Simply instruct your employees on the importance of not leaving a workstation unsecured (i.e. locked, logged off, etc.). Use a 3-strike system, if you must. There really shouldn't be a need for such fancy equipment.
If that would work, it would have worked by now. It doesn't. We can skip all the philosophical discussion about why and how and bla bla bla. The real world provides us with the evidence that this solution does not work, and that really is all there is to it.
Not likely. The setting this is advertised for is the medical environment, where users are well aware that they are handling sensitive data. If logging back on is as easy as they make it seem in the video, it may even be a benefit to the users.
Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality,
True. I have long discounted Free/Open Source software for productivity tools. My servers run Debian, but I would never again use that on my desktop. Though I moved upwards to OS X, not downwards to windows, I can relate to those users.
a lack of usability
Also true, most Free/Open Source software is still made and designed by geeks for geeks, and hasn't had a desperately needed visit to a usability expert. Usability is not something you can do as an afterthought. Either you have it designed in from the start, or it won't be there.
and poor interoperability."
By which they most likely mean it doesn't read.xslx files and doesn't sync properly with Exchange. Welcome to the world of MS lock-in. It is real, and it's the main profit source for MS. Now we know that even a government can't free itself from that burden.
What is a small company supposed to do if you want to host your own mail?
Get a VPS somewhere and use that as a mailserver. Heck, I have one privately, how small a company are you that you don't?
It makes sense from many perspectives. You are still online when the power or connectivity in your office goes down, it can serve as an off-site backup, it will have a static IP address, getting you past many RBLS, etc. filters.
In fact, being a good sysadmin, all my servers are MEANT to be rebooted if something goes sour.
You and I have different work philosophies.
Yes, rebooting is the fastest way to bring a system from an unknown state back to a known state.
But a system should never enter an unknown state. Every event of that type is the result of a failure. Sometimes, it happens, IT is complicated like that. But it shouldn't happen.
My philosophy is that every server should come up clean and running all its services if it ever gets rebooted for whatever reason - no handholding. At the same time, it should not ever require a reboot. If it does, something went horribly wrong.
Maybe among Fox News commentators, or windows admins, or some other kind of inferior life form. I've never heard a Unix admin say that, and I've been working with them or as one of them for over 15 years.
You don't reboot a Unix system except for: * kernel updates * hardware replacement * you really, really, really have tried absolutely everything else and you need a minute of time to think while you look as if you were doing something else than staring blankly at the wall and you know it fools the windows-only boss-idiot.
I know my Unix systems measure their uptimes in months and sometimes years, and I still remember that one time when I spent an hour looking for traces of what I thought was an unexpected reboot, until I finally found out that the Linux uptime counter rolls over after some 460 or so days.
You don't reboot Unix servers. Whoever thinks the premises of the article with its myth is remotely true - please don't let people like that within 10 feet of your servers.
As a matter of fact, at the Chaos Communications Camp near Berlin in, I think, 1999, there was one discussion about those PayBack and other schemes. Don't know if you have them outside Europe, basically you get a card that you can use during your shopping at shops that participate, and you get "points", and from points you get money, I think it's something like a 0.5% discount on your shopping. The privacy implications are, of course, that the shops and the system providers can link your personal data to your shopping locations and habbits.
So a guy from the Netherlands and me proposed a simple solution, which was implemented right then and there and a few people have continued it later on - exchange your card with someone else's. Since we all do roughly the same amount of grocery, etc. shopping, it comes out to about the same values for you, even in systems where the points are not directly discounted from your purchase price. And the database gets screwed up, at least as far as your data is concerned.
So yes, exchanging your account with someone else every now and then is a worthwhile thing for some sites. Unfortunately, not for sites like Facebook.
We live in a time when national security is the highest priority
Uh, no? Where do you get that from? National security is no more or less important than at any other time in history. There have always been nations who hate your guts, there have always been people armed with the latest in destructive technologies, there have always been people getting killed violently.
Scientifically speaking, apply logic 101. If your assumption is incorrect, your conclusion is worse than false, it is meaningless.
We really, really need to teach kids logic 101. Maybe then when they grow up, this nonsense by which national policies are determined by unsubstantiated claims will finally end.
