Who decides what is a legitimate use of anonymity?
By default, any use is. It should require at least an order from a court of competent authority to compel the disclosure of an identity. As I've discussed with another respondent, that may not be ideal, but it's the pragmatic benchmark on which everything else in the legal system rests. There's nothing special about anonymity on the Internet, nor any reason to use a different mechanism to assess what is or is not reasonable.
The government? If you don't like the Nixon example, pick any repressive and corrupt government, and give them the power to control or ban anonymous programs that people use for free speech - which is what you're talking about.
I knew someone would come up with that counter; actually, I'm surprised it's taken this long. The problem with it is this: under the sort of regime you're talking about, they don't ban the anonymising software, they shoot you without a second thought and then they probably charge your family for the bullet. The actual benefits of "free" speech on the Internet under an oppressive regime that's prepared to take such action without conscience are few indeed.
Copyright infringment is a good example of this, in fact. Large numbers of people do not feel the copyright laws are fair or legitimate, or they'd abide by them.
Unfortunately, that's a non sequitur. An equally plausible alternative is that significant numbers of people know damn well that what they're doing isn't fair on others, but their selfishness overcomes this and they do it anyway.
No, because cash isn't completely anonymous for practical purposes. Try walking into a flight school and asking to learn to fly a plane, then telling them not to worry about teaching you how to land it. Pay with cash, and see how fast the authorities find you.
Also, on the subject of responsibility to balance freedom: honestly, I reject the notion that a system has to balance freedom. It is the most valuable and the single most important thing in our lives -- it IS our lives, and as such nothing should step in and limit it. I do not wish to compromise at *all* on my freedom.
I do understand where you're coming from, and other things being equal I'd agree. In fact, I'd love to live in a world where we could all exercise the kind of freedom you describe, secure in the knowledge that we would come to no harm through others doing likewise.
But that's the problem: what happens when, in the harsh real world, your rights and freedoms come into conflict with another individual's? In a system with no checks and balances, the only possible conclusion is for one or other to lose out unfairly, because by definition any infringement on anyone's freedom is unfair.
This is why I take a "pragmatic liberal" view that by default everyone should be free to do anything they wish, with the number of restrictions on this as small as possible and robustly justified on an individual basis.
I sympathise with your argument. I have always agreed that some people will lose out on genuine benefits if true anonymity cannot be guaranteed, and first among them will always be those who seek to oppose the establishment.
The only comfort I take from this no-win situation is that as long as separation of powers is maintained, even the police/government/etc. can't get your information legitimately without a valid court order, and they must make their case to the court just like anyone else.
Of course, whether certain government agencies ever bother with doing this properly is open to debate, as is whether courts are necessarily truly unbiased. I suspect the answer is no in both cases, even to some extent in our "civilised" cultures. However, if you're on the wrong side of either of these, you're probably screwed for far more serious reasons than a lack of on-line anonymity anyway.
I don't really disagree with much of what you wrote there, actually.
To give a concrete example of the court judgement/information existence issue, in order for you to be in court and compelled to disclose some information you sent in encrypted form, there must first be a case to answer. If you'd been logged attempting to download several new movies from a MPAA plant then, possible entrapment issues aside, the court would hopefully find that there was a reasonable case to answer, and you could be compelled to disclose what you downloaded as evidence (or inferences could be drawn if you refused).
If, however, the MPAA just wrote to a court and accused every student at a university of illegally ripping movies because the university has a high-speed Internet link, without further evidence, then there is no substantive case to answer. Now the courts should tell the MPAA where to go without troubling the students for any information about their downloading habits.
Rather, we should discern, case by case, whether people are abusing it to perpetrate evil, in which case they should be punished for their evil deeds and not for using anonimity, or using it to further some good cause.
Normally (substitute "a tool" for "anonymity") I would agree entirely. But what's special about anonymity is that even if you do discern that someone is doing something to perpetrate evil, you can't then hold them accountable for it, ever. There is no concept of responsibility to balance the freedom of the system, at which point nothing else matters. I don't object to BitTorrent. I don't object to PGP. I don't object to using an alias on-line. I do object to making people immune to the law, particularly when it's very likely that many of their actions are in fact illegal.
Why are you not taking the same position against PGP and friends?
Who said I'm not?
I take the pragmatic view that, ultimately, you have to trust courts and their officials to act responsibly. If you can't assume that, then you've already lost anyway. That being the case, if a judge (or suitable equivalent authority) feels that information is necessary for the court to reach a just decision, then they must have the ability to demand that the information be brought before the court.
