It's funny how everyone jeers that big media was smug too soon, yet within only a few hours of the new version of TPB going up.
What makes you think big media won't immediately slap takedown notices on the new versions and their operators as well, and wind up with a few more of the people involved arrested?
Do the words "no warranty, either expressed or implied" ring any bells for anybody?
Sure, but they're not worth the paper they're printed on if the law says they're unenforceable.
Sometimes industries collectively act against the best interests of the public, and regulation is required to prevent this. Under those circumstances, it's quite normal to legislate that the industry may not enforce certain one-sided contractual terms. The whole idea of monopoly abuse and antitrust legislation is one big example of this, and there are countless others. AFAICS, this proposal is basically just saying that software should fall into this category as well.
Failing that, if a peice of code is developed FSF/OSF style, exactly who do you sue for redress if a bug causes you fiduciary loss? The author? Go prove that his code is actually the source of the bug.
Be very careful with that argument. It's a textbook example of what leads into compulsory registration/licensing/insurance in an industry "to protect the public", and that would be the end of most OSS as we know it.
Yes, but only for those old enough to commit a crime. By legal definition, someone too young cannot be responsible for their actions and therefore cannot commit a crime.
In the U.S., I'd grab him by the collar of his shirt, drag him to his home (if you know where it is), tell his parents what he was doing.
In the UK, that would be some combination of assault, kidnap, etc.
Alternatively, if you want a potentially more significant impact on his behavior, hold on to him and call the police (assuming you carry a mobile phone). When the police arrive, hand him over with an accurate description of his vandalism and your contact information.
Again, in the UK, you probably just got yourself arrested, and branded some sort of child abuser in court.
This is exactly my point. The premise that a child can be too young to understand their responsibilities isn't in itself unreasonable. But if a child is too young to be responsible for their own actions, then why isn't adult supervision required?
Fair point, but I think age restrictions are something of a special case.
Children are not adults, and cannot reasonably be expected to make appropriate decisions for themselves (however you choose to define "appropriate"). Thus I don't have a problem with treating them differently where there's a clear benefit to doing so.
Where you draw the line is always going to be something of a grey area, of course, but I doubt many of us would argue that 5-year-olds should really have the vote, or 12-year-olds should really be allowed to drive on public roads.
If anything, I think a lot of today's problems stem from treating children too much like adults. Here in the UK, school teachers have had their powers to discipline poorly behaved children severely curtailed over recent years, and now the government is meddling with average parenting as well. (I'm not just talking abuse, which of course we have to deal with - a legitimate case of "think of the children".) The result is a load of young, irresponsible people who have no self-discipline or respect for authority, and consequently who misbehave to the detriment of others, because they know that they'll probably get away with it.
True story: I've had a kid who was trying to damage a neighbour's car tell me that "You can't stop me - I'm only nine, I can't commit a crime!" Sadly, since our law does not admit any kind of guilt below the age of 10, he was right, and AIUI I couldn't have laid a finger on him even as I watched him keying the car. Fortunately, my presence appeared to scare him off on that occasion and nothing came of it. But how can it be right that children can have no legal responsibility themselves, while the adults who are supposed to have that legal responsibility are not required to actively supervise them?
Again, this comes down to responsibility: in this case, it's the recognition that a young child cannot be treated as an adult, and the assignment of responsibility for looking after them to an appropriate person. And again, the example I just gave comes down to someone not meeting their responsibilities properly. In this sort of situation, I think blanket bans on young people having certain rights and abilities are appropriate, and thus I have no problem with not selling knives/fireworks/petrol to kids.
The example you gave is a tougher one, because here in the UK the current limit is 16, and I'd rather see 15-year-olds who are going to do it anyway taught about the dangers and then left to enjoy it, rather than treated as rapists because they did something a day too soon. These things are never black-and-white, and we don't necessarily have the best shades of grey right now.
