Such decisions are inevitably made as a result of both technical and economic concerns. The bottom line is that fundamentally changing your set-up like that is a very hard thing to do in practice.
In protocol terms, you don't just reallocate some bandwidth. You also have to consider what control channel information might be required to reserve appropriate space on the data channel(s) you're now using for your messages, for one thing.
In software terms, you're talking about significantly changing and completely retesting all the system routing software at every level across your entire network. As I mentioned elsewhere, we used to do that exhaustively and manually, with each new release of system software taking literally months to approve, and similar lengths of time involved in approving new handsets for use on the network.
Then you have to deal with all the handsets themselves, which may or may not have any easy means to upgrade their software to use your new protocol. That in turn may mean forcing customers to switch, with the associated costs in subsidies to keep upgrade costs for customers reasonable and/or increased churn where you lose customers who like their old set and don't see any need to switch.
For these sorts of reasons, mobile networks tend to change through evolution rather than revolution. The simple fact is that messaging has outgrown its anticipated role, and the old systems are struggling to keep up, but they are keeping up. As long as that's true, it's hard to see the mobile operators spending pretty much a fortune just to switch protocols in a way that will inconvenience some customers and bring few apparent benefits to any of the rest. Look at e-mail, web pages and the history of Internet standards, and you'll see a similar picture for similar reasons.
Sorry, but there really isn't any evidence for that.
Apart from the dramatic increase in the number and severity of crimes committed by young people, the dramatic decrease in the level of classroom discipline and respect for authority figures such as parents and teachers, and the general "me, me, me" attitude increasingly exhibited by Generation Text?
Oh, but wait, you've got a stunning counterargument:
Correlation is not causation.
Well, that's true, it's not. But if you can manage to look deeper than statistical dogma for a moment, you'll notice that correlation is suggestive of causation. Moreover, when other likely factors can reasonably be ruled out (for example, because they have been controlled), correlation does become evidence of causation.
So, tell us: what other major changes have their been in the way children have been raised over the past decade or two compared to the time before, which could credibly account for the dramatic change in behaviour exhibited by school-age children today?
If his parents can't think of a way to discipline him that doesn't involve physical violence, they have no business raising kids.
You write this, and in your following paragraph accuse me of setting up a straw man? How ironic.
Most parents who use physical means to discipline their children are not habitual child-beaters and do not use excessive force. In fact, statistically (according to the surveys carried out around the time restrictions on parental chastisement were introduced in the UK nations a few years ago, at least) most parents who support smacking naughty children do not actually administer such punishment very often, and see it as a last resort when the child fails to respond to milder punishment rather than the default.
I know in "today's PC world", people hate being told that they're incompetent parents, but sometimes it's true.
Yes, sometimes it is. But if it were true of every parent who ever laid a finger on their child to discipline them, I'd wager more than half the human population of the world is "incompetent" as a parent. We're doing pretty well, considering how long ago that would have led to entire generations being dominated by badly brought-up kids.
But if beatings were an acceptable and effective punishment for misbehavior, we wouldn't need all these jails
Who's talking about "beatings"? Unless that word has very different connotations where you are from what it means to me, there is a big difference between giving a kid a beating and giving them some brief physical punishment such as a light smack. An increasing number of PC child protection charities apparently can't comprehend the rather fundamental difference, which is why I no longer support them, and why I have no problem arguing for a reasonable balance in discussions like this.
'Teaching' kids through punishment ignores the real reason why they should do good and makes it about avoiding the wrath of whover has more power.
Did it ever occur to you that this is nature's way of teaching the young?
Treating kids like adults, expecting them to have an adult understanding of the responsibilities that accompany their freedoms, is naive. They don't have that understanding. That's why they're kids.
Hopefully, as a child grows up and learns to behave responsibly, the parents allow the child increasing degrees of freedom to go with the responsibility they exhibit. However, this is a continual process: it doesn't start with the child waking up on the second day after it's born and suddenly having an adult level of understanding and responsibility. (Neither does it suddenly flip at age 18 or 21 or something.)
IMHO, one of the most impressive things about good parents is their ability to judge how far along this transition from innocent to adult their child is, and to give or restrict their freedoms accordingly.
It's a 'might makes right' lesson that's dehumanizing and disrespectful to a child (or any human being.)
So is a criminal justice system backed by police (who will, of course, use force to arrest you if you break the law and don't cooperate) or a country defending itself by military means. But in the real world, carrots and sticks are both effective ways of getting someone to do what you want. The humanity is in keeping that balance as far towards carrots as possible, and the skill is in knowing when the stick is required.
As soon as you resort to smacking, spanking, or hitting in any way, you've signaled your failure as a parent.
Sorry, but I prefer to judge people's success as a parent by things that make a difference in the long run: do their kids grow up as decent people, succeed in areas that interest them, etc.
I seem to have written this a lot here this week, but what goes before that is just a means to an end, and its value is exactly the degree to which it helps to achieve a good end. Put another way, if evaluating parenthood were as simple as what you wrote, then the world would be full of failed parents, and I can't believe the world would be in the mostly good shape it is if that were really the case.
They're good kids, but the few times they've done something wrong, they've been more hurt by my disappointment than any physical pain I could inflict.
Really? Of course kids want their parents to be proud of them, but if that one goal is now dominating their lives to the extent implied by what you wrote there, have you considered that maybe you're a little too hands-on?
However, it doesn't work unless you've been consistent since day one.
OK, so what would you suggest parents do if they haven't already found the silver bullet before their first child is born?
FWIW, I post a fair bit on various technical Usenet groups. Several of them are aimed at helping beginners to learn things like new programming languages.
We mostly get people trying their best, but you can spot the "do my homework please" morons a mile off. You also see kids turn up every now and then who post using txt spk. Unsurprisingly, the almost universal reaction from the volunteers posting replies is to ignore them.
This is partly because if they can't be bothered to write properly, they convey a lack of respect that makes them less appealing targets for volunteered help than those who make an effort. (C.f. people who post questions on Usenet, but ask people to reply by e-mail because they don't have time to check the group, kthx.)
However, it's also because most of the messages posted using "clever" abbreviations are simply unintelligible. Helping those people would require more effort, simply because you would first have to work out what they actually needed, where those who write in clear English (in the case of the English-language groups I follow) have already run that roadblock.
So in this case, a lack of basic communication skills and trying to be too clever in an inappropriate forum really is directly harming the person posting the message.
