Really, though, I would think that such a practice would itself be subject to some kind of government censure, although they are still doing it.
Yes, it really should be. I believe "barratry" is the word you're looking for.
Of course, this is the same US administration that reined in the DoJ just as it was about to hurt Microsoft, so its position on the people vs. big business is pretty clear. I wouldn't hold your breath on the barratry thing...
The case isn't THAT obviously open-and-shut, is it?
Actually, it almost looks like it is. The music industry guys seem to have dropped the ball big time with this one.
A little digging turns up a load of links to the various litigation documents, courtesy of defence lawyer Ray Beckerman's blog. If you read the defence's revised reply memorandum of law, they make a convincing (to me as a non-lawyer) argument for what appear to be two open-and-shut claims, which basically mean the plaintiffs have failed to make a case for the defendant to answer. If the court accepts that argument, presumably any of the the other stuff doesn't matter, because the music industry didn't file it at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way.
Interestingly, just before the conclusion, that defence memorandum reads
The Court should therefore dismiss the Complaint with prejudice for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted. See Cuoco v. Moritsugu, 222 F.3d 99, 112 (2d Cir. 2000) (dismissing without leave to replead because nothing in the complaint "suggests that the plaintiff has a claim that she has inadequately or inartfully pleaded and that she should therefore be given a chance to reframe").
That sounds to me like not only are they trying to get this initial case dismissed, but also they're trying to block any attempt to bring any directly related case in future. I don't know how the appeal rules work if the court finds for the defence in this case, but given the defence's argument and the judge's apparent contempt for actions that don't give the defendant a fair chance to defend herself, it sounds as though this one's going to stop as dead as any music industry case ever can.
Law suits should not be a legitimate business model.
Actually, the most interesting thing about the transcript as I read it was that the lawyer for the music industry wanted the defendant/her lawyer to mess around with some industry settlement process, but the judge basically squashed it flat:
MR. MASCHIO:
I'll give her my card, but our instructions are for these people to deal with the conference settlement center. They had discussions.
THE COURT: I'm sorry. Your instructions from me, the Judge --
MR. MASCHIO: Okay.
THE COURT: -- are that, if she appears with a lawyer, her lawyer will deal with you.
MR. MASCHIO: Oh, absolutely, your Honor.
THE COURT: Otherwise, you take your action and you file it in front of an arbitrator.
MR. MASCHIO: No, all I was suggesting, your Honor, is that, if she doesn't come with an attorney, that the more direct way of doing this -- and this is just to facilitate things -- is to deal directly with the conference center.
THE COURT: Not once you've filed an action in my court.
MR. MASCHIO: Okay.
THE COURT: You file an action in my court, your conference center is out of it. They have nothing to do with anything.
MR. MASCHIO: Okay. I'll give her my card.
THE COURT: If you are here, you are here as an officer of the court. You're taking up my time and cluttering up my calendar, so you will do it in the context of the Court. Maybe it will be with a magistrate judge, but you will be representing your client, not some conference center. And if your people want things to be done through the conference center, tell them not to bring lawsuits.
[Emphasis added]
The judge earlier stamped on an attempt to get the defendant to state a position under oath before having the chance to take legal advice pretty heavily, too.
Certainly we MUST NOT allow this to become a legal precedent.
I hate to break this to you, but it already is a legal precedent, at least within US jurisdiction. Moreover, this ruling just reinforced it. I don't fully understand the US legal system, being an outsider and all, but AFAICT this would have to go very high indeed to get overturned now, and the chances of that happening in this case seem slim.
so... where are *your* stats? Or don't you need such trivial things in Cambridge?
I'm all for people being able to back up their claims, but please make at least a token effort to do some basic research before you chime in! More or less any sensible search in Google leads to numerous relevant pages: try "cycling accident statistics cambridge uk" or "cycle car relative accident rate" for example. Whether it's local cycling groups or national government statistics, the picture is pretty consistent in this case. And you could have found that for yourself in the time it's taking you to read this post.
And I would think a university population, would have to be adjusted because young people have more accidents via recklessness and drinking.
You might think that, but if you go try one of those web searches I just gave you, you'll actually know.
Having never used Acrobat to create PDF's, what DOES it add that "print to PDF" tools do not?
Well, the differences between good PDF generators (which I'll assume Acrobat is, though it's not my personal choice) and bad ones (like many print-to-PDF hacks) include:
size of output file (particularly where unusual fonts are concerned, as noted by another poster)
quality of output file (I've had poor quality PDF output rejected by a professional printing bureau since they couldn't read them due to bugs in the generator tool creating an incorrect document)
meta features like bookmarks and TOCs, hyperlinks and preview images working vs. being completely ignored.
Thanks once again for the helpful comments. A couple of the con points you mentioned sound a little worrying: I do have a relatively high-end ATI graphics card, and as a professional software developer I'm certainly interested in seeing how the OSS compile-it-yourself model works in its natural environment sooner rather than later. Still, maybe simple is good to start with. Presumably, this being Linux, I can replace an Ubuntu distro with another fairly easily when I'm ready to explore a little deeper?
Icons generally are double clicked whereas toolbar buttons are not. [...] That convention is generally accepted on most OSes throughout history.
The problem is, the waters have been muddied.
