However if similar allegations were made against members of the public (especially if the alleged victims were police officers) they would undoubtedly have been arrested and their names and pictures splashed all over the media.
Well, probably, but remember that members of the public don't have the convenient ability to declare the mere act of photographing them to be a terrorist activity and impose all sorts of summary measures against the photographer as a result.
You have to keep a sense of perspective, you see. It's an important part of national security that the police be allowed to take their identification numbers off and arrest anyone who might be able to identify them by other means before they beat the crap out of innocent bystanders. Otherwise there might be unfortunate repercussions, and we need to ensure that the boys and girls in blue are protected from those so they can go on keeping us safe.
Sorry, I'm not normally one for ad hominem attacks, but you really are completely and utterly clueless.
Significant numbers of police units in the UK now routinely carry firearms, not just the odd specialist firearms car, and plans to deploy weapons like tasers to non-specialist units are well advanced in some forces.
And no, people cannot possess big sticks and bring themselves into line with what the police have. Carrying anything made or adapted for use as a weapon will fall under catch-all legislation and get you arrested, carrying anything that can be used as a serious weapon (sharps, firearms, etc.) will probably get you an automatic several years in prison, and even wearing body armour but being unarmed on an estate notorious for gang violence among its young population will get you a visit from a police officer telling you to take off the armour.
This is all a matter of public record, but if you want to see how things really work, just go read the stories about the use of kettling tactics by the Met at the recent London protests, and take a look at the videos that show police officers in full riot gear assaulting completely non-violent people, in some cases those who were just passing through the wrong place at the wrong time on their way home from work and didn't even have anything to do with the protests. One such person died, and the Independent Police Complaints Commission received hundreds of complaints and are actively investigating several cases of alleged police brutality where the video evidence captured by others present seems pretty hard to see any other way.
Seriously, if you think the public are allowed even close to the level of force the police use (and, it is now clear, abuse) here in the UK, then you need to watch the news a bit more often.
You can't complain when you are given something for free.
We seem to have drifted off-track a bit. I'm not complaining about something I'm given for free. I'm just explaining why many volunteers find it difficult to contribute in the manner you suggest.
The primary development environments for most FOSS projects are on FOSS platforms, not Windows.
And I imagine that will remain the case as long as the people who set up the projects only value having a good process on the FOSS platforms, which is regrettable given the number of keen folks running on other platforms who might be willing and able to offer help if there wasn't such a high wall to climb first.
If you had no reason to believe the transaction was encumbered, then you're not liable for anything the seller did.
If you had no reason to believe the goods were stolen, you won't wind up in jail either, but you'll still have to give the goods back. The legitimate holder's rights come first. This principle is particularly important when it comes to copyright, because otherwise a single infringing copier could effectively negate an entire copyright, while not having anything close to the resources to fairly compensate the legitimate copyright holder for the resulting damage.
The only thing you need to know is that you're posting information on the Internet.
As I do when I make a payment using on-line banking or give my credit card details to Amazon, you mean?
Sure, that's a reasonable expectation. But it isn't necessarily reality.
Not today, but it would soon become so if we started fining companies that failed to comply 10% of their annual profit and throwing a randomly selected member of the board of directors in jail for each lapse.
So it's limited to those people... Let's say FaceBook doesn't give out the information to other people, doesn't retain it after you deleted your account, etc. But one of your friends shares your information where they shouldn't have - re-posts it to a different website or something.
Ah, see, now you're getting to one of the real problems with privacy laws: it sucks that my friend did that, but in the days when it was probably an off-hand comment the damage was limited, whereas in an era of permanent, searchable databases the damage could be catastrophic. Failing to accommodate this reality and pretending that the friend is the only contributor to this problem is naive and will not solve the problem.
But, myself, I just don't post anything terribly incriminating there. There's no information on FaceBook that isn't already posted dozens of other places on the Internet.
Lucky you. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work that way, for the reason you alluded to yourself above: Facebook's entire MO is basically to get friends to post information about each other. When I signed up — a very short-lived diversion — I gave them nothing but my name, e-mail address, and university, and obviously identified a few friends. Within a few days, it felt like those friends had given Facebook my entire life story, one little note at a time. Facebook have since added a lot more control over who gets to see what and removing information, but again, by your own argument above, that control isn't really worth very much, and as we discussed earlier it's also rather disingenuous when literally a million other people (who may or may not know you personally, of course) also have access to that information.
I'm saying that a key ingredient in the whole mix is common sense, which many people don't have.
Perhaps. But moving beyond non-essential sites like Facebook and considering the wider issue, it is next to impossible to function in modern society without giving out a lot of personal information to a lot of people, and it is clear that a lot of damage is done when information gets into the wrong hands, whatever the cause. Heck, I live in the UK, where the government itself managed to lose sensitive information about nearly half the population in one day, and those people didn't have any choice.
To my mind, common sense says that those with disproportionate power (such as large organisations with the resources to collect this sort of data, including governments) should also be subject to disproportionate responsibility and effective oversight to protect ordinary people. That is what the law is for.
Bull. I've been developing software on Windows for years, and the build process required for any project I've set up consists of running one script.
The recurring problem I've encountered is all these "open" projects that have a convenient build process on exactly one platform and require jumping through crazy hoops to build anything else. (For the record, those requiring Cygwin to do anything on Windows are the most tragic cases of this disease.) Volunteers aren't as likely to help such a project as one where making a contribution is easier technically, any more than they are unlikely to support a project where the clique of core developers do not invite and welcome contributions.
