Once software is made, it is trivial to make enough for everyone.
It's that first part that is the kicker, though, isn't it? It's great that digital works can be reproduced and distributed with very low marginal costs, but you still have to cover the sunk costs of the initial development. Those are huge for this kind of software project, and they are typically paid in advance and with no guaranteed level of return. The economic model has to take that into account or it won't work.
No one is suggesting that Microsoft should be compelled to do anything they don't want to do.
Of course they are. They are saying that as well as developing their code to make new products that they then sell (which they presumably want to do) Microsoft should also incur an indefinite, substantial, unfunded obligation to help people competing with those new products and using Microsoft's own code from their earlier products to do it. There is absolutely no business benefit to Microsoft for doing this, and the overheads involved are far higher than could reasonably be justified on the grounds of promoting general competition in the market.
That's a fair point, but I think it's more analogous to requiring Microsoft to disclose details of things like APIs and data formats required for interoperability (as others in this discussion have suggested) than to requiring Microsoft to disclose their source code. I think promoting interoperability and compatibility is generally beneficial, and as such I don't have the same objections to requiring a reasonable level API/format disclosure, where "reasonable" takes into account both the usefulness of any given disclosure and the burden imposed by requiring it.
But two swing out of the realm of opinion, you compare Windows XP to "OpenSource darlings like firefox" whose long-term support is measured in "months, not years". This is a bad comparison.
Fair enough, though it wasn't really meant as a direct comparison, more an illustration of how much effort is required to support old software for extended periods.
A better comparison would be Ubuntu LTS which includes firefox and whose support is measured in years not months.
It is. In fact, the period is now five years for both desktop and server versions.
Again, just to put that in perspective, Windows 7 (two generations after Windows XP) was released around 4.5 years ago.
I think it would be a great idea to require Microsoft to "open up" even if it was outside of their interests. Hell if Windows 8 could not compete with community supported open source XP, it still means that people get better software:)
Well, it would be great, in the short term, for everyone except Microsoft. But who is going to build the next software product that is so successful that almost everyone uses it for nearly a decade in that world?
Perhaps if Microsoft hadn't developed a series of OS's that treated security like a two-bit whore, none of this would be a major issue.
That's just silly. Microsoft has done a huge amount to further software security over the years, and objectively their track record isn't bad at all compared to other large software vendors. They had the misfortune to be the biggest target in town for a long time (today that "honour" probably goes to Android) and so had to deal with both a relatively high number of attacks and a lot of bad press when something got through.
it's a pretty easy barrier if enforced on _everyone_.
Supporting consumer grade software that is sold for ~$100 a time indefinitely, including providing full internal technical details to arbitrary additional parties, is a "pretty easy barrier"? I'm sorry, but that is absurd.
There are people in this discussion suggesting that someone who doesn't want to comply with such rules can go **** themselves and just give up on entering the US market. Well, guess what? They probably would. The burden imposed by this kind of requirement would almost certainly be prohibitive in cost. A vendor such as Microsoft would therefore do better to sacrifice the entire US market if it meant avoiding both an eternal unfunded mandate to support everything they ever sold and giving up their trade secrets to all their competitors.
There are also people in this discussion pointing out that other industries, such as automotive manufacture, involve a much higher level of safety standards and engineering approval. That is true, but cars typically cost 2-4 orders of magnitude more than commercial off-the-shelf software products, and they have working lifetimes that are probably shorter than Windows XP's 12+ years in many cases. Moreover, the auto manufacturers still aren't required to disclose the keys to the kingdom to the degree that is suggested here.
I'm all for developing good quality software, and if you're running a long-term software business then I think providing a reasonable degree of free-of-charge support to your existing customers is probably a good investment. But providing heavyweight support has a large cost, so unless you as a customer are willing either to regulate the industry and pay N times as much for your software purchases up-front or to pay the true cost of ongoing support via proper support contracts, I don't think it's realistic to expect that vendors will just cover that cost indefinitely out of their own pockets.
In fact, in the entire history of software development, that has almost never happened. Apple have released the first version of OS X around the same time as Microsoft released Windows XP, yet Apple have aggressively promoted numerous upgrades, most of which cost a significant amount of money, since that time, and somehow I suspect you'd have trouble getting full support for an original OS X system today. And to put this all in perspective Open Source darlings like Mozilla Firefox have "long term support" releases with lifetimes measured in months, not years. It's actually remarkable that Microsoft have offered free support to Windows XP for as long as they have, despite releasing not one but three successor generations of the product during that period.
