And I'd say, you're missing the point. Granted, the GP is almost certainly wrong about the issue of anti-competitive monopolistic tying in Google's case. However, it's still a problem that "there doesn't [seem] to be a way to change where internet results [are] received from". If it's Google's policy to "not be evil", then one would also hope part of its policy would also be "do what the customer wants". Clearly there are people who don't want to use Google for various reasons*. Now, I'm sure there are plenty at Google (probably not the majority but I'd assume a lot, given the popularity of Google search) who don't see a real problem with it because they simply see the feature as a value added feature.
But, that's the same mindset that caused MS to tie IE into Windows. Sure, at first, it was great because it provided a pretty guaranteed vehicle for web access as well as html content. So, of course, some parts of the OS started using IE for things even though (a) there was already an extant web browser for Windows that the majority liked (Netscape) and (b) a critical component of what Windows was about was allowing a user to define what application opened what file format. Now, MS kept with it for a long while trying to fight having to treat IE as just another application and not a first-class component of Windows and that hurted the goodwill of people precisely because IE (and web browsers in general) became was such a swiss cheese of security which made MS's efforts seem almost intent on causing Windows machines to be vulnerable.
So, Google shouldn't really shouldn't fight this. Because the "wave of the future" is concerns of privacy online, be it Facebook or through Google's collection and mining of data through their web service. If Google fights the ability of people to opt-out of Google, even if most people never will (just like most people still choose IE) then it sets the standard that they wish all the negative consequences that arise from that lack of privacy. So, the major catalyst really is the if and when of Google's collected data being visibly abused, be it multiple times or one very grand scandal (be it a Google employee or a third-party associate or a massive data leak/hack resulting in a nefarious act).
*Not everyone trusts Google, especially the more all encompassing its search tools become to devices one uses every day. Part of that can mean simply disabling the ability to search using a Google tool you don't trust. Part of that can mean switching to a competitor in part or hold to at least mitigate the potential damage and cross-linking of data (say Google for personal and Bing for business). Personally, I just like the feeling of control I have in choosing if or if not to give out the data, even if I'm pretty sure I'm too irrelevant to really matter. Because in the end, it was never that Microsoft did an evil act against a single person that made people hate them. It was the seeming ambivalence and dedication to their own end against the seeming wishes of masses as a whole that ticked people off. The law part of it shouldn't really matter, given you want to have loyal customers who choose you. Only an arrogant, monopolistic bastard would act like it doesn't matter what the average person thinks as if they had no choice.
The alleged goal is to hurt lots of random people without any personal gain.
Read those lines carefully. The goals seems more than anything to hurt Israeli banks. That may or may not be for personal gain--one can presumably play the money market towards that end. The fact that lots of random people are hurt is an indirect consequence, not the objective goal.
And what is the goal of terrorism?
"the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes." Now, if the above is an attempt to cause Israel harm through its banks or to change the banking system through political acts...but even then, there's no violence involved and while the suggested interpretation of resulting events from the leak are intimidating and coercive, the fact that they're actually releasing the credit card details make it more than just a threat. So, no, overall, I'd guess the term you're looking for is the term "asshole". Sure, terrorists might be assholes, but not all assholes are terrorists.
If anything, this sounds like a case of (a) if all you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail--and Israel sure likes it anti-terrorism hammer--and (b) just another example of political corruption where instead of punishing the banks for somehow fucking up so badly that the information was leaked online and calling for their heads (figuratively) they're more interested in calling for the heads (literally) of the people who exposed just how fucked up securing that data was--an act that is ultimately self-defeating if it were meant to protect those random people who are hurt as instead of using the opportunity for a very public, open expose on the issues with the banking system as a justification to fix those problems they've chosen to focused on attacking the messengers (evil bastards that they are) and leaving tons of other crooks to do the same thing in secret (although I guess Israel could always send its secret police into other countries to execute the crooks, but they can't advertise that as a deterrent, so that rather counters the whole idea that this is more a symbolic thing to draw attention to avoid future breaches).
In short, this is why calling everything terrorism is fucked up. It solves nothing, blurs the evil that terrorism is, and demonstrates how beholden governments are to their people: those (people and organizations) with money and not the average person.
PS - This doesn't mean I don't think the leakers shouldn't be punished both for the breach and the leak. But that doesn't justify any claim of terrorism nor the focus on the leakers seemingly over and above those that allowed the leak. Either Israeli banks are secure or they are not. If they're not--which seems to be demonstrated--and one's whole country is dependent upon them, I'd be more upset and focused on them failing in their duty than the countless evil or assholic people in the world who would exploit such businesses. I mean, there's an implied fraud given the reasonable expectations of what a bank is supposed to be, a firm that will securely hold your money; it's harder to be upset at the child/man/bastard who shows everyone the emperor wears no clothes.
Is it Karma Whoring to note the first thing that sprung to mind was the Windows Me Tour video showing System Restore (starts at 1:03) and how badly that worked? The truth is, like you said, one can say what the GP said about any backup system. The issue is that backups are hard. You want to keep multiple backups, do it regularly, verify those backups actually work, and yet have the backup medium not connected to the system regularly to avoid it being inherently compromisable. That means users have to plan and buy extra storage just for backups, keep them in a safe place, and develop the understanding that they're the system administrator and it's their job to do the work necessary to keep their system operational. None of that is something the causal user wants to hear, so you end up with things like automatic updates, system restore data stored on the same HD as the main partition, etc. And even then, just getting every setting and document to be retained in the right way is just hard given how much that data is stored all over the place at times. MS is just as guilty of this, not only having configuration interfaces all over the place but specialty programs to tweak the registry in various places because apparently it's too much to keep it all well organized. And I'd hardly say Firefox has it right, not even integrating into the registry for a lot of stuff.
I'll not buy into the Occupy claims of victimization and persecution when they squatted for TWO MONTHS before the police were sent in to clear them out. You have a right to protest, to share your ideas, and to educate the public. You do NOT have the right to squat in public spaces until the world does things your way, or we'd still have grey-haired hippies camped out all across the nation demanding that you "free the weed."
Last I checked, we do still have grey-haired hippies camped out all across the nation demanding that you "free the weed". Yes, they got pulled out of the public spaces by people from the previous generation like you, who got sick of seeing them. But, last I checked, the right to petition government for redress of grievances was clearly spelled out in the First Amendment: that is the right innately exists given the whole "government of the people" thing and a special point was made to list in along with things like other innate rights like freedom of speech, freedom of religion (ie of conscience), and freedom of the press which all play a large part in what the government does and how it acts.
Now, granted, I could see a point of complaint for trashing public property, but I don't see the logic of barring anyone from "squatting" on public land on its face. Public land should be commons land, and the only real oversight the government should really invoke itself in is making sure the tragedy of the commons doesn't unfold. To that end, the only thing that would inherently stop Occupy (or those 60s hippies) would be either government compliance to change, a lack of general motivation to continue, or the lack of resources necessary to continue to live on such land (since food, heating, shelter all are consumed). Yes, this would imply that a sufficiently well funded private minority could "squat" on public land for a long time, which is what astroturfing is all about, but then generally people don't "squat" on public land but because it's much cheaper than regular motel/hotel bills.
I mean, most people with money don't want to make a spectacle of themselves by living in a tent on public land to be gawked at by people, like you, who seem to view such people at or slight above the position of the homeless. Of course, that's just a general part of the obvious cost saving strategy of most, normal people who don't have gobs of cash and want to stretch out their attempt at redress as long as possible. Or, I guess, everyone in the Occupy movement should just buy up all those foreclosed houses and move in just for that two month or more protest (and likely stuffing 10 or 20 people to a house to share the cost). I mean, I'm certainly people wouldn't be bitching about that...
I certainly won't buy any paranoid claims that they're going to be locked up as terrorists.
Right, there's no need. There's already enough past thuggery that vindicates the idea governors or mayors can send in police to beat, mace, or pepper spray the non-violent; and then we can mock the weak, pacifist hippies because, you know, it's not like a key figure in our countries ideology was seeming weak and pacifist who allowed himself to be executed. And if anyone becomes violent over that, well that justifies more the reason to kick them all out, not just the few who were violent. I mean, we take the same stance with governments and companies doing unliked things, having the police march in to beat, mace, or pepper spray those we detest and using any force of self-defense as justification to dissolve legislatures or boards of directors. Oh, right, that wouldn't be just.
Meanwhile, there aren't enough real leaders to label as terrorists so it'd be a moot point, anyways. And then there's the risk of another Kent State, where they'd just make a figurative martyr by hauling someone away as a terrorist because they chose to address their state legislature over the absurdity of them losing their home because their bank gave them a
Because I can choose what corporations (or individuals, or used item venues, or barter events, etc.) I do business with (or not), and how much business to do if I decide to do business at all.
But can you choose whether businesses do business with you? If enough people start using Facebook to pay their bills that your gas company requires it, do you stop heating your house with natural gas to avoid Facebook? If Wal-Mart being a monopsopy in goods causes almost all drills to start being made out of plastic and pushes the price of higher quality drills up, do you just give up on a drill for that home repair because it's now out of your price range? And if Ford pays enough money to have your state require car inspectors check for Ford-certified mufflers, do you just move?*
I can't choose to do business with the government; they take my money by threat and coercion, they use it for things I would never stand behind, they make laws that force people to do things I would never have them forced to do, and in the end, they set the rules the corporations have to abide by -- and they have done so very poorly.
So you don't like having your named attached to bad things and you can just ignore that you, in funding various corporations which provide the donations that result in the election of those officials who so underfund, understaff, and undersubject corporate corruption and miscreance, are doing the same thing just without it so clearly spelled out (unless you really go out of your way to avoid those corporations).
So corporations are definitely quite a ways down the list of my concerns from a government operating well out of its authorized sphere. Getting government into constitutional compliance is far more important. Once there, it would be reasonable to revisit what the constitution allows, and perhaps make a few legitimate changes.
That's the patent absurdity, though. So, the US federal government doesn't have authority over X so can't legal force issues over X. Yeahh, in the future we finally undo the US federal government's meddling over X. Well, oops, nearly every US state (if not every US state) has authority over X. So, the corruption gets funneled to state government, at higher corporate/personal expense but similarly the same. Yep, that solved everything. Ie, the problem isn't constituionality. It's the meddling itself, be it under some enacted authority or not. I mean, even if the federal government did have the authority, don't you think it should still be stopped?
