The problem is, if they're going to have to 'fess up, but then get away with nothing more than a slap on the wrist anyway, then this law is unlikely to do much to improve the security of personal information and the integrity with which it is handled. What they ought to do, IMHO, is enact a law that both requires disclosure and hits the offender with a financial penalty proportionate to the damage caused and the degree to which the offender's negligence caused it.
If a business carelessly loses 1,000 customers' credit card details but then gets hit with a dent to their bottom line of 1,000 x $AVERAGE_COST_PER_CARD_FRAUD + $COSTS_INCURRED_BY_AUDITORS + $SIGNIFICANT_PENALTY_CHARGE, then maybe it will become enough of a priority on the executive radar to do something about it. Similarly, if identity thefts or other more serious consequences arise, the costs of cleaning those up can be incorporated into the penalty; naturally, this should include compensation for the time spent by the affected individuals and any third parties they had to deal with to fix the problem.
At the same time, this approach removes the financial burden of conducting after-disaster audits from the taxpayer, and passes it onto the offending party instead.
For our boys and girls in the UK, don't forget that the Gowers review is still accepting responses to their call for evidence, and covers (inter alia) the same sort of questions.
I think it's more a case of "shafted, politically." Although the Queen does have to give royal assent to the bill as a formality before it becomes law, I seem to recall her intonation as she read that part of the (government-written) Queen's Speech last year made her personal views on the matter pretty clear!
There have been some fairly specific lawsuits, yes, but the general principle hasn't really been attacked yet AFAIK.
In the only related US law suit that I can immediately recall, the plaintiff effectively admitted in court that he knew very well how to ask that the content on his web site not be archived, but had actively encouraged the archival anyway. At that point the judge essentially threw out the whole case.
This is a far cry from what we're looking at here, where the caches and previews on the ask.com site are completely misrepresenting the site they're supposed to reflect. This could be very damaging, whether simply by causing people who would otherwise have visited the site to stay away, or more seriously by giving a false impression of the site's host and their products or services, perhaps resulting in a direct loss of business. I'd expect that such a site might have a rather strong case against the poor caching service, and IMHO they do deserve to be compensated in this case, since the caching is no longer benefitting the public and is actively harming the web site operator, which hardly constitutes "fair use" of the content!
But if they're then effectively presenting the web site's content before you visit the site, they're open to all the same inevitable legal shenanigans that Google Cache is going to get slammed with sooner or later. If they're presenting a cut-down preview that doesn't potentially make the site itself redundant, they would seem to me to have a much safer position when it comes to fair use/fair dealing/whatever it's called in your jurisdiction.
Then again, the preview image for the front page of a fairly large web site I run is several months out of date, and the cache supposedly scanned just a few minutes ago shows a blank page, while our site is happily up and running. This sort of out-of-date, inaccurate information makes the features worse than useless, and is one of the stronger legal arguments for slapping down unauthorised caching and previewing of other people's web sites.
Actually giving up the guns was a really good idea. It's a lot safer now.
Of course. That's presumably why violent crime, and for that matter gun-related crime, are on the increase in this country, and an estimated 500,000 illegal firearms are in circulation: that's one for every 100 people in the UK!
There are a few great quotations that always come to my mind when this subject comes up.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. - Pitt the Younger
When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think. - Pat Schroeder
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. - H. L. Mencken
And perhaps the most astute of all:
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. - another one from H. L. Mencken
That's what I thought about government when I was younger and more naive. You've nothing to fear with nothing to hide, they told me. That's fine, as long as no-one in government ever makes an honest mistake. Yeah, like that would ever happen, right?
One day, a low-level civil servant working in a tax office mistyped a National Insurance number, probably one of hundreds he entered into the system during that working day alone. Unfortunately for me, he fluked typing mine instead. My tax records instantly got tied to someone else's, I lost all my allowances without warning, and it took me countless hours ringing around countless tax offices over the next few months to get it put right.
In other words, for several months, my paycheque turned up hundreds of pounds short, without any notice, and with absolutely nothing I could do about it.
