I don't think encapsulation really solves the problem. Fundamentally a background service is just a bad paradigm when it comes to power management. Consider microkernels and how they're fundamentally enshrined in the idea of encapsulation. Yet, by their very nature they tend to have a large collection of separate userland processes that have to be some level of active to service requests. Hence, all the I/O time and generally busy-time to check the queue for more tasks is multiplied out by some potentially large factor. Meanwhile, leaving it to a unified kernel can side-step a lot of that repetitive overhead at the expense of encapsulation. Some middle-ground usually resides in programs either doing the work themselves or having an on-demand background service that only has overhead for as long as it's active.
In short, I think you're generally off-base. Encapsulation is basically the thesis of the Windows NT model. One can complain that there's too much spread out over too many services/libraries (although that's generally unavoidable when there's overlap in function between various parts of the system) and hence the encapsulation isn't done well. But, I don't think better encapsulation would improve the situation much as it'd essential just shift around where the code resides in the various background services while likely not reducing the count much, if any.
Having said all that, I'd really prefer it if pulseaudio wasn't so horrible when it came to CPU time.:(
You mean like requiring restaurants to provide calorie and other nutritional information for their menus?
Yeah! How dare the government require restaurants to label their products for their content! It's not like you're ingesting it or anything. And we all know people don't have allergies to certain foods. While we're at it, let's lift the prohibition on cocaine. I think cocaine would make a great additive to fast food. Best of all, no need to label it as included.
And warning labels on products, warning against idiots using them in idiotic ways?
Um, that almost always has more to do with lawsuits or fear of lawsuits. There's only a handful of government regulations that involve warning labels and they're predominantly related to things like hazardous materials. But, yea, it's crazy to requiring a big warning on an otherwise unlabeled drum of some random chemical.
And any other sort of regulation that actually doesn't do anything other than make people feel good about protecting the idiots out there that don't actually (or can't actually) read the various things that are now regulated?
Congratulations. You've moved from "the free market best functions by having an informed consumer" to "why bother informing people because they're all idiots". I guess we can then just move straight to communism, then. Or, you know, we could acknowledge that you can't make people not be stupid but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of people who do actually use the information. But, yea, let's harp on the outliers that make for great news stories. Or we can focus on epidemic problems (obesity) and just pretend that somehow regulation is causing it (or the free market is) instead, of oh, figuring out it's probably something to do with human nature and the best that can be done is to give people information and try to encourage them to use it.
We are now at a point where there are so many regulations, that many times they are contradictory or duplicated or otherwise have become meaningless noise that people filter out anyway.
Mind giving me a list of these contradictory, duplicated, etc regulations? Mind giving them to your local, state, or federal representative? Mind making it an election issue? Or is this all vague hand waving?
AND removing these over regulations is impossible, so instead of solving any problems we are just building more of them into the system.
Perhaps because (1) you aren't making concrete points on what regulations should be removed, (2) your representative might be running on removing regulations but he's just as hand waving as you are, and (3) you don't actually hold your representative to task for failing to accomplish anything because he can use the excuse that "removing these over regulations is impossible" (a great reason to vote the person out, when they state they can't do what they promised to do) while knowing that because nothing specific was brought up that even token removal of regulations might placate you and others of his constituency without really meaning much of anything.
Seriously, are you or is *anyone* doing the legwork to track down all these over regulations? Because, yeah, it's near impossible to remove a list of regulations when you don't have a list of regulations to remove. And politicians aren't ones who actually know the good and the bad of regulation as a general point--they rely upon experts and think tanks for that. Meanwhile, think tanks don't want to make a succinct list of corrections because if they actually worked, they'd be out of a job if a few years*. So it really does fall upon you to, you know, work at it.
*Okay, this isn't really fair. The same sort of charge is thrown at climate scientists as an excuse for them pushing for climate change to get grant money. But in both cases, I think the truth is the people
So he's completely wrong and a "bootlicking shill" because he disagrees with you and has actual citations to support his position.
And Clinton was a horrible President because he had marital affairs and lied about it. But Reagan was a great President because he directly or indirectly negotiated with terrorists and sold weapons to the Iranians to fund the Contra all while lying about it^W^W^W forgetting about it.
You see what I did there? The two aspects are unrelated. Besides, the fact remains that (a) Snowden lying to get access to documents may be unethical but it may be moral and (b) every other citation was about the *Russians* lying (at a time before Russia necessarily was fully committed and didn't wish to tip their hand on their plans) with the implication that the Russians would only go to such great lengths in exchange for documents. But, could it be that the Russians presumed too much or Snowden lied/implied to them too much? Or maybe it was enough that Russia's leaders are still embedded in the Cold War mindset that states it is enough to give the US a black eye, by implying they're a champion of freedom, to give amnesty to an "enemy of the US [government]"?
Honestly, we don't have any concrete facts about what is or is not true. The best we have are statements made by people who were personally involved (Snowden) and innuendo and implication along with claims that certain people or entities are liars (people discrediting the one person who would know, Snowden). Well, even liars tell the truth some times--or do you accept an always liar that says "I am lying"?
So, the only thing left is either the GGP is some sort of bootlicking shill, a paid shill, a bigot, or some line of that. Because nothing he has stated provides anything remotely like concrete evidence that Snowden can't be taken at his word in this specific instance.
Turning documents over to journalists, or anybody employed in any other profession, does not make them magically uninterceptable, unreadable, or unposessable by Russians, Chinese, or anybody else.
Reading comprehension fail? Clearly the statement is that Snowden turned the documents directly over to journalists without some intermediary and not to known Russian or Chinese government agents. Obviously, Snoweden wouldn't know if he's handing over documents to Russian agents embedded in the journalistic field any more than he'd know, while he was still in the NSA's employ, handing over documents to Russian agents embedded in the NSA.
He has no control over the distribution after he hands it off to anybody, and the people who have the stuff might not even know if someone else is reading it.
Like how the NSA has no control over Snowden handing over documents to the Russians or Chinese once they handed over [access to] documents to him? Why, it's turtles all the way down!
So how much tax on the super wealthy is right? 70%? 100%? What prevents them from using that super wealth to offer the country both middle fingers and move somewhere that doesn't want to reach into their wallet and take everything?
Great reductio ad absurdum--except it could just as well be used to block all tax increases on anyone which is also reductio ad absurdum. Too bad people aren't calling for 70%+ taxation but instead a modest 5% increase on income taxes. They are also calling for things like capital gains taxes to be abolished and income tax rates to be used--which would admittedly effectively increase the rate by 15%+ for some people--precisely because this whole "take my ball and move" mentality is not a useful justification for the regressive tax system available to the super wealthy. Oh, and, btw, there was a time when the super wealthy tax rate was 90% and not everyone left. I wouldn't recommend a rate near that, but cowering in fear isn't even justified by historical evidence.
The 2009 Federal Budget had a bottom line of $3.518T actual spending. The so-called 1% had a total adjusted gross income of $1.3T in 2009. If you tax them at 100%, that gets you about 4.5 months into the fiscal year, or around March 12th.
And? Should we tax them nothing then because they can't pay for everything? No? Well, then, perhaps your little bit of math is only relevant for the fractional percentage of people who even desire such a system.
The "super wealthy" might be a politically expedient punching bag, but they aren't the solution.
They aren't THE solution, but raising taxes on higher income earners is PART of the solution.
The solution is to stop spending money we don't fucking have, and we're doing way too much of that.
Granted, the other PART of the solution is to cut spending. Funny how the ACA or a universal health care system would actually cut costs. After all, we're already funding Medicare/Medicaid at the Federal/State level and its per capita costs are the same as Canada's per capita costs. Another approach would be to stop the Medicare/Medicaid tax and funnel all the health insurance spending to the government to implement universal health care, as too all health insurance spending in the US near is equivalent to Canada's per capita costs on its universal health care. Regardless, health care coverage by a single payer is a big win--and anyone who understands monopsonies would see why.
