What you're missing is that they can get that work done for $250 or less.
No, they can't. Not even outsourcing to (competent) people in lower-paying countries would get you close to that. But since the average person posting a job spec on sites like that thinks they've got the world's best idea but will drop it as soon as they realise they're being wildly unrealistic, it doesn't really cost anyone anything.
Actually, I kinda wish you did. I was trying to demonstrate how far you can take arguments based only on unreasonable generalisations and selective evidence (such as glossing over the smaller scale WMDs that you mentioned). Everything I wrote does have elements of truth to it, but the post as a whole and the conclusions it drew didn't consider the complete picture — exactly the problem with the Islamophobic post I was replying to.
Perhaps it's escaped your attention, but typically the kind of people who are in charge of security at these places have far greater powers than simply asking you a few questions. Depending on how serious they think the threat is, you are potentially going to be held at gunpoint, strip-searched, and allowed to watch as they pull apart any of your luggage they think contains anything they don't like, as well as being arbitrarily delayed, potentially reported in the media, etc. And the best part is, they usually have little accountability for their actions, while you are typically not entitled to any compensation even if they cause your entire holiday to fall apart or cause expensive damage to your property. It's basically subject to their professional (or otherwise) judgement. Now, do you think installing a warning system liable to significant numbers of false positives is going to make this situation better or worse? And if you think any of the specific possibilities I have mentioned here is only hypothetical, please be very clear about which of those powers you do not think the security people have at most Western transport hubs, and I'm sure someone here can enlighten you.
Indeed it was, in the parts you criticised. That was the point! By replying to debunk my obviously unreasonable claims, you reinforce my point rather well: of course we shouldn't use selective evidence and sweeping generalisations to make sound-bite judgements about large sections of the human race and then take draconian steps as a result. Unfortunately, the post to which I originally replied seemed to think that sort of plan was a good idea.
So... nobody could ever be unaware they're carrying a "disruptive device" (is that like a crackberry?) through a checkpoint?
The one time I've flown in Europe recently, I was approached by security staff flying home from Italy. They asked me whether I had left any prohibited containers in my backpack, as something had apparently triggered their scanner. I thought for a second, and then realised that I had left a small bottle of sunscreen tucked in one of the back pockets, along with various other things you'd want to have with you while out for the day.
I apologised, and in the next few moments I went from embarassment to fear of what they were going to do because I'd inadvertently tried to take something banned onto the plane. But then they said they'd have to remove it because of the liquids ban, and just through it into a huge container (full of mostly unopened bottles: many more suntan containers, drinks, and other harmless things) and let me go through without another look.
I take it you've never been the guy they stopped by mistake. Being questioned and searched under such circumstances is not a trivial experience. It can be deeply unpleasant, and for some people it can leave mental scars that take a very long time to heal.
It looks like we need to update Pastor Niemoeller's famous poem. First they came from the Muslims...
Here are a few other conclusions from a non-PC but apparently somewhat more objective observer.
Probably the most violent recent religion looking over its history is Christianity. Should we detain all Christians? I bet that'll go down well in the US.
Actually, speaking of the US, they are the only nation ever to have actually used a weapon of mass destruction at a cost of numerous civilian lives, and they have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to go to war other than to protect themselves from an immediate physical threat. Maybe the rest of the world should just nuke the whole US and be done with them?
Then again, the administration of any country that had WMDs could lose the plot and use them based on such dubious arguments, and any administration that has been in power for more than a short time and retains the option apparently has a willingness to consider using WMDs. Maybe it would be better for all of us if they just turned on each other to remove the threat against everyone else?
I'll stop there, because I've pretty much killed the entire world in only three steps by applying the kind of tragic, fear-driven thinking exhibited by the parent post. But I truly hope that 2009 offers us more than a binary choice between PC security theatre and the kind of indiscriminate fear-mongering we see here.
and we've seen what they charge for text messages. i don't trust that.
Text messages are an odd case in several ways. Their pricing is on the high side, but then their pricing for calls is on the low side, and in neither case do they really make that much money out of their customers: it's the high-end, premium services like mobile Internet browsing and picture messaging where they make the big money these days.
In any case, this isn't really the same idea as what I was suggesting. Distinguishing by service like this would be more akin to letting people browse web sites cheaply, but charging a premium for sending e-mails and a very high rate for streaming media, regardless of the volume of data actually transferred. I don't think anyone is currently proposing distinguishing pricing by the protocol in use.
and referring to bandwidth as a commodity seems a little like fallacious thinking.
