The constitution gives you a right to freedom of speech. It does not give your a right to have people want to hear what you have to say, nor does it give you a right to force people to listen to you.
The Supreme Court has decided that the First Amendment guarantees you a right to speak in public places. You can't make people listen, of course, but the government can't, for example, allow you to say whatever you want, so long as you're in the middle of the desert.
Which is, of course, the strategy which is being pursued. But most slashdotters are too wrapped-up trying to figure out a definition of porn to realize it.
The FCC is in the process of declaring the Internet to be private property; not a public space at all.
They've already ruled neither cable nor DSL providers are to be encumbered by common carrier regulations. That means you can no longer demand access to sites they don't want to give you access to, porn or not. They'll still grant it, perhaps for a long while, but if at some point in the future you find you can't access certain content or can't publish it, you'll have no Constitutional recourse, because the Internet is not a public space.
Of course by that point this comment will have expired, and no one will remember it anyhow, so what does it all matter?
Well, then, thre's the start. Post your email address here, and a URL for the "These sites are broken under IE" web site you're planning to create (if you're still planning to do that) and I'll encourage all my friends to email you every time they come across a site they think is broken.
Why are wiki sites successfull?
A job gets done when it's placed in the hands of someone who is clued, motivated and authorized. Wiki's authorize everyone, use a community feedback mechanism to sort out the clued, and don't depend on the actions of anyone who is not self-motivated. The plan you are proposing depands on cooperation between (self-motivated and possibly clued, but not authorized) spotters, (self motivated and possibly clued, but not authorized) screeners, and (weakly motivated, clearly unclued, but fully authorized) web maintainers. No single party posseses all three components, so the job will likely never get done.
Peoeple seem willing enough to donate information if they like the cause.
For some web administrators, having the information (that a page is broken) will be enough, since they are self-motivated to fix their pages. For them, they just need to know the circumstances (page, browser, state, plugin, etc.) under which a page is broken. Anything else is unnecessary, and degrages the process.
I for one would gladly click a button on my browser when I came accross something that didn't work in firefox.
How would you know something doesn't work in Firefox? How useful is it to find sites that "require IE" and tell the webmin "Hey dude, did you know your site requires IE"? There are sites where text or graphics clobber each other, but many of these will fail to render properly even under IE under many circumstances.
Are you going to just ignore the fact that I already stated this project would require volunteers to do something with the data?
No, but you haven't thought this through. You've specified at least two layers of volunteers (spotters and screeners) who must collect the data, but cannot do anything with the data. The only ones who can do anything with the data are not volunteers.
I suppose you could make description a required field.
So let's walk this through. I'm browsing the web. I hit a site which doesn't render properly, and in order to get done what I need to get done I need it to render properly. I click my "report it" button and say "it doesn't render properly" and off goes the report. If everything works properly, a volunteer somewhere will screen the report and send a polite letter to the web administrator for the broken page asking him to fix the problem. But guess what? Any update to the page is weeks away and I still need to get done what I need to get done. After a few cycles of "click the button, fill-in the mandatory description, fail to see results" I'm going to start hesitating to click that button, because clicking that button means I need to fill-in the mandatory description, and I'm not browsing the web in order to fill-in a mandatory description, I'm browsing the web to get done what I need to get done. Soon after, the mandatory description will start getting nonsense values like
"asdfjkl;" just so I can hit "submit" rather than "cancel" (which just wastes the screener's time) and at that point the plug-in might just as well uninstall itself.
I assume some comments would be of the variety: "firefox isn't showing the navigation menu on the site, but it shows up fine in IE"
So, part of this Firefox plugin will launch IE in the background, so that people can compare
Are you volunteering to do this filtering, or just pay others to filter?;-)
No resposnes should be sent out automatically.
If it isn't automatic, it won't happen. Most people never even change the default security setting of their brower.
If you come across a broken site...
How do I know if a site is broken, or if the webmaster is just being creative? Sometimes a site can be broken without leaving obviously visible artifacts. Other times the unreadable rendering results from incorrect client-side settings.
..you hit the feedback button...
I suspect you'd see a lot of false positives or incorrect usage comments such as "that color looks ugly" or "how do I get to your competitor's homepage".
...and put in a short description.
I think most people would leave the description field blank, or worse, be unable to provide a useful comment. How would the average person describe buttons which didn't render, if their browser gave no hint that there were supposed to be buttons in the first place?
Someone with a broken website may be ignoring logs and need their feet held to the fire.
If the sitemaster is ignoring logs, you've got no chance of changing their behavior with anything short of a lawsuit. You likely couldn't even get their attention by driving their traffic to zero, because they're ignoring their logs. If they're getting any sort of click-through revenus, though, they won't be ingoring their logs.
Be it a friendly email...
There is no reliable way to associate an email address with a site. You could 'guess' something like "webmaster@domain" but anything that obvious is either already blackholed against spam, or would be as soon as you started sending 'friendly' complaints to that address. What about hosting companise? Who gets the report if http://sourceforge/myproject is broke?
...or their website showing up as a high rated broken site on a hopefully popular statistics page.
Broken site or broken page? Would one page broken on a site make the whole site 'broken'? And who is running this highly rated site of pages you wouldn't bother visiting? More to the point, who is their lawyer, because if they say something negative like that about one of my pages, and it reduces my site traffic or revenue, I'm going to sue. After all, broken html is not a crime.
