The spies already got caught red-handed and by leaks, but that only caused a slight ripple of mild outrage. The powers that be don't care much about agencies of other nations spying on our citizens, and in case of allies they'll actively help them from time to time. The real outrage erupts when it is discovered that these politicians themselves are being spied upon. France this time, but it was the same in Germany and the Netherlands.
Good, maybe this means that we'll finally meet our agreed obligations to NATO as well. Even better: in that case the judge won't also have to pull a number out of their arse; it's right there in the treaty.
And with much less public excitement and inspirational value. Another robot on Mars will not be widely seen as a major step forward in our exploration of the solar system, a man on Mars will be.
Interesting NYTimes article, as it mirrors the situation here in the Netherlands in some ways. However we do not have this bizarre exception for IT workers. How on earth did that ever get passed?
Any evidence of this (even anecdotal)? I interviewed a few independent contractors looking for a job with my former employer, and most of them got one. Expect to be asked "Why did you decide to quit your job and become a contractor?", and "What makes you want to go back to employment instead of being your own man?", but those are just to figure out what motivates a candidate, rather than figure out if they can be a nice puppet on a string. I found them to be good easy opening questions as well; most candidates had thought about them and didn't mind answering them, which puts them at ease and makes the rest of the interview easier. (No, an interviewer's job is not to make the candidate as uncomfortable as possible).
Few people would object to granting artists a reasonable term of copyright, or to paying them for their work. Of course one can argue about what is "reasonable", but when looking at the original goals of patents and copyright, it is pretty clear that the duration of these have been extended to ridiculous lengths. Other unreasonable restrictions apply: IP holders think it is completely natural and acceptable to ask consumers to pay the full price multiple times for the same content in order to play it on different devices or to play it after upgrading their equipment to a different standard. Couple that with the fact that most labels pay a pittance to artists (have a platinum album and you can still be in the hole with the label), and the public soon loses its sense of paying a fair price for a fair value. So they pirate.
Personally I am OK with pirating stuff in order to send a message (whether they get it is another issue). Our government for a long time was of the same opinion, and decided not to prosecute people pirating stuff for personal use, as long as there was no reasonable legal alternative. For music, there are plenty of reasonable and affordable choices, and I haven't pirated music in the past 10 years or so. Movies and series are a different story; I still pirate these, but I did subscribe to HBO and Netflix to pay for their content that I "steal" from them. If Warner Bros or Sony offer me to buy a reasonably priced "license" for movies I've pirated from them (or better: include a convenient store with downloads), I'll pay them as well. e-Books? I'll pay for them if you'll sell them to me. If you refuse to sell to me for whatever reason (region), and offer insult to injury by offering me the physical book instead, then it's FU and off to the Pirate Bay for me.
What Apple did was something else. They decided to offer music on a free trial basis and not charge for that, in order to promote their new service (and presumably the music as well). That's fine, and in the end it could even have been beneficial to the artists, but Apple did not have the right to make that decision for the artists. If Amazon started to give away sellers' items for free for a while and not reimburse those sellers, they'd be pissed, and rightly so.
Are they being treated differently? Property rights of most other people are protected, but only up to a point, and land can be appropriated for public use (is that what you call "eminent domain"?). And how impressed should we be by claims of sacred land being violated, on a scale of 1 being the field behind some random NIMBY's house, and 10 being the Kaäba or the Temple Mount?
Careful: if the connectors on your equipment aren't gold-plated, then it's those hard-to-replace connectors that will rust instead of the easily replaced cable. Gold does not improve signal quality; it merely prevents rust which degrades conductivity.
You get to be a leader by getting people to follow you. Bluster and bullying works for some, others actually pull it off by being nice (not the same as trying to please everyone!). Others still lead quietly by example. And what works for some will put off others. Of course, it helps to be right often; if you are, you don't have to give people shit to make them follow, but they'll still follow if you do. That is what Jobs and Torvalds had/have going for them.
The one disadvantage about quiet leadership is that you will much less talked and written about. Or maybe that's an advantage...
