So just digitally sign everything you personally rip. I don't see how that could be so difficult.
It's not that such a thing is difficult, it's that there is never any point where a user has reason to do that.
The point of knowing the origin of each file is to avoid infringement, but if you want to avoid infringement, then you simply won't infringe, so your whole collection is whitelisted by default.
There isn't any way to look at a file and know whether you encoded it or someone else encoded it, unless you had the foresight when you encoded it, to somehow indicate so.
And more importantly, there isn't any way to look at a file and determine whether or not it was transmitted to you with the authorization of the copyright holder, or without that authorization. That's impossible. If that were even remotely possible, then someone would have invented a non-user-hostile DRM system by now.
The thing you want can't be done. Anyone who offers you a technical solution will be attempting to defraud you.
If you go by what the MAFIAA advocates through their DRM values, the best approach is "assume the worst." Just as DRM always assumes that anything that might be used or could be used for infringement, must be prohibited by default, any file of yours which might or could be the product of infringement should be deleted by default. If you don't remember where you got it, delete it.
If that's not an acceptable approach to you (i.e. too much collateral damage), then it sounds like you are not at peace with MAFIAA thinking. In which case, I advise you to stop worrying. Just accept that you might have some pirated files, and do your best going forward in accordance with your own ethics. Nobody really gives a fuck that you pirated some song 10 years ago.
It sounds like the lesson here is that iPhone users are still willing to pay for what are essentially specialized Yellow Pages. I don't mean to knock your app (it actually sounds like something that I would like and maybe I'll check it out later today), but it's pretty amazing that users (rather than the businesses getting listed) would be willing to pay for something like that. (OTOH if the businesses pay, then the listings lose integrity so no users want to use it, so.. hey, it's a dilemma.)
Apple users are very special people and we should encourage them to stay that way. But I sure wouldn't want to be one.
People see the front page of Market? I thought the first thing someone did upon launching the Market app, was go into search and start typing whatever they're looking for.
But if that makes it Fair Use, then Righthaven won't make money off suing you, so by using the material under Fair Use, you're impacting their "sewer" business and revenue, which removes the Fair Use defense. I think Ray Liotta expressed this as "Fuck you, pay me!"
So a company can't hire a third party law firm to blanket sue?
If I understand this case correctly (and maybe I don't), they still can, but the copyright holder still
needs to be the plaintiff, with the company they hire being their representation. It sounds like what
happened here, is that Righthaven themselves were the plaintiffs.
For example, say your ISP's DHCP server gives you the same address that was used a few weeks earlier by
someone who died, but whose daughter had set up a wireless router, and someone else was using that
router to bittorrent a Disney movie. You're a suspected Disney copyright infringer. But instead
of getting a summons where Disney (represented by Righthaven) is suing you, you get a letter saying
Righthaven is suing you.
Assuming that's how the Righthaven attacks worked, it's fun to speculate about why Righthaven built
a business like this. One of the things we learned from all the RIAA actions was that they were
frought with mistakes, often suing people who clearly didn't infringe the copyrights. Maybe
Righthaven's gimmick is to tell copyright holders that by not being the actual plaintiffs, they can
go after suspected copyright infringers without the copyright holder taking big liability risks, since
mass-infringement lawsuits are so randomly scattershot and error-prone, and open up the plaintiffs to
countersuits, sanctions, etc. Since many of the people being sued probably didn't actually infringe, all
it takes is one of them with the resources to fight back, then it could be costly for the plaintiff. Does
Disney want to pay for that? Fuck no. Enter Righthaven, offering to take the risk in exchange for higher fees.
Is it wise to run a browser (and when Chrome OS comes out, a full fledged operating system) pushed by the biggest advertising, tracking, and marketing company on the web?
It's wise to be cautious and go into the decision with no faith.
The awesome thing about Free Software, is that it doesn't require faith. Chromium is there for you to see. If you like what you see, then there's nothing unwise about running it.
Sooo. If 51% of Americans voted to teach only creationism in schools and evolution should be illegal that should be ok by your rules?
[Assuming a scenario where First Amendment has already been repealed.] It wouldn't be "ok" but it would have to be allowed. America has the right to self-destruction, if that's what we really want.
Let's say we answer the question with "no, that would be completely intolerable and would have to be forcefully resisted." How could that be done?
