"Everyone complaining above agrees that an officer who arrests a hit and run offender should not be allowed to search the defendants phone to see if they were talking / texting at the time of the accident?"
I'm certainly not comfortable with your average highway patrolman making such a determination.
Me neither. Let him note down the time of the incident and let the lawyers issue a few subpoenas.
The fact is that most voters are loyal to their party. Party loyalty is responsible for many of our current problems.
They're ridiculously loyal to the various brands of consumer products they buy as well, regardless of whether there's another make available that's better and/or cheaper. While many people give standing ovations when politicians spew rhetoric about "change" (Clinton and Obama are famous for this) the reality is that they really don't want it. And that's reasonable: we're basically conservative in that regard, because change for the sake of change is inherently risky. If you are going to screw around with our basic institutions and traditions, you'd better have something viable with which to replace them. But they never do, and so matters go from bad to worse.
In addition, exercising the power of the vote wisely requires time, effort, education and level of understanding which is far more than most Americans are willing to invest. That's true even though the payback, if enough of us did that, would come in spades.
Furthermore, if our much-vaunted, Constitutionally-protected "free press" (term used very loosely) had not sold out or fallen down on the job, we might be able to make better decisions. Knowledge is power.
Replace the whole system with direct democracy via the Internet. Representative democracy only evolved because of technological constraints that no longer exist.
But what about security blah blah blah - if the Internet is secure enough for banking it is secure enough for voting. The results couldn't be any worse than what we have now.
Yeah, they could, and would.
The kind of security you're talking about is not the issue (but it is an issue, make no mistake). What's at stake here is the confidentiality and impartiality of voting. When a person goes into that booth, nobody but he, she and his or her God (if present) knows for sure how that vote was cast, and there isn't anyone standing over their shoulder influencing their decision.
Open the doors to Internet voting, and it'll go to Hell pretty damn fast. Employers will insist that their workers vote a certain way... and they'll make sure they do. It would also be an issue in private settings: "As head of this household, I will decide for whom the family casts its votes." Sure, that's illegal, but you know it would happen. Frequently.
Going to the polling booth just makes a whole lot of sense regardless of the technology involved.
This is Jerry Brown we're talking about. California voters had to be seriously history-impaired to vote for him this time. Not that his Repub opponent was any prize, but really, electing Governor Moonbeam again? What were they thinking?
If we're lucky, we get the government we deserve. If not, we get the government we want.
Don't forget that colony of ants that held up widening of the road for 6 years in San Jose, total retardation to choke 5 lanes down to 2 to save some fucking ants.
You're kidding me, right? The insect world outnumbers us by trillions to one, there are ant supercolonies hundreds of miles long... and they held up a road to "save" one? And I thought that bit about LA outlawing the term "master/slave" in technical documentation was out there.
I kind of disagree, in some way. As a government employee you have actually sufficient time to think it though. But the big obvious problem is that you normally don'T think of all the hooks and notches while you write the original spec. Then you go for a bid and Germany, (for government contracts) you need to take the cheapest bid, that fulfills some basic requirements. As it tuns out there is ALWAYS one bid that servilely undercuts the other bids and you know that this one is crap. Only problem is formally the bid is ok. There is a reason why the Netherlands always take the second best bid, that prevents price fixing.
Ideally, there should be some give-and-take. There's no way in hell that a spec author can account for everything, know everything, or be aware of special capabilities of a given supplier. Given some communication with contractors during the spec-writing phase a lot of important details can get nailed down, and the purchaser may often learn about options and methodologies of which he wasn't aware. I used to be a contractor, a long time ago: my specs precisely fit customer requirements because I worked them while I was writing it.
Google+, on the other hand,is what everybody thinks it is: a social network. Whether everybody will find a reason to use it is another question entirely.
Not according to Eric Schmidt.
Well, it is a social network. The fact that it has other purposes is another issue entirely, and one worth of its own discussion. Fact is, none of these guys run these networks as a philanthropic endeavor: they want eyeballs and information for datamining.