Frankly, I don't see how you can possibly judge whether something is child abuse based on whether an object is involved anyway. Intent, OK. Physical harm caused, fair enough. Lasting psychological damage, sure. But whether a kid gets belted, caned, or just the traditional back-hander really isn't what matters, and I don't really see how any other position makes sense whether or not you agree with the use of physical discipline.
Personally, I find it odd how older generations who were so "abused" often have much greater respect for others than those raised in the past few years with no fear of real repercussions if they break the rules. I'm afraid every single argument put forward by the "it's all child abuse" PC crowd pretty much falls flat by the simple reasoning that their softly-softly approach doesn't work. This is abundantly clear from the changes in school discipline in places like the UK as teachers and then parents systematically had their rights to physically discipline badly behaved children eroded.
Sure, some parents hit their kids way too much and that's wrong, and sure, if all parents had degrees in child psychology and access to state-of-the-art resources for correcting children's problem behaviours immediately, that might reduce the need to almost zero. But in reality, I'd rather have a world where kids got a clip round the ear occasionally and had a little respect for the rules and their elders than today's PC world, where they're all little angels, laying a finger on them is called child abuse, and I hear nine-year-olds who've just scratched right down the side of my neighbour's new car doing hundreds of pounds of damage telling him point-blank that it's his problem because "I can't commit a crime, I'm only 9!".
Bollocks. I'm sorry, but you really are just talking politically correct crap.
For a start, there's no such thing as a perfect parent or a perfectly behaved child, no matter how good your intentions. If you really have children and you really believe they're little angels, have you ever had an honest discussion with their school teachers to make sure they're not just hiding their poor behaviour from you and indulging in it elsewhere? A lot of parents don't, and have absolutely no idea what they're missing. (And yes, I have worked in a school, and seen this phenomenon a surprising number of times.)
More philosophically, which is really more cruel to a child, a quick smack when they do something wrong so they understand that their behaviour isn't acceptable, or the emotional trauma of, say, being denied part of their weekly spending money allowance, which will punish them for several days?
Pain is nature's teacher, and using pain to discipline children is entirely natural. Arguments like yours, which equalise all forms of physical discipline, are painting a coloured world in black and white. In fact, I no longer support certain child protection charities precisely because they can't tell the difference between a parent with a temper who regularly beats their child (a genuine and serious problem) and a loving parent who uses occasional physical chastisement to teach their child what is and isn't acceptable behaviour.
I used to work in the Engineering department of a mobile service provider, so the information here may be somewhat out of date, but the principles are probably still the same today.
In general, mobile communications networks don't use the same channel for everything. For example, you might have several frequencies available, use one as a control channel (registering handsets as they move around; handshaking to set up calls, etc.) and then have several channels used for voice data.
Now, it's not unusual for small data messages, such as SMS, to be carried on the control channel rather than voice channels. That means there is much less capacity available for such messages than for voice, because they have only a single channel, and they are also in competition with all the network registration traffic, etc.
Moreover, the testing overhead for data messages can be higher than voice calls. Certainly for the network I worked on, every call type was made between every possible combination of approved handsets and checked by a real person before new software went live. (Yes, that did take months.)
So in fact, from a technical point of view, it's entirely unfair to compare voice and data transactions. That probably doesn't matter in practice, of course, because prices will no doubt be set by what the market will bear rather than what it costs to provide the service. That usually means voice and basic texting are relatively cheap these days, but things like photo messaging (or whatever the bonus feature du jour is) tend to cost more.
You seem to have far too much respect for the effectiveness of law, and far too little realization of how frequently government actors are willing to ignore the law to further their personal agenda.
Not really, I just accept that a government prepared to sidestep its own laws is probably as willing to develop the tools for this kind of surveillance covertly as to employ them illegally. If the checks and balances of government aren't working, then there are bigger problems than monitoring what the people are saying, and you're onto at least the second box.
I suspect that we're never quite going to see eye to eye on this one, even if we might agree on some of the general themes. For what it's worth, I admire your willingness to stand by your principles, even if I don't personally think that doing so is always the pragmatic thing to do, and I thank you for an interesting discussion.
You're doing better than I was. At the time I left them, there was no way at all to get through the phone menu system to speak to a real person. I'm pretty sure about this, because I tried all the remotely plausible paths through the menus, as my phone bill will testify.
There was a flaw in the third party software they where using for web mail, and they suffered from a zero day attack. Hardly Plus.Nets fault.
On the contrary. The software they chose to use was bug-ridden — and I don't mean subtle, occasional bugs, I mean "incapable of even performing its basic functions correctly" — and this was abundantly clear to anyone who had tried to use it for more than a few minutes and received a couple of HTML e-mails. It doesn't require a 45th level geek to appreciate that such software is also likely to be unreliable and insecure.
So, either Plus didn't test the software, or they tested it but missed the fact that it was clearly broken, or they tested it, knew that it was broken, but went ahead and used it anyway. All of these scenarios make the problems Plus's fault, and they are the only possible scenarios that explain what happened. This is negligence, pure and simple.
FWIW, I shifted to Zen when I left Plus a few months ago, with a very similar story to yours. Aside from a few teething troubles getting it set up, most of which turned out to be BT's fault rather than Zen's, the technical service has been fine.
The customer service at Zen is appalling, however. They don't have a 24-hour tech support number, for one thing, so there is no "quiet" time to call. After sitting on hold for 45 minutes during one of those teething troubles, my first question of the technical adviser was how many staff they had answering the phones that night. He dodged the question at least three times. I asked whether, since we both knew very well that I was paying around 50% over the odds to get Zen because they supposedly provided better service than other ISPs with similar packages, he thought it was reasonable for me to be on hold for 45 minutes just to follow up a call from the night before. "All I can do is apologise..." He even had the audacity to suggest that perhaps if we moved right along to my problem, it would help ease the pressure on their phone lines!
Zen therefore have a black mark against them in my book as well. There must be UK ISPs who provide the equivalent of what I'm using (well under 5GB a month, "up to 8MB" speeds) for less than the 25 quid a month Zen charge, with better service. If and when I identify one, I will be taking advantage of Zen's month-at-a-time billing to leave them immediately.
I was with Plus for many years, but their service deteriorated dramatically around a year to 18 months ago.
At the time, they made it unreasonably difficult to get a transfer authorisation for my BT line to move to another ADSL ISP, and the rules requiring all ISPs to give transfer authorisations within a reasonable time hadn't yet come into force, so I would have lost connection for probably a month during the move. Since I knew I would be moving house fairly soon, I put up with them until then, when I could cancel without losing connection unnecessarily. I didn't even consider signing up for their service at the new place, though.