That was one number out of probably thousands typed by one government staffer out of thousands that week. Moreover, since the system now said things like I was working two full-time jobs on opposite sides of the country at the same time, it was pretty obviously screwed up when I finally did get the right person to check it. What happens when it's not just a tax allowance, but your entire life that's in the database, and the mistake isn't that your job changed, it's that you're no longer entitled to NHS medical care, or you lose state benefits you rely on to buy food, or you fail a CRB check and lose your job? And those are the nicer possibilities.
they can track me all they like. it's not gonna change me on any fundamental level.
Tell that to Jean Charles de Menezes. Oh, wait, you can't, because he was shot dead by government agents after a tracking exercise went wrong and he was incorrectly identified as a terrorist.
And the National ID in the UK was pushed by the Labor Party, who would be far-left by U.S. standards.
Not any more, they're not.
The Labour Party used to be fairly left-wing, friend of the common man, strong links to the unions, more socialist than capitalist in direction, etc.
New Labour under Tony Blair have gone so right-wing they're no longer recognisable as the same party. They have all but severed their former union ties, often supported businesses over workers in their economic policy, and quite literally introduced the most draconian legislative framework for government in human history.
How they're even still in office is a mystery, explainable only by a series of quirks in our election system that basically let them fluke their way in with an absolute majority of seats in the Commons despite winning only 22% of the vote, and losing it outright if you consider England alone. They have no popular mandate, yet Home Secretary Charles Clarke likes to throw around phrases like "accepting the will of the people" when telling those who oppose government policy why they should just stop.
This administration knows they're playing on borrowed time - they've done too much damage now, and Brown is going to be nothing like the figurehead Blair was at the next election - so they're trying to write their place in the history books while they still can. Too bad they'll be remembered for all the wrong reasons as one of the worst governments anywhere in the world at any point in history, and an in 20 years this period will probably be presented as an object lesson in the importance of due process and defending civil liberties.
It started several years ago. Since then we've had Regulation of Investigatory Powers; Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security; Civil Contingencies; and now this.
I'm not sure what the legal basis was, but one of the political satire shows on TV the other day was implying that you can now be tagged, placed under curfew, or made subject to an ASBO, all without even being charged with committing a crime, never mind given due process. If you break the relevant condition then you can immediately be sent to prison without trial.
The one good thing about all this is that it's now gone so far that someone's going to have to knock it all down forcibly and rebuild it from scratch, for example by voting the entire New Labout administration out of office.
Yep, I renewed my passport recently for exactly this reason.
I'm hopeful, if not terribly optimistic, that by the time it's due to be renewed, the New Labour, nanny-state, authoritarian, draconian-law-passing regime will long since have been kicked out of office. Maybe some sanity will even have returned to our legal system - perhaps starting by repealing every law passed in recent years under the mantra of fighting terrorism that can't be shown, publicly and with clear evidence rather than based on trusting Tony, to have made an obvious and significant difference to the threat it's supposed to protect us against!
It's really too bad they missed the fact that the National Identity Register is the truly dangerous part of all this. Without it, the card is just a piece of plastic. With it, it doesn't matter whether you've got a card or not, you're just a record in a database waiting to be pulled by mistake.
For example, besides electing a new mayor, we voted on what is to be done with a vacant building on the waterfront, whether to keep floride in the city water system, etc.
I suspect this is part of the problem.
I've long held the view that the most effective way to get a reasonably democratic political system is to have the electorate vote on exactly two things: deciding the Big Issues (constitutional changes and the like) directly; and electing the representatives who will decide on the Little Issues for them.
My own experience, from running a medium-sized, not-for-profit organisation, is that few people have the time to fully research every choice that the management must make, even if they have the inclination. If you rely too much on mass voting, you get well-intentioned people actually voting against their best interests through lack of understanding, failure to see the big picture and appreciate the wider or longer-term implications of their vote, etc. Thus you can't make all the detailed little decisions by consultation with the entire electorate, or even in a big committee; it ceases to represent the best interests of the electorate beyond a certain point.
