This is one of those laws written by people with no clue about technology, and therefore hopelessly and dangerously broad. In this case, the text reads:
(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he makes, adapts, supplies or offers to supply any article-
(a) knowing that it is designed or adapted for use in the course of or in connection with an offence under section 1 or 3; or
(b) intending it to be used to commit, or to assist in the commission of, an offence under section 1 or 3.
A loose but credible reading of the above seems to cover every mainstream operating system, every compiler or interpreter, every text editor, every communications tool, and more.
Just FYI, we don't currently have degrees of murder here in the UK. If you commit murder, the only sentence available to the judge is life. (This is one reason why guilty of manslaughter is often the verdict returned instead; manslaughter carries the widest range of possible sentences of any crime in the UK.)
Actually, Slashdotting almost certainly would be regarded as a deliberate DDoS attack.
It suddenly diverts massive numbers of requests to a particular system, resulting in an obvious denial of service.
The admins of that system are given no prior warning and have no particular reason to expect such a spike, so they can't do anything about it. (There goes the "if it's on the web, it's fair game" argument.)
The Slashdot admins know damn well about the Slashdot effect, and have consistently ignored public suggestions to improve their procedures.
I would expect that if the Slashdot editorial staff continue to allow linking in articles without giving any sort of warning or (better) seeking consent from the linked service's admins, the first case will go against Slashdot in a matter of minutes, and there will be genuine consequences for the admins. Let's hope the more enlightened editorial policy zillions of Slashdotters have been advocating for years results.
Looking just at the word processor, it seems to me that there are several things that could be improved rather sharply, to genuinely make things easier for users and/or corporate admins, and to improve the quality of results.
Consider a single example from the world of design and typography: paragraph justification. People use fully justified paragraphs in documents all the time, yet the justification and hyphenation algorithms in Word and Writer are kindergarten toys. TeX famously had a better line-breaking algorithm decades ago, leading to much better spacing and less hyphenation. More advanced typography can improve this still further. This seems like a small thing, but it is important, because better typography here makes a significant difference both to readability (in the sense of how fast and accurately a reader can read a work) and to perceived quality (a balanced page with a clean design and even greyness presents a more professional image). There are countless other things that could be enhanced in this area, improving the quality of output subtly but significantly for millions of people, but no-one has yet implemented them in a word processor.
Now consider the related UI issues. When it comes to applying formatting, why oh why do we still have cluttered toolbars with bold and double-underlining and font lists and highlight colours and bullet list symbols? I've long argued that formatting should be based on a powerful stylesheet and template model, with the default user interface providing a simple window onto the commonly used aspects. Show the logical attributes like "title" or "emphasized" on a simple toolbar. You can still support ad-hoc formatting by allowing the easy creation of on-the-fly styles, but this should be the thing that's hidden deeper in the menus, not basic stylesheet support! Provide some decent defaults, unlike the current crop of heading styles and such that are typographical monstrosities in all major WPs. More importantly, provide powerful tools for creating document templates, so corporate admins or home users actually find them simple enough to use and adopt good practices by default. None of this is rocket science; on the contrary, my experiences of helping several non-geeks to write masters or doctoral theses using tools like LaTeX or to present material on the web suggest that people who care about their documents take to the separation of logical structure from presentation and the ready customisation of the latter very easily.
Obviously there are 101 other graphic design and typography features that could be useful to significant numbers of people -- those writing multi-language documents, for example -- or could simply be introduced subtly in the background to improve quality without any action on the part of the user. Likewise, there are any number of corresponding UI improvements that would make these things easy enough that Joe User could take advantage of them, rather than only so-called power users who know arcane nested dialog box options inside out.
And this is just in the area of formatting and presentation! I could make similar comments about writing aids (spelling, grammar, matching against "house style" that amazingly no-one seems to have picked up on yet, simple things like accurate and flexible word counting), collaboration and proofing tools, large document support (things like indexing, tables of contents, bibliographies and cross-references) and more. Word processors could do so much to help people, and yet all they do today is tinker with menu colours and dialog box layout, and obsess about importing 17 versions of.doc without any characters shifting position. How sad.
