"Dump the disks to a virtual image, virtualise the machines and then you can snapshot away to your hearts content. Be it via the virtualisation tech, or the host's file systems."
No, you can't count on the host system for a snapshot of a live guest.
"The Slashdot article's Venture Capitalists seem to forget that software patents protect small players more than big plays"
It's only that, no, they don't forget it and no, it doesn't protect small players more that big ones.
"For example, trade secrecy, ready access to markets, trademark rights, speed of development, and consumer goodwill may to some degree act as substitutes to the patent system. However, individual inventors and small firms often do not have these mechanisms at their disposal"
It's only that small companies have an easier time going bellow the radar, being agile, faster at both development and market timely than big ones.
Of course yes. But it makes its profit indepently of your ballance; that's why you could expect getting benefits (at the expense of other players, never against the house).
"If you gamble on the internet, and believe there is any skill involved, or that there is any opportunity for profit, you are a fool."
Not so simple.
There are in fact no choices when you game against the dealer but there's no problem when you gamble against other players (like in poker) as long as the dealer doesn't commit fraud.
But given news like this one, it seems that fraud is an accepted and legal practice on some States.
"It's a long-running linux services company that is for all intents and purposes, completely incompetent at doing the job at hand."
It's the second message you talk about how bad the company is, but you still didn't offer any argument about the central point.
"Sure, a business, but a business that's whining about not being able to bid for contracts that it SHOULD NEVER be allowed to bid on."
Which is why on Earth, but for legal problems, would be ANY company to be forbidden to bid. If it has such a bad record it will bid but it'll never win the bid. The problem being, then?
"Savoirefairelinux is a great example of everything that's wrong in the linux world"
Even conceding this company is as bad as you state (and you smell quite too trollish to accept just your word for it) I'm ready to bet that it is not an "example of everything that's wrong in the linux world" but an "example of everything that's wrong in the corporate world".
Or are you implying that if Savoirefairelinux were pushing Windows instead of Linux, it would miracously become a top notch company all of a sudden?
"Personnaly, I can't imagine changing from Windows to anything else just because a different company won a contest."
I do. It's just a matter to know (as always) if it won the contest by its bid's merits or by any other means.
"There is so much Windows specific programs and software package where I work that it would create some pretty huge problems."
So that would have to be accounted for in the RfP and properly weighted. If changing platforms is still the best option then, well, it's the best option, and that's why it won the bid, isn't it?
"If the government of Quebec wants to upgrade their AutoCad 2000 license to AutoCad 2010 licenses, do they have to accept bids from people who want to sell them the free software program "Bricscad" running under Wine?"
Of course not, and the sentence says no otherwise.
It's simply that there's no thing as "upgrading AutoCad 2000 to AutoCad 2010". It needs to be a "public procurement for an overhaul of Computer Assisted Design software at the Quebecois Regional Government".
Of course, in the procurement process things like the easyness and cost of the overhaul process, compatibility and/or moving-forward costs for porting in-house developments to the new platform, front licensing costs, guarantees and maintenance fees will be taken into consideration, so maybe (even probably) the winner bid will be the one proposing a migration from AutoCad 2000 to AutoCad 2010, but that will be *AFTER* proper consideration of the presented bids, not by negating access to the procurement process to anyone with the ability and desire to cover the functional needs of the publica res.
"The government of quebec's argument (an office 2003 to 2007, xp to vista) UPGRADE is not a bid-spec for a complete wholesale exchange of all their software and systems for one that is not compatible with all the other software in their list."
And the judge has clearly stated that this is illegal and it shouldn't have been done that way. If they need unbroken operations within the current environment, then so they need to state, not that the software will be from this or that brand and model. What if by some unstated means one of the bidders is able to give the asked for functionality, port all needed applications, with 0 maintenance stops, proper personnel formation, etc. and still get better price and guarantees? Should it be unable to bid because it happens not to be "Brand Foo Model Bar"? It's not up the government to say in advance "nah... that's impossible, so I'll ask for AutoCad 2010 instead", but to ask for functionalities and functional restrictions and then look what the bidders have to offer.
"I agree that the government should be considering extracting itself from the control of the "multinationals" as google-translate in TFA renders it."
And so the judge states too. It's not only that the government (illegally) asked for brands and models instead of functionalities, but that it didn't take its due dilligence not developing a study regarding what such needs and functionalities in fact were.
