So you're not running any GNU tools. So *your* system is *not* GNU/Linux. Nearly all systems with Linux on them, however, *are*. How hard is this, really?
Nobody supported the contras against the communists because Nicaragua was not in fact run by communists. They were a moderate-left government, about as far left as, say, Sweden, or Lula's Workers' party in Brazil. They were also elected. Cocaine producers may well have supported the contras against the moderate-leftist elected government, yes.
Meanwhile, the real reason that many perceive drugs to have been closely involved in Iran-Contra is that many believe that, since the contras were a creation of the United States and many saw the South American cocaine trade as closely entangled with the CIA at the time, it was the CIA's drug money that was being used to pay for the contras' guns (and salaries--most of them were mercenaries, after all) as a replacement for official government financing which was not forthcoming.
The contras certainly were an essentially mercenary force supported solely by the American government. Whether the CIA was using drug trade profits to help finance them, or indeed how deeply the CIA was or is involved in the South American cocaine trade, I can't say; I have the vague recollection that I've seen good evidence, but it's all long enough ago that it's gone somewhat fuzzy, so I could be wrong. But this was certainly a widespread perception, and when perceptions that run counter to the government's interests become widespread there is often something behind them.
The software may be licensed, not sold, but the conditions are not violated by the hack.
It says "You are licensed to use such software only in your Xbox product and you may not reverse engineer it, except as expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation".
Well, the hack does not replicate the software or in any way use it outside the Xbox. And it doesn't reverse engineer the software either--it wipes some away and replaces it, yes? So, it remains legal. The hardware, you own. The software, you're not violating the license of. No problem.
Which in turn means that, *even if* one construes the behaviour of the people who came up with the hack as blackmail, *it remains completely kosher* to make use of their hack. Similarly, with respect to normal blackmail, if a blackmailer releases incriminating information about a politician it remains OK for a reporter to publish that information; incriminating information about politicians isn't illegal in itself. They wish.
That's nice and all, but this assumes a few things.
It assumes the nature of people. What are real people, especially the kind who go work for security agencies, like? Our experience of police brutality suggests they're often nasty, petty and vindictive, and like hurting anyone who violates the status quo whether they're actually a threat or not. If you've got a bunch of SOBs capable of shafting anyone they don't like with one click of a mouse, it's gonna happen. Not all the time, but a fair amount.
Second, you assume these systems will actually work reliably without any false positives. This has never been the case before, why should it start being the case now? Even with what we've got, there have been numerous cases of people being put on lists for
-no reason
-because they're of arab descent
-because they're of descent that some nimrod confused with arab
-because their name is common and so they, along with three hundred other people with the same name, get hassled every time they fly because some other guy with the same name got put on a list and the people who put it there didn't supply any other details. OK, so this last one has only happened once to my knowledge.
Finally, it assumes that the uses the system will be put to are identical to the uses the system is officially claimed to be for--i.e. nabbing actual terrorists and lawbreakers. Chances are it will be hijacked to target civil rights activists, peace movement activists, antiglobalists, activist labour movements and so forth. Again, that's how things have tended to work in the past, and they're already starting to again now--at least one "antiterror" bureau has been providing police groups with frightening bulletins about how some conference of such people was really terrorists and should be preemptively arrested to stop them talking to each other. And of course there was a recent egregious case in Buffalo of cops stopping, arresting and beating up about a dozen people, apparently for the sin of cycling through the city in a group (the full group was rather larger, not all were arrested. Apparently they do an annual thing where they cycle as a big group to promote bicycle use--we're not talking radical political people here, but apparently for some police even slight shades of culturally different are enough to bring out the batons)
Between all these things, there are lots of possible reasons to worry about intensified state surveillance even if you don't happen to be a lawbreaker or a terrorist or even politically active. But certainly if you *do* happen to be politically active, or even socially active in ways you would expect not to be politically relevant, you have reason to worry.
"There probably ought to be a law restricting dumpster diving in general"!?
Of course. Let me misquote--"The law, in its majestic evenhandedness, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, from begging, stealing bread, and sleeping under bridges."
Why, exactly, should there be a law stopping people from reducing their hunger and general penury by putting wasted food to use and re-using stuff that would otherwise go into landfills? So some rich boys can feel absolutely sure that no deadbeats are getting access for free to stuff they couldn't sell? Sheesh.
The whole "some people will make it big" argument is pointless.
Yes, some people will make it big. To be precise, rather few people will make it big. Even fewer will make it big by doing something useful. And sure, those people will arguably deserve to be better off than most other people. But how much? Enough to create third-world style income and wealth disparities?
