Tit for tat... if we can't link to your articles, we won't give you links to help you write those articles.
You know, there's a word for using leverage from one field in which you are dominant in order to promote your offering in another field. Now what was it, again? Antitruth? Anticomparison? Something like that, anyway.
Google, of course, do no evil and would never be guilty of using exactly the same below-the-belt tactics as evil overlords like Microsoft, so they would have nothing to fear from following your suggestion.
Does it not make sense to you that people should be taxed more for having more polluting vehicles
If that were a fair reflection of what was being proposed, that would make perfect sense, but it doesn't make sense at all today, because the definitions being used are inaccurate weasel words: I now drive a "more polluting vehicle", yet I produce nearly an order of magnitude less pollution than I did driving a "less polluting vehicle".
Even with the same vehicle, someone driving with good technique and an awareness for the effect things like electricals and aerodynamics have on efficiency will get far better mileage (and thus far lower pollution) than someone who thrashes the car to bits with the windows half-open, the air con on all the time, front fogs on at night to look "cool" (if illegal, at least in my country), the rear window demister switch left in the on position all the time, and 100kg of unnecessary baggage permanently stored in the back.
My point here is that there is little correlation between the type of car someone drives and the amount of pollution they generate driving it, and even what there is does not imply a causal link between the car and the pollution. If you want to improve the environment by increasing taxes, then it makes far more sense to push the tax on fuel up even further, since there is at least a causal link between the amount of fuel consumed and the amount of pollution generated.
Taxing fuel more does make sense, but it also makes sense to apply preventative measures to reduce the level of really polluting cars on the road, after all, we're not the ones going to be cleaning it up.
Be careful what you wish for. The environmental cost of everyone scrapping their "more polluting" vehicles on the day before the taxes change and buying new "less polluting" vehicles instead would be staggering. If you insist on taxing by vehicle type, then it makes far more sense to apply a tax at the time a new car is first purchased, thus incentivising people who are buying a new car anyway to switch to more economic models. As we've seen with safety improvements in the past, that will result in the vast majority of cars on the road following the new rules within a relatively small number of years. But that's not what's being proposed, at least by any of the major political parties here.
The main reason would be to learn programming, instead of focusing on a language.
People who learn C or Java get caught up in the specifics of the language, and have a hard time thinking about the underlying concepts. They think in terms of pointers and blocks of memory, instead of values and functions.
Speaking as someone with an academic CS background, who now writes high performance maths libraries for a living: while I see where you're coming from, I think the approach is backwards.
Bit-twiddlers have real-world skills that can be used to write useful programs. People with more appreciation of the theory tend to produce better designs. These are obviously complementary skills.
But for teaching them? I'd rather take someone who learned several real-world languages and built an understanding of the theoretical concepts based on the similarities and differences between those languages, than someone who learned the theory from the top but doesn't understand why programming with neat higher-order functions may cause a horrendous performance hit because they have no idea what's going on under the hood.
All CS courses should teach these concepts, but IMHO they should conclude with an extensive "programming concepts" course after they've learned the basics of assembler, C, some functional language, some OO language, etc. At that point, aside from everyone having more programming experience generally, the students will have a base of knowledge to help them appreciate the similiarities and differences, rather than just quoting the textbook in an exam.
Sorry, I don't usually post these, but how on earth is the parent post "flamebait"?
It seemed to be making the perfectly reasonable point that just because LISP dialects are very uniform, this doesn't necessarily make them easier for humans to use.
And even with our absurdly high tax rates on fuel, some political parties are still talking about adding mega-taxes on "highly polluting vehicles" (as in, extra thousands of pounds per year for having one).
The thing is, I used to drive a little 1.2-litre Vauxhall Corsa (1995 model) to work. Now I drive a 2-litre turbo Subaru Impreza WRX (2003 model). The former was significantly more fuel efficient (though as an interesting anecdote, far less fuel efficient than the newer model) and would be in one of the lowest bands for these new "environmental taxes". The latter is deemed a monster, and would be in the highest or second-highest band. And yet in reality, the WRX's emissions aren't much higher than a typical family saloon.
What's really telling is that when I drove the Corsa, I commuted around a 70 mile round-trip per day to get to work. Now I work in the city where I live, and do maybe 1/10 of that. I generate vastly less pollution now than I used to, and most of what I do generate is sitting in artificially generated traffic queues designed by our local bus-mad council to make car driving unappealing and promote bus use. And yet, these proposed "environmental taxes" would penalise me far more today.
If you insist on using the tax system to make some behaviours unpopular (I question the ethicality of this approach in any context, but that's a different matter) and you want to make pollution from cars unpopular, then taxing fuel rather than the type of vehicle makes far more sense.
I'm under 30, and I can tell you for sure that there's little support for the surveillance society among my friends and work colleagues.
My father is around twice my age, and if you think I'm vehemently opposed to the sort of invasions of privacy going on, you should hear him talk about it.:-)
I suspect that you have made a very important point about the acceptance issue, but that in reality it's the politically apathetic who have accepted this, just as they accept everything else thrown at them by government, because they've forgotten that they have the right to change things.
You'd have to pride yourself on doing no evil to think that was a good idea...
