If I read it right, it's more like walking being banned because it's not customary historic use of a car*.
*Available from all major auto dealers, starting at $10,000.
Some of provisions cited in TFA sound like they could affect people's ability to play and record their own original compositions, even if there was no connection to any of the major record labels at all!
No, but they offer the wannabe rock stars promises of fame, riches, pelt, and doing blow off hookers' asses.
The irony, of course, is that promises is all they are, and a promise is only as good as its keeper (or not). In reality, most newbie artists who sign with record labels wind up making little, if any, net profit. By the time they've finished meeting their obligations to cover the record label's ass (which they signed up for before day one as the "price of admission" to the market) the record label will rarely be out of pocket and will have taken most of any profits, yet the artist doing all the real work may well have actually lost money.
It's not just you guys. We have this sort of crap in the UK, too.
One of my favourite political comments of recent times came from Lord Hoffman, a Law Lord (our highest judicial authority). In the conclusion of a review of our recent "anti-terrorist" legislation, he stated:
"The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws like these."
I take some small comfort in the fact that the tide seems to be turning. Tony Blair has been handed a string of defeats in the House of Lords this week, including a heavy slap-down of his ID card proposals. In Parliament, there are enough rebels in his own party that even with his undeserved absolute majority of seats, he's unlikely to pass any further draconian legislation without making major concessions. His political career is effectively over, and when he goes, hopefully he'll take the heavy-handed Home Secretary types like Straw, Clarke and Blunkett with him.
Now all we need is some sort of written constitution so we can immediately overturn previous laws like the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, and we might restore some semblance of civil liberty in this country. We can but hope...
Re:HI can I have two cans of soup and 100 minutes.
on
Supermarket VOIP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Next? I've been f**ked six times in the last month! Their swanky new DIY tills don't seem to understand what special offers are, nor to be able to count change accurately...
The end for BT? I doubt it.
on
Supermarket VOIP
·
· Score: 3, Informative
is this the end for the classic telecoms providers like BT?
I doubt it.
For a start, Tesco's on-line systems to date have sucked. I subscribed to Tesco Downloads to get a legal music download I wanted, and the UI was so bad that having let me sign up with a particular e-mail address, I then couldn't log in using it because it was a character too long for the field on the web form! I tried to contact them, but... there were no contact details, anywhere, and mails to webmaster at both the Tesco Downloads and the main Tesco site went unanswered. This doesn't exactly make me want to try relying on their VOIP system.
In addition to Tesco's apparent incompetence, BT (or the cable companies, depending on who you're with) still make a significant amount of money from those broadband subscribers. I hardly use my landline any more, but I still have to cough up several quid a month for BT line rental so that my broadband ISP and I can communicate. The actual cost of my calls on BT represents around 0.1% of the money I pay them, since they've been offering calls-for-almost-nothing for months anyway.
In other words, BT are now effectively an infrastructure company and not a services company, and their own phone service is almost free. Why do I need VOIP again?
Whether this would really help is debatable. Anyone who wants to use a sample of GPL'd code in order to test for the presence of a particular GPL'd application still has various legal fair use and interoperability provisions available to them, regardless of what any FSF lawyers decide to put in the next GPL, so no doubt their own lawyers will find a way to argue that it's legal. Hence I don't see how any provision in any licence is going to stop some DRM-happy gang detecting and trying to block GPL'd ripping software, for example. (Whether they can use GPL'd code as part of their own application in its own right is, of course, a different issue, and it doesn't seem entirely clear which category XCP falls into from what I've read.)
That's one approach, and if I'm one of the earlier posters in a thread I may well do it. But if someone else has already posted correct information, I'd rather try to focus the discussion on the correct post(s) than repost that information myself. The latter creates redundant posts, and potentially fragments any follow-up discussion.
