All they want to do is browse the web. If your browser doesn't let them do that, they don't care why, and for that matter why should they?
As much as it may irritate the likes of you and me, the reality is that Microsoft has easily 80+% market share on the web, and that means that they define the relevant interfaces and not the W3C. We can encourage people writing web sites to stick to standards for the benefit of the other <20%, but ultimately if you're talking to people in it for the money who have finite resources, they're going to go with the heavy market trend without a second thought.
If the dev team behind Moz would swallow their pride for a year or two and provide a compatibility mode, as pretty much every other successful web browser in history has done at some stage, they'd get a whole lot more market share from Joe Public who was shown Moz/Firebird by friends or family. Unfortunately, their stubborn insistence on supporting the standards, the whole standards and nothing but the standards is supporting the wrong standards. When they have 80% of the market share, then they can get all philosophical and insist on only supporting web sites following W3C standards if they want, and the web will follow them. Until then, they're simply making themselves irrelevant to most of their potential market. Worse, this actually reinforces Microsoft's position, and damages the efforts of others to promote W3C standards on the web.
That's a shame, of course. We all know that the Moz/*bird teams produce great products. I'm sure many of us appreciate the time and effort they put in, and are grateful to have the apps to use. It's just a pity that a stubborn pride amongst the project leaders taints the projects, and no-one will acknowledge that however much we don't like it, it always will.
But I bet you'd be the first to sue if you ate some of the beef and subsequently found out about this
Sadly, he'd probably win, too.
Surely this is a clear-cut question: anyone with personal information on you should be able to use it in a manner not explicitly agreed if and only if they genuinely believe that the situation is an emergency, and they are confident enough in that belief that they are prepared to be heavily penalised by a court that doesn't agree with them. In this case, it's a pretty obvious call to any reasonable person: if there really is a risk of getting seriously ill as a result of eating the food, the warning is genuine, and contacting customers by any means available is warranted; if it's just an elaborate PR exercise, screw 'em.
FWIW, at a previous job, I was helping to set up a long document, essentially a big directory for internal reference. The text wasn't heavily formatted, but had many numbered lists, and a few headings. The page count was around 300. At that stage, we found Word (an older version, this was late '90s) grinding to a halt, literally: pressing an arrow key to scroll resulted in a ten minute wait before the screen was redrawn. OK, the computers were not as powerful as today's and they've updated the software a few times since, but it seemed to be due to some daft internal limitation, their own version of "nobody will ever need more than 640K of RAM".
The best part was that when we called, taking advantage of our expensive support contract, we were basically told in as many words, "That's too bad. Word's not really meant for long documents, and you should be using more appropriate software for a project like that." And that's from Microsoft themselves!
I'm a great fan of LaTeX. I used it throughout my academic career in maths and later CS, with great success. I've also helped friends in entirely non-scientific fields to use it when writing their theses. That include not only the useful tools for indexing, cross-references and such, but also the community and packages that come with it: I've created numerous diagrams using METAPOST, and a whole foreign language character set, even mapped onto the usual Roman transliterations of Hindi, using METAFONT.
However, LaTeX is not for everyone, and I think your statement about any complex document over 50 pages is a hugely inappropriate generalisation. I also do some minor publishing work to support other groups I work with, resulting in heavily formatted brochure-style documents. LaTeX wouldn't have a prayer at getting the kind of precise control we're looking for here, and doesn't come close to supporting some of the features we need in a useful way.
It's a great tool, but not a universal solution to long, complex documents. As you say, use the right tool -- but that may or may not be LaTeX.
Like it or not people do need to exchange information, they do use defacto standard Office formats to do it, and we do need to have software other than Microsoft Office which can read and write those formats. Just saying "Hey, don't use Office format documents!" is myopic and stupid.
Not at all. A lot of people use MS Office simply because "everyone else does". The format becomes pervasive, the expected norm for sending reports, CVs, and other "self-published" documents.
