I think that is unrealistic. None of these people is going to govern in isolation if they are elected, so you might as well have the team that's behind them involved in the election process itself.
What matters in the leader is not their own expertise in any particular field, but the combination of their principles and their ability to apply those principles in the presence of expert advice. Other than in areas such as sudden military conflicts or unforeseen natural disasters, they will never have to do this in real time while in office, so why would you impose such a restriction on the campaign trail? If you do that, you just get the guy with the best sound-bites elected.
Isn't it great that we have so many choices for leadership? If we don't like the opinions of one person, we have one other person to choose from. Certainly each one of us can find one of these two people who will agree with and advocate for all that we believe in. Right?
In a sense, politics is a one-dimensional game at that level: at the extremes, either you believe that individual rights and responsibilities should be completely subservient to some "greater good" society, or you believe that individual rights and responsibilities are the dominant factor and any concept of society exists only to support them. A great many of the big decisions do flow naturally from this simple distinction: a preference for big vs. small government in general, and many more specific issues such as socialised healthcare vs. the private insurance model.
Of course it's not that simple in reality. There are some issues of ethics where perhaps people from both ends of the spectrum would agree. And there is no single concept of "society".
It seems to me that the biggest disruptive factor in politics, particularly in the US in recent years, is the concept of the corporation: entities that started as a group of individuals, taking advantage of collaboration in a free market to build a power base, are now recognised as having rights of their own, which necessarily compete with those of both individuals and society as a whole, while the people controlling those entities are shielded as individuals from most responsibility for the actions they control. Thus we have things like the recent banking collapses and the Enron fiasco, where the laws have not served to protect either individuals or the community as a whole for a long time, and now it is the rest of the people who have to deal with the mess. Likewise, we have Big Media raking in most of the profits from the work of a few individuals, backed by laws which have been distorted so they serve neither the individual artists nor society as a whole.
Right now, there are only two parties with a realistic prospect of winning power in the US in the near term, and both of them are heavily pro-corporation, so there is no real choice at all. It is an eternal mystery to me how this position was reached, given that corporations do not (yet) have the vote and there are other candidates in most elections. But now that the position has been reached, it seems that nothing short of fundamental reform of the electoral system will fix it. Of course, the parties in power are unlikely to do that voluntarily given their corporate affiliations, so it's going to need a slow, grass-roots process.
Irony for the day: the sort of misinterpretation in the parent post and the rumours that result are exactly the sort of things Berners-Lee was concerned about in a recent interview. (See also: Slashdot article summaries.;-))
I think the trick is not to try to create an authority to give endorsements itself — which we seem to agree is doomed before it starts — but rather to begin with a mechanism by which a web site can claim one or more endorsements by named parties on specified dates, those endorsements and dates can be verified in real time, and there is a mechanism for immediate revocation by the endorsing party if a more recent check makes continued endorsement inappropriate.
As various recent discussions on SSL have considered, we are already part way there, but at the moment all you can do is prove you have a secure connection to a certain on-line resource, without knowing who is behind that resource in real life. This is already a significant problem for industries such as banking, but any structured identification protocols developed to help there could just as well be used to show that, for example, a site describing first aid procedures was verified and endorsed by the Red Cross within the last three months.
The overheads of getting real people to check sites before giving an endorsement might be prohibitive, and I'm not sure you'd get that many endorsements relative to the number of sites that might deserve them if there was time to check them all. But starting from that basis, we could move to more of a web-of-trust system. As Google proved with their Page Rank algorithm, even a relatively simple idea along these lines can be remarkably effective as a starting point.
Of course, Google's story also tells us that sooner or later, people will learn how to game such a simple system, and that is an as-yet unsolved problem. But that doesn't mean it can't be solved, particularly if we're talking about a new organisation with some real world resources that could get real people to investigate the credentials of major nodes in your trust network as a starting point. Community-driven web sites like Wikipedia have shown us another possible tool we could use: it's also a system that can be gamed, but usually not for long without someone noticing, and for the most part the information supplied is good.
There is a lot of potential complexity here, and there are many ways things could go wrong. I doubt any system will ever be perfect. However, it's not as if this is a win/lose scenario: just improving the signal/noise ratio is a benefit to everyone affected, and we could certainly do better than we do today.
Hopefully the WWWF will take a rather more balanced view than that expressed in the parent post. I have some faith that it will: Berners-Lee has always struck me as both a smart guy and someone who genuinely wants to do the right thing. It is interesting that considering issues such as privacy and security is explicitly mentioned in the WWWF concept paper (available on their web site), but that Berners-Lee also told the BBC he was concerned about the need to separate rumour from reliable information on the web. Whether or not on-line anonymity should be possible is pretty fundamental to these issues.