You will find that unix-like OSes are far more user-friendly as development environments. [...] As more of you come to find this out first-hand, more of you will switch away from Windows to a Linux, Mac OS X or *BSD.
Some might find your assumption that those of us who choose to use Windows do so only out of ignorance to be insulting. I find it naive, amusing, and symptomatic of the same problem I mentioned above.
Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, blogs, text messaging, cell phones... They're all just ways of distributing a message. The problem isn't that distribution has become insanely quick, easy, and efficient. The problem is that nobody is thinking about the message anymore.
Actually, the problems being cited by the privacy officials are more the kind of thing the average user probably would not realise/anticipate.
If I ask a site to delete my personal data when they no longer have any reason to hold it, I might reasonably expect them to delete it — not stick some flag in a database, and then find when they have a security breach in five years' time that the data was still there. If an organisation is unwilling to follow this rule, the law should make them; the consequences of failing to do so with modern technology are demonstrated all too frequently, and often with horrendous, underserved consequences for those affected.
If I flag my personal data as private and restrict access to only a select group of friends, I might reasonably expect that data to be kept private and accessible only to those friends — not made accessible, in its entirety, to a million arbitrary developers of Facebook apps around the world, many from countries with far less privacy protection than the law in my country (and other countries where Facebook is hosted) provides. Again, if a site that specialises in collecting personal data and attracts that data on the basis that it can be held in confidence is unable to keep that confidence, the law should compel them to do so.
The way Facebook doesn't really delete data and the way they allow app developers open-ended access to it are the two big reasons I personally don't use their service, and I would be interested to know how many of my Facebook-using friends would agree if they knew the full implications of signing up for one game of Scrabulous or whatever it's called these days.
The world has changed in the Internet age, because now transgressions that might have been forgotten or overlooked after a while in the past are kept on-file forever and searchable for all to see. That in itself makes both education (particularly for the young/vulnerable), privacy awareness, and explicit legal protections for personal information much more important.
Personally, I believe personal data protection and privacy laws are far, far too weak in most jurisdictions today, lagging well behind modern technology and its less constructive applications. I would like to see statutory safeguards on all collection, use and distribution of personal data, and awesome, business-destroying penalties for those who are not careful enough to do so.
Our current path, towards a database state and wholesale aggregation of personal data by private entities, using software that is frequently insecure, with low-level staff unreliable at following even basic security procedures, in a world where leaks can turn a victim's life upside down and the damage may be expensive or impossible to fix, is not a healthy path to follow.
Basically, it's reasonable to expect some common sense from those old enough to know what they're doing, but it is not reasonable to expect people to make decisions based on information they probably don't know or understand, and in any case, no-one is perfect and I personally think society would be a better place with stronger privacy laws governing organisations that compile massive databases of personal data. As I often comment in these discussions, just because we can do something does not mean we should, and just because someone who is only human once made a mistake does not mean we have to catalogue it and make it searchable by anyone for the rest of their life.
Re:I'd fix bugs and contribute quality code
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Firefox 3.5.1 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That's cute, but missing the point.
The majority of us use Windows, and will therefore probably want to develop on that platform.
If you read the Windows section of the page you linked to, the very first line is "Building on 64-bit Windows does not seem to be supported."
If you read the rest, you get told about using Visual Studio Express Editions and Windows SDKs, but as anyone who's tried it will know, just finding and installing the right SDKs there can be tricky. (Microsoft's own web site had links to an out-of-date version for a while, which didn't help.)
Then you get to the MozillaBuild bit. What, yet another proprietary build system? At that point, I really start to shudder, because even if an experienced Windows developer might already have Visual Studio,.Net and the Windows SDKs installed, they won't have this. Using Mercurial isn't so bad (at least it's not Git) but it's still going to be different to what most Windows developers are familiar with.
Then there are the fiddly bits of actually building it, to do with the Windows user home directory stuff that approximately no-one actually uses.
Seriously, if you think this is a "simple" build procedure that's going to get casual volunteers contributing small fixes, you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. A simple build consists of "get_source_code <directory>" followed by changing to that directory and "make". If yours is more complicated, it's a roadblock to casual contribution, by which I mean contribution by those who don't make a full-time hobby of working on the project but would be happy to help fix the odd bug or implementing a minor feature they really want.
That may all be true, but it doesn't mean it's good policy.
There is exactly one reason why anything should ever be messing with the boot sector on my hard drive: to configure a boot loader. Once I've got an OS installed, the only times I will ever need to modify the boot sector will be if I am upgrading or if I am installing a multi-boot configuration, both things that approximately no-one actually does apart from geeks on rare occasions.
Is it really rocket science to suggest that it should not be open to any old application to override this and potentially wreck my entire system? I don't think so. Some stuff belongs in the hard drive equivalent of ring 0, and should require the hard drive equivalent of sudo to even read it.
C&C:4 will require a constant Internet connection to play. How long do you think it will be before other games follow? And how long do you think it will be before most games have something like Microsoft's so-called Genuine Advantage, where each game comes with a serial number that must be validated before the game will play? Once that serial number is registered, selling the CD doesn't do any good at all. And game companies are under no obligation to allow you to transfer that serial number to someone else.
Well, Slashdot's anti-copyright crowd are always harping on about how we shouldn't prop up dying business models and media companies need to adapt to modern technology. I guess they should have been more careful what they wished for.
Personally, I don't have a problem with companies doing this provided that it is completely transparent to the person making the purchasing decision and there are no hidden consequences: they have to say (in letters big enough to be noticed) that if their company goes bust or their server goes down, your $70 DVD will immediately become an expensive coaster, and that if you resell the game the person buying it is just getting an expensive coaster, and that if you need to reinstall because of a hard drive failure on your PC the DVD is... well, you get the idea.
