Hey, I didn't say the hybrids were an improvement!:-)
My point was that an algorithm that is fast in real terms -- such as quicksort -- may be theoretically less efficient in the worst case than O(n log n). That says more about the practical relevant of measuring complexity using big-O notation than anything else.
Please make at least a vague attempt to research before you post. Googling for "proof sort nlogn" turns up several papers giving the standard arguments for the lower bound.
(And yes, I'm only talking about comparison sorting here. Obviously you can use radix/bucket/whatever for specialist applications and these are lower than the bound, but they're not exactly equivalent algorithms to the merge sort referenced in the headline, are they?)
You're right, of course. I foolishly assumed that we were talking about a fair comparison, which since merge sort is the other algorithm under discussion, kinda implies comparison-based sorting. In that context, you simply can't beat O(n log n) without additional information. On further examination, the algorithm in question seems to be some variation of radix sort, meaning that it isn't really a 10x faster substitute for merge sort on linked lists at all, unless the data in your linked lists happens to be of a very specific nature.
Third, merge sort is O(n log n) time, hard to beat for random data.
Provably impossible, in fact.
Fourth, most people use variations of the QUICK SORT not merge sort.
I'm not sure that's a fair generalisation. There are several good O(n log n) sorting algorithms, heap sort being another obvious one, and typically things like the data structures involved, need for stability, or ease of parallelisation are the deciding factors in practice. In fact some of the best performing algorithms in real terms are theoretically O(n^2) in the worst case, hence the creation of hybrids like introsort, a quicksort variant designed to avoid the worst case by switching to heap sort after a certain recursion depth is reached.
Anyway, I'm afraid this is another article by a 21-year-old student who is well-meaning, but not nearly experienced enough yet to appreciate that his suggestion is just rehashing (no pun intended) a lot of long-established ideas. I think the giveaway sign is that his CV on the site still lists just about every programming language and web development skill in existence.:-)
No offence, but I think you're still reading words I haven't written. I have very carefully acknowledged the differences between physical property and "intellectual property" throughout this discussion, and I have never (intentionally) used phrases like "taking intellectual property" that imply a direct loss to the previous holder, as would be the case with real property.
Your argument seems to be based entirely on physical realities, and since (as you rightly observe) the physical consequences of copying someone else's IP are not the same as physically taking their physical property, you seem to be arguing that IP has no value at all.
My alternative argument is that information can have value even though it is non-physical. To give an obvious example, if it requires some research or creativity to produce the information, the information will not be produced unless someone has sufficient incentive to do that research or to sit down and be creative. That incentive needn't be economic, of course -- clearly some people produce some work for purely altruistic reasons -- but it can be. Copyright is just one possible mechanism to arrange this. Work for hire is another. Making money off related products or services is another.
Now, I don't claim encyclopedic knowledge of debates on the information economy, but I've read around the subject a fair bit. I have yet to see any alternative to copyright proposed that supports the realistic creation of works that have a high development cost, a much lower value to individuals, and a wide market. (Note that this needn't just be mass market consumer things like books and CDs. It could just as well be a specialist software library, developed by a single company but paid for by ten customers, none of whom would individually be willing to pay the entire development costs.) Work for hire is a perfectly reasonable arrangement for one-off, bespoke jobs, but it's no use if there isn't a single buyer willing to pay for the work. Altruism is fine, but it won't pay the rent. Copyright is simply one possible way for society to create a middle ground for the useful "many small payments" model that lets you buy a music track or book for a few dollars. If you have a viable alternative suggestion that is reasonable to all parties and still supports such distributed compensation, please do say so, because I (and no doubt many others) would love to hear it!
ActiveX. It's been a security nightmare since the day it was introduced.
Isn't that a bit like saying computers have been a security nightmare since the day they were invented? Sure, they're useful for lots of stuff and no-one has yet suggested an equally effective and significantly more secure alternative, but they do undeniably have security risks associated with them.
Firefox is not perfect, but it is demonstrably more secure than MSIE.
Really? And who's demonstrated that, then? Unless I missed something, this whole discussion is a result of someone basically taking Firefox's security apart to show that it isn't the shining beacon of light that some advocates make it out to be.
I provide technical support for numerous organisations, most of whose staff have extremely limited understanding about the Internet and its dangers. After I made a concerted effort to move everyone to Firefox in early 2004, I experienced a consistent and statistically significant reduction in calls related to spyware/trojan/virus infection. In quantitative terms, this represented a roughly 70% reduction in related calls.
And I'm sure many other people have similar anecdotes they could relate. Whether this is caused by the inherent security of Firefox or the lower number of people trying to crack it because doing so isn't "sticking it to da man" and/or it has lower market share and therefore fewer targets, is not something we can determine based only on the type of data you cited. There are more variables in the game than simply IE vs. Firefox, and the others are not being controlled enough to draw the conclusions you are drawing.
First of all, trying to discredit the argument with an emotional appeal (i.e., calling it "tired") is a fallacy.
It's a figure of speech. If I want to discredit the argument, I'm quite capable of doing so on rigorous, logical grounds if you wish.
