If that were true, most of us wouldn't have such a problem with Facebook.
It is precisely the fact that they know more than what you volunteer — indeed, their entire model is based on getting friends to contribute information about each other — that is the main problem with sites like Facebook.
I've seen a similar scenario. When I was a neutral witness to a road traffic accident, I was asked to attend court to give evidence. This I did, and I was offered some compensation and expenses for my trouble (though my employer was kind enough to overlook the missed day of work and pay my normal salary anyway, which they were not required to do).
What I found concerning was that the accused, who was found not guilty of the offence, did not seem to be eligible for any compensation for their lost time and the effort they had made in defending themselves. My understanding is that had they had a lawyer, they might have received the costs for that, but there doesn't seem to be any provision at all for looking after the wrongly accused in their own right. As the story suggests, defending yourself can be expensive — and I live in the UK, where we theoretically have "loser pays" as the default position in court cases.
I don't know what you call a system that makes someone attend court twice, gives them stress for more than a year in total before their case is resolved, finds them not guilty... and then says "Oh, well, never mind, you'll get over it". I'm not sure the word "justice" would feature in my description, though.
I doubt I'm in your country, you stupid litigious fuck.
In any case, companies who break important laws should be penalised for doing so. If the laws are not enforced and the regulators don't act when regulations are breached, what is the point of having them?
There is a difference between looking to mount expensive lawsuits by default, and taking enforcement action when companies persistently and deliberately fail to meet their legal obligations. One is wasteful. The other is necessary.
You have to look at the specific cases. But in Europe, for example, there are generic data protection provisions that mean it's usually against the rules to hold personal data (which has a specific meaning) about people without fulfilling various criteria. If you do hold personal data, there are rules about how you may use it, requirements to register information about what you're doing, and so on.
Personally I don't believe the rules are strong enough: fundamental issues, such as whether you can always prevent someone compiling a database about you without your consent and whether you can force a service you no longer deal with to properly delete things like your contact details and credit card number, are not clear, and I see no reason they can't be clarified.
But no, it's not just an assertion. There are whole chunks of law about this stuff, and in those cases that have come to a trial (at least in Europe and the US) the courts have mostly taken a fairly generous line on upholding privacy concerns.
And, moreover, what is the threshold at which Facebook gets to say they acted in good faith and be absolutely correct about it.
It's amazing how many people have been citing "good faith" as if it's some sort of defence recently. Good faith is not carte blanche to do whatever you want, fail to undertake due diligence to learn of any obligations you have while doing it, turn a blind eye, and then wash you hands of the consequences. Consider it a case of "ignorance of the law is no defence": it's not like an organisation the size of Facebook can pretend it hasn't got lawyers to check these things.
Tried applying for credit recently, while living at the same address as someone with bad credit history?
Applied for a job, while sharing a name with a convicted criminal who lives near you?
Been pulled over by the police or sent fines for speeding, because someone cloned your car's plates?
These are the sorts of things that are affected when authorities don't check their facts properly and leap to conclusions, and the examples above are only based on information that ought to be private, but often isn't private enough. When the government and data mining companies (I'm looking at you, Google) will basically give out any information about anyone, the results will only get worse.
I understand your personal preference, but it's worth keeping in mind that Facebook are not immune from data protection rules either. If they are holding personal information about you without your consent, and worse, sharing it with others, then they may well be breaking the law in some jurisdictions.
I almost wish a few people who still value privacy would start filing formal complaints with the appropriate courts/regulatory authorities, so social networking sites get the message that they only get to collect data with people's informed consent. The sort of opt-out policy that Facebook et al. currently take is just an unscalable cop-out. Of course, this would be easier if we had decent privacy and data protection laws, which many countries still don't.
There is no special category of legal document called "licence agreement", so the question is: if a licence isn't a contract, why does it have any legal standing at all?
Actually, in some jurisdictions, there is an interesting question of whether a contract would actually be needed to use software you have obtained legitimately, and therefore whether an end user licence agreement has any weight in any case. It depends on the local copyright laws. But you would almost certainly need permission to redistribute someone else's code, even you don't need an EULA to use it yourself, and that is really what we're talking about here I think.
IANAL either, of course, though I do follow developments in this area out of interest.
Your post is an excellent argument for why those who claim more authority than the average citizen should never be allowed to use "good faith" alone to excuse a mistake. With the extra power must come extra responsibility to get things right, and the rule for such people must be "if in doubt, don't". The consequences of any system not biased strongly in that direction are far worse than any individual mistake. It's just like the fundamental principle that it is better to risk letting a guilty man go free, at least for now, than to risk sentencing an innocent man erroneously.
Thus in cases like this, I think it would be far better if there was an immediate presumption that no evidence or charges at all connected with the inappropriate search ever have legal standing. Moreover, the person or persons responsible for the mistake should by default be personally liable for their illegal actions just as anyone else would be. There may be some good faith defence in the latter case, but good faith should never take precedence over the safeguard that the former offers. Even in the latter case, one must be careful that the benefits of good faith remain proportionate to the mistake, to avoid the risk of authorities erring on the side of "shooting the innocent man" and escaping the penalty for it later.
