I've been arguing for a long time that completely free and effectively unaccountable speech on-line, particularly when made anonymously, is not necessarily a good thing, and on balance it may do a lot more harm than good. The principled people tend to shout/mod me down, but on this one I think it's the pragmatic view: freedom of speech is not an absolute right, and with that freedom when it does exist must come responsibility for what is spoken. As long as anyone can post anything about anyone on-line without so much as offering any right of reply, never mind (in practice) being subject to the usual legal comebacks in more serious cases, there will be abuses, and the consequences can be very serious, even life-changing. You can argue that the Internet is not a reliable source of information and people shouldn't trust random information for important decisions as much as you like, but in practice it will always cause problems, as we see here.
I've also argued for a long time that archiving of everything on an opt-out basis, as with things like the Wayback Machine and Google Groups, is not necessarily as much in the public interest as the advocates would have us believe. Again, while there is clearly merit in having a record of the general state of the world and useful content that might otherwise be lost, there is also scope for a lot of abuse. Perhaps more seriously, there can be a lot of accidental damage, maybe due to out-of-date information being assumed to be current, maybe because information that was never correct was posted at some stage and later retracted, but the archive didn't pick up the later correction. Of course, it would be best if some information were never on-line in the first place -- quite a lot of it, these days (ask the CIA;-)) -- and archives that help themselves to content without permission exacerbate this problem, too.
I suspect that in the long run, the abuses will become so great that the fundamental nature of the Internet will have to change. Anonymity will simply not be allowed, with countries not prepared to play along being excluded from the network. Archiving will have to become opt-in. Cross-border regulation will be created to enable people to defend their reputations much more straightforwardly than is the case at present.
It's a shame, but the simple truth is that while the unregulated nature of the Internet has been an advantage in developing it, it has also led to serious problems that, at current rates, will bring about its demise just as fast. I'd rather accept putting my name to my words and standing by my comments than the continued and increasing presence of viruses, spam e-mails, phishing, websites offering incorrect (sometimes dangerously so) information, major crimes like fraud and identity theft being carried out behind the Internet's shield of anonymity, sickos distributing kiddie porn, and all the rest of it. Ultimately, you're never really anonymous on-line anyway, it's just a lot of effort to work out who you. Why continue with the delusion when it does this much damage?
The only advantages that the new formats seem to have is clearer picture (if your TV supports it)
And a good HDTV will upscale regular DVD to almost the same quality anyway under many circumstances. I recently bought a funky new Loewe box, and the most impressive thing about it is that the kind of films people have mentioned in this thread -- The Matrix or the Star Wars series, say -- look almost as good as any of the hi-def demos I saw while I was looking into which TV to get.
Sure, there are some circumstances where hi-def will give a much better picture than regular DVD, such as crowd scenes shot from some way away, where there simply isn't enough detail in lo-def for the TV to sharpen it up usefully. However, I do wonder how often they'll make a difference in practice.
I think the thing about quoting is that you might have at least two potential legal bases for doing it. There is the implicit consent argument we've been discussing: it's the usual nature of the medium and anyone using Usenet might reasonably be expected to know that. I wonder whether in some places there is also a fair use provision that might cover reasonable quoting. Given that fair uses usually aren't based on the copyright holder's views (though the affect on the holder is certainly taken into consideration when deciding whether a use is fair in most places I know about) I suspect that if there's a fair use provision that covers quoting on Usenet then this basically undermines the whole X-No-Archive concept. Of course, that very fact might be a reason for such a use not to be fair.
Hmm... It's after 2am and now my head hurts. I'll let the lawyers work out whether the above actually does apply in these cases!:-)
I was addressing the general comment of the post I replied to (implying that you effectively give up your copyright somehow as soon as someone quotes your post) rather than this specific case.
That said, I believe your reasoning in your final point (b) is flawed in law almost everywhere. The key thing about the implicit consent argument is what the person holding the rights knew (or could reasonably be expected to have known) about how their content might be used. The burden of proof is on the copy-maker, who must show that the person volunteering the content has given implied consent to make the copy, which would otherwise be illegal other than where provided for under fair use or similar.
If a poster knew they were inviting some form of copying as a normal result of posting their content - as with replication through the Usenet network so others could read it, for example - and they chose to post it anyway, then there is implied consent to making those copies.
What is implied for one person may be very different for what is implied for another. For example, there was a case recently where a guy was trying to sue (IIRC) the people behind archive.org, for reproducing his material. The case was dismissed, and a crucial part of the ruling was that the poster not only knew (by his own admission) about the conventions for using robots.txt, but actually invited archiving of his material by his deliberate actions. This is a very different situation to Ma and Pa McNewbie, who might reasonably assume that if their ISP's Usenet system retains posts for up to a month then anything they write would not still be around five years later.