Although seriously, I noticed on some video footage during the latest airline security fiasco that there are signs up in US airports saying that you're not only being watched, but security staff are actually listening in to your conversations on microphones.
So let me be clear about this. With stated current intentions, not hypotheticals, national governments in "free countries" like the US and UK are now recording where everyone goes by plane, where everyone goes by car, where anyone is seen in the street, and what those people are saying in at least some of these cases. They are also developing technology for facial recognition from a distance and automated numberplate scanning. While they're at it, they can track your general movements if you have a mobile phone switched on, whatever mode of transport you choose. They have security devices that effectively display you naked to the operator. They intercept your phone calls and Internet communications, often on dubious authority, and record these for several years too. Soon, biometric technology will mean everyone gets an ID card and/or passport that are required to access any public services, and will be linked into a centralised database tracking all of your use of those services as well. Putting too much money into your bank account at once triggers alarm bells with the authorities, as does taking too much out.
Now, if, somewhere in that enormous central database they're building of everyone's life, something looks suspicious (sorry, muslims/immigrants/people with the same name as a registered sex offender, you're out of luck this month) then your account can be frozen without appeal, you can be subject to detailed investigations into your finances for the past several years by the tax office requiring you to produce a detailed paper trial for everything, you can be arrested and held for (depending on where) weeks, months or even years without trial, your freedoms can be curtailed with arbitrary ASBOs and control orders even if the law doesn't provide for that kind of curtailment otherwise, and in the worst case, you get seriously hurt or killed in a screwed-up operation.
And they still worry that the bottle of cola you're holding at the airport might blow a plane out of the sky.
Oh, yes, it's a wonderful, free world we live in, said the Anonymous Brave Guy, glancing at his.sig...
I'm sorry, but I think you forgot we're talking about the UK here. The approved phraseology here is, "Drop your weapon. You have ten seconds to comply." And then they shoot you anyway.
I live in the UK, and whilst I see lots of cameras, they certainly aren't on every street corner
Actually, here in Cambridge (UK), they pretty much are on every street corner, at least anywhere near the middle of town. On top of that, they now have mobile units they can set up anywhere, which are used further out. Then there's all the cameras at things like ATMs, the ones in shops, the ones scanning your number plate when you park at Tesco, the numberplate-scanning equipment in police vehicles and in the new average speed cameras...
And you know what? The few relatively dangerous places around the place -- not that Cambridge is a particularly dangerous city to live in -- are still dangerous. My girlfriend still can't walk across a park alone late at night, or go through the underpass to get across the road. When they want to prosecute people for violent crime, the pictures are so poor that they can't reliably identify anyone involved. It's been repeatedly demonstrated that they can't read number plates on vehicles, either. In fact, the only thing they seem to be good for is watching outside pubs late at night to pick up any serious fights slightly faster than someone would call them in.
Personally, I think it's all gone way too far. I now shop at other supermarkets that don't spy on everyone entering or leaving their car park, I don't sign up for any new "loyalty" cards in shops, etc. I have even reached the point that I'm considering voting for a political party I never thought I'd support, on the basis that they have given a solid promise that they will repeal the ID card legislation Tony's cronies have forced through. Whatever else I think of that party, I will almost certainly vote for them next time just for that.
I think historic evidence completely discounts that point of view. Most of the great works of history were unprotected by copyright.
This is a common counter-argument, and I agree that on the face of things it has merit.
However, consider that historically, much art was done on commission for a wealthy patron. There were no printing presses, and there was no concept of mass distribution of works where many individuals contributed a small amount each to the cost. Most of those historical works didn't benefit the masses for many, many years.
The little guy who makes a DVD that is a great teaching resource will draw students in more than sufficient numbers to make a good income.
Not necessarily. As I noted before, my partner and I travel around 100 miles just to see on teacher of that calibre. A lot of people aren't lucky enough to live so close to such good teachers, even if they have the money to afford the transportation costs as well as the lesson fees. As a corollary, the number of realistically available students for even the best teacher is always limited.
If people respect the basic idea of copyright, then the knowledge and insight of such teachers can reach further, and the teachers are less dependent on a sparse resource (students close enough to visit) to make a living.
For a start, a lot of big name web sites aren't significantly bigger than what I described. Most of my pages are unique. I doubt many web sites for SMEs have much more than 100 unique pages on them. Not everyone is Amazon or e-Bay, and even those that are still use a few templates for the vast majority of pages they serve. They just have bigger databases and server farms, which makes no difference whatsoever to the difficulty of co-ordinating the design and presentation aspects with the scripting and database look-up. Just take a look at the code and templates for Slashdot, which receives the kind of volume of hits your talking about.
In any case, I wasn't proposing myself as some sort of authority on large-scale web design. Rather, my site is a counterexample to the effectiveness of over-priced and under-powered "web design" programs. If they aren't much use even for the site I've set up, then any team of professionals who are doing this as a day job on a larger scale are bound to want more powerful tools than a glorified text editor that does syntax highlighting for CSS (wow!) and checking for broken links within your own site (whoopee!).
Are they working on the basis that companies have graphics designers who work out the visual appearance, and programmmers who write the scripts to update the content in whatever way, and these two roles are independent?
In my experience, that rarely happens, just as it rarely happens for desktop apps that there's someone who designs the user interface, and then there are guys who write the code behind it. Perhaps for very large projects in very large companies this is more common, but certainly not in smaller outfits IME.
