I have no problem with either of your statements. But by definition, anonymity strong enough to use as a vehicle for free speech against an oppressive government is also strong enough to protect anyone against all penalties enforced by a legitimate government for any other actions they might take.
People have their lives ENDED by the excesses I am talking about.
In which country? I rather doubt any have lost their lives to such excesses in my country in the past several decades, nor in the countries of most other people reading this comment.
Identity theft, on the other hand, is now wrecking thousands of lives every year in those countries, and is but one example of the kind of dangers I mentioned.
My turn for a little idealism here; I don't particularly want to live in a society that practices summary executions in that manner.
I'm sorry that you can't distinguish such obvious hyperbole from a literal argument. Are you sure you're thinking rationally about this?
That dangerously ignores the question of what you do the day after you replace a government by force.
I suppose that depends on the extent to which force is necessary. I suspect that there is going to be sufficient popular backlash against the "database state" and "nanny state" in the next few years that literal use of force will not be necessary.
In any case, there is no shortage of people with much better ideas about how to run things than the fools who get elected one after another under the current system. Popular revolutions (preferably bloodless, forceful if necessary) have led to much better governments that have endured for many years plenty of times in the past. If the vested interests at the heart of our current political systems become sufficiently corrupt that such actions are necessary, there is no reason to believe that we would somehow descend into anarchy instead.
Those are only bold claims to a person who has spend years living under a rock, seriously.
If it's so obvious, then you'll have no trouble finding examples where legitimate criticism of a corporation has cost someone their job and made it difficult for them to find another, or where my government (or any other in the first world) has actively threatened the lives of public critics, will you?
The fact you are posting on/. suggests that you yourself haven't "grown a spine" and done what you are suggesting (taken arms against your government).
Taken up arms? No. We're still a long way short of that. But used my vote, given substantial financial contributions to those campaigning for a better world in various ways, volunteered my time where I can help, and openly opposed various unsavoury political practices? You bet. And so far, despite the fact that it would probably be easy enough for the government to identify me on several of these counts if they really wanted to, no-one has coming knocking on my door or threatened the lives of me or my loved ones.
It's hard to argue with such a complete lack of perspective. Identity theft destroys lives.
'Healthy responsibility and oversight within government' are a fantasy. [...] What does work is the powerless being able to criticize and poke and mock under the blanket of anonymity.
That is a curious claim to make at the end of a lengthy argument about how our leaders perpetrated obvious war crimes and yet walked away without suffering any serious penalty.
I propose an alternative theory: when leaders go to war without a clear mandate and popular support, we put them up against a wall and shoot them once for each innocent who dies in that war.
The fact that we haven't got sensible oversight within governments at the moment doesn't mean we can't have it, it just means we have to forcibly evict those who hold power at the moment (by which I don't just mean the current administrations, I mean the in-crowd of major political parties and corporate sponsors who can buy all the ad time they need so that at least one of them gets elected).
If you criticize Scientology without anonymity, they follow you around and make your life hell. If you criticize the government without anonymity, they put your families life in danger out of spite, or harass you so much you kill yourself. If you criticize a corporation you lose your job and find it kind of hard to find another one.
That's a lot of bold claims to make without the slightest attempt to back them up with any real evidence whatsoever.
Again, if these really are true, then anonymity is not the answer. Draconian penalties for those who commit heinous offences are the answer.
Your are speaking from the position of 18th century liberal idealism about how a society works. I am speaking from 21st century pragmatism.
No, you're not. You're speaking as someone who has seen a relatively dark period of human history in recent years and given up. Grow a spine and help fix the problem, please.
But most of the people it is a threat to, frankly deserve to live with being threatened.
Here are a few things that are done, frequently, under the cover of pseudo-anonymity on the Internet:
Spamming
Phishing and identity theft
Malware distribution
Botnet management and extortion
Please explain to me how a typical victim of these crimes deserves the consequences.
Obviously there are many more illegal acts committed routinely under cover of on-line anonymity, particularly those to do with infringing intellectual property rights and defamation, but I'm omitting those because there is at least the potential for another side to many of those stories, while the examples I've given above are pretty much black-and-white bad things.
Anonymity can enable online bullying or petty fraud, but those are nuisances on the grand scale of things.
That's your opinion, and of course you're entitled to it. Still, I'd bet that you have never been on the wrong side of these "nuisances" to the point where they seriously screw up your life for months at a time. Not everyone is so lucky. Been there, done that, consoled the friends, been the guy who called the police.
The people for whom anonymity is an actual threat are governments who want to monitor and control their citizens, unsavory groups such as the church of Scientology who want to harass their critics, and businesses that want to force consumption of their products in the way they demand they are consumed.
There are much better solutions to those things than hiding behind anonymity: for a start, they include enforcing a healthy degree of responsibility and oversight within government, punishing harshly those who would harass others for their own benefit, and setting and openly enforcing (in both directions) a sensible legal framework for the relationships between producers and consumers.
Part of the concern I have with on-line anonymity is that in the cases where it has legitimate merits—and I don't for an instant dispute that anonymity can be a force for good under some circumstances—it tends to be more of a sticking plaster that treats symptoms rather than a fix for the underlying causes of problems. As I've noted before, if you need to rely on on-line anonymity to fight against a government so corrupt that the people cannot openly challenge it, then there are much more important rights than on-line anonymity to protect, and the time for the use of words alone has probably passed. For threats below the level of corrupt government, any good legal system should protect the right of its citizens to speak openly and honestly on matters of importance without fear of reprisal, just as it should balance such rights with the protection of innocents from defamation and invasion of privacy. In short, anonymity shouldn't be necessary, and where it seems to be, I believe the benefits are often illusory.
Meanwhile, the basic downside of anonymity remains: if freedom comes with responsibility, then how do you hold someone accountable for their actions if you can't identify them? The combined cost of the acts I listed at the start of this post, both to society in general and to effective use of the Internet in particular, is not trivial, and that's before you even get into less tangible damage as evidenced by the GIFT.
