How do things like support for PNG transparency make a developer's life more difficult?
I really dislike these "Firefox is da bom, IE7 sux0rz" type posts. Firefox is a great product, and my browser of choice at both home and work. That doesn't change the facts that its printing system is so broken as to be useless (I fired up IE last night to print off some reports from an intranet, because Firefox couldn't handle a simple table that extended beyond the end of a page) and that IE7 seems to render some aspects of our intranet in "true" fashion with no HTML or CSS changes required, where IE6 falls back on the usable-but-less-pretty degraded versions.
You seem to imply that they were in favour at the start of the poll, but somehow the poll informed them, aznd if they'd have been asked at the end of the poll, there answer would have been different.
I imply no such thing. It would be interesting to see whether the same proportions supported and disliked the general idea at the end of the survey. After all, it is basic psychology covered in any introductory statistics course that the phrasing and order of questions in a survey can profoundly affect the results achieved.
But what I really want to see is a survey of an informed and representative sample of the population, who have been presented with a reasonably balanced view of the issues, complete with objective, verifiable information and arguments both for and against each claim, and then given time to consider the implications. Nothing else really matters in this sort of discussion. Why would anyone except a politician care about the view of someone who hasn't bothered to research their subject before forming an opinion?
In fact, it's interesting that you have explicitly inferred, in two posts now, that because the survey results apparently agree with your view of this issue, those who took it are "well-informed about what an ID card will and will not do". Indeed, you are guilty of the very conceit you see in "mdwh2" and me: projecting your own views onto information that doesn't necessarily support them.
You show me a study that presents both the questions at the top of this post and the verifiable facts afterwards in a balanced way and then tells me the majority of the population wants ID cards
I can do better than that. I'll show you a poll that asked the ID question as the first question on the poll. No leading questions at all.
That isn't doing better; it's doing different.
I think perhaps I'm not making my main point clear here. I am not arguing that all the polls show people against ID cards as a general principle. Clearly this isn't true. Rather, I consider that what actually matters is how people would feel about the sorts of issues raised by the ID card and database scheme, if they were reasonably well-informed about the pros and cons of the proposals. I do not believe the sort of blanket statement polls we've been talking about give a useful indication of this.
Now, if the population wants to back the ID card scheme when it's well-informed about the details of what's involved, then fair enough. However, I don't believe it would. Let's look at the YouGov poll you cited yourself, as it's a great example of what I'm talking about.
The first question is generic, and got a favourable response, as you said. However, on specific questions about the actual scheme proposed, such as whether the system would be expensive, insecure, inaccurate, effective in reducing terrorism, beaten by determined criminals, cause an enormous amount of disruption and inconvenience, or be implemented using equipment that actually works, the views are strongly against the proposed scheme.
In fact, based on your own poll, the only specific areas where people expressed clear support for the scheme were in relation to benefit fraud/health tourism and catching bogus asylum-seekers. This is all well and good, but since even the most pessimistic estimates put annual losses due to such frauds well below the cost of the proposed ID card/NIR scheme, it's hardly a compelling argument in support of the cards. Moreover, the only strongly positive response to an ethical question was the belief that people who have nothing to fear have nothing to hide, which is a rather odd view given that the overwhelming majority believe the system will be flawed and subject to abuse. I'd like to see people answering the same question after watching an interview with a victim of identity theft.
The apparent contradictions here, where people express favourable views about the general idea yet disagree strongly when faced with the specifics, are common symptoms of what I'm talking about in this thread. You appear to take the view that the overall support for the generic principle is the important thing. I disagree: I think the responses to the specific questions are far more significant, and should have the stronger influence on any policy-making decisions.
Incidentally, as a small footnote, the crime stats you mentioned earlier are interesting as well. Does the British Crime Survey agree with the official government figures on those?
I hope your comment was of the straight latter meaning, not a sarcastic reference to the former.
Actually, I question the methodology they use for the polls in the first place. The vast majority of those I've seen cited in the media are government-funded, and carried out by the kind of organisation one hires when one already knows the result required.
Having seen the full list of questions they asked in a couple of cases, it usually goes something like this:
Do you believe terrorism is a threat to UK security?
Do you believe fraudulent benefit claims represent a significant drain on the UK economy?
