Obviously public transportation where you live is absurdly poor (or you live ridiculously far from your job), so I can't blame you for taking the car. However, calling it a time waste is stretching things a bit, as on public transportation you can focus on something other than the road. Personally, I like to read on the trams to work, and I don't consider that time wasted at all. My car using colleagues truly waste the time it takes them to travel to work though.
As long as the feature is still useless, I see little reason to be "happy" about it. It doesn't matter to me if it's a light year or an inch from being useful, it's still useless.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why John Honeyball is writing about IT, rather than actually solve any problems with it. That, or possibly the other way around. It's hard to judge cause and consequences.
But, lest anybody be confused, there is no single point where security is not a concern. The only way to reach adequate (heh) security is to stop all components from doing more than they need, rather than just one. A functioning such approach pretty much obsoletes the need for specific "security devices" such as firewalls (although they may be nice to have as an extra safety net). Any approach which relies solely on specific security devices leaves you vulnerable as soon as you have failed to predict an attack from a direction they do not block - and there will always be one of those.
Europe, on the other hand until the last couple of centuries required everybody to be armed and made it a national obligation
I'm a European, and this sounds very odd to me. Nothing I remember from history classes (and yes, I usually paid attention). Are you sure you're not confusing "everybody" with the aristocracy, that was supposed to be able to support the king in times of war? Also, remember that Europe is a divided place. If you think we've managed to squeeze many countries into a small area here today, it pales with how it (effectively) looked some hundreds of years ago.
they should be given patent protection because we need to encourage that level of innovation
I ask these questions very seriously: Do you really believe that a potential patent (and the potential stream of money said patent would supposedly generate) is actually a motivating factor for these innovators? Do you really believe that it would be possible to - within a reasonable time frame - design and implement a mechanism for awarding these patents where the overhead of the process is so small that more innovations won't be lost because the innovators are distracted by irrelevant things (such as filing patent applications) rather than actually... innovating? Most importantly, do you really believe that the downside of having these innovations patented (and thus restricted) are actually outweighed by the vast number of extra innovations that are generated by the supposedly oh, so much more motivated innovators?
I think your view of what drives these people is extremely disconnected from reality, that your dream that it is possible to implement a system that does more good than harm for actual innovation is nothing but delusion, and that the harm caused by restricted software technologies is huge compared to the few actual extra innovations that a patent system could possibly provoke.
In the meantime, those of us who work in the software industry live under the perpetual fear of being sued into ruin over nonsense. Or, as in the case of many software companies (my own employer included, fortunately) - stay the hell away from the USA.
While the market for pictures of shoes is smaller than that for music, it obviously exists. Otherwise these pictures wouldn't have been taken in the first place, and the police would not have wanted copies of them (that's the definition of a market, after all).
Is there some magic clause somewhere which says that copyright infringement only becomes a crime if your estimated target audience exceeds a certain number?
And for the record, I'm a Swedish resident. I think our police have done the morally right thing in this case, but that aspect has never been relevant when it comes to copyright law, and in particular not the Swedish police's behavior in regards to it. If there's any organisation I expect to follow the letter, rather than the spirit of the law, it's the police.
Close, but that isn't quite what I said. More accurate would be "...regardless as to whether it's the easy way of expressing their message". There will always be times when going against the code will make the better story, but I feel that rather than making the story better it often just makes the story easier to write, which is a hard thing for most authors to resist.
Let me rephrase what you said, or perhaps draw this to its conclusion (which you may or may not already have thought of): This may force bad and mediocre authors to be slightly better (by spending slightly more effort), but deprives good authors (those that wouldn't just simply chose the "easy" way regardless of arbitrary rules, those that realize how to write to make the better story) of their most useful tools.
I must say that I agree with the sarcastic tone of GP: Genius.
Of course there was source for the hack at some point. However, this source "disappeared" (i.e. was reverted) after having been compiled once. Subsequent recompiles (of login, or the compiler itself) by an already contaminated compiler propagated the hack. In practice, there was no way to get rid of it without compiling the compiler with a compiler that was known to be uncontaminated - something you had no easy way of verifying (or even suspect that you would need to verify). Remember that at some point, you need to start with a binary (compiler) that you simply have trust (well, at least in practice - in theory you can build your own computer from the scratch with twigs and bubble gum), and unless you're God himself, that binary was probably built by Ken.
In fact, when I said in my original post that I think this is more a matter of two "very confused women" rather than conspiracies, this is what I meant. Not only is it relatively risk free to accuse someone of rape, we seem to have reached a point where the definition of rape has become very diluted. Anything from "proper" rape (a man that, through violence of some sort, physically restrains and forces intercourse on a woman) to "woman feeling slightly uncomfortable (for whatever reason) during voluntary sex" seems to qualify these days, and my highly private suspicion is that this is a case of the later. Essentially a cultural difference between Sweden (or Nordic countries in general, I suspect) and the rest of the world which took Assange completely off guard. This is obviously pure speculation on my part (and numerous Swedish bloggers the last days - mostly female) though, and nothing I have any facts whatsoever to back up.
