There are certainly nicer ways it could be done, I agree. Another thing that I think would be widely useful is an extension of HTTP Authentication and browser UIs to cover the common use case where you don't want to force people to go through a dialog box and log in just to visit your public site, but you want to allow them to log in optionally so they can, say, customise the pages you send or access premium features. This would make a lot of cookie-based hackery redundant anyway.
Without cookies there is no way we could do any path analysis to see how individual people are using our site.
Then I'm very sorry, but you are incompetent: not only are you apparently unable to think of any of several other possible approaches, but you are also unable to read the up-moderated comment just a few posts from here that started an entire discussion about them.
You can persist state server-side, you just need a unique session ID of some sort to index it.
You could generate a session ID on the first page view and incorporate it into any relevant links/scripts via GET/POST as I described before, without storing anything permanent on the visitor's computer, though of course it will be rather obvious to the user that you are doing this.
The only thing you can't do with this approach is track people across multiple visits or multiple sites without getting them to create an account or otherwise generating a permanent, unique ID that they give you, which they will know about.
Please don't collect data on "screen resolution" or make *any* assumptions at all about it.
People don't browse with the browser window maximized unless they have to, and in the era of wide-screen monitors, it's getting less and less useful to have such a set up anyway.
I challenge your claim about maximized browsers. I have never seen any evidence to support it.
In any case, realistically, what you want to know is not just the maximum screen size of your visitors but also the typical viewable area they have. This is valuable, not so much for telling you how large you can go, but for telling you how small an area you need to cope with. For example, if I'm writing a blog about coding and I want to make sure my code listings are maximally readable, I want to avoid unnecessary line-breaks, but if the lines are going to break it's preferable to provide custom layout. Since the effort to do that for every moderately long line is prohibitive, if I have a fair idea of how wide my readers can make their window, I can aim for the best defaults.
You're right about the ideal in terms of viewing arcs of course, but as you say, there is a limit to what we can realistically achieve, so we have to make some reasonable assumptions and work from there. Likewise, there's nothing wrong with making a design adaptable for those who have particular viewing needs, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't present an attractive, effective default that works well for most of your visitors.
It seems to me that what you're saying is that you make a living telling people what they "should" do, and helping them to do things that way. You are being told that your model of doing things is under threat, and your objection is that this will make your life more difficult. While I sympathise if that is your predicament, because you don't seem to be trying to abuse the system yourself, I do not find your situation to be a particularly strong argument for permitting undisclosed monitoring of people. Indeed, those abusing the current system could make the exact same argument if that were the case.
I think the strength of your argument is diminished by repeatedly stating technical nonsense. There is nothing particularly difficult about setting up a CMS that automatically appends a unique identifier to URLs in links, and logs the identifier of pages visited this way. If you have the resources to do tricks with cookies, you have the resources do this. It's just a different approach. Incidentally, this is actually likely to give more reliable results if you really want to prioritise information gathering, since it will overcome most common cache tools.
I have no idea what you're talking about in terms of controlling back/forward buttons; I don't see how those are relevant to this at all. Likewise, there is no problem with "free for all content"; this is just what you serve if someone visits a page without any identifier appended, and is directly analogous to (but probably more reliable than) checking for an empty referrer. The only major technical downside with this approach is that if someone bookmarks one of your pages, then they'll be bookmarking the tracking identifier as well.
Of course, there is a danger that someone would interpret the new rules as prohibiting this sort of tracking behaviour as well. And of course, it would be nicer if there were some standard way of indicating preferences for all cookie-like behaviour within browsers. But right now, the software supplier and the cookie abusers are running the show, and I think a moderate degradation in the ability of site owners to track users directly using cookies is a small price to pay to prohibit that abuse.
I did see your smiley, but being serious for a moment, yes, we do have simple privacy policies, linked from every page, that explain what the JavaScript is for. Also, we don't collect anything trackable or personally identifiable by that means, only generic data about the systems used to view our sites such as the things I mentioned before.
I mentioned the referrer point merely because it completely debunks the specific argument you made in your previous post: "Most sites have 60%+ visits coming from Google in the middle of the site, to do any usability testing they need to know where they arrived to focus that usability."
You seem to have ignored the fact that I also mentioned using JavaScript for more detailed analysis.
If you need to follow specific users around your site, you can do this without cookies by adding a suitable GET/POST field on your links/form submissions.
The only thing you've mentioned that can't be done without cookies is tracking users across visits, where they leave your site and then return again later. I'll concede that this might be useful, but to me it seems a small price to pay for saying that as a user, it means no-one else can track my movements between sites either.
You can, could, and still will be able to block cookies in your browser, so whatever web site operators are doing with them, it isn't going to affect your privacy or "trackability".
Unfortunately, that isn't really what happens.
For example, many sites now use local shared objects ("Flash cookies") to store data, rather than regular cookies. No mainstream browser controls these by default, so even if you have disabled all cookies in your browser's privacy settings or asked to clear all your private data, LSOs will still work. Moreover, use of LSOs is often not even mentioned in a site's privacy policy; even big-name sites like YouTube have been offenders in this respect. Moremoreover, the way to disable these little buggers in Flash is hidden in a settings dialog that most users wouldn't even know to exist.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't see how failing to disable something that is being used to do something you never asked for, which you don't know is happening, via an obscure dialog you don't know exists, can constitute implied consent, particularly if you've explicitly disabled all similar functionality that is presented in your browser's UI.
I can't decide whether this is Brazil-style bureaucracy galore, or Eastern Standard Tribe-style anti-productivity warfare.
Neither, it's basic privacy protection, and as far as I can see it's long overdue and a good thing. Why should we support out-opt monitoring rather than opt-in, just to make life easier for those who want to produce targeted advertising and affiliate blogspam?
If you have a legitimate need to use cookies, for example to help a user with a shopping cart or remember they've logged into your forum, then there will be no problem stating clearly at the point that they start to use these facilities that a cookie will be set for that purpose. If you manage to wade through all the FUD blog posts and find the actual wording we're talking about here (you'll want article 2, clause 5, on page 76), you'll notice that this does not require UAC-style dialogs or 'screen after screen of "permissions" to continue'. In fact, there is even wording saying that the new rule doesn't apply in cases where the user has explicitly requested a service that needs to store cookie-like information to function properly.
So do you actually have any evidence to back up your doomsaying, or is it just your personal view that you'd like to shove down everyone else's throat?
