Yes, and their results don't support your statements.
Which results and statements, exactly, would those be? For someone who's so keen on justifying "specific claims with specific evidence", your criticisms of my argument here are remarkably troll-like.
For a start, I haven't really made any specific claims in this thread. In fact, my whole point was pretty much that this is a general issue with today's robotic, mathematical systems vs. human perception, that does not seem to be restricted to specific cases. About the closest I can think of with typography was "The best fonts are still hand-hinted by experienced typographers," and since I didn't specify best in what sense and have mentioned at least two relevant ones (which I called "perceived readability" and "actual readability" for want of better terms), that's hardly a specific claim.
Now, I could make specific claims. Indeed, I had several in mind to support my general premise, but decided not to elongate my earlier post by listing them. But before I do, I'd be fascinated to know what specific claims you think I should back up with specific evidence.
Yes, and Nielsen couldn't back up his statements with actual facts if his life depended on it; usually, he takes a tiny factoid from some vaguely related experiment and completely overgeneralizes from it.
Have you ever actually read one of NN Group's usability reports, or even the web site articles? They frequently discuss the experimental methods and sampling techniques they use, and how they derive their quantitivate data. Your claim sounds like you used to insist on doing something your way, and you don't like the fact their more objective studies have debunked your "expert" views.
Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Either you back up specific claims with specific evidence, or your statements are just hot air.
So cite some claims Nielsen has made that are over-generalised "tiny factoids from some vaguely related experiment" and explain why his method was flawed in each case.
I thought the number of finished lines of code per developer-day (that means debugged, documented, etc.) was only 20 for an average developer? A top developer will get closer to 10x that (mainly because when they write a lot of code in a day, they don't introduce lots of silly bugs that take a lot of time to correct later). Some developers actually have negative productivity overall (which makes sense when you consider the time spent by their colleagues to fix their bugs afterwards).
I can't remember where I saw those stats: probably something like Code Complete or The Mythical Man Month, I imagine, or possibly the IBM study into developer productivity at different ages (the one that says anyone under 25 is only good for documentation, and anyone 25-30 should only work on one project at once). Does anyone recognise the number?
I can't see any references in the blog post. Where do the figures of 6,200 (and the earlier 9,000) LOC/year come from?
Except that it's not really "just my opinion" at all, nor even just the opinion of many professionals in the industry.
Regarding the typography, academic studies of both perceived readability (which font people prefer to look at) and actual readability (how fast and accurately people can read text in different fonts) have been carried out. Several factors appear to affect both, not always correlated as directly as one might assume, and there are no known algorithms that effectively optimise some of those factors (optimal kerning to give even colour, for one).
Likewise, there is a whole industry, albeit a relatively small one, dedicated to usability. Jakob Nielsen's useit.com is probably the best-known web site on the subject, even if it's not what it used to be these days, and there are many more. These people perform quantitative studies on how effectively user interfaces work. Again, their conclusions don't always agree with what "everyone knows", but those conclusions are typically based on objective studies of what users actually do, not reading some big company's handbook of UI design standards.
So no, this is not based on idle conjecture. My opinions have been formed after studying this field for several years, and the sources I'm most interested in are those that are not hypothetical but based on objective evidence.
The answer is to use native widgets in a way that is flexible enough to allow the toolkit to decide look & feel issues rather than the programmer.
The problem is, machines just aren't good at visual design and HCI stuff.
Sure, some things can be automated: do we centre the titles over related groups of controls on this platform?
Other things can't: the conventions for labelling buttons are wildly different from platform to platform. We can say, "Platform A's convention is much clearer, so we'll just use those labels everywhere," and it might even be true from a UI perspective. However, it would still look out of place on Platforms B and C.
The same is true of pretty much any aspect of graphic design, typography, or other presentation. The best fonts are still hand-hinted by experienced typographers. The most impressive web pages often use solid, carefully planned layout and judicious graphics, rather than relying on browsers to render fluid layouts as effectively. Publishers don't rely on the templates that come with word processors or DTP packages, they get their own designed for each publication. And software developers who care about their users don't trust algorithms to generate a clear, effective user interface, they get a real person who understands HCI and platform conventions to design it.
