The people who are using P2P and also buying CDs, might very well be buying more CDs in the absence of file sharing.
And yet, in the very first conclusion in the Summary of Findings, the authors write:
In the aggregate, we are unable to discover any direct relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchases in Canada. The analysis of the entire Canadian population does not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased. That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file-sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.
An awful lot of people in this thread are jumping up and down as if the correlation between CD purchasing and P2P use somehow supports the theory that P2P is good for music sales really. It doesn't, and in fact the study explicitly examined the overall effect across the wider population and found no clear impact either way.
This could be explained in several simple ways. For example, one possibility entirely consistent with both the conclusions mentioned in TFS is that while music-lovers tend to buy CDs and download over P2P, some P2P sharers buy more CDs as a result, some buy fewer, and the two effects broadly cancel out.
The law is that you are not entitled to identity information unless and until you can prove by competent evidence, in admissible form, a prima facie case against the person whose identity you are seeking.
I won't pretend I understand the legal niceties of all those terms you just used. However, please correct me if I'm wrong, but the standard of proof required for a civil case in your country is balance of probability, is it not? If so, and you've got solid evidence that an identified computer was used in breaking the law, and you know the identity of the person whose credentials were used to connect it to the network, then I think that would be sufficient to bring a valid case.
Now, if the defendant had given their (presumably private) credentials to someone else, or someone else had access to the computer at the time, then that can be brought up in court. But really, is this more likely than the alternative explanation than that the law-breaking was done by the person whose credentials were used, and if not, why isn't a case on the basis of this evidence reasonable, and therefore discovering the identity justified?
I can't imagine why you would think there's anything unfair about such a legal principle.
Because if the law is as you describe it and my argument above isn't valid, then you have created a cyclic argument: no realistic case can be brought without already knowing the identity of the would-be defendant, yet you can't ascertain the identity without already having a case. Such a system denies those who are damaged any realistic prospect of protecting their rights through the legal system, and surely as a lawyer you can understand why I find that wrong.
OK, maybe I'm out of my legal depth here, but let me propose a dubious analogy (recognising that obviously we're not talking about a life-and-death criminal case here). If a murder has been committed, and a smoking gun has been found, and there is forensic evidence on that gun that would strongly suggest a certain individual used the weapon in the recent past (though it might not have been the shot that killed the victim in this case), and a known source has information that links that forensic clue to the person associated with it, the analogous rule to what you're saying would be that the police couldn't get the known source to tell them who the past user was so further evidence could be collected prior to either bringing charges or clearing them. Do you have any rules about obstructing an investigation in your jurisdiction? If so, do they only apply to criminal cases, then? And so if, how is any plaintiff ever supposed to bring a reasonable case against someone who did damage them in a case like the real one here?
I'm sorry, Ray, but I just don't see how any reasonable, impartial person could accept the arguments you make here.
Yeah, but if you read the litigation documents carefully you'll see they ARE sticking up for the students' rights. They're saying "we're not going to give you someone's name if you don't have evidence that that person did in fact commit a copyright infringement".
If you know with reasonable certainty which computer was used to commit an infringement, that is evidence that its owner was responsible. It's certainly not conclusive evidence, and it might turn out to be evidence that someone else did it instead, but it's evidence all the same.
When they say "this subpoena would require us to conduct an investigation" they are in effect saying "the RIAA hasn't conducted an appropriate investigation".
And how are they supposed to conduct an "appropriate" investigation themselves if the University can withhold key information that would allow the RIAA to continue?
You can't have it both ways. Either the RIAA is responsible for constructing a full case before bringing it to court, in which case it's only fair that when they have evidence pointing in a certain direction they are able to follow up on it, or the RIAA only need the basis for a case and the court must legally compel others to provide any missing information they have, including the identities of the Does being accused. Personally, it seems to me that the latter is ethically more appropriate, but that approach seems to be what a bazillion people around here complain about every time an RIAA-related story comes up and someone gets sent notices and legal threats based on little more than an IP address.
I'm impressed: with one post making a perfectly reasonable argument, you've managed to get one reply accusing you of trolling because they disagree with your position, a second one that completely missed the point that this whole discussion is about what the law requires the University to do, and a third who thinks Slashdot groupthink is a good source of legal advice as long as it's repeated often enough.