I've built several high-end PCs from scratch and spec'd several more at component level, during a period of well over a decade and most recently just a couple of years ago, and I still have absolutely no idea what any of the fine summary meant.
Does anyone actually label/number components in any sort of logical way at all any more? Codename this, year that, version.subversion.minorversion.veryminorversion the other (revision C17, of course; the C16s and B17s didn't have the double overclocked doobreeflips in the L7 cache).
It's a wonder anyone can build a PC that runs at any speed at all any more. Sheesh.
The light penalties for causing or nearly causing death or serious injury while driving relative to causing the same harm by any other means have been rather controversial in the UK in recent years, following a string of court cases where people walked out with what amounted to a slap on the wrist after negligently killing someone. New laws are planned (and might have come into effect recently, I can't remember just now) to address this to some extent.
The problem with all of these laws, however, is that they only work after-the-fact. Driving in such a way that you are likely to seriously hurt or kill someone does not in itself attract a severe penalty, given the potential consequences of those actions.
If you mean the danger of using hands-free, then I agree that a similar change in reaction time is not necessarily the same as as similar change in the overall danger, and clearly the physical limitation of a hand-held device does make the latter worse. This is why I only wrote "almost as dangerous".
The main thing I'm going on in writing "almost" was an experiment (conducted IIRC by the RAC, for a TV documentary around the time the law was passed here) where people were driving in a simulator under various conditions, and there was little difference in ability to avoid an accident or reduce its severity between the hand-held and hands-free cases. The reaction time was clearly the dominant factor. Again IIRC, the effective impediment was compared to driving well over the legal alcohol limit or after taking strong drugs. I'm afraid I don't have a formal citation for that, because it wasn't an academic paper and I've long since deleted the recording of the programme, but FWIW it was consistent with the research the government itself was citing at the time. Surely if that research, whatever specifics it considered, was sufficient to justify a ban on using hand-held phones while driving, then the same evidence was sufficient to justify a ban on using hands-free kits as well.
If you meant a citation for advertisers using the new laws as a way of condoning driving with a hands-free kit, then all I can say is that the practice was widespread. For example, walking into my local Tesco around the time the law came into effect, I was confronted by a big display above some hands-free kits claiming unambiguously that using those kits while driving was safe. Likewise, suppliers of hands-free kits ran aggressive advertising campaigns on our local commercial radio stations. Even if I'm completely misremembering the results above and safety with hands-free is a significant improvement on hand-held, it's still clearly untrue to claim that using a hands-free and slowing your reactions to those of a drunk driver is safe as these advertisers were doing.
I have heard that laws against texting / talking on the phone / whatever while driving do not actually cause there to be less accidents.
I've heard that listening to unsourced claims by anonymous cowards on Slashdot may be hazardous to your brain functions.
My ideal system for dealing with texting / drinking / $distraction while driving would go like this: Once you've hit someone while being distracted or intoxicated, they get you not only for whatever injuries and damages you do, but also get you for criminal negligence.
That's lovely, unless you're the guy who got dead because no-one pulled the driver for doing something obviously dangerous before the accident.
I propose an alternative approach: anyone who drives a vehicle that is likely to cause a fatality in a collision, and who is demonstrably not properly alert and in control of that vehicle for any reason, should be treated the same way as someone who attempts murder. A crazy number of people get killed or seriously hurt on the road every year, and a crazy number of drivers are scarily blasé about it, warm and cozy inside their big metal safety cages.
Well, saying it's illegal is reasonable enough, but one could argue that it should be covered by general laws about driving without paying proper attention.
The problem with making a specific law against using hand-held phones is that it led to a wave of advertising about how you should buy a hands-free kit to stay safe while you're driving. Some large advertising used literally those words.
Unfortunately, statistically, using a hands-free kit is almost as dangerous as using a handheld kit, and the new law was used by advertisers to condone it.
Final note to those who are about to reply and say that I'm wrong and you're much safer using a hands-free kit: please spare us. You are wrong, and the evidence is overwhelming. For a start, the same data that the British government used to justify the law banning handheld phones would support a ban on hands-free kit as well. Google is your friend. Please let's not have another ill-informed "I am a better driver than you" subthread. Thank you.
Some software is "licensed" in a manner where the licensee needs to pay an annual fee to continue using it.
If there's a rental model in place, and that is understood by all parties up-front, then fair enough. But in that case, there is a known price for a known period of use right from the start, and consumers can choose accordingly whether they are willing to accept that deal. Claiming that software for which someone made a one-off payment with the expectation of indefinite use has suddenly fallen back under the control of the copyright holder is a different matter.
This "incredibly expensive" paradigm is a case for "software licenses". IBM isn't going to sell 10,000 new copies of ClearCase per year, but they still need to accumulate the $100 million dollars that it costs to develop that software.
Do they?
A free market capitalist might challenge that assumption. If a company's development process is too inefficient to produce software cost-effectively, either that product shouldn't be made or that company shouldn't be the one making it.
But the point is... demanding annual payment for a software product does have tangible benefits for the seller and the sellee.
And as long as it's all clear up-front, I have no problem with that. However, I don't personally believe the market would accept everyday business software like MS Office or Autodesk moving to that basis at this point, and competitors would arrive to fill the gap (or people simply wouldn't upgrade any more and would stick with what they already paid for). My objection as far as licensing is concerned is to businesses who want to eat their cake and have it, trying to avoid fair competition by playing legal tricks so they look like they're selling you stuff but then act like you're renting.
Now, the DMCA would allow Autodesk to, say, validate a CD key online once only and then deny future installs on other hardware, since any attempt to get past that would be a circumvention attempt prohibited by the DMCA. But it's not Vernor's fault that Autodesk didn't do that. (Of course, just maybe they know that if they did, customers would be more reluctant to buy their software since most people don't like DRM.)
