So, score one for open source I guess, headline be damned.
OK, you win a point for open source, but only if you promise to criticise everyone who ever writes a snarky one-liner about how wonderful the Linux world is compared to any alternative platform because you can just "{package manager} {get command} {package name}".
Oh, and if you explain how all the companies forming behind major OSS projects like Linux are actually doing anything valuable in exchange for the money they get paid if they can't even provide robust support for the packages concerned and a high quality default installation. If the default packages don't work properly and you just have to rebuild from source anyway, why not just set up your own Linux installation with only those packages you actually care about and use, rely on the community for support, and let the Linux distro companies go bust?
Look, between the two "evils" of utterly stripping public officials and the government itself from any "privacy" and granting them "privacy" (which is by definition arbitrarily defined and subjective) to hide behind, it is clear that the former choice is orders of magnitude better.
I respectfully disagree. While you make valid points, they assume the extreme position of having no useful disclosure at all. Why can't there be a middle ground, where government are required to fully disclose any actions they are actually taking and any money they spend or accept? The people are quite capable of judging for themselves why they think the government did those things and voting accordingly, but actions always speak louder than words. (And if the government want national security get-outs on those releases, they should have to at least convince an independent panel, preferably a randomly selected citizen jury just like you'd get at a trial, who are entitled to see absolutely everything).
Yes, by entering public office you immediately forfeit all rights to a private life. This is definitely the way to encourage normal people with typical values to participate, rather than scaring them off and leaving a government full of sociopaths with exhibitionist God complexes.
Moreover, putting all internal government communications on the record is well known to encourage free and frank discussion among senior policy makers, leading to well considered decisions made in the best interests of those the government is supposed to represent. It certainly does not create a culture of CYA where everyone strives to do as little as possible so that they cannot be held accountable later.
The problem with sites like Wikileaks, and attitudes like the parent poster's, is that they basically assume that any kind of privacy and secrecy is bad. This simply is not true. Publishing confidential information, usually without context, independent verification, right to reply or responsibility accepted for any consequences, is not really in the interests of anyone except those seeking to build a reputation for themselves based on the hype. Wikileaks is basically a joke at this point, and frankly, the world would be a better place if it crawled back under the rock.
After all, since all terrorists use their real names when flying, it is sure to catch them all.
The irony of your post is that most of the perpetrators of recent terrorist attacks in the West had valid ID and were, in many cases, citizens of the country they attacked. Even with all the intrusive surveillance, vast databases and draconian security measures, they still got through, just by keeping a low profile until they were ready to attack. Which tells you exactly how much measures like the list we're talking about are actually worth in practice...
Oh, boy, are you in for a shock. They dunk you in Holy Water. If you drown, you're hired on the spot. Otherwise, you're a terrorist, and they shoot you.
Fair point. In that case, the next logical step is presumably that in sensitive cases, the court proceedings themselves are not open to the public for some (strictly limited) period, perhaps long enough for a pre-trial hearing, with those records only being released unanonymized if the case continues to a full hearing or something.
I have sometimes suggested that as a means to restore sanity to the copyright market, a copyright could exist for a relatively long time when held by the original creator of a work, but immediately be reduced to a relatively short time the moment it is transferred to any other party. Such a transfer is typically a purely commercial deal, and often with a known quantity so there is little risk involved. This leaves the original creators free to create many works in the expectation that they will have a fair chance to exploit them in an open market, which I think would be an effective incentive to produce many works of good quality. It also means that all the middlemen like book publishers and record labels can't wind up being the dominant force at the expense of both the consumer and the artist, as often happens today.
I think many of the problems with copyright in practice today basically stem from this middleman problem. There are decent ethical and economic arguments in favour of both the consumer and the artist, and while different people will favour different ones (and often produce dubious post facto arguments about the origins and "purpose" of copyright to support their position), I think most people would at least agree that the copyright can be of benefit to both these parties. Middlemen, on the other hand, are of "artistic" value only to the extent that they benefit one of the other groups, and are eminently expendable and readily replaced.
An alternative possibility would be to prohibit transfer of copyright entirely, but provide a legal framework for legally binding exclusive distribution deals with a statutory maximum period that is quite short (I'm thinking months, or maybe one or two years, at most). This way, there would still be a clear mechanism for any middleman to make a return by offering his services to artists, but a middleman who didn't get a work distributed effectively and thus make more money for the artist (and as a side effect, allow more other people to enjoy the work) would risk losing his position, and leave an artist free to seek another distributor. Also, if a work really took off in popularity, this would leave the artist with the power to renegotiate a deal with his distributor, or to seek a better deal elsewhere, rather than (as happens so much today) just making arbitrary profits for a middleman who is just a cash grabber while not benefitting the artist any further. Surely the artist-centric approach is a better incentive to produce works that are likely to fetch a higher price because of their quality or appeal to a wider audience because of their general interest, which again are in the interests of both the artist and the consumer (and the middleman who is actually earning his pay) in this scheme.
This is somewhat off-topic, but since you brought it up:
... go to any of the font collection websites, and you'll find all their fonts are free.
Well, no. The likes of Linotype and Adobe charge significant amounts for their fonts, and the major font collection web sites usually have deals with these big names. You can often buy the fonts cheaper through a reseller than direct, but it's still not free of charge.
These guys are in business, and as anyone who has ever tried it can testify, making a good font is a lot of hard work that a professional font designer usually expects to be paid for. On the other hand, the fonts from these sources are so much better than the cheaposoft offerings that make up the freebie font sites that serious font users are willing to pay for them. There is the occasional rare gem that someone is kind enough to give away for free, but rare is the correct word.
Actually, fonts are an interesting area in terms of IP rights. Some places, including the US, explicitly do not permit reserving certain types of rights in connection with the design of a font, on the basis that there is a risk of impairing communication if that approach is taken to its logical conclusion and that is too high a price to pay just to incentivise creation of new fonts. But copyright normally still applies to a font file itself, so if you want to create a clone of some commercial font you can do it (at least in the US) but you basically have to redo all the hard work from scratch. That seems fair enough, given the immense amount of time and effort by highly skilled people that goes into producing even a single professional grade font.
You can't control Internet by gagging a few editors because the Internet is full of normal people blogging away about the things that interest them.
Are your "normal people" also too stupid to understand why the judge's preference in this case might be guided by a well-informed sense of justice, and to acknowledge that he might actually be right? Do you really believe that everyone's right to know everything (whether or not it is actually true, and regardless of the practical implications) is far more important than an innocent person's right not to be tarnished for life for something they did not do?
