I've never been in an accident in over 7 years of driving, but I know when I've almost been in one
You may know some of the times you've almost been in one, but how do you know you didn't miss one?
The research (some of which I cited in another post near here, in case you missed it) is pretty clear: regardless of what drivers think about their performance, under controlled, objective conditions, there is little distinction between measured driver performance using a hand-held mobile and measured driver performance using a hands-free kit. But hey, we live in a world where more than half of drivers questioned think they're in the top 10%, drunks are sure their performance isn't impaired because they've "only had a couple", and people die asleep at the wheel even though they know they can stay awake all the way home. Don't let us disrupt your ego with the facts, will you?
Personally, if talking on a regular cell phone while driving is 1 on the 'safety scale' and just driving is 10 on that scale, I'd put using a hands free setup at 2. But that's just my opinion. Much like yours, not based on any actual facts.
Except that it is. See this report, for example. From the executive summary:
The evidence suggested that the negative effects of phone use while driving were similar whether the phone was hand-held or hands-free. [...] The Board notes that the UK legislation on the use of phones in motor vehicles, making it illegal to use any hand-held phone, is tailored to the practicality of enforcement. The evidence remains, however, that the use of mobile phones in moving vehicles, both hand-held and hands-free, can significantly increase the risk of an accident.
Tests by scientists at the Transport Research Laboratory said drivers on mobiles had slower reaction times and stopping times than those under the influence of alcohol. [...] And it said hands-free kits were almost as dangerous as hand-held phones.
Those were just a couple of links from the first page on Google, BTW.
It's easy to assume that the physical problems are the major contributory factor to road safety, and this is the problem with false-security legislation such as that recently introduced in the UK. However, the reality acknowledged by several proper studies says otherwise. It's easy to go into denial about this counter-intuitive result, particularly if you're a driver who does use a mobile phone on the road trying to justify your actions, but the results are about as clear as you ever get: driving while using a mobile phone is comparable to driving while drunk, and using a hands-free kit does not make much of a difference.
Unfortunately, like most people, you've got completely the wrong idea of why driving while using a mobile phone is dangerous. At this point, I'd like to pause for a moment to thank the UK government for introducing legislation attacking the wrong problem, and thus giving millions of drivers a false sense of security when they're using a hands-free kit.
In fact, if you look at the studies done in the UK and elsewhere before the explicit ban was introduced in the UK, the big problem is the loss of concentration. The physical incapacity caused by tying up one hand obviously doesn't help, but it makes far, far less of a difference to road safety.
The reason that talking on a phone isn't like talking to a person next to you is that a person next to you will sense when you need to concentrate, because they can see that you're approaching a hazard for example, and they'll shut up and not distract you while you navigate around the hazard. Someone you're talking to on a phone can't do that, and will change the subject, ask you a question, or otherwise attract your attention just as much when you're approaching a potential danger as when you're driving on an open road without another car in sight. Whether you're holding a little box near your ear or listening to someone through a speaker doesn't affect this at all.
If the UK government really wanted to improve the level of road safety rather than score cheap political points, they would have banned all mobile phone use while driving. Then again, the whole idea of such a specific offence seems a bit redundant when you already have legislation making dangerous driving illegal in general. Presumably someone thought it would draw more attention to the specific and increasing problem, or they were just after the political points.
In summary, this is wrong:
If you want/need to use a phone while driving get a hands free kit.
For most people, you simply don't need to use a phone while driving, period. If you want to talk to someone elsewhere while on the move, get someone else to drive. Doing anything less will dramatically increase your risk of having an accident, as surely as driving while drunk, tired or stoned.
I have been a VERY close observer and participant of the OOo program and I think I know what the vast majority of bugs are dealing with: MS Word compatibility. You can't really blame the OOo team for that, can you?
You don't have to blame them, but that's a different thing from saying it doesn't matter.
Maybe what we need to be asking is not "If Open Source is good, why is it so buggy" but "If proprietary software spends 100 times the resources to produce a 10% better product, who has the better development model again?"
That depends on whether that extra 10% makes a difference to how well you can do what you need to do, I suppose.
FWIW, my experience is rather different to yours: whether you call them bugs or usability issues, I find quite a lot of the non-trivial functionality in OOo is bizarrely hard to use. Updating data that you're using elsewhere seems to be particularly troublesome: try updating a Calc spreadsheet you're using as a data source for a Writer mail merge, for example. I also find even simple adjustments of graphs in Calc difficult at times: I have actually found myself unable to tweak basic elements once a graph was created, even after extensive consultation with the generally unhelpful built-in help and the usually much more helpful Internet. Compared to this sort of thing, the equivalent features in Word and Excel are effortless to use.
On the flip side you have things like Word's "interesting" numbering tools. This is clearly an area where usability didn't quite work out as well as it should have and which has strangely never been fixed. Then again, I find Writer's just as counter-intuitive. Overall, and obviously just IME, OOo applications still have a lot more usability quirks/UI bugs. YMMV, of course, and by the sounds of it, it has.
