Steve knew something else that no one else ever seemed to get: Clever little business strategies aren't a substitute for making products that people want. I think understanding that was a big component of what made Jobs successful. Yes, he had showmanship. He had a design sense. He had a knack for finding and hiring talented people. He had other talents and virtues, I'm sure. But a big part of his success, I think, is that he didn't act like a stereotypical 'businessman' out to make money from whatever crappy product he could.
Actually, I think Ubuntu's approach makes more sense. Assuming you're talking about the phone they're building, they're talking about having it present a desktop interface when it's plugged into desktop components, giving you a normal Ubuntu desktop experience. When it's not plugged into those components, it's supposed to present you with a different UI designed specifically to run on a phone.
I think this is a much better solution than Microsoft's, which is to force desktop users to use the tablet interface and also have tablet users sometimes interacting with the desktop UI.
In my view, the problem with Microsoft's Surface is not really the product lineup. The problem is that, once again, Microsoft has a poor marketing vision, i.e. they're selling a product without a real place in the market.
You might think I'm crazy, but iPads and Android tablets have a more clear place in the market. They're not full computers, we all know they're not full computers, but they allow us to do the things we'd do on our phones if our phones had bigger screens. There are enough people who want that kind of casual device.
There might also be a market for a full-computer tablets, but that's a bit trickier. The problem is that, as we've seen, a good desktop UI won't work well on a small-screen touch device. Likewise, a good UI for a small-screen touch-device won't work well for a full desktop computer.
Microsoft tried to meld the two, and in my opinion, they screwed up. The result looked pretty but wasn't good, and people don't like it. Meanwhile, Android users are basically happy with Android. iOS users are happy with iOS. Not many people really want to jump ship for a half-assed bastard child of desktop and tablet computing. Microsoft just needs to rethink the direction they took with Windows.
I'm not sure it's about the OSX theme per se, but I'm interested in the idea of having a stripped down desktop UI that's very simple, moderately attractive and modern looking, and doesn't do anything crazy.
Examples of "doing something crazy" would be like replacing the Windows Start menu with a weird full-screen menu and trying to force desktop users to use tablet applications, like what Microsoft did. "Doing something crazy" would also include Gnome 3's overhaul, which still kind of confuses me.
It seems like OSX has the only desktop UI that has simplified and modernized the desktop experience without losing their minds.
Agreed. I don't think hosting your email in another country will do much to secure your email. If anything, it will make you a bigger target, since they've claimed their attention is pointed most directly in communications going in and out of the US.
What you're not seeing is people actually abusing these programs.
On the surface, it sounds like a fair point. To my knowledge, there haven't really been allegations of people digging into these records for specific unethical and abusive purposes. However:
(a) I would question whether the collection and warehousing of this data is, in itself, and abuse.
(b) It's pretty much impossible for us to know whether these programs are being abused, since there is no public oversight.
(c) If there were reports of abuse, I'm not sure we'd know about it, since it's apparently illegal to talk about this program.
All told, I don't feel particularly reassured. Even if there's no malicious abuse of the system, I would bet money that there's some casual abuse going on. As Obama is fond of saying, sunlight is the best disinfectant. If the NSA has done nothing wrong, then they have nothing to hide.
Well it's not as simple as that. If the government were simply not allowed to do anything not specifically explicitly listed in the Constitution, then there wouldn't be a need to list things that they couldn't do. Also, there'd be no real point in having Congress, because no laws would need to be written.
It's true, the Bill of Rights is not supposed to be an exhaustive list of all of a citizen's rights. It's certainly not saying, "Here are the 10 ways that the government is limited, but the government is permitted to do anything else." There's plenty of reason to think that the authors of the Constitution expected us to use our heads and figure out where to draw some of the lines between what the government can or can't do. It's actually pretty absurd to think otherwise. Why else would you have 3 different branches all play a role in creating, interpreting, and executing laws *in addition* to the Constitution? Why have an ability to amend the Constitution? Obviously they expected some level of fluidity and contextual judgment, though we could debate what they expected that level to be.