However, there are other file formats suitable for self-publishing purposes; PDF springs to mind. Again, a crucial factor is that almost anyone can read a PDF file, whether or not they have paid for something like Acrobat, because Adobe offer the free PDF reader software. (Note that there are now several applications that can export to PDF other than Adobe's own product range, including OpenOffice.)
If Microsoft slips and loses market share in this area, then the significance of the MS Word file formats will be much reduced. That in turn will release much of the lock-in effect; if people might not be able to read your documents anyway, why bother paying $$$ for an absurdly expensive office apps suite when there are cheaper alternatives to all of the programs available that do as good a job (at least for day-to-day office work, which is all the vast majority of people use Word and Excel for anyway).
It's funny the Tesco/Levi case has come up, because for example "car supermarkets" are doing very well in the UK. Their basic business model is importing new vehicles and selling them on at a lower price than main dealers charge in the UK, and of course the major car manufacturers don't like that, either.
There was some concern at government level not long ago about how car prices in the UK compared with European prices for essentially the same specs (give or take which side the steering wheel goes) and whether the manufacturers were basically price-fixing. AFAIK no-one has made any sort of legal challenge on the car supermarkets since that time. So the legal grounds for manufacturers blocking importing their products to the UK and selling on the cheap here are obviously not completely clear.
[In case anyone's interested, I'm looking to buy a car at present, and the car supermarkets are typically coming in around 10-15% cheaper than the biggest discount any main dealer will give me, which is itself around 10% of the list price for the model I'm looking at. Then again, the supermarket models aren't backed by full manufacturer warranties and such, and by the time you've paid extra for comparable after-sales support, the gap is still there but much closer. Just mentioning it in case anyone else is car-hunting.:-)]
The most interesting development in the music industry case seems to be the BPI considering similar action against Amazon. As CD-Wow! pointed out, they are only a small company, and it may have been prudent for them to settle. Amazon are not a small company, and if my friends and family are anything to go by, they are responsible for a very significant proportion of legitimate music sales in the UK now.
I rather doubt a retailer in their position will just roll over and die for the music industry. A lot of the reason for their market share is down to charging significantly less than our high street stores for CDs (and DVDs and books). Without that advantage, they still have a much broader catalogue, but that's probably their only major advantage. On the flip side, you have to wait several days to get stuff, and there's more risk of something needing returning due to damage in the post (which Amazon are quite professional about IME, but still takes more time). I imagine they'd lose a lot of sales back to "buy here, have now" high street retailers if the price difference were cut, so it's well worth their while to get the lobbyists out and fight the legal battle over the free trade/imports question.
As MS demonstrated so successfully against Netscape (and numerous others) you can't outcompete free.
That's simply not true, of course, assuming you're referring to the same MS that still holds 85-90% of the browser market.
Microsoft are, at present, outcompeting free very successfully in all their major markets. Compare Windows sales with potential sales lost to Linux. Compare Microsoft Office sales with potential sales lost to OpenOffice.org. Those two markets make up the vast majority of Microsoft's business, and there's no doubt at all about who's winning.
What's worrying them, of course, is the speed at which the open source alternatives are catching up on features as well. There's no doubt today about who's winning, but next year? By 2010? This is what's worrying the big software companies: you can outcompete free, but you can't outcompete free and better.
I mean, Mike Rowe is his name, is that a trademark violation?
Potentially, in most places, I think the answer is yes.
There's an unfortunate and inevitable conflict between a trading body's "right" not to have someone else misrepresent themselves as that body, and someone's "right" to use their own name to describe themselves.
AIUI (IANAL) the law in most places sides with whoever was there first.
Of course, whether a site called www.mikerowesoft.com that is owned by a guy who's called Mike Rowe and doesn't look obviously like the MS web site is actually in any danger of misrepresenting its owner as the biggest software company in the world is a different question...
