Let it never be said again that there's no substantive difference between free software and open source—here you have an open source booster (Red Hat's CEO Jim Whitehurst) pitching proprietary software as a good thing unto itself. Many years ago the Free Software Foundation told us about this when they wrote about the "Fear of Freedom" and the section that highlights how open source enthusiasts and free software activists react radically differently to non-free software:
The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program that is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users' freedom. Free software activists and open source enthusiasts will react very differently to that.
A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, "I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?" This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.
The free software activist will say, "Your program is very attractive, but I value my freedom more. So I reject your program. I will get my work done some other way, and support a project to develop a free replacement." If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.
Whitehurst mentioned "why Microsoft had to open source.NET". What freedoms does that really convey to.NET users? It's worth taking a look at Microsoft's Patent Promise for.NET Libraries and Runtime Components and understanding its limitations. This patent promise doesn't look out for your software freedom. As End Software Patents warned us two years ago:
[Y]ou're only protected if you're distributing the code "as part of either a.NET Runtime or as part of any application designed to run on a.NET Runtime". So if you add any of the code to another project, then you lose protection and MS reserves the right to use their patents against you.
Secondly, the protection only applies to a "compliant implementation" of.NET. So if you want to remove some parts and make a streamlined framework for embedded devices, then your implementation won't be compliant and the protection doesn't apply to you.
Microsoft's "patent promise" so-called "protection" looks very different from how the GPLv3 treats users. End Software Patents summarizes the GPLv3's language in section 11: "[c]ode distributed under the GNU GPLv3[] comes with a patent grant which basically says the contributors can't use their patents against the users for exercising the freedoms granted in the licence" whereas Microsoft's "protections disappear very quickly for those who wish to modify or re-use the code".
A major difference being that of those three only Firefox lets users see what's going on, alter the code, and share their improvements with others (even commercially). It's a lot harder to get away with spying and other kinds of subterfuge in software users are free to run, inspect, share, and modify. Subterfuge is trivially easy to do in proprietary software, thus proprietary software is never trustworthy and never safe to use. Furthermore, both Google and Microsoft work with government agencies (such as the NSA) to help their spying efforts. You're better off with even worse quality code that is free software than more featureful, less buggy, faster, or in any other way "better" proprietary software. Software can be improved to become technically better but only the copyright holder can free their proprietary software.
I too wouldn't mind seeing deceptive practices properly punished, but punishments won't inherently bring software freedom. Jailing amazon.com's leaders for taking away (of all books) "1984" from some legal purchasers of that eBook on the amazon DRM-riddled eBook device won't grant those readers what they need—DRM-free copies of the books they purchase and fully free software eBook reader source code. I think big organizations will eventually come to realize (if they don't already) that letting some higher-ups get punished is a small price to pay to retain the power over the user proprietary software gives them.
Also, open source was established well after the free software movement and open source was established precisely to disconnect the call for freedom that the free software makes central to its cause. A couple essays (older essay, newer essay) describe the on-the-ground practical differences in this and they couldn't be more stark: there are situations where open source fans will accept proprietary software where free software activists will instead choose to do without and perhaps work on a free replacement for the software. This difference also gets to why some people refer to open source's efforts to make non-free things look better than they are "openwashing" (a term based in the word "greenwashing" to make anti-environmental things look environmentally conscious; I first came across the term in a talk by Brad Kuhn, former Free Software Foundation Executive Director and currently at the Software Freedom Conservancy).
The point is that modern cars have computers in them running proprietary software which control how the car behaves. Implementing the same limits with mechanical apparatus means exposing how the apparatus works and allowing the car owner to remove or adapt the apparatus. Proprietary software hides the rules and makes it much harder for the car's owner to remove or adapt how the software works. Apparently a variety of car manufacturers use this secrecy to deceive consumers into buying a car that didn't behave the same in testing as it does in regular use. The consequences of this are vast and hardly limited to cars. But the only real solution is the same: pass on the code to the good being sold under a free software license right along side selling the good so the owner of the good can truly make their object their own.
"Bitching that their test doesn't reproduce real world driving" is very much the problem here because the same thing happened in environmental tests with a very large variety of makes and models running software designed to cheat testing. It hardly matters whether the feature that exposes the problem is compliance with emissions regulations, getting the RPMs one expects out of a car, or anything else because the underlying issue is controlling the user through proprietary software and therefore one has to understand the inherent untrustworthiness of proprietary software as the root of the problem.
If you see the commonality between this story and so many other stories on/. it's because you understand that/. points readers to a lot of stories where proprietary software is to blame. Every DRM story, every story where the good the owner purchased isn't behaving reasonably comes down to proprietary software isn't giving the owner full control over the device they own. Anyone who owns anything running on proprietary software has good reason to be concerned about this. Everyone should use the presence of proprietary software in a device as a reason to not buy that device. The only way to fix that problem is free software. As I said in another thread, software freedom is the only thing that will keep proprietors from taking advantage of computer users because when the proprietors don't know who is inspecting the code, improving the code, or distributing improved versions they know they can be caught.
Disclosure is no substitute for software freedom. It's so easy to disclose something, give the user a bogus UI for "controlling" the program, and then do whatever the proprietor really wants done (which could include covertly recording audio from unsuspecting users who believe they control their computer's mic). There's no substitute for being free to run, share, inspect, and modify the program at any time for any reason. Software freedom is the only thing that will keep proprietors from taking advantage of computer users because when the proprietors don't know who is inspecting the code, improving the code, or distributing improved versions they know they can be caught.