Not only that, but firing 90% of your sysadmins indicates that either:
A) You were grossly overstaffed to begin with. And I mean *grossly* overstaffed, because 90% of your workforce is simply unnecessary. That's not just, "we're a bit overstaffed, so let's let some people go." That's at the level of, "We're totally incompetent and have no idea what we're doing." Frankly, it would be terrifying ot think that this program is being run by such incompetent people. --or--
B) Once you're done firing people, you're going to be severly understaffed for administering your servers properly. Given that part of the sysadmin's job is to maintain and secure the servers, being severely understaffed would mean that the servers are not being maintained and secured properly, which is also a bit terrifying given the data being collected and stored.
Either way, it's kind of terrifying. Oh, but I guess there's also a 3rd possibility: Maybe both "A" and "B" are true. It wouldn't surprise me.
They really should have added some PC Compatibility for some legacy systems.
Well in my mind, they probably should have picked one direction or another. They should have made it compatible, or they should have made it its own incompatible system, with everything optimized just to run applications written for it. Sometimes when you pick the middle road between satisfying two needs, you end up failing to fulfill either need.
The fourth/fith amendments exist to protect innocent citizens from otherwise accidentally incriminating themselves.
And even more specifically, the fourth and fifth amendment exist to protect innocent citizens from being forced into incriminating themselves by an overreaching government who is trying to silence dissidents.
People frequently overlook the historical context of the Bill of Rights. You have a bunch of people who had just fought a revolution against a government that they believed was oppressive, and they were trying to safeguard themselves against falling under another oppressive government. The Bill of Rights was created specifically for that reason. Essentially, you have a bunch of people who were recently rebels, who want to limit the government's ability to quash a rebellion, silence dissidents, or subvert a popular uprising.
To guide them, they look through their recent history for the tools employed by the power they had just thrown off. The British had limited speech, forbidden ownership of guns, stationed military personnel in people's homes, performed searches without cause, etc. In order to prevent a new oppressive government from using those tools, the authors of the Bill of Rights made them illegal.
So it's not really a defense to say, "This should be ok, because we're only trying to catch dissidents, terrorists, and enemies of the state!" The founding fathers were dissidents, terrorists, and enemies of the state. The Bill of Rights was written to protect exactly those kinds of people.
That is not the same as being prohibited from criticizing the government for having such a process, which clearly he does. Whether it is there in so many words or not, the message is clear. What he's prohibited from talking about are the specifics of what happened.
If all you can legally say is, "Bad things are happening and I don't like it, but I'm not allowed to talk about it," that doesn't count as 'freedom of speech'. It doesn't matter if we can have some kind of general guess as to what's going on or what he doesn't like. He should be permitted to describe *what* he doesn't like so that he can convince others to agree with him.
There is a very great difference between "I oppose FISA and everything to do with it and our government should cease" and "I was issued a FISA warrant for email from XYZ and don't want to comply, and I oppose..." The former is criticism of the government, the latter is releasing specific details of an ongoing investigation AND criticism of the government. Notice that the difference is only the details part, and that the criticism is not prohibited in either case.
Yes, but you're creating a false dichotomy here. He can say, "I oppose FISA" but can't say, "I oppose FISA because they asked me for email records on John Smith pertaining to his travel to Saudi Arabia." But no one would is arguing that he should be able to say the latter. However, he should be able to say, publicly, "I oppose FISA because they came to me and required that I installed a backdoor so that they could query email accounts and collect all data on a specific person. Of course, I won't tell you who they're collecting data on or what the parameters of the search are, but that doesn't matter. The point is, I refuse to install a backdoor that allows the NSA to access any arbitrary email and bypass my encryption scheme."
He should be allowed to level specific criticisms of the government's attack on his business, so long as he doesn't give specific details of who or what they're searching for.
So Snowden has released information about this request that happened after Snowden left a position where he had access to such information? You don't know, you admit it is a guess. Yeah, I'm guessing the same thing.
YES! That's my point. We can only speculate about what's going on, because the government has made it illegal to talk about their secret spy program that collects data on US citizens. The fact that we can only guess is a big part of the problem. The fact that we wouldn't even be able to guess if Snowden hadn't leaked information is another big part of the problem. Although this kind of spying has been going on for years, it is illegal for people who are aware of it to criticize the government about it. The only person who has come out and criticized the government had to take asylum in Russia.
You can't say that it's legal to criticize the government openly when the only person to release specific criticisms, based on knowledge and not guesses, had to flee the country and find asylum in Russia.
