Slashdot Mirror
Europe To Block ACTA Disconnect Provisions
superglaze writes "The European Commission is 'not supporting and will not accept' any attempt to have ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) force countries to disconnect people for downloading copyrighted material, a spokesman for the new EU trade commissioner has said. All the signs are that the new commission, which took office earlier this month, intends to take a hard-line stance against US proposals for a filesharing-related disconnection system. 'Three strikes' is allowed in EU countries, but not mandated by the European government itself, and it looks like the new administration wants to keep it that way. From trade commission spokesman John Clancy, quoted in ZDNet UK's article: '[Ac ta] has never been about pursuing infringements by an individual who has a couple of pirated songs on their music player. For several years, the debate has been about what is "commercial scale" [piracy]. EU legislation has left it to each country to define what a commercial scale is and this flexibility should be kept in ACTA.'"
OK, here you go:
Big Corporation: Open Source is bad for everyone.
Open Source Advocate: No, monopolies are bad for everyone.
BC: Open Source leads to piracy.
OSA: No, monopolies lead to piracy.
BC: It's people like you who are what's wrong with the world today.
OSA: No, it's people like you who are what's wrong with the world today.
Hopefully that will save us about 50 posts in this thread.
Big Corporation: We use the best tool for the job, be it a free tool or a pay for use one.
Open Source Advocate: No, you should always use open source.
BC: No, sometimes commercial apps are better than the free alternative.
OSA: No, use OSS all the time, no matter what!
BC: It's people like you who are what's wrong with the world today.
OSA: No, it's people like you who are what's wrong with the world today.
This is more what I see here on slashdot. Somewhere in the middle is the common ground.
Sent from your iPad.
Most imaginary piracy is of US imaginary products. The EU has far less to lose in terms of jobs and tax revenue - i.e. swill for the Brussels trough - than the US.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
http://digg.com/tech_news/Bill_Gates_Piracy_Confession
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
No, companies don't really care if they need to pay a few hundred to get the programmer Visual Studio and increase his productivity by 1500% instead of using the free Dev-C++.
Same thing as most companies working with graphics aren't shy to buy Photoshop instead of frustrating their workers with GIMP.
Big Corporation: Open Source is bad for everyone.
Open Source Advocate: No, monopolies are bad for everyone.
Politician: Open source is good for the poor! It's free! Think of the children!
Big Corporation: Damn.
Open Source Advocate: Well..... (shrug)..... whatever works. Open source is good for the children! Free Ubuntu or Puppy Linux for everyone! Goto www.freeubuntu.com or www.freepuppy.com for your free computer OS.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Something is wrong with the way we keep using the phrase "downloading copyrighted material" like it implies something illegal is going on.
The Linux kernel is copyrighted. Me downloading it is not illegal.
If I buy a book for my Kindle and download it, that's not illegal either.
But they are examples of downloading copyrighted material.
There needs to be a language adjustment such that we use "illegally downloading copyrighted material" instead.
While you're right, that isn't really the reason in most cases. Else, explain to me the success of SAP, which lowered productivity and increased overhead in most companies it was employed in.
The reason why commercial software is successful is simply that software is not bought by the people who use it the most. Software, like pretty much anything in a large company, is bought by some sort of "buy crap" department, who does often not have any idea what exactly they're doing. They're responsible for buying car spare parts, printing paper, office furniture, computer hardware, cleaning detergents and of course software. Even assuming they know what they're doing in one area (9 out of 10 times NOT, because their expertise is in business administration, for good reason), they will be out of their league most time when they're tasked with buying something.
So they will go for brand names. You can't go wrong with Photoshop because everyone uses it and so you can argue the expense if someone comes and complains. Same applies to Windows and VS. It's used in other big companies and while it may not be the "100% right tool", it also won't be the wrong tool. It's not something you will be questioned about.
Buying "commercial brands" is a way to cover your ass for the "buy crap" department. They don't buy it because it's the right decision, they buy it because it's almost certainly not the wrong one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's not even that.
I was for while the CTO of a large company. Never again, but that's another story. You often have no choice but to buy their crap. Even if you know that some OSS tool would do the trick better, easier and of course cheaper. Nobody wants change in their office world. They are already used to the previous version of whatever you get to buy. So whatever change you plan to employ will be met with utmost resistance, on all levels, from your CEO to the post office grunt. Even if the change meant they'd have to trade their wash board for a washer/dryer combo that fills itself, they'd complain that there is no wash board so they have no idea how to use it.
You can now either use a lot of effort to overcome that resistance (which sometimes borders on sabotage) and risk being the scapegoat should the tinyest bit go wrong, or just rubberstamp the purchase of the next version of the (maybe even inferior) tool you had for the last 20 years, which will cause at least as many headaches but nobody will complain about that.
Be honest! Which one will you choose?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
and all I have to say is "thank god someone is standing up to us".
I would not call Ubuntu "just as good as Windows 7" for the same reason that I would not call a pry bar "just as good as a hammer." They are similar and can both be used for hammering nails in and pulling nails out, but the pry bar is better at prying nails out (and a bunch of other things) but a hammer is still better and hamming nails in.
If you tell somebody that Ubuntu is just as good as Windows, the person will expect Ubuntu to be just as good as Windows at every single thing he did with Windows, and will end up thinking Ubuntu sucks.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
If a programmers productivity goes up 1500% because you switched editors/IDE's, maybe the company should consider hiring better programmers.