Finally, they cannot take the freedom away from you in either license, because you can't relicense code retroactively.
People often say this, but it isn't a trivial legal point. For any sort of binding contract to exist, a legal system typically requires consideration in both directions. This is why you see "bust" businesses and "worthless" items being bought for $10, rather than given away. There is an interesting, and as far as I'm aware still open, question of whether some legal systems actually have a provision for permanently and irrevocably contributing works that fall under copyright to the public domain. Similar concerns apply to open source licences.
That isn't an analogy, it's hyperbole. Unlike sleep, you don't have a biological need for email.
No, but I imagine in today's society the majority would consider it an important communications channel, like the postal service or telephone. It has important practical uses, and improves quality of life generally.
My mailbox is full of it right now. It has all the same characteristics of spam. It's annoying, it's wasteful, only a fraction of a percent of recipients generate a sale, and disposal of it costs me money. Guess what? I haven't heard of a single case where OfficeMax or Bed, Bath, & Beyond, etc have been taken to court for spamming my mailbox.
Then your country's laws suck. Physical mail, as you say, has much the same characteristics of spam. My country has chosen not to accept the annoyance to the general population, and one quick trip to a web site put my address on a compulsory no-junk-mail list. Telephoning me for marketing purposes is also against the rules, via the analogous preference service, again activated by one quick trip to a web site. Anyone violating these prohibitions is liable to substantial financial penalties.
As I pointed out above, you're clearly arguing for a double standard.
No, I'm being perfectly consistent, and you're ill-informed and making a typical slashtroll assumption that everywhere in the world works like wherever you live.
So, we'd be 'free' to do whatever you say? Greaaaat!
I'm sorry, but I think you missed my point here. I prefer the current system, where the default is that anyone can e-mail anyone else for any reason, and we only prohibit specific harmful actions. Any alternative, if we followed your suggestion and changed the protocol to avoid abuse, would surely be more restrictive by default.
Your only hope to truly defeat spam would be to offer a better solution than spam.
Oh, I think imposing draconian penalties on those who go around making countless others' lives less pleasant would help, too. This is how laws normally work. It's a combination of deterrence and, if that fails, active prevention through loss of liberty.
The problem is that right now, we don't seem to be able to do that, mainly because people like you seem to think the law should provide a right to harass everyone else with impunity.
Simply trying to remove junk mail without having a replacement plan is like the RIAA trying to stamp out piracy without offering any alternatives.
Well, not so much, because at least in the RIAA's case a substantial proportion of the population clearly feel justified in violating the current system for one reason or another. (As it happens, I don't believe most people really think such behaviour is ethical, and I think people who illegally copy music should be penalised effectively as well. I'd just like the see the RIAA suffer a multi-billion dollar penalty for illegal price fixing and violation of competition laws to go with it.)
In any case, I rather doubt that a similar proportion of the population welcomes the junk mail it receives. Junk mail is nothing but a small group of selfish people harassing innocent bystanders against their will, and should be treated accordingly in law. It is, at least in my country, in every case but on-line.
I'm a big gamer, and game on Vista Home Premium. Since release, I've had only one issue: KOTOR 2 wouldn't work. Other than that, works beautifully.
Except for the huge performance hits reported by just about every game review since Vista's release, that sounds perfectly normal.
And what DX10-based games actually have noticeably better graphics than DX9 anyway? DX10 isn't an advantage unless game developers are actually using it to good effect.
As far as I recall, all that has ever been offered is traffic going to Microsoft, which in no way constitutes any sort of proof.
Erm... Right. They've been caught red-handed calling home without permission more than 20 different ways, and they have a history of monitoring things like what you watch or listen to in Media Player using tracking IDs, and they have things like Windows "Genuine Advantage" (ha ha), but it's all entirely benevolent. They'd never actually get it wrong and remotely shut machines down, would they?
This isn't normally a problem, but it happens sometimes when people spew bullshit about Vista "forcing" you to download patches, when it does nothing of the sort.
Tell that to all the sysadmins who had to sort out the updates when MS screwed up SUS a few months back.
Or you could just trust them, assume those words they've added to recent licence agreements saying they can do this are just there for decoration, and believe that there is no technical mechanism through which they could actually do it.
but if you're building a new machine, there's no reason to avoid it.
Unless you play games.
Or you don't like the pointless and sometimes downright infuriating UI changes.
Or you prefer not to support compulsory, consumer-hostile technologies like DRM, activation, remote monitoring, forced downloads of patches, and all that jazz, which are generally worse in Vista than in XP (though the licence agreement for some of the XP service packs is doing its best to make them almost as bad).
Which describes almost every home user I know who is still running on Windows.
You're the one running a server and listening to any traffic that comes in.
I'm not, though, am I? And neither are almost all of the other average people sitting at home, whose Internet connections are mainly used for surfing the web and keeping in touch by e-mail. But we still get to pay — in many cases, on a meter basis — for the downloaded material.
Your protocol is broken and you're asking for *legislators* to fix it?
