Because our current political and economic culture selects for psychopaths. I've worked with top-level executives for years and I've seen what their jobs consist of. You more or less have to be a psychopath to be good at that and still be able to look at yourself in a mirror.
Before the Civil War, you had to go to the local post office to pick up your mail.
In my country (Germany), my grandparents once told me that the postman used to come three times a day, not once as I've seen it all day.
You know, there was a time where the post office thought its primary purpose was the delivery of mail. Not a profitable quarter.
I was also astonished when I learnt for the first time that in some countries, your mailbox is not an input, but an IO system and you can put mail you want to send there and the postman will pick it up. That's also something I didn't know from my own place.
So there are many different levels of service that a post office can provide. Here's my issue with this proposal: The sole focus is cost. They got the numbers on what the higher service level costs. None of them thought about asking the people affected if it is worth it to them, given this cost. If it is, you could think about raising your prices, for example. A letter is 58 Euro-cents in my country. I wouldn't mind paying 60 or 70 if the alternative is having to pick up my mail at the post office.
Many, many years ago, public services and government-controlled monopoly companies had a mission to provide a service, not to make a profit.
Then, privatization was "the thing" to do and politicians were frothing at the mouth about estimated profits. Everyone with 2 working brain cells already had the "too good to be true" feeling, but since we all know politicians, they went through with it.
Other then others I don't think that private or public ownership is the deciding factor, but whether your focus is service or profit.
For Europe, the result is higher prices with massively reduced quality in the areas of postal services, trains, energy and several others. It appears to have worked so-so (i.e. no drastic negative changes) for public transport (busses, underground, etc.) and it actually does appear to have worked in telecommunications.
The rage right now is buying these things back. I would love to make a final calculation at the end, about what this whole stupidity has cost the taxpayer, in other words: How much money was transferred from the public to some private companies. And then sue the fuckers for it and jail them. I just fear that won't happen.
This is political. There are two possibilities here: Either, the guy who said that is an old-school politician, or he is of the new breed.
The new breed outright lies to you, straight into your face. That's the kind of people that run our governments today.
The old-school guys, however, will not lie. Well... not outright. In this case, he would say something that is technically the truth. For example, if they have several seperate and independent internal mailing systems - which is quite likely given that they have offices around the world and certainly don't want to send confidential mail around public data networks just for the convenience of central mail management - then he could well be saying the truth in that there is in fact "no central method"... see where this is going? Of course they can search their e-mails, but they can't search everyone's emails from one central location. See, not a lie...
*Maybe* they're telling the truth, if they've got some custom, highly-encrypted system where emails can only be decrypted by the users.
Incredibly unlikely. The NSA would be the #1 top candidate for a list of "organisations that know what key escrow is for".
If you work in the intelligence sector, you should understand that people can go missing or become no-longer-trustworthy very unexpectedly and you definitely do not want to lose access to their data. And in the later case, you absolutely want access to their data, especially communications, to check if they did any damage and what they knew.
I knew something was missing from my original post:
KDE sucks just as badly as Gnome does. In fact, the total failure of the desktop environments on Linux is part of what drove me to OS X. I can't speak about today, since it's been years since I've last used a Linux desktop (I still run plenty of servers on Linux, but that's commandline only), but back when I switched, it was an awakening. It was like having driven a 1950s car all your life and then you buy a modern car and you realize that there are all these amazing tiny things that make everything just so much better, smoother and less painful to use.
Plus you don't have to take it apart and fix something yourself every thousand miles or so.
Wars ending? You still from the 20th century? When is the last time the USA ended a war? Iraq, Afghanistan, drugs, terrorism - all the more recent wars are designed and intended to last forever.
but when they started becoming more and more a Windows clone, I lost my faith in them.
ditto.
Gnome was very promising once, I even worked on it for a while. But this exactly, there was a point where it turned into a me-too project, where ideas for making things better were shunned in favour of making things familiar, which at that time meant copying windows.
Gnome is a major example of Free Software fucking it up because of bikeshedding and copying instead of innovating.
