More than one campaign was ruined by the staggering complexity of maintaining an army dependent upon animal power.
In fact General Howe's largely unsuccessful New Jersey campaign in the winter of 1777 is often called The Forage War. The need to feed his animals meant he had commandeer fodder and supplies from locals, putting troops into daily confrontations with civilians. This lead to an inevitable cycle of atrocities and reprisals, ruining his "hearts and minds" strategy to gain the trust and support of the populace. Breaking his superbly trained and coordinated army into foraging squads not only created conflict with civilians, it subjected his troops to terrifying opportunistic attacks by guerrillas, who were poorly equipped and disciplined, but highly motivated and cunning.
Of course, being able to use gasoline doesn't mean these kinds of problems go away;-)
Well, it's funny that Jobs likes to lecture the music and movie industry about the futility of DRM, but then he tries to lock down the iPhone.
If he were rational (which is not to say that irrational precludes being brilliant), I don't think he'd really care that much about iPhone hacking, unless people started to look at it as something safe and normal and that Apple should support those hacks.
When somebody solders a modchip onto a game console motherboard, he knows very well that he's on his own. But when a hacked up iPhone starts to feel normal to users, then Apple loses the ability to control the release cycle. They don't want their new products to compete with hacks for their existing ones, because they've discovered the secret of the software subscription model Microsoft toyed with a few years ago: you don't call it a subscription, you call it spiffy new hardware.
Of course, he might well be totally ape-shit over iPhone hacking, I don't know. I don't think like him, which is why I'm not rich.
This is what you get when you take the normal human tendency to lose sight of the big picture and apply it to public policy.
I have a friend who is a management consultant. Normally I have not truck with that profession, but he's a really good management consultant, because he's a really good listener. He can listen and listen until you've talked yourself in circles so many times even you realize it. Then he tells you something that would be blindingly obvious to you if you hadn't managed to bury it under tons of mental clutter. In a sense, he specializes in reminding people of the things they shouldn't need a management a consultant to tell them, but somehow they do.
One of his chief themes has to do with confirmation bias. When people are favoring a course of action, the intended consequences of that course of action are very clear to them, sometimes even exaggerated. The unintended consequences tend to be fuzzy, or maybe even invisible.
So imagine you are trying to prevent violent crime. It's a very important job that you take seriously. You have the idea that getting DNA from young children with behavior problems and putting them in a database would prevent some violent crimes. And you're probably right: it would prevent some violent crimes, although you might not be able to quantify how many. But it's a sure bet you aren't considering the bad things that might happen as a result of this, much less quantifying those bad things and putting them into the scales against the good you intend. In fact, where you really go wrong is when you start to think of it, unconsciously of course, in personal terms. People who are pointing out bad things (which you are not prepared to believe) about your plan are trying to stop you from preventing violent crimes. So they must be bad people. Certainly not somebody you'd seriously listen to.
It's childish thinking of course, but are any of us completely above it? Mark Twain once said,"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." But I'd go farther; It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble; it's what you know but are too proud to be reminded of.
The Tibetans have a charismatic, articulate and eloquent spokesman in the Dalai Lama. Here in the US he's probably the most venerated spiritual leader in the US outside of the Pope or the conservative protestant movement. He's almost the chief rabbi for large swath of American intellectuals who think of themselves as "spiritual" but not aligned with a conservative religious movement and who eschew formal theological dogma.
So, in a way the Chinese leadership is right on the mark when they talk about a "Dalai Clique".
The thing that makes him a tough opponent in this game is that he's so darned reasonable and mild mannered. He's not calling for armed uprising. He's not even insisting on national sovereignty. He refuses to act angry, or even wronged. He just insists that the Chinese leadership should talk, and listen with an open mind.
The thing is, there's a lot about the old Tibetan system that is ugly and bad -- along with much that is admirable and good. The Chinese would love people to think about the abuses of the old monastic system when they think of Tibet. But can't oppose somebody like the Dalai Lama without being nakedly blunt about their own unreasonableness and brutality, which makes everything they do an international embarrassment to their country. And that makes this news.
You're absolutely right, we should be concerned with other places where minorities are oppressed for their religious, cultural, racial or linguistic characteristics. But you can't focus on all the tyrants in the world at once. You focus on the ones that can be made representative of tyranny, in the hope that they some day they will become representative of the futility of tyranny.
