Remember, criticising the government is antisocial behavior. I mean you can't get much more antisocial than attacking the government, now can you?
Given that one of the few places in the UK where it is explicitly illegal to protest is right outside the Houses of Parliament, it seems you're right.:-(
Any conceivable implementation would only give access to relevant information for each type of user.
You don't think the government can conceive of a system that shares data more widely than is strictly necessary to achieve legitimate goals? What's the weather like on your planet, I'd like to emigrate?:-)
Britons should stop thinking of themselves as "subjects".
We don't. Whatever made you think we do?
Remember, most of us didn't even vote for the current administration, and it's only an electoral system so unrepresentative it makes the US collegiate system look unbiased that has allowed Blair and his cronies to remain in power for so long. Reform is long overdue, and this sort of rubbish (combined with unpopular subjects like Iraq, of course) may even be enough of a catalyst to force any party wanting to form the next government to commit to undertaking that reform.
Hey, I may not be a free man in today's society, but I can dream, can't I?
Now imagine they are all linked and i phone a single number and POOF.
So this would be like the bank that I moved to, which offered to transfer all my direct debits, salary payments etc. from my old bank account to the new one automatically? The one where they made such a mess of a simple process that after several weeks of grief, I went into my local branch, demanded to see the manager, and sat there while he phoned head office and asked them to stop, please? I then contacted all the organisations involved manually, correcting the screw-ups and updating the bank account details, in less time than it took to fix the bank transfer department's mess.
The problem with all these grand plans is that they're great in theory. If everything works, and the data never leaks, and only trustworthy people have access to the database, it's all fine. But what if this doesn't happen in practice? What legal requirement is there for the government to keep the information 100% secure? Where is the law that says I will automatically be refunded all expenses incurred as a result of any leak, in perpetuity? Where is the law that says a court will immediately dismiss any action taken against me by any government department as a result of an error the government made in the mega-database? How will they put the horse back in the stable if (when?) the information in the database leaks to ID thieves? Where is the law that says the government will disclose any such leak to me in timely fashion? Where is the law that says the government must provide a simple, effective and fast mechanism for me to correct errors in the database when I become aware of them? (If you're about to cite the Data Protection Acts, where is the funding to increase staff levels at the Office of the Information Commissioner by a factor of three so that they can meet the workload they already have under the DPA and FOIA?) Where is the guarantee that the contractors brought in to implement the scheme will complete it for the originally agreed amount of money, or that this original amount of money will be less than the savings made by switching to the new system? You get the idea: things that work in theory do not always work in practice.
It reminds me of the debate about having a national identity card.
I always find it odd that it's called a debate. Of course I can go only by my own experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, but I've never heard anyone except a politician and a few people on obviously biased on-line boards speak in favour of the government's proposals for ID cards and the National Identity Register. Moreover, those surveys I have seen that should be representative of the population as a whole suggest that in fact, most people here are unconvinced of the benefits.
Am I the only person who thinks a debate is what governments call presenting a fait accompli to the population, and letting it hit the papers for a few days so they can claim they consulted the people on the matter before proceeding to implement what they'd already decided to do anyway?
As for privacy. All the government agencies know this info anyway(or can get it).
No, they can't. Government is a big place (think what proportion of the population work for it!) and fortunately for us all, things aren't nearly as open as that today.
No, you couldn't, unless "whatever OS" only includes Windows and MacOS. It took many many years before licensed DVD player software appeared for Linux.
So in other words, what I wrote is pretty much right. It just wasn't right a few years ago.
People without A/V inputs on their TV (which wasn't that long ago) had similar problems trying to play DVDs through their VCRs.
My previous TV, until I upgraded a few months ago, was many years old, and even that had no trouble playing direct from the DVD player. You have to go back probably a decade or more to find TVs with no SCART sockets, and there aren't a lot of people still using such old TVs today. This is hardly comparable to the situation where someone who went out and bought an HDTV, whose main selling point was HD resolution, as little as a year ago, without HDCP, and now finds that they can't watch HD movies on their HD TV because of the DRM rubbish.
MANY people were predicting that with DVDs as well... After all, nobody will accept copy protection like DVD CSS.
Have you been following the thread at all? The point is that the DVD copy protection did not significantly inhibit the vast majority of legitimate users from basic use of the product. The HD versions may do so, particularly in markets where HDTVs didn't come with HDCP as standard for a long time. If it does, then that's likely to bring a consumer backlash with it.