I'm not sure it ever arrived. IME, even today most people don't care about MS Office, they care about one or two specific products that come as part of MS Office. For me, it's Word and Excel. I don't use Outlook, or Project, or whatever else they throw in these days. (The fact that I don't even know what else they throw in these days, having just installed some version of Office 2003 on a new PC at work, is quite telling, I think.)
Why can't we write software like grown-ups, with standard mechanisms for information exchange provided by the platform, and then dedicated, high quality applications for each task as required that communicate via those standard protocols if and when necessary? It's not like the ideas here are new; on the contrary, they predate the "office suite", and I don't think it was a change for the better. Kudos to the marketing guys for pulling it off, though.
We need a wordprocesser that encourages semantic layout. I'm talking about templates that are easy to use, not hidden, with accessible formatting controls (think WordPerfect reveal codes).
I've been making your argument for years, but alas never convincing anyone with the resources to have a go.
I think a combination of making the use of stylesheets the default and (shock!) not even putting manual formatting controls on the toolbars and such by default would make a huge difference. Make the menus and toolbars very simple, with only the major commands directly related to writing easily accessible, and let the powerful, flexible but easy-to-misuse things be the ones only power users can find.
Obviously this can't happen in isolation. For a start, it would require extensive usability testing to determine fast and easy to use interfaces to configure the styles themselves, store them for future use, construct template documents etc. This sort of thing is often a chore in today's applications, yet I see little reason it should be more than a couple of clicks or a quick shortcut key to do most of it, if the UI places the emphasis on the right ideas that support it.
I have a similar view of OpenOffice to you, I think. I'm grateful to those who choose to give it away, because it helps me to do some things I'd otherwise find inconvenient without paying for software since I don't install illegal copies of commercial products. However, I have no illusions about the power or quality of the product, nor its overtaking MS Office in any significant way any time soon.
In fact, without wishing to seem ungrateful, OpenOffice doesn't really have much going for it over its major commercial rival at all, other than being free-as-in-beer. There are countless useful ways a word processor could do better than Word, making real people more productive at real jobs or giving nicer output for jobs they already do, yet in five years of Microsoft not really addressing any of the issues, the open source world has failed to do anything particularly innovative, preferring to play a never-ending game of catch-up with the market leader.
What I really wanted to challenge, though, was this statement in the parent post:
Also, the author of the article is way off the mark to flaw the open source movement as a whole just because of Open Office's shortcomings.
Perhaps, but look at it this way. We know, just by looking at popular OSS sites like this one and the download stats from OSS web sites, that OSS provides a few big-name, mass-market products: Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla et al., that sort of thing. It also provides a wider range of fairly established tools for more specialised niches. And then it provides mountains of rubbish, most of which never gets to version 1.
Now, the list of advantages given by advocates of the OSS approach often starts with things being less buggy and more secure, on the basis of the "many eyes" principle mentioned in TFA. This claim is usually backed up by citing the relative scarcity of security breaches in Linux-based systems, the relative immunity of Firefox to nasty web pages, and so on. OSS is also claimed by some advocates to produce more innovative software, basically because the developers aren't tied to company conventions, can adapt faster to changing requirements from users, etc.
However, if -- as the author of TFA argues based on actual bug and feature request data -- you can't necessarily rely on user support to improve a product even for probably the largest and most widely used products of the OSS world, that blows that whole argument out of the water. OpenOffice isn't less buggy than MS Office, nor innovative in any serious way; it's a near carbon copy of the established commercial player, a few years behind the times in features and robustness. And if the OSS approach doesn't achieve the claimed benefits for OpenOffice, why should it provide any advantage for smaller products with smaller user bases?
To an extent, there is a genuine answer to this question. As I've discovered myself, the code base for products like OpenOffice and Firefox is simply too big for a keen amateur to get stuck into within a reasonable period of time. Just downloading the source and getting a build set up is often a chore for the many of us who are running Windows boxes, because so many products tend to be built using GCC on Linux or something similar. Smaller, less unwieldy projects might fare better here. But then again, does something like OpenOffice or Firefox really need to be the size they are, or is the source just bloated as a result of the less structured development processes that are inevitably used when software is being built by a constantly varying and geographically diverse group of volunteers?
In other words, while I agree that it's unsound to generalise too much from the author's factual data on a specific OSS product, that product does offer a pretty solid counter-example to the usual arguments advanced by OSS evangelists for the superiority of their approach over traditional closed source, commercial development.
We need a different approach to web styling
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The Future of HTML
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It's also a much more powerful model.
For some things, sure. For others, no; otherwise there wouldn't have been the obvious examples that started this subthread.
