What you seem to not be aware of is that OpenType is a container format that can contain a *either* Type 1 format font or TrueType format font. Nice try pretending you actually know something about font technology.
ROFLMAO. Perhaps, Mr AC, you didn't notice my earlier post, which was up several hours before yours, where I mentioned the quadratic vs. cubic issue, and that this wasn't the whole story behind OpenType? Or did you not realise that this refers to the Postscript vs. TrueType distinction? If not, then nice try pretending you actually know something about font technology!
If you ask me, all fonts besides Courier New and Arial are superfluous. [...] Maybe that's why I'm not a web designer.
Actually, you'd probably do a better job than a lot of people who are web designers. It's amazing how many of them still don't get that on the web you don't have 100% control of your fonts and sizes, and they continue to try to hack around the limitation rather than simply designing to to allow for the nature of the medium.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but a fair bit of the "traditional wisdom" of typographers just doesn't stand up in what few objective studies there have been on readability, legibility, image projection, etc. Some of the general principles hold reliably, and so do some of the common sense rules of thumb born of experience, things like avoiding fonts where important glyphs in your work have similar shapes and might be misread in context.
But a lot of the talk, particularly about the importance of choosing just the right specific font(s), is just marketing babble designed to justify the exorbitant prices charged by many much of the design industry. It may be many things, but scientific certainly isn't one of them.
The problem with web pages that specify arial is that it usually comes in the I'm-a-Frontpage-using-retard form of "arial,helvetica,sans-serif" which inflicts a bitmap helvetica font on anyone using a standard X11 install.
Sorry, but the problem there isn't the web page, it's that your "standard X11 install" apparently has a poor quality of font rendering that the rest of the world left behind over a decade ago.
It's only a holy war between people who don't do high-DPI outputs for a living.
In other words, it's a holy war.
Sure, it would be better if the Windows engine provided an alternative rendering mode that could be used for things like print preview features or DTP packages, to avoid the distortion effect of the closer pixel alignment they favour. Similarly, it would be better if the MacOS engine provided a less blurry version for people who don't care about print and just want the cleanest on-screen text they can have. But right now they don't. Unless you're either working in serious graphic design/typography or you have poor vision and can't actually read the softer text well, it's not a black and white choice and which is "better" comes down to personal preference. Neither technology is broken, they simply have different aims.
I'm not talking about web typography. Im talking about print.
/me glances at the discussion title.
Maybe you're in the wrong discussion?:-)
And, if you go take a look at the type libraries of any large ad agency, pre-press house or printer you will find that almost all of the fonts are Postscript Type 1. More and more Opentype fonts are appearing, but at this moment it's still almost all Type 1. In five years that may not be the case. But as the original poster said that Opentype is the de facto standard now, I stand by my statement.
Fair enough. I meant that if you were going out now to get some professional fonts, OpenType is what you'd find, but I didn't say this clearly and obviously many agencies and the like have an established collection of older fonts. I guess a lot of those were probably bought before OpenType even existed....
Furthermore, "Opentype" is more of a marketing phrase than a description of the technology.
Not really. Sure, you can define the shape of the glyphs using either quadratic or cubic curves, but all of the good stuff that we didn't have before — in particular, the smart matching from source characters and context to glyphs — is common.
Erm... No, sorry. All of the big foundries now supply pretty much their entire collection in OpenType format, and several are moving towards only supplying new fonts in this format. If you're not aware of this, a little reading around the usual web typography forums will soon show you the direction things are moving in.
Actually, the Microsoft Typography people are pretty good, and the new wave of OpenType fonts are pretty good about supporting things like ligatures. And of course OpenType is itself a technology that Microsoft has been heavily involved in supporting, and is basically the de facto standard format for all professional fonts now.
The Windows vs. MacOS anti-aliasing debate is a holy war so I'm not going there. But in terms of poor support for typography, it's not Windows that's the problem. Even Notepad in WinXP could deal with OpenType. It's just that flagship applications like Word can't, because despite BillG's grand announcement a few years ago about how important this all is (and the readability and accessibility research that agrees with him) the Office team didn't consider it enough of a priority to get it working in 2007.
