12 Disadvantages of an Internet connected PC over a Traditional Phone Book for your Grandma:
1. The phone book doesn't require power.
a. This has other advantages beyond the obvious "save the electricity bill". Nobody in history has ever tripped over the phone book's power cable. 2. The phone book can't crash. 3. It's vanishingly unlikely that the normal, day-to-day use of the phone book will result in some scrote in Russia gaining access to her phone book. And even if it did, the only information in there is publicly available anyway. 4. The phone book doesn't take 2 minutes to start up. 5. The phone book doesn't occasionally - and for no reason that is apparent to your gran - pop up unintelligible messages. 6. It's very familiar technology. 7. It's easy for your gran to tell the difference between an advert and a normal listing in the phone book. 8. Why does gran care that some random stranger knows what numbers she's looking up? Hell, it's quite likely she strongly dislikes the idea. 9. Making the text bigger can be accomplished using this amazing piece of technology called a magnifying glass. It's intuitive, it doesn't require significant training to learn and you don't have to memorise some obscure key combination to make it happen. 10. The phone book doesn't add £15/month to your phone bill. (No idea how much a basic DSL service would cost in the US) 11. If you're not quite sure of the spelling of someone's name but know the first few letters are correct it's fairly easy to find what you're looking for in the phone book. I've yet to see an internet-based telephone directory which allows you to browse based on the first few letters (though I'm happy to be proven wrong). 12. I've never yet seen a telephone book that required a friendly neighbour to perform routine maintenance - nor a phone book which never quite worked properly after it transpired that the friendly neighbour didn't know as much as they claimed.
(To be fair, most of these arguments are probably more applicable to a generation that is rapidly becoming great-grandmothers and dying out, not necessarily in that order).
Standing up for your rights is one thing, but I'd also argue: Choose your battles wisely.
In any situation where there is a huge imbalance of power (which there is in this case - the student has paid his tuition fees for the year and there's no obligation for the university to actually hand over the degree certificate), the one thing you do not do if you're in the less-powerful position is piss off the person in the more-powerful position - unless you want to wind up being thoroughly crushed. You make sure the balance of power is restored and then you start pissing them off.
I'm wondering - if you were to pay under protest and then sue for the money back at a later date (which is quite possible to do in the UK if you're over a barrel), the statute of limitations is six years. Hypothetically (and IANAL), he could pay up under protest now and sue once he's graduated.
It probably is, but you're starting to go down a rabbit warren where the only way out would be to find a judge who would grant an injunction forcing the university to forget about the £300 and let him graduate.
As a lay person, this is something I wouldn't feel comfortable with unless I had some serious legal assistance - and for the sake of £300 it might be as well to put it down to experience. It would certainly be a lot cheaper.
Dean of Welfare (Students), wrote: “Following the serious complaints brought to this institution regarding the contents of the site and your association with it, I find myself having to bring a charge under UCL’s Disciplinary Code of Bringing the College into Disrepute. Therefore I am fining you £300.”
IANAL but AFAIK private organisations in the UK cannot enforce fines - that's a privilege open exclusively to the government. And the nation's universities are essentially private institutions (albeit receiving heavy state funding).
Having said that, if the university I went to was any guide they'll probably have something in their rules which states that if you owe them so much as a penny on graduation day, you don't graduate. And though they may not be able to get a judge to force him to pay, I have no idea if he'd be able to get a judge to force them to write off the £300 "fine".
I don't know how it works in other parts of the world, but in the UK a condition of pretty much all mortgages is you must have buildings insurance.
However, under normal circumstances buildings insurance is intended to rebuild your house where it previously stood - so it only covers the cost of rebuilding, not the value of the land on which the building stood. Quite what you're supposed to do if the land on which the building stood isn't there any more I don't know.
Assuming you own your house (with a mortgage) - how easy is it to hand the keys back to the mortgage company and declare yourself bankrupt to deal with any shortfall between the price the house sells for and your outstanding mortgage when you live in Guatemala?
I guess I just dont get this whole "email the CEO" thing. We keep seeing people getting replies from Steve Jobs (no doubt really from his team) and I have read of people having luck with other big companies. I think the problem would go away if they just stopped answering normal customers emails to the CEO and executives, or at least just replied with the customer service contact details.
Shit flows much faster downhill than it does uphill.
FWIW, I think this guy could have worded his email a little more diplomatically - I've contacted MDs offices before now (never actually spoken to the MD, but have spoken to his secretary once or twice) and if you're calm, polite, explain that you're sorry to bother them but you're experiencing an issue and that while you don't make a habit of contacting the MD you can't think of any other way to get it resolved, you almost always get a call back with exactly what you asked for very quickly indeed. But I do sympathise with the general gist of what he's saying, and any senior exec whose team can't handle getting snotty emails - either directly or CC'd in - needs a new team.
I actually think it probably does a lot of companies good to get the occasional call like that - so many senior execs seem to be totally unaware of what a complete mess their company has become that with any luck it'll shake them up a bit. If you're an ardent, dyed in the wool capitalist, think of it as a friendly warning before the free market starts to exert a not-so-friendly warning.