Congratulations, that's a pretty good hat trick for just having a dissenting view!:-)
It still does not reduce the poool of people by any reasonable amount....
If the room is dual occupancy, and there is evidence that the law was being broken using a PC in that room, and only one occupant of that room has a PC, then I'm sorry, but on balance it's looking like that person was the one breaking the law. Moreover, this is only 5 of the 17 Does. For another 9 of them, they do have the identity of the person whose credentials were used to access the wireless networking facilities, and apparently the argument is just that they can't prove the person who actually accessed the network was the person whose credentials were used.
Now, seriously, the university is claiming that in 16/17 cases, it can't identify the alleged infringers without interviewing or forensic examination. But is it being asked to, or is it just being asked to disclose the relevant information it does have so that further discovery can take place? This isn't the court case, and the University's information isn't a ruling that the law was actually broken. However, if you've got the credentials of someone whose computer is caught red-handed breaking the law, or the circumstances do realistically indicate whose computer was being used, then I think that is justification for seeking that interview and/or forensic examination via the court system to further the case.
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't comment on the legal technicalities that might be at work here, and I won't have much sympathy for the RIAA if it turns out that they've been abusing the system again. But on the face of it, this seems like a request for reasonable information from the University, based on a genuine belief that the law has been broken, and I don't see why it's inappropriate for the RIAA to attempt discovery here. If you start denying all discovery based on the possibility that someone with evidence against them may turn out not to be in the wrong, rather than conducting discovery and then examining the case in court, then it seems to me that you are breaking the legal system.
Exactly. GWB's classic "you're either with us or against us" pitch was just an act of terrorism itself: it was telling the rest of the world that they must support the US policy even if they didn't like it, on pain of feeling the repercussions of the US acting against them next.
The trouble with taking this binary stance is that it doesn't allow anyone who wants to remain neutral to do so. On balance, you'll find most of them turning against you if you force them to take sides, and that's what we're seeing now with the US reputation being pretty terrible in most of the rest of the world. Before very long, the US economy is probably going to be in big trouble, and with the rapid growth of some other major economies, it may never return to being the dominant force it has been for the past few years. Payback will come when everyone else looks out for themselves and leaves the US out to dry.
You didn't fix anything at all. What you wrote simply isn't true — not least because only one of the European bodies you mentioned is elected at all. The others are appointed, by people whom I as a citizen am not guaranteed a say in choosing, using procedures over which I as a citizen have no control.
So how is this different from Blair's deputy, Brown, taking over when public pressure forces Blair to resign?
In two rather fundamental ways, actually:
Cheney was explicitly voted for by the electorate: he was on the ticket with Bush.
Cheney's post is explicitly to be the deputy President; Gordon Brown had no such role. (Technically, the Deputy PM was John Prescott, and it was he who stood in for Tony Blair when TB was on holiday etc.)
You're absolutely right that different people learn in different ways. However, presumably that's also been true of the groups of test subjects in all the research, and everyone still seems to conclude that just reading out your slides sucks compared to presenting either orally or via the slides alone...
You elected the party, Brown leads it now. Deal with it.
Why should I? Here's some electoral facts for you, from the 2005 general election:
Labour received only 1/3 or so of the votes, which corresponds to only 22% of the total electorate. Despite this, Labour holds an absolute majority in Parliament and by a substantial margin.
Labour lost the popular vote in England to the Conservatives. Despite this, Labour currently has 286 MPs for English constituencies, while the Conservatives have only 194 (and the incidental changes since the general election are nowhere close to this margin).
Labour campaigned on a promise that Tony Blair would serve a full third term as Prime Minister, i.e., voters were explicitly not voting for a party Gordon Brown would be leading before the next election.
Gordon Brown could have called an election this summer to establish a personal mandate, but decided at the last minute not to risk the alternative ending.
So apart from the fact that our first past the post electoral system is pretty crooked to begin with, the Labour Party's mandate to hold those seats in government expired the moment a central promise of their pre-election manifesto was broken and they have carefully avoided seeking an independent mandate for the new administration.
Now, you can cut that any way you want and make smart-ass comments as an AC if you like, but it's still no more than a pretence of representative democracy. I wonder how our friends in the US would react if Bush was forced out of office, some other Republican with significantly different views was appointed to replace him without a vote, and that person set about restaffing the entire administration and rewriting policy, knowing he was completely immune to any sort of electoral consequences for several years anyway.