Beyond that, there's the obvious point that your argument devolves info "well, we can't start arresting and prosecuting the rapists or the car thieves because there's still murderers on the loose". It'd seem rather obvious we unlikely to ever catch every murder or near every murderer and being hamstrung on that idea to avoid taking care of real issues rather misses the need to
Until then, I am not worried about Apple; I am really, really concerned about the federal and state governments.
Funny that, given Apple outsources work to other countries because presumably the high living conditions enforced by federal and state government doesn't allow the sort of crap reported under Foxconn to happen--or at least, to happen for as long.
*Admittedly, a lot of that happens as clearly evident is through government-enforced acts. But, there's an obvious point that a race to the bottom on quality hurts everyone and makes it actually less affordable to get decent quality: demand shifts to crap products meaning decent build products have less demand because even a slight drop in demand will often enough shift the supply side right and increase the price. Then there's things like trying to avoid credit cards or credit card companies if you question their actions over Wikileaks a
While this makes for an interesting "what if" project, my understanding is that Google mainly designed NaCl for two reasons: to allow for writing plugins that are inherently sandboxed and to allow for snippets of performance critical Javascript to be written in native code. I personally think I have a better idea: invert NaCl's and Chrome's relationship. It's quite obvious that one of the focuses Chrome has had is on sandboxing itself to obtain a level of security. At the same time, a large point of what Chrome is is a multiplatform browser. Hence, NaCl, an inherent sandbox, running as a much smaller code base to run on multiple platforms provides a much better base to situate the coding of a browser. Furthermore, it'd strongly encourage further optimization of NaCl to be a viable, generic platform for other programs (not unlike what.NET's CLR was supposed to be) and the creation of sandboxes for more CPUs (AFAIK, there's still no NaCl-ARM). Best of all, if done right, it'd finally upset a core point of why people don't choose Linux as a platform; if developers had NaCl as a viable platform, then games could inherently run on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
Maybe i could support the Occupy people if I had some clue what they wanted. All they seem to want is for goverment to not be corrupt, rich people to pay taxes, and something else I think...
In other words, you do have some clue of what they want.
While I generally support all of those goals, I can't really get behind them without knowing how they would like it. Do they have any ideas on how to makes those or whatever goals happen?
So, you'd get behind them if they had a suggested, workable course of action and until then you're just not willing to support their more abstract objectives. Hmm.. Some of that I get, as it's easy to rant about the problems of the world and one doesn't want to support a group that ends up deciding some crazy later on as the solution when it's nothing of the sort. But, the converse of that has often been to have a solution and then pretend to shoehorn it to solve the problem of the day. I'd say to a great extent, the fact that the Occupy movement hasn't gone out of its way to offer solutions is in part to not exclude a lot of people who would quickly hear any semi-formulated (as that's how it'll invariable start out) plan, quickly categorize it as right or left, and then use previous arguments of how each system is flawed--it obvious is since we're here precisely because both right and left have had a go at it and always failed to some degree--to discount the group as a whole; ie, it wants to set the stage for serious support of its objectives and only then to actually discuss a course of action so there will be actual discussion instead of pigeonholing.
The other part, of course, is that I don't think the Occupy movement really hasn't a good idea how to real their goals really any more than the current political scene has a clue. I mean, sure, Republicans wave the free market around but then forget that the free market as an ideal can't exist as it requires a level of omniscience that's surreal and falling short of that ideal is used as but an excuse for why there are invariable problems when a heavily free market approach is taken instead of acknowledging there are limitations to the construct that is the free market. Meanwhile, Democrats so often wave legislation around as if by writing a law people or companies will actually follow them when it's often the point that those laws are either pointless, circumvented--often with the de facto blessing of those same Democrats--, or never fully applied or applicable to an actual problem.
And my point isn't to say "well, they're both wrong some times, so we shouldn't listen to their ideas or ever follow their suggestions". It's to acknowledge that an actual discussion needs to take place that tries very hard to avoid reverting to a position of ideology for the sake of that ideology while losing sight of the big picture. Of course, a lot of people have their own agenda--hence the noted issue of corruption--so perhaps too often the big picture is being looked after, it's just not in the role of representing the people. That more fundamental problem isn't really inherently solvable; so, it leads one more to wonder how to at least counter it as it goes, and that's a point that's rarely heavily discussed as corruption behaves much like how computer viruses do with anti-virus scanners--there's always someone behind the scenes who can work to see if it takes but a single bit flip to pass the current test and it makes all the effort seemingly futile. That's the sort of distressing truth that makes it hard for someone to spend a lifetime working constantly to root out corruption when it occurs and install non-corrupt individuals to power.
There is always risks in businesses. Even without being dependent on anyone, a disruptive technology can ruin you in a short time or a competitor will outdo you.
Granted. The general point though is if you have the ability to advocate and support one model or another, open open source apis would be the best ideal and closed closed source apis would be the worst ideal. As I implied, you're basically stuck with whatever is popular at the moment anyways. Perhaps in the future you can have some say but perhaps not.
Companies don't necessarily have to be super smart, but if they made it big, chances are they aren't stupid. They have no incentive to piss off developers because they know they will jump ship for something else.
The heavily depends on how much of a "something else" there is. Look at how much Microsoft repeatedly pissed off developers by outright consuming other companies or obsoleting them; the monopolistic anti-competitive practice of bundling, after all, is a smart move to improve uptake of your extant product when you've otherwise saturated the market to the point that you're competing with yourself and you certainly aren't going to allow developer complaints to stop you. The general issue is, Microsoft was the better option compared to Apple because it was more open but because it was still closed source (and admittedly not entirely open and cloneable) one couldn't fork away from Microsoft because of the inherent lockin. That's part of the "largely makes money for someone else". Open source makes it a lot harder to hold a monpoly so reduces the risk.
Of course, it's not like there was a practical alternative to Windows or DOS in the past that was more open. To the same end, there's no real practical alternative to Google and Facebook now. Part of that's just the inherent part of market inertia. Part of that's all the collected data which has nothing to do with code. But, then, in the long term most of that data will be churned over for new data meaning that someone with their code could potential unseat them if they managed to do all they did but better. And if you or I or anyone has any sway over the situation, I'd advocate that Google, Facebook, etc go open source to increase competition and reduce future potential lock-in.
Open APIs are only a middle-term stopgap, especially as more often than not open apis aren't entirely open and cloneable; source meanwhile reproduce the results exactly even if no one understands why. Of course, in an ideal world open APIs would be truly open and there'd be multiple code bases, open and closed, so they'd no longer really be a stopgap. And certainly, I support the idea of Open APIs and open source and clones. But that still requires the source.
PS - Feel free to replace in the above API with ABI, file specification, etc as I think it equally applies. Remember that the major complaint of ooxml was precisely that its openness was hindered by a lack of source code--and the felt undue complexity of trying to encode source code back into text more to maintain the status quo than to make a clean specification while often leaving out the more technical stuff because of either self-interest or the spec already being too complex. Of course, if they had explicitly spelled out the quirks in more general terms, I'm pretty sure people would have still been upset because MS would have had a leg up in both defining the spec to include the quirks they use in their own products and presumably coding it as they went. And if MS had just did a code dump and stated they weren't interested in standards, per se, I think people would have been even happier. To me, that's the situation with Google and Facebook. I think what they offer is but a means to their own end, and that end isn't good for the user let alone the developer, even if they can manage to enrich themselves along the way.
What is the point in building code to support a library that puts you in a position wherein you immediately become dependant on something you cannot control. Resulting in a product that largely makes money for someone else.
Many developers have made millions by using these APIs.
Many others make virtually nothing while greatly advantaging the API owner. And then sometimes the API owner decides to incorporate a clone of your product into their API, often at great expense to themselves with no direct benefit. The more popular your product, the more likely that is to happen. If you're lucky, you'll get bought out quickly and it won't just turn into a drawn out negotiation where they glean enough about how your product works to then dump you for another, cheap competitor or to go it alone.
Smart companies make their APIs mutually beneficial and aren't planning on screwing developers for no reason.
What percentage of companies are smart? How realistic is it to assume the smart company is the popular enough company and hence it's capable to develop for such an API in the long term? And what's to stop a smart company from one day turning dumb and ruining a decade of specialized work, requiring you to jump ship and start over building your brand? All of the above is a risk to open source APIs, but at least there's always the extra option of "if the developers go crazy, we can determine the cost of support of the API with perhaps a joint splinter group (look at the various open source forks) vs abandoning it for something else". That's about the most flexibility you can realistically get.
You educate your users (or attempt to) so that when you tell them "no, you cannot install angry birds" they don't continue to bitch,
One, I doubt any amount of education will stop users from bitching; the best you'll get is company policy enforcing a level of professionalism that at least they won't bitch around you. Two, there shouldn't be a time where you're actually fielding questions or answers about what can/cannot be installed. Company policy should spell out such things, as dictated by the company president/owner/whatever after careful input from the IT manager, and it's that policy that should "educate" users.
or ask them to be more specific as to what, exactly, is broken about "Teh Internets," you get an answer that narrows it down to something other than PEBKAC, if possible.
Why are you, the IT expert, asking the user specific questions about what's broken? Once you have a general idea, you should be able to engage in a course of actions (check the cable/connection, reimage the system and restore backups, etc) to fix the problem with rather minimal input. To put in perspective, it's like going to a doctor and them asking you twenty questions and them trying to educate you about nerves, tendons, etc for the next time you come up when it's generally their job to make a diagnosis using pretty minimal information and extrapolating upon the likely causes and taking pretty grand action until the symptoms disappear.
"You mean to say that you are not happy that the home page is now the corporate page and you can't change it to icanhazcheezburger? I'm closing this ticket."