Under those circumstances -- when there's a properly conducted trial, and a proper authority requires the disclosure of information that you've sent in encrypted form for the purposes of that trial -- I have no problem with drawing inferences if you refuse to provide that information to the court without an adequate explanation. That would be contempt of court and/or perjury, just the same as any other refusal to give evidence as the law requires.
In other words, it's not the encryption I'm concerned with here. Go ahead, knock yourself out with PGP or any other such tool. Just know that if you are charged with a crime and brought before a lawful authority, you may be required to disclose that information if it's relevant, and you can be held accountable for your actions regardless of the encryption. This accountability is what anonymity removes, and why anonymity is therefore so dangerous.
Wanting anonymity doesn't necessarily mean your doing something illegal.
No, it doesn't. But the vast, vast majority of people using a tool like this are doing so because it shields their illegal activities.
Now, as a general principle, I don't like restricting people's behaviour without a very good reason. More specifically, I don't believe in automatically banning things that have legitimate uses just because they also have illegitimate ones.
However, I also believe that with freedom comes responsibility, always. In exchange for the freedom to use these tools for their beneficial purposes, you take on the responsibility of not abusing that trust.
Sadly, not everyone can be trusted to act responsibly; if they could, we wouldn't need laws and police and armies. What's needed is a balance where those authorities don't interfere with someone exercising their freedoms responsibly, but can interfere when the trust is abused.
And that is why, on balance, complete anonymity on the Internet is not a good idea. I have no problem with being anonymous for routine use, but if you can't even be identified in the face of overwhelming evidence of a crime, backed by an order from the lawful authorities, something's wrong. At that point, for everyone who could genuinely take advantage of true anonymity to make a contribution to society -- and I'm sure these people do exist -- how many spammers, virus writers, phishers, fraudsters, copyright violators, organised criminals, paedophiles, and even (really, for once) terrorists are we letting get away with it?
I think the point is that some developers may feel cheated if someone comes along after you've been working on something for 5 years, re-package it, re-brand it, and sell it - with source of course - and make a pile of money.
In which case (sorry for stating the blindingly obvious here) perhaps those developers shouldn't release their code under a licence which explicitly allows this? Copyright exists for a reason.
The man was on his property, and they were breaking and entering, so any benefit of the doubt has to be on his side.
Indeed, and if he'd shot them inside the property, in the dark, without knowing where they were, I'd totally agree with you. I'm just not sure there's any doubt to have the benefit of in this case.
As to the guy being shot in the back, sure that doesn't look good. But when they are on his property, three to one, he has every reason to consider himself in danger and every right to use force to defend himself. And remember this was at night, in the dark. Did the homeowner *know* the intruder had his back turned? It seems unlikely.
Please don't assume. The facts of this case are pretty well known since the court case.
You also seem to believe Martin was somehow a long-suffering victim. While he had been subject to crime before, local police have always denied that he went to the meetings about local crime management that he claimed to have attended before the event. The firearm he used was illegally owned, and he had a history of hostile behaviour, including threats to kill people he believed (wrongly) were responsible for the earlier raids on his property, and supporting the British National Party. This isn't some innocent angel we're talking about.
I see clear violation of his human rights, starting with the initial legal situation you yourself criticised rather nonspecifically. There is no more important and basic human right than the right to defend oneself.
And they didn't prosecute him for the actions he took to defend himself, nor (IIRC) for the possession of an illegal firearm, something that would be an automatic 5 years inside if it happened today. They prosecuted him for shooting a fleeing man in the back and killing him.
I'm sorry, but I believe you're factually wrong on several counts. Principally, your assessment of when burglars break in is not supported by any information I've ever seen from the police, crime surveys, etc.[1]
Moreover, breaking into someone's home does not imply a threat to life: statistically, burglary is far less often associated with violence than many other crimes.
Finally, while I agree wholeheartedly that everyone should have the legal right to defend themselves, shooting a fleeing man in the back is not defending yourself. There was no immediate threat, pretty much any legal system in the western world would agree with that position, and I know of no legal argument in the UK (or most other places, though I wouldn't bet against Texas) that permits the use of lethal force in the absence of such a threat.
The UK government is guilty of many things in connection with this case, most seriously failing to supply adequate support or security directly, but also creating a legal framework where it was near impossible for Martin to deter the burglars himself. However, it is not guilty of abusing his human rights, and this is absolutely clear to anyone taking the time to study the case. Introducing such hype is unconstructive, both in this case, and more generally where it diminshes to effect of cases that really are a government abusing an individual's rights.