This is rather academic to the point I was making previously, of course, since in that case consent has been explicitly denied and any arguments of implied consent along the above lines are moot points.
At that point, it is no longer "your" post anyway, so you have no right to say if the reply should also have X-No-Archive. Unless someone considers quoting copyright infringment as well [...]
And there's your sticking point. If the original poster has explicitly indicated that they do not wish their post to be archived, it seems pretty clear that copying their material in a way that will be archived is an infringement of their copyright.
Usenet archives essentially rely on an "implied permission" defence to any charges of copyright infringement: they argue that if the person posted the comment, then are giving implicit permission to copy the post for the purposes of circulating it on Usenet, and archiving is just joining in with that network. Regardless of anyone's personal opinion, there is clearly some logic behind this position, and it's a fair case to make.
However, if the poster has explicitly indicated that they do not wish to have their post archived permanently, then there is clearly no implicit permission to do so, and keeping it beyond a normal period (which I'm guessing most Usenet users would describe in terms of weeks) would be an infringement.
Similarly, it's the accepted convention that someone replying to a Usenet post should quote properly. At least, it used to be; today, the law might view quoting improperly a la Microsoft and Google Groups to be the accepted convention.:-( In any case, one could again make a reasonable argument that implicit permission has been given by the poster to copy relevant excerpts of the original post for the purpose of preserving context in subsequent discussion.
Again, however, if the poster has explicitly denied their permission to archive their material permanently, then you can't really argue that they're giving implicit permission to copy their material in a way that will be preserved essentially forever. Quoting such a post without marking your own post as not-for-archiving itself might be dubious, and I'd have to conclude that archiving the material via that indirect route was a clear violation of the original poster's copyright.
The bottom line is that all of these archiving systems are on shaky legal ground as long as they're opt-out, because being on the Internet does not somehow preempt the accepted conventions of copyright law. (Neither do the opinions of a few people on Slashdot whose personal view is that copyright is wrong and the law doesn't apply to them, incidentally.) One could at least argue a reasonable defence of things like Google Groups and the Wayback Machine on the basis of implied consent, but if that consent has been explicitly withheld (via X-No-Archive, robots.txt or whatever) then really, it's hard to see how any service archiving such material via any means has a legal leg to stand on.
As you say, ID is generally required to open an account in the UK. In fact, the money laundering regulations have been tightened up considerably in recent years: IIRC it is now illegal for banks to accept the kind of casual identification they often used to on accounts that don't involve overdrafts, loans, credit cards or similar. I've switched personal accounts and been involved with several accounts for non-profit clubs and the like in recent years, and the rules and paperwork have been heavier each time (and strictly followed, which they often weren't before).
Maybe Europe alone can build a match for the F-22, in a 10-15 years, but by then the USA will have something better.
Yep, the US technological advantage today is at least a decade. That's why I recorded the film on my VHS VCR last night, and I'll be tootling off home in my Austin Metro at the end of the day to play Doom on my state-of-the-art 80386 PC.
Still, at least my job's safe: my group writes the core software for a major US corporation, and as long as they have to make sure we can't take our bang-up-to-date 1990s skillsets and use them to benefit a British company, they can't fire me! I'm sure the same is true of all the major defence companies in the region, who only supply their technology to the US military and would never dream of offering it to our own as well, or even instead.
The UK is about to spend out on new aircraft carriers designed to work with the JSF. It's gonna be a big shit sandwich if the JSF goes titsup.
There are all kinds of problems with timing and budget overruns in the UK military, but they really aren't stupid. I would be staggered if there were no contingency plan involving some Eurofighter variant.
(In fact, I thought that was the original plan, but apparently either I misunderstood or the plans have changed since I read about the new carrier project a few years ago.)
Of course, the people actually selling CDs are no longer offering this, now that they load up their CDs with "copy protection" technologies which circumvent security measures, often mimic viruses, and in some cases fill the error-checking bits with garbage, thus hastening degradation of the CD-- and which the consumer is giving no warning that these technologies are present.
Which, of course, is illegal almost everywhere, since such a product is not a CD and representing it as such is misleading.
With the increase in data density, a scratch is really going to be very bad for your media.
No problem, just back up your media when you buy it, and work from the back-up instead of the originals. That's been the standard, common-sense advice for years.
I'm surprised this hasn't come up more often already.
On-screen reading speeds simply aren't comparable to reading off paper, for anyone, no matter how much of a geek. (Go ahead and Google for the research: books have been found to be anywhere from 1/3 to over 2x faster.)
