Finding that not all of the evidence presented completely and unambiguously supports a position doesn't necessarily mean the position isn't basically correct.
Try looking up Aren Cambre's database of speed-related source material, and reading some of the many studies cited there. Of course it's not all roses and lollipops, but the overall picture is about as clear as you're ever going to get on a subject like this. There simply isn't much of a justification for legal speed limits substantially below what most drivers would choose anyway, and while we continue to allow a political focus on speed, there are other contributing factors to the frequency and severity of accidents that are far more significant but going mostly unaddressed.
Even if speeding itself does not *cause* an accident it *does* make the consequences worse.
Even if travelling by car does not cause an accident, it does make the consequences worse. Maybe we should ban cars and cycle or walk everywhere?
Sorry, but your cute sound-bite is naive on several counts.
Firstly, you ignore the probability issue: it may be more likely that a driver travelling at an unnecessarily slow speed because of a legal limit will cause an accident in the first place. The consequences of that are likely to be worse than those of an accident that never happened, don't you think? There are at least two bodies of evidence to suggest that this actually happens: those researching driver alertness (people don't concentrate as much when they're cruising along slow and bored) and those considering speed differentials (it's not the absolute speed that causes a lot of accidents, it's the fact that two vehicles were travelling at significantly different speeds and the drivers failed to allow for this, and forcing law-abiding drivers to slow down where driving conditions don't need it artificially increases speed differentials since realistically a significant number of drivers will exceed an inappropriately low limit anyway).
Secondly, like just about every other so-called road safety campaigner out there, you conveniently assume that causing everyone to spend longer making journeys because they can't go as fast has no negative consequences of its own. I imagine those who waste extra minutes or hours of their life in the car every day because of needlessly low speed limits would disagree with that premise. Probably so would those whose shopping for household essentials got more expensive because of the increased infrastructure costs of supplying it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for improving road safety, and I have no problem with lowering speed limits where it is genuinely appropriate to do so. But I'd rather actually improve safety than dogmatically enforce technical rules that make good political sound-bites but have little evidence to show they work. Talking hypothetically about the consequences of accidents without considering other factors doesn't really advance the debate at all. And even glossing over all of the above, your argument is still flawed because it is based on normal travelling speed, where what matters most in terms of an accident's consequences is the impact speed, which is a very different thing.
IME, most drivers already choose to slow down to an appropriate speed even if it's below the limit when circumstances indicate that it is necessary, while those drivers who speed mostly do so where it is safe to break the limit anyway. It's the drivers whose judgement (or consideration for others) is not up to the standard we require who we need to target, and they are precisely the ones who are likely to ignore artificially low limits anyway.
I'm assuming no such thing. I'm merely assuming that both dangerous driving and insecure computers on the Internet cause significant damage to society that is worth preventing, and noting that personal responsibility for competence is one possible way to assist such prevention that would be applicable in both scenarios.
And remember, while insecure computers may not kill people directly, they certainly can be a route to things like identity theft for individuals and extortion/denial of service for organisations, both of which are pretty crippling if you're on the wrong end of them. We're not just talking about a background effect on the whole Internet's efficiency, with the knock-on cost and performance hit for everyone, though of course that is a significant problem in itself.
One of us has a sustainable approach. The other one's approach is responsible for most of the problems plaguing the Internet today. Sorry, but we're going to have to agree to disagree about who's wrong.
I wouldn't let your 70-year-old parents drive if they could no longer see more than 20 feet in front of the car, either, but I have no problem with 100-year-olds driving if they're safe when doing so. Age is irrelevant, but competence is not.
There is not a question about Word taking over from LaTeX in academia since Word already dominates academia.
Dominates is perhaps too strong a term. I've helped several friends to get Masters/PhD theses written up using LaTeX, after they gave up on Word out of frustration. The screwed-up cross-references and so on have bitten more than one of my other friends firmly in the backside. My usual example, unfortunate as it was, was that one friend submitted her thesis written using Word, only to discover that every single cross-reference was off by a page, and nearly had it sent back as a result.
Those friends were all studying humanities, languages and other arts subjects rather than maths or CompSci, BTW, and none of them had any difficulty using LaTeX once they'd been shown the basics for half an hour.
I don't know anyone who was holding onto TeX based purely on its support for Advanced Typographic features of OpenType.
At the risk of stating the obvious, that's probably because TeX doesn't have any advanced support for OpenType. This has been a major thorn in its side for years, because while its typography was always better than Windows 3.1 TrueType, modern professional grade fonts are pretty much all distributed as OpenType now, and the visual quality you can get with the likes of Adobe InDesign using them is substantially better than you can get from TeX unless you really have a thing for Computer Modern.
This has started to change since the arrival of XeTeX and XeLaTeX/fontspec/etc, but TeX's layout engine just isn't cut out to handle them: for example, a lot of the spacing for the maths is semi-fixed for Computer Modern and needs a lot of micro-adjustment to get good results with fonts that have significantly difference dimensions. Despite the hard work of a few key volunteers, even the state of the art in the TeX world isn't really there yet, which rather defeats the point of using TeX-based tools in the first place.
