You raise some interesting general points, though I'm not sure I agree fully with all of them. In any case, I think we're talking at cross-purposes here: when I described the viewers in terms of software running on computers, I mean this quite literally, not as a metaphor for people who are trained not to think. Such viewers would never go through the same sort of filtering process themselves, and don't know anything about statutes of limitations. All they know is how to do what the programmer told them to do, and we all know how well that approach works for building reliable, effective software, don't we?
Privacy is a much bigger issue than computing. [...] Instead of trying to come up with some half-assed way to protect privacy by saying "people should forget stuff" we need to actually say "people have a right to privacy that must be protected."
Oh, I couldn't agree more. Please see my up-modded comments in thread called "Unrealistic" a bit further down this discussion, and indeed many posts I've previously made to other discussions here.
However, I think it's fair to say that in the very recent past, the rules have changed. We used to live in a world where infringing on people's privacy was discourteous and unpleasant, but relatively harmless otherwise. With today's technology, we now have the ability to store much greater quantities of data on individuals, and to process data from diverse sources to build an overall picture automatically and in near real-time.
It's the difference between someone in the street seeing me walk into a shop, because they happened to be in the same public place as me; and computers systematically tracking every store I visit on my entire shopping trip via CCTV and automatic facial recognition, looking up the corresponding credit card transactions to work out what I bought, checking with vehicle licensing to find my car's number plate, checking their ANPR systems to identify where I parked, and then having my vehicle impounded and my bank account sealed immediately, all because an automated system decided that there was a 0.7% chance that the collection of things I'd bought that day could be used in terrorist activities in combination with the things bought by someone else who was also out shopping that afternoon and lives within a half-mile of my home.
It is ridiculous to make critical decisions based on that kind of information. Unfortunately, what is critical to you or me is just acceptable losses to a bank, prospective employer, etc. As long as the decision is right enough of the time that the cost savings from using the automated system outweigh the losses caused by its mistakes, it is commercially viable to run them, and they will choose to do so unless legislation is put in place to protect the unfortunate people whose card gets marked incorrectly by the system.
Forgive, but don't forget. Remember where you came from, and what you overcame.
An excellent post, with just one small flaw: all too soon, the viewers that are mining this information to decide whether to give you a mortgage, offer you a job, or revoke your medical insurance are going to be emotionless software running on cold, calculating machines. They do not forget, and they do not understand forgiveness.
They probably do, however, believe that because of those girls you slept with, you are statistically at increased risk of picking up an STD, and therefore your medical insurance bill will always be higher.
Oh, and that because you cheat at games, your personality is not compatible with taking that high-paying senior job at the bank. (What do you mean you were only 11? Nothing in here says to consider any indicator of age! But you do get extra demerits for defaulting on that debt, regardless of whether you were paying someone's emergency medical bills instead.)
So at the very least, for your approach to work, there would have to be a legal safeguard on any decision ever made by a data-mining program about anything, so that anyone affected by it (knowingly or otherwise) could require a real human to look at the real circumstances in full context and review the decision. Interestingly, this is theoretically the case in my country for automated credit-checking by financial organisations already, because of the many mistakes that were made earlier on. Of course, this relies on the fact that you know you have been harmed by such a decision, which might be obvious if you know that you've just applied for a loan, but which in general won't be.
So in terms of a personal philosophy, I can respect your post, very much. But as a practical philosophy in a world ruled by computers and big business, I think it is a very, very dangerous thing. People can forgive (and perhaps we should learn to do it more often) but machines do not.
I'm not sure I see where the connection is between privacy laws and social websites. Social websites contain material that is voluntarily posted by members, not material that is forced to be posted against one's will.
I'm not sure that's always true.
For example, I was talked into signing up for Facebook a while ago, when various friends starting using it to host their photo albums and logging in was required to see them. Over the next few weeks, I was bombarded with notifications: a friend has indicated that they know me, and how; another friend has identified me in 17 photographs; I have been labelled as holding this position in that organisation and went to some other place for a while.
Within a very short space of time, I decided that Facebook's entire modus operandi is based on getting friends to spy on each other. Despite the fact that I gave them nothing but the bare minimum data required to get an account (name, place of study, e-mail address), they now know what I look like, many of my hobbies, many people who know me and who we know in common, where I live, much of my academic history, and more. And I gave them none of this; it was all freely volunteered by my friends, probably without a second thought.
I deactivated my account on Facebook. In fact, after that incident, I decided that my paranoia really wasn't a side-effect of the high concentration of tin foil in my kitchen, and was justified. I deactivated all my accounts on social networking sites where I could easily be identified.
The only web site that remains is actually Slashdot, where I post using this alias but someone who really wanted to could probably data mine my 6,000 or so posts and get a fair idea of who I am. I also post to Usenet, using my real name, but mostly on technical forums and always with an awareness that what I'm writing may be archived without my consent. Even there, I no longer use my surname or give obvious personal information like a verifiable e-mail address these days.
I think it is sad that things have come to this. I did find the social networking sites useful for keeping up with friends when we couldn't meet in real life for a while. However, knowing that (for example) Facebook still allows everyone to record information about me even though my account is now deactivated (and I therefore can't untag photos and so on), I do not regret my decision to reduce my on-line footprint dramatically.
I would prefer to be able to force these web sites to remove all personally identifiable information about me since we no longer have a relationship. This is where privacy laws here in the UK are hopeless, IMNSHO. As it stands today, I suspect that their terms of use protect them because I did consent to having an account, even though others supplied almost all of the personal information about me without my consent.
But even without such long-term safeguards, I'm glad I got clear before too much potentially damaging information about me was out there for all to see. I've been on the wrong side of a case of mistaken identity, and it is not fun.
