Seriously, that's not funny. Maybe if their practices weren't so predatory then we wouldn't have to donate so much to charity because the original companies would still be around...
So, let's see here... the Gates foundation does things like fix up millions of kids with innoculations they wouldn't otherwise get, bringsd truckloads of networking infrastructure to places like New Orleans when the local government doesn't have a chance of procuring it on their own that fast, provides millions for scholarships, and so on. Are you actually suggesting that if Netscape had managed to make a real go at being a stand-alone business, or if BeOS had thrived, that there wouldn't be no place for the billions in philanthropy that Gates is doing?
Are are you certain that part of Netscape's plans included clinics in Africa? Or that despite Novell being largely annoying in so many ways, they would have somehow also gotten into fund raising if they'd pursuaded more people to stick with their NOS? You're trying to set up a false dichotomy just because you like demonizing Bill.
What delicious irony! It's still, theoretically, a communist country: the biggest, most "fair" union of them all! Everyone in China is in the union, and it's a worker's paradise. No? Well, it's never that socialism is bad, of course, only that it's not being used thoroughly enough, on enough people, especially those that have some crazy notion about better-run factories/business units deserving rewards for being... better (how counter-revolutionary!). The PRC must be slipping if things are less than paradisical for - ahem - some of their workers.
Condoleeza Rice (for a high profile exmple) has been advising presidential decisions for 20 years
Actually, I'd say you've just made my point for me. If her influence was that substantial, I doubt that her idealogical opponents would have been in the White House for 8 years out of those 20.
Also "theocratic" would be maybe stretching it but the US for example has seen a strong resurgence in fundamentalist Christian philosophy influencing everything from presidential opinion to education. Not as extreme in some ways as fundamentalist muslim countries but nevertheless influential.
I agree that "theocratic" is stretching it. Personally I can't stand the fundy-types. But their resurgence is, I think, a lot noisier than substantial. And the pendulum (especially on that fringier side of things, both for the right-wing crazies and the left-wing ones) does swing back and forth, pushing around the more functional moderate middle that actually does things.
Maybe it's because as the world turns increasingly to s h i t, people develop a imaturity complex derived from the "laugh" half of the proverbial "laugh or cry" syndrome.
I think maybe you've got it backwards. By historical standards, life is better, for more people, than it ever has been. For most westerners, we live in the lap of luxury, doing relatively little back breaking work, cut down ever less often by capricious diseases, and with a standard of living that would make our ancestors blush. It's precisely because we have it so easy that we're still experiencing the world the way that a child does (with the hard stuff handled by your parents, you can just "be a child" and not sweat stuff). So, when a little bit of adversity comes along, it feels not unlike that first round or two of angst that clobbers so many teenagers ("It's, like, so not fair!").
Dealing with some adversity personally is one of the things that brings on a mature, rational, balanced outlook. Despite some obvious exceptions, I think that very trying participation in sports, or some truly rough-and-ready outdoorsy stuff, or even a short stint in something like military service tends to produce much better-rounded people than simply shifting from couch to couch in front of an increasingly sophisticated variety of game consoles. Yes, horrific trauma is an exception, and the results from that stress are not what I'm talking about. Although, a lot of young people today consider not having a new smart phone at least once a year to be true deprivation.
The "I don't know whether to laugh or cry" symptom is, I think, actually literally true. People without experience in certain trying circumstances literally don't know how to process the low-level stuff they're feeling in the context of their rather cushy lives. I've been pretty convinced for a while now that most of the professional people I know (like techies) don't really grow up (if at all) until they're in their late 30's - usually it takes things like death in the family, a couple of layoffs... the modern equivalent of the bad stuff that used to happen continually to people from a very young age, and built the mental toughness required for better perspective on what is, and is not, a hard life.
Oil does not vote. Oil does not elect representatives. There is nothing noble about going to war for oil. Therefore, saying that the war was for oil cannot be "craven".
Oh just quit it. It's not about the oil, per se, and you know it. It's about the fact that the oil is the basis for the local economy, and an opportunity for the conrolling local government to pursue their agenda with that revenue. Saddam used it to build palaces and weapons programs, and keep the people from his own village brutally in power. You don't fight for the oil, you fight to make sure that the people generating revenue from the oil don't use it in the way that Saddam did, or that the A-Q types regularly proclaim that they want to use it (global caliphate, blah blah) and actually do use it - like pumping resources into further Islamifying the Sudan, etc.
The blood of all those kurds that saddam gassed with american weapons is on your hands, and the rest of the world is not going to simply forget this.
So, let's get this straight: you're unhappy that the US government, after putting together a coalition to remove Saddam from Kuwait, couldn't continue to get wider UN support for more intervention in Iraq. Big mistake, not doing things more unilaterlly, and just taking him out entirely at the time. So, when the US does do the right thing (now), regardless of the pressure from many corners to just let Iraq stew, you don't like that, either?