One answer would be to have a powerful government, which just happens to have a pro-science agenda, and have that government defy the will of the people.
Another answer would be to have a civil war where the side that wins just happens to be the pro-science side.
(Got any others?)
The terrible weakness with relying on these strategies to uphold science, is the "just happens" part. The balance of power could easily tilt the other way. If you start arming for civil war or you put more power into the hands of government so that they can oppress the 51% anti-science majority, I have to ask, what are you going to do when these powers take a creationist position and try to assert themselves over 51% pro-science citizenry?
(This kind of thing (to a lesser degree) happens all the time. Remember the 2000s when the Bush whitehouse advocated a larger government and a strongly-liberal interpretation of the powers of the executive branch? Everyone chuckled and asked "How are you going to feel about a more invasive government and stronger president, when the president is a Democrat?" They ignored the question, but sure enough, a Democrat president was elected and the Republicans are now pretty fucking sore that they so heedlessly abandoned conservativism, and now they're over-reacting, desperately trying to convince voters that they're the small-government-with-balanced-branches party -- and the only way they can do it is to take positions that look ridiculously over-the-top from the centrists' point of view, so it's going to cost them the next election. It should be interesting to see if the Republican president from 2016-2024 repeats Bush's mistakes.) It's dangerous to invest someone with power over others, unless you know what they're going to do with that power, and with institutions you never know, long-term, what they're going to want to do.
Democracy isn't the problem here; thoughtless opinions (whether about the viability of nuclear energy, or how science forms theories, or whatever) are the problem. If you don't like how people vote, I think you're better off working harder to persuade them, rather than taking away their political power.
If Italy wants to have one fewer energy options on its table, what could you do about that, without being even more harmful to Italy?
Yes, but did your system automatically contact the person being tagged and then refuse to work if the other person declined?
TFA says the patent is broad, but it sounds pretty narrow to me. IMHO, it's not only narrow, but narrow to the point of completely uselessness. I would never want to violate this patent (not that a programmer doing his job ever has that choice or even the knowledge of how many dozenss of patents they routinely and unwittingly violate every day).
If you actually feel insecure about your abilities as a designer/programmer for secure systems, then you're probably 10x better than the people who actually make the stuff everyone uses.;-)
It's not encrypted end-to-end when security services can listen in.
No, that's just it. It very well can be encrypted end-to-end yet have virtually worthless security. That's why whenever someone merely brags about having encryption, it should set off alarms in your head. You can't meaningfully talk about encrypted communications without also talking about how keys are exchanged. Anyone who glosses over the topic of key exchange is probably bullshitting you. And guess what: Skype glosses over the topic of key exchange.
You've got a good point: if Facebook users start using Skype to talk to each other instead of reading and writing, they'll end up illiterate. I think the big question here, is why did Skype do their trials in Detroit instead of somewhere more affluent where more people are on the "have" side of the digital divide?
Chris Rock is either not a programmer or his desires are rare.
It would be trivial to implement a preference that when enabled, monitors the estimated-remaining-energy and warn/refuse certain tasks when it falls to a reserve amount.
If the iPhone doesn't have that yet, then it must be because not very many people consider always-available to be a super-important need. People got along for tens of thousands of years without always having a charged phone ready for emergencies. It's a nice thing to have but risking it being down sometimes is ok, because there's almost always a Plan B available.
And when there isn't a Plan B, you're that one-in-a-million case. If you worry about that sort of thing, you have bigger problems than applications competing for your battery. The price of an extra battery is negligible compared to what you paid for the plate armor that you always wear (even when it gets unpleasantly hot inside your bomb shelter).
If the difference between an iPod touch and an iPhone were really a dollar's worth of hardware, as Cajun Hell seems to think
And just to be clear, yes, I do think that. While I'm exaggerating when I say it's a dollar, I think it's a lot closer to a dollar than the hundreds of dollars in price difference. Those hundreds of dollars of extra hardware just aren't there in the iPhone.
the iPhone wouldn't need to be subsidized by the carrier
Maybe Apple charges a lot for it. Apple product pricing tends to be more oriented toward what people ware willing to pay, rather than whiteboxer's cost+markup where competitors erode markup. Whatever I think of their products, I must admit they've maneuvered brilliantly.
