I totally agree, and I would extend that to taxpayer-financed patents. Indeed that phrase should be an oxymoron.
I would further extend that to all research done by a college, university, or research institution funded by even a single dollar of US government taxpayer or other derived revenue. If the US paid for it, it's owned by its citizens.
Um, no. Totally disagree with you entirely. There is no recourse from this disagreement.
It's ugly, but it's salvageable. And I must fight your attitude because you're part of the dystopia. Once you surrender your democracy, you're one of *them*, enslaved to ennui and servitude. Enjoy your overlords.
You lump many conservative arguments into your reply, too many to disambiguate within the confines of/.
The reshuffling is both random, and pushing nations towards covering their own butts. Allies? Nope. Common cause? Nope. Humanitarian needs? Nope. The US can't even prevent post-disaster holocausts on their own soil.
Were it I, I wouldn't trust my data on foreign soil, but then, I don't even trust my next-door neighbor with my data. A government? The US or Germany? No.
I don't blame Germany, even if their own surveillance mechanisms have access to it. But encrypt on the wire, and in place. Anyone with sufficient interest knows who I am; slashdot is not immune from the NSA, and a myriad of intelligence services that kiss but don't tell... except each other.
What good is the sovereignty of a nation? Not so much these days. NAFTA changes will be bent and broken and reformed. History as a guide, the businesses fund the campaign contributions that make public policy, and when the contributions change their shape, so will the government.
Somewhere in the middle are methods to help starving countries, refugees, and the other trash of corporate welfare. The attempt to sequester data is Pyrrhic at best, and Quixote-ish when it's revealed that it was all for the votes and little else.
It's about power and control. Government likes it. Police like it. Intimidation in the name of public safety is a time-honored madness.
That politicians exempt themselves from most things is to be expected. You'll know corruption has ended and snowballs will make it through hell when they stop being privileged. We're animals, and being alpha is part of your legacy and mine.... and some of use exercise that tendency more than others.
Handing over your keys is a big problem for most people. Others will trustingly (or in deep fear) relinquish them. Or if you're Google, you'll sell them to the highest bidder.
Encryption will be broken, but each time this gets close to happening, new and more interesting and novel encryption methods are published.
We did not grant rights to these elected governments to have ultimate surveillance powers over us, citizens.
Those that read this: vote. Query your candidates for their position on privacy and surveillance. Ask them outright, and feel free to distribute the answers to these questions. Then vote. Get those who can't easily vote to the polls. Make your positions known.
In reality, it's a mess. As stated, were I them, I'd cover my own butt. The US hasn't exactly built a mound of trust recently. They attack as much as they're attacked. I see router walls forming in the not distant future. Do you have a data passport? Ok. The mail was sent, the website accessed, the Salesforce query done.
Face it, the US cyber intelligence community (an oxymoron) is in total disarray. Its weapons have been exposed and re-weaponized for organized crime, it can't keep a cybersecurity "czar" in office, and it has a half-dozen competing agencies snooping and sniffing and still are unable to be of much use when an actual disaster happens.
Were I a German policy maker, I'd say: cut the meager tether and spend the money to protect myself and EU interests. I'm not sure the US is going to do that much longer, and in many areas, has already stopped cold.
And I'm sincerely hoping that the missiles don't fly.
Your understanding of how Coinbase and others work is lacking. You can trade dollars for cryptocurrency readily. Yes, they take a fee if you change it back to another currency, say BTC to USD.
The US hasn't used gold as a currency backer for decades. The price of gold mirrors paranoia more than any other perceived trait. You can buy crypto coins easily, and you used no energy, someone else did. Maybe their energy was cheap Probably not.
You can mint your own coins. Takes hardware and brains and electricity. Some coins are easier to make with one kind of hardware vs another. Some really need ASICs. Some do not, but accumulate asset values at a different rate, made non-linear by moment-to-moment trading.
You won't be a millionaire using your laptop, unless you're a thief. But if you have a data center that has too much hardware for the current workload, and cheap electricity, making coins might work.