IMHO, what the CSS guys should have done is introduce some proper relationships between different boxes, so that a fluid layout could be described in some reasonably natural way. Think about the toolkits you get for defining dialog boxes that scale nicely so controls are appropriately sized and positioned on different platforms. For that matter, think about the simple alignment tools you get in every decent vector graphics program ever, where positions can be set absolutely, but also elements can be aligned vertically and horizontally, made the same width and height, etc. We could even allow (shock!) simple equations to relate the relative proportions of text blocks, white space, font heights, etc. Hey, it worked for Knuth.:-)
It's not like these are new, or even particularly complicated, ideas. They just didn't go into the style sheets that are supposed to describe how to render HTML. Instead we have a load of special cases like "float: this" and "clear: that" and "position: the other", and a lot of underpowered "auto" entries that just don't cut it for serious design. How much nicer would it have been, if we'd had a technology with the same content vs. styling separation, that actually let designers specify a fluid (or, for that matter, fixed) layout in an simple, natural, intuitive way?
It would be nice if you could set all replies/forwards so they saved to the folder of the original message, instead of some generic "sent mail" space. Other mail clients can do this, but AFAIK Thunderbird can't at present. For all the nice things about TB, I really miss this option.
I'm not, personally, too worried about having my identity deliberately stolen. I take reasonable precautions, and key places like banks and employers tend to be wise to obvious and seriously damaging identity theft and how to deal with it these days. Relative to the odds of it happening, I have more serious things to worry about...
...like incompetence, for example. All it took was one government staffer mistyping my NI number (roughly the UK equivalent of a US SSN) into a database, out of probably thousands they typed that day, and my whole tax/NI contribution record was messed up. It took me months to clear it up, calling round several tax offices, and out of pocket by hundreds of pounds in the meantime. (At the time, I had just started my first job, and could barely afford the rent as it was, so that was a very serious position to be in.)
The thing that was scary was that this is supposed to be systemically "impossible". (I think that just means there's a check digit in the number, and they have to fluke that being consistent when they mistype it...) That means they don't bother telling you about it (even though their database had me working in two different full time jobs on opposite sides of the country!), so the first I heard of it was when my employer deducted more from my pay for tax than usual, as they are legally required to do on receiving notice from the tax office.
Worse, there weren't any serious systems in place to deal with the problem. The first several government people I spoke to on the phone wouldn't even talk to me, because I couldn't tell them the name of my employer or my address. Or rather, I couldn't tell them the name of the other guy's employer and his address, since it turned out they'd somehow merged part of my record with someone else's because of the incorrect ID. I only got through in the end by convincing one of the staffers to listen to my explanation and tell me what I could do, and between us we figured out what must have happened and who I needed to contact to get it fixed.
This bothers me far more than a malicious ID theft, because (a) it's the tax man, who is basically immune to any sort of useful legal action in this sort of situation; (b) it's probably far more common, because thousands of people get processed by these operators every day; and (c) there obviously aren't sufficient checks and safeguards in the system to even identify a clearly inconsistent database entry and flag it for checking by a real person, never mind a proper mechanism for me to get the situation resolved quickly and effectively.
Given that the problems are much the same here as for a minor identity theft, except that you don't have the normal legal avenues available to you to pursue the culprit and it's probably a lot more common, I'd say that makes unintended human error a much bigger danger than ID theft with criminal intent, at least until they tighten up key systems in governments, banks, credit agencies, etc.
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK, most commercial radio stations seem to be funded by the ad placements, not the recording industry. They do need a special kind of licence to play the music over the air, though, and presumably the copyright holder could deny them permission to do it.
Yeah, they're just the same -- except that apparently, the guys who run Google still speak English, while you probably have a side job working for this site, and they are driven by running a business effectively, while you appear to be driven by trying to attract more traffic to your web site.
Please take your meaningless buzzwords and corporate doublespeak elsewhere, and leave those of us who want to talk about the real world using real words with actual meanings alone.
I agree entirely; as another respondent pointed out, it pretty clearly fails on one of the four tests for fairness under US law. That doesn't stop the widespread belief that the magical "fair use" is some sort of legal right (rather than an exemption) that means you can copy anything you like as long as you're not directly making money from it, though. Hence my concern is that with the US-style approach, you can too easily argue that something like this is fair use, not that it actually is fair use in the eyes of the law.
In practice, I think I'd rather see our law extended to provide an explicit list of exemptions, set out as consumer rights that those selling under copyright may not deliberately inhibit, which is at least clear in law even if slightly more restrictive. Ideally, I'd like to see a blanket statement to the effect that once you've paid for one copy of the content, you may use it in any way you like that's personal to you, but how you could phrase the intent without leaving loopholes I'm not quite sure...
You're talking about the same government that wants to suspend trial by jury, presumption of innocence and the right to face your accusers in court for persons suspected of terrorist offences, right?