What seems to be the problem with Stallman (and indeed, many people on this site) is that he can't imagine anyone else having a different viewpoint from him.
That may or may not be correct. I don't know the man personally. But my take on Stallman's position is more along the lines of trends. He (rather correctly, I believe) perceives walled gardens as being seductive traps that snare the user and eventually restrict him in ways that he wouldn't have thought possible, to the considerable profit of others. The most impressive aspect to Apple's garden is the spirited defense mounted by its residents, who seem unable to acknowledge any of the very real problems involved. That blows me away on a regular basis.
I think the question then is how would the person enforce the terms they negotiated when they sold themselves into slavery? If they are able to terminate the agreement if the other party doesn't uphold their side of the agreement, I don't think most people would consider that slavery, but rather a long term contract.
We all have only the rights enforceable by law, and if your legal system happens to support slavery... pretty much by definition you don't have any. Rights, that is.
That's because slaves are property, and have no more "rights' than your iPhone.
Even my 10 year old know that you can say "I don't like it" lightly, but "it is bad" must be really weighted before proclaimed. Fact is, many people like it. So, is it really that bad?
It comes down to whether those people truly understand the long-term consequences of what it is that they are buying into. I can guarantee you that 99.9999% of the iOS-using market does not. Lots of people like McDonald's and religion too. Contrary to popular belief, the number of believers (or wilfully ignorant) people you have following you has nothing to do with whether you are good or right.
Seriously, what was he thinking? Now people will think of Linux geeks as those lunatics who are happy to see people die.
What?
With FOSS software the author just throwns in together quickly, with some menu items or buttons sometimes just as a placeholder that do nothing!
Yes, you're right... no software written for the Mac could ever be coded by a second-rate author. A computer manufacturer and an operating system do not a quality application make: a quality developer does that.
Apart from the fact that it is completely stupid thing to say, he just seems jealous that people like Jobs' products and ideas better.
What? That's hysterical considering that under the hood, OSX and iOS are nothing but Unix distros with an Apple-developed GUI layer, and in no way can Richard Stallman be considered a competitor to Apple Computer.
but Richard Stallman has no merits to basically say he's glad Steve Jobs is dead.
He didn't. He said he was glad that Job's influence is gone, and you know what? As a software engineer of some thirty years, I'm glad too. And that has nothing to do with his being dead: I was perfectly happy to see him retired. So, I'm sure, was Richard Stallman. As businessmen, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are pretty much cut from the same cloth, poured from the same mold: the more success they achieved, the less they were able to tolerate competition in what they came to consider as "their" private markets. Steve Jobs' remarks when Android was announced were telling:
We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake, they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there's no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don't be evil mantra: "It's bullshit." Audience roars.
So, because Apple chose not to compete with Google in search, Google therefore has no right to compete in the mobile market. That's arrogance in the extreme, and Jobs was perfectly aware when he said that that mobile was a space that Google not afford to ignore, regardless of Jobs' opinion on the matter. He was just mad that he hadn't been able to lock down the smartphone market totally before Google came in and took it away from him. Maybe if he hadn't made that exclusive with AT&T he'd have had a chance to marginalize Android on smartphones, but he failed miserably at that.
Running only free software really does not concern them and never will.
And that's too bad. There are a lot of things that people should care about but don't. That doesn't make them smart. It makes them ignorant, and likely to walk off cliffs.
It would be good if Stallman and other FOSS fanatics understood that and stop acting like jerks, because that will only have negative effect on their image.
So in other words, the specifics of Richard Stallman and the FOSS "fanatics" position and values are irrelevant, it only matters that they are properly charismatic? Okay. Reality distortion field at maximum output.
I'm not exactly fan of Apple,
Yes, you most certainly are.
The rest of you, I apologize for feeding the troll.