Today, my Coinbase account is a real asset. I can change BTC/etc into any "hard" currency that I want. Takes seconds. I'm not sure you understand the topic sufficiently.
You forgot their greatest two benefits: money laundering and international transfers of an interloping currency state.
Yes, it's currency, bizarre as that might seem. Consider the state of the Turkish Lira. Or the fates of Iran, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and a dozen more nations where there are either controls in place for international transfers, or worse, hyper-inflation.
The world's alternate currency used to be the US Dollar, Swiss Francs, the Euro, and pounds sterling. Even the yuan has caved to the whims of "the west". If you wanted an alternate currency to say: Fuck You, or change out that truck load of dope, crypto currency has its attractions.
Just like the Internet has pseudoanonymity, so does BTC. For now, no one knows you're a dog.
Imagine you have the world's most bloated operating system, supporting legacy APIs so old and iteratively patched and fixed that your code base has become pretty wretched. So wretched, you had to give it away after charging for it for years, losing much of your appeal. But big business and gov bought your stuff like lemmings.
The Chromebook is a wickedly tawdry attempt at a cloud access device, but it plays videos, and allows online fun and games at a snail's pace, with hardly any storage or computational power. And it's slim, kinda sorta maybe low-priced.
Because there are only two eyes, and only twenty-four hours, a Chromebook appears to be a fearsome competitor, cool access device, and is really nothing more than that. But see 2eyes/24hour.
It oozes delightful subscription models that work more with Google's cadre of ugly apps than Microsoft's cadre of ugly online apps. Follow the money, and you'll find the motivation. Oh yeah, privacy? Har. Accessibility whilst off grid? Har har. Security? There are great arguments for a low attack profile... until one of them cracks Google or cracks Microsoft. It's only a matter of time until one or the other is broken and burglarized, along with every chunk of info about you or owned by you.
Humans are *not* the problem; unsafe coding practices and lack of regimen is THE problem. Yes, stuff happens. But the onerous conclusion that we have to modify our behavior for the needs of some god-forsaken coder's neural network is something to be actively rebelled against. What churl-- we're the people, they're not.
This is great stuff if you're looking for your telecom stock to go up.
This stuff is PR foam and goo and reality distortion if you're anyone but a telecom stockholder.
Utility regulation in the US was made for a very good reason, which is that utilities will turn into monopolistic snakes in lieu of being forced to act even reasonably human. They are snakes and toads and lizards.
These distractions are designed to take concern away by a makeover of the worst, most misleading kind. It smacks of the propaganda campaigns so moneyed in current western world politics.
Not so long ago, there was another conservative, ex-military officer, a technologist who stood down Russia over Afghanistan, and battled the oil cartels. He was a white guy from the South.
His name was Jimmy Carter.
Carter did what he thought was right, and wasn't interested in polls. During his office, the primordial tech soup evolved into the first microcomputers. The long peace process with Vietnam was started. The Cold War got colder.
And conservative as he might be, he was also a Democrat.
My comment doesn't have to do with "older school media". There are those of us that don't watch much media, as there is sometimes a real problem with the signal to noise ratio, and can keep ourselves "entertained" by doing anything *but* watching TV. Maybe a movie once in a while, if it suits us.
We actually get outdoors, create stuff, travel, read, and aren't interested in positioning ourselves within an artificial rating system pimped and pruned by external forces looking for revenue.
A fundamental of this is the energy economy. Have cheap energy? Make it work. It started with stone mills, horses, tired back muscles, and grew to steam, hydro, fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, geothermal, and more.
For more human power, sugar cane/beets, then potatoes, corn, and other sugar/starch fuels.
This is an energy economy, and suits those that can make energy cheaply. In terms of its asset value compared to traditional currency, it's going to wax and wane, but the supply/demand will taper off if residual asset value doesn'tt conform to "profitable" economic outcomes. The energy will go somewhere else where it can pay.
For better or worse, Musk is his own enemy. Part Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field (R), part genius, part visionary, and part unredeemable a$$hole, all-in-one.
