The amount of information government truly needs to gather to protect us is also sufficient to greatly threaten our liberty.
No amount of information will truly protect you from every threat. Never can, never will. The very premise behind all of the recent initiatives is fundamentally flawed.
I'm definitely not saying that we should cripple government in gathering and using information.
Yes, we should. (My sig is particularly appropriate at this moment.)
The security services should be able to gather information when they have a reasonable basis for expecting to need it. That information must be held confidentially until it becomes clearly relevant. If it turns out to be relevant, it should automatically be admissible in court. If it turns out not to be after a reasonable period, then it should be destroyed. Yes, I know that's a tough decision to make. Too bad.
And failure to handle the kind of information governments are starting to collect in a responsible fashion should be the thing carrying the draconian penalties.
I think it's a little unfair to call a population (as a whole) "stupid" in cases like this. Perhaps "naive" would be more appropriate? After all, I suspect many of the people reading this board have spent a lot more time doing their homework on their nation's governments and the civil liberties implications than most average citizens. It shouldn't be necessary to assume that all the information you're getting out of government is misleading or outright wrong, though in practice with the sort of power-hungry governments and weak leaders we have in the West today it seems sadly necessary.
Ironically, I think it was Herman Goering who explained our current predicament best, in a comment he made during the time of the Nuremberg trials:
Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
I suspect I speak for more than a few users on Slashdot when I state that I don't care how cheap OpenOffice is, as long as it's nowhere near as good as MS Office.
We've had this discussion a thousand times under past articles, and there are a few things that ring true every time. One is that the entirely objective list of bugs in OpenOffice is not trivial, and likewise for major functionality gaps compared to the Microsoft incumbent. Another is that the cost of switch is not zero, because of the retraining issues, and the lower efficiency in using a program with poor usability and help features.
Why would you think you speak for every Slashdot user when you advocate using an inferior piece of software, just because it's cheap or from someone other than Microsoft?
FYI, the big problems are in converting between Office 95 and the newer format, which is shared mostly unchanged in more recent versions as far as we can tell. We did experience this firsthand at work a few years back, and it was a royal PITA.
A fair point, but relatively speaking, the timescales to rework a web site are likely to be much shorter than the timescales for the bulk of the population to shift to a completely different browser (other than perhaps upgrading to IE7, since presumably automatic updates and buying new PCs will do a lot of that). Assuming the decision to focus on IE rather than W3C specs was taken in an informed way, and not just out of naivete, we might reasonably suppose that someone in the management chain is keeping tabs on the browser distribution of the site's visitors, and would set up a project to support additional browser(s) as they became significant enough to be worth the cost.
As almost everyone seems to have understood except you, all I was advocating in my parent post is considering your goals and choosing your tools and techniques appropriately. If you think you have a better plan, don't worry about firing me, you'd never be able to hire me.
And just so you know, our corporate net bans ActiveX (no yada, yada, yada here). If you had half a clue you would know that internal intrussion is as bad, or even worst than an external threat, for the simple reason that the intruder already has keys to the front of the house.
I don't care what your corporate net does; I don't work for your corporation. My employer's corporate Intranet makes effective use of ActiveX for several minor things that many of us use everyday, and not being able to do them would be a pain. If you have an internal security problem, then ActiveX is the least of your worries anyway.
I don't want "practical tools" that make it dead easy to shoot myself in the foot. Such cavalier attitude is completely unacceptable.
There is no perfect tool, no bulletproof security. Even if there were, it would be useless if its security features prevented it from doing anything useful. Everything is a trade-off, a balance between providing enough functionality and flexibility to be useful and enough security to reduce the risk of a breach.
You are welcome to err on the side of safety. For your business, and with your attitude, perhaps that is for the best. But don't make the naive assumption that what works best for you is also the approach that will work best for everyone else. Some of us like practical tools where it's dead easy to shoot ourselves in the foot, because once you've learned how to use the safety, they tend to be more powerful than the alternatives.
When you use your version of IE to test your web pages and apps, you may think you're ensuring compatability with about 85% of users, but that's not really the case. Although about 85% of people use IE, I think you'd find a significant percentage of those people don't use the latest version.
Well, at least my server logs disagree with you: the incidence of IE below 6 is almost zero for those sites I maintain. YMMV, of course.
