"You are like the Spanish speakers who insist that "American" in English is not unambiguously something or someone from the USA."
Except that he isnt right.
Archaeology does indeed mean study of ancient things, which is about as accurate as a one-word designation could be here, but that should not be taken to imply that there is some minimum age before the techniques, the craft, of the archaeologist may be applied. The connotation of extreme age informs but does not necessarily constrain the denotative value.
On the other hand america in both English and Spanish refers to the whole binary continent system, north and south, which includes by standard count 35 independent American States at present. The idiosyncratic usage inside the US is to some degree understandable, but the sheer dumbassitude of those that actually do as you just did in elevating street slang, and not just any street slang, but a particular phrase apparently chosen for its sheer jingoist ugliness, as if it were proper English is what blows me away. It's like you heard about 'the ugly american' but somehow got the idea this was an example to be followed with passion and commitment, rather than a cautionary tale about pitfalls to avoid.
Well I tried it just now and either I was mistaken in thinking that youtube was the site where it would assert without even clicking, or if youtube changed something on their end to quit doing that. But once you click the player to pause, change volume, etc. the bug reasserts. This breaks on tons of other sites with many different plugins. Other browsers dont seem to have such problems with it, but from reading countless pages of bug reports and discussion I get the idea there is something particularly bad here in the mozilla design - for some reason it seems to actually give up the keyboard input when it focuses a plugin, rather than passing it on after parsing it still, and I read stuff like "We should give plugins the ability to pass through shortcuts to the browser" ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Plugin_keyboard_focus ) which seems rather backward - the browser should be deciding what part of the keyboard input to pass through to the plugin rather than begging adobe to pass them back after the fact, no?
Clearly it's not impossible to do that, IE and Safari both manage it without issue.
The fourth amendment has specific requirements (probable cause, specificity about exactly what is to be searched) that the FISA 'warrants' dont typically appear to meet. The fourth amendment was written specifically to prohibit overbroad warrants - it ties the probable cause directly to a specification of what is to be seized, so that only things actually covered by the probable cause can be taken. That is fundamentally incompatible with the goverments 'grab everything' approach.
The bigger violation in relation to that particular star chamber, however, is probably that of the fifth amendment. The requirement for due process is completely incompatible with a secret court whose judgements are reached ex parte.
"My argument is more that people attach themselves so very strongly to left right but don't completely know where to stand on authority. "
I would say that is insightful, which is why I have been working for a long time to get people to think about that issue explicitly.
"The key problem with all this is that it can be cultural. In the US there is a culture of glorifying extreme success. While this can be argued to push people to achieve, only a tiny tiny minority will every be extremely successful. Yet since so many dream of being wildly successful they won't support measures that might hurt the successful, including those that would vastly improve their own lot. You have the working poor not supporting minimum wage all the while watching the owner of the business they work for buy another BMW for his kid going to a $50,000 per year collage. "
Again insightful, though I disagree with your judgement that this is a "problem." It points to the fact that we have an inherent sense of right and wrong and many of us are not willing to sacrifice that so easily for personal gain - a very good thing, not a problem. And raising the minimum wage is not a great idea, btw, it hurts the least advantaged members of the workforce the most and it's positively Orwellian to pitch that as being a benefit for poor people.
The fact is we americans generally want a fair system, and we are even generally willing to take the short end of the stick if that's what we pull - as long as we think the game itself is fair. Again, that's not a problem, it's mostly a good thing. It can be taken advantage of, sure, but the solution in those cases is to expose the genuine unfairness involved. Dont give us this crap about 'social justice' and allied rot - expose a person who stole his money, by fraud or by force, and we'll support legal action against them, no problem. But try to tell us that simply having money is wrong, and propose robbing them all to make up for it, and we'll tell you right off. With good reason.
Yes, it's blocked because of the braindead way firefox handles plugin (not specific to flash either.) No, it's nothing new, they've been studiously ignoring it for over a decade as I said. Your attempt to justify the bug is very mozilla-ish, but in fact this is not a VM running a different OS, it's a browser plugin, there is no reason the plugin needs to break the UI, and every other browser on earth outside of mozilla actually seems to handle this correctly.
The implication here is that you know the formula, you know the inputs, you can hand it to a computer and be done at that point. Just a math problem.
