It's up to the citizens of a given state to decide whether the "socialist" programs in that state are useless or not.
That would be a more compelling argument if the citizens of the state were fully informed about the consequences of their actions, and collectively making rational choices accordingly.
Unfortunately, this will never happen, because people can't simultaneously be legal experts, economic experts, public health experts, criminologists, etc. If they could, we wouldn't need to appoint so many representatives who could explore these issues full time on our behalf.
To see how little the average person really understands about how economics in particular works, just take a look at any popular on-line discussion forum in the run up to a national budget day. You'll find loads of people whose attitude is "me, me, me". There will be quite a few whose attitude is "well, the rich can afford it, we should just tax them as much as we need to prop up any government spending we like". There will also be a couple of token rich guys, probably business owners, who point out that under a punitive tax regime people like them will either move away or stop doing the socially useful things that made them rich, which means raising taxes on the rich and on business too high ultimately reduces both tax income and social benefit. Of course, the rich guys either get ignored or get attacked for being selfish, probably by people who would rapidly become unemployed and unemployable under the tax system they advocate when the business owners were no longer creating jobs for them.
Another point is that most of our governments are not democracies in the original meaning. Here in the UK, the previous administration came to power on a political technicality without ever facing a public vote. The administration they succeeded had the explicit support of only 1/5 or so of the electorate, yet they had the legal power to act in ways the other 4/5 of us did not support. (See "War, Iraq" for an obvious example.)
Finally, we appoint general representatives, and those representatives in turn make choices on our behalf. Even if we generally like our local representative, we may not agree with or support every choice they make, but typically we do not vote for a different representative in each area of specialisation under our current system. The idea is presumably that you appoint a representative whose principles you support, and who would therefore be likely to make choices you would mostly agree with in any given situation, but even then it is unlikely that you would find someone whose views exactly matched your own.
In other words, "the citizens decide" is a very weak argument, and so it must always be. Our current political systems may be the best we've come up with so far, but that certainly does not imply that they are beyond criticism or always act in ways that those they supposedly represent would support. That is why it is so important to include strong safeguards, such as constitutional protection for basic rights, so the government of the day cannot trample on individuals on a whim just because of the way the political wind is blowing this week. Unfortunately, we have yet to devise similarly robust safeguards for government spending, not least because there is much less agreement among the general population about how much governments should be entitled to spend.
I'm not defending the GP post's black-and-white position, but your position is equally untenable. By your argument, it is perfectly OK for the government to take as much tax revenue as it likes, and I think a lot of us would have a problem with that, too.
Taxation is, essentially, legalised theft, just as most of our governments are, essentially, legalised mob rule. History suggests that allowing some degree of both is better than the alternative, which is the Somalia situation you mentioned. But we should never forget that both a government that awards itself power over individual citizens and the concept of taxation are necessary evils. They are not good things, and they are to be tolerated only to the extent that we don't have any better ideas yet.
Whether it's open source or closed source isn't the most important thing. Whether it's run locally or in the cloud doesn't make that much difference.
What really matters is whether the data is readily accessible in a known format. If you can get your data in some sane way that is independent of your current software, then you are in control. If you cannot, then you are not in control.
Of course, going OSS and going cloud-based each have their pros and cons as well, but IMHO they are secondary to controlling the data. For example, while OSS theoretically implies being able to access your data in a known format, I would still rather use a closed source solution with a cleaner known data format than an OSS solution where the code that manipulates the file format is difficult to understand and the format itself is more awkward.
Business: Yeah, running 4 specific apps is the only thing that a business does. And there aren't any tasks for which GNU/Linux is more suitable! (Well, this is mostly true, since all software for GNU/Linux is available for Windows)
I think they were being generous to Linux here, actually. Business apps, creative apps and games are the areas above all others where the Linux world doesn't yet have a serious answer to any of the high-end native Windows applications, and for web-based business tools one browser is as good as another anyway (unless it's IE only, but mercifully even the most die-hard businesses seem to be moving on from ActiveX Hell these days, so let's call this one a tie).
I'm not going to get into an argument about how $LINUX_APP is as good as $WINDOWS_APP. A few tools — OpenOffice Writer and Gnumeric come to mind — can just about hold their own for basic use these days, though it is rare to find anything they actually do better than the industry standard Windows equivalent. Most business/creative tools on Linux simply aren't credible alternatives for professional use, and I have posted various specific criticisms in the past that anyone can go look up in my posting history if they care.
IIRC my college English professors taught the big words actually interfere with communication rather than enhance it.
That is often true. Longer words can be interesting, if they allow subtle distinctions in meaning, or practically useful, if they allow precisely defined terminology to replace vague descriptions. On the other hand, writing "he answered affirmatively" instead of "he said yes" doesn't really help anyone, and all that business-speak "utilise" instead of "use" nonsense needs to die.
That's a long time to wait for the absurdum part to take hold.
I'm not sure that's a very good counter-example.
For one thing, most of the "spreading across Europe" part was during the war rather than prior to it; France and Britain did, after all, declare war on Germany almost immediately after the invasion of Poland.
Also, while the cost of WWII was horrendous, I'm not sure we're doing so much better today: there are creeping power grabs by some very powerful nations without any significant force opposing them. It is more subtle, but still devastatingly expensive in everything from human life (and quality of life) to the world economy. But it's either all most of the population have ever known or happening far from home, so the average citizen in the places concerned allows it to continue, and the true corridors of power are rarely in the workplaces of popular representatives any more.
Your metaphor is quite apt. According to some theories, dinosaurs such as the stegosaurus may have had a second brain-like organ that provided advantageous autonomous behaviour in times of crisis, without relying to the main brain in the head. "Europe", in its various incarnations, often functions similarly.
The less charitable are free to insert an alternative characterisation of European bureaucracy involving left hands, right hands and knowledge here.:-)
That's because I don't believe I've ever heard of an alternative "scalable business model" that could credibly replace the function that copyright provides today within realistic overheads. There are some alternative models that I think might have potential, but I can't see a viable implementation of any of them becoming the norm in what I meant by the medium term (say 5-10 years).
No system that tries to implement any sort of monopoly can address the fundamental problem with copyright that the internet has amplified - that it is human nature to copy stuff we like
A few years ago in my country, people would have said the same about driving home after "just a couple of drinks", or driving on a mobile phone, or smoking in a restaurant. When laws were proposed to make these things illegal, there was a lot of opposition from people with the "me, me, me" attitude and/or who felt it was an unwarranted government intrusion.
Today, with much greater public awareness of the real consequences now that the laws have taken effect, there is much less opposition. People do still use mobile phones while driving, and they do still have accidents because the raw power of their egos does not actually prevent them from driving less competently than someone over the legal drink-drive limit. But these damaging activities have become socially unacceptable to a large chunk of our population.