Note to stupid people reading posts: never trust legal advice you see on Slashdot without verifying that it's true, and in particular, true in your own jurisdiction.
Note to stupid people writing posts: it is really unhelpful to state legal "facts" that are wildly inaccurate for a high proportion of people reading your post. Depending on where you are, doing so may itself be illegal.
Although I recognize that it's probably a subjective judgment, I think that the new set of fonts are more readable.
Actually, it's not entirely subjective. The new fonts were designed to work well with Microsoft's ClearType anti-aliasing technology. This means the fonts can be a bit more adventurous about their design and hinting, and if you're using a flatscreen where ClearType improves the perceived resolution, you might get smoother rendering and at smaller font sizes. CRT users on Windows are basically out of luck on this one, and will just see another font that might even not look as good as the previous generation fonts at unfortunate sizes. I can't comment on how well any smart font rendering technology will handle these on Macs and Linux, but if MS are going to be giving them away with no strings attached at some point (what else makes sense if you want to establish a web font?) then they're probably worth a look.
Speaking as a programmer, I think the set is worth having just for Consolas. Speaking as someone familiar with graphic design and typography, I quite like Calibri and Corbel for on-screen use, though they have one or two unfortunate artifacts at common sizes that spoil them a bit, particularly for web pages where you can't control the size reliably and in any case you can't rely on your visitor having the fonts installed yet. Candara I'm not so keen on, as things like Optima use similar principles to better effect IMHO, and in any case those tricks don't really work well on-screen. I don't like either of the new serif faces at all. They're clunky, and even at their best sizes, offer little over something like Georgia for on-screen use or numerous established fonts for high-res printing. Also, things like using old-style numerals by default in a general purpose screen font, so o (oh) and 0 (zero) are visually almost identical, has been shown to result in a near-100% misrecognition rate when viewed in an ambiguous context and is therefore pretty dumb. Typographic details like old-style numerals have their place, but that place is to be used in the right context where they make things easier to read, not to be used everywhere regardless.
Exactly: it's better for an officer to end up dead than an innocent -- the officer signed up for it.
I don't know whether that was intended as serious or humorous. I don't think it matters, though: officers are the people least likely to suffer injury or worse, because the officers should be the ones controlling any potentially violent encounter, and should take steps to do so from relatively safe positions. Unless you are calling in cops with firearms because there is a guy with a gun literally shooting people right now, or something similarly urgent but similarly obvious, it should be possible to completely avoid the sort of confrontations we see all too often.
If you give the guys on the ground these split-second, life-or-death decisions, they will inevitably get wrong sometimes, no matter how well trained and well intentioned they may be. A cop with a gun is still only human. The point is that they shouldn't be there, with that high-pressure decision to make, in the first place. Better planning from the senior officers could have avoided such tragic showdowns in almost all of the cases I've heard about.
Three more cases to go and they'll gain a temporary geek credebility booster.
Following the success of our recent high-profile advertising campaign, we are delighted to announce the successful completion of 3 new legal matters, bringing our total for the past two years to -1.
The saddest thing here is that you seem to think it's perfectly OK to object to the US spying on its own people, but you have no problem with your government authorising completely open-ended spying on anyone else, for any purpose, regardless of whether they are political allies or otherwise friendly, etc.
I wonder if we'll have another article this week about why letting US-based companies dominate Internet routing and administration is a bad idea.
I think I'm too old for this stuff. It seems like these days, if I mention to a younger software developer that even now Robocop is still one of the scariest films I've ever seen, they assume it's because of the ketchup effects.
Sorry, but looking in from the outside, I don't understand how any American can possibly believe Clinton's indiscretion was worthy of impeachment while Bush Jr's systematic erosion of the checks and balances in your government and immoral actions causing the deaths of countless thousands of people apparently are not. You would think that given the obvious centralisation of power around the executive branch and its willingness to outright ignore the authority of the other two apparently on a whim, you would see Congress and the judiciary restraining the President as a survival measure if nothing else....