Sounds like the company is wasting your time. Of course, if the company took the better approach*, you'd possibly be out of a job. Beyond that, educating your users more can mean (a) you might be able to find out faster that they can't seem to work around the new corporate home page which they hate since they really want it to be icanhazcheezburger and/or (b) they find more clever ways to mess up your setup or otherwise work around company policy and only then come running to you for help. I definitely agree the former would save you time, but I don't think it'd save you much frustration which I gatther seems to be the bigger issue for you. I certainly don't think you can "educate" them well enough not to choose to do stupid things like install spyware because, after all, it's your job to take care of any sort of mess they make, so they likely don't have the strongest incentive to not do it except to incur whatever wrath (ie, your clear annoyance at them) for it (but they can shrug that off as IT people being aloof). Now, if you had managers that (a) were better educated and (b) enforced some actual punishment on people who wasted IT's time include through things like negligence.... But half of that's entirely out of your control and the other half is the IT manager's job.
*As another person down the thread notes, IT's time is worth a lot. Factor in several people in the IT department doing frontline tech support that could be mostly, if not entirely, replaced with an aggressive machine replacement policy coupled with an aggressive backup policy (that is, to take the rather brute force approach to solving problems) and the can save tens of thousands of dollars a year which is enough to pay for all those machines and backup equipment in the long term.
Re:This is where western medicine has failed...
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How Doctors Die
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With all due respect, I think what you're seeing has nothing to do with layman's expectations of medicine. It's that a lot of people, when they see a loved one is dying or at risk of dying and they have someone to turn to beg for that life, they'll do a lot of pleading and demanding because they're so focused on that person being gone in their life they're not really thinking rationally about the situation*. And the cruel truth is, medicine generally overreaches their actual expectations: for a person they're told to otherwise expect to die any minute, modern medicine may be able to keep them alive for days, weeks, or maybe even months.
*This, btw, is the focus of a lot of legislation. What are politicians good at? Hearing complaints and "[doing] something", even if that something really has no net effect on fixing the problem. Obviously, physicians like you are in a much worse situation since you're subject to lawsuits and there's medical licencing boards that can confirm that you didn't actual follow a known procedure; meanwhile, obviously, the worst a politician general has to fear is not being reelected. Oh, and from what you've said, I'm sure I'm just preaching to the choir about the need to change those medical licensing boards so "follow a known procedure" can include the "let them die peacefully even over the family's objections" so individual physicians, not the almost caricature "death panels", can decide with some confidence that doing the right thing is also the legal thing and will be properly covered under malpractice insurance if it comes to that. That alone would probably stop a lot of the lawsuits before they're even filed.
But this is impossible. The glassy stare cuts in about 30 seconds to a minute into any conversation dealing with IT or computers in general.
The question is, is there a reason to have a 30 second conversation about IT or computers with the average end-user? If you're fielding support, it should be about problems and solutions, not so much IT or computers. And if you're discussing general IT projects, that should be a management discussion of which there should be little end-user interaction and even then it's a matter, as another poster suggested, of speaking in terms of the motivations managers care about.
Try convincing someone that "IE is not the Internet"
It took me/months/ to break someone of that habit.
Out of curiosity, why did you bother to break someone of that habit? That's an example of needless aloofness, where one feels compelled to force people into a certain mindset of what things are, how they're pronounced or spelled, etc. I mean, if it's a critical part of their job function to know the difference, then yes, you should teach them. But, if they use the internet through a web browser, they'll use the one provided by/through the IT department as sanctioned by management and the link to it will likely say "Internet" whatever the web browser is, just because it simplifies whatever training there is. A company is a business, not a school, after all.
'... it'd seem clearer that for friends to "cheat" together would be acceptable but that cheating in the wild with people who don't know if one is "cheating" or not [is not].'
I want him to formulate proper arguments for why one form of cheating is good while another form of cheating isn't. I mean, it IS still cheating, it wouldn't be called cheating if it was acceptable and within granted limits, so it's kind of an oxymoron in and of itself.
Well, how about a silly example of a form of cheating I see as acceptable. I like the game Mega Man X3 a good bit. I've played through it plenty of times. There's a certain spot in the game where a bot with two morning stars for arms sits fully blocking the path. However, it is the case that the hit detection is a bit off, so it's actually possible to, if timed right, do an air dash through the very upper part of the bot without taking damage and proceeding forward. Now, as I see it, this is acceptable because it both exploits a glitch in the game (questionable hit detection) while simultaneously being a rather moot point (it's a single player game and the action is done more to make the play every so slightly faster and more enjoyable--the very fact that one can glitch is part of what makes it enjoyable).
Now, the best argument I can hear against doing the above is that to exploit the glitch cheats oneself. One could say the same about intentionally getting hit so one can stand on otherwise instant kill spikes. Perhaps at some point the designers intended for this to be an acceptable part of play, but even then it's clearly a cheaper act to ever intentionally get hit. So, every time one plays a game without trying one's best (ie, to accept that one can survive taking many hits so may choose to never exert more effort to learn the game than the amount needed to survive), they could be said to be cheating themself. And maybe that's true as well.
But it's also true that one plays a game for enjoyment and playing at one's best isn't always enjoyable; I certainly enjoy one-hit-kill games, but I don't play them all the time and for games that offer the mode I wish to play that in addition to the multi-hit-kill mode. So, given that the core issue is a matter of enjoyment, it'd seem clearer that for friends to "cheat" together would be acceptable but that cheating in the wild with people who don't know if one is "cheating" or not.
So, does that help explain why it's an unclear issue and it's not simply a matter of being an oxymoron?
After witnessing enough conversations about how TSA is worthless, or worse, yet another part of an effort to acclimate hapless Americans to living in a police state, I think it's valid to consider the reasons for even "appearances" of security, and I'm glad this article laid them out clearly. Even appearances can be a deterrent.
That explains the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber. Well, yes, I guess it deterred some people. But, it seems the biggest thing that's protected planes so far is the incompetence of those who wish ill. I mean, sure, people have been brainwashed to inherently trust uniforms--I don't exclude myself from this--even if we know that uniform == Uncle Sam. And then there are those short lapses of confidence whenever there's yet another bomb that makes it through the TSA, and not just from some undercover journalist who'd never use it. But those are quickly forgotten because there's nothing visible to remember. If anything, it's that the WTC fell that did the trick really, since there wasn't the same paranoia from after the WTC bombing in the 90s.
The other points in the article are also valid. I believe we need to ask ourselves the question that if at least some amount of "theater" is appropriate, what is that amount, and what would the damage been to the air transport sector if nothing (visible) had been done? Note I don't pretend to know the answer.
So, we need "theater" to protect the air transport sector... Yep, that's America for you. It's all about tricking the public to keep a key component of the empire running. What was that about bread and circuses again...
Some say that money might better have been spent "educating" people why such security measures don't work, so they won't be a afraid when they don't see it. That's a task far easier said than done. Alongside the constant drumbeat in some circles that the government is out to get them, it's important to understand there are actual legitimate reasons for things the TSA is doing, seen and unseen.
Really? There is? You might make that argument about the DHS, but even that might be a stretch--it's really one of its subordinate departments that's doing the real work. But, everything about the TSA seems to be an eyesore. Waiting to the near last minute for someone to board a plane is a desperate last line of defense fraught with massive false positives given the massive number of travels versus the number of terrorists. It's so bad, I don't see how they could do anything but more harm than good. I mean, it's in the same line of logic of relying upon suspected murderers with a warrant for their arrest showing up at the police station and announcing their real name.
None of this means that our homeland security efforts should be exempt from criticism or thoughtful scrutiny, but it needs to be done against a backdrop of reason.
The reason is based clearly in the irrationality of deception because people are treated as "people". That may be justified for a very brief period after a situation where emotion overrides reason. But, that's a matter of days. It does not remote justify a backdrop that has lasted a decade.
I know military spending is a lot higher than it should be, but at least the defense of this nation is a justified core element.
The problem is military spending != defense. Defense is things like border agents, custom agents, national guard troops *in* the US, etc. Those are the sorts of things that are cut, underfunded, etc in the name of trimming waste so the US can fund* "defense"--ie proactive offense--in other countries. The irony, of course, is that repeatedly sending US troops into other countries if anything makes them less capable of actually defending the US, as they both won't be here to actually engage in defense and because it limits the capacity for troop rotation to allow for sufficient breaks that those troops can operate effectively.
As of 2005, out of the near 2 Trillion in public expenditures and grants, certainly you would agree that there's some fat here to be trimmed.
Something which both Democrats and Republicans heavily agree upon. The question isn't if trimming is necessary or appropriate. It's heavily on what should be trimmed, how much, and whether tax increases should be considered because not only are some things necessary and need to be funded but new programs for old or new problems need to be generated. To that end, Republicans don't seem willing to concede that trimming alone may not be the answer. Given that the US spends 150%+ its revenue, that doesn't seem an intuitively viable option unless one is willing to effectively cut out large parts of US spending nearly entirely: ie, to give up Social Security or Defense Spending almost complete. Such is a rather needless and pointless rock and a hard place which I can only see Republicans supporting either because they're very naive or they have some vested interest against social programs like Social Security and do want to see people, young and old, starving in poverty.:/ Perhaps I'd feel differently if Republicans offered a better solution than vague talk about the "free market" without a matching "progressive phasing out of social programs"; but that'd probably make them unelectable.
*Truthfully, it's not that the trimming has to take place and the agencies need to be underfunded. It's simply the belief of some that the agencies are really overfunded and trimming just makes them a leaner operation. There is some truth to that but mainly in the sense that no amount of funding will offer perfect border protection and the drop off rate of near optimal border protection may be rather slow (ie, you may see a gradual decline to 80% border protection at 50% of optimal funding and only after see a drastic drop off). Still, it shows an interesting priority to try to underfund actual defense in the name of continued funding of offense when it'd probably only require a modest tax increase to adequately fund both.
Off hand, I may own a PS Vita but not an Xperia Play or a Galaxy Player. It's the same reason I use/develop homebrew on a GBA. Perhaps a good question would be, why buy a PS Vita over an Xperia Play. Personally, I wouldn't know except to say I'm leery of any device I'm afraid of putting in my pocket for fear it'll become scratched up or break. To that end, I don't really know if any of the above are something I'd want.
So...RP can't be for an issue because the US Constitution currently forbids it, even though the US Constitution can be changed to allow it and RP could run precisely on the platform of changing the US Constitution to support those issues he believes in? Instead, he has to run within the confines of the law as written and not have selective interpretation, which means he should be for things like the Federal Reserve which are clearly within the purview of Congress to enshrine*? I see...