Moreover, prolonged VDU use, particularly when focussing at the same distance constantly and not making the effort to relax the eyes and switch subject occasionally, increases eye strain. It's less strenuous to read a well-printed book in good light, and doing so doesn't reduce your rate of blinking and therefore dry your eyes out to the same extent while you're concentrating.
All in all, any form of extended electronic reading is pretty much doomed to be niche-only until display devices are far, far better than they are today. Get back to me when you've got at least 5x the resolution of a typical display screen and contrast/brightness that auto-adjust to the surroundings for optimum reading comfort. The cost, DRM, etc. are pretty much irrelevant until that point.
I realise one has to keep these things in perspective, but you're spectacularly missing the point in some of these cases.
The insidious thing about ASBOs is that they allow the creation and punishment of new crimes without parliamentary or even judicidial oversight. An ASBO can say more-or-less anything, and breaking an ASBO can carry heavy prison sentence, even if the act prohibited by the ASBO carries no such sentence in law.
Smoking in bars, pubs and even private members' clubs in England will shortly be illegal under recently-passed legislation.
The road camera tracking network is going live any day now, by the admission of senior police officers involved. It has neither needed nor received any parliamentary oversight until the issue was raised recently, since previous legislation was so broad that the police could just go ahead and impose the most pervasive surveillance system in human history without so much as a by-your-leave. No doubt some MPs and probably the Information Commissioner will kick up more of a fuss when the issue finally hits the papers big-time, but by then it will, as ever, be too late.
Seriously, these things are happening, and they do have more than sinister overtones. Did you realise that an act is quietly going through Parliament that will allow ministers, without any further recourse to Parliament nor any vote of MPs, to impose major new legislation, including several of the things that have recently been strongly opposed in both houses? Several professors of Law at Cambridge University recently wrote to a national newspaper expressing their dismay at this turn of events and their support for Cambridge MP David Howarth's challenge against it, but other than that, even the mainstream media appears not to have noticed.
At current rates (i.e., with the proposals currently proceeding through Parliament passing into law on the expected timetable, and based on current or announced intent in the use of the laws by the relevant authorities) the following will be true in the UK by 2010:
Anyone walking in the street may be stopped by a police officer, searched, and their property confiscated.
Anyone walking in the street may be arrested by a police officer, taken to a police station, held without charge for up to 28 days (and they're pushing for 90 again), and have their DNA and other biometric information forcibly collected and added to a national database, there to remain in perpetuity even if they are released without charge.
Anyone walking in the street may be moved on by a police officer, even if they have committed no offence.
Anyone wanting to get a passport will be required to submit biometric information to that same National Identity Register (though of course, ID cards aren't going to be mandatory yet -- you don't have to get a passport -- unless you want to travel anywhere, that is).
All members of the public will be tracked almost anywhere in public they go, via CCTV, the road camera network, and other surveillance mechanisms. (These mechanisms will conveniently be off-line for maintenance in the event that the police decide to detain hundreds of civilians illegally for several hours during a prominent but entirely legal protest. Unless it's outside the Houses of Parliament, in which case such protests are no longer legal and the citizens can be arrested.)
All communications providers will be required, at their own expense, to record the nature of the activities of all of their customers, and to turn this information over to the authorities on demand. Any personal computer equipment owned by any suspected individuals may be confiscated without any charge being brought, and failure to disclose the password to access any information the authorities suspect to be on that equipment, regardless of whether any such information and password exist, will be a criminal offence carrying a penalty of several years in prison.
Yes, but why should this failing prevent the use of OOP when it's use alone (without the use of other idioms) is more powerful than procedural alone?
It certainly shouldn't prevent its use -- one should always choose the best tool for the job -- but remember that we're talking about teaching here. In that context, it is impossible to teach OOP alone; it inherently builds on the concepts of procedural programming.
I don't quite understand what you're driving at when you talk about teaching OOP first and from the start. How can you teach OOP without teaching, say, functional decomposition and structured programming? You wouldn't have any tools to write the methods with! How can you teach OOP without teaching modular design, and separation of interface from implementation? You can't appreciate the organisational power of classes without understanding encapsulation.
And I could not disagree more. I think ideas such as inheritance and polymorphism are unquestionably unique and distinctive aspects of OOP, and vastly underused in the software industry.