There is no end to the number of surprises proprietary software offers its users because its users are never in control of the computer running the proprietary software. Fines, mea culpas from VW et al, and firing workers are no substitute for software freedom—the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the software at any time for any reason.
A major expenditure for political campaigns is media buys—buying TV ads, for instance—but Trump was given billions of dollars in gratis TV coverage (1, 2). That's not "technology".
Trump was up against a horrible Democratic Party candidate who built on a long line of screwing the poor and ignored the lessons of Brexit. As corporate media lined up to bolster her, enough of the Trump voters' interests were left out. While she got busy calling them names (like being a "basket of deplorables") poor voters tried to make rent and feed their families. Every Trump jibe echoed around (such as the rubbish from news parody shows) without acknowledging what had been happening to the disenfranchised for 30 years under Democratic and Republican rule that Trump had nothing to do with setting up. Reacting to a bad economy with no end in sight had a lot more to do with Trump's victory than "technology".
To answer the question the summary poses: Even when the Democrats control both houses of congress and the presidency they don't want to abolish the electoral college. So even the to-be minority party won't do this.
Building on the parent post: And as to Democrats blaming anyone but themselves for pulling defeat from the jaws of victory in a rigged system that favors the corporate duopoly, I'm sure they'd like to add another factor they dared not mention until now: competition from third parties such as the Greens & Libertarians. We're not allowed to hear from them in the "debates" because they're not deemed popular enough to be a factor in the election but when the Democrats lose suddenly they're a factor (paraphrasing Lawrence O'Donnell from "An Unreasonable Man".
Glenn Greenwald has salient factors listed and commented on in his latest on the Intercept. Democrats just don't want to acknowledge how running a corporate-driven system with endless war and no justice against the rapacious banks doesn't go over well by the US public, particularly in states where Clinton lost and among groups who are increasingly poor.
That's not a fair interpretation of what the grandparent poster wrote. Should we interpret your response to be anti-business because you didn't mention that non-developing users can hire developers? Of course not, that wouldn't be fair because you didn't say any such thing.
Users who aren't developers still have viable options. They can learn development (as the other developing users did) or they can hire developers. These options make FLOSS better than proprietary software. When proprietary software isn't good enough, nobody is allowed to improve it, distribute their improved versions (even commercially), and help others.
It's also great that FileZilla is GPL'd so the copyright holders can compel those who distribute to distribute their improved source code too. Software freedom is great to have and copyleft is a good mechanism for helping others get to share in the freedom.
I don't agree. I think it's always good to have the specifics to hand. It's helpful to be able to point out salient details and understand more about context regarding why powerful people make the decisions they do. Historically, it will be more valuable in ways we don't yet know just as having old newspapers scanned and OCRed turns out to be helpful. If Clinton becomes the next US President, I suspect people will continue to find interesting connections to (then current) policy choices and something she told the banks but wouldn't tell the public (like how a lot of Syrians are going to die in her Syrian "no-fly zone"). It's already been helpful to put her alleged support for women into proper context by showing how she's the more dangerous of the two major party candidates with regard to women. Trump will use ugly language and he may grope women in arms reach (as he is alleged to have done to about a dozen women that we know of), and this is certainly bad for those women and their families. But it's not murder. Clinton will kill many more women halfway around the world (possibly including Americans like Obama did in the drone war against the al-Awlaki father and son pair of men). That's objectively worse.
Whatever side of the Clinton email thing you're on, how would you feel about having the last 10 years of your private communication dumped out in an investigation?
I don't think that's the relevant issue because that question leaves out a lot of choices Hillary Clinton made which led to this happening to her. She chose to co-mingle personal and professional emails, she chose to have a campaign head who wasn't facile enough with an email account to pick a good password for his account yet also choosing to do considerable business via email, she chose (in another email scandal) to try and evade FOIA discoverability, and she chose to either destroy evidence or have it destroyed on her behalf. None of these are good choices, none of these choices make her look good, and I suspect all of these choices help explain her phenomenally low trustworthiness rating and continued inability to set a commanding lead over Trump in her race for the US presidency.
You know you're in the underclass when you can't avoid being recorded to get what you want done. You know you're in the upper class when you can avoid being recorded and still get what you want done.
No, not everyone "enjoys and uses" these services particularly because that lower rate you refer to comes at the cost of a profound dishonesty, as the legal case points out. Another aspect of this dishonest accounting, I suspect, is in the form of car insurance as I've pointed out in another recent post. Low prices at the cost of exploitation is no bargain, it's hiding the real cost of providing the good or service.
They are flipping around—a clear sign that Hillary Clinton is a poor candidate for office, just like she was against Sen. Obama 8 years ago. As much as she and her supporters insist Trump is more dangerous and must be defeated, she has never managed to establish the commanding lead over Trump she needs to make it clear the country believes that rhetoric.
However, as much as Jill Stein presents a cogent, ethical, and realistic set of policy changes, I doubt the Green Party will win enough electoral votes to carry any state let alone the US election. The establishment candidate for US president, Hillary Clinton, is part of the bipartisan agreement to lock Stein out for being not popular enough (an anti-competitive excuse offered to the public as if popularity should be a consideration at all, rather than allowing every candidate on enough ballots in enough states to theoretically win into those privately-controlled so-called "debates"). Clinton knows that. Just as when she ran against Obama and Sanders her team knows if anyone is perceived running to the left of her, she'll lose. Therefore Clinton has to use whatever resources are available to her (legal, ethical, or not) to make sure progressive candidates are either removed from the race or largely unheard from and minimized in the corporate-friendly press (including every comedy news program and popular commentary show likely to be seen/heard by young voters). This leaves her to run against the only allowable competition, the Republicans, and try to get them to prop up a candidate from her short list (as listed in the leaked Podesta emails) where she can try to come out looking progressive by comparison to people who think emotionally rather than critically.