Of course, none of this changes the view that everyone here seems to agree on: Word isn't going to take over TeX's market any time soon. Adding nice OpenType feature support is one small step in that direction, but to present any sort of interest at all to TeX users who value presentation and/or ease of use, you'd need much better H&J, much more efficient handling of equations and diagrams, and much better long/formal document support, to name but a few things (and leaving aside the mark-up vs. WYSIWYG debate).
Re:Drupal cannot currently be taken seriously
on
Front End Drupal
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· Score: 1
Thanks for sharing your experience and insights. It sounds like both your background before Drupal and your general views of development are pretty similar to most of our guys.
We've reached the first test you described so far: we've got a test install, and established that much of what we need can be done with the core plus a few modules built around CCK and Views for the custom data. Some of it is indeed not as simple as with just writing a bit of database code, to be sure, but so far it's been close enough in our case.
What sounds like the deal-making feature for us is essentially the inversion of control you mentioned: we are moving from an eclectic system with numerous individual scripts in more than one language, and having a systematic framework where we know exactly where each bit of custom code we've written hooks in has a lot of value in itself. But as a result of your comments, at least we know to look out for the performance, replication and bulk data issues as we start more detailed trials, so thanks again for the contribution.
Yes, there are. I'm from the UK, which is hardly the last refuge of freedom and civil liberties right now, so I hear where you're coming from.
But I think there are more effective ways to fight for those rights in our two countries than writing some random, anonymous blog. For example, I contribute financially to a variety of charities and advocacy groups whose actions and campaigns I believe in supporting. All of those contributions have my name under them: I am proud to support those causes. Likewise, on the odd occasions when I have written to my elected representatives or other officials, it has my signature right there at the bottom of the letter and my address at the top, so they know I'm a real person with a real vote.
Put another way, of Howdershelt's four boxes, if anonymity is required merely to use the soap box, it's time to move on to the other three.
"There are four boxes to be used in the defence of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please use in that order."
I guess our experiences have been very different. There are a few fast cars around in my city, which is small enough that as a regular driver I recognise several of them now, but it's not the guys driving these cars that tend to be the idiots. On the contrary, they tend to be well-driven for the most part, and it's very rare to see them speeding at all around town, perhaps because the drivers know they have nothing to prove. When I go to our local dealer, the advertising obviously highlights the performance, but it's all of the "this is a really nice car to drive" variety, not the "buy this and join the L337 R8C3RZ". The pictures of the STI-type vehicles and performance kit are of cars on a track, and in some of the dealers they actually advertise track days.
In reality, it's the chavved up small cars, mostly driven by young guys, that bomb it around like crazy round here. The most carelessly driven cars are probably executivemobiles driven by older guys and huge 4x4s driven by women with young kids in the back. The most aggressive cars are usually taxis, though there are plenty of courteous taxi drivers as well.
In short, like most car analogies, this one is pretty flawed. If you wanted to make a good car argument, you should have asked why cars don't come by default with 70mph maximum speed limiters here in the UK, given that there are no roads here where it is legal to exceed such a speed. That would be an interesting political move, not least because it would bring the whole "speed kills" debate to a head, force the government to back down on some of its sillier laws since they would be actively enforced and that would be a huge vote loser, and perhaps bring the focus back to things that actually help road safety. One could make a similar argument about copyright: if the legal system screwed those people who really were freeloading but was also changed to legalise all reasonable personal uses, I think it would be a lot more credible, don't you?
1. Any individual shall be able to choose anonymity when posting to Internet sites
Well, we've done this one plenty before, but it's still ultimately down to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. With freedom comes responsibility. An anonymous party cannot effectively be held accountable for their actions. QED.
Oh, and please spare us the sob story about a hypothetical oppressive regime where anonymous speech on the Internet will bring the cure for cancer and world peace. This is not the US a few centuries ago. In modern countries where free speech with your name attached is not protected, anonymity on the Internet is pretty far down the list of priorities and hardly going to be the decisive factor in making things better (not least because if you have access to the Internet at all, it's probably strictly monitored by the state and your identity is known before you ever reach a keyboard anyway).
2. No network provider may constrain or restrict access to the Internet in any way, shape, or form other than agreed-upon access speeds
Ah, yes, let's have the lawyers interfere with running the Internet, because that always works out well.
What is wrong with a non-neutral Internet anyway? All that really seems to mean is giving preferential bandwidth to some services over others, and frankly, if you think your five-reader blog is as important as Google or BBC News then you're the deluded one. Likewise, if you see a high-bandwidth future where streaming services and remote applications are popular or even the norm, you'd better start studying economics if you think the current financial models are going to support it.
As for crushing the little guy, I have yet to see an argument that isn't pure FUD. A huge amount of Internet traffic isn't from the big businesses who are really going to be affected by such laws, and there is always going to be a demand for the valuable part of that traffic, creating a market for providing such access. We already have competition laws in place should anyone start actually abusing the system to close out that market artificially, and otherwise, why isn't it just commercial dealing, on which foundation we seem to have managed to get this far?