They're not claiming to recreate the web or anything like that. Rather, Berners-Lee has expressed concern about some of the trends in the way the WWW is working, and is now doing something about it. One example cited in the media today is the difficulty in distinguishing between rumours and content from reputable sources, since there is no robust mechanism for indicating the authenticity or credibility of a web site. This has led to fears of the LHC sucking the world into a black hole or, more seriously, to parents being misinformed about the dangers of MMR vaccine and making health decisions that are not in their child's best interests because of the bad information.
I would suggest that this is a more general problem rather than anything specific to the web, and I don't believe it can ever be solved in all cases because there can never be an ultimate authority on all things, nor should there be. But an effort to provide a framework where realistically credible groups can be seen to endorse the content on certain sites as respectable has to be a step in the right direction: sometimes there's no substitute for seeing a qualified, experienced professional, but if I'm looking for general information on-line, I'd rather know that the professional-looking site I'm reading has been vetted by expert medical, legal, financial, technical or other eyes, as appropriate, rather than just being designed by someone with a good eye but containing content that is misleading or outright dangerous.
Surely being given an opportunity to demonstrate one's skill/flair isn't disrespectful?
It depends on how it's done.
Exactly. I'm in the camp that says some sort of programming test is fair for any level. If you're really a "Senior software engineer" with "excellent $LANGUAGE skills" then writing something like fizzbuzz will only take you two minutes, right? The number of people I've seen come to an interview making that sort of claim who could not code fizzbuzz is scary. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my tolerance for taking this sort of test myself increased significantly when I crossed from being an experienced developer who just found them patronising to having the kind of role that also involves sitting on the other side of the table from time to time and seeing what some of the other candidates are like.
On the other hand, I rather doubt I'll ever be working for the kind of place that has a whole-day interview process that consists of solving an endless series of trivial programming problems, followed by a load of "Have you seen this one before?" questions like the 1/2/5/10 problem. These tests are only useful as a block for the low end prankster, not as a way of gauging how good someone competent really is. After the first couple, if it seems like there are going to be more, I will take control of the interview and, usually, end it shortly thereafter.
This is a valuable reminder that interviewing is a two-way process, and that those applying for higher positions with more responsibility should be entitled to ask "difficult" questions that any competent employer should have no difficulty answering, too. Just as a significant proportion of interviewees are a joke, so are a significant proportion of interviewers/employers. These days, I'll basically let a prospective employer run the first interview, but if I'm called back for a second interview so I know they are serious, I will ask to see a sample of their production code and a sample of their development documentation, I'll ask straight questions about their software development process, company culture and working conditions, and if I'm still ambivalent perhaps I'll ask to speak privately with a current employee who is doing a similar job to the one I'm applying for.
I think perhaps you missed my point. I am not saying that abuses don't happen. On the contrary, I'm quite sure they do, and I oppose them as much as anyone.
What I am saying is that on-line anonymity isn't much of a protection from any government that has the power to abuse its citizens in that sort of way. The only way to administer a government in a manner that is safe for its people is via some sort of representative system to decide who gets to govern, combined with due process and effective separation of powers to stop any one part of the government becoming judge, jury and executioner. Without that, you could get that special 6am wake-up call anyway.
There's an old saying about boxes and the order they are to be used in. If you oppose a regime that doesn't respect the voice box, the answer isn't whispering, it's moving to the next box.
How about under judicial oversight, to identify real criminals for prosecution through due process, like any other investigative tool in a civilised society?
The arguments about abuse by governments are fundamentally flawed: if a government is free to abuse this sort of thing, it's probably free to walk up to your front door and just arrest you without any evidence anyway. There are practical solutions to such problems, but this is not one of them.
Sadly, your comments could be applied with equal validity to most of the replies in this thread. I do wonder whether the people posting to discussions like this have ever stopped to think about the implications of allowing total anonymity and complete privacy, or whether they just parrot lots of stuff about "rights" and "freedoms" because it makes them feel like they're sticking it to the man. It would be interesting to know how many of these people, come election time, still vote for major political parties who will continue to run the same sort of system.
Privacy and anonymity have a valuable role to play, and should certainly be the default, but they cannot be an excuse to put people above the law in a civilised society. Anonymity separates freedom from responsibility, and that can be just as dangerous to the well-being of a society as having no freedom in the first place.