"Let's look at it another way. If the product were ball bearings and there was only one maker of ball bearings, that would be the only brand that would get consideration."
And then it would be illegal for a public procurement. If they need ball bearings, then they'll have to ask for "ball bearings" not for "ACME ball bearings", disregarding how many competitors there are in the market.
But then, let's look at it another way. I bet that there was a time when there was no black judges in Canada, (or in the USA for that matter). Do you think proper asking for "white judges, after all there're no black judges, you know"?
"Sounds like they didn't realize that implementing correct monitoring infrastructure, testing infrastructure and using that data to optimize your production infrastructure was a long term cost savings over barreling ahead under the 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' ideal."
Except when, well... it is not... which happens to be the case in an awful lot of cases.
At the very mininum your time costs 100$/hour to your company (not even mentioning the oportunity costs). That means that, more or less, a single day of your labour can buy them another cheap server. Compound this with a flexible (or, more to the truth, hurrying) environment where time-to-market is a very precious value and you'll get that in so many times the half-assed, made in a hurry, ashamingly dirty hack becomes *the* proper solution no matter how disgusting we, technosavvies, find it.
This is not to say that proper implementation, monitoring and optimization are not important: when they are important they are paramountly important. But the case is that it's not always as important as we tend to think.
You are right about tapes being more resilient, cheap and brought in a better form factor (not a minor concern; in fact that's what makes tapes the proper choice most times). But you are wrong in everything else.
"How do you backup TB's of data across many drives?"
Just exactly as you do with tapes.
"how do you ensure your disks dont get damaged on the ride to the bank/vault?"
By using careful transportation? Heck, if we can move a Ming dinasty jar all across the world, we can certainly move a bunch of SATA disks to the vault.
"today I sent out 9 LTO4 tapes (each holds upto 1.6TB) to the vault. I couldn't manage 9 disks."
You must be joking. 9 3.5" disks fit comfortably in a cardboard box protected with bubble plastic. Can't you manage *that*? Really?
"With tapes I just put them in the tape library and it manages everything itself"
Do you mean a cheap disk cabin wouldn't do the same? My two 15 SATA disks cabins must be a matter of magic, then.
"moves them around"
Of course your tape library moves the tapes around. That's because readers are so expensive that it only has one or two of them instead of fiveteen. Two 8 ports areca cards won't need to move any disk around: it gets enough ports to access all of them at the same time.
"knows which tape has what data, what can be overwritten, etc. Everyday it gives me a list of tapes to bring back from the vault and it gives me a list of tapes to take to the vault."
Exactly the same with disks, of course, since that's a matter of software, nothing physical media-related. Oh! and you'll get decent speed for random reads (like when recovering a single file) which you can't dream with tapes.
"The tapes cost about $40 each. A drive costs probably $1000."
A LTO4 probably will cost you more 50$ than 40$ but, anyway. Of course, a 2TB disk will cost you about 150$, not 1000$. The cost per GB is still on the side of tapes, but it's not sooo far from disks. And disks can be accessed randomly, and stand for read/write cycles orders of magnitude beyond tapes, so they are fastly coming to odds.
"My tape library cost like $10,000, it has two drives and holds around 40 tapes."
A SATA disk cabin will cost you about 1500$, holds 15 disks, will give you simultanous random access to all of them *and* will be easily upgraded to bigger disks when they become affordable.
Now, have you tried to move them in and out on (at most) a weekly basis?
Disks are certainly good for near-line but I don't see them beating tapes for off-site (and without off-site you shouldn't call it "back up").
"Picture your backup tapes. Now picture how useless they would be if your tape drive broke (or was destroyed in a disaster)."
Picture your hard disks. Now picture how useless they would be if your server or disk cabin broke (or were destroyed in a disaster). What you do in both cases is (gasp!) bring in a new driver/server.
A disaster qualifies itself by the loses it induces. Take an earthquake, a tsunami, a stock crash...
"I thought the 100 million (now estimated) accounts compromised in the TJX breach or the approximately 100 million in the Heartland Payment Systems breach, were just that - disastrous."
So you thought, uh? What exactly were the loses? Specifically, what were the loses for those responsible of the incident? Because if there were no loses, then there's no disaster. A nuisance or an incident, maybe, but not a disaster.