Leaving aside the issue of whether such limitations would ever be enforcable in a case of severe negligence, that EULA applied to my legitimately-purchased copy of Windows XP. If other Microsoft software subsequently installed on my PC were used deliberately by Microsoft to render the machine useless, contrary to the information given to me when I installed it, then I'm not sure that they'd have much of a legal leg to stand on, at least in some jurisdictions.
But some can't switch back [to IE] because it was never there to begin with.
Sure, but strategically, their numbers may be too small to be significant and the project management may not care. There is a price to being outside the mainstream when the vast majority of people are in it.
I wonder how the bulk of slashdotters, for whom a W3C standard seems to be a sacred cow, will react to the message that these standards are all-too-often ambiguous, bone-headed, poorly supported, slow-moving, and lacking important features.
I think you're being a little unfair there. There are some highly vocal, pro-W3C zealots around, but there are also some of us who have always argued that any sort of formal specification is merely a means to an end, and should be used if (and only if) that end is desirable under the circumstances.
In web design, if you want maximum portability, you follow W3C standards for all the smaller browsers, and then provide suitable hacks for the big one. OTOH, if you just want to reach most of the general public and don't want to chase diminishing returns much, targetting IE is the obvious choice, since it is the only relevant standard (albeit a de facto one) in this context, and your pages will still mostly work on other browsers (or get their users to switch back temporarily to IE) anyway.
Similarly for corporate intranets, some people bitch about how dangerous ActiveX is and yada yada yada, but the fact remains that it's a practical tool to solve a problem. Users complaining that "better" browsers like Firefox don't support it is going to cut exactly zero ice with any corporate management/IT.
IME, posts pointing this sort of thing out are frequently modded both Insightful and Troll/Flamebait several times, usually more + than -. Thus it seems rather unfair to characterise "the bulk of slashdotters" as being semi-religious W3C devotees. The majority of posters in certain discussions perhaps, but apparently not the majority of mods, and we'll never know about the lurkers or those who do post but are sensible enough to avoid religious topics.
If WGA is wrong (Microsoft? Bugs? Never!) then a legit copy of Windows may go inactive with a major hassle to get it working again.
Oh please, please let them do this. The lawsuit would be staggering, and it would probably be Microsoft's XCP in terms of convincing the execs that the whole approach was a massive business liability and should be stopped permanently.
Absolutely. There's a balance between higher-level languages having more semantic information that they can use to optimise, and lower-level languages having fewer overheads because they're closer to the machine and the abstractions, such as they are, don't carry much deadweight.
Naturally, as optimisation techniques develop to take advantage of the higher-level abstractions, and processor architectures go beyond the model of the traditional lower-level languages with multiple cores, vectorised instructions and so on, the balance will shift.
I think of it a bit like the old software optimisation contrast: you can optimise at a low level, and get a small multiplier in your speed-up, or you can optimise your algorithms, and get something with lower complexity but with a practical difference that only matters for larger-scale problems. In the long run, improving algorithmic complexity can bring far greater returns, but your low-level stuff has to be reasonable to start with.
Let's not jump the gun here. The big threat to humans is a mutated strain of something like H5N1 that does the damage of the original bird flu but spreads through humans as fast as a human flu. Developing a vaccine for this threat requires knowing what the threat is, and as yet, there have been no confirmed cases of human-human transmission.
Even with recent advances, developing and mass-producing vaccines takes several weeks, by which time the vaccine will be irrelevant for many people if the mutated strain starts to spread. This is the nightmare scenario, and is why so much research is currently being done into improving vaccine development, and so much planning focusses on identifying human-human transmission as early as possible.
Of course anything to reduce the spread of the original bird flu also reduces the opportunity for a mutated strain to develop, and is therefore a good thing. But let's not misunderstand what's been achieved here.
I am reminded of an anecdote my father once told me, about the management policy in a large company where he worked.
One day, the management decided to call in the management consultants. In due course, a snappily-dressed 24-year-old strolled into the office where my father worked as leader of a team who were, essentially, the world's experts in their particular area of R&D.
My father is not a man who suffers fools gladly, and after the introductions, asked the 24-year-old in his tailored suit what he could offer by way of background, to help him guide a man with 20 years' experience in the industry to perform better.
I've never seen anything in either the UK's IP legislation or anything like the EU Copyright Directive...
Those uphold the principles of reciprocity, not the right of the government to act within it.