If a society's political system or legal framework are sufficiently screwed up that a reasonable balance is impossible, on-line anonymity is hardly their biggest problem, nor their salvation. This is my objection to the whole "Chinese dissidents", "American revolution" brigade: they seem to ignore the fact that the relative anonymity of the Internet today hasn't stopped the abuse by corrupt regimes, while at the same time ignoring all the illegal activities that nasty people are getting away with under cover of anonymity in more democratic societies.
It's doubtful someone would sue "Mozilla" (whoever that is; perhaps you mean Mozilla Corp? Mozilla Foundation?) over something not supplied by them. If anyone did do that, the response would probably be something simple like "It's nothing to do with us, go away", followed by some sort of legal counter-claim if necessary, rather than the nonsense posted by the parent.
Why on earth would any of the organisations behind Firefox be responsible for malware, just because someone chose to call it Firefox? Is your bank responsible for your loss if you fall for a phishing attack, just because someone in eastern Europe sent you an e-mail with the bank's logo on it? If I write a check and sign your name, do you have to pay it? Of course not.
and by getting rid of Firefox, it'll just be more difficult to get people to migrate...
Why? AFAIK, none of the commercial Mozilla groups has any special claim on the code. The only thing you get in exchange for this EULA nonsense is the Firefox branding, isn't it? Just fork the code and call it "Web browser" in the UI, or use one of the existing alternatives. Average Joe won't know the difference because he doesn't care what a browser is as long as he can see web sites, and anyone technical will probably understand what has been done and not object anyway, or they'll just download Firefox themselves. In any case, there doesn't seem any reason to set an unwelcome precedent by letting commercial groups who are trying to take control of big name, high value projects start dictating terms to popular distro suppliers.
Sure, but presumably there are also 21 cops who pulled those people over because they were driving like drunks, and 21 different units used to measure whether this was true, give or take the occasional overlap or the occasion second unit used for double-checking. It doesn't make the "There must be something wrong, Your Honour!" defence any more plausible, unless some of them actually have more than their own wishful thinking to back up their claim that the device actually is broken.
I would have thought that the court(s) would rule that the prosecution had to provide the court (and the defense) with the source code (and schematics, device testing procedures,...) in order to use the results of the test as evidence.
That "..." is the killer. Where do you stop? Do they have to provide records of the quality control at the factory where the transistors were produced? The microcode on every chip in the unit? Academic papers justifying the models used in the measurement?
I have nothing against the defence having access to any relevant material that could make a case that there is reasonable doubt about their client's guilt. But there has to be some credible possibility of establishing such doubt before you go to this level, or you are just creating an open-ended route for anyone who doesn't like any court case against them to stall it out until it becomes too expensive to prosecute, and that surely isn't in the interests of justice.
I see where you're coming from, but I'm not sure I completely agree.
If the defence can produce to the court some evidence to suggest that the device may not be reliable, for example, indications that on some past occasions it has given false readings, or that the reading presented is within the device's margin of error of the relevant legal level of blood alcohol, then I do think that is a reasonable basis for further investigation. A court might consider that reasonable grounds for compelling the controlled release of the source code for expert analysis by the defence.
On the other hand, if the device has been used after a reasonable amount of testing, and the particular unit(s) in the case had been properly calibrated to whatever the accepted standard is, and the defence can only say "well, there might be a software bug!" without anything to back it up, then to me that is just a fishing expedition and allowing a case to be delayed is unrealistic. Sitting on a jury, if a police officer has observed driver behaviour suggesting they are drunk and a standard bit of kit with no history of failure backed up the officer's claim quantitatively, and the defence had nothing but pure conjecture about software as a counter-argument, I would have no difficulty in finding that "beyond reasonable doubt". It isn't beyond any doubt at all, but that is not the standard in a court case, and for good reason.
Your point about young people's expectations is well taken, but on the flip side, young people are for the most part pretty clueless about economics so perhaps we shouldn't be too hasty to bend to their will. After all, it's all very well saying the law should adapt to the will of the people, but if dumb people don't think through the implications of their short term satisfaction, we may find that no-one makes big budget movies or games any more because it just isn't commercially viable. You can bet your house the same people who are freeloading today are going to bitch like crazy if that happens! For the Hollywood blockbuster type, you could argue that some money could be saved by not paying a small number of leading actors silly money, but in some cases, it just costs a fortune to film on location, get high quality artwork made for an entire game world, etc.