Personally, I was alarmed by the rapid spike in website defacements on Windows 2003 during the period, which started at 72 thousand in 2005 and soared to 114 thousand in 2007. I'm sticking with Windows 2000, which started at 101 thousand in 2005 and dropped to under 24 thousand in 2007.
If this trends continues, there will be negative fourteen thousand defacements of Windows 2000 this year -- that is to say fourteen thousand anti-defacements. Fourteen thousand webmasters hosting on Windows 2000 will find their sites say what they meant to say, despite their having actually said the wrong thing.
It's like having an operating system that, instead of asking "where do you want to go today?" simply tells you where you ought to go.... Oh,wait.
He wasn't in charge of a land war. He was in charge of US Central Command, which means he's supposed to be in charge of security for a massive swath of the planet running from Kenya to Kazakhstan. Note that this includes the Persian Gulf.
I don't think we need to compare, say, Bill Gates to Hitler. Nor do I think that proprietary software is tantamount to Naziism.
At least if we draw our analogies from history so literally, we'd be better off not knowing any history at all.
The apt part of the analogy here is that there are so many people to whom so many are are indebted to, we can scarcely begin to enumerate them, much less name them.
I don't think the existence of proprietary software is inconsistent with a free civil society. But I do believe that society has become so dependent upon software that it is necessary to have robust, free alternatives to proprietary software. Without that, ownership of key pieces of intellectual property, such as file formats, could confer on private parties powers no private party should have.
A case in point is the license restriction on proprietary database systems, which usually forbid publication of benchmarks that have not been approved by the vendor. The ostensible purpose is to prevent invalid benchmarks from being published, which would certainly happen. But preventing the spread of erroneous ideas has always been the high sounding excuse for censorship; in truth it's humanly impossible to quash all error, and in practice censorship merely replaces the errors of the masses with the errors of the few.
Accepting a gag on database performance testing results is not the end of free speech as we know it, but it's not a healthy development. Exactly where should we draw the line beyond which the vendor cannot censor our opinions? And without free software, how much longer would we be able to draw the line for ourselves, without withdrawing from civil society altogether?
And poetically, "Operation Overlord" was the code name for the allied invasion of Normandy, which signaled the beginning of the end of the European war.
Of course, we are much more at what Churchill would have termed the "end of the beginning" stage when it comes to free software, and in that spirit I offer a Churchill quotation that is rather apt:
This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a war of the Unknown Warriors; but let all strive without failing in faith or in duty, and the dark curse of Hitler will be lifted from our age."
Of course, it's not precisely true that "their deeds will never be recorded", at least if they are using source control as they should.
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But it's really not that expensive. It only seems expensive to you. Enough money has been spent to equip everybody with anything they could possibly need; the reason that nothing much got done is because the money was spent in crisis mode, so nobody was looking much at substance, so much as volume of money spent and paperwork filled in.
I've worked in companies working around the edges of various issues that have become "national emergencies". There's always people doing yeoman work in those areas who could work miracles with a marginal increase in funding. But they never get a marginal increase in funding.
What happens is that once the politicians decide there is an emergency, there is a deluge of cash. Often, the people who've been doing the work all along never see this as people closer to the budgeting process divert the money into crash programs run by people who have no knowledge or interest in what as actually bee done. Other times, they end up with vast quantities of cash that they have to spend right away; the emergency becomes spending all the money before anybody accuses you of dragging your feet. I've seen cases where agencies have literally paid millions of dollars to have a web site with a email backed fill in form that could have been done (by several competent and independent evaluations) for around $50K. The reason was that they never had anything like two million dollars in the kitty before, and had no idea of how to spend it. If they had had a $100K windfall, they could have spent it very well indeed, but they didn't even know where to begin to spend the money they'd been given; certainly not fast enough.
So they turned to a company that specialized in absorbing lots of cash on federal contracts quickly.
I'll let you in on a dirty little secret about government contracting. All those rules that supposedly keep Uncle Sam from being fleeced actually make it easier for somebody with political connections to take him to the cleaner. The reason is that the only way to absorb the money generated by the federal government in a "national emergency", and comply with all the accounting rules, is to have a company or a subsidiary that specializes in absorbing federal money and filling out all the paperwork. The government doesn't buy what it needs in an emergency on the open market, but by outfits starting with Halliburton and all the way down to small time operations that eat up a few millions here and there.