It doesn't sound like they're using web apps, at least not yet. From TFA:
At this stage we're still going to be using Office, Outlook and Exchange, but we're planning to look at a move to a cloud-based productivity and email tool later in the year and that would clearly be an evaluation of Google Apps and Office 365
So paying the compensation is the punishment. Much like libel.
Right. But doesn't that give us the same problem as with libel? That is, the law works on a "no harm, no foul" basis, but it only considers monetary or otherwise quantifiable losses to be harm. With both privacy and defamation, the nastiest consequences of the antisocial behaviour often have nothing to do with money at all. If we're limiting the scope of the debate to possible civil actions and compensation measured by financial losses, I think we're missing the point of why privacy matters. That said, personally I'm very happy to see any move to take privacy more seriously at a political level.
Under the proposal, courts would be able to compensate victims, but the ALRC said it would not propose penalties for offenders.
It doesn't seem clear that they are proposing much of a ban on anything, really. This looks like more of a compensation scheme if someone does infringe on your privacy in this kind of way and you then suffer some significant, financially quantifiable harm from it.
I would argue that many/most infringements on privacy (or the chilling effect that comes from the threat of having your privacy infringed) are not so easily quantifiable, that the law in many places has little meaningful recognition of non-financial damage, and that some behaviours can't be fixed by compensation after the fact anyway. It doesn't look like they're going as far as addressing these issues so far, though.
Sadly, there are still a lot of people who will claim that even in cases like you describe, the phone had nothing to do with the bad driving.
I'll share a personal anecdote from yesterday. I was driving on some back streets on my way to a friend's house, the kind of roads where cars are parked down both sides so you've only got space for one car at a time in between (traffic can't pass in opposite directions without someone pulling over to give way).
As I'm coming up to a crossroads, someone in a 4x4, a big vehicle that is difficult to fit down these roads at the best of times, is coming the other way. Then they just stop, right in the middle of the road, blocking it completely, take out their phone and start making a call.
Now, I was the other side of the junction at that point, but clearly visible maybe 30m from the other vehicle, and my position and lack of turn signals implied that I was waiting to go down that road. They didn't even notice me for about half a minute.
When they eventually did, they pulled forward a bit to where there was a gap in the parked cars on one side (still chatting away on their phone) and started trying to reverse back into the space (still on the phone). I watched in horror as they came within probably an inch of the parked car just in front. Now, sure, they could have just been very good at manoeuvring their vehicle, but they'd have to be a pretty amazing driver to pass that close when at no point during the entire manoeuvre did they even look in that direction. Then they bumped up the kerb. Good thing the mother walking along the pavement with a pushchair had seen them and stopped well back, then. The driver proceeded to shuffle their vehicle around for probably another two minutes, chatting away throughout, until eventually they were far enough into the space that I could safely get past (though somehow they still managed to be nearly a foot away from the kerb, so good thing I was only a car trying to get past rather than something larger like an ambulance or fire engine, I guess).
It is a requirement for reaching driving test standard in the UK that a driver can perform that manoeuvre. If I'd been doing it in my car, I would have been off the road and into the space in maybe ten seconds, plus however long I'd had to wait to let the lady with the pushchair pass first just to be safe.
But I'm sure that just makes me the world's best driver and the guy in the 4x4 was just lucky to pass his test. Being on the phone surely had nothing to do with his apparent lack of awareness of other road users, a serious hazard on the pavement, or the position of other vehicles close to his own. And I'm sure his utter incompetence at getting his tank into the space (well, almost into the space, kind of, if we're being generous) had nothing to do with performing the whole manoeuvre one-handed or, at a few times, two-handed but with his head cocked at an angle to hold the phone so he couldn't look around instead.
Here in the UK we already have enough laws to cover this - using a non-hands free mobile phone whilst driving is illegal, and driving without due care and attention covers any other poor driving due to distraction of any kind, but requires you to actually be driving poorly.
I've shifted my position slightly on this over the years.
I used to be of the view that only a very small number of statutory driving offences should be required: dangerous driving, inconsiderate driving, driving without proper documentation/insurance, and that's about it. Allow each a reasonable but wide-ranging set of penalties to be used by the courts on a case-by-case basis, and you're done, right?
After reading a few discussions like this one, I realised the problem with that approach is that there's always That Guy who thinks he's the best driver in the world, and that none of the crazy things he's doing are dangerous or even inconsiderate to other road users, even though he's obviously much more likely to have an accident with serious consequences than most people. You know the guy, he's the one who thinks that running a red light several seconds late is fine because everyone who's now on green will take a second to get moving anyway, and that tailgating while flashing his lights aggressively at motorway speeds is harmless because he hasn't caused any accidents doing it yet.