Frankly, it amazes me it's taken this long for their webmail service to be cracked. They shifted to some funny "@mail" system a few months before I left them, and it was hopelessly easy to break with simple HTML e-mails and the like. It was also bug-ridden to the point of being almost unusable at times.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to being smug that I'm no longer with them, and humming "I told you so" to myself. Which I did, in several problem reports I raised, all of which they fobbed off. Ain't karma wonderful?:-)
Well, once either side start to step outside the bounds of the law, all bets are off. If a nation's government is united enough and willing to break their own laws on protecting human rights, I rather doubt they'll care about "the PR disaster associated with directly breaking the Internet". Just take a look at the much more dangerous changes that have been made in places like the US and UK post-9/11 and post-7/7, which the people have allowed to stand with only the civil liberties crowds campaigning against them.
To put it in US terms, when you reach the point you're talking about, you need the second amendment more than the first. As Ed Howdershelt remarked, “There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.”
But in the meantime, in the real world, we still have serious damage being done by on-line anonymity. Your doomsday scenario is important — please don't think I'm not listening or don't understand your point — I just don't believe it's the only thing that's important.
I think you missed my point. Go read why.xxx still isn't a TLD, despite the reasonable arguments made in favour and the relatively widespread support, and perhaps you'll understand.
First, I think that if there are censorship methods in place all that stands between governments and restraining political speech is one legal restriction, we've already failed. They'll ignore that restriction without a second thought because all they have to do is use a tool that they have in place. If we prevent them from installing that set of tools, then we at least have a chance to see what they're doing and respond before it's too late.
But you speak as if "government" is a single, unified entity. It never is. Government is composed of individual people, and if sensibly structured, it has checks and balances to ensure that no subgroup from among those people can exceed its lawful authority to act on behalf of the people without another group calling them on it. This is what separation of powers is all about, and the principle applies just as much on smaller scales, and particularly in the area of oversight of sensitive, security-related activities, as it does to separation of legislature, judiciary and executive branch. Other relevant issues include having a free press and freedom of information laws that require governments to disclose information openly to the public. (It is ironic, perhaps, that we have this discussion on the day the UK's Parliament voted to proceed with the process of exempting themselves from the current government's own Freedom of Information Act, which would seem pretty cynical if we weren't used to far worse from the current administration.)
Your argument seems to rely fundamentally on a government being weaker than an individual — which is not the same as weaker than the people as a whole. Realistically, this is never going to be the case in practice, since one of the primary roles of most governments is to administer the legal system, which includes enforcing the law. So in a very real sense, laws are always all that stand between a government, collectively, and doing wrong. This isn't a philosophical point; it's a practical and pretty much universal reality.
Second, I believe that anonymous speech is an essential element of free speech. By its very nature, the speech that needs to be protected will always be unpopular - no need to help the government identify "dissidents" too quickly.
I've discussed this point in detail before, and I invite you to search my posting history on this subject. In short, on-line anonymity is rarely absolute — someone determined enough and with sufficient resources could track down almost anything — and I believe relying on it for protection in serious cases is over-rated. I believe it is better if people can express their opinions openly, with the full weight of the law and the state's law enforcement machine to defend them if they are unfairly challenged or penalised for doing so.
Obviously this requires a state that protects people's basic rights in the first place. Many of my arguments against anonymity do not really apply in places where this is not the case. But the biggest issue there is not the lack of anonymity, it's the lack of respect for basic human rights, which is a far more difficult problem to deal with.
However, in a culture that does respect freedom of expression and the like, anonymity is just the ability to speak without accountability, which like being free to do anything else without taking responsibility for one's actions is anathema to ensuring justice for all.
Please read my posts in this thread again, very carefully. At no point have I argued (intentionally, at least) that government should have carte blanche to restrict communications. But in a sense, that is beside the point I am currently trying to make anyway.
Most of my arguments in this discussion relate to holding people responsible for those actions they are able to take. That principle applies just as much to the executive branch as it does to someone abusing the freedom of the Internet, and the judgement is typically reserved to a jury of the people under the authority of the judiciary. This is one reason why separation of government powers is also an important principle.
Put another way, you seem to be concerned with what people can do. In contrast, I accept that governments will always be physically able to impair communications if they disregard any legal restrictions on them, and I accept that someone sufficiently determined and willing to pay any price will probably always be able to circumvent any restrictions. I am therefore more concerned that when either group's actions are reviewed under due process afterwards, justice should be done for all involved.
It is *precisely* the "lawless" state of the internet today that makes it useful as a tool for freedom (and flexible as a basis for building things).
The Internet is useful as a tool for freedom? Do you really, honestly believe that more benefit is gained by those advocating freedom using the Internet in its current form than by governments using it as a tool to monitor their citizens? I'm not so sure. And in any case, I rather suspect that the kind of freedom you're talking about, which might be affected by greater regulation, is a vanishingly small proportion of all Internet use even in those countries with the kind of oppressive regime in power that prefers to limit freedom of expression for political reasons.
Spam is a technical problem with the design of the SMTP protocol, and a really interesting social issue re: the appropriateness of push marketing in any medium designed for 1 to 1 personal communication.
I'd argue the social problem is in connection with push marketing and one-to-many communication. I'm afraid I don't quite see how you're going to fix that social problem with a few tweaks to protocol, while still maintaining the freedom of the Internet, which you value. In the meantime, everyone is quite literally paying the price of spam, and it's measured in billions of lost time and wasted bandwidth, not to mention the general reduction in quality of life.
More importantly, Defamation is in no way an important enough issue to consider restraining the essential liberty that is freedom of communication.
Spoken like someone who's never been on the wrong side of it. Not all defamation is trivial. Rightly or wrongly, this is a crime that can destroy lives, and almost by definition the victims of it are usually innocent.
Freedom of communication is not an absolute right, and never has been. Nor should it be a right at all, unless it comes with the corresponding responsibility. If someone won't accept responsibility for what they say, given reasonable safeguards such as due process, then I don't have a problem with restricting their right to say it.
Phishing and other scams are no more interesting to me than pickpockets in open air markets
Again, spoken like someone who has never been on the wrong side of it, and who has no appreciation for the damage that can be done.
Not everyone is as smart or Internet-savvy as the average person in this Slashdot discussion. While I am all for personal responsibility and teaching people to look after themselves, I am also a pragmatist, and I recognise that no-one is an expert in everything and sometimes it is appropriate for governments to step in to protect their people from abusive minorities.
