I entirely agree. It's like the problem with the government and military spending. We spend billions of dollars on "the military problem", resulting in private corporations/companies/contractors that charge outrageous rates for things to deliver at best questionable results*. Instead, we should end all military spending and just let the market take care of things.
Oh, and if you can't tell, I was being sarcastic. The problem isn't per se government involvement but the means of involvement, which always seems to lack accountability, cost requirements, or clear objectives. Yes, without all that, government can actually make the problem worse because a project that fails done by one party (say Republicans) will only induce another party (say Democrats) to come up with their own plans to try to prove the other party wrong. In the end, instead of actually working towards solving the problem, it just becomes a political game of spending.
*The US spends $600 billion or more yearly just on the Department of Defense. Actual war costs are even higher and budgeted separately. That isn't to say, of course, a lot of that $600 billion isn't spent on things like planes, tanks, soldier salaries, etc. Still, for every day the US isn't at war it seems an undue waste, starting wars to justify the cost seems absolutely horrible, and it's highly unlikely that anything close to $600 billion of actual value comes out of the spending. That is, you might get $600 billion of economic activity from the spending, but $600 billion worth of bombs that are summarily detonated don't do nearly the good as say $600 billion of broadband infrastructure improvements, even if they were as inefficiently done as the study suggests.
Re:How about "when software is named by assholes"
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Allright. A little race segregation? A little "women should not drive cars because they could be offended if men shouth nasty things on the road"? Black programmers can only if they are not offended by a library called libnigger? Women should only could if they are not offended by libbitch? You know, i dont like to work with people who would be offended if you call their library libcartman.
Personally, I'd very much be offended by libnigger or libbitch, and if I wanted to use them I'd probably want to rename them to make it clear I don't agree with the message they're trying to convey. I don't agree either with the GP's notion that keeping people who are potentially offended away from an industry is any sort of answer. At the same time, focusing on a project just because it's called libnigger or libbitch also misses the point. If the code is worthy, fork the project and rename it. That's the FOSS way.
You may think you words contain some wisdom, but believe me, racist and sexist assholes exists in rough amounts and you are in no sense special.
A very true sentiment.
I personally worked with women and Asians on software and to be honest - i never had to restrict the names i give. If you are not able to talk in a acceptable way without focusing explicitly on being not embarrassing, then just stay in your basement.
To add to that, the GP made a point that not all code is meant for the enterprise. So, yes, they have no plan necessarily to move out of the basement. That doesn't mean there won't be a lot of users of their code. The point isn't that it is justifiable to name a project offensively. It's that focusing on it has more to do with trying to make racists, assholes, etc better by shining a light on them. It'd seem the simpler thing, again, is simply if the code is worthy to incorporate code and rename it. Otherwise, just ignore the project as a whole*. I don't think it does any good to obsess over one project that's an outliers and act either that it's the norm or must follow some philosophy or that it must be converted for the sake of conversion. The only true philosophy, if there is one, would be that the code is important.
*Btw, to that end, I still agree that some people likely did the reverse and ignored the project because of the name; like racists and sexists who are prejudice about the outside, I'm a bit weary of worrying about catering to those peoples wants and needs. But, I assume most people just ignored it because there's other libraries that do the same thing, the code to write just a parser is relatively trivial, the code in question wasn't particularly special, or that markdown is still such a niche that there aren't much users. In short, I think the whole discussion is pretty much a non-issue. But I'm happy for the few people who found the library useful, and I still think it's best to release the code because it can't really hurt to have more code (well...so long as it works reasonably well and there's not spam levels of code).
Re:How about "when software is named by assholes"
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When Software Offends
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I don't disagree with that, but that's sort of the problem. The very thing being focused upon: it isn't that libupskirt is badly or well coded; it isn't that libupskirt is an undersung or underutilized library; it's that the name "libupskirt" might be offensive to people and we really need to focus on gender equality in the FOSS world. That simply does a disservice to the author of the library and seems more a focus of pandering to a point than actually working to overcome a real problem.
As others have commented, there's all sorts of projects in the FOSS (and Commercial) world that have seemingly opaque and unrelated names. The mantra of the technical and the professionally oriented in the FOSS has been that what matters is functionality, not naming. So, it's okay to name something silly or stupid or whatever. I mean, what part of Mozilla or Firefox say anything about anything? Microsoft and Windows Internet Explorer at least presumably had some semblance of meaning at one time to their goals or functions, but even then the names used only give some vague notion of what is involved and the really important thing is their use and functionality.
In the end, I guess, I think I'd feel a lot different if the whole discussion was one of "Gee, I found a quirky named library called libupskirt, and it does this neat thing; let me show you" than what is being delivered as a story instead. And maybe eventually the name would be changed because the author felt like it. Instead, it feels more like an attempt to shove some level of political correctness down the throats of everyone and it being more a rather zero-sum political debate. If FOSS is all about the code, then I want there to be talk about the code. I'd comment myself, except I don't think I'm enough of an expert to espouse anything particularly useful into an article to submit to Slashdot or elsewhere. And if there's nothing particularly insightful to say about libupskirt's code, then why is Slashdot covering it? Ah, but I guess it is news for nerds of a sort. It just seems to be of the wrong focus. It seems more the fluff stuff to fill the space in the local evening news.
Re:How about "when software is named by assholes"
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When Software Offends
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I think you're missing the big picture, though. If you read the author's statements, I don't think the main problem is with her being manipulated into potentially humiliating herself. It is heavily that instead of having a group of users that take advantage of the library she created, people are quick to condemn her as a "dude" and an "asshole" and focus on "the controversy". If you create something useful to yourself and you think will be useful to others, I don't think you necessarily care too much about the marketing of it.
So, if it offends people, it offends people. The frustrating part was how until "the controversy", there was only around 3 users (including the author) to offend. Isn't the point of FOSS supposed to be about finding useful code? And after multiple years, there's been very little uptake by other people it seems. I can certainly see why, after that, people focusing not on your work but a name or title might push you to say "fuck it, it wasn't worth the effort to contribute".
Having said all that, I do hope the author continues to contribute. I know that I'm well in the same boat, but without "the controversy". I create code and release it and I doubt very many people use that code. It's very disheartening to put a lot of effort into something, think that it's decently useful to people, and have very little positive feedback. But, I always put it in the back of my mind that I need to scratch my own proverbial itches and write code. So, even if I post it online somewhere and no one else ever uses it, the little bit of effort I put into it is worth it. It's not worth running a git tree, perhaps. But, every long once in a while I get at least one comment back from someone. And even if it were "your code sucks", at least it means someone bothered to d/l the code and look at it.:)
1.He installed unauthorized software on a computer not belonging to him, a security guard would not have the authority to give this person permission to do this, the Security guard i bet technically doesn't work for Apple, but will work for a security firm that has a contract with the store.
Um...the store is presumably the only one who could grant authority to install software on the computers in question, so presumably the security guard could be granted authority to allow/deny access to installing software just like the security guard is granted authority to allow/deny access to the store in general. I agree, it's much more dubious than gaining permission from a manager.
2.Yes in apple stores you can use the camera, but would you think it's ok for Apple to store those pictures and upload them to a public website, no i doubt you would
Google does it. Disney does (or least did) it (Splash Mountain). Security cameras in general are legal, and lots of those have been played on national television, be it to spot a criminal or simply because something "funny" happened. I have no idea how much permission was obtained from the people involved, though.
3.Technically he is not in a public space, he is in a apple store who can prohibit people from taking pictures, a lot of shops will not allow you to take pictures in there store.
A store is a public space until such point at which is marked/stated otherwise (Employees only signs or being asked to leave). Hence a nice "no pictures can be taken" sign or the security guard, if his job is to prevent people from taking pictures, would have been to say no to the artist's request and possibly deny him access to the building.
4. It cannot be assumed people are aware there pictures are being taken, not everyone is computer literate and would notice things such as the camera light.
Yep, it sucks to be in public where you never know if your picture is being taken. Feel free to have the law changed to that end. For example, there are various exclusions made for taking picture in public for decided private places, like banning cameras in shoes taking upward pictures.
5.There is nothing against the law of taking pictures of people on a beach for instance and posting them on the web, one it's a public area, and also would tend to be more obvious carrying around a camera taking snaps.
Telescoping lens, satellites, etc sort of remove that notion. Again, as much as it sucks, being in public means you're in public.
6.there is very little difference legally had he set up a laptop in changing room and done the same thing
Actually, there is. Again, it's a matter of expectation of privacy. A changing room is, by most reasonably people, considered a private space. A restroom in general is as well. Clothes provide privacy too. People could be said that they don't expect a computer with a camera to photograph them. But, they can't be said to expect that they can't be legally photographed in general standing in the same spot in the same way from a virtually identical angle.