I was amazed and appalled the degree to which you could hire a lobbyist and make a quick buck on a shoeshine and a shell product, provided you were dealing with something "important".
It's the kernel of truth in the geek stereotype. Most geeks are normal in most respects other than their interests and aptitudes. But quite a few fancy themselves John Galt. It's easy when, in certain contexts, you are accustomed to being right to assume the reason you aren't ruling the half-wits around you is that people of vision and talent and wisdom like yourself are being oppressed. It's all warmed over Nietzsche; Nietzsche was a dreamer of adolescent power fantasies, albeit a brilliant one.
It is true, as Thoreau says, that a person more right than his neighbors is a majority of one. But being able to design a computer or organize a computer network, while indicating you have valuable intellectual talents, doesn't qualify you as philosopher king. Geeks who are honest with themselves know that the realm in which their intellectual superiority is extreme is rather narrow.
But it's a pleasant fantasy, one which absolves us of any of our own personal failings. Some brands of sci-fi certainly cater to this fantasy; but it isn't the source. The fantasy ready made with every generation of youthful overconfidence. Personally, I'm rather a fan of Terry Pratchett. He writes about extremely powerful characters, but the one thing they all have in common is that they realize they can't get what they want by wielding power. It's a good lesson for people who have power, whether it's authority, or simple brain power.
"Of course"?
I think not.
If it were me, I'd not only have a backup, but I'd take the drives out, carefully label and inventory them, and store them in a highly secure safe.
The drive, and the information on it, does not belong to my department, nor does it belong to the user or the administration. It belongs to the people of the United States. If there were a possibility the people would lose control of it, if foreign troops were marching on Washington, sure, I'd destroy them. But none of the arguments that the executive branch needs privacy to make decisions efficiently applies to posterity, especially posterity in the form of a subpoena. If Congress issues a constitutionally valid subpoena, say during the course of an impeachment, then they should get the information on the drives. If the next administration wants to read those drives, out they come. If they want to erase those drives, then sorry sir, I can't do that. You're the President, not a friggen' dictator. You've got no right to stand in the way of the law, or to tie the hands of your successors, or even keep things from the public because somebody might be emarassed. Or prosecuted. Especially prosecuted.
Probably every single hard drive used by a white house staffer could fit into a single large walk in safe. Backups for the everything is peanuts compared to what the President will be spending on his Presidential Library. Is the monument to his ego more important than the information that goes into it?
Sure there is; just "/sbin/swapoff -a", and there's no backing store.
That's not really a good example, because the stickers aren't there to protect the user from the product. They're there to protect the vendor from the users.
In fact, the proliferation of warning stickers is a disservice to user safety, because it teaches them to become functionally blind to caution notices.
Getting back to this issue of deleting files, I think that the problem is one of metaphors. In some ways, the trash can metaphor is a particularly good one, because it reproduces the same characteristics of its real world counterpart, down to the aspects people don't think about enough. Anybody can easily fish a document out of a trash can, real or virtual. Once the trash has been "taken away", all bets are off; you can't count on getting any of it back, nor can you count on somebody with enough determination and knowledge of the trash processing system being unable to retrieve part or all of the document. Taking your credit card bills out to the curb in a recycling bin doesn't keep an identity thief from recovering them. Nor should you count on being able to get them back if you want to dispute a charge.
In as sense, what is missing is a "shredder". Of course the physical process of shredding a paper document is just an encumbrance to the computer file user: you don't want to shred a document then put it in the trash. But this carries over the bit of the process that is essential to the user: you shred things you want to be unrecoverable, not just "thrown away".
This points out, I think, the reason that documentation has to make up for insufficient design. Distinguishing "shredding" from "trashing" would communicate the notion that trashing is less secure. On the other hand, it is true that some users will take the unintended message that deleted files can always be recovered. This is unfortunate, but you can't shield people from every folly they might commit. You are responsible to make clear where your metaphors are flawed, either in documentation or in notification; you can't be faulted for when your metaphors actually work the way they are supposed to. If you find you needs lots of explanations for why your metaphors don't work, then your metaphors are not being helpful, and maybe you need new ones.
Oh, come now.
