I'd assert a right to not have one's time wasted by the government is a fundamental human right.
As nice as that sounds, I don't think it's entirely realistic.
For example, would you want a court system where juries were composed only of people who self-selected as volunteers for jury service? You did use the expression "time wasted" so perhaps this kind of thing isn't something you'd consider a waste of time, but in that case, where do you draw the line? And of course in a rather different example, the very premise of prison as a penalty is that it is the government deliberately wasting your time.
Now, if you'd suggested that governments shouldn't be able to demand one citizen's time significantly more than another without some reasonable, independent benchmark, such as being convicted through a fair judicial process before being sent to jail, that might be different. But then there's still the question of what constitutes a reasonable, independent benchmark in for example the jury service situation, and if expecting everyone to do their civic duty by serving on a jury if randomly called is reasonable, you could also argue that giving up time to serve as a witness or to defend yourself is reasonable to ensure the effective functioning of the court system.
Perhaps there would be mileage in something demanding reasonable equality in any burden placed on citizens unless they have been convicted of an offence, and additionally placing limits on the total burden and requiring full compensation where time spent is not reasonably avoidable (for example, if someone has been reasonably charged with an offence, resulting in time spent on a trial, but they subsequently defended themselves successfully in court).
For the traffic offenses, can the UK national or local governments put the money for these fines into their budget? If the money goes ANYWHERE into the budget, that creates a major ethical conflict of interest
Remember that you're talking about organisations that use "safety cameras" that are often paid for by the fines they generate, yet which would generate no money if they succeeded in their claimed goals of making drivers go more slowly, stopping people running red lights, etc. A large part of the automated traffic enforcement industry is built on fundamental conflicts of interest.
Loss of earnings is trickier. I suppose this would again be an award in equity and would only really apply in crown cases (because civil actions can't have imprisonment as a punishment in normal circumstances). Just having to appear in court would not normally let you claim for loss of earnings (and that's a good thing, as it stops a rich man using that as a way to dissuade a poor man from bringing a case).
For private civil litigation, maybe. For crown prosecutions, where someone has been compelled to appear in court (presumably to answer charges against them because they've been arrested or otherwise identified by the police/CPS/other public services) I tend to think that anyone found not guilty should automatically be compensated for any and all losses they have suffered as a result of their appearance, including any distress it has caused.
This would surely be expensive and result in bringing fewer borderline cases to court, but the alternative is that you have a system/state where an individual can be disadvantaged despite having done nothing wrong. That is a line that I personally don't think any legal system should be allowed to cross lightly, for exactly the same reasons that in more serious criminal cases there is a requirement to prove guilt beyond any reasonable doubt before punishing someone.
Minor traffic offences are notorious for this effect in the UK. The cost to challenge a ticket for perhaps £30 or £60 that was issued as a result of a camera or a dubiously incentivised parking attendant is often higher than the financial cost of just eating the fine and not wasting any more time on it. This also means that a significant number of people probably have penalty points on their driving licences that they didn't deserve. A lot of public authorities have atrocious records for issuing tickets that are successfully challenged on appeal. Obviously there are plenty of chancers trying their luck, but if 1 in 3 of your appeals is overturning the original ticket on a scale of thousands of tickets a year, it doesn't speak well of how accurately the original tickets are being issued and how many more innocent people are being wrongly penalised but not challenging it for the reasons above.
For lawyers' fees, that makes a certain amount of sense, I agree. But it's also why I didn't spend any money on a lawyer and instead spent dozens of hours wading through legal process documentation and court forms and so on myself (including many pages similar to the source you gave, from the likes of Citizens Advice and from the courts themselves). That is time that directly cost me income, as a freelancer who was working by the hour and would certainly have been working for some of that time, but I have absolutely no way of proving any such loss in court because by the nature of freelance work I had no contractual "standard hours" or similar provisions to cite.
I'm quite sure the other party, a professional organisation who managed to find a different person to respond to me and a different version of events every time I wrote to them, were well aware of this. After all, those people were probably going to be paid to be at the office anyway, so writing fob-me-off letters cost them nothing, while writing carefully worded letters based on my written records of exactly what actually happened cost me a lot, relative to the amount in dispute in the first place.
This is why I'm a little sceptical of the reply by "History's Coming To", suggesting that he/she "could make quite a nice living from just sitting in court and winning cases which are meant to be inconveniencing me".
Generally the losing party has to pay the legal costs of the winning party (i.e. pay for your time if you're representing yourself)
I guess it's whether the second part really falls under the first that I'm questioning.
On another occasion, I got ripped off myself, for a modest but significant amount of money. It seemed like it should be a straightforward case: they took a deposit for something, then tried to fundamentally change the deal, and then repeatedly contradicted themselves in writing when I called them on it. I spent considerable time carefully documenting everything as this was all happening and reading up on small claims procedures.
However, I couldn't find anything to suggest that I would get any compensation for the time I was spending even if I won a case, because that time didn't necessarily represent a direct loss of income, and apparently my time and inconvenience has no value in the eyes of the law even if paying a lawyer a far greater sum to spend far less time looking at the case would do because it's then money that I've personally had to spend. That meant the amount of money I'd "lost" (if you just took the time I'd spent and multiplied it by my normal hourly rate, as a relatively objective measure of its worth) was already worth more than the amount of money I was out in the first place, before I'd even filed any paperwork to start the court case.
I would love for someone who is actually a UK lawyer to tell me that I misunderstood this. It irritates me greatly that the other party basically got away with something (and from stories I've heard since, I was neither the first nor the last person they pulled this on, either) and all I really did was teach them that people who send letters as the first step in a formal legal action will probably go away rather than actually take you to court if you just waste enough of their time. Unfortunately, again it was a situation where spending money to take on a lawyer would have cost a significant fraction of the disputed amount, so all I could go on was the (not always helpful) public documentation available from the court web sites etc.
in the UK at least I can claim loss of earnings from the litigant when I win the case
Is that true in general, or only in specific circumstances?
I was called as a third party witness in a minor court case a while back. One of the things that surprised me was that the accused, having been found not guilty, did not seem to be entitled to much in the way of compensation at all. This was a criminal case, though, not a civil one.
