As has been pointed out, money is necessary to pay for effective speech, so limiting money in essence limits the effectiveness of speech, which is an infringement.
A flag is a possession, not an action, but wearing a flag on one's lapel is a form of speech.
Donations to candidates are limited because people seeking to serve the public trust shouldn't be unduly influenced by one person with deep pockets.
Money is a possession. It is not speech. Someone giving me money hasn't "speeched" to me, then. I can easily accept money (into a common campaign fund) that does not influence me.
Further, it is insulting for you to think that my vote can be bought. YOUR ethical system may allow you to wave which ever way the wind blows, but mine does not. I will vote the way I think best without regard to who donated money to a campaign. (The point of that statement is that by assuming that every politician is corrupt you will always wind up with a system where politicians are corrupt. Why shouldn't they be? They are expected to be that way.)
Donations to campaign funds could be trivially sanitized from influence by allowing them to be any amount if anonymous. If I don't know who gave me money, I can't predict how he wants me to vote, can I? If the donor tells me he donated, then it's no longer anonymous and is subject to limits. If you think I'm going to break those limits, then why do you think I'd not simply violate the existing limits too? Of what good are limits you know I'm going to break?
...any form of communications used by House members on any subject would be Constitutionally protected by Amendment 1.
Oh for the days before McCain/Feingold.
Do you wonder why so many politicians appear in ads saying "I approved this message"? They are legally required to do that. The 1st amendment protects freedom of speech. Requiring someone to say something is as abridging of freedom as preventing them.
Do you know that there are prohibitions on political speech (ads) within a certain number of days before an election?
Do you know that you cannot give more than a certain amount to a candidate every year? Money is a form of speech, isn't it? You can't use that money to buy airtime for him, either, which is a more direct representation of money being speech.
Read the Wikipedia entry on campaign finance reform for a good summary. In short, politicians get limited in what they can do to try to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Doesn't work, but they try.
In early Unixes (SunOS, e.g.), the memory manager was dumb and preallocated swap space sufficient to swap your entire process out if it became necessary, and it really did want contiguous. Running out of swap was common, even if it was really never used, and the "rule" to avoid that problem was 2xRAM. Further, if you had two swap partitions, or a partition and a file, your process stayed in whatever swap it started in and did not split across both. You could be out of swap space and still have a completely empty swap file.
Memory managers have gotten smarter, mapping smarter, and now swap is only used when it really is necessary. Pages that are not dirty don't get swapped, they get reloaded from the disk they came from. Pages that are swapped are often used soon enough that they never leave the RAM buffers.
Yesterday, I had a user come to me saying he was getting an "out of memory" error from Matlab. Matlab is notorious for not garbage collecting when it needs to. His Matlab process had 800Mb of resident memory, even though he said he had just 300Mb of data. The kicker? Somehow, over the last couple of years, the swap file I had created to extend the 512Mb swap partition had gotten lost. Dunno where it went, just not there. He had 512Mb of swap, and most of that wasn't being used. Never noticed it until yesterday. His 2Gb of RAM was sufficient for what he was doing.
It's a case of people who learned early just doing what they know works, telling youngsters the "rule" so they do the same thing.
There is legal recourse for them misusing sensitive data in the cloud so at the end of the day its not a stretch to imagine thats ok in the cloud too. Finally you can jsut use end point encryption and at one fell stroke the evil companies have lost their ability to snoop on you.
First, we assume that the data being discussed is valuable enough to care about at all. Of course your life history and such is fine in the cloud even if Myspazz may go away. That's your choice of value.
And yes, there may be legal protection for sensitive data, but by the time you can sue the company for losing or disclosing it, it's been lost or disclosed. It's sensitive data; the fact that it was disclosed is bad. The fact that the service company probably has a fine-print disclaimer makes it worse.
And I'm not sure how you "end point encrypt" your email in gmail or yahoo. It comes into yahoo from outside in the clear, it is stored in the clear on their server. What you do while you read it (SSL or whatever) is not really relevant. It's like having a mailbox on your house that encrypts postcards that the postman drops into the slot. By the time they are encrypted, he's read them all.
Only reall problem is data loss if the provider goes away, but even this isnt a problem as long as your aware of the possibility.
Well, I think that is the point of this whole brouhaha -- making people aware of the problem. Not everyone reads/. or Risks Digest. Not everyone knows what might happen, or even what has happened. Not every cloud service provider is right up front telling people that their data could go away tomorrow.
and what if the car maker goes bankrupt? Where are you going to get spare parts from?
Any of the aftermarket parts suppliers that make a living providing cheaper spare parts than the manufacturer. But the "car maker" in this analogy is unlikely to go bankrupt. Web companies and services come and go; computer companies come and go but their products are becoming interchangable. For example, had you banked on keeping your data on a gopher server early on, you'd be out of luck. The same computer that was a gopher server, however, can be a web server.
Many people would assume that Amazon and Google are probably safer than Ford are.
We are not talking about Amazon and Google, we are talking about specific services offered by Amazon and Google. Things change. Companies that do free stuff sometimes stop. Sometimes they change the rules in mid-stream. And sometimes they become a large enough target that crackers take them down, where a cracker might not bother 1000 small companies individually.
Now the data is off site, so why not look for an on site backup solution to back up your data.
Because the data is at the wrong end of a relatively slow pipe, and stored in a way that users don't have access to the bulk data. You can access the data, but it's through the method that the provider gives you -- usually a nice gui web page.
If backing up your data is not possible then you did not care for your data.
The possibility of backing up ones data depends not on how much one cares for it, but upon the methods provided by the host.
