I'm worried that I'm feeding a troll here, but I'll take your post at face value.
The internet's structure (sans spam) seems to be working well. Why change it.
It's not bad, but there's plenty that could be improved. Ask yourself why:
the original protocols haven't evolved to keep up with use, resulting in many pseudo-standards and a lot of edge cases that don't work
spam is rendering things like e-mail and Usenet less usable by the day
identity theft and large scale fraud are being perpetrated on a wide scale, thanks largely to inherently difficult-to-secure protocols
similar protocols allow DDoS attacks that can cripple an organisation or even cause it to fail, on the whim of some 14-year-old Russian cracker
dubious web sites are distributing at best accidentally unhelpful and at worst deliberately damaging information on subjects regulated in the real world, such as medicine, law or finances
there is little international co-operation on anything but the most serious crimes; they might get the occasional child porn sicko, but minor yet still hurtful defamation takes place all the time, because with effective anonymity comes the freedom to say whatever you like and damn the consequences
the much-cited architectural robustness in the face of disruption isn't really that robust at all
the US government does meddle pretty directly with the development of the systems, even though the rest of us don't necessarily share its supporters' Christian right beliefs
and so the list goes on.
Little of this is directly related to the technical issue at hand, of course, but I think there are plenty of reasons the Internet as it's evolved isn't as good as it could be if we were making the decisions today with what we now know.
If Mongolia created the internet and kept it working fine, I'm sure that most of the users would be ok with that - sans little fears and a bit of "why can't our country run out part of it" pride.
The problem isn't pride, it's that the US government has demonstrated repeatedly that it doesn't give a shit about the international community's views on issues as fundamental as going to war or the health of the planet, and it's willing to make any sacrifices it deems necessary to further its own business and economic interests. This is why the EU, amongst others, would be more than happy for the US government not to have direct control over any aspect of a fundamental technology on which they rely. It's the same reason we're developing an independent GPS-style satellite network, and collaborating on EU-wide defence agreements and technology, and making up our own minds on going to war for oil, and countless other things.
We created it, we have a system that works, and we're running it.
Oh, for goodness' sake, quit with the "we created it" crap already. Sure, the US paid the majority (but by no means all) of the very early money several decades ago, and did a lot (but by no means all) of the very early research. The US is not responsible for all of the work even going back that far, and it certainly isn't responsible for many of the advances that have given the Internet most of the success it's had over the past decade or so.
However, the fact that you apparently don't know that (or choose to ignore/disbelieve it) is an excellent example of why the rest of us don't want you guys in charge any more.
Wow. It could be just as effective as a UN. Wait. That would be a very bad idea.
IIRC, there was nothing in the original proposals that specified that the UN would be involved in running the Internet instead of ICANN (though as screwed up organisations go, ICANN are one of the few to really give the UN a run for their money). The important point was simply that it would be something under multilateral control, not a talking shop for the US government.
As others have noted, it's a formal title. In the UK, it applies to members of the Privy Council, which includes the Cabinet, and to various nobles with historic titles. Hence, as Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw is addressed formally in written correspondence as "The Right Honourable Jack Straw".
You'll also hear members of parliament refer to "The honourable member for <place>" during debates, for those MPs who aren't Privy Counsellors, or to "The right honourable member for <place>" for those who are. I'm sure you can find more details somewhere like Wikipedia if you're interested.
It's really scary how fast a story can spread through the media, too.
In my spare time, I happen to do the publicity for a local sports club. Someone gave a comment to a media rep a few weeks ago, saying that we were hiring a full-time coach for the first time. We don't know exactly where the story originated; it wasn't any of the executive committee, nor the coach concerned, so presumably came from a not-particularly-well-informed club member.
That wound up on the AP wire, and within 24 hours, it had made a couple of the big national papers, the BBC News web site, and goodness knows how many local press contacts. The organisers, including myself, aren't professional administrators -- we all have day jobs, and volunteer to help run the club in our free time -- and we were so swamped with enquiries from media contacts that we had to set up a press releases page on our web site setting the record straight, and in some cases switch off mobile phones during the day so we didn't keep getting disturbed at work by people who'd managed to track down a personal number.
The really scary thing is that the article was completely wrong. The coach in question had been with us for some time, and his role hadn't really changed, nor had that of the 20 or so other professionals we bring in to help coach our members. But once it's been "researched" by a "normally reliable source" (that description from the BBC person we contacted to ask what they were talking about in their article) it gets everywhere.
In other words, I don't think it much matters whether something is "researched on-line" or not any more. The level of research behind a lot of the stories you read is shockingly bad, and often many of the big news outlets will be running a whole story of a single small piece on one of the news wires. Whether that's accurate, and whether it comes from an off-hand comment overheard in a bar or it's lifted from a blog of unknown quality, doesn't much seem to matter.
Judges have no problems coming down on mothers of five because they truthfully don't care.
I think this is the same case covered on Slashdot a few weeks back, isn't it? In that case, the judge definitely does care, and indeed gave the RIAA lawyer a pretty good roasting about their dubious legal shenanigans in court the first time. The transcript was hilarious, in a sad-but-true kinda way.