My protocol isn't broken, it's just being abused. If someone was driving around town in the middle of the night, shouting obscenities through car-mounted megaphones, then they would be regarded as antisocial, and the police would prevent them from disturbing the peace any further. If someone started putting offensive leaflets through a victim's door, hundreds of times per day, then that would be regarded as antisocial, and harassment proceedings and an injunction would probably follow.
There is a difference between being able to do something and using that freedom responsibly. So it goes with many things in life, and the Internet is no different. We have laws to penalise those who harm others through their failure to act responsibly, and again, the Internet should be no different in this respect. But it is still much better, IMHO, for freedom to be the default and efforts to be concentrated on holding those who abuse the privilege to account, than to make prohibitions and rules and limited functionality the default and hinder constructive use by the overwhelming majority of participants.
Perhaps you should put your money and mental effort into finding a better technical solution instead of dreaming of a legislative one.
For someone so hot on legislative philosophy, you seem to have missed the old saying about technical solutions to social problems.
When you tell people they can't spam, you're telling them that they don't have the right to speak their mind to the world.
No, you're telling them that they don't have the right to make everyone listen to what they want to say... which they don't, as far as I'm concerned.
What they choose to say on their own web site, which I visit voluntarily, or in a public forum, which no-one is forced to attend, is one thing. What they shove, unsolicited, into millions of inboxes is quite another. The problem with spam is not what they say, but the push model they use to say it.
The failed businesses did have sufficient verifiable assets to support their transactions at the time they were made.
The financial trickery going on behind the scenes involved leverage on silly scales. If the picture is as simple as you suggest, how do you account for the failure of banks in Europe, which are not subject to US accounting rules?
So what are you advocating, exactly? That businesses should carry sufficient cash to have positive net worth even if the value of all other assets falls to zero?
No, of course not. And I agree the change in accounting rules that relied on daily valuations was foolish. But financial commitments should only be permissible when there is a reasonable expectation that the means are there to back them up. Lending 125% mortgages to people who didn't have a prayer of repaying that kind of money was never in that category. Selling stocks you don't actually own in an attempt to game the markets was never in that category. Lots of bad stuff that has been happening was never in that category.
The credit crunch wasn't caused by a change in accounting rules, and that change is not what is sinking the banks. Their own arrogance and stupidity is what is sinking the banks, and it is taking everyone else down with them. No company should ever have been allowed to reach the point that if it failed it would undermine the entire economy and therefore require a public bail-out.
I'm not saying banks shouldn't be able to make loans. I'm just saying they shouldn't be able to make loans they can't afford. If that is really a problem for the economy as a whole, perhaps we need to reconsider the extent to which our society is built on debt.
Would it really be such a bad thing if people could only borrow modestly, and as a consequence prices for more expensive assets such as houses had to be more realistic? Would it be such a bad thing if lenders weren't allowed to lend irresponsibly, and financially naive people didn't wind up bankrupt because they thought they could afford something but found they couldn't when the economic environment changed? Would it be such a bad thing if businesses couldn't make artificially large returns for their investors, by charging unrealistic prices, paying unrealistically low wages to their staff, and thus perpetuating the cycle of debt?
Thinking "I'll put my money in the stock market now then in five years, I'll cash it out" is plain wrong. Gradually you need to move away from stocks into bonds.
I'm not going to get into financial advice; I suspect that we would agree a lot, but this isn't really the forum for that discussion. Regardless, the way the tax system is set up in my country, and the advice that was routinely given by numerous financial advisers until quite recently, both encouraged people to take a stocks-and-shares view even for medium-term investments, and effectively imposed significant penalties on those looking for safer or alternative investment opportunities — or just keeping their money in a bank account, for that matter.
I think you'll find that most people's pensions and savings will recover value just like any other investment.
In time, yes, they will. But it could take several years in some markets.
The problem is that those who will be retiring in the near future and compelled to cash in their pension funds might never have the opportunity to enjoy those gains.
If you can find [a bank] that can afford to pay interest, since it can't, in your world, loan out any money.
Of course it can. It just can't lend out more money than it can afford, just like everyone else in the world.
And what that has to do with paying interest, I don't know: banks invariably pay interest rates that are below the long-term return they will make while investing their customers' money. In any case, there would be no problem with lending money secured against real assets (as is the case with most mortgages) provided the assets could reasonably be expected to cover the loss if the borrower defaulted. That's fine if you're lending a reasonable proportion of the value of a home, it just means you can't lend significant multiples that are effectively unsecured. And that, frankly, is no bad thing for anyone involved.
You can't expect a bank to have 100% of what it needs on hand. It just doesn't work that way. 10% is plenty, and the proof of that is how well the traditional banks are weathering this.
Erm... No, sorry, I don't buy it. If it weren't for central banks taking huge liberties with what is, ultimately, tax-payer-backed money, those "traditional" banks would be toast right about now. Several of them are anyway. You write as if the others have healthy balance sheets, which isn't exactly a safe bet today.