And if Microsoft were to adopt this, would it also list sites broken to IE? If they did, most of the reports would be from IE users, considering their market share. I pity the poor Mozilla foundation employee spending all his time politely asking IIS webmins to fix their site so that IE users have a more pleasant web surfing experience...
It doesn't necessarily need to be a current mozilla volunteer. It doesn't even need to be a mozilla project if it was just a popular plug-in. If it was something that provided just enough data to be useful and fix some websites that were IE only, it could be something that some people do in fact care about.
Interesting thought experiment, but I think the discussion has run it's course.
Let me know when you get the beta written, I'd love to see the result.
What if there was a simple feedback form as part of firefox? These would send error reports to a database at mozilla or somewhere. The reports can be gone over and a standard polite email can be sent to the webmaster informing them of the problems with their websites.
I don't think that would scale very well. I suspect the number of broken web page views that occur on the internet per day, even by Firefox users alone, would put the amount of spam received by an unfiltered account to shame.
Perhaps a better solution would be to encourage a web standard wherby the return code from a web browser rendering a web page could be sent back to the web server as part of an OPTIONS method call including the information about the URL being rendered.
Still full of holes (need to include state information, and possibly not only the browser info but information about plug-in versions as well) but at least it sends the necessary information to someone in a position to effect a change, rather than to some Mozilla foundation volunteer who really couldn't care less.
I don't think so. We may be the period with the most destroyed records, but probably nowhere near that with the least surviving. You've got to take into account the huge amount of solid history that is being generated, from books down to blogs. Even if only a small percentage are dedicated to continually saving and upconverting their data, there will potentially be a wealth of information left.
We'll have to disagree on this. While I agree there will be surviving records from our age, I'm concerned not only about access to those records, but their reliability as well.
We all acknowledge history as being written by the winners. Historians understand this, too, and are often faced with the problem of seeing past these historical filters to the original events. To address this, they look to historical records which are un-filtered. For pre-historic events, for example, we know that iron tools were an improvement over bronze by noting how and where such tools were used, not by trusting some cave wall press release.
We know Caesar hit England around 80 B.C. We know the Romans reported it as a resounding success. We also know if you look beyond the official Roman records a different story emerges.
The records we create today seem extremely succeptible to both revisionist-style doctoring and inadvertent myoptic doctoring. The politically correct rants some person-of-future-importance writes here on slashdot will likely have less significance to future historians than the uncensored thoughts and feeling expressed in his personal emails, but are much more likely to survive. We can look back 200 years and find out what was on John Adam's mind as he wrote to his wife concerning his farm while away formulating the Declaration of Independence. If we look for similar insights about Bill Gates, will we find only a reference to Microsoft's data retention policies?
If future historians judge the importance of events by how much was written about it in blogs, will they conclude nothing of importance happened last year beyond the 2004 election?
Already it's becomming difficult for some people to remember just how absolutely sure they were back in 2003 that Saddam had given Nigerian-based nukes to al Qaeda. As people realize their mistakes, reports which supported that conclusion at the time will be deemed less reliable, and thus less important. A future historian looking to understand why the US went to war with Iraq is less likely to find reports of the supporting evidence, and more likely to find only discussions of how the supporting evidence was wrong. The raw data will be gone.
Another example, try asking Google how we used to spell that bin Laden dude's first name before we all standardized the spelling as "Osama"? If you can't remember, how will you find out what he was doing back in 1978, when everyone was referring to him by his other name?
Fifteen years after I graduated I still refer to old textbooks from time to time.
I'm twenty years out, and still referring to mine. My high school required students to buy their own books (rather than lending them out) and so I still have a copy of my Junior year Physics book. I homeschool my own kids, so I figure it will come in handy once they're ready for it.
Additionally, I've a habit of collecting old books in general, non-fiction mainly. I have European history books which discuss the battles and technologies of the World War (before there was a sequel), civics textbooks from the American south in the 60's discussing "the negro problem" and a rather insightful textbook The Essentials of Logic by Sellars from 1917, which my grandfather used when he attended college.
And then I think about the piles of electronic documents I have collecting in the basement, rotting away on 5¼ inch floppies where I don't have an application which can interpret them even if I could find an operating system version the application demands, or the computer hardware the operating system would require, or the hardware, drivers, patches, etc. to read the disk if I got that far. And those disks are all post-college for me, many less than a decade old.
But it makes financial sense for the publisher, though. If we figure (very conservatively) a text book costs $100, loses 50% of it's value when resold as Used, and is used for just 5 years, new book only sales would amount to $500 for the publisher and $0 to their competition, while the new/used life of a book under the same conditions leaves the publisher with just $100 but drives sales for their competition to almost the same level.
Welcome to the digital dark ages. Ironic, isn't it, that the period of history when protecting intellectual works is deemed most valuable will be viewed by our decendents as the period of history with the fewest surviving records.
Currently yes, it is [legal to sell armor-piercing rounds]. And the reason is simple... it was recognized by our founders that it is essential to a democracy for the citizenry to be able to, if need be, defend themselves [from the] government.
Except that those same Founding Fathers also seemed to think it essential to a democracy that free speech/free press not be infringed. Remember that Copyright Law, in it's essence, if an infringment on the free press insofar as it grants an exclusive right of publication to a single party.
It would be a different situation if the RIAA were, for example, suing people who burn pirated music and sell it.
Copyright law does not compensate authors and inventors with money, it compensates them with control.
If you respect copyright law, then you will respect the control it grants to both the GPL coder and the RIAA artists equally.
