Most people are still considering voting for either McCain or Obama. In other words, most people don't want them to be accountable.
Have you heard of a third party candidate running for President this year whose campaigning skills and positions on the issues are sufficient to get them elected?
I haven't. And that's why I will vote for either McCain or Obama. That doesn't mean I don't want accountability. It means that I recognize that elections are almost always a choice between two flawed options, and that our voting system is biased towards creating a two-party duopoly. The choices we have are:
1) Vote for a third-party candidate who has no chance of getting elected, thus wasting your vote. 2) Vote for the lesser of the two evils, whichever way your political inclinations lean.
The choice we do not have is some third-party candidate who has better positions and sufficient political skills and resources to get elected. If that option ever appears, then I'll vote for them.
If the people wanted accountability, the symptom would be that in the November election, McCain and Obama would both lose to someone else, as would many incumbents in Congress.
While I obviously disagree WRT the presidential election, I agree with your take on Congress. Somehow people always seem to think their Congresscritter is OK even when they think the rest are a bunch of corrupt bastards. Hell, William Jefferson even got re-elected by his constituents after a FBI sting showed him accepting $100,000 in bribe money.
Nobody disputes your right to enter into whatever purchasing agreement you desire, to include DRM or not. (Some may dispute whether you really have much choice, given that the music market is controlled by a small cartel, but let's assume for the sake of argument you both had the choice and chose DRM).
Now suppose you want to want to play that music on your open-source device - say a Linux-based mp3 player. Since open source software guarantees you the freedom to modify the source code, there is nothing to prevent you from modifying the operating system or other open source code on the device to circumvent whatever DRM measure the vendor put in place.
This situation is of great concern to the DRM-using vendor. They wish to enforce your agreement by technical means (rather than legal means), in part because it avoids them having to know whether you're breaking the agreement you made, and in part because it's a lot cheaper for them than suing you for copyright infringement or breach of contract in the event you violate your agreement.
Thus the vendors start playing tricks like building hardware that will only run software that the vendor themselves digitally signed. This includes the GPL operating system and other GPL software on the device. This allows them to enforce their DRM, but also prevents you from exercising your freedoms under the GPL to run your modified software, even when your modifications are unrelated to the DRM you agreed to.
The free software community views this tactic as an attack on the whole point of the GPL. The DRM-using vendors simply don't care about the collateral damage their attempts at technical enforcement of DRM impose. But the free software community cares a lot about those freedoms.
That is why GPLv3 has explicit provisions against this sort of practice - if vendors want to use technology to restrict your freedoms, they can write their own software to do it. If they want to use GPLed software, they need to honor its terms (and hopefully the spirit too). What they can't do is have it both ways.
So to summarize - open source software gives you the freedoms that DRM companies aren't willing to let you keep, and gives them cost savings they aren't willing to give up. So instead they try to circumvent the GPL, creating the current conflict.
George W. Bush is no conservative. Conservatives support limited government - under Bush's watch it's increased vastly. Conservatives support fiscal responsibility - Bush has been a disaster in that way as well. Conservatives support the rule of law - which Bush has been flouting regularly, whether it's signing statements that purport to negate the meaning of a law, warrantless wiretapping, or abominations like Abu Ghraib. Conservatives are... conservative - wary of grand schemes that assume nothing will go wrong (*cough* Iraq *cough*). Bush has done more to divorce the Republican party from conservative ideals, and from competence, than I thought possible.
And as far as Democrats' supposed policy superiority - they certainly have no such superiority on economics. I grew up in New York State - the people are great, and it's a beautiful place to live - but the Democrat politicians there are as liberal, and as dumb on policy, as they come. They've managed to drive jobs out of the state year after year after year. If you want a bright future it's not the place to be. I moved to Virginia after college because that's where I could find a good job. I would have loved to stay near all my family and high school friends. But the jobs just aren't there. Virginia, though, is a Republican state, and the jobs around here keep growing. There's a large population of refugees from the western New York area who live down here now - it's reasonably close to family back in NY but you can actually find a decent job. And that sort of pattern has been happening nationally - red states have been gaining jobs at a far greater pace than the blue states. There's a reason for that, and it's inferior economic policy on the part of the Democrats.
I wouldn't be so sure we're "imposing" democracy upon Iraq.
If you recall during the 90s the Shia in Iraq rose up against Saddam (and were subsequently crushed). That to me does not sound like a people who want to continue that sort of regime.
Now they have the opportunity to govern themselves - and judging by the vote turnouts, they want to do just that. And they are indeed paying the price "in blood", as the Iraqi Army takes a lot more casualties than the Americans do.
That to me says they've got a real chance of making it work. It could still all go south, but they've got a chance. For their sake and ours, let's hope they succeed.