We don't use cookies on the sites I run, yet I still have a pretty good idea of what our users do, because we have these things called server logs. They include something called a referrer field, which tells you where the visitor came from before they reached their current page, for example. Moreover, for more detailed analysis, it is far more valuable for site improvement to have a little JavaScript that can also identify things like screen resolutions and browser versions, which give us information that is directly useful to checking that our pages will look good on the systems our visitors are actually using. Cookies won't tell you any of that.
We are contemplating using cookies for a new system on one of our sites, because it will allow users to create an account and then filter data shown on various pages according to their personal preferences. All the cookie will do is remember whether the user has logged in, and if so, who they are, for the duration of their visit. And we're only doing that because the site will work fine without an account, so we don't want to throw up HTTP Authentication screens for every visitor. We would have no problem disclosing this fully to any visitor to our site at the time they create an account.
The two most important words for anyone doing web design and/or development are degrade gracefully.
Erm... No. Sorry, not even close.
Here are a few much more important pairs of words for most people doing web design other than purely for personal satisfaction:
Cost/benefit
Market share
Progressive enhancement
There is a certain proportion of people in the world who are quite happy to visit others' web sites and consume the content free of charge, yet who think the web designers should go out of their way to accommodate people who actively choose not to view the content as intended by those offering it. For most designers, there is a good word for that proportion: "insignificant".
Now, some people will prefer to view a web site with fonts a little larger or smaller. Some will have genuine disabilities, and will appreciate good mark-up that supports assistive technology. I have nothing against catering to these people in a web site design. This will have a cost, but often the return on investment from the effort will be worthwhile. If you're going to do this, IMHO viewing it as progressive enhancement (i.e., start with something basic but universally usable, then add the nicer features on top) is much better than as graceful degradation (i.e., start with the full works, then try to hack away parts of it to make it still work without breaking anything).
But in any case, if you as a visitor actively choose to replace fonts completely, or not to show images, or not to run JavaScript, or to read web pages using a ten-year-old browser, or as raw HTML, or as a hex dump, well, that's a problem of your own making. Don't expect anyone else to care. You're free to go and visit some other site, but please close the door behind you on the way out.
How about, um, reducing the level of waste you produce?
Please see my response to the other person who replied to my previous post.
Our household produces less than one bag full of waste each week, our bin can fit 5 or 6 full bags.
Our household also typically produces less than a full bag of non-recyclable waste each week, but our black bins would only fit about 3 bags; the recycling bins have about twice this volume. That means if they miss a collection, or even if you have more waste one week for some reason (some of us do invite friends around occasionally!), you simply can't fit everything in the bin.
The funniest thing I saw was a TV news report on bi-weekly bin collections where a woman was complaining that she couldn't recycle cans because they'd sit there in her kitchen smelling all week before they were collected. How much effort does it take to wash out a can?
To wash out one can? Not much.
To wash out every can, wash out every plastic bottle, clean all your cardboard, separate all your food waste and wrap it in newspaper, buy a newspaper you otherwise wouldn't every couple of days just so you have something to wrap with, remove the windows from all the windowed envelopes going in paper recycling, separate out the impersonal junk mail that can go in one box from the junk mail with name and address details that should be shredded and then placed in a different box... Well, now it's starting to become an unreasonable hassle. And all of those things are based on the direct advice from our local council (and, in the case of shredding, the police).
If your waste doesn't fit in your bin then reduce your waste. Shut the lid on the bin, compost food waste, voilà no bad smells.
That's cute, except that we don't get to control how supermarkets pack everyday items, which is where most of our non-recyclable waste comes from; the size of the bins around here is rather arbitrary, and in most cases is based on what people used to have for a weekly collection (with the recycling arrangements roughly the same before and since); not everyone has somewhere for composting or any use for the compost afterwards; and so on, and so on.
I'm afraid you sound a bit like some of our local councillors, who from their large, detached houses with ample back gardens and off-road areas to keep their bins and boxes other than on collection days, with officials who keep them updated as part of their job on what goes where among the different containers, who dine on high quality fresh food bought from a variety of local shops, can't quite understand why people living in a block of flats, with about 10 square-metres of garden area in total, who keep not getting the information about what goes where for collection that the council jobsworths say they keep sending out, and who buy whatever economy food they can best afford from the local supermarket, are annoyed by all the arrangements that would require physics-defying ingenuity just to avoid literally breaking the law, never mind actually getting the rubbish collected.
Perhaps you should. In the time it took you to write those words, you could instead have typed "bi-weekly bin collection UK", clicked the search button, and found numerous articles immediately, from all over the country, showing the current situation. (I'd find you some summary statistics, but strangely, neither local councils nor the central government people promoting this arrangement are going out of their way to acknowledge how widespread it has become and the level of dissatisfaction it has caused.)
I have spent almost 30 years living in the UK. I have friends in virtually every region of the country and can tell you that I know no-one who has bi-weekly general waste collection
You have friends within virtually every local council area in the country? Is that like having 600 Facebook "friends" or something?
Or are you trying to generalise from one person's limited experience—your own—and assuming that just because you haven't experienced this at all, no-one else has either?
I wouldn't call 4 or 5 instances a common problem in, at least, over 100 collections.
You might if each of those occasions meant that for the corresponding type of waste you had no collection for a month, and possibly for another 2–4 weeks more depending on how long it took for a replacement to be delivered since the collection people won't accept any non-standard containers for "health and safety" reasons. Put another way, someone with that failure rate has sub-standard waste collection for approximately 50% of the year.
Also, please give evidence of low income families being required to pay for a replacement for a bin that the council lost.
In my city, as far as I've been told by the council, everyone has to pay to get their black (general waste) bin replaced if it goes missing for any reason. The low income part is only relevant because if you've got around £50 to spare it's an irritation while if you've got around £50 to buy food this week it's a bit more than that.
However, if any of the various kinds of recycling bin or box used in our area go missing, the council replaces them free of charge, albeit often with a delay before the new one is delivered.
Council Tax (really, more than £2,000 a year? Where do you live?)
In a detached house in East Anglia. Ours isn't quite that much (though it's not far off these days), but I think one or two bands further and you're past that mark, and last time I checked we were actually a little below the national average rates for each band.
I'm not saying bin collection is perfect, but you seem to have gone way over the top in your post.