It's that simple. The value of a social network lies in having all your friends on it too, and that's true for Facebook but it isn't true for G+. Also, Facebook has the games people want to play, while G+ doesn't, so there just isn't much to attract anybody to G+ other than curiosity.
Interesting perspective. I look at Google+ as a way to find more interesting people. Frankly, I don't care if any of my friends are on G+ or not. I go there to follow other people who are often more interesting (or at least, more entertaining) than the people I already know.
No. Everybody isn't. I'm not; my family is not; Many of my co-workers are not. Facebook's TOS are no better than Google's (in fact, in some ways they are more restrictive); if you doubt this, go read them both and see.
Until (if ever) someone comes up with a social platform that actually respects the user's wishes for privacy, "everyone" won't be on Facebook or anywhere else, for that matter.
Don't forget that Google makes all of your user data easily exportable in a ZIP download. Way cool. Conversely, Zuckerberg owns your data, so far as he is concerned, and he's doing everything he can to prevent users from migrating to other services. That evinces a total lack of respect for the user, and is just an asshole way to do business, but it's what I've come to expect from Zuckerberg's brainchild. It's one of many reason why I won't have anything to do with it.
This. If you need any indication of how much people hate change...just check the statuses after FB makes a change. People go nuts! People want what they're used to. The way FB made it simple was looping them in young and bright (college students). They became the evangelists of FB then spreading to the mainstream.
Until everyone is on Google, nobody's going to Google - Even though I find it to be a superior product...I find myself using FB because that's where the people I care about are.
Remember the brouhaha when Netflix changed its user interface a couple of months ago. "OMG, it's different." I kinda got to like it after a while.
The real thing to remember here is that nothing lasts forever. Markets change, people's perceptions change... market leaders stumble. This isn't about Google taking all of Facebook's market share overnight: it's about building a better product that will, over time, generate ad revenue. It doesn't have to be the biggest or most popular service to do that either.
What will eventually drive people to Google+, if Google does it right, is the integration with all their other services.
But putting an invitation system into G+ was devastating.
but Wave had the same problem and they did not learn from it.
Not really. Wave's problem was that nobody understood what it was, what it was for, and consequently nobody bothered to use it. Sometimes being ahead of your time is just not good salesmanship, if your potential users can't figure out what it is your selling (that's one of Google's problems, I think: they're a fundamentally intellectual outfit, and they often give us way too much credit.) Google+, on the other hand, is what everybody thinks it is: a social network. Whether everybody will find a reason to use it is another question entirely.
What the invitation system did do was limit the number of users who could come in at once: even Google may have resource issues when deploying something as massive and real-time as Google Plus, and it's better to have fewer users who aren't bitching about how slow and flaky your service is, than lots of users that are. Most of the legitimate complaints about G+ (and there are many) center around new features that people would like to see, rather than problems with the existing codebase, and that's where you want to be at this stage.
My own feeling is that with the ongoing integration with all the rest of Google's services G+ will be able to make a compelling case for your average-Joe Facebooker to give it a shot. Everybody first assumed that G+ would wipe Facebook off the map because it did a lot of things that Facebook didn't, and because, well, it's Google. That was ridiculously premature, of course. Conversely, what G+ is now is not what it's going to be a year from now, or even a month from now. Personally, I appreciate the slower, more thoughtful, more responsive approach that the G+ developers are taking. In the end, they'll have a much better service than Facebook. Time will tell if that's enough to keep it viable.
Personally, I never liked Facebook, never trusted Facebook... and I still don't on either score. Real-name issue or not, Google tends do most things well from a technical perspective, and does seem to have a better handle on trust issues than Facebook. So I'm not writing them out of the picture yet. That's like betting against Microsoft: they have the resources to stay in the game for a long time. If I were Zuckerberg, I wouldn't get too complacent: when he first heard about G+, I'll bet he felt the same way that Jobs did when he found out that Google was entering the smartphone market.
In any event, what has resulted from this head-to-head competition is that Facebook improved their service, and We the Consumer have more and better choices. That's a good thing.