Do you realise the kind of music that gets into the top 40 these days? If you were humming that in front of me in the street, I'd hit you in the face with a shovel!
Its about time to put Fair Use into law I think, now if only I could find legislators I trust to do that well...
Erm... I'm pretty sure that on that side of the pond, fair use already is law... The fact that the recording industry doesn't seem to know that is their problem.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that OOP brings a load of new tools to the table that are abused far more often than they're used correctly, which creates a whole world of bug-ridden, unmaintainable spaghetti code.
You might make a reasonable case that in the hands of a skilled and knowledgable developer, OOP provides some useful extra tools for structuring code, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. However, my experience is that the vast majority of developers working on OOP projects do not fall into that category. One could argue that that is a management failing -- these developers often haven't been given even basic training in how OOP was intended to work, so they keep hitting nails with screwdrivers because they don't know there's a hammer -- but this is the situation all the same.
Similarly, you might make a reasonable case that with good OOP designs, it should be possible to develop tools to support the developers better. In practice, while there are a few neat refactoring gizmos appearing in some editors, we also have abominations like Rational Rose, and I doubt I'm the only one who finds the phrase "round-trip engineering" nauseating these days. Again, the balance is heavily towards the bad side so far, IME.
As for designing and visualising larger systems with more reliability than ever, I'm not sure that's realistic. OOP systems often have absurdly large code bases, but what counts isn't how big your code base is, it's what that code base achieves. Other styles of coding -- look at languages as varied as Erlang, LISP and Haskell -- have demonstrated far more potential for developing robust, large-scale (in terms of functionality, not code size) applications than OOP has so far.
Exactly. The line between hardcore developers and the average Joe will get fuzzy around the same time that we can no longer tell the difference between a joint-the-dots puzzle and a Picasso...
But the ZDNet article has the highest hype per paragraph ratio of anything I've read for a while.
Amen. I nearly always RTFA before commenting, and in this case since I find the premise that anyone can program effectively rather dubious, I was interested to see what arguments might be made to challenge my assumption. All I saw was two paragraphs of unadulterated bullshit technobabble. (I think there was more, but I actually gave up at that point, having concluded that if there was, it probably wasn't worth the time to read it.)
Wow, you truly have drunk the Kool-Aid, haven't you?
Protecting the population from foreign threats may be a valid role of government, but it's hardly the only one, and it's hard to argue on any factual basis that it's anything like the most important.
As for the nuke threat, sure, it could happen, maybe, one day. And what makes you think anything the governments of the US, UK, Australia, etc. are doing will do the slightest thing to prevent it anyway? Remember that these are the people who had bin Laden pinned down in Afghanistan, and decided to let him go so they could pursue a war against Iraq instead. Iraq has still, AFAIK, had no link to the 9/11 attacks shown, though a high proportion of US citizens in surveys now think it did. However, the TV news in the background just told me that 379 Iraqi citizens have been killed in sectarian violence in the last week alone. That's more than all the terrorist attacks in Europe in the past year, in one week, and it's our governments' fault!
Moreover, please look at the reality: you can't ever protect everything all the time. There is simply too much major infrastructure to protect every power station, every water/gas/oil supply system, every telecommunications network, every governmental site, and ultimately every public space. It just can't be done. If they want to get you, and they get the resources to do it, they're going to get you unless you can find out that they're going to do it first. Approximately none of the measures being proposed lately have any verifiable evidence whatsoever backing them up to show that they would help with this.
As for driving, you shouldn't put words into people's mouths unless you want to look a fool. I am in favour of a balanced transport network, giving appropriate support to both public and private transport, because at the end of the day nothing else will work. Certainly here in the UK, that means the government needs to stop penalising motorists who have no viable alternative transportation in a futile attempt to encourage people out of making unnecessary car journeys, and start investing in viable alternatives at several times the rate they're spending at the moment. But of course, we're so busy spending millions and millions fighting foreign wars we have no business being in, and for that matter supporting European beaurocracy to the tune of billions a year despite the fact that we get little benefit in return and its own auditors have refused to sign off its accounts for years, that the idea of making long-overdue investment in our own transport, health, justice and education systems seems almost irrelevant.