I'm all for personal responsibility, but this isn't as simple as standing by what you once said.
For one thing, no-one is perfect. If I took offence every time one of my friends said or did something a little childish or hurtful to another of my friends, I would have few friends left, yet I know that all of my friends are basically nice, decent people, who on balance I am glad I met. Magnify this up to the whole world stage, and suddenly the whole world is an a**hole.
Secondly, people's views change for many reasons, not all of them bad, and society as a whole is not good at recognising this. Just look at what happens to politicians today who change their position on an issue. "U-turn! U-turn!" As I've pointed out before, even in politics it is silly to think that our elected representatives have the time to fully study each issue on which they vote in the same detail as an expert, or to retain a staff of suitably smart and qualified people who can at least advise them well. Wouldn't you rather be represented by someone who would change their mind if they realised their previous position was short-sighted or ill-informed, rather than one forced by the system to stick to their guns even if they knew they had made a mistake?
I've commented on this subject before on Slashdot, in the context of social networking sites. I think humanity needs to learn that in a highly-connected world, you have to be careful what you say, you have to be wary of reading too much into what others say, and most important of all, you have to cut people a little slack sometimes. Right now, IMHO, our laws don't place nearly enough value on privacy, and I think this is a painful lesson that we are going to learn as an entire generation who grew up with the likes of Facebook, Myspace and LiveJournal run into problems for the next few decades.
Bottom line: kids will be kids, adults will behave like kids sometimes, even the most mature and responsible adult makes mistakes, and all of this is only human. I, for one, would prefer not to live in a world where everyone's dirty laundry was aired in public, with full search features.
While not realtime data with Google Earth at least you can get the latitude and longitude of those spots. That Air base like most the rest of the US has no real anti-aircraft defense systems it would be very easy to target those planes.
Really? What are you going to do, poke the screen with voodoo needles? I rather doubt that anyone with the will to "target those planes" has access to a handy air force.
I am not saying that I like the idea but to dismiss it seems less than honest. This is not a black and white issue.
Granted, that's true, and there is some degree of risk in this. There is also some degree of risk in advertising the exact location of a shopping centre or railway station, where many civilian targets could be hit at once and they are far less capable of defending themselves from anything relevant to this discussion, but we don't hide those, do we?
So while I'll agree that the situation is not entirely black and white, I think it's nearer 99% grey than 50%.:-)
A government can never make its country 100% physically secure in the real world. There are too many "key" targets in civilian infrastructure: transport systems; utility supplies (electricity, water, gas, etc.); government facilities; emergency services; the list goes on. You can't protect them all, because the number of people involved in security would then become so great that vetting them all sensibly would be impossible in practice.
For the same reason, no government surveillance culture will ever be 100% effective. You could monitor every communication in every medium around the world, and employ state-of-the-art software to filter it, and you still wouldn't have enough suitably smart and trustworthy people to analyse it all in real time.
The whole idea that central government can somehow "prevent terrorism" in some magic, blanket way is an illusion, and always has been. The idea that civilian infrastructure does not need to be conscious of its own security is an illusion, and always has been. If showing someone what a couple of rooftops look like at your nuclear power station is really enough to pose a serious threat, you might as well paint an X on the relevant spot and label it "bomb here", since you're obviously an easy target anyway.
Once upon a time, it was considered acceptable that some information was unavailable to the public.
Once upon a time, it was considered that governments would use official secrets only to protect genuinely sensitive information.
That time has passed. Western governments have been caught with their pants down, repeatedly, abusing their privilege of withholding information from the public for political reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with safeguarding the security of the nation and its people.
The general public has basically no need for this sort of information, but a hypothetical attacker does.
Perhaps, but (a) you were talking about detailed information relating to critical infrastructure, which is pretty close to being a straw man in a discussion about satellite imagery that clearly has many potential uses for the average person and probably doesn't show more than three big buildings in an L-shape, and (b) this question is really a matter of principle and not of specifics: should the presumption be that information must be released to the people by the people's government, or that the government may withhold information at will from the people?
My views on this one are pretty clear now: no political administration should be allowed to keep any information away from the public, without a clear national security reason for doing so, as determined by an impartial official observer not directly connected with or accountable to the administration of the day.
If you don't understand why the balance of power must be this way to protect the people, take a look at my sig, and then read a good book on 20th century history with that in mind.
People who didn't pay that lower price for the product they didn't want aren't customers, at least not for that product. They might be (or become) customers who buys the other product, but the two things need not be related.
They gave us something we didn't want in the first place, and now they're using the taking away of it to justify a higher price? WTF?
They're giving you something you do want at a (higher) price they think it's worth. The lower price you never paid for something you didn't want is irrelevant.
If standing up for French companies and citizens by supporting their software freedom is not important, I'm not sure what is.
I really hope that's not true.
Your computer is your press, your store of important information and your telcom all rolled into one. No modern state can live without them and their security and ownership are tantamount to independence. Does he want CIA planted backdoors in his office?
Your sensationalist comments, and others like TFA itself, are exactly why free software isn't taken seriously by a lot of government figures.
Sarkozy's position is cautious and conservative, but I don't see how you can argue with his position that it is not the state's job to tell people how to use their computers. I would much rather have a government in favour of the people being able to make their own decisions about computing platforms than one that mandated anything, whether it be Microsoft Windows, Ubuntu Feisty, or whatever other pet OS some adviser loves today.
Your analogy is perhaps unfortunate, considering that judo isn't so much about using your opponent's strength against him (in the sense that, say, aikido is) but rather about using your own strength efficiently.
