And if you study fossilization, I believe that you would find that the catastrophic answer makes more sense
The catastrophic answer may make sense, but it's the scientific version not the Christian version. The one time I attempted to read a Creationist magazine (on display at my local Baptist church) I had to physically restrain myself from grabbing a pen and annotating all the dumb mistakes (examples available on request).
Science's foundation is the questioning of established ideas, not the dogmatic defense of them.
As a result, scientific theories tend to be better-thought-out than equivalent religious theories, because if they're false they get debunked faster. Hence scientific theories will generally be more dependable. What was your point here again?
C'mon, people, take your evolutionary blinders off for a moment, and examine the two theories critically, instead of spasmodically twitching whenever anyone mentions ID.
Right. Care to give us any evidence for belief in some undefined "other" that created everything from scratch?
Incidentally, take what I say with a pinch of salt cos I currently have a minor grudge against Christianity. However, I believe that this conflict of interest doesn't invalidate my points.
Regards free will: God is omniscient. God is omnipotent. Hence God both knew what was going to happen and was able to avert it if necessary. Hence God is responsible for what happened (if you have a non-handwavey counterargument please tell). He certainly doesn't have any grounds for blaming the human race unto the umpteenth generation.
From this follows a lot of stuff: God causes war and suffering, God is partially sinful, God isn't worth following. In particular, God is ultimately responsible for Slashdot. Given this last, I feel that being incarnated then nailed to a cross was possibly getting off too lightly.
Yes, that was a joke. Yes, I blame God for my lousy sense of humour.
I've heard this called the "God of the Gaps" approach - every time you have something which science hasn't adequately explained (Big Bang), or for which the evidence could in any way be construed as hazy (evolution), you claim that God did it and declare all the scientists to be heretics for trying to disprove the self-evident truth of God's greatness manifest.
Problem is that, as the new theories emerge or the evidence gets stronger, God is pushed further and further back. This is therefore not a good basis for any religious beliefs you may have - Christianity is absolute but science is ever-changing and is very good at debunking unsupportable theories...
Also, have an amusing and relevant animated gif (mirrored from my webspace cos I can't find it online anymore).
And it's just as likely for a well-behaved Christian to get fired if their liberal, bigoted boss finds out what they've been doing on their own time. What's your point?
I wouldn't support that either, in fact I'd be strongly in favour of legislation to prevent that happening. What's your point?
My question here is whether you want legislation to protect your interests or whether you want it to force others to believe in your cause.
I'm not actually gay. I have no interest in this matter except as it relates to the general health of society.
But if you show up for work late every day because you spent all night "screwing around" then don't expect a lot of sympathy out of me as I'm giving you your walking papers.
That wouldn't come under the heading of "the most well-behaved of homosexuals", which I believe I specified in the grandparent post. The only time I'd have a problem with the situation you just described was if the employee's heterosexual peers were getting away with the same behaviour on a regular basis.
Problem is that, without legislation like this, it's still quite likely for the most well-behaved of homosexuals to get fired if their redneck, bigoted boss finds out what they've been doing in their own time.
I don't think there are patents on the concept of water treatment/radar systems. If there had been, they'd have expired by now. There may be patents on the newest and coolest technologies, but that falls under the heading of expediency, as in "they have no hold over us but expediency".
On the other hand, there's now a patent on the concept of using 911 services from a handheld. Given that, iirc, nonstandard telephony equipment etc was intended to become a major part of the 911 infrastructure (I know they were planning legislation to get 911 to work with VoIP), the emergency telephone system is more or less screwed.
Water treatment, radar systems, internet backbone companies... we can, if we so wish, tell these people to take a hike. It may not be cheap or practical, but they have no hold over us but expediency.
With patents, however, there's no way to say "sorry, mate, we don't want your crappy products so we're going next door". At least not if next door hasn't been allowed to license the patent-encapsulated pearls of genius, such as this trivial extension of the existing 911 system.
The difference is, suppliers can be escaped if you throw enough money at the problem. Controllers can't be escaped without fleeing the country, which would be rather counterproductive for a government.
Legislating against silly buggers is a fair idea, but as far as I know said legislation has yet to be drafted. And, given that the patent under discussion seems to qualify as silly buggers within existing legislation (doesn't pass the obviousness test), I can't imagine that more red tape would do much.
