Sure, but as I pointed out earlier in the thread, this is a flawed solution: if you ever change that code (or perhaps something it depends on), it might no longer be appropriate to suppress the Lint warning, but the comment won't go away by itself.
Besides, any comment where a developer has written "I know what I am doing here" should automatically be flagged for triple independent code review, since it is automatically in the most likely 1% of places in the code base to find a serious error.;-)
That Openoffice Calc cannot sort cells containing simple calculations with relative cell references is true.
Given the lack of veracity with the above I wouldn't trust anything in your entire post until I tested it myself.
Don't trouble yourself. Given your apparent failure to grasp basic logic (hint: true != false) and your apparent willingness to launch ad hominem attacks rather than discussing things objectively, I doubt you would have anything worthwhile to contribute anyway.
For the record in case anyone else is interested, I just built a simple table of numbers and their squares in Excel 2007, with the squares defined using relative references to another cell in the same row, and sorting the rows based on the squares column worked just fine.
When you first configure PC-Lint you need to tune the configuration to ignore stuff that you don't have a problem with, ie. assignments within a test.
The problem is, sometimes that is idiomatic and correct, and sometimes it's a bug. You can't just blanket disable it without losing some of the benefit. In fact, I would say that is the typical problem a beginner causes: instead of fixing the problem, hack around it, even though you lose some good things as a side-effect.
As another responder has already pointed out, your particular example is unfortunate anyway, because you can always code around it explicitly if you really mean it. Many other things aren't so easy, though. For example, Lint is always whining about possible out-of-bounds array access when in fact the code is provably safe, but you surely wouldn't want to miss a genuine potential out-of-bounds error.
I've also used Polyspace. In my opinion, it is expensive, slow, can't handle some constructs well and has a *horrible* signal to noise ratio.
The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty horrendous in most static analysis tools for C and C++, IME. This is my biggest problem with them. If I have to go through and document literally thousands of cases where a perfectly legitimate and well-defined code construct should be allowed without a warning because the tool isn't quite sure, I rapidly lose any real benefit and everyone just starts ignoring the tool output. Things like Lint's -e option aren't much good as workarounds either, because then even if you're hiding an issue that might be a phantom problem today, you'll still be hiding it if it becomes a real problem tomorrow.:-(
If you read the post carefully you'll noticed I said "multiple indexes" not multiple tocs.
OK, so your "demanding" uses happen not to include the buggy one. Unfortunately, that doesn't tell us anything useful other than that this particular bug in OO will not annoy you personally.
If it really is unable to generate multiple TOCs (specicially) I'd call that a minor bug since multiple TOCs would be pretty weird.
Actually, it's pretty routine for serious textbooks in many fields. You'd often have a high-level TOC with just the chapter and appendix titles, and a detailed TOC with all the subheadings, for example. Some more traditional books include a brief paragraph of text summarising what each chapter is about in the high-level TOC as well, though this is unusual in modern books.
I didn't mention the PDF output of OpenType fonts.
Which again means only that the bug doesn't annoy you personally, not that it isn't there and isn't a show-stopper for many other people.
Only an active OOo developer is qualified to interpret the contents of the OOo bugzilla.
Like the ones who keep posting comments in the discussion of the OpenType bugs, you mean?
Seriously, I'm happy for you that these sorts of bug don't annoy you, but please don't assume the rest of us in the conversation are clueness newbies. The bugs are real, and they really are in the database, and they are acknowledged by real high-level OO developers, and they really do have many votes, and they still really aren't getting fixed. The same could be said of many other mainstream, everyday OSS applications. This isn't a criticism of the developers, many of whom are no doubt very hard working volunteers. It's merely an objective observation of the general state of OSS projects today, for comparison with the state of established alternatives available on non-Linux platforms, to support my argument that Linux itself is not the problem with Linux on the desktop but the applications running on it are.
For a start, one of the many serious flaws I have previously observed with OpenOffice Writer is its complete inability to generate more than a single table of contents with the page numbers updating properly.