Does anyone else just feel worn out by all political BS in the U.S these days?
You think it's any different elsewhere? I live in Germany. I can not name one top-level politician whom I would grant any competence whatsoever. I don't know how it happened, but we have a government that is so bad at everything, I am very, very certain that if you replaced them all by people randomly picked from the street, those would do better.
There was a very good commentary on the middle-east uprisings these days. It basically said that those guys are smarter than us, and if we had any brains, we would join them and kick out our governments, for they aren't any better than the dictators that are being toppled now.
When the demos against the government - not just against any single particular point, but against this government itself, with its incompetence and corruption and self-serving and arrogance - start, you can count me in. And if they don't, I'll do my part to make them start.
It shouldn't exhaust you, it should prompt you to do something about it. And since our election system has been corrupted by the very same people, resistance (peaceful or armed, whatever rocks your boat) is the only option.
Yes, the US routinely applies US laws to foreign citizens. I have first hand experience of that, as one of the defendants back in the DeCSS case.
No, the same does of course not apply the other way around. The US does not consider itself a peer amongst peers, it thinks of itself as the greatest nation on earth, chosen by god himself, above all international law save the one they bring themselves, with guns and tanks.
But it's good that they're doing it now. Julian has hinted towards this from the beginning, it will give his fight against extradition more strength.
In videogames, you play against your own competence or against other players. The one which shows the most mastery at the game win. The goal of the game is competition.
That is an extremely simplified view. While many people compete in sports for the very same reason, others use sports to feel better, excercise, be with friends - and competition enters very late, if at all. In my final school years, I was in a local Volleyball team. We went to competitions every now and then, and usually lost horribly. It didn't matter to us, because the fun, and being with the same group of people you liked regularily, was what counted most.
Same with games. Some games you play to win, some you play because you enjoy them. Some for the story and some for the challenge, and some just because you want an activity you can share with your 200 km away girlfriend.
You're funny. I've been doing security as a profession since times when "windows" referred to the glassy panes you have in your house. I've also had one system of mine compromised in that entire time. But contrary to you, I don't believe that I should be responsible for installing the brakes, airbag, ABS and safety belts in my car, even if I happen to be a mechanic. If the car is inherently unsafe, it's not because the owner failed to install his own brakes, it's because cars ought to have brakes.
And if you think rwx is the pinacle of security principles, there's nothing I can do for you, because you would need years of study in order to appreciate what's out there. Meanwhile, remind me why a user has exactly one set of permissions and why every file he opens, every program he runs and everything else he does needs to inherit the very same set of permissions. As if we had never invented roles, domains, RBAC, MAC, MLS and two dozen other concepts.
Look, MS knows little about security, and doesn't care about users.
Remind me why we're listening to them, please?
They've become so primitive recently. Did you notice who is missing in the list of people potentially responsible for the computer security? The user is there, the ISP is there, the OS manufacturer is... oh... hm... what a surprise.
If MS would get off its lazy but and add some 20 year old security principles to its OS, we'd all be better off.
Postal is the only game series where your quest is to buy some milk, and then you go out and kill everything that moves. Does that kind of remind you of your typical MMO quest, except it's a lot more honest about the "yeah, we only make up a thin excuse of a story so you don't feel like it's mindless killing" part?
They also made fun of terrorists back when everyone else was afraid of them.
It's certainly not a masterpiece, but there's a bit more in it than what you make out, and it rightfully has its fans.
The United States was born out of not only a distrust of, but an actual rejection of the government that was running it.
You're not the only country in the world with a revolution, you know? In fact, compared to most others, your overthrow of your government was painless. Maybe that's why you think it's not such a big deal.
The whole point of the US constitution is to prevent the government from getting in the way of its people.
That's where things begin to differ, yes. Every other revolution tried to put in a better government. Your goal was to have less government. People elsewhere still believe that government can be made better. You believe that better equals less.
In a country where you have everything, and don't really understand anymore why you pay those taxes, that might be an understandable attitude. In a country where people will starve to death if the government stops supplying food, that's suicide.
because in the last several decades (and thus, for the entirety of most people's lives), the people who have had the legislative power for the longest stretches of that period (the left) have systematically sought to alter the government's role in private lives.