The die-hard Android or (gasp!) Windows phone users have no interest in buying an iPhone, but most of them will agree that the iPod is much sweeter than that POS Phillips/Sony/etc. they're currently packing around.
Are you speaking as such a person? If you are, then I guess you represent that group so I can't argue that your opinion isn't what it is.;)
Otherwise, I'm sceptical that any die-hard Android users really think the iPod is so overwhelmingly great at playing music. I've used an iPod and there's nothing special about its music-playing capabilities (other than the fact that, compared to other players, it's so hard to get music onto and it likes to delete things when you sync unless you're very careful). So if you're arguing that the iPod is better because Android player apps suck, I think software can be fixed and Apple can't count on that never happening.
The iPod-is-deaders were right, but for wrong the reasons. It's true that no one listens to 1000 songs, but anyone working in tech knows that storage will expand. If this years model has 1000 song capacity, the next one will have 5000 and within a few years you'll find something that works for you.
Nevertheless, that product really is doomed, though not as an evolutionary dead-end. The iPhone replaces it.
All small gizmos are converging and for some reason, whenever application X combines with application phonecall, we end up calling the device a phone rather than an X. Phone is the "top" app (even if some people don't use that part of the device, it's still called a "phone"). An music player (even if it's an iPod) that makes phone calls isn't called a music player, a camera that makes phone calls isn't called a camera, and so on.
What is the iPod right now, but an iPhone with one less network interface? Eventually it's going to be cheaper for Apple to have one less manufacturing line, even accounting for the extra 50 cent cost of the cell network chip. And that's be the end of the iPod.
If you take a long view, Ballmer was right about the iPhone too. Apple's fractional share of the market will continue to fall. But it's a mistake to think that means Apple will lose money, because it'll be a tiny sliver of a motherfucking huge market.
I think you're repeating the oft-made mistake here of thinking the operation in Iraq had something to do with the "War on Terror".
(Did you read my post?) No, I'm thinking that whatever money was spent on the Iraq war, can't be counted toward the cost of killing Bin Laden. MonsterTrimble tried to make it sounds like trillions of dollars were spent to kill Bin Laden. I have heard a lot of whackjob conspiracy theories and I have heard some very plausible explanations for why the Iraq war happened, but so far nobody has suggested that Iraq was invaded as part of Bush's brilliant round-about way of gathering intell about Bin Laden's address or guard-changing schedule.
Just my luck, it'll turn out to be true. Next month we'll read a story that someone in Pakistan knew where Bin Laden was and was willing to cough up the info. But instead of settling for the half-million dollar reward, he said he'd only reveal the coordinates if the US government could make his dream come true of running a profitable ice cream store in Bagdad. But Saddam Hussein hated ice cream and would never let it happen. After much negotiating, Bush reluctantly agreed to invade Iraq.
Some turmoil followed, but was eventually sorted out. The informant was finally able to enter Iraq in 2005 and open the store, but the economy was shit and the store didn't make a profit. After filing Chapter 7 in 2008, the informant tried again and opened a yogurt store and it worked and he made it into a good business. Then in October 2010 he got an idea to use the success of this yogurt business to subsidize the building of a new ice cream campaign. At first it didn't work, but then in mid-April he was going over the 1st quarter 2011 results and realized he made a slight profit on ice cream itself if you ignored the start up costs, and his accountant explained that he had to, since those were written off in 4th quarter 2010. So he called the White House to make good on the deal, got the runaround since the person who answered the phone thought it was a prank call when he asked for President Bush, but it eventually got ironed out and he spoke to President Obama on April 23 and gave him Bin Laden's address. The hit squad sprang into action.
That's believable, but is it true? Maybe, maybe not. If it is, then MonsterTrimble's claim that trillions of dollars were spent to kill Bin Laden will be validated and everyone can say I'm a damn fool for arguing with him. But I submit to you that we don't really have any evidence that Saddam Hussein hated ice cream. So how do you explain that?!
That expense is spread over many other goals. Trillions of dollars weren't spent to kill Bin Laden (but probably a few million were). Trillions of dollars were spent to overthrow the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, suppress Al Quaida, make profit for contractors who have friends in government, etc. Killing a particular person is only part of that overall objective.
