The Mozilla guys go to Redmond, manage to get FF up and running on the "final" release candidate for Vista. IE 7 is still only 55% compliant with CSS 2 and has all sorts of other breakages at this juncture and FF looks infinitely better.
Two weeks later Vista is released and when you start FF it immediately crashes. Suddenly invites to Redmond are in short supply...
> You really can't/shouldn't make software/licenes a moral warfare or a means for social reform.
So what do you think the proprietary vendors, RIAA, MPAA and their ilk are doing? Remember what the point of copyright was and what these organisations are attempting to do with it now.
The answer is no in most cases. They follow a standard methodology (Prince 2 here in the UK is probably the most popular) which means they have to have certain things on their ticklist whether they are sensible or not. Another conversation:
You: we want to give you access to some of the tables in our company's database
Security guy: The information is confidential, so you will to encrypt it
You: But the data is arriving in your company over a private wire, and never leaves the local LAN segment. The LAN is switched so nobody can sniff it.
Security guy: If you can span the port that the data is coming in on then you could sniff it.
You: But to do that you would need access to the management VLAN which is protected by ACLs, and anyway you can only get on to that VLAN in our premises.
Security guy: But the data is confidential so you will have to encrypt it.
This is similar to the EU position. It could be defeated in the same way, a coordinated request for information by a significant number of users.
Bear in mind that while individual retailers hold information on your purchases with them your bank has the data on all your purchases with everybody you ever signed a cheque or credit card slip to.
> One of the more fascinating aspects of my emigration to England
So when did you emigrate? If you weren't here in the period 1979-1990 you really won't have a clue as to who Blaire and his cohorts take after, namely Margaret Thatcher. She loathed anything to do with public services and did her best to privatise everything. She never quite had the bottle to do this to the National Health Service, which is something the current lot are doing. She too had an incredibly illiberal Home Secretary, Michael Howard (who had "something of the night about him" according to Anne Widecombe) whose competence was debatable.
There have been liberal leaders in both the Labour and Conservative parties (Atlee and Callaghan in the former, Heath in the latter). Unfortunately these were a time back and both parties are now in thrall to corporate interests, Rupert Murdoch in particular.
The only thing I would disagree with you on is the constitutional "tinkering". The creation of the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly, along with the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords were some of the best things that the current administration have done. Unfortunately Blair only did these because they were manifesto commitments and he stopped as soon as he could and has not completed the process (a federal UK and a fully elected House of Lords). He has used this halfway house to increase the democratic deficit.
You need to look back at the history of the parties and also read one of the two real national newspapers that exist in the UK rather than follow rags like the Daily Mail or Times.
> Nowhere have I seen anything that suggested this data will be available to 3rd parties such as shops but for sure, they want the data from shops.
And of course what has been neglected in all the discussion here is that the corporates already have copious amounts of data about you. Agreed that ASDA (Walmart UK) only have information about what you spent in their shops, but the banks hold information on all your spending.
Given the amount of information you have to provide to stop money laundering and identity theft they probably also know your passport and social security details as well.
So, yes the proposal is a Stalinist's wet dream but it is been done in minature already.
If it had been in the "News of the World" or "Sunday Mail" I might have agreed with you. However the Observer is one of the two Sunday newspapers that are actually newspapers (the Independent being the other, the Sunday Times is an upmarket Murdoch tabloid).
So, even though there have been some fairly well reported failures in UK government IT projects I am not dismissing this one.
> Just to play Devil's Advocate here, but why SHOULD they facilitate the use of other OS'es? Look at the customers who make up 99% of their base:
In logical terms this is a fallacy known as an Appeal to Common Practice.
If Linux distros can do it then Windows should be able to do it and should actually do it. What if I want to run Windows 2003 server and XP on the same box for testing purposes?
Some extremely good points, especially about accessibility.
However, a lot of this is down to the templates used rather than the core functionality of the CMS. And a lot of it is down to people using Photoshop to produce the graphical layout and then slicing the image.
I think it is a matter of expectation. With a car or a washing machine people expect it to just work for a very large amount of time and they accept occasional breakages due to wear and tear.
With anything to do with computers the expectation is that very much lower, breakage is the normal state of affairs. So anything that prevents you playing media on your PC will just be accepted.
The only place I can see people become angry with the likes of the RIAA and MPAA is if there is breakage in something that is in the first class, e.g. a DVD will not work in DVD player. However, I think rather than becoming angry people will accept the argument that it is "out of date" and just buy one that actually implements the restrictions management.
> Of course it seems obvious to me the ultimate result of all of this nonsense is the buying public either is so angry at their treatment, or confused by all of the rules and regulations
Unfortunately I think you are wrong.
If you were right then people would have got rid of their crashing, malware prone MS desktops years ago. As it is they moan and groan, but still don't switch to anything better.