This is the problem for consumers, and the cash cow for the media companies. Casual copying is fully fucking legal!
Only in the US, where fair use laws are far more open than they are in most places, and only for personal use in any case. This isn't really the kind of copying that causes Big Media headaches, though, and they don't generally go after people who do it, legally or otherwise.
The big problem for Big Media is the professional fraudsters, but they won't stop them with DRM anyway. The other major concern is people giving casual copies to school friends, office colleagues etc. This is what they want to inhibit, and since most people aren't geeks, I'm guessing that mild DRM is probably quite effective at this.
Nobody cares about your guys arguments about DRM and it doesn't bother the customer.
Please read the other posts before ranting, Mr AC. My main point in this discussion is that the stuff they're using DRM for on HD media will bother the average consumer, and that this is why they are likely to suffer a backlash here where they got away with some basic copy protection on VHS, DVD, etc.
Using the same standard [for e-mail] for that is used for webpages makes a vast amount of sense.
No, it doesn't, for several reasons.
For a start, e-mail is a push medium, while the web is a pull medium. I am unlikely to accidentally receive a huge web page containing nothing but junk advertising by mistake; the closest you get is an e-commerce or review site that contains lots of banner ads. I am unlikely to accidentally receive a web page full of porn, or other material that may not be legal in my jurisdiction. If a web page is bloated and takes ages to load over a 56K modem (don't make the mistake of thinking everyone has high-speed Internet access; we are far from there yet) then I can stop it and go somewhere else, while most people don't know how to configure their e-mail client to ignore big spam mails and get to the important stuff.
Next up, about 99.999% of the web using public use a fully graphical browser (source: my backside). In contrast, a very significant proportion of e-mail users have text-only mail clients. This includes many in the academic community, increasing numbers of people who read e-mail on devices other than a desktop or laptop computer with a big screen, etc.
There are several other issues as well, but I think either of those alone is enough to refute your point. As a third and final point for now, not everyone uses Outlook to read mail, not by a long shot. If Microsoft play chicken here, I think they'll lose this one, just as Firefox tends to lose the standards argument with any non-geek who finds his bank/cinema/local shop web site doesn't render properly. "But it works with $POPULAR_ALTERNATIVE!" they will cry, as they wonder what this rubbish software on their computer is doing there and why stuff used to work and is now broken.
I think you miss the point. On-line distribution is a reality, and is not realistically going to stop. Therefore, in the long run, it will be more profitable for Big Media to take advantage of this. Things move slowly, but eventually businesses do get it, as iTMS and the like demonstrate. Why do you think anything different will happen with movies and the like?
Similarly, markets tend to accept crap for a while, but after a few years they get bored of putting up with it. Then a consumer backlash occurs, resulting in either a change in the products available or an exodus from the market. Just ask cinemas how business is going since large TVs and DVD players became common at home.
First you have to explain how the AACS DRM on HD-DVDs is any worse than CSS on DVDs...
The DRM technology is just a tool. The point is that what it's being used to prevent is different.
For example, the standard DRM used on DVDs inhibits copying. I can, however, put my DVD in any standard DVD player, or in my computer running whatever OS, and watch my movie/TV show/whatever. The most annoying things for many people are the disabling of user controls while the DVD runs trailers and copyright warnings, and the region coding, neither of which is really a copy protection issue per se.
With the HD stuff, on the other hand, the copy protection will get in the way even if you just want to watch your legally purchased movie. For example, if your new HDTV cost you $2,000 but dates from pre-HDPC-as-standard days (which really isn't that long ago) then your new HD-DVD or Blu-ray player isn't going to give you full-res output and you might as well have just bought the DVD. Don't even mention all the crap that's going into locking down Vista, inevitably a futile gesture that will be cracked anyway, but which will annoy a lot of legitimate users in the meantime by deliberately screwing up the video quality or blocking the audio output.
I predict, with considerable confidence, that if the big studios, Microsoft and everyone else involved push forward down this path, they will suffer the consumer backlash they have been avoiding so far. This is simply a matter of market forces. Upsetting the geeks who run Linux or want to duplicate the content onto another disk without the ads only gets a relatively small proportion of the market. Cutting off everyone with an HDTV older than a year or two -- basically, telling them that by being early adopters, they wasted their money, because they're never going to watch HD movies on that TV -- and screwing with the most popular desktop OS on the planet in a similar way? Those are going to have repercussions.