But in fact, they clearly do NOT know all the inputs, or the full formula. There are all kinds of computer simulations but not one that has been proven accurate.
Yes, greenhouse gases trap sunlight and raise the temperature. That is simple and straightforward enough. If we could hold every other variable still and move just one slider for a greenhouse gas, we would expect it to raise the temperature. But not necessarily on a linear scale, and we dont know exactly what interactions we might hit at various points along that slider either.
More importantly, we dont know what the baseline is. We cant just slide that slider back and forth and observe an experimental earth to see what happens, but we CAN look at the record of planetary climate prior to human industrial activity, and it's a pretty wild graph even back before humans were doing anything at all. None of the formula these people are using actually reproduces the existing record btw. Which means that no one really understands why the earth went hot when it went hot, or cold when it went cold, many times before humans existed.
Basically, the earth long-term switches back periodically between a cold earth (one with icecaps, which expand and recede periodically giving the cold earth glacial and 'interglacial' periods) and a hot earth (with alligators in london and no icecaps at all.)
Humans evolved on cold earth, and we are happiest in the warm phases of the cold earth (the 'interglacials' when ice caps exist but remain relatively small.) We prefer that, so we idolise it as the perfect climate, and view any deviation from it as an unatural threat. Glacials drive us into a narrower band around the tropics, effectively reducing our access to all resources. But a full on hot phase, $deity forbid, would be a disaster of an even greater scale. With our present technology I refuse to call it an existential threat - there is no way it would kill us all, but it would likely confine us to a smaller habital zone than maximum glaciation would, and that zone would be further split, with each pole inhabitable, and a vast and extremely dangerous tropical belt separating the two small habitable zones. Higher sea levels would also put much of the land under water, further reducing habitable land to a truly paltry remnant. (On the bright side, moving underwater might well become cost effective in that scenario.)
The key thing to understand, though, is that these changes are exactly what we have to expect naturally. In order to know whether our activity is going to cause a disaster, we have to know not only precisely what we are doing - but what the baseline, without our action, would have been as well. The former we are still fuzzy on, and the latter is almost completely unknown. The earth is warming. Would it be warming if we werent doing what we are doing? We dont know. Maybe it would be getting colder, and our greenhouse gases are all that is holding back a new glacial - or maybe the earth is ready to switch to hothouse planet again, and our emissions are only very slightly hastening the inevitable. Maybe everything was perfectly tuned to go on for another few centuries until we started burning coal but by now we have already thrown things too far off-kilter for any changes in our behaviour to matter. Maybe this warm spell is just the last bump in the chart BEFORE the next glacial, and we should be pumping the atmosphere with all the greenhouse gases we can set our hands on to delay that cold snap a few more years. Or maybe the underlying forces driving the cycle are so much more powerful than our emissions that we are only flattering ourselves thinking we can affect it either way. Or maybe we are even more powerful than we think and actually triggered the upcoming change to hothouse earth even earlier - human activity has been affecting macroclimate in
"Spying" might be too strong a word but it's creepy as hell. It wants to run all the time, and from wierd oddball directories it shouldnt be touching to boot (what is this, chrome or datamgr?,) and it was constantly begging me to sign in for easier tracking. It doesnt want to keep my local settings local, it clearly wants to store them somewhere outside my control. And when someone tried to make a noscript for chrome, they found the architecture wouldnt allow it! (I know there is a noscript-like extension for chrome, but unless chrome has been fundamentally re-architected recently it's only blocking scripts AFTER it wastes bandwidth downloading them.)
So it may not be spying on me, but it certainly acts like that is what is on its mind.
Well I am still using firefox at the moment, but actively looking for another option. I just hate all the others as well, and use each when necessary of course. But firefox is the ONLY browser I know of where you can open a tab, type a few keys and pull out a video from url history, enter, then press ctrl-t for a new tab and it does not work. It's a basic UI bug that's been reported many many times over more than a decade, and how many times have they screwed their users over with gratuitous change-for-the-sake-of-change in the UI department over these years while simultaneously ignoring the stuff that did need to be fixed?
Several other replies here also mentioning things that have earned Mozilla some illwill over the years as well. And recent Mozilla history appears to be about making Firefox into Chrome. Dammit, if I wanted Chrome I would be using it already! Chrome is the creepiest thing on the net the first and so far only download from google that I went wtf? and disinfected.
