But I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is a dictatorship, there's a really odd mixture of checks and balances on all kinds of different levels that is a result of being such an old country with a colourful history. I think a written constitution would clear a lot of this up.
I don't recall using the word dictatorship myself. My argument is more that the current system isn't as democratic in practice as it might sound in theory. It sounds like we pretty much agree that the reality is somewhere between these extremes today, though perhaps you would view it as further towards the democratic end of the scale than I do.
As for a written constitution, I agree wholeheartedly. It is long past time we established a formal, clearly stated constitution and a constitutional court to enforce it over the whims of the administration of the day. Personally, I'm also intrigued by the idea, as used in some US states IIRC, that a large enough number of citizens can force a referendum on any proposal, which if it passed would also be higher in legal standing than laws passed by the government. Hopefully such things could help overcome the sort of random giving and taking of rights and freedoms that has plagued the current British administration in recent years.
They are caught between a rock and a hard place here. On the one hand, of course the default should be that government officials get no special treatment. But on the other hand, we protect discussions between citizens and people like lawyers and doctors for a reason, and one could make a strong case that discussions between citizens and their elected representatives should be considered similarly privileged.
The obvious solution is not to impose such draconian surveillance on anyone, MPs or otherwise, and then you don't have this ethical problem in the first place. This doesn't deal with the fact that there may be legitimate grounds for believing that tapping is necessary for genuine security reasons, of course.
Then they have to convince the democratically elected House of Commons to pass it.
The House of Commons is hardly democratically elected. Our "first past the post" system means that despite only 22% of the population voting for them at the last election, and not even winning the popular vote in England, Blair's Labour party currently have an absolute majority in the Commons.
Then they have to convince the House of Lords to pass it.
Or just invoke the Parliament Act.
Then they have to convince the Queen to give her assent.
Which is a formality, since this was last withheld in 1708. Any attempt to withhold it now would probably result in the fall of the monarchy rather than the fall of legislation that had been approved by Parliament.
The party in power does not have the authority to imprison people at will without passing a law. That is a constitutionally protected right found in the Magna Carta, dating back almost eight centuries.
Presumably that's why they imposed legislation before imprisoning people at will. And note that when the arbitrary detention laws were thrown out, leading to the control orders we have today, it wasn't on ethical or constitutional grounds, but because the victims successfully argued that the laws were discriminatory. Had the government simply said that anyone suspected of terrorist activities could be held arbitrarily, without reference to quibbles like nationality, the same defence would not have been applicable.
And of course, if Blair and co succeed in getting through the sort of shortcuts they already tried once in the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, this will all become academic in practice anyway, since MPs wouldn't even have time to read the complete text of a bill pushed through by the government, never mind debate it before voting on it. It's a brave new world, my friend.
When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think. -- Pat Schroeder
Let's put it this way. If you or a loved one (an innocent human being) were kidnapped and locked in a cage by this man (the ruling class), for whatever reason, would the thought even cross your mind that "maybe he's just acting in his best intentions, being true to his beliefs"? Would his rationale, whatever that may be, matter to you for even a split second?
There was a "Have your say" board running on the BBC News web site a few days ago, after the Metropolitan Police were once again criticised over their bungled "anti-terror" raid on the home of some dark-skinned men with beards. The raid was based on bad intelligence, and one of the men was shot. And yet, on the BBC board, a chilling number of commenters essentially said "If a few people have to suffer for the greater good, that's a price we have to pay." I bet their views would have been different if their loved ones had been the ones being shot by the police, too.
The thing about all of this ID business is exactly what you said: what matters is not intentions, it is reality. In reality, the system will be abused. More subtle, but probably more damaging, is the fact that innocent mistakes will be made by those using the system. What will it take to get someone's benefits suspended, or for them to fail a background check and be denied a job, or for them to be arrested on suspicion of committing a crime five years ago? One tired operator mistyping the hundredth update they've done that day? One bad communications link where parts of the database get out of sync? One false positive or false negative on a statistically unreliable biometric test? If these things are possible, surely there must be an immediate, effective, easily accessible mechanism in place so that individuals can get the mistake Fixed Right Now(TM)? Strangely, I've never seen any mention of such a mechanism. Bizarrely, but based on personal experience, it is actually this "genuine mistake" problem that I fear most about the NIR and ID card scheme. (This is not to say that deliberate abuse, civil liberties, costs and so on are not also legitimate objections.)
