So bring on the DRM and trusted computing and locked-down everything, only not for me. Keep screwing those other guys so Linux will get more users and developers and I get more help with the piddly annoying things like that damned sound issue.
It all depends on the timing. The control freaks are doing this step by step:
Build the hardware with built-in DRM. This has already been done.
Build the OS with built-in DRM that makes use of the hardware mentioned in the previous step. This was done as of Vista. In such OSes, everything required to maintain DRM carries a digital signature, including the bootloader and the OS itself.
Modify the hardware/bootloader combination so that the only OSes it will boot are those with the proper signature. This has not been done yet, but you can bet it's coming.
That last step will effectively lock out all but "special" versions of Linux. The big content providers and Microsoft together represent a large enough influence over the government that the last step will most likely be mandated by law. Instead of being mandated directly, it may wind up being mandated by requiring ISPs to enforce DRM requirements on subscribers who wish to connect to the internet.
This may sound like paranoid ranting, but then so did the warnings we got 20 years ago or so that software patents would greatly hinder software development. People back then didn't believe it would ever happen, either. And while not all paranoid rantings come true (of course), the ones that do tend to be the ones where those in power stand to gain the most. As is the case here.
Just look at the steaming pile of crap that is the ISS and there's your Moon Base Alpha right there. Grandiose dreams and visions reduced to a paltry 3-man crew that spends most of its time trying to stay alive. Rah farkin' rah.
Besides, everyone knows that once we build a Moon Base Alpha on the moon, the nuclear waste dump will blow up and send the moon hurtling out of the solar system, so why bother wasting the money? The surfers sure wouldn't be happy with the tides disappearing, either...
It looks to me (and others) like the Republicans attempted to steal the entire 2006 congressional election (more precisely, enough to maintain a Republican majority in both the House and Senate) and failed only because voter opinion became even more favorable to the Democrats at the last minute. See http://electiondefensealliance.org/landslide_denie d_exit_polls_vs_vote_count_2006 for details.
And lest you think the pre-cooked exit polls were "inaccurate" this time around, the details of how they did the exit polling are important. In particular, they also asked how the voter voted in the 2004 presidential election, which allows them to independently determine whether "adjusting" the exit polls to correspond with the official count is realistic.
OK great. We've all totally GOT IT that freedom of speech is a critical and inalienable HUMAN (ie applies to all, not just US citizens) right.
Then again...
Then again, nothing.
Get this through your thick skull: freedom has a price. The price is risk. Freedom is dangerous.
If you wanna live in a completely sanitized world in which all the dangers are "taken care of" for you then you must give up all your freedom. But after having done so, don't be surprised if you suddenly find that not only are the dangers are still there, but there are even more of them, with the greatest of them coming from the very entity you trusted to "protect" you. And you'll be a slave, since that's what it means to not have any freedom. Oh, and did I mention that you'll also be a pussy-assed wimp for giving up your freedom in order to live free of danger?
I, for one, would rather live with danger and retain my freedom. I'd much rather live with the super-low probability (less than that of being struck by lightning!) of being killed by a terrorist than give up an ounce of my freedom to "fight" those same terrorists.
If you really wanna give up your freedom for safety, there are already plenty of countries you can move to for that, e.g., China. Feel free. Just don't expect to have the freedom to move back here when you discover that the promised "safety" that comes with losing your freedom isn't exactly what you had in mind.
How do YOU stop someone sitting next to you whose beliefs are not only inimical to yours, but he WANTS to kill you? Do you 'tolerate' him until he (hopefully) goes away? What about when he starts grabbing the local kids off the playground and starts explaining to them how wonderful his creed of hate is, blaming you for everything wrong that's ever happened to him, and telling them that if they kill you they will be rewarded, even if they die doing it?
The answer is: you 'tolerate' him until he does something that violates your rights. Until then, you do nothing. Toleration of things that you don't like but which don't violate your rights goes with the territory of freedom. Deal with it. As for dealing with an attack, that's what a defensive military is for. 9/11 wouldn't have happened if our defensive military had been behaving the way it was supposed to (the fact that it conveniently wasn't on that particular day is very suspicious in and of itself).
10 years ago the terrorist were not in possession of nuclear weapons...thanks to our Liberal ways in the US, we have alowed these same terrorists to arm and train themselves for a long fight with us "infadels."
And guess what? Today the terrorists are... wait for it... still not in possession of nuclear weapons!
Take your fearmongering ball and go home. I've heard enough of this shit in the past 6 years, and I dare say that goes for most of us here. It's starting to ring hollow (actually, it's been ringing hollow for quite some time now).
Hopefully soon we'll see some changes to the patent system for a better concept of intellectual property.
From the same Supreme Court that in Eldred vs. Ashcroft ruled, in essence, that a copyright term remains "limited" and thus is in keeping with the Constitution as long as it has a stated limit, even if the limit increases over time at the same rate that time passes? You must be on some other planet if you think that same Supreme Court will make any improvements (from the point of view of actual practitioners in the various fields, as opposed to the patent attorneys) to "intellectual property" (gad, how I hate that phrase) law.
I think it's at least as likely that they'll decide that "obvious" really means "obvious to even the greatest of morons in the field", and thus that pretty much anything you care to name is patentable.