The problem with copyright is that it is difficult to educate the general public about the real consequences of changing or removing the legal protection for several reasons, not least that no-one really knows what the consequences would be. All we can make are educated guesses and logical arguments based on limited information and "reasonable" assumptions, which will only convince significant numbers of people if they are willing to accept that the assumptions concerned are in fact reasonable (see numerous Slashdot copyright debates passim).
The other problem with mostly unenforced copyright is that it appears to function like progressive taxation: those with the resources to spend (often correlated with those who are the most appealing targets for real enforcement) wind up subsidising those who can't or won't pay for the material. However, in the system as it typically works today, a lot of people who don't have money to burn but don't want to break the law are subsidising people who actually have more money but don't care about breaking the law. That isn't somehow progressive and ethical, it just means the freeloaders are screwing the law-abiding.
I see only three possible outcomes in the medium term.
One possibility is that copyright law (or some replacement) will be adapted to a system that most people on both consumer and creator sides find fair; infringing will become socially unacceptable as a consequence; and targeted enforcement will deal with the serious cases. This is the "good" outcome, IMHO.
Another possibility is that in response to continued mass infringement, ever more draconian laws will be introduced, resulting in ever less reliable technology with ever more compulsory surveillance built in. Those who use this technology will wind up paying more for content because Big Media will have a lock on the market and it appears that no government is currently willing to go after them for anti-competitive/cartel-like behaviour. Those who do not use the technology will be relatively few, as most people won't know how to circumvent it safely, and absurdly draconian penalties will be applied pour encourager les autres.
The final possibility is that things swing too far the other way: the everything-should-be-free crowd actually win; putting in the effort to make original, good quality content becomes economically impractical; and new works are mostly reduced to the level of volunteer-run OSS projects, fan fiction, low-budget inde films, and the writing on Wikipedia. In other words, some works with real value will get created, but probably only a few that are better than entry-level work produced under the commercial system today, and most will downright suck.
It is regrettable that the first outcome seems by far the least likely to happen in practice, given the tendency of controversial political debates to polarise and ultimately to be decided in favour of whichever extremist view wins.
The problem I have with these debates is that some participants seem to think that because I don't approve of Wikileaks and its behaviour, I somehow condone the genuinely disturbing things they have revealed or support war-mongering murderers. I most certainly do not. I simply don't think Wikileaks is the right approach to making any of those things better.
I don't think Wikileaks are some sort of saviours, who are somehow enlightening the public about the dubious activities of certain parts of their governments. It's not as though people didn't suspect this, or as though the press hadn't published numerous other leaks that painted the same picture. Some of the details are different, but that doesn't actually matter all that much, because it's the big picture that really makes a difference to anything. And despite the sarcastic comments from Wikileaks fans, investigative journalism is not dead, political action does matter, and there are even elected politicians who genuinely care and will stand up to the government when it is doing the wrong thing (not so much in the US right now, admittedly, but the US establishment will suffer the consequences of that particular arrogance in due course).
I also don't think Wikileaks are particularly effective at anything other than generating publicity for Wikileaks. What has actually changed for the better as a result of their actions? Here in the UK, we managed to get a couple of million people out to protest about the Iraq war because of a well organised public campaign, and while it didn't stop the war, it did set the tone for our politics ever since (including changes in the law of the "never again" variety). We have since had several public enquiries, which for all the claims of "whitewash" have revealed all sorts of awkward truths about the people who were involved in taking us to war and the lack of planning and so on that we all suspected, many of which were at least as juicy as anything Wikileaks have ever published to my knowledge. Did I mention that going to war against popular opinion also cost the then-Prime Minister his political career, and probably his whole party any serious chance of governing again for a generation?
Moreover, I suspect that in practice, Wikileaks is currently causing valuable resources (mostly the time and attention of people who care) to be redirected away from where they could do the most good. In other words, not only is it potentially harmful because of what it leaks, I think it is also harmful merely for existing and operating as it does. There are only a few good men, as the saying goes, and the more of them spend their time talking up or their money supporting Wikileaks, the fewer of them are likely to spend their time supporting (for example) organisations like Amnesty, the International Red Cross and the ACLU/Liberty/your nation's equivalent.
Exactly none of this means I support or condone the conduct of various governments, including my own. I am all in favour of much stronger independent oversight and public scrutiny, significant changes in various laws to restrict the powers of the few to commit the many in various contexts, and frankly draconian penalties for those in public office who abuse the privilege. I am even getting some of my wishes in this country, now that we've kicked out the administration responsible for those particular screw-ups. And again, I'm pretty sure Wikileaks had pretty much nothing to do with these changes, in contrast with traditional popular campaigns, genuine politics, traditional media, and on-line activities that bridge the gaps between these efforts more than ever.
Don't be simple, not even wikileaks believes that.
Maybe not, but they are apparently fine with making claims like this: '[Assange] also said Wikileaks had "tried hard to make sure that this material does not put innocents at harm".'
Of course, the Pentagon refused to help, leaving wikileaks to do the best they could.
Of course they did! What did you think they were going to do, invite Wikileaks staff in to check the rest of their sensitive records just in case?!
I'd wager that the threat is largely political; anyway, this sort of thing is probably good on the whole.
I couldn't disagree more.
For one thing, Wikileaks' actions may have brought more information into the public domain. There clearly is risk associated with doing so, as you acknowledged yourself above. Some people clearly have been damaged, even if there are no confirmed cases as a result of this one particular leak yet. On the other hand, while the defenders of Wikileaks are quick to demand proof of any actual harm caused by the leaks, no-one seems to have even claimed to show any specific benefits it has brought.
Moreover, a less sensationalist, more focussed release of some of that information, managed properly by a critical free press, might have been much more effective at forcing a government to address genuinely inappropriate actions. And as long as people who want government accountability are chanting the Wikileaks anthem, there is less incentive to introduce serious reforms in the real checks and balances, people in a position of oversight with actual powers to do something when things are going wrong.
Basically, Wikileaks is a vigilante, anarchist organisation. If you think that way of operating governments really is "probably good on the whole", I hear Somalia is a nice vacation spot this time of year.
Does anyone seriously believe that the U.S. (or any other) government has the integrity to properly classify what is and is not in the interests of "national security"?
We certainly shouldn't rely on it without proper checks and balances, and I would certainly agree that not all governments have those today. My sig is not there by accident.
However, two wrongs do not make a right. The correct solution to the problem of excessive government secrecy is better oversight built into the system, not relying on vigilante organisations with questionable ethics and no accountability.
