It's actually worse than that. Failing to compact folders will eventually result in bugs and apparent data loss, requiring higher order geek hackery to restore what's left.
Moreover, if you do switch on the prompt to compact folders automatically, it comes up so regularly that it makes Vista's password prompt for system-wide settings seem positively user-friendly. Also, the explicit menu command to compact folders sometimes does nothing, with no indication of why; I assume this is a bug, since it often seems to do nothing even if there's stuff to do.
Seriously, it's nearly 2007. Remind me again why users should ever have to care about this sort of implementation detail?
I think you make many valid points about the nature of today's e-mail infrastructure. Certainly there is no inherent need for things like spam filtering to be done in the reader software, for example.
On the other hand, I also find the classic UNIX mail set-up to be incredibly unwieldy: variations of not-quite-standard file and directory structures, many completely independent programs that have to be strung together in ways that don't always fit very well with little commonality in interface or approach, far too much complexity in numerous command line tools, etc.
I'm sure there is a happy medium somewhere, where the overall system is made up of components running on client and/or server as appropriate, but those components are consistent and designed to fit together. I think this modular approach would be necessary for any improvement on today's approach, simply because not everyone will have the same requirements.
(Incidentally, I'd like to read your comments about Word some time, too. I've often argued that many things could be done better than Word does them, and that contrary to conventional wisdom, there is a huge market out there just waiting for someone to do it right. This is obviously O/T for this thread, but if you've got a link to where your blog will be when it's back up, I'd be interested.)
Even without the extensions, it never even occurred to me that this was a problem or difficult to use until I read the article and comments here. I routinely send mail from two different ISPs for personal use, and from several official addresses at domains belonging to groups I help to run. In all, I probably have eight or nine accounts set up, and several different incoming and outgoing servers to deal with. It might have taken me a minute or two to find the SMTP server options when I first started using Thunderbird and needed a second account, but making out like it's some fatal flaw is just silly.
I know what you're saying, and like countless other people responsible for web sites, I've heard the arguments many times. The thing is, that lot isn't enough reason for many people/organisations to spend a lot of time and money switching away from a table-based site that works well and is tried and tested. And of course, it's not as one-sided as your post might suggest: CSS brings problems of its own, as exemplified by countless sites that have tips on how to achieve trivial layout effects to varying degrees of reliability using this or that CSS hack.
For new web sites, IME the small advantages make it worth going with CSS from the start. But for established sites, all the arguments you gave really aren't worth that much, aside from the accessibility ones for some sites. This may not be the "accepted wisdom" in some parts of the web design community, but accepted wisdom does not a business case make.
While I agree that some of the concepts you mention could be useful, I don't see that Javascript's implementations are particularly powerful or elegant.
It's hard to comment on the function-attaching example you gave, since obviously any real implementation of most languages already has functions such as those you describe. In general, however, I've found these dynamic features to be overhyped, and usually no substitute for having a decent design in the first place. I don't miss them in languages where they aren't there.
As for the scoping and closure stuff, IMHO having first class functions in a language is a big plus. Javascript's version always seems a bit like Functional Programming Lite, though: in real functional programming languages, the rules on scoping and such tend to be absolutely clear, and the syntax clean and powerful. So-called scripting languages tend to try but fail on this count here; Javascript is certainly not alone in the field.
I'm not sure if I completely agree with the implication that hardware infrastructure and network reliability trumps usability. For me, a site that is designed badly or behaves badly on the browser side is a greater offense than a site that loads a little slower than most.
Ah, but you're not in the server hardware business. From the business name, it sounds like the guy you were quoting (whose company commissioned the study) is in exactly that business.
Navigation is but a portion of layout. Other studies have shown that the brain subconsciously identifies all the major areas of a web page (header, navigation, main content, ancillary content) in 1/20 of a second after the page loads, and that the common practice of placing navigation/secondary content a left-hand column causes people to ignore anything in the right-side column (a phenomenon known as "right side blindness"), because people have learned that most of the time, what's in the right-hand column is less related (if it's relevant at all) to their task at hand... typically third party banners or other cruft.
In one of the few articles worth reading on UseIT in recent years, Jakob Nielsen describes the results of their eye-tracking studies into how users read web pages as an "F" shape. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when you look at some real pages with the eye-tracking data, you see a combination of several effects: the user typically scans across for selected lines (headings?) but less so as they get further down the page, scans the left side of the main column and any extra column to the left (usually menus?), and will also focus on obviously relevant boxes to the right (shopping carts? menus?). IMHO it's worth a read if you're interested in this sort of thing.
I hope that the conclusion is that modern, CSS driven, user-centric designs are less stress inducing than bloated, image-laden table layouts, but I get the feeling that the reseearchers aren't prepared to commit to saying it.
I hope they wouldn't. After all, why should a user see any difference at all between CSS-driven and table-layout-driven sites, if the tools are used to generate the same effect? (Please don't tell me the research is really about accessibility, which is the only compelling reason I have so far seen for moving to CSS if you have an existing table-based layout on your site that works acceptably. The rest is mostly hype IME, usually proposed by people with a vested interest.)
