It doesn't matter if the defendant is guilty. The 'punishment' is in the legal fees.
For an example in another area dear to the hearts of slashdotters... I'm sure the majority of the people the RIAA runs into court are probably guilty of something to do with the DMCA. My point is that they are all effectively punished because they can't afford to fight it in court. They end up settling with the RIAA... usually for the balance of their savings accounts. Even if you are guilty, you should have the right to a fair trial. These people can either just settle and accept their fate without due process, or battle it out and possibly get screwed even worse.
I'm not saying our legal system is terrible or anything, I'm just saying for the little guy (not Tom Delay, Scooter Libby, or Larry Craig), you are pretty screwed fighting a civil suit if the other party has a lot more money than you. Likewise for a company like AT&T... even if they were to successfully defend every case and came out vindicated, they would have had to spend a lot of money doing so. The motivation to request amnesty is to avoid that 'punishment'.
If "no law has been broken" then why are they lobbying so hard to get amnesty from prosecution??
Because with America's awesome legal system, you don't have to actually be guilty of anything to be punished for it. The lawsuits will drag out for years, cost them hundreds of thousands in legal fees, and probably millions more in settlements to make them go away. Amnesty just nips that all in the bud.
I'm not saying it's right, but it seems pretty clear to me what their motivation is.
Oh trust me, I agree with you. I was trying to argue that people won't have turf wars just because they have a shared workspace. I imagine the turf wars will be roughly the same as before, or less, since there are fewer clearly defined things to fight over.
The distraction issue, on the other hand, will be a real problem. Like you said, open work areas work great for social jobs, but no serious technical work is going to get done unless people are left alone, in an office with a door, to concentrate.
As a dweller of cube land (and one of those people with no personal effects in my cube), I'd argue that the only reason people become defensive of 'their spot' (be it a cube or a chair in college) is because it is defined by a physical object or location. You remove the physical delimiter of 'my space' versus 'your space'... and it's hard to fight over space. The same story has been done in a million TV shows. You have two characters that have to share a room, and they fight constantly. One of them has the brilliant idea to put a line down the middle, so each has one half. The moral of the show is that the line always makes it worse. Suddenly everyone is hypervigilant of the line. Remove the line, and no one notices if my stuff is three inches over it.
In college we had our regular table in the library, but if it was taken when we showed up, we had no problem sitting at another identical table nearby. I think people sit in the same seat in class out of habit, not because they fancy it 'their seat.'
I'm sure after a while people will fall into a routine in this open office environment, but I think the danger lies more in distraction than turf wars. You get a ton of people in an open room working together, and they are going to talk. I guess it depends on what kind of work they do, but I know as a lowly programmer, I can't think straight with people around me talking all day. At least for my job, I wish I had an office with a door AND a big common area. The office doesn't even have to be mine (or very big)... just something I can reserve for the day and shut the door to get some work done. The common area is absolutely necessary for team work. Ever try to work with people in cubes? I always feel like I'm invading their space and want to run away.
Funny how this instantly devolved into name-calling along party lines.
I agree with you and whoever started this thread... it would be awesome if our senators could focus on public policy and not parenting.
Sadly, the right is slaved to a series of moral crusades by it's religious base, and the left is slaved to a series of Orwellian crusades against Fair Use by it's Hollywood backers. Neither side is good for you if you just want to play video games and listen to your music on any device you want.
But the lines aren't really that clear cut. Witness Hillary's historically anti-video-game stance and Tipper Gore's moral crusades against violent lyrics. But it's a formula in politics... create a controversy out of something that isn't, act really flustered and appalled, hold a bunch of hearings, enact some 900 page law that solves nothing (but handily doles out billions for new bridges/dams/roads/pet project of the month), then wait until everyone forgets and dredge it up again.
Eh, I think the public is that brain-dead. No one pays attention to what Congress actually does on a day-to-day basis. It would only be an issue during an election, and even then, only a minor one. People can't see past all the non-issues like flag burning, abortion, national debt, gay marriage, minimum wages, and immigration to something so trivial as defending the Bill of Rights.
And honestly, it might be assuming too much to think they even care about those non-issues I listed. More likely they are busy watching the latest American Idol while DVRing reruns of the OC.
Well since we Americans are net debtors, shouldn't you British be pissed that your savings is in dollars?