You're right: bridges never fall down, electronic devices never catch fire, cars are never recalled, walls never develop cracks, and buildings never leak. Oh wait, they do.
If you mount a light switch upside down, or you use door knobs from a different source than your design specifies, your building generally won't come crashing down. In the world of software, it very well might.
we can still trace EVERY SINGLE LINE OF CODE to a requirements document
So can I, for the software that I have produced. Line 1263 in stuff.c maps to the requirements "document" that I jotted down on the back of a coaster on the day we were having that 4 martini lunch. So do all the other lines, come to think of it.
But seriously... I'm no hard core software engineer and I've never been involved in anything that required that amount of rigour. I've wondered how one ensures that requirements are correct at that level, and are correct together. Even in relatively simple business software I've see such mistakes: every item passes its unit test and checks out against specifications, but the overall thing fails because of unforeseen conditions in the higher level program flow, deadlocks or race conditions, that sort of thing.
In any case you are right. Good requirement specs benefits maintenance on software of any age, where after a few years even the original developers are scratching their heads thinking "why on earth did we do that?"
If you have the headset, why not add the VR stuff at the same time? Besides, some movie makers are considering adding VR aspects to their movies. Imagine being able to look around; even the action would probably still be limited to what's in front of you, it would add a whole new level of immersion. Certain movies will benefit greatly from this, though whether the additional cost and effort is worth it remains to be seen.
See, I do not see the two as mutually exclusive. It is possible to have privacy AND security.
This is key. In fact, it's not just that they are not mutually exclusive; I think that there isn't even a strong relationship between the two. There's little or no trade-off, and having our privacy violated in the many ways it has been in the past years is not buying us a lot more security. Security is an excuse to violate our privacy. In rare, individual cases a valid one... and I fully agree that surveillance in such cases ought to be possible but require transparent laws and regulations, proper oversight, and real consequences for violations. We ought to be able to trust our government (I am Dutch by the way but the situation is largely the same), but they have shown us precious little trustworthiness in this matter. No proper rules (or any rules at all), no oversight, no punishment, and not even the basic IT smarts to keep sensitive data save. I wouldn't trust these guys with my phone number...
Snowden leaking details of operations on foreign soil along with details of domestic violations of privacy is another matter of course. But lets not forget that privacy was Snowden's motivation, and he has been rather careful in releasing snippets of information and securing the rest. Maybe he messed up with the encryption, or the capabilities of the Russian and Chinese governments proved too strong. Still worth it. And I am not at all convinced yet that Snowden's cache has indeed been cracked; the who thing is suspiciously convenient for embarrassed spy agencies.
The state or even the FBI having these pics on file isn't nearly as bad as having them available electronically to whomever pays for access, and offering the ability to combine them with camera feeds and facial recognition software so that pretty much anyone anywhere can track your whereabouts or be alerted to your presence (and in the near future your behaviour as well).
If your friends are active on social network, chances are that those networks have already been able to build a pretty interesting profile of you, including your name and likeness. It'd be funny (and scary as hell) if you signed up at last for FB, and up pops your ready made profile without you having to enter any of it.
The real value and the real threat (to us) are to be found in combinations of the data. Our image data, tagged, combined with live camera feeds, our financial data and our shopping habits. It is unlikely that any one large company will be able to effectively amass enough data sets to combine them in a way that will profit them directly (in ways other than simply selling the data to interested 3rd parties) and greatly harm us. And laws would prevent (or at least punish) collusion or crowdsourcing efforts, like letting the local grocer have some sales data or customer alerts in exchange for him piping his CCTV feeds into Google's servers for processing.
Even so, laws can mitigate some of the effects. Being tagged in photos and having a search engine easily bring up embarrassing pictures of you at a drunken dorm blowout is the future, and laws can do little about that. A shopkeeper being informed by his CCTV cam that you walk by his store every day, so he can throw some specific ads your way, can probably not be prevented either. But at least we can stop such sensitive data to be shared and processed en masse by both corporations and governments alike, by outlawing the practise. And of course that won't stop it completely, but at least we'll have something of a stick to hit transgressors with.