There's only one type of person who uses the phrase "Islamo-fascism" and it ain't Democrats or Libertarians or Greens... far Right-wing nuts
There's only one kind of person that thinks the entire landscape of political perspective is divided up into those four groups. I love the irony of your relying on party-talking-point-fueled-labels attempt to describe someone as being some sort of specific partisan.
Iran is a Theocracy. Iraq was Fascist. They were at WAR with each other.
And I suppose your next proposition will be that the war was over the finer points of the one political system vs. the other? It was a witch's brew of tribalism, cultural sectarianism, territorialism, and cold war proxyism. And the term "islamo-fascism" is completely accurate, in that nicely sums up the toxic mix of backwards religious extremism, totalitarianism, and faux-populism that characterizes movements like the Taliban.
I bet the US government checks up on you before any European government does.
Ah, so it's not about whether the EU's entities do exactly the same thing, just whether or not they're as efficient about it.
murder of innocent human beings is the absolute worst evil that can ever be committed, far beyond any chance of justification
Then I'm glad you're on board with the military action that removed from power a man that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of his own people and bulldozed them into mass graves, and caused millions to be killed in his war with Iran. You can't have it both ways: either you think murder is evil, and stop it, or you let it continue. When you are dealing with cowards that put innocent civilians in front of themselves as human shields, you either have to face that dilema and act, or walk away, tolerating the very evil you say is the most intolerable. Pick one.
hmmm... ""medieval-minded theocratic crazies""....careful how you bandy round a phrase like that... some might argue that somes up the current management of the USA quite nicely:-)
Happily, the US is entirely built around the ability to regularly shift and change the people who deal with daily policies, budgets, etc. That's exactly the difference between (most of) the west and what the people we're talking about want for the world.
When you are talking about making deals: let's make the deal that the Americans keep their paws out of countries not in their jurisdiction.
Whew! It's a good thing that the UN issued so many resolutions about Saddam, then, making jurisdiction a non-issue.
That they don't declare war based on fraudulous claims
Which ones? I suppose you think that the Taliban wasn't sheltering the organization that killed thousands of our citizens? Or that Saddam's invasion of Kuwait wasn't a matter for other countries to worry about? You may also want to lecture the French, say, about Africa.
That they don't torture people and don't keep them detained without indictment.
Happily, torture's not a viable or sanctioned policy. But then, I don't consider keeping people like Kalid Sheik Mohammed uncomfortable until he starts singing like a bird to be torture, either. I do think that some reservist idiot who thinks it's funny to be a parody of an evil prison guard should go to jail himself... which is exactly what happened.
As for indictments: those don't really apply to foreign nationals caught shooting at US soldiers or planting bombs, etc., in a combat zone overseas. But since those people aren't uniformed military, they don't conveniently fall into the tradional POW status, either. So, they can't be released (since they tend to show right back up tryin to kill people again), and that calls for a sort of handling that has little precedent. The ball is currently in the hands of the US Supreme Court.
That they don't interfere with the religous matters of other people
You mean the sort of religious matters that Al Queda specifically cites as their reason for attacking western targets? How can we leave idealogy out of the conversation when people who kill kids in restaurants or blow up train stations expressly cite their idealogy as the reason they do it?
That they don't stamp their own flawed ideas about business moral upon others.
Well, that's easy. Don't take US business if you don't like US business. Don't sell goods for US cash, and don't offer up people for US employment. And don't spend money on US goods, entertainment, or other services. That makes the problem go away, right?
I always love that response: "We didn't find WMD's? Well then, he must have moved them." That's the perfect bulletproof argument.
Except, we don't have to make that argument, the facts make that argument. All Saddam had to do was demonstrate what he did with all of the stockpiles that we know where there because the UN inspectors saw them and recorded them. The biggest song and dance that Saddam went into wasn't about whether he had them, it was about where they went since he couldn't/wouldn't show sites where they had been destroyed, and couldn't even be bothered to fake up decent forged records about the process of destroying them (mind you, this in a regime that was fastidious about record keeping, including fantastic lists of weapons stashes, body counts, etc). Nope: it's a question of what became of large piles of VX, sarin, and other really nasty stuff. It's not sitting around anywhere obvious (yet, anyway), he wouldn't say how or whether he destroyed it, and we have all sorts of evidence of years and years of two-way weapons commerce with Syria. It's not like this is a mystery in broad terms, just at the serial-number and truckload level. But even so, some pieces of the stash are still turning up, or were some time back, and are just now being talked about again.
The sad thing is, you actually believe all of that. Please try to watch something else besides Fox News.
Why bother watching Fox? Better perhaps to take advantage of the BBC's reporting. Take a moment and any of their coverage. It's hard not to notice the actual facts of chemical weapon use. Which, of course, rather requires the existence of the same. Saddam's years-long campaign of obfuscation revolved almost entirely around hiding the ultimate disposition of such weapons, and the (then) ongoing, parallel work in missile development and manufacturing.
The US is in Iraq for one thing, and one thing only. Oil.
