This whole story shouldn't be about what wiki leaks did, or who got the information. It should be about what these "diplomats" were doing and saying about each other in a non-civilized fashion. Transparency is the biggest fear of the corrupt, like light to vampires.
I just posted something, and then I noticed this. Certainly worthy of a +1 Interesting mod.
Personally, I'm quite happy with the leaks. I finally get to see how diplomats represent their countries. I value accountability a lot more than secrecy. Are there secrets that are harmful to leak? No doubt. But I think secrecy should be the exception rather than the rule.
I'm particularly amazed that governments complain about the embarrassment. Don't they always tell us that if we've done nothing wrong, we've got nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of? So what have they done wrong? I guess we know now.
But the most important issue to me is this: governments should be accountable to the people, not the other way around.
It's illegal in this country to distribute this information. Amazon had a legal obligation to terminate their relationship with Wikileaks. I feel that Wikileaks is doing nothing unethical or immoral, but illegal? It is most certainly illegal. Perhaps you should go read up on Civil Disobedience.
Is it Wikileaks that has done something illegal, or is it Amazon? Let's assume, for the sake of the argument, that distributing these documents is illegal in the US, but not elsewhere (I think that's a reasonably safe assumption, but I'm no lawyer). Wikileaks is not located in the US, so they haven't done anything illegal. At least not until they host their stuff on Amazon, which is located in the US. So it's really only the hosting on Amazon that was illegal.
If a domesticated animal has been abandoned and unwanted, the most humane thing to do is end its suffering as quickly and painlessly as possible. Keeping it caged in hopes that someone will come and adopt it may feel nice, but it isn't in the animal's best interest.
It's still an interesting question who gets to determine when death is in your best interest.
That's wht the PETA spoof is so important for them. On their site they explain how they've been trolling the PETA forums, hoping for this to happen. Apparently with success. It's a weird kind of PR, but it works, because now you've heard of Super Meat Boy. Thanks to trolling, PETA and Slashdot.
I never tried to type quickly on any touchscreen, but I am sure I can learn it.
It'll never be the same, though. You don't get the tactile feedback that you get from a real keyboard.
I'd be more worried about no mouse. What if my task is to drag and drop stuff on the vertical part for 2 hrs (assuming I cannot automate the process)? Then I end up with my arm stretched in front of me for 2 hrs. I think I'll be tired before that time.
Good point. The screen/desk/whatever it is is clearly made for dragging stuff. But how ergonomic is it to do that for a long time?
On the other hand, teachers seem to be quite able to draw on a vertical blackboard for a long time.
Looks cool, but without a keyboard (and a virtual keyboard is a lousy substitute), I wonder who this is really for. And if the screen is projected, will documents really be readable? A screen this big is either going to have a ridiculously high resolution, or it's just not good enough.
They can't work because there's nothing up there. Period.
What do you mean: there's nothing up there? There's no moon? No sunlight? No asteroids at all?
There's plenty of stuff up there. The only question is: what good is it to us?
Moon colonies sound cute, but there's not much of interest there. There's He3 which might be interesting to mine one we get the appropriate nuclear fusion tech, but not much else. (Mars, on the other hand, is much more interesting. As are space habitats.)
Space-based solar power? Sounds rather obvious to me. The sun always shines in space. The only problem is getting that power to earth. That's not a small problem, but I don't see why it can't ever be solved.
Asteroid mining? I think it's definitely going to happen some day. Some minerals are really rare on earth. Your smartphone contains metals from war-torn African countries. No idea whether the wars are about control of the mines, or the mines are used to fuel the wars, but ethically these metals are comparable to blood diamonds, and they're in every single handset in the world, because we can't get them anywhere else. But some minerals that are rare on earth, are reasonably common in some asteroids.
Then again, if you skim the "junk DNA" (which may or may not really be junk),
It's not junk. It doesn't encode genes, but it certainly does something very important.
Something interesting I learned from a Scientific American last year: the DNA difference between us and chimps is almost entirely in "junk" DNA that's practically identical in all mammals, but different in us. So as long as we don't fully understand "junk" DNA, we won't know what it is that makes us human.
Before you go off on a tangent about Guantanamo, please remember that international law allows personnel captured in combat without uniforms or other means of identifying them as combatants can be dealt with under the law of the capturing country.
And I don't think Guantanamo would have been much of an issue if that'd been what happened. Instead, they were held in a lawless vacuum.
Isn't it funny how Julian Assange is so quiet about his own personal life and background, eh?