For all your principled support of Internet freedom, things are rarely so black and white in the real world. This freedom of communication you defend so passionately comes at the cost of everyone's moral and legal rights to hold others accountable for damage they do, and thousands of people every year are paying some pretty steep prices as a result.
We should always defend basic human rights and freedoms against abuse, and we should never give them up lightly. But we should also recognise that sometimes different rights of different people come into conflict, it is impossible to fully respect all the rights of both parties in these cases, and we must choose which we value more highly. These decisions are never easy (c.f. arguments for greater government powers in the name of security during the ongoing terrorism saga) and never as one-sided as you make out.
Please spare us your random, unsupported UN-bashing. Right now, under US leadership, (a) the censorship is widespread (as TFA demonstrates), and (b) the US-based authorities have demonstrated a willingness to impose their own values on others (the.xxx domain to give one obvious example). How exactly could having the Internet under UN control be worse on either count?
Fair enough. However, in that case, I can't help noting that most things run "by the people" do have some degree of order associated with them, in the form of governments and legal systems. At least in principle, these represent the interests of the people as a whole; being run for the people does not imply anarchy.
Right now, it is precisely the lawless nature of the Internet (in that it is unreasonably difficult to enforce accepted laws there, even when pretty much everyone agrees they are reasonable laws) that leads to problems like spam, defamation, phishing expeditions, and all the other bad stuff that I'm sure everyone except those benefiting personally could happily live without.
My argument in discussions like this has often been that trying to protect the Internet in its current state is not the best way forward, because its current state is broken in some fundamental ways, and support from more traditional government and laws will help to combat some of that abuse. What we should be doing, IMHO, is campaigning for principles like freedom of information and due process to be considered as relevant for everyone on the Internet as they are in many countries already, so that whatever common system of regulation and government ultimately does come out of it, the fundamental principles are fair and reasonable.
There is no question in my mind that a completely open system like the Internet will come to be more regulated, whether everyone likes it or not, for the same reasons that societies have developed laws to preserve order. What concerns me is that along with that regulation should come the same protection of individual rights and freedoms that free societies have also developed to avoid their laws becoming too restrictive.
It's ironic that you wrote this just as I was writing the post below it about how some people's illusions are about to be shattered.
Please stop and think about this. Who owns the vast amounts of hardware infrastructure that have been created to support it? Who defines the standards and protocols on which it is based? How does an individual gain access to the Internet? If the Internet really belongs to the people, why do governments and commercial organisations dominate the answer to every one of those basic questions?
Governments have done this with newspapers and other media for ever.
To varying degrees, yes. I think the main news here is that some people's illusions are about to be shattered, because for some reason they thought this couldn't happen on the Internet.
I can't count how many debates I've had on Slashdot, where the other guy relied on something like Internet anonymity or hosting dubiously ethical content offshore to back up an argument. Sometimes the reasons were legitimate, and I was arguing that they should be more afraid of government or big corporate intervention making things worse. Sometimes it was more the other way around, as they flippantly argued that their "right" to defame someone anonymously (or to copy music illegally, or...) could not be stopped, as if the Internet is some all-powerful weapon of the people against oppressive governments everywhere.
IMHO, it would be better for all concerned if the reality was clearer, and I think this sort of eye-catching statistic makes it very clear indeed that the Internet isn't some brave new world, and for better or worse it will always have risks and opportunities similar to those of any other communications medium. We should regulate (or not), legislate (or not), standardise (or not) and seek international co-operation (or not) accordingly.
Thanks, that explains a lot. The other day, while editing a large graphics file on a machine with relatively modest RAM fitted, the system was grinding to a halt. That seemed odd, because I had worked out that the RAM should be sufficient to handle the image. It turned out that a copy of Firefox 2 was sitting in the background, with no pages currently loaded, but still with a working set of nearly 100MB of RAM. Why WinXP couldn't just page almost the whole thing out to disk and instead went into a swapping frenzy when I loaded the graphic, I have no idea.:-(
Your renderer did what most renderers years ago should have done: failed outright upon errors. That would have been essentially the same as a C++ compiler not emitting anything upon encountering a syntax error.
Which would make perfect sense, except that the person running the C++ compiler probably wrote the C++ code they're putting through it, or at least has direct access to it so if something doesn't work they can fix it. For how many of the web pages you visit regularly did you write the HTML and CSS?
Unfortunately, the early browser developers, mainly at Netscape and Microsoft, decided to try to handle such shit input.
Following the established user interface principle that when things go wrong, you don't make it the user's fault.
And so today we have crap like MySpace.
Where "crap" presumably means a hugely popular service used regularly by a bazillion people?
Technical details and web standards and browser workarounds and so on are just means to an end. That end is getting web sites that people want to use onto their computers so they can use them. The means matter exactly up to the point that they help to do this, and no further.
In a moment I'll talk about my views on rewriting large code bases, but first I'll say that I'm glad I wasn't the only one who was with the GP poster up until the SML advocacy, and then disagreed. Even given the neat way that functional languages tend to model parsing problems, web browsers do a lot more than parse HTML and CSS files. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that this is the easiest problem they solve. Systematically resolving the layout rules in arbitrarily complex cases is a somewhat difficult problem, given the way those rules are expressed in CSS. And of course, web pages are no longer the static things they used to be: today's browsers need to cope with scripts moving the goalposts arbitrarily, maintaining the integrity of the display as much as possible during lengthy downloads of large pages or after AJAXified updates, etc. etc. It's far from clear that a language like SML offers better support for these naturally concurrent operations than the many alternatives.
I do disagree with the parent post on one fundamental point, though:
In general, throwing out an existing code base is rarely a good idea. Practically speaking there's rarely a code base so bad that no part of it can be salvaged. Even when things are rewritten, it's almost always the overall structure that's just refactored by a lot of copy pasting.
I'll see your reuse dogma, and raise you my "plan to throw one away" dogma.:-)
Actually, I don't cite this as some sort of dogmatic adherence to ConceptsTryingToSoundMoreCleverThanTheyAre at all. Rather, I happen to agree with the principle based on practical experience. In general, software design is difficult, and few people are good at it. Even those who are rarely have the good fortune to know exactly what their design will be called upon to do a few years later, and will inevitably allow more flexibility (and commensurate overhead) in some places than is really needed, while making some things unnecessarily strict and thus making later changes more difficult than they might have been.