Unfortunately, I don't believe most consumers really appreciate the dangers of DRM yet. I'm looking forward to the day that a court case comes up where someone tries to sell on a second-hand product (software, e-book, whatever), gets told they can't because DMCA/EUCD/whatever anti-circumvention provisions are artificially blocking the sale, and then goes after the original supplier for fraud. Remember, in many jurisdictions, there is a fundamental requirement for honesty/understanding in any contract, and often there are laws specifically for one-sided cases such as where one party (the software/e-book/whatever business) had expensive lawyers write some huge long contract and a typical other party (a consumer making a purchase) could not reasonably be expected to understand all the subtle implications of the legal fine print.
Perhaps it's about time we had a balancing law that anyone selling[1] software with artificial, external barriers to use[2] must lodge a version of their software with no such barriers with some central organisation or forfeit their anti-circumvention protections entirely. The central organisation would then be free to release the unrestricted software on expiry of the copyright or in the event that a user was unable to make fair use[3] of the software and those who accepted the money/hold the rights failed to make reasonable allowance for this on request.
[1] No, you don't get to weasel out of this by claiming it's licensed, not sold. If you take money for it, consumers think it's either a sale (by default) or a rental (if there is a clear, fixed timespan attached).
[2] By "artificial, external barriers to use" I mean things like product activation and DRM schemes.
[3] Or whatever your jurisdiction calls its equivalent concept.
Anyways, yes, if someone finds a decent ISP let us know please.
I've been with Zen's ADSL service for a couple of years now, since moving house. Give or take rare small glitches (and even then, they've had fewer of those than anyone else I've used) their service has always been fast and reliable. They don't have 24/7 tech support available, which did worry me to start with, but since I've never needed to call tech support once the service was set up that no longer bothers me. It does cost significantly more than the cheap providers as well, but I guess you get what you pay for. YMMV, caveat emptor, etc., but I'd sign up with them again.
Statistically speaking, even a 100% result with a sample of one is significant. Doesn't that make a rather enlightening statement about how much such statistical claims are really worth when taken out of context?
Next, they'll be telling you that you can make other results statistically significant or not based on the choice of one entirely arbitrary number, but don't worry, they're just yanking your chain.
I'm going to be leaving T-Mobile UK shortly, because they overcharged me for several months having screwed up a transfer to a new package, and then had the audacity to accuse me of lying because I didn't notice the small amount in question immediately. (There is now way that any reasonable person with my usage history would have asked for the combination of facilities they claim I did: it was basically the new package plus part of my old package providing essentially the same service that they hadn't cancelled properly.)
In this case, it's not really worth chasing them for the small amount of money concerned, I'll just take satisfaction in voting with my wallet. However, having the itemised, printed bills from them would certainly have been useful had it been worth going to court over.
Also, it's interesting that they told me a few years back that they wanted to stop sending me itemised bills, immediately after I'd caught them overcharging me using the itemisation just the previous month. They do charge for itemisation, which I rather resent, since they demonstrably aren't trustworthy to charge me a varying sum of money each month without explaining where it comes from.
Sorry, I modded the parent by mistake, so I'm mainly posting to undo that.
However, it is worth pointing out that the parent is misleading on several counts. The BBC's public funding comes primarily from the licence fee rather than a tax on new TV purchases, and the BBC is not the same as the government. I have a suspicion that the whole post might have been meant as humour/irony, but if so, I'm afraid it failed: it's too close to the truth to be ironic, yet too wrong to be informative.
Do you realise how the DRM/copy protection scheme used by Adobe Creative Suite works? It screws with your boot sector, which is about as big a risk as you can get in terms of system stability.
This is exactly why things like DRM are a bad idea for consumers: even if something works now, it can arbitrarily break later, there could be collateral damage, and the company who set it up might or might not be around to fix the problem.
Notice the issues they are and *aren't* appealing.
Sure, but as far as I can see, they're in danger of being in a no-win situation. I'm sure they'd like a ruling that allows them to carry on here without affecting anything else to do with software patents, but even if they manage to get something that specific, they're going to have to make some sort of argument to justify it given that a ruling has already been made against them. I'm not an expert on the US legal system, but I assume if those arguments are made in a sufficiently senior court and result in the original decision being adjusted or overturned, that would be considered a precedent. And of course, there's no guarantee that a court case like this will result in such a narrow ruling (though in my limited experience, US courts do seem to prefer those to suggesting general principles).
I didn't miss that at all. In fact, in the summary of the very article you linked to, it mentions Microsoft's recent patent related to XML documents. My point was not that i4i themselves would necessarily seek to prevent distribution of OpenOffice, it was that if i4i can prevent distribution of Word in this way and someone then tries to ship OpenOffice instead, it's a good bet that Microsoft's patent people will be in there like a shot seeking injunctive relief of their own.
This is an odd issue for the courts, as Microsoft did legitimately cheat I4I out (read the details), but on the flip side software patents are an unnecessary burden.
This "odd issue" is an excellent situation for just about everyone not involved in the case, though.
Firstly, arguably the biggest player in the software business is now on the wrong side of a software patents lawsuit, which is going to mean probably the most powerful legal team in the business is going to be looking for all sorts of arguments to get such patents overturned.
Secondly, there are going to be some hard questions about what constitutes "copying" in the case of software, which the big players have been carefully avoiding answering in court for a very long time, for fear that the already dubious legal basis for their EULAs and reseller-based sales models will be invalidated. Answering those questions definitively cannot help but clarify a lot of the ambiguity surrounding those issues. Does the act of installing a piece of software for which you have already paid constitute making a copy? Does the mere act of running software already installed constitute making a copy? It's going to be very unpleasant for players like Dell and HP if the injunction stands, even for a few weeks, and those things are found to constitute making a copy. But if they're not making a copy for the purposes of this software patent-related case, then logically they can't be affected by copyright either, and EULAs fall apart.
I wouldn't like to predict the outcome here, but I'm guessing some big players in our industry are going to be pretty upset one way or another. And given that consumers (and smaller players in the industry, for that matter) are almost always on the wrong side of status quo, hopefully that means we're all going to be pretty happy one way or another.
Even in a representative democracy, sometimes leaders need to lead, and not follow popular opinion.