I'd respectfully suggest that next time you just state your (entirely valid) point about the GPL resting on copyright without the awkward MA analogy.:-)
The solution to "no games" on Linux is for developers to write good open source games that run on Linux. There are a number of good ones out there in some genres: real-time-strategy fans should try globulation and my favorite game in any genre is Battle for Wesnoth (turn-based strategy). I think that BfW really pushes the edge regarding what open source can effectively accomplish but in the end it shows that many of the limits we thought were there are not.
In an unfortunate way, you support the cynic's argument with your example. I downloaded Battle for Wesnoth (for Windows, ironically) and played it for a while, but it simply didn't hold my attention after the first few scenarios. The gameplay became repetitive. I can forgive a game having dated graphics and a limited soundtrack if the gameplay is better than the alternatives, but that (IMHO) just isn't the case here.
For contrast, the two game families I have most replayed on my PC are Total Annihilation and the Baldur's Gate trilogy. Both have graphics and game mechanics that are better than Battle for Wesnoth, despite being relatively old games now. (Obviously there is no comparison in the graphics department between these and more recent titles like Supreme Commander and Neverwinter Nights). More importantly, there is a certain scale and complexity defined by titles like TA and BG, and that brings replay value.
By the simple mechanism of adding new units and maps in TA, the replay value is dramatically increased. Notice that those additions don't just change the graphics; they can fundamentally alter the balance of the game and therefore the strategies needed to win.
BG's adaptability comes from a somewhat similar trick. Here they provide many more NPCs than can join a party at once, each with their own remarkably detailed characterisation: personal and often non-trivial subplots, interactions with other NPCs in the party, etc. Thus even though the main story arc is always the same, the majority of the story if you follow up the side plots is different. For each new game, you can also use very different tactics depending on your party make-up: strong individually (paladins, ubermages, etc.) vs. balance and flexibility across the party as a whole (multi-class characters, buffing, bards, etc.), combat-heavy vs. magic-heavy vs. stealth and cunning, good vs. evil philosophies, large party vs. small party vs. solo, and so on.
What these things all have in common is a kind of depth and flexibility that just doesn't come with a relatively simple strategy game like Wesnoth. It takes a lot of work to craft a storyline of the calibre of the BG series, from great overall direction and plot design right down to strong voice actors for the NPCs. (Granted, few commercial games really get this right either, but I've never seen a freebie that does.) It takes a lot of work to design the variety of units, maps, even whole factions in a RTS that allows for varied strategies yet still keeps the game balanced. Again, while a few stand-out commercial RTS games have done it (and many more have failed), I've never seen a freebie example in the same league.
Of course, whether any of this really matters is a moot point. Most people who want the latest and greatest action games buy consoles anyway these days. (Consoles are around 80% of the gaming market today.) Linux can certainly provide good versions of classic puzzle games, which I suspect tend to appeal more to the Linux-using market anyway. And of course, Linux can still support many Windows games well enough via emulation to make them playable.
So although I basically agree with you about the problems faced by Linux in getting a serious game development culture up and running, and what the solution would be, I'm not sure it really matters all that much anyway.
Sorry, but I can't agree with your reasoning. To explain, let met set out a few realities of software development, as I've personally come to see them after some years as a developer:
Code reuse is mostly a myth. One significant exception is libraries/components — code specifically designed to be modular, generic, self-contained and open to reuse, and typically on a relatively large scale. Apart from that, it is much more common to reuse design concepts, interface standards and the like, rather than code itself. Reuse of isolated code fragments from one project in another is very rare.
Choice is not always a good thing. The simplest reason for this is that if you only need one product to do a job, then at the time you're doing that particular job, having one good product available is worth more than a choice among multiple inferior products. And of course, if you have finite development resources, they can get more done in combination than in competition, other things being equal.
The first attempt at a complex project never gets everything right. It might be a good design, but it won't be the best. It won't anticipate future changes to the ideal degree for optimal development over the lifetime of the project. In general, the decisions won't be as good as they would with hindsight. Prototyping work often gives a very high return on investment. However, development processes that emphasise working only to current requirements with limited or no future planning do not scale to larger projects and tend to collapse under their own weight after a while.
Now, these are obviously blanket statements, and no doubt there are valid exceptions to each rule. Indeed, the rules themselves seem almost contradictory, though I think that is just an illusion: what they really tell us is that balance is required, both in the degree of concentration of effort vs. parallel development, and in the degree of future planning and generality vs. the efficiency of developing what will actually be used in the end.
Now, take a look again at the argument you gave in the parent post.
If you have 100 different ideas for ways to solve a problem, then go ahead and develop 100 different solutions to see which work best. But in reality, do you really, or are there only really a relatively small number of solutions, but many implementations of each with few real differences?
OK, let's assume there really were 100 unique approaches, and that in practice 5 of them turn out to work best. Did the other 95 learn something developing their failed alternatives? Perhaps, but they might have learned something helping to develop the successful alternatives as well. After all, if so few of the ideas really worked out, would it not be better to study those and the ideas and techniques of the people behind them?
You also suggested that the 95 would have given something back to the community. But would what they gave back have much value? Again, it seems unlikely that if 5 different solutions were all viable, the other 95 would really offer many further ideas in terms of high level design or general approach. And again, if they did, perhaps those same good ideas could have made the better solutions even better still if the development teams had compared notes earlier, giving a best-of-both result. The 95 might also have some neat implementation tricks, but as I suggested above, in reality it seems very rare for one project to borrow code from another in this way unless the code in question was specifically developed as a self-contained library, in which case it's not really specific to one of the 95 failed attempts anyway.
It's not hard to see that a small number of ideas, perhaps 2, perhaps 5, might offer genuine pros and cons, and with a concentration of development effort they might be able to learn from each other's experience and systematically share code for common functionality so that all benefit. But really, I don't see this happening at a micro level. It has to be mac
No, sorry, it's all about humanity. In particular, it's about a government doing what is right for its own people.