This is similar to broadband providers using QoS to assign a lower priority to VoIP traffic that doesn't come from their own VoIP service. Shady, yes. Illegal, probably not.
Wouldn't the VoIP example be a pretty clear breach of competition laws in most places?
Do they really mean just e-mail, or do they mean a replacement for Outlook? There are many decent e-mail clients on many platforms, but IME it's the lack of things like calendars and Exchange connectivity that get in the way at the office, and cause things like Thunderbird to be rejected even though there's a Windows version.
I'm not quite sure why the parent post was modded (+1, Funny). Maybe I'm missing something (or maybe it really is as bad as the one thing I can think of <shudder>).
In any case, I don't see why there shouldn't be a legal bar on naming anyone accused of any offence before they have been convicted. Going through the accusation process is bad enough, without an innocent being tarred for life afterwards because people assume there's no smoke without fire.
It is fine to get angry about what other people say.
The thing is, "sticks and stones" doesn't work in the real world. Try telling a teacher who has been falsely accused by a malicious student of assault or sexual harrassment that it's only words, as they get suspended, ultimately lose their job because of negative PR even when found not guilty, and lose their livelihood, while the child concerned shows off to their friends about how they did Mr Jones over because they're really cool.
I've seen this almost happen to not one but two close family friends, completely independently. Everyone knew that the accusations were rubbish -- in one case the child even admitted as much later on -- but it still made the teachers' lives hell for several months as they fought the system to clear their name. Once an allegation like that gets made public, most of the damage is done, regardless of the outcome.
If he were so intelligent, he'd know that truth is an absolute defence against defamation.
Legally speaking, that depends on where you are and what you're including under "defamation". For example, reporting something factually correct but in conflict with an individual's privacy rights may be covered by defamation-style laws.
If they're made aware of it, then I can see an argument being made
Having been the victim of on-line defamation before myself (by an ex on LiveJournal in my case), I believe something should be done here, because at present you basically have little comeback, or none at all if you're in a different jurisdiction to the hosting web site.
On the other hand, that's not a popular view around here, because it has the audacity to suggest that my right not to be publicly attacked based on incorrect and misleading information might be more important than someone else's precious right to free speech under all circumstances ever, even if they're speaking hurtful untruths. When I made the mistake of mentioning this before, I was told to shove it by a large number of Slashbots, most of whom have presumably never been on the receiving end of this and thought it was all terribly funny.
Even I acknowledge that there are serious free speech issues here, though. If you can force anyone to take down anything by simply telling the host you disagree with it, then justified free speech is damaged. If you require some standard of proof to go with the allegation that the content is unreasonable, then you just gave the host the role of a court. If you never remove anything, then people can be damaged. (I'm still rather disturbed that the Slashdot editors didn't make an exception and remove an anonymous post containing the personal contact information of the father of the convicted con artist mentioned in a story the other day, whose health and property were very much endangered by posting that information publicly.)
A little older and wiser now, I've concluded that there is definitely a problem here. Unfortunately, I've also concluded that there is no easy solution that is fair to both sides in a dispute.
It's safer not to think about the provisions the UK government has in an emergency. Under the Civil Contingencies Bill they recently rammed through parliament, they basically said that a load of political people can declare an emergency. Unless something changed very late on, it doesn't even have to be major players like the Prime Minister or Home Secretary, who will at least be held accountable eventually, if only by getting their government unelected. Rather, it can be a few political weenies at the Treasury or something.
Now it gets really good. Once an emergency has been declared, the government may require you to do almost anything (literally), may require you not to do almost anything (literally), and specifically may restrict your freedom of movement or association, may confiscate your property or kill any animals without any obligation to pay compensation... well, you get the idea. I don't think they quite suspended voting rights and the requirement to hold a general election every few years, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had been added as a late amendment.
Yeah, it's a great Act, right up there with Regulation of Investigatory Powers, all the recent anti-terrorism stuff, ID cards/database, and the almost-finished-without-any-parliamentary-oversigh t police plan to install spy cameras every few hundred metres on our main roads and track every vehicle in the UK everywhere it goes.
We really, really need a written constitution setting forth, amongst other things, reasonable rights to privacy and not to have personal information about you stored where it's not absolutely necessary. No, a declared state of emergency isn't a good enough excuse: that's like the US government saying they'll only completely ignore the US Constitution during war time, and then conveniently reinterpreting the word "war" to apply to actions against unspecified targets with unspecified end criteria ("war on drugs", "war on terror") in order to pretend the rights of citizens no longer apply in perpetuity.
The sort of thing they're talking about seems unlikely to help anyway. If something like a highly virulent human flu-bird flu hybrid does take hold, they'll never have the resources to track down all the individuals who might be affected fast enough to do anything useful anyway. It might help with collecting statistics, but I can't see it saving (m)any lives. (Can anyone who knows more about the field tell me whether I'm missing something here?) At that point, mandating complete surveillance of society that will inevitably be abused sooner rather than later seems a rather high price to pay for a small, and only hypothetical, benefit.
Why do C++ people use the acronym RAII "resource acquisition is initialiation" to talk about when the object is uninitialized?