[1] I used to help teach at a martial arts club. Since people going to such classes often ask about self-defence, I made a point of seeking proper advice on the non-physical aspects (which is most of it where real SD training is concerned). This way I could give them informed answers, or at least direct them to someone else who could. The best summary I can give is that the majority of burglaries are committed in the evening or at night, under cover of darkness, and that burglars will usually flee if they discover that the property is occupied rather than risk a confrontation.
The thing is, in the scenario you described, you wouldn't have the option to change the kind of bridge after it was in construction.
Whether you should be allowed to do it with software is a good question, too. Obviously there's more scope for reusing a line of code than a 10 tonne block of concrete, but code reuse is one of those semi-mythical creatures that you rarely see in real life. It would be fascinating to know how many "programmer error" bugs that cause loss of data, security breaches, etc. occur in code that was changed late and in a hurry, though I'm not aware of any formal studies into this.
This is why we moved from more functional languages, to more Object Oriented languages. If someone writes a program abstract enough, then adding functionality is as simple as throwing in a new object, inhieriting, and you're done.
I'm assuming you mean "more procedural languages"; in common terminology, "procedural" means C, Pascal, FORTRAN, etc., while "functional" means ML, Haskell, etc. In any case, the benefits of OO aren't as clear-cut as the evangelists make out. Making your program "abstract enough" to do what you describe typically results in a vastly over-engineered design where the complexity does more harm to productivity than good, IME. OO provides some useful design tools, but again IME, they're far more useful when handled pragmatically and not put on some sort of pedestal.
Things like function pointers, generic structures, generic pointers, and type casting (most of these being very Cish/Pascalish things because that's all of the functional programming I do) can make a functional language more abstract. But the cost is that these things tend to be a little bit more tricky.
With no offence intended, I'm pretty sure now that you're misunderstanding what "functional programming" means. In functional programming, functions are first-order concepts -- you can build them, pass them around, combine them and evaluate them more-or-less arbitrarily. That's almost the definition of functional programming! Concepts like function pointers or delegates are the poor man's knock-offs, and only exist because the languages that offer them aren't up to the real thing.
By your definition *all* the parties lost the popular vote
No; my definition of winning the popular vote is achieving more votes than any other party.
The point is that one party did win in this sense. The problem is that that party isn't the one currently forming the government, and nor is any proportionate combination of representatives that reflects the spread of votes.
The British council members are democratically elected (though they are still in favour of the CIID because Labour is shite).
I feel obliged to point out that this depends on your definition of "democratically elected". I'm not sure a government that attracted only just over 1/5 of the vote at a general election really has a mandate to be making radical policy decisions over the complaints of the electorate, particularly when that "winning" party in fact lost the popular vote in England. The only other people we elect directly are our MEPs; the ministers etc. are all appointed by the ruling party.
Maybe not, but the situation was at least dubious. If they don't have the wits to check that out, God help any company they ever wind up running.
Personally, I don't think they should be the ones punished, but rather the person in charge of the security of the website...
The latter is certainly true; if the educational establishments in question are trying to make a point about how the real world works, then firing someone for gross incompetence is a pretty obvious point to make.
As for the first part, yes, it does seem harsh to turn them away. On the flip side, you're talking about a limited number of places on very prestigious courses. Other students, probably just as worthy in an ideal world and unlucky not to get offered a place before, will now get to study there and launch their careers instead.
It's sad for the unlucky ones that this happened, but the harsh reality is that smaller mistakes are enough to let your competitors wipe you out in real business. Perhaps they'll learn something valuable from business school after all.
It is a dark time for OSS developers. Although Internet Explorer 7 has failed to secure 90% market share, Microsoft lawyers have driven the OSS developers from their hidden basements in their parents' houses and sued them across the US.
Evading the dreaded Imperial lawsuits, a group of free software developers led by Ben Goodger has established a new secret development on a remote CVS server.
The evil Lord Gates, obsessed with finding young Goodger, has dispatched thousands of code monkeys to the far reaches of the Internet...
Survey after survey conducted for the Government shows that only a minority are actually against the idea of ID cards.
So I've been told. It's strange that I don't know anyone who's actually in favour of them, then...
Of course, in the most comprehensive survey to date, only a little over 20% of eligible people actually voted for the government we now have. After Iraq, ID cards seem to be by far the next most serious sticking point, at least among people I know.