No, those define what copyright is -- the fact that it even exists, how it is acquired and transferred, and so on. The WIPO treaties are what impose reciprocity, and would require one nation to recognise copyrights established in another.
Generally speaking, when assigning remedies, courts have options related to the breach of the law that occurred. For example, the UK's legislature will indicate that a certain crime may carry a fine not exceeding a certain level on a scale, and it is then for the court in a particular case to determine what fine to impose within those limits. Of course civil and criminal law don't work exactly the same way, but then again we don't have punitive damages in the UK either.
So, in order for a court to seize something, there must be some provision in law allowing them to do so. In the case of money for a fine, this is well established. The seizure of physical property if money is not directly available is also established. But I haven't encountered anything that indicates that intellectual property is to be treated the same way, as if it were a tangible, physical asset. Neither would it necessarily make sense to treat it so, since as people often note around here, IP is not the same as physical property. Would it make sense for a court to claim the copyright of a GPL'd application because one of the contributors upset it? What does that imply for any licences already granted? What if a defendant decided to assign all their IP to some other body just before the ruling was given? I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but attempting a parallel with forfeiture of physical goods is not likely to work as an analogy here.
I'm not a lawyer, so I could indeed be completely wrong about this, but a quick web search didn't turn up any example cases either. Have you actually seen any specific cases where this happened? You mentioned bankruptcies and the like, but I've yet to (knowingly) see a bust games company's code either being reused by another company or appearing in the public domain, for example.
Actually, it is you who is completely wrong. Both the EU and the US have under numerous cases confiscated intellectual property rights as well as other assets from convicted criminals.
I'd be interested to see some examples. As many here are often at pains to point out, intellectual property is not the same as physical property. I've never seen anything in either the UK's IP legislation or anything like the EU Copyright Directive that provides for copyright to be transferred "forcibly" just because someone broke the law in some other way, but perhaps I am indeed wrong and I've just missed the critical provisions. What (and where) are they?
All the WIPO/WTO (global treaties of that kind) have provisions for emergencies and strategical resources. (*) M$Windows is installed on 95% of computers in Europe => M$Windows is strategical resource. M$ pulls out of Europe => that would be emergency.
Well, as you said yourself, it's unrealistic to think that MS would ever voluntarily pull out of a market the size of the EU: they'd sink like osmium moments later.
However, I'm not convinced about your "emergency" claim. It's not like MS not selling in Europe in the future would suddenly invalidate all the existing licences, and most of the big customers (governments, non-tiny businesses) will have open licence agreements on a per-site or per-organisation basis. So it's not like they'd be required by their own laws to uninstall every copy of Windows and Office overnight, or even like they couldn't install new copies of versions where they've already got open licensing arrangements.
Of course, they wouldn't necessarily get security patches or be able to buy future versions of Windows/Office/whatever. But by the time they come along, the millions European governments would be putting into deals with competitors, whose private investment income would be going through the roof as well while Microsoft was busy collapsing under the weight of its own arrogance, would be starting to yield big returns.
In other words, I don't think Microsoft pulling out of the EU would be a disaster for the EU, only for Microsoft. As such, the EU couldn't realistically claim that MS pulling out was an imminent emergency that required immediate and total nullification of the effects of an international treaty. But then again, they wouldn't need to, so why bother?
The EU has a population of approximately 450 million, while the US is around 300 million. The GDP, on a PPP basis, is approximately the same for both.
However, there is a wide gap between the top and bottom nations in the EU, particularly since the recent expansion. Looking at GDP per capita, the US is hardly exceptional on the world stage. It's not at the top of the list, and within about 75% you have most of central Europe and Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, and Japan, as well as several much smaller countries.
Personally, I can live with our modestly lower level of productivity (on that metric, at least - the reliance on PPP in a market which isn't 100% efficient is not a perfect model) in exchange for our much higher quality of life (most of those nations work shorter hours, take more vacation time, live longer, etc.) and not conceding inappropriate levels of power and influence to The Mighty Corporation. YMMV, of course.
The parent isn't insightful, it's simply wrong. Under WIPO treaties, to which pretty much every major economic power in Europe is a signatory, the EU can do no such thing. All the posts about cancelling Microsoft's copyrights are fantasy. Then again, pretty much every other post in this discussion seems to think this is just an ineffective slap on the wrist, without considering the likely consequences.