*The US Constitution specific vests within Congress the power "To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;". Now, I'm going to take a wild guess here and presume this doesn't mean that Congress is supposed to own a coin minting machine and actual print coins. Instead, it means they have the power to create institutions to create coin money. Similarly, they have the power to create institutions to regulate the value of that money--that's the point of the Federal Reserve. The only real iffy part is that it's supposed to be "coin Money" which implies metal must be involved at some level (and technically those metal strips in money might count), but that seems a pretty irrelevant technicality. I mean, if "paper" money were made out of aluminum fibers, do you think RP would be okay with it?
Well, my overall experience with the Humble Bundle #4 so far has been nearly as bad as my experience with many open source games: seemingly heavily excessive requirements that an older computer like I have can't match and general instability/slowdowns/simply not working. Just for perspective, this is a Sempron 3000+ with 1.25GB of RAM with a Radeon 9200 (ie, no pixel shader support) with 128MB of VRAM.
Cave Story+ crashes with SIGILL in libsdl-1.2 on a movq instruction (on idea how that's possible as Semprons most definitely support mmx) which was resolve by renaming the lib directory so the system libsdl-1.2 would be used. Still, there's noticeable slow downs.
NightSkyHD seems slow, doesn't seem to work in full screen, and trying to load "The Beach" which I assume is the first map just hangs it.
Gratuitous Space Battles hangs at the splash title screen. At least according to the specs, it look might the game might actually work if it actually worked.
Jamestown refuses to work because of "/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found" although I'm rather certain it'd still not work as the System Requirements listed for the Windows version says I need OpenGL 2.0 and 256MB+ of VRAM.
Bit.Trip.Runner has the same "/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found" and again I don't think it'll work anyways because the Windows specs say I need OpenGL 2.1 and shader model 3.
Super Meat Boy requires a set of GL extensions my video card doesn't have.
And I'm still waiting on Shank to finish downloading to find out why it will probably not work.
Now, obviously if I had a newer computer with Windows, at least some of these problems would go away. But as noted again in the System Requirements, Intel Integrated graphics won't necessarily work in at least one of the games. So, to actually play all the games, I'd have to make sure to make a special purchase for a video card...which at this point might as well be called a game card since that's the only real reason to buy it. And at that point, I'd rather just buy a game console and skip all the fuss of libraries and GL extensions and whatever other shit that's involved. It's simply not worth the headache and Humble Bundle just further confirms it.
PS - Okay, I do actually do some gaming on the PC. But, it's incredibly hit and miss. Only a hand full of open source anything games actually work on my system. Now, I'd assume that if I used Windows and not crappy open source drivers* then things would be better, but I don't think it'd be that much better. The overall point is that developers, be they open or closed source ones, are unwilling to support anything particularly old intentionally, so it's more of a crap shoot and testing and praying. This holds true even for "2D" games, a lot of which use OpenGL and specifically various features that my card simple doesn't support at all or not well. Of course, there's also the general issue that a lot of games are probably just badly written, where actually scaling to full screen suddenly causes massive frame rate loss and noticeable slowdown. *Sigh*
*I say this with all due respect. I recognize that a lot of the drivers are significantly, if not entirely, the byproduct of reverse engineering. Never the less, some of them are simply very obviously incomplete, unstable, and glitchy and there's no one either willing or able to work more on them precisely because they're related to older hardware. In my case, I simply don't know enough about the technology or I'd gladly contribute; I simply don't know where to begin. To that end, I'm also rather too lazy to try to fix a lot of the problems because I know that with the hardware being so old, it's not like I could work miracles to support enough features to make a lot of games work. That is, I'd have to not only fix the graphics first but I'd then have to fix/downgrade the requirements of a lot of the games. It's simply too large of a task for me to even begin to contemplate.
When you are done with the witch hunt, the cries of constitutional violations, etc, and you actually start to focus on how to solve the problem, you will realize nothing short of legislation requiring carriers to allow you to opt out will fix this.
That's rather the problem. The legislature has already proven it's perfectly willing to grant and even retroactively grant actual warrantless wiretaps. So, what hope is there in the legislature working to close a loophole that gives more power to people to control information about themselves instead of leaving "job creating" companies alone with their valid contracts? I mean, closing down or shrinking Carrier IQ or companies like it with stiffly worded privacy laws will cost jobs and in this difficult economic time--excuse me as I go vomit in a corner after hearing that tripe spewed again and again by Congress because it's more convenient to use an excuse of job killing to attack an actual issue than to actually discuss the issue and resolve it. Meanwhile, the executive branch is the one carrying out the effective abuse, be it unconstitutional or not. So, is it any wonder that people scream out "unconstitutional" with a hope that the courts might not be so corrupt to allow this absurd abuse; I mean, the courts have repeatedly demonstrated creative interpretation to the benefit of the people. Oh, right, Citizens United. Well, we're fucked.
Meanwhile, I don't care, personally, if it's a witch or a duck. Clearly it's wrong and it should stop, period. I'm no more convinced the legislature will stop it with a new law than the FBI will chose to stop on its own. I mean, why should it, given it's all strictly legal? Of course, such a road is clearly the fascism of a police state, to use companies as the instrument of spying that the state can't legally do itself. It's no better than using foreign powers to spy on one's own citizens while spying on their citizens and swapping the data. And again, even if made illegal, it's just a matter of retroactive legalizing it because apparently "ex post facto" only works one way.
But, you know, we could always protest or make a big scene. I mean, that's working so well with the whole Occupy movement, where the media is keen enough to comment about the evictions and not spend much time consideration the fucking mindset that has people wanting to Occupy in the first place, given the obvious past examples of people protesting. I mean, I find it funny how it's readily ignored that in the past it was quite common and standard that any redress of grievance against the government inherently meant an "occupy" of local land because the actual travel involved in the first place meant you weren't going to go marching home every day and even if you could you wanted to be there to make it constantly known to those in power what your issues were. Another thing is, it was enough to say "here is how we have been grieved" without having to hand the politicians language to insert into a bill to sign into law; but, then, I guess law makers aren't used to thinking on their own and making laws so they need 3rd parties to do all the leg work? Or are they really that clueless on a lot of what Occupy's grievances are?
Well, excuse me, I'm just wasting my emotion, time, and energy. I mean, here I am posting on a website. Clearly I should be doing at least as much as you are and whatever you're doing to resolve the issue, assuming you see there's an issue. So, what was it you're doing again?
It's more ignorant to think that users need to know the underlying system or how URL is formed to use computer or internet.
The issue isn't so much if the all inclusive need to know exists. The issue is more that it should be possible to know and how much people do have a general want or need to know.
Truth is, no one wants to have to learn things they don't care about. While you may think it's essential for everyone to know how computers operate, many people think otherwise.
Well, people may not want to learn things they don't care about, but they may need to.
Likewise, I bet you don't have to learn things you don't care about just to enjoy them.
That's quite untrue. I want to eat enjoyable food. To have them, I need to know what makes them enjoyable and possible how to fix them. That is, there exists a necessary cause to lead to an effect. The effect is wanted and the cause is needed. Pragmatically, this paradigm is the root of many wants.
We have almost 7 billion people on earth - we can specialize in things and enjoy all the things world offers but someone has to simplify it for the rest of us so that we have the time to enjoy and use everything.
Granted, but to simplify things is to abstract them to a point that one need understand a more minimal scope of things to reach those desires. To use my analogy above, if I want enjoyable food I could fix the food myself and have a need to learn to cook. Or, I can rely upon the specialization of others in cooking and then my need is procuring that premade food. Upon the latter point, the need exists to locate and acquire that food. To that end, one or more URLs of sorts exists in the real world for acquiring that food. To say I don't "need" to understand real world URLs might even be true: I could always use a third party for that. But that's just another level of indirection, is often more expensive, and it doesn't really get me away from my base need. So, at some point, I still have to learn and understand something or I'm left to pure ignorance and hope in the benevolence of others, forever. That simply isn't realistically viable.
You can't learn everything, and for majority of people computers are just something they want to use, not something they want to learn to understand.
And the majority of people need to learn something to use a computer. Now, I am not one who can reasonably say with absolute certainly where that cut off point is for all people, the majority of people, or even a minority of people. But, never the less there clearly is some amount of learning that is necessary. The argument is then just how much abstraction can exist before so little learning occurs that the majority of people feel the velvet glove that hinders them rather than helps them. I can certainly see why there is the feeling that hiding URLs is one of those things that prevents people from adequately achieving their goals by hindering their ability to learn what is needed to accomplish their goals. That doesn't mean no one can benefit from hiding URLs. But, then, is Safari really intended for just those people?
So I have to write my stuff twice? I barely have enough time to write what's needed once!
Or three or four times. ARM needs the boost more than x86, anyways, but honestly given that Javascript still doesn't seem suited for more than twirling fobs, I'm not sure what the real point is. I mean, if the performance does become high enough that it's feasible to push games into the browser, I can only see that as a combination of annoying users--just like flash does--while offering an inferior experience to a stand-alone client--since it's enough of a hassle worrying if the game itself will crash without also having to worry about the browser crashing as well. Of course, perhaps I'd feel a bit differently if web browsers didn't still crash, hang, become generally unresponsive, and/or have regularly security concerns. But, then, OS kernels have all those problems as well, even Linux, so I'm not exactly getting my hopes up. It's just that adding another layer doesn't seem to improve things.
We already have angry nerds. Angry nerds either (a) don't develop in walled gardens or (b) do it as a paid job and complain about it. Notice, a lot of software developers aren't nerds, let alone angry ones. So, even if angry nerds were to stop working in walled gardens, it wouldn't magically solve anything. No, generally, the best way to end a walled garden is for people to stop paying for a walled garden. Now, even an angry consumer won't necessarily do the job. Look at how many consumers were/are angry with Windows in the 90s and how well funded Microsoft was. But, that's at least closer to the mark[et].
Talking to the choir about not "sinning" really misses the mark. You have to speak from the pulpit about the congregation to the congregation and make them realize they should be angry and why they have to make the tough choices. Yes, this will end up pissing off the congregation and many will not listen. But, making out nerds to be the bogey men who are the cause of the problem or magical saviors who can fix the problem they did not cause does very little to fix anything. I mean, we already have Richard Stallman, the FSF, and the GPL, and we still have walled gardens.