The Democrats & Republicans agree in large part on almost all the big money issues of the day. It's a safe bet either Trump or Clinton will become the next US President. With that the US can look forward to more exploitative economic policy at home and abroad via the TPP including treating women & girls horribly despite Clinton's alleged feminism or anti-Trump talk (and repeated replays of his sexist comments). This includes encouraging an atmosphere of belittlement and molestation in small numbers in the case of Trump and his sexist commentary, and killing them by the thousands in the case of Clinton and her many wars of aggression making her a war criminal even now. Trump is the less effective evil because he's nowhere near as belligerent as Clinton. But the Democrats and Republicans continue to be far more alike than different, similar enough that it's not worth voting for either of them.
Come up with a term that covers all of the commercial services and I'll consider using that term instead. But I don't know of any such name and I won't use a name which is basically advertising for any of them (like calling all portable music players "walkmen" or "ipods", or calling an audio recording online a "podcast"). I understand the value of calling things by their proper names, but your post and a sibling post to yours complain of essentially the same thing while offering no specific language to use instead.
Also, I believe the name covering these services is hardly significant in terms of why people would choose to use them. These services are inexpensive (probably partially due to the savings of not having to deal with car insurance) and convenient due to integrating quite well with mobile phones; a potent combination which I understand traditional cab services didn't really compete with until pushed by these services.
I await the data to speak to the following issue, but I strongly suspect all commercial rideshare services worsen driving for all drivers by structurally encouraging poor rideshare drivers to work without commercial car insurance. I suspect this choice drives up the cost of car insurance for other drivers operating their vehicles within the terms of their respective policy.
I figure that poor drivers looking to make quick money by being employed by the rideshare service are more likely to attempt commercial ridesharing without car insurance.
When the uninsured (or improperly insured, there's no distinguishable difference here) have an accident, the other driver is likely to be an insured driver operating their vehicle within the terms of their insurance. If the rideshare driver is at fault and they don't have commercial car insurance, their insurance agent hears about the accident and says the insurer won't cover any damage to either vehicle, the attempted claim is a breach of contract, and whatever insurance they had is now canceled. In order to be made whole, the insured driver has to have thought ahead to this situation and previously bought "uninsured driver" insurance. This additional policy increases the cost of any car insurance.
Sure, uninsured driver insurance existed well before rideshare services. But I suspect organized, commercialized rideshare services increase the odds that one will need uninsured driver insurance because people have a tough time holding the rideshare service liable for accidents their employees (inappropriately called "independent contractors") cause.
Will the US play along with this and not expand the extrajudicial assassination by drone program to Sweden? There's a high likelihood the next US administration will continue the drone war (which the US would call "state-sponsored terrorism" if any other country were doing has been doing). Terror Tuesday is coming up fast but we all know murder-by-drone is lighthearted humor except for its victims and anyone who thinks killing is wrong. Like Obama said, "Turns out I'm really good at killing people. Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine". Paving the way for the next war criminal, Hillary Clinton, to take over the role.
Indeed; there are many reasons not to do business with Apple and many reasons to never use proprietary, user-subjugating software. Contrary to one of the follow-ups to the parent post, this has everything to do with TrueCrypt, VeraCrypt, and any other free software to which one entrusts their sensitive information. There's nothing these programs can do to fix the real problem. The user has to switch operating systems to a fully free software, user-respecting OS and install only free software on top of that to do the best we can do to avoid the aforementioned problems. So while nobody can blame these free software programs for leaked keys, passphrases, and other leaked information there's no reason to trust the underlying proprietary software these free programs rely on to do everything they do when running on non-free OSes.
The problem isn't the trouble of having to read and modify so much, it's that even if you do all that you can't trust what you have; you can't be sure those "41 pages of switches, GPOs, and reg hacks" will grant you the privacy you seek even on the Enterprise variant of Windows. Anyone who tells you otherwise is speculating from ignorance. You can't stop any variant of Windows from tricking users into "upgrading" to some more recently-released variant (like the trouble Windows users had with Windows 10 "upgrades" recently). That's the thing about proprietary software; you're never in charge of what it does. Even if you think you've set the switches the right way, programmers can make a UI that looks like it is doing what the user wants but actually does something the user does not want and does this without the user's permission or control. No configuration of switches can fix this. Users need software freedom to fix this.
Satya Nadella and Bill Gates before him focused on what's important for modern proprietors—spying on the user because that's profitable and secures powerful friends. Consider that Microsoft tells the NSA about bugs before fixing them. This doesn't help most Windows users, but it helps the NSA know to devalue those bugs. And it tells you to devalue proprietary software. With proprietors, you're the product: all the data you generate including what you run, when you're using the computer, and where you take the computer (for computers with cell phone capability or GPS units) can and is spied upon. You don't get out of that trap without software freedom either.
Thanks for the clarification. Are people meant to run other OSes but GNU atop Windows Subsystem for Linux? I've not heard of anyone doing this nor have I seen any announcement this was intended.