Well, a man can dream... But the fact that such undesirable practises are easy to do and hard to police doesn't mean that we shouldn't still have those laws in place.
You need a serious amount of delta v to get to orbit. Rockets deliver that through a long burn; if you want to shave off a significant amount of fuel by launching a rocket by rail gun, it would have to be a really long run or accelerate quite hard. Probably not good for launching manned flights on that thing.
So winning at poker or doing well at the stock exchange is stealing now? He didn't con an old lady out of her savings; he made a bet with banks and other investors who should have known better. No underhanded tricks, nothing up his sleeves, he just thought he saw were the market was going and acted accordingly. Jail the bankers for making such a mess with their subprime mortgages. Better yet: if you think this sort of thing is undesirable, propose laws against it before your start running your mouth about jailing people.
The point about DRM and exclusive deals is valid. If a band decides to exclusively sell their CDs through a particular chain, no problem: if I want the CD, I'll order it from that store. If I want a book that is exclusively sold through Amazon, I'll get it there. This is the model that many people had in mind when we moved from physical media to downloadable content: buy anywhere, pay once, play anywhere. But streaming services are paid for access rather than content, and if fragmentation and exclusive deals become more prevalent, then we will have to subscribe to multiple services to get the music we want. It's worse for e-books: if Amazon is the only one selling a particular book, I can't just simply get it from them but I'll have to buy their damn reader as well. As one WSJ columnist wrote: the book industry is even more clueless about the digital age than the music industry ever was.
Or we go back to CDs and ripping. Or the Pirate Bay. So indeed, we have a choice, and no one is forcing us. In case of exclusive e-books I'll just rip it from the pirate bay, then buy it from the store without ever downloading it. It's still illegal and I'd vastly prefer a more convenient way to shop, but this is what DRM and exclusive deals get you.
Slashdot Mirror
The spies already got caught red-handed and by leaks, but that only caused a slight ripple of mild outrage. The powers that be don't care much about agencies of other nations spying on our citizens, and in case of allies they'll actively help them from time to time. The real outrage erupts when it is discovered that these politicians themselves are being spied upon. France this time, but it was the same in Germany and the Netherlands.
Good, maybe this means that we'll finally meet our agreed obligations to NATO as well. Even better: in that case the judge won't also have to pull a number out of their arse; it's right there in the treaty.
And with much less public excitement and inspirational value. Another robot on Mars will not be widely seen as a major step forward in our exploration of the solar system, a man on Mars will be.
Interesting NYTimes article, as it mirrors the situation here in the Netherlands in some ways. However we do not have this bizarre exception for IT workers. How on earth did that ever get passed?
Any evidence of this (even anecdotal)? I interviewed a few independent contractors looking for a job with my former employer, and most of them got one. Expect to be asked "Why did you decide to quit your job and become a contractor?", and "What makes you want to go back to employment instead of being your own man?", but those are just to figure out what motivates a candidate, rather than figure out if they can be a nice puppet on a string. I found them to be good easy opening questions as well; most candidates had thought about them and didn't mind answering them, which puts them at ease and makes the rest of the interview easier. (No, an interviewer's job is not to make the candidate as uncomfortable as possible).
Only if you also sport a tramp stamp (or "reetgewei" = "arse antlers" as they are known in my country)
Few people would object to granting artists a reasonable term of copyright, or to paying them for their work. Of course one can argue about what is "reasonable", but when looking at the original goals of patents and copyright, it is pretty clear that the duration of these have been extended to ridiculous lengths. Other unreasonable restrictions apply: IP holders think it is completely natural and acceptable to ask consumers to pay the full price multiple times for the same content in order to play it on different devices or to play it after upgrading their equipment to a different standard. Couple that with the fact that most labels pay a pittance to artists (have a platinum album and you can still be in the hole with the label), and the public soon loses its sense of paying a fair price for a fair value. So they pirate.