On that, and indeed the rest of your post here, we agree entirely. However, in this context, don't you lead by convincing the general population that you are right?
Slavery wasn't really abolished because a few people in authority dictated that it should be. It was abolished because a few thoughtful people believed it should be, those people argued strongly to justify their position, and ultimately those people brought others around to their point of view. Were this not the case, any abolition could have been temporary, as a future administration would be more likely to be elected if it agreed with the majority view among the people.
So it goes with just about any major change. As you say, no-one has time to be fully informed on every topic. We elect representatives who can, at least in theory, dedicate their time to learning about a subject of interest in enough detail to form sensible judgements. But the idea is still that those people would form the same sort of opinion as those they represent, had those other people the time to consider the subject in similar detail.
As a counterpoint to your Churchill quotation, I leave you with one of my own favourites, by Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
I'm not sure it's productive to reply to every point you made individually, but please let me address some of the main ones.
I'd say that the council of Ministers is at least as, if not more important than the Commission myself, after all it contains executive officers from all the member states, who will have to get directives through their respective countries legislatures. Secondly, the parliament did a good job of blocking Software patents recently. It has more power than you think.
Perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree here. To me, it seems that almost everything major that gets dumped on us out of the EU originates with a Commissioner of some sort. Lack of software patents was perhaps an exception, but a rare and possibly temporary one. (Guess who was the EU Trade Commissioner, whose portfolio includes intellectual property issues, at the time that proposal started floating around?)
That's a Westminster problem, we could have an elected executive as in the USA, even so the Commissioners are no more removed than the Lords [...] Only the people of Sedgefield voted for Tony Blair, I don't remember people saying it was undemocratic that he was Prime Minister, or people complaining that because only the people of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath voted for Gordon Brown he should been Chancellor, the same goes for all UK cabinet portfolios.
Well, I can't speak for others, but I certainly think it's undemocratic that our Prime Minister (and, by extension, the entire executive administration) is not directly elected. This is how we wind up with policies being implemented that are not supported even by a Parliament where the executive's political party has a majority.
As a personal preference, I would like to try a system where any government organisation that has any kind of legislative/regulatory authority or that is allocated a significant budget funded by the taxpayer must also have directly elected leadership. For one thing, it would be impractical to continue having the vast numbers of such organisations that we have today, so such a change would force government to consolidate, with each department having a clear mandate, and less opportunity to hide things or pass the buck. For another, it would be the end of the kind of abuses we've been talking about here, whether our own executive, the Lords or the EU Commissioners.
What part of Masstricht exactly do you oppose?
It's not Maastricht as such, it's Maastricht and the stream of follow-up agreements that created what we know today as the EU. In place of useful trade agreements and co-operation on human rights, which we already had anyway, we now have a body that costs us billions every year (though it is, apparently, incapable of ever producing any audited accounts to justify that) and that has undemocratic legislative/regulatory powers.
An appeal to the majority is a logical fallacy.
In logic, yes, but we're talking about representative democracy. There is no way to determine an absolute right and wrong, so we use an appeal to the majority as our best guess. If you can't convince a majority of the people to respect your position and values, you're not supposed to wield power on behalf of the people.
Personally I'm against referenda of any kind, except major constitutional change. I don't have time to read the Treaty of Lisbon, that's what I elected my MP and pay her to do
If you had read the Treaty of Lisbon, you might see the contradiction in your position here.
Is not the major benefit of a constitution that it creates a basic framework of rights and responsibilities, understandable by anyone and agreed by all, within which any delegated representatives must act? It is beneficial precisely because it is a safe
Both the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers are elected bodies; it's true that the commission is made up of appointees, but they are appointed by elected member governments - a bit like the house of lords, except that commissioners don't get life terms. All in all it's just as, if not more (due to PR) democratic than our system here in the UK
No, it's not.
Firstly, the Commissioners are the ones with real power. The directly elected groups are so impotent in practice as to be effectively irrelevant; such powers as they nominally do possess have been ineffective at influencing the Commission to any significant degree.
Secondly, it's bad enough that our government is determined through an average of averages and that we don't directly elect the executive independent of the legislature, but anyone we send to be a Commissioner is one level further removed still. Even then we send only one Commissioner, with all the others provided by other nations without our having any say at all, and we don't get to choose which portfolio each Commissioner gets.
If you really think that it's in Britain's interest to remove itself from direct access to and the decision making process of the world's largest free trade block, it's your prerogative.
Once again, you imply a false dichotomy, as if a nation is either "in" Europe or "out" of it. As I noted in my previous post, the two major benefits to European integration — the trade agreements and the human rights agreements — were both working, and working pretty well actually, long before the European Union came along. It's all the expensive, unaccountable crap that has been added since Maastricht that I object to.
And if you think I'm the only one, or that my country is the only place where the people would prefer the simpler, more transparently useful agreements of old, take a look at the results in every country that actually allowed its people to have a say on the Lisbon Treaty, and notice how many governments had to cut their people out of that decision-making process entirely because they knew damn well what the result of any referendum would be. Tell me again how Europe is democratic, would you please?
However, you'll excuse me if I choose to exercise my freedom of movement and move to another EU member state if UKIP ever look like forming a government. I want to leave before the inevitable economic crash that'll make the 'credit crunch' look like a walk in the park.
Why do you think that reverting to transparent bilateral or multilateral free trade agreements within the equivalent of the old EEA would somehow leave us in a worse position than we are in now, when the EU has expanded far faster than was sensible and mandated uniform agreements for everyone that leave both the leading and the less developed economies suffering as a result? In economic terms, one-size-fits-all agreements are rarely effective unless all parties have similar power and balancing needs. That is clearly not even close to true across the entire EU today.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no problem with either of your statements. But by definition, anonymity strong enough to use as a vehicle for free speech against an oppressive government is also strong enough to protect anyone against all penalties enforced by a legitimate government for any other actions they might take.
People have their lives ENDED by the excesses I am talking about.