This is the sort of problem that comes about when the government subsidizes any entity of a religious nature. People start arguing over what beliefs are deserving of subsidy, which of course are always their beliefs rather than their neighbor's. And then people start trying to use government funds as a way to coerce or bribe groups into changing their beliefs to suit whatever the government (usually majority) view is.
It's a mess, which is why we have (or at least supposedly have) a separation of church and state.
But I submit that while the Boy Scouts could avoid the controversy by forgoing such subsidies, they are no worse than any of the many "faith-based" groups getting government funds for activities that are viewed as beneficial to the public (nobody argues that scouting is anything but a good thing, it's the membership criteria that have caused problems). IMO the larger fault is with the politicians who think subsidizing religious organizations of any kind (no matter whether you have a high opinion of the particular organization or not) was a good idea.
That said, if I were the leader of any religious organization such as the Scouts, I would be very leery of accepting any government funds. Once you grow dependent on the government money, it becomes difficult to stand on principle when the government threatens to withhold the money. Just look at how state governments have caved in and allowed the federal government to dictate state policy simply by threatening to withhold federal highway or other funds.
Look, I have no problem with gays or atheists being in the Scouts. But I would like to make two points:
1. The Scouts are a private organization, and they have a right to choose who they associate with, whether as members or as troop leaders. If they think atheism or homosexuality is contrary to their belief system, they may be wrong but it's their decision to make. Similarly, you don't have to associate with the Scouts if you don't like their beliefs.
2. Equal rights is not the same thing as equal acceptance. We all have an equal right to free speech, but if you go around saying things I consider morally wrong, I have every right to refuse to associate with you. And you have the same right with respect to me. There's no grand requirement that people must consider all viewpoints equal and refrain from criticizing your beliefs. If the Scouts believe in God, and you don't, well then maybe it's not the right organization for you. They're not discriminating against any right of yours to tell you that.
I understand you're logic, but why give money to someone supporting you already? Unless it's a "Job Well Done" type of payment, which doesn't look so good either. Because you want the politician to get re-elected and continue what you view as good policies. If he gets defeated by an opponent, who has differing views on the policies important to you, you have a problem. So you give as a way to protect your interests, which happen to coincide with the candidate's interests.
Because intelligence is not the same as competence. It's possible to be both very intelligent and very clueless about the way the world works.
An idiot's bad idea is likely to be something simple. This lends itself to easier criticism, and thus is less likely to actually get implemented. And even if it does, the simplicity of it lends hope that it can be more easily fixed when the idiot is no longer in power (not always true, but probably often).
An intelligent but clueless person's bad idea is more likely to be terribly complex and *sound* like a better idea. Thus it's more likely to get passed. And its complexity lends itself to all sorts of unintended consequences, which cause more havoc and be more difficult to repair than the idiot's bad idea would have been.
Now, if both the idiot and the smart politician were *competent*, then clearly the intelligent person would be a better choice.
Their ages don't make it "completely obvious". I have a great-uncle who's somewhere in his upper 80s who's more tech-savvy than some 20-year olds. Maybe that means I should vote for McCain.
The problem with generalizations is they're mostly useless when dealing with individuals rather than groups.
There is a phenomenon called "regulatory capture", in which government agencies devoted to regulating an industry become dominated by vested interests within that industry. Heavy regulation provides a lot of incentives for companies to spend money lobbying and otherwise trying to influence the policy, with the result that they end up dominating their supposed overseers. This has been a real problem in the telecommunications field, which is probably why McCain is leery of further regulations without a clear and present case of abuse. McCain's comments on the matter have generally been to take a wait-and-see approach to see if regulations will be truly necessary, such that the risks associated with the regulation are a worthwhile tradeoff.
There is also the Law of Unintended Consequences. Even if everyone agrees on a definition of Net Neutrality (surprisingly difficult) and agrees that it's a good thing (also difficult), constructing a law that will accomplish that goal without significant collateral damage can be tricky. Look at how just a couple years ago everyone in politics thought it was a grand idea to subsidize ethanol production - it'll help reduce our oil dependence, right? So the law got passed. Now everyone's realizing that it's created incentives for people to use corn for ethanol rather than as feed for livestock, and to plant corn instead of other crops, the result of which has been to drive up the cost of food. So now they're thinking of changing the law back.
So yes, there are reasons to think regulation could be a threat to the Internet's diversity.
First of all, nobody was shot or asked to shoot anyone.
Second of all, if senior officials from our intelligence community, the men and women we rely on to protect us from terrorists, come to you and say they need your help to prevent the next 9/11, most reasonable people will at least consider the request. Especially when memories of that time were a little fresher in all our minds.