It's not on 1% to fix it. It's on ALL OF US to fix it.
No doubt. Funny thing, then, that that 1% make up a part of ALL OF US and so they too need to do their part. To put it in perspective, if we demand the poorest of us should give up an expensive meal once a month be it through less government spending or more taxes, we should demand at least as much of a token gesture by the top 1%. It just happens that at top 1% levels, a token gesture is a lot more money.
Commentators on the Lavabit case, including the judge himself, have criticized Lavabit for designing its system in a way that resisted court-ordered access to user data.
What next? Complaining about hidden compartment in desks?
They ask: If court orders are legitimate, why should we allow engineers to design services that protect users against court-ordered access?
Oh, I don't know...because of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? I don't know about you, Mr. Judge, but I personally don't want a court, court-ordered or not, snooping on my life--such inherently is a big way to disrupt my happiness. But, even if we forgo the DoI and move to the CotUS, it's "life, liberty, and property". Well, whether you view it as the user's property or Lavabit's property, they sure as fuck can do what they want with it. What part of any of that should be to make the court's job easier? Why would they seek to bend over backwards for any court?
Of course, the big one is liberty. The biggest liberty of all is exploring the possibilities of math and the universe. And that heavily flows into attempts to make functionally unbreakable encryption resistant to even the US government. And is also flows from the point of just being a general asshole, which God Bless the United States of America, is very much recognized as a Creator given right. Clearly the judge is exercising it when he shows contempt for other people daring to live their lives in ways he doesn't like.
Honestly, though, I do not try to be too much of an asshole. And I do recognize that there does need to be a means for courts and court-orders to function. The problem the judge seems to realize--and honestly why the NSA keeps getting the go ahead--is that criminals are most inclined to use those sorts of tools to hide their activities. The good response should be the obvious: most criminals don't go through the bother because they don't think they'll be caught and the rest are almost always found before the court-order (after all, you have to have evidence to get that far) or the court-order is a very inappropriate fishing expedition. All a court-order is there for is to solidify a case, not to make one. And so the very notion that there's something wrong with efforts to make their case inherently harder to prove is, well, fine by me. It almost always just means the prosecutor and the police have to work a bit harder to prove their case, if they care enough to go through the effort. The real limit of justice then is not the strength of encryption or the willingness of first or third parties to comply with handing over incrimination evidence. It has almost everything to do with running a decent investigation in the first place.
PS - *sigh* The NSA part was probably unnecessary, but it reeks of the same stupidity and with the same sorts of results. Trying to find a needle in a haystack is easier because at least then you know you're looking for a needle. And if, by analogy, you know you're looking for a specific terrorist plot in a general time frame with certain people, you're already 90% of your way towards having a prosecutable case and a pathway to find accomplices.
I've actually thought that open and accessible cameras in public are a good idea - so long as they are accessible by the public. To me this would be akin to the many-eyes philosophy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus's_Law [wikipedia.org]
Uh, yea, no. Liberty and individuality are orthogonal to strictly solvable, perfectible systems. Your comment is analogous to having cameras constantly pointed at the clouds to make rain fall shallow. And while I honestly don't think you mean it this way, your line of thinking is precisely the same sort of naive thinking that is used to support a police state.:(
I don't think I've really noticed that much overhead from Steam - and isn't the DRM portion all when you launch the game anyway?
Well, my problem is that I don't have a Windows install (and VMs have sucky 3D support), while WINE clearly has performance hiccups. So, maybe Steam on Windows isn't nearly as bad. But, regardless, you can't not run Steam when playing the games and so regardless it's yet more overhead. I mean, if your logic held, Steam would run just long enough to launch the game then quit. But, then that leads to...
It's not fair to blame achievement hiccups on DRM for example..
No. But if you have to run Steam to play game X because of the DRM and game X only has achievement hiccups because of Steam, then indirectly DRM is responsible. Yea, it's possible Steam would still force achievements even if the DRM never existed, so I don't entirely disagree with you. In any case, I was speaking more about Origin than Steam which seems to do a much worse job of it.
Yes there is, because no browser will want a bad implementation. When the browsers get to implement it themselves, they will make sure it works well - especially Google and Apple who will make money on it working well.
And that makes no sense. Understand that what the W3C has approved is a platform for running binary DRM plugins--whatever they wish to call them. So, fundamentally, it's no different than any other plugin running in the browser. By your logic, Flash shouldn't currently have performance issues, but clearly whatever issues it does have is in the hands of (a) Adobe and (b) developers of the actual Flash apps/games/whatever--and even though Google has their own custom-compiled Flash plugin, it doesn't show remarkably better performance than standard Flash. And since the DRM plugin, be it written for Flash or the W3C standard, are inherently going to be handled by the same people who are doing it now, I don't see there being significant improvements in performance. And note, when I say "significant improvements in performance", I mean for them to radically alter the complexity of their DRM scheme which is presumably the basis for such poor performance. An O(n^2) algorithm in native code may do much better than O(n^2) in Flash, but O(n*ln n) is usually much better regardless. And, really, the fact that the performance of the DRM even *matters* considering the complexity of the video/audio decoders speaks volumes on just how bad the current situation is.
What do you think Social Security is? Intrusive? Massive power grab? Enforced by the SSA? Plenty of other bad things?
Seriously, the biggest complaint Republicans seem to have is they (1) offered Obamacare as an alterative to Universal Health Care, (2) figured Democrats would never support, and (3) are finally upset that Obamacare passed because (a) they can't claim they made it, (b) can't get behind it working because it goes against their "government can't do anything right" mantra, and (c) never really wanted people to have any sort of decent health care coverage because to actually deliver on anything good would basically cut off their ability to whine about it.
I mean, fuck, the whole Government Shutdown is *precisely* what the Republican mantra is--to cut off non-essential spending. So, why exactly are Republicans bothering with any sort of effort to fix the problem? Because as long as they act upset, they can whine and cry about the big, mean Democrats. Oh, and let's not forget, the very mantra they support if followed through would put said Republicans out of a job, especially if they realized how unnecessary they are. Non-essential, indeed.
Actually, I was referring to Steam, Origin, Cdilla, and a variety of other game-related DRM schemes that offer some advantages (mostly the former two as distribution and update systems with some achievment/cloud stuff) with a lot of disadvantages (those achievments + network latency = random jerky behavior, using up a lot of CPU time *just* to run the Steam/Origin/whatever crap at all times while playing a game, and then there's the lack of portability of your games if you're trying to diagnose an install problem--and who wants to re-d/l 9GB on another system even if it's allow).
No, you're quick to blame Flash and Silverlight, yet obviously if one can play video in Flash, adding on DRM shouldn't cripple it--that is, the specific DRM scheme is the problem. By the same token, there's nothing that'll magically make the DRM scheme ported to the W3C efficient. Sure, it *could* be efficient. But, then, it could be relatively efficient now and a lot aren't. Why not? Beause there's really no incentive for DRM makers to make their schemes small and lightweight. The very fact that it is such a CPU crusher would seem to prove to DRM buyers that their DRM scheme works. After all, most DRM schemes are not roll-your-own but instead some version of some bought brand from some company.
So, don't be surprised if you'll need 10 different minor versions of a DRM scheme installed for 10 different sites--because upgrades cost money for the web site--and be amazed how easily some trojan malware can walk right in and hide in a non-existant version number or under some legitimate sounding, but actually bogus, name. That isn't to say any of the above can't happen now. The point is none of the offering makes it any better.
I really don't understand all the f-ing fuzz about DRM being added to the standard, as a developer/company you DON'T have to use the DRM on your site, you CAN use it without having to resort to external components which are not available on many platforms.
Wow. It's almost like you have no idea what you're talking about. The whole W3C standard is fundamentally about allowing for DRM being a binary blob that inherently may not be available on many platforms. That it is "internal" is by definition but it's no more internal than flash or silverlight plugins, really.
Well, if you object to having DRM in the standard, then you should also have to object to anything in the standard that replaces stuff like silverlight and flash..
