Agreed. In fact, in any kind of multi-person office (or single for that matter), only PC software should be on the hard drive. No files. Anything of any importance should be saved to a network.
That's nice. I've got about 2GB of automated tests I need to run before I make each release of new code/tests I write to source control. Running these from a local hard drive takes about 2 hours. Running them across the network takes about 10 hours, if one person is doing it at once. There are about 20 developers sharing the main development server that hosts source control etc. in my office. Tell me again how having files locally is wrong, and we should run everything over the network?
(Before you cite the reliability argument, you should know that our super-duper mega-redundant top-notch Dell server fell over last week, losing not one but two drives in the RAID array at once, and thus removing the hot-swapping recovery option and requiring the server to be taken down while the disk images were rebuilt. A third drive then failed during that, resulting in the total loss of the entire RAID array, and the need to replace the lot and restore everything from back-ups. Total down-time was about two days for the entire development group. (In case you're curious, they also upgraded some firmware in the RAID controller to fix some known issues that may have been responsible for part of this chaos. No, we don't believe three HDs all randomly failed within two days of each other, either.)
Fortunately, we were all working from local data, so most of us effectively had our own back-ups. However, this didn't much help since everything is tied to the Windows domain, so all the services we normally use for things like tracking bugs and source control were out anyway. We did actually lose data, since there hadn't been a successful back-up of the server the previous night due to the failures, so in effect we really lost three days of work time.
All in all, I think your "store everything on the network, or else" policy stinks of BOFHness, and your generalisation is wholly unfounded. But you carry on enforcing your corporate policy like the sysadmin overlord you apparently are, as long as you're happy for all your users to hold you accountable for it if it falls apart when another policy would have been more appropriate.
if you are a public figure, there are many circumstances under which I can make false statements about you that are harmful to you without suffering consequences. I think this is a good principle.
I wrote:
You think it's a good principle that someone should be able to deliberately harm someone else, purely out of malice, and face no consequences?
How does that not follow directly from what you wrote?
My position is the pragmatic one, because it's the one we already have: people can generally make anonymous statements, but if they start behaving too outrageously, then the police machinery kicks in and attempts to track them down. It's a simple, pragmatic balance.
Well, I guess we have very different views on this one. I wonder if perhaps we also have very different personal experiences of the kind of abusive behaviour that can result.
Have you ever been on the wrong side of something like identity theft, or on-line defamation? Or has anyone you know? These sorts of things can quite literally destroy lives for months, or even longer, while the unfortunate victim attempts to clear up the mess. And yet, the odds of the police even noticing, never mind being able to take any sort of effective action against a perpetrator based in another jurisdiction, are laughably small at present.
In any case, surely you've received plenty of spam, phishing e-mails, etc. Today, these problems are getting so bad for some people that they have to give up e-mail addresses, and risk losing contacts as a result, just to get clear of them. What are you supposed to do to fight back, e-mail abuse@claimed.sending.domain.com?
I'm afraid I don't view today's situation as even close to acceptable, and I don't think any position that advocates status quo is at all pragmatic. Of course no one nation can unilaterally fix this: it's an international problem. But the international community built the Internet; it can certainly collaborate enough to police it where there's a need.
I suspect we'll just have to agree to disagree on the issue at this point, but thanks for an interesting conversation.
I don't think any party since the second world war has won an overall majority vote
I certainly don't know of any. But in this case, New Labour didn't even win the greatest number of English votes of any party standing; the Conservatives did. Tony's cronies only got in again because we have a UK parliament with no separate English component, so Scottish Labour carried the day for them.
Yeah. I always find it ironic when Charles Clarke tells the Lords (via the media) that they should stop opposing "the will of the people" and let his draconian legislation through unchallenged - particularly when that particular piece of legislation is violating a manifesto pledge by his own party in the first place!
(the courts decided it couldn't be applied to him for some reason)
IIRC, the court found that the wording didn't imply that the law applied to already-existing protests, and he had been there continuously since before the law was passed.
You're thinking of the Parliament Act, which affects the Lords. This is much worse: it effectively removes the power of the Commons to properly discuss legislation before it's passed into law.
I say: absolve the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and revert all power to HRH Elizabeth Regina. We'll then all get along splendidly. (Or at least untill Charles takes the thrown.)
You laugh, but even at his most old-fashioned and controversial, Charles's opinions usually make more sense to me than a lot of what the current lot have been doing. Frankly, we'd do better with the old-fashioned approach for the next few years...