It's been my experience that in long-term projects, far too many managers aren't willing to throw out a whole module, subsystem, or even product, because of popular wisdom that anything they replace it with will just have bugs of its own. I believe this is a mistake because, again speaking only from my own experience, a high proportion of bugs originate in special or boundary cases. According to my reasoning above, a new project built from scratch with no prior experience will rarely get an overall design that automatically avoids these completely. Discipline is rarely good enough on software projects to allow for this and ensure that new requirements are integrated into a clean overall design rather than bolted on; indeed, in a commercial environment, this may not be realistic given short term deadlines and the typical management and marketing pressures. However, over time, such bolted-on special cases will tend to build up. They start to interact, they don't always get properly documented, and new people on the project team either don't know about them or at best don't know all the original reasoning behind them, making safe maintenance difficult.
Sometimes, this problem is manageable, particularly if your project leadership consistently take a long-term view and give maintenance and testing the priority they deserve. But usually, IME, the problem reaches a certain critical mass where the costs of ongoing development of a code base full of dubiously documented special cases outweigh the costs of stopping to clean things up.
As an additional, very practical concern, tools and programming techniques are always developing. Over the sort of timescales we're talking about here, it's entirely possible that more effective tools will have been created, or more effective techniques discovered, that could solve the underlying problem much more effectively in a different way.
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Such decisions are inevitably made as a result of both technical and economic concerns. The bottom line is that fundamentally changing your set-up like that is a very hard thing to do in practice.
In protocol terms, you don't just reallocate some bandwidth. You also have to consider what control channel information might be required to reserve appropriate space on the data channel(s) you're now using for your messages, for one thing.
In software terms, you're talking about significantly changing and completely retesting all the system routing software at every level across your entire network. As I mentioned elsewhere, we used to do that exhaustively and manually, with each new release of system software taking literally months to approve, and similar lengths of time involved in approving new handsets for use on the network.
Then you have to deal with all the handsets themselves, which may or may not have any easy means to upgrade their software to use your new protocol. That in turn may mean forcing customers to switch, with the associated costs in subsidies to keep upgrade costs for customers reasonable and/or increased churn where you lose customers who like their old set and don't see any need to switch.
For these sorts of reasons, mobile networks tend to change through evolution rather than revolution. The simple fact is that messaging has outgrown its anticipated role, and the old systems are struggling to keep up, but they are keeping up. As long as that's true, it's hard to see the mobile operators spending pretty much a fortune just to switch protocols in a way that will inconvenience some customers and bring few apparent benefits to any of the rest. Look at e-mail, web pages and the history of Internet standards, and you'll see a similar picture for similar reasons.
Apart from the dramatic increase in the number and severity of crimes committed by young people, the dramatic decrease in the level of classroom discipline and respect for authority figures such as parents and teachers, and the general "me, me, me" attitude increasingly exhibited by Generation Text?
Oh, but wait, you've got a stunning counterargument:
Well, that's true, it's not. But if you can manage to look deeper than statistical dogma for a moment, you'll notice that correlation is suggestive of causation. Moreover, when other likely factors can reasonably be ruled out (for example, because they have been controlled), correlation does become evidence of causation.
So, tell us: what other major changes have their been in the way children have been raised over the past decade or two compared to the time before, which could credibly account for the dramatic change in behaviour exhibited by school-age children today?
You write this, and in your following paragraph accuse me of setting up a straw man? How ironic.
Most parents who use physical means to discipline their children are not habitual child-beaters and do not use excessive force. In fact, statistically (according to the surveys carried out around the time restrictions on parental chastisement were introduced in the UK nations a few years ago, at least) most parents who support smacking naughty children do not actually administer such punishment very often, and see it as a last resort when the child fails to respond to milder punishment rather than the default.
Yes, sometimes it is. But if it were true of every parent who ever laid a finger on their child to discipline them, I'd wager more than half the human population of the world is "incompetent" as a parent. We're doing pretty well, considering how long ago that would have led to entire generations being dominated by badly brought-up kids.
Who's talking about "beatings"? Unless that word has very different connotations where you are from what it means to me, there is a big difference between giving a kid a beating and giving them some brief physical punishment such as a light smack. An increasing number of PC child protection charities apparently can't comprehend the rather fundamental difference, which is why I no longer support them, and why I have no problem arguing for a reasonable balance in discussions like this.
Did it ever occur to you that this is nature's way of teaching the young?
Treating kids like adults, expecting them to have an adult understanding of the responsibilities that accompany their freedoms, is naive. They don't have that understanding. That's why they're kids.
Hopefully, as a child grows up and learns to behave responsibly, the parents allow the child increasing degrees of freedom to go with the responsibility they exhibit. However, this is a continual process: it doesn't start with the child waking up on the second day after it's born and suddenly having an adult level of understanding and responsibility. (Neither does it suddenly flip at age 18 or 21 or something.)
IMHO, one of the most impressive things about good parents is their ability to judge how far along this transition from innocent to adult their child is, and to give or restrict their freedoms accordingly.
So is a criminal justice system backed by police (who will, of course, use force to arrest you if you break the law and don't cooperate) or a country defending itself by military means. But in the real world, carrots and sticks are both effective ways of getting someone to do what you want. The humanity is in keeping that balance as far towards carrots as possible, and the skill is in knowing when the stick is required.
Sorry, but I prefer to judge people's success as a parent by things that make a difference in the long run: do their kids grow up as decent people, succeed in areas that interest them, etc.
I seem to have written this a lot here this week, but what goes before that is just a means to an end, and its value is exactly the degree to which it helps to achieve a good end. Put another way, if evaluating parenthood were as simple as what you wrote, then the world would be full of failed parents, and I can't believe the world would be in the mostly good shape it is if that were really the case.
Really? Of course kids want their parents to be proud of them, but if that one goal is now dominating their lives to the extent implied by what you wrote there, have you considered that maybe you're a little too hands-on?
OK, so what would you suggest parents do if they haven't already found the silver bullet before their first child is born?
FWIW, I post a fair bit on various technical Usenet groups. Several of them are aimed at helping beginners to learn things like new programming languages.
We mostly get people trying their best, but you can spot the "do my homework please" morons a mile off. You also see kids turn up every now and then who post using txt spk. Unsurprisingly, the almost universal reaction from the volunteers posting replies is to ignore them.
This is partly because if they can't be bothered to write properly, they convey a lack of respect that makes them less appealing targets for volunteered help than those who make an effort. (C.f. people who post questions on Usenet, but ask people to reply by e-mail because they don't have time to check the group, kthx.)