I'm sorry, but FISA requests have been part of the Patriot Act for many years.
Speaking for myself, I wasn't aware that the US government held a secret court that issued secret search warrants. I didn't know that the NSA had backdoors into telecommunication provider to monitor everyone's email without a warrant. We still don't really know the limits or details of these programs. We have a pretty good guess that this company was issued a request for *something*, but we don't know what. We don't know how disturbing the request was, or how large an abuse of power it represents, and we can't know because he's not permitted to talk about it.
And I believe that, even if this case is somehow innocuous, it still represents a slippery slope. Why doesn't this enable police departments, or the FBI, or any other government agency to issue a court order barring you from discussing how they conduct business? Could Congress pass a law saying that you're not allowed to talk about how the police conduct investigations, because it inhibits their ability to prevent and prosecute crime?
The best way to win in court is to violate the secret unconstitutional orders and get arrested.
I don't think that's the only option. I think that he can take the government to court for whatever warrant, court order, or threat they've given him. You can sue the government. I think. IANAL.
Well no, there is a prohibition of criticism. If you read his post, he only implies what's going on, and you have to read between the lines. What he's implying is that he can't speak his mind or talk about the issues publicly without facing legal repercussions.
I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot.
Now we can all guess, in terms of recent events, what's going on. The NSA has come to him and asked for access to the emails on his server. The only reason we know about this is because of Snowden, who has had to flee the country for revealing the information. If we did not have the "illegal" leak from Snowden, we would not know what this mail provider was talking about, and he would not be allowed to reveal it to us.
Well that's an interpretation of the 1st Amendment, and a reasonable one given that it doesn't offer exceptions in the text. However, don't have a problem with the exceptions related to slander/libel, or yelling 'fire' in a theater. Of course, I don't even have a problem with the idea that there are national security secrets, and that you could be charged with treason for disclosing certain kinds of information.
However, any decent historian can tell you that the intention of the 1st Amendment was to prevent the government from punishing dissidents for criticizing the government. They've now created a law that says that, if the government asks you to disclose private information in a program that spies on US citizens, you're not allowed to even talk about the issue.
So for example, I could see the government saying, "Here is a warrant for some of the emails that you hold. You are not allowed to disclose what's in those emails, or even the details of who the specific target of the search is, since the target is currently being investigated and we don't want to tip them off." All that might be fair enough. But then they take the extra step, it seems, of saying, "You can't even talk about the fact that we asked you for information, You can't talk about how this process works." That, to me, is the root of the 1st Amendment violation. It means that you can't even complain about the situation without risking prison.
It's because the only rights that the Republican party cares about are (a) the right to property, specifically when it relates to rich people not being taxed; and (b) the right to bear arms. Caring about other rights makes you a dirty communist hippie traitor.
In my mind, disallowing people from criticizing government actions and government policy is a serious violation of the First Amendment. It is exactly what the First Amendment was written to prevent. I hope someone will challenge this issue in court.
You're right, he's just answering questions. And his answers, are snide, petty, passive aggressive, self-serving, and ultimately stupid. This is not a man who is interested in doing good in the world.
It isn't as much that Internet balloons are a bad idea, however the good produced from it isn't worth the cost.
... according to Bill Gates' accountants' speculative judgments and calculations. Without a clear explanation of how you define the amount of "good produced", that judgment isn't worth a whole lot to me.
Oooo... Look at me! I'm a multi-billionaire dilettante! I made all my money screwing over the little guy, engaging in unethical business practices, but now I'm the best person in the world because I gave some money to malaria. That's right, I screwed y'all out of so much money, that after buying my mansions and getting bored being a super-rich asshole, I still had plenty to spend on African diseases!
Oh, some other rich guys also donate to charitable causes? Well, are those charitable causes MUTHERFUKIN MALARIA?! No? Well then I shit on all of their efforts. In fact, the world just grind to a halt right now, and everyone should focus on 2 things:
1) Wiping out malaria, because that's the only problem that matters.
2) Talking about how awesome I am, because I'm donating some of my money to wiping out malaria.
In defense of the idea, the character of 'the Doctor' over the years has been defined by "taking an established character and turning it into something very different." The fun of regeneration is that they get to re-imagine the character, while trying to still capture his 'Doctor-ness'. Also, there's a bit of a problem with doing a spin-off series featuring a female Timelord, in that the Doctor is the only Timelord left.