It's almost funny, reading this article and the comments today. Here in the UK, the media are making a big thing about knife crime just now, after a couple of high-profile stabbings. The comments in the forums on places like BBC News are full of people saying we should raise jail sentences for carrying/using/killing with a knife (what, again?) and other similar knee-jerk reactions. Those suggesting looking at why we have such a problem (and indeed whether we really do or it's just media hype) make up a small minority of those posting comments, as do those suggesting that there may be a better answer and proposing a response other than much harsher penalties for those caught in posession of or using a knife.
I see clear parallels there with the discussions about home chemistry, and for that matter with discussions about writing computer programs for various purposes often mentioned in these parts.
It's sad. We used to tell kids about being responsible, teaching them that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, and disciplining those who abused their freedoms at others' expense. Then we'd know that most people would grow up to be responsible adults, and focus on those that weren't. These days, it's more about telling people they can't do something in the first place, and imposing draconian penalties if they even think about trying.
We never used to deny people opportunities to learn about things and enjoy them for their own sake, just because they had some small potential for abuse. I remember being inspired at around the age of 14 by a public presentation at a local university, explaining how fireworks were made. I went along with my dad - a scientist himself by trade - and he found it interesting as well. I went on to study chemistry for several years.
But today, that sort of thing is probably frowned upon. I drive a car that can go very fast, so obviously I'm a dangerous driver and need five speed cameras to check up on me on the way to work. (And yet friends who ride with me often describe me as one of the safest drivers they know, and I've never been so much as pulled over by a police car in over a decade of driving.) I've spent much of my life studying various martial arts, and lost count of how many ways I know to seriously injure or kill someone, so perhaps I should go register myself as a lethal weapon. (And yet the last involvement I had with a mugging was giving first aid to the victim afterwards - something I'm also trained to do.) Post-Dunblane, a friend of mine who used to shoot for sport had to give up his Olympic-style pistols and his hobby. (And yet, he never fired a gun outside a supervised range in his life, while gun crime in general has gone up since the ban.) You get the idea.
What happened to everyone having freedoms and taking personal responsibility for exercising them in an ethical way? I'm not sure whether it's big brother, the nanny state, or some bastard child of both, but whatever it is, I liked society better the old way.
Trade-based, proprietarian market economies seem flawed and suboptimal to me; inefficient ways of distributing resources and assigning tasks. Nothing makes this more clear than "intellectual property" laws.
I suspect you're right that they're suboptimal. The question is whether we can find a viable and superior alternative that takes advantage of the mass-distribution possibilities we have today without taking away fair recognition and compensation for artists and thus reducing the incentive to create and share new work that today's intellectual property framework provides.
I think this is one of the most interesting questions of our day. Ideas like micropayments for web page views have potential here, for example. But right now, I don't think anyone's close enough to a better alternative to justify scrapping/ignoring the existing IP framework.
No offence, but you should really look at what typical recording contracts actually say before launching into a rant like that.
Hint: if you're part of a newbie band and things go to hell, you're probably going to get stuck with most of the expenses, not the record label.
People around here need to stop associating defending the principle of intellectual property with defending the big record labels, who are for the most part the scum of the earth.
That doesn't mean that I am against what you said, it only means that you cannot be friendly or kind to this kind of people. They don't deserve any rights because they would gladly restrict ours to the point of being useless.
Please stop generalising way too far. The intellectual property laws implemented throughout the western world apply just as much to the part-time musician earning a bit of extra money to see herself through college, or the guys who write software in small businesses and make enough to live on but not much more. The whole world is not the MPAA, RIAA, or similar organisations. In fact, those organisations act for a rather small proportion of the people who make a living through creative work and rely on the protections copyright and the like should provide them to guarantee their return on investment.
Your concluding statement is demonstrably false, simply because I write software for a living and don't wish to see your rights reduced to nothing.
For example, Janis Ian claims she has actually sold more cd's thanks to Napster and its offspring.
