Because our current political and economic culture selects for psychopaths. I've worked with top-level executives for years and I've seen what their jobs consist of. You more or less have to be a psychopath to be good at that and still be able to look at yourself in a mirror.
Before the Civil War, you had to go to the local post office to pick up your mail.
In my country (Germany), my grandparents once told me that the postman used to come three times a day, not once as I've seen it all day.
You know, there was a time where the post office thought its primary purpose was the delivery of mail. Not a profitable quarter.
I was also astonished when I learnt for the first time that in some countries, your mailbox is not an input, but an IO system and you can put mail you want to send there and the postman will pick it up. That's also something I didn't know from my own place.
So there are many different levels of service that a post office can provide. Here's my issue with this proposal: The sole focus is cost. They got the numbers on what the higher service level costs. None of them thought about asking the people affected if it is worth it to them, given this cost. If it is, you could think about raising your prices, for example. A letter is 58 Euro-cents in my country. I wouldn't mind paying 60 or 70 if the alternative is having to pick up my mail at the post office.
Many, many years ago, public services and government-controlled monopoly companies had a mission to provide a service, not to make a profit.
Then, privatization was "the thing" to do and politicians were frothing at the mouth about estimated profits. Everyone with 2 working brain cells already had the "too good to be true" feeling, but since we all know politicians, they went through with it.
Other then others I don't think that private or public ownership is the deciding factor, but whether your focus is service or profit.
For Europe, the result is higher prices with massively reduced quality in the areas of postal services, trains, energy and several others. It appears to have worked so-so (i.e. no drastic negative changes) for public transport (busses, underground, etc.) and it actually does appear to have worked in telecommunications.
The rage right now is buying these things back. I would love to make a final calculation at the end, about what this whole stupidity has cost the taxpayer, in other words: How much money was transferred from the public to some private companies. And then sue the fuckers for it and jail them. I just fear that won't happen.
Yes and no.
This is political. There are two possibilities here: Either, the guy who said that is an old-school politician, or he is of the new breed.
The new breed outright lies to you, straight into your face. That's the kind of people that run our governments today.
The old-school guys, however, will not lie. Well... not outright. In this case, he would say something that is technically the truth. For example, if they have several seperate and independent internal mailing systems - which is quite likely given that they have offices around the world and certainly don't want to send confidential mail around public data networks just for the convenience of central mail management - then he could well be saying the truth in that there is in fact "no central method"... see where this is going? Of course they can search their e-mails, but they can't search everyone's emails from one central location. See, not a lie...
*Maybe* they're telling the truth, if they've got some custom, highly-encrypted system where emails can only be decrypted by the users.
Incredibly unlikely. The NSA would be the #1 top candidate for a list of "organisations that know what key escrow is for".
If you work in the intelligence sector, you should understand that people can go missing or become no-longer-trustworthy very unexpectedly and you definitely do not want to lose access to their data. And in the later case, you absolutely want access to their data, especially communications, to check if they did any damage and what they knew.
and I've been using KDE ever since.
I knew something was missing from my original post:
KDE sucks just as badly as Gnome does. In fact, the total failure of the desktop environments on Linux is part of what drove me to OS X. I can't speak about today, since it's been years since I've last used a Linux desktop (I still run plenty of servers on Linux, but that's commandline only), but back when I switched, it was an awakening. It was like having driven a 1950s car all your life and then you buy a modern car and you realize that there are all these amazing tiny things that make everything just so much better, smoother and less painful to use.
Plus you don't have to take it apart and fix something yourself every thousand miles or so.
Wars ending? You still from the 20th century? When is the last time the USA ended a war? Iraq, Afghanistan, drugs, terrorism - all the more recent wars are designed and intended to last forever.
but when they started becoming more and more a Windows clone, I lost my faith in them.
ditto.
Gnome was very promising once, I even worked on it for a while. But this exactly, there was a point where it turned into a me-too project, where ideas for making things better were shunned in favour of making things familiar, which at that time meant copying windows.
Gnome is a major example of Free Software fucking it up because of bikeshedding and copying instead of innovating.
All of the options are 20th century.
The very point of what has been revealed is that none of this is true, and the truth is much worse.
They don't watch you or keep a file on you. And they care and don't care at the same time. Basically, you don't exist except as a metadata field until someone mentions your name and asks for your data. Only then, because they are vacuuming up everything can they run a big search and create that huge file on you on demand. And not just on you, on everyone.
William Gibson was right. If he had written stories about what is reality today, 20 years ago we would've laughed about how over-the-edge paranoid he is.
They could try selling them without warranty or with a very simple 30 day exchange warranty for defective products, but that could leave them with a PR problem when people run into problems
Plus it would be outright illegal in most of the world, most importantly the EU, which is the biggest market for tech products (considerably larger than the US, sorry dudes).
there's one surefire way to
Right, because no one else but you has ever thought about it, done some calculations, asked a few experts or (gasp!) customers, and ran the scenario. Least of all the people who just took one of the largest stock dives in their history and wrote off more money than you will ever see in your entire life.
Why was this piece of crap posted to the frontpage, instead of some unknown blog with 5 readers, where it belongs?
Yes, you would. Depending on your jurisdiction, though, as long as you don't publicly perform or exhibit it, or try to sell it etc., you would likely fall into one of the many exceptions to copyright law.
What's copyrighted is the idea, not the physical manifestation or "input".
You can not copyright ideas. You copyright works, i.e. specific implementations of ideas.
The rest of your comment is spot on.
Precedent seems to imply that the resulting object cannot be controlled (e.g. the output of a GPLed program is not GPLed, so why should executing a program on a 3D printer be any different?).
Don't you hate it when those "power-users" in your company talk about computers? Does it make you cringe when they mix and abuse tech terms that make them look smart to the other users who have no idea what they're talking about, but to you, a real techie, it just hurts you inside?
Guess what, it's the same with law. Those who know about the law cringe when they hear those crappy pseudo-smart comments from the geeks and nerds who think they got it, but they don't.
The output of a software does not fall under the license of the software nor is it covered by the copyright that covers the software. However that does not mean it exists in a legal vacuum. If I write a piece of software that, in whichever way, creates a precise copy of Harry Potter as its output, that resulting text is still legally a copy of Harry Potter and me publishing it as a book would run afoul of copyright law.
That is what copyright law is about. You can't legally copy stuff that is copyrighted by someone else without his permission. It doesn't matter if you copy it with a photocopier, or by taking a picture, or by hand the way the bible was copied through the middle ages. It is the resulting copy that is governed by the law, not the means of getting it.
It can be, doesn't have to.
"Fallen" is a good example. It has a nice atmosphere and storytelling, but the real kicker that made it a memorable movie is in the structure of the story and how the end loops back to the beginning and makes you re-visit the entire movie in your head. I don't want to go into more detail because it would ruin the movie for everyone who hasn't seen it.
The structure of the story is one element of the whole, and like every other element, you can creatively play with it. If people stop doing that, it's a loss in variety. Same as for everything else.
Work continues in this area. -- DEC's SPR-Answering-Automaton