Well, the government (as in Tony and his cronies) may want that, but the majority party (the Labour Party) has recently demonstrated that it is not entirely bereft of spine, so Tony and co may not get what they want for much longer, and I doubt some of the more draconian legislative steps that have been taken recently will last for long.
Fortunately, jests aside, you're wrong. Labour's back benchers have finally developed some spine, hitting Tony pretty hard over the 90 day detention without trial issue (though still missing the principle and increasing the figure to an insulting 28 days, but at least it's a start). They're threatening to do it repeatedly over ID cards, health and education reforms, too. It's a real shame that old school Labour figures like Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam didn't get to see (and participate in) what's been happening in Blair's third term, but I hope they'd be proud of their legacy.
The problem, of course, is that Tony's unaccountable cronies in Europe are now trying to set up his own legacy via centralised, undemocratically formed legislation that will filter down, placing obligations on future governments even after the New Labour lot are inevitably kicked out before the next election. Look at the EUCD and the various "anti-terror" spy legislation that Europe has been producing recently, often in breach of the EU's own convention on human rights (and notice that big media groups are already campaigning to have the Internet access records opened up so they can pursue copyright infringement cases against the population en masse).
I used to think that being part of the EU should bring benefits to us, but I become more eurosceptic every time something like this filters through.
If you don't want to pay a big bandwidth bill then don't run a webserver.
If you want access to a web server, don't run a system that's known to give the provider big bandwidth bills.
At the end of the the day, they don't owe you anything, and anything they offer you is a courtesy, not an obligation. If you don't like that, please feel free to go create and finance your own WWW.
Many slashdot readers are starting to realize what a scam Intellectual Property laws are...
And do "many people" who want to add artificial weight to their own views on a controversial subject start their statements by implying, without proof, that many other people agree with them?
Several uses that I think most of us would consider reasonable are actually illegal in the UK, or legal only on a technicality under some circumstances. Making back-ups, format shifting, and making music compilations are all somewhat dodgy, for example, even where only legitimately bought content is involved and it's strictly for personal use by the person who bought it.
To give an example of how daft this is, a local dancing club I help to run would like to make compilation CDs of the music we have legitimately paid for, since we have a large library and carrying all the CDs everywhere is awkward. We also pay an additional fee for the right to play this music at public classes and events, so our use of the music itself is entirely legit. We have concluded that none of the standard licensing agencies can authorise the simple compilations we'd like to produce, so we have made efforts to contact the copyright holders directly.
Interestingly enough, the specialist dancing music companies from which we buy most of our CDs (we're talking about things like ballroom, rock 'n' roll, salsa and swing here, rather than clubbing stuff) tend to be helpful, slightly surprised that we've even bothered to ask, and happy to grant permission for reasonable uses. The big names, which we actually don't buy as much from, have also been slightly surprised to hear from us, but we get strange things like permission for the mechanical copyright, but not for the actual recording because the publisher doesn't actually hold that copyright, and doesn't seem to know who does.
In other words, we have a reasonable use, we're paying properly for the music itself and the right to play it at public events, when asked the publishers generally haven't objected to our request or asked for any extra consideration in exchange, but legal technicalities mean that strictly speaking we still can't make the compilations because some unknown copyright holder hasn't given permission and there's no way for us to seek it. That seems a bit daft to me.
Personally, I'm not sure US-style fair use is the best way to go in a digital world; it's just too easy to argue that activities which could -- not necessarily are in practice today -- be seriously damaging to copyright holders are authorised. I'm thinking in particular of distribution to "friends", and thence to their "friends" and so on, until a new track/e-book/game/whatever has suddenly spread across the whole Internet.
However, it seems about time that paying to buy content should guarantee certain inalienable consumer rights, such as the right to make a back-up copy, to shift to a different media format, and the right to make compilations composed only of legitimately purchased content. In particular, those should be rights rather than exemptions, so that the media industries can't simply add DRM that makes it technically difficult for an average consumer to do these things (or to criminalise the behaviour under alternative laws such as the EUCD or DMCA as a back door).
Hopefully, the guy they've put in charge of this review has his head screwed on the right way, and a reasonable balance between the legitimate interests of the consumer and the legitimate interests of the copyright holder and content creators will be found. I'm a bit worried about some of the language, as no doubt mentioned by others in this discussion by the time I post this, but I'm far more interested in how the review actually goes than in any guesses based on government weasel words before they've even started.
More often than not, the proposed system will save more lives than it takes.
That's an assumption you haven't supported.
I live in Canada, and I have read numerous stories about reckless drivers (mostly teens to young adults) trying to race during rush hour traffic.
In which case they should be done for reckless driving, or whatever the equivalent offence is in your jurisdiction. Would the racing be any less dangerous if you're on the wrong side of the road for a long time but driving 5mph under the limit? As usual, the speed isn't the problem, it's choosing that speed under inappropriate circumstances, and combining it with a generally dangerous driving style.