You may have be making fair use of a work you have if you copy select parts of it for the sorts of purpose you mentioned. That doesn't give you any sort of right to rip a copy of the entire work first, which is blatant copyright infringement if you don't have the appropriate rights, or permission from whoever does.
I think the parent poster has pretty much hit the nail on the head. Many recent technological advances have the potential to invade privacy, from our photography subject here, to CCTV, to government databases. However, the problem isn't usually the individual items of data, but the way that data can be combined together and processed to gain new insights. Someone seeing me in the street while I'm shopping is one thing. Someone following me around and recording everywhere I go would be creepy.
Personally, and before it's too late, I think it is necessary for high laws to be established that recognise the dangers posed by mass storage and data processing systems, if only the traditional limitations where such processing was not possible are maintained. With no disrespect to our street photographer posters here, the right to privacy is more important, in many people's eyes, than your rights of free expression (which, contrary to someone's earlier whinge about the first amendment, are not absolute and never have been).
The damage that will be done to society if recent trends for mining personal data are not regulated is huge, and if that means you can't photograph people in a street and then publish the images without rendering people unrecognisable, I'm afraid I consider that an insignificantly small price to pay.
So even if you don't put your photo on Flickr because you are afraid of being identified by search engine there is nothing stopping me from putting it up there for you.
I strongly suggest that anyone planning to do this check with a lawyer in their jurisdiction first. In many places, here in the UK for example, the privacy laws are a bit of a mess, and it is not necessarily an offence to take a random photograph in a public place for private use just because that photograph contains someone recognisable. However, as soon as you start publishing the photo, using it for any commercial purpose, or violate any of countless other restrictions, all kinds of privacy- and data protection-related laws start creeping up around you. Given that whether a person's private life is significantly impacted can be a criteria for assessing whether an action was illegal (see the European Convention on Human Rights, for example), if you did take a recognisable photo of them without their consent and put it on the 'net, and it did later cause them problems, you could be in all kinds of legal trouble.
I do agree with much of what you're saying. Perhaps I'm just more naive/optimistic/hopeful.:-)
The Tories are losing a lot of grass root votes over Cameron's left wing crap, and "Hug a Hoodie" isn't helping. It's a shame Portillo left, a Tory party full of ideas like his would be something worth voting for.
I'm not sure that's why they're losing the momentum they gained from Cameron taking over. I suspect still not announcing much in the way of real policy a year later has more to do with it. On the other hand, I think the Tory top brass are being quite clever about this: short of a snap general election (something Labour are pretending to consider) voter opinion today doesn't really matter all that much. It's what they think in a couple of years that will start to count, and if the Tories have come up with some suitably voter-pleasing sound-bites by then, they'll probably kick Brown's arse halfway to redundancy in the next general election. What they really need is someone charismatic and frank to the point of being credible to front them. Wait... Boris for PM!:-):-)
The only practical way to get power slightly back to the people in the UK is to enforce secret voting in Parliament. No danger of being whipped then.
Unfortunately, also no way of being held accountable by the electorate, who won't know whether you actually stood up and voted for anything you claimed to support once you'd been elected.
Personally, the more I think about this, the more I conclude that I'd want two elected chambers, with the second having long electoral cycles, staggered and based on some form of PR, with no power to propose new legislation but an absolute veto over the first house. This way someone gets to form the administration and make the decisions, but there is always a barrier to anything that is clearly a step too far. Combine that with a written constitution, a court with the authority to strike down unconstitutional legislation, and effectively-financed, current-administration-independent oversight of secretive government organisations such as the police and security services (which we have to some extent in some cases now, but not uniformly enough for my taste) and we would have some semblance of real representation of the people.
We'd also solve problems like the case at hand rather simply with this framework, since the spirit of copyright can be expressed rather concisely, and in cases like these it's usually pretty clear who is deliberately flouting the law on a technicality and who is just caught in the cross-fire. Moreover, if court cases do not need to set detailed precedents because the principles are all that is codified and a court cannot change those, one silly result that catches an unfortunate ISP won't kill the whole Internet industry in a country!
What I'd really like, in a perfect world, is to see government compelled to introduce no more than 10 laws per year, each of which must be a statement of principle written in plain English and no longer than one printed page, with courts required to try cases against the spirit of the law (since that's pretty much all you could codify) in light of the specifics of any given case and with the overriding priority of interpreting the law so justice is served. But even in the season of miracles, that won't happen.:-(
Yes, the tax was changed to something even more unfair, which charges pensioners in the house they lived in all their lives more the mass-resource-using family of 6.
I agree that Council Tax is wildly unfair, as are most other local taxes that have been proposed, for one reason or another. That's not really relevant to my point, though, which was simply that enough people dislike something enough, it will change.
At best it'll slow things down slightly, over the mid to long term, the tide won't be turned against big buisness, it never has.
What a terribly defeatist attitude. In recent years, we've seen massive upheaval for businesses post-Enron, boardroom culls becoming more common, increases in business taxes and statutory minimum standards for employee compensation, and so on. It's not nearly as one-sided as you seem to think.
They'll compromise on a DNA database and centralisation over passports and driving licenses, which is an ID card to practically everyone anyway. Besides, driving licenses are going european in 6 years.