The Fair Use crowd has won Round One; now how will the industry respond?
It will send in a few lawyers. After a while, they will realise that their impact is negligible in the grand scheme of things: the DRM will continue to deter casual copying to some extent, but will continue to be impotent in preventing anyone determined to make a copy and willing to spend a little time on the 'net to find out how (or download a pre-ripped version).
Meanwhile, genuine customers will get seriously annoyed at the fact that DRM in HD-world has now moved beyond a minor inconvenience or ethical question as it was with things like DVDs, and into the realms of seriously impeding their enjoyment of the product they have legally purchased. A consumer backlash will result, with the effect that DRM becomes a "dirty word" 2-3 years from now, and distributors drop heavily-encumbered formats and go back to what works: a mostly hands-off scheme that's enough to deter casual copying by schoolkids but nothing that risks seriously impacting the marketability of their merchandise.
On the same sort of time scales, on-line distribution will reach a critical mass, and the movie distributors will adopt a second, parallel strategy where cheap, legal, unencumbered downloads are the norm. They will make their profit from on-line users through many small incomes, rather than the larger one-offs represented by (HD-)DVD purchases today. This will render illegal distribution channels mostly irrelevant, and the damage due to illegal copying will revert to being low-level noise as it mostly was before they started their current crusade anyway.
Hey, it's a new year and everyone else is making crystal ball predictions. Can't I have mine, too?:-)
Sealand claims some sort of special status, and has indeed seen off a couple of half-hearted attempts to get rid of it.
However, let's be serious for a minute. The UK does not recognise the independence of Sealand, which is entirely contained within UK national waters under international law. Seeing off the navy is a cute joke, but if anyone who "bought" the "nation" started seriously impeding UK interests, for example by flagrantly violating UK law, then the "nation" could cease to exist rather abruptly. More realistically, the government would probably just ship a few police officers over there, arrest everyone, and throw them in jail. You'd hear their cries of "You have no jurisdiction!" all the way to the police helicopter, of course.:-)
I saw a job ad yesterday that clearly stated that the application must have 2-6 years experience. Then went on to state "Candidates with 7 years or more of commercial IT experience are unlikely to be considered by this particular organisation".
In other news, Naive Management, Inc. was recently added to www.fuckedcompany.com, after consistent reports showed abysmal market response to their poor-quality products and they announced that everyone other than the board and the patent attorneys were being fired.
I've walked out of interviews at places where the technical people displayed the "I am god and you must impress me, pesant" mentality
You can do better than that, though. IME, those people are usually the ones who aren't actually very good at their thing. It's far more fun to demonstrate that your skill and expertise are vastly greater than those of your cocky interviewer in some suitably obvious way.
And if I was a complete dick, I'd just reject applications with no feedback whatsoever, not even a rejection letter. They're applying to me, I don't owe them anything, right?
Sure, but a little courtesy does no harm. If they have given up some of their valuable time to respond to your invitation to interview, the least you can do is send them a brief letter saying sorry but we're not going to offer you the job. You don't have to give reasons (and indeed your lawyers may ask you not to) but you don't have to leave a candidate wondering, either.
I submit this personal anecdote, for whatever it's worth. Last time I was applying for a job, I only interviewed at two places. For one, I'd applied speculatively six months earlier and been turned down politely; I now work there, and have since discovered that there genuinely wasn't a vacancy at my level before. In the other case, after spending much of a day visiting the company and talking to their staff, I was not sent so much as a courtesy "Thanks but no thanks" letter. As it happens, I wouldn't have taken the job anyway; I obviously wasn't going to like their corporate culture for various reasons. However, I know that at least two other people haven't even bothered applying since then because I mentioned my experience to them, and those two people might well have got on there if they'd been offered the job. In other words, it's a small world, and being an ass with one interview candidate may cost you another you'd have liked to recruit.
No, but given the number of business users who rely on MS Office and a few other key applications, and the number of home users who play games, I'm afraid your 35% is wildly optimistic. I'd guess it's nearer 1/10 of that, if you're lucky, and most of that is server-side rather than user desktop.