Right, there's no interest at all in avoiding another Taliban-like haven for government-sponsored terrorism, as is found in Iran. That sort of retrograde, destabilizing influence on the entire middle east certainly does impact oil flow (for the entire world, in case you're not paying attention), and allowing it to thrive is unacceptable on a lot of levels, not just as it relates to oil. And before you start mentioning Saddam as some sort of not-so-bad alternative to the extremist jihaddi types, remember that he was busy shipping (along with press releases!) cash to organizations like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and even to individual families of suicide bombers. To say nothing of lobbing scud missles across borders, trying to annex Kuwait, and so on. "For oil" is a tidy bit of sophistry, though, that must feel convenient. But the real issue with the oil is that it lies in a place where its value is being sought by medieval-minded theocratic crazies that use that single source of revenue to keep places like Iran running backwards from history. Putting those oil reserves in the hands of constitutional democracies is certainly acting "for the oil," but not in the way you so cravenly describe. That's like saying that when the US marched into Germany and liberated the concentration camps, that it was for the German beer.
You americans can do whatever the fuck you want to your own citizens.
But please keep us europeans out of it.
Well then, how about we make a deal? You keep your universities and other institutions from being petri dishes full of festering militant Islamo-fascism that occasionally ships people like Mohammad Atta (who spent his time in Europe organizing, recruiting, meeting, and arranging finances in advance of killing several thousand US citizens and no small number or Europeans) right through your own financial and legal system and straight over here, or back into the frey of proto-democracies in the middle east. You obviously don't care if operators like that kill hundreds of Spaniards, so perhaps they're not European enough for you.
Anyway, you stop that (from impacting US citizens), and stop being a haven for the very financial transactions that power that sort of thing, and then there's nothing to watch for. Out of curiosity, and do you really think the international banking operations in the EU don't monitor and report to your own law enforcement, intel, and counter-terrorism agencies on international money transfers, especially to and from known terrorist supporters? Are you that naive? No, I didn't think so. You're just grinding the usual blunt, directionless, anti-American axe. How about we transfer $10k back and forth between us, and you can speculate on whether or not your own government will know it happened, and attempt to correlate that transaction against all of your credit card purchases and travel?
take our word for it, we know Saddam has chemical weapons
Why take the US's word for it? Take the gassed villages' word for it. Or take the UN inspectors' word for it, since they saw, and in some cases partly demolished enormous stockpiles. Or, you could consider the 500 sarin and mustard gas shells recently disclosed. Whether or not Saddam had (and used) such weapons was never in any doubt, by the US, the UN, or anyone else. It's what he did with them that remains hard to hammer out, and that's what he was spending so much time and energy trying to hide from everyone, despite signing an agreement allowing full inspection. So, we found some, continue to find more, and know that truckloads of that stuff went off to Syria when he knew his days in charge were numbered. You know all of this, though, but you're still reciting the mantra because you think it helps you, rhetorically. It doesn't.
How do you suppose we track and clamp down on the international flow of cash between and for people like A-Q? By... tracking it. How do you think that bombers from Indonesia to Madrid to the US get their operating funds from the deeper pockets that provide it? Carrier pigeon?
Just because backers tend to be religious does not by itself make it wrong
True, that isn't what makes it wrong. It's inherent wrongness makes it wrong...
If a Darwin or SETI cult formed, would evolution or SETI's hypothesis grow less likely?
...just like the inherent reasonableness of SETI's tests, or the demonstrable validity of Darwin's observations don't become wrong, even if someone less rational embraces them for the wrong reasons.
is about the end user, who damn well shouldn't be forced to accept a mysterious black-box product
Like airplane engines, specialized medical ceramics, and secret-for-decades French perfume recipes? I mean, who knows what's in that stuff? Or, for that matter, the Alfredo recipe at a restaurant that knows it does it better than anyone else and has the customers to prove it. Should your law require them to divulge their trade secrets just in case someone is worried about how they handle the specific ingredients, relative to some vague sense that they'll feel safer if they know everything?
Do you really think that consumers will be better served when an entire new generation of lawyers, bureaucrats, escrow workers and other non-productive people must have their costs tacked onto everything you purchase or make? Your model reduces competition by making innovation pointless in a competitive market, foists a huge bureaucracy and court system even further onto every industry and business practice, and will still fail to prevent buggy code from being produced (just as F/OSS scrutiny fails to do so now).
Google isn't providing the backend software to anybody, so this doesn't apply to them.
So, the software that I use in conjunction with my WiFi transciever does count, but the locally-installed Google software on my desktop doesn't? How about the Google hardware appliance that's running enterprise search in my datacenter? Their software sure as hell is being "provided," and they're sure as hell not going to let all of their competition see their code and erode their competitive edge in those areas.
They have patents and copyrights; they need nothing more unless they are trying to hide something evil.
But you're saying they also need access to their competition's source code and trade secrets. I don't think they do.
You want protection? You're supposed to get a patent.
