What happened to "Just because you can do something, that doesn't mean you should"?
By the kind of argument you (and, to be fair, many others in this discussion) make, we should just ignore all laws and societal conventions, and be mercenary about doing anything that advances our personal interests. If you are disadvantaged when someone else does this, well, you should have defended yourself better, taken out more insurance, hidden away more, not gone out, paid in cash, not walked past the front of the adult movie store and coincidentally looked over your shoulder just when the photo was taken, not bought three items on the same day which in combination coincidentally trigger a terrorist threat warning...
So, where do we draw the line?
Exactly two things have changed today, in the context of privacy, from a few years ago: technology has improved to make it much easier to spy on people and data mine info about them; and people (actually, mainly businesses and governments) have become almost militant in their desire to capture as much information as possible about everyone, all the time. This is a very dangerous combination, which if left unchecked will inevitably lead to the erosion and ultimately the destruction of our basic quality of life. Just because we can do something, that really doesn't mean we should.
If you don't want someone to take pictures of you, or see you doing the nasty, or anything else inside your house, close your blinds, otherwise you have no expectation of privacy, either from the government, or from your fellow citizens.
Did you know that police in the UK have recently taken to asking people to spy on their neighbours? One of the main warning signs of someone growing drugs illegally is apparently that they always keep their curtains drawn/blinds closed. So sorry, but if you do that, you're obviously a drug dealer and will be reported accordingly. Then the police will come and arrest you on suspicion, take you down to the police station, hold you without charge for a while, and forcibly collect a sample of your DNA to be added to the largest DNA database in the world (and to be left there even after your release, since the current administration removed the legal requirement to destroy such samples if nothing came of the arrest).
See, the thing is, I have different expectations. I expect a little common courtesy from my fellow citizens, to be considered innocent until proven guilty by my government, and to be left alone by businesses I don't wish to deal with. I don't go around looking through all my neighbours' windows and recording what I see. I don't go around arresting policemen in the street because I suspect that they're going to abuse the increasing range of summary powers they are being given. I don't have time to spy on all the executives and shareholders of my local supermarket looking for those extra gifts for ladies they buy when I know their wife just bought one last week anyway. What happened to doing unto others as you would have done unto you, representative government, respect for the privacy of others, and a general sense of common decency? Is expecting these things really so unreasonable or unusual, or is your comment just a sign of how low our standards have dropped?
Yep. As has been noted before, there is a big difference between a one-off observation of something anyone can see in a public place, and the systematic collection and reuse of data. There is also a big difference between what you can see in a public place, and what you can see from a public place using invasive surveillance technology to observe something that would normally be regarded as private. Similar issues arise with everything from store loyalty cards to CCTV to the UK government's proposed ID cards and National Identity Register database.
The bottom line is that privacy isn't dead, but it's in a coma. If the people value privacy — as IME almost everyone does when you ask non-loaded questions — then governments should wake it up, by enacting laws strongly restricting the collection of personal data and the invasion of people's privacy, which must apply to every person, business, government body or other organisation.
Of course, this doesn't go down with businesses who are making a lot more money by being able to track and analyse consumers. "Privacy is dead," they tell us. "It's not your data, it's data about you," they protest.
So the question is, are we going to be a world of free citizens with private lives, or are we going to be a world of consumers who are worth only as much as the latest statistical analysis predicted we would spend this week?
It's certainly an unfortunate reality that there is much material about programming on-line, but relatively little of it is really good, and it's by definition impossible for someone new to a given area to work out for themselves which is which. Indeed, it's might be that the best technical content isn't the best written, and that the wonderfully easy-to-read stuff is littered with dangerous misconceptions and technical errors.
If you've got the patience, I've written a few fairly detailed posts here in the past with good starting points for those learning various aspects of programming: on-line resources you can usually trust, book lists, that sort of thing. Google seems to do a reasonable job of handling Slashdot's archives, so go ahead and browse. Just ignore me when I'm ranting on some political subject.:-)
If there's one piece of general advice I'd give for those looking to learn on-line, it's learn to use Usenet. Unlike your average programming web site, programmers who frequent the various language newsgroups tend to be pretty competent. More to the point, their replies to questions tend to be effectively and constructively peer reviewed, making them more accurate and often more insightful than any most people's personal web sites. There are newsgroups for most popular programming languages, as well as for many specialised programming areas, programming for different operating systems, using different programming tools, etc. You can access these using services like Google Groups if your ISP doesn't have a Usenet server. Look for the comp.* hierarchy, particularly comp.lang.* for different languages (and alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++ if you're learning either C or C++).
