It seems somewhat plausible that Microsoft is concerned about the general lack of programming experience on their products that college students get. I know at all of the universities I ever went to, (three) and all the ones anyone I can recall asking about it went to, (more than three) the dominant programming infrastructure was Unix. As far as I can tell, this has only become more prevalent in recent years, with almost every CS student I know running a linux box at home to save the effort of having to sit in a lab to code homework assignments.
It is a shame that it will be harder to find people who have no experience with the.NET stuff in order to RE it for purposes of Linux interoperability, though. Maybe that's another reason MS is pushing to have it's code displayed so broadly. So noone can legitimately RE it.
I'd pay big dollars for a device that would recognize people I'd met in the past and pull up their contact file. If it was standardized I'd happly attach my facal geometery to my vCard to make it easier.
Fellow at the MIT wearable computer project was doing this very same thing. Borglab and Thad Starner were talking about it. Of course, they had full on wearable computers to run the apps on, not just cell phones.
I was working on a project designed to deal with this very problem for a while. A cool idea, but we never got very far with it. First, we didn't have enough programming skill, then when we had that, we didn't have time to work on it.
The concept was called "Nonbox", and the concept was basically a big, cryptographically secure anonymizing server, distributed through many many countries, in order to make no specific portion of it enforceably subpoenable. The information relating to any given login, or log, or whatever, whould be spread out across several international borders, so there would be no way to correlate a user's login ID with their meatspace identity. If 'Tilly' seemed to be @nonbox.net, there would be no way for his employer to demand all of his extracurricular work. Now, it requires cryptographic signing, to prove your nym identity, but you would be cryptographically capable of determining that the person who was that nym last time, was that nym this time.
You are assuming that because the US attempts to apply laws to its citizens outside the US the rest of the world does the same. When most nations apply their laws only to people present in their territory.
Oh, you really didn't read the article. I was just being inflammatory before. Ok, let me see if I can explain this in small words so you will understand. France told Yahoo France that they couldn't sell Nazi memorabilia because it violated French law. Ok. Yahoo France agreed, and took those items off their website. France then declared that Yahoo had to prevent French people from buying those items from any website they owned. Including the websites which have nothing to do with France. There, in a nutshell, France applying it's laws to people outside it's country. Do you understand the situation now?
That means that organisations who wish to trade anywhere in the world cannot simply produce a standard "catalogue" for everywhere. Which is how they have to operate anyway, so it's not really an issue. Indeed it is a somewhat bogus issue in the first place, since there are few companies geared up to sell to anywhere in the first place.
But that is precisely the nature of Internet commerce. You can sell to anywhere that has some form of postal service and network connectivity. It's not the same as not having caffeinated mints in your Swedish catalogue, it's not being able to put caffeinated mints in any catalog because Swedish people might be able to order them.
This ruling has nothing to do with what a US company can sell in the US, it's about a French court telling a US company that their operations in France must comply with French law. Unlike US courts the French ones actually understand the concept of international borders.
You didn't actually pay any attention to the article, did you? This case is in exactitude about a French court saying that a US company can't do a certain sort of business. Yahoo had already cleared the Nazi memorabilia off their Yahoo France site, and then the French said that they had to do the same with their US / International site, because French people could access it. They are entirely ignoring the concept of international borders, and applying their laws to foreign companies.
For the record, I disagree with the USA policies regarding trade with Cuba, as well. But that isn't the topic of this discussion.
This is pretty much the exact comment I was going to make. In Sweden it's illegal to sell caffeine-added products. In Iraq it's illegal to have "non-religious" cassette tapes or CDs. The intersection of all of the sets of "items which are allowed to be sold" for every country on the planet with 'net access is vanishingly small. And what right does Afghanistan or Zimbabwe have to determine what I can buy here in the USA, either through direct censorship or de facto censorship.
And of course, if we allow foreign governments to determine what our companies can sell online, than why should we not allow them to determine what our news organizations can say online? I'm sure criticizing the Burmese government is illegal in Burma, but if Burmese citizens can read those criticisms online in USA based sources, well, Burma could certainly sue CNN for not blocking Burmese access to derogatory and demeaning comments about the Burmese government.
I'm certain that someone will flame me for sounding jingoistic, but we (meaning the USA) are a sovereign country, and we have our own laws and constitution because we are allowed to determine for ourselves what restrictions we will or won't place on ourselves. If we allow France to strike this blow against us, the path is open for any other country to do the same, and at that point, we are nothing more than the ultimate colony of every country in the world, subject to being stepped upon by any nation that wants to.
And these comments do not apply to just the USA. Any country which allowed another to determine laws for it is then just as surely under their heel as if they had been militarily defeated. (Much like when France was subject to German law in the early 1940s...) (And for those that will take this point and run, No, treaties don't apply, as those are agreed to by the countries that are held to them. This is a case of France peremptorily subjecting the USA to French law, without our prior agreement.)