"Which is, in and of itself, not a problem. IT should not be selecting the software used, because IT doesn't understand what the business needs."
Neither should the bussiness units because bussiness units don't understand the grand IT scheme where everything should fit.
But that's no news... OK, I'll rewrite: that *shouldn't* be news since that's "team playing 101".
"Unfortunately, that's a much easier task for multinationals than it is for SMEs."
Not because SMEs 'per se' since on small companies is *way* easier for everybody to know everybody and for informal comunication channels to stablish worthy thourough information nets. The problem is that on SMEs the "cult to the personality" and the "you won't tell me how to drive my bussiness" is even stronger than in big corps.
"'Your stocks will be worthless (than any other's) in 23 hours if and only if those said others are allowed to sell sooner than you and *specially* sooner than the buyer's knowledge about the bankrupcy' No, your stocks will be worthless, period."
No, they won't or at the very least they won't get traded on worse conditions than they really are: if there's in fact a reasoned consensus that it worths nothing, then why should they had to be exchanged for any more? The "reasoned" part is the key factor here. People cannot rise to reasoned conclusions in milliseconds, machines can but then you are increasing assimetry between those with big machines near to the trade floor and those without. I thought information and action assimetries were the worst enemy of free market.
Reality probes my point: if you can really stock at the expected value on milliseconds, how is it that they were *in fact* traded so much for peanuts that the whole system has been forced to recognice it and so invalidate the exchanges?
It's obvious that trading on a 24h cycle a problem like this from the news cannot happen. Now the question is: which bad things will happen if moving to a 24h trade cycle that are not happing because millisecond trades are allowed? Are they more or less burdensome than current situation?
"And that's why that club of banks/brokers called the SEC was called in, and they are fixing this problem with this new rule."
So millisecond trades are not a problem but the way free market goes when big tycoons make millions out of it but then it's a problem that must be resolved when tycoons lose millions out of it.
With the best system being the one where big tycoons can make millions per millisecond out of nothing without risking nothing, did I understand it properly?
">>>Trades faster than a day should be simply outlawed You just bought Ford stock an hour ago, and now you just learned that the company is declaring bankruptcy effective 5 o'clock today. Do you really want to be forced to keep that stock until 23 hours from now (when it will be worthless)?"
Didn't you read? On his account, there's no problem. You will need to wait for 23 hours... but everybody else will have to too!
Your stocks will be worthless (than any other's) in 23 hours if and only if those said others are allowed to sell sooner than you and *specially* sooner than the buyer's knowledge about the bankrupcy. If everybody *have* to wait for a sane amount of time, the same for everybody, you are just leveraging the field allowing for more competitors and better reasoned actions.
Now, what do you prefer? To compete with big traders on an equal foot or compete with your morning newspaper against their supercomputers under the trade ring?
"I agree with your idea of 1 second intervals, but not 24 hours. A lot can change during that time."
It is not what can change between intervals but how much time is allowed for you to digest it.
Defense prevents a damage: it's reasonable by itself -if even within proportions. Punishment, in the other hand, does nothing to avoid the damage; it's only retaliation. While eye for eye was and advancement back in its day, put us in the same ethical ground than the one we try to despise.
I for one don't want to live in a society where the main difference between the ethically correct and wrong is that the former is backed up by the strongest bully in the playground (the Government).
Slashdot Mirror
"We can build zero energy houses already"
Not to say that's not a worthy goal that we should be achieving right now but...
"just by using sufficient insulation."
Which, unfortunately, you won't be producing for free.
"We can reduce our populations"
No, "we" can't do that, unless you offer yourself to be the first one to be "reduced".
"if we could deport all the third world immigrants"
Now I see why you posted as AC. That's both trollish and obviously stupid: moving people from here to there won't help to reduce world's population.
"ITER is an epic fail"
Obviously, since after two decades hasn't been able to get enough money to even give it a try. But may be you didn't tell it in that sense.
"Dump the disks to a virtual image, virtualise the machines and then you can snapshot away to your hearts content. Be it via the virtualisation tech, or the host's file systems."
No, you can't count on the host system for a snapshot of a live guest.
"if you are using tape backup, you better have multiple backups."
There's no such a beast as a "single copy backup". If it's not multiple, it's a copy, not a backup.
"if you want reliable, multiple, and offside-stored backups, tape really is the answer."