Re:Have you tried coding anything hard?
on
The End of Native Code?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The interface logic most certainly is appropriate to be highe level, but the database engine itself is probably better off as native code. Ditto for the operating system kernel.
Thank you. In that one, concise post, you have provided the only credible answer to the question in the title: no.
As always, we should use the right tool for the job. For anything where processing performance matters, native code blows away anything interpreted, and always will. I loved this little bit of rhetoric in the original post:
Regardless of the negligible performance hit compared to native code, major software houses, as well as a lot of open-source developers, prefer native code for major projects even though interpreted languages are easier to port cross-platform, often have a shorter development time, and are just as powerful as languages that generate native code.
Negligible performance hit? Don't make me laugh. I write high performance maths libraries for a living, and there's a reason almost everything in this business is still done in C, C++ or FORTRAN.
Moreover, we probably port our libraries to some platforms that Java doesn't even have VM for, so the whole portability argument is FUD, too. If you want to be seriously impressed, go check out the work of the ATLAS project.
Of course more powerful, higher-level languages can make developers more productive in terms of getting projects finished faster. I don't think anyone's disputing that. If you can solve a problem effectively using a high-level language as glue and combining pre-built components, go ahead and knock yourself out, that's what the tools are there for. But somewhere along the line, someone has to write those components, and if performance matters, there's always going to be native code involved sooner or later. This is something the parent poster appears to understand, but the original asker apparently doesn't.
Actually, I believe the Australian AG recently announced quite a few changes to copyright laws, including legitimising format shifting.
Re:Microsoft just seems to be kind of flailing.
on
Web 2.0, Meet .Net 3.0
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
*coughshillcough*
Given that his.sig says "Yes, I do work for Microsoft" and has done for ages, and also that his comments are generally informed and relevant, I'm not sure how you can call him a shill.:-)
It'd be a lot more effective for them to monitor bandwidth usage on campus and then start "wiretapping" students who are heavy users to see just what the hell they're doing.
It would probably also be effective to cut off campus networks entirely from the Internet, or for that matter to impose random searches of any computer on the network, with the the owner of any machine containing any infringing content immediately being kicked out of college.
Of course, whether it's even slightly ethical or legal to do these things is an entirely different question. I'd like to think you were joking about the wiretapping suggest, because it's such an affront to my sense of decency that I can't imagine anyone actually supporting such a move.
I'm sure the recording industry would love that. But why should those of us who don't rip content illegally pay up lots of money to subsidise those of you who do?
While I agree with much of what you say, I do have to ask who's responsible for all those workers in poverty conditions in less developed countries. It's simplistic to say that it's just the big, bad corporations exploiting them, but there's a lot of truth in that claim all the same.
As I often suggest in slippery-slope discussions, perhaps we should actively encourage this sort of behaviour by the government. It's going to happen anyway: power corrupts, sheeple are naive, and all that. But the sooner it gets to the point that the average voter in the street sees the dangers, rather than just those who believe in civil liberties and scrutinise government actions, the sooner the popular feeling will start to turn against it.
Then the media will pick it up, and government popularity will take a nosedive as people switch from buying anything with the words "fighting terrorism" in it to assuming most things like that are government smokescreens for unpleasant behaviour that wouldn't normally be acceptable. Backing further draconian laws will become politically untenable, no matter how much the Powers That Be offer in political funding, and the whole tower of cards will come crashing down.
The problem is, if the process happens slowly, it's too subtle for the average voter to notice it and the changes are too small in isolation for people to vote against en masse. Thus I think the way to beat it is to accelerate the inevitable "things getting worse" part, to the point where it's so obvious that everyone starts crying foul and "things get better" happens as soon as possible.
Not to get too far off topic, but companies may now become very leery of sensitive data making it out past their firewalls, especially when it seems their employees can't handle it properly or keep it safe.
Some companies already are. Taking source code onto laptops and such is pretty much verboten around these parts. Entirely coincidentally, shortly before this policy was introduced, one of our customers had to hunt down a leak after someone offered to sell the code for their entire product on the black market.