Thank you very much for sharing that. I can't tell you how annoying it's been, and it's obvious from reading the descriptions that the frequent crashes I have seen recently are caused by this problem. I knew my PC wouldn't be able to address all 4GB of physical RAM using a 32-bit WinXP because of the graphics card address mapping, but it didn't even occur to me that SupCom would be hitting 2GB, never mind being poor enough to crash without explanation when doing so!
So the volume of apache servers is insignificant in comparison to the volume of commercial software servers? How about Radiohead making millions on an album they also gave for free? Does that example cover your "creativity isn't a manufactured product so profit isn't possible without copyright" argument?
Please go back and read my post again. It seems like you completely failed to understand what I said. In particular, I am talking about whether a creative industry as a whole would be as effecive at producing and distributing works without copyright. As I said before, it's not that the sharing model can't produce useful work, it's just that it does so far, far less frequently on the evidence to date.
Granting a short term in which no other person/entity may manufacture and sell a product save its creator is giving them first dibs at the market. I'm not sure why that's hard to understand.
They already had "first dibs at the market", because they start out as the only person with the work. Copyright confers no particular advantage in this respect, and is therefore no incentive from that point of view. What copyright does do is provide continued exclusivity that could otherwise be lost within moments of the early copies being sold. This is what provides the incentive to share works generally, rather than with just a select group of high payers.
As per your argument the volume of FOSS/creative commons products are smaller than the volume of copyrighted products I say naturally so. So long as businesses are granted such privilege they will take it, and they will abuse it.
But how can this be "natural", if the commons-based approach is a better incentive to produce and share useful works?
Certainly if the FOSS/Creative Commons approach were more effective as an incentive, we would expect the creators of works to be switching to these alternative models in large numbers, yet they have not done so in any creative field. This suggests a bound on the effectiveness of these alternative approaches as incentives to create and distribute works: they do not appear to be significantly better as an incentive than the copyright-based approach.
On the other hand, there are numerous areas where the commons approach has produced no offering, but commercial arrangements supported by copyright have provided useful products. This suggests that, at least in those areas, the copyright approach is an effective incentive, while the commons approach is not.
This looks to me like pretty objective evidence that copyright is doing its job, and a lack of any evidence that the commons approach would do that job any better.
Copyright/Intellectual property laws in their current metastasized form actively hinder the progress of science and the arts.
So people around here keep saying, yet so far not one of them had produced anything other than speculation and hand waving to support their position. If copyright is holding everyone back so much, why is so much useful stuff produced within that framework in so many different fields, when little or nothing is produced in those fields using alternative, commons-based approaches?
Now if only they'd fix the damn crash bugs. Every patch I've installed has made things worse, and my near-state-of-the-art, otherwise-100%-reliable gaming PC literally crashes every ten minutes with the 3280 patch on a large map. I've gone back to playing the original version, but of course it doesn't have all the small but nice improvements and the few extra units that the later revisions come with. The CD thing was a pain, but I would rather live with that than have an unplayable game...
A bit off-topic, but a friendly warning that anyone interested in this particular title might want to wait for feedback on the next patch.
It's hard to know where to start rebutting that. Lessig is a smart and thoughtful guy, but you could fly his precious aeroplanes through the holes in his argument in this case. Just to give a few obvious counter-points:
His whole argument is basically a "think of the children" plea, talking about how their freedom to be creative with existing works is restricted by the legal framework today. And yet, he acknowledges that he is not talking about wholesale redistribution of others' work, but rather the creative works that borrow from that existing work. There would be a strong argument in most jurisdictions that the kind of work to be considered fair use (or whatever the local equivalent is called).
Shortly afterwards, he implies that fair use is not sufficient, citing the automatic filtering technology proposed for services like YouTube. But again, he has already undermined his own case: the ASCAP/BMI example demonstrates very clearly that when one party provides a service that is no longer good value, people will switch to the competition. What would stop someone else from creating a service to rival YouTube that did not auto-filter legitimate fair use or provided a way to override it?
Finally, perhaps the most serious flaw in his argument is that copyright is so horrible to children and they don't like it. Well, guess what: they are children and they don't always get what they want. If my kids wanted to go and run around in the street when I knew lots of fast-moving vehicles would be passing, they wouldn't be allowed to do it. If they wanted to have a candy bar from the shop when they had already has some treat food that day, they wouldn't get it. If they attempted to "go underground" on me by sneaking out of the house, or perhaps more relevant here, to break the law by picking up a candy bar while they thought I wasn't looking, they would rapidly and decisively learn the error of their ways. Kids are kids because they are not yet mature and responsible enough to make decisions completely independently, but that doesn't mean any law that makes childish behaviour illegal is broken.