So GNU doesn't come with this, but one runs ELF binaries (Ubuntu's 14.05 release, for instance) on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux to effectively get GNU. Since this ostensibly doesn't include the Linux kernel this wouldn't qualify as GNU/Linux either.
Functionally, however, I don't see a great deal of difference between this and Cygwin as in both cases one ends up with a lot of the same programs running atop Microsoft Windows.
MS has stated that this is very new and very buggy but that they are working on it. It is not yet for public consumption.
Apparently Microsoft released it to the public.
MS has been embracing Open source minus the extinguish part for some time now.
Time will tell.
Linux (okay so not the kernel but still) on Windows outside of a virtual machine is everything a lot of people have wanted but never thought would happen.
This tends to confirm the view that the GNU/Linux misnaming as "Linux" is really about denying credit where credit is due (particularly noteworthy amongst people who are sticklers for technical accuracy and in need of a clearer distinction for what one has). This project includes some parts of a system but without the Linux kernel and yet you're still giving that project credit. What Microsoft has released might be a GNU/kWindows (akin in naming to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, meaning GNU running atop the kernel of some other system—Microsoft Windows or FreeBSD, respectively) but whatever it is, it is certainly not "Linux" and it contains no Linux kernel code. Also, Cygwin has delivered some variant of comparable functionality for years.
If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, she'll be entering office as a war criminal having achieved that status well prior. She has backed possibly every war the US is engaged in and shows no signs of pulling the US out of its many occupations. Her belligerent stance on Syria, for instance, is to push for a "no-fly zone" which she acknowledges (to her bankster friends who also bankrolled Pres. Obama's candidacy) will "kill a lot of Syrians". Patrick Cockburn disagrees any US president would actually do this, but that doesn't stop her from making it known she is fine with the bombastic talk. She'll continue all of Obama's wars just as Obama continued and expanded G.W. Bush's wars. We don't know precisely where she'll expand US wars to, but it's likely to be some other poor country just as Obama expanded wars into Yemen. She'll continue the extrajudicial assassinations of Obama's drone wars (which Obama engaged in far more than Bush, making the drone wars a hallmark of Obama's presidency).
The drone strikes deserve some special attention because so few people seem to know about them. If any other country did this the US would have no problem identifying them as "state-sponsors of global terror" or calling them "terrorists". Each of these wars kill a lot of women and children (putting into perspective how much Clinton cares about women), including Americans (as we've seen with the Al-awlakis, such as killing a father and son 2 weeks apart in separate drone attacks) without due process. And the drones kill completely unsuspected innocent passers-by (such as one infamous wedding party attack. The US kills so many civilians they can't keep track of them all but are clearly ashamed by the deaths so they released (on a Friday before a holiday weekend when mainstream corporate media are least likely to carry the story) an internal assessment of civilian killings in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya (including those killed including during Clinton's stint as Secretary of State). In that assessment we find an undercount due to the US reclassification of any military-age male as an "enemy combatant" in a desperate attempt to reduce the civilian death toll. There's every reason to expect more of the same from Hillary Clinton should she become president.
Domestically, Clinton's anti-poor/anti-working-person policies are bound to worsen the plight of women. Taking so much money from global banks ensures a continuation of no prosecutions for global banksters, no matter what fellow Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren says. Global trade pacts will help the US more efficiently exploit the poor. The TPP is a fine example of this: the TPP was known to, and does, receive massive international disapproval hence the TPP negotiations and early drafts were done in secret even keeping US congresspeople in the dark. Regardless of what Clinton says or hints to the US public, Clinton picked a pro-TPP vice presidential candidate in Tim Kaine and Clinton picked TPP boosters in her cabinet setup committee. It's hardly surprising that in April 2015 TheIntercept.com reported that "TPP Propon
You're thinking correctly in that, it's right in line with why we commonly call liberating a device to run software the owner wants to run without the approval of the device's proprietor(s) "jailbreaking"—a clear acknowledgement that the device shackles the user. The real harm comes from the inequity making the owner of the computer (typically the user) subservient to whatever proprietors are involved in making and selling the device. But the device's true purpose is spying on the user's movements and discussions, tracking and recording what the user does in real-time.
Her long history with Wal-Mart and being the wife of former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, and the namecalling you brought up notwithstanding, are virtually sideshows compared to war with Russia. This war will probably take the form of her promised "no-fly zone" and "safe zone" in Syria which even she (privately, to her bankster funders) admits will "kill a lot of Syrians" and require ground troops. What is a no-fly zone? Dr. Jill Stein, also running for US president, has clarified what that means:
Hillary Clinton has said she would like to impose a no-fly zone over Syria, which basically means we are going to war with Russia, because that's what you do when you impose a no-fly zone, is you shoot down people that are in that airspace. And remember, we have 2,000 nuclear weapons now, between us and the Russians, on hair-trigger alert. So, this is certainly a very dangerous territory, where Hillary Clinton has continued to beat the drums of war with this idea that we are showing strength and leadership, but leading us in exactly the wrong direction and a very dangerous direction.