I think I agree with the underlying ideas of what you're saying, but I disagree with the comments about amateurs.
I don't play in an orchestra, but I do have a lot of experience in the world of dance. The current world champions in the style I dance turned professional recently, after winning the world amateur championships. In their first competition as professionals, I think they came fourth, i.e., although they were training as amateurs, they were comparable to the fourth best couple in the world by professional standards. Clearly this is the peak of achievement, something most of us can only aspire to, but the same pattern is repeated at lesser levels as well, with people reaching the top ranks of amateur competition in their country, turning pro, and almost immediately establishing a high ranking in pro competitions as well.
Perhaps more telling is that when organising events for my local club and looking for a couple to do a show, we've often found that top amateur couples give a more entertaining performance than some of the pros. Technically, they're not always quite as sharp (though this is by no means certain either way), but the passion and performance are all there, while sometimes it feels like a pro couple are just going through the motions. I've always put this down to the fact that the amateurs are doing it for love, not money. Every show is still a special occasion to them and not just earning enough cash to pay the rent, and they take pride in their performance and enjoy entertaining people for its own sake.
That love-or-money distinction applies to a great many fields, IME, and software is no exception. As numerous freeware, shareware, and open source apps have demonstrated over the years, amateur developers can be every bit as good as professionals, if they work effectively and (very importantly in this case) they collaborate well. IME, it's usually the latter that lets down larger-scale amateur software compared to professional stuff written by teams who are all working in the same place with professional management co-ordinating them.
Not only could they make a mistake, they could frame you, but then again, they could do that anyway.
Funnily enough, though I'm conscious of the risks of someone being set up, I'm more concerned in practice with the risks of simple human error. As I've described once or twice before around these parts, I wound up overpaying tax a few months into my first job, an amount that wouldn't be much to most of us but which was devastating to someone starting a career and actually losing money each month until his first pay rise. It took me three months to get the situation sorted out, after calls to several different tax offices, my company accountant, etc. etc. There was no advance warning -- the first I knew of the problem was when my pay cheque for the month was 100 short -- and clearly there was no effective mechanism in place to identify and fix the mistake. It all turned out to be caused by one person working in a tax office mistyping someone else's NI number (like an American SSN) and fluking mine instead. That person probably typed dozens, maybe hundreds, of such numbers every day, and I doubt there was any malice in their actions, but nevertheless it nearly wrecked my life for several months.
Perhaps this experience colours my personal perspective of the risks here, but I can honestly say that I don't know anyone who's been set up by our government here, while I know many people who have been the innocent victims of government mistakes. The malice, on the whole, comes from people like identity thieves, though of course a system like this (or, God forbid, the proposed National Identity Register in the UK) is crying out for abuse by these guys too.:-(
Slashdot Mirror
They can try, but I accept no responsibility for the consequences... :-)
Given that one of the few places in the UK where it is explicitly illegal to protest is right outside the Houses of Parliament, it seems you're right. :-(
You don't think the government can conceive of a system that shares data more widely than is strictly necessary to achieve legitimate goals? What's the weather like on your planet, I'd like to emigrate? :-)
We don't. Whatever made you think we do?
Remember, most of us didn't even vote for the current administration, and it's only an electoral system so unrepresentative it makes the US collegiate system look unbiased that has allowed Blair and his cronies to remain in power for so long. Reform is long overdue, and this sort of rubbish (combined with unpopular subjects like Iraq, of course) may even be enough of a catalyst to force any party wanting to form the next government to commit to undertaking that reform.
Hey, I may not be a free man in today's society, but I can dream, can't I?
So this would be like the bank that I moved to, which offered to transfer all my direct debits, salary payments etc. from my old bank account to the new one automatically? The one where they made such a mess of a simple process that after several weeks of grief, I went into my local branch, demanded to see the manager, and sat there while he phoned head office and asked them to stop, please? I then contacted all the organisations involved manually, correcting the screw-ups and updating the bank account details, in less time than it took to fix the bank transfer department's mess.
