On the other hand, blocking a web site and blowing up the building hosting your company can have pretty close to the same effect on your business. That's pretty much the biggest problem here.
Yeah, this sucks for the hosted people, but hey - move your site. Your hoster sucks and doesn't deserve your business.
Spoken like someone who never administered more than his family home page.
Businesses usually can't just up and move to a different ISP. It requires a lot of time and money to do that, and they could just get the same bad luck at the next one anyway.
However, a spammer with false credentials faked his way into a hosting account with my colo provider and as a result, SBL blocked multiple entire submnets, rendering my entire site and service useless for almost an entire month (we deal with auctions, meaning nobody was getting closed notices, won notices, outbid notices, addresses to send payment, registration emails, lost password emails - and when they complained, I couldn't respond to help them and explain it to them).
What I've never understood is how a human-run operation that blacklists based on human decisions, and which by blacklisting an organisation can interfere with both their business and their reputation, isn't breaking about half a dozen laws that would subject them to more-or-less open-ended damage suits. Can any lawyer reading this please explain why this doesn't count under things like defamation legislation?
Moreover, lots of people around here like the term "fair use rights". AFAIK, there are no rights granted by fair use or similar provisions in the US whatsoever.
What you have is a list of uses where copying is legal if you can do it, but they're exemptions rather than rights. There is no obligation on the content provider to allow you to make a copy; if you can't, for example because you can't break the DRM system they use, then in the eyes of the law, that's your problem.
Herein lies one of the fundamental imbalances of the debate, and one reason legislation like the DMCA and EUCD is so evil: even uses that are legitimate and otherwise legal (making a back-up copy of a software CD you bought, for example) can be rendered illegal if the act of doing so requires you to bypass a copy protection mechanism in order to do so.
A group of friends and I have recently been considering this in the context of music: we'd like to make some compilation CDs containing our favourite copyrighted music tracks, for use at some dancing classes. Even if we properly pay for the original copies, and the right to play that music in public, and again for the right to copy the material into a compilation, we may still be stuffed if the original material is on a copy-protected not-quite-CD, as much of it is these days. At this point, none of the acts we'd be performing under proper licence would be illegal in itself, and perhaps the copy protection was only intended to inhibit illegal copying, but nevertheless if we went ahead we could be making criminals of ourselves. This is in the UK, BTW, but AFAICS a similar argument would apply anywhere in the US or Europe if the DMCA/EUCD is in force.
IMHO, the only realistic way you can defend the principle of copyright in law is if you also admit certain basic rights to users of copyright material, of which making back-ups and format-shifting for personal use are the two most obvious at present. That doesn't in any way render ripping off the media companies legal, and nor should it. However, it does mean that if (as the companies like to claim) the high price you pay for mass-produced media reflects the value of the content, then what you're buying is a personal right to that content, where using the MP3 player/car CD player/multimedia software on your computer that the same industry sells does not rather hypocritically turn you into a criminal.
FWIW, we also develop on many platforms, including MacOS X, Linux and various other UNIXes.
Unfortunately, 2/3 of our organisation are sales and marketing types rather than developers, and right now, they get standard-issue Windows desktops, Office 2003 included. As much as I wish it were otherwise, Sunbird isn't even in the same game as Outlook when it comes to co-ordinating shared resources between a group of workers, never mind actually giving it any competition. As long as that's the case, Outlook's more-than-e-mail features are basically unchallenged in workplaces like this, and those of us who like another e-mail client better have to accept the limitations of not using Outlook, or accept the limitations of using Outlook for e-mail as well.:-(
Someone here used to have a sig warning people to configure their systems properly and not to get a firewall to do their work for them. I think perhaps you're the person it was aimed at...
For the uninitiated, NAT != secure, Firefox != no vulnerabilities, and Thunderbird != no vulnerabilities. Believing that you're safe because you use these technologies, regardless of any other vulnerabilities, is naive at best and e-fatal at worst.
