Not even in countries where the government actually is evil.
Right, because the people in North Korea have a lot of opportunities to say what they think, right? They don't have to theorize about whether their governent is evilly keeping them miserable, because they get to live that reality every day, and get to head off to enormous labor camps where they get to starve to death if they complain. At best.
That's a typical quote you'd not hear anywhere in Europe or Asia
Yes, those silly people in Eastern Europe didn't have a thing to say about their governments before they replaced them with something resembling modern constitutional democracies, right? You don't get as much of it Russia, of course, because we're back to seeing journalists shot down in the street when they make the sort of comments you say nobody makes. And then you have places like Hugo Chavez's increasingly autocratic little totalitarian-minded socialist wonderland, where the people who complain about the government are physically beaten for entering elections, have their newspapers and radio stations seized for questioning things like his new rule-by-fiat powers, etc. And then you've got people jailed and killed in Iran for saying the things you claim nobody says.
So what's your point? That people who like having oppressive governments don't complain about them, and that for some reason you're not hearing a lot from the people living under them who wish they weren't? That's really insightful of you.
We're on the downslope of the fraction of the available hydrocarbons we've even begun to bother retrieving and using, if that's what you mean. Or did you mean to just troll?
Not everything any government could potentially theoretically may want to do is automatically evil
But plenty of things that a lot of governments actually really do are day-in, day-out, routinely evil. It is their chartered, stated purpose to be that way, and they actually are. So, I'm not sure what you think "you stupid Americans" has to do with it, other than you're just part of the generally hateful noise floor.
Have you ever seen the derailment of a normal higher-speed train? 75-ton passenger cars going 250mph have an astounding amount of inertia. They could go hundreds of feet into industrial areas along side the tracks. These areas include large natural gas pipelines, petro-chemical storage areas, spurs with tankers full of chlorine lined up, large office structures, large bridges, and so on. You've also got freight trains loaded with chemicals passing the other direction, with all of that kinetic energy being added to such a collision if you time it right. Think it through.
What makes you think that a train going 250 mph past an industrial site isn't going to be just as tasty a terrorist target as an aircraft about to land in Detroit? You'll end up having your same baggage, security, and profiling issues on those trains as you do getting on an aircraft now.
do you really think that a company would turn down a request to make such a change?
Well, this web site features a non-stop parade of people complaining that companies have shown a willingness to help out with CT matters. If they are legally compelled to, it straightens that issue out. Doesn't mean the people with that power will always make the right call, or be working with what turns out to be good intel, or be people that voters shouldn't replace at their first opportunity.
There are all sorts of squirrely rules along these lines. In my state, if you want your callsign on your vehicle tags, you are also signing up for specific obligations to allow your vehicle to be commandeered during emergencies. Some of those rules are getting seriously outdated, needless to say - most of them pre-dated many other types of commodity communication gear.
And by "we," you mean you and the other people who continue to try to blow up airplanes full of people? Yes, that has definitely ruined the earlier, classical experience of havig a hijacker just take you to Cuba for the day.
So what you're saying is that it's impossible for someone with government power to use any sort of judgement? You do realize that government officials make decisions every day that include things like closing down highways, buildings, power supplies, etc., right? Neve mind, I know you're trolling.
Or they might do it via cell phone, so you should shut down all cell phones too.
You mean, like during the Mumbai attacks, when the guys killing civilians were using cell phones to coordinate what they were doing? Once you find out that's what's in play, do you not see value in being able to direct the carrier to shut down the tower they're using?
The government already has, and has long had the power to sieze vehicles in an emergency. To compell HAM operators to work with them or to shut down. To take over food supplies/transport. To stockpile and control the flow of things like bauxite or fuel. In an emergency, they've got juice. This (internetworking stuff) is an area in which those powers are not codified. Wouldn't you rather it was clearly spelled out, and there were rules that an executive had to follow, including chain of events, documentation, etc? Those things are already true about other emergency powers.
Where do you draw the line between the a large network and the Internet as a whole?
You draw the line exactly where it actually exists: where the people running that large network make peering arrangements to allow traffic to come and go through other networks and carriers. There is no internet. There are a bunch of networks that have very complex agreements allowing traffic to pass between and through them.