So I don't think it's quite as black and white as your example would suggest.
That said, I don't think the telecoms should have immunity for anything that was clearly illegal. One, the law is the law. Two, it's a horrible precedent to set. We have a system of checks and balances for a reason. The President needs to go through Congress if he thinks the laws need changing. He can't be allowed to just circumvent our Constitution and the will of the people by getting companies to break the law on his behalf. Yet that's what was done - when this was happening, there was no ongoing debate in Congress about the appropriate oversight of domestic surveillance, because the President didn't bother asking for new legislation at that time. Whatever you want to call it - incompetence, laziness, or simple arrogance - it's not the way our system works or is supposed to work. Providing immunity practically guarantees it'll happen again.
The more interesting question is, what's cause and what's effect? Are politicians taking a position because of contributions, or are people making contributions because that politician already shares their position?
There's no evidence that either candidate for President has changed positions due to campaign contributions. McCain in particular has a long-standing reputation as being difficult to lobby.
It's not all that clear that paper is any more reliable. You get into issues like hanging or dimpled chads, or ballots in which two mutually exclusive choices were checked - maybe the voter was an idiot, but maybe the ballot was modified fraudulently to prevent identification of its voter's true choice.
What people are concerned about with electronic machines is that the machines are black boxes that could be either buggy or malicious. I.e. the counting machines are untrusted. So why not employ the same technique we employ when counting paper ballots using untrusted humans? When counting paper votes, both the Republican and Democratic observer must agree on the ballot's marking. So why not use two or more counting machines from independent vendors?
This could be performed much more rapidly and cheaply than using human counters of paper ballots. One such approach would be to employ a "dumb" input device (e.g. a simple keypad which is ignorant of what a numbered choice represents) whose output is sent to multiple counting devices provided by independent vendors. Having 2 counting machines would allow you to detect the presence of errors. Having 3 such counting machines would allow you to correct errors by majority vote. The odds that 2 different machines running different software from different vendors make the same mistake are pretty low. And the system would allow you to evaluate the accuracy of different vendor's products.
Obviously there are some details to be worked out (how are the ballot choices displayed to the user, etc). But with a little engineering work to specify the required interfaces, you could have a pretty reliable system even without having to completely trust the individual subsystems.
The practical need is that it focuses people on the perpetrators rather than the tactic. You can't have a war against a tactic, which is why the phrase "war on terror" is idiotic. It's like declaring a war on missiles - it misses the whole point, which is that there are people out there trying to kill you by whatever tactic they can use. Whether it's by a missile or a suicide bomber is tactically useful to know for your defense but is strategically minor. Those people are the enemy, not their choice of weapon.
It's important in trying to defeat these folks to understand them. It's also important to understand the communities from which they draw their support, so we can try to drive a wedge between the terrorists and their communities. For these purposes, it's vital to identify the enemy as Islamic extremists rather than simply terrorists.
What's the alternative to COTS? Custom-building every piece of hardware and writing every piece of code from the firmware, to the operating system, and applications in-house?
There's a lot of reason to believe that doing so would result in less secure software. The software would have less people trying to break it, thus less opportunity to find and fix the inevitable bugs. There's something to be said for the trial-by-fire that is a public release of software. And in many cases it probably wouldn't get the same investment of dollars into the software as the commercial world can afford, so you have less money to fix said bugs when they were discovered.
Similarly the software would likely be less functional, given that even the defense budget is not infinite. It just makes sense to leverage COTS, provided you can ensure adequate supply of parts in a major conflict. That is a challenge with the effects of globalization.
Using COTS where it makes sense doesn't mean you should hook everything up the Internet though.
I think we agree - restrictions are not freedoms, they are tools used to protect certain freedoms.
I agree it would be dangerous (and yes, sophistry) to start saying things like "real freedom of expression" in the libel example. What's being protected by libel laws is not freedom of expression, it's a freedom from defamation, at a (IMO fairly limited) cost to our freedom of expression. The way to avoid the sophistry is to be accurate in what freedom is being protected, and at the expense of what others.
The Techdirt article is explicitly premised on the idea that you are in a competitive market. It is in a competitive market that the price gets driven to the marginal cost.
If you don't have a competitive market - say you have locked customers into your walled garden like Apple's trying to do - then sure, there is nothing to require you to price at marginal cost. That is a tried-and-true business model (though bad for consumers), especially when you have long service contracts and the like to prevent customers from going elsewhere easily.
There are still factors that could force Apple to reflect at least some of their near-zero marginal cost in their pricing. If other phone platforms (maybe Android) start to give them stiff competition, that would have an impact. If you can get applications much cheaper elsewhere, that could be sufficient incentive for folks to switch out of Apple's walled garden.
