There is too much fetishism about democracy in the West today and not enough honest questioning of what we really have. Are we freer than we were at any point the past? Are we safer? Are we more prosperous? Do our laws and courts secure justice better or worse than they used to?
One of the major problems with democracy is that every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to have his say without having to put his money where his mouth is. The moment a democracy lets people vote without paying any taxes is the moment it begins its death spiral. For a FOSS project, the moment it starts weighing the input of every two-bit commenter as much as the core community (barring them having a genuine insight) is the moment it becomes consigned to ad hoc, designed-by-committee hell.
The way I see it, FOSS projects are like republican city states except with an infinite supply of land. Don't like someone's decision? Fork the code and move on. That stops contrarians pretty quickly. People want the democratic input because they don't want to have to do the leg work like, for example, supporting multiple L&F packages on ubuntu.
This mandate will likely result in little of value for the tax payers because it is a general mandate, not a specific one. Most of us here know what happens when you do that with a software project. Government is not only no different, but is often worse. What is truly needed is targeted transparency. For example, all Inspector General reports should be posted online unless their publication, **in the opinion of the IG, not agency** presents a clear and present threat to national security or danger to the lives of government employees, private citizens or property. All government contracts should be posted online where possible. All competing offers as well.
Both are filled with more quackery than actual sound practices. There is very little difference between most "security experts" today and the snake oil peddlers who told the public that their 150 proof secret tonic could cure everything from whooping cough to "consumption."
Previously, around 1,000 staff had been maintaining the 15,000 PCs making up the Munich computing landscape in 21 independent IT centres. There was, according to Schießl, no common directory, no common user management, no common hardware or software management. There were more than 300 applications in use, many of which did the same job. On the desktop side, there were 21 different Windows systems with different update levels and security settings
You can't convert a bureaucracy like this anymore than you can build a political/military empire by invading a dozen good size countries and trying to integrate them all at once. Rome wasn't built in a day. They should have gone in first with the intention of standardizing things, straightening out all of the kinks and quirks each little fief had. All of the file servers here where possible, all OpenOffice there...
They should come for IT next
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
As I have pointed out, IT is as wasteful, if not more so, than the health care system. It is also filled with far more errors, failures, etc. than would ever be tolerated from the health care system. Even if you believe this is comparing apples to oranges, they're still fruit; both are extremely complicated, technically-challenging fields which have added a significant benefit to the lives of most modern people and the efficiency of our economic system. Medical professionals are as educated, if not more so, on average, than most IT workers and software developers. They are also significantly more regulated than most of us who have to work for on business infrastructure so we don't get to use the excuse of obstacles with them.
Yet, no one on Slashdot and other left-leaning sites wants to see a similar smashing of major enterprise IT firms like Oracle simply on the basis that their products are bloated, inefficient are so overly complicated that their "ecosystem" of support professionals is damn near a make-work program considering the delta between what most customers actually need, and what the computer industry rams down their throats. I don't want to see more regulation, I want to see less, but at this point I freely say to a lot of the geeks I meet who make big bucks on software that is as bloated, inefficient and overpriced as they say the health care industry is "yuck it up chuckles, they may come for your ass next."
Take a good look at the hostility that Apple is getting for its store/SDK policies and now it's patent war with HTC. They have an entrenched product that is a 800lb gorilla in market share and arguably quality, compared to the embryonic lemur you call Windows Phone 7 (no apps, no phones shipping it yet). If you want to steal from Apple and the Android community, the only way is to be magnanimous toward developers of all stripes so that Windows Phone 7 can get traction with apps.
From the Oracle at Google, I found this paper by Orin Kerr (the professor featured in TFA) who argues convincingly that encryption does not create a legal standard presumption of privacy. Based on my educated layman's understanding of the law, his reasoning is sound in that the fourth amendment regulates access to the data WRT possession, not access in the sense of being able to use the data. Therefore, the government cannot compel you to give them your encryption key willy nilly if they need it to grok the data, but you can't protect yourself if they have the means to break the encryption.