The point is that *everyone* can't make it big. And the people who do make it big depend on the existence of all the ones who don't. Someone has to do the actual work. Work is useful. The people who didn't make it big are not worthless. And in a system which is arranged to keep employment less than full for purposes of "marketplace discipline", even unemployment is useful. Or, if it isn't, it's at least required--deliberately built in. When unemployment gets too low, and the economy is considered to be "overheating" (which is to say, people might start demanding decent wages) then interest rates get pumped up to strangle the problem. Meanwhile, on an individual firm basis we know perfectly well that layoffs are essentially random nowadays. You can be a good worker who put in a good, and even innovative, day's work for 25 years and you're gone tomorrow--quick exit interview and led out by security.
Given that, blaming the unemployed people for being unemployed, or people who work at boring, backbreaking jobs for working at them, is a bit beside the point. What would we do if they stopped? We'd find out what they mean when they say "Any urban area is 24 hours away from barbarism".
If we're going to have structural unemployment, which *is* an economic choice, we have something of a duty to the people we have structurally unemployed.
And if we're going to have a society that runs on hard work, we should pay decent wages to the people who do it. This mythology that the only people creating value are "entrepreneurs" like the folks who ran Enron is dangerous nonsense.
Huh. And people always say the public sector is inefficient! We have vanishingly little of that kind of crap at the university library I work in. We have some other kinds of crap--but at least people spend most of their time getting the actual work done.
You can't sensibly say that some other
programmer should have applied (eg) BSD to some
code so as not to "restrict" users.
Second guy:
Everything else you say is true. This one
doesn't make any sense to me, though. Why can't
I?
Well, you can--but you can't have it both ways. It seems contradictory to say someone should have used a freer license (BSD) so as to give you the right to use a less free one. I mean, am I the only person who feels there's a whiff of hypocrisy there? Surely if the *other* guy ought to be using BSD, *you* should too--but that's basically all the GPL says; it gives you all the rights the BSD does, *except* the right to reduce the next guy's freedom.
Seems to me this wouldn't so much be a case for monetary payments (aside from a basic fine perhaps) as for revocation of privileges--unless they wrote all the GPL software they were distributing from scratch.
Which seems unlikely--as I understand it, the FSF normally prefers to deal legally only with software they have copyright on. Chances are, this outfit is shipping a Linux on these set-top boxes or whatever, and that Linux has GNU tools on it as per usual, thus giving the FSF their legal basis, as the copyright holders, for a suit.
Paper documents can be altered too.
They call them "forgeries", like the one about Iraq buying uranium from Africa.
Arguably, the legal system hasn't caught up to centuruies-old technology . . .
CNN is a big media corp. People working for big media corps generally are going to look better to their bosses if they make it look like The Evil Oppressor is the government, as opposed to big media corps.
"Greed drives innovation."
Sure; many things do. But it is clearly not the only thing that does, or even in the top three or so--or are you one of those people who thinks open source never innovates?
"Look at the Space Program."
Yes. Look at it. When did it go places? When it was driven by national pride and rivalry. Which parts are still doing worthwhile things today? The parts driven by scientific curiosity, which are still despite the cuts sending out really cool probes and telescopes to this day, which in turn are driving an ongoing revolution in cosmology and basic physics.
What's about the most useful thing in space? GPS, put there by the military in case it came in handy.
What has greed ever managed in space? A bunch of communications satellites, and that spectacular failure Motorola did with the cell phones. Greed doesn't drive any innovation in space, because it can't see an immediate profit.
Frankly, in the past the general tendency is that curiosity and government funding drive innovation. The internet and the web are both derivatives of government funding, one military, one scientific (CERN). Bell Labs used to be an exception--but that was largely because Ma Bell was practically a government unto itself, and could afford a long-term perspective. Since deregulation and carving up, Bell Labs is largely toast.
Now what greed really drives is implementation of existing innovation, and small incremental changes. Which is useful. But if what you want is *innovation*, don't rely on greed.
You want to know why you're at war?
Here's the link:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsrepo rts.htm
Go there and download the "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century," report.
Note that it's dated 2000. Note that it was written or backed by a number of people now influential in the Bush administration. Note that it calls for invading Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and possibly others, as well as greatly expanding the number and coverage of US military bases. Note at one point the open wish that some "Pearl harbor type" event would at some point take place to furnish the political will necessary to embark on this course. Honestly, we protestor types don't have to find dissidents or conspiracy theories any more. We can just take the frightening facts from government figures' own webpages.
Rufus Polson
finally got himself a login
Slashdot Mirror
So you're not running any GNU tools.