The thing I find amazing here is that we're talking about the military/security establishment, one of the few groups of government for whom tight security is an operational necessity. And yet, my other half seems to go through more security going into and out of one of the UK copyright libraries (the special libraries that tend to look after irreplaceable historical documents amongst other things) when doing her research than would be necessary to stop such a simple breach of security as apparently happened here.
I know social engineering is usually quoted as the number one cause of security breaches, but this wasn't so much social engineering (the guy with clearance taking the data home and deliberately giving it to someone) as outright incompetence (the guy with clearance taking the data home in a format where if the hardware was stolen the data could be viewed). This isn't a trusting your people issue, it's a basic policy issue.
He was shot because of a combination of bad intelligence and poor judgement by the authorities and their agents. It's hardly an isolated case, either; see my earlier reply to another poster. Of course I wrote that in a deliberately overstated way, but that was just because I wanted to highlight how absurd the situation is.
Now, imagine how many memos the Prez got saying that Saddam Hussein wanted to attack. Putin gave him one. The Mossad, others. Who knows how many the CIA or NSA provided. Do you expect the Prez to sit around and do nothing again?
That depends on what the memos actually said, now doesn't it? There's a bit of a difference between "Iraq may have WMDs and the ability to deploy them to their immediate neighbours" and "Iraq has WMDs that could be deployed against our country within 45 minutes". Maybe your media tell a different story in the US, but it's pretty well established in the UK that the former is what was said by the intelligence services and the latter is what was heard (or at least reported to the public) by Blair et al.
After 9/11, do you still sit around seeing if anything happens before acting on it? Don't you think that would be just a bit irresponsible?
What the hell did 9/11 change? There has always been a threat from this group or that group. The threat has always been relatively small, but the groups do what they do to instill fear that however small the risk, it could happen to you. That's why they're called "terrorists". The only difference is that the attack on 9/11 claimed more lives than those before it or since. There is no moral or ethical difference in the world today from that on 10 September, and there should be no difference in the judgements and responses of a rational, objective person.
The irresponsible action in this context is to make snap decisions about important issues in light of incomplete information. There was no need to invade Iraq when we did, and the intelligence (such as it was) was being flagged as speculative by the agencies providing it. Any leader with an army at his command and a trigger finger that itchy really isn't fit for the job.
Your argument allocates the power and privilege of God to the State. While I'm sure Dubya would accept and even applaud this argument, most actual believers would find this troubling.
Yeah. Dubya is only God's right-hand man, remember? God talks to him, and told him to invade Iraq.
It's truly disturbing that around half the voting public in America seems to buy that.
Thanks. I actually wrote that originally, but then realised that I wasn't sure it was true in this case and didn't have time to check, so I deleted it again....:-)
Yes, it was one incident, but the fact that it could ever happen betrays such a fundamental failure of so many policies and organisations that I think using it as an example is justified. The same is true of the other example I gave.
Of course, it's not really an isolated incident. For a start, there's been another questionable shooting by the police just this week. And not so long ago, one man was shot dead while carrying a wooden table leg, by police who were following up an entirely incorrect and unverified report that he was carrying a gun. The officers who fired were poorly positioned when they challenged the victim, and therefore perceived a greater threat than they should have when the victim turned around and they fired the fatal shots. Then there was the man shot dead while lying naked in his bed in the middle of the night, when police burst into his bedroom and opened fire. And what's the connection between all of these (aside from the inappropriateness and fatality, of course)? They were all "intelligence-led" operations - exactly what the snooping we're talking about is (allegedly) for.
But perhaps the most telling thing of all is the arrests under so-called anti-terror laws. Since 9/11 and the knee-jerk legislation that followed, vast numbers of people have been arrested under the new laws: we're talking well into five figures in the UK alone. Of those, only a fairly small proportion are ever even charged with an offence, and only a tiny fraction have been convicted of any terrorism-related offence. Of course, being arrested and then released doesn't matter: it's not inconvenient, doesn't attach a permanent stigma to you among your friends and family, and certainly won't result in your DNA winding up forever on a police database that would ever be abused or cause questioned to be asked by MPs. Except, of course, for all the times when all of this has happened as well.
