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Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

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Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#131

Post by m_fayer »

jgaa wrote: post #45

Governments will always do evil. Not to everyone, all of the time - but they are by nature evil. When I wrote the War FTP Daemon in 1996, as freeware, this became a problem to me. I did want to give away my work for free, but I did not want any government agency to abuse it. So I came up with a solution - a GPL license with an additional clause - that the government - any government - could not use it for any purpose…

Governments are what happen when a group of people live in a community too large and complicated to be governed by an ad-hoc group of elders talking it out. Governments are what happen when humans want to trade in an organized fashion. Governments are what happen when people don't want to be in a constant state of conflict, inter and intra group. Governments are what happen if your community wants to live by the rule of principle and consensus (law), as opposed to rule of the mighty. In other words, government is inevitable.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#132

Post by makomk »

firic wrote: post #93
zimpenfish wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a lot of people far more well-informed about US politics and law say that there is no such law - this is a pure policy decision by Trump. Can you cite the law he's required to enforce here?

Sure: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2016/07/06/1...

That does seem pretty unambiguous to me: if they're holding the parents for immigration offences, by law they have to separate their kids from them because they cannot imprison the kids too. I think the US media is outright making people less accurately informed on this. The most I've seen is a brief mention that "US protocol prohibits detaining children with their parents because the children are not charged with a crime, while the parents are", without explaining what this means and the fact that this is a legal settlement that the US administration cannot modify.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#133

Post by Xylakant »

jgaa wrote: post #60
adrr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious how that is enforced as a copyright clause. I grasp how GPL and other copyleft licenses work when copies are distributed but can't see how a usage restriction can be applied unless the party is distributing the software.

It is very difficult to enforce any clause in any user agreement (or even in law) - as bad people will just ignore them. My clause was a statement: Don't use my software - I did not make it for you. The Microsoft employees wish to put restrictions in commercial contracts is interesting - and also scary. There are so many interest groups, and so many agendas, and so many views on whats right and whats wrong - that thi…

In an interesting twist, your whole idea of using a license and copyright hinges on a government, the rule of law and the enforcement of said rule of law by a government. Which is in your eyes inherently evil. The software that the license applies to is distributed via the internet, a technology funded in large parts by the government, something inherently evil.

I agree that governments by their very nature will do evil things, but governments are not a single entity with a single mind controlling them, but rather a sprawling ecosystem of individual parts where some parts diverge from the party line, just to be checked and put back into place by other parts. Sometimes those checks fail and the whole thing goes downhill fast. In the general case, however, governments as a concept have enabled a society that is better off and capable of building infrastructure and things that an each man for his own kind of organization would never have been capable of.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#134

Post by TeMPOraL »

Folcon wrote: post #126
TeMPOraL wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bunch of ideas: 1) It would need to have good mechanisms for structuring knowledge and discovery (and deduplication) of previous points. Instead of time-based approach, where people read and respond to streams of comments, it should be easy to review past discussions and maybe add updates based on new information or situations that develop. Structuring and discovery is hard . I spent some time on Kialo[0], which is…

Ok that's interesting, you've clearly done a lot in this space already, are you still working in this space and would you be up for a quick discussion about it? I was actually thinking about it from a different direction. Allow people to enter free text and then aggressively parse it out into a structure. Make the structure visible and then work with the structure. But allow the free text to stand as metadata. Allow…

> Ok that's interesting, you've clearly done a lot in this space already, are you still working in this space and would you be up for a quick discussion about it?

Sure! Feel free to mail me (address in the profile).

I wouldn't say I have done a lot in this space - I am just interested in it, and try to pay attention to any new ways to structure discussions and thoughts that helps people reach agreement.

--

Your concept is very interesting, and indeed a completely different direction than what I was thinking. You seem to want to start from making free-text comments more machine-understandable, so that they can be further analyzed and grouped with similar points from other people? This seems it could mesh with what I wrote in the previous comment - I want to get a graph of ideas, and you just suggested an approach to generating that graph.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#135

Post by SuperNinKenDo »

jgaa wrote: post #45

Governments will always do evil. Not to everyone, all of the time - but they are by nature evil. When I wrote the War FTP Daemon in 1996, as freeware, this became a problem to me. I did want to give away my work for free, but I did not want any government agency to abuse it. So I came up with a solution - a GPL license with an additional clause - that the government - any government - could not use it for any purpose…

Awesome. I've had the same idea but worried it wasn't feasible. Thank you for showing me there's precedent.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#136

Post by prepend »

allenz wrote: post #77
ggg9990 wrote: post #48

I just don't think we're tracking towards a healthy world where your email vendor pulls the plug on your contract because of your activities. I don't think any business should be allowed to deny their offering to any paying customer. Edit: Does that mean I have to sell lumber to the KKK even though they will likely burn a cross with it? Yes, unless they explicitly say they're going to. Leave those policing problems t…

When ICE violates human rights, it's no longer a free speech issue. Microsoft shouldn't work with ICE in the same way that banks shouldn't work with sanctioned oligarchs.