Even if the larger companies want to put more effort into the presentation/usability aspects of their web sites, how is this any different to the problems of UI design for desktop apps that we've been working on for years? Just get the guys who are experts in graphic design, accessibility, and so on to put together the concepts and work out the HTML, CSS and graphics they want to use. Then give the specs and prototypes to the programming team to insert their code into them. This idea is not difficult to implement for even the largest desktop applications, and I don't see why the fact that the presentation medium is a web page makes any difference.
Then again, I still code up my pages using text editors and scripted tools rather than all these funky "web design" applications, and I only maintain a few hundred pages with thousands of hits per day single-handed and in my spare time, so I have no idea what I'm talking about.:-)
As long as the bank doesn't give users a way to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent communication, they should be responsible for the results.
My bank stated, very clearly, when I first opened my account that I should never divulge my security details to anyone. They warned me about the risk of phishing, and stated very clearly that they do not send unsolicited e-mails to the address they hold for me, ever.
That means any communication I receive purporting to come from my bank is easily diagnosed as fraudulent. Why should my bank bear any responsibility if I'm stupid enough to act on it? Should they also be responsible if I take my "chip and PIN" card into the supermarket, enter my PIN in plain sight of half a dozen people, and then leave the card behind?
Of course, banks may consider it in their interests to distinguish themselves from competitors by providing certain guarantees about on-line security, which may include taking out insurance against successful phishing attacks that compensates customers who fall victim. But that's a customer service decision for them to make, on a cost-benefit basis. I don't see why they should have any enforced liability at all for customers too stupid to believe the warnings they are (IME) invariably given when they sign up about security for on-line banking facilities.
I think you're missing one of the most commonly overlooked points about copyright: it's not really there to protect stuff that already exists, it's there to incentivise the existence (and sharing) of stuff in the future.
The cost to society of revoking copyrights in their entirety would be nothing for those works that already exist. The artists can't unmake them, or take them back. Everyone in society would gain them all for no further cost. Taken in isolation, that's clearly a good thing for society.
But of course it doesn't happen in isolation. It's also a bad thing for the artists who get stuffed, because society isn't honouring its side of the bargain. And there's the downside: those artists may then choose not to trust society in future, and as a consequence they may choose not to create or release further works. This is where society really takes a hit.
Now, personally, I couldn't give a damn if the big record labels suddenly find it hard to sell lots of prefabricated pseudomusic. There are enough good musicians in the world that we can afford to lose the odd Robbie Williams or Madonna, or at least they could afford to lose 90% of their income.
But again, something that's often overlooked in these discussions is that copyright is also there to protect the little guy, and there are a lot more little guys than big guys. For one of my hobbies, my partner and I travel over 100 miles to have lessons with a world-class teacher. We spend three times as long travelling as the lesson itself, and the effective cost of a 1.5 hour lesson is nearly 200 pounds (UK).
For the same amount of money, you can buy a set of DVDs from another world-class partnership, full of well-edited explanations and tips, that lasts several times as long. Sure, it's not tailored to our personal needs, but on the other hand, we can watch it more than once, or in slow motion to capture details of how the presenters move.
In fact, the teacher we go to see has some DVDs of her own. The target audience isn't big, but they bring in a little bit of money for the teacher each time someone buys them. That money helps to keep the teacher's rates down, particularly when she's supporting amateurs who couldn't possibly afford the rates a teacher of that calibre could charge if she was in it purely for the money.
The net effect of this typical "little guy" scenario is that if you start putting videos like that on sites like YouTube (and people do, in their entirety), a teacher with a lot of dedication to her students and a lot of knowledge to pass on loses out on her DVD income and stops making DVDs. Then everyone loses out because a valuable teaching resource has gone. Moreover, the students who go to the teacher in person lose out because their rates inevitably go up to compensate, since the teacher still has rent to pay. Everybody loses, and the people who watched on YouTube instead of buying a DVD just lose less.
As you've probably figured, this is not a hypothetical scenario. I know of people who have been in this position, and I've seen the results. And I've seen it in more than one field; you get it in any subject that makes sense on film, from performing arts to sports strategy. The biggest loser in the long run is always society, if they don't get to benefit from further works from valuable sources, and there is often collateral damage as well.
This is why it really is important to protect the basic principle of copyright, or to produce a similarly balanced replacement, even as we fight to defend the legitimate users of copyright material from being unreasonably controlled by rightsholders.
Either copyright law needs to be changed, or technology and behavior need to change.
Agreed, those are the two plausible ways forward. Indeed, I think I specified that the discussion in my earlier post only applied if we assumed copyright in essentially its current form.
However, I think your argument is overlooking something when you write this:
My preferred solution? Legalize non-commercial file sharing. Make a strong distinction between commercial uses and non-commercial uses. The copyright holder looses his monopoly on distribution, but still retains the exclusive right to profit from the work.
What if the reward someone seeks for their work isn't financial? The GPL is an obvious example. People share their code, but on the understanding that it's a two-way deal and anyone who benefits from it in certain ways will share their own improvements in return. No money is involved, but if non-commercial use is free for all, you've just removed the incentive for a certain type of person to share their work with others.