For the record, I generally agree with the principle of intellectual property as a practical approach. It's not the only principle I might agree with, and I don't like some of the current implementation details in some places, but on balance I think copyright, patents and the like serve their intended purpose more often than not.
However, they are artificial monopolies, and monopoly holders are not subject to the usual economic competition in a capitalist market. It is therefore necessary for governments to regulate them, on behalf of the people, if those monopolies are abused. This is true of everything from energy and transport providers (where regulation is the norm in many countries where the services are not state-owned anyway) to copyright holders (where copyright is usually not absolute, and there are typically exemptions for fair use, fair dealing or whatever your jurisdiction calls it). The most common examples of such abuse are probably using a monopoly in one industry to force an artificial commercial advantage in an unrelated industry, and charging disproportionate prices.
The argument holds just as true for medicines. If the government of Brazil has made a good faith effort to negotiate a realistic price for the drug on behalf of its people, and Merck have refused to co-operate, then the government of Brazil is absolutely within both its moral and its legal rights to overrule Merck's patent in the interests of its people. No-one died and left either US IP law or US corporations in charge of the rest of the world, much as the collective arrogance of US big business would like that to be so.
Your argument about prevention of new inventions would have a lot of truth to it if this was a case of someone spending the money up-front on R&D, asking only a fair price for the results, and others refusing to pay. But I'm betting that's not the case here, and the price being demanded was in fact vastly greater than the proportionate costs incurred during R&D. If you read TFA and compare what Merck were demanding from Brazil with what they accepted from Thailand, you'll see what I mean. In other words, your point about companies not being able to make money from their inventions simply isn't true; they just aren't being allowed to make arbitrarily large amounts of money, at the expense of human lives. I'm sorry if you have a problem with that, but I really don't think most of us do.
Personally, I wouldn't burn the CDs either. For one thing, I think the basic premise of copyright is a reasonable, practical idea and I don't consider ripping the fruits of others' labours without compensation to have any sort of moral or ethical basis. For another, even if it were a "minor" crime in isolation, committing it under those circumstances would not just be breaking the law, but doing so for personal profit (if it's part of the job for which I am being paid), which as far as I'm concerned makes it not minor at all.
I think you're confusing me with another poster on some of your comment, BTW.
I did say "even if" it means quitting on the spot. That may well be the outcome, when Mr Executive says "Well, either you follow our instructions or we let you go."
I don't know US law but in the UK, that would be clear cut unfair dismissal and they could be severely punished by the courts.
US employment law is completely different to that in the UK. In particular, IIRC most US states are still "at will" states, where either party may terminate an employment contract without notice, and for any reason not explicitly prohibited (e.g., by anti-discrimination legislation).
I suggest you document everything, off site and get your CV circulated immediately.
That's the only sensible course of action here, but I would add: do NOT do something illegal on behalf of your employer, ever, even if means quitting on the spot. No job is worth the hit you will personally take when it comes out. "I was just following orders" doesn't cut much ice with the military when lives are on the line, and will cut absolutely none if you knowingly broke the law just to make money for your employer. The fact that you documented knowingly breaking the law is going to be worth nothing in court, either.
It is my hope that websites like this will encourage quality teaching and improvement in teacher training/practice
IMHO, the problem with that ideal is that, like the novices who review beginners' books on Amazon just after reading them, the critics are fundamentally unqualified to offer informed criticism. What you get is someone's subjective perception of the teacher's presentation, not an objective measure of the quality of material taught and how effectively the teacher helped the student to learn it.
When I was at school, I remember thinking some of the lessons were a complete waste of time. Ten years older and a little wiser, I had realised that some of this was my own failure to pay attention and learn what I could. Twenty years later and hopefully a little wiser still, and some of the things I learned that I thought completely pointless or poorly taught at the time have been very valuable to me, and I realised that it was my arrogance and inexperience that prevented me learning more, not the deficiencies of the teachers.
Students simply aren't qualified to review teachers objectively, and pretending otherwise is just delusion. When those students are children, this goes doubly, because children by their nature have not yet developed the ability to form balanced judgements and appreciate the narrowness of their own perspective. This is why in my country, the authorities rely on experienced professionals (many of them formerly successful teachers themselves) to assess teachers and schools, and not gossip written by kids on web sites.
The problem is, in practice, its weight is much greater than that.
I had this debate once before, in a slightly different context where a jealous ex was posting doctored e-mails from when we'd been going out on forums read by mutual friends. I happened to mention this anecdotally on Slashdot, during a discussion about freedom of speech. I was told a variety of unconstructive things, most of which boiled down either to accusations that it must all have been my fault or she wouldn't have done it; or to claims that it was just words, trying to get the (untrue, hurtful) posts removed was censorship, and I should get over it.
Well, in the way of these things, I did get over it in time. There was relatively little lasting damage in that case. But now, come back to the case under discussion here. The underlying problem is the same: on the Internet, everyone can be a publisher to a wide audience, almost instantly, and effectively without having to accept any responsibility for what is said. Sometimes you can post anonymously. Even when you don't, and what you say is genuinely damaging, it's rarely enough to make a court case for defamation worthwhile. You can simply get away with hurtful behaviour, under the pretense of free speech.
So, newsflash for the younger generation: with freedom comes responsibility. I will respect your freedom of speech, as long as you accept responsibility for what you say, and that there may be consequences for you if what you say is unfairly damaging to others. If you will not accept that responsibility, then I have no problem whatsoever with arbitrarily restricting your freedom of speech.
In this case, those of us with friends and family in the profession can immediately tell you the consequences of web sites like this. They result in a few outstanding teachers being recognised for the gifts that they truly are. They result in a few truly poor teachers being recognised for the liabilities that they are. And they result in a lot of competent teachers, doing a very difficult job for relatively little money, being bad-mouthed by so many brats who think they know better that they start leaving the profession, to take on less demanding, better paid jobs that bring far less benefit to society.