In any case, banks are not the only ones who count. The entire economy in most western countries is royally screwed, and is likely to remain so for quite some time at this point. Numerous everyday people have seen a huge chunk wiped out of their pensions and savings, for the crime of investing in businesses that were just doing decent business, and it is primarily the fault of the financial services firms who could not honour their commitments, and the governments and regulators who allowed them to make those commitments anyway. The nice returns investors in some banks may get back down the line will be little comfort to the millions of people whose retirement funds just got ruined and won't have time to recover and the millions more who will now lose their jobs.
Perhaps having 100% in current assets (I didn't say "liquid") is unrealistic, but I suspect you'll find the "it just doesn't work that way" line cuts rather little ice over the next few years. The people who don't want it to work that way aren't going to be allowed to make that call any more, that's for sure.
The problem with democracy is that it only works well in the presence of an informed and rational population. As all the scary news reports make pretty clear, much of the population is not well-informed and does not act in their own best interests.
This is, to some extent, inevitable, because no-one has the time to learn about all the issues governments manage day-to-day. But even if you move to a representative-based system, as most first-world countries have, you still need the people to elect representatives who share their basic principles and beliefs, so those representatives can become well-informed on the issues of the day and act accordingly. This requires that elected representatives have some accountability, which with terms of office lasting several years and populations who give a significant proportion of the vote to whoever the media support, is pretty unlikely: far too much damage can be done by politicians who just lie to get elected and then abuse their position for years, before the people get a chance to be heard again.
I'd settle for a regulation saying businesses may not enter into financial negotiations they do not, at that time, have sufficient verifiable assets to support.
You might still take a hit if housing prices drop a few percent and lenders who made reasonable lending decisions find themselves stretched, but you would be unlikely to see the kind of major players failing that we have seen recently.
Perhaps more to the point, you wouldn't get the sort of silly leveraging that has been going unchecked in the financial services industry for years, where no-one could really keep the promises they were making. That is how you get companies "too big to fail", which then need government intervention that is completely unjustifiable in a sane world, because while the mega-businesses deserve to fail and their investors deserve to lose out, the collateral damage to the innocent bystanders in the rest of the economy is nasty.
There are all these clever analyses flying around about what went wrong and how to fix it, but it seems to me that the basic problem has simply been allowing businesses to make promises they cannot keep.
Perhaps not, but it's a lot closer than the markets sometimes seem to think. There are all kinds of clever economic theories, but ultimately, there are only so many goods produced and useful services provided in the world, no matter how much money gets printed to pay for them, and the efficiency of production and service provision only increases so fast over time. As we've all been finding out rather painfully in recent weeks, economies that ignore this reality, based on funny money that is not backed by anything of any real value, are liable to collapse when someone knocks the bottom card out of the house.
For the first time ever, my investment portfolio has actually tipped over into an overall negative return recently. Several years of gains from investing in decent companies trading in useful markets with sound fundamentals, carefully avoiding madness like the dot-com bubble and the financial services industry that caused the current mess, have been wiped out in a matter of weeks. Sure, the market will recover in time, and if you're lucky enough to have a substantial sum of spare cash lying around to put in now then there are probably long-term bargains to be had. And sure, I know that objectively, given the various tax implications in my country, I am still better to be in my current position that I would have been if I had put the money in a bank and then bought in for the prices available now.
Even so, this makes it all too clear that stock market investing really is a long-term prospect: even something like a five-year plan, which is what a lot of the pros used to quote as a sensible minimum investment period, has brought little safety at all in the past 10–15 years. And how many people really have enough money that they can invest for 10+ years without wanting to spend any of it, yet still have little enough money that the return on investment matters? Maybe once you own the house and your kids are grown up, if you want to save for your retirement...?
Your link doesn't seem to work. In any case, my funds still report losing another 4+% today despite late recoveries in some of the markets, and I have never even invested in the silly financial businesses that screwed all of this up!:-/
I know that tomorrow most of the portfolio will rise, because once-per-day reporting times do strange things, but even so, there is a very long way to go before I consider the financial troubles past, and they most certainly aren't restricted to the US markets.
If you're working in an environment where complete security is essential and staff can't be trusted, and there is no possibility of fixing the latter problem, then perhaps that sort of measure is justified. Anyone working in such an environment probably accepts that as part of the nature of their job anyway.
On the other hand, it is currently 20:15 where I am, and I am goofing off reading Slashdot for a few minutes while waiting to make sure a build and test run gets going OK overnight. Would I still be here if I had to sit at my desk doing nothing for this time? Hell, no. Contrary to your claim that we are being well paid for our services, I imagine most people doing what I'm doing now aren't being paid at all to be at the office this late.
Incidentally, I don't log my breaks formally during the day, and I frequently have some browser window open somewhere on a site that has personal interest. By your reckoning, it's amazing I ever get anything done, because obviously I'm just slacking off all day. Of course, that's not the reality: I just like to switch my attention frequently for a short time rather than for long periods at fixed intervals, and I'm pretty sure that working this way suits me better and therefore makes me more productive in the end, which is clearly in my employer's best interests.
Slashdot Mirror
They only can know what you tell.
If that were true, most of us wouldn't have such a problem with Facebook.