And indeed, that's just what people do. They patent their general method or approach, in varying degrees of specificity. That doesn't mean that have to expose the minute details of their algorithms - sort of like Google patents their search engine, and talks about the types of things they take into account when they score content... but they don't disclose the specific details of how they do that, because that would be giving away what they've invested millions (or in their case, billions) in producing. Why let AltaVista or MSN play catch up and duplicate search worthiness without having to invest all of that same work? Exposing their code erodes competition and innovation.
Time "obscuring the derivitive nature of what you're producing" is wasted time.
If you've just ripped off someone who spent years designing and coding something, and all you have to do is invest a little time in hiding the derivitive nature of what you're now also producing, that's not time wasted - it's a shortcut to producing something that's just as good, but which you can sell for less because you didn't have to invest in inventing it. See China, for an example of an entire economy that works largely that way. Companies hide their trade secrets (and code) exactly because there are lazy, unethical people out there more than willing to make a parasitic living off of other people's innovations, right down to changing the spelling on variable names.
In any case, it's the overall well-being of society that counts
At whose expense? Aren't the people who invest all of that time and money in producing an innovative product part of society? Should they just be slaves to everyone else? If you promote that approach, you'll shut down high-risk, big-ticket projects faster than by any other means.
P.S., Try not to sugar-coat it so much there, man. People may not get that you actually have some disdain for the GP's take on things.
P.P.S. Heh. Thank you for brightening my day. I was starting to get all mopey, reading about the 500 sarin and mustard gas shells they turned up in Iraq. First, another article about global warming that points the finger directly at my Chevy, and now WMD stashes where none could possibly exist... why, the whole journalistic world's gone crazy!
Except your analogy is stupid, because it compares something that is legal, sending IR signals to a TV to change the channel, with something that is explicitly illegal, accessing a computer network after having your authorization revoked.
Holey moley! I'm trying to point out the simple difference between passively strolling by thing (like a TV in a window), and actively trying to make USE of something, especially when it requires two-way interaction to be useful. I didn't bring up the TV-in-the-window analogy, I'm responding to it with a reminder that this clown was NOT just passively "receiving a transmission," etc.
I challenge you to find a law where that actually is illegal.
You're missing the point. The law doesn't have to be that specific about anyone who is making a public nuisance of themselves, disrupting a private business's operations, loitering, or doing any of a number of other things that are arrest-worthy. I'm making the distinction between passively seeing a TV through a window, and (knowing it's contrary to custom, reasonableness, and the spoken wishes of the business) actively making interactive use of the same. I don't have to be pedantic to point that out, but anyone trying to defend their own theft of service habits by trying to paint this guy as some sit-on-the-street-surfing-for-three-months "victim" does have to be. At best.
The current market for computer hardware and software is neither fair nor free
Well, if by "unfair" or "not free" you mean, "you have to be an actual business able to raise real capital and invest millions in order to produce a product anybody will actually want," then, sure. But anyone is free to propose a product and seek venture capital, or spend money they've made elsewhere getting into that market. And it's "fair" in the sense that the highly volatile consumer marketplace lurches, week to week, from one maker to the next in rapid pursuit of whichever specs they most like, or price they're willing to spend. The competition is ruthless, and price/performance sweet spots always win. That's as fair as it gets, and we all get cool stuff, some of which is sometimes buggy if we're too rabid to hold off for a few months buying it while the maker hashes out some weak spots.
I think the test is something like "could a sufficiently competent programmer use the information presented to write a program for a computer enabling the use of all the device's features?"
And if the maker of a product (and its drivers) fails that test, or doesn't provide enough documentation for the product's users to put the device adequately to work... the product will simply fail to compare to those produced by other people. It happens all the time... the more approachable, functional products sell better, and put pressure on everyone else to compete. People who focus only on price get exactly what they deserve (in computer hardware, hamburger quality, underwear longevity, etc).
Sure there have been a few high-profile cases of driver troubles... [cites Mandriva, etc]... but these are the exception rather than the rule.
And wouldn't you say that the (unexploited) issue being discussed here is exactly that: the exception? Untold millions of WiFi devices are in use, with the risks/security well understood in general terms. This is an exception, and the driver people will no doubt be scrambling to patch it.
I mean the source is publicly available, but only the copyright holder has the right to modify it or produce derived works (such as binaries) from it. It's read-only source code
And the reason this isn't common is because you can still save yourself millions of dollars of R&D and enter a market with lower overhead than your competition by just learning everything they know from their code, and then just spending your (much shorter) time obscuring the derivitive nature of what you're producing. Making trade secrets "read-only" doesn't protect their value to the people that invested millions producing them.
there is no negotiation and because the balance of power is so slanted
The balance of power is slanted, entirely, towards the person with his hand on his wallet looking at his choice of dozen different WiFi products. This is exactly the same as looking at desk lamps or microwave ovens... and the private sector solved some of those problems by evolving entities like Underwriters Laboritories. That "UL" mark is certainly a better indication that the microwave won't burn your house down than is most any advertising slogan from the manufacturer.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, that's not funny. Maybe if their practices weren't so predatory then we wouldn't have to donate so much to charity because the original companies would still be around...