In that case, the defendant had been charged with an offence, presumably suffered more than a year of distress with the case hanging over them before it was finally resolved, spent whatever time and money it cost them to mount their own defence (they represented themselves in court), and obviously incurred the lost time and inconvenience of having to attend court itself. I was genuinely disappointed in our legal system when it seemed they were sent on their way as if they should somehow be grateful that, after suffering all of that distress and inconvenience, at least they hadn't been found guilty of what they'd been charged with and fined/thrown in jail.
First crysis' biggest problem was the fact that they hid a lot of gameplay depth in the game, but there was no easy way to access it. I first played through the game essentially never activating maximum strength, as I didn't like melee. Then I read on what suit modes things actually did and I raged at how little it was explained in game.
Same here, but TBH even when I did find out some of the effects, the whole suit thing just seemed like a gimmick that made little meaningful difference to the gameplay. For example, regardless of suit settings, if there was a way to melee against more than a small number of opponents at higher difficulty settings without getting fragged almost instantly, I never found it, but if you had only one or two opponents then you didn't really need the suit anyway. It might have reduced the risk of a frustrating reload but it didn't seem to enable many new tactics or any new strategies.
(And BTW, what's with all these modern games where you have to reach some artificial checkpoint to save instead of just hitting quick save whenever you want? I don't tend to buy modern AAA PC titles anyway -- they all seem to come with built-in malware and I can't remember the last time I bought one that didn't have enjoyment-spoiling crash bugs -- but it seems like console-friendly dumbing down is now the norm. How sad.)
The right to privacy, which includes the right to not hand one's passwords over to the government, ever, under any circumstances, is a fundamental human right.
Not according to European human rights law, it's not.
And even ignoring the legal position and looking at the ethical situation, things are never so clear cut: the "fundamental" rights of one individual can clash with other "fundamental" rights of another individual, and then some sort of balance must be found between them where inevitably at least one party's rights will not be fully respected.
Encrypt everything by default, and allow nothing unencrypted, just needs to become default behavior in all operating systems, and become the de-facto standard, for everything, for security purposes, before anyone else can act.
The trouble is, while passing good laws often requires a lot of time and debate, passing knee-jerk reactionary laws based on lobbying in technical fields that most legislators frankly don't understand can be done almost in moments. It's already a criminal offence here in the UK to refuse to hand over a password if the Powers That Be want to know what your encrypted communications say, and the law was widely criticised for (among other things) being about as black-and-white as you could possibly be. For example, minor details like whether the password you've been required to provide actually exists tend not to be relevant to any defence.
So in my admittedly pessimistic view of how these things currently tend to work in practice, I don't see your "default behaviour in all operating systems" as being even remotely possible until the authorities and in particular the legislators are far, far more clued up on technical issues than most of them are today. Plausible preemptive countermeasures might include whoever first creates such an operating system being labelled an $EMOTIVE_THREAT and getting banned from trading/selling in the jurisdiction, anyone installing such an OS being labelled a criminal under those same knee-jerk blanket-ban laws I talked about before, or possibly more insidious things like Microsoft/Apple/etc. cutting a RIM-style deal where their "secure" systems weren't really secure at all (but of course any more secure/trustworthy platform like, say, Linux, is now an $EMOTIVE_THREAT, according to lots of "industry experts" probably indirectly funded by the aforementioned Microsoft/Apple/etc.).
The basic problem with this whole situation is that there is no good answer that always works. There really are bad people in the world, and there really are legitimate reasons that security services would want to intercept their communications, so any argument for universally encrypting anything is always going to run into some degree of resistance for sensible reasons that few reasonable people would disagree with even if they might feel that on balance the costs outweigh the benefits. But as we've seen on many occasions already, such legitimate reasons are all too easily twisted into mere commercial power plays when governments and big business mix. Sadly, but honestly, I see no reason to expect anything better to happen as long as the political status quo in most of the western world remains.
I understand what you're saying, but just remember the old warning: you have to be lucky every time, and they only have to be lucky once. Everyone makes mistakes, even world class black hats, and most people ripping off the latest movie aren't world class black hats even if they think they're smart because they heard the terms "proxy" and "VPN" once.
This will only speed up the race to fully encrypted comms.
Which will promptly be declared illegal in itself and probably with worse penalties than the original copyright infringement, unless you're connecting to an organisation sufficiently rich to allow it like a bank or government. Consider the way that merely circumventing technical measures protecting a copyrighted work is enough to make your actions illegal in many countries now even if your actual use of the work would have otherwise been completely legal. Just mention something about terrorism or child pornography and add the copyright thing as a rider, and every bought-and-paid-for politician this side of Mars will be voting for it to protect the public or something.
Copyright reform needs to happen before we get to everyone encrypting everything by default, or it's in danger of being the catalyst for something far worse than anything the **AA and their international brethren have ever done.
What were those, the famous last words of a few Anonymous script kiddies right before they got arrested?
Finding someone who is "anonymous" on the Internet is hard, in the same way that cracking a new hardware-based DRM scheme is hard. It can take a lot of work, at least if you're the first person trying to do it, but ultimately trying to establish two-way communications over the Internet and yet remain completely anonymous is just as futile as trying to lock up content that you're also showing to someone. There may be many levels of indirection that are difficult to follow, but it's impossible to do what you actually need to do and yet still remain 100% safe from hostile activity.
Somehow, I suspect that if you downloaded Linux over BT but with the filename skyfall.iso you'd still find yourself answering someone's accusation (or just getting black marked without any opportunity to answer). How these systems tend to work is unfortunately rather well known, since Big Media have screwed up so many times by going after perfectly legitimate and legal activities that were a bit too close to some keyword they naively searched for.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use XML."
Now they have <grammar:quantified-entity><quantity type='integer'><literal type='integer' base='10'>2</literal></quantity><entity type='noun'>problems</entity></grammar:quantified-entity>.
Well, I mentioned a whole bunch of areas in earlier posts, not just rounded corners; the rounded corners issue includes a whole string of bugs over an extended period, as you could tell if you bothered to follow the link in my previous post; those rounded corners still don't render very well in some cases; it wasn't possible to work around some of the problems at all without resorted to using graphics the old school way; some of the problems weren't edge cases but the most basic use of the feature; and playing the "CSS3 isn't finished yet" card is like playing the "HTML5 isn't finished yet" card, i.e., something you can't credibly do if you're advocating a browser that pushes a new release every six weeks and claims better compliance with those (not yet finished) standards than everyone else as probably its biggest advantage.