There's a lot of what silverlight and flash do that could be implemented in an open fashion without resorting to binary blobs, but yes, I'd say that if to replace silverlight/flash meant requiring various opaque binary elements, then I'm against it. That doesn't mean a lot of the functionality couldn't or shouldn't be incorporated into the W3C standards.
People who are against putting DRM into the standard are just a bunch of morons.. If DRM works correctly as a user you won't have any problems (you can view/read/listen to the content without any problems),
So, people are morons because *if* DRM works correctly... Well, fuck, good thing DRM has never been shown to work incorrectly or for DRM-like schemes to be used to trojan malware. Yep, we're all just a bunch of morons.
DRM mostly becomes a problem if you want to consume some content without willing to pay..
Odd, since I'd imagine DRM will be used heavily on content *you* don't pay for but advertisers do. Since that's the primary model for a lot of companies to provide content, I don't see how you wouldn't be concerned that you're implying either (a) most content will be locked under DRM schemes which may work correctly and (b) perhaps, using your pejorative stance, a lot more of the content will be user-pay-only accessible which translates into a lot less open/free of a web. But, then, perhaps you want the internet to be that way?
Go make your own content if you don't want to pay for content, see how long you can keep up with spending money but not getting any back..
You might want to talk to a lot of OSS developers about that. Even high-profile projects like OpenSSH don't rake in the funds to do even the simple things like guaranteed physical meetings every once in a while. Meanwhile, most OSS problems are one or two person operations that are supported heavily by having free hosting, which cuts down heavily on the out of pocket expenses. Honestly, the barriers to creating content in just about every field have been cut so drastically (cheaper cameras, cheaper computers, cheaper audio recording equipment, etc) that if anything the real danger is being lost in the flood of near-free content (and a reason why ad-driven can be such a successful model on the internet). None of the above, you know, demands DRM. In some ways, actually, big conglomerates adopting W3C DRM may actually help the majority of content creators by making their content more desirable--humblebundle.com shows how that logic doesn't fully hold.
But, then, you quickly turn the situation into one where you're a "hipster" because you dare not follow along with the popular culture because 5 or 10 companies control 90% of the distribution through their DRM scheme. Hence, most people will blindly put up with shit because it's good enough--no problem there--and everyone else is further marginalized and disregarded. That's not healthy for a society. Besides that, it's almost certainly not good for Linux users. But, fuck them, right?
The DRM will in fact make MORE free content likely because the people giving out the content will feel more assured that people cannot copy it.
And just like today, DRM will be a bastard and suck down CPU cycles that on a limited system will make said content unusable. Worse, and the real reason to be against DRM, is that it introduces a layer of "trust us, download this" as a part of said "free content". That is the very hallmark of a lot of the current malware epidemic. That the W3C is greenlighting any of this is going to make already said limited systems even worse off if it catches on.
So, just like today, people will be better off just bypassing all of the above and pirating the content post DRM-removal.
Video providers ALREADY use DRM in browsers today. Why are you and others thinking it's WORSE to have a standard for this instead of having the node-podge of Flash and other solutions we have today? We are you not rushing to support something that can kill both Flash and Silverlight in one fell swoop?
Jolly, everyone else is doing a shitty job and pushing on DRM people. The W3C should too! Because making it a standard somehow makes it better.
You should really watch Batman (1943). Or you can just read the serial's chapter titles:
The Electrical Brain
The Bat's Cave
The Mark of the Zombies
Slaves of the Rising Sun
The Living Corpse
Poison Peril
The Phoney Doctor
Lured by Radium
The Sign of the Sphinx
Flying Spies
A Nipponese Trap
Embers of Evil
Eight Steps Down
The Executioner Strikes
The Doom of the Rising Sun
I think it shows two obvious things: zombie films as an overdone "art form" is rather old and perhaps that as much as it's not a conspiracy to use current events to sell tickets, it's certainly a historical truth that current events are used to sell tickets.
Send a text 10 years ago trying to find a hooker? Potentially end your political career. Shut down the government and risk world-wide economic collapse, possibly as even your stated goal? Get ready to be re-elected.
Honestly, though, considering just how far politicians go to be elected and how much they're willing to smear their competitor, the real question is why aren't more of these supposed texts leaked anyways? If all it takes is 140-characters or less of text to blackmail Mr. Congressman, how could Mr. Congressman even be in a position of power when others without those texts exist? It is, after all, a very large gray area of people who would do slimy election campaigns but never left of a trace of their skeleton closet. And it's not for a lack of rich people with a desire for power over others--although some claim can be said that only the loser rich become politicians as the rest can be better paid and without burning through millions of charity from the public just to be paid a pittance by comparison.
Nah, I think the honest truth is Mr. Congressman is generally unwilling to upset the status quo. But, they're told what is the status quo and what isn't. This whole government shutdown, I'm certain, was orchestrated with strategist likely telling those involved that somehow everything important would still keep going. Yet there's no one in a position of power who would argue the same thing about defunding the NSA. And when it's not your money on the line and you don't think the NSA will actually do harm to you, why would you care how much it may hypothetically screw everyone else in the future? Better yet, it might be a stage and pony show to further entrench your job by "proving" how unnecessary the government is, irregardless of how *you* are part of the government.
Really, thinking that this is all a matter of blackmail is relatively high-minded in comparison.
Reminds me of a funny thing I was thinking about recently. The media's attitude towards the government shutdown has been incredibly one-sided. That is, there's been virtually no press on all the good that a government shutdown is doing. What could I possibly mean? Well, the very party line of Republicans, especially of the Tea Party variety, is precisely to eliminate as many non-essential functions from the federal government as possible. The very fact that a government shutdown has produced that situation has not resulted in House Republicans taking credit for the shutdown but instead the media has turned the situation into a blame game about how bad the government shutdown is.
To actually bring polls forward to ask how many people are *glad* that there's a government shutdown is so antithetical to what the media is interested in--possibly not least because a government shutdown makes new wars seem even more preposterous than usual--and likely what most the people are actually against, regardless of it being precisely the calling card of many campaigns they vote for. This, of course, is no doubt due to the fact that poll questions like "would you like a smaller government" are seemingly designed to be so ambiguous that few could find reason to disagree. It's quite easy to realize that the media so wholly controls the narrative in so many circumstances that even without a per se oligarchy of newspapers and TV stations, there's enough of a group think involved that the US is so very far off from having any real scope of reality.
No, investors do have vision, a desire to better the company, and a focus on long-term profits. What you're describing are speculators. Sadly, speculation has become a massive part of the stock market and has almost everything to do with the 90s shift of pensions to stock-based retirement funds managed by mutual and hedge funds.
The small bright side is that a lot more people are involved in the stock market and its benefits instead of it being limited to only the wealthy. The big down side are events like this where the same people who would have in the past used a few wealthy holders to obtain controlling interest and liquidate a company are now supported by thousands or millions of smaller investors to do the same, often with much more reach in monetary power. And, of course, this isn't to say that no one chooses long-term mutual funds or that all mutual or hedge funds are bad.
One could even argue that the ability to liquidate a company is a sign of its weakness and the industry is better off with such companies gone. The counter to that, of course, is not that the statement is outright incorrect but the scale of it is way off with short-term greed driving companies out of business to the long-term detriment of everyone, even the investors. The point, though, is it's not a simple black and white issue even to the extent that speculation seems inherently bad.
If you work for the government, you can't really be expected to provide an impartial audit of government activities. The end. The only time Congress appoints actual outsiders is when the majority party is able to excert enough power to get them appointed. Of course, this is heavily politicalized as well -- they don't appoint people without knowing what their answer will be.
Actually, it's much worse than that. The truth is that if by some miracle they did do an in-depth audit that recommend drastic measures that radically acknowledged the inherent unconstitutionality of the acts and called for trials, jail time, etc, it'd all well be ignored. And after perhaps a few months of controversy in the media at best, the majority of people will assume that either (a) the actions suggested were carried out or (b) there were no calls for action; ie, most everyone will think it was all a grand success and not inherently a futile exercise.