I'm not going to ask [SWAT] to stand there and get shot because they can't be certain that they're shooting at the right guy with the gun. There is going to be a certain amount of risk, and I trust they'll be out there trying to minimize that risk, but it'll never be eliminated.
They don't have to stand there. They control the timing and nature of the confrontation. From the mostly anecdotal evidence I've seen, a remarkably high proportion of bad shootings by police officers started with a simple confrontation being mishandled, resulting in a fast moving situation with panic reactions rather than a controlled challenge with safety paramount. The whole point of having trained public servants to do this rather than any old Joe is that the trained guys are supposed to be better at it.
I don't know when we as a society started thinking that we ought to be sacrosanct in our persons. I don't want anything bad to happen to me or mine, but I'm not going to go gunning for the cops when one of my loved ones get caught in a crossfire between cops and criminals, or in a situation like this, where a third party put them all in harms way.
I don't know when we as a society started thinking it was acceptable for police to get away with murder, either. But seriously, when was the last time you saw a cop in any western country successfully prosecuted for shooting an innocent person dead? "Friendly fire" might be an unfortunate reality in war, but there's not much excuse for it in everyday life. I would rather the police always erred on the side of caution in this sort of encounter rather than risk shooting someone innocent. At least that way, if bad things happen, it's not our own authorities doing it to us.
Frankly it pisses me off just as much when someone like you maintains they should just be able to shoot whoever the hell enters their house without bothering to verify their target first, as when the cops shoot an innocent person.
We don't have (legal) ownership of guns here for the average guy, so this doesn't really apply to me. However, if I wake up in the middle of the night to find someone sneaking around in my house, potentially armed or with accomplices, in the dark, then I think they are a legitimate target for anything I do have: kitchen knife, bat, whatever.
I have only two options, unless I can somehow hide everyone safely and wait for the police, which is obviously preferable if I don't know what I'm up against. One is to challenge the intruder directly. This will soon verify who they are and whether they are armed and/or accompanied. Unfortunately, it will only do so by dramatically reducing my own survival chances if they are willing to use violence.
The other option is that I surprise them, and do whatever is necessary to incapacitate them before they have chance to react and potentially fight back. This is the option I am going to choose, if I have to make the choice. Moreover, unless I am absolutely sure they are alone and unarmed, I am going to err on the side of caution and hit them with everything I've got, and keep going until they are either held securely or too broken or unconscious to pose a continuing threat. At that point I stop: I am concerned with protecting me and mine, not vigilante "justice". But anything less is risking my life and those of my loved ones to protect an intruder who is already breaking the law. I am legally allowed to use reasonable force to protect myself, and against an unknown aggressor, breaking them or rendering them unconscious is reasonable until you can be sure they no longer pose a threat.
If it comes to court and anyone thinks this is not reasonable force under those circumstances, I will be happy to demonstrate the less than one second it would take me to deliver multiple likely lethal strikes with a concealed knife to an unarmed person who challenged me openly if I were the intruder. Many law enforcement groups around the world have much more liberal rules of engagement than this during incidents where an armed or potentially armed threat is involved, and I would expect the same consideration to be given to anyone who acted realistically to protect their home from an intruder in otherwise unknown circumstances.
The only reason SWAT members discharge their weapons is if there is an immediate danger to themselves or others (I.E. madman pointing a gun at police or shooting from a window at people below).
Yeah, that's what our firearms cops said too, right before they shot the guy carrying a table leg in a bag based on nothing but a poorly executed confrontation (easy to say with hindsight, of course) after a tip-off from a paranoid guy in a bar. Oh, and that little incident on the London Underground, where they shot the guy for getting on a tube train. (Apparently he was exhibiting suspicious behaviour by getting off a bus on the way to the station, then getting back on again; the observing officer had failed to notice that the underground station he had got off to enter the first time happened to be closed that day, and the controlling officers interpreted his actions as counter-surveillance techniques. This was just one in a string of ****-ups that led to the man's death.)
I appreciate that cops with guns are in an inherently difficult position. Make the wrong call, and someone you're supposed to protect dies because you didn't take out the criminal; make the wrong call the other way, and you kill an innocent civilian. But don't ever kid yourself that just because these guys are cops with some firearms training that either their physical or emotional reactions are perfect in a high-stress situation. Humans just don't work that way, no matter how well-intentioned and well-trained.