Then, if any other game provider chooses as a commercial decision to make their games available without such restrictions and advertise this prominently, well, they're perfectly entitled to do so and to compete on that basis. If no-one does, maybe game piracy really does do more damage to the bottom line than the pirates like to admit.
I see this as no different to the rental model: I don't expect to keep the DVD forever when I'm only paying a fraction of the retail cost, but I choose to pay the much lower price because I'll probably only watch the movie once anyway. Everyone knows the rules and no-one gets offended.
Whether there should be DRM-free escrow requirements for published software along the same lines as requiring published books to provide a copy to a reference library is a different question, but given that realistically the interesting lifetime of a game for most gamers will be a few years at most, this is mainly of academic rather than practical interest.
Can you give an example of what can be done in PS that cannot be in GIMP? Is there a function in PS that really cannot be recreated in GIMP, even maybe with many steps? What advanced tool is there in PS that cannot be done manually in GIMP?
Those are fair questions, though we really should have an FAQ for these things.
As food for thought, here are a few basic things that come immediately to mind where the Photoshop feature either has no direct equivalent in the GIMP, gets visibly better results, and/or is dramatically easier to use:
layer management/styles
brush/stroke path tools
typography
colour management.
I suspect going into lots of details is too far off-topic for this discussion, but if you search the Slashdot archives for stories in this area, we've definitely had much deeper exploration of this topic in the past.
I think my general point is still valid, however: there are a lot of programs that really are Windows-only, at least to the point where you need to play virtualisation tricks and work around all sorts of EULA nonsense if you want any chance of using them on another platform.
Also whatever features you need, report them to similar but lacking applications and eventually they should get implemented.
The problem with this is that it just doesn't happen that way. It's no secret that Creative Suite is the choice of around 100% of graphic design professionals. The web is full of tutorials that rely on a relatively small number of features in, say, Photoshop, to get the effects they use. And yet none of the other commercial graphics products even comes close, and nothing in the Open Source world is even on the same scale. (Please don't anyone post about how wonderful their favourite OSS product is; advocacy is not going to turn GIMP into Photoshop or Scribus into InDesign, no matter how forcefully you proclaim them to be just as good.)
A similar argument applies to the AC who suggested that I shouldn't expect something if I'm not willing to help build it. In my world, there are whole businesses who make software, and I pay them money to use theirs instead of spending several lifetimes rewriting it myself. The problem is that even businesses who make good, useful software can have naive or unhelpful management and legal departments.
The only problem with this once-good advice is that in a world of DRM-restricted ****, a complete wipe and reinstall of your system almost guarantees you'll lose something, even if you think you've backed everything up.
I suppose this is what we get for using an operating system that doesn't clearly distinguish between data that can change (real or configuration metadata) vs. fixed code/data for the OS and applications that changes only if and when you install a different version. It's also what we get for using an OS that lets applications mess with things like your boot sector to implement DRM (I'm looking at you, Adobe) and provides separate storage for configuration that isn't in the main file system at all (registry), so there are all sorts of places for vital information to hide and avoid being backed up in the first place or easy to restore even if it is saved.
Unfortunately, until Microsoft grow up on this front or someone writes software as powerful as Creative Suite to run on Linux, this is the world many of us are stuck in.:-(
Wikipedia's policy of having no "spoiler" mechanism has annoyed me for a long time. Yes, reading an encyclopedia entry about a TV show might refer to plot details, but I'm still not going to be amused if the introduction spoils the ending of the new series I didn't know was out yet in the first couple of lines. This is why just about every other TV review site or fan site wiki has some way of indicating that spoilers are ahead, if necessary with some reference to the particular episode(s) or series so those watching at different rates in different countries know. It isn't hard to do this, and many people consider it courteous.
The exact same argument applies to magic tricks, as mentioned by someone in an earlier post to this thread. How to do many popular illusions is public knowledge, and might even be helpful to aspiring magicians, but if someone looks up the name of a popular trick they might not want the first thing they see to be a diagram giving away the secret. It's not hard to hide such details by default but make them visible on demand. Heck, the mark-up structure on a site like Wikipedia is practically made for that sort of distinction.
And of course exactly the same goes for the Rorschach stuff here, solutions to common brain teasers, and many other things. Just because something is public knowledge, that doesn't mean everyone reading about it automatically wants to know everything.
Given all of this, the lack of a spoiler mechanism in Wikipedia just defies belief. It seems a prime example of how despite the overwhelmingly beneficial nature of community-driven sites, the collective ego of a few editors who want things done Their Way(TM) is still enough to make the experience worse for millions of others. For once, it would be nice to be proved wrong...
For users with anything pre-multi-core (and that's only a few years old), this will result in things getting *slower* because of the process overhead.
You are vastly over-estimating the impact of a process switch on any hardware from the last decade or more. Right now, my WinXP PC is running 53 processes. If I click another application on my task bar, a full screen has redrawn with the new application's window before my finger has finished releasing the mouse button I clicked. Do you have any idea how many process switches took place in the fraction of a second while that happened?
Better philosophical architecture is a good thing.
There's a lot more than philosophy going on here.
Independent processes allow a dramatic improvement in robustness. Any plug-in, heck even a hostile JavaScript, can take out your entire Firefox browser right now. Plenty of people browse with many windows open doing everything from writing e-mail to posting on social networking sites to watching YouTube. All of that goes boom if a single tab hits a single plug-in/scripting bug.