Email is one of the easiest examples. If you leave all of your email only on Google and never place it local, then you do not mind if it is gone.
If my email is local, my system administrator will make backup copies of it on a regular basis. If it is on gmail, I must make whatever backups I can when I can of my own email, over the net, using whatever access methods gmail provides, and every other member of the company that uses gmail must do the same, individually. There is a significant difference between the two situations, and it has nothing to do with whether I mind that the data is gone. In fact, as CEO of the company, I mind quite a bit if the data is gone, but have little control over the backup strategy practiced by my sales staff, other than firing them for not doing it. I can plead, cajole, implore, demand, and ask for it to be done, but the ultimate stick is firing -- and by then it is too late.
Since I mind, I will not rely on an outside provider of a free service to keep my data, I will keep it locally.
Email backup will be done on the main server where one person can access it all, and where a weeks worth of data is not lost simply because the cloud crashed (or went bankrupt) at the end of the week someone was on vacation.
That is the point RMS is making. People who DO care don't cloud.
Small business people want to focus on their businesses, not on setting up and maintaining IT. They don't service their own cars & delivery vans, so why should they run their own inhouse IT?
Because if their auto mechanic goes bankrupt/closes they can always find another one to take their cars to. If their IT service goes bankrupt/closes, you can find another provider, but the data you had is gone.
It is in only the rare case that your car is in the shop when the mechanic goes bankrupt that you have any chance of losing your car; your data is always in the IT shop.
Also, there is little of proprietary interest in your automobile. "Oh, look, they drove 3000 miles since the last oil change." Doesn't mean much. There is a LOT of proprietary interest in your customer data, and stealing it would be trivial. You wouldn't even know it was gone, because technically it wouldn't be. It would just be that your competitor has a copy of all your data, too.
Your fricken kidding me, your average owner/manager is not going to give any money saved on lower wages to the investor. Its going into managerial bonuses and expensive cars.
The problem with this discussion is that yes, the AVERAGE owner is going to put the money back into the business instead of their own pocket. It is the abberations that get the press, not the average. You need to keep in the front of your mind that NEWS papers and NEWS programs don't publish anything about average people, it's only about NEWS. Yes, that's a result of capitalism, too. People don't want to read about average things, they want to know what is unusual. Nobody wants to buy a paper filled with the ordinary or usual. Few enough want to buy a paper at all, these days.
Perhaps you should also say child labor laws should be removed so unbridled capitalism can maim a few more million children for a profit,...
Don't you dare try putting words in my mouth. Child labor laws and capitalism are two, unrelated topics, and both can exist at the same time without problems.
Oh wait we shipped all those jobs to China!
WE didn't ship anything to China. China is an awakening capitalist bear, ready to demonstrate to us the principles of capitalism. We, on the other hand, have been heading towards socialism for a long time, where people expect the government to take care of them instead of them taking care of themselves. Please, government, tell those nasty employers that they must pay us more than our jobs are worth so every job, no matter how menial or low level, can provide for a family. I hate to be a reminder of this, but entry level jobs are just that -- entry level. The costs of an entry level employee aren't necessarily covered by his productivity.
Isn't it amazing, it is actually CHEAPER for a fast food restuarant to have the drive through order taker located somewhere else. "The World Is Flat" talks about this. Having the order taker in the building isn't worth the money it takes. Having one person cover three drive-in windows via VoIP is faster, cheaper, and results in fewer errors. Simply remarkable.
Sure ardent capitalists like to point out the failings of socialism without ever looking at the success stories (e.g. every Nordic country)
I'm sorry, but "every Nordic country" is not a success story for socialism. People live there, but they don't stay there when they find out how much better it is elsewhere. Funny thing, when I was young, I had two flight instructors who came over to the US to make their money, because they just couldn't make it under their existing system. And CFI don't make much money at all, compared to most people.
You can call it class envy, but a lot people just want a chance to play the game.
What you call "playing the game" is actually "winning the game". Sure, everyone would like to walk away from a job they spent two weeks on with $20 million. Your example of Bill Gates is laughable. Bill Gates won the game a long time before he got to $10 billion. He was "in the club" a long time before he got to $100 million.
Capitalism might be totally great, if every 50 years we took all the capital, divided it up evenly, and then carried on with capitalism again.
Yeah, capitalism would be great if it were just like socialism, every socialist says.
I think the proper quote is "capitalism is the worst form of economic system, except for every other one."
but you omitted some negative examples of market distortion...
I omitted many examples. I wasn't trying for a complete list, just one example.
also, it would be hard to argue that some distortions are bad - like requiring equal treatment for different classes of people, including races, sexual preference and disabilities.
Pure capitalism doesn't care what color or gender or whatever you are. If you are a cheaper resource and have the qualifications, you are hired. Unfortunately, what is a distortion is when preferences are enacted. Such as the source of the current lending crisis. It started because lenders were coerced by the government into having a "good" minority lending history before they would be approved to do other normal business things like open branches or add services. This was called the CRA, under Carter. It was expanded under Clinton.
The word we are looking for is "redlining". It was bad, but the answer, we are now learning, is badder. In order to get a good CRA score, lenders were forced to make loans to less qualified borrowers.
Uncontrolled, unbridled capitalism is only good if you're rich, or in the middle of getting rich -- it basically craps on everyone who isn't, and leaves them to fend for themselves on the bottom.
No, capitalism doesn't have to do with being rich. The hatred of the rich is called "class envy" and it is a principal component of socialism. Capitalism is what RESULTS in some people being rich, but to claim that the system is good only for the rich is incorrect.