The examples you gave were of corporations supplying goods, not controlling them. My feeling is that no government should allow itself to get into a position where (for example) MS has control over a part of (for example) their emergency infrastructure. That's what this is about.
I'm currently running a forum for people who do maths at my uni (and any others if you wanna drop by). One of the things that we want to do with it is start putting up lecture notes. The problem is the same one: at what point do said notes cease to be property of the lecturer?
If we recorded the lectures and posted the audio files, that would definitely be copyright breach. As would a complete transcript of whatever the lecturer wrote on the board. If we abstract it, does that mean it's a new work or is it still derivative? What if we need to stick a proof up? Without putting appreciable time into finding a new proof (not likely to happen) we're stuck with using whatever the lecturer put up on the board.
The fundamental problem is that copyright is a very hazy concept in academia. Works tend to be on the very limit of what is copyrightable - you can't copyright truth. Students copy from postgrads who copy from PhDs who copy from Professors who copied from other students when they were undergrads.
You can't copyright truth, but you can copyright layout. If we put lecture notes up online which, due to the fact that they were written down in the Statistics lecture course, are identical in layout to the lecturing Professor's new book, is that plagiarism? It's very hard to draw the line, and I know that our university maths society has taken down its lecture notes due to just these issues.
So, to summarise, the uncertainty is screwing us over.
If the proprietary {software;standard} can do something that the open version can't, then there's an argument for using it. I'm a firm believer in the "rising water level" model of open source, whereby proprietary companies are perfectly able to survive *as long as they keep climbing*.
Since a decent majority of open source developers actually give, to use your phrase, a flying fuck about standards, it's generally not in their best interests to promote use of something that isn't a standard, will never be a standard and would be completely undesirable as a standard. Additionally, if it can't be ported across architectures then including it would do a hell of a lot of damage to firefox's geek cred, and hence developer base.
Having said that, I think a plugin that allowed you to use activeX is a cool idea. I just don't think that tying the browser down to any one platform is a great idea. If you're particularly keen to produce an ActiveX version, go fork the codebase.
Thanks for the excellent summary. I'd been pondering whether to add an apologia for intrascience controversy but I decided a) I'd been rabbiting on for too long as it was and b) I couldn't express it nearly well enough.
Of course, the argument could be made that, if scientists are biased in all different directions, then it's true that, on average, they're perfectly rational...:P
Scientists, on average, are perfectly rational when at work, and are objective and unbiased at all times during the day. Religion-bashing is a hobby for when they get home at night. Consider the evolutionary biologist or palaeontologist who is automatically stigmatised by large groups of orthodox christians. On a lesser note, consider the average scientist, who sees in the attitude of religious groups a continual repeat of Caliph Omar's infamous command to burn the books of the Library of Alexandria because "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous."
At the worst, expression of these attitudes online helps to blow off steam. At best, it helps to prevent a return to the same religious totalitarianism that Europe has spent the last millennium escaping from (the Catholics who slaughtered the Cathars and 'heretics', the Protestants who burned the Catholics and 'witches', and the Inquisition who burned everyone). I agree that, in an ideal world, a scientist's beliefs would have no impact on his work. However, in the world we live in, there are large numbers of Christian pseudoscientists (as opposed to actual Christian scientists) who spend their lives attempting to bolster Christianity at the expense of the scientific method (this applies to other religions too, notably Islam). Undesirable as extreme antireligion beliefs may be, IMO they provide a necessary counterweight to extremism on 'the other side'.
I also wouldn't say that using the effectiveness of science to bash religion is as bad or as cowardly as your example of the total obliteration of entire cultures. In particular, science may be value-neutral as far as the existence of a God is concerned, but it is entirely based on the assumption that any such God is not having an effect on events down here. As such, its success provides pretty strong evidence that, whether one exists or not, a god is probably not a prerequisite for the universe as it is today.
Bottom line is that they are there for punishment.
I would very much disagree with this. Prisons (and the justice system as a whole) aren't for punishment, they're for reducing crime. Punishment is a means to that end and, as such, should be applied as necessary.
I'm reasonably sure that punishment applied to excess is counterproductive (iirc, a test on monkeys showed that an environment of randomised punishment just makes people more dysfunctional - I can look it up if anyone would like). Hence, alternative methods of preventing re-offending need to be applied. Education is an important example - if someone leaves prison with no more chance of a decent job than they had when they went in, they're not likely to spontaneously become a model citizen. They'll just make sure they're harder to catch next time, which, depending on the type of crime, could mean slaughtering the witnesses.