What does work, IME, is:
creating a basic framework (in national politics, that's your constitution, basic legal processes, etc.) within which a given administration will work
electing representatives who you think will act most in alignment with your personal preferences on lesser issues
letting them get on with representing you.
Naturally, such representatives may still consult their electorate on any given issue, and any given voter may contact their representative to express a view on any given subject. A representative who fails to consult adequately when it is appropriate risks not being re-elected, so as long as your terms of office are of reasonable duration, there is relatively low risk of abuse. You can also have a safeguard where if a sufficiently large number of voters want to vote on a particular subject, they can force a vote with or without the consent of their representatives.
This removes entirely the need for routine voting on minor issues like how to use a building or what to put in water. I suspect that almost all such issues are best left to be decided by representatives with the time to investigate the implications properly anyway. Joe Public just won't know in a lot of cases, and the voting will essentially be a random number generator with a small bias due to people who actually do understand any given decision.
The only remaining question then becomes how big is big enough to vote on separately, and what structure of representatives will you use: do you elect just the national legislature, or local officials too; do you elect major public offices like the heads of public services or just the political guys?
Once you've sorted that out, hopefully you never have more than a handful of people to elect at once. Have your voting machine tally up the voter's choice for each decision/election electronically, but have it also print separate, human-readable slips, on different paper colours for different decisions, and have the voter put these slips in matching colour-coded boxes. Bingo, you get instant results from the machines when voting closes, but you have an easy manual verification of the count if it's close and/or challenged.
What a great extension - it just made it straight onto my (fairly short) list of installed Firefox add-ins.
One minor request: any chance we could customise the reply to selected text option? At the moment, it just seems to wrap everything in blockquote tags, which doesn't necessarily yield well-formed HTML, and might not match someone's preferred quoting style.
ISO certification or not, true open standards are the wave of the future. Too many companies and people have gotten burned by vendor lock too many times, to the point where the movement toward open standards and open source here in Taxachusetts has attracted mainstream press, not just technical journalists.
Most of whom wouldn't know a truly open standard from an industry con-job if they sat on one. We used to have this problem with poor business processes, and now we have ISO 9000 and Tick-It, which don't actually say much useful, but tick some pretty boxes on contract proposals. Yay for the illusion of progress!
In any case, your pleasant dream misses the slightly important point that no software using ODF is currently even close to catching the MS equivalent in either functionality or installed base. It's going to take a lot more than making ODF an open standard to get people to use it in large numbers: it's going to take an Office-killer, and nobody's got one yet.
Sorry, I'm lost. What's the difference between your two scenarios? Are you asking whether it's actually impossible to skip the content, or just hard to work out how to do it? If so, I think we're talking about the former.
If you have to sit through 2 minutes of tedious copyright notices in 7 languages before your DVD will go to the main menu, or you have to sit through 20 minutes of trailers every time you play the DVD, because the DVD is telling the player not to let you use any of the controls, then your time is being wasted and you're not getting to see the content you paid for. That seems to me to be wrong any way you cut it.
I've never encountered the 20 minute trailers thing (though I've heard several times that certain organisations do do it) but I've run into the copyrights and anti-piracy warnings thing plenty. Isn't that daft: surely on a pirate DVD the first thing they're going to strip out is all the warnings? Duh...
On a couple of occasions, I've been tempted to take the DVD right back to the shop and ask for a refund on the basis that it wasn't fit for purpose. It's never quite been annoying enough for me to do this with anything I've bought so far, but one of these days (particularly if I hit the 20 minute trailers) I suspect it's going to happen.
A high-flying executive with a proven track record (wholly responsible for two failed multinationals) seeking further opportunities to develop my management style at CxO level.
Career history
2003-2005 - MegaCorp, Inc. Chief Financial Officer
Major achievements:
Successfully circumvented Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements, to present a financial statement to SEC/shareholders consistent with high profitability while omitting losses exceeding $10B in FY2004-2005.