Independent processes also allow improvements in security. Resources on modern operating systems are typically allocated on a per-process basis; this is the difference between a process and a thread. Avoiding sharing resources between different tabs, where such tabs might contain scripts or plug-ins that you have granted certain extra permissions, is a good thing.
And of course, in practice, many people are now running on multi-core hardware that will benefit in performance terms as well. Moreover, major architectural clean-ups on software projects tend to improve performance as a side-effect anyway.
I'm afraid your post is one long stream of technically incompetent FUD.
In every RPG I've ever played you start out pretty weak and helpless, and work your way up to being an unstoppable demigod.
But the power is relative. For example, if you start at level 1 in a D&D style game, sure, your one magic missile or leather armour sucks compared to what you get by the end of the game. But then just because you've got area effect spells and magically enhanced weapons by the end, that doesn't mean the sequel can't have bigger, badder bad guys who are tougher and/or in some way resistant to those attacks, such that you have to develop still more powerful tricks to beat them.
The Baldur's Gate series made this jump pretty well, twice. Of course your powers by the end of the series would annihilate an entire city full of the bad guys you fought hard against back at the start without breaking a sweat, but by the end of the series you're not fighting against a room full of 3' tall, 20HP monsters with basic shortbows any more.
Yes, that's a more serious problem. Then again, both MS Office and OpenOffice have always sucked at formatting lists and automatic numbering, and for some reason I can't fathom, neither development group has ever shown much interest in fixing it.
Personally, I find the whole "it slightly reformats my text" argument less than compelling anyway, regardless of which office suite is being advocated at the time.
For 99% of the cases, it doesn't matter. Heck, anyone who works in a company with both US and European offices probably gets their documents reformatted between A4 and US Letter paper sizes fairly often, and that's particularly amusing since many of them will only ever be displayed on-screen where such sizes are pretty bad for readability anyway.
For the other 1% of cases, well, that's what PDF is for.
There are certainly ways to change the default behaviour on both platforms. My point is only that different people will have their own preferences, and I don't think the usability of either approach is objectively better than the usability of the other.
It's worth pointing out that the usability of features like this is variable. I know plenty of people who swear by UNIXy window focus, but personally I swear at it. Each of us will probably be more productive using our own preferred environment.
In contrast, the big benefits from usability work come when you observe users working with your software and discover ways that make most or all of your users more productive, ideally without affecting anyone else.
Opposition to the current copyright regime is not synonymous with the abolition of copyright. Many of us, instead, feel that copyright needs to be reformed, not abolished:
An excellent post, and I agree with most of your position. I do challenge one of your points, however:
2. Legalize non-commercial distribution of audiovisual works.
The problem with this is that it doesn't scale as technology improves and viewing habits change.
For example, it will be a few years, at most, before we have the capacity for individuals to host full-quality videos to be streamed from their own sites (as opposed to using a commercial hosting service such as YouTube). This already happens to some extent via BitTorrent and the like.
Also, IME at least, people are turning quickly to using on-demand streamling from on-line sources. My other half now watches more BBC programmes via iPlayer than she watches live on TV, for example. I suspect that traditional television now has a remaining useful lifetime of only a few years, and any physical medium for distribution of content (CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc.) won't last much longer.
So, suppose we legalise non-commercial distribution of audiovisual works, and let's jump ahead ten years. Everyone is used to downloading content from on-line suppliers, and a handful of (now 100% legal, run as non-profit) copy-sites have become trusted sources for new films, much as YouTube is the first place many people look for music videos today. Within minutes of a new movie being released, whatever DRM it came with is broken and a copy is placed on the copy-sites. With no legal restrictions, even most of those who would have paid for the content today rather than looking for a dubious alternative source go to the copy-site and save their money. Now the only way for movies to make money is in the cinema, but with increased specifications for home theatre systems and ready availability of full-quality content, those are dying too. Consequently, no-one can get a return on investment on movies that cost the astronomical sums they do today. But equally, no-one can get a return on investment on other works that are expensive considering the size of their target audience, whether it's genuinely ground-breaking nature documentaries like the BBC's Planet Earth series, or hiring a professional recording studio for a day so an indie group can make high-quality recordings to share with their fans, or putting on a big sports event.
Now, one could argue that this is market forces driving down prices: A-list celebrities from actors to sports stars are overpaid and will have to suck it up, cinemas will have to offer a significantly better experience than home theatre to entice people to show up, sports events will have to charge enough for admission to make up for not making anything on the broadcast rights, and so on. I'm sure there is some truth in this.
One could also argue that true fans would pay to support the smaller projects anyway, and an effectively donation-based model would take over some markets. Again, there is probably some truth in this.
But to me, this seems like too risky a path to go down any time soon. I think you could have a simple, reasonable, mostly-respected fair use law just by saying once you've obtained a legitimate copy of some content, you're free to use it as you wish personally and within your own household, but sharing it beyond that is an infringement. If you allow open-ended sharing, with the resulting exponential growth in distribution, I would have serious concerns about the viability of creating and distributing a lot of works that many people enjoy today. It would take longer for our society to evolve to the point where people supported such artistic work voluntarily to the extent required, just as people make charitable contributions to causes they support today, though this might be a laudable goal in the long term.
If they were looking for something really dangerous, on the basis of credible evidence, wouldn't it have been an even better idea to call the professionals?
School official: "Yes, Johnny, I think you're concealing a gun in your jacket in violation of school rules."
Johnny: "Sir, what you have to ask yourself now is, 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do you?"
Slashdot Mirror
You could add a useful automated statistic at the end of the list:
Websites where which our browser is useful today: 8%
However if similar allegations were made against members of the public (especially if the alleged victims were police officers) they would undoubtedly have been arrested and their names and pictures splashed all over the media.