I, for one, am very glad that someone intimately familiar with both the justice system and the real world implications of the Internet has stopped to think about the balance between public oversight of the judicial system and open government on the one hand, and a private citizen's rights to privacy and due process on the other. Personally, I'm 100% with the judge on this one.
If this doesn't work voluntarily, it may become necessary to anonymize court proceedings, so the defendant, witnesses, etc. are identified only by artificial names until the conclusion of a case (and the real names never released by the court in the event that the defendant is found not guilty). Frankly, I'd prefer that anyway, since I think it better serves the interests of justice while still keeping courts open and subject to a healthy level of oversight, but whether it is reasonable for a judge to start ordering this sort of thing unilaterally to make a point is a different question. Indeed, the extent of a lone judge's powers in cases like this, and to which they can or should lobby government for changes in the legal framework where their experience indicates it would be helpful, are all interesting questions.
Anyway, more power to this judge. If nothing else, his actions will raise important philosophical and ethical questions that are long overdue being addressed in the Internet age.
Programming functional style (and NO side effects) makes this task easier. With multi-threaded apps, its an all-or-nothing approach.
Is that perhaps a bit too much of a blanket statement? I assume that by "limiting side effects", the GP referred to having a controlled effect system where there is a clear model of what effects, and what interactions between those effects, are possible. I guess the most well-known example of this today is the monadic approach in Haskell, though that's not the only approach being explored. As long as you have a robust model that allows you to reason about the effects, I see no reason you couldn't potentially apply any auto-parallelisation techniques that are developed as well (as long as each auto-parallelisation technique you use only relies on guarantees the effect system proves are safe, of course).
Concurrency is another big win for interpreted (and to jit-ted code like Java) code. The compiler on the target machine gets to decide how to optimize the the code based on the number of processors.
Which would be great, if only someone had invented algorithms that could take advantage of that in cases other than trivial parallelisation where the more cores the better. Unfortunately, understanding of how to do that is still in its infancy even in academia, which means that the combination of old fashioned compilation plus moderate run-time adjustments are still likely to blow away anything interpreted for a while to come, and JIT compilation is no big advantage yet either.
My gut feeling tells me the solution will rather involve changing our expectations of privacy. In short, people will stop caring so much who knows what about their personal lives.
I've heard a few people say that, but personally I don't think it will work. We (the human race) have learned to value privacy for very practical reasons, and the damage caused by ignoring those possibilities won't be reduced just because we pretend it doesn't matter. Nor do I believe everyone will just learn to live with knowing things about other people all the time (and other people knowing things about them) that are best forgotten, or spoken only between friends. While I personally feel that honesty is usually the best policy, there are times when secrets, little white lies and second chances make life more pleasant for all concerned.
In short, everyone being completely open with everyone else is not a solution to the privacy problem. A few well-known authors in the field have written extensively about why this is so, and you might like to search for the commonly cited writing and research their arguments, since they make them far more powerfully and convincingly than I ever could in a Slashdot post.
Privacy is becoming impossible, and it seems a lot of people won't care.
The question that I ask is not whether they won't care, but whether the reason for that is genuine apathy or simply a lack of awareness.
There are many problems with society that people "don't care" about, and indeed governments and businesses love to publish surveys showing this when they are trying to drive through a controversial plan. However, when you explore the knowledge of the people surveyed, you often find they did not understand the issue they were asked to comment on, and crucially, when a more comprehensive and objective explanation has been given to them, they often change their minds and oppose the controversial move.
Put another way, ignorance and apathy are not the same thing. Everyone is ignorant about most things, because life is too short to become an expert on everything. This should not be mistaken for apathy, nor should a lack of protest from those unaware of an issue be interpreted as support for status quo. The solution to problems like this is often simply to raise public awareness in a calm, objective manner. Or, as the British government has been doing lately, to screw up in a way that personally affects literally half of the population.;-)
Terrorist actions could win the fight in theory, but in reality it's much harder to fight as a terrorist because the collateral damage turns the population against you. I just don't see any way an armed revolt could work given the realities of today's military.
Which is presumably why the vast power of the United States military, supported by numerous allied nations, subdued Iraq and established a secure replacement government so quickly. Oh, wait, they still haven't quite done that, have they?
You seem to be confusing terrorism with asymmetric warfare. The two concepts, while often encountered together, are quite different.
You are also assuming that all that military and security power would willingly turn against its own people if it really came to the crunch. That seems unlikely, and it would only take a relatively small amount of resistance in military units or intelligence organisations to cause a great deal of damage. After all, that is why these groups take security so seriously when confronting other foes.
The really sad thing is that the US government (and those of many other nations) have basically talked themselves into the current madness by overreacting to a small number of isolated but high profile events, developing a culture of fear, and giving absurdy disproportionate emphasis and resources to vaguely defined goals that are somehow supposed to prevent any further high profile bad events. In other words, the terrorists have won, because now the government is doing their job for them and forcing people to change their behaviour out of fear. Meanwhile, orders of magnitude more innocent lives have been lost in the resulting conflicts than ever were in the original attacks. Even worse, orders of magnitude more damage has been done by wasting time, money and public awareness on assorted wars on abstract nouns instead of basic things like making roads safer, curing illnesses, heating the homes of the elderly in winter, and improving the education and opportunities of our kids so they don't go on to become bored and disillusioned enough to explore lives of crime in the first place, any of which alone would do more to improve the health and happiness of the nations than any military action or national security effort ever could.
That's true, but the one blessing we have here is that it's pretty hard to conceal the fact that you have a database that isn't supposed to exist any more storing data on 61 million people. Such stories have a way of leaking to the press, and if the culture continues to shift again state surveillance, such stores are going to become politically very costly. In any case, it's hard to present evidence in court that you're not allowed to have, which in itself makes keeping databases pretty much a waste of time (and money) for most government departments, and protects the people against minor abuses or incidental failures, which is certainly worth doing.
I think it's just a generally authoritarian regime, with insufficient checks and balances.
It probably comes from a succession of Home Secretaries have each made the last look tame in their willingness to disregard any semblance of due process and respect for personal privacy in their quest to do whatever they felt needed doing at the time. This was carried out under weak leadership that relied on the politics of fear and more generally a culture of spin for several years under Blair, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11 and then the London bombings. Now we have Brown and his administration, who don't have a mandate but many of whom were also involved in the previous government so they can't make a break for new territory. And throughout the past decade the ruling party have held a comfortable absolute majority in Parliament, so few MPs have been willing to rock the boat and challenge any of the legislation.
