Yes but it's a statutory corporation, which is a very very different kettle of fish from a trading corporation. As the parent poster pointed out, the BBC is not subject to the vissicitudes of the market nor the pressure of advertisers, in deciding upon it s activities.
In fact the reason for the corporate structure of the BBC (and in Australia the ABC) is to isolate the organisation from the direct influence of the executive government. This is always the greatest risk which "government-owned" media must be protected from.
It is silly to oppose "corporate power" while in the same argument saying that the BBC is not an example of it.
No, on the contrary, you are the one being silly, (well actually disingenuous), by failing to distinguish what kind of corporation the BBC is, and by failing to understand what kind of power is being referred by the term 'corporate power.' The BBC, though a statutory corporation, is clearly at the opposite end of the spectrum from the 'corporate power' media.
The BBC is indeed 100% a part of the government in the UK. Its directors are government appointees.
In practice, however, when the public broadcaster is the most forthright critic of the actual government policies of the day, you know you're doing something right.
The solution is to write better laws that address the specifics.
So long as laws are written in a human language, the solution will be to have judges, who according to accepted methodologies, deem to intepret the "will of the legislature." This is so even where a statute is specific to the point of agony. Law is not an engineering problem.
We should also keep in mind the reality that we as programmers make mistakes and typing a few extra characters to improve code readability/maintainability may not be at that bad of an idea.
One of Python's great virtues is its readibility/maintainability. Python is not a terse language, if your really want to minimise line count (and decrease readibility) you'd do much better with Perl (which is not to say that you cannot write readible Perl). In fact part of Python culture is the eschew the one-liner.
The reason it takes less lines of code to get something done in Python as opposed to Java, in my experience, is that you don't have to spend so much time wrestling with the compile-time type system of Java (Python is run-time typed). When I write^H^H^Hote Java I had to cast objects continuously. For instance to collect a bunch of ints into a vector, and then pull them out again, I'd have to cast the ints into Integers, stick them in the Vector, when I want them again out come Objects that have to be cast to Integers etc etc. Python (at least since 2.2) is more object oriented. There are not non-object primitives, ints are already objects (meaning btw that you can subclass them), and the basic list in Python is a vector. So you just push ints into a list and pop them out again, no drama, no casting, and consequently shorter and more readible code.
Another benefit of run-time typing is that true polymorphism of interface (rather than of implementation) a la Smalltalk, is possible. That is to say, where Java will ask an object it's racial background (why type are you?) before operating on it, Python will just ask the object what it can do. Consequently the try-except (try-catch) mechanism adopts a central role in the logic of Python programs.
Now people often fear that run-time typing will result in more and more difficult to locate errors. I remain to be convinced of this. In any case, the kind of unit testing discussed in this article is, imho, a far more effective way of locating/preventing errors, than relying on a type system.
Can someone help me understand why I would want to use Python as opposed to Java?
Maybe you wouldn't want to. Trying the language out would probably be the best way of answering your question. Perhaps you are so comfortable with Java, that you would find it difficult to think 'pythonically' about the problem, and you would hate Python? Lucky you! For myself, when I try to write in Java nowadays, my nose starts to bleed;)
I'm learning Python and I think the unittest section will help greatly while stumbling through the process of building applications.
I've found that writing tests before writing the code they test requires a deal of self-discipline (ie. I don't do it as often as I should. When I have made this effort however, rather than stumbling through, the unittest module will took me by the hand and led me through.
Running the test suite while writing really focuses you on a specific part of your code (ie. that part that is failing) which can in turn affect the logic of your program.
I didn't address that because I was responding to the idea that the guilt of the arrested person was the justification for publicity. Certainly it is an absolute requirement that someone who bears the arrested person's interests be informed of their whereabouts.
There is a good argument that it is the public at large who should be that someone, both because the public has a right to know about the activites of their police forces, and also because of the vexed question of who else that someone should be, and more to the point, who (and on what basis) should choose that someone otherwise. On the other hand the reputation of an innocent accused ought also to be protected.
Though it may not be recognised at law, there are in fact different levels of 'public' information. I mean it is one thing to inform an accused's family and nominated legal representative and to give out information upon reasonable inquiry, and it is quite another to publish a weekly list of names and addresses of all people arrested in the local paper (as is in some places done for all people convicted).