Bottom line: The current approach of "intelligence gathering at all costs" is causing problems for tens of thousands of people, and resulting in serious injury or even fatality to innocent civilians in the worst cases. If I actually believed that this was averting catastrophic terrorist actions and saving hundreds of lives, then I might give some merit to the "fighting terrorism" argument, but I'm afraid government credibility is pretty much all used up on that one. The major threat today isn't from terrorists, it's from poorly-overseen government intervention and excessive transfer of authority from the citizens to the state.
It sounds like you're from the US, where the political system seems to be irrelevant these days for the sort of reason you state (combined with the complete naivety of the electorate, who collectively bring that irrelevance upon themselves by robotically voting for one of two near-cloned candidates every time).
Fortunately, most of the world isn't like that. In some places, we even have politicians with integrity, who get into politics because they genuinely want to make a difference, and act accordingly in office. Granted they are not the only type of politician, nor perhaps even the majority, but they exist.
Moreover, these people command the respect of both other politicians and the public through their actions rather than expensively bought sound-bites. It is rare in this country for an MP known for standing up for their principles and their constituents to lose their seat at an election; on the contrary, those who do this tend to have the biggest majorities outside of the safe seats where parties put their big names.
I'm genuinely sorry that you feel so down about politics. There really is another way, and until corporations get the vote, all the money in the world won't matter if you can get the electorate to stop and realise it without buying them.
We get one or two new MPs voted in "on principle" at most general elections in the UK: at the last election, for example, one serving male MP wasn't reselected by his party to contest the next election, because of a centrally-mandated all-woman shortlist. He ran as an independent instead, and secured a huge proportion of the vote; I think the party in question may even have lost their deposit. Similarly, look at Martin Bell, a respected British journalist who ran as an MP on an anti-sleaze mandate to make a point (complete with whiter-than-white suit:-)) and again overwhelmingly won the vote.
Maybe, just maybe, the MPs in this particular parliamentary group are cut from the same cloth, and have the backbone to do the right thing. I choose to live in hope.
Your anecdote represents one side of the public perception, and you're right that there's a disturbing apathy about these things among the population at large.
But there's another side that also makes the news. In the UK, the police now shoot people for getting on tube trains, and veteran members of the Labour Party are manhandled out of party conferences for having the audacity to... <shock> utter a single word of criticism (it was "nonsense") about the government justification for invading Iraq </shock>. Stories like those make headlines, too, and at least for a while even the average man or woman in the street thinks something's wrong. If only they remembered...
The MPs proposed a series of constructive changes, and the fact that one poor choice of wording reflected into your eyes off your tinfoil hat doesn't mean they shouldn't be given credit for trying to do the right thing. I'm sure Big Media would like them to do what you say, but right now, it doesn't look like things are going their way very much.
Some of us spent considerable time writing a submission to the Gowers review. Having proposed several of these moves in my own submission, I, for one, am gratified to see that others appear to have agreed, and something good may come of it.
Looking at Australia, which conducted a similar but smaller-scale review a few months earlier than the UK, changes have now been announced that clearly are improvements in previously daft copyright laws. This looks like a first step in the UK going the same way. Why must you attack out of pure cynicism those who seem to be trying to do a good thing, rather than supporting them and being grateful that the world may become a nicer place to live because of their actions?
Damn straight - if you buy from iTunes, you have to remember that you're at Apple's mercy - you've waived your rights to fair use
How's that, exactly?
In the US, at least, fair use is an affirmative defence, rather than a right. But I don't see how buying from any particular content provider denies you that legal option.
Whether making copies of iTMS-sourced music violates other laws, such as the DMCA, is a different question. Perhaps the single most insidious thing about that particular piece of legislation is that it does seem to provide Big Media(TM) with a means of making fair use illegal by the back door.