The bottom line is that after a while, even if you're a pretty decent teacher, the negative comments start to hurt. Even if you're pretty sure that they aren't really true, doubts creep in. You find yourself second-guessing whether you've made big mistakes, failed to do the right thing, let someone down. That leads you to steering the safe course, not the right one, when you're working with the kids in your classes. And that, ultimately, degrades the quality of the kids' education and makes things worse for everyone. Whether you recognise that before or after you wind up leaving for less stressful work doesn't really matter: the end result is still that the teaching world loses a valuable asset, and a good person is left feeling bad.
So, next time you're making a principled argument for free speech that doesn't mention the word "responsibility", or shouting "sticks and stones" from the cheap seats, please stop and consider whether the entirely one-sided approach you are advocating really represents the kind of world you want to live in when taken to its logical conclusion.
So given the usual flippant editorial comment here:
How long before the magic 16-hex-pairs number shows up in a comment here?
and the predictable result in terms of 90% of early comments to this thread, exactly how safe is Slashdot under the various safe harbour-style protections of relevant US law?
Slashdot Mirror
You raise some interesting general points, though I'm not sure I agree fully with all of them. In any case, I think we're talking at cross-purposes here: when I described the viewers in terms of software running on computers, I mean this quite literally, not as a metaphor for people who are trained not to think. Such viewers would never go through the same sort of filtering process themselves, and don't know anything about statutes of limitations. All they know is how to do what the programmer told them to do, and we all know how well that approach works for building reliable, effective software, don't we?
Oh, I couldn't agree more. Please see my up-modded comments in thread called "Unrealistic" a bit further down this discussion, and indeed many posts I've previously made to other discussions here.
However, I think it's fair to say that in the very recent past, the rules have changed. We used to live in a world where infringing on people's privacy was discourteous and unpleasant, but relatively harmless otherwise. With today's technology, we now have the ability to store much greater quantities of data on individuals, and to process data from diverse sources to build an overall picture automatically and in near real-time.
It's the difference between someone in the street seeing me walk into a shop, because they happened to be in the same public place as me; and computers systematically tracking every store I visit on my entire shopping trip via CCTV and automatic facial recognition, looking up the corresponding credit card transactions to work out what I bought, checking with vehicle licensing to find my car's number plate, checking their ANPR systems to identify where I parked, and then having my vehicle impounded and my bank account sealed immediately, all because an automated system decided that there was a 0.7% chance that the collection of things I'd bought that day could be used in terrorist activities in combination with the things bought by someone else who was also out shopping that afternoon and lives within a half-mile of my home.
It is ridiculous to make critical decisions based on that kind of information. Unfortunately, what is critical to you or me is just acceptable losses to a bank, prospective employer, etc. As long as the decision is right enough of the time that the cost savings from using the automated system outweigh the losses caused by its mistakes, it is commercially viable to run them, and they will choose to do so unless legislation is put in place to protect the unfortunate people whose card gets marked incorrectly by the system.
An excellent post, with just one small flaw: all too soon, the viewers that are mining this information to decide whether to give you a mortgage, offer you a job, or revoke your medical insurance are going to be emotionless software running on cold, calculating machines. They do not forget, and they do not understand forgiveness.
They probably do, however, believe that because of those girls you slept with, you are statistically at increased risk of picking up an STD, and therefore your medical insurance bill will always be higher.
Oh, and that because you cheat at games, your personality is not compatible with taking that high-paying senior job at the bank. (What do you mean you were only 11? Nothing in here says to consider any indicator of age! But you do get extra demerits for defaulting on that debt, regardless of whether you were paying someone's emergency medical bills instead.)
So at the very least, for your approach to work, there would have to be a legal safeguard on any decision ever made by a data-mining program about anything, so that anyone affected by it (knowingly or otherwise) could require a real human to look at the real circumstances in full context and review the decision. Interestingly, this is theoretically the case in my country for automated credit-checking by financial organisations already, because of the many mistakes that were made earlier on. Of course, this relies on the fact that you know you have been harmed by such a decision, which might be obvious if you know that you've just applied for a loan, but which in general won't be.
So in terms of a personal philosophy, I can respect your post, very much. But as a practical philosophy in a world ruled by computers and big business, I think it is a very, very dangerous thing. People can forgive (and perhaps we should learn to do it more often) but machines do not.
I'm not sure that's always true.
For example, I was talked into signing up for Facebook a while ago, when various friends starting using it to host their photo albums and logging in was required to see them. Over the next few weeks, I was bombarded with notifications: a friend has indicated that they know me, and how; another friend has identified me in 17 photographs; I have been labelled as holding this position in that organisation and went to some other place for a while.
Within a very short space of time, I decided that Facebook's entire modus operandi is based on getting friends to spy on each other. Despite the fact that I gave them nothing but the bare minimum data required to get an account (name, place of study, e-mail address), they now know what I look like, many of my hobbies, many people who know me and who we know in common, where I live, much of my academic history, and more. And I gave them none of this; it was all freely volunteered by my friends, probably without a second thought.
I deactivated my account on Facebook. In fact, after that incident, I decided that my paranoia really wasn't a side-effect of the high concentration of tin foil in my kitchen, and was justified. I deactivated all my accounts on social networking sites where I could easily be identified.
The only web site that remains is actually Slashdot, where I post using this alias but someone who really wanted to could probably data mine my 6,000 or so posts and get a fair idea of who I am. I also post to Usenet, using my real name, but mostly on technical forums and always with an awareness that what I'm writing may be archived without my consent. Even there, I no longer use my surname or give obvious personal information like a verifiable e-mail address these days.