If the iPlayer agreement is so objectionable, are you happy with the licence terms for the operating system you must use it on?
I'm not happy with the licence agreements for most software these days, but whether any of those are enforceable is questionable under my country's law. (Currently there is an interesting and as-yet untested discrepancy between what national law says and the European directive which it was supposed to implement.) In any case, even the most absurd of EULAs for software I use doesn't make the kind of demands the iPlayer agreement does.
Really, though, my point is that such dangerous, open-ended agreements are entirely avoidable here. As the BBC is now demonstrating, you can arrange things in other ways, without the hostile agreements that no sane person would accept (perhaps even so literally that they would be unenforceable, but who wants to try that defence on the end of a huge lawsuit for P2P copyright infringement?). Thus I am happy to condemn the potentially abusive option, and to support more flexible, less dangerous options where they provide the same essential functionality.
There are far more direct problems caused when a big BBC show comes into conflict with people's everyday lives. For example, while Strictly Come Dancing (that's Dancing with the Stars to our friends across the pond) is good, clean, family fun and has done a lot to promote dancing and get rid of some misconceptions, behind the scenes it has also ruined professional careers, pushed up prices for dedicated students, and resulted in local dancing clubs being messed around whenever the production team got anywhere near them or their teachers.
But despite having been on the wrong end of this, I still don't think it's deliberate malice of the "we pwn3d ur pc" cracker/file-sharing abuser type. It's just a production team trying to make a good TV show, as it should be, and some unfortunate side-effects they probably didn't see coming. Similarly, I imagine if anyone who had a clue about modern culture had read the conditions of using the earlier iPlayer, instead of some corporate lawyer, perhaps it would have been written in a more plain English, less ass-covering manner. The Beeb do, to their credit, seem to take on constructive criticism well, and hopefully this latest iPlayer offering will learn from the mistakes of the earlier one.
Hmm... I only discovered this at the weekend, but perhaps I should now go and write a quick e-mail to the BBC pointing them at my earlier post, so they can see how their existing offering comes across to someone used to checking the small print.
But at a price. I went to try it out the other day, having inadvertently deleted a program from my PVR before watching it. As always, I scanned the small print before installing new software, and this is what I found:
Assuming that I understand the agreement correctly and that it is legal, by installing the current version of iPlayer you agree to:
join a third-party P2P network and pay for any amount of bandwidth required to use that network
accept all liability for any material sent over that network using your computer, though the BBC offer you no guarantee that any of it will be legal
allow the BBC to monitor your use of the P2P network, and anything else they put in a policy on a web page somewhere, which they can change without you knowing about it
allow the BBC to automatically install updates to their iPlayer software on your computer, without your knowledge or consent, with no restriction on what they may do
allow the BBC's software to automatically change your network configuration in ways that are unspecified but that you are explicitly warned may break it
not hold the BBC responsible for any damage done to your system etc. etc. etc. including via the above-mentioned updates and network configuration changes
allow the BBC to terminate the agreement at any time, but
have no right to terminate it yourself.
In other words, you agree to them doing anything they want on your machine and your network, specifically including using it as a distribution hub for transmitting potentially illegal content to and from unknown users while being monitored, at your expense, without any responsibility on their side and with full liability for any illegal activity resting on you.
Now, the BBC is usually a pretty decent organisation. They don't get things right all the time, but on the whole, I think they do a good job, and I don't think they're the kind of organisation that would deliberately try to screw people. But tell me, what person in their right mind would agree to the terms for using the current iPlayer software, with today's legal and file-sharing cultures?
If the new version is streaming, Flash-based, and otherwise no-questions-asked, then as far as I'm concerned, it will be a huge improvement for Windows users as well... not least, because you won't be opening yourself up to a wrecked system, unlimited bandwidth charges, and an expensive lawsuit, just for clicking "OK". I might even be able to use it, which as a licence fee payer would be nice.
