As I understand copyright law (being a layman, and neither employed in nor pretending to offer advice in the legal realm), a work is truly copyrighted the moment you create it. The first tricky detail is proving that you created it if someone else attempts to distribute it or copy it. The second important detail is finding the legal muscle to represent you against someone attempting to distribute or copy your work if you didn't bother to register it, since AFAIK, the law only allows you to sue to recover damages you suffered when someone else began distributing and/or copying your work. If you create a work, then distribute it freely, it's kind of hard to claim that you suffered damages when someone else begins doing the same thing.
Isn't it a violation of the DMCA to remove any logos or watermarks from a copyrighted* work? If so, leaving the cracking group's logo and fingerprints may have been legally The Right Thing To Do**.
*Yes, I know that the pirates are in a bit of a tough legal position, since they potentially violated DMCA to release a cracked version of the code. However, as I understand copyright law in the U.S. (IANAL, etc.), copyright is automatically implied on any creative work as soon as you create it. Therefore, their patch *is* a copyrighted work.
**It is rather difficult to parse "The Right Thing To Do" in this context because there are so many potential ways it has already gone wrong. I don't know if Rockstar worked with the cracking group (since TFA is blocked by the firewall at work...sigh), the cracking group already violated DMCA, the DRM was already a step in the wrong direction, etc. <Head Asplodes> is the likely result if you spend too much time (i.e., more than about 2 seconds) thinking through this legal minefield.
A couple of years ago, IIRC,/. had an article on an Australian bank that required their users to login with Knoppix that they distributed on a CD-ROM. If you weren't using their version of Knoppix and their recommended web browser, you didn't get on-line access to your account. I tend not to be a terribly egotistic person, but despite that, my first thought was, "I'm a SYS ADMIN, and I know MY PC isn't infected. Where do they get off thinking that I'm not competent enough to keep my PC secure?!?!?" Then I realized that most home users are going to think pretty much the same thing...
If Linux had the market share of Windows, it would have as much, or nearly as much, malware.
Seriously, can we put this to rest? Compare the number of Linux servers and Windows servers on the web and tell me again that that argument holds water.
Who cares if you're not running as root if everything interesting is owned by the user's account?
If that were the case, you would be correct. Unfortunately, it isn't, and you aren't. When malware installed on a Windows machine can write to the registry and to DLL's in C:\Windows\system32, it becomes very, very difficult to remove such malware. By contrast, the one and only time I ever needed to clean up a compromised Linux machine, it was a simple matter of changing an Internet user's password (to fix the initial exploit -- a weak, compromised password) and deleting a copy of PHPShell that the hacker had uploaded into the compromised user's public_html directory. Since neither the compromised user account nor the web server daemon had write access to anything outside of/home/username or/var/www (i.e., binaries or libraries), it was orders of magnitude easier to clean up this particular Linux machine than any Windows machine I've ever had to disinfect.
If you can lock down a Windows box and keep it clean, more power to you. I have yet to see a Windows machine stay clean indefinitely, however, no matter how conscientious or skilled the admin. To be honest, whether Linux is inherently more secure (which I think it is) or is more secure simply because, as you say, Windows is more common and therefore, it is less profitable to write malware for Linux, I really don't care. What I know is my Linux boxes don't see the same kind of exploits Windows boxes regularly do, and until they do, I'll stick with Linux.
It's slightly more complicated than that, I'd say.
Let me offer an analogy (hey, this is/. after all, even though I won't be making this a car analogy). If my PHB* decides that we need to implement a technology that I'm not familiar with, I learn the technology. I may not like the tech, but if the decision has been made above my pay grade, I have the choice of learning and implementing the tech or getting a new job.
Now, to bring it home. Why do businesses create web sites? To create revenue, of course. Typically, this means a commercial web site exists to advertise the company's products. If the tech (for example, Flash) used to implement the web site excessively limits the number of users that can view said web site, then the web site is not meeting its design goals.
Case in point: last year, I was looking for a new motorcycle. I visited Honda's web site, Suzuki's web site, Yamaha's web site and Triumph's web site. All of those web sites except for Honda's rendered just fine in my browser. While I won't claim that the web site is the only reason for the purchase decision I made, I will state that the fact that I couldn't look on-line to see what Honda offered certainly affected my choice. In the end, I purchased a Suzuki. Honda may have had a better bike that met my specs, but if they did, the local dealer didn't have one, and I couldn't view Honda's web site to search for a bike that the local dealer could have special ordered.