I realise that was the obvious joke, but seriously... I do use Thunderbird at work, but may shortly have to switch back to the corporate-standard Outlook 2003 thanks to those missing features. As of today, we no longer co-ordinate using meeting rooms using a pen & paper diary system, for example, so since I don't use Outlook I can't tell who might have them booked, nor can I book them myself. Whether this was a step forwards or backwards is left as a question for the reader, but the fact is that management have made this decision for whatever reason, and now I'm disadvantaged by using Thunderbird.
In some environments, much the same will be true of Windows. Personally, I always liked Win2K; IMHO it's the one they've got closest to "right" so far. However, it doesn't support all the latest bells and whistles, and if your network happens to take advantage of those features then a Win2K box will be left behind. Microsoft's dilemma is that most places don't use (or probably need) some (or probably any) of those features, so they have no compelling reason to upgrade.
Ask yourself what scientist or engineer who knew their subject would ever make a universal claim like that, when they obviously can't know that it's true. Then gauge the credibility of your source.:-)
I was not suggesting that Blair ask the people if they want an ID card. I am suggesting he say, "You are having an ID card, what would you like to see from such a system?"
Sure, I realise that's what you're saying. My point was more that if (as was indicated earlier in the thread) this is supposed to make people more accepting, then it would be a good idea not to start with the assertion that something many people currently don't accept at all is a good thing.
The whole scheme seems ill thought out and rushed. If they were to actually ask the people what they wanted from a national ID system then they might gain better acceptance.
The problem with that is exemplified by the recent French vote on the European constitution, where the vast majority of government said they'd vote in favour, but in the actual referendum the motion was defeated by the majority of the people. In other words, sometimes if you ask the people what they want, you won't get the answer you want to hear. Do you really think Blair's control-freak regime is going to risk that fate for one of its favourite Draconian policies?
In the UK at present, the usual standard of identification for something like opening a bank account is to provide two forms of ID from reasonably broad lists. One of these must show your photograph: a passport or photocard driving licence, for example. The other must show your current address and be dated within (IIRC) the past three months: a recent utility bill for your home or an electoral registration card would suffice.
How is the the fact that the police know who you are equivalent to the fact that you're a suspect?
OK, here's Standard Argument Against National ID Cards/Database #3 of 17,469,285.:-)
This system would be backed by a national identity database, holding amongst other things various biometric information on each individual in the country.
The police would have access to this database.
Having found something that might be matched biometrically at a crime scene, the police could therefore search the database for potential matches, and flag anyone in that category as a suspect.
The failure rate (false positive matches) of even the best of the biometric technologies they're contemplating using makes them unreliable for this kind of operation. (Incidentally, though not relevant to this particular argument, failure rates including false negatives are as bad as 1 in 3 in some of the worst technologies proposed according to some reports. These include the facial recognition technology that would be used at airports etc.)
Unlucky citizens are likely to be arrested, detained, tried and even convicted of crimes on the basis of nothing but a false positive biometric match. After all, if the evidence weren't reliable in court there'd be no point in having it, and since we've got a biometric match identifying you, why would need to show anything mundane like motive and opportunity?
This is likely to result in literally thousands of people being turned into not just suspects (though that's bad enough) but potentially also convicted criminals, for nothing more than unluckily having biometric information slightly too close to a sample that was found at a crime scene.
But here's a revision: "It's perfectly reasonable to compare the two, since they are the latest consumer desktop solutions offerings from Fedora and Microsoft." In any case, they're competing products for the title of "What's the first thing you install on a newly built computer to start using it."
I'm still not sure I agree with your terminology in the first "" above; Windows isn't a "consumer desktop solution", nor marketed as one, it's an operating system. Either way, the argument seemed to be that Windows was inferior to FC because the FC installation included all sorts of other stuff during exactly the same process. I don't see how that holds at all; I can just as easily download and install OpenOffice or Firefox on Windows as on FC, and indeed I'm typing this in just such a FF installation now. As you say, the comparison is between the first things installed, but the conclusion was as if they had to be the only things installed, and a real Windows installation wouldn't be followed by installing equivalent end user applications right afterwards anyway.