In which country? I rather doubt any have lost their lives to such excesses in my country in the past several decades, nor in the countries of most other people reading this comment.
Identity theft, on the other hand, is now wrecking thousands of lives every year in those countries, and is but one example of the kind of dangers I mentioned.
My turn for a little idealism here; I don't particularly want to live in a society that practices summary executions in that manner.
I'm sorry that you can't distinguish such obvious hyperbole from a literal argument. Are you sure you're thinking rationally about this?
That dangerously ignores the question of what you do the day after you replace a government by force.
I suppose that depends on the extent to which force is necessary. I suspect that there is going to be sufficient popular backlash against the "database state" and "nanny state" in the next few years that literal use of force will not be necessary.
In any case, there is no shortage of people with much better ideas about how to run things than the fools who get elected one after another under the current system. Popular revolutions (preferably bloodless, forceful if necessary) have led to much better governments that have endured for many years plenty of times in the past. If the vested interests at the heart of our current political systems become sufficiently corrupt that such actions are necessary, there is no reason to believe that we would somehow descend into anarchy instead.
Those are only bold claims to a person who has spend years living under a rock, seriously.
If it's so obvious, then you'll have no trouble finding examples where legitimate criticism of a corporation has cost someone their job and made it difficult for them to find another, or where my government (or any other in the first world) has actively threatened the lives of public critics, will you?
The fact you are posting on /. suggests that you yourself haven't "grown a spine" and done what you are suggesting (taken arms against your government).
Taken up arms? No. We're still a long way short of that. But used my vote, given substantial financial contributions to those campaigning for a better world in various ways, volunteered my time where I can help, and openly opposed various unsavoury political practices? You bet. And so far, despite the fact that it would probably be easy enough for the government to identify me on several of these counts if they really wanted to, no-one has coming knocking on my door or threatened the lives of me or my loved ones.
Yes, they are just nuisances.
It's hard to argue with such a complete lack of perspective. Identity theft destroys lives.
'Healthy responsibility and oversight within government' are a fantasy. [...] What does work is the powerless being able to criticize and poke and mock under the blanket of anonymity.
That is a curious claim to make at the end of a lengthy argument about how our leaders perpetrated obvious war crimes and yet walked away without suffering any serious penalty.
I propose an alternative theory: when leaders go to war without a clear mandate and popular support, we put them up against a wall and shoot them once for each innocent who dies in that war.
The fact that we haven't got sensible oversight within governments at the moment doesn't mean we can't have it, it just means we have to forcibly evict those who hold power at the moment (by which I don't just mean the current administrations, I mean the in-crowd of major political parties and corporate sponsors who can buy all the ad time they need so that at least one of them gets elected).
If you criticize Scientology without anonymity, they follow you around and make your life hell. If you criticize the government without anonymity, they put your families life in danger out of spite, or harass you so much you kill yourself. If you criticize a corporation you lose your job and find it kind of hard to find another one.
That's a lot of bold claims to make without the slightest attempt to back them up with any real evidence whatsoever.
Again, if these really are true, then anonymity is not the answer. Draconian penalties for those who commit heinous offences are the answer.
Your are speaking from the position of 18th century liberal idealism about how a society works. I am speaking from 21st century pragmatism.
No, you're not. You're speaking as someone who has seen a relatively dark period of human history in recent years and given up. Grow a spine and help fix the problem, please.
But most of the people it is a threat to, frankly deserve to live with being threatened.
Here are a few things that are done, frequently, under the cover of pseudo-anonymity on the Internet:
Please explain to me how a typical victim of these crimes deserves the consequences.
Obviously there are many more illegal acts committed routinely under cover of on-line anonymity, particularly those to do with infringing intellectual property rights and defamation, but I'm omitting those because there is at least the potential for another side to many of those stories, while the examples I've given above are pretty much black-and-white bad things.
Anonymity can enable online bullying or petty fraud, but those are nuisances on the grand scale of things.
That's your opinion, and of course you're entitled to it. Still, I'd bet that you have never been on the wrong side of these "nuisances" to the point where they seriously screw up your life for months at a time. Not everyone is so lucky. Been there, done that, consoled the friends, been the guy who called the police.
The people for whom anonymity is an actual threat are governments who want to monitor and control their citizens, unsavory groups such as the church of Scientology who want to harass their critics, and businesses that want to force consumption of their products in the way they demand they are consumed.
There are much better solutions to those things than hiding behind anonymity: for a start, they include enforcing a healthy degree of responsibility and oversight within government, punishing harshly those who would harass others for their own benefit, and setting and openly enforcing (in both directions) a sensible legal framework for the relationships between producers and consumers.
Part of the concern I have with on-line anonymity is that in the cases where it has legitimate merits—and I don't for an instant dispute that anonymity can be a force for good under some circumstances—it tends to be more of a sticking plaster that treats symptoms rather than a fix for the underlying causes of problems. As I've noted before, if you need to rely on on-line anonymity to fight against a government so corrupt that the people cannot openly challenge it, then there are much more important rights than on-line anonymity to protect, and the time for the use of words alone has probably passed. For threats below the level of corrupt government, any good legal system should protect the right of its citizens to speak openly and honestly on matters of importance without fear of reprisal, just as it should balance such rights with the protection of innocents from defamation and invasion of privacy. In short, anonymity shouldn't be necessary, and where it seems to be, I believe the benefits are often illusory.
Meanwhile, the basic downside of anonymity remains: if freedom comes with responsibility, then how do you hold someone accountable for their actions if you can't identify them? The combined cost of the acts I listed at the start of this post, both to society in general and to effective use of the Internet in particular, is not trivial, and that's before you even get into less tangible damage as evidenced by the GIFT.
I've built several high-end PCs from scratch and spec'd several more at component level, during a period of well over a decade and most recently just a couple of years ago, and I still have absolutely no idea what any of the fine summary meant.
Does anyone actually label/number components in any sort of logical way at all any more? Codename this, year that, version.subversion.minorversion.veryminorversion the other (revision C17, of course; the C16s and B17s didn't have the double overclocked doobreeflips in the L7 cache).
