I think you have a valid concern, but one of the few things more powerful in this world than the police/justice system is free communications. Once a few videos like this start appearing on the Internet, showing people who look like police officers beating people up, or better yet showing identifiable officers, then the higher authorities will have to take action, and it will have to be quick, obvious and decisive. Being seen to defend or condone this sort of behaviour is enough to get powerful people unelected/fired, and a popular backlash would also be hugely damaging to legitimate police behaviour, which would become much more difficult if the public stopped supporting it.
I'm guessing that in most places, the majority of police officers are just decent people trying to do a decent job as well as they can. The problem is the minority who abuse the authority for kicks or personal gain. If this is true, then it won't take long to either force that minority to behave, or to identify them and hold them accountable for their actions.
a) Credit is only debt if you do not pay the bill.
Credit is debt until you pay the bill. If you buy a nice TV using a loan or mortgage, you are in debt until you have repaid that money.
b) Home prices have shown steady growth in most regions. The only places that will be susceptible to the 'bubble' are CA, Phoenix, etc. I still doubt that there will be a pop though. Something like a cooling off is more likely.
Home prices have shown absurd growth here in the UK in recent years. We have had a situation where people who would have been average first-time buyers a few years ago simply can't afford to buy a home now. Something like 1 in every 3 first homes is now bought using heavy financial support from a previous generation, itself funded by housing market debt. Repayments on mortgages represent a much more significant proportion of total household expenditure than they used to. Because many people took out mortgages at absurdly high multipliers of their income a couple of years ago, when interest rates were relatively low, they are now in financial difficulties as their fixed rates run out and they discover that the base rate have soared since then. The market is being sustained to some extent by various factors that weren't around at the time of the last big crash a few years ago, but these will not support it forever, and even if they would, there is increasing political will to go after people like buy-to-let investors who are distorting the market. While none of this makes a crash inevitable, it certainly isn't impossible, which (coming back to the matter at hand) makes using home-secured loans to buy things other than the home itself rather a dangerous proposition for many people. Clearly that hasn't stopped them, perhaps because of the "it won't happen to me" mindset.
c) Why would you WANT a housing crash and high interest rates? It's like wishing for your neighbors house to go up in flames and expect that yours will be untouched.
High house prices don't really help anyone other than the industry (mortgage lenders, estate agents, etc.), the tax man, those playing around with multiple homes, and perhaps those "trading down" to smaller homes later in life. For the average household, who just want to buy a place to live, and who trade up a lot more often than down as their families grow, higher prices just mean paying out more money every time they move.
And for what it's worth, my home would be untouched by a crash. Like many others of my generation, I have chosen not to buy a home at an inflated price because I don't want to pay a stupidly large deposit and then inflated mortgage payments for many years to come. So, like all those others, I choose (or am forced to) rent, until the market doesn't look like a liability.
if someone had told you even ten years ago that people would be taking out second mortgages to buy flat screen TVs, would you have believed it?
That sounds like a really bad deal (for the closing costs alone).
Actually, I think it sounds more like a nation of naive people who don't understand that (a) credit is just another word for debt, (b) house prices are not guaranteed to continue rising at double-figure increments per year, and indeed may fall sharply if the bubble gets too big, and (c) the combination may lead people to have a lot, lot less money than they thought, with relatively little warning.
But hey, that's good news for those of us who save up, don't buy houses at stupidly inflated prices, and only spend what we can actually afford. High interest rates now followed by a house price crash later in the year would suit me nicely.:-)
I'm sure that Michael Dell had to personally kiss Steve Ballmer's pinky ring in order to provide Ubuntu without having Microsoft double their Windows licensing fees. Part of the agreement being to keep it out of their business computers.
I doubt it. For one thing, there's this little area called antitrust law, under which I'm fairly sure Microsoft aren't allowed to pull that kind of stunt any more. For another thing, for a software company that is (relatively speaking) in big trouble to antagonise a hardware company that is (relatively speaking) one of its major routes to the business market is probably not a smart business move, either.
Besides, even if Dell start shipping Linux boxes to business, it's hardly likely that this will undermine Microsoft's dominant position on business desktops. It might even work in their favour to encourage this now: things like Linux GUIs and big name products like OpenOffice aren't ready to take on Microsoft in the business world yet. If a few big businesses try to make the switch now and find the OSS-based alternatives aren't good enough, word will get around (no pun intended!) and Microsoft are probably safe for another few years. Try the same experiment in another two or three years, though, and if current rates of progress are anything to go by in OSS world, Microsoft might find themselves with a much more permanent shift taking place that really would damage them seriously.
In other words, Microsoft probably isn't anywhere close to the bargaining power required to pull this off, and even if it were, it's probably illegal, and even if it were legal, it's probably shortsighted.
Since r1 > r2 just due to the way the banking system works
Except that, as noted previously, that isn't typically the case with current UK student loans vs. current UK savings accounts. Your own maths show exactly why leaving money in a student loan can be advantageous.
I'm afraid I don't see the point of your offsetting argument. A typical offset mortgage effectively is just allowing someone to pay off more per month than usual, thus reducing the amount outstanding on which interest is paid. The period of a loan doesn't matter, unless there is some sort of annual charge or similar; it is the total interest paid over the period of the loan, relative to the other uses to which any reduction payments could have been put, that counts.