One rule for Julian Assange. One rule for the rest of us.
I think it's "one rule for private individuals, another rule for governments". Of course the US government feels exactly the same way, only they have a different idea about what rule is for whom.
wikileaks mainly publishes leaks of government info of US... how come they don't publish stuff which embarasses india? every day there's corruption being reported in the news in india... but wikileaks covers none of it?
They post lots of stuff about other countries. When they can get their hands on it. This is easily the biggest and most high-profile leak they've ever had. But it's by no means the first.
The US wouldn't be able to win full on conventional war with Iran at this point. And the Iranians know it, hence their attitude on uranium enrichment.
The US may not have to defeat all of Iran completely. There's always been a democratic movement in Iran. Recent protests proved there's still a lot of opposition to the ayatollahs.
Of course supporting a coup has lots of risks on its own; that's what created this mess in the first place (in 1953). But if they'd be able to have honest elections without any interference from the religious leaders, that might make all the difference we need.
This is exactly what I thought. If the US is afraid that this release will damage their reputation with their allies, then doesn't that mean that maybe they shouldn't have done those embarrassing things in the first place? The leak reveals that they just haven't been very good allies.
The first thing I heard of was that apparently the US had supplied the PKK with weapons, which is completely stupefying if it's true. And apparently Turkey may have known about Turks supplying Al Qaeda-in-Iraq with weapons and not stopping it. WTF? Has the word "ally" completely lost all meaning?
It works fine. Google is just not going to push it anymore. They hope other people are going to pick it up and turn it into something cool. Who knows, they might even jump on board again when it gets some impetus. Joining Apache is certainly a good step in that direction.
I think the idea of Wave is still brilliant, but it does need some polishing. My biggest beef is with the user interface. A big wave can quickly turn into a confusing mess. What's new? What's old? What do I still need to respond to?
I need more tools to manage my view on the wave. Close bits, split different subthreads with diverging topics into separate waves, flag messages as read, unread, important, interesting to others, archive-worthy, etc.
The technology is very powerful, but it needs a better UI to do it justice.
How can they honestly do a proper examination of prior art? There is really enormous amounts of code out there, it's not centralized in any way, and a lot of it is not freely accessible. How can the PTO possibly analyse all of that?
Do you need to take IBM to court? I think the only thing you need is that when IBM uses this patent to sue anyone, the defender has to point to this code and say: "look there! prior art!" And they're in the clear. The submitter wouldn't have to do anything.
At least, that's how I understand patent lawsuits.
But there is no way to ensure that there is no prior art. There is no way to know and understand all the software that has been implemented by others.
The other problem with software patents is the same thing the other way around: when writing software, it's not feasible to check whether someone might have patented any of the things you're trying to do. It puts an unreasonable burden on developers.
Whichever way you turn it, software patents can't possibly be reasonable, workable and enforceable in any reasonable way.
Unless maybe if you severely restrict the number of patents that are granted, and they are so widely publicized that everybody can know about them. Maybe patent offices should only grant patents to the 100 most innovative software inventions each year. Only true innovation with lots of expensive research behind it really needs that kind of protection anyway. If that.
I think the burden of proof is pretty unfair in most software patent cases. It's just impossible to know who might have done what when. That's exactly why software patents need to be abolished.
Patents (like registered trademarks, and unlike copyright) are assumed enforcable unless proven otherwise.
Wouldn't prior art prove otherwise?
They're not supposed to be granted in the first place if they're invalid.
I seem to recall that some years ago, the USPTO stopped checking the validity of patents, simply approving pretty much every application. It would certainly explain the flood of ridiculous patents.
Now, assuming that it does not satisfy you as an explanation, you could indicate that you are going to pursue legal action (the I in IBM stands for International) but you are willing to settle and sign away your rights for some relatively nominal fee.
What rights does he have to sign away? He didn't patent anything. He just published prior art under an open source license. So everybody already has the right to use this technology for free. IBM acquired a useless patent.
At least, that's as far as I understand patent law. Maybe someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
Didn't the USPTO some years ago stop checking the validity of patents completely, leaving it to the courts to decide whether a patent is actually valid?
That means in this particular case, the patentholder just wasted a lot of money, as the submitter's code is clearly prior art. It also raises the question why patent applications are still so expensive if the patent office doesn't actually do anything anymore. (Answer: to increase profits, of course!)
Slashdot Mirror
This whole story shouldn't be about what wiki leaks did, or who got the information. It should be about what these "diplomats" were doing and saying about each other in a non-civilized fashion. Transparency is the biggest fear of the corrupt, like light to vampires.