The problem with all these grand plans is that they're great in theory. If everything works, and the data never leaks, and only trustworthy people have access to the database, it's all fine. But what if this doesn't happen in practice? What legal requirement is there for the government to keep the information 100% secure? Where is the law that says I will automatically be refunded all expenses incurred as a result of any leak, in perpetuity? Where is the law that says a court will immediately dismiss any action taken against me by any government department as a result of an error the government made in the mega-database? How will they put the horse back in the stable if (when?) the information in the database leaks to ID thieves? Where is the law that says the government will disclose any such leak to me in timely fashion? Where is the law that says the government must provide a simple, effective and fast mechanism for me to correct errors in the database when I become aware of them? (If you're about to cite the Data Protection Acts, where is the funding to increase staff levels at the Office of the Information Commissioner by a factor of three so that they can meet the workload they already have under the DPA and FOIA?) Where is the guarantee that the contractors brought in to implement the scheme will complete it for the originally agreed amount of money, or that this original amount of money will be less than the savings made by switching to the new system? You get the idea: things that work in theory do not always work in practice.
I always find it odd that it's called a debate. Of course I can go only by my own experience, which may not be representative of the entire population, but I've never heard anyone except a politician and a few people on obviously biased on-line boards speak in favour of the government's proposals for ID cards and the National Identity Register. Moreover, those surveys I have seen that should be representative of the population as a whole suggest that in fact, most people here are unconvinced of the benefits.
Am I the only person who thinks a debate is what governments call presenting a fait accompli to the population, and letting it hit the papers for a few days so they can claim they consulted the people on the matter before proceeding to implement what they'd already decided to do anyway?
No, they can't. Government is a big place (think what proportion of the population work for it!) and fortunately for us all, things aren't nearly as open as that today.
Technically you're right, of course, but I suspect the vast majority of e-mail users have a different perspective.
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So in other words, what I wrote is pretty much right. It just wasn't right a few years ago.
My previous TV, until I upgraded a few months ago, was many years old, and even that had no trouble playing direct from the DVD player. You have to go back probably a decade or more to find TVs with no SCART sockets, and there aren't a lot of people still using such old TVs today. This is hardly comparable to the situation where someone who went out and bought an HDTV, whose main selling point was HD resolution, as little as a year ago, without HDCP, and now finds that they can't watch HD movies on their HD TV because of the DRM rubbish.
Have you been following the thread at all? The point is that the DVD copy protection did not significantly inhibit the vast majority of legitimate users from basic use of the product. The HD versions may do so, particularly in markets where HDTVs didn't come with HDCP as standard for a long time. If it does, then that's likely to bring a consumer backlash with it.
Only in the US, where fair use laws are far more open than they are in most places, and only for personal use in any case. This isn't really the kind of copying that causes Big Media headaches, though, and they don't generally go after people who do it, legally or otherwise.
The big problem for Big Media is the professional fraudsters, but they won't stop them with DRM anyway. The other major concern is people giving casual copies to school friends, office colleagues etc. This is what they want to inhibit, and since most people aren't geeks, I'm guessing that mild DRM is probably quite effective at this.
Please read the other posts before ranting, Mr AC. My main point in this discussion is that the stuff they're using DRM for on HD media will bother the average consumer, and that this is why they are likely to suffer a backlash here where they got away with some basic copy protection on VHS, DVD, etc.
No, it doesn't, for several reasons.
For a start, e-mail is a push medium, while the web is a pull medium. I am unlikely to accidentally receive a huge web page containing nothing but junk advertising by mistake; the closest you get is an e-commerce or review site that contains lots of banner ads. I am unlikely to accidentally receive a web page full of porn, or other material that may not be legal in my jurisdiction. If a web page is bloated and takes ages to load over a 56K modem (don't make the mistake of thinking everyone has high-speed Internet access; we are far from there yet) then I can stop it and go somewhere else, while most people don't know how to configure their e-mail client to ignore big spam mails and get to the important stuff.
Next up, about 99.999% of the web using public use a fully graphical browser (source: my backside). In contrast, a very significant proportion of e-mail users have text-only mail clients. This includes many in the academic community, increasing numbers of people who read e-mail on devices other than a desktop or laptop computer with a big screen, etc.
There are several other issues as well, but I think either of those alone is enough to refute your point. As a third and final point for now, not everyone uses Outlook to read mail, not by a long shot. If Microsoft play chicken here, I think they'll lose this one, just as Firefox tends to lose the standards argument with any non-geek who finds his bank/cinema/local shop web site doesn't render properly. "But it works with $POPULAR_ALTERNATIVE!" they will cry, as they wonder what this rubbish software on their computer is doing there and why stuff used to work and is now broken.