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What you seem to not be aware of is that OpenType is a container format that can contain a *either* Type 1 format font or TrueType format font. Nice try pretending you actually know something about font technology.
ROFLMAO. Perhaps, Mr AC, you didn't notice my earlier post, which was up several hours before yours, where I mentioned the quadratic vs. cubic issue, and that this wasn't the whole story behind OpenType? Or did you not realise that this refers to the Postscript vs. TrueType distinction? If not, then nice try pretending you actually know something about font technology!
If you ask me, all fonts besides Courier New and Arial are superfluous. [...] Maybe that's why I'm not a web designer.
Actually, you'd probably do a better job than a lot of people who are web designers. It's amazing how many of them still don't get that on the web you don't have 100% control of your fonts and sizes, and they continue to try to hack around the limitation rather than simply designing to to allow for the nature of the medium.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but a fair bit of the "traditional wisdom" of typographers just doesn't stand up in what few objective studies there have been on readability, legibility, image projection, etc. Some of the general principles hold reliably, and so do some of the common sense rules of thumb born of experience, things like avoiding fonts where important glyphs in your work have similar shapes and might be misread in context.
But a lot of the talk, particularly about the importance of choosing just the right specific font(s), is just marketing babble designed to justify the exorbitant prices charged by many much of the design industry. It may be many things, but scientific certainly isn't one of them.
The problem with web pages that specify arial is that it usually comes in the I'm-a-Frontpage-using-retard form of "arial,helvetica,sans-serif" which inflicts a bitmap helvetica font on anyone using a standard X11 install.
Sorry, but the problem there isn't the web page, it's that your "standard X11 install" apparently has a poor quality of font rendering that the rest of the world left behind over a decade ago.
It's only a holy war between people who don't do high-DPI outputs for a living.
In other words, it's a holy war.
Sure, it would be better if the Windows engine provided an alternative rendering mode that could be used for things like print preview features or DTP packages, to avoid the distortion effect of the closer pixel alignment they favour. Similarly, it would be better if the MacOS engine provided a less blurry version for people who don't care about print and just want the cleanest on-screen text they can have. But right now they don't. Unless you're either working in serious graphic design/typography or you have poor vision and can't actually read the softer text well, it's not a black and white choice and which is "better" comes down to personal preference. Neither technology is broken, they simply have different aims.
I'm not talking about web typography. Im talking about print.
/me glances at the discussion title.
Maybe you're in the wrong discussion? :-)
And, if you go take a look at the type libraries of any large ad agency, pre-press house or printer you will find that almost all of the fonts are Postscript Type 1. More and more Opentype fonts are appearing, but at this moment it's still almost all Type 1. In five years that may not be the case. But as the original poster said that Opentype is the de facto standard now, I stand by my statement.
Fair enough. I meant that if you were going out now to get some professional fonts, OpenType is what you'd find, but I didn't say this clearly and obviously many agencies and the like have an established collection of older fonts. I guess a lot of those were probably bought before OpenType even existed....
Furthermore, "Opentype" is more of a marketing phrase than a description of the technology.
Not really. Sure, you can define the shape of the glyphs using either quadratic or cubic curves, but all of the good stuff that we didn't have before — in particular, the smart matching from source characters and context to glyphs — is common.
Postscript Type 1 still rules the roost.
Erm... No, sorry. All of the big foundries now supply pretty much their entire collection in OpenType format, and several are moving towards only supplying new fonts in this format. If you're not aware of this, a little reading around the usual web typography forums will soon show you the direction things are moving in.
Actually, the Microsoft Typography people are pretty good, and the new wave of OpenType fonts are pretty good about supporting things like ligatures. And of course OpenType is itself a technology that Microsoft has been heavily involved in supporting, and is basically the de facto standard format for all professional fonts now.
The Windows vs. MacOS anti-aliasing debate is a holy war so I'm not going there. But in terms of poor support for typography, it's not Windows that's the problem. Even Notepad in WinXP could deal with OpenType. It's just that flagship applications like Word can't, because despite BillG's grand announcement a few years ago about how important this all is (and the readability and accessibility research that agrees with him) the Office team didn't consider it enough of a priority to get it working in 2007.