Second, you're missing the point. "Real property" and "intellectual property" are different
Ah, I see. So when I wrote "The consequences of taking someone else's property are different in the two cases of course", which part of that point was I missing?
Now, you're right that a law allowing me to put down my rock and walk off while still "owning" it is a construction of society. However, such laws are still based on and justified by the physical reality of the situation. As a consequence, laws that try to establish the same thing for "intellectual property" have no basis or justification!
Please read up on basic economics. I would be happy to debate this subject with you, but until you have at least an elementary understanding of that field and how today's intellectual property laws fit into it, I do not see how I can illustrate the hole in your argument logically. As a starting point, consider that any time and money spend creating a work has an opportunity cost associated with it. Then consider that just because someone shares some information without themselves profiting from doing so, the act may still damage the commercial value of that information to others. Combine these two basic ideas and you start to build a more detailed economic picture that shows how a copyright holder can indeed be damaged by others sharing their work without compensating them, even if they still have a copy of the work themselves.
In other words, although we, as a society, build up artificial constructs of law, eventually it all boils down to the physical fact that a rock cannot be used by both you and me at the same time, but an idea must be shared between us in order to be used. Everything else must follow from that, or else we end up with the situation we have here, which is that everyone disregards the law.
For someone so clued up about logical fallacies, you're very quick to use an appeal to the masses. In fact, your final claim is demonstrably false, given that I am a counterexample. The recent success of legal on-line music services suggests that I am not the only one.
We could debate other points about your post -- such as your claim that an idea must be shared to have value -- but first I invite you to read around the subject a little more, and develop arguments beyond those that I and others have debunked many times before on this very forum. I see that you are a subscriber, which IIRC means you can see a user's complete posting history, so if the search facilities provided by Slashdot are any good you should be able to find relevant arguments I've made in the past fairly quickly if you care to do so.
Software is approaching the complexity of organic life.
I'm approaching 100 years old, but I've still got a very long way to go before I get there.
So, why do we need software to be "finished," anyway?
Because as a consumer, if I blow 300 bucks to buy a funky new PVR, I'd like it to at least record the programmes I ask it to, the way my VHS VCR did 20 years ago?
Because the time lost in business due to poor software products being inefficient costs a staggering amount of money compared to what we could do if we made the effort to get the top 10 most used applications designed and built properly, and these costs are ultimately passed on to society one way or another?
Because when I'm driving in my car (or the US Navy is sailing in their warship, take your pick) I don't want a stupid software bug to leave me stranded?
You get the idea, I'm sure. Software is typically sold as a product (or in connection with a physical product) to perform a specific task. I don't want to learn a new meaning of pain and suffering as the software slowly evolves to actually working over a period of 1,000 years. I just want it to perform the task for which it was developed safely, efficiently and reliably. This should not be difficult, but the commercial software world consistently produces crap because the market has demonstrated a willingness to pay for it.
Re:If only the UK goverment realised this.
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DRM Causes Piracy
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· Score: 1
I don't trust our government as far as I can throw them. Nor was I entirely happy with the Gowers report (which was supposed to be evidence-led and to fairly address issues raised in submissions, yet which completely overlooked many points I made in my extensive submission on this and other areas).
However, I honestly don't have a big problem with their answer here. As long as those offering protected media are compelled (a) to be straight with customers about what they are and aren't getting for their money, and (b) not to abuse any monopoly or oligopoly position they are in because of their copyrights via anticompetitive practices, let 'em do what they want. Things like DRM and annoying trailers at the start of DVDs will soon start losing out to products that don't hamper the paying customer, and businesses will go with what the people want.
One problem at the moment is that a lot of stuff is being sold as if it's a film you can just sit down and watch, yet it forces you to sit through 15 minutes of ads and copyright propaganda first. Compel any organisation producing such disks to display an honest warning occupying 1/3 of the front box cover saying that this is the case (as they do with smoking health warnings in this country now) and see how fast that policy dies.
Similarly, if "CDs" are not likely to be playable in all CD players (including car systems, computers, etc.) then don't let them put that on line 9 of the small print on the back and stock the disc on the same shelf as real CDs. Make them display in big letters a list of the systems the disc will play in or a warning about the systems it won't, and penalise them for misleading advertising if they lie. Again, if you have a market that is let down by this (Linux being an obvious example in this forum) then no-one will be ripped off by paying for stuff that doesn't do what they expect when they buy it. Market opportunities will be created for the niches, and if enough people want something and are willing to pay what it costs to make it then it will probably be provided. If not (c.f. Linux games), well, it's not really the content vendors' problem if a few people choose to go a different route to everyone else, and nothing stops that situation changing if it becomes commercially viable to support alternative platforms.