Sending out an email circular to local practitioners seems to me to fall in between these extremes. I'm not entirely sure of whether I think it is a good thing or not. But given the conflicting demands of protecting liberty and protecting reputation this is at least a defensible practice.
There's a few hundred people in Cuba with no-doubt strong opinions on the subject.
The situation in which these people are being held would seem to suggest that mere public information of who is being held in custody, is not sufficient to guarantee the protection of an individual's rights as against the power of the state.
Those who are innocent will want lawyers who relentlessly pursue the truth. The rest need lawyers who know what people can get away with. In our oppositional based legal system, the demand for scummy lawyers will be equal or greater than honest lawyers.
In what way is this insightful?
Surely the guilty every bit as much as the innocent deserve legal representation. In what way can a lawyer defending an innocent party be described as "honest" in comparison to a "scummy" lawyer (indeed perhaps the same lawyer) defending a guilty party.
It is not the role of a defence lawyer to "relentlessly pursue the truth" any more than it is the role of a busdriver to do so. It is the judge and the jury who are charged with doing that. It is the lawyer's role to zealously defend the rights of his or her client.
Is the busdriver who took the guilty accused to the court in the morning "scummy"? How would you calculate a busdriver's moral culpability? -- By some sort of averaging of the scumminess and honesty of the passengers on the bus?
Let me spell this out, honest lawyers can and do defend guilty criminal accused, and scummy lawyers can and do defend innocent criminal accused. To ascribe moral culpablity to a lawyer based on the moral culpablilty of their client is absurd, not insightful.
I'm sorry, but this is PUBLIC information. If *you* violate the law, your arrest records are a matter of public record.
Why did you phrase this as a conditional? Are you saying that If *you* did not violate the law, your arrest record would not be a matter of public record?
The question here sure is whether arrest records should be a matter of public record, given that the fact of a violation of the law is an unknown at that stage.
Any government can ignore or enforce patents as it sees fit within its borders.
Not in this century. Ever heard of TRIPS? Or the WTO perhaps? Lemme guess you were asleep when they covered international aspects IP law, at law school?
... reduced it beyond the pale to being so simple as to be useless.
Beyond the pale? I never even mentioned Ireland!
A lot of things are like this. I'll give you an example.
Why give criminal law examples when discussing tort law reform?
The same meme is true with tort laws and civil lawsuits.
Not at all. You can't simply apply the same meme here, remember this a complex question. It pays to be parsimonious, tort law examples would have served your argument better. It makes little sense in demonstrating how tort law is "wielded unjustly against the large and the small," to give examples relating criminal statutes.
The bottom line being, tort reform, like all lawmaking, is vastly complex.
I don't disagree at all. In particular I think that your point about medical indemnity is well put.
This is a complex problem, but only if you want to solve it to guarantee the best outcome for the greatest number of stakeholders. What is much more simple though, is to protect the interests of a vested interest group, at the expense of the vast majority of the citizenry. Simply adding protection from suit, to say tobacco and drug manufacturers, reducing ordinary people's rights to sue and capping the awards, etc, these changes are quite simple to institute. And in fact these are the changes which are being instituted under the rubric of 'tort law reform'
The bottom line is...
... another insufferable cliche, (unless of course one is discussing accountancy.)
My point was simply that we, as ordinary citizens, should not allow ourselves to be hoodwinked into willingly surrendering our rights.
... the last vestige of citizen protection, the lawsuit, must be removed from the hands of the people.
Tell it like it is!
What's worse, this is a abrogation of liberty that is incredibly easy to sell. After all we all hate lawyers, don't we? The incantation of formulae such as 'ambulance chaser' (I like how Forbes uses it here) replaces any informed assesment. The gullible swallow up bullshit McDonalds-Hot-Coffee stories without pausing to ask what the facts in any case really were.
"be nice to see linux there but m$ will probably..."
You can bank on m$ getting what it wants for Iraq. They didn't go in to Iraq to let some pinko Finnish free software take that market that rightfully belongs to a friendly megacorp.
What's the government, a third party person? The government is me. Government is using my money, my resources. I am one of the guys who maintain the government, not the government itself.
NO the government is not you, it's us. The government is not using your money, it's using the funds from (what in the ACT is called) 'consolidated revenue.' Once you have paid your taxes that money is not yours in any personal sense, any more than the money you spent on that can of coke is yours, notwithstanding the fact that you may be a shareholder of the CocaCola Co. Once again it is ours.