I'm sure some artists do benefit from the advertising effect. People benefit from charity when there's no obligation to give as well, and I can imagine that artists with a certain level of support - enough that word of mouth will widen exposure significantly but low enough in profile that they wouldn't receive that exposure otherwise - will benefit in that way.
But for everyone I personally know who uses P2P as a preview and really does buy the CD/software/whatever to support the artists, I know closer to 10 who just rip people off. If this is the situation when it is illegal to rip music, I see no particular reason to believe that fewer people would take without giving back if it was legal.
If noone bought any books but everyone went to the library to read said books, would the library be considered pirates and be responsible for the "loss of income", raided and all the stacks confiscated?
Well, for that to happen, the library would have to buy many copies of the books at the regular price anyway...
I agree wholeheartedly. Believing in some sort of fair compensation for people who create works of knowledge seems to be terribly out-dated around these parts, which is kinda sad. I guess either good content grows on infinitely duplicated trees in some people's world, or none of the content those people rip is good enough for them to care about (which does make you wonder why they rip it in the first place).
Of course the big media industries have gone way too far in some respects, and people should be aware of that and support moves to bring things back to a more reasonable balance. But it irritates the hell out of me when Slashdot gets overrun by kids who've grown up thinking everything in life is free, who don't understand that concepts like fairness and social responsibility are important too.
Personally, I try to avoid using the word "theft" in this context, simply because it is inflammatory. That doesn't mean that the real arguments against this sort of behaviour are any less valid because the person making them could have written "copyright infringement" instead.
And yes, the argument that they haven't deprived the original copy-holder of anything is crap. Just above this thread, I made the elementary economic point that even if you haven't deprived the copyright holder of a physical work, you've still reduced the market value of their work. Taking that argument to its logical conclusion in isolation, the value is reduced to no more than the cost of the first publicly-available copy.
That's just as damaging as ripping the amount of lost compensation right out of someone's bank account. Ah, but there's no physical property being stolen then either, so presumably these guys see stealing $500 in paper money from someone's home as theft, but think just cracking their account on-line should be legal...
It seems the like the guys at the piratebay.org has fun with the legal threats, insulting all those idiots, I wouldn't be surprised that a good number of them took it personally, knowing how big and inflamed their egos are. Does it mean the bad guys win after all?
That depends on whom you consider to be the bad guys: the guys who deliberately helped to rip off half the world and then made a point of showing off about it and treating the authorities with contempt, or the authorities who bitch-slapped them for it.
Sure. It's just that under that scheme, there's no reason for anyone else to buy it either. The market value of the content is dramatically reduced by allowing use without compensation.
I use a lot of different software and I don't share your perception at all. Of course, I use a lot of open source software which could be of higher quality.
I'm not sure we want to go there. I have tried a fair bit of OSS as well, and I've found major bugs in plenty of big name products. Suffice it to say that I don't think this problem is particularly reserved to commercial/closed source software.
It's true that I haven't read the design specs for any of the published products I'm talking about. However, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that none of them lists crashing, corruption or total loss of data, or implementing standard communications protocols in an insecure way.;-)
As someone who works in software development, I'm aware of the risks of assuming a manual or help page is an accurate reflection of the design spec, so I'm wary of assuming much beyond the really obvious. Of course, when the manual says something sensible and the code does give a completely different result, in practice there's a pretty good chance that the design spec agreed with the manual. I can't prove this with the big name products, but it's certainly true of just about all software projects I've ever encountered as a professional programmer.
As for product titles where I've encountered major bugs - things like loss of data, crashes, security flaws, or completely implausible output - these include:
every major MS Office application
all recent versions of Internet Explorer on Windows
all recent versions of Visual Studio
Paint Shop Pro X
countless games
every major OpenOffice application
Firefox
Thunderbird
Scribus
the GIMP
several LaTeX packages
and those are just off the top of my head in a minute of thinking.