I'm biased, but then again, I've also been repeatedly screwed. Our Council Tax has gone up while the level of service has gone down. We've had so many missed collections that formal complaints resulted in the collection people having to call a supervisor every time they wanted to mark one of our bins as not being put out. And while we personally have never lost the one bin you'd have to pay for, we've had the other one not come back on collection day twice, and as I write this we have neither of the two boxes we should have any more and the Council won't replace them because they're moving to a new system with a third bin instead in a few weeks, so basically for about two months we are missing half of our collections.
This sort of mess is precisely the kind of thing normal people with real lives and time-consuming jobs shouldn't have to worry about, yet here I am, so annoyed by it that I'm debating the subject with a stranger on Slashdot. I shudder to think how much time I've used chasing up the council each time something has gone wrong. This is the sort of stuff that should Just Work, and it's what local councils are for. If they're
If memory serves, the wording in the EU (at least in the original international agreement, not necessarily in individual nations' implementations thereof) is about exempting copies that would be necessary for the normal use of a product. For example, if you sell someone a CD, it's going to be hard to argue that you didn't expect them to play the music, so any transient copies created for that purpose would be exempt.
This is where the interesting twist with software comes in, because again, it's hard to argue that you've taken 300 Euro from someone for a shrink-wrapped software product, but you didn't expect them to install and use that software on their computer. (Compare with the case where they buy one "single" product at a "single" product price, but then install and use it on every computer at their office, which would not be a normal understanding.)
It's interesting that the national implementations of that particular technicality don't always seem to reflect the EU-level agreement. The UK, for example, seems to have some rather important wording that doesn't quite mean the same thing. I don't know what happens if, according to UK law, the copy made is infringing, but only because the UK failed to implement an EU-level agreement properly.
This also means there is potential for a very different kind of agreement if a consumer purchases software directly from the maker/copyright holder vs. if they purchase the software via a third party, because in the former case there is clearly consideration beyond merely making a transient copy to install or run the program in the normal way.
I don't see how, as a matter of fact, a court could find any differently. It is an objective reality that a copy in RAM is made of data on a disk when a program is loaded. That is the "loading" part.;-)
Whether or not such copying should be subject to restriction by copyright law is a different question entirely, and from a legal point of view it is much more interesting. As mentioned in TFS, some major jurisdictions (including IIRC both the US and the EU) have specific and/or general wording in some of their laws that might exclude these copies. It that were the case, it could negate any legal argument about controlling the use of software based purely on ability to load and run an otherwise legal copy.
That matters profoundly, because it could have huge repercussions for the validity of EULAs and similar arrangements: for software purchased via a third party, the copying-into-memory angle could be the only influence the original copyright holder has, and if that is negated then there is nothing in it for the consumer to agree to an EULA. It's not clear how any sort of binding contractual agreement, such as any other EULA terms, could be valid at that point.
Don't be so quick to criticise Eady. His case history shows a strong bias towards promoting personal privacy, a consideration that for the most part is sorely lacking in law in the UK.
Personally, I'd much rather have a legal system that presumed privacy and overrode it when there was clear public interest than one that presumed you could say whatever you wanted about someone regardless of truth or the damage it would cause and then relied on innocent parties to mount expensive lawsuits to (attempt to) fix the damage after-the-fact. Privacy is an under-rated thing in today's society, but in 20 years' time I think we will look back on our own naivete in allowing government by database state, and permitting global corporations to profile people's entire lives and then use that information arbitrarily (but rarely in the interest of the profilee).
In other words, freedom of speech is a dangerous thing if not balanced by the rights of others not to be abused: such a pure freedom brings with it no responsibility for what you say, and provides carte blanche to damage innocent people with impunity, which is exactly what laws are supposed to guard against. The main value in freedom of speech is in promoting public debate about important principles, without artificial barriers limiting the scope of the debate to what is currently morally acceptable by some particular group or politically acceptable to the current government. The value in freedom of speech is not in allowing one individual or group to attack another with relative impunity, denying the attacked party any right of reply or fair compensation for undue harm caused.
I've heard of no councils that have reduced bin collection to every 2 weeks - only certain 'luxury pickups' like garden waste (leaves, hedge trimmings etc.) and certain recycling pickups; so definite citation needed here
Credibility fail. Literally five seconds with Google would show you that this practice has become commonplace across the UK in recent years, usually against public opinion. The details of which recycling is collected vary by local council, but reducing general rubbish collections to biweekly is almost always involved.
This does make things somewhat unpleasant in terms of smells and pests at certain times of year. IME, the worse problem is that it means if a council miss your collection one week, you wind up with an entire month of rubbish to go in the (typically small) bin, which just doesn't fit. Then the council may refuse to collect excess waste (or you get fined via the legal system), and often there is no useful process of appeal: if the bin men say your bin wasn't out, that's it, even if it clearly was and they've made the same mistake several times already. I'm writing from personal experience, but I'm hardly the only one who's mentioned this problem on local forums around where I live.
The man wasn't arrested for leaving his bin open - he was fined, for over-filling his bin. It was a bit specific to the letter of the law, but its not outrageous to draw the line where they did
That rather depends on whether the council are doing a decent job otherwise, doesn't it? As I noted above, they frequently don't, but now instead of it being their problem, it has legally become yours.
There are numerous other minor abuses going on, e.g., if you get home from work on collection day and find one of your recycling bins/boxes hasn't come back, you can get another one free, but some places charge a lot of money to replace the general waste bin under the same circumstances. Once again, containers not being put back outside your home after collection is a common problem—we've had four or five instances in the past couple of years—and to a household on a low income, the cost of replacement just so they can use the bin service they're already paying through the nose for via Council Tax, is a lot of money.
Defenders of such policies usually seem to mumble something about not having hypothecated taxation, so just because we have a dedicated Council Tax that goes to our local authorities and just because those local authorities are legally responsible for providing waste collection services, that doesn't mean you're entitled to actually get a working service or any minimum standards just because you pay them thousands of pounds a year in tax. Seriously, I've been told this many times, and it seems to be the best they've got. What happened to no taxation without representation? Why aren't our representatives up in arms over this sort of failure to provide essential basic services?
That's a lovely idea. Unfortunately, short of violent overthrow of the existing government, it's unlikely to happen in the immediate future.
Political pressure is bringing about changes, slowly but surely: as of a few days ago, we have complete separation of the judiciary from the legislature, for example, and most of the hereditary peers have gone from the Lords, so at least you have to suck up yourself to get in there instead of being given a place just because some ancestor of yours once did.