Most of these groups have a decent FAQ that you should read before starting, to determine the best place to ask your questions. For instance, questions about particular operating system APIs or development tools are often off-topic in the generic programming language newsgroups, since they will only apply to people using that language with the specific OS or tool, but the same question might be perfectly reasonable in another group. The FAQs also tend to have good lists of books and tutorial/reference web sites you can trust. If you start from those, then for the most part, things they link to will also be fairly trustworthy. Just don't go and put something like "Java tutorial" or "learn Python" into Google and expect the top ten hits to be great, because most of them will probably be hobbyist sites written by enthusiastic but not terribly well-informed or experienced people.
First off, it is a side effect, according to the usual definition of that term in computer science.
Secondly, it's not just syntactic sugar, either. The increment and decrement operators are separate things to addition and subtraction, and this is particularly relevant in C++ where you may have a type that understands the concepts of "next" and "previous" without having any concept (or even any defined operator) for addition or subtraction. Iterators that do not admit random access are a typical example.
In my very long experience in this industry, the star programmers cobble something together as fast as possible without worrying about maintenance or documentation.
In my experience, what real star programmers cobble together is usually remarkably self-documenting. The best overall developers — the people you'd actually want to hire — are a combination of "star programmer" and conscientious worker who at least writes up the basic reference documentation for others less skilled and/or experienced than them who will come later.
That's a bit harsh. Apart from writing comments that are a maintenance liability, using C++ macros when constants would be better, mentioning the use of Hungarian notation that is a liability without mentioning the use that can actually be useful, advocating silent failure in the case of failed preconditions, misquoting Knuth and, to add insult to injury, citing a Wikipedia article in support when that article is currently tagged as having dubious citations (I know; I put the tag there a few weeks ago), failing to understand that games development is one of the few areas where early optimisation is basically a fact of life for some genres, and arguing that you shouldn't rely on programmers knowing basic language facilities like the pre- and post-increment operators in the C family, what was wrong with it?:-)
I am, of course, being facetious. As the author himself points out at the end, much of this stuff isn't obvious to newbies, and it's better if someone tells them earlier rather than later, so kudos to him for taking the time to write it up. I do wish people volunteering such material would get some peer review if they can, though, because the only thing worse for inquisitive newbies than no information is bad information.
I couldn't agree more, except that I'm not sure several of those have ever really been live skills. Most end user software has terrible usability, and always has had. Most systems software has always had terrible security, and the field has always been dominated by urban legends and popular wisdom. Junior geeks have always wanted to develop using the funky new toys, regardless of the business merit of going with tried and tested.
You're clearly spot on with some of them, though. In particular, efficient use of data structures and algorithms seems to be a dying art, with a world full of know-it-alls whose answer is always that hardware is cheap and whatever's in the library is good enough.
The curse of good presentation skills is that no-one ever notices that you've used them, because you're good at presentation.:-)
I'm currently having a similar debate at the office. We're working on a new tool, effectively a web front end for a simple database with a few handy UI gimmicks. In the grand scheme of things, it's a pretty simple tool, but it's part of a routine business process and literally thousands of people are going to be using it for a few hours each month.
At a progress meeting yesterday, one of our (cross-discipline but manager-dominated) team suggested that we should skip the next couple of weeks of detailed design work and just go with something OK, because it will save a few days of our time and so be available faster. It doesn't seem to occur to them that all that time is the equivalent of mere minutes for each person who will be using the tool. If we identify a simple usability improvement that saves every user ten seconds the first time they use the tool just because they find something a little quicker, then that's saved the equivalent of about two solid weeks of one person's time to design and implement that improvement.
So it goes with typography and graphic design in documents. Poor choice of fonts or use of whitespace = hard to read on-screen = wasted staff time. Awkward page layout = people can't follow the text = wasted staff time. Poorly drawn diagram = distracted reader = wasted staff time. Poorly typeset equation = delayed understanding while the reader figures out what it says = wasted staff time. And so on...