For another, a second poster has already commented in this thread that they also just tried sorting a spreadsheet with formula-based data and got bad results, so apparently it's not just some fluke of my system or the particular formula I used.
Heck, most of the things I (and others) have pointed out are logged as confirmed bugs in the OO.o tracker. The PDF/OpenType fiasco I mentioned gets several highly voted bugs just on that one topic alone.
If you're really pushing it hard every day and you haven't hit any of the numerous problems identified in this and previous Slashdot discussions, then frankly, you've been very lucky. Even if that is so, your anecdotal data point doesn't counter the mass of evidence that OO is full of serious bugs, starting with their own bug database.
You are mistaking your technical ability to get that working (and possibly a willingness to overlook any legal concerns?) for a typical user's confidence that stuff will Just Work.
The "good enough" argument is a fair point, but for these specific examples, I respectfully disagree that they are even "good enough". Sure, if you're literally only writing a trivially formatted letter or resizing an image, they can do it, but of course, so can much simpler programs. The big problems come when you want to do things a little bit more advanced, where using a real word processor, spreadsheet or image editor is actually necessary.
It's not just the functionality, though that has some pretty serious limitations. I'm not sure how on-topic the specifics are in this thread, but if you're interested in OpenOffice in particular, go ahead and Google my user name and terms like "OpenOffice" on site:slashdot.org, and my previous detailed commentary is easy to find. It goes without saying that OpenOffice Writer is quite some way ahead of all the major OSS alternatives in features, at least on paper, so I think it's fair to use it as a benchmark of where the Linux+OSS world stands relative to a traditional Windows-based system.
More seriously, the big problem with a lot of everyday OSS applications is quality control. The unfortunate reality is that OpenOffice has always been horribly bug-ridden, often in quite fundamental ways, and worse, the dev team show no great inclination to fix some of these things even though they have been consistently highly voted in the bug tracker for years. If I have a word processor with a major selling point in PDF export, but PDF export is completely borked with OpenType fonts, that's a downer. Spreadsheets that can't sort data when the cells contain simple calculations are pretty broken, too. And so it goes, and so it has been with many other everyday OSS packages I've tried. Sure, Windows products are hardly immune from bugs, but at least the main features in major applications are normally usable. So, until this sort of thing is fixed in the major OSS applications, I find it hard to believe that any amount of "many eyes making all bugs shallow", "with the source code you can always do it yourself" advocacy will convince the average punter that Linux and the applications that run on it are ready to replace the typical Windows-based set-up in practice.
I think you've touched on the real issue there. Popular Linux builds have themselves been ready for the desktop for years. What is still missing from Linux that Vista has is applications that are ready for typical end users. As long as Linux geeks continue to believe that OpenOffice is as good as Microsoft Office, the GIMP is as good as Photoshop, etc., and as long as Linux doesn't have things like games and business admin software of the same level as those available on Windows, it doesn't matter how funky your window manager effects are. Real people don't use an OS because of its window manager, they use it because it hosts applications they want.
I don't think there's much doubt about why your typical sysadmin distrusts a lot of people. Whether it's a sensible policy is a different question. What happens when you start distrusting otherwise reasonable people and it hampers their ability to do their job is that those reasonable people will do whatever is necessary to circumvent your protections. Unless you are literally operating in something like a military base or a bank vault, there's always something.
Or, you could just support the competent people in doing their jobs, and save the distrust for those who earn it.
I appreciate the desire to raise awareness, but there's no practical benefit to running this story other than Windows bashing. It'll get patched, the patch will probably ship on some future Tuesday given this is a feature few people use and the risk of exploitation is relatively low, and that'll be that.
In contrast, a far more dangerous bug in the openssl package used by Debian and its derivatives was discovered earlier this week, and doesn't seem to have made the Slashdot home page at all, even though it's probably relevant to a lot of the Slashdot readership and there is real action they can take to fix things. Go figure...
You can waste an awful lot of time reading contracts and discovering that you've agreed to obnoxious things... and that there's not an awful lot you can do about it because all the competitors have similar contracts... and that, surprise, surprise, the employee behind the car rental counter is not interested in striking out clauses and negotiating contracts with an individual customer with a line behind him.