GPL software is not given freely, it comes with terms and conditions spelled out in the GPL. But the music published by the RIAA and crew is similarly distributed under restrictive terms and conditions, although those terms are not as clearly spelled-out as the GPL.
If you do not respect copyright law, then I fail to see how you can have any realistic expectation that others will.
We, as individuals, appear to believe that we have much more to gain by not respecting copyright than by respecting it. After all, compare the amount of money you've lost by people pirating your own copyrighted works against the amount of money you've saved by downloading stuff from p2p. No brainer, eh.
But we, as the Free Software Community, must view things differently, since the community has everything to lose and nothing to gain by not respecting copyright. That's why it's also a no-brainer to react with fury whenever the terms of the GPL are violated.
So here's the question to you: are you a supporting member of the Free Software Community or not? 'Cause you can't have it both ways.
Realistically, the courts could say "well, the GPL is invalid, so the code is in the public domain", and literally, all the GPL code out there would be up for grabs.
It would not be the courts making that decision, at least not for the United States. The Constitution grants that power to Congress, and the Supreme Court just affirmed that in Eldred.
So, could Congress just up and decree something like "...the GPL is invalid, so the code is in the public domain"?
It's difficult to imagine how they would define "the code" such that only code released under GPL loses it's copyright protection. I suppose they could do away with copyright protection altogether, or (perhaps more surgically) declare all licensing agreements for copyright works invalid, but I think there are enough proprietary software vendors who'd raise a stink to prevent that.
It's an interresting question, though. If you had a magical "pass one law free" card and wanted to er...um..."outlaw(?) the GPL", how would you go about doing it? Would you eliminate copyright protection for source code? For binaries? Make license agreements inapplicable to copyright works?
I'm really having a hard time imagining a simple way to do that, and I've spent some time thinking about it. The closest I've come up with would allow anyone who distributes software to be held liable for faults in the code, but that would only stop binary distributions, and Microsoft would never support that.
I suppose alternately, you could reduce the copyright protection for software to something like 3 years (long enough for Microsoft's product cycles, but short enough to effectively put most of the GPL'd stuff into the public domain.
I'm interested to hear other ideas, if anyone cares to venture them...
You're assuming that "we" agree with the opinion that MS shouldn't be forced to unbundle IE...
By we I meant the U.S. government DOJ, and by extension, the people who elected (directly or indirectly) these representatives. I can't say wether that applies to you, but I, unfortunately, have to live with the decisions the other people in the US made.
But more to the point, I think it is a correct decision to leave software developers (including the ones who work for Microsoft) the freedom to choose what software they supply, without government interference. Otherwise we (meaning FOSS developers) might find ourselves having to include or exclude certain functions we'd rather not, such as DRM in our ogg players, respect for the BroadcastBit in our Bittorrent clients, etc.
But if I had my druthers, I'd've granted them the right to include or exclude whatever functionality they choose, provided they disclose what was being included. Wouldn't've made a difference to the FOSS crowd (we do that anyway) but would probably have been impossible for proprietary software vendors to implement. At least, I would've hoped so...;-)
It's a moot popint, however. People are beginning to understand that allowing Microsoft to bundle IE is a liability they wish they could choose to avoid.
Why should Adobe be held to any different standard than Microsoft? If we've decided that Microsoft can't (at least in the U.S.) be forced to remove IE from Windows (even after they have been proven to posess market "monopoly" power) then why should we now demand that an "integral part of Adobe's product" be removable, hidable or whatever.
Or maybe it was a mistake to allow Microsoft to get away with that?
So what happens where some future software patent holder slaps Google with a C&D order against a piece of Free Software implementing a patent-infringing technology and suddenly no one can download the source to that package. At that point, I'll bet no one even knows how to work on free software without a central database as a repository.
Come to think of it, isn't SourceForge vulnerable to the same sort of Blitzkrieg?
purposely annoying the fuck out of hundreds of people each day doesn't mean you have a bad job, it means you are a bad person. these people should all get some sort of disease that affects their throat, forcing them to go and be productive members of the human race.
I think you're missing something.
We've created a world where "purposely annoying the fuck out of hundreds of people each day" is defined as being "productive members of the human race". When we tell crippled people (and those with small children to care for) to "get off the dole and fine a "Real Job" this is one of the least harmful prospects. In this society, anything which earns you enough money to feed your family is considered right an proper.
Would you rather have them earning their daily bread by bombing the indigent population (which might just be you next time) so that some oil company can make this quarter's numbers, or perhaps by pushing some of the rather less-productive members of the human race out of a cargo plane over the ocean at night?
There are two ways to destroy a file; you can overwrite the blocks with zeros, or you can remove the inode.
Similarly, there are two ways to stop people from reading a library book: you can remove the book from the shelf, or you can just remove it's entry in the card catalog.
We should all keep in mind that Google is becomming the "card catalog" for much of the on-line world. Many would argue that if it doesn't exist on the from page of a Google search, then for most of the world, it just doesn't exist.
Patents protect the commercial use of an invention.
Um, no. a patent grants the owner rights to control the expression of the idea. If I own a patent for a kind of mousetrap, I can press a case against both the person who builds such a device without my permission and the person who uses such a device without my permission.
In other words, it's perfectly fine to write, compile, link, and run software that uses algorithms covered by other people's patents. It's only the running of the program for commercial advantage which is protected.
Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. Even if the patent owner has little motivation to go after people who aren't making a killing off the patent, it's still protected. You could easily code your own One-Click, and as long as nobody used it you'd probably get away with it. But if you brought it to the attention of Amazon's lawyers, they'd be happy to explain things to you at their usual hourly rate.
On the subject of polygamy practiced by "mormons" you're only partially correct.
Thank you for the correction, and the additional information as well.
It was not my intention to portray polygamy among mormons as the norm, although I see now how it could be read that way. I'll accept it as having mis-spoken and appreciate your correction.
Marriage confers certain legal rights and privileges.
This is but one of the problems we have to deal with when we allow the government to confer legal rights and privileges based on one's status under a given religion.
So, change the law so that these "legal rights and privileges" are conferred based on civil union status, not marriage. Set a limit to the number of individuals who can enter into a civil union, and let anyone marry any man, woman, or sheep he wants, provided he can find (or start) a religious institution to sanctify it.
The real question is, how will Bush's core supporters (the Coalition of the Willingly Misled) perceive this? Is he backing away from Federalism, or backing away from "Family Values"?
Perhaps we should allow marriages only between even numbers of people?
#define struct UNION constrain WORD aligned
If men can take multiple women,then there will be a surfeit of unmatched heterosexual males who will not be able to participate in the institution of marriage.
You got something against capitalism?;-) What are you, some sort of commie?;[)
So, if we're supposed to no longer be concerned about limiting marriage to "a man and a woman", are we soon going to see a recognition of the Mormon practice of polygamy (one man, multiple wives)?
If a state decides that a civil union requireds 1man+1woman, but a "marriage" can be anything, what has really changed?
If a state decides that 1any + 1any is an acceptable union, what's the point in limiting this to just sets of two?
Methinks Bush is just flip-flopping in the week before the election knowing that he'll never have to answer the hard questions such a reversed philosophy raises.
Anyone in Jersey can go to the election officials and ask for a paper write in ballot instead of using the machines.
I believe this is the case nationwide, but I can't cite a source.
What happens next could be of interest: The total number of write-in ballots are determined, but not tallied. No attempt is made to determine voter intent, which is to say, even if you wrote-in the name of someone on the ballot, it will not count as a vote for that candidate, at least not yet. These are treated as "disputed" ballots.
Then the official ballots are tallied and a number of votes for each candidate determined, as well as the number of votes where intent cannot be determined. (This stack would include all the "hanging chad" ballots, the optical scan ballots which weren't unambiguously scanned, etc.) These are also disputed ballots, and a count of the disputed ballots is made.
If the race is not close (where "close" is a function of the difference in votes between two candidates and the number of disputed ballots), these ballots are never looked at again; no attempt is made to determine voter intent.
In a close race, where adding all of the disputed votes to the runner-up would change the result, only then is an attempt made to determine voter intent for the disputed ballots.
This is the lynchpin: electronic voting machines make it possible to place all the votes cast on a given machine into dispute. Or, select a more common trait; poorly trained election workers at a certain precinct means you can place a whole precinct into dispute, allegations of flaws in a certain version of the e-vote software places all votes cast on boxes running that version into dispute. This means they don't get counted for any candidate unless the race is "close", and almost guarantees that the race will be "close enough" to require them to be counted.
Recall that, in Florida in 2000, the state's Electorial Votes had been granted to Bush (by the Board of Elections and the State Legislature) long before the "voters intent" could be extracted out of all the hanging chad and butterfly ballots. In effect, the people of Florida did not vote to elect Bush in 2000 (although if things had gone more smoothly it appeared they would have) but instead the State Legislature cast that vote, and apparently cast it with prescience, spotting in favor of Bush over Gore before the recounts and lawsuits made the final determination.
From where we stand today, it appears that, best case, we will never know if the candidate elected to office in 2004 is the one we actually would have elected if things had gone more smoothly. In the worst case, we'll see several states where the Electorial Votes will be cast for one candidate or the other by whateve mechanism is provided for by that state's law, and it will later turn out to have been cast differently than they would have been had the process gone smoothly.
Oh! to be a Lawyer in 2004; think of the windfall. But I suppose I shouldn't be greedy. After all, I was a Mainframe programmer through Y2K. What more could I ask for?
How do you handle the Graveyard voting? You know, someone comes along and represents himself as Joe Blow, votes, then goes to the next precinct, and repeats the process with a different name. Faking ID isn't hard, really - kids do it all the time to get beer.
Assuming you're a professional (you can create an unlimited number of perfect-but-fake ID's, you have a way to be assured you will never be recognised by anyone who knew the deceased, you have a way to ensure dead people are not purged from the voting roles, you have an adequate supply of suitable "dead" people to fake and precincts in which to cast their votes, you have fabulous cross-precinct transportation capabilities, you waste no time casting the votes, etc) you may be able to bump up the votes for your candidate by a hundred, max, in a given day. By yourself, this wouldn't have changed even the '2000 election in Florida. Add to is a conspiracy of a half dozen or so equally-talented and completely trustable accomplises and you might have made a difference. If you had seen it coming.
Compare that to the number of votes I (using rigged e-vote software) could add or subtract by simply mistakenly declaring some temporary variable as a an unsigned_short rather than an int, or forgetting to clear the carry_bit between operations.
Take the number of votes fudged on this one machine in this one precinct. Multiply by the number of machines per precinct, the number of precincts, and the number of states where the machines are used. It's clear one of the more difficult problems of rigging an election this way would be calibrating the exploit to avoid a massive landslide result from a close (by the polls) election.