Unfortunately, presentation skills are one of those things where people don't really notice the subtleties. If something is poorly presented then the viewer will still read something more slowly, or misunderstand what it says, or not remember it as well later, but they probably won't realise what they're missing.
Indeed. As I argued here not so long ago, I do not believe in “freedom of religion”. As soon as you introduce the word “religion”, you introduce all kinds of unhelpful ambiguity into what should be fairly simple principles, and things very worthy of protection become entangled with things that are anything but.
Quote of the day:
“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.” — Thomas Jefferson
I got the impression from the news last night, that the cameras were to stop the people who feel it's the traffic warden's fault they're parked on double yellow lines.
Not just that. They're also talking about using them to have these wardens issue fines for miscellaneous antisocial behaviour, such as littering. I don't know the situation in the locality here, but in many places these days, parking enforcement is done by target-driven, commercially-employed civilians, not police officers or similar officials. It's bad enough giving police officers the power to level on-the-spot fines, but giving it to other civilians is just a recipe for disaster.
Here in England, a huge number of people have a huge problem with parking laws and seem to believe that abuse and violence will get there ticket canceled.
For the record, I don't park illegally, and have never received a ticket. However, it's not hard to see why people feel aggrieved, when many local councils are (a) deliberately reducing parking opportunities and dramatically increasing the associated charges, in a fairly transparent move to penalise car drivers, and (b) using target-driven enforcement that allows no discretion to the warden (though to be fair, you usually can appeal afterwards if you'd rather waste several hours of your life than pay a small fine). Just remember, the next time your car breaks down and you pull it over to the side of the road to minimise the disruption to others before it can be reparied/towed, that there is no exemption in law for this, and you can be penalised for something you have no control over.
It's a bit like car tax: the government is very proud of its database (as its adverts keep telling us) and smart enough to find people to send them penalty notices if someone forgets to pay, yet somehow they can't reliably distribute the reminders (which are also necessary to pay in the most convenient ways, though apparently you can get an alternative form from a Post Office if you dig out four different bits of paperwork and take them all along in person). Although you can pay on-line, it takes about five days to get you a tax disc, and driving without displaying one (even if you've properly paid the tax) is an offence in its own right that can carry a 1k fine. Oh, and while they can have an entire on-line system for payment, and a robust database that has everyone's contact details, it seems to be beyond them to send an e-mail reminder a couple of days before the deadline to those who "forgot" (or just didn't get the reminder letter). Presumably this would save many drivers the embarrassment of being criminalised, but it would also cost the government all those lovely fines.
Such a culture inevitably breeds contempt for the law and those who enforce it, and it's the same with parking fines. Sure, ticket the antisocial gits who think their need to get takeaway pizza is more important than anyone else's need to get down a busy road in the rush hour, but someone who gets back to a pay-and-display car park five minutes late on a properly bought three-hour ticket shouldn't be treated as a criminal. Everyone makes mistakes, and laws that penalise everyone are broken.
3) Cameras recording private & public spaces are completely different.
They are different, but not so much. It's not the camera in the public place that is the problem, it's the potential permanent storage and data mining of an entire network of cameras (and other data sources).
Put another way, it's the difference between someone randomly passing you in the street who sees you walk into a shop, and your own personal spy who follows you around every shop you ever visit, logging where you go, when, with whom. One of these is the nature of going out in public, but I suspect most people would object to the other as an unwarranted invasion of their privacy.
Oh, come on. Everyone knows who you are. You must post more comments on Slashdot than anyone else in the world! There's so much data that identifying you will be easy.
We've had a similar problem on some technical Usenet groups where I help out, teaching beginners various programming-related subjects. Some posts are obviously asking us to do their homework. Most are obviously genuine questions. A few are harder to classify.
Our benchmark in the case of ambiguity is whether the person asking the question has demonstrated some effort of their own. For example, if a person posted some source code showing how far they'd got already, and then explained what it seemed to be doing, what they wanted it to do, and what the difference was, then generally plenty of people would come along and either point out their mistake or suggest a way forward. If the question was just stated without any accompanying code, then typically the poster would be invited to show what they've got already and identify where their problem is.