Prisons when viewed in this light are basically a type of school where you're allowed to assume that the kids are brats (rather than having to wait til they prove it to you). As someone whose one period of high school teaching assistance culminated in the attempted stabbing of myself with a chair, I can confirm that this analogy is not entirely invalid. The ideal prison would be one that punks who wanted to reform would volunteer for, as a chance to get a decent education and add value back to society.
Certainly punishment alone won't do anything more than keep the cycle going.
Sorry to rain on your parade but the article is about an incident that took place in India. If that's not people other than myself talking about outsourcing to India then what is it?
That's why I used the phrase "particular discussion" - the discussion that these points arose in rather than the article itself. It is of course possible to have a discussion that covers wider issues than the article itself, even on slashdot:P
Again, as for my initial comment which you consider irrelevant, it was intended to point out to a poster who was concerned about justice being done that justice was being done, albeit by the relevant Indian authorities rather than their US counterparts.
I don't consider it irrelevant, sorry if I gave that impression. I was just making the point that, if we're throwing anecdotal evidence into the melting pot, mentioning China is just as valid as mentioning India - neither country was explicitly or implicitly mentioned in the question you were responding to.
By the way, the "[W]ho's talking about outsourcing to China?" in my previous post was a question asking for examples of companies who are currently outsourcing to China or even considering it.
Ah, mea culpa, I misinterpreted it as a derogatory "where the heck did China come into it?". China is apparently due to be the next big outsourcing location, so the manyhorrorstories are definitely something to worry about. (The last link isn't strictly related to outsourcing, but the same problems apply)
As for xenophobia you'll notice that I qualified my remarks by saying "sorry, that's what it looks like from where I'm standing", which was my way of saying "hey, you may not have meant it this way, but that's what it's going to look like to some people" but in not so many words.
Ah, thanks for the warning. I hadn't really considered the possibility it might be taken that way. Seems that too long in a sufficiently multicultural society tends to desensitise you to people's sensitivity.
Open source software can aid Brazil in developing its IT infrastructure and training its citizens. Or it can be used by the Chinese government to spy on *its* citizens. Open source is developed according to aesthetic, not moral, judgements. Lawyers work the same way - a beautifully prepared case is still beautiful if it defends Adolf Hitler.
As I pointed out, no-one involved in this particular discussion, apart from your good self, was talking about outsourcing to India. We were, if I understand correctly, talking about outsourcing in general. As outsourcing to China is a subclass of outsourcing in general, I considered it a valid example to bring up.
Obviously you considered outsourcing to India to be a valid example to bring up, but if you read back you'll see that the first few posts in this thread do not reference any particular country, but talk about outsourcing in general. In fact, your response to Robert's one-liner "It is hard to enforce U.S. law on foreigners" is, viewed in this light, completely irrelevant.
You responded with "So you think that the Indian authorities would be soft on this sort of crime because the victims aren't Indian citizens? Please. If anything - and I speak with a great deal of personal knowledge about the country having travelled there many times - they're probably more vigilant about crimes against westerners than they are about crime in general." You will note that your response has nothing whatsoever to do with the difficulty or otherwise of enforcing US law on foreigners.
I'm not arguing with your personal knowledge of India cos you almost certainly know more about that area of the world than me. Actually, there are things preserved in the Arctic permafrost that know more about India than me. But, speaking as a Cambridge-trained debater, my comment was at least as relevant as yours, and your unwarranted accusations of racism are, well, unwarranted.
Actually, as far as this particular thread of conversation is concerned, India is no more relevant than China. Below is a summary of what seems to be the indicative lines in the grandparent posts (YMMV):
---- Why is identity theft by foreigners considered more scary that identity theft by Americans? - Gowen
It is hard to enforce U.S. law on foreigners. - robert
So you think that the Indian authorities would be soft on this sort of crime because the victims aren't Indian citizens? Please. - WIAKywbfatw
India may be very law-abiding; be aware that that isn't a universal trait. - Lifewish ----
You'll notice that India was brought back into the conversation by yourself as an example of the law-abidingness of some foreign parts, an anecdote which you seemed to be trying to extend to foreign parts in general (apologies if I misinterpreted). China was brought into the conversation by myself as the counterexample to the implied statement "It's generally safe to outsource to foreign countries".
