I think we all have moral obligations to obey just laws. On the other hand, I think that we have moral obligations to disobey unjust laws because non-cooperation with evil is just as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good.
I think the distinction here is that when one breaks the law that conscious tells him is unjust, he must do it openly, he must do it cheerfully, he must do it lovingly, he must do it civilly, not uncivilly, and he must do it with the willingness to accept the penalty. And any man who breaks the law that conscious tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail in order to arouse the conscious of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for law.
git and other decentralized code repositories can provide good protection from the insertion of malicious code from outsiders, as long as people using them pay attention to what’s happening whenever they are pulling new code. This blog post has a nice description of that scenario, and also highlights the importance of making commits readable as well as actually reading the commits that others are pushing:
And if you use git and haven’t already read in depth about git, I strongly recommend that all git users read one of the git books, like the Git Community Book and Pro Git, to get a solid understanding of how to use it and how it works. It will save you lots of time in the long run
Slate ran an article about Google’s recent acquisition of Motorola Mobility. There is a good discussion about how Google will need to make Motorola profitable to make it worthwhile, that is hard to get around. But just because Apple makes something like $370 per phone doesn’t mean Google ever could. Google was an internet company and quickly got into the mobile business with a clever and innovative strategy. The point isn’t so much that Apple makes more money per phone than Google, but rather Google now makes money on phones when before it did not. Apple has huge margins it wants to keep, Android has slim margins. In the long run, that’ll be very difficult for Apple (and indeed Microsoft) to avoid.
I think there Android strategy plays very well against Apple’s and that’s why Apple is fighting Android so hard, with every dirty trick available. I see the patent wars as the beginning of the end of Apple. It re-rose from its duldrums because it made better products and sold them well, not because of patent litigation. Now it seems to be fighting mostly with patent litigation, so that means they’re feeling not up to competing on merit.
It seems to me a reply of the 80s Apple. Apple boomed because it made better products. Then it started to lock things down and lock people in, and eventually it just wasn’t worth it to be locked into Apple. They are doing the same thing with the iPhone. It rose because it was so much better, now that its popular, Apple is locking people in and locking the phone down more and more. Android is much like the PC ecosystem of the 80s. There were a lot of really crappy PCs out there then…