Quite frankly, from outside that's pure nonsense. All your governments have tried to get more control, only the means differ. The right-right pushes through terror hysteria, the middle-right pushes through health care. You don't have a left. Your so-called "left" would be a conservative party over here in Europe.
Are you suggesting that Americans should not recoil at that sort of governance?
I recoil at ours, and while I think your current one is a ton better than the one before, you're free to dislike it. But you need to realize that the "less government" strawman is just that. Read the book-within-a-book in "1984" again. It explains the process very clearly.
Do you really think the Tea Party, for example, would reduce government and/or government spending? Please. Once a politician has his greedy hands on tax money, he doesn't give it back. They'll just change who gets it.
Nanny State
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. None, nada, zilch, zero. You remind me of a man who is afraid he will become homosexual against his will because his wife asks him to comb his hair. You are incredibly far away from anything that could rightfully be called a "Nanny State". Heck, you don't have half of the government services that the rest of the world considers essential. Health care? I don't know many non-3rd-world countries who don't have something like that.
wait for it all to turn into a Greece, a Spain, an Ireland, or a Portugal.
That's an entirely different thing, and has nothing to do with facts. This is an evil meeting of politics and out-of-control economy. Portugal, for example, has no problems justifying the ratings, and has in fact less debt than most of Europe, including France, Germany, etc.
Do some more research on that before you use it as an argument.
Imagine a system where everything is stored in tags and where folders become obsolete or used far less often.
Folders will never go away.
You need a unique, constant ordering system in order to access your data. And you almost always have groups of data that belong together.
Folders are the simplest solution to this problem, and there is always a context where the simple solution is the best one.
I'd rather expect folders to become more like tags. I've had the opportunity to direct some money towards Punakea so it would support a virtual folder structure. That's one solution I believe has a future. Tags alone are a mess once you approach thousands of documents and/or share your files with other people in a team.
We definitely need more and better use of metadata. OS X has the basic infrastructure in its filesystem, but it isn't used as much as it should.
Right, because the people in North Korea have a lot of opportunities to say what they think, right?
Fox News is not the only place where people can speak their minds, and North Korea is not the only place with an oppressive government.
You see the current revolution in Egypt on TV. I've actually talked to egyptian people in Egypt about their government. My view is certainly not representative because I could only speak to a few people. But I heard years ago what you only see on TV very recently.
Yes, those silly people in Eastern Europe didn't have a thing to say about their governments before they replaced them with something resembling modern constitutional democracies, right?
You missed the point by about 0.5 AU, congratulations. Yes, those people disliked and ultimately removed their governments. They still, not then and not now, have a general distrust of (abstract) Government. Americans distrust Government - the abstract, "per se" term. People elsewhere distrust their particular, actual government. They still believe in the concept of government.
So what's your point?
Learn to read. I've stated my point clearly and more than once. If you want to demonstrate imaginative superior dialectics against an imaginary position you attempt to attribute to the nearest bystander who happens to argue something that has a remote resemblance to something that once met a close relative of what you are actually trying to attack, you should at least be less transparent.
Where the hell do come up with Americans == The US Government?
Nowhere. Maybe you should add comprehension to your list of skills, you already have reading on it, which is a good start.
The people you're going off on are not the US Government, they're fellow Slashdotters. You asshat.
Nowhere did I intend to go off on the US government. It was my full intention to go off on the slashdotters. I don't like your government any more than you do, but that doesn't mean this simplistic, bullheaded, "if you're not with us you're against us" attitude towards your own government is right. That's a medieval kind of thinking, that anyone who doesn't work the way you'd prefer must be in league with the devil or otherwise pure evil. The world is not that simple. Governments are not all bad all the time, though the do evil things sometimes. Not all muslims are terrorists, though some are. Not all germans are Nazis, even though half a century ago most were. Not all americans are stupid, there actually are a few with brains. I even know a priest who I'm fairly sure is not a child molester. There are always exceptions, there is never a single simple sentence to explain a complex situation, and when you look at it, you'll even find your terms misleading - what exactly is "the government", for instance? Where does it begin and where does it end? Precisely? Is the policeman "the government"? The fireman? The guy sweeping the sidewalk? The nurse in the state-run hospital? "The government" is a fuzzy entity when you look closely. And that's important because while Obama or Merkel or Mubarak are clearly a part of "the government", they are not identical to it. And most of the evil does not begin with them, and much not even come across them. The real powers in most governments are not the leading public figures, but the unseen administration under them.