Personally I am OK with pirating stuff in order to send a message (whether they get it is another issue). Our government for a long time was of the same opinion, and decided not to prosecute people pirating stuff for personal use, as long as there was no reasonable legal alternative. For music, there are plenty of reasonable and affordable choices, and I haven't pirated music in the past 10 years or so. Movies and series are a different story; I still pirate these, but I did subscribe to HBO and Netflix to pay for their content that I "steal" from them. If Warner Bros or Sony offer me to buy a reasonably priced "license" for movies I've pirated from them (or better: include a convenient store with downloads), I'll pay them as well. e-Books? I'll pay for them if you'll sell them to me. If you refuse to sell to me for whatever reason (region), and offer insult to injury by offering me the physical book instead, then it's FU and off to the Pirate Bay for me.
What Apple did was something else. They decided to offer music on a free trial basis and not charge for that, in order to promote their new service (and presumably the music as well). That's fine, and in the end it could even have been beneficial to the artists, but Apple did not have the right to make that decision for the artists. If Amazon started to give away sellers' items for free for a while and not reimburse those sellers, they'd be pissed, and rightly so.
Are they being treated differently? Property rights of most other people are protected, but only up to a point, and land can be appropriated for public use (is that what you call "eminent domain"?). And how impressed should we be by claims of sacred land being violated, on a scale of 1 being the field behind some random NIMBY's house, and 10 being the Kaäba or the Temple Mount?
Careful: if the connectors on your equipment aren't gold-plated, then it's those hard-to-replace connectors that will rust instead of the easily replaced cable. Gold does not improve signal quality; it merely prevents rust which degrades conductivity.
Apple, Monster, Beats, an ex hedge fund manager turned headphone designer... This reads like a Marvel comic with only supervillains in it.
You get to be a leader by getting people to follow you. Bluster and bullying works for some, others actually pull it off by being nice (not the same as trying to please everyone!). Others still lead quietly by example. And what works for some will put off others. Of course, it helps to be right often; if you are, you don't have to give people shit to make them follow, but they'll still follow if you do. That is what Jobs and Torvalds had/have going for them.
The one disadvantage about quiet leadership is that you will much less talked and written about. Or maybe that's an advantage...
You're right: bridges never fall down, electronic devices never catch fire, cars are never recalled, walls never develop cracks, and buildings never leak. Oh wait, they do.
If you mount a light switch upside down, or you use door knobs from a different source than your design specifies, your building generally won't come crashing down. In the world of software, it very well might.
Holding your breath in a (near) vacuum is a sucky idea...
You're right of course. That leaves the lawyers...
we can still trace EVERY SINGLE LINE OF CODE to a requirements document
So can I, for the software that I have produced. Line 1263 in stuff.c maps to the requirements "document" that I jotted down on the back of a coaster on the day we were having that 4 martini lunch. So do all the other lines, come to think of it.
But seriously... I'm no hard core software engineer and I've never been involved in anything that required that amount of rigour. I've wondered how one ensures that requirements are correct at that level, and are correct together. Even in relatively simple business software I've see such mistakes: every item passes its unit test and checks out against specifications, but the overall thing fails because of unforeseen conditions in the higher level program flow, deadlocks or race conditions, that sort of thing.
In any case you are right. Good requirement specs benefits maintenance on software of any age, where after a few years even the original developers are scratching their heads thinking "why on earth did we do that?"
If you have the headset, why not add the VR stuff at the same time? Besides, some movie makers are considering adding VR aspects to their movies. Imagine being able to look around; even the action would probably still be limited to what's in front of you, it would add a whole new level of immersion. Certain movies will benefit greatly from this, though whether the additional cost and effort is worth it remains to be seen.
See, I do not see the two as mutually exclusive. It is possible to have privacy AND security.
This is key. In fact, it's not just that they are not mutually exclusive; I think that there isn't even a strong relationship between the two. There's little or no trade-off, and having our privacy violated in the many ways it has been in the past years is not buying us a lot more security. Security is an excuse to violate our privacy. In rare, individual cases a valid one... and I fully agree that surveillance in such cases ought to be possible but require transparent laws and regulations, proper oversight, and real consequences for violations. We ought to be able to trust our government (I am Dutch by the way but the situation is largely the same), but they have shown us precious little trustworthiness in this matter. No proper rules (or any rules at all), no oversight, no punishment, and not even the basic IT smarts to keep sensitive data save. I wouldn't trust these guys with my phone number...