What you say makes perfect sense on the public Internet: ActiveX has indeed been a cause of security problems on more than one occasion. On an office intranet, however, where the only standard is whatever the company uses and the security is only as good as your corporate network's, those arguments are pretty much irrelevant.
Well, when I go to any sites on our corporate intranet using IE, it just loads them. Firefox invariably prompts me for username and password, and it does so for every different site on our intranet that requires authentication.
Sorry, I still don't have a problem with any of this.
Because of the 111 individuals who settled out of court, who decided it was cheaper and simpler to pay the settlement than pay for a solicitor and go for the longer drawn out battle in court, even if they might have won on the merits of their case?
We're talking about the UK, which has a loser-pays legal system and a presumption of innocence. The cost of defending yourself in court, even without a solicitor if necessary, is likely to be small.
I'm more inclined to believe that since all of the cases that have gone to court have been won by the industry, a lot of people who know damn well that they should lose are settling up-front to avoid the risk of the court awarding higher damages and/or costs.
Because there's 24 people who have neither settled or been found guilty, and are presumably going through this long, expensive process?
What long, expensive process?
Because not all of us agree that the penalties for copyright infringment levelled against private individual sharing are necessarily fair and just?
Well, that's your decision, and of course you're as entitled as anyone else to have your own opinion. However, since we don't appear to know how big the settlements and court-ordered penalties are in this case, and in any case those should be defined by the law and the specifics of the case rather than your or my personal preferences, I don't see that this point has any relevance.
Because many people infringing are children, and NOT aware of the law and its consquences, so their parents end up with multi-thousand pound fines?
Then maybe their parents should be a little more responsible, I dunno, maybe supervising their kids and bringing them up to obey the law?
Sorry, but I have absolutely no sympathy for a parent that lets their kids go roaming around on the Internet, unsupervised and unrestricted, for the extended periods of time necessary to be in this situation. Maybe a few thousand in fines will remind them of the responsibility they took on when they brought a child into this world.
It's the THREAT of court by a private body that forces settlements from the majority. Whether they are guilty or not, we'll never know.
No, I don't think so. You're thinking like someone used to seeing US tactics, where megacorps can draw out extensive cases, and get awarded absurd punitive damages for trivial infractions. Fortunately for all of us, the UK hasn't quite descended to that level yet. I don't swap songs illegally on-line, and you better believe I'd defend myself in court against a frivolous lawsuit rather than roll over and play dead.
As for guilt, in individual cases, no, of course you mustn't prejudge the outcome. Overall, let's not kid ourselves, it's a good bet that the vast majority of people doing enough to get noticed here are guilty as sin.
Just because the big 4 have the law on their side doesn't make them right, or worthy of my business. I've made my choice to only buy from independants, you're welcome to make your own.
Indeed, and as it happens, I rarely buy music of any sort these days. I just don't find it enjoyable enough that I want to spend my hard-earned money on it, so I listen to the radio or whatever instead. I have no problem with your decision either; it's absolutely your right to make that choice, whatever Big Media might like to think. The only thing I have a problem with here is people who decide they do want Big Media's products, but are going to take them illegally rather than paying the going rate.
Slashdot Mirror
No amount of information will truly protect you from every threat. Never can, never will. The very premise behind all of the recent initiatives is fundamentally flawed.
Yes, we should. (My sig is particularly appropriate at this moment.)
The security services should be able to gather information when they have a reasonable basis for expecting to need it. That information must be held confidentially until it becomes clearly relevant. If it turns out to be relevant, it should automatically be admissible in court. If it turns out not to be after a reasonable period, then it should be destroyed. Yes, I know that's a tough decision to make. Too bad.
And failure to handle the kind of information governments are starting to collect in a responsible fashion should be the thing carrying the draconian penalties.
I think it's a little unfair to call a population (as a whole) "stupid" in cases like this. Perhaps "naive" would be more appropriate? After all, I suspect many of the people reading this board have spent a lot more time doing their homework on their nation's governments and the civil liberties implications than most average citizens. It shouldn't be necessary to assume that all the information you're getting out of government is misleading or outright wrong, though in practice with the sort of power-hungry governments and weak leaders we have in the West today it seems sadly necessary.
Ironically, I think it was Herman Goering who explained our current predicament best, in a comment he made during the time of the Nuremberg trials:
I suspect I speak for more than a few users on Slashdot when I state that I don't care how cheap OpenOffice is, as long as it's nowhere near as good as MS Office.
