Judge them in a fair trial. Give innocent people compensation for their unfair imprisonment. Give every people compensation for their mistreatment if there were any.
You know, treat them as you think human beings should be treated ? Yes, almost exactly like an American. Time for a quote:
"Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
--- Universal Declaration of Human Rights
I know this is non-binding. But nowadays its violation by governments is considered a good excuse to wage a war.
Here in France, 3 years ago, the geek magazine "pirate mag" made fun of French military (Yes we also do that here) because they proudly announced the opening of their new "cyber-warfare strategical center" (or some other shiny words) and the picture that was given to every newspaper were two officers holding wireless keyboards in front of a flat display. The keyboard model was of course a very common one with absolutely no encryption.
Well I don't think that the techie would have a legal foot to stand on even in that case : by not lying he does damage the company and is potentially liable of this. And that is my point : no law says that a tech should not be constrained to act contrary to ethics. There are however such laws for medics and lawyers.
Scenario 1:
Boss : "We sell them this drug, it is expensive and useless but tell them it will solve their cancer"
Medic : "No sir. This is contrary to medial ethics. I could lose my license for that so you have to understand that I will do no such thing"
Boss : "do that or I'll fire you."
Medic : "for what ? being professional ?"
Scenario 2:
Boss : "We sell them this software, it is expensive and useless but tell them it will solve their network problems"
Techie : "I'd rather not, I don't want to make my whole profession look bad by spreading lies.
Boss : "do that or I'll fire you for being unprofessional."
I would also like to add that doctors and lawyers are protected by the law when they need to keep secrets private. A doctor can tell to his boss that a given practice goes against medical secret or medical ethics. There are no such things in IT.
Sorry to be nitpicking, but it *IS* easier to drop a nuke than to attack a correctly set-up network.
Hollywood managed to persuade everyone that with a few million dollars and a rock-star hacker it is possible to break into the most secure systems. The fact is that when sysadmins have been doing their jobs, it is easier to conduct a physical attack than a networked one. Do you think that electronic money could exist otherwise ?
I am still waiting for a proof of this claim. Not a lot of people know about Switzerland's system. When I talk about this system (without mentionning it's Switzerland's) people usually say "That could work for a small town, but not for a country with millions of inhabitants". Then I tell Switzerland uses this and it is indeed "Oh, well maybe 8 millions, but not more then 100 millions".
As pointed out in a later post, the Linux project in USA is basically charity.
If they continue having problems like this, simply don't send any to them. Let SCO explain to the US government and people how their greed and abuse of patent law is screwing up the education of US children and putting them at a serious disadvantage to the country's neighbors.
What's my point ? Nigeria is not one big boat with every people concerned about youth education. It is full of normal greedy humans including soulless lawyers. The OLPC project mentality is that Nigerian kids are like our kids, they desserve education, no matter how much greedy people try to interfere. In other words : OLPC, stand strong ! Show the absurdity of the situation but fight it! Don't fall back !
Yeah, I am sure that phone companies are really worried about this illogic reasoning that brings them extra profit on the short term. Of course, never mind the fact that in the end people try to phone less, they don't have that kind of long term planning.
Oh, and don't believe that it is hard to change the billing system. I remember the beginning of the cell phone era, when texting was free. That's right FREE. I heard that originally it was developed by telecom engineers as a test protocol. Then it was released for clients but nobody thought people would want to type text on a 12 keys keyboard. Here in France, a study has shown that a text message billed 20 or 30 cents to a client costs in fact less than 1 cent to the phone company.
Well we can consider that MP3 is pretty mainstream by now and not a geek-only thing anymore. When people can't play their CDs on their computer, rip them to put them on their MP3 player or copy files as they want, they may not understand what is going on but they do care. And like always, they blame it on the seller or the artist.
consumers don't really care about freedom, they just want entertainment and flashiness They do care, put freedom in a slogan, it does sell. Most of them just don't know how to achieve freedom in IT. After all, it can be confusing when open source is labeled as communism, Vista supposed to free creativity and DRMs to be a consumer service.
Call me a corporate drone full of lobby money if you wish but... Isn't making a easy to use open source devkit for biology akin to giving away a SDK to make computer virus in a world where all users are locked with an unpatched Windows ME on an unfiltered internet connection ?
I think to recall that the Japanese code was cracked by a totally different, american team. And unless I am having my reality mixed up with Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (dont'read it, go buy a history book about WWII true Bletchley Park, far more fascinationg) they first had to get a code book for this.
You can counter this by imposing these people to collaborate on a project that has some coherence constraint. Uneducated, misinformed or malicious people, even in large groups, are rarely coherent as a whole and when they are, they are not coherent with facts. In the wikipedia for instance, a contribution with a good citation usually wins against ten contributions with the word "penis" in them. An open scientific process about a phenomenon allows any crackpot to shout their theories but only assimilate ideas that improve the current understanding on the subject.
Such processes work on the "wisdom of the crowds" argument : that the bigger the crowd, the more wise people you get. They may not be a majority but if you give them a chance to be heard, they will be happy to help you.
That's 50% of the world where there isn't any discussion... creationism is the truth. The fact that there can even be discussion about this without violence in America is a very rare thing. More than 50% of the world population live in a society open enough to be called a democracy, that includes the right to speak about evolution or religion freely. Once you have counted these 50%, you can add China which is not really famous for its religious fanaticism.
Slashdot Mirror
Safety ? Isn't half of the crashes due to human errors ?