Now, the scale of the damage in that policy is debatable. Personally, I suspect that a lot of the applications currently distributed under the GPL aren't given that licence because of the author's particular philosophical or ethical agreement with the principle, but merely because they want to contribute and that's the trendy way of doing so in geek circles. If we did as you suggest and opened non-commercial distribution entirely, then probably a lot of these people would still give away their code, and so would a lot of the people who then built on it. But not all of them, and there's the rub.
Surely all Spamhaus do is maintain a blacklist of network addresses of known spammers?
If that were true, and true of all spam blacklists not just Spamhaus, there would be far fewer problems.
Things go wrong when the addresses on their list are not those of spammers, but just someone in the same IP block as a spammer, someone who was the victim of a false complaint, someone who takes over an IP block that used to be owned by a spammer until they were kicked, etc.
Spamhaus are not liable if the information they published is used by a third party to decide not to accept your mail.
They may or may not be liable for the blocking itself, but I imagine if their actions amount to defamation and someone suffers as a consequence of the actions others take based on that defamation then there is a court case waiting to happen (and rightly so).
I think this is another example of one of the biggest legal issues on the Internet today.
Whether it's YouTube, or P2P software, or posting reg-required articles verbatim on Slashdot for that matter, it comes down to the same thing: we now have services that can host/transport copyright-protected content on the Internet, which mean that content can reach huge numbers of people very quickly.
Now, as the saying goes, technology is neutral and it's what you do with it that counts. Clearly there are valuable uses for rapid, widespread distribution: look at the use of BitTorrent to distribution large OSS installers, or the small bands taking advantage of the opportunity to increase their profile. On the other hand, let's not kid ourselves: the vast majority of the content on some of these services is infringing someone's copyright. Those people aren't always the big players, either: YouTube is full of rips of specialist videos/DVDs about hobbies, made by teachers who aren't going to get much compensation in return for their efforts even if everyone in their small target audience buys a genuine copy.
The problem is that this is a legal rock meeting an ethical hard place. The legal concept of a common carrier, and more generally the idea of unmoderated forums, have served us well historically. No-one's going to run a large-scale communications service if they're legally responsible for every transmission they carry. They don't have the resources to check everything. Even if they did, I don't think we should appoint commercial entities to the role of courts. And they can't possibly know about every copyright in the world, so they couldn't guarantee the right decision even if they were checking.
On the other hand, copyright holders have a legitimate grievance here. I know people who teach various hobbies I have, and I've seen copies of their videos on YouTube, and (this is the bit that annoys me) I've heard people talking about ripping those videos rather than buying them. I may not have much sympathy with the RIAA and their ilk -- they're big enough to look after themselves, and hardly paragons of ethical virtue -- but I have a lot of sympathy for the little guys, and there must be a lot more of them. I think it's really sad that the number of specialist DVDs being produced for my hobbies by world-class teachers is dropping fast, and I have a pretty good idea from all sides about why that is.
That all said, I think there are some inescapable conclusions if we're going to keep any hint of sanity in the legal position:
Infrastructure providers are facilitating widespread copyright infringement.
It is unrealistic to believe that there is no damage caused by the copyright infringement.
It is also unrealistic to believe that there would be no damage if the infrastructure was completely shut down (even if this was technically possible, which is doubtful).
It is unrealistic to expect infrastructure providers to filter all content to prevent that copyright infringement ahead-of-time (and we probably shouldn't ask them to even if they could).
It is easily possible for infrastructure providers to block or remove specific content if they know what it is and where in their system to find it.
Requests by individuals to infrastructure providers to remove content put them in a difficult position, because again they are being asked to act as judge and jury, and potentially liable for making the wrong decision either way.
As long as our copyright system remains in something like its current form (for example, with copyright being assigned, without explicit registration, to any artist who publishes their material) I think the most realistic approach is to have a system where copyright holders can show infringements to some binding authority, which can then instruct infrastructure providers to block that particular infringement quickly to limit any damage they're helping to cause. (An infrastructure provider that fails to honour suc
In my Java classes, when a resource is freed by a destructor - as opposed to by a close() method or equivalent - it logs a warning.
Whereas in my programming classes, we learned about different approaches to memory allocation and resource management, including that finalization in Java isn't the same as destruction in C++. In particular, we learned that there was no way to guarantee finalize() being called, so you can't rely on tricks like this to tell you anything you didn't already know.
You just have to read (-1, Overrated) as (-1, I Don't Agree) these days.
I don't have exact counts, but as a fair estimate, 75% of my down-mods are (-1, Overrated) on posts also moderated up, often with multiple (+1, Insightful) mods.
Don't take it personally. I, for one, found some new and interesting material thanks to your links, and I'm grateful that you took the time to share them.
For what it's worth, our Information Commissioner is one of all-too-few good guys holding public office in the UK. He and his department have very consistently acted in the public interest, even when it meant directly opposing government policy over things like ID cards, or telling the government that freedom of information requests could not be dodged on technicalities (as with some MPs' expenses just this week). They also provide genuinely helpful guidance, e.g., on their web site there's a simple interactive system that tells you whether your organisation is exempt from requirements to register under the Data Protection Act, which has been useful and reassuring for several local clubs/community groups I've been involved with.