Bundling Firefox with a distro is not the same as integrating IE into Windows. You can un-check the Firefox box when installing Fedora. You can't uninstall Internet Explorer from Windows.
I think this is ignoring the case Microsoft made, which regardless of other motivations did have some merit: you can uninstall the IE front-end, but you'll still have the same HTML rendering engine included, as this is a service provided by the operating system's UI libraries, used not only by the IE front-end but also other applications by both Microsoft and third parties. That may not be a particularly good design decision, but it's a credible one.
In any case, the issues in Europe over Media Player seem a fairer comparison, and in that case Microsoft was basically required to provide a version of Windows without Media Player installed by default, despite the fact that MP isn't anything like as closely tied to the OS as IE was.
It's perfectly reasonable to compare the two, since they're the two latest OS's from Fedora and Microsoft.
No, it's the latest Fedora distro and the latest OS from Microsoft. Please understand the difference.
Incidentally, I seem to recall a large number of people around here bitching about Microsoft shipping Windows with even basic utility software like Media Player or Internet Explorer installed out of the box, and ultimately being found guilty of anti-competitive behaviour as a result. You wouldn't have been one of the people complaining about that, would you?
If Microsoft can't keep Windows up-to-date between major releases, whose fault is that?
Sorry, but WTF? My Windows XP, which I first installed around 3 years ago, quite happily keeps itself up-to-date with nothing more than an occasional click to approve downloading and installing a security patch. The latest drivers, including those for my video and sound cards, are obtainable through Windows Update just like any other OS patch. Microsoft is perfectly capable of keeping Windows up-to-date, and tomorrow when this month's security patches come out, I imagine they'll do it again. And I don't have to reinstall Windows from scratch every month to do it, either.
I'm already not looking forward to install WinXP on my new all-SATA all-PCI-E computer. I really hope no driver diskettes are involved, namely because I couldn't bear to put a floppy drive in the thing.
Since my system doesn't even have a floppy drive, and as noted above it's been running XP happily for years, presumably your concerns will only materialise if your system is poorly set-up and unable to boot from a SATA CD/DVD drive. Then again, if you don't have hardware that's capable of booting from anything other than a floppy drive when everyone else has been doing it for years, whose fault is that?
Well, the #include line doesn't use either <> or "". Then there's the main function, which ought to be int main(void). Finally, AFAICR C doesn't support the implicit return at the end of main that C++ does, so there's a missing return statement. (I may be wrong about the third one if it was fixed in C99; I don't have a copy of the revised standard handy.)
My motivation for using Thunderbird has nothing to do with MS' supply line; I just prefer a simple but effective mail client. I switched away from Outlook a couple of years ago, after a string of screw-ups led to trying (and failing) to restore my old mail from a back-up, combined with basic features like mail filtering never working properly.
Now, I may have to switch back; after my employer was taken over by a larger group that uses Exchange routinely, they've switched basic things like meeting planning and booking rooms to a system that Outlook can access, but Thunderbird can't. Without something like Sunbird getting up to speed to fill these critical non-email functions that Outlook supports, I won't be able to use Thunderbird for e-mail any more.:-(
Most of them don't. In fact, most don't even get close to the "clear and concise" requirement. Of those who do, very few introduce large numbers of bugs that wouldn't be turned up by a competent code review; the fact that most coding shops don't perform such reviews routinely does not reduce the significance of this!
The question is: can one change the nature of a system by replacing the managing people in that system?
Yes, one can. In fact, it's probably a necessary step; the nature of an organisation is effectively defined by how it is managed.