Clearly it's the choices of the populace at large that is the issue. Having said that, I think it should be recognized that a significant subset of the population may choose to live in a walled garden and that doesn't mean the end of the freedom that most will and do enjoy on the PC. That's just Armageddon speak that's yet to be realized. Sure, people need to speak up and tell the populace that Armageddon could occur if they don't do something. But, it's one thing to warn of a possible future and condemn those who choose a present for themselves that only effects themselves--well, to the degree anything one chooses for oneself only effects oneself.
Nobody seems to be clueing in to my assertion that the Feds could require antivirus firewalls at every Internet border crossing. It would not be hard at all to program those firewalls with the checksums for every open source file found on the entire Internet.
So, you think the Feds would agree to banning all open source files just to stop one distro and that wouldn't be struck down as violating freedom of speech? More generally, you don't think the very idea of an "antivirus firewall" purposed to block speech, even if it's claimed to be of a very restrictive nature, wouldn't be struck down? It's one thing to seize a domain name. It's quite another to actually block or filter traffic to a server.
To create an Internet connection with some foreign router without placing such a firewall between would carry a heavy criminal penalty. Recall that the guy who wrote PGP got prosecuted for exporting munitions in violations of arms control laws for no other reason than that he put the PGP source code on his own FTP site, purely within US borders.
And that Criminal Investigation didn't really go anywhere, with at least one stated possible work around in the case of PGP: source code printed in books are covered under freedom of speech. Now, tariffs are a different beast entirely, but the point is that given how if anything the world has come to view ebooks as books more and more, I don't see how filtering international traffic would work under First Amendment considerations.
It would not work at all for Canonical to have a US presence such as a post office box, or even a brick-and-mortar office. To the extent that the product they provide is developed overseas, they would have to pay the punitive tariff for whatever they imported.
It worked for Toyota. It works for Nintendo USA. It works for Microsoft USA, for that matter. I can see the Fed using a tariff to effectively bribe Canonical to establish "a brick-and-mortar office" but that's about it.
While one can argue that once a single copy of Ubuntu has been imported into the US, every US resident can obtain a copy of that master copy for free, without paying the tariff. But Microsoft - and Apple - could reasonably argue that the amount of that punitive tariff ought to be based on how many copies of that single master import actually get produced, with that number being multiplied by the current wholesale price of Windows or Mac OS X.
So, the Linux Alliance, funded in part by IBM and Google, get to buy a copy of Ubuntu and host it for the US because evil MS, evil Apple, and the evil Fed wants to censor it? Yea, that'd just do wonders to help MS and hurt Ubuntu.
It would cost in the billions of dollars of dollars to import a single ISO installer image. What do you suppose would happen if US Customs caught you failing to pay a billion dollar tariff?
Once it's in the US, it's in the US. And once here, a new copy is regularly "made" under the terms of the GPL and hence the import fee doesn't have to be paid again. So, the single issue is getting someone to import a legal copy. I can see that happening.
Slashdot Mirror
And I'd say, you're missing the point. Granted, the GP is almost certainly wrong about the issue of anti-competitive monopolistic tying in Google's case. However, it's still a problem that "there doesn't [seem] to be a way to change where internet results [are] received from". If it's Google's policy to "not be evil", then one would also hope part of its policy would also be "do what the customer wants". Clearly there are people who don't want to use Google for various reasons*. Now, I'm sure there are plenty at Google (probably not the majority but I'd assume a lot, given the popularity of Google search) who don't see a real problem with it because they simply see the feature as a value added feature.
But, that's the same mindset that caused MS to tie IE into Windows. Sure, at first, it was great because it provided a pretty guaranteed vehicle for web access as well as html content. So, of course, some parts of the OS started using IE for things even though (a) there was already an extant web browser for Windows that the majority liked (Netscape) and (b) a critical component of what Windows was about was allowing a user to define what application opened what file format. Now, MS kept with it for a long while trying to fight having to treat IE as just another application and not a first-class component of Windows and that hurted the goodwill of people precisely because IE (and web browsers in general) became was such a swiss cheese of security which made MS's efforts seem almost intent on causing Windows machines to be vulnerable.
So, Google shouldn't really shouldn't fight this. Because the "wave of the future" is concerns of privacy online, be it Facebook or through Google's collection and mining of data through their web service. If Google fights the ability of people to opt-out of Google, even if most people never will (just like most people still choose IE) then it sets the standard that they wish all the negative consequences that arise from that lack of privacy. So, the major catalyst really is the if and when of Google's collected data being visibly abused, be it multiple times or one very grand scandal (be it a Google employee or a third-party associate or a massive data leak/hack resulting in a nefarious act).
*Not everyone trusts Google, especially the more all encompassing its search tools become to devices one uses every day. Part of that can mean simply disabling the ability to search using a Google tool you don't trust. Part of that can mean switching to a competitor in part or hold to at least mitigate the potential damage and cross-linking of data (say Google for personal and Bing for business). Personally, I just like the feeling of control I have in choosing if or if not to give out the data, even if I'm pretty sure I'm too irrelevant to really matter. Because in the end, it was never that Microsoft did an evil act against a single person that made people hate them. It was the seeming ambivalence and dedication to their own end against the seeming wishes of masses as a whole that ticked people off. The law part of it shouldn't really matter, given you want to have loyal customers who choose you. Only an arrogant, monopolistic bastard would act like it doesn't matter what the average person thinks as if they had no choice.
Read those lines carefully. The goals seems more than anything to hurt Israeli banks. That may or may not be for personal gain--one can presumably play the money market towards that end. The fact that lots of random people are hurt is an indirect consequence, not the objective goal.
"the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes." Now, if the above is an attempt to cause Israel harm through its banks or to change the banking system through political acts...but even then, there's no violence involved and while the suggested interpretation of resulting events from the leak are intimidating and coercive, the fact that they're actually releasing the credit card details make it more than just a threat. So, no, overall, I'd guess the term you're looking for is the term "asshole". Sure, terrorists might be assholes, but not all assholes are terrorists.
If anything, this sounds like a case of (a) if all you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail--and Israel sure likes it anti-terrorism hammer--and (b) just another example of political corruption where instead of punishing the banks for somehow fucking up so badly that the information was leaked online and calling for their heads (figuratively) they're more interested in calling for the heads (literally) of the people who exposed just how fucked up securing that data was--an act that is ultimately self-defeating if it were meant to protect those random people who are hurt as instead of using the opportunity for a very public, open expose on the issues with the banking system as a justification to fix those problems they've chosen to focused on attacking the messengers (evil bastards that they are) and leaving tons of other crooks to do the same thing in secret (although I guess Israel could always send its secret police into other countries to execute the crooks, but they can't advertise that as a deterrent, so that rather counters the whole idea that this is more a symbolic thing to draw attention to avoid future breaches).
In short, this is why calling everything terrorism is fucked up. It solves nothing, blurs the evil that terrorism is, and demonstrates how beholden governments are to their people: those (people and organizations) with money and not the average person.
PS - This doesn't mean I don't think the leakers shouldn't be punished both for the breach and the leak. But that doesn't justify any claim of terrorism nor the focus on the leakers seemingly over and above those that allowed the leak. Either Israeli banks are secure or they are not. If they're not--which seems to be demonstrated--and one's whole country is dependent upon them, I'd be more upset and focused on them failing in their duty than the countless evil or assholic people in the world who would exploit such businesses. I mean, there's an implied fraud given the reasonable expectations of what a bank is supposed to be, a firm that will securely hold your money; it's harder to be upset at the child/man/bastard who shows everyone the emperor wears no clothes.
Is it Karma Whoring to note the first thing that sprung to mind was the Windows Me Tour video showing System Restore (starts at 1:03) and how badly that worked? The truth is, like you said, one can say what the GP said about any backup system. The issue is that backups are hard. You want to keep multiple backups, do it regularly, verify those backups actually work, and yet have the backup medium not connected to the system regularly to avoid it being inherently compromisable. That means users have to plan and buy extra storage just for backups, keep them in a safe place, and develop the understanding that they're the system administrator and it's their job to do the work necessary to keep their system operational. None of that is something the causal user wants to hear, so you end up with things like automatic updates, system restore data stored on the same HD as the main partition, etc. And even then, just getting every setting and document to be retained in the right way is just hard given how much that data is stored all over the place at times. MS is just as guilty of this, not only having configuration interfaces all over the place but specialty programs to tweak the registry in various places because apparently it's too much to keep it all well organized. And I'd hardly say Firefox has it right, not even integrating into the registry for a lot of stuff.
Last I checked, we do still have grey-haired hippies camped out all across the nation demanding that you "free the weed". Yes, they got pulled out of the public spaces by people from the previous generation like you, who got sick of seeing them. But, last I checked, the right to petition government for redress of grievances was clearly spelled out in the First Amendment: that is the right innately exists given the whole "government of the people" thing and a special point was made to list in along with things like other innate rights like freedom of speech, freedom of religion (ie of conscience), and freedom of the press which all play a large part in what the government does and how it acts.
Now, granted, I could see a point of complaint for trashing public property, but I don't see the logic of barring anyone from "squatting" on public land on its face. Public land should be commons land, and the only real oversight the government should really invoke itself in is making sure the tragedy of the commons doesn't unfold. To that end, the only thing that would inherently stop Occupy (or those 60s hippies) would be either government compliance to change, a lack of general motivation to continue, or the lack of resources necessary to continue to live on such land (since food, heating, shelter all are consumed). Yes, this would imply that a sufficiently well funded private minority could "squat" on public land for a long time, which is what astroturfing is all about, but then generally people don't "squat" on public land but because it's much cheaper than regular motel/hotel bills.
I mean, most people with money don't want to make a spectacle of themselves by living in a tent on public land to be gawked at by people, like you, who seem to view such people at or slight above the position of the homeless. Of course, that's just a general part of the obvious cost saving strategy of most, normal people who don't have gobs of cash and want to stretch out their attempt at redress as long as possible. Or, I guess, everyone in the Occupy movement should just buy up all those foreclosed houses and move in just for that two month or more protest (and likely stuffing 10 or 20 people to a house to share the cost). I mean, I'm certainly people wouldn't be bitching about that...