We've had this discussion a thousand times under past articles, and there are a few things that ring true every time. One is that the entirely objective list of bugs in OpenOffice is not trivial, and likewise for major functionality gaps compared to the Microsoft incumbent. Another is that the cost of switch is not zero, because of the retraining issues, and the lower efficiency in using a program with poor usability and help features.
Why would you think you speak for every Slashdot user when you advocate using an inferior piece of software, just because it's cheap or from someone other than Microsoft?
No, OOo is a piece of software. ODF is the format. The two are related, but not exclusively intertwined.
FYI, the big problems are in converting between Office 95 and the newer format, which is shared mostly unchanged in more recent versions as far as we can tell. We did experience this firsthand at work a few years back, and it was a royal PITA.
A fair point, but relatively speaking, the timescales to rework a web site are likely to be much shorter than the timescales for the bulk of the population to shift to a completely different browser (other than perhaps upgrading to IE7, since presumably automatic updates and buying new PCs will do a lot of that). Assuming the decision to focus on IE rather than W3C specs was taken in an informed way, and not just out of naivete, we might reasonably suppose that someone in the management chain is keeping tabs on the browser distribution of the site's visitors, and would set up a project to support additional browser(s) as they became significant enough to be worth the cost.
As almost everyone seems to have understood except you, all I was advocating in my parent post is considering your goals and choosing your tools and techniques appropriately. If you think you have a better plan, don't worry about firing me, you'd never be able to hire me.
I don't care what your corporate net does; I don't work for your corporation. My employer's corporate Intranet makes effective use of ActiveX for several minor things that many of us use everyday, and not being able to do them would be a pain. If you have an internal security problem, then ActiveX is the least of your worries anyway.
There is no perfect tool, no bulletproof security. Even if there were, it would be useless if its security features prevented it from doing anything useful. Everything is a trade-off, a balance between providing enough functionality and flexibility to be useful and enough security to reduce the risk of a breach.
You are welcome to err on the side of safety. For your business, and with your attitude, perhaps that is for the best. But don't make the naive assumption that what works best for you is also the approach that will work best for everyone else. Some of us like practical tools where it's dead easy to shoot ourselves in the foot, because once you've learned how to use the safety, they tend to be more powerful than the alternatives.
Well, at least my server logs disagree with you: the incidence of IE below 6 is almost zero for those sites I maintain. YMMV, of course.
Leaving aside the issue of whether such limitations would ever be enforcable in a case of severe negligence, that EULA applied to my legitimately-purchased copy of Windows XP. If other Microsoft software subsequently installed on my PC were used deliberately by Microsoft to render the machine useless, contrary to the information given to me when I installed it, then I'm not sure that they'd have much of a legal leg to stand on, at least in some jurisdictions.
Sure, but strategically, their numbers may be too small to be significant and the project management may not care. There is a price to being outside the mainstream when the vast majority of people are in it.
I think you're being a little unfair there. There are some highly vocal, pro-W3C zealots around, but there are also some of us who have always argued that any sort of formal specification is merely a means to an end, and should be used if (and only if) that end is desirable under the circumstances.
In web design, if you want maximum portability, you follow W3C standards for all the smaller browsers, and then provide suitable hacks for the big one. OTOH, if you just want to reach most of the general public and don't want to chase diminishing returns much, targetting IE is the obvious choice, since it is the only relevant standard (albeit a de facto one) in this context, and your pages will still mostly work on other browsers (or get their users to switch back temporarily to IE) anyway.
Similarly for corporate intranets, some people bitch about how dangerous ActiveX is and yada yada yada, but the fact remains that it's a practical tool to solve a problem. Users complaining that "better" browsers like Firefox don't support it is going to cut exactly zero ice with any corporate management/IT.
IME, posts pointing this sort of thing out are frequently modded both Insightful and Troll/Flamebait several times, usually more + than -. Thus it seems rather unfair to characterise "the bulk of slashdotters" as being semi-religious W3C devotees. The majority of posters in certain discussions perhaps, but apparently not the majority of mods, and we'll never know about the lurkers or those who do post but are sensible enough to avoid religious topics.
Oh please, please let them do this. The lawsuit would be staggering, and it would probably be Microsoft's XCP in terms of convincing the execs that the whole approach was a massive business liability and should be stopped permanently.
