I feel a sudden urge to publish a satirical paper entitled "Structured programming considered harmful", just to see how long it takes the academics to realise it's a joke...
You mean if I need to insert more than 10 new lines in my code, I should just go change the compiler to use fractional line numbers? Wow, this open source thingy is L337 and I am the U83rhax0r!
The great irony, of course, is that at some time in your programming career you probably will come across a genuine compiler bug, and no-one will believe you...
However, I can't find a case where Mozilla's rendering of HTML causes a page not to work, as you originally described. Can you give just one example of this?
I don't know what you mean by "not to work". Are you talking about only crashes, and ignoring unacceptably bad user experiences or something? If you're talking about poor rendering, there are several examples in this thread at least as bad as the oft-cited box model bug in some versions of IE, and you need look no further than Slashdot, which regularly gets reports of massively incorrect rendering because of layout bugs. Or are you going to argue that the HTML is malformed and it's not Mozilla's fault, even though on a refresh or size up-size down, Moz renders it just fine? (Before anyone jumps in, I know steps are being taken to fix this, but it's been irritating loads of people for months so I think it's a valid example.)
I provided two scenarios where there are serious bugs, you're reading a site which exhibits a serious problem itself from time to time, and two minutes in Bugzilla searching for words related to those scenarios will find you several specific test cases. If that doesn't make the point well enough, then sorry, but I'm not going to waste ten minutes generating a whole HTML page and stylesheet for you.
Make some noise. Get the problem noticed. If it's a commercial site, and they start believing they're losing customers over it, then they might take notice. Or they might lose you as a customer.
<business manager>
<shrug/>
Some customers are worth losing. I'd rather spend my limited budget in a way that appeals to 95% of the visitors to my site.
</business manager>
I agree that it would be nice if web sites were all written according to standards and all worked in any browser. But right now, the world doesn't work that way, and expecting businesses to adopt some sort of moral stance on this at the expense of potentially vast sums of money is unrealistic.
No, sorry, I can't produce 50 lines of standard HTML+CSS off the top of my head that demonstrate each problem. However, in the time it took you to post that comment, you could have found bug reports for both the issues I mentioned in Bugzilla.:-)
(Being serious, pretty much any use of xsl:number used to confuse the XSLT generator when formatting was involved, and I think any use of unordered lists in combination with floats currently leads to the bullet points off the left margin problem.)
OK, a lot of replies to my post have been the usual defence of Moz. I understand that; most of us are fans, and like many of you I use Firefox myself. But really, I didn't mention the margin hack and I didn't mention pages that browser detect. Gecko is quite capable of messing up perfectly standards-compliant pages in its own right.
For example, try playing with HTML+CSS pages and working with list tags. Try it particularly while you're working with block elements, floats, etc. You can easily get things like bullet points for unordered lists floating off the left of the containing box -- clearly not the intent of CSS standards. Trying to use an in-line format for lists rather than the usual vertical arrangement is a road to ruin as well. To their credit, they are getting better, but there are plenty of examples like this where IE does get it right and display a page sensibly, while Gecko's display is at best unpleasant. If you're going to give a point to Moz/FF for getting the box model right, you really have to give a point to IE for understanding elementary CSS when applied to lists.
Although we're talking about HTML specifically in this thread, there have been plenty of problems with XML/XSLT in Moz/Firefox as well. Simple XSLT elements for things like counting just didn't work properly for a long time, which meant those of us who really wanted to use XML+XSLT+CSS for Intranet sites and ditch HTML altogether couldn't if we used Moz (though IE can count, apparently) and had to use some intermediate step to generate (X)HTML that Moz could render properly instead. Again, to their credit, I think the dev team fixed this specific XSLT issue a little while back now, but it was outstanding for a long time.