I guess my point was that this is a case where LaTeX can do it, albeit with a bit of hard work at the time, but other things just can't, at least not without even more effort. Although Windows provides Uniscribe and OpenType fonts are available with comprehensive glyph sets, there are still no major Windows applications (other than possibly a couple of Adobe's high-end products) that actually take advantage of this.
As I've noted earlier in this thread, Word doesn't even do basic ligatures used in everyday English correctly yet. (I suspect from scanning their blogs that some of the Microsoft Typography people are rather annoyed that the new version of Word gets yet another UI makeover, but still doesn't get basic typography right.) OpenOffice.org's support for professional grade fonts is so poor that I've had to abandon projects and restart them. (The much-hyped PDF output decides to output all text set in Zapfino in Lucida Calligraphic on my system, for example!) And here was me thinking this was the hi-tech, internationally-friendly 21st century.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Which results and statements, exactly, would those be? For someone who's so keen on justifying "specific claims with specific evidence", your criticisms of my argument here are remarkably troll-like.
For a start, I haven't really made any specific claims in this thread. In fact, my whole point was pretty much that this is a general issue with today's robotic, mathematical systems vs. human perception, that does not seem to be restricted to specific cases. About the closest I can think of with typography was "The best fonts are still hand-hinted by experienced typographers," and since I didn't specify best in what sense and have mentioned at least two relevant ones (which I called "perceived readability" and "actual readability" for want of better terms), that's hardly a specific claim.
Now, I could make specific claims. Indeed, I had several in mind to support my general premise, but decided not to elongate my earlier post by listing them. But before I do, I'd be fascinated to know what specific claims you think I should back up with specific evidence.
Have you ever actually read one of NN Group's usability reports, or even the web site articles? They frequently discuss the experimental methods and sampling techniques they use, and how they derive their quantitivate data. Your claim sounds like you used to insist on doing something your way, and you don't like the fact their more objective studies have debunked your "expert" views.
So cite some claims Nielsen has made that are over-generalised "tiny factoids from some vaguely related experiment" and explain why his method was flawed in each case.
I thought the number of finished lines of code per developer-day (that means debugged, documented, etc.) was only 20 for an average developer? A top developer will get closer to 10x that (mainly because when they write a lot of code in a day, they don't introduce lots of silly bugs that take a lot of time to correct later). Some developers actually have negative productivity overall (which makes sense when you consider the time spent by their colleagues to fix their bugs afterwards).
I can't remember where I saw those stats: probably something like Code Complete or The Mythical Man Month, I imagine, or possibly the IBM study into developer productivity at different ages (the one that says anyone under 25 is only good for documentation, and anyone 25-30 should only work on one project at once). Does anyone recognise the number?
I can't see any references in the blog post. Where do the figures of 6,200 (and the earlier 9,000) LOC/year come from?
Except that it's not really "just my opinion" at all, nor even just the opinion of many professionals in the industry.
Regarding the typography, academic studies of both perceived readability (which font people prefer to look at) and actual readability (how fast and accurately people can read text in different fonts) have been carried out. Several factors appear to affect both, not always correlated as directly as one might assume, and there are no known algorithms that effectively optimise some of those factors (optimal kerning to give even colour, for one).
Likewise, there is a whole industry, albeit a relatively small one, dedicated to usability. Jakob Nielsen's useit.com is probably the best-known web site on the subject, even if it's not what it used to be these days, and there are many more. These people perform quantitative studies on how effectively user interfaces work. Again, their conclusions don't always agree with what "everyone knows", but those conclusions are typically based on objective studies of what users actually do, not reading some big company's handbook of UI design standards.
So no, this is not based on idle conjecture. My opinions have been formed after studying this field for several years, and the sources I'm most interested in are those that are not hypothetical but based on objective evidence.
The problem is, machines just aren't good at visual design and HCI stuff.
Sure, some things can be automated: do we centre the titles over related groups of controls on this platform?
Other things can't: the conventions for labelling buttons are wildly different from platform to platform. We can say, "Platform A's convention is much clearer, so we'll just use those labels everywhere," and it might even be true from a UI perspective. However, it would still look out of place on Platforms B and C.
