Get to know some people. Maybe your neighbors. In my case, half the people in town seem to know me or my wife. I actually know the Mayor, city council, several police officers, to president of one of the banks, the owners of several shops, a lot of the staff at my kid's school. That's not to brag. It's just that we're known. If I lose my ID, I can easily find dozens of people who can positively ID me. Some would actually even help us out while we're dealing with getting a normal life put back together. It wasn't always that way. Our kids forced us out of anonymity, but it's actually not a bad thing.
What you are talking about is the idea of "Portability". Systemd has very little to do with that, instead taking the "Our way or the highway" approach. If systemd catches on the way it appears it will, I hope someone forks it away from the current maintainers. They may not be enough to destroy the Linux ecosystem, but they are certainly damaging it.
So if something you've done stirs up an angry mob, you've done something bad? My grandmother had an angry mob burn a cross in her yard one night because her parents "helped the wrong kind of people". I suggest you refine your definition of what makes something OK.
Do you think it's ok that a company (not even a government, but a mere, ordinary COMPANY) should get away with digging through your emails at a hunch?
Well the rules are tighter for a government than companies for a reason. You have an easy(-ish) choice who to contract for email. Your say in who governs is much smaller. Especially at the federal level. And the government has more authority they could abuse.
But overall I'd say yes it was 'ok' for Microsoft to do what they did because the user agreed to a contract that said it was ok for Microsoft to do what they did. I blame the user, and the billions of other users who agree to such contracts allowing them to become the norm. It would be one thing if companies or governments were forcing people into these contracts. (You can't vote without a hotmail account. You can buy food without a facebook account.) It another when people agree to trade away things like privacy for a free email account. It's awful but this person has no more right to complain than the guy who basejumps for fun and get injured due to a mishap. In both cases they have the information up front to understand the risk and choose to proceed anyway.
I'm just angry that some many people have been this irresponsible that now the few who don't want to be so irresponsible are looked upon as freaks. Things should change about how private information is handled, but the answer isn't to have the government rewrite the contracts people irresponsibly agreed to. The answer is for people to start acting like grown ups and change the demand in the market.
Amongst other fallacies, sounds like you are assuming it takes longer for an innocent person to get on this list than it does to get off the list. Otherwise the list could ever be free of innocent people.
Common sense is on a watch list. It has a hard time getting around government areas much less getting past government surveillance and getting in the front door of a court house.
The thing is I disliked Microsoft and their business practices long before the Netscape thing. By then Microsoft's style of foul play was already established. Microsoft acquired their monopoly through questionable business practices and while producing products with awful quality. I had assignments in introductory level programming classes where I had to produce simple things like pattern matchers with higher quality than the pattern matching in MS's production operating system at the time. (DOS 6.1 I believe.)
By comparison, Apple may be acting awfully, but any weight they might have to throw around came from giving people enough of what they wanted to get people to buy their products. I just watch the market in shock. People are putting on their own shackles and buying into the walled garden, but they are doing it freely. Apple hasn't worked out deals with vendors and hardware companies to block or cripple competitors. (There are the patent wars, but that's different and awful in it's own special ways. It's not unique to Apple. And MS has had their role as well.)
So in the end I don't like Apple's model. I don't like Google's either. But you can't call what Apple is doing a monopoly. They don't own the PC market. They don't own the server market. And thanks to Google, they don't own the mobile market.
I might buy that Google is using its position on the internet and the lock-in is has started to create with the Play store in a way that could be abuse of either a horizontal or vertical monopoly, but I think it would be a hard sell legally. Too many people are buying in for the convenience and then want to complain after the fact. Google, Facebook and Twitter all act very nasty in my opinion, but the market (the consumers themselves) are buying it. The consumers like these things better than what they had before. Why, I can't fathom.
I certainly would not give Apple, Facebook or Google a pass. But none of they have yet earned the reputation for foul play that Microsoft has.
I can't think of how many times I've heard comparisons asking "Is X the Microsoft of the Y world?" Microsoft has set the bar for being underhanded and abusing a Monopolistic position and have done so to such an extreme to be Godwin worthy. You want to talk about facism you compare to the nazis. You want to talk employee abuse you talk EA or Foxconn. You want to talk monopolistic abuse, you go to Microsoft.
They've worked hard earning that reputation and actually had to wrestle it way from others. You don't just expect that to be forgotten.
These alarmist scientists are so committed to frightening everyone into believing that global warming is a man made threat that they had to go and weaponize it. Just like Oppenheimer. Too focused on what they can do to consider if they should do it. When will we learn!
I read most of the summaries in rss. I follow the link to articles that I think might have something interesting in the comments. Reading from work, I get sent to beta. Once the beta interface is the only one, I'll probably stop following the link to the comments. It's irritating to navigate.
The NSA et al are (legally) *more* restricted in the US than abroad....