I think things will continue to improve, because trust in politicians is at an all-time low, and merely getting elected will probably require some significant concessions now. We have the mess of the expenses scandal, which has effectively cost about 20% of MPs their jobs or senior positions (not to mention actual cash in many cases). Worse, it has cost the entire political class a lot of credibility, compounding things like the Iraq war (over the obvious objections of literally millions of citizens taking to the streets), numerous heavy-handed actions on the part of the police in recent years, the surveillance state, and the way the Brown administration took over running the country on the back of an extremely dubious mandate. It's hard to see any part getting to the general election next year without promising significant action on many of these points (or at least backtracking quietly, in the case of Labour).
In other news, serial resigner, unelected jobsworth, and general insult to the democratic process "Lord" Peter Mandelson, having been appointed to high government office on a technicality by serial bad decision maker, unelected jobsworth, and general insult to the democractic process Gordon Brown, will shortly be resigning, again, having demonstrated a stunning lack of competence in public office, again.
Sorry, we've got an update: the Labour Party are going to get hammered so badly in the general election next year that they might actually come third, the current administration is already in lame duck mode, and Mandelson's views are all but irrelevant.
Frankly, I'm more worried about what David Cameron and his crew are going to do when they get in. If memory serves, they have publicly backed screwing the people in favour of Big Media pretty much any time the question has come up, also directly contravening overwhelming public sentiment expressed to Gowers et al.
You're right that there are good capitalists (good people who are capitalists, not people who are good at being capitalists) out there. But they can only be good capitalists by being bad capitalists (by *not* being good at being a capitalist).
That's one way of looking at it. The other way is that they are people who decide that it's worth paying a certain price to support things they believe in. The same could be said of anyone who, for example, donates to a charity: by definition, they are not required to give up their money, but money is just a simulated measure of worth, and the donor considers the charity they support worthy.
Put another way, you're only looking at one side of the coin when you consider the capitalist ideal of generating maximum money (which to a pure capitalist is equivalent to producing the most benefit). You also have to consider that money is worthless unless it is, in turn, exchanged for other things of value.
Are you sure you didn't change anything else: the fonts available on your system, the paper size, the compatibility options, something like that?
I don't doubt that there might be minor changes otherwise, but I can honestly say that I have never seen anything "not look correct at all" in the situation you describe, and I've been working with plenty of Word documents for a long time. What formatting or layout features didn't translate properly for you?
I completely agree, though I think it's a lot worse than you say.
Why do we insist on displaying information that is probably read more often on-screen than on-paper these days in an area that lends itself to printing on standardised paper sizes, and that was never very good for readability with the typical margin set-up even then? Basic text layout could be handled much better for on-screen use: see numerous discussions about layout for web pages. Supplementary content like charts, tables, diagrams, footnotes and citations/cross-references could be displayed in many more helpful ways, given the typical properties of a modern widescreen monitor, than the fixed, paper-based layouts typically available today. Again, even basic web pages are better at some of this stuff, and the layout and presentation tools in HTML/CSS are crude by professional design standards.
Why do we still present a bazillion hard-coded formatting options, when most possible combinations are only ever (a) ignored or (b) over-used with horrendous results? Pretty much everyone else, from serious publishers to people writing papers in LaTeX to those working on web content using HTML and CSS has been using structured, semantic mark-up with separate formatting rules since roughly forever.
Why do we still have all the emphasis on presentation anyway? Sure, formatting documents and laying out the information for good readability is important, but the content itself is also important. There are all kinds of things tools could do both to help streamline the editing process and to help authors to write better content. Sadly, the most help we get from typical word processors today is a spelling checker (in your country's variation of your native language if you're lucky), a grammar checker (which is wrong more often than it's right if you are a reasonably competent author writing in your native language), and simple metrics like word count and a few mostly-incomprehensible reading ease indicators.
And why are document review and process support tools, such as version labelling, adding comments and proposing edits, tracking changes, and recording approvals, all still in the Stone Age by computing standards? These are very important in a lot of business and other formal contexts, and form a major part of the way a lot of people work with digital documents. I shudder to think what the world economy loses just because of time wasted trying to pass basic feedback from one colleague to another while working on documents of mutual interest.
Clearly even niche markets in document editing have pretty vast potential, because it's one of the most common reasons many of us use computers and even if the media change, the need to communicate in more than 140 characters isn't going to die out any time soon. Moreover, some people do produce rather nice alternatives to heavyweight applications like MS Word and OpenOffice Writer, and there are various apparently successful small businesses (or groups within large businesses, in the case of companies like Apple) doing so. I don't understand why most of these seem to be confined to Apple systems, though, with few decent choices available for either Windows (where you'd think the dominant interest would lie from commercial developers) or the freebie platforms (with their legions of volunteers ready to contribute). There must be a killer business waiting to be born somewhere out there...
I almost agree. I'm sure there are niches where on-line document editing has merit, but the bottom line is that cloud computing is still more vapour than solid software. On-line office suites suck in almost every other way compared to their desktop-based brethren, and it's not as if there's no scope for improvement in those, they've just reached the point of being "good enough" that people tolerate their problems.
I can't help noticing that every time someone makes observations like these on forums like Slashdot, there are usually a string of responses about how trusting Google/Amazon/whoever with your sensitive data is better than trusting in-house people who are still a security risk, don't have the same resources to build in resilience to system failures, and so on. And then over the following week, it always seems like there are a couple of articles about major downtime from such services, another one about a serious security breach, and every few weeks there's a major data loss incident.
In any case, while centralised storage has merit for some purposes, you don't need software-as-a-service for that, you just need somewhere you can save a file.
It is as compatible as different versions of MS Office...
Sorry, but that simply isn't true. The last major screw-up Microsoft made on that front was nearly a decade ago. They may have introduced different file formats since, but new versions of Office open files created in older versions just fine, and in some cases vice versa if you download the right add-in software from MS.
You are only totally compatible when everyone is running the same version of the same program.
Indeed. And that means your comment overlook sthe fundamental problem: most people aren't comparing moving from one version of MS Office to either another version or to OpenOffice. They already have a version of MS Office that works fine, and is compatible with itself just fine. OpenOffice being 100% compatible isn't a plus point relative to what most users already have, it's merely a prerequisite for even being equal, and one that isn't yet satisfied for a lot of people.