Though I personally prefer page layout languages, when I have to use a WYSIWYG word processor, I find them all to be lacking compared to Word. Yes it's sold by the source of all evil, yes it's got that lame Clippy thing (first thing to turn off, of course), but I like it because of exactly what your father wants: keyboard shortcuts for every damn thing.
Hear, hear (though Clippy is some way down my list, after "Don't hide all the damn menus" and other such irritations).
You're spot on about the keyboard usability, though. I had high hopes when I downloaded OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 the other day, with all the comments about work they'd done on customising the UI. I was very disappointed to see that you still can't assign a keyboard shortcut to apply a style or insert an arbitrary character. That vastly reduces the usefulness of both features, IMHO, and is a major usability advantage for Microsoft's offering.
There are a few places Word is really weak in usability: automatic numbering, for example. Unfortunately, OpenOffice.org has yet to get that one right either (in fact, if anything, it's worse in that particular case). If you're going to play "Copy Microsoft" for the UI, you really need to do it better if you want your application to succeed in the wider community...
Interesting concept, but scalability seems to be a problem in several ways with this particular implementation. The screen is just too busy, and one thing common to pretty much all good user interfaces is enough complexity to get the job done, and no more.
A database filing system supporting compound filters is certainly the way forward: show me all files with the type "picture" (or the type "JPEG image"; one file could be of more than one type) that match the keywords "holiday 2004" and "photo". Now use "Thumbnail Creator 2.7" to "create a web page" from that collection.
This sort of thing is definitely an interesting area for research, but I don't think I'd be switching to that particular UI any time soon.
As I have talked about before, we need tog et[sic] some fresh blood...
Interesting place to mistype a space. Getting someone like Tog involved would probably do wonders for Linux usability, and adding some more fresh blood as well wouldn't go amiss.
Our chief weapon is uncertainty... uncertainty and fear... fear and uncertainty... our two weapons are fear and uncertainty... and doubt. Our three weapons are fear, uncertainty and doubt and an almost fanatical devotion to lawyers... Our four... no... amongst our weapons... amongst our weaponry are such elements as fear, uncertainty... I'll come in again.
But it is in our human nature to try to blame someone.:)
At the risk of being nationalist, I think that's actually a peculiarly American attitude, encouraged by your absurdly over-litigious society. Unfortunately, the US is a big influence, and what started there with a few silly court rulings and some dodgy public officials and new laws is spreading.
In the UK, for example, we've switched from a system that provided legal aid to accident victims wanting to take action against someone who was responsible to a system of "no-win, no-fee" representation. That sounds all fine and dandy, but the immediate result is zillions of lawyers -- who were previously legally restricted in their advertising -- going ambulance chasing. Guess what? Now we have loads of frivolous lawsuits.
Just the other day, a guy who was employed as a chef took action against his employer after he cut himself with a knife while preparing food, alleging that he hadn't been shown how to cut the food with that knife safely. THE GUY WAS A CHEF, FFS! If he wasn't competent to do the job, he shouldn't have taken it. Now, what was (from the descriptions I saw) a minor cut to his finger has allegedly jeopardised his whole career. What a shame he didn't accidentally cut off his head with a meat cleaver instead.
And so it goes on. What used to be office politics is now sexual discrimination, racism, ageism, "not what you know it's who you know" and worse. Some of this is legitimate, of course, and it's absolutely right that people's personal prejudice shouldn't impair the careers of women, people from different religious backgrounds, etc. The problem is that now everything negative that happens to a woman, or a black man, or a man over 50, seems to be damned as discrimination, even if there's a clear-cut case for employing the chosen 35-year-old white man instead.
I, for one, do not welcome our new highly-litigious compensation-seeking overlords. Fortunately, the senior members of our legal profession in this country seem to be at least somewhat more down-to-earth than those in the US, and most of the frivolous lawsuits have been dismissed in fairly short order. For now...
(Interestingly, I've just seen this BBC News article, published today, with comments from a senior Law Lord. Just 8 people responsible for 178 claims since 2000? Man, they must be the most unlucky people on the planet! Or...)