I can remember ten years ago being told that you have to trim every extraneous character from messages, refrain from quoting more than one sentence, and keep your sig to three lines, all because we were worried that we were gobbling up precious bandwidth.
And there was me thinking it was just because sensible quoting was far more efficient and effective as a means of communication...
Bandwidth at the local level can't meaningfully be traded, of course, but consider the impact on higher tiers. If the entire world (or even an entire country) starts telecommuting overnight because of something like bird flu, the demands on the backbone systems are going to rocket, and perhaps more significantly, a lot more upstream bandwidth is likely to be needed. All those finely-tuned caching algorithms for popular web sites won't help much with that.
I'm not an American. In fact, I've never been there, and I strongly disapprove of their current administration's policies on many counts. I was simply telling it like it is, so please take your righteous indignation and rant it at someone else.
I can't possibly be expected to know what a "reasonable" price is on every single consumer good out there.
No, but you can reasonably be expected to know that giving away two copies of a DVD box set for no charge is not the intended offer when you've just clicked through a page with "Buy one, get one free" written in big letters on it.
Once charged, billed and shipped, the transaction is done.
On general principles, I would agree with you, give or take shipping vs. delivery issues and the like. As far as I know, so would the law in most places. caveat vendor.
However, I'm not quite clear about the details here, and there could be an interesting twist if the customer really did pay nothing for the goods. Contracts generally require consideration in both directions, and I imagine Amazon's lawyers could build some sort of legal argument if Amazon received absolutely no payment for the goods.
You could also throw in some wording about bad faith on the part of consumers going for a deal that was obviously too good to be true and not what Amazon intended, particularly if the offer that was meant to be available was clearly advertised.
I'd guess we've got to a decent case by now. Frankly, I wouldn't have a problem with that. Contract law often protects consumers from unreasonable terms imposed by mass market vendors or service companies. I don't see why the same principle shouldn't apply in reverse as well. Amazon should be responsible for any expenses incurred by customers in returning both sets if they don't want the intended deal, of course; that's the price you pay for screwing up. But I will have little sympathy for any customers who were deliberately taking advantage and now find they can't.
It is when it makes downloading music for free legal.
That depends on whether you use your recordable media for downloaded music. Personally, I use it for back-ups. I'm pretty glad my country doesn't make me pay media cartels who don't even produce much that I want to listen to, before I can back-up my e-mail.
When will you Americans learn you cannot have it both ways.
When another large country or a group of smaller countries develop enough backbone to stand up to the US militarily and economically. Until then, the US can have it both ways, because it's the biggest boy in the gang.
The transport costs would be negligible. Politicians, being full of hot air, can float independently over land or sea. They require a bit of a push to get them out over the water, but then one well-placed shot each to deflate them would drop them in.
No, sorry, that can't be right. I'm sure SCO wrote the Linux kernel. I read a news piece about it, right after the one where Al Gore invented the Internet!
Actually, that's not necessarily true. In contract law, for example, typically both parties must understand what they are agreeing to for the contract to be binding.
In any case, the burden of proof here is clearly on Google: if the relevant copyright laws do not give an exemption for whatever they are doing and they rely on implied consent, they must demonstrate that such consent has implicitly been given. That can hardly be the case when the copyright holder was unaware of a mechanism and hasn't expressed a preference either way through that mechanism.
By making content available on a public web server you are obviously OK with anyone looking at it, Google included. If you don't want the big G looking, the accepted custom is to place a line into robots.txt telling that search engine to stay out.
Well, robots.txt is hardly an accepted custom. Even the most official definitions indicate that it is a voluntary protocol. Moreover, the majority of people putting content on websites have probably never heard of it. Either of those facts alone should be enough to disqualify it as a serious suggestion in this context.
The implied consent argument is fine, but you're only implying consent for as long as the material is freely available from your server. If you remove it, you pretty much remove any argument of implied consent as well.
Of course no sane business would willingly disappear themselves from the net like that, so these guys want to dictate the TERMS under which Google indexes and presents their content.