Absolutely. There's a balance between higher-level languages having more semantic information that they can use to optimise, and lower-level languages having fewer overheads because they're closer to the machine and the abstractions, such as they are, don't carry much deadweight.
Naturally, as optimisation techniques develop to take advantage of the higher-level abstractions, and processor architectures go beyond the model of the traditional lower-level languages with multiple cores, vectorised instructions and so on, the balance will shift.
I think of it a bit like the old software optimisation contrast: you can optimise at a low level, and get a small multiplier in your speed-up, or you can optimise your algorithms, and get something with lower complexity but with a practical difference that only matters for larger-scale problems. In the long run, improving algorithmic complexity can bring far greater returns, but your low-level stuff has to be reasonable to start with.
Let's not jump the gun here. The big threat to humans is a mutated strain of something like H5N1 that does the damage of the original bird flu but spreads through humans as fast as a human flu. Developing a vaccine for this threat requires knowing what the threat is, and as yet, there have been no confirmed cases of human-human transmission.
Even with recent advances, developing and mass-producing vaccines takes several weeks, by which time the vaccine will be irrelevant for many people if the mutated strain starts to spread. This is the nightmare scenario, and is why so much research is currently being done into improving vaccine development, and so much planning focusses on identifying human-human transmission as early as possible.
Of course anything to reduce the spread of the original bird flu also reduces the opportunity for a mutated strain to develop, and is therefore a good thing. But let's not misunderstand what's been achieved here.
Well I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it! ;-)
I am reminded of an anecdote my father once told me, about the management policy in a large company where he worked.
One day, the management decided to call in the management consultants. In due course, a snappily-dressed 24-year-old strolled into the office where my father worked as leader of a team who were, essentially, the world's experts in their particular area of R&D.
My father is not a man who suffers fools gladly, and after the introductions, asked the 24-year-old in his tailored suit what he could offer by way of background, to help him guide a man with 20 years' experience in the industry to perform better.
"I have a degree," said the 24-year-old.
"That's interesting," said my father. "So do I."
"Mine's from Oxford," said the 24-year-old.
You can imagine the reaction...
No, those define what copyright is -- the fact that it even exists, how it is acquired and transferred, and so on. The WIPO treaties are what impose reciprocity, and would require one nation to recognise copyrights established in another.
Generally speaking, when assigning remedies, courts have options related to the breach of the law that occurred. For example, the UK's legislature will indicate that a certain crime may carry a fine not exceeding a certain level on a scale, and it is then for the court in a particular case to determine what fine to impose within those limits. Of course civil and criminal law don't work exactly the same way, but then again we don't have punitive damages in the UK either.
So, in order for a court to seize something, there must be some provision in law allowing them to do so. In the case of money for a fine, this is well established. The seizure of physical property if money is not directly available is also established. But I haven't encountered anything that indicates that intellectual property is to be treated the same way, as if it were a tangible, physical asset. Neither would it necessarily make sense to treat it so, since as people often note around here, IP is not the same as physical property. Would it make sense for a court to claim the copyright of a GPL'd application because one of the contributors upset it? What does that imply for any licences already granted? What if a defendant decided to assign all their IP to some other body just before the ruling was given? I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but attempting a parallel with forfeiture of physical goods is not likely to work as an analogy here.
I'm not a lawyer, so I could indeed be completely wrong about this, but a quick web search didn't turn up any example cases either. Have you actually seen any specific cases where this happened? You mentioned bankruptcies and the like, but I've yet to (knowingly) see a bust games company's code either being reused by another company or appearing in the public domain, for example.
I'd be interested to see some examples. As many here are often at pains to point out, intellectual property is not the same as physical property. I've never seen anything in either the UK's IP legislation or anything like the EU Copyright Directive that provides for copyright to be transferred "forcibly" just because someone broke the law in some other way, but perhaps I am indeed wrong and I've just missed the critical provisions. What (and where) are they?
Well, as you said yourself, it's unrealistic to think that MS would ever voluntarily pull out of a market the size of the EU: they'd sink like osmium moments later.
However, I'm not convinced about your "emergency" claim. It's not like MS not selling in Europe in the future would suddenly invalidate all the existing licences, and most of the big customers (governments, non-tiny businesses) will have open licence agreements on a per-site or per-organisation basis. So it's not like they'd be required by their own laws to uninstall every copy of Windows and Office overnight, or even like they couldn't install new copies of versions where they've already got open licensing arrangements.