Higher-rate tax is a bit of a red herring. If you never even earned the money in the first place (e.g. because you had no savings due to having spent them on a repayment on your loan instead), you can't be taxed on it!
Exactly. So if I have x pounds to put somewhere, my mortgage rate is m, a savings account would get me interest at a rate of s, and this is taxed at a rate of t, then I can either reduce my mortgage interest by mx pounds this year, or bring in s(1-t)x extra pounds in savings interest after tax. That makes paying off part of the mortgage advantageous unless m < s(1-t), which is unrealistic at commercial rates today if t = 0.4 for a higher-rate taxpayer, and unlikely but perhaps not impossible for standard rate taxpayers (ignoring odd percentage points for whatever NI is doing this week).
Friendly word of advice: don't be so quick to post authoritative-sounding financial advice when you're wrong.
In particular, the student loans in the UK (which sounds like what the GP poster was referring to) are not run no the same commercial basis as a loan from a bank. They are money-making: if you have one and really believe that you're only paying interest at the rate of inflation, go look at how the interest is actually calculated relative to when you actually get payments taken out of your salary, and ask yourself why Gordy thinks he can sell student loans to a commercial investor for £6B. However, the effective interest rate can still be less than current commercial rates, and therefore it does make sense for some people who have outstanding student loans to invest their money in a safe savings account rather than paying off the loan.
Also, while offsetting schemes still obviously make money for a bank, that doesn't imply that they're bad for the borrower. Consider the tax implications for a higher-rate taxpayer, who gets hit for a massive 40% of any interest they make on a typical savings account, but whose reduction in interest payment on an offset mortgage is just cutting a loss and therefore not taxable in the same way.
Seriously, if anyone reading this doesn't already know all this stuff but thinks it might be important, go talk to a financial adviser about where to put your money. The cost of a half-hour chat with someone who knows what they are talking about could save you a fortune over the long run, particularly if that half-hour chat comes with the label "free initial consultation". (I am not such an adviser, and you should trust the words in this post exactly as much as anything else you read on the web, i.e., not a lot.)
Software is a virtual good that has virtual value.
What is a "virtual value"? Something is worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. If no-one is prepared to pay what it costs to make something, plus a worthwhile profit, then that thing will not be made by a commercial organisation. This is as true for software as it is for bread or beans. The economics are different, because software costs are almost all in development, while costs for commodity foodstuffs are much more in the marginal cost per item, but the overall principle is identical.
What is going to end up happening, is all the companies who make the hardware will simply give the software that uses that hardware away fore next to nothing or free. What *WILL* be sold, are consulting services related to that software (whereby the vendor consults to make specific improvements for a given customer), ans support agreements.
I think you're wrong on both counts. Look at the games industry. Can you really see the console manufacturers shifting to a model where they give you the console and every game available for it as a bundle, everyone pays say 3x what they currently pay for a console to get that bundle, and no further games are available?
The consulting services argument is tired now. The potential for that has been there for well over a decade, and the simple truth is that some people do make money consulting on software, but they are relatively few. It's like saying you can make money on OSS: sure you can, as long as you're one of the 10 or 20 biggest names in the business, with a business based around one of the handful of killer products that has a huge market. No doubt there are others in both groups who also do make money in various niches — I've worked for several firms that have combined income based on one-off licensing, recurring support/enhancement subscriptions, and in some cases royalties where the product was a library that other developers would include in a product for end users. But the economics don't stack up outside the mainstream or in very competitive markets. Good software is too expensive to develop and then give away, in the hope of later income from consulting or of getting lots of support contracts. Unless something comes along that radically changes the skill and/or timescales required to develop good software, I can't see this changing, and as long as that's the case, software will continue to follow a product model in many fields.
This reality change has been going on for awhile now, andis spurred on by a number of things - The Internet, Open Source, cheap massive storage, global interchange withc countries without IP laws - all these things push us more and more to the point where it is IMPOSSIBLE to sell intellectual property anymore.
Only in a society without ethics. To me, your argument is like saying that the number of bars and stores that sell alcohol, the number of cars and bikes owned by the population, the sheer scale of the road networks and the relatively few traffic police officers around make it IMPOSSIBLE to prevent drink-driving. Of course, most people do not drink-drive anyway, because effective public information campaigns have made the law well-known, the potential consequences of breaking it clear, and therefore the act itself socially unacceptable.
By the same token, to me it is morally unacceptable to rip off someone else's work for free, whether that is software, or music, or a movie, or whatever. In principle, I don't see why we can't have a society that values the creative efforts of people who work on these things, and considers it fair to pay them accordingly. The big difference is that right now, we have Big Media and Big Software doing similarly morally unacceptable things in terms of price fixing, abuse of legal systems, DRM, etc. But the correct answer to this, IMHO, is to enforce existing laws to prevent the abusive prof
I believe your argument is flawed in several ways.
Historically, the rise of the software industry coincided with personal computers becoming commodity items. One might just as well argue that IBM or Apple is responsible for the foundation of what we might call the "software industry" today, for creating the PC and Mac. Indeed, arguing that it was Microsoft alone is surely incorrect, since at the time there were several other similarly powerful companies developing end user software; Microsoft's rise to supremacy in areas like desktop operating systems and office suite software did not occur until many years later.