The same is true of pretty much any aspect of graphic design, typography, or other presentation. The best fonts are still hand-hinted by experienced typographers. The most impressive web pages often use solid, carefully planned layout and judicious graphics, rather than relying on browsers to render fluid layouts as effectively. Publishers don't rely on the templates that come with word processors or DTP packages, they get their own designed for each publication. And software developers who care about their users don't trust algorithms to generate a clear, effective user interface, they get a real person who understands HCI and platform conventions to design it.
Thank you. In that one, concise post, you have provided the only credible answer to the question in the title: no.
As always, we should use the right tool for the job. For anything where processing performance matters, native code blows away anything interpreted, and always will. I loved this little bit of rhetoric in the original post:
Negligible performance hit? Don't make me laugh. I write high performance maths libraries for a living, and there's a reason almost everything in this business is still done in C, C++ or FORTRAN.
Moreover, we probably port our libraries to some platforms that Java doesn't even have VM for, so the whole portability argument is FUD, too. If you want to be seriously impressed, go check out the work of the ATLAS project.
Of course more powerful, higher-level languages can make developers more productive in terms of getting projects finished faster. I don't think anyone's disputing that. If you can solve a problem effectively using a high-level language as glue and combining pre-built components, go ahead and knock yourself out, that's what the tools are there for. But somewhere along the line, someone has to write those components, and if performance matters, there's always going to be native code involved sooner or later. This is something the parent poster appears to understand, but the original asker apparently doesn't.
Actually, I believe the Australian AG recently announced quite a few changes to copyright laws, including legitimising format shifting.
Given that his .sig says "Yes, I do work for Microsoft" and has done for ages, and also that his comments are generally informed and relevant, I'm not sure how you can call him a shill. :-)
They can't. But it doesn't matter anyway, now everyone's reading eDiarist 4.0 Beta...
It would probably also be effective to cut off campus networks entirely from the Internet, or for that matter to impose random searches of any computer on the network, with the the owner of any machine containing any infringing content immediately being kicked out of college.
Of course, whether it's even slightly ethical or legal to do these things is an entirely different question. I'd like to think you were joking about the wiretapping suggest, because it's such an affront to my sense of decency that I can't imagine anyone actually supporting such a move.
I'm sure the recording industry would love that. But why should those of us who don't rip content illegally pay up lots of money to subsidise those of you who do?
While I agree with much of what you say, I do have to ask who's responsible for all those workers in poverty conditions in less developed countries. It's simplistic to say that it's just the big, bad corporations exploiting them, but there's a lot of truth in that claim all the same.
As I often suggest in slippery-slope discussions, perhaps we should actively encourage this sort of behaviour by the government. It's going to happen anyway: power corrupts, sheeple are naive, and all that. But the sooner it gets to the point that the average voter in the street sees the dangers, rather than just those who believe in civil liberties and scrutinise government actions, the sooner the popular feeling will start to turn against it.
Then the media will pick it up, and government popularity will take a nosedive as people switch from buying anything with the words "fighting terrorism" in it to assuming most things like that are government smokescreens for unpleasant behaviour that wouldn't normally be acceptable. Backing further draconian laws will become politically untenable, no matter how much the Powers That Be offer in political funding, and the whole tower of cards will come crashing down.
The problem is, if the process happens slowly, it's too subtle for the average voter to notice it and the changes are too small in isolation for people to vote against en masse. Thus I think the way to beat it is to accelerate the inevitable "things getting worse" part, to the point where it's so obvious that everyone starts crying foul and "things get better" happens as soon as possible.
Just a thought...
Some companies already are. Taking source code onto laptops and such is pretty much verboten around these parts. Entirely coincidentally, shortly before this policy was introduced, one of our customers had to hunt down a leak after someone offered to sell the code for their entire product on the black market.
The thing I find amazing here is that we're talking about the military/security establishment, one of the few groups of government for whom tight security is an operational necessity. And yet, my other half seems to go through more security going into and out of one of the UK copyright libraries (the special libraries that tend to look after irreplaceable historical documents amongst other things) when doing her research than would be necessary to stop such a simple breach of security as apparently happened here.