Those are two concrete, and quite wide-ranging, examples where IE is clearly superior in how it renders the page, according to W3C standards, to Gecko-based browsers. Some web pages do work properly with IE and don't work properly with Gecko, even if they are completely compliant with W3C standards. Can we just learn to workaround the box model flaw like everyone else and play nice now, please?:-)
Just to be clear, unparseable XHTML is not XHTML. In "Matrix" terms, there is no web page.
Just to be clear, the user doesn't care. In "user" terms, there is a web page, and a browser that fails to render it is broken. This is intensely annoying to those of us (and this includes me as well as you) with technical mindsets, but it is true nonetheless.
I'm well aware of the nature of XML, and what the standards people would like to have happen. I'm also well aware of how frustrating it is to run a web site that has to work in browsers that's don't support the standards; I maintain a large site myself using XML, XSLT, HTML and CSS amongst other buzzabbreviations. However, the simple fact is that in the real world, standards are simply a means to an end (or not). If you're writing software for users, then the user experience is all that matters. Anything else -- standards, security, UI, file formats, whatever -- matters only to the extent that it affects the user experience.
As an interesting aside, you might like to read the AC reply to your previous post as well, and note that in fact C compilers do frequently have to deal with not-quite-right code because C programmers, like web developers, make mistakes.
I repeat: code that crashes with a null pointer error is wrong. End of story.
It's never that simple. If you're talking about an end-user application that crashes, I'd probably agree. But it can certainly be appropriate for libraries to have undefined behaviour given bad input, rather than spending lots of time performing validity checks that are really the client code's job. (Think high-performance mathematical code, where the validity checks can cause unacceptable slow-down.)
However, there are programs which should crash, in particular programs which trust the source of their input.
I think there's a difference in how you're using the word "crash" there. In one case, we're presumably talking about the application being shut down abruptly by the OS having attempted to violate system integrity. In the other, we're presumably talking about the application realising it cannot complete its task, taking whatever error recovery might be appropriate, and then immediately shutting itself down rather than attempting to proceed with bad data. There's a world of difference in terms of security and robustness between those two cases...
But is that according to the people who wrote the XHTML standard, or the user who just wants to see the web page? One is rather more important than the other in this context.
I don't see how this is a bad thing. This just means that IE does not catch some of the malformed code people use to cause havoc on the net.
But the other browsers not only didn't catch it, they actually crashed when parsing it. I'm all for compatibility and standards compliance where possible, but a crash/potential security hole is far more serious an issue than letting through some sloppy HTML. (Besides which, as a user, I find it infuriating that Mozilla/Firefox are so stuck up on perfectly standard HTML that they just don't work with some web sites that are perfectly usable in IE anyway.)
I'm still of the opinion that criminalising your audience is a very dangerous game for the record labels to be getting involved in.
They're not "criminalising the audience", they're identifying the major uploaders. These are the people we've been saying to go after all the time! These people are criminals, knowingly breaking the law and aiding others in doing the same!
Why is it that when the music industry does the right thing -- it's going after the people who are ripping illegally, not the ISPs, and it's doing it through the courts -- half of Slashdot still complains that they're greedy, money-grabbing, yada yada...?
The internet industry totally depends on filesharing. It's time to acknowledge that, not fight it.
You prove it, and I'll acknowledge it. Very few people I know spend much, if any, time ripping illegal content. Most of us surf the web, read our e-mail, sometimes use Usenet, IRC or IM apps, or play on-line games, none of which relies on the type of filesharing you're describing.
Incidentally, if you think about it, a lot more than 80% of the content transferred over the Internet is probably covered by someone's copyright. The important question is whether that person says it's OK for you to copy it anyway.
I'm guessing he used to be a manager who couldn't reach someone and hadn't planned properly so he had a fall-back position. I'm guessing that right now he's unemployed.:-)
Using a cell phone, on the other hand, is widely considered normal.
Sure; I was responding to the generic "not my problem" claim made by the AC. That said, I would guess most people would describe using a mobile phone as antisocial in the cinema context we were discussing previously, and obviously they are often banned in hospitals, on the forecourt of a gas station, etc. precisely because in some places the risk from interference is greater.