It's also possible that applications from non-Apple sources may not tie their software licenses to the phone platform - so if you switch from an iPhone to a Motorola device, your license key for Killer App 2007 could still work when you download a copy of the (probably Java) program onto the new phone. That would similarly mean Apple would have to work harder to retain people in their ecosystem, which would imply lower prices. Though this scenario assumes that your new device/carrier is open to such application downloads, rather than just being a different walled garden. While par for the course in the PC software industry, that would be quite a switch for the cellular industry.
Libertad is not something you get from signing a contract or getting a license for - it is your fundamental right as a human being to be free of imposed restrictions. One man's freedom is another's imposed restriction. Society deters me from swinging my arms in certain ways such that my fists do not contact someone else's face. That is a loss of my freedom to do as I please with my body. But is simultaneously the freedom of everyone else to be free of assault. Similarly, I cannot be simultaneously free to speak my mind and also free from the possibility others might slander or libel me. The same goes for kidnapping laws and a whole list of restrictions that guarantee our freedoms.
Fundamentally, different freedoms cannot always coexist in their absolute form. But they're still freedoms - it's not sophistry to label them as such. We simply need to realize that it is not possible to have all freedoms at all times; instead we prioritize and make tradeoffs based on the situation. So we have laws protecting most speech but forbidding libel. We have contracts like the GPL that limit certain developer freedoms to protect other developer and user freedoms.
And unlike laws, free software licenses themselves are not imposed upon anyone. You are free to write your own software to do whatever you want it to do. You are also free to agree to use the work of others on their terms - whether it's a "free" license or otherwise. The law does constrain your choices to these two options - but that's property law, not the license. The license is simply the terms on which others agree that you can use their property.
If I had any good recommendations for such tools, I'd give them, but I don't, so I'll try to help in another way. I'll pose some questions that hopefully your friend will be asking herself:
1) Isn't this missing the forest for the trees? If a marriage is so lacking in trust that she thinks her spouse is spying on her, there's a problem. If her spouse actually did install such a thing, there is similarly a problem. This is a much greater problem than the software itself. If she wants to save the marriage, this is the sort of situation where a counselor or similar trusted third party could be very helpful.
2) If the logger or other software is indeed there, what is she worried about him discovering? If she's just (rightfully) angry about the installation of this software, and trying to demonstrate a point by removing it, that's one thing. But if there actually is something she wants to hide, again this is a far bigger problem in the relationship than the software.
Good luck to your friend. This sounds like a tough spot to be in.
The problem there was that Bush's opponents were lousy too. I mean really - did the Democratic Party actually think that its best possible candidates for President were Al Gore and John Kerry?
Having to choose between either of those two and George W. Bush is liking asking which of two men you'd rather have kick you in the nuts. Personally, I'd rather not be kicked at all, but unfortunately that's not the way our system works. Even if you vote for a third party candidate, you know you're still going to be hurting when all is said and done.
1. I don't believe the alternative to poor government (inefficiency) need be worse government (such as dictatorship). Also, dictatorships traditionally have not been terribly efficient at much other than enriching the dictator and his friends.
2. While well-considered policies take time to figure out, I see little evidence that the slowness that bureaucracies promote has had any corresponding positive effect on quality or sanity. On the contrary - these bloated organizations seem both slow and stupid. This is hardly what we should be striving for.
3. An inefficient government wastes huge sums of money, which means it taxes citizens more heavily to do things that are not only wasteful but can actually be worse than doing nothing.
4. There are some things which only the government can do (e.g. national defense and certain other public infrastructure). Inefficiency at these things is dangerous because there is no feasible alternative mechanism to get necessary tasks done.
Thus government inefficiency is absolutely NOT a good thing. It's not even the least of the available evils - we would be better off with less government than inefficient government. Either way the problems don't get solved, but at least in the "less government" case we're not spending money in the process.
Whatever one thinks of the war in Iraq, it has forced us to prioritize scientific and engineering issues we previously had not emphasized. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. For example:
Techniques to defeat highly asymmetric warfare tactics such as the use of IEDs. There's been a lot of money pouring into trying to solve that problem, because solutions will save lives. Google "counter IED" and you get an idea of the communications and jamming technologies involved.
Trauma medicine has been getting a lot of innovation. For example, the Pentagon has a 250 million dollar effort to create the ability to regrow limbs, noses, etc of wounded soldiers. The HemCon bandage, a portable heart-lung machine, and improvements in treatment methodologies are discussed here.
Materials science has been getting the kind of attention it hasn't seen in a long time. One example with obvious civilian application is the push for novel flame-retardant woven and knitted fabrics.