And once you start into a real, serious discussion about government, you see how ridiculous this primitive "it's all evil" attitude is. That's like saying "all plants are green" or "all animals have four legs". At first glance it's right, at second glance it's wrong, at third glance it's just stupid to say something like that, and if you discuss it with a biologist, you'll find out that "plants" and "animals" are terms that are quite a bit more complicated than you'd thought (as are "green" and "legs").
we don't trust any governments. That's not an American thing. That's anybody-with-a-brain thing.
No, it isn't. Anyone non-american with a brain knows that the world is not that simple, that governments come in good and bad, and that a lot of things are a matter of perspective.
History shows repeatedly that when governments have the authority to do something, they always abuse that authority. Always.
If you wait long enough, you will certainly find proof. What you ignore is the many years inbetween. And, of course, the good that you rightfully need to consider as well. I'm no friend of my current government, absolutely not. They're incompetent nutcases, idiots, powermongers and things I don't yet have words for. But there's in important difference between seing government as evil per se and seing it as a tool that - like all tools - can be used well or badly, or abuse, and thus needs to be put into the hands of the right people.
Governments have to be kept in check, just like people.
There's no difference. Governments aren't run by aliens or SkyNet, they're run by people. To abuse another american proverb: "Governments don't oppress people. People oppress people."
Nowhere in the entire world that I've travelled to or had contact with - and that's quite a bit of it - do you find the same conspiracy theory base attitude towards government. Not even in countries where the government actually is evil.
Most people, even and sometimes especially those who live under an oppressive government, are able to see the world in shades of grey. That means understanding that some things a government does are good, and some are bad, and most are a matter of perspective.
It is their chartered, stated purpose to be that way, and they actually are.
That's a typical quote you'd not hear anywhere in Europe or Asia, and not in very many places in South America or even Africa, where they arguably have the worst governments.
You stupid americans need to come off the drug trip. Not everything any government could potentially theoretically may want to do is automatically evil, and putting control into the hands of one single, undemocratic, bureaucratic, unaccountable entity is not a proper solution.
And, quite frankly, the rest of the world has about had it with your attitude. If you don't want to be treated as assholes by the rest of us, stop fucking act like it.
And it is an asshole attitude to say "we don't trust your governments, so we want to keep control of a global system with ours."
If the same were reversed, if, say, by pure historic accident control over ICANN were with France, you would've spent the past 20 years screaming bloody murder.
That is one low UID mate. I threw my low number away as it seemed to attract fan-boi types.
It does, but I have enough controversial opinions and not enough fear to post them and that combination keeps the numbers low.
When/. started to attract the I had better fan/friend that dude as he has a low UID I started to feel sad for the future of/.
Indeed, I held back for several years on setting anyone on fan or foe myself, because just like Facebook I find that a too binary, too simple, too undifferentiated qualifier. But I've long since given up hope that someone will give us a better set of options. Hey Facebook, if you're listening, at least make the diffference between "I know this person" and "he's a friend". *sigh* (and no, groups is not the same thing, as it doesn't show publicly)
ideas for new methods of moderation that might increase the signal to noise ratio but all to no avail.
I think the problem is in the numbers. A fixed number system is nice and easy to understand and code - but it doesn't scale. Especially when you encourage moderators to prefer modding up over modding down. In a sufficiently large crowd, you will find 5 people who think you're genius.
That said, it does work fairly well. I find the selection of comments (I browse at +4) better than at any other site, that's one of the reasons I'm still here - most articles I couldn't care less, but the comments are often good.
Slashdot Mirror
Simply instruct your employees on the importance of not leaving a workstation unsecured (i.e. locked, logged off, etc.). Use a 3-strike system, if you must. There really shouldn't be a need for such fancy equipment.