3. No individual shall be held liable for effects of malware or malicious code unknowingly run on a personal computer
Throw in something about negligence and perhaps. But if you're one of the dumbfucks who connects a computer to the Internet and then spews out lots of spam because you're too ignorant to learn basic security, then you are a liability to the rest of the world and deserve to be cut off until you learn better.
One court case with a stupid outcome does not negate this point, incidentally.
4. A company that produces and sells closed source software for use on computers shall be responsible for the security of that product, and a user has a right to seek damages in the event of a failure to secure their product
Way to go, you just undermined the entire software development world. Little, if any, of the software running on most computers today would have been developed under this model, because there would be no sound business case for taking on such a risk under conditions that will never be perfect. Most consumers, private and business alike, simply don't need — or want to pay the disproportionate cost for — that level of quality.
Oh, and spare us the blatant Open-Source-by-the-back-door pitch, please. If you want to compete, make a better product. Forcing competition out of the market through dubious legal tricks is pathetic when big business tries it to prop up their dying business models, and it will be just as pathetic if the OSS world tries it if it turns out that they don't really make better products after all.
5. Any software or hardware used to conduct or support laws and public policy shall be open-source
Perhaps if someone signed up asking for where they can download Photoshop, you might have a point, but this argument doesn't apply to the way that ISPs sell Internet access, since those users do not ask about any such upgrades.
It certainly doesn't apply generally, no. That was exactly what I was trying to get across with the personal car anecdote.
But equally, we're talking about computers, which can automatically collect, analyse and redistribute vast quantities of data. That is, after all, the problem from the media industry's point of view. Arguing that there are no cases that could legitimately be detected by such means is like turning a blind eye: it's a false separation, a convenience, a conceit even.
Which is off-topic here, as that requires knowledge or intent.
Again, you're assuming convention. ISPs do know that a lot of people will use their systems for illegal purposes, and some of the packages they sell certainly are pitched pretty obviously at file traders; one or two have even run obviously suggestive advertising campaigns to match. In any case, they've bitched about file sharing plenty here in the UK when it came time to consider upgrade costs for the hardware, and many of them seem to have no difficulty throttling all high-bandwidth users when it allows them to continue selling overlapping bandwidth, even if that traps those who are merely using the advertised package for legitimate, legal purposes.
If you want to compare to other systems, the obvious example is common carriers such as the postal service.
It is the obvious example, but it's still a bad analogy. The postal service does not automatically collect, analyse and redistribute vast amounts of data. It is a very manual purpose. That makes it impractical to use it for the mass copyright infringement enabled by the Internet, and impractical to monitor automatically for the same reason.
Which ones do you mean?
Safe harbour, common carrier and the like, whatever your personal jurisdiction calls them.
I drive a fast car, I'm regarded by family and friends as a safe and legal driver, and I have a clean licence and no accidents in many years of driving.
Coincidentally, a police officer friend once told me that the kind of car I drive is also among the most popular getaway vehicles in old fashioned hold-ups: its performance is good, but it's common/discreet enough not to stick out.
Should a car dealer not sell such cars? Obviously I would disagree.
Should a car dealer not sell such cars to people who come in, ask about upgrading the performance and handling, ask about options for tinted windows, ask about the mechanics of transferring their personalised plates onto the car, ask to take a test drive under load of a route from a bank to an airport, show no interest in security or insurance details, and then say "Yeah, we're just looking for a good getaway car"? Well, maybe not so much.
There are good reasons to have defences in law for people who assist illegal activity unknowingly or involuntarily. But there are also good reasons that pretty much every justice system considers assisting illegal activity and/or inciting illegal activity itself to be illegal. It is odd that so many posters here spend a lot of time arguing that the current copyright system is broken and should be changed because it's unfair, yet we spend little time considering whether all these blanket exceptions and "get out of jail free" cards we give to facilitators are universally justified and in the interests of fairness.
Re:Drupal cannot currently be taken seriously
on
Front End Drupal
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Would you be willing to elaborate a little on your concerns, please?
Some colleagues and I are about to start a major overhaul of a moderately large site (a few dozen pages, a few thousand users, a few hundred visitors per day). It seems like the first choice is basically between "standard framework with some plug-in custom features" (CMSes like Drupal) and "custom architecture with some standard plug-in features" (using things like Django and some common libraries).
So far, we've been forming the opposite view to you: a lot of the site we'll be producing is static content, but a few parts will require moderately structured data (the equivalent of a few tables and some simple SQL queries), and for that balance Drupal seems like the best tool we've considered so far. We don't have much experience with these particular tools, but the guys building the system will be proper designers/developers, while the guys maintaining some of the content will be entirely non-technical. Is our situation just different to what you're describing, or are there really a bunch of problems waiting for us a little way down the line?
Also, it would help if Slashdot posters realised that the US can't dictate the law to the rest of the world, much as it often tries to, and that neither the US Constitution nor the SCOTUS are the defining authority for what copyright is, why it exists, or what it may or may not do. The other 95% of the world's population are getting a bit bored with this now.