As others have noted, this is a fairly controversial subject right now, particularly because Blair's government didn't win the popular vote in England, and have relied heavily on their Scottish MPs to force through legislation that will only affect England (and therefore probably not upset those MPs' constituents enough to lose their votes, even if it's terrible law).
It's commonly referred to as the "West Lothian question", if you want to Google for more background.
Should any monarch try to make use of their theoretical powers, it would be massive constitutial crisis, and they would be removed in short order.
Well, somebody would be removed in short order. Whether it was the monarch deciding to act on the traditional powers they've never formally given up, or the Prime Minister whose abuse of the loan of said powers was so grievous that the monarch felt compelled to intervene, is a question I'd very much like to see tested on some of the recent legislation imposed by Blair and his cronies. I'm betting on dear old Liz.
They can if this Act is itself approved by the current process, just as the Parliament Act now allows the House of Commons to over-rule opposition from the House of Lords if it really, really wants to. (Whether that act was ever actually approved by the Lords, as required before it was passed, is a different question, of course, but the current administration's senior legal advisers decided that didn't matter...)
The trick is that the MPs would have to effectively sign their own irrelevance warrant, but of course when your 22% of the popular vote gives you a huge absolute majority in the Commons, and you've already got the Lords tied up via the Parliament Act, this is a convenient way to extend the longevity of your administration and the damage it can do before the next general election, presumably in 2009 unless they've managed to cancel that by then as well. (Don't laugh, they've cancelled elections on a more local scale in some places already.)
I don't think I need to write to my MP on this one: he's already strongly and publicly criticised the bill for the insult to democracy it is, and indeed a group of professors of law from our local university (which, for the benefit of US readers, means a lot of very highly placed academics in the UK) wrote to a national newspaper to express their support for his opposition. I do believe in contacting my representatives, but in this case his view seems pretty solidly on the right side of sane.
As for who would write the laws, it would basically be ministers, i.e., senior politicians appointed by the current administration and generally drawn from the ranks of both houses of parliament. This is basically carte blanche for the administration, once elected, to pass its laws without scrutiny or opposition from the other political parties. Technically, IIRC, the bill does allow for a couple of hours of debate, which is just about long enough for everyone to sit down...:-(
When you consider that this bill could be used to pass several pieces of legislation that have recently proved highly controversial within the house (ID cards and draconian "anti-terrorism" measures among them) you can see how dangerous it could be.
Then consider that under our first-past-the-post electoral system, the current administration was empowered based on only 22% of the population's support. They didn't actually win the popular vote in England at all, and they have relied repeatedly on Scottish MPs to force through controversial legislation that won't affect those MPs' own constituents because it only applies in England.
In other words, this bill would essentially hand executive authority to a group of people who are not directly elected to such responsibility, but rather appointed by another group who can have as little as 1/5 of the population supporting them, and with that they can impose their will over the other 4/5 and their duly elected representatives challenge. Why would this disturb anyone?
(Then again, we live in the land of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act, the Serious Organised Crime Act, The Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act and most recently the Civil Contingencies Act, which collectively have stripped away pretty much almost every freedom and right that UK citizens enjoyed prior to the current administration being elected. What more damage can they do?)
The solution to that is much simpler: people should stop paying attention to anonymous statements, unless they can independently verify them.
Yes, they should. But they won't, at least not any time soon. As I've reiterated throughout our discussion, my position on this issue is a pragmatic one. In the long run, I'd like to think it wouldn't be necessary, but that's clearly not where we are today.
In any case, this debate isn't new, it goes back to the founding fathers, and the ability to speak and criticize anonymously (look under "pamphleteering") is an important part of our democracy.
Assuming you're from the US, this debate goes back a lot further than your founding fathers! In any case, take a look at this week's news over here in the UK: some of our largest political parties grossly abused the electoral rules at the general election, by taking secret loans to fund campaigns with the lenders remaining anonymous at the time. They promptly offered peerages (not just an honour, but a significant and potentially life-long role in our legislature) to several of the lenders! Did keeping the lenders anonymous at the time really help democracy here? Or what it have been better if, as Blair's administration are now hastily proposing, all of the big loans had to be matters of public record, so it could be seen easily by the public whether there was a dubious correlation between loaning money to the party in government and receiving a peerage?