Capitalism is based on supply and demand. That includes services. If your services are not in demand, then you don't make a lot of money. If you go to your employer and say "I want overtime pay" and they can find someone else to provide the same service without paying overtime, then they'll hire him and fire you. In short, the supply is greater than the demand. There are more people offering to work than there are positions. That holds true for any job. If someone will accept lower pay than what you want, they'll get the job and you won't, all else being equal.
The times it doesn't hold true are when there are non-capitalist distortions to the system. E.g., a labor union that will coerce non-union members into not filling the gap in supply when union workers strike, or have in other ways artificially limited the supply.
In essence, if you want to blame anyone for your not being rich, blame the other people who will do the same job you do for less money. It's not the fault of the employer who seeks to lower costs and give the investors a return on their investment, it's the guy who lives next to you who will accept an offer to do your job for less than you. If every employer over-paid all of their employees, prices would skyrocket so that nobody could afford anything and pay would have to go up to match. Or investors would get no return on their investment in a company, no payback for taking the chance, and would stop investing. Fewer companies would exist. Fewer jobs, higher prices...
Before you claim that you'd never do that kind of thing, how about this? You are looking for a lawn maintenance company so you don't have to mow the damn lawn every two days during the summer. There are two companies in town. Both have the same abilities and long lists of glowing referrals. One wants 15% less for the same job. Who do you hire? Are you altruistic enough to say "I'll pay more", or do you say "cheap is good"? Isn't paying less based on this example of unbridled capitalism good for you? Is it good for you because you are rich, or is it good for you because you save money and may become richer?
In this case, though, the principal was judge, jury, and executioner.
And the school board is the first level of appeal, with the existing courts as a backup. Nobody was executed, by the way. That's a bit hyperbolic.
I'm guessing that should they choose to appeal, this would be overturned.
Not if I were on the school board. A young lady who thinks she can make unfounded accusations about people who work for me is going to learn otherwise. If she thinks this is a proper response to some perceived injustice, then I'll help remove her from the difficult situation which she cannot handle.
Of course, I lived through the 80's, when accusations of sexual harassment (which is the TAMEST thing that this can be called) were taken seriously and not dismissed as childish pranks to be ignored.
It's just that in-school punishment is not the proper method for an out-of-school act.
Is calling the Principal a pedophile for actions he performed in school an "out of school" act? It is directed at a school employee in their function as a school employee for actions that occurred in school. It is intended to interfere with "in-school" order.
Should an employer be prevented from acting "in school" if an employee were to do the same kind of thing?
That being said, the punishment went through the wrong channels entirely (school-administrative versus personal civil/legal).
Hmmm. Does the school have a responsibility to protect it's employees from malicious acts by students? We do think that the school has a responsibility to protect students from malicious employees, don't we? We expect that someone who has a charge of pedophilia leveled against them will be fired from a teaching position, don't we?
Doesn't the school also have a responsibility to maintain order? Does allowing a student to make unsupported malicious statements about an employee help maintain order? How do you protect a teach that is unliked because he is too tough or doesn't inflate the grades like all the others? Should students be free to slander and libel him to get him to cooperate?
Just a thought.
It's a shame that a civil suit would have required a large investment on the part of the principal. I'd love to see the student and her parents get sued for everything they own.
You are wrong. You can repeat your assertion, but that doesn't make it correct.
All rights come with responsibilities. Even "free speech". This is called "rule of law".
The principal should not have to "put up with" an asshole who defames his character and accuses him of being a pedophile. The principal should have sued the student and his parents for every penny they have and will make in the future, simply because this student tried to remove from the principal HIS ability to make a living in his chosen profession, as well as his good name and reputation.
The fact that someone can be punished for defamation of character, slander, and libel does not make the right of free speech meaningless. In fact, it makes that right worth just that much more. It serves as a filter against random assholes making defamatory and libelous statements.
This student got off easy. If you want to complain that the punishment is in the wrong venue, ok, but to claim that someone ought to have to "put up with" this kind of baseless accusation is ridiculous and patently absurd.
I remember I thought those guys were mad, they had set their minds to look for an enemy and a 10 year old kid running with a plastic gun could trigger the same split-second response the very Osama would, and it would have been a bloody mess. I chose not to go back since then.
First, it is hyperbole and fear mongering to claim that there would be such a "split second response". Those troops aren't gun happy, they are, for the most part, more scared of shooting someone (even when required) than you are of being shot. It's a traumatic incident for them, even when they have to shoot someone because there is no other option. It's called "critical incident stress", and it's become recognized over the last decade as a serious issue.
Second, any parent who allows a ten year old to run around an airport is reckless and irresponsible. Any parent who allows any age child to carry a toy gun at an airport is even more so. I've not seen a single ten year old brandishing a toy gun anywhere near an airport in any of the trips I've made, and I expect I'll never see one. I suspect that the first person who sees such activity would tell the parents to get a clue and solve the problem.
And third, they aren't "mad" in either sense of the word. They are doing a job that they were asked to do, which is arguably necessary (in other words, there are valid arguments for it, even if there are also valid arguments against).
I miss some things from USA off-course but I won't risk beign treated like sh1t while I'm on vacation.
If you think that having armed security in US airports is directed at making you feel like sh*t, or you allow it to make you feel that way, well, don't go to Israel. El Al security is even tighter than ours -- and rightly so. I've also seen gun-toting soldiers for security in European airports (Heathrow and Munich, for example.) This is not a "problem" limited to the US.