Statements like this only confuse the issue, because security is no more a property of any individual element of a system than temperature is the property of a single molecule of gas.
Also -- "secure" is a lot like "hot"; it's a relative term. Hot enough to fry an egg is not hot enough to forge a horseshoe. Dogmatic pronouncements like "paper based elections are no more secure" are based on the assumption that "security" is something you either have completely or lack utterly. This is why public officials get hoodwinked into thinking vendors who make ATMs know how to make perfectly secure systems. They don't realize that ATMs are not very secure at all, just that adding enough security to them to prevent $1 of theft would cost the banks more than $1. It's highly unlikely that the standards of "secure enough" in that situation apply at all to elections.
The sophisticated way of framing the issue is this: "given the expense, effort and time we are willing to put into an election, can we achieve an acceptable level of confidence that we have achieved an acceptable level of security in a paper-free system?"
Now, I am not so dogmatic that I'd rule out the possibility of achieving an acceptable level of security in a paper free system. However, I'm pretty sure I'd never be confident that a paper free system is secure enough, and I don't flatter myself when I say that I know a hell of a lot more about this sort of thing than the average secretary of state or election district procurement officer.
The thing that makes paperless voting systems a really, really bad idea is that the people accepting them are never going to be qualified to evaluate them. Any confidence they may have in the system is bound to be derived from a considerable degree of wishful thinking. This is not a theoretical possibilty, it's been proven by the insanely insecure systems these people have signed off on. And, sadly, delegating the evaluation of what is "secure enough" to an industry consortium does not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. It's not that they are going to collude in stealing elections, it's that their incentives are all wrong. They'll want the standard that is most profitable to sell, which may or may not have any useful bearing on being secure enough to trust with our national destiny.
Now, let's ask the next question: "given the expense, effort and time we are willing to put into an election, can we achieve an acceptable level of confidence that we have achieved an acceptable level of security in a system with a paper audit trail?"
I think the answer is yes. Not absolute security, but acceptable security. Every government agency, indeed every large entity, employs people who have a lot of experience in preventing and detecting fraud using a paper audit trail. They're called accountants. Of course, financial fraud is still very widespread, but it is not for lack of expertise in stopping it, but will. You can still use the rarefied skills of high end computer security experts in evaluating a system if available to you, but you can also use much more commonly available skills in the design of tamper protection and fraud detection if you introduce a paper trail.
Given the chemical and physical characteristics of this stuff, it'd be fairer to say we've discovered the "Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch" of science.
Well, Ubuntu isn't exactly great when it comes to things common laptop sound cards, or certain popular USB wi-fi adapters. If you're lucky, it just works, but the same goes for Vista. But Ubuntu is not particularly good among Linux ditros when it comes to hardware support. I can attest this from personal experience.
Vista's problem appears to be that drivers often don't exist for "legacy" devices -- that is to say devices that aren't currently being sold but were being sold last week. Ubuntu's problem is that they ship drivers that don't work with their kernel modifications. The solution to most device problems seems to be either to get source for an updated driver and compile it against the Ubuntu headers, or to replace the Ubuntu kernel with a stock Debian kernel. That is, that is the solution if you are lucky.
I hardly think Ubuntu deserves to be held up as an example of hardware compatibility, if they ship drivers with their distro that doesn't work with their kernel modifications. Microsoft, at least, can justly claim they don't have access to the driver source.
If you have a couple of different problems with Ubuntu and hardware, and search the net for solutions, you hear the same stories over and over again. The Ubuntu upgrade broke some piece of hardware, but some people had good luck getting the source and compiling it against Ubuntu's headers; others have luck replacing the Ubuntu kernel with the stock Debian kernel. Then you have a smattering of things that people tried and worked for some reason they can't fathom, then there are instructions of the jump-down-turn-around-pick-a-bale-of-cotton variety which might work but nobody real expects them to. Then you have a few lonely voices saying they tried every suggestion and nothing and worked, and does anybody please, please have any ideas of what to try next? Sometimes they get an answer, which is that this sort of thing should be much less common in the next major release, contrary to experience with every prior release since the project's inception.
Still, I'm using Ubuntu, not because it's perfect, but because it's better for what I need it for. I use virtual machines extensively, and they run more smoothly under Ubuntu X86_64 than under Ubuntu 32 bit or Vista. I can live without sound, although I miss playing music while I work.