For similar reasons, we rarely post "final" code suitable for handing in unmodified, although one or two posters have been known to be deliberately evil to an obvious homework question, posting a simple-looking and technically correct answer that relied on advanced techniques no beginner would know. I imagine a few lazy students have handed those in without even reading them properly, and then faced some embarrassing questions about how the programs worked... <wicked grin>
Personally, being a friend of someone who writes viruses for a living, I think there are three negatives to making virus writing illegal:
People have a choice, and if they choose to distribute viruses and risk penalties, that should be their right.
By moving such choices to the rim of existence, you also make it harder for sysadmins to check their systems are secure.
You run people out of business who are offering a fairly victimless "crime", at least compared to global thermonuclear war.
Forgive me if I don't find your defence of people whose entire business model revolves around deception terribly compelling!
Incidentally, this kind of service is hardly victimless. For every person who goes out into the world and gets a good job on the basis of a qualification they didn't earn, someone who did earn that qualification loses out. That almost certainly damages both people who did earn the qualification and the people who would hire them.
The purpose of Google Search is to make money for Google. They will presumably do with their search engine whatever they think is most likely to achieve that goal, taking into account things like negative PR for "censorship" vs. negative PR for "being evil" by supporting unethical businesses and negative PR for returning results full of things most people don't want.
I'm not in favor of one over the other, but from everything I see blu-ray seems to be the winner.
I'm not in favour of either, but from everything I see DVD still seems to be winning pretty decisively! When people moved from VHS to DVD, there were clear differences, and most people I knew were jumping on the bandwagon as soon as they could (or at least realising that what they had was significantly worse than what others had). This time around, all I'm seeing is a wave of "Huh?", with occasional "What's that?"
Even when the technologies are better known, I doubt they'll ever really take off the same way DVD did. The only significant advantage they have is higher resolution, which won't make much real difference to anyone without a huge TV anyway. In contrast, they require new and expensive hardware, they have more expensive media, they have a vastly smaller selection of content available, both the Internet and games consoles now compete much more strongly for home entertainment time than they did when DVDs made it big, there are two competing but incompatible formats with significant backing, and the new formats both have serious negative PR with both the early adopter and the geek crowds.
Personally, I don't see any of this changing any time soon, even with the support of the new generation of consoles (which have shipped only low tens of millions of unit altogether, barely a dent in the world DVD player market). I don't expect either format to reach critical mass until the downsides become less severe, and if the big movie studios stick to their guns, their suicide note may just be marginally longer than Microsoft's.
Slashdot Mirror
What happened to "Just because you can do something, that doesn't mean you should"?
By the kind of argument you (and, to be fair, many others in this discussion) make, we should just ignore all laws and societal conventions, and be mercenary about doing anything that advances our personal interests. If you are disadvantaged when someone else does this, well, you should have defended yourself better, taken out more insurance, hidden away more, not gone out, paid in cash, not walked past the front of the adult movie store and coincidentally looked over your shoulder just when the photo was taken, not bought three items on the same day which in combination coincidentally trigger a terrorist threat warning...
So, where do we draw the line?
Exactly two things have changed today, in the context of privacy, from a few years ago: technology has improved to make it much easier to spy on people and data mine info about them; and people (actually, mainly businesses and governments) have become almost militant in their desire to capture as much information as possible about everyone, all the time. This is a very dangerous combination, which if left unchecked will inevitably lead to the erosion and ultimately the destruction of our basic quality of life. Just because we can do something, that really doesn't mean we should.
Did you know that police in the UK have recently taken to asking people to spy on their neighbours? One of the main warning signs of someone growing drugs illegally is apparently that they always keep their curtains drawn/blinds closed. So sorry, but if you do that, you're obviously a drug dealer and will be reported accordingly. Then the police will come and arrest you on suspicion, take you down to the police station, hold you without charge for a while, and forcibly collect a sample of your DNA to be added to the largest DNA database in the world (and to be left there even after your release, since the current administration removed the legal requirement to destroy such samples if nothing came of the arrest).
See, the thing is, I have different expectations. I expect a little common courtesy from my fellow citizens, to be considered innocent until proven guilty by my government, and to be left alone by businesses I don't wish to deal with. I don't go around looking through all my neighbours' windows and recording what I see. I don't go around arresting policemen in the street because I suspect that they're going to abuse the increasing range of summary powers they are being given. I don't have time to spy on all the executives and shareholders of my local supermarket looking for those extra gifts for ladies they buy when I know their wife just bought one last week anyway. What happened to doing unto others as you would have done unto you, representative government, respect for the privacy of others, and a general sense of common decency? Is expecting these things really so unreasonable or unusual, or is your comment just a sign of how low our standards have dropped?