Their deaths were tragic. No-one is denying that. But so are the 50,000 or so deaths caused every year by road traffic accidents in North America alone. Is the US government dedicating itself unremittingly to reducing this figure, investing 15x the money and PR in that cause as in the war on terror? So are the many thousands of deaths every year from cancer, and heart disease, and other illnesses, but is the US government investing proportionately in medical research?
It's unpleasant, but at the end of the day, there is only so much a government can do to support public safety with its finite resources, and the only responsible thing to do is to prioritise those resources to gain the maximum benefit. Spending billions of dollars and a vast amount of the government's public relations resources promoting an ill-defined "war on terror", not to mention disregarding the basic rights of the people in waging said "war", is a negligent use of taxpayers' money. It's as simple as that.
The only reason anything seems new to you is because you're living it.
Not at all. Look at the history of ID cards here in the UK. It took world wars to bring them in previously, and they were scrapped in the face of popular objections within a few years of the end of the war. Today we're bringing them in because... well, we're not quite sure since the argument from government keeps changing, but it's been acknowledged several times that neither the 7 July London bombings nor the Madrid bombings before them would have been prevented by the use of ID cards, so it's not anti-terrorism.
Right now, we're looking at having a national database within just a couple of years that will literally be able to track everyone almost everywhere, thanks to a combination of facial biometrics required for passports/ID cards, widescale implementation of CCTV cameras, ANPR systems tracking vehicle movements everywhere on our motorway network, and a variety of local systems such as the London congestion charge. Look at the statistics for the accuracy of biometric matching technology, and it's scary: on the scale being implemented, it's entirely possible that the whole system will be thrown out as inadmissible evidence within weeks of going live, because it's so error-prone and so many false positives are generated that it can't be relied on in court.
I was watching a television programme about this just last night, where they were talking about the back-door collection of a national DNA and fingerprint database independent of the National Identity Register (which hasn't yet received final Parliamentary approval), on which thousands of innocent people's data is held. The Lord Chancellor was interviewed about this, and appeared to feel that this was entirely appropriate if it helped to prevent any crime at all. That was less convincing since it was shown just after a clip of an innocent man (previously a witness to a crime, who had given his fingerprints at that point only due to a police error) who's been wrongly arrested because his fingerprints were found on some recovered stolen letters and matched against the database -- unsurprising, since he sent the mail in the first place! Fortunately, he was a law student, so didn't take the police advice to accept a caution, and fought to clear his name. But the fact that mistakes can be made, even on such a small database, just backs up the concerns about the reliability of any system for widescale, automated domestic surveillance.
All of this leads to a truly, objectively unprecedented scale of surveillance of the innocent citizen of our nation, and given the scope for mistakes and the clear evidence that they can and will happen, I'm not sure that price can ever be worth paying.
But are yuo willing to pay for the security you want, the liberty you demand, and still having them following all laws?
Countries across the world have managed for centuries with both a reasonable level of security and a strong standard of liberty, without blatantly violating basic human rights laws. No-one has yet demonstrated that the threat today is somehow greater than what we have faced in the past. On the contrary, when looked at objectively, the damage caused by all the terrorist atrocities in the western world in the past decade combined is a mere fraction of the loss of human life in road accidents, treatable medical conditions, and many other things that could more productively have been addressed with the resources our governments so carelessly throw at the "war on terror". If you want to invoke the cost argument, then the war on terror is pathetic value for money.
I don't like DRM either, but the BBC isn't the right place to start reforming the West's foobared intellectual property system.
Hang on a minute. The BBC's mission is, in essence, to provide content to the British public. They can do this, based on a remarkably low licence fee, because they only have to pay for the broadcast rights in Britain for content they buy in, and because for content they produce themselves they can resell the rights for broadcast elsewhere, so that those who benefit elsewhere contribute to the cost.