It's a wonder anyone can build a PC that runs at any speed at all any more. Sheesh.
The light penalties for causing or nearly causing death or serious injury while driving relative to causing the same harm by any other means have been rather controversial in the UK in recent years, following a string of court cases where people walked out with what amounted to a slap on the wrist after negligently killing someone. New laws are planned (and might have come into effect recently, I can't remember just now) to address this to some extent.
The problem with all of these laws, however, is that they only work after-the-fact. Driving in such a way that you are likely to seriously hurt or kill someone does not in itself attract a severe penalty, given the potential consequences of those actions.
Do you have a citation for that?
Sorry, I'm not clear which part you meant.
If you mean the danger of using hands-free, then I agree that a similar change in reaction time is not necessarily the same as as similar change in the overall danger, and clearly the physical limitation of a hand-held device does make the latter worse. This is why I only wrote "almost as dangerous".
The main thing I'm going on in writing "almost" was an experiment (conducted IIRC by the RAC, for a TV documentary around the time the law was passed here) where people were driving in a simulator under various conditions, and there was little difference in ability to avoid an accident or reduce its severity between the hand-held and hands-free cases. The reaction time was clearly the dominant factor. Again IIRC, the effective impediment was compared to driving well over the legal alcohol limit or after taking strong drugs. I'm afraid I don't have a formal citation for that, because it wasn't an academic paper and I've long since deleted the recording of the programme, but FWIW it was consistent with the research the government itself was citing at the time. Surely if that research, whatever specifics it considered, was sufficient to justify a ban on using hand-held phones while driving, then the same evidence was sufficient to justify a ban on using hands-free kits as well.
If you meant a citation for advertisers using the new laws as a way of condoning driving with a hands-free kit, then all I can say is that the practice was widespread. For example, walking into my local Tesco around the time the law came into effect, I was confronted by a big display above some hands-free kits claiming unambiguously that using those kits while driving was safe. Likewise, suppliers of hands-free kits ran aggressive advertising campaigns on our local commercial radio stations. Even if I'm completely misremembering the results above and safety with hands-free is a significant improvement on hand-held, it's still clearly untrue to claim that using a hands-free and slowing your reactions to those of a drunk driver is safe as these advertisers were doing.
I have heard that laws against texting / talking on the phone / whatever while driving do not actually cause there to be less accidents.
I've heard that listening to unsourced claims by anonymous cowards on Slashdot may be hazardous to your brain functions.
My ideal system for dealing with texting / drinking / $distraction while driving would go like this: Once you've hit someone while being distracted or intoxicated, they get you not only for whatever injuries and damages you do, but also get you for criminal negligence.
That's lovely, unless you're the guy who got dead because no-one pulled the driver for doing something obviously dangerous before the accident.
I propose an alternative approach: anyone who drives a vehicle that is likely to cause a fatality in a collision, and who is demonstrably not properly alert and in control of that vehicle for any reason, should be treated the same way as someone who attempts murder. A crazy number of people get killed or seriously hurt on the road every year, and a crazy number of drivers are scarily blasé about it, warm and cozy inside their big metal safety cages.
It's illegal in the UK, and quite right too.
Well, saying it's illegal is reasonable enough, but one could argue that it should be covered by general laws about driving without paying proper attention.
The problem with making a specific law against using hand-held phones is that it led to a wave of advertising about how you should buy a hands-free kit to stay safe while you're driving. Some large advertising used literally those words.
Unfortunately, statistically, using a hands-free kit is almost as dangerous as using a handheld kit, and the new law was used by advertisers to condone it.
Final note to those who are about to reply and say that I'm wrong and you're much safer using a hands-free kit: please spare us. You are wrong, and the evidence is overwhelming. For a start, the same data that the British government used to justify the law banning handheld phones would support a ban on hands-free kit as well. Google is your friend. Please let's not have another ill-informed "I am a better driver than you" subthread. Thank you.
Some software is "licensed" in a manner where the licensee needs to pay an annual fee to continue using it.
If there's a rental model in place, and that is understood by all parties up-front, then fair enough. But in that case, there is a known price for a known period of use right from the start, and consumers can choose accordingly whether they are willing to accept that deal. Claiming that software for which someone made a one-off payment with the expectation of indefinite use has suddenly fallen back under the control of the copyright holder is a different matter.
This "incredibly expensive" paradigm is a case for "software licenses". IBM isn't going to sell 10,000 new copies of ClearCase per year, but they still need to accumulate the $100 million dollars that it costs to develop that software.
Do they?
A free market capitalist might challenge that assumption. If a company's development process is too inefficient to produce software cost-effectively, either that product shouldn't be made or that company shouldn't be the one making it.
But the point is... demanding annual payment for a software product does have tangible benefits for the seller and the sellee.
And as long as it's all clear up-front, I have no problem with that. However, I don't personally believe the market would accept everyday business software like MS Office or Autodesk moving to that basis at this point, and competitors would arrive to fill the gap (or people simply wouldn't upgrade any more and would stick with what they already paid for). My objection as far as licensing is concerned is to businesses who want to eat their cake and have it, trying to avoid fair competition by playing legal tricks so they look like they're selling you stuff but then act like you're renting.
Now, the DMCA would allow Autodesk to, say, validate a CD key online once only and then deny future installs on other hardware, since any attempt to get past that would be a circumvention attempt prohibited by the DMCA. But it's not Vernor's fault that Autodesk didn't do that. (Of course, just maybe they know that if they did, customers would be more reluctant to buy their software since most people don't like DRM.)
Unfortunately, I don't believe most consumers really appreciate the dangers of DRM yet. I'm looking forward to the day that a court case comes up where someone tries to sell on a second-hand product (software, e-book, whatever), gets told they can't because DMCA/EUCD/whatever anti-circumvention provisions are artificially blocking the sale, and then goes after the original supplier for fraud. Remember, in many jurisdictions, there is a fundamental requirement for honesty/understanding in any contract, and often there are laws specifically for one-sided cases such as where one party (the software/e-book/whatever business) had expensive lawyers write some huge long contract and a typical other party (a consumer making a purchase) could not reasonably be expected to understand all the subtle implications of the legal fine print.
