A universal voucher system would quickly correct this inequity,

With a sufficient injection of frictionless ropes and massless pulleys, by George, you could be onto something.

Some of what you say is certainly fair, but I don't think the useful/not useful cases for OpenStack are quite as black and white as you seem to be implying.

For a single physical box that's going to pretend to be a handful of not-often-changing virtual boxes, sure, something like OpenStack is way overspecified (and overcomplicated).

However, scaling up a bit, you moved into the territory where you have a few powerful machines and multiple large-scale storage devices, and you probably want them to run lots of services and get more frequent requests to provision a new facility. Most of all, you really, really don't want a single point of failure, because if any of your big boxes goes down it takes out half a department until everything is fixed. At that point, there is a lot of potential upside to building all your IT facilities on logical/virtual infrastructure that is in turn built on top of physical hardware but without your users ever seeing it.

Right now, with these technologies for private clouds or whatever buzzword we're using this week still in their infancy, there are a lot of growing pains. Virtualisation for processors and storage is complicated enough on its own, before you add SDN on top, and then the more specialised services and all the infrastructure to tie it all together like identity and image management. User interfaces for sysadmins tend to be pretty bad even in fields that are already well established with relatively obvious requirements, which this isn't.

So for today, I don't know who would find a good cost/benefit for moving to OpenStack. But of course, not so many years ago, people used to say that about obscure new technologies like Linux and web applications, too.

I'm guessing he wasn't meeting expectations

You're never seen a person be fired because the ranks of management are equally vile?

Have you never seen a manager go to jail because he deliberately fired or drove away the company's most competent employee on fabricated allegations in order to exact revenge for a perceived slight, prior to his own dismissal or resignation?

No, I didn't think so. The master retributivist of eternal liberty sabotages human systems instead.

Doesn't your friend have access to
1) public transit? At least buses?
2) taxis?
3) Airport shuttles of some kind?
4) Zipcar or other car rental services?

OpenStack is more about virtualisation than anything else. Its potential usefulness for "cloud" service providers is one example, but it's probably of more interest to large organisations looking to consolidate their own in-house IT services. As with many "open" technologies, the realities aren't quite as simple as the article here suggests, though.

It's certainly true that proprietary high-end networking gear and virtualisation software can be expensive. In that respect, alternatives like OpenStack are potentially disruptive.

On the other hand, ask anyone who's actually had to administer an OpenStack system how they feel about it, and the response might be a string of curse words that would make your mother blush. This is a technology (or more accurately, a loosely connected family of technologies) still very much in its infancy, and sometimes it shows.

Also, just because big name brands are keen to be associated with the shiny new buzzword, don't mistake that for sincere support. OpenStack poses a direct threat to the established business model of some of those networking giants, and just like everyone else, the executives at those businesses are wondering where the industry is going next and how to look like you're playing nicely while really still trying to optimise your own financial position.

I tend towards the view that if someone was tried and not convicted, it should be possible for them to have unproven allegations against them hidden. If a court with actual evidence in front of it did not decide to convict, should the accused really then face a second trial by public opinion? Whose interests are really served by such a policy?

Then again, I tend toward the view that no-one should be publicly named as a suspect in most crimes anyway unless and until they have been properly convicted. None of these situations allows some perfect disclosure policy that never gives undesirable outcomes, and I do understand that there are reasonable arguments in favour of disclosure. However, my bias is toward innocent-until-proven-guilty, simply because some damage can't be undone, and once rumours start they will tend to spread whether or not they are founded on anything remotely resembling the truth. Which brings us back to where we came in...

Of course this all applies as much to the original source as to any services dealing in second-hand information, but I don't think it's plausible to ignore the huge magnifying effect of a service like Google. Its actions clearly have consequences, possibly serious ones, in cases like this, so it is not obvious that they should be absolved of all associated responsibility just because it's inconvenient to their business model.

It appears we are in strong agreement.

I don't think we should ever become comfortable with state surveillance and censorship, just as for example we should never be comfortable with armed people going around with the power to forcibly detain us or worse. These things may be necessary evils without which the law cannot in practice be upheld, but they are evils all the same.

Such powers should therefore be granted by law only to the minimum necessary level to enforce the law itself, and they should be applied to everyone equally, and they should probably be overseen by ruthless monsters with the ability to punish in some suitably slow and painful fashion any public official who abuses their privileged powers.

It is unfortunate that in reality government officials tend to get away with a lot more than they should, even in our supposedly democratic and civilised societies. We still have a long way to go before serious abuse of office is considered a high crime tantamount to treason and punished accordingly, but I can't help thinking modern society would probably be a fairer place if we could get there.

As far as I'm aware, there is literally no country in the world that actually has 100% free speech protection in law. Certainly the US does not: there are numerous things that you are not free to express without penalty. You can shout about your theoretical First Amendment protections as much as you want, but you can still be sued for infringing copyright, you can still be arrested for threatening to kill someone, etc.