I just posted something, and then I noticed this. Certainly worthy of a +1 Interesting mod.
Personally, I'm quite happy with the leaks. I finally get to see how diplomats represent their countries. I value accountability a lot more than secrecy. Are there secrets that are harmful to leak? No doubt. But I think secrecy should be the exception rather than the rule.
I'm particularly amazed that governments complain about the embarrassment. Don't they always tell us that if we've done nothing wrong, we've got nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of? So what have they done wrong? I guess we know now.
But the most important issue to me is this: governments should be accountable to the people, not the other way around.
It's illegal in this country to distribute this information. Amazon had a legal obligation to terminate their relationship with Wikileaks. I feel that Wikileaks is doing nothing unethical or immoral, but illegal? It is most certainly illegal. Perhaps you should go read up on Civil Disobedience.
Is it Wikileaks that has done something illegal, or is it Amazon? Let's assume, for the sake of the argument, that distributing these documents is illegal in the US, but not elsewhere (I think that's a reasonably safe assumption, but I'm no lawyer). Wikileaks is not located in the US, so they haven't done anything illegal. At least not until they host their stuff on Amazon, which is located in the US. So it's really only the hosting on Amazon that was illegal.
If a domesticated animal has been abandoned and unwanted, the most humane thing to do is end its suffering as quickly and painlessly as possible. Keeping it caged in hopes that someone will come and adopt it may feel nice, but it isn't in the animal's best interest.
It's still an interesting question who gets to determine when death is in your best interest.
That's wht the PETA spoof is so important for them. On their site they explain how they've been trolling the PETA forums, hoping for this to happen. Apparently with success. It's a weird kind of PR, but it works, because now you've heard of Super Meat Boy. Thanks to trolling, PETA and Slashdot.
I never tried to type quickly on any touchscreen, but I am sure I can learn it.
It'll never be the same, though. You don't get the tactile feedback that you get from a real keyboard.
I'd be more worried about no mouse. What if my task is to drag and drop stuff on the vertical part for 2 hrs (assuming I cannot automate the process)? Then I end up with my arm stretched in front of me for 2 hrs. I think I'll be tired before that time.
Good point. The screen/desk/whatever it is is clearly made for dragging stuff. But how ergonomic is it to do that for a long time?
On the other hand, teachers seem to be quite able to draw on a vertical blackboard for a long time.
Looks cool, but without a keyboard (and a virtual keyboard is a lousy substitute), I wonder who this is really for. And if the screen is projected, will documents really be readable? A screen this big is either going to have a ridiculously high resolution, or it's just not good enough.
They can't work because there's nothing up there. Period.
What do you mean: there's nothing up there? There's no moon? No sunlight? No asteroids at all?
There's plenty of stuff up there. The only question is: what good is it to us?
Moon colonies sound cute, but there's not much of interest there. There's He3 which might be interesting to mine one we get the appropriate nuclear fusion tech, but not much else. (Mars, on the other hand, is much more interesting. As are space habitats.)
Space-based solar power? Sounds rather obvious to me. The sun always shines in space. The only problem is getting that power to earth. That's not a small problem, but I don't see why it can't ever be solved.
Asteroid mining? I think it's definitely going to happen some day. Some minerals are really rare on earth. Your smartphone contains metals from war-torn African countries. No idea whether the wars are about control of the mines, or the mines are used to fuel the wars, but ethically these metals are comparable to blood diamonds, and they're in every single handset in the world, because we can't get them anywhere else. But some minerals that are rare on earth, are reasonably common in some asteroids.
Then again, if you skim the "junk DNA" (which may or may not really be junk),
It's not junk. It doesn't encode genes, but it certainly does something very important.
Something interesting I learned from a Scientific American last year: the DNA difference between us and chimps is almost entirely in "junk" DNA that's practically identical in all mammals, but different in us. So as long as we don't fully understand "junk" DNA, we won't know what it is that makes us human.
Before you go off on a tangent about Guantanamo, please remember that international law allows personnel captured in combat without uniforms or other means of identifying them as combatants can be dealt with under the law of the capturing country.
And I don't think Guantanamo would have been much of an issue if that'd been what happened. Instead, they were held in a lawless vacuum.
Isn't it funny how Julian Assange is so quiet about his own personal life and background, eh?
One rule for Julian Assange. One rule for the rest of us.