In my web browser, I click a hyperlink once to open it. In my file system browser, I double-click. Unless the two have been pseudo-merged, in which case, maybe I only click once.
In applications, dialog boxes clearly indicate where I can do things by using standardised widgets like buttons and check boxes. Unless they are pretend web pages, and you have to click the underlined (or not) blue text that isn't really a label, but works like a button.
Toolbars have icons in them, which you can click once to do what they do. Except, obviously, when those icons really indicate the current option from a menu of icons, such option being changed if you click the not-quite-arrow triangle thing slightly too far away from the button along the toolbar to be visually connected to it.
I agree wholeheartedly with the spirit of the grandparent post: things that work subtly differently in two different places are bad UI design. One of the things that made early Windows versions such a great success was the consistency of interfaces it brought to a world full of uniquely styled MS-DOS applications. Apple always had this going for them as well, and they were better at it. The fact that Microsoft and their slightly-too-trendy followers now try to distinguish their own applications by breaking their own usability guidelines is not a point in their favour!
My problem isn't so much with using a Linux system. I work with several flavours of UNIX and occasional Linux boxes all the time at the office, so the basics of the file system and such are reasonably familiar to me.
The problem I have is much more about confidence in getting a system up and running from scratch. I've just read too many nightmare stories about people inadvertently trashing this or that, or having to reinstall the whole thing from scratch after messing up a single line in a configuration file somewhere. Doubtless an experienced user could have identified the problem quickly and resolved it without such drastic measures, but I don't have that experience, nor convenient access to anyone who does if I screw it up. Hence I need at least a fair chance of getting everything set up properly first time, and everything I've seen suggests that without outside help, I don't have that.
Perhaps this is just an irrational fear of the unknown, but as I said before, I also do serious work on this machine. As interested as I am in getting a Linux partition up and running to play with, it's a distant second to keeping the machine fully operational. The LiveCD idea has a certain appeal as a way of seeing what it's like, but ultimately it sounds like ducking the question: what worries me is screwing up the installation/configuration in some (to me) fatal way, not getting to know the system once it's installed and running.
What is it that makes you recommend Ubuntu in particular? Would that still apply given I'm reasonably happy using this sort of system, and only really worried about the installation, configuration and updating side of things?
What if the individual entrepreneur is organized as a C corporation?
No problem. The entrepreneur keeps the copyright, and allows the business to make whatever copies are necessary.
Corporations themselves are not evil; they are a form of business entity.
Sure. I don't object to the existence of corporations, their intent to make money, or their use of copyright material to do so. I simply acknowledge that it is never a business itself that creates new works; it is the people working for the business. Thus I believe any legal rights granted to promote creation of works -- what are commonly called intellectual property rights -- should be heavily biased towards supporting individuals, or collaborations that directly produce new works.
Now, if businesses can set up an industry around these people as a side-effect, great, that's capitalism. But if they can't, I don't think IP laws should be used to bail them out. That would be providing unwarranted support for an ineffective business model, which isn't the goal of those laws, nor indeed a worthy goal at all in my book.
Ironically enough, choice is exactly the reason I still don't have Linux installed on my home PC, despite having intended to dual boot it from the day it was born three years ago.
I'm an experienced techie, and in most respects a geek. I use Firefox and OpenOffice. But every time I look at Linux, from an outsider's point of view, I have no idea which distros would make a good starting point, no idea whether my hardware will work reliably, no idea which packages I'd want to install, and so on. And it's not because I haven't looked, either; I've spent days browsing the web, reading guides to the distros, supported hardware lists, and all that. But since half of them contradicted the other half, and I have no idea which are giving me rumours and hear'say and which are giving me up-to-date information, they're not much help.
Perhaps I should just bite the bullet and install one of them, and see how I do. But that's not in my nature. I use this machine for serious work as well as playing around, and I'm naturally averse to installing anything when I don't know enough about it in advance to be comfortable controlling it.
I live in Cambridge, UK (the old university city) where cycling is a Very Big Thing. Many people use it as their main form of transportation, not least because 15,000+ university students aren't allowed to bring their cars with them when they come here to study.
Our accident statistics show that cycling is far more dangerous than driving by just about any measure you care to pick. Involvement in accidents, and the results in terms of injuries and equipment damage, are far worse at all levels for cyclists than for cars. And of course, many relatively minor accidents involving cyclists go unreported, whereas almost all accidents involving a car and causing serious damage or injury get into the records.
The quiz you linked to is a fascinating exercise in defending a position, but certainly isn't anywhere near representative of the situation in this cycling-heavy city. The questions are almost all loaded. In particular, the accident statistics for what they call an "enthusiastic cyclist" are much better than the average. They do concede that in Britain, cycling is more dangerous than driving, while apparently it's not in a few other countries. I'd be interested to see how many of those other countries use cycling as heavily as we do here in Cambridge. And I've never heard of the "Cyclists Touring Club", despite knowing people (and for several years being one of them) who cycle almost everywhere.
Perhaps we really are uniquely bad in this respect. God knows, there are plenty of local cycling enthusiasts pushing ideas to make cycling safer around these parts, and the local councils' pro-cycling measures are frequently attacked as being ineffective. But I'd like to know how many average people (not "enthusiastic" cycling club members) use a bike as their primary means of travel in the other places considered before accepting their conclusions.