They could try selling them without warranty or with a very simple 30 day exchange warranty for defective products, but that could leave them with a PR problem when people run into problems
Plus it would be outright illegal in most of the world, most importantly the EU, which is the biggest market for tech products (considerably larger than the US, sorry dudes).
Right, because no one else but you has ever thought about it, done some calculations, asked a few experts or (gasp!) customers, and ran the scenario. Least of all the people who just took one of the largest stock dives in their history and wrote off more money than you will ever see in your entire life.
Why was this piece of crap posted to the frontpage, instead of some unknown blog with 5 readers, where it belongs?
Yes, you would. Depending on your jurisdiction, though, as long as you don't publicly perform or exhibit it, or try to sell it etc., you would likely fall into one of the many exceptions to copyright law.
Precedent seems to imply that the resulting object cannot be controlled (e.g. the output of a GPLed program is not GPLed, so why should executing a program on a 3D printer be any different?).
Don't you hate it when those "power-users" in your company talk about computers? Does it make you cringe when they mix and abuse tech terms that make them look smart to the other users who have no idea what they're talking about, but to you, a real techie, it just hurts you inside?
Guess what, it's the same with law. Those who know about the law cringe when they hear those crappy pseudo-smart comments from the geeks and nerds who think they got it, but they don't.
The output of a software does not fall under the license of the software nor is it covered by the copyright that covers the software. However that does not mean it exists in a legal vacuum. If I write a piece of software that, in whichever way, creates a precise copy of Harry Potter as its output, that resulting text is still legally a copy of Harry Potter and me publishing it as a book would run afoul of copyright law.
That is what copyright law is about. You can't legally copy stuff that is copyrighted by someone else without his permission. It doesn't matter if you copy it with a photocopier, or by taking a picture, or by hand the way the bible was copied through the middle ages. It is the resulting copy that is governed by the law, not the means of getting it.
"Fallen" is a good example. It has a nice atmosphere and storytelling, but the real kicker that made it a memorable movie is in the structure of the story and how the end loops back to the beginning and makes you re-visit the entire movie in your head. I don't want to go into more detail because it would ruin the movie for everyone who hasn't seen it.
The structure of the story is one element of the whole, and like every other element, you can creatively play with it. If people stop doing that, it's a loss in variety. Same as for everything else.
but the bulk of box-office success ultimately comes down to the most elusive and unquantifiable of things: knowing what the audience wants before it does, and a whole lot of luck.
My personal pet theory is a lot simpler:
Not overfeeding them on the same stuff.
There are only so many times you can see the same movie and enjoy it. Hollywood blockbusters have largely turned into remixes of the same movie. If you know anything about storywriting, you've long realized that almost all Hollywood movies have the same script. Not just similarities the way most stories have, say, a beginning, a middle and an end, or a dramatic curve with a typical shape, but actually the same fucking script. Replace specifics like names, locations or technologies/species/etc. (giant robots/aliens/monsters/whatever) with placeholders and you'll see that they're pretty much all telling the same story.
And you can only hear the same story so often before it gets boring.
Surprise, people with a common interest banding together and pooling their resources to make it happen is a model that can actually work.
Thinking about it, that's how corporations originally got started. You know, before they turned into immortal international government-corruption special interest lobby groups.
Also; if anybody with an open-source-inspired name starts first-posting with links to MS sites; check their posting history and see if they've ever posted anything non-MS-related, often you'll find they won't. Lately every first post on slashdot seems to somehow relate whatever TFA is about to some random MS link.
It's too much work to check the background of every random poster, which is exactly what they're betting on. Maybe we should have a/. version of "spot the Fed".
Right, because falling over backwards and giving in is the only reasonable choice when someone pressures you.
If I were the CEO of an international corporation with a budget that dwarfs several small countries, I would have enough legal experts on staff to check the law very carefully and make a stand when they cross the line.
I would also understand that the last thing they would do to force through a secret and very likely highly illegal program is jailing a public person.
No one expects anyone to risk being shot in the face. But putting one of the 2800 million dollars of profit (Google, in this example) into a legal defense against this wouldn't bancrupt the company. Basically, all the "fighting" they do now they could've done when they received the first PRISM request.