I'm pretty sure I'm not xenophobic as, of my friends, one is half-Malay and half-Chinese, another two are Chinese born and bred, and one is apparently from somewhere in the region of Thailand (I've never asked but her accent matches).
However, I'm aware that attitudes differ between countries. It is wise to be careful where you outsource to as it may be somewhere with a different attitude to, say, ripping off your data than the US or EU. India seems safe; China may not be.
Switzerland does not have a reputation for protecting its citizens at the expense of international law and foreign countries. China, unfortunately, does. The appropriate anecdote (probably apocryphal) is that of the factory owner visiting his China branch, taking a wrong turning and finding an exact duplicate of his factory on the other side of the mountain.
The question I was responding to was "why should outsourcing to foreign parts be considered more dangerous than outsourcing to local companies?" I was providing China as a counterexample.
As far as I know, there is no recorded instance of Freedonia playing silly buggers with foreigners' stuff, so it's probably OK to outsource to.
IIRC, it's very very hard for foreign companies to get Chinese companies prosecuted. India may be very law-abiding; be aware that that isn't a universal trait.
If it harms no-one, then there shouldn't be a law against it. If there is a law against it, that law is a bad law. If a law is a bad law, enforcement of that law is at best unnecessary and at worst destructive.
The contractual parts are specifically written to describe what should happen if you don't agree to the license parts - it's an exception handler. The contractual agreement states that, if you don't accept the license, you can get a refund. If you can't get a refund then MS has breached that contract.
I'm not sure what the results would be. However, your side of the contract is to not install the software. MS's failure to refund possibly provides a loophole by which one could install the software without being legally considered to have accepted the license. Then they only have to abide by normal copyright laws.
I'm sure a lawyer could argue that way, anyway. And, of course, this means you could sue Microsoft if they set an update to automatically install (SP2 anyone?) since, without agreement to their license, they have no right to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you study fossilization, I believe that you would find that the catastrophic answer makes more sense
The catastrophic answer may make sense, but it's the scientific version not the Christian version. The one time I attempted to read a Creationist magazine (on display at my local Baptist church) I had to physically restrain myself from grabbing a pen and annotating all the dumb mistakes (examples available on request).
Science's foundation is the questioning of established ideas, not the dogmatic defense of them.
As a result, scientific theories tend to be better-thought-out than equivalent religious theories, because if they're false they get debunked faster. Hence scientific theories will generally be more dependable. What was your point here again?
C'mon, people, take your evolutionary blinders off for a moment, and examine the two theories critically, instead of spasmodically twitching whenever anyone mentions ID.
Right. Care to give us any evidence for belief in some undefined "other" that created everything from scratch?
Incidentally, take what I say with a pinch of salt cos I currently have a minor grudge against Christianity. However, I believe that this conflict of interest doesn't invalidate my points.
Regards free will: God is omniscient. God is omnipotent. Hence God both knew what was going to happen and was able to avert it if necessary. Hence God is responsible for what happened (if you have a non-handwavey counterargument please tell). He certainly doesn't have any grounds for blaming the human race unto the umpteenth generation.
From this follows a lot of stuff: God causes war and suffering, God is partially sinful, God isn't worth following. In particular, God is ultimately responsible for Slashdot. Given this last, I feel that being incarnated then nailed to a cross was possibly getting off too lightly.
Yes, that was a joke. Yes, I blame God for my lousy sense of humour.
I've heard this called the "God of the Gaps" approach - every time you have something which science hasn't adequately explained (Big Bang), or for which the evidence could in any way be construed as hazy (evolution), you claim that God did it and declare all the scientists to be heretics for trying to disprove the self-evident truth of God's greatness manifest.
Problem is that, as the new theories emerge or the evidence gets stronger, God is pushed further and further back. This is therefore not a good basis for any religious beliefs you may have - Christianity is absolute but science is ever-changing and is very good at debunking unsupportable theories...
Also, have an amusing and relevant animated gif (mirrored from my webspace cos I can't find it online anymore).
And it's just as likely for a well-behaved Christian to get fired if their liberal, bigoted boss finds out what they've been doing on their own time. What's your point?
I wouldn't support that either, in fact I'd be strongly in favour of legislation to prevent that happening. What's your point?
My question here is whether you want legislation to protect your interests or whether you want it to force others to believe in your cause.