The interesting thing here is that contract law in most places already makes allowances for this sort of thing. There's even a legal term — contract of adhesion — describing standard contracts where there wasn't equal power for each party to negotiate on the details. Also, contracts generally require a meeting of minds, with both sides understanding what they are agreeing to; where this is not the case, courts can (and do) hold that unreasonable conditions are unenforceable.
In other words, it shouldn't be necessary to change the law to achieve what you want. If a contract of adhesion includes deceptive provisions that a typical person would be unlikely to agree to if they understood the implications, then it's already the case that courts might strike those provisions. You just need someone to bring the case.
Furthermore, if you can record a flagged broadcast with XP or TiVo you should probably file a complaint that this software is circumventing the DRM and failing to manage your digital rights properly.
Priceless.:-)
Ironically, here in the UK, the front of today's Guardian Technology section has a full-page story on how pretty much anyone who is anyone is dropping DRM as fast as they can open their fingers. Among other things, it cites research showing that shows DRM has no impact on piracy levels (and makes the obvious but rarely stated observation that this means DRM is just annoying legitimate customers), and mentions several major on-line music distributors who are already offering DRM-free tracks or have definite plans to do so later this year. Apparently the market has a different view on how it would like its digital rights managed than Microsoft do...
Thank you. I often argue in these discussions that there are real dangers to allowing searchable databases of permanent content taken out of context, even if a passer-by in a public place could see the same thing if they looked for a moment. Somehow these arguments usually get seen as trolling or infringing the spying photographer's freedom more than the photographee's privacy. As you so perfectly demonstrate, it's never that simple.
Not only that but this is just another example of "not in my backyard" mentality. All the people complaining about this i bet don't complain about celebrities being followed around by the paparazzi.
Such unfounded generalisation might demonstrate your own prejudice, but it does not an argument make.
And the people who don't want the google van taking pictures of the inside of their house, there is a really easy solution to this. Curtains, blinds paint, newspaper, one way mirrors, etc take your pick.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm sorry, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect anyone who cares about some basic privacy in their own home to keep their curtains closed all the time, just in case some dubious character with a high resolution camera pulls up outside their front window and starts snapping away to see if they can get anything useful: credit card statement on the table, maybe? And if you think this can't be done, try asking the two (yes, two) UK government ministers who were embarrassed this week when inadvertent movements revealed briefing papers long enough for a paparazzo to snap them and sell them to the papers. (You might say the ministers should have kept the papers in a briefcase, and you might be right, but it's still proof that the technology to take such high-res photos from a distance is readily available.)
Or, we could decide that the odd person running around with high resolution cameras trying to photograph personal material kept in the privacy of someone's own home is the problem here, not the millions of people who have personal items on display in their home but don't want to live in a windowless castle their whole lives.
Of all the privacy concerns in the world having your picture taken in public from a very standard (as in not from a shoe's) perspective is really a non-issue especially in comparison.
You're missing the point. New technology makes things that used to be unlikely routinely possible today. If nothing is done, they may become standard perspectives. Technology exists or is under active development to hear conversations inside a home from outside, to see movement through walls, to photograph at high resolution from hundreds of metres away. The natural state of things is that no-one would be able to do this, but technology lets them, so if we still value privacy in the traditional sense, we have to create laws that mandate socially acceptable behaviour. This is just a rehash of time-honoured ideas like "do unto others as you would have done unto you", "just because we can do something, that doesn't mean we should", "a man's home is his castle", "mind your own business", and "no-one likes a peeping Tom", brought up to date to match modern technology.
And if you really think having your picture taken in public and then put on a searchable database isn't a problem, I invite you to get a photograph of yourself standing outside a drug rehabilitation clinic, another with you outside a court, and a third with you outside a police station, put these all on-line where anyone searching for your name will readily find them, and then explain that it's all a big prank and you're not really a druggie at your next job interview.