If Motorola et al were putting out cell phones that interfered with FM radio (wild example I know), wouldn't the manufacturer be responsible, rather than the people who think it's just a regular non-interfering cell phone?
Depending on where you are, there's a whole load of testing and approvals required before a new unit is allowed out into the market. For example, when we tested a new mobile radio (not quite a mobile phone, but similar principles) we would go through a formal spec with literally thousands of different types of call, to numerous other models, using the service provider's network in numerous different ways. Only after several weeks of testing just about every type of call possible does the unit get approved for use on the network. Without such approval, using it to transmit on the designated network channels would be illegal in most places.
Clearly something known to interfere with other frequencies wouldn't be approved in the first place, and I imagine someone at the network and/or the manufacturer would take a hit if such a device was ever approved.
As a result of the testing process, the risk of approved hardware causing problems is relatively low. Of course it does happen from time to time due to hardware failure if nothing else, and you sometimes have to track down a "rogue" handset and get the owner to have it serviced/replaced. I'm guessing (but it probably varies with jurisdiction and I don't know the exact law anywhere) that the user of approved hardware isn't responsible until they're informed that their hardware is playing up, but then they become liable if they don't immediately switch it off.
If being unable to reach one person for a couple of hours can result in losing a big contract and sending you into bankruptcy, your management team are incompetent and a much greater liability than any technician. What were you planning to do if he accidentally switched off his phone, or got hit by a bus on the way into town, and then that incident occurred? You seem to be missing 98% of your sense of perspective here...
Part of certain jobs is to be on call for extended periods of time.
Sure, and being a student in class is not one of them.
If this takes off, I'm sure a mechanism will soon evolve so that someone who's on call can leave their details at the front desk and be contacted discretely by cinema staff if they do happen to be needed. Alternatively, just don't visit the cinema while you're on call, which is a solution for most (but not all) people I know who sometimes have to be.
Sure, phones are annoying, but it's ridiculous to lower someone's final grade by that amount (easily a pass or fail margin) because they forgot to turn their cell off once. That takes a grade A asshole.
Or, presumably, a grade B asshole if his phone rang at the wrong time?
But seriously... Teachers have to do more than just teach kids facts and figures. Do people not believe in teachers setting a good example of how to behave generally any more? What happened to pastoral care? How did we get to this state where school was all about passing exams, and not learning and growing as a human being?
Anyone who objects to that sort of policy is probably exactly the sort of person who desperately needs to be subject to it.
Fuck that! It's not MY DUTY to make sure my appliances does not interfer with yours.
Yes, it is. Aside from simply being courteous to those who are less privileged that you in this particular case, in many places you are legally required not to use equipment that interferes with certain frequencies. Try setting your amateur radio to broadcast white noise on the police band and you'll get a fantastic demonstration of how this stuff works.
I used to work for the engineering department of a telecomms company. People/equipment that transmitted on the wrong frequencies could bring down whole areas of the network (don't bitch, it's an inherent limitation of radio technology) and were chased down as fast as humanly possible. In most cases, it turned out to be some sort of hardware fault with the guy's radio and he had no idea, but you did get the occasional smart-ass, and nobody liked them very much.
Just how DO they intend on determining what is and is not an emergency phone call?
An emergency call is one that merits dialling 911 (or 999, or 112, or whatever it is in your part of the world).
If you're worried by anything else, like the various clearly unusual situations you listed there, maybe you should consider not going to the cinema at all. It's a wonder humanity survived all those years without mobile phones...
And yet, if such powers are granted to the courts, they will make it down to the RIAA and their lawyers -- you've seen the bills permitting the RIAA to make other queries which legitimately should require court orders, no?
I'm not aware of all the gory details, but yes, I'd gathered that this sort of thing was happening. IMHO it's completely inappropriate, and amounts to vigilante justice, denial of due process, etc.