I think the same will be true about restrictions management. People will grumble but accept it as normal. It is only the activists who will attempt to do something about and they stand a good chance of being dismissed by the (bought) legislators who can point to the fact that most people accept and are therefore happy with the situation (yes, I do know there is a non seqitur there).
> We surrendered because you tree hugging liberals forced the issue by cutting off funding in Congress for the war.
The tree hugging liberals were actually in the army and fighting in Vietnam. You right wing xenophobes were getting deferments because you had better things to do.
I know it is an attempt at a joke but it is getting very old.
In WWII the Americans had 11,200 civilian casualties, the French had 267,000. In total the Americans had 407,300 military casualties from a population of 132 million, the French had 212,000 from a population of 41.7 million.
> Seriously, A french robot? Come on. Its for sale as a submissive sex partner isn't it? I mean, thats all the french seem to be good for anyways...the submissive part.
At least the French seem to appreciate sex. Americans, sex - nah, does not compute.
I went to a series of concerts in York (UK) last week as part of the York Early Music Festival. Will they be looking to enforce copyright on the pieces that Micrologus did from 15th century Italy?
> Not since the quantum crisis have scientists been that arrogant to assume that their theories are set in stone
I agree with your point that hypotheses are tentative, but the credit for this idea really goes to Karl Popper. Before his "Logic of Scientific Discovery" groups like the Vienna School were hooked on the idea of inductive methods for scientific argument.
I have just been spammed by someone offering me tickets for the Football world cup. A glance at the whois record for their site shows their sponsoring registrar to have been no other than Go Daddy.
Have you actually been there? Are you aware of Diderot and Voltaire? Are you aware of the protests against the government that have been going on recently?
are not going to be bothered about pointy-clicky interfaces. They will be running highly complex, custom programs that use standard parallelisation libraries. If they want graphics it will be in terms of rendered output.
The last thing they need is a pointy-clicky interface chewing up cycles that would be better used for computation.
Slashdot Mirror
> Has any other US president ever done as much damage to the institution of science in the US as Bush has?
Ah, but if it doesn't back up your policies or religious opinions then it isn't real science.
The Mozilla guys go to Redmond, manage to get FF up and running on the "final" release candidate for Vista. IE 7 is still only 55% compliant with CSS 2 and has all sorts of other breakages at this juncture and FF looks infinitely better.
Two weeks later Vista is released and when you start FF it immediately crashes. Suddenly invites to Redmond are in short supply...
> You really can't/shouldn't make software/licenes a moral warfare or a means for social reform.
So what do you think the proprietary vendors, RIAA, MPAA and their ilk are doing? Remember what the point of copyright was and what these organisations are attempting to do with it now.
Sorry you have been modded down.
The answer is no in most cases. They follow a standard methodology (Prince 2 here in the UK is probably the most popular) which means they have to have certain things on their ticklist whether they are sensible or not. Another conversation:
You: we want to give you access to some of the tables in our company's database
Security guy: The information is confidential, so you will to encrypt it
You: But the data is arriving in your company over a private wire, and never leaves the local LAN segment. The LAN is switched so nobody can sniff it.
Security guy: If you can span the port that the data is coming in on then you could sniff it.
You: But to do that you would need access to the management VLAN which is protected by ACLs, and anyway you can only get on to that VLAN in our premises.
Security guy: But the data is confidential so you will have to encrypt it.
And so on
Spit.
The trouble with project managers (and security people) is that they have a checklist mentality.
PM: Have you done this as yet.
You: No, there is no need for it
PM: But I need to get it checked off on my plan
You: It shouldn't be on the plan in the first place
PM: But it is on the plan, so I need to get it checked off. When are you going to do it.
And so on.
This is similar to the EU position. It could be defeated in the same way, a coordinated request for information by a significant number of users.
Bear in mind that while individual retailers hold information on your purchases with them your bank has the data on all your purchases with everybody you ever signed a cheque or credit card slip to.
> One of the more fascinating aspects of my emigration to England
So when did you emigrate? If you weren't here in the period 1979-1990 you really won't have a clue as to who Blaire and his cohorts take after, namely Margaret Thatcher. She loathed anything to do with public services and did her best to privatise everything. She never quite had the bottle to do this to the National Health Service, which is something the current lot are doing. She too had an incredibly illiberal Home Secretary, Michael Howard (who had "something of the night about him" according to Anne Widecombe) whose competence was debatable.
There have been liberal leaders in both the Labour and Conservative parties (Atlee and Callaghan in the former, Heath in the latter). Unfortunately these were a time back and both parties are now in thrall to corporate interests, Rupert Murdoch in particular.
The only thing I would disagree with you on is the constitutional "tinkering". The creation of the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly, along with the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords were some of the best things that the current administration have done. Unfortunately Blair only did these because they were manifesto commitments and he stopped as soon as he could and has not completed the process (a federal UK and a fully elected House of Lords). He has used this halfway house to increase the democratic deficit.