On the contrary, it is the very essence of a commodity in the economic sense of the term: one ISPs bandwidth is as good as another (at least for now) but there is only so much available.
Is it just being realistic? Here in the UK, ISPs have been selling flat-rate "up to 8MB" broadband for some time now, but glossing over the very high contention ratios they've been using (and getting away with so far, because the average user doesn't currently want anything like 8MB/s of data transfer).
With the rise of streaming, real-time media — and the BBC's iPlayer has been a great success story over here — the assumption that a large group of users only ever sends a few e-mails and shops at Amazon is becoming less valid. While quite a few people have visited YouTube and the like and watched a five minute clip of something, that's a long way from a service that offers full-length, full-quality downloads of major programs and advertises this fact prominently on several major TV stations.
Unfortunately, the reality is that the ISPs don't have the bandwidth they've sold if everyone wants to use it, any more than the banks had the money they were selling. Some sort of change in pricing is inevitable. One way or another, those who have been doing very well out of the current flat-rate deals are going to be the ones who lose out, because they are getting things disproportionately cheap right now.
Personally, I don't like the filtering by source/destination idea. It sounds like something that will attack the openness that has made the Internet such a success. I'd rather go back to some sort of metred use policy, perhaps with tiered flat rate bundles for a bit of predictability for low/average users (so that up to x MB/month is a standard rate, up to y MB/month is another standard rate, and after that it's metred or something). This model seems to work fairly well for the mobile phone industry, and the pricing is transparent and sustainable.
But whether it's done by bandwidth, web sites visited, protocols used, or what postcode you live in, anyone who has been happily streaming tens of gigabytes per month of downloads on their flat rate plan and thinks an extra 10 pounds a month is excessive is just deluding themselves. The bandwidth simply isn't there to support everyone doing that, and when commodities are scarce, prices go up.
For one thing, MS certainly isn't giving the developer tools away - yes, you have the "Express" editions, but those have pretty heavy limitations which really only make them useful for a student and low-profile hobbyist writing simple freeware or shareware stuff. For any serious development, you're going to need VS Pro, and that still costs quite a bit.
Well, you say that, but I can't think of a single thing I've ever done at any of the places I've worked professionally that the Express editions don't cover. Maybe if you're working on really huge projects or using the latest MS tools for something like architecture or source control the Pro version is useful, but again everywhere I've worked had found other approaches to those problems long before Microsoft's latest round of tools started incorporating them, so there was no particular reason to switch. As you say, though, pretty much everywhere just gets an MSDN subscription anyway, so this is something of a moot point.
So most Windows shops go for it, and I'd imagine it's also a pretty steady revenue stream for MS - at least last I heard about this, Microsoft DevDiv (Developer Division) is fully self-sufficient.
Well, not being loss-making is always a plus of course, but I don't think Microsoft's interest in DevDiv has anything to do with how much money it makes. In itself, its revenue is line noise, but as a strategic asset, it's invaluable.
The justification? [...] To require all MCSE's to re certify. Oh and to get the millions of employees using windows out there to take new training courses in windows.
The thing is, that doesn't make sense. Microsoft make almost all of their money on exactly two product lines: Windows and Office. Everything else is just window dressing (no pun intended) to try to boost sales of Windows and Office. For example, Microsoft's developer tools are quite decent, but did you notice that they've started giving them away in recent years? That's because they don't make any serious money on them, but if they can get people using their tools then those people are going to target their platform, and the more applications are available on their platform, preferably exclusively, the more attractive that platform is for people who might buy it. Ditto for all the back office stuff. I haven't checked the figures for the gaming and Internet stuff recently, but they were lucky not to make a substantial loss lass time I looked, so I very much doubt they are more than a drop in the ocean either.
In this context, forcing people to retrain and recertify doesn't help Microsoft, because it makes their key products less attractive. It just doesn't fit into their business plan. When they've reached the unique position of having near 100% market penetration in their two primary markets, the only thing they can do to keep the serious money coming in is provide upgrades that people are willing to pay for, and Vista was so far off-target that substantial chunks of the market actively chose to go for Windows XP instead. If Windows 7 is another cock-up on that scale, then we could realistically be looking at the beginning of the end for Microsoft.