Having created such a climate of fear, the Blair/Brown administration has essentially denied itself a politically credible way of saying "that was a bad call" and backing away from things like the ID cards and database state. It therefore persists in claiming that long-debunked benefits and obviously optimistic costs will come to pass, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
During the same period, there has been an increasing reliance on automated means of enforcing laws rather than using trained police officers and judicial proceedings on a case-by-case basis. An obvious example is the rise in ANPR cameras, dramatic drop in traffic police numbers, consequent reliance on summary justice and prosecuting technical offences like speeding or mobile phone use rather than actual dangerous or inconsiderate driving, and therefore the ever-necessary spin that this sort of blanket law enforcement actually makes things better. Again, this happens despite all evidence to the contrary and the easy debunking of many of the statistical arguments made by government spin doctors to support their doomed policies. Once the technological framework for enforcement of such blanket laws was in place, authoritarian scope creep was inevitable, and the old line about it being easier to ask forgiveness than permission was never more apt. Similar stories will probably be told about monitoring communications channels, the appalling rise in the use of CCTV (yet again, despite ample evidence showing that it isn't actually helping overall), and so on.
Supporting all of this wherever possible is a media driven by sales, and sadly, a good scare story is great for sales. All too few of the population have ever stopped to think deeply about the implications of our current path, and we are outnumbered by those who will believe whatever the latest tabloid editor tells them.
Pretty much the only government voices opposing these measures are a few judges who retain some common sense, but whose hands are tied by the laws passed by the government (who are not afraid of reconfiguring the judicial system itself if they can get away with it), and the Information Commissioner, who is basically a good guy as far as I can tell, but whose department is obviously hopelessly underfunded and understaffed to cope with all the data protection and freedom of information cases they are tasked with handling. As a consequence, other government departments break the freedom of information laws with impunity, and only when a high profile media outlet gets stung does anyone really make any fuss over this. I sincerely hope that this will change and pressure to increase both the power and resources of the Information Commissioner's Office will result in some improvement in the fairly near future.
Basically, it's all a loaded deck. With those at the top of government more concerned with being seen to be tough on crime and terrorism than actually doing effective things to improve the situation, and a media who love a population in fear behind them, absurdly generalised and draconian powers have been pushed through Parliament, everyone fro
A year or two ago, I might have agreed with you in despair, but in light of the increasing number of high-profile government screw-ups that are now making it into mainstream media, there may yet be hope of some sanity being imposed before our governments entrench surveillance/database powers beyond any hope of effective removal. (Here in the UK, I consider that to mean before the National Identity Register is fully established, ID cards are in widespread use and similar projects like the DNA database and ANPR tracking are too big to bring back under control by deleting data that should never have been kept permanently in the first place.)
Note that several of the administrations that are primarily responsible for the current draconian state powers will be subject to elections that could remove them from power within the next year or two. If privacy and state intrusion become significant electoral issues before then, the balance reached might at least be tolerable. Again, even a year ago I would have worried that the elections would happen too soon, but at least here in the UK, the issue is actually gaining a high enough profile that it could swing a significant number of votes at the next general election (and fortunately, both of the main opposition parties in England are on the record prominently as opposing things like the ID card scheme, which means making more aggressive promises may swing votes between them).
The only way to safeguard privacy in a world where ever more intrusive collection mechanisms, mass storage and automated processing of data is possible is to have a default policy that personal data cannot be held and then work on the exceptions. We need to understand the old saying that just because we can do something it does not mean we should, to consider what ethical boundaries could or should exist, and to make people, particularly young people, more aware of the benefits of privacy, the implications of giving it up, and the fact that privacy is not a binary switch.
Such an approach will inevitably require a dramatic shift in the assumptions (and sometimes business models) that commercial and government entities operate with today, but without it, nothing else really matters. If businesses and governments are allowed to collect, store and mine personal data with little effective restriction on what data they use and how they get it, then given the inherent imbalance in resources between those organisations and any individual, it will be impossible to reconcile significant privacy with a typical modern lifestyle.
There is no point fining the government in these circumstances, because when they lose almost half the population's details, those people just pay themselves and everyone else effectively gets fined. I didn't vote for for the b*****ds in the first place, and neither did most other people, so I would consider such a fine to be rather unethical on several counts!
IMHO, the only effective response in cases like this is personal liability: someone in charge has to have personal consequences that directly and seriously affect them in the event of a breach. I'm not necessarily talking about jail time or million pound fines for accidental breaches, but something equivalent to barring them from holding any public office, or in the private sector from acting as a company director, for a significant period of time would seem appropriate. Deliberate breaches are a different matter, and I have no problem with major fines or jail time for anyone who deliberately and maliciously abuses access to personal information. Data protection is a serious issue, identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes there is and also one that is deeply unpleasant and inconvenient for the victim, and it's about time our legal system stopped treating it like a minor misdemeanour.
I believe there should also be a law requiring that any government procedure that can compel a citizen to provide information and/or money or other material goods must come with a corresponding appeal procedure that provides for correcting errors quickly, easily and at no cost to the victim, under judicial oversight, and again with direct personal penalties for anyone responsible for setting up a system that gets things wrong without making adequate provision for correcting the inevitable mistakes.
Bottom line: heads have to roll at high levels before anything will change. As long as anyone who screws up still gets to go to work tomorrow and hide behind corporate responsibility or crown immunity, nothing will change.
I'm still trying to figure this 4 million figure out. The child benefit leak alone lost personal details relating to 25 million people, and that was in October 2007 so still comfortably within a year of today. There have since been numerous other leaks, with anywhere from a few hundred to many thousand people involved. Much of the information has been highly sensitive: not just names and addresses, but classified national security information, information about criminal records, information about people applying for sensitive jobs and who has been asked to vouch for them, etc.
This whole affair is somewhat ironic for me. I have long argued against the database state and national ID cards on the basis that not only do such measures present obvious civil liberties concerns and potential for abuse, but more seriously they will be operated primarily by bored, low-paid civil servants who type thousands of names, address and so on every day into software developed by a government and contractors with a near 100% record of project failure, making accidental mistakes (which will inevitably require vastly disproportionate effort by the victim to fix) a much bigger danger to the average citizen than malicious attacks. I am reassured that the media and thus the public are finally starting to realise this. Better late than never!
Incidentally, as a point of general interest, there are now more than 61 million people living in the UK. According to statistics released yesterday by the ONS, the count is rising by about 1 million every three years, due partly to long-term migration, and partly to an increase in child birth (much of which is due to earlier migrants starting to have children).
For example how about a fellow accused of date rape being unable to open records showing that the female has accused nine different men of the same thing over a twelve year period?