Right, there's no need. There's already enough past thuggery that vindicates the idea governors or mayors can send in police to beat, mace, or pepper spray the non-violent; and then we can mock the weak, pacifist hippies because, you know, it's not like a key figure in our countries ideology was seeming weak and pacifist who allowed himself to be executed. And if anyone becomes violent over that, well that justifies more the reason to kick them all out, not just the few who were violent. I mean, we take the same stance with governments and companies doing unliked things, having the police march in to beat, mace, or pepper spray those we detest and using any force of self-defense as justification to dissolve legislatures or boards of directors. Oh, right, that wouldn't be just.
Meanwhile, there aren't enough real leaders to label as terrorists so it'd be a moot point, anyways. And then there's the risk of another Kent State, where they'd just make a figurative martyr by hauling someone away as a terrorist because they chose to address their state legislature over the absurdity of them losing their home because their bank gave them a
But can you choose whether businesses do business with you? If enough people start using Facebook to pay their bills that your gas company requires it, do you stop heating your house with natural gas to avoid Facebook? If Wal-Mart being a monopsopy in goods causes almost all drills to start being made out of plastic and pushes the price of higher quality drills up, do you just give up on a drill for that home repair because it's now out of your price range? And if Ford pays enough money to have your state require car inspectors check for Ford-certified mufflers, do you just move?*
So you don't like having your named attached to bad things and you can just ignore that you, in funding various corporations which provide the donations that result in the election of those officials who so underfund, understaff, and undersubject corporate corruption and miscreance, are doing the same thing just without it so clearly spelled out (unless you really go out of your way to avoid those corporations).
That's the patent absurdity, though. So, the US federal government doesn't have authority over X so can't legal force issues over X. Yeahh, in the future we finally undo the US federal government's meddling over X. Well, oops, nearly every US state (if not every US state) has authority over X. So, the corruption gets funneled to state government, at higher corporate/personal expense but similarly the same. Yep, that solved everything. Ie, the problem isn't constituionality. It's the meddling itself, be it under some enacted authority or not. I mean, even if the federal government did have the authority, don't you think it should still be stopped?
Beyond that, there's the obvious point that your argument devolves info "well, we can't start arresting and prosecuting the rapists or the car thieves because there's still murderers on the loose". It'd seem rather obvious we unlikely to ever catch every murder or near every murderer and being hamstrung on that idea to avoid taking care of real issues rather misses the need to
Funny that, given Apple outsources work to other countries because presumably the high living conditions enforced by federal and state government doesn't allow the sort of crap reported under Foxconn to happen--or at least, to happen for as long.
*Admittedly, a lot of that happens as clearly evident is through government-enforced acts. But, there's an obvious point that a race to the bottom on quality hurts everyone and makes it actually less affordable to get decent quality: demand shifts to crap products meaning decent build products have less demand because even a slight drop in demand will often enough shift the supply side right and increase the price. Then there's things like trying to avoid credit cards or credit card companies if you question their actions over Wikileaks a
While this makes for an interesting "what if" project, my understanding is that Google mainly designed NaCl for two reasons: to allow for writing plugins that are inherently sandboxed and to allow for snippets of performance critical Javascript to be written in native code. I personally think I have a better idea: invert NaCl's and Chrome's relationship. It's quite obvious that one of the focuses Chrome has had is on sandboxing itself to obtain a level of security. At the same time, a large point of what Chrome is is a multiplatform browser. Hence, NaCl, an inherent sandbox, running as a much smaller code base to run on multiple platforms provides a much better base to situate the coding of a browser. Furthermore, it'd strongly encourage further optimization of NaCl to be a viable, generic platform for other programs (not unlike what .NET's CLR was supposed to be) and the creation of sandboxes for more CPUs (AFAIK, there's still no NaCl-ARM). Best of all, if done right, it'd finally upset a core point of why people don't choose Linux as a platform; if developers had NaCl as a viable platform, then games could inherently run on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
This concludes my New Years fantasy.
In other words, you do have some clue of what they want.
So, you'd get behind them if they had a suggested, workable course of action and until then you're just not willing to support their more abstract objectives. Hmm.. Some of that I get, as it's easy to rant about the problems of the world and one doesn't want to support a group that ends up deciding some crazy later on as the solution when it's nothing of the sort. But, the converse of that has often been to have a solution and then pretend to shoehorn it to solve the problem of the day. I'd say to a great extent, the fact that the Occupy movement hasn't gone out of its way to offer solutions is in part to not exclude a lot of people who would quickly hear any semi-formulated (as that's how it'll invariable start out) plan, quickly categorize it as right or left, and then use previous arguments of how each system is flawed--it obvious is since we're here precisely because both right and left have had a go at it and always failed to some degree--to discount the group as a whole; ie, it wants to set the stage for serious support of its objectives and only then to actually discuss a course of action so there will be actual discussion instead of pigeonholing.
The other part, of course, is that I don't think the Occupy movement really hasn't a good idea how to real their goals really any more than the current political scene has a clue. I mean, sure, Republicans wave the free market around but then forget that the free market as an ideal can't exist as it requires a level of omniscience that's surreal and falling short of that ideal is used as but an excuse for why there are invariable problems when a heavily free market approach is taken instead of acknowledging there are limitations to the construct that is the free market. Meanwhile, Democrats so often wave legislation around as if by writing a law people or companies will actually follow them when it's often the point that those laws are either pointless, circumvented--often with the de facto blessing of those same Democrats--, or never fully applied or applicable to an actual problem.
And my point isn't to say "well, they're both wrong some times, so we shouldn't listen to their ideas or ever follow their suggestions". It's to acknowledge that an actual discussion needs to take place that tries very hard to avoid reverting to a position of ideology for the sake of that ideology while losing sight of the big picture. Of course, a lot of people have their own agenda--hence the noted issue of corruption--so perhaps too often the big picture is being looked after, it's just not in the role of representing the people. That more fundamental problem isn't really inherently solvable; so, it leads one more to wonder how to at least counter it as it goes, and that's a point that's rarely heavily discussed as corruption behaves much like how computer viruses do with anti-virus scanners--there's always someone behind the scenes who can work to see if it takes but a single bit flip to pass the current test and it makes all the effort seemingly futile. That's the sort of distressing truth that makes it hard for someone to spend a lifetime working constantly to root out corruption when it occurs and install non-corrupt individuals to power.
Granted. The general point though is if you have the ability to advocate and support one model or another, open open source apis would be the best ideal and closed closed source apis would be the worst ideal. As I implied, you're basically stuck with whatever is popular at the moment anyways. Perhaps in the future you can have some say but perhaps not.
The heavily depends on how much of a "something else" there is. Look at how much Microsoft repeatedly pissed off developers by outright consuming other companies or obsoleting them; the monopolistic anti-competitive practice of bundling, after all, is a smart move to improve uptake of your extant product when you've otherwise saturated the market to the point that you're competing with yourself and you certainly aren't going to allow developer complaints to stop you. The general issue is, Microsoft was the better option compared to Apple because it was more open but because it was still closed source (and admittedly not entirely open and cloneable) one couldn't fork away from Microsoft because of the inherent lockin. That's part of the "largely makes money for someone else". Open source makes it a lot harder to hold a monpoly so reduces the risk.
Of course, it's not like there was a practical alternative to Windows or DOS in the past that was more open. To the same end, there's no real practical alternative to Google and Facebook now. Part of that's just the inherent part of market inertia. Part of that's all the collected data which has nothing to do with code. But, then, in the long term most of that data will be churned over for new data meaning that someone with their code could potential unseat them if they managed to do all they did but better. And if you or I or anyone has any sway over the situation, I'd advocate that Google, Facebook, etc go open source to increase competition and reduce future potential lock-in.
Open APIs are only a middle-term stopgap, especially as more often than not open apis aren't entirely open and cloneable; source meanwhile reproduce the results exactly even if no one understands why. Of course, in an ideal world open APIs would be truly open and there'd be multiple code bases, open and closed, so they'd no longer really be a stopgap. And certainly, I support the idea of Open APIs and open source and clones. But that still requires the source.
PS - Feel free to replace in the above API with ABI, file specification, etc as I think it equally applies. Remember that the major complaint of ooxml was precisely that its openness was hindered by a lack of source code--and the felt undue complexity of trying to encode source code back into text more to maintain the status quo than to make a clean specification while often leaving out the more technical stuff because of either self-interest or the spec already being too complex. Of course, if they had explicitly spelled out the quirks in more general terms, I'm pretty sure people would have still been upset because MS would have had a leg up in both defining the spec to include the quirks they use in their own products and presumably coding it as they went. And if MS had just did a code dump and stated they weren't interested in standards, per se, I think people would have been even happier. To me, that's the situation with Google and Facebook. I think what they offer is but a means to their own end, and that end isn't good for the user let alone the developer, even if they can manage to enrich themselves along the way.
Many others make virtually nothing while greatly advantaging the API owner. And then sometimes the API owner decides to incorporate a clone of your product into their API, often at great expense to themselves with no direct benefit. The more popular your product, the more likely that is to happen. If you're lucky, you'll get bought out quickly and it won't just turn into a drawn out negotiation where they glean enough about how your product works to then dump you for another, cheap competitor or to go it alone.
What percentage of companies are smart? How realistic is it to assume the smart company is the popular enough company and hence it's capable to develop for such an API in the long term? And what's to stop a smart company from one day turning dumb and ruining a decade of specialized work, requiring you to jump ship and start over building your brand? All of the above is a risk to open source APIs, but at least there's always the extra option of "if the developers go crazy, we can determine the cost of support of the API with perhaps a joint splinter group (look at the various open source forks) vs abandoning it for something else". That's about the most flexibility you can realistically get.
One, I doubt any amount of education will stop users from bitching; the best you'll get is company policy enforcing a level of professionalism that at least they won't bitch around you. Two, there shouldn't be a time where you're actually fielding questions or answers about what can/cannot be installed. Company policy should spell out such things, as dictated by the company president/owner/whatever after careful input from the IT manager, and it's that policy that should "educate" users.
Why are you, the IT expert, asking the user specific questions about what's broken? Once you have a general idea, you should be able to engage in a course of actions (check the cable/connection, reimage the system and restore backups, etc) to fix the problem with rather minimal input. To put in perspective, it's like going to a doctor and them asking you twenty questions and them trying to educate you about nerves, tendons, etc for the next time you come up when it's generally their job to make a diagnosis using pretty minimal information and extrapolating upon the likely causes and taking pretty grand action until the symptoms disappear.