Arranged personal golden parachute worth in excess of $20M without knowledge or consent of other executive managers and corporate counsel.
2000-2003 - SuperCorp, Inc. Senior Vice President - US finances
Major achievements:
Incentivised real terms reductions in HR budget, bringing net positive impact on corporate bottom line, through creative use of share options schemes to motivate reduced regular financial commitments.
Increased profitability of major departments through rapid realignment of staff volume with reduced corporate financial commitments, with particular success redistributing more experienced but less cost-effective human resources to alternative appointments.
Notice period
Currently unavailable for interview, but should be released on Monday 17 April (subject to sufficient funds being available to bribe officials at hearing).
Microsoft keep aiming too high. In the end, it's as simple as that.
The executives who are driving the show like to promote corporation-wide initiatives (.Net springs to mind) but they lack the clarity of vision and coherence of presentation to get their message across. This is, of course, assuming that they're clear themselves about what their initiative seeks to achieve, which I doubt in many cases. Once you're detached from clear goals and clear plans to achieve them, and you descend into corporate initiative, business imperative, growth driver, buzzword buzzword zzzzz territory, you'll sink right to the bottom in no time.
The next level down - the guys who are basically running the show for Windows, or Office, or the more minor products like Visual Studio - are constantly in a state of flux because they don't know where the corporation-wide initiatives are driving them. Worse yet, they don't know where they're driving each other, but it's surely somewhere: if you want a radical new UI in Vista, you've got to have the tools to write programs that use it in Visual Studio, and your next version of Office has to fit in with the style, for example.
Now, the guys working on the products keep coming up with revolutionary new features that require dramatic changes in a single version. These are always a risk, and if things don't work out, it's rare that you can half-implement the good bits and scrap the rest, so you get cancellation of the entire feature if bad stuff happens. Combine that with the constant changes in high level business plans and such, particularly pressure to get a release out in time for this or that shareholder meeting (that means you, VS2005 team) and you can see why often these things do suffer catastrophic failure.
So, if your next release is based on three Big Features(TM), as was the case with Vista originally, and these then start falling to the wayside under business pressures, what do you do? You can't cancel them all, or you've got no product and your reputation is mud, but if you can't get them ready in time either, then your release dates keep slipping and your reputation is a different colour of mud. Such is the price you pay when you decide to go for the big features and not across-the-board, incremental improvements, and that's the mistake they keep making.
His article was almost as vapour-filled as the press event he's condemning. He could have just said, "Microsoft held a press non-event, and everyone thought it was boring".
And I'm pretty sure promoting a company whose stock you hold without giving notice of this fact used to be considered unethical and/or illegal.
No problem. Are you storing them on a server? Or is your only copy on your hard drive. If it is only on your hard drive, then you are asking for problems.
The master copy is under source control on the server. New tests that haven't yet been released are held locally. There is no problem with this, because the back-up system pulls any such data from our machines each night, just as it does from the server.
And as far as your server going down... I do not know the size of your company. But in mine, even if the whole thing melted to the floor, we'd have a replacement in place within three hours, and all data would be back online next day max. Three days' lost work would NEVER happen.
It's a 5,000-strong multinational, with all the premier support agreements with major hardware and software suppliers.
We should have had a system up and running within hours, too, in theory.
But if you re suggesting it is safer (both loss and letting the workng people see it) to store vital information on your local hard drive, then you are mistaken.
Why? No-one has given any justification for this claim anywhere in this thread, AFAICS. Using local drives is much faster for many data-intensive types of work, and also distributes the risk of failure. That's two compelling advantages for local storage. As long as everything is properly backed up and accessible across the network where relevant, what advantage is there to the alternative plan, where we stuff the entire office's data all on a single centralised storage system?
While I'd agree with the general sentiment that Excel is the strongest of the MS Office applications, I don't think it can take 100% credit for MSO winning the race here. We had some discussion about this in another thread the other day, where I cited some serious usability concerns in OOo Writer as a major disadvantage against Word, for example.