This is the guy that specific laws, including the ones about mobile phone use, are aimed at. For similar reasons, I do think the government here made a mistake in banning only hand-held mobiles if they were going to ban mobiles at all. I understand that they were concerned about enforcement with hands-free kits, but if you remember when these laws first came in, all they really did was prompt 6ft high smiling cardboard people selling hands-free kits on the way into the supermarket with marketing claims like "Drive safe - use hands-free!". If you accept the evidence the government used to justify the ban in the first place as being reasonable, then that same evidence also showed that hands-free kits were almost as bad as hand-held, and they shouldn't have effectively encouraged hands-free use either.
And studies where people are actually driving in real world environments find that talking on the phone does not increase accidents.
I see a lot of people claiming "Studies show X", but no citations of actual studies that we can discuss in an informed way. Which one(s) are you talking about?
I don't disagree with anything you wrote there, but please consider that any technical limitations of early models like today's Glass will probably be overcome by better battery life and improved mobile connectivity tomorrow, at which point all the concerns you rightly raise about CCTV could apply to personal recording devices as well. Relying on the fact that it can't (yet) do something undesirable doesn't seem like a very good plan, because it's much more likely this kind of thing will be stopped now when it's a new idea and a lot of people find it creepy than in five or ten years if it's merely a quantitative extension of universal spying that is already happening.
The right to record what happens in a public environment is fundamental to keeping a society free.
So is the right to privacy, and something's got to give. Maybe the balance that has been convenient for your profession for the past few years is no longer appropriate for society as a whole as we learn to deal with the implications of new technologies, and maybe you're just the guy who's going to lose out. That sucks and I'm sorry for you, but it maybe it's a price we have to pay to avoid all of us living with Big Brother and his commercial partners analysing our every movement the moment we step outside our homes.
Given the track record of large tech organisations like Google when it comes to both privacy and their willingness to change terms and privacy policies dramatically and in their favour when it suits them, I personally think they exhausted any credibility they might have had there a long time ago. Moreover, given what we now know of various government organisations aggressively trying both to infiltrate these large tech organisations and to take direct control of devices with surveillance applications, we have to assume that even if organisations like Google don't voluntarily abuse the hardware, other hostile actors are trying to and have a fair chance of succeeding.
I don't like the idea that we should have to give up potentially useful technologies because of potential abuses, but as the saying goes, this is why we can't have nice things. I just don't think it's logical to treat such devices as anything other than a serious privacy threat any more.
That being the case, I think the most effective way to defend our privacy from such intrusions (apart from voting with our wallets by not buying these things ourselves) is to make those who do buy and use them around us feel as uncomfortable as possible about doing so and as unwelcome as possible in as many places as possible. Also, when Google post rather weak rebuttals to genuine concerns, like arguing as they do several times in the original blog post here that certain dangers aren't really that dangerous because they pinky-swear not to abuse the new technology, they can and should be called on both their own privacy track record and the kind of precedents they are trying to set where others who aren't under Google's control might follow.
Faced with a person who wears an HD button cam, however, they do not have this psychological response.. even though their every move may very well be recorded; ignorance truly is bliss in this case.
Also, it is highly unlikely that significant numbers of people are going to go fit covert recording devices to their clothes and then upload the results to a massive database for mining by a megacorp. The technology exists, but most people don't use it, because it's obviously creepy. No doubt quite a few people would challenge or object to it if they did discover it happening.
A lot of the objection to Google Glass is that it erodes standards of socially acceptable behaviour in this respect, and it does so at the will of an organisation who are openly hostile to anyone having privacy any more. Schmidt and his pals made their bed, now they have to lie in it, and that sound you can't quite make out is the million tiny violins of sympathy that aren't playing for them right now.
They can include whatever clauses they like, but they still won't override statute law.
Under the law in my country, a landlord can't just turn up and let himself into a property you're renting from him, other than under certain specific conditions that are typically emergencies. At a minimum, there are normally some basic requirements for giving notice and visiting at a reasonable time in other cases, even where there normal landlord's rights such as being able to inspect the property to check its current condition apply.