It is precisely the fact that they know more than what you volunteer — indeed, their entire model is based on getting friends to contribute information about each other — that is the main problem with sites like Facebook.
I've seen a similar scenario. When I was a neutral witness to a road traffic accident, I was asked to attend court to give evidence. This I did, and I was offered some compensation and expenses for my trouble (though my employer was kind enough to overlook the missed day of work and pay my normal salary anyway, which they were not required to do).
What I found concerning was that the accused, who was found not guilty of the offence, did not seem to be eligible for any compensation for their lost time and the effort they had made in defending themselves. My understanding is that had they had a lawyer, they might have received the costs for that, but there doesn't seem to be any provision at all for looking after the wrongly accused in their own right. As the story suggests, defending yourself can be expensive — and I live in the UK, where we theoretically have "loser pays" as the default position in court cases.
I don't know what you call a system that makes someone attend court twice, gives them stress for more than a year in total before their case is resolved, finds them not guilty... and then says "Oh, well, never mind, you'll get over it". I'm not sure the word "justice" would feature in my description, though.
I doubt I'm in your country, you stupid litigious fuck.
In any case, companies who break important laws should be penalised for doing so. If the laws are not enforced and the regulators don't act when regulations are breached, what is the point of having them?
There is a difference between looking to mount expensive lawsuits by default, and taking enforcement action when companies persistently and deliberately fail to meet their legal obligations. One is wasteful. The other is necessary.
Is that true, or merely an assertion?
You have to look at the specific cases. But in Europe, for example, there are generic data protection provisions that mean it's usually against the rules to hold personal data (which has a specific meaning) about people without fulfilling various criteria. If you do hold personal data, there are rules about how you may use it, requirements to register information about what you're doing, and so on.
Personally I don't believe the rules are strong enough: fundamental issues, such as whether you can always prevent someone compiling a database about you without your consent and whether you can force a service you no longer deal with to properly delete things like your contact details and credit card number, are not clear, and I see no reason they can't be clarified.
But no, it's not just an assertion. There are whole chunks of law about this stuff, and in those cases that have come to a trial (at least in Europe and the US) the courts have mostly taken a fairly generous line on upholding privacy concerns.
And, moreover, what is the threshold at which Facebook gets to say they acted in good faith and be absolutely correct about it.
It's amazing how many people have been citing "good faith" as if it's some sort of defence recently. Good faith is not carte blanche to do whatever you want, fail to undertake due diligence to learn of any obligations you have while doing it, turn a blind eye, and then wash you hands of the consequences. Consider it a case of "ignorance of the law is no defence": it's not like an organisation the size of Facebook can pretend it hasn't got lawyers to check these things.
In what way are they likely to 'hit' you?
Tried applying for credit recently, while living at the same address as someone with bad credit history?
Applied for a job, while sharing a name with a convicted criminal who lives near you?
Been pulled over by the police or sent fines for speeding, because someone cloned your car's plates?
These are the sorts of things that are affected when authorities don't check their facts properly and leap to conclusions, and the examples above are only based on information that ought to be private, but often isn't private enough. When the government and data mining companies (I'm looking at you, Google) will basically give out any information about anyone, the results will only get worse.
I understand your personal preference, but it's worth keeping in mind that Facebook are not immune from data protection rules either. If they are holding personal information about you without your consent, and worse, sharing it with others, then they may well be breaking the law in some jurisdictions.
I almost wish a few people who still value privacy would start filing formal complaints with the appropriate courts/regulatory authorities, so social networking sites get the message that they only get to collect data with people's informed consent. The sort of opt-out policy that Facebook et al. currently take is just an unscalable cop-out. Of course, this would be easier if we had decent privacy and data protection laws, which many countries still don't.
There is no special category of legal document called "licence agreement", so the question is: if a licence isn't a contract, why does it have any legal standing at all?
Actually, in some jurisdictions, there is an interesting question of whether a contract would actually be needed to use software you have obtained legitimately, and therefore whether an end user licence agreement has any weight in any case. It depends on the local copyright laws. But you would almost certainly need permission to redistribute someone else's code, even you don't need an EULA to use it yourself, and that is really what we're talking about here I think.
IANAL either, of course, though I do follow developments in this area out of interest.
Your post is an excellent argument for why those who claim more authority than the average citizen should never be allowed to use "good faith" alone to excuse a mistake. With the extra power must come extra responsibility to get things right, and the rule for such people must be "if in doubt, don't". The consequences of any system not biased strongly in that direction are far worse than any individual mistake. It's just like the fundamental principle that it is better to risk letting a guilty man go free, at least for now, than to risk sentencing an innocent man erroneously.
Thus in cases like this, I think it would be far better if there was an immediate presumption that no evidence or charges at all connected with the inappropriate search ever have legal standing. Moreover, the person or persons responsible for the mistake should by default be personally liable for their illegal actions just as anyone else would be. There may be some good faith defence in the latter case, but good faith should never take precedence over the safeguard that the former offers. Even in the latter case, one must be careful that the benefits of good faith remain proportionate to the mistake, to avoid the risk of authorities erring on the side of "shooting the innocent man" and escaping the penalty for it later.