Next time around I'm definitely going back to Debian. They may be slow to get the latest versions of everything out, but when they do it works better. I'd go back to Debian now, but I've spent way more than my budgeted time screwing around with the operating system, and its well past the "educational" stage where you do things like read the ACPI specs to figure out how things work, and into the stage of being a plain old PITA.
Clearly, Linux is a better operating system in this sense: given that it's mere fantasy that "things just work", it's better to have a single device fail than to have the entire OS unusable. Not that a bad device driver can't cause a kernel panic, but when the source to a driver is available, it's much less likely to make it into a distribution doing something that will bring the entire system down. It might not work -- that takes having the actual hardware in question available for testing.
I'm not saying Ubuntu is a bad distro. It'd be a great distro if it didn't fiddle with the kernel, then ship that kernel with drivers that don't work with its changes. If there is somebody else taking care of this for you, fine. I think Dell sells machines with Ubuntu preinstalled. But I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anybody who didn't have somebody supporting them who was comfortable doing things like installing custom kernels and the like.
Having worked in the field, I have a slightly different perspective.
It was never the case that slow hardware plagued Microsoft's PDA offerings. The problem is that the use-case models (if there were any) for the Pocket PC user interface were absurd. They have a kind of "desktop replacement" mentality; yet to the degree something is convenient to carry in your pocket, it is awkward as a general purpose computing device (with an interface mimicking a desktop no less). And vice versa.
It is the badness of the Windows Mobile interfaces, coupled with the excessive bulk of the early WinCE PDAs that made them crap. It was a cascade of bad consequences, all starting with the attempt to be good at everything: to give a desktop-y kind of experience, you needed lots of pixels, and those pixels had to be color and they had to come cheap, so you ended up with a large device with a big honking battery to drive the backlight through the cheap lcd. It's the hi-res displays and the high capacity batteries that make modern Windows Mobile PDAs tolerable. Not the CPU speed.
Palm, in its heyday, created a niche product that was convenient to carry, and performed in a few limited roles very well. Think about this: that very same description also fits Apple's iPod. Now, there were people like me who exploited the fact that Palm was a platform, and made a nice living off it for a while. We could define new roles for the device.
It is true Palm made some mistakes, but the idea that they failed to make a spiffy enough OS is a myth. The real problem is that the PDA niche became unprofitable as prices dropped. Most who had a Palm V would probably be happy with one today -- if it cost about $35. But that's not the kind of thing Palm sells; they sell stuff in the 200-$500 range. So, they began to add spiffiness to their products, spiffiness that their users neither needed, nor wanted, but was mandated by the price range they wanted to occupy. So they blurred the distinction between PalmOS and PocketPC by becoming more PocketPC like.
In the end, it was not so much a case of Palm moving too slowly, as not having a very good place to move towards, other than into smart phones.
In smart phones, business friendliness continues to be a weak spot for Palm and a marketing strength for Microsoft. But Microsoft isn't as dominant as people here seem to think. It is the carriers rule the smart phone market, not Microsoft. I see the smart phone as only an interim solution, not because PDA functions need to be liberated from a phone, but vice versa. We're in a state of incredible flux at present, with categories of mobile devices multiplying rapidly, and the boundaries of those categories being very fuzzy.
Actually, Paul Allen of Microsoft did something very much like this; he took the vast fortune he made and created a set of complex financial instruments that made it independent of any future actions by Microsoft management. The story that is told about this is that he contracted cancer, and overheard Gates and Ballmer scheming to get his shares back after he died.
Now I've had that kind of stockholder discussion, although never after the fact of somebody contracting a potentially fatal illness, and never behind their back. It's the kind of discussion you have to have, but when your partners are doing it on the sly is a bad sign. Evidently Allen didn't trust Microsoft management with his financial destiny after that. It was perfectly ethical in his case, which was about a situation that applied specifically to him.
But I disagree that this kind of thing is ethical in every case. It's one thing for a former CEO or a pre-IPO employee to do this after his term of service. It's another thing for a current senior manager to do it while he has access to information that other investors do not.