This is interesting. We seem to have similar backgrounds, and we've obviously both thought about this a fair bit, yet we seem to have very different experiences and to have drawn completely opposite conclusions. I would say that inheritance was the most over-used tool in the OOP world; I've seen countless occasions where composition or some other form of collaboration between classes would provide a far more flexible design. Indeed, I have often wondered whether the only time one should use inheritance in a robust OO design is when polymorphism is to be employed, since anything else binds more tightly without gaining any particular benefit over composition.
I think perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree here. I don't see that either inheritance or polymorphism is unique to OOP, as mentioned in earlier posts (c.f. pattern matching and disjunctive types in the case of polymorphism). One should certainly teach them, but if we're to achieve the greater depth of understanding that we both seem to want, I think you have to come at it by teaching the wider implications of polymorphism, which first requires understanding of many other concepts. I don't believe that throwing students in at the deep end with Java or the like really works, because it's been common practice in many academic institutions for years; if it worked, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
[OOP] is far more than just syntactic sugar, introducing ideas such as polymorphism which are fundamental to a the power of OOP development.
But is it, really?
I'm not knocking the power of polymorphism, but the concept exists outside the world of OOP as well. Consider the nature of pattern matching on disjunctive types in several functional programming languages, for example.
Similarly, I'm not knocking the power of OOP-style function dispatching, but one has to view them in context. C programmers have been using look-up tables of function pointers since a long time before someone thought of "virtual function calls".
And again, I'm not knocking a data-centric programming style, but you can write data-centric code without trying to turn everything into an object. People have talked about abstract data types and maintaining invariants since a long time before the OOP label took holf. None of this stuff is really new, it's just higher profile now.
Taking these ideas to the logical conclusion, we reach the concept that methods are attached to objects, or messages are sent to objects, or whatever terminology your particular language uses for this idea, and the resulting behaviour can be changed to accommodate derived object types.
However, this approach has limitations of its own. It often creates a different syntax for function calls. It often makes the first parameter of the function special. Use of inheritance forces a hierarchical view of the relationships between data types that may not be the most flexible representation.
All of these things can actually get in the way of sound general programming practices. Almost as bad, they prevent OOP playing nicely with other programming idioms that, as you observed yourself, should be orthogonal to the use of objects, not in competition with it. I realise that not all OO languages have these limitations, but the mainstream ones all do, and I would argue that this is what most people think of when they talk about OOP.
I write code for a living. I've worked on large-scale projects in OO languages, and seen the power of an effective design taking advantage of polymorphism first-hand. But I also have an academic CS background, and experience of other programming styles. After many years of doing this stuff, I'm more convinced than ever that while OO provides a model of certain ideas that is useful because it's accessible to a wide range of programmers, ultimately it doesn't really have any unique ideas of its own. It simply emphasises particular aspects, and presents a particular view of some general ideas.
My view is that the best way is to teach something like Smalltalk or Ruby initially in a procedural style, and then show that everything in the language is an object, with methods and properties. [...] OOP needs to be taught at the start, not as an optional add-on.
The problem with this approach, IMHO, is that it presupposes the superiority, and indeed the exclusivity, of OOP. The former is arguable but unproven, the latter is clearly false.
If I'm teaching someone to program, I want them to learn to appreciate useful, general concepts like modular design, or the nature of an expression, or the effective use of functions, or structured programming.
OOP, ultimately, is just syntactic sugar for a particular style of procedural programming, a specific application of these general principles. I think that presenting OOP as The One Truth, which you do at least implicitly if you start by teaching a language such as Java or Ruby, is doing your students a disservice.
Rather, take any student who groks concepts like simple expressions, basic procedural programming, indirection and modular design, and you can teach them the additional layer that is OOP quickly, without misrepresenting it as the universal truth in programming.
IME, a lot of the problems with programming today stem from the crazy belief that OOP is the only way to do things, which has been widespread in certain parts of our industry for a decade or more. Then people wonder why powerful concepts like higher-level functions and closures, or disjunctive types and pattern matching, remain almost exclusively in the world of academic programming languages, while industrial programming struggles on eternally with the STL, and NULL pointers, and introspection, thinking that these are clever ways to write code.
That's not a matter for court interpretation, that's basic English.
The problem is, everything is a matter for court interpretation.
It may be "obvious" to you and me that an operating system or comms tool wasn't designed to be used for cracking, but nevertheless these things can be used for that purpose, and proving lack of intent is rather difficult. Where do you draw the line? What about a tool that maps all the IP addresses on the Internet? What about a tool that cracks MS Office files that you may legitimately have and where you've forgotten the password?
Nothing is ever black and white where the law requires tests for reasonableness or intent. Hence explicit safeguards are required to protect those whose intentions might be miscontrued, where they have a legitimate reason to use a particular tool, but that tool also has less legitimate applications.