Of course the world isn't perfect. The question is whether the system as it stands can realistically be improved. If it can't, there's no point bitching about it. How would you realistically improve the current situation? (You can't just say "Don't award stupid patents", because it appears to be the case that with current resources, or anything close to the same level, the system will be fallible.)
The accuracy is extremely low if even one such patent comes through.
You do realise the typical conditions under which a patent application is examined, right?
I find it amazing that a board full of people who use software all the time -- y'know, the stuff with bugs that are many, various and occasionally catastrophic -- expect a 100% perfection rate from other professionals working in a challenging field under constraints that effectively make it impossible to do a good job reliably. I think it's remarkable that there are so few bad patents, and while this one is clearly absurd, it will equally clearly be laughed out of court in short order on that basis, so no harm, no foul, K?
The fact that having a lawyer is often necessary does not in any way make lawyers good.
Lawyers are a good thing. Yes, you read that right.
The simple fact is that the law is necessarily a complicated thing at times. It has a complicated job to do. Thus, while you or I should certainly be able to understand it if we choose to investigate, it's helpful to have specialists who know the basics off the top of their heads, and perhaps more importantly, who are familiar with the background in their field (relevant case law, key decisions, known or potential loop-holes, etc.) and have real world experience in how their field works.
This is no different to any other professional field. If you're a technical guy running a large company and you're smart, you'll have accountants to do your finances for you, because accountants know basic finance off the top of their heads, and will be familiar with local company financial regulations and such. You don't try to sell everything yourself, you get salesmen and marketing people to handle that side of the business, because they'll know the basics of sales and marketing and they'll have a good knowledge of your business area, who you most likely prospects are, how to close a beneficial deal, and so on.
Now, you can view these people as necessary evils, or even scum-sucking bottom-feeders, if you like. And of course, there are always bad apples in the bunch who are motivated by nothing but personal advancement and have... dubious... ethics. But most lawyers actually aren't like that, and as the old cliche says, behind every sleazy lawyer, there's a sleazy client.
IANAL, BTW; nor am I married to one, working for one, or otherwise biased in their favour.
So the voters' continually elect lawyers to write law, and it's the voters who shoulder all the blame because they should know better than to elect lawyers?
Yep, s'funny that. I had rotting stairs outside my place, too. Warned them about them for nearly 18 months. Then one day, one gave way under me. Seriously injured my back, several days off work, pain and no physical hobbies for weeks, you know the drill. Contacted my landlord's agents shortly after that, pointed out the injury, and said pretty bluntly that if they didn't fix it within a couple of weeks, I'd make arrangements to do it myself and send them a bill of unspecified size to cover everything. Strangely, it was fixed pretty sharpish. A lot of people suggested I sue them, too. I decided against it since finding decent accommodation around here is a pretty tall order just now, and once the stairs were fixed my place was OK. But next time...
Where do you have a one-year lock-in for broadband service? Are you out of the US perhaps?
Yep, I'm in the UK. Here it's pretty standard for all of the big broadband ISPs offering ADSL to make you sign up for a "minimum one year" contract, to offset their expenses from connecting up a property and make up for all the upgrade work that's been performed on telephone exchanges to support ADSL. We have a weird, and often criticised, system where the infrastructure providers and ISPs are all tied up in one tangled web. The guy who really gets stung, unfortunately, is the consumer (surprise!).
There have, as I understand it, been questions asked about whether/how the contract could be enforced if you moved and wanted to move your broadband contract with you. Nevertheless, as written, if I sign up and then my landlord decides he'd like his flat back in a couple of months, I'm out of pocket by 10 x monthly broadband subscription fee, for no benefit. I'm not rich enough to risk that.
Unfortunately, wives compatible with hi-tech households are quite rare.