You know, contrary to the popular opinion in some quarters of Slashdot, there actually is a genuine national security concern with some sensitive information, and a good reason for it not to be public. I'm not saying that every time a government bleats "national security" they are justified in doing so. I'm not saying there shouldn't be stronger controls, or additional independent checks, to make sure that the privilege of hiding data from the public is only used under circumstances when it is truly justified. But revealing sources, particularly sources based in countries that do not have the political and law enforcement sensibilities that some of our home nations do, can and does get people killed. Revealing military plans and current locations/movements of valuable targets can and does get people killed. There is even a standard military term for the consequence: "target of opportunity".
Does anyone seriously believe that Wikileaks have the resources and skills necessary to ensure that all information they publish is guaranteed not to compromise anything valuable by mistake? They published over 75,000 documents about the Afghan war, to which presumably only a very small inner circle had prior access. Did they have time to review every one of those documents, with the same skill and care of a military intelligence analyst? Did they have access to all other relevant non-public information, to make sure nothing sensitive could be deduced from what they were leaking by someone bad who already had some but not all of the picture? This is one of those situations where Wikileaks have to be lucky every time but the bad guys only have to get lucky once, and I just don't see how they can possibly vet the sort of stuff they publish properly to ensure the leaks do no harm to innocents.
The bottom line in this debate is that Wikileaks have shown that they do not respect the law in several countries by now. They have also shown that they are not merely engaging in responsible civil disobedience, but are quite willing to leak information that outs people who could be seriously damaged (and there have definitely been serious consequences in some such cases, even if nothing has been reliably confirmed yet in the case you're talking about).
Wikileaks are irresponsible, they do pose a clear threat to the national security of several countries in both military and civil/political terms, and they have made it very clear that they intend to continue doing so and don't much care what anyone else thinks. It genuinely amazes me that none of those countries has dealt with that threat more seriously yet (by which I do not mean summarily assassinating someone, before the testosterone brigade start reading words I didn't actually write — making Assange a martyr probably wouldn't help anyway).
If I pirate a game, play it, and tell a friend about it, that's free advertising.
That's nice. It's also absolutely worthless to the game developer if your friends also then pirate the game without paying for it. So either you're screwing your friend, expecting them to pay for something you won't, or you're screwing the people who developed the game you're enjoying, by participating in a giant pyramid scheme. Which kind of evil are you?
That's an effect that it's pretty hard to collect statistics on.
There are several possible explanations for that. One of them is that the number of people who actually behave as the hypothetical good guy in this favourite Slashdot fairytale is so small that it gets lost in the noise.
You're saying that the people who believe in your math are right.
Not at all. I'm merely giving an illustrative argument, hence the "if" in the text you quoted.
Like smarter game developers have pointed out already: pirates are irrelevant.
Really? And who are they? I have never seen any professional game developer make any such claim.
Pirates who aren't going to by your stuff anyway are irrelevant from a commercial point of view, or even a net plus due to the advertising effect. However, pirates who would buy your stuff if you made it harder for them to rip it illegally are very relevant, and pretending that there are no such people in the world is about as silly as pretending that every pirated copy equates to a lost sale.
This is a fallacy. There's no guarantee that those missing 10% now paid money for the game.
That's true, there isn't. However, you are completely missing the point.
Logical proof is utterly irrelevant here. The exact figures don't matter either. The only thing that really counts is whether the guys at the software companies who make the call on whether or not to include DRM in their next game believe that doing so is going to generate additional income greater than the implementation cost.
It is a simple business decision, and if you think Slashdot pseudo-lawyerese arguments about the evil nature of DRM and how "You can't prove anything!" are going to convince anyone running a software business, I've got a few used cars that might interest you.
Consider that courts of law make life-changing decisions every day based on standards like "on the balance of probabilities" or "beyond reasonable doubt". Neither of these requires a 100% guarantee, because in the real world that's often an impossible goal. All you can do is try to make the best decision you can at the time, and hope it's the right one.
In contrast, the executives at a company aren't even under any obligation to give a fair hearing to both sides of a story. You might not like it, but as long as it's their business on the line, it's their call. You are free to start your own software business if you think they're wrong and you can do things better. Somehow, though, I suspect that most people making arguments about how a certain part of the user base wouldn't pay for software anyway would find that a revealing, and deeply unpleasant, experience.
I was going to mod you (+1, Everything You Said Is True), but decided to post instead so I could observe that unfortunately, you and I seem to be a relatively small group compared to the vast numbers of freeloaders out there.
As a guy who runs software development businesses, I can appreciate that a games company isn't doing this for fun, they're doing it to make a living. In cold, hard maths, if they are looking at piracy rates of 90% on a DRM-free title and DRM can cut that down to 80%, that doubles the amount of income they're making on that game, which probably does a lot more than doubling their profits after sunk costs are taken into account. I fear that easily outweighs any losses to a few people like you and me who won't spend their hard-earned cash on a game with those kinds of restrictions.
There seems to be an entire generation now who have this "everything I want should be free" entitlement culture. I'm sure it's partly to do with being able to rip things like games and music on-line, but it's also a lot to do with how the kids are brought up: walk through the city centre on a Saturday afternoon, and most of the 12-year-olds have more expensive phones than I do. If I wanted something nice when I was younger, I had to help with the household chores or do my homework, and my parents would give me enough money to buy a little treat if and when I had fulfilled my other obligations. When was the last time you heard about a child having to work for their phone? This is not a healthy trend, but as long as it is socially acceptable to get whatever you want without having to work for it, it's going to be a tough market that companies like computer game vendors to operate in.
Change the law to prohibit behaviour whose implications society now finds to be unacceptable.
As I have noted before, it's not difficult to establish objective criteria that separate what Google is doing with Street View from the natural interactions of someone walking down the street, or for that matter from someone taking private holiday snaps or a professional photographer working in a public place. There is a commercial/private use distinction, whether we're talking about a small number of one-off observations or systematic recording of a large area, whether the information collected uses equipment to observe things that someone going about their normal daily lives could not, whether the observations will be published to the general public or used only internally, how location data will or will not be associated with each observation, whether the data can be looked up by some sort of database search, etc.
What we need to do is find out which criteria, or combination of criteria, give rise to the implications that apparently a significant number of people do not wish to accept, decide whether additional prohibitions should be made in these areas, and leave everything else alone until we have reason to do otherwise.
What the hell kind of argument is that?
That the law should reflect ethics and not the other way around? I think it's a basic principle of any just legal system.
How is it unethical to engage in Constitutionally protected rights?
Unpopular speech is exactly what the First Amendment is there to protect.
That's nice for you, but we're not talking about the US, we're talking about Germany. Do you realise not only that US laws do not apply to the rest of us, but also that the US has some of the weakest protections for privacy and personal data of any country in the world and most of us do not regard its laws as a model of how this sort of issue should be handled? It's actually illegal to transfer personal data from European businesses to the US without explicit permission, because your legal safeguards aren't up to even the minimum standards we consider acceptable here.
