...to create a "secure" IT gateway between confidential submissions to the market authorities and the general public, which can then be downloaded to a DVD by some employee wanting to "look at it at home", which is then accidentally left lying around in a car somewhere shortly before billions of personal financial transactions end up in a file torrented on the PirateBay with edited highlights providing Julian Assange with another headline.

I didn't say I wanted to do it :)

I meant I thought the idea was neat. I think it's rough ideas like these that develop into products in the future.

The first part of my phrase was what I meant, "handling stolen documents". I ad-libbed too aggressively when I put words in their mouth.

That having been said, I think that if a (for example) British citizen decided to disclose the names and addresses of families of US troops deployed in Afghanistan and someone got attacked as a consequence, there would be decent grounds to mount a case against that individual, under British law if necessary, or under US law if they set foot in the country.

On a less legalistic note, my personal opinion would be that the person bore some share of the responsibility (moral, logical, whatever) for the attack, and that they should be aware when dealing in such sensitive information that their actions have consequences on the lives of others. The alternative (that the person bears no blame at all) seems unreasonably lenient on people dealing in stolen information.

It's a tricky subject to be sure, the UK had to deal with it when tabloid newspapers starting publishing the names and addresses of individuals who were on the sex offenders register and these people began getting attacked in their homes. It's hard to feel sympathy for people who are on such a list, but at the same time screaming mobs throwing bricks at their houses isn't really the answer either. The tabloid wasn't attacked because, I seem to recall, there was an argument made that the list was essentially in the public domain anyway, just not particularly easy to piece together.

Yes, it's part of the modern method of communicating. Volume of mail isn't, however, perfectly correclated with the importance of a subject. It's correlated with the degree of organisation of the special interest group promoting the letter-writing campaign, and it damages the signal-to-noise ratio because all the letters on this subject become statistics.

A well-written letter with 300 signatures gets read. 300 letters that are all treat the same subject just get counted. It's not communication anymore, it's bandwidth control.

I quite like the idea that you could use ads that you pay for (that don't cost much) to advertise your party or to post silly messages to your friends. Of course the privacy implications of what google needs to know in order to be able to do this are absolutely terrifying, but the idea remains cute.

Additionally, I liked the idea when they turned it on its head, saying that certain individuals can agree to receive adverts of a certain type and you can then pay to have your adverts targeted to those people... such as recruiters.

I wonder the extent to which these ideas are just that : great ideas, but completely impractical in the real world, but this kind of brainstorming is what gives rise to the really good ideas in the end anyway, so its not surprising that they should be having this sort of discussion internally.

Or they're saying they don't like where the economic optimum will take them (i.e. inefficient factories burning massive amounts of energy in a period of rapid growth in energy demand), and would prefer to pre-empt the energy crisis this would create by intervening now.

The alternative is to leave these factories alone. What happens then?

1) China can't increase energy production fast enough to meet demand.
2) Energy prices increase.
3) New, more efficient factories gradually enter, taking over the business of the inefficient factories as they are forced out by rising energy prices.
4) Meanwhile, the increased energy prices affect the rest of the economy, slowing economic growth and raising prices for consumers.

This way is better, because they're creating room for the competition without waiting for the energy price to do it for them. This will reduce the consequences of future energy shortages on the rest of the economy, and accelerate the adoption of more efficient technology in heavy industry.

True, but any assistance by the government in redacting the documents can be interpreted as a partial authorisation to leak the unredacted bits.

I would have sent back documents covered in black ink with a couple of conjunctions and a few bits of punctuation unredacted.

The US goverment's point is that the documents were illegally obtained, that they are protected as official secrets and that therefore their dissemination is a criminal offense, and no, they're not going to play ball.

While there's an argument that says they could have limited the damage, there's an argument that says WikiLeaks shouldn't be publishing classified government documents in the first place.

If even one thing published by WikiLeaks turns out to have aided an enemy of the US, I would imagine (IANAL) that this would put the members of WikiLeaks in a highly dubious legal position vis-a-vis the US authorities, and any allies they may have. They're handling stolen documents, saying "we gave you the opportunity to help us redact the documents we stole from you" doesn't actually exonerate them in any way.

Faulty logic: Defending something bad by pointing at something worse doesn't work, they're still both bad. If Wikileaks are, in fact, responsible for endangering civilians, then that's a bad thing, regardless of what the US military has or has not done.

That's leaving to one side the highly contentious basis of your argument. Militaries exist to deter, and where that fails, to do violence, and they are supposed to minimise the impact of that violence on non-combatants. The members of wikileaks probably don't even own guns. The comparison makes no sense.

Furthermore, Wikileaks has been around for a short while. The US Military for a somewhat longer while. The impact of wikileaks is still being measured on a leak-by-leak basis, and the potential to do harm is massive, even if it has not yet materialised (and hopefully won't). I can understand why having an organisation staffed by volunteers of various nationalities and of unknown affiliations, who's daily job is to sift through classified information that they shouldn't normally have access to, who decide what secrets to divulge and when, and who distribute these secrets on a global and publically-accessible platform, might be a little worrying to members of the defense establishment.