Now, let me be clear. I am no big fan of DRM, not least because in theory any effective DRM fundamentally conflicts with basic fair use of copyright material as currently provided for by law in many places, and in practice DRM penalises legitimate customers while doing little to hamper people who rip stuff illegally. But I think a lot of the problems we have today aren't really caused by copyright or DRM at all. They're caused by old-fashioned monopoly abuse, price fixing, misleading advertising, and the like. The correct solution to these is to punish the businesses that engage in such practices, at which point the market would reasonably quickly separate the wheat from the chaff, and I suspect DRM would die (as seems to be starting in the music world recently) without any explicit bans by government. The latter should be a last resort, if only because any precedent that prevents people with legal rights using technological means to protect those rights in the face of widespread abuse is likely to be dangerous in other, as yet unknown contexts.
Capitalism fails to solve this because the government has sabotaged it.
Capitalism solves the problem just fine. The government grants you legal rights to protect your content against being copied by others. They do not give you a legal right to profit. If you choose not to share your content in a format for which customers are willing to pay, you will go out of business, or will lose business to other organisations who are willing to share alternative content in a way that customers value enough to pay for it.
Sure murders, assaults and rapes would go unpunished. But that's because there is nothing to punish because they're not crimes!
You're being too literal. There are crimes which most sane people would agree are unethical, such as those you listed. And then there are crimes that most sane people would not have a moral problem with, but which laws make illegal anyway. All the latter laws do is criminalise people that society has no moral problem with. Legal systems should be structured so that society can collectively force its government to remove such laws, though of course many aren't, as we see in cases like this.
As for the crimes you mentioned, I'm not sure a society without any formal laws would have a problem with such obvious cases. After the first few rapists had their genitals cut/burned off by victims' families, bad people would get the idea. The problems would be in more subtle cases, where harm is done that would not be immediate obvious to an outside observer, or the kind of damage is only clear to someone who has spent considerable time reasoning through the situation and its implications. A lot of laws are written in light of problems that people didn't see coming, by observing that something bad is happening and then getting the legislature or other relevant authority to spend the time doing that reasoning, and then hopefully banning the root cause.
I wanted to buy KT Tunstall's CD, but since I listen to my music on the computer, I had to pirate it (it's copy-protected)
No, you didn't. Either buy something you want if it's offered at what you consider a fair price, or don't (and, if you want to improve things, spend 10 minutes writing a brief letter to the supplier explaining why you chose not to buy their product). But please don't break the law and then pretend someone forced you to do it just because you didn't like the legal alternatives. A few things in life might morally justify such action -- breaking weapons laws to protect an innocent from harm, say -- but I rather doubt that depriving you of a few minutes listening to KT Tunstall is that important.
I don't know what the complete answer is but I do know that the people who claim that copyright law as it is currently implemented is the only possible way information creators can benefit are fanatics, very likely entrenched interests and middlemen who know full well that they add no value. Parasites in other words.
Your arbitrary generalisation is unwarranted.
I'm sure there may be alternatives to copyright that have better results, but the favoured alternative of many -- piracy -- is not one of them.
Moreover, there are different justifications for copyright. I discussed this with several friends and colleagues prior to submitting my comments to our government's review on the subject a few months ago. The comments in favour ranged everywhere from purely economic arguments (copyright as incentive to produce and distribute new works) to ethical/academic mindset ones (copyright as fair recognition of authorship, or the question of whether someone should ever be able to profit off the back of someone else's work without compensating them). Many of the people expressing these views were just average people, who might have had incidental benefits from copyright in some cases, but certainly not people who made money off the work of others by taking advantage of the system.
Intellectual property law is a pure product of the mind and can be anything that we want it to be.
All laws are the product of the mind. The natural order of things is that if I'm bigger and stronger than you, better armed than you, or in a larger gang than you, I get my way. Fortunately today's societies typically recognise that the "might is right" argument is not the most beneficial way for people to work together, and thus legal systems are born where hopefully the largest "gang" is society as a whole, and the weight of the legal system overcomes any individuals who like to throw their weight around.
To give a specific example, the law of property ownership is a product of the mind. The natural state of things is that if I see something and it isn't tied down or guarded, it is mine if I want to take it. I always find it odd that people trot out the same tired arguments about how "intellectual property" and "real property" aren't at all the same thing, when in fact they are more similar than different. Both are artificial concepts created by the law. The consequences of taking someone else's property are different in the two cases of course, but they are not zero in either case.
Even something as simple as discussing what the correct copyright period should be, right down to zero, should be discussed and scientifically justified rather than the hand waving like "nobody will create without copyright" (that's nonsense) or "copyright is the only option" (that's also nonsense).
And tell me, how are you "scientifically" going to justify a "correct" copyright period? Different people have different views on the ethicality of copyright protection and on the economic benefits, and there is no one universal justification for having the concept in the first place. How therefore you can you have a single test for what is "correct"? (Please don't bother with any reply involving the US Constitution. Copyright is an international concept with far wider implications than US-specific laws.)
Re:Bad month ends up with a good product.
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A Bad Month for Firefox
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Buffer overruns happen.
Not if you use proper design techniques, or programming languages where they aren't a possibility. Saying "buffer overruns happen" is just a concession to current poor programming practices. Better ways to do things have been known for a long time, it just requires more effort to use them when most of the world isn't yet.
Security models have holes. This is nothing new, and you'll find it in damn near every software project of any complexity.
