I think this is right. What Google was arguing was a maximalist position that the API was fundamentally uncopyrightable. I don't think that's right. A work is copyrighted upon creation. On the question of fair use however, they're exactly right. If Oracle persists in its path, it WILL destroy Java. Developers will simply leave it because they could without realizing it be guilty of copyright infringement ofr any of the code they write. Consider graphics APIs or graphing APIs . Of necessity, inorder to be faithful to the underlying mathematical, logical and structural realities these APIs are created to contorl, the names of classes methods and members virtually write themselves. doLayout(Graphics graphics) doOrthoginalLayout(Vertices, Edges) isConnected (Vertext, Vertex) . doHierarchicalLayout(Vertices Edges) isConnected(vertices, Edges) Etc etc etc onto a million and more narrow verticals whose entities and relationships are shared cultural knowledge. There's a reason Gosling left Oracle after just a few weeks. Oracles DNA is opportunistic, exploitative and indifferent to the common good. It's been this way for decades and decades and that means something. It means that everyone who has come up through the Oracle culture, who has withstood the test of time and "succeeded" all come to share the same world view. That's what a corporate culture is- the ongoing systematic elimination of people who don't fit the dominant corporate culture. Alowed to run over decades, it becomes a self-perpetuating machine with no need for any specific enforcer or even consciousness of what it is.. Nothing is going to change it, nothing is going to make Oracle see the light" They're Oracle.

"but the security team doesn't care about optimization, summarily blaming sluggishness on lack of SSDs. Are they blowing smoke?"

They're blowing smoke to a large degree. SSDs are lot faster however as anyone who ever bought one knows, they are not capable of speeding up the movement of a large number of files \all THAT much since the Windows Explorer builds in a huge overhead around every file transfer and this is what takes files so long to be copied from point A to point B. So to the extent that you're opening a lot of files, transfering their bytes into RAM, then closing them,. it's still going to take a significant amount of time.

Sure, if you have one HUGE zipped file then SSDs are all that and a slice of cake, as advertised, but not much of what you're describing involves moving large files to and fro. Processing many files you;re going to see some speed up but mostly it's the processing itself that takes the time.

Yes, it's faster to read and write with an SSD but you'd be shocked how often the actual speed of reading into memory and writing out to disk has to little to do with how fast something happens on your computer. I was.

No you can implement transactional processing with full ACID guarantess on top of a non-transactional, non-fail-safe file system, even on that quits mid process- i.e. the plug gets pulled out in the middle of a transaction. Absolutely you can. I refer you to Jim Grey's "Transaction Processing" probably the greatest book on this subject ever written. He explains it so well anyone could implemnent it. Reading that book made me realize I COULD write a fully functional database if the urge was ever to overwhlem me. It will make you realize that too.

God bless you Jim, wherever you are.

Yeah it's great for blowing jihadiis out of their Lexuses in Yemen but that doesn't mean it scales for civilian contexts and populated areas where, you know Newton's Laws of gravitational force act on bodies. You can't have even 4 lb objects flying anywhere they want because each one turns into a downward missle as soon as it malfunctions for any reason whatsoever or runs into a power line or a bird or whatever (whatever =~ 1 million other unforeseen events).

Air space is controlled by the FAA , just some people don't understand that and think drones==kites, 'cause , you know , they're both marketed as harmless toys.

We're not going to be a society whizzing drones overhead ala The Jetsons with falling anvil warning signs ala The Roadrunner everywhere. This is where Hanna Barbera visions of the future break down.

We'll have makebot manufacturing in our general localities before that happens.

Amazon wants to do this and even with all their power to buy the votes of politicians, it aint' gonna happen.

You're just parroting what comapies have always said about everything from anti-lock brakes to air bags ...oh it's too expensive, it will destroy the market,

What you're preaching is the inevitability of market failure- that markets can't build X at a profitable price. Then someone does it or they all get forced to by legislation. Then everyone forgets what businesses were saying about how it can't be done. Then businesses trumpet technology X in their ads as their great technological leap and proof they're consciencous corporate citizens.

Rinse and repeat.

Get a new argument.

Yeah it's like this. Until physics prevents a flying drone that fails or is interfered with from following Newton's Laws, drones are too dangerous to be flying over populated areas.

Even "failsafe" parachutes only slow the descent of the 100lb mechanical thing landing on the pedestrian, window, moving car, bridge, darkened road, power line, etc. etc. et fucking cetera.

"People paying high rents have a harder time saving for a down payment, preventing tenants from exiting the rental market. "

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

>>No. The 'catching terrorists' angle is simply the cover story used to justify the construction of the surveillance state.

Not a chance that that statement is true.