Slashdot Mirror
There are certainly nicer ways it could be done, I agree. Another thing that I think would be widely useful is an extension of HTTP Authentication and browser UIs to cover the common use case where you don't want to force people to go through a dialog box and log in just to visit your public site, but you want to allow them to log in optionally so they can, say, customise the pages you send or access premium features. This would make a lot of cookie-based hackery redundant anyway.
Without cookies there is no way we could do any path analysis to see how individual people are using our site.
Then I'm very sorry, but you are incompetent: not only are you apparently unable to think of any of several other possible approaches, but you are also unable to read the up-moderated comment just a few posts from here that started an entire discussion about them.
Sorry, I don't follow.
You can persist state server-side, you just need a unique session ID of some sort to index it.
You could generate a session ID on the first page view and incorporate it into any relevant links/scripts via GET/POST as I described before, without storing anything permanent on the visitor's computer, though of course it will be rather obvious to the user that you are doing this.
The only thing you can't do with this approach is track people across multiple visits or multiple sites without getting them to create an account or otherwise generating a permanent, unique ID that they give you, which they will know about.
I have zero problem with this situation.
Please don't collect data on "screen resolution" or make *any* assumptions at all about it.
People don't browse with the browser window maximized unless they have to, and in the era of wide-screen monitors, it's getting less and less useful to have such a set up anyway.
I challenge your claim about maximized browsers. I have never seen any evidence to support it.
In any case, realistically, what you want to know is not just the maximum screen size of your visitors but also the typical viewable area they have. This is valuable, not so much for telling you how large you can go, but for telling you how small an area you need to cope with. For example, if I'm writing a blog about coding and I want to make sure my code listings are maximally readable, I want to avoid unnecessary line-breaks, but if the lines are going to break it's preferable to provide custom layout. Since the effort to do that for every moderately long line is prohibitive, if I have a fair idea of how wide my readers can make their window, I can aim for the best defaults.
You're right about the ideal in terms of viewing arcs of course, but as you say, there is a limit to what we can realistically achieve, so we have to make some reasonable assumptions and work from there. Likewise, there's nothing wrong with making a design adaptable for those who have particular viewing needs, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't present an attractive, effective default that works well for most of your visitors.
It seems to me that what you're saying is that you make a living telling people what they "should" do, and helping them to do things that way. You are being told that your model of doing things is under threat, and your objection is that this will make your life more difficult. While I sympathise if that is your predicament, because you don't seem to be trying to abuse the system yourself, I do not find your situation to be a particularly strong argument for permitting undisclosed monitoring of people. Indeed, those abusing the current system could make the exact same argument if that were the case.
I think the strength of your argument is diminished by repeatedly stating technical nonsense. There is nothing particularly difficult about setting up a CMS that automatically appends a unique identifier to URLs in links, and logs the identifier of pages visited this way. If you have the resources to do tricks with cookies, you have the resources do this. It's just a different approach. Incidentally, this is actually likely to give more reliable results if you really want to prioritise information gathering, since it will overcome most common cache tools.
I have no idea what you're talking about in terms of controlling back/forward buttons; I don't see how those are relevant to this at all. Likewise, there is no problem with "free for all content"; this is just what you serve if someone visits a page without any identifier appended, and is directly analogous to (but probably more reliable than) checking for an empty referrer. The only major technical downside with this approach is that if someone bookmarks one of your pages, then they'll be bookmarking the tracking identifier as well.
Of course, there is a danger that someone would interpret the new rules as prohibiting this sort of tracking behaviour as well. And of course, it would be nicer if there were some standard way of indicating preferences for all cookie-like behaviour within browsers. But right now, the software supplier and the cookie abusers are running the show, and I think a moderate degradation in the ability of site owners to track users directly using cookies is a small price to pay to prohibit that abuse.
I did see your smiley, but being serious for a moment, yes, we do have simple privacy policies, linked from every page, that explain what the JavaScript is for. Also, we don't collect anything trackable or personally identifiable by that means, only generic data about the systems used to view our sites such as the things I mentioned before.
I mentioned the referrer point merely because it completely debunks the specific argument you made in your previous post: "Most sites have 60%+ visits coming from Google in the middle of the site, to do any usability testing they need to know where they arrived to focus that usability."
You seem to have ignored the fact that I also mentioned using JavaScript for more detailed analysis.
If you need to follow specific users around your site, you can do this without cookies by adding a suitable GET/POST field on your links/form submissions.
The only thing you've mentioned that can't be done without cookies is tracking users across visits, where they leave your site and then return again later. I'll concede that this might be useful, but to me it seems a small price to pay for saying that as a user, it means no-one else can track my movements between sites either.
You can, could, and still will be able to block cookies in your browser, so whatever web site operators are doing with them, it isn't going to affect your privacy or "trackability".
Unfortunately, that isn't really what happens.
For example, many sites now use local shared objects ("Flash cookies") to store data, rather than regular cookies. No mainstream browser controls these by default, so even if you have disabled all cookies in your browser's privacy settings or asked to clear all your private data, LSOs will still work. Moreover, use of LSOs is often not even mentioned in a site's privacy policy; even big-name sites like YouTube have been offenders in this respect. Moremoreover, the way to disable these little buggers in Flash is hidden in a settings dialog that most users wouldn't even know to exist.
Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't see how failing to disable something that is being used to do something you never asked for, which you don't know is happening, via an obscure dialog you don't know exists, can constitute implied consent, particularly if you've explicitly disabled all similar functionality that is presented in your browser's UI.
I can't decide whether this is Brazil-style bureaucracy galore, or Eastern Standard Tribe-style anti-productivity warfare.
Neither, it's basic privacy protection, and as far as I can see it's long overdue and a good thing. Why should we support out-opt monitoring rather than opt-in, just to make life easier for those who want to produce targeted advertising and affiliate blogspam?
If you have a legitimate need to use cookies, for example to help a user with a shopping cart or remember they've logged into your forum, then there will be no problem stating clearly at the point that they start to use these facilities that a cookie will be set for that purpose. If you manage to wade through all the FUD blog posts and find the actual wording we're talking about here (you'll want article 2, clause 5, on page 76), you'll notice that this does not require UAC-style dialogs or 'screen after screen of "permissions" to continue'. In fact, there is even wording saying that the new rule doesn't apply in cases where the user has explicitly requested a service that needs to store cookie-like information to function properly.
So do you actually have any evidence to back up your doomsaying, or is it just your personal view that you'd like to shove down everyone else's throat?