It's really a shame there isn't some sort of (-1, Objectively Untrue) mod. This means that if someone is spreading plausible-sounding but ultimately incorrect information and gets modded (+1, Informative) several times, the only justifiable way to knock the post back is to mod it (-1, Overrated). I do this, although only if I consider that the post presents objectively wrong information as fact, and I mod up correct alternatives if I can. I sometimes use all five mod points within ten minutes of a story going live if I happen to turn up then, in an attempt to prevent common fallacies overtaking informed and accurate posts.
However, personally, I dislike using (-1, Overrated) on principle, because of its immunity to metamoderation. I stand by my moderations, but if others feel they are unfair, they can say so through the M2 process. Given that only a tiny fraction of my meta-mods are "unfair", I assume my moderations are generally reasonable, but I'd still prefer something more accurate where I'm down-modding a post that's factually incorrect and has been marked (+1, Informative).
In the interests of fairness, I should note that something like 3/4 of the downmods I receive myself are (-1, Overrated) on anti-groupthink posts also modded (+1, Insightful) several times, so perhaps my objections to (-1, Overrated) aren't entirely benevolent.
Since we appear to be having the grammar discussion despite CmdrTaco's request, let me just defend the editors on one point. You claimed that:
A quotation at the end of a sentence almost never strands the period outside the quotes, and so on.
This is a stylistic point, and the accepted style varies with location. If I (as a reader in the UK) submit a story, the "correct" punctuation for me may not be the "correct" punctuation for a reader in the US. If I've taken the effort to write a story carefully and submit it with correct English grammar, I would consider it rude if an editor took it upon themselves to americanize it.
Some things are simply wrong. They are annoying. They affect readability. And yes, a few seconds of an editor's time saves annoyance for thousands of readers. (I note the irony that CmdrTaco asks for URLs in posts because three seconds of our time translates to three minutes of his.) But at the end of the day, I think he's right: the meaning is more important than avoiding any given spelling or grammatical error.
But the point of TFA was that just an increase in visitors isn't necessarily an advantage to some sites. It's only a benefit if that increase translates into higher profits, or more awareness for your cause, or otherwise furthering whatever the goal of your site may be.
In particular, if higher traffic makes you more money, but you have to pay an equal or greater amount to a search engine just to get it, then only one side is benefitting -- and it's not the one doing the real work and providing the real content. This is not in the interests of society as a whole, any more than it's in society's interests for authors to give up most of their benefits to publishers, or musicians to give up most of their benefits to the big music distributors.
I guess it depends what you mean by "large scale" programs. If you're talking about web development then maybe the Slash codebase is large. In general, it's pretty small. It seems common to define a large codebase as one with over a million lines of code, and tens of millions aren't unusual.
In fact, if you look at the history of Slashdot and the comments by the guys who developed and maintain the code, it's quite an interesting catalogue of the good and the bad of Perl. The devs took some neat ideas, and have implemented them effectively and from what I can tell reasonably quickly. OTOH, any non-trivial changes seem to be rather hard work for the dev team, and there have been some apparently simple (to the user) bugs that have gone unfixed for months.
If we take this as representative of Perl code in general (which may or may not be fair) then it seems Perl is good for quick prototyping jobs and mostly write-only code, but not so good for long-term maintenance of larger developments. But I guess most people here already knew that.:-)
In the boxes I've read about, it was the only browser icon on the default desktop. Whether it's also the default browser in OS terms is another question, which I can't answer.
Ironically, I use Internet banking precisely because my bank offers a no-questions-asked guarantee against any loss through insecure Internet transactions. If anyone manages to crack my account or just guesses my credit card number for an on-line purchase, I get the money back first and ask questions later.
In person, however, they have (probably accidentally) given me bad information on several occasions, resulting in lots of effort to fix problems in some cases, and actually losing money in others (when they gave me incorrect information about a special offer on my credit card and I took them at their word and wound up paying unnecessary interest).
YMMV, of course, but as an informed geek I'm still betting I'm a lot safer with my on-line banking than anyone who hands over their card in a store and enters their PIN without checking who's watching.