On the contrary. I don't quite understand the Slashdot groupthink on Google, with which you seem to be agreeing, at the moment. There were big web sites before Google, that don't need any help from Google to attract hits. There are other big search engines than Google, which don't offer the equivalent of a Google Cache facility and simply index the web as search engines always have. Being delisted from Google is not suicide for a web site. You are making a big assumption that being covered by Google Cache is in the business's interests. In the case at hand -- where Google Cache is continuing to display information that has been deliberately removed by the provider -- clearly it is not in the business's interests for Google to do this, and being delisted from all Google services may well be preferable.
Google should start making examples of some of these cases. Simply delete them. And ask for a declaratory judgement as to whether any other entity in that country can sue on similar grounds. If the court gives the wrong answer announce a near date when they will delete the entire.cc from their results until such time as the local laws are corrected. Provided they exercised some good judgement on the selected date the local laws would get fixed.
The correct response to that action, IMNSHO, is to change absolutely nothing about your local laws, and wait for Google to suffer death by 1,000 market share reductions at the hands of Yahoo et al. The alternative is overturning an entire established, broadly successful legal doctrine throughout the world, just because one overvalued and overhyped US company doesn't like it. This would not exactly be a healthy precedent, would it?
You effectively disappear off of the Internet w/o Google
What a silly thing to say. Google don't even have a monopoly on the search engine market, and there are plenty of sites so big that no-one ever needs a search engine to find them.
Maybe after they've lived in a black hole for a while they'll realize the benefit of having their free material easy for web users to find and view.
Did someone forget to RTFA? Or even the summary, in fact?
That depends on how the proxy works. Consider each case on its merits. A proxy server that faithfully reproduces an entire page in exactly its original form is potentially depriving the original host of some useful information in their server logs with any damage that brings, but that's about the total extent of the harm done, and no advantage is being taken by the proxy service. That is not the case here, however.
Given that I'm careful with my primary e-mail address, but in recent months I've been hit with huge amounts of spam sent to [firstname]@[domain], your argument is kinda flawed.
Finally, the google cache (and archive.org for that matter) are invaluable resources when attempting to look up information that is more than a year old (the average lifetime for information on the internet is only a few months).
I disagree.
Google Cache doesn't cache everything: look at how they deal with pictures, for a start. IIRC the information disappears after a while, too.
Also, from personal research based on a long-standing web site I've worked on, archive.org can't even manage a single remotely accurate reproduction of the home page from any point over the past five or so years. It does, however, provide several completely screwed-up versions, with missing files, broken layouts, and mismatched information that would make the site look bad if anyone saw them and thought that was what the site ever looked like.
These are hardly invaluable resources. They are, however, a drain on someone else's resources, and a misrepresentation of how things used to be that could do more harm than good.
There is clearly public good being done by these caching services so discarding them wholesale is a step backward for the internet.
I couldn't disagree more. If we scrapped the legally dubious, functionally flawed and ethically challenged menaces we had now, we could start replacing them with a widely-supported, opt-in convention that could be the basis for much better replacement services with none of the major problems we have today.
Result.... news dinosaurs go extinct and news mammals come to rule Earth
Moral.... don't be greedy beyond survival.
Except that Google is not the only way to find pages on the web. In fact, most of the popular news sites predate it by some time, and if Google died tomorrow, I don't imagine many of them would even notice the dent in their page views.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't recall using the word dictatorship myself. My argument is more that the current system isn't as democratic in practice as it might sound in theory. It sounds like we pretty much agree that the reality is somewhere between these extremes today, though perhaps you would view it as further towards the democratic end of the scale than I do.
As for a written constitution, I agree wholeheartedly. It is long past time we established a formal, clearly stated constitution and a constitutional court to enforce it over the whims of the administration of the day. Personally, I'm also intrigued by the idea, as used in some US states IIRC, that a large enough number of citizens can force a referendum on any proposal, which if it passed would also be higher in legal standing than laws passed by the government. Hopefully such things could help overcome the sort of random giving and taking of rights and freedoms that has plagued the current British administration in recent years.
They are caught between a rock and a hard place here. On the one hand, of course the default should be that government officials get no special treatment. But on the other hand, we protect discussions between citizens and people like lawyers and doctors for a reason, and one could make a strong case that discussions between citizens and their elected representatives should be considered similarly privileged.
The obvious solution is not to impose such draconian surveillance on anyone, MPs or otherwise, and then you don't have this ethical problem in the first place. This doesn't deal with the fact that there may be legitimate grounds for believing that tapping is necessary for genuine security reasons, of course.