Finally, they cannot take the freedom away from you in either license, because you can't relicense code retroactively.
People often say this, but it isn't a trivial legal point. For any sort of binding contract to exist, a legal system typically requires consideration in both directions. This is why you see "bust" businesses and "worthless" items being bought for $10, rather than given away. There is an interesting, and as far as I'm aware still open, question of whether some legal systems actually have a provision for permanently and irrevocably contributing works that fall under copyright to the public domain. Similar concerns apply to open source licences.
That isn't an analogy, it's hyperbole. Unlike sleep, you don't have a biological need for email.
No, but I imagine in today's society the majority would consider it an important communications channel, like the postal service or telephone. It has important practical uses, and improves quality of life generally.
My mailbox is full of it right now. It has all the same characteristics of spam. It's annoying, it's wasteful, only a fraction of a percent of recipients generate a sale, and disposal of it costs me money. Guess what? I haven't heard of a single case where OfficeMax or Bed, Bath, & Beyond, etc have been taken to court for spamming my mailbox.
Then your country's laws suck. Physical mail, as you say, has much the same characteristics of spam. My country has chosen not to accept the annoyance to the general population, and one quick trip to a web site put my address on a compulsory no-junk-mail list. Telephoning me for marketing purposes is also against the rules, via the analogous preference service, again activated by one quick trip to a web site. Anyone violating these prohibitions is liable to substantial financial penalties.
As I pointed out above, you're clearly arguing for a double standard.
No, I'm being perfectly consistent, and you're ill-informed and making a typical slashtroll assumption that everywhere in the world works like wherever you live.
So, we'd be 'free' to do whatever you say? Greaaaat!
I'm sorry, but I think you missed my point here. I prefer the current system, where the default is that anyone can e-mail anyone else for any reason, and we only prohibit specific harmful actions. Any alternative, if we followed your suggestion and changed the protocol to avoid abuse, would surely be more restrictive by default.
Your only hope to truly defeat spam would be to offer a better solution than spam.
Oh, I think imposing draconian penalties on those who go around making countless others' lives less pleasant would help, too. This is how laws normally work. It's a combination of deterrence and, if that fails, active prevention through loss of liberty.
The problem is that right now, we don't seem to be able to do that, mainly because people like you seem to think the law should provide a right to harass everyone else with impunity.
Simply trying to remove junk mail without having a replacement plan is like the RIAA trying to stamp out piracy without offering any alternatives.
Well, not so much, because at least in the RIAA's case a substantial proportion of the population clearly feel justified in violating the current system for one reason or another. (As it happens, I don't believe most people really think such behaviour is ethical, and I think people who illegally copy music should be penalised effectively as well. I'd just like the see the RIAA suffer a multi-billion dollar penalty for illegal price fixing and violation of competition laws to go with it.)
In any case, I rather doubt that a similar proportion of the population welcomes the junk mail it receives. Junk mail is nothing but a small group of selfish people harassing innocent bystanders against their will, and should be treated accordingly in law. It is, at least in my country, in every case but on-line.
I'm a big gamer, and game on Vista Home Premium. Since release, I've had only one issue: KOTOR 2 wouldn't work. Other than that, works beautifully.
Except for the huge performance hits reported by just about every game review since Vista's release, that sounds perfectly normal.
And what DX10-based games actually have noticeably better graphics than DX9 anyway? DX10 isn't an advantage unless game developers are actually using it to good effect.
As far as I recall, all that has ever been offered is traffic going to Microsoft, which in no way constitutes any sort of proof.
Erm... Right. They've been caught red-handed calling home without permission more than 20 different ways, and they have a history of monitoring things like what you watch or listen to in Media Player using tracking IDs, and they have things like Windows "Genuine Advantage" (ha ha), but it's all entirely benevolent. They'd never actually get it wrong and remotely shut machines down, would they?
This isn't normally a problem, but it happens sometimes when people spew bullshit about Vista "forcing" you to download patches, when it does nothing of the sort.
Tell that to all the sysadmins who had to sort out the updates when MS screwed up SUS a few months back.
Or you could just trust them, assume those words they've added to recent licence agreements saying they can do this are just there for decoration, and believe that there is no technical mechanism through which they could actually do it.
Yes.
HTH. HAND.
but if you're building a new machine, there's no reason to avoid it.
Unless you play games.
Or you don't like the pointless and sometimes downright infuriating UI changes.
Or you prefer not to support compulsory, consumer-hostile technologies like DRM, activation, remote monitoring, forced downloads of patches, and all that jazz, which are generally worse in Vista than in XP (though the licence agreement for some of the XP service packs is doing its best to make them almost as bad).
Which describes almost every home user I know who is still running on Windows.
You're the one running a server and listening to any traffic that comes in.
I'm not, though, am I? And neither are almost all of the other average people sitting at home, whose Internet connections are mainly used for surfing the web and keeping in touch by e-mail. But we still get to pay — in many cases, on a meter basis — for the downloaded material.
