I suppose the big empty space on the right is where "Respects users' privacy in their own business practices" should be.
But of course this is only about the Big Bad Government.
It's an interesting cultural difference how privacy suddenly becomes in issue in the US now that it's about the government, and totally fine when people were being tracked an profiled for profit.
You're [dead], create a new account. I don't know why you're banned, your comments are mostly pertinent and not boring. Maybe the admins don't like Europeans ^^.
"They abandon their principle that code is free speech by suggesting that some code needs to be regulated."
Typical false dichotomy of libertarian extremist. Speech is regulated all the time, based on intent or effect (yelling "fire" in a crowded theater), and the formal protection of free speech is a regulation in itself. (Much like, hey, Net Neutrality.)
One typical sign of extremism is calling everybody that applies thought or nuance unprincipled.
I too find Robert Graham's libertarianism off-putting, because I'm not a libertarian. But let's get past the "typical libertarians" stuff and engage with the actual substance of the issue.
Do you think Congress should be regulating cyber-weapons?
And, how far through have you thought that position?
Although Merkel is just being opportunistic, I'm optimistic that, like with ACTA, we are slowly seeing that the complete sell-out of European civil rights to US interests is no longer politically sustainable.
Whether they mean it or not, the fact that the staunchest supporters of the US feel the political need to speak out is significant in itself.
The US has gone a bridge to far by treating the citizens of a friendly nations as the enemy.
Virtually every negative effect the likes of RMS and the FSF have predicted when it comes to not using free software has come true.
And yet more people are enjoying more content and more benefits from technology than at any point in human history.
Sometimes content creation industries screw up in how they treat their customers, and it's good to realise that and to fix it when it happens.
Sometimes people take advantage of secrecy, and they should be called on it and punished for it, by market forces or laws or both.
However, the general FSF/RMS/GPL3 "everything must be free" philosophy seems counterproductive to me, because it denies the middle ground where most useful things actually happen and most real progress gets made. They're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and then the bath after it, and then knocking down the house because it wasn't built with the appropriately sourced bricks and living in a mud hut. How is that going to keep the baby cleaner?
I'm surprised that on HN people cannot distinguish between Netflix business need to use DRM in their content delivery system (which is undesirable but defensible), and Netflix nefarious scheming to break the open web in order to make that an easier delivery system for DRM-ed content.
It's like defending a company that wants to dump toxic waste into our drinking water with the argument "well, they have to leave it somewhere".
Screw that. They want to use DRM, fine. But not at the expense of a free and open web.
This isn't about DRM. This isn't about copyright. This isn't even about greed. This is about power and control.
> I'm surprised that on HN people cannot distinguish between Netflix business need to use DRM in their content delivery system (which is undesirable but defensible), and Netflix nefarious scheming to break the open web in order to make that an easier delivery system for DRM-ed content.
I'm not aware of any portion of Netflix's proposals that would "break the open web." If the open web isn't broken by what Netflix and thousands of other companies are doing right now, how will "Netflix nefarious scheming" break it?
As far as I know, the US is the only country where sugar-free soda is referred to as "diet".
The notion that it would help lose weight is totally new to me, I'm presuming that is because most countries outside the US would never allow it to be marketed that way.
It seems like for reduced calorie Coke specifically, it is marketed as "Diet Coke" or "Diet Coca Cola", in at least Australia[1], New Zealand[2], The United Kingdom[3], India, Israel and The US[4].
It's called diet here in Canada as well. In any case, diet does not and has never meant "lose weight". If you pay any attention to what you consume, you are "on a diet".
One of five possible definitions includes losing weight in no universe means that diet means "lose weight" -- you don't get to choose what Diet means on a can of soda.
Diet is nothing more than the things you eat, and a "diet" can be to lose, gain, maintain weight, or simply to pay attention to what you eat for the purposes of healthy eating. A diet soda is a soda modified to reduce/eliminate sugar, which again is in no way manifestly correlated with losing weight.
It's not Russia that doesn't let him leave the airport, it's the US by revoking his passport in a clear violation of human rights.
No country on the planet can just let him pass the border without violating it's own laws. This is exactly why revoking his passport is such a disgusting move that violates all common decency.
If there was ever one specific moment in history in which the US changed from a flawed democracy to a totalitarian state, it's the moment they took Snowden's passport.
Snowden doesn't need a passport to leave Russia or enter Venezuela if he claims refugee status and requests asylum. The 1951 Refugee Convention allows a person seeking refuge to travel without a passport due to the possibility that the asylum seeker could be persecuted if identified by a document they're carrying. E.g. If your name is John Smith and your country is killing everyone named John Smith, you may not want to carry your passport with you.
But why not violate its own laws? Countries make and break their own laws all the time? Cops drive through red lights by flicking on their lights for a minute, surely a country can wave him onto a plane without checking his papers.
The fact that people are not prepared to stand alone doesn't mean they don't care about privacy.
Very few people are in a position to make a difference alone, and even fewer dare to act. There's only one Snowden.
The rest of us, we vote, support civil liberties organisations, sign petitions, and the most active amongst us lobby and demonstrate.
The notion that the way to change things is by individual sacrifice, and if we don't we obviously don't care enough, is an fundamentalist libertarian fantasy.
The real world doesn't work that way. Real people don't work that way. At least 99% of us don't.
> Real people don't work that way. At least 99% of us don't.
This statement rings with me quite a bit.
I'm reminded of the day the FBI released the video and photos of the Tsarnaevs just after the Boston bombing and it was discovered that they were from Chechnya. If you visited twitter and searched for their names, you could have found a few thousand tweets asking why the Czech Republic was attacking the US. Here are thousands of Americans, typing words into a computer connected to the largest distributed information storage network ever conceived by man, and they don't bother to verify that Chechnya and the Czech Republic aren't the same place.
Most people aren't stupid, they just don't care. How many times last week did knowing the difference between Chechnya and the Czech Republic come in handy for you? Likewise, knowing that the NSA is actively slurping all your phone calls and emails, what can you do that doesn't require massive lifestyle changes?
>>The notion that the way to change things is by individual sacrifice, and if we don't we obviously don't care enough, is an fundamentalist libertarian fantasy.
Thank goodness not everyone feels the same way you do. You can't change the world if you don't at least try.
I'm glad that at least 1% does work that way. I think it's too bad there aren't more of these types of people in the world.
But of course this is only about the Big Bad Government.
It's an interesting cultural difference how privacy suddenly becomes in issue in the US now that it's about the government, and totally fine when people were being tracked an profiled for profit.