And of course, it's worth repeating for the thousandth time on this "kill switch" topic: what the administration wants isn't some button to push, but the legal authority to tell various players (service providers, carriers, software/service operators, etc) that they must immediately honor requests to change what they're doing in an emergency. Say we get hard intel that sometime later that day, someone will be using Twitter or Gmail to issue timing commands to a bunch of people ready to drop off backpack bombs on metro trains in half a dozen large cities around the country. The "kill switch" mechanism doesn't shut down the internet. It allows the counter terror people to ask the administration to use that legal power to get on the phone with Twitter and tell them what needs to happen to prevent such use.
Why make yet another apples v. oranges topic distract from the original bad comparison? Google isn't out there supporting Android installs on ten year old PCs with tens of thousands of peripherals. Of course, you know that.
Google can change its search engine implementation and strategy continuously and overnight. Microsoft can only change Windows in big increments, with lots of concern for backward compatibility.
Well, then it's a good thing for Google that their search engine implementation isn't the selling of an operating system that has to run on a virtually unlimited mix of hardware. You could hardly have picked two more apples/oranges things to compare. In fact, you've pointed out exactly why it's hard to by Microsoft, and exactly why it's never the year of Linux on the desktop. Building an OS that works in a commodity computing world, while also serving complex corporate environments: it's hard. And you have to sell it, and suppport it. Google doesn't have as part of its legacy the need to deal with such scenarios. Google's search strategy doesn't have to deal with the fact that people will still be using IDE ribbon cables, floppy drives, and dial-up serial-connector modems for another decade or so. And there's a reason that people are plenty scared of trusting all of their word processing and spreadsheet eggs to Google's basket.
You're better off looking at MS and Apple - that's a far more appropriate comparison. Apple refuses to support the wide universe that MS does, and charges far more for what they provide, while they're at it. And in the meantime, I can't go to Apple or to Google for full-fledged accounting systems able to run huge and small companies alike, and I can't go to either of them for widely embraced, reasonable priced scaleable database servers, etc. If your mental map of Microsoft doesn't get you past Win 7 (which... works quite well, actually), then you're really misunderstanding the landscape.
There's a computer shop around the corner from me that sells ready-to-go Windows boxes, lean and mean, to regular customers every day. It's not some special secret place that only technies know about.
Private enterprises would never ever sacrifice security to cut costs
Private enterprises make a lot of cars I would never drive on roads that are used by other people or crossed by large animals... and they also make some incredibly safe, well-engineered vehicles. Those two products serve different markets and budgets. The private space flight market isn't aimed at the people who buy subcompact death mobiles, right?
you shouldn't have to do that with an OS that you're paying for
And, happily, you don't. You can buy PCs from any of thousands of vendors (or roll your own) without that experience. The OS is just part of what most people buy from a typical large retailer. If they don't like that experience any more than they like having an activated-for-one-year OnStar system in the car they just bought, they can shop for their computer (and their car) somewhere else. It's called a market, and it does offer more alternatives than you can count.
Oh crap, dirty brown people are getting their hands on technology
Nice race-baiting straw man, there. People worrying about the Iranians and high-end weapons-related tech don't give a crap what color anybody is. It's the cultural world-view of the mysoginistic, retrograde theocratic thugocracy running the country, their vocal and overt support for terrorism, and their stated objective of wiping a country off the map. Who cares about skin pigment? It's what people do that matters. Like jailing and killing political opponents who don't want to be subject the Iranian leadership's beard and haircut police, language restrictions, and all of the other cultural toxicity that makes them so objectionable.
the only reason they don't have the secular government they used to have is because we installed the shah because they weren't doing what we wanted, oops!
Ah. So, our support for the Shah's regime is why the Mullahs rigged the most recent election and continue to beat down the nation's secularists?
If you're feeling threatened by someone, perhaps you should examine why they don't like you
All you have to examine are the actual words that the Mullahs and their proxies speak, out loud, on the record. They do hate western sensibilities (quick! ban the word pizza! make it a crime to be female without cloth on your head! have people killed for being insufficiently Islamic!). The west supports freedom of speech, of association, and of religious practice (including no religious practice). That perspective is intolerable to the crazies in charge of that country, and they are willing to murder civilians in neighboring countries in order to sustain an atmosphere of instability in which their medieval rule-by-ignorance-and-sword can continue to be the biggest influence on their region. Why you think it's a good idea is a mystery.