I doubt it. My "think of the children" trumps your "FEAR THE TERRORISTS!" on the DNA database. And the European driving licence is nothing like the proposed horror that is ID cards + NIR in the UK.
2 million? That number just goes up and up. Besides, what about the other 58 million that didn't march? Where was the massive swing to libdems in the 2005 election? If the war was important to enough people, why are Labour still in power?
The figure was the one widely quoted in the UK media at the time, and frequently since. My MP is now a Lib Dem, who toppled a long-established New Labour toadie who went into the last general election with a huge majority. Labour are still forming the government because our electoral system is corrupt: they lost the popular vote in England, and only held onto office because of MPs from neighbour countries whose votes on England-only issues will not in general affect their own electorates. Even without that, it's absurd that a government that took only around 1/3 of the popular votes cast can hold an absolute majority in Parliament, and calls for reform of the Commons as well as the (unelected) Lords are starting to get louder.
War was in 2003, Blair is still in power in 2006, doesn't seem a direct cause and effect to me.
Blair is still in office. He hasn't been in power for at least a year. His party stood by him long enough to get a third term, because kicking out your leader just before a general election is electoral suicide whoever he is. (Many Labour candidates did actively avoid using him in their campaigns, however; in fact, Charles Kennedy was the only major party leader who was regarded as a net asset by his parliamentary candidates before the last election, and he got kicked out under dubious circumstances shortly afterwards, something many of his party have since regretted.)
Today, Blair faces backbench rebellions on key legislation, causing him to lose votes for the first time since 1997, and has had to force through other manifesto commitments under a three-line whip in the face of popular opposition that would have seen enough MPs rebelling to defeat the motion otherwise.
Internationally, Blair's reputation is "Bush's poodle". Locally, Blair's reputation is the lame duck waiting for Brown to take over. His political credibility is gone, his influence on policy almost negative. Many of his pet "legacy" projects, like ID cards, are going down the pan rapidly (witness the latest stage of the U-turn on the NIR plans just today, and many other related but quietly-made announcements in recent months). Basically, Blair is toast, so is his whole New Labour vision, and the best Brown can hope for if he is crowned Prime Minister is to undo the damage and separate himself from the legacy in
I understand your concern, and from what I've experienced it certainly appears that the US has more of a problem here than the UK does, for now at least. It's telling that some sort of campaign finance reform seems to be permanently on the legislative agenda permanently in every major jurisdiction (we're doing it too, about loans to political parties, right now) yet never goes anywhere.
The thing is, people can still find out about politics without mass media; they've just forgotten how, because it's easier to read soundbites in the Daily Mail or watch FOX News. Politicians who wanted to get elected used to have to go out, meet the people, and build grass roots support. They'd get elected locally, and supporters of their values further afield would notice, and help elect them to higher office later on by publicising for them. This requires relatively little money and is pretty much immune to Big Media bias, but it requires a personal touch that takes a lot of hard work, and most politicians today go for the easy option of buying Big Media coverage instead.
As long as people accept that as their primary/only source of information about politicians, and don't care enough to look any deeper before marking their X, we're screwed. But the Internet is a great equaliser, as many a little-known software house, music artist or Google founder can tell you, and the best advertising has always been word-of-mouth. If a few politicians with any integrity and values people want to vote for started taking advantage of these opportunities, they could seriously upset the political landscape. Again, I personally believe that this is only a matter of time, that the spin doctors' days are numbered, and that the world will be a much nicer place when we have more considered, representative politics and less sound-bite-driven mass-media crap.
After all, it's the season of miracles. A man can dream, can't he?:-)
Fortunately for all of us, the whole "no, no, you have to do this is the eeeeevil terrrrrorists will get us" argument carries about as much credibility as Tony Blair or GW Bush these days, and is rapidly becoming a ticket to not being reelected...
Yes, I've argued similarly myself in the past. The sooner things get so bad that the guy in the street starts to notice, the sooner things will change.
Actually, there are several examples here in the UK where popular discontent has resulted in major changes in government policy in recent years. The Poll Tax fiasco led to a popular revolt, the law being changed, and a landslide victory to another political party. The petrol protests a few years ago brought the country to a standstill, cost businesses a huge amount of money, and led to the government changing its tax policy despite this being a favourite cash cow at the Treasury. The Gowers Review of IP, discussed here just last week, proposes several significant shifts in the IP landscape, not all of which are big-business friendly (software patents and copyright extensions receiving strongly worded objections, for example). As I said before, I won't be surprised if DRM-type technologies are next for the chop, though the government could lose the whole ID card and "anything in the name of fighting terrorism" issue first. The only major exception I can think of in recent years is the Iraq War, where 2 million protestors marching in our capital city did not result in Blair backing down, and the fact that it has cost him his job and his party most of its political power will be little comfort to those suffering as a result.
That aside, your whole argument has one fundamental problem: businesses don't vote, people do. Until you have a political system so corrupt that businesses do get a vote like citizens -- and this has never happened anywhere, to my knowledge -- the support of businesses and lobby groups is only as good as their money. Sure, that buys advertising and that buys swing votes, but upset enough of the people often enough and you'll be out of office, no matter how much big business may like you. This holds even in the business-friendly US, and much more so in countries without the obvious two-party bias the US currently suffers in its electoral system.