On the other hand, I have no doubt that they could write around the lack of other Timelords. It's not as though they've been completely consistent over the years, and I'm sure they'll write out the limit on regenerations, too. There are already a few semi-Timelord female characters floating around-- River, Donna, and the Doctor's half-clone (Jenny?).
Personally, though, my feeling is that they shouldn't go through great pains to bring diversity to the character. They should go through possible casting choices, and pick the best one. If one day, they find a black actor or female actor or asian actor who would do a great job, go for it. But don't do a female Doctor as some kind of gimmick.
Well, I hope you don't keep any sensitive/private information on your computer, then. Having it password protected at boot would keep out many casual attempts to get access to your data, but without encryption, it won't keep out anyone who knows what they're doing. Not having a password at all is fine, as long as you don't mind people accessing your data.
Well I think part of the problem is that security experts are experts, and they don't understand that if they really want to encourage better security, they need to make it easy for non-experts. It's funny, because you'd think security experts would know this. One of the key things about security is that a great security measure that nobody uses and everyone circumvents is actually a terrible security measure.
Encryption implementations need to be so well designed and foolproof that they're enabled by default. Right now, we don't usually turn on full-drive encryption because it may cause unexpected problems and complications. We don't enable SSL on all of our web servers because it's an annoying and expensive process to get a cert from a CA. We don't enable encryption on email because it requires plugins and complicated setups. We don't use TOR because it's not quite brain-dead simple.
The experts will respond, "But it *is* brain-dead simple. Just download this plugin, drop into the command line and type [insert command here], compile this binary, change this configuration file in/etc. Oh wait, you're on Windows? Sorry, then you need to download these other files. Get GPG v1 because v2 is completely different and doesn't work with the plugins. Then when you get this error, hit 'ignore'..." And all that makes sense to the experts because they're experts, and they understand what's going on. People won't start using encryption en masse until it's so brain-dead simple that they don't even know they're using it.
Slashdot Mirror
Steve knew something else that no one else ever seemed to get: Clever little business strategies aren't a substitute for making products that people want. I think understanding that was a big component of what made Jobs successful. Yes, he had showmanship. He had a design sense. He had a knack for finding and hiring talented people. He had other talents and virtues, I'm sure. But a big part of his success, I think, is that he didn't act like a stereotypical 'businessman' out to make money from whatever crappy product he could.
And Apples massively successful database server is ...?
Filemaker...?
I mean, they're still not direct competitors, but that's the answer to your question.
Actually, I think Ubuntu's approach makes more sense. Assuming you're talking about the phone they're building, they're talking about having it present a desktop interface when it's plugged into desktop components, giving you a normal Ubuntu desktop experience. When it's not plugged into those components, it's supposed to present you with a different UI designed specifically to run on a phone.
I think this is a much better solution than Microsoft's, which is to force desktop users to use the tablet interface and also have tablet users sometimes interacting with the desktop UI.
In my view, the problem with Microsoft's Surface is not really the product lineup. The problem is that, once again, Microsoft has a poor marketing vision, i.e. they're selling a product without a real place in the market.
You might think I'm crazy, but iPads and Android tablets have a more clear place in the market. They're not full computers, we all know they're not full computers, but they allow us to do the things we'd do on our phones if our phones had bigger screens. There are enough people who want that kind of casual device.
There might also be a market for a full-computer tablets, but that's a bit trickier. The problem is that, as we've seen, a good desktop UI won't work well on a small-screen touch device. Likewise, a good UI for a small-screen touch-device won't work well for a full desktop computer.
Microsoft tried to meld the two, and in my opinion, they screwed up. The result looked pretty but wasn't good, and people don't like it. Meanwhile, Android users are basically happy with Android. iOS users are happy with iOS. Not many people really want to jump ship for a half-assed bastard child of desktop and tablet computing. Microsoft just needs to rethink the direction they took with Windows.
I'm not sure it's about the OSX theme per se, but I'm interested in the idea of having a stripped down desktop UI that's very simple, moderately attractive and modern looking, and doesn't do anything crazy.
Examples of "doing something crazy" would be like replacing the Windows Start menu with a weird full-screen menu and trying to force desktop users to use tablet applications, like what Microsoft did. "Doing something crazy" would also include Gnome 3's overhaul, which still kind of confuses me.