Do you believe immigrants working illegally take jobs away from unemployed British citizens?
Do you believe identity theft is increasing at a rate of 500% per year?
Do you believe the UK government should introduce identity cards?
the cost of all of this is likely to run to billions of pounds (and until a couple of weeks ago the government consistently refused to give any quantitative estimate of the total cost of the system to all parties, and even the 5.4 billion pound figure in that article was immediately challenged by other parties who put the likely cost several times higher);
pretty much no major government IT project in recent British history has come in even close to on-time or on-budget, and there have been very expensive failures when projects were scrapped after years of development to cut losses
the civil liberties implications of the measures proposed are pretty horrendous.
You show me a study that presents both the questions at the top of this post and the verifiable facts afterwards in a balanced way and then tells me the majority of the population wants ID cards, and I'll believe my failure to encounter a single person who speaks favourably of them is just a matter of moving in different circles. Until then, it's just lying with statistics, and you can conduct as many polls as you like but still you have no meaningful information about how the population as a whole would feel on the issue if it had a balanced knowledge of the potential advantages and potential risks.
You might find that the typical slashdotter might go apeshit over ID cards, but you misrepresent the feelings of the English. Every single poll that's ever been done in the UK about ID cards has shown the majority to be in favour.
Most of us here in the UK are in favour of speed cameras and CCTV as well, according to the polls. It's funny how rarely one meets someone with such views, when more than half the population has them, isn't it?
If you put out a product that be essentially made worthless by a 160x160 jerky video, then you're doing something wrong. Either the value isn't there, or you don't have some added value for people to buy the DVD. I realize me saying this will piss you off, but its plain to pretty much everybody. You just refuse to acknowledge it.
The problem with your argument is that it's untenable. If there were no value in the material, people wouldn't nick it and put it on YouTube. OTOH, for most of these specialist videos, it's the teacher's insight and demonstration that has the value. There would be little point, to pick up your example, in putting a booklet about martial arts moves in with a DVD. As anyone who's played the game could readily tell you, the booklet probably wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on without the video (or a real life instructor, of course). But you can pick up what the teacher is doing at YouTube resolution almost as well as in DVD quality.
What it comes down to is, of course you can easily break copyright laws with today's technology. This isn't really in any doubt, regardless of any technological means the copyright holder might use to try and stop you or slow you down. You can break a lot of other laws easily, too. But just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. If we go down your path, all these people who produce this content will no longer have the incentive to do so, and the world will be the worse for its loss. That's why we have copyright in the first place.
When the copyright system was originated, you couldn't perfectly duplicate an entire work onto every desktop in the world within a matter of hours. Today's technology would make it trivial to do so. Do you really think the principle of copyright can be supported effectively by the enforcement measures of a century ago in today's Internet age?
Actually, Mr AC, my comment was based on direct personal experience, in more than one field, where I both know the teachers whose videos are being ripped and have personally experienced plenty of people talk about watching the demos on YouTube so they didn't have to buy the material. If you're trying to nick the choreography from a dance teaching DVD or see the demo on a martial arts video, the lower quality really doesn't mean jack. So in reality, based on direct personal experience, one problem with YouTube is exactly what I think it is. The fact that you personally may not have experienced anything other than mainstream stuff doesn't mean it's not going on.
The "small, specialist outfits" are precisely the ones who could benefit most from the huge, free exposure that a YouTube provides - they should be embracing this opportunity.
I'm sorry, but your logic escapes me. How does having your entire video/DVD catalogue available on someone else's web site help anyone except that someone else? This isn't promotion, or marketing. I've seen both sides of this in some cases, and posted about it before. The short version is: loads of people just look it up on-line and watch it there, and despite the wishful thinking of some around these parts, they don't then go and buy legitimate copies to support the artists and production teams who came up with the show. At least some of those people represent lost sales.
And would you apply the same standards to the countless small, specialist outfits, which produce much of the best video material out there, yet which are threatened with quite literally going under because of sites like this ripping their stuff? This type of organisation couldn't afford a lobbyist in their wildest dreams, never mind having anything to do with getting copyright law changed.