In today's personal computing industry, the hardware is generic, and it is the software that provides specific applications. There are many application domains. Within each, there is much scope for customisation. Thus we have a variety of software products available today, and "universal software" such as an operating system that almost everyone will use is the exception. This immediately undermines your view of hardware and software as a combined unit: the wants and needs of one person who buys a PC may be completely different to those of another person who would buy identical hardware.
Finally, there is a simple economic fallacy in your argument. You are considering only the marginal cost of creating software products in your economic model, and from the fact that this is near zero for software products, you have inferred that the value of the industry is near zero. However, you have ignored the initial development cost. Even if software were only priced to cover the development cost, and development incurred no overhead in sales, marketing, legal, administration and so on, the money involved for a major software project must pay for the full-time labour of hundreds of highly skilled people over a period of years.
One of the major benefits of the copyright economic model, often ignored in these discussions, is that it provides a mechanism for a market to pay a realistic price for a product that they would all like to have but no one person could afford individually, by splitting the cost. If the product in question has a high development cost but low marginal production cost, then in a competitive industry, one would expect the cost per unit to converge on the value of the software divided by the size of the available market. Charge less than that, and it is not financially viable to build the software product, and everyone loses out because it doesn't get written. Charge more, and a competitor with a product of similar quality can undercut you. This naturally accommodates the uncertainty where the size of market cannot be predicted accurately ahead of time.
In your alternative reality, where software is not a useful industry in its own right, how do you deal with the generality of hardware and the economics of software development to make sure that code actually gets written to make the hardware useful?
Such a presumption exists only after the prosecutor proves that you did at some time possess the "appropriate password".
I appreciate that such a safeguard is written into the letter of the law, but what matters is the practical interpretation in a court. In the sort of case where we might expect this law to be applied, how would anyone ever prove that someone once had a password? What standard of evidence will be required, realistically?
The thing is, that would just lead to a whole bunch of not particularly well-informed people who have enough time/money to secure the appropriate (probably very expensive) certification from the appropriate (partial to vested interests but technically unqualified) regulatory body being given a loud voice in legal matters that their expertise does not merit. It would be like paying thousands for so-called expert witnesses, but for every court case that ever involved technology. Oh, and probably having them be deemed right by the court automatically, even if you (as someone who does know what they're talking about) present an informed opinion that disagrees.
I doubt anybody will get in trouble because a judge doesn't know a PS/2 port from a SATA connector.
Don't count on it. In the UK, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, anyone can be required to turn over the password to decrypt any encrypted data they have that is needed for certain legal purposes... even if the "encrypted data" is just random bits, with no significance and not derived from any meaningful data. You are presumed guilty if you won't (or can't) supply the appropriate password.
If this case happened in the UK, the RIP Act would appear to make you guilty by default if you couldn't supply a password that "decrypted" whatever data was in the RAM when it was next powered up to turn it back into whatever they think was there before. And given that these are people who don't appreciate the volatile nature of RAM, I wouldn't hold out much hope of explaining to the judge why it's not possible to comply with their ruling.
Aren't you glad that our inept legislators and your incompetent judges work in different jurisdictions?
If our laws made what Google's doing illegal, they'd also be making most outdoor photography illegal.
Not unless most outdoor photographs are now taken by commercial organisations with the explicit intent of cataloguing and republishing them complete with search facilities.
Outlook without Exchange, itself isn't any better or worse than.. Thunderbird, Evolution, Pegasus, Eudora, or pretty much any email app.
Actually, I disagree with that. I think Outlook as a plain e-mail client is inferior to several of the above in various objective ways, particularly relating to message rules/filters and dealing with spam, and it's also missing a lot of nice usability features offered by various competitors.
But the simple fact is, at work, I have now switched back to Outlook just because I can't work with the corporate meeting and calendar facilities using Thunderbird. Until TB has support for that — and despite all the PR speeches about how resistance is futile and everything will be done with OSS, the Sunbird/Lightning work appears to be going almost nowhere — the Outlook/Exchange combination seems pretty much unbeatable. Which is sad, because frankly, it's not that great and there's plenty of scope for improvement.
You'd probably get a significant increase in visitors from outside the US as well. I can't speak for terrorists, but I know that I have declined to visit the US on both professional and personal grounds since 9/11 — and not because I think terrorists are going to fly my plane into a building.
On the face of it, that's a reasonable case to make, but please see my comments in the discussion on Google Street View last week for why I don't think it is (or at least, should be) as simple as that. This one addresses your comment quite nicely, IMHO.
OK, for one thing, I do work in computers. I wrote my first program at the age of 4, several decades ago. I am now a senior developer and mentor to junior programmers who make the kinds of dogmatic assumption you do, because they haven't yet learned enough about how to design large, complicated systems to do what they need, not what they already know how to do. You're right about one thing: there is no magic. So if you want a large database system to support this sort of facility, you design it so that you can identify the records and the various back-ups of them if you really need to. It's not rocket science, it's simple software engineering. It's not like the back-up tapes clone themselves while you're not looking, and it's not like you don't already have a systematic way of filing the data so you can find it if you need to restore it. So please do us all a favour and save the patronising "You just don't understand" pitch for someone who actually doesn't, because you aren't carrying any weight with that around here.