All this group is being offered is a chance to whitewash what was done, quite possibly with strict definitions to work with--probably with a vocabulary that makes it near impossible within the report to even acknowledge abuses. Those brave enough to functionally subvert the panel/report will be badgered and harassed by near half the media (and perhaps 30% of the population) over fluff reasons--be it claims of a breach of national security, not working within the rules, or having some ax to grind. And through it all, nothing of note will actually happen except perhaps ending the revolving door of industry and government for a few people who didn't tow the line.
This isn't dinner theater. At least in dinner theater you can throw tomatoes and the performers and boo them off the stage. And, honestly, they may well lose their job over a bad performance. But, then, I guess it all presumes that the vast majority of Americans aren't so blindly stupid to accept "US is #1" for everything. Then again, if the media is the one who keeps asking the poll questions and gearing towards an answer they want, it's quite possible to get confused answers to your liking, but that's tantamount to the opening act being spared tomatoes; the real meat of the show may still be open for some real abuse.
In many ways we get all up an arms about Governments and Corporations "spying" or "profiling your information" however the internet wasn't ever really meant for private information.
Non-sequitor. No matter the source or the means, a government or a corporation having such extensive knowledge about a group can and will use that information for abuse*.
It design doesn't make private information easy. Sure we have came up with encryption and other crazy hacks to try to make us more secure, we are still communicating on a public network, to systems that we shouldn't fully trust.
It sure doesn't help when (1) the government consistently has actively pursued a policy to eliminate any standard means of wide scale encryption to ensure private communication on the internet and (2) intentionally worked towards crippling the effective of the standards they do enforce (with possibly some exceptions). Even still, networks exist that do functionally undermine those efforts. Either that or the governments of the world are willfully allowing numerous terrorists to run free, regardless of their seeming willingness to drone strike (with collateral damage) all those they view as worthy of death. Or the governments, even with all that information, are still not omniscient.
Encryption and other privacy methods are akin to putting a lock on the door (Good enough to stop most casual attempts to poke around), often not enough to be rally secure, against any group that really wants to get it.
Good encryption is akin to putting a DVD in a block of cement and then dropping it off at a random place in the universe. Locks are akin to tissue paper by comparison.
Remember this fact if you are going to choose a SaaS or Cloud solution. Not that using such systems are Bad or Evil like RMS likes to claim, however if you are going to trust your information to an outside source, you better be sure that you could handle a breach.
Any serious work you want to do on a SaaS or Cloud solution, you want to trust the provider to produce good results, which you inherently can't do; further, an information breach would be inherently detrimental to your cause as it would undermine the faith in your work even further. For non-serious work, why would you go through the bother and expense? More importantly, how much non-serious work do you have that you'd care to have an information breach?
*Note, I speak of the colloquial use of the word "abuse" and not the selective reinterpretation that often accompanies such collection efforts which chooses to effectively undefine abuse.
And if I can't be bothered to share my half-assed opinion, I should at least have the option to "like" someone elses', damn it!
I know you say it with a bit of contempt, but considering how often news articles contain opinion or facts presented by an unnamed source, I would find it interesting if every speaker in a news article had Like/Dislike attached to their words, including the article's author(s). The idea of Like/Disliking whole articles often makes little sense. Like/Disliking a speaker may make even less sense. But if there's some belief that hearing others opinions to well articulate what they think about parts or all of an article are unacceptable, I'd still find it pretty interesting to be able to "vote" on parts of an article and see how (a) people feel, (b) how many spam bots would cast their vote, and (c) how effective the web site's anti-spam technology is.
Hey everyone. Tired of every new iteration of Gnome screwing up more and more with the UI? Switch to IceWM. You may dislike it. You may even hate it. But seeing as it's (mostly) a dead project, you can be reasonably assured it can't get any worse.:)
PS - I prefer IceWM. There's certainly ways I'd like to see it improved, but most of that would involve completely redesigning IceWM from a stacking to a compositing design--so, yea, I don't expect anyone to go through the effort for the marginal improvement. Beyond that, IceWM has been for me the WM with the least issue of focus stealing windows, and that's reason enough to stick to a WM.
... invariably I... has to put on the horn to get them to pay attention to what they're doing as they're holding up traffic.
So, I assume you want to be ticketed too, right? Nearly everywhere that I'm aware of, "[the] driver of a motor vehicle shall when reasonably necessary to insure safe operation give audible warning with his horn but shall not otherwise use the horn when upon a highway." or similar wordings to that effect. Stationary vehicles holding up traffic are no safety threat in themselves except perhaps if they are blocking traffic for an extended period of time (most of a light change isn't enough, I don't think). Further, honking during traffic jams isn't "reasonably necessary". Overall, from the tone of your post, I'm guessing you didn't wait a reasonable amount of time and were honking because you were impatient.
In any case, two wrongs don't make a right. And just because everyone else does it doesn't make it legal.
The libs want guns gone. The Pubs want to "protect my right to hunt and protect myself from other people."
As a "lib"[eral/ertarian], I don't want guns gone. You want guns? Great. You want drugs? Great. Honestly, it's authoritarian libs who want guns gone just like authoritarian conservatives want to enshrine things like marriage, religion, etc in government. Oh, and most "Pubs" want guns to play with, be it play hunting or make believe that they're protecting themselves from other people. I say this because, honestly, guns are by design deadly weapons meant specifically for killing usually people--hunting wild game is a nice add-on.
To that end, I don't think most people treat guns with the sort of respect that they should. I'd also note that, honestly, if one can truly be respectful of owning a gun, I see no reason they shouldn't be "allowed" to own a tank, a cannon, a B-52 bomber, or a nuclear weapon--allowed is a dubious word more or less because Constitutionally it seems pretty clear it'd all fall under a right and as such infringement upon that right is some sort of violation against humanity. They all stem from the same point, a means of unleashing possibly massive harm on other people. But the fact is, people who are against "hard" drugs are also against "hard" weapons. They cling to civil usages of them as justification for ownership. To me, that's either cowardice or a real unwillingness to accept exactly what is desired. Either way, as you say, the treatment by "libs" and "Pubs" is all very unconstitutional.
To chime in (and join the choir), I definitely agree with what is said. But, honestly, I think we're at the point that the US Constitution needs to be rewritten. I state this for a number of reasons. The largest one is that after 200 years, it has become very clear that a combination of select interpretation or reinterpretation by those both for an "originalist", "modern language", or a "living document" view all fail very badly at providing the sort of protections of rights the people that people want/expect while also failing pretty badly at actually providing for the duties the people want/expect. One could argue that the current political environment is so corrosive to the point that any major rewrite would, even it were to be ratified, be so warped to the point of what is desired or good.
But, I'd argue that the original Constitution was written under similar circumstances--this is one reason why "origianlists" are so often full of it, ignoring how you begin to interpret it when layered on with each amendment--by a relatively small committee based upon a much larger set of resolutions from a collection of representatives from various facets of governance and that a similar approach could be taken today if so desired. I think you can look no further than National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to show an act is possible--the laundry list of opponents is some of the best evidence, IMHO, on just how good it is. At the same time, the very fact that no part of the federal government today seems interested in passing any functional part of it* is a good indication that if such a reform would pass, it'd be by an act of the states. It seems fitting since the only state ratified amendment to date was repealing prohibition. What better place than to be "drunk" again in the open instead of the false sobriety?:)
*Spend more? Sure. Cut taxes? Sure. Tax increases, but only to cover more spending and even then rarely enough to actually cover the spending? Sure. *sigh*
I don't personally care that much about the NSA snooping through my e-mails. But if some criminal can read them just as easily, it's a different story.
The NSA snooping through your emails is a criminal act unless, you know, they got a search warrant to search though your emails because they specifically believe your emails contain evidence of a crime and got said warrant to search said specific emails. Your comment is no different than "I have no problem with illegal aliens who are law abiding citizens." By definition, being an illegal alien is..illegal*.:) This is the same double think that you see people advocating "limited government" who also seemingly have a different idea of the word limited in "for a limited time" when it comes to copyright--although considering how they act, there's truthfully a lot of parallels in their practice.