One wonders if one could make a persuasive argument that electronic voting booths are illegal because they deny third parties an opportunity to observe the ballot box?
Does anyone know of any state law (NJ or otherwise) which guarantees independent observers the right to verify the "ballot box" is empty before voting begins, to observe the box at all times during vote casting, verify that the box is sealed after election is closed, and observe the counting of the votes post-election? If so, I think an electronic ballot box would fail all those tests.
NOt just nukes, but sophisticated, tested, proven missile technology to deliver them. And that, Sir, is why Bush is so hot to get a Missile Defense System into production; why he considers it a top priority for defending America.
He's not worried about some barely-able-to-get-off-the-ground North Korean beast, or a non-existant Iraqi knob-lobber, He's
wants to be able to first-strike-with-impunity on anybody who get's between his oil buddies and the Arab oil they think they own.
The bottom line is that we need to accept the fact that voting systems will not be 100% functional.
The ballot system does not need to be 100% accurate. It needs to be accurate enough for us to determine if the number of undisputed votes for the leading candidate exceeds the number of undisputed votes for any other candidate were we to grant all disputed votes to him. When it does, the election can be settled. If it doesn't, we need to turn some of the disputed votes into undisputed votes, and repeat until the equation completes.
The Year 200 Florida problem resulted from a close election where this question could not be answered without going through the process of turning disputed votes into undisputed votes by examining chad, filing lawsuits, etc.
The problem with electronic voting machines is the number of ballots potentially affected . Instead of having individual ballots where the disputed/undisputed wheel must be spun, an electronic ballot system raises that question for all ballots cast on that machine, or all machines running that software release, or all machines manufactured by that company.
This election isn't going to be settled by the voters on November 2nd, but by whatever remedial vote resolution process each precinct subscribes to. If the losing party refuses to give up it's assertion that the vote was stolen, we will have a second disputed Presidency.
Strap yourself in. It's gonna be another long election cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
The Supreme Court has decided that the First Amendment guarantees you a right to speak in public places. You can't make people listen, of course, but the government can't, for example, allow you to say whatever you want, so long as you're in the middle of the desert.
Which is, of course, the strategy which is being pursued. But most slashdotters are too wrapped-up trying to figure out a definition of porn to realize it.
The FCC is in the process of declaring the Internet to be private property; not a public space at all.
They've already ruled neither cable nor DSL providers are to be encumbered by common carrier regulations. That means you can no longer demand access to sites they don't want to give you access to, porn or not. They'll still grant it, perhaps for a long while, but if at some point in the future you find you can't access certain content or can't publish it, you'll have no Constitutional recourse, because the Internet is not a public space.
Of course by that point this comment will have expired, and no one will remember it anyhow, so what does it all matter?
Well, then, thre's the start. Post your email address here, and a URL for the "These sites are broken under IE" web site you're planning to create (if you're still planning to do that) and I'll encourage all my friends to email you every time they come across a site they think is broken.
A job gets done when it's placed in the hands of someone who is clued, motivated and authorized. Wiki's authorize everyone, use a community feedback mechanism to sort out the clued, and don't depend on the actions of anyone who is not self-motivated. The plan you are proposing depands on cooperation between (self-motivated and possibly clued, but not authorized) spotters, (self motivated and possibly clued, but not authorized) screeners, and (weakly motivated, clearly unclued, but fully authorized) web maintainers. No single party posseses all three components, so the job will likely never get done.
For some web administrators, having the information (that a page is broken) will be enough, since they are self-motivated to fix their pages. For them, they just need to know the circumstances (page, browser, state, plugin, etc.) under which a page is broken. Anything else is unnecessary, and degrages the process.
How would you know something doesn't work in Firefox? How useful is it to find sites that "require IE" and tell the webmin "Hey dude, did you know your site requires IE"? There are sites where text or graphics clobber each other, but many of these will fail to render properly even under IE under many circumstances.
No, but you haven't thought this through. You've specified at least two layers of volunteers (spotters and screeners) who must collect the data, but cannot do anything with the data. The only ones who can do anything with the data are not volunteers.
So let's walk this through. I'm browsing the web. I hit a site which doesn't render properly, and in order to get done what I need to get done I need it to render properly. I click my "report it" button and say "it doesn't render properly" and off goes the report. If everything works properly, a volunteer somewhere will screen the report and send a polite letter to the web administrator for the broken page asking him to fix the problem. But guess what? Any update to the page is weeks away and I still need to get done what I need to get done. After a few cycles of "click the button, fill-in the mandatory description, fail to see results" I'm going to start hesitating to click that button, because clicking that button means I need to fill-in the mandatory description, and I'm not browsing the web in order to fill-in a mandatory description, I'm browsing the web to get done what I need to get done. Soon after, the mandatory description will start getting nonsense values like "asdfjkl;" just so I can hit "submit" rather than "cancel" (which just wastes the screener's time) and at that point the plug-in might just as well uninstall itself.
So, part of this Firefox plugin will launch IE in the background, so that people can compare
Are you volunteering to do this filtering, or just pay others to filter? ;-)
If it isn't automatic, it won't happen. Most people never even change the default security setting of their brower.
How do I know if a site is broken, or if the webmaster is just being creative? Sometimes a site can be broken without leaving obviously visible artifacts. Other times the unreadable rendering results from incorrect client-side settings.