Read my other post; I am well aware of this. But both can be true. The potential for unlimited blackmail and or targeted destruction AND the leaking of methods and tactics to the enemy. Both.

No one is helped and nothing is advanced by lying or going with a purely emotional (fear based or hate based) argument. As long as we don't tell the story ully in all its complexity , the other side" will detect our fundamental dishonesty and use it to dismiss our entire argument.

First, tell the truth.

t's not completely true what yo'reb saying. Many terrorists did NOT know about the extent of our capabilities. I am ot saying this as a rebuttal to your entire argument, just facts are facts and we shouldn't cloud them for any reason. Both things happened. Snowden blew the whistle on illegal and unconstitutional practices AND ALSO terrorists were made aware of techniques and methods that otherwise would have been used to catch them. Both. Are. True.

FTFA:
What Snowden revelaed is just too much unchecked power waiting to be abused. It's a structural flaw in how governments operate that one day is going to cause catastrophic damage to democracy.

I would not have done what Snowden did just because think of the damage to national security and where's the evidence this power is currently being abused to stifle democratic liberties?

Where are the bodies and innocent ruined lives?

Where's the influenced or rigged elections?

Where 's the blackmail of Senators and Congresspeople?

All of these crimes are the stuff a panopticon faciliates, but we find no evidence for them, at least yet.

The worst we know about was what Anonymous revealed- a despicable but private effort on the part of govt. contractors to smear and destroy Glenn Greenwald's career and ability to make a living.

But that was private actors, the Chamber of Commerce going to Stratfor looking to destroy him, not the government.

OTOH revealing what he revealed absolutely helps Very Bad People do Very Bad Things. So that is absolutely a cost to society that can't be just brushed aside.

Point is, this panopticon 1984 shit should never have been put into place without serious limitations and safeguards, ones which were not left in the hands of a small group of political lackeys like the FISA court.

Abusive panopticons are what develop in the dark when no one is looking. No one is above the temptation to create unlimited power and take it unto themselves "for the greater good". If it's not being abused, it will be.

We would never know about it- Wyden wasn't able or willing to get the word out- except for Snowden. So we all owe Snowden a debt of gratitude, even if his process was imperfect. He could not sort everything he took for relevance \ danger to national security \ criminality. It was a logisitcal limitation. So he left it to reproters to sort it out.

It's complicated and I dont feel a need to make is less complicated than it is.

He clearly revealed things that are illegal and dangerous to the point of killing the democracy- dangerous to the point of *clearly being a threat to national security*.

At the same time he clearly damaged national secuity.

Legitimate appeals to national security cannot be allowed to evolve into a democracy suicide-pact.

You can't be allowed to baby-step the democracy off a cliff. You built a dangerous system you can't legitimately claim you can control, that is ripe and aching for Stasi / Nazi / Soviet style abuse, which could be used to kill the democracy. Your otherwise legitimate claims to national security are severely undermined .

What Snowden means is the NSA et al were power hungry madmen building a democracy killing WMD and someone who was not brainwashed into the cult found out about it and blew the whistle, and damaged our national security in the process.

The scary thing is this- we're not any better than THAT at preventing group-think within the parts of government that might wield extraordinary power.

This is the professionalization and fineness of capability at keeping people with dissenting views out.

If our system worked, Greemnwald and Snowden would work WITHIN the NSA in watchdog capacites, not outside it, throwing a baby out with every bathtub of dirty water.

It's not their fault in that sense. It's ours. It our failure to demand that government condict itself in light of the science we have done; science about group think, science about exclusionary tendencies of teams, about mobbing within organizations, about the ways power becomes corrupted.

OK then.

Presidential pardon for Snowden- reinstate him and whomever he selects as watchdogs within the NSA. Let outsiders from academia , lawyers and scholars who understand civil liberties into the sytem in a formal way and give them real, unusurpable apolitical power.

We need to go radically outside the comfort zones of those currently in power. Give them their medals and pensions and honors and then retire them; times are changing faster than they can keep up with.

We're not dealing with treasonous traitors. This is an internal dispute betwen equally patriotic Americans.

SEe above. It's not about encrypting the story, it's about encrypting your connection so your anonymity remains secure.

FTFA:
  Last night, the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times published their lead front-page Sunday article, headlined âoeBritish Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.â

This is the power relationship in this case:

Murdoch's papers are fundamentally criminal enterprises who have been caught tapping the phones of government officials and celebrities alike, among other crimes.

They also deny that man-made climate change is a threat to human civilization, a fact about them which bascially makes them mass murderers in a lot of people's eyes, including a lot of people in government.

So their entire existence is hanging by a thread of goodwill and if that thread ever gets cut, they're going to prosecuted out of existence and Murdoch is going to jail like the criminal he is.