But at least you were right about... No, actually, every single point in your post was wrong. Well, except for the weeping part, I guess. I appreciate your sympathy; developing for Chrome can indeed bring a grown man to tears at times.:-)
If the OP really means what the community as a whole needs rather than one useful thing for part of that community, then ironically I think you've just nailed it: more than anything else, the community needs a way to match up willing and able contributors with projects that could benefit from their contributions.
To do that, the OP could develop a simple database that understands things like:
different kinds of contribution ("I want to help with programming")
technical skills ("I program C++ pretty well, and a bit of Ruby")
application domains ("I like graphics-related projects")
levels of difficulty ("this is a million-lines project" => it will take a while to get into and might need significant infrastructure installed to work on it)
availability ("I can spare an hour or two a week" => probably better to help with small things on smaller, more accessible projects).
Provide some sort of keyword store (extension: recognise related entries/common aliases) or defined scale for each property, let projects say what they need and volunteers say what they're willing to contribute, and help people get matched up.
This has the handy advantage for the OP of being readily scalable from a simple proof of concept with a simple native or web-based UI right up to a full-blown and genuinely useful service if you can find a way of getting it hosted properly. It might help particularly with contribution in areas other than programming, which in practice is often where OSS projects run by volunteers for free start to fall behind commercial projects run by businesses with cross-disciplinary teams.
Not fixing a bug for a long time is not a "stable target". It's a failure to fix a bug
It's both, though if if there's a simple workaround available, sometimes the stability aspect is actually the more important in terms of being able to build working sites and web apps on the platform.
The real killer is when bugs are introduced, which is why I'm so down on the six-weekly cycle of Chrome and Firefox. They keep breaking stuff that used to work. To be fair, often these things are cosmetic, and while they're mildly irritating, they probably get fixed again six weeks later and no real harm is done. But sometimes the regression isn't just cosmetic, it stops things working at all. And then it isn't Google or Mozilla whose guys get paged at 10pm because my client's customers can't use the web app my clients paid for. (Would you like to guess why we won't include those browsers in our support contracts any more?)
A "different" box model. Yeesh. No, I'm sure you're right about this.
Even IE6 supported a standard-compliant mode that used the W3C box model. Remember where "quirks mode" came from? All you had to do was put a valid doctype on your page.
Moreover, to the extent that it applied since early CSS wasn't as uniform in allowing things like padding and margins to be specified anyway, pretty much all the browsers used to use that traditional model. It wasn't just IE, Netscape did the same. The W3C didn't standardise the way the major browsers worked.
So it's rather unfair to attack IE as if it was somehow either going it alone or defying the existence of then-new standards.
Still, if the traditional box model was such a dumb idea, at least it's dead now. That's why the CSS3 UI module provides a box-sizing property that allows the stylesheet author to switch explicitly to using an old-IE-style model (they called it border-box), which is supported in every major browser of recent years (including IE8+).
Even popular web design bloggers like Jon Hicks and Chris Coyier have promoted the border-box model as a useful tool, and obviously I agree with them. It makes far more sense if you're trying to implement a moderately complex page layout, particularly in the era of responsive/adaptive designs, to have the assigned width of an element reflect the total width it needs including all visible parts.
One day we'll surely all see the light.
As far as the box model thing goes, most of the world saw the light at least 3-4 years ago, even if you didn't notice.
As far as rapid release cycles go, we're not there yet, but I think the push-back from people who need to get real work done will start to overtake the new-shiny factor that makes for fun blog posts fairly soon. Lots of people do get the point anyway, but it's becoming more obvious as blog posts promoting new shiny that only works in WebKit or (less often) only works in Gecko are starting to come along, and more and more people are noticing that this is just IE-vs-Netscape all over again, but with more browsers this time.
Speaking as a senior "web guy" who is a large contributor to JS library, if you're getting that sort of response it's for a reason and you have yet to graduate from "web guy".
Standard way to make yourself look foolish on the Internet #735: Make a comment assuming someone with a different point of view to you must somehow be an inexperienced junior guy, and then provide direct evidence that the other guys knows a lot more about the situation than you do.
There are bugs, but they are minor and occur in experimental implementations. Most of the issues rise with sandboxed features and implementations of HTML5, CSS3, and Canvas.
That simply isn't true. There have been numerous basic rendering bugs in Chrome, many based on CSS2.1 features that have been standard for years. Of course, there have also been quite a few in common CSS3 things like rounded corners and gradients as well, which are hardly experimental any more. And while there have been bugs, still present in the latest release today, in high profile additions like HTML5 media support, there have been some horrible regressions lately in old school areas like integrating with a Java plug-in too.
As I've just pointed out to someone else, this is not a matter of personal opinion or some sort of subjective view based on private data. The bug trackers are public, and you're just as capable as I am of googling any of the above areas with the words "Chrome bug" and finding direct links to those bug trackers that will validate my claims. Whether you chose to do so and improve your knowledge or you prefer to assume you know best and write hostile comments to someone on the Internet you don't even know is up to you -- it's not as if you're going to fool anyone else who does do that into thinking I'm some crazy guy, and obviously your bad assumptions aren't going to convince me that bugs I've got repeatable test cases for don't really exist -- but if you're really a senior web guy perhaps you should consider the more enlightened option.
You do not do "real" work and have no "real" clients especially if you're targeting primarily for IE. Why this shit gets modded up, I have no idea.
As the old saying goes, if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, they probably know something you don't. As I said, you might consider the possibility that you have our roles reversed, and that your own lack of real world experience with both debugging Chrome issues and negotiating contracts with major clients is showing.
The bug trackers relevant to Chrome are public. You don't need me to post bug reports, you could just google any of the example areas I mentioned and find several different ones for yourself by looking at the first page of results.
It's a shame you didn't do that, but in a way you made my original point for me: far too many people come along every time this topic is raised on most Internet forums and just attack the critics in a knee-jerk reaction, instead of considering whether actually the criticism might be valid and making even the slightest effort to find out.
You blame Firefox and Chrome for being buggy. You admit that IE has bugs and target it exclusively.
Once again, you don't seem to be reading what I'm writing before going on the attack.
We will not officially support either Mozilla or Chrome in contracts because they are rapidly moving targets. All browsers have bugs, but when the bugs they have can change every few weeks, it's simply not possible to run a proper testing programme for a major project and give any meaningful guarantee at the end of it that your work will still support Firefox or Chrome after the next update that will be no more than six weeks away. With IE, the time between major releases is long enough to make testing against and then claiming to support certain versions a meaningful concept.