I have the same problem with a credit card company I use. Isn't it ironic that the only web site I use regularly that doesn't work with the probably-more-secure browser is the site where I really want not to be vulnerable to security breaches?:-/
I'd say, in the UK... they are mainly in places were the user is forced to user a certain well-known browser... due to slow organisations (or the slow IT departments thereof) who don't like change.
I don't think that's fair at all. I love Firefox, but using it at the office sucks. The senior developers love their security to such an extent that their browser is useless for using the intranet at work. At home, I can choose not to use sites with ActiveX or whatever, and frankly I've never found this a problem. At work, I have no choice, and it's a showstopper.
The problem attitude is exemplified by the mess that is CAPS, introduced in Firefox 1.5. We used to be able to set a single preference in about:config to stop Firefox blocking links to local files. Now you have to set a whole range of options, and the senior devs are deliberately not advertising the equivalent of the old option because for some reason they think this will help us. Their super-new, highly-configurable system apparently can't handle the single most obvious configuration -- allow unchecked access only to machines on my own network -- or if it can, the docs are so cryptic that a whole group of us who looked, all experienced Firefox users, couldn't work out how to do it in ten minutes without basically listing every machine explicitly in the CAPS entry.
In any case, the result is the same either way: a well known problem for many business users remains inadequately addressed, Firefox developers continue to think they're doing the world a favour, and businesses continue to consider Firefox substandard regardless of its other merits. The solution is easy, but first the senior developers have to accept that they don't know their users' requirements better than their users.
I never understood this. Does US law really permit a blanket restriction on where someone may sue you, and on what damages a court may award if you win?
What does a judge do if you bring a legitimate grievance against someone to court elsewhere? Will a court really allow the condition to be enforced and invalidate a case with legal merit? Will a judge really say "Ah, well, I know they've lost the case, but I can't award damages of more than two cents because the losing party said so?
...until companies such as EMI, Sony, etc, realise that DRM hurts their profits more than benefit, we will continue to see new and more invasive DRM technology being pushed on to us.
Or not see it, if we want to watch or listen to the content on perfectly sensible devices that aren't Approved(TM) for the purpose...
When the patent process actually changes, THEN you can say the tide is turning.
Erm... We don't want the process to change over here. Right now, software patents are of dubious value at best here in Europe, and one of the few things our European overlords have got right recently is kicking out the attempt to change that.
The pro-Patent lobby suddenly switched at the last minute and told their cronies and shills in the EU parliament to vote against the directive.
Because they knew they couldn't win, and by voting for the proposal that had no chance, they would have hampered their further chances later on. They still weren't going to win; apparently even they realised that.
And yet somehow, as a person who writes software that does maths all day, and having spent several years studying maths at university before that, I find the keypad useful for nothing other than gaming.
I do wish we'd had this discussion a couple of weeks ago, though. My old keyboard was dying, and no-one seems to supply a straightforward 102- or even 105-key box at my local PC store any more. I settled on a nice-looking Advent aluminium job, since the keys feel quite nice to type on and it's easy on the eyes next to an aluminium case. Still, I really, really wish they had left the navigation keys and things like shift and enter in the right places. I'm still wasting time days later correcting mistakes where I try to hold down alt to choose a menu item, and instead hit \ and overwrite my highlighted text. Damn, that's annoying...
Isn't it considered "fair use" to record a broadcast for personal use? This is exactly like someone recording a TV show with their VCR.
Sure it is, as long as the broadcaster is paying an analogous amount to the copyright holder for the right to broadcast the material in each case. I don't know if that's true here or not, but it seems to me that this is exactly what copyright is for: the copyright holder can force the broadcaster to pay them an amount commensurate with what they think they'll lose in individual sales before allowing them to broadcast the material. It's up to the broadcaster how they finance that payment; if their business model is viable, they'll manage, and if not, they won't be able to deprive the holder of income they're due. Either way, it's in both parties' interests to go for the solution that maximises the number of people who will pay to hear the material.
Whether or not the current copyright arrangements are ethical, particularly when it comes to artists signing away their copyright to middlemen, is an entirely different question, of course.