Then you're mistaken, at least on the European side, as a few moments consulting any popular usage guide will confirm. (The first result of googling for "apostrophe usage" includes a related example, as do several further results from the first page.) This isn't even a stylistic point; failure to use the apostrophe is simply wrong according to British English.
I think our anonymous friend has missed my point here. It doesn't say the article can't have other, legitimate uses. Simply being designed or adapted for use in connection with an offence suffices. Any communications software is designed or adapted for use in sending communications, which is how many of these offences will be initiated.
NB: I'm not saying this is a sensible interpretation of the wording, merely that it is a possible one. Courts have missed the point far more spectacularly in the past.
Reading the proposed wording, there is no definition of "DDoS". The offences are defined in terms of denying access to a system, and you would simply have to make the case that the Slashdot editors had the requisite knowledge and intent. The knowledge is clear; the Slashdot effect is widely known, and it is not credible that the editorial staff are unaware of the likely effect of linking to a site on the front page of Slashdot. The intent is less clear, but I'm sure you'd find a lawyer who could make a strong case for it. We might refer to a "DDoS attack" in conversation, but the use of zombie machines or whatever is irrelevant to whether or not an offence is committed under the proposed law.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been arguing for a long time that completely free and effectively unaccountable speech on-line, particularly when made anonymously, is not necessarily a good thing, and on balance it may do a lot more harm than good. The principled people tend to shout/mod me down, but on this one I think it's the pragmatic view: freedom of speech is not an absolute right, and with that freedom when it does exist must come responsibility for what is spoken. As long as anyone can post anything about anyone on-line without so much as offering any right of reply, never mind (in practice) being subject to the usual legal comebacks in more serious cases, there will be abuses, and the consequences can be very serious, even life-changing. You can argue that the Internet is not a reliable source of information and people shouldn't trust random information for important decisions as much as you like, but in practice it will always cause problems, as we see here.
I've also argued for a long time that archiving of everything on an opt-out basis, as with things like the Wayback Machine and Google Groups, is not necessarily as much in the public interest as the advocates would have us believe. Again, while there is clearly merit in having a record of the general state of the world and useful content that might otherwise be lost, there is also scope for a lot of abuse. Perhaps more seriously, there can be a lot of accidental damage, maybe due to out-of-date information being assumed to be current, maybe because information that was never correct was posted at some stage and later retracted, but the archive didn't pick up the later correction. Of course, it would be best if some information were never on-line in the first place -- quite a lot of it, these days (ask the CIA ;-)) -- and archives that help themselves to content without permission exacerbate this problem, too.
I suspect that in the long run, the abuses will become so great that the fundamental nature of the Internet will have to change. Anonymity will simply not be allowed, with countries not prepared to play along being excluded from the network. Archiving will have to become opt-in. Cross-border regulation will be created to enable people to defend their reputations much more straightforwardly than is the case at present.
It's a shame, but the simple truth is that while the unregulated nature of the Internet has been an advantage in developing it, it has also led to serious problems that, at current rates, will bring about its demise just as fast. I'd rather accept putting my name to my words and standing by my comments than the continued and increasing presence of viruses, spam e-mails, phishing, websites offering incorrect (sometimes dangerously so) information, major crimes like fraud and identity theft being carried out behind the Internet's shield of anonymity, sickos distributing kiddie porn, and all the rest of it. Ultimately, you're never really anonymous on-line anyway, it's just a lot of effort to work out who you. Why continue with the delusion when it does this much damage?
And a good HDTV will upscale regular DVD to almost the same quality anyway under many circumstances. I recently bought a funky new Loewe box, and the most impressive thing about it is that the kind of films people have mentioned in this thread -- The Matrix or the Star Wars series, say -- look almost as good as any of the hi-def demos I saw while I was looking into which TV to get.
Sure, there are some circumstances where hi-def will give a much better picture than regular DVD, such as crowd scenes shot from some way away, where there simply isn't enough detail in lo-def for the TV to sharpen it up usefully. However, I do wonder how often they'll make a difference in practice.
I think the thing about quoting is that you might have at least two potential legal bases for doing it. There is the implicit consent argument we've been discussing: it's the usual nature of the medium and anyone using Usenet might reasonably be expected to know that. I wonder whether in some places there is also a fair use provision that might cover reasonable quoting. Given that fair uses usually aren't based on the copyright holder's views (though the affect on the holder is certainly taken into consideration when deciding whether a use is fair in most places I know about) I suspect that if there's a fair use provision that covers quoting on Usenet then this basically undermines the whole X-No-Archive concept. Of course, that very fact might be a reason for such a use not to be fair.