The House of Commons is hardly democratically elected. Our "first past the post" system means that despite only 22% of the population voting for them at the last election, and not even winning the popular vote in England, Blair's Labour party currently have an absolute majority in the Commons.
Or just invoke the Parliament Act.
Which is a formality, since this was last withheld in 1708. Any attempt to withhold it now would probably result in the fall of the monarchy rather than the fall of legislation that had been approved by Parliament.
Presumably that's why they imposed legislation before imprisoning people at will. And note that when the arbitrary detention laws were thrown out, leading to the control orders we have today, it wasn't on ethical or constitutional grounds, but because the victims successfully argued that the laws were discriminatory. Had the government simply said that anyone suspected of terrorist activities could be held arbitrarily, without reference to quibbles like nationality, the same defence would not have been applicable.
And of course, if Blair and co succeed in getting through the sort of shortcuts they already tried once in the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, this will all become academic in practice anyway, since MPs wouldn't even have time to read the complete text of a bill pushed through by the government, never mind debate it before voting on it. It's a brave new world, my friend.
When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think. -- Pat Schroeder
There was a "Have your say" board running on the BBC News web site a few days ago, after the Metropolitan Police were once again criticised over their bungled "anti-terror" raid on the home of some dark-skinned men with beards. The raid was based on bad intelligence, and one of the men was shot. And yet, on the BBC board, a chilling number of commenters essentially said "If a few people have to suffer for the greater good, that's a price we have to pay." I bet their views would have been different if their loved ones had been the ones being shot by the police, too.
The thing about all of this ID business is exactly what you said: what matters is not intentions, it is reality. In reality, the system will be abused. More subtle, but probably more damaging, is the fact that innocent mistakes will be made by those using the system. What will it take to get someone's benefits suspended, or for them to fail a background check and be denied a job, or for them to be arrested on suspicion of committing a crime five years ago? One tired operator mistyping the hundredth update they've done that day? One bad communications link where parts of the database get out of sync? One false positive or false negative on a statistically unreliable biometric test? If these things are possible, surely there must be an immediate, effective, easily accessible mechanism in place so that individuals can get the mistake Fixed Right Now(TM)? Strangely, I've never seen any mention of such a mechanism. Bizarrely, but based on personal experience, it is actually this "genuine mistake" problem that I fear most about the NIR and ID card scheme. (This is not to say that deliberate abuse, civil liberties, costs and so on are not also legitimate objections.)
And there was me thinking it was just because sensible quoting was far more efficient and effective as a means of communication...
Bandwidth at the local level can't meaningfully be traded, of course, but consider the impact on higher tiers. If the entire world (or even an entire country) starts telecommuting overnight because of something like bird flu, the demands on the backbone systems are going to rocket, and perhaps more significantly, a lot more upstream bandwidth is likely to be needed. All those finely-tuned caching algorithms for popular web sites won't help much with that.
I'm not an American. In fact, I've never been there, and I strongly disapprove of their current administration's policies on many counts. I was simply telling it like it is, so please take your righteous indignation and rant it at someone else.
No, but you can reasonably be expected to know that giving away two copies of a DVD box set for no charge is not the intended offer when you've just clicked through a page with "Buy one, get one free" written in big letters on it.
On general principles, I would agree with you, give or take shipping vs. delivery issues and the like. As far as I know, so would the law in most places. caveat vendor.
However, I'm not quite clear about the details here, and there could be an interesting twist if the customer really did pay nothing for the goods. Contracts generally require consideration in both directions, and I imagine Amazon's lawyers could build some sort of legal argument if Amazon received absolutely no payment for the goods.
You could also throw in some wording about bad faith on the part of consumers going for a deal that was obviously too good to be true and not what Amazon intended, particularly if the offer that was meant to be available was clearly advertised.
I'd guess we've got to a decent case by now. Frankly, I wouldn't have a problem with that. Contract law often protects consumers from unreasonable terms imposed by mass market vendors or service companies. I don't see why the same principle shouldn't apply in reverse as well. Amazon should be responsible for any expenses incurred by customers in returning both sets if they don't want the intended deal, of course; that's the price you pay for screwing up. But I will have little sympathy for any customers who were deliberately taking advantage and now find they can't.
That depends on whether you use your recordable media for downloaded music. Personally, I use it for back-ups. I'm pretty glad my country doesn't make me pay media cartels who don't even produce much that I want to listen to, before I can back-up my e-mail.