Exactly. Regardless of whether one agrees with your particular hypothetical example, there are at least five qualitative differences between what is observed by a casual passer-by going about their business in a public place and the intentional, systematic collection(1) of a permanent(2), searchable(3) database of pictures that will be made available to the public(4) by a commercial entity(5).
Natural expectations have, at least until recently, been that public behaviour is subject to the first kind of scrutiny, but not the second. If the latter is also to be considered, then privacy laws may need to change to keep up with people's expectations. That may in turn mean, for example, that photographers will have to give up some of their current legal freedom to snap away in public, in order to safeguard the principle of people having a reasonable expectation of privacy in their lives. The interesting question is where the balance lies: in a world with mass storage, fast communication, ever more invasive surveillance technology, and ever more powerful image and sound processing algorithms, what reasonable expectations of privacy should the law protect?
And the upskirt stuff, yes crosses a privacy line but thats done very stealthily, taking pictures from a giant van with cameras on top of it doesn't really resemble stealth.
So it would be OK to go around taking upskirt shots as long as you told people you were doing it, even if they didn't want you to?
My comment was based on my personal experience of why cell-phones are bad: the act of talking and concentrating on something other than driving is what's distracting, not the fact that I'm holding something in my hand to do so.
I wonder if I misunderstood you? I certainly agree with the above, and so does all the research.
I'd be curious to know whether there are studies that compare talking on a cell phone to talking to a passenger - I haven't seen any.
I can't immediately cite it, but it certainly does exist (and shows a clear difference between the situations you mentioned). Some of it was being thrown around by government types around the time the mobile phone ban came in here in the UK.
Since no one has been stupid enough to directly insert submitted strings into SQL before sending it to the server for at least 5 years now
Don't mock: some of us still have to maintain systems running on PHP4, using things like the old-style MySQL interface, where in-line SQL is basically the only way to do things.
When our systems are upgraded to PHP5 — which is out of my hands — I'd love to rewrite the relevant parts of the system to banish in-line SQL and use a proper ORM, but this requires someone else to make the upgrade and someone to write a production-quality ORM for PHP. So far, Doctrine is the best I've found, but everything I've looked at has significant shortcomings, usually including an unhealthy obsessions with rewriting most of SQL in a not-quite-similar way to provide not-quite-full support for object persistence. You'= would think we would have learned from the whole proprietary standard, vendor lock-in debate and we ought to have a standard object-based query language by now, but alas, we aren't there yet. Until then, for some purposes, it's still easiest just to use prepared SQL statements, which are better than in-line SQL, it's true, but only one step removed in terms of power and vulnerability.
I hate to break it to you, but I could say all those same things. I'm a very experienced driver, trained well above the basic test standard required here and with extra paperwork from examiners to prove it. I've never had an accident, and never had a ticket. I'm a smart guy. I drive a high performance vehicle, which I know how to handle. Statistically, I'm one of the safest guys on the road, and it's entirely possibly that I would drive better at the legal limit for blood alcohol than some people would drive sober. And you know what? I'm still not arrogant enough to believe I'm better than everyone else, and can safely drive while impaired. People like you are the reason it is necessary to legislate and enforce road traffic laws, because you are in denial, and one day that denial is going to get someone killed. And frankly, I don't really care if you believe me or not, because I'm damn sure which side the court is going to take. I only hope you get what is coming to you before someone else gets what you're throwing at them.
I couldn't agree more with the AC's point here. Personally, I'm not a fan of legislating against numerous specific offences; I'd rather have general laws against, say, driving dangerously or inconsiderately, with a wide range of possible penalties so courts can do the job and decide each case on their own merits. But of course it's much easier (<cynic>and more profitable</cynic>) for government to decide that a certain activity is universally bad, and thus to ban speeding, or using a mobile phone, or driving while over a certain blood alcohol level than it is to pay for traffic police who can look at whether real harm is done.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but as I pointed out earlier in the thread, this is a flawed solution: if you ever change that code (or perhaps something it depends on), it might no longer be appropriate to suppress the Lint warning, but the comment won't go away by itself.