What about oligarchs who aren’t sanctioned? What rule of law do you apply to determine oligarchs have committed some crime? Is there a certain number of tweets where you consider an oligarch sanctioned? Do you rely on an ICC ruling? A judgement from a single nation? A UN resolution? A case being brought to the ICC?

The challenge I see here is that applying an arbitrary measurement to what constitutes “ICE violates human rights” because it is so obvious will be problematic and unpredictable.

Will we get to the point where felons can’t use MSOffice? Or only certain felons?

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#137

Post by prepend »

pluma wrote: post #129
cm2187 wrote: post #66

The problem is that "doing evil" is in the eyes of the beholder. To some it is performing a gay wedding. Are we supporting a world where it is ok to refuse to sell a cake because it would be used in a gay wedding? Is it a good thing that the major cloud providers and OS makers enforce a democrat agenda on their clients? I think this is undesirable and dangerous. Already there are many calls for social medias to step…

I don't know. "Does it violate the UN Convention on Human Rights?" is a good start. Also "Does it violate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child?". Or, y'know, the Kantian Imperative.

I think that’s actually a good standard. How are determinations made for what violates the UN Convention on Human Rights?

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#138

Post by TulliusCicero »

jgaa wrote: post #45

Governments will always do evil. Not to everyone, all of the time - but they are by nature evil. When I wrote the War FTP Daemon in 1996, as freeware, this became a problem to me. I did want to give away my work for free, but I did not want any government agency to abuse it. So I came up with a solution - a GPL license with an additional clause - that the government - any government - could not use it for any purpose…

> Governments will always do evil.

> they are by nature evil.

These statements are not equivalent. It does not necessarily follow that doing a non-zero amount of evil means an institution, or type of institution, is by nature evil.

You could easily say the same thing about individuals or any grouping of people; individuals "always do evil", therefore all individuals are by their nature evil? It's true only in a trivial sense, in that humans and human-created groupings are imperfect and will do a mix of good and bad.

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#139

Post by kojon99 »

pluma wrote: post #129
cm2187 wrote: post #66

The problem is that "doing evil" is in the eyes of the beholder. To some it is performing a gay wedding. Are we supporting a world where it is ok to refuse to sell a cake because it would be used in a gay wedding? Is it a good thing that the major cloud providers and OS makers enforce a democrat agenda on their clients? I think this is undesirable and dangerous. Already there are many calls for social medias to step…

I don't know. "Does it violate the UN Convention on Human Rights?" is a good start. Also "Does it violate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child?". Or, y'know, the Kantian Imperative.

[flagged]

Re: Microsoft Employees Pressure Leadership to Cancel ICE Contract

#140

Post by Folcon »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #134
Folcon wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok that's interesting, you've clearly done a lot in this space already, are you still working in this space and would you be up for a quick discussion about it? I was actually thinking about it from a different direction. Allow people to enter free text and then aggressively parse it out into a structure. Make the structure visible and then work with the structure. But allow the free text to stand as metadata. Allow…

> Ok that's interesting, you've clearly done a lot in this space already, are you still working in this space and would you be up for a quick discussion about it? Sure! Feel free to mail me (address in the profile). I wouldn't say I have done a lot in this space - I am just interested in it, and try to pay attention to any new ways to structure discussions and thoughts that helps people reach agreement. -- Your conce…

Definitely. I'll fire you an email =)... I basically want to get an understanding of what pitfalls and issues that you had exposure to.

Fundamentally however the reason I keep thinking about that graph is that I keep wanting it. I wander into a complex nested discussion online which seems interesting and just want to see it visualised. Select statements and see who's making them. Focus on a part of the discussion one step at a time. Find commonalities and differences marked up.

EDIT: I sent that email I mentioned, not sure if you've seen it =)...

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