Because the concept is more fundamental than merely "resource release is destruction", although the latter is arguably the most important aspect of it.
What you're doing in C++ is tying the period between allocation and release of a resource to the lifetime of an object. If you like, the resource-owning class's invariant conditions include the fact that the resource is allocated correctly.
That means that allocating the resource in the constructor is quite fundamental. If the allocation fails, the constructor should fail. If it does so in the idiomatic way -- throwing an exception -- then the resource-owning object never exists, and can't inadvertently be misused because its name will be inaccessible.
Similarly, as long as the resource-owning class is instantiated as an automatic variable, the deterministic destruction when it goes out of scope ensures that the allocation of the resource can't outlast the owning object either. Again, it also ensures that once the resource is no longer allocated, the name of the owning object is no longer accessible.
In between, you have a valid object, which can present whatever interface the programmer deems useful in order to access the resource it owns, and which can hide any handle necessary to refer to that resource.
All of this is possible because of the interaction between C++'s scoping rules, automatic variables, deterministic destruction and exceptions. Since Java lacks at least two of those, it's not possible to get the main benefits of RAII in the same way.
It's not just you. A lot of people in this discussion are confusing fundamentally different concepts whose implementations often happen to coincide.
In particular, whether or not something is ever cleaned up is different from whether or not it is cleaned up promptly. Also, releasing memory is not the same as destroying/finalising an object that happens to be stored in that memory.
Garbage collection addresses exactly one of the four possible combinations: making sure that memory is always released.
The main advantage of C++'s RAII idiom covers the opposite combination: making sure that objects are destroyed promptly. (As it happens, in C++ the underlying memory is also guaranteed to be released after the destruction of the object when using automatic variables, so we're actually covering two of the combinations here.)
The fact that the latter can be used to guarantee the former, but the converse does not hold, is why RAII is a much more powerful tool than a straightforward GC. The fact that the former works automatically while the latter requires some coding skill is why a simple GC is a more reliable tool for average programmers than RAII.
As always, you have to look at what you've got to do and who's going to be doing it, and then pick an appropriate point on the power-safety spectrum.
You can't ignore the complexity of manual memory management.
A lot of posts in this discussion almost imply that there is 100% manual memory management, or some sort of super-generational-buzzwordy-GC, and nothing in between. That simply isn't the case.
I write C++ for a living. I work with intricate, graph-like data structures, using performance-sensitive algorithms, with pointers all over the place. And yet I can't remember the last time I had to use the delete operator, nor any sort of super-ref-counted-smart-pointer. We just have a simple, effective ownership scheme, and deterministic destruction of the owning objects guarantees everything is always cleaned up completely and promptly.
There is no magic. There is only knowing which tool to use for which job.
Disclaimer: I write libraries used in things like CAD software for a living. This post is based on my personal impressions of the industry as a whole, and does not represent the views of my employer or anyone else working in the business.
I think fully capable, open source CAD software is a great example of why OSS works well for mass market applications, but will never realistically compete with traditional, commercial applications in a more specialist field. I think those who don't work in the industry often fail to appreciate that we're talking about some of the largest, most complex software applications in the world here!
For the benefit of those not in the know, let me try to describe the scale of the task "create a professional standard CAD package". A conservative estimate of the effort required to produce a mid-range, pro-standard package is 1,000,000 man-hours. (It's taken a lot more than that for most of these companies to get where they are today, but let's assume we're basically cloning with at least some idea of what we're doing, and not repeating all of the past two decades' R&D as well.) The guys who work on the software that goes into a pro standard CAD package are generally pretty good programmers with strong academic backgrounds, so the total cost of the development staff alone is measured well into eight figures of dollars at commercial rates, and remember this is a conservative estimate.
In other words, to come up with an OSS alternative of just what we have today from the major vendors, you'd need to have something like a team of 50 skilled and knowledgable developers working full-time with good project management for a decade. I don't believe any OSS project is capable of attracting that in a non-mass-market field, nor is ever likely to be.
Isn't this exactly what publishing houses do everyday?
Not at all. If you've ever looked into getting a technical book published, for example, then I'm sure you'll have seen the sort of "application form" any big-name publisher will expect you to complete. You'll be expected to give a detailed breakdown of the structure for each chapter; typically a couple of mostly complete sample chapters; an analysis of the market you're aiming for, any other books in competition with yours and how they compare; a list of key selling points for your book; and plenty more. And that's just to get them to consider publishing your book.
In the current model you have to trust the publisher's marketing hype to judge the quality of a work before you buy it... which is often misleading.
Erm... No. I go to my local bookstore and take a quick look, or I hear the track on the radio and like it, or I see the trailer for a movie and ask friends who went to see it already what they thought of it. Under your scheme, all of this might even be impossible, because it's not clear whether it would even be practical to run a bookstore or music radio station profitably.
If someone prints your work and sells lots of copies, you'd be overjoyed. It would mean that you'd soon have enough patrons to write your next work while being paid for it.
So you only have to be able to do all the work necessary to produce a complete work for free, and then you might get paid something for the next one? This is where your idea really isn't practical. How many people are ever going to set out on that road, no matter how good the end result might be if everything went well? How many people could even afford to? You've created a barrier to entry that is completely divorced from ability to create a useful work and entirely dependent on finanicial resources.