Of course, that assumes that they'll issue any sort of meaningful ruling whatsoever. It's entirely possible that they'll simply say that it's up to Congress to define in greater detail what it means, and until then leave things as they are. Just like they did in Eldred.
"'I don't see no problem,' said [a club-goer], 22. 'That happens every day on the Internet. Any hacker can get the information anyway.' [A Web media executive] said such reactions aren't surprising from a generation accustomed to sharing personal information on Web sites such as Facebook.com and Myspace.com. 'The kids don't care,' [he] said, 'because only old people like you and me suffer from the illusion of privacy these days.'"
Yeah. Well, they won't care until that information is used against them, either via identity theft or something worse.
Of course, most people won't experience that, but the easier it is to "steal" or otherwise misuse someone's identity, the more often it'll happen, and that means more people will be affected by it. Not that most people will ever figure out the connection. Thanks to the sorry state of education in the U.S., precious few know how to think anymore.
And not that it matters anyway, even if they did figure it out. This is the United States, where corporations and those who run them rule all. The troubles of the lowly consumer underclass matter not at all here.
As an example of how hilariously wrong you are, are you presented with terms and asked to agree to them before renting a movie? Does a DVD tell you before you buy it that you're not allowed to do x,y, and z with it? How about warranty terms--are they disclosed to you before you buy a product?
None of those cases is relevant in the least. In the first (renting a movie), the terms and conditions are a combination of copyright law (which is always in force) and the terms and conditions of your rental agreement with the rental company, which you signed when getting an account with them. In the second (purchase of the DVD), the "terms and conditions" are encoded directly in copyright law and are in force at all times. In the third case (the warranty), the terms are an offer of additional rights that, sans the laws on the books that govern minimal warranty and such (and if the law is more generous than the supplied warranty then the law trumps the supplied warranty), wouldn't be there at all, and are not in force until the purchaser attempts to make use of those additional rights.
A EULA adds restrictions. It does not, in any of the cases that matter here, grant additional rights that one doesn't already have under copyright law. Finally, it attempts to impose those restrictions at the point in time that the purchaser attempts to make use of the rights granted him by copyright law, in a unilateral way, without giving any additional consideration to the purchaser.
So the bottom line is that a EULA is relatively unique in that it is, in essence, a one-way contract, a set of terms imposed unilaterally on the purchaser in a situation in which the purchaser has almost always already irrevocably committed his resources. That's about as close to "duress" as it gets.
Whether or not the courts see it that way is an entirely different matter, of course, but that's irrelevant to my original point.
And your attempt to equate the terms and conditions of a EULA to law with respect to "ignorance is not a defense" is laughable, since a traditional bedrock of contract law is awareness of the terms of the contract by all sides (were this not the case then terms and conditions written up in 1-point font would be enforceable in court, which is something that is decidedly not the case).
it recommends that the UK move from a model where knowledge is 'an asset first and a public resource second' to one where knowledge is primarily a public resource and secondarily an asset.
There are far too many well-financed players that want things to at least stay the same, if not move towards a model where knowledge is treated even more like an asset than it already is, for a move in the opposite direction to ever get off the ground pretty much anywhere in the world. The entities in question are multinational, extremely rich and powerful, and have no interest in the common good.
Those who make and enforce laws pay much more attention to those people than they do to the needs of society as a whole. It's why there's been such a big shift in the direction of fascism in recent years. Fascism == corporate-friendly government.
So I'd bet that this is a total non-starter and will be summarily ignored by anyone with any real ability to change things.
The objective of a guerrilla war is not to directly engage the enemy and it does not require "major military victories" to be successful. The objective is to simply disrupt the enemy by targeting thier supplies, infrastructure etc. and strategize your attacks for maximum propaganda value and wait it out until they run out of resources or lose politacal will. If you check your history you will see it has been very successful; for instance, the U.S. invasion of Vietnam and the USSR invasion of Afghanistan.
So, what, you think the U.S. government is just going to eventually give up power and hand it over to the revolutionaries just because they're being a significant nuisance? The scenario in question here is that the U.S. has gone totalitarian and an armed resistance has formed. You think the government in that case is going to voluntarily give up power? Please.
None of the wars you refer to are relevant at all in this regard. Guerilla warfare is an effective means of defense against an invading aggressor. Do not make the mistake of assuming that what is effective for defense must also be effective for offense. The goal of the guerillas in all those wars was to make the occupation not worth maintaining. The goal of the revolutionaries would be to overthrow the sitting government. The latter is much much harder than the former, by orders of magnitude, because the latter requires military victory whereas the former only requires a stalemate.
To believe otherwise is to believe that the sitting government will simply surrender of its own free will in the face of an underground revolutionary movement. That has never happened.
People always say this but I don't think they always think it through. If advanced military hardware has such overwhelming power, then how do you explain the Afghanistan-USSR conflict or the Iraq-US conflict.
Neither of those conflicts is relevant or revealing. In both cases, the superior military force took control of the region. In both cases, the resistance was/is unable to achieve military victory over the occupying force. In both cases, the occupying force was/is that of a foreign power. In the case of Afghanistan, the occupying force left of its own will.