Perhaps it's about time we had a balancing law that anyone selling[1] software with artificial, external barriers to use[2] must lodge a version of their software with no such barriers with some central organisation or forfeit their anti-circumvention protections entirely. The central organisation would then be free to release the unrestricted software on expiry of the copyright or in the event that a user was unable to make fair use[3] of the software and those who accepted the money/hold the rights failed to make reasonable allowance for this on request.
[1] No, you don't get to weasel out of this by claiming it's licensed, not sold. If you take money for it, consumers think it's either a sale (by default) or a rental (if there is a clear, fixed timespan attached).
[2] By "artificial, external barriers to use" I mean things like product activation and DRM schemes.
[3] Or whatever your jurisdiction calls its equivalent concept.
Anyways, yes, if someone finds a decent ISP let us know please.
I've been with Zen's ADSL service for a couple of years now, since moving house. Give or take rare small glitches (and even then, they've had fewer of those than anyone else I've used) their service has always been fast and reliable. They don't have 24/7 tech support available, which did worry me to start with, but since I've never needed to call tech support once the service was set up that no longer bothers me. It does cost significantly more than the cheap providers as well, but I guess you get what you pay for. YMMV, caveat emptor, etc., but I'd sign up with them again.
Statistically speaking, even a 100% result with a sample of one is significant. Doesn't that make a rather enlightening statement about how much such statistical claims are really worth when taken out of context?
Next, they'll be telling you that you can make other results statistically significant or not based on the choice of one entirely arbitrary number, but don't worry, they're just yanking your chain.
A 100% result is always significant. Sorry to spoil your otherwise excellent point. ;-)
(Of course, whether you were actually testing what you thought you were testing is a different question...)
Exactly.
I'm going to be leaving T-Mobile UK shortly, because they overcharged me for several months having screwed up a transfer to a new package, and then had the audacity to accuse me of lying because I didn't notice the small amount in question immediately. (There is now way that any reasonable person with my usage history would have asked for the combination of facilities they claim I did: it was basically the new package plus part of my old package providing essentially the same service that they hadn't cancelled properly.)
In this case, it's not really worth chasing them for the small amount of money concerned, I'll just take satisfaction in voting with my wallet. However, having the itemised, printed bills from them would certainly have been useful had it been worth going to court over.
Also, it's interesting that they told me a few years back that they wanted to stop sending me itemised bills, immediately after I'd caught them overcharging me using the itemisation just the previous month. They do charge for itemisation, which I rather resent, since they demonstrably aren't trustworthy to charge me a varying sum of money each month without explaining where it comes from.
Sorry, I modded the parent by mistake, so I'm mainly posting to undo that.
However, it is worth pointing out that the parent is misleading on several counts. The BBC's public funding comes primarily from the licence fee rather than a tax on new TV purchases, and the BBC is not the same as the government. I have a suspicion that the whole post might have been meant as humour/irony, but if so, I'm afraid it failed: it's too close to the truth to be ironic, yet too wrong to be informative.
Do you realise how the DRM/copy protection scheme used by Adobe Creative Suite works? It screws with your boot sector, which is about as big a risk as you can get in terms of system stability.
This is exactly why things like DRM are a bad idea for consumers: even if something works now, it can arbitrarily break later, there could be collateral damage, and the company who set it up might or might not be around to fix the problem.
Sales of Win7 are down so low MS isn't even promoting it in most places.
Maybe that's because it won't be released until 22 October?
Notice the issues they are and *aren't* appealing.
Sure, but as far as I can see, they're in danger of being in a no-win situation. I'm sure they'd like a ruling that allows them to carry on here without affecting anything else to do with software patents, but even if they manage to get something that specific, they're going to have to make some sort of argument to justify it given that a ruling has already been made against them. I'm not an expert on the US legal system, but I assume if those arguments are made in a sufficiently senior court and result in the original decision being adjusted or overturned, that would be considered a precedent. And of course, there's no guarantee that a court case like this will result in such a narrow ruling (though in my limited experience, US courts do seem to prefer those to suggesting general principles).
I didn't miss that at all. In fact, in the summary of the very article you linked to, it mentions Microsoft's recent patent related to XML documents. My point was not that i4i themselves would necessarily seek to prevent distribution of OpenOffice, it was that if i4i can prevent distribution of Word in this way and someone then tries to ship OpenOffice instead, it's a good bet that Microsoft's patent people will be in there like a shot seeking injunctive relief of their own.
They should be forced to ship their machines with something like OpenOffice.
That would be the same OpenOffice that uses custom XML in its file formats, would it?
I think perhaps you missed what this case is all about.
This is an odd issue for the courts, as Microsoft did legitimately cheat I4I out (read the details), but on the flip side software patents are an unnecessary burden.
This "odd issue" is an excellent situation for just about everyone not involved in the case, though.
Firstly, arguably the biggest player in the software business is now on the wrong side of a software patents lawsuit, which is going to mean probably the most powerful legal team in the business is going to be looking for all sorts of arguments to get such patents overturned.
Secondly, there are going to be some hard questions about what constitutes "copying" in the case of software, which the big players have been carefully avoiding answering in court for a very long time, for fear that the already dubious legal basis for their EULAs and reseller-based sales models will be invalidated. Answering those questions definitively cannot help but clarify a lot of the ambiguity surrounding those issues. Does the act of installing a piece of software for which you have already paid constitute making a copy? Does the mere act of running software already installed constitute making a copy? It's going to be very unpleasant for players like Dell and HP if the injunction stands, even for a few weeks, and those things are found to constitute making a copy. But if they're not making a copy for the purposes of this software patent-related case, then logically they can't be affected by copyright either, and EULAs fall apart.