Unfortunately, in the real world, PHB's often don't know what tech is available, and therefore rely upon their designers to offer them choices. In that case, the designer does, in fact, rule the web. The designer codes up a spiffy web site with whatever (crappy) tools they know, show it to the PHB, who has no clue that the whiz-bang web site *only* renders correctly on the exact version of IE that (s)he and the designer are using, and therefore gives a thumbs up to a web site that will only look good to two thirds of the web site's visitors, and the remaining third shop somewhere else.
*Just in case my PHB does end up reading this post, he actually is more technically savvy than the rest of us in the office, and all of his tech choices are really, really good. Can I have my raise now?
My wife and I are both somewhat tall, and the baby carrier we had was pretty much a tank (one advantage of waiting until you are in your thirties to have kids -- we did the research and bought the best baby seat we could find). It wouldn't fit behind the driver's seat unless we were scrunched up.
Thus the "I'm not there, so it's easy to say..." I acknowledge that fact. However, when my boss says to do something illegal or massively unethical, I don't bend. Period. (and yes, I have BTDT -- it worked out okay in my case).
Same goes for car keyfobs. Keyless entry is nice, but you still need the ignition key anyway, and the keyfob will just run out of batteries someday.
That advice is fine for single/childless people or for people who have cars that were built over ten or fifteen years ago. However, if you have a car that was made in the last ten years and have a small child, it's a real PITA. My wife used to own a Jeep Grand Cherokee, which came with exactly two door locks: one on the rear hatch (IIRC -- there might not have been one there, even) and one on the driver side door. When my daughter was born, we installed the baby seat behind the passenger seat and immediately discovered a problem: any time we did not have the key fob, we had to carry the baby to the driver side door, use the key to unlock the door, use the inside door lock to open *all* the doors, then walk around the car to the passenger side to put her in her baby seat, then walk back around to the driver side. That gets to be pretty lame really quickly, so I started carrying a key fob (still do, even though my daughter is now 9 and no longer rides in a child seat...and is capable of fastening her own seat belt).
Talk work into getting badge access instead of having yet another set of keys.
Good luck with that. If the company you work for has enough keys to need that, and is too cheap to buy a badge reader, they aren't going to give a rip if your pockets get too full to carry all the keys you need. For that matter, I would leave those keys in my backpack. If the backpack gets lost, and I've lost all my work keys, they can deal with replacing them. NMFP.
A plasma (or, more properly, an electromagnetic plasma) is a phase of matter that has enough energy for the electrons to [be] separated from the nucleus. It consists of independently moving electrons and nuclei...
Wouldn't it be impossible to have a plasma made from a molecule, especially a polar molecule like H2O? It's been a long time since high school and college chemistry, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but if a plasma, by definition, has enough energy to strip electrons from the nucleus of an atom, then wouldn't it also have enough energy to break molecules into their elemental constituents? Or are some molecular binding forces stronger than the electrical forces that bind electrons to nuclei?
At least some of the Android phones do WiFi, so your "large monthly fee" doesn't have to be any larger than what you already pay for Internet (as long as you've got a WiFi router). Furthermore, you can get them on e-bay without a data plan for about half of what GPP claimed, so even the initial outlay isn't that bad (a coworker did that a few days after I bought my Hero).
...to "trivially" access it over the internet.
I saw an app today in the Android Market that would allow your phone to act as a web server. However, I didn't install it, so I don't know what limitations it has. It might be trivial to set up, or it might not.
No, not really. You're going to have a hard time finding the right IP address to connect to.
Two of the first apps I installed on my Hero: ipconfig and NetInfo do that. There were plenty of others. And that's assuming you are too lazy to look in your WiFi router to see what devices are connected. So, no, it's really not that hard.
But the same consumer that's okay with private industry doing that [violating privacy] is not okay, in a knee-jerk reaction, with government doing that.
That's because private industry* does not have the power or authority to ship me off to Guantanamo Bay. Government is not inefficient because the public distrusts the government. Government is inefficient because it has no economic incentive to be efficient. If income < expenditures, then the government raises our taxes and the public either pays or goes to jail. Private businesses, on the other hand either find ways to cut costs, increase revenue or go bankrupt.
She touches on the crux of the problem in TFA: "A not-well-intentioned government, or a government with authoritarian tendencies, is going to use these technologies in ways that the citizenry wouldn't approve of." Exactly. Until you can provide a completely foolproof** way where the public can prevent a government with authoritarian tendencies from abusing technology "in ways that the citizenry wouldn't approve of" the public is going to have a fundamental distrust of government. That's a good thing. Quite honestly, I don't want my government to be too efficient. A tyranny is a very efficient form of government, but that doesn't mean I want to live in one.