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. Nor should they be implemented: it's not the contractor's fault if the purchasing party has its head up its collective ass. Know what you're asking for when you put out a bid request: it's the only way you'll a. have any chance of getting what you want and b. be able to tell if you ultimately got what you paid for. Specs can be a pain in the neck, and many see them as a waste of time, but without a proper spec a development contract is a crapshoot.
at least as competent as the guys on the other side of the fence.
The general public is not known for their competence in computer software development. The government would be better off employing criminal hackers.
The problem there is... they're criminals. You'd have to have any code they come up with vetted by someone competent enough, indeed tricky enough, to make sure there's nothing in there that could make the whole thing backfire (I mean, hell, if you were a blackhat of that magnitude... wouldn't you try to put one over on the gendarmes? Just as a matter of principle?) And if you know someone you can trust who's good enough to spot any problems, you might as well just hire him (or her) in the first place.
It's a bit of a conundrum though, if you work for law enforcement: any capable programmer with ethics is going to think twice about accepting that kind of a job in the first place. The fact that it's "for the good guys" isn't sufficient reason in my mind. I wouldn't do it, even though I could. It's one of a number of areas where I just won't go, even if it might be an entertaining technical challenge. Too much potential for innocent people to get hurt, and I wouldn't want that on my head.
Slashdot Mirror
"Everyone complaining above agrees that an officer who arrests a hit and run offender should not be allowed to search the defendants phone to see if they were talking / texting at the time of the accident?"
I'm certainly not comfortable with your average highway patrolman making such a determination.
Me neither. Let him note down the time of the incident and let the lawyers issue a few subpoenas.
Perhaps you would have been more satified had hebused Wetbacks. There is no substitute for the abyss that is a liberals ignorance.
Actually, I think he was trying to be funny not make a position statement.
This would be a ban on the police/state doing something, not a ban on the citizens doing something, so there's no need for constitutional review.
Did you mean "police/state" or "police state"?
The fact is that most voters are loyal to their party. Party loyalty is responsible for many of our current problems.
They're ridiculously loyal to the various brands of consumer products they buy as well, regardless of whether there's another make available that's better and/or cheaper. While many people give standing ovations when politicians spew rhetoric about "change" (Clinton and Obama are famous for this) the reality is that they really don't want it. And that's reasonable: we're basically conservative in that regard, because change for the sake of change is inherently risky. If you are going to screw around with our basic institutions and traditions, you'd better have something viable with which to replace them. But they never do, and so matters go from bad to worse.
In addition, exercising the power of the vote wisely requires time, effort, education and level of understanding which is far more than most Americans are willing to invest. That's true even though the payback, if enough of us did that, would come in spades.
Furthermore, if our much-vaunted, Constitutionally-protected "free press" (term used very loosely) had not sold out or fallen down on the job, we might be able to make better decisions. Knowledge is power.
Replace the whole system with direct democracy via the Internet. Representative democracy only evolved because of technological constraints that no longer exist.
But what about security blah blah blah - if the Internet is secure enough for banking it is secure enough for voting. The results couldn't be any worse than what we have now.
Yeah, they could, and would.
... and they'll make sure they do. It would also be an issue in private settings: "As head of this household, I will decide for whom the family casts its votes." Sure, that's illegal, but you know it would happen. Frequently.
The kind of security you're talking about is not the issue (but it is an issue, make no mistake). What's at stake here is the confidentiality and impartiality of voting. When a person goes into that booth, nobody but he, she and his or her God (if present) knows for sure how that vote was cast, and there isn't anyone standing over their shoulder influencing their decision.
Open the doors to Internet voting, and it'll go to Hell pretty damn fast. Employers will insist that their workers vote a certain way
Going to the polling booth just makes a whole lot of sense regardless of the technology involved.
This is Jerry Brown we're talking about. California voters had to be seriously history-impaired to vote for him this time. Not that his Repub opponent was any prize, but really, electing Governor Moonbeam again? What were they thinking?