The bottom line issue, I feel, is that copyright attempts to treat ideas like property, which is foolish.
One man's foolishness is another man's genius. It's no more artificial than the concept of physical property: the natural order of things is that you can take what you want unless someone physically stops you. A long time ago, we worked out that there are benefits to recognising the convention of "possession" even where someone is not physically guarding their goods. This generally works, because most people in society respect the convention, and you can effectively charge the few who don't with theft.
There's no particular reason a similar concept shouldn't apply to intellectual property. Clearly IP works differently to PP, so the rules needn't be exactly the same, but if there are benefits to have some sort of IP framework then the question just becomes what the rules should be such that the general public finds them reasonable.
I just don't see how what you describe is at all workable.
For a start, you're asking the general public to pay for a commodity product that they can't specify or examine in any detail in advance. In fields where commissioning is effectively the norm, you usually have a fairly detailed specification (my new wardrobe will have these dimensions, these shelves, and be made of this wood with that finish) and/or ongoing participation of those commissioning the work to ensure that the result is satisfactory. That's hardly viable for a fiction novel, or a piece of pop music, or a shoot 'em up aimed at a wide market and sold at a low price per individual customer/patron. How this is an improvement on today's model, where the prospective consumer can see the work to assess its value and decide whether it's worth the asking price, I just don't see.
In addition, I'm afraid I can't see your model for new artists working. As you say, it's difficult for someone to break through now, even when they can write their first book, and use that as its own marketing, letting stand on its merits. If you couldn't do that, because anyone who wanted to could just take it without any sort of compensation at all, all you've got is a sales pitch produced with no budget.
One plausible result of such a scheme is that most works will wind up being "commissioned" by the big publishing/musical companies who can afford the up-front expenses in exchange for some token compensation to the artist, and then sold on a mass-produced scale for a price where it's easier for people to pay it than to copy the work themselves. Result: even more profit for big business, even less compensation for the hard-working artist. Not the desired outcome, I hope you'll agree.
My suggestion is a return to patronage but instead of works created at the behest of a Nobleman or Publisher, those interested in the authors work would pay for the service of creation.
OK, that sounds reasonable enough in principle, but how is that going to work in practice? You'd need thousands of people to be interested in a particular random paperback novel being written in order to get enough money to pay the rent for the author during the months it takes to write it, yet still have each individual pay the same price they pay today for the pleasure of reading it.
The creation of useful and entertaining works is a service, and should be paid for as a service, not through an artificial lock on the reproduction of the results of that service.
So do you believe everyone should have to pay every time they want to read the same book, or do you believe nothing should be created for mass markets?
Well, I know a great number of people (especially here on slashdot) would say that a great deal of the content that is created explicitly for profit is crap.
Indeed. Then again, I know a great number of people (especially here on Slashdot) would say that Microsoft products suck, yet most of them still use Microsoft products everyday.:-)
I think the issue is that without draconian laws enforcing IP laws seems meaningless. To me, IP crime doesn't deserve severe punishment for an offense and if that's required to enforce the law then the problem is being approached in the wrong way.
Absolutely, and I think this is the crux of the current problem.
If people believe that the law is fair, then most people will respect and obey it. Look at legitimate on-line music sales, where the asking price for a single track is under a dollar and you don't have to pay for five filler tracks just to get the one you want, to give a particularly relevant example. Try asking about where to find a crack for a good game on a Usenet group or on-line forum about it, and chances are several dedicated players will tell you to get stuffed and go buy a copy like everyone else, because they want to support the company that provided a game they enjoyed.
The problems start when the general population starts to feel that something isn't fair. A CD album priced at an order of magnitude more than it costs to produce isn't widely perceived as fair, and people aren't buying as many of them as they used to. It doesn't just have to be money, either. Films that are released in the US well before they're released here in the UK are often ripped off on a massive scale over the Internet, even by people who are regular cinema goers but don't want to wait for a month to see it. I know plenty of people (myself included) who would buy a lot of music on-line if it were just the music they were getting, but won't use current services much because DRM is inconvenient and stops us doing reasonable things with the music we're paying for.
Now, if the music industry were seen to be fairly rewarding the musicians, song writers, production teams etc. who are directly producing the music, and charging a reasonable price to the public for the works, then I think copyright infringement would drop to a pretty low level, and ultimately become viewed as antisocially as smoking in a room with people who don't or drink-driving.
At that point, peer pressure will do most of the work, because society in general respects the rules and abides by them. Then you can use copyright legislation to prevent the selfish few from taking advantage by breaking the rules. Keep the penalties sensible - fine someone who's been ripping music illegally a few times the market price of each track they've ripped, or something - and again, people will respect the law. Perhaps more importantly for the media industries, when you do sting someone who really is undermining distribution on a wide scale by mass copying, you'll have public support for taking them for huge sums, in the same way no-one minds today when a serial fraudster gets fined millions when he's caught.
As the old adage says, if you need a police state to enforce your laws, then your laws are broken. If your laws are reasonable, they mostly won't need to be enforced in the first place, because they'll be followed voluntarily.