I'm not actually gay. I have no interest in this matter except as it relates to the general health of society.
But if you show up for work late every day because you spent all night "screwing around" then don't expect a lot of sympathy out of me as I'm giving you your walking papers.
That wouldn't come under the heading of "the most well-behaved of homosexuals", which I believe I specified in the grandparent post. The only time I'd have a problem with the situation you just described was if the employee's heterosexual peers were getting away with the same behaviour on a regular basis.
Problem is that, without legislation like this, it's still quite likely for the most well-behaved of homosexuals to get fired if their redneck, bigoted boss finds out what they've been doing in their own time.
As far as I know Microsoft aren't releasing a version of IE7 for Debian Linux. Looks like I'm stuck with Mozilla then. Oh what a crying shame.
I don't think there are patents on the concept of water treatment/radar systems. If there had been, they'd have expired by now. There may be patents on the newest and coolest technologies, but that falls under the heading of expediency, as in "they have no hold over us but expediency".
On the other hand, there's now a patent on the concept of using 911 services from a handheld. Given that, iirc, nonstandard telephony equipment etc was intended to become a major part of the 911 infrastructure (I know they were planning legislation to get 911 to work with VoIP), the emergency telephone system is more or less screwed.
Water treatment, radar systems, internet backbone companies... we can, if we so wish, tell these people to take a hike. It may not be cheap or practical, but they have no hold over us but expediency.
With patents, however, there's no way to say "sorry, mate, we don't want your crappy products so we're going next door". At least not if next door hasn't been allowed to license the patent-encapsulated pearls of genius, such as this trivial extension of the existing 911 system.
The difference is, suppliers can be escaped if you throw enough money at the problem. Controllers can't be escaped without fleeing the country, which would be rather counterproductive for a government.
Legislating against silly buggers is a fair idea, but as far as I know said legislation has yet to be drafted. And, given that the patent under discussion seems to qualify as silly buggers within existing legislation (doesn't pass the obviousness test), I can't imagine that more red tape would do much.
The examples you gave were of corporations supplying goods, not controlling them. My feeling is that no government should allow itself to get into a position where (for example) MS has control over a part of (for example) their emergency infrastructure. That's what this is about.
I'm currently running a forum for people who do maths at my uni (and any others if you wanna drop by). One of the things that we want to do with it is start putting up lecture notes. The problem is the same one: at what point do said notes cease to be property of the lecturer?
If we recorded the lectures and posted the audio files, that would definitely be copyright breach. As would a complete transcript of whatever the lecturer wrote on the board. If we abstract it, does that mean it's a new work or is it still derivative? What if we need to stick a proof up? Without putting appreciable time into finding a new proof (not likely to happen) we're stuck with using whatever the lecturer put up on the board.
The fundamental problem is that copyright is a very hazy concept in academia. Works tend to be on the very limit of what is copyrightable - you can't copyright truth. Students copy from postgrads who copy from PhDs who copy from Professors who copied from other students when they were undergrads.
You can't copyright truth, but you can copyright layout. If we put lecture notes up online which, due to the fact that they were written down in the Statistics lecture course, are identical in layout to the lecturing Professor's new book, is that plagiarism? It's very hard to draw the line, and I know that our university maths society has taken down its lecture notes due to just these issues.
So, to summarise, the uncertainty is screwing us over.
If the proprietary {software;standard} can do something that the open version can't, then there's an argument for using it. I'm a firm believer in the "rising water level" model of open source, whereby proprietary companies are perfectly able to survive *as long as they keep climbing*.
Replace "the problem" with "a major problem" and you've got a rock-hard case there. And the word "agglomerates" really isn't used enough these days.
Since a decent majority of open source developers actually give, to use your phrase, a flying fuck about standards, it's generally not in their best interests to promote use of something that isn't a standard, will never be a standard and would be completely undesirable as a standard. Additionally, if it can't be ported across architectures then including it would do a hell of a lot of damage to firefox's geek cred, and hence developer base.
Having said that, I think a plugin that allowed you to use activeX is a cool idea. I just don't think that tying the browser down to any one platform is a great idea. If you're particularly keen to produce an ActiveX version, go fork the codebase.
Thanks for the excellent summary. I'd been pondering whether to add an apologia for intrascience controversy but I decided a) I'd been rabbiting on for too long as it was and b) I couldn't express it nearly well enough.