How about "agrees with copyright in principle but thinks current laws and implementation are unjust"?
That's a perfectly reasonable position, but then I would say that, since it's my position.:-)
However, this seems to fall pretty clearly into one of two of the categories I gave: either you accept the principle but copy anyway in the expectation that you won't get caught, or you accept the principle and choose not to deliberately infringe. There's nothing to say members of either group can't also be lobbying for fairer legal implementations of the copyright principle, but I think that's a separate issue.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that is unrealistic. None of these people is going to govern in isolation if they are elected, so you might as well have the team that's behind them involved in the election process itself.
What matters in the leader is not their own expertise in any particular field, but the combination of their principles and their ability to apply those principles in the presence of expert advice. Other than in areas such as sudden military conflicts or unforeseen natural disasters, they will never have to do this in real time while in office, so why would you impose such a restriction on the campaign trail? If you do that, you just get the guy with the best sound-bites elected.
Isn't it great that we have so many choices for leadership? If we don't like the opinions of one person, we have one other person to choose from. Certainly each one of us can find one of these two people who will agree with and advocate for all that we believe in. Right?
In a sense, politics is a one-dimensional game at that level: at the extremes, either you believe that individual rights and responsibilities should be completely subservient to some "greater good" society, or you believe that individual rights and responsibilities are the dominant factor and any concept of society exists only to support them. A great many of the big decisions do flow naturally from this simple distinction: a preference for big vs. small government in general, and many more specific issues such as socialised healthcare vs. the private insurance model.
Of course it's not that simple in reality. There are some issues of ethics where perhaps people from both ends of the spectrum would agree. And there is no single concept of "society".
It seems to me that the biggest disruptive factor in politics, particularly in the US in recent years, is the concept of the corporation: entities that started as a group of individuals, taking advantage of collaboration in a free market to build a power base, are now recognised as having rights of their own, which necessarily compete with those of both individuals and society as a whole, while the people controlling those entities are shielded as individuals from most responsibility for the actions they control. Thus we have things like the recent banking collapses and the Enron fiasco, where the laws have not served to protect either individuals or the community as a whole for a long time, and now it is the rest of the people who have to deal with the mess. Likewise, we have Big Media raking in most of the profits from the work of a few individuals, backed by laws which have been distorted so they serve neither the individual artists nor society as a whole.
Right now, there are only two parties with a realistic prospect of winning power in the US in the near term, and both of them are heavily pro-corporation, so there is no real choice at all. It is an eternal mystery to me how this position was reached, given that corporations do not (yet) have the vote and there are other candidates in most elections. But now that the position has been reached, it seems that nothing short of fundamental reform of the electoral system will fix it. Of course, the parties in power are unlikely to do that voluntarily given their corporate affiliations, so it's going to need a slow, grass-roots process.
Berners-Lee also used to be the next president of the United States?
So you're suggesting that the way to beat this system is multiple personality disorder? :-)
Irony for the day: the sort of misinterpretation in the parent post and the rumours that result are exactly the sort of things Berners-Lee was concerned about in a recent interview. (See also: Slashdot article summaries. ;-))
I think the trick is not to try to create an authority to give endorsements itself — which we seem to agree is doomed before it starts — but rather to begin with a mechanism by which a web site can claim one or more endorsements by named parties on specified dates, those endorsements and dates can be verified in real time, and there is a mechanism for immediate revocation by the endorsing party if a more recent check makes continued endorsement inappropriate.
As various recent discussions on SSL have considered, we are already part way there, but at the moment all you can do is prove you have a secure connection to a certain on-line resource, without knowing who is behind that resource in real life. This is already a significant problem for industries such as banking, but any structured identification protocols developed to help there could just as well be used to show that, for example, a site describing first aid procedures was verified and endorsed by the Red Cross within the last three months.
The overheads of getting real people to check sites before giving an endorsement might be prohibitive, and I'm not sure you'd get that many endorsements relative to the number of sites that might deserve them if there was time to check them all. But starting from that basis, we could move to more of a web-of-trust system. As Google proved with their Page Rank algorithm, even a relatively simple idea along these lines can be remarkably effective as a starting point.
Of course, Google's story also tells us that sooner or later, people will learn how to game such a simple system, and that is an as-yet unsolved problem. But that doesn't mean it can't be solved, particularly if we're talking about a new organisation with some real world resources that could get real people to investigate the credentials of major nodes in your trust network as a starting point. Community-driven web sites like Wikipedia have shown us another possible tool we could use: it's also a system that can be gamed, but usually not for long without someone noticing, and for the most part the information supplied is good.