The entertainment/military/industrial complex is working with the big telcos to make sure Slashdot becomes a quaint throwback to the days of open internet. Sure there will still be geeks pining about the days when any old body could put up a web site that could get the same attention as one put up by Sony, and a couple of nobodies could come up with a Google, but face it, that's just not the way of the world.
I'll take that bet. My money's on the world.
Historically, it has been common for industries, laws, and other Big Systems to favour the corporations in new endeavours. Twice armed is he who knows his cause is just, but thrice armed is he who gets his blow in first, and all that. Let's face it, corporations with their huge financial and lobbying power tend to be pretty quick off the mark at stealing an advantage over the public. Perhaps more to the point, until they try it, the public don't know what they have to protect themselves against.
But a little further down the line, perhaps 5-10 years for the things I can think of off the top of my head, the public always win. The next big swing I'm expecting is for DRM, when the public start to realise that they've been had. DRM is relatively safe as long as it doesn't annoy the average person and only geeks see what's wrong with it, but it's been getting serious for a few years now. As people's first MP3 players start dying or they upgrade their PCs and they realise they can't take their music collection with them, as people who spent a fortune on early HDTVs get told they can't watch HD discs they paid a premium for at any better resolution than a normal DVD because of something called HDCP, as people whose legitimately purchased software starts deactivating itself in a case of mistaken identity and costing them or their business time and money... Then the people will cease to accept it, DRM will become a political timebomb, and the politicians and lawyers will turn on the tech and media companies who advocate DRM like piranha in a frenzy. It always ends this way, when something good is corrupted by corporate interests; it's only a matter of time.
For someone so keen on hard evidence, you're making a mighty big jump from what affects individuals who are screwed up enough to kill someone with a firearm and what affects a profit-making business. If you make something painful enough in financial terms, businesses will tend not to do it. Short of making the executives personally liable -- which would be no more constructive anyway by your own argument -- what better incentive would you suggest?
Typically, the vendor is responsible for the loss if they permit a card transaction and it gets challenged successfully by the card holder. If the vendor doesn't check the signature or PIN properly, it's not going to be the card company's loss.
The only major exception is if the vendor has correctly followed procedures laid down by the card companies to verify ID (e.g., collecting a signature and checking it against the card, or using the Chip and PIN machine). In this case, card companies typically limit how much a card can be used -- and particularly how much it can be used in different circumstances to the historical pattern -- before alarm bells start going off and the card holder gets a call asking them to confirm that the transactions are legit. I got such a call once just for using a credit card to buy a tank of petrol: I'd had the card for a couple of years, and usually used it only for on-line purchases of tech stuff, and according to the card company guy who called me, the sudden change to a use that's a favourite for casual card thieves was enough to trigger a confirmation call.
The upshot of all of this is that while a certain amount of money may be lost to serious fraudsters, it's a drop in the ocean compared to the total volume of transactions these companies deal with. Relative to reducing the number of card transactions in favour of either something less secure or just not doing the business, both of which would cost the card companies a fortune, the level of loss is considered acceptable. Whether you really signed for your shopping doesn't matter to them, because if you make what appears on a simple examination to be a legitimate complaint, then it's cheaper to pay you back your $15 or whatever than to investigate more fully.
Yep, absolutely. This is the way forward, and it's long overdue. Awards of 100% of real damages plus statutory punitive damages of $100 per victim per incident if negligence is demonstrated would do the trick real quick, I'd imagine.
Yes, governments have databases about the citizens of their countries, for tax purposes, medical purposes, driver licensing and so on. That in itself is not unreasonable, as long as the data collected is necessary for the purpose, properly and securely handled, with suitable checks made on those with access to it and confidentiality maintained.
The National Identity Register in the UK, however, will combine most of the existing government databases into a single, centralised point of failure. In practice, it will likely be the case that most government departments and many outside agencies will have access to all of the records about an individual, not just those they have reason to see.
A second major concern is that the NIR will track every time it is checked. That won't help with the identity theft problem that follows from the above, unless the security of access is near-perfect across many thousands of people with access to the database. It will, however, mean that once the national ID card becomes the "easy option" for identity verification, the government has a handy record of each citizen's entire life: where they shop, which financial services they've been using, jobs they've been applying for, where they've travelled and who with, etc. There is simply no need for any state organisation to keep this sort of information about any citizen, other than when conducting legitimate surveillance of a suspect for genuine security purposes, with independent oversight.
Identity thieves, however, already happy to be part of the fastest-growing and most profitable crime wave in recent history, have hit the jackpot. Just along the Slashdot front page from this story as I write this, there is another article estimating that 100 million personal information leaks have occurred within the past couple of years or so. If that combination isn't reason enough to stop the NIR plans right now, I don't know what kind of sanity prevails in the government's universe.
Kind of. You see, once you label him as a Windows user with the feathers, half an hour later what's left of him will be so small that you could transport or store it in a tiny fraction of the space originally required. Rumour has it that the algorithm is somewhat lossy, however.
And it's fun to see the look on the faces of the people who see them for the first time ("wtf ? is this some kind of joke ?")...:)
Except, of course, that suggesting such an absurdity is a good way to get yourself stopped and "checked out" by the guys at the control point when you land. As is making any sort of joke about the proceedings yourself.