:P
Of course, the argument could be made that, if scientists are biased in all different directions, then it's true that, on average, they're perfectly rational...
Scientists, on average, are perfectly rational when at work, and are objective and unbiased at all times during the day. Religion-bashing is a hobby for when they get home at night. Consider the evolutionary biologist or palaeontologist who is automatically stigmatised by large groups of orthodox christians. On a lesser note, consider the average scientist, who sees in the attitude of religious groups a continual repeat of Caliph Omar's infamous command to burn the books of the Library of Alexandria because "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous."
At the worst, expression of these attitudes online helps to blow off steam. At best, it helps to prevent a return to the same religious totalitarianism that Europe has spent the last millennium escaping from (the Catholics who slaughtered the Cathars and 'heretics', the Protestants who burned the Catholics and 'witches', and the Inquisition who burned everyone). I agree that, in an ideal world, a scientist's beliefs would have no impact on his work. However, in the world we live in, there are large numbers of Christian pseudoscientists (as opposed to actual Christian scientists) who spend their lives attempting to bolster Christianity at the expense of the scientific method (this applies to other religions too, notably Islam). Undesirable as extreme antireligion beliefs may be, IMO they provide a necessary counterweight to extremism on 'the other side'.
I also wouldn't say that using the effectiveness of science to bash religion is as bad or as cowardly as your example of the total obliteration of entire cultures. In particular, science may be value-neutral as far as the existence of a God is concerned, but it is entirely based on the assumption that any such God is not having an effect on events down here. As such, its success provides pretty strong evidence that, whether one exists or not, a god is probably not a prerequisite for the universe as it is today.
Bottom line is that they are there for punishment.
I would very much disagree with this. Prisons (and the justice system as a whole) aren't for punishment, they're for reducing crime. Punishment is a means to that end and, as such, should be applied as necessary.
I'm reasonably sure that punishment applied to excess is counterproductive (iirc, a test on monkeys showed that an environment of randomised punishment just makes people more dysfunctional - I can look it up if anyone would like). Hence, alternative methods of preventing re-offending need to be applied. Education is an important example - if someone leaves prison with no more chance of a decent job than they had when they went in, they're not likely to spontaneously become a model citizen. They'll just make sure they're harder to catch next time, which, depending on the type of crime, could mean slaughtering the witnesses.
Prisons when viewed in this light are basically a type of school where you're allowed to assume that the kids are brats (rather than having to wait til they prove it to you). As someone whose one period of high school teaching assistance culminated in the attempted stabbing of myself with a chair, I can confirm that this analogy is not entirely invalid. The ideal prison would be one that punks who wanted to reform would volunteer for, as a chance to get a decent education and add value back to society.
Certainly punishment alone won't do anything more than keep the cycle going.
Sorry to rain on your parade but the article is about an incident that took place in India. If that's not people other than myself talking about outsourcing to India then what is it?
:P
:)
That's why I used the phrase "particular discussion" - the discussion that these points arose in rather than the article itself. It is of course possible to have a discussion that covers wider issues than the article itself, even on slashdot
Again, as for my initial comment which you consider irrelevant, it was intended to point out to a poster who was concerned about justice being done that justice was being done, albeit by the relevant Indian authorities rather than their US counterparts.
I don't consider it irrelevant, sorry if I gave that impression. I was just making the point that, if we're throwing anecdotal evidence into the melting pot, mentioning China is just as valid as mentioning India - neither country was explicitly or implicitly mentioned in the question you were responding to.
By the way, the "[W]ho's talking about outsourcing to China?" in my previous post was a question asking for examples of companies who are currently outsourcing to China or even considering it.
Ah, mea culpa, I misinterpreted it as a derogatory "where the heck did China come into it?". China is apparently due to be the next big outsourcing location, so the many horror stories are definitely something to worry about. (The last link isn't strictly related to outsourcing, but the same problems apply)
As for xenophobia you'll notice that I qualified my remarks by saying "sorry, that's what it looks like from where I'm standing", which was my way of saying "hey, you may not have meant it this way, but that's what it's going to look like to some people" but in not so many words.
Ah, thanks for the warning. I hadn't really considered the possibility it might be taken that way. Seems that too long in a sufficiently multicultural society tends to desensitise you to people's sensitivity.