I suspect you'd see a lot of false positives or incorrect usage comments such as "that color looks ugly" or "how do I get to your competitor's homepage".
I think most people would leave the description field blank, or worse, be unable to provide a useful comment. How would the average person describe buttons which didn't render, if their browser gave no hint that there were supposed to be buttons in the first place?
If the sitemaster is ignoring logs, you've got no chance of changing their behavior with anything short of a lawsuit. You likely couldn't even get their attention by driving their traffic to zero, because they're ignoring their logs. If they're getting any sort of click-through revenus, though, they won't be ingoring their logs.
There is no reliable way to associate an email address with a site. You could 'guess' something like "webmaster@domain" but anything that obvious is either already blackholed against spam, or would be as soon as you started sending 'friendly' complaints to that address. What about hosting companise? Who gets the report if http://sourceforge/myproject is broke?
Broken site or broken page? Would one page broken on a site make the whole site 'broken'? And who is running this highly rated site of pages you wouldn't bother visiting? More to the point, who is their lawyer, because if they say something negative like that about one of my pages, and it reduces my site traffic or revenue, I'm going to sue. After all, broken html is not a crime.
And if Microsoft were to adopt this, would it also list sites broken to IE? If they did, most of the reports would be from IE users, considering their market share. I pity the poor Mozilla foundation employee spending all his time politely asking IIS webmins to fix their site so that IE users have a more pleasant web surfing experience...
Interesting thought experiment, but I think the discussion has run it's course.
Let me know when you get the beta written, I'd love to see the result.
I don't think that would scale very well. I suspect the number of broken web page views that occur on the internet per day, even by Firefox users alone, would put the amount of spam received by an unfiltered account to shame.
Perhaps a better solution would be to encourage a web standard wherby the return code from a web browser rendering a web page could be sent back to the web server as part of an OPTIONS method call including the information about the URL being rendered.
Still full of holes (need to include state information, and possibly not only the browser info but information about plug-in versions as well) but at least it sends the necessary information to someone in a position to effect a change, rather than to some Mozilla foundation volunteer who really couldn't care less.
We'll have to disagree on this. While I agree there will be surviving records from our age, I'm concerned not only about access to those records, but their reliability as well.
We all acknowledge history as being written by the winners. Historians understand this, too, and are often faced with the problem of seeing past these historical filters to the original events. To address this, they look to historical records which are un-filtered. For pre-historic events, for example, we know that iron tools were an improvement over bronze by noting how and where such tools were used, not by trusting some cave wall press release.
We know Caesar hit England around 80 B.C. We know the Romans reported it as a resounding success. We also know if you look beyond the official Roman records a different story emerges.
The records we create today seem extremely succeptible to both revisionist-style doctoring and inadvertent myoptic doctoring. The politically correct rants some person-of-future-importance writes here on slashdot will likely have less significance to future historians than the uncensored thoughts and feeling expressed in his personal emails, but are much more likely to survive. We can look back 200 years and find out what was on John Adam's mind as he wrote to his wife concerning his farm while away formulating the Declaration of Independence. If we look for similar insights about Bill Gates, will we find only a reference to Microsoft's data retention policies?
If future historians judge the importance of events by how much was written about it in blogs, will they conclude nothing of importance happened last year beyond the 2004 election?
Already it's becomming difficult for some people to remember just how absolutely sure they were back in 2003 that Saddam had given Nigerian-based nukes to al Qaeda. As people realize their mistakes, reports which supported that conclusion at the time will be deemed less reliable, and thus less important. A future historian looking to understand why the US went to war with Iraq is less likely to find reports of the supporting evidence, and more likely to find only discussions of how the supporting evidence was wrong. The raw data will be gone.
Another example, try asking Google how we used to spell that bin Laden dude's first name before we all standardized the spelling as "Osama"? If you can't remember, how will you find out what he was doing back in 1978, when everyone was referring to him by his other name?
I'm twenty years out, and still referring to mine. My high school required students to buy their own books (rather than lending them out) and so I still have a copy of my Junior year Physics book. I homeschool my own kids, so I figure it will come in handy once they're ready for it.
Additionally, I've a habit of collecting old books in general, non-fiction mainly. I have European history books which discuss the battles and technologies of the World War (before there was a sequel), civics textbooks from the American south in the 60's discussing "the negro problem" and a rather insightful textbook The Essentials of Logic by Sellars from 1917, which my grandfather used when he attended college.
And then I think about the piles of electronic documents I have collecting in the basement, rotting away on 5¼ inch floppies where I don't have an application which can interpret them even if I could find an operating system version the application demands, or the computer hardware the operating system would require, or the hardware, drivers, patches, etc. to read the disk if I got that far. And those disks are all post-college for me, many less than a decade old.
But it makes financial sense for the publisher, though. If we figure (very conservatively) a text book costs $100, loses 50% of it's value when resold as Used, and is used for just 5 years, new book only sales would amount to $500 for the publisher and $0 to their competition, while the new/used life of a book under the same conditions leaves the publisher with just $100 but drives sales for their competition to almost the same level.
Welcome to the digital dark ages. Ironic, isn't it, that the period of history when protecting intellectual works is deemed most valuable will be viewed by our decendents as the period of history with the fewest surviving records.
Except that those same Founding Fathers also seemed to think it essential to a democracy that free speech/free press not be infringed. Remember that Copyright Law, in it's essence, if an infringment on the free press insofar as it grants an exclusive right of publication to a single party.