Note also that the ability of public figures to sue people for defamation is very limited in the US; if you are a public figure, there are many circumstances under which I can make false statements about you that are harmful to you without suffering consequences. I think this is a good principle.
You think it's a good principle that someone should be able to deliberately harm someone else, purely out of malice, and face no consequences?
No, I think a better solution is to disallow permanent archiving of speech unless you have permission of the copyright holder.
I pretty much agree with that. It was the other major point in my original post to this discussion.
I've never signed a software license agreement, have you?
That doesn't necessarily mean you're not contractually bound by one. They've been upheld in several jurisdictions, sometimes under quite unreasonable-sounding circumstances.
You can't expect to protect people from their own stupidity.
There is a difference between protecting people from stupidity and protecting them from naivety. No-one is an expert in every field, and no-one has time to make themselves into one. The law should encourage/require popular services to work as the public would expect, not encourage the exact opposite.
That was my first reaction too. We had a high-tech universe full of jedi doing great deeds until episodes 1-3, and then we already know there's a quiet patch full of evil empireness until a few years later, and then we have episodes 4-6 telling the story of how the rebels fixed it. Prequels or sequels might have had potential, but something in the middle, when the older generation's original favourite characters are still in kindergarten and there are no jedi not in hiding? Zzzzzzz.
Well, my observation is that I'm about the only person I know at work who uses styles
Indeed. As I've argued around these parts in the past, one area where today's word processors could seriously improve is to shift the UI focus and formatting tools from ad-hoc adjustments to the use of more powerful stylesheet and template features.
If they did this, a user who doesn't care about formatting would soon learn to add the "emphasized" tag instead of clicking italics. The way that emphasis within emphasis happens to toggle the formatting back to roman again will probably go unnoticed.
On the other hand, a user who does take a little care to make their documents look smart, or a corporate staffer setting up the office stylesheets and templates, would be able to format their documents more quickly and easily, and to help less knowledgeable colleagues to do likewise.
Alas, despite this suggestion getting several positive comments/mods here in the past, none of the major WP product teams seems to have any interest in improving this glaring weakness. C'est la vie.
I appreciate the reply, but AFAICS that workaround is only effective if you're not already using styles for anything else. Similarly, one could record a macro that went into the relevant dialog box and flicked the list box to the right setting, if one were brave enough to go near OO macros. But you still can't, say, add a control to the toolbar that indicates when small caps are active, as you can (and by default do) have with the bold or italic settings, nor can you use the expected UI to set up a keyboard shortcut for this feature in the same way that you would with other similar features.
My concern with OO here is more the naive approach to usability than the actual lack of features. As I argued later in my previous post, OO lost the features battle before it even started anyway. But for any application to be taken seriously by non-techies, usability is pretty much paramount, and this is an area where MS Office remains at least a decade ahead of OO.
If we attempt to eliminate anonymity in the world in which we live in today, we end up giving the state near total control over communications while achieving none of the goals you want to achieve. That isn't balance, as you claim, it's the end of democracy.
I don't quite follow this.
There is a fundamental difference between losing freedom of speech and having it but being held accountable for what you say. I advocate only the latter here: the state does not get any right to stop me criticising the actions of the administration publicly, stop me expressing opposing viewpoints, stop me supporting another political party, or otherwise censor me.
It does, however, mean that if I start spreading unfounded rumours with the intent of embarrassing a member of the administration out of office through trial-by-media, then that person has the same right as anyone else to set the record straight by calling me before a court to defend my actions.
We can't openly discuss controversial issues until we are assured our employers, neighbors, and the authorities will refrain from persecuting us for holding unpopular opinions.
Sure. But isn't it better to deal with this issue by openly expressing your views, having an effective legal system that protects citizens from unfair discrimination, and if you're still subject to abuse, being able to argue that your opinions were on record and the abuse started when you started to express those views? My father once taught me that it's hard to beat an honest man in an argument, and that advice has served me well for many years.
Remember that I'm not advocating a blanket ban on anonymity in the world here. I am only arguing that in the specific case of Internet use, the costs of pseudo-anonymity-by-default now outweigh the benefits.
If my ideas are valid, they stand by themselves, and my name can't affect their validity.
That simply isn't true, for at least two reasons.
Firstly, not everyone knows everything about everything, so we rely on authorities who specialise to summarise or explain relevant information for us. If you are an established authority in a field, then your comments on a related subject will probably carry more weight with someone who isn't.