In the case of an armed revolution, the revolutionaries would have to achieve military victory over the sitting government's forces. You make some excellent points with respect to that, but you assume that a large fraction of the military will side with the revolutionaries.
But the reasons you give for that are the same reasons that would lead one to believe that no military dictator should be able to achieve power: that the military, which is comprised of men (and, in some cases, women) who grew up with the very people they are being asked to oppress, would be unwilling to fire on civilians in their own country.
History, including U.S. history (see Kent State for example), is littered with the corpses of those who would attest to the falsehood of that belief. There is no reason at all to believe that the U.S. military is any different than any other government organization in this regard. Military personnel initially take a vague oath to "uphold and defend the constitution" but that cannot match the everyday indoctrination they receive to follow orders. History is littered with even more corpses of those who can attest that many/most military personnel will follow orders even if they disagree with them.
Additionally, most military personnel in any given location in the U.S. are not from that location, and thus do not have any strong ties to that location. The only difference between that and an overseas assignment is that the locals happen to speak the same language and are probably a bit more similar in terms of beliefs and customs. When the order comes to implement martial law, there will be little reason on the part of the local military personnel to disobey orders.
Finally, whatever makes you think that the top military brass will be told the truth about why they are being asked to implement martial law in a region, or that they will share that information with their subordinates in the unlikely event that they are told the truth?
Military personnel are unlikely to start shooting civilians unless they put up some sort of resistance. If the civilians don't put up any resistance then martial law succeeds. If the civilians do put up significant resistance then the military personnel on the scene are much more likely to start shooting if only because such a situation by its nature must represent a significant threat to their lives. If a bunch of military people are faced with civilians pointing guns at them, do you really think the military personnel will surrender just because the civilians in question happen to be from their own country? Please.
The bottom line is that unless the revolutionaries get real military backing from whatever source (and it's unlikely that said backing will come from their own government's military), they will fail in their bid to overthrow the government. They can't merely be a sufficient nuisance as they can in Iran or Afghanistan -- they have to achieve military victory, because the government in question will be fighting for its survival. The sort of person who would declare martial law against his own population in order to secure his own power is the sort of person who simply doesn't care what it takes to remain in power, and will thus do whatever it takes, even if it means killing off a large fraction of his country's population.
It's nice to believe that, somehow, if the U.S. government gets completely out of control and goes totalitarian, large portions of the U.S. military will take up arms against that government. But the majority of history is against you on that one.
Really? They seem to be working OK for the Iraqis.
No, they're not. Want proof? We're still there. Only when we've been kicked out forcibly as a result of taking far too much in the way of military losses (like, for instance, losing more than 50% of our fighting force) can you say that armed resistance has worked for the Iraqis in the same way that it would have to for domestic revolutionaries.
The Iraqis have been a nuisance, yes. But a successful revolution through arms requires a lot more than that. It requires major military victory. Victory by revolutionaries armed with nothing bigger than a few 50mm cannons against an opponent as well-armed as the U.S. government is nigh unto impossible.
Against a sitting government that will do literally anything it has to in order to remain in power, being a mere nuisance is worth as much as doing nothing at all.
No, for an armed revolution to succeed in the U.S., it has to have the backing of major portions of the U.S. military. All the shotguns, M-16s, etc. in the world will do you no good at all against a bomber cruising along at 45,000 feet, or against a cruise missile heading your way at 600 mph, or (in the worst case) against a nuclear-tipped Titan missile heading your direction.
In the fight for freedom, we have lost. There is nothing left to do and nowhere left to go.
This is why armed revolution worked in the U.S. back in the day, and why democracy managed to spread throughout the world. Those conditions aren't true anymore. The technological landscape favors totalitarianism more today than it has any other time in human history. Given that, is it any surprise that it's right on our doorstep now, even (especially?) in the "land of the free"?
Two points in particular he has made, privately (which I shall paraphrase here) that I'm still chewing on are:
Don't place blind faith in Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" to guide the marketplace.
Don't confuse power and freedom
The second one is still rather Yoda-ish to me.
The second is actually rather straightforward, once you think about it a bit:
Power (not be be confused with influence) is the ability to control. When one person has power over another, that person has the ability to control the other. Control over another, when exercised, always comes at the expense of freedom, because it forces the other to do something that they otherwise would not, or to not do something that they otherwise would.
Freedom is the ability to, at least in principle, do whatever one wishes, subject only to the laws of nature. One could argue that power is a subset of freedom, of course, but clearly the exercise of power comes at the expense of someone else's freedom, and so it's reasonable to believe that the total amount of freedom available to all is diminished when power is exercised.
Not all forms of freedom require power, but all forms of power require some type of freedom (on the part of the person wielding the power in question) and also come at the expense of freedom (on the part of the person being controlled).
Just because you can't use any of your mods on their hardware no way limits your freedom to use the GPL'd software.
Wait. Their hardware? No. It's my hardware. I bought it, so I own it. Not them.
Their implementation of the hardware that requires that the binaries be signed by them violates my rights as the owner of the property, because it usurps the control that I as the owner have the right to and gives it to them. I own the hardware. It is my right to say what software the hardware can and cannot run, not theirs.