Britain is the third largest single foreign owner of our debt (behind Japan and China respectively), and every time the dollar falls one cent against the pound, we owe you $2.44 billion less... since you were kind enough to lend to us in our own currency.
Two things generally stop one from encrypting their communications.
It's not easy to do, and usually involves separately configuring each program to do so.
The person at the other end doesn't do encryption, so you can't really put it to use once you figure out how to set it up.
Sure, the people here on/. can set this stuff up, but the average user cannot. The only way this will happen is if we come up with a way to blanket encrypt everything that comes out of a box, and then enable it by default. The end user won't even realize they are protected, but it gives you another feature bullet point for those who care.
I have been trying for years to use encryption on my IM convos, but only have one friend that bothers to encrypt his end too. It's a shame that new shiny software that gets popular doesn't leverage that popularity to encrypt-by-default.
While they seem to be talking about client-side stuff in TFA, I think the title is a little misleading. Internet security is already a whitelist, since SSL certs are basically a whitelist. TFA is talking about PC security in general.
One, the NSA has been able to do this for years, and now has some form of quantum encryption ready, so they are leaking the code breaking stuff into the public (got to have an up to date pool of scientists ready to hire, so no sense hiding it when you no longer need to).
Two, this is honestly being done first by civilians, and the NSA (or some other government) will swoop in and make it top secret for reasons of national security. Although there is the possibility that some big company will fund and complete a working machine, which it could use for personal gain by reading competitor's and government's communications.
Anyway, the point of all that babbling is, no matter what, not likely it matters if we can break encryption, because it's not like you or I will be doing it anytime soon, just some powerful agency/company. At least for a few years anyway.
I'm sure there is a special place in Hell for Patent Trolls. Most likely right next to the RIAA booth, where they recruit lawyers from among Satan's minions.
Slashdot Mirror
Or at least the Best-Post-From-An-AC award.
It doesn't matter if the defendant is guilty. The 'punishment' is in the legal fees.
For an example in another area dear to the hearts of slashdotters... I'm sure the majority of the people the RIAA runs into court are probably guilty of something to do with the DMCA. My point is that they are all effectively punished because they can't afford to fight it in court. They end up settling with the RIAA... usually for the balance of their savings accounts. Even if you are guilty, you should have the right to a fair trial. These people can either just settle and accept their fate without due process, or battle it out and possibly get screwed even worse.
I'm not saying our legal system is terrible or anything, I'm just saying for the little guy (not Tom Delay, Scooter Libby, or Larry Craig), you are pretty screwed fighting a civil suit if the other party has a lot more money than you. Likewise for a company like AT&T... even if they were to successfully defend every case and came out vindicated, they would have had to spend a lot of money doing so. The motivation to request amnesty is to avoid that 'punishment'.
Because with America's awesome legal system, you don't have to actually be guilty of anything to be punished for it. The lawsuits will drag out for years, cost them hundreds of thousands in legal fees, and probably millions more in settlements to make them go away. Amnesty just nips that all in the bud.
I'm not saying it's right, but it seems pretty clear to me what their motivation is.
If that is the content of AC's brain, I'd hate to see his PGP passphrase...
Pretty sure that would propel the unions into a homicidal rage...
Why did you have to be so brilliantly insightful on a day I didn't have mod points.
Plan better next time!
There.
Fixed that for you.
Oh trust me, I agree with you. I was trying to argue that people won't have turf wars just because they have a shared workspace. I imagine the turf wars will be roughly the same as before, or less, since there are fewer clearly defined things to fight over.
The distraction issue, on the other hand, will be a real problem. Like you said, open work areas work great for social jobs, but no serious technical work is going to get done unless people are left alone, in an office with a door, to concentrate.
As a dweller of cube land (and one of those people with no personal effects in my cube), I'd argue that the only reason people become defensive of 'their spot' (be it a cube or a chair in college) is because it is defined by a physical object or location. You remove the physical delimiter of 'my space' versus 'your space' ... and it's hard to fight over space. The same story has been done in a million TV shows. You have two characters that have to share a room, and they fight constantly. One of them has the brilliant idea to put a line down the middle, so each has one half. The moral of the show is that the line always makes it worse. Suddenly everyone is hypervigilant of the line. Remove the line, and no one notices if my stuff is three inches over it.
In college we had our regular table in the library, but if it was taken when we showed up, we had no problem sitting at another identical table nearby. I think people sit in the same seat in class out of habit, not because they fancy it 'their seat.'