There is a lot of potential complexity here, and there are many ways things could go wrong. I doubt any system will ever be perfect. However, it's not as if this is a win/lose scenario: just improving the signal/noise ratio is a benefit to everyone affected, and we could certainly do better than we do today.
Hopefully the WWWF will take a rather more balanced view than that expressed in the parent post. I have some faith that it will: Berners-Lee has always struck me as both a smart guy and someone who genuinely wants to do the right thing. It is interesting that considering issues such as privacy and security is explicitly mentioned in the WWWF concept paper (available on their web site), but that Berners-Lee also told the BBC he was concerned about the need to separate rumour from reliable information on the web. Whether or not on-line anonymity should be possible is pretty fundamental to these issues.
They're not claiming to recreate the web or anything like that. Rather, Berners-Lee has expressed concern about some of the trends in the way the WWW is working, and is now doing something about it. One example cited in the media today is the difficulty in distinguishing between rumours and content from reputable sources, since there is no robust mechanism for indicating the authenticity or credibility of a web site. This has led to fears of the LHC sucking the world into a black hole or, more seriously, to parents being misinformed about the dangers of MMR vaccine and making health decisions that are not in their child's best interests because of the bad information.
I would suggest that this is a more general problem rather than anything specific to the web, and I don't believe it can ever be solved in all cases because there can never be an ultimate authority on all things, nor should there be. But an effort to provide a framework where realistically credible groups can be seen to endorse the content on certain sites as respectable has to be a step in the right direction: sometimes there's no substitute for seeing a qualified, experienced professional, but if I'm looking for general information on-line, I'd rather know that the professional-looking site I'm reading has been vetted by expert medical, legal, financial, technical or other eyes, as appropriate, rather than just being designed by someone with a good eye but containing content that is misleading or outright dangerous.
Surely being given an opportunity to demonstrate one's skill/flair isn't disrespectful?
It depends on how it's done.
Exactly. I'm in the camp that says some sort of programming test is fair for any level. If you're really a "Senior software engineer" with "excellent $LANGUAGE skills" then writing something like fizzbuzz will only take you two minutes, right? The number of people I've seen come to an interview making that sort of claim who could not code fizzbuzz is scary. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my tolerance for taking this sort of test myself increased significantly when I crossed from being an experienced developer who just found them patronising to having the kind of role that also involves sitting on the other side of the table from time to time and seeing what some of the other candidates are like.
On the other hand, I rather doubt I'll ever be working for the kind of place that has a whole-day interview process that consists of solving an endless series of trivial programming problems, followed by a load of "Have you seen this one before?" questions like the 1/2/5/10 problem. These tests are only useful as a block for the low end prankster, not as a way of gauging how good someone competent really is. After the first couple, if it seems like there are going to be more, I will take control of the interview and, usually, end it shortly thereafter.
This is a valuable reminder that interviewing is a two-way process, and that those applying for higher positions with more responsibility should be entitled to ask "difficult" questions that any competent employer should have no difficulty answering, too. Just as a significant proportion of interviewees are a joke, so are a significant proportion of interviewers/employers. These days, I'll basically let a prospective employer run the first interview, but if I'm called back for a second interview so I know they are serious, I will ask to see a sample of their production code and a sample of their development documentation, I'll ask straight questions about their software development process, company culture and working conditions, and if I'm still ambivalent perhaps I'll ask to speak privately with a current employee who is doing a similar job to the one I'm applying for.
I think perhaps you missed my point. I am not saying that abuses don't happen. On the contrary, I'm quite sure they do, and I oppose them as much as anyone.
What I am saying is that on-line anonymity isn't much of a protection from any government that has the power to abuse its citizens in that sort of way. The only way to administer a government in a manner that is safe for its people is via some sort of representative system to decide who gets to govern, combined with due process and effective separation of powers to stop any one part of the government becoming judge, jury and executioner. Without that, you could get that special 6am wake-up call anyway.
There's an old saying about boxes and the order they are to be used in. If you oppose a regime that doesn't respect the voice box, the answer isn't whispering, it's moving to the next box.
Wait... How can you correctly use this service?
How about under judicial oversight, to identify real criminals for prosecution through due process, like any other investigative tool in a civilised society?
The arguments about abuse by governments are fundamentally flawed: if a government is free to abuse this sort of thing, it's probably free to walk up to your front door and just arrest you without any evidence anyway. There are practical solutions to such problems, but this is not one of them.