Rape is a very difficult thing to prove, as a consequence of which some true accusations do not result in a conviction. In fact, the conviction rate for rape is one of the lowest of any crime. Someone who had the track record you describe would be unusually unlucky and should perhaps reconsider her lifestyle for her own benefit, but the victim's lifestyle is never an excuse for committing a crime against them and statistically it is, unfortunately, credible that so many true accusations could be made yet none of them result in a conviction.
In other words, your perhaps well-meaning but actually naive and uninformed argument is exactly the reason such past records should not be given undue weight in cases like this (and in some jurisdictions, there are rules about admissible evidence and historical records being presented to juries that cover this sort of thing).
Privacy and freedom are dead opposite notions.
Neither is black and white, and the right to a private life is recognised on the same level as other basic human rights in most of the major constitutional and international treaty declarations on the subject.
This is very important, simply because no-one is perfect, and a world in which no-one gets a second chance would be a very nasty place to live. This isn't just hypothetical: in an earlier post in this discussion, I mentioned the fact that people who are forever held to account for a minor offence committed in their youth have a much higher reoffending rate, for example.
In a free society where anyone can accumulate information one simply must claim responsibility for one's actions. Those with stains on their past should be willing to live with those stains.
Everyone has stains in their past, and most of us probably have something, somewhere, that could potentially have very serious consequences such as the loss of a job or the break-up of a relationship. If I disowned any friend I knew to have done something I personally disapproved of that might hurt another of my friends, I would have few friends left, so I keep secrets. Who would really benefit if I told everyone everything I know about everyone else? No-one. And who am I to judge my friends' actions anyway? I'm no angel, only human, and humans have evolved the concept of privacy because experience shows that forgiveness and moving on are usually better than bearing grudges forever. Perhaps in a world where everyone realised that no-one is perfect and honestly didn't give undue weight to past indiscretions, this wouldn't be a problem, but it will be a long time before we live in that world.
I do agree, strongly, that with freedom comes responsibility. I'm not a big supporter of arbitrary free speech protected by anonymity, for example. But I do believe that in an ideal world, such anonymity would only be involuntarily compromised under specific circumstances when it was appropriate, under judicial oversight; I'm not talking about banning nicknames in on-line discussions, I'm just talking about someone whose life is ruined by people slandering them and hiding behind nicknames being able to identify their attacker and seek justice in court. This is a difficult issue in the age of the Internet, when international laws do not always agree on what is and is not acceptable behaviour and there is no universal legitimate authority to determine when anonymity should be broken, but one thing that is certain is that this is not a black and white issue.
One of the major points of a free society is the openness of courts. The reason is that it's a lot harder to engage in shenanigans if you know that the public has the ability to attend the proceedings or view the record.
Yes, but the important thing is that any member of the public may observe a court in action to determine that it is being run according to a fair process. For this purpose, the way a case is dealt with and any precedents the ruling sets are very important, but the participants in the particular case are not.
In an appropriate metaphor, allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment and support the anonymity of court participants. There are several good reasons for keeping the identity of any participant in a court case secret.
Firstly, witnesses and victims may have to disclose personal, embarrassing or otherwise private information in court. If they are effectively guaranteeing by doing so that the whole world can find out this information, it will inevitably make people less willing to come forward. This is not in the interests of justice, and it clearly is a real problem, as the recent debate in the UK over allowing testimony by witnesses whose identities are concealed has demonstrated. (The specific problem there is a much more difficult one, as it relates to permitting absolute anonymity even in court; I use it only to demonstrate that people do get put off appearing because of these issues.)
Secondly, the law may acknowledge the concept of a second chance when a criminal has paid their dues, but there is little point officially saying that someone is no longer required to disclose a past conviction for a minor offence after a certain period if anyone dealing with them can just look it up on-line anyway. Again, the UK has demonstrated this problem recently with the CRB mess, where people in good standing doing everyday jobs have suddenly been fired because some new jobsworth manager made an illegal request for a CRB check, got information to which they were never entitled by law, and then for example fired someone in their 30s for a minor shoplifting conviction 20 years earlier. Again, it is unlikely that retaining such information serves the interests of justice, which is why there are second chance laws in some jurisdictions in the first place. Moreover, any argument that retaining that information in the public domain is beneficial to society is trivially debunked: the reoffending rate is dramatically reduced when criminals who have paid the court-ordered price for their actions are allowed to get on with their lives, while denying them a second chance to get a job and rebuild their lives leads to a high probability of reoffending and committing more serious crimes. I note that no "second chance" laws I'm aware of would hide someone who had committed a terrible crime like murder or rape in this way, and those with legitimate needs to know about such convictions can find out about them forever under UK law via CRB checks anyway, so this is not an argument for opening court records.
Finally, if court records for ongoing cases are made available, then there is the problem of stigma: anyone accused of committing a crime will naturally be suspected of having done so, and even if the court subsequently finds them not guilty, there is no guarantee that anyone who sees the court record showing the charges will also see the final result. IMHO, if someone has been found not guilty by a court, there should be no public record identifying them personally that even shows they were charged.
In none of these cases would it be necessary to restrict public, searchable court records from disclosing the evidence considered (or the nature of the evidence, where the details would disclose identity), the conclusions drawn and the resulting verdict. But those are three pretty strong arguments for not naming names or otherwise personally identifying participants.
Perl has no mainstream, normal, people yelling and screaming for it. There's just the older, gruffer programmers and, more likely, sysadmins.
Yeah, the same sorts of idiots who still use UNIX, Emacs, C and Usenet (with that whole snipping and bottom-posting weirdness). Some of them probably even grok Lisp and wasted their time learning prehistoric nonsense like assembly language. Don't even get them started on documentation, or designing code before writing it; if you even mention unit tests, they'll just mumble something about understanding how code works before changing it. What have people like that ever done for the world, anyway?
You know, one day it would be really funny if these dinosaurs decided to take a sabbatical for a couple of months, all at the same time, and let the younger generation and their high-tech advances run the show for a while. Then management would see how much more effective you can be with a 3D GUI in your OS, a visual IDE, web application frameworks and wikis!
The differences between endianess, width of various data types, etc etc. would get you anyway if you try to simply reuse nontrivial x86 C/C++ code non-trivial on other architechtures.
How do you figure that? C was created to be a portable assembly language. I haven't seen a lot of horror stories about porting C code written for 32-bit machines to 64-bit platforms in recent years. What differences do you think are difficult to overcome?
Slashdot Mirror
So, score one for open source I guess, headline be damned.