I wouldn't like to predict the outcome here, but I'm guessing some big players in our industry are going to be pretty upset one way or another. And given that consumers (and smaller players in the industry, for that matter) are almost always on the wrong side of status quo, hopefully that means we're all going to be pretty happy one way or another.
Even in a representative democracy, sometimes leaders need to lead, and not follow popular opinion.
On that, and indeed the rest of your post here, we agree entirely. However, in this context, don't you lead by convincing the general population that you are right?
Slavery wasn't really abolished because a few people in authority dictated that it should be. It was abolished because a few thoughtful people believed it should be, those people argued strongly to justify their position, and ultimately those people brought others around to their point of view. Were this not the case, any abolition could have been temporary, as a future administration would be more likely to be elected if it agreed with the majority view among the people.
So it goes with just about any major change. As you say, no-one has time to be fully informed on every topic. We elect representatives who can, at least in theory, dedicate their time to learning about a subject of interest in enough detail to form sensible judgements. But the idea is still that those people would form the same sort of opinion as those they represent, had those other people the time to consider the subject in similar detail.
As a counterpoint to your Churchill quotation, I leave you with one of my own favourites, by Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
I'm not sure it's productive to reply to every point you made individually, but please let me address some of the main ones.
I'd say that the council of Ministers is at least as, if not more important than the Commission myself, after all it contains executive officers from all the member states, who will have to get directives through their respective countries legislatures. Secondly, the parliament did a good job of blocking Software patents recently. It has more power than you think.
Perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree here. To me, it seems that almost everything major that gets dumped on us out of the EU originates with a Commissioner of some sort. Lack of software patents was perhaps an exception, but a rare and possibly temporary one. (Guess who was the EU Trade Commissioner, whose portfolio includes intellectual property issues, at the time that proposal started floating around?)
That's a Westminster problem, we could have an elected executive as in the USA, even so the Commissioners are no more removed than the Lords [...] Only the people of Sedgefield voted for Tony Blair, I don't remember people saying it was undemocratic that he was Prime Minister, or people complaining that because only the people of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath voted for Gordon Brown he should been Chancellor, the same goes for all UK cabinet portfolios.
Well, I can't speak for others, but I certainly think it's undemocratic that our Prime Minister (and, by extension, the entire executive administration) is not directly elected. This is how we wind up with policies being implemented that are not supported even by a Parliament where the executive's political party has a majority.
As a personal preference, I would like to try a system where any government organisation that has any kind of legislative/regulatory authority or that is allocated a significant budget funded by the taxpayer must also have directly elected leadership. For one thing, it would be impractical to continue having the vast numbers of such organisations that we have today, so such a change would force government to consolidate, with each department having a clear mandate, and less opportunity to hide things or pass the buck. For another, it would be the end of the kind of abuses we've been talking about here, whether our own executive, the Lords or the EU Commissioners.
What part of Masstricht exactly do you oppose?
It's not Maastricht as such, it's Maastricht and the stream of follow-up agreements that created what we know today as the EU. In place of useful trade agreements and co-operation on human rights, which we already had anyway, we now have a body that costs us billions every year (though it is, apparently, incapable of ever producing any audited accounts to justify that) and that has undemocratic legislative/regulatory powers.
An appeal to the majority is a logical fallacy.
In logic, yes, but we're talking about representative democracy. There is no way to determine an absolute right and wrong, so we use an appeal to the majority as our best guess. If you can't convince a majority of the people to respect your position and values, you're not supposed to wield power on behalf of the people.
Personally I'm against referenda of any kind, except major constitutional change. I don't have time to read the Treaty of Lisbon, that's what I elected my MP and pay her to do
If you had read the Treaty of Lisbon, you might see the contradiction in your position here.
Is not the major benefit of a constitution that it creates a basic framework of rights and responsibilities, understandable by anyone and agreed by all, within which any delegated representatives must act? It is beneficial precisely because it is a safe
Both the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers are elected bodies; it's true that the commission is made up of appointees, but they are appointed by elected member governments - a bit like the house of lords, except that commissioners don't get life terms. All in all it's just as, if not more (due to PR) democratic than our system here in the UK
No, it's not.
Firstly, the Commissioners are the ones with real power. The directly elected groups are so impotent in practice as to be effectively irrelevant; such powers as they nominally do possess have been ineffective at influencing the Commission to any significant degree.
Secondly, it's bad enough that our government is determined through an average of averages and that we don't directly elect the executive independent of the legislature, but anyone we send to be a Commissioner is one level further removed still. Even then we send only one Commissioner, with all the others provided by other nations without our having any say at all, and we don't get to choose which portfolio each Commissioner gets.
If you really think that it's in Britain's interest to remove itself from direct access to and the decision making process of the world's largest free trade block, it's your prerogative.
Once again, you imply a false dichotomy, as if a nation is either "in" Europe or "out" of it. As I noted in my previous post, the two major benefits to European integration — the trade agreements and the human rights agreements — were both working, and working pretty well actually, long before the European Union came along. It's all the expensive, unaccountable crap that has been added since Maastricht that I object to.
And if you think I'm the only one, or that my country is the only place where the people would prefer the simpler, more transparently useful agreements of old, take a look at the results in every country that actually allowed its people to have a say on the Lisbon Treaty, and notice how many governments had to cut their people out of that decision-making process entirely because they knew damn well what the result of any referendum would be. Tell me again how Europe is democratic, would you please?
However, you'll excuse me if I choose to exercise my freedom of movement and move to another EU member state if UKIP ever look like forming a government. I want to leave before the inevitable economic crash that'll make the 'credit crunch' look like a walk in the park.
Why do you think that reverting to transparent bilateral or multilateral free trade agreements within the equivalent of the old EEA would somehow leave us in a worse position than we are in now, when the EU has expanded far faster than was sensible and mandated uniform agreements for everyone that leave both the leading and the less developed economies suffering as a result? In economic terms, one-size-fits-all agreements are rarely effective unless all parties have similar power and balancing needs. That is clearly not even close to true across the entire EU today.