If you are sure that your position is the right one, you might like to consider that places like Germany have rather more recent, and sometimes all too personal, experience of the consequences of allowing too much mass surveillance of the population than you do across the pond. Their national culture has a definite element of "never again" about it, born of that experience.
Either way, Google is being nice by taking down photographs upon request. This is not a legal requirement, or censorship, or anything like that.
Not yet.
Clearly a lot of people felt strongly enough that this sort of activity constituted some sort of invasion of privacy to make the effort to ask Google to take the photos down. Clearly Google felt there was enough of a risk (legal, PR or otherwise) in not doing so that they instituted a policy to comply with these requests, and they have introduced various other policies for related reasons.
If people like this Jens guy won't voluntarily respect that and want to deliberately upset all those other people just because they can legally do so today, then the law can always be changed tomorrow to fix that problem. This is the basic flaw in the whole "You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place" argument: it based on law rather than on ethics, and ignores the fact that laws are supposed to change as the world does, including keeping up with the implications of new technologies and how people feel about them.
Even if the HTML5/CSS3 features were proprietary to browsers, the sane vendors have de-facto standards for such proprietary extensions. And they'll be standards one day, even if slightly different.
Perhaps. If and when that day comes, HTML5 and CSS3 will be better choices than they are today.
As for video, there are two choices now: use WebM or pay for H.264. That's good enough.
That's a matter of opinion. For now, WebM is not widely supported in mainstream browsers: Opera has it, but it's only in testing versions of the major Gecko and Webkit browsers, and of course if you need IE or mobile browsers (both very big markets for on-line video) you're out of luck. As for H.264, it's an encumbered format with licensing costs, which automatically limits its usefulness to projects that can accept those limitations.
Otherwise two extra containers are needed along with some float rules to fake it.
Exactly. And now your "semantic" HTML is full of extra divs that are there entirely to support the layout, along with a whole bunch of float rules that again aren't really there to float content but because it's still the only way to get sensible column layouts in CSS.
I note in passing that a layout using such extra containers and floats, containing within it another layout using floats, that works correctly across all modern browsers, is quite a rare beast.
Now for my example.
Forgive me for skipping the NSFW link, but in any case, I don't dispute that using CSS for layout is often the right approach. I am merely saying it is not "always the right approach, because".
Do they have to?
Yes, if they want to start criticising others on accessibility grounds, I think they should actually know something about accessibility. IMNSHO, that knowledge should come from empirical data and real world experience, not dogmatic adherence to the rules people who are probably mostly not disabled posted on a blog too many.
Websites that make extensive uses of table-based lay-outs take much more than just 5 lines, while the equivalent CSS is lighter by comparison.
OK, let's try a few simple examples. Here's one from a web app I was working on yesterday: I want to display a short, plain text message in some sort of notification or dialog area, with an icon next to it. The icon should be a fixed horizontal distance from the text, and the whole icon+message should be centred within the containing block, with the text lines wrapping if necessary. For your reference, here is some quick and dirty HTML using a table-based layout, which nevertheless already works in every browser I have here, including the older ones I only test for backward compatibility these days:
<table><tr>
<td><!-- Icon img goes here --></td>
<td><!-- Text goes here --></td>
</tr></table>
Just add a line or two of CSS to set the spacing you want. What combination of semantic HTML and CSS, which works on all major browsers and regardless of its context in the overall page layout, would you propose as an alternative? (If you're about to suggest something involving a float and some negative margins, please make sure it still works across the board when the containing block of the message is itself part of an arbitrary layout, possibly constructed using floats.)
Of course, there are numerous more global page layouts that still require absurd amounts of effort in the CSS to get a basic result. Anything involving aligning content at the bottom of a multi-column layout (within a column, not in a footer) is probably a good example.
You mean web developers are not allowed to argue for accessibility for, say, the blind, because they're not blind themselves?
No, I mean that web developers who are advocating CSS over table layouts frequently justify this on the grounds of accessibility, but I'd bet good money that most of them have never heard a single page read aloud by a screen reader, let alone done actual usability testing with a partially sighted subject. You can tell this from the way they use perfectly standards-compliant HTML and CSS to render a page in a beautiful combination of colours that will sound fine when read by a screen reader... but be utterly unreadable to a significant proportion of the population with the wrong form of colour blindness.
Finally, an announcement for the knee-jerk troll moderators: Please note that at no point in this post nor the one before it have I advocated any of (a) using table-based layouts routinely in production web sites, (b) not using CSS layouts in production web sites, or (c) building production web sites that do not cater properly for their target audience, including any members of that audience with special accessibility requirements. I am merely saying that dogmatic assumption that CSS is better than table layout is a lot like dogmatic assumption that HTML5 video is better than Flash: it may well be true in any given case, but "It's just better, because." is not a strong argument.
Depends what you mean by "soon". I predict less than five years until...
You may well be right. I hope you are. However, five years is an eternity in Internet time. Some people become multimillionaires in less time. Other people try two or three different failed start-ups.
To check your perspective, please try to identify any top tier web-based business today that is still using the same core technologies as it was five years ago. For reference, in mid-2005, Firefox was a year old, Safari was on version 2, IE6 was still the latest release, and Chrome wasn't even a twinkle in Sergey's and Larry's eyes. Tim O'Reilly had just popularised the term "Web 2.0", and YouTube had only just been invented. Neither major server-side frameworks like Ruby on Rails and CodeIgniter nor major client-side frameworks like jQuery had been released yet, and cloud hosting platforms like AWS didn't exist (for the general public, at least).
Really? Give examples of this, please. In CSS you sometimes have to state the same exact rule three times or more, but it's the same rule with the same syntax in all common cases I can think of except gradients.
I suspect gradients are indeed the main obvious example where the syntax differs significantly between browsers. If we're talking more generally about features that don't have effective cross-browser support yet, obviously neither IE nor Opera support much CSS3 stuff in their latest versions. There are several more features like animations that are only supported to any useful extent in Webkit browsers, so there aren't enough competing implementations to allow for different versions of CSS in your file.:-)
In fact, this stuff is generally standardized already. The problem is it's not always implemented
In any case, for real projects rather than exploratory or for-fun pages, it is what's implemented that counts. There's no rule that we can't change a project to use a better technology later if one is available, but it's pretty hard to run a successful project using a better technology that most users don't have yet.
Sorry, but I live in the real world. The only things I am interested in when making a decision about technology today are those things that can be reasonably expected or guaranteed as of today. I will worry about hypothetical futures tomorrow, when Linux is on the desktop, Apple have bowed to public pressure and made the iPhone an open platform, the RIAA has realised that on-line sales could make them a lot of money and abandoned DRM, and the W3C can manage to standardise something as important as HTML and CSS in less than the average human lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
It's up to the citizens of a given state to decide whether the "socialist" programs in that state are useless or not.