Sure, but an employer who is willing to make such a decision (ignoring the collective will of its staff, even if it costs them the business and the staff's position was tenable) will presumably also be foolish enough to ignore the will of a union that represents most/all of its staff at the same cost. The business in that situation is doomed anyway, and the staff are all going to need new jobs anyway, so having a union there doesn't really help anyone.
Collective bargaining by employees works against an aggressive employer, but this doesn't necessarily imply the presence of a union. I was involved in some contractual changes following a takeover, and all it took for the new employer's HR people to get the message was the first few employees actively and publicly objecting to the revised terms. Then others joined in, and critical mass was reached.
quite why the value of that music automatically deteriorates after X years of its composition eludes me.
This is where we disagree. Something that can be reproduced at effectively zero marginal cost has no intrinisic value the moment it is out in the open, because anyone can take it for free. The only reason information works have value beyond that point is because copyright artificially assigns value to them.
Now, I consider that to be a decent system in principle, because it opens up possibilities for collective payment for a work of moderate value to many people that might otherwise be too much hassle to organise, and therefore it promotes the creation and distribution of such works. But it doesn't change the fact that the value is illusory, a social construction. Without copyright, the value of a music recording (or a film, or a piece of computer software) deteriorates to zero the moment anyone has a copy of it.
I think if the 60 million want to enjoy the copyrighted works they have to pay for them, in the same way that if I want to enjoy my local farmers apples, I have to buy them, despite the fact that the evil corporate scumbag planted those apple trees YEARS AGO.
I often agree with you on these sorts of issues, Cliff, but on this one I do side with the IP-is-not-physical-property crowd. There are only so many apples produced by your local farmer, and someone has to look after the trees every year to keep that going. There is ongoing work involved and it produces finite goods. If you think the asking price for the apple is disproportionate to the amount of work required, you are free to grow an apple tree in your own garden and eat as much of its fruit as you like. The situation just isn't the same for pure information, which can be duplicated and distributed at negligible cost and almost instantaneously.
Now, I don't have a problem with the principle of copyright, but it's a two-way thing: the artists get a temporary monopoly so they can exploit their work in ways that would otherwise be unrealistic, but they get that benefit in return for sharing that work with the public who get to benefit from it afterwards. If there is no benefit to the general public in having a law, then why should there be any law restricting people's ability to copy information freely at all?
It clearly isn't necessary to increase the duration of copyright retrospectively in order to get artists to produce the works covered, because they already produced and distributed them, knowing what the deal was at the time. Making such a change now is just breaking one side of the deal, screwing the general public for the benefit of... well, actually, it's not even the artists in most cases, it's the record labels and a few already-richer-than-you-or-I-will-ever-be big names. Society's debt to these people has been paid, and it's time for them to live up to their side of the bargain. If they weren't prepared to do that, no-one forced them to share their work: they could have gone out and got a day job that pays the bills like everyone else, and they could still be living in obscurity and doing that job today like everyone else too.
It's not quite as simple as that, because the duration of copyright protection varies by both the kind of work (e.g., software vs. music) and by the role played (e.g., performer vs. composer). So while it may strictly speaking be true that some synchronisation would occur if this went through, arguments about consistency aren't very convincing.
This is the thing that really annoys me. The statement from Burnham is quite open that his priority is supporting the artists no matter what. When do the other 60 million of the population get their go?
The Conservatives recently reiterated their commitment to a similar policy, unfortunately, so we're basically screwed.
For the record, if you look at the submissions to the Gowers Review by members of the public (of which there were many, which are available on-line from the government's Gowers Review web site) you find that despite the huge scope of the review, many of the replies concentrated on this issue, sometimes only this issue — and I didn't see a single one in favour of copyright term extension.
How sad. I wonder why I bothered spending the time to put a detailed comment into Gowers, if the government was just going to ignore the outcome anyway (and having agreed with it at that!). This is hardly the way to encourage the people to contribute to their "democracy".
It's interesting to see how polarised people's comments are in this thread. Some think the reply should have been kind and constructive, trying to correct misinformation. Others think she's beyond hope and should have the book thrown at her. For what it's worth, I fall somewhere in the middle.
I agree with the parent post that there is no need for ranting and being rude. It is perfectly possible to explain that the teacher was mistaken about free software not existing, by giving popular real world examples, and to point out politely that in fact it is her disinformation that is the harmful thing to spread here. I suggest that it might be better to focus any such feedback on the concept of free-as-in-no-money software, since this is easy for non-technical people to understand. In any case, freeware has been around for as long as there have been computers, long before the GPL and such came along and tried to claim words like "free" for their own purposes, so there is no need to get into the political/ethical side of things.