You think that's a problem? Try having a g/f who comes home and tells you what techno wizardry you need, how her computer is more powerful than yours, etc...:o/
Funny, but still true... Those of us renting have to ask the landlord before we even put up new shelves, and daren't install broadband because it has a one year lock-in but the landlord could end our tenancy with two months' notice. Not much scope for funky gadgets here.:-(
But hey, keep the ideas coming. We can dream...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Does it matter?
All they want to do is browse the web. If your browser doesn't let them do that, they don't care why, and for that matter why should they?
As much as it may irritate the likes of you and me, the reality is that Microsoft has easily 80+% market share on the web, and that means that they define the relevant interfaces and not the W3C. We can encourage people writing web sites to stick to standards for the benefit of the other <20%, but ultimately if you're talking to people in it for the money who have finite resources, they're going to go with the heavy market trend without a second thought.
If the dev team behind Moz would swallow their pride for a year or two and provide a compatibility mode, as pretty much every other successful web browser in history has done at some stage, they'd get a whole lot more market share from Joe Public who was shown Moz/Firebird by friends or family. Unfortunately, their stubborn insistence on supporting the standards, the whole standards and nothing but the standards is supporting the wrong standards. When they have 80% of the market share, then they can get all philosophical and insist on only supporting web sites following W3C standards if they want, and the web will follow them. Until then, they're simply making themselves irrelevant to most of their potential market. Worse, this actually reinforces Microsoft's position, and damages the efforts of others to promote W3C standards on the web.
That's a shame, of course. We all know that the Moz/*bird teams produce great products. I'm sure many of us appreciate the time and effort they put in, and are grateful to have the apps to use. It's just a pity that a stubborn pride amongst the project leaders taints the projects, and no-one will acknowledge that however much we don't like it, it always will.
Sadly, he'd probably win, too.
Surely this is a clear-cut question: anyone with personal information on you should be able to use it in a manner not explicitly agreed if and only if they genuinely believe that the situation is an emergency, and they are confident enough in that belief that they are prepared to be heavily penalised by a court that doesn't agree with them. In this case, it's a pretty obvious call to any reasonable person: if there really is a risk of getting seriously ill as a result of eating the food, the warning is genuine, and contacting customers by any means available is warranted; if it's just an elaborate PR exercise, screw 'em.
FWIW, at a previous job, I was helping to set up a long document, essentially a big directory for internal reference. The text wasn't heavily formatted, but had many numbered lists, and a few headings. The page count was around 300. At that stage, we found Word (an older version, this was late '90s) grinding to a halt, literally: pressing an arrow key to scroll resulted in a ten minute wait before the screen was redrawn. OK, the computers were not as powerful as today's and they've updated the software a few times since, but it seemed to be due to some daft internal limitation, their own version of "nobody will ever need more than 640K of RAM".
The best part was that when we called, taking advantage of our expensive support contract, we were basically told in as many words, "That's too bad. Word's not really meant for long documents, and you should be using more appropriate software for a project like that." And that's from Microsoft themselves!
I'm a great fan of LaTeX. I used it throughout my academic career in maths and later CS, with great success. I've also helped friends in entirely non-scientific fields to use it when writing their theses. That include not only the useful tools for indexing, cross-references and such, but also the community and packages that come with it: I've created numerous diagrams using METAPOST, and a whole foreign language character set, even mapped onto the usual Roman transliterations of Hindi, using METAFONT.
However, LaTeX is not for everyone, and I think your statement about any complex document over 50 pages is a hugely inappropriate generalisation. I also do some minor publishing work to support other groups I work with, resulting in heavily formatted brochure-style documents. LaTeX wouldn't have a prayer at getting the kind of precise control we're looking for here, and doesn't come close to supporting some of the features we need in a useful way.
It's a great tool, but not a universal solution to long, complex documents. As you say, use the right tool -- but that may or may not be LaTeX.
Not at all. A lot of people use MS Office simply because "everyone else does". The format becomes pervasive, the expected norm for sending reports, CVs, and other "self-published" documents.