It seems like point (2) is probably your strongest, given how much fuss there has been about Google Streetview, that I'm not sure if Disney is still releasing photos of park visitors, and the release of some but not all security tapes might be considered a special exception (that criminals might give up some right to privacy in committing a crime). Overall, I'd agree it's a dubious thing in the same way that security cameras are generally dubious. The artist's specific intents might have been more or less dubious than that, and hence there might be a case to be made, especially of the civil sort. But without some more specific information about a ban or a specific law in the State in question, I just don't see how one can claim an expectation of privacy and demand to not be photographed.
The fact that you apparently wish to deliberately distort my meaning is what is sad.
I am sorry if I distorted your meaning, but I did not do so deliberately. If I understand you, your core message is complaining doesn't change the way things are and you offer a solution of sorts, to effectively fork the whole DNS system totally ignoring the US.
Given how you state you believe the whole ICE situation is ridiculous...I suggest you start running your own DNS fork. Otherwise, I don't see the point in stating how my complaining may not in itself be an effective tool in achieving my desired end, since I don't see the point in complaining about what I'm doing and not doing when you seem to be doing the same thing. Such seems to reek of a desire for superiority on the issue by being the most correct on the issue. Also, I would prefer it if you didn't claim ownership of the internet personally and its construction while simultaneously presuming my nationality denies me potential joint ownership. Because if you say, as owner, how the internet should be controlled, then if I'm an owner too, I should be able to say how the internet should be controlled as well.
"United we stand, divided we fall". It holds true for a union of states. It holds true for a union of networks. But, yes, let's focus on the who built what (because the web sites in question and the actual networks to reach them are in the US and the whole.com changes only effect the ability of people in the US to access them) and not the lack of due process of law (which could at least be a beginning to justify how things are instead of a "it's my ball and if you don't like how I play you can go home, I don't care how little my new rules make any sense"). The fact that you wish to spin the situation as an us vs them debate instead of recognizing how the actions of the US through ICE fundamentally undermines the very founding principles of the US is disturbing at best and saddening at worst.
Except that.com,.net,.org and.edu all fall squarely within the domain of the U.S. as far as regulation goes, as per the blurb.
Which is precisely why other countries have pushed for ICANN to not be under US regulation because it's absurd that.com,.net,.org, and.edu should be US regulated or more generally that it's under US authority to create/destroy new TLDs.
The other point made in the blurb is if you are targeting a particular nation's citizens, that you may also be subject to that nation's regulations.
Even if one were to believe that premise, what does that have to do with the situation? The fact that a lot of.com,.net, etc domains belong to US (or European) companies has a lot to do with where the Internet/Web first grew substantially. That doesn't mean.com,.net, etc inherently target Americans or Europeans. Similarly, a lot of the initial web sites were in English, not only because of heavy US involvement in the web's start but because English is a widely used second language and hence the closest to a globally inter-operable language.
Beyond that, I'd say it's pretty bloody obvious that plenty of pirates don't necessarily target a specifically nationality. Plenty of people in the world want to watch US made shows, play US made games, etc. Similarly, there's plenty of people in the US who want to watch shows from other countries (subbed or dubbed, if necessary), play games from other countries (translated, if necessary), etc. But, again, as English is very much a global inter-operable language, there's plenty of non-native English speakers who have become accustom to watching, playing, etc copyrighted works in English precisely because they're never translated into their native language.
In short, I'd probably feel a good bit different if this wasn't ICE seemingly just blacklisting domains as their own discretion, without oversight. Such a situation means ICE doesn't have to even bother proving in any way that any targeting happened, unless the domain happens to not be under their control; then they have to actually obtain cooperation from another government. And this situation just further highlights the point that.com,.net, etc should not be under ICE/US control.
Patents is a type of intellectual property by definition.
I think the point was to argue that "intellectual property" having a definition that includes patent is absurd. This is based on the obviousness that property is, under a classical sense, some sort of inherently rival thing be it personal property, title and usage of land, etc. Meanwhile, there's nothing inherently rival about information.
Hence the point that the use of "property" seems intent to confuse the issue by extrapolating how natural patents, copyright, etc are when they're not natural at all. To have to admit they're entirely societal/government constructs would then result in having to, at some level, justify the existence of patents, copyright, etc. That's something I don't think a lot of people really want to do, given how many edge cases could likely be cut out in various industries where it'd be better if there were less or even no patent, copyright, etc protection. Of course, I can imagine where there's places it'd be better if there were even more protection, but then "why not just extend protection for everything"? Well, that's almost certainly less than optimal. Is it any wonder some people are so upset about copyright being extended so much?
PS - It's rather funny the GP brought up property taxes, as they were created precisely because even though property is such a core belief in many developed countries, it was recognized by some that property ownership can reduce to something akin to a fiefdom when a few people can retain large land ownership and force most people to be their tenants. Beyond that, property taxes tend to push people to actually usually their owned lands, through mining or farming or whatever, instead of leaving the land fallow. Whether or not the idea works or not, the GP's point at least has merit on the principle of property taxes being applied such that people don't needlessly hold onto copyrights, patents, etc and try to do more than let them go fallow and hence underutilized. It seems only fair if one really wants to talk of such things as if they're property.
While I don't really agree with IrishStu on all of his Interning Big Lies, I'd say the "people who need a wage in order to survive" is the real biggest problem. It creates disproportion opportunity with those who are well-off enough* to move to wherever a job is and pay for rent and food without an income. It would seem this is part of the root of why government is so fucked up: government internship is so commonly done by people who are well-off and it's difficult for an "average Joe" to enter government. This isn't to say "average Joe" would inherently run the government better, but it would clearly seem that there's a conflict of interest and possibly even an biased agenda if one's guardians, who likely paid for your internship, are well-off because of stock, company ownership, etc and your career path is not grounded in the daily wage or yearly salary work under the subordinate whim and possible non-sequitur of a company.
*This doesn't necessarily mean people who are the children of the rich, but it strongly leans that way. In general, internships are the domain of would-be college graduates. While the poor can and do receive adequate loans to pay for college, they are unlikely to have sufficient funds to work on a no-pay internship. Meanwhile, the middle class generally can't get loans and sink most of their money into paying for a good/great college, generally leaving little that could be used towards a no-pay internship. The rich, however, by definition have sufficient funds, so they inherently could support a no-pay internship. Now, the poor or the middle class could potentially save sufficiently prior to college towards an internship (although that means devoting money towards the internship instead of a "better" college), they may take a position as an assistant lecturer if they're in grad school (which does nothing to help undergraduates), or they could wait until after college after saving up money to work in an internship (which beyond delaying one's career by multiple years, might become a hindrance to one's hiring).
MasterCard etc. are not government agencies. They are privately owned companies. They are free to do anything they want to that is not in violation of the law including not processing payments to and from organizations that they do not wish to for ANY reason unless it violates some anti-discrimination or other law.
So, let's see... A company, created for the purpose of maximizing its own profit (presumably legally and not necessarily through attempts to manipulate the government to write laws to its own advantage) has every "right" to go against that mandate...unless it violates some anti-discrimination or other law, since that company "right" is not absolute but a facade to make it easier to write laws governing company behavior. Sounds like Visa/Mastercard are showing clear and willful signs of a market failure, which screams out for a need to change the law in the US to make their actions illegal (tortious interference might apply at the civil level, regardless, but I'm no lawyer). It sounds like their actions might already be illegal in the EU.
MC/Visa etc. don't discriminate against pornography per se. It is perfectly possible to use your MasterCard to purchase this sort of stuff.
And? If MC/Visa/etc were discriminating against pornography, wikileaks, or whatever because ti furthered their profit motive, then at least that'd have some logical foundation in the function of a company. If it's being done to placate US Congressmen so they'll be more likely to write laws favorable to MC/Visa/etc without consideration of the US Congressmen's constituents (since it's possible a law may only incidentally advantage MC/Visa/etc when its primary effect is for the people), it's sounds like an attempt at quid pro quo or otherwise indirect bribery.
If the only thing that can be said is that what MC, Visa, etc do today is not currently illegal in the US, it says little about what should be illegal. Companies, after all, are social constructs. The individuals inside them are individuals. Things might be different if all interactions in a company were simply individuals agreeing upon contracts. But, that sort of organizational structure would make most medium to large companies untenable.
What I've come to realize, after living in Texas for several years, is that it is all about manners. In Texas, we don't like to offend folks, we keep our private business private, and it is no one's business what happens behind closed doors. I think the perceived hypocrisy of the porn v/s guns debate has a lot to do with this mentality, and I think this is a sentiment that shared (to various degrees) around the US.
The problem I have with your argument is, I don't think the problem is with the hypocrisy per se. The problem is what people consider public, what people consider private, and just what sort of reaction you get from people when they stop acting upon their manners. If sex is private, then people don't want to see sex in public. But then, you can't hide things like your race so some groups are persecuted or belittled because there are no manners to cover over the incident; this I'd say is true anywhere there are racists, so I wouldn't say that part is unique to Texas.