Secondly, the opinion of one man is one man's opinion. The opinion of many people is usually more significant. If you don't know how many different people are really coming out in support of something, how do you gauge its popularity if you're charged with making a decision?
For most people, especially those using the wordprocessor, and maybe spreadsheets, OOo is more than good enough.
No, it's not. That's exactly why most people/businesses aren't switching to the free-as-in-beer alternative and still cough up the cash for MS Office. Contrary to popular belief, I rather doubt most people using an office tool really do just type letters and view using right alignment as an advanced technique.
Before I continue, let me just say that I personally use OpenOffice at home and MS Office at work, and have done for several years now. I don't use office software enough at home for MS Office to be worth the asking price to me, and I don't believe in ripping off other people's software illegally, so OO it is. I'm grateful to those who give OO away so I can use it, and I'm not criticising them for having an inferior product. They are several years of development time behind MS here so it's unreasonable to expect the two to be similarly powerful/refined.
Having made that clear, I have to say that OO simply isn't up to scratch on usability yet. The other day I was editing a word processor document, and using a lot of small capitals formatting. I wanted to add a button to the toolbar or a shortcut key to make this easier, but in OO you can't. I was going to report this, but found there's already an open bug to this effect and has been for years. In general, the keyboard support in OO is weak, which near-fatal in a word processor: where are the easy ways to set keyboard shortcuts for styles, special characters, specific formatting, etc? Compare and contrast with Word, which has done this stuff in its sleep for years.
I try to think of a different example every time I make this point. Last time it was silly limitations in mail merging and fundamental weaknesses in the data sources model used in OO. Next time it'll probably be underpowered charting in Calc, or maybe the terrible keyboard and mouse behaviour when using things like tables and text boxes in Writer. The point is, MS Office products are quite mature now, and while they may not have changed much in years and certainly have places they could be improved, they have relatively few really daft shortcomings. OO just isn't there yet, which is why I'm happy to use it at home for fairly simple jobs, but wouldn't dream of recommending it for business use.
Ultimately, the feature list is a battle OO can never win, as long as they're trying to be a better MS Office than MS Office and always chasing the leader. Microsoft might give them a huge boost by actually sending MS Office backwards with the weird new interface, but I'd bet by release time there will be an option to switch that off. Meanwhile, if OO wants to start providing genuine advantages over the MS offering, it needs to stop trying to be that MS offering, and start focussing on improving its own features and particularly their usability, and on offering things MS Office can't (like page layout and typography options beyond kindergarten level, or genuinely useful writing aids, for example).
You must be kidding, Mr. Anonymous-Brave-Guy without a real name. Given your name, your signature, and your behavior, I really have to wonder whether you aren't pulling my leg. Come on--you don't really believe that a pervasive assault against anonymity is a good idea, do you?
I realise it's weird, but yes, I really do question the benefits of anonymity in this particular context.
The handle was obviously a joke originally, but happened to be what I became known by around here, so I still keep it. I post on forums that matter for more than a few minutes of entertainment under my real name.
I appreciate that this seems an odd position for someone who strongly opposes almost everything governments do to restrain public freedoms, and it took me a lot of thinking to reach it. I have concluded, at least for now, there are simply more important things to protect on balance. Anonymity is merely a means to an end, or rather it would be if it actually achieved what you describe; obviously I don't believe it does.
Whether it's a "good thing" is completely irrelevant: there simply is no reasonable way of preventing unaccountable speech from happening in a free society.
But you most certainly can't speak in public without being held accountable, since normally anyone can see who you are.
The choice we face is the kind of world you are advocating, a fascist, totalitarian world in which ordinary citizens are deprived of the ability to discuss controversial issues freely and openly, but in which viruses, propaganda, manipulation, and crime continue to thrive, and the status quo, a messy mix of anonymous speech and accountability.
You miss my point entirely. In general, I am heavily pro-civil-liberties. In this case, however, the "liberty" is illusory, and I think the price is too high to pay for a pretend benefit. There isn't really any anonymity on the Internet; there never has been. It's just a matter of how much effort is required to track you down.
Moreover, I don't know where you get the idea that holding people accountable for their actions is somehow fascist and totalitarian, but apparently you need to go back and study politics from the beginning again to learn what the long words mean. Indeed, holding people accountable for their actions seems to be one of the hallmarks of civilised society, and the foundation of every legal system in the modern world. Why do you think the Internet should be available as a tool for those who would seek to circumvent the normal rule of law?