Yep. As has been noted before, there is a big difference between a one-off observation of something anyone can see in a public place, and the systematic collection and reuse of data. There is also a big difference between what you can see in a public place, and what you can see from a public place using invasive surveillance technology to observe something that would normally be regarded as private. Similar issues arise with everything from store loyalty cards to CCTV to the UK government's proposed ID cards and National Identity Register database.
The bottom line is that privacy isn't dead, but it's in a coma. If the people value privacy — as IME almost everyone does when you ask non-loaded questions — then governments should wake it up, by enacting laws strongly restricting the collection of personal data and the invasion of people's privacy, which must apply to every person, business, government body or other organisation.
Of course, this doesn't go down with businesses who are making a lot more money by being able to track and analyse consumers. "Privacy is dead," they tell us. "It's not your data, it's data about you," they protest.
So the question is, are we going to be a world of free citizens with private lives, or are we going to be a world of consumers who are worth only as much as the latest statistical analysis predicted we would spend this week?
It's certainly an unfortunate reality that there is much material about programming on-line, but relatively little of it is really good, and it's by definition impossible for someone new to a given area to work out for themselves which is which. Indeed, it's might be that the best technical content isn't the best written, and that the wonderfully easy-to-read stuff is littered with dangerous misconceptions and technical errors.
If you've got the patience, I've written a few fairly detailed posts here in the past with good starting points for those learning various aspects of programming: on-line resources you can usually trust, book lists, that sort of thing. Google seems to do a reasonable job of handling Slashdot's archives, so go ahead and browse. Just ignore me when I'm ranting on some political subject. :-)
If there's one piece of general advice I'd give for those looking to learn on-line, it's learn to use Usenet. Unlike your average programming web site, programmers who frequent the various language newsgroups tend to be pretty competent. More to the point, their replies to questions tend to be effectively and constructively peer reviewed, making them more accurate and often more insightful than any most people's personal web sites. There are newsgroups for most popular programming languages, as well as for many specialised programming areas, programming for different operating systems, using different programming tools, etc. You can access these using services like Google Groups if your ISP doesn't have a Usenet server. Look for the comp.* hierarchy, particularly comp.lang.* for different languages (and alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++ if you're learning either C or C++).
Most of these groups have a decent FAQ that you should read before starting, to determine the best place to ask your questions. For instance, questions about particular operating system APIs or development tools are often off-topic in the generic programming language newsgroups, since they will only apply to people using that language with the specific OS or tool, but the same question might be perfectly reasonable in another group. The FAQs also tend to have good lists of books and tutorial/reference web sites you can trust. If you start from those, then for the most part, things they link to will also be fairly trustworthy. Just don't go and put something like "Java tutorial" or "learn Python" into Google and expect the top ten hits to be great, because most of them will probably be hobbyist sites written by enthusiastic but not terribly well-informed or experienced people.
Very little apart from failing to respect scope and not encoding any type information?
First off, it is a side effect, according to the usual definition of that term in computer science.
Secondly, it's not just syntactic sugar, either. The increment and decrement operators are separate things to addition and subtraction, and this is particularly relevant in C++ where you may have a type that understands the concepts of "next" and "previous" without having any concept (or even any defined operator) for addition or subtraction. Iterators that do not admit random access are a typical example.
In my experience, what real star programmers cobble together is usually remarkably self-documenting. The best overall developers — the people you'd actually want to hire — are a combination of "star programmer" and conscientious worker who at least writes up the basic reference documentation for others less skilled and/or experienced than them who will come later.
That's a bit harsh. Apart from writing comments that are a maintenance liability, using C++ macros when constants would be better, mentioning the use of Hungarian notation that is a liability without mentioning the use that can actually be useful, advocating silent failure in the case of failed preconditions, misquoting Knuth and, to add insult to injury, citing a Wikipedia article in support when that article is currently tagged as having dubious citations (I know; I put the tag there a few weeks ago), failing to understand that games development is one of the few areas where early optimisation is basically a fact of life for some genres, and arguing that you shouldn't rely on programmers knowing basic language facilities like the pre- and post-increment operators in the C family, what was wrong with it? :-)
I am, of course, being facetious. As the author himself points out at the end, much of this stuff isn't obvious to newbies, and it's better if someone tells them earlier rather than later, so kudos to him for taking the time to write it up. I do wish people volunteering such material would get some peer review if they can, though, because the only thing worse for inquisitive newbies than no information is bad information.