(Before anyone chimes in with the obvious counter: if the grunts are poor but the management is good, then it is already in the nature of the system that the grunts will be improved or replaced, it just hasn't had time to happen yet. In fact, this is quite likely to be the situation you're in immediately after replacing poor management with better.)
This is not a hard task, but it's kind of stupid, on the order of "who can break into the most computers today"
If you sincerely believe this is not a hard task, then you're either very, very good at programming, or really not very good at all.
Most developers aren't very good at writing clear, concise code that actually does what it's supposed to. Writing code of that quality that looks like it does what it's supposed to do, while actually doing something subtly different, sounds like a very difficult challenge to me.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, blocking a web site and blowing up the building hosting your company can have pretty close to the same effect on your business. That's pretty much the biggest problem here.
Gee, I dunno... Preventing spamming, maybe?
Seriously, it is actually illegal to send UCE in many jurisdictions, and has been for some time.
Spoken like someone who never administered more than his family home page.
Businesses usually can't just up and move to a different ISP. It requires a lot of time and money to do that, and they could just get the same bad luck at the next one anyway.
Your solution isn't.
What I've never understood is how a human-run operation that blacklists based on human decisions, and which by blacklisting an organisation can interfere with both their business and their reputation, isn't breaking about half a dozen laws that would subject them to more-or-less open-ended damage suits. Can any lawyer reading this please explain why this doesn't count under things like defamation legislation?
Moreover, lots of people around here like the term "fair use rights". AFAIK, there are no rights granted by fair use or similar provisions in the US whatsoever.
What you have is a list of uses where copying is legal if you can do it, but they're exemptions rather than rights. There is no obligation on the content provider to allow you to make a copy; if you can't, for example because you can't break the DRM system they use, then in the eyes of the law, that's your problem.
Herein lies one of the fundamental imbalances of the debate, and one reason legislation like the DMCA and EUCD is so evil: even uses that are legitimate and otherwise legal (making a back-up copy of a software CD you bought, for example) can be rendered illegal if the act of doing so requires you to bypass a copy protection mechanism in order to do so.
A group of friends and I have recently been considering this in the context of music: we'd like to make some compilation CDs containing our favourite copyrighted music tracks, for use at some dancing classes. Even if we properly pay for the original copies, and the right to play that music in public, and again for the right to copy the material into a compilation, we may still be stuffed if the original material is on a copy-protected not-quite-CD, as much of it is these days. At this point, none of the acts we'd be performing under proper licence would be illegal in itself, and perhaps the copy protection was only intended to inhibit illegal copying, but nevertheless if we went ahead we could be making criminals of ourselves. This is in the UK, BTW, but AFAICS a similar argument would apply anywhere in the US or Europe if the DMCA/EUCD is in force.
IMHO, the only realistic way you can defend the principle of copyright in law is if you also admit certain basic rights to users of copyright material, of which making back-ups and format-shifting for personal use are the two most obvious at present. That doesn't in any way render ripping off the media companies legal, and nor should it. However, it does mean that if (as the companies like to claim) the high price you pay for mass-produced media reflects the value of the content, then what you're buying is a personal right to that content, where using the MP3 player/car CD player/multimedia software on your computer that the same industry sells does not rather hypocritically turn you into a criminal.
<Obligatory West Wing joke>
Oh dear, now you've gone and started the music...
</Obligatory West Wing joke>
FWIW, we also develop on many platforms, including MacOS X, Linux and various other UNIXes.
Unfortunately, 2/3 of our organisation are sales and marketing types rather than developers, and right now, they get standard-issue Windows desktops, Office 2003 included. As much as I wish it were otherwise, Sunbird isn't even in the same game as Outlook when it comes to co-ordinating shared resources between a group of workers, never mind actually giving it any competition. As long as that's the case, Outlook's more-than-e-mail features are basically unchallenged in workplaces like this, and those of us who like another e-mail client better have to accept the limitations of not using Outlook, or accept the limitations of using Outlook for e-mail as well. :-(
Someone here used to have a sig warning people to configure their systems properly and not to get a firewall to do their work for them. I think perhaps you're the person it was aimed at...