However, it's also because most of the messages posted using "clever" abbreviations are simply unintelligible. Helping those people would require more effort, simply because you would first have to work out what they actually needed, where those who write in clear English (in the case of the English-language groups I follow) have already run that roadblock.
So in this case, a lack of basic communication skills and trying to be too clever in an inappropriate forum really is directly harming the person posting the message.
Frankly, I don't see how you can possibly judge whether something is child abuse based on whether an object is involved anyway. Intent, OK. Physical harm caused, fair enough. Lasting psychological damage, sure. But whether a kid gets belted, caned, or just the traditional back-hander really isn't what matters, and I don't really see how any other position makes sense whether or not you agree with the use of physical discipline.
Personally, I find it odd how older generations who were so "abused" often have much greater respect for others than those raised in the past few years with no fear of real repercussions if they break the rules. I'm afraid every single argument put forward by the "it's all child abuse" PC crowd pretty much falls flat by the simple reasoning that their softly-softly approach doesn't work. This is abundantly clear from the changes in school discipline in places like the UK as teachers and then parents systematically had their rights to physically discipline badly behaved children eroded.
Sure, some parents hit their kids way too much and that's wrong, and sure, if all parents had degrees in child psychology and access to state-of-the-art resources for correcting children's problem behaviours immediately, that might reduce the need to almost zero. But in reality, I'd rather have a world where kids got a clip round the ear occasionally and had a little respect for the rules and their elders than today's PC world, where they're all little angels, laying a finger on them is called child abuse, and I hear nine-year-olds who've just scratched right down the side of my neighbour's new car doing hundreds of pounds of damage telling him point-blank that it's his problem because "I can't commit a crime, I'm only 9!".
Bollocks. I'm sorry, but you really are just talking politically correct crap.
For a start, there's no such thing as a perfect parent or a perfectly behaved child, no matter how good your intentions. If you really have children and you really believe they're little angels, have you ever had an honest discussion with their school teachers to make sure they're not just hiding their poor behaviour from you and indulging in it elsewhere? A lot of parents don't, and have absolutely no idea what they're missing. (And yes, I have worked in a school, and seen this phenomenon a surprising number of times.)
More philosophically, which is really more cruel to a child, a quick smack when they do something wrong so they understand that their behaviour isn't acceptable, or the emotional trauma of, say, being denied part of their weekly spending money allowance, which will punish them for several days?
Pain is nature's teacher, and using pain to discipline children is entirely natural. Arguments like yours, which equalise all forms of physical discipline, are painting a coloured world in black and white. In fact, I no longer support certain child protection charities precisely because they can't tell the difference between a parent with a temper who regularly beats their child (a genuine and serious problem) and a loving parent who uses occasional physical chastisement to teach their child what is and isn't acceptable behaviour.
I used to work in the Engineering department of a mobile service provider, so the information here may be somewhat out of date, but the principles are probably still the same today.
In general, mobile communications networks don't use the same channel for everything. For example, you might have several frequencies available, use one as a control channel (registering handsets as they move around; handshaking to set up calls, etc.) and then have several channels used for voice data.
Now, it's not unusual for small data messages, such as SMS, to be carried on the control channel rather than voice channels. That means there is much less capacity available for such messages than for voice, because they have only a single channel, and they are also in competition with all the network registration traffic, etc.
Moreover, the testing overhead for data messages can be higher than voice calls. Certainly for the network I worked on, every call type was made between every possible combination of approved handsets and checked by a real person before new software went live. (Yes, that did take months.)
So in fact, from a technical point of view, it's entirely unfair to compare voice and data transactions. That probably doesn't matter in practice, of course, because prices will no doubt be set by what the market will bear rather than what it costs to provide the service. That usually means voice and basic texting are relatively cheap these days, but things like photo messaging (or whatever the bonus feature du jour is) tend to cost more.
Not really, I just accept that a government prepared to sidestep its own laws is probably as willing to develop the tools for this kind of surveillance covertly as to employ them illegally. If the checks and balances of government aren't working, then there are bigger problems than monitoring what the people are saying, and you're onto at least the second box.
I suspect that we're never quite going to see eye to eye on this one, even if we might agree on some of the general themes. For what it's worth, I admire your willingness to stand by your principles, even if I don't personally think that doing so is always the pragmatic thing to do, and I thank you for an interesting discussion.
You're doing better than I was. At the time I left them, there was no way at all to get through the phone menu system to speak to a real person. I'm pretty sure about this, because I tried all the remotely plausible paths through the menus, as my phone bill will testify.
On the contrary. The software they chose to use was bug-ridden — and I don't mean subtle, occasional bugs, I mean "incapable of even performing its basic functions correctly" — and this was abundantly clear to anyone who had tried to use it for more than a few minutes and received a couple of HTML e-mails. It doesn't require a 45th level geek to appreciate that such software is also likely to be unreliable and insecure.
So, either Plus didn't test the software, or they tested it but missed the fact that it was clearly broken, or they tested it, knew that it was broken, but went ahead and used it anyway. All of these scenarios make the problems Plus's fault, and they are the only possible scenarios that explain what happened. This is negligence, pure and simple.
FWIW, I shifted to Zen when I left Plus a few months ago, with a very similar story to yours. Aside from a few teething troubles getting it set up, most of which turned out to be BT's fault rather than Zen's, the technical service has been fine.
The customer service at Zen is appalling, however. They don't have a 24-hour tech support number, for one thing, so there is no "quiet" time to call. After sitting on hold for 45 minutes during one of those teething troubles, my first question of the technical adviser was how many staff they had answering the phones that night. He dodged the question at least three times. I asked whether, since we both knew very well that I was paying around 50% over the odds to get Zen because they supposedly provided better service than other ISPs with similar packages, he thought it was reasonable for me to be on hold for 45 minutes just to follow up a call from the night before. "All I can do is apologise..." He even had the audacity to suggest that perhaps if we moved right along to my problem, it would help ease the pressure on their phone lines!
Zen therefore have a black mark against them in my book as well. There must be UK ISPs who provide the equivalent of what I'm using (well under 5GB a month, "up to 8MB" speeds) for less than the 25 quid a month Zen charge, with better service. If and when I identify one, I will be taking advantage of Zen's month-at-a-time billing to leave them immediately.
I was with Plus for many years, but their service deteriorated dramatically around a year to 18 months ago.