I can't believe you idiot "capitalists" can't see the obvious right in front of your face: the mechanisms that Tivo, Microsoft, and others have put into place have gutted and made a complete mockery of the property rights you claim to so dearly cherish. They have managed to turn your property into their property, and to therefore relegate you to the status of a second-class citizen, one who is not allowed to control his own "property".
Either wise up and start demanding your rights as property owners, or admit that your feigned belief in property rights is nothing more than a sham.
I see your "the customer is always right" cliche and raise you one "use the right tool for the right job".
Can you cut and paste from Inkscape into the GIMP?
No?
Then STFU about "the right tool", because the right tool or set of tools that gives you the combination of features you need doesn't exist in the Linux world. And until that changes, people are right to ask for easy-to-use drawing functionality in the GIMP.
And even if it were possible to cut and paste between Inkscape and GIMP, there's another reason they're right to want easy-to-use drawing functionality in the GIMP: because it's not uncommon that you'll need to perform some drawing on a photo or other complex image, and using another program for that isn't possible because the nature of the drawing operation requires that the drawing dimensions be taken from the photo itself. That's trivial to do if the drawing functions are in your image manipulation program, and difficult to do if they're not.
In a sane world, it would be astounding that anyone would hire these "analyst" groups. But this is far from a sane world.
"Analysts" as a group are some of the most useless people around. They're not technically adept enough to properly examine the technical market and they're not market-savvy enough to make accurate predictions about it.
In short, everything I've seen suggests that they don't know anything and they don't do anything of any real importance. Based on the quality of their "keen insights", these must be the guys that actually flunked out of college (not to be confused with simply dropping out). They seem to have all the intelligence of my cat's toy mouse. They're apparently too dumb to be able to get a real job, even in marketing (that's saying something!), much less in a technical field like computers.
So why, exactly, does anyone even listen to them? I can only conclude that it's because, as I said, this is far from a sane world.
Once the data leaves the hands of the EU, it is beyond the control of the EU. DHS can (and will, I'm sure) give it to anyone they want to. I have little reason to believe that won't include corporations that are willing to pay off the right people.
So, really, how is this any better than what the U.S. was demanding to begin with, other than the fact that the EU gets to decide ahead of time whose data gets sent to the U.S.? For ordinary people, it seems to me that this is no different. Only people with "special" standing within the EU (i.e., those who have special connections to the people who decide what data goes out) will be protected.
The actions of all governments with respect to the rights, liberties, and protections of the people have become so predictable that it's depressing.:-(
By the time this gets to court, either or both houses of Congress will be controlled by Democrats. Which means that Congress can and will investigate this.
A lot of people here are predicting this.
I predict the opposite. I predict the Republicans will retain control over both houses of Congress.
I predict this because despite the fact that awareness of the problems of electronic voting is higher now than ever before (keep in mind that awareness and caring are not the same thing), about 40% (cite) of the country will be using unauditable electronic voting machines for the November election. That's easily enough to make it possible to undetectably change the outcome of any race that's reasonably close and where such machines are in use. And the Republicans are in a much better position to pressure the machine manufacturers into subtlely changing (via software) the results in regions that matter the most, if only because they control the two electable branches of government.
The outcome may be "surprising" in some cases, but people will accept it just the same as they always have.
This one is already fixed in Debian's openssl version 0.9.8b-3 in -testing (-unstable now has 0.9.8c-1), and 0.9.7e-3sarge2 in -stable-security.
This is one of the reasons I run Debian. Important things like this get fixed quickly and updating is painless, thanks to apt-get.
I expect that Ubuntu is similarly responsive. I know that it's just as easy to keep updated, since they use the same packaging and dependency-tracking mechanisms.
The only reason it's an issue at all is that advertisers insist on measuring the wrong thing: the number of clicks on an ad. I suppose that's an improvement over measuring "impressions", but it's not much of one.
At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is whether or not an ad generates additional purchases of the service or product in question over and beyond what it would be without the ad.
So clickthroughs isn't what they should be measuring. Instead, they should be measuring actual purchases that occur as a result of the ad. It's kinda hard to fake a purchase.
But they're lazy. They'd rather measure the wrong thing easily than measure the right thing with difficulty.
Until they get their heads out of their asses, they'll continue to have these problems.
Murphy states the bad actuator is the last one you test
Well, yeah - because once you've found the bad one you don't test any more, right?
Only if it's almost as much trouble to test them as it is to pull/replace them to begin with.
Otherwise, if you've had to pull them all, you may as well test them all. Might wind up detecting a marginal one, for instance, or you might end up catching a multiple-actuator failure (as unlikely as that might be).
Two hundred years ago, liberal democracy was an oddity, now it has spread over the globe .
Yes. The reason it spread when it did is because two things coincided at the same time:
People in relatively influential positions (e.g., the founders of the U.S.) who had been deeply influenced by the intellectuals of the Enlightenment wanted to try something they thought would be better overall than totalitarianism.
The firepower of the average civilian was about the same as the firepower of the average soldier. That meant that popular revolution was possible without requiring the participation of an extremely large fraction of the population or of the military itself.
Both of those conditions are necessary for an internal revolution towards democracy to succeed as it did in France and the United States.