Beyond that you're bitching that "I shouldn't have to support Chrome for free!"
You keep writing things like that, but I haven't talked about money at any point in this conversation, other than in direct reply to points you introduced yourself.
All I'm doing here is supporting TFA, which expresses a view I think should be more widely understood rather than all the nauseating hero worship that tends to go on.
I don't know how long you've been in the business, but if your big beef is font rendering, you don't remember very far back.
And now the ad hominems based on silly assumptions start. I've been developing web sites since NCSA Mosaic was state of the art. And while font rendering is hardly my "big beef" -- I have plenty of criticisms to make about Chrome's support for CSS and basic rendering, and this is merely one of them -- that poor rendering is a real problem because it means sites that have carefully chosen design features render fine in say IE and Firefox but can become almost illegible in Chrome. Ironically, that's because Chrome sucks at following web standards in certain ways; not recognising fractional letter-spacing is one example we've run into recently.
IE6 had a broken box model
IE6 had a different box model. When IE6 came out, there was still considerable debate about what the best model would be, and neither Firefox nor Chrome was yet a twinkle in someone's eye.
In any case, IE6 is so old that even Microsoft say everyone should upgrade these days and no longer support it. People who still harp on about how terrible IE is and then start talking about IE6 instead of at least IE8 really need to change the record.
Ironically, IE6 is still a good example of my general point, though. It didn't work the same way as more recent browsers and it had a handful of irritating layout bugs, but because it was a stable target for years, pretty much everyone in the industry knew what those bugs were (or at worst could find out reliably with a few seconds of googling) and how to work around them. It took more effort than would be ideal if everyone followed standards perfectly, but there was no trouble writing sites that would work reliably with IE6 and would continue to do so even today.
Your bitching is hyperbolic, hypocritical, and counterproductive.
My "bitching" mostly seems to be in your head. And whether or not you personally happen to like the situation TFA described doesn't change the underlying facts or make it any less of a valid criticism that could usefully be addressed for the benefit of the entire web dev community.
What world do you live in that non-OSS software is bug-free?
Sorry, you don't seem to have actually read what I wrote before posting your reply. Here is the relevant part again:
"Just as important, the relatively few serious bugs in the more recent versions of IE tend to be well-known, and the necessary workarounds are well-established and stable because the goalposts don't move every six weeks."
I don't see how that equates to anything like what you wrote.
On with your next point:
What, besides your own prejudice, justifies supporting a browser that you admit has some serious bugs, and also does not properly implement the web standards?
And again with the twisting of words. Here to remind you is what I actually wrote:
"While [recent versions of IE] don't have all the bleeding edge shiny, the basic functionality does generally work very reliably, and actually IE9+ have a lot of the more useful recent developments anyway. Just as important, the relatively few serious bugs in the more recent versions of IE tend to be well-known...
I put the parts you twisted in bold for you so you can see where you went wrong.
In any case, I fail to see how making decisions based on extensive practical evidence constitutes prejudice. Prejudice would be, for example, saying I was going to advocate a browser that consistently shows up more bugs in basic functionality than all the other major ones instead of IE, just because the more buggy browser is not written by Microsoft.
And there is a difference between having a feature and supporting standards. I think if you're going to claim to support a standard, the feature should actually work. Chrome has had, and in many cases continues to have, obvious and fully reported bugs in CSS rendering. These include popular CSS3 effects like gradients and rounded corners not drawing properly under various conditions. They also include basic CSS 2.1 text styling problems like the infamous letter-spacing limitations, because Chrome still relies on its own very poor text rendering rather than using the far superior tools built into various host operating systems. It's not as if these kinds of issues are big secrets; some have been in the bug tracker for years with numerous people echoing the problem.
I don't see any facts or evidence in your post -- that would presumably detract from your trolling.
I was posting in support of TFA, not trying to make an independent case of my own.
However, I have made my own case based on my own evidence on several previous occasions on this forum and elsewhere. Unfortunately, even if you cite a bunch of specific issues, the response is rarely any better than your own: someone in denial of the situation who thinks anyone criticising their beloved browser must be trolling and can't possibly have actually experienced numerous documented and repeatable bugs, even though the bug tracker is a matter of public record and mere seconds searching it would confirm the kinds of bugs people are citing.
Charge for compatibility beyond IE, and charge for any time spent submitting bug reports.
Sorry, but I'm a professional, and as such I do the job my clients hired me for. If Google would like to hire me to help test their code, I'll be happy to quote them a suitable fee like anyone else. But right now, my real, paying clients typically hire me to produce web apps that work for contractually specified targets, not to provide subsidised debugging for someone else's product.
Today, those specified targets are usually something like IE8, IE9 and IE10, because with the deliberate policy by both Google and Mozilla to avoid stable versions and push updates every few weeks, it's difficult to specify support for Chrome or Firefox in any useful way in a contract even if you do want to. Without a stable platform to test against, there is no way to write acceptance criteria that are going to be relevant for more than one release cycle of those browsers, which for many projects isn't even time to run through the QA/release process fully.
Of course there is: porting a vast suite of software to an entirely new OS is going to cost a fortune. No-one I've seen has yet made a convincing case for why anyone would spend serious money to buy an office suite on a touch-only tablet or smartphone, never mind enough people doing it to actually make the port profitable.
OK, but none of them produces the kind of data you create in Office-like applications. I don't see what any of them has to do with the topic at hand. To reiterate my original point, I'm not saying tablets and smartphones don't have their uses, just that they are useful for content consumption (like the book reading example you mentioned) but not very suitable for content creation (which is what Office applications are primarily used for).
make an effort to understand the codebase you're complaining about
In my experience, it typically takes 6-12 months for a professional software engineer joining a new large project to find their way around the codebase. And that's assuming they're doing it at work, probably with a mentor assigned to help them find their way and with other people within walking distance to ask for help on the tricky parts.
It simply isn't reasonable to expect people to understand the code base, or even the internal architecture, of a vast project like a modern web browser just in order to get problems fixed.
(Yes, this is horribly unfair on the guys developing the browser, who get a bazillion vague reports of half-broken maybe-bugs. It sucks for them. But I'm not the one claiming normal people should switch to my browser instead of other competing ones, they are. And if they do want better bug reports from normal people, they need a vastly better bug reporting system than any major browser offers today to help normal people report their problems.)