I think it is sad that things have come to this. I did find the social networking sites useful for keeping up with friends when we couldn't meet in real life for a while. However, knowing that (for example) Facebook still allows everyone to record information about me even though my account is now deactivated (and I therefore can't untag photos and so on), I do not regret my decision to reduce my on-line footprint dramatically.
I would prefer to be able to force these web sites to remove all personally identifiable information about me since we no longer have a relationship. This is where privacy laws here in the UK are hopeless, IMNSHO. As it stands today, I suspect that their terms of use protect them because I did consent to having an account, even though others supplied almost all of the personal information about me without my consent.
But even without such long-term safeguards, I'm glad I got clear before too much potentially damaging information about me was out there for all to see. I've been on the wrong side of a case of mistaken identity, and it is not fun.
I'm all for personal responsibility, but this isn't as simple as standing by what you once said.
For one thing, no-one is perfect. If I took offence every time one of my friends said or did something a little childish or hurtful to another of my friends, I would have few friends left, yet I know that all of my friends are basically nice, decent people, who on balance I am glad I met. Magnify this up to the whole world stage, and suddenly the whole world is an a**hole.
Secondly, people's views change for many reasons, not all of them bad, and society as a whole is not good at recognising this. Just look at what happens to politicians today who change their position on an issue. "U-turn! U-turn!" As I've pointed out before, even in politics it is silly to think that our elected representatives have the time to fully study each issue on which they vote in the same detail as an expert, or to retain a staff of suitably smart and qualified people who can at least advise them well. Wouldn't you rather be represented by someone who would change their mind if they realised their previous position was short-sighted or ill-informed, rather than one forced by the system to stick to their guns even if they knew they had made a mistake?
I've commented on this subject before on Slashdot, in the context of social networking sites. I think humanity needs to learn that in a highly-connected world, you have to be careful what you say, you have to be wary of reading too much into what others say, and most important of all, you have to cut people a little slack sometimes. Right now, IMHO, our laws don't place nearly enough value on privacy, and I think this is a painful lesson that we are going to learn as an entire generation who grew up with the likes of Facebook, Myspace and LiveJournal run into problems for the next few decades.
Bottom line: kids will be kids, adults will behave like kids sometimes, even the most mature and responsible adult makes mistakes, and all of this is only human. I, for one, would prefer not to live in a world where everyone's dirty laundry was aired in public, with full search features.
Really? What are you going to do, poke the screen with voodoo needles? I rather doubt that anyone with the will to "target those planes" has access to a handy air force.
Granted, that's true, and there is some degree of risk in this. There is also some degree of risk in advertising the exact location of a shopping centre or railway station, where many civilian targets could be hit at once and they are far less capable of defending themselves from anything relevant to this discussion, but we don't hide those, do we?
So while I'll agree that the situation is not entirely black and white, I think it's nearer 99% grey than 50%. :-)
Don't laugh, but as of today... The UK has a "Ministry of Justice".
A government can never make its country 100% physically secure in the real world. There are too many "key" targets in civilian infrastructure: transport systems; utility supplies (electricity, water, gas, etc.); government facilities; emergency services; the list goes on. You can't protect them all, because the number of people involved in security would then become so great that vetting them all sensibly would be impossible in practice.
For the same reason, no government surveillance culture will ever be 100% effective. You could monitor every communication in every medium around the world, and employ state-of-the-art software to filter it, and you still wouldn't have enough suitably smart and trustworthy people to analyse it all in real time.
The whole idea that central government can somehow "prevent terrorism" in some magic, blanket way is an illusion, and always has been. The idea that civilian infrastructure does not need to be conscious of its own security is an illusion, and always has been. If showing someone what a couple of rooftops look like at your nuclear power station is really enough to pose a serious threat, you might as well paint an X on the relevant spot and label it "bomb here", since you're obviously an easy target anyway.
Once upon a time, it was considered that governments would use official secrets only to protect genuinely sensitive information.
That time has passed. Western governments have been caught with their pants down, repeatedly, abusing their privilege of withholding information from the public for political reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with safeguarding the security of the nation and its people.
Perhaps, but (a) you were talking about detailed information relating to critical infrastructure, which is pretty close to being a straw man in a discussion about satellite imagery that clearly has many potential uses for the average person and probably doesn't show more than three big buildings in an L-shape, and (b) this question is really a matter of principle and not of specifics: should the presumption be that information must be released to the people by the people's government, or that the government may withhold information at will from the people?
My views on this one are pretty clear now: no political administration should be allowed to keep any information away from the public, without a clear national security reason for doing so, as determined by an impartial official observer not directly connected with or accountable to the administration of the day.
If you don't understand why the balance of power must be this way to protect the people, take a look at my sig, and then read a good book on 20th century history with that in mind.
People who didn't pay that lower price for the product they didn't want aren't customers, at least not for that product. They might be (or become) customers who buys the other product, but the two things need not be related.
They're giving you something you do want at a (higher) price they think it's worth. The lower price you never paid for something you didn't want is irrelevant.
I really hope that's not true.
Your sensationalist comments, and others like TFA itself, are exactly why free software isn't taken seriously by a lot of government figures.
Sarkozy's position is cautious and conservative, but I don't see how you can argue with his position that it is not the state's job to tell people how to use their computers. I would much rather have a government in favour of the people being able to make their own decisions about computing platforms than one that mandated anything, whether it be Microsoft Windows, Ubuntu Feisty, or whatever other pet OS some adviser loves today.
Your analogy is perhaps unfortunate, considering that judo isn't so much about using your opponent's strength against him (in the sense that, say, aikido is) but rather about using your own strength efficiently.