Besides, any comment where a developer has written "I know what I am doing here" should automatically be flagged for triple independent code review, since it is automatically in the most likely 1% of places in the code base to find a serious error. ;-)
That Openoffice Calc cannot sort cells containing simple calculations with relative cell references is true.
Given the lack of veracity with the above I wouldn't trust anything in your entire post until I tested it myself.
Don't trouble yourself. Given your apparent failure to grasp basic logic (hint: true != false) and your apparent willingness to launch ad hominem attacks rather than discussing things objectively, I doubt you would have anything worthwhile to contribute anyway.
For the record in case anyone else is interested, I just built a simple table of numbers and their squares in Excel 2007, with the squares defined using relative references to another cell in the same row, and sorting the rows based on the squares column worked just fine.
When you first configure PC-Lint you need to tune the configuration to ignore stuff that you don't have a problem with, ie. assignments within a test.
The problem is, sometimes that is idiomatic and correct, and sometimes it's a bug. You can't just blanket disable it without losing some of the benefit. In fact, I would say that is the typical problem a beginner causes: instead of fixing the problem, hack around it, even though you lose some good things as a side-effect.
As another responder has already pointed out, your particular example is unfortunate anyway, because you can always code around it explicitly if you really mean it. Many other things aren't so easy, though. For example, Lint is always whining about possible out-of-bounds array access when in fact the code is provably safe, but you surely wouldn't want to miss a genuine potential out-of-bounds error.
I've also used Polyspace. In my opinion, it is expensive, slow, can't handle some constructs well and has a *horrible* signal to noise ratio.
The signal-to-noise ratio is pretty horrendous in most static analysis tools for C and C++, IME. This is my biggest problem with them. If I have to go through and document literally thousands of cases where a perfectly legitimate and well-defined code construct should be allowed without a warning because the tool isn't quite sure, I rapidly lose any real benefit and everyone just starts ignoring the tool output. Things like Lint's -e option aren't much good as workarounds either, because then even if you're hiding an issue that might be a phantom problem today, you'll still be hiding it if it becomes a real problem tomorrow. :-(
If you read the post carefully you'll noticed I said "multiple indexes" not multiple tocs.
OK, so your "demanding" uses happen not to include the buggy one. Unfortunately, that doesn't tell us anything useful other than that this particular bug in OO will not annoy you personally.
If it really is unable to generate multiple TOCs (specicially) I'd call that a minor bug since multiple TOCs would be pretty weird.
Actually, it's pretty routine for serious textbooks in many fields. You'd often have a high-level TOC with just the chapter and appendix titles, and a detailed TOC with all the subheadings, for example. Some more traditional books include a brief paragraph of text summarising what each chapter is about in the high-level TOC as well, though this is unusual in modern books.
I didn't mention the PDF output of OpenType fonts.
Which again means only that the bug doesn't annoy you personally, not that it isn't there and isn't a show-stopper for many other people.
Only an active OOo developer is qualified to interpret the contents of the OOo bugzilla.
Like the ones who keep posting comments in the discussion of the OpenType bugs, you mean?
Seriously, I'm happy for you that these sorts of bug don't annoy you, but please don't assume the rest of us in the conversation are clueness newbies. The bugs are real, and they really are in the database, and they are acknowledged by real high-level OO developers, and they really do have many votes, and they still really aren't getting fixed. The same could be said of many other mainstream, everyday OSS applications. This isn't a criticism of the developers, many of whom are no doubt very hard working volunteers. It's merely an objective observation of the general state of OSS projects today, for comparison with the state of established alternatives available on non-Linux platforms, to support my argument that Linux itself is not the problem with Linux on the desktop but the applications running on it are.
I call bullshit.
For a start, one of the many serious flaws I have previously observed with OpenOffice Writer is its complete inability to generate more than a single table of contents with the page numbers updating properly.
For another, a second poster has already commented in this thread that they also just tried sorting a spreadsheet with formula-based data and got bad results, so apparently it's not just some fluke of my system or the particular formula I used.