However, it is clear that his department is under-resourced, given the backlog of unhandled requests under the data protection and freedom of information legislation. I suspect this is not an accident, but it's not their fault. Similarly, the various data protection and freedom of information rules the Office of the Information Commisioner deals with have some (IMHO) unnecessary limitations that aren't really in the public interest, but he can't act against people taking advantage of them because the law says it's OK to do so.
The sad thing is, we used to have that here in the UK, but today it's all but disappeared. Instead, we hear cases where some upstanding citizen catches kids in the act of throwing bricks through a neighbour's car window, and the end result is that the kids get away with it, but the citizen is prosecuted for some variation on assault/battery because he pulled the child away from the car (or the citizen got shot while chasing the kids away, in the most unfortunate cases).
I'm sure that Google have smart guys, too. In fact, I know some pretty smart people who work or have worked at both places. There are plenty of smart people in this industry, and they don't all work for the big names, either.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, there's a word for using leverage from one field in which you are dominant in order to promote your offering in another field. Now what was it, again? Antitruth? Anticomparison? Something like that, anyway.
Google, of course, do no evil and would never be guilty of using exactly the same below-the-belt tactics as evil overlords like Microsoft, so they would have nothing to fear from following your suggestion.
If that were a fair reflection of what was being proposed, that would make perfect sense, but it doesn't make sense at all today, because the definitions being used are inaccurate weasel words: I now drive a "more polluting vehicle", yet I produce nearly an order of magnitude less pollution than I did driving a "less polluting vehicle".
Even with the same vehicle, someone driving with good technique and an awareness for the effect things like electricals and aerodynamics have on efficiency will get far better mileage (and thus far lower pollution) than someone who thrashes the car to bits with the windows half-open, the air con on all the time, front fogs on at night to look "cool" (if illegal, at least in my country), the rear window demister switch left in the on position all the time, and 100kg of unnecessary baggage permanently stored in the back.
My point here is that there is little correlation between the type of car someone drives and the amount of pollution they generate driving it, and even what there is does not imply a causal link between the car and the pollution. If you want to improve the environment by increasing taxes, then it makes far more sense to push the tax on fuel up even further, since there is at least a causal link between the amount of fuel consumed and the amount of pollution generated.
Be careful what you wish for. The environmental cost of everyone scrapping their "more polluting" vehicles on the day before the taxes change and buying new "less polluting" vehicles instead would be staggering. If you insist on taxing by vehicle type, then it makes far more sense to apply a tax at the time a new car is first purchased, thus incentivising people who are buying a new car anyway to switch to more economic models. As we've seen with safety improvements in the past, that will result in the vast majority of cars on the road following the new rules within a relatively small number of years. But that's not what's being proposed, at least by any of the major political parties here.
Speaking as someone with an academic CS background, who now writes high performance maths libraries for a living: while I see where you're coming from, I think the approach is backwards.
Bit-twiddlers have real-world skills that can be used to write useful programs. People with more appreciation of the theory tend to produce better designs. These are obviously complementary skills.
But for teaching them? I'd rather take someone who learned several real-world languages and built an understanding of the theoretical concepts based on the similarities and differences between those languages, than someone who learned the theory from the top but doesn't understand why programming with neat higher-order functions may cause a horrendous performance hit because they have no idea what's going on under the hood.
All CS courses should teach these concepts, but IMHO they should conclude with an extensive "programming concepts" course after they've learned the basics of assembler, C, some functional language, some OO language, etc. At that point, aside from everyone having more programming experience generally, the students will have a base of knowledge to help them appreciate the similiarities and differences, rather than just quoting the textbook in an exam.
Sorry, I don't usually post these, but how on earth is the parent post "flamebait"?
It seemed to be making the perfectly reasonable point that just because LISP dialects are very uniform, this doesn't necessarily make them easier for humans to use.
And even with our absurdly high tax rates on fuel, some political parties are still talking about adding mega-taxes on "highly polluting vehicles" (as in, extra thousands of pounds per year for having one).
The thing is, I used to drive a little 1.2-litre Vauxhall Corsa (1995 model) to work. Now I drive a 2-litre turbo Subaru Impreza WRX (2003 model). The former was significantly more fuel efficient (though as an interesting anecdote, far less fuel efficient than the newer model) and would be in one of the lowest bands for these new "environmental taxes". The latter is deemed a monster, and would be in the highest or second-highest band. And yet in reality, the WRX's emissions aren't much higher than a typical family saloon.
What's really telling is that when I drove the Corsa, I commuted around a 70 mile round-trip per day to get to work. Now I work in the city where I live, and do maybe 1/10 of that. I generate vastly less pollution now than I used to, and most of what I do generate is sitting in artificially generated traffic queues designed by our local bus-mad council to make car driving unappealing and promote bus use. And yet, these proposed "environmental taxes" would penalise me far more today.
If you insist on using the tax system to make some behaviours unpopular (I question the ethicality of this approach in any context, but that's a different matter) and you want to make pollution from cars unpopular, then taxing fuel rather than the type of vehicle makes far more sense.
Which current generation is that?
I'm under 30, and I can tell you for sure that there's little support for the surveillance society among my friends and work colleagues.