I'd respectfully suggest that next time you just state your (entirely valid) point about the GPL resting on copyright without the awkward MA analogy. :-)
In an unfortunate way, you support the cynic's argument with your example. I downloaded Battle for Wesnoth (for Windows, ironically) and played it for a while, but it simply didn't hold my attention after the first few scenarios. The gameplay became repetitive. I can forgive a game having dated graphics and a limited soundtrack if the gameplay is better than the alternatives, but that (IMHO) just isn't the case here.
For contrast, the two game families I have most replayed on my PC are Total Annihilation and the Baldur's Gate trilogy. Both have graphics and game mechanics that are better than Battle for Wesnoth, despite being relatively old games now. (Obviously there is no comparison in the graphics department between these and more recent titles like Supreme Commander and Neverwinter Nights). More importantly, there is a certain scale and complexity defined by titles like TA and BG, and that brings replay value.
By the simple mechanism of adding new units and maps in TA, the replay value is dramatically increased. Notice that those additions don't just change the graphics; they can fundamentally alter the balance of the game and therefore the strategies needed to win.
BG's adaptability comes from a somewhat similar trick. Here they provide many more NPCs than can join a party at once, each with their own remarkably detailed characterisation: personal and often non-trivial subplots, interactions with other NPCs in the party, etc. Thus even though the main story arc is always the same, the majority of the story if you follow up the side plots is different. For each new game, you can also use very different tactics depending on your party make-up: strong individually (paladins, ubermages, etc.) vs. balance and flexibility across the party as a whole (multi-class characters, buffing, bards, etc.), combat-heavy vs. magic-heavy vs. stealth and cunning, good vs. evil philosophies, large party vs. small party vs. solo, and so on.
What these things all have in common is a kind of depth and flexibility that just doesn't come with a relatively simple strategy game like Wesnoth. It takes a lot of work to craft a storyline of the calibre of the BG series, from great overall direction and plot design right down to strong voice actors for the NPCs. (Granted, few commercial games really get this right either, but I've never seen a freebie that does.) It takes a lot of work to design the variety of units, maps, even whole factions in a RTS that allows for varied strategies yet still keeps the game balanced. Again, while a few stand-out commercial RTS games have done it (and many more have failed), I've never seen a freebie example in the same league.
Of course, whether any of this really matters is a moot point. Most people who want the latest and greatest action games buy consoles anyway these days. (Consoles are around 80% of the gaming market today.) Linux can certainly provide good versions of classic puzzle games, which I suspect tend to appeal more to the Linux-using market anyway. And of course, Linux can still support many Windows games well enough via emulation to make them playable.
So although I basically agree with you about the problems faced by Linux in getting a serious game development culture up and running, and what the solution would be, I'm not sure it really matters all that much anyway.
Sorry, but I can't agree with your reasoning. To explain, let met set out a few realities of software development, as I've personally come to see them after some years as a developer:
Now, these are obviously blanket statements, and no doubt there are valid exceptions to each rule. Indeed, the rules themselves seem almost contradictory, though I think that is just an illusion: what they really tell us is that balance is required, both in the degree of concentration of effort vs. parallel development, and in the degree of future planning and generality vs. the efficiency of developing what will actually be used in the end.
Now, take a look again at the argument you gave in the parent post.
If you have 100 different ideas for ways to solve a problem, then go ahead and develop 100 different solutions to see which work best. But in reality, do you really, or are there only really a relatively small number of solutions, but many implementations of each with few real differences?
OK, let's assume there really were 100 unique approaches, and that in practice 5 of them turn out to work best. Did the other 95 learn something developing their failed alternatives? Perhaps, but they might have learned something helping to develop the successful alternatives as well. After all, if so few of the ideas really worked out, would it not be better to study those and the ideas and techniques of the people behind them?
You also suggested that the 95 would have given something back to the community. But would what they gave back have much value? Again, it seems unlikely that if 5 different solutions were all viable, the other 95 would really offer many further ideas in terms of high level design or general approach. And again, if they did, perhaps those same good ideas could have made the better solutions even better still if the development teams had compared notes earlier, giving a best-of-both result. The 95 might also have some neat implementation tricks, but as I suggested above, in reality it seems very rare for one project to borrow code from another in this way unless the code in question was specifically developed as a self-contained library, in which case it's not really specific to one of the 95 failed attempts anyway.
It's not hard to see that a small number of ideas, perhaps 2, perhaps 5, might offer genuine pros and cons, and with a concentration of development effort they might be able to learn from each other's experience and systematically share code for common functionality so that all benefit. But really, I don't see this happening at a micro level. It has to be mac
I live in those islands. What was it about the two-party state that you thought applied here?
No, sorry, it's all about humanity. In particular, it's about a government doing what is right for its own people.
For the record, I generally agree with the principle of intellectual property as a practical approach. It's not the only principle I might agree with, and I don't like some of the current implementation details in some places, but on balance I think copyright, patents and the like serve their intended purpose more often than not.
However, they are artificial monopolies, and monopoly holders are not subject to the usual economic competition in a capitalist market. It is therefore necessary for governments to regulate them, on behalf of the people, if those monopolies are abused. This is true of everything from energy and transport providers (where regulation is the norm in many countries where the services are not state-owned anyway) to copyright holders (where copyright is usually not absolute, and there are typically exemptions for fair use, fair dealing or whatever your jurisdiction calls it). The most common examples of such abuse are probably using a monopoly in one industry to force an artificial commercial advantage in an unrelated industry, and charging disproportionate prices.
The argument holds just as true for medicines. If the government of Brazil has made a good faith effort to negotiate a realistic price for the drug on behalf of its people, and Merck have refused to co-operate, then the government of Brazil is absolutely within both its moral and its legal rights to overrule Merck's patent in the interests of its people. No-one died and left either US IP law or US corporations in charge of the rest of the world, much as the collective arrogance of US big business would like that to be so.