So *your* system is *not* GNU/Linux.
Nearly all systems with Linux on them, however, *are*.
How hard is this, really?
Nobody supported the contras against the communists because Nicaragua was not in fact run by communists. They were a moderate-left government, about as far left as, say, Sweden, or Lula's Workers' party in Brazil. They were also elected. Cocaine producers may well have supported the contras against the moderate-leftist elected government, yes. Meanwhile, the real reason that many perceive drugs to have been closely involved in Iran-Contra is that many believe that, since the contras were a creation of the United States and many saw the South American cocaine trade as closely entangled with the CIA at the time, it was the CIA's drug money that was being used to pay for the contras' guns (and salaries--most of them were mercenaries, after all) as a replacement for official government financing which was not forthcoming. The contras certainly were an essentially mercenary force supported solely by the American government. Whether the CIA was using drug trade profits to help finance them, or indeed how deeply the CIA was or is involved in the South American cocaine trade, I can't say; I have the vague recollection that I've seen good evidence, but it's all long enough ago that it's gone somewhat fuzzy, so I could be wrong. But this was certainly a widespread perception, and when perceptions that run counter to the government's interests become widespread there is often something behind them.
The software may be licensed, not sold, but the conditions are not violated by the hack. It says "You are licensed to use such software only in your Xbox product and you may not reverse engineer it, except as expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation". Well, the hack does not replicate the software or in any way use it outside the Xbox. And it doesn't reverse engineer the software either--it wipes some away and replaces it, yes? So, it remains legal. The hardware, you own. The software, you're not violating the license of. No problem. Which in turn means that, *even if* one construes the behaviour of the people who came up with the hack as blackmail, *it remains completely kosher* to make use of their hack. Similarly, with respect to normal blackmail, if a blackmailer releases incriminating information about a politician it remains OK for a reporter to publish that information; incriminating information about politicians isn't illegal in itself. They wish.
That's nice and all, but this assumes a few things. It assumes the nature of people. What are real people, especially the kind who go work for security agencies, like? Our experience of police brutality suggests they're often nasty, petty and vindictive, and like hurting anyone who violates the status quo whether they're actually a threat or not. If you've got a bunch of SOBs capable of shafting anyone they don't like with one click of a mouse, it's gonna happen. Not all the time, but a fair amount. Second, you assume these systems will actually work reliably without any false positives. This has never been the case before, why should it start being the case now? Even with what we've got, there have been numerous cases of people being put on lists for -no reason -because they're of arab descent -because they're of descent that some nimrod confused with arab -because their name is common and so they, along with three hundred other people with the same name, get hassled every time they fly because some other guy with the same name got put on a list and the people who put it there didn't supply any other details. OK, so this last one has only happened once to my knowledge. Finally, it assumes that the uses the system will be put to are identical to the uses the system is officially claimed to be for--i.e. nabbing actual terrorists and lawbreakers. Chances are it will be hijacked to target civil rights activists, peace movement activists, antiglobalists, activist labour movements and so forth. Again, that's how things have tended to work in the past, and they're already starting to again now--at least one "antiterror" bureau has been providing police groups with frightening bulletins about how some conference of such people was really terrorists and should be preemptively arrested to stop them talking to each other. And of course there was a recent egregious case in Buffalo of cops stopping, arresting and beating up about a dozen people, apparently for the sin of cycling through the city in a group (the full group was rather larger, not all were arrested. Apparently they do an annual thing where they cycle as a big group to promote bicycle use--we're not talking radical political people here, but apparently for some police even slight shades of culturally different are enough to bring out the batons) Between all these things, there are lots of possible reasons to worry about intensified state surveillance even if you don't happen to be a lawbreaker or a terrorist or even politically active. But certainly if you *do* happen to be politically active, or even socially active in ways you would expect not to be politically relevant, you have reason to worry.
"There probably ought to be a law restricting dumpster diving in general"!? Of course. Let me misquote--"The law, in its majestic evenhandedness, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, from begging, stealing bread, and sleeping under bridges." Why, exactly, should there be a law stopping people from reducing their hunger and general penury by putting wasted food to use and re-using stuff that would otherwise go into landfills? So some rich boys can feel absolutely sure that no deadbeats are getting access for free to stuff they couldn't sell? Sheesh.