It seems to me that this is exactly what the concept of copyright is designed to do: it allows the production of material where any given consumer base isn't contributing excessively just to support others. The DRM is inconvenient for those of us in the UK, but I think claiming the whole system is foobared while ignoring the way it's allowing the BBC to do exactly what it's supposed to do is rather shortsighted.
And I say once *we* (the fee paying public) have paid for it and watched it - give it away! - why not give it to the rest of the world?
In a word, economics.
The BBC is only funded in relatively small part by the licence fee. They also make substantial returns on, among other things, reselling rights to BBC-produced content abroad.
Sadly, the Slashdot eds decided not to run my story about the Gowers Review calling for evidence as of yesterday, so since it's directly relevant I'll mention it here.
For those who don't know, this is a government-ordered review into the current state of intellectual property, and whether it needs amending in light of new technologies, easy distribution over the Internet, etc.
The review is concerned with several quite general questions, quite a few specific issues, and any other comments interested parties care to make. Among the specific issues explicitly mentioned in the call for evidence (available on the web site linked above) are:
the period for which copyright lasts;
what sorts of fair use rights might be appropriate in the UK (bearing in mind that we don't have anything directly equivalent to US fair use provisions at present, and a lot of the things mentioned in this discussion -- such as format-shifting for personal use -- are clearly illegal here at present);
the use of DRM (including several very relevant questions about balancing the right of a copyright holder to protect their work and the right of a consumer to use it reasonably);
access to orphaned works, for which the legitimate copyright holder can no longer be reached.
So, if you're from the UK and you've ever bitched on Slashdot about the unfairness of DRM, the media cartels gaining ever longer "temporary" protections, the daftness that format-shifting is illegal even when the industry is happy to sell you equipment that all but requires it to be useful, the use of patents to create a barrier to entry for OSS, or any number of other IP-related issues, stop complaining on here and write to the Gowers Review to make your case. You can bet the big businesses all will be.
Microsoft's primary crime -- of which it has been found guilty and for which it has been sentenced -- was breaking monopoly rules. Anything they're doing here is secondary (assuming that what they're doing here really is wrong; I haven't read the documents so I don't know whether Microsoft or the EC is in the right at this point).
Just because the current US administration laughably let off their own corporation within days of coming to power for dubious reasons, you can't really expect anyone else to do the same. Nor can you realistically claim that the rest of the world is somehow being harsh on Microsoft just because they actually enforce their own laws against them where the US obviously and publicly declined to do so (after a change of administration). Microsoft knew the rules, knew it was at best walking a tightrope, and chose to do business that way anyway.
In any case, you seem to have little understanding of how European "democracy" works. European Commissioners are almost entirely unaccountable. Many are political rejects whose prominent careers failed in their own countries to the extent that they could no longer hold a high public office credibly, and thus they get assigned (not voted by the electorate) to positions on the EC by national governments looking out for their own. The whole thing is a corrupt pile of politicised shenanigans, and if you really think the commissioners care anything for the electorate or businesses, rather than their own political lives and protecting those who installed them in their positions of power, you need to read a little more about how European politics works and why it needs changing.
I think we're in agreement here; your example is precisely what I'm talking about. You, as someone who's gone out and bought an HDTV well ahead of the curve, are hardly going to be impressed if you now can't use HD signals because of some artificial limitation. If that artificial limitation hurts large numbers of early HDTV adopters, who's going to be recommending HDTV enough to drive it into the mainstream, and who's going to be recommending HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs to their friends?
The whole HDTV thing is a disaster. Confusing and changing standards are going to piss off the mainstream consumer.
Perhaps, but screwed early adopters = dead technology anyway. Look at the history of the consumer technology market, and I defy anyone to find me a major exception.
It might be inconvenient for mainstream consumers too, but since their "expert" friends and family (the guys who invested silly money early to play with the new toys) will all be telling them to steer well clear, I doubt the tech will get far enough for that to matter.