Overall, though, no, I don't want the NSA or FBI or GCHQ or Google or anyone snooping through my email. Google's automated email scanner for presenting ads is borderline acceptable only because (1) they're pretty open about it and hence I and near everyone knows about it, (2) I can effective opt out of almost of their profiling/snooping if I so choose (email redirects to other peoples gmail accounts makes that a less than 100% true statement), and (3) it's all a very much automated process meant to maximize their profit but without any risk of jail time or other nefarious acts upon my person. But the NSA, GCHQ, etc have actively suppressed any knowledge of their snooping and without Snowden there'd still be enough room for reasonable denial, there's no reasonable standard to opt out of not sending traffic through US or UK "jurisdiction" (makes me wonder if Verizon Germany has NSA hooks too), and by their very secret nature I cannot rely upon their supposed limited scope preventing them from seeking criminal or extralegal action against me (if I boast in emails about a long history of bypassing parking violation laws, they may just leak it to the city I live in). Basically, it's entirely unacceptable on its face by most ever reasonable standard I can think of.
*Okay, this is a bit of a dicey area to be honest. There's an inherent Right to Travel. Without it, there would be no means to eat, seek shelter, etc. But nation states have long established they have a right to set standard of entry into their territory, if nothing else to exclude people they believe have or will commit criminal acts--this isn't wholly unreasonable. Having said that, most illegals are in the US illegally because the US (and most other developed countries) have decided to setup quota systems not based upon a reasonable standard of how many people they can reasonably process a year but on some vague notion of the socioeconomic impact of a lot of refugees entering the country and straining "the safety net" meant "for the citizens". Without getting into a argument of how true that statement is or how much resentment that builds from "the citizens", I'm left with the core point of what "citizen" means--a city resident. In the end, the standards of defining a person a resident is reasonably long-term occupation and for that most illegals are citizens. That the US, since its founding, and other countries wish to redefine the term as a means of control of the potential makeup of the people is disgusting to me. Never the less, even if the laws are unjust at one level, that so few illegals even attempt legitimate entry into the US leaves very little moral high ground on their part and would, if the law were just, make them equivalently guilty of a crime paramount to a fine-able misdemeanor. So, yea, still technically criminal.
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I don't think encapsulation really solves the problem. Fundamentally a background service is just a bad paradigm when it comes to power management. Consider microkernels and how they're fundamentally enshrined in the idea of encapsulation. Yet, by their very nature they tend to have a large collection of separate userland processes that have to be some level of active to service requests. Hence, all the I/O time and generally busy-time to check the queue for more tasks is multiplied out by some potentially large factor. Meanwhile, leaving it to a unified kernel can side-step a lot of that repetitive overhead at the expense of encapsulation. Some middle-ground usually resides in programs either doing the work themselves or having an on-demand background service that only has overhead for as long as it's active.
In short, I think you're generally off-base. Encapsulation is basically the thesis of the Windows NT model. One can complain that there's too much spread out over too many services/libraries (although that's generally unavoidable when there's overlap in function between various parts of the system) and hence the encapsulation isn't done well. But, I don't think better encapsulation would improve the situation much as it'd essential just shift around where the code resides in the various background services while likely not reducing the count much, if any.
Having said all that, I'd really prefer it if pulseaudio wasn't so horrible when it came to CPU time. :(
Yeah! How dare the government require restaurants to label their products for their content! It's not like you're ingesting it or anything. And we all know people don't have allergies to certain foods. While we're at it, let's lift the prohibition on cocaine. I think cocaine would make a great additive to fast food. Best of all, no need to label it as included.
Um, that almost always has more to do with lawsuits or fear of lawsuits. There's only a handful of government regulations that involve warning labels and they're predominantly related to things like hazardous materials. But, yea, it's crazy to requiring a big warning on an otherwise unlabeled drum of some random chemical.
Congratulations. You've moved from "the free market best functions by having an informed consumer" to "why bother informing people because they're all idiots". I guess we can then just move straight to communism, then. Or, you know, we could acknowledge that you can't make people not be stupid but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of people who do actually use the information. But, yea, let's harp on the outliers that make for great news stories. Or we can focus on epidemic problems (obesity) and just pretend that somehow regulation is causing it (or the free market is) instead, of oh, figuring out it's probably something to do with human nature and the best that can be done is to give people information and try to encourage them to use it.
Mind giving me a list of these contradictory, duplicated, etc regulations? Mind giving them to your local, state, or federal representative? Mind making it an election issue? Or is this all vague hand waving?
Perhaps because (1) you aren't making concrete points on what regulations should be removed, (2) your representative might be running on removing regulations but he's just as hand waving as you are, and (3) you don't actually hold your representative to task for failing to accomplish anything because he can use the excuse that "removing these over regulations is impossible" (a great reason to vote the person out, when they state they can't do what they promised to do) while knowing that because nothing specific was brought up that even token removal of regulations might placate you and others of his constituency without really meaning much of anything.
Seriously, are you or is *anyone* doing the legwork to track down all these over regulations? Because, yeah, it's near impossible to remove a list of regulations when you don't have a list of regulations to remove. And politicians aren't ones who actually know the good and the bad of regulation as a general point--they rely upon experts and think tanks for that. Meanwhile, think tanks don't want to make a succinct list of corrections because if they actually worked, they'd be out of a job if a few years*. So it really does fall upon you to, you know, work at it.
*Okay, this isn't really fair. The same sort of charge is thrown at climate scientists as an excuse for them pushing for climate change to get grant money. But in both cases, I think the truth is the people
And Clinton was a horrible President because he had marital affairs and lied about it. But Reagan was a great President because he directly or indirectly negotiated with terrorists and sold weapons to the Iranians to fund the Contra all while lying about it^W^W^W forgetting about it.
You see what I did there? The two aspects are unrelated. Besides, the fact remains that (a) Snowden lying to get access to documents may be unethical but it may be moral and (b) every other citation was about the *Russians* lying (at a time before Russia necessarily was fully committed and didn't wish to tip their hand on their plans) with the implication that the Russians would only go to such great lengths in exchange for documents. But, could it be that the Russians presumed too much or Snowden lied/implied to them too much? Or maybe it was enough that Russia's leaders are still embedded in the Cold War mindset that states it is enough to give the US a black eye, by implying they're a champion of freedom, to give amnesty to an "enemy of the US [government]"?
Honestly, we don't have any concrete facts about what is or is not true. The best we have are statements made by people who were personally involved (Snowden) and innuendo and implication along with claims that certain people or entities are liars (people discrediting the one person who would know, Snowden). Well, even liars tell the truth some times--or do you accept an always liar that says "I am lying"?
So, the only thing left is either the GGP is some sort of bootlicking shill, a paid shill, a bigot, or some line of that. Because nothing he has stated provides anything remotely like concrete evidence that Snowden can't be taken at his word in this specific instance.
Reading comprehension fail? Clearly the statement is that Snowden turned the documents directly over to journalists without some intermediary and not to known Russian or Chinese government agents. Obviously, Snoweden wouldn't know if he's handing over documents to Russian agents embedded in the journalistic field any more than he'd know, while he was still in the NSA's employ, handing over documents to Russian agents embedded in the NSA.
Like how the NSA has no control over Snowden handing over documents to the Russians or Chinese once they handed over [access to] documents to him? Why, it's turtles all the way down!
Great reductio ad absurdum--except it could just as well be used to block all tax increases on anyone which is also reductio ad absurdum. Too bad people aren't calling for 70%+ taxation but instead a modest 5% increase on income taxes. They are also calling for things like capital gains taxes to be abolished and income tax rates to be used--which would admittedly effectively increase the rate by 15%+ for some people--precisely because this whole "take my ball and move" mentality is not a useful justification for the regressive tax system available to the super wealthy. Oh, and, btw, there was a time when the super wealthy tax rate was 90% and not everyone left. I wouldn't recommend a rate near that, but cowering in fear isn't even justified by historical evidence.