OK, you win a point for open source, but only if you promise to criticise everyone who ever writes a snarky one-liner about how wonderful the Linux world is compared to any alternative platform because you can just "{package manager} {get command} {package name}".
Oh, and if you explain how all the companies forming behind major OSS projects like Linux are actually doing anything valuable in exchange for the money they get paid if they can't even provide robust support for the packages concerned and a high quality default installation. If the default packages don't work properly and you just have to rebuild from source anyway, why not just set up your own Linux installation with only those packages you actually care about and use, rely on the community for support, and let the Linux distro companies go bust?
Look, between the two "evils" of utterly stripping public officials and the government itself from any "privacy" and granting them "privacy" (which is by definition arbitrarily defined and subjective) to hide behind, it is clear that the former choice is orders of magnitude better.
I respectfully disagree. While you make valid points, they assume the extreme position of having no useful disclosure at all. Why can't there be a middle ground, where government are required to fully disclose any actions they are actually taking and any money they spend or accept? The people are quite capable of judging for themselves why they think the government did those things and voting accordingly, but actions always speak louder than words. (And if the government want national security get-outs on those releases, they should have to at least convince an independent panel, preferably a randomly selected citizen jury just like you'd get at a trial, who are entitled to see absolutely everything).
Yes, by entering public office you immediately forfeit all rights to a private life. This is definitely the way to encourage normal people with typical values to participate, rather than scaring them off and leaving a government full of sociopaths with exhibitionist God complexes.
Moreover, putting all internal government communications on the record is well known to encourage free and frank discussion among senior policy makers, leading to well considered decisions made in the best interests of those the government is supposed to represent. It certainly does not create a culture of CYA where everyone strives to do as little as possible so that they cannot be held accountable later.
The problem with sites like Wikileaks, and attitudes like the parent poster's, is that they basically assume that any kind of privacy and secrecy is bad. This simply is not true. Publishing confidential information, usually without context, independent verification, right to reply or responsibility accepted for any consequences, is not really in the interests of anyone except those seeking to build a reputation for themselves based on the hype. Wikileaks is basically a joke at this point, and frankly, the world would be a better place if it crawled back under the rock.
After all, since all terrorists use their real names when flying, it is sure to catch them all.
The irony of your post is that most of the perpetrators of recent terrorist attacks in the West had valid ID and were, in many cases, citizens of the country they attacked. Even with all the intrusive surveillance, vast databases and draconian security measures, they still got through, just by keeping a low profile until they were ready to attack. Which tells you exactly how much measures like the list we're talking about are actually worth in practice...
Oh, boy, are you in for a shock. They dunk you in Holy Water. If you drown, you're hired on the spot. Otherwise, you're a terrorist, and they shoot you.
Fair point. In that case, the next logical step is presumably that in sensitive cases, the court proceedings themselves are not open to the public for some (strictly limited) period, perhaps long enough for a pre-trial hearing, with those records only being released unanonymized if the case continues to a full hearing or something.
Yeah, I remember the days when you could tell the difference between an Intel processor and an nVidia graphics chipset. :-)
I have sometimes suggested that as a means to restore sanity to the copyright market, a copyright could exist for a relatively long time when held by the original creator of a work, but immediately be reduced to a relatively short time the moment it is transferred to any other party. Such a transfer is typically a purely commercial deal, and often with a known quantity so there is little risk involved. This leaves the original creators free to create many works in the expectation that they will have a fair chance to exploit them in an open market, which I think would be an effective incentive to produce many works of good quality. It also means that all the middlemen like book publishers and record labels can't wind up being the dominant force at the expense of both the consumer and the artist, as often happens today.
I think many of the problems with copyright in practice today basically stem from this middleman problem. There are decent ethical and economic arguments in favour of both the consumer and the artist, and while different people will favour different ones (and often produce dubious post facto arguments about the origins and "purpose" of copyright to support their position), I think most people would at least agree that the copyright can be of benefit to both these parties. Middlemen, on the other hand, are of "artistic" value only to the extent that they benefit one of the other groups, and are eminently expendable and readily replaced.
An alternative possibility would be to prohibit transfer of copyright entirely, but provide a legal framework for legally binding exclusive distribution deals with a statutory maximum period that is quite short (I'm thinking months, or maybe one or two years, at most). This way, there would still be a clear mechanism for any middleman to make a return by offering his services to artists, but a middleman who didn't get a work distributed effectively and thus make more money for the artist (and as a side effect, allow more other people to enjoy the work) would risk losing his position, and leave an artist free to seek another distributor. Also, if a work really took off in popularity, this would leave the artist with the power to renegotiate a deal with his distributor, or to seek a better deal elsewhere, rather than (as happens so much today) just making arbitrary profits for a middleman who is just a cash grabber while not benefitting the artist any further. Surely the artist-centric approach is a better incentive to produce works that are likely to fetch a higher price because of their quality or appeal to a wider audience because of their general interest, which again are in the interests of both the artist and the consumer (and the middleman who is actually earning his pay) in this scheme.
This is somewhat off-topic, but since you brought it up:
... go to any of the font collection websites, and you'll find all their fonts are free.
Well, no. The likes of Linotype and Adobe charge significant amounts for their fonts, and the major font collection web sites usually have deals with these big names. You can often buy the fonts cheaper through a reseller than direct, but it's still not free of charge.
These guys are in business, and as anyone who has ever tried it can testify, making a good font is a lot of hard work that a professional font designer usually expects to be paid for. On the other hand, the fonts from these sources are so much better than the cheaposoft offerings that make up the freebie font sites that serious font users are willing to pay for them. There is the occasional rare gem that someone is kind enough to give away for free, but rare is the correct word.
Actually, fonts are an interesting area in terms of IP rights. Some places, including the US, explicitly do not permit reserving certain types of rights in connection with the design of a font, on the basis that there is a risk of impairing communication if that approach is taken to its logical conclusion and that is too high a price to pay just to incentivise creation of new fonts. But copyright normally still applies to a font file itself, so if you want to create a clone of some commercial font you can do it (at least in the US) but you basically have to redo all the hard work from scratch. That seems fair enough, given the immense amount of time and effort by highly skilled people that goes into producing even a single professional grade font.
You can't control Internet by gagging a few editors because the Internet is full of normal people blogging away about the things that interest them.
Are your "normal people" also too stupid to understand why the judge's preference in this case might be guided by a well-informed sense of justice, and to acknowledge that he might actually be right? Do you really believe that everyone's right to know everything (whether or not it is actually true, and regardless of the practical implications) is far more important than an innocent person's right not to be tarnished for life for something they did not do?