For another thing, when did this become all about webmail? Webmail is far from the worst privacy violation Google is guilty of, because webmail is obvious and participation is voluntary. I doubt all these people being caught in their underwear or picking their nose or walking past strip clubs on Google Street View knew about or agreed to that photography. Ditto Google Maps. Ditto much of the stuff with tracking cookies and so on. This is why your "Just don't use the service" argument is broken. (The same goes for many of the other major privacy offenders: Facebook's entire modus operandi effectively revolves around getting friends to provide information about each other.)
Oh, and for the record, I'm on first name terms with the guys who run my ISP, and I know damn well how their webmail system works on the odd occasion that I need to use it. I don't have the "same concerns" here, because I know how they operate (having checked before signing up with them) and more to the point, because I'm using a voluntary service, and they aren't compiling a huge database of information about my entire on-line presence without my consent. But obviously I'm just "naive", because I actually bother to check out the services I'm going to be trusting with my data before I sign up, and I don't sign up with (or, if necessary, I opt out from) organisations that are basically just privacy bombs waiting to go off.
I assume the open letter from PI wasn't written by the individual in question, and it was that which didn't name him, so I don't think we can infer much about whether there is some reason this person would like to remain anonymous.
I was just observing that the letter didn't hide from the fact that there is an MS employee working with PI (in fact, it acknowledges that and then defends him in very strong terms), and wondering if it was the same person being mentioned in this thread.
Contrary to most of the replies here, I think Open source is already "too big" in at least one sense. As evidence, I offer the simple fact that I keep hearing about sysadmins at local firms where friends work, who have committed their businesses to run on OSS because either they support the OSS philosophy or they don't like $BIG_CSS_COMPANY. This is often done despite the fact that $ANOTHER_BIG_CSS_COMPANY offers an objectively better product for their business needs.
Aggressive advocacy of something with potential is no bad thing, but it needs to be tempered with reality. Much of the OSS world isn't yet good enough to beat the established CSS competition. Until it is, sysadmins should not be making objectively inferior business decisions based on personal philosophical preferences.
If Google loses the legal fight to defend their data from government violations, then you should be looking at your government, not Google for the privacy violation.
If Google loses (or gives up) the legal fight, then it's what other people are looking at you should be worrying about.
I think you missed the point. I though the GP was talking about encrypting the data internally in the file system (and therefore in all back-ups), not about user passwords.
I'm not sure this really helps much, though, because now you have the additional costs of space and time for using encryption, but you still have the same basic problem of tracking down all the encryption keys and their back-ups to delete them and reduce the other data to random bits. If you can do that, you've already solved the original problem, given that the size of any worthwhile keys is going to be significant compared to the size of the items to be encrypted, and for this to work you'll need a 1-1 mapping between keys and protected data.
Asking Google to cleanse out ALL of your data, at your whim, is... a bit unreasonable, don't you think?
Both your comment and the other reply to my GP post suggest that the cost makes doing this unreasonable. I guess we just fundamentally disagree on this, because I don't care about the cost. (Actually, that's not quite true, but I do consider it very much secondary to preserving people's right to privacy.)
It's not like Google didn't see the privacy implications coming when they started a project like Street View. I have questioned the ethics of collecting material that has such potential to invade people's privacy and then putting it on-line without, apparently, even reviewing it effectively first.
In any case, if they knew the risks and still chose to implement that system without proper review and without a procedure for removing offending material easily, then I'm afraid I don't have much sympathy if people whose privacy they violate then demand that the offending content be removed and it costs Google a lot of money to make it happen. Indeed, you could make a strong argument that businesses only learn through how much it costs to do things, and therefore the only way to tame the 800lb gorilla of the information age is to make abusing their vast databases very expensive.
One of the biggest differences between Google and other online companies is this: Google is being absolutely, utterly honest about their actual privacy policies and data retention. They will NEVER lie just to tell you what you want to hear, nor will they pretend things are easier than they really are.
Again, that's all well and good, but where I come from, we don't consider doing something bad to be OK as long as you own up to it first. It's not being open about their privacy policy that's getting Google raked over the coals, it's what the policy says and how they implement it.
People who think that the idea of being able to delete your profile is in any way simple or trivial are deluding themselves. Google themselves have said that because of the way GFS works they can *NEVER* know when a piece of data flagged for deletion is actually no longer recoverable. That fault tolerance and redundancy is built into the design.
As others have said, a file system and back-up protocols where you can't readily identify the location of a specific piece of data given its "key" doesn't sound very fault-tolerant to me. We only run a relatively small network, but you can bet that if anything went wrong, we could walk into the server room and pick up the appropriate back-up tapes and/or call the off-site data archive service we use and get every copy they have within a couple of hours. I fail to see why any of the principles involved don't scale arbitrarily, and since Google's whole business model revolves around this stuff, I'm betting they've spent more time thinking about it and have more resources available relative to their network size than we do.
Tell me, if someone like a three letter agency came along with a court order saying that Google must delete all traces of certain information that had inadvertently been stored on its systems but that violated national security, do you think they would
reformat their entire file system and burn all the back-ups because they couldn't tell where it was,
refuse to do this and watch their executives get crucified in court, or
identify the relevant information and get rid of it, keeping sufficient records to demonstrate to the court that this had been done with due diligence?