However, let's be fair. It is very unlikely that HDTV itself will fail; the quality of HDTV images is genuinely much better than what we have now, and the connectivity is all there for anyone who chooses to use it. Those who do, in a consumer-friendly way, will profit. Just as with on-line music sales, there is a ripe market with a lot of cash to throw around. As soon as someone's smart enough to fill the niche, they'll make a lot of money, and it's just a matter of time before that happens whatever any particular media cartel wants.
We all seem to be skipping the question "Do you need to use a framework?"
If the answer to that is yes -- which, IMHO, is far from clear in many cases -- then you must be able to answer the questions "Why?" and more specifically "What benefits can using a framework offer?"
When you've answered those questions, you know what you're looking for, and that is how you choose your framework.
If you can't give good answers to those questions, perhaps using a framework isn't the right choice for your project.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of those laws written by people with no clue about technology, and therefore hopelessly and dangerously broad. In this case, the text reads:
A loose but credible reading of the above seems to cover every mainstream operating system, every compiler or interpreter, every text editor, every communications tool, and more.
Just FYI, we don't currently have degrees of murder here in the UK. If you commit murder, the only sentence available to the judge is life. (This is one reason why guilty of manslaughter is often the verdict returned instead; manslaughter carries the widest range of possible sentences of any crime in the UK.)
Actually, Slashdotting almost certainly would be regarded as a deliberate DDoS attack.
I would expect that if the Slashdot editorial staff continue to allow linking in articles without giving any sort of warning or (better) seeking consent from the linked service's admins, the first case will go against Slashdot in a matter of minutes, and there will be genuine consequences for the admins. Let's hope the more enlightened editorial policy zillions of Slashdotters have been advocating for years results.
Looking just at the word processor, it seems to me that there are several things that could be improved rather sharply, to genuinely make things easier for users and/or corporate admins, and to improve the quality of results.
Consider a single example from the world of design and typography: paragraph justification. People use fully justified paragraphs in documents all the time, yet the justification and hyphenation algorithms in Word and Writer are kindergarten toys. TeX famously had a better line-breaking algorithm decades ago, leading to much better spacing and less hyphenation. More advanced typography can improve this still further. This seems like a small thing, but it is important, because better typography here makes a significant difference both to readability (in the sense of how fast and accurately a reader can read a work) and to perceived quality (a balanced page with a clean design and even greyness presents a more professional image). There are countless other things that could be enhanced in this area, improving the quality of output subtly but significantly for millions of people, but no-one has yet implemented them in a word processor.
Now consider the related UI issues. When it comes to applying formatting, why oh why do we still have cluttered toolbars with bold and double-underlining and font lists and highlight colours and bullet list symbols? I've long argued that formatting should be based on a powerful stylesheet and template model, with the default user interface providing a simple window onto the commonly used aspects. Show the logical attributes like "title" or "emphasized" on a simple toolbar. You can still support ad-hoc formatting by allowing the easy creation of on-the-fly styles, but this should be the thing that's hidden deeper in the menus, not basic stylesheet support! Provide some decent defaults, unlike the current crop of heading styles and such that are typographical monstrosities in all major WPs. More importantly, provide powerful tools for creating document templates, so corporate admins or home users actually find them simple enough to use and adopt good practices by default. None of this is rocket science; on the contrary, my experiences of helping several non-geeks to write masters or doctoral theses using tools like LaTeX or to present material on the web suggest that people who care about their documents take to the separation of logical structure from presentation and the ready customisation of the latter very easily.
Obviously there are 101 other graphic design and typography features that could be useful to significant numbers of people -- those writing multi-language documents, for example -- or could simply be introduced subtly in the background to improve quality without any action on the part of the user. Likewise, there are any number of corresponding UI improvements that would make these things easy enough that Joe User could take advantage of them, rather than only so-called power users who know arcane nested dialog box options inside out.
And this is just in the area of formatting and presentation! I could make similar comments about writing aids (spelling, grammar, matching against "house style" that amazingly no-one seems to have picked up on yet, simple things like accurate and flexible word counting), collaboration and proofing tools, large document support (things like indexing, tables of contents, bibliographies and cross-references) and more. Word processors could do so much to help people, and yet all they do today is tinker with menu colours and dialog box layout, and obsess about importing 17 versions of .doc without any characters shifting position. How sad.