So, let's see here... the Gates foundation does things like fix up millions of kids with innoculations they wouldn't otherwise get, bringsd truckloads of networking infrastructure to places like New Orleans when the local government doesn't have a chance of procuring it on their own that fast, provides millions for scholarships, and so on. Are you actually suggesting that if Netscape had managed to make a real go at being a stand-alone business, or if BeOS had thrived, that there wouldn't be no place for the billions in philanthropy that Gates is doing?
Are are you certain that part of Netscape's plans included clinics in Africa? Or that despite Novell being largely annoying in so many ways, they would have somehow also gotten into fund raising if they'd pursuaded more people to stick with their NOS? You're trying to set up a false dichotomy just because you like demonizing Bill.
Sadly, China has no unions
What delicious irony! It's still, theoretically, a communist country: the biggest, most "fair" union of them all! Everyone in China is in the union, and it's a worker's paradise. No? Well, it's never that socialism is bad, of course, only that it's not being used thoroughly enough, on enough people, especially those that have some crazy notion about better-run factories/business units deserving rewards for being... better (how counter-revolutionary!). The PRC must be slipping if things are less than paradisical for - ahem - some of their workers.
Condoleeza Rice (for a high profile exmple) has been advising presidential decisions for 20 years
Actually, I'd say you've just made my point for me. If her influence was that substantial, I doubt that her idealogical opponents would have been in the White House for 8 years out of those 20.
Also "theocratic" would be maybe stretching it but the US for example has seen a strong resurgence in fundamentalist Christian philosophy influencing everything from presidential opinion to education. Not as extreme in some ways as fundamentalist muslim countries but nevertheless influential.
I agree that "theocratic" is stretching it. Personally I can't stand the fundy-types. But their resurgence is, I think, a lot noisier than substantial. And the pendulum (especially on that fringier side of things, both for the right-wing crazies and the left-wing ones) does swing back and forth, pushing around the more functional moderate middle that actually does things.
Maybe it's because as the world turns increasingly to s h i t, people develop a imaturity complex derived from the "laugh" half of the proverbial "laugh or cry" syndrome.
... the modern equivalent of the bad stuff that used to happen continually to people from a very young age, and built the mental toughness required for better perspective on what is, and is not, a hard life.
I think maybe you've got it backwards. By historical standards, life is better, for more people, than it ever has been. For most westerners, we live in the lap of luxury, doing relatively little back breaking work, cut down ever less often by capricious diseases, and with a standard of living that would make our ancestors blush. It's precisely because we have it so easy that we're still experiencing the world the way that a child does (with the hard stuff handled by your parents, you can just "be a child" and not sweat stuff). So, when a little bit of adversity comes along, it feels not unlike that first round or two of angst that clobbers so many teenagers ("It's, like, so not fair!").
Dealing with some adversity personally is one of the things that brings on a mature, rational, balanced outlook. Despite some obvious exceptions, I think that very trying participation in sports, or some truly rough-and-ready outdoorsy stuff, or even a short stint in something like military service tends to produce much better-rounded people than simply shifting from couch to couch in front of an increasingly sophisticated variety of game consoles. Yes, horrific trauma is an exception, and the results from that stress are not what I'm talking about. Although, a lot of young people today consider not having a new smart phone at least once a year to be true deprivation.
The "I don't know whether to laugh or cry" symptom is, I think, actually literally true. People without experience in certain trying circumstances literally don't know how to process the low-level stuff they're feeling in the context of their rather cushy lives. I've been pretty convinced for a while now that most of the professional people I know (like techies) don't really grow up (if at all) until they're in their late 30's - usually it takes things like death in the family, a couple of layoffs
Brain cells are one of the places we know become feeling and even conscious beings. So... is it ethical for us to set them in products?
Well, if you're not actually putting them in a framework that, by its very nature, can possibly develop into an actual brain... then, yes, certainly.
Oil does not vote. Oil does not elect representatives. There is nothing noble about going to war for oil. Therefore, saying that the war was for oil cannot be "craven".
Oh just quit it. It's not about the oil, per se, and you know it. It's about the fact that the oil is the basis for the local economy, and an opportunity for the conrolling local government to pursue their agenda with that revenue. Saddam used it to build palaces and weapons programs, and keep the people from his own village brutally in power. You don't fight for the oil, you fight to make sure that the people generating revenue from the oil don't use it in the way that Saddam did, or that the A-Q types regularly proclaim that they want to use it (global caliphate, blah blah) and actually do use it - like pumping resources into further Islamifying the Sudan, etc.
The blood of all those kurds that saddam gassed with american weapons is on your hands, and the rest of the world is not going to simply forget this.
So, let's get this straight: you're unhappy that the US government, after putting together a coalition to remove Saddam from Kuwait, couldn't continue to get wider UN support for more intervention in Iraq. Big mistake, not doing things more unilaterlly, and just taking him out entirely at the time. So, when the US does do the right thing (now), regardless of the pressure from many corners to just let Iraq stew, you don't like that, either?