That would be a more compelling argument if the citizens of the state were fully informed about the consequences of their actions, and collectively making rational choices accordingly.
Unfortunately, this will never happen, because people can't simultaneously be legal experts, economic experts, public health experts, criminologists, etc. If they could, we wouldn't need to appoint so many representatives who could explore these issues full time on our behalf.
To see how little the average person really understands about how economics in particular works, just take a look at any popular on-line discussion forum in the run up to a national budget day. You'll find loads of people whose attitude is "me, me, me". There will be quite a few whose attitude is "well, the rich can afford it, we should just tax them as much as we need to prop up any government spending we like". There will also be a couple of token rich guys, probably business owners, who point out that under a punitive tax regime people like them will either move away or stop doing the socially useful things that made them rich, which means raising taxes on the rich and on business too high ultimately reduces both tax income and social benefit. Of course, the rich guys either get ignored or get attacked for being selfish, probably by people who would rapidly become unemployed and unemployable under the tax system they advocate when the business owners were no longer creating jobs for them.
Another point is that most of our governments are not democracies in the original meaning. Here in the UK, the previous administration came to power on a political technicality without ever facing a public vote. The administration they succeeded had the explicit support of only 1/5 or so of the electorate, yet they had the legal power to act in ways the other 4/5 of us did not support. (See "War, Iraq" for an obvious example.)
Finally, we appoint general representatives, and those representatives in turn make choices on our behalf. Even if we generally like our local representative, we may not agree with or support every choice they make, but typically we do not vote for a different representative in each area of specialisation under our current system. The idea is presumably that you appoint a representative whose principles you support, and who would therefore be likely to make choices you would mostly agree with in any given situation, but even then it is unlikely that you would find someone whose views exactly matched your own.
In other words, "the citizens decide" is a very weak argument, and so it must always be. Our current political systems may be the best we've come up with so far, but that certainly does not imply that they are beyond criticism or always act in ways that those they supposedly represent would support. That is why it is so important to include strong safeguards, such as constitutional protection for basic rights, so the government of the day cannot trample on individuals on a whim just because of the way the political wind is blowing this week. Unfortunately, we have yet to devise similarly robust safeguards for government spending, not least because there is much less agreement among the general population about how much governments should be entitled to spend.
I'm not defending the GP post's black-and-white position, but your position is equally untenable. By your argument, it is perfectly OK for the government to take as much tax revenue as it likes, and I think a lot of us would have a problem with that, too.
Taxation is, essentially, legalised theft, just as most of our governments are, essentially, legalised mob rule. History suggests that allowing some degree of both is better than the alternative, which is the Somalia situation you mentioned. But we should never forget that both a government that awards itself power over individual citizens and the concept of taxation are necessary evils. They are not good things, and they are to be tolerated only to the extent that we don't have any better ideas yet.
Whether it's open source or closed source isn't the most important thing. Whether it's run locally or in the cloud doesn't make that much difference.
What really matters is whether the data is readily accessible in a known format. If you can get your data in some sane way that is independent of your current software, then you are in control. If you cannot, then you are not in control.
Of course, going OSS and going cloud-based each have their pros and cons as well, but IMHO they are secondary to controlling the data. For example, while OSS theoretically implies being able to access your data in a known format, I would still rather use a closed source solution with a cleaner known data format than an OSS solution where the code that manipulates the file format is difficult to understand and the format itself is more awkward.
Business: Yeah, running 4 specific apps is the only thing that a business does. And there aren't any tasks for which GNU/Linux is more suitable! (Well, this is mostly true, since all software for GNU/Linux is available for Windows)
I think they were being generous to Linux here, actually. Business apps, creative apps and games are the areas above all others where the Linux world doesn't yet have a serious answer to any of the high-end native Windows applications, and for web-based business tools one browser is as good as another anyway (unless it's IE only, but mercifully even the most die-hard businesses seem to be moving on from ActiveX Hell these days, so let's call this one a tie).
I'm not going to get into an argument about how $LINUX_APP is as good as $WINDOWS_APP. A few tools — OpenOffice Writer and Gnumeric come to mind — can just about hold their own for basic use these days, though it is rare to find anything they actually do better than the industry standard Windows equivalent. Most business/creative tools on Linux simply aren't credible alternatives for professional use, and I have posted various specific criticisms in the past that anyone can go look up in my posting history if they care.
IIRC my college English professors taught the big words actually interfere with communication rather than enhance it.
That is often true. Longer words can be interesting, if they allow subtle distinctions in meaning, or practically useful, if they allow precisely defined terminology to replace vague descriptions. On the other hand, writing "he answered affirmatively" instead of "he said yes" doesn't really help anyone, and all that business-speak "utilise" instead of "use" nonsense needs to die.
That's a long time to wait for the absurdum part to take hold.
I'm not sure that's a very good counter-example.
For one thing, most of the "spreading across Europe" part was during the war rather than prior to it; France and Britain did, after all, declare war on Germany almost immediately after the invasion of Poland.
Also, while the cost of WWII was horrendous, I'm not sure we're doing so much better today: there are creeping power grabs by some very powerful nations without any significant force opposing them. It is more subtle, but still devastatingly expensive in everything from human life (and quality of life) to the world economy. But it's either all most of the population have ever known or happening far from home, so the average citizen in the places concerned allows it to continue, and the true corridors of power are rarely in the workplaces of popular representatives any more.
Your metaphor is quite apt. According to some theories, dinosaurs such as the stegosaurus may have had a second brain-like organ that provided advantageous autonomous behaviour in times of crisis, without relying to the main brain in the head. "Europe", in its various incarnations, often functions similarly.
The less charitable are free to insert an alternative characterisation of European bureaucracy involving left hands, right hands and knowledge here. :-)
That's because I don't believe I've ever heard of an alternative "scalable business model" that could credibly replace the function that copyright provides today within realistic overheads. There are some alternative models that I think might have potential, but I can't see a viable implementation of any of them becoming the norm in what I meant by the medium term (say 5-10 years).
No system that tries to implement any sort of monopoly can address the fundamental problem with copyright that the internet has amplified - that it is human nature to copy stuff we like
A few years ago in my country, people would have said the same about driving home after "just a couple of drinks", or driving on a mobile phone, or smoking in a restaurant. When laws were proposed to make these things illegal, there was a lot of opposition from people with the "me, me, me" attitude and/or who felt it was an unwarranted government intrusion.
Today, with much greater public awareness of the real consequences now that the laws have taken effect, there is much less opposition. People do still use mobile phones while driving, and they do still have accidents because the raw power of their egos does not actually prevent them from driving less competently than someone over the legal drink-drive limit. But these damaging activities have become socially unacceptable to a large chunk of our population.