Real users don't compile executables. They download their software from FTP where the world mirrors them.
You forgot that DRM helps you manage your access to music, silly! :-)
Do you realise the kind of music that gets into the top 40 these days? If you were humming that in front of me in the street, I'd hit you in the face with a shovel!
Erm... I'm pretty sure that on that side of the pond, fair use already is law... The fact that the recording industry doesn't seem to know that is their problem.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that OOP brings a load of new tools to the table that are abused far more often than they're used correctly, which creates a whole world of bug-ridden, unmaintainable spaghetti code.
You might make a reasonable case that in the hands of a skilled and knowledgable developer, OOP provides some useful extra tools for structuring code, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. However, my experience is that the vast majority of developers working on OOP projects do not fall into that category. One could argue that that is a management failing -- these developers often haven't been given even basic training in how OOP was intended to work, so they keep hitting nails with screwdrivers because they don't know there's a hammer -- but this is the situation all the same.
Similarly, you might make a reasonable case that with good OOP designs, it should be possible to develop tools to support the developers better. In practice, while there are a few neat refactoring gizmos appearing in some editors, we also have abominations like Rational Rose, and I doubt I'm the only one who finds the phrase "round-trip engineering" nauseating these days. Again, the balance is heavily towards the bad side so far, IME.
As for designing and visualising larger systems with more reliability than ever, I'm not sure that's realistic. OOP systems often have absurdly large code bases, but what counts isn't how big your code base is, it's what that code base achieves. Other styles of coding -- look at languages as varied as Erlang, LISP and Haskell -- have demonstrated far more potential for developing robust, large-scale (in terms of functionality, not code size) applications than OOP has so far.
Exactly. The line between hardcore developers and the average Joe will get fuzzy around the same time that we can no longer tell the difference between a joint-the-dots puzzle and a Picasso...
Amen. I nearly always RTFA before commenting, and in this case since I find the premise that anyone can program effectively rather dubious, I was interested to see what arguments might be made to challenge my assumption. All I saw was two paragraphs of unadulterated bullshit technobabble. (I think there was more, but I actually gave up at that point, having concluded that if there was, it probably wasn't worth the time to read it.)
Wow, you truly have drunk the Kool-Aid, haven't you?
Protecting the population from foreign threats may be a valid role of government, but it's hardly the only one, and it's hard to argue on any factual basis that it's anything like the most important.
As for the nuke threat, sure, it could happen, maybe, one day. And what makes you think anything the governments of the US, UK, Australia, etc. are doing will do the slightest thing to prevent it anyway? Remember that these are the people who had bin Laden pinned down in Afghanistan, and decided to let him go so they could pursue a war against Iraq instead. Iraq has still, AFAIK, had no link to the 9/11 attacks shown, though a high proportion of US citizens in surveys now think it did. However, the TV news in the background just told me that 379 Iraqi citizens have been killed in sectarian violence in the last week alone. That's more than all the terrorist attacks in Europe in the past year, in one week, and it's our governments' fault!
Moreover, please look at the reality: you can't ever protect everything all the time. There is simply too much major infrastructure to protect every power station, every water/gas/oil supply system, every telecommunications network, every governmental site, and ultimately every public space. It just can't be done. If they want to get you, and they get the resources to do it, they're going to get you unless you can find out that they're going to do it first. Approximately none of the measures being proposed lately have any verifiable evidence whatsoever backing them up to show that they would help with this.
As for driving, you shouldn't put words into people's mouths unless you want to look a fool. I am in favour of a balanced transport network, giving appropriate support to both public and private transport, because at the end of the day nothing else will work. Certainly here in the UK, that means the government needs to stop penalising motorists who have no viable alternative transportation in a futile attempt to encourage people out of making unnecessary car journeys, and start investing in viable alternatives at several times the rate they're spending at the moment. But of course, we're so busy spending millions and millions fighting foreign wars we have no business being in, and for that matter supporting European beaurocracy to the tune of billions a year despite the fact that we get little benefit in return and its own auditors have refused to sign off its accounts for years, that the idea of making long-overdue investment in our own transport, health, justice and education systems seems almost irrelevant.
