So you think ordering something from a website - perhaps using a secure page - now counts as "publish info in the internet about themselves" and it's therefore fair game for them to broadcast that to all and sundry without your consent?
* Causes hassles for the people. * Actually creates a security risk in itself (the example of the crowded waiting lines, as the OP pointed out). * It costs vast amounts of money, that could be used saving lives in other areas (policing, health).
And it's still clueless and inept - pleading "But I'm intentionally being clueless and inept to fool other people who are clueless and inept" doesn't change the fact that they're being clueless and inept. It's like saying a stupid person is just pretending to be stupid all the time - if it walks like a duck, etc.
How about one of the many open phones (you mention Android as one example), that's either a SIM free version or available on multiple networks? We already have "phone size appliances like Iphones" - they're called phones:)
I'm not sure how that example is relevant, unless evidence was put forward to justify the death sentence, and then the Canadian court was considering that.
Here however, the question of how much damages are is relevant, and it seems reasonable to take their public statements into account as evidence, no matter which country they made them in.
And note that Apple's actual mobile phone share is much smaller (early 2009 was about 1%), whilst Nokia are still around 40%.
("Smartphone" is illdefined, and it's debatable that the Iphone counts anyway, unless you use a broad definition that would include all feature phones - it's misleading to redefine the market to something smaller, but still including the Iphone, just to inflate its share.)
But surely it's the reverse? Children can talk as much as they like, and now adults aren't allowed to talk to them - even to tell them "Children should be seen and not heard"...
Next up, children telling "Adults should be seen and not heard".
That's a browser issue, not a webmaster fault. Why on earth should a webmaster know whether your system is running "windows" or "tabs" or whatever else, especially considering the wide range of browsers and operating systems out there?
A "window" is a broad general concept - if a browser runs with single windows in one main window (tabs, MDI, whatever you want to call it), then the obvious choice would be that "open this link in a new window" is interpreted as opening a new tab/internal window/whatever. If it doesn't, your browser is broken.
What's so bad about MDI? It means an application's windows are grouped together. And tabs are MDI anyway, although some browsers like Firefox use their own custom method to implement them (which also loses features, as you can't resize them anymore or view them side by side).
Yes, there are other ways than MDI - e.g., screens/workspaces. But the more recent trend on Windows to simply have every window in existence to be a main application window, thus littering the taskbar and having no hierarchy, is nonsense.
At the moment, full-screen-only-tabs don't offer that functionality. Surely by the time you add the complexity of the UI to allow for all the possible split pane and multiple viewing of various tabs, you're going to be back at the current windowed situation anyway.
I have no idea whether Farmville is a good game - maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But if they want to look at why it's so successful, they can't ignore the simple fact of the huge amount of spam that is used to advertise it, which puts it at an unfair advantage. Sure, if I was writing a game, I could make it so that it offers to spam everyone in your address book everyday, but that doesn't mean I'd do it, nor would doing so make me a good game developer.
If you're using Urban Dictionary to look up words that are already part of the language, are products, or ask questions about medical issues, you're doing it wrong. It's a dictionary for slang.
You might as well slag of Slashdot, because of the equally uninformed opinions some people have on certain OSs here. Or slag off dictionaries, because they don't tell you the meaning of slang words not yet in widespread use.
I know, let's criminalise breathing oxygen. I'm sure that we can trust the police to only use the law against the "bad guys", and we can conveniently do away with the need for pesky things like evidence. And I'm sure than no innocents will be caught by having to meet their targets for catching "people who breath oxygen". If the worst comes to the worst, they can always bring in some guy who taped something off the radio, and sentence him to decades in prison!
Indeed - sadly it's just as mad over here in the UK (where they've also recently added "extreme" adult porn to the list, and a law that I believe has just passed, or is about to, will criminalise any sexual drawings/cartoons that appear to show an under-18 - thus the set of illegal images they could catch you with is vastly broader now).
It also makes me wonder, when discussions about things like whether the Virgin Killers album cover counts as child porn (or say, cartoon images). You get these people saying it's child porn - and I'm thinking, hang on. If I encountered something that I believed was child porn, I back away and never check the site again, and be running erasing tools over my hard disk. I certainly wouldn't be admitting I'd viewed it in public!
So either they are extremely naive about the consequences of viewing child porn (I mean, saying that they only looked to see if it was child porn is hardly a defence - the "But I was doing research" argument does not work), or when they claim it's "child porn", they still draw a distinction between these images, and actual images of child abuse.
the Daily Mail is a decent publication that at least occasionally publishes a decent story.
Just because it has published at least one okay story doesn't mean they are a decent publication (the story is still inaccurate - suggesting that Wikipedia are now required to reveal the address, when legally they are not, and have instead simply chosen to cooperate - as well as using it as an opportunity to slag off Wikipedia when it's off-topic; the only difference here is that the rest of the media are also misrepresenting the story, and are slagging them off, presumably as the media can't stand a free source of information that's more popular than them).
And how come we never get stories from the likes of The Sun, The Mirror, or The News Of The World? Normally Slashdot doesn't touch tabloids with a bargepole (not in the UK, anyway) - it'll be the BBC, or the broadsheets. Or the Daily Mail, for some reason.