*Yes, I know that some private businesses have the government in their pockets. This, however, does not negate the fact that private businesses still don't have their own armies of IRS and FBI agents who have the power to arrest you and throw you in jail.
**Yes, I know that nothing is ever completely foolproof. That's why an efficient government that Medina is aiming for is a bad idea.
Well, I hope you would be a little more precise in taking out the sniper than to use a mortar around a crowd of people, but your point is taken.
I was looking at it from the point of view of the perpetrator has not been caught in the act, but we have some evidence that suggests we know who it might be. Even if the evidence is pretty damning, there is always room for error, and therefore we *have* to go through the legal system. Lynching an innocent person because, "well...he fit the description", is inexcusable. If the case isn't strong enough to stand up in court, it isn't strong enough for John Q. Public to go perform a "public service".
Stopping someone who is actively engaged in a crime...well, all bets are off, in that case.
There, I agree completely. We have elevated the process until we no longer understand that the process is only a tool to achieve a particular goal. I don't know how to fix that, but I don't think completely ditching the process because it is sometimes (even "often") abused is going to help. We've already been there, and what we had then was even worse.
Pretending that unix/linux solutions are inherently safe is about the same as sticking your head in the sand. The only reason they're safer is because people aren't that interested in exploiting the relatively few people who use them.
Inherently safe? Yeah, you're probably right. Even the best, most secure OS in the world can't protect a truly motivated idiot from himself. Inherently safer, however, is what I would claim for Linux, based upon my own anecdotal experience. It's harder to hose an entire Linux box than an entire Windows box and easier to clean up after the fact (having had to clean up both OS'...YMMV). I knew a Linux admin (and I use the term very loosely) who constantly had his boxes hacked on a regular basis. As a result of his experiences, I took a really long, hard look at my choice of OS to see if it really was that much better. In the end, I realized the guy was just an idiot. He didn't take basic precautions to secure his machines, and he was regularly exploited because of it. The one other Linux box I have ever seen compromised was a public-facing FTP and web server where a user with a weak password had their account compromised and PHPShell was uploaded into their public_html directory, and was used to install a spam relayer. That was the extent of the exploit -- they never gained root privileges, they never got outside of the user's home directory. It took us two hours to detect (because it was hacked one hour before we got to work), and maybe another hour to clean up. Cleaning up Windows infections is a whole other story, and that's why most home users just buy a new PC when they get a virus. They run A/V and if the problem is still there, they throw it out and buy a new PC. That's wasteful and expensive.
Like it or not, Windows is the premier operating system in the world, for personal computers.
For now, yes. But that's changing. Like it or not, Linux is becoming more mainstream. My entire datacenter, except for three servers, is Linux (well, and one FreeBSD-based appliance). *ALL* of the desktops our field personnel use are Linux. You can now buy Linux installed from mainstream OEMs.
The average user is never going to be a linux nerd...
If by "Linux nerd" you mean someone like me, who likes to build and maintain Linux machines, yeah, you're probably right. But the average Windows user is not a "Windows nerd", either. They aren't downloading and installing beta versions of the next Windows OS, they aren't tweaking their system on a daily basis, and they don't rebuild the OS when their computer stops working. The average computer user just wants software that works, regardless of operating system. They don't really know the difference -- or care -- between Windows and Linux, because they only want to surf the Internet, send e-mail and type up the occasional document or spreadsheet.
...the OS is unstable...
Pot...Kettle...Black? I've got Linux servers and routers that have uptimes of over five years (well, I did...a few recent power outages that outlasted the aging UPS's changed that). I have *never* seen a Windows box with an uptime like that. Again, YMMV, and the plural of anecdote != data, etc., etc.
...and requires too much technical expertise with too little software support. You can deny that, but we all know it's true.
Yeah, I'll deny that. Ubuntu has become at least as easy to install as any version of Windows I've ever used. Once it's up and running, it's not any more difficult to use than Windows, and speaking as a sys admin who has to maintain about 70 Linux desktops that sit 500 miles away from my office, I can tell you it's far, far easier to maintain a Linux machine from the CLI across a satellite hop than a Windows machine using rdesktop or VNC. Even for a home u
I'm undoing a lot of moderation to post this, but I just have to. Here goes...
A person, continuing to violate laws and harm people doesn't have rights. They don't have a right to trial, to remain silent or anything else.
Agreed. Unfortunately, only God (if you accept His existence) and the perpetrator knows who that is. Everyone else has a best guess. It might be a really, really good guess, but ultimately, that's all it is.
