You are absolutely correct. The philosophical underpinnings of the US Constitution are that all rights, every last one of them, belong to the people, and only by their explicit consent can government violate them.
The right to be secure in your self and your property belongs to you. It requires the highest law in the land, the constitution, to allow the government to violate that via search and seizure.
A private company cannot do this without explicit permission from you, such as in the form of a contract. The DMCA is wrong.
It doesn't have to explicitly specify that it is the government which limited in search in seizures, because this is a part of the US Constitution, which specifically applies only to the US Government.
Under a strict definition of libertarianism, then you would be right. One could certainly contract away their privacy.
But the offtopic topic at hand was the reference to the "libertarian excesses" of the drug war. Come again? How can throwing people in jail for shoving strange substances up their noses be in any way considered "libertarian"?
There have been a lot of sensible proposals for the secure safe storage of nuclear waste, but every one has been shouted down by the "anti-nuke" crowd. Not in my county! Not in my state. Heck, not even in my continent!
What's wrong with abandoned salt mines? It may not be perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than steels drums sitting around. Or what about encasing the waste in ceramic nodules and dumping them into the Marianas trench? Digging mile long shafts into geologically stable granite mountains?
Europe's using a heck of a lot of nuclear power. Probably ten times what the US is using. What do they do with it?
This is another example of large businesses desiring regulation. Most people think businesses don't want any government intervention in their industry. This is just wrong. The will desire it if it hurts their competition more than it hurts them.
Large ossified businesses don't want to compete with small agile businesses. The easiest and cheapest way to do this is to tax and regulate the small business out of business [sic]. It's nothing new. The guilds of the medieval and renaissance eras performed only one function, to lobby the king to pass laws keeping competition at bay. Unions today do much the same thing on the other side of the coin.
The current crop of regulations means that a business must employ of lawyers in order to understand and thus stay on the right side of the law. This is not a problem for large businesses. But a small business just can't afford it. Regulations that are mere nuisances to entities as large corporations, but which serve to keep others out of the market, will be supported by the likes of AT&T, IBM, Siemens, GE, Motorola, Philips, etc.
There once has a fabulous apple tree. No matter how many apples one would take from it, there were just as many as before! When this was heard by the villagers they all rushed to the apple tree and took apples. But no matter how many they took, there were just as many apples as before. But some of them came and took apples and locked them within a chest, so that none could steal them. And they laughed at the other villagers, saying, "Look, they do not protect their apples. Surely a thief will come and steal them."
Licensing issues mostly. But licensing issues of a pragmatic, not religious, nature. Unlike Linux, the userlands of the BSDs are an integral part of a single source tree. It's much easier to release the entire OS under a single license. It's to the benefit of the developers and the users. But when some code is not "BSD license compatible", it becomes a pain in the butt.
The difference is that Microsoft is a market monopoly. You don't go to jail for creating a competing operating system. But if there's a state chartered monopoly and you compete with it, jail becomes a real possibility.
Just try delivering first class mail without working for the USPS if you don't believe me.
Most of the people who are against it are the typical nay-sayers who are going to be against any type of progress/innovation.
I'm generally opposed to electronic voting, but I am all in favor of progress and "innovation". But as a software engineer, I know all too well the propensity of human beings to view technology as an infallible magic. At work we are building a networked embedded system using out-of-the-box WinXP Pro. This is a $200K system used in the medical field. Anyone see the problem here? Unfortunately, the average registrar of voters belongs to the same species as the average upper level corporate manager.
The only way I would potentially support electronic voting is for it to be completely and 100% open from front to back. But that's just the minimum requirement for me. So far no proposed system under consideration meets even that.
Well here in California some ballots were found floating is SF bay, and a ballot box left too long in the trunk of a pollworker's car. I don't have the facts, but I read it in several different local newspapers. No, I don't have sources, since I through out newspapers more than a week old.
But simple logic should tell you that after a few recounts in Dade county involving manual handling, the odds of unpunched chads becoming loose or even falling out, are not insignificant.
I also have experience on the latter. I spent a few months working for a major printing press that had the contract for the upcoming state primary elections for several states. All the ballots were punch-style. Loose chads were all over the floor at the end of the shift. Just sliding a ballot sheet over another would guarantee a chad dropping out. Fortunately there were a lot of QA procedures in place. Overall the damaged ballots would be an insignificant factor in an election. But when the 2000 Florida race was so close, that factor could make a whole bunch of people get their panties in a twist.
Re:But there *are* things we cant do for ourselves
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This is inevitably a government task, or markets end up breaking down.
The proof of which can be seen in every anarchist and minarchist free market society available for study.
It's going to be part of the next generation of GNOME. But I hope to heck it won't be the standard of the next generation of GNOME.
Reading through these threads, it seems to me like there's two types of people. One type is hierarchically organized, the other disorganized completely. I know of no one is is organized relationally out in the non-computer world. Oh, I'm sure there's a few, but I've never met any.
So neither of the two types of people will get much utility out of this filesystem. The first type won't need it. And the second type won't organize their metadata to make it useful.
Thus, it shouldn't be the standard for the next generation of GNOME. Keep working on it. Make it available. But get it usable for the average bloke before you impose it on everyone.
If my filesystem becomes corrupt, I can recover most of it. Heck, I might even be able to recover all of it.
I think the core problem here is RDBMS versus The World. When you've been raised to fervently believe in your soul that RDBMS is the answer to everything, then everything else is a heresy. Heck, why not just get rid of the files while you're at it.
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You are absolutely correct. The philosophical underpinnings of the US Constitution are that all rights, every last one of them, belong to the people, and only by their explicit consent can government violate them.