Only 15 times? Honestly, I'd say there's a good two orders of magnitude between the most productive development environment and the least. Yes, programmer productivity can vary by an order of magnitude, but I've personally seen a team of 7 engineers get more done with Linux than 40+ could do with Windows.
Look, according to Brooks' Mythical man month, the average programmer can write 1000 lines of code a year. I, however, work in a company where anyone who *can't* write 10k+ per year is at serious risk of getting fired. Here, the difference between editors really can make or break your career. And yes, there is a tremendous difference in the amount of work you can get done with an editor which supports mouse-driven copy/paste, and one that does not. Most people assume editor choice is a matter of preference. Most people don't keep track of their productivity metrics. I, however, do, and I've seen a dramatic difference in the amount of work I'm able to get done. It's not so much that I can't do my job in other editors, but rather, that other editors force an inefficient working paradigm on the user. Consider the difference between someone working in Emacs who has to open a different shell window and grep through header files, vs. an IDE that automatically cross-references the source tree and displays the definitions as the user browses the file. Both coders will get code written, but the second will get it done much faster than the first, all other things being equal.
Granted, a poor programmer won't be made great by a great IDE, but a good programmer with professional ethics is going to insist on having the tools needed to do the job in the most efficient manner. It's not whining to ask for the proper tools; rather, it's foolish to expect good results when one uses the wrong tool for the job. It's not 1970 anymore, and the days of programmers ruling the roost are long gone. Business now expects *everything* to be faster-cheaper-better, and you can't deliver that writing code with ed.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Open Source leads to free software for society, which is a public good. It's the equivalent of charity.
Piracy undermines the ability of software developers to create the software that the public wants to use. The long term consequences is to deprive the public of software by undermining the engines that create it.
While it would be nice to believe that open-source would step in to fill the nitch left by piracy-bankrupted companies, I have a hard time believing that open-source, through volunteer effort, would create the variety and quality of software produced by the closed-source software businesses. Can anyone honestly claim that the video game industry would have anywhere near the quality and variety that it does if it was purely an open source effort? Would anything similar to WOW, Starcraft 2, Team Fortress 2, Left for Dead 2, Modern Warfare, etc, etc exist? I strongly doubt it. Yeah, I know open-source advocates are going to hate this post. If you want to disagree with me, then you should first run this mental test: think of the top one hundred closed-source games and compare their quality and depth to the top one hundred open-source games (preferably ones that aren't clones of closed-source ones).
It will be nice when the day comes when open source has taken over and all of this will be a moot point.
Not likely. We should note that, as Bruce Perens and others pointed out the the open-source court decision story the other day, for open-source software to stay open and available requires that it be copyrighted (and/or patented), and accompanied by the right license that's been vetted by knowledgeable lawyers. Corporations like to treat open source as public domain, which permits them to make their own claim for it, sue you for infringement, and bankrupt you with legal expenses.
Of course, the idea of disconnecting people "for downloading copyrighted material", as the summary puts it, has its own built-in threat to all of us. Note, for example, the slashdot correctly places at the bottom of discussion pages: "All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster." This is literally correct in the US, the EU, and most other countries. Everything you're reading here is copyrighted. This message is copyrighted by me, by default, since I didn't explicitly declare it to be public domain.
You don't have written permission from me or anyone else to download this message or any other message on the page you're reading. So according to the proposed rule, you should be disconnected for unauthorized downloading of copyrighted material. Pretty much everything on every web page is copyrighted, with very few exceptions for quotes of ancient text that's out of copyright. So the proposed rule simply says that anyone using the Internet can legally be disconnected at any time by anyone in power. The charge of downloading copyrighted material will always be trivially true, unless the "copyrighted by default" law is repealed (or "fair use" is radically expanded and enforced).
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
See also: US handling of ACTA. (Oh no, we're not passing any stupid laws without involving the actual legislators. It's those foreigners. It's just a trade treaty.)
Only 15 times? Honestly, I'd say there's a good two orders of magnitude between the most productive development environment and the least.
Indeed Visual Studio is orders of magnitude better than edlin, which is orders of magnitude better than flipping dip switches on the front panel.
These are clearly relevant comparisons.
Look, according to Brooks' Mythical man month, the average programmer can write 1000 lines of code a year. I, however, work in a company where anyone who *can't* write 10k+ per year is at serious risk of getting fired.
I think they meant written and fully debugged, like 1000 lines of good code a year. I've also heard 20 lines a day of fully debugged code a day, which sounds more reasonable.
Personally, I'd run screaming from any job that looked at how many lines of code I've written as a measure of my worth as an employee, rather than how much I get done regardless of the amount of lines of code it took.
And yes, there is a tremendous difference in the amount of work you can get done with an editor which supports mouse-driven copy/paste, and one that does not.
LOL, that's a good one.
Consider the difference between someone working in Emacs who has to open a different shell window and grep through header files
That's funny, I use emacs, and I just hit ^C-s-g to see definitions. Can't remember the last time I had to grep.
Business now expects *everything* to be faster-cheaper-better, and you can't deliver that writing code with ed.
Yeah, I can see how given a choice between Visual Studio and ed you'd go with Visual Studio. That is a decision I agree with 100%.
But seriously, VC is a fine IDE. The difference between it and other fine IDEs is not an order of magnitude.
The enemies of Democracy are