It's really very annoying when people equate "copyright law" with "abuse of power by multinational corporations". The latter are the last people who need copyright to protect them. However, when you attack the copyright system as a means of getting at the megacorps, you also undermine the protection that should be afforded to all the little guys producing new, interesting, informative, really valuable content. Yes, the actions of the megacorps suck, but you're aiming at the wrong target by going after copyright; you want "price fixing" and "corrupt legislative systems", down the hall and on the right.
So, you're saying there's no way to do this in its current form without flouting the law? Perhaps they should have thought of that before spending zillions on the idea?
Can you really not see any practical difference between the print world, where each separate infringement by an individual typically requires a significant time and materials overhead, and the on-line world, where mass infringement by thousands of individuals using sites like YouTube is near-free and near-instantaneous? Do you really believe that these have the same potential for damaging an injured party, and at the same speed, and thus merit the same response to uphold the spirit of the law?
Traditionally, the government's executive branch is responsible for catching law-breakers, and the judiciary for dealing with them.
On the flip side, copyright infringement is traditionally a civil matter. Recent legislation in some jurisdictions has changed this. Perhaps this fairly recognises that the speed any damage is done today will be vastly faster than the speed of any protracted civil court proceedings, or perhaps it's because of lobbying from Big Media who want to reduce their overheads; take your pick.
I'm not completely decided on this one, but you can certainly understand content providers feeling that the government should act against organisations who, let's be fair, basically run a business model predicated on ripping off those content providers in violation of the law.
Thanks for the spoiler warning. I didn't read the rest of your post because of it, but this seemed an opportune moment to point out that those of us outside the US couldn't even download the webisodes before this mess all came down, apparently (if I read the blogs right) because of similar problems over who had rights to what. So even if they were "promotional", the only thing they promoted to the non-US audience was that the studio were trying to screw us. Of course, given the whole "Series 2.0" DVD box set fiasco (check out the comments on Amazon) it's not a great surprise. What a shame, for a show that's one of the better ones of recent times, to be backed by such silly politics.
It's not foolish at all to expect a right to reasonable privacy at work. On the contrary, it's common sense.
Morally, any reasonable employer must accept that they are employing human beings and not machines, that human beings have certain expectations about privacy, and that our culture today makes it all but certain that occasional personal use of phones, web sites and the like will be necessary during working hours.
Legally, I know the US sucks here, but in the UK for example, the Office of the Information Commissioner explicitly notes in their guidance that employers should be aware of employees' privacy expectations, and that introducing monitoring and stating that you're doing so does not give you carte blanche to intercept whatever you like. (Introducing monitoring without stating that you're doing so, other than in some very exceptional circumstances, is a one-way ticket to losing a lawsuit.) Similar legislation is in place in many other European nations, and elsewhere.
In answer to the original poster, my policy (as an employee who is highly productive, yet also makes reasonable personal use of the Internet and phone system, as authorised by by managers the day I joined) is simple: if I ever find out that you even looked at or listened to information gained through intercepting my private communications, you will be responsible for my immediate resignation and every kind of legal hell I can throw at your organisation thereafter. If you distributed it without a good reason, which you won't have since my use is reasonable and private, then God help you, because your lawyers won't be able to. Is that a clear enough guideline?
Your point would be valid, if the fears expressed by Side B really were unrealistic. The problem is, they're not.
For example, consider the UK, in the recent past. We've had a guy being sent repeated fines for not paying a camera-controlled congestion charge, when he hasn't driven in the area at all for years. He could prove he was elsewhere on many of those occasions, yet still has the inconvenience of explaining this to the authorities and defending himself against charges of not paying. At the other end of the spectrum, we've had people literally being shot dead by police officers based on bad intelligence. There are plenty of in-the-middle examples as well, such as the lawyer who was arrested and held based on a bad DNA match from a crime scene.
So we can see, quite objectively, that the sort of pervasive, surveillance-society culture that our governments seem to want does have real consequences, very possibly for you, or me, or the guy next door. Some of them are big, spectacular and tragic. Many more of them are small and go mostly unnoticed, but are a royal PITA if you're the unlucky guy whose car licence plate gets cloned by the charge-dodgers, or who gets wrongly arrested (and then has your fingerprints and DNA forcibly taken and added to further databases, even if you're never even charged with anything).