Snowden leaking details of operations on foreign soil along with details of domestic violations of privacy is another matter of course. But lets not forget that privacy was Snowden's motivation, and he has been rather careful in releasing snippets of information and securing the rest. Maybe he messed up with the encryption, or the capabilities of the Russian and Chinese governments proved too strong. Still worth it. And I am not at all convinced yet that Snowden's cache has indeed been cracked; the who thing is suspiciously convenient for embarrassed spy agencies.
The state or even the FBI having these pics on file isn't nearly as bad as having them available electronically to whomever pays for access, and offering the ability to combine them with camera feeds and facial recognition software so that pretty much anyone anywhere can track your whereabouts or be alerted to your presence (and in the near future your behaviour as well).
If your friends are active on social network, chances are that those networks have already been able to build a pretty interesting profile of you, including your name and likeness. It'd be funny (and scary as hell) if you signed up at last for FB, and up pops your ready made profile without you having to enter any of it.
The real value and the real threat (to us) are to be found in combinations of the data. Our image data, tagged, combined with live camera feeds, our financial data and our shopping habits. It is unlikely that any one large company will be able to effectively amass enough data sets to combine them in a way that will profit them directly (in ways other than simply selling the data to interested 3rd parties) and greatly harm us. And laws would prevent (or at least punish) collusion or crowdsourcing efforts, like letting the local grocer have some sales data or customer alerts in exchange for him piping his CCTV feeds into Google's servers for processing.
Even so, laws can mitigate some of the effects. Being tagged in photos and having a search engine easily bring up embarrassing pictures of you at a drunken dorm blowout is the future, and laws can do little about that. A shopkeeper being informed by his CCTV cam that you walk by his store every day, so he can throw some specific ads your way, can probably not be prevented either. But at least we can stop such sensitive data to be shared and processed en masse by both corporations and governments alike, by outlawing the practise. And of course that won't stop it completely, but at least we'll have something of a stick to hit transgressors with.
Well, a man can dream... But the fact that such undesirable practises are easy to do and hard to police doesn't mean that we shouldn't still have those laws in place.
They are planning to test the concept in a few locations in the US. The FCC license they seek covers this test.
You need a serious amount of delta v to get to orbit. Rockets deliver that through a long burn; if you want to shave off a significant amount of fuel by launching a rocket by rail gun, it would have to be a really long run or accelerate quite hard. Probably not good for launching manned flights on that thing.
So winning at poker or doing well at the stock exchange is stealing now? He didn't con an old lady out of her savings; he made a bet with banks and other investors who should have known better. No underhanded tricks, nothing up his sleeves, he just thought he saw were the market was going and acted accordingly. Jail the bankers for making such a mess with their subprime mortgages. Better yet: if you think this sort of thing is undesirable, propose laws against it before your start running your mouth about jailing people.
The point about DRM and exclusive deals is valid. If a band decides to exclusively sell their CDs through a particular chain, no problem: if I want the CD, I'll order it from that store. If I want a book that is exclusively sold through Amazon, I'll get it there. This is the model that many people had in mind when we moved from physical media to downloadable content: buy anywhere, pay once, play anywhere. But streaming services are paid for access rather than content, and if fragmentation and exclusive deals become more prevalent, then we will have to subscribe to multiple services to get the music we want. It's worse for e-books: if Amazon is the only one selling a particular book, I can't just simply get it from them but I'll have to buy their damn reader as well. As one WSJ columnist wrote: the book industry is even more clueless about the digital age than the music industry ever was.
Or we go back to CDs and ripping. Or the Pirate Bay. So indeed, we have a choice, and no one is forcing us. In case of exclusive e-books I'll just rip it from the pirate bay, then buy it from the store without ever downloading it. It's still illegal and I'd vastly prefer a more convenient way to shop, but this is what DRM and exclusive deals get you.