But yes, it is funny how various "right wing" groups all hate each other. The one blessing of electing BNP members to the EU Parliament is that they are now forced to work with people they hate - doubly so, since they'll have to go and work with those "nasty foreigners", and won't get along with even the other fascist groups in Europe...
Nevertheless, the Daily Mail is wrong: the woman has not "won the right" to the IP address; UK courts cannot give people that right.
Indeed yes, most of the media have this wrong, with headlines like being "forced" or "ordered" to reveal the IP address. And these are the same media articles that are also using the story as an opportunity to throw in jabs about Wikipedia being untrustworthy...
Does the U.K. actually have any newspapers that aren't tabloids these days?
Yes, plenty.
Does the left in the U.K. still try to dismiss anyone who isn't as left as they are by labeling them as "far-right" and "foaming-at-the-mouth"?
I'm not sure what your point is - the Daily Mail is generally reasonably described as a right wing newspaper. And tell me, do you try to dismiss people by labelling them as left?
It's always been the case that Wikimedia could reveal an IP address - just as Slashdot, or any other site could. When people leave comments on my blog, I get the IP addresses - if they annoyed me, or maybe for no reason at all, I could make their IP addresses public. No need for a court order.
I don't think it follows that just because Wikimedia reveals it in the case of a UK court order, for blackmail (something that is illegal in the US too, and is reasonably seen as illegal and unethical), not to mention vandalising Wikipedia, that they would also do so in the case of China for doing something that was entirely legal in the US, and where the edit was entirely reasonable.
Just because someone is not required by law to do something, doesn't mean they can't decide to do it anyway. Remember we're talking about someone vandalising the site - if I trolled some website, I could hardly go pleading sympathy if they revealed my IP address, whether or not a court was involved.
Can you point me to the comments where the "slashhordes" have been outraged by this court order? I mean, your rant is all very nice, I just don't see who it's directed against? "we will see a lot of howling", "we see a lot of complaints on these forums and in general about rights"? Where?
what we don't see much discussion is one about responsibilities.
There's plenty of discussion. Indeed, if X is a right, then that surely implies the discussion that not infringing X is a responsibility.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't seem to have got one of these notices at all...
So you think ordering something from a website - perhaps using a secure page - now counts as "publish info in the internet about themselves" and it's therefore fair game for them to broadcast that to all and sundry without your consent?
But then by that argument, what about all the civilian personnel working in military installations in Iraq, or any other war?
That argument stops when it:
* Causes hassles for the people.
* Actually creates a security risk in itself (the example of the crowded waiting lines, as the OP pointed out).
* It costs vast amounts of money, that could be used saving lives in other areas (policing, health).
And it's still clueless and inept - pleading "But I'm intentionally being clueless and inept to fool other people who are clueless and inept" doesn't change the fact that they're being clueless and inept. It's like saying a stupid person is just pretending to be stupid all the time - if it walks like a duck, etc.
How about one of the many open phones (you mention Android as one example), that's either a SIM free version or available on multiple networks? We already have "phone size appliances like Iphones" - they're called phones :)
I'm not sure how that example is relevant, unless evidence was put forward to justify the death sentence, and then the Canadian court was considering that.
Here however, the question of how much damages are is relevant, and it seems reasonable to take their public statements into account as evidence, no matter which country they made them in.
And note that Apple's actual mobile phone share is much smaller (early 2009 was about 1%), whilst Nokia are still around 40%.
("Smartphone" is illdefined, and it's debatable that the Iphone counts anyway, unless you use a broad definition that would include all feature phones - it's misleading to redefine the market to something smaller, but still including the Iphone, just to inflate its share.)
But surely it's the reverse? Children can talk as much as they like, and now adults aren't allowed to talk to them - even to tell them "Children should be seen and not heard"...
Next up, children telling "Adults should be seen and not heard".
That's a browser issue, not a webmaster fault. Why on earth should a webmaster know whether your system is running "windows" or "tabs" or whatever else, especially considering the wide range of browsers and operating systems out there?
A "window" is a broad general concept - if a browser runs with single windows in one main window (tabs, MDI, whatever you want to call it), then the obvious choice would be that "open this link in a new window" is interpreted as opening a new tab/internal window/whatever. If it doesn't, your browser is broken.
What's so bad about MDI? It means an application's windows are grouped together. And tabs are MDI anyway, although some browsers like Firefox use their own custom method to implement them (which also loses features, as you can't resize them anymore or view them side by side).
Yes, there are other ways than MDI - e.g., screens/workspaces. But the more recent trend on Windows to simply have every window in existence to be a main application window, thus littering the taskbar and having no hierarchy, is nonsense.
So what is it you are proposing?
At the moment, full-screen-only-tabs don't offer that functionality. Surely by the time you add the complexity of the UI to allow for all the possible split pane and multiple viewing of various tabs, you're going to be back at the current windowed situation anyway.
effectively marrying good viral marketing (aka, News Feed)
aka, Spam.
Spam is not good, and we shouldn't be congratulating developers for resorting to such methods.