I know social engineering is usually quoted as the number one cause of security breaches, but this wasn't so much social engineering (the guy with clearance taking the data home and deliberately giving it to someone) as outright incompetence (the guy with clearance taking the data home in a format where if the hardware was stolen the data could be viewed). This isn't a trusting your people issue, it's a basic policy issue.
He was shot because of a combination of bad intelligence and poor judgement by the authorities and their agents. It's hardly an isolated case, either; see my earlier reply to another poster. Of course I wrote that in a deliberately overstated way, but that was just because I wanted to highlight how absurd the situation is.
That depends on what the memos actually said, now doesn't it? There's a bit of a difference between "Iraq may have WMDs and the ability to deploy them to their immediate neighbours" and "Iraq has WMDs that could be deployed against our country within 45 minutes". Maybe your media tell a different story in the US, but it's pretty well established in the UK that the former is what was said by the intelligence services and the latter is what was heard (or at least reported to the public) by Blair et al.
What the hell did 9/11 change? There has always been a threat from this group or that group. The threat has always been relatively small, but the groups do what they do to instill fear that however small the risk, it could happen to you. That's why they're called "terrorists". The only difference is that the attack on 9/11 claimed more lives than those before it or since. There is no moral or ethical difference in the world today from that on 10 September, and there should be no difference in the judgements and responses of a rational, objective person.
The irresponsible action in this context is to make snap decisions about important issues in light of incomplete information. There was no need to invade Iraq when we did, and the intelligence (such as it was) was being flagged as speculative by the agencies providing it. Any leader with an army at his command and a trigger finger that itchy really isn't fit for the job.
Yeah. Dubya is only God's right-hand man, remember? God talks to him, and told him to invade Iraq.
It's truly disturbing that around half the voting public in America seems to buy that.
Thanks. I actually wrote that originally, but then realised that I wasn't sure it was true in this case and didn't have time to check, so I deleted it again.... :-)
Yes, it was one incident, but the fact that it could ever happen betrays such a fundamental failure of so many policies and organisations that I think using it as an example is justified. The same is true of the other example I gave.
Of course, it's not really an isolated incident. For a start, there's been another questionable shooting by the police just this week. And not so long ago, one man was shot dead while carrying a wooden table leg, by police who were following up an entirely incorrect and unverified report that he was carrying a gun. The officers who fired were poorly positioned when they challenged the victim, and therefore perceived a greater threat than they should have when the victim turned around and they fired the fatal shots. Then there was the man shot dead while lying naked in his bed in the middle of the night, when police burst into his bedroom and opened fire. And what's the connection between all of these (aside from the inappropriateness and fatality, of course)? They were all "intelligence-led" operations - exactly what the snooping we're talking about is (allegedly) for.
But perhaps the most telling thing of all is the arrests under so-called anti-terror laws. Since 9/11 and the knee-jerk legislation that followed, vast numbers of people have been arrested under the new laws: we're talking well into five figures in the UK alone. Of those, only a fairly small proportion are ever even charged with an offence, and only a tiny fraction have been convicted of any terrorism-related offence. Of course, being arrested and then released doesn't matter: it's not inconvenient, doesn't attach a permanent stigma to you among your friends and family, and certainly won't result in your DNA winding up forever on a police database that would ever be abused or cause questioned to be asked by MPs. Except, of course, for all the times when all of this has happened as well.
Bottom line: The current approach of "intelligence gathering at all costs" is causing problems for tens of thousands of people, and resulting in serious injury or even fatality to innocent civilians in the worst cases. If I actually believed that this was averting catastrophic terrorist actions and saving hundreds of lives, then I might give some merit to the "fighting terrorism" argument, but I'm afraid government credibility is pretty much all used up on that one. The major threat today isn't from terrorists, it's from poorly-overseen government intervention and excessive transfer of authority from the citizens to the state.
What a terribly sad world you seem to live in.