If such abuse of powers continues, then of course the Internet-using public at large will fight back, and IMNSHO the hackers of the world uniting will toast every major media industry in their way in fairly short order whether legal or not. Of course, that will then guarantee that the risks associated with mass copyright infringement come to fruition -- the content from many sources will dry up -- and there will be far too many people incarcerated or fined more than they can afford along the way. It will also send entirely the wrong signal to such people, who will get bored of cracking DRM technologies and find new ways to entertain themselves -- writing the next big virus, for example. It will also provide the justification for even more draconian laws, probably leading to the lock-down of the Internet as we know it and the worst kind of "trusted computing". Everybody loses in the long run if we go down the (not-so-)civil disobediance route, and IMO we just don't want to be there.
One of the points that the Libertarian party makes well is that the tendency of governmental powers to end up being used in a manner favorable to large corporations and unfavorable to individuals is contingent on goverenment having those powers in the first place.
Of course, and I accept that there is a potential problem there. On the other hand it also depends on the US having a corrupt voting system that essentially reduces all major elections to two-horse races, the legal ability for parties to accept absurd amounts of campaign contributions from business interests to put on the most glitzy shows and sucker voters in, and ultimately on the stupidity of the American public in voting for the guys with the snazziest propaganda.
Given that businesses don't get a vote and the population as a whole do, if government winds up doing things in the interests of big business, it must be because not enough people cared to do anything about it come election time. If 100,000 voters mailed their state senators and said "This is not in our interests, and if you vote for it, I won't for you" then things would start happening. I accept that you're trapped in a vicious circle, but as long as that's the case, you'll never see laws that are truly in the interests of the general population, and you'll see a gradual erosion of individual rights until the businesses dominate completely.
To implement what you propose would mean a massive reduction in the range of actions that individuals would be able to take with their own [network-enabled] personal property; and from my perspective, that's an absolute travesty wrt human rights.
On the contrary; a fundamental principle of what I want to see is that the rights of individuals are never routinely impaired. My key point here is that individuals must exercise those rights responsibly, and it must be possible to hold them to account through due process when they do not. This is a (the?) necessary concession to maintain a civil society, just as we require the use of identifying information before handing out benefits or access to bank accounts (because many people would commit fraud otherwise), before letting you drive a car on the road (because many people would drive dangerously and inconsiderately otherwise), and so on.
Do you see potential for such an improved compromise that stays fair to that section of the public which behaves morally?
I don't really have firm ideas on this yet, but after considering it for a while, there seem to be a few self-evident truths (at least given the framework of today's society and how it behaves). For example, we know that:
Significant numbers of people use P2P software for legitimate distribution of material in fair and legal ways.
Signficant numbers of people use the technology to violate copyrights illegally.
Distinguishing the two reliably in some automatic way is a relatively hard problem to solve; there are plenty of examples of DMCA-based takedown notices today that are obviously based on trivia like the names of files, without any reference to the contents.
I think one underlying problem with much of this area is that many people -- including those breaking the law -- value the effective anonymity offered by the Internet. On the other hand, as I've noted on many occasions in the past, with freedom must come responsibility. If you're going to have the freedom to transfer legally protected data around the Internet (or, for that matter, to comment on others, to dispense advice normally reserved to qualified professionals, etc.) then there must be some means of identifying the movement of the data, should a suitably empowered legal authority feel the need to do so during the investigation of a crime. (For the avoidance of doubts, I'm talking about things like courts and their agents, and not things like the RIAA and their lawyers.)
Hence I think a prerequisite to fixing most of the major problems on the Internet, from copyright infringement to spam e-mail, electronic identity theft, writing viruses and worms, web pages claiming to be doctors/lawyers/etc. offering bad advice under false pretences, defamation, and more, is relinquishing the anonymity. In a way, so-called trusted computing is a half-assed step towards this. As long as anonymity remains (or remains in practice, because in reality it costs too much time or money to resolve the identity of the information source) these problems will have a unique defence unavailable outside the electronic world, and thus the laws that generally work reasonably well in the outside world will be unenforceable in practice -- and thus useless -- in on-line cases.