Woah, obviously logically challenged person here. We can only, at most, discuss weather patents as currently provided for by law are essential.
Says who? The original comment to which you replied was talking about patent reform, as are many others in this discussion. You're the only one who's equating patents (the principle) with the current under-performance by the USPTO specifically.
Since I doubt anyone is going to argue that the current poor state of affairs in the USPTO is a good thing, there's nothing to discuss if you adopt that position. But as strange as it may seem to you, the rest of us don't even have some of the problem patent types you US guys do, and our legal systems don't encourage such litigious behaviour by big business either. There is scope for us to discuss the merits of patents (as the rest of the world uses them) and useful reforms in that context as well.
Woah, obvious troll there. Of course a system run by incompetents is likely to fail, but nothing about the principle of patents says they have to be administered by incompetents. That's just an implementation detail, albeit a rather important one.
What would you think if we replaced current patent officers with an office that retained the services of suitably experienced professionals to vet applications, and then implemented a pricing structure that made it efficient for the little guy to apply for a small number of patents, and the big guy to apply for a large number of patents, but penalised any group that had a disproportionate number of its applications rejected (at least enough to cover the wasted costs of assessing those failed applications)?
Of course, that would probably increase the basic cost of applying for patents even if successful, because it would cost significantly more to check the applications. But if a patent would provide so small an advantage that this extra cost was prohibitive, maybe the invention wasn't sufficiently creative to be worth a patent in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
I think you have a valid concern, but one of the few things more powerful in this world than the police/justice system is free communications. Once a few videos like this start appearing on the Internet, showing people who look like police officers beating people up, or better yet showing identifiable officers, then the higher authorities will have to take action, and it will have to be quick, obvious and decisive. Being seen to defend or condone this sort of behaviour is enough to get powerful people unelected/fired, and a popular backlash would also be hugely damaging to legitimate police behaviour, which would become much more difficult if the public stopped supporting it.
I'm guessing that in most places, the majority of police officers are just decent people trying to do a decent job as well as they can. The problem is the minority who abuse the authority for kicks or personal gain. If this is true, then it won't take long to either force that minority to behave, or to identify them and hold them accountable for their actions.
For context, I'm in the UK.
Credit is debt until you pay the bill. If you buy a nice TV using a loan or mortgage, you are in debt until you have repaid that money.
Home prices have shown absurd growth here in the UK in recent years. We have had a situation where people who would have been average first-time buyers a few years ago simply can't afford to buy a home now. Something like 1 in every 3 first homes is now bought using heavy financial support from a previous generation, itself funded by housing market debt. Repayments on mortgages represent a much more significant proportion of total household expenditure than they used to. Because many people took out mortgages at absurdly high multipliers of their income a couple of years ago, when interest rates were relatively low, they are now in financial difficulties as their fixed rates run out and they discover that the base rate have soared since then. The market is being sustained to some extent by various factors that weren't around at the time of the last big crash a few years ago, but these will not support it forever, and even if they would, there is increasing political will to go after people like buy-to-let investors who are distorting the market. While none of this makes a crash inevitable, it certainly isn't impossible, which (coming back to the matter at hand) makes using home-secured loans to buy things other than the home itself rather a dangerous proposition for many people. Clearly that hasn't stopped them, perhaps because of the "it won't happen to me" mindset.
High house prices don't really help anyone other than the industry (mortgage lenders, estate agents, etc.), the tax man, those playing around with multiple homes, and perhaps those "trading down" to smaller homes later in life. For the average household, who just want to buy a place to live, and who trade up a lot more often than down as their families grow, higher prices just mean paying out more money every time they move.
And for what it's worth, my home would be untouched by a crash. Like many others of my generation, I have chosen not to buy a home at an inflated price because I don't want to pay a stupidly large deposit and then inflated mortgage payments for many years to come. So, like all those others, I choose (or am forced to) rent, until the market doesn't look like a liability.
Actually, I think it sounds more like a nation of naive people who don't understand that (a) credit is just another word for debt, (b) house prices are not guaranteed to continue rising at double-figure increments per year, and indeed may fall sharply if the bubble gets too big, and (c) the combination may lead people to have a lot, lot less money than they thought, with relatively little warning.
But hey, that's good news for those of us who save up, don't buy houses at stupidly inflated prices, and only spend what we can actually afford. High interest rates now followed by a house price crash later in the year would suit me nicely. :-)
I doubt it. For one thing, there's this little area called antitrust law, under which I'm fairly sure Microsoft aren't allowed to pull that kind of stunt any more. For another thing, for a software company that is (relatively speaking) in big trouble to antagonise a hardware company that is (relatively speaking) one of its major routes to the business market is probably not a smart business move, either.
Besides, even if Dell start shipping Linux boxes to business, it's hardly likely that this will undermine Microsoft's dominant position on business desktops. It might even work in their favour to encourage this now: things like Linux GUIs and big name products like OpenOffice aren't ready to take on Microsoft in the business world yet. If a few big businesses try to make the switch now and find the OSS-based alternatives aren't good enough, word will get around (no pun intended!) and Microsoft are probably safe for another few years. Try the same experiment in another two or three years, though, and if current rates of progress are anything to go by in OSS world, Microsoft might find themselves with a much more permanent shift taking place that really would damage them seriously.