Hmm... It's after 2am and now my head hurts. I'll let the lawyers work out whether the above actually does apply in these cases! :-)
I was addressing the general comment of the post I replied to (implying that you effectively give up your copyright somehow as soon as someone quotes your post) rather than this specific case.
That said, I believe your reasoning in your final point (b) is flawed in law almost everywhere. The key thing about the implicit consent argument is what the person holding the rights knew (or could reasonably be expected to have known) about how their content might be used. The burden of proof is on the copy-maker, who must show that the person volunteering the content has given implied consent to make the copy, which would otherwise be illegal other than where provided for under fair use or similar.
If a poster knew they were inviting some form of copying as a normal result of posting their content - as with replication through the Usenet network so others could read it, for example - and they chose to post it anyway, then there is implied consent to making those copies.
What is implied for one person may be very different for what is implied for another. For example, there was a case recently where a guy was trying to sue (IIRC) the people behind archive.org, for reproducing his material. The case was dismissed, and a crucial part of the ruling was that the poster not only knew (by his own admission) about the conventions for using robots.txt, but actually invited archiving of his material by his deliberate actions. This is a very different situation to Ma and Pa McNewbie, who might reasonably assume that if their ISP's Usenet system retains posts for up to a month then anything they write would not still be around five years later.
This is rather academic to the point I was making previously, of course, since in that case consent has been explicitly denied and any arguments of implied consent along the above lines are moot points.
And there's your sticking point. If the original poster has explicitly indicated that they do not wish their post to be archived, it seems pretty clear that copying their material in a way that will be archived is an infringement of their copyright.
Usenet archives essentially rely on an "implied permission" defence to any charges of copyright infringement: they argue that if the person posted the comment, then are giving implicit permission to copy the post for the purposes of circulating it on Usenet, and archiving is just joining in with that network. Regardless of anyone's personal opinion, there is clearly some logic behind this position, and it's a fair case to make.
However, if the poster has explicitly indicated that they do not wish to have their post archived permanently, then there is clearly no implicit permission to do so, and keeping it beyond a normal period (which I'm guessing most Usenet users would describe in terms of weeks) would be an infringement.
Similarly, it's the accepted convention that someone replying to a Usenet post should quote properly. At least, it used to be; today, the law might view quoting improperly a la Microsoft and Google Groups to be the accepted convention. :-( In any case, one could again make a reasonable argument that implicit permission has been given by the poster to copy relevant excerpts of the original post for the purpose of preserving context in subsequent discussion.
Again, however, if the poster has explicitly denied their permission to archive their material permanently, then you can't really argue that they're giving implicit permission to copy their material in a way that will be preserved essentially forever. Quoting such a post without marking your own post as not-for-archiving itself might be dubious, and I'd have to conclude that archiving the material via that indirect route was a clear violation of the original poster's copyright.
The bottom line is that all of these archiving systems are on shaky legal ground as long as they're opt-out, because being on the Internet does not somehow preempt the accepted conventions of copyright law. (Neither do the opinions of a few people on Slashdot whose personal view is that copyright is wrong and the law doesn't apply to them, incidentally.) One could at least argue a reasonable defence of things like Google Groups and the Wayback Machine on the basis of implied consent, but if that consent has been explicitly withheld (via X-No-Archive, robots.txt or whatever) then really, it's hard to see how any service archiving such material via any means has a legal leg to stand on.
Really? No shit, Sherlock!
As you say, ID is generally required to open an account in the UK. In fact, the money laundering regulations have been tightened up considerably in recent years: IIRC it is now illegal for banks to accept the kind of casual identification they often used to on accounts that don't involve overdrafts, loans, credit cards or similar. I've switched personal accounts and been involved with several accounts for non-profit clubs and the like in recent years, and the rules and paperwork have been heavier each time (and strictly followed, which they often weren't before).
Yep, the US technological advantage today is at least a decade. That's why I recorded the film on my VHS VCR last night, and I'll be tootling off home in my Austin Metro at the end of the day to play Doom on my state-of-the-art 80386 PC.
Still, at least my job's safe: my group writes the core software for a major US corporation, and as long as they have to make sure we can't take our bang-up-to-date 1990s skillsets and use them to benefit a British company, they can't fire me! I'm sure the same is true of all the major defence companies in the region, who only supply their technology to the US military and would never dream of offering it to our own as well, or even instead.
There are all kinds of problems with timing and budget overruns in the UK military, but they really aren't stupid. I would be staggered if there were no contingency plan involving some Eurofighter variant.
(In fact, I thought that was the original plan, but apparently either I misunderstood or the plans have changed since I read about the new carrier project a few years ago.)