Well, probably, but remember that members of the public don't have the convenient ability to declare the mere act of photographing them to be a terrorist activity and impose all sorts of summary measures against the photographer as a result.
You have to keep a sense of perspective, you see. It's an important part of national security that the police be allowed to take their identification numbers off and arrest anyone who might be able to identify them by other means before they beat the crap out of innocent bystanders. Otherwise there might be unfortunate repercussions, and we need to ensure that the boys and girls in blue are protected from those so they can go on keeping us safe.
Sorry, I'm not normally one for ad hominem attacks, but you really are completely and utterly clueless.
Significant numbers of police units in the UK now routinely carry firearms, not just the odd specialist firearms car, and plans to deploy weapons like tasers to non-specialist units are well advanced in some forces.
And no, people cannot possess big sticks and bring themselves into line with what the police have. Carrying anything made or adapted for use as a weapon will fall under catch-all legislation and get you arrested, carrying anything that can be used as a serious weapon (sharps, firearms, etc.) will probably get you an automatic several years in prison, and even wearing body armour but being unarmed on an estate notorious for gang violence among its young population will get you a visit from a police officer telling you to take off the armour.
This is all a matter of public record, but if you want to see how things really work, just go read the stories about the use of kettling tactics by the Met at the recent London protests, and take a look at the videos that show police officers in full riot gear assaulting completely non-violent people, in some cases those who were just passing through the wrong place at the wrong time on their way home from work and didn't even have anything to do with the protests. One such person died, and the Independent Police Complaints Commission received hundreds of complaints and are actively investigating several cases of alleged police brutality where the video evidence captured by others present seems pretty hard to see any other way.
Seriously, if you think the public are allowed even close to the level of force the police use (and, it is now clear, abuse) here in the UK, then you need to watch the news a bit more often.
You can't complain when you are given something for free.
We seem to have drifted off-track a bit. I'm not complaining about something I'm given for free. I'm just explaining why many volunteers find it difficult to contribute in the manner you suggest.
The primary development environments for most FOSS projects are on FOSS platforms, not Windows.
And I imagine that will remain the case as long as the people who set up the projects only value having a good process on the FOSS platforms, which is regrettable given the number of keen folks running on other platforms who might be willing and able to offer help if there wasn't such a high wall to climb first.
If you had no reason to believe the transaction was encumbered, then you're not liable for anything the seller did.
If you had no reason to believe the goods were stolen, you won't wind up in jail either, but you'll still have to give the goods back. The legitimate holder's rights come first. This principle is particularly important when it comes to copyright, because otherwise a single infringing copier could effectively negate an entire copyright, while not having anything close to the resources to fairly compensate the legitimate copyright holder for the resulting damage.
The only thing you need to know is that you're posting information on the Internet.
As I do when I make a payment using on-line banking or give my credit card details to Amazon, you mean?
Sure, that's a reasonable expectation. But it isn't necessarily reality.
Not today, but it would soon become so if we started fining companies that failed to comply 10% of their annual profit and throwing a randomly selected member of the board of directors in jail for each lapse.
So it's limited to those people... Let's say FaceBook doesn't give out the information to other people, doesn't retain it after you deleted your account, etc. But one of your friends shares your information where they shouldn't have - re-posts it to a different website or something.
Ah, see, now you're getting to one of the real problems with privacy laws: it sucks that my friend did that, but in the days when it was probably an off-hand comment the damage was limited, whereas in an era of permanent, searchable databases the damage could be catastrophic. Failing to accommodate this reality and pretending that the friend is the only contributor to this problem is naive and will not solve the problem.
But, myself, I just don't post anything terribly incriminating there. There's no information on FaceBook that isn't already posted dozens of other places on the Internet.
Lucky you. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work that way, for the reason you alluded to yourself above: Facebook's entire MO is basically to get friends to post information about each other. When I signed up — a very short-lived diversion — I gave them nothing but my name, e-mail address, and university, and obviously identified a few friends. Within a few days, it felt like those friends had given Facebook my entire life story, one little note at a time. Facebook have since added a lot more control over who gets to see what and removing information, but again, by your own argument above, that control isn't really worth very much, and as we discussed earlier it's also rather disingenuous when literally a million other people (who may or may not know you personally, of course) also have access to that information.
I'm saying that a key ingredient in the whole mix is common sense, which many people don't have.
Perhaps. But moving beyond non-essential sites like Facebook and considering the wider issue, it is next to impossible to function in modern society without giving out a lot of personal information to a lot of people, and it is clear that a lot of damage is done when information gets into the wrong hands, whatever the cause. Heck, I live in the UK, where the government itself managed to lose sensitive information about nearly half the population in one day, and those people didn't have any choice.
To my mind, common sense says that those with disproportionate power (such as large organisations with the resources to collect this sort of data, including governments) should also be subject to disproportionate responsibility and effective oversight to protect ordinary people. That is what the law is for.
It sounds like Windows is the problem.
Bull. I've been developing software on Windows for years, and the build process required for any project I've set up consists of running one script.
The recurring problem I've encountered is all these "open" projects that have a convenient build process on exactly one platform and require jumping through crazy hoops to build anything else. (For the record, those requiring Cygwin to do anything on Windows are the most tragic cases of this disease.) Volunteers aren't as likely to help such a project as one where making a contribution is easier technically, any more than they are unlikely to support a project where the clique of core developers do not invite and welcome contributions.