You don't actually need flash, sure some sites are all flash based, but hey, that's their problem!
It's true that you don't need Flash, and it's probably true that most Flash content is either ads or web-site-in-a-SWF design, neither of which is a good idea.
However, Flash is still a useful tool if used to provide small, interactive areas as part of a web site. The BBC News web site often does this to good effect: right now, they've got an animated guide to how hurricanes form as part of their coverage of Katrina. You can still read the news without viewing the supporting material, but it's interesting and there if you want it.
The BBC generally seem to get this sort of thing right. Earlier this year, they had a couple of neat Flash applications presenting information about the election on a map as it came in. They often provide backgrounders for their main stories like the one I linked to above or a similar one explaining tsunamis a few months ago. They certainly get my vote for the "most effective use of Flash" prize.
Are you saying anyone who ever took part in a boxing-match can be sued for assault in the UK ?
No; the parent over-generalised. You can consent under certain circumstances, such as to allow surgery or as part of a properly conducted sporting activity. See here for example. Note, however, that attacking someone in a way that is not covered by the accepted rules of your activity, and therefore does not have the implied consent of the other party, can get you in a lot of trouble. Also, there are further legal requirements on boxing events specifically in the UK, including the presence of medical cover.
I believe Walt Disney himself created those characters and therefore it's pretty straightforward that his corporation should be allowed those rights.
This is where we do disagree, I think. I make a clear distinction between the rights of an individual and the rights of a corporation. Corporations don't create new content, individuals do, even if they're working for a corporation at the time.
I have no problem with offering generous legal protection to the rights of individuals or collaborating groups who actually produce new work, if that's the bargain necessary to get those works created in the first place and ultimately contributed to society. I do have a problem with providing similarly generous legal rights to a money-making body that does not itself create new work, simply because the rights were granted to the creators and they were effectively forced to hand them over in exchange for a relatively small pay cheque. The original creators could have created the same work without the help of the corporation middlemen, and exactly one of the two groups is expendable as far as promoting the creation of new works for the benefit of society.
Thus I believe that while it is necessary for corporations to be able to secure some rights in exchange for paying an individual, those rights should be heavily restricted. If copyright is to be given up to a megacorp in exchange for compensation, then the megacorp doesn't need more than a few years (depending on the nature of the work) to capitalise on that before giving up the material to society. Perhaps it should be impossible to transfer copyright at all -- thus preventing the intra-industry collaboration that discriminates against the valuable content creators so much today -- but a business should be able to make an exclusive distribution deal for a fixed time period with the work's creators.
In any case, the current balance surely can't be right. With copyright lasting effectively forever and transferrable, and creators of works effectively forced to hand it over to businesses for a pittance if they want to get serious advertising and distribution volume, the original goal -- to promote the creation and distribution of new works -- is being placed second to corporate profits. Something's got to give, and I think in the reasonably near future, the Internet will be the catalyst for exactly that.
So why aren't you at the top, making those decisions, if you are so clued in?
Because my interest is in doing good technical work, not management. I already work for a small company whose managers are perfectly competent enough to use sensible recruiting policies themselves. I don't imagine someone like me working for someone like them is a coincidence for either party.:-)
...if I were a mid-level manager and needed to hire an IT person, and I hire someone with certification I can truthfully say I checked his qualifications. If they screw up, well, it's not my fault because I checked on what I could.
On the contrary: it most certainly would be your fault, because you used a naive recruitment process and hired crappy applicants, and your job was to use a good process to hire good applicants.
I'd rather have a competent tech or programmer than a certified one, but if you're not a the top, it can be different.
If I were at the top, my organisation would only use recruiters who liked the start of your second paragraph more than the end of your first. Of course, the system is engineered by those currently at the top to ensure that no-one like me will ever get there to threaten them. Oh, well...
While not directly illegal, choosing to disqualify someone based on the most readily understandable part of their resume is asking for a lawsuit. It comes off as an obvious attempt to mask hiring discrimination that follows under the letter of the law.
It's long been regarded as good practice, at least among employers I've encountered here in the UK, to have a simple written statement of what the company looks for during a recruitment process, including anything that will be used to automatically disqualify candidates. This is sensible anyway, since it avoids one particular interviewer's prejudices artificially affecting the process. However, it also guarantees that everyone's singing from the same hymn sheet, so if someone is rejected on grounds like this, there's a clear policy to justify it and it can't be turned around into some sort of discrimination case because the unwanted candidate also happened to be black, female, or whatever.
When contemplating notions of "legality" one must first contemplate what sort of jurors you may ultimately be forced to justify your actions to.
Screw that. If a company can't even apply its own tests of technical merit in the hiring process, and then can't fire someone crap for the same reason, your economy is doomed by your own legal system. I support, with reservations, legislation that prevents discrimination against groups who are clearly the victims of widescale prejudice that should be irrelevant to their ability to do a job. However, that is the absolute limit of how a company's hands should be tied when it comes to staff selection; requiring a company to employ someone they really don't want is unlikely to be good for either party.
(BTW, the "with reservations" above is only because I have personally encountered several cases where this legislation was abused by the supposedly disadvantaged party to force a win-win proposition at an employer's expense, and very few where it was used to seek redress after genuinely inappropriate discrimination. I certainly do not condone inappropriate discrimination where a decision is not justified on other, more objective grounds.)