The other thing you have to understand is that even if our current administrations sincerely believe that mass intelligence-gathering and data-mining is in the interests of society, they're holding Pandora's box. Once the databases and protocols are in place, there's no going back. In ten years' time, if the UK government has forced through the identity cards and the national database, and in doing so has created the single most profitable target for perpetrators of one of the fastest-growing crimes of our time (identity theft), it can't just pop the lid back on, delete a couple of files, and pretend it never happened. The damage will have been done, and every current generation will suffer the consequences for the rest of their lives.
My signature seems particularly apt today. Maybe next week, I'll use stats for the number of people who died in road traffic accidents last year and the annual government road safety budget.
If you think that the variety makes it difficult to compary CVs, you can specify a certain structure. [...] For applicants that can be a pain (unless you use e.g. monster), so you may lose some, but if it makes your work easier, it might be worth it.
It might be, but IME it almost certainly isn't. I had this discussion just the other day, funnily enough, while talking to a recruiter I'd linked up with a friend looking for a job. I was explaining that the friend had decided not to bother applying, because the recruiter used an extensive, poorly formatted, and difficult to edit application form, which would require a silly amount of time to fill in. The candidate could have spent the same amount of time tailoring their already good CV and writing covering letters for three or four other vacancies that were at least as appealing.
Many HR people look for fonts and spelling etc, but I always found that a bit superficial. Instead have a look for good command of the english language, which is not at all too common:-).
It is indeed a relatively rare skill, and an underestimated one in technical jobs. That would be "the English language", BTW.:-)
Having said that, I think good presentation skills are also underestimated. Other things being roughly equal, I'd probably give a little bonus to a candidate who had taken the time to present their CV in a structured, easily readable format, simply because if they do that with a document like a CV, I think they're more likely to consider it when they're writing formal documents (or code, for that matter) as well.
If they don't know what a CPAN id is, well then they almost certainly aren't getting the job:)
I have no idea what a CPAN id is. I'm guessing from context that it's what you use if you're submitting a module to CPAN.
I've also spent countless hours over the last several years using Perl to write the kind of automation scripts it was designed for, countless more using it as a CGI back-end to link web sites with databases, and obviously a fair amount of time looking up and using CPAN modules in relation to both.
Does this mean I shouldn't be hired for a job that requires Perl, then?
The parent is spot on. In today's recruitment business, there may be as many as three filters before you even get to the guys who are technically knowledgeable: a recruitment agency/job board if you use one, the HR database at the company you're applying for, and the HR weenie who's pulling out things that pass their automated filters to pass to the technical guys. Exactly none of these steps is likely to involve anyone technically competent who understands what the buzzwords and abbreviations mean. Java is the same as Javascript, right? But there's no way someone with five years' experience working with Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl is going to be of any use doing a job that uses PostgreSQL and PHP.
Of course the skills list is of limited value to the technical reviewers/interviewers. In fact, it's of no value at all unless the candidate has attached some sort of meaningful experience/skill level indicators to each entry. But to get that far with most large organisations or if agencies are involved, you've got to play the database game. That's yet another reason I prefer working for smaller companies, where the CVs that aren't obvious recycling fodder generally go straight to the technical guys who are doing the interviews.
You don't earn rights. If it has to be earned, it isn't a right.
The natural order is that you have no rights that you are not prepared to die defending, because anything else can be taken away from you with sufficient force. All other rights, at least in the sense of legal or "human" rights, are merely societal agreements, and most of them come with qualifiers. For example, if you don't behave responsibly by following the laws society sets out, then your right to freedom of movement may be curtailed by society throwing your ass in jail for a while.
Rights are not God-given absolutes, granted to all mankind under all circumstances. Believing otherwise is nothing more than a convenient delusion.
The service in question does already add an X-Whatever header indicating the result of their spam score. It's just that as a general principle, they take the view that such automated processing should be advisory and user-configurable, so they flag and forward everything unless otherwise requested by their users.
They have introduced a policy in response to this issue that they will not forward mails that their system flags as likely spam to the services that won't accept it. Of course, this means they are now as likely as AOL or Hotmail to block a few legitimate e-mails as well (though at least they will generate a proper bounce message if they do so).