We don't use cookies on the sites I run, yet I still have a pretty good idea of what our users do, because we have these things called server logs. They include something called a referrer field, which tells you where the visitor came from before they reached their current page, for example. Moreover, for more detailed analysis, it is far more valuable for site improvement to have a little JavaScript that can also identify things like screen resolutions and browser versions, which give us information that is directly useful to checking that our pages will look good on the systems our visitors are actually using. Cookies won't tell you any of that.
We are contemplating using cookies for a new system on one of our sites, because it will allow users to create an account and then filter data shown on various pages according to their personal preferences. All the cookie will do is remember whether the user has logged in, and if so, who they are, for the duration of their visit. And we're only doing that because the site will work fine without an account, so we don't want to throw up HTTP Authentication screens for every visitor. We would have no problem disclosing this fully to any visitor to our site at the time they create an account.
The two most important words for anyone doing web design and/or development are degrade gracefully.
Erm... No. Sorry, not even close.
Here are a few much more important pairs of words for most people doing web design other than purely for personal satisfaction:
There is a certain proportion of people in the world who are quite happy to visit others' web sites and consume the content free of charge, yet who think the web designers should go out of their way to accommodate people who actively choose not to view the content as intended by those offering it. For most designers, there is a good word for that proportion: "insignificant".
Now, some people will prefer to view a web site with fonts a little larger or smaller. Some will have genuine disabilities, and will appreciate good mark-up that supports assistive technology. I have nothing against catering to these people in a web site design. This will have a cost, but often the return on investment from the effort will be worthwhile. If you're going to do this, IMHO viewing it as progressive enhancement (i.e., start with something basic but universally usable, then add the nicer features on top) is much better than as graceful degradation (i.e., start with the full works, then try to hack away parts of it to make it still work without breaking anything).
But in any case, if you as a visitor actively choose to replace fonts completely, or not to show images, or not to run JavaScript, or to read web pages using a ten-year-old browser, or as raw HTML, or as a hex dump, well, that's a problem of your own making. Don't expect anyone else to care. You're free to go and visit some other site, but please close the door behind you on the way out.
I honestly can't work out if you're trolling or satirising.
How about, um, reducing the level of waste you produce?
Please see my response to the other person who replied to my previous post.
Our household produces less than one bag full of waste each week, our bin can fit 5 or 6 full bags.
Our household also typically produces less than a full bag of non-recyclable waste each week, but our black bins would only fit about 3 bags; the recycling bins have about twice this volume. That means if they miss a collection, or even if you have more waste one week for some reason (some of us do invite friends around occasionally!), you simply can't fit everything in the bin.
The funniest thing I saw was a TV news report on bi-weekly bin collections where a woman was complaining that she couldn't recycle cans because they'd sit there in her kitchen smelling all week before they were collected. How much effort does it take to wash out a can?
To wash out one can? Not much.
To wash out every can, wash out every plastic bottle, clean all your cardboard, separate all your food waste and wrap it in newspaper, buy a newspaper you otherwise wouldn't every couple of days just so you have something to wrap with, remove the windows from all the windowed envelopes going in paper recycling, separate out the impersonal junk mail that can go in one box from the junk mail with name and address details that should be shredded and then placed in a different box... Well, now it's starting to become an unreasonable hassle. And all of those things are based on the direct advice from our local council (and, in the case of shredding, the police).
If your waste doesn't fit in your bin then reduce your waste. Shut the lid on the bin, compost food waste, voilà no bad smells.
That's cute, except that we don't get to control how supermarkets pack everyday items, which is where most of our non-recyclable waste comes from; the size of the bins around here is rather arbitrary, and in most cases is based on what people used to have for a weekly collection (with the recycling arrangements roughly the same before and since); not everyone has somewhere for composting or any use for the compost afterwards; and so on, and so on.
I'm afraid you sound a bit like some of our local councillors, who from their large, detached houses with ample back gardens and off-road areas to keep their bins and boxes other than on collection days, with officials who keep them updated as part of their job on what goes where among the different containers, who dine on high quality fresh food bought from a variety of local shops, can't quite understand why people living in a block of flats, with about 10 square-metres of garden area in total, who keep not getting the information about what goes where for collection that the council jobsworths say they keep sending out, and who buy whatever economy food they can best afford from the local supermarket, are annoyed by all the arrangements that would require physics-defying ingenuity just to avoid literally breaking the law, never mind actually getting the rubbish collected.
I've not spent 5 seconds with Google
Perhaps you should. In the time it took you to write those words, you could instead have typed "bi-weekly bin collection UK", clicked the search button, and found numerous articles immediately, from all over the country, showing the current situation. (I'd find you some summary statistics, but strangely, neither local councils nor the central government people promoting this arrangement are going out of their way to acknowledge how widespread it has become and the level of dissatisfaction it has caused.)
I have spent almost 30 years living in the UK. I have friends in virtually every region of the country and can tell you that I know no-one who has bi-weekly general waste collection
You have friends within virtually every local council area in the country? Is that like having 600 Facebook "friends" or something?
Or are you trying to generalise from one person's limited experience—your own—and assuming that just because you haven't experienced this at all, no-one else has either?
I wouldn't call 4 or 5 instances a common problem in, at least, over 100 collections.
You might if each of those occasions meant that for the corresponding type of waste you had no collection for a month, and possibly for another 2–4 weeks more depending on how long it took for a replacement to be delivered since the collection people won't accept any non-standard containers for "health and safety" reasons. Put another way, someone with that failure rate has sub-standard waste collection for approximately 50% of the year.
Also, please give evidence of low income families being required to pay for a replacement for a bin that the council lost.
In my city, as far as I've been told by the council, everyone has to pay to get their black (general waste) bin replaced if it goes missing for any reason. The low income part is only relevant because if you've got around £50 to spare it's an irritation while if you've got around £50 to buy food this week it's a bit more than that.
However, if any of the various kinds of recycling bin or box used in our area go missing, the council replaces them free of charge, albeit often with a delay before the new one is delivered.
Council Tax (really, more than £2,000 a year? Where do you live?)
In a detached house in East Anglia. Ours isn't quite that much (though it's not far off these days), but I think one or two bands further and you're past that mark, and last time I checked we were actually a little below the national average rates for each band.
I'm not saying bin collection is perfect, but you seem to have gone way over the top in your post.