Representation is a rather essential part of representative democracy. That's why Labour has no mandate in England. That's also why people frown on measures that could be used to skew the measurement of what the people want when their representatives are chosen, such as those in Germany that we're discussing here. Speaking of which, this little thread has drifted rather off-topic, so now, back to our normally scheduled political ranting...:-)
And what's wrong with wasting some time in the office? The idea that every second must be productive leads directly to burnt-out staff and high turnover, as well as some sort of monitoring regime better suited to prisons or battery hens than trusted workers.
The thing is, if you've got people who enjoy their work, you needn't have either the burn-out or the prison-like monitoring regime. I can relax and enjoy a good, informative presentation that's relevant to me, and it provides a nice break in the day as well as helping me to do something. On the other hand, spending time in unproductive, poorly presented meetings, is horrendous and does more to sap office morale than just about anything else I can think of.
I'm not going to argue that the EU comission is the pinncale of democratic legitimacy, but the EU comission gets appointed by the 27 (democratically) elected governments (one of which you had the chance to vote for)
Except that I didn't, as noted later in my post.
In any case, the European Commission is just a dumping ground for political friends who have no credibility left at home, precisely because the Powers That Be can appoint people there with impunity. They then use the rules created by those eurocrats as an excuse to impose legislation back home that would never fly with the electorate if proposed directly. It's a sweet deal... if your interests involve pushing through legislation against the will of the electorate.
That's not so much a critique of presentation software so much as a critique of how people USE it.
You're right of course, and my post was meant to be humorous rather than entirely literal.
However, presentation software is like word processors, only worse: it's one of those things where businesses expect everyone to be able to use it effectively, yet never provide any training. As a consequence, those businesses get information being poorly presented and therefore lose time due to inefficiency. Good presentation style is like good graphic design and typography: the audience doesn't even notice it, they just take in the content efficiently and come away with the intended impression.
Steve Jobs is, as you noted, an excellent presenter. Most corporate people aren't, as you can tell by the number of insanely overcomplicated diagrams, extensive bullet points, clip art "jokes", and transition effects they manage to cram into what should have been a simple, concise presentation.
Does anyone else think all presentation software should be banned, on the basis of services to humanity?
Slideshows can support effective presentation styles well
Most slideshows don't do this
Instead they're full of bullets
and sub-bullets
which don't really add anything
and are hard to read while listening to the speaker
and often just say the same anyway
Instead, we could just go back to explaining things orally
Slideshows should be reserved for useful supporting graphics
That doesn't mean random clip-art!:-):-/ }:-)
In fact, almost everything promoted and supported by presentation software like Powerpoint is widely acknowledged by communications trainers as a bad thing
Conclusions: we should just abandon the concept, and save zillions of hours of wasted office time every year.
(But it won't happen, because it would expose managers who suck.)
I don't know who "we" is for you, but here in the UK, it's official in name only: most of the laws being passed today that affect me are either coming from Europe (where the Commission I don't get a say in electing trump the Parliament I do), Gordon Brown and his administration (who were never elected and have no legitimate mandate whatsoever), or my local County Council (who are imposing very unpopular measures on my city — which gets represented by only a few seats on the County Council — in direct conflict with the City Council).
In other words, I haven't even had a chance to vote either for or against any of the three major levels of government that can make "official" rules that affect me today. They may be official on pretty headed paper, but they've no more ethical basis than a third world dictator.
However, for the first time today, senior figures in a credible opposition party started talking openly about mass civil disobedience in protest against one of these heavy-handed laws imposed by a government with little popular support. There is yet hope...
Seriously, I agree with you. It's getting old that you can't post an honest opinion that isn't pro-OSS, pro-Google or pro-Apple without getting the beat down with the overrated mod.
I'd like to offer an opposing view, then. I'm hardly in the Slashdot groupthink box: I consider (reasonable implementations of) copyright to be a viable, ethical system; I don't run Linux on my home PC (for all the same reasons other people don't); I think Microsoft does produce some good software (though far from all of it and I have no problem with saying that either)... You get the idea.