Perhaps some of us just have more interesting friends. I mean yeah, if your friends are boring, Facebook will be boring.
Indeed - this isn't that better than "But you can opt out of this email spam if you click on the link"...
How so? More friends leads to more spamming.
I agree.
I have no idea whether Farmville is a good game - maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But if they want to look at why it's so successful, they can't ignore the simple fact of the huge amount of spam that is used to advertise it, which puts it at an unfair advantage. Sure, if I was writing a game, I could make it so that it offers to spam everyone in your address book everyday, but that doesn't mean I'd do it, nor would doing so make me a good game developer.
If you're using Urban Dictionary to look up words that are already part of the language, are products, or ask questions about medical issues, you're doing it wrong. It's a dictionary for slang.
You might as well slag of Slashdot, because of the equally uninformed opinions some people have on certain OSs here. Or slag off dictionaries, because they don't tell you the meaning of slang words not yet in widespread use.
I know, let's criminalise breathing oxygen. I'm sure that we can trust the police to only use the law against the "bad guys", and we can conveniently do away with the need for pesky things like evidence. And I'm sure than no innocents will be caught by having to meet their targets for catching "people who breath oxygen". If the worst comes to the worst, they can always bring in some guy who taped something off the radio, and sentence him to decades in prison!
Indeed - sadly it's just as mad over here in the UK (where they've also recently added "extreme" adult porn to the list, and a law that I believe has just passed, or is about to, will criminalise any sexual drawings/cartoons that appear to show an under-18 - thus the set of illegal images they could catch you with is vastly broader now).
It also makes me wonder, when discussions about things like whether the Virgin Killers album cover counts as child porn (or say, cartoon images). You get these people saying it's child porn - and I'm thinking, hang on. If I encountered something that I believed was child porn, I back away and never check the site again, and be running erasing tools over my hard disk. I certainly wouldn't be admitting I'd viewed it in public!
So either they are extremely naive about the consequences of viewing child porn (I mean, saying that they only looked to see if it was child porn is hardly a defence - the "But I was doing research" argument does not work), or when they claim it's "child porn", they still draw a distinction between these images, and actual images of child abuse.
the Daily Mail is a decent publication that at least occasionally publishes a decent story.
Just because it has published at least one okay story doesn't mean they are a decent publication (the story is still inaccurate - suggesting that Wikipedia are now required to reveal the address, when legally they are not, and have instead simply chosen to cooperate - as well as using it as an opportunity to slag off Wikipedia when it's off-topic; the only difference here is that the rest of the media are also misrepresenting the story, and are slagging them off, presumably as the media can't stand a free source of information that's more popular than them).
And how come we never get stories from the likes of The Sun, The Mirror, or The News Of The World? Normally Slashdot doesn't touch tabloids with a bargepole (not in the UK, anyway) - it'll be the BBC, or the broadsheets. Or the Daily Mail, for some reason.
I think this post highlights the hypocrisy of the Daily Mail (and other tabloids) versus the BNP: http://enemiesofreason.blogspot.com/2009/10/hmm-remember-this.html .
But yes, it is funny how various "right wing" groups all hate each other. The one blessing of electing BNP members to the EU Parliament is that they are now forced to work with people they hate - doubly so, since they'll have to go and work with those "nasty foreigners", and won't get along with even the other fascist groups in Europe...
Nevertheless, the Daily Mail is wrong: the woman has not "won the right" to the IP address; UK courts cannot give people that right.
Indeed yes, most of the media have this wrong, with headlines like being "forced" or "ordered" to reveal the IP address. And these are the same media articles that are also using the story as an opportunity to throw in jabs about Wikipedia being untrustworthy...
Does the U.K. actually have any newspapers that aren't tabloids these days?
Yes, plenty.
Does the left in the U.K. still try to dismiss anyone who isn't as left as they are by labeling them as "far-right" and "foaming-at-the-mouth"?
I'm not sure what your point is - the Daily Mail is generally reasonably described as a right wing newspaper. And tell me, do you try to dismiss people by labelling them as left?
It's always been the case that Wikimedia could reveal an IP address - just as Slashdot, or any other site could. When people leave comments on my blog, I get the IP addresses - if they annoyed me, or maybe for no reason at all, I could make their IP addresses public. No need for a court order.
I don't think it follows that just because Wikimedia reveals it in the case of a UK court order, for blackmail (something that is illegal in the US too, and is reasonably seen as illegal and unethical), not to mention vandalising Wikipedia, that they would also do so in the case of China for doing something that was entirely legal in the US, and where the edit was entirely reasonable.
Just because someone is not required by law to do something, doesn't mean they can't decide to do it anyway. Remember we're talking about someone vandalising the site - if I trolled some website, I could hardly go pleading sympathy if they revealed my IP address, whether or not a court was involved.
Can you point me to the comments where the "slashhordes" have been outraged by this court order? I mean, your rant is all very nice, I just don't see who it's directed against? "we will see a lot of howling", "we see a lot of complaints on these forums and in general about rights"? Where?
what we don't see much discussion is one about responsibilities.
There's plenty of discussion. Indeed, if X is a right, then that surely implies the discussion that not infringing X is a responsibility.