Then, that ever loving desire for manners and privacy results in you finding some people you think were your friends who, now being close to you, drop their manners and talk about how they like you "even though you're Christian/Jewish/Black/White/Straight/Homosexual/whatever". Ie, there's only a surface layer of tolerance for other people and you only can really feel the greatest deal of tolerance if you happen to be in the majority in almost everything. I'm not saying being flagrantly intolerant at all times is better, but closeted intolerance along with many people unwilling to challenge people in private over their personal beliefs can lead to oppression of others in private settings in a way few would know about, and that just makes the problem look bigger when it's found out about.
My point then, is if anything liberals, especially the "bleeding-heart" type, actually try to follow the Christian philosophy of actually trying to love everyone without judgment. Perhaps only in that is there reason to take issue with the hypocrisy of many so-called Christians. The alcohol, guns, strip clubs, etc all seem irrelevant in comparison.
PS - This holds true everyone on the globe, btw. To that end, I agree Texas, the southern US, and the US in general are just useful, stereotypical scapegoats which in being scapegoats show the speaker as actually failing the love everyone without judgment bit.
This isn't an either-or situation. The TSA's perpetrated a number of civil liberties violations, yes. On the other hand, some kind of free market libertarian fantasy should not come at the expense of public safety either.
True enough, but I think you're failing to miss the real point. It's not really a "free market libertarian fantasy"; it's the rallying cry of the Republican party to privatize everything, especially those things that were originally enshrined in government by Republicans. Ie, it's simply a form of corporate welfare and government created monopolies or oligarchies. Libertarian's are just the useful idiots to point to, like Communists are pointed to, because there's invariably some of them that will advocate such an absolutely ridiculous plan based upon an extreme and unreal ideology.
That also proves that the US population is so politically titled to the right that Republicans can call upon the extreme right for their aid and use the extreme left, again Communists, to stereotype those left of them in what should be an obvious charade. Of course, the most obviously dubious part is calls that any Democrat is actually anti-business, as if larger government programs as a general point have anything but pro-business effects.
The TSA needs to be re-imagined, but we shouldn't revert to the system we had before. But c'mon. A free market system has no incentive to improve in this kind of situation (oh, you died in a terrorist attack? Fine, go to some other airport next time!)
How about the old system: if I was blown up by a terrorist, then the population could as a whole generally agree that the terrorist was a bad man who if he lived should be brought to justice; if a government or business employee groped me, then the population could as a whole generally agree that the employee was a bad man who should be brought to justice; and if a person waterboards someone else, then the population could a whole generally agree that the person was a bad man who should be brought to justice. Oh, right, the US wouldn't elect a person who actually advocated and pursued stuff like that. Justice is a communist plot and only senseless libertarian ideals--but only in the form of a "free market"--can save the day, so we should just privatize some of that and bypass the whole legal system.
PS - Just because you think the free market does somethings really well, like optimize the trade of goods, and people have an innate right to liberty doesn't mean you're a libertarian. Libertarianism has been contorted by too many to cover subjects it has no business covering (like the absurdity of religion covering math or vice versa). But, then, that's the same sort of problem Communism had in part.:/
So long as you don't want up front pay/benefits. You can't reasonably expect a company to give it to you both ways. If you are willing to be a part of the financial risk of a project, meaning your pay, or lack thereof, depends on how well it does then sure you can have part of the profits. That is basically how it works for all small business owners. How much they get depends on how well they do. However that means you have to accept that you only get paid when it makes money and that if it bombs, you don't get anything.
You don't seem to realize, the issue isn't black and white. Less pay* can translate into better short-term benefits. Even less pay can translate into even better long-term benefits, effectively predicated on longer-term company success. Established companies with reasonably steady income, of the sort that's used by management to justify their own demanded pay raises, can translate into workers demanding to receive pay raises or short/long-term benefits in the form of stock, a more direct equity program, or a pension system. That doesn't mean management or the workers obtain what they demand, but it's certainly a financial possibility. It can also potentially lead to greater quality, but that's obviously predicated on the assumption that taking a financial risk* means you'll inherently work harder because you have a stake in the outcome and that you then in turn deserve the fruits of that risk and work.
In any case, the real issue would seem to be a lot less about profit sharing and more about overworking employees. To that end, it comes down to an amount of seeming manipulation upon employees to not be compensated in pay but in praise that they were working on a top tier game and that was effective pay enough or in simply not enough consideration on the amount of hours and years it would take to actually complete development. It simply sounds like it was never made clear to employees exactly what they were agreeing to when they became employed. As much as people lament this as simply naivety on the part of those employees, as there's note that game companies are generically notorious for such issues, it ignores that there's plenty of game companies that don't have such problems, that the notoriety of working conditions are a false stereotype, and it seems very unacceptable to have such working conditions. But, then, clearly a lot of employees felt the same way given there was apparently a turnover rate of at least 80 people over 7 years.
*In this sense, it's the opportunity cost where "less pay" and "financial risk" are instated. Clearly, being paid $40,000/year at one company vs $30,000/year plus end-of-employment profit sharing is trading less up front pay for the greater risk and opportunity in optimizing one's total pay over the course of one's employment. But, then, some companies want to work $40,000/year employees steadily at 2x the hourly rate of $30,000/year plus profit sharing employees, so the effective hourly payment is inherently worse for the former.
Browsers are old tech. Browsers are utilitarian. Non-technical people don't want a constantly evolving piece of basic software.
Non-technical people want computers that never break, no matter what you do, and process any request made of them instantly. Hell, I want a computer like that too. But, I'm not sure it's realistic or that browers are so old tech, utilitarian that they are above evolving.
Mainstream browsers are not the place for "cool and cutting edge" development. I want a browser that focuses on security and standards compliance.
Doing decent security involves cool, cutting edge development (like various sandboxing techniques*). Maintaining compliance with the latest standards, which aren't fully defined, is cool, cutting-edge development.
New features outside that should be addons/plugins until they are so widely adopted, or self-evidently useful, that they get moved into the core of the browser. I call this the Blizzard model because that is the method they follow for World of Warcraft.
Ie, copy Opera and Chrome? Well, they seem to be well on that track, which is precisely why they're pushing for the sort of changes people seem to hate. That isn't to say I agree with what Mozilla is doing, either. But, I don't believe there's some sort of clear mandate on what they should be doing as far as an obvious consensus or an evident need. Neither Chrome nor Opera seem much better in that boat either, as there's parts of each browser feature wise I'd like to see merged in the other ones.
Mozilla seem to have adopted We-are-graphic-designers-and-so-know-better-than-you-plebs model that turned "Web 2.0" into a steaming pile of shit.
Perhaps "Web 2.0" was inherently "a steaming pile of shit", just like "Cloud Computing" will be? It's not that there aren't some uses for "Web 2.0" or "Cloud Computing", but few people or enterprises seem to really know what will work and what won't with such concepts. As a result, lots of people try to go full tilt on the concept, betting big on the potential payoff, and only a few technologies really stick as applicable. That's general capitalism, though; that's just how bubbles operate. I don't think there's a really solution for that except for people to stop being greedy.
Honestly, given how much of a mess Windows is generally when it comes to installing files**, I'm sort of surprised they don't do checksums at that level anyways. But, then, that would involve some forward thinking upon helping the home user outside of a more generic, and reliable, wipe and reinstall everything.
*Admittedly, it won't actually work on all files on your machine: you still have to verify the boot loader separately, system config files have to be handled separately (although that's likely to be rather trivial for most people), and all your logs are obviously modified too commonly for checksums to make sense; but, it goes a long way to being able to verify a system. Too bad I don't know of any actual tool to automate most of the above to rectify debsums' deficiencies. Still, given how a root-kit attack works, it goes a long way towards protecting you.
**Windows does an amazingly good job at one level, given it has to deal with so many different and inconsistent install methods spanning over two decades. At the same time, it'd make a lot of sense if Windows had something equivalent to checkinstall to actually bottle installs, including the production of checksums, to mitigate the risk to the system and general make uninstalling a lot less messy. That seems especially true given all the "virtual folder" technology that has been included since Vista which could have been designed to mitigated the risk of an MBR or another type of root-kit attack.
Or perhaps the GP was simply dismissing the implication of this story being news: that if we only had profiling, we could all cower in fear but instead of it being a 95-year-olds with diapers being molested and humiliated, we'd limit the molestation and humiliation to minority, brown-looking people. After all, if molestation and humiliation by the TSA is such a horrible thing, shouldn't it be a daily story in the news that another (short/medium/tall) (black/brown/white) (young/middle-age/old) (fat/thin) (male/female) was molested and humiliated by the TSA just to get on a plane? Shouldn't that inherently be news worthy?
More to the point, if the forum goers are right, and most players of the game are exactly like them, then the solution is obvious: don't buy any of the items. If you don't buy them, CCP gains nothing, and they'll eventually stop offering them. Free market.
More to the point, if the environmentalists are right, and most people are exactly like them, then the solution is obvious: don't buy any of the right-to-dump-sludge-in-the-river credits. If you don't buy them, the government gains nothing, and they'll eventually stop offering them. Free market.