That's really where your argument falls apart. Encrypted email is analogous to a postcard coded with something like the caesar cipher. Any postal employee can legally break that over a coffee break since the read the writing on the post card without violating the law. The closest thing to the protection of a first class envelope that an email could have would be to have the data buried inside a steganographically coded image or sound file.
No one would question but that a government might prevent actual obstruction to its recruiting service or the publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops. [source]
The other half of that statement would apply to classified data in many cases.
This reinforced the idea that it was the Nixon Administration's responsibility to show sufficient evidence that the newspapers’ actions would cause a “grave and irreparable” danger.
The pentagon papers would only cause embarrassment to the US, but there are a lot of classified documents which can cause demonstrable harm to US government property, US government personnel, US intelligence assets and American citizens. Those documents would easily fall under the purview of what the SCOTUS would allow for a prior restraint.
To the outrage of a number of people I've met, I've suggested that the legal profession is actually not inherently an extremely intellectually rigorous profession on the grounds that most of its "complexities" are what programmers and engineers call "hacks" and in more layman terms, "making shit up as you go along." Exhibit A:
To see where the 11th Circuit is getting this argument, you need to know a little bit about how the Fourth Amendment protects postal mail and packages. The Fourth Amendment ordinarily protects postal mail and packages during delivery. The same rule applies to both government postal mail and private delivery companies like UPS: As soon as the sender drops off the mail in the mailbox, both the sender and recipient enjoy Fourth Amendment protection in the contents of the mail during delivery. When the mail is delivered to the recipient, the sender loses his Fourth Amendment protection: The Fourth Amendment rights are transfered solely to the recipient. In practice, this works pretty simply: Each party has Fourth Amendment protection in the mail when they’re in possession of it, and both the sender and receiver have Fourth Amendment rights in the contents of the mail when the postal service or private mail carrier is holding the mail on their mutual behalf.
Exhibit B:
The Supreme Court “consistently has held that a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.”
Now, a person of **reasonable** intelligence has to ask why the Post Office is holding it in care of the parties and an ISP is not. Even if you expand this out, each party in the routing from point A to point B of the packets of the email message is holding that data temporarily in care of party A until it reaches the email provider of party B who, in turn holds it in care of party B. The very essence of this is that each third party is acting, in a daisy chained relationship, like the Post Office with respect to the transportation of that communication.
Mr. "I have a doctorate in law judge Joe Shmoe" apparently doesn't have the basic sense once attributed to the peasantry to apply the existing rulings to a new scenario. It's not rocket science. There is no reason why email should be subjected to a different standard than snail mail, unless that standard is even more restrictive of the government since some email systems even go so far as to use systems like SSL to explicitly add a level of privacy expectation to the communication not readily had by the average person with snail mail.
However, it has since emerged that Williams-Thomas was not using Facebook for his research but a different, unspecified social network. In a message on Twitter he claims that the reference to Facebook was introduced by editors at the paper, despite being told it was wrong.
The only way to fix this is to make defamation a graduated crime. If the Daily Mail pulls a complete hail mary by putting a front page confession, then let them off lightly. If they put it on page Z30 where no one reads, then fine them to the point that they won't make a red cent in profit for two business quarters. If they won't retract it, but fight it, knowing full well that what they did was defamation, then let Faceboook and this journalist pick their bones clean.
This at least makes sense considering how much harm illegal immigration does to American blue collar workers. As long as I can go out in public without it and buy goods without it, I'm not going to lose much sleep over it.
I have to wonder, though, how many people who are going "oh noes... mah freedum iz under attack" would get upset if a state government suddenly abolished its concealed carry license laws and declared that any adult who can legally carry a weapon is entitled to concealed carry.
I bet it's A LOT more than most slashdotters would guess.
I think JavaScript and Google, however, count as the foundation for the actual coffin itself because they were critical to making it so genuinely useful in ways that allowed for a lot of what he dismissed. JavaScript really enabled all of the applications he said wouldn't exist and Google enabled us to easily find them.