And because it is ours, and we can (and in the ACT must) vote, the government better spend it in a cost effective manner (no multi-million dollar salary packages in the public service I'm afraid). If using OSS, or products for which the service market is competitive, saves the government money then it is quite the correct thing for the government to do.
Beyond the niggardly concerns of how consolidated revenue is to spent, however, there is a greater issue of principle here. 'Access' and 'Transparency' are supposed to be touchstones of democratic government. Clearly it behoves a government to embrace standards which are non-proprietary and open insofar as it is practicable.
This is not about open source, this is about your own freedom to choose.... And nobody can make decision for you, neither government nor open source zealots.
Once again, nobody is making the decision for you. You can use whatever you like. This is about what it is appropriate for a democractic government to use. You need to learn to disguise your teenage libertarian paranoia a little better.
I'm breaking my own rule of never arguing more than two posts deep on slashdot, but here goes.
My point was, when someone says, "I have this information, but I'm not telling!" that's not censorship. It's called keeping a secret. It's called confidential information. It's not called censorship. Censorship requires a party other than a publisher and reader.
Much better! Allow me to summarise: Censorship involves A, someone who has information and a desire to communicate it; B, a potential recipient; and C, a censor, someone who has the functional power to inhibit that communication. Is that close enough to what you are saying?
Actually I would prefer to talk about the right to to communicate and the right to receive, precisely because of such legal issues as "confidential information" which A may have access to without having any right to communicate it. However your definition seems workable and sensible, so let's go with that for the moment.
I simply said that censorship is impossible because you can always go anonymously on the 'net to publish your thoughts.
I think this is a really weak point in your argument. It can hardly have been the case that when the old Soviet Union was banning the publication or importation of the Bible, they were not engaging in censorship merely because some Evanglical societies successfully smuggled Bibles into Russia. There may be workarounds, there may be censorship which is less than 100% effective. But this is still censorship.
Moreover I doubt the effectiveness of web publication as a form of circumventing media censorship. If anything I would say that the sheer size of the market in the US (providing we can stop it all from falling into Mr Murdoch's hands) is the best protection the American public has. Clearly the more players there are in a market, the less chance there is of effective collusion
Smaller markets are not always so fortunate, especially when you consider strategic control of the media. In Australia, for instance, Murdoch has the game sown up as regards print media which floating voters read. That highbrow Sydney Morming Herald and The Age are only read by people who already know how they are going to vote. As a consequence there has not been a (federal) change of government in Australia
from 1972, which has not had Murdoch's approval. The same is probably true for the UK from the days of Thatcher onwards (but there haven't been too many changes, so its a moot point).
I agree that it would be wrong, but it would not be censorship. If a reporter found out about it, went to post it on the web, and was stopped by his employer, that would be censorship.
What if the reporter wanted it published in the newspaper. You would have the situation of A, a reporter wanting to do his/her job of informing the public, B a public which ought to be informed,and C a newspaper proprietor using their functional power to inhibit that communication?
Of course this isn't an easy thing to resolve. After all proprietors must have some say in what the publish and what not. Indeed publishers arguably have as much a duty to censor as they do the publish, for instance when something a reporter wants to print, would, in their judgment, endanger the operational security of a section of the nations armed forces during a time of war. Our concern should be with what is being censored, what those people who occupy that special place a democracy accords, decide to allow to filter through to us, and what they don't. And why.
Of course we should oppose this, but it's next to impossible for it to happen because of the way the network is setup. First of all, who has this "right" to sell it?...
The same people who sold off (not licensed, but sold) a section of the electro-magnetic spectrum for the next generation communications technologies. Governmen
Well that doesn't happen in the US because we can find anything we damn well want on the 'net.
Yes, the net does, to some extent, redress the balance. This is why social theorists waxed lyrical in the early days about the "democratizing potential" of the internet.
However, if a company like Wallmart could tell a band like Nirvana to change lyrics to their songs, and get the band's compliance can you honestly say that that corporate censorship doesn't happen in America? The fact is all sorts of non-governmental (as well as governmental) censorship does happen, and the net is not in all cases able to prevent nor remedy it. Nor, realistically, are all citizens capable of finding the information they don't know is out there. The net's great, but it is still nowhere as important in informing public opinion as the print and broadcast media.