Hillary Clinton's hawkishness is bound to cost the US trillions. Continuing Obama's wars (which are all of G.W. Bush's wars plus more wars via drones in a couple countries Bush didn't attack) would do that without adding new wars. But Clinton's belligerency is why the Intercept notes "Robert Kagan and Other Neocons Are Backing Hillary Clinton". A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for more war, more extrajudicial assassination, and that includes killing women and children whom Clinton is so keen to convince us she cares about. This merely builds on the wars she's voted for or otherwise supported (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc.). She may be more gentle-toned than Trump but she's the more lethal choice than Trump too. Donald Trump's wide ignorance and many bigotries, as ugly and reprehensible as they are, are being pitched loudly to distract one from considering Sec. Clinton's lethal record of injustice. Fortunately, as I'm sure the Democrats will be happy to attest to should Clinton lose again, there's more than 2 choices for US president.
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Let it never be said again that there's no substantive difference between free software and open source—here you have an open source booster (Red Hat's CEO Jim Whitehurst) pitching proprietary software as a good thing unto itself. Many years ago the Free Software Foundation told us about this when they wrote about the "Fear of Freedom" and the section that highlights how open source enthusiasts and free software activists react radically differently to non-free software:
Whitehurst mentioned "why Microsoft had to open source .NET". What freedoms does that really convey to .NET users? It's worth taking a look at Microsoft's Patent Promise for .NET Libraries and Runtime Components and understanding its limitations. This patent promise doesn't look out for your software freedom. As End Software Patents warned us two years ago:
Microsoft's "patent promise" so-called "protection" looks very different from how the GPLv3 treats users. End Software Patents summarizes the GPLv3's language in section 11: "[c]ode distributed under the GNU GPLv3[] comes with a patent grant which basically says the contributors can't use their patents against the users for exercising the freedoms granted in the licence" whereas Microsoft's "protections disappear very quickly for those who wish to modify or re-use the code".
A major difference being that of those three only Firefox lets users see what's going on, alter the code, and share their improvements with others (even commercially). It's a lot harder to get away with spying and other kinds of subterfuge in software users are free to run, inspect, share, and modify. Subterfuge is trivially easy to do in proprietary software, thus proprietary software is never trustworthy and never safe to use. Furthermore, both Google and Microsoft work with government agencies (such as the NSA) to help their spying efforts. You're better off with even worse quality code that is free software than more featureful, less buggy, faster, or in any other way "better" proprietary software. Software can be improved to become technically better but only the copyright holder can free their proprietary software.
I too wouldn't mind seeing deceptive practices properly punished, but punishments won't inherently bring software freedom. Jailing amazon.com's leaders for taking away (of all books) "1984" from some legal purchasers of that eBook on the amazon DRM-riddled eBook device won't grant those readers what they need—DRM-free copies of the books they purchase and fully free software eBook reader source code. I think big organizations will eventually come to realize (if they don't already) that letting some higher-ups get punished is a small price to pay to retain the power over the user proprietary software gives them.
Also, open source was established well after the free software movement and open source was established precisely to disconnect the call for freedom that the free software makes central to its cause. A couple essays (older essay, newer essay) describe the on-the-ground practical differences in this and they couldn't be more stark: there are situations where open source fans will accept proprietary software where free software activists will instead choose to do without and perhaps work on a free replacement for the software. This difference also gets to why some people refer to open source's efforts to make non-free things look better than they are "openwashing" (a term based in the word "greenwashing" to make anti-environmental things look environmentally conscious; I first came across the term in a talk by Brad Kuhn, former Free Software Foundation Executive Director and currently at the Software Freedom Conservancy).
The point is that modern cars have computers in them running proprietary software which control how the car behaves. Implementing the same limits with mechanical apparatus means exposing how the apparatus works and allowing the car owner to remove or adapt the apparatus. Proprietary software hides the rules and makes it much harder for the car's owner to remove or adapt how the software works. Apparently a variety of car manufacturers use this secrecy to deceive consumers into buying a car that didn't behave the same in testing as it does in regular use. The consequences of this are vast and hardly limited to cars. But the only real solution is the same: pass on the code to the good being sold under a free software license right along side selling the good so the owner of the good can truly make their object their own.
"Bitching that their test doesn't reproduce real world driving" is very much the problem here because the same thing happened in environmental tests with a very large variety of makes and models running software designed to cheat testing. It hardly matters whether the feature that exposes the problem is compliance with emissions regulations, getting the RPMs one expects out of a car, or anything else because the underlying issue is controlling the user through proprietary software and therefore one has to understand the inherent untrustworthiness of proprietary software as the root of the problem.
If you see the commonality between this story and so many other stories on /. it's because you understand that /. points readers to a lot of stories where proprietary software is to blame. Every DRM story, every story where the good the owner purchased isn't behaving reasonably comes down to proprietary software isn't giving the owner full control over the device they own. Anyone who owns anything running on proprietary software has good reason to be concerned about this. Everyone should use the presence of proprietary software in a device as a reason to not buy that device. The only way to fix that problem is free software. As I said in another thread, software freedom is the only thing that will keep proprietors from taking advantage of computer users because when the proprietors don't know who is inspecting the code, improving the code, or distributing improved versions they know they can be caught.
Disclosure is no substitute for software freedom. It's so easy to disclose something, give the user a bogus UI for "controlling" the program, and then do whatever the proprietor really wants done (which could include covertly recording audio from unsuspecting users who believe they control their computer's mic). There's no substitute for being free to run, share, inspect, and modify the program at any time for any reason. Software freedom is the only thing that will keep proprietors from taking advantage of computer users because when the proprietors don't know who is inspecting the code, improving the code, or distributing improved versions they know they can be caught.