I hope the next CEO has a lot of corks to stick in his mouth, lest his lip flatulence craters his seemingly honest endeavors. Whenever they need drugs to sleep, and drugs to stay awake, it's the drugs.
While the use of a "legacy system" is a bad thing, the NFC tags inside the badges could be easily read. One vendor offered a free RFID wallet for passersby, who yes, had their badges scanned.
Unusually, the name tag didn't have embedded NFC, rather, an additional tag was used. Remove the tag, and no NFC read.
But the UBM contractor who screwed up.... is a Black Spot on their event.
All good points. I have yet to download and use a distro that didn't ask me, one way or the other, to agree to the terms of the license (usually GPLv2 which covers the kernel) or other terms of use.
Git, subversion, etc etc have different methodologies for adding license terms. The code and its use are licensed, usually the same between source and use.
With free software, as you cite, often tough to go wrong if you're a user, and not a developer or integrator. There are a myriad ways to go wrong with licensed software, no matter where it comes from, unless unconstrained free use is portended from the onset, as most software is covered in its natural state by copyright law, unless otherwise stated.
Asserting copyright ownership and constraints is a whole other bag of worms, as is the use of a copyrighted work without understanding use rights granted. This weaves copyright law with licensing. With over 100 variations of "free licensing", this makes knowledgeable choices difficult, including mixtures of software using differing licensing methods (with incumbent copyright grants), if you're a developer or integrator. Civilians don't have as much to worry about, thankfully.
Some licenses don't make any limitations based upon the user's status as an individual vs use in a commercial endeavor. Licensing as a subject and reality isn't necessarily easy. Ask any compliance officer.
Slashdot Mirror
I totally agree, and I would extend that to taxpayer-financed patents. Indeed that phrase should be an oxymoron.
I would further extend that to all research done by a college, university, or research institution funded by even a single dollar of US government taxpayer or other derived revenue. If the US paid for it, it's owned by its citizens.
Um, no. Totally disagree with you entirely. There is no recourse from this disagreement.
It's ugly, but it's salvageable. And I must fight your attitude because you're part of the dystopia. Once you surrender your democracy, you're one of *them*, enslaved to ennui and servitude. Enjoy your overlords.
You lump many conservative arguments into your reply, too many to disambiguate within the confines of /.
The reshuffling is both random, and pushing nations towards covering their own butts. Allies? Nope. Common cause? Nope. Humanitarian needs? Nope. The US can't even prevent post-disaster holocausts on their own soil.
Were it I, I wouldn't trust my data on foreign soil, but then, I don't even trust my next-door neighbor with my data. A government? The US or Germany? No.
I don't blame Germany, even if their own surveillance mechanisms have access to it. But encrypt on the wire, and in place. Anyone with sufficient interest knows who I am; slashdot is not immune from the NSA, and a myriad of intelligence services that kiss but don't tell... except each other.
What good is the sovereignty of a nation? Not so much these days. NAFTA changes will be bent and broken and reformed. History as a guide, the businesses fund the campaign contributions that make public policy, and when the contributions change their shape, so will the government.
Somewhere in the middle are methods to help starving countries, refugees, and the other trash of corporate welfare. The attempt to sequester data is Pyrrhic at best, and Quixote-ish when it's revealed that it was all for the votes and little else.
It's about power and control. Government likes it. Police like it. Intimidation in the name of public safety is a time-honored madness.
That politicians exempt themselves from most things is to be expected. You'll know corruption has ended and snowballs will make it through hell when they stop being privileged. We're animals, and being alpha is part of your legacy and mine.... and some of use exercise that tendency more than others.
Handing over your keys is a big problem for most people. Others will trustingly (or in deep fear) relinquish them. Or if you're Google, you'll sell them to the highest bidder.
Encryption will be broken, but each time this gets close to happening, new and more interesting and novel encryption methods are published.
We did not grant rights to these elected governments to have ultimate surveillance powers over us, citizens.
Those that read this: vote. Query your candidates for their position on privacy and surveillance. Ask them outright, and feel free to distribute the answers to these questions. Then vote. Get those who can't easily vote to the polls. Make your positions known.