If that would work, it would have worked by now. It doesn't. We can skip all the philosophical discussion about why and how and bla bla bla. The real world provides us with the evidence that this solution does not work, and that really is all there is to it.
Not likely. The setting this is advertised for is the medical environment, where users are well aware that they are handling sensitive data. If logging back on is as easy as they make it seem in the video, it may even be a benefit to the users.
Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality,
True. I have long discounted Free/Open Source software for productivity tools. My servers run Debian, but I would never again use that on my desktop. Though I moved upwards to OS X, not downwards to windows, I can relate to those users.
a lack of usability
Also true, most Free/Open Source software is still made and designed by geeks for geeks, and hasn't had a desperately needed visit to a usability expert. Usability is not something you can do as an afterthought. Either you have it designed in from the start, or it won't be there.
and poor interoperability."
By which they most likely mean it doesn't read .xslx files and doesn't sync properly with Exchange. Welcome to the world of MS lock-in. It is real, and it's the main profit source for MS. Now we know that even a government can't free itself from that burden.
What is a small company supposed to do if you want to host your own mail?
Get a VPS somewhere and use that as a mailserver. Heck, I have one privately, how small a company are you that you don't?
It makes sense from many perspectives. You are still online when the power or connectivity in your office goes down, it can serve as an off-site backup, it will have a static IP address, getting you past many RBLS, etc. filters.
In fact, being a good sysadmin, all my servers are MEANT to be rebooted if something goes sour.
You and I have different work philosophies.
Yes, rebooting is the fastest way to bring a system from an unknown state back to a known state.
But a system should never enter an unknown state. Every event of that type is the result of a failure. Sometimes, it happens, IT is complicated like that. But it shouldn't happen.
My philosophy is that every server should come up clean and running all its services if it ever gets rebooted for whatever reason - no handholding. At the same time, it should not ever require a reboot. If it does, something went horribly wrong.
That's a myth?
Maybe among Fox News commentators, or windows admins, or some other kind of inferior life form. I've never heard a Unix admin say that, and I've been working with them or as one of them for over 15 years.
You don't reboot a Unix system except for:
* kernel updates
* hardware replacement
* you really, really, really have tried absolutely everything else and you need a minute of time to think while you look as if you were doing something else than staring blankly at the wall and you know it fools the windows-only boss-idiot.
I know my Unix systems measure their uptimes in months and sometimes years, and I still remember that one time when I spent an hour looking for traces of what I thought was an unexpected reboot, until I finally found out that the Linux uptime counter rolls over after some 460 or so days.
You don't reboot Unix servers. Whoever thinks the premises of the article with its myth is remotely true - please don't let people like that within 10 feet of your servers.
As a matter of fact, at the Chaos Communications Camp near Berlin in, I think, 1999, there was one discussion about those PayBack and other schemes. Don't know if you have them outside Europe, basically you get a card that you can use during your shopping at shops that participate, and you get "points", and from points you get money, I think it's something like a 0.5% discount on your shopping. The privacy implications are, of course, that the shops and the system providers can link your personal data to your shopping locations and habbits.
So a guy from the Netherlands and me proposed a simple solution, which was implemented right then and there and a few people have continued it later on - exchange your card with someone else's. Since we all do roughly the same amount of grocery, etc. shopping, it comes out to about the same values for you, even in systems where the points are not directly discounted from your purchase price. And the database gets screwed up, at least as far as your data is concerned.
So yes, exchanging your account with someone else every now and then is a worthwhile thing for some sites. Unfortunately, not for sites like Facebook.
We live in a time when national security is the highest priority
Uh, no? Where do you get that from? National security is no more or less important than at any other time in history. There have always been nations who hate your guts, there have always been people armed with the latest in destructive technologies, there have always been people getting killed violently.
Scientifically speaking, apply logic 101. If your assumption is incorrect, your conclusion is worse than false, it is meaningless.
We really, really need to teach kids logic 101. Maybe then when they grow up, this nonsense by which national policies are determined by unsubstantiated claims will finally end.
Does anyone else just feel worn out by all political BS in the U.S these days?