My father is around twice my age, and if you think I'm vehemently opposed to the sort of invasions of privacy going on, you should hear him talk about it. :-)
I suspect that you have made a very important point about the acceptance issue, but that in reality it's the politically apathetic who have accepted this, just as they accept everything else thrown at them by government, because they've forgotten that they have the right to change things.
You'd have to pride yourself on doing no evil to think that was a good idea...
Although seriously, I noticed on some video footage during the latest airline security fiasco that there are signs up in US airports saying that you're not only being watched, but security staff are actually listening in to your conversations on microphones.
So let me be clear about this. With stated current intentions, not hypotheticals, national governments in "free countries" like the US and UK are now recording where everyone goes by plane, where everyone goes by car, where anyone is seen in the street, and what those people are saying in at least some of these cases. They are also developing technology for facial recognition from a distance and automated numberplate scanning. While they're at it, they can track your general movements if you have a mobile phone switched on, whatever mode of transport you choose. They have security devices that effectively display you naked to the operator. They intercept your phone calls and Internet communications, often on dubious authority, and record these for several years too. Soon, biometric technology will mean everyone gets an ID card and/or passport that are required to access any public services, and will be linked into a centralised database tracking all of your use of those services as well. Putting too much money into your bank account at once triggers alarm bells with the authorities, as does taking too much out.
Now, if, somewhere in that enormous central database they're building of everyone's life, something looks suspicious (sorry, muslims/immigrants/people with the same name as a registered sex offender, you're out of luck this month) then your account can be frozen without appeal, you can be subject to detailed investigations into your finances for the past several years by the tax office requiring you to produce a detailed paper trial for everything, you can be arrested and held for (depending on where) weeks, months or even years without trial, your freedoms can be curtailed with arbitrary ASBOs and control orders even if the law doesn't provide for that kind of curtailment otherwise, and in the worst case, you get seriously hurt or killed in a screwed-up operation.
And they still worry that the bottle of cola you're holding at the airport might blow a plane out of the sky.
Oh, yes, it's a wonderful, free world we live in, said the Anonymous Brave Guy, glancing at his .sig...
I'm sorry, but I think you forgot we're talking about the UK here. The approved phraseology here is, "Drop your weapon. You have ten seconds to comply." And then they shoot you anyway.
Actually, here in Cambridge (UK), they pretty much are on every street corner, at least anywhere near the middle of town. On top of that, they now have mobile units they can set up anywhere, which are used further out. Then there's all the cameras at things like ATMs, the ones in shops, the ones scanning your number plate when you park at Tesco, the numberplate-scanning equipment in police vehicles and in the new average speed cameras...
And you know what? The few relatively dangerous places around the place -- not that Cambridge is a particularly dangerous city to live in -- are still dangerous. My girlfriend still can't walk across a park alone late at night, or go through the underpass to get across the road. When they want to prosecute people for violent crime, the pictures are so poor that they can't reliably identify anyone involved. It's been repeatedly demonstrated that they can't read number plates on vehicles, either. In fact, the only thing they seem to be good for is watching outside pubs late at night to pick up any serious fights slightly faster than someone would call them in.
Personally, I think it's all gone way too far. I now shop at other supermarkets that don't spy on everyone entering or leaving their car park, I don't sign up for any new "loyalty" cards in shops, etc. I have even reached the point that I'm considering voting for a political party I never thought I'd support, on the basis that they have given a solid promise that they will repeal the ID card legislation Tony's cronies have forced through. Whatever else I think of that party, I will almost certainly vote for them next time just for that.
That's "autumn" here in the UK, you insensitive clod!
This is a common counter-argument, and I agree that on the face of things it has merit.
However, consider that historically, much art was done on commission for a wealthy patron. There were no printing presses, and there was no concept of mass distribution of works where many individuals contributed a small amount each to the cost. Most of those historical works didn't benefit the masses for many, many years.
Not necessarily. As I noted before, my partner and I travel around 100 miles just to see on teacher of that calibre. A lot of people aren't lucky enough to live so close to such good teachers, even if they have the money to afford the transportation costs as well as the lesson fees. As a corollary, the number of realistically available students for even the best teacher is always limited.
If people respect the basic idea of copyright, then the knowledge and insight of such teachers can reach further, and the teachers are less dependent on a sparse resource (students close enough to visit) to make a living.
You miss the point repeatedly, Mr AC.
For a start, a lot of big name web sites aren't significantly bigger than what I described. Most of my pages are unique. I doubt many web sites for SMEs have much more than 100 unique pages on them. Not everyone is Amazon or e-Bay, and even those that are still use a few templates for the vast majority of pages they serve. They just have bigger databases and server farms, which makes no difference whatsoever to the difficulty of co-ordinating the design and presentation aspects with the scripting and database look-up. Just take a look at the code and templates for Slashdot, which receives the kind of volume of hits your talking about.
In any case, I wasn't proposing myself as some sort of authority on large-scale web design. Rather, my site is a counterexample to the effectiveness of over-priced and under-powered "web design" programs. If they aren't much use even for the site I've set up, then any team of professionals who are doing this as a day job on a larger scale are bound to want more powerful tools than a glorified text editor that does syntax highlighting for CSS (wow!) and checking for broken links within your own site (whoopee!).
...I still have no idea what its point is.