I went through a phase a while back where it seemed like many of my non-groupthink-supporting posts were modded both (+1, Insightful) and (-1, Overrated), with the latter sometimes stacking up to hide a post because of the "two strikes and you lose your +1 bonus" rule even if it was also modded up multiple times.
For the past few months, I've seen this much more rarely. I assume you still can't M2 a (-1, Overrated) mod; I've certainly never been offered one. So I can only conclude that modding down posts you disagree with is giving way to more reasoned discussion. At the same time, I have noticed a welcome increase in non-trivial, constructive responses to my posts, both agreeing and disagreeing with me, and those often lead to the interesting discussions I come here for. I, for one, say good riddance to our (-1, Overrated) modding, non-reply-posting underlords.:-)
The only thing I have given up with for now is submitting stories. I'm sure there were good reasons all my recent submissions were rejected, and several of the topics made it via an alternative submission anyway, but it's just depressing to go to the effort of writing something up carefully and with checked links, only to see a day full of substandard press release jobs making it instead. This mainly predates the Firehose system, though, so perhaps it's better now. One of these days I might just find out.
What? Surely the US would never treat an innocent guest as a potential terrorist? Especially not the international development minister for a foreign government visiting the US as a guest of the DHS to talk about tackling terrorism! And certainly not twice...
Did I mention that he's the first Muslim minister in British history?
If a robot takes your job (or in this case, a mashup) then your job was pointless.
Not necessarily. Your job is now pointless, but that doesn't mean it wasn't useful before. After all, if it wasn't, why are people bothering to automate it?
Of course, now that it can be automated, that leaves you as a good IT person free to work on more challenging things that still require human input, hopefully providing better support to the rest of your organisation as a result. The only people who will lose out here are poorly skilled IT workers who could serve the role of a machine in one area, but can't do anything else and won't learn to become worth more. Losing their jobs is the corporate version of natural selection.
Poor attitude among IT folk is a much bigger threat than Web2.0 or indeed anything else. [...] When everyone walks around with a dangling ring of USB flashdrives because trying to get networked fileshare space is a major hassle and ridiculously expensive ($3k for a 1 gig partition charged to your overhead budget!)
I wonder when the next story will come along about a huge data leak because someone at a big company didn't follow security procedures.
Does it occur to you that corporate IT may be responsible for things like keeping data stored securely and backed up, and that by taking your attitude you are undermining their efforts to handle data in a responsible, professional manner?
Yes, it's possible that the corporate IT people in this case are just incompetent. But it's also possible that they're just trying to do their job properly, and you seem awfully quick to judge.
Fair point, but the tinfoil hat brigade might suggest that the officer "retired" conveniently to give an excuse to drop the case because they expected to lose it and set a clear and (to them) damaging precedent....
Except for the A-Team, the world's only "crack commando unit" who can't actually shoot anyone until they've had several series of training, that is...:-)
At least in regards to law enforcement, I find the all black uniforms simply serve to make them look threatening. I understand that in an encounter they don't want to give any impression of vunerability or weakness, but these people are human (most of them, anyway) and their job is to serve the public.
The thing is, in this country we used to have policing by consent. That had some major advantages, not the least of which was that the police commanded the respect of the public they served, and members of the public could generally be relied upon to help them. Today, it's increasingly a them-and-us culture the closer to the top you get, thanks in no small part to an increasing number of silly laws pushed through by politicians but lacking popular support: everything from excessive stop-and-search to "road safety" laws based on cameras and fines rather than real police stopping people who are really dangerous. As the saying goes, any bad law serves to bring all law into contempt, and this has a direct effect on the way the front line beat officers are perceived.
At this rate I'd rather see (visually speaking) the military show up in their respective typical colors than cops in all black. Psychologically, that's kind of scary.
The sad irony of that comment is that the military actually do seem to understand the importance of relating to the people they are there to help. Witness the actions of the British army in Iraq, when they deliberately did things like going out to meet the people there, wearing caps instead of armoured helmets. They have the helmets for when they're needed, but the guys at the top made the decision not to present the face of an oppressor, and for a while it actually worked (and it when they had to switch back, that wasn't the reason).
Compare and contrast with the aforementioned police force, who seem to be actively cultivating a "we're scarier than you are" aura and the fear of the populace rather than their respect. It's the wrong call, IMNSHO, and after letting it go too far for the past few years we're starting to see the backlash both on the street and at political levels. I'm sure they'll look great in those funky face-shields, though. It's very sad.