If you buy food from a supermarket and it's normal but not to your taste, you don't get to take it back for a refund. It's up to you to take reasonable steps to protect yourself before you spend your money.
On the flip side, if you buy software from a store and it actually isn't fit for purpose, perhaps because it's so buggy that it can't reasonably be used as advertised, then there's an interesting lawsuit waiting to happen. Just because people don't tend to challenge store policies saying you can't return opened goods, that doesn't necessarily mean the person who brings an informed legal challenge won't succeed. Indeed, IIRC the EU authorities are currently reviewing consumer protection laws as they apply in this area with precisely that sort of behaviour in mind.
And in any case, there are numerous ways you can sample a vast amount of music perfectly legally before buying: listen to it on the radio, listen to extracts on any number of legal on-line services, borrow the CD from your local library or from a friend... The "we need to be able to download full length, full quality tracks at will just in case we don't like them" argument is tired, and even less credible today than it was when the first freeloader invoked it years ago.
The parent completely glosses over the fact that in Godfrey vs. Demon, the ISP had been told about the offending content and declined to act. It also completely fails to mention the provisions under section 1 of the Defamation Act 1996, relating to the defence of innocent dissemination. These were pretty important factors in the case in question, particularly in that one was used to negate the other in the reasoning. The legal position reached was somewhat analogous to the "safe harbor" provisions under the DMCA and the effect on them of submitting a takedown notice.
Why should ISPs police their networks and eliminate revenue without compensation?
I know this is Slashdot and all, but isn't the answer "because that revenue is generated by helping people to break the law" reasonable?
I don't think it's necessarily the best answer, but making cute comments about the recording industry's tactics when substantial numbers of people are currently ripping them off in violation of the law isn't exactly strengthening the case against these sorts of tactics.
Anything in public view should be fair game to publish on the net.
Why?
There is a difference between one person incidentally observing something while going about their daily business and having a commercial organisation with vast resources deliberately and systematically collect information about the entire world and then provide it in a permanent, publicly available, searchable form that anyone can use for any purpose.
Well, actually, that's at least seven qualitative differences.
If you really can't see why those differences matter or why it might be better to consider one form of behaviour antisocial and legislate accordingly, then I invite you to have some random stranger follow you around every time you go out in public, running a live video feed on the Internet, looking over your shoulder every time you enter a PIN or sign your name to make a card purchase or withdraw cash, cataloguing every road you follow and the times you've been there, looking up the identity of every person you meet and sticking their name and face up there as well. Then when you get home, they can wait outside your house in a public space, and use high resolution video equipment to look through your windows (or any gaps if you close the blinds/curtains) and film whatever you're doing on your computer, whoever is getting changed upstairs, who's visited you and when, and anything else they can see. After all, this is all stuff that you've done that's visible from a public place, so in your world it seems everyone in the universe has a right to see it.
If people put themselves in embarrassing positions why is it wrong to expose them?
Because everyone makes mistakes, and perhaps the world would be a nicer place if they didn't have to suffer for them publicly, universally and eternally?
I think this is confusing two issues: the duration of copyright, and the extent to which it can be assigned/inherited.
If copyright durations were more modest, something that allowed those who did the work to benefit from it but didn't keep it locked up literally for a lifetime, then I doubt many here would object to the copyright also being hereditary as with any other assets. For a start, making it otherwise would be a terrific incentive to start killing content producers for commercial reasons.:-/
The problem with Disney isn't that the copyrights for the early works were transferrable, though that system is itself flawed because it's how the middlemen get in at the expense of artist and consumer alike. The greater evil here is that those copyrights have been extended well beyond the lifetime of most people who were around at the time they first took effect. That makes copyright a very one-sided bargain: those millions of people never got the work to enjoy freely in the public domain, but the content creator (or, more precisely, the commercial middlemen to which the rights transferred) still got the profits and exclusivity. Why should society actively legislate to support such a bargain?
For what it's worth, if you look at the responses to the Gowers Review in the UK a couple of years back, the public overwhelmingly opposed the copyright term extension, but not the principle of copyright itself.
Our government originally said it would go along with that, though at some point a few weeks ago, very quietly, they seem to have performed a complete U-turn on this issue and now trot out the usual nonsense about promoting artists' rights.
The sad thing is that the opposition Conservatives, who are almost certain to form the government after next year's general election, do seem to support heavy-handed copyright laws -- which seems odd to me given their general political/economic views, but I guess they've bought into the Big Media spin and not really thought it through.
But if a court awards damages against you, then what do thousands of other people have to do with it?
I'm no legal expert, but don't most places have rules about fines being paid by the person who is given them? The BBC got caught up with something along these lines recently, when it was fined over the inappropriate behaviour of a couple of high-profile presenters: after suggestions that those presenters should pay the fines themselves rather than letting the (publicly funded) BBC pay them, I thought the conclusion was that they couldn't do this for legal reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Finding that not all of the evidence presented completely and unambiguously supports a position doesn't necessarily mean the position isn't basically correct.