Copyright law does not compensate authors and inventors with money, it compensates them with control.
If you respect copyright law, then you will respect the control it grants to both the GPL coder and the RIAA artists equally.
GPL software is not given freely, it comes with terms and conditions spelled out in the GPL. But the music published by the RIAA and crew is similarly distributed under restrictive terms and conditions, although those terms are not as clearly spelled-out as the GPL.
If you do not respect copyright law, then I fail to see how you can have any realistic expectation that others will.
We, as individuals, appear to believe that we have much more to gain by not respecting copyright than by respecting it. After all, compare the amount of money you've lost by people pirating your own copyrighted works against the amount of money you've saved by downloading stuff from p2p. No brainer, eh.
But we, as the Free Software Community, must view things differently, since the community has everything to lose and nothing to gain by not respecting copyright. That's why it's also a no-brainer to react with fury whenever the terms of the GPL are violated.
So here's the question to you: are you a supporting member of the Free Software Community or not? 'Cause you can't have it both ways.
It would not be the courts making that decision, at least not for the United States. The Constitution grants that power to Congress, and the Supreme Court just affirmed that in Eldred.
So, could Congress just up and decree something like "...the GPL is invalid, so the code is in the public domain"?
It's difficult to imagine how they would define "the code" such that only code released under GPL loses it's copyright protection. I suppose they could do away with copyright protection altogether, or (perhaps more surgically) declare all licensing agreements for copyright works invalid, but I think there are enough proprietary software vendors who'd raise a stink to prevent that.
It's an interresting question, though. If you had a magical "pass one law free" card and wanted to er...um..."outlaw(?) the GPL", how would you go about doing it? Would you eliminate copyright protection for source code? For binaries? Make license agreements inapplicable to copyright works?
I'm really having a hard time imagining a simple way to do that, and I've spent some time thinking about it. The closest I've come up with would allow anyone who distributes software to be held liable for faults in the code, but that would only stop binary distributions, and Microsoft would never support that.
I suppose alternately, you could reduce the copyright protection for software to something like 3 years (long enough for Microsoft's product cycles, but short enough to effectively put most of the GPL'd stuff into the public domain.
I'm interested to hear other ideas, if anyone cares to venture them...
By we I meant the U.S. government DOJ, and by extension, the people who elected (directly or indirectly) these representatives. I can't say wether that applies to you, but I, unfortunately, have to live with the decisions the other people in the US made.
But more to the point, I think it is a correct decision to leave software developers (including the ones who work for Microsoft) the freedom to choose what software they supply, without government interference. Otherwise we (meaning FOSS developers) might find ourselves having to include or exclude certain functions we'd rather not, such as DRM in our ogg players, respect for the BroadcastBit in our Bittorrent clients, etc.
But if I had my druthers, I'd've granted them the right to include or exclude whatever functionality they choose, provided they disclose what was being included. Wouldn't've made a difference to the FOSS crowd (we do that anyway) but would probably have been impossible for proprietary software vendors to implement. At least, I would've hoped so... ;-)
It's a moot popint, however. People are beginning to understand that allowing Microsoft to bundle IE is a liability they wish they could choose to avoid.
Or maybe it was a mistake to allow Microsoft to get away with that?
Come to think of it, isn't SourceForge vulnerable to the same sort of Blitzkrieg?
I think you're missing something.
We've created a world where "purposely annoying the fuck out of hundreds of people each day" is defined as being "productive members of the human race". When we tell crippled people (and those with small children to care for) to "get off the dole and fine a "Real Job" this is one of the least harmful prospects. In this society, anything which earns you enough money to feed your family is considered right an proper.
Would you rather have them earning their daily bread by bombing the indigent population (which might just be you next time) so that some oil company can make this quarter's numbers, or perhaps by pushing some of the rather less-productive members of the human race out of a cargo plane over the ocean at night?
Similarly, there are two ways to stop people from reading a library book: you can remove the book from the shelf, or you can just remove it's entry in the card catalog.
We should all keep in mind that Google is becomming the "card catalog" for much of the on-line world. Many would argue that if it doesn't exist on the from page of a Google search, then for most of the world, it just doesn't exist.
Um, no. a patent grants the owner rights to control the expression of the idea. If I own a patent for a kind of mousetrap, I can press a case against both the person who builds such a device without my permission and the person who uses such a device without my permission.
Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. Even if the patent owner has little motivation to go after people who aren't making a killing off the patent, it's still protected. You could easily code your own One-Click, and as long as nobody used it you'd probably get away with it. But if you brought it to the attention of Amazon's lawyers, they'd be happy to explain things to you at their usual hourly rate.
Thank you for the correction, and the additional information as well.
It was not my intention to portray polygamy among mormons as the norm, although I see now how it could be read that way. I'll accept it as having mis-spoken and appreciate your correction.
This is but one of the problems we have to deal with when we allow the government to confer legal rights and privileges based on one's status under a given religion.
So, change the law so that these "legal rights and privileges" are conferred based on civil union status, not marriage. Set a limit to the number of individuals who can enter into a civil union, and let anyone marry any man, woman, or sheep he wants, provided he can find (or start) a religious institution to sanctify it.
The real question is, how will Bush's core supporters (the Coalition of the Willingly Misled) perceive this? Is he backing away from Federalism, or backing away from "Family Values"?