And? Should we tax them nothing then because they can't pay for everything? No? Well, then, perhaps your little bit of math is only relevant for the fractional percentage of people who even desire such a system.
They aren't THE solution, but raising taxes on higher income earners is PART of the solution.
Granted, the other PART of the solution is to cut spending. Funny how the ACA or a universal health care system would actually cut costs. After all, we're already funding Medicare/Medicaid at the Federal/State level and its per capita costs are the same as Canada's per capita costs. Another approach would be to stop the Medicare/Medicaid tax and funnel all the health insurance spending to the government to implement universal health care, as too all health insurance spending in the US near is equivalent to Canada's per capita costs on its universal health care. Regardless, health care coverage by a single payer is a big win--and anyone who understands monopsonies would see why.
No doubt. Funny thing, then, that that 1% make up a part of ALL OF US and so they too need to do their part. To put it in perspective, if we demand the poorest of us should give up an expensive meal once a month be it through less government spending or more taxes, we should demand at least as much of a token gesture by the top 1%. It just happens that at top 1% levels, a token gesture is a lot more money.
What next? Complaining about hidden compartment in desks?
Oh, I don't know...because of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? I don't know about you, Mr. Judge, but I personally don't want a court, court-ordered or not, snooping on my life--such inherently is a big way to disrupt my happiness. But, even if we forgo the DoI and move to the CotUS, it's "life, liberty, and property". Well, whether you view it as the user's property or Lavabit's property, they sure as fuck can do what they want with it. What part of any of that should be to make the court's job easier? Why would they seek to bend over backwards for any court?
Of course, the big one is liberty. The biggest liberty of all is exploring the possibilities of math and the universe. And that heavily flows into attempts to make functionally unbreakable encryption resistant to even the US government. And is also flows from the point of just being a general asshole, which God Bless the United States of America, is very much recognized as a Creator given right. Clearly the judge is exercising it when he shows contempt for other people daring to live their lives in ways he doesn't like.
Honestly, though, I do not try to be too much of an asshole. And I do recognize that there does need to be a means for courts and court-orders to function. The problem the judge seems to realize--and honestly why the NSA keeps getting the go ahead--is that criminals are most inclined to use those sorts of tools to hide their activities. The good response should be the obvious: most criminals don't go through the bother because they don't think they'll be caught and the rest are almost always found before the court-order (after all, you have to have evidence to get that far) or the court-order is a very inappropriate fishing expedition. All a court-order is there for is to solidify a case, not to make one. And so the very notion that there's something wrong with efforts to make their case inherently harder to prove is, well, fine by me. It almost always just means the prosecutor and the police have to work a bit harder to prove their case, if they care enough to go through the effort. The real limit of justice then is not the strength of encryption or the willingness of first or third parties to comply with handing over incrimination evidence. It has almost everything to do with running a decent investigation in the first place.
PS - *sigh* The NSA part was probably unnecessary, but it reeks of the same stupidity and with the same sorts of results. Trying to find a needle in a haystack is easier because at least then you know you're looking for a needle. And if, by analogy, you know you're looking for a specific terrorist plot in a general time frame with certain people, you're already 90% of your way towards having a prosecutable case and a pathway to find accomplices.
Uh, yea, no. Liberty and individuality are orthogonal to strictly solvable, perfectible systems. Your comment is analogous to having cameras constantly pointed at the clouds to make rain fall shallow. And while I honestly don't think you mean it this way, your line of thinking is precisely the same sort of naive thinking that is used to support a police state. :(
Well, my problem is that I don't have a Windows install (and VMs have sucky 3D support), while WINE clearly has performance hiccups. So, maybe Steam on Windows isn't nearly as bad. But, regardless, you can't not run Steam when playing the games and so regardless it's yet more overhead. I mean, if your logic held, Steam would run just long enough to launch the game then quit. But, then that leads to...
No. But if you have to run Steam to play game X because of the DRM and game X only has achievement hiccups because of Steam, then indirectly DRM is responsible. Yea, it's possible Steam would still force achievements even if the DRM never existed, so I don't entirely disagree with you. In any case, I was speaking more about Origin than Steam which seems to do a much worse job of it.
And that makes no sense. Understand that what the W3C has approved is a platform for running binary DRM plugins--whatever they wish to call them. So, fundamentally, it's no different than any other plugin running in the browser. By your logic, Flash shouldn't currently have performance issues, but clearly whatever issues it does have is in the hands of (a) Adobe and (b) developers of the actual Flash apps/games/whatever--and even though Google has their own custom-compiled Flash plugin, it doesn't show remarkably better performance than standard Flash. And since the DRM plugin, be it written for Flash or the W3C standard, are inherently going to be handled by the same people who are doing it now, I don't see there being significant improvements in performance. And note, when I say "significant improvements in performance", I mean for them to radically alter the complexity of their DRM scheme which is presumably the basis for such poor performance. An O(n^2) algorithm in native code may do much better than O(n^2) in Flash, but O(n*ln n) is usually much better regardless. And, really, the fact that the performance of the DRM even *matters* considering the complexity of the video/audio decoders speaks volumes on just how bad the current situation is.
What do you think Social Security is? Intrusive? Massive power grab? Enforced by the SSA? Plenty of other bad things?
Seriously, the biggest complaint Republicans seem to have is they (1) offered Obamacare as an alterative to Universal Health Care, (2) figured Democrats would never support, and (3) are finally upset that Obamacare passed because (a) they can't claim they made it, (b) can't get behind it working because it goes against their "government can't do anything right" mantra, and (c) never really wanted people to have any sort of decent health care coverage because to actually deliver on anything good would basically cut off their ability to whine about it.
I mean, fuck, the whole Government Shutdown is *precisely* what the Republican mantra is--to cut off non-essential spending. So, why exactly are Republicans bothering with any sort of effort to fix the problem? Because as long as they act upset, they can whine and cry about the big, mean Democrats. Oh, and let's not forget, the very mantra they support if followed through would put said Republicans out of a job, especially if they realized how unnecessary they are. Non-essential, indeed.
Actually, I was referring to Steam, Origin, Cdilla, and a variety of other game-related DRM schemes that offer some advantages (mostly the former two as distribution and update systems with some achievment/cloud stuff) with a lot of disadvantages (those achievments + network latency = random jerky behavior, using up a lot of CPU time *just* to run the Steam/Origin/whatever crap at all times while playing a game, and then there's the lack of portability of your games if you're trying to diagnose an install problem--and who wants to re-d/l 9GB on another system even if it's allow).
No, you're quick to blame Flash and Silverlight, yet obviously if one can play video in Flash, adding on DRM shouldn't cripple it--that is, the specific DRM scheme is the problem. By the same token, there's nothing that'll magically make the DRM scheme ported to the W3C efficient. Sure, it *could* be efficient. But, then, it could be relatively efficient now and a lot aren't. Why not? Beause there's really no incentive for DRM makers to make their schemes small and lightweight. The very fact that it is such a CPU crusher would seem to prove to DRM buyers that their DRM scheme works. After all, most DRM schemes are not roll-your-own but instead some version of some bought brand from some company.
So, don't be surprised if you'll need 10 different minor versions of a DRM scheme installed for 10 different sites--because upgrades cost money for the web site--and be amazed how easily some trojan malware can walk right in and hide in a non-existant version number or under some legitimate sounding, but actually bogus, name. That isn't to say any of the above can't happen now. The point is none of the offering makes it any better.
Wow. It's almost like you have no idea what you're talking about. The whole W3C standard is fundamentally about allowing for DRM being a binary blob that inherently may not be available on many platforms. That it is "internal" is by definition but it's no more internal than flash or silverlight plugins, really.