As I said on my blog****, the irony was that within 1 year of his article JavaScript was released in Netscape Navigator 2.0 and Brin and Page began Google. The former played a key role in enabling a lot of the usefulness in the web and the latter played a key role in organizing it effectively from the viewpoint of the public, especially to the extent that his point about how hard it was to find useful data was negated by Google.
I have to agree with Newsweek's writer who criticized him by saying that his problem wasn't in stating what the problems were, but his blithe assumption that they would never be overcome. That, right there, was the fatal flaw as it assumed that the computer industry was not invested in the Internet's future. That's almost like assuming that the established auto companies have no interest in the electric car market and would gladly let Tesla take it over unmolested.
****Just an ironic dig since he figured that blogging would never become mainstream, let alone that some bloggers (myself excluded) would become powerful players in the media.
It'll fail and be another boondoggle. The federal government is an incredible diverse organization with varying degrees of competence. Much of it, mainly the DoD and DoJ, can't even safely use cloud computing environments except in strict isolation from the rest of the world. Those two departments alone account for the overwhelming majority of federal employees.
They had the temerity to make law enforcement agencies that use this statute write a detailed report on their behavior every year to explain themselves, but did not so much as put anything in there to provide for their prosecution by state agencies if they abuse it. This is the worst kind of transparency as it says to the public, "yes, we know there are violations of the law, we have them right here, nicely documented, but damned if we'll do anything about it."
Typical feminist hypocrisy on **anything** that might appeal to heterosexual male sexuality, but that doesn't involve a "by your leave, your majesty" from a woman! It's ok for a woman to masturbate, use toys and sleep around. That's "empowering." A man does anything like that and he's "degrading women."
This is what happens when you have socialized education, rather than a competitive market where parents are customers, rather than consumers of a limited good (consumer and customer are not the same social standing). If education were run more like a business, the schools would actually be afraid of overreaching against parental authority because the parents would be the ones writing the checks that keep the school afloat.
Of course, since parental authority is meaningless to the public schools aside from when it means parental responsibility (more specifically, culpability), they feel perfectly free to take the legal equivalent of a sledgehammer to their children and teens.
There won't even be bones for their families to bury by the time the lawyers, both prosecutors and trial lawyers, are done with them for aiding and abetting this if the robber used their app.
This is so stupid that it would make running a mirror of The Pirate Bay in the middle of Hollywood look slightly intelligent by comparison.
I'm a big supporter for copyright in principle, but I have no sympathy for the big content companies losing money left and right to pirates because most of them are by anti-property rights leftists and are constantly harping on "Capitalism is bad, mmmmkay?" If things were philosophically balanced where the little guy's property rights were as rigidly secure as big corps' IP, and those same big corps didn't spew out an anti-property rights, anti-"rich" mentality, I might have some mercy for them getting more aggressive in protecting their rights.
Slashdot Mirror
There is too much fetishism about democracy in the West today and not enough honest questioning of what we really have. Are we freer than we were at any point the past? Are we safer? Are we more prosperous? Do our laws and courts secure justice better or worse than they used to?
One of the major problems with democracy is that every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to have his say without having to put his money where his mouth is. The moment a democracy lets people vote without paying any taxes is the moment it begins its death spiral. For a FOSS project, the moment it starts weighing the input of every two-bit commenter as much as the core community (barring them having a genuine insight) is the moment it becomes consigned to ad hoc, designed-by-committee hell.
The way I see it, FOSS projects are like republican city states except with an infinite supply of land. Don't like someone's decision? Fork the code and move on. That stops contrarians pretty quickly. People want the democratic input because they don't want to have to do the leg work like, for example, supporting multiple L&F packages on ubuntu.
This mandate will likely result in little of value for the tax payers because it is a general mandate, not a specific one. Most of us here know what happens when you do that with a software project. Government is not only no different, but is often worse. What is truly needed is targeted transparency. For example, all Inspector General reports should be posted online unless their publication, **in the opinion of the IG, not agency** presents a clear and present threat to national security or danger to the lives of government employees, private citizens or property. All government contracts should be posted online where possible. All competing offers as well.