At the time, they made it unreasonably difficult to get a transfer authorisation for my BT line to move to another ADSL ISP, and the rules requiring all ISPs to give transfer authorisations within a reasonable time hadn't yet come into force, so I would have lost connection for probably a month during the move. Since I knew I would be moving house fairly soon, I put up with them until then, when I could cancel without losing connection unnecessarily. I didn't even consider signing up for their service at the new place, though.
Frankly, it amazes me it's taken this long for their webmail service to be cracked. They shifted to some funny "@mail" system a few months before I left them, and it was hopelessly easy to break with simple HTML e-mails and the like. It was also bug-ridden to the point of being almost unusable at times.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to being smug that I'm no longer with them, and humming "I told you so" to myself. Which I did, in several problem reports I raised, all of which they fobbed off. Ain't karma wonderful? :-)
Well, once either side start to step outside the bounds of the law, all bets are off. If a nation's government is united enough and willing to break their own laws on protecting human rights, I rather doubt they'll care about "the PR disaster associated with directly breaking the Internet". Just take a look at the much more dangerous changes that have been made in places like the US and UK post-9/11 and post-7/7, which the people have allowed to stand with only the civil liberties crowds campaigning against them.
To put it in US terms, when you reach the point you're talking about, you need the second amendment more than the first. As Ed Howdershelt remarked, “There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.”
But in the meantime, in the real world, we still have serious damage being done by on-line anonymity. Your doomsday scenario is important — please don't think I'm not listening or don't understand your point — I just don't believe it's the only thing that's important.
I think you missed my point. Go read why .xxx still isn't a TLD, despite the reasonable arguments made in favour and the relatively widespread support, and perhaps you'll understand.
But you speak as if "government" is a single, unified entity. It never is. Government is composed of individual people, and if sensibly structured, it has checks and balances to ensure that no subgroup from among those people can exceed its lawful authority to act on behalf of the people without another group calling them on it. This is what separation of powers is all about, and the principle applies just as much on smaller scales, and particularly in the area of oversight of sensitive, security-related activities, as it does to separation of legislature, judiciary and executive branch. Other relevant issues include having a free press and freedom of information laws that require governments to disclose information openly to the public. (It is ironic, perhaps, that we have this discussion on the day the UK's Parliament voted to proceed with the process of exempting themselves from the current government's own Freedom of Information Act, which would seem pretty cynical if we weren't used to far worse from the current administration.)
Your argument seems to rely fundamentally on a government being weaker than an individual — which is not the same as weaker than the people as a whole. Realistically, this is never going to be the case in practice, since one of the primary roles of most governments is to administer the legal system, which includes enforcing the law. So in a very real sense, laws are always all that stand between a government, collectively, and doing wrong. This isn't a philosophical point; it's a practical and pretty much universal reality.
I've discussed this point in detail before, and I invite you to search my posting history on this subject. In short, on-line anonymity is rarely absolute — someone determined enough and with sufficient resources could track down almost anything — and I believe relying on it for protection in serious cases is over-rated. I believe it is better if people can express their opinions openly, with the full weight of the law and the state's law enforcement machine to defend them if they are unfairly challenged or penalised for doing so.
Obviously this requires a state that protects people's basic rights in the first place. Many of my arguments against anonymity do not really apply in places where this is not the case. But the biggest issue there is not the lack of anonymity, it's the lack of respect for basic human rights, which is a far more difficult problem to deal with.
However, in a culture that does respect freedom of expression and the like, anonymity is just the ability to speak without accountability, which like being free to do anything else without taking responsibility for one's actions is anathema to ensuring justice for all.
Please read my posts in this thread again, very carefully. At no point have I argued (intentionally, at least) that government should have carte blanche to restrict communications. But in a sense, that is beside the point I am currently trying to make anyway.
Most of my arguments in this discussion relate to holding people responsible for those actions they are able to take. That principle applies just as much to the executive branch as it does to someone abusing the freedom of the Internet, and the judgement is typically reserved to a jury of the people under the authority of the judiciary. This is one reason why separation of government powers is also an important principle.
Put another way, you seem to be concerned with what people can do. In contrast, I accept that governments will always be physically able to impair communications if they disregard any legal restrictions on them, and I accept that someone sufficiently determined and willing to pay any price will probably always be able to circumvent any restrictions. I am therefore more concerned that when either group's actions are reviewed under due process afterwards, justice should be done for all involved.
The Internet is useful as a tool for freedom? Do you really, honestly believe that more benefit is gained by those advocating freedom using the Internet in its current form than by governments using it as a tool to monitor their citizens? I'm not so sure. And in any case, I rather suspect that the kind of freedom you're talking about, which might be affected by greater regulation, is a vanishingly small proportion of all Internet use even in those countries with the kind of oppressive regime in power that prefers to limit freedom of expression for political reasons.
I'd argue the social problem is in connection with push marketing and one-to-many communication. I'm afraid I don't quite see how you're going to fix that social problem with a few tweaks to protocol, while still maintaining the freedom of the Internet, which you value. In the meantime, everyone is quite literally paying the price of spam, and it's measured in billions of lost time and wasted bandwidth, not to mention the general reduction in quality of life.
Spoken like someone who's never been on the wrong side of it. Not all defamation is trivial. Rightly or wrongly, this is a crime that can destroy lives, and almost by definition the victims of it are usually innocent.
Freedom of communication is not an absolute right, and never has been. Nor should it be a right at all, unless it comes with the corresponding responsibility. If someone won't accept responsibility for what they say, given reasonable safeguards such as due process, then I don't have a problem with restricting their right to say it.
Again, spoken like someone who has never been on the wrong side of it, and who has no appreciation for the damage that can be done.
Not everyone is as smart or Internet-savvy as the average person in this Slashdot discussion. While I am all for personal responsibility and teaching people to look after themselves, I am also a pragmatist, and I recognise that no-one is an expert in everything and sometimes it is appropriate for governments to step in to protect their people from abusive minorities.
For all your principled support of Internet freedom, things are rarely so black and white in the real world. This freedom of communication you defend so passionately comes at the cost of everyone's moral and legal rights to hold others accountable for damage they do, and thousands of people every year are paying some pretty steep prices as a result.
We should always defend basic human rights and freedoms against abuse, and we should never give them up lightly. But we should also recognise that sometimes different rights of different people come into conflict, it is impossible to fully respect all the rights of both parties in these cases, and we must choose which we value more highly. These decisions are never easy (c.f. arguments for greater government powers in the name of security during the ongoing terrorism saga) and never as one-sided as you make out.