There's a lot of what silverlight and flash do that could be implemented in an open fashion without resorting to binary blobs, but yes, I'd say that if to replace silverlight/flash meant requiring various opaque binary elements, then I'm against it. That doesn't mean a lot of the functionality couldn't or shouldn't be incorporated into the W3C standards.
So, people are morons because *if* DRM works correctly... Well, fuck, good thing DRM has never been shown to work incorrectly or for DRM-like schemes to be used to trojan malware. Yep, we're all just a bunch of morons.
Odd, since I'd imagine DRM will be used heavily on content *you* don't pay for but advertisers do. Since that's the primary model for a lot of companies to provide content, I don't see how you wouldn't be concerned that you're implying either (a) most content will be locked under DRM schemes which may work correctly and (b) perhaps, using your pejorative stance, a lot more of the content will be user-pay-only accessible which translates into a lot less open/free of a web. But, then, perhaps you want the internet to be that way?
You might want to talk to a lot of OSS developers about that. Even high-profile projects like OpenSSH don't rake in the funds to do even the simple things like guaranteed physical meetings every once in a while. Meanwhile, most OSS problems are one or two person operations that are supported heavily by having free hosting, which cuts down heavily on the out of pocket expenses. Honestly, the barriers to creating content in just about every field have been cut so drastically (cheaper cameras, cheaper computers, cheaper audio recording equipment, etc) that if anything the real danger is being lost in the flood of near-free content (and a reason why ad-driven can be such a successful model on the internet). None of the above, you know, demands DRM. In some ways, actually, big conglomerates adopting W3C DRM may actually help the majority of content creators by making their content more desirable--humblebundle.com shows how that logic doesn't fully hold.
But, then, you quickly turn the situation into one where you're a "hipster" because you dare not follow along with the popular culture because 5 or 10 companies control 90% of the distribution through their DRM scheme. Hence, most people will blindly put up with shit because it's good enough--no problem there--and everyone else is further marginalized and disregarded. That's not healthy for a society. Besides that, it's almost certainly not good for Linux users. But, fuck them, right?
And just like today, DRM will be a bastard and suck down CPU cycles that on a limited system will make said content unusable. Worse, and the real reason to be against DRM, is that it introduces a layer of "trust us, download this" as a part of said "free content". That is the very hallmark of a lot of the current malware epidemic. That the W3C is greenlighting any of this is going to make already said limited systems even worse off if it catches on.
So, just like today, people will be better off just bypassing all of the above and pirating the content post DRM-removal.
Jolly, everyone else is doing a shitty job and pushing on DRM people. The W3C should too! Because making it a standard somehow makes it better.
You should really watch Batman (1943). Or you can just read the serial's chapter titles:
I think it shows two obvious things: zombie films as an overdone "art form" is rather old and perhaps that as much as it's not a conspiracy to use current events to sell tickets, it's certainly a historical truth that current events are used to sell tickets.
Send a text 10 years ago trying to find a hooker? Potentially end your political career. Shut down the government and risk world-wide economic collapse, possibly as even your stated goal? Get ready to be re-elected.
Honestly, though, considering just how far politicians go to be elected and how much they're willing to smear their competitor, the real question is why aren't more of these supposed texts leaked anyways? If all it takes is 140-characters or less of text to blackmail Mr. Congressman, how could Mr. Congressman even be in a position of power when others without those texts exist? It is, after all, a very large gray area of people who would do slimy election campaigns but never left of a trace of their skeleton closet. And it's not for a lack of rich people with a desire for power over others--although some claim can be said that only the loser rich become politicians as the rest can be better paid and without burning through millions of charity from the public just to be paid a pittance by comparison.
Nah, I think the honest truth is Mr. Congressman is generally unwilling to upset the status quo. But, they're told what is the status quo and what isn't. This whole government shutdown, I'm certain, was orchestrated with strategist likely telling those involved that somehow everything important would still keep going. Yet there's no one in a position of power who would argue the same thing about defunding the NSA. And when it's not your money on the line and you don't think the NSA will actually do harm to you, why would you care how much it may hypothetically screw everyone else in the future? Better yet, it might be a stage and pony show to further entrench your job by "proving" how unnecessary the government is, irregardless of how *you* are part of the government.
Really, thinking that this is all a matter of blackmail is relatively high-minded in comparison.
Reminds me of a funny thing I was thinking about recently. The media's attitude towards the government shutdown has been incredibly one-sided. That is, there's been virtually no press on all the good that a government shutdown is doing. What could I possibly mean? Well, the very party line of Republicans, especially of the Tea Party variety, is precisely to eliminate as many non-essential functions from the federal government as possible. The very fact that a government shutdown has produced that situation has not resulted in House Republicans taking credit for the shutdown but instead the media has turned the situation into a blame game about how bad the government shutdown is.
To actually bring polls forward to ask how many people are *glad* that there's a government shutdown is so antithetical to what the media is interested in--possibly not least because a government shutdown makes new wars seem even more preposterous than usual--and likely what most the people are actually against, regardless of it being precisely the calling card of many campaigns they vote for. This, of course, is no doubt due to the fact that poll questions like "would you like a smaller government" are seemingly designed to be so ambiguous that few could find reason to disagree. It's quite easy to realize that the media so wholly controls the narrative in so many circumstances that even without a per se oligarchy of newspapers and TV stations, there's enough of a group think involved that the US is so very far off from having any real scope of reality.
No, investors do have vision, a desire to better the company, and a focus on long-term profits. What you're describing are speculators. Sadly, speculation has become a massive part of the stock market and has almost everything to do with the 90s shift of pensions to stock-based retirement funds managed by mutual and hedge funds.
The small bright side is that a lot more people are involved in the stock market and its benefits instead of it being limited to only the wealthy. The big down side are events like this where the same people who would have in the past used a few wealthy holders to obtain controlling interest and liquidate a company are now supported by thousands or millions of smaller investors to do the same, often with much more reach in monetary power. And, of course, this isn't to say that no one chooses long-term mutual funds or that all mutual or hedge funds are bad.
One could even argue that the ability to liquidate a company is a sign of its weakness and the industry is better off with such companies gone. The counter to that, of course, is not that the statement is outright incorrect but the scale of it is way off with short-term greed driving companies out of business to the long-term detriment of everyone, even the investors. The point, though, is it's not a simple black and white issue even to the extent that speculation seems inherently bad.
Actually, it's much worse than that. The truth is that if by some miracle they did do an in-depth audit that recommend drastic measures that radically acknowledged the inherent unconstitutionality of the acts and called for trials, jail time, etc, it'd all well be ignored. And after perhaps a few months of controversy in the media at best, the majority of people will assume that either (a) the actions suggested were carried out or (b) there were no calls for action; ie, most everyone will think it was all a grand success and not inherently a futile exercise.
All this group is being offered is a chance to whitewash what was done, quite possibly with strict definitions to work with--probably with a vocabulary that makes it near impossible within the report to even acknowledge abuses. Those brave enough to functionally subvert the panel/report will be badgered and harassed by near half the media (and perhaps 30% of the population) over fluff reasons--be it claims of a breach of national security, not working within the rules, or having some ax to grind. And through it all, nothing of note will actually happen except perhaps ending the revolving door of industry and government for a few people who didn't tow the line.
This isn't dinner theater. At least in dinner theater you can throw tomatoes and the performers and boo them off the stage. And, honestly, they may well lose their job over a bad performance. But, then, I guess it all presumes that the vast majority of Americans aren't so blindly stupid to accept "US is #1" for everything. Then again, if the media is the one who keeps asking the poll questions and gearing towards an answer they want, it's quite possible to get confused answers to your liking, but that's tantamount to the opening act being spared tomatoes; the real meat of the show may still be open for some real abuse.
It's called a quine compiler. :)
Non-sequitor. No matter the source or the means, a government or a corporation having such extensive knowledge about a group can and will use that information for abuse*.