It seems like OSX has the only desktop UI that has simplified and modernized the desktop experience without losing their minds.
Agreed. I don't think hosting your email in another country will do much to secure your email. If anything, it will make you a bigger target, since they've claimed their attention is pointed most directly in communications going in and out of the US.
If the NSA was spying on you just now, I bet they heard a faint whooshing sound.
This quote really bothers me:
What you're not seeing is people actually abusing these programs.
On the surface, it sounds like a fair point. To my knowledge, there haven't really been allegations of people digging into these records for specific unethical and abusive purposes. However:
(a) I would question whether the collection and warehousing of this data is, in itself, and abuse.
(b) It's pretty much impossible for us to know whether these programs are being abused, since there is no public oversight.
(c) If there were reports of abuse, I'm not sure we'd know about it, since it's apparently illegal to talk about this program.
All told, I don't feel particularly reassured. Even if there's no malicious abuse of the system, I would bet money that there's some casual abuse going on. As Obama is fond of saying, sunlight is the best disinfectant. If the NSA has done nothing wrong, then they have nothing to hide.
Well it's not as simple as that. If the government were simply not allowed to do anything not specifically explicitly listed in the Constitution, then there wouldn't be a need to list things that they couldn't do. Also, there'd be no real point in having Congress, because no laws would need to be written.
It's true, the Bill of Rights is not supposed to be an exhaustive list of all of a citizen's rights. It's certainly not saying, "Here are the 10 ways that the government is limited, but the government is permitted to do anything else." There's plenty of reason to think that the authors of the Constitution expected us to use our heads and figure out where to draw some of the lines between what the government can or can't do. It's actually pretty absurd to think otherwise. Why else would you have 3 different branches all play a role in creating, interpreting, and executing laws *in addition* to the Constitution? Why have an ability to amend the Constitution? Obviously they expected some level of fluidity and contextual judgment, though we could debate what they expected that level to be.
Not only that, but firing 90% of your sysadmins indicates that either:
A) You were grossly overstaffed to begin with. And I mean *grossly* overstaffed, because 90% of your workforce is simply unnecessary. That's not just, "we're a bit overstaffed, so let's let some people go." That's at the level of, "We're totally incompetent and have no idea what we're doing." Frankly, it would be terrifying ot think that this program is being run by such incompetent people. --or--
B) Once you're done firing people, you're going to be severly understaffed for administering your servers properly. Given that part of the sysadmin's job is to maintain and secure the servers, being severely understaffed would mean that the servers are not being maintained and secured properly, which is also a bit terrifying given the data being collected and stored.
Either way, it's kind of terrifying. Oh, but I guess there's also a 3rd possibility: Maybe both "A" and "B" are true. It wouldn't surprise me.
They really should have added some PC Compatibility for some legacy systems.
Well in my mind, they probably should have picked one direction or another. They should have made it compatible, or they should have made it its own incompatible system, with everything optimized just to run applications written for it. Sometimes when you pick the middle road between satisfying two needs, you end up failing to fulfill either need.
The fourth/fith amendments exist to protect innocent citizens from otherwise accidentally incriminating themselves.
And even more specifically, the fourth and fifth amendment exist to protect innocent citizens from being forced into incriminating themselves by an overreaching government who is trying to silence dissidents.
People frequently overlook the historical context of the Bill of Rights. You have a bunch of people who had just fought a revolution against a government that they believed was oppressive, and they were trying to safeguard themselves against falling under another oppressive government. The Bill of Rights was created specifically for that reason. Essentially, you have a bunch of people who were recently rebels, who want to limit the government's ability to quash a rebellion, silence dissidents, or subvert a popular uprising.
To guide them, they look through their recent history for the tools employed by the power they had just thrown off. The British had limited speech, forbidden ownership of guns, stationed military personnel in people's homes, performed searches without cause, etc. In order to prevent a new oppressive government from using those tools, the authors of the Bill of Rights made them illegal.
So it's not really a defense to say, "This should be ok, because we're only trying to catch dissidents, terrorists, and enemies of the state!" The founding fathers were dissidents, terrorists, and enemies of the state. The Bill of Rights was written to protect exactly those kinds of people.