I agree. Many of the best moments in B5 related to the established supporting roles rather than the main players like Sheridan and Delenn. Bester was perhaps first among them (though a certain Ranger gave him a run for his money). The Core Is Mother, The Core Is Father was one of the most interesting episodes, and the depth Koenig brought to a character that only actually appeared in a handful of episodes during the five series was remarkable.
Part of me thinks it's a shame they never made Whatever Happened To Mr Bester, to resolve the Bester-Garibaldi storyline where you can work out what happened but you don't know how. Perhaps that's a trademark of the show -- you have to read between the lines, but if you do, there isn't much that isn't tidied up by the end -- but there was so much scope for an episode where Bester was viewed from both sides that it seems a missed opportunity. In another lifetime, perhaps...
I think it's sad that the parent post was modded flamebait. Copyright in its present form is not ideal, but the question of why someone who invests the time, money and effort to create a work shouldn't have the exclusive rights to it is a very good one. The rest of society didn't create the work, and has no moral claim on it without giving up something in return. Sadly, few people in these parts seem to grok even the basic significance of this argument, preferring to chant "Information wants to be free!" or mod (-1, I Wish It Weren't So).
That said...
Someone invented Mickey Mouse; people are still willing to pay for him; why should parasites who put no effort into the character get a free ride?
The problem is that large corporations now take advantage of the legal definition of copyright to pervert the original intent. They, who themselves put little effort into actually creating the works, reap huge profits. At the same time, the authors, singers, songwriters, performers, software developers, artists (in the graphical sense) and so on -- the people who actually create the work and bring it to life -- get relatively little. The collective power of the megacorps has left artists (in the general sense) with little choice but to surrender their copyright in exchange for distribution: try getting a book published without giving up the copyright to the publishers and see how far you get.
At this point, copyright is breaking down. The system is not securing long-term benefits for the originators of the work -- something I have far less problem with, since getting a work released at all is normally better for society than nothing -- but instead is allowing the transfer of those benefits under duress to the distributors who are just glorified middlemen.
IMHO, a better rule could be as simple as this: a person or group who themselves create a work can retain the copyright over it for an extended period, but the moment that right is transferred for compensation, the copyright reduces to a limit of a few years at most. That's still enough to make it commercially worthwhile for someone commissioning a work for hire or distributing someone else's work, but in the interests of society it denies ever-lasting, profit-making organisations (rather than individuals) the ability to keep intellectual property away from society so they can profit indefinitely themselves.
Fortunately, the game is swinging massively against these megacorps anyway. Most (sometimes all) of the value they add is in the advertising and distribution area; they rarely do more than arrange editing and presentation of the content itself, if that. These days, anyone with an Internet connection potentially has an equally powerful resource for the distribution and, with a little thought and good word-of-web-page publicity, for the advertising as well.
With a little technical knowledge, or help from friends (or even paid staff) who have it, the artists and supporting people who actually work to create the material could publish just about anything directly via the Internet. Even books can now be printed economically in small runs via specialist print-on-demand shops, and combined with places like Amazon you've got a self-publishing channel that offers returns approaching 50% of cover price for the authors and their immediate support, rather than the 5-10% you'd get going via an old-fashioned publishing house.
This is going to be big, and in the end, the megacorps will either adapt (for example, by providing actually-useful "portal" services in the sense that Amazon provides a link to the world of books) or lose out to individual artists and their supporting crews who have far lower margins and won't need to give up their right to fair compensation for their own works. I'm looking forward to the day when this is the norm; I think it will help to undo the unwelcome trends recently where a few big record labels, a few big publishing houses, etc. have been essentially cashing in the benefits for others' work, on the back of what's basically a loophole in the way copyright law is set up.
So what you're saying is: Search engines are illegal.
No. Infringing copyright is illegal. The search engine is only in trouble if it is doing so or, potentially, aiding others in doing so. If it isn't, this is a non-issue. If it is, why should it get special treatment compared to anyone else who breaks the law?
why should Google be responsible for monitoring ALL the internet for ALL companies looking for abuse of their property?
Because being the biggest name on the Internet does not exempt you from basic copyright obligations, and Google is directly or indirectly providing access to material without holding the copyright. It's indirect in this case, but see also past discussion of Google Groups, PDF to HTML translation, Google Cache, etc.
I know this isn't a popular view around these parts, but that doesn't make it any less true. You might argue a reasonable compromise that Google is providing a generic service similar to common carrier status in telecomms, and therefore should be excluded from responsibility as long as its service is completely impartial. However, even then it's tough to argue that when you've been explicitly notified of a specific breach you can continue to look the other way and pretend it's nothing to do with you.
Thanks for posting that. You sound like your gaming interests are close to my own: I loved BG2 for the storyline, variations and party dynamics, and I missed the same things in Neverwinter Nights (which I played for several hours, but still never really got into).
I always wondered about Planescape: Torment, but I'd probably be disappointed in the same things you were. Despite the comments of another poster who replied in this subthread, I'm pretty sure we would be in the target market for a game like that, but while I can forgive basic graphics in exchange for good gameplay/plot, nothing kills an RPG like a limiting interface.:-(
No need for the flamesuit, at least not from me. As I've noted a couple of times in this thread, I don't personally believe all of those devil's advocate positions and none of the pro-US ones, I was simply presenting the opposite extreme in the debate.