Can you tell us the name of the application, or of the file that changed? It would be interesting to Google for Microsoft's explanation for such behaviour and/or articles exposing it if they denied it...
The bottom line is, was, and always will be, this: if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about!
Unless you're one of the false positives, which for the current technologies being proposed in the UK only covers about 2.5 million people.
Or if someone at the government offices makes a genuine mistake, while performing routine processing on one of several dozen records they'll be working with that day, and messes up your database entry. Yes, it did happen to me (by the tax office) and it took three months chasing down about six different tax officers in four different places to sort out the mess, during which time I was out of pocket by hundreds of pounds in overpaid tax with no recourse and barely able to pay the rent.
There are many reasons to oppose these schemes: potential for civil liberties abuse, they won't bring the advertised benefits, they cost a fortune, and so on. For me, by far the most likely problem is either systematic error (false positives) or human error administering the system (my example above), either of which could have devastating consequences if adequate systemic safeguards are not in place (which they aren't for any other government database I've ever encountered).
I can't help feeling that my sig is particularly apt today.
By now anyone who is a known terrorist will not be using his real ID to go anywhere.
True, and it's also well known that most of the guys actually blowing buildings/people/themselves up aren't already known and do have valid ID. This is why the anti-terrorism argument for this idiocy has pretty much died, at least in the UK.
Our government (UK) just spend x millions in creating this ID card scheme which is says we need...
The great irony is that in a recent discussion on the BBC News site, approximately 80% of respondents to a poll said they didn't want the cards, compared to well under 20% who did. Now, on-line polls are hardly the most scientific study in the world -- there was no CowboyNeal option for a start -- but IME the ones on the BBC do tend to be fairly representative when compared to proper studies.
One common objection cited in the discussion was the cost, and specifically who will wind up paying it, and how often UK governments give (mostly US-based) megacorps lucrative contracts that then strangely over-run and cost the taxpayer even more.
Another common objection was the shifting goalposts in the benefits it's supposed to bring us: pre-election it was all about anti-terrorism, until various Spanish bombings despite ID cards were repeatedly mentioned. Then it was illegal immigration, until about half the world failing to stop illegal immigration despite requiring ID was repeatedly mentioned. Now it's identity theft, but people are pointing out that super-cards could actually make it easier for professional criminals to take an identity, not to mention the hazards of locking all the key information about a citizen into a single, centralised database.
Perhaps the real reason is that the US wants it, and Blair is playing along? Not that that's ever happened before, you understand.
I'm not sure I'd want to be able to condem her to death to save the aircraft. I'm not sure I'd want someone with that level of detachment flying my plane.
That's exactly the sort of person I'd want flying the plane. The only way to deal with the sort of atrocity you're talking about is objectively and dispassionately. It's heartless, it's horrible, and it's the only option that will ever work in extreme circumstances.
This is hard stuff - and no simple solution is going to solve it.
Such is life. All we can do is live it as best we can.
When a government is willing to imprison an innocent man for defending himself from criminals
He wasn't defending himself. He shot a fleeing man in the back from a distance.
The Tony Martin case was tragic in many ways. I have a lot of sympathy for Martin and a lot of concern about the situation he found himself in and the lack of support he'd received until that point.
Nevertheless, the act for which he was actually imprisoned appears to have been a poorly-judged over-reaction. In fact, it's an excellent example of the dangers posed by letting just anyone have access to firearms. (I'm not taking sides in the debate here, just saying that this case would definitely strengthen the case for the gun control lobby.)
Mozilla.org was launched in 1998. The first "quirks mode" was introduced in 1999, and that certainly wasn't the first concession to compatibility.
Nevertheless, while quirks mode is certainly a welcome tip of the hat, the project's behaviour has not always been so "charitable", and as noted in the example I originally gave, sometimes it still isn't.
Even if we take it as a given that the ISP is unresponsive and clueless, and that you, as a web developer, are unable to procure the basic necessities of web hosting, it's still a stupid thing to argue about.
Firstly, not all web developers are professionals, operating with professional budgets. In this particular case, I was attempting to make available some articles that people on a newsgroup had found useful. Secondly, my ISP at the time were morons who didn't understand the MIME type issue with their server. However, the time I didn't have my own domain name registered, and keeping the e-mail address was a major lock-in. Nor did I have the money to start using multiple ISPs at once.