There is no end to the number of surprises proprietary software offers its users because its users are never in control of the computer running the proprietary software. Fines, mea culpas from VW et al, and firing workers are no substitute for software freedom—the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the software at any time for any reason.
A major expenditure for political campaigns is media buys—buying TV ads, for instance—but Trump was given billions of dollars in gratis TV coverage (1, 2). That's not "technology".
Trump was up against a horrible Democratic Party candidate who built on a long line of screwing the poor and ignored the lessons of Brexit. As corporate media lined up to bolster her, enough of the Trump voters' interests were left out. While she got busy calling them names (like being a "basket of deplorables") poor voters tried to make rent and feed their families. Every Trump jibe echoed around (such as the rubbish from news parody shows) without acknowledging what had been happening to the disenfranchised for 30 years under Democratic and Republican rule that Trump had nothing to do with setting up. Reacting to a bad economy with no end in sight had a lot more to do with Trump's victory than "technology".
To answer the question the summary poses: Even when the Democrats control both houses of congress and the presidency they don't want to abolish the electoral college. So even the to-be minority party won't do this.
Building on the parent post: And as to Democrats blaming anyone but themselves for pulling defeat from the jaws of victory in a rigged system that favors the corporate duopoly, I'm sure they'd like to add another factor they dared not mention until now: competition from third parties such as the Greens & Libertarians. We're not allowed to hear from them in the "debates" because they're not deemed popular enough to be a factor in the election but when the Democrats lose suddenly they're a factor (paraphrasing Lawrence O'Donnell from "An Unreasonable Man".
Glenn Greenwald has salient factors listed and commented on in his latest on the Intercept. Democrats just don't want to acknowledge how running a corporate-driven system with endless war and no justice against the rapacious banks doesn't go over well by the US public, particularly in states where Clinton lost and among groups who are increasingly poor.
According to >http://www.webupd8.org/2016/03/how-to-install-budgie-desktop-in-ubuntu-ppa.html"Budgie is a modern GTK-based desktop that was written from scratch, with simplicity and elegance in mind." and http://www.webupd8.org/2016/04/a-quick-look-at-budgie-remix-1604.htmlsays "Budgie is a shell for GNOME". Both links have more to say about this desktop based on GNOME.
I'm still not clear why this needs an entire disk image rather than continuing on as a personal package archive (PPA).
That's not a fair interpretation of what the grandparent poster wrote. Should we interpret your response to be anti-business because you didn't mention that non-developing users can hire developers? Of course not, that wouldn't be fair because you didn't say any such thing.
Users who aren't developers still have viable options. They can learn development (as the other developing users did) or they can hire developers. These options make FLOSS better than proprietary software. When proprietary software isn't good enough, nobody is allowed to improve it, distribute their improved versions (even commercially), and help others.
It's also great that FileZilla is GPL'd so the copyright holders can compel those who distribute to distribute their improved source code too. Software freedom is great to have and copyleft is a good mechanism for helping others get to share in the freedom.
I don't agree. I think it's always good to have the specifics to hand. It's helpful to be able to point out salient details and understand more about context regarding why powerful people make the decisions they do. Historically, it will be more valuable in ways we don't yet know just as having old newspapers scanned and OCRed turns out to be helpful. If Clinton becomes the next US President, I suspect people will continue to find interesting connections to (then current) policy choices and something she told the banks but wouldn't tell the public (like how a lot of Syrians are going to die in her Syrian "no-fly zone"). It's already been helpful to put her alleged support for women into proper context by showing how she's the more dangerous of the two major party candidates with regard to women. Trump will use ugly language and he may grope women in arms reach (as he is alleged to have done to about a dozen women that we know of), and this is certainly bad for those women and their families. But it's not murder. Clinton will kill many more women halfway around the world (possibly including Americans like Obama did in the drone war against the al-Awlaki father and son pair of men). That's objectively worse.
I don't think that's the relevant issue because that question leaves out a lot of choices Hillary Clinton made which led to this happening to her. She chose to co-mingle personal and professional emails, she chose to have a campaign head who wasn't facile enough with an email account to pick a good password for his account yet also choosing to do considerable business via email, she chose (in another email scandal) to try and evade FOIA discoverability, and she chose to either destroy evidence or have it destroyed on her behalf. None of these are good choices, none of these choices make her look good, and I suspect all of these choices help explain her phenomenally low trustworthiness rating and continued inability to set a commanding lead over Trump in her race for the US presidency.
You know you're in the underclass when you can't avoid being recorded to get what you want done.
You know you're in the upper class when you can avoid being recorded and still get what you want done.
No, not everyone "enjoys and uses" these services particularly because that lower rate you refer to comes at the cost of a profound dishonesty, as the legal case points out. Another aspect of this dishonest accounting, I suspect, is in the form of car insurance as I've pointed out in another recent post. Low prices at the cost of exploitation is no bargain, it's hiding the real cost of providing the good or service.
They are flipping around—a clear sign that Hillary Clinton is a poor candidate for office, just like she was against Sen. Obama 8 years ago. As much as she and her supporters insist Trump is more dangerous and must be defeated, she has never managed to establish the commanding lead over Trump she needs to make it clear the country believes that rhetoric.