If we're lucky, we get the government we deserve. If not, we get the government we want.
Don't forget that colony of ants that held up widening of the road for 6 years in San Jose, total retardation to choke 5 lanes down to 2 to save some fucking ants.
You're kidding me, right? The insect world outnumbers us by trillions to one, there are ant supercolonies hundreds of miles long ... and they held up a road to "save" one? And I thought that bit about LA outlawing the term "master/slave" in technical documentation was out there.
I kind of disagree, in some way. As a government employee you have actually sufficient time to think it though. But the big obvious problem is that you normally don'T think of all the hooks and notches while you write the original spec. Then you go for a bid and Germany, (for government contracts) you need to take the cheapest bid, that fulfills some basic requirements. As it tuns out there is ALWAYS one bid that servilely undercuts the other bids and you know that this one is crap. Only problem is formally the bid is ok. There is a reason why the Netherlands always take the second best bid, that prevents price fixing.
Ideally, there should be some give-and-take. There's no way in hell that a spec author can account for everything, know everything, or be aware of special capabilities of a given supplier. Given some communication with contractors during the spec-writing phase a lot of important details can get nailed down, and the purchaser may often learn about options and methodologies of which he wasn't aware. I used to be a contractor, a long time ago: my specs precisely fit customer requirements because I worked them while I was writing it.
Google+, on the other hand,is what everybody thinks it is: a social network. Whether everybody will find a reason to use it is another question entirely.
Not according to Eric Schmidt.
Well, it is a social network. The fact that it has other purposes is another issue entirely, and one worth of its own discussion. Fact is, none of these guys run these networks as a philanthropic endeavor: they want eyeballs and information for datamining.
What seems to be the problem with Stallman (and indeed, many people on this site) is that he can't imagine anyone else having a different viewpoint from him.
That may or may not be correct. I don't know the man personally. But my take on Stallman's position is more along the lines of trends. He (rather correctly, I believe) perceives walled gardens as being seductive traps that snare the user and eventually restrict him in ways that he wouldn't have thought possible, to the considerable profit of others. The most impressive aspect to Apple's garden is the spirited defense mounted by its residents, who seem unable to acknowledge any of the very real problems involved. That blows me away on a regular basis.
I think the question then is how would the person enforce the terms they negotiated when they sold themselves into slavery? If they are able to terminate the agreement if the other party doesn't uphold their side of the agreement, I don't think most people would consider that slavery, but rather a long term contract.
We all have only the rights enforceable by law, and if your legal system happens to support slavery ... pretty much by definition you don't have any. Rights, that is.
That's because slaves are property, and have no more "rights' than your iPhone.
walled-gardens are bad ideas anyway.
Even my 10 year old know that you can say "I don't like it" lightly, but "it is bad" must be really weighted before proclaimed. Fact is, many people like it. So, is it really that bad?
It comes down to whether those people truly understand the long-term consequences of what it is that they are buying into. I can guarantee you that 99.9999% of the iOS-using market does not. Lots of people like McDonald's and religion too. Contrary to popular belief, the number of believers (or wilfully ignorant) people you have following you has nothing to do with whether you are good or right.
Didn't apple have some patent for a screen that can also function as a camera, yer basic scifi 2 way display or did I imagine the whole thing?
Yes, Citizen, you did imagine the whole thing. Now go back to work.
Seriously, what was he thinking? Now people will think of Linux geeks as those lunatics who are happy to see people die.
What?
With FOSS software the author just throwns in together quickly, with some menu items or buttons sometimes just as a placeholder that do nothing!
Yes, you're right ... no software written for the Mac could ever be coded by a second-rate author. A computer manufacturer and an operating system do not a quality application make: a quality developer does that.
Apart from the fact that it is completely stupid thing to say, he just seems jealous that people like Jobs' products and ideas better.