The first condition had not been true until a couple of hundred years ago. It may or may not still be true.
The second condition is certainly no longer true. The firepower of the average civilian is many orders of magnitude lower than the firepower of the average soldier. I'm not talking about raw firepower on an individual basis, but rather the average firepower after considering things like air support, ground support, advanced weaponry, etc. The average civilian, even a large group of them, cannot shoot down a heavy bomber cruising at 40,000 feet.
The end result is that what was possible 200-odd years ago is no longer possible.
The other thing that you might feel better knowing about is that despite this steady progress, the dominant pattern is a cycle. Things swing back and forth. In the 70's we stopped the bloody Vietnam war and we forced Nixon to resign in disgrace. Things had swung in the direction of freedom. Since then things have been swinging back in the opposite direction towards fascism (Godwin's rule be damned). You have incorrectly interpreted this current swing as a steady linear trend.
No, I have not. I've not been interpreting just the current trend, I've been interpreting the trend across the cycles. That is, I've been considering the very long term picture, not just the current cycle. The current cycle has taken us much closer to totalitarianism than the last cycle, and this cycle isn't even close to its upwards swing yet.
Additionally, I'm not interpeting the cycles blindly. I'm examining why and how they have happened. The current cycle will go much deeper towards fascism than previous cycles because of the technological landscape. Current technology gives much more power and control to those who already have it than to those who do not. That technology includes surveillance technology, weaponry, communications, etc. There is nothing in this current cycle that balances that out.
That is why I say that I see nothing that looks like it can stop the current trend. Because there really isn't. The people who want fascism and who would benefit from it have a much, much stronger advantage now than they have ever had in the history of mankind. They control all the money, all the resources, and all the guns, and that control gives them more of an advantage now than it ever could before. There is literally nothing of consequence standing in their way.
And so I have no reason at all to believe that this cycle will bottom out anywhere but at totalitarianism. Once that happens, there is no way back up, because it ain't the 1700s anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
It all depends on the timing. The control freaks are doing this step by step:
That last step will effectively lock out all but "special" versions of Linux. The big content providers and Microsoft together represent a large enough influence over the government that the last step will most likely be mandated by law. Instead of being mandated directly, it may wind up being mandated by requiring ISPs to enforce DRM requirements on subscribers who wish to connect to the internet.
This may sound like paranoid ranting, but then so did the warnings we got 20 years ago or so that software patents would greatly hinder software development. People back then didn't believe it would ever happen, either. And while not all paranoid rantings come true (of course), the ones that do tend to be the ones where those in power stand to gain the most. As is the case here.
Besides, everyone knows that once we build a Moon Base Alpha on the moon, the nuclear waste dump will blow up and send the moon hurtling out of the solar system, so why bother wasting the money? The surfers sure wouldn't be happy with the tides disappearing, either...
It's worse than that, I think.
It looks to me (and others) like the Republicans attempted to steal the entire 2006 congressional election (more precisely, enough to maintain a Republican majority in both the House and Senate) and failed only because voter opinion became even more favorable to the Democrats at the last minute. See http://electiondefensealliance.org/landslide_denie d_exit_polls_vs_vote_count_2006 for details.
And lest you think the pre-cooked exit polls were "inaccurate" this time around, the details of how they did the exit polling are important. In particular, they also asked how the voter voted in the 2004 presidential election, which allows them to independently determine whether "adjusting" the exit polls to correspond with the official count is realistic.
Then again, nothing.
Get this through your thick skull: freedom has a price. The price is risk. Freedom is dangerous.
If you wanna live in a completely sanitized world in which all the dangers are "taken care of" for you then you must give up all your freedom. But after having done so, don't be surprised if you suddenly find that not only are the dangers are still there, but there are even more of them, with the greatest of them coming from the very entity you trusted to "protect" you. And you'll be a slave, since that's what it means to not have any freedom. Oh, and did I mention that you'll also be a pussy-assed wimp for giving up your freedom in order to live free of danger?
I, for one, would rather live with danger and retain my freedom. I'd much rather live with the super-low probability (less than that of being struck by lightning!) of being killed by a terrorist than give up an ounce of my freedom to "fight" those same terrorists.
If you really wanna give up your freedom for safety, there are already plenty of countries you can move to for that, e.g., China. Feel free. Just don't expect to have the freedom to move back here when you discover that the promised "safety" that comes with losing your freedom isn't exactly what you had in mind.
The answer is: you 'tolerate' him until he does something that violates your rights. Until then, you do nothing. Toleration of things that you don't like but which don't violate your rights goes with the territory of freedom. Deal with it. As for dealing with an attack, that's what a defensive military is for. 9/11 wouldn't have happened if our defensive military had been behaving the way it was supposed to (the fact that it conveniently wasn't on that particular day is very suspicious in and of itself).
And guess what? Today the terrorists are ... wait for it ... still not in possession of nuclear weapons!
Take your fearmongering ball and go home. I've heard enough of this shit in the past 6 years, and I dare say that goes for most of us here. It's starting to ring hollow (actually, it's been ringing hollow for quite some time now).