Because, you know, it's not like the whole complaint is precisely that most but not all people are like them, and it's those few that aren't who are more than willing to fuck over the environment, be it through toxic sludge that kills rivers and makes people sick or real world money transactions that'll fuck over the extant in-game economy and radically change the power balance in the game; and in the long term, that might well change the norm that most people will dump sludge into the river (look at NYC) or buy their way to success. Perhaps you're simply unaware of the concept of externalities?
PS - Yes, those forum ragers and those environmentalists might be wrong. But it'd probably be best to discredit their actual arguments and not simply pretend that the free market term or concept thrown into a discussion is a magic resolution.
Metroid Zero Mission is fantastic. other than nostalgia, I can't see a reason to play the old one. it really feels clunky and you're getting nearly the same experience with zero mission (plus epilogue)
As an avid Metroid fan, I'd have to say you perhaps missed the point of the original Metroid? It didn't involve hand-coddling, story-driven direction. It threw you in a sandbox with a vague notion of your mission, then let you discover in a 2D platform adventure just where you were supposed to go and what you were supposed to do; ie, it in many ways was the platform adventure equivalent of the Legend of Zelda, which isn't that surprising.
Now, having said all that, I agree that the original Metroid was clunky (limited direction of fire and no ability to crouch, off-hand). But, in some ways Metroid Zero Mission really missed the mark, IMO, in trying too hard to tell people what to do. Thankfully, yes, they put in enough hidden blocks so people could work around some of that.
However, clearly the atmosphere in Metroid Zero Mission tries too hard to tell the player exactly where to go and what to do. In short, it simply feels too heavy handed. In some ways, I'd place Castlevania - Harmony of Dissonance and Castlevania - Aria of Sorrow as better Metroid games in spirit, as they don't try to push plot as a means to direct you on where to go or what to do; the point of an adventure and an adventurer is to figure that stuff out on your own. And yes, that means that the original Metroid, with all its many clear flaws, still has something to offer that I just don't see Metroid Zero Misson offering...except, you know, in that it includes Metroid as an unlockable.:)
PS - Please don't mistake this for me saying Metroid Zero Mission is a bad game. It is quite good, just like Metroid Fusion. Truthfully, almost all the Metroid games pretty badly break the original Metroid formula, be it through progressively lowering acid, one-way gates, locked doors, or translation decoder locks. A major part of the fun of Metroid has resulted in simply bypassing the developer induced barriers in unexpected ways. Because of how glitchy the original Metroid is, it's actually one of the best in the series for that sort of fun. I mean, who wants to wait to get the Varia when it just requires some well timed bombing or luring a Waver up to freeze?
The.NET framework and language stack, C# in particular, is on the same general level as Java: it is a language that more or less suits the needs of every platform developer. Why the hell would they want to obsolete that?
No, languages aren't the issue with MS development, nor are they the theme of the article; frameworks are. A perfectly good language can be horrendous to use if it is unable to properly interact with its host environment to accomplish what it needs to accomplish. In this case (once again FTFA) C++ could interact worlds better with Windows than.NET could, and so.NET use suffered. This was an implementation failure on Microsoft's part. The article stipulates that Windows 8 intends to bring.NET back on-par with C++ as a development language, which (if true) means that it will be stronger than ever.
It's funny you say that as I've always saw that as the Catch-22 of the.NET framework and why Java doesn't see as much widespread use on client systems. A major point of the.NET framework was precisely that it was a clean-slate, well designed system that could run on many platforms. In effect,.NET framework (like Java) became the platform and the major task to consider for the client was whether they could reasonably run that platform on the various hardware they had, be it a low-power (cpu and battery life) netbook or smartphone or a high end server.
The obvious catch is, once you start introducing hooks into a specific platform, you start having problems. If you merely punt the work into the native API of one platform, you necessitate writing a lot of duplicate code on other platforms which tends to create a clear performance disparity as you've added an extra layer of redirection. More importantly, you in many ways are for the framework for some platform to faithfully duplicate all the quirks of another underlying API. Meanwhile, if you merely duplicate a near clone of one platform's API, you can mostly avoid the quirks issue but you balloon up the size and complexity of the framework and odds are good the result will be something less optimal than the original native API which discourages extant developers from moving to your new platform, especially when it lacks various functions, changes how things are done to be more consistent with some design vision, etc. Finally, this all tends to translate into a much larger framework as it moves less away from a clean design and more into providing for the wants and needs of the original native API developers which makes the whole framework less viable on lower powered devices, effectively limiting the real world application of the framework.
Now, there have obviously been attempts to make these points less of an issue through the use of name spacing, sufficient fragmentation of the components of a framework, and the packing of micro frameworks that try to provide clean subsets of the framework that work well enough on even the tiniest of expected common hardware, but that still heavily relies upon the developer making the consideration to target that smaller subset of the framework and leaves the end user still stuck with the reality that only a major subset or the whole framework is enough to seriously run many applications.
Personally, I don't see a way out of the fundamental problem. The only idea I can think to mitigate it is to have even more extreme fragmentation of name spacing and have the expectation of being able to stream only the needed components onto a device, effectively making a very custom micro framework library that's dependent heavily on the running applications and nothing more. I don't really know how viably that really is or if it'd have any real effect, either.
PS - If not obvious, this is all my own armchair analysis of the situation and it's probably way off base.
Of course, most parts of the country have 1.5mbs or less for their internet connection. Should the emphasis be on providing a few people, in select metropolitan areas, unbelievable bandwidth or should it be on providing reasonable bandwidth for the rest of the country?
How about providing unbelievable bandwidth to everyone in the country? We might even manage to obtain the envy of the world, even from places like Japan and Sweden.
The ARM vendors (TI, Samsung, etc.) do release their kernel changes. What they do not do is work with Linus and RMK on getting their code merged upstream. The GPL does not require that they do that.
I think you're missing two points. One, except for the claim that some smaller ARM vendors might not be so diligently releasing their kernel source changes, the articles points out bigger vendors (presumably including TI, Samsung, etc) are complying properly with the GPL. Two, the article/blog was going out of its way to explain that some ARM vendors not working to get their code merged upstream is a bad thing and that it might result in some vendors code not at all being merged in the mainline kernel.
As much as nothing about the GPL requires that vendors try to merge code with the mainline of a open source project, it's in the same vein true that nothing about the existence of extant roadways/railways/waterways requires anyone to use them. It's just general stupid for most companies to outright avoid them, especially when it comes to building the smaller pieces that bridge to their front door or effectively damaging those transport pathways heavily in use. If an ARM vendor wants to reinvent the wheel while many other ARM vendors are cooperating upstream, they'll likely end up producing repeated code in the short term, increase code management issues in the long term, and have lengthy rewrites/patches/merges in their own forks if they every choose to try to realign with the mainline kernel in the future.
In short, the issue isn't very much about what GPL requires legally. It's that there's a synergy in cooperation that licenses like the GPL were meant to embody and are frequently used for, where many people can benefit from working together and share the fruits of that effort. Any vendor can always choose to "go it alone", but except in some circumstances it really doesn't make sense for the long term.
I think you've missed the point of the proposed law, which was to prevent harm caused by *people who take agriculture jobs only to gain access to the animals for videotaping*. In other words, to protect businesses from a specific type of fraudulent behaviour, which is probably a better route (punish those found guilty of such fraud) than business being forced to institute invasive background checks on every prospective employee (which is not exactly a good thing for personal privacy, is an onerous burden on the business, and creates an atmosphere of assumed guilt til proven otherwise).
If that's the point, why was there any provision on banning the recording of farm animal treatment? In fact, if you wanted to punish people who take agriculture jobs only to gain access to the animals for videotaping, you'd want them to make recordings of farm animal treatment because that would make great evidence in your case. Having said that, a fraudulent employment law would be a generic thing which could apply to all businesses.
IMO its mistake was in not extending the law to ALL businesses. It's one thing to discover something ill is going on at your place of work, and report it. It's quite another to take a job with the sole intent of finding wrongdoing, which may not exist (and if not, the activists will MAKE it exist).
That's the problem, though. The bill was geared just towards the agricultural arena precisely because it was realized a more generic "prohibiting recordings of company activities and punished people who take company jobs only to gain access to company activities for videotaping" would ban all nature of whistle blowing and would have a lot more resistance in being passed. And clearly, the inclusion of "prohibiting recordings" wasn't there to stop PETA from working at factory farms. It's there to prevent extant workers from possibly collecting valid evidence, adding yet another reason to not be a whistle blower.
And if you were confronted with a film that showed your employees *apparently* caught in the act, what would you think? if you don't know a 3rd party instigated it, naturally you'd assume yep, our guys are guilty, better fix that.
One, you should be able to verify if the people filmed are actually your employees. Two, you should have explicit training on how to do treat the animals and explicit policy in place to discipline/fire people who go against that training, which when presented to a court or the public is likely to deflect most of the punishment and the blame on the employees for going against explicit policy, training, etc. Three, if there's any deficient in policy or training you discover along the way, yes, you should very well fix those problems.