I think it's "one rule for private individuals, another rule for governments". Of course the US government feels exactly the same way, only they have a different idea about what rule is for whom.
wikileaks mainly publishes leaks of government info of US... how come they don't publish stuff which embarasses india? every day there's corruption being reported in the news in india... but wikileaks covers none of it?
They post lots of stuff about other countries. When they can get their hands on it. This is easily the biggest and most high-profile leak they've ever had. But it's by no means the first.
I like Pratchett's misspelling: "the truth will make you fret"
The US wouldn't be able to win full on conventional war with Iran at this point. And the Iranians know it, hence their attitude on uranium enrichment.
The US may not have to defeat all of Iran completely. There's always been a democratic movement in Iran. Recent protests proved there's still a lot of opposition to the ayatollahs.
Of course supporting a coup has lots of risks on its own; that's what created this mess in the first place (in 1953). But if they'd be able to have honest elections without any interference from the religious leaders, that might make all the difference we need.
This is exactly what I thought. If the US is afraid that this release will damage their reputation with their allies, then doesn't that mean that maybe they shouldn't have done those embarrassing things in the first place? The leak reveals that they just haven't been very good allies.
The first thing I heard of was that apparently the US had supplied the PKK with weapons, which is completely stupefying if it's true. And apparently Turkey may have known about Turks supplying Al Qaeda-in-Iraq with weapons and not stopping it. WTF? Has the word "ally" completely lost all meaning?
It works fine. Google is just not going to push it anymore. They hope other people are going to pick it up and turn it into something cool. Who knows, they might even jump on board again when it gets some impetus. Joining Apache is certainly a good step in that direction.
I think the idea of Wave is still brilliant, but it does need some polishing. My biggest beef is with the user interface. A big wave can quickly turn into a confusing mess. What's new? What's old? What do I still need to respond to?
I need more tools to manage my view on the wave. Close bits, split different subthreads with diverging topics into separate waves, flag messages as read, unread, important, interesting to others, archive-worthy, etc.
The technology is very powerful, but it needs a better UI to do it justice.
How can they honestly do a proper examination of prior art? There is really enormous amounts of code out there, it's not centralized in any way, and a lot of it is not freely accessible. How can the PTO possibly analyse all of that?
Do you need to take IBM to court? I think the only thing you need is that when IBM uses this patent to sue anyone, the defender has to point to this code and say: "look there! prior art!" And they're in the clear. The submitter wouldn't have to do anything.
At least, that's how I understand patent lawsuits.
But there is no way to ensure that there is no prior art. There is no way to know and understand all the software that has been implemented by others.
The other problem with software patents is the same thing the other way around: when writing software, it's not feasible to check whether someone might have patented any of the things you're trying to do. It puts an unreasonable burden on developers.
Whichever way you turn it, software patents can't possibly be reasonable, workable and enforceable in any reasonable way.
Unless maybe if you severely restrict the number of patents that are granted, and they are so widely publicized that everybody can know about them. Maybe patent offices should only grant patents to the 100 most innovative software inventions each year. Only true innovation with lots of expensive research behind it really needs that kind of protection anyway. If that.
I think the burden of proof is pretty unfair in most software patent cases. It's just impossible to know who might have done what when. That's exactly why software patents need to be abolished.
Patents (like registered trademarks, and unlike copyright) are assumed enforcable unless proven otherwise.
Wouldn't prior art prove otherwise?
They're not supposed to be granted in the first place if they're invalid.
I seem to recall that some years ago, the USPTO stopped checking the validity of patents, simply approving pretty much every application. It would certainly explain the flood of ridiculous patents.
Now, assuming that it does not satisfy you as an explanation, you could indicate that you are going to pursue legal action (the I in IBM stands for International) but you are willing to settle and sign away your rights for some relatively nominal fee.
What rights does he have to sign away? He didn't patent anything. He just published prior art under an open source license. So everybody already has the right to use this technology for free. IBM acquired a useless patent.
At least, that's as far as I understand patent law. Maybe someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
Didn't the USPTO some years ago stop checking the validity of patents completely, leaving it to the courts to decide whether a patent is actually valid?
That means in this particular case, the patentholder just wasted a lot of money, as the submitter's code is clearly prior art. It also raises the question why patent applications are still so expensive if the patent office doesn't actually do anything anymore. (Answer: to increase profits, of course!)
Please, do not try to find new genres. Have you tried a new genre in cinema these days? Dogma movies?
What do you mean, movies? Is there a sequel?
How about go adopt a kid instead? There's a world full of children that need good parents.
Apparently, but it's getting harder and harder to adopt them. At least where I live.