This is true, though I don't really think it counters my original point, which was that this is no proof that the system is corrupt. Yes, former head prosecutor Sven-Erik Alhem questions the behavior of the individual prosecutor. He does not, however, suggest that there is "something is seriously wrong with [Sweden's] system of justice". In fact, I'd go as far as to suggest that it's a good sign that the system works fairly well when individual mistakes get criticized quickly. If a prosecutor isn't allowed to make decisions about who to arrest, then who the hell is? Which infallible entity are you going to consult?
What Sven-Erik doesn't discuss in that article is how the prosecutor's office should avoid "broadcasting" (basunera ut) the news. I'm not sure whether warrants for arrest is classified material, but I wouldn't be very surprised if it's not, and if so it would be illegal to withhold the information...
(and as a native Swedish speaker I can confirm that your translation is good enough)
This is nonsense. There is nothing wrong with the justice system. They did not "publicly accuse" anybody of anything. They did exactly what they should do in this case. Two women contacted the police and informed them of a crime that had been committed. They needed to speak to the accused, and since it's a matter of a foreign citizen that is expected to leave the country soon, they chose consider him "anhållen i sin frånvaro", something that has somewhat wrongly been translated to "arrested", as that's the closest counterpart in English speaking nations. This, they did in order to give the police authority to actually detain him long enough for an interrogation.
The "publicly accusing", "name splashed over international media" and whatnot is the work of media, and has absolutely nothing to do with the justice system.
What would you have them do? Ignore the accusations? Interrogate the witnesses more thoroughly so the suspect had plenty of time to leave the country? Keep in mind that ill treatment (e.g. harsh interrogation shortly after the crime) of rape victims is not something that's particularly popular around here (for good reasons).
For the record, I am convinced that Assange isn't guilty (although I believe the whole thing is the result of a pair of very confused women, rather than a military conspiracy), but I honestly don't see how a justice system would become better by ignoring self proclaimed victims reporting crime to the police...
Unlikely. DOM structures are generally huge, complicated beasts. The odds that you can write a CSS selector that matches the ads on one page without hitting anything on other pages are pretty good. Even if it is just a div in a div in a div in a div called left-nav, some of the ancestors are likely to have identifyable properties, either from classes, ids, other attributes, their position with regards to their siblings... something. And since it would be easy to keep unique css rules per site or even page, you wouldn't really run the risk of wiping out content on other websites.
It's all about how much effort you (for some value of "you") want to spend keeping the rules up to date.
Here goes: I would have reacted differently. I would have called bull on that blurb of yours, as there would very unlikely be a way to easily verify that what the software in question was doing.
The keyword in your test is not "bias", but "free" (as in speech).
Stop changing topic. Read back, and then remind me how this applies to the discussion at hand. You were discussing how people having a series of ones and zeroes stored on their hard disk (and transferred to and from said disk through a network provided by the ISP the story is about) should by default be spied upon because said series of ones and zeroes may violate some random person's morals (even if it does not violate any laws). Be specific about how this makes any sense whatsoever. Stop dragging completely unrelated things like murder into the discussion, or I'll send Chewie on your ass.
Nonsense. There are numerous rules about how businesses may operate, and what type of quality they need to provide. This is not authoritarianism. Examples: - Food manufacturers can not sell highly poisonous food - Car manufacturers are affected by all sort of regulations w/r to safety & environmental impact - All businesses are affected by laws about how they handle personal information about their customers (at least in Sweden, which is what this article is about)
There are already various rules about how ISPs may and may not operate. It is not that far fetched to include strong customer protection of the kind PirateISP is doing in that set of rules.
The premise for this discussion was that certain things would be considered immoral without being illegal. I don't know where you live, but most countries actually forbid you to kill people, even if God told you to.
Keyword: guideline. Also note that sentences may be adjusted (up or down) for several different reasons, one of which is obstruction of justice, which this may count as.
Perhaps because "let's stick more buttons on it" is only innovative while you're under the effect of certain reality distortion fields, may they be fruit flavored or not.
I can't think of a single piece of data that should be classified by another entity than the one that created it.
Yes, my password should be secret. I created it, and it's nobody's business but my own. If you, however, want to spread your password around, it should not be up to me to stop you. Nor, the government, for that matter.
I suspect I may be wrong though, so I leave it to you to provide examples.
In the context of TFA though, I certainly don't see how it should be up to the government to suddenly classify just about all information, given that the Internet is by far the most reliable source of information for many these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously public transportation where you live is absurdly poor (or you live ridiculously far from your job), so I can't blame you for taking the car. However, calling it a time waste is stretching things a bit, as on public transportation you can focus on something other than the road. Personally, I like to read on the trams to work, and I don't consider that time wasted at all.