I'm biased, but then again, I've also been repeatedly screwed. Our Council Tax has gone up while the level of service has gone down. We've had so many missed collections that formal complaints resulted in the collection people having to call a supervisor every time they wanted to mark one of our bins as not being put out. And while we personally have never lost the one bin you'd have to pay for, we've had the other one not come back on collection day twice, and as I write this we have neither of the two boxes we should have any more and the Council won't replace them because they're moving to a new system with a third bin instead in a few weeks, so basically for about two months we are missing half of our collections.
This sort of mess is precisely the kind of thing normal people with real lives and time-consuming jobs shouldn't have to worry about, yet here I am, so annoyed by it that I'm debating the subject with a stranger on Slashdot. I shudder to think how much time I've used chasing up the council each time something has gone wrong. This is the sort of stuff that should Just Work, and it's what local councils are for. If they're
If memory serves, the wording in the EU (at least in the original international agreement, not necessarily in individual nations' implementations thereof) is about exempting copies that would be necessary for the normal use of a product. For example, if you sell someone a CD, it's going to be hard to argue that you didn't expect them to play the music, so any transient copies created for that purpose would be exempt.
This is where the interesting twist with software comes in, because again, it's hard to argue that you've taken 300 Euro from someone for a shrink-wrapped software product, but you didn't expect them to install and use that software on their computer. (Compare with the case where they buy one "single" product at a "single" product price, but then install and use it on every computer at their office, which would not be a normal understanding.)
It's interesting that the national implementations of that particular technicality don't always seem to reflect the EU-level agreement. The UK, for example, seems to have some rather important wording that doesn't quite mean the same thing. I don't know what happens if, according to UK law, the copy made is infringing, but only because the UK failed to implement an EU-level agreement properly.
This also means there is potential for a very different kind of agreement if a consumer purchases software directly from the maker/copyright holder vs. if they purchase the software via a third party, because in the former case there is clearly consideration beyond merely making a transient copy to install or run the program in the normal way.
I don't see how, as a matter of fact, a court could find any differently. It is an objective reality that a copy in RAM is made of data on a disk when a program is loaded. That is the "loading" part. ;-)
Whether or not such copying should be subject to restriction by copyright law is a different question entirely, and from a legal point of view it is much more interesting. As mentioned in TFS, some major jurisdictions (including IIRC both the US and the EU) have specific and/or general wording in some of their laws that might exclude these copies. It that were the case, it could negate any legal argument about controlling the use of software based purely on ability to load and run an otherwise legal copy.
That matters profoundly, because it could have huge repercussions for the validity of EULAs and similar arrangements: for software purchased via a third party, the copying-into-memory angle could be the only influence the original copyright holder has, and if that is negated then there is nothing in it for the consumer to agree to an EULA. It's not clear how any sort of binding contractual agreement, such as any other EULA terms, could be valid at that point.
Don't be so quick to criticise Eady. His case history shows a strong bias towards promoting personal privacy, a consideration that for the most part is sorely lacking in law in the UK.
Personally, I'd much rather have a legal system that presumed privacy and overrode it when there was clear public interest than one that presumed you could say whatever you wanted about someone regardless of truth or the damage it would cause and then relied on innocent parties to mount expensive lawsuits to (attempt to) fix the damage after-the-fact. Privacy is an under-rated thing in today's society, but in 20 years' time I think we will look back on our own naivete in allowing government by database state, and permitting global corporations to profile people's entire lives and then use that information arbitrarily (but rarely in the interest of the profilee).
In other words, freedom of speech is a dangerous thing if not balanced by the rights of others not to be abused: such a pure freedom brings with it no responsibility for what you say, and provides carte blanche to damage innocent people with impunity, which is exactly what laws are supposed to guard against. The main value in freedom of speech is in promoting public debate about important principles, without artificial barriers limiting the scope of the debate to what is currently morally acceptable by some particular group or politically acceptable to the current government. The value in freedom of speech is not in allowing one individual or group to attack another with relative impunity, denying the attacked party any right of reply or fair compensation for undue harm caused.
I've heard of no councils that have reduced bin collection to every 2 weeks - only certain 'luxury pickups' like garden waste (leaves, hedge trimmings etc.) and certain recycling pickups; so definite citation needed here
Credibility fail. Literally five seconds with Google would show you that this practice has become commonplace across the UK in recent years, usually against public opinion. The details of which recycling is collected vary by local council, but reducing general rubbish collections to biweekly is almost always involved.
This does make things somewhat unpleasant in terms of smells and pests at certain times of year. IME, the worse problem is that it means if a council miss your collection one week, you wind up with an entire month of rubbish to go in the (typically small) bin, which just doesn't fit. Then the council may refuse to collect excess waste (or you get fined via the legal system), and often there is no useful process of appeal: if the bin men say your bin wasn't out, that's it, even if it clearly was and they've made the same mistake several times already. I'm writing from personal experience, but I'm hardly the only one who's mentioned this problem on local forums around where I live.
The man wasn't arrested for leaving his bin open - he was fined, for over-filling his bin. It was a bit specific to the letter of the law, but its not outrageous to draw the line where they did
That rather depends on whether the council are doing a decent job otherwise, doesn't it? As I noted above, they frequently don't, but now instead of it being their problem, it has legally become yours.
There are numerous other minor abuses going on, e.g., if you get home from work on collection day and find one of your recycling bins/boxes hasn't come back, you can get another one free, but some places charge a lot of money to replace the general waste bin under the same circumstances. Once again, containers not being put back outside your home after collection is a common problem—we've had four or five instances in the past couple of years—and to a household on a low income, the cost of replacement just so they can use the bin service they're already paying through the nose for via Council Tax, is a lot of money.
Defenders of such policies usually seem to mumble something about not having hypothecated taxation, so just because we have a dedicated Council Tax that goes to our local authorities and just because those local authorities are legally responsible for providing waste collection services, that doesn't mean you're entitled to actually get a working service or any minimum standards just because you pay them thousands of pounds a year in tax. Seriously, I've been told this many times, and it seems to be the best they've got. What happened to no taxation without representation? Why aren't our representatives up in arms over this sort of failure to provide essential basic services?
That's a lovely idea. Unfortunately, short of violent overthrow of the existing government, it's unlikely to happen in the immediate future.
Political pressure is bringing about changes, slowly but surely: as of a few days ago, we have complete separation of the judiciary from the legislature, for example, and most of the hereditary peers have gone from the Lords, so at least you have to suck up yourself to get in there instead of being given a place just because some ancestor of yours once did.