By which, of course, you mean the editorial staff's strong political leanings and the web site's lefty culture? If that actually becomes more balanced, people who go there for their news aggregation will just go somewhere else. This is just the web site's founder doing what she planned all along, and finally racking up a big chunk of cash after setting out bait for an audience that swears they hate it when anyone makes a big bunch of cash. The irony is pretty great, though.
I'll assume you're not a US citizen, and aren't familiar with the structure of the country's government. It's made of three branches: the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Two are politically elected (so that change can come regularly) and the third is a lifetime appointment, so that politics plays a different role there. The legislature writes laws, and the executive signs off on (and executes) them. The courts weigh in - when asked - on whether those actions are in keeping with constitution. If the constitution is found wanting by enough people, there is a deliberately difficult legislative mechanism by which to amend it.
Just because the writer can't imagine a time before tweeting doesn't mean it's Twitter that provides the right. That is a natural right, and in the US it's protected from government interference by the Constitution. That's not to be confused with use of a network of computer networks being a "right," or using a private company's microblogging service to set up a flash mob with the right to assemble. People managed to speak and assemble long before companies, schools, and government agencies started peering their networks.
How can you say nothing has interfered with these peoples brains?
You're confusing low-level herd/pack behavior that we share to varying degrees with countless other mammals... with the EM effects of a phone that's sitting on the shelf in a retail store while you wait in line for it?
Are you really this uninformed, filled with hate, bitter, and angry at the world, or do you just act that way because you think you're scoring some sort of points? Regardless, read up on paid speaking engagements, paid appearances, etc. If you really think that broadcast networks are the only ones who pay political activists and personalities to say what they say, then you're forming a world view based on a huge helping of deliberate ignorance.
Slashdot Mirror
Not even in countries where the government actually is evil.
Right, because the people in North Korea have a lot of opportunities to say what they think, right? They don't have to theorize about whether their governent is evilly keeping them miserable, because they get to live that reality every day, and get to head off to enormous labor camps where they get to starve to death if they complain. At best.
That's a typical quote you'd not hear anywhere in Europe or Asia
Yes, those silly people in Eastern Europe didn't have a thing to say about their governments before they replaced them with something resembling modern constitutional democracies, right? You don't get as much of it Russia, of course, because we're back to seeing journalists shot down in the street when they make the sort of comments you say nobody makes. And then you have places like Hugo Chavez's increasingly autocratic little totalitarian-minded socialist wonderland, where the people who complain about the government are physically beaten for entering elections, have their newspapers and radio stations seized for questioning things like his new rule-by-fiat powers, etc. And then you've got people jailed and killed in Iran for saying the things you claim nobody says.
So what's your point? That people who like having oppressive governments don't complain about them, and that for some reason you're not hearing a lot from the people living under them who wish they weren't? That's really insightful of you.
TEACH THEM HOW TO READ at the level they are supposed to be at
*you have been killed by irony*
Try Again? [y/n]
We're on the down-slope now.
We're on the downslope of the fraction of the available hydrocarbons we've even begun to bother retrieving and using, if that's what you mean. Or did you mean to just troll?
Not everything any government could potentially theoretically may want to do is automatically evil
But plenty of things that a lot of governments actually really do are day-in, day-out, routinely evil. It is their chartered, stated purpose to be that way, and they actually are. So, I'm not sure what you think "you stupid Americans" has to do with it, other than you're just part of the generally hateful noise floor.
Have you ever seen the derailment of a normal higher-speed train? 75-ton passenger cars going 250mph have an astounding amount of inertia. They could go hundreds of feet into industrial areas along side the tracks. These areas include large natural gas pipelines, petro-chemical storage areas, spurs with tankers full of chlorine lined up, large office structures, large bridges, and so on. You've also got freight trains loaded with chemicals passing the other direction, with all of that kinetic energy being added to such a collision if you time it right. Think it through.
What makes you think that a train going 250 mph past an industrial site isn't going to be just as tasty a terrorist target as an aircraft about to land in Detroit? You'll end up having your same baggage, security, and profiling issues on those trains as you do getting on an aircraft now.
do you really think that a company would turn down a request to make such a change?