What? That's hysterical considering that under the hood, OSX and iOS are nothing but Unix distros with an Apple-developed GUI layer, and in no way can Richard Stallman be considered a competitor to Apple Computer.
but Richard Stallman has no merits to basically say he's glad Steve Jobs is dead.
He didn't. He said he was glad that Job's influence is gone, and you know what? As a software engineer of some thirty years, I'm glad too. And that has nothing to do with his being dead: I was perfectly happy to see him retired. So, I'm sure, was Richard Stallman. As businessmen, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are pretty much cut from the same cloth, poured from the same mold: the more success they achieved, the less they were able to tolerate competition in what they came to consider as "their" private markets. Steve Jobs' remarks when Android was announced were telling:
We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake, they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there's no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don't be evil mantra: "It's bullshit." Audience roars.
So, because Apple chose not to compete with Google in search, Google therefore has no right to compete in the mobile market. That's arrogance in the extreme, and Jobs was perfectly aware when he said that that mobile was a space that Google not afford to ignore, regardless of Jobs' opinion on the matter. He was just mad that he hadn't been able to lock down the smartphone market totally before Google came in and took it away from him. Maybe if he hadn't made that exclusive with AT&T he'd have had a chance to marginalize Android on smartphones, but he failed miserably at that.
Running only free software really does not concern them and never will.
And that's too bad. There are a lot of things that people should care about but don't. That doesn't make them smart. It makes them ignorant, and likely to walk off cliffs.
It would be good if Stallman and other FOSS fanatics understood that and stop acting like jerks, because that will only have negative effect on their image.
So in other words, the specifics of Richard Stallman and the FOSS "fanatics" position and values are irrelevant, it only matters that they are properly charismatic? Okay. Reality distortion field at maximum output.
I'm not exactly fan of Apple,
Yes, you most certainly are.
The rest of you, I apologize for feeding the troll.
If they had simply used DNS names, they could fail-over on many levels simply by re-pointing DNS.
Maybe they were worried about DNS poisoning or something like that. Still should be a way to remotely update those "service book" addresses though.
... they just don't know it yet.
So, you're saying they've been zombied.
That would explain a lot actually.
Facebook offers a good deal of your data for export/download http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/06/facebook-now-allows-you-to-download-your-information/
Interesting. I hadn't heard about that. Not hard to figure out where they got the motivation.
It's that simple. The value of a social network lies in having all your friends on it too, and that's true for Facebook but it isn't true for G+. Also, Facebook has the games people want to play, while G+ doesn't, so there just isn't much to attract anybody to G+ other than curiosity.
Interesting perspective. I look at Google+ as a way to find more interesting people. Frankly, I don't care if any of my friends are on G+ or not. I go there to follow other people who are often more interesting (or at least, more entertaining) than the people I already know.
No. Everybody isn't. I'm not; my family is not; Many of my co-workers are not. Facebook's TOS are no better than Google's (in fact, in some ways they are more restrictive); if you doubt this, go read them both and see.
Until (if ever) someone comes up with a social platform that actually respects the user's wishes for privacy, "everyone" won't be on Facebook or anywhere else, for that matter.
Don't forget that Google makes all of your user data easily exportable in a ZIP download. Way cool. Conversely, Zuckerberg owns your data, so far as he is concerned, and he's doing everything he can to prevent users from migrating to other services. That evinces a total lack of respect for the user, and is just an asshole way to do business, but it's what I've come to expect from Zuckerberg's brainchild. It's one of many reason why I won't have anything to do with it.
This. If you need any indication of how much people hate change...just check the statuses after FB makes a change. People go nuts! People want what they're used to. The way FB made it simple was looping them in young and bright (college students). They became the evangelists of FB then spreading to the mainstream. Until everyone is on Google, nobody's going to Google - Even though I find it to be a superior product...I find myself using FB because that's where the people I care about are.
Remember the brouhaha when Netflix changed its user interface a couple of months ago. "OMG, it's different." I kinda got to like it after a while.