I, for one, am very glad that someone intimately familiar with both the justice system and the real world implications of the Internet has stopped to think about the balance between public oversight of the judicial system and open government on the one hand, and a private citizen's rights to privacy and due process on the other. Personally, I'm 100% with the judge on this one.
If this doesn't work voluntarily, it may become necessary to anonymize court proceedings, so the defendant, witnesses, etc. are identified only by artificial names until the conclusion of a case (and the real names never released by the court in the event that the defendant is found not guilty). Frankly, I'd prefer that anyway, since I think it better serves the interests of justice while still keeping courts open and subject to a healthy level of oversight, but whether it is reasonable for a judge to start ordering this sort of thing unilaterally to make a point is a different question. Indeed, the extent of a lone judge's powers in cases like this, and to which they can or should lobby government for changes in the legal framework where their experience indicates it would be helpful, are all interesting questions.
Anyway, more power to this judge. If nothing else, his actions will raise important philosophical and ethical questions that are long overdue being addressed in the Internet age.
Programming functional style (and NO side effects) makes this task easier. With multi-threaded apps, its an all-or-nothing approach.
Is that perhaps a bit too much of a blanket statement? I assume that by "limiting side effects", the GP referred to having a controlled effect system where there is a clear model of what effects, and what interactions between those effects, are possible. I guess the most well-known example of this today is the monadic approach in Haskell, though that's not the only approach being explored. As long as you have a robust model that allows you to reason about the effects, I see no reason you couldn't potentially apply any auto-parallelisation techniques that are developed as well (as long as each auto-parallelisation technique you use only relies on guarantees the effect system proves are safe, of course).
Concurrency is another big win for interpreted (and to jit-ted code like Java) code. The compiler on the target machine gets to decide how to optimize the the code based on the number of processors.
Which would be great, if only someone had invented algorithms that could take advantage of that in cases other than trivial parallelisation where the more cores the better. Unfortunately, understanding of how to do that is still in its infancy even in academia, which means that the combination of old fashioned compilation plus moderate run-time adjustments are still likely to blow away anything interpreted for a while to come, and JIT compilation is no big advantage yet either.
My gut feeling tells me the solution will rather involve changing our expectations of privacy. In short, people will stop caring so much who knows what about their personal lives.
I've heard a few people say that, but personally I don't think it will work. We (the human race) have learned to value privacy for very practical reasons, and the damage caused by ignoring those possibilities won't be reduced just because we pretend it doesn't matter. Nor do I believe everyone will just learn to live with knowing things about other people all the time (and other people knowing things about them) that are best forgotten, or spoken only between friends. While I personally feel that honesty is usually the best policy, there are times when secrets, little white lies and second chances make life more pleasant for all concerned.
In short, everyone being completely open with everyone else is not a solution to the privacy problem. A few well-known authors in the field have written extensively about why this is so, and you might like to search for the commonly cited writing and research their arguments, since they make them far more powerfully and convincingly than I ever could in a Slashdot post.
Privacy is becoming impossible, and it seems a lot of people won't care.
The question that I ask is not whether they won't care, but whether the reason for that is genuine apathy or simply a lack of awareness.
There are many problems with society that people "don't care" about, and indeed governments and businesses love to publish surveys showing this when they are trying to drive through a controversial plan. However, when you explore the knowledge of the people surveyed, you often find they did not understand the issue they were asked to comment on, and crucially, when a more comprehensive and objective explanation has been given to them, they often change their minds and oppose the controversial move.
Put another way, ignorance and apathy are not the same thing. Everyone is ignorant about most things, because life is too short to become an expert on everything. This should not be mistaken for apathy, nor should a lack of protest from those unaware of an issue be interpreted as support for status quo. The solution to problems like this is often simply to raise public awareness in a calm, objective manner. Or, as the British government has been doing lately, to screw up in a way that personally affects literally half of the population. ;-)
Terrorist actions could win the fight in theory, but in reality it's much harder to fight as a terrorist because the collateral damage turns the population against you. I just don't see any way an armed revolt could work given the realities of today's military.
Which is presumably why the vast power of the United States military, supported by numerous allied nations, subdued Iraq and established a secure replacement government so quickly. Oh, wait, they still haven't quite done that, have they?
You seem to be confusing terrorism with asymmetric warfare. The two concepts, while often encountered together, are quite different.
You are also assuming that all that military and security power would willingly turn against its own people if it really came to the crunch. That seems unlikely, and it would only take a relatively small amount of resistance in military units or intelligence organisations to cause a great deal of damage. After all, that is why these groups take security so seriously when confronting other foes.
The really sad thing is that the US government (and those of many other nations) have basically talked themselves into the current madness by overreacting to a small number of isolated but high profile events, developing a culture of fear, and giving absurdy disproportionate emphasis and resources to vaguely defined goals that are somehow supposed to prevent any further high profile bad events. In other words, the terrorists have won, because now the government is doing their job for them and forcing people to change their behaviour out of fear. Meanwhile, orders of magnitude more innocent lives have been lost in the resulting conflicts than ever were in the original attacks. Even worse, orders of magnitude more damage has been done by wasting time, money and public awareness on assorted wars on abstract nouns instead of basic things like making roads safer, curing illnesses, heating the homes of the elderly in winter, and improving the education and opportunities of our kids so they don't go on to become bored and disillusioned enough to explore lives of crime in the first place, any of which alone would do more to improve the health and happiness of the nations than any military action or national security effort ever could.
That's true, but the one blessing we have here is that it's pretty hard to conceal the fact that you have a database that isn't supposed to exist any more storing data on 61 million people. Such stories have a way of leaking to the press, and if the culture continues to shift again state surveillance, such stores are going to become politically very costly. In any case, it's hard to present evidence in court that you're not allowed to have, which in itself makes keeping databases pretty much a waste of time (and money) for most government departments, and protects the people against minor abuses or incidental failures, which is certainly worth doing.
I think it's just a generally authoritarian regime, with insufficient checks and balances.
It probably comes from a succession of Home Secretaries have each made the last look tame in their willingness to disregard any semblance of due process and respect for personal privacy in their quest to do whatever they felt needed doing at the time. This was carried out under weak leadership that relied on the politics of fear and more generally a culture of spin for several years under Blair, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11 and then the London bombings. Now we have Brown and his administration, who don't have a mandate but many of whom were also involved in the previous government so they can't make a break for new territory. And throughout the past decade the ruling party have held a comfortable absolute majority in Parliament, so few MPs have been willing to rock the boat and challenge any of the legislation.