You will find that unix-like OSes are far more user-friendly as development environments. [...] As more of you come to find this out first-hand, more of you will switch away from Windows to a Linux, Mac OS X or *BSD.
Some might find your assumption that those of us who choose to use Windows do so only out of ignorance to be insulting. I find it naive, amusing, and symptomatic of the same problem I mentioned above.
Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, blogs, text messaging, cell phones... They're all just ways of distributing a message. The problem isn't that distribution has become insanely quick, easy, and efficient. The problem is that nobody is thinking about the message anymore.
Actually, the problems being cited by the privacy officials are more the kind of thing the average user probably would not realise/anticipate.
If I ask a site to delete my personal data when they no longer have any reason to hold it, I might reasonably expect them to delete it — not stick some flag in a database, and then find when they have a security breach in five years' time that the data was still there. If an organisation is unwilling to follow this rule, the law should make them; the consequences of failing to do so with modern technology are demonstrated all too frequently, and often with horrendous, underserved consequences for those affected.
If I flag my personal data as private and restrict access to only a select group of friends, I might reasonably expect that data to be kept private and accessible only to those friends — not made accessible, in its entirety, to a million arbitrary developers of Facebook apps around the world, many from countries with far less privacy protection than the law in my country (and other countries where Facebook is hosted) provides. Again, if a site that specialises in collecting personal data and attracts that data on the basis that it can be held in confidence is unable to keep that confidence, the law should compel them to do so.
The way Facebook doesn't really delete data and the way they allow app developers open-ended access to it are the two big reasons I personally don't use their service, and I would be interested to know how many of my Facebook-using friends would agree if they knew the full implications of signing up for one game of Scrabulous or whatever it's called these days.
The world has changed in the Internet age, because now transgressions that might have been forgotten or overlooked after a while in the past are kept on-file forever and searchable for all to see. That in itself makes both education (particularly for the young/vulnerable), privacy awareness, and explicit legal protections for personal information much more important.
Personally, I believe personal data protection and privacy laws are far, far too weak in most jurisdictions today, lagging well behind modern technology and its less constructive applications. I would like to see statutory safeguards on all collection, use and distribution of personal data, and awesome, business-destroying penalties for those who are not careful enough to do so.
Our current path, towards a database state and wholesale aggregation of personal data by private entities, using software that is frequently insecure, with low-level staff unreliable at following even basic security procedures, in a world where leaks can turn a victim's life upside down and the damage may be expensive or impossible to fix, is not a healthy path to follow.
Basically, it's reasonable to expect some common sense from those old enough to know what they're doing, but it is not reasonable to expect people to make decisions based on information they probably don't know or understand, and in any case, no-one is perfect and I personally think society would be a better place with stronger privacy laws governing organisations that compile massive databases of personal data. As I often comment in these discussions, just because we can do something does not mean we should, and just because someone who is only human once made a mistake does not mean we have to catalogue it and make it searchable by anyone for the rest of their life.
That's cute, but missing the point.
The majority of us use Windows, and will therefore probably want to develop on that platform.
If you read the Windows section of the page you linked to, the very first line is "Building on 64-bit Windows does not seem to be supported."
If you read the rest, you get told about using Visual Studio Express Editions and Windows SDKs, but as anyone who's tried it will know, just finding and installing the right SDKs there can be tricky. (Microsoft's own web site had links to an out-of-date version for a while, which didn't help.)
Then you get to the MozillaBuild bit. What, yet another proprietary build system? At that point, I really start to shudder, because even if an experienced Windows developer might already have Visual Studio, .Net and the Windows SDKs installed, they won't have this. Using Mercurial isn't so bad (at least it's not Git) but it's still going to be different to what most Windows developers are familiar with.
Then there are the fiddly bits of actually building it, to do with the Windows user home directory stuff that approximately no-one actually uses.
Seriously, if you think this is a "simple" build procedure that's going to get casual volunteers contributing small fixes, you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. A simple build consists of "get_source_code <directory>" followed by changing to that directory and "make". If yours is more complicated, it's a roadblock to casual contribution, by which I mean contribution by those who don't make a full-time hobby of working on the project but would be happy to help fix the odd bug or implementing a minor feature they really want.
That may all be true, but it doesn't mean it's good policy.
There is exactly one reason why anything should ever be messing with the boot sector on my hard drive: to configure a boot loader. Once I've got an OS installed, the only times I will ever need to modify the boot sector will be if I am upgrading or if I am installing a multi-boot configuration, both things that approximately no-one actually does apart from geeks on rare occasions.
Is it really rocket science to suggest that it should not be open to any old application to override this and potentially wreck my entire system? I don't think so. Some stuff belongs in the hard drive equivalent of ring 0, and should require the hard drive equivalent of sudo to even read it.
C&C:4 will require a constant Internet connection to play. How long do you think it will be before other games follow? And how long do you think it will be before most games have something like Microsoft's so-called Genuine Advantage, where each game comes with a serial number that must be validated before the game will play? Once that serial number is registered, selling the CD doesn't do any good at all. And game companies are under no obligation to allow you to transfer that serial number to someone else.
Well, Slashdot's anti-copyright crowd are always harping on about how we shouldn't prop up dying business models and media companies need to adapt to modern technology. I guess they should have been more careful what they wished for.
Personally, I don't have a problem with companies doing this provided that it is completely transparent to the person making the purchasing decision and there are no hidden consequences: they have to say (in letters big enough to be noticed) that if their company goes bust or their server goes down, your $70 DVD will immediately become an expensive coaster, and that if you resell the game the person buying it is just getting an expensive coaster, and that if you need to reinstall because of a hard drive failure on your PC the DVD is... well, you get the idea.