But why include the cost to "make damn sure he didn't do anything more serious and insidious"?
Because once a system is known to be compromised, the only completely secure response is to reinstall everything, completely clean, and restore data from known good back-ups. Anything less leaves open the possibility of backdoors, something the perp here clearly knows how to use.
It's all very well saying the defence claiming that the perp only did this or that, but it would be negligent for the management/sysadmins not to verify that independently, and the perp should be held liable for all work required by those people on account of his illegal activity.
Slashdot Mirror
If I read it right, it's more like walking being banned because it's not customary historic use of a car*.
*Available from all major auto dealers, starting at $10,000.
Some of provisions cited in TFA sound like they could affect people's ability to play and record their own original compositions, even if there was no connection to any of the major record labels at all!
The irony, of course, is that promises is all they are, and a promise is only as good as its keeper (or not). In reality, most newbie artists who sign with record labels wind up making little, if any, net profit. By the time they've finished meeting their obligations to cover the record label's ass (which they signed up for before day one as the "price of admission" to the market) the record label will rarely be out of pocket and will have taken most of any profits, yet the artist doing all the real work may well have actually lost money.
It's not just you guys. We have this sort of crap in the UK, too.
One of my favourite political comments of recent times came from Lord Hoffman, a Law Lord (our highest judicial authority). In the conclusion of a review of our recent "anti-terrorist" legislation, he stated:
I take some small comfort in the fact that the tide seems to be turning. Tony Blair has been handed a string of defeats in the House of Lords this week, including a heavy slap-down of his ID card proposals. In Parliament, there are enough rebels in his own party that even with his undeserved absolute majority of seats, he's unlikely to pass any further draconian legislation without making major concessions. His political career is effectively over, and when he goes, hopefully he'll take the heavy-handed Home Secretary types like Straw, Clarke and Blunkett with him.
Now all we need is some sort of written constitution so we can immediately overturn previous laws like the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, and we might restore some semblance of civil liberty in this country. We can but hope...
Next? I've been f**ked six times in the last month! Their swanky new DIY tills don't seem to understand what special offers are, nor to be able to count change accurately...
I doubt it.
For a start, Tesco's on-line systems to date have sucked. I subscribed to Tesco Downloads to get a legal music download I wanted, and the UI was so bad that having let me sign up with a particular e-mail address, I then couldn't log in using it because it was a character too long for the field on the web form! I tried to contact them, but... there were no contact details, anywhere, and mails to webmaster at both the Tesco Downloads and the main Tesco site went unanswered. This doesn't exactly make me want to try relying on their VOIP system.
In addition to Tesco's apparent incompetence, BT (or the cable companies, depending on who you're with) still make a significant amount of money from those broadband subscribers. I hardly use my landline any more, but I still have to cough up several quid a month for BT line rental so that my broadband ISP and I can communicate. The actual cost of my calls on BT represents around 0.1% of the money I pay them, since they've been offering calls-for-almost-nothing for months anyway.
In other words, BT are now effectively an infrastructure company and not a services company, and their own phone service is almost free. Why do I need VOIP again?
Whether this would really help is debatable. Anyone who wants to use a sample of GPL'd code in order to test for the presence of a particular GPL'd application still has various legal fair use and interoperability provisions available to them, regardless of what any FSF lawyers decide to put in the next GPL, so no doubt their own lawyers will find a way to argue that it's legal. Hence I don't see how any provision in any licence is going to stop some DRM-happy gang detecting and trying to block GPL'd ripping software, for example. (Whether they can use GPL'd code as part of their own application in its own right is, of course, a different issue, and it doesn't seem entirely clear which category XCP falls into from what I've read.)
That's one approach, and if I'm one of the earlier posters in a thread I may well do it. But if someone else has already posted correct information, I'd rather try to focus the discussion on the correct post(s) than repost that information myself. The latter creates redundant posts, and potentially fragments any follow-up discussion.