There's only one type of person who uses the phrase "Islamo-fascism" and it ain't Democrats or Libertarians or Greens ... far Right-wing nuts
There's only one kind of person that thinks the entire landscape of political perspective is divided up into those four groups. I love the irony of your relying on party-talking-point-fueled-labels attempt to describe someone as being some sort of specific partisan.
Iran is a Theocracy. Iraq was Fascist. They were at WAR with each other.
And I suppose your next proposition will be that the war was over the finer points of the one political system vs. the other? It was a witch's brew of tribalism, cultural sectarianism, territorialism, and cold war proxyism. And the term "islamo-fascism" is completely accurate, in that nicely sums up the toxic mix of backwards religious extremism, totalitarianism, and faux-populism that characterizes movements like the Taliban.
I bet the US government checks up on you before any European government does.
Ah, so it's not about whether the EU's entities do exactly the same thing, just whether or not they're as efficient about it.
murder of innocent human beings is the absolute worst evil that can ever be committed, far beyond any chance of justification
Then I'm glad you're on board with the military action that removed from power a man that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of his own people and bulldozed them into mass graves, and caused millions to be killed in his war with Iran. You can't have it both ways: either you think murder is evil, and stop it, or you let it continue. When you are dealing with cowards that put innocent civilians in front of themselves as human shields, you either have to face that dilema and act, or walk away, tolerating the very evil you say is the most intolerable. Pick one.
hmmm... ""medieval-minded theocratic crazies"" ....careful how you bandy round a phrase like that... some might argue that somes up the current management of the USA quite nicely :-)
Happily, the US is entirely built around the ability to regularly shift and change the people who deal with daily policies, budgets, etc. That's exactly the difference between (most of) the west and what the people we're talking about want for the world.
When you are talking about making deals: let's make the deal that the Americans keep their paws out of countries not in their jurisdiction.
Whew! It's a good thing that the UN issued so many resolutions about Saddam, then, making jurisdiction a non-issue.
That they don't declare war based on fraudulous claims
Which ones? I suppose you think that the Taliban wasn't sheltering the organization that killed thousands of our citizens? Or that Saddam's invasion of Kuwait wasn't a matter for other countries to worry about? You may also want to lecture the French, say, about Africa.
That they don't torture people and don't keep them detained without indictment.
Happily, torture's not a viable or sanctioned policy. But then, I don't consider keeping people like Kalid Sheik Mohammed uncomfortable until he starts singing like a bird to be torture, either. I do think that some reservist idiot who thinks it's funny to be a parody of an evil prison guard should go to jail himself... which is exactly what happened.
As for indictments: those don't really apply to foreign nationals caught shooting at US soldiers or planting bombs, etc., in a combat zone overseas. But since those people aren't uniformed military, they don't conveniently fall into the tradional POW status, either. So, they can't be released (since they tend to show right back up tryin to kill people again), and that calls for a sort of handling that has little precedent. The ball is currently in the hands of the US Supreme Court.
That they don't interfere with the religous matters of other people
You mean the sort of religious matters that Al Queda specifically cites as their reason for attacking western targets? How can we leave idealogy out of the conversation when people who kill kids in restaurants or blow up train stations expressly cite their idealogy as the reason they do it?
That they don't stamp their own flawed ideas about business moral upon others.
Well, that's easy. Don't take US business if you don't like US business. Don't sell goods for US cash, and don't offer up people for US employment. And don't spend money on US goods, entertainment, or other services. That makes the problem go away, right?
I always love that response: "We didn't find WMD's? Well then, he must have moved them." That's the perfect bulletproof argument.
Except, we don't have to make that argument, the facts make that argument. All Saddam had to do was demonstrate what he did with all of the stockpiles that we know where there because the UN inspectors saw them and recorded them. The biggest song and dance that Saddam went into wasn't about whether he had them, it was about where they went since he couldn't/wouldn't show sites where they had been destroyed, and couldn't even be bothered to fake up decent forged records about the process of destroying them (mind you, this in a regime that was fastidious about record keeping, including fantastic lists of weapons stashes, body counts, etc). Nope: it's a question of what became of large piles of VX, sarin, and other really nasty stuff. It's not sitting around anywhere obvious (yet, anyway), he wouldn't say how or whether he destroyed it, and we have all sorts of evidence of years and years of two-way weapons commerce with Syria. It's not like this is a mystery in broad terms, just at the serial-number and truckload level. But even so, some pieces of the stash are still turning up, or were some time back, and are just now being talked about again.
The sad thing is, you actually believe all of that. Please try to watch something else besides Fox News.
Why bother watching Fox? Better perhaps to take advantage of the BBC's reporting. Take a moment and any of their coverage. It's hard not to notice the actual facts of chemical weapon use. Which, of course, rather requires the existence of the same. Saddam's years-long campaign of obfuscation revolved almost entirely around hiding the ultimate disposition of such weapons, and the (then) ongoing, parallel work in missile development and manufacturing.
The US is in Iraq for one thing, and one thing only. Oil.