In other words, Microsoft probably isn't anywhere close to the bargaining power required to pull this off, and even if it were, it's probably illegal, and even if it were legal, it's probably shortsighted.
Except that, as noted previously, that isn't typically the case with current UK student loans vs. current UK savings accounts. Your own maths show exactly why leaving money in a student loan can be advantageous.
I'm afraid I don't see the point of your offsetting argument. A typical offset mortgage effectively is just allowing someone to pay off more per month than usual, thus reducing the amount outstanding on which interest is paid. The period of a loan doesn't matter, unless there is some sort of annual charge or similar; it is the total interest paid over the period of the loan, relative to the other uses to which any reduction payments could have been put, that counts.
Exactly. So if I have x pounds to put somewhere, my mortgage rate is m, a savings account would get me interest at a rate of s, and this is taxed at a rate of t, then I can either reduce my mortgage interest by mx pounds this year, or bring in s(1-t)x extra pounds in savings interest after tax. That makes paying off part of the mortgage advantageous unless m < s(1-t), which is unrealistic at commercial rates today if t = 0.4 for a higher-rate taxpayer, and unlikely but perhaps not impossible for standard rate taxpayers (ignoring odd percentage points for whatever NI is doing this week).
Friendly word of advice: don't be so quick to post authoritative-sounding financial advice when you're wrong.
In particular, the student loans in the UK (which sounds like what the GP poster was referring to) are not run no the same commercial basis as a loan from a bank. They are money-making: if you have one and really believe that you're only paying interest at the rate of inflation, go look at how the interest is actually calculated relative to when you actually get payments taken out of your salary, and ask yourself why Gordy thinks he can sell student loans to a commercial investor for £6B. However, the effective interest rate can still be less than current commercial rates, and therefore it does make sense for some people who have outstanding student loans to invest their money in a safe savings account rather than paying off the loan.
Also, while offsetting schemes still obviously make money for a bank, that doesn't imply that they're bad for the borrower. Consider the tax implications for a higher-rate taxpayer, who gets hit for a massive 40% of any interest they make on a typical savings account, but whose reduction in interest payment on an offset mortgage is just cutting a loss and therefore not taxable in the same way.
Seriously, if anyone reading this doesn't already know all this stuff but thinks it might be important, go talk to a financial adviser about where to put your money. The cost of a half-hour chat with someone who knows what they are talking about could save you a fortune over the long run, particularly if that half-hour chat comes with the label "free initial consultation". (I am not such an adviser, and you should trust the words in this post exactly as much as anything else you read on the web, i.e., not a lot.)
What is a "virtual value"? Something is worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. If no-one is prepared to pay what it costs to make something, plus a worthwhile profit, then that thing will not be made by a commercial organisation. This is as true for software as it is for bread or beans. The economics are different, because software costs are almost all in development, while costs for commodity foodstuffs are much more in the marginal cost per item, but the overall principle is identical.
I think you're wrong on both counts. Look at the games industry. Can you really see the console manufacturers shifting to a model where they give you the console and every game available for it as a bundle, everyone pays say 3x what they currently pay for a console to get that bundle, and no further games are available?
The consulting services argument is tired now. The potential for that has been there for well over a decade, and the simple truth is that some people do make money consulting on software, but they are relatively few. It's like saying you can make money on OSS: sure you can, as long as you're one of the 10 or 20 biggest names in the business, with a business based around one of the handful of killer products that has a huge market. No doubt there are others in both groups who also do make money in various niches — I've worked for several firms that have combined income based on one-off licensing, recurring support/enhancement subscriptions, and in some cases royalties where the product was a library that other developers would include in a product for end users. But the economics don't stack up outside the mainstream or in very competitive markets. Good software is too expensive to develop and then give away, in the hope of later income from consulting or of getting lots of support contracts. Unless something comes along that radically changes the skill and/or timescales required to develop good software, I can't see this changing, and as long as that's the case, software will continue to follow a product model in many fields.
Only in a society without ethics. To me, your argument is like saying that the number of bars and stores that sell alcohol, the number of cars and bikes owned by the population, the sheer scale of the road networks and the relatively few traffic police officers around make it IMPOSSIBLE to prevent drink-driving. Of course, most people do not drink-drive anyway, because effective public information campaigns have made the law well-known, the potential consequences of breaking it clear, and therefore the act itself socially unacceptable.
By the same token, to me it is morally unacceptable to rip off someone else's work for free, whether that is software, or music, or a movie, or whatever. In principle, I don't see why we can't have a society that values the creative efforts of people who work on these things, and considers it fair to pay them accordingly. The big difference is that right now, we have Big Media and Big Software doing similarly morally unacceptable things in terms of price fixing, abuse of legal systems, DRM, etc. But the correct answer to this, IMHO, is to enforce existing laws to prevent the abusive prof
I believe your argument is flawed in several ways.
Historically, the rise of the software industry coincided with personal computers becoming commodity items. One might just as well argue that IBM or Apple is responsible for the foundation of what we might call the "software industry" today, for creating the PC and Mac. Indeed, arguing that it was Microsoft alone is surely incorrect, since at the time there were several other similarly powerful companies developing end user software; Microsoft's rise to supremacy in areas like desktop operating systems and office suite software did not occur until many years later.