Rights don't exist to protect the scumbag who hurt someone else. Rights exist to make sure that we don't punish the innocent for things they didn't do. Right not to be forced to testify against yourself? Yeah...England (and lots of other places) used to torture suspects to extract a confession. Turns out it didn't work so well, if justice is your goal (if straight conviction rates are your yardstick, it's the bees knees, however). You see...torture someone for long enough -- whether or not they are really guilty -- and they will confess to anything just to make the pain stop. Right to trial? That's so we can at least go through the motions of hearing whether or not the case against the accused stands up to reason. Mistakes happen, but this is the best thing we've found so far for making sure that you don't end up in jail simply because someone accused you. Right to a jury? Well, I, for one, don't like the idea of having the only people listening to my side of the story being a part of the same "good-ole-boy" network. If the cop, the judge and the prosecutor are all drinking buddies, what are the odds of me convincing the judge that I was framed (assuming I really didn't do it)? So we pick twelve (hypothetically) unbiased people to decide whether or not I'm guilty before the judge gets to sentence me. Right to a lawyer? Ever have someone twist everything you said to make it look like you're saying the exact opposite of what you really mean? I had a friend in high school who was really good at that. If she were to cross examine me on the stand, she could probably convince a jury that I was the one who shot JFK, even though I wasn't even born yet. So, everyone accused of a crime gets the right to level the playing field a little by hiring someone who professes to that skill as well. Right to remain silent? There are a lot of dumb things you can say to build a case against you, even if you aren't guilty, under the stress of being arrested. This right guarantees that, if you are smart enough to keep your mouth shut, you can have your lawyer filter what you say in questioning.
You can mock those rights all you want, but in the end, it's not about "hurting their wittle feewings". It's about making sure that the bad guy you put in jail really is the scumwad who was "raping girls and killing people." I want HIM in jail (or the electric chair; I don't care), not some poor sap who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
1) IMHO, (and I grew up on military bases), military cops are even worse than public cops. Maybe you were different (I don't know, so I won't say either way) but I only met maybe three MPs in 21+ years that didn't have Barney Fife syndrome.
2) "we take care of our own" Then you are part of the problem. "Tak[ing] care of your own" fosters distrust with the population you serve. Is it better to have everyone in the community you are in thinking of you as part of the problem, or to know that your department is, on the whole, very professional and very ethical, and therefore they are willing to work with you to get the job done? There's a reason people don't want to talk to the cops -- they don't trust them, and when you "take care of your own", you show that people are right not to trust the cops.
3) "... and deliver our own form of punishment." That's called "vigilantism", and it's illegal whether you wear a badge or not. What you are saying by your actions, therefore, is "the system is good enough for you, because you are civilian, but it's not good enough for us because we're cops." That's B.S., sorry.
I think, perhaps, your original post looks like you are saying something other than what you intended. It looked to me like you were saying cops' naturally tendency is to trust anyone, when (I think) what you were actually trying to say is that cops' natural tendency is to trust each other. I didn't catch your real meaning at first, either.
My wife was a dispatcher and got to know a lot of the cops in town pretty well. It is a brotherhood (with all that's good and bad about that) for the exact reason you stated.
Make the police know to take the video and log requests seriously. Done. Not really a big problem.
And how do you do that without making it a big problem? Humans have a tendency to look at things in terms of risk vs. reward. If police officers get into the habit of violating the law (and abusing civil rights) because we brush it off as "not really a big problem" when they do that, but it makes their jobs easier 99% of the time, what motivation do they have to take video and log requests seriously? No, fire the cops who arrested the guy on bogus charges and fire the cops who covered up for them after the fact. Make it a big problem, or it will continue to happen.
That's a matter of perspective. I like to think long term, and therefore, my definition of "smart" is significantly different than yours. Get arrested today (and let off tomorrow because it was a bogus charge) or surrender my rights and continue goose-stepping into a fascist state. Take your pick. IMHO, you might think I'm pretty freaking stupid for not letting "the man with the gun and the arrest powers" trample all over my civil rights, but I'm okay with that. I'd rather be in in jail with MLK, Rosa Parks, George Washington and who knows how many others than out of jail (but still not "free") and cowering.
Slashdot Mirror
As I understand copyright law (being a layman, and neither employed in nor pretending to offer advice in the legal realm), a work is truly copyrighted the moment you create it. The first tricky detail is proving that you created it if someone else attempts to distribute it or copy it. The second important detail is finding the legal muscle to represent you against someone attempting to distribute or copy your work if you didn't bother to register it, since AFAIK, the law only allows you to sue to recover damages you suffered when someone else began distributing and/or copying your work. If you create a work, then distribute it freely, it's kind of hard to claim that you suffered damages when someone else begins doing the same thing.