The problem with copyright is that it is difficult to educate the general public about the real consequences of changing or removing the legal protection for several reasons, not least that no-one really knows what the consequences would be. All we can make are educated guesses and logical arguments based on limited information and "reasonable" assumptions, which will only convince significant numbers of people if they are willing to accept that the assumptions concerned are in fact reasonable (see numerous Slashdot copyright debates passim).
The other problem with mostly unenforced copyright is that it appears to function like progressive taxation: those with the resources to spend (often correlated with those who are the most appealing targets for real enforcement) wind up subsidising those who can't or won't pay for the material. However, in the system as it typically works today, a lot of people who don't have money to burn but don't want to break the law are subsidising people who actually have more money but don't care about breaking the law. That isn't somehow progressive and ethical, it just means the freeloaders are screwing the law-abiding.
I see only three possible outcomes in the medium term.
One possibility is that copyright law (or some replacement) will be adapted to a system that most people on both consumer and creator sides find fair; infringing will become socially unacceptable as a consequence; and targeted enforcement will deal with the serious cases. This is the "good" outcome, IMHO.
Another possibility is that in response to continued mass infringement, ever more draconian laws will be introduced, resulting in ever less reliable technology with ever more compulsory surveillance built in. Those who use this technology will wind up paying more for content because Big Media will have a lock on the market and it appears that no government is currently willing to go after them for anti-competitive/cartel-like behaviour. Those who do not use the technology will be relatively few, as most people won't know how to circumvent it safely, and absurdly draconian penalties will be applied pour encourager les autres.
The final possibility is that things swing too far the other way: the everything-should-be-free crowd actually win; putting in the effort to make original, good quality content becomes economically impractical; and new works are mostly reduced to the level of volunteer-run OSS projects, fan fiction, low-budget inde films, and the writing on Wikipedia. In other words, some works with real value will get created, but probably only a few that are better than entry-level work produced under the commercial system today, and most will downright suck.
It is regrettable that the first outcome seems by far the least likely to happen in practice, given the tendency of controversial political debates to polarise and ultimately to be decided in favour of whichever extremist view wins.
The problem I have with these debates is that some participants seem to think that because I don't approve of Wikileaks and its behaviour, I somehow condone the genuinely disturbing things they have revealed or support war-mongering murderers. I most certainly do not. I simply don't think Wikileaks is the right approach to making any of those things better.
I don't think Wikileaks are some sort of saviours, who are somehow enlightening the public about the dubious activities of certain parts of their governments. It's not as though people didn't suspect this, or as though the press hadn't published numerous other leaks that painted the same picture. Some of the details are different, but that doesn't actually matter all that much, because it's the big picture that really makes a difference to anything. And despite the sarcastic comments from Wikileaks fans, investigative journalism is not dead, political action does matter, and there are even elected politicians who genuinely care and will stand up to the government when it is doing the wrong thing (not so much in the US right now, admittedly, but the US establishment will suffer the consequences of that particular arrogance in due course).
I also don't think Wikileaks are particularly effective at anything other than generating publicity for Wikileaks. What has actually changed for the better as a result of their actions? Here in the UK, we managed to get a couple of million people out to protest about the Iraq war because of a well organised public campaign, and while it didn't stop the war, it did set the tone for our politics ever since (including changes in the law of the "never again" variety). We have since had several public enquiries, which for all the claims of "whitewash" have revealed all sorts of awkward truths about the people who were involved in taking us to war and the lack of planning and so on that we all suspected, many of which were at least as juicy as anything Wikileaks have ever published to my knowledge. Did I mention that going to war against popular opinion also cost the then-Prime Minister his political career, and probably his whole party any serious chance of governing again for a generation?
Moreover, I suspect that in practice, Wikileaks is currently causing valuable resources (mostly the time and attention of people who care) to be redirected away from where they could do the most good. In other words, not only is it potentially harmful because of what it leaks, I think it is also harmful merely for existing and operating as it does. There are only a few good men, as the saying goes, and the more of them spend their time talking up or their money supporting Wikileaks, the fewer of them are likely to spend their time supporting (for example) organisations like Amnesty, the International Red Cross and the ACLU/Liberty/your nation's equivalent.
Exactly none of this means I support or condone the conduct of various governments, including my own. I am all in favour of much stronger independent oversight and public scrutiny, significant changes in various laws to restrict the powers of the few to commit the many in various contexts, and frankly draconian penalties for those in public office who abuse the privilege. I am even getting some of my wishes in this country, now that we've kicked out the administration responsible for those particular screw-ups. And again, I'm pretty sure Wikileaks had pretty much nothing to do with these changes, in contrast with traditional popular campaigns, genuine politics, traditional media, and on-line activities that bridge the gaps between these efforts more than ever.
Don't be simple, not even wikileaks believes that.
Maybe not, but they are apparently fine with making claims like this: '[Assange] also said Wikileaks had "tried hard to make sure that this material does not put innocents at harm".'
Of course, the Pentagon refused to help, leaving wikileaks to do the best they could.
Of course they did! What did you think they were going to do, invite Wikileaks staff in to check the rest of their sensitive records just in case?!
I'd wager that the threat is largely political; anyway, this sort of thing is probably good on the whole.
I couldn't disagree more.
For one thing, Wikileaks' actions may have brought more information into the public domain. There clearly is risk associated with doing so, as you acknowledged yourself above. Some people clearly have been damaged, even if there are no confirmed cases as a result of this one particular leak yet. On the other hand, while the defenders of Wikileaks are quick to demand proof of any actual harm caused by the leaks, no-one seems to have even claimed to show any specific benefits it has brought.
Moreover, a less sensationalist, more focussed release of some of that information, managed properly by a critical free press, might have been much more effective at forcing a government to address genuinely inappropriate actions. And as long as people who want government accountability are chanting the Wikileaks anthem, there is less incentive to introduce serious reforms in the real checks and balances, people in a position of oversight with actual powers to do something when things are going wrong.
Basically, Wikileaks is a vigilante, anarchist organisation. If you think that way of operating governments really is "probably good on the whole", I hear Somalia is a nice vacation spot this time of year.
Does anyone seriously believe that the U.S. (or any other) government has the integrity to properly classify what is and is not in the interests of "national security"?
We certainly shouldn't rely on it without proper checks and balances, and I would certainly agree that not all governments have those today. My sig is not there by accident.
However, two wrongs do not make a right. The correct solution to the problem of excessive government secrecy is better oversight built into the system, not relying on vigilante organisations with questionable ethics and no accountability.
You know, contrary to the popular opinion in some quarters of Slashdot, there actually is a genuine national security concern with some sensitive information, and a good reason for it not to be public. I'm not saying that every time a government bleats "national security" they are justified in doing so. I'm not saying there shouldn't be stronger controls, or additional independent checks, to make sure that the privilege of hiding data from the public is only used under circumstances when it is truly justified. But revealing sources, particularly sources based in countries that do not have the political and law enforcement sensibilities that some of our home nations do, can and does get people killed. Revealing military plans and current locations/movements of valuable targets can and does get people killed. There is even a standard military term for the consequence: "target of opportunity".