Heck, most of the things I (and others) have pointed out are logged as confirmed bugs in the OO.o tracker. The PDF/OpenType fiasco I mentioned gets several highly voted bugs just on that one topic alone.
If you're really pushing it hard every day and you haven't hit any of the numerous problems identified in this and previous Slashdot discussions, then frankly, you've been very lucky. Even if that is so, your anecdotal data point doesn't counter the mass of evidence that OO is full of serious bugs, starting with their own bug database.
What was the problem, again?
You are mistaking your technical ability to get that working (and possibly a willingness to overlook any legal concerns?) for a typical user's confidence that stuff will Just Work.
The "good enough" argument is a fair point, but for these specific examples, I respectfully disagree that they are even "good enough". Sure, if you're literally only writing a trivially formatted letter or resizing an image, they can do it, but of course, so can much simpler programs. The big problems come when you want to do things a little bit more advanced, where using a real word processor, spreadsheet or image editor is actually necessary.
It's not just the functionality, though that has some pretty serious limitations. I'm not sure how on-topic the specifics are in this thread, but if you're interested in OpenOffice in particular, go ahead and Google my user name and terms like "OpenOffice" on site:slashdot.org, and my previous detailed commentary is easy to find. It goes without saying that OpenOffice Writer is quite some way ahead of all the major OSS alternatives in features, at least on paper, so I think it's fair to use it as a benchmark of where the Linux+OSS world stands relative to a traditional Windows-based system.
More seriously, the big problem with a lot of everyday OSS applications is quality control. The unfortunate reality is that OpenOffice has always been horribly bug-ridden, often in quite fundamental ways, and worse, the dev team show no great inclination to fix some of these things even though they have been consistently highly voted in the bug tracker for years. If I have a word processor with a major selling point in PDF export, but PDF export is completely borked with OpenType fonts, that's a downer. Spreadsheets that can't sort data when the cells contain simple calculations are pretty broken, too. And so it goes, and so it has been with many other everyday OSS packages I've tried. Sure, Windows products are hardly immune from bugs, but at least the main features in major applications are normally usable. So, until this sort of thing is fixed in the major OSS applications, I find it hard to believe that any amount of "many eyes making all bugs shallow", "with the source code you can always do it yourself" advocacy will convince the average punter that Linux and the applications that run on it are ready to replace the typical Windows-based set-up in practice.
I think you've touched on the real issue there. Popular Linux builds have themselves been ready for the desktop for years. What is still missing from Linux that Vista has is applications that are ready for typical end users. As long as Linux geeks continue to believe that OpenOffice is as good as Microsoft Office, the GIMP is as good as Photoshop, etc., and as long as Linux doesn't have things like games and business admin software of the same level as those available on Windows, it doesn't matter how funky your window manager effects are. Real people don't use an OS because of its window manager, they use it because it hosts applications they want.
I don't think there's much doubt about why your typical sysadmin distrusts a lot of people. Whether it's a sensible policy is a different question. What happens when you start distrusting otherwise reasonable people and it hampers their ability to do their job is that those reasonable people will do whatever is necessary to circumvent your protections. Unless you are literally operating in something like a military base or a bank vault, there's always something.
Or, you could just support the competent people in doing their jobs, and save the distrust for those who earn it.
I appreciate the desire to raise awareness, but there's no practical benefit to running this story other than Windows bashing. It'll get patched, the patch will probably ship on some future Tuesday given this is a feature few people use and the risk of exploitation is relatively low, and that'll be that.
In contrast, a far more dangerous bug in the openssl package used by Debian and its derivatives was discovered earlier this week, and doesn't seem to have made the Slashdot home page at all, even though it's probably relevant to a lot of the Slashdot readership and there is real action they can take to fix things. Go figure...
You can waste an awful lot of time reading contracts and discovering that you've agreed to obnoxious things... and that there's not an awful lot you can do about it because all the competitors have similar contracts... and that, surprise, surprise, the employee behind the car rental counter is not interested in striking out clauses and negotiating contracts with an individual customer with a line behind him.