That's true, but not every software project makes grand claims about having better security than the opposition. There is little text on the Firefox home page, but one of the three big headings is "Stay secure on the web". "Firefox continues to lead the way in online security," it tells us. Clicking through the link finds explicit claims about the open source model and the use of "security experts".
Microsoft's stuff is broken for =years=, which allows a security nightmare. Firefox is broken for a few days, or a month or two... too quick for all but the most dedicated and talented black-hats to take advantage of.
And how do you know that all of these Firefox bugs have only been added recently, and haven't already been exploited by black hats before they were announced? Do you personally check into the background of every bug report in Firefox? Do you think everyone who uses it does? How many serious vulnerabilities in IE are really open for years? Do you have stats to back this up, or are you just a Firefox fanboy spreading FUD? These are, after all, exactly the criticisms commonly levelled at IE.
When will we see a stable and secure project? That's an important question when dealing with closed source products. On something like Mozilla, with an open development model, the project goals and progress aren't company secrets...
So all security bugs in the Mozilla family are immediately and openly disclosed to the public?
I mean, I know Bethesda Softworks and Valve and people have been making advanced 3d engines for a while now, but Microsoft managed to rotate windows in Vista. I don't know about you but I think that's pretty damn amazing.
Wielded by people who get angery when someone doesn't take the time to learn their profession language, but they won't take time to learn someone elses profession language.
The difference is that some people use jargon for precision or brevity, while others use it to mask the fact that they're talking crap.
I'm basically a front-line grunt in a software company, but for various reasons I was recently asked to join a company-wide team working on a new strategy for something. Most of the other people in the group are management types, so I've had a bit of a crash course in trendy management newspeak.
The thing is, there are two very distinct kinds of manager in our group. Some of them can convey their meaning using clear, simple English with no trouble at all. Others constantly drop in buzzwords and abbreviations, which of course the rest of us then have to clarify during or after the meeting. Every single manager who has reached a high level in the company, or who I regard as contributing valuable insights to our group, is in the former category. Every single trouble-maker -- the kind of person who talks a lot yet says almost nothing -- is in the second category.
Management talks that way, and it makes sence within it's context
Sure, just like the manager whose team each made up a funky buzzphrase and started dropping them in at meetings to see whose would be picked up first. The winner was "getting everyone rowing from the same side of the boat". Yep, that makes perfect sense for the kind of groups that manager ran.
I think you've got to the point of this pretty much exactly there.
In my experience, formal meetings need just a few simple things to happen to be effective.
Formal meetings must have a simple, clear plan. Everyone coming to the meeting needs to know why the meeting is being called: what are the specific aims in terms of making decisions or sharing information, and what is the group going to discuss to get there? This usually means having an an agenda, and circulating any relevant background information in advance for people to consider on their own time.
Formal meetings must have a strong leader chairing them. This person above all others must understand why the agenda is what it is, and must keep the discussion on track at all times.
Formal meetings usually need someone smart to keep minutes, so that afterwards, a concise and accurate record is kept of all decisions made and information shared. This person should never be the person chairing the meeting.
The attendees at a formal meeting should be chosen because they have a reason to be there, want to contribute, and are willing to consider others' contributions with an open mind.
Really, none of this stuff is rocket science. You can train people to work this way, or smart people who've been to a few meetings can think about this and reach these conclusions for themselves. It really doesn't matter. But just about everything that goes wrong in meetings -- drifting off-topic, a couple of loud people dominating the discussion even if their ideas aren't actually very good, reading out extensive background material during the meeting because people didn't prepare or weren't shown it in advance, talking for ages but no-one really knowing afterwards whether anything useful was achieved -- all of this stuff is trivially avoidable if you follow the simple guidelines, and have a good plan, good chair, good minute-taker and the right people there.
As a footnote, being a good leader includes realising when having a formal meeting isn't the right solution. A lot of the time, sticking a handful of smart people around a whiteboard or something will be more productive than holding structured, formal debate with many participants.
Yep, I being to understand now why people no longer bother to RTFA so often on Slashdot. I thought this was the best line:
What Aero does is for the first time give you a truly 2.5D desktop in Windows.
Speaking as someone who writes computational geometry software for a living, I'm pretty sure that statement is just a load of words strung together to sound cool, while having absolutely no real meaning whatsoever.
Smashing everything in sight, killing anyone that seems to represent the business. This would get some action.
It would. In fact, it would get a lot of people killed, probably including many innocents, and it would get a lot more people in jail for murder.
Speaking as someone who lives near a business that had a direct action campaign run against it for some considerable time, though, I can guarantee that such campaigns are not reliably effective in changing the behaviour of a business.
There is no courage left in the US nor Western Europe. Courage is the now held by the people that know the way to win is to strike terror in the heart of their opponent. You behead a few schoolgirls. You blow up some restaurant where your opponent is comfortable, thinking they have nothing to fear. This is activism. This is courage.
No, it's anarchy, vigilantism, murder, criminal damage...