[LaTeX might] be easy to use if you're a geek, but otherwise... not really.
But you have to look at the target audience. Do you really think the kind of person who uses a tool like LaTeX has any trouble with the concept of semantic mark-up and the use of a few macros?
I think that they might periodically copy across to the server to be part of the groupwide backing up of all data as well.
Exactly. I didn't get the attitude of the poster I replied to: he seemed to be almost proud of the fact that his IT department might trash a PC and lose user data if it was only stored locally. In many environments I've worked in, it makes far more sense to have the data stored on local users' PCs, and to have a centralised back-up that pulls a copy of the data and archives it as appropriate. It's not like there's a shortage of software to automate this process...
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, if they're going to have to 'fess up, but then get away with nothing more than a slap on the wrist anyway, then this law is unlikely to do much to improve the security of personal information and the integrity with which it is handled. What they ought to do, IMHO, is enact a law that both requires disclosure and hits the offender with a financial penalty proportionate to the damage caused and the degree to which the offender's negligence caused it.
If a business carelessly loses 1,000 customers' credit card details but then gets hit with a dent to their bottom line of 1,000 x $AVERAGE_COST_PER_CARD_FRAUD + $COSTS_INCURRED_BY_AUDITORS + $SIGNIFICANT_PENALTY_CHARGE, then maybe it will become enough of a priority on the executive radar to do something about it. Similarly, if identity thefts or other more serious consequences arise, the costs of cleaning those up can be incorporated into the penalty; naturally, this should include compensation for the time spent by the affected individuals and any third parties they had to deal with to fix the problem.
At the same time, this approach removes the financial burden of conducting after-disaster audits from the taxpayer, and passes it onto the offending party instead.
For our boys and girls in the UK, don't forget that the Gowers review is still accepting responses to their call for evidence, and covers (inter alia) the same sort of questions.
I think it's more a case of "shafted, politically." Although the Queen does have to give royal assent to the bill as a formality before it becomes law, I seem to recall her intonation as she read that part of the (government-written) Queen's Speech last year made her personal views on the matter pretty clear!
There have been some fairly specific lawsuits, yes, but the general principle hasn't really been attacked yet AFAIK.
In the only related US law suit that I can immediately recall, the plaintiff effectively admitted in court that he knew very well how to ask that the content on his web site not be archived, but had actively encouraged the archival anyway. At that point the judge essentially threw out the whole case.
This is a far cry from what we're looking at here, where the caches and previews on the ask.com site are completely misrepresenting the site they're supposed to reflect. This could be very damaging, whether simply by causing people who would otherwise have visited the site to stay away, or more seriously by giving a false impression of the site's host and their products or services, perhaps resulting in a direct loss of business. I'd expect that such a site might have a rather strong case against the poor caching service, and IMHO they do deserve to be compensated in this case, since the caching is no longer benefitting the public and is actively harming the web site operator, which hardly constitutes "fair use" of the content!
Or special forces, depending on whose version you believe.
Or just going through the barrier with a prepaid card, depending on whose version you believe.
But if they're then effectively presenting the web site's content before you visit the site, they're open to all the same inevitable legal shenanigans that Google Cache is going to get slammed with sooner or later. If they're presenting a cut-down preview that doesn't potentially make the site itself redundant, they would seem to me to have a much safer position when it comes to fair use/fair dealing/whatever it's called in your jurisdiction.
Then again, the preview image for the front page of a fairly large web site I run is several months out of date, and the cache supposedly scanned just a few minutes ago shows a blank page, while our site is happily up and running. This sort of out-of-date, inaccurate information makes the features worse than useless, and is one of the stronger legal arguments for slapping down unauthorised caching and previewing of other people's web sites.
Blockquoth the AC:
Of course. That's presumably why violent crime, and for that matter gun-related crime, are on the increase in this country, and an estimated 500,000 illegal firearms are in circulation: that's one for every 100 people in the UK!