Right, there's no interest at all in avoiding another Taliban-like haven for government-sponsored terrorism, as is found in Iran. That sort of retrograde, destabilizing influence on the entire middle east certainly does impact oil flow (for the entire world, in case you're not paying attention), and allowing it to thrive is unacceptable on a lot of levels, not just as it relates to oil. And before you start mentioning Saddam as some sort of not-so-bad alternative to the extremist jihaddi types, remember that he was busy shipping (along with press releases!) cash to organizations like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and even to individual families of suicide bombers. To say nothing of lobbing scud missles across borders, trying to annex Kuwait, and so on. "For oil" is a tidy bit of sophistry, though, that must feel convenient. But the real issue with the oil is that it lies in a place where its value is being sought by medieval-minded theocratic crazies that use that single source of revenue to keep places like Iran running backwards from history. Putting those oil reserves in the hands of constitutional democracies is certainly acting "for the oil," but not in the way you so cravenly describe. That's like saying that when the US marched into Germany and liberated the concentration camps, that it was for the German beer.
You americans can do whatever the fuck you want to your own citizens.
But please keep us europeans out of it.
Well then, how about we make a deal? You keep your universities and other institutions from being petri dishes full of festering militant Islamo-fascism that occasionally ships people like Mohammad Atta (who spent his time in Europe organizing, recruiting, meeting, and arranging finances in advance of killing several thousand US citizens and no small number or Europeans) right through your own financial and legal system and straight over here, or back into the frey of proto-democracies in the middle east. You obviously don't care if operators like that kill hundreds of Spaniards, so perhaps they're not European enough for you.
Anyway, you stop that (from impacting US citizens), and stop being a haven for the very financial transactions that power that sort of thing, and then there's nothing to watch for. Out of curiosity, and do you really think the international banking operations in the EU don't monitor and report to your own law enforcement, intel, and counter-terrorism agencies on international money transfers, especially to and from known terrorist supporters? Are you that naive? No, I didn't think so. You're just grinding the usual blunt, directionless, anti-American axe. How about we transfer $10k back and forth between us, and you can speculate on whether or not your own government will know it happened, and attempt to correlate that transaction against all of your credit card purchases and travel?
take our word for it, we know Saddam has chemical weapons
Why take the US's word for it? Take the gassed villages' word for it. Or take the UN inspectors' word for it, since they saw, and in some cases partly demolished enormous stockpiles. Or, you could consider the 500 sarin and mustard gas shells recently disclosed. Whether or not Saddam had (and used) such weapons was never in any doubt, by the US, the UN, or anyone else. It's what he did with them that remains hard to hammer out, and that's what he was spending so much time and energy trying to hide from everyone, despite signing an agreement allowing full inspection. So, we found some, continue to find more, and know that truckloads of that stuff went off to Syria when he knew his days in charge were numbered. You know all of this, though, but you're still reciting the mantra because you think it helps you, rhetorically. It doesn't.
How do you suppose we track and clamp down on the international flow of cash between and for people like A-Q? By... tracking it. How do you think that bombers from Indonesia to Madrid to the US get their operating funds from the deeper pockets that provide it? Carrier pigeon?
Just because backers tend to be religious does not by itself make it wrong
...just like the inherent reasonableness of SETI's tests, or the demonstrable validity of Darwin's observations don't become wrong, even if someone less rational embraces them for the wrong reasons.
True, that isn't what makes it wrong. It's inherent wrongness makes it wrong...
If a Darwin or SETI cult formed, would evolution or SETI's hypothesis grow less likely?
is about the end user, who damn well shouldn't be forced to accept a mysterious black-box product
Like airplane engines, specialized medical ceramics, and secret-for-decades French perfume recipes? I mean, who knows what's in that stuff? Or, for that matter, the Alfredo recipe at a restaurant that knows it does it better than anyone else and has the customers to prove it. Should your law require them to divulge their trade secrets just in case someone is worried about how they handle the specific ingredients, relative to some vague sense that they'll feel safer if they know everything?
Do you really think that consumers will be better served when an entire new generation of lawyers, bureaucrats, escrow workers and other non-productive people must have their costs tacked onto everything you purchase or make? Your model reduces competition by making innovation pointless in a competitive market, foists a huge bureaucracy and court system even further onto every industry and business practice, and will still fail to prevent buggy code from being produced (just as F/OSS scrutiny fails to do so now).
A perfect place to put your data. And for only $4.95 per year more, they'll make it private.
Google isn't providing the backend software to anybody, so this doesn't apply to them.
So, the software that I use in conjunction with my WiFi transciever does count, but the locally-installed Google software on my desktop doesn't? How about the Google hardware appliance that's running enterprise search in my datacenter? Their software sure as hell is being "provided," and they're sure as hell not going to let all of their competition see their code and erode their competitive edge in those areas.
They have patents and copyrights; they need nothing more unless they are trying to hide something evil.
But you're saying they also need access to their competition's source code and trade secrets. I don't think they do.
You want protection? You're supposed to get a patent.