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I'd assert a right to not have one's time wasted by the government is a fundamental human right.
As nice as that sounds, I don't think it's entirely realistic.
For example, would you want a court system where juries were composed only of people who self-selected as volunteers for jury service? You did use the expression "time wasted" so perhaps this kind of thing isn't something you'd consider a waste of time, but in that case, where do you draw the line? And of course in a rather different example, the very premise of prison as a penalty is that it is the government deliberately wasting your time.
Now, if you'd suggested that governments shouldn't be able to demand one citizen's time significantly more than another without some reasonable, independent benchmark, such as being convicted through a fair judicial process before being sent to jail, that might be different. But then there's still the question of what constitutes a reasonable, independent benchmark in for example the jury service situation, and if expecting everyone to do their civic duty by serving on a jury if randomly called is reasonable, you could also argue that giving up time to serve as a witness or to defend yourself is reasonable to ensure the effective functioning of the court system.
Perhaps there would be mileage in something demanding reasonable equality in any burden placed on citizens unless they have been convicted of an offence, and additionally placing limits on the total burden and requiring full compensation where time spent is not reasonably avoidable (for example, if someone has been reasonably charged with an offence, resulting in time spent on a trial, but they subsequently defended themselves successfully in court).
For the traffic offenses, can the UK national or local governments put the money for these fines into their budget? If the money goes ANYWHERE into the budget, that creates a major ethical conflict of interest
Remember that you're talking about organisations that use "safety cameras" that are often paid for by the fines they generate, yet which would generate no money if they succeeded in their claimed goals of making drivers go more slowly, stopping people running red lights, etc. A large part of the automated traffic enforcement industry is built on fundamental conflicts of interest.
Loss of earnings is trickier. I suppose this would again be an award in equity and would only really apply in crown cases (because civil actions can't have imprisonment as a punishment in normal circumstances). Just having to appear in court would not normally let you claim for loss of earnings (and that's a good thing, as it stops a rich man using that as a way to dissuade a poor man from bringing a case).
For private civil litigation, maybe. For crown prosecutions, where someone has been compelled to appear in court (presumably to answer charges against them because they've been arrested or otherwise identified by the police/CPS/other public services) I tend to think that anyone found not guilty should automatically be compensated for any and all losses they have suffered as a result of their appearance, including any distress it has caused.
This would surely be expensive and result in bringing fewer borderline cases to court, but the alternative is that you have a system/state where an individual can be disadvantaged despite having done nothing wrong. That is a line that I personally don't think any legal system should be allowed to cross lightly, for exactly the same reasons that in more serious criminal cases there is a requirement to prove guilt beyond any reasonable doubt before punishing someone.
Minor traffic offences are notorious for this effect in the UK. The cost to challenge a ticket for perhaps £30 or £60 that was issued as a result of a camera or a dubiously incentivised parking attendant is often higher than the financial cost of just eating the fine and not wasting any more time on it. This also means that a significant number of people probably have penalty points on their driving licences that they didn't deserve. A lot of public authorities have atrocious records for issuing tickets that are successfully challenged on appeal. Obviously there are plenty of chancers trying their luck, but if 1 in 3 of your appeals is overturning the original ticket on a scale of thousands of tickets a year, it doesn't speak well of how accurately the original tickets are being issued and how many more innocent people are being wrongly penalised but not challenging it for the reasons above.
For lawyers' fees, that makes a certain amount of sense, I agree. But it's also why I didn't spend any money on a lawyer and instead spent dozens of hours wading through legal process documentation and court forms and so on myself (including many pages similar to the source you gave, from the likes of Citizens Advice and from the courts themselves). That is time that directly cost me income, as a freelancer who was working by the hour and would certainly have been working for some of that time, but I have absolutely no way of proving any such loss in court because by the nature of freelance work I had no contractual "standard hours" or similar provisions to cite.
I'm quite sure the other party, a professional organisation who managed to find a different person to respond to me and a different version of events every time I wrote to them, were well aware of this. After all, those people were probably going to be paid to be at the office anyway, so writing fob-me-off letters cost them nothing, while writing carefully worded letters based on my written records of exactly what actually happened cost me a lot, relative to the amount in dispute in the first place.
This is why I'm a little sceptical of the reply by "History's Coming To", suggesting that he/she "could make quite a nice living from just sitting in court and winning cases which are meant to be inconveniencing me".
Generally the losing party has to pay the legal costs of the winning party (i.e. pay for your time if you're representing yourself)
I guess it's whether the second part really falls under the first that I'm questioning.
On another occasion, I got ripped off myself, for a modest but significant amount of money. It seemed like it should be a straightforward case: they took a deposit for something, then tried to fundamentally change the deal, and then repeatedly contradicted themselves in writing when I called them on it. I spent considerable time carefully documenting everything as this was all happening and reading up on small claims procedures.
However, I couldn't find anything to suggest that I would get any compensation for the time I was spending even if I won a case, because that time didn't necessarily represent a direct loss of income, and apparently my time and inconvenience has no value in the eyes of the law even if paying a lawyer a far greater sum to spend far less time looking at the case would do because it's then money that I've personally had to spend. That meant the amount of money I'd "lost" (if you just took the time I'd spent and multiplied it by my normal hourly rate, as a relatively objective measure of its worth) was already worth more than the amount of money I was out in the first place, before I'd even filed any paperwork to start the court case.
I would love for someone who is actually a UK lawyer to tell me that I misunderstood this. It irritates me greatly that the other party basically got away with something (and from stories I've heard since, I was neither the first nor the last person they pulled this on, either) and all I really did was teach them that people who send letters as the first step in a formal legal action will probably go away rather than actually take you to court if you just waste enough of their time. Unfortunately, again it was a situation where spending money to take on a lawyer would have cost a significant fraction of the disputed amount, so all I could go on was the (not always helpful) public documentation available from the court web sites etc.
in the UK at least I can claim loss of earnings from the litigant when I win the case
Is that true in general, or only in specific circumstances?
I was called as a third party witness in a minor court case a while back. One of the things that surprised me was that the accused, having been found not guilty, did not seem to be entitled to much in the way of compensation at all. This was a criminal case, though, not a civil one.