To bring this back to the topic of the OP, I've taken my laptop (and sometimes two) across the border many times and have never had them ask me to turn it on, much less look at the data. On my last trip, I was carrying about 20Gb of SD/microSD cards in my carryon, and another 20 in my luggage. Not a single question about any of it (and some of it was listed in plain english on my customs declaration form.) I HAVE had TSA rip the TSA-approved locks (and the zipper pulls they were attached to) off of my luggage. This legislation is insufficient, if the problem does exist. "Here's a piece of paper" isn't a sufficient exchange for a $3000 laptop or even a $400 PDA.
I was modded flamebait and this is modded informative?
I don't know what Alaska you are thinking of, but the State of Alaska in the United States is physically larger than almost any other state. (I'm pretty sure it is largest, but I'm not going to bother looking up the fine details. It's HUGE, and to claim it is the size of a small city is just preposterous.) The fall 2007 estimate of FY 2009 general fund revenue is 6.6 BILLION dollars. It's not the biggest state in the union, but it not "a small city" by any means.
Wassila is a city, even if you grew up in a town that was twice the size. The size of your city is irrelvant. It is still a city, it still has an executive branch with all the functions of an executive branch, and Palin served there.
As for Obama, how is it that for him the only experience you count is Federal?
I count all of Obama's experience. He has ZERO, ZIP, NADA experience in an executive branch position. He's been in the legislative branch, and for an extremely small amount of time there.
Palin has 0 years of federal experience compared to Obama's 3 years. Gee, that sounds like Obama has more.
And YOU asked ME why I was counting only federal experience? And then you count only federal experience for Palin.
Whether it is state or federal is irrelevant. What matters is the KIND of experience. Obama, as we all know and admit, has zero executive experience. He hasn't run anything but a campaign, and he's not really running that himself anyway. He's never been the one who is ultimately responsible for anything. Palin has run both a city and a HUGE state. As the governor, you can bet she has experience with the federal government -- the kind of experience Obama does not have. She has dealings with two foreign countries because she has two foreign countries on her borders. Illinois (Obama's state) has NO foreign countries to deal with, and he wasn't in charge of Illinois in any case.
If all you want to count is years of "federal service", I'd propose that we elect the White House barber, since he's (probably) been there for more time than anyone currently on the ballot. No, I'm sorry, but what kind of service it is does make a difference.
Additionally, while in the Senate Obama has served on the Foreign Relations Committee as well as the Homeland Security Committee.
Great. He has committee experience. The President of the United States is not a committee. He is the head of the executive branch. HE makes the decisions. Obama has zero experience in that role. None. Not at the state level, not at the federal level. Being on a committe is not preparation to be President. (By the way, if he's on the Homeland Security Committee, why does he think that there are 57 states?)
So no Obama doesn't have any executive experience, but he does have experience that relates to actual issues a President will deal with.
Why do you limit the issues to just those two? As the governor of a major oil producing state, Palin has considerably more experience in energy policy than Obama has. Just how much oil does Illinois produce again? As the governor of Alaska, she has considerably more experience dealing with foreign governments than Obama has. The president needs experience in both, and Obama has none. Obama thinks "foreign policy" is going to Germany and sucking up to Germans.
Barack Obama is only less qualified for office when you distort the facts to fit that conclusion.
Barack Obama is unqualified based on the facts, and no distortion is necessary. He has zero executive branch experience, and that is a fact. It is a distortion to pretend that his limited service in the legislative branch can make up for that. It is a GROSS and DELIBERATE distortion of the facts to call Alaska "the size of a small city". Who was it that made that statement again?
I would not be surprised if we see companies trying to take on the do-not-call list next.
Why? They just ignore it, use hidden caller id, and play you a recorded message.
If you "press 1" to ask for more information (like "who the HELL ARE YOU?" so you can file an FTC complaint) you've just opted in. If you "press 9" to "opt out", you haven't, but you still don't have either a name or a number so you can't file a complaint.
I get regular calls from "credit service" or something like that, talking about this being the last day to take advantage of some offer that will "lower my rates". (I pay in full each month, I don't really care what my rates are.) When I ask who they are, they hang up. When I press 9 to opt out, I can swear I hear chuckling in the background.
Today I got the same kind of call from Dish Network. They had a caller id number. They used the company name. I reported it faster than you can say "do not call."
As for the poster who claimed that spam doesn't physically harm him, I'll point out this tiny detail. Network access via T-Mobile 3G networks costs $15/Mb (I think it was) for US subscribers while in Germany. That spam message being downloaded costs me money, which I would have been able to spend on food. That's causing physical harm.
That or drag the motherfuckers into the streets and shoot them.
Stone. The victims ought to have a bit more fun than just one or two shots ending the pain. Maybe if you said "shoot them in the extremities, progressively moving toward the heart" I'd agree, but the next scum would get the sentence overturned because has no heart.
Differentiate, please, between MISinformation and "screwup". How does one tell the difference, and should people who spread misinformation be exempt from prosecution just because "screwups happen"? Should those who "screwup" and cause huge monetary losses to a large number of people be exempt from punishment for that screwup? My answer is, IF they used due care in the execution of their duties. Is not considering that a story was written in 2002 before publishing it as current "due care"? I don't think so.
A reasonable person would not think so, I believe. It's a simple thing to test. Take a newspaper clipping from a 6 year old newspaper and remove the dateline. Make sure the story is something that is no longer true. (E.g., "Local big company dumping refuse in the river.") Hand it to someone on the street. Ask them if they think that the information that the story is six years old is important. I bet they say "yes".
The fact is if you are going to play the game of trying to move before everyone else does you are going to base some of your moves on bad information.