Society will be much better if we discuss controversial issues freely and openly, rather than in secretive groups behind closed doors. That is what ultimately leads to many of the problems society has faced historically, and continues to face today. And people should support the causes they believe in, loudly and vocally, so their voice actually counts for more than an anonymous mark contributing to a tally in some so-called representative's log book.
All this messing around with pseudo-anonymity doesn't really help: the few people in the world who might benefit in theory, and who are often mentioned by advocates of on-line anonymity around these parts, rarely have the freedom to speak freely that those advocates think they do anyway. Meanwhile, several of the most damaging crimes that exist today are increasing dramatically in frequency, thanks to the shield provided by the Internet and in particular its international scope.
Would you claim that any state that has a police force to enforce the collective will of the people, as expressed through a reasonably representative political system, is totalitarian and fascist? If not, why do you think the Internet should remain essentially outside the law?
The day people like you win the argument will be the end for democracy.
On the contrary. Democracy is already dying, courtesy of Bush, Blair, and their ilk. The only way to restore the balance of power to the people of their countries is to conduct genuinely open debate among the people, to have them inform and educate their peers where they can, and to promote an honest an exchange of views. That'll never happen until people who care have the courage to put their name to what they believe in, no matter how many almost-anonymous posts they make on the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
That's nice. I've got about 2GB of automated tests I need to run before I make each release of new code/tests I write to source control. Running these from a local hard drive takes about 2 hours. Running them across the network takes about 10 hours, if one person is doing it at once. There are about 20 developers sharing the main development server that hosts source control etc. in my office. Tell me again how having files locally is wrong, and we should run everything over the network?
(Before you cite the reliability argument, you should know that our super-duper mega-redundant top-notch Dell server fell over last week, losing not one but two drives in the RAID array at once, and thus removing the hot-swapping recovery option and requiring the server to be taken down while the disk images were rebuilt. A third drive then failed during that, resulting in the total loss of the entire RAID array, and the need to replace the lot and restore everything from back-ups. Total down-time was about two days for the entire development group. (In case you're curious, they also upgraded some firmware in the RAID controller to fix some known issues that may have been responsible for part of this chaos. No, we don't believe three HDs all randomly failed within two days of each other, either.)
Fortunately, we were all working from local data, so most of us effectively had our own back-ups. However, this didn't much help since everything is tied to the Windows domain, so all the services we normally use for things like tracking bugs and source control were out anyway. We did actually lose data, since there hadn't been a successful back-up of the server the previous night due to the failures, so in effect we really lost three days of work time.
All in all, I think your "store everything on the network, or else" policy stinks of BOFHness, and your generalisation is wholly unfounded. But you carry on enforcing your corporate policy like the sysadmin overlord you apparently are, as long as you're happy for all your users to hold you accountable for it if it falls apart when another policy would have been more appropriate.
You wrote:
I wrote:
How does that not follow directly from what you wrote?
Well, I guess we have very different views on this one. I wonder if perhaps we also have very different personal experiences of the kind of abusive behaviour that can result.
Have you ever been on the wrong side of something like identity theft, or on-line defamation? Or has anyone you know? These sorts of things can quite literally destroy lives for months, or even longer, while the unfortunate victim attempts to clear up the mess. And yet, the odds of the police even noticing, never mind being able to take any sort of effective action against a perpetrator based in another jurisdiction, are laughably small at present.
In any case, surely you've received plenty of spam, phishing e-mails, etc. Today, these problems are getting so bad for some people that they have to give up e-mail addresses, and risk losing contacts as a result, just to get clear of them. What are you supposed to do to fight back, e-mail abuse@claimed.sending.domain.com?
I'm afraid I don't view today's situation as even close to acceptable, and I don't think any position that advocates status quo is at all pragmatic. Of course no one nation can unilaterally fix this: it's an international problem. But the international community built the Internet; it can certainly collaborate enough to police it where there's a need.
I suspect we'll just have to agree to disagree on the issue at this point, but thanks for an interesting conversation.
I certainly don't know of any. But in this case, New Labour didn't even win the greatest number of English votes of any party standing; the Conservatives did. Tony's cronies only got in again because we have a UK parliament with no separate English component, so Scottish Labour carried the day for them.
Yeah. I always find it ironic when Charles Clarke tells the Lords (via the media) that they should stop opposing "the will of the people" and let his draconian legislation through unchallenged - particularly when that particular piece of legislation is violating a manifesto pledge by his own party in the first place!