Given that the point here is an analogy with Microsoft just deciding to inspect someone's mail because they happen to host it, it's not a very accurate comparison. There are often specific laws covering rental/tenancy agreements, just as there are specific laws for mail sent via the US Postal Service or for common carriers. As far as I'm aware, there are no specific laws covering the kind of behaviour Microsoft has apparently engaged in here, so the question is more about contract law and any more general laws that might apply regarding privacy etc.
Maybe. My experience has been that the kind of people who don't install plug-ins in Firefox have mostly moved to Chrome or were always on IE anyway, while the people still using Firefox tend to have a bunch of plug-ins installed and something to improve the default tabs is often one of them. Obviously that experience might not be representative, but it's a very clear pattern among people I know, hence my comment.
And what if making the browser more like Chrome gets them more money because they get more users who want something like Chrome?
If they're confident that's the case, good luck to them, but they shouldn't be surprised when other users start installing plug-ins to put things back how they were or, if that's no longer possible, when someone forks the Firefox codebase and spins off a direct competitor. Firefox is an Open Source product, after all, and as far as I'm aware Mozilla Corporation have no special claim to any of it other than the branding.
The very existence of SASS and LESS prove CSS needs to be fixed.
I'd rather say their creation proved that CSS needed to be fixed. They came along and fixed it reasonably well, at least in those respects where they were also evidence of a problem in the first place.
Mozilla makes a lot of money, and it does it because users use Firefox. The fact that they currently make most of the money indirectly rather than from the users themselves does not change this, and upsetting lots of users by taking a product they like and making it worse is a terrible business strategy. Of course Mozilla doesn't owe Joe Randomuser exactly the browser they want, but it cuts both ways, and Joe Randomuser doesn't owe Mozilla a +1 in the number of users column next time they're renegotiating with Google either.
I like it when application refine things to make better use of space.
For users on small screens, that might be an advantage, though I'm slightly wondering how many people use the default versions of things like tabs rather than a plug-in anyway.
I hope they aren't doing it at the expense of stability in the UI, though. I use Firefox on big screens, so saving a few pixels here and there has little benefit to me, but moving everything around just because I "upgraded" is infuriating.
I was looking through this and thinking that just before Mr Schmidt's visit, perhaps all the students should have attended a talk from the school principal on the risks of modern life, including such important lessons as the dangers of addiction, how something that looks too good to be true usually is, how to keep your personal data safe on-line, and the importance of knowing who you're talking to and judging how much you should trust what they say. As an example of the latter, maybe all the kids should have been told how Eric Schmidt of Google doesn't think anyone should be doing anything they don't want others to know about, perhaps followed by a short history lesson on the persecution of minorities. Just one kid piping up with "Most worthwhile things in life aren't free, Mr Schmidt, so what's the catch?" would have been gold.
The original work, having entered the public domain, is free for anyone to enjoy. Anyone may also create derivative works from it.
For a specific derivative work, the new aspects are then subject to copyright in the normal way. Derivatives specifically of that work (i.e., not merely other derivative works of the original, but something that is based on the derived, copyrighted work) are similarly subject to copyright in the normal way.
There is nothing in copyright law anywhere I know that contradicts this, not even in the lasts-almost-forever jurisdictions. Anyone telling you otherwise might have expensive lawyers you can't afford to argue with, but they don't seem to have the law itself on their side. And yes, that system is broken IMHO, but as I've noted previously, it's broken much more widely than just copyright.
Incidentally, are you sure Disney didn't originate the blue genie representation? I can find plenty of references to the Aladdin story going back many decades before Disney's film, but nothing about that specific variation so far.
Also, while you keep referring to how ripe this system is for abuse, my google-fu has failed to locate any cases of Disney actually suing people just for writing a story about Aladdin based on the original work, either. Citations welcome.
Is a new unique work, put in the Public Domain by the author still in the Public Domain if someone alters it to improve on it?
Yes. That is the very essence of being in the public domain.
That you don't know how copyright works around derivative works doesn't mean it's not part of the law.
The Disney situation with Aladdin is a textbook example of what I'm talking about. It seems reasonable to me for them to claim copyright over their interpretation of Aladdin -- a specific film they created, or the particular style they use to depict the character visually. These are original creations of their own making. But the idea that no-one else can tell a story that was first published at least a century ago because copyright somehow forbids it is crazy, an absurd abuse of the legal mechanism, and as I mentioned, it seems to be primarily a US thing where Disney vs. Little Guy is unlikely to end well in practice no matter the merits of Little Guy's case.
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Once software is made, it is trivial to make enough for everyone.