You are criticising Mozilla for not going out of spec when every implementation but one follows the spec
If that one implementation holds 95% of the browser market, then writing primarily for any other spec, standard or not, is simply not good practice if you're aiming to maximise the number of people who find your web site useful.
By all means support standards, and push for the behemoths to do so as well. I've never said anything else. But understand that in an industry with lots of little fish supporting an official standard and one big fish with its own way of doing things, most people will prefer you to support the latter. Today's big fish is Microsoft, and the bias of many web sites towards IE and many businesses towards.doc are prime examples. There will be other big fish, and other examples. It's just what happens when one product/supplier/method gets way ahead in the market for a while.
They're mellowing their stance these days. Having earlier implied that they were going for complete standards compliance, reality has bitten, and one suspects that the prospect of never getting significant market share because of things like daft incompatibilities with IE changed their perspective. Things like compatibility modes are a symptom of this reality.
Details please.
We've done this one on Slashdot before, so here's the short version. Suppose your ISP hosts your web site for you, but is unkind enough to provide incorrect MIME type information for XML files you store on the web space they host. (Note that this is something over which you, the ISP subscriber, have no direct control.) Now suppose you upload a perfectly valid XML file, correctly referencing a perfectly valid XSLT file that generates perfectly valid XHTML. If a visitor browses to that XML file, but the MIME types aren't set to reflect the content of the files (e.g., you get text/html as the type, even though the preamble in the file is obviously written to XML standards) then what do you think happens in Mozilla, and what do you think happens in IE?
Slashdot Mirror
By default, any use is. It should require at least an order from a court of competent authority to compel the disclosure of an identity. As I've discussed with another respondent, that may not be ideal, but it's the pragmatic benchmark on which everything else in the legal system rests. There's nothing special about anonymity on the Internet, nor any reason to use a different mechanism to assess what is or is not reasonable.
I knew someone would come up with that counter; actually, I'm surprised it's taken this long. The problem with it is this: under the sort of regime you're talking about, they don't ban the anonymising software, they shoot you without a second thought and then they probably charge your family for the bullet. The actual benefits of "free" speech on the Internet under an oppressive regime that's prepared to take such action without conscience are few indeed.
Unfortunately, that's a non sequitur. An equally plausible alternative is that significant numbers of people know damn well that what they're doing isn't fair on others, but their selfishness overcomes this and they do it anyway.
No, because cash isn't completely anonymous for practical purposes. Try walking into a flight school and asking to learn to fly a plane, then telling them not to worry about teaching you how to land it. Pay with cash, and see how fast the authorities find you.
I do understand where you're coming from, and other things being equal I'd agree. In fact, I'd love to live in a world where we could all exercise the kind of freedom you describe, secure in the knowledge that we would come to no harm through others doing likewise.
But that's the problem: what happens when, in the harsh real world, your rights and freedoms come into conflict with another individual's? In a system with no checks and balances, the only possible conclusion is for one or other to lose out unfairly, because by definition any infringement on anyone's freedom is unfair.
This is why I take a "pragmatic liberal" view that by default everyone should be free to do anything they wish, with the number of restrictions on this as small as possible and robustly justified on an individual basis.
I sympathise with your argument. I have always agreed that some people will lose out on genuine benefits if true anonymity cannot be guaranteed, and first among them will always be those who seek to oppose the establishment.
The only comfort I take from this no-win situation is that as long as separation of powers is maintained, even the police/government/etc. can't get your information legitimately without a valid court order, and they must make their case to the court just like anyone else.
Of course, whether certain government agencies ever bother with doing this properly is open to debate, as is whether courts are necessarily truly unbiased. I suspect the answer is no in both cases, even to some extent in our "civilised" cultures. However, if you're on the wrong side of either of these, you're probably screwed for far more serious reasons than a lack of on-line anonymity anyway.
I don't really disagree with much of what you wrote there, actually.
To give a concrete example of the court judgement/information existence issue, in order for you to be in court and compelled to disclose some information you sent in encrypted form, there must first be a case to answer. If you'd been logged attempting to download several new movies from a MPAA plant then, possible entrapment issues aside, the court would hopefully find that there was a reasonable case to answer, and you could be compelled to disclose what you downloaded as evidence (or inferences could be drawn if you refused).
If, however, the MPAA just wrote to a court and accused every student at a university of illegally ripping movies because the university has a high-speed Internet link, without further evidence, then there is no substantive case to answer. Now the courts should tell the MPAA where to go without troubling the students for any information about their downloading habits.