Then, if any other game provider chooses as a commercial decision to make their games available without such restrictions and advertise this prominently, well, they're perfectly entitled to do so and to compete on that basis. If no-one does, maybe game piracy really does do more damage to the bottom line than the pirates like to admit.
I see this as no different to the rental model: I don't expect to keep the DVD forever when I'm only paying a fraction of the retail cost, but I choose to pay the much lower price because I'll probably only watch the movie once anyway. Everyone knows the rules and no-one gets offended.
Whether there should be DRM-free escrow requirements for published software along the same lines as requiring published books to provide a copy to a reference library is a different question, but given that realistically the interesting lifetime of a game for most gamers will be a few years at most, this is mainly of academic rather than practical interest.
Can you give an example of what can be done in PS that cannot be in GIMP? Is there a function in PS that really cannot be recreated in GIMP, even maybe with many steps? What advanced tool is there in PS that cannot be done manually in GIMP?
Those are fair questions, though we really should have an FAQ for these things.
As food for thought, here are a few basic things that come immediately to mind where the Photoshop feature either has no direct equivalent in the GIMP, gets visibly better results, and/or is dramatically easier to use:
I suspect going into lots of details is too far off-topic for this discussion, but if you search the Slashdot archives for stories in this area, we've definitely had much deeper exploration of this topic in the past.
Never tried running Creative Suite on Mac?
Fair point, in that particular case.
I think my general point is still valid, however: there are a lot of programs that really are Windows-only, at least to the point where you need to play virtualisation tricks and work around all sorts of EULA nonsense if you want any chance of using them on another platform.
Also whatever features you need, report them to similar but lacking applications and eventually they should get implemented.
The problem with this is that it just doesn't happen that way. It's no secret that Creative Suite is the choice of around 100% of graphic design professionals. The web is full of tutorials that rely on a relatively small number of features in, say, Photoshop, to get the effects they use. And yet none of the other commercial graphics products even comes close, and nothing in the Open Source world is even on the same scale. (Please don't anyone post about how wonderful their favourite OSS product is; advocacy is not going to turn GIMP into Photoshop or Scribus into InDesign, no matter how forcefully you proclaim them to be just as good.)
A similar argument applies to the AC who suggested that I shouldn't expect something if I'm not willing to help build it. In my world, there are whole businesses who make software, and I pay them money to use theirs instead of spending several lifetimes rewriting it myself. The problem is that even businesses who make good, useful software can have naive or unhelpful management and legal departments.
The only problem with this once-good advice is that in a world of DRM-restricted ****, a complete wipe and reinstall of your system almost guarantees you'll lose something, even if you think you've backed everything up.
I suppose this is what we get for using an operating system that doesn't clearly distinguish between data that can change (real or configuration metadata) vs. fixed code/data for the OS and applications that changes only if and when you install a different version. It's also what we get for using an OS that lets applications mess with things like your boot sector to implement DRM (I'm looking at you, Adobe) and provides separate storage for configuration that isn't in the main file system at all (registry), so there are all sorts of places for vital information to hide and avoid being backed up in the first place or easy to restore even if it is saved.
Unfortunately, until Microsoft grow up on this front or someone writes software as powerful as Creative Suite to run on Linux, this is the world many of us are stuck in. :-(
Exactly.
Wikipedia's policy of having no "spoiler" mechanism has annoyed me for a long time. Yes, reading an encyclopedia entry about a TV show might refer to plot details, but I'm still not going to be amused if the introduction spoils the ending of the new series I didn't know was out yet in the first couple of lines. This is why just about every other TV review site or fan site wiki has some way of indicating that spoilers are ahead, if necessary with some reference to the particular episode(s) or series so those watching at different rates in different countries know. It isn't hard to do this, and many people consider it courteous.
The exact same argument applies to magic tricks, as mentioned by someone in an earlier post to this thread. How to do many popular illusions is public knowledge, and might even be helpful to aspiring magicians, but if someone looks up the name of a popular trick they might not want the first thing they see to be a diagram giving away the secret. It's not hard to hide such details by default but make them visible on demand. Heck, the mark-up structure on a site like Wikipedia is practically made for that sort of distinction.
And of course exactly the same goes for the Rorschach stuff here, solutions to common brain teasers, and many other things. Just because something is public knowledge, that doesn't mean everyone reading about it automatically wants to know everything.
Given all of this, the lack of a spoiler mechanism in Wikipedia just defies belief. It seems a prime example of how despite the overwhelmingly beneficial nature of community-driven sites, the collective ego of a few editors who want things done Their Way(TM) is still enough to make the experience worse for millions of others. For once, it would be nice to be proved wrong...
For users with anything pre-multi-core (and that's only a few years old), this will result in things getting *slower* because of the process overhead.
You are vastly over-estimating the impact of a process switch on any hardware from the last decade or more. Right now, my WinXP PC is running 53 processes. If I click another application on my task bar, a full screen has redrawn with the new application's window before my finger has finished releasing the mouse button I clicked. Do you have any idea how many process switches took place in the fraction of a second while that happened?
Better philosophical architecture is a good thing.
There's a lot more than philosophy going on here.
Independent processes allow a dramatic improvement in robustness. Any plug-in, heck even a hostile JavaScript, can take out your entire Firefox browser right now. Plenty of people browse with many windows open doing everything from writing e-mail to posting on social networking sites to watching YouTube. All of that goes boom if a single tab hits a single plug-in/scripting bug.
Independent processes also allow improvements in security. Resources on modern operating systems are typically allocated on a per-process basis; this is the difference between a process and a thread. Avoiding sharing resources between different tabs, where such tabs might contain scripts or plug-ins that you have granted certain extra permissions, is a good thing.