Note to stupid people reading posts: never trust legal advice you see on Slashdot without verifying that it's true, and in particular, true in your own jurisdiction.
Note to stupid people writing posts: it is really unhelpful to state legal "facts" that are wildly inaccurate for a high proportion of people reading your post. Depending on where you are, doing so may itself be illegal.
Although I recognize that it's probably a subjective judgment, I think that the new set of fonts are more readable.
Actually, it's not entirely subjective. The new fonts were designed to work well with Microsoft's ClearType anti-aliasing technology. This means the fonts can be a bit more adventurous about their design and hinting, and if you're using a flatscreen where ClearType improves the perceived resolution, you might get smoother rendering and at smaller font sizes. CRT users on Windows are basically out of luck on this one, and will just see another font that might even not look as good as the previous generation fonts at unfortunate sizes. I can't comment on how well any smart font rendering technology will handle these on Macs and Linux, but if MS are going to be giving them away with no strings attached at some point (what else makes sense if you want to establish a web font?) then they're probably worth a look.
Speaking as a programmer, I think the set is worth having just for Consolas. Speaking as someone familiar with graphic design and typography, I quite like Calibri and Corbel for on-screen use, though they have one or two unfortunate artifacts at common sizes that spoil them a bit, particularly for web pages where you can't control the size reliably and in any case you can't rely on your visitor having the fonts installed yet. Candara I'm not so keen on, as things like Optima use similar principles to better effect IMHO, and in any case those tricks don't really work well on-screen. I don't like either of the new serif faces at all. They're clunky, and even at their best sizes, offer little over something like Georgia for on-screen use or numerous established fonts for high-res printing. Also, things like using old-style numerals by default in a general purpose screen font, so o (oh) and 0 (zero) are visually almost identical, has been shown to result in a near-100% misrecognition rate when viewed in an ambiguous context and is therefore pretty dumb. Typographic details like old-style numerals have their place, but that place is to be used in the right context where they make things easier to read, not to be used everywhere regardless.
Exactly: it's better for an officer to end up dead than an innocent -- the officer signed up for it.
I don't know whether that was intended as serious or humorous. I don't think it matters, though: officers are the people least likely to suffer injury or worse, because the officers should be the ones controlling any potentially violent encounter, and should take steps to do so from relatively safe positions. Unless you are calling in cops with firearms because there is a guy with a gun literally shooting people right now, or something similarly urgent but similarly obvious, it should be possible to completely avoid the sort of confrontations we see all too often.
If you give the guys on the ground these split-second, life-or-death decisions, they will inevitably get wrong sometimes, no matter how well trained and well intentioned they may be. A cop with a gun is still only human. The point is that they shouldn't be there, with that high-pressure decision to make, in the first place. Better planning from the senior officers could have avoided such tragic showdowns in almost all of the cases I've heard about.
Three more cases to go and they'll gain a temporary geek credebility booster.
Following the success of our recent high-profile advertising campaign, we are delighted to announce the successful completion of 3 new legal matters, bringing our total for the past two years to -1.
The saddest thing here is that you seem to think it's perfectly OK to object to the US spying on its own people, but you have no problem with your government authorising completely open-ended spying on anyone else, for any purpose, regardless of whether they are political allies or otherwise friendly, etc.
I wonder if we'll have another article this week about why letting US-based companies dominate Internet routing and administration is a bad idea.
I think I'm too old for this stuff. It seems like these days, if I mention to a younger software developer that even now Robocop is still one of the scariest films I've ever seen, they assume it's because of the ketchup effects.
Sorry, I missed the end of that story. How did it turn out, again?
Sorry, but looking in from the outside, I don't understand how any American can possibly believe Clinton's indiscretion was worthy of impeachment while Bush Jr's systematic erosion of the checks and balances in your government and immoral actions causing the deaths of countless thousands of people apparently are not. You would think that given the obvious centralisation of power around the executive branch and its willingness to outright ignore the authority of the other two apparently on a whim, you would see Congress and the judiciary restraining the President as a survival measure if nothing else....