Isn't it a violation of the DMCA to remove any logos or watermarks from a copyrighted* work? If so, leaving the cracking group's logo and fingerprints may have been legally The Right Thing To Do**.
*Yes, I know that the pirates are in a bit of a tough legal position, since they potentially violated DMCA to release a cracked version of the code. However, as I understand copyright law in the U.S. (IANAL, etc.), copyright is automatically implied on any creative work as soon as you create it. Therefore, their patch *is* a copyrighted work.
**It is rather difficult to parse "The Right Thing To Do" in this context because there are so many potential ways it has already gone wrong. I don't know if Rockstar worked with the cracking group (since TFA is blocked by the firewall at work...sigh), the cracking group already violated DMCA, the DRM was already a step in the wrong direction, etc. <Head Asplodes> is the likely result if you spend too much time (i.e., more than about 2 seconds) thinking through this legal minefield.
That's like the difference between a road trip to Tijuana and a road trip to Tierra del Fuego.
I'm game for either destination :)
And yet, rather than logically dissect his arguments, you resort to ad-hominem attacks, instead. Interesting.
Ummm...the Internet is the bad part of town. Your Intranet is the only network you can really trust (and TFA puts doubt on that, even).
Just sayin'...
It's simply a matter of convenience.
And ego (or maybe it's just me).
/. had an article on an Australian bank that required their users to login with Knoppix that they distributed on a CD-ROM. If you weren't using their version of Knoppix and their recommended web browser, you didn't get on-line access to your account. I tend not to be a terribly egotistic person, but despite that, my first thought was, "I'm a SYS ADMIN, and I know MY PC isn't infected. Where do they get off thinking that I'm not competent enough to keep my PC secure?!?!?" Then I realized that most home users are going to think pretty much the same thing...
A couple of years ago, IIRC,
If Linux had the market share of Windows, it would have as much, or nearly as much, malware.
Seriously, can we put this to rest? Compare the number of Linux servers and Windows servers on the web and tell me again that that argument holds water.
Who cares if you're not running as root if everything interesting is owned by the user's account?
If that were the case, you would be correct. Unfortunately, it isn't, and you aren't. When malware installed on a Windows machine can write to the registry and to DLL's in C:\Windows\system32, it becomes very, very difficult to remove such malware. By contrast, the one and only time I ever needed to clean up a compromised Linux machine, it was a simple matter of changing an Internet user's password (to fix the initial exploit -- a weak, compromised password) and deleting a copy of PHPShell that the hacker had uploaded into the compromised user's public_html directory. Since neither the compromised user account nor the web server daemon had write access to anything outside of /home/username or /var/www (i.e., binaries or libraries), it was orders of magnitude easier to clean up this particular Linux machine than any Windows machine I've ever had to disinfect.
If you can lock down a Windows box and keep it clean, more power to you. I have yet to see a Windows machine stay clean indefinitely, however, no matter how conscientious or skilled the admin. To be honest, whether Linux is inherently more secure (which I think it is) or is more secure simply because, as you say, Windows is more common and therefore, it is less profitable to write malware for Linux, I really don't care. What I know is my Linux boxes don't see the same kind of exploits Windows boxes regularly do, and until they do, I'll stick with Linux.
It's slightly more complicated than that, I'd say.
/. after all, even though I won't be making this a car analogy). If my PHB* decides that we need to implement a technology that I'm not familiar with, I learn the technology. I may not like the tech, but if the decision has been made above my pay grade, I have the choice of learning and implementing the tech or getting a new job.
Let me offer an analogy (hey, this is
Now, to bring it home. Why do businesses create web sites? To create revenue, of course. Typically, this means a commercial web site exists to advertise the company's products. If the tech (for example, Flash) used to implement the web site excessively limits the number of users that can view said web site, then the web site is not meeting its design goals.
Case in point: last year, I was looking for a new motorcycle. I visited Honda's web site, Suzuki's web site, Yamaha's web site and Triumph's web site. All of those web sites except for Honda's rendered just fine in my browser. While I won't claim that the web site is the only reason for the purchase decision I made, I will state that the fact that I couldn't look on-line to see what Honda offered certainly affected my choice. In the end, I purchased a Suzuki. Honda may have had a better bike that met my specs, but if they did, the local dealer didn't have one, and I couldn't view Honda's web site to search for a bike that the local dealer could have special ordered.