From the same Supreme Court that in Eldred vs. Ashcroft ruled, in essence, that a copyright term remains "limited" and thus is in keeping with the Constitution as long as it has a stated limit, even if the limit increases over time at the same rate that time passes? You must be on some other planet if you think that same Supreme Court will make any improvements (from the point of view of actual practitioners in the various fields, as opposed to the patent attorneys) to "intellectual property" (gad, how I hate that phrase) law.
I think it's at least as likely that they'll decide that "obvious" really means "obvious to even the greatest of morons in the field", and thus that pretty much anything you care to name is patentable.
Of course, that assumes that they'll issue any sort of meaningful ruling whatsoever. It's entirely possible that they'll simply say that it's up to Congress to define in greater detail what it means, and until then leave things as they are. Just like they did in Eldred.
Yeah. Well, they won't care until that information is used against them, either via identity theft or something worse.
Of course, most people won't experience that, but the easier it is to "steal" or otherwise misuse someone's identity, the more often it'll happen, and that means more people will be affected by it. Not that most people will ever figure out the connection. Thanks to the sorry state of education in the U.S., precious few know how to think anymore.
And not that it matters anyway, even if they did figure it out. This is the United States, where corporations and those who run them rule all. The troubles of the lowly consumer underclass matter not at all here.
None of those cases is relevant in the least. In the first (renting a movie), the terms and conditions are a combination of copyright law (which is always in force) and the terms and conditions of your rental agreement with the rental company, which you signed when getting an account with them. In the second (purchase of the DVD), the "terms and conditions" are encoded directly in copyright law and are in force at all times. In the third case (the warranty), the terms are an offer of additional rights that, sans the laws on the books that govern minimal warranty and such (and if the law is more generous than the supplied warranty then the law trumps the supplied warranty), wouldn't be there at all, and are not in force until the purchaser attempts to make use of those additional rights.
A EULA adds restrictions. It does not, in any of the cases that matter here, grant additional rights that one doesn't already have under copyright law. Finally, it attempts to impose those restrictions at the point in time that the purchaser attempts to make use of the rights granted him by copyright law, in a unilateral way, without giving any additional consideration to the purchaser.
So the bottom line is that a EULA is relatively unique in that it is, in essence, a one-way contract, a set of terms imposed unilaterally on the purchaser in a situation in which the purchaser has almost always already irrevocably committed his resources. That's about as close to "duress" as it gets.
Whether or not the courts see it that way is an entirely different matter, of course, but that's irrelevant to my original point.
And your attempt to equate the terms and conditions of a EULA to law with respect to "ignorance is not a defense" is laughable, since a traditional bedrock of contract law is awareness of the terms of the contract by all sides (were this not the case then terms and conditions written up in 1-point font would be enforceable in court, which is something that is decidedly not the case).
There are far too many well-financed players that want things to at least stay the same, if not move towards a model where knowledge is treated even more like an asset than it already is, for a move in the opposite direction to ever get off the ground pretty much anywhere in the world. The entities in question are multinational, extremely rich and powerful, and have no interest in the common good.
Those who make and enforce laws pay much more attention to those people than they do to the needs of society as a whole. It's why there's been such a big shift in the direction of fascism in recent years. Fascism == corporate-friendly government.
So I'd bet that this is a total non-starter and will be summarily ignored by anyone with any real ability to change things.
Umm....because the users already paid for it and almost certainly can't get their money back?
I'd call having real money on the line "duress", since in this case the software manufacturer is essentially holding that money hostage.
The emperor is not as forgiving as I am...
So, what, you think the U.S. government is just going to eventually give up power and hand it over to the revolutionaries just because they're being a significant nuisance? The scenario in question here is that the U.S. has gone totalitarian and an armed resistance has formed. You think the government in that case is going to voluntarily give up power? Please.
None of the wars you refer to are relevant at all in this regard. Guerilla warfare is an effective means of defense against an invading aggressor. Do not make the mistake of assuming that what is effective for defense must also be effective for offense. The goal of the guerillas in all those wars was to make the occupation not worth maintaining. The goal of the revolutionaries would be to overthrow the sitting government. The latter is much much harder than the former, by orders of magnitude, because the latter requires military victory whereas the former only requires a stalemate.
To believe otherwise is to believe that the sitting government will simply surrender of its own free will in the face of an underground revolutionary movement. That has never happened.
Neither of those conflicts is relevant or revealing. In both cases, the superior military force took control of the region. In both cases, the resistance was/is unable to achieve military victory over the occupying force. In both cases, the occupying force was/is that of a foreign power. In the case of Afghanistan, the occupying force left of its own will.
In the case of an armed revolution, the revolutionaries would have to achieve military victory over the sitting government's forces. You make some excellent points with respect to that, but you assume that a large fraction of the military will side with the revolutionaries.
But the reasons you give for that are the same reasons that would lead one to believe that no military dictator should be able to achieve power: that the military, which is comprised of men (and, in some cases, women) who grew up with the very people they are being asked to oppress, would be unwilling to fire on civilians in their own country.
History, including U.S. history (see Kent State for example), is littered with the corpses of those who would attest to the falsehood of that belief. There is no reason at all to believe that the U.S. military is any different than any other government organization in this regard. Military personnel initially take a vague oath to "uphold and defend the constitution" but that cannot match the everyday indoctrination they receive to follow orders. History is littered with even more corpses of those who can attest that many/most military personnel will follow orders even if they disagree with them.