Your argument about prevention of new inventions would have a lot of truth to it if this was a case of someone spending the money up-front on R&D, asking only a fair price for the results, and others refusing to pay. But I'm betting that's not the case here, and the price being demanded was in fact vastly greater than the proportionate costs incurred during R&D. If you read TFA and compare what Merck were demanding from Brazil with what they accepted from Thailand, you'll see what I mean. In other words, your point about companies not being able to make money from their inventions simply isn't true; they just aren't being allowed to make arbitrarily large amounts of money, at the expense of human lives. I'm sorry if you have a problem with that, but I really don't think most of us do.
Personally, I wouldn't burn the CDs either. For one thing, I think the basic premise of copyright is a reasonable, practical idea and I don't consider ripping the fruits of others' labours without compensation to have any sort of moral or ethical basis. For another, even if it were a "minor" crime in isolation, committing it under those circumstances would not just be breaking the law, but doing so for personal profit (if it's part of the job for which I am being paid), which as far as I'm concerned makes it not minor at all.
I think you're confusing me with another poster on some of your comment, BTW.
I did say "even if" it means quitting on the spot. That may well be the outcome, when Mr Executive says "Well, either you follow our instructions or we let you go."
US employment law is completely different to that in the UK. In particular, IIRC most US states are still "at will" states, where either party may terminate an employment contract without notice, and for any reason not explicitly prohibited (e.g., by anti-discrimination legislation).
That's the only sensible course of action here, but I would add: do NOT do something illegal on behalf of your employer, ever, even if means quitting on the spot. No job is worth the hit you will personally take when it comes out. "I was just following orders" doesn't cut much ice with the military when lives are on the line, and will cut absolutely none if you knowingly broke the law just to make money for your employer. The fact that you documented knowingly breaking the law is going to be worth nothing in court, either.
If you don't want ACs teaching your kids, why would you want them rating your teachers?
IMHO, the problem with that ideal is that, like the novices who review beginners' books on Amazon just after reading them, the critics are fundamentally unqualified to offer informed criticism. What you get is someone's subjective perception of the teacher's presentation, not an objective measure of the quality of material taught and how effectively the teacher helped the student to learn it.
When I was at school, I remember thinking some of the lessons were a complete waste of time. Ten years older and a little wiser, I had realised that some of this was my own failure to pay attention and learn what I could. Twenty years later and hopefully a little wiser still, and some of the things I learned that I thought completely pointless or poorly taught at the time have been very valuable to me, and I realised that it was my arrogance and inexperience that prevented me learning more, not the deficiencies of the teachers.
Students simply aren't qualified to review teachers objectively, and pretending otherwise is just delusion. When those students are children, this goes doubly, because children by their nature have not yet developed the ability to form balanced judgements and appreciate the narrowness of their own perspective. This is why in my country, the authorities rely on experienced professionals (many of them formerly successful teachers themselves) to assess teachers and schools, and not gossip written by kids on web sites.
The problem is, in practice, its weight is much greater than that.
I had this debate once before, in a slightly different context where a jealous ex was posting doctored e-mails from when we'd been going out on forums read by mutual friends. I happened to mention this anecdotally on Slashdot, during a discussion about freedom of speech. I was told a variety of unconstructive things, most of which boiled down either to accusations that it must all have been my fault or she wouldn't have done it; or to claims that it was just words, trying to get the (untrue, hurtful) posts removed was censorship, and I should get over it.
Well, in the way of these things, I did get over it in time. There was relatively little lasting damage in that case. But now, come back to the case under discussion here. The underlying problem is the same: on the Internet, everyone can be a publisher to a wide audience, almost instantly, and effectively without having to accept any responsibility for what is said. Sometimes you can post anonymously. Even when you don't, and what you say is genuinely damaging, it's rarely enough to make a court case for defamation worthwhile. You can simply get away with hurtful behaviour, under the pretense of free speech.
So, newsflash for the younger generation: with freedom comes responsibility. I will respect your freedom of speech, as long as you accept responsibility for what you say, and that there may be consequences for you if what you say is unfairly damaging to others. If you will not accept that responsibility, then I have no problem whatsoever with arbitrarily restricting your freedom of speech.
In this case, those of us with friends and family in the profession can immediately tell you the consequences of web sites like this. They result in a few outstanding teachers being recognised for the gifts that they truly are. They result in a few truly poor teachers being recognised for the liabilities that they are. And they result in a lot of competent teachers, doing a very difficult job for relatively little money, being bad-mouthed by so many brats who think they know better that they start leaving the profession, to take on less demanding, better paid jobs that bring far less benefit to society.
The bottom line is that after a while, even if you're a pretty decent teacher, the negative comments start to hurt. Even if you're pretty sure that they aren't really true, doubts creep in. You find yourself second-guessing whether you've made big mistakes, failed to do the right thing, let someone down. That leads you to steering the safe course, not the right one, when you're working with the kids in your classes. And that, ultimately, degrades the quality of the kids' education and makes things worse for everyone. Whether you recognise that before or after you wind up leaving for less stressful work doesn't really matter: the end result is still that the teaching world loses a valuable asset, and a good person is left feeling bad.
So, next time you're making a principled argument for free speech that doesn't mention the word "responsibility", or shouting "sticks and stones" from the cheap seats, please stop and consider whether the entirely one-sided approach you are advocating really represents the kind of world you want to live in when taken to its logical conclusion.
So given the usual flippant editorial comment here:
and the predictable result in terms of 90% of early comments to this thread, exactly how safe is Slashdot under the various safe harbour-style protections of relevant US law?