I think things will continue to improve, because trust in politicians is at an all-time low, and merely getting elected will probably require some significant concessions now. We have the mess of the expenses scandal, which has effectively cost about 20% of MPs their jobs or senior positions (not to mention actual cash in many cases). Worse, it has cost the entire political class a lot of credibility, compounding things like the Iraq war (over the obvious objections of literally millions of citizens taking to the streets), numerous heavy-handed actions on the part of the police in recent years, the surveillance state, and the way the Brown administration took over running the country on the back of an extremely dubious mandate. It's hard to see any part getting to the general election next year without promising significant action on many of these points (or at least backtracking quietly, in the case of Labour).
In other news, serial resigner, unelected jobsworth, and general insult to the democratic process "Lord" Peter Mandelson, having been appointed to high government office on a technicality by serial bad decision maker, unelected jobsworth, and general insult to the democractic process Gordon Brown, will shortly be resigning, again, having demonstrated a stunning lack of competence in public office, again.
Sorry, we've got an update: the Labour Party are going to get hammered so badly in the general election next year that they might actually come third, the current administration is already in lame duck mode, and Mandelson's views are all but irrelevant.
Frankly, I'm more worried about what David Cameron and his crew are going to do when they get in. If memory serves, they have publicly backed screwing the people in favour of Big Media pretty much any time the question has come up, also directly contravening overwhelming public sentiment expressed to Gowers et al.
You're right that there are good capitalists (good people who are capitalists, not people who are good at being capitalists) out there. But they can only be good capitalists by being bad capitalists (by *not* being good at being a capitalist).
That's one way of looking at it. The other way is that they are people who decide that it's worth paying a certain price to support things they believe in. The same could be said of anyone who, for example, donates to a charity: by definition, they are not required to give up their money, but money is just a simulated measure of worth, and the donor considers the charity they support worthy.
Put another way, you're only looking at one side of the coin when you consider the capitalist ideal of generating maximum money (which to a pure capitalist is equivalent to producing the most benefit). You also have to consider that money is worthless unless it is, in turn, exchanged for other things of value.
Are you sure you didn't change anything else: the fonts available on your system, the paper size, the compatibility options, something like that?
I don't doubt that there might be minor changes otherwise, but I can honestly say that I have never seen anything "not look correct at all" in the situation you describe, and I've been working with plenty of Word documents for a long time. What formatting or layout features didn't translate properly for you?
I completely agree, though I think it's a lot worse than you say.
Why do we insist on displaying information that is probably read more often on-screen than on-paper these days in an area that lends itself to printing on standardised paper sizes, and that was never very good for readability with the typical margin set-up even then? Basic text layout could be handled much better for on-screen use: see numerous discussions about layout for web pages. Supplementary content like charts, tables, diagrams, footnotes and citations/cross-references could be displayed in many more helpful ways, given the typical properties of a modern widescreen monitor, than the fixed, paper-based layouts typically available today. Again, even basic web pages are better at some of this stuff, and the layout and presentation tools in HTML/CSS are crude by professional design standards.
Why do we still present a bazillion hard-coded formatting options, when most possible combinations are only ever (a) ignored or (b) over-used with horrendous results? Pretty much everyone else, from serious publishers to people writing papers in LaTeX to those working on web content using HTML and CSS has been using structured, semantic mark-up with separate formatting rules since roughly forever.
Why do we still have all the emphasis on presentation anyway? Sure, formatting documents and laying out the information for good readability is important, but the content itself is also important. There are all kinds of things tools could do both to help streamline the editing process and to help authors to write better content. Sadly, the most help we get from typical word processors today is a spelling checker (in your country's variation of your native language if you're lucky), a grammar checker (which is wrong more often than it's right if you are a reasonably competent author writing in your native language), and simple metrics like word count and a few mostly-incomprehensible reading ease indicators.
And why are document review and process support tools, such as version labelling, adding comments and proposing edits, tracking changes, and recording approvals, all still in the Stone Age by computing standards? These are very important in a lot of business and other formal contexts, and form a major part of the way a lot of people work with digital documents. I shudder to think what the world economy loses just because of time wasted trying to pass basic feedback from one colleague to another while working on documents of mutual interest.
Clearly even niche markets in document editing have pretty vast potential, because it's one of the most common reasons many of us use computers and even if the media change, the need to communicate in more than 140 characters isn't going to die out any time soon. Moreover, some people do produce rather nice alternatives to heavyweight applications like MS Word and OpenOffice Writer, and there are various apparently successful small businesses (or groups within large businesses, in the case of companies like Apple) doing so. I don't understand why most of these seem to be confined to Apple systems, though, with few decent choices available for either Windows (where you'd think the dominant interest would lie from commercial developers) or the freebie platforms (with their legions of volunteers ready to contribute). There must be a killer business waiting to be born somewhere out there...
I almost agree. I'm sure there are niches where on-line document editing has merit, but the bottom line is that cloud computing is still more vapour than solid software. On-line office suites suck in almost every other way compared to their desktop-based brethren, and it's not as if there's no scope for improvement in those, they've just reached the point of being "good enough" that people tolerate their problems.
I can't help noticing that every time someone makes observations like these on forums like Slashdot, there are usually a string of responses about how trusting Google/Amazon/whoever with your sensitive data is better than trusting in-house people who are still a security risk, don't have the same resources to build in resilience to system failures, and so on. And then over the following week, it always seems like there are a couple of articles about major downtime from such services, another one about a serious security breach, and every few weeks there's a major data loss incident.
In any case, while centralised storage has merit for some purposes, you don't need software-as-a-service for that, you just need somewhere you can save a file.
It is as compatible as different versions of MS Office...
Sorry, but that simply isn't true. The last major screw-up Microsoft made on that front was nearly a decade ago. They may have introduced different file formats since, but new versions of Office open files created in older versions just fine, and in some cases vice versa if you download the right add-in software from MS.
You are only totally compatible when everyone is running the same version of the same program.
Indeed. And that means your comment overlook sthe fundamental problem: most people aren't comparing moving from one version of MS Office to either another version or to OpenOffice. They already have a version of MS Office that works fine, and is compatible with itself just fine. OpenOffice being 100% compatible isn't a plus point relative to what most users already have, it's merely a prerequisite for even being equal, and one that isn't yet satisfied for a lot of people.