Such an compromised entity is called "useful" in government circles.

"Please dont' prosecute us, we'll do anything you say any time say.. anything..anything!"

Thus this news story.

No one should take from this that I am specifically pro-Snowden.

What I am is anti-what-he-revealed. It's just too much unchecked power waiting to be abused. It's a structural flaw in how governments operate that one day is going to cause catastrophic damage to democracy.

I would not have done what Snowden did just because think of the damage to national security and where's the evidence this power is currently being abused to stifle democratic liberties?

Where are the bodies and innocent ruined lives?

Where's the influenced or rigged elections?

Where 's the blackmail of Senators and Congresspeople?

All of these crimes are the stuff a panopticon faciliates, but we find no evidence for them, at least yet.

The worst we know about was what Anonymous revealed- a despicable but private effort on the part of govt. contractors to smear and destroy Glenn Greenwald's career and ability to make a living.

But that was private actors, the Chamber of Commerce going to Stratfor looking to destroy him, not the government.

OTOH revealing what he revealed absolutely helps Very Bad People do Very Bad Things. So that is absolutely a cost to society that can't be just brushed aside.

Point is, this panopticon 1984 shit should never have been put into place without serious limitations and safeguards, ones which were not left in the hands of a small group of political lackeys like the FISA court.

Abusive panopticons are what develop in the dark when no one is looking. No one is above the temptation to create unlimited power and take it unto themselves "for the greater good". If it's not being abused, it will be.

We would never know about it- Wyden wasn't able or willing to get the word out- except for Snowden. So we all owe Snowden a debt of gratitude, even if his process was imperfect. He could not sort everything he took for relevance \ danger to national security \ criminality. It was a logisitcal limitation. So he left it to reproters to sort it out.

It's complicated and I dont feel a need to make is less complicated than it is.

He clearly revealed things that are illegal and dangerous to the point of killing the democracy- dangerous to the point of *clearly being a threat to national security*.

At the same time he clearly damaged national secuity.

Legitimate appeals to national security cannot be allowed to evolve into a democracy suicide-pact.

You can't be allowed to baby-step the democracy off a cliff. You built a dangerous system you can't legitimately claim you can control, that is ripe and aching for Stasi / Nazi / Soviet style abuse, which could be used to kill the democracy. Your otherwise legitimate claims to national security are severely undermined .

What Snowden means is the NSA et al were power hungry madmen building a democracy killing WMD and someone who was not brainwashed into the cult found out about it and blew the whistle, and damaged our national security in the process.

The scary thing is this- we're not any better than THAT at preventing group-think within the parts of government that might wield extraordinary power.

This is the professionalization and fineness of capability at keeping people with dissenting views out.

If our system worked, Greemnwald and Snowden would work WITHIN the NSA in watchdog capacites, not outside it, throwing a baby out with every bathtub of dirty water.

It's not their fault in that sense. It's ours. It our failure to demand that government condict itself in light of the science we have done; science about group think, science about exclusionary tendencies of teams, about mobbing within organizations, about the ways power becomes corrupted.

OK then.

Presidential pardon for Snowden- reinstate him and whomever he selects as watchdogs within the NSA. Let outsiders from academia , lawyers and scholars who understand civil liberties into the sytem in a formal way and give them real, unusurpable apolitical power.

This is what needs to be done. We need to go radically outside the comfort zones of those currently in power. Give them their medals and pensions and honors and then retire them; times are changing faster than they can keep up with.

We're not dealing with treasonous traitors ala Hansen here. This is an internal dispute betwen equally patriotic Americans.

\

In good stories, the verifiable facts speak for themselves . That is pretty much the definition of good journalism.

We don't believe journalist's stories because we trust the individual journalist. We believe their stories because of the evidence those journalists assembled in their stories.

I clearly need to be more detailed in my comments. My bad. See two comments aboe you for connection between encryption and anonymity.

Encryption -not of content (the story) but of internet connections- is what permits people to post and read online anonymously.

If people can find out what your IP address is or otherwise get at what computer you were using to author the story then they have an excellent chance at identifying you. To defeat this and remain anonymous, encryption is used by software like TOR to hopelessly obscure the actual source of the computer.

If you surf using some form of encryption to hide your actual IP address it makes it hard for low-level bad guys, even ones with govt. connections, to know who you are.

Of course very powerful goverments like the US can track you, absolutely using a VPN (we know this from Snowden) and probably even TOR can't protect you anymore - that is just my best guess given how TOR works and the what resources that government has at its disposal.

But it takes a nation-state level effort to do that. This guy was not killed by someone with access to that kind of power.

HTH