Unfortunately, in the real world, PHB's often don't know what tech is available, and therefore rely upon their designers to offer them choices. In that case, the designer does, in fact, rule the web. The designer codes up a spiffy web site with whatever (crappy) tools they know, show it to the PHB, who has no clue that the whiz-bang web site *only* renders correctly on the exact version of IE that (s)he and the designer are using, and therefore gives a thumbs up to a web site that will only look good to two thirds of the web site's visitors, and the remaining third shop somewhere else.
*Just in case my PHB does end up reading this post, he actually is more technically savvy than the rest of us in the office, and all of his tech choices are really, really good. Can I have my raise now?
My wife and I are both somewhat tall, and the baby carrier we had was pretty much a tank (one advantage of waiting until you are in your thirties to have kids -- we did the research and bought the best baby seat we could find). It wouldn't fit behind the driver's seat unless we were scrunched up.
Thus the "I'm not there, so it's easy to say..." I acknowledge that fact. However, when my boss says to do something illegal or massively unethical, I don't bend. Period. (and yes, I have BTDT -- it worked out okay in my case).
Same goes for car keyfobs. Keyless entry is nice, but you still need the ignition key anyway, and the keyfob will just run out of batteries someday.
That advice is fine for single/childless people or for people who have cars that were built over ten or fifteen years ago. However, if you have a car that was made in the last ten years and have a small child, it's a real PITA. My wife used to own a Jeep Grand Cherokee, which came with exactly two door locks: one on the rear hatch (IIRC -- there might not have been one there, even) and one on the driver side door. When my daughter was born, we installed the baby seat behind the passenger seat and immediately discovered a problem: any time we did not have the key fob, we had to carry the baby to the driver side door, use the key to unlock the door, use the inside door lock to open *all* the doors, then walk around the car to the passenger side to put her in her baby seat, then walk back around to the driver side. That gets to be pretty lame really quickly, so I started carrying a key fob (still do, even though my daughter is now 9 and no longer rides in a child seat...and is capable of fastening her own seat belt).
Talk work into getting badge access instead of having yet another set of keys.
Good luck with that. If the company you work for has enough keys to need that, and is too cheap to buy a badge reader, they aren't going to give a rip if your pockets get too full to carry all the keys you need. For that matter, I would leave those keys in my backpack. If the backpack gets lost, and I've lost all my work keys, they can deal with replacing them. NMFP.
Those two choices are not mutually exclusive...
At some places, you do your job and keep your mouth shut, or find somewhere else to work.
I'm not there, so it's easy to say, etc., but...wow. That would be a really easy choice.
A plasma (or, more properly, an electromagnetic plasma) is a phase of matter that has enough energy for the electrons to [be] separated from the nucleus. It consists of independently moving electrons and nuclei...
Wouldn't it be impossible to have a plasma made from a molecule, especially a polar molecule like H2O? It's been a long time since high school and college chemistry, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but if a plasma, by definition, has enough energy to strip electrons from the nucleus of an atom, then wouldn't it also have enough energy to break molecules into their elemental constituents? Or are some molecular binding forces stronger than the electrical forces that bind electrons to nuclei?
Pay a large monthly fee...
At least some of the Android phones do WiFi, so your "large monthly fee" doesn't have to be any larger than what you already pay for Internet (as long as you've got a WiFi router). Furthermore, you can get them on e-bay without a data plan for about half of what GPP claimed, so even the initial outlay isn't that bad (a coworker did that a few days after I bought my Hero).
...to "trivially" access it over the internet.
I saw an app today in the Android Market that would allow your phone to act as a web server. However, I didn't install it, so I don't know what limitations it has. It might be trivial to set up, or it might not.
No, not really. You're going to have a hard time finding the right IP address to connect to.
Two of the first apps I installed on my Hero: ipconfig and NetInfo do that. There were plenty of others. And that's assuming you are too lazy to look in your WiFi router to see what devices are connected. So, no, it's really not that hard.
And you will probably be firewalled out
Because...?
But the same consumer that's okay with private industry doing that [violating privacy] is not okay, in a knee-jerk reaction, with government doing that.
That's because private industry* does not have the power or authority to ship me off to Guantanamo Bay. Government is not inefficient because the public distrusts the government. Government is inefficient because it has no economic incentive to be efficient. If income < expenditures, then the government raises our taxes and the public either pays or goes to jail. Private businesses, on the other hand either find ways to cut costs, increase revenue or go bankrupt.