Seriously, this is probably the least surprising news of the year.
MS jumping on the tablet bandwagon with a windows tablet? *yawn* the most obvious business decision Balmer could make.
That it would suck and sell badly? The only people who didn't expect that were the ones not yet born when MS launched the Zune. Not only that MS first version of everything sucks so bad you have to be either a MS employee or a total moron with brain damage, amnesia and an IQ below room temperature to buy one, but especially in the mobile sector MS is so much of a non-player that their de-facto-acquisition of Nokia destroyed one of the largest mobile phone manufacturers instead of boosting the sales of MS mobile devices.
If they gave away a "greatest idiot on the planet" medal with each tablet sold, they might increase sales and do something honest for a change.
So, aside from click-baiting, why is this article on/. ?
I don't think the idea of taking something on faith without proof is inherently utterly without merit.
Why not?
If you accept that, then how do you seperate the scammers you tell you hogwash for their personal profit from those that (your assumption) have something valuable to say?
If nothing else I take it on faith that my experience of the world is real;
I don't. However, for all practical purposes, acting as if it were real until I know for sure (if ever) is the reasonable thing to do, because acting as if it weren't has all kinds of interesting consequences.
Basically, in situations where evidence is not available, it is perfectly rational to go with whatever the best and most reasonable path appears to be. But that still isn't a faith-based approach. The difference between an evidence-based approach and a faith-based approach is that in the former you keep your mind open to evidence to the contrary, and in the later you don't.
And its worth noting that atheism is itself a faith proposition
No, it isn't, and that this sentence has become popular is merely a strategy of the religious people fighting against atheism. It's a bold lie, just like the phrase about christians being persecuted.
There is literally tons of proof, just visit the nearest university library. What you are looking for is the one "big" piece of proof that proves everything. But the very core of science is that such a thing doesn't exist, that understanding the world does not come from a "root cause" approach (that is the faith-based "everything flows from god" way), but from looking at the small parts and how they interact with each other.
The proof is there. It's just not the kind of proof that people brought up in a "one ring to rule them all"... errr... wrong meme... "one answer to end all questions" culture are satisfied with.
The real reason I switched is because I don't want to be a part of their extortion scheme.
You see, you are not the victim in this scam, you are the weapon. With millions of users behind them, they can go to advertising networks and say "nice campaign you have there, would be a shame if something happened to it..."
This is about to fall off the end of my comments list, so I'd like to sum up a bit:
I don't think we disagree on the science/unknowable bit. There may or may not be parts of reality that science will never explain. I personally doubt it, because science is very flexible, but I am sure that there are parts that science as we know it today won't explain.
We also agree that religion does not know the answers that science doesn't. At best, they pretend to, and so far each and every one of their pseudo-explanations has been found to be hogwash. With that track record, it's a pretty safe bet to assume the remaining ones are just more of the same.
So, in summary, religion is bullshit and teaching it to young children as if it were fact is indoctrination. In fact, I think child abuse would be a better term and yes, many people suffer for life from the crap they were told as children.
My argument there is that we can be motivated to war without religion. If religion were eliminated we'd stop using it as an excuse to kill people, but I'm doubtful we'd fight less. We'll just find other excuses.
I'm pretty sure there would still be war, yes.
I am also pretty sure that there would be less violence. Modern islamic terrorism, for example, is unthinkable without islam. On the christian side, both the crusades and the prosecution of Jews can not be imagined without the religious component. There is still plenty of violence in the middle ages if you substract these, so it's not like I'm claiming religion is the root of all evil. Sometimes it is the cause of evil and sometimes it is just a tool. I think seing it as only one or the other is too simplistic a view.
Slashdot Mirror
Because our current political and economic culture selects for psychopaths. I've worked with top-level executives for years and I've seen what their jobs consist of. You more or less have to be a psychopath to be good at that and still be able to look at yourself in a mirror.
Before the Civil War, you had to go to the local post office to pick up your mail.
In my country (Germany), my grandparents once told me that the postman used to come three times a day, not once as I've seen it all day.