It's that first part that is the kicker, though, isn't it? It's great that digital works can be reproduced and distributed with very low marginal costs, but you still have to cover the sunk costs of the initial development. Those are huge for this kind of software project, and they are typically paid in advance and with no guaranteed level of return. The economic model has to take that into account or it won't work.
No one is suggesting that Microsoft should be compelled to do anything they don't want to do.
Of course they are. They are saying that as well as developing their code to make new products that they then sell (which they presumably want to do) Microsoft should also incur an indefinite, substantial, unfunded obligation to help people competing with those new products and using Microsoft's own code from their earlier products to do it. There is absolutely no business benefit to Microsoft for doing this, and the overheads involved are far higher than could reasonably be justified on the grounds of promoting general competition in the market.
That's a fair point, but I think it's more analogous to requiring Microsoft to disclose details of things like APIs and data formats required for interoperability (as others in this discussion have suggested) than to requiring Microsoft to disclose their source code. I think promoting interoperability and compatibility is generally beneficial, and as such I don't have the same objections to requiring a reasonable level API/format disclosure, where "reasonable" takes into account both the usefulness of any given disclosure and the burden imposed by requiring it.
But two swing out of the realm of opinion, you compare Windows XP to "OpenSource darlings like firefox" whose long-term support is measured in "months, not years". This is a bad comparison.
Fair enough, though it wasn't really meant as a direct comparison, more an illustration of how much effort is required to support old software for extended periods.
A better comparison would be Ubuntu LTS which includes firefox and whose support is measured in years not months.
It is. In fact, the period is now five years for both desktop and server versions.
Again, just to put that in perspective, Windows 7 (two generations after Windows XP) was released around 4.5 years ago.
I think it would be a great idea to require Microsoft to "open up" even if it was outside of their interests. Hell if Windows 8 could not compete with community supported open source XP, it still means that people get better software :)
Well, it would be great, in the short term, for everyone except Microsoft. But who is going to build the next software product that is so successful that almost everyone uses it for nearly a decade in that world?
Perhaps if Microsoft hadn't developed a series of OS's that treated security like a two-bit whore, none of this would be a major issue.
That's just silly. Microsoft has done a huge amount to further software security over the years, and objectively their track record isn't bad at all compared to other large software vendors. They had the misfortune to be the biggest target in town for a long time (today that "honour" probably goes to Android) and so had to deal with both a relatively high number of attacks and a lot of bad press when something got through.
it's a pretty easy barrier if enforced on _everyone_.
Supporting consumer grade software that is sold for ~$100 a time indefinitely, including providing full internal technical details to arbitrary additional parties, is a "pretty easy barrier"? I'm sorry, but that is absurd.
There are people in this discussion suggesting that someone who doesn't want to comply with such rules can go **** themselves and just give up on entering the US market. Well, guess what? They probably would. The burden imposed by this kind of requirement would almost certainly be prohibitive in cost. A vendor such as Microsoft would therefore do better to sacrifice the entire US market if it meant avoiding both an eternal unfunded mandate to support everything they ever sold and giving up their trade secrets to all their competitors.
There are also people in this discussion pointing out that other industries, such as automotive manufacture, involve a much higher level of safety standards and engineering approval. That is true, but cars typically cost 2-4 orders of magnitude more than commercial off-the-shelf software products, and they have working lifetimes that are probably shorter than Windows XP's 12+ years in many cases. Moreover, the auto manufacturers still aren't required to disclose the keys to the kingdom to the degree that is suggested here.
I'm all for developing good quality software, and if you're running a long-term software business then I think providing a reasonable degree of free-of-charge support to your existing customers is probably a good investment. But providing heavyweight support has a large cost, so unless you as a customer are willing either to regulate the industry and pay N times as much for your software purchases up-front or to pay the true cost of ongoing support via proper support contracts, I don't think it's realistic to expect that vendors will just cover that cost indefinitely out of their own pockets.
In fact, in the entire history of software development, that has almost never happened. Apple have released the first version of OS X around the same time as Microsoft released Windows XP, yet Apple have aggressively promoted numerous upgrades, most of which cost a significant amount of money, since that time, and somehow I suspect you'd have trouble getting full support for an original OS X system today. And to put this all in perspective Open Source darlings like Mozilla Firefox have "long term support" releases with lifetimes measured in months, not years. It's actually remarkable that Microsoft have offered free support to Windows XP for as long as they have, despite releasing not one but three successor generations of the product during that period.