These are big name applications, often used by millions of people worldwide, and often with large and experienced development teams. If they can't manage to write code that doesn't crash or stuff your data in some really obvious way, then I think it's fair to say that on the whole, our industry sucks when it comes to quality control.
I get to directly vote for my MEP. I get absolutely no say in who's supposed to represent my interests on the Council of Ministers. Those positions are appointed, by a government for whom I may not have voted at all. Indeed, in my country only 22% of the population did vote for them at the last general election; they didn't even win the popular vote, and got to run things with an absolute majority in our parliament anyway, essentially on a technicality.
The Council of Ministers has little legitimacy, but makes a very convenient way for our own politicians to do things they couldn't do at home because they'd be voted out of office, on the pretence that "Europe" has compelled them to do it. That's how accountable the European administration is.
Our "representatives" will change the law if they have to.
You do know that it was the elected representatives - the European Parliament - who brought this action, right? And that they were acting against the unelected high-flyers (the Council of Ministers)?
I think you overestimate how much credit the US gets for WW2, and underestimate how much is simply down to the fact that the US is a major player in the world economy.
When the latter becomes a liability - as it already is to those of us who just lost around 20% of our share value in two weeks as the US government let the dollar slide - then the US will suddenly find itself holding little influence and with few friends in the world.
The US will cave a long time before the EU airlines on this one, because the US can't afford not to have travel, while the EU airlines can afford (at least for long enough) to focus more on other routes (like, say, to Canada).
Webalizer is very useful: we recently set up a new web site, and the information it provides has been handy for tweaking. It doesn't seem to provide everything we could want - there's no obvious way to gauge the relative popularity of different links on a given page, for example - but it does provide an idea of relative browser popularity among our visitors, which pages are most important (or at least most visited), and other useful information.
Of course, like all log file-based tools, it suffers from the modern day curse of webmasters everywhere: caching. For example, the site I mentioned is for a university club. Around 1/3 of our hits are from the university cache servers, which all students are strongly encouraged to use. That messes up any analysis of total hits on each page of the site, and it would also mess up analysis of which links people tend to find most useful (assuming those they follow from one page to another are representative of this) if we had tools to do that.
I'm sure anyone who reads Slashdot regularly will see the upside of caching, but a lot of people forget that it has a downside as well. As a webmaster trying to set up the most useful site possible (this is a non-profit group, run by volunteers, so my interests here are entirely benevolent) I would be more than happy to have accurate stats for all visits to our site in the past month, say, rather than lower bandwidth use.
AFAICS, the only way to get anything close to accurate stats at the moment is to install some sort of "web bug" that will make it through the caches. However, this has rather sinister overtones, and I'm reluctant to do something that might be perceived as "spying". Would the crowd here consider it reasonable to go down that road, given that as stated above we have no ulterior motive and are just trying to monitor the way our new site design is working with a view to improving links etc? Would it reassure you if we did the "privacy policy" thing? (Personally, I don't find them particularly reassuring in most cases. If I don't trust a site not to screw me, why would I trust it more because they say they won't? Then again, full disclosure and all that...) Do we really have to resort to the tried-and-tested "visit counter" graphics?:o)
McConnell's book is one of the classics, though I think the first edition was actually much better for its time than the second is, and I certainly don't agree with everything he writes. This, apparently, is one of those times. (I don't have a copy of Code Complete in front of me and don't remember how he defines a bug, so I'm taking it as read that your comment is reporting him accurately.)
Bugs, in the sense I'm talking about, are one problem with software development. They're a developer-centric issue, and you need developer-centric techniques to deal with them. Of course, issues where a feature is missing or not working as customers want are also important, but those are design and customer support issues. They need entirely different types of solution, based around the designers and marketing/customer support staff.