I couldn't agree more, except that I'm not sure several of those have ever really been live skills. Most end user software has terrible usability, and always has had. Most systems software has always had terrible security, and the field has always been dominated by urban legends and popular wisdom. Junior geeks have always wanted to develop using the funky new toys, regardless of the business merit of going with tried and tested.
You're clearly spot on with some of them, though. In particular, efficient use of data structures and algorithms seems to be a dying art, with a world full of know-it-alls whose answer is always that hardware is cheap and whatever's in the library is good enough.
The curse of good presentation skills is that no-one ever notices that you've used them, because you're good at presentation. :-)
I'm currently having a similar debate at the office. We're working on a new tool, effectively a web front end for a simple database with a few handy UI gimmicks. In the grand scheme of things, it's a pretty simple tool, but it's part of a routine business process and literally thousands of people are going to be using it for a few hours each month.
At a progress meeting yesterday, one of our (cross-discipline but manager-dominated) team suggested that we should skip the next couple of weeks of detailed design work and just go with something OK, because it will save a few days of our time and so be available faster. It doesn't seem to occur to them that all that time is the equivalent of mere minutes for each person who will be using the tool. If we identify a simple usability improvement that saves every user ten seconds the first time they use the tool just because they find something a little quicker, then that's saved the equivalent of about two solid weeks of one person's time to design and implement that improvement.
So it goes with typography and graphic design in documents. Poor choice of fonts or use of whitespace = hard to read on-screen = wasted staff time. Awkward page layout = people can't follow the text = wasted staff time. Poorly drawn diagram = distracted reader = wasted staff time. Poorly typeset equation = delayed understanding while the reader figures out what it says = wasted staff time. And so on...
Unfortunately, presentation skills are one of those things where people don't really notice the subtleties. If something is poorly presented then the viewer will still read something more slowly, or misunderstand what it says, or not remember it as well later, but they probably won't realise what they're missing.
Alas, the only thing we learn from history is that the only thing we learn from history is that...
Indeed. As I argued here not so long ago, I do not believe in “freedom of religion”. As soon as you introduce the word “religion”, you introduce all kinds of unhelpful ambiguity into what should be fairly simple principles, and things very worthy of protection become entangled with things that are anything but.
Quote of the day:
Not just that. They're also talking about using them to have these wardens issue fines for miscellaneous antisocial behaviour, such as littering. I don't know the situation in the locality here, but in many places these days, parking enforcement is done by target-driven, commercially-employed civilians, not police officers or similar officials. It's bad enough giving police officers the power to level on-the-spot fines, but giving it to other civilians is just a recipe for disaster.
For the record, I don't park illegally, and have never received a ticket. However, it's not hard to see why people feel aggrieved, when many local councils are (a) deliberately reducing parking opportunities and dramatically increasing the associated charges, in a fairly transparent move to penalise car drivers, and (b) using target-driven enforcement that allows no discretion to the warden (though to be fair, you usually can appeal afterwards if you'd rather waste several hours of your life than pay a small fine). Just remember, the next time your car breaks down and you pull it over to the side of the road to minimise the disruption to others before it can be reparied/towed, that there is no exemption in law for this, and you can be penalised for something you have no control over.
It's a bit like car tax: the government is very proud of its database (as its adverts keep telling us) and smart enough to find people to send them penalty notices if someone forgets to pay, yet somehow they can't reliably distribute the reminders (which are also necessary to pay in the most convenient ways, though apparently you can get an alternative form from a Post Office if you dig out four different bits of paperwork and take them all along in person). Although you can pay on-line, it takes about five days to get you a tax disc, and driving without displaying one (even if you've properly paid the tax) is an offence in its own right that can carry a 1k fine. Oh, and while they can have an entire on-line system for payment, and a robust database that has everyone's contact details, it seems to be beyond them to send an e-mail reminder a couple of days before the deadline to those who "forgot" (or just didn't get the reminder letter). Presumably this would save many drivers the embarrassment of being criminalised, but it would also cost the government all those lovely fines.