Well, this web site features a non-stop parade of people complaining that companies have shown a willingness to help out with CT matters. If they are legally compelled to, it straightens that issue out. Doesn't mean the people with that power will always make the right call, or be working with what turns out to be good intel, or be people that voters shouldn't replace at their first opportunity.
There are all sorts of squirrely rules along these lines. In my state, if you want your callsign on your vehicle tags, you are also signing up for specific obligations to allow your vehicle to be commandeered during emergencies. Some of those rules are getting seriously outdated, needless to say - most of them pre-dated many other types of commodity communication gear.
We've already ruined air travel
And by "we," you mean you and the other people who continue to try to blow up airplanes full of people? Yes, that has definitely ruined the earlier, classical experience of havig a hijacker just take you to Cuba for the day.
So what you're saying is that it's impossible for someone with government power to use any sort of judgement? You do realize that government officials make decisions every day that include things like closing down highways, buildings, power supplies, etc., right? Neve mind, I know you're trolling.
Or they might do it via cell phone, so you should shut down all cell phones too.
You mean, like during the Mumbai attacks, when the guys killing civilians were using cell phones to coordinate what they were doing? Once you find out that's what's in play, do you not see value in being able to direct the carrier to shut down the tower they're using?
The government already has, and has long had the power to sieze vehicles in an emergency. To compell HAM operators to work with them or to shut down. To take over food supplies/transport. To stockpile and control the flow of things like bauxite or fuel. In an emergency, they've got juice. This (internetworking stuff) is an area in which those powers are not codified. Wouldn't you rather it was clearly spelled out, and there were rules that an executive had to follow, including chain of events, documentation, etc? Those things are already true about other emergency powers.
Where do you draw the line between the a large network and the Internet as a whole?
You draw the line exactly where it actually exists: where the people running that large network make peering arrangements to allow traffic to come and go through other networks and carriers. There is no internet. There are a bunch of networks that have very complex agreements allowing traffic to pass between and through them.
And of course, it's worth repeating for the thousandth time on this "kill switch" topic: what the administration wants isn't some button to push, but the legal authority to tell various players (service providers, carriers, software/service operators, etc) that they must immediately honor requests to change what they're doing in an emergency. Say we get hard intel that sometime later that day, someone will be using Twitter or Gmail to issue timing commands to a bunch of people ready to drop off backpack bombs on metro trains in half a dozen large cities around the country. The "kill switch" mechanism doesn't shut down the internet. It allows the counter terror people to ask the administration to use that legal power to get on the phone with Twitter and tell them what needs to happen to prevent such use.
pretending Android doesn't exist
Why make yet another apples v. oranges topic distract from the original bad comparison? Google isn't out there supporting Android installs on ten year old PCs with tens of thousands of peripherals. Of course, you know that.
Google can change its search engine implementation and strategy continuously and overnight. Microsoft can only change Windows in big increments, with lots of concern for backward compatibility.
Well, then it's a good thing for Google that their search engine implementation isn't the selling of an operating system that has to run on a virtually unlimited mix of hardware. You could hardly have picked two more apples/oranges things to compare. In fact, you've pointed out exactly why it's hard to by Microsoft, and exactly why it's never the year of Linux on the desktop. Building an OS that works in a commodity computing world, while also serving complex corporate environments: it's hard. And you have to sell it, and suppport it. Google doesn't have as part of its legacy the need to deal with such scenarios. Google's search strategy doesn't have to deal with the fact that people will still be using IDE ribbon cables, floppy drives, and dial-up serial-connector modems for another decade or so. And there's a reason that people are plenty scared of trusting all of their word processing and spreadsheet eggs to Google's basket.
... works quite well, actually), then you're really misunderstanding the landscape.
You're better off looking at MS and Apple - that's a far more appropriate comparison. Apple refuses to support the wide universe that MS does, and charges far more for what they provide, while they're at it. And in the meantime, I can't go to Apple or to Google for full-fledged accounting systems able to run huge and small companies alike, and I can't go to either of them for widely embraced, reasonable priced scaleable database servers, etc. If your mental map of Microsoft doesn't get you past Win 7 (which
There's a computer shop around the corner from me that sells ready-to-go Windows boxes, lean and mean, to regular customers every day. It's not some special secret place that only technies know about.