Their deaths were tragic. No-one is denying that. But so are the 50,000 or so deaths caused every year by road traffic accidents in North America alone. Is the US government dedicating itself unremittingly to reducing this figure, investing 15x the money and PR in that cause as in the war on terror? So are the many thousands of deaths every year from cancer, and heart disease, and other illnesses, but is the US government investing proportionately in medical research?
It's unpleasant, but at the end of the day, there is only so much a government can do to support public safety with its finite resources, and the only responsible thing to do is to prioritise those resources to gain the maximum benefit. Spending billions of dollars and a vast amount of the government's public relations resources promoting an ill-defined "war on terror", not to mention disregarding the basic rights of the people in waging said "war", is a negligent use of taxpayers' money. It's as simple as that.
Not at all. Look at the history of ID cards here in the UK. It took world wars to bring them in previously, and they were scrapped in the face of popular objections within a few years of the end of the war. Today we're bringing them in because... well, we're not quite sure since the argument from government keeps changing, but it's been acknowledged several times that neither the 7 July London bombings nor the Madrid bombings before them would have been prevented by the use of ID cards, so it's not anti-terrorism.
Right now, we're looking at having a national database within just a couple of years that will literally be able to track everyone almost everywhere, thanks to a combination of facial biometrics required for passports/ID cards, widescale implementation of CCTV cameras, ANPR systems tracking vehicle movements everywhere on our motorway network, and a variety of local systems such as the London congestion charge. Look at the statistics for the accuracy of biometric matching technology, and it's scary: on the scale being implemented, it's entirely possible that the whole system will be thrown out as inadmissible evidence within weeks of going live, because it's so error-prone and so many false positives are generated that it can't be relied on in court.
I was watching a television programme about this just last night, where they were talking about the back-door collection of a national DNA and fingerprint database independent of the National Identity Register (which hasn't yet received final Parliamentary approval), on which thousands of innocent people's data is held. The Lord Chancellor was interviewed about this, and appeared to feel that this was entirely appropriate if it helped to prevent any crime at all. That was less convincing since it was shown just after a clip of an innocent man (previously a witness to a crime, who had given his fingerprints at that point only due to a police error) who's been wrongly arrested because his fingerprints were found on some recovered stolen letters and matched against the database -- unsurprising, since he sent the mail in the first place! Fortunately, he was a law student, so didn't take the police advice to accept a caution, and fought to clear his name. But the fact that mistakes can be made, even on such a small database, just backs up the concerns about the reliability of any system for widescale, automated domestic surveillance.
All of this leads to a truly, objectively unprecedented scale of surveillance of the innocent citizen of our nation, and given the scope for mistakes and the clear evidence that they can and will happen, I'm not sure that price can ever be worth paying.
Very possibly. Which government rewrote your history, and how recently?
I'm betting on the one with around 300,000,000 people on it.
Countries across the world have managed for centuries with both a reasonable level of security and a strong standard of liberty, without blatantly violating basic human rights laws. No-one has yet demonstrated that the threat today is somehow greater than what we have faced in the past. On the contrary, when looked at objectively, the damage caused by all the terrorist atrocities in the western world in the past decade combined is a mere fraction of the loss of human life in road accidents, treatable medical conditions, and many other things that could more productively have been addressed with the resources our governments so carelessly throw at the "war on terror". If you want to invoke the cost argument, then the war on terror is pathetic value for money.
Hang on a minute. The BBC's mission is, in essence, to provide content to the British public. They can do this, based on a remarkably low licence fee, because they only have to pay for the broadcast rights in Britain for content they buy in, and because for content they produce themselves they can resell the rights for broadcast elsewhere, so that those who benefit elsewhere contribute to the cost.