I think you miss the point. On-line distribution is a reality, and is not realistically going to stop. Therefore, in the long run, it will be more profitable for Big Media to take advantage of this. Things move slowly, but eventually businesses do get it, as iTMS and the like demonstrate. Why do you think anything different will happen with movies and the like?
Similarly, markets tend to accept crap for a while, but after a few years they get bored of putting up with it. Then a consumer backlash occurs, resulting in either a change in the products available or an exodus from the market. Just ask cinemas how business is going since large TVs and DVD players became common at home.
The DRM technology is just a tool. The point is that what it's being used to prevent is different.
For example, the standard DRM used on DVDs inhibits copying. I can, however, put my DVD in any standard DVD player, or in my computer running whatever OS, and watch my movie/TV show/whatever. The most annoying things for many people are the disabling of user controls while the DVD runs trailers and copyright warnings, and the region coding, neither of which is really a copy protection issue per se.
With the HD stuff, on the other hand, the copy protection will get in the way even if you just want to watch your legally purchased movie. For example, if your new HDTV cost you $2,000 but dates from pre-HDPC-as-standard days (which really isn't that long ago) then your new HD-DVD or Blu-ray player isn't going to give you full-res output and you might as well have just bought the DVD. Don't even mention all the crap that's going into locking down Vista, inevitably a futile gesture that will be cracked anyway, but which will annoy a lot of legitimate users in the meantime by deliberately screwing up the video quality or blocking the audio output.
I predict, with considerable confidence, that if the big studios, Microsoft and everyone else involved push forward down this path, they will suffer the consumer backlash they have been avoiding so far. This is simply a matter of market forces. Upsetting the geeks who run Linux or want to duplicate the content onto another disk without the ads only gets a relatively small proportion of the market. Cutting off everyone with an HDTV older than a year or two -- basically, telling them that by being early adopters, they wasted their money, because they're never going to watch HD movies on that TV -- and screwing with the most popular desktop OS on the planet in a similar way? Those are going to have repercussions.
It will send in a few lawyers. After a while, they will realise that their impact is negligible in the grand scheme of things: the DRM will continue to deter casual copying to some extent, but will continue to be impotent in preventing anyone determined to make a copy and willing to spend a little time on the 'net to find out how (or download a pre-ripped version).
Meanwhile, genuine customers will get seriously annoyed at the fact that DRM in HD-world has now moved beyond a minor inconvenience or ethical question as it was with things like DVDs, and into the realms of seriously impeding their enjoyment of the product they have legally purchased. A consumer backlash will result, with the effect that DRM becomes a "dirty word" 2-3 years from now, and distributors drop heavily-encumbered formats and go back to what works: a mostly hands-off scheme that's enough to deter casual copying by schoolkids but nothing that risks seriously impacting the marketability of their merchandise.
On the same sort of time scales, on-line distribution will reach a critical mass, and the movie distributors will adopt a second, parallel strategy where cheap, legal, unencumbered downloads are the norm. They will make their profit from on-line users through many small incomes, rather than the larger one-offs represented by (HD-)DVD purchases today. This will render illegal distribution channels mostly irrelevant, and the damage due to illegal copying will revert to being low-level noise as it mostly was before they started their current crusade anyway.
Hey, it's a new year and everyone else is making crystal ball predictions. Can't I have mine, too? :-)
Sealand claims some sort of special status, and has indeed seen off a couple of half-hearted attempts to get rid of it.
However, let's be serious for a minute. The UK does not recognise the independence of Sealand, which is entirely contained within UK national waters under international law. Seeing off the navy is a cute joke, but if anyone who "bought" the "nation" started seriously impeding UK interests, for example by flagrantly violating UK law, then the "nation" could cease to exist rather abruptly. More realistically, the government would probably just ship a few police officers over there, arrest everyone, and throw them in jail. You'd hear their cries of "You have no jurisdiction!" all the way to the police helicopter, of course. :-)
In other news, Naive Management, Inc. was recently added to www.fuckedcompany.com, after consistent reports showed abysmal market response to their poor-quality products and they announced that everyone other than the board and the patent attorneys were being fired.