This is above-and-beyond the obvious fact that it is perhaps the most illegal and immoral thing I've ever heard of congress doing.
Apart from failing in their duty to remove an unethical President from office?
I'm not going to ask [SWAT] to stand there and get shot because they can't be certain that they're shooting at the right guy with the gun. There is going to be a certain amount of risk, and I trust they'll be out there trying to minimize that risk, but it'll never be eliminated.
They don't have to stand there. They control the timing and nature of the confrontation. From the mostly anecdotal evidence I've seen, a remarkably high proportion of bad shootings by police officers started with a simple confrontation being mishandled, resulting in a fast moving situation with panic reactions rather than a controlled challenge with safety paramount. The whole point of having trained public servants to do this rather than any old Joe is that the trained guys are supposed to be better at it.
I don't know when we as a society started thinking that we ought to be sacrosanct in our persons. I don't want anything bad to happen to me or mine, but I'm not going to go gunning for the cops when one of my loved ones get caught in a crossfire between cops and criminals, or in a situation like this, where a third party put them all in harms way.
I don't know when we as a society started thinking it was acceptable for police to get away with murder, either. But seriously, when was the last time you saw a cop in any western country successfully prosecuted for shooting an innocent person dead? "Friendly fire" might be an unfortunate reality in war, but there's not much excuse for it in everyday life. I would rather the police always erred on the side of caution in this sort of encounter rather than risk shooting someone innocent. At least that way, if bad things happen, it's not our own authorities doing it to us.
Frankly it pisses me off just as much when someone like you maintains they should just be able to shoot whoever the hell enters their house without bothering to verify their target first, as when the cops shoot an innocent person.
We don't have (legal) ownership of guns here for the average guy, so this doesn't really apply to me. However, if I wake up in the middle of the night to find someone sneaking around in my house, potentially armed or with accomplices, in the dark, then I think they are a legitimate target for anything I do have: kitchen knife, bat, whatever.
I have only two options, unless I can somehow hide everyone safely and wait for the police, which is obviously preferable if I don't know what I'm up against. One is to challenge the intruder directly. This will soon verify who they are and whether they are armed and/or accompanied. Unfortunately, it will only do so by dramatically reducing my own survival chances if they are willing to use violence.
The other option is that I surprise them, and do whatever is necessary to incapacitate them before they have chance to react and potentially fight back. This is the option I am going to choose, if I have to make the choice. Moreover, unless I am absolutely sure they are alone and unarmed, I am going to err on the side of caution and hit them with everything I've got, and keep going until they are either held securely or too broken or unconscious to pose a continuing threat. At that point I stop: I am concerned with protecting me and mine, not vigilante "justice". But anything less is risking my life and those of my loved ones to protect an intruder who is already breaking the law. I am legally allowed to use reasonable force to protect myself, and against an unknown aggressor, breaking them or rendering them unconscious is reasonable until you can be sure they no longer pose a threat.
If it comes to court and anyone thinks this is not reasonable force under those circumstances, I will be happy to demonstrate the less than one second it would take me to deliver multiple likely lethal strikes with a concealed knife to an unarmed person who challenged me openly if I were the intruder. Many law enforcement groups around the world have much more liberal rules of engagement than this during incidents where an armed or potentially armed threat is involved, and I would expect the same consideration to be given to anyone who acted realistically to protect their home from an intruder in otherwise unknown circumstances.
And if you make yelling "Police!" as you smash the door down illegal, only home-invading criminals will yell "Police!"
The only reason SWAT members discharge their weapons is if there is an immediate danger to themselves or others (I.E. madman pointing a gun at police or shooting from a window at people below).
Yeah, that's what our firearms cops said too, right before they shot the guy carrying a table leg in a bag based on nothing but a poorly executed confrontation (easy to say with hindsight, of course) after a tip-off from a paranoid guy in a bar. Oh, and that little incident on the London Underground, where they shot the guy for getting on a tube train. (Apparently he was exhibiting suspicious behaviour by getting off a bus on the way to the station, then getting back on again; the observing officer had failed to notice that the underground station he had got off to enter the first time happened to be closed that day, and the controlling officers interpreted his actions as counter-surveillance techniques. This was just one in a string of ****-ups that led to the man's death.)