In that case, the defendant had been charged with an offence, presumably suffered more than a year of distress with the case hanging over them before it was finally resolved, spent whatever time and money it cost them to mount their own defence (they represented themselves in court), and obviously incurred the lost time and inconvenience of having to attend court itself. I was genuinely disappointed in our legal system when it seemed they were sent on their way as if they should somehow be grateful that, after suffering all of that distress and inconvenience, at least they hadn't been found guilty of what they'd been charged with and fined/thrown in jail.
First crysis' biggest problem was the fact that they hid a lot of gameplay depth in the game, but there was no easy way to access it. I first played through the game essentially never activating maximum strength, as I didn't like melee. Then I read on what suit modes things actually did and I raged at how little it was explained in game.
Same here, but TBH even when I did find out some of the effects, the whole suit thing just seemed like a gimmick that made little meaningful difference to the gameplay. For example, regardless of suit settings, if there was a way to melee against more than a small number of opponents at higher difficulty settings without getting fragged almost instantly, I never found it, but if you had only one or two opponents then you didn't really need the suit anyway. It might have reduced the risk of a frustrating reload but it didn't seem to enable many new tactics or any new strategies.
(And BTW, what's with all these modern games where you have to reach some artificial checkpoint to save instead of just hitting quick save whenever you want? I don't tend to buy modern AAA PC titles anyway -- they all seem to come with built-in malware and I can't remember the last time I bought one that didn't have enjoyment-spoiling crash bugs -- but it seems like console-friendly dumbing down is now the norm. How sad.)
That depends on whether your goal is to spend the next couple of years in jail.
The right to privacy, which includes the right to not hand one's passwords over to the government, ever, under any circumstances, is a fundamental human right.
Not according to European human rights law, it's not.
And even ignoring the legal position and looking at the ethical situation, things are never so clear cut: the "fundamental" rights of one individual can clash with other "fundamental" rights of another individual, and then some sort of balance must be found between them where inevitably at least one party's rights will not be fully respected.
Encrypt everything by default, and allow nothing unencrypted, just needs to become default behavior in all operating systems, and become the de-facto standard, for everything, for security purposes, before anyone else can act.
The trouble is, while passing good laws often requires a lot of time and debate, passing knee-jerk reactionary laws based on lobbying in technical fields that most legislators frankly don't understand can be done almost in moments. It's already a criminal offence here in the UK to refuse to hand over a password if the Powers That Be want to know what your encrypted communications say, and the law was widely criticised for (among other things) being about as black-and-white as you could possibly be. For example, minor details like whether the password you've been required to provide actually exists tend not to be relevant to any defence.
So in my admittedly pessimistic view of how these things currently tend to work in practice, I don't see your "default behaviour in all operating systems" as being even remotely possible until the authorities and in particular the legislators are far, far more clued up on technical issues than most of them are today. Plausible preemptive countermeasures might include whoever first creates such an operating system being labelled an $EMOTIVE_THREAT and getting banned from trading/selling in the jurisdiction, anyone installing such an OS being labelled a criminal under those same knee-jerk blanket-ban laws I talked about before, or possibly more insidious things like Microsoft/Apple/etc. cutting a RIM-style deal where their "secure" systems weren't really secure at all (but of course any more secure/trustworthy platform like, say, Linux, is now an $EMOTIVE_THREAT, according to lots of "industry experts" probably indirectly funded by the aforementioned Microsoft/Apple/etc.).
The basic problem with this whole situation is that there is no good answer that always works. There really are bad people in the world, and there really are legitimate reasons that security services would want to intercept their communications, so any argument for universally encrypting anything is always going to run into some degree of resistance for sensible reasons that few reasonable people would disagree with even if they might feel that on balance the costs outweigh the benefits. But as we've seen on many occasions already, such legitimate reasons are all too easily twisted into mere commercial power plays when governments and big business mix. Sadly, but honestly, I see no reason to expect anything better to happen as long as the political status quo in most of the western world remains.
I understand what you're saying, but just remember the old warning: you have to be lucky every time, and they only have to be lucky once. Everyone makes mistakes, even world class black hats, and most people ripping off the latest movie aren't world class black hats even if they think they're smart because they heard the terms "proxy" and "VPN" once.
This will only speed up the race to fully encrypted comms.
Which will promptly be declared illegal in itself and probably with worse penalties than the original copyright infringement, unless you're connecting to an organisation sufficiently rich to allow it like a bank or government. Consider the way that merely circumventing technical measures protecting a copyrighted work is enough to make your actions illegal in many countries now even if your actual use of the work would have otherwise been completely legal. Just mention something about terrorism or child pornography and add the copyright thing as a rider, and every bought-and-paid-for politician this side of Mars will be voting for it to protect the public or something.
Copyright reform needs to happen before we get to everyone encrypting everything by default, or it's in danger of being the catalyst for something far worse than anything the **AA and their international brethren have ever done.
What were those, the famous last words of a few Anonymous script kiddies right before they got arrested?
Finding someone who is "anonymous" on the Internet is hard, in the same way that cracking a new hardware-based DRM scheme is hard. It can take a lot of work, at least if you're the first person trying to do it, but ultimately trying to establish two-way communications over the Internet and yet remain completely anonymous is just as futile as trying to lock up content that you're also showing to someone. There may be many levels of indirection that are difficult to follow, but it's impossible to do what you actually need to do and yet still remain 100% safe from hostile activity.
Somehow, I suspect that if you downloaded Linux over BT but with the filename skyfall.iso you'd still find yourself answering someone's accusation (or just getting black marked without any opportunity to answer). How these systems tend to work is unfortunately rather well known, since Big Media have screwed up so many times by going after perfectly legitimate and legal activities that were a bit too close to some keyword they naively searched for.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use XML."
Now they have <grammar:quantified-entity><quantity type='integer'><literal type='integer' base='10'>2</literal></quantity><entity type='noun'>problems</entity></grammar:quantified-entity>.
Well, I mentioned a whole bunch of areas in earlier posts, not just rounded corners; the rounded corners issue includes a whole string of bugs over an extended period, as you could tell if you bothered to follow the link in my previous post; those rounded corners still don't render very well in some cases; it wasn't possible to work around some of the problems at all without resorted to using graphics the old school way; some of the problems weren't edge cases but the most basic use of the feature; and playing the "CSS3 isn't finished yet" card is like playing the "HTML5 isn't finished yet" card, i.e., something you can't credibly do if you're advocating a browser that pushes a new release every six weeks and claims better compliance with those (not yet finished) standards than everyone else as probably its biggest advantage.