Equating privacy protection with censorship misses the point. There's an old saying that your right to swing your fist ends at the bridge of my nose. It's not strictly true from a modern legal perspective, but the point that you need to balance many rights and freedoms for everyone is just as valid as it ever was. There will always be a tension between freedom of expression and right to privacy, and using inflammatory language like "censorship" to describe anything but an absolutely one-sided position isn't going to achieve anything constructive.

In fact, it's rather ironic that in one paragraph you attack the idea of protecting privacy as a form of censorship, yet in the very next paragraph you argue for government supervision and market regulation so that companies are not free to act as they wish.

There is a certain stunning irony in someone on the US side of this particular debate complaining about nations wanting to enforce their own laws in other nations.

For one thing, that doesn't appear to be what the ruling actually says.

That aside, someone from the United States is arguing against enforcing local laws abroad? Seriously?!

I say let's go with your idea. It sounds great. You can have your free speech on your part of the wild west Internet, and we can have our privacy protection in our part of the grown up, normal laws do actually apply here Internet. Also, maybe we can go back to having reasonable IP laws. And perhaps we might even keep the tax revenues from sales by Internet companies in our countries. With a bit of luck, we might even develop more home grown tech industry that way, too.

With a small herd of these pet pandasauri—and an enormous harvest of coprolignum—one could well up the Great Wall of China in record time. It would still required great hordes or workers, but the workers would be highly obedient. Anyone who slacks off would have their highly-prized long-handled trowel promptly confiscated. With no hall pass, it's crenellation duty for you. From there it's years fighting your way up the rank just to obtain the corner-pocket edge-finishing tool.

Would any consciousness be able to deal with such a relative delay?

Interesting to frame the story in such a way as to bring the existence of human intelligence itself into doubt.

Roger Penrose believes that human creativity is rooted at quantum effects, effects which probably play out at the Planck scale, where the ratio between the Planck scale and the reconfiguration of a single molecular bond in a gathering neurotransmitter pulse likely exceeds the ratio of a CPU cycle to a trans-continental ping.

Shall I continue wanking, or should we put this bizarre speculation to bed?

Fair enough, bricking the device was a poor example as it's likely to be presumed a software fault. But what about more controversial issues, like the problem with running a speaker too loud and actually damaging the hardware that was doing the rounds a little while back? What if you flash a wireless router and you subsequently get in trouble because it is found to be transmitting other than in accordance with the local regulations? There are issues that could be related to the software change, but it might not be trivial to demonstrate that either way.

Of course in some jurisdictions there are statutory minimum levels of guarantee that vendors are required to provide, and sometimes there is also a presumption that the item was faulty if a problem happens within a certain period after purchasing it. My question is to what extent this will necessarily help you if you've modified some part of the device significantly, in this case by installing new firmware.

(Please note that I'm not claiming the law doesn't support that position in any specific place, I'm just asking for specific citations or other verifiable data to show that it really does. A lot of major manufacturers are on the record as saying that flashing firmware will void your warranty, which suggests they may fight claims in this area, which to me suggests it may not be worth pushing your luck without the law clearly being on your side.)

Exactly. I read this and actually laughed:

Yeah, those crazy employers, sticking with things that work! What were they thinking?!

Perhaps if this guy hired a few more experienced developers, they could have explained the relatively value of the terms "tried and tested" and "unproven and risky". Good older programmers are just as capable of learning useful new technologies as good younger programmers. The real difference is that the experienced ones tend not to waste their time learning five different [JS frameworks]* that they know will all be obsolete long before the project built on them is finished, because they were too busy building something that would actually get the job done using [jQuery]*.

*Please substitute respectively an overhyped but underperforming technology and an established reliable technology in your fields of choice.

In which jurisdiction(s)?

If you're going to give a statement like that, which blatantly contradicts the stated position of lots of companies selling consumer devices that are subsequently modified/jailbroken, then you'd better have more than an AC post saying all those companies can't enforce their terms, because.

For example, I've just checked the current law here in the UK, and I've found various pages about the statutory minimal guarantees for consumer sales under EU law. I also found a couple of pages arguing that rooting/flashing your device can't therefore void the warranty, but their arguments didn't have much to do with what the law actually says. I did not find any documented case of someone flashing custom firmware onto a device without the manufacturer's support, bricking that device, and subsequently compelling the manufacturer to accept legal responsibility for the consequences.

So please enlighten us, AC, on why those Internet rumours and the clear public statements of many companies like smartphone and camera manufacturers on this issue are all unenforceable.

A lot of people have reported problems with using their locally installed applications at all, or with features like the Typekit integration even if the software would start. It seems to be a much wider problem than just the on-line storage and activation for new licences.