In short, at worst you might accept a small guilt in part in being an unwilling accessory to a crime. That's not a good thing, obviously, and I can see how that might cause a person to lose heart in working in a field. That doesn't explain why the actual animals abusers aren't behind bars or paying heavy fines.
A quick google suggests that animal abuse against livestock isn't particularly illegal in Iowa and possibly some other states, anyways, so at least from the legal side of things I'm not entirely sure anyone would end up in court. Certainly, I don't see how it'd ruin a company on its face unless the company made no consideration for training or policy and simply had no idea what was happening on their farms so relied solely on evidence provided by a 3rd party. That's a mistake in any company.
No, this is more like banning planting evidence that said politicians were committing [insert unpopular/illegal vice here]. The problem hasn't been the reporting, it's been the deliberate manipulation of public opinion using bogus evidence.
Funny. Where do the words "planting evidence" appear in the proposed bill? No, the wording is more like banning recording undercover video of politicians and punishing those who become employees of a politician for the expressed purpose of videotaping said politician. From one of many articles through Google News (since there seems more info there):
"The Iowa measure would have prohibited recordings of farm animal treatment and punished people who take agriculture jobs only to gain access to the animals for videotaping. Proposed penalties included fines of up to $7,500 and up to five years in prison."
At no point does "planting evidence" enter into it except as an excuse for a blanket ban under some idea that there is no way to collect evidence of abuse because there is no abuse hence all attempts are really just staged planting of evidence.
Such as the tactic noted in another post:
Or the videos from the pig farms, where the activists wake the pigs up, shine lights around, and distribute food just out of reach (and just out of frame....)
Naturally the animals are alarmed by the unexpected lights and noises in the middle of the night, and make various distressed noises...
Golly. That sounds like a possible case of animal abuse. If so, those activists should be prosecuted. So..again, why the need for a new law?
In a local case, the company itself thought it was at fault for mistreating cows (so it appeared from the videos), and consequently didn't put up all that much defense in court. Only several months after the company was shut down did it come out that the incident was entirely staged by PETA, who had paid some of the workers to film it after hours. (The workers, being backcountry Mexicans, had no idea that bribes to perform such acts were illegal in the U.S.) But by now it was too late for the truth to matter, the business was gone and the public mind was already made up.
Two things. One, why the hell would the company think it was guilty of animal abuse? Yes, a video would strongly imply it was possible. But it sounds like the company internally acknowledged that either (a) the company head hadn't put in policy to make abuse very unlikely and hence was unaware of just what was going on, (b) the company head had actually witnessed abuse in the past and felt guilty enough to not argue over the merit of one video, or (c) the company head was a very trusting person who believed that a single video showing abuse overrode all his personal experience where there was no abuse. Otherwise, why wouldn't the company argue the point of extenuating circumstances outside the norm? Two, it's very shitty for PETA to have done this, if true, and hence they should be prosecuted under obstruction of justice, animal abuse, etc.
This is far more the rule than the exception. The fact is, if there's a bad situation it will be obvious from the overt condition of the animals, and there's no need to do "undercover" work in the first place.
That greatly contradicts your previous example. If PETA can make one undercover video of abuse in an otherwise abuse free farm and a company believes it, it sounds like either abuse is rather common or it's actually hard to be sure that many types of abuse are happening without undercover work.
Another AC complains that we're just deniers if we don't believe the videos. Well, the videos show real abuse, they just didn't show WHO did the abusing (or at whose behest it was done), and that is the problem this proposed law attempted to address: In the AR-activist world, it is perfectly acceptable to covert
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I entirely agree. It's like the problem with the government and military spending. We spend billions of dollars on "the military problem", resulting in private corporations/companies/contractors that charge outrageous rates for things to deliver at best questionable results*. Instead, we should end all military spending and just let the market take care of things.
Oh, and if you can't tell, I was being sarcastic. The problem isn't per se government involvement but the means of involvement, which always seems to lack accountability, cost requirements, or clear objectives. Yes, without all that, government can actually make the problem worse because a project that fails done by one party (say Republicans) will only induce another party (say Democrats) to come up with their own plans to try to prove the other party wrong. In the end, instead of actually working towards solving the problem, it just becomes a political game of spending.
*The US spends $600 billion or more yearly just on the Department of Defense. Actual war costs are even higher and budgeted separately. That isn't to say, of course, a lot of that $600 billion isn't spent on things like planes, tanks, soldier salaries, etc. Still, for every day the US isn't at war it seems an undue waste, starting wars to justify the cost seems absolutely horrible, and it's highly unlikely that anything close to $600 billion of actual value comes out of the spending. That is, you might get $600 billion of economic activity from the spending, but $600 billion worth of bombs that are summarily detonated don't do nearly the good as say $600 billion of broadband infrastructure improvements, even if they were as inefficiently done as the study suggests.
Personally, I'd very much be offended by libnigger or libbitch, and if I wanted to use them I'd probably want to rename them to make it clear I don't agree with the message they're trying to convey. I don't agree either with the GP's notion that keeping people who are potentially offended away from an industry is any sort of answer. At the same time, focusing on a project just because it's called libnigger or libbitch also misses the point. If the code is worthy, fork the project and rename it. That's the FOSS way.
A very true sentiment.
To add to that, the GP made a point that not all code is meant for the enterprise. So, yes, they have no plan necessarily to move out of the basement. That doesn't mean there won't be a lot of users of their code. The point isn't that it is justifiable to name a project offensively. It's that focusing on it has more to do with trying to make racists, assholes, etc better by shining a light on them. It'd seem the simpler thing, again, is simply if the code is worthy to incorporate code and rename it. Otherwise, just ignore the project as a whole*. I don't think it does any good to obsess over one project that's an outliers and act either that it's the norm or must follow some philosophy or that it must be converted for the sake of conversion. The only true philosophy, if there is one, would be that the code is important.
*Btw, to that end, I still agree that some people likely did the reverse and ignored the project because of the name; like racists and sexists who are prejudice about the outside, I'm a bit weary of worrying about catering to those peoples wants and needs. But, I assume most people just ignored it because there's other libraries that do the same thing, the code to write just a parser is relatively trivial, the code in question wasn't particularly special, or that markdown is still such a niche that there aren't much users. In short, I think the whole discussion is pretty much a non-issue. But I'm happy for the few people who found the library useful, and I still think it's best to release the code because it can't really hurt to have more code (well...so long as it works reasonably well and there's not spam levels of code).
I don't disagree with that, but that's sort of the problem. The very thing being focused upon: it isn't that libupskirt is badly or well coded; it isn't that libupskirt is an undersung or underutilized library; it's that the name "libupskirt" might be offensive to people and we really need to focus on gender equality in the FOSS world. That simply does a disservice to the author of the library and seems more a focus of pandering to a point than actually working to overcome a real problem.
As others have commented, there's all sorts of projects in the FOSS (and Commercial) world that have seemingly opaque and unrelated names. The mantra of the technical and the professionally oriented in the FOSS has been that what matters is functionality, not naming. So, it's okay to name something silly or stupid or whatever. I mean, what part of Mozilla or Firefox say anything about anything? Microsoft and Windows Internet Explorer at least presumably had some semblance of meaning at one time to their goals or functions, but even then the names used only give some vague notion of what is involved and the really important thing is their use and functionality.
In the end, I guess, I think I'd feel a lot different if the whole discussion was one of "Gee, I found a quirky named library called libupskirt, and it does this neat thing; let me show you" than what is being delivered as a story instead. And maybe eventually the name would be changed because the author felt like it. Instead, it feels more like an attempt to shove some level of political correctness down the throats of everyone and it being more a rather zero-sum political debate. If FOSS is all about the code, then I want there to be talk about the code. I'd comment myself, except I don't think I'm enough of an expert to espouse anything particularly useful into an article to submit to Slashdot or elsewhere. And if there's nothing particularly insightful to say about libupskirt's code, then why is Slashdot covering it? Ah, but I guess it is news for nerds of a sort. It just seems to be of the wrong focus. It seems more the fluff stuff to fill the space in the local evening news.
I think you're missing the big picture, though. If you read the author's statements, I don't think the main problem is with her being manipulated into potentially humiliating herself. It is heavily that instead of having a group of users that take advantage of the library she created, people are quick to condemn her as a "dude" and an "asshole" and focus on "the controversy". If you create something useful to yourself and you think will be useful to others, I don't think you necessarily care too much about the marketing of it.
So, if it offends people, it offends people. The frustrating part was how until "the controversy", there was only around 3 users (including the author) to offend. Isn't the point of FOSS supposed to be about finding useful code? And after multiple years, there's been very little uptake by other people it seems. I can certainly see why, after that, people focusing not on your work but a name or title might push you to say "fuck it, it wasn't worth the effort to contribute".