In reality, it's a mess. As stated, were I them, I'd cover my own butt. The US hasn't exactly built a mound of trust recently. They attack as much as they're attacked. I see router walls forming in the not distant future. Do you have a data passport? Ok. The mail was sent, the website accessed, the Salesforce query done.
Face it, the US cyber intelligence community (an oxymoron) is in total disarray. Its weapons have been exposed and re-weaponized for organized crime, it can't keep a cybersecurity "czar" in office, and it has a half-dozen competing agencies snooping and sniffing and still are unable to be of much use when an actual disaster happens.
Were I a German policy maker, I'd say: cut the meager tether and spend the money to protect myself and EU interests. I'm not sure the US is going to do that much longer, and in many areas, has already stopped cold.
And I'm sincerely hoping that the missiles don't fly.
Your understanding of how Coinbase and others work is lacking. You can trade dollars for cryptocurrency readily. Yes, they take a fee if you change it back to another currency, say BTC to USD.
The US hasn't used gold as a currency backer for decades. The price of gold mirrors paranoia more than any other perceived trait. You can buy crypto coins easily, and you used no energy, someone else did. Maybe their energy was cheap Probably not.
You can mint your own coins. Takes hardware and brains and electricity. Some coins are easier to make with one kind of hardware vs another. Some really need ASICs. Some do not, but accumulate asset values at a different rate, made non-linear by moment-to-moment trading.
You won't be a millionaire using your laptop, unless you're a thief. But if you have a data center that has too much hardware for the current workload, and cheap electricity, making coins might work.
Today, my Coinbase account is a real asset. I can change BTC/etc into any "hard" currency that I want. Takes seconds. I'm not sure you understand the topic sufficiently.
You forgot their greatest two benefits: money laundering and international transfers of an interloping currency state.
Yes, it's currency, bizarre as that might seem. Consider the state of the Turkish Lira. Or the fates of Iran, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and a dozen more nations where there are either controls in place for international transfers, or worse, hyper-inflation.
The world's alternate currency used to be the US Dollar, Swiss Francs, the Euro, and pounds sterling. Even the yuan has caved to the whims of "the west". If you wanted an alternate currency to say: Fuck You, or change out that truck load of dope, crypto currency has its attractions.
Just like the Internet has pseudoanonymity, so does BTC. For now, no one knows you're a dog.
Imagine you have the world's most bloated operating system, supporting legacy APIs so old and iteratively patched and fixed that your code base has become pretty wretched. So wretched, you had to give it away after charging for it for years, losing much of your appeal. But big business and gov bought your stuff like lemmings.
The Chromebook is a wickedly tawdry attempt at a cloud access device, but it plays videos, and allows online fun and games at a snail's pace, with hardly any storage or computational power. And it's slim, kinda sorta maybe low-priced.
Because there are only two eyes, and only twenty-four hours, a Chromebook appears to be a fearsome competitor, cool access device, and is really nothing more than that. But see 2eyes/24hour.
It oozes delightful subscription models that work more with Google's cadre of ugly apps than Microsoft's cadre of ugly online apps. Follow the money, and you'll find the motivation. Oh yeah, privacy? Har. Accessibility whilst off grid? Har har. Security? There are great arguments for a low attack profile... until one of them cracks Google or cracks Microsoft. It's only a matter of time until one or the other is broken and burglarized, along with every chunk of info about you or owned by you.
Oh, sure.
That's why hundreds of thousands of systems were victims of ransomware in the past 18months. Everyone updates!
Indeed we're alls suffering from update fatigue.
If you can't trust humanity, your'll be surprised just how bad coders are. And if you think they're predictable, you have another thing coming still.
Humans are *not* the problem; unsafe coding practices and lack of regimen is THE problem. Yes, stuff happens. But the onerous conclusion that we have to modify our behavior for the needs of some god-forsaken coder's neural network is something to be actively rebelled against. What churl-- we're the people, they're not.
This is great stuff if you're looking for your telecom stock to go up.
