I contend that is because you owned the hardware. I can't see any Government (D or R) ordering Microsoft (or Apple, Google, etc.) to install a competitor's software on their own servers.
To be honest, under current laws, I have no clue what would happen. You would end up with an oligopoly, where only software made by a cloud host or their preferred partners is allowed to even exist. Whereas under the current IT system you can choose to switch platforms, hardware, or pretty much anything else if the status quo is too "closed", the future we're envisioning is one where you can't switch, because nothing else exists. The U.S. government and judicial system don't usually look kindly on that kind of setup.
I wasn't aware that the President (D or R) had direct unfettered control, over all Government departments (in non-emergency circumstances).
The President of the United States is "the man" in the executive branch. He can issue an executive order at any time, for any reason, and as long as that order does not contradict or blatantly exceed the power (of any kind) that has been granted to that particular bureaucracy, they have the authority to carry out the order. The POTUS usually chooses not to micromanage every office himself, because our bureaucracy is so gigantic by now that it would be next to impossible. But, within the scope of the authority granted by Congress, yes he can exercise direct unfettered control if he so chooses. And whenever you hear about the bureaucracy in this country doing this, that, or the other thing, that order generally came from someone else in the executive branch. It is very
very rare for Congress to take action on that level, partially because it would take them weeks to write a resolution and get it passed in both houses, whereas the President can just sign a piece of paper. Congress also has the collective authority to give detailed orders to our military, but they rarely, if ever, exercise that authority because, like law enforcement, it's not their job and it is very time-consuming and complicated for them.
OK I see where our difference of opinion lies. I contend that "Decision-making" & "Enforcement" are both Government powers and if either (or both) are increased, so is Government power.
Both of the examples I cited, require judicial intervention.
Somebody has to pay for all or the judges, court officials and buildings.
In Australia that "Somebody" is the taxpayer, via the Government.
I contend that if you have less money, you have less freedom of choice and therefore less power.
The points you make are very good, although I feel the need to point out that having less money only reduces your freedom of choice in financial/economic ways. Having less money (in the U.S. at least) does not affect your voting rights, freedom of speech, or anything else along those lines.
I honestly don't know much about the political system in Australia. In the U.S., there is a big difference between civil lawsuits (private entity suing private entity) and criminal lawsuits (government suing private entity). The DMCA (which I do believe to be very very flawed) gave the judicial system the authority to protect private entities' intellectual property,
if requested by said entity (therefore, the real power lies with the entity). In my opinion, increasing the ability of the judicial system to settle disputes between private entities is not an increase in government power (mainly because the gov't can't decide to intervene in a situation on its own, one of the parties involved has to ask them to act). There are other laws, which shall remain nameless, that have increased the power of the bureaucracy by allowing them to dictate policy and pursue resistance with criminal charges.
I think you would agree that, while you may contend both examples to be displaying "government power", one is certainly more dangerous than the other, and both have very different ramifications.
I think that our positions are actually the same (just expressed differently).
Initially they will try to sucker people in by exaggerating the convenience factor.
Once your PC becomes a just a keyboard and monitor (i.e. dumb terminal) you will have
no choice but to swap to an online OS.
And that's the problem. Once again, I can't picture this actually happening because it would be an obvious step backward. (If I recall, central workstations with multiple dumb terminals attached to them is the way companies
used to do things. They shifted away from that as it became affordable to maintain larger numbers of independent computers.) Not to mention, it would shut down the entire OEM industry.
If the are smart (e.g. organised criminals) they'll wait until a certain level of market penetration has been achieved.
If all of the PC makers are wiped out by the "Cloud", it will be too late to go back to the "good old days".
Worse, they could step up attacks against non-"Cloud" users.
This could force people to swap and boost the illusion that "Cloud" services are more secure.
I'm not sure why they would attack non-cloud users more, when the cloud users would be so much more lucrative.
The first option is a doomsday scenario. The infrastructure of every major government would collapse overnight due to heavy volume of identity theft (which would start with a few 100k, then probably increase to a few 100m in very short order). Society would completely fall apart. You wouldn't even be able to punish criminals, because they could raid five towns a day, and use a different stolen identity each time; you'd imprison entire populations just trying to catch them.
At present, there are no major platforms on the cloud. (Chrome OS doesn't and won't count because it is still stored locally.) We need to keep it that way. Perhaps solutions like MS Windows Azure will be the answer. If they are refined enough, people will be able to use them to manage clouds of their very own, so that
less data is pushed to the web. Now that concept I like!
:huh:
), but much of what they are currently doing is exercising power that Congress never gave them, and thus by definition they are doing so on orders from either the relevant office head, Secretary, or the President; that's why it's sparking so much contention.
