I'm not sure how applicable this is seeing how the amount of money is so small, but i guess it might still be valid.
Well, I don't really see how they're going to argue credibly that thousands of people "accidentally" transferred tiny sums of money to the same law firm just after the public request to do so from the TPB guys, so I don't really see how it's going to be applicable at all.
It will, however, conveniently identify the next few thousand targets for aggressive legal action by that law firm, Big Media, and anyone else with an interest in fighting TPB and its supporters.
So let me just make sure I understand this, because I was thinking along similar lines.
The guys behind TPB set up a service of dubious legality, publicly advocated using it for illegal purposes, went to court, and had a fine issued against them.
Now instead of taking their medicine, they have escalated from taking the piss out of international megacorps to taking the piss out of courts and legal firms.
Is this anything but outright denial and pride going before the fall? Does this end any way but the TPB founders becoming Bubba's bitch for a few years?
I suspect you'll be in a fairly small minority. The current UI not only looks dated (not a serious problem) but also has basic usability flaws all over it (which is). It's visually cluttered but inconsistent in where related commands appear on menus and toolbars, and there are numerous problems with interfaces for specific functionality (the styles and numbering features in Writer, formula editing in Calc, etc.).
If you follow the link to TFA and note the various priorities they describe there, I reckon they've got a pretty good handle on how a replacement UI should be designed, and if you consider how each point applies to the current UI, it's a pretty good checklist to identify the shortcomings.
You jest, but who ever forgot the keyboard bindings for Word 5 for DOS? Those function key guides were very useful, and keyboard shortcuts were far more useful as a result.
Oh, I don't assume that everyone posting here is in the same group. I'm not one to follow the crowd, and I'm guessing neither are you.
However, if you look at the tone of posts and the direction of moderations in any discussions on subjects like copyright and Open Source Software, it's pretty clear which way the wind blows in Slashdot territory, and a few people who post often enough to have recognisable names do seem to crop up every time. I just find it mildly amusing that the direction the wind blows so often seems to be "the way I want to go", even if the arguments made are totally opposite depending on who the beneficiaries are in that particular case.
It's a bit like politicians talking about "fairer" tax systems, by which they invariably mean "tax systems that will charge the people who aren't going to vote for me anyway more and the people who might vote for me less".
However, when the software won't work at all for you, the supplier can not hide behind EULAs and could be forced to compensate your damages... It will be a case-by-case balancing of responsibilities.
The question is, why isn't this already covered under general laws anyway? Causing harm through unreasonable levels of negligence is typically going to be actionable in most places, is it not? Likewise, if you pay for something that just doesn't work reasonably, AFAIK there are laws in a lot of places that say you can take it back for refund/repair/replacement or similar. The fact that most people don't and a lot of shops have scary-looking "no refunds" policies on open software boxes doesn't actually mean someone who spent what a lawyer friend calls "five minutes on a freephone number" wouldn't know better and win the case anyway. I imagine there are a few small software company executives who have nightmares about the day that the first consumer rights group campaign causes a wave of such cases and public awareness of what the law actually says increases...
You've got to love Slashdot groupthink, where making the latest film available on P2P doesn't mean anyone actually downloaded the infringing work, but for open source developers many eyes make all bugs shallow.;-)
Exactly. The problem with trying to enforce this kind of measure for software is that there is a cost/performance curve, and most people don't want to pay to be right up at the end of it.
Heck, no-one in the world knows how to get right up to the end of it. Even the guys at NASA, whose development process is awesomely effective at producing reliable software compared to the the commercial/home user industry, still get bugs. Given the nature of their work, their bugs can cost as much in a single mission as a bug in widely used home user software costs spread across the whole user base, potentially including a cost in human lives, so it's not like they're hiring stupid people or not trying to get everything perfect.
Your choice is either to have the megacorp as an owner, or as a competitor.
Of course, a few years ago, that's probably what Yahoo! and Altavista were telling a couple of young kids named Sergey and Larry.
Our industry is one of the few where a start-up with dedicated, smart people and a really good idea actually can take on a megacorp, because the running costs and barriers to entry are so low and market share can explode.
Perhaps it was because I actually addressed what was in the post I replied to. What having "breaking" or "violating" civil laws got to do with anything? I didn't use those terms, and neither did the post I was challenging. And yes, civil laws do prohibit things. That's why you get penalised if you break them.