And malicious individuals can make use of that knowledge to make a profit. Should such malicious activity be allowed, or should those who do it knowing the result be punished?
Suppose you know that a piece of metal of a certain diameter and thickness will be accepted by a vending machine as a quarter. Are you guilty of a crime if you act upon that information? Of course. You cannot argue that the vending machine is at fault for accepting slugs to secure your innocence. You cannot claim innocence if you spread misinformation knowing that people will act upon it to your financial gain.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe thinking that a YouTube video is open, ongoing communication is too idealistic.
A flag is a possession, not an action, but wearing a flag on one's lapel is a form of speech.
Donations to candidates are limited because people seeking to serve the public trust shouldn't be unduly influenced by one person with deep pockets.
Money is a possession. It is not speech. Someone giving me money hasn't "speeched" to me, then. I can easily accept money (into a common campaign fund) that does not influence me.
Further, it is insulting for you to think that my vote can be bought. YOUR ethical system may allow you to wave which ever way the wind blows, but mine does not. I will vote the way I think best without regard to who donated money to a campaign. (The point of that statement is that by assuming that every politician is corrupt you will always wind up with a system where politicians are corrupt. Why shouldn't they be? They are expected to be that way.)
Donations to campaign funds could be trivially sanitized from influence by allowing them to be any amount if anonymous. If I don't know who gave me money, I can't predict how he wants me to vote, can I? If the donor tells me he donated, then it's no longer anonymous and is subject to limits. If you think I'm going to break those limits, then why do you think I'd not simply violate the existing limits too? Of what good are limits you know I'm going to break?
Oh for the days before McCain/Feingold.
Do you wonder why so many politicians appear in ads saying "I approved this message"? They are legally required to do that. The 1st amendment protects freedom of speech. Requiring someone to say something is as abridging of freedom as preventing them.
Do you know that there are prohibitions on political speech (ads) within a certain number of days before an election?
Do you know that you cannot give more than a certain amount to a candidate every year? Money is a form of speech, isn't it? You can't use that money to buy airtime for him, either, which is a more direct representation of money being speech.
Read the Wikipedia entry on campaign finance reform for a good summary. In short, politicians get limited in what they can do to try to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Doesn't work, but they try.
In early Unixes (SunOS, e.g.), the memory manager was dumb and preallocated swap space sufficient to swap your entire process out if it became necessary, and it really did want contiguous. Running out of swap was common, even if it was really never used, and the "rule" to avoid that problem was 2xRAM. Further, if you had two swap partitions, or a partition and a file, your process stayed in whatever swap it started in and did not split across both. You could be out of swap space and still have a completely empty swap file.
Memory managers have gotten smarter, mapping smarter, and now swap is only used when it really is necessary. Pages that are not dirty don't get swapped, they get reloaded from the disk they came from. Pages that are swapped are often used soon enough that they never leave the RAM buffers.
Yesterday, I had a user come to me saying he was getting an "out of memory" error from Matlab. Matlab is notorious for not garbage collecting when it needs to. His Matlab process had 800Mb of resident memory, even though he said he had just 300Mb of data. The kicker? Somehow, over the last couple of years, the swap file I had created to extend the 512Mb swap partition had gotten lost. Dunno where it went, just not there. He had 512Mb of swap, and most of that wasn't being used. Never noticed it until yesterday. His 2Gb of RAM was sufficient for what he was doing.
It's a case of people who learned early just doing what they know works, telling youngsters the "rule" so they do the same thing.
First, we assume that the data being discussed is valuable enough to care about at all. Of course your life history and such is fine in the cloud even if Myspazz may go away. That's your choice of value.
And yes, there may be legal protection for sensitive data, but by the time you can sue the company for losing or disclosing it, it's been lost or disclosed. It's sensitive data; the fact that it was disclosed is bad. The fact that the service company probably has a fine-print disclaimer makes it worse.
And I'm not sure how you "end point encrypt" your email in gmail or yahoo. It comes into yahoo from outside in the clear, it is stored in the clear on their server. What you do while you read it (SSL or whatever) is not really relevant. It's like having a mailbox on your house that encrypts postcards that the postman drops into the slot. By the time they are encrypted, he's read them all.
Only reall problem is data loss if the provider goes away, but even this isnt a problem as long as your aware of the possibility.
Well, I think that is the point of this whole brouhaha -- making people aware of the problem. Not everyone reads /. or Risks Digest. Not everyone knows what might happen, or even what has happened. Not every cloud service provider is right up front telling people that their data could go away tomorrow.
Any of the aftermarket parts suppliers that make a living providing cheaper spare parts than the manufacturer. But the "car maker" in this analogy is unlikely to go bankrupt. Web companies and services come and go; computer companies come and go but their products are becoming interchangable. For example, had you banked on keeping your data on a gopher server early on, you'd be out of luck. The same computer that was a gopher server, however, can be a web server.
Many people would assume that Amazon and Google are probably safer than Ford are.
We are not talking about Amazon and Google, we are talking about specific services offered by Amazon and Google. Things change. Companies that do free stuff sometimes stop. Sometimes they change the rules in mid-stream. And sometimes they become a large enough target that crackers take them down, where a cracker might not bother 1000 small companies individually.
Because the data is at the wrong end of a relatively slow pipe, and stored in a way that users don't have access to the bulk data. You can access the data, but it's through the method that the provider gives you -- usually a nice gui web page.
If backing up your data is not possible then you did not care for your data.
The possibility of backing up ones data depends not on how much one cares for it, but upon the methods provided by the host.
Email is one of the easiest examples. If you leave all of your email only on Google and never place it local, then you do not mind if it is gone.