There are a few great quotations that always come to my mind when this subject comes up.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. - Pitt the Younger
When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think. - Pat Schroeder
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. - H. L. Mencken
And perhaps the most astute of all:
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. - another one from H. L. Mencken
That's what I thought about government when I was younger and more naive. You've nothing to fear with nothing to hide, they told me. That's fine, as long as no-one in government ever makes an honest mistake. Yeah, like that would ever happen, right?
One day, a low-level civil servant working in a tax office mistyped a National Insurance number, probably one of hundreds he entered into the system during that working day alone. Unfortunately for me, he fluked typing mine instead. My tax records instantly got tied to someone else's, I lost all my allowances without warning, and it took me countless hours ringing around countless tax offices over the next few months to get it put right.
In other words, for several months, my paycheque turned up hundreds of pounds short, without any notice, and with absolutely nothing I could do about it.
That was one number out of probably thousands typed by one government staffer out of thousands that week. Moreover, since the system now said things like I was working two full-time jobs on opposite sides of the country at the same time, it was pretty obviously screwed up when I finally did get the right person to check it. What happens when it's not just a tax allowance, but your entire life that's in the database, and the mistake isn't that your job changed, it's that you're no longer entitled to NHS medical care, or you lose state benefits you rely on to buy food, or you fail a CRB check and lose your job? And those are the nicer possibilities.
Tell that to Jean Charles de Menezes. Oh, wait, you can't, because he was shot dead by government agents after a tracking exercise went wrong and he was incorrectly identified as a terrorist.
Not any more, they're not.
The Labour Party used to be fairly left-wing, friend of the common man, strong links to the unions, more socialist than capitalist in direction, etc.
New Labour under Tony Blair have gone so right-wing they're no longer recognisable as the same party. They have all but severed their former union ties, often supported businesses over workers in their economic policy, and quite literally introduced the most draconian legislative framework for government in human history.
How they're even still in office is a mystery, explainable only by a series of quirks in our election system that basically let them fluke their way in with an absolute majority of seats in the Commons despite winning only 22% of the vote, and losing it outright if you consider England alone. They have no popular mandate, yet Home Secretary Charles Clarke likes to throw around phrases like "accepting the will of the people" when telling those who oppose government policy why they should just stop.
This administration knows they're playing on borrowed time - they've done too much damage now, and Brown is going to be nothing like the figurehead Blair was at the next election - so they're trying to write their place in the history books while they still can. Too bad they'll be remembered for all the wrong reasons as one of the worst governments anywhere in the world at any point in history, and an in 20 years this period will probably be presented as an object lesson in the importance of due process and defending civil liberties.
It started several years ago. Since then we've had Regulation of Investigatory Powers; Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security; Civil Contingencies; and now this.
I'm not sure what the legal basis was, but one of the political satire shows on TV the other day was implying that you can now be tagged, placed under curfew, or made subject to an ASBO, all without even being charged with committing a crime, never mind given due process. If you break the relevant condition then you can immediately be sent to prison without trial.
The one good thing about all this is that it's now gone so far that someone's going to have to knock it all down forcibly and rebuild it from scratch, for example by voting the entire New Labout administration out of office.
Yep, I renewed my passport recently for exactly this reason.
I'm hopeful, if not terribly optimistic, that by the time it's due to be renewed, the New Labour, nanny-state, authoritarian, draconian-law-passing regime will long since have been kicked out of office. Maybe some sanity will even have returned to our legal system - perhaps starting by repealing every law passed in recent years under the mantra of fighting terrorism that can't be shown, publicly and with clear evidence rather than based on trusting Tony, to have made an obvious and significant difference to the threat it's supposed to protect us against!
That'll be 78%, then. :-)
It's really too bad they missed the fact that the National Identity Register is the truly dangerous part of all this. Without it, the card is just a piece of plastic. With it, it doesn't matter whether you've got a card or not, you're just a record in a database waiting to be pulled by mistake.
I suspect this is part of the problem.