You're trying to dress up a very simple situation (the law says you may not do something => that act is illegal and you may be penalised for breaking the law) using legal niceties about criminal vs. civil law and how the penalty system works, and inventing distinctions between words like "break" and "violate" that weren't used in the first place.
Sorry, but I don't understand your point. We're talking about the EU: it's right up there in the discussion title. In much of the EU, under the laws I mentioned, copyright infringement can be a criminal matter, and AFAIK it is illegal under at least civil law in all of them.
(Sweden is an odd case, because despite being a signatory to the relevant international treaties, its national law currently does not seem to meet the minimum standards required by those treaties in some respects.)
Sorry, but how on earth is that (+5, Informative)? Your "awareness" is absolutely, objectively incorrect, and as far as I'm aware, this is true in every nation of the EU.
Copyright infringement is not the same in law as theft, and it is often dealt with by civil rather than criminal law, but it is still against the law. Moreover, even that is not absolute and universal: since the EU Copyright Directive and related laws, many European nations can treat large-scale, commercial copyright infringement a criminal matter, for example.
Gah... Messed up the edits, sorry. I meant to write, "You could just as well argue that the UK invented it because Colossus was built here before the US built ENIAC."
Please don't let facts get in the way of their pride.:-)
But yes, arguing that the US "invented" the Internet because some of the very early networking happened between US sites is a bit futile. You could just as well argue that the UK invented it because ENIAC was built here, or that the Babylonians are really the guys responsible because they used the abacus to perform addition and subtraction.
The reality is that things have moved on. The Internet as we know it today draws on myriad technologies and ideas that originated in many different nations, that were researched in many different nations, and whose development was funded in and sometimes by many different nations and carried out by people from many different nations. Without those diverse contributions, the Internet would be nothing like as technologically advanced nor as useful as it is today.
And yes, many of those contributions were made well before ICANN and the data it co-ordinates came were invented.
My apologies, I stand corrected. The proportion has changed dramatically. For example, back around 1999/2000, 95% of income was from licence fees, but the income from overseas licensing and such has increased severalfold since then. However, with the recent rises in fees, it seems they're still about 75% of the the total income. (Sources: the BBC annual reports for the relevant years.) Maybe the figures I was thinking of referred to the increase in income from other sources relative to the existing licence fee income or something, but in any case, it looks like I was wrong before.
The BBC don't need a business model. It's funded by licence fees.
Just FYI, the BBC's money mostly comes from things like rights for foreign shows. TV licence fees actually contribute a relatively small proportion of the Beeb's income.
Sure, it might be "incomplete" rather than "incorrect", but if we're talking about a standard for interoperability, doesn't "incomplete" pretty much imply "broken"? That sort of standard only has one job, and it isn't going to do it...
I was thinking exactly the same thing. If MS have made a compliant implementation but it isn't compatible with anyone else's, doesn't that mean that ODF is broken? Isn't this exactly the sort of complaint certain people around here have made against Microsoft's own formats in the past: just because there's a standard that officially states what the document format is, it's no use if other people can't realistically implement it and then trust that interoperability will work?
OK, but at the risk of asking the obvious, if you're only tracking their RSS feeds then you're not really giving their site your eyeballs anyway, are you? Or do you mean you used the RSS feed to spot articles of interest, but you did actually visit the site to discuss those articles?
I'll do worse than that: I'll add malicious code that makes their site look bad whenever they try to view my site in it, but is completely harmless to anyone visiting or linking to my site in the normal way. I suspect replacing parts of the enclosing frame with either a prominent and embarrassing explanatory message or perhaps some NSFW or politically offensive content would be sufficient.
Most people sharing popular Firefox add-ons don't do it to make money.
In any case, there is no excuse for modifying the behaviour of other software on a computer without the user's consent. There are words for that sort of behaviour, starting with "malware" and in many places ending in "illegal".
Nations such as who? Certainly no one involved in WWI or II.
Take a look at obvious indicators like average life expectancy, numeracy and literacy of children, or per capita murder rate some time. The record of the United States compared to... well, almost every developed nation that was involved in those wars, actually... is poor. Even five minutes with Google or Wikipedia would have confirmed this for you.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing with the idea of having a standing army. If you don't have at least a sufficient deterrent in defensive force, your diplomacy has no teeth.