Normally (substitute "a tool" for "anonymity") I would agree entirely. But what's special about anonymity is that even if you do discern that someone is doing something to perpetrate evil, you can't then hold them accountable for it, ever. There is no concept of responsibility to balance the freedom of the system, at which point nothing else matters. I don't object to BitTorrent. I don't object to PGP. I don't object to using an alias on-line. I do object to making people immune to the law, particularly when it's very likely that many of their actions are in fact illegal.
Who said I'm not?
I take the pragmatic view that, ultimately, you have to trust courts and their officials to act responsibly. If you can't assume that, then you've already lost anyway. That being the case, if a judge (or suitable equivalent authority) feels that information is necessary for the court to reach a just decision, then they must have the ability to demand that the information be brought before the court.
Under those circumstances -- when there's a properly conducted trial, and a proper authority requires the disclosure of information that you've sent in encrypted form for the purposes of that trial -- I have no problem with drawing inferences if you refuse to provide that information to the court without an adequate explanation. That would be contempt of court and/or perjury, just the same as any other refusal to give evidence as the law requires.
In other words, it's not the encryption I'm concerned with here. Go ahead, knock yourself out with PGP or any other such tool. Just know that if you are charged with a crime and brought before a lawful authority, you may be required to disclose that information if it's relevant, and you can be held accountable for your actions regardless of the encryption. This accountability is what anonymity removes, and why anonymity is therefore so dangerous.
No, it doesn't. But the vast, vast majority of people using a tool like this are doing so because it shields their illegal activities.
Now, as a general principle, I don't like restricting people's behaviour without a very good reason. More specifically, I don't believe in automatically banning things that have legitimate uses just because they also have illegitimate ones.
However, I also believe that with freedom comes responsibility, always. In exchange for the freedom to use these tools for their beneficial purposes, you take on the responsibility of not abusing that trust.
Sadly, not everyone can be trusted to act responsibly; if they could, we wouldn't need laws and police and armies. What's needed is a balance where those authorities don't interfere with someone exercising their freedoms responsibly, but can interfere when the trust is abused.
And that is why, on balance, complete anonymity on the Internet is not a good idea. I have no problem with being anonymous for routine use, but if you can't even be identified in the face of overwhelming evidence of a crime, backed by an order from the lawful authorities, something's wrong. At that point, for everyone who could genuinely take advantage of true anonymity to make a contribution to society -- and I'm sure these people do exist -- how many spammers, virus writers, phishers, fraudsters, copyright violators, organised criminals, paedophiles, and even (really, for once) terrorists are we letting get away with it?
In which case (sorry for stating the blindingly obvious here) perhaps those developers shouldn't release their code under a licence which explicitly allows this? Copyright exists for a reason.
Indeed, and if he'd shot them inside the property, in the dark, without knowing where they were, I'd totally agree with you. I'm just not sure there's any doubt to have the benefit of in this case.
Please don't assume. The facts of this case are pretty well known since the court case.
You also seem to believe Martin was somehow a long-suffering victim. While he had been subject to crime before, local police have always denied that he went to the meetings about local crime management that he claimed to have attended before the event. The firearm he used was illegally owned, and he had a history of hostile behaviour, including threats to kill people he believed (wrongly) were responsible for the earlier raids on his property, and supporting the British National Party. This isn't some innocent angel we're talking about.
And they didn't prosecute him for the actions he took to defend himself, nor (IIRC) for the possession of an illegal firearm, something that would be an automatic 5 years inside if it happened today. They prosecuted him for shooting a fleeing man in the back and killing him.
I'm sorry, but I believe you're factually wrong on several counts. Principally, your assessment of when burglars break in is not supported by any information I've ever seen from the police, crime surveys, etc.[1]
Moreover, breaking into someone's home does not imply a threat to life: statistically, burglary is far less often associated with violence than many other crimes.
Finally, while I agree wholeheartedly that everyone should have the legal right to defend themselves, shooting a fleeing man in the back is not defending yourself. There was no immediate threat, pretty much any legal system in the western world would agree with that position, and I know of no legal argument in the UK (or most other places, though I wouldn't bet against Texas) that permits the use of lethal force in the absence of such a threat.
The UK government is guilty of many things in connection with this case, most seriously failing to supply adequate support or security directly, but also creating a legal framework where it was near impossible for Martin to deter the burglars himself. However, it is not guilty of abusing his human rights, and this is absolutely clear to anyone taking the time to study the case. Introducing such hype is unconstructive, both in this case, and more generally where it diminshes to effect of cases that really are a government abusing an individual's rights.