Both are filled with more quackery than actual sound practices. There is very little difference between most "security experts" today and the snake oil peddlers who told the public that their 150 proof secret tonic could cure everything from whooping cough to "consumption."
You can't convert a bureaucracy like this anymore than you can build a political/military empire by invading a dozen good size countries and trying to integrate them all at once. Rome wasn't built in a day. They should have gone in first with the intention of standardizing things, straightening out all of the kinks and quirks each little fief had. All of the file servers here where possible, all OpenOffice there...
As I have pointed out, IT is as wasteful, if not more so, than the health care system. It is also filled with far more errors, failures, etc. than would ever be tolerated from the health care system. Even if you believe this is comparing apples to oranges, they're still fruit; both are extremely complicated, technically-challenging fields which have added a significant benefit to the lives of most modern people and the efficiency of our economic system. Medical professionals are as educated, if not more so, on average, than most IT workers and software developers. They are also significantly more regulated than most of us who have to work for on business infrastructure so we don't get to use the excuse of obstacles with them.
Yet, no one on Slashdot and other left-leaning sites wants to see a similar smashing of major enterprise IT firms like Oracle simply on the basis that their products are bloated, inefficient are so overly complicated that their "ecosystem" of support professionals is damn near a make-work program considering the delta between what most customers actually need, and what the computer industry rams down their throats. I don't want to see more regulation, I want to see less, but at this point I freely say to a lot of the geeks I meet who make big bucks on software that is as bloated, inefficient and overpriced as they say the health care industry is "yuck it up chuckles, they may come for your ass next."
Take a good look at the hostility that Apple is getting for its store/SDK policies and now it's patent war with HTC. They have an entrenched product that is a 800lb gorilla in market share and arguably quality, compared to the embryonic lemur you call Windows Phone 7 (no apps, no phones shipping it yet). If you want to steal from Apple and the Android community, the only way is to be magnanimous toward developers of all stripes so that Windows Phone 7 can get traction with apps.
From the Oracle at Google, I found this paper by Orin Kerr (the professor featured in TFA) who argues convincingly that encryption does not create a legal standard presumption of privacy. Based on my educated layman's understanding of the law, his reasoning is sound in that the fourth amendment regulates access to the data WRT possession, not access in the sense of being able to use the data. Therefore, the government cannot compel you to give them your encryption key willy nilly if they need it to grok the data, but you can't protect yourself if they have the means to break the encryption.
That's really where your argument falls apart. Encrypted email is analogous to a postcard coded with something like the caesar cipher. Any postal employee can legally break that over a coffee break since the read the writing on the post card without violating the law. The closest thing to the protection of a first class envelope that an email could have would be to have the data buried inside a steganographically coded image or sound file.
The other half of that statement would apply to classified data in many cases.
The pentagon papers would only cause embarrassment to the US, but there are a lot of classified documents which can cause demonstrable harm to US government property, US government personnel, US intelligence assets and American citizens. Those documents would easily fall under the purview of what the SCOTUS would allow for a prior restraint.
Exhibit B:
Now, a person of **reasonable** intelligence has to ask why the Post Office is holding it in care of the parties and an ISP is not. Even if you expand this out, each party in the routing from point A to point B of the packets of the email message is holding that data temporarily in care of party A until it reaches the email provider of party B who, in turn holds it in care of party B. The very essence of this is that each third party is acting, in a daisy chained relationship, like the Post Office with respect to the transportation of that communication.
Mr. "I have a doctorate in law judge Joe Shmoe" apparently doesn't have the basic sense once attributed to the peasantry to apply the existing rulings to a new scenario. It's not rocket science. There is no reason why email should be subjected to a different standard than snail mail, unless that standard is even more restrictive of the government since some email systems even go so far as to use systems like SSL to explicitly add a level of privacy expectation to the communication not readily had by the average person with snail mail.
Only on slashdot would a statement so legally invalid as this be considered "informative."
The federal government is not very big on IBM hardware. Sun SPARC and PC servers are the big players.
It would be trivial for those policy makers to order GSA to drop IBM from its vendor list...