Additionally, most military personnel in any given location in the U.S. are not from that location, and thus do not have any strong ties to that location. The only difference between that and an overseas assignment is that the locals happen to speak the same language and are probably a bit more similar in terms of beliefs and customs. When the order comes to implement martial law, there will be little reason on the part of the local military personnel to disobey orders.
Finally, whatever makes you think that the top military brass will be told the truth about why they are being asked to implement martial law in a region, or that they will share that information with their subordinates in the unlikely event that they are told the truth?
Military personnel are unlikely to start shooting civilians unless they put up some sort of resistance. If the civilians don't put up any resistance then martial law succeeds. If the civilians do put up significant resistance then the military personnel on the scene are much more likely to start shooting if only because such a situation by its nature must represent a significant threat to their lives. If a bunch of military people are faced with civilians pointing guns at them, do you really think the military personnel will surrender just because the civilians in question happen to be from their own country? Please.
The bottom line is that unless the revolutionaries get real military backing from whatever source (and it's unlikely that said backing will come from their own government's military), they will fail in their bid to overthrow the government. They can't merely be a sufficient nuisance as they can in Iran or Afghanistan -- they have to achieve military victory, because the government in question will be fighting for its survival. The sort of person who would declare martial law against his own population in order to secure his own power is the sort of person who simply doesn't care what it takes to remain in power, and will thus do whatever it takes, even if it means killing off a large fraction of his country's population.
It's nice to believe that, somehow, if the U.S. government gets completely out of control and goes totalitarian, large portions of the U.S. military will take up arms against that government. But the majority of history is against you on that one.
No, they're not. Want proof? We're still there. Only when we've been kicked out forcibly as a result of taking far too much in the way of military losses (like, for instance, losing more than 50% of our fighting force) can you say that armed resistance has worked for the Iraqis in the same way that it would have to for domestic revolutionaries.
The Iraqis have been a nuisance, yes. But a successful revolution through arms requires a lot more than that. It requires major military victory. Victory by revolutionaries armed with nothing bigger than a few 50mm cannons against an opponent as well-armed as the U.S. government is nigh unto impossible.
Against a sitting government that will do literally anything it has to in order to remain in power, being a mere nuisance is worth as much as doing nothing at all.
No, for an armed revolution to succeed in the U.S., it has to have the backing of major portions of the U.S. military. All the shotguns, M-16s, etc. in the world will do you no good at all against a bomber cruising along at 45,000 feet, or against a cruise missile heading your way at 600 mph, or (in the worst case) against a nuclear-tipped Titan missile heading your direction.
In the fight for freedom, we have lost. There is nothing left to do and nowhere left to go.
This is why armed revolution worked in the U.S. back in the day, and why democracy managed to spread throughout the world. Those conditions aren't true anymore. The technological landscape favors totalitarianism more today than it has any other time in human history. Given that, is it any surprise that it's right on our doorstep now, even (especially?) in the "land of the free"?
The second is actually rather straightforward, once you think about it a bit:
Power (not be be confused with influence) is the ability to control. When one person has power over another, that person has the ability to control the other. Control over another, when exercised, always comes at the expense of freedom, because it forces the other to do something that they otherwise would not, or to not do something that they otherwise would.
Freedom is the ability to, at least in principle, do whatever one wishes, subject only to the laws of nature. One could argue that power is a subset of freedom, of course, but clearly the exercise of power comes at the expense of someone else's freedom, and so it's reasonable to believe that the total amount of freedom available to all is diminished when power is exercised.
Not all forms of freedom require power, but all forms of power require some type of freedom (on the part of the person wielding the power in question) and also come at the expense of freedom (on the part of the person being controlled).
Wait. Their hardware? No. It's my hardware. I bought it, so I own it. Not them.
Their implementation of the hardware that requires that the binaries be signed by them violates my rights as the owner of the property, because it usurps the control that I as the owner have the right to and gives it to them. I own the hardware. It is my right to say what software the hardware can and cannot run, not theirs.
I can't believe you idiot "capitalists" can't see the obvious right in front of your face: the mechanisms that Tivo, Microsoft, and others have put into place have gutted and made a complete mockery of the property rights you claim to so dearly cherish. They have managed to turn your property into their property, and to therefore relegate you to the status of a second-class citizen, one who is not allowed to control his own "property".
Either wise up and start demanding your rights as property owners, or admit that your feigned belief in property rights is nothing more than a sham.
Can you cut and paste from Inkscape into the GIMP?
No?
Then STFU about "the right tool", because the right tool or set of tools that gives you the combination of features you need doesn't exist in the Linux world. And until that changes, people are right to ask for easy-to-use drawing functionality in the GIMP.
And even if it were possible to cut and paste between Inkscape and GIMP, there's another reason they're right to want easy-to-use drawing functionality in the GIMP: because it's not uncommon that you'll need to perform some drawing on a photo or other complex image, and using another program for that isn't possible because the nature of the drawing operation requires that the drawing dimensions be taken from the photo itself. That's trivial to do if the drawing functions are in your image manipulation program, and difficult to do if they're not.