Muddying the waters by equating these fundamentally different concerns is unconstructive, IMHO. It's also unhelpful to say things like "No software can ever ship without bugs" in this more general context. Well, duh, as they say. Anything else would imply that it was possibly to satisfy all customers all of the time, which for most people in business simply isn't true, whether you're talking about software or any other industry. More to the point, that blanket acknowledgement removes the focus on "real bugs", and is a bit of a smoke screen for the fact that most software quality today sucks and we could do much better.
This is why I think it's important to avoid distorting the technical term "bug" to mean more than it should. It's not that I disagree with your other concerns; on the contrary, I agree wholeheartedly that they're very important. I just think we have to look for the appropriate solution to each kind of problem, and that means first recognising that there are different kinds of problem.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny how everyone jeers that big media was smug too soon, yet within only a few hours of the new version of TPB going up.
What makes you think big media won't immediately slap takedown notices on the new versions and their operators as well, and wind up with a few more of the people involved arrested?
And for that matter, exactly which law makes caching (in the sense of Google Cache) legal?
Sure, but they're not worth the paper they're printed on if the law says they're unenforceable.
Sometimes industries collectively act against the best interests of the public, and regulation is required to prevent this. Under those circumstances, it's quite normal to legislate that the industry may not enforce certain one-sided contractual terms. The whole idea of monopoly abuse and antitrust legislation is one big example of this, and there are countless others. AFAICS, this proposal is basically just saying that software should fall into this category as well.
Be very careful with that argument. It's a textbook example of what leads into compulsory registration/licensing/insurance in an industry "to protect the public", and that would be the end of most OSS as we know it.
Yes, but only for those old enough to commit a crime. By legal definition, someone too young cannot be responsible for their actions and therefore cannot commit a crime.
In the UK, that would be some combination of assault, kidnap, etc.
Again, in the UK, you probably just got yourself arrested, and branded some sort of child abuser in court.
This is exactly my point. The premise that a child can be too young to understand their responsibilities isn't in itself unreasonable. But if a child is too young to be responsible for their own actions, then why isn't adult supervision required?
Fair point, but I think age restrictions are something of a special case.
Children are not adults, and cannot reasonably be expected to make appropriate decisions for themselves (however you choose to define "appropriate"). Thus I don't have a problem with treating them differently where there's a clear benefit to doing so.
Where you draw the line is always going to be something of a grey area, of course, but I doubt many of us would argue that 5-year-olds should really have the vote, or 12-year-olds should really be allowed to drive on public roads.
If anything, I think a lot of today's problems stem from treating children too much like adults. Here in the UK, school teachers have had their powers to discipline poorly behaved children severely curtailed over recent years, and now the government is meddling with average parenting as well. (I'm not just talking abuse, which of course we have to deal with - a legitimate case of "think of the children".) The result is a load of young, irresponsible people who have no self-discipline or respect for authority, and consequently who misbehave to the detriment of others, because they know that they'll probably get away with it.
True story: I've had a kid who was trying to damage a neighbour's car tell me that "You can't stop me - I'm only nine, I can't commit a crime!" Sadly, since our law does not admit any kind of guilt below the age of 10, he was right, and AIUI I couldn't have laid a finger on him even as I watched him keying the car. Fortunately, my presence appeared to scare him off on that occasion and nothing came of it. But how can it be right that children can have no legal responsibility themselves, while the adults who are supposed to have that legal responsibility are not required to actively supervise them?
Again, this comes down to responsibility: in this case, it's the recognition that a young child cannot be treated as an adult, and the assignment of responsibility for looking after them to an appropriate person. And again, the example I just gave comes down to someone not meeting their responsibilities properly. In this sort of situation, I think blanket bans on young people having certain rights and abilities are appropriate, and thus I have no problem with not selling knives/fireworks/petrol to kids.
The example you gave is a tougher one, because here in the UK the current limit is 16, and I'd rather see 15-year-olds who are going to do it anyway taught about the dangers and then left to enjoy it, rather than treated as rapists because they did something a day too soon. These things are never black-and-white, and we don't necessarily have the best shades of grey right now.