I understand that they would want to minimize the impact in the islamic world by not defiling his body in any way which was recorded
IMHO even that was a mistake, but I'm no diplomat. I would have thought the best PR would be to treat him as a non-muslim, to emphasize (i.e. assert) that Bin Laden's decisions were contrary to any sort of mainstream Islamic teachings. But maybe thinking that is one of the many reasons I'm not president.
You don't just need a network firewall; with the modern mobile platforms you really need an API / IPC firewall. And it should come with optional honeypots too.
Exactly - there's no benefit to a company in developing a nice, free, safe application. Either they need ad revenue, or people have to start paying for software again.
Or people have to stop thinking of "companies" as where you get commodity software. How much do you pay for a kernel these days? (Or a media player or web browser or text editor or file manger?) These things are worth a lot but it wouldn't even occur to me to buy them; you don't get these things from "companies," you get them from the repository without thinking how/if they were originally funded.
It's understood that if your software is generic enough that pretty much everyone in the world has a use for it, then whatever development costs it had are amortized down to nearly $0 per user. So it's either going to be subsidized by someone like Red Hat's customers who needed it before it was readily available, or it's written/maintained by amateurs who have the freedom to concentration on its functionality without having to worry about how that functionality may conflict with making a profit.
Everyone knew this already. It's just that when the iPhone came out, some people tried to live in denial. Some were lucky because their users had forgotten, so a few people made money selling through Apple's store. At the time, tiny PCs were viewed as novel where maybe all the inevitable economic rules wouldn't really be inevitable. But now everyone is getting reminders of how real life works, so if the application you want isn't Free Software, and if you didn't pay real money for it, then it is almost certainly spyware/malware.
Spyware/malware is what you should expect to find in a $0.99 app store. If it's not Free and it's not expensive, then it sucks.
Ask anyone who steps out out of a 2007 time capsule, and he might not know this, his eyes full of stars and his mind clouded by idealistic delusions. But ask the guy who stepped out of the 2006 time capsule, and he does remember it. Ask the newbie Linux user who migrated from one of the proprietary desktops, and he'll be amazed that you even asked something so blindingly obvious, right before he starts preaching to you.
Fortunately, we're on our way back to the 2006 software market, and we'll have 2011 hardware to run it on, when we get there.;-)
The reason that's such small comfort, is that the 4th Amendment doesn't say illegal evidence won't be used in court; it says the rights of the people.. shall not be infringed. As long as we view convictions as the only way that government may harm people, police will continue to do these things.
There need to be statutes that put the "illegal" back into "illegal search and seizure." Cops who consider illegally searching/seizing should be weighing the benefits of the activity against the sentences that they might end up serving.
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It's not that such a thing is difficult, it's that there is never any point where a user has reason to do that.
The point of knowing the origin of each file is to avoid infringement, but if you want to avoid infringement, then you simply won't infringe, so your whole collection is whitelisted by default.
There isn't any way to look at a file and know whether you encoded it or someone else encoded it, unless you had the foresight when you encoded it, to somehow indicate so.
And more importantly, there isn't any way to look at a file and determine whether or not it was transmitted to you with the authorization of the copyright holder, or without that authorization. That's impossible. If that were even remotely possible, then someone would have invented a non-user-hostile DRM system by now.
The thing you want can't be done. Anyone who offers you a technical solution will be attempting to defraud you.
If you go by what the MAFIAA advocates through their DRM values, the best approach is "assume the worst." Just as DRM always assumes that anything that might be used or could be used for infringement, must be prohibited by default, any file of yours which might or could be the product of infringement should be deleted by default. If you don't remember where you got it, delete it.
If that's not an acceptable approach to you (i.e. too much collateral damage), then it sounds like you are not at peace with MAFIAA thinking. In which case, I advise you to stop worrying. Just accept that you might have some pirated files, and do your best going forward in accordance with your own ethics. Nobody really gives a fuck that you pirated some song 10 years ago.
It sounds like the lesson here is that iPhone users are still willing to pay for what are essentially specialized Yellow Pages. I don't mean to knock your app (it actually sounds like something that I would like and maybe I'll check it out later today), but it's pretty amazing that users (rather than the businesses getting listed) would be willing to pay for something like that. (OTOH if the businesses pay, then the listings lose integrity so no users want to use it, so .. hey, it's a dilemma.)