Comparing the two on the basis of which has killed more people makes no sense. WikiLeaks worries certain people because of its potential to do harm. The harm done by the US Military is as relevant as the number of road deaths in Arkansas, the point is that if Wikileaks puts people in danger, then that is objectively a bad thing, and who is Julian Assange to make decisions about whether the value of the transparency he provides is worth the risk to human lives that is the by-product of certain disclosures?

Are you sure that "from your website" wasn't shorthand for "people sent me mail because your website asked them to"? In this case each email would come from a different domain.

The way many of these campaigns work is that a group organises a mass mailing effort to swamp a member of parliament with emails on a single issue in order to force them to deal with the question. It's basically not far off a denial-of-service attack via email.

I agree that it can probably be dealt with using simple filtering because these websites typically provide the draft to be copy-pasted in the email, so the text is always very similar. It's still a fairly unpleasant political tactic, better to have a petition signed and send one document with a few thousand signatures.

No. There's a gaseous reek

I was being polite.. :)

Given the context of the discussion, I don't think he was comparing the iPhone OS to Microsoft's OS in the smartphone market. He was comparing the iPhone's market position (i.e. "is it a monopoly") to the position Windows XP held when Microsoft was getting lambasted for abuse of monopoly power by the courts.

In his second sentence, he then talked about the smartphone market, to demonstrate how others provide robust competition to the iPhone (further proof that the market is not a monopoly).

The gist of his message is right... They can't be considered a monopoly since they don't control the market, and Android is a new entrant and is gaining market share, as the link you yourself provided proves.

You didn't read his post, nobody's qualifying monopolies as good or bad here... here's the key phrase :

if Apple was classified as a monopoly, their activities would without a doubt be considered anti competitive, something the OP pretty clearly implied.

I didn't say being a monopoly was "bad", and neither did he, we both said that their present actions could be considered bad were they to be qualified as a monopolist. I said that if Apple were a monopolist, then their behaviour (blocking certain applications from running on their OS) could be interpreted in the same light as Microsoft's actions in the past. In other words as abuse of monopoly power. But to abuse it you have to have it...

Since they are not a monopolist, they can defend their actions by saying that they don't control enough of the market for their behaviour to qualify as market abuse as developers such as Adobe have the ability to produce software for many other platforms and a very large chunk of the market.

The first AP (with the charming "ig'orant" remark) probably just read my post to fast and had an itchy trigger finger. I didn't think I needed to spell my argument out in all its detail, but anyway, this is slashdot, flames are part of the scenery.

My point exactly : Apple's argument is that they're not dominant. But I agree violently with your characterisation of some of their more recent moves as "dickish". There's a slight whiff of megalomania, perhaps a faint odour of superiority, to their reactions to anything that isn't either home-grown or plays within their rules.

...all the people who want to develop applications for sale through the App store, for whom Apple is still the gatekeeper who can enforce whatever rules any way they choose.

Hard to believe this behaviour in the wake of the Microsoft cases heard in Europe and elsewhere, but I suppose Apple can still argue that they don't control enough of the market with the iPhone to be considered a monopolist, and so can impose any conditions on developers that they choose.

But the demand for a product is dependent on the supply curve, and with piracy, what you have is a zero-price channel to market, or a point on the supply curve that's at "infinity" quantity, zero price. In a perfect market, demand would be the total population of people who desire the product even a little bit, at the zero price point, with corresponding revenues of zero for the supplier. The reasons people avoid piracy add a couple of specks of demand elsewhere on the chart, be the reason honesty, convenience, price-insensitivity or fear of enforcement.

In a market with a zero price point, the aberration is that anyone pays for the product at all, not the other way around.

The presence of DRM merely increases the 'price' or decreases the ease or convenience of the piracy channel to market. It will therefore increase legitimate sales, other things remaining equal, regardless of the official price of the product. That's unless there are lots of people who won't buy software if it contains DRM, but I have my doubts about this argument, I think those people are way over-represented on a forum like Slashdot.

Trying to read people's opinions from the shape of a demand curve in the presence of piracy is not possible, it involves solving a multi-variant problem with only two pieces of information, one of which (number of copies pirated) is not accurately derivable anyway. What we're left with is a lot of people using fuzzy logic and presenting conjecture as fact. We cannot know, with the information available, the reasons for people's piracy, which is why the discussions on here are always the same - some people argue that it's all about price points, others argue that its about convenience, some say its about selfishness and an unwillingness to pay for things unless you're forced to, but really, we have insufficient information to know for sure.

As self-respecting geeks, we should be sufficiently adept at statistics to know what we don't know. Personal pet peeve : It would be nice if we could also be self-aware enough to stop presenting our personal opinions, decisions and reactions as in any way representative of the crowd, as so many posts here tend to do (not yours though!)