Come now, do you think that "piracy" can get worse than it is today?
Piracy might not get much worse, but today the majority of people do obtain their music, movies, software, etc. legally. If you make it legal for them to copy it from someone else rather than pay for it, you are effectively inviting them to do so rather than buying it. That's not to say that it would necessarily get worse for artists in the long term, because secondary effects like advertising might mess up the "obvious" conclusions, but certainly if you go down that path you might as well give up with copyright altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
The people who are using P2P and also buying CDs, might very well be buying more CDs in the absence of file sharing.
And yet, in the very first conclusion in the Summary of Findings, the authors write:
In the aggregate, we are unable to discover any direct relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchases in Canada. The analysis of the entire Canadian population does not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased. That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file-sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.
An awful lot of people in this thread are jumping up and down as if the correlation between CD purchasing and P2P use somehow supports the theory that P2P is good for music sales really. It doesn't, and in fact the study explicitly examined the overall effect across the wider population and found no clear impact either way.
This could be explained in several simple ways. For example, one possibility entirely consistent with both the conclusions mentioned in TFS is that while music-lovers tend to buy CDs and download over P2P, some P2P sharers buy more CDs as a result, some buy fewer, and the two effects broadly cancel out.
The law is that you are not entitled to identity information unless and until you can prove by competent evidence, in admissible form, a prima facie case against the person whose identity you are seeking.
I won't pretend I understand the legal niceties of all those terms you just used. However, please correct me if I'm wrong, but the standard of proof required for a civil case in your country is balance of probability, is it not? If so, and you've got solid evidence that an identified computer was used in breaking the law, and you know the identity of the person whose credentials were used to connect it to the network, then I think that would be sufficient to bring a valid case.
Now, if the defendant had given their (presumably private) credentials to someone else, or someone else had access to the computer at the time, then that can be brought up in court. But really, is this more likely than the alternative explanation than that the law-breaking was done by the person whose credentials were used, and if not, why isn't a case on the basis of this evidence reasonable, and therefore discovering the identity justified?
I can't imagine why you would think there's anything unfair about such a legal principle.
Because if the law is as you describe it and my argument above isn't valid, then you have created a cyclic argument: no realistic case can be brought without already knowing the identity of the would-be defendant, yet you can't ascertain the identity without already having a case. Such a system denies those who are damaged any realistic prospect of protecting their rights through the legal system, and surely as a lawyer you can understand why I find that wrong.
OK, maybe I'm out of my legal depth here, but let me propose a dubious analogy (recognising that obviously we're not talking about a life-and-death criminal case here). If a murder has been committed, and a smoking gun has been found, and there is forensic evidence on that gun that would strongly suggest a certain individual used the weapon in the recent past (though it might not have been the shot that killed the victim in this case), and a known source has information that links that forensic clue to the person associated with it, the analogous rule to what you're saying would be that the police couldn't get the known source to tell them who the past user was so further evidence could be collected prior to either bringing charges or clearing them. Do you have any rules about obstructing an investigation in your jurisdiction? If so, do they only apply to criminal cases, then? And so if, how is any plaintiff ever supposed to bring a reasonable case against someone who did damage them in a case like the real one here?
I'm sorry, Ray, but I just don't see how any reasonable, impartial person could accept the arguments you make here.
Yeah, but if you read the litigation documents carefully you'll see they ARE sticking up for the students' rights. They're saying "we're not going to give you someone's name if you don't have evidence that that person did in fact commit a copyright infringement".
If you know with reasonable certainty which computer was used to commit an infringement, that is evidence that its owner was responsible. It's certainly not conclusive evidence, and it might turn out to be evidence that someone else did it instead, but it's evidence all the same.
When they say "this subpoena would require us to conduct an investigation" they are in effect saying "the RIAA hasn't conducted an appropriate investigation".
And how are they supposed to conduct an "appropriate" investigation themselves if the University can withhold key information that would allow the RIAA to continue?
