>systemd and Upstart are both a large improvement over the System V init scripts.
Userland utils like wget depending on a specific init package is a large improvement over sysvinit? Nope.
137 karma · joined May 21, 2013
Userland utils like wget depending on a specific init package is a large improvement over sysvinit? Nope.
It's almost as though, by treating criminals so harshly as we do here ("tough on crime" is a popular slogan for politicians), that instead of reducing crime, we reduce our society's recognition of each individual's humanity and value, and thus cause crime to rise.
One possibility is that they did it this way specifically because it's legally compliant with some order they got, but suspicious enough to raise alarm in the tech community and telegraph that something has gone deeply, deeply wrong.
This could be a warrant canary.
How do you feel about working for a company that employs a war criminal on their board of directors, and that lied to the public about its collusion with the NSA over PRISM and other warrantless surveillance programs?
In a knowledge economy built on creativity, I'll take Different Thinkers over Cogs of Constancy any day.
At least the heroes in those implausible stories behaved like heroes, rather than villains who you only identify with out of some jingoistic team spirit.
Remember also that producers of these shows often do have contact with members of the intelligence and defense communities who serve as official or unofficial advisors, at least so long as the depictions are acceptable to the establishment. Through these advisors, entertainment producers learn about secret programs long before the public. Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty is a particularly prominent recent example of how this works, and why it is a bad thing that results in "entertainment" which is very much a form of propaganda.
That, or it's purely coincidental that "24" debuted following disclosure of Bush's torture programs, and "Person of Interest" debuted ahead of common knowledge of the extent of mass surveillance.
It may not be propaganda officially ordered and authored by some Ministry of Information, but it's the same thing no matter how many layers of abstraction it goes through: a way to shape the narrative and facts that inform the common person and allow them to form an understanding of an issue.
If we've given up on growing up as a species, and now believe that humanity's only hope of survival is to limit the spread of information, then we're well and truly doomed. And, sadly, it's probably for the best. After all, who wants to live in a dystopian, nerfed society full of imprisoned intellects? Who wants a bunch of angry apes who're all one bad day from unleashing Armageddon loping around with warp engines and antimatter bombs and black hole generators?
As a side note... reading the commentary on this story is both intriguing and disheartening. The "hacker" mentality that apologizes for, and is comforted by, this sort of manufacturer-imposed limitation on an owned product, this denial of the right to tinker, is a very different mentality than was common when I earned my stripes. Have legally-imposed culture changes like the DMCA really corrupted our community so much? Have constant, overblown reminders of the threat of terrorism rendered us so fearful of each other? Could an individual raised in a community with this mentality ever produce open, populist-enabling technologies, PGP and P2P and DeCSS and modchips? IP itself? Are we still hackers, or are we all just consumers, now?
Yes, what he did clearly meets the statutory definition of perjury. He's still employed by the government because our officials, elected and appointed, are almost completely unaccountable to the public due to the political process being broken down by a corporate-controlled media and corporatocratic (see: Mussolini) system of government. The law is no longer equally applied - wealthy, important, and powerful people are "too big to fail", while even the most urgent concerns of average proles is generally beneath notice of those in charge. The only exception to this is when the proles' concerns become so widespread that a movement forms and majority demand for democratic change might result. In these cases a number of pacification strategies are adopted, like co-opting the proletariat movement with well-spoken placebo change agents who offer strong messages of hope, and have absolutely no intention of following through with them, or discrediting the movement by airing the dirty laundry of those movement leaders who cannot be corrupted or co-opted.
In an ethical/moral, if not a legal, sense: yes. Absolutely.
>If a German citizen was supplying raw materials to Nazi is that citizen a Nazi and evil when he was just making a living for his family while he absolutely hate Hitler and Nazi?
Does it mean they were Nazis? No, Nazis were members of the NAZI political party. Does it make them a Nazi supporter, though? Yes.
Does it make the person evil? That's a moral judgement I don't think we can have a sensible argument about, but unarguably it does make the person a supporter of evil.
This is the key takeaway from the Milgram experiment, and the key point of Hannah Arendt's concept of "the banality of evil". We think of evil acts as things perpetrated by conniving, malicious villains, but the reality is that evil acts like the holocaust were not perpetrated by cackling villains, but only happened because enough regular, otherwise perfectly nice people surrendered any personal responsibility for the larger implications of their work and contented themselves to "just follow orders".
I suggest reading and considering Hannah Arendt's famous work, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" for a different perspective on this.
Our typical idea of a perpetrator of evil is this malicious, moustache-twirling, cackling super-villain. The reality of how very evil acts are perpetrated is typically much different, though. It has more in common with what we see with the Milgram experiment: lots of small cogs doing highly compartmentalized, abstract work that simply adds up to something ghastly. Paper-pushers who simply "do their jobs" without bothering to examine or take responsibility for the ethical implications of their work output, preferring instead to shift that ethical responsibility to the superiors/authorities who handed down their orders.
RMS has been recommending the Loongson Lemote for a long time, which would seem to be a much better choice. The Lemote's firmware and hardware is essentially all open source, including its MIPS CPU.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/18...
Do you think the federal government cares more about protecting your personal data, or their own top secret data?
Edward Snowden was able to single-handedly pull together reams and reams of data on a cornucopia of the most highly classified top secret projects of our government. He wasn't noticed at all, except for the fact that he outed himself.
Had Edward Snowden actually been a spy working for a foreign government, he probably wouldn't have been caught at all, and would still be working for the government.
>It's not just cell data that you need, but also license plate scans, court records, etc. These are all fairly independent things, unlikely to be stored in the same place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_fusion is the process of unifying disparate data sources in order to glean information not readily apparent by looking at the sources individually. Guess who is leading the charge in this budding field?
>Institutions can be built to be a lot harder to corrupt.
Once all this information is stored, its value is essentially incalculable. Almost no expense at all will be too high for a foreign government or a multinational corporation to pay for access to it - it is too profound a leg up on Bob the competitor, Joe the union organizer, and Sally the investigative reporter. The act of collecting and storing the information is, itself, opening Pandora's box.
Risk aversion and stagnation go hand in hand. Or, as Theodore Roosevelt said, "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."