If it is not reliable, multiple and off-sited, it's not backup.
"The Slashdot article's Venture Capitalists seem to forget that software patents protect small players more than big plays"
It's only that, no, they don't forget it and no, it doesn't protect small players more that big ones.
"For example, trade secrecy, ready access to markets, trademark rights, speed of development, and consumer goodwill may to some degree act as substitutes to the patent system. However, individual inventors and small firms often do not have these mechanisms at their disposal"
It's only that small companies have an easier time going bellow the radar, being agile, faster at both development and market timely than big ones.
"Patents don't protect small companies or large ones. They're chess pieces on a board."
OK, then. What's the problem with a gambit? It usually simplifies the battlefield in ways both contenders find adequate.
"And yet the house still makes a profit"
Of course yes. But it makes its profit indepently of your ballance; that's why you could expect getting benefits (at the expense of other players, never against the house).
"If you gamble on the internet, and believe there is any skill involved, or that there is any opportunity for profit, you are a fool."
Not so simple.
There are in fact no choices when you game against the dealer but there's no problem when you gamble against other players (like in poker) as long as the dealer doesn't commit fraud.
But given news like this one, it seems that fraud is an accepted and legal practice on some States.
"It's a long-running linux services company that is for all intents and purposes, completely incompetent at doing the job at hand."
It's the second message you talk about how bad the company is, but you still didn't offer any argument about the central point.
"Sure, a business, but a business that's whining about not being able to bid for contracts that it SHOULD NEVER be allowed to bid on."
Which is why on Earth, but for legal problems, would be ANY company to be forbidden to bid. If it has such a bad record it will bid but it'll never win the bid. The problem being, then?
"Savoirefairelinux is a great example of everything that's wrong in the linux world"
Even conceding this company is as bad as you state (and you smell quite too trollish to accept just your word for it) I'm ready to bet that it is not an "example of everything that's wrong in the linux world" but an "example of everything that's wrong in the corporate world".
Or are you implying that if Savoirefairelinux were pushing Windows instead of Linux, it would miracously become a top notch company all of a sudden?
"Personnaly, I can't imagine changing from Windows to anything else just because a different company won a contest."
I do. It's just a matter to know (as always) if it won the contest by its bid's merits or by any other means.
"There is so much Windows specific programs and software package where I work that it would create some pretty huge problems."
So that would have to be accounted for in the RfP and properly weighted. If changing platforms is still the best option then, well, it's the best option, and that's why it won the bid, isn't it?
"If the government of Quebec wants to upgrade their AutoCad 2000 license to AutoCad 2010 licenses, do they have to accept bids from people who want to sell them the free software program "Bricscad" running under Wine?"
Of course not, and the sentence says no otherwise.
It's simply that there's no thing as "upgrading AutoCad 2000 to AutoCad 2010". It needs to be a "public procurement for an overhaul of Computer Assisted Design software at the Quebecois Regional Government".
Of course, in the procurement process things like the easyness and cost of the overhaul process, compatibility and/or moving-forward costs for porting in-house developments to the new platform, front licensing costs, guarantees and maintenance fees will be taken into consideration, so maybe (even probably) the winner bid will be the one proposing a migration from AutoCad 2000 to AutoCad 2010, but that will be *AFTER* proper consideration of the presented bids, not by negating access to the procurement process to anyone with the ability and desire to cover the functional needs of the publica res.
"The government of quebec's argument (an office 2003 to 2007, xp to vista) UPGRADE is not a bid-spec for a complete wholesale exchange of all their software and systems for one that is not compatible with all the other software in their list."
And the judge has clearly stated that this is illegal and it shouldn't have been done that way. If they need unbroken operations within the current environment, then so they need to state, not that the software will be from this or that brand and model. What if by some unstated means one of the bidders is able to give the asked for functionality, port all needed applications, with 0 maintenance stops, proper personnel formation, etc. and still get better price and guarantees? Should it be unable to bid because it happens not to be "Brand Foo Model Bar"? It's not up the government to say in advance "nah... that's impossible, so I'll ask for AutoCad 2010 instead", but to ask for functionalities and functional restrictions and then look what the bidders have to offer.
"I agree that the government should be considering extracting itself from the control of the "multinationals" as google-translate in TFA renders it."