It doesn't sound like they're using web apps, at least not yet. From TFA:
At this stage we're still going to be using Office, Outlook and Exchange, but we're planning to look at a move to a cloud-based productivity and email tool later in the year and that would clearly be an evaluation of Google Apps and Office 365
So paying the compensation is the punishment. Much like libel.
Right. But doesn't that give us the same problem as with libel? That is, the law works on a "no harm, no foul" basis, but it only considers monetary or otherwise quantifiable losses to be harm. With both privacy and defamation, the nastiest consequences of the antisocial behaviour often have nothing to do with money at all. If we're limiting the scope of the debate to possible civil actions and compensation measured by financial losses, I think we're missing the point of why privacy matters. That said, personally I'm very happy to see any move to take privacy more seriously at a political level.
From TFA:
Under the proposal, courts would be able to compensate victims, but the ALRC said it would not propose penalties for offenders.
It doesn't seem clear that they are proposing much of a ban on anything, really. This looks like more of a compensation scheme if someone does infringe on your privacy in this kind of way and you then suffer some significant, financially quantifiable harm from it.
I would argue that many/most infringements on privacy (or the chilling effect that comes from the threat of having your privacy infringed) are not so easily quantifiable, that the law in many places has little meaningful recognition of non-financial damage, and that some behaviours can't be fixed by compensation after the fact anyway. It doesn't look like they're going as far as addressing these issues so far, though.
Sadly, there are still a lot of people who will claim that even in cases like you describe, the phone had nothing to do with the bad driving.
I'll share a personal anecdote from yesterday. I was driving on some back streets on my way to a friend's house, the kind of roads where cars are parked down both sides so you've only got space for one car at a time in between (traffic can't pass in opposite directions without someone pulling over to give way).
As I'm coming up to a crossroads, someone in a 4x4, a big vehicle that is difficult to fit down these roads at the best of times, is coming the other way. Then they just stop, right in the middle of the road, blocking it completely, take out their phone and start making a call.
Now, I was the other side of the junction at that point, but clearly visible maybe 30m from the other vehicle, and my position and lack of turn signals implied that I was waiting to go down that road. They didn't even notice me for about half a minute.
When they eventually did, they pulled forward a bit to where there was a gap in the parked cars on one side (still chatting away on their phone) and started trying to reverse back into the space (still on the phone). I watched in horror as they came within probably an inch of the parked car just in front. Now, sure, they could have just been very good at manoeuvring their vehicle, but they'd have to be a pretty amazing driver to pass that close when at no point during the entire manoeuvre did they even look in that direction. Then they bumped up the kerb. Good thing the mother walking along the pavement with a pushchair had seen them and stopped well back, then. The driver proceeded to shuffle their vehicle around for probably another two minutes, chatting away throughout, until eventually they were far enough into the space that I could safely get past (though somehow they still managed to be nearly a foot away from the kerb, so good thing I was only a car trying to get past rather than something larger like an ambulance or fire engine, I guess).
It is a requirement for reaching driving test standard in the UK that a driver can perform that manoeuvre. If I'd been doing it in my car, I would have been off the road and into the space in maybe ten seconds, plus however long I'd had to wait to let the lady with the pushchair pass first just to be safe.
But I'm sure that just makes me the world's best driver and the guy in the 4x4 was just lucky to pass his test. Being on the phone surely had nothing to do with his apparent lack of awareness of other road users, a serious hazard on the pavement, or the position of other vehicles close to his own. And I'm sure his utter incompetence at getting his tank into the space (well, almost into the space, kind of, if we're being generous) had nothing to do with performing the whole manoeuvre one-handed or, at a few times, two-handed but with his head cocked at an angle to hold the phone so he couldn't look around instead.
Here in the UK we already have enough laws to cover this - using a non-hands free mobile phone whilst driving is illegal, and driving without due care and attention covers any other poor driving due to distraction of any kind, but requires you to actually be driving poorly.
I've shifted my position slightly on this over the years.
I used to be of the view that only a very small number of statutory driving offences should be required: dangerous driving, inconsiderate driving, driving without proper documentation/insurance, and that's about it. Allow each a reasonable but wide-ranging set of penalties to be used by the courts on a case-by-case basis, and you're done, right?
After reading a few discussions like this one, I realised the problem with that approach is that there's always That Guy who thinks he's the best driver in the world, and that none of the crazy things he's doing are dangerous or even inconsiderate to other road users, even though he's obviously much more likely to have an accident with serious consequences than most people. You know the guy, he's the one who thinks that running a red light several seconds late is fine because everyone who's now on green will take a second to get moving anyway, and that tailgating while flashing his lights aggressively at motorway speeds is harmless because he hasn't caused any accidents doing it yet.