Having said all that, I do hope the author continues to contribute. I know that I'm well in the same boat, but without "the controversy". I create code and release it and I doubt very many people use that code. It's very disheartening to put a lot of effort into something, think that it's decently useful to people, and have very little positive feedback. But, I always put it in the back of my mind that I need to scratch my own proverbial itches and write code. So, even if I post it online somewhere and no one else ever uses it, the little bit of effort I put into it is worth it. It's not worth running a git tree, perhaps. But, every long once in a while I get at least one comment back from someone. And even if it were "your code sucks", at least it means someone bothered to d/l the code and look at it. :)
Um...the store is presumably the only one who could grant authority to install software on the computers in question, so presumably the security guard could be granted authority to allow/deny access to installing software just like the security guard is granted authority to allow/deny access to the store in general. I agree, it's much more dubious than gaining permission from a manager.
Google does it. Disney does (or least did) it (Splash Mountain). Security cameras in general are legal, and lots of those have been played on national television, be it to spot a criminal or simply because something "funny" happened. I have no idea how much permission was obtained from the people involved, though.
A store is a public space until such point at which is marked/stated otherwise (Employees only signs or being asked to leave). Hence a nice "no pictures can be taken" sign or the security guard, if his job is to prevent people from taking pictures, would have been to say no to the artist's request and possibly deny him access to the building.
Yep, it sucks to be in public where you never know if your picture is being taken. Feel free to have the law changed to that end. For example, there are various exclusions made for taking picture in public for decided private places, like banning cameras in shoes taking upward pictures.
Telescoping lens, satellites, etc sort of remove that notion. Again, as much as it sucks, being in public means you're in public.
Actually, there is. Again, it's a matter of expectation of privacy. A changing room is, by most reasonably people, considered a private space. A restroom in general is as well. Clothes provide privacy too. People could be said that they don't expect a computer with a camera to photograph them. But, they can't be said to expect that they can't be legally photographed in general standing in the same spot in the same way from a virtually identical angle.
It seems like point (2) is probably your strongest, given how much fuss there has been about Google Streetview, that I'm not sure if Disney is still releasing photos of park visitors, and the release of some but not all security tapes might be considered a special exception (that criminals might give up some right to privacy in committing a crime). Overall, I'd agree it's a dubious thing in the same way that security cameras are generally dubious. The artist's specific intents might have been more or less dubious than that, and hence there might be a case to be made, especially of the civil sort. But without some more specific information about a ban or a specific law in the State in question, I just don't see how one can claim an expectation of privacy and demand to not be photographed.
I am sorry if I distorted your meaning, but I did not do so deliberately. If I understand you, your core message is complaining doesn't change the way things are and you offer a solution of sorts, to effectively fork the whole DNS system totally ignoring the US.
Given how you state you believe the whole ICE situation is ridiculous...I suggest you start running your own DNS fork. Otherwise, I don't see the point in stating how my complaining may not in itself be an effective tool in achieving my desired end, since I don't see the point in complaining about what I'm doing and not doing when you seem to be doing the same thing. Such seems to reek of a desire for superiority on the issue by being the most correct on the issue. Also, I would prefer it if you didn't claim ownership of the internet personally and its construction while simultaneously presuming my nationality denies me potential joint ownership. Because if you say, as owner, how the internet should be controlled, then if I'm an owner too, I should be able to say how the internet should be controlled as well.
"United we stand, divided we fall". It holds true for a union of states. It holds true for a union of networks. But, yes, let's focus on the who built what (because the web sites in question and the actual networks to reach them are in the US and the whole .com changes only effect the ability of people in the US to access them) and not the lack of due process of law (which could at least be a beginning to justify how things are instead of a "it's my ball and if you don't like how I play you can go home, I don't care how little my new rules make any sense"). The fact that you wish to spin the situation as an us vs them debate instead of recognizing how the actions of the US through ICE fundamentally undermines the very founding principles of the US is disturbing at best and saddening at worst.
Which is precisely why other countries have pushed for ICANN to not be under US regulation because it's absurd that .com, .net, .org, and .edu should be US regulated or more generally that it's under US authority to create/destroy new TLDs.
Even if one were to believe that premise, what does that have to do with the situation? The fact that a lot of .com, .net, etc domains belong to US (or European) companies has a lot to do with where the Internet/Web first grew substantially. That doesn't mean .com, .net, etc inherently target Americans or Europeans. Similarly, a lot of the initial web sites were in English, not only because of heavy US involvement in the web's start but because English is a widely used second language and hence the closest to a globally inter-operable language.
Beyond that, I'd say it's pretty bloody obvious that plenty of pirates don't necessarily target a specifically nationality. Plenty of people in the world want to watch US made shows, play US made games, etc. Similarly, there's plenty of people in the US who want to watch shows from other countries (subbed or dubbed, if necessary), play games from other countries (translated, if necessary), etc. But, again, as English is very much a global inter-operable language, there's plenty of non-native English speakers who have become accustom to watching, playing, etc copyrighted works in English precisely because they're never translated into their native language.
In short, I'd probably feel a good bit different if this wasn't ICE seemingly just blacklisting domains as their own discretion, without oversight. Such a situation means ICE doesn't have to even bother proving in any way that any targeting happened, unless the domain happens to not be under their control; then they have to actually obtain cooperation from another government. And this situation just further highlights the point that .com, .net, etc should not be under ICE/US control.
I think the point was to argue that "intellectual property" having a definition that includes patent is absurd. This is based on the obviousness that property is, under a classical sense, some sort of inherently rival thing be it personal property, title and usage of land, etc. Meanwhile, there's nothing inherently rival about information.
Hence the point that the use of "property" seems intent to confuse the issue by extrapolating how natural patents, copyright, etc are when they're not natural at all. To have to admit they're entirely societal/government constructs would then result in having to, at some level, justify the existence of patents, copyright, etc. That's something I don't think a lot of people really want to do, given how many edge cases could likely be cut out in various industries where it'd be better if there were less or even no patent, copyright, etc protection. Of course, I can imagine where there's places it'd be better if there were even more protection, but then "why not just extend protection for everything"? Well, that's almost certainly less than optimal. Is it any wonder some people are so upset about copyright being extended so much?
PS - It's rather funny the GP brought up property taxes, as they were created precisely because even though property is such a core belief in many developed countries, it was recognized by some that property ownership can reduce to something akin to a fiefdom when a few people can retain large land ownership and force most people to be their tenants. Beyond that, property taxes tend to push people to actually usually their owned lands, through mining or farming or whatever, instead of leaving the land fallow. Whether or not the idea works or not, the GP's point at least has merit on the principle of property taxes being applied such that people don't needlessly hold onto copyrights, patents, etc and try to do more than let them go fallow and hence underutilized. It seems only fair if one really wants to talk of such things as if they're property.
While I don't really agree with IrishStu on all of his Interning Big Lies, I'd say the "people who need a wage in order to survive" is the real biggest problem. It creates disproportion opportunity with those who are well-off enough* to move to wherever a job is and pay for rent and food without an income. It would seem this is part of the root of why government is so fucked up: government internship is so commonly done by people who are well-off and it's difficult for an "average Joe" to enter government. This isn't to say "average Joe" would inherently run the government better, but it would clearly seem that there's a conflict of interest and possibly even an biased agenda if one's guardians, who likely paid for your internship, are well-off because of stock, company ownership, etc and your career path is not grounded in the daily wage or yearly salary work under the subordinate whim and possible non-sequitur of a company.
*This doesn't necessarily mean people who are the children of the rich, but it strongly leans that way. In general, internships are the domain of would-be college graduates. While the poor can and do receive adequate loans to pay for college, they are unlikely to have sufficient funds to work on a no-pay internship. Meanwhile, the middle class generally can't get loans and sink most of their money into paying for a good/great college, generally leaving little that could be used towards a no-pay internship. The rich, however, by definition have sufficient funds, so they inherently could support a no-pay internship. Now, the poor or the middle class could potentially save sufficiently prior to college towards an internship (although that means devoting money towards the internship instead of a "better" college), they may take a position as an assistant lecturer if they're in grad school (which does nothing to help undergraduates), or they could wait until after college after saving up money to work in an internship (which beyond delaying one's career by multiple years, might become a hindrance to one's hiring).
Funny, I was thinking of a different game.
So, let's see... A company, created for the purpose of maximizing its own profit (presumably legally and not necessarily through attempts to manipulate the government to write laws to its own advantage) has every "right" to go against that mandate...unless it violates some anti-discrimination or other law, since that company "right" is not absolute but a facade to make it easier to write laws governing company behavior. Sounds like Visa/Mastercard are showing clear and willful signs of a market failure, which screams out for a need to change the law in the US to make their actions illegal (tortious interference might apply at the civil level, regardless, but I'm no lawyer). It sounds like their actions might already be illegal in the EU.
And? If MC/Visa/etc were discriminating against pornography, wikileaks, or whatever because ti furthered their profit motive, then at least that'd have some logical foundation in the function of a company. If it's being done to placate US Congressmen so they'll be more likely to write laws favorable to MC/Visa/etc without consideration of the US Congressmen's constituents (since it's possible a law may only incidentally advantage MC/Visa/etc when its primary effect is for the people), it's sounds like an attempt at quid pro quo or otherwise indirect bribery.