Yes, it does sound pretty simplistic. You're assuming that exceeding the speed limit only affects you. Sometimes, it does, and if it's illegal but safe and not inconveniencing others, go ahead and knock yourself out. On the other hand, driving too fast for the conditions endangers or disrupts others. To me, your freedom to drive at a dangerous speed without a very good reason is not as important as someone else's freedom not to be hurt or killed because you couldn't be bothered to drive with consideration for others.
If you are literally transporting a life-or-death case to hospital when an ambulance couldn't reach you or carrying the only key that disarms the nuclear bomb, fair enough, but most people who drive at dangerous speeds are simply inconsiderate and/or careless. If you want to take the view that civil disobediance is fine and the law is just a game, that's fair enough too, just as long as you don't mind the penalty for being caught speeding being the immediate destruction of your car by RPG and life imprisonment for the driver to prevent them endangering any other innocent person.
Slashdot Mirror
You may know some of the times you've almost been in one, but how do you know you didn't miss one?
The research (some of which I cited in another post near here, in case you missed it) is pretty clear: regardless of what drivers think about their performance, under controlled, objective conditions, there is little distinction between measured driver performance using a hand-held mobile and measured driver performance using a hands-free kit. But hey, we live in a world where more than half of drivers questioned think they're in the top 10%, drunks are sure their performance isn't impaired because they've "only had a couple", and people die asleep at the wheel even though they know they can stay awake all the way home. Don't let us disrupt your ego with the facts, will you?
Except that it is. See this report, for example. From the executive summary:
Or consider the reports behind this BBC article:
Those were just a couple of links from the first page on Google, BTW.
It's easy to assume that the physical problems are the major contributory factor to road safety, and this is the problem with false-security legislation such as that recently introduced in the UK. However, the reality acknowledged by several proper studies says otherwise. It's easy to go into denial about this counter-intuitive result, particularly if you're a driver who does use a mobile phone on the road trying to justify your actions, but the results are about as clear as you ever get: driving while using a mobile phone is comparable to driving while drunk, and using a hands-free kit does not make much of a difference.
Unfortunately, like most people, you've got completely the wrong idea of why driving while using a mobile phone is dangerous. At this point, I'd like to pause for a moment to thank the UK government for introducing legislation attacking the wrong problem, and thus giving millions of drivers a false sense of security when they're using a hands-free kit.
In fact, if you look at the studies done in the UK and elsewhere before the explicit ban was introduced in the UK, the big problem is the loss of concentration. The physical incapacity caused by tying up one hand obviously doesn't help, but it makes far, far less of a difference to road safety.
The reason that talking on a phone isn't like talking to a person next to you is that a person next to you will sense when you need to concentrate, because they can see that you're approaching a hazard for example, and they'll shut up and not distract you while you navigate around the hazard. Someone you're talking to on a phone can't do that, and will change the subject, ask you a question, or otherwise attract your attention just as much when you're approaching a potential danger as when you're driving on an open road without another car in sight. Whether you're holding a little box near your ear or listening to someone through a speaker doesn't affect this at all.
If the UK government really wanted to improve the level of road safety rather than score cheap political points, they would have banned all mobile phone use while driving. Then again, the whole idea of such a specific offence seems a bit redundant when you already have legislation making dangerous driving illegal in general. Presumably someone thought it would draw more attention to the specific and increasing problem, or they were just after the political points.
In summary, this is wrong:
For most people, you simply don't need to use a phone while driving, period. If you want to talk to someone elsewhere while on the move, get someone else to drive. Doing anything less will dramatically increase your risk of having an accident, as surely as driving while drunk, tired or stoned.
Sure. What's your e-mail address?
You don't have to blame them, but that's a different thing from saying it doesn't matter.
That depends on whether that extra 10% makes a difference to how well you can do what you need to do, I suppose.
FWIW, my experience is rather different to yours: whether you call them bugs or usability issues, I find quite a lot of the non-trivial functionality in OOo is bizarrely hard to use. Updating data that you're using elsewhere seems to be particularly troublesome: try updating a Calc spreadsheet you're using as a data source for a Writer mail merge, for example. I also find even simple adjustments of graphs in Calc difficult at times: I have actually found myself unable to tweak basic elements once a graph was created, even after extensive consultation with the generally unhelpful built-in help and the usually much more helpful Internet. Compared to this sort of thing, the equivalent features in Word and Excel are effortless to use.
On the flip side you have things like Word's "interesting" numbering tools. This is clearly an area where usability didn't quite work out as well as it should have and which has strangely never been fixed. Then again, I find Writer's just as counter-intuitive. Overall, and obviously just IME, OOo applications still have a lot more usability quirks/UI bugs. YMMV, of course, and by the sounds of it, it has.
I'm not sure it ever arrived. IME, even today most people don't care about MS Office, they care about one or two specific products that come as part of MS Office. For me, it's Word and Excel. I don't use Outlook, or Project, or whatever else they throw in these days. (The fact that I don't even know what else they throw in these days, having just installed some version of Office 2003 on a new PC at work, is quite telling, I think.)
