But there is no law against it, so .... what is going to compel us to perform in morally acceptable ways?

BTW, Corporations are amoral by definition. They are only governed by what is legal.

Is it paranoia if it is true?

What is the opposite of paranoia? You know, seeing danger and not believing it is real?

But XMPP Federation is what makes XMPP interesting. I understand why Google would like to remove Federation, but that doesn't make it right. I would much rather Google provide a mechanism for providing XMPP Federation without the SPAM bots. Perhaps web of trust of some sort. Blind acceptance of Federation is not good, but there ought to be a way to make this work, simply and easily.

No, the real solution is transaction taxes, where you tax the movement of money between jurisdictions. Money that remains in a jurisdiction is taxed at that jurisdiction's rate. You have a tax haven in some back woods country, great, but you have to leave it there.

Our idea of how we tax things needs to change.

As I've been told by many a liberal ... you cannot legislate morality.

So, which is it? Can you legislate morality, or not? This is not a trick question, it is the sad result of those that say one thing, until it conflicts with their version of morality. We call that "hypocrisy" in my neck of the woods.

Tyranny is already here. It is just masked in Bureaucracy. All you need to know is that the Powers that be, have already targeted "enemies of the state", simply because they oppose the Bureaucracy's over reaching power.

Well, I'll see it before Glass does, of course.

Glass will be connected through a really powerful telescope that peers through a 300Mm path of prisms, so I'll have a second to block its camera. Maybe I'll also tune netfilter to run everything through a 10MB FIFO buffer, so that might give me another few seconds to cut off the uplink. Hell, maybe I'll configure it to act as a "FR33 C4NDY" open wifi access point too, so all other Glass users within line-of-sight would also have a 10 second uplink delay I could surreptitiously cut... hmm.

Or maybe I just won't be recording all of the damn time. I dunno. Glass sounds like it would be much more useful if it really was recording all of the time, so I can go back to see what I did with my keys.

Please, do let me know about the part where I said it was 'okay'(or not okay, for that matter)...

My point was exclusively a hypothesis about strategies under different constraints:

When large corporations shop around projects(ie. siting a new plant, or even a new stadium, complete with six jobs selling hotdogs...) they usually try to get multiple states and municipalities competing to offer them sweeter 'incentives'. There are even consultancies, often associated with full-service corporate relocation outfits, who will assist in doing this, for a cut of the take. Under such circumstances, states generally end up paying out, often rather absurd amounts, and don't tend to fuck with the new partner. This is arguably a major market distortion for smaller competitors who don't have the same leverage; but it happens.

With a big federal 'defense' project, the siting is more likely to have been hashed out by some sort of congressional sausage-making process. This doesn't give the state unlimited leverage, moving a datacenter is expensive, but not infinitely so; but it does leave room for them to turn the screws a bit.

My understanding is that "Notes" is really just the default public face of Domino Server, which is an enterprise-grade implementation of the Turing Tarpit: Anything is possible, nothing of interest is easy, and the corpses of lots of obsolete animals can be found lurking in the depths...

While I support the spirit of the concept(it's kind of insane that software that is so commercially irrelevant that you can't even hunt somebody down and force them to take your money may still be under copyright until after most of us posting right now are dead), I suspect that such a law would, in practice, lead to a lot of 'on sale in name only' arrangements:

Using Amazon Glacier(just because they have a handy price sheet, not necessarily because they are the best), you can store seldom-accessed data for 1 cent per gigabyte, per month. Let's make the (probably pessimistic) assumption that your software product occupies an entire DVD9, so call it 10GB. For $1.20/year, you can have Amazon squirrel it away. Transfer from the glacier vault to the web is another buck-twenty per transfer.

When you want to discontinue a product, you could just jack up the list price by 10x-100x(depending on whether it was originally cheapy shrinkwrap or expensive enterprise stuff) to discourage anybody from actually trying it, and then keep it in the back of the catalog for as long as you want. Per decade doing so would cost less than a couple of decent six-packs...

I loved how Notes couldn't handle daylight savings (especially when a meeting request came from Outlook). Try explaining to your manager that you missed a meeting because the reminder was automagically set an hour late. God-awful POS.

That's what puzzles me about the move: If Google said '95% of 3rd party XMPP servers are spam bots, we aren't doing federation unless you are a Google Apps customer or otherwise verifiably unlikely to do something dramatically stupid', that'd be annoying but not wildly surprising. Dropping XMPP entirely, though, both kills 3rd-party clients and suggests that they were either unable to shoehorn what they wanted into XMPP(even as a proprietary extension, with the standardized subset allowing partial compatibility), or they saw breaking compatibility as a virtue.

I suspect that federation(at least outside of paying customers, who are both more important to listen to, and less likely to be spambots), is viewed as more trouble than it's worth; but dropping XMPP entirely is an entirely different game.

The extra amusing thing about the unrelated case is that he is representing his wife. "Sorry honey, not 'attorney-client relations' today, I'm under investigation for moral turpitude unbecoming the profession..."

A private company operating an enterprise of equivalent size might actually have made a few little 'community investments', possibly scored some sweet 'development incentives', maybe even a 'public/private partnership' to get some of the infrastructure built for them...

Sucks for their smaller competitors; but private enterprises shake down state and local governments all the time. If anything, this particular situation is probably coming up because the location of the NSA datacenter was decided by jockying at the federal level(rather than by the NSA shopping it around and having states beg for it), so once the location was fixed, the state has a strong incentive to soak them just hard enough that they don't actually pack up and leave.

Does anybody know how mucus differs from the 'extracellular polymeric substance' of which biofilms are made, such that the one would be a haven for bacteriophages and the other a haven for bacteria?