You think it's any different elsewhere? I live in Germany. I can not name one top-level politician whom I would grant any competence whatsoever. I don't know how it happened, but we have a government that is so bad at everything, I am very, very certain that if you replaced them all by people randomly picked from the street, those would do better.
There was a very good commentary on the middle-east uprisings these days. It basically said that those guys are smarter than us, and if we had any brains, we would join them and kick out our governments, for they aren't any better than the dictators that are being toppled now.
When the demos against the government - not just against any single particular point, but against this government itself, with its incompetence and corruption and self-serving and arrogance - start, you can count me in. And if they don't, I'll do my part to make them start.
It shouldn't exhaust you, it should prompt you to do something about it. And since our election system has been corrupted by the very same people, resistance (peaceful or armed, whatever rocks your boat) is the only option.
Yes, No.
Yes, the US routinely applies US laws to foreign citizens. I have first hand experience of that, as one of the defendants back in the DeCSS case.
No, the same does of course not apply the other way around. The US does not consider itself a peer amongst peers, it thinks of itself as the greatest nation on earth, chosen by god himself, above all international law save the one they bring themselves, with guns and tanks.
But it's good that they're doing it now. Julian has hinted towards this from the beginning, it will give his fight against extradition more strength.
In videogames, you play against your own competence or against other players. The one which shows the most mastery at the game win. The goal of the game is competition.
That is an extremely simplified view. While many people compete in sports for the very same reason, others use sports to feel better, excercise, be with friends - and competition enters very late, if at all. In my final school years, I was in a local Volleyball team. We went to competitions every now and then, and usually lost horribly. It didn't matter to us, because the fun, and being with the same group of people you liked regularily, was what counted most.
Same with games. Some games you play to win, some you play because you enjoy them. Some for the story and some for the challenge, and some just because you want an activity you can share with your 200 km away girlfriend.
You're funny. I've been doing security as a profession since times when "windows" referred to the glassy panes you have in your house. I've also had one system of mine compromised in that entire time. But contrary to you, I don't believe that I should be responsible for installing the brakes, airbag, ABS and safety belts in my car, even if I happen to be a mechanic. If the car is inherently unsafe, it's not because the owner failed to install his own brakes, it's because cars ought to have brakes.
And if you think rwx is the pinacle of security principles, there's nothing I can do for you, because you would need years of study in order to appreciate what's out there. Meanwhile, remind me why a user has exactly one set of permissions and why every file he opens, every program he runs and everything else he does needs to inherit the very same set of permissions. As if we had never invented roles, domains, RBAC, MAC, MLS and two dozen other concepts.
Look, MS knows little about security, and doesn't care about users.
Remind me why we're listening to them, please?
They've become so primitive recently. Did you notice who is missing in the list of people potentially responsible for the computer security? The user is there, the ISP is there, the OS manufacturer is... oh... hm... what a surprise.
If MS would get off its lazy but and add some 20 year old security principles to its OS, we'd all be better off.
I disagree quite heavily.
Postal is the only game series where your quest is to buy some milk, and then you go out and kill everything that moves. Does that kind of remind you of your typical MMO quest, except it's a lot more honest about the "yeah, we only make up a thin excuse of a story so you don't feel like it's mindless killing" part?
They also made fun of terrorists back when everyone else was afraid of them.
It's certainly not a masterpiece, but there's a bit more in it than what you make out, and it rightfully has its fans.
Didn't even know it was coming. Very cool.
Looking forward to a game that makes no stupid excuses. Let's shoot some innocents in the head. It's a game, after all.
The United States was born out of not only a distrust of, but an actual rejection of the government that was running it.
You're not the only country in the world with a revolution, you know? In fact, compared to most others, your overthrow of your government was painless. Maybe that's why you think it's not such a big deal.
The whole point of the US constitution is to prevent the government from getting in the way of its people.
That's where things begin to differ, yes. Every other revolution tried to put in a better government. Your goal was to have less government. People elsewhere still believe that government can be made better. You believe that better equals less.
In a country where you have everything, and don't really understand anymore why you pay those taxes, that might be an understandable attitude. In a country where people will starve to death if the government stops supplying food, that's suicide.
because in the last several decades (and thus, for the entirety of most people's lives), the people who have had the legislative power for the longest stretches of that period (the left) have systematically sought to alter the government's role in private lives.