I think it is questionable if IP has any or SHOULD have any future. IP has a tendency to make something scarce that doesn't need to be. From life saving drugs to life-enriching music, IP makes scarce things that no longer need to be. Trying to force an old system of control onto a new paradigm is going to cause trouble. It does require at a minimum, as you suggest, a drastic overhaul.
We seem to agree on most of this. Where we disagree here is that I think it's easy to say something doesn't need to be scarce when you're looking at a specific example that has already been made and can easily be distributed.
The point of the various IP protections, as I believe they should work, is that you have to look at the bigger picture, not the one-offs. If there's no benefit to offering a work to the public, then many potential creators won't want (or be able to afford) to spend their time on creating or improving works. Sure, there will always be those who are kind enough to work on something and give it away to others freely, but a lot of works don't originate that way. Removing the incentive to create those works as well will make them more than scarce, it will make them non-existent.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm worried that I'm feeding a troll here, but I'll take your post at face value.
It's not bad, but there's plenty that could be improved. Ask yourself why:
- the original protocols haven't evolved to keep up with use, resulting in many pseudo-standards and a lot of edge cases that don't work
- spam is rendering things like e-mail and Usenet less usable by the day
- identity theft and large scale fraud are being perpetrated on a wide scale, thanks largely to inherently difficult-to-secure protocols
- similar protocols allow DDoS attacks that can cripple an organisation or even cause it to fail, on the whim of some 14-year-old Russian cracker
- dubious web sites are distributing at best accidentally unhelpful and at worst deliberately damaging information on subjects regulated in the real world, such as medicine, law or finances
- there is little international co-operation on anything but the most serious crimes; they might get the occasional child porn sicko, but minor yet still hurtful defamation takes place all the time, because with effective anonymity comes the freedom to say whatever you like and damn the consequences
- the much-cited architectural robustness in the face of disruption isn't really that robust at all
- the US government does meddle pretty directly with the development of the systems, even though the rest of us don't necessarily share its supporters' Christian right beliefs
and so the list goes on.Little of this is directly related to the technical issue at hand, of course, but I think there are plenty of reasons the Internet as it's evolved isn't as good as it could be if we were making the decisions today with what we now know.
The problem isn't pride, it's that the US government has demonstrated repeatedly that it doesn't give a shit about the international community's views on issues as fundamental as going to war or the health of the planet, and it's willing to make any sacrifices it deems necessary to further its own business and economic interests. This is why the EU, amongst others, would be more than happy for the US government not to have direct control over any aspect of a fundamental technology on which they rely. It's the same reason we're developing an independent GPS-style satellite network, and collaborating on EU-wide defence agreements and technology, and making up our own minds on going to war for oil, and countless other things.
Oh, for goodness' sake, quit with the "we created it" crap already. Sure, the US paid the majority (but by no means all) of the very early money several decades ago, and did a lot (but by no means all) of the very early research. The US is not responsible for all of the work even going back that far, and it certainly isn't responsible for many of the advances that have given the Internet most of the success it's had over the past decade or so.
However, the fact that you apparently don't know that (or choose to ignore/disbelieve it) is an excellent example of why the rest of us don't want you guys in charge any more.
IIRC, there was nothing in the original proposals that specified that the UN would be involved in running the Internet instead of ICANN (though as screwed up organisations go, ICANN are one of the few to really give the UN a run for their money). The important point was simply that it would be something under multilateral control, not a talking shop for the US government.
As others have noted, it's a formal title. In the UK, it applies to members of the Privy Council, which includes the Cabinet, and to various nobles with historic titles. Hence, as Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw is addressed formally in written correspondence as "The Right Honourable Jack Straw".
You'll also hear members of parliament refer to "The honourable member for <place>" during debates, for those MPs who aren't Privy Counsellors, or to "The right honourable member for <place>" for those who are. I'm sure you can find more details somewhere like Wikipedia if you're interested.
No offence, but apparently you're mistaken!
Isn't this where someone starts shouting about Digg, kuro5hin, or something? ;-)
It's really scary how fast a story can spread through the media, too.
In my spare time, I happen to do the publicity for a local sports club. Someone gave a comment to a media rep a few weeks ago, saying that we were hiring a full-time coach for the first time. We don't know exactly where the story originated; it wasn't any of the executive committee, nor the coach concerned, so presumably came from a not-particularly-well-informed club member.
That wound up on the AP wire, and within 24 hours, it had made a couple of the big national papers, the BBC News web site, and goodness knows how many local press contacts. The organisers, including myself, aren't professional administrators -- we all have day jobs, and volunteer to help run the club in our free time -- and we were so swamped with enquiries from media contacts that we had to set up a press releases page on our web site setting the record straight, and in some cases switch off mobile phones during the day so we didn't keep getting disturbed at work by people who'd managed to track down a personal number.
The really scary thing is that the article was completely wrong. The coach in question had been with us for some time, and his role hadn't really changed, nor had that of the 20 or so other professionals we bring in to help coach our members. But once it's been "researched" by a "normally reliable source" (that description from the BBC person we contacted to ask what they were talking about in their article) it gets everywhere.