If the only thing that can be said is that what MC, Visa, etc do today is not currently illegal in the US, it says little about what should be illegal. Companies, after all, are social constructs. The individuals inside them are individuals. Things might be different if all interactions in a company were simply individuals agreeing upon contracts. But, that sort of organizational structure would make most medium to large companies untenable.
The problem I have with your argument is, I don't think the problem is with the hypocrisy per se. The problem is what people consider public, what people consider private, and just what sort of reaction you get from people when they stop acting upon their manners. If sex is private, then people don't want to see sex in public. But then, you can't hide things like your race so some groups are persecuted or belittled because there are no manners to cover over the incident; this I'd say is true anywhere there are racists, so I wouldn't say that part is unique to Texas.
Then, that ever loving desire for manners and privacy results in you finding some people you think were your friends who, now being close to you, drop their manners and talk about how they like you "even though you're Christian/Jewish/Black/White/Straight/Homosexual/whatever". Ie, there's only a surface layer of tolerance for other people and you only can really feel the greatest deal of tolerance if you happen to be in the majority in almost everything. I'm not saying being flagrantly intolerant at all times is better, but closeted intolerance along with many people unwilling to challenge people in private over their personal beliefs can lead to oppression of others in private settings in a way few would know about, and that just makes the problem look bigger when it's found out about.
My point then, is if anything liberals, especially the "bleeding-heart" type, actually try to follow the Christian philosophy of actually trying to love everyone without judgment. Perhaps only in that is there reason to take issue with the hypocrisy of many so-called Christians. The alcohol, guns, strip clubs, etc all seem irrelevant in comparison.
PS - This holds true everyone on the globe, btw. To that end, I agree Texas, the southern US, and the US in general are just useful, stereotypical scapegoats which in being scapegoats show the speaker as actually failing the love everyone without judgment bit.
True enough, but I think you're failing to miss the real point. It's not really a "free market libertarian fantasy"; it's the rallying cry of the Republican party to privatize everything, especially those things that were originally enshrined in government by Republicans. Ie, it's simply a form of corporate welfare and government created monopolies or oligarchies. Libertarian's are just the useful idiots to point to, like Communists are pointed to, because there's invariably some of them that will advocate such an absolutely ridiculous plan based upon an extreme and unreal ideology.
That also proves that the US population is so politically titled to the right that Republicans can call upon the extreme right for their aid and use the extreme left, again Communists, to stereotype those left of them in what should be an obvious charade. Of course, the most obviously dubious part is calls that any Democrat is actually anti-business, as if larger government programs as a general point have anything but pro-business effects.
How about the old system: if I was blown up by a terrorist, then the population could as a whole generally agree that the terrorist was a bad man who if he lived should be brought to justice; if a government or business employee groped me, then the population could as a whole generally agree that the employee was a bad man who should be brought to justice; and if a person waterboards someone else, then the population could a whole generally agree that the person was a bad man who should be brought to justice. Oh, right, the US wouldn't elect a person who actually advocated and pursued stuff like that. Justice is a communist plot and only senseless libertarian ideals--but only in the form of a "free market"--can save the day, so we should just privatize some of that and bypass the whole legal system.
PS - Just because you think the free market does somethings really well, like optimize the trade of goods, and people have an innate right to liberty doesn't mean you're a libertarian. Libertarianism has been contorted by too many to cover subjects it has no business covering (like the absurdity of religion covering math or vice versa). But, then, that's the same sort of problem Communism had in part. :/
You don't seem to realize, the issue isn't black and white. Less pay* can translate into better short-term benefits. Even less pay can translate into even better long-term benefits, effectively predicated on longer-term company success. Established companies with reasonably steady income, of the sort that's used by management to justify their own demanded pay raises, can translate into workers demanding to receive pay raises or short/long-term benefits in the form of stock, a more direct equity program, or a pension system. That doesn't mean management or the workers obtain what they demand, but it's certainly a financial possibility. It can also potentially lead to greater quality, but that's obviously predicated on the assumption that taking a financial risk* means you'll inherently work harder because you have a stake in the outcome and that you then in turn deserve the fruits of that risk and work.
In any case, the real issue would seem to be a lot less about profit sharing and more about overworking employees. To that end, it comes down to an amount of seeming manipulation upon employees to not be compensated in pay but in praise that they were working on a top tier game and that was effective pay enough or in simply not enough consideration on the amount of hours and years it would take to actually complete development. It simply sounds like it was never made clear to employees exactly what they were agreeing to when they became employed. As much as people lament this as simply naivety on the part of those employees, as there's note that game companies are generically notorious for such issues, it ignores that there's plenty of game companies that don't have such problems, that the notoriety of working conditions are a false stereotype, and it seems very unacceptable to have such working conditions. But, then, clearly a lot of employees felt the same way given there was apparently a turnover rate of at least 80 people over 7 years.
*In this sense, it's the opportunity cost where "less pay" and "financial risk" are instated. Clearly, being paid $40,000/year at one company vs $30,000/year plus end-of-employment profit sharing is trading less up front pay for the greater risk and opportunity in optimizing one's total pay over the course of one's employment. But, then, some companies want to work $40,000/year employees steadily at 2x the hourly rate of $30,000/year plus profit sharing employees, so the effective hourly payment is inherently worse for the former.
Non-technical people want computers that never break, no matter what you do, and process any request made of them instantly. Hell, I want a computer like that too. But, I'm not sure it's realistic or that browers are so old tech, utilitarian that they are above evolving.
Doing decent security involves cool, cutting edge development (like various sandboxing techniques*). Maintaining compliance with the latest standards, which aren't fully defined, is cool, cutting-edge development.
Ie, copy Opera and Chrome? Well, they seem to be well on that track, which is precisely why they're pushing for the sort of changes people seem to hate. That isn't to say I agree with what Mozilla is doing, either. But, I don't believe there's some sort of clear mandate on what they should be doing as far as an obvious consensus or an evident need. Neither Chrome nor Opera seem much better in that boat either, as there's parts of each browser feature wise I'd like to see merged in the other ones.
Perhaps "Web 2.0" was inherently "a steaming pile of shit", just like "Cloud Computing" will be? It's not that there aren't some uses for "Web 2.0" or "Cloud Computing", but few people or enterprises seem to really know what will work and what won't with such concepts. As a result, lots of people try to go full tilt on the concept, betting big on the potential payoff, and only a few technologies really stick as applicable. That's general capitalism, though; that's just how bubbles operate. I don't think there's a really solution for that except for people to stop being greedy.
<jokingly>debsums?*</jokingly>
Honestly, given how much of a mess Windows is generally when it comes to installing files**, I'm sort of surprised they don't do checksums at that level anyways. But, then, that would involve some forward thinking upon helping the home user outside of a more generic, and reliable, wipe and reinstall everything.
*Admittedly, it won't actually work on all files on your machine: you still have to verify the boot loader separately, system config files have to be handled separately (although that's likely to be rather trivial for most people), and all your logs are obviously modified too commonly for checksums to make sense; but, it goes a long way to being able to verify a system. Too bad I don't know of any actual tool to automate most of the above to rectify debsums' deficiencies. Still, given how a root-kit attack works, it goes a long way towards protecting you.
**Windows does an amazingly good job at one level, given it has to deal with so many different and inconsistent install methods spanning over two decades. At the same time, it'd make a lot of sense if Windows had something equivalent to checkinstall to actually bottle installs, including the production of checksums, to mitigate the risk to the system and general make uninstalling a lot less messy. That seems especially true given all the "virtual folder" technology that has been included since Vista which could have been designed to mitigated the risk of an MBR or another type of root-kit attack.
Or perhaps the GP was simply dismissing the implication of this story being news: that if we only had profiling, we could all cower in fear but instead of it being a 95-year-olds with diapers being molested and humiliated, we'd limit the molestation and humiliation to minority, brown-looking people. After all, if molestation and humiliation by the TSA is such a horrible thing, shouldn't it be a daily story in the news that another (short/medium/tall) (black/brown/white) (young/middle-age/old) (fat/thin) (male/female) was molested and humiliated by the TSA just to get on a plane? Shouldn't that inherently be news worthy?
More to the point, if the environmentalists are right, and most people are exactly like them, then the solution is obvious: don't buy any of the right-to-dump-sludge-in-the-river credits. If you don't buy them, the government gains nothing, and they'll eventually stop offering them. Free market.
Because, you know, it's not like the whole complaint is precisely that most but not all people are like them, and it's those few that aren't who are more than willing to fuck over the environment, be it through toxic sludge that kills rivers and makes people sick or real world money transactions that'll fuck over the extant in-game economy and radically change the power balance in the game; and in the long term, that might well change the norm that most people will dump sludge into the river (look at NYC) or buy their way to success. Perhaps you're simply unaware of the concept of externalities?