It seems to me that this is exactly what the concept of copyright is designed to do: it allows the production of material where any given consumer base isn't contributing excessively just to support others. The DRM is inconvenient for those of us in the UK, but I think claiming the whole system is foobared while ignoring the way it's allowing the BBC to do exactly what it's supposed to do is rather shortsighted.
In a word, economics.
The BBC is only funded in relatively small part by the licence fee. They also make substantial returns on, among other things, reselling rights to BBC-produced content abroad.
Sadly, the Slashdot eds decided not to run my story about the Gowers Review calling for evidence as of yesterday, so since it's directly relevant I'll mention it here.
For those who don't know, this is a government-ordered review into the current state of intellectual property, and whether it needs amending in light of new technologies, easy distribution over the Internet, etc.
The review is concerned with several quite general questions, quite a few specific issues, and any other comments interested parties care to make. Among the specific issues explicitly mentioned in the call for evidence (available on the web site linked above) are:
So, if you're from the UK and you've ever bitched on Slashdot about the unfairness of DRM, the media cartels gaining ever longer "temporary" protections, the daftness that format-shifting is illegal even when the industry is happy to sell you equipment that all but requires it to be useful, the use of patents to create a barrier to entry for OSS, or any number of other IP-related issues, stop complaining on here and write to the Gowers Review to make your case. You can bet the big businesses all will be.
Microsoft's primary crime -- of which it has been found guilty and for which it has been sentenced -- was breaking monopoly rules. Anything they're doing here is secondary (assuming that what they're doing here really is wrong; I haven't read the documents so I don't know whether Microsoft or the EC is in the right at this point).
Just because the current US administration laughably let off their own corporation within days of coming to power for dubious reasons, you can't really expect anyone else to do the same. Nor can you realistically claim that the rest of the world is somehow being harsh on Microsoft just because they actually enforce their own laws against them where the US obviously and publicly declined to do so (after a change of administration). Microsoft knew the rules, knew it was at best walking a tightrope, and chose to do business that way anyway.
In any case, you seem to have little understanding of how European "democracy" works. European Commissioners are almost entirely unaccountable. Many are political rejects whose prominent careers failed in their own countries to the extent that they could no longer hold a high public office credibly, and thus they get assigned (not voted by the electorate) to positions on the EC by national governments looking out for their own. The whole thing is a corrupt pile of politicised shenanigans, and if you really think the commissioners care anything for the electorate or businesses, rather than their own political lives and protecting those who installed them in their positions of power, you need to read a little more about how European politics works and why it needs changing.
I think we're in agreement here; your example is precisely what I'm talking about. You, as someone who's gone out and bought an HDTV well ahead of the curve, are hardly going to be impressed if you now can't use HD signals because of some artificial limitation. If that artificial limitation hurts large numbers of early HDTV adopters, who's going to be recommending HDTV enough to drive it into the mainstream, and who's going to be recommending HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs to their friends?
Perhaps, but screwed early adopters = dead technology anyway. Look at the history of the consumer technology market, and I defy anyone to find me a major exception.
It might be inconvenient for mainstream consumers too, but since their "expert" friends and family (the guys who invested silly money early to play with the new toys) will all be telling them to steer well clear, I doubt the tech will get far enough for that to matter.
However, let's be fair. It is very unlikely that HDTV itself will fail; the quality of HDTV images is genuinely much better than what we have now, and the connectivity is all there for anyone who chooses to use it. Those who do, in a consumer-friendly way, will profit. Just as with on-line music sales, there is a ripe market with a lot of cash to throw around. As soon as someone's smart enough to fill the niche, they'll make a lot of money, and it's just a matter of time before that happens whatever any particular media cartel wants.
We all seem to be skipping the question "Do you need to use a framework?"
If the answer to that is yes -- which, IMHO, is far from clear in many cases -- then you must be able to answer the questions "Why?" and more specifically "What benefits can using a framework offer?"
When you've answered those questions, you know what you're looking for, and that is how you choose your framework.
If you can't give good answers to those questions, perhaps using a framework isn't the right choice for your project.
It's OK, the lawyers were all ISO 9001 certified. :-)