Why not just return the missiles? Saves on postage and packing, and has a very low rate of vendor complaints afterwards. ;-)
Which, of course, is illegal almost everywhere, since such a product is not a CD and representing it as such is misleading.
No problem, just back up your media when you buy it, and work from the back-up instead of the originals. That's been the standard, common-sense advice for years.
Oh...
Yes, sir, Captain Tightpants. :-)
Don't tell that to the guy above who wants Serenity instead. ;-)
Would that be complete with shuttle occupants, sir?
I'm surprised this hasn't come up more often already.
On-screen reading speeds simply aren't comparable to reading off paper, for anyone, no matter how much of a geek. (Go ahead and Google for the research: books have been found to be anywhere from 1/3 to over 2x faster.)
Moreover, prolonged VDU use, particularly when focussing at the same distance constantly and not making the effort to relax the eyes and switch subject occasionally, increases eye strain. It's less strenuous to read a well-printed book in good light, and doing so doesn't reduce your rate of blinking and therefore dry your eyes out to the same extent while you're concentrating.
All in all, any form of extended electronic reading is pretty much doomed to be niche-only until display devices are far, far better than they are today. Get back to me when you've got at least 5x the resolution of a typical display screen and contrast/brightness that auto-adjust to the surroundings for optimum reading comfort. The cost, DRM, etc. are pretty much irrelevant until that point.
I realise one has to keep these things in perspective, but you're spectacularly missing the point in some of these cases.
The insidious thing about ASBOs is that they allow the creation and punishment of new crimes without parliamentary or even judicidial oversight. An ASBO can say more-or-less anything, and breaking an ASBO can carry heavy prison sentence, even if the act prohibited by the ASBO carries no such sentence in law.
Smoking in bars, pubs and even private members' clubs in England will shortly be illegal under recently-passed legislation.
The road camera tracking network is going live any day now, by the admission of senior police officers involved. It has neither needed nor received any parliamentary oversight until the issue was raised recently, since previous legislation was so broad that the police could just go ahead and impose the most pervasive surveillance system in human history without so much as a by-your-leave. No doubt some MPs and probably the Information Commissioner will kick up more of a fuss when the issue finally hits the papers big-time, but by then it will, as ever, be too late.
Seriously, these things are happening, and they do have more than sinister overtones. Did you realise that an act is quietly going through Parliament that will allow ministers, without any further recourse to Parliament nor any vote of MPs, to impose major new legislation, including several of the things that have recently been strongly opposed in both houses? Several professors of Law at Cambridge University recently wrote to a national newspaper expressing their dismay at this turn of events and their support for Cambridge MP David Howarth's challenge against it, but other than that, even the mainstream media appears not to have noticed.
At current rates (i.e., with the proposals currently proceeding through Parliament passing into law on the expected timetable, and based on current or announced intent in the use of the laws by the relevant authorities) the following will be true in the UK by 2010:
It certainly shouldn't prevent its use -- one should always choose the best tool for the job -- but remember that we're talking about teaching here. In that context, it is impossible to teach OOP alone; it inherently builds on the concepts of procedural programming.
I don't quite understand what you're driving at when you talk about teaching OOP first and from the start. How can you teach OOP without teaching, say, functional decomposition and structured programming? You wouldn't have any tools to write the methods with! How can you teach OOP without teaching modular design, and separation of interface from implementation? You can't appreciate the organisational power of classes without understanding encapsulation.
This is interesting. We seem to have similar backgrounds, and we've obviously both thought about this a fair bit, yet we seem to have very different experiences and to have drawn completely opposite conclusions. I would say that inheritance was the most over-used tool in the OOP world; I've seen countless occasions where composition or some other form of collaboration between classes would provide a far more flexible design. Indeed, I have often wondered whether the only time one should use inheritance in a robust OO design is when polymorphism is to be employed, since anything else binds more tightly without gaining any particular benefit over composition.
I think perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree here. I don't see that either inheritance or polymorphism is unique to OOP, as mentioned in earlier posts (c.f. pattern matching and disjunctive types in the case of polymorphism). One should certainly teach them, but if we're to achieve the greater depth of understanding that we both seem to want, I think you have to come at it by teaching the wider implications of polymorphism, which first requires understanding of many other concepts. I don't believe that throwing students in at the deep end with Java or the like really works, because it's been common practice in many academic institutions for years; if it worked, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
But is it, really?
I'm not knocking the power of polymorphism, but the concept exists outside the world of OOP as well. Consider the nature of pattern matching on disjunctive types in several functional programming languages, for example.