Sounds like the company is wasting your time. Of course, if the company took the better approach*, you'd possibly be out of a job. Beyond that, educating your users more can mean (a) you might be able to find out faster that they can't seem to work around the new corporate home page which they hate since they really want it to be icanhazcheezburger and/or (b) they find more clever ways to mess up your setup or otherwise work around company policy and only then come running to you for help. I definitely agree the former would save you time, but I don't think it'd save you much frustration which I gatther seems to be the bigger issue for you. I certainly don't think you can "educate" them well enough not to choose to do stupid things like install spyware because, after all, it's your job to take care of any sort of mess they make, so they likely don't have the strongest incentive to not do it except to incur whatever wrath (ie, your clear annoyance at them) for it (but they can shrug that off as IT people being aloof). Now, if you had managers that (a) were better educated and (b) enforced some actual punishment on people who wasted IT's time include through things like negligence.... But half of that's entirely out of your control and the other half is the IT manager's job.
*As another person down the thread notes, IT's time is worth a lot. Factor in several people in the IT department doing frontline tech support that could be mostly, if not entirely, replaced with an aggressive machine replacement policy coupled with an aggressive backup policy (that is, to take the rather brute force approach to solving problems) and the can save tens of thousands of dollars a year which is enough to pay for all those machines and backup equipment in the long term.
With all due respect, I think what you're seeing has nothing to do with layman's expectations of medicine. It's that a lot of people, when they see a loved one is dying or at risk of dying and they have someone to turn to beg for that life, they'll do a lot of pleading and demanding because they're so focused on that person being gone in their life they're not really thinking rationally about the situation*. And the cruel truth is, medicine generally overreaches their actual expectations: for a person they're told to otherwise expect to die any minute, modern medicine may be able to keep them alive for days, weeks, or maybe even months.
*This, btw, is the focus of a lot of legislation. What are politicians good at? Hearing complaints and "[doing] something", even if that something really has no net effect on fixing the problem. Obviously, physicians like you are in a much worse situation since you're subject to lawsuits and there's medical licencing boards that can confirm that you didn't actual follow a known procedure; meanwhile, obviously, the worst a politician general has to fear is not being reelected. Oh, and from what you've said, I'm sure I'm just preaching to the choir about the need to change those medical licensing boards so "follow a known procedure" can include the "let them die peacefully even over the family's objections" so individual physicians, not the almost caricature "death panels", can decide with some confidence that doing the right thing is also the legal thing and will be properly covered under malpractice insurance if it comes to that. That alone would probably stop a lot of the lawsuits before they're even filed.
The question is, is there a reason to have a 30 second conversation about IT or computers with the average end-user? If you're fielding support, it should be about problems and solutions, not so much IT or computers. And if you're discussing general IT projects, that should be a management discussion of which there should be little end-user interaction and even then it's a matter, as another poster suggested, of speaking in terms of the motivations managers care about.
Out of curiosity, why did you bother to break someone of that habit? That's an example of needless aloofness, where one feels compelled to force people into a certain mindset of what things are, how they're pronounced or spelled, etc. I mean, if it's a critical part of their job function to know the difference, then yes, you should teach them. But, if they use the internet through a web browser, they'll use the one provided by/through the IT department as sanctioned by management and the link to it will likely say "Internet" whatever the web browser is, just because it simplifies whatever training there is. A company is a business, not a school, after all.
Sorry, I should have proofread that.
'... it'd seem clearer that for friends to "cheat" together would be acceptable but that cheating in the wild with people who don't know if one is "cheating" or not [is not].'
Well, how about a silly example of a form of cheating I see as acceptable. I like the game Mega Man X3 a good bit. I've played through it plenty of times. There's a certain spot in the game where a bot with two morning stars for arms sits fully blocking the path. However, it is the case that the hit detection is a bit off, so it's actually possible to, if timed right, do an air dash through the very upper part of the bot without taking damage and proceeding forward. Now, as I see it, this is acceptable because it both exploits a glitch in the game (questionable hit detection) while simultaneously being a rather moot point (it's a single player game and the action is done more to make the play every so slightly faster and more enjoyable--the very fact that one can glitch is part of what makes it enjoyable).
Now, the best argument I can hear against doing the above is that to exploit the glitch cheats oneself. One could say the same about intentionally getting hit so one can stand on otherwise instant kill spikes. Perhaps at some point the designers intended for this to be an acceptable part of play, but even then it's clearly a cheaper act to ever intentionally get hit. So, every time one plays a game without trying one's best (ie, to accept that one can survive taking many hits so may choose to never exert more effort to learn the game than the amount needed to survive), they could be said to be cheating themself. And maybe that's true as well.
But it's also true that one plays a game for enjoyment and playing at one's best isn't always enjoyable; I certainly enjoy one-hit-kill games, but I don't play them all the time and for games that offer the mode I wish to play that in addition to the multi-hit-kill mode. So, given that the core issue is a matter of enjoyment, it'd seem clearer that for friends to "cheat" together would be acceptable but that cheating in the wild with people who don't know if one is "cheating" or not.
So, does that help explain why it's an unclear issue and it's not simply a matter of being an oxymoron?
Exactly. It'll lead to dancing [sugar plums in their heads]!
That explains the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber. Well, yes, I guess it deterred some people. But, it seems the biggest thing that's protected planes so far is the incompetence of those who wish ill. I mean, sure, people have been brainwashed to inherently trust uniforms--I don't exclude myself from this--even if we know that uniform == Uncle Sam. And then there are those short lapses of confidence whenever there's yet another bomb that makes it through the TSA, and not just from some undercover journalist who'd never use it. But those are quickly forgotten because there's nothing visible to remember. If anything, it's that the WTC fell that did the trick really, since there wasn't the same paranoia from after the WTC bombing in the 90s.
So, we need "theater" to protect the air transport sector... Yep, that's America for you. It's all about tricking the public to keep a key component of the empire running. What was that about bread and circuses again...
Really? There is? You might make that argument about the DHS, but even that might be a stretch--it's really one of its subordinate departments that's doing the real work. But, everything about the TSA seems to be an eyesore. Waiting to the near last minute for someone to board a plane is a desperate last line of defense fraught with massive false positives given the massive number of travels versus the number of terrorists. It's so bad, I don't see how they could do anything but more harm than good. I mean, it's in the same line of logic of relying upon suspected murderers with a warrant for their arrest showing up at the police station and announcing their real name.
The reason is based clearly in the irrationality of deception because people are treated as "people". That may be justified for a very brief period after a situation where emotion overrides reason. But, that's a matter of days. It does not remote justify a backdrop that has lasted a decade.
The problem is military spending != defense. Defense is things like border agents, custom agents, national guard troops *in* the US, etc. Those are the sorts of things that are cut, underfunded, etc in the name of trimming waste so the US can fund* "defense"--ie proactive offense--in other countries. The irony, of course, is that repeatedly sending US troops into other countries if anything makes them less capable of actually defending the US, as they both won't be here to actually engage in defense and because it limits the capacity for troop rotation to allow for sufficient breaks that those troops can operate effectively.
Something which both Democrats and Republicans heavily agree upon. The question isn't if trimming is necessary or appropriate. It's heavily on what should be trimmed, how much, and whether tax increases should be considered because not only are some things necessary and need to be funded but new programs for old or new problems need to be generated. To that end, Republicans don't seem willing to concede that trimming alone may not be the answer. Given that the US spends 150%+ its revenue, that doesn't seem an intuitively viable option unless one is willing to effectively cut out large parts of US spending nearly entirely: ie, to give up Social Security or Defense Spending almost complete. Such is a rather needless and pointless rock and a hard place which I can only see Republicans supporting either because they're very naive or they have some vested interest against social programs like Social Security and do want to see people, young and old, starving in poverty. :/ Perhaps I'd feel differently if Republicans offered a better solution than vague talk about the "free market" without a matching "progressive phasing out of social programs"; but that'd probably make them unelectable.
*Truthfully, it's not that the trimming has to take place and the agencies need to be underfunded. It's simply the belief of some that the agencies are really overfunded and trimming just makes them a leaner operation. There is some truth to that but mainly in the sense that no amount of funding will offer perfect border protection and the drop off rate of near optimal border protection may be rather slow (ie, you may see a gradual decline to 80% border protection at 50% of optimal funding and only after see a drastic drop off). Still, it shows an interesting priority to try to underfund actual defense in the name of continued funding of offense when it'd probably only require a modest tax increase to adequately fund both.
Off hand, I may own a PS Vita but not an Xperia Play or a Galaxy Player. It's the same reason I use/develop homebrew on a GBA. Perhaps a good question would be, why buy a PS Vita over an Xperia Play. Personally, I wouldn't know except to say I'm leery of any device I'm afraid of putting in my pocket for fear it'll become scratched up or break. To that end, I don't really know if any of the above are something I'd want.
So...RP can't be for an issue because the US Constitution currently forbids it, even though the US Constitution can be changed to allow it and RP could run precisely on the platform of changing the US Constitution to support those issues he believes in? Instead, he has to run within the confines of the law as written and not have selective interpretation, which means he should be for things like the Federal Reserve which are clearly within the purview of Congress to enshrine*? I see...
*The US Constitution specific vests within Congress the power "To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;". Now, I'm going to take a wild guess here and presume this doesn't mean that Congress is supposed to own a coin minting machine and actual print coins. Instead, it means they have the power to create institutions to create coin money. Similarly, they have the power to create institutions to regulate the value of that money--that's the point of the Federal Reserve. The only real iffy part is that it's supposed to be "coin Money" which implies metal must be involved at some level (and technically those metal strips in money might count), but that seems a pretty irrelevant technicality. I mean, if "paper" money were made out of aluminum fibers, do you think RP would be okay with it?
Well, my overall experience with the Humble Bundle #4 so far has been nearly as bad as my experience with many open source games: seemingly heavily excessive requirements that an older computer like I have can't match and general instability/slowdowns/simply not working. Just for perspective, this is a Sempron 3000+ with 1.25GB of RAM with a Radeon 9200 (ie, no pixel shader support) with 128MB of VRAM.