Try looking up Aren Cambre's database of speed-related source material, and reading some of the many studies cited there. Of course it's not all roses and lollipops, but the overall picture is about as clear as you're ever going to get on a subject like this. There simply isn't much of a justification for legal speed limits substantially below what most drivers would choose anyway, and while we continue to allow a political focus on speed, there are other contributing factors to the frequency and severity of accidents that are far more significant but going mostly unaddressed.
Even if speeding itself does not *cause* an accident it *does* make the consequences worse.
Even if travelling by car does not cause an accident, it does make the consequences worse. Maybe we should ban cars and cycle or walk everywhere?
Sorry, but your cute sound-bite is naive on several counts.
Firstly, you ignore the probability issue: it may be more likely that a driver travelling at an unnecessarily slow speed because of a legal limit will cause an accident in the first place. The consequences of that are likely to be worse than those of an accident that never happened, don't you think? There are at least two bodies of evidence to suggest that this actually happens: those researching driver alertness (people don't concentrate as much when they're cruising along slow and bored) and those considering speed differentials (it's not the absolute speed that causes a lot of accidents, it's the fact that two vehicles were travelling at significantly different speeds and the drivers failed to allow for this, and forcing law-abiding drivers to slow down where driving conditions don't need it artificially increases speed differentials since realistically a significant number of drivers will exceed an inappropriately low limit anyway).
Secondly, like just about every other so-called road safety campaigner out there, you conveniently assume that causing everyone to spend longer making journeys because they can't go as fast has no negative consequences of its own. I imagine those who waste extra minutes or hours of their life in the car every day because of needlessly low speed limits would disagree with that premise. Probably so would those whose shopping for household essentials got more expensive because of the increased infrastructure costs of supplying it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for improving road safety, and I have no problem with lowering speed limits where it is genuinely appropriate to do so. But I'd rather actually improve safety than dogmatically enforce technical rules that make good political sound-bites but have little evidence to show they work. Talking hypothetically about the consequences of accidents without considering other factors doesn't really advance the debate at all. And even glossing over all of the above, your argument is still flawed because it is based on normal travelling speed, where what matters most in terms of an accident's consequences is the impact speed, which is a very different thing.
IME, most drivers already choose to slow down to an appropriate speed even if it's below the limit when circumstances indicate that it is necessary, while those drivers who speed mostly do so where it is safe to break the limit anyway. It's the drivers whose judgement (or consideration for others) is not up to the standard we require who we need to target, and they are precisely the ones who are likely to ignore artificially low limits anyway.
I'm assuming no such thing. I'm merely assuming that both dangerous driving and insecure computers on the Internet cause significant damage to society that is worth preventing, and noting that personal responsibility for competence is one possible way to assist such prevention that would be applicable in both scenarios.
And remember, while insecure computers may not kill people directly, they certainly can be a route to things like identity theft for individuals and extortion/denial of service for organisations, both of which are pretty crippling if you're on the wrong end of them. We're not just talking about a background effect on the whole Internet's efficiency, with the knock-on cost and performance hit for everyone, though of course that is a significant problem in itself.
One of us has a sustainable approach. The other one's approach is responsible for most of the problems plaguing the Internet today. Sorry, but we're going to have to agree to disagree about who's wrong.
I wouldn't let your 70-year-old parents drive if they could no longer see more than 20 feet in front of the car, either, but I have no problem with 100-year-olds driving if they're safe when doing so. Age is irrelevant, but competence is not.
The version number is to be fixed at pi upon Knuth's death, IIRC.
There is not a question about Word taking over from LaTeX in academia since Word already dominates academia.
Dominates is perhaps too strong a term. I've helped several friends to get Masters/PhD theses written up using LaTeX, after they gave up on Word out of frustration. The screwed-up cross-references and so on have bitten more than one of my other friends firmly in the backside. My usual example, unfortunate as it was, was that one friend submitted her thesis written using Word, only to discover that every single cross-reference was off by a page, and nearly had it sent back as a result.
Those friends were all studying humanities, languages and other arts subjects rather than maths or CompSci, BTW, and none of them had any difficulty using LaTeX once they'd been shown the basics for half an hour.
I don't know anyone who was holding onto TeX based purely on its support for Advanced Typographic features of OpenType.
At the risk of stating the obvious, that's probably because TeX doesn't have any advanced support for OpenType. This has been a major thorn in its side for years, because while its typography was always better than Windows 3.1 TrueType, modern professional grade fonts are pretty much all distributed as OpenType now, and the visual quality you can get with the likes of Adobe InDesign using them is substantially better than you can get from TeX unless you really have a thing for Computer Modern.
This has started to change since the arrival of XeTeX and XeLaTeX/fontspec/etc, but TeX's layout engine just isn't cut out to handle them: for example, a lot of the spacing for the maths is semi-fixed for Computer Modern and needs a lot of micro-adjustment to get good results with fonts that have significantly difference dimensions. Despite the hard work of a few key volunteers, even the state of the art in the TeX world isn't really there yet, which rather defeats the point of using TeX-based tools in the first place.