In today's personal computing industry, the hardware is generic, and it is the software that provides specific applications. There are many application domains. Within each, there is much scope for customisation. Thus we have a variety of software products available today, and "universal software" such as an operating system that almost everyone will use is the exception. This immediately undermines your view of hardware and software as a combined unit: the wants and needs of one person who buys a PC may be completely different to those of another person who would buy identical hardware.
Finally, there is a simple economic fallacy in your argument. You are considering only the marginal cost of creating software products in your economic model, and from the fact that this is near zero for software products, you have inferred that the value of the industry is near zero. However, you have ignored the initial development cost. Even if software were only priced to cover the development cost, and development incurred no overhead in sales, marketing, legal, administration and so on, the money involved for a major software project must pay for the full-time labour of hundreds of highly skilled people over a period of years.
One of the major benefits of the copyright economic model, often ignored in these discussions, is that it provides a mechanism for a market to pay a realistic price for a product that they would all like to have but no one person could afford individually, by splitting the cost. If the product in question has a high development cost but low marginal production cost, then in a competitive industry, one would expect the cost per unit to converge on the value of the software divided by the size of the available market. Charge less than that, and it is not financially viable to build the software product, and everyone loses out because it doesn't get written. Charge more, and a competitor with a product of similar quality can undercut you. This naturally accommodates the uncertainty where the size of market cannot be predicted accurately ahead of time.
In your alternative reality, where software is not a useful industry in its own right, how do you deal with the generality of hardware and the economics of software development to make sure that code actually gets written to make the hardware useful?
I appreciate that such a safeguard is written into the letter of the law, but what matters is the practical interpretation in a court. In the sort of case where we might expect this law to be applied, how would anyone ever prove that someone once had a password? What standard of evidence will be required, realistically?
The thing is, that would just lead to a whole bunch of not particularly well-informed people who have enough time/money to secure the appropriate (probably very expensive) certification from the appropriate (partial to vested interests but technically unqualified) regulatory body being given a loud voice in legal matters that their expertise does not merit. It would be like paying thousands for so-called expert witnesses, but for every court case that ever involved technology. Oh, and probably having them be deemed right by the court automatically, even if you (as someone who does know what they're talking about) present an informed opinion that disagrees.
Tagging (beta): greatintheory, hopelessinpractice
Don't count on it. In the UK, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, anyone can be required to turn over the password to decrypt any encrypted data they have that is needed for certain legal purposes... even if the "encrypted data" is just random bits, with no significance and not derived from any meaningful data. You are presumed guilty if you won't (or can't) supply the appropriate password.
If this case happened in the UK, the RIP Act would appear to make you guilty by default if you couldn't supply a password that "decrypted" whatever data was in the RAM when it was next powered up to turn it back into whatever they think was there before. And given that these are people who don't appreciate the volatile nature of RAM, I wouldn't hold out much hope of explaining to the judge why it's not possible to comply with their ruling.
Aren't you glad that our inept legislators and your incompetent judges work in different jurisdictions?
Not unless most outdoor photographs are now taken by commercial organisations with the explicit intent of cataloguing and republishing them complete with search facilities.
Actually, I disagree with that. I think Outlook as a plain e-mail client is inferior to several of the above in various objective ways, particularly relating to message rules/filters and dealing with spam, and it's also missing a lot of nice usability features offered by various competitors.
But the simple fact is, at work, I have now switched back to Outlook just because I can't work with the corporate meeting and calendar facilities using Thunderbird. Until TB has support for that — and despite all the PR speeches about how resistance is futile and everything will be done with OSS, the Sunbird/Lightning work appears to be going almost nowhere — the Outlook/Exchange combination seems pretty much unbeatable. Which is sad, because frankly, it's not that great and there's plenty of scope for improvement.
You'd probably get a significant increase in visitors from outside the US as well. I can't speak for terrorists, but I know that I have declined to visit the US on both professional and personal grounds since 9/11 — and not because I think terrorists are going to fly my plane into a building.
On the face of it, that's a reasonable case to make, but please see my comments in the discussion on Google Street View last week for why I don't think it is (or at least, should be) as simple as that. This one addresses your comment quite nicely, IMHO.
OK, for one thing, I do work in computers. I wrote my first program at the age of 4, several decades ago. I am now a senior developer and mentor to junior programmers who make the kinds of dogmatic assumption you do, because they haven't yet learned enough about how to design large, complicated systems to do what they need, not what they already know how to do. You're right about one thing: there is no magic. So if you want a large database system to support this sort of facility, you design it so that you can identify the records and the various back-ups of them if you really need to. It's not rocket science, it's simple software engineering. It's not like the back-up tapes clone themselves while you're not looking, and it's not like you don't already have a systematic way of filing the data so you can find it if you need to restore it. So please do us all a favour and save the patronising "You just don't understand" pitch for someone who actually doesn't, because you aren't carrying any weight with that around here.
For another thing, when did this become all about webmail? Webmail is far from the worst privacy violation Google is guilty of, because webmail is obvious and participation is voluntary. I doubt all these people being caught in their underwear or picking their nose or walking past strip clubs on Google Street View knew about or agreed to that photography. Ditto Google Maps. Ditto much of the stuff with tracking cookies and so on. This is why your "Just don't use the service" argument is broken. (The same goes for many of the other major privacy offenders: Facebook's entire modus operandi effectively revolves around getting friends to provide information about each other.)