You can't have it both ways. Either the RIAA is responsible for constructing a full case before bringing it to court, in which case it's only fair that when they have evidence pointing in a certain direction they are able to follow up on it, or the RIAA only need the basis for a case and the court must legally compel others to provide any missing information they have, including the identities of the Does being accused. Personally, it seems to me that the latter is ethically more appropriate, but that approach seems to be what a bazillion people around here complain about every time an RIAA-related story comes up and someone gets sent notices and legal threats based on little more than an IP address.
I'm impressed: with one post making a perfectly reasonable argument, you've managed to get one reply accusing you of trolling because they disagree with your position, a second one that completely missed the point that this whole discussion is about what the law requires the University to do, and a third who thinks Slashdot groupthink is a good source of legal advice as long as it's repeated often enough.
Congratulations, that's a pretty good hat trick for just having a dissenting view! :-)
It still does not reduce the poool of people by any reasonable amount....
If the room is dual occupancy, and there is evidence that the law was being broken using a PC in that room, and only one occupant of that room has a PC, then I'm sorry, but on balance it's looking like that person was the one breaking the law. Moreover, this is only 5 of the 17 Does. For another 9 of them, they do have the identity of the person whose credentials were used to access the wireless networking facilities, and apparently the argument is just that they can't prove the person who actually accessed the network was the person whose credentials were used.
Now, seriously, the university is claiming that in 16/17 cases, it can't identify the alleged infringers without interviewing or forensic examination. But is it being asked to, or is it just being asked to disclose the relevant information it does have so that further discovery can take place? This isn't the court case, and the University's information isn't a ruling that the law was actually broken. However, if you've got the credentials of someone whose computer is caught red-handed breaking the law, or the circumstances do realistically indicate whose computer was being used, then I think that is justification for seeking that interview and/or forensic examination via the court system to further the case.
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't comment on the legal technicalities that might be at work here, and I won't have much sympathy for the RIAA if it turns out that they've been abusing the system again. But on the face of it, this seems like a request for reasonable information from the University, based on a genuine belief that the law has been broken, and I don't see why it's inappropriate for the RIAA to attempt discovery here. If you start denying all discovery based on the possibility that someone with evidence against them may turn out not to be in the wrong, rather than conducting discovery and then examining the case in court, then it seems to me that you are breaking the legal system.
Exactly. GWB's classic "you're either with us or against us" pitch was just an act of terrorism itself: it was telling the rest of the world that they must support the US policy even if they didn't like it, on pain of feeling the repercussions of the US acting against them next.
The trouble with taking this binary stance is that it doesn't allow anyone who wants to remain neutral to do so. On balance, you'll find most of them turning against you if you force them to take sides, and that's what we're seeing now with the US reputation being pretty terrible in most of the rest of the world. Before very long, the US economy is probably going to be in big trouble, and with the rapid growth of some other major economies, it may never return to being the dominant force it has been for the past few years. Payback will come when everyone else looks out for themselves and leaves the US out to dry.
You didn't fix anything at all. What you wrote simply isn't true — not least because only one of the European bodies you mentioned is elected at all. The others are appointed, by people whom I as a citizen am not guaranteed a say in choosing, using procedures over which I as a citizen have no control.
So how is this different from Blair's deputy, Brown, taking over when public pressure forces Blair to resign?
In two rather fundamental ways, actually:
You're absolutely right that different people learn in different ways. However, presumably that's also been true of the groups of test subjects in all the research, and everyone still seems to conclude that just reading out your slides sucks compared to presenting either orally or via the slides alone...
Quoth the AC:
You elected the party, Brown leads it now. Deal with it.
Why should I? Here's some electoral facts for you, from the 2005 general election:
So apart from the fact that our first past the post electoral system is pretty crooked to begin with, the Labour Party's mandate to hold those seats in government expired the moment a central promise of their pre-election manifesto was broken and they have carefully avoided seeking an independent mandate for the new administration.
Now, you can cut that any way you want and make smart-ass comments as an AC if you like, but it's still no more than a pretence of representative democracy. I wonder how our friends in the US would react if Bush was forced out of office, some other Republican with significantly different views was appointed to replace him without a vote, and that person set about restaffing the entire administration and rewriting policy, knowing he was completely immune to any sort of electoral consequences for several years anyway.