The fact that we don't do these things is what separates us from the terrorists. The fact that we are finding ways to share knowledge among the people and act collectively in the interests of the people without resorting to violence and within our own legal systems is exactly why our society is worth defending.
There are a few things in this life that I might consider to justify direct physical action. Overthrowing an abusive government to restore power to the people would be an obvious one. But I'm afraid being upset with that toy you bought your kid from Best Buy is short of the mark by, oh, a few light years.
I thought the other 2999 cases without mitigating circumstances would be sufficient.
Well, sorry, but I happen to disagree. I think prosecuting him for the 2,999 other cases but letting the judge one go implies pretty clearly that the end justifies the means.
No, really, don't. This guy knowingly, systematically broke the law for an extended period, invading thousands of people's privacy in the process. He should spend the next few months in jail. He should then spend the next few years prohibited from going near anything that has the slightest chance of spying on others: networked computers, camera or video equipment, binoculars and telescopes, the works. If he ever talks about anything else he saw during the period to anyone, he should automatically spend the next few years in solitary confinement. And he should be banned from holding any public office that requires access to confidential information for the rest of his life, including any possibility of ever serving in the police or security services. There are enough good people on the right side of the law that we don't need ethically unstable people in that sort of position of responsibility.
Seriously, privacy invasion is one of the nastiest things you can do to someone. It's subtle, but as with related concerns like identity theft, the damage can be life-changing and can last a very long time. With modern technology making covert surveillance and data collection on a massive scale a realistic possibility, the only defence is to annihilate the people who would abuse such technology to violate the basic rights of others.
This guy should not be hailed as a hero. He should be made an example. And the evidence against the judge should be given zero weight in court as a matter of legal principle. The end cannot justify the means in cases like this, or the world will become a very nasty place to live.
I wasn't referring so much the safeguards that are there, such as they are. Rather, I was thinking of the toned down provision that would have let the government push through legislation with ministerial backing with only a couple of hours in Parliament -- barely long enough even to read a bill, never mind to properly understand and debate it. I'm not saying that what's left is much better, but it doesn't seem to be quite as bad.:-/
Well, as Bill Watterson observed, "Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, I didn't say the hybrids were an improvement! :-)
My point was that an algorithm that is fast in real terms -- such as quicksort -- may be theoretically less efficient in the worst case than O(n log n). That says more about the practical relevant of measuring complexity using big-O notation than anything else.
Please make at least a vague attempt to research before you post. Googling for "proof sort nlogn" turns up several papers giving the standard arguments for the lower bound.
(And yes, I'm only talking about comparison sorting here. Obviously you can use radix/bucket/whatever for specialist applications and these are lower than the bound, but they're not exactly equivalent algorithms to the merge sort referenced in the headline, are they?)
You're right, of course. I foolishly assumed that we were talking about a fair comparison, which since merge sort is the other algorithm under discussion, kinda implies comparison-based sorting. In that context, you simply can't beat O(n log n) without additional information. On further examination, the algorithm in question seems to be some variation of radix sort, meaning that it isn't really a 10x faster substitute for merge sort on linked lists at all, unless the data in your linked lists happens to be of a very specific nature.
Provably impossible, in fact.
I'm not sure that's a fair generalisation. There are several good O(n log n) sorting algorithms, heap sort being another obvious one, and typically things like the data structures involved, need for stability, or ease of parallelisation are the deciding factors in practice. In fact some of the best performing algorithms in real terms are theoretically O(n^2) in the worst case, hence the creation of hybrids like introsort, a quicksort variant designed to avoid the worst case by switching to heap sort after a certain recursion depth is reached.
Anyway, I'm afraid this is another article by a 21-year-old student who is well-meaning, but not nearly experienced enough yet to appreciate that his suggestion is just rehashing (no pun intended) a lot of long-established ideas. I think the giveaway sign is that his CV on the site still lists just about every programming language and web development skill in existence. :-)
No offence, but I think you're still reading words I haven't written. I have very carefully acknowledged the differences between physical property and "intellectual property" throughout this discussion, and I have never (intentionally) used phrases like "taking intellectual property" that imply a direct loss to the previous holder, as would be the case with real property.
Your argument seems to be based entirely on physical realities, and since (as you rightly observe) the physical consequences of copying someone else's IP are not the same as physically taking their physical property, you seem to be arguing that IP has no value at all.
My alternative argument is that information can have value even though it is non-physical. To give an obvious example, if it requires some research or creativity to produce the information, the information will not be produced unless someone has sufficient incentive to do that research or to sit down and be creative. That incentive needn't be economic, of course -- clearly some people produce some work for purely altruistic reasons -- but it can be. Copyright is just one possible mechanism to arrange this. Work for hire is another. Making money off related products or services is another.