To address a couple of your points where I do happen to agree with some of the criticism of the US, though:
State sponsor of Terror - My favorite line from Anti-Americans. What airplanes have we blown up or rammed into buildings, what Walmart sells bomb jackets, and what car bombs do we drive down the street?
I was surprised to see so many people object to this one, since to me it seems to be one of the most true-to-life.
The US has supplied training and military equipment to many dubious regimes, not least several in the Middle East. The US supports the administration in Saudi Arabia, one of the biggest shelters for terrorists in the world. The US trained and equipped Osama bin Laden a few years ago, and IIRC supported Saddam and Iraq at one time, too. Israel, Pakistan, the list goes on.
Moreover, the US itself has engaged in direct military action and invading foreign countries in a manner I'm sure many of their citizens would describe as terrorist, with only the thinnest veil of international support, most recently in Iraq of course. The fact that they drop thousands of leaflets condemning the ruling party and then use carpet bombs/cruise missiles/gunships instead of blowing themselves up and then praising their cause on Arab TV is more an indicator of US military superiority than of inherently higher moral standards in the eyes of an Iraqi civilian who lost three family members since the US invasion started.
All in all, for a country that claims to be fighting a war on terror, the current US administration does look pretty hypocritical from the outside right now.
Constitution for big business - If you're talking the Kelo decision, yes, but Merck is paying a 1/4 of a BILLION for one death. Big tobacco is still paying for anti-smoking ads 7 years after the decision.
I think this criticism is usually more about extending copyright, reducing privacy, and the like.
Gitmo - I'd love to talk in detail about this, but the short of it is - the legal arguments don't exist, the moral arguments do.
Just ask any international aid agency. In fact, as I write, the very first link at Amnesty International is about Gitmo and "coercive interrogation".
If the US legal system provides convenient loopholes that offend the moral standards of the rest of the world, then that pretty much confirms that the criticism is valid, doesn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it really should be. I believe "barratry" is the word you're looking for.
Of course, this is the same US administration that reined in the DoJ just as it was about to hurt Microsoft, so its position on the people vs. big business is pretty clear. I wouldn't hold your breath on the barratry thing...
Actually, it almost looks like it is. The music industry guys seem to have dropped the ball big time with this one.
A little digging turns up a load of links to the various litigation documents, courtesy of defence lawyer Ray Beckerman's blog. If you read the defence's revised reply memorandum of law, they make a convincing (to me as a non-lawyer) argument for what appear to be two open-and-shut claims, which basically mean the plaintiffs have failed to make a case for the defendant to answer. If the court accepts that argument, presumably any of the the other stuff doesn't matter, because the music industry didn't file it at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way.
Interestingly, just before the conclusion, that defence memorandum reads
That sounds to me like not only are they trying to get this initial case dismissed, but also they're trying to block any attempt to bring any directly related case in future. I don't know how the appeal rules work if the court finds for the defence in this case, but given the defence's argument and the judge's apparent contempt for actions that don't give the defendant a fair chance to defend herself, it sounds as though this one's going to stop as dead as any music industry case ever can.
Actually, the most interesting thing about the transcript as I read it was that the lawyer for the music industry wanted the defendant/her lawyer to mess around with some industry settlement process, but the judge basically squashed it flat:
The judge earlier stamped on an attempt to get the defendant to state a position under oath before having the chance to take legal advice pretty heavily, too.
I hate to break this to you, but it already is a legal precedent, at least within US jurisdiction. Moreover, this ruling just reinforced it. I don't fully understand the US legal system, being an outsider and all, but AFAICT this would have to go very high indeed to get overturned now, and the chances of that happening in this case seem slim.
I'm all for people being able to back up their claims, but please make at least a token effort to do some basic research before you chime in! More or less any sensible search in Google leads to numerous relevant pages: try "cycling accident statistics cambridge uk" or "cycle car relative accident rate" for example. Whether it's local cycling groups or national government statistics, the picture is pretty consistent in this case. And you could have found that for yourself in the time it's taking you to read this post.
You might think that, but if you go try one of those web searches I just gave you, you'll actually know.
Well, the differences between good PDF generators (which I'll assume Acrobat is, though it's not my personal choice) and bad ones (like many print-to-PDF hacks) include:
Thanks once again for the helpful comments. A couple of the con points you mentioned sound a little worrying: I do have a relatively high-end ATI graphics card, and as a professional software developer I'm certainly interested in seeing how the OSS compile-it-yourself model works in its natural environment sooner rather than later. Still, maybe simple is good to start with. Presumably, this being Linux, I can replace an Ubuntu distro with another fairly easily when I'm ready to explore a little deeper?
The problem is, the waters have been muddied.
In my web browser, I click a hyperlink once to open it. In my file system browser, I double-click. Unless the two have been pseudo-merged, in which case, maybe I only click once.
In applications, dialog boxes clearly indicate where I can do things by using standardised widgets like buttons and check boxes. Unless they are pretend web pages, and you have to click the underlined (or not) blue text that isn't really a label, but works like a button.