Consider this too. Should we oppose selling to either AOL or Microsoft, for example, exclusive rights to content-filter the net? If you think this is something that should be opposed, then you do see that non-state censorship is possible, and in fact want to oppose it, well done! The parent poster would have to say, well there's no censorship there, I'll just accept it.
Censorship is when party C has some information, party B wants access to said information...
So when the Chinese block the net, those Chinese who are unaware that something is being blocked, (ie they don't want access to that information, they don't even know that information exists), you maintain that is not censorship? I beg to differ.
... and party A gets to decide whether or not party B can access it.
But this does happen in situtations where A is not a government.
Freedom to speak implies freedom to STFU and there's not a damn thing wrong with that.
There is though. The problem is that we have contending rights that must be balanced. In your equation the right to free speech simply trumphs the right to make an informed democratic choice.
As is recognised in the 1st Amendment, the news industry has a special role to play in a democracy. The freedom of the press is articulated separtely from any general freedom of speech. Unfashionable though it may be, I believe that the rights they are afforded implicitly impose duties. If a government engaged in some activity, which it was vital for the citizenry to know about in coming to a decision to excercise their democratic rights, it is wrong for Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner and a handful of others, merely by virtue of their control of the media, and merely because they stand collectively to gain from said activity, to decide that such information be surpressed. As well as having a right, the media have a duty to report those things reasonably necessary for the conduct of an informed democractic republic.
dude that's not censorship, censorship would be the government steping in and saying that, but when a private entity steps out and says "If you criticize our leadership while we're at war, you're a traitor." then that is OK becuase they are exercising their right to free speech.
Wrong, censorship is when party A who has control of information, (whether that is because they are a state and control the laws or a corporation and control the distribution), decides what party B is permitted to see and what party B is not permitted to see.
Until you manage to free yourself of the misapprehension that censorship is something only states can do, you will never be free from censorship.
at the moment the usa more or less control the internet
Does it? I would have thought that organisations such as ICANN have gone out of their way to internationlise. If anything, considering the proportion of internet users that are US residents, the bodies which do regulate the net, (inasmuch as it is regulated), have a decidely international flavour.
While it's not good with all this censorship thing
When talking about censorship I think we should distinguish between the use of censorship as a weapon of political oppression by a state,(or by some other power bloc), against the citizenry of a country, from its use to set bounds of what is culturally appropriate as agreed upon by at least a majority of the citizens of a country. Censorship of child pornography, for instance, is supported by many, even though it might not be strictly illegal in some countries. Surely people of different countries have a right to make choices as a people, that you or I might disagree with? Should we put them in a situation where accepting the internet is an all or nothing choice, resulting in a situation where, in keeping out something that is culturally taboo (eg prOn) they are also keeping out information that might politically inform the citizens?
As it is the UN Charter of Human Rights contains fairly expansive guarantees of rights to access information, and rights of conscience and expression. One could not imagine that the UN, were it to become responsible for the governance of the net, could condone a situation where its instrumentalities were deployed to negate those guarantees.
Anyway, as I pointed out above, I feel that net governance is already sufficiently international, and really don't seem much point in involving the UN.
This is not complicated. People make it complicated because they want the Jews to be the bad guys.
The Jews are not the bad guys. The Israeli government are the bad guys! The Palestinians are not the bad guys, Hamas, Hezbollah etc are. When you get two lots of bad guys, as evil as Palestinian terror groups and the current Israeli administration going at each other, it adds up to a lot of dead children. On both sides.
Isn't it clear that each bomb Hamas explode on a crowded comuter bus, or each missle the Israeli Airforce lob into a crowded market, merely demands more killing from the other side? Should we expect better from Hamas? I don't think so. Should we expect better from the Israeli state? Definitely! Can we call one side legitimate and the other terrorists? Not with any sense of balance.
Slashdot Mirror
"could"?!
Yes but it's a statutory corporation, which is a very very different kettle of fish from a trading corporation. As the parent poster pointed out, the BBC is not subject to the vissicitudes of the market nor the pressure of advertisers, in deciding upon it s activities.
In fact the reason for the corporate structure of the BBC (and in Australia the ABC) is to isolate the organisation from the direct influence of the executive government. This is always the greatest risk which "government-owned" media must be protected from.
It is silly to oppose "corporate power" while in the same argument saying that the BBC is not an example of it.No, on the contrary, you are the one being silly, (well actually disingenuous), by failing to distinguish what kind of corporation the BBC is, and by failing to understand what kind of power is being referred by the term 'corporate power.' The BBC, though a statutory corporation, is clearly at the opposite end of the spectrum from the 'corporate power' media.