... market leaders stumble. This isn't about Google taking all of Facebook's market share overnight: it's about building a better product that will, over time, generate ad revenue. It doesn't have to be the biggest or most popular service to do that either.
The real thing to remember here is that nothing lasts forever. Markets change, people's perceptions change
What will eventually drive people to Google+, if Google does it right, is the integration with all their other services.
But putting an invitation system into G+ was devastating.
but Wave had the same problem and they did not learn from it.
Not really. Wave's problem was that nobody understood what it was, what it was for, and consequently nobody bothered to use it. Sometimes being ahead of your time is just not good salesmanship, if your potential users can't figure out what it is your selling (that's one of Google's problems, I think: they're a fundamentally intellectual outfit, and they often give us way too much credit.) Google+, on the other hand, is what everybody thinks it is: a social network. Whether everybody will find a reason to use it is another question entirely.
... and I still don't on either score. Real-name issue or not, Google tends do most things well from a technical perspective, and does seem to have a better handle on trust issues than Facebook. So I'm not writing them out of the picture yet. That's like betting against Microsoft: they have the resources to stay in the game for a long time. If I were Zuckerberg, I wouldn't get too complacent: when he first heard about G+, I'll bet he felt the same way that Jobs did when he found out that Google was entering the smartphone market.
What the invitation system did do was limit the number of users who could come in at once: even Google may have resource issues when deploying something as massive and real-time as Google Plus, and it's better to have fewer users who aren't bitching about how slow and flaky your service is, than lots of users that are. Most of the legitimate complaints about G+ (and there are many) center around new features that people would like to see, rather than problems with the existing codebase, and that's where you want to be at this stage.
My own feeling is that with the ongoing integration with all the rest of Google's services G+ will be able to make a compelling case for your average-Joe Facebooker to give it a shot. Everybody first assumed that G+ would wipe Facebook off the map because it did a lot of things that Facebook didn't, and because, well, it's Google. That was ridiculously premature, of course. Conversely, what G+ is now is not what it's going to be a year from now, or even a month from now. Personally, I appreciate the slower, more thoughtful, more responsive approach that the G+ developers are taking. In the end, they'll have a much better service than Facebook. Time will tell if that's enough to keep it viable.
Personally, I never liked Facebook, never trusted Facebook
In any event, what has resulted from this head-to-head competition is that Facebook improved their service, and We the Consumer have more and better choices. That's a good thing.
What's not in the specs does not get implemented.
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. Nor should they be implemented: it's not the contractor's fault if the purchasing party has its head up its collective ass. Know what you're asking for when you put out a bid request: it's the only way you'll a. have any chance of getting what you want and b. be able to tell if you ultimately got what you paid for. Specs can be a pain in the neck, and many see them as a waste of time, but without a proper spec a development contract is a crapshoot.
"The government would be better off employing criminal hackers."
The leaders don't like the competition.
Ha ... isn't that the truth.
at least as competent as the guys on the other side of the fence.
The general public is not known for their competence in computer software development. The government would be better off employing criminal hackers.
The problem there is ... they're criminals. You'd have to have any code they come up with vetted by someone competent enough, indeed tricky enough, to make sure there's nothing in there that could make the whole thing backfire (I mean, hell, if you were a blackhat of that magnitude ... wouldn't you try to put one over on the gendarmes? Just as a matter of principle?) And if you know someone you can trust who's good enough to spot any problems, you might as well just hire him (or her) in the first place.
It's a bit of a conundrum though, if you work for law enforcement: any capable programmer with ethics is going to think twice about accepting that kind of a job in the first place. The fact that it's "for the good guys" isn't sufficient reason in my mind. I wouldn't do it, even though I could. It's one of a number of areas where I just won't go, even if it might be an entertaining technical challenge. Too much potential for innocent people to get hurt, and I wouldn't want that on my head.
In particular the USA which has been found to NOT have a data protection standard that is good enough
We have one of those?