This stuff is PR foam and goo and reality distortion if you're anyone but a telecom stockholder.
Utility regulation in the US was made for a very good reason, which is that utilities will turn into monopolistic snakes in lieu of being forced to act even reasonably human. They are snakes and toads and lizards.
These distractions are designed to take concern away by a makeover of the worst, most misleading kind. It smacks of the propaganda campaigns so moneyed in current western world politics.
Not so long ago, there was another conservative, ex-military officer, a technologist who stood down Russia over Afghanistan, and battled the oil cartels. He was a white guy from the South.
His name was Jimmy Carter.
Carter did what he thought was right, and wasn't interested in polls. During his office, the primordial tech soup evolved into the first microcomputers. The long peace process with Vietnam was started. The Cold War got colder.
And conservative as he might be, he was also a Democrat.
My comment doesn't have to do with "older school media". There are those of us that don't watch much media, as there is sometimes a real problem with the signal to noise ratio, and can keep ourselves "entertained" by doing anything *but* watching TV. Maybe a movie once in a while, if it suits us.
We actually get outdoors, create stuff, travel, read, and aren't interested in positioning ourselves within an artificial rating system pimped and pruned by external forces looking for revenue.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.....
Where will it pay? Electric cars, trucks, trains, container ships, data mining (you're the gold nugget), and more.
Should fusion energy be made reasonable and profitable, or other sources found, cheap energy will fuel many efforts that we can't afford today.
A fundamental of this is the energy economy. Have cheap energy? Make it work. It started with stone mills, horses, tired back muscles, and grew to steam, hydro, fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, geothermal, and more.
For more human power, sugar cane/beets, then potatoes, corn, and other sugar/starch fuels.
This is an energy economy, and suits those that can make energy cheaply. In terms of its asset value compared to traditional currency, it's going to wax and wane, but the supply/demand will taper off if residual asset value doesn'tt conform to "profitable" economic outcomes. The energy will go somewhere else where it can pay.
See the cat, see the cradle. I hope they don't accidentally drop it down a sink somewhere....
No Ambien dreams here. Nope.
No naked short sellers, either.
For better or worse, Musk is his own enemy. Part Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field (R), part genius, part visionary, and part unredeemable a$$hole, all-in-one.
I hope the next CEO has a lot of corks to stick in his mouth, lest his lip flatulence craters his seemingly honest endeavors. Whenever they need drugs to sleep, and drugs to stay awake, it's the drugs.
Wrong story.
While the use of a "legacy system" is a bad thing, the NFC tags inside the badges could be easily read. One vendor offered a free RFID wallet for passersby, who yes, had their badges scanned.
Unusually, the name tag didn't have embedded NFC, rather, an additional tag was used. Remove the tag, and no NFC read.
But the UBM contractor who screwed up.... is a Black Spot on their event.
Hmmmm. It's been a while.
I'll re-check a download. Thanks.
Ubuntu, RH, Fedora, and I'm probably sure that CentOS asks you, too.
All good points. I have yet to download and use a distro that didn't ask me, one way or the other, to agree to the terms of the license (usually GPLv2 which covers the kernel) or other terms of use.
Git, subversion, etc etc have different methodologies for adding license terms. The code and its use are licensed, usually the same between source and use.
With free software, as you cite, often tough to go wrong if you're a user, and not a developer or integrator. There are a myriad ways to go wrong with licensed software, no matter where it comes from, unless unconstrained free use is portended from the onset, as most software is covered in its natural state by copyright law, unless otherwise stated.
Asserting copyright ownership and constraints is a whole other bag of worms, as is the use of a copyrighted work without understanding use rights granted. This weaves copyright law with licensing. With over 100 variations of "free licensing", this makes knowledgeable choices difficult, including mixtures of software using differing licensing methods (with incumbent copyright grants), if you're a developer or integrator. Civilians don't have as much to worry about, thankfully.
Some licenses don't make any limitations based upon the user's status as an individual vs use in a commercial endeavor. Licensing as a subject and reality isn't necessarily easy. Ask any compliance officer.