In addition to the book recommendations, you might also like to introduce your students to the relevant Usenet newsgroups, particularly alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++. There are a lot of people on these groups willing to help out newbies with genuine questions, and the level of understanding and correctness is much higher than many other resources (including a lot of the books you'll find in a store). Usually, all they ask is that students make a genuine attempt to solve a problem or read up on a subject before asking questions about it, and since you said these were keen students that shouldn't be a problem.
Actually, terrorists often do carry ID. In fact, in most major terrorist attacks in the West since 9/11, the terrorists have been carrying genuine ID. The 9/11 hijackers used real ID to get on the planes. The Madrid train bombers had official ID. The London transport bombers were not using false ID.
This is why the whole ID card scheme business, both over in the US and here in the UK, is one big sham. In fact, our government has moved the goalposts so often, as each successive "justification" has been debunked, that I can't even remember what useful stuff they do think they'll achieve now.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually worse than that. Failing to compact folders will eventually result in bugs and apparent data loss, requiring higher order geek hackery to restore what's left.
Moreover, if you do switch on the prompt to compact folders automatically, it comes up so regularly that it makes Vista's password prompt for system-wide settings seem positively user-friendly. Also, the explicit menu command to compact folders sometimes does nothing, with no indication of why; I assume this is a bug, since it often seems to do nothing even if there's stuff to do.
Seriously, it's nearly 2007. Remind me again why users should ever have to care about this sort of implementation detail?
I think you make many valid points about the nature of today's e-mail infrastructure. Certainly there is no inherent need for things like spam filtering to be done in the reader software, for example.
On the other hand, I also find the classic UNIX mail set-up to be incredibly unwieldy: variations of not-quite-standard file and directory structures, many completely independent programs that have to be strung together in ways that don't always fit very well with little commonality in interface or approach, far too much complexity in numerous command line tools, etc.
I'm sure there is a happy medium somewhere, where the overall system is made up of components running on client and/or server as appropriate, but those components are consistent and designed to fit together. I think this modular approach would be necessary for any improvement on today's approach, simply because not everyone will have the same requirements.
(Incidentally, I'd like to read your comments about Word some time, too. I've often argued that many things could be done better than Word does them, and that contrary to conventional wisdom, there is a huge market out there just waiting for someone to do it right. This is obviously O/T for this thread, but if you've got a link to where your blog will be when it's back up, I'd be interested.)
Even without the extensions, it never even occurred to me that this was a problem or difficult to use until I read the article and comments here. I routinely send mail from two different ISPs for personal use, and from several official addresses at domains belonging to groups I help to run. In all, I probably have eight or nine accounts set up, and several different incoming and outgoing servers to deal with. It might have taken me a minute or two to find the SMTP server options when I first started using Thunderbird and needed a second account, but making out like it's some fatal flaw is just silly.
I know what you're saying, and like countless other people responsible for web sites, I've heard the arguments many times. The thing is, that lot isn't enough reason for many people/organisations to spend a lot of time and money switching away from a table-based site that works well and is tried and tested. And of course, it's not as one-sided as your post might suggest: CSS brings problems of its own, as exemplified by countless sites that have tips on how to achieve trivial layout effects to varying degrees of reliability using this or that CSS hack.
For new web sites, IME the small advantages make it worth going with CSS from the start. But for established sites, all the arguments you gave really aren't worth that much, aside from the accessibility ones for some sites. This may not be the "accepted wisdom" in some parts of the web design community, but accepted wisdom does not a business case make.
While I agree that some of the concepts you mention could be useful, I don't see that Javascript's implementations are particularly powerful or elegant.
It's hard to comment on the function-attaching example you gave, since obviously any real implementation of most languages already has functions such as those you describe. In general, however, I've found these dynamic features to be overhyped, and usually no substitute for having a decent design in the first place. I don't miss them in languages where they aren't there.
As for the scoping and closure stuff, IMHO having first class functions in a language is a big plus. Javascript's version always seems a bit like Functional Programming Lite, though: in real functional programming languages, the rules on scoping and such tend to be absolutely clear, and the syntax clean and powerful. So-called scripting languages tend to try but fail on this count here; Javascript is certainly not alone in the field.
Ah, but you're not in the server hardware business. From the business name, it sounds like the guy you were quoting (whose company commissioned the study) is in exactly that business.
In one of the few articles worth reading on UseIT in recent years, Jakob Nielsen describes the results of their eye-tracking studies into how users read web pages as an "F" shape. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when you look at some real pages with the eye-tracking data, you see a combination of several effects: the user typically scans across for selected lines (headings?) but less so as they get further down the page, scans the left side of the main column and any extra column to the left (usually menus?), and will also focus on obviously relevant boxes to the right (shopping carts? menus?). IMHO it's worth a read if you're interested in this sort of thing.
I hope they wouldn't. After all, why should a user see any difference at all between CSS-driven and table-layout-driven sites, if the tools are used to generate the same effect? (Please don't tell me the research is really about accessibility, which is the only compelling reason I have so far seen for moving to CSS if you have an existing table-based layout on your site that works acceptably. The rest is mostly hype IME, usually proposed by people with a vested interest.)