But the US doesn't have just a deterrent defensive force, does it? No, the US actively and openly seeks to have sufficient power to play policeman to the world, while placing itself above international law whenever it suits its purposes. It devotes a vastly higher proportion of its national resources to the military than almost everywhere else, and frankly, I'm not sure I'd want to be in that particular exclusive club looking at who else is there. The US political system and arguably a significant chunk of its entire society is dominated by the military-industrial complex. In most countries, the highest elected officials are viewed as political and diplomatic leaders. In the US, the highest elected official is proudly saluted first and foremost as Commander-in-Chief.
And what benefits does this bring? Thousands of servicemen and women dead in wars that were dubious in the first place. Thousands killed in the biggest terrorist attacks in generations. That Commander-in-Chief has his own private army just to protect him from the people so angry they're willing to commit murder to get rid of him. Meanwhile, supporting those aggressive foreign policies and lack of keeping the house in order at home have resulted in the worst financial mess in nearly a century, with high unemployment, increasing taxes, increasing home reposessions, and generally reduced quality of life. There are still areas with high crime rates and where a high proportion of the population lives below the poverty line anyway. A surprisingly high proportion of the population doesn't have ready access to good medical care either, and the healthcare system generally is overpriced and underperforming compared to other first world countries. The legal system is frequently bought and paid for via an inherently corrupt system of campaign contributions and the incestuous political classes. Even compared to a decade ago, there seems to be a clear slowdown in the number of high-flying scientists moving to the US. Tourists and businesspeople avoid the US because they don't want to be treated like criminals just for visiting the country. Even basic constitutional rights for US citizens themselves are ignored at will.
Such is the legacy of a nation too proud of its military and too paranoid about national security. Me, I'd rather live in any number of other countries in Scandanavia or Europe, or in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Hong Kong... Just look at basic metrics on things like work-life balance, health, education, and even crime, and it puts the whole emphasis of the US on violence and security in perspective.
Even if we accept your premise that the primary purpose of government is to protect its citizens, you are making a big assumption that the best way to do so is through military power. I'm not sure either history or the contemporary government of the nations of the world with the highest quality of life and safest populations really support that view.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure how applicable this is seeing how the amount of money is so small, but i guess it might still be valid.
Well, I don't really see how they're going to argue credibly that thousands of people "accidentally" transferred tiny sums of money to the same law firm just after the public request to do so from the TPB guys, so I don't really see how it's going to be applicable at all.
It will, however, conveniently identify the next few thousand targets for aggressive legal action by that law firm, Big Media, and anyone else with an interest in fighting TPB and its supporters.
So let me just make sure I understand this, because I was thinking along similar lines.
The guys behind TPB set up a service of dubious legality, publicly advocated using it for illegal purposes, went to court, and had a fine issued against them.
Now instead of taking their medicine, they have escalated from taking the piss out of international megacorps to taking the piss out of courts and legal firms.
Is this anything but outright denial and pride going before the fall? Does this end any way but the TPB founders becoming Bubba's bitch for a few years?
I suspect you'll be in a fairly small minority. The current UI not only looks dated (not a serious problem) but also has basic usability flaws all over it (which is). It's visually cluttered but inconsistent in where related commands appear on menus and toolbars, and there are numerous problems with interfaces for specific functionality (the styles and numbering features in Writer, formula editing in Calc, etc.).
If you follow the link to TFA and note the various priorities they describe there, I reckon they've got a pretty good handle on how a replacement UI should be designed, and if you consider how each point applies to the current UI, it's a pretty good checklist to identify the shortcomings.
You jest, but who ever forgot the keyboard bindings for Word 5 for DOS? Those function key guides were very useful, and keyboard shortcuts were far more useful as a result.
Oh, I don't assume that everyone posting here is in the same group. I'm not one to follow the crowd, and I'm guessing neither are you.
However, if you look at the tone of posts and the direction of moderations in any discussions on subjects like copyright and Open Source Software, it's pretty clear which way the wind blows in Slashdot territory, and a few people who post often enough to have recognisable names do seem to crop up every time. I just find it mildly amusing that the direction the wind blows so often seems to be "the way I want to go", even if the arguments made are totally opposite depending on who the beneficiaries are in that particular case.