I've long held the view that the most effective way to get a reasonably democratic political system is to have the electorate vote on exactly two things: deciding the Big Issues (constitutional changes and the like) directly; and electing the representatives who will decide on the Little Issues for them.
My own experience, from running a medium-sized, not-for-profit organisation, is that few people have the time to fully research every choice that the management must make, even if they have the inclination. If you rely too much on mass voting, you get well-intentioned people actually voting against their best interests through lack of understanding, failure to see the big picture and appreciate the wider or longer-term implications of their vote, etc. Thus you can't make all the detailed little decisions by consultation with the entire electorate, or even in a big committee; it ceases to represent the best interests of the electorate beyond a certain point.
What does work, IME, is:
- creating a basic framework (in national politics, that's your constitution, basic legal processes, etc.) within which a given administration will work
- electing representatives who you think will act most in alignment with your personal preferences on lesser issues
- letting them get on with representing you.
Naturally, such representatives may still consult their electorate on any given issue, and any given voter may contact their representative to express a view on any given subject. A representative who fails to consult adequately when it is appropriate risks not being re-elected, so as long as your terms of office are of reasonable duration, there is relatively low risk of abuse. You can also have a safeguard where if a sufficiently large number of voters want to vote on a particular subject, they can force a vote with or without the consent of their representatives.This removes entirely the need for routine voting on minor issues like how to use a building or what to put in water. I suspect that almost all such issues are best left to be decided by representatives with the time to investigate the implications properly anyway. Joe Public just won't know in a lot of cases, and the voting will essentially be a random number generator with a small bias due to people who actually do understand any given decision.
The only remaining question then becomes how big is big enough to vote on separately, and what structure of representatives will you use: do you elect just the national legislature, or local officials too; do you elect major public offices like the heads of public services or just the political guys?
Once you've sorted that out, hopefully you never have more than a handful of people to elect at once. Have your voting machine tally up the voter's choice for each decision/election electronically, but have it also print separate, human-readable slips, on different paper colours for different decisions, and have the voter put these slips in matching colour-coded boxes. Bingo, you get instant results from the machines when voting closes, but you have an easy manual verification of the count if it's close and/or challenged.
So it is. Thanks, I completely missed that first time around. D'oh...
What a great extension - it just made it straight onto my (fairly short) list of installed Firefox add-ins.
One minor request: any chance we could customise the reply to selected text option? At the moment, it just seems to wrap everything in blockquote tags, which doesn't necessarily yield well-formed HTML, and might not match someone's preferred quoting style.
Most of whom wouldn't know a truly open standard from an industry con-job if they sat on one. We used to have this problem with poor business processes, and now we have ISO 9000 and Tick-It, which don't actually say much useful, but tick some pretty boxes on contract proposals. Yay for the illusion of progress!
In any case, your pleasant dream misses the slightly important point that no software using ODF is currently even close to catching the MS equivalent in either functionality or installed base. It's going to take a lot more than making ODF an open standard to get people to use it in large numbers: it's going to take an Office-killer, and nobody's got one yet.
Sorry, I'm lost. What's the difference between your two scenarios? Are you asking whether it's actually impossible to skip the content, or just hard to work out how to do it? If so, I think we're talking about the former.
If you have to sit through 2 minutes of tedious copyright notices in 7 languages before your DVD will go to the main menu, or you have to sit through 20 minutes of trailers every time you play the DVD, because the DVD is telling the player not to let you use any of the controls, then your time is being wasted and you're not getting to see the content you paid for. That seems to me to be wrong any way you cut it.
I've never encountered the 20 minute trailers thing (though I've heard several times that certain organisations do do it) but I've run into the copyrights and anti-piracy warnings thing plenty. Isn't that daft: surely on a pirate DVD the first thing they're going to strip out is all the warnings? Duh...
On a couple of occasions, I've been tempted to take the DVD right back to the shop and ask for a refund on the basis that it wasn't fit for purpose. It's never quite been annoying enough for me to do this with anything I've bought so far, but one of these days (particularly if I hit the 20 minute trailers) I suspect it's going to happen.