Quite frankly, from outside that's pure nonsense. All your governments have tried to get more control, only the means differ. The right-right pushes through terror hysteria, the middle-right pushes through health care. You don't have a left. Your so-called "left" would be a conservative party over here in Europe.
Are you suggesting that Americans should not recoil at that sort of governance?
I recoil at ours, and while I think your current one is a ton better than the one before, you're free to dislike it. But you need to realize that the "less government" strawman is just that. Read the book-within-a-book in "1984" again. It explains the process very clearly.
Do you really think the Tea Party, for example, would reduce government and/or government spending? Please. Once a politician has his greedy hands on tax money, he doesn't give it back. They'll just change who gets it.
Nanny State
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. None, nada, zilch, zero. You remind me of a man who is afraid he will become homosexual against his will because his wife asks him to comb his hair. You are incredibly far away from anything that could rightfully be called a "Nanny State". Heck, you don't have half of the government services that the rest of the world considers essential. Health care? I don't know many non-3rd-world countries who don't have something like that.
wait for it all to turn into a Greece, a Spain, an Ireland, or a Portugal.
That's an entirely different thing, and has nothing to do with facts. This is an evil meeting of politics and out-of-control economy. Portugal, for example, has no problems justifying the ratings, and has in fact less debt than most of Europe, including France, Germany, etc.
Do some more research on that before you use it as an argument.
Imagine a system where everything is stored in tags and where folders become obsolete or used far less often.
Folders will never go away.
You need a unique, constant ordering system in order to access your data. And you almost always have groups of data that belong together.
Folders are the simplest solution to this problem, and there is always a context where the simple solution is the best one.
I'd rather expect folders to become more like tags. I've had the opportunity to direct some money towards Punakea so it would support a virtual folder structure. That's one solution I believe has a future. Tags alone are a mess once you approach thousands of documents and/or share your files with other people in a team.
We definitely need more and better use of metadata. OS X has the basic infrastructure in its filesystem, but it isn't used as much as it should.
Right, because the people in North Korea have a lot of opportunities to say what they think, right?
Fox News is not the only place where people can speak their minds, and North Korea is not the only place with an oppressive government.
You see the current revolution in Egypt on TV. I've actually talked to egyptian people in Egypt about their government. My view is certainly not representative because I could only speak to a few people. But I heard years ago what you only see on TV very recently.
Yes, those silly people in Eastern Europe didn't have a thing to say about their governments before they replaced them with something resembling modern constitutional democracies, right?
You missed the point by about 0.5 AU, congratulations. Yes, those people disliked and ultimately removed their governments. They still, not then and not now, have a general distrust of (abstract) Government. Americans distrust Government - the abstract, "per se" term. People elsewhere distrust their particular, actual government. They still believe in the concept of government.
So what's your point?
Learn to read. I've stated my point clearly and more than once. If you want to demonstrate imaginative superior dialectics against an imaginary position you attempt to attribute to the nearest bystander who happens to argue something that has a remote resemblance to something that once met a close relative of what you are actually trying to attack, you should at least be less transparent.
Where the hell do come up with Americans == The US Government?
Nowhere. Maybe you should add comprehension to your list of skills, you already have reading on it, which is a good start.
The people you're going off on are not the US Government, they're fellow Slashdotters. You asshat.
Nowhere did I intend to go off on the US government. It was my full intention to go off on the slashdotters. I don't like your government any more than you do, but that doesn't mean this simplistic, bullheaded, "if you're not with us you're against us" attitude towards your own government is right. That's a medieval kind of thinking, that anyone who doesn't work the way you'd prefer must be in league with the devil or otherwise pure evil.