Apple users are very special people and we should encourage them to stay that way. But I sure wouldn't want to be one.
People see the front page of Market? I thought the first thing someone did upon launching the Market app, was go into search and start typing whatever they're looking for.
But if that makes it Fair Use, then Righthaven won't make money off suing you, so by using the material under Fair Use, you're impacting their "sewer" business and revenue, which removes the Fair Use defense. I think Ray Liotta expressed this as "Fuck you, pay me!"
If I understand this case correctly (and maybe I don't), they still can, but the copyright holder still needs to be the plaintiff, with the company they hire being their representation. It sounds like what happened here, is that Righthaven themselves were the plaintiffs.
For example, say your ISP's DHCP server gives you the same address that was used a few weeks earlier by someone who died, but whose daughter had set up a wireless router, and someone else was using that router to bittorrent a Disney movie. You're a suspected Disney copyright infringer. But instead of getting a summons where Disney (represented by Righthaven) is suing you, you get a letter saying Righthaven is suing you.
Assuming that's how the Righthaven attacks worked, it's fun to speculate about why Righthaven built a business like this. One of the things we learned from all the RIAA actions was that they were frought with mistakes, often suing people who clearly didn't infringe the copyrights. Maybe Righthaven's gimmick is to tell copyright holders that by not being the actual plaintiffs, they can go after suspected copyright infringers without the copyright holder taking big liability risks, since mass-infringement lawsuits are so randomly scattershot and error-prone, and open up the plaintiffs to countersuits, sanctions, etc. Since many of the people being sued probably didn't actually infringe, all it takes is one of them with the resources to fight back, then it could be costly for the plaintiff. Does Disney want to pay for that? Fuck no. Enter Righthaven, offering to take the risk in exchange for higher fees.
It's wise to be cautious and go into the decision with no faith.
The awesome thing about Free Software, is that it doesn't require faith. Chromium is there for you to see. If you like what you see, then there's nothing unwise about running it.
[Assuming a scenario where First Amendment has already been repealed.] It wouldn't be "ok" but it would have to be allowed. America has the right to self-destruction, if that's what we really want.
Let's say we answer the question with "no, that would be completely intolerable and would have to be forcefully resisted." How could that be done?
One answer would be to have a powerful government, which just happens to have a pro-science agenda, and have that government defy the will of the people.
Another answer would be to have a civil war where the side that wins just happens to be the pro-science side.
(Got any others?)
The terrible weakness with relying on these strategies to uphold science, is the "just happens" part. The balance of power could easily tilt the other way. If you start arming for civil war or you put more power into the hands of government so that they can oppress the 51% anti-science majority, I have to ask, what are you going to do when these powers take a creationist position and try to assert themselves over 51% pro-science citizenry?
(This kind of thing (to a lesser degree) happens all the time. Remember the 2000s when the Bush whitehouse advocated a larger government and a strongly-liberal interpretation of the powers of the executive branch? Everyone chuckled and asked "How are you going to feel about a more invasive government and stronger president, when the president is a Democrat?" They ignored the question, but sure enough, a Democrat president was elected and the Republicans are now pretty fucking sore that they so heedlessly abandoned conservativism, and now they're over-reacting, desperately trying to convince voters that they're the small-government-with-balanced-branches party -- and the only way they can do it is to take positions that look ridiculously over-the-top from the centrists' point of view, so it's going to cost them the next election. It should be interesting to see if the Republican president from 2016-2024 repeats Bush's mistakes.) It's dangerous to invest someone with power over others, unless you know what they're going to do with that power, and with institutions you never know, long-term, what they're going to want to do.
Democracy isn't the problem here; thoughtless opinions (whether about the viability of nuclear energy, or how science forms theories, or whatever) are the problem. If you don't like how people vote, I think you're better off working harder to persuade them, rather than taking away their political power.
If Italy wants to have one fewer energy options on its table, what could you do about that, without being even more harmful to Italy?
Yes, but did your system automatically contact the person being tagged and then refuse to work if the other person declined?
TFA says the patent is broad, but it sounds pretty narrow to me. IMHO, it's not only narrow, but narrow to the point of completely uselessness. I would never want to violate this patent (not that a programmer doing his job ever has that choice or even the knowledge of how many dozenss of patents they routinely and unwittingly violate every day).