Not really. My ability to click on a dozen files and drag them is completely unaffected by such things. Naming conventions may be your friend, but the rest of us are free to name things as seems most descriptive without worrying about it.:-)
I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I'm not for an instant suggesting that awards in the millions against parents because kids are kids are sensible or justified. I'm simply agreeing that parents do carry some responsibility for their children's actions.
Frankly, I don't see what not yet having kids of my own has to do with this. I have a much younger sibling, and supervised her much of the time when she was a child. I have worked in a school with very young children. I am well aware that kids will push the limits, and indeed that doing so is an important part of the learning process. What I also acknowledge, but you seem to challenge, is that if you are responsible for a child, you have a duty to be aware when they do cross lines, and to teach them why doing so is wrong.
Allowing the kind of unsupervised use of the Internet that presumably was involved here, for children who would still do this sort of thing, does not sound like responsible parenting to me. Would you still be saying "Oh, never mind, no real harm done, we'll just tell them not to do it again" if your kids were giving out their personal details to strangers over IM?
Slashdot Mirror
How do things like support for PNG transparency make a developer's life more difficult?
I really dislike these "Firefox is da bom, IE7 sux0rz" type posts. Firefox is a great product, and my browser of choice at both home and work. That doesn't change the facts that its printing system is so broken as to be useless (I fired up IE last night to print off some reports from an intranet, because Firefox couldn't handle a simple table that extended beyond the end of a page) and that IE7 seems to render some aspects of our intranet in "true" fashion with no HTML or CSS changes required, where IE6 falls back on the usable-but-less-pretty degraded versions.
I imply no such thing. It would be interesting to see whether the same proportions supported and disliked the general idea at the end of the survey. After all, it is basic psychology covered in any introductory statistics course that the phrasing and order of questions in a survey can profoundly affect the results achieved.
But what I really want to see is a survey of an informed and representative sample of the population, who have been presented with a reasonably balanced view of the issues, complete with objective, verifiable information and arguments both for and against each claim, and then given time to consider the implications. Nothing else really matters in this sort of discussion. Why would anyone except a politician care about the view of someone who hasn't bothered to research their subject before forming an opinion?
In fact, it's interesting that you have explicitly inferred, in two posts now, that because the survey results apparently agree with your view of this issue, those who took it are "well-informed about what an ID card will and will not do". Indeed, you are guilty of the very conceit you see in "mdwh2" and me: projecting your own views onto information that doesn't necessarily support them.
That isn't doing better; it's doing different.
I think perhaps I'm not making my main point clear here. I am not arguing that all the polls show people against ID cards as a general principle. Clearly this isn't true. Rather, I consider that what actually matters is how people would feel about the sorts of issues raised by the ID card and database scheme, if they were reasonably well-informed about the pros and cons of the proposals. I do not believe the sort of blanket statement polls we've been talking about give a useful indication of this.
Now, if the population wants to back the ID card scheme when it's well-informed about the details of what's involved, then fair enough. However, I don't believe it would. Let's look at the YouGov poll you cited yourself, as it's a great example of what I'm talking about.
The first question is generic, and got a favourable response, as you said. However, on specific questions about the actual scheme proposed, such as whether the system would be expensive, insecure, inaccurate, effective in reducing terrorism, beaten by determined criminals, cause an enormous amount of disruption and inconvenience, or be implemented using equipment that actually works, the views are strongly against the proposed scheme.
In fact, based on your own poll, the only specific areas where people expressed clear support for the scheme were in relation to benefit fraud/health tourism and catching bogus asylum-seekers. This is all well and good, but since even the most pessimistic estimates put annual losses due to such frauds well below the cost of the proposed ID card/NIR scheme, it's hardly a compelling argument in support of the cards. Moreover, the only strongly positive response to an ethical question was the belief that people who have nothing to fear have nothing to hide, which is a rather odd view given that the overwhelming majority believe the system will be flawed and subject to abuse. I'd like to see people answering the same question after watching an interview with a victim of identity theft.
The apparent contradictions here, where people express favourable views about the general idea yet disagree strongly when faced with the specifics, are common symptoms of what I'm talking about in this thread. You appear to take the view that the overall support for the generic principle is the important thing. I disagree: I think the responses to the specific questions are far more significant, and should have the stronger influence on any policy-making decisions.