It's really a shame there isn't some sort of (-1, Objectively Untrue) mod. This means that if someone is spreading plausible-sounding but ultimately incorrect information and gets modded (+1, Informative) several times, the only justifiable way to knock the post back is to mod it (-1, Overrated). I do this, although only if I consider that the post presents objectively wrong information as fact, and I mod up correct alternatives if I can. I sometimes use all five mod points within ten minutes of a story going live if I happen to turn up then, in an attempt to prevent common fallacies overtaking informed and accurate posts.
However, personally, I dislike using (-1, Overrated) on principle, because of its immunity to metamoderation. I stand by my moderations, but if others feel they are unfair, they can say so through the M2 process. Given that only a tiny fraction of my meta-mods are "unfair", I assume my moderations are generally reasonable, but I'd still prefer something more accurate where I'm down-modding a post that's factually incorrect and has been marked (+1, Informative).
In the interests of fairness, I should note that something like 3/4 of the downmods I receive myself are (-1, Overrated) on anti-groupthink posts also modded (+1, Insightful) several times, so perhaps my objections to (-1, Overrated) aren't entirely benevolent.
Since we appear to be having the grammar discussion despite CmdrTaco's request, let me just defend the editors on one point. You claimed that:
This is a stylistic point, and the accepted style varies with location. If I (as a reader in the UK) submit a story, the "correct" punctuation for me may not be the "correct" punctuation for a reader in the US. If I've taken the effort to write a story carefully and submit it with correct English grammar, I would consider it rude if an editor took it upon themselves to americanize it.
Some things are simply wrong. They are annoying. They affect readability. And yes, a few seconds of an editor's time saves annoyance for thousands of readers. (I note the irony that CmdrTaco asks for URLs in posts because three seconds of our time translates to three minutes of his.) But at the end of the day, I think he's right: the meaning is more important than avoiding any given spelling or grammatical error.
But the point of TFA was that just an increase in visitors isn't necessarily an advantage to some sites. It's only a benefit if that increase translates into higher profits, or more awareness for your cause, or otherwise furthering whatever the goal of your site may be.
In particular, if higher traffic makes you more money, but you have to pay an equal or greater amount to a search engine just to get it, then only one side is benefitting -- and it's not the one doing the real work and providing the real content. This is not in the interests of society as a whole, any more than it's in society's interests for authors to give up most of their benefits to publishers, or musicians to give up most of their benefits to the big music distributors.
I guess it depends what you mean by "large scale" programs. If you're talking about web development then maybe the Slash codebase is large. In general, it's pretty small. It seems common to define a large codebase as one with over a million lines of code, and tens of millions aren't unusual.
In fact, if you look at the history of Slashdot and the comments by the guys who developed and maintain the code, it's quite an interesting catalogue of the good and the bad of Perl. The devs took some neat ideas, and have implemented them effectively and from what I can tell reasonably quickly. OTOH, any non-trivial changes seem to be rather hard work for the dev team, and there have been some apparently simple (to the user) bugs that have gone unfixed for months.
If we take this as representative of Perl code in general (which may or may not be fair) then it seems Perl is good for quick prototyping jobs and mostly write-only code, but not so good for long-term maintenance of larger developments. But I guess most people here already knew that. :-)
In the boxes I've read about, it was the only browser icon on the default desktop. Whether it's also the default browser in OS terms is another question, which I can't answer.
Ironically, I use Internet banking precisely because my bank offers a no-questions-asked guarantee against any loss through insecure Internet transactions. If anyone manages to crack my account or just guesses my credit card number for an on-line purchase, I get the money back first and ask questions later.
In person, however, they have (probably accidentally) given me bad information on several occasions, resulting in lots of effort to fix problems in some cases, and actually losing money in others (when they gave me incorrect information about a special offer on my credit card and I took them at their word and wound up paying unnecessary interest).
YMMV, of course, but as an informed geek I'm still betting I'm a lot safer with my on-line banking than anyone who hands over their card in a store and enters their PIN without checking who's watching.