CEOs get massive compensation packages based on the theory that they'll work harder if their financial future is tied to a company. Personally, I think that theory is self-serving rubbish, and the truth is that too many CEOs sit on each others' compensation committees. However, it is unethical to negotiate a compensation package in which you agree to yoke your financial future to the company, and then exploit a loophole to obtain value from your inside knowledge that other investors can't.
Well, that's OK because the rules describe precisely the same set.
Let L and R be two sets of rational numbers, such that for every number a in L, a < 1 and for every number c in R, c >= 1, and every rational number is either in L or R. Let b be a real number such that for any a in L and c in R, a < b < c.
Let G be the set of geek humor, and let f(x) mapping from any member x of G to R be the funniness of x, and g(x) mapping from any member x of G be the cleverness of x.
Postulate (b): for any x in G, g(x) > f(x).
Actually, American versions of Pilsners, while evolving towards lightness, didn't become insipid until after Prohibition. When Prohibition was repealed, Americans were ready to drink anything. Only a few breweries left, which had survived selling malt for malted milk and root beer, provided a thirsty nation with beer that you could drink a lot of, very quickly.
I've done a bit of home brewing, and the funny thing is that an American style beer is actually an extremely difficult style of beer to make. Replacing much of the malt with rice means that you end up with a very light flavor. The tiniest off flavor is immediately detectable. Get anything wrong with the fermentation, or the water, or the storage and it tastes really bad.
In contrast, I've made Russian Imperial Stouts that have a starting specific gravity so dense the hydrometer wouldn't go into the wort, it just sat on top. Practically speaking, the wort was syrup. While the recipe is complicated in that it has lots of stuff in it, it's actually quite easy to succeed with. You could probably brew it with swamp water, and the three types of malt plus roasted buckwheat would beat the swamp muck taste into a mere "peaty overtone".
When I started homebrewing, wife was afraid I was going to turn into an alcoholic, but in fact there are easier ways to get drunk than spending a day mixing sticky ingredients in carefully sterilized equipment then nursing a yeast culture for weeks before you get something minimally drinkable. I got interested in brewing for its chemistry-set aspects; I'd been mucking around with sour dough and yogurt, and moved onto brewing as a logical next step.
The thing is, I still don't drink very much, and I give away most of what I make. For myself, I'd bottle my beer in six ounce bottles if I could, since I'm more interested in the flavor and feel of the beer than its effects. But I do know a lot more about what is a good beer and what is a bad beer than before. And American "Pilsners" are not bad beers, they're just uninteresting beers (and they certainly aren't the same thing as "real" Czech style pilsners). Since, when I am thirsty, I prefer water to beer, and when I am drinking beer, I prefer complex to simple, I don't bother with beers like Bud. But they have their place; I've heard them called "lawnmower beers".
I've bet you've had a few peer reviewed results, it's just that one of the other side effects of drinking "plenty of beer" is memory loss.
That said, I'm curious as to what quantity exactly qualifies as "plenty" beer? Now there is a topic for ongoing research.
Actually, reality is a subset of the set you identified. Unfortunately, mass delusions share precisely the same property.
For that matter so do social conventions, like social status, wealth, property, and law. These things have a kind of belief bootstrapped existence; the law is the law precisely because people agree that is so. A rational person doesn't have to accept these these things as valid, only that others believe them to be so.
It can be argued, as Thoreau did, that "a person more right than his neighbors is a majority of one."
This is the same American people who still think that we found WMD in Iraq? Or that Sadaam orchestrated the 9/11 attacks?
It's not that the American people are stupid, as peoples go. It's that we're as vulnerable to fuzzy thinking and misinformation as anybody else.
The problem isn't that there is proof that the Executive branch has been spying on Americans -- at least if we're not counting the by now well documented fact of FBI use of national security letters; or the fact that NSA domestic surveillance program which supposedly was launched in response to the 9/11 attacks actually started the previous February. You also have to discount the now well documented fact that the NSA has a data mining program that tracks every number you dial, or are called from, and how long you talk. Let's stipulate for the moment that these sorts of things only concern the "tinfoil hat" crowd -- your open minded way of asserting people who disagree with you must be mentally deficient.
The problem is that "take our word for it" isn't a good enough answer in a constitutional system. It's certainly not the way our Constitution was written. We may or may not like this, depending on who is in power in each branch, but the Executive Branch's powers are supposed to be exercised with Congressional oversight. Even his war fighting powers -- or perhaps especially his war fighting powers.