Incidentally, as a small footnote, the crime stats you mentioned earlier are interesting as well. Does the British Crime Survey agree with the official government figures on those?
Actually, I question the methodology they use for the polls in the first place. The vast majority of those I've seen cited in the media are government-funded, and carried out by the kind of organisation one hires when one already knows the result required.
Having seen the full list of questions they asked in a couple of cases, it usually goes something like this:
What they fail to mention is that:
You show me a study that presents both the questions at the top of this post and the verifiable facts afterwards in a balanced way and then tells me the majority of the population wants ID cards, and I'll believe my failure to encounter a single person who speaks favourably of them is just a matter of moving in different circles. Until then, it's just lying with statistics, and you can conduct as many polls as you like but still you have no meaningful information about how the population as a whole would feel on the issue if it had a balanced knowledge of the potential advantages and potential risks.
Most of us here in the UK are in favour of speed cameras and CCTV as well, according to the polls. It's funny how rarely one meets someone with such views, when more than half the population has them, isn't it?
The problem with your argument is that it's untenable. If there were no value in the material, people wouldn't nick it and put it on YouTube. OTOH, for most of these specialist videos, it's the teacher's insight and demonstration that has the value. There would be little point, to pick up your example, in putting a booklet about martial arts moves in with a DVD. As anyone who's played the game could readily tell you, the booklet probably wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on without the video (or a real life instructor, of course). But you can pick up what the teacher is doing at YouTube resolution almost as well as in DVD quality.
What it comes down to is, of course you can easily break copyright laws with today's technology. This isn't really in any doubt, regardless of any technological means the copyright holder might use to try and stop you or slow you down. You can break a lot of other laws easily, too. But just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. If we go down your path, all these people who produce this content will no longer have the incentive to do so, and the world will be the worse for its loss. That's why we have copyright in the first place.
Windows Vista is going to support a 90" flat-screen display? Coooool...
Meesa tinkin youssum invitin da veeeery bad jokes...
When the copyright system was originated, you couldn't perfectly duplicate an entire work onto every desktop in the world within a matter of hours. Today's technology would make it trivial to do so. Do you really think the principle of copyright can be supported effectively by the enforcement measures of a century ago in today's Internet age?
Actually, Mr AC, my comment was based on direct personal experience, in more than one field, where I both know the teachers whose videos are being ripped and have personally experienced plenty of people talk about watching the demos on YouTube so they didn't have to buy the material. If you're trying to nick the choreography from a dance teaching DVD or see the demo on a martial arts video, the lower quality really doesn't mean jack. So in reality, based on direct personal experience, one problem with YouTube is exactly what I think it is. The fact that you personally may not have experienced anything other than mainstream stuff doesn't mean it's not going on.
I'm sorry, but your logic escapes me. How does having your entire video/DVD catalogue available on someone else's web site help anyone except that someone else? This isn't promotion, or marketing. I've seen both sides of this in some cases, and posted about it before. The short version is: loads of people just look it up on-line and watch it there, and despite the wishful thinking of some around these parts, they don't then go and buy legitimate copies to support the artists and production teams who came up with the show. At least some of those people represent lost sales.
And would you apply the same standards to the countless small, specialist outfits, which produce much of the best video material out there, yet which are threatened with quite literally going under because of sites like this ripping their stuff? This type of organisation couldn't afford a lobbyist in their wildest dreams, never mind having anything to do with getting copyright law changed.
It's really very annoying when people equate "copyright law" with "abuse of power by multinational corporations". The latter are the last people who need copyright to protect them. However, when you attack the copyright system as a means of getting at the megacorps, you also undermine the protection that should be afforded to all the little guys producing new, interesting, informative, really valuable content. Yes, the actions of the megacorps suck, but you're aiming at the wrong target by going after copyright; you want "price fixing" and "corrupt legislative systems", down the hall and on the right.
So, you're saying there's no way to do this in its current form without flouting the law? Perhaps they should have thought of that before spending zillions on the idea?