Of course, the downside to this is that giving up the anonymity is not without cost. The free speech offered by the Internet is of little value in the west, where we have that freedom by default, but of immense value in some places. And since you can't easily recognise some national legal authorities but not others in a global Internet for the purposes of disclosing identity, and we haven't yet developed a body of international law to govern global communications media, that makes any moves to remove identity wholesale a very bad idea, at least for now.
Thus we reach an impasse, and the only way to resolve it is going to be getting together some globally recognised legal framework to govern international communications channels such as today's Internet, and identifying some globally acceptable legal authorities who would have the power to identify the individuals responsible for adding certain content where a recognised court found they were acting illegally in doing so.
As a final note, none of this means giving up anonymity to Joe Public, necessarily. It's just that someone must be able to hold those committing criminal acts on the Internet to account, if the laws we accept in any other context on defamation, harrassment, criminal damage, etc. are to apply in the electronic world as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel a sudden urge to publish a satirical paper entitled "Structured programming considered harmful", just to see how long it takes the academics to realise it's a joke...
You mean if I need to insert more than 10 new lines in my code, I should just go change the compiler to use fractional line numbers? Wow, this open source thingy is L337 and I am the U83rhax0r!
The great irony, of course, is that at some time in your programming career you probably will come across a genuine compiler bug, and no-one will believe you...
I don't know what you mean by "not to work". Are you talking about only crashes, and ignoring unacceptably bad user experiences or something? If you're talking about poor rendering, there are several examples in this thread at least as bad as the oft-cited box model bug in some versions of IE, and you need look no further than Slashdot, which regularly gets reports of massively incorrect rendering because of layout bugs. Or are you going to argue that the HTML is malformed and it's not Mozilla's fault, even though on a refresh or size up-size down, Moz renders it just fine? (Before anyone jumps in, I know steps are being taken to fix this, but it's been irritating loads of people for months so I think it's a valid example.)
I provided two scenarios where there are serious bugs, you're reading a site which exhibits a serious problem itself from time to time, and two minutes in Bugzilla searching for words related to those scenarios will find you several specific test cases. If that doesn't make the point well enough, then sorry, but I'm not going to waste ten minutes generating a whole HTML page and stylesheet for you.
<business manager>
<shrug/>
Some customers are worth losing. I'd rather spend my limited budget in a way that appeals to 95% of the visitors to my site.
</business manager>
I agree that it would be nice if web sites were all written according to standards and all worked in any browser. But right now, the world doesn't work that way, and expecting businesses to adopt some sort of moral stance on this at the expense of potentially vast sums of money is unrealistic.
No, sorry, I can't produce 50 lines of standard HTML+CSS off the top of my head that demonstrate each problem. However, in the time it took you to post that comment, you could have found bug reports for both the issues I mentioned in Bugzilla. :-)
(Being serious, pretty much any use of xsl:number used to confuse the XSLT generator when formatting was involved, and I think any use of unordered lists in combination with floats currently leads to the bullet points off the left margin problem.)
OK, a lot of replies to my post have been the usual defence of Moz. I understand that; most of us are fans, and like many of you I use Firefox myself. But really, I didn't mention the margin hack and I didn't mention pages that browser detect. Gecko is quite capable of messing up perfectly standards-compliant pages in its own right.
For example, try playing with HTML+CSS pages and working with list tags. Try it particularly while you're working with block elements, floats, etc. You can easily get things like bullet points for unordered lists floating off the left of the containing box -- clearly not the intent of CSS standards. Trying to use an in-line format for lists rather than the usual vertical arrangement is a road to ruin as well. To their credit, they are getting better, but there are plenty of examples like this where IE does get it right and display a page sensibly, while Gecko's display is at best unpleasant. If you're going to give a point to Moz/FF for getting the box model right, you really have to give a point to IE for understanding elementary CSS when applied to lists.