#define struct UNION constrain WORD aligned
You got something against capitalism? ;-) What are you, some sort of commie? ;[)
If a state decides that a civil union requireds 1man+1woman, but a "marriage" can be anything, what has really changed?
If a state decides that 1any + 1any is an acceptable union, what's the point in limiting this to just sets of two?
Methinks Bush is just flip-flopping in the week before the election knowing that he'll never have to answer the hard questions such a reversed philosophy raises.
I believe this is the case nationwide, but I can't cite a source.
What happens next could be of interest: The total number of write-in ballots are determined, but not tallied. No attempt is made to determine voter intent, which is to say, even if you wrote-in the name of someone on the ballot, it will not count as a vote for that candidate, at least not yet. These are treated as "disputed" ballots.
Then the official ballots are tallied and a number of votes for each candidate determined, as well as the number of votes where intent cannot be determined. (This stack would include all the "hanging chad" ballots, the optical scan ballots which weren't unambiguously scanned, etc.) These are also disputed ballots, and a count of the disputed ballots is made.
If the race is not close (where "close" is a function of the difference in votes between two candidates and the number of disputed ballots), these ballots are never looked at again; no attempt is made to determine voter intent.
In a close race, where adding all of the disputed votes to the runner-up would change the result, only then is an attempt made to determine voter intent for the disputed ballots.
This is the lynchpin: electronic voting machines make it possible to place all the votes cast on a given machine into dispute. Or, select a more common trait; poorly trained election workers at a certain precinct means you can place a whole precinct into dispute, allegations of flaws in a certain version of the e-vote software places all votes cast on boxes running that version into dispute. This means they don't get counted for any candidate unless the race is "close", and almost guarantees that the race will be "close enough" to require them to be counted.
Recall that, in Florida in 2000, the state's Electorial Votes had been granted to Bush (by the Board of Elections and the State Legislature) long before the "voters intent" could be extracted out of all the hanging chad and butterfly ballots. In effect, the people of Florida did not vote to elect Bush in 2000 (although if things had gone more smoothly it appeared they would have) but instead the State Legislature cast that vote, and apparently cast it with prescience, spotting in favor of Bush over Gore before the recounts and lawsuits made the final determination.
From where we stand today, it appears that, best case, we will never know if the candidate elected to office in 2004 is the one we actually would have elected if things had gone more smoothly. In the worst case, we'll see several states where the Electorial Votes will be cast for one candidate or the other by whateve mechanism is provided for by that state's law, and it will later turn out to have been cast differently than they would have been had the process gone smoothly.
Oh! to be a Lawyer in 2004; think of the windfall. But I suppose I shouldn't be greedy. After all, I was a Mainframe programmer through Y2K. What more could I ask for?
Assuming you're a professional (you can create an unlimited number of perfect-but-fake ID's, you have a way to be assured you will never be recognised by anyone who knew the deceased, you have a way to ensure dead people are not purged from the voting roles, you have an adequate supply of suitable "dead" people to fake and precincts in which to cast their votes, you have fabulous cross-precinct transportation capabilities, you waste no time casting the votes, etc) you may be able to bump up the votes for your candidate by a hundred, max, in a given day. By yourself, this wouldn't have changed even the '2000 election in Florida. Add to is a conspiracy of a half dozen or so equally-talented and completely trustable accomplises and you might have made a difference. If you had seen it coming.
Compare that to the number of votes I (using rigged e-vote software) could add or subtract by simply mistakenly declaring some temporary variable as a an unsigned_short rather than an int, or forgetting to clear the carry_bit between operations.
Take the number of votes fudged on this one machine in this one precinct. Multiply by the number of machines per precinct, the number of precincts, and the number of states where the machines are used. It's clear one of the more difficult problems of rigging an election this way would be calibrating the exploit to avoid a massive landslide result from a close (by the polls) election.
Does anyone know of any state law (NJ or otherwise) which guarantees independent observers the right to verify the "ballot box" is empty before voting begins, to observe the box at all times during vote casting, verify that the box is sealed after election is closed, and observe the counting of the votes post-election? If so, I think an electronic ballot box would fail all those tests.
NOt just nukes, but sophisticated, tested, proven missile technology to deliver them. And that, Sir, is why Bush is so hot to get a Missile Defense System into production; why he considers it a top priority for defending America.
He's not worried about some barely-able-to-get-off-the-ground North Korean beast, or a non-existant Iraqi knob-lobber, He's wants to be able to first-strike-with-impunity on anybody who get's between his oil buddies and the Arab oil they think they own.
The ballot system does not need to be 100% accurate. It needs to be accurate enough for us to determine if the number of undisputed votes for the leading candidate exceeds the number of undisputed votes for any other candidate were we to grant all disputed votes to him. When it does, the election can be settled. If it doesn't, we need to turn some of the disputed votes into undisputed votes, and repeat until the equation completes.
The Year 200 Florida problem resulted from a close election where this question could not be answered without going through the process of turning disputed votes into undisputed votes by examining chad, filing lawsuits, etc.
The problem with electronic voting machines is the number of ballots potentially affected . Instead of having individual ballots where the disputed/undisputed wheel must be spun, an electronic ballot system raises that question for all ballots cast on that machine, or all machines running that software release, or all machines manufactured by that company.
This election isn't going to be settled by the voters on November 2nd, but by whatever remedial vote resolution process each precinct subscribes to. If the losing party refuses to give up it's assertion that the vote was stolen, we will have a second disputed Presidency.
Strap yourself in. It's gonna be another long election cycle.