This is the guy that specific laws, including the ones about mobile phone use, are aimed at. For similar reasons, I do think the government here made a mistake in banning only hand-held mobiles if they were going to ban mobiles at all. I understand that they were concerned about enforcement with hands-free kits, but if you remember when these laws first came in, all they really did was prompt 6ft high smiling cardboard people selling hands-free kits on the way into the supermarket with marketing claims like "Drive safe - use hands-free!". If you accept the evidence the government used to justify the ban in the first place as being reasonable, then that same evidence also showed that hands-free kits were almost as bad as hand-held, and they shouldn't have effectively encouraged hands-free use either.
And studies where people are actually driving in real world environments find that talking on the phone does not increase accidents.
I see a lot of people claiming "Studies show X", but no citations of actual studies that we can discuss in an informed way. Which one(s) are you talking about?
I don't disagree with anything you wrote there, but please consider that any technical limitations of early models like today's Glass will probably be overcome by better battery life and improved mobile connectivity tomorrow, at which point all the concerns you rightly raise about CCTV could apply to personal recording devices as well. Relying on the fact that it can't (yet) do something undesirable doesn't seem like a very good plan, because it's much more likely this kind of thing will be stopped now when it's a new idea and a lot of people find it creepy than in five or ten years if it's merely a quantitative extension of universal spying that is already happening.
The right to record what happens in a public environment is fundamental to keeping a society free.
So is the right to privacy, and something's got to give. Maybe the balance that has been convenient for your profession for the past few years is no longer appropriate for society as a whole as we learn to deal with the implications of new technologies, and maybe you're just the guy who's going to lose out. That sucks and I'm sorry for you, but it maybe it's a price we have to pay to avoid all of us living with Big Brother and his commercial partners analysing our every movement the moment we step outside our homes.
Given the track record of large tech organisations like Google when it comes to both privacy and their willingness to change terms and privacy policies dramatically and in their favour when it suits them, I personally think they exhausted any credibility they might have had there a long time ago. Moreover, given what we now know of various government organisations aggressively trying both to infiltrate these large tech organisations and to take direct control of devices with surveillance applications, we have to assume that even if organisations like Google don't voluntarily abuse the hardware, other hostile actors are trying to and have a fair chance of succeeding.
I don't like the idea that we should have to give up potentially useful technologies because of potential abuses, but as the saying goes, this is why we can't have nice things. I just don't think it's logical to treat such devices as anything other than a serious privacy threat any more.
That being the case, I think the most effective way to defend our privacy from such intrusions (apart from voting with our wallets by not buying these things ourselves) is to make those who do buy and use them around us feel as uncomfortable as possible about doing so and as unwelcome as possible in as many places as possible. Also, when Google post rather weak rebuttals to genuine concerns, like arguing as they do several times in the original blog post here that certain dangers aren't really that dangerous because they pinky-swear not to abuse the new technology, they can and should be called on both their own privacy track record and the kind of precedents they are trying to set where others who aren't under Google's control might follow.
Faced with a person who wears an HD button cam, however, they do not have this psychological response.. even though their every move may very well be recorded; ignorance truly is bliss in this case.
Also, it is highly unlikely that significant numbers of people are going to go fit covert recording devices to their clothes and then upload the results to a massive database for mining by a megacorp. The technology exists, but most people don't use it, because it's obviously creepy. No doubt quite a few people would challenge or object to it if they did discover it happening.
A lot of the objection to Google Glass is that it erodes standards of socially acceptable behaviour in this respect, and it does so at the will of an organisation who are openly hostile to anyone having privacy any more. Schmidt and his pals made their bed, now they have to lie in it, and that sound you can't quite make out is the million tiny violins of sympathy that aren't playing for them right now.
They can include whatever clauses they like, but they still won't override statute law.
Under the law in my country, a landlord can't just turn up and let himself into a property you're renting from him, other than under certain specific conditions that are typically emergencies. At a minimum, there are normally some basic requirements for giving notice and visiting at a reasonable time in other cases, even where there normal landlord's rights such as being able to inspect the property to check its current condition apply.
Given that the point here is an analogy with Microsoft just deciding to inspect someone's mail because they happen to host it, it's not a very accurate comparison. There are often specific laws covering rental/tenancy agreements, just as there are specific laws for mail sent via the US Postal Service or for common carriers. As far as I'm aware, there are no specific laws covering the kind of behaviour Microsoft has apparently engaged in here, so the question is more about contract law and any more general laws that might apply regarding privacy etc.