She touches on the crux of the problem in TFA: "A not-well-intentioned government, or a government with authoritarian tendencies, is going to use these technologies in ways that the citizenry wouldn't approve of." Exactly. Until you can provide a completely foolproof** way where the public can prevent a government with authoritarian tendencies from abusing technology "in ways that the citizenry wouldn't approve of" the public is going to have a fundamental distrust of government. That's a good thing. Quite honestly, I don't want my government to be too efficient. A tyranny is a very efficient form of government, but that doesn't mean I want to live in one.
*Yes, I know that some private businesses have the government in their pockets. This, however, does not negate the fact that private businesses still don't have their own armies of IRS and FBI agents who have the power to arrest you and throw you in jail.
**Yes, I know that nothing is ever completely foolproof. That's why an efficient government that Medina is aiming for is a bad idea.
Well, I hope you would be a little more precise in taking out the sniper than to use a mortar around a crowd of people, but your point is taken.
I was looking at it from the point of view of the perpetrator has not been caught in the act, but we have some evidence that suggests we know who it might be. Even if the evidence is pretty damning, there is always room for error, and therefore we *have* to go through the legal system. Lynching an innocent person because, "well...he fit the description", is inexcusable. If the case isn't strong enough to stand up in court, it isn't strong enough for John Q. Public to go perform a "public service".
Stopping someone who is actively engaged in a crime...well, all bets are off, in that case.
There, I agree completely. We have elevated the process until we no longer understand that the process is only a tool to achieve a particular goal. I don't know how to fix that, but I don't think completely ditching the process because it is sometimes (even "often") abused is going to help. We've already been there, and what we had then was even worse.
Pretending that unix/linux solutions are inherently safe is about the same as sticking your head in the sand. The only reason they're safer is because people aren't that interested in exploiting the relatively few people who use them.
Inherently safe? Yeah, you're probably right. Even the best, most secure OS in the world can't protect a truly motivated idiot from himself. Inherently safer , however, is what I would claim for Linux, based upon my own anecdotal experience. It's harder to hose an entire Linux box than an entire Windows box and easier to clean up after the fact (having had to clean up both OS'...YMMV). I knew a Linux admin (and I use the term very loosely) who constantly had his boxes hacked on a regular basis. As a result of his experiences, I took a really long, hard look at my choice of OS to see if it really was that much better. In the end, I realized the guy was just an idiot. He didn't take basic precautions to secure his machines, and he was regularly exploited because of it. The one other Linux box I have ever seen compromised was a public-facing FTP and web server where a user with a weak password had their account compromised and PHPShell was uploaded into their public_html directory, and was used to install a spam relayer. That was the extent of the exploit -- they never gained root privileges, they never got outside of the user's home directory. It took us two hours to detect (because it was hacked one hour before we got to work), and maybe another hour to clean up. Cleaning up Windows infections is a whole other story, and that's why most home users just buy a new PC when they get a virus. They run A/V and if the problem is still there, they throw it out and buy a new PC. That's wasteful and expensive.
Like it or not, Windows is the premier operating system in the world, for personal computers.
For now, yes. But that's changing. Like it or not, Linux is becoming more mainstream. My entire datacenter, except for three servers, is Linux (well, and one FreeBSD-based appliance). *ALL* of the desktops our field personnel use are Linux. You can now buy Linux installed from mainstream OEMs.
The average user is never going to be a linux nerd...
If by "Linux nerd" you mean someone like me, who likes to build and maintain Linux machines, yeah, you're probably right. But the average Windows user is not a "Windows nerd", either. They aren't downloading and installing beta versions of the next Windows OS, they aren't tweaking their system on a daily basis, and they don't rebuild the OS when their computer stops working. The average computer user just wants software that works, regardless of operating system. They don't really know the difference -- or care -- between Windows and Linux, because they only want to surf the Internet, send e-mail and type up the occasional document or spreadsheet.
...the OS is unstable...
Pot...Kettle...Black? I've got Linux servers and routers that have uptimes of over five years (well, I did...a few recent power outages that outlasted the aging UPS's changed that). I have *never* seen a Windows box with an uptime like that. Again, YMMV, and the plural of anecdote != data, etc., etc.
...and requires too much technical expertise with too little software support. You can deny that, but we all know it's true.
Yeah, I'll deny that. Ubuntu has become at least as easy to install as any version of Windows I've ever used. Once it's up and running, it's not any more difficult to use than Windows, and speaking as a sys admin who has to maintain about 70 Linux desktops that sit 500 miles away from my office, I can tell you it's far, far easier to maintain a Linux machine from the CLI across a satellite hop than a Windows machine using rdesktop or VNC. Even for a home u
A person, continuing to violate laws and harm people doesn't have rights. They don't have a right to trial, to remain silent or anything else.