Private enterprises would never ever sacrifice security to cut costs
Private enterprises make a lot of cars I would never drive on roads that are used by other people or crossed by large animals ... and they also make some incredibly safe, well-engineered vehicles. Those two products serve different markets and budgets. The private space flight market isn't aimed at the people who buy subcompact death mobiles, right?
you shouldn't have to do that with an OS that you're paying for
And, happily, you don't. You can buy PCs from any of thousands of vendors (or roll your own) without that experience. The OS is just part of what most people buy from a typical large retailer. If they don't like that experience any more than they like having an activated-for-one-year OnStar system in the car they just bought, they can shop for their computer (and their car) somewhere else. It's called a market, and it does offer more alternatives than you can count.
Oh crap, dirty brown people are getting their hands on technology
Nice race-baiting straw man, there. People worrying about the Iranians and high-end weapons-related tech don't give a crap what color anybody is. It's the cultural world-view of the mysoginistic, retrograde theocratic thugocracy running the country, their vocal and overt support for terrorism, and their stated objective of wiping a country off the map. Who cares about skin pigment? It's what people do that matters. Like jailing and killing political opponents who don't want to be subject the Iranian leadership's beard and haircut police, language restrictions, and all of the other cultural toxicity that makes them so objectionable.
the only reason they don't have the secular government they used to have is because we installed the shah because they weren't doing what we wanted, oops!
Ah. So, our support for the Shah's regime is why the Mullahs rigged the most recent election and continue to beat down the nation's secularists?
If you're feeling threatened by someone, perhaps you should examine why they don't like you
All you have to examine are the actual words that the Mullahs and their proxies speak, out loud, on the record. They do hate western sensibilities (quick! ban the word pizza! make it a crime to be female without cloth on your head! have people killed for being insufficiently Islamic!). The west supports freedom of speech, of association, and of religious practice (including no religious practice). That perspective is intolerable to the crazies in charge of that country, and they are willing to murder civilians in neighboring countries in order to sustain an atmosphere of instability in which their medieval rule-by-ignorance-and-sword can continue to be the biggest influence on their region. Why you think it's a good idea is a mystery.
independence of the HP editorial staff
By which, of course, you mean the editorial staff's strong political leanings and the web site's lefty culture? If that actually becomes more balanced, people who go there for their news aggregation will just go somewhere else. This is just the web site's founder doing what she planned all along, and finally racking up a big chunk of cash after setting out bait for an audience that swears they hate it when anyone makes a big bunch of cash. The irony is pretty great, though.
So, who's actually enforcing the constitution?
I'll assume you're not a US citizen, and aren't familiar with the structure of the country's government. It's made of three branches: the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Two are politically elected (so that change can come regularly) and the third is a lifetime appointment, so that politics plays a different role there. The legislature writes laws, and the executive signs off on (and executes) them. The courts weigh in - when asked - on whether those actions are in keeping with constitution. If the constitution is found wanting by enough people, there is a deliberately difficult legislative mechanism by which to amend it.
people are calling net neutrality a government regulation
If it's enforced by the government, that's exactly what it is.
Just because the writer can't imagine a time before tweeting doesn't mean it's Twitter that provides the right. That is a natural right, and in the US it's protected from government interference by the Constitution. That's not to be confused with use of a network of computer networks being a "right," or using a private company's microblogging service to set up a flash mob with the right to assemble. People managed to speak and assemble long before companies, schools, and government agencies started peering their networks.
There's an app for that.
How can you say nothing has interfered with these peoples brains?
You're confusing low-level herd/pack behavior that we share to varying degrees with countless other mammals ... with the EM effects of a phone that's sitting on the shelf in a retail store while you wait in line for it?
Are you really this uninformed, filled with hate, bitter, and angry at the world, or do you just act that way because you think you're scoring some sort of points? Regardless, read up on paid speaking engagements, paid appearances, etc. If you really think that broadcast networks are the only ones who pay political activists and personalities to say what they say, then you're forming a world view based on a huge helping of deliberate ignorance.