Why can't we write software like grown-ups, with standard mechanisms for information exchange provided by the platform, and then dedicated, high quality applications for each task as required that communicate via those standard protocols if and when necessary? It's not like the ideas here are new; on the contrary, they predate the "office suite", and I don't think it was a change for the better. Kudos to the marketing guys for pulling it off, though.
And exactly how many of them are there? (I say "exactly", because I imagine it'll be possible to enumerate every single one of them fairly quickly.)
I've been making your argument for years, but alas never convincing anyone with the resources to have a go.
I think a combination of making the use of stylesheets the default and (shock!) not even putting manual formatting controls on the toolbars and such by default would make a huge difference. Make the menus and toolbars very simple, with only the major commands directly related to writing easily accessible, and let the powerful, flexible but easy-to-misuse things be the ones only power users can find.
Obviously this can't happen in isolation. For a start, it would require extensive usability testing to determine fast and easy to use interfaces to configure the styles themselves, store them for future use, construct template documents etc. This sort of thing is often a chore in today's applications, yet I see little reason it should be more than a couple of clicks or a quick shortcut key to do most of it, if the UI places the emphasis on the right ideas that support it.
Yep, and it even pops up a really annoying dialog every time it does it!
I have a similar view of OpenOffice to you, I think. I'm grateful to those who choose to give it away, because it helps me to do some things I'd otherwise find inconvenient without paying for software since I don't install illegal copies of commercial products. However, I have no illusions about the power or quality of the product, nor its overtaking MS Office in any significant way any time soon.
In fact, without wishing to seem ungrateful, OpenOffice doesn't really have much going for it over its major commercial rival at all, other than being free-as-in-beer. There are countless useful ways a word processor could do better than Word, making real people more productive at real jobs or giving nicer output for jobs they already do, yet in five years of Microsoft not really addressing any of the issues, the open source world has failed to do anything particularly innovative, preferring to play a never-ending game of catch-up with the market leader.
What I really wanted to challenge, though, was this statement in the parent post:
Perhaps, but look at it this way. We know, just by looking at popular OSS sites like this one and the download stats from OSS web sites, that OSS provides a few big-name, mass-market products: Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla et al., that sort of thing. It also provides a wider range of fairly established tools for more specialised niches. And then it provides mountains of rubbish, most of which never gets to version 1.
Now, the list of advantages given by advocates of the OSS approach often starts with things being less buggy and more secure, on the basis of the "many eyes" principle mentioned in TFA. This claim is usually backed up by citing the relative scarcity of security breaches in Linux-based systems, the relative immunity of Firefox to nasty web pages, and so on. OSS is also claimed by some advocates to produce more innovative software, basically because the developers aren't tied to company conventions, can adapt faster to changing requirements from users, etc.
However, if -- as the author of TFA argues based on actual bug and feature request data -- you can't necessarily rely on user support to improve a product even for probably the largest and most widely used products of the OSS world, that blows that whole argument out of the water. OpenOffice isn't less buggy than MS Office, nor innovative in any serious way; it's a near carbon copy of the established commercial player, a few years behind the times in features and robustness. And if the OSS approach doesn't achieve the claimed benefits for OpenOffice, why should it provide any advantage for smaller products with smaller user bases?
To an extent, there is a genuine answer to this question. As I've discovered myself, the code base for products like OpenOffice and Firefox is simply too big for a keen amateur to get stuck into within a reasonable period of time. Just downloading the source and getting a build set up is often a chore for the many of us who are running Windows boxes, because so many products tend to be built using GCC on Linux or something similar. Smaller, less unwieldy projects might fare better here. But then again, does something like OpenOffice or Firefox really need to be the size they are, or is the source just bloated as a result of the less structured development processes that are inevitably used when software is being built by a constantly varying and geographically diverse group of volunteers?
In other words, while I agree that it's unsound to generalise too much from the author's factual data on a specific OSS product, that product does offer a pretty solid counter-example to the usual arguments advanced by OSS evangelists for the superiority of their approach over traditional closed source, commercial development.
For some things, sure. For others, no; otherwise there wouldn't have been the obvious examples that started this subthread.
IMHO, what the CSS guys should have done is introduce some proper relationships between different boxes, so that a fluid layout could be described in some reasonably natural way. Think about the toolkits you get for defining dialog boxes that scale nicely so controls are appropriately sized and positioned on different platforms. For that matter, think about the simple alignment tools you get in every decent vector graphics program ever, where positions can be set absolutely, but also elements can be aligned vertically and horizontally, made the same width and height, etc. We could even allow (shock!) simple equations to relate the relative proportions of text blocks, white space, font heights, etc. Hey, it worked for Knuth. :-)
It's not like these are new, or even particularly complicated, ideas. They just didn't go into the style sheets that are supposed to describe how to render HTML. Instead we have a load of special cases like "float: this" and "clear: that" and "position: the other", and a lot of underpowered "auto" entries that just don't cut it for serious design. How much nicer would it have been, if we'd had a technology with the same content vs. styling separation, that actually let designers specify a fluid (or, for that matter, fixed) layout in an simple, natural, intuitive way?