[1] I used to help teach at a martial arts club. Since people going to such classes often ask about self-defence, I made a point of seeking proper advice on the non-physical aspects (which is most of it where real SD training is concerned). This way I could give them informed answers, or at least direct them to someone else who could. The best summary I can give is that the majority of burglaries are committed in the evening or at night, under cover of darkness, and that burglars will usually flee if they discover that the property is occupied rather than risk a confrontation.
Whether you should be allowed to do it with software is a good question, too. Obviously there's more scope for reusing a line of code than a 10 tonne block of concrete, but code reuse is one of those semi-mythical creatures that you rarely see in real life. It would be fascinating to know how many "programmer error" bugs that cause loss of data, security breaches, etc. occur in code that was changed late and in a hurry, though I'm not aware of any formal studies into this.
I'm assuming you mean "more procedural languages"; in common terminology, "procedural" means C, Pascal, FORTRAN, etc., while "functional" means ML, Haskell, etc. In any case, the benefits of OO aren't as clear-cut as the evangelists make out. Making your program "abstract enough" to do what you describe typically results in a vastly over-engineered design where the complexity does more harm to productivity than good, IME. OO provides some useful design tools, but again IME, they're far more useful when handled pragmatically and not put on some sort of pedestal.
With no offence intended, I'm pretty sure now that you're misunderstanding what "functional programming" means. In functional programming, functions are first-order concepts -- you can build them, pass them around, combine them and evaluate them more-or-less arbitrarily. That's almost the definition of functional programming! Concepts like function pointers or delegates are the poor man's knock-offs, and only exist because the languages that offer them aren't up to the real thing.
No; my definition of winning the popular vote is achieving more votes than any other party.
The point is that one party did win in this sense. The problem is that that party isn't the one currently forming the government, and nor is any proportionate combination of representatives that reflects the spread of votes.
I feel obliged to point out that this depends on your definition of "democratically elected". I'm not sure a government that attracted only just over 1/5 of the vote at a general election really has a mandate to be making radical policy decisions over the complaints of the electorate, particularly when that "winning" party in fact lost the popular vote in England. The only other people we elect directly are our MEPs; the ministers etc. are all appointed by the ruling party.
Maybe not, but the situation was at least dubious. If they don't have the wits to check that out, God help any company they ever wind up running.
The latter is certainly true; if the educational establishments in question are trying to make a point about how the real world works, then firing someone for gross incompetence is a pretty obvious point to make.
As for the first part, yes, it does seem harsh to turn them away. On the flip side, you're talking about a limited number of places on very prestigious courses. Other students, probably just as worthy in an ideal world and unlucky not to get offered a place before, will now get to study there and launch their careers instead.
It's sad for the unlucky ones that this happened, but the harsh reality is that smaller mistakes are enough to let your competitors wipe you out in real business. Perhaps they'll learn something valuable from business school after all.
BROWSER WARS
EPISODE V: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
It is a dark time for OSS developers. Although Internet Explorer 7 has failed to secure 90% market share, Microsoft lawyers have driven the OSS developers from their hidden basements in their parents' houses and sued them across the US.
Evading the dreaded Imperial lawsuits, a group of free software developers led by Ben Goodger has established a new secret development on a remote CVS server.
The evil Lord Gates, obsessed with finding young Goodger, has dispatched thousands of code monkeys to the far reaches of the Internet...
So I've been told. It's strange that I don't know anyone who's actually in favour of them, then...
Of course, in the most comprehensive survey to date, only a little over 20% of eligible people actually voted for the government we now have. After Iraq, ID cards seem to be by far the next most serious sticking point, at least among people I know.
What a strange behaviour...
Can you tell us the name of the application, or of the file that changed? It would be interesting to Google for Microsoft's explanation for such behaviour and/or articles exposing it if they denied it...
Unless you're one of the false positives, which for the current technologies being proposed in the UK only covers about 2.5 million people.
Or if someone at the government offices makes a genuine mistake, while performing routine processing on one of several dozen records they'll be working with that day, and messes up your database entry. Yes, it did happen to me (by the tax office) and it took three months chasing down about six different tax officers in four different places to sort out the mess, during which time I was out of pocket by hundreds of pounds in overpaid tax with no recourse and barely able to pay the rent.