For the uninitiated, NAT != secure, Firefox != no vulnerabilities, and Thunderbird != no vulnerabilities. Believing that you're safe because you use these technologies, regardless of any other vulnerabilities, is naive at best and e-fatal at worst.
I realise that was the obvious joke, but seriously... I do use Thunderbird at work, but may shortly have to switch back to the corporate-standard Outlook 2003 thanks to those missing features. As of today, we no longer co-ordinate using meeting rooms using a pen & paper diary system, for example, so since I don't use Outlook I can't tell who might have them booked, nor can I book them myself. Whether this was a step forwards or backwards is left as a question for the reader, but the fact is that management have made this decision for whatever reason, and now I'm disadvantaged by using Thunderbird.
In some environments, much the same will be true of Windows. Personally, I always liked Win2K; IMHO it's the one they've got closest to "right" so far. However, it doesn't support all the latest bells and whistles, and if your network happens to take advantage of those features then a Win2K box will be left behind. Microsoft's dilemma is that most places don't use (or probably need) some (or probably any) of those features, so they have no compelling reason to upgrade.
Ask yourself what scientist or engineer who knew their subject would ever make a universal claim like that, when they obviously can't know that it's true. Then gauge the credibility of your source. :-)
Sure, I realise that's what you're saying. My point was more that if (as was indicated earlier in the thread) this is supposed to make people more accepting, then it would be a good idea not to start with the assertion that something many people currently don't accept at all is a good thing.
And if the matching process were reliable. Which it's not, nor even close, for any of the types of biometric data under consideration.
The problem with that is exemplified by the recent French vote on the European constitution, where the vast majority of government said they'd vote in favour, but in the actual referendum the motion was defeated by the majority of the people. In other words, sometimes if you ask the people what they want, you won't get the answer you want to hear. Do you really think Blair's control-freak regime is going to risk that fate for one of its favourite Draconian policies?
In the UK at present, the usual standard of identification for something like opening a bank account is to provide two forms of ID from reasonably broad lists. One of these must show your photograph: a passport or photocard driving licence, for example. The other must show your current address and be dated within (IIRC) the past three months: a recent utility bill for your home or an electoral registration card would suffice.
OK, here's Standard Argument Against National ID Cards/Database #3 of 17,469,285. :-)
This system would be backed by a national identity database, holding amongst other things various biometric information on each individual in the country.
The police would have access to this database.
Having found something that might be matched biometrically at a crime scene, the police could therefore search the database for potential matches, and flag anyone in that category as a suspect.
The failure rate (false positive matches) of even the best of the biometric technologies they're contemplating using makes them unreliable for this kind of operation. (Incidentally, though not relevant to this particular argument, failure rates including false negatives are as bad as 1 in 3 in some of the worst technologies proposed according to some reports. These include the facial recognition technology that would be used at airports etc.)
Unlucky citizens are likely to be arrested, detained, tried and even convicted of crimes on the basis of nothing but a false positive biometric match. After all, if the evidence weren't reliable in court there'd be no point in having it, and since we've got a biometric match identifying you, why would need to show anything mundane like motive and opportunity?
This is likely to result in literally thousands of people being turned into not just suspects (though that's bad enough) but potentially also convicted criminals, for nothing more than unluckily having biometric information slightly too close to a sample that was found at a crime scene.
I'm still not sure I agree with your terminology in the first "" above; Windows isn't a "consumer desktop solution", nor marketed as one, it's an operating system. Either way, the argument seemed to be that Windows was inferior to FC because the FC installation included all sorts of other stuff during exactly the same process. I don't see how that holds at all; I can just as easily download and install OpenOffice or Firefox on Windows as on FC, and indeed I'm typing this in just such a FF installation now. As you say, the comparison is between the first things installed, but the conclusion was as if they had to be the only things installed, and a real Windows installation wouldn't be followed by installing equivalent end user applications right afterwards anyway.