A landlord can go into your apartment without your permission also.
Not in my country, he can't, other than under quite strictly defined conditions such as to effect repairs in an emergency.
What you say might be true in the US, but Europe typically has stronger privacy safeguards.
Maybe. My experience has been that the kind of people who don't install plug-ins in Firefox have mostly moved to Chrome or were always on IE anyway, while the people still using Firefox tend to have a bunch of plug-ins installed and something to improve the default tabs is often one of them. Obviously that experience might not be representative, but it's a very clear pattern among people I know, hence my comment.
And what if making the browser more like Chrome gets them more money because they get more users who want something like Chrome?
If they're confident that's the case, good luck to them, but they shouldn't be surprised when other users start installing plug-ins to put things back how they were or, if that's no longer possible, when someone forks the Firefox codebase and spins off a direct competitor. Firefox is an Open Source product, after all, and as far as I'm aware Mozilla Corporation have no special claim to any of it other than the branding.
The very existence of SASS and LESS prove CSS needs to be fixed.
I'd rather say their creation proved that CSS needed to be fixed. They came along and fixed it reasonably well, at least in those respects where they were also evidence of a problem in the first place.
Mozilla makes a lot of money, and it does it because users use Firefox. The fact that they currently make most of the money indirectly rather than from the users themselves does not change this, and upsetting lots of users by taking a product they like and making it worse is a terrible business strategy. Of course Mozilla doesn't owe Joe Randomuser exactly the browser they want, but it cuts both ways, and Joe Randomuser doesn't owe Mozilla a +1 in the number of users column next time they're renegotiating with Google either.
I like it when application refine things to make better use of space.
For users on small screens, that might be an advantage, though I'm slightly wondering how many people use the default versions of things like tabs rather than a plug-in anyway.
I hope they aren't doing it at the expense of stability in the UI, though. I use Firefox on big screens, so saving a few pixels here and there has little benefit to me, but moving everything around just because I "upgraded" is infuriating.
I was looking through this and thinking that just before Mr Schmidt's visit, perhaps all the students should have attended a talk from the school principal on the risks of modern life, including such important lessons as the dangers of addiction, how something that looks too good to be true usually is, how to keep your personal data safe on-line, and the importance of knowing who you're talking to and judging how much you should trust what they say. As an example of the latter, maybe all the kids should have been told how Eric Schmidt of Google doesn't think anyone should be doing anything they don't want others to know about, perhaps followed by a short history lesson on the persecution of minorities. Just one kid piping up with "Most worthwhile things in life aren't free, Mr Schmidt, so what's the catch?" would have been gold.
I don't see any problem here.
The original work, having entered the public domain, is free for anyone to enjoy. Anyone may also create derivative works from it.
For a specific derivative work, the new aspects are then subject to copyright in the normal way. Derivatives specifically of that work (i.e., not merely other derivative works of the original, but something that is based on the derived, copyrighted work) are similarly subject to copyright in the normal way.
There is nothing in copyright law anywhere I know that contradicts this, not even in the lasts-almost-forever jurisdictions. Anyone telling you otherwise might have expensive lawyers you can't afford to argue with, but they don't seem to have the law itself on their side. And yes, that system is broken IMHO, but as I've noted previously, it's broken much more widely than just copyright.
Incidentally, are you sure Disney didn't originate the blue genie representation? I can find plenty of references to the Aladdin story going back many decades before Disney's film, but nothing about that specific variation so far.
Also, while you keep referring to how ripe this system is for abuse, my google-fu has failed to locate any cases of Disney actually suing people just for writing a story about Aladdin based on the original work, either. Citations welcome.
Is a new unique work, put in the Public Domain by the author still in the Public Domain if someone alters it to improve on it?
Yes. That is the very essence of being in the public domain.
That you don't know how copyright works around derivative works doesn't mean it's not part of the law.
The Disney situation with Aladdin is a textbook example of what I'm talking about. It seems reasonable to me for them to claim copyright over their interpretation of Aladdin -- a specific film they created, or the particular style they use to depict the character visually. These are original creations of their own making. But the idea that no-one else can tell a story that was first published at least a century ago because copyright somehow forbids it is crazy, an absurd abuse of the legal mechanism, and as I mentioned, it seems to be primarily a US thing where Disney vs. Little Guy is unlikely to end well in practice no matter the merits of Little Guy's case.