But at least you were right about... No, actually, every single point in your post was wrong. Well, except for the weeping part, I guess. I appreciate your sympathy; developing for Chrome can indeed bring a grown man to tears at times. :-)
If the OP really means what the community as a whole needs rather than one useful thing for part of that community, then ironically I think you've just nailed it: more than anything else, the community needs a way to match up willing and able contributors with projects that could benefit from their contributions.
To do that, the OP could develop a simple database that understands things like:
Provide some sort of keyword store (extension: recognise related entries/common aliases) or defined scale for each property, let projects say what they need and volunteers say what they're willing to contribute, and help people get matched up.
This has the handy advantage for the OP of being readily scalable from a simple proof of concept with a simple native or web-based UI right up to a full-blown and genuinely useful service if you can find a way of getting it hosted properly. It might help particularly with contribution in areas other than programming, which in practice is often where OSS projects run by volunteers for free start to fall behind commercial projects run by businesses with cross-disciplinary teams.
Not fixing a bug for a long time is not a "stable target". It's a failure to fix a bug
It's both, though if if there's a simple workaround available, sometimes the stability aspect is actually the more important in terms of being able to build working sites and web apps on the platform.
The real killer is when bugs are introduced, which is why I'm so down on the six-weekly cycle of Chrome and Firefox. They keep breaking stuff that used to work. To be fair, often these things are cosmetic, and while they're mildly irritating, they probably get fixed again six weeks later and no real harm is done. But sometimes the regression isn't just cosmetic, it stops things working at all. And then it isn't Google or Mozilla whose guys get paged at 10pm because my client's customers can't use the web app my clients paid for. (Would you like to guess why we won't include those browsers in our support contracts any more?)
A "different" box model. Yeesh. No, I'm sure you're right about this.
Even IE6 supported a standard-compliant mode that used the W3C box model. Remember where "quirks mode" came from? All you had to do was put a valid doctype on your page.
Moreover, to the extent that it applied since early CSS wasn't as uniform in allowing things like padding and margins to be specified anyway, pretty much all the browsers used to use that traditional model. It wasn't just IE, Netscape did the same. The W3C didn't standardise the way the major browsers worked.
So it's rather unfair to attack IE as if it was somehow either going it alone or defying the existence of then-new standards.
Still, if the traditional box model was such a dumb idea, at least it's dead now. That's why the CSS3 UI module provides a box-sizing property that allows the stylesheet author to switch explicitly to using an old-IE-style model (they called it border-box), which is supported in every major browser of recent years (including IE8+).
Even popular web design bloggers like Jon Hicks and Chris Coyier have promoted the border-box model as a useful tool, and obviously I agree with them. It makes far more sense if you're trying to implement a moderately complex page layout, particularly in the era of responsive/adaptive designs, to have the assigned width of an element reflect the total width it needs including all visible parts.
One day we'll surely all see the light.
As far as the box model thing goes, most of the world saw the light at least 3-4 years ago, even if you didn't notice.
As far as rapid release cycles go, we're not there yet, but I think the push-back from people who need to get real work done will start to overtake the new-shiny factor that makes for fun blog posts fairly soon. Lots of people do get the point anyway, but it's becoming more obvious as blog posts promoting new shiny that only works in WebKit or (less often) only works in Gecko are starting to come along, and more and more people are noticing that this is just IE-vs-Netscape all over again, but with more browsers this time.
Speaking as a senior "web guy" who is a large contributor to JS library, if you're getting that sort of response it's for a reason and you have yet to graduate from "web guy".
Standard way to make yourself look foolish on the Internet #735: Make a comment assuming someone with a different point of view to you must somehow be an inexperienced junior guy, and then provide direct evidence that the other guys knows a lot more about the situation than you do.
There are bugs, but they are minor and occur in experimental implementations. Most of the issues rise with sandboxed features and implementations of HTML5, CSS3, and Canvas.
That simply isn't true. There have been numerous basic rendering bugs in Chrome, many based on CSS2.1 features that have been standard for years. Of course, there have also been quite a few in common CSS3 things like rounded corners and gradients as well, which are hardly experimental any more. And while there have been bugs, still present in the latest release today, in high profile additions like HTML5 media support, there have been some horrible regressions lately in old school areas like integrating with a Java plug-in too.
As I've just pointed out to someone else, this is not a matter of personal opinion or some sort of subjective view based on private data. The bug trackers are public, and you're just as capable as I am of googling any of the above areas with the words "Chrome bug" and finding direct links to those bug trackers that will validate my claims. Whether you chose to do so and improve your knowledge or you prefer to assume you know best and write hostile comments to someone on the Internet you don't even know is up to you -- it's not as if you're going to fool anyone else who does do that into thinking I'm some crazy guy, and obviously your bad assumptions aren't going to convince me that bugs I've got repeatable test cases for don't really exist -- but if you're really a senior web guy perhaps you should consider the more enlightened option.
You do not do "real" work and have no "real" clients especially if you're targeting primarily for IE. Why this shit gets modded up, I have no idea.
As the old saying goes, if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, they probably know something you don't. As I said, you might consider the possibility that you have our roles reversed, and that your own lack of real world experience with both debugging Chrome issues and negotiating contracts with major clients is showing.
Post your bug reports or it didn't happen.
Here you go
The bug trackers relevant to Chrome are public. You don't need me to post bug reports, you could just google any of the example areas I mentioned and find several different ones for yourself by looking at the first page of results.
It's a shame you didn't do that, but in a way you made my original point for me: far too many people come along every time this topic is raised on most Internet forums and just attack the critics in a knee-jerk reaction, instead of considering whether actually the criticism might be valid and making even the slightest effort to find out.
You blame Firefox and Chrome for being buggy. You admit that IE has bugs and target it exclusively.
Once again, you don't seem to be reading what I'm writing before going on the attack.
We will not officially support either Mozilla or Chrome in contracts because they are rapidly moving targets. All browsers have bugs, but when the bugs they have can change every few weeks, it's simply not possible to run a proper testing programme for a major project and give any meaningful guarantee at the end of it that your work will still support Firefox or Chrome after the next update that will be no more than six weeks away. With IE, the time between major releases is long enough to make testing against and then claiming to support certain versions a meaningful concept.
Beyond that you're bitching that "I shouldn't have to support Chrome for free!"