My car using colleagues truly waste the time it takes them to travel to work though.
The addon vulnerability that let everyone access your real ID list wasn't really voluntary...
As long as the feature is still useless, I see little reason to be "happy" about it. It doesn't matter to me if it's a light year or an inch from being useful, it's still useless.
Well, that was easy. Next question?
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why John Honeyball is writing about IT, rather than actually solve any problems with it.
That, or possibly the other way around. It's hard to judge cause and consequences.
But, lest anybody be confused, there is no single point where security is not a concern. The only way to reach adequate (heh) security is to stop all components from doing more than they need, rather than just one. A functioning such approach pretty much obsoletes the need for specific "security devices" such as firewalls (although they may be nice to have as an extra safety net). Any approach which relies solely on specific security devices leaves you vulnerable as soon as you have failed to predict an attack from a direction they do not block - and there will always be one of those.
I'm a European, and this sounds very odd to me. Nothing I remember from history classes (and yes, I usually paid attention).
Are you sure you're not confusing "everybody" with the aristocracy, that was supposed to be able to support the king in times of war?
Also, remember that Europe is a divided place. If you think we've managed to squeeze many countries into a small area here today, it pales with how it (effectively) looked some hundreds of years ago.
I ask these questions very seriously:
Do you really believe that a potential patent (and the potential stream of money said patent would supposedly generate) is actually a motivating factor for these innovators?
Do you really believe that it would be possible to - within a reasonable time frame - design and implement a mechanism for awarding these patents where the overhead of the process is so small that more innovations won't be lost because the innovators are distracted by irrelevant things (such as filing patent applications) rather than actually... innovating?
Most importantly, do you really believe that the downside of having these innovations patented (and thus restricted) are actually outweighed by the vast number of extra innovations that are generated by the supposedly oh, so much more motivated innovators?
I think your view of what drives these people is extremely disconnected from reality, that your dream that it is possible to implement a system that does more good than harm for actual innovation is nothing but delusion, and that the harm caused by restricted software technologies is huge compared to the few actual extra innovations that a patent system could possibly provoke.
In the meantime, those of us who work in the software industry live under the perpetual fear of being sued into ruin over nonsense. Or, as in the case of many software companies (my own employer included, fortunately) - stay the hell away from the USA.
While the market for pictures of shoes is smaller than that for music, it obviously exists. Otherwise these pictures wouldn't have been taken in the first place, and the police would not have wanted copies of them (that's the definition of a market, after all).
Is there some magic clause somewhere which says that copyright infringement only becomes a crime if your estimated target audience exceeds a certain number?
And for the record, I'm a Swedish resident. I think our police have done the morally right thing in this case, but that aspect has never been relevant when it comes to copyright law, and in particular not the Swedish police's behavior in regards to it. If there's any organisation I expect to follow the letter, rather than the spirit of the law, it's the police.
Let me rephrase what you said, or perhaps draw this to its conclusion (which you may or may not already have thought of): This may force bad and mediocre authors to be slightly better (by spending slightly more effort), but deprives good authors (those that wouldn't just simply chose the "easy" way regardless of arbitrary rules, those that realize how to write to make the better story) of their most useful tools.
I must say that I agree with the sarcastic tone of GP: Genius.
Of course there was source for the hack at some point. However, this source "disappeared" (i.e. was reverted) after having been compiled once. Subsequent recompiles (of login, or the compiler itself) by an already contaminated compiler propagated the hack.
In practice, there was no way to get rid of it without compiling the compiler with a compiler that was known to be uncontaminated - something you had no easy way of verifying (or even suspect that you would need to verify).
Remember that at some point, you need to start with a binary (compiler) that you simply have trust (well, at least in practice - in theory you can build your own computer from the scratch with twigs and bubble gum), and unless you're God himself, that binary was probably built by Ken.
In fact, when I said in my original post that I think this is more a matter of two "very confused women" rather than conspiracies, this is what I meant.
Not only is it relatively risk free to accuse someone of rape, we seem to have reached a point where the definition of rape has become very diluted. Anything from "proper" rape (a man that, through violence of some sort, physically restrains and forces intercourse on a woman) to "woman feeling slightly uncomfortable (for whatever reason) during voluntary sex" seems to qualify these days, and my highly private suspicion is that this is a case of the later. Essentially a cultural difference between Sweden (or Nordic countries in general, I suspect) and the rest of the world which took Assange completely off guard.
This is obviously pure speculation on my part (and numerous Swedish bloggers the last days - mostly female) though, and nothing I have any facts whatsoever to back up.