Your protocol is broken and you're asking for *legislators* to fix it?
My protocol isn't broken, it's just being abused. If someone was driving around town in the middle of the night, shouting obscenities through car-mounted megaphones, then they would be regarded as antisocial, and the police would prevent them from disturbing the peace any further. If someone started putting offensive leaflets through a victim's door, hundreds of times per day, then that would be regarded as antisocial, and harassment proceedings and an injunction would probably follow.
There is a difference between being able to do something and using that freedom responsibly. So it goes with many things in life, and the Internet is no different. We have laws to penalise those who harm others through their failure to act responsibly, and again, the Internet should be no different in this respect. But it is still much better, IMHO, for freedom to be the default and efforts to be concentrated on holding those who abuse the privilege to account, than to make prohibitions and rules and limited functionality the default and hinder constructive use by the overwhelming majority of participants.
Perhaps you should put your money and mental effort into finding a better technical solution instead of dreaming of a legislative one.
For someone so hot on legislative philosophy, you seem to have missed the old saying about technical solutions to social problems.
When you tell people they can't spam, you're telling them that they don't have the right to speak their mind to the world.
No, you're telling them that they don't have the right to make everyone listen to what they want to say... which they don't, as far as I'm concerned.
What they choose to say on their own web site, which I visit voluntarily, or in a public forum, which no-one is forced to attend, is one thing. What they shove, unsolicited, into millions of inboxes is quite another. The problem with spam is not what they say, but the push model they use to say it.
The failed businesses did have sufficient verifiable assets to support their transactions at the time they were made.
The financial trickery going on behind the scenes involved leverage on silly scales. If the picture is as simple as you suggest, how do you account for the failure of banks in Europe, which are not subject to US accounting rules?
So what are you advocating, exactly? That businesses should carry sufficient cash to have positive net worth even if the value of all other assets falls to zero?
No, of course not. And I agree the change in accounting rules that relied on daily valuations was foolish. But financial commitments should only be permissible when there is a reasonable expectation that the means are there to back them up. Lending 125% mortgages to people who didn't have a prayer of repaying that kind of money was never in that category. Selling stocks you don't actually own in an attempt to game the markets was never in that category. Lots of bad stuff that has been happening was never in that category.
The credit crunch wasn't caused by a change in accounting rules, and that change is not what is sinking the banks. Their own arrogance and stupidity is what is sinking the banks, and it is taking everyone else down with them. No company should ever have been allowed to reach the point that if it failed it would undermine the entire economy and therefore require a public bail-out.
I'm not saying banks shouldn't be able to make loans. I'm just saying they shouldn't be able to make loans they can't afford. If that is really a problem for the economy as a whole, perhaps we need to reconsider the extent to which our society is built on debt.
Would it really be such a bad thing if people could only borrow modestly, and as a consequence prices for more expensive assets such as houses had to be more realistic? Would it be such a bad thing if lenders weren't allowed to lend irresponsibly, and financially naive people didn't wind up bankrupt because they thought they could afford something but found they couldn't when the economic environment changed? Would it be such a bad thing if businesses couldn't make artificially large returns for their investors, by charging unrealistic prices, paying unrealistically low wages to their staff, and thus perpetuating the cycle of debt?
Thinking "I'll put my money in the stock market now then in five years, I'll cash it out" is plain wrong. Gradually you need to move away from stocks into bonds.
I'm not going to get into financial advice; I suspect that we would agree a lot, but this isn't really the forum for that discussion. Regardless, the way the tax system is set up in my country, and the advice that was routinely given by numerous financial advisers until quite recently, both encouraged people to take a stocks-and-shares view even for medium-term investments, and effectively imposed significant penalties on those looking for safer or alternative investment opportunities — or just keeping their money in a bank account, for that matter.
I think you'll find that most people's pensions and savings will recover value just like any other investment.
In time, yes, they will. But it could take several years in some markets.
The problem is that those who will be retiring in the near future and compelled to cash in their pension funds might never have the opportunity to enjoy those gains.
If you can find [a bank] that can afford to pay interest, since it can't, in your world, loan out any money.
Of course it can. It just can't lend out more money than it can afford, just like everyone else in the world.
And what that has to do with paying interest, I don't know: banks invariably pay interest rates that are below the long-term return they will make while investing their customers' money. In any case, there would be no problem with lending money secured against real assets (as is the case with most mortgages) provided the assets could reasonably be expected to cover the loss if the borrower defaulted. That's fine if you're lending a reasonable proportion of the value of a home, it just means you can't lend significant multiples that are effectively unsecured. And that, frankly, is no bad thing for anyone involved.
You can't expect a bank to have 100% of what it needs on hand. It just doesn't work that way. 10% is plenty, and the proof of that is how well the traditional banks are weathering this.
Erm... No, sorry, I don't buy it. If it weren't for central banks taking huge liberties with what is, ultimately, tax-payer-backed money, those "traditional" banks would be toast right about now. Several of them are anyway. You write as if the others have healthy balance sheets, which isn't exactly a safe bet today.