On the other hand, she didn't just object to Linux. She accused the children in her care of breaking the law, threatened a completely innocent third party, and confiscated property without good cause. There is no excuse for that kind of behaviour from anyone, much less a teacher in a position of trust. Given the poor attitude she exhibited, formally reprimanding her (and requiring her to give back whatever she confiscated) is entirely appropriate.
see the latest NuStasi attempts to reduce benefits payments to single mothers who have a 1 year-old child by 40% if they're not 'actively seeking work and can demonstrate a clear plan of action to this end'
That isn't "rape and pillage of the working classes". For one thing, that person is not working. We should invent some new classes in the system. Let's call them the "scrounging off everyone else" classes.
This whole attitude of bailing out people who screwed up (invariably at the expense of those who made wise decisions and lived within their means) is really starting to get on my nerves now. I have no debts, I rent because I can't afford to buy a home yet, I haven't had kids yet because I don't have enough money saved up to support them as well as I would want to, and what savings I have are invested either in sound companies that make real products (not financial institutions and the like) or in interest-bearing bank accounts. And for living within our means this way, my partner and I are getting screwed almost daily at present, as the government bails out failed financial institutions, underwrites people who took out mortgages they couldn't afford to repay, and so on. We are penalised for being financially sensible, while those who made poor judgements are rewarded at our expense. This is exactly the wrong way to run an economy!
Don't get me wrong: I'm no Labour supporter. But on the score of dramatically reducing the freebie hand-outs they've invented/increased over the past decade, I agree wholeheartedly.
While I don't doubt your anecdote, I think it's a little unfair to label those who ask to speak to a supervisor by default as idiots just for that. Making that request is a natural reaction to the fact that first line support for most places really are both incompetent and impotent to do anything about typical customer problems. I'm sure we could discuss the arms race between call centres and customers who want useful service, but this doesn't seem to be the right place for it...
Slashdot Mirror
What you're missing is that they can get that work done for $250 or less.
No, they can't. Not even outsourcing to (competent) people in lower-paying countries would get you close to that. But since the average person posting a job spec on sites like that thinks they've got the world's best idea but will drop it as soon as they realise they're being wildly unrealistic, it doesn't really cost anyone anything.
I don't disagree with your post.
Actually, I kinda wish you did. I was trying to demonstrate how far you can take arguments based only on unreasonable generalisations and selective evidence (such as glossing over the smaller scale WMDs that you mentioned). Everything I wrote does have elements of truth to it, but the post as a whole and the conclusions it drew didn't consider the complete picture — exactly the problem with the Islamophobic post I was replying to.
Perhaps it's escaped your attention, but typically the kind of people who are in charge of security at these places have far greater powers than simply asking you a few questions. Depending on how serious they think the threat is, you are potentially going to be held at gunpoint, strip-searched, and allowed to watch as they pull apart any of your luggage they think contains anything they don't like, as well as being arbitrarily delayed, potentially reported in the media, etc. And the best part is, they usually have little accountability for their actions, while you are typically not entitled to any compensation even if they cause your entire holiday to fall apart or cause expensive damage to your property. It's basically subject to their professional (or otherwise) judgement. Now, do you think installing a warning system liable to significant numbers of false positives is going to make this situation better or worse? And if you think any of the specific possibilities I have mentioned here is only hypothetical, please be very clear about which of those powers you do not think the security people have at most Western transport hubs, and I'm sure someone here can enlighten you.
Your post is full of it.
Indeed it was, in the parts you criticised. That was the point! By replying to debunk my obviously unreasonable claims, you reinforce my point rather well: of course we shouldn't use selective evidence and sweeping generalisations to make sound-bite judgements about large sections of the human race and then take draconian steps as a result. Unfortunately, the post to which I originally replied seemed to think that sort of plan was a good idea.
So... nobody could ever be unaware they're carrying a "disruptive device" (is that like a crackberry?) through a checkpoint?
The one time I've flown in Europe recently, I was approached by security staff flying home from Italy. They asked me whether I had left any prohibited containers in my backpack, as something had apparently triggered their scanner. I thought for a second, and then realised that I had left a small bottle of sunscreen tucked in one of the back pockets, along with various other things you'd want to have with you while out for the day.