Google makes a decent (not great, but decent) OS, so use that. But for fuck's sake, don't use it for what they want you to use it for.
If you actually feel insecure about your abilities as a designer/programmer for secure systems, then you're probably 10x better than the people who actually make the stuff everyone uses. ;-)
That would give us enough salt to last forever!!
No, that's just it. It very well can be encrypted end-to-end yet have virtually worthless security. That's why whenever someone merely brags about having encryption, it should set off alarms in your head. You can't meaningfully talk about encrypted communications without also talking about how keys are exchanged. Anyone who glosses over the topic of key exchange is probably bullshitting you. And guess what: Skype glosses over the topic of key exchange.
You've got a good point: if Facebook users start using Skype to talk to each other instead of reading and writing, they'll end up illiterate. I think the big question here, is why did Skype do their trials in Detroit instead of somewhere more affluent where more people are on the "have" side of the digital divide?
Chris Rock is either not a programmer or his desires are rare.
It would be trivial to implement a preference that when enabled, monitors the estimated-remaining-energy and warn/refuse certain tasks when it falls to a reserve amount.
If the iPhone doesn't have that yet, then it must be because not very many people consider always-available to be a super-important need. People got along for tens of thousands of years without always having a charged phone ready for emergencies. It's a nice thing to have but risking it being down sometimes is ok, because there's almost always a Plan B available.
And when there isn't a Plan B, you're that one-in-a-million case. If you worry about that sort of thing, you have bigger problems than applications competing for your battery. The price of an extra battery is negligible compared to what you paid for the plate armor that you always wear (even when it gets unpleasantly hot inside your bomb shelter).
And just to be clear, yes, I do think that. While I'm exaggerating when I say it's a dollar, I think it's a lot closer to a dollar than the hundreds of dollars in price difference. Those hundreds of dollars of extra hardware just aren't there in the iPhone.
Maybe Apple charges a lot for it. Apple product pricing tends to be more oriented toward what people ware willing to pay, rather than whiteboxer's cost+markup where competitors erode markup. Whatever I think of their products, I must admit they've maneuvered brilliantly.
Are you speaking as such a person? If you are, then I guess you represent that group so I can't argue that your opinion isn't what it is. ;)
Otherwise, I'm sceptical that any die-hard Android users really think the iPod is so overwhelmingly great at playing music. I've used an iPod and there's nothing special about its music-playing capabilities (other than the fact that, compared to other players, it's so hard to get music onto and it likes to delete things when you sync unless you're very careful). So if you're arguing that the iPod is better because Android player apps suck, I think software can be fixed and Apple can't count on that never happening.
The iPod-is-deaders were right, but for wrong the reasons. It's true that no one listens to 1000 songs, but anyone working in tech knows that storage will expand. If this years model has 1000 song capacity, the next one will have 5000 and within a few years you'll find something that works for you.
Nevertheless, that product really is doomed, though not as an evolutionary dead-end. The iPhone replaces it.
All small gizmos are converging and for some reason, whenever application X combines with application phonecall, we end up calling the device a phone rather than an X. Phone is the "top" app (even if some people don't use that part of the device, it's still called a "phone"). An music player (even if it's an iPod) that makes phone calls isn't called a music player, a camera that makes phone calls isn't called a camera, and so on.
What is the iPod right now, but an iPhone with one less network interface? Eventually it's going to be cheaper for Apple to have one less manufacturing line, even accounting for the extra 50 cent cost of the cell network chip. And that's be the end of the iPod.
If you take a long view, Ballmer was right about the iPhone too. Apple's fractional share of the market will continue to fall. But it's a mistake to think that means Apple will lose money, because it'll be a tiny sliver of a motherfucking huge market.
(Did you read my post?) No, I'm thinking that whatever money was spent on the Iraq war, can't be counted toward the cost of killing Bin Laden. MonsterTrimble tried to make it sounds like trillions of dollars were spent to kill Bin Laden. I have heard a lot of whackjob conspiracy theories and I have heard some very plausible explanations for why the Iraq war happened, but so far nobody has suggested that Iraq was invaded as part of Bush's brilliant round-about way of gathering intell about Bin Laden's address or guard-changing schedule.