The world is not that simple. Governments are not all bad all the time, though the do evil things sometimes. Not all muslims are terrorists, though some are. Not all germans are Nazis, even though half a century ago most were. Not all americans are stupid, there actually are a few with brains. I even know a priest who I'm fairly sure is not a child molester. There are always exceptions, there is never a single simple sentence to explain a complex situation, and when you look at it, you'll even find your terms misleading - what exactly is "the government", for instance? Where does it begin and where does it end? Precisely? Is the policeman "the government"? The fireman? The guy sweeping the sidewalk? The nurse in the state-run hospital? "The government" is a fuzzy entity when you look closely. And that's important because while Obama or Merkel or Mubarak are clearly a part of "the government", they are not identical to it. And most of the evil does not begin with them, and much not even come across them. The real powers in most governments are not the leading public figures, but the unseen administration under them.
And once you start into a real, serious discussion about government, you see how ridiculous this primitive "it's all evil" attitude is. That's like saying "all plants are green" or "all animals have four legs". At first glance it's right, at second glance it's wrong, at third glance it's just stupid to say something like that, and if you discuss it with a biologist, you'll find out that "plants" and "animals" are terms that are quite a bit more complicated than you'd thought (as are "green" and "legs").
we don't trust any governments. That's not an American thing. That's anybody-with-a-brain thing.
No, it isn't. Anyone non-american with a brain knows that the world is not that simple, that governments come in good and bad, and that a lot of things are a matter of perspective.
History shows repeatedly that when governments have the authority to do something, they always abuse that authority. Always.
If you wait long enough, you will certainly find proof. What you ignore is the many years inbetween. And, of course, the good that you rightfully need to consider as well.
I'm no friend of my current government, absolutely not. They're incompetent nutcases, idiots, powermongers and things I don't yet have words for.
But there's in important difference between seing government as evil per se and seing it as a tool that - like all tools - can be used well or badly, or abuse, and thus needs to be put into the hands of the right people.
Governments have to be kept in check, just like people.
There's no difference. Governments aren't run by aliens or SkyNet, they're run by people. To abuse another american proverb: "Governments don't oppress people. People oppress people."
It has everything to do with it.
Nowhere in the entire world that I've travelled to or had contact with - and that's quite a bit of it - do you find the same conspiracy theory base attitude towards government. Not even in countries where the government actually is evil.
Most people, even and sometimes especially those who live under an oppressive government, are able to see the world in shades of grey. That means understanding that some things a government does are good, and some are bad, and most are a matter of perspective.
It is their chartered, stated purpose to be that way, and they actually are.
That's a typical quote you'd not hear anywhere in Europe or Asia, and not in very many places in South America or even Africa, where they arguably have the worst governments.
You stupid americans need to come off the drug trip. Not everything any government could potentially theoretically may want to do is automatically evil, and putting control into the hands of one single, undemocratic, bureaucratic, unaccountable entity is not a proper solution.
And, quite frankly, the rest of the world has about had it with your attitude. If you don't want to be treated as assholes by the rest of us, stop fucking act like it.
And it is an asshole attitude to say "we don't trust your governments, so we want to keep control of a global system with ours."
If the same were reversed, if, say, by pure historic accident control over ICANN were with France, you would've spent the past 20 years screaming bloody murder.
That is one low UID mate. I threw my low number away as it seemed to attract fan-boi types.
It does, but I have enough controversial opinions and not enough fear to post them and that combination keeps the numbers low.
When /. started to attract the I had better fan/friend that dude as he has a low UID I started to feel sad for the future of /.
Indeed, I held back for several years on setting anyone on fan or foe myself, because just like Facebook I find that a too binary, too simple, too undifferentiated qualifier. But I've long since given up hope that someone will give us a better set of options. Hey Facebook, if you're listening, at least make the diffference between "I know this person" and "he's a friend". *sigh*
(and no, groups is not the same thing, as it doesn't show publicly)
ideas for new methods of moderation that might increase the signal to noise ratio but all to no avail.
I think the problem is in the numbers. A fixed number system is nice and easy to understand and code - but it doesn't scale. Especially when you encourage moderators to prefer modding up over modding down. In a sufficiently large crowd, you will find 5 people who think you're genius.
That said, it does work fairly well. I find the selection of comments (I browse at +4) better than at any other site, that's one of the reasons I'm still here - most articles I couldn't care less, but the comments are often good.
Someone has - the .kids TLD has already been proposed.
Why do we need more TLDs?
Because then you can sell all the same names again.