I think this is ignoring the case Microsoft made, which regardless of other motivations did have some merit: you can uninstall the IE front-end, but you'll still have the same HTML rendering engine included, as this is a service provided by the operating system's UI libraries, used not only by the IE front-end but also other applications by both Microsoft and third parties. That may not be a particularly good design decision, but it's a credible one.
In any case, the issues in Europe over Media Player seem a fairer comparison, and in that case Microsoft was basically required to provide a version of Windows without Media Player installed by default, despite the fact that MP isn't anything like as closely tied to the OS as IE was.
No, it's the latest Fedora distro and the latest OS from Microsoft. Please understand the difference.
Incidentally, I seem to recall a large number of people around here bitching about Microsoft shipping Windows with even basic utility software like Media Player or Internet Explorer installed out of the box, and ultimately being found guilty of anti-competitive behaviour as a result. You wouldn't have been one of the people complaining about that, would you?
Sorry, but WTF? My Windows XP, which I first installed around 3 years ago, quite happily keeps itself up-to-date with nothing more than an occasional click to approve downloading and installing a security patch. The latest drivers, including those for my video and sound cards, are obtainable through Windows Update just like any other OS patch. Microsoft is perfectly capable of keeping Windows up-to-date, and tomorrow when this month's security patches come out, I imagine they'll do it again. And I don't have to reinstall Windows from scratch every month to do it, either.
Since my system doesn't even have a floppy drive, and as noted above it's been running XP happily for years, presumably your concerns will only materialise if your system is poorly set-up and unable to boot from a SATA CD/DVD drive. Then again, if you don't have hardware that's capable of booting from anything other than a floppy drive when everyone else has been doing it for years, whose fault is that?
One's an operating system, first released several years ago, while the other is a distribution, first released a few days ago?
That's hardly a fair comparison.
Blockquoth the AC:
Well, the #include line doesn't use either <> or "". Then there's the main function, which ought to be int main(void). Finally, AFAICR C doesn't support the implicit return at the end of main that C++ does, so there's a missing return statement. (I may be wrong about the third one if it was fixed in C99; I don't have a copy of the revised standard handy.)
My motivation for using Thunderbird has nothing to do with MS' supply line; I just prefer a simple but effective mail client. I switched away from Outlook a couple of years ago, after a string of screw-ups led to trying (and failing) to restore my old mail from a back-up, combined with basic features like mail filtering never working properly.
Now, I may have to switch back; after my employer was taken over by a larger group that uses Exchange routinely, they've switched basic things like meeting planning and booking rooms to a system that Outlook can access, but Thunderbird can't. Without something like Sunbird getting up to speed to fill these critical non-email functions that Outlook supports, I won't be able to use Thunderbird for e-mail any more. :-(
Most of them don't. In fact, most don't even get close to the "clear and concise" requirement. Of those who do, very few introduce large numbers of bugs that wouldn't be turned up by a competent code review; the fact that most coding shops don't perform such reviews routinely does not reduce the significance of this!
Yes, I'm pretty sure he knew that.
And, as he says, there are still several errors. :-)
Yes, one can. In fact, it's probably a necessary step; the nature of an organisation is effectively defined by how it is managed.
(Before anyone chimes in with the obvious counter: if the grunts are poor but the management is good, then it is already in the nature of the system that the grunts will be improved or replaced, it just hasn't had time to happen yet. In fact, this is quite likely to be the situation you're in immediately after replacing poor management with better.)
If you sincerely believe this is not a hard task, then you're either very, very good at programming, or really not very good at all.
Most developers aren't very good at writing clear, concise code that actually does what it's supposed to. Writing code of that quality that looks like it does what it's supposed to do, while actually doing something subtly different, sounds like a very difficult challenge to me.