It sounds like you're from the US, where the political system seems to be irrelevant these days for the sort of reason you state (combined with the complete naivety of the electorate, who collectively bring that irrelevance upon themselves by robotically voting for one of two near-cloned candidates every time).
Fortunately, most of the world isn't like that. In some places, we even have politicians with integrity, who get into politics because they genuinely want to make a difference, and act accordingly in office. Granted they are not the only type of politician, nor perhaps even the majority, but they exist.
Moreover, these people command the respect of both other politicians and the public through their actions rather than expensively bought sound-bites. It is rare in this country for an MP known for standing up for their principles and their constituents to lose their seat at an election; on the contrary, those who do this tend to have the biggest majorities outside of the safe seats where parties put their big names.
I'm genuinely sorry that you feel so down about politics. There really is another way, and until corporations get the vote, all the money in the world won't matter if you can get the electorate to stop and realise it without buying them.
We get one or two new MPs voted in "on principle" at most general elections in the UK: at the last election, for example, one serving male MP wasn't reselected by his party to contest the next election, because of a centrally-mandated all-woman shortlist. He ran as an independent instead, and secured a huge proportion of the vote; I think the party in question may even have lost their deposit. Similarly, look at Martin Bell, a respected British journalist who ran as an MP on an anti-sleaze mandate to make a point (complete with whiter-than-white suit :-)) and again overwhelmingly won the vote.
Maybe, just maybe, the MPs in this particular parliamentary group are cut from the same cloth, and have the backbone to do the right thing. I choose to live in hope.
Your anecdote represents one side of the public perception, and you're right that there's a disturbing apathy about these things among the population at large.
But there's another side that also makes the news. In the UK, the police now shoot people for getting on tube trains, and veteran members of the Labour Party are manhandled out of party conferences for having the audacity to... <shock> utter a single word of criticism (it was "nonsense") about the government justification for invading Iraq </shock>. Stories like those make headlines, too, and at least for a while even the average man or woman in the street thinks something's wrong. If only they remembered...
I'm reinstituting my previous sig, because I think it says all that needs to be said about this point.
Oh, please stop over-dramatising.
The MPs proposed a series of constructive changes, and the fact that one poor choice of wording reflected into your eyes off your tinfoil hat doesn't mean they shouldn't be given credit for trying to do the right thing. I'm sure Big Media would like them to do what you say, but right now, it doesn't look like things are going their way very much.
Some of us spent considerable time writing a submission to the Gowers review. Having proposed several of these moves in my own submission, I, for one, am gratified to see that others appear to have agreed, and something good may come of it.
Looking at Australia, which conducted a similar but smaller-scale review a few months earlier than the UK, changes have now been announced that clearly are improvements in previously daft copyright laws. This looks like a first step in the UK going the same way. Why must you attack out of pure cynicism those who seem to be trying to do a good thing, rather than supporting them and being grateful that the world may become a nicer place to live because of their actions?
How's that, exactly?
In the US, at least, fair use is an affirmative defence, rather than a right. But I don't see how buying from any particular content provider denies you that legal option.
Whether making copies of iTMS-sourced music violates other laws, such as the DMCA, is a different question. Perhaps the single most insidious thing about that particular piece of legislation is that it does seem to provide Big Media(TM) with a means of making fair use illegal by the back door.
I guess my point was that this is a case where LaTeX can do it, albeit with a bit of hard work at the time, but other things just can't, at least not without even more effort. Although Windows provides Uniscribe and OpenType fonts are available with comprehensive glyph sets, there are still no major Windows applications (other than possibly a couple of Adobe's high-end products) that actually take advantage of this.
As I've noted earlier in this thread, Word doesn't even do basic ligatures used in everyday English correctly yet. (I suspect from scanning their blogs that some of the Microsoft Typography people are rather annoyed that the new version of Word gets yet another UI makeover, but still doesn't get basic typography right.) OpenOffice.org's support for professional grade fonts is so poor that I've had to abandon projects and restart them. (The much-hyped PDF output decides to output all text set in Zapfino in Lucida Calligraphic on my system, for example!) And here was me thinking this was the hi-tech, internationally-friendly 21st century. ;-)