I appreciate that cops with guns are in an inherently difficult position. Make the wrong call, and someone you're supposed to protect dies because you didn't take out the criminal; make the wrong call the other way, and you kill an innocent civilian. But don't ever kid yourself that just because these guys are cops with some firearms training that either their physical or emotional reactions are perfect in a high-stress situation. Humans just don't work that way, no matter how well-intentioned and well-trained.
Unless the BBC commits to using the subset of Flash that has been reimplemented by Gnash and other projects, I don't think it's a big step forward.
Before: only Windows users can view the programmes without paying any more for them.
After: Windows, Mac, and Linux users (and anyone else with access to Flash) can view the programmes without paying any more for them.
I'm sorry, but claiming that this isn't a big step forward on some sort of philosophical grounds is just cutting off your nose to spite your face.
If the iPlayer agreement is so objectionable, are you happy with the licence terms for the operating system you must use it on?
I'm not happy with the licence agreements for most software these days, but whether any of those are enforceable is questionable under my country's law. (Currently there is an interesting and as-yet untested discrepancy between what national law says and the European directive which it was supposed to implement.) In any case, even the most absurd of EULAs for software I use doesn't make the kind of demands the iPlayer agreement does.
Really, though, my point is that such dangerous, open-ended agreements are entirely avoidable here. As the BBC is now demonstrating, you can arrange things in other ways, without the hostile agreements that no sane person would accept (perhaps even so literally that they would be unenforceable, but who wants to try that defence on the end of a huge lawsuit for P2P copyright infringement?). Thus I am happy to condemn the potentially abusive option, and to support more flexible, less dangerous options where they provide the same essential functionality.
There are far more direct problems caused when a big BBC show comes into conflict with people's everyday lives. For example, while Strictly Come Dancing (that's Dancing with the Stars to our friends across the pond) is good, clean, family fun and has done a lot to promote dancing and get rid of some misconceptions, behind the scenes it has also ruined professional careers, pushed up prices for dedicated students, and resulted in local dancing clubs being messed around whenever the production team got anywhere near them or their teachers.
But despite having been on the wrong end of this, I still don't think it's deliberate malice of the "we pwn3d ur pc" cracker/file-sharing abuser type. It's just a production team trying to make a good TV show, as it should be, and some unfortunate side-effects they probably didn't see coming. Similarly, I imagine if anyone who had a clue about modern culture had read the conditions of using the earlier iPlayer, instead of some corporate lawyer, perhaps it would have been written in a more plain English, less ass-covering manner. The Beeb do, to their credit, seem to take on constructive criticism well, and hopefully this latest iPlayer offering will learn from the mistakes of the earlier one.
Hmm... I only discovered this at the weekend, but perhaps I should now go and write a quick e-mail to the BBC pointing them at my earlier post, so they can see how their existing offering comes across to someone used to checking the small print.
iPlayer offers other programs.
But at a price. I went to try it out the other day, having inadvertently deleted a program from my PVR before watching it. As always, I scanned the small print before installing new software, and this is what I found:
Assuming that I understand the agreement correctly and that it is legal, by installing the current version of iPlayer you agree to:
In other words, you agree to them doing anything they want on your machine and your network, specifically including using it as a distribution hub for transmitting potentially illegal content to and from unknown users while being monitored, at your expense, without any responsibility on their side and with full liability for any illegal activity resting on you.
Now, the BBC is usually a pretty decent organisation. They don't get things right all the time, but on the whole, I think they do a good job, and I don't think they're the kind of organisation that would deliberately try to screw people. But tell me, what person in their right mind would agree to the terms for using the current iPlayer software, with today's legal and file-sharing cultures?
If the new version is streaming, Flash-based, and otherwise no-questions-asked, then as far as I'm concerned, it will be a huge improvement for Windows users as well... not least, because you won't be opening yourself up to a wrecked system, unlimited bandwidth charges, and an expensive lawsuit, just for clicking "OK". I might even be able to use it, which as a licence fee payer would be nice.