Of course, none of this changes the view that everyone here seems to agree on: Word isn't going to take over TeX's market any time soon. Adding nice OpenType feature support is one small step in that direction, but to present any sort of interest at all to TeX users who value presentation and/or ease of use, you'd need much better H&J, much more efficient handling of equations and diagrams, and much better long/formal document support, to name but a few things (and leaving aside the mark-up vs. WYSIWYG debate).
Thanks for sharing your experience and insights. It sounds like both your background before Drupal and your general views of development are pretty similar to most of our guys.
We've reached the first test you described so far: we've got a test install, and established that much of what we need can be done with the core plus a few modules built around CCK and Views for the custom data. Some of it is indeed not as simple as with just writing a bit of database code, to be sure, but so far it's been close enough in our case.
What sounds like the deal-making feature for us is essentially the inversion of control you mentioned: we are moving from an eclectic system with numerous individual scripts in more than one language, and having a systematic framework where we know exactly where each bit of custom code we've written hooks in has a lot of value in itself. But as a result of your comments, at least we know to look out for the performance, replication and bulk data issues as we start more detailed trials, so thanks again for the contribution.
Yes, there are. I'm from the UK, which is hardly the last refuge of freedom and civil liberties right now, so I hear where you're coming from.
But I think there are more effective ways to fight for those rights in our two countries than writing some random, anonymous blog. For example, I contribute financially to a variety of charities and advocacy groups whose actions and campaigns I believe in supporting. All of those contributions have my name under them: I am proud to support those causes. Likewise, on the odd occasions when I have written to my elected representatives or other officials, it has my signature right there at the bottom of the letter and my address at the top, so they know I'm a real person with a real vote.
Put another way, of Howdershelt's four boxes, if anonymity is required merely to use the soap box, it's time to move on to the other three.
"There are four boxes to be used in the defence of liberty: soap, ballot, jury and ammo. Please use in that order."
— Ed Howdershelt
I guess our experiences have been very different. There are a few fast cars around in my city, which is small enough that as a regular driver I recognise several of them now, but it's not the guys driving these cars that tend to be the idiots. On the contrary, they tend to be well-driven for the most part, and it's very rare to see them speeding at all around town, perhaps because the drivers know they have nothing to prove. When I go to our local dealer, the advertising obviously highlights the performance, but it's all of the "this is a really nice car to drive" variety, not the "buy this and join the L337 R8C3RZ". The pictures of the STI-type vehicles and performance kit are of cars on a track, and in some of the dealers they actually advertise track days.
In reality, it's the chavved up small cars, mostly driven by young guys, that bomb it around like crazy round here. The most carelessly driven cars are probably executivemobiles driven by older guys and huge 4x4s driven by women with young kids in the back. The most aggressive cars are usually taxis, though there are plenty of courteous taxi drivers as well.
In short, like most car analogies, this one is pretty flawed. If you wanted to make a good car argument, you should have asked why cars don't come by default with 70mph maximum speed limiters here in the UK, given that there are no roads here where it is legal to exceed such a speed. That would be an interesting political move, not least because it would bring the whole "speed kills" debate to a head, force the government to back down on some of its sillier laws since they would be actively enforced and that would be a huge vote loser, and perhaps bring the focus back to things that actually help road safety. One could make a similar argument about copyright: if the legal system screwed those people who really were freeloading but was also changed to legalise all reasonable personal uses, I think it would be a lot more credible, don't you?
Every single one of the six points is silly.
1. Any individual shall be able to choose anonymity when posting to Internet sites
Well, we've done this one plenty before, but it's still ultimately down to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. With freedom comes responsibility. An anonymous party cannot effectively be held accountable for their actions. QED.
Oh, and please spare us the sob story about a hypothetical oppressive regime where anonymous speech on the Internet will bring the cure for cancer and world peace. This is not the US a few centuries ago. In modern countries where free speech with your name attached is not protected, anonymity on the Internet is pretty far down the list of priorities and hardly going to be the decisive factor in making things better (not least because if you have access to the Internet at all, it's probably strictly monitored by the state and your identity is known before you ever reach a keyboard anyway).
2. No network provider may constrain or restrict access to the Internet in any way, shape, or form other than agreed-upon access speeds
Ah, yes, let's have the lawyers interfere with running the Internet, because that always works out well.
What is wrong with a non-neutral Internet anyway? All that really seems to mean is giving preferential bandwidth to some services over others, and frankly, if you think your five-reader blog is as important as Google or BBC News then you're the deluded one. Likewise, if you see a high-bandwidth future where streaming services and remote applications are popular or even the norm, you'd better start studying economics if you think the current financial models are going to support it.
As for crushing the little guy, I have yet to see an argument that isn't pure FUD. A huge amount of Internet traffic isn't from the big businesses who are really going to be affected by such laws, and there is always going to be a demand for the valuable part of that traffic, creating a market for providing such access. We already have competition laws in place should anyone start actually abusing the system to close out that market artificially, and otherwise, why isn't it just commercial dealing, on which foundation we seem to have managed to get this far?