In my humble (mostly) opinion, at least part of the reason for this is that most private schools (In the USA) do not concern themselves solely with [getting more funding from the government] putting students in seats and maybe teaching them something, but also with instilling *some* code of ethics. Perhaps it's not *the* code of ethics I have, but there is some modicum of importance placed on the concept of personal responsibility, which is a subject sorely lacking in most public schools, and from the mouths of most parents as well.
I'm certain this is going to sound like the ranting of a paranoid delusional to some, but it seems as though the US government has been doing it's best to disparage personal responsibility as an admirable virtue. They do not allow people to decide for themselves on many basic topics (drug use, retirement), they encourage dependance on the state while discouraging people from educating themselves, and they attempt at every turn to reinforce the notion that only the government can do things for you, even if it wasn't something you needed done. To put it another way, the government is very good at breaking your leg, then handing you a crutch and pointing out how screwed you'd be if they weren't there to support you.
All of these combine to combat the instilling of responsibility for one's actions as a goal to be admired. When people do not feel any need to be accountable to themselves, it is no wonder that they act on impulses to destroy their tormentors, or gain notoriety by shooting up their schools. They are after all, children, with (not a complete lack, but) a more tenuous grip on reality than a more experienced person. I'm certainly not saying it excuses their actions, just that it does help explain them.
I know how you feel. I had a similar experience the other day. There I was, standing quietly by myself, (clad in long black coat, of course,) when I saw him. It was terrifying. The thought ran through my mind, "What if he's like the others? What if he's got a gun!?!" Then he simply delivered the mail, and walked off down the street. I suppose it's silly to fear the postman, but there is a history of postal employees shooting people.
Perhaps I'm being facetious, and perhaps I'm just being a sarcastic bastard. But someone I know was arrested last night, for the crime of wearing a trenchcoat, and having significant numbers of "goth-industrial" bumper stickers on his car. Admittedly, they just took him downtown, took his picture, and let him go, but the point is, if the authorities are going to fear all people who dress a certain way because a statistically insignificant number of them, *ahem*, "Go postal", as it were, then it seems like we should fear postal employees. And cops. (Since it seems like they shoot an awful lot of people, and they all dress the same.) The military. Then again, I'm probably expecting rational behaviour from those it should not be expected from, again.
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It seems somewhat plausible that Microsoft is concerned about the general lack of programming experience on their products that college students get. I know at all of the universities I ever went to, (three) and all the ones anyone I can recall asking about it went to, (more than three) the dominant programming infrastructure was Unix. As far as I can tell, this has only become more prevalent in recent years, with almost every CS student I know running a linux box at home to save the effort of having to sit in a lab to code homework assignments.
.NET stuff in order to RE it for purposes of Linux interoperability, though. Maybe that's another reason MS is pushing to have it's code displayed so broadly. So noone can legitimately RE it.
It is a shame that it will be harder to find people who have no experience with the
-il cylic
I'd pay big dollars for a device that would recognize people I'd met in the past and pull up their contact file. If it was standardized I'd happly attach my facal geometery to my vCard to make it easier.
Fellow at the MIT wearable computer project was doing this very same thing. Borglab and Thad Starner were talking about it. Of course, they had full on wearable computers to run the apps on, not just cell phones.
-il cylic
I was working on a project designed to deal with this very problem for a while. A cool idea, but we never got very far with it. First, we didn't have enough programming skill, then when we had that, we didn't have time to work on it.
The concept was called "Nonbox", and the concept was basically a big, cryptographically secure anonymizing server, distributed through many many countries, in order to make no specific portion of it enforceably subpoenable. The information relating to any given login, or log, or whatever, whould be spread out across several international borders, so there would be no way to correlate a user's login ID with their meatspace identity. If 'Tilly' seemed to be @nonbox.net, there would be no way for his employer to demand all of his extracurricular work. Now, it requires cryptographic signing, to prove your nym identity, but you would be cryptographically capable of determining that the person who was that nym last time, was that nym this time.
-il cylic
You are assuming that because the US attempts to apply laws to its citizens outside the US the rest of the world does the same. When most nations apply their laws only to people present in their territory.
Oh, you really didn't read the article. I was just being inflammatory before. Ok, let me see if I can explain this in small words so you will understand. France told Yahoo France that they couldn't sell Nazi memorabilia because it violated French law. Ok. Yahoo France agreed, and took those items off their website. France then declared that Yahoo had to prevent French people from buying those items from any website they owned. Including the websites which have nothing to do with France. There, in a nutshell, France applying it's laws to people outside it's country. Do you understand the situation now?