Correct. And in practice it appears the NSA is completely unrestricted in the US. Contrary to what the Administration and NSA have told us, there has been excessive spying on US citizens, there has been abuses, there has been lying to Congress and there does not appear to be any consequence or accountability. The Intelligence Community only appears to be upset that they have been caught. They've even had the audacity to ask to increase their intrusive programs.
So yes, you are correct. The NSA are legally more restricted in the US than abroad. And even then, that bar is so low you couldn't hit it with a lawn mower. At least if you get the data out of our country, there may be some physical, legal & diplomatic barriers caused by things like distance and sovereignty.
I'm not sure, but it sounds like you are implying that I've managed to at least support part of the infinite monkey theorem. Now I have to decide if I'm insulted.
Actually I spewed a little postmodern gibberish that came to me. Then I googled "postmodern gibberish" and found this: http://www.infiltec.com/j-postmd.htm. After that I pick a few choice words and filtered them through a thesaurus and strung it all together.
I guess a good magician shouldn't give away he technique. Just don't ask me what any of it was supposed to mean.
To understand it you have to frame the topic with postmodern vocalities to extract the deeper counter-context of the coherency structures embellished by undifferentiated interval exposition. Once you see that, it's actually pretty intuitive.
I don't use twitter. Knowing this I believe twitter should be help liable for every mistake. Every unsafe site a user is sent to. Every false positive and every false negative they report. If they want to obscure every link posted so the user can't asses if they trust the site being linked to prior to clicking it, then they assume the responsibility for what's on the other side. In exchange for that liability they get the data from snooping on every link that gets clicked provided that voyeurism isn't violating some other law.
I second this. Add to it that companies do Steam only releases. I can't buy games for the kids and let them all play different games at once on less I create a separate account for each game. (Even for single player games!) I have 3 computers but the kids have to serialize game time.
This call-home DRM only makes PC gaming worse. The publishers say piracy is what is killing their market. At this point I wouldn't cry if it would finally just die. Then they might be replace by something that doesn't punish the consumer.
I think this is the major issue/point for me. I'm not against this feature, put I personally don't find it that useful. I'd like their parental control to selectively share titles with the kids and I'd like to be able to let one child play Game A on one computer while another plays Game B on the other. We do that with our DRM free games.
Slashdot Mirror
There used to be some, but they've somehow ceased to exist.
That list is a bit small. It leaves off Ray Orbison and Tennessee Williams. I'm guessing they've left off other notables.
Get to know some people. Maybe your neighbors. In my case, half the people in town seem to know me or my wife. I actually know the Mayor, city council, several police officers, to president of one of the banks, the owners of several shops, a lot of the staff at my kid's school. That's not to brag. It's just that we're known. If I lose my ID, I can easily find dozens of people who can positively ID me. Some would actually even help us out while we're dealing with getting a normal life put back together. It wasn't always that way. Our kids forced us out of anonymity, but it's actually not a bad thing.
What you are talking about is the idea of "Portability". Systemd has very little to do with that, instead taking the "Our way or the highway" approach. If systemd catches on the way it appears it will, I hope someone forks it away from the current maintainers. They may not be enough to destroy the Linux ecosystem, but they are certainly damaging it.
So if something you've done stirs up an angry mob, you've done something bad? My grandmother had an angry mob burn a cross in her yard one night because her parents "helped the wrong kind of people". I suggest you refine your definition of what makes something OK.
Do you think it's ok that a company (not even a government, but a mere, ordinary COMPANY) should get away with digging through your emails at a hunch?
Well the rules are tighter for a government than companies for a reason. You have an easy(-ish) choice who to contract for email. Your say in who governs is much smaller. Especially at the federal level. And the government has more authority they could abuse.
But overall I'd say yes it was 'ok' for Microsoft to do what they did because the user agreed to a contract that said it was ok for Microsoft to do what they did. I blame the user, and the billions of other users who agree to such contracts allowing them to become the norm. It would be one thing if companies or governments were forcing people into these contracts. (You can't vote without a hotmail account. You can buy food without a facebook account.) It another when people agree to trade away things like privacy for a free email account. It's awful but this person has no more right to complain than the guy who basejumps for fun and get injured due to a mishap. In both cases they have the information up front to understand the risk and choose to proceed anyway.
I'm just angry that some many people have been this irresponsible that now the few who don't want to be so irresponsible are looked upon as freaks. Things should change about how private information is handled, but the answer isn't to have the government rewrite the contracts people irresponsibly agreed to. The answer is for people to start acting like grown ups and change the demand in the market.
Amongst other fallacies, sounds like you are assuming it takes longer for an innocent person to get on this list than it does to get off the list. Otherwise the list could ever be free of innocent people.
Common sense is on a watch list. It has a hard time getting around government areas much less getting past government surveillance and getting in the front door of a court house.
The thing is I disliked Microsoft and their business practices long before the Netscape thing. By then Microsoft's style of foul play was already established. Microsoft acquired their monopoly through questionable business practices and while producing products with awful quality. I had assignments in introductory level programming classes where I had to produce simple things like pattern matchers with higher quality than the pattern matching in MS's production operating system at the time. (DOS 6.1 I believe.)