However, there are other file formats suitable for self-publishing purposes; PDF springs to mind. Again, a crucial factor is that almost anyone can read a PDF file, whether or not they have paid for something like Acrobat, because Adobe offer the free PDF reader software. (Note that there are now several applications that can export to PDF other than Adobe's own product range, including OpenOffice.)
If Microsoft slips and loses market share in this area, then the significance of the MS Word file formats will be much reduced. That in turn will release much of the lock-in effect; if people might not be able to read your documents anyway, why bother paying $$$ for an absurdly expensive office apps suite when there are cheaper alternatives to all of the programs available that do as good a job (at least for day-to-day office work, which is all the vast majority of people use Word and Excel for anyway).
It's funny the Tesco/Levi case has come up, because for example "car supermarkets" are doing very well in the UK. Their basic business model is importing new vehicles and selling them on at a lower price than main dealers charge in the UK, and of course the major car manufacturers don't like that, either.
There was some concern at government level not long ago about how car prices in the UK compared with European prices for essentially the same specs (give or take which side the steering wheel goes) and whether the manufacturers were basically price-fixing. AFAIK no-one has made any sort of legal challenge on the car supermarkets since that time. So the legal grounds for manufacturers blocking importing their products to the UK and selling on the cheap here are obviously not completely clear.
[In case anyone's interested, I'm looking to buy a car at present, and the car supermarkets are typically coming in around 10-15% cheaper than the biggest discount any main dealer will give me, which is itself around 10% of the list price for the model I'm looking at. Then again, the supermarket models aren't backed by full manufacturer warranties and such, and by the time you've paid extra for comparable after-sales support, the gap is still there but much closer. Just mentioning it in case anyone else is car-hunting. :-)]
The most interesting development in the music industry case seems to be the BPI considering similar action against Amazon. As CD-Wow! pointed out, they are only a small company, and it may have been prudent for them to settle. Amazon are not a small company, and if my friends and family are anything to go by, they are responsible for a very significant proportion of legitimate music sales in the UK now.
I rather doubt a retailer in their position will just roll over and die for the music industry. A lot of the reason for their market share is down to charging significantly less than our high street stores for CDs (and DVDs and books). Without that advantage, they still have a much broader catalogue, but that's probably their only major advantage. On the flip side, you have to wait several days to get stuff, and there's more risk of something needing returning due to damage in the post (which Amazon are quite professional about IME, but still takes more time). I imagine they'd lose a lot of sales back to "buy here, have now" high street retailers if the price difference were cut, so it's well worth their while to get the lobbyists out and fight the legal battle over the free trade/imports question.
That's simply not true, of course, assuming you're referring to the same MS that still holds 85-90% of the browser market.
Microsoft are, at present, outcompeting free very successfully in all their major markets. Compare Windows sales with potential sales lost to Linux. Compare Microsoft Office sales with potential sales lost to OpenOffice.org. Those two markets make up the vast majority of Microsoft's business, and there's no doubt at all about who's winning.
What's worrying them, of course, is the speed at which the open source alternatives are catching up on features as well. There's no doubt today about who's winning, but next year? By 2010? This is what's worrying the big software companies: you can outcompete free, but you can't outcompete free and better.
Potentially, in most places, I think the answer is yes.
There's an unfortunate and inevitable conflict between a trading body's "right" not to have someone else misrepresent themselves as that body, and someone's "right" to use their own name to describe themselves.
AIUI (IANAL) the law in most places sides with whoever was there first.
Of course, whether a site called www.mikerowesoft.com that is owned by a guy who's called Mike Rowe and doesn't look obviously like the MS web site is actually in any danger of misrepresenting its owner as the biggest software company in the world is a different question...
Sounds like this poor guy's Farked whatever's going on with his web site...
Hear, hear (though Clippy is some way down my list, after "Don't hide all the damn menus" and other such irritations).