The right to be secure in your self and your property belongs to you. It requires the highest law in the land, the constitution, to allow the government to violate that via search and seizure.
A private company cannot do this without explicit permission from you, such as in the form of a contract. The DMCA is wrong.
It doesn't have to explicitly specify that it is the government which limited in search in seizures, because this is a part of the US Constitution, which specifically applies only to the US Government.
Under a strict definition of libertarianism, then you would be right. One could certainly contract away their privacy.
But the offtopic topic at hand was the reference to the "libertarian excesses" of the drug war. Come again? How can throwing people in jail for shoving strange substances up their noses be in any way considered "libertarian"?
Even the worst libertarian excesses of the 1980s War on Drugs, as presided over by Edwin Meese...
You might want to pick up a dictionary and look at the word "libertarian".
There have been a lot of sensible proposals for the secure safe storage of nuclear waste, but every one has been shouted down by the "anti-nuke" crowd. Not in my county! Not in my state. Heck, not even in my continent!
What's wrong with abandoned salt mines? It may not be perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than steels drums sitting around. Or what about encasing the waste in ceramic nodules and dumping them into the Marianas trench? Digging mile long shafts into geologically stable granite mountains?
Europe's using a heck of a lot of nuclear power. Probably ten times what the US is using. What do they do with it?
This is another example of large businesses desiring regulation. Most people think businesses don't want any government intervention in their industry. This is just wrong. The will desire it if it hurts their competition more than it hurts them.
Large ossified businesses don't want to compete with small agile businesses. The easiest and cheapest way to do this is to tax and regulate the small business out of business [sic]. It's nothing new. The guilds of the medieval and renaissance eras performed only one function, to lobby the king to pass laws keeping competition at bay. Unions today do much the same thing on the other side of the coin.
The current crop of regulations means that a business must employ of lawyers in order to understand and thus stay on the right side of the law. This is not a problem for large businesses. But a small business just can't afford it. Regulations that are mere nuisances to entities as large corporations, but which serve to keep others out of the market, will be supported by the likes of AT&T, IBM, Siemens, GE, Motorola, Philips, etc.
If ext2fs is both fast and reliable, then why the heck is every Linux distro dumping it for ext3, xfs or reiserfs?
There once has a fabulous apple tree. No matter how many apples one would take from it, there were just as many as before! When this was heard by the villagers they all rushed to the apple tree and took apples. But no matter how many they took, there were just as many apples as before. But some of them came and took apples and locked them within a chest, so that none could steal them. And they laughed at the other villagers, saying, "Look, they do not protect their apples. Surely a thief will come and steal them."
Licensing issues mostly. But licensing issues of a pragmatic, not religious, nature. Unlike Linux, the userlands of the BSDs are an integral part of a single source tree. It's much easier to release the entire OS under a single license. It's to the benefit of the developers and the users. But when some code is not "BSD license compatible", it becomes a pain in the butt.
The difference is that Microsoft is a market monopoly. You don't go to jail for creating a competing operating system. But if there's a state chartered monopoly and you compete with it, jail becomes a real possibility.
Just try delivering first class mail without working for the USPS if you don't believe me.
Most of the people who are against it are the typical nay-sayers who are going to be against any type of progress/innovation.
I'm generally opposed to electronic voting, but I am all in favor of progress and "innovation". But as a software engineer, I know all too well the propensity of human beings to view technology as an infallible magic. At work we are building a networked embedded system using out-of-the-box WinXP Pro. This is a $200K system used in the medical field. Anyone see the problem here? Unfortunately, the average registrar of voters belongs to the same species as the average upper level corporate manager.
The only way I would potentially support electronic voting is for it to be completely and 100% open from front to back. But that's just the minimum requirement for me. So far no proposed system under consideration meets even that.
Well here in California some ballots were found floating is SF bay, and a ballot box left too long in the trunk of a pollworker's car. I don't have the facts, but I read it in several different local newspapers. No, I don't have sources, since I through out newspapers more than a week old.
But simple logic should tell you that after a few recounts in Dade county involving manual handling, the odds of unpunched chads becoming loose or even falling out, are not insignificant.
I also have experience on the latter. I spent a few months working for a major printing press that had the contract for the upcoming state primary elections for several states. All the ballots were punch-style. Loose chads were all over the floor at the end of the shift. Just sliding a ballot sheet over another would guarantee a chad dropping out. Fortunately there were a lot of QA procedures in place. Overall the damaged ballots would be an insignificant factor in an election. But when the 2000 Florida race was so close, that factor could make a whole bunch of people get their panties in a twist.
This is inevitably a government task, or markets end up breaking down.
The proof of which can be seen in every anarchist and minarchist free market society available for study.
It's going to be part of the next generation of GNOME. But I hope to heck it won't be the standard of the next generation of GNOME.
Reading through these threads, it seems to me like there's two types of people. One type is hierarchically organized, the other disorganized completely. I know of no one is is organized relationally out in the non-computer world. Oh, I'm sure there's a few, but I've never met any.
So neither of the two types of people will get much utility out of this filesystem. The first type won't need it. And the second type won't organize their metadata to make it useful.
Thus, it shouldn't be the standard for the next generation of GNOME. Keep working on it. Make it available. But get it usable for the average bloke before you impose it on everyone.
If my filesystem becomes corrupt, I can recover most of it. Heck, I might even be able to recover all of it. I think the core problem here is RDBMS versus The World. When you've been raised to fervently believe in your soul that RDBMS is the answer to everything, then everything else is a heresy. Heck, why not just get rid of the files while you're at it.