In any case, banks are not the only ones who count. The entire economy in most western countries is royally screwed, and is likely to remain so for quite some time at this point. Numerous everyday people have seen a huge chunk wiped out of their pensions and savings, for the crime of investing in businesses that were just doing decent business, and it is primarily the fault of the financial services firms who could not honour their commitments, and the governments and regulators who allowed them to make those commitments anyway. The nice returns investors in some banks may get back down the line will be little comfort to the millions of people whose retirement funds just got ruined and won't have time to recover and the millions more who will now lose their jobs.
Perhaps having 100% in current assets (I didn't say "liquid") is unrealistic, but I suspect you'll find the "it just doesn't work that way" line cuts rather little ice over the next few years. The people who don't want it to work that way aren't going to be allowed to make that call any more, that's for sure.
The problem with democracy is that it only works well in the presence of an informed and rational population. As all the scary news reports make pretty clear, much of the population is not well-informed and does not act in their own best interests.
This is, to some extent, inevitable, because no-one has the time to learn about all the issues governments manage day-to-day. But even if you move to a representative-based system, as most first-world countries have, you still need the people to elect representatives who share their basic principles and beliefs, so those representatives can become well-informed on the issues of the day and act accordingly. This requires that elected representatives have some accountability, which with terms of office lasting several years and populations who give a significant proportion of the vote to whoever the media support, is pretty unlikely: far too much damage can be done by politicians who just lie to get elected and then abuse their position for years, before the people get a chance to be heard again.
I'd settle for a regulation saying businesses may not enter into financial negotiations they do not, at that time, have sufficient verifiable assets to support.
You might still take a hit if housing prices drop a few percent and lenders who made reasonable lending decisions find themselves stretched, but you would be unlikely to see the kind of major players failing that we have seen recently.
Perhaps more to the point, you wouldn't get the sort of silly leveraging that has been going unchecked in the financial services industry for years, where no-one could really keep the promises they were making. That is how you get companies "too big to fail", which then need government intervention that is completely unjustifiable in a sane world, because while the mega-businesses deserve to fail and their investors deserve to lose out, the collateral damage to the innocent bystanders in the rest of the economy is nasty.
There are all these clever analyses flying around about what went wrong and how to fix it, but it seems to me that the basic problem has simply been allowing businesses to make promises they cannot keep.
The economy is not a zero sum game
Perhaps not, but it's a lot closer than the markets sometimes seem to think. There are all kinds of clever economic theories, but ultimately, there are only so many goods produced and useful services provided in the world, no matter how much money gets printed to pay for them, and the efficiency of production and service provision only increases so fast over time. As we've all been finding out rather painfully in recent weeks, economies that ignore this reality, based on funny money that is not backed by anything of any real value, are liable to collapse when someone knocks the bottom card out of the house.
For the first time ever, my investment portfolio has actually tipped over into an overall negative return recently. Several years of gains from investing in decent companies trading in useful markets with sound fundamentals, carefully avoiding madness like the dot-com bubble and the financial services industry that caused the current mess, have been wiped out in a matter of weeks. Sure, the market will recover in time, and if you're lucky enough to have a substantial sum of spare cash lying around to put in now then there are probably long-term bargains to be had. And sure, I know that objectively, given the various tax implications in my country, I am still better to be in my current position that I would have been if I had put the money in a bank and then bought in for the prices available now.
Even so, this makes it all too clear that stock market investing really is a long-term prospect: even something like a five-year plan, which is what a lot of the pros used to quote as a sensible minimum investment period, has brought little safety at all in the past 10–15 years. And how many people really have enough money that they can invest for 10+ years without wanting to spend any of it, yet still have little enough money that the return on investment matters? Maybe once you own the house and your kids are grown up, if you want to save for your retirement...?
Your link doesn't seem to work. In any case, my funds still report losing another 4+% today despite late recoveries in some of the markets, and I have never even invested in the silly financial businesses that screwed all of this up! :-/
I know that tomorrow most of the portfolio will rise, because once-per-day reporting times do strange things, but even so, there is a very long way to go before I consider the financial troubles past, and they most certainly aren't restricted to the US markets.
If you're working in an environment where complete security is essential and staff can't be trusted, and there is no possibility of fixing the latter problem, then perhaps that sort of measure is justified. Anyone working in such an environment probably accepts that as part of the nature of their job anyway.
On the other hand, it is currently 20:15 where I am, and I am goofing off reading Slashdot for a few minutes while waiting to make sure a build and test run gets going OK overnight. Would I still be here if I had to sit at my desk doing nothing for this time? Hell, no. Contrary to your claim that we are being well paid for our services, I imagine most people doing what I'm doing now aren't being paid at all to be at the office this late.
Incidentally, I don't log my breaks formally during the day, and I frequently have some browser window open somewhere on a site that has personal interest. By your reckoning, it's amazing I ever get anything done, because obviously I'm just slacking off all day. Of course, that's not the reality: I just like to switch my attention frequently for a short time rather than for long periods at fixed intervals, and I'm pretty sure that working this way suits me better and therefore makes me more productive in the end, which is clearly in my employer's best interests.
And with that, my build is done...