There are many reasons to oppose these schemes: potential for civil liberties abuse, they won't bring the advertised benefits, they cost a fortune, and so on. For me, by far the most likely problem is either systematic error (false positives) or human error administering the system (my example above), either of which could have devastating consequences if adequate systemic safeguards are not in place (which they aren't for any other government database I've ever encountered).
I can't help feeling that my sig is particularly apt today.
True, and it's also well known that most of the guys actually blowing buildings/people/themselves up aren't already known and do have valid ID. This is why the anti-terrorism argument for this idiocy has pretty much died, at least in the UK.
The great irony is that in a recent discussion on the BBC News site, approximately 80% of respondents to a poll said they didn't want the cards, compared to well under 20% who did. Now, on-line polls are hardly the most scientific study in the world -- there was no CowboyNeal option for a start -- but IME the ones on the BBC do tend to be fairly representative when compared to proper studies.
One common objection cited in the discussion was the cost, and specifically who will wind up paying it, and how often UK governments give (mostly US-based) megacorps lucrative contracts that then strangely over-run and cost the taxpayer even more.
Another common objection was the shifting goalposts in the benefits it's supposed to bring us: pre-election it was all about anti-terrorism, until various Spanish bombings despite ID cards were repeatedly mentioned. Then it was illegal immigration, until about half the world failing to stop illegal immigration despite requiring ID was repeatedly mentioned. Now it's identity theft, but people are pointing out that super-cards could actually make it easier for professional criminals to take an identity, not to mention the hazards of locking all the key information about a citizen into a single, centralised database.
Perhaps the real reason is that the US wants it, and Blair is playing along? Not that that's ever happened before, you understand.
That's exactly the sort of person I'd want flying the plane. The only way to deal with the sort of atrocity you're talking about is objectively and dispassionately. It's heartless, it's horrible, and it's the only option that will ever work in extreme circumstances.
Such is life. All we can do is live it as best we can.
He wasn't defending himself. He shot a fleeing man in the back from a distance.
The Tony Martin case was tragic in many ways. I have a lot of sympathy for Martin and a lot of concern about the situation he found himself in and the lack of support he'd received until that point.
Nevertheless, the act for which he was actually imprisoned appears to have been a poorly-judged over-reaction. In fact, it's an excellent example of the dangers posed by letting just anyone have access to firearms. (I'm not taking sides in the debate here, just saying that this case would definitely strengthen the case for the gun control lobby.)
Blockquoth the AC:
Nevertheless, while quirks mode is certainly a welcome tip of the hat, the project's behaviour has not always been so "charitable", and as noted in the example I originally gave, sometimes it still isn't.
Firstly, not all web developers are professionals, operating with professional budgets. In this particular case, I was attempting to make available some articles that people on a newsgroup had found useful. Secondly, my ISP at the time were morons who didn't understand the MIME type issue with their server. However, the time I didn't have my own domain name registered, and keeping the e-mail address was a major lock-in. Nor did I have the money to start using multiple ISPs at once.
If that one implementation holds 95% of the browser market, then writing primarily for any other spec, standard or not, is simply not good practice if you're aiming to maximise the number of people who find your web site useful.
By all means support standards, and push for the behemoths to do so as well. I've never said anything else. But understand that in an industry with lots of little fish supporting an official standard and one big fish with its own way of doing things, most people will prefer you to support the latter. Today's big fish is Microsoft, and the bias of many web sites towards IE and many businesses towards .doc are prime examples. There will be other big fish, and other examples. It's just what happens when one product/supplier/method gets way ahead in the market for a while.
My point exactly. :-)
Blockquoth the AC:
They're mellowing their stance these days. Having earlier implied that they were going for complete standards compliance, reality has bitten, and one suspects that the prospect of never getting significant market share because of things like daft incompatibilities with IE changed their perspective. Things like compatibility modes are a symptom of this reality.
We've done this one on Slashdot before, so here's the short version. Suppose your ISP hosts your web site for you, but is unkind enough to provide incorrect MIME type information for XML files you store on the web space they host. (Note that this is something over which you, the ISP subscriber, have no direct control.) Now suppose you upload a perfectly valid XML file, correctly referencing a perfectly valid XSLT file that generates perfectly valid XHTML. If a visitor browses to that XML file, but the MIME types aren't set to reflect the content of the files (e.g., you get text/html as the type, even though the preamble in the file is obviously written to XML standards) then what do you think happens in Mozilla, and what do you think happens in IE?