The BBC is indeed 100% a part of the government in the UK. Its directors are government appointees.In practice, however, when the public broadcaster is the most forthright critic of the actual government policies of the day, you know you're doing something right.
The solution is to write better laws that address the specifics.
So long as laws are written in a human language, the solution will be to have judges, who according to accepted methodologies, deem to intepret the "will of the legislature." This is so even where a statute is specific to the point of agony. Law is not an engineering problem.
We should also keep in mind the reality that we as programmers make mistakes and typing a few extra characters to improve code readability/maintainability may not be at that bad of an idea.
One of Python's great virtues is its readibility/maintainability. Python is not a terse language, if your really want to minimise line count (and decrease readibility) you'd do much better with Perl (which is not to say that you cannot write readible Perl). In fact part of Python culture is the eschew the one-liner.
The reason it takes less lines of code to get something done in Python as opposed to Java, in my experience, is that you don't have to spend so much time wrestling with the compile-time type system of Java (Python is run-time typed). When I write^H^H^Hote Java I had to cast objects continuously. For instance to collect a bunch of ints into a vector, and then pull them out again, I'd have to cast the ints into Integers, stick them in the Vector, when I want them again out come Objects that have to be cast to Integers etc etc. Python (at least since 2.2) is more object oriented. There are not non-object primitives, ints are already objects (meaning btw that you can subclass them), and the basic list in Python is a vector. So you just push ints into a list and pop them out again, no drama, no casting, and consequently shorter and more readible code.
Another benefit of run-time typing is that true polymorphism of interface (rather than of implementation) a la Smalltalk, is possible. That is to say, where Java will ask an object it's racial background (why type are you?) before operating on it, Python will just ask the object what it can do. Consequently the try-except (try-catch) mechanism adopts a central role in the logic of Python programs.
Now people often fear that run-time typing will result in more and more difficult to locate errors. I remain to be convinced of this. In any case, the kind of unit testing discussed in this article is, imho, a far more effective way of locating/preventing errors, than relying on a type system.
Can someone help me understand why I would want to use Python as opposed to Java?
Maybe you wouldn't want to. Trying the language out would probably be the best way of answering your question. Perhaps you are so comfortable with Java, that you would find it difficult to think 'pythonically' about the problem, and you would hate Python? Lucky you! For myself, when I try to write in Java nowadays, my nose starts to bleed ;)
I'm learning Python and I think the unittest section will help greatly while stumbling through the process of building applications.
I've found that writing tests before writing the code they test requires a deal of self-discipline (ie. I don't do it as often as I should. When I have made this effort however, rather than stumbling through, the unittest module will took me by the hand and led me through.
Running the test suite while writing really focuses you on a specific part of your code (ie. that part that is failing) which can in turn affect the logic of your program.
As for showing John Q. Public how powerful these systems are... You should try reading some of the stuff on privacy at Reason's website.
Problem is that if you do the InternationalGovernmentalConspiracy(tm) will have logged you IP number!
Pretty much a requirement in an open society.
I didn't address that because I was responding to the idea that the guilt of the arrested person was the justification for publicity. Certainly it is an absolute requirement that someone who bears the arrested person's interests be informed of their whereabouts.
There is a good argument that it is the public at large who should be that someone, both because the public has a right to know about the activites of their police forces, and also because of the vexed question of who else that someone should be, and more to the point, who (and on what basis) should choose that someone otherwise. On the other hand the reputation of an innocent accused ought also to be protected.
Though it may not be recognised at law, there are in fact different levels of 'public' information. I mean it is one thing to inform an accused's family and nominated legal representative and to give out information upon reasonable inquiry, and it is quite another to publish a weekly list of names and addresses of all people arrested in the local paper (as is in some places done for all people convicted).
Sending out an email circular to local practitioners seems to me to fall in between these extremes. I'm not entirely sure of whether I think it is a good thing or not. But given the conflicting demands of protecting liberty and protecting reputation this is at least a defensible practice.
There's a few hundred people in Cuba with no-doubt strong opinions on the subject.
The situation in which these people are being held would seem to suggest that mere public information of who is being held in custody, is not sufficient to guarantee the protection of an individual's rights as against the power of the state.