You know, there was a time where the post office thought its primary purpose was the delivery of mail. Not a profitable quarter.
I was also astonished when I learnt for the first time that in some countries, your mailbox is not an input, but an IO system and you can put mail you want to send there and the postman will pick it up. That's also something I didn't know from my own place.
So there are many different levels of service that a post office can provide. Here's my issue with this proposal: The sole focus is cost. They got the numbers on what the higher service level costs. None of them thought about asking the people affected if it is worth it to them, given this cost. If it is, you could think about raising your prices, for example. A letter is 58 Euro-cents in my country. I wouldn't mind paying 60 or 70 if the alternative is having to pick up my mail at the post office.
Many, many years ago, public services and government-controlled monopoly companies had a mission to provide a service, not to make a profit.
Then, privatization was "the thing" to do and politicians were frothing at the mouth about estimated profits. Everyone with 2 working brain cells already had the "too good to be true" feeling, but since we all know politicians, they went through with it.
Other then others I don't think that private or public ownership is the deciding factor, but whether your focus is service or profit.
For Europe, the result is higher prices with massively reduced quality in the areas of postal services, trains, energy and several others. It appears to have worked so-so (i.e. no drastic negative changes) for public transport (busses, underground, etc.) and it actually does appear to have worked in telecommunications.
The rage right now is buying these things back. I would love to make a final calculation at the end, about what this whole stupidity has cost the taxpayer, in other words: How much money was transferred from the public to some private companies. And then sue the fuckers for it and jail them. I just fear that won't happen.
Yes and no.
This is political. There are two possibilities here: Either, the guy who said that is an old-school politician, or he is of the new breed.
The new breed outright lies to you, straight into your face. That's the kind of people that run our governments today.
The old-school guys, however, will not lie. Well... not outright. In this case, he would say something that is technically the truth. For example, if they have several seperate and independent internal mailing systems - which is quite likely given that they have offices around the world and certainly don't want to send confidential mail around public data networks just for the convenience of central mail management - then he could well be saying the truth in that there is in fact "no central method"... see where this is going? Of course they can search their e-mails, but they can't search everyone's emails from one central location. See, not a lie...
*Maybe* they're telling the truth, if they've got some custom, highly-encrypted system where emails can only be decrypted by the users.
Incredibly unlikely. The NSA would be the #1 top candidate for a list of "organisations that know what key escrow is for".
If you work in the intelligence sector, you should understand that people can go missing or become no-longer-trustworthy very unexpectedly and you definitely do not want to lose access to their data. And in the later case, you absolutely want access to their data, especially communications, to check if they did any damage and what they knew.
and I've been using KDE ever since.
I knew something was missing from my original post:
KDE sucks just as badly as Gnome does. In fact, the total failure of the desktop environments on Linux is part of what drove me to OS X. I can't speak about today, since it's been years since I've last used a Linux desktop (I still run plenty of servers on Linux, but that's commandline only), but back when I switched, it was an awakening. It was like having driven a 1950s car all your life and then you buy a modern car and you realize that there are all these amazing tiny things that make everything just so much better, smoother and less painful to use.
Plus you don't have to take it apart and fix something yourself every thousand miles or so.
Wars ending? You still from the 20th century? When is the last time the USA ended a war? Iraq, Afghanistan, drugs, terrorism - all the more recent wars are designed and intended to last forever.
but when they started becoming more and more a Windows clone, I lost my faith in them.
ditto.
Gnome was very promising once, I even worked on it for a while. But this exactly, there was a point where it turned into a me-too project, where ideas for making things better were shunned in favour of making things familiar, which at that time meant copying windows.
Gnome is a major example of Free Software fucking it up because of bikeshedding and copying instead of innovating.
They could try selling them without warranty or with a very simple 30 day exchange warranty for defective products, but that could leave them with a PR problem when people run into problems
Plus it would be outright illegal in most of the world, most importantly the EU, which is the biggest market for tech products (considerably larger than the US, sorry dudes).
there's one surefire way to
Right, because no one else but you has ever thought about it, done some calculations, asked a few experts or (gasp!) customers, and ran the scenario. Least of all the people who just took one of the largest stock dives in their history and wrote off more money than you will ever see in your entire life.