And so the judge states too. It's not only that the government (illegally) asked for brands and models instead of functionalities, but that it didn't take its due dilligence not developing a study regarding what such needs and functionalities in fact were.
"Let's look at it another way. If the product were ball bearings and there was only one maker of ball bearings, that would be the only brand that would get consideration."
And then it would be illegal for a public procurement. If they need ball bearings, then they'll have to ask for "ball bearings" not for "ACME ball bearings", disregarding how many competitors there are in the market.
But then, let's look at it another way. I bet that there was a time when there was no black judges in Canada, (or in the USA for that matter). Do you think proper asking for "white judges, after all there're no black judges, you know"?
I count 1,2,4,5... for there is the number I never mention except to explode the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.
"our average across our organization is $45/hour"
That's what you get, not what you cost. Do those 45$/hour count the cost for your share on office space, electricity, taxes, infrastructures, etc.?
"Sounds like they didn't realize that implementing correct monitoring infrastructure, testing infrastructure and using that data to optimize your production infrastructure was a long term cost savings over barreling ahead under the 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' ideal."
Except when, well... it is not... which happens to be the case in an awful lot of cases.
At the very mininum your time costs 100$/hour to your company (not even mentioning the oportunity costs). That means that, more or less, a single day of your labour can buy them another cheap server. Compound this with a flexible (or, more to the truth, hurrying) environment where time-to-market is a very precious value and you'll get that in so many times the half-assed, made in a hurry, ashamingly dirty hack becomes *the* proper solution no matter how disgusting we, technosavvies, find it.
This is not to say that proper implementation, monitoring and optimization are not important: when they are important they are paramountly important. But the case is that it's not always as important as we tend to think.
You are right about tapes being more resilient, cheap and brought in a better form factor (not a minor concern; in fact that's what makes tapes the proper choice most times). But you are wrong in everything else.
"How do you backup TB's of data across many drives?"
Just exactly as you do with tapes.
"how do you ensure your disks dont get damaged on the ride to the bank/vault?"
By using careful transportation? Heck, if we can move a Ming dinasty jar all across the world, we can certainly move a bunch of SATA disks to the vault.
"today I sent out 9 LTO4 tapes (each holds upto 1.6TB) to the vault. I couldn't manage 9 disks."
You must be joking. 9 3.5" disks fit comfortably in a cardboard box protected with bubble plastic. Can't you manage *that*? Really?
"With tapes I just put them in the tape library and it manages everything itself"
Do you mean a cheap disk cabin wouldn't do the same? My two 15 SATA disks cabins must be a matter of magic, then.
"moves them around"
Of course your tape library moves the tapes around. That's because readers are so expensive that it only has one or two of them instead of fiveteen. Two 8 ports areca cards won't need to move any disk around: it gets enough ports to access all of them at the same time.
"knows which tape has what data, what can be overwritten, etc. Everyday it gives me a list of tapes to bring back from the vault and it gives me a list of tapes to take to the vault."
Exactly the same with disks, of course, since that's a matter of software, nothing physical media-related. Oh! and you'll get decent speed for random reads (like when recovering a single file) which you can't dream with tapes.
"The tapes cost about $40 each. A drive costs probably $1000."
A LTO4 probably will cost you more 50$ than 40$ but, anyway. Of course, a 2TB disk will cost you about 150$, not 1000$. The cost per GB is still on the side of tapes, but it's not sooo far from disks. And disks can be accessed randomly, and stand for read/write cycles orders of magnitude beyond tapes, so they are fastly coming to odds.
"My tape library cost like $10,000, it has two drives and holds around 40 tapes."
A SATA disk cabin will cost you about 1500$, holds 15 disks, will give you simultanous random access to all of them *and* will be easily upgraded to bigger disks when they become affordable.
"Disks."
Now, have you tried to move them in and out on (at most) a weekly basis?
Disks are certainly good for near-line but I don't see them beating tapes for off-site (and without off-site you shouldn't call it "back up").
"Picture your backup tapes. Now picture how useless they would be if your tape drive broke (or was destroyed in a disaster)."
Picture your hard disks. Now picture how useless they would be if your server or disk cabin broke (or were destroyed in a disaster). What you do in both cases is (gasp!) bring in a new driver/server.
"I'm sorry, perhaps you need to qualify disaster.