Those who are innocent will want lawyers who relentlessly pursue the truth. The rest need lawyers who know what people can get away with. In our oppositional based legal system, the demand for scummy lawyers will be equal or greater than honest lawyers.
In what way is this insightful?
Surely the guilty every bit as much as the innocent deserve legal representation. In what way can a lawyer defending an innocent party be described as "honest" in comparison to a "scummy" lawyer (indeed perhaps the same lawyer) defending a guilty party.
It is not the role of a defence lawyer to "relentlessly pursue the truth" any more than it is the role of a busdriver to do so. It is the judge and the jury who are charged with doing that. It is the lawyer's role to zealously defend the rights of his or her client.
Is the busdriver who took the guilty accused to the court in the morning "scummy"? How would you calculate a busdriver's moral culpability? -- By some sort of averaging of the scumminess and honesty of the passengers on the bus?
Let me spell this out, honest lawyers can and do defend guilty criminal accused, and scummy lawyers can and do defend innocent criminal accused. To ascribe moral culpablity to a lawyer based on the moral culpablilty of their client is absurd, not insightful.
I'm sorry, but this is PUBLIC information. If *you* violate the law, your arrest records are a matter of public record.
Why did you phrase this as a conditional? Are you saying that If *you* did not violate the law, your arrest record would not be a matter of public record?
The question here sure is whether arrest records should be a matter of public record, given that the fact of a violation of the law is an unknown at that stage.
Well, the typical Aussie response would be:
"Tell 'em to get stuffed"
A typical Aussie lawyer's response might be to bring an action under Section 202 of the Copyright Act (C'th) 1968
SCO had better be sure of their claims before they even threaten to sue someone in Oz. We've got laws against that kind of thing ;)
"... would be immediately disqualified ... regardless of whether or not they had been following the story, had a favourite OS, or were impartial."
Perhaps I should have been clearer! ;)
Where are they going to find impartial jurors?
*Everyone* with enough technical background to fully understand the issue ...
... would of course be immediately disqualified from the jury.
this really won't be good for anyone if it actually works
It would be pretty good for Open Market's shareholders.
What? Patents are not an international thing.
Except on planet Earth.
Any government can ignore or enforce patents as it sees fit within its borders.
Not in this century. Ever heard of TRIPS? Or the WTO perhaps? Lemme guess you were asleep when they covered international aspects IP law, at law school?
a judge has seen how ridiculous our patent system is.
Nothing could be further from the truth. What a judge has seen is that this particular patent was unenforceable under the patent system.
What is ridiculous, is that it is often more cost effective to pay licensing fees for these kinds of patents, than to defeat them in the court system.
Beyond the pale? I never even mentioned Ireland!
A lot of things are like this. I'll give you an example.
Why give criminal law examples when discussing tort law reform?
The same meme is true with tort laws and civil lawsuits.
Not at all. You can't simply apply the same meme here, remember this a complex question. It pays to be parsimonious, tort law examples would have served your argument better. It makes little sense in demonstrating how tort law is "wielded unjustly against the large and the small," to give examples relating criminal statutes.
The bottom line being, tort reform, like all lawmaking, is vastly complex.
I don't disagree at all. In particular I think that your point about medical indemnity is well put.
This is a complex problem, but only if you want to solve it to guarantee the best outcome for the greatest number of stakeholders. What is much more simple though, is to protect the interests of a vested interest group, at the expense of the vast majority of the citizenry. Simply adding protection from suit, to say tobacco and drug manufacturers, reducing ordinary people's rights to sue and capping the awards, etc, these changes are quite simple to institute. And in fact these are the changes which are being instituted under the rubric of 'tort law reform'
The bottom line is ...
... another insufferable cliche, (unless of course one is discussing accountancy.)
My point was simply that we, as ordinary citizens, should not allow ourselves to be hoodwinked into willingly surrendering our rights.
Tell it like it is!
What's worse, this is a abrogation of liberty that is incredibly easy to sell. After all we all hate lawyers, don't we? The incantation of formulae such as 'ambulance chaser' (I like how Forbes uses it here) replaces any informed assesment. The gullible swallow up bullshit McDonalds-Hot-Coffee stories without pausing to ask what the facts in any case really were.
The correct format is yyyy/mm/dd, anything else doesn't sort correctly when used to date filenames, etc.