In a sane world, it would be astounding that anyone would hire these "analyst" groups. But this is far from a sane world.
"Analysts" as a group are some of the most useless people around. They're not technically adept enough to properly examine the technical market and they're not market-savvy enough to make accurate predictions about it.
In short, everything I've seen suggests that they don't know anything and they don't do anything of any real importance. Based on the quality of their "keen insights", these must be the guys that actually flunked out of college (not to be confused with simply dropping out). They seem to have all the intelligence of my cat's toy mouse. They're apparently too dumb to be able to get a real job, even in marketing (that's saying something!), much less in a technical field like computers.
So why, exactly, does anyone even listen to them? I can only conclude that it's because, as I said, this is far from a sane world.
Once the data leaves the hands of the EU, it is beyond the control of the EU. DHS can (and will, I'm sure) give it to anyone they want to. I have little reason to believe that won't include corporations that are willing to pay off the right people.
So, really, how is this any better than what the U.S. was demanding to begin with, other than the fact that the EU gets to decide ahead of time whose data gets sent to the U.S.? For ordinary people, it seems to me that this is no different. Only people with "special" standing within the EU (i.e., those who have special connections to the people who decide what data goes out) will be protected.
The actions of all governments with respect to the rights, liberties, and protections of the people have become so predictable that it's depressing. :-(
A lot of people here are predicting this.
I predict the opposite. I predict the Republicans will retain control over both houses of Congress.
I predict this because despite the fact that awareness of the problems of electronic voting is higher now than ever before (keep in mind that awareness and caring are not the same thing), about 40% (cite) of the country will be using unauditable electronic voting machines for the November election. That's easily enough to make it possible to undetectably change the outcome of any race that's reasonably close and where such machines are in use. And the Republicans are in a much better position to pressure the machine manufacturers into subtlely changing (via software) the results in regions that matter the most, if only because they control the two electable branches of government.
The outcome may be "surprising" in some cases, but people will accept it just the same as they always have.
This one is already fixed in Debian's openssl version 0.9.8b-3 in -testing (-unstable now has 0.9.8c-1), and 0.9.7e-3sarge2 in -stable-security.
This is one of the reasons I run Debian. Important things like this get fixed quickly and updating is painless, thanks to apt-get.
I expect that Ubuntu is similarly responsive. I know that it's just as easy to keep updated, since they use the same packaging and dependency-tracking mechanisms.
Not driving when my destination is 30 miles away and I have to be there within an hour definitely causes me anxiety.
I guess I must be addicted!
Of course, it doesn't help my addiction that my car is fast and handles like it's on rails. :-)
Think I'll go for a drive...
The only reason it's an issue at all is that advertisers insist on measuring the wrong thing: the number of clicks on an ad. I suppose that's an improvement over measuring "impressions", but it's not much of one.
At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is whether or not an ad generates additional purchases of the service or product in question over and beyond what it would be without the ad.
So clickthroughs isn't what they should be measuring. Instead, they should be measuring actual purchases that occur as a result of the ad. It's kinda hard to fake a purchase.
But they're lazy. They'd rather measure the wrong thing easily than measure the right thing with difficulty.
Until they get their heads out of their asses, they'll continue to have these problems.
Only if it's almost as much trouble to test them as it is to pull/replace them to begin with.
Otherwise, if you've had to pull them all, you may as well test them all. Might wind up detecting a marginal one, for instance, or you might end up catching a multiple-actuator failure (as unlikely as that might be).
Yes. The reason it spread when it did is because two things coincided at the same time:
Both of those conditions are necessary for an internal revolution towards democracy to succeed as it did in France and the United States.
The first condition had not been true until a couple of hundred years ago. It may or may not still be true.
The second condition is certainly no longer true. The firepower of the average civilian is many orders of magnitude lower than the firepower of the average soldier. I'm not talking about raw firepower on an individual basis, but rather the average firepower after considering things like air support, ground support, advanced weaponry, etc. The average civilian, even a large group of them, cannot shoot down a heavy bomber cruising at 40,000 feet.
The end result is that what was possible 200-odd years ago is no longer possible.
No, I have not. I've not been interpreting just the current trend, I've been interpreting the trend across the cycles. That is, I've been considering the very long term picture, not just the current cycle. The current cycle has taken us much closer to totalitarianism than the last cycle, and this cycle isn't even close to its upwards swing yet.
Additionally, I'm not interpeting the cycles blindly. I'm examining why and how they have happened. The current cycle will go much deeper towards fascism than previous cycles because of the technological landscape. Current technology gives much more power and control to those who already have it than to those who do not. That technology includes surveillance technology, weaponry, communications, etc. There is nothing in this current cycle that balances that out.
That is why I say that I see nothing that looks like it can stop the current trend. Because there really isn't. The people who want fascism and who would benefit from it have a much, much stronger advantage now than they have ever had in the history of mankind. They control all the money, all the resources, and all the guns, and that control gives them more of an advantage now than it ever could before. There is literally nothing of consequence standing in their way.
And so I have no reason at all to believe that this cycle will bottom out anywhere but at totalitarianism. Once that happens, there is no way back up, because it ain't the 1700s anymore.