You forgot William Shatner.
But then you have to whitelist Canada for Elisha Cuthbert and Evangeline Lilly, for whom many sins can be forgiven. ;-)
When another large country or a group of smaller countries develop enough backbone to stand up to the US militarily and economically. Until then, the US can have it both ways, because it's the biggest boy in the gang.
The transport costs would be negligible. Politicians, being full of hot air, can float independently over land or sea. They require a bit of a push to get them out over the water, but then one well-placed shot each to deflate them would drop them in.
I can't help feeling that the tone of these UAC jokes is very generous. Personally, I'd have gone for a more traditional:
Windows Vista detected.
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
It's only cheating if you get caught, though. ;-)
Really? I've never seen anyone do that...
No, sorry, that can't be right. I'm sure SCO wrote the Linux kernel. I read a news piece about it, right after the one where Al Gore invented the Internet!
Actually, that's not necessarily true. In contract law, for example, typically both parties must understand what they are agreeing to for the contract to be binding.
In any case, the burden of proof here is clearly on Google: if the relevant copyright laws do not give an exemption for whatever they are doing and they rely on implied consent, they must demonstrate that such consent has implicitly been given. That can hardly be the case when the copyright holder was unaware of a mechanism and hasn't expressed a preference either way through that mechanism.
I think there are a few flaws in your argument.
Well, robots.txt is hardly an accepted custom. Even the most official definitions indicate that it is a voluntary protocol. Moreover, the majority of people putting content on websites have probably never heard of it. Either of those facts alone should be enough to disqualify it as a serious suggestion in this context.
The implied consent argument is fine, but you're only implying consent for as long as the material is freely available from your server. If you remove it, you pretty much remove any argument of implied consent as well.
On the contrary. I don't quite understand the Slashdot groupthink on Google, with which you seem to be agreeing, at the moment. There were big web sites before Google, that don't need any help from Google to attract hits. There are other big search engines than Google, which don't offer the equivalent of a Google Cache facility and simply index the web as search engines always have. Being delisted from Google is not suicide for a web site. You are making a big assumption that being covered by Google Cache is in the business's interests. In the case at hand -- where Google Cache is continuing to display information that has been deliberately removed by the provider -- clearly it is not in the business's interests for Google to do this, and being delisted from all Google services may well be preferable.
The correct response to that action, IMNSHO, is to change absolutely nothing about your local laws, and wait for Google to suffer death by 1,000 market share reductions at the hands of Yahoo et al. The alternative is overturning an entire established, broadly successful legal doctrine throughout the world, just because one overvalued and overhyped US company doesn't like it. This would not exactly be a healthy precedent, would it?
What a silly thing to say. Google don't even have a monopoly on the search engine market, and there are plenty of sites so big that no-one ever needs a search engine to find them.
Did someone forget to RTFA? Or even the summary, in fact?
That depends on how the proxy works. Consider each case on its merits. A proxy server that faithfully reproduces an entire page in exactly its original form is potentially depriving the original host of some useful information in their server logs with any damage that brings, but that's about the total extent of the harm done, and no advantage is being taken by the proxy service. That is not the case here, however.
Given that I'm careful with my primary e-mail address, but in recent months I've been hit with huge amounts of spam sent to [firstname]@[domain], your argument is kinda flawed.
I disagree.
Google Cache doesn't cache everything: look at how they deal with pictures, for a start. IIRC the information disappears after a while, too.
Also, from personal research based on a long-standing web site I've worked on, archive.org can't even manage a single remotely accurate reproduction of the home page from any point over the past five or so years. It does, however, provide several completely screwed-up versions, with missing files, broken layouts, and mismatched information that would make the site look bad if anyone saw them and thought that was what the site ever looked like.
These are hardly invaluable resources. They are, however, a drain on someone else's resources, and a misrepresentation of how things used to be that could do more harm than good.
I couldn't disagree more. If we scrapped the legally dubious, functionally flawed and ethically challenged menaces we had now, we could start replacing them with a widely-supported, opt-in convention that could be the basis for much better replacement services with none of the major problems we have today.
Except that Google is not the only way to find pages on the web. In fact, most of the popular news sites predate it by some time, and if Google died tomorrow, I don't imagine many of them would even notice the dent in their page views.