Just to be perfectly pedantic, the 'correct' (iso8601) format is yyyy-mm-dd or yyyymmdd, both of which sort quite nicely. ;)
"be nice to see linux there but m$ will probably ..."
You can bank on m$ getting what it wants for Iraq. They didn't go in to Iraq to let some pinko Finnish free software take that market that rightfully belongs to a friendly megacorp.
What's the government, a third party person? The government is me. Government is using my money, my resources. I am one of the guys who maintain the government, not the government itself.
NO the government is not you, it's us. The government is not using your money, it's using the funds from (what in the ACT is called) 'consolidated revenue.' Once you have paid your taxes that money is not yours in any personal sense, any more than the money you spent on that can of coke is yours, notwithstanding the fact that you may be a shareholder of the CocaCola Co. Once again it is ours.
And because it is ours, and we can (and in the ACT must) vote, the government better spend it in a cost effective manner (no multi-million dollar salary packages in the public service I'm afraid). If using OSS, or products for which the service market is competitive, saves the government money then it is quite the correct thing for the government to do.
Beyond the niggardly concerns of how consolidated revenue is to spent, however, there is a greater issue of principle here. 'Access' and 'Transparency' are supposed to be touchstones of democratic government. Clearly it behoves a government to embrace standards which are non-proprietary and open insofar as it is practicable.
This is not about open source, this is about your own freedom to choose. ... And nobody can make decision for you, neither government nor open source zealots.
Once again, nobody is making the decision for you. You can use whatever you like. This is about what it is appropriate for a democractic government to use. You need to learn to disguise your teenage libertarian paranoia a little better.
I'm breaking my own rule of never arguing more than two posts deep on slashdot, but here goes.
My point was, when someone says, "I have this information, but I'm not telling!" that's not censorship. It's called keeping a secret. It's called confidential information. It's not called censorship. Censorship requires a party other than a publisher and reader.
Much better! Allow me to summarise: Censorship involves A, someone who has information and a desire to communicate it; B, a potential recipient; and C, a censor, someone who has the functional power to inhibit that communication. Is that close enough to what you are saying?
Actually I would prefer to talk about the right to to communicate and the right to receive, precisely because of such legal issues as "confidential information" which A may have access to without having any right to communicate it. However your definition seems workable and sensible, so let's go with that for the moment.
I simply said that censorship is impossible because you can always go anonymously on the 'net to publish your thoughts.
I think this is a really weak point in your argument. It can hardly have been the case that when the old Soviet Union was banning the publication or importation of the Bible, they were not engaging in censorship merely because some Evanglical societies successfully smuggled Bibles into Russia. There may be workarounds, there may be censorship which is less than 100% effective. But this is still censorship.
Moreover I doubt the effectiveness of web publication as a form of circumventing media censorship. If anything I would say that the sheer size of the market in the US (providing we can stop it all from falling into Mr Murdoch's hands) is the best protection the American public has. Clearly the more players there are in a market, the less chance there is of effective collusion
Smaller markets are not always so fortunate, especially when you consider strategic control of the media. In Australia, for instance, Murdoch has the game sown up as regards print media which floating voters read. That highbrow Sydney Morming Herald and The Age are only read by people who already know how they are going to vote. As a consequence there has not been a (federal) change of government in Australia from 1972, which has not had Murdoch's approval. The same is probably true for the UK from the days of Thatcher onwards (but there haven't been too many changes, so its a moot point).
I agree that it would be wrong, but it would not be censorship. If a reporter found out about it, went to post it on the web, and was stopped by his employer, that would be censorship.
What if the reporter wanted it published in the newspaper. You would have the situation of A, a reporter wanting to do his/her job of informing the public, B a public which ought to be informed,and C a newspaper proprietor using their functional power to inhibit that communication?
Of course this isn't an easy thing to resolve. After all proprietors must have some say in what the publish and what not. Indeed publishers arguably have as much a duty to censor as they do the publish, for instance when something a reporter wants to print, would, in their judgment, endanger the operational security of a section of the nations armed forces during a time of war. Our concern should be with what is being censored, what those people who occupy that special place a democracy accords, decide to allow to filter through to us, and what they don't. And why.
Of course we should oppose this, but it's next to impossible for it to happen because of the way the network is setup. First of all, who has this "right" to sell it? ...
The same people who sold off (not licensed, but sold) a section of the electro-magnetic spectrum for the next generation communications technologies. Governmen
Well that doesn't happen in the US because we can find anything we damn well want on the 'net.