IIRC, the court found that the wording didn't imply that the law applied to already-existing protests, and he had been there continuously since before the law was passed.
Yes. :-)
You're thinking of the Parliament Act, which affects the Lords. This is much worse: it effectively removes the power of the Commons to properly discuss legislation before it's passed into law.
Well, if you protest outside the Houses of Parliament, you're now breaking the law and subject to arrest, for a start.
You laugh, but even at his most old-fashioned and controversial, Charles's opinions usually make more sense to me than a lot of what the current lot have been doing. Frankly, we'd do better with the old-fashioned approach for the next few years...
As others have noted, this is a fairly controversial subject right now, particularly because Blair's government didn't win the popular vote in England, and have relied heavily on their Scottish MPs to force through legislation that will only affect England (and therefore probably not upset those MPs' constituents enough to lose their votes, even if it's terrible law).
It's commonly referred to as the "West Lothian question", if you want to Google for more background.
Well, somebody would be removed in short order. Whether it was the monarch deciding to act on the traditional powers they've never formally given up, or the Prime Minister whose abuse of the loan of said powers was so grievous that the monarch felt compelled to intervene, is a question I'd very much like to see tested on some of the recent legislation imposed by Blair and his cronies. I'm betting on dear old Liz.
They can if this Act is itself approved by the current process, just as the Parliament Act now allows the House of Commons to over-rule opposition from the House of Lords if it really, really wants to. (Whether that act was ever actually approved by the Lords, as required before it was passed, is a different question, of course, but the current administration's senior legal advisers decided that didn't matter...)
The trick is that the MPs would have to effectively sign their own irrelevance warrant, but of course when your 22% of the popular vote gives you a huge absolute majority in the Commons, and you've already got the Lords tied up via the Parliament Act, this is a convenient way to extend the longevity of your administration and the damage it can do before the next general election, presumably in 2009 unless they've managed to cancel that by then as well. (Don't laugh, they've cancelled elections on a more local scale in some places already.)
I don't think I need to write to my MP on this one: he's already strongly and publicly criticised the bill for the insult to democracy it is, and indeed a group of professors of law from our local university (which, for the benefit of US readers, means a lot of very highly placed academics in the UK) wrote to a national newspaper to express their support for his opposition. I do believe in contacting my representatives, but in this case his view seems pretty solidly on the right side of sane.
As for who would write the laws, it would basically be ministers, i.e., senior politicians appointed by the current administration and generally drawn from the ranks of both houses of parliament. This is basically carte blanche for the administration, once elected, to pass its laws without scrutiny or opposition from the other political parties. Technically, IIRC, the bill does allow for a couple of hours of debate, which is just about long enough for everyone to sit down... :-(
When you consider that this bill could be used to pass several pieces of legislation that have recently proved highly controversial within the house (ID cards and draconian "anti-terrorism" measures among them) you can see how dangerous it could be.
Then consider that under our first-past-the-post electoral system, the current administration was empowered based on only 22% of the population's support. They didn't actually win the popular vote in England at all, and they have relied repeatedly on Scottish MPs to force through controversial legislation that won't affect those MPs' own constituents because it only applies in England.
In other words, this bill would essentially hand executive authority to a group of people who are not directly elected to such responsibility, but rather appointed by another group who can have as little as 1/5 of the population supporting them, and with that they can impose their will over the other 4/5 and their duly elected representatives challenge. Why would this disturb anyone?
(Then again, we live in the land of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act, the Serious Organised Crime Act, The Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act and most recently the Civil Contingencies Act, which collectively have stripped away pretty much almost every freedom and right that UK citizens enjoyed prior to the current administration being elected. What more damage can they do?)
Yes, they should. But they won't, at least not any time soon. As I've reiterated throughout our discussion, my position on this issue is a pragmatic one. In the long run, I'd like to think it wouldn't be necessary, but that's clearly not where we are today.
Assuming you're from the US, this debate goes back a lot further than your founding fathers! In any case, take a look at this week's news over here in the UK: some of our largest political parties grossly abused the electoral rules at the general election, by taking secret loans to fund campaigns with the lenders remaining anonymous at the time. They promptly offered peerages (not just an honour, but a significant and potentially life-long role in our legislature) to several of the lenders! Did keeping the lenders anonymous at the time really help democracy here? Or what it have been better if, as Blair's administration are now hastily proposing, all of the big loans had to be matters of public record, so it could be seen easily by the public whether there was a dubious correlation between loaning money to the party in government and receiving a peerage?