Having created such a climate of fear, the Blair/Brown administration has essentially denied itself a politically credible way of saying "that was a bad call" and backing away from things like the ID cards and database state. It therefore persists in claiming that long-debunked benefits and obviously optimistic costs will come to pass, in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
During the same period, there has been an increasing reliance on automated means of enforcing laws rather than using trained police officers and judicial proceedings on a case-by-case basis. An obvious example is the rise in ANPR cameras, dramatic drop in traffic police numbers, consequent reliance on summary justice and prosecuting technical offences like speeding or mobile phone use rather than actual dangerous or inconsiderate driving, and therefore the ever-necessary spin that this sort of blanket law enforcement actually makes things better. Again, this happens despite all evidence to the contrary and the easy debunking of many of the statistical arguments made by government spin doctors to support their doomed policies. Once the technological framework for enforcement of such blanket laws was in place, authoritarian scope creep was inevitable, and the old line about it being easier to ask forgiveness than permission was never more apt. Similar stories will probably be told about monitoring communications channels, the appalling rise in the use of CCTV (yet again, despite ample evidence showing that it isn't actually helping overall), and so on.
Supporting all of this wherever possible is a media driven by sales, and sadly, a good scare story is great for sales. All too few of the population have ever stopped to think deeply about the implications of our current path, and we are outnumbered by those who will believe whatever the latest tabloid editor tells them.
Pretty much the only government voices opposing these measures are a few judges who retain some common sense, but whose hands are tied by the laws passed by the government (who are not afraid of reconfiguring the judicial system itself if they can get away with it), and the Information Commissioner, who is basically a good guy as far as I can tell, but whose department is obviously hopelessly underfunded and understaffed to cope with all the data protection and freedom of information cases they are tasked with handling. As a consequence, other government departments break the freedom of information laws with impunity, and only when a high profile media outlet gets stung does anyone really make any fuss over this. I sincerely hope that this will change and pressure to increase both the power and resources of the Information Commissioner's Office will result in some improvement in the fairly near future.
Basically, it's all a loaded deck. With those at the top of government more concerned with being seen to be tough on crime and terrorism than actually doing effective things to improve the situation, and a media who love a population in fear behind them, absurdly generalised and draconian powers have been pushed through Parliament, everyone fro
A year or two ago, I might have agreed with you in despair, but in light of the increasing number of high-profile government screw-ups that are now making it into mainstream media, there may yet be hope of some sanity being imposed before our governments entrench surveillance/database powers beyond any hope of effective removal. (Here in the UK, I consider that to mean before the National Identity Register is fully established, ID cards are in widespread use and similar projects like the DNA database and ANPR tracking are too big to bring back under control by deleting data that should never have been kept permanently in the first place.)
Note that several of the administrations that are primarily responsible for the current draconian state powers will be subject to elections that could remove them from power within the next year or two. If privacy and state intrusion become significant electoral issues before then, the balance reached might at least be tolerable. Again, even a year ago I would have worried that the elections would happen too soon, but at least here in the UK, the issue is actually gaining a high enough profile that it could swing a significant number of votes at the next general election (and fortunately, both of the main opposition parties in England are on the record prominently as opposing things like the ID card scheme, which means making more aggressive promises may swing votes between them).
The only way to safeguard privacy in a world where ever more intrusive collection mechanisms, mass storage and automated processing of data is possible is to have a default policy that personal data cannot be held and then work on the exceptions. We need to understand the old saying that just because we can do something it does not mean we should, to consider what ethical boundaries could or should exist, and to make people, particularly young people, more aware of the benefits of privacy, the implications of giving it up, and the fact that privacy is not a binary switch.
Such an approach will inevitably require a dramatic shift in the assumptions (and sometimes business models) that commercial and government entities operate with today, but without it, nothing else really matters. If businesses and governments are allowed to collect, store and mine personal data with little effective restriction on what data they use and how they get it, then given the inherent imbalance in resources between those organisations and any individual, it will be impossible to reconcile significant privacy with a typical modern lifestyle.
There is no point fining the government in these circumstances, because when they lose almost half the population's details, those people just pay themselves and everyone else effectively gets fined. I didn't vote for for the b*****ds in the first place, and neither did most other people, so I would consider such a fine to be rather unethical on several counts!
IMHO, the only effective response in cases like this is personal liability: someone in charge has to have personal consequences that directly and seriously affect them in the event of a breach. I'm not necessarily talking about jail time or million pound fines for accidental breaches, but something equivalent to barring them from holding any public office, or in the private sector from acting as a company director, for a significant period of time would seem appropriate. Deliberate breaches are a different matter, and I have no problem with major fines or jail time for anyone who deliberately and maliciously abuses access to personal information. Data protection is a serious issue, identity theft is one of the fastest growing crimes there is and also one that is deeply unpleasant and inconvenient for the victim, and it's about time our legal system stopped treating it like a minor misdemeanour.
I believe there should also be a law requiring that any government procedure that can compel a citizen to provide information and/or money or other material goods must come with a corresponding appeal procedure that provides for correcting errors quickly, easily and at no cost to the victim, under judicial oversight, and again with direct personal penalties for anyone responsible for setting up a system that gets things wrong without making adequate provision for correcting the inevitable mistakes.
Bottom line: heads have to roll at high levels before anything will change. As long as anyone who screws up still gets to go to work tomorrow and hide behind corporate responsibility or crown immunity, nothing will change.
I'm still trying to figure this 4 million figure out. The child benefit leak alone lost personal details relating to 25 million people, and that was in October 2007 so still comfortably within a year of today. There have since been numerous other leaks, with anywhere from a few hundred to many thousand people involved. Much of the information has been highly sensitive: not just names and addresses, but classified national security information, information about criminal records, information about people applying for sensitive jobs and who has been asked to vouch for them, etc.
This whole affair is somewhat ironic for me. I have long argued against the database state and national ID cards on the basis that not only do such measures present obvious civil liberties concerns and potential for abuse, but more seriously they will be operated primarily by bored, low-paid civil servants who type thousands of names, address and so on every day into software developed by a government and contractors with a near 100% record of project failure, making accidental mistakes (which will inevitably require vastly disproportionate effort by the victim to fix) a much bigger danger to the average citizen than malicious attacks. I am reassured that the media and thus the public are finally starting to realise this. Better late than never!
Incidentally, as a point of general interest, there are now more than 61 million people living in the UK. According to statistics released yesterday by the ONS, the count is rising by about 1 million every three years, due partly to long-term migration, and partly to an increase in child birth (much of which is due to earlier migrants starting to have children).