And of course, in practice, many people are now running on multi-core hardware that will benefit in performance terms as well. Moreover, major architectural clean-ups on software projects tend to improve performance as a side-effect anyway.
I'm afraid your post is one long stream of technically incompetent FUD.
In every RPG I've ever played you start out pretty weak and helpless, and work your way up to being an unstoppable demigod.
But the power is relative. For example, if you start at level 1 in a D&D style game, sure, your one magic missile or leather armour sucks compared to what you get by the end of the game. But then just because you've got area effect spells and magically enhanced weapons by the end, that doesn't mean the sequel can't have bigger, badder bad guys who are tougher and/or in some way resistant to those attacks, such that you have to develop still more powerful tricks to beat them.
The Baldur's Gate series made this jump pretty well, twice. Of course your powers by the end of the series would annihilate an entire city full of the bad guys you fought hard against back at the start without breaking a sweat, but by the end of the series you're not fighting against a room full of 3' tall, 20HP monsters with basic shortbows any more.
Yes, that's a more serious problem. Then again, both MS Office and OpenOffice have always sucked at formatting lists and automatic numbering, and for some reason I can't fathom, neither development group has ever shown much interest in fixing it.
Personally, I find the whole "it slightly reformats my text" argument less than compelling anyway, regardless of which office suite is being advocated at the time.
For 99% of the cases, it doesn't matter. Heck, anyone who works in a company with both US and European offices probably gets their documents reformatted between A4 and US Letter paper sizes fairly often, and that's particularly amusing since many of them will only ever be displayed on-screen where such sizes are pretty bad for readability anyway.
For the other 1% of cases, well, that's what PDF is for.
On a related topic, if you were to write Design Patterns today, would you omit or significantly modify any of the original 23 patterns?
There are certainly ways to change the default behaviour on both platforms. My point is only that different people will have their own preferences, and I don't think the usability of either approach is objectively better than the usability of the other.
It's worth pointing out that the usability of features like this is variable. I know plenty of people who swear by UNIXy window focus, but personally I swear at it. Each of us will probably be more productive using our own preferred environment.
In contrast, the big benefits from usability work come when you observe users working with your software and discover ways that make most or all of your users more productive, ideally without affecting anyone else.
Not to nitpick, but in case anyone wants to look it up, it's "Council of Europe", not "Counsel of Europe".
Opposition to the current copyright regime is not synonymous with the abolition of copyright. Many of us, instead, feel that copyright needs to be reformed, not abolished:
An excellent post, and I agree with most of your position. I do challenge one of your points, however:
2. Legalize non-commercial distribution of audiovisual works.
The problem with this is that it doesn't scale as technology improves and viewing habits change.
For example, it will be a few years, at most, before we have the capacity for individuals to host full-quality videos to be streamed from their own sites (as opposed to using a commercial hosting service such as YouTube). This already happens to some extent via BitTorrent and the like.
Also, IME at least, people are turning quickly to using on-demand streamling from on-line sources. My other half now watches more BBC programmes via iPlayer than she watches live on TV, for example. I suspect that traditional television now has a remaining useful lifetime of only a few years, and any physical medium for distribution of content (CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc.) won't last much longer.
So, suppose we legalise non-commercial distribution of audiovisual works, and let's jump ahead ten years. Everyone is used to downloading content from on-line suppliers, and a handful of (now 100% legal, run as non-profit) copy-sites have become trusted sources for new films, much as YouTube is the first place many people look for music videos today. Within minutes of a new movie being released, whatever DRM it came with is broken and a copy is placed on the copy-sites. With no legal restrictions, even most of those who would have paid for the content today rather than looking for a dubious alternative source go to the copy-site and save their money. Now the only way for movies to make money is in the cinema, but with increased specifications for home theatre systems and ready availability of full-quality content, those are dying too. Consequently, no-one can get a return on investment on movies that cost the astronomical sums they do today. But equally, no-one can get a return on investment on other works that are expensive considering the size of their target audience, whether it's genuinely ground-breaking nature documentaries like the BBC's Planet Earth series, or hiring a professional recording studio for a day so an indie group can make high-quality recordings to share with their fans, or putting on a big sports event.
Now, one could argue that this is market forces driving down prices: A-list celebrities from actors to sports stars are overpaid and will have to suck it up, cinemas will have to offer a significantly better experience than home theatre to entice people to show up, sports events will have to charge enough for admission to make up for not making anything on the broadcast rights, and so on. I'm sure there is some truth in this.
One could also argue that true fans would pay to support the smaller projects anyway, and an effectively donation-based model would take over some markets. Again, there is probably some truth in this.
But to me, this seems like too risky a path to go down any time soon. I think you could have a simple, reasonable, mostly-respected fair use law just by saying once you've obtained a legitimate copy of some content, you're free to use it as you wish personally and within your own household, but sharing it beyond that is an infringement. If you allow open-ended sharing, with the resulting exponential growth in distribution, I would have serious concerns about the viability of creating and distributing a lot of works that many people enjoy today. It would take longer for our society to evolve to the point where people supported such artistic work voluntarily to the extent required, just as people make charitable contributions to causes they support today, though this might be a laudable goal in the long term.
If they were looking for something really dangerous, on the basis of credible evidence, wouldn't it have been an even better idea to call the professionals?
School official: "Yes, Johnny, I think you're concealing a gun in your jacket in violation of school rules."
Johnny: "Sir, what you have to ask yourself now is, 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do you?"
<BANG>