Um... No.
You may have be making fair use of a work you have if you copy select parts of it for the sorts of purpose you mentioned. That doesn't give you any sort of right to rip a copy of the entire work first, which is blatant copyright infringement if you don't have the appropriate rights, or permission from whoever does.
Personally, no, but it is how a lot of people are likely to make decisions. That's the point.
Fortunately, our experience with RBLs shows that they never make mistakes, and small businesses never get seriously hurt by them.
Ah, a good, old-fashioned protection racket. I'm so glad they're still alive and well, even in these high-tech times.
Yes, because small businesses are never successful unless they're scammers.
I think the parent poster has pretty much hit the nail on the head. Many recent technological advances have the potential to invade privacy, from our photography subject here, to CCTV, to government databases. However, the problem isn't usually the individual items of data, but the way that data can be combined together and processed to gain new insights. Someone seeing me in the street while I'm shopping is one thing. Someone following me around and recording everywhere I go would be creepy.
Personally, and before it's too late, I think it is necessary for high laws to be established that recognise the dangers posed by mass storage and data processing systems, if only the traditional limitations where such processing was not possible are maintained. With no disrespect to our street photographer posters here, the right to privacy is more important, in many people's eyes, than your rights of free expression (which, contrary to someone's earlier whinge about the first amendment, are not absolute and never have been).
The damage that will be done to society if recent trends for mining personal data are not regulated is huge, and if that means you can't photograph people in a street and then publish the images without rendering people unrecognisable, I'm afraid I consider that an insignificantly small price to pay.
I strongly suggest that anyone planning to do this check with a lawyer in their jurisdiction first. In many places, here in the UK for example, the privacy laws are a bit of a mess, and it is not necessarily an offence to take a random photograph in a public place for private use just because that photograph contains someone recognisable. However, as soon as you start publishing the photo, using it for any commercial purpose, or violate any of countless other restrictions, all kinds of privacy- and data protection-related laws start creeping up around you. Given that whether a person's private life is significantly impacted can be a criteria for assessing whether an action was illegal (see the European Convention on Human Rights, for example), if you did take a recognisable photo of them without their consent and put it on the 'net, and it did later cause them problems, you could be in all kinds of legal trouble.
I do agree with much of what you're saying. Perhaps I'm just more naive/optimistic/hopeful. :-)
I'm not sure that's why they're losing the momentum they gained from Cameron taking over. I suspect still not announcing much in the way of real policy a year later has more to do with it. On the other hand, I think the Tory top brass are being quite clever about this: short of a snap general election (something Labour are pretending to consider) voter opinion today doesn't really matter all that much. It's what they think in a couple of years that will start to count, and if the Tories have come up with some suitably voter-pleasing sound-bites by then, they'll probably kick Brown's arse halfway to redundancy in the next general election. What they really need is someone charismatic and frank to the point of being credible to front them. Wait... Boris for PM! :-) :-)
Unfortunately, also no way of being held accountable by the electorate, who won't know whether you actually stood up and voted for anything you claimed to support once you'd been elected.
Personally, the more I think about this, the more I conclude that I'd want two elected chambers, with the second having long electoral cycles, staggered and based on some form of PR, with no power to propose new legislation but an absolute veto over the first house. This way someone gets to form the administration and make the decisions, but there is always a barrier to anything that is clearly a step too far. Combine that with a written constitution, a court with the authority to strike down unconstitutional legislation, and effectively-financed, current-administration-independent oversight of secretive government organisations such as the police and security services (which we have to some extent in some cases now, but not uniformly enough for my taste) and we would have some semblance of real representation of the people.
We'd also solve problems like the case at hand rather simply with this framework, since the spirit of copyright can be expressed rather concisely, and in cases like these it's usually pretty clear who is deliberately flouting the law on a technicality and who is just caught in the cross-fire. Moreover, if court cases do not need to set detailed precedents because the principles are all that is codified and a court cannot change those, one silly result that catches an unfortunate ISP won't kill the whole Internet industry in a country!
What I'd really like, in a perfect world, is to see government compelled to introduce no more than 10 laws per year, each of which must be a statement of principle written in plain English and no longer than one printed page, with courts required to try cases against the spirit of the law (since that's pretty much all you could codify) in light of the specifics of any given case and with the overriding priority of interpreting the law so justice is served. But even in the season of miracles, that won't happen. :-(
I agree that Council Tax is wildly unfair, as are most other local taxes that have been proposed, for one reason or another. That's not really relevant to my point, though, which was simply that enough people dislike something enough, it will change.
What a terribly defeatist attitude. In recent years, we've seen massive upheaval for businesses post-Enron, boardroom culls becoming more common, increases in business taxes and statutory minimum standards for employee compensation, and so on. It's not nearly as one-sided as you seem to think.
I doubt it. My "think of the children" trumps your "FEAR THE TERRORISTS!" on the DNA database. And the European driving licence is nothing like the proposed horror that is ID cards + NIR in the UK.