That is not the same as being prohibited from criticizing the government for having such a process, which clearly he does. Whether it is there in so many words or not, the message is clear. What he's prohibited from talking about are the specifics of what happened.
If all you can legally say is, "Bad things are happening and I don't like it, but I'm not allowed to talk about it," that doesn't count as 'freedom of speech'. It doesn't matter if we can have some kind of general guess as to what's going on or what he doesn't like. He should be permitted to describe *what* he doesn't like so that he can convince others to agree with him.
There is a very great difference between "I oppose FISA and everything to do with it and our government should cease" and "I was issued a FISA warrant for email from XYZ and don't want to comply, and I oppose..." The former is criticism of the government, the latter is releasing specific details of an ongoing investigation AND criticism of the government. Notice that the difference is only the details part, and that the criticism is not prohibited in either case.
Yes, but you're creating a false dichotomy here. He can say, "I oppose FISA" but can't say, "I oppose FISA because they asked me for email records on John Smith pertaining to his travel to Saudi Arabia." But no one would is arguing that he should be able to say the latter. However, he should be able to say, publicly, "I oppose FISA because they came to me and required that I installed a backdoor so that they could query email accounts and collect all data on a specific person. Of course, I won't tell you who they're collecting data on or what the parameters of the search are, but that doesn't matter. The point is, I refuse to install a backdoor that allows the NSA to access any arbitrary email and bypass my encryption scheme."
He should be allowed to level specific criticisms of the government's attack on his business, so long as he doesn't give specific details of who or what they're searching for.
So Snowden has released information about this request that happened after Snowden left a position where he had access to such information? You don't know, you admit it is a guess. Yeah, I'm guessing the same thing.
YES! That's my point. We can only speculate about what's going on, because the government has made it illegal to talk about their secret spy program that collects data on US citizens. The fact that we can only guess is a big part of the problem. The fact that we wouldn't even be able to guess if Snowden hadn't leaked information is another big part of the problem. Although this kind of spying has been going on for years, it is illegal for people who are aware of it to criticize the government about it. The only person who has come out and criticized the government had to take asylum in Russia.
You can't say that it's legal to criticize the government openly when the only person to release specific criticisms, based on knowledge and not guesses, had to flee the country and find asylum in Russia.
I'm sorry, but FISA requests have been part of the Patriot Act for many years.
Speaking for myself, I wasn't aware that the US government held a secret court that issued secret search warrants. I didn't know that the NSA had backdoors into telecommunication provider to monitor everyone's email without a warrant. We still don't really know the limits or details of these programs. We have a pretty good guess that this company was issued a request for *something*, but we don't know what. We don't know how disturbing the request was, or how large an abuse of power it represents, and we can't know because he's not permitted to talk about it.
And I believe that, even if this case is somehow innocuous, it still represents a slippery slope. Why doesn't this enable police departments, or the FBI, or any other government agency to issue a court order barring you from discussing how they conduct business? Could Congress pass a law saying that you're not allowed to talk about how the police conduct investigations, because it inhibits their ability to prevent and prosecute crime?
The best way to win in court is to violate the secret unconstitutional orders and get arrested.
I don't think that's the only option. I think that he can take the government to court for whatever warrant, court order, or threat they've given him. You can sue the government. I think. IANAL.
Well no, there is a prohibition of criticism. If you read his post, he only implies what's going on, and you have to read between the lines. What he's implying is that he can't speak his mind or talk about the issues publicly without facing legal repercussions.
I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot.
Now we can all guess, in terms of recent events, what's going on. The NSA has come to him and asked for access to the emails on his server. The only reason we know about this is because of Snowden, who has had to flee the country for revealing the information. If we did not have the "illegal" leak from Snowden, we would not know what this mail provider was talking about, and he would not be allowed to reveal it to us.
Well that's an interpretation of the 1st Amendment, and a reasonable one given that it doesn't offer exceptions in the text. However, don't have a problem with the exceptions related to slander/libel, or yelling 'fire' in a theater. Of course, I don't even have a problem with the idea that there are national security secrets, and that you could be charged with treason for disclosing certain kinds of information.
However, any decent historian can tell you that the intention of the 1st Amendment was to prevent the government from punishing dissidents for criticizing the government. They've now created a law that says that, if the government asks you to disclose private information in a program that spies on US citizens, you're not allowed to even talk about the issue.