The interesting thing here is that contract law in most places already makes allowances for this sort of thing. There's even a legal term — contract of adhesion — describing standard contracts where there wasn't equal power for each party to negotiate on the details. Also, contracts generally require a meeting of minds, with both sides understanding what they are agreeing to; where this is not the case, courts can (and do) hold that unreasonable conditions are unenforceable.
In other words, it shouldn't be necessary to change the law to achieve what you want. If a contract of adhesion includes deceptive provisions that a typical person would be unlikely to agree to if they understood the implications, then it's already the case that courts might strike those provisions. You just need someone to bring the case.
Furthermore, if you can record a flagged broadcast with XP or TiVo you should probably file a complaint that this software is circumventing the DRM and failing to manage your digital rights properly.
Priceless. :-)
Ironically, here in the UK, the front of today's Guardian Technology section has a full-page story on how pretty much anyone who is anyone is dropping DRM as fast as they can open their fingers. Among other things, it cites research showing that shows DRM has no impact on piracy levels (and makes the obvious but rarely stated observation that this means DRM is just annoying legitimate customers), and mentions several major on-line music distributors who are already offering DRM-free tracks or have definite plans to do so later this year. Apparently the market has a different view on how it would like its digital rights managed than Microsoft do...
Thank you. I often argue in these discussions that there are real dangers to allowing searchable databases of permanent content taken out of context, even if a passer-by in a public place could see the same thing if they looked for a moment. Somehow these arguments usually get seen as trolling or infringing the spying photographer's freedom more than the photographee's privacy. As you so perfectly demonstrate, it's never that simple.
Not only that but this is just another example of "not in my backyard" mentality. All the people complaining about this i bet don't complain about celebrities being followed around by the paparazzi.
Such unfounded generalisation might demonstrate your own prejudice, but it does not an argument make.
And the people who don't want the google van taking pictures of the inside of their house, there is a really easy solution to this. Curtains, blinds paint, newspaper, one way mirrors, etc take your pick.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm sorry, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect anyone who cares about some basic privacy in their own home to keep their curtains closed all the time, just in case some dubious character with a high resolution camera pulls up outside their front window and starts snapping away to see if they can get anything useful: credit card statement on the table, maybe? And if you think this can't be done, try asking the two (yes, two) UK government ministers who were embarrassed this week when inadvertent movements revealed briefing papers long enough for a paparazzo to snap them and sell them to the papers. (You might say the ministers should have kept the papers in a briefcase, and you might be right, but it's still proof that the technology to take such high-res photos from a distance is readily available.)
Or, we could decide that the odd person running around with high resolution cameras trying to photograph personal material kept in the privacy of someone's own home is the problem here, not the millions of people who have personal items on display in their home but don't want to live in a windowless castle their whole lives.
Of all the privacy concerns in the world having your picture taken in public from a very standard (as in not from a shoe's) perspective is really a non-issue especially in comparison.
You're missing the point. New technology makes things that used to be unlikely routinely possible today. If nothing is done, they may become standard perspectives. Technology exists or is under active development to hear conversations inside a home from outside, to see movement through walls, to photograph at high resolution from hundreds of metres away. The natural state of things is that no-one would be able to do this, but technology lets them, so if we still value privacy in the traditional sense, we have to create laws that mandate socially acceptable behaviour. This is just a rehash of time-honoured ideas like "do unto others as you would have done unto you", "just because we can do something, that doesn't mean we should", "a man's home is his castle", "mind your own business", and "no-one likes a peeping Tom", brought up to date to match modern technology.
And if you really think having your picture taken in public and then put on a searchable database isn't a problem, I invite you to get a photograph of yourself standing outside a drug rehabilitation clinic, another with you outside a court, and a third with you outside a police station, put these all on-line where anyone searching for your name will readily find them, and then explain that it's all a big prank and you're not really a druggie at your next job interview.