Toolbars have icons in them, which you can click once to do what they do. Except, obviously, when those icons really indicate the current option from a menu of icons, such option being changed if you click the not-quite-arrow triangle thing slightly too far away from the button along the toolbar to be visually connected to it.
I agree wholeheartedly with the spirit of the grandparent post: things that work subtly differently in two different places are bad UI design. One of the things that made early Windows versions such a great success was the consistency of interfaces it brought to a world full of uniquely styled MS-DOS applications. Apple always had this going for them as well, and they were better at it. The fact that Microsoft and their slightly-too-trendy followers now try to distinguish their own applications by breaking their own usability guidelines is not a point in their favour!
A miracle?
Thanks for the comments.
My problem isn't so much with using a Linux system. I work with several flavours of UNIX and occasional Linux boxes all the time at the office, so the basics of the file system and such are reasonably familiar to me.
The problem I have is much more about confidence in getting a system up and running from scratch. I've just read too many nightmare stories about people inadvertently trashing this or that, or having to reinstall the whole thing from scratch after messing up a single line in a configuration file somewhere. Doubtless an experienced user could have identified the problem quickly and resolved it without such drastic measures, but I don't have that experience, nor convenient access to anyone who does if I screw it up. Hence I need at least a fair chance of getting everything set up properly first time, and everything I've seen suggests that without outside help, I don't have that.
Perhaps this is just an irrational fear of the unknown, but as I said before, I also do serious work on this machine. As interested as I am in getting a Linux partition up and running to play with, it's a distant second to keeping the machine fully operational. The LiveCD idea has a certain appeal as a way of seeing what it's like, but ultimately it sounds like ducking the question: what worries me is screwing up the installation/configuration in some (to me) fatal way, not getting to know the system once it's installed and running.
What is it that makes you recommend Ubuntu in particular? Would that still apply given I'm reasonably happy using this sort of system, and only really worried about the installation, configuration and updating side of things?
No problem. The entrepreneur keeps the copyright, and allows the business to make whatever copies are necessary.
Sure. I don't object to the existence of corporations, their intent to make money, or their use of copyright material to do so. I simply acknowledge that it is never a business itself that creates new works; it is the people working for the business. Thus I believe any legal rights granted to promote creation of works -- what are commonly called intellectual property rights -- should be heavily biased towards supporting individuals, or collaborations that directly produce new works.
Now, if businesses can set up an industry around these people as a side-effect, great, that's capitalism. But if they can't, I don't think IP laws should be used to bail them out. That would be providing unwarranted support for an ineffective business model, which isn't the goal of those laws, nor indeed a worthy goal at all in my book.
Ironically enough, choice is exactly the reason I still don't have Linux installed on my home PC, despite having intended to dual boot it from the day it was born three years ago.
I'm an experienced techie, and in most respects a geek. I use Firefox and OpenOffice. But every time I look at Linux, from an outsider's point of view, I have no idea which distros would make a good starting point, no idea whether my hardware will work reliably, no idea which packages I'd want to install, and so on. And it's not because I haven't looked, either; I've spent days browsing the web, reading guides to the distros, supported hardware lists, and all that. But since half of them contradicted the other half, and I have no idea which are giving me rumours and hear'say and which are giving me up-to-date information, they're not much help.
Perhaps I should just bite the bullet and install one of them, and see how I do. But that's not in my nature. I use this machine for serious work as well as playing around, and I'm naturally averse to installing anything when I don't know enough about it in advance to be comfortable controlling it.
I live in Cambridge, UK (the old university city) where cycling is a Very Big Thing. Many people use it as their main form of transportation, not least because 15,000+ university students aren't allowed to bring their cars with them when they come here to study.
Our accident statistics show that cycling is far more dangerous than driving by just about any measure you care to pick. Involvement in accidents, and the results in terms of injuries and equipment damage, are far worse at all levels for cyclists than for cars. And of course, many relatively minor accidents involving cyclists go unreported, whereas almost all accidents involving a car and causing serious damage or injury get into the records.
The quiz you linked to is a fascinating exercise in defending a position, but certainly isn't anywhere near representative of the situation in this cycling-heavy city. The questions are almost all loaded. In particular, the accident statistics for what they call an "enthusiastic cyclist" are much better than the average. They do concede that in Britain, cycling is more dangerous than driving, while apparently it's not in a few other countries. I'd be interested to see how many of those other countries use cycling as heavily as we do here in Cambridge. And I've never heard of the "Cyclists Touring Club", despite knowing people (and for several years being one of them) who cycle almost everywhere.
Perhaps we really are uniquely bad in this respect. God knows, there are plenty of local cycling enthusiasts pushing ideas to make cycling safer around these parts, and the local councils' pro-cycling measures are frequently attacked as being ineffective. But I'd like to know how many average people (not "enthusiastic" cycling club members) use a bike as their primary means of travel in the other places considered before accepting their conclusions.
It's true that you don't need Flash, and it's probably true that most Flash content is either ads or web-site-in-a-SWF design, neither of which is a good idea.
However, Flash is still a useful tool if used to provide small, interactive areas as part of a web site. The BBC News web site often does this to good effect: right now, they've got an animated guide to how hurricanes form as part of their coverage of Katrina. You can still read the news without viewing the supporting material, but it's interesting and there if you want it.