Oh, and for the record, I'm on first name terms with the guys who run my ISP, and I know damn well how their webmail system works on the odd occasion that I need to use it. I don't have the "same concerns" here, because I know how they operate (having checked before signing up with them) and more to the point, because I'm using a voluntary service, and they aren't compiling a huge database of information about my entire on-line presence without my consent. But obviously I'm just "naive", because I actually bother to check out the services I'm going to be trusting with my data before I sign up, and I don't sign up with (or, if necessary, I opt out from) organisations that are basically just privacy bombs waiting to go off.
I assume the open letter from PI wasn't written by the individual in question, and it was that which didn't name him, so I don't think we can infer much about whether there is some reason this person would like to remain anonymous.
I was just observing that the letter didn't hide from the fact that there is an MS employee working with PI (in fact, it acknowledges that and then defends him in very strong terms), and wondering if it was the same person being mentioned in this thread.
Contrary to most of the replies here, I think Open source is already "too big" in at least one sense. As evidence, I offer the simple fact that I keep hearing about sysadmins at local firms where friends work, who have committed their businesses to run on OSS because either they support the OSS philosophy or they don't like $BIG_CSS_COMPANY. This is often done despite the fact that $ANOTHER_BIG_CSS_COMPANY offers an objectively better product for their business needs.
Aggressive advocacy of something with potential is no bad thing, but it needs to be tempered with reality. Much of the OSS world isn't yet good enough to beat the established CSS competition. Until it is, sysadmins should not be making objectively inferior business decisions based on personal philosophical preferences.
If Google loses (or gives up) the legal fight, then it's what other people are looking at you should be worrying about.
I think you missed the point. I though the GP was talking about encrypting the data internally in the file system (and therefore in all back-ups), not about user passwords.
I'm not sure this really helps much, though, because now you have the additional costs of space and time for using encryption, but you still have the same basic problem of tracking down all the encryption keys and their back-ups to delete them and reduce the other data to random bits. If you can do that, you've already solved the original problem, given that the size of any worthwhile keys is going to be significant compared to the size of the items to be encrypted, and for this to work you'll need a 1-1 mapping between keys and protected data.
Both your comment and the other reply to my GP post suggest that the cost makes doing this unreasonable. I guess we just fundamentally disagree on this, because I don't care about the cost. (Actually, that's not quite true, but I do consider it very much secondary to preserving people's right to privacy.)
It's not like Google didn't see the privacy implications coming when they started a project like Street View. I have questioned the ethics of collecting material that has such potential to invade people's privacy and then putting it on-line without, apparently, even reviewing it effectively first.
In any case, if they knew the risks and still chose to implement that system without proper review and without a procedure for removing offending material easily, then I'm afraid I don't have much sympathy if people whose privacy they violate then demand that the offending content be removed and it costs Google a lot of money to make it happen. Indeed, you could make a strong argument that businesses only learn through how much it costs to do things, and therefore the only way to tame the 800lb gorilla of the information age is to make abusing their vast databases very expensive.
Again, that's all well and good, but where I come from, we don't consider doing something bad to be OK as long as you own up to it first. It's not being open about their privacy policy that's getting Google raked over the coals, it's what the policy says and how they implement it.
As others have said, a file system and back-up protocols where you can't readily identify the location of a specific piece of data given its "key" doesn't sound very fault-tolerant to me. We only run a relatively small network, but you can bet that if anything went wrong, we could walk into the server room and pick up the appropriate back-up tapes and/or call the off-site data archive service we use and get every copy they have within a couple of hours. I fail to see why any of the principles involved don't scale arbitrarily, and since Google's whole business model revolves around this stuff, I'm betting they've spent more time thinking about it and have more resources available relative to their network size than we do.
Tell me, if someone like a three letter agency came along with a court order saying that Google must delete all traces of certain information that had inadvertently been stored on its systems but that violated national security, do you think they would
Is this the anonymous member cited in the open letter from Privacy International?
Says who? The original comment to which you replied was talking about patent reform, as are many others in this discussion. You're the only one who's equating patents (the principle) with the current under-performance by the USPTO specifically.
Since I doubt anyone is going to argue that the current poor state of affairs in the USPTO is a good thing, there's nothing to discuss if you adopt that position. But as strange as it may seem to you, the rest of us don't even have some of the problem patent types you US guys do, and our legal systems don't encourage such litigious behaviour by big business either. There is scope for us to discuss the merits of patents (as the rest of the world uses them) and useful reforms in that context as well.
Woah, obvious troll there. Of course a system run by incompetents is likely to fail, but nothing about the principle of patents says they have to be administered by incompetents. That's just an implementation detail, albeit a rather important one.
What would you think if we replaced current patent officers with an office that retained the services of suitably experienced professionals to vet applications, and then implemented a pricing structure that made it efficient for the little guy to apply for a small number of patents, and the big guy to apply for a large number of patents, but penalised any group that had a disproportionate number of its applications rejected (at least enough to cover the wasted costs of assessing those failed applications)?
Of course, that would probably increase the basic cost of applying for patents even if successful, because it would cost significantly more to check the applications. But if a patent would provide so small an advantage that this extra cost was prohibitive, maybe the invention wasn't sufficiently creative to be worth a patent in the first place?