You can do better than that, though. IME, those people are usually the ones who aren't actually very good at their thing. It's far more fun to demonstrate that your skill and expertise are vastly greater than those of your cocky interviewer in some suitably obvious way.
And then walk out. ;-)
Sure, but a little courtesy does no harm. If they have given up some of their valuable time to respond to your invitation to interview, the least you can do is send them a brief letter saying sorry but we're not going to offer you the job. You don't have to give reasons (and indeed your lawyers may ask you not to) but you don't have to leave a candidate wondering, either.
I submit this personal anecdote, for whatever it's worth. Last time I was applying for a job, I only interviewed at two places. For one, I'd applied speculatively six months earlier and been turned down politely; I now work there, and have since discovered that there genuinely wasn't a vacancy at my level before. In the other case, after spending much of a day visiting the company and talking to their staff, I was not sent so much as a courtesy "Thanks but no thanks" letter. As it happens, I wouldn't have taken the job anyway; I obviously wasn't going to like their corporate culture for various reasons. However, I know that at least two other people haven't even bothered applying since then because I mentioned my experience to them, and those two people might well have got on there if they'd been offered the job. In other words, it's a small world, and being an ass with one interview candidate may cost you another you'd have liked to recruit.
No, but given the number of business users who rely on MS Office and a few other key applications, and the number of home users who play games, I'm afraid your 35% is wildly optimistic. I'd guess it's nearer 1/10 of that, if you're lucky, and most of that is server-side rather than user desktop.
I think I agree with the underlying ideas of what you're saying, but I disagree with the comments about amateurs.
I don't play in an orchestra, but I do have a lot of experience in the world of dance. The current world champions in the style I dance turned professional recently, after winning the world amateur championships. In their first competition as professionals, I think they came fourth, i.e., although they were training as amateurs, they were comparable to the fourth best couple in the world by professional standards. Clearly this is the peak of achievement, something most of us can only aspire to, but the same pattern is repeated at lesser levels as well, with people reaching the top ranks of amateur competition in their country, turning pro, and almost immediately establishing a high ranking in pro competitions as well.
Perhaps more telling is that when organising events for my local club and looking for a couple to do a show, we've often found that top amateur couples give a more entertaining performance than some of the pros. Technically, they're not always quite as sharp (though this is by no means certain either way), but the passion and performance are all there, while sometimes it feels like a pro couple are just going through the motions. I've always put this down to the fact that the amateurs are doing it for love, not money. Every show is still a special occasion to them and not just earning enough cash to pay the rent, and they take pride in their performance and enjoy entertaining people for its own sake.
That love-or-money distinction applies to a great many fields, IME, and software is no exception. As numerous freeware, shareware, and open source apps have demonstrated over the years, amateur developers can be every bit as good as professionals, if they work effectively and (very importantly in this case) they collaborate well. IME, it's usually the latter that lets down larger-scale amateur software compared to professional stuff written by teams who are all working in the same place with professional management co-ordinating them.
And on off-days, it also sells breakfast cereals! ;-)
So you're saying we should play Star Trek games, but only the even-numbered ones?
Pretty much exactly like that, yes. :-(
Funnily enough, though I'm conscious of the risks of someone being set up, I'm more concerned in practice with the risks of simple human error. As I've described once or twice before around these parts, I wound up overpaying tax a few months into my first job, an amount that wouldn't be much to most of us but which was devastating to someone starting a career and actually losing money each month until his first pay rise. It took me three months to get the situation sorted out, after calls to several different tax offices, my company accountant, etc. etc. There was no advance warning -- the first I knew of the problem was when my pay cheque for the month was 100 short -- and clearly there was no effective mechanism in place to identify and fix the mistake. It all turned out to be caused by one person working in a tax office mistyping someone else's NI number (like an American SSN) and fluking mine instead. That person probably typed dozens, maybe hundreds, of such numbers every day, and I doubt there was any malice in their actions, but nevertheless it nearly wrecked my life for several months.
Perhaps this experience colours my personal perspective of the risks here, but I can honestly say that I don't know anyone who's been set up by our government here, while I know many people who have been the innocent victims of government mistakes. The malice, on the whole, comes from people like identity thieves, though of course a system like this (or, God forbid, the proposed National Identity Register in the UK) is crying out for abuse by these guys too. :-(
Confucius he say: man who believe others deserve no rights one day find others believe he deserve no rights.