3. No individual shall be held liable for effects of malware or malicious code unknowingly run on a personal computer
Throw in something about negligence and perhaps. But if you're one of the dumbfucks who connects a computer to the Internet and then spews out lots of spam because you're too ignorant to learn basic security, then you are a liability to the rest of the world and deserve to be cut off until you learn better.
One court case with a stupid outcome does not negate this point, incidentally.
4. A company that produces and sells closed source software for use on computers shall be responsible for the security of that product, and a user has a right to seek damages in the event of a failure to secure their product
Way to go, you just undermined the entire software development world. Little, if any, of the software running on most computers today would have been developed under this model, because there would be no sound business case for taking on such a risk under conditions that will never be perfect. Most consumers, private and business alike, simply don't need — or want to pay the disproportionate cost for — that level of quality.
Oh, and spare us the blatant Open-Source-by-the-back-door pitch, please. If you want to compete, make a better product. Forcing competition out of the market through dubious legal tricks is pathetic when big business tries it to prop up their dying business models, and it will be just as pathetic if the OSS world tries it if it turns out that they don't really make better products after all.
5. Any software or hardware used to conduct or support laws and public policy shall be open-source
Perhaps if someone signed up asking for where they can download Photoshop, you might have a point, but this argument doesn't apply to the way that ISPs sell Internet access, since those users do not ask about any such upgrades.
It certainly doesn't apply generally, no. That was exactly what I was trying to get across with the personal car anecdote.
But equally, we're talking about computers, which can automatically collect, analyse and redistribute vast quantities of data. That is, after all, the problem from the media industry's point of view. Arguing that there are no cases that could legitimately be detected by such means is like turning a blind eye: it's a false separation, a convenience, a conceit even.
Which is off-topic here, as that requires knowledge or intent.
Again, you're assuming convention. ISPs do know that a lot of people will use their systems for illegal purposes, and some of the packages they sell certainly are pitched pretty obviously at file traders; one or two have even run obviously suggestive advertising campaigns to match. In any case, they've bitched about file sharing plenty here in the UK when it came time to consider upgrade costs for the hardware, and many of them seem to have no difficulty throttling all high-bandwidth users when it allows them to continue selling overlapping bandwidth, even if that traps those who are merely using the advertised package for legitimate, legal purposes.
If you want to compare to other systems, the obvious example is common carriers such as the postal service.
It is the obvious example, but it's still a bad analogy. The postal service does not automatically collect, analyse and redistribute vast amounts of data. It is a very manual purpose. That makes it impractical to use it for the mass copyright infringement enabled by the Internet, and impractical to monitor automatically for the same reason.
Which ones do you mean?
Safe harbour, common carrier and the like, whatever your personal jurisdiction calls them.
You mean like every sports car made?
Stereotype, much?
I drive a fast car, I'm regarded by family and friends as a safe and legal driver, and I have a clean licence and no accidents in many years of driving.
Coincidentally, a police officer friend once told me that the kind of car I drive is also among the most popular getaway vehicles in old fashioned hold-ups: its performance is good, but it's common/discreet enough not to stick out.
Should a car dealer not sell such cars? Obviously I would disagree.
Should a car dealer not sell such cars to people who come in, ask about upgrading the performance and handling, ask about options for tinted windows, ask about the mechanics of transferring their personalised plates onto the car, ask to take a test drive under load of a route from a bank to an airport, show no interest in security or insurance details, and then say "Yeah, we're just looking for a good getaway car"? Well, maybe not so much.
There are good reasons to have defences in law for people who assist illegal activity unknowingly or involuntarily. But there are also good reasons that pretty much every justice system considers assisting illegal activity and/or inciting illegal activity itself to be illegal. It is odd that so many posters here spend a lot of time arguing that the current copyright system is broken and should be changed because it's unfair, yet we spend little time considering whether all these blanket exceptions and "get out of jail free" cards we give to facilitators are universally justified and in the interests of fairness.
Would you be willing to elaborate a little on your concerns, please?
Some colleagues and I are about to start a major overhaul of a moderately large site (a few dozen pages, a few thousand users, a few hundred visitors per day). It seems like the first choice is basically between "standard framework with some plug-in custom features" (CMSes like Drupal) and "custom architecture with some standard plug-in features" (using things like Django and some common libraries).
So far, we've been forming the opposite view to you: a lot of the site we'll be producing is static content, but a few parts will require moderately structured data (the equivalent of a few tables and some simple SQL queries), and for that balance Drupal seems like the best tool we've considered so far. We don't have much experience with these particular tools, but the guys building the system will be proper designers/developers, while the guys maintaining some of the content will be entirely non-technical. Is our situation just different to what you're describing, or are there really a bunch of problems waiting for us a little way down the line?
Also, it would help if Slashdot posters realised that the US can't dictate the law to the rest of the world, much as it often tries to, and that neither the US Constitution nor the SCOTUS are the defining authority for what copyright is, why it exists, or what it may or may not do. The other 95% of the world's population are getting a bit bored with this now.
If you buy food from a supermarket and it's normal but not to your taste, you don't get to take it back for a refund. It's up to you to take reasonable steps to protect yourself before you spend your money.