Just my luck, it'll turn out to be true. Next month we'll read a story that someone in Pakistan knew where Bin Laden was and was willing to cough up the info. But instead of settling for the half-million dollar reward, he said he'd only reveal the coordinates if the US government could make his dream come true of running a profitable ice cream store in Bagdad. But Saddam Hussein hated ice cream and would never let it happen. After much negotiating, Bush reluctantly agreed to invade Iraq.
Some turmoil followed, but was eventually sorted out. The informant was finally able to enter Iraq in 2005 and open the store, but the economy was shit and the store didn't make a profit. After filing Chapter 7 in 2008, the informant tried again and opened a yogurt store and it worked and he made it into a good business. Then in October 2010 he got an idea to use the success of this yogurt business to subsidize the building of a new ice cream campaign. At first it didn't work, but then in mid-April he was going over the 1st quarter 2011 results and realized he made a slight profit on ice cream itself if you ignored the start up costs, and his accountant explained that he had to, since those were written off in 4th quarter 2010. So he called the White House to make good on the deal, got the runaround since the person who answered the phone thought it was a prank call when he asked for President Bush, but it eventually got ironed out and he spoke to President Obama on April 23 and gave him Bin Laden's address. The hit squad sprang into action.
That's believable, but is it true? Maybe, maybe not. If it is, then MonsterTrimble's claim that trillions of dollars were spent to kill Bin Laden will be validated and everyone can say I'm a damn fool for arguing with him. But I submit to you that we don't really have any evidence that Saddam Hussein hated ice cream. So how do you explain that?!
That expense is spread over many other goals. Trillions of dollars weren't spent to kill Bin Laden (but probably a few million were). Trillions of dollars were spent to overthrow the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, suppress Al Quaida, make profit for contractors who have friends in government, etc. Killing a particular person is only part of that overall objective.
IMHO even that was a mistake, but I'm no diplomat. I would have thought the best PR would be to treat him as a non-muslim, to emphasize (i.e. assert) that Bin Laden's decisions were contrary to any sort of mainstream Islamic teachings. But maybe thinking that is one of the many reasons I'm not president.
(Emphasis mine.) Yes, America is in less perceptible danger.
A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat!
You don't just need a network firewall; with the modern mobile platforms you really need an API / IPC firewall. And it should come with optional honeypots too.
Or people have to stop thinking of "companies" as where you get commodity software. How much do you pay for a kernel these days? (Or a media player or web browser or text editor or file manger?) These things are worth a lot but it wouldn't even occur to me to buy them; you don't get these things from "companies," you get them from the repository without thinking how/if they were originally funded.
It's understood that if your software is generic enough that pretty much everyone in the world has a use for it, then whatever development costs it had are amortized down to nearly $0 per user. So it's either going to be subsidized by someone like Red Hat's customers who needed it before it was readily available, or it's written/maintained by amateurs who have the freedom to concentration on its functionality without having to worry about how that functionality may conflict with making a profit.
Everyone knew this already. It's just that when the iPhone came out, some people tried to live in denial. Some were lucky because their users had forgotten, so a few people made money selling through Apple's store. At the time, tiny PCs were viewed as novel where maybe all the inevitable economic rules wouldn't really be inevitable. But now everyone is getting reminders of how real life works, so if the application you want isn't Free Software, and if you didn't pay real money for it, then it is almost certainly spyware/malware.
Spyware/malware is what you should expect to find in a $0.99 app store. If it's not Free and it's not expensive, then it sucks.
Ask anyone who steps out out of a 2007 time capsule, and he might not know this, his eyes full of stars and his mind clouded by idealistic delusions. But ask the guy who stepped out of the 2006 time capsule, and he does remember it. Ask the newbie Linux user who migrated from one of the proprietary desktops, and he'll be amazed that you even asked something so blindingly obvious, right before he starts preaching to you.
Fortunately, we're on our way back to the 2006 software market, and we'll have 2011 hardware to run it on, when we get there. ;-)
The reason that's such small comfort, is that the 4th Amendment doesn't say illegal evidence won't be used in court; it says the rights of the people .. shall not be infringed. As long as we view convictions as the only way that government may harm people, police will continue to do these things.
There need to be statutes that put the "illegal" back into "illegal search and seizure." Cops who consider illegally searching/seizing should be weighing the benefits of the activity against the sentences that they might end up serving.