Now, I don't claim encyclopedic knowledge of debates on the information economy, but I've read around the subject a fair bit. I have yet to see any alternative to copyright proposed that supports the realistic creation of works that have a high development cost, a much lower value to individuals, and a wide market. (Note that this needn't just be mass market consumer things like books and CDs. It could just as well be a specialist software library, developed by a single company but paid for by ten customers, none of whom would individually be willing to pay the entire development costs.) Work for hire is a perfectly reasonable arrangement for one-off, bespoke jobs, but it's no use if there isn't a single buyer willing to pay for the work. Altruism is fine, but it won't pay the rent. Copyright is simply one possible way for society to create a middle ground for the useful "many small payments" model that lets you buy a music track or book for a few dollars. If you have a viable alternative suggestion that is reasonable to all parties and still supports such distributed compensation, please do say so, because I (and no doubt many others) would love to hear it!
Isn't that a bit like saying computers have been a security nightmare since the day they were invented? Sure, they're useful for lots of stuff and no-one has yet suggested an equally effective and significantly more secure alternative, but they do undeniably have security risks associated with them.
Really? And who's demonstrated that, then? Unless I missed something, this whole discussion is a result of someone basically taking Firefox's security apart to show that it isn't the shining beacon of light that some advocates make it out to be.
And I'm sure many other people have similar anecdotes they could relate. Whether this is caused by the inherent security of Firefox or the lower number of people trying to crack it because doing so isn't "sticking it to da man" and/or it has lower market share and therefore fewer targets, is not something we can determine based only on the type of data you cited. There are more variables in the game than simply IE vs. Firefox, and the others are not being controlled enough to draw the conclusions you are drawing.
It's a figure of speech. If I want to discredit the argument, I'm quite capable of doing so on rigorous, logical grounds if you wish.
Ah, I see. So when I wrote "The consequences of taking someone else's property are different in the two cases of course", which part of that point was I missing?
Please read up on basic economics. I would be happy to debate this subject with you, but until you have at least an elementary understanding of that field and how today's intellectual property laws fit into it, I do not see how I can illustrate the hole in your argument logically. As a starting point, consider that any time and money spend creating a work has an opportunity cost associated with it. Then consider that just because someone shares some information without themselves profiting from doing so, the act may still damage the commercial value of that information to others. Combine these two basic ideas and you start to build a more detailed economic picture that shows how a copyright holder can indeed be damaged by others sharing their work without compensating them, even if they still have a copy of the work themselves.
For someone so clued up about logical fallacies, you're very quick to use an appeal to the masses. In fact, your final claim is demonstrably false, given that I am a counterexample. The recent success of legal on-line music services suggests that I am not the only one.
We could debate other points about your post -- such as your claim that an idea must be shared to have value -- but first I invite you to read around the subject a little more, and develop arguments beyond those that I and others have debunked many times before on this very forum. I see that you are a subscriber, which IIRC means you can see a user's complete posting history, so if the search facilities provided by Slashdot are any good you should be able to find relevant arguments I've made in the past fairly quickly if you care to do so.
I'm approaching 100 years old, but I've still got a very long way to go before I get there.
Because as a consumer, if I blow 300 bucks to buy a funky new PVR, I'd like it to at least record the programmes I ask it to, the way my VHS VCR did 20 years ago?
Because the time lost in business due to poor software products being inefficient costs a staggering amount of money compared to what we could do if we made the effort to get the top 10 most used applications designed and built properly, and these costs are ultimately passed on to society one way or another?
Because when I'm driving in my car (or the US Navy is sailing in their warship, take your pick) I don't want a stupid software bug to leave me stranded?
You get the idea, I'm sure. Software is typically sold as a product (or in connection with a physical product) to perform a specific task. I don't want to learn a new meaning of pain and suffering as the software slowly evolves to actually working over a period of 1,000 years. I just want it to perform the task for which it was developed safely, efficiently and reliably. This should not be difficult, but the commercial software world consistently produces crap because the market has demonstrated a willingness to pay for it.
I don't trust our government as far as I can throw them. Nor was I entirely happy with the Gowers report (which was supposed to be evidence-led and to fairly address issues raised in submissions, yet which completely overlooked many points I made in my extensive submission on this and other areas).
However, I honestly don't have a big problem with their answer here. As long as those offering protected media are compelled (a) to be straight with customers about what they are and aren't getting for their money, and (b) not to abuse any monopoly or oligopoly position they are in because of their copyrights via anticompetitive practices, let 'em do what they want. Things like DRM and annoying trailers at the start of DVDs will soon start losing out to products that don't hamper the paying customer, and businesses will go with what the people want.
One problem at the moment is that a lot of stuff is being sold as if it's a film you can just sit down and watch, yet it forces you to sit through 15 minutes of ads and copyright propaganda first. Compel any organisation producing such disks to display an honest warning occupying 1/3 of the front box cover saying that this is the case (as they do with smoking health warnings in this country now) and see how fast that policy dies.
Similarly, if "CDs" are not likely to be playable in all CD players (including car systems, computers, etc.) then don't let them put that on line 9 of the small print on the back and stock the disc on the same shelf as real CDs. Make them display in big letters a list of the systems the disc will play in or a warning about the systems it won't, and penalise them for misleading advertising if they lie. Again, if you have a market that is let down by this (Linux being an obvious example in this forum) then no-one will be ripped off by paying for stuff that doesn't do what they expect when they buy it. Market opportunities will be created for the niches, and if enough people want something and are willing to pay what it costs to make it then it will probably be provided. If not (c.f. Linux games), well, it's not really the content vendors' problem if a few people choose to go a different route to everyone else, and nothing stops that situation changing if it becomes commercially viable to support alternative platforms.