For example how about a fellow accused of date rape being unable to open records showing that the female has accused nine different men of the same thing over a twelve year period?
Rape is a very difficult thing to prove, as a consequence of which some true accusations do not result in a conviction. In fact, the conviction rate for rape is one of the lowest of any crime. Someone who had the track record you describe would be unusually unlucky and should perhaps reconsider her lifestyle for her own benefit, but the victim's lifestyle is never an excuse for committing a crime against them and statistically it is, unfortunately, credible that so many true accusations could be made yet none of them result in a conviction.
In other words, your perhaps well-meaning but actually naive and uninformed argument is exactly the reason such past records should not be given undue weight in cases like this (and in some jurisdictions, there are rules about admissible evidence and historical records being presented to juries that cover this sort of thing).
Privacy and freedom are dead opposite notions.
Neither is black and white, and the right to a private life is recognised on the same level as other basic human rights in most of the major constitutional and international treaty declarations on the subject.
This is very important, simply because no-one is perfect, and a world in which no-one gets a second chance would be a very nasty place to live. This isn't just hypothetical: in an earlier post in this discussion, I mentioned the fact that people who are forever held to account for a minor offence committed in their youth have a much higher reoffending rate, for example.
In a free society where anyone can accumulate information one simply must claim responsibility for one's actions. Those with stains on their past should be willing to live with those stains.
Everyone has stains in their past, and most of us probably have something, somewhere, that could potentially have very serious consequences such as the loss of a job or the break-up of a relationship. If I disowned any friend I knew to have done something I personally disapproved of that might hurt another of my friends, I would have few friends left, so I keep secrets. Who would really benefit if I told everyone everything I know about everyone else? No-one. And who am I to judge my friends' actions anyway? I'm no angel, only human, and humans have evolved the concept of privacy because experience shows that forgiveness and moving on are usually better than bearing grudges forever. Perhaps in a world where everyone realised that no-one is perfect and honestly didn't give undue weight to past indiscretions, this wouldn't be a problem, but it will be a long time before we live in that world.
I do agree, strongly, that with freedom comes responsibility. I'm not a big supporter of arbitrary free speech protected by anonymity, for example. But I do believe that in an ideal world, such anonymity would only be involuntarily compromised under specific circumstances when it was appropriate, under judicial oversight; I'm not talking about banning nicknames in on-line discussions, I'm just talking about someone whose life is ruined by people slandering them and hiding behind nicknames being able to identify their attacker and seek justice in court. This is a difficult issue in the age of the Internet, when international laws do not always agree on what is and is not acceptable behaviour and there is no universal legitimate authority to determine when anonymity should be broken, but one thing that is certain is that this is not a black and white issue.
One of the major points of a free society is the openness of courts. The reason is that it's a lot harder to engage in shenanigans if you know that the public has the ability to attend the proceedings or view the record.
Yes, but the important thing is that any member of the public may observe a court in action to determine that it is being run according to a fair process. For this purpose, the way a case is dealt with and any precedents the ruling sets are very important, but the participants in the particular case are not.
In an appropriate metaphor, allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment and support the anonymity of court participants. There are several good reasons for keeping the identity of any participant in a court case secret.
Firstly, witnesses and victims may have to disclose personal, embarrassing or otherwise private information in court. If they are effectively guaranteeing by doing so that the whole world can find out this information, it will inevitably make people less willing to come forward. This is not in the interests of justice, and it clearly is a real problem, as the recent debate in the UK over allowing testimony by witnesses whose identities are concealed has demonstrated. (The specific problem there is a much more difficult one, as it relates to permitting absolute anonymity even in court; I use it only to demonstrate that people do get put off appearing because of these issues.)
Secondly, the law may acknowledge the concept of a second chance when a criminal has paid their dues, but there is little point officially saying that someone is no longer required to disclose a past conviction for a minor offence after a certain period if anyone dealing with them can just look it up on-line anyway. Again, the UK has demonstrated this problem recently with the CRB mess, where people in good standing doing everyday jobs have suddenly been fired because some new jobsworth manager made an illegal request for a CRB check, got information to which they were never entitled by law, and then for example fired someone in their 30s for a minor shoplifting conviction 20 years earlier. Again, it is unlikely that retaining such information serves the interests of justice, which is why there are second chance laws in some jurisdictions in the first place. Moreover, any argument that retaining that information in the public domain is beneficial to society is trivially debunked: the reoffending rate is dramatically reduced when criminals who have paid the court-ordered price for their actions are allowed to get on with their lives, while denying them a second chance to get a job and rebuild their lives leads to a high probability of reoffending and committing more serious crimes. I note that no "second chance" laws I'm aware of would hide someone who had committed a terrible crime like murder or rape in this way, and those with legitimate needs to know about such convictions can find out about them forever under UK law via CRB checks anyway, so this is not an argument for opening court records.
Finally, if court records for ongoing cases are made available, then there is the problem of stigma: anyone accused of committing a crime will naturally be suspected of having done so, and even if the court subsequently finds them not guilty, there is no guarantee that anyone who sees the court record showing the charges will also see the final result. IMHO, if someone has been found not guilty by a court, there should be no public record identifying them personally that even shows they were charged.
In none of these cases would it be necessary to restrict public, searchable court records from disclosing the evidence considered (or the nature of the evidence, where the details would disclose identity), the conclusions drawn and the resulting verdict. But those are three pretty strong arguments for not naming names or otherwise personally identifying participants.
Perl has no mainstream, normal, people yelling and screaming for it. There's just the older, gruffer programmers and, more likely, sysadmins.
Yeah, the same sorts of idiots who still use UNIX, Emacs, C and Usenet (with that whole snipping and bottom-posting weirdness). Some of them probably even grok Lisp and wasted their time learning prehistoric nonsense like assembly language. Don't even get them started on documentation, or designing code before writing it; if you even mention unit tests, they'll just mumble something about understanding how code works before changing it. What have people like that ever done for the world, anyway?
You know, one day it would be really funny if these dinosaurs decided to take a sabbatical for a couple of months, all at the same time, and let the younger generation and their high-tech advances run the show for a while. Then management would see how much more effective you can be with a 3D GUI in your OS, a visual IDE, web application frameworks and wikis!
I've always liked Bill Gates' perspective on this one:
Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
The differences between endianess, width of various data types, etc etc. would get you anyway if you try to simply reuse nontrivial x86 C/C++ code non-trivial on other architechtures.
How do you figure that? C was created to be a portable assembly language. I haven't seen a lot of horror stories about porting C code written for 32-bit machines to 64-bit platforms in recent years. What differences do you think are difficult to overcome?