In other words, I don't think it much matters whether something is "researched on-line" or not any more. The level of research behind a lot of the stories you read is shockingly bad, and often many of the big news outlets will be running a whole story of a single small piece on one of the news wires. Whether that's accurate, and whether it comes from an off-hand comment overheard in a bar or it's lifted from a blog of unknown quality, doesn't much seem to matter.
I think this is the same case covered on Slashdot a few weeks back, isn't it? In that case, the judge definitely does care, and indeed gave the RIAA lawyer a pretty good roasting about their dubious legal shenanigans in court the first time. The transcript was hilarious, in a sad-but-true kinda way.
This from a guy with less than 1% of my post count? ;-)
Well, the US likes to lend its laws to Europe when it comes to IP and such, so we were just returning the favour. :-)
Wouldn't the VoIP example be a pretty clear breach of competition laws in most places?
Do they really mean just e-mail, or do they mean a replacement for Outlook? There are many decent e-mail clients on many platforms, but IME it's the lack of things like calendars and Exchange connectivity that get in the way at the office, and cause things like Thunderbird to be rejected even though there's a Windows version.
I'm not quite sure why the parent post was modded (+1, Funny). Maybe I'm missing something (or maybe it really is as bad as the one thing I can think of <shudder>).
In any case, I don't see why there shouldn't be a legal bar on naming anyone accused of any offence before they have been convicted. Going through the accusation process is bad enough, without an innocent being tarred for life afterwards because people assume there's no smoke without fire.
The thing is, "sticks and stones" doesn't work in the real world. Try telling a teacher who has been falsely accused by a malicious student of assault or sexual harrassment that it's only words, as they get suspended, ultimately lose their job because of negative PR even when found not guilty, and lose their livelihood, while the child concerned shows off to their friends about how they did Mr Jones over because they're really cool.
I've seen this almost happen to not one but two close family friends, completely independently. Everyone knew that the accusations were rubbish -- in one case the child even admitted as much later on -- but it still made the teachers' lives hell for several months as they fought the system to clear their name. Once an allegation like that gets made public, most of the damage is done, regardless of the outcome.
Legally speaking, that depends on where you are and what you're including under "defamation". For example, reporting something factually correct but in conflict with an individual's privacy rights may be covered by defamation-style laws.
Having been the victim of on-line defamation before myself (by an ex on LiveJournal in my case), I believe something should be done here, because at present you basically have little comeback, or none at all if you're in a different jurisdiction to the hosting web site.
On the other hand, that's not a popular view around here, because it has the audacity to suggest that my right not to be publicly attacked based on incorrect and misleading information might be more important than someone else's precious right to free speech under all circumstances ever, even if they're speaking hurtful untruths. When I made the mistake of mentioning this before, I was told to shove it by a large number of Slashbots, most of whom have presumably never been on the receiving end of this and thought it was all terribly funny.
Even I acknowledge that there are serious free speech issues here, though. If you can force anyone to take down anything by simply telling the host you disagree with it, then justified free speech is damaged. If you require some standard of proof to go with the allegation that the content is unreasonable, then you just gave the host the role of a court. If you never remove anything, then people can be damaged. (I'm still rather disturbed that the Slashdot editors didn't make an exception and remove an anonymous post containing the personal contact information of the father of the convicted con artist mentioned in a story the other day, whose health and property were very much endangered by posting that information publicly.)
A little older and wiser now, I've concluded that there is definitely a problem here. Unfortunately, I've also concluded that there is no easy solution that is fair to both sides in a dispute.
It's safer not to think about the provisions the UK government has in an emergency. Under the Civil Contingencies Bill they recently rammed through parliament, they basically said that a load of political people can declare an emergency. Unless something changed very late on, it doesn't even have to be major players like the Prime Minister or Home Secretary, who will at least be held accountable eventually, if only by getting their government unelected. Rather, it can be a few political weenies at the Treasury or something.
Now it gets really good. Once an emergency has been declared, the government may require you to do almost anything (literally), may require you not to do almost anything (literally), and specifically may restrict your freedom of movement or association, may confiscate your property or kill any animals without any obligation to pay compensation... well, you get the idea. I don't think they quite suspended voting rights and the requirement to hold a general election every few years, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had been added as a late amendment.
Yeah, it's a great Act, right up there with Regulation of Investigatory Powers, all the recent anti-terrorism stuff, ID cards/database, and the almost-finished-without-any-parliamentary-oversigh t police plan to install spy cameras every few hundred metres on our main roads and track every vehicle in the UK everywhere it goes.
We really, really need a written constitution setting forth, amongst other things, reasonable rights to privacy and not to have personal information about you stored where it's not absolutely necessary. No, a declared state of emergency isn't a good enough excuse: that's like the US government saying they'll only completely ignore the US Constitution during war time, and then conveniently reinterpreting the word "war" to apply to actions against unspecified targets with unspecified end criteria ("war on drugs", "war on terror") in order to pretend the rights of citizens no longer apply in perpetuity.