This is true, though I don't really think it counters my original point, which was that this is no proof that the system is corrupt. Yes, former head prosecutor Sven-Erik Alhem questions the behavior of the individual prosecutor. He does not, however, suggest that there is "something is seriously wrong with [Sweden's] system of justice". In fact, I'd go as far as to suggest that it's a good sign that the system works fairly well when individual mistakes get criticized quickly.
If a prosecutor isn't allowed to make decisions about who to arrest, then who the hell is? Which infallible entity are you going to consult?
What Sven-Erik doesn't discuss in that article is how the prosecutor's office should avoid "broadcasting" (basunera ut) the news. I'm not sure whether warrants for arrest is classified material, but I wouldn't be very surprised if it's not, and if so it would be illegal to withhold the information...
(and as a native Swedish speaker I can confirm that your translation is good enough)
This is nonsense. There is nothing wrong with the justice system. They did not "publicly accuse" anybody of anything. They did exactly what they should do in this case. Two women contacted the police and informed them of a crime that had been committed. They needed to speak to the accused, and since it's a matter of a foreign citizen that is expected to leave the country soon, they chose consider him "anhållen i sin frånvaro", something that has somewhat wrongly been translated to "arrested", as that's the closest counterpart in English speaking nations. This, they did in order to give the police authority to actually detain him long enough for an interrogation.
The "publicly accusing", "name splashed over international media" and whatnot is the work of media, and has absolutely nothing to do with the justice system.
What would you have them do? Ignore the accusations? Interrogate the witnesses more thoroughly so the suspect had plenty of time to leave the country? Keep in mind that ill treatment (e.g. harsh interrogation shortly after the crime) of rape victims is not something that's particularly popular around here (for good reasons).
For the record, I am convinced that Assange isn't guilty (although I believe the whole thing is the result of a pair of very confused women, rather than a military conspiracy), but I honestly don't see how a justice system would become better by ignoring self proclaimed victims reporting crime to the police...
Very much so. Which is also why it is the opposite of useful that the tech is patented...
No they don't. They plan to, after the election (even though I honestly doubt they'll pass the dreaded 4% limit), but at the moment they do not.
Unlikely. DOM structures are generally huge, complicated beasts. The odds that you can write a CSS selector that matches the ads on one page without hitting anything on other pages are pretty good. Even if it is just a div in a div in a div in a div called left-nav, some of the ancestors are likely to have identifyable properties, either from classes, ids, other attributes, their position with regards to their siblings... something. And since it would be easy to keep unique css rules per site or even page, you wouldn't really run the risk of wiping out content on other websites.
It's all about how much effort you (for some value of "you") want to spend keeping the rules up to date.
Here goes: I would have reacted differently. I would have called bull on that blurb of yours, as there would very unlikely be a way to easily verify that what the software in question was doing.
The keyword in your test is not "bias", but "free" (as in speech).
Perhaps. But the story has been covered by every major Swedish newspaper the last few days.
Svenska Dagbladet
Dagens Nyheter
Göteborgsposten
Sydsvenskan
It's the Chancellor of Justice that is being quoted...
Stop changing topic. Read back, and then remind me how this applies to the discussion at hand. You were discussing how people having a series of ones and zeroes stored on their hard disk (and transferred to and from said disk through a network provided by the ISP the story is about) should by default be spied upon because said series of ones and zeroes may violate some random person's morals (even if it does not violate any laws).
Be specific about how this makes any sense whatsoever. Stop dragging completely unrelated things like murder into the discussion, or I'll send Chewie on your ass.
Nonsense. There are numerous rules about how businesses may operate, and what type of quality they need to provide. This is not authoritarianism. Examples:
- Food manufacturers can not sell highly poisonous food
- Car manufacturers are affected by all sort of regulations w/r to safety & environmental impact
- All businesses are affected by laws about how they handle personal information about their customers (at least in Sweden, which is what this article is about)
There are already various rules about how ISPs may and may not operate. It is not that far fetched to include strong customer protection of the kind PirateISP is doing in that set of rules.
The premise for this discussion was that certain things would be considered immoral without being illegal. I don't know where you live, but most countries actually forbid you to kill people, even if God told you to.
Find a better example.
Keyword: guideline. Also note that sentences may be adjusted (up or down) for several different reasons, one of which is obstruction of justice, which this may count as.
And again, simple decades old technologies (in this case IRC) solved the problem from the start.
Perhaps because "let's stick more buttons on it" is only innovative while you're under the effect of certain reality distortion fields, may they be fruit flavored or not.
I can't think of a single piece of data that should be classified by another entity than the one that created it.
Yes, my password should be secret. I created it, and it's nobody's business but my own. If you, however, want to spread your password around, it should not be up to me to stop you. Nor, the government, for that matter.
I suspect I may be wrong though, so I leave it to you to provide examples.
In the context of TFA though, I certainly don't see how it should be up to the government to suddenly classify just about all information, given that the Internet is by far the most reliable source of information for many these days.