If my email is local, my system administrator will make backup copies of it on a regular basis. If it is on gmail, I must make whatever backups I can when I can of my own email, over the net, using whatever access methods gmail provides, and every other member of the company that uses gmail must do the same, individually. There is a significant difference between the two situations, and it has nothing to do with whether I mind that the data is gone. In fact, as CEO of the company, I mind quite a bit if the data is gone, but have little control over the backup strategy practiced by my sales staff, other than firing them for not doing it. I can plead, cajole, implore, demand, and ask for it to be done, but the ultimate stick is firing -- and by then it is too late.
Since I mind, I will not rely on an outside provider of a free service to keep my data, I will keep it locally. Email backup will be done on the main server where one person can access it all, and where a weeks worth of data is not lost simply because the cloud crashed (or went bankrupt) at the end of the week someone was on vacation. That is the point RMS is making. People who DO care don't cloud.
He lost me when he said he thought that non-commercial anonymous spam should be legal.
Because if their auto mechanic goes bankrupt/closes they can always find another one to take their cars to. If their IT service goes bankrupt/closes, you can find another provider, but the data you had is gone.
It is in only the rare case that your car is in the shop when the mechanic goes bankrupt that you have any chance of losing your car; your data is always in the IT shop.
Also, there is little of proprietary interest in your automobile. "Oh, look, they drove 3000 miles since the last oil change." Doesn't mean much. There is a LOT of proprietary interest in your customer data, and stealing it would be trivial. You wouldn't even know it was gone, because technically it wouldn't be. It would just be that your competitor has a copy of all your data, too.
You asked and answered your own question. Punishment. And how does the company come to sign such a contract? Voluntarily? Ho ho ho.
Corporations do this ALL THE TIME in the form of "trade associations" yet nobody accuses them of "socialism".
Actually, many anti-competitive practices are illegal and considered unethical, whatever 'ism' you want to call it.
The problem with this discussion is that yes, the AVERAGE owner is going to put the money back into the business instead of their own pocket. It is the abberations that get the press, not the average. You need to keep in the front of your mind that NEWS papers and NEWS programs don't publish anything about average people, it's only about NEWS. Yes, that's a result of capitalism, too. People don't want to read about average things, they want to know what is unusual. Nobody wants to buy a paper filled with the ordinary or usual. Few enough want to buy a paper at all, these days.
Perhaps you should also say child labor laws should be removed so unbridled capitalism can maim a few more million children for a profit,...
Don't you dare try putting words in my mouth. Child labor laws and capitalism are two, unrelated topics, and both can exist at the same time without problems.
Oh wait we shipped all those jobs to China!
WE didn't ship anything to China. China is an awakening capitalist bear, ready to demonstrate to us the principles of capitalism. We, on the other hand, have been heading towards socialism for a long time, where people expect the government to take care of them instead of them taking care of themselves. Please, government, tell those nasty employers that they must pay us more than our jobs are worth so every job, no matter how menial or low level, can provide for a family. I hate to be a reminder of this, but entry level jobs are just that -- entry level. The costs of an entry level employee aren't necessarily covered by his productivity.
Isn't it amazing, it is actually CHEAPER for a fast food restuarant to have the drive through order taker located somewhere else. "The World Is Flat" talks about this. Having the order taker in the building isn't worth the money it takes. Having one person cover three drive-in windows via VoIP is faster, cheaper, and results in fewer errors. Simply remarkable.
I'm sorry, but "every Nordic country" is not a success story for socialism. People live there, but they don't stay there when they find out how much better it is elsewhere. Funny thing, when I was young, I had two flight instructors who came over to the US to make their money, because they just couldn't make it under their existing system. And CFI don't make much money at all, compared to most people.
You can call it class envy, but a lot people just want a chance to play the game.
What you call "playing the game" is actually "winning the game". Sure, everyone would like to walk away from a job they spent two weeks on with $20 million. Your example of Bill Gates is laughable. Bill Gates won the game a long time before he got to $10 billion. He was "in the club" a long time before he got to $100 million.
Capitalism might be totally great, if every 50 years we took all the capital, divided it up evenly, and then carried on with capitalism again.
Yeah, capitalism would be great if it were just like socialism, every socialist says.
I think the proper quote is "capitalism is the worst form of economic system, except for every other one."
I omitted many examples. I wasn't trying for a complete list, just one example.
also, it would be hard to argue that some distortions are bad - like requiring equal treatment for different classes of people, including races, sexual preference and disabilities.
Pure capitalism doesn't care what color or gender or whatever you are. If you are a cheaper resource and have the qualifications, you are hired. Unfortunately, what is a distortion is when preferences are enacted. Such as the source of the current lending crisis. It started because lenders were coerced by the government into having a "good" minority lending history before they would be approved to do other normal business things like open branches or add services. This was called the CRA, under Carter. It was expanded under Clinton.
The word we are looking for is "redlining". It was bad, but the answer, we are now learning, is badder. In order to get a good CRA score, lenders were forced to make loans to less qualified borrowers.
No, we would have been wearing turbans and praying five times a day, in a society with no economy and no downtown New York City.
No, capitalism doesn't have to do with being rich. The hatred of the rich is called "class envy" and it is a principal component of socialism. Capitalism is what RESULTS in some people being rich, but to claim that the system is good only for the rich is incorrect.
Capitalism is based on supply and demand. That includes services. If your services are not in demand, then you don't make a lot of money. If you go to your employer and say "I want overtime pay" and they can find someone else to provide the same service without paying overtime, then they'll hire him and fire you. In short, the supply is greater than the demand. There are more people offering to work than there are positions. That holds true for any job. If someone will accept lower pay than what you want, they'll get the job and you won't, all else being equal.