Thanks for a good debate
Open source software can aid Brazil in developing its IT infrastructure and training its citizens. Or it can be used by the Chinese government to spy on *its* citizens. Open source is developed according to aesthetic, not moral, judgements. Lawyers work the same way - a beautifully prepared case is still beautiful if it defends Adolf Hitler.
As I pointed out, no-one involved in this particular discussion, apart from your good self, was talking about outsourcing to India. We were, if I understand correctly, talking about outsourcing in general. As outsourcing to China is a subclass of outsourcing in general, I considered it a valid example to bring up.
Obviously you considered outsourcing to India to be a valid example to bring up, but if you read back you'll see that the first few posts in this thread do not reference any particular country, but talk about outsourcing in general. In fact, your response to Robert's one-liner "It is hard to enforce U.S. law on foreigners" is, viewed in this light, completely irrelevant.
You responded with "So you think that the Indian authorities would be soft on this sort of crime because the victims aren't Indian citizens? Please. If anything - and I speak with a great deal of personal knowledge about the country having travelled there many times - they're probably more vigilant about crimes against westerners than they are about crime in general." You will note that your response has nothing whatsoever to do with the difficulty or otherwise of enforcing US law on foreigners.
I'm not arguing with your personal knowledge of India cos you almost certainly know more about that area of the world than me. Actually, there are things preserved in the Arctic permafrost that know more about India than me. But, speaking as a Cambridge-trained debater, my comment was at least as relevant as yours, and your unwarranted accusations of racism are, well, unwarranted.
Hope that clears things up.
Actually, as far as this particular thread of conversation is concerned, India is no more relevant than China. Below is a summary of what seems to be the indicative lines in the grandparent posts (YMMV):
----
Why is identity theft by foreigners considered more scary that identity theft by Americans? - Gowen
It is hard to enforce U.S. law on foreigners. - robert
So you think that the Indian authorities would be soft on this sort of crime because the victims aren't Indian citizens? Please. - WIAKywbfatw
India may be very law-abiding; be aware that that isn't a universal trait. - Lifewish
----
You'll notice that India was brought back into the conversation by yourself as an example of the law-abidingness of some foreign parts, an anecdote which you seemed to be trying to extend to foreign parts in general (apologies if I misinterpreted). China was brought into the conversation by myself as the counterexample to the implied statement "It's generally safe to outsource to foreign countries".
I'm pretty sure I'm not xenophobic as, of my friends, one is half-Malay and half-Chinese, another two are Chinese born and bred, and one is apparently from somewhere in the region of Thailand (I've never asked but her accent matches).
However, I'm aware that attitudes differ between countries. It is wise to be careful where you outsource to as it may be somewhere with a different attitude to, say, ripping off your data than the US or EU. India seems safe; China may not be.
Switzerland does not have a reputation for protecting its citizens at the expense of international law and foreign countries. China, unfortunately, does. The appropriate anecdote (probably apocryphal) is that of the factory owner visiting his China branch, taking a wrong turning and finding an exact duplicate of his factory on the other side of the mountain.
The question I was responding to was "why should outsourcing to foreign parts be considered more dangerous than outsourcing to local companies?" I was providing China as a counterexample.
As far as I know, there is no recorded instance of Freedonia playing silly buggers with foreigners' stuff, so it's probably OK to outsource to.
IIRC, it's very very hard for foreign companies to get Chinese companies prosecuted. India may be very law-abiding; be aware that that isn't a universal trait.
If it harms no-one, then there shouldn't be a law against it. If there is a law against it, that law is a bad law. If a law is a bad law, enforcement of that law is at best unnecessary and at worst destructive.
Even the download could possibly be considered to be playing silly buggers with your computer ("I *needed* that disk space, your Honour).
:P
I fully accept that this is pushing the limits of the plausible, but since when did lawyers not do that at every opportunity
The contractual parts are specifically written to describe what should happen if you don't agree to the license parts - it's an exception handler. The contractual agreement states that, if you don't accept the license, you can get a refund. If you can't get a refund then MS has breached that contract.
I'm not sure what the results would be. However, your side of the contract is to not install the software. MS's failure to refund possibly provides a loophole by which one could install the software without being legally considered to have accepted the license. Then they only have to abide by normal copyright laws.
I'm sure a lawyer could argue that way, anyway. And, of course, this means you could sue Microsoft if they set an update to automatically install (SP2 anyone?) since, without agreement to their license, they have no right to do this.