Such a culture inevitably breeds contempt for the law and those who enforce it, and it's the same with parking fines. Sure, ticket the antisocial gits who think their need to get takeaway pizza is more important than anyone else's need to get down a busy road in the rush hour, but someone who gets back to a pay-and-display car park five minutes late on a properly bought three-hour ticket shouldn't be treated as a criminal. Everyone makes mistakes, and laws that penalise everyone are broken.
They are different, but not so much. It's not the camera in the public place that is the problem, it's the potential permanent storage and data mining of an entire network of cameras (and other data sources).
Put another way, it's the difference between someone randomly passing you in the street who sees you walk into a shop, and your own personal spy who follows you around every shop you ever visit, logging where you go, when, with whom. One of these is the nature of going out in public, but I suspect most people would object to the other as an unwarranted invasion of their privacy.
Never mind you amateurs. I want it to display properly on my 30" screen at 2560x1600! This is the One True Resolution!
To borrow a joke from another poster:
Point ------->
o
You --> -+-
|
/ \
Ooooh, ooooh! Does it come with chocolate and ice cream? If it does, I'm in!
Not really. If it was as simple as you make out, businesses wouldn't have PR departments.
Oh, come on. Everyone knows who you are. You must post more comments on Slashdot than anyone else in the world! There's so much data that identifying you will be easy.
We've had a similar problem on some technical Usenet groups where I help out, teaching beginners various programming-related subjects. Some posts are obviously asking us to do their homework. Most are obviously genuine questions. A few are harder to classify.
Our benchmark in the case of ambiguity is whether the person asking the question has demonstrated some effort of their own. For example, if a person posted some source code showing how far they'd got already, and then explained what it seemed to be doing, what they wanted it to do, and what the difference was, then generally plenty of people would come along and either point out their mistake or suggest a way forward. If the question was just stated without any accompanying code, then typically the poster would be invited to show what they've got already and identify where their problem is.
For similar reasons, we rarely post "final" code suitable for handing in unmodified, although one or two posters have been known to be deliberately evil to an obvious homework question, posting a simple-looking and technically correct answer that relied on advanced techniques no beginner would know. I imagine a few lazy students have handed those in without even reading them properly, and then faced some embarrassing questions about how the programs worked... <wicked grin>
Personally, being a friend of someone who writes viruses for a living, I think there are three negatives to making virus writing illegal:
Forgive me if I don't find your defence of people whose entire business model revolves around deception terribly compelling!
Incidentally, this kind of service is hardly victimless. For every person who goes out into the world and gets a good job on the basis of a qualification they didn't earn, someone who did earn that qualification loses out. That almost certainly damages both people who did earn the qualification and the people who would hire them.
Can't you just use a computer program?
Hey, we could finally write the real Slashbot! :-)
The purpose of Google Search is to make money for Google. They will presumably do with their search engine whatever they think is most likely to achieve that goal, taking into account things like negative PR for "censorship" vs. negative PR for "being evil" by supporting unethical businesses and negative PR for returning results full of things most people don't want.
I'm not in favour of either, but from everything I see DVD still seems to be winning pretty decisively! When people moved from VHS to DVD, there were clear differences, and most people I knew were jumping on the bandwagon as soon as they could (or at least realising that what they had was significantly worse than what others had). This time around, all I'm seeing is a wave of "Huh?", with occasional "What's that?"
Even when the technologies are better known, I doubt they'll ever really take off the same way DVD did. The only significant advantage they have is higher resolution, which won't make much real difference to anyone without a huge TV anyway. In contrast, they require new and expensive hardware, they have more expensive media, they have a vastly smaller selection of content available, both the Internet and games consoles now compete much more strongly for home entertainment time than they did when DVDs made it big, there are two competing but incompatible formats with significant backing, and the new formats both have serious negative PR with both the early adopter and the geek crowds.
Personally, I don't see any of this changing any time soon, even with the support of the new generation of consoles (which have shipped only low tens of millions of unit altogether, barely a dent in the world DVD player market). I don't expect either format to reach critical mass until the downsides become less severe, and if the big movie studios stick to their guns, their suicide note may just be marginally longer than Microsoft's.
You thought a film about a man whose entire life is a computer-generated fiction in which he develops super powers was being completely serious? ;-)