However, as much as Jill Stein presents a cogent, ethical, and realistic set of policy changes, I doubt the Green Party will win enough electoral votes to carry any state let alone the US election. The establishment candidate for US president, Hillary Clinton, is part of the bipartisan agreement to lock Stein out for being not popular enough (an anti-competitive excuse offered to the public as if popularity should be a consideration at all, rather than allowing every candidate on enough ballots in enough states to theoretically win into those privately-controlled so-called "debates"). Clinton knows that. Just as when she ran against Obama and Sanders her team knows if anyone is perceived running to the left of her, she'll lose. Therefore Clinton has to use whatever resources are available to her (legal, ethical, or not) to make sure progressive candidates are either removed from the race or largely unheard from and minimized in the corporate-friendly press (including every comedy news program and popular commentary show likely to be seen/heard by young voters). This leaves her to run against the only allowable competition, the Republicans, and try to get them to prop up a candidate from her short list (as listed in the leaked Podesta emails) where she can try to come out looking progressive by comparison to people who think emotionally rather than critically.
The Democrats & Republicans agree in large part on almost all the big money issues of the day. It's a safe bet either Trump or Clinton will become the next US President. With that the US can look forward to more exploitative economic policy at home and abroad via the TPP including treating women & girls horribly despite Clinton's alleged feminism or anti-Trump talk (and repeated replays of his sexist comments). This includes encouraging an atmosphere of belittlement and molestation in small numbers in the case of Trump and his sexist commentary, and killing them by the thousands in the case of Clinton and her many wars of aggression making her a war criminal even now. Trump is the less effective evil because he's nowhere near as belligerent as Clinton. But the Democrats and Republicans continue to be far more alike than different, similar enough that it's not worth voting for either of them.
Come up with a term that covers all of the commercial services and I'll consider using that term instead. But I don't know of any such name and I won't use a name which is basically advertising for any of them (like calling all portable music players "walkmen" or "ipods", or calling an audio recording online a "podcast"). I understand the value of calling things by their proper names, but your post and a sibling post to yours complain of essentially the same thing while offering no specific language to use instead.
Also, I believe the name covering these services is hardly significant in terms of why people would choose to use them. These services are inexpensive (probably partially due to the savings of not having to deal with car insurance) and convenient due to integrating quite well with mobile phones; a potent combination which I understand traditional cab services didn't really compete with until pushed by these services.
I await the data to speak to the following issue, but I strongly suspect all commercial rideshare services worsen driving for all drivers by structurally encouraging poor rideshare drivers to work without commercial car insurance. I suspect this choice drives up the cost of car insurance for other drivers operating their vehicles within the terms of their respective policy.
I figure that poor drivers looking to make quick money by being employed by the rideshare service are more likely to attempt commercial ridesharing without car insurance.
When the uninsured (or improperly insured, there's no distinguishable difference here) have an accident, the other driver is likely to be an insured driver operating their vehicle within the terms of their insurance. If the rideshare driver is at fault and they don't have commercial car insurance, their insurance agent hears about the accident and says the insurer won't cover any damage to either vehicle, the attempted claim is a breach of contract, and whatever insurance they had is now canceled. In order to be made whole, the insured driver has to have thought ahead to this situation and previously bought "uninsured driver" insurance. This additional policy increases the cost of any car insurance.
Sure, uninsured driver insurance existed well before rideshare services. But I suspect organized, commercialized rideshare services increase the odds that one will need uninsured driver insurance because people have a tough time holding the rideshare service liable for accidents their employees (inappropriately called "independent contractors") cause.
Will the US play along with this and not expand the extrajudicial assassination by drone program to Sweden? There's a high likelihood the next US administration will continue the drone war (which the US would call "state-sponsored terrorism" if any other country were doing has been doing). Terror Tuesday is coming up fast but we all know murder-by-drone is lighthearted humor except for its victims and anyone who thinks killing is wrong. Like Obama said, "Turns out I'm really good at killing people. Didn't know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine". Paving the way for the next war criminal, Hillary Clinton, to take over the role.
Indeed; there are many reasons not to do business with Apple and many reasons to never use proprietary, user-subjugating software. Contrary to one of the follow-ups to the parent post, this has everything to do with TrueCrypt, VeraCrypt, and any other free software to which one entrusts their sensitive information. There's nothing these programs can do to fix the real problem. The user has to switch operating systems to a fully free software, user-respecting OS and install only free software on top of that to do the best we can do to avoid the aforementioned problems. So while nobody can blame these free software programs for leaked keys, passphrases, and other leaked information there's no reason to trust the underlying proprietary software these free programs rely on to do everything they do when running on non-free OSes.
The problem isn't the trouble of having to read and modify so much, it's that even if you do all that you can't trust what you have; you can't be sure those "41 pages of switches, GPOs, and reg hacks" will grant you the privacy you seek even on the Enterprise variant of Windows. Anyone who tells you otherwise is speculating from ignorance. You can't stop any variant of Windows from tricking users into "upgrading" to some more recently-released variant (like the trouble Windows users had with Windows 10 "upgrades" recently). That's the thing about proprietary software; you're never in charge of what it does. Even if you think you've set the switches the right way, programmers can make a UI that looks like it is doing what the user wants but actually does something the user does not want and does this without the user's permission or control. No configuration of switches can fix this. Users need software freedom to fix this.
Satya Nadella and Bill Gates before him focused on what's important for modern proprietors—spying on the user because that's profitable and secures powerful friends. Consider that Microsoft tells the NSA about bugs before fixing them. This doesn't help most Windows users, but it helps the NSA know to devalue those bugs. And it tells you to devalue proprietary software. With proprietors, you're the product: all the data you generate including what you run, when you're using the computer, and where you take the computer (for computers with cell phone capability or GPS units) can and is spied upon. You don't get out of that trap without software freedom either.