It's a bit like politicians talking about "fairer" tax systems, by which they invariably mean "tax systems that will charge the people who aren't going to vote for me anyway more and the people who might vote for me less".
However, when the software won't work at all for you, the supplier can not hide behind EULAs and could be forced to compensate your damages... It will be a case-by-case balancing of responsibilities.
The question is, why isn't this already covered under general laws anyway? Causing harm through unreasonable levels of negligence is typically going to be actionable in most places, is it not? Likewise, if you pay for something that just doesn't work reasonably, AFAIK there are laws in a lot of places that say you can take it back for refund/repair/replacement or similar. The fact that most people don't and a lot of shops have scary-looking "no refunds" policies on open software boxes doesn't actually mean someone who spent what a lawyer friend calls "five minutes on a freephone number" wouldn't know better and win the case anyway. I imagine there are a few small software company executives who have nightmares about the day that the first consumer rights group campaign causes a wave of such cases and public awareness of what the law actually says increases...
You've got to love Slashdot groupthink, where making the latest film available on P2P doesn't mean anyone actually downloaded the infringing work, but for open source developers many eyes make all bugs shallow. ;-)
Exactly. The problem with trying to enforce this kind of measure for software is that there is a cost/performance curve, and most people don't want to pay to be right up at the end of it.
Heck, no-one in the world knows how to get right up to the end of it. Even the guys at NASA, whose development process is awesomely effective at producing reliable software compared to the the commercial/home user industry, still get bugs. Given the nature of their work, their bugs can cost as much in a single mission as a bug in widely used home user software costs spread across the whole user base, potentially including a cost in human lives, so it's not like they're hiring stupid people or not trying to get everything perfect.
Your choice is either to have the megacorp as an owner, or as a competitor.
Of course, a few years ago, that's probably what Yahoo! and Altavista were telling a couple of young kids named Sergey and Larry.
Our industry is one of the few where a start-up with dedicated, smart people and a really good idea actually can take on a megacorp, because the running costs and barriers to entry are so low and market share can explode.
Why have YOU been given (+5, Informative)?
Perhaps it was because I actually addressed what was in the post I replied to. What having "breaking" or "violating" civil laws got to do with anything? I didn't use those terms, and neither did the post I was challenging. And yes, civil laws do prohibit things. That's why you get penalised if you break them.
You're trying to dress up a very simple situation (the law says you may not do something => that act is illegal and you may be penalised for breaking the law) using legal niceties about criminal vs. civil law and how the penalty system works, and inventing distinctions between words like "break" and "violate" that weren't used in the first place.
Sorry, but I don't understand your point. We're talking about the EU: it's right up there in the discussion title. In much of the EU, under the laws I mentioned, copyright infringement can be a criminal matter, and AFAIK it is illegal under at least civil law in all of them.
(Sweden is an odd case, because despite being a signatory to the relevant international treaties, its national law currently does not seem to meet the minimum standards required by those treaties in some respects.)
Sorry, but how on earth is that (+5, Informative)? Your "awareness" is absolutely, objectively incorrect, and as far as I'm aware, this is true in every nation of the EU.
Copyright infringement is not the same in law as theft, and it is often dealt with by civil rather than criminal law, but it is still against the law. Moreover, even that is not absolute and universal: since the EU Copyright Directive and related laws, many European nations can treat large-scale, commercial copyright infringement a criminal matter, for example.
Gah... Messed up the edits, sorry. I meant to write, "You could just as well argue that the UK invented it because Colossus was built here before the US built ENIAC."
Please don't let facts get in the way of their pride. :-)
But yes, arguing that the US "invented" the Internet because some of the very early networking happened between US sites is a bit futile. You could just as well argue that the UK invented it because ENIAC was built here, or that the Babylonians are really the guys responsible because they used the abacus to perform addition and subtraction.
The reality is that things have moved on. The Internet as we know it today draws on myriad technologies and ideas that originated in many different nations, that were researched in many different nations, and whose development was funded in and sometimes by many different nations and carried out by people from many different nations. Without those diverse contributions, the Internet would be nothing like as technologically advanced nor as useful as it is today.
And yes, many of those contributions were made well before ICANN and the data it co-ordinates came were invented.
Then set up your own damn root servers and STFU.
Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.
No, wait... This isn't really about root servers at all, is it?