Ok, say you are right. What happens when the next major development in computing is a breakthrough that gives us a practial way around those limits?
Are you sure there wont be such a development within your lifetime? Completely sure?
Are you sure that when the next such development occurs, it wont be kept in-house between the top 'national security' agencies, and you wont have all of them covertly having access to your backups to search through for something useful should you wind up in commercial competition with some undersecretary's second mistresses third cousins firm?
Here's the thing: for most of us, if the only way to assert our rights involves hiring attorneys for what could easily be a protracted court case, then we have been effectively stripped of our rights.
Apple's contract, on its face, clearly and plainly requires us to agree to onerous conditions which, on their face, render Apple incapable of qualifying for the GPL. Apple has absolutely zero interest in changing that in any way and has made that very clear. That is their right.
Using GPL software to entice people into their "system," however, is not their right. Not morally, and not legally. It's a privilege extended only to those willing to comply with the incredibly reasonable, and extraordinarily specific, terms of the GPL. Given that Apple has made it clear they have no interest or intention whatsoever of allowing their customers the essential freedoms the GPL was built to preserve, why on earth would anyone expect them to be allowed to use the code?
You are being ridiculous. You are happy to give up any pretense of privacy on your home wireless network for the convenience of not typing in, what, 16 digits? Probably less, and only once.
On the other hand someone may discover some mathematics that changes your evaluation any day now.
The unfortunate fact is there is a decent chance that persons discovery wont be published, you wont even know about it, the info will be slapped "Top Secret" and while your government minders and Chinese competitors will know about it, you might find out 10 years later, after they have destroyed you financially and privately.
"In this situation, any vote is a vote for your masters' system."
I agree with a lot of what you say, but this is not just wrong, it's dangerously wrong.
If voting goes down they will not be forced to scrap it, they will rejoice as we make it easier for them to create electoral majorities.
Voting for third parties and sane candidates reduces, rather than increases, the claimable mandate for establishment candidates. Every. Single. Time.
This is why they make it so incredibly difficult for a third party candidate to get on the ballot. Now you may think that jumping through those hoops to get someone independent, whether a libertarian or a socialist, on the ballot is a waste of time. That's fine - if you feel that way dont go out of your way to help with that task, that's perfectly reasonable. But once other people have spent their own time and money to get someone that is not beholden to the one-party-posing-as-two system on the ballot, the least you could do, for yourself, for all of our children, is to show up and vote for them.
"If they really are concerned with the extent of the surveillance, why don't they use their extensive lobbying clout to propose actual changes to the laws"
There are ample reasons to suspect they are posing here and do not actually care about this - but you are still missing the mark. Proposing changes to the laws is silly. This crap is already against the law here and has been since 1776. The problem isnt that the law allows it, the problem is that we have a government that thinks it is above the law.
"They could always break those court orders en masse. See if the government has cojones to sue each of them after those particular revelations have become public."
This is exactly what they should do. The people who make these decisions are doubtless receiving emails right now detailing every piece of dirty laundry the national insecurity state has on them, along with frightening predictions of the consequences for them if they do more than write letters.
If they actually managed to get together and make that move in a coordinated fashion anyway, I expect they would win. The orders preventing them from doing what they claim they want to do are unconstitutional on their face and would be laughed out of any fair court. Fair courts are hard to find at the moment, I know, but the country seems about ready for a paradigm shift, and a lot of courts could easily rediscover the law in a hurry if it looked like it stood a chance in hell of being honored.
Those are good arguments, that I cannot rebut on their own terms.
All I can say is that I can remember algorithms going from practically unbreakable to trivially cracked within my lifetime, and I have seen computer power increase from the point where every cycle on that CPU was a precious resource to be conserved in any way possible, to our current state where people routinely throw away the equivalent of dozens of CPUs just to save typing a few lines of code. My gut tells me you cannot rule out another leap in capability that will render all your encryption for not, and again, 'the cloud' is never going to forget.
The users here are screwed no matter what, and it's Apple doing the screwing either way. Encouraging them to continue going back to Apple for more abuse is a worse screwing than removing your video player though, by orders of magnitude.
"It was a VLC developer that requested it be removed."