That means that organisations who wish to trade anywhere in the world cannot simply produce a standard "catalogue" for everywhere. Which is how they have to operate anyway, so it's not really an issue. Indeed it is a somewhat bogus issue in the first place, since there are few companies geared up to sell to anywhere in the first place.
But that is precisely the nature of Internet commerce. You can sell to anywhere that has some form of postal service and network connectivity. It's not the same as not having caffeinated mints in your Swedish catalogue, it's not being able to put caffeinated mints in any catalog because Swedish people might be able to order them.
This ruling has nothing to do with what a US company can sell in the US, it's about a French court telling a US company that their operations in France must comply with French law. Unlike US courts the French ones actually understand the concept of international borders.
You didn't actually pay any attention to the article, did you? This case is in exactitude about a French court saying that a US company can't do a certain sort of business. Yahoo had already cleared the Nazi memorabilia off their Yahoo France site, and then the French said that they had to do the same with their US / International site, because French people could access it. They are entirely ignoring the concept of international borders, and applying their laws to foreign companies.
For the record, I disagree with the USA policies regarding trade with Cuba, as well. But that isn't the topic of this discussion.
This is pretty much the exact comment I was going to make. In Sweden it's illegal to sell caffeine-added products. In Iraq it's illegal to have "non-religious" cassette tapes or CDs. The intersection of all of the sets of "items which are allowed to be sold" for every country on the planet with 'net access is vanishingly small. And what right does Afghanistan or Zimbabwe have to determine what I can buy here in the USA, either through direct censorship or de facto censorship.
And of course, if we allow foreign governments to determine what our companies can sell online, than why should we not allow them to determine what our news organizations can say online? I'm sure criticizing the Burmese government is illegal in Burma, but if Burmese citizens can read those criticisms online in USA based sources, well, Burma could certainly sue CNN for not blocking Burmese access to derogatory and demeaning comments about the Burmese government.
I'm certain that someone will flame me for sounding jingoistic, but we (meaning the USA) are a sovereign country, and we have our own laws and constitution because we are allowed to determine for ourselves what restrictions we will or won't place on ourselves. If we allow France to strike this blow against us, the path is open for any other country to do the same, and at that point, we are nothing more than the ultimate colony of every country in the world, subject to being stepped upon by any nation that wants to.
And these comments do not apply to just the USA. Any country which allowed another to determine laws for it is then just as surely under their heel as if they had been militarily defeated. (Much like when France was subject to German law in the early 1940s...) (And for those that will take this point and run, No, treaties don't apply, as those are agreed to by the countries that are held to them. This is a case of France peremptorily subjecting the USA to French law, without our prior agreement.)
In my humble (mostly) opinion, at least part of the reason for this is that most private schools (In the USA) do not concern themselves solely with [getting more funding from the government] putting students in seats and maybe teaching them something, but also with instilling *some* code of ethics. Perhaps it's not *the* code of ethics I have, but there is some modicum of importance placed on the concept of personal responsibility, which is a subject sorely lacking in most public schools, and from the mouths of most parents as well.
I'm certain this is going to sound like the ranting of a paranoid delusional to some, but it seems as though the US government has been doing it's best to disparage personal responsibility as an admirable virtue. They do not allow people to decide for themselves on many basic topics (drug use, retirement), they encourage dependance on the state while discouraging people from educating themselves, and they attempt at every turn to reinforce the notion that only the government can do things for you, even if it wasn't something you needed done. To put it another way, the government is very good at breaking your leg, then handing you a crutch and pointing out how screwed you'd be if they weren't there to support you.
All of these combine to combat the instilling of responsibility for one's actions as a goal to be admired. When people do not feel any need to be accountable to themselves, it is no wonder that they act on impulses to destroy their tormentors, or gain notoriety by shooting up their schools. They are after all, children, with (not a complete lack, but) a more tenuous grip on reality than a more experienced person. I'm certainly not saying it excuses their actions, just that it does help explain them.
-il cylic
I know how you feel. I had a similar experience the other day. There I was, standing quietly by myself, (clad in long black coat, of course,) when I saw him. It was terrifying. The thought ran through my mind, "What if he's like the others? What if he's got a gun!?!" Then he simply delivered the mail, and walked off down the street. I suppose it's silly to fear the postman, but there is a history of postal employees shooting people.
Perhaps I'm being facetious, and perhaps I'm just being a sarcastic bastard. But someone I know was arrested last night, for the crime of wearing a trenchcoat, and having significant numbers of "goth-industrial" bumper stickers on his car. Admittedly, they just took him downtown, took his picture, and let him go, but the point is, if the authorities are going to fear all people who dress a certain way because a statistically insignificant number of them, *ahem*, "Go postal", as it were, then it seems like we should fear postal employees. And cops. (Since it seems like they shoot an awful lot of people, and they all dress the same.) The military. Then again, I'm probably expecting rational behaviour from those it should not be expected from, again.