My apologies, I stand corrected. The proportion has changed dramatically. For example, back around 1999/2000, 95% of income was from licence fees, but the income from overseas licensing and such has increased severalfold since then. However, with the recent rises in fees, it seems they're still about 75% of the the total income. (Sources: the BBC annual reports for the relevant years.) Maybe the figures I was thinking of referred to the increase in income from other sources relative to the existing licence fee income or something, but in any case, it looks like I was wrong before.
The BBC don't need a business model. It's funded by licence fees.
Just FYI, the BBC's money mostly comes from things like rights for foreign shows. TV licence fees actually contribute a relatively small proportion of the Beeb's income.
Sure, it might be "incomplete" rather than "incorrect", but if we're talking about a standard for interoperability, doesn't "incomplete" pretty much imply "broken"? That sort of standard only has one job, and it isn't going to do it...
I was thinking exactly the same thing. If MS have made a compliant implementation but it isn't compatible with anyone else's, doesn't that mean that ODF is broken? Isn't this exactly the sort of complaint certain people around here have made against Microsoft's own formats in the past: just because there's a standard that officially states what the document format is, it's no use if other people can't realistically implement it and then trust that interoperability will work?
OK, but at the risk of asking the obvious, if you're only tracking their RSS feeds then you're not really giving their site your eyeballs anyway, are you? Or do you mean you used the RSS feed to spot articles of interest, but you did actually visit the site to discuss those articles?
I'll do worse than that: I'll add malicious code that makes their site look bad whenever they try to view my site in it, but is completely harmless to anyone visiting or linking to my site in the normal way. I suspect replacing parts of the enclosing frame with either a prominent and embarrassing explanatory message or perhaps some NSFW or politically offensive content would be sufficient.
Nations such as who? Certainly no one involved in WWI or II.
Take a look at obvious indicators like average life expectancy, numeracy and literacy of children, or per capita murder rate some time. The record of the United States compared to... well, almost every developed nation that was involved in those wars, actually... is poor. Even five minutes with Google or Wikipedia would have confirmed this for you.
Just to be clear, I'm not arguing with the idea of having a standing army. If you don't have at least a sufficient deterrent in defensive force, your diplomacy has no teeth.
But the US doesn't have just a deterrent defensive force, does it? No, the US actively and openly seeks to have sufficient power to play policeman to the world, while placing itself above international law whenever it suits its purposes. It devotes a vastly higher proportion of its national resources to the military than almost everywhere else, and frankly, I'm not sure I'd want to be in that particular exclusive club looking at who else is there. The US political system and arguably a significant chunk of its entire society is dominated by the military-industrial complex. In most countries, the highest elected officials are viewed as political and diplomatic leaders. In the US, the highest elected official is proudly saluted first and foremost as Commander-in-Chief.
And what benefits does this bring? Thousands of servicemen and women dead in wars that were dubious in the first place. Thousands killed in the biggest terrorist attacks in generations. That Commander-in-Chief has his own private army just to protect him from the people so angry they're willing to commit murder to get rid of him. Meanwhile, supporting those aggressive foreign policies and lack of keeping the house in order at home have resulted in the worst financial mess in nearly a century, with high unemployment, increasing taxes, increasing home reposessions, and generally reduced quality of life. There are still areas with high crime rates and where a high proportion of the population lives below the poverty line anyway. A surprisingly high proportion of the population doesn't have ready access to good medical care either, and the healthcare system generally is overpriced and underperforming compared to other first world countries. The legal system is frequently bought and paid for via an inherently corrupt system of campaign contributions and the incestuous political classes. Even compared to a decade ago, there seems to be a clear slowdown in the number of high-flying scientists moving to the US. Tourists and businesspeople avoid the US because they don't want to be treated like criminals just for visiting the country. Even basic constitutional rights for US citizens themselves are ignored at will.
Such is the legacy of a nation too proud of its military and too paranoid about national security. Me, I'd rather live in any number of other countries in Scandanavia or Europe, or in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Hong Kong... Just look at basic metrics on things like work-life balance, health, education, and even crime, and it puts the whole emphasis of the US on violence and security in perspective.
Even if we accept your premise that the primary purpose of government is to protect its citizens, you are making a big assumption that the best way to do so is through military power. I'm not sure either history or the contemporary government of the nations of the world with the highest quality of life and safest populations really support that view.