The sort of thing they're talking about seems unlikely to help anyway. If something like a highly virulent human flu-bird flu hybrid does take hold, they'll never have the resources to track down all the individuals who might be affected fast enough to do anything useful anyway. It might help with collecting statistics, but I can't see it saving (m)any lives. (Can anyone who knows more about the field tell me whether I'm missing something here?) At that point, mandating complete surveillance of society that will inevitably be abused sooner rather than later seems a rather high price to pay for a small, and only hypothetical, benefit.
Because the concept is more fundamental than merely "resource release is destruction", although the latter is arguably the most important aspect of it.
What you're doing in C++ is tying the period between allocation and release of a resource to the lifetime of an object. If you like, the resource-owning class's invariant conditions include the fact that the resource is allocated correctly.
That means that allocating the resource in the constructor is quite fundamental. If the allocation fails, the constructor should fail. If it does so in the idiomatic way -- throwing an exception -- then the resource-owning object never exists, and can't inadvertently be misused because its name will be inaccessible.
Similarly, as long as the resource-owning class is instantiated as an automatic variable, the deterministic destruction when it goes out of scope ensures that the allocation of the resource can't outlast the owning object either. Again, it also ensures that once the resource is no longer allocated, the name of the owning object is no longer accessible.
In between, you have a valid object, which can present whatever interface the programmer deems useful in order to access the resource it owns, and which can hide any handle necessary to refer to that resource.
All of this is possible because of the interaction between C++'s scoping rules, automatic variables, deterministic destruction and exceptions. Since Java lacks at least two of those, it's not possible to get the main benefits of RAII in the same way.
It's not just you. A lot of people in this discussion are confusing fundamentally different concepts whose implementations often happen to coincide.
In particular, whether or not something is ever cleaned up is different from whether or not it is cleaned up promptly. Also, releasing memory is not the same as destroying/finalising an object that happens to be stored in that memory.
Garbage collection addresses exactly one of the four possible combinations: making sure that memory is always released.
The main advantage of C++'s RAII idiom covers the opposite combination: making sure that objects are destroyed promptly. (As it happens, in C++ the underlying memory is also guaranteed to be released after the destruction of the object when using automatic variables, so we're actually covering two of the combinations here.)
The fact that the latter can be used to guarantee the former, but the converse does not hold, is why RAII is a much more powerful tool than a straightforward GC. The fact that the former works automatically while the latter requires some coding skill is why a simple GC is a more reliable tool for average programmers than RAII.
As always, you have to look at what you've got to do and who's going to be doing it, and then pick an appropriate point on the power-safety spectrum.
A lot of posts in this discussion almost imply that there is 100% manual memory management, or some sort of super-generational-buzzwordy-GC, and nothing in between. That simply isn't the case.
I write C++ for a living. I work with intricate, graph-like data structures, using performance-sensitive algorithms, with pointers all over the place. And yet I can't remember the last time I had to use the delete operator, nor any sort of super-ref-counted-smart-pointer. We just have a simple, effective ownership scheme, and deterministic destruction of the owning objects guarantees everything is always cleaned up completely and promptly.
There is no magic. There is only knowing which tool to use for which job.
Disclaimer: I write libraries used in things like CAD software for a living. This post is based on my personal impressions of the industry as a whole, and does not represent the views of my employer or anyone else working in the business.
I think fully capable, open source CAD software is a great example of why OSS works well for mass market applications, but will never realistically compete with traditional, commercial applications in a more specialist field. I think those who don't work in the industry often fail to appreciate that we're talking about some of the largest, most complex software applications in the world here!
For the benefit of those not in the know, let me try to describe the scale of the task "create a professional standard CAD package". A conservative estimate of the effort required to produce a mid-range, pro-standard package is 1,000,000 man-hours. (It's taken a lot more than that for most of these companies to get where they are today, but let's assume we're basically cloning with at least some idea of what we're doing, and not repeating all of the past two decades' R&D as well.) The guys who work on the software that goes into a pro standard CAD package are generally pretty good programmers with strong academic backgrounds, so the total cost of the development staff alone is measured well into eight figures of dollars at commercial rates, and remember this is a conservative estimate.
In other words, to come up with an OSS alternative of just what we have today from the major vendors, you'd need to have something like a team of 50 skilled and knowledgable developers working full-time with good project management for a decade. I don't believe any OSS project is capable of attracting that in a non-mass-market field, nor is ever likely to be.
Not at all. If you've ever looked into getting a technical book published, for example, then I'm sure you'll have seen the sort of "application form" any big-name publisher will expect you to complete. You'll be expected to give a detailed breakdown of the structure for each chapter; typically a couple of mostly complete sample chapters; an analysis of the market you're aiming for, any other books in competition with yours and how they compare; a list of key selling points for your book; and plenty more. And that's just to get them to consider publishing your book.
Erm... No. I go to my local bookstore and take a quick look, or I hear the track on the radio and like it, or I see the trailer for a movie and ask friends who went to see it already what they thought of it. Under your scheme, all of this might even be impossible, because it's not clear whether it would even be practical to run a bookstore or music radio station profitably.