The BBC generally seem to get this sort of thing right. Earlier this year, they had a couple of neat Flash applications presenting information about the election on a map as it came in. They often provide backgrounders for their main stories like the one I linked to above or a similar one explaining tsunamis a few months ago. They certainly get my vote for the "most effective use of Flash" prize.
No; the parent over-generalised. You can consent under certain circumstances, such as to allow surgery or as part of a properly conducted sporting activity. See here for example. Note, however, that attacking someone in a way that is not covered by the accepted rules of your activity, and therefore does not have the implied consent of the other party, can get you in a lot of trouble. Also, there are further legal requirements on boxing events specifically in the UK, including the presence of medical cover.
This is where we do disagree, I think. I make a clear distinction between the rights of an individual and the rights of a corporation. Corporations don't create new content, individuals do, even if they're working for a corporation at the time.
I have no problem with offering generous legal protection to the rights of individuals or collaborating groups who actually produce new work, if that's the bargain necessary to get those works created in the first place and ultimately contributed to society. I do have a problem with providing similarly generous legal rights to a money-making body that does not itself create new work, simply because the rights were granted to the creators and they were effectively forced to hand them over in exchange for a relatively small pay cheque. The original creators could have created the same work without the help of the corporation middlemen, and exactly one of the two groups is expendable as far as promoting the creation of new works for the benefit of society.
Thus I believe that while it is necessary for corporations to be able to secure some rights in exchange for paying an individual, those rights should be heavily restricted. If copyright is to be given up to a megacorp in exchange for compensation, then the megacorp doesn't need more than a few years (depending on the nature of the work) to capitalise on that before giving up the material to society. Perhaps it should be impossible to transfer copyright at all -- thus preventing the intra-industry collaboration that discriminates against the valuable content creators so much today -- but a business should be able to make an exclusive distribution deal for a fixed time period with the work's creators.
In any case, the current balance surely can't be right. With copyright lasting effectively forever and transferrable, and creators of works effectively forced to hand it over to businesses for a pittance if they want to get serious advertising and distribution volume, the original goal -- to promote the creation and distribution of new works -- is being placed second to corporate profits. Something's got to give, and I think in the reasonably near future, the Internet will be the catalyst for exactly that.
Because my interest is in doing good technical work, not management. I already work for a small company whose managers are perfectly competent enough to use sensible recruiting policies themselves. I don't imagine someone like me working for someone like them is a coincidence for either party. :-)
On the contrary: it most certainly would be your fault, because you used a naive recruitment process and hired crappy applicants, and your job was to use a good process to hire good applicants.
If I were at the top, my organisation would only use recruiters who liked the start of your second paragraph more than the end of your first. Of course, the system is engineered by those currently at the top to ensure that no-one like me will ever get there to threaten them. Oh, well...
It's long been regarded as good practice, at least among employers I've encountered here in the UK, to have a simple written statement of what the company looks for during a recruitment process, including anything that will be used to automatically disqualify candidates. This is sensible anyway, since it avoids one particular interviewer's prejudices artificially affecting the process. However, it also guarantees that everyone's singing from the same hymn sheet, so if someone is rejected on grounds like this, there's a clear policy to justify it and it can't be turned around into some sort of discrimination case because the unwanted candidate also happened to be black, female, or whatever.
Screw that. If a company can't even apply its own tests of technical merit in the hiring process, and then can't fire someone crap for the same reason, your economy is doomed by your own legal system. I support, with reservations, legislation that prevents discrimination against groups who are clearly the victims of widescale prejudice that should be irrelevant to their ability to do a job. However, that is the absolute limit of how a company's hands should be tied when it comes to staff selection; requiring a company to employ someone they really don't want is unlikely to be good for either party.
(BTW, the "with reservations" above is only because I have personally encountered several cases where this legislation was abused by the supposedly disadvantaged party to force a win-win proposition at an employer's expense, and very few where it was used to seek redress after genuinely inappropriate discrimination. I certainly do not condone inappropriate discrimination where a decision is not justified on other, more objective grounds.)
I agree. Many of the best moments in B5 related to the established supporting roles rather than the main players like Sheridan and Delenn. Bester was perhaps first among them (though a certain Ranger gave him a run for his money). The Core Is Mother, The Core Is Father was one of the most interesting episodes, and the depth Koenig brought to a character that only actually appeared in a handful of episodes during the five series was remarkable.
Part of me thinks it's a shame they never made Whatever Happened To Mr Bester, to resolve the Bester-Garibaldi storyline where you can work out what happened but you don't know how. Perhaps that's a trademark of the show -- you have to read between the lines, but if you do, there isn't much that isn't tidied up by the end -- but there was so much scope for an episode where Bester was viewed from both sides that it seems a missed opportunity. In another lifetime, perhaps...
I think it's sad that the parent post was modded flamebait. Copyright in its present form is not ideal, but the question of why someone who invests the time, money and effort to create a work shouldn't have the exclusive rights to it is a very good one. The rest of society didn't create the work, and has no moral claim on it without giving up something in return. Sadly, few people in these parts seem to grok even the basic significance of this argument, preferring to chant "Information wants to be free!" or mod (-1, I Wish It Weren't So).
That said...