On the flip side, if you buy software from a store and it actually isn't fit for purpose, perhaps because it's so buggy that it can't reasonably be used as advertised, then there's an interesting lawsuit waiting to happen. Just because people don't tend to challenge store policies saying you can't return opened goods, that doesn't necessarily mean the person who brings an informed legal challenge won't succeed. Indeed, IIRC the EU authorities are currently reviewing consumer protection laws as they apply in this area with precisely that sort of behaviour in mind.
And in any case, there are numerous ways you can sample a vast amount of music perfectly legally before buying: listen to it on the radio, listen to extracts on any number of legal on-line services, borrow the CD from your local library or from a friend... The "we need to be able to download full length, full quality tracks at will just in case we don't like them" argument is tired, and even less credible today than it was when the first freeloader invoked it years ago.
The parent completely glosses over the fact that in Godfrey vs. Demon, the ISP had been told about the offending content and declined to act. It also completely fails to mention the provisions under section 1 of the Defamation Act 1996, relating to the defence of innocent dissemination. These were pretty important factors in the case in question, particularly in that one was used to negate the other in the reasoning. The legal position reached was somewhat analogous to the "safe harbor" provisions under the DMCA and the effect on them of submitting a takedown notice.
Why should ISPs police their networks and eliminate revenue without compensation?
I know this is Slashdot and all, but isn't the answer "because that revenue is generated by helping people to break the law" reasonable?
I don't think it's necessarily the best answer, but making cute comments about the recording industry's tactics when substantial numbers of people are currently ripping them off in violation of the law isn't exactly strengthening the case against these sorts of tactics.
You know the other NINETY percent of the market.
Source, please?
And seriously, considering software that actually makes money, what proportion of a software development business's income comes from home users?
Anything in public view should be fair game to publish on the net.
Why?
There is a difference between one person incidentally observing something while going about their daily business and having a commercial organisation with vast resources deliberately and systematically collect information about the entire world and then provide it in a permanent, publicly available, searchable form that anyone can use for any purpose.
Well, actually, that's at least seven qualitative differences.
If you really can't see why those differences matter or why it might be better to consider one form of behaviour antisocial and legislate accordingly, then I invite you to have some random stranger follow you around every time you go out in public, running a live video feed on the Internet, looking over your shoulder every time you enter a PIN or sign your name to make a card purchase or withdraw cash, cataloguing every road you follow and the times you've been there, looking up the identity of every person you meet and sticking their name and face up there as well. Then when you get home, they can wait outside your house in a public space, and use high resolution video equipment to look through your windows (or any gaps if you close the blinds/curtains) and film whatever you're doing on your computer, whoever is getting changed upstairs, who's visited you and when, and anything else they can see. After all, this is all stuff that you've done that's visible from a public place, so in your world it seems everyone in the universe has a right to see it.
If people put themselves in embarrassing positions why is it wrong to expose them?
Because everyone makes mistakes, and perhaps the world would be a nicer place if they didn't have to suffer for them publicly, universally and eternally?
I think this is confusing two issues: the duration of copyright, and the extent to which it can be assigned/inherited.
If copyright durations were more modest, something that allowed those who did the work to benefit from it but didn't keep it locked up literally for a lifetime, then I doubt many here would object to the copyright also being hereditary as with any other assets. For a start, making it otherwise would be a terrific incentive to start killing content producers for commercial reasons. :-/
The problem with Disney isn't that the copyrights for the early works were transferrable, though that system is itself flawed because it's how the middlemen get in at the expense of artist and consumer alike. The greater evil here is that those copyrights have been extended well beyond the lifetime of most people who were around at the time they first took effect. That makes copyright a very one-sided bargain: those millions of people never got the work to enjoy freely in the public domain, but the content creator (or, more precisely, the commercial middlemen to which the rights transferred) still got the profits and exclusivity. Why should society actively legislate to support such a bargain?
For what it's worth, if you look at the responses to the Gowers Review in the UK a couple of years back, the public overwhelmingly opposed the copyright term extension, but not the principle of copyright itself.
Our government originally said it would go along with that, though at some point a few weeks ago, very quietly, they seem to have performed a complete U-turn on this issue and now trot out the usual nonsense about promoting artists' rights.
The sad thing is that the opposition Conservatives, who are almost certain to form the government after next year's general election, do seem to support heavy-handed copyright laws -- which seems odd to me given their general political/economic views, but I guess they've bought into the Big Media spin and not really thought it through.
But if a court awards damages against you, then what do thousands of other people have to do with it?
I'm no legal expert, but don't most places have rules about fines being paid by the person who is given them? The BBC got caught up with something along these lines recently, when it was fined over the inappropriate behaviour of a couple of high-profile presenters: after suggestions that those presenters should pay the fines themselves rather than letting the (publicly funded) BBC pay them, I thought the conclusion was that they couldn't do this for legal reasons.
Unfortunately, history suggests that our government has no problem screwing innocent people based on garbage data.
How's that "we think the courts are naive and/or stupid" policy working out for them so far?