I apologised, and in the next few moments I went from embarassment to fear of what they were going to do because I'd inadvertently tried to take something banned onto the plane. But then they said they'd have to remove it because of the liquids ban, and just through it into a huge container (full of mostly unopened bottles: many more suntan containers, drinks, and other harmless things) and let me go through without another look.
I take it you've never been the guy they stopped by mistake. Being questioned and searched under such circumstances is not a trivial experience. It can be deeply unpleasant, and for some people it can leave mental scars that take a very long time to heal.
Damn, missed a rather important typo. s/from/for/, obviously.
It looks like we need to update Pastor Niemoeller's famous poem. First they came from the Muslims...
Here are a few other conclusions from a non-PC but apparently somewhat more objective observer.
Probably the most violent recent religion looking over its history is Christianity. Should we detain all Christians? I bet that'll go down well in the US.
Actually, speaking of the US, they are the only nation ever to have actually used a weapon of mass destruction at a cost of numerous civilian lives, and they have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to go to war other than to protect themselves from an immediate physical threat. Maybe the rest of the world should just nuke the whole US and be done with them?
Then again, the administration of any country that had WMDs could lose the plot and use them based on such dubious arguments, and any administration that has been in power for more than a short time and retains the option apparently has a willingness to consider using WMDs. Maybe it would be better for all of us if they just turned on each other to remove the threat against everyone else?
I'll stop there, because I've pretty much killed the entire world in only three steps by applying the kind of tragic, fear-driven thinking exhibited by the parent post. But I truly hope that 2009 offers us more than a binary choice between PC security theatre and the kind of indiscriminate fear-mongering we see here.
and we've seen what they charge for text messages. i don't trust that.
Text messages are an odd case in several ways. Their pricing is on the high side, but then their pricing for calls is on the low side, and in neither case do they really make that much money out of their customers: it's the high-end, premium services like mobile Internet browsing and picture messaging where they make the big money these days.
In any case, this isn't really the same idea as what I was suggesting. Distinguishing by service like this would be more akin to letting people browse web sites cheaply, but charging a premium for sending e-mails and a very high rate for streaming media, regardless of the volume of data actually transferred. I don't think anyone is currently proposing distinguishing pricing by the protocol in use.
and referring to bandwidth as a commodity seems a little like fallacious thinking.
On the contrary, it is the very essence of a commodity in the economic sense of the term: one ISPs bandwidth is as good as another (at least for now) but there is only so much available.
Is it just being realistic? Here in the UK, ISPs have been selling flat-rate "up to 8MB" broadband for some time now, but glossing over the very high contention ratios they've been using (and getting away with so far, because the average user doesn't currently want anything like 8MB/s of data transfer).
With the rise of streaming, real-time media — and the BBC's iPlayer has been a great success story over here — the assumption that a large group of users only ever sends a few e-mails and shops at Amazon is becoming less valid. While quite a few people have visited YouTube and the like and watched a five minute clip of something, that's a long way from a service that offers full-length, full-quality downloads of major programs and advertises this fact prominently on several major TV stations.
Unfortunately, the reality is that the ISPs don't have the bandwidth they've sold if everyone wants to use it, any more than the banks had the money they were selling. Some sort of change in pricing is inevitable. One way or another, those who have been doing very well out of the current flat-rate deals are going to be the ones who lose out, because they are getting things disproportionately cheap right now.
Personally, I don't like the filtering by source/destination idea. It sounds like something that will attack the openness that has made the Internet such a success. I'd rather go back to some sort of metred use policy, perhaps with tiered flat rate bundles for a bit of predictability for low/average users (so that up to x MB/month is a standard rate, up to y MB/month is another standard rate, and after that it's metred or something). This model seems to work fairly well for the mobile phone industry, and the pricing is transparent and sustainable.
But whether it's done by bandwidth, web sites visited, protocols used, or what postcode you live in, anyone who has been happily streaming tens of gigabytes per month of downloads on their flat rate plan and thinks an extra 10 pounds a month is excessive is just deluding themselves. The bandwidth simply isn't there to support everyone doing that, and when commodities are scarce, prices go up.
For one thing, MS certainly isn't giving the developer tools away - yes, you have the "Express" editions, but those have pretty heavy limitations which really only make them useful for a student and low-profile hobbyist writing simple freeware or shareware stuff. For any serious development, you're going to need VS Pro, and that still costs quite a bit.