Looking more to the future, the war's need for intelligence from foreign-language sources has driven DARPA to fund automatic translation research. That's a real tough problem, but if they can solve it has enormous civilian applications.
The list goes on an on. I'm not saying it justifies a war, but war certainly does drive scientific and engineering research to solve thorny real-world problems.
I think you are just agreeing with me, but using a disagreeing 'tone'. Based on your latest post, I think I misinterpreted your original post as meaning the opposite of your intent. Peril of the online experience I guess. Thanks for following up.
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Most people are still considering voting for either McCain or Obama. In other words, most people don't want them to be accountable.
Have you heard of a third party candidate running for President this year whose campaigning skills and positions on the issues are sufficient to get them elected?
I haven't. And that's why I will vote for either McCain or Obama. That doesn't mean I don't want accountability. It means that I recognize that elections are almost always a choice between two flawed options, and that our voting system is biased towards creating a two-party duopoly. The choices we have are:
1) Vote for a third-party candidate who has no chance of getting elected, thus wasting your vote.
2) Vote for the lesser of the two evils, whichever way your political inclinations lean.
The choice we do not have is some third-party candidate who has better positions and sufficient political skills and resources to get elected. If that option ever appears, then I'll vote for them.
If the people wanted accountability, the symptom would be that in the November election, McCain and Obama would both lose to someone else, as would many incumbents in Congress.
While I obviously disagree WRT the presidential election, I agree with your take on Congress. Somehow people always seem to think their Congresscritter is OK even when they think the rest are a bunch of corrupt bastards. Hell, William Jefferson even got re-elected by his constituents after a FBI sting showed him accepting $100,000 in bribe money.
IANAL but I don't believe there has to be any economic loss in the US - merely damage to one's reputation.
Nobody disputes your right to enter into whatever purchasing agreement you desire, to include DRM or not. (Some may dispute whether you really have much choice, given that the music market is controlled by a small cartel, but let's assume for the sake of argument you both had the choice and chose DRM).
Now suppose you want to want to play that music on your open-source device - say a Linux-based mp3 player. Since open source software guarantees you the freedom to modify the source code, there is nothing to prevent you from modifying the operating system or other open source code on the device to circumvent whatever DRM measure the vendor put in place.
This situation is of great concern to the DRM-using vendor. They wish to enforce your agreement by technical means (rather than legal means), in part because it avoids them having to know whether you're breaking the agreement you made, and in part because it's a lot cheaper for them than suing you for copyright infringement or breach of contract in the event you violate your agreement.
Thus the vendors start playing tricks like building hardware that will only run software that the vendor themselves digitally signed. This includes the GPL operating system and other GPL software on the device. This allows them to enforce their DRM, but also prevents you from exercising your freedoms under the GPL to run your modified software, even when your modifications are unrelated to the DRM you agreed to.
The free software community views this tactic as an attack on the whole point of the GPL. The DRM-using vendors simply don't care about the collateral damage their attempts at technical enforcement of DRM impose. But the free software community cares a lot about those freedoms.
That is why GPLv3 has explicit provisions against this sort of practice - if vendors want to use technology to restrict your freedoms, they can write their own software to do it. If they want to use GPLed software, they need to honor its terms (and hopefully the spirit too). What they can't do is have it both ways.
So to summarize - open source software gives you the freedoms that DRM companies aren't willing to let you keep, and gives them cost savings they aren't willing to give up. So instead they try to circumvent the GPL, creating the current conflict.
George W. Bush is no conservative. Conservatives support limited government - under Bush's watch it's increased vastly. Conservatives support fiscal responsibility - Bush has been a disaster in that way as well. Conservatives support the rule of law - which Bush has been flouting regularly, whether it's signing statements that purport to negate the meaning of a law, warrantless wiretapping, or abominations like Abu Ghraib. Conservatives are... conservative - wary of grand schemes that assume nothing will go wrong (*cough* Iraq *cough*). Bush has done more to divorce the Republican party from conservative ideals, and from competence, than I thought possible.
And as far as Democrats' supposed policy superiority - they certainly have no such superiority on economics. I grew up in New York State - the people are great, and it's a beautiful place to live - but the Democrat politicians there are as liberal, and as dumb on policy, as they come. They've managed to drive jobs out of the state year after year after year. If you want a bright future it's not the place to be. I moved to Virginia after college because that's where I could find a good job. I would have loved to stay near all my family and high school friends. But the jobs just aren't there. Virginia, though, is a Republican state, and the jobs around here keep growing. There's a large population of refugees from the western New York area who live down here now - it's reasonably close to family back in NY but you can actually find a decent job. And that sort of pattern has been happening nationally - red states have been gaining jobs at a far greater pace than the blue states. There's a reason for that, and it's inferior economic policy on the part of the Democrats.