It's almost funny, reading this article and the comments today. Here in the UK, the media are making a big thing about knife crime just now, after a couple of high-profile stabbings. The comments in the forums on places like BBC News are full of people saying we should raise jail sentences for carrying/using/killing with a knife (what, again?) and other similar knee-jerk reactions. Those suggesting looking at why we have such a problem (and indeed whether we really do or it's just media hype) make up a small minority of those posting comments, as do those suggesting that there may be a better answer and proposing a response other than much harsher penalties for those caught in posession of or using a knife.
I see clear parallels there with the discussions about home chemistry, and for that matter with discussions about writing computer programs for various purposes often mentioned in these parts.
It's sad. We used to tell kids about being responsible, teaching them that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, and disciplining those who abused their freedoms at others' expense. Then we'd know that most people would grow up to be responsible adults, and focus on those that weren't. These days, it's more about telling people they can't do something in the first place, and imposing draconian penalties if they even think about trying.
We never used to deny people opportunities to learn about things and enjoy them for their own sake, just because they had some small potential for abuse. I remember being inspired at around the age of 14 by a public presentation at a local university, explaining how fireworks were made. I went along with my dad - a scientist himself by trade - and he found it interesting as well. I went on to study chemistry for several years.
But today, that sort of thing is probably frowned upon. I drive a car that can go very fast, so obviously I'm a dangerous driver and need five speed cameras to check up on me on the way to work. (And yet friends who ride with me often describe me as one of the safest drivers they know, and I've never been so much as pulled over by a police car in over a decade of driving.) I've spent much of my life studying various martial arts, and lost count of how many ways I know to seriously injure or kill someone, so perhaps I should go register myself as a lethal weapon. (And yet the last involvement I had with a mugging was giving first aid to the victim afterwards - something I'm also trained to do.) Post-Dunblane, a friend of mine who used to shoot for sport had to give up his Olympic-style pistols and his hobby. (And yet, he never fired a gun outside a supervised range in his life, while gun crime in general has gone up since the ban.) You get the idea.
What happened to everyone having freedoms and taking personal responsibility for exercising them in an ethical way? I'm not sure whether it's big brother, the nanny state, or some bastard child of both, but whatever it is, I liked society better the old way.
Blockquoth the AC:
I suspect you're right that they're suboptimal. The question is whether we can find a viable and superior alternative that takes advantage of the mass-distribution possibilities we have today without taking away fair recognition and compensation for artists and thus reducing the incentive to create and share new work that today's intellectual property framework provides.
I think this is one of the most interesting questions of our day. Ideas like micropayments for web page views have potential here, for example. But right now, I don't think anyone's close enough to a better alternative to justify scrapping/ignoring the existing IP framework.
Absolutely. (I'm not doing that, in case it's not clear. I think my posting history makes that pretty unambiguous...)
No offence, but you should really look at what typical recording contracts actually say before launching into a rant like that.
Hint: if you're part of a newbie band and things go to hell, you're probably going to get stuck with most of the expenses, not the record label.
People around here need to stop associating defending the principle of intellectual property with defending the big record labels, who are for the most part the scum of the earth.
Blockquoth the AC:
Please stop generalising way too far. The intellectual property laws implemented throughout the western world apply just as much to the part-time musician earning a bit of extra money to see herself through college, or the guys who write software in small businesses and make enough to live on but not much more. The whole world is not the MPAA, RIAA, or similar organisations. In fact, those organisations act for a rather small proportion of the people who make a living through creative work and rely on the protections copyright and the like should provide them to guarantee their return on investment.
Your concluding statement is demonstrably false, simply because I write software for a living and don't wish to see your rights reduced to nothing.