Now, let me be clear. I am no big fan of DRM, not least because in theory any effective DRM fundamentally conflicts with basic fair use of copyright material as currently provided for by law in many places, and in practice DRM penalises legitimate customers while doing little to hamper people who rip stuff illegally. But I think a lot of the problems we have today aren't really caused by copyright or DRM at all. They're caused by old-fashioned monopoly abuse, price fixing, misleading advertising, and the like. The correct solution to these is to punish the businesses that engage in such practices, at which point the market would reasonably quickly separate the wheat from the chaff, and I suspect DRM would die (as seems to be starting in the music world recently) without any explicit bans by government. The latter should be a last resort, if only because any precedent that prevents people with legal rights using technological means to protect those rights in the face of widespread abuse is likely to be dangerous in other, as yet unknown contexts.
Capitalism solves the problem just fine. The government grants you legal rights to protect your content against being copied by others. They do not give you a legal right to profit. If you choose not to share your content in a format for which customers are willing to pay, you will go out of business, or will lose business to other organisations who are willing to share alternative content in a way that customers value enough to pay for it.
You're being too literal. There are crimes which most sane people would agree are unethical, such as those you listed. And then there are crimes that most sane people would not have a moral problem with, but which laws make illegal anyway. All the latter laws do is criminalise people that society has no moral problem with. Legal systems should be structured so that society can collectively force its government to remove such laws, though of course many aren't, as we see in cases like this.
As for the crimes you mentioned, I'm not sure a society without any formal laws would have a problem with such obvious cases. After the first few rapists had their genitals cut/burned off by victims' families, bad people would get the idea. The problems would be in more subtle cases, where harm is done that would not be immediate obvious to an outside observer, or the kind of damage is only clear to someone who has spent considerable time reasoning through the situation and its implications. A lot of laws are written in light of problems that people didn't see coming, by observing that something bad is happening and then getting the legislature or other relevant authority to spend the time doing that reasoning, and then hopefully banning the root cause.
No, you didn't. Either buy something you want if it's offered at what you consider a fair price, or don't (and, if you want to improve things, spend 10 minutes writing a brief letter to the supplier explaining why you chose not to buy their product). But please don't break the law and then pretend someone forced you to do it just because you didn't like the legal alternatives. A few things in life might morally justify such action -- breaking weapons laws to protect an innocent from harm, say -- but I rather doubt that depriving you of a few minutes listening to KT Tunstall is that important.
Your arbitrary generalisation is unwarranted.
I'm sure there may be alternatives to copyright that have better results, but the favoured alternative of many -- piracy -- is not one of them.
Moreover, there are different justifications for copyright. I discussed this with several friends and colleagues prior to submitting my comments to our government's review on the subject a few months ago. The comments in favour ranged everywhere from purely economic arguments (copyright as incentive to produce and distribute new works) to ethical/academic mindset ones (copyright as fair recognition of authorship, or the question of whether someone should ever be able to profit off the back of someone else's work without compensating them). Many of the people expressing these views were just average people, who might have had incidental benefits from copyright in some cases, but certainly not people who made money off the work of others by taking advantage of the system.
All laws are the product of the mind. The natural order of things is that if I'm bigger and stronger than you, better armed than you, or in a larger gang than you, I get my way. Fortunately today's societies typically recognise that the "might is right" argument is not the most beneficial way for people to work together, and thus legal systems are born where hopefully the largest "gang" is society as a whole, and the weight of the legal system overcomes any individuals who like to throw their weight around.
To give a specific example, the law of property ownership is a product of the mind. The natural state of things is that if I see something and it isn't tied down or guarded, it is mine if I want to take it. I always find it odd that people trot out the same tired arguments about how "intellectual property" and "real property" aren't at all the same thing, when in fact they are more similar than different. Both are artificial concepts created by the law. The consequences of taking someone else's property are different in the two cases of course, but they are not zero in either case.
And tell me, how are you "scientifically" going to justify a "correct" copyright period? Different people have different views on the ethicality of copyright protection and on the economic benefits, and there is no one universal justification for having the concept in the first place. How therefore you can you have a single test for what is "correct"? (Please don't bother with any reply involving the US Constitution. Copyright is an international concept with far wider implications than US-specific laws.)
Not if you use proper design techniques, or programming languages where they aren't a possibility. Saying "buffer overruns happen" is just a concession to current poor programming practices. Better ways to do things have been known for a long time, it just requires more effort to use them when most of the world isn't yet.
That's true, but not every software project makes grand claims about having better security than the opposition. There is little text on the Firefox home page, but one of the three big headings is "Stay secure on the web". "Firefox continues to lead the way in online security," it tells us. Clicking through the link finds explicit claims about the open source model and the use of "security experts".