Why was this piece of crap posted to the frontpage, instead of some unknown blog with 5 readers, where it belongs?
Yes, you would. Depending on your jurisdiction, though, as long as you don't publicly perform or exhibit it, or try to sell it etc., you would likely fall into one of the many exceptions to copyright law.
What's copyrighted is the idea, not the physical manifestation or "input".
You can not copyright ideas. You copyright works, i.e. specific implementations of ideas.
The rest of your comment is spot on.
Precedent seems to imply that the resulting object cannot be controlled (e.g. the output of a GPLed program is not GPLed, so why should executing a program on a 3D printer be any different?).
Don't you hate it when those "power-users" in your company talk about computers? Does it make you cringe when they mix and abuse tech terms that make them look smart to the other users who have no idea what they're talking about, but to you, a real techie, it just hurts you inside?
Guess what, it's the same with law. Those who know about the law cringe when they hear those crappy pseudo-smart comments from the geeks and nerds who think they got it, but they don't.
The output of a software does not fall under the license of the software nor is it covered by the copyright that covers the software. However that does not mean it exists in a legal vacuum. If I write a piece of software that, in whichever way, creates a precise copy of Harry Potter as its output, that resulting text is still legally a copy of Harry Potter and me publishing it as a book would run afoul of copyright law.
That is what copyright law is about. You can't legally copy stuff that is copyrighted by someone else without his permission. It doesn't matter if you copy it with a photocopier, or by taking a picture, or by hand the way the bible was copied through the middle ages. It is the resulting copy that is governed by the law, not the means of getting it.
It can be, doesn't have to.
"Fallen" is a good example. It has a nice atmosphere and storytelling, but the real kicker that made it a memorable movie is in the structure of the story and how the end loops back to the beginning and makes you re-visit the entire movie in your head. I don't want to go into more detail because it would ruin the movie for everyone who hasn't seen it.
The structure of the story is one element of the whole, and like every other element, you can creatively play with it. If people stop doing that, it's a loss in variety. Same as for everything else.
but the bulk of box-office success ultimately comes down to the most elusive and unquantifiable of things: knowing what the audience wants before it does, and a whole lot of luck.
My personal pet theory is a lot simpler:
Not overfeeding them on the same stuff.
There are only so many times you can see the same movie and enjoy it. Hollywood blockbusters have largely turned into remixes of the same movie. If you know anything about storywriting, you've long realized that almost all Hollywood movies have the same script. Not just similarities the way most stories have, say, a beginning, a middle and an end, or a dramatic curve with a typical shape, but actually the same fucking script. Replace specifics like names, locations or technologies/species/etc. (giant robots/aliens/monsters/whatever) with placeholders and you'll see that they're pretty much all telling the same story.
And you can only hear the same story so often before it gets boring.
Which company will get a license to print money by being selected the provider of the mandatory hardware, software and/or filtering list?
What odds are the bookies giving on that company belonging to someone who is either a relative or a good friend of a high-ranking politician?
Surprise, people with a common interest banding together and pooling their resources to make it happen is a model that can actually work.
Thinking about it, that's how corporations originally got started. You know, before they turned into immortal international government-corruption special interest lobby groups.
Also; if anybody with an open-source-inspired name starts first-posting with links to MS sites; check their posting history and see if they've ever posted anything non-MS-related, often you'll find they won't. Lately every first post on slashdot seems to somehow relate whatever TFA is about to some random MS link.
It's too much work to check the background of every random poster, which is exactly what they're betting on. Maybe we should have a /. version of "spot the Fed".
Right, because falling over backwards and giving in is the only reasonable choice when someone pressures you.
If I were the CEO of an international corporation with a budget that dwarfs several small countries, I would have enough legal experts on staff to check the law very carefully and make a stand when they cross the line.
I would also understand that the last thing they would do to force through a secret and very likely highly illegal program is jailing a public person.