I wouldn't be so sure we're "imposing" democracy upon Iraq.
If you recall during the 90s the Shia in Iraq rose up against Saddam (and were subsequently crushed). That to me does not sound like a people who want to continue that sort of regime.
Now they have the opportunity to govern themselves - and judging by the vote turnouts, they want to do just that. And they are indeed paying the price "in blood", as the Iraqi Army takes a lot more casualties than the Americans do.
That to me says they've got a real chance of making it work. It could still all go south, but they've got a chance. For their sake and ours, let's hope they succeed.
This is the sort of problem that comes about when the government subsidizes any entity of a religious nature. People start arguing over what beliefs are deserving of subsidy, which of course are always their beliefs rather than their neighbor's. And then people start trying to use government funds as a way to coerce or bribe groups into changing their beliefs to suit whatever the government (usually majority) view is.
It's a mess, which is why we have (or at least supposedly have) a separation of church and state.
But I submit that while the Boy Scouts could avoid the controversy by forgoing such subsidies, they are no worse than any of the many "faith-based" groups getting government funds for activities that are viewed as beneficial to the public (nobody argues that scouting is anything but a good thing, it's the membership criteria that have caused problems). IMO the larger fault is with the politicians who think subsidizing religious organizations of any kind (no matter whether you have a high opinion of the particular organization or not) was a good idea.
That said, if I were the leader of any religious organization such as the Scouts, I would be very leery of accepting any government funds. Once you grow dependent on the government money, it becomes difficult to stand on principle when the government threatens to withhold the money. Just look at how state governments have caved in and allowed the federal government to dictate state policy simply by threatening to withhold federal highway or other funds.
Look, I have no problem with gays or atheists being in the Scouts. But I would like to make two points:
1. The Scouts are a private organization, and they have a right to choose who they associate with, whether as members or as troop leaders. If they think atheism or homosexuality is contrary to their belief system, they may be wrong but it's their decision to make. Similarly, you don't have to associate with the Scouts if you don't like their beliefs.
2. Equal rights is not the same thing as equal acceptance. We all have an equal right to free speech, but if you go around saying things I consider morally wrong, I have every right to refuse to associate with you. And you have the same right with respect to me. There's no grand requirement that people must consider all viewpoints equal and refrain from criticizing your beliefs. If the Scouts believe in God, and you don't, well then maybe it's not the right organization for you. They're not discriminating against any right of yours to tell you that.
Because intelligence is not the same as competence. It's possible to be both very intelligent and very clueless about the way the world works.
An idiot's bad idea is likely to be something simple. This lends itself to easier criticism, and thus is less likely to actually get implemented. And even if it does, the simplicity of it lends hope that it can be more easily fixed when the idiot is no longer in power (not always true, but probably often).
An intelligent but clueless person's bad idea is more likely to be terribly complex and *sound* like a better idea. Thus it's more likely to get passed. And its complexity lends itself to all sorts of unintended consequences, which cause more havoc and be more difficult to repair than the idiot's bad idea would have been.
Now, if both the idiot and the smart politician were *competent*, then clearly the intelligent person would be a better choice.
Their ages don't make it "completely obvious". I have a great-uncle who's somewhere in his upper 80s who's more tech-savvy than some 20-year olds. Maybe that means I should vote for McCain.
The problem with generalizations is they're mostly useless when dealing with individuals rather than groups.
There is a phenomenon called "regulatory capture", in which government agencies devoted to regulating an industry become dominated by vested interests within that industry. Heavy regulation provides a lot of incentives for companies to spend money lobbying and otherwise trying to influence the policy, with the result that they end up dominating their supposed overseers. This has been a real problem in the telecommunications field, which is probably why McCain is leery of further regulations without a clear and present case of abuse. McCain's comments on the matter have generally been to take a wait-and-see approach to see if regulations will be truly necessary, such that the risks associated with the regulation are a worthwhile tradeoff.
There is also the Law of Unintended Consequences. Even if everyone agrees on a definition of Net Neutrality (surprisingly difficult) and agrees that it's a good thing (also difficult), constructing a law that will accomplish that goal without significant collateral damage can be tricky. Look at how just a couple years ago everyone in politics thought it was a grand idea to subsidize ethanol production - it'll help reduce our oil dependence, right? So the law got passed. Now everyone's realizing that it's created incentives for people to use corn for ethanol rather than as feed for livestock, and to plant corn instead of other crops, the result of which has been to drive up the cost of food. So now they're thinking of changing the law back.
So yes, there are reasons to think regulation could be a threat to the Internet's diversity.
First of all, nobody was shot or asked to shoot anyone.