The whole "some people will make it big" argument is pointless. Yes, some people will make it big. To be precise, rather few people will make it big. Even fewer will make it big by doing something useful. And sure, those people will arguably deserve to be better off than most other people. But how much? Enough to create third-world style income and wealth disparities? The point is that *everyone* can't make it big. And the people who do make it big depend on the existence of all the ones who don't. Someone has to do the actual work. Work is useful. The people who didn't make it big are not worthless. And in a system which is arranged to keep employment less than full for purposes of "marketplace discipline", even unemployment is useful. Or, if it isn't, it's at least required--deliberately built in. When unemployment gets too low, and the economy is considered to be "overheating" (which is to say, people might start demanding decent wages) then interest rates get pumped up to strangle the problem. Meanwhile, on an individual firm basis we know perfectly well that layoffs are essentially random nowadays. You can be a good worker who put in a good, and even innovative, day's work for 25 years and you're gone tomorrow--quick exit interview and led out by security. Given that, blaming the unemployed people for being unemployed, or people who work at boring, backbreaking jobs for working at them, is a bit beside the point. What would we do if they stopped? We'd find out what they mean when they say "Any urban area is 24 hours away from barbarism". If we're going to have structural unemployment, which *is* an economic choice, we have something of a duty to the people we have structurally unemployed. And if we're going to have a society that runs on hard work, we should pay decent wages to the people who do it. This mythology that the only people creating value are "entrepreneurs" like the folks who ran Enron is dangerous nonsense.
Huh. And people always say the public sector is inefficient! We have vanishingly little of that kind of crap at the university library I work in. We have some other kinds of crap--but at least people spend most of their time getting the actual work done.
You can't sensibly say that some other programmer should have applied (eg) BSD to some code so as not to "restrict" users.
Second guy:
Everything else you say is true. This one doesn't make any sense to me, though. Why can't I?
Well, you can--but you can't have it both ways. It seems contradictory to say someone should have used a freer license (BSD) so as to give you the right to use a less free one. I mean, am I the only person who feels there's a whiff of hypocrisy there? Surely if the *other* guy ought to be using BSD, *you* should too--but that's basically all the GPL says; it gives you all the rights the BSD does, *except* the right to reduce the next guy's freedom.
Seems to me this wouldn't so much be a case for monetary payments (aside from a basic fine perhaps) as for revocation of privileges--unless they wrote all the GPL software they were distributing from scratch. Which seems unlikely--as I understand it, the FSF normally prefers to deal legally only with software they have copyright on. Chances are, this outfit is shipping a Linux on these set-top boxes or whatever, and that Linux has GNU tools on it as per usual, thus giving the FSF their legal basis, as the copyright holders, for a suit.
Paper documents can be altered too. They call them "forgeries", like the one about Iraq buying uranium from Africa. Arguably, the legal system hasn't caught up to centuruies-old technology . . .
CNN is a big media corp. People working for big media corps generally are going to look better to their bosses if they make it look like The Evil Oppressor is the government, as opposed to big media corps.
Well, you can sue corporations (so far), and they're just ideas . . .
"Greed drives innovation." Sure; many things do. But it is clearly not the only thing that does, or even in the top three or so--or are you one of those people who thinks open source never innovates? "Look at the Space Program." Yes. Look at it. When did it go places? When it was driven by national pride and rivalry. Which parts are still doing worthwhile things today? The parts driven by scientific curiosity, which are still despite the cuts sending out really cool probes and telescopes to this day, which in turn are driving an ongoing revolution in cosmology and basic physics. What's about the most useful thing in space? GPS, put there by the military in case it came in handy. What has greed ever managed in space? A bunch of communications satellites, and that spectacular failure Motorola did with the cell phones. Greed doesn't drive any innovation in space, because it can't see an immediate profit. Frankly, in the past the general tendency is that curiosity and government funding drive innovation. The internet and the web are both derivatives of government funding, one military, one scientific (CERN). Bell Labs used to be an exception--but that was largely because Ma Bell was practically a government unto itself, and could afford a long-term perspective. Since deregulation and carving up, Bell Labs is largely toast. Now what greed really drives is implementation of existing innovation, and small incremental changes. Which is useful. But if what you want is *innovation*, don't rely on greed.
There is no fork!
You want to know why you're at war? Here's the link: http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsrepo rts.htm
Go there and download the "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century," report.
Note that it's dated 2000. Note that it was written or backed by a number of people now influential in the Bush administration. Note that it calls for invading Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and possibly others, as well as greatly expanding the number and coverage of US military bases. Note at one point the open wish that some "Pearl harbor type" event would at some point take place to furnish the political will necessary to embark on this course. Honestly, we protestor types don't have to find dissidents or conspiracy theories any more. We can just take the frightening facts from government figures' own webpages.
Rufus Polson
finally got himself a login