Although we're talking about HTML specifically in this thread, there have been plenty of problems with XML/XSLT in Moz/Firefox as well. Simple XSLT elements for things like counting just didn't work properly for a long time, which meant those of us who really wanted to use XML+XSLT+CSS for Intranet sites and ditch HTML altogether couldn't if we used Moz (though IE can count, apparently) and had to use some intermediate step to generate (X)HTML that Moz could render properly instead. Again, to their credit, I think the dev team fixed this specific XSLT issue a little while back now, but it was outstanding for a long time.
Those are two concrete, and quite wide-ranging, examples where IE is clearly superior in how it renders the page, according to W3C standards, to Gecko-based browsers. Some web pages do work properly with IE and don't work properly with Gecko, even if they are completely compliant with W3C standards. Can we just learn to workaround the box model flaw like everyone else and play nice now, please? :-)
Just to be clear, the user doesn't care. In "user" terms, there is a web page, and a browser that fails to render it is broken. This is intensely annoying to those of us (and this includes me as well as you) with technical mindsets, but it is true nonetheless.
I'm well aware of the nature of XML, and what the standards people would like to have happen. I'm also well aware of how frustrating it is to run a web site that has to work in browsers that's don't support the standards; I maintain a large site myself using XML, XSLT, HTML and CSS amongst other buzzabbreviations. However, the simple fact is that in the real world, standards are simply a means to an end (or not). If you're writing software for users, then the user experience is all that matters. Anything else -- standards, security, UI, file formats, whatever -- matters only to the extent that it affects the user experience.
As an interesting aside, you might like to read the AC reply to your previous post as well, and note that in fact C compilers do frequently have to deal with not-quite-right code because C programmers, like web developers, make mistakes.
It's never that simple. If you're talking about an end-user application that crashes, I'd probably agree. But it can certainly be appropriate for libraries to have undefined behaviour given bad input, rather than spending lots of time performing validity checks that are really the client code's job. (Think high-performance mathematical code, where the validity checks can cause unacceptable slow-down.)
I think there's a difference in how you're using the word "crash" there. In one case, we're presumably talking about the application being shut down abruptly by the OS having attempted to violate system integrity. In the other, we're presumably talking about the application realising it cannot complete its task, taking whatever error recovery might be appropriate, and then immediately shutting itself down rather than attempting to proceed with bad data. There's a world of difference in terms of security and robustness between those two cases...
But is that according to the people who wrote the XHTML standard, or the user who just wants to see the web page? One is rather more important than the other in this context.
But the other browsers not only didn't catch it, they actually crashed when parsing it. I'm all for compatibility and standards compliance where possible, but a crash/potential security hole is far more serious an issue than letting through some sloppy HTML. (Besides which, as a user, I find it infuriating that Mozilla/Firefox are so stuck up on perfectly standard HTML that they just don't work with some web sites that are perfectly usable in IE anyway.)
They're not "criminalising the audience", they're identifying the major uploaders. These are the people we've been saying to go after all the time! These people are criminals, knowingly breaking the law and aiding others in doing the same!
Why is it that when the music industry does the right thing -- it's going after the people who are ripping illegally, not the ISPs, and it's doing it through the courts -- half of Slashdot still complains that they're greedy, money-grabbing, yada yada...?
As opposed to the greedy people who want more music for free, who clearly have the moral high ground.
You prove it, and I'll acknowledge it. Very few people I know spend much, if any, time ripping illegal content. Most of us surf the web, read our e-mail, sometimes use Usenet, IRC or IM apps, or play on-line games, none of which relies on the type of filesharing you're describing.
Incidentally, if you think about it, a lot more than 80% of the content transferred over the Internet is probably covered by someone's copyright. The important question is whether that person says it's OK for you to copy it anyway.