I'm sure some artists do benefit from the advertising effect. People benefit from charity when there's no obligation to give as well, and I can imagine that artists with a certain level of support - enough that word of mouth will widen exposure significantly but low enough in profile that they wouldn't receive that exposure otherwise - will benefit in that way.
But for everyone I personally know who uses P2P as a preview and really does buy the CD/software/whatever to support the artists, I know closer to 10 who just rip people off. If this is the situation when it is illegal to rip music, I see no particular reason to believe that fewer people would take without giving back if it was legal.
Well, for that to happen, the library would have to buy many copies of the books at the regular price anyway...
I agree wholeheartedly. Believing in some sort of fair compensation for people who create works of knowledge seems to be terribly out-dated around these parts, which is kinda sad. I guess either good content grows on infinitely duplicated trees in some people's world, or none of the content those people rip is good enough for them to care about (which does make you wonder why they rip it in the first place).
Of course the big media industries have gone way too far in some respects, and people should be aware of that and support moves to bring things back to a more reasonable balance. But it irritates the hell out of me when Slashdot gets overrun by kids who've grown up thinking everything in life is free, who don't understand that concepts like fairness and social responsibility are important too.
Personally, I try to avoid using the word "theft" in this context, simply because it is inflammatory. That doesn't mean that the real arguments against this sort of behaviour are any less valid because the person making them could have written "copyright infringement" instead.
And yes, the argument that they haven't deprived the original copy-holder of anything is crap. Just above this thread, I made the elementary economic point that even if you haven't deprived the copyright holder of a physical work, you've still reduced the market value of their work. Taking that argument to its logical conclusion in isolation, the value is reduced to no more than the cost of the first publicly-available copy.
That's just as damaging as ripping the amount of lost compensation right out of someone's bank account. Ah, but there's no physical property being stolen then either, so presumably these guys see stealing $500 in paper money from someone's home as theft, but think just cracking their account on-line should be legal...
Meesa tingkin youssum tryin too hard. :-)
Or, presumably, unless they have probably cause and a court-issued warrant, or whatever the equivalent is in Sweden...
That depends on whom you consider to be the bad guys: the guys who deliberately helped to rip off half the world and then made a point of showing off about it and treating the authorities with contempt, or the authorities who bitch-slapped them for it.
Sure. It's just that under that scheme, there's no reason for anyone else to buy it either. The market value of the content is dramatically reduced by allowing use without compensation.
And that's a problem because...?
:-)
I'm not sure we want to go there. I have tried a fair bit of OSS as well, and I've found major bugs in plenty of big name products. Suffice it to say that I don't think this problem is particularly reserved to commercial/closed source software.
It's true that I haven't read the design specs for any of the published products I'm talking about. However, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that none of them lists crashing, corruption or total loss of data, or implementing standard communications protocols in an insecure way. ;-)
As someone who works in software development, I'm aware of the risks of assuming a manual or help page is an accurate reflection of the design spec, so I'm wary of assuming much beyond the really obvious. Of course, when the manual says something sensible and the code does give a completely different result, in practice there's a pretty good chance that the design spec agreed with the manual. I can't prove this with the big name products, but it's certainly true of just about all software projects I've ever encountered as a professional programmer.
As for product titles where I've encountered major bugs - things like loss of data, crashes, security flaws, or completely implausible output - these include:
and those are just off the top of my head in a minute of thinking.
These are big name applications, often used by millions of people worldwide, and often with large and experienced development teams. If they can't manage to write code that doesn't crash or stuff your data in some really obvious way, then I think it's fair to say that on the whole, our industry sucks when it comes to quality control.
I get to directly vote for my MEP. I get absolutely no say in who's supposed to represent my interests on the Council of Ministers. Those positions are appointed, by a government for whom I may not have voted at all. Indeed, in my country only 22% of the population did vote for them at the last general election; they didn't even win the popular vote, and got to run things with an absolute majority in our parliament anyway, essentially on a technicality.