Sadly, your comments could be applied with equal validity to most of the replies in this thread. I do wonder whether the people posting to discussions like this have ever stopped to think about the implications of allowing total anonymity and complete privacy, or whether they just parrot lots of stuff about "rights" and "freedoms" because it makes them feel like they're sticking it to the man. It would be interesting to know how many of these people, come election time, still vote for major political parties who will continue to run the same sort of system.
Privacy and anonymity have a valuable role to play, and should certainly be the default, but they cannot be an excuse to put people above the law in a civilised society. Anonymity separates freedom from responsibility, and that can be just as dangerous to the well-being of a society as having no freedom in the first place.
If a society's political system or legal framework are sufficiently screwed up that a reasonable balance is impossible, on-line anonymity is hardly their biggest problem, nor their salvation. This is my objection to the whole "Chinese dissidents", "American revolution" brigade: they seem to ignore the fact that the relative anonymity of the Internet today hasn't stopped the abuse by corrupt regimes, while at the same time ignoring all the illegal activities that nasty people are getting away with under cover of anonymity in more democratic societies.
It's doubtful someone would sue "Mozilla" (whoever that is; perhaps you mean Mozilla Corp? Mozilla Foundation?) over something not supplied by them. If anyone did do that, the response would probably be something simple like "It's nothing to do with us, go away", followed by some sort of legal counter-claim if necessary, rather than the nonsense posted by the parent.
Why on earth would any of the organisations behind Firefox be responsible for malware, just because someone chose to call it Firefox? Is your bank responsible for your loss if you fall for a phishing attack, just because someone in eastern Europe sent you an e-mail with the bank's logo on it? If I write a check and sign your name, do you have to pay it? Of course not.
and by getting rid of Firefox, it'll just be more difficult to get people to migrate...
Why? AFAIK, none of the commercial Mozilla groups has any special claim on the code. The only thing you get in exchange for this EULA nonsense is the Firefox branding, isn't it? Just fork the code and call it "Web browser" in the UI, or use one of the existing alternatives. Average Joe won't know the difference because he doesn't care what a browser is as long as he can see web sites, and anyone technical will probably understand what has been done and not object anyway, or they'll just download Firefox themselves. In any case, there doesn't seem any reason to set an unwelcome precedent by letting commercial groups who are trying to take control of big name, high value projects start dictating terms to popular distro suppliers.
Sure, but presumably there are also 21 cops who pulled those people over because they were driving like drunks, and 21 different units used to measure whether this was true, give or take the occasional overlap or the occasion second unit used for double-checking. It doesn't make the "There must be something wrong, Your Honour!" defence any more plausible, unless some of them actually have more than their own wishful thinking to back up their claim that the device actually is broken.
I would have thought that the court(s) would rule that the prosecution had to provide the court (and the defense) with the source code (and schematics, device testing procedures, ...) in order to use the results of the test as evidence.
That "..." is the killer. Where do you stop? Do they have to provide records of the quality control at the factory where the transistors were produced? The microcode on every chip in the unit? Academic papers justifying the models used in the measurement?
I have nothing against the defence having access to any relevant material that could make a case that there is reasonable doubt about their client's guilt. But there has to be some credible possibility of establishing such doubt before you go to this level, or you are just creating an open-ended route for anyone who doesn't like any court case against them to stall it out until it becomes too expensive to prosecute, and that surely isn't in the interests of justice.
I see where you're coming from, but I'm not sure I completely agree.
If the defence can produce to the court some evidence to suggest that the device may not be reliable, for example, indications that on some past occasions it has given false readings, or that the reading presented is within the device's margin of error of the relevant legal level of blood alcohol, then I do think that is a reasonable basis for further investigation. A court might consider that reasonable grounds for compelling the controlled release of the source code for expert analysis by the defence.
On the other hand, if the device has been used after a reasonable amount of testing, and the particular unit(s) in the case had been properly calibrated to whatever the accepted standard is, and the defence can only say "well, there might be a software bug!" without anything to back it up, then to me that is just a fishing expedition and allowing a case to be delayed is unrealistic. Sitting on a jury, if a police officer has observed driver behaviour suggesting they are drunk and a standard bit of kit with no history of failure backed up the officer's claim quantitatively, and the defence had nothing but pure conjecture about software as a counter-argument, I would have no difficulty in finding that "beyond reasonable doubt". It isn't beyond any doubt at all, but that is not the standard in a court case, and for good reason.