Don't worry, Willy Wagglestick didn't write Romeo and Juliet himself either (he was illiterate) so there's prior art. :-)
I'm guessing he used to be a manager who couldn't reach someone and hadn't planned properly so he had a fall-back position. I'm guessing that right now he's unemployed. :-)
Sure; I was responding to the generic "not my problem" claim made by the AC. That said, I would guess most people would describe using a mobile phone as antisocial in the cinema context we were discussing previously, and obviously they are often banned in hospitals, on the forecourt of a gas station, etc. precisely because in some places the risk from interference is greater.
Depending on where you are, there's a whole load of testing and approvals required before a new unit is allowed out into the market. For example, when we tested a new mobile radio (not quite a mobile phone, but similar principles) we would go through a formal spec with literally thousands of different types of call, to numerous other models, using the service provider's network in numerous different ways. Only after several weeks of testing just about every type of call possible does the unit get approved for use on the network. Without such approval, using it to transmit on the designated network channels would be illegal in most places.
Clearly something known to interfere with other frequencies wouldn't be approved in the first place, and I imagine someone at the network and/or the manufacturer would take a hit if such a device was ever approved.
As a result of the testing process, the risk of approved hardware causing problems is relatively low. Of course it does happen from time to time due to hardware failure if nothing else, and you sometimes have to track down a "rogue" handset and get the owner to have it serviced/replaced. I'm guessing (but it probably varies with jurisdiction and I don't know the exact law anywhere) that the user of approved hardware isn't responsible until they're informed that their hardware is playing up, but then they become liable if they don't immediately switch it off.
If being unable to reach one person for a couple of hours can result in losing a big contract and sending you into bankruptcy, your management team are incompetent and a much greater liability than any technician. What were you planning to do if he accidentally switched off his phone, or got hit by a bus on the way into town, and then that incident occurred? You seem to be missing 98% of your sense of perspective here...
Sure, and being a student in class is not one of them.
If this takes off, I'm sure a mechanism will soon evolve so that someone who's on call can leave their details at the front desk and be contacted discretely by cinema staff if they do happen to be needed. Alternatively, just don't visit the cinema while you're on call, which is a solution for most (but not all) people I know who sometimes have to be.
Or, presumably, a grade B asshole if his phone rang at the wrong time?
But seriously... Teachers have to do more than just teach kids facts and figures. Do people not believe in teachers setting a good example of how to behave generally any more? What happened to pastoral care? How did we get to this state where school was all about passing exams, and not learning and growing as a human being?
Anyone who objects to that sort of policy is probably exactly the sort of person who desperately needs to be subject to it.
Quoth the AC:
Yes, it is. Aside from simply being courteous to those who are less privileged that you in this particular case, in many places you are legally required not to use equipment that interferes with certain frequencies. Try setting your amateur radio to broadcast white noise on the police band and you'll get a fantastic demonstration of how this stuff works.
I used to work for the engineering department of a telecomms company. People/equipment that transmitted on the wrong frequencies could bring down whole areas of the network (don't bitch, it's an inherent limitation of radio technology) and were chased down as fast as humanly possible. In most cases, it turned out to be some sort of hardware fault with the guy's radio and he had no idea, but you did get the occasional smart-ass, and nobody liked them very much.
An emergency call is one that merits dialling 911 (or 999, or 112, or whatever it is in your part of the world).
If you're worried by anything else, like the various clearly unusual situations you listed there, maybe you should consider not going to the cinema at all. It's a wonder humanity survived all those years without mobile phones...
I'm not aware of all the gory details, but yes, I'd gathered that this sort of thing was happening. IMHO it's completely inappropriate, and amounts to vigilante justice, denial of due process, etc.