Are they working on the basis that companies have graphics designers who work out the visual appearance, and programmmers who write the scripts to update the content in whatever way, and these two roles are independent?
In my experience, that rarely happens, just as it rarely happens for desktop apps that there's someone who designs the user interface, and then there are guys who write the code behind it. Perhaps for very large projects in very large companies this is more common, but certainly not in smaller outfits IME.
Even if the larger companies want to put more effort into the presentation/usability aspects of their web sites, how is this any different to the problems of UI design for desktop apps that we've been working on for years? Just get the guys who are experts in graphic design, accessibility, and so on to put together the concepts and work out the HTML, CSS and graphics they want to use. Then give the specs and prototypes to the programming team to insert their code into them. This idea is not difficult to implement for even the largest desktop applications, and I don't see why the fact that the presentation medium is a web page makes any difference.
Then again, I still code up my pages using text editors and scripted tools rather than all these funky "web design" applications, and I only maintain a few hundred pages with thousands of hits per day single-handed and in my spare time, so I have no idea what I'm talking about. :-)
My bank stated, very clearly, when I first opened my account that I should never divulge my security details to anyone. They warned me about the risk of phishing, and stated very clearly that they do not send unsolicited e-mails to the address they hold for me, ever.
That means any communication I receive purporting to come from my bank is easily diagnosed as fraudulent. Why should my bank bear any responsibility if I'm stupid enough to act on it? Should they also be responsible if I take my "chip and PIN" card into the supermarket, enter my PIN in plain sight of half a dozen people, and then leave the card behind?
Of course, banks may consider it in their interests to distinguish themselves from competitors by providing certain guarantees about on-line security, which may include taking out insurance against successful phishing attacks that compensates customers who fall victim. But that's a customer service decision for them to make, on a cost-benefit basis. I don't see why they should have any enforced liability at all for customers too stupid to believe the warnings they are (IME) invariably given when they sign up about security for on-line banking facilities.
I think you're missing one of the most commonly overlooked points about copyright: it's not really there to protect stuff that already exists, it's there to incentivise the existence (and sharing) of stuff in the future.
The cost to society of revoking copyrights in their entirety would be nothing for those works that already exist. The artists can't unmake them, or take them back. Everyone in society would gain them all for no further cost. Taken in isolation, that's clearly a good thing for society.
But of course it doesn't happen in isolation. It's also a bad thing for the artists who get stuffed, because society isn't honouring its side of the bargain. And there's the downside: those artists may then choose not to trust society in future, and as a consequence they may choose not to create or release further works. This is where society really takes a hit.
Now, personally, I couldn't give a damn if the big record labels suddenly find it hard to sell lots of prefabricated pseudomusic. There are enough good musicians in the world that we can afford to lose the odd Robbie Williams or Madonna, or at least they could afford to lose 90% of their income.
But again, something that's often overlooked in these discussions is that copyright is also there to protect the little guy, and there are a lot more little guys than big guys. For one of my hobbies, my partner and I travel over 100 miles to have lessons with a world-class teacher. We spend three times as long travelling as the lesson itself, and the effective cost of a 1.5 hour lesson is nearly 200 pounds (UK).
For the same amount of money, you can buy a set of DVDs from another world-class partnership, full of well-edited explanations and tips, that lasts several times as long. Sure, it's not tailored to our personal needs, but on the other hand, we can watch it more than once, or in slow motion to capture details of how the presenters move.
In fact, the teacher we go to see has some DVDs of her own. The target audience isn't big, but they bring in a little bit of money for the teacher each time someone buys them. That money helps to keep the teacher's rates down, particularly when she's supporting amateurs who couldn't possibly afford the rates a teacher of that calibre could charge if she was in it purely for the money.
The net effect of this typical "little guy" scenario is that if you start putting videos like that on sites like YouTube (and people do, in their entirety), a teacher with a lot of dedication to her students and a lot of knowledge to pass on loses out on her DVD income and stops making DVDs. Then everyone loses out because a valuable teaching resource has gone. Moreover, the students who go to the teacher in person lose out because their rates inevitably go up to compensate, since the teacher still has rent to pay. Everybody loses, and the people who watched on YouTube instead of buying a DVD just lose less.
As you've probably figured, this is not a hypothetical scenario. I know of people who have been in this position, and I've seen the results. And I've seen it in more than one field; you get it in any subject that makes sense on film, from performing arts to sports strategy. The biggest loser in the long run is always society, if they don't get to benefit from further works from valuable sources, and there is often collateral damage as well.
This is why it really is important to protect the basic principle of copyright, or to produce a similarly balanced replacement, even as we fight to defend the legitimate users of copyright material from being unreasonably controlled by rightsholders.
Agreed, those are the two plausible ways forward. Indeed, I think I specified that the discussion in my earlier post only applied if we assumed copyright in essentially its current form.
However, I think your argument is overlooking something when you write this:
What if the reward someone seeks for their work isn't financial? The GPL is an obvious example. People share their code, but on the understanding that it's a two-way deal and anyone who benefits from it in certain ways will share their own improvements in return. No money is involved, but if non-commercial use is free for all, you've just removed the incentive for a certain type of person to share their work with others.