Yes, the net does, to some extent, redress the balance. This is why social theorists waxed lyrical in the early days about the "democratizing potential" of the internet.
However, if a company like Wallmart could tell a band like Nirvana to change lyrics to their songs, and get the band's compliance can you honestly say that that corporate censorship doesn't happen in America? The fact is all sorts of non-governmental (as well as governmental) censorship does happen, and the net is not in all cases able to prevent nor remedy it. Nor, realistically, are all citizens capable of finding the information they don't know is out there. The net's great, but it is still nowhere as important in informing public opinion as the print and broadcast media.
Consider this too. Should we oppose selling to either AOL or Microsoft, for example, exclusive rights to content-filter the net? If you think this is something that should be opposed, then you do see that non-state censorship is possible, and in fact want to oppose it, well done! The parent poster would have to say, well there's no censorship there, I'll just accept it.
Censorship is when party C has some information, party B wants access to said information ...
So when the Chinese block the net, those Chinese who are unaware that something is being blocked, (ie they don't want access to that information, they don't even know that information exists), you maintain that is not censorship? I beg to differ.
But this does happen in situtations where A is not a government.
Freedom to speak implies freedom to STFU and there's not a damn thing wrong with that.
There is though. The problem is that we have contending rights that must be balanced. In your equation the right to free speech simply trumphs the right to make an informed democratic choice.
As is recognised in the 1st Amendment, the news industry has a special role to play in a democracy. The freedom of the press is articulated separtely from any general freedom of speech. Unfashionable though it may be, I believe that the rights they are afforded implicitly impose duties. If a government engaged in some activity, which it was vital for the citizenry to know about in coming to a decision to excercise their democratic rights, it is wrong for Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner and a handful of others, merely by virtue of their control of the media, and merely because they stand collectively to gain from said activity, to decide that such information be surpressed. As well as having a right, the media have a duty to report those things reasonably necessary for the conduct of an informed democractic republic.
dude that's not censorship, censorship would be the government steping in and saying that, but when a private entity steps out and says "If you criticize our leadership while we're at war, you're a traitor." then that is OK becuase they are exercising their right to free speech.
Wrong, censorship is when party A who has control of information, (whether that is because they are a state and control the laws or a corporation and control the distribution), decides what party B is permitted to see and what party B is not permitted to see.
Until you manage to free yourself of the misapprehension that censorship is something only states can do, you will never be free from censorship.
at the moment the usa more or less control the internet
Does it? I would have thought that organisations such as ICANN have gone out of their way to internationlise. If anything, considering the proportion of internet users that are US residents, the bodies which do regulate the net, (inasmuch as it is regulated), have a decidely international flavour.
While it's not good with all this censorship thing
When talking about censorship I think we should distinguish between the use of censorship as a weapon of political oppression by a state,(or by some other power bloc), against the citizenry of a country, from its use to set bounds of what is culturally appropriate as agreed upon by at least a majority of the citizens of a country. Censorship of child pornography, for instance, is supported by many, even though it might not be strictly illegal in some countries. Surely people of different countries have a right to make choices as a people, that you or I might disagree with? Should we put them in a situation where accepting the internet is an all or nothing choice, resulting in a situation where, in keeping out something that is culturally taboo (eg prOn) they are also keeping out information that might politically inform the citizens?
As it is the UN Charter of Human Rights contains fairly expansive guarantees of rights to access information, and rights of conscience and expression. One could not imagine that the UN, were it to become responsible for the governance of the net, could condone a situation where its instrumentalities were deployed to negate those guarantees.
Anyway, as I pointed out above, I feel that net governance is already sufficiently international, and really don't seem much point in involving the UN.
This is not complicated. People make it complicated because they want the Jews to be the bad guys.
The Jews are not the bad guys. The Israeli government are the bad guys! The Palestinians are not the bad guys, Hamas, Hezbollah etc are. When you get two lots of bad guys, as evil as Palestinian terror groups and the current Israeli administration going at each other, it adds up to a lot of dead children. On both sides.
Isn't it clear that each bomb Hamas explode on a crowded comuter bus, or each missle the Israeli Airforce lob into a crowded market, merely demands more killing from the other side? Should we expect better from Hamas? I don't think so. Should we expect better from the Israeli state? Definitely! Can we call one side legitimate and the other terrorists? Not with any sense of balance.