The problem is that large corporations now take advantage of the legal definition of copyright to pervert the original intent. They, who themselves put little effort into actually creating the works, reap huge profits. At the same time, the authors, singers, songwriters, performers, software developers, artists (in the graphical sense) and so on -- the people who actually create the work and bring it to life -- get relatively little. The collective power of the megacorps has left artists (in the general sense) with little choice but to surrender their copyright in exchange for distribution: try getting a book published without giving up the copyright to the publishers and see how far you get.
At this point, copyright is breaking down. The system is not securing long-term benefits for the originators of the work -- something I have far less problem with, since getting a work released at all is normally better for society than nothing -- but instead is allowing the transfer of those benefits under duress to the distributors who are just glorified middlemen.
IMHO, a better rule could be as simple as this: a person or group who themselves create a work can retain the copyright over it for an extended period, but the moment that right is transferred for compensation, the copyright reduces to a limit of a few years at most. That's still enough to make it commercially worthwhile for someone commissioning a work for hire or distributing someone else's work, but in the interests of society it denies ever-lasting, profit-making organisations (rather than individuals) the ability to keep intellectual property away from society so they can profit indefinitely themselves.
Fortunately, the game is swinging massively against these megacorps anyway. Most (sometimes all) of the value they add is in the advertising and distribution area; they rarely do more than arrange editing and presentation of the content itself, if that. These days, anyone with an Internet connection potentially has an equally powerful resource for the distribution and, with a little thought and good word-of-web-page publicity, for the advertising as well.
With a little technical knowledge, or help from friends (or even paid staff) who have it, the artists and supporting people who actually work to create the material could publish just about anything directly via the Internet. Even books can now be printed economically in small runs via specialist print-on-demand shops, and combined with places like Amazon you've got a self-publishing channel that offers returns approaching 50% of cover price for the authors and their immediate support, rather than the 5-10% you'd get going via an old-fashioned publishing house.
This is going to be big, and in the end, the megacorps will either adapt (for example, by providing actually-useful "portal" services in the sense that Amazon provides a link to the world of books) or lose out to individual artists and their supporting crews who have far lower margins and won't need to give up their right to fair compensation for their own works. I'm looking forward to the day when this is the norm; I think it will help to undo the unwelcome trends recently where a few big record labels, a few big publishing houses, etc. have been essentially cashing in the benefits for others' work, on the back of what's basically a loophole in the way copyright law is set up.
Blockquoth the AC:
No. Infringing copyright is illegal. The search engine is only in trouble if it is doing so or, potentially, aiding others in doing so. If it isn't, this is a non-issue. If it is, why should it get special treatment compared to anyone else who breaks the law?
Because being the biggest name on the Internet does not exempt you from basic copyright obligations, and Google is directly or indirectly providing access to material without holding the copyright. It's indirect in this case, but see also past discussion of Google Groups, PDF to HTML translation, Google Cache, etc.
I know this isn't a popular view around these parts, but that doesn't make it any less true. You might argue a reasonable compromise that Google is providing a generic service similar to common carrier status in telecomms, and therefore should be excluded from responsibility as long as its service is completely impartial. However, even then it's tough to argue that when you've been explicitly notified of a specific breach you can continue to look the other way and pretend it's nothing to do with you.
Thanks for posting that. You sound like your gaming interests are close to my own: I loved BG2 for the storyline, variations and party dynamics, and I missed the same things in Neverwinter Nights (which I played for several hours, but still never really got into).
I always wondered about Planescape: Torment, but I'd probably be disappointed in the same things you were. Despite the comments of another poster who replied in this subthread, I'm pretty sure we would be in the target market for a game like that, but while I can forgive basic graphics in exchange for good gameplay/plot, nothing kills an RPG like a limiting interface. :-(
No need for the flamesuit, at least not from me. As I've noted a couple of times in this thread, I don't personally believe all of those devil's advocate positions and none of the pro-US ones, I was simply presenting the opposite extreme in the debate.
To address a couple of your points where I do happen to agree with some of the criticism of the US, though:
I was surprised to see so many people object to this one, since to me it seems to be one of the most true-to-life.
The US has supplied training and military equipment to many dubious regimes, not least several in the Middle East. The US supports the administration in Saudi Arabia, one of the biggest shelters for terrorists in the world. The US trained and equipped Osama bin Laden a few years ago, and IIRC supported Saddam and Iraq at one time, too. Israel, Pakistan, the list goes on.
Moreover, the US itself has engaged in direct military action and invading foreign countries in a manner I'm sure many of their citizens would describe as terrorist, with only the thinnest veil of international support, most recently in Iraq of course. The fact that they drop thousands of leaflets condemning the ruling party and then use carpet bombs/cruise missiles/gunships instead of blowing themselves up and then praising their cause on Arab TV is more an indicator of US military superiority than of inherently higher moral standards in the eyes of an Iraqi civilian who lost three family members since the US invasion started.
All in all, for a country that claims to be fighting a war on terror, the current US administration does look pretty hypocritical from the outside right now.
I think this criticism is usually more about extending copyright, reducing privacy, and the like.
Just ask any international aid agency. In fact, as I write, the very first link at Amnesty International is about Gitmo and "coercive interrogation".
If the US legal system provides convenient loopholes that offend the moral standards of the rest of the world, then that pretty much confirms that the criticism is valid, doesn't it?