The times it doesn't hold true are when there are non-capitalist distortions to the system. E.g., a labor union that will coerce non-union members into not filling the gap in supply when union workers strike, or have in other ways artificially limited the supply.
In essence, if you want to blame anyone for your not being rich, blame the other people who will do the same job you do for less money. It's not the fault of the employer who seeks to lower costs and give the investors a return on their investment, it's the guy who lives next to you who will accept an offer to do your job for less than you. If every employer over-paid all of their employees, prices would skyrocket so that nobody could afford anything and pay would have to go up to match. Or investors would get no return on their investment in a company, no payback for taking the chance, and would stop investing. Fewer companies would exist. Fewer jobs, higher prices ...
Before you claim that you'd never do that kind of thing, how about this? You are looking for a lawn maintenance company so you don't have to mow the damn lawn every two days during the summer. There are two companies in town. Both have the same abilities and long lists of glowing referrals. One wants 15% less for the same job. Who do you hire? Are you altruistic enough to say "I'll pay more", or do you say "cheap is good"? Isn't paying less based on this example of unbridled capitalism good for you? Is it good for you because you are rich, or is it good for you because you save money and may become richer?
And the school board is the first level of appeal, with the existing courts as a backup. Nobody was executed, by the way. That's a bit hyperbolic.
I'm guessing that should they choose to appeal, this would be overturned.
Not if I were on the school board. A young lady who thinks she can make unfounded accusations about people who work for me is going to learn otherwise. If she thinks this is a proper response to some perceived injustice, then I'll help remove her from the difficult situation which she cannot handle.
Of course, I lived through the 80's, when accusations of sexual harassment (which is the TAMEST thing that this can be called) were taken seriously and not dismissed as childish pranks to be ignored.
Is calling the Principal a pedophile for actions he performed in school an "out of school" act? It is directed at a school employee in their function as a school employee for actions that occurred in school. It is intended to interfere with "in-school" order.
Should an employer be prevented from acting "in school" if an employee were to do the same kind of thing?
Hmmm. Does the school have a responsibility to protect it's employees from malicious acts by students? We do think that the school has a responsibility to protect students from malicious employees, don't we? We expect that someone who has a charge of pedophilia leveled against them will be fired from a teaching position, don't we?
Doesn't the school also have a responsibility to maintain order? Does allowing a student to make unsupported malicious statements about an employee help maintain order? How do you protect a teach that is unliked because he is too tough or doesn't inflate the grades like all the others? Should students be free to slander and libel him to get him to cooperate?
Just a thought.
It's a shame that a civil suit would have required a large investment on the part of the principal. I'd love to see the student and her parents get sued for everything they own.
You are wrong. You can repeat your assertion, but that doesn't make it correct.
All rights come with responsibilities. Even "free speech". This is called "rule of law".
The principal should not have to "put up with" an asshole who defames his character and accuses him of being a pedophile. The principal should have sued the student and his parents for every penny they have and will make in the future, simply because this student tried to remove from the principal HIS ability to make a living in his chosen profession, as well as his good name and reputation.
The fact that someone can be punished for defamation of character, slander, and libel does not make the right of free speech meaningless. In fact, it makes that right worth just that much more. It serves as a filter against random assholes making defamatory and libelous statements.
This student got off easy. If you want to complain that the punishment is in the wrong venue, ok, but to claim that someone ought to have to "put up with" this kind of baseless accusation is ridiculous and patently absurd.
First, it is hyperbole and fear mongering to claim that there would be such a "split second response". Those troops aren't gun happy, they are, for the most part, more scared of shooting someone (even when required) than you are of being shot. It's a traumatic incident for them, even when they have to shoot someone because there is no other option. It's called "critical incident stress", and it's become recognized over the last decade as a serious issue.
Second, any parent who allows a ten year old to run around an airport is reckless and irresponsible. Any parent who allows any age child to carry a toy gun at an airport is even more so. I've not seen a single ten year old brandishing a toy gun anywhere near an airport in any of the trips I've made, and I expect I'll never see one. I suspect that the first person who sees such activity would tell the parents to get a clue and solve the problem.
And third, they aren't "mad" in either sense of the word. They are doing a job that they were asked to do, which is arguably necessary (in other words, there are valid arguments for it, even if there are also valid arguments against).
I miss some things from USA off-course but I won't risk beign treated like sh1t while I'm on vacation.
If you think that having armed security in US airports is directed at making you feel like sh*t, or you allow it to make you feel that way, well, don't go to Israel. El Al security is even tighter than ours -- and rightly so. I've also seen gun-toting soldiers for security in European airports (Heathrow and Munich, for example.) This is not a "problem" limited to the US.
To bring this back to the topic of the OP, I've taken my laptop (and sometimes two) across the border many times and have never had them ask me to turn it on, much less look at the data. On my last trip, I was carrying about 20Gb of SD/microSD cards in my carryon, and another 20 in my luggage. Not a single question about any of it (and some of it was listed in plain english on my customs declaration form.) I HAVE had TSA rip the TSA-approved locks (and the zipper pulls they were attached to) off of my luggage. This legislation is insufficient, if the problem does exist. "Here's a piece of paper" isn't a sufficient exchange for a $3000 laptop or even a $400 PDA.
No, it's easier to just read the RFID tags in the tires.
What is this "The Newspaper" credit? Did something happen after I went to bed last night that left us with only one?