The figure was the one widely quoted in the UK media at the time, and frequently since. My MP is now a Lib Dem, who toppled a long-established New Labour toadie who went into the last general election with a huge majority. Labour are still forming the government because our electoral system is corrupt: they lost the popular vote in England, and only held onto office because of MPs from neighbour countries whose votes on England-only issues will not in general affect their own electorates. Even without that, it's absurd that a government that took only around 1/3 of the popular votes cast can hold an absolute majority in Parliament, and calls for reform of the Commons as well as the (unelected) Lords are starting to get louder.
Blair is still in office. He hasn't been in power for at least a year. His party stood by him long enough to get a third term, because kicking out your leader just before a general election is electoral suicide whoever he is. (Many Labour candidates did actively avoid using him in their campaigns, however; in fact, Charles Kennedy was the only major party leader who was regarded as a net asset by his parliamentary candidates before the last election, and he got kicked out under dubious circumstances shortly afterwards, something many of his party have since regretted.)
Today, Blair faces backbench rebellions on key legislation, causing him to lose votes for the first time since 1997, and has had to force through other manifesto commitments under a three-line whip in the face of popular opposition that would have seen enough MPs rebelling to defeat the motion otherwise.
Internationally, Blair's reputation is "Bush's poodle". Locally, Blair's reputation is the lame duck waiting for Brown to take over. His political credibility is gone, his influence on policy almost negative. Many of his pet "legacy" projects, like ID cards, are going down the pan rapidly (witness the latest stage of the U-turn on the NIR plans just today, and many other related but quietly-made announcements in recent months). Basically, Blair is toast, so is his whole New Labour vision, and the best Brown can hope for if he is crowned Prime Minister is to undo the damage and separate himself from the legacy in
I understand your concern, and from what I've experienced it certainly appears that the US has more of a problem here than the UK does, for now at least. It's telling that some sort of campaign finance reform seems to be permanently on the legislative agenda permanently in every major jurisdiction (we're doing it too, about loans to political parties, right now) yet never goes anywhere.
The thing is, people can still find out about politics without mass media; they've just forgotten how, because it's easier to read soundbites in the Daily Mail or watch FOX News. Politicians who wanted to get elected used to have to go out, meet the people, and build grass roots support. They'd get elected locally, and supporters of their values further afield would notice, and help elect them to higher office later on by publicising for them. This requires relatively little money and is pretty much immune to Big Media bias, but it requires a personal touch that takes a lot of hard work, and most politicians today go for the easy option of buying Big Media coverage instead.
As long as people accept that as their primary/only source of information about politicians, and don't care enough to look any deeper before marking their X, we're screwed. But the Internet is a great equaliser, as many a little-known software house, music artist or Google founder can tell you, and the best advertising has always been word-of-mouth. If a few politicians with any integrity and values people want to vote for started taking advantage of these opportunities, they could seriously upset the political landscape. Again, I personally believe that this is only a matter of time, that the spin doctors' days are numbered, and that the world will be a much nicer place when we have more considered, representative politics and less sound-bite-driven mass-media crap.
After all, it's the season of miracles. A man can dream, can't he? :-)
Fortunately for all of us, the whole "no, no, you have to do this is the eeeeevil terrrrrorists will get us" argument carries about as much credibility as Tony Blair or GW Bush these days, and is rapidly becoming a ticket to not being reelected...
Yes, I've argued similarly myself in the past. The sooner things get so bad that the guy in the street starts to notice, the sooner things will change.
Actually, there are several examples here in the UK where popular discontent has resulted in major changes in government policy in recent years. The Poll Tax fiasco led to a popular revolt, the law being changed, and a landslide victory to another political party. The petrol protests a few years ago brought the country to a standstill, cost businesses a huge amount of money, and led to the government changing its tax policy despite this being a favourite cash cow at the Treasury. The Gowers Review of IP, discussed here just last week, proposes several significant shifts in the IP landscape, not all of which are big-business friendly (software patents and copyright extensions receiving strongly worded objections, for example). As I said before, I won't be surprised if DRM-type technologies are next for the chop, though the government could lose the whole ID card and "anything in the name of fighting terrorism" issue first. The only major exception I can think of in recent years is the Iraq War, where 2 million protestors marching in our capital city did not result in Blair backing down, and the fact that it has cost him his job and his party most of its political power will be little comfort to those suffering as a result.
That aside, your whole argument has one fundamental problem: businesses don't vote, people do. Until you have a political system so corrupt that businesses do get a vote like citizens -- and this has never happened anywhere, to my knowledge -- the support of businesses and lobby groups is only as good as their money. Sure, that buys advertising and that buys swing votes, but upset enough of the people often enough and you'll be out of office, no matter how much big business may like you. This holds even in the business-friendly US, and much more so in countries without the obvious two-party bias the US currently suffers in its electoral system.
I'll take that bet. My money's on the world.
Historically, it has been common for industries, laws, and other Big Systems to favour the corporations in new endeavours. Twice armed is he who knows his cause is just, but thrice armed is he who gets his blow in first, and all that. Let's face it, corporations with their huge financial and lobbying power tend to be pretty quick off the mark at stealing an advantage over the public. Perhaps more to the point, until they try it, the public don't know what they have to protect themselves against.