Well, you say that, but I can't think of a single thing I've ever done at any of the places I've worked professionally that the Express editions don't cover. Maybe if you're working on really huge projects or using the latest MS tools for something like architecture or source control the Pro version is useful, but again everywhere I've worked had found other approaches to those problems long before Microsoft's latest round of tools started incorporating them, so there was no particular reason to switch. As you say, though, pretty much everywhere just gets an MSDN subscription anyway, so this is something of a moot point.
So most Windows shops go for it, and I'd imagine it's also a pretty steady revenue stream for MS - at least last I heard about this, Microsoft DevDiv (Developer Division) is fully self-sufficient.
Well, not being loss-making is always a plus of course, but I don't think Microsoft's interest in DevDiv has anything to do with how much money it makes. In itself, its revenue is line noise, but as a strategic asset, it's invaluable.
The justification? [...] To require all MCSE's to re certify. Oh and to get the millions of employees using windows out there to take new training courses in windows.
The thing is, that doesn't make sense. Microsoft make almost all of their money on exactly two product lines: Windows and Office. Everything else is just window dressing (no pun intended) to try to boost sales of Windows and Office. For example, Microsoft's developer tools are quite decent, but did you notice that they've started giving them away in recent years? That's because they don't make any serious money on them, but if they can get people using their tools then those people are going to target their platform, and the more applications are available on their platform, preferably exclusively, the more attractive that platform is for people who might buy it. Ditto for all the back office stuff. I haven't checked the figures for the gaming and Internet stuff recently, but they were lucky not to make a substantial loss lass time I looked, so I very much doubt they are more than a drop in the ocean either.
In this context, forcing people to retrain and recertify doesn't help Microsoft, because it makes their key products less attractive. It just doesn't fit into their business plan. When they've reached the unique position of having near 100% market penetration in their two primary markets, the only thing they can do to keep the serious money coming in is provide upgrades that people are willing to pay for, and Vista was so far off-target that substantial chunks of the market actively chose to go for Windows XP instead. If Windows 7 is another cock-up on that scale, then we could realistically be looking at the beginning of the end for Microsoft.
If only they'd produce a version for Windows... :-(
Sure, but an employer who is willing to make such a decision (ignoring the collective will of its staff, even if it costs them the business and the staff's position was tenable) will presumably also be foolish enough to ignore the will of a union that represents most/all of its staff at the same cost. The business in that situation is doomed anyway, and the staff are all going to need new jobs anyway, so having a union there doesn't really help anyone.
Collective bargaining by employees works against an aggressive employer, but this doesn't necessarily imply the presence of a union. I was involved in some contractual changes following a takeover, and all it took for the new employer's HR people to get the message was the first few employees actively and publicly objecting to the revised terms. Then others joined in, and critical mass was reached.
quite why the value of that music automatically deteriorates after X years of its composition eludes me.
This is where we disagree. Something that can be reproduced at effectively zero marginal cost has no intrinisic value the moment it is out in the open, because anyone can take it for free. The only reason information works have value beyond that point is because copyright artificially assigns value to them.
Now, I consider that to be a decent system in principle, because it opens up possibilities for collective payment for a work of moderate value to many people that might otherwise be too much hassle to organise, and therefore it promotes the creation and distribution of such works. But it doesn't change the fact that the value is illusory, a social construction. Without copyright, the value of a music recording (or a film, or a piece of computer software) deteriorates to zero the moment anyone has a copy of it.
I think if the 60 million want to enjoy the copyrighted works they have to pay for them, in the same way that if I want to enjoy my local farmers apples, I have to buy them, despite the fact that the evil corporate scumbag planted those apple trees YEARS AGO.
I often agree with you on these sorts of issues, Cliff, but on this one I do side with the IP-is-not-physical-property crowd. There are only so many apples produced by your local farmer, and someone has to look after the trees every year to keep that going. There is ongoing work involved and it produces finite goods. If you think the asking price for the apple is disproportionate to the amount of work required, you are free to grow an apple tree in your own garden and eat as much of its fruit as you like. The situation just isn't the same for pure information, which can be duplicated and distributed at negligible cost and almost instantaneously.
Now, I don't have a problem with the principle of copyright, but it's a two-way thing: the artists get a temporary monopoly so they can exploit their work in ways that would otherwise be unrealistic, but they get that benefit in return for sharing that work with the public who get to benefit from it afterwards. If there is no benefit to the general public in having a law, then why should there be any law restricting people's ability to copy information freely at all?