Putting restraints on executive power isn't something done out of theoretical view of what unrestrained governments could hypothetically do. It's based on hard won,real world experience of what people with power do when nobody can restrain them. The outliers -- who may at times be admittedly a bit paranoid -- play an important role in our society. You may lose patience with them; and they may get attention at times for all the wrong reasons. But if they didn't get attention for the wrong reasons, they'd never get attention for the right one either, which is that nobody is supposed to have unlimited authority to decide for the American people what is in their best interest. Every decision, even if it is not of a nature that is publishable in the short term, is supposed to be subject to independent scrutiny.
Ah, yes. Cookie -- the thinking man's monster.
With respect to C is for Cookie, you have to understand that song in its proper cultural context. The typical "pop culture" monster song on Sesame Street is Elmo's Song. You know:" La la la la! La la la la! Elmo's song!" In the Sesame Street context, C is for Cookie is their cultural equivalent of Mozart's Mass in C Minor. Of course, we all know Cookie Monster is Sesame Street's leading intellectual, and not only gustatory matters. Under his Alistair Cookie nom de plume, he serves as their doyen of cultural, literary and performance criticism.
Yet desite his high culture credentials, Cookie has the common touch: one never feels condescended to, or that he is slumming in popular culture.
It is rare gift, to steer between the Scylla of pop-culture imposture and Charybdis of high culture pandering. It is no accident, therefore, that the song he is most associated with is, in relative terms, a masterpiece, yet still something of a toe-tapper.
Well, if you read the history books, a major factor in military campaigns was getting fodder for your animals. You either limit your offensives to summer, or you expend huge amounts of energy transporting fodder (by draft animals who run on -- fodder), stockpiling it, and guarding it. More than one campaign was ruined by the staggering complexity of maintaining an army dependent upon animal power.
;-)
In fact General Howe's largely unsuccessful New Jersey campaign in the winter of 1777 is often called The Forage War. The need to feed his animals meant he had commandeer fodder and supplies from locals, putting troops into daily confrontations with civilians. This lead to an inevitable cycle of atrocities and reprisals, ruining his "hearts and minds" strategy to gain the trust and support of the populace. Breaking his superbly trained and coordinated army into foraging squads not only created conflict with civilians, it subjected his troops to terrifying opportunistic attacks by guerrillas, who were poorly equipped and disciplined, but highly motivated and cunning.
Of course, being able to use gasoline doesn't mean these kinds of problems go away
Well, it's funny that Jobs likes to lecture the music and movie industry about the futility of DRM, but then he tries to lock down the iPhone.
If he were rational (which is not to say that irrational precludes being brilliant), I don't think he'd really care that much about iPhone hacking, unless people started to look at it as something safe and normal and that Apple should support those hacks.
When somebody solders a modchip onto a game console motherboard, he knows very well that he's on his own. But when a hacked up iPhone starts to feel normal to users, then Apple loses the ability to control the release cycle. They don't want their new products to compete with hacks for their existing ones, because they've discovered the secret of the software subscription model Microsoft toyed with a few years ago: you don't call it a subscription, you call it spiffy new hardware.
Of course, he might well be totally ape-shit over iPhone hacking, I don't know. I don't think like him, which is why I'm not rich.
This is what you get when you take the normal human tendency to lose sight of the big picture and apply it to public policy.
I have a friend who is a management consultant. Normally I have not truck with that profession, but he's a really good management consultant, because he's a really good listener. He can listen and listen until you've talked yourself in circles so many times even you realize it. Then he tells you something that would be blindingly obvious to you if you hadn't managed to bury it under tons of mental clutter. In a sense, he specializes in reminding people of the things they shouldn't need a management a consultant to tell them, but somehow they do.
One of his chief themes has to do with confirmation bias. When people are favoring a course of action, the intended consequences of that course of action are very clear to them, sometimes even exaggerated. The unintended consequences tend to be fuzzy, or maybe even invisible.
So imagine you are trying to prevent violent crime. It's a very important job that you take seriously. You have the idea that getting DNA from young children with behavior problems and putting them in a database would prevent some violent crimes. And you're probably right: it would prevent some violent crimes, although you might not be able to quantify how many. But it's a sure bet you aren't considering the bad things that might happen as a result of this, much less quantifying those bad things and putting them into the scales against the good you intend. In fact, where you really go wrong is when you start to think of it, unconsciously of course, in personal terms. People who are pointing out bad things (which you are not prepared to believe) about your plan are trying to stop you from preventing violent crimes. So they must be bad people. Certainly not somebody you'd seriously listen to.