Little test for you: Go onto almost any non-techie forum and post that this is happening in their "Computers" section (many such forums have computer sections). I bet you anything you like 90% of the responses you get will be along the lines of "anything that catches child molesters is a good thing" - and you'll likely get a few which get really quite vociferous in arguing how anyone who is against it must be child molester themselves.
I'm not American, so you'll have to bear with me here.
I gave up physics, biology and chemistry at 16, so that's a few years ago now, but I don't think we were once told that the word "theory" has a slightly different meaning in science to its colloquial meaning. The colloquial understanding of the word "theory" is probably closer to "hypothesis" - and it's absolutely crucial to understand this because without it the creationist "it's just a theory, we don't know for sure" argument is much harder to refute.
At least if you know the definition of the word "theory" in a scientific context, you can understand that the statement "it's just a theory" is utterly fatuous.
You see, I'm not entirely convinced this is the case.
Lots of countries have quite strict rules regarding political parties accepting donations; I think it's rather more likely that the officially-given arguments (piracy will destroy the industry, causing immense loss of revenue to the nations' economy and huge job loss) are actually believed by politicians.
In which case, the counter-arguments that I've mostly seen (which by and large amount to "waah I don't like it!" and seldom provide any hard research or evidence to suggest why such proposals are a bad idea) are fantastically weak.
I say again: The RIAA/MPAA and their sister organisations in other countries are putting forward all sorts of hard numbers backed up with reams of evidence (I'm not going to speculate on how reliable that evidence is) suggesting how terrible piracy is and how it must be stamped out at all costs.
Those protesting it are at worst countering with "Waaah I don't like it!" and at best countering with "Those numbers don't sound quite right to me but I'm not going to explain why not". They're not saying "Numbers from this other comparable industry demonstrate how more lenient copyright laws are a good thing", they're seldom saying "Look at this group of people who actually produce entertainment, the directors, actors and musicians. They mostly reckon the MPAA/RIAA are completely wrong". Why the hell not?
Copyright holders have very few valid economic arguments; the economic effects of copyright are fundamentally equivalent to any other taxation scheme. Claiming that more copyright is better for the economy is equivalent to claiming more tax is better for the economy.
The more likely flow of argument is that industry goon tells USTR representative that more copyright is good for him, then the USTR threatens various countries, who cave in as handing money to the industry goon is cheaper than fighting trade wars.
Of course, the main reason they get away with that is because IPR funding isn't accounted for in state budgets as it's an externally gathered tax. Had the actual state budget had a '"insurance" payoffs to the MAFIAA so nothing "happens" to our trade status' line it might have been a bit harder to motivate.
This is exactly the kind of response I'm talking about.
Forget about anything that's specific to your country, because we've seen similar behaviour worldwide. Copyright holders will bamboozle representatives (be it MPs, senators or whatever you call them in your country) with all sorts of figures about how much the film and record industries are worth, how much they're losing out to piracy right now, point out that every £/$/€ they lose to piracy means that the proportion of that which would normally be paid in tax won't, present some terrible disaster scenario about how many jobs would be lost (indirectly as well as directly) and how things are getting so much worse.
They've been doing this for decades and they've got pretty good at it - any counter argument has to be backed up with some real research, preferably from someone whose opinion is going to carry some weight, rather than some randomer simply saying "bullshit" and calling the film industry the MAFIAA.
I personally think there should be a referendum on every single law, and only then should it pass . Sure it costs money, but then you know the people are making the laws, not bought out politicians and corporate interests. WTF is the point of having a elected government if they keep trying to pass shit people do not want?
Ah, the Irish system. They have referendums (referenda?) all the time on important issues.
I'm afraid they too have their faults. Usually there are two ways to make sure a referendum gets you the results you want.
1. If you don't get the result you want, run it again a few weeks or months later. 2. Change the way you word the question. A referendum is almost invariably posed as a question to the public: "Do you think we should do this? Yes or no?". All you do is you word the question such that nobody's quite sure which box they should tick.
You know something? Those of us who have moderate views on copyright protection have tried suggesting all sorts of moderations like this.
I know of no country where a single one of them has been implemented. Yet I know of lots of countries which have enacted absurd "just shy of perpetual copyright, any attempt to break it is a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment and silly fines" laws. Clearly the copyright holders are asking for silly things and getting them.
We need to ask why that is. Is it because nobody is contacting their representative to say "hang on a minute here..."? Or is it because the arguments we put forward are viewed as being so pathetically weak that they may as well be ignored? Bear in mind that copyright holders are using economics arguments, which are always going to be perceived as being much stronger than "I don't like this law because I don't think it's very nice" arguments.
IME, Google's premium support generally does exactly this.
You may not always like the answers - some aspects of their systems work slightly differently to what one might expect and cannot be configured otherwise, so I hope you haven't developed a whole bunch of business processes which assume particular behaviour - but they're normally intelligently written in clear English and bear some resemblance to the question asked.
Very few Christians believe much of the Old Testament. It's the fundamentalists (with the emphasis on "mentalist") who do, and they're a relatively small but very vocal bunch.
