Replying to them and making it twice as visible that the word was used, does not further your cause. It does, however, let you show us that you're so much better and holier than them.

I don't like or agree with every term that everyone uses all the time myself. I just don't bitch about it. I don't tell others how they should express themselves because that's worse than any word they could use, and because I am not their lord and master. The only person I want to control is myself.

That this particular term "sheeple" gets so deeply and visibly under the skin of so many tells me something. It tells me that this word has power, that it's significant, that it must in fact do a very good job of connecting an ugly tendency with an ugly word. "Follower", "lemming", "droid", "trendy", "mindless automaton" etc. all describe the same thing, but for some reason it is the word "sheeple" that so many I'm-better-than-you types fixate on. That's all the more reason to use it.

If you believe that censorship is fundamentally wrong then you have two choices: 1) Be a hypocrite and pretend it's different when you do it, or 2) don't censor content on your own Web site either. This KWin maintainer is choosing the first option. What he doesn't seem to appreciate is easy enough to understand: if the trolls can cause him to abandon one of his core beliefs and make a hypocrite of himself, then that's a victory for the trolls and a defeat for himself. It reminds me of how certain nations respond to terrorism by eliminating freedoms -- if the terrorists want to do as much lasting harm as possible, then they must be delighted by that.

This near-obsession with treating government as a special case even when the discussion is about abstract principles is why you were confused. Government is only a special case when the discussion is about censorship via the legal system, because government is the only entity legally allowed to use force or threat of force to achieve its goals. A Web site operator isn't going to arrest a troll and throw him in jail so that just doesn't apply here. Said operator might, however, delete certain posts or ban certain users to effect censorship.

I think our society in general is losing the ability to think in terms of abstract principles (part of why privacy is eroding). This is why we have to rehash the same old "but but .. government!" discussion every single time censorship is mentioned regardless of context. It's a nearly indestructible meme it would seem. You will probably be fired if you tell your boss to go fuck himself and that, too, is a form of censorship. Anyway, this is like a GPL vs. BSD license discussion -- check the Slashdot archives and you'll find that every conceivable point and counterpoint has already been debated ad nauseum.

That's a fine job of redundantly restating my sentence while also pointing out the obvious.

That's the problem with this media-driven urge to view the entire world through the lens of group identity. It becomes a fixation, and people who allow their thought process to be a product of media will miss your clearly-stated point because of it.

You are describing authorized use by those officials who have access to the system.

We were talking about unauthorized use by outside attackers who manage to compromise said system. The post to which I replied spelled this out explicitly and I quoted that in my own post.

See how simple that is?

When the day comes that this information is obtained and used against the same politicians who voted for it, it will be some delicious comeuppance. And better than they deserve. And a minor observation. From the fine summary:

It's funny the way they phrase things when governments are involved. If you steal your neighbor's car, they won't call it a "friendly theft" just because you were on good terms prior to the theft.

Would you concede that (say, by using managed languages) eliminating all buffer overflows would be a huge step in the right direction? We have the capability of doing that. There is still the impossibility of ever conclusively proving that a given piece of software is completely free of all possible bugs, but that's a lofty and unrealistic goal. There are many feasible steps we could take that are realistic. We generally don't take those steps because the trade-offs involved don't fit our priorities. They usually mean more effort and therefore more expense, but government is the one institution that does not need to make a profit.

Referring to your original post, there is a huge difference between "this doctor is incompetent and is guilty of malpractice" versus "cure all diseases all the time". I am essentially agreeing with you, except I think that with the latter case, you're going to an absurd extreme that no one is realistically suggesting. That was my point.

It's a form of sabre-rattling. Although, it is useful to note the difference between spying as in passive information gathering, versus something intended to cause material damage like Stuxnet. The latter actually is a form of attack.

I imagine the Soviets were pissed off about this one.

The Trans-Siberian Pipeline, as planned, would have a level of complexity that would require advanced automated control software, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA). The pipeline used plans for a sophisticated control system and its software that had been stolen from a Canadian firm by the KGB. The CIA allegedly had the company insert a logic bomb in the program for sabotage purposes, eventually resulting in an explosion with the power of three kilotons of TNT.

That's quite a bit more destructive than merely learning unauthorized information.

Vehicles that never fail? No. Vehicles that have a reasonable failure mode? Yes.

Consider the air brakes on a tractor trailer. The air is what keeps the brakes apart. If some mechanical failure caused a loss of air pressure, the failure mode would be stopping the vehicle. That is acceptable. If they did it the other way, with the air pressure being used to apply the brakes, the first sign of failure could be the inability to stop the vehicle at highway speed. That is not acceptable.

Either way, it's not a question of perfection. It's a question of expecting failure. The principle applies to software as well.

Assuming one is shallow, inexperienced, or quick to judge, then yes that is true. But did you want to be with someone who has that much emotional growing up to do?

Sadly what you described is the majority. That makes it easy to forget that not everyone operates that way.

Exactly. Politicians just love that former category, precisely because it never works. It never works and never solves the problem, so there is always a menacing problem they can promise to do something about the next time they campaign. It also has the side-effect of requiring a police state to have even a slight hope of enforcement, which again is great from the perspective of most politicians.

Politicians know the War on Drugs doesn't stop people from acquiring drugs. They know that mass shootings overwhelmingly tend to happen in "gun free" zones. They know even an outright ban on guns doesn't stop criminals from acquiring them. They know someone not afraid of a murder charge isn't going to be deterred by a weapons violation. They probably know that the USA has one of the highest murder rates of the industralized world ... unless you exclude Chicago and a few other cities where it is practically impossible to legally own a firearm; then the USA has one of the lowest. They understand all of this.

They are interested in perpetuating the problems. It's what wins elections. It's what makes people increasingly feel they need government intervention. It's fun to think of them as a bunch of morons who couldn't find their ass in the dark, but this is called allowing sentiment to interfere with judgment.

At least we are teaching them that those with authority and political power are not to be trusted.

Did you ever consider it in terms of strategy? Companies try to use strategy instead of lazily waiting until the last minute to passively react the way so many individuals do.

It's trivial now but that could change. They are taking steps to keep it trivial and/or to make it more so. If they neglected it entirely, it might become a very large, entrenched, difficult-to-eliminate market by the time they get around to reacting to it. What would really entrench a used-games market with no artificial restrictions? That's easy: for it to be common and perceived as normal by the average customer, something they come to expect, something they would be outraged about if it were taken away.

The game companies don't want that to happen. They're smart, so they think of these things ahead of time. They're greedy control freaks, but they're not stupid.

Do yourself a favor and apply this strategic view to every action corporations and politicians take and to every word they say. The world will become mostly predictable then.

That old statute outweighs the Fourth Amendment? Interesting.

The drug-dog loophole certainly is convenient.

What is a trained drug-sniffing dog, if it is not a (living) device for the sole purpose of performing a search? Using a dog to search your home or your car is not fundamentally different from the cop just using his hands and his eyes to search the same places. Yet the dog gives a cue and *poof* there goes your Fourth Amendment.

Of course they have to have such a loophole to keep up the War on (some) Drugs. A war on drugs (really a war on personal freedom) simply couldn't be conducted by the federal government under a reasonable reading of the Constitution. So we're losing some of our more precious rights and freedoms in exchange for being able to ineffectively tell other people how they should live. What a bargain.