Agreed. Unfortunately, only God (if you accept His existence) and the perpetrator knows who that is. Everyone else has a best guess. It might be a really, really good guess, but ultimately, that's all it is.
Rights don't exist to protect the scumbag who hurt someone else. Rights exist to make sure that we don't punish the innocent for things they didn't do. Right not to be forced to testify against yourself? Yeah...England (and lots of other places) used to torture suspects to extract a confession. Turns out it didn't work so well, if justice is your goal (if straight conviction rates are your yardstick, it's the bees knees, however). You see...torture someone for long enough -- whether or not they are really guilty -- and they will confess to anything just to make the pain stop. Right to trial? That's so we can at least go through the motions of hearing whether or not the case against the accused stands up to reason. Mistakes happen, but this is the best thing we've found so far for making sure that you don't end up in jail simply because someone accused you. Right to a jury? Well, I, for one, don't like the idea of having the only people listening to my side of the story being a part of the same "good-ole-boy" network. If the cop, the judge and the prosecutor are all drinking buddies, what are the odds of me convincing the judge that I was framed (assuming I really didn't do it)? So we pick twelve (hypothetically) unbiased people to decide whether or not I'm guilty before the judge gets to sentence me. Right to a lawyer? Ever have someone twist everything you said to make it look like you're saying the exact opposite of what you really mean? I had a friend in high school who was really good at that. If she were to cross examine me on the stand, she could probably convince a jury that I was the one who shot JFK, even though I wasn't even born yet. So, everyone accused of a crime gets the right to level the playing field a little by hiring someone who professes to that skill as well. Right to remain silent? There are a lot of dumb things you can say to build a case against you, even if you aren't guilty, under the stress of being arrested. This right guarantees that, if you are smart enough to keep your mouth shut, you can have your lawyer filter what you say in questioning.
You can mock those rights all you want, but in the end, it's not about "hurting their wittle feewings". It's about making sure that the bad guy you put in jail really is the scumwad who was "raping girls and killing people." I want HIM in jail (or the electric chair; I don't care), not some poor sap who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
1) IMHO, (and I grew up on military bases), military cops are even worse than public cops. Maybe you were different (I don't know, so I won't say either way) but I only met maybe three MPs in 21+ years that didn't have Barney Fife syndrome.
2) "we take care of our own" Then you are part of the problem. "Tak[ing] care of your own" fosters distrust with the population you serve. Is it better to have everyone in the community you are in thinking of you as part of the problem, or to know that your department is, on the whole, very professional and very ethical, and therefore they are willing to work with you to get the job done? There's a reason people don't want to talk to the cops -- they don't trust them, and when you "take care of your own", you show that people are right not to trust the cops.
3) "... and deliver our own form of punishment." That's called "vigilantism", and it's illegal whether you wear a badge or not. What you are saying by your actions, therefore, is "the system is good enough for you, because you are civilian, but it's not good enough for us because we're cops." That's B.S., sorry.
I think, perhaps, your original post looks like you are saying something other than what you intended. It looked to me like you were saying cops' naturally tendency is to trust anyone, when (I think) what you were actually trying to say is that cops' natural tendency is to trust each other. I didn't catch your real meaning at first, either.
Exactly.
My wife was a dispatcher and got to know a lot of the cops in town pretty well. It is a brotherhood (with all that's good and bad about that) for the exact reason you stated.
Make the police know to take the video and log requests seriously. Done. Not really a big problem.
And how do you do that without making it a big problem? Humans have a tendency to look at things in terms of risk vs. reward. If police officers get into the habit of violating the law (and abusing civil rights) because we brush it off as "not really a big problem" when they do that, but it makes their jobs easier 99% of the time, what motivation do they have to take video and log requests seriously? No, fire the cops who arrested the guy on bogus charges and fire the cops who covered up for them after the fact. Make it a big problem, or it will continue to happen.
That's a matter of perspective. I like to think long term, and therefore, my definition of "smart" is significantly different than yours. Get arrested today (and let off tomorrow because it was a bogus charge) or surrender my rights and continue goose-stepping into a fascist state. Take your pick. IMHO, you might think I'm pretty freaking stupid for not letting "the man with the gun and the arrest powers" trample all over my civil rights, but I'm okay with that. I'd rather be in in jail with MLK, Rosa Parks, George Washington and who knows how many others than out of jail (but still not "free") and cowering.