Thanks for the clarification. Are people meant to run other OSes but GNU atop Windows Subsystem for Linux? I've not heard of anyone doing this nor have I seen any announcement this was intended.
So GNU doesn't come with this, but one runs ELF binaries (Ubuntu's 14.05 release, for instance) on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux to effectively get GNU. Since this ostensibly doesn't include the Linux kernel this wouldn't qualify as GNU/Linux either.
Functionally, however, I don't see a great deal of difference between this and Cygwin as in both cases one ends up with a lot of the same programs running atop Microsoft Windows.
Apparently Microsoft released it to the public.
Time will tell.
This tends to confirm the view that the GNU/Linux misnaming as "Linux" is really about denying credit where credit is due (particularly noteworthy amongst people who are sticklers for technical accuracy and in need of a clearer distinction for what one has). This project includes some parts of a system but without the Linux kernel and yet you're still giving that project credit. What Microsoft has released might be a GNU/kWindows (akin in naming to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, meaning GNU running atop the kernel of some other system—Microsoft Windows or FreeBSD, respectively) but whatever it is, it is certainly not "Linux" and it contains no Linux kernel code. Also, Cygwin has delivered some variant of comparable functionality for years.
If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, she'll be entering office as a war criminal having achieved that status well prior. She has backed possibly every war the US is engaged in and shows no signs of pulling the US out of its many occupations. Her belligerent stance on Syria, for instance, is to push for a "no-fly zone" which she acknowledges (to her bankster friends who also bankrolled Pres. Obama's candidacy) will "kill a lot of Syrians". Patrick Cockburn disagrees any US president would actually do this, but that doesn't stop her from making it known she is fine with the bombastic talk. She'll continue all of Obama's wars just as Obama continued and expanded G.W. Bush's wars. We don't know precisely where she'll expand US wars to, but it's likely to be some other poor country just as Obama expanded wars into Yemen. She'll continue the extrajudicial assassinations of Obama's drone wars (which Obama engaged in far more than Bush, making the drone wars a hallmark of Obama's presidency).
The drone strikes deserve some special attention because so few people seem to know about them. If any other country did this the US would have no problem identifying them as "state-sponsors of global terror" or calling them "terrorists". Each of these wars kill a lot of women and children (putting into perspective how much Clinton cares about women), including Americans (as we've seen with the Al-awlakis, such as killing a father and son 2 weeks apart in separate drone attacks) without due process. And the drones kill completely unsuspected innocent passers-by (such as one infamous wedding party attack. The US kills so many civilians they can't keep track of them all but are clearly ashamed by the deaths so they released (on a Friday before a holiday weekend when mainstream corporate media are least likely to carry the story) an internal assessment of civilian killings in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya (including those killed including during Clinton's stint as Secretary of State). In that assessment we find an undercount due to the US reclassification of any military-age male as an "enemy combatant" in a desperate attempt to reduce the civilian death toll. There's every reason to expect more of the same from Hillary Clinton should she become president.
Domestically, Clinton's anti-poor/anti-working-person policies are bound to worsen the plight of women. Taking so much money from global banks ensures a continuation of no prosecutions for global banksters, no matter what fellow Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren says. Global trade pacts will help the US more efficiently exploit the poor. The TPP is a fine example of this: the TPP was known to, and does, receive massive international disapproval hence the TPP negotiations and early drafts were done in secret even keeping US congresspeople in the dark. Regardless of what Clinton says or hints to the US public, Clinton picked a pro-TPP vice presidential candidate in Tim Kaine and Clinton picked TPP boosters in her cabinet setup committee. It's hardly surprising that in April 2015 TheIntercept.com reported that "TPP Propon
You're thinking correctly in that, it's right in line with why we commonly call liberating a device to run software the owner wants to run without the approval of the device's proprietor(s) "jailbreaking"—a clear acknowledgement that the device shackles the user. The real harm comes from the inequity making the owner of the computer (typically the user) subservient to whatever proprietors are involved in making and selling the device. But the device's true purpose is spying on the user's movements and discussions, tracking and recording what the user does in real-time.
Her long history with Wal-Mart and being the wife of former Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, and the namecalling you brought up notwithstanding, are virtually sideshows compared to war with Russia. This war will probably take the form of her promised "no-fly zone" and "safe zone" in Syria which even she (privately, to her bankster funders) admits will "kill a lot of Syrians" and require ground troops. What is a no-fly zone? Dr. Jill Stein, also running for US president, has clarified what that means:
Hillary Clinton's hawkishness is bound to cost the US trillions. Continuing Obama's wars (which are all of G.W. Bush's wars plus more wars via drones in a couple countries Bush didn't attack) would do that without adding new wars. But Clinton's belligerency is why the Intercept notes "Robert Kagan and Other Neocons Are Backing Hillary Clinton". A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for more war, more extrajudicial assassination, and that includes killing women and children whom Clinton is so keen to convince us she cares about. This merely builds on the wars she's voted for or otherwise supported (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc.). She may be more gentle-toned than Trump but she's the more lethal choice than Trump too. Donald Trump's wide ignorance and many bigotries, as ugly and reprehensible as they are, are being pitched loudly to distract one from considering Sec. Clinton's lethal record of injustice. Fortunately, as I'm sure the Democrats will be happy to attest to should Clinton lose again, there's more than 2 choices for US president.