Now, the scale of the damage in that policy is debatable. Personally, I suspect that a lot of the applications currently distributed under the GPL aren't given that licence because of the author's particular philosophical or ethical agreement with the principle, but merely because they want to contribute and that's the trendy way of doing so in geek circles. If we did as you suggest and opened non-commercial distribution entirely, then probably a lot of these people would still give away their code, and so would a lot of the people who then built on it. But not all of them, and there's the rub.
If that were true, and true of all spam blacklists not just Spamhaus, there would be far fewer problems.
Things go wrong when the addresses on their list are not those of spammers, but just someone in the same IP block as a spammer, someone who was the victim of a false complaint, someone who takes over an IP block that used to be owned by a spammer until they were kicked, etc.
They may or may not be liable for the blocking itself, but I imagine if their actions amount to defamation and someone suffers as a consequence of the actions others take based on that defamation then there is a court case waiting to happen (and rightly so).
I hear you. I mean, what's the point of suing someone for bajillions of dollars if they haven't worked out step 2 yet...?
I think this is another example of one of the biggest legal issues on the Internet today.
Whether it's YouTube, or P2P software, or posting reg-required articles verbatim on Slashdot for that matter, it comes down to the same thing: we now have services that can host/transport copyright-protected content on the Internet, which mean that content can reach huge numbers of people very quickly.
Now, as the saying goes, technology is neutral and it's what you do with it that counts. Clearly there are valuable uses for rapid, widespread distribution: look at the use of BitTorrent to distribution large OSS installers, or the small bands taking advantage of the opportunity to increase their profile. On the other hand, let's not kid ourselves: the vast majority of the content on some of these services is infringing someone's copyright. Those people aren't always the big players, either: YouTube is full of rips of specialist videos/DVDs about hobbies, made by teachers who aren't going to get much compensation in return for their efforts even if everyone in their small target audience buys a genuine copy.
The problem is that this is a legal rock meeting an ethical hard place. The legal concept of a common carrier, and more generally the idea of unmoderated forums, have served us well historically. No-one's going to run a large-scale communications service if they're legally responsible for every transmission they carry. They don't have the resources to check everything. Even if they did, I don't think we should appoint commercial entities to the role of courts. And they can't possibly know about every copyright in the world, so they couldn't guarantee the right decision even if they were checking.
On the other hand, copyright holders have a legitimate grievance here. I know people who teach various hobbies I have, and I've seen copies of their videos on YouTube, and (this is the bit that annoys me) I've heard people talking about ripping those videos rather than buying them. I may not have much sympathy with the RIAA and their ilk -- they're big enough to look after themselves, and hardly paragons of ethical virtue -- but I have a lot of sympathy for the little guys, and there must be a lot more of them. I think it's really sad that the number of specialist DVDs being produced for my hobbies by world-class teachers is dropping fast, and I have a pretty good idea from all sides about why that is.
That all said, I think there are some inescapable conclusions if we're going to keep any hint of sanity in the legal position:
As long as our copyright system remains in something like its current form (for example, with copyright being assigned, without explicit registration, to any artist who publishes their material) I think the most realistic approach is to have a system where copyright holders can show infringements to some binding authority, which can then instruct infrastructure providers to block that particular infringement quickly to limit any damage they're helping to cause. (An infrastructure provider that fails to honour suc
I realised that, but thanks anyway. :-)
Whereas in my programming classes, we learned about different approaches to memory allocation and resource management, including that finalization in Java isn't the same as destruction in C++. In particular, we learned that there was no way to guarantee finalize() being called, so you can't rely on tricks like this to tell you anything you didn't already know.
You just have to read (-1, Overrated) as (-1, I Don't Agree) these days.
I don't have exact counts, but as a fair estimate, 75% of my down-mods are (-1, Overrated) on posts also moderated up, often with multiple (+1, Insightful) mods.
Don't take it personally. I, for one, found some new and interesting material thanks to your links, and I'm grateful that you took the time to share them.
For what it's worth, our Information Commissioner is one of all-too-few good guys holding public office in the UK. He and his department have very consistently acted in the public interest, even when it meant directly opposing government policy over things like ID cards, or telling the government that freedom of information requests could not be dodged on technicalities (as with some MPs' expenses just this week). They also provide genuinely helpful guidance, e.g., on their web site there's a simple interactive system that tells you whether your organisation is exempt from requirements to register under the Data Protection Act, which has been useful and reassuring for several local clubs/community groups I've been involved with.
However, it is clear that his department is under-resourced, given the backlog of unhandled requests under the data protection and freedom of information legislation. I suspect this is not an accident, but it's not their fault. Similarly, the various data protection and freedom of information rules the Office of the Information Commisioner deals with have some (IMHO) unnecessary limitations that aren't really in the public interest, but he can't act against people taking advantage of them because the law says it's OK to do so.
The sad thing is, we used to have that here in the UK, but today it's all but disappeared. Instead, we hear cases where some upstanding citizen catches kids in the act of throwing bricks through a neighbour's car window, and the end result is that the kids get away with it, but the citizen is prosecuted for some variation on assault/battery because he pulled the child away from the car (or the citizen got shot while chasing the kids away, in the most unfortunate cases).
I'm sure that Google have smart guys, too. In fact, I know some pretty smart people who work or have worked at both places. There are plenty of smart people in this industry, and they don't all work for the big names, either.