Can you really not see any practical difference between the print world, where each separate infringement by an individual typically requires a significant time and materials overhead, and the on-line world, where mass infringement by thousands of individuals using sites like YouTube is near-free and near-instantaneous? Do you really believe that these have the same potential for damaging an injured party, and at the same speed, and thus merit the same response to uphold the spirit of the law?
Traditionally, the government's executive branch is responsible for catching law-breakers, and the judiciary for dealing with them.
On the flip side, copyright infringement is traditionally a civil matter. Recent legislation in some jurisdictions has changed this. Perhaps this fairly recognises that the speed any damage is done today will be vastly faster than the speed of any protracted civil court proceedings, or perhaps it's because of lobbying from Big Media who want to reduce their overheads; take your pick.
I'm not completely decided on this one, but you can certainly understand content providers feeling that the government should act against organisations who, let's be fair, basically run a business model predicated on ripping off those content providers in violation of the law.
Thanks for the spoiler warning. I didn't read the rest of your post because of it, but this seemed an opportune moment to point out that those of us outside the US couldn't even download the webisodes before this mess all came down, apparently (if I read the blogs right) because of similar problems over who had rights to what. So even if they were "promotional", the only thing they promoted to the non-US audience was that the studio were trying to screw us. Of course, given the whole "Series 2.0" DVD box set fiasco (check out the comments on Amazon) it's not a great surprise. What a shame, for a show that's one of the better ones of recent times, to be backed by such silly politics.
It's not foolish at all to expect a right to reasonable privacy at work. On the contrary, it's common sense.
Morally, any reasonable employer must accept that they are employing human beings and not machines, that human beings have certain expectations about privacy, and that our culture today makes it all but certain that occasional personal use of phones, web sites and the like will be necessary during working hours.
Legally, I know the US sucks here, but in the UK for example, the Office of the Information Commissioner explicitly notes in their guidance that employers should be aware of employees' privacy expectations, and that introducing monitoring and stating that you're doing so does not give you carte blanche to intercept whatever you like. (Introducing monitoring without stating that you're doing so, other than in some very exceptional circumstances, is a one-way ticket to losing a lawsuit.) Similar legislation is in place in many other European nations, and elsewhere.
In answer to the original poster, my policy (as an employee who is highly productive, yet also makes reasonable personal use of the Internet and phone system, as authorised by by managers the day I joined) is simple: if I ever find out that you even looked at or listened to information gained through intercepting my private communications, you will be responsible for my immediate resignation and every kind of legal hell I can throw at your organisation thereafter. If you distributed it without a good reason, which you won't have since my use is reasonable and private, then God help you, because your lawyers won't be able to. Is that a clear enough guideline?
Your point would be valid, if the fears expressed by Side B really were unrealistic. The problem is, they're not.
For example, consider the UK, in the recent past. We've had a guy being sent repeated fines for not paying a camera-controlled congestion charge, when he hasn't driven in the area at all for years. He could prove he was elsewhere on many of those occasions, yet still has the inconvenience of explaining this to the authorities and defending himself against charges of not paying. At the other end of the spectrum, we've had people literally being shot dead by police officers based on bad intelligence. There are plenty of in-the-middle examples as well, such as the lawyer who was arrested and held based on a bad DNA match from a crime scene.
So we can see, quite objectively, that the sort of pervasive, surveillance-society culture that our governments seem to want does have real consequences, very possibly for you, or me, or the guy next door. Some of them are big, spectacular and tragic. Many more of them are small and go mostly unnoticed, but are a royal PITA if you're the unlucky guy whose car licence plate gets cloned by the charge-dodgers, or who gets wrongly arrested (and then has your fingerprints and DNA forcibly taken and added to further databases, even if you're never even charged with anything).
The other thing you have to understand is that even if our current administrations sincerely believe that mass intelligence-gathering and data-mining is in the interests of society, they're holding Pandora's box. Once the databases and protocols are in place, there's no going back. In ten years' time, if the UK government has forced through the identity cards and the national database, and in doing so has created the single most profitable target for perpetrators of one of the fastest-growing crimes of our time (identity theft), it can't just pop the lid back on, delete a couple of files, and pretend it never happened. The damage will have been done, and every current generation will suffer the consequences for the rest of their lives.