And indeed, that's just what people do. They patent their general method or approach, in varying degrees of specificity. That doesn't mean that have to expose the minute details of their algorithms - sort of like Google patents their search engine, and talks about the types of things they take into account when they score content... but they don't disclose the specific details of how they do that, because that would be giving away what they've invested millions (or in their case, billions) in producing. Why let AltaVista or MSN play catch up and duplicate search worthiness without having to invest all of that same work? Exposing their code erodes competition and innovation.
Time "obscuring the derivitive nature of what you're producing" is wasted time.
If you've just ripped off someone who spent years designing and coding something, and all you have to do is invest a little time in hiding the derivitive nature of what you're now also producing, that's not time wasted - it's a shortcut to producing something that's just as good, but which you can sell for less because you didn't have to invest in inventing it. See China, for an example of an entire economy that works largely that way. Companies hide their trade secrets (and code) exactly because there are lazy, unethical people out there more than willing to make a parasitic living off of other people's innovations, right down to changing the spelling on variable names.
In any case, it's the overall well-being of society that counts
At whose expense? Aren't the people who invest all of that time and money in producing an innovative product part of society? Should they just be slaves to everyone else? If you promote that approach, you'll shut down high-risk, big-ticket projects faster than by any other means.
Mod parent, and parent's dog, up.
Signed,
this slashdot user's dog
P.S., Try not to sugar-coat it so much there, man. People may not get that you actually have some disdain for the GP's take on things.
P.P.S. Heh. Thank you for brightening my day. I was starting to get all mopey, reading about the 500 sarin and mustard gas shells they turned up in Iraq. First, another article about global warming that points the finger directly at my Chevy, and now WMD stashes where none could possibly exist... why, the whole journalistic world's gone crazy!
Except your analogy is stupid, because it compares something that is legal, sending IR signals to a TV to change the channel, with something that is explicitly illegal, accessing a computer network after having your authorization revoked.
Holey moley! I'm trying to point out the simple difference between passively strolling by thing (like a TV in a window), and actively trying to make USE of something, especially when it requires two-way interaction to be useful. I didn't bring up the TV-in-the-window analogy, I'm responding to it with a reminder that this clown was NOT just passively "receiving a transmission," etc.
I challenge you to find a law where that actually is illegal.
You're missing the point. The law doesn't have to be that specific about anyone who is making a public nuisance of themselves, disrupting a private business's operations, loitering, or doing any of a number of other things that are arrest-worthy. I'm making the distinction between passively seeing a TV through a window, and (knowing it's contrary to custom, reasonableness, and the spoken wishes of the business) actively making interactive use of the same. I don't have to be pedantic to point that out, but anyone trying to defend their own theft of service habits by trying to paint this guy as some sit-on-the-street-surfing-for-three-months "victim" does have to be. At best.
The current market for computer hardware and software is neither fair nor free
... [cites Mandriva, etc] ... but these are the exception rather than the rule.
Well, if by "unfair" or "not free" you mean, "you have to be an actual business able to raise real capital and invest millions in order to produce a product anybody will actually want," then, sure. But anyone is free to propose a product and seek venture capital, or spend money they've made elsewhere getting into that market. And it's "fair" in the sense that the highly volatile consumer marketplace lurches, week to week, from one maker to the next in rapid pursuit of whichever specs they most like, or price they're willing to spend. The competition is ruthless, and price/performance sweet spots always win. That's as fair as it gets, and we all get cool stuff, some of which is sometimes buggy if we're too rabid to hold off for a few months buying it while the maker hashes out some weak spots.
I think the test is something like "could a sufficiently competent programmer use the information presented to write a program for a computer enabling the use of all the device's features?"
And if the maker of a product (and its drivers) fails that test, or doesn't provide enough documentation for the product's users to put the device adequately to work... the product will simply fail to compare to those produced by other people. It happens all the time... the more approachable, functional products sell better, and put pressure on everyone else to compete. People who focus only on price get exactly what they deserve (in computer hardware, hamburger quality, underwear longevity, etc).
Sure there have been a few high-profile cases of driver troubles
And wouldn't you say that the (unexploited) issue being discussed here is exactly that: the exception? Untold millions of WiFi devices are in use, with the risks/security well understood in general terms. This is an exception, and the driver people will no doubt be scrambling to patch it.
I mean the source is publicly available, but only the copyright holder has the right to modify it or produce derived works (such as binaries) from it. It's read-only source code
And the reason this isn't common is because you can still save yourself millions of dollars of R&D and enter a market with lower overhead than your competition by just learning everything they know from their code, and then just spending your (much shorter) time obscuring the derivitive nature of what you're producing. Making trade secrets "read-only" doesn't protect their value to the people that invested millions producing them.
there is no negotiation and because the balance of power is so slanted
The balance of power is slanted, entirely, towards the person with his hand on his wallet looking at his choice of dozen different WiFi products. This is exactly the same as looking at desk lamps or microwave ovens... and the private sector solved some of those problems by evolving entities like Underwriters Laboritories. That "UL" mark is certainly a better indication that the microwave won't burn your house down than is most any advertising slogan from the manufacturer.