But a little further down the line, perhaps 5-10 years for the things I can think of off the top of my head, the public always win. The next big swing I'm expecting is for DRM, when the public start to realise that they've been had. DRM is relatively safe as long as it doesn't annoy the average person and only geeks see what's wrong with it, but it's been getting serious for a few years now. As people's first MP3 players start dying or they upgrade their PCs and they realise they can't take their music collection with them, as people who spent a fortune on early HDTVs get told they can't watch HD discs they paid a premium for at any better resolution than a normal DVD because of something called HDCP, as people whose legitimately purchased software starts deactivating itself in a case of mistaken identity and costing them or their business time and money... Then the people will cease to accept it, DRM will become a political timebomb, and the politicians and lawyers will turn on the tech and media companies who advocate DRM like piranha in a frenzy. It always ends this way, when something good is corrupted by corporate interests; it's only a matter of time.
For someone so keen on hard evidence, you're making a mighty big jump from what affects individuals who are screwed up enough to kill someone with a firearm and what affects a profit-making business. If you make something painful enough in financial terms, businesses will tend not to do it. Short of making the executives personally liable -- which would be no more constructive anyway by your own argument -- what better incentive would you suggest?
They realise it, they just don't care.
Typically, the vendor is responsible for the loss if they permit a card transaction and it gets challenged successfully by the card holder. If the vendor doesn't check the signature or PIN properly, it's not going to be the card company's loss.
The only major exception is if the vendor has correctly followed procedures laid down by the card companies to verify ID (e.g., collecting a signature and checking it against the card, or using the Chip and PIN machine). In this case, card companies typically limit how much a card can be used -- and particularly how much it can be used in different circumstances to the historical pattern -- before alarm bells start going off and the card holder gets a call asking them to confirm that the transactions are legit. I got such a call once just for using a credit card to buy a tank of petrol: I'd had the card for a couple of years, and usually used it only for on-line purchases of tech stuff, and according to the card company guy who called me, the sudden change to a use that's a favourite for casual card thieves was enough to trigger a confirmation call.
The upshot of all of this is that while a certain amount of money may be lost to serious fraudsters, it's a drop in the ocean compared to the total volume of transactions these companies deal with. Relative to reducing the number of card transactions in favour of either something less secure or just not doing the business, both of which would cost the card companies a fortune, the level of loss is considered acceptable. Whether you really signed for your shopping doesn't matter to them, because if you make what appears on a simple examination to be a legitimate complaint, then it's cheaper to pay you back your $15 or whatever than to investigate more fully.
Yep, absolutely. This is the way forward, and it's long overdue. Awards of 100% of real damages plus statutory punitive damages of $100 per victim per incident if negligence is demonstrated would do the trick real quick, I'd imagine.
Yes, governments have databases about the citizens of their countries, for tax purposes, medical purposes, driver licensing and so on. That in itself is not unreasonable, as long as the data collected is necessary for the purpose, properly and securely handled, with suitable checks made on those with access to it and confidentiality maintained.
The National Identity Register in the UK, however, will combine most of the existing government databases into a single, centralised point of failure. In practice, it will likely be the case that most government departments and many outside agencies will have access to all of the records about an individual, not just those they have reason to see.
A second major concern is that the NIR will track every time it is checked. That won't help with the identity theft problem that follows from the above, unless the security of access is near-perfect across many thousands of people with access to the database. It will, however, mean that once the national ID card becomes the "easy option" for identity verification, the government has a handy record of each citizen's entire life: where they shop, which financial services they've been using, jobs they've been applying for, where they've travelled and who with, etc. There is simply no need for any state organisation to keep this sort of information about any citizen, other than when conducting legitimate surveillance of a suspect for genuine security purposes, with independent oversight.
Identity thieves, however, already happy to be part of the fastest-growing and most profitable crime wave in recent history, have hit the jackpot. Just along the Slashdot front page from this story as I write this, there is another article estimating that 100 million personal information leaks have occurred within the past couple of years or so. If that combination isn't reason enough to stop the NIR plans right now, I don't know what kind of sanity prevails in the government's universe.
Kind of. You see, once you label him as a Windows user with the feathers, half an hour later what's left of him will be so small that you could transport or store it in a tiny fraction of the space originally required. Rumour has it that the algorithm is somewhat lossy, however.
Except, of course, that suggesting such an absurdity is a good way to get yourself stopped and "checked out" by the guys at the control point when you land. As is making any sort of joke about the proceedings yourself.
In addition to the book recommendations, you might also like to introduce your students to the relevant Usenet newsgroups, particularly alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++. There are a lot of people on these groups willing to help out newbies with genuine questions, and the level of understanding and correctness is much higher than many other resources (including a lot of the books you'll find in a store). Usually, all they ask is that students make a genuine attempt to solve a problem or read up on a subject before asking questions about it, and since you said these were keen students that shouldn't be a problem.
Actually, terrorists often do carry ID. In fact, in most major terrorist attacks in the West since 9/11, the terrorists have been carrying genuine ID. The 9/11 hijackers used real ID to get on the planes. The Madrid train bombers had official ID. The London transport bombers were not using false ID.
This is why the whole ID card scheme business, both over in the US and here in the UK, is one big sham. In fact, our government has moved the goalposts so often, as each successive "justification" has been debunked, that I can't even remember what useful stuff they do think they'll achieve now.