Exactly. Regardless of whether one agrees with your particular hypothetical example, there are at least five qualitative differences between what is observed by a casual passer-by going about their business in a public place and the intentional, systematic collection(1) of a permanent(2), searchable(3) database of pictures that will be made available to the public(4) by a commercial entity(5).
Natural expectations have, at least until recently, been that public behaviour is subject to the first kind of scrutiny, but not the second. If the latter is also to be considered, then privacy laws may need to change to keep up with people's expectations. That may in turn mean, for example, that photographers will have to give up some of their current legal freedom to snap away in public, in order to safeguard the principle of people having a reasonable expectation of privacy in their lives. The interesting question is where the balance lies: in a world with mass storage, fast communication, ever more invasive surveillance technology, and ever more powerful image and sound processing algorithms, what reasonable expectations of privacy should the law protect?
And the upskirt stuff, yes crosses a privacy line but thats done very stealthily, taking pictures from a giant van with cameras on top of it doesn't really resemble stealth.
So it would be OK to go around taking upskirt shots as long as you told people you were doing it, even if they didn't want you to?
My comment was based on my personal experience of why cell-phones are bad: the act of talking and concentrating on something other than driving is what's distracting, not the fact that I'm holding something in my hand to do so.
I wonder if I misunderstood you? I certainly agree with the above, and so does all the research.
I'd be curious to know whether there are studies that compare talking on a cell phone to talking to a passenger - I haven't seen any.
I can't immediately cite it, but it certainly does exist (and shows a clear difference between the situations you mentioned). Some of it was being thrown around by government types around the time the mobile phone ban came in here in the UK.
“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” — Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++
And not closing security holes and letting the language stagnate is a sure road to obscurity.
Don't tell that to the C guys. :-)
Please tell me that really was meant to be a clever troll! I assumed so, but a few of the responders seem to think you were being serious...
Since no one has been stupid enough to directly insert submitted strings into SQL before sending it to the server for at least 5 years now
Don't mock: some of us still have to maintain systems running on PHP4, using things like the old-style MySQL interface, where in-line SQL is basically the only way to do things.
When our systems are upgraded to PHP5 — which is out of my hands — I'd love to rewrite the relevant parts of the system to banish in-line SQL and use a proper ORM, but this requires someone else to make the upgrade and someone to write a production-quality ORM for PHP. So far, Doctrine is the best I've found, but everything I've looked at has significant shortcomings, usually including an unhealthy obsessions with rewriting most of SQL in a not-quite-similar way to provide not-quite-full support for object persistence. You'= would think we would have learned from the whole proprietary standard, vendor lock-in debate and we ought to have a standard object-based query language by now, but alas, we aren't there yet. Until then, for some purposes, it's still easiest just to use prepared SQL statements, which are better than in-line SQL, it's true, but only one step removed in terms of power and vulnerability.
I hate to break it to you, but I could say all those same things. I'm a very experienced driver, trained well above the basic test standard required here and with extra paperwork from examiners to prove it. I've never had an accident, and never had a ticket. I'm a smart guy. I drive a high performance vehicle, which I know how to handle. Statistically, I'm one of the safest guys on the road, and it's entirely possibly that I would drive better at the legal limit for blood alcohol than some people would drive sober. And you know what? I'm still not arrogant enough to believe I'm better than everyone else, and can safely drive while impaired. People like you are the reason it is necessary to legislate and enforce road traffic laws, because you are in denial, and one day that denial is going to get someone killed. And frankly, I don't really care if you believe me or not, because I'm damn sure which side the court is going to take. I only hope you get what is coming to you before someone else gets what you're throwing at them.
Of course not. Their chief weapon is surprise!
I couldn't agree more with the AC's point here. Personally, I'm not a fan of legislating against numerous specific offences; I'd rather have general laws against, say, driving dangerously or inconsiderately, with a wide range of possible penalties so courts can do the job and decide each case on their own merits. But of course it's much easier (<cynic>and more profitable</cynic>) for government to decide that a certain activity is universally bad, and thus to ban speeding, or using a mobile phone, or driving while over a certain blood alcohol level than it is to pay for traffic police who can look at whether real harm is done.