It sure doesn't help when (1) the government consistently has actively pursued a policy to eliminate any standard means of wide scale encryption to ensure private communication on the internet and (2) intentionally worked towards crippling the effective of the standards they do enforce (with possibly some exceptions). Even still, networks exist that do functionally undermine those efforts. Either that or the governments of the world are willfully allowing numerous terrorists to run free, regardless of their seeming willingness to drone strike (with collateral damage) all those they view as worthy of death. Or the governments, even with all that information, are still not omniscient.
Good encryption is akin to putting a DVD in a block of cement and then dropping it off at a random place in the universe. Locks are akin to tissue paper by comparison.
Any serious work you want to do on a SaaS or Cloud solution, you want to trust the provider to produce good results, which you inherently can't do; further, an information breach would be inherently detrimental to your cause as it would undermine the faith in your work even further. For non-serious work, why would you go through the bother and expense? More importantly, how much non-serious work do you have that you'd care to have an information breach?
*Note, I speak of the colloquial use of the word "abuse" and not the selective reinterpretation that often accompanies such collection efforts which chooses to effectively undefine abuse.
I know you say it with a bit of contempt, but considering how often news articles contain opinion or facts presented by an unnamed source, I would find it interesting if every speaker in a news article had Like/Dislike attached to their words, including the article's author(s). The idea of Like/Disliking whole articles often makes little sense. Like/Disliking a speaker may make even less sense. But if there's some belief that hearing others opinions to well articulate what they think about parts or all of an article are unacceptable, I'd still find it pretty interesting to be able to "vote" on parts of an article and see how (a) people feel, (b) how many spam bots would cast their vote, and (c) how effective the web site's anti-spam technology is.
Hey everyone. Tired of every new iteration of Gnome screwing up more and more with the UI? Switch to IceWM. You may dislike it. You may even hate it. But seeing as it's (mostly) a dead project, you can be reasonably assured it can't get any worse. :)
PS - I prefer IceWM. There's certainly ways I'd like to see it improved, but most of that would involve completely redesigning IceWM from a stacking to a compositing design--so, yea, I don't expect anyone to go through the effort for the marginal improvement. Beyond that, IceWM has been for me the WM with the least issue of focus stealing windows, and that's reason enough to stick to a WM.
So, I assume you want to be ticketed too, right? Nearly everywhere that I'm aware of, "[the] driver of a motor vehicle shall when reasonably necessary to insure safe operation give audible warning with his horn but shall not otherwise use the horn when upon a highway." or similar wordings to that effect. Stationary vehicles holding up traffic are no safety threat in themselves except perhaps if they are blocking traffic for an extended period of time (most of a light change isn't enough, I don't think). Further, honking during traffic jams isn't "reasonably necessary". Overall, from the tone of your post, I'm guessing you didn't wait a reasonable amount of time and were honking because you were impatient.
In any case, two wrongs don't make a right. And just because everyone else does it doesn't make it legal.
As a "lib"[eral/ertarian], I don't want guns gone. You want guns? Great. You want drugs? Great. Honestly, it's authoritarian libs who want guns gone just like authoritarian conservatives want to enshrine things like marriage, religion, etc in government. Oh, and most "Pubs" want guns to play with, be it play hunting or make believe that they're protecting themselves from other people. I say this because, honestly, guns are by design deadly weapons meant specifically for killing usually people--hunting wild game is a nice add-on.
To that end, I don't think most people treat guns with the sort of respect that they should. I'd also note that, honestly, if one can truly be respectful of owning a gun, I see no reason they shouldn't be "allowed" to own a tank, a cannon, a B-52 bomber, or a nuclear weapon--allowed is a dubious word more or less because Constitutionally it seems pretty clear it'd all fall under a right and as such infringement upon that right is some sort of violation against humanity. They all stem from the same point, a means of unleashing possibly massive harm on other people. But the fact is, people who are against "hard" drugs are also against "hard" weapons. They cling to civil usages of them as justification for ownership. To me, that's either cowardice or a real unwillingness to accept exactly what is desired. Either way, as you say, the treatment by "libs" and "Pubs" is all very unconstitutional.
To chime in (and join the choir), I definitely agree with what is said. But, honestly, I think we're at the point that the US Constitution needs to be rewritten. I state this for a number of reasons. The largest one is that after 200 years, it has become very clear that a combination of select interpretation or reinterpretation by those both for an "originalist", "modern language", or a "living document" view all fail very badly at providing the sort of protections of rights the people that people want/expect while also failing pretty badly at actually providing for the duties the people want/expect. One could argue that the current political environment is so corrosive to the point that any major rewrite would, even it were to be ratified, be so warped to the point of what is desired or good.
But, I'd argue that the original Constitution was written under similar circumstances--this is one reason why "origianlists" are so often full of it, ignoring how you begin to interpret it when layered on with each amendment--by a relatively small committee based upon a much larger set of resolutions from a collection of representatives from various facets of governance and that a similar approach could be taken today if so desired. I think you can look no further than National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to show an act is possible--the laundry list of opponents is some of the best evidence, IMHO, on just how good it is. At the same time, the very fact that no part of the federal government today seems interested in passing any functional part of it* is a good indication that if such a reform would pass, it'd be by an act of the states. It seems fitting since the only state ratified amendment to date was repealing prohibition. What better place than to be "drunk" again in the open instead of the false sobriety? :)
*Spend more? Sure. Cut taxes? Sure. Tax increases, but only to cover more spending and even then rarely enough to actually cover the spending? Sure. *sigh*
The NSA snooping through your emails is a criminal act unless, you know, they got a search warrant to search though your emails because they specifically believe your emails contain evidence of a crime and got said warrant to search said specific emails. Your comment is no different than "I have no problem with illegal aliens who are law abiding citizens." By definition, being an illegal alien is..illegal*. :) This is the same double think that you see people advocating "limited government" who also seemingly have a different idea of the word limited in "for a limited time" when it comes to copyright--although considering how they act, there's truthfully a lot of parallels in their practice.
Overall, though, no, I don't want the NSA or FBI or GCHQ or Google or anyone snooping through my email. Google's automated email scanner for presenting ads is borderline acceptable only because (1) they're pretty open about it and hence I and near everyone knows about it, (2) I can effective opt out of almost of their profiling/snooping if I so choose (email redirects to other peoples gmail accounts makes that a less than 100% true statement), and (3) it's all a very much automated process meant to maximize their profit but without any risk of jail time or other nefarious acts upon my person. But the NSA, GCHQ, etc have actively suppressed any knowledge of their snooping and without Snowden there'd still be enough room for reasonable denial, there's no reasonable standard to opt out of not sending traffic through US or UK "jurisdiction" (makes me wonder if Verizon Germany has NSA hooks too), and by their very secret nature I cannot rely upon their supposed limited scope preventing them from seeking criminal or extralegal action against me (if I boast in emails about a long history of bypassing parking violation laws, they may just leak it to the city I live in). Basically, it's entirely unacceptable on its face by most ever reasonable standard I can think of.
*Okay, this is a bit of a dicey area to be honest. There's an inherent Right to Travel. Without it, there would be no means to eat, seek shelter, etc. But nation states have long established they have a right to set standard of entry into their territory, if nothing else to exclude people they believe have or will commit criminal acts--this isn't wholly unreasonable. Having said that, most illegals are in the US illegally because the US (and most other developed countries) have decided to setup quota systems not based upon a reasonable standard of how many people they can reasonably process a year but on some vague notion of the socioeconomic impact of a lot of refugees entering the country and straining "the safety net" meant "for the citizens". Without getting into a argument of how true that statement is or how much resentment that builds from "the citizens", I'm left with the core point of what "citizen" means--a city resident. In the end, the standards of defining a person a resident is reasonably long-term occupation and for that most illegals are citizens. That the US, since its founding, and other countries wish to redefine the term as a means of control of the potential makeup of the people is disgusting to me. Never the less, even if the laws are unjust at one level, that so few illegals even attempt legitimate entry into the US leaves very little moral high ground on their part and would, if the law were just, make them equivalently guilty of a crime paramount to a fine-able misdemeanor. So, yea, still technically criminal.