Representation is a rather essential part of representative democracy. That's why Labour has no mandate in England. That's also why people frown on measures that could be used to skew the measurement of what the people want when their representatives are chosen, such as those in Germany that we're discussing here. Speaking of which, this little thread has drifted rather off-topic, so now, back to our normally scheduled political ranting... :-)
And what's wrong with wasting some time in the office? The idea that every second must be productive leads directly to burnt-out staff and high turnover, as well as some sort of monitoring regime better suited to prisons or battery hens than trusted workers.
The thing is, if you've got people who enjoy their work, you needn't have either the burn-out or the prison-like monitoring regime. I can relax and enjoy a good, informative presentation that's relevant to me, and it provides a nice break in the day as well as helping me to do something. On the other hand, spending time in unproductive, poorly presented meetings, is horrendous and does more to sap office morale than just about anything else I can think of.
I'm not going to argue that the EU comission is the pinncale of democratic legitimacy, but the EU comission gets appointed by the 27 (democratically) elected governments (one of which you had the chance to vote for)
Except that I didn't, as noted later in my post.
In any case, the European Commission is just a dumping ground for political friends who have no credibility left at home, precisely because the Powers That Be can appoint people there with impunity. They then use the rules created by those eurocrats as an excuse to impose legislation back home that would never fly with the electorate if proposed directly. It's a sweet deal... if your interests involve pushing through legislation against the will of the electorate.
That's not so much a critique of presentation software so much as a critique of how people USE it.
You're right of course, and my post was meant to be humorous rather than entirely literal.
However, presentation software is like word processors, only worse: it's one of those things where businesses expect everyone to be able to use it effectively, yet never provide any training. As a consequence, those businesses get information being poorly presented and therefore lose time due to inefficiency. Good presentation style is like good graphic design and typography: the audience doesn't even notice it, they just take in the content efficiently and come away with the intended impression.
Steve Jobs is, as you noted, an excellent presenter. Most corporate people aren't, as you can tell by the number of insanely overcomplicated diagrams, extensive bullet points, clip art "jokes", and transition effects they manage to cram into what should have been a simple, concise presentation.
Does anyone else think all presentation software should be banned, on the basis of services to humanity?
Conclusions: we should just abandon the concept, and save zillions of hours of wasted office time every year.
(But it won't happen, because it would expose managers who suck.)
I don't know who "we" is for you, but here in the UK, it's official in name only: most of the laws being passed today that affect me are either coming from Europe (where the Commission I don't get a say in electing trump the Parliament I do), Gordon Brown and his administration (who were never elected and have no legitimate mandate whatsoever), or my local County Council (who are imposing very unpopular measures on my city — which gets represented by only a few seats on the County Council — in direct conflict with the City Council).
In other words, I haven't even had a chance to vote either for or against any of the three major levels of government that can make "official" rules that affect me today. They may be official on pretty headed paper, but they've no more ethical basis than a third world dictator.
However, for the first time today, senior figures in a credible opposition party started talking openly about mass civil disobedience in protest against one of these heavy-handed laws imposed by a government with little popular support. There is yet hope...
Seriously, I agree with you. It's getting old that you can't post an honest opinion that isn't pro-OSS, pro-Google or pro-Apple without getting the beat down with the overrated mod.
I'd like to offer an opposing view, then. I'm hardly in the Slashdot groupthink box: I consider (reasonable implementations of) copyright to be a viable, ethical system; I don't run Linux on my home PC (for all the same reasons other people don't); I think Microsoft does produce some good software (though far from all of it and I have no problem with saying that either)... You get the idea.
I went through a phase a while back where it seemed like many of my non-groupthink-supporting posts were modded both (+1, Insightful) and (-1, Overrated), with the latter sometimes stacking up to hide a post because of the "two strikes and you lose your +1 bonus" rule even if it was also modded up multiple times.
For the past few months, I've seen this much more rarely. I assume you still can't M2 a (-1, Overrated) mod; I've certainly never been offered one. So I can only conclude that modding down posts you disagree with is giving way to more reasoned discussion. At the same time, I have noticed a welcome increase in non-trivial, constructive responses to my posts, both agreeing and disagreeing with me, and those often lead to the interesting discussions I come here for. I, for one, say good riddance to our (-1, Overrated) modding, non-reply-posting underlords. :-)
The only thing I have given up with for now is submitting stories. I'm sure there were good reasons all my recent submissions were rejected, and several of the topics made it via an alternative submission anyway, but it's just depressing to go to the effort of writing something up carefully and with checked links, only to see a day full of substandard press release jobs making it instead. This mainly predates the Firehose system, though, so perhaps it's better now. One of these days I might just find out.