And how do you know that all of these Firefox bugs have only been added recently, and haven't already been exploited by black hats before they were announced? Do you personally check into the background of every bug report in Firefox? Do you think everyone who uses it does? How many serious vulnerabilities in IE are really open for years? Do you have stats to back this up, or are you just a Firefox fanboy spreading FUD? These are, after all, exactly the criticisms commonly levelled at IE.
So all security bugs in the Mozilla family are immediately and openly disclosed to the public?
I'm suitably impressed. :-)
The difference is that some people use jargon for precision or brevity, while others use it to mask the fact that they're talking crap.
I'm basically a front-line grunt in a software company, but for various reasons I was recently asked to join a company-wide team working on a new strategy for something. Most of the other people in the group are management types, so I've had a bit of a crash course in trendy management newspeak.
The thing is, there are two very distinct kinds of manager in our group. Some of them can convey their meaning using clear, simple English with no trouble at all. Others constantly drop in buzzwords and abbreviations, which of course the rest of us then have to clarify during or after the meeting. Every single manager who has reached a high level in the company, or who I regard as contributing valuable insights to our group, is in the former category. Every single trouble-maker -- the kind of person who talks a lot yet says almost nothing -- is in the second category.
Sure, just like the manager whose team each made up a funky buzzphrase and started dropping them in at meetings to see whose would be picked up first. The winner was "getting everyone rowing from the same side of the boat". Yep, that makes perfect sense for the kind of groups that manager ran.
I think you've got to the point of this pretty much exactly there.
In my experience, formal meetings need just a few simple things to happen to be effective.
Really, none of this stuff is rocket science. You can train people to work this way, or smart people who've been to a few meetings can think about this and reach these conclusions for themselves. It really doesn't matter. But just about everything that goes wrong in meetings -- drifting off-topic, a couple of loud people dominating the discussion even if their ideas aren't actually very good, reading out extensive background material during the meeting because people didn't prepare or weren't shown it in advance, talking for ages but no-one really knowing afterwards whether anything useful was achieved -- all of this stuff is trivially avoidable if you follow the simple guidelines, and have a good plan, good chair, good minute-taker and the right people there.
As a footnote, being a good leader includes realising when having a formal meeting isn't the right solution. A lot of the time, sticking a handful of smart people around a whiteboard or something will be more productive than holding structured, formal debate with many participants.
Yep, I being to understand now why people no longer bother to RTFA so often on Slashdot. I thought this was the best line:
Speaking as someone who writes computational geometry software for a living, I'm pretty sure that statement is just a load of words strung together to sound cool, while having absolutely no real meaning whatsoever.
It would. In fact, it would get a lot of people killed, probably including many innocents, and it would get a lot more people in jail for murder.
Speaking as someone who lives near a business that had a direct action campaign run against it for some considerable time, though, I can guarantee that such campaigns are not reliably effective in changing the behaviour of a business.
No, it's anarchy, vigilantism, murder, criminal damage...
The fact that we don't do these things is what separates us from the terrorists. The fact that we are finding ways to share knowledge among the people and act collectively in the interests of the people without resorting to violence and within our own legal systems is exactly why our society is worth defending.
There are a few things in this life that I might consider to justify direct physical action. Overthrowing an abusive government to restore power to the people would be an obvious one. But I'm afraid being upset with that toy you bought your kid from Best Buy is short of the mark by, oh, a few light years.
Well, sorry, but I happen to disagree. I think prosecuting him for the 2,999 other cases but letting the judge one go implies pretty clearly that the end justifies the means.
Er... Yes. And various other linked material, and many previous comments to this thread. What's your point?
No, really, don't. This guy knowingly, systematically broke the law for an extended period, invading thousands of people's privacy in the process. He should spend the next few months in jail. He should then spend the next few years prohibited from going near anything that has the slightest chance of spying on others: networked computers, camera or video equipment, binoculars and telescopes, the works. If he ever talks about anything else he saw during the period to anyone, he should automatically spend the next few years in solitary confinement. And he should be banned from holding any public office that requires access to confidential information for the rest of his life, including any possibility of ever serving in the police or security services. There are enough good people on the right side of the law that we don't need ethically unstable people in that sort of position of responsibility.
Seriously, privacy invasion is one of the nastiest things you can do to someone. It's subtle, but as with related concerns like identity theft, the damage can be life-changing and can last a very long time. With modern technology making covert surveillance and data collection on a massive scale a realistic possibility, the only defence is to annihilate the people who would abuse such technology to violate the basic rights of others.
This guy should not be hailed as a hero. He should be made an example. And the evidence against the judge should be given zero weight in court as a matter of legal principle. The end cannot justify the means in cases like this, or the world will become a very nasty place to live.
I wasn't referring so much the safeguards that are there, such as they are. Rather, I was thinking of the toned down provision that would have let the government push through legislation with ministerial backing with only a couple of hours in Parliament -- barely long enough even to read a bill, never mind to properly understand and debate it. I'm not saying that what's left is much better, but it doesn't seem to be quite as bad. :-/
Well, as Bill Watterson observed, "Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act passed, but fortunately only with a watered-down version of the "enabling act" provisions... this time.