You keep writing things like that, but I haven't talked about money at any point in this conversation, other than in direct reply to points you introduced yourself.
All I'm doing here is supporting TFA, which expresses a view I think should be more widely understood rather than all the nauseating hero worship that tends to go on.
I don't know how long you've been in the business, but if your big beef is font rendering, you don't remember very far back.
And now the ad hominems based on silly assumptions start. I've been developing web sites since NCSA Mosaic was state of the art. And while font rendering is hardly my "big beef" -- I have plenty of criticisms to make about Chrome's support for CSS and basic rendering, and this is merely one of them -- that poor rendering is a real problem because it means sites that have carefully chosen design features render fine in say IE and Firefox but can become almost illegible in Chrome. Ironically, that's because Chrome sucks at following web standards in certain ways; not recognising fractional letter-spacing is one example we've run into recently.
IE6 had a broken box model
IE6 had a different box model. When IE6 came out, there was still considerable debate about what the best model would be, and neither Firefox nor Chrome was yet a twinkle in someone's eye.
In any case, IE6 is so old that even Microsoft say everyone should upgrade these days and no longer support it. People who still harp on about how terrible IE is and then start talking about IE6 instead of at least IE8 really need to change the record.
Ironically, IE6 is still a good example of my general point, though. It didn't work the same way as more recent browsers and it had a handful of irritating layout bugs, but because it was a stable target for years, pretty much everyone in the industry knew what those bugs were (or at worst could find out reliably with a few seconds of googling) and how to work around them. It took more effort than would be ideal if everyone followed standards perfectly, but there was no trouble writing sites that would work reliably with IE6 and would continue to do so even today.
Your bitching is hyperbolic, hypocritical, and counterproductive.
My "bitching" mostly seems to be in your head. And whether or not you personally happen to like the situation TFA described doesn't change the underlying facts or make it any less of a valid criticism that could usefully be addressed for the benefit of the entire web dev community.
What world do you live in that non-OSS software is bug-free?
Sorry, you don't seem to have actually read what I wrote before posting your reply. Here is the relevant part again:
"Just as important, the relatively few serious bugs in the more recent versions of IE tend to be well-known, and the necessary workarounds are well-established and stable because the goalposts don't move every six weeks."
I don't see how that equates to anything like what you wrote.
On with your next point:
What, besides your own prejudice, justifies supporting a browser that you admit has some serious bugs, and also does not properly implement the web standards?
And again with the twisting of words. Here to remind you is what I actually wrote:
"While [recent versions of IE] don't have all the bleeding edge shiny, the basic functionality does generally work very reliably, and actually IE9+ have a lot of the more useful recent developments anyway. Just as important, the relatively few serious bugs in the more recent versions of IE tend to be well-known...
I put the parts you twisted in bold for you so you can see where you went wrong.
In any case, I fail to see how making decisions based on extensive practical evidence constitutes prejudice. Prejudice would be, for example, saying I was going to advocate a browser that consistently shows up more bugs in basic functionality than all the other major ones instead of IE, just because the more buggy browser is not written by Microsoft.
And there is a difference between having a feature and supporting standards. I think if you're going to claim to support a standard, the feature should actually work. Chrome has had, and in many cases continues to have, obvious and fully reported bugs in CSS rendering. These include popular CSS3 effects like gradients and rounded corners not drawing properly under various conditions. They also include basic CSS 2.1 text styling problems like the infamous letter-spacing limitations, because Chrome still relies on its own very poor text rendering rather than using the far superior tools built into various host operating systems. It's not as if these kinds of issues are big secrets; some have been in the bug tracker for years with numerous people echoing the problem.
I don't see any facts or evidence in your post -- that would presumably detract from your trolling.
I was posting in support of TFA, not trying to make an independent case of my own.
However, I have made my own case based on my own evidence on several previous occasions on this forum and elsewhere. Unfortunately, even if you cite a bunch of specific issues, the response is rarely any better than your own: someone in denial of the situation who thinks anyone criticising their beloved browser must be trolling and can't possibly have actually experienced numerous documented and repeatable bugs, even though the bug tracker is a matter of public record and mere seconds searching it would confirm the kinds of bugs people are citing.
Charge for compatibility beyond IE, and charge for any time spent submitting bug reports.
Sorry, but I'm a professional, and as such I do the job my clients hired me for. If Google would like to hire me to help test their code, I'll be happy to quote them a suitable fee like anyone else. But right now, my real, paying clients typically hire me to produce web apps that work for contractually specified targets, not to provide subsidised debugging for someone else's product.
Today, those specified targets are usually something like IE8, IE9 and IE10, because with the deliberate policy by both Google and Mozilla to avoid stable versions and push updates every few weeks, it's difficult to specify support for Chrome or Firefox in any useful way in a contract even if you do want to. Without a stable platform to test against, there is no way to write acceptance criteria that are going to be relevant for more than one release cycle of those browsers, which for many projects isn't even time to run through the QA/release process fully.
There is no "business case" to avoid iOS.
Of course there is: porting a vast suite of software to an entirely new OS is going to cost a fortune. No-one I've seen has yet made a convincing case for why anyone would spend serious money to buy an office suite on a touch-only tablet or smartphone, never mind enough people doing it to actually make the port profitable.
All of those devices can be used to produce data.
OK, but none of them produces the kind of data you create in Office-like applications. I don't see what any of them has to do with the topic at hand. To reiterate my original point, I'm not saying tablets and smartphones don't have their uses, just that they are useful for content consumption (like the book reading example you mentioned) but not very suitable for content creation (which is what Office applications are primarily used for).
Sorry, but I'm not sure what your comment has to do with mine. Did you reply to the wrong post?
make an effort to understand the codebase you're complaining about
In my experience, it typically takes 6-12 months for a professional software engineer joining a new large project to find their way around the codebase. And that's assuming they're doing it at work, probably with a mentor assigned to help them find their way and with other people within walking distance to ask for help on the tricky parts.
It simply isn't reasonable to expect people to understand the code base, or even the internal architecture, of a vast project like a modern web browser just in order to get problems fixed.
(Yes, this is horribly unfair on the guys developing the browser, who get a bazillion vague reports of half-broken maybe-bugs. It sucks for them. But I'm not the one claiming normal people should switch to my browser instead of other competing ones, they are. And if they do want better bug reports from normal people, they need a vastly better bug reporting system than any major browser offers today to help normal people report their problems.)