You think it's a good principle that someone should be able to deliberately harm someone else, purely out of malice, and face no consequences?
I pretty much agree with that. It was the other major point in my original post to this discussion.
That doesn't necessarily mean you're not contractually bound by one. They've been upheld in several jurisdictions, sometimes under quite unreasonable-sounding circumstances.
There is a difference between protecting people from stupidity and protecting them from naivety. No-one is an expert in every field, and no-one has time to make themselves into one. The law should encourage/require popular services to work as the public would expect, not encourage the exact opposite.
That was my first reaction too. We had a high-tech universe full of jedi doing great deeds until episodes 1-3, and then we already know there's a quiet patch full of evil empireness until a few years later, and then we have episodes 4-6 telling the story of how the rebels fixed it. Prequels or sequels might have had potential, but something in the middle, when the older generation's original favourite characters are still in kindergarten and there are no jedi not in hiding? Zzzzzzz.
Indeed. As I've argued around these parts in the past, one area where today's word processors could seriously improve is to shift the UI focus and formatting tools from ad-hoc adjustments to the use of more powerful stylesheet and template features.
If they did this, a user who doesn't care about formatting would soon learn to add the "emphasized" tag instead of clicking italics. The way that emphasis within emphasis happens to toggle the formatting back to roman again will probably go unnoticed.
On the other hand, a user who does take a little care to make their documents look smart, or a corporate staffer setting up the office stylesheets and templates, would be able to format their documents more quickly and easily, and to help less knowledgeable colleagues to do likewise.
Alas, despite this suggestion getting several positive comments/mods here in the past, none of the major WP product teams seems to have any interest in improving this glaring weakness. C'est la vie.
I appreciate the reply, but AFAICS that workaround is only effective if you're not already using styles for anything else. Similarly, one could record a macro that went into the relevant dialog box and flicked the list box to the right setting, if one were brave enough to go near OO macros. But you still can't, say, add a control to the toolbar that indicates when small caps are active, as you can (and by default do) have with the bold or italic settings, nor can you use the expected UI to set up a keyboard shortcut for this feature in the same way that you would with other similar features.
My concern with OO here is more the naive approach to usability than the actual lack of features. As I argued later in my previous post, OO lost the features battle before it even started anyway. But for any application to be taken seriously by non-techies, usability is pretty much paramount, and this is an area where MS Office remains at least a decade ahead of OO.
I don't quite follow this.
There is a fundamental difference between losing freedom of speech and having it but being held accountable for what you say. I advocate only the latter here: the state does not get any right to stop me criticising the actions of the administration publicly, stop me expressing opposing viewpoints, stop me supporting another political party, or otherwise censor me.
It does, however, mean that if I start spreading unfounded rumours with the intent of embarrassing a member of the administration out of office through trial-by-media, then that person has the same right as anyone else to set the record straight by calling me before a court to defend my actions.
Blockquoth the AC:
Sure. But isn't it better to deal with this issue by openly expressing your views, having an effective legal system that protects citizens from unfair discrimination, and if you're still subject to abuse, being able to argue that your opinions were on record and the abuse started when you started to express those views? My father once taught me that it's hard to beat an honest man in an argument, and that advice has served me well for many years.
Remember that I'm not advocating a blanket ban on anonymity in the world here. I am only arguing that in the specific case of Internet use, the costs of pseudo-anonymity-by-default now outweigh the benefits.
That simply isn't true, for at least two reasons.
Firstly, not everyone knows everything about everything, so we rely on authorities who specialise to summarise or explain relevant information for us. If you are an established authority in a field, then your comments on a related subject will probably carry more weight with someone who isn't.
Secondly, the opinion of one man is one man's opinion. The opinion of many people is usually more significant. If you don't know how many different people are really coming out in support of something, how do you gauge its popularity if you're charged with making a decision?
No, it's not. That's exactly why most people/businesses aren't switching to the free-as-in-beer alternative and still cough up the cash for MS Office. Contrary to popular belief, I rather doubt most people using an office tool really do just type letters and view using right alignment as an advanced technique.