It clearly isn't necessary to increase the duration of copyright retrospectively in order to get artists to produce the works covered, because they already produced and distributed them, knowing what the deal was at the time. Making such a change now is just breaking one side of the deal, screwing the general public for the benefit of... well, actually, it's not even the artists in most cases, it's the record labels and a few already-richer-than-you-or-I-will-ever-be big names. Society's debt to these people has been paid, and it's time for them to live up to their side of the bargain. If they weren't prepared to do that, no-one forced them to share their work: they could have gone out and got a day job that pays the bills like everyone else, and they could still be living in obscurity and doing that job today like everyone else too.
It's not quite as simple as that, because the duration of copyright protection varies by both the kind of work (e.g., software vs. music) and by the role played (e.g., performer vs. composer). So while it may strictly speaking be true that some synchronisation would occur if this went through, arguments about consistency aren't very convincing.
NOT BENEFICIAL OF CITIZENS AT ALL.
This is the thing that really annoys me. The statement from Burnham is quite open that his priority is supporting the artists no matter what. When do the other 60 million of the population get their go?
The Conservatives recently reiterated their commitment to a similar policy, unfortunately, so we're basically screwed.
For the record, if you look at the submissions to the Gowers Review by members of the public (of which there were many, which are available on-line from the government's Gowers Review web site) you find that despite the huge scope of the review, many of the replies concentrated on this issue, sometimes only this issue — and I didn't see a single one in favour of copyright term extension.
How sad. I wonder why I bothered spending the time to put a detailed comment into Gowers, if the government was just going to ignore the outcome anyway (and having agreed with it at that!). This is hardly the way to encourage the people to contribute to their "democracy".
It's interesting to see how polarised people's comments are in this thread. Some think the reply should have been kind and constructive, trying to correct misinformation. Others think she's beyond hope and should have the book thrown at her. For what it's worth, I fall somewhere in the middle.
I agree with the parent post that there is no need for ranting and being rude. It is perfectly possible to explain that the teacher was mistaken about free software not existing, by giving popular real world examples, and to point out politely that in fact it is her disinformation that is the harmful thing to spread here. I suggest that it might be better to focus any such feedback on the concept of free-as-in-no-money software, since this is easy for non-technical people to understand. In any case, freeware has been around for as long as there have been computers, long before the GPL and such came along and tried to claim words like "free" for their own purposes, so there is no need to get into the political/ethical side of things.
On the other hand, she didn't just object to Linux. She accused the children in her care of breaking the law, threatened a completely innocent third party, and confiscated property without good cause. There is no excuse for that kind of behaviour from anyone, much less a teacher in a position of trust. Given the poor attitude she exhibited, formally reprimanding her (and requiring her to give back whatever she confiscated) is entirely appropriate.
I'd look one up for you, but I would have to put my pizza down first. Sorry.
see the latest NuStasi attempts to reduce benefits payments to single mothers who have a 1 year-old child by 40% if they're not 'actively seeking work and can demonstrate a clear plan of action to this end'
That isn't "rape and pillage of the working classes". For one thing, that person is not working. We should invent some new classes in the system. Let's call them the "scrounging off everyone else" classes.
This whole attitude of bailing out people who screwed up (invariably at the expense of those who made wise decisions and lived within their means) is really starting to get on my nerves now. I have no debts, I rent because I can't afford to buy a home yet, I haven't had kids yet because I don't have enough money saved up to support them as well as I would want to, and what savings I have are invested either in sound companies that make real products (not financial institutions and the like) or in interest-bearing bank accounts. And for living within our means this way, my partner and I are getting screwed almost daily at present, as the government bails out failed financial institutions, underwrites people who took out mortgages they couldn't afford to repay, and so on. We are penalised for being financially sensible, while those who made poor judgements are rewarded at our expense. This is exactly the wrong way to run an economy!
Don't get me wrong: I'm no Labour supporter. But on the score of dramatically reducing the freebie hand-outs they've invented/increased over the past decade, I agree wholeheartedly.
While I don't doubt your anecdote, I think it's a little unfair to label those who ask to speak to a supervisor by default as idiots just for that. Making that request is a natural reaction to the fact that first line support for most places really are both incompetent and impotent to do anything about typical customer problems. I'm sure we could discuss the arms race between call centres and customers who want useful service, but this doesn't seem to be the right place for it...