Second of all, if senior officials from our intelligence community, the men and women we rely on to protect us from terrorists, come to you and say they need your help to prevent the next 9/11, most reasonable people will at least consider the request. Especially when memories of that time were a little fresher in all our minds.
So I don't think it's quite as black and white as your example would suggest.
That said, I don't think the telecoms should have immunity for anything that was clearly illegal. One, the law is the law. Two, it's a horrible precedent to set. We have a system of checks and balances for a reason. The President needs to go through Congress if he thinks the laws need changing. He can't be allowed to just circumvent our Constitution and the will of the people by getting companies to break the law on his behalf. Yet that's what was done - when this was happening, there was no ongoing debate in Congress about the appropriate oversight of domestic surveillance, because the President didn't bother asking for new legislation at that time. Whatever you want to call it - incompetence, laziness, or simple arrogance - it's not the way our system works or is supposed to work. Providing immunity practically guarantees it'll happen again.
The more interesting question is, what's cause and what's effect? Are politicians taking a position because of contributions, or are people making contributions because that politician already shares their position?
There's no evidence that either candidate for President has changed positions due to campaign contributions. McCain in particular has a long-standing reputation as being difficult to lobby.
It's not all that clear that paper is any more reliable. You get into issues like hanging or dimpled chads, or ballots in which two mutually exclusive choices were checked - maybe the voter was an idiot, but maybe the ballot was modified fraudulently to prevent identification of its voter's true choice.
What people are concerned about with electronic machines is that the machines are black boxes that could be either buggy or malicious. I.e. the counting machines are untrusted. So why not employ the same technique we employ when counting paper ballots using untrusted humans? When counting paper votes, both the Republican and Democratic observer must agree on the ballot's marking. So why not use two or more counting machines from independent vendors?
This could be performed much more rapidly and cheaply than using human counters of paper ballots. One such approach would be to employ a "dumb" input device (e.g. a simple keypad which is ignorant of what a numbered choice represents) whose output is sent to multiple counting devices provided by independent vendors. Having 2 counting machines would allow you to detect the presence of errors. Having 3 such counting machines would allow you to correct errors by majority vote. The odds that 2 different machines running different software from different vendors make the same mistake are pretty low. And the system would allow you to evaluate the accuracy of different vendor's products.
Obviously there are some details to be worked out (how are the ballot choices displayed to the user, etc). But with a little engineering work to specify the required interfaces, you could have a pretty reliable system even without having to completely trust the individual subsystems.
The practical need is that it focuses people on the perpetrators rather than the tactic. You can't have a war against a tactic, which is why the phrase "war on terror" is idiotic. It's like declaring a war on missiles - it misses the whole point, which is that there are people out there trying to kill you by whatever tactic they can use. Whether it's by a missile or a suicide bomber is tactically useful to know for your defense but is strategically minor. Those people are the enemy, not their choice of weapon.
It's important in trying to defeat these folks to understand them. It's also important to understand the communities from which they draw their support, so we can try to drive a wedge between the terrorists and their communities. For these purposes, it's vital to identify the enemy as Islamic extremists rather than simply terrorists.
What's the alternative to COTS? Custom-building every piece of hardware and writing every piece of code from the firmware, to the operating system, and applications in-house?
There's a lot of reason to believe that doing so would result in less secure software. The software would have less people trying to break it, thus less opportunity to find and fix the inevitable bugs. There's something to be said for the trial-by-fire that is a public release of software. And in many cases it probably wouldn't get the same investment of dollars into the software as the commercial world can afford, so you have less money to fix said bugs when they were discovered.
Similarly the software would likely be less functional, given that even the defense budget is not infinite. It just makes sense to leverage COTS, provided you can ensure adequate supply of parts in a major conflict. That is a challenge with the effects of globalization.
Using COTS where it makes sense doesn't mean you should hook everything up the Internet though.
I think we agree - restrictions are not freedoms, they are tools used to protect certain freedoms.
I agree it would be dangerous (and yes, sophistry) to start saying things like "real freedom of expression" in the libel example. What's being protected by libel laws is not freedom of expression, it's a freedom from defamation, at a (IMO fairly limited) cost to our freedom of expression. The way to avoid the sophistry is to be accurate in what freedom is being protected, and at the expense of what others.
The Techdirt article is explicitly premised on the idea that you are in a competitive market. It is in a competitive market that the price gets driven to the marginal cost.
If you don't have a competitive market - say you have locked customers into your walled garden like Apple's trying to do - then sure, there is nothing to require you to price at marginal cost. That is a tried-and-true business model (though bad for consumers), especially when you have long service contracts and the like to prevent customers from going elsewhere easily.