If such abuse of powers continues, then of course the Internet-using public at large will fight back, and IMNSHO the hackers of the world uniting will toast every major media industry in their way in fairly short order whether legal or not. Of course, that will then guarantee that the risks associated with mass copyright infringement come to fruition -- the content from many sources will dry up -- and there will be far too many people incarcerated or fined more than they can afford along the way. It will also send entirely the wrong signal to such people, who will get bored of cracking DRM technologies and find new ways to entertain themselves -- writing the next big virus, for example. It will also provide the justification for even more draconian laws, probably leading to the lock-down of the Internet as we know it and the worst kind of "trusted computing". Everybody loses in the long run if we go down the (not-so-)civil disobediance route, and IMO we just don't want to be there.
Of course, and I accept that there is a potential problem there. On the other hand it also depends on the US having a corrupt voting system that essentially reduces all major elections to two-horse races, the legal ability for parties to accept absurd amounts of campaign contributions from business interests to put on the most glitzy shows and sucker voters in, and ultimately on the stupidity of the American public in voting for the guys with the snazziest propaganda.
Given that businesses don't get a vote and the population as a whole do, if government winds up doing things in the interests of big business, it must be because not enough people cared to do anything about it come election time. If 100,000 voters mailed their state senators and said "This is not in our interests, and if you vote for it, I won't for you" then things would start happening. I accept that you're trapped in a vicious circle, but as long as that's the case, you'll never see laws that are truly in the interests of the general population, and you'll see a gradual erosion of individual rights until the businesses dominate completely.
On the contrary; a fundamental principle of what I want to see is that the rights of individuals are never routinely impaired. My key point here is that individuals must exercise those rights responsibly, and it must be possible to hold them to account through due process when they do not. This is a (the?) necessary concession to maintain a civil society, just as we require the use of identifying information before handing out benefits or access to bank accounts (because many people would commit fraud otherwise), before letting you drive a car on the road (because many people would drive dangerously and inconsiderately otherwise), and so on.
I don't really have firm ideas on this yet, but after considering it for a while, there seem to be a few self-evident truths (at least given the framework of today's society and how it behaves). For example, we know that:
I think one underlying problem with much of this area is that many people -- including those breaking the law -- value the effective anonymity offered by the Internet. On the other hand, as I've noted on many occasions in the past, with freedom must come responsibility. If you're going to have the freedom to transfer legally protected data around the Internet (or, for that matter, to comment on others, to dispense advice normally reserved to qualified professionals, etc.) then there must be some means of identifying the movement of the data, should a suitably empowered legal authority feel the need to do so during the investigation of a crime. (For the avoidance of doubts, I'm talking about things like courts and their agents, and not things like the RIAA and their lawyers.)
Hence I think a prerequisite to fixing most of the major problems on the Internet, from copyright infringement to spam e-mail, electronic identity theft, writing viruses and worms, web pages claiming to be doctors/lawyers/etc. offering bad advice under false pretences, defamation, and more, is relinquishing the anonymity. In a way, so-called trusted computing is a half-assed step towards this. As long as anonymity remains (or remains in practice, because in reality it costs too much time or money to resolve the identity of the information source) these problems will have a unique defence unavailable outside the electronic world, and thus the laws that generally work reasonably well in the outside world will be unenforceable in practice -- and thus useless -- in on-line cases.
Of course, the downside to this is that giving up the anonymity is not without cost. The free speech offered by the Internet is of little value in the west, where we have that freedom by default, but of immense value in some places. And since you can't easily recognise some national legal authorities but not others in a global Internet for the purposes of disclosing identity, and we haven't yet developed a body of international law to govern global communications media, that makes any moves to remove identity wholesale a very bad idea, at least for now.
Thus we reach an impasse, and the only way to resolve it is going to be getting together some globally recognised legal framework to govern international communications channels such as today's Internet, and identifying some globally acceptable legal authorities who would have the power to identify the individuals responsible for adding certain content where a recognised court found they were acting illegally in doing so.
As a final note, none of this means giving up anonymity to Joe Public, necessarily. It's just that someone must be able to hold those committing criminal acts on the Internet to account, if the laws we accept in any other context on defamation, harrassment, criminal damage, etc. are to apply in the electronic world as well.