Curriculum Vitae - Adam N. Other
Personal profile
A high-flying executive with a proven track record (wholly responsible for two failed multinationals) seeking further opportunities to develop my management style at CxO level.
Career history
2003-2005 - MegaCorp, Inc.
Chief Financial Officer
Major achievements:
2000-2003 - SuperCorp, Inc.
Senior Vice President - US finances
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Currently unavailable for interview, but should be released on Monday 17 April (subject to sufficient funds being available to bribe officials at hearing).
Microsoft keep aiming too high. In the end, it's as simple as that.
The executives who are driving the show like to promote corporation-wide initiatives (.Net springs to mind) but they lack the clarity of vision and coherence of presentation to get their message across. This is, of course, assuming that they're clear themselves about what their initiative seeks to achieve, which I doubt in many cases. Once you're detached from clear goals and clear plans to achieve them, and you descend into corporate initiative, business imperative, growth driver, buzzword buzzword zzzzz territory, you'll sink right to the bottom in no time.
The next level down - the guys who are basically running the show for Windows, or Office, or the more minor products like Visual Studio - are constantly in a state of flux because they don't know where the corporation-wide initiatives are driving them. Worse yet, they don't know where they're driving each other, but it's surely somewhere: if you want a radical new UI in Vista, you've got to have the tools to write programs that use it in Visual Studio, and your next version of Office has to fit in with the style, for example.
Now, the guys working on the products keep coming up with revolutionary new features that require dramatic changes in a single version. These are always a risk, and if things don't work out, it's rare that you can half-implement the good bits and scrap the rest, so you get cancellation of the entire feature if bad stuff happens. Combine that with the constant changes in high level business plans and such, particularly pressure to get a release out in time for this or that shareholder meeting (that means you, VS2005 team) and you can see why often these things do suffer catastrophic failure.
So, if your next release is based on three Big Features(TM), as was the case with Vista originally, and these then start falling to the wayside under business pressures, what do you do? You can't cancel them all, or you've got no product and your reputation is mud, but if you can't get them ready in time either, then your release dates keep slipping and your reputation is a different colour of mud. Such is the price you pay when you decide to go for the big features and not across-the-board, incremental improvements, and that's the mistake they keep making.
His article was almost as vapour-filled as the press event he's condemning. He could have just said, "Microsoft held a press non-event, and everyone thought it was boring".
And I'm pretty sure promoting a company whose stock you hold without giving notice of this fact used to be considered unethical and/or illegal.
The master copy is under source control on the server. New tests that haven't yet been released are held locally. There is no problem with this, because the back-up system pulls any such data from our machines each night, just as it does from the server.
It's a 5,000-strong multinational, with all the premier support agreements with major hardware and software suppliers.
We should have had a system up and running within hours, too, in theory.
Why? No-one has given any justification for this claim anywhere in this thread, AFAICS. Using local drives is much faster for many data-intensive types of work, and also distributes the risk of failure. That's two compelling advantages for local storage. As long as everything is properly backed up and accessible across the network where relevant, what advantage is there to the alternative plan, where we stuff the entire office's data all on a single centralised storage system?
While I'd agree with the general sentiment that Excel is the strongest of the MS Office applications, I don't think it can take 100% credit for MSO winning the race here. We had some discussion about this in another thread the other day, where I cited some serious usability concerns in OOo Writer as a major disadvantage against Word, for example.
But you have to look at the target audience. Do you really think the kind of person who uses a tool like LaTeX has any trouble with the concept of semantic mark-up and the use of a few macros?
Exactly. I didn't get the attitude of the poster I replied to: he seemed to be almost proud of the fact that his IT department might trash a PC and lose user data if it was only stored locally. In many environments I've worked in, it makes far more sense to have the data stored on local users' PCs, and to have a centralised back-up that pulls a copy of the data and archives it as appropriate. It's not like there's a shortage of software to automate this process...