"Even more people are getting their butts of the beds every morning, going to the job they hate, just to support the basic needs."
And you think that programmers don't? I work as a badly underpaid php developer and have slept on a couch in a ~35m² single-room apartment for the last few years. I handed in my resignation this week, because this job causes depressions that make me borderline suicidal. I'll have to live off of state welfare, if I can get it, if I don't then I'll be homeless, but I just can't take this shit anymore, so I'm taking the plunge and hope for the best.
For every well-paid and -treated programmer there are a whole bunch of underpaid and ill-treated ones. Besides, what's so wrong about not wanting to work? You as someone with a good grip on what technology can do should see that we could've started to automate the production of things needed for basic survival (food, shelter, energy…) decades, if not even longer, ago.
As far as I can tell, programmers have far greater chances to end up with depression or burnout than most other jobs, so please don't act like it's all sunshine and unicorn farts for all of us.
Most people will just shrug it off as "The logo is ugly, so what?". But please consider this:
The thing is not that the logos are ugly; The thing is that GNU is spectacularly bad at (graphic) design. Design might not be important for gcc, but if a project has no one with design expertise, their [G]UIs will (and do) suck. You can see this for instance with just about any open source crypto application ever.
You know, I'd post a comment on there but I always get that really useless "Your comment submission failed for the following reasons: Text entered was wrong. Try again."-shit.
Doesn't really paint a good picture of perl if something that simple already fails…
Even if you take away the belief system in the Catholic church and the Pope has an affect on a huge number of human beings, and that is really what this is all about...
Yes, and it's about how many people are affected, not how many "care" about it.
You don't have to care about the Leaks in order for the revealed programs to affect you. And it's not only the first world, as every spy agency freely siphons any and all "foreign" data they can get their hands on. So third world countries are considered fair game by pretty much all spy agencies and are obviously spied upon (German authorities for instance often repeat the mantra that they spy on Afghani data traffic because terror). Even now the largest part of the third world population has a cellphone and is getting ever more connected.
The catholic church might have a good deal of political sway and lots of followers, but the Snowden Leaks affect as close to 100% of the global population as you'll ever get.
Edit: I'd also like to point out that the influence of the church is dwindling while the influence of digital communication is going to continue to soar.
You are doing the same thing by assuming that Snowden's influence is as vast as that of Christianity.
It's not "just" about the internet, or even IT - it's the revelation that we are forced into a panopticon, that all of us are spied upon.
Christianity has nothing real at it's base. It's just mythology. Yeah, there are a huge number of people who "believe" it.
In contrast IT shapes just about every damn aspect of our lives. Just about all financial transfers, personal communication, news, etc. etc. are stored on computers of some shape and travel the internet. The internet has enabled the arab spring, international scientific collaboration and many, many, MANY other things.
As a little example of the real impact the Snowden Leaks have, just look at the number of Christians[1] vs. the number of cellphone subscriptions[2]: There's about 2 billion Christians. And about 6 billion cellphone subscriptions. So please don't go yapping about how fucking important some half-dead fairytale is.
Addendum: Please also note, that the Pope doesn't even represent all Christians but just catholic Christians, of which there's even less than a billion.
Meanwhile, the Snowden Leaks are important to just about everyone. The only people who are unaffacted by this are people who live without any computers.
But hey, if you live with some indigenous tribe in the jungle, you're (probably) in the clear; Until realtime surveillance with satellites becomes cheap enough at least.
So, the US' biggest data collectors are coming together to fight government surveillance?
I'm not the only one thinking this is a tad hypocritical, am I? It just makes me think that somewhere, some powerful dude went "They are trying to cut in on our action?!?" and decided not to accept projected financial losses by something as petty as a government.
But obviously, this might be the first voice governments actually listen to. Not because what they propose is the right thing to do, but because money.
Apparently this is the best the system currently allows. Capitalism depresses me.
Fuck that guy. HE of all people is talking about people being arrogant bastards for trying to solve problems with technology?
If all the people in the Pirate Parties wouldn't have tried for years to get their foot into the proverbial door of power but instead worked on technologies and organizations to solve the problems they see in society, we'd be way, WAY farther along the way.
It's not too hard to realize that changing things politically in any major way benefitting humanity is improbable, if not completely impossible. But apparently trying (pointlessly as well as fruitlessly) to get into power to tell others what to do means being less of an arrogant bastard.
The thing is, in politics you can only make changes the public won't be rioting too much over. And while this is true in the positive sense that they can't just go full oppression at once, they also can't make things much better at once - even if they wanted to (which most of them don't, being corrupt and all that). Big changes scare people.
As for gradual change - You probably know how long politicians usually think. You should be able to extrapolate from there…
All too often 'nerds' like Sunde see their surroundings as being average - they're not. The average citizen is much more okay with what the state does than you'd think.
Summarizing, I can only say I'll pick someone working on an open technology meant to make people more independent any day over any 'politician' who thinks he's moving the world.
Sounds nice so far. What I've immediately noticed is that the search dialogue isn't very keyboard-friendly. Just searching 'sec' gave me a few suggestions, but selecting them with the cursor keys and hitting Enter didn't do anything - only seems to work with a mouse. :/
Let's fix this before it causes a scandal even bigger than Watergate—or permits behavior more scandalous than Watergate that is never uncovered, rectified or punished.
What does he think he is, some sort of time-traveler?
Shouldn't I be compelled to read all of it if the claims were true? :P