The only way to fix this is to make defamation a graduated crime. If the Daily Mail pulls a complete hail mary by putting a front page confession, then let them off lightly. If they put it on page Z30 where no one reads, then fine them to the point that they won't make a red cent in profit for two business quarters. If they won't retract it, but fight it, knowing full well that what they did was defamation, then let Faceboook and this journalist pick their bones clean.
This at least makes sense considering how much harm illegal immigration does to American blue collar workers. As long as I can go out in public without it and buy goods without it, I'm not going to lose much sleep over it.
I have to wonder, though, how many people who are going "oh noes... mah freedum iz under attack" would get upset if a state government suddenly abolished its concealed carry license laws and declared that any adult who can legally carry a weapon is entitled to concealed carry.
I bet it's A LOT more than most slashdotters would guess.
I think JavaScript and Google, however, count as the foundation for the actual coffin itself because they were critical to making it so genuinely useful in ways that allowed for a lot of what he dismissed. JavaScript really enabled all of the applications he said wouldn't exist and Google enabled us to easily find them.
As I said on my blog****, the irony was that within 1 year of his article JavaScript was released in Netscape Navigator 2.0 and Brin and Page began Google. The former played a key role in enabling a lot of the usefulness in the web and the latter played a key role in organizing it effectively from the viewpoint of the public, especially to the extent that his point about how hard it was to find useful data was negated by Google.
I have to agree with Newsweek's writer who criticized him by saying that his problem wasn't in stating what the problems were, but his blithe assumption that they would never be overcome. That, right there, was the fatal flaw as it assumed that the computer industry was not invested in the Internet's future. That's almost like assuming that the established auto companies have no interest in the electric car market and would gladly let Tesla take it over unmolested.
****Just an ironic dig since he figured that blogging would never become mainstream, let alone that some bloggers (myself excluded) would become powerful players in the media.
It'll fail and be another boondoggle. The federal government is an incredible diverse organization with varying degrees of competence. Much of it, mainly the DoD and DoJ, can't even safely use cloud computing environments except in strict isolation from the rest of the world. Those two departments alone account for the overwhelming majority of federal employees.
They had the temerity to make law enforcement agencies that use this statute write a detailed report on their behavior every year to explain themselves, but did not so much as put anything in there to provide for their prosecution by state agencies if they abuse it. This is the worst kind of transparency as it says to the public, "yes, we know there are violations of the law, we have them right here, nicely documented, but damned if we'll do anything about it."
Heh, guess I should have proof read that a little better.
Typical feminist hypocrisy on **anything** that might appeal to heterosexual male sexuality, but that doesn't involve a "by your leave, your majesty" from a woman! It's ok for a woman to masturbate, use toys and sleep around. That's "empowering." A man does anything like that and he's "degrading women."
This is what happens when you have socialized education, rather than a competitive market where parents are customers, rather than consumers of a limited good (consumer and customer are not the same social standing). If education were run more like a business, the schools would actually be afraid of overreaching against parental authority because the parents would be the ones writing the checks that keep the school afloat.
Of course, since parental authority is meaningless to the public schools aside from when it means parental responsibility (more specifically, culpability), they feel perfectly free to take the legal equivalent of a sledgehammer to their children and teens.
There won't even be bones for their families to bury by the time the lawyers, both prosecutors and trial lawyers, are done with them for aiding and abetting this if the robber used their app. This is so stupid that it would make running a mirror of The Pirate Bay in the middle of Hollywood look slightly intelligent by comparison.
I'm a big supporter for copyright in principle, but I have no sympathy for the big content companies losing money left and right to pirates because most of them are by anti-property rights leftists and are constantly harping on "Capitalism is bad, mmmmkay?" If things were philosophically balanced where the little guy's property rights were as rigidly secure as big corps' IP, and those same big corps didn't spew out an anti-property rights, anti-"rich" mentality, I might have some mercy for them getting more aggressive in protecting their rights.
They should federalize all franchising so that local and state governments cannot limit which telecoms and cable companies can operate where.