You're spot on about the keyboard usability, though. I had high hopes when I downloaded OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 the other day, with all the comments about work they'd done on customising the UI. I was very disappointed to see that you still can't assign a keyboard shortcut to apply a style or insert an arbitrary character. That vastly reduces the usefulness of both features, IMHO, and is a major usability advantage for Microsoft's offering.
There are a few places Word is really weak in usability: automatic numbering, for example. Unfortunately, OpenOffice.org has yet to get that one right either (in fact, if anything, it's worse in that particular case). If you're going to play "Copy Microsoft" for the UI, you really need to do it better if you want your application to succeed in the wider community...
Interesting concept, but scalability seems to be a problem in several ways with this particular implementation. The screen is just too busy, and one thing common to pretty much all good user interfaces is enough complexity to get the job done, and no more.
A database filing system supporting compound filters is certainly the way forward: show me all files with the type "picture" (or the type "JPEG image"; one file could be of more than one type) that match the keywords "holiday 2004" and "photo". Now use "Thumbnail Creator 2.7" to "create a web page" from that collection.
This sort of thing is definitely an interesting area for research, but I don't think I'd be switching to that particular UI any time soon.
True usability is defined (for me) as a machine that I can use.
True usability is defined (for my grandma) as a machine that my grandma can use.
Whether the two are, or should be, the same or not are the interesting questions.
Interesting place to mistype a space. Getting someone like Tog involved would probably do wonders for Linux usability, and adding some more fresh blood as well wouldn't go amiss.
I'll bet. And if those running Open Source projects learned from his wisdom, they'd have a lot more people contributing.
Our chief weapon is uncertainty... uncertainty and fear... fear and uncertainty... our two weapons are fear and uncertainty... and doubt. Our three weapons are fear, uncertainty and doubt and an almost fanatical devotion to lawyers... Our four... no... amongst our weapons... amongst our weaponry are such elements as fear, uncertainty... I'll come in again.
It may be widely known amongst geeks in the IT community, but the mainstream press still seem to give SCO rather too much credit some of the time!
The value of your investment may go down or up.
Or down and up.
Or down because it went up.
Or up because it went down because it went up.
Or down while Darl McBride's goes up.
Or down when Darl McBridge goes down.
Does anyone else's head hurt?
At the risk of being nationalist, I think that's actually a peculiarly American attitude, encouraged by your absurdly over-litigious society. Unfortunately, the US is a big influence, and what started there with a few silly court rulings and some dodgy public officials and new laws is spreading.
In the UK, for example, we've switched from a system that provided legal aid to accident victims wanting to take action against someone who was responsible to a system of "no-win, no-fee" representation. That sounds all fine and dandy, but the immediate result is zillions of lawyers -- who were previously legally restricted in their advertising -- going ambulance chasing. Guess what? Now we have loads of frivolous lawsuits.
Just the other day, a guy who was employed as a chef took action against his employer after he cut himself with a knife while preparing food, alleging that he hadn't been shown how to cut the food with that knife safely. THE GUY WAS A CHEF, FFS! If he wasn't competent to do the job, he shouldn't have taken it. Now, what was (from the descriptions I saw) a minor cut to his finger has allegedly jeopardised his whole career. What a shame he didn't accidentally cut off his head with a meat cleaver instead.
And so it goes on. What used to be office politics is now sexual discrimination, racism, ageism, "not what you know it's who you know" and worse. Some of this is legitimate, of course, and it's absolutely right that people's personal prejudice shouldn't impair the careers of women, people from different religious backgrounds, etc. The problem is that now everything negative that happens to a woman, or a black man, or a man over 50, seems to be damned as discrimination, even if there's a clear-cut case for employing the chosen 35-year-old white man instead.
I, for one, do not welcome our new highly-litigious compensation-seeking overlords. Fortunately, the senior members of our legal profession in this country seem to be at least somewhat more down-to-earth than those in the US, and most of the frivolous lawsuits have been dismissed in fairly short order. For now...