Before I continue, let me just say that I personally use OpenOffice at home and MS Office at work, and have done for several years now. I don't use office software enough at home for MS Office to be worth the asking price to me, and I don't believe in ripping off other people's software illegally, so OO it is. I'm grateful to those who give OO away so I can use it, and I'm not criticising them for having an inferior product. They are several years of development time behind MS here so it's unreasonable to expect the two to be similarly powerful/refined.
Having made that clear, I have to say that OO simply isn't up to scratch on usability yet. The other day I was editing a word processor document, and using a lot of small capitals formatting. I wanted to add a button to the toolbar or a shortcut key to make this easier, but in OO you can't. I was going to report this, but found there's already an open bug to this effect and has been for years. In general, the keyboard support in OO is weak, which near-fatal in a word processor: where are the easy ways to set keyboard shortcuts for styles, special characters, specific formatting, etc? Compare and contrast with Word, which has done this stuff in its sleep for years.
I try to think of a different example every time I make this point. Last time it was silly limitations in mail merging and fundamental weaknesses in the data sources model used in OO. Next time it'll probably be underpowered charting in Calc, or maybe the terrible keyboard and mouse behaviour when using things like tables and text boxes in Writer. The point is, MS Office products are quite mature now, and while they may not have changed much in years and certainly have places they could be improved, they have relatively few really daft shortcomings. OO just isn't there yet, which is why I'm happy to use it at home for fairly simple jobs, but wouldn't dream of recommending it for business use.
Ultimately, the feature list is a battle OO can never win, as long as they're trying to be a better MS Office than MS Office and always chasing the leader. Microsoft might give them a huge boost by actually sending MS Office backwards with the weird new interface, but I'd bet by release time there will be an option to switch that off. Meanwhile, if OO wants to start providing genuine advantages over the MS offering, it needs to stop trying to be that MS offering, and start focussing on improving its own features and particularly their usability, and on offering things MS Office can't (like page layout and typography options beyond kindergarten level, or genuinely useful writing aids, for example).
I realise it's weird, but yes, I really do question the benefits of anonymity in this particular context.
The handle was obviously a joke originally, but happened to be what I became known by around here, so I still keep it. I post on forums that matter for more than a few minutes of entertainment under my real name.
I appreciate that this seems an odd position for someone who strongly opposes almost everything governments do to restrain public freedoms, and it took me a lot of thinking to reach it. I have concluded, at least for now, there are simply more important things to protect on balance. Anonymity is merely a means to an end, or rather it would be if it actually achieved what you describe; obviously I don't believe it does.
But you most certainly can't speak in public without being held accountable, since normally anyone can see who you are.
You miss my point entirely. In general, I am heavily pro-civil-liberties. In this case, however, the "liberty" is illusory, and I think the price is too high to pay for a pretend benefit. There isn't really any anonymity on the Internet; there never has been. It's just a matter of how much effort is required to track you down.
Moreover, I don't know where you get the idea that holding people accountable for their actions is somehow fascist and totalitarian, but apparently you need to go back and study politics from the beginning again to learn what the long words mean. Indeed, holding people accountable for their actions seems to be one of the hallmarks of civilised society, and the foundation of every legal system in the modern world. Why do you think the Internet should be available as a tool for those who would seek to circumvent the normal rule of law?
Society will be much better if we discuss controversial issues freely and openly, rather than in secretive groups behind closed doors. That is what ultimately leads to many of the problems society has faced historically, and continues to face today. And people should support the causes they believe in, loudly and vocally, so their voice actually counts for more than an anonymous mark contributing to a tally in some so-called representative's log book.
All this messing around with pseudo-anonymity doesn't really help: the few people in the world who might benefit in theory, and who are often mentioned by advocates of on-line anonymity around these parts, rarely have the freedom to speak freely that those advocates think they do anyway. Meanwhile, several of the most damaging crimes that exist today are increasing dramatically in frequency, thanks to the shield provided by the Internet and in particular its international scope.
Would you claim that any state that has a police force to enforce the collective will of the people, as expressed through a reasonably representative political system, is totalitarian and fascist? If not, why do you think the Internet should remain essentially outside the law?
On the contrary. Democracy is already dying, courtesy of Bush, Blair, and their ilk. The only way to restore the balance of power to the people of their countries is to conduct genuinely open debate among the people, to have them inform and educate their peers where they can, and to promote an honest an exchange of views. That'll never happen until people who care have the courage to put their name to what they believe in, no matter how many almost-anonymous posts they make on the Internet.
You think that's bad? I share my name with a US senator! :o)