There are still factors that could force Apple to reflect at least some of their near-zero marginal cost in their pricing. If other phone platforms (maybe Android) start to give them stiff competition, that would have an impact. If you can get applications much cheaper elsewhere, that could be sufficient incentive for folks to switch out of Apple's walled garden.
It's also possible that applications from non-Apple sources may not tie their software licenses to the phone platform - so if you switch from an iPhone to a Motorola device, your license key for Killer App 2007 could still work when you download a copy of the (probably Java) program onto the new phone. That would similarly mean Apple would have to work harder to retain people in their ecosystem, which would imply lower prices. Though this scenario assumes that your new device/carrier is open to such application downloads, rather than just being a different walled garden. While par for the course in the PC software industry, that would be quite a switch for the cellular industry.
Fundamentally, different freedoms cannot always coexist in their absolute form. But they're still freedoms - it's not sophistry to label them as such. We simply need to realize that it is not possible to have all freedoms at all times; instead we prioritize and make tradeoffs based on the situation. So we have laws protecting most speech but forbidding libel. We have contracts like the GPL that limit certain developer freedoms to protect other developer and user freedoms.
And unlike laws, free software licenses themselves are not imposed upon anyone. You are free to write your own software to do whatever you want it to do. You are also free to agree to use the work of others on their terms - whether it's a "free" license or otherwise. The law does constrain your choices to these two options - but that's property law, not the license. The license is simply the terms on which others agree that you can use their property.
If I had any good recommendations for such tools, I'd give them, but I don't, so I'll try to help in another way. I'll pose some questions that hopefully your friend will be asking herself:
1) Isn't this missing the forest for the trees? If a marriage is so lacking in trust that she thinks her spouse is spying on her, there's a problem. If her spouse actually did install such a thing, there is similarly a problem. This is a much greater problem than the software itself. If she wants to save the marriage, this is the sort of situation where a counselor or similar trusted third party could be very helpful.
2) If the logger or other software is indeed there, what is she worried about him discovering? If she's just (rightfully) angry about the installation of this software, and trying to demonstrate a point by removing it, that's one thing. But if there actually is something she wants to hide, again this is a far bigger problem in the relationship than the software.
Good luck to your friend. This sounds like a tough spot to be in.
The problem there was that Bush's opponents were lousy too. I mean really - did the Democratic Party actually think that its best possible candidates for President were Al Gore and John Kerry?
Having to choose between either of those two and George W. Bush is liking asking which of two men you'd rather have kick you in the nuts. Personally, I'd rather not be kicked at all, but unfortunately that's not the way our system works. Even if you vote for a third party candidate, you know you're still going to be hurting when all is said and done.
Efficiency to me is a function both of speed and of quality. Adopting something quickly is not efficient if what you adopt is highly flawed.
I disagree on several counts:
1. I don't believe the alternative to poor government (inefficiency) need be worse government (such as dictatorship). Also, dictatorships traditionally have not been terribly efficient at much other than enriching the dictator and his friends.
2. While well-considered policies take time to figure out, I see little evidence that the slowness that bureaucracies promote has had any corresponding positive effect on quality or sanity. On the contrary - these bloated organizations seem both slow and stupid. This is hardly what we should be striving for.
3. An inefficient government wastes huge sums of money, which means it taxes citizens more heavily to do things that are not only wasteful but can actually be worse than doing nothing.
4. There are some things which only the government can do (e.g. national defense and certain other public infrastructure). Inefficiency at these things is dangerous because there is no feasible alternative mechanism to get necessary tasks done.
Thus government inefficiency is absolutely NOT a good thing. It's not even the least of the available evils - we would be better off with less government than inefficient government. Either way the problems don't get solved, but at least in the "less government" case we're not spending money in the process.
Whatever one thinks of the war in Iraq, it has forced us to prioritize scientific and engineering issues we previously had not emphasized. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. For example:
Techniques to defeat highly asymmetric warfare tactics such as the use of IEDs. There's been a lot of money pouring into trying to solve that problem, because solutions will save lives. Google "counter IED" and you get an idea of the communications and jamming technologies involved.
Trauma medicine has been getting a lot of innovation. For example, the Pentagon has a 250 million dollar effort to create the ability to regrow limbs, noses, etc of wounded soldiers. The HemCon bandage, a portable heart-lung machine, and improvements in treatment methodologies are discussed here.
Materials science has been getting the kind of attention it hasn't seen in a long time. One example with obvious civilian application is the push for novel flame-retardant woven and knitted fabrics.
Looking more to the future, the war's need for intelligence from foreign-language sources has driven DARPA to fund automatic translation research. That's a real tough problem, but if they can solve it has enormous civilian applications.
The list goes on an on. I'm not saying it justifies a war, but war certainly does drive scientific and engineering research to solve thorny real-world problems.