It's childish thinking of course, but are any of us completely above it? Mark Twain once said,"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." But I'd go farther; It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble; it's what you know but are too proud to be reminded of.
It's really rather simple.
The Tibetans have a charismatic, articulate and eloquent spokesman in the Dalai Lama. Here in the US he's probably the most venerated spiritual leader in the US outside of the Pope or the conservative protestant movement. He's almost the chief rabbi for large swath of American intellectuals who think of themselves as "spiritual" but not aligned with a conservative religious movement and who eschew formal theological dogma.
So, in a way the Chinese leadership is right on the mark when they talk about a "Dalai Clique".
The thing that makes him a tough opponent in this game is that he's so darned reasonable and mild mannered. He's not calling for armed uprising. He's not even insisting on national sovereignty. He refuses to act angry, or even wronged. He just insists that the Chinese leadership should talk, and listen with an open mind.
The thing is, there's a lot about the old Tibetan system that is ugly and bad -- along with much that is admirable and good. The Chinese would love people to think about the abuses of the old monastic system when they think of Tibet. But can't oppose somebody like the Dalai Lama without being nakedly blunt about their own unreasonableness and brutality, which makes everything they do an international embarrassment to their country. And that makes this news.
You're absolutely right, we should be concerned with other places where minorities are oppressed for their religious, cultural, racial or linguistic characteristics. But you can't focus on all the tyrants in the world at once. You focus on the ones that can be made representative of tyranny, in the hope that they some day they will become representative of the futility of tyranny.
Personally, I was alarmed by the rapid spike in website defacements on Windows 2003 during the period, which started at 72 thousand in 2005 and soared to 114 thousand in 2007. I'm sticking with Windows 2000, which started at 101 thousand in 2005 and dropped to under 24 thousand in 2007.
If this trends continues, there will be negative fourteen thousand defacements of Windows 2000 this year -- that is to say fourteen thousand anti-defacements. Fourteen thousand webmasters hosting on Windows 2000 will find their sites say what they meant to say, despite their having actually said the wrong thing.
It's like having an operating system that, instead of asking "where do you want to go today?" simply tells you where you ought to go.... Oh,wait.
He wasn't in charge of a land war. He was in charge of US Central Command, which means he's supposed to be in charge of security for a massive swath of the planet running from Kenya to Kazakhstan. Note that this includes the Persian Gulf.
I don't think we need to compare, say, Bill Gates to Hitler. Nor do I think that proprietary software is tantamount to Naziism.
At least if we draw our analogies from history so literally, we'd be better off not knowing any history at all.
The apt part of the analogy here is that there are so many people to whom so many are are indebted to, we can scarcely begin to enumerate them, much less name them.
I don't think the existence of proprietary software is inconsistent with a free civil society. But I do believe that society has become so dependent upon software that it is necessary to have robust, free alternatives to proprietary software. Without that, ownership of key pieces of intellectual property, such as file formats, could confer on private parties powers no private party should have.
A case in point is the license restriction on proprietary database systems, which usually forbid publication of benchmarks that have not been approved by the vendor. The ostensible purpose is to prevent invalid benchmarks from being published, which would certainly happen. But preventing the spread of erroneous ideas has always been the high sounding excuse for censorship; in truth it's humanly impossible to quash all error, and in practice censorship merely replaces the errors of the masses with the errors of the few.
Accepting a gag on database performance testing results is not the end of free speech as we know it, but it's not a healthy development. Exactly where should we draw the line beyond which the vendor cannot censor our opinions? And without free software, how much longer would we be able to draw the line for ourselves, without withdrawing from civil society altogether?
Of course, we are much more at what Churchill would have termed the "end of the beginning" stage when it comes to free software, and in that spirit I offer a Churchill quotation that is rather apt:
Of course, it's not precisely true that "their deeds will never be recorded", at least if they are using source control as they should.
Well, have you looked at where health insurance premiums have gone over the last decade?
I for one welcome our new coca leaf prescribing medical overlords.