You need to look back at the history of the parties and also read one of the two real national newspapers that exist in the UK rather than follow rags like the Daily Mail or Times.
> Nowhere have I seen anything that suggested this data will be available to 3rd parties such as shops but for sure, they want the data from shops.
And of course what has been neglected in all the discussion here is that the corporates already have copious amounts of data about you. Agreed that ASDA (Walmart UK) only have information about what you spent in their shops, but the banks hold information on all your spending.
Given the amount of information you have to provide to stop money laundering and identity theft they probably also know your passport and social security details as well.
So, yes the proposal is a Stalinist's wet dream but it is been done in minature already.
If it had been in the "News of the World" or "Sunday Mail" I might have agreed with you. However the Observer is one of the two Sunday newspapers that are actually newspapers (the Independent being the other, the Sunday Times is an upmarket Murdoch tabloid).
So, even though there have been some fairly well reported failures in UK government IT projects I am not dismissing this one.
> Just to play Devil's Advocate here, but why SHOULD they facilitate the use of other OS'es? Look at the customers who make up 99% of their base:
In logical terms this is a fallacy known as an Appeal to Common Practice.
If Linux distros can do it then Windows should be able to do it and should actually do it. What if I want to run Windows 2003 server and XP on the same box for testing purposes?
Some extremely good points, especially about accessibility.
However, a lot of this is down to the templates used rather than the core functionality of the CMS. And a lot of it is down to people using Photoshop to produce the graphical layout and then slicing the image.
> They are a software company
No they aren't. They are a marketing company that just happens to produce software.
> I don't think thats a good analogy.
;-)
Reasoning by analogy is always tricky
I think it is a matter of expectation. With a car or a washing machine people expect it to just work for a very large amount of time and they accept occasional breakages due to wear and tear.
With anything to do with computers the expectation is that very much lower, breakage is the normal state of affairs. So anything that prevents you playing media on your PC will just be accepted.
The only place I can see people become angry with the likes of the RIAA and MPAA is if there is breakage in something that is in the first class, e.g. a DVD will not work in DVD player. However, I think rather than becoming angry people will accept the argument that it is "out of date" and just buy one that actually implements the restrictions management.
> Of course it seems obvious to me the ultimate result of all of this nonsense is the buying public either is so angry at their treatment, or confused by all of the rules and regulations
Unfortunately I think you are wrong.
If you were right then people would have got rid of their crashing, malware prone MS desktops years ago. As it is they moan and groan, but still don't switch to anything better.
I think the same will be true about restrictions management. People will grumble but accept it as normal. It is only the activists who will attempt to do something about and they stand a good chance of being dismissed by the (bought) legislators who can point to the fact that most people accept and are therefore happy with the situation (yes, I do know there is a non seqitur there).
Nice use of the Oxford comma by the way.
> We surrendered because you tree hugging liberals forced the issue by cutting off funding in Congress for the war.
The tree hugging liberals were actually in the army and fighting in Vietnam. You right wing xenophobes were getting deferments because you had better things to do.
I know it is an attempt at a joke but it is getting very old.
In WWII the Americans had 11,200 civilian casualties, the French had 267,000. In total the Americans had 407,300 military casualties from a population of 132 million, the French had 212,000 from a population of 41.7 million.
> Seriously, A french robot? Come on. Its for sale as a submissive sex partner isn't it? I mean, thats all the french seem to be good for anyways...the submissive part.
At least the French seem to appreciate sex. Americans, sex - nah, does not compute.
I went to a series of concerts in York (UK) last week as part of the York Early Music Festival. Will they be looking to enforce copyright on the pieces that Micrologus did from 15th century Italy?
> Two hundred innocent people are killed and people are worried that future events like these might cause an IT outage?
You do realise the society is run for the benefit of the economy, and not the other way around.
> Not since the quantum crisis have scientists been that arrogant to assume that their theories are set in stone
I agree with your point that hypotheses are tentative, but the credit for this idea really goes to Karl Popper. Before his "Logic of Scientific Discovery" groups like the Vienna School were hooked on the idea of inductive methods for scientific argument.
Have a quick Google for Ernest Saunders and the Guiness fraud scandal.
Mr. Saunders was let out of prison early because he was suffering from Alzheimers. He miraculously recovered once he was free.
Actually no, it is actually in West Yorkshire here in the UK.
I have just been spammed by someone offering me tickets for the Football world cup. A glance at the whois record for their site shows their sponsoring registrar to have been no other than Go Daddy.
Have you actually been there? Are you aware of Diderot and Voltaire? Are you aware of the protests against the government that have been going on recently?
are not going to be bothered about pointy-clicky interfaces. They will be running highly complex, custom programs that use standard parallelisation libraries. If they want graphics it will be in terms of rendered output.
The last thing they need is a pointy-clicky interface chewing up cycles that would be better used for computation.