So you only have to be able to do all the work necessary to produce a complete work for free, and then you might get paid something for the next one? This is where your idea really isn't practical. How many people are ever going to set out on that road, no matter how good the end result might be if everything went well? How many people could even afford to? You've created a barrier to entry that is completely divorced from ability to create a useful work and entirely dependent on finanicial resources.
One man's foolishness is another man's genius. It's no more artificial than the concept of physical property: the natural order of things is that you can take what you want unless someone physically stops you. A long time ago, we worked out that there are benefits to recognising the convention of "possession" even where someone is not physically guarding their goods. This generally works, because most people in society respect the convention, and you can effectively charge the few who don't with theft.
There's no particular reason a similar concept shouldn't apply to intellectual property. Clearly IP works differently to PP, so the rules needn't be exactly the same, but if there are benefits to have some sort of IP framework then the question just becomes what the rules should be such that the general public finds them reasonable.
I just don't see how what you describe is at all workable.
For a start, you're asking the general public to pay for a commodity product that they can't specify or examine in any detail in advance. In fields where commissioning is effectively the norm, you usually have a fairly detailed specification (my new wardrobe will have these dimensions, these shelves, and be made of this wood with that finish) and/or ongoing participation of those commissioning the work to ensure that the result is satisfactory. That's hardly viable for a fiction novel, or a piece of pop music, or a shoot 'em up aimed at a wide market and sold at a low price per individual customer/patron. How this is an improvement on today's model, where the prospective consumer can see the work to assess its value and decide whether it's worth the asking price, I just don't see.
In addition, I'm afraid I can't see your model for new artists working. As you say, it's difficult for someone to break through now, even when they can write their first book, and use that as its own marketing, letting stand on its merits. If you couldn't do that, because anyone who wanted to could just take it without any sort of compensation at all, all you've got is a sales pitch produced with no budget.
One plausible result of such a scheme is that most works will wind up being "commissioned" by the big publishing/musical companies who can afford the up-front expenses in exchange for some token compensation to the artist, and then sold on a mass-produced scale for a price where it's easier for people to pay it than to copy the work themselves. Result: even more profit for big business, even less compensation for the hard-working artist. Not the desired outcome, I hope you'll agree.
OK, that sounds reasonable enough in principle, but how is that going to work in practice? You'd need thousands of people to be interested in a particular random paperback novel being written in order to get enough money to pay the rent for the author during the months it takes to write it, yet still have each individual pay the same price they pay today for the pleasure of reading it.
So do you believe everyone should have to pay every time they want to read the same book, or do you believe nothing should be created for mass markets?
Indeed. Then again, I know a great number of people (especially here on Slashdot) would say that Microsoft products suck, yet most of them still use Microsoft products everyday. :-)
Absolutely, and I think this is the crux of the current problem.
If people believe that the law is fair, then most people will respect and obey it. Look at legitimate on-line music sales, where the asking price for a single track is under a dollar and you don't have to pay for five filler tracks just to get the one you want, to give a particularly relevant example. Try asking about where to find a crack for a good game on a Usenet group or on-line forum about it, and chances are several dedicated players will tell you to get stuffed and go buy a copy like everyone else, because they want to support the company that provided a game they enjoyed.
The problems start when the general population starts to feel that something isn't fair. A CD album priced at an order of magnitude more than it costs to produce isn't widely perceived as fair, and people aren't buying as many of them as they used to. It doesn't just have to be money, either. Films that are released in the US well before they're released here in the UK are often ripped off on a massive scale over the Internet, even by people who are regular cinema goers but don't want to wait for a month to see it. I know plenty of people (myself included) who would buy a lot of music on-line if it were just the music they were getting, but won't use current services much because DRM is inconvenient and stops us doing reasonable things with the music we're paying for.
Now, if the music industry were seen to be fairly rewarding the musicians, song writers, production teams etc. who are directly producing the music, and charging a reasonable price to the public for the works, then I think copyright infringement would drop to a pretty low level, and ultimately become viewed as antisocially as smoking in a room with people who don't or drink-driving.
At that point, peer pressure will do most of the work, because society in general respects the rules and abides by them. Then you can use copyright legislation to prevent the selfish few from taking advantage by breaking the rules. Keep the penalties sensible - fine someone who's been ripping music illegally a few times the market price of each track they've ripped, or something - and again, people will respect the law. Perhaps more importantly for the media industries, when you do sting someone who really is undermining distribution on a wide scale by mass copying, you'll have public support for taking them for huge sums, in the same way no-one minds today when a serial fraudster gets fined millions when he's caught.
As the old adage says, if you need a police state to enforce your laws, then your laws are broken. If your laws are reasonable, they mostly won't need to be enforced in the first place, because they'll be followed voluntarily.
We seem to agree on most of this. Where we disagree here is that I think it's easy to say something doesn't need to be scarce when you're looking at a specific example that has already been made and can easily be distributed.
The point of the various IP protections, as I believe they should work, is that you have to look at the bigger picture, not the one-offs. If there's no benefit to offering a work to the public, then many potential creators won't want (or be able to afford) to spend their time on creating or improving works. Sure, there will always be those who are kind enough to work on something and give it away to others freely, but a lot of works don't originate that way. Removing the incentive to create those works as well will make them more than scarce, it will make them non-existent.