Of course, they wouldn't necessarily get security patches or be able to buy future versions of Windows/Office/whatever. But by the time they come along, the millions European governments would be putting into deals with competitors, whose private investment income would be going through the roof as well while Microsoft was busy collapsing under the weight of its own arrogance, would be starting to yield big returns.
In other words, I don't think Microsoft pulling out of the EU would be a disaster for the EU, only for Microsoft. As such, the EU couldn't realistically claim that MS pulling out was an imminent emergency that required immediate and total nullification of the effects of an international treaty. But then again, they wouldn't need to, so why bother?
The EU has a population of approximately 450 million, while the US is around 300 million. The GDP, on a PPP basis, is approximately the same for both.
However, there is a wide gap between the top and bottom nations in the EU, particularly since the recent expansion. Looking at GDP per capita, the US is hardly exceptional on the world stage. It's not at the top of the list, and within about 75% you have most of central Europe and Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, and Japan, as well as several much smaller countries.
Personally, I can live with our modestly lower level of productivity (on that metric, at least - the reliance on PPP in a market which isn't 100% efficient is not a perfect model) in exchange for our much higher quality of life (most of those nations work shorter hours, take more vacation time, live longer, etc.) and not conceding inappropriate levels of power and influence to The Mighty Corporation. YMMV, of course.
If they don't pay, then effectively, the EU just send the bailiffs in and start physically carrying Microsoft assets out of the building.
In practice, of course, this phenomenon is more likely to manifest itself through ordering banks to confiscate MS funds in the first instance.
Arresting a few directors would probably get things moving, too.
The parent isn't insightful, it's simply wrong. Under WIPO treaties, to which pretty much every major economic power in Europe is a signatory, the EU can do no such thing. All the posts about cancelling Microsoft's copyrights are fantasy. Then again, pretty much every other post in this discussion seems to think this is just an ineffective slap on the wrist, without considering the likely consequences.
What you say makes perfect sense on the public Internet: ActiveX has indeed been a cause of security problems on more than one occasion. On an office intranet, however, where the only standard is whatever the company uses and the security is only as good as your corporate network's, those arguments are pretty much irrelevant.
Well, when I go to any sites on our corporate intranet using IE, it just loads them. Firefox invariably prompts me for username and password, and it does so for every different site on our intranet that requires authentication.
Sorry, I still don't have a problem with any of this.
We're talking about the UK, which has a loser-pays legal system and a presumption of innocence. The cost of defending yourself in court, even without a solicitor if necessary, is likely to be small.
I'm more inclined to believe that since all of the cases that have gone to court have been won by the industry, a lot of people who know damn well that they should lose are settling up-front to avoid the risk of the court awarding higher damages and/or costs.
What long, expensive process?
Well, that's your decision, and of course you're as entitled as anyone else to have your own opinion. However, since we don't appear to know how big the settlements and court-ordered penalties are in this case, and in any case those should be defined by the law and the specifics of the case rather than your or my personal preferences, I don't see that this point has any relevance.
Then maybe their parents should be a little more responsible, I dunno, maybe supervising their kids and bringing them up to obey the law?
Sorry, but I have absolutely no sympathy for a parent that lets their kids go roaming around on the Internet, unsupervised and unrestricted, for the extended periods of time necessary to be in this situation. Maybe a few thousand in fines will remind them of the responsibility they took on when they brought a child into this world.
No, I don't think so. You're thinking like someone used to seeing US tactics, where megacorps can draw out extensive cases, and get awarded absurd punitive damages for trivial infractions. Fortunately for all of us, the UK hasn't quite descended to that level yet. I don't swap songs illegally on-line, and you better believe I'd defend myself in court against a frivolous lawsuit rather than roll over and play dead.
As for guilt, in individual cases, no, of course you mustn't prejudge the outcome. Overall, let's not kid ourselves, it's a good bet that the vast majority of people doing enough to get noticed here are guilty as sin.
Indeed, and as it happens, I rarely buy music of any sort these days. I just don't find it enjoyable enough that I want to spend my hard-earned money on it, so I listen to the radio or whatever instead. I have no problem with your decision either; it's absolutely your right to make that choice, whatever Big Media might like to think. The only thing I have a problem with here is people who decide they do want Big Media's products, but are going to take them illegally rather than paying the going rate.