The Council of Ministers has little legitimacy, but makes a very convenient way for our own politicians to do things they couldn't do at home because they'd be voted out of office, on the pretence that "Europe" has compelled them to do it. That's how accountable the European administration is.
You do know that it was the elected representatives - the European Parliament - who brought this action, right? And that they were acting against the unelected high-flyers (the Council of Ministers)?
I think you overestimate how much credit the US gets for WW2, and underestimate how much is simply down to the fact that the US is a major player in the world economy.
When the latter becomes a liability - as it already is to those of us who just lost around 20% of our share value in two weeks as the US government let the dollar slide - then the US will suddenly find itself holding little influence and with few friends in the world.
EU airlines to US: Bite us.
The US will cave a long time before the EU airlines on this one, because the US can't afford not to have travel, while the EU airlines can afford (at least for long enough) to focus more on other routes (like, say, to Canada).
Webalizer is very useful: we recently set up a new web site, and the information it provides has been handy for tweaking. It doesn't seem to provide everything we could want - there's no obvious way to gauge the relative popularity of different links on a given page, for example - but it does provide an idea of relative browser popularity among our visitors, which pages are most important (or at least most visited), and other useful information.
Of course, like all log file-based tools, it suffers from the modern day curse of webmasters everywhere: caching. For example, the site I mentioned is for a university club. Around 1/3 of our hits are from the university cache servers, which all students are strongly encouraged to use. That messes up any analysis of total hits on each page of the site, and it would also mess up analysis of which links people tend to find most useful (assuming those they follow from one page to another are representative of this) if we had tools to do that.
I'm sure anyone who reads Slashdot regularly will see the upside of caching, but a lot of people forget that it has a downside as well. As a webmaster trying to set up the most useful site possible (this is a non-profit group, run by volunteers, so my interests here are entirely benevolent) I would be more than happy to have accurate stats for all visits to our site in the past month, say, rather than lower bandwidth use.
AFAICS, the only way to get anything close to accurate stats at the moment is to install some sort of "web bug" that will make it through the caches. However, this has rather sinister overtones, and I'm reluctant to do something that might be perceived as "spying". Would the crowd here consider it reasonable to go down that road, given that as stated above we have no ulterior motive and are just trying to monitor the way our new site design is working with a view to improving links etc? Would it reassure you if we did the "privacy policy" thing? (Personally, I don't find them particularly reassuring in most cases. If I don't trust a site not to screw me, why would I trust it more because they say they won't? Then again, full disclosure and all that...) Do we really have to resort to the tried-and-tested "visit counter" graphics? :o)
McConnell's book is one of the classics, though I think the first edition was actually much better for its time than the second is, and I certainly don't agree with everything he writes. This, apparently, is one of those times. (I don't have a copy of Code Complete in front of me and don't remember how he defines a bug, so I'm taking it as read that your comment is reporting him accurately.)
Bugs, in the sense I'm talking about, are one problem with software development. They're a developer-centric issue, and you need developer-centric techniques to deal with them. Of course, issues where a feature is missing or not working as customers want are also important, but those are design and customer support issues. They need entirely different types of solution, based around the designers and marketing/customer support staff.
Muddying the waters by equating these fundamentally different concerns is unconstructive, IMHO. It's also unhelpful to say things like "No software can ever ship without bugs" in this more general context. Well, duh, as they say. Anything else would imply that it was possibly to satisfy all customers all of the time, which for most people in business simply isn't true, whether you're talking about software or any other industry. More to the point, that blanket acknowledgement removes the focus on "real bugs", and is a bit of a smoke screen for the fact that most software quality today sucks and we could do much better.
This is why I think it's important to avoid distorting the technical term "bug" to mean more than it should. It's not that I disagree with your other concerns; on the contrary, I agree wholeheartedly that they're very important. I just think we have to look for the appropriate solution to each kind of problem, and that means first recognising that there are different kinds of problem.