It would be nice if you could set all replies/forwards so they saved to the folder of the original message, instead of some generic "sent mail" space. Other mail clients can do this, but AFAIK Thunderbird can't at present. For all the nice things about TB, I really miss this option.
I'm not, personally, too worried about having my identity deliberately stolen. I take reasonable precautions, and key places like banks and employers tend to be wise to obvious and seriously damaging identity theft and how to deal with it these days. Relative to the odds of it happening, I have more serious things to worry about...
...like incompetence, for example. All it took was one government staffer mistyping my NI number (roughly the UK equivalent of a US SSN) into a database, out of probably thousands they typed that day, and my whole tax/NI contribution record was messed up. It took me months to clear it up, calling round several tax offices, and out of pocket by hundreds of pounds in the meantime. (At the time, I had just started my first job, and could barely afford the rent as it was, so that was a very serious position to be in.)
The thing that was scary was that this is supposed to be systemically "impossible". (I think that just means there's a check digit in the number, and they have to fluke that being consistent when they mistype it...) That means they don't bother telling you about it (even though their database had me working in two different full time jobs on opposite sides of the country!), so the first I heard of it was when my employer deducted more from my pay for tax than usual, as they are legally required to do on receiving notice from the tax office.
Worse, there weren't any serious systems in place to deal with the problem. The first several government people I spoke to on the phone wouldn't even talk to me, because I couldn't tell them the name of my employer or my address. Or rather, I couldn't tell them the name of the other guy's employer and his address, since it turned out they'd somehow merged part of my record with someone else's because of the incorrect ID. I only got through in the end by convincing one of the staffers to listen to my explanation and tell me what I could do, and between us we figured out what must have happened and who I needed to contact to get it fixed.
This bothers me far more than a malicious ID theft, because (a) it's the tax man, who is basically immune to any sort of useful legal action in this sort of situation; (b) it's probably far more common, because thousands of people get processed by these operators every day; and (c) there obviously aren't sufficient checks and safeguards in the system to even identify a clearly inconsistent database entry and flag it for checking by a real person, never mind a proper mechanism for me to get the situation resolved quickly and effectively.
Given that the problems are much the same here as for a minor identity theft, except that you don't have the normal legal avenues available to you to pursue the culprit and it's probably a lot more common, I'd say that makes unintended human error a much bigger danger than ID theft with criminal intent, at least until they tighten up key systems in governments, banks, credit agencies, etc.
cialisfor.eu? I've been getting ads for that site in my inbox for months...
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK, most commercial radio stations seem to be funded by the ad placements, not the recording industry. They do need a special kind of licence to play the music over the air, though, and presumably the copyright holder could deny them permission to do it.
Yeah, they're just the same -- except that apparently, the guys who run Google still speak English, while you probably have a side job working for this site, and they are driven by running a business effectively, while you appear to be driven by trying to attract more traffic to your web site.
Please take your meaningless buzzwords and corporate doublespeak elsewhere, and leave those of us who want to talk about the real world using real words with actual meanings alone.
I agree entirely; as another respondent pointed out, it pretty clearly fails on one of the four tests for fairness under US law. That doesn't stop the widespread belief that the magical "fair use" is some sort of legal right (rather than an exemption) that means you can copy anything you like as long as you're not directly making money from it, though. Hence my concern is that with the US-style approach, you can too easily argue that something like this is fair use, not that it actually is fair use in the eyes of the law.
In practice, I think I'd rather see our law extended to provide an explicit list of exemptions, set out as consumer rights that those selling under copyright may not deliberately inhibit, which is at least clear in law even if slightly more restrictive. Ideally, I'd like to see a blanket statement to the effect that once you've paid for one copy of the content, you may use it in any way you like that's personal to you, but how you could phrase the intent without leaving loopholes I'm not quite sure...
Well, the government (as in Tony and his cronies) may want that, but the majority party (the Labour Party) has recently demonstrated that it is not entirely bereft of spine, so Tony and co may not get what they want for much longer, and I doubt some of the more draconian legislative steps that have been taken recently will last for long.
Fortunately, jests aside, you're wrong. Labour's back benchers have finally developed some spine, hitting Tony pretty hard over the 90 day detention without trial issue (though still missing the principle and increasing the figure to an insulting 28 days, but at least it's a start). They're threatening to do it repeatedly over ID cards, health and education reforms, too. It's a real shame that old school Labour figures like Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam didn't get to see (and participate in) what's been happening in Blair's third term, but I hope they'd be proud of their legacy.