Cave Story+ crashes with SIGILL in libsdl-1.2 on a movq instruction (on idea how that's possible as Semprons most definitely support mmx) which was resolve by renaming the lib directory so the system libsdl-1.2 would be used. Still, there's noticeable slow downs.
NightSkyHD seems slow, doesn't seem to work in full screen, and trying to load "The Beach" which I assume is the first map just hangs it.
Gratuitous Space Battles hangs at the splash title screen. At least according to the specs, it look might the game might actually work if it actually worked.
Jamestown refuses to work because of "/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found" although I'm rather certain it'd still not work as the System Requirements listed for the Windows version says I need OpenGL 2.0 and 256MB+ of VRAM.
Bit.Trip.Runner has the same "/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found" and again I don't think it'll work anyways because the Windows specs say I need OpenGL 2.1 and shader model 3.
Super Meat Boy requires a set of GL extensions my video card doesn't have.
And I'm still waiting on Shank to finish downloading to find out why it will probably not work.
Now, obviously if I had a newer computer with Windows, at least some of these problems would go away. But as noted again in the System Requirements, Intel Integrated graphics won't necessarily work in at least one of the games. So, to actually play all the games, I'd have to make sure to make a special purchase for a video card...which at this point might as well be called a game card since that's the only real reason to buy it. And at that point, I'd rather just buy a game console and skip all the fuss of libraries and GL extensions and whatever other shit that's involved. It's simply not worth the headache and Humble Bundle just further confirms it.
PS - Okay, I do actually do some gaming on the PC. But, it's incredibly hit and miss. Only a hand full of open source anything games actually work on my system. Now, I'd assume that if I used Windows and not crappy open source drivers* then things would be better, but I don't think it'd be that much better. The overall point is that developers, be they open or closed source ones, are unwilling to support anything particularly old intentionally, so it's more of a crap shoot and testing and praying. This holds true even for "2D" games, a lot of which use OpenGL and specifically various features that my card simple doesn't support at all or not well. Of course, there's also the general issue that a lot of games are probably just badly written, where actually scaling to full screen suddenly causes massive frame rate loss and noticeable slowdown. *Sigh*
*I say this with all due respect. I recognize that a lot of the drivers are significantly, if not entirely, the byproduct of reverse engineering. Never the less, some of them are simply very obviously incomplete, unstable, and glitchy and there's no one either willing or able to work more on them precisely because they're related to older hardware. In my case, I simply don't know enough about the technology or I'd gladly contribute; I simply don't know where to begin. To that end, I'm also rather too lazy to try to fix a lot of the problems because I know that with the hardware being so old, it's not like I could work miracles to support enough features to make a lot of games work. That is, I'd have to not only fix the graphics first but I'd then have to fix/downgrade the requirements of a lot of the games. It's simply too large of a task for me to even begin to contemplate.
That's rather the problem. The legislature has already proven it's perfectly willing to grant and even retroactively grant actual warrantless wiretaps. So, what hope is there in the legislature working to close a loophole that gives more power to people to control information about themselves instead of leaving "job creating" companies alone with their valid contracts? I mean, closing down or shrinking Carrier IQ or companies like it with stiffly worded privacy laws will cost jobs and in this difficult economic time--excuse me as I go vomit in a corner after hearing that tripe spewed again and again by Congress because it's more convenient to use an excuse of job killing to attack an actual issue than to actually discuss the issue and resolve it. Meanwhile, the executive branch is the one carrying out the effective abuse, be it unconstitutional or not. So, is it any wonder that people scream out "unconstitutional" with a hope that the courts might not be so corrupt to allow this absurd abuse; I mean, the courts have repeatedly demonstrated creative interpretation to the benefit of the people. Oh, right, Citizens United. Well, we're fucked.
Meanwhile, I don't care, personally, if it's a witch or a duck. Clearly it's wrong and it should stop, period. I'm no more convinced the legislature will stop it with a new law than the FBI will chose to stop on its own. I mean, why should it, given it's all strictly legal? Of course, such a road is clearly the fascism of a police state, to use companies as the instrument of spying that the state can't legally do itself. It's no better than using foreign powers to spy on one's own citizens while spying on their citizens and swapping the data. And again, even if made illegal, it's just a matter of retroactive legalizing it because apparently "ex post facto" only works one way.
But, you know, we could always protest or make a big scene. I mean, that's working so well with the whole Occupy movement, where the media is keen enough to comment about the evictions and not spend much time consideration the fucking mindset that has people wanting to Occupy in the first place, given the obvious past examples of people protesting. I mean, I find it funny how it's readily ignored that in the past it was quite common and standard that any redress of grievance against the government inherently meant an "occupy" of local land because the actual travel involved in the first place meant you weren't going to go marching home every day and even if you could you wanted to be there to make it constantly known to those in power what your issues were. Another thing is, it was enough to say "here is how we have been grieved" without having to hand the politicians language to insert into a bill to sign into law; but, then, I guess law makers aren't used to thinking on their own and making laws so they need 3rd parties to do all the leg work? Or are they really that clueless on a lot of what Occupy's grievances are?
Well, excuse me, I'm just wasting my emotion, time, and energy. I mean, here I am posting on a website. Clearly I should be doing at least as much as you are and whatever you're doing to resolve the issue, assuming you see there's an issue. So, what was it you're doing again?
The issue isn't so much if the all inclusive need to know exists. The issue is more that it should be possible to know and how much people do have a general want or need to know.
Well, people may not want to learn things they don't care about, but they may need to.
That's quite untrue. I want to eat enjoyable food. To have them, I need to know what makes them enjoyable and possible how to fix them. That is, there exists a necessary cause to lead to an effect. The effect is wanted and the cause is needed. Pragmatically, this paradigm is the root of many wants.
Granted, but to simplify things is to abstract them to a point that one need understand a more minimal scope of things to reach those desires. To use my analogy above, if I want enjoyable food I could fix the food myself and have a need to learn to cook. Or, I can rely upon the specialization of others in cooking and then my need is procuring that premade food. Upon the latter point, the need exists to locate and acquire that food. To that end, one or more URLs of sorts exists in the real world for acquiring that food. To say I don't "need" to understand real world URLs might even be true: I could always use a third party for that. But that's just another level of indirection, is often more expensive, and it doesn't really get me away from my base need. So, at some point, I still have to learn and understand something or I'm left to pure ignorance and hope in the benevolence of others, forever. That simply isn't realistically viable.
And the majority of people need to learn something to use a computer. Now, I am not one who can reasonably say with absolute certainly where that cut off point is for all people, the majority of people, or even a minority of people. But, never the less there clearly is some amount of learning that is necessary. The argument is then just how much abstraction can exist before so little learning occurs that the majority of people feel the velvet glove that hinders them rather than helps them. I can certainly see why there is the feeling that hiding URLs is one of those things that prevents people from adequately achieving their goals by hindering their ability to learn what is needed to accomplish their goals. That doesn't mean no one can benefit from hiding URLs. But, then, is Safari really intended for just those people?
Or three or four times. ARM needs the boost more than x86, anyways, but honestly given that Javascript still doesn't seem suited for more than twirling fobs, I'm not sure what the real point is. I mean, if the performance does become high enough that it's feasible to push games into the browser, I can only see that as a combination of annoying users--just like flash does--while offering an inferior experience to a stand-alone client--since it's enough of a hassle worrying if the game itself will crash without also having to worry about the browser crashing as well. Of course, perhaps I'd feel a bit differently if web browsers didn't still crash, hang, become generally unresponsive, and/or have regularly security concerns. But, then, OS kernels have all those problems as well, even Linux, so I'm not exactly getting my hopes up. It's just that adding another layer doesn't seem to improve things.
We already have angry nerds. Angry nerds either (a) don't develop in walled gardens or (b) do it as a paid job and complain about it. Notice, a lot of software developers aren't nerds, let alone angry ones. So, even if angry nerds were to stop working in walled gardens, it wouldn't magically solve anything. No, generally, the best way to end a walled garden is for people to stop paying for a walled garden. Now, even an angry consumer won't necessarily do the job. Look at how many consumers were/are angry with Windows in the 90s and how well funded Microsoft was. But, that's at least closer to the mark[et].
Talking to the choir about not "sinning" really misses the mark. You have to speak from the pulpit about the congregation to the congregation and make them realize they should be angry and why they have to make the tough choices. Yes, this will end up pissing off the congregation and many will not listen. But, making out nerds to be the bogey men who are the cause of the problem or magical saviors who can fix the problem they did not cause does very little to fix anything. I mean, we already have Richard Stallman, the FSF, and the GPL, and we still have walled gardens.
Clearly it's the choices of the populace at large that is the issue. Having said that, I think it should be recognized that a significant subset of the population may choose to live in a walled garden and that doesn't mean the end of the freedom that most will and do enjoy on the PC. That's just Armageddon speak that's yet to be realized. Sure, people need to speak up and tell the populace that Armageddon could occur if they don't do something. But, it's one thing to warn of a possible future and condemn those who choose a present for themselves that only effects themselves--well, to the degree anything one chooses for oneself only effects oneself.
So, you think the Feds would agree to banning all open source files just to stop one distro and that wouldn't be struck down as violating freedom of speech? More generally, you don't think the very idea of an "antivirus firewall" purposed to block speech, even if it's claimed to be of a very restrictive nature, wouldn't be struck down? It's one thing to seize a domain name. It's quite another to actually block or filter traffic to a server.
And that Criminal Investigation didn't really go anywhere, with at least one stated possible work around in the case of PGP: source code printed in books are covered under freedom of speech. Now, tariffs are a different beast entirely, but the point is that given how if anything the world has come to view ebooks as books more and more, I don't see how filtering international traffic would work under First Amendment considerations.
It worked for Toyota. It works for Nintendo USA. It works for Microsoft USA, for that matter. I can see the Fed using a tariff to effectively bribe Canonical to establish "a brick-and-mortar office" but that's about it.
So, the Linux Alliance, funded in part by IBM and Google, get to buy a copy of Ubuntu and host it for the US because evil MS, evil Apple, and the evil Fed wants to censor it? Yea, that'd just do wonders to help MS and hurt Ubuntu.
Once it's in the US, it's in the US. And once here, a new copy is regularly "made" under the terms of the GPL and hence the import fee doesn't have to be paid again. So, the single issue is getting someone to import a legal copy. I can see that happening.