Please spare us your random, unsupported UN-bashing. Right now, under US leadership, (a) the censorship is widespread (as TFA demonstrates), and (b) the US-based authorities have demonstrated a willingness to impose their own values on others (the .xxx domain to give one obvious example). How exactly could having the Internet under UN control be worse on either count?
Fair enough. However, in that case, I can't help noting that most things run "by the people" do have some degree of order associated with them, in the form of governments and legal systems. At least in principle, these represent the interests of the people as a whole; being run for the people does not imply anarchy.
Right now, it is precisely the lawless nature of the Internet (in that it is unreasonably difficult to enforce accepted laws there, even when pretty much everyone agrees they are reasonable laws) that leads to problems like spam, defamation, phishing expeditions, and all the other bad stuff that I'm sure everyone except those benefiting personally could happily live without.
My argument in discussions like this has often been that trying to protect the Internet in its current state is not the best way forward, because its current state is broken in some fundamental ways, and support from more traditional government and laws will help to combat some of that abuse. What we should be doing, IMHO, is campaigning for principles like freedom of information and due process to be considered as relevant for everyone on the Internet as they are in many countries already, so that whatever common system of regulation and government ultimately does come out of it, the fundamental principles are fair and reasonable.
There is no question in my mind that a completely open system like the Internet will come to be more regulated, whether everyone likes it or not, for the same reasons that societies have developed laws to preserve order. What concerns me is that along with that regulation should come the same protection of individual rights and freedoms that free societies have also developed to avoid their laws becoming too restrictive.
It's ironic that you wrote this just as I was writing the post below it about how some people's illusions are about to be shattered.
Please stop and think about this. Who owns the vast amounts of hardware infrastructure that have been created to support it? Who defines the standards and protocols on which it is based? How does an individual gain access to the Internet? If the Internet really belongs to the people, why do governments and commercial organisations dominate the answer to every one of those basic questions?
To varying degrees, yes. I think the main news here is that some people's illusions are about to be shattered, because for some reason they thought this couldn't happen on the Internet.
I can't count how many debates I've had on Slashdot, where the other guy relied on something like Internet anonymity or hosting dubiously ethical content offshore to back up an argument. Sometimes the reasons were legitimate, and I was arguing that they should be more afraid of government or big corporate intervention making things worse. Sometimes it was more the other way around, as they flippantly argued that their "right" to defame someone anonymously (or to copy music illegally, or...) could not be stopped, as if the Internet is some all-powerful weapon of the people against oppressive governments everywhere.
IMHO, it would be better for all concerned if the reality was clearer, and I think this sort of eye-catching statistic makes it very clear indeed that the Internet isn't some brave new world, and for better or worse it will always have risks and opportunities similar to those of any other communications medium. We should regulate (or not), legislate (or not), standardise (or not) and seek international co-operation (or not) accordingly.
Thanks, that explains a lot. The other day, while editing a large graphics file on a machine with relatively modest RAM fitted, the system was grinding to a halt. That seemed odd, because I had worked out that the RAM should be sufficient to handle the image. It turned out that a copy of Firefox 2 was sitting in the background, with no pages currently loaded, but still with a working set of nearly 100MB of RAM. Why WinXP couldn't just page almost the whole thing out to disk and instead went into a swapping frenzy when I loaded the graphic, I have no idea. :-(
Which would make perfect sense, except that the person running the C++ compiler probably wrote the C++ code they're putting through it, or at least has direct access to it so if something doesn't work they can fix it. For how many of the web pages you visit regularly did you write the HTML and CSS?
Following the established user interface principle that when things go wrong, you don't make it the user's fault.
Where "crap" presumably means a hugely popular service used regularly by a bazillion people?
Technical details and web standards and browser workarounds and so on are just means to an end. That end is getting web sites that people want to use onto their computers so they can use them. The means matter exactly up to the point that they help to do this, and no further.
In a moment I'll talk about my views on rewriting large code bases, but first I'll say that I'm glad I wasn't the only one who was with the GP poster up until the SML advocacy, and then disagreed. Even given the neat way that functional languages tend to model parsing problems, web browsers do a lot more than parse HTML and CSS files. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that this is the easiest problem they solve. Systematically resolving the layout rules in arbitrarily complex cases is a somewhat difficult problem, given the way those rules are expressed in CSS. And of course, web pages are no longer the static things they used to be: today's browsers need to cope with scripts moving the goalposts arbitrarily, maintaining the integrity of the display as much as possible during lengthy downloads of large pages or after AJAXified updates, etc. etc. It's far from clear that a language like SML offers better support for these naturally concurrent operations than the many alternatives.
I do disagree with the parent post on one fundamental point, though:
I'll see your reuse dogma, and raise you my "plan to throw one away" dogma. :-)
Actually, I don't cite this as some sort of dogmatic adherence to ConceptsTryingToSoundMoreCleverThanTheyAre at all. Rather, I happen to agree with the principle based on practical experience. In general, software design is difficult, and few people are good at it. Even those who are rarely have the good fortune to know exactly what their design will be called upon to do a few years later, and will inevitably allow more flexibility (and commensurate overhead) in some places than is really needed, while making some things unnecessarily strict and thus making later changes more difficult than they might have been.
It's been my experience that in long-term projects, far too many managers aren't willing to throw out a whole module, subsystem, or even product, because of popular wisdom that anything they replace it with will just have bugs of its own. I believe this is a mistake because, again speaking only from my own experience, a high proportion of bugs originate in special or boundary cases. According to my reasoning above, a new project built from scratch with no prior experience will rarely get an overall design that automatically avoids these completely. Discipline is rarely good enough on software projects to allow for this and ensure that new requirements are integrated into a clean overall design rather than bolted on; indeed, in a commercial environment, this may not be realistic given short term deadlines and the typical management and marketing pressures. However, over time, such bolted-on special cases will tend to build up. They start to interact, they don't always get properly documented, and new people on the project team either don't know about them or at best don't know all the original reasoning behind them, making safe maintenance difficult.
Sometimes, this problem is manageable, particularly if your project leadership consistently take a long-term view and give maintenance and testing the priority they deserve. But usually, IME, the problem reaches a certain critical mass where the costs of ongoing development of a code base full of dubiously documented special cases outweigh the costs of stopping to clean things up.
As an additional, very practical concern, tools and programming techniques are always developing. Over the sort of timescales we're talking about here, it's entirely possible that more effective tools will have been created, or more effective techniques discovered, that could solve the underlying problem much more effectively in a different way.
Thus, s