Thanks. Actually, I bought a pack that contained both games, but I figured I'd start with the first part first. :-)
Your point about young people's expectations is well taken, but on the flip side, young people are for the most part pretty clueless about economics so perhaps we shouldn't be too hasty to bend to their will. After all, it's all very well saying the law should adapt to the will of the people, but if dumb people don't think through the implications of their short term satisfaction, we may find that no-one makes big budget movies or games any more because it just isn't commercially viable. You can bet your house the same people who are freeloading today are going to bitch like crazy if that happens! For the Hollywood blockbuster type, you could argue that some money could be saved by not paying a small number of leading actors silly money, but in some cases, it just costs a fortune to film on location, get high quality artwork made for an entire game world, etc.
Thank you very much for sharing that. I can't tell you how annoying it's been, and it's obvious from reading the descriptions that the frequent crashes I have seen recently are caused by this problem. I knew my PC wouldn't be able to address all 4GB of physical RAM using a 32-bit WinXP because of the graphics card address mapping, but it didn't even occur to me that SupCom would be hitting 2GB, never mind being poor enough to crash without explanation when doing so!
If you don't mind, what graphics card are you using?
So the volume of apache servers is insignificant in comparison to the volume of commercial software servers? How about Radiohead making millions on an album they also gave for free? Does that example cover your "creativity isn't a manufactured product so profit isn't possible without copyright" argument?
Please go back and read my post again. It seems like you completely failed to understand what I said. In particular, I am talking about whether a creative industry as a whole would be as effecive at producing and distributing works without copyright. As I said before, it's not that the sharing model can't produce useful work, it's just that it does so far, far less frequently on the evidence to date.
Granting a short term in which no other person/entity may manufacture and sell a product save its creator is giving them first dibs at the market. I'm not sure why that's hard to understand.
They already had "first dibs at the market", because they start out as the only person with the work. Copyright confers no particular advantage in this respect, and is therefore no incentive from that point of view. What copyright does do is provide continued exclusivity that could otherwise be lost within moments of the early copies being sold. This is what provides the incentive to share works generally, rather than with just a select group of high payers.
As per your argument the volume of FOSS/creative commons products are smaller than the volume of copyrighted products I say naturally so. So long as businesses are granted such privilege they will take it, and they will abuse it.
But how can this be "natural", if the commons-based approach is a better incentive to produce and share useful works?
Certainly if the FOSS/Creative Commons approach were more effective as an incentive, we would expect the creators of works to be switching to these alternative models in large numbers, yet they have not done so in any creative field. This suggests a bound on the effectiveness of these alternative approaches as incentives to create and distribute works: they do not appear to be significantly better as an incentive than the copyright-based approach.
On the other hand, there are numerous areas where the commons approach has produced no offering, but commercial arrangements supported by copyright have provided useful products. This suggests that, at least in those areas, the copyright approach is an effective incentive, while the commons approach is not.
This looks to me like pretty objective evidence that copyright is doing its job, and a lack of any evidence that the commons approach would do that job any better.
Copyright/Intellectual property laws in their current metastasized form actively hinder the progress of science and the arts.
So people around here keep saying, yet so far not one of them had produced anything other than speculation and hand waving to support their position. If copyright is holding everyone back so much, why is so much useful stuff produced within that framework in so many different fields, when little or nothing is produced in those fields using alternative, commons-based approaches?
Now if only they'd fix the damn crash bugs. Every patch I've installed has made things worse, and my near-state-of-the-art, otherwise-100%-reliable gaming PC literally crashes every ten minutes with the 3280 patch on a large map. I've gone back to playing the original version, but of course it doesn't have all the small but nice improvements and the few extra units that the later revisions come with. The CD thing was a pain, but I would rather live with that than have an unplayable game...
A bit off-topic, but a friendly warning that anyone interested in this particular title might want to wait for feedback on the next patch.
It's hard to know where to start rebutting that. Lessig is a smart and thoughtful guy, but you could fly his precious aeroplanes through the holes in his argument in this case. Just to give a few obvious counter-points:
How about "agrees with copyright in principle but thinks current laws and implementation are unjust"?
That's a perfectly reasonable position, but then I would say that, since it's my position. :-)
However, this seems to fall pretty clearly into one of two of the categories I gave: either you accept the principle but copy anyway in the expectation that you won't get caught, or you accept the principle and choose not to deliberately infringe. There's nothing to say members of either group can't also be lobbying for fairer legal implementations of the copyright principle, but I think that's a separate issue.