PS - Yes, those forum ragers and those environmentalists might be wrong. But it'd probably be best to discredit their actual arguments and not simply pretend that the free market term or concept thrown into a discussion is a magic resolution.
As an avid Metroid fan, I'd have to say you perhaps missed the point of the original Metroid? It didn't involve hand-coddling, story-driven direction. It threw you in a sandbox with a vague notion of your mission, then let you discover in a 2D platform adventure just where you were supposed to go and what you were supposed to do; ie, it in many ways was the platform adventure equivalent of the Legend of Zelda, which isn't that surprising.
Now, having said all that, I agree that the original Metroid was clunky (limited direction of fire and no ability to crouch, off-hand). But, in some ways Metroid Zero Mission really missed the mark, IMO, in trying too hard to tell people what to do. Thankfully, yes, they put in enough hidden blocks so people could work around some of that.
However, clearly the atmosphere in Metroid Zero Mission tries too hard to tell the player exactly where to go and what to do. In short, it simply feels too heavy handed. In some ways, I'd place Castlevania - Harmony of Dissonance and Castlevania - Aria of Sorrow as better Metroid games in spirit, as they don't try to push plot as a means to direct you on where to go or what to do; the point of an adventure and an adventurer is to figure that stuff out on your own. And yes, that means that the original Metroid, with all its many clear flaws, still has something to offer that I just don't see Metroid Zero Misson offering...except, you know, in that it includes Metroid as an unlockable. :)
PS - Please don't mistake this for me saying Metroid Zero Mission is a bad game. It is quite good, just like Metroid Fusion. Truthfully, almost all the Metroid games pretty badly break the original Metroid formula, be it through progressively lowering acid, one-way gates, locked doors, or translation decoder locks. A major part of the fun of Metroid has resulted in simply bypassing the developer induced barriers in unexpected ways. Because of how glitchy the original Metroid is, it's actually one of the best in the series for that sort of fun. I mean, who wants to wait to get the Varia when it just requires some well timed bombing or luring a Waver up to freeze?
It's funny you say that as I've always saw that as the Catch-22 of the .NET framework and why Java doesn't see as much widespread use on client systems. A major point of the .NET framework was precisely that it was a clean-slate, well designed system that could run on many platforms. In effect, .NET framework (like Java) became the platform and the major task to consider for the client was whether they could reasonably run that platform on the various hardware they had, be it a low-power (cpu and battery life) netbook or smartphone or a high end server.
The obvious catch is, once you start introducing hooks into a specific platform, you start having problems. If you merely punt the work into the native API of one platform, you necessitate writing a lot of duplicate code on other platforms which tends to create a clear performance disparity as you've added an extra layer of redirection. More importantly, you in many ways are for the framework for some platform to faithfully duplicate all the quirks of another underlying API. Meanwhile, if you merely duplicate a near clone of one platform's API, you can mostly avoid the quirks issue but you balloon up the size and complexity of the framework and odds are good the result will be something less optimal than the original native API which discourages extant developers from moving to your new platform, especially when it lacks various functions, changes how things are done to be more consistent with some design vision, etc. Finally, this all tends to translate into a much larger framework as it moves less away from a clean design and more into providing for the wants and needs of the original native API developers which makes the whole framework less viable on lower powered devices, effectively limiting the real world application of the framework.
Now, there have obviously been attempts to make these points less of an issue through the use of name spacing, sufficient fragmentation of the components of a framework, and the packing of micro frameworks that try to provide clean subsets of the framework that work well enough on even the tiniest of expected common hardware, but that still heavily relies upon the developer making the consideration to target that smaller subset of the framework and leaves the end user still stuck with the reality that only a major subset or the whole framework is enough to seriously run many applications.
Personally, I don't see a way out of the fundamental problem. The only idea I can think to mitigate it is to have even more extreme fragmentation of name spacing and have the expectation of being able to stream only the needed components onto a device, effectively making a very custom micro framework library that's dependent heavily on the running applications and nothing more. I don't really know how viably that really is or if it'd have any real effect, either.
PS - If not obvious, this is all my own armchair analysis of the situation and it's probably way off base.
How about providing unbelievable bandwidth to everyone in the country? We might even manage to obtain the envy of the world, even from places like Japan and Sweden.
I think you're missing two points. One, except for the claim that some smaller ARM vendors might not be so diligently releasing their kernel source changes, the articles points out bigger vendors (presumably including TI, Samsung, etc) are complying properly with the GPL. Two, the article/blog was going out of its way to explain that some ARM vendors not working to get their code merged upstream is a bad thing and that it might result in some vendors code not at all being merged in the mainline kernel.
As much as nothing about the GPL requires that vendors try to merge code with the mainline of a open source project, it's in the same vein true that nothing about the existence of extant roadways/railways/waterways requires anyone to use them. It's just general stupid for most companies to outright avoid them, especially when it comes to building the smaller pieces that bridge to their front door or effectively damaging those transport pathways heavily in use. If an ARM vendor wants to reinvent the wheel while many other ARM vendors are cooperating upstream, they'll likely end up producing repeated code in the short term, increase code management issues in the long term, and have lengthy rewrites/patches/merges in their own forks if they every choose to try to realign with the mainline kernel in the future.
In short, the issue isn't very much about what GPL requires legally. It's that there's a synergy in cooperation that licenses like the GPL were meant to embody and are frequently used for, where many people can benefit from working together and share the fruits of that effort. Any vendor can always choose to "go it alone", but except in some circumstances it really doesn't make sense for the long term.
If that's the point, why was there any provision on banning the recording of farm animal treatment? In fact, if you wanted to punish people who take agriculture jobs only to gain access to the animals for videotaping, you'd want them to make recordings of farm animal treatment because that would make great evidence in your case. Having said that, a fraudulent employment law would be a generic thing which could apply to all businesses.
IMO its mistake was in not extending the law to ALL businesses. It's one thing to discover something ill is going on at your place of work, and report it. It's quite another to take a job with the sole intent of finding wrongdoing, which may not exist (and if not, the activists will MAKE it exist).
That's the problem, though. The bill was geared just towards the agricultural arena precisely because it was realized a more generic "prohibiting recordings of company activities and punished people who take company jobs only to gain access to company activities for videotaping" would ban all nature of whistle blowing and would have a lot more resistance in being passed. And clearly, the inclusion of "prohibiting recordings" wasn't there to stop PETA from working at factory farms. It's there to prevent extant workers from possibly collecting valid evidence, adding yet another reason to not be a whistle blower.
One, you should be able to verify if the people filmed are actually your employees. Two, you should have explicit training on how to do treat the animals and explicit policy in place to discipline/fire people who go against that training, which when presented to a court or the public is likely to deflect most of the punishment and the blame on the employees for going against explicit policy, training, etc. Three, if there's any deficient in policy or training you discover along the way, yes, you should very well fix those problems.
In short, at worst you might accept a small guilt in part in being an unwilling accessory to a crime. That's not a good thing, obviously, and I can see how that might cause a person to lose heart in working in a field. That doesn't explain why the actual animals abusers aren't behind bars or paying heavy fines.
A quick google suggests that animal abuse against livestock isn't particularly illegal in Iowa and possibly some other states, anyways, so at least from the legal side of things I'm not entirely sure anyone would end up in court. Certainly, I don't see how it'd ruin a company on its face unless the company made no consideration for training or policy and simply had no idea what was happening on their farms so relied solely on evidence provided by a 3rd party. That's a mistake in any company.
Funny. Where do the words "planting evidence" appear in the proposed bill? No, the wording is more like banning recording undercover video of politicians and punishing those who become employees of a politician for the expressed purpose of videotaping said politician. From one of many articles through Google News (since there seems more info there):
"The Iowa measure would have prohibited recordings of farm animal treatment and punished people who take agriculture jobs only to gain access to the animals for videotaping. Proposed penalties included fines of up to $7,500 and up to five years in prison."
At no point does "planting evidence" enter into it except as an excuse for a blanket ban under some idea that there is no way to collect evidence of abuse because there is no abuse hence all attempts are really just staged planting of evidence.
Golly. That sounds like a possible case of animal abuse. If so, those activists should be prosecuted. So..again, why the need for a new law?
Two things. One, why the hell would the company think it was guilty of animal abuse? Yes, a video would strongly imply it was possible. But it sounds like the company internally acknowledged that either (a) the company head hadn't put in policy to make abuse very unlikely and hence was unaware of just what was going on, (b) the company head had actually witnessed abuse in the past and felt guilty enough to not argue over the merit of one video, or (c) the company head was a very trusting person who believed that a single video showing abuse overrode all his personal experience where there was no abuse. Otherwise, why wouldn't the company argue the point of extenuating circumstances outside the norm? Two, it's very shitty for PETA to have done this, if true, and hence they should be prosecuted under obstruction of justice, animal abuse, etc.
That greatly contradicts your previous example. If PETA can make one undercover video of abuse in an otherwise abuse free farm and a company believes it, it sounds like either abuse is rather common or it's actually hard to be sure that many types of abuse are happening without undercover work.