What? Surely the US would never treat an innocent guest as a potential terrorist? Especially not the international development minister for a foreign government visiting the US as a guest of the DHS to talk about tackling terrorism! And certainly not twice...
Did I mention that he's the first Muslim minister in British history?
If a robot takes your job (or in this case, a mashup) then your job was pointless.
Not necessarily. Your job is now pointless, but that doesn't mean it wasn't useful before. After all, if it wasn't, why are people bothering to automate it?
Of course, now that it can be automated, that leaves you as a good IT person free to work on more challenging things that still require human input, hopefully providing better support to the rest of your organisation as a result. The only people who will lose out here are poorly skilled IT workers who could serve the role of a machine in one area, but can't do anything else and won't learn to become worth more. Losing their jobs is the corporate version of natural selection.
Poor attitude among IT folk is a much bigger threat than Web2.0 or indeed anything else. [...] When everyone walks around with a dangling ring of USB flashdrives because trying to get networked fileshare space is a major hassle and ridiculously expensive ($3k for a 1 gig partition charged to your overhead budget!)
I wonder when the next story will come along about a huge data leak because someone at a big company didn't follow security procedures.
Does it occur to you that corporate IT may be responsible for things like keeping data stored securely and backed up, and that by taking your attitude you are undermining their efforts to handle data in a responsible, professional manner?
Yes, it's possible that the corporate IT people in this case are just incompetent. But it's also possible that they're just trying to do their job properly, and you seem awfully quick to judge.
Fair point, but the tinfoil hat brigade might suggest that the officer "retired" conveniently to give an excuse to drop the case because they expected to lose it and set a clear and (to them) damaging precedent....
Probably depends on whether you're in a one- or two-party state; in the latter case, everyone being recorded has to consent.
Is there by any chance an exemption saying the cops are perfectly free to record you without your consent?
Except for the A-Team, the world's only "crack commando unit" who can't actually shoot anyone until they've had several series of training, that is... :-)
At least in regards to law enforcement, I find the all black uniforms simply serve to make them look threatening. I understand that in an encounter they don't want to give any impression of vunerability or weakness, but these people are human (most of them, anyway) and their job is to serve the public.
The thing is, in this country we used to have policing by consent. That had some major advantages, not the least of which was that the police commanded the respect of the public they served, and members of the public could generally be relied upon to help them. Today, it's increasingly a them-and-us culture the closer to the top you get, thanks in no small part to an increasing number of silly laws pushed through by politicians but lacking popular support: everything from excessive stop-and-search to "road safety" laws based on cameras and fines rather than real police stopping people who are really dangerous. As the saying goes, any bad law serves to bring all law into contempt, and this has a direct effect on the way the front line beat officers are perceived.
At this rate I'd rather see (visually speaking) the military show up in their respective typical colors than cops in all black. Psychologically, that's kind of scary.
The sad irony of that comment is that the military actually do seem to understand the importance of relating to the people they are there to help. Witness the actions of the British army in Iraq, when they deliberately did things like going out to meet the people there, wearing caps instead of armoured helmets. They have the helmets for when they're needed, but the guys at the top made the decision not to present the face of an oppressor, and for a while it actually worked (and it when they had to switch back, that wasn't the reason).
Compare and contrast with the aforementioned police force, who seem to be actively cultivating a "we're scarier than you are" aura and the fear of the populace rather than their respect. It's the wrong call, IMNSHO, and after letting it go too far for the past few years we're starting to see the backlash both on the street and at political levels. I'm sure they'll look great in those funky face-shields, though. It's very sad.
Come now, do you think that "piracy" can get worse than it is today?
Piracy might not get much worse, but today the majority of people do obtain their music, movies, software, etc. legally. If you make it legal for them to copy it from someone else rather than pay for it, you are effectively inviting them to do so rather than buying it. That's not to say that it would necessarily get worse for artists in the long term, because secondary effects like advertising might mess up the "obvious" conclusions, but certainly if you go down that path you might as well give up with copyright altogether.