The problem, of course, is that Tony's unaccountable cronies in Europe are now trying to set up his own legacy via centralised, undemocratically formed legislation that will filter down, placing obligations on future governments even after the New Labour lot are inevitably kicked out before the next election. Look at the EUCD and the various "anti-terror" spy legislation that Europe has been producing recently, often in breach of the EU's own convention on human rights (and notice that big media groups are already campaigning to have the Internet access records opened up so they can pursue copyright infringement cases against the population en masse).
I used to think that being part of the EU should bring benefits to us, but I become more eurosceptic every time something like this filters through.
If you want access to a web server, don't run a system that's known to give the provider big bandwidth bills.
At the end of the the day, they don't owe you anything, and anything they offer you is a courtesy, not an obligation. If you don't like that, please feel free to go create and finance your own WWW.
And do "many people" who want to add artificial weight to their own views on a controversial subject start their statements by implying, without proof, that many other people agree with them?
The two aren't really equivalent.
Several uses that I think most of us would consider reasonable are actually illegal in the UK, or legal only on a technicality under some circumstances. Making back-ups, format shifting, and making music compilations are all somewhat dodgy, for example, even where only legitimately bought content is involved and it's strictly for personal use by the person who bought it.
To give an example of how daft this is, a local dancing club I help to run would like to make compilation CDs of the music we have legitimately paid for, since we have a large library and carrying all the CDs everywhere is awkward. We also pay an additional fee for the right to play this music at public classes and events, so our use of the music itself is entirely legit. We have concluded that none of the standard licensing agencies can authorise the simple compilations we'd like to produce, so we have made efforts to contact the copyright holders directly.
Interestingly enough, the specialist dancing music companies from which we buy most of our CDs (we're talking about things like ballroom, rock 'n' roll, salsa and swing here, rather than clubbing stuff) tend to be helpful, slightly surprised that we've even bothered to ask, and happy to grant permission for reasonable uses. The big names, which we actually don't buy as much from, have also been slightly surprised to hear from us, but we get strange things like permission for the mechanical copyright, but not for the actual recording because the publisher doesn't actually hold that copyright, and doesn't seem to know who does.
In other words, we have a reasonable use, we're paying properly for the music itself and the right to play it at public events, when asked the publishers generally haven't objected to our request or asked for any extra consideration in exchange, but legal technicalities mean that strictly speaking we still can't make the compilations because some unknown copyright holder hasn't given permission and there's no way for us to seek it. That seems a bit daft to me.
Personally, I'm not sure US-style fair use is the best way to go in a digital world; it's just too easy to argue that activities which could -- not necessarily are in practice today -- be seriously damaging to copyright holders are authorised. I'm thinking in particular of distribution to "friends", and thence to their "friends" and so on, until a new track/e-book/game/whatever has suddenly spread across the whole Internet.
However, it seems about time that paying to buy content should guarantee certain inalienable consumer rights, such as the right to make a back-up copy, to shift to a different media format, and the right to make compilations composed only of legitimately purchased content. In particular, those should be rights rather than exemptions, so that the media industries can't simply add DRM that makes it technically difficult for an average consumer to do these things (or to criminalise the behaviour under alternative laws such as the EUCD or DMCA as a back door).
Hopefully, the guy they've put in charge of this review has his head screwed on the right way, and a reasonable balance between the legitimate interests of the consumer and the legitimate interests of the copyright holder and content creators will be found. I'm a bit worried about some of the language, as no doubt mentioned by others in this discussion by the time I post this, but I'm far more interested in how the review actually goes than in any guesses based on government weasel words before they've even started.
That's an assumption you haven't supported.
In which case they should be done for reckless driving, or whatever the equivalent offence is in your jurisdiction. Would the racing be any less dangerous if you're on the wrong side of the road for a long time but driving 5mph under the limit? As usual, the speed isn't the problem, it's choosing that speed under inappropriate circumstances, and combining it with a generally dangerous driving style.
Yes, it does sound pretty simplistic. You're assuming that exceeding the speed limit only affects you. Sometimes, it does, and if it's illegal but safe and not inconveniencing others, go ahead and knock yourself out. On the other hand, driving too fast for the conditions endangers or disrupts others. To me, your freedom to drive at a dangerous speed without a very good reason is not as important as someone else's freedom not to be hurt or killed because you couldn't be bothered to drive with consideration for others.
If you are literally transporting a life-or-death case to hospital when an ambulance couldn't reach you or carrying the only key that disarms the nuclear bomb, fair enough, but most people who drive at dangerous speeds are simply inconsiderate and/or careless. If you want to take the view that civil disobediance is fine and the law is just a game, that's fair enough too, just as long as you don't mind the penalty for being caught speeding being the immediate destruction of your car by RPG and life imprisonment for the driver to prevent them endangering any other innocent person.