A disaster qualifies itself by the loses it induces. Take an earthquake, a tsunami, a stock crash...
"I thought the 100 million (now estimated) accounts compromised in the TJX breach or the approximately 100 million in the Heartland Payment Systems breach, were just that - disastrous."
So you thought, uh? What exactly were the loses? Specifically, what were the loses for those responsible of the incident? Because if there were no loses, then there's no disaster. A nuisance or an incident, maybe, but not a disaster.
"The apt-get tool is powerful, but the interface and output is terrible [...] Want to install software?
yum install packagename"
aptitude install packagename
"Remove software?
yum remove packagename"
aptitude remove packagename
"Want to find a package?
yum search keyword
aptitude search keyword
"With the apt-get family of tools, most of the commands are short and.or cryptic."
Yeah, sure they are.
"Which is, in and of itself, not a problem. IT should not be selecting the software used, because IT doesn't understand what the business needs."
Neither should the bussiness units because bussiness units don't understand the grand IT scheme where everything should fit.
But that's no news... OK, I'll rewrite: that *shouldn't* be news since that's "team playing 101".
"Unfortunately, that's a much easier task for multinationals than it is for SMEs."
Not because SMEs 'per se' since on small companies is *way* easier for everybody to know everybody and for informal comunication channels to stablish worthy thourough information nets. The problem is that on SMEs the "cult to the personality" and the "you won't tell me how to drive my bussiness" is even stronger than in big corps.
"Eircom are a private company, they can choose to do business with whoever they please."
No they don't.
They are private company, making bussiness in a *regulated* market.
They can't (and shouldn't) do bussiness with whoever they please but with whoever its market regulations stablish.
"'Your stocks will be worthless (than any other's) in 23 hours if and only if those said others are allowed to sell sooner than you and *specially* sooner than the buyer's knowledge about the bankrupcy'
No, your stocks will be worthless, period."
No, they won't or at the very least they won't get traded on worse conditions than they really are: if there's in fact a reasoned consensus that it worths nothing, then why should they had to be exchanged for any more? The "reasoned" part is the key factor here. People cannot rise to reasoned conclusions in milliseconds, machines can but then you are increasing assimetry between those with big machines near to the trade floor and those without. I thought information and action assimetries were the worst enemy of free market.
Reality probes my point: if you can really stock at the expected value on milliseconds, how is it that they were *in fact* traded so much for peanuts that the whole system has been forced to recognice it and so invalidate the exchanges?
It's obvious that trading on a 24h cycle a problem like this from the news cannot happen. Now the question is: which bad things will happen if moving to a 24h trade cycle that are not happing because millisecond trades are allowed? Are they more or less burdensome than current situation?
"And that's why that club of banks/brokers called the SEC was called in, and they are fixing this problem with this new rule."
So millisecond trades are not a problem but the way free market goes when big tycoons make millions out of it but then it's a problem that must be resolved when tycoons lose millions out of it.
With the best system being the one where big tycoons can make millions per millisecond out of nothing without risking nothing, did I understand it properly?
">>>Trades faster than a day should be simply outlawed
You just bought Ford stock an hour ago, and now you just learned that the company is declaring bankruptcy effective 5 o'clock today. Do you really want to be forced to keep that stock until 23 hours from now (when it will be worthless)?"
Didn't you read? On his account, there's no problem. You will need to wait for 23 hours... but everybody else will have to too!
Your stocks will be worthless (than any other's) in 23 hours if and only if those said others are allowed to sell sooner than you and *specially* sooner than the buyer's knowledge about the bankrupcy. If everybody *have* to wait for a sane amount of time, the same for everybody, you are just leveraging the field allowing for more competitors and better reasoned actions.
Now, what do you prefer? To compete with big traders on an equal foot or compete with your morning newspaper against their supercomputers under the trade ring?
"I agree with your idea of 1 second intervals, but not 24 hours. A lot can change during that time."
It is not what can change between intervals but how much time is allowed for you to digest it.
"And?"
Defense prevents a damage: it's reasonable by itself -if even within proportions. Punishment, in the other hand, does nothing to avoid the damage; it's only retaliation. While eye for eye was and advancement back in its day, put us in the same ethical ground than the one we try to despise.
I for one don't want to live in a society where the main difference between the ethically correct and wrong is that the former is backed up by the strongest bully in the playground (the Government).