This is a declaration of intent, of ideal. This is neither a statement of fact, neither a law.
Judge them in a fair trial. Give innocent people compensation for their unfair imprisonment. Give every people compensation for their mistreatment if there were any.
:
You know, treat them as you think human beings should be treated ? Yes, almost exactly like an American. Time for a quote
"Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
--- Universal Declaration of Human Rights
I know this is non-binding. But nowadays its violation by governments is considered a good excuse to wage a war.
Here in France, 3 years ago, the geek magazine "pirate mag" made fun of French military (Yes we also do that here) because they proudly announced the opening of their new "cyber-warfare strategical center" (or some other shiny words) and the picture that was given to every newspaper were two officers holding wireless keyboards in front of a flat display. The keyboard model was of course a very common one with absolutely no encryption.
A cold war is a war that doesn't happen.
A cyber war is a war that doesn't happen physically.
A Cyber Cold War is a scam to get government funding.
Apple is there
Microsoft is not
Well I don't think that the techie would have a legal foot to stand on even in that case : by not lying he does damage the company and is potentially liable of this. And that is my point : no law says that a tech should not be constrained to act contrary to ethics. There are however such laws for medics and lawyers.
Scenario 1:
Boss : "We sell them this drug, it is expensive and useless but tell them it will solve their cancer"
Medic : "No sir. This is contrary to medial ethics. I could lose my license for that so you have to understand that I will do no such thing"
Boss : "do that or I'll fire you."
Medic : "for what ? being professional ?"
Scenario 2:
Boss : "We sell them this software, it is expensive and useless but tell them it will solve their network problems"
Techie : "I'd rather not, I don't want to make my whole profession look bad by spreading lies.
Boss : "do that or I'll fire you for being unprofessional."
It is a field of anthropology. One could call it Anthropology of religion but it is difficult to isolate it from other fields of anthropology.
Of course religious types usually don't like their conclusions and tone that don't favor any religion over the other.
I would also like to add that doctors and lawyers are protected by the law when they need to keep secrets private. A doctor can tell to his boss that a given practice goes against medical secret or medical ethics. There are no such things in IT.
Sorry to be nitpicking, but it *IS* easier to drop a nuke than to attack a correctly set-up network.
Hollywood managed to persuade everyone that with a few million dollars and a rock-star hacker it is possible to break into the most secure systems. The fact is that when sysadmins have been doing their jobs, it is easier to conduct a physical attack than a networked one. Do you think that electronic money could exist otherwise ?
I am still waiting for a proof of this claim. Not a lot of people know about Switzerland's system. When I talk about this system (without mentionning it's Switzerland's) people usually say "That could work for a small town, but not for a country with millions of inhabitants". Then I tell Switzerland uses this and it is indeed "Oh, well maybe 8 millions, but not more then 100 millions".
Sounds like a comforting lie to me.
I always thought that a clever use of captchas and whitelisting could prevent automated spam...
Let's try to replace some words...
As pointed out in a later post, the Linux project in USA is basically charity.
If they continue having problems like this, simply don't send any to them. Let SCO explain to the US government and people how their greed and abuse of patent law is screwing up the education of US children and putting them at a serious disadvantage to the country's neighbors.
What's my point ? Nigeria is not one big boat with every people concerned about youth education. It is full of normal greedy humans including soulless lawyers. The OLPC project mentality is that Nigerian kids are like our kids, they desserve education, no matter how much greedy people try to interfere. In other words : OLPC, stand strong ! Show the absurdity of the situation but fight it! Don't fall back !
Man, if Linux isn't running on your desktop yet, you are doing something wrong.
Of course it will take a few years before this joke dies out on Slashdot...
Yeah, I am sure that phone companies are really worried about this illogic reasoning that brings them extra profit on the short term. Of course, never mind the fact that in the end people try to phone less, they don't have that kind of long term planning.
Oh, and don't believe that it is hard to change the billing system. I remember the beginning of the cell phone era, when texting was free. That's right FREE. I heard that originally it was developed by telecom engineers as a test protocol. Then it was released for clients but nobody thought people would want to type text on a 12 keys keyboard. Here in France, a study has shown that a text message billed 20 or 30 cents to a client costs in fact less than 1 cent to the phone company.
Seconded. But That doesn't mean that I would trust Skype to have any concern about privacy...
Even weaker assumption : This department of German police has a up-to-date encryption group.
Call me a corporate drone full of lobby money if you wish but... Isn't making a easy to use open source devkit for biology akin to giving away a SDK to make computer virus in a world where all users are locked with an unpatched Windows ME on an unfiltered internet connection ?
I think to recall that the Japanese code was cracked by a totally different, american team. And unless I am having my reality mixed up with Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (dont'read it, go buy a history book about WWII true Bletchley Park, far more fascinationg) they first had to get a code book for this.
I suppose the license won't allow to put it in a linux ditrib any time soon ?
You can counter this by imposing these people to collaborate on a project that has some coherence constraint. Uneducated, misinformed or malicious people, even in large groups, are rarely coherent as a whole and when they are, they are not coherent with facts. In the wikipedia for instance, a contribution with a good citation usually wins against ten contributions with the word "penis" in them. An open scientific process about a phenomenon allows any crackpot to shout their theories but only assimilate ideas that improve the current understanding on the subject.
Such processes work on the "wisdom of the crowds" argument : that the bigger the crowd, the more wise people you get. They may not be a majority but if you give them a chance to be heard, they will be happy to help you.
And that has always been a great incentive for them to fix bugs in the past