No one expects anyone to risk being shot in the face. But putting one of the 2800 million dollars of profit (Google, in this example) into a legal defense against this wouldn't bancrupt the company. Basically, all the "fighting" they do now they could've done when they received the first PRISM request.
Moon still orbiting Earth, news at 11.
Seriously, this is probably the least surprising news of the year.
MS jumping on the tablet bandwagon with a windows tablet? *yawn* the most obvious business decision Balmer could make.
That it would suck and sell badly? The only people who didn't expect that were the ones not yet born when MS launched the Zune. Not only that MS first version of everything sucks so bad you have to be either a MS employee or a total moron with brain damage, amnesia and an IQ below room temperature to buy one, but especially in the mobile sector MS is so much of a non-player that their de-facto-acquisition of Nokia destroyed one of the largest mobile phone manufacturers instead of boosting the sales of MS mobile devices.
If they gave away a "greatest idiot on the planet" medal with each tablet sold, they might increase sales and do something honest for a change.
So, aside from click-baiting, why is this article on /. ?
"They are violating our rights, spying on everyone and forcing us to cooperate in all of that." - "I got it! Let's send them a really stern letter!"
This is PR damage-control, nothing else. They're trying to create the impression they were unwilling accomplices.
Adblock Edge is a recent fork that seems well-maintained.
I don't think the idea of taking something on faith without proof is inherently utterly without merit.
Why not?
If you accept that, then how do you seperate the scammers you tell you hogwash for their personal profit from those that (your assumption) have something valuable to say?
If nothing else I take it on faith that my experience of the world is real;
I don't. However, for all practical purposes, acting as if it were real until I know for sure (if ever) is the reasonable thing to do, because acting as if it weren't has all kinds of interesting consequences.
Basically, in situations where evidence is not available, it is perfectly rational to go with whatever the best and most reasonable path appears to be. But that still isn't a faith-based approach. The difference between an evidence-based approach and a faith-based approach is that in the former you keep your mind open to evidence to the contrary, and in the later you don't.
And its worth noting that atheism is itself a faith proposition
No, it isn't, and that this sentence has become popular is merely a strategy of the religious people fighting against atheism. It's a bold lie, just like the phrase about christians being persecuted.
There is literally tons of proof, just visit the nearest university library. What you are looking for is the one "big" piece of proof that proves everything. But the very core of science is that such a thing doesn't exist, that understanding the world does not come from a "root cause" approach (that is the faith-based "everything flows from god" way), but from looking at the small parts and how they interact with each other.
The proof is there. It's just not the kind of proof that people brought up in a "one ring to rule them all" ... errr... wrong meme... "one answer to end all questions" culture are satisfied with.
The real reason I switched is because I don't want to be a part of their extortion scheme.
You see, you are not the victim in this scam, you are the weapon. With millions of users behind them, they can go to advertising networks and say "nice campaign you have there, would be a shame if something happened to it..."
This is about to fall off the end of my comments list, so I'd like to sum up a bit:
I don't think we disagree on the science/unknowable bit. There may or may not be parts of reality that science will never explain. I personally doubt it, because science is very flexible, but I am sure that there are parts that science as we know it today won't explain.
We also agree that religion does not know the answers that science doesn't. At best, they pretend to, and so far each and every one of their pseudo-explanations has been found to be hogwash. With that track record, it's a pretty safe bet to assume the remaining ones are just more of the same.
So, in summary, religion is bullshit and teaching it to young children as if it were fact is indoctrination. In fact, I think child abuse would be a better term and yes, many people suffer for life from the crap they were told as children.
My argument there is that we can be motivated to war without religion. If religion were eliminated we'd stop using it as an excuse to kill people, but I'm doubtful we'd fight less. We'll just find other excuses.
I'm pretty sure there would still be war, yes.
I am also pretty sure that there would be less violence. Modern islamic terrorism, for example, is unthinkable without islam. On the christian side, both the crusades and the prosecution of Jews can not be imagined without the religious component. There is still plenty of violence in the middle ages if you substract these, so it's not like I'm claiming religion is the root of all evil. Sometimes it is the cause of evil and sometimes it is just a tool. I think seing it as only one or the other is too simplistic a view.