I'm sure after a while people will fall into a routine in this open office environment, but I think the danger lies more in distraction than turf wars. You get a ton of people in an open room working together, and they are going to talk. I guess it depends on what kind of work they do, but I know as a lowly programmer, I can't think straight with people around me talking all day. At least for my job, I wish I had an office with a door AND a big common area. The office doesn't even have to be mine (or very big)... just something I can reserve for the day and shut the door to get some work done. The common area is absolutely necessary for team work. Ever try to work with people in cubes? I always feel like I'm invading their space and want to run away.
I'm a personal fan of Hungry Hippo.
Bonus points if they break convention and through in a second 'Hungry'
Funny how this instantly devolved into name-calling along party lines.
I agree with you and whoever started this thread... it would be awesome if our senators could focus on public policy and not parenting.
Sadly, the right is slaved to a series of moral crusades by it's religious base, and the left is slaved to a series of Orwellian crusades against Fair Use by it's Hollywood backers. Neither side is good for you if you just want to play video games and listen to your music on any device you want.
But the lines aren't really that clear cut. Witness Hillary's historically anti-video-game stance and Tipper Gore's moral crusades against violent lyrics. But it's a formula in politics... create a controversy out of something that isn't, act really flustered and appalled, hold a bunch of hearings, enact some 900 page law that solves nothing (but handily doles out billions for new bridges/dams/roads/pet project of the month), then wait until everyone forgets and dredge it up again.
Eh, I think the public is that brain-dead. No one pays attention to what Congress actually does on a day-to-day basis. It would only be an issue during an election, and even then, only a minor one. People can't see past all the non-issues like flag burning, abortion, national debt, gay marriage, minimum wages, and immigration to something so trivial as defending the Bill of Rights.
And honestly, it might be assuming too much to think they even care about those non-issues I listed. More likely they are busy watching the latest American Idol while DVRing reruns of the OC.
Maybe you missed out on the 90s, so I'll recap it in three letters for you:
AOL
I, for one, welcome our Soviet Tiger Overlords!
Well since we Americans are net debtors, shouldn't you British be pissed that your savings is in dollars?
Britain is the third largest single foreign owner of our debt (behind Japan and China respectively), and every time the dollar falls one cent against the pound, we owe you $2.44 billion less... since you were kind enough to lend to us in our own currency.
Thanks!
I define time as a big soggy spaghetti monster... take that!
Yeah! AT&T really su... CARRIER LOST
Since that makes it soooooo much more obvious Intel... good one.
Seriously, have no idea the difference between Centrino and Centrino with vPro whatever. Why do you actually give one a completely different name?
Was thinking Johnny Drama from Entourage, but I'll concede the point.
Two things generally stop one from encrypting their communications.
Sure, the people here on /. can set this stuff up, but the average user cannot. The only way this will happen is if we come up with a way to blanket encrypt everything that comes out of a box, and then enable it by default. The end user won't even realize they are protected, but it gives you another feature bullet point for those who care.
I have been trying for years to use encryption on my IM convos, but only have one friend that bothers to encrypt his end too. It's a shame that new shiny software that gets popular doesn't leverage that popularity to encrypt-by-default.
While they seem to be talking about client-side stuff in TFA, I think the title is a little misleading. Internet security is already a whitelist, since SSL certs are basically a whitelist. TFA is talking about PC security in general.
hahahaha!
Don't even try to pretend you wait 30 mins between visits...
Wait... mashing refresh trying to get first post isn't normal? Maybe I should take a break...
Well there are probably two scenarios.
One, the NSA has been able to do this for years, and now has some form of quantum encryption ready, so they are leaking the code breaking stuff into the public (got to have an up to date pool of scientists ready to hire, so no sense hiding it when you no longer need to).
Two, this is honestly being done first by civilians, and the NSA (or some other government) will swoop in and make it top secret for reasons of national security. Although there is the possibility that some big company will fund and complete a working machine, which it could use for personal gain by reading competitor's and government's communications.
Anyway, the point of all that babbling is, no matter what, not likely it matters if we can break encryption, because it's not like you or I will be doing it anytime soon, just some powerful agency/company. At least for a few years anyway.
I'm sure there is a special place in Hell for Patent Trolls. Most likely right next to the RIAA booth, where they recruit lawyers from among Satan's minions.