Does anyone seriously believe that Wikileaks have the resources and skills necessary to ensure that all information they publish is guaranteed not to compromise anything valuable by mistake? They published over 75,000 documents about the Afghan war, to which presumably only a very small inner circle had prior access. Did they have time to review every one of those documents, with the same skill and care of a military intelligence analyst? Did they have access to all other relevant non-public information, to make sure nothing sensitive could be deduced from what they were leaking by someone bad who already had some but not all of the picture? This is one of those situations where Wikileaks have to be lucky every time but the bad guys only have to get lucky once, and I just don't see how they can possibly vet the sort of stuff they publish properly to ensure the leaks do no harm to innocents.
The bottom line in this debate is that Wikileaks have shown that they do not respect the law in several countries by now. They have also shown that they are not merely engaging in responsible civil disobedience, but are quite willing to leak information that outs people who could be seriously damaged (and there have definitely been serious consequences in some such cases, even if nothing has been reliably confirmed yet in the case you're talking about).
Wikileaks are irresponsible, they do pose a clear threat to the national security of several countries in both military and civil/political terms, and they have made it very clear that they intend to continue doing so and don't much care what anyone else thinks. It genuinely amazes me that none of those countries has dealt with that threat more seriously yet (by which I do not mean summarily assassinating someone, before the testosterone brigade start reading words I didn't actually write — making Assange a martyr probably wouldn't help anyway).
If I pirate a game, play it, and tell a friend about it, that's free advertising.
That's nice. It's also absolutely worthless to the game developer if your friends also then pirate the game without paying for it. So either you're screwing your friend, expecting them to pay for something you won't, or you're screwing the people who developed the game you're enjoying, by participating in a giant pyramid scheme. Which kind of evil are you?
That's an effect that it's pretty hard to collect statistics on.
There are several possible explanations for that. One of them is that the number of people who actually behave as the hypothetical good guy in this favourite Slashdot fairytale is so small that it gets lost in the noise.
You're saying that the people who believe in your math are right.
Not at all. I'm merely giving an illustrative argument, hence the "if" in the text you quoted.
Like smarter game developers have pointed out already: pirates are irrelevant.
Really? And who are they? I have never seen any professional game developer make any such claim.
Pirates who aren't going to by your stuff anyway are irrelevant from a commercial point of view, or even a net plus due to the advertising effect. However, pirates who would buy your stuff if you made it harder for them to rip it illegally are very relevant, and pretending that there are no such people in the world is about as silly as pretending that every pirated copy equates to a lost sale.
This is a fallacy. There's no guarantee that those missing 10% now paid money for the game.
That's true, there isn't. However, you are completely missing the point.
Logical proof is utterly irrelevant here. The exact figures don't matter either. The only thing that really counts is whether the guys at the software companies who make the call on whether or not to include DRM in their next game believe that doing so is going to generate additional income greater than the implementation cost.
It is a simple business decision, and if you think Slashdot pseudo-lawyerese arguments about the evil nature of DRM and how "You can't prove anything!" are going to convince anyone running a software business, I've got a few used cars that might interest you.
Consider that courts of law make life-changing decisions every day based on standards like "on the balance of probabilities" or "beyond reasonable doubt". Neither of these requires a 100% guarantee, because in the real world that's often an impossible goal. All you can do is try to make the best decision you can at the time, and hope it's the right one.
In contrast, the executives at a company aren't even under any obligation to give a fair hearing to both sides of a story. You might not like it, but as long as it's their business on the line, it's their call. You are free to start your own software business if you think they're wrong and you can do things better. Somehow, though, I suspect that most people making arguments about how a certain part of the user base wouldn't pay for software anyway would find that a revealing, and deeply unpleasant, experience.
just so they get the opportunity to aggravate the hell out of the IRS.
My money's on the tax man. Any takers? :-)
I was going to mod you (+1, Everything You Said Is True), but decided to post instead so I could observe that unfortunately, you and I seem to be a relatively small group compared to the vast numbers of freeloaders out there.
As a guy who runs software development businesses, I can appreciate that a games company isn't doing this for fun, they're doing it to make a living. In cold, hard maths, if they are looking at piracy rates of 90% on a DRM-free title and DRM can cut that down to 80%, that doubles the amount of income they're making on that game, which probably does a lot more than doubling their profits after sunk costs are taken into account. I fear that easily outweighs any losses to a few people like you and me who won't spend their hard-earned cash on a game with those kinds of restrictions.
There seems to be an entire generation now who have this "everything I want should be free" entitlement culture. I'm sure it's partly to do with being able to rip things like games and music on-line, but it's also a lot to do with how the kids are brought up: walk through the city centre on a Saturday afternoon, and most of the 12-year-olds have more expensive phones than I do. If I wanted something nice when I was younger, I had to help with the household chores or do my homework, and my parents would give me enough money to buy a little treat if and when I had fulfilled my other obligations. When was the last time you heard about a child having to work for their phone? This is not a healthy trend, but as long as it is socially acceptable to get whatever you want without having to work for it, it's going to be a tough market that companies like computer game vendors to operate in.
And how do you propose fixing that "problem?"
Change the law to prohibit behaviour whose implications society now finds to be unacceptable.
As I have noted before, it's not difficult to establish objective criteria that separate what Google is doing with Street View from the natural interactions of someone walking down the street, or for that matter from someone taking private holiday snaps or a professional photographer working in a public place. There is a commercial/private use distinction, whether we're talking about a small number of one-off observations or systematic recording of a large area, whether the information collected uses equipment to observe things that someone going about their normal daily lives could not, whether the observations will be published to the general public or used only internally, how location data will or will not be associated with each observation, whether the data can be looked up by some sort of database search, etc.
What we need to do is find out which criteria, or combination of criteria, give rise to the implications that apparently a significant number of people do not wish to accept, decide whether additional prohibitions should be made in these areas, and leave everything else alone until we have reason to do otherwise.
What the hell kind of argument is that?
That the law should reflect ethics and not the other way around? I think it's a basic principle of any just legal system.
How is it unethical to engage in Constitutionally protected rights?
Unpopular speech is exactly what the First Amendment is there to protect.
That's nice for you, but we're not talking about the US, we're talking about Germany. Do you realise not only that US laws do not apply to the rest of us, but also that the US has some of the weakest protections for privacy and personal data of any country in the world and most of us do not regard its laws as a model of how this sort of issue should be handled? It's actually illegal to transfer personal data from European businesses to the US without explicit permission, because your legal safeguards aren't up to even the minimum standards we consider acceptable here.