By comparison, Apple may be acting awfully, but any weight they might have to throw around came from giving people enough of what they wanted to get people to buy their products. I just watch the market in shock. People are putting on their own shackles and buying into the walled garden, but they are doing it freely. Apple hasn't worked out deals with vendors and hardware companies to block or cripple competitors. (There are the patent wars, but that's different and awful in it's own special ways. It's not unique to Apple. And MS has had their role as well.)
So in the end I don't like Apple's model. I don't like Google's either. But you can't call what Apple is doing a monopoly. They don't own the PC market. They don't own the server market. And thanks to Google, they don't own the mobile market.
I might buy that Google is using its position on the internet and the lock-in is has started to create with the Play store in a way that could be abuse of either a horizontal or vertical monopoly, but I think it would be a hard sell legally. Too many people are buying in for the convenience and then want to complain after the fact. Google, Facebook and Twitter all act very nasty in my opinion, but the market (the consumers themselves) are buying it. The consumers like these things better than what they had before. Why, I can't fathom.
I certainly would not give Apple, Facebook or Google a pass. But none of they have yet earned the reputation for foul play that Microsoft has.
I can't think of how many times I've heard comparisons asking "Is X the Microsoft of the Y world?" Microsoft has set the bar for being underhanded and abusing a Monopolistic position and have done so to such an extreme to be Godwin worthy. You want to talk about facism you compare to the nazis. You want to talk employee abuse you talk EA or Foxconn. You want to talk monopolistic abuse, you go to Microsoft.
They've worked hard earning that reputation and actually had to wrestle it way from others. You don't just expect that to be forgotten.
These alarmist scientists are so committed to frightening everyone into believing that global warming is a man made threat that they had to go and weaponize it. Just like Oppenheimer. Too focused on what they can do to consider if they should do it. When will we learn!
I don't see why you have to bring THEM into it. What do THEY have to do with THEM? It's not like THEY work for THEM!
I read most of the summaries in rss. I follow the link to articles that I think might have something interesting in the comments. Reading from work, I get sent to beta. Once the beta interface is the only one, I'll probably stop following the link to the comments. It's irritating to navigate.
I still hear people here in MN complaining because the Governor closed all the schools in the state "for nothing" on a day with -50F wind chill.
You can't believe he's eligible! He doesn't meet the age minimum requirement!
Snowden's leaks also revealed information about EU member states. It's already clear the UK is not happy about that.
The NSA et al are (legally) *more* restricted in the US than abroad. ...
Correct. And in practice it appears the NSA is completely unrestricted in the US. Contrary to what the Administration and NSA have told us, there has been excessive spying on US citizens, there has been abuses, there has been lying to Congress and there does not appear to be any consequence or accountability. The Intelligence Community only appears to be upset that they have been caught. They've even had the audacity to ask to increase their intrusive programs.
So yes, you are correct. The NSA are legally more restricted in the US than abroad. And even then, that bar is so low you couldn't hit it with a lawn mower. At least if you get the data out of our country, there may be some physical, legal & diplomatic barriers caused by things like distance and sovereignty.
Don't kill bugs!
Google hasn't (to my knowledge) black-bagged anyone....
I wasn't sure if that was true, but a google search turned up nothing. I guess you are right.
I'm not sure, but it sounds like you are implying that I've managed to at least support part of the infinite monkey theorem. Now I have to decide if I'm insulted.
Actually I spewed a little postmodern gibberish that came to me. Then I googled "postmodern gibberish" and found this: http://www.infiltec.com/j-postmd.htm. After that I pick a few choice words and filtered them through a thesaurus and strung it all together.
I guess a good magician shouldn't give away he technique. Just don't ask me what any of it was supposed to mean.
To understand it you have to frame the topic with postmodern vocalities to extract the deeper counter-context of the coherency structures embellished by undifferentiated interval exposition. Once you see that, it's actually pretty intuitive.
I don't use twitter. Knowing this I believe twitter should be help liable for every mistake. Every unsafe site a user is sent to. Every false positive and every false negative they report. If they want to obscure every link posted so the user can't asses if they trust the site being linked to prior to clicking it, then they assume the responsibility for what's on the other side. In exchange for that liability they get the data from snooping on every link that gets clicked provided that voyeurism isn't violating some other law.
I second this. Add to it that companies do Steam only releases. I can't buy games for the kids and let them all play different games at once on less I create a separate account for each game. (Even for single player games!) I have 3 computers but the kids have to serialize game time.
This call-home DRM only makes PC gaming worse. The publishers say piracy is what is killing their market. At this point I wouldn't cry if it would finally just die. Then they might be replace by something that doesn't punish the consumer.
I think this is the major issue/point for me. I'm not against this feature, put I personally don't find it that useful. I'd like their parental control to selectively share titles with the kids and I'd like to be able to let one child play Game A on one computer while another plays Game B on the other. We do that with our DRM free games.