So for example, I could see the government saying, "Here is a warrant for some of the emails that you hold. You are not allowed to disclose what's in those emails, or even the details of who the specific target of the search is, since the target is currently being investigated and we don't want to tip them off." All that might be fair enough. But then they take the extra step, it seems, of saying, "You can't even talk about the fact that we asked you for information, You can't talk about how this process works." That, to me, is the root of the 1st Amendment violation. It means that you can't even complain about the situation without risking prison.
It's because the only rights that the Republican party cares about are (a) the right to property, specifically when it relates to rich people not being taxed; and (b) the right to bear arms. Caring about other rights makes you a dirty communist hippie traitor.
In my mind, disallowing people from criticizing government actions and government policy is a serious violation of the First Amendment. It is exactly what the First Amendment was written to prevent. I hope someone will challenge this issue in court.
You're right, he's just answering questions. And his answers, are snide, petty, passive aggressive, self-serving, and ultimately stupid. This is not a man who is interested in doing good in the world.
It isn't as much that Internet balloons are a bad idea, however the good produced from it isn't worth the cost.
... according to Bill Gates' accountants' speculative judgments and calculations. Without a clear explanation of how you define the amount of "good produced", that judgment isn't worth a whole lot to me.
Oooo... Look at me! I'm a multi-billionaire dilettante! I made all my money screwing over the little guy, engaging in unethical business practices, but now I'm the best person in the world because I gave some money to malaria. That's right, I screwed y'all out of so much money, that after buying my mansions and getting bored being a super-rich asshole, I still had plenty to spend on African diseases!
Oh, some other rich guys also donate to charitable causes? Well, are those charitable causes MUTHERFUKIN MALARIA?! No? Well then I shit on all of their efforts. In fact, the world just grind to a halt right now, and everyone should focus on 2 things:
1) Wiping out malaria, because that's the only problem that matters.
2) Talking about how awesome I am, because I'm donating some of my money to wiping out malaria.
In defense of the idea, the character of 'the Doctor' over the years has been defined by "taking an established character and turning it into something very different." The fun of regeneration is that they get to re-imagine the character, while trying to still capture his 'Doctor-ness'. Also, there's a bit of a problem with doing a spin-off series featuring a female Timelord, in that the Doctor is the only Timelord left.
On the other hand, I have no doubt that they could write around the lack of other Timelords. It's not as though they've been completely consistent over the years, and I'm sure they'll write out the limit on regenerations, too. There are already a few semi-Timelord female characters floating around-- River, Donna, and the Doctor's half-clone (Jenny?).
Personally, though, my feeling is that they shouldn't go through great pains to bring diversity to the character. They should go through possible casting choices, and pick the best one. If one day, they find a black actor or female actor or asian actor who would do a great job, go for it. But don't do a female Doctor as some kind of gimmick.
Well, I hope you don't keep any sensitive/private information on your computer, then. Having it password protected at boot would keep out many casual attempts to get access to your data, but without encryption, it won't keep out anyone who knows what they're doing. Not having a password at all is fine, as long as you don't mind people accessing your data.
I think you need to re-read my post if you think I was "railing against Microsoft".
Well I think part of the problem is that security experts are experts, and they don't understand that if they really want to encourage better security, they need to make it easy for non-experts. It's funny, because you'd think security experts would know this. One of the key things about security is that a great security measure that nobody uses and everyone circumvents is actually a terrible security measure.
Encryption implementations need to be so well designed and foolproof that they're enabled by default. Right now, we don't usually turn on full-drive encryption because it may cause unexpected problems and complications. We don't enable SSL on all of our web servers because it's an annoying and expensive process to get a cert from a CA. We don't enable encryption on email because it requires plugins and complicated setups. We don't use TOR because it's not quite brain-dead simple.
The experts will respond, "But it *is* brain-dead simple. Just download this plugin, drop into the command line and type [insert command here], compile this binary, change this configuration file in /etc. Oh wait, you're on Windows? Sorry, then you need to download these other files. Get GPG v1 because v2 is completely different and doesn't work with the plugins. Then when you get this error, hit 'ignore'..." And all that makes sense to the experts because they're experts, and they understand what's going on. People won't start using encryption en masse until it's so brain-dead simple that they don't even know they're using it.