I was modded flamebait and this is modded informative?
I don't know what Alaska you are thinking of, but the State of Alaska in the United States is physically larger than almost any other state. (I'm pretty sure it is largest, but I'm not going to bother looking up the fine details. It's HUGE, and to claim it is the size of a small city is just preposterous.) The fall 2007 estimate of FY 2009 general fund revenue is 6.6 BILLION dollars. It's not the biggest state in the union, but it not "a small city" by any means.
Wassila is a city, even if you grew up in a town that was twice the size. The size of your city is irrelvant. It is still a city, it still has an executive branch with all the functions of an executive branch, and Palin served there.
As for Obama, how is it that for him the only experience you count is Federal?
I count all of Obama's experience. He has ZERO, ZIP, NADA experience in an executive branch position. He's been in the legislative branch, and for an extremely small amount of time there.
Palin has 0 years of federal experience compared to Obama's 3 years. Gee, that sounds like Obama has more.
And YOU asked ME why I was counting only federal experience? And then you count only federal experience for Palin.
Whether it is state or federal is irrelevant. What matters is the KIND of experience. Obama, as we all know and admit, has zero executive experience. He hasn't run anything but a campaign, and he's not really running that himself anyway. He's never been the one who is ultimately responsible for anything. Palin has run both a city and a HUGE state. As the governor, you can bet she has experience with the federal government -- the kind of experience Obama does not have. She has dealings with two foreign countries because she has two foreign countries on her borders. Illinois (Obama's state) has NO foreign countries to deal with, and he wasn't in charge of Illinois in any case.
If all you want to count is years of "federal service", I'd propose that we elect the White House barber, since he's (probably) been there for more time than anyone currently on the ballot. No, I'm sorry, but what kind of service it is does make a difference.
Additionally, while in the Senate Obama has served on the Foreign Relations Committee as well as the Homeland Security Committee.
Great. He has committee experience. The President of the United States is not a committee. He is the head of the executive branch. HE makes the decisions. Obama has zero experience in that role. None. Not at the state level, not at the federal level. Being on a committe is not preparation to be President. (By the way, if he's on the Homeland Security Committee, why does he think that there are 57 states?)
So no Obama doesn't have any executive experience, but he does have experience that relates to actual issues a President will deal with.
Why do you limit the issues to just those two? As the governor of a major oil producing state, Palin has considerably more experience in energy policy than Obama has. Just how much oil does Illinois produce again? As the governor of Alaska, she has considerably more experience dealing with foreign governments than Obama has. The president needs experience in both, and Obama has none. Obama thinks "foreign policy" is going to Germany and sucking up to Germans.
Barack Obama is only less qualified for office when you distort the facts to fit that conclusion.
Barack Obama is unqualified based on the facts, and no distortion is necessary. He has zero executive branch experience, and that is a fact. It is a distortion to pretend that his limited service in the legislative branch can make up for that. It is a GROSS and DELIBERATE distortion of the facts to call Alaska "the size of a small city". Who was it that made that statement again?
Thanks, but I plan on hiring a telemarketing firm to call up people and play recorded messages at them.
And the message will ask people to vote for my opponents.
Why? They just ignore it, use hidden caller id, and play you a recorded message.
If you "press 1" to ask for more information (like "who the HELL ARE YOU?" so you can file an FTC complaint) you've just opted in. If you "press 9" to "opt out", you haven't, but you still don't have either a name or a number so you can't file a complaint.
I get regular calls from "credit service" or something like that, talking about this being the last day to take advantage of some offer that will "lower my rates". (I pay in full each month, I don't really care what my rates are.) When I ask who they are, they hang up. When I press 9 to opt out, I can swear I hear chuckling in the background.
Today I got the same kind of call from Dish Network. They had a caller id number. They used the company name. I reported it faster than you can say "do not call."
As for the poster who claimed that spam doesn't physically harm him, I'll point out this tiny detail. Network access via T-Mobile 3G networks costs $15/Mb (I think it was) for US subscribers while in Germany. That spam message being downloaded costs me money, which I would have been able to spend on food. That's causing physical harm.
That or drag the motherfuckers into the streets and shoot them.
Stone. The victims ought to have a bit more fun than just one or two shots ending the pain. Maybe if you said "shoot them in the extremities, progressively moving toward the heart" I'd agree, but the next scum would get the sentence overturned because has no heart.
Differentiate, please, between MISinformation and "screwup". How does one tell the difference, and should people who spread misinformation be exempt from prosecution just because "screwups happen"? Should those who "screwup" and cause huge monetary losses to a large number of people be exempt from punishment for that screwup? My answer is, IF they used due care in the execution of their duties. Is not considering that a story was written in 2002 before publishing it as current "due care"? I don't think so.
A reasonable person would not think so, I believe. It's a simple thing to test. Take a newspaper clipping from a 6 year old newspaper and remove the dateline. Make sure the story is something that is no longer true. (E.g., "Local big company dumping refuse in the river.") Hand it to someone on the street. Ask them if they think that the information that the story is six years old is important. I bet they say "yes".
The fact is if you are going to play the game of trying to move before everyone else does you are going to base some of your moves on bad information.
And malicious individuals can make use of that knowledge to make a profit. Should such malicious activity be allowed, or should those who do it knowing the result be punished?
Suppose you know that a piece of metal of a certain diameter and thickness will be accepted by a vending machine as a quarter. Are you guilty of a crime if you act upon that information? Of course. You cannot argue that the vending machine is at fault for accepting slugs to secure your innocence. You cannot claim innocence if you spread misinformation knowing that people will act upon it to your financial gain.