If you are sure that your position is the right one, you might like to consider that places like Germany have rather more recent, and sometimes all too personal, experience of the consequences of allowing too much mass surveillance of the population than you do across the pond. Their national culture has a definite element of "never again" about it, born of that experience.
Either way, Google is being nice by taking down photographs upon request. This is not a legal requirement, or censorship, or anything like that.
Not yet.
Clearly a lot of people felt strongly enough that this sort of activity constituted some sort of invasion of privacy to make the effort to ask Google to take the photos down. Clearly Google felt there was enough of a risk (legal, PR or otherwise) in not doing so that they instituted a policy to comply with these requests, and they have introduced various other policies for related reasons.
If people like this Jens guy won't voluntarily respect that and want to deliberately upset all those other people just because they can legally do so today, then the law can always be changed tomorrow to fix that problem. This is the basic flaw in the whole "You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place" argument: it based on law rather than on ethics, and ignores the fact that laws are supposed to change as the world does, including keeping up with the implications of new technologies and how people feel about them.
Even if the HTML5/CSS3 features were proprietary to browsers, the sane vendors have de-facto standards for such proprietary extensions. And they'll be standards one day, even if slightly different.
Perhaps. If and when that day comes, HTML5 and CSS3 will be better choices than they are today.
As for video, there are two choices now: use WebM or pay for H.264. That's good enough.
That's a matter of opinion. For now, WebM is not widely supported in mainstream browsers: Opera has it, but it's only in testing versions of the major Gecko and Webkit browsers, and of course if you need IE or mobile browsers (both very big markets for on-line video) you're out of luck. As for H.264, it's an encumbered format with licensing costs, which automatically limits its usefulness to projects that can accept those limitations.
Otherwise two extra containers are needed along with some float rules to fake it.
Exactly. And now your "semantic" HTML is full of extra divs that are there entirely to support the layout, along with a whole bunch of float rules that again aren't really there to float content but because it's still the only way to get sensible column layouts in CSS.
I note in passing that a layout using such extra containers and floats, containing within it another layout using floats, that works correctly across all modern browsers, is quite a rare beast.
Now for my example.
Forgive me for skipping the NSFW link, but in any case, I don't dispute that using CSS for layout is often the right approach. I am merely saying it is not "always the right approach, because".
Do they have to?
Yes, if they want to start criticising others on accessibility grounds, I think they should actually know something about accessibility. IMNSHO, that knowledge should come from empirical data and real world experience, not dogmatic adherence to the rules people who are probably mostly not disabled posted on a blog too many.
Websites that make extensive uses of table-based lay-outs take much more than just 5 lines, while the equivalent CSS is lighter by comparison.
OK, let's try a few simple examples. Here's one from a web app I was working on yesterday: I want to display a short, plain text message in some sort of notification or dialog area, with an icon next to it. The icon should be a fixed horizontal distance from the text, and the whole icon+message should be centred within the containing block, with the text lines wrapping if necessary. For your reference, here is some quick and dirty HTML using a table-based layout, which nevertheless already works in every browser I have here, including the older ones I only test for backward compatibility these days:
<table><tr>
<td><!-- Icon img goes here --></td>
<td><!-- Text goes here --></td>
</tr></table>
Just add a line or two of CSS to set the spacing you want. What combination of semantic HTML and CSS, which works on all major browsers and regardless of its context in the overall page layout, would you propose as an alternative? (If you're about to suggest something involving a float and some negative margins, please make sure it still works across the board when the containing block of the message is itself part of an arbitrary layout, possibly constructed using floats.)
Of course, there are numerous more global page layouts that still require absurd amounts of effort in the CSS to get a basic result. Anything involving aligning content at the bottom of a multi-column layout (within a column, not in a footer) is probably a good example.
You mean web developers are not allowed to argue for accessibility for, say, the blind, because they're not blind themselves?
No, I mean that web developers who are advocating CSS over table layouts frequently justify this on the grounds of accessibility, but I'd bet good money that most of them have never heard a single page read aloud by a screen reader, let alone done actual usability testing with a partially sighted subject. You can tell this from the way they use perfectly standards-compliant HTML and CSS to render a page in a beautiful combination of colours that will sound fine when read by a screen reader... but be utterly unreadable to a significant proportion of the population with the wrong form of colour blindness.
Finally, an announcement for the knee-jerk troll moderators: Please note that at no point in this post nor the one before it have I advocated any of (a) using table-based layouts routinely in production web sites, (b) not using CSS layouts in production web sites, or (c) building production web sites that do not cater properly for their target audience, including any members of that audience with special accessibility requirements. I am merely saying that dogmatic assumption that CSS is better than table layout is a lot like dogmatic assumption that HTML5 video is better than Flash: it may well be true in any given case, but "It's just better, because." is not a strong argument.
Depends what you mean by "soon". I predict less than five years until...
You may well be right. I hope you are. However, five years is an eternity in Internet time. Some people become multimillionaires in less time. Other people try two or three different failed start-ups.
To check your perspective, please try to identify any top tier web-based business today that is still using the same core technologies as it was five years ago. For reference, in mid-2005, Firefox was a year old, Safari was on version 2, IE6 was still the latest release, and Chrome wasn't even a twinkle in Sergey's and Larry's eyes. Tim O'Reilly had just popularised the term "Web 2.0", and YouTube had only just been invented. Neither major server-side frameworks like Ruby on Rails and CodeIgniter nor major client-side frameworks like jQuery had been released yet, and cloud hosting platforms like AWS didn't exist (for the general public, at least).
Really? Give examples of this, please. In CSS you sometimes have to state the same exact rule three times or more, but it's the same rule with the same syntax in all common cases I can think of except gradients.
I suspect gradients are indeed the main obvious example where the syntax differs significantly between browsers. If we're talking more generally about features that don't have effective cross-browser support yet, obviously neither IE nor Opera support much CSS3 stuff in their latest versions. There are several more features like animations that are only supported to any useful extent in Webkit browsers, so there aren't enough competing implementations to allow for different versions of CSS in your file. :-)
In fact, this stuff is generally standardized already. The problem is it's not always implemented
Actually, no CSS3 module has yet become a W3C Recommendation.
In any case, for real projects rather than exploratory or for-fun pages, it is what's implemented that counts. There's no rule that we can't change a project to use a better technology later if one is available, but it's pretty hard to run a successful project using a better technology that most users don't have yet.
Sorry, but I live in the real world. The only things I am interested in when making a decision about technology today are those things that can be reasonably expected or guaranteed as of today. I will worry about hypothetical futures tomorrow, when Linux is on the desktop, Apple have bowed to public pressure and made the iPhone an open platform, the RIAA has realised that on-line sales could make them a lot of money and abandoned DRM, and the W3C can manage to standardise something as important as HTML and CSS in less than the average human lifetime.