I have the same problem with a credit card company I use. Isn't it ironic that the only web site I use regularly that doesn't work with the probably-more-secure browser is the site where I really want not to be vulnerable to security breaches? :-/
I don't think that's fair at all. I love Firefox, but using it at the office sucks. The senior developers love their security to such an extent that their browser is useless for using the intranet at work. At home, I can choose not to use sites with ActiveX or whatever, and frankly I've never found this a problem. At work, I have no choice, and it's a showstopper.
The problem attitude is exemplified by the mess that is CAPS, introduced in Firefox 1.5. We used to be able to set a single preference in about:config to stop Firefox blocking links to local files. Now you have to set a whole range of options, and the senior devs are deliberately not advertising the equivalent of the old option because for some reason they think this will help us. Their super-new, highly-configurable system apparently can't handle the single most obvious configuration -- allow unchecked access only to machines on my own network -- or if it can, the docs are so cryptic that a whole group of us who looked, all experienced Firefox users, couldn't work out how to do it in ten minutes without basically listing every machine explicitly in the CAPS entry.
In any case, the result is the same either way: a well known problem for many business users remains inadequately addressed, Firefox developers continue to think they're doing the world a favour, and businesses continue to consider Firefox substandard regardless of its other merits. The solution is easy, but first the senior developers have to accept that they don't know their users' requirements better than their users.
OK, you're wrong. Have a nice day. :-)
I never understood this. Does US law really permit a blanket restriction on where someone may sue you, and on what damages a court may award if you win?
What does a judge do if you bring a legitimate grievance against someone to court elsewhere? Will a court really allow the condition to be enforced and invalidate a case with legal merit? Will a judge really say "Ah, well, I know they've lost the case, but I can't award damages of more than two cents because the losing party said so?
I'm afraid that already happened.
Another is swallowing a bullet, while a third fell on his sword. There's more than one way to do yourself in!
Or not see it, if we want to watch or listen to the content on perfectly sensible devices that aren't Approved(TM) for the purpose...
Erm... We don't want the process to change over here. Right now, software patents are of dubious value at best here in Europe, and one of the few things our European overlords have got right recently is kicking out the attempt to change that.
Because they knew they couldn't win, and by voting for the proposal that had no chance, they would have hampered their further chances later on. They still weren't going to win; apparently even they realised that.
And yet somehow, as a person who writes software that does maths all day, and having spent several years studying maths at university before that, I find the keypad useful for nothing other than gaming.
I do wish we'd had this discussion a couple of weeks ago, though. My old keyboard was dying, and no-one seems to supply a straightforward 102- or even 105-key box at my local PC store any more. I settled on a nice-looking Advent aluminium job, since the keys feel quite nice to type on and it's easy on the eyes next to an aluminium case. Still, I really, really wish they had left the navigation keys and things like shift and enter in the right places. I'm still wasting time days later correcting mistakes where I try to hold down alt to choose a menu item, and instead hit \ and overwrite my highlighted text. Damn, that's annoying...
Sure it is, as long as the broadcaster is paying an analogous amount to the copyright holder for the right to broadcast the material in each case. I don't know if that's true here or not, but it seems to me that this is exactly what copyright is for: the copyright holder can force the broadcaster to pay them an amount commensurate with what they think they'll lose in individual sales before allowing them to broadcast the material. It's up to the broadcaster how they finance that payment; if their business model is viable, they'll manage, and if not, they won't be able to deprive the holder of income they're due. Either way, it's in both parties' interests to go for the solution that maximises the number of people who will pay to hear the material.
Whether or not the current copyright arrangements are ethical, particularly when it comes to artists signing away their copyright to middlemen, is an entirely different question, of course.
Because once a system is known to be compromised, the only completely secure response is to reinstall everything, completely clean, and restore data from known good back-ups. Anything less leaves open the possibility of backdoors, something the perp here clearly knows how to use.
It's all very well saying the defence claiming that the perp only did this or that, but it would be negligent for the management/sysadmins not to verify that independently, and the perp should be held liable for all work required by those people on account of his illegal activity.