Have you seen the specs for 4G? It's a pure packet-switched wireless network with target data rates on the order of 100Mbps for mobile devices and 1Gbps for non-mobile devices.
A 5GB cap is simply insane for a network like that.
It's a big cap, but I don't think it's necessarily an insanely big cap. Even web browsing can take up a surprising amount of bandwidth these days - most websites gave up trying to accommodate dial-up users in their design some time ago, and turning on Firebug will demonstrate that many even relatively simple pages can easily involve downloading 500k or more. Start using sites like Flickr or YouTube and that will go up very quickly.
Put a family of four in the house all with their own computers, and I can see it looking a bit tight come the end of the month.
.... the closest thing we have to a whitelist (UAC in Windows) is effectively useless because the default response of the end user is almost always going to be to click "Allow".
.... sticking every application in a VM fails horribly as soon as you want an application to do something that may involve interaction (either with the underlying OS or another application). Example: How are you going to download ${RANDOM_APP} if your web browser can only save files within a VM that gets automatically erased when you shut it down? You can't allow exceptions so the web browser can under some circumstances save files on the underlying host because as soon as you do that you eliminate most, if not all of the security that running in a virtualised environment offers.
... malware frequently doesn't need to exploit the end user, it exploits bugs in applications or the underlying OS. In which case, talk of whitelists and sandboxing simply adds another layer of complication where more bugs may be appear, while giving little additional security.
Slashdot Mirror
12 Disadvantages of an Internet connected PC over a Traditional Phone Book for your Grandma:
1. The phone book doesn't require power.
a. This has other advantages beyond the obvious "save the electricity bill". Nobody in history has ever tripped over the phone book's power cable.
2. The phone book can't crash.
3. It's vanishingly unlikely that the normal, day-to-day use of the phone book will result in some scrote in Russia gaining access to her phone book. And even if it did, the only information in there is publicly available anyway.
4. The phone book doesn't take 2 minutes to start up.
5. The phone book doesn't occasionally - and for no reason that is apparent to your gran - pop up unintelligible messages.
6. It's very familiar technology.
7. It's easy for your gran to tell the difference between an advert and a normal listing in the phone book.
8. Why does gran care that some random stranger knows what numbers she's looking up? Hell, it's quite likely she strongly dislikes the idea.
9. Making the text bigger can be accomplished using this amazing piece of technology called a magnifying glass. It's intuitive, it doesn't require significant training to learn and you don't have to memorise some obscure key combination to make it happen.
10. The phone book doesn't add £15/month to your phone bill. (No idea how much a basic DSL service would cost in the US)
11. If you're not quite sure of the spelling of someone's name but know the first few letters are correct it's fairly easy to find what you're looking for in the phone book. I've yet to see an internet-based telephone directory which allows you to browse based on the first few letters (though I'm happy to be proven wrong).
12. I've never yet seen a telephone book that required a friendly neighbour to perform routine maintenance - nor a phone book which never quite worked properly after it transpired that the friendly neighbour didn't know as much as they claimed.
(To be fair, most of these arguments are probably more applicable to a generation that is rapidly becoming great-grandmothers and dying out, not necessarily in that order).
Standing up for your rights is one thing, but I'd also argue: Choose your battles wisely.
In any situation where there is a huge imbalance of power (which there is in this case - the student has paid his tuition fees for the year and there's no obligation for the university to actually hand over the degree certificate), the one thing you do not do if you're in the less-powerful position is piss off the person in the more-powerful position - unless you want to wind up being thoroughly crushed. You make sure the balance of power is restored and then you start pissing them off.
I'm wondering - if you were to pay under protest and then sue for the money back at a later date (which is quite possible to do in the UK if you're over a barrel), the statute of limitations is six years. Hypothetically (and IANAL), he could pay up under protest now and sue once he's graduated.
It probably is, but you're starting to go down a rabbit warren where the only way out would be to find a judge who would grant an injunction forcing the university to forget about the £300 and let him graduate.
As a lay person, this is something I wouldn't feel comfortable with unless I had some serious legal assistance - and for the sake of £300 it might be as well to put it down to experience. It would certainly be a lot cheaper.
From TFA:
Dean of Welfare (Students), wrote: “Following the serious complaints brought to this institution regarding the contents of the site and your association with it, I find myself having to bring a charge under UCL’s Disciplinary Code of Bringing the College into Disrepute. Therefore I am fining you £300.”
IANAL but AFAIK private organisations in the UK cannot enforce fines - that's a privilege open exclusively to the government. And the nation's universities are essentially private institutions (albeit receiving heavy state funding).
Having said that, if the university I went to was any guide they'll probably have something in their rules which states that if you owe them so much as a penny on graduation day, you don't graduate. And though they may not be able to get a judge to force him to pay, I have no idea if he'd be able to get a judge to force them to write off the £300 "fine".
I don't know how it works in other parts of the world, but in the UK a condition of pretty much all mortgages is you must have buildings insurance.
However, under normal circumstances buildings insurance is intended to rebuild your house where it previously stood - so it only covers the cost of rebuilding, not the value of the land on which the building stood. Quite what you're supposed to do if the land on which the building stood isn't there any more I don't know.