My signature seems particularly apt today. Maybe next week, I'll use stats for the number of people who died in road traffic accidents last year and the annual government road safety budget.
It might be, but IME it almost certainly isn't. I had this discussion just the other day, funnily enough, while talking to a recruiter I'd linked up with a friend looking for a job. I was explaining that the friend had decided not to bother applying, because the recruiter used an extensive, poorly formatted, and difficult to edit application form, which would require a silly amount of time to fill in. The candidate could have spent the same amount of time tailoring their already good CV and writing covering letters for three or four other vacancies that were at least as appealing.
It is indeed a relatively rare skill, and an underestimated one in technical jobs. That would be "the English language", BTW. :-)
Having said that, I think good presentation skills are also underestimated. Other things being roughly equal, I'd probably give a little bonus to a candidate who had taken the time to present their CV in a structured, easily readable format, simply because if they do that with a document like a CV, I think they're more likely to consider it when they're writing formal documents (or code, for that matter) as well.
I have no idea what a CPAN id is. I'm guessing from context that it's what you use if you're submitting a module to CPAN.
I've also spent countless hours over the last several years using Perl to write the kind of automation scripts it was designed for, countless more using it as a CGI back-end to link web sites with databases, and obviously a fair amount of time looking up and using CPAN modules in relation to both.
Does this mean I shouldn't be hired for a job that requires Perl, then?
The parent is spot on. In today's recruitment business, there may be as many as three filters before you even get to the guys who are technically knowledgeable: a recruitment agency/job board if you use one, the HR database at the company you're applying for, and the HR weenie who's pulling out things that pass their automated filters to pass to the technical guys. Exactly none of these steps is likely to involve anyone technically competent who understands what the buzzwords and abbreviations mean. Java is the same as Javascript, right? But there's no way someone with five years' experience working with Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl is going to be of any use doing a job that uses PostgreSQL and PHP.
Of course the skills list is of limited value to the technical reviewers/interviewers. In fact, it's of no value at all unless the candidate has attached some sort of meaningful experience/skill level indicators to each entry. But to get that far with most large organisations or if agencies are involved, you've got to play the database game. That's yet another reason I prefer working for smaller companies, where the CVs that aren't obvious recycling fodder generally go straight to the technical guys who are doing the interviews.
Blockquoth the AC:
The natural order is that you have no rights that you are not prepared to die defending, because anything else can be taken away from you with sufficient force. All other rights, at least in the sense of legal or "human" rights, are merely societal agreements, and most of them come with qualifiers. For example, if you don't behave responsibly by following the laws society sets out, then your right to freedom of movement may be curtailed by society throwing your ass in jail for a while.
Rights are not God-given absolutes, granted to all mankind under all circumstances. Believing otherwise is nothing more than a convenient delusion.
The service in question does already add an X-Whatever header indicating the result of their spam score. It's just that as a general principle, they take the view that such automated processing should be advisory and user-configurable, so they flag and forward everything unless otherwise requested by their users.
They have introduced a policy in response to this issue that they will not forward mails that their system flags as likely spam to the services that won't accept it. Of course, this means they are now as likely as AOL or Hotmail to block a few legitimate e-mails as well (though at least they will generate a proper bounce message if they do so).
Not really. My ability to click on a dozen files and drag them is completely unaffected by such things. Naming conventions may be your friend, but the rest of us are free to name things as seems most descriptive without worrying about it. :-)
I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I'm not for an instant suggesting that awards in the millions against parents because kids are kids are sensible or justified. I'm simply agreeing that parents do carry some responsibility for their children's actions.
Frankly, I don't see what not yet having kids of my own has to do with this. I have a much younger sibling, and supervised her much of the time when she was a child. I have worked in a school with very young children. I am well aware that kids will push the limits, and indeed that doing so is an important part of the learning process. What I also acknowledge, but you seem to challenge, is that if you are responsible for a child, you have a duty to be aware when they do cross lines, and to teach them why doing so is wrong.
Allowing the kind of unsupervised use of the Internet that presumably was involved here, for children who would still do this sort of thing, does not sound like responsible parenting to me. Would you still be saying "Oh, never mind, no real harm done, we'll just tell them not to do it again" if your kids were giving out their personal details to strangers over IM?