Similarly, I'm not knocking the power of OOP-style function dispatching, but one has to view them in context. C programmers have been using look-up tables of function pointers since a long time before someone thought of "virtual function calls".
And again, I'm not knocking a data-centric programming style, but you can write data-centric code without trying to turn everything into an object. People have talked about abstract data types and maintaining invariants since a long time before the OOP label took holf. None of this stuff is really new, it's just higher profile now.
Taking these ideas to the logical conclusion, we reach the concept that methods are attached to objects, or messages are sent to objects, or whatever terminology your particular language uses for this idea, and the resulting behaviour can be changed to accommodate derived object types.
However, this approach has limitations of its own. It often creates a different syntax for function calls. It often makes the first parameter of the function special. Use of inheritance forces a hierarchical view of the relationships between data types that may not be the most flexible representation.
All of these things can actually get in the way of sound general programming practices. Almost as bad, they prevent OOP playing nicely with other programming idioms that, as you observed yourself, should be orthogonal to the use of objects, not in competition with it. I realise that not all OO languages have these limitations, but the mainstream ones all do, and I would argue that this is what most people think of when they talk about OOP.
I write code for a living. I've worked on large-scale projects in OO languages, and seen the power of an effective design taking advantage of polymorphism first-hand. But I also have an academic CS background, and experience of other programming styles. After many years of doing this stuff, I'm more convinced than ever that while OO provides a model of certain ideas that is useful because it's accessible to a wide range of programmers, ultimately it doesn't really have any unique ideas of its own. It simply emphasises particular aspects, and presents a particular view of some general ideas.
The problem with this approach, IMHO, is that it presupposes the superiority, and indeed the exclusivity, of OOP. The former is arguable but unproven, the latter is clearly false.
If I'm teaching someone to program, I want them to learn to appreciate useful, general concepts like modular design, or the nature of an expression, or the effective use of functions, or structured programming.
OOP, ultimately, is just syntactic sugar for a particular style of procedural programming, a specific application of these general principles. I think that presenting OOP as The One Truth, which you do at least implicitly if you start by teaching a language such as Java or Ruby, is doing your students a disservice.
Rather, take any student who groks concepts like simple expressions, basic procedural programming, indirection and modular design, and you can teach them the additional layer that is OOP quickly, without misrepresenting it as the universal truth in programming.
IME, a lot of the problems with programming today stem from the crazy belief that OOP is the only way to do things, which has been widespread in certain parts of our industry for a decade or more. Then people wonder why powerful concepts like higher-level functions and closures, or disjunctive types and pattern matching, remain almost exclusively in the world of academic programming languages, while industrial programming struggles on eternally with the STL, and NULL pointers, and introspection, thinking that these are clever ways to write code.
The problem is, everything is a matter for court interpretation.
It may be "obvious" to you and me that an operating system or comms tool wasn't designed to be used for cracking, but nevertheless these things can be used for that purpose, and proving lack of intent is rather difficult. Where do you draw the line? What about a tool that maps all the IP addresses on the Internet? What about a tool that cracks MS Office files that you may legitimately have and where you've forgotten the password?
Nothing is ever black and white where the law requires tests for reasonableness or intent. Hence explicit safeguards are required to protect those whose intentions might be miscontrued, where they have a legitimate reason to use a particular tool, but that tool also has less legitimate applications.
Then you're mistaken, at least on the European side, as a few moments consulting any popular usage guide will confirm. (The first result of googling for "apostrophe usage" includes a related example, as do several further results from the first page.) This isn't even a stylistic point; failure to use the apostrophe is simply wrong according to British English.
I think our anonymous friend has missed my point here. It doesn't say the article can't have other, legitimate uses. Simply being designed or adapted for use in connection with an offence suffices. Any communications software is designed or adapted for use in sending communications, which is how many of these offences will be initiated.
NB: I'm not saying this is a sensible interpretation of the wording, merely that it is a possible one. Courts have missed the point far more spectacularly in the past.
Reading the proposed wording, there is no definition of "DDoS". The offences are defined in terms of denying access to a system, and you would simply have to make the case that the Slashdot editors had the requisite knowledge and intent. The knowledge is clear; the Slashdot effect is widely known, and it is not credible that the editorial staff are unaware of the likely effect of linking to a site on the front page of Slashdot. The intent is less clear, but I'm sure you'd find a lawyer who could make a strong case for it. We might refer to a "DDoS attack" in conversation, but the use of zombie machines or whatever is irrelevant to whether or not an offence is committed under the proposed law.
I'm not normally one to pick on grammar, but he's right about the apostrophe and you're wrong. Sorry.