(Interestingly, I've just seen this BBC News article, published today, with comments from a senior Law Lord. Just 8 people responsible for 178 claims since 2000? Man, they must be the most unlucky people on the planet! Or...)
Of course the world isn't perfect. The question is whether the system as it stands can realistically be improved. If it can't, there's no point bitching about it. How would you realistically improve the current situation? (You can't just say "Don't award stupid patents", because it appears to be the case that with current resources, or anything close to the same level, the system will be fallible.)
You do realise the typical conditions under which a patent application is examined, right?
I find it amazing that a board full of people who use software all the time -- y'know, the stuff with bugs that are many, various and occasionally catastrophic -- expect a 100% perfection rate from other professionals working in a challenging field under constraints that effectively make it impossible to do a good job reliably. I think it's remarkable that there are so few bad patents, and while this one is clearly absurd, it will equally clearly be laughed out of court in short order on that basis, so no harm, no foul, K?
Lawyers are a good thing. Yes, you read that right.
The simple fact is that the law is necessarily a complicated thing at times. It has a complicated job to do. Thus, while you or I should certainly be able to understand it if we choose to investigate, it's helpful to have specialists who know the basics off the top of their heads, and perhaps more importantly, who are familiar with the background in their field (relevant case law, key decisions, known or potential loop-holes, etc.) and have real world experience in how their field works.
This is no different to any other professional field. If you're a technical guy running a large company and you're smart, you'll have accountants to do your finances for you, because accountants know basic finance off the top of their heads, and will be familiar with local company financial regulations and such. You don't try to sell everything yourself, you get salesmen and marketing people to handle that side of the business, because they'll know the basics of sales and marketing and they'll have a good knowledge of your business area, who you most likely prospects are, how to close a beneficial deal, and so on.
Now, you can view these people as necessary evils, or even scum-sucking bottom-feeders, if you like. And of course, there are always bad apples in the bunch who are motivated by nothing but personal advancement and have... dubious... ethics. But most lawyers actually aren't like that, and as the old cliche says, behind every sleazy lawyer, there's a sleazy client.
IANAL, BTW; nor am I married to one, working for one, or otherwise biased in their favour.
Well, you could always elect Hollywood instead...
Yep, s'funny that. I had rotting stairs outside my place, too. Warned them about them for nearly 18 months. Then one day, one gave way under me. Seriously injured my back, several days off work, pain and no physical hobbies for weeks, you know the drill. Contacted my landlord's agents shortly after that, pointed out the injury, and said pretty bluntly that if they didn't fix it within a couple of weeks, I'd make arrangements to do it myself and send them a bill of unspecified size to cover everything. Strangely, it was fixed pretty sharpish. A lot of people suggested I sue them, too. I decided against it since finding decent accommodation around here is a pretty tall order just now, and once the stairs were fixed my place was OK. But next time...
Yep, I'm in the UK. Here it's pretty standard for all of the big broadband ISPs offering ADSL to make you sign up for a "minimum one year" contract, to offset their expenses from connecting up a property and make up for all the upgrade work that's been performed on telephone exchanges to support ADSL. We have a weird, and often criticised, system where the infrastructure providers and ISPs are all tied up in one tangled web. The guy who really gets stung, unfortunately, is the consumer (surprise!).
There have, as I understand it, been questions asked about whether/how the contract could be enforced if you moved and wanted to move your broadband contract with you. Nevertheless, as written, if I sign up and then my landlord decides he'd like his flat back in a couple of months, I'm out of pocket by 10 x monthly broadband subscription fee, for no benefit. I'm not rich enough to risk that.
You think that's a problem? Try having a g/f who comes home and tells you what techno wizardry you need, how her computer is more powerful than yours, etc... :o/
Funny, but still true... Those of us renting have to ask the landlord before we even put up new shelves, and daren't install broadband because it has a one year lock-in but the landlord could end our tenancy with two months' notice. Not much scope for funky gadgets here. :-(
But hey, keep the ideas coming. We can dream... :-)