Correct. Because it was being distributed in violation of copyright law. Best I can tell, that is still the case.
"There is lots of GPL licensed software on the iOS App Store - Apple doesn't care at all."
Of course they don't, they have never cared about copyright (as long as it's someone elses copyright.) And the availability of GPL software in the App Store is to their advantage - it adds value to their product without costing them anything. I am sure they would love to have more of it.
But they are not entitled to it. The GPL is clear - you can distribute GPL software, or impose the kind of terms that the Apple store imposes, but you cannot do both. Apple has made their choice and it is not compatible with free software at all, so they should not be able to reap the benefits they are not entitled to here.
"Ballmer had a point when he referred to the GPL as a "cancer"."
He was projecting. It's a common psychological coping mechanism. The GPL is actually an anti-cancer. It cant kill cancer (unfortunately) but it reveals it and hinders it by refusing to mix with it, by design. Naturally the cancer doesnt like this.
Yeah, this doesnt seem like exciting news to me at all. Dual-licensing it to get it in the app store is a failure, not a victory. If the app store isnt compatible with GPL software, then the app store shouldnt be getting access to GPL software. Dual-licensing to work around Apples error seems actively counterproductive to me.
Even assuming there is no way to break it except brute force, processor power has been increasing exponentially for a long time. If that continues, it will indeed be possible for script kiddies to brute force your encryption before many more years have passed.
Here's the thing. Even if you encrypt the data before giving it to them, and dont keep the key (which is much harder to do than to say) so what? Do you really think any encryption algorithm you are going to use today will stand up to the tools available to script-kiddies in 5 or 10 years? You do understand that once you put something 'in the cloud' it's probably never going away, right?
I said the problem is not ads and I will repeat it. The problem is not ads. The problem is the way that ads are typically being delivered, and it's not exclusive to the ads. Other things delivered in the same manner are subject to the same problems, and it's perfectly possible to do advertising in other ways.
Slashdot Mirror
"You are like the Spanish speakers who insist that "American" in English is not unambiguously something or someone from the USA."
Except that he isnt right.
Archaeology does indeed mean study of ancient things, which is about as accurate as a one-word designation could be here, but that should not be taken to imply that there is some minimum age before the techniques, the craft, of the archaeologist may be applied. The connotation of extreme age informs but does not necessarily constrain the denotative value.
On the other hand america in both English and Spanish refers to the whole binary continent system, north and south, which includes by standard count 35 independent American States at present. The idiosyncratic usage inside the US is to some degree understandable, but the sheer dumbassitude of those that actually do as you just did in elevating street slang, and not just any street slang, but a particular phrase apparently chosen for its sheer jingoist ugliness, as if it were proper English is what blows me away. It's like you heard about 'the ugly american' but somehow got the idea this was an example to be followed with passion and commitment, rather than a cautionary tale about pitfalls to avoid.
Well I tried it just now and either I was mistaken in thinking that youtube was the site where it would assert without even clicking, or if youtube changed something on their end to quit doing that. But once you click the player to pause, change volume, etc. the bug reasserts. This breaks on tons of other sites with many different plugins. Other browsers dont seem to have such problems with it, but from reading countless pages of bug reports and discussion I get the idea there is something particularly bad here in the mozilla design - for some reason it seems to actually give up the keyboard input when it focuses a plugin, rather than passing it on after parsing it still, and I read stuff like "We should give plugins the ability to pass through shortcuts to the browser" ( https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Plugin_keyboard_focus ) which seems rather backward - the browser should be deciding what part of the keyboard input to pass through to the plugin rather than begging adobe to pass them back after the fact, no?
Clearly it's not impossible to do that, IE and Safari both manage it without issue.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78414
The fourth amendment has specific requirements (probable cause, specificity about exactly what is to be searched) that the FISA 'warrants' dont typically appear to meet. The fourth amendment was written specifically to prohibit overbroad warrants - it ties the probable cause directly to a specification of what is to be seized, so that only things actually covered by the probable cause can be taken. That is fundamentally incompatible with the goverments 'grab everything' approach.
The bigger violation in relation to that particular star chamber, however, is probably that of the fifth amendment. The requirement for due process is completely incompatible with a secret court whose judgements are reached ex parte.
"My argument is more that people attach themselves so very strongly to left right but don't completely know where to stand on authority. "
I would say that is insightful, which is why I have been working for a long time to get people to think about that issue explicitly.
"The key problem with all this is that it can be cultural. In the US there is a culture of glorifying extreme success. While this can be argued to push people to achieve, only a tiny tiny minority will every be extremely successful. Yet since so many dream of being wildly successful they won't support measures that might hurt the successful, including those that would vastly improve their own lot. You have the working poor not supporting minimum wage all the while watching the owner of the business they work for buy another BMW for his kid going to a $50,000 per year collage. "
Again insightful, though I disagree with your judgement that this is a "problem." It points to the fact that we have an inherent sense of right and wrong and many of us are not willing to sacrifice that so easily for personal gain - a very good thing, not a problem. And raising the minimum wage is not a great idea, btw, it hurts the least advantaged members of the workforce the most and it's positively Orwellian to pitch that as being a benefit for poor people.
The fact is we americans generally want a fair system, and we are even generally willing to take the short end of the stick if that's what we pull - as long as we think the game itself is fair. Again, that's not a problem, it's mostly a good thing. It can be taken advantage of, sure, but the solution in those cases is to expose the genuine unfairness involved. Dont give us this crap about 'social justice' and allied rot - expose a person who stole his money, by fraud or by force, and we'll support legal action against them, no problem. But try to tell us that simply having money is wrong, and propose robbing them all to make up for it, and we'll tell you right off. With good reason.
Yes, it's blocked because of the braindead way firefox handles plugin (not specific to flash either.) No, it's nothing new, they've been studiously ignoring it for over a decade as I said. Your attempt to justify the bug is very mozilla-ish, but in fact this is not a VM running a different OS, it's a browser plugin, there is no reason the plugin needs to break the UI, and every other browser on earth outside of mozilla actually seems to handle this correctly.
"Now, it just becomes a math problem."
The implication here is that you know the formula, you know the inputs, you can hand it to a computer and be done at that point. Just a math problem.
But in fact, they clearly do NOT know all the inputs, or the full formula. There are all kinds of computer simulations but not one that has been proven accurate.
Yes, greenhouse gases trap sunlight and raise the temperature. That is simple and straightforward enough. If we could hold every other variable still and move just one slider for a greenhouse gas, we would expect it to raise the temperature. But not necessarily on a linear scale, and we dont know exactly what interactions we might hit at various points along that slider either.
More importantly, we dont know what the baseline is. We cant just slide that slider back and forth and observe an experimental earth to see what happens, but we CAN look at the record of planetary climate prior to human industrial activity, and it's a pretty wild graph even back before humans were doing anything at all. None of the formula these people are using actually reproduces the existing record btw. Which means that no one really understands why the earth went hot when it went hot, or cold when it went cold, many times before humans existed.
Basically, the earth long-term switches back periodically between a cold earth (one with icecaps, which expand and recede periodically giving the cold earth glacial and 'interglacial' periods) and a hot earth (with alligators in london and no icecaps at all.)
Humans evolved on cold earth, and we are happiest in the warm phases of the cold earth (the 'interglacials' when ice caps exist but remain relatively small.) We prefer that, so we idolise it as the perfect climate, and view any deviation from it as an unatural threat. Glacials drive us into a narrower band around the tropics, effectively reducing our access to all resources. But a full on hot phase, $deity forbid, would be a disaster of an even greater scale. With our present technology I refuse to call it an existential threat - there is no way it would kill us all, but it would likely confine us to a smaller habital zone than maximum glaciation would, and that zone would be further split, with each pole inhabitable, and a vast and extremely dangerous tropical belt separating the two small habitable zones. Higher sea levels would also put much of the land under water, further reducing habitable land to a truly paltry remnant. (On the bright side, moving underwater might well become cost effective in that scenario.)
The key thing to understand, though, is that these changes are exactly what we have to expect naturally. In order to know whether our activity is going to cause a disaster, we have to know not only precisely what we are doing - but what the baseline, without our action, would have been as well. The former we are still fuzzy on, and the latter is almost completely unknown. The earth is warming. Would it be warming if we werent doing what we are doing? We dont know. Maybe it would be getting colder, and our greenhouse gases are all that is holding back a new glacial - or maybe the earth is ready to switch to hothouse planet again, and our emissions are only very slightly hastening the inevitable. Maybe everything was perfectly tuned to go on for another few centuries until we started burning coal but by now we have already thrown things too far off-kilter for any changes in our behaviour to matter. Maybe this warm spell is just the last bump in the chart BEFORE the next glacial, and we should be pumping the atmosphere with all the greenhouse gases we can set our hands on to delay that cold snap a few more years. Or maybe the underlying forces driving the cycle are so much more powerful than our emissions that we are only flattering ourselves thinking we can affect it either way. Or maybe we are even more powerful than we think and actually triggered the upcoming change to hothouse earth even earlier - human activity has been affecting macroclimate in
"Spying" might be too strong a word but it's creepy as hell. It wants to run all the time, and from wierd oddball directories it shouldnt be touching to boot (what is this, chrome or datamgr?,) and it was constantly begging me to sign in for easier tracking. It doesnt want to keep my local settings local, it clearly wants to store them somewhere outside my control. And when someone tried to make a noscript for chrome, they found the architecture wouldnt allow it! (I know there is a noscript-like extension for chrome, but unless chrome has been fundamentally re-architected recently it's only blocking scripts AFTER it wastes bandwidth downloading them.)
So it may not be spying on me, but it certainly acts like that is what is on its mind.
Well I am still using firefox at the moment, but actively looking for another option. I just hate all the others as well, and use each when necessary of course. But firefox is the ONLY browser I know of where you can open a tab, type a few keys and pull out a video from url history, enter, then press ctrl-t for a new tab and it does not work. It's a basic UI bug that's been reported many many times over more than a decade, and how many times have they screwed their users over with gratuitous change-for-the-sake-of-change in the UI department over these years while simultaneously ignoring the stuff that did need to be fixed?
Several other replies here also mentioning things that have earned Mozilla some illwill over the years as well. And recent Mozilla history appears to be about making Firefox into Chrome. Dammit, if I wanted Chrome I would be using it already! Chrome is the creepiest thing on the net the first and so far only download from google that I went wtf? and disinfected.
Ok, say you are right. What happens when the next major development in computing is a breakthrough that gives us a practial way around those limits?
Are you sure there wont be such a development within your lifetime? Completely sure?
Are you sure that when the next such development occurs, it wont be kept in-house between the top 'national security' agencies, and you wont have all of them covertly having access to your backups to search through for something useful should you wind up in commercial competition with some undersecretary's second mistresses third cousins firm?
Here's the thing: for most of us, if the only way to assert our rights involves hiring attorneys for what could easily be a protracted court case, then we have been effectively stripped of our rights.
Apple's contract, on its face, clearly and plainly requires us to agree to onerous conditions which, on their face, render Apple incapable of qualifying for the GPL. Apple has absolutely zero interest in changing that in any way and has made that very clear. That is their right.
Using GPL software to entice people into their "system," however, is not their right. Not morally, and not legally. It's a privilege extended only to those willing to comply with the incredibly reasonable, and extraordinarily specific, terms of the GPL. Given that Apple has made it clear they have no interest or intention whatsoever of allowing their customers the essential freedoms the GPL was built to preserve, why on earth would anyone expect them to be allowed to use the code?
Come on.
Your point is that this is better explained by laziness or incompetence, rather than malice?
I'll give you that. At the moment it seems likely to be somewhat correct. So what?
You are being ridiculous. You are happy to give up any pretense of privacy on your home wireless network for the convenience of not typing in, what, 16 digits? Probably less, and only once.
You are the person Ben Franklin was thinking of.
That might be true.
On the other hand someone may discover some mathematics that changes your evaluation any day now.
The unfortunate fact is there is a decent chance that persons discovery wont be published, you wont even know about it, the info will be slapped "Top Secret" and while your government minders and Chinese competitors will know about it, you might find out 10 years later, after they have destroyed you financially and privately.
Better just to avoid the cloud I think.
"In this situation, any vote is a vote for your masters' system."
I agree with a lot of what you say, but this is not just wrong, it's dangerously wrong.
If voting goes down they will not be forced to scrap it, they will rejoice as we make it easier for them to create electoral majorities.
Voting for third parties and sane candidates reduces, rather than increases, the claimable mandate for establishment candidates. Every. Single. Time.
This is why they make it so incredibly difficult for a third party candidate to get on the ballot. Now you may think that jumping through those hoops to get someone independent, whether a libertarian or a socialist, on the ballot is a waste of time. That's fine - if you feel that way dont go out of your way to help with that task, that's perfectly reasonable. But once other people have spent their own time and money to get someone that is not beholden to the one-party-posing-as-two system on the ballot, the least you could do, for yourself, for all of our children, is to show up and vote for them.
"If they really are concerned with the extent of the surveillance, why don't they use their extensive lobbying clout to propose actual changes to the laws"
There are ample reasons to suspect they are posing here and do not actually care about this - but you are still missing the mark. Proposing changes to the laws is silly. This crap is already against the law here and has been since 1776. The problem isnt that the law allows it, the problem is that we have a government that thinks it is above the law.
Thanks for what you are doing. Many may not understand, or see the connection, but I certainly do.
"They could always break those court orders en masse. See if the government has cojones to sue each of them after those particular revelations have become public."
This is exactly what they should do. The people who make these decisions are doubtless receiving emails right now detailing every piece of dirty laundry the national insecurity state has on them, along with frightening predictions of the consequences for them if they do more than write letters.
If they actually managed to get together and make that move in a coordinated fashion anyway, I expect they would win. The orders preventing them from doing what they claim they want to do are unconstitutional on their face and would be laughed out of any fair court. Fair courts are hard to find at the moment, I know, but the country seems about ready for a paradigm shift, and a lot of courts could easily rediscover the law in a hurry if it looked like it stood a chance in hell of being honored.
Those are good arguments, that I cannot rebut on their own terms.
All I can say is that I can remember algorithms going from practically unbreakable to trivially cracked within my lifetime, and I have seen computer power increase from the point where every cycle on that CPU was a precious resource to be conserved in any way possible, to our current state where people routinely throw away the equivalent of dozens of CPUs just to save typing a few lines of code. My gut tells me you cannot rule out another leap in capability that will render all your encryption for not, and again, 'the cloud' is never going to forget.
The users here are screwed no matter what, and it's Apple doing the screwing either way. Encouraging them to continue going back to Apple for more abuse is a worse screwing than removing your video player though, by orders of magnitude.
"Technically according to the contract, yes you do."
There is no contract. It's a license, a one-sided grant, not a two-party agreement.
"It was a VLC developer that requested it be removed."
Correct. Because it was being distributed in violation of copyright law. Best I can tell, that is still the case.
"There is lots of GPL licensed software on the iOS App Store - Apple doesn't care at all."
Of course they don't, they have never cared about copyright (as long as it's someone elses copyright.) And the availability of GPL software in the App Store is to their advantage - it adds value to their product without costing them anything. I am sure they would love to have more of it.
But they are not entitled to it. The GPL is clear - you can distribute GPL software, or impose the kind of terms that the Apple store imposes, but you cannot do both. Apple has made their choice and it is not compatible with free software at all, so they should not be able to reap the benefits they are not entitled to here.
"Ballmer had a point when he referred to the GPL as a "cancer"."
He was projecting. It's a common psychological coping mechanism. The GPL is actually an anti-cancer. It cant kill cancer (unfortunately) but it reveals it and hinders it by refusing to mix with it, by design. Naturally the cancer doesnt like this.
Yeah, this doesnt seem like exciting news to me at all. Dual-licensing it to get it in the app store is a failure, not a victory. If the app store isnt compatible with GPL software, then the app store shouldnt be getting access to GPL software. Dual-licensing to work around Apples error seems actively counterproductive to me.
Even assuming there is no way to break it except brute force, processor power has been increasing exponentially for a long time. If that continues, it will indeed be possible for script kiddies to brute force your encryption before many more years have passed.
Here's the thing. Even if you encrypt the data before giving it to them, and dont keep the key (which is much harder to do than to say) so what? Do you really think any encryption algorithm you are going to use today will stand up to the tools available to script-kiddies in 5 or 10 years? You do understand that once you put something 'in the cloud' it's probably never going away, right?
I said the problem is not ads and I will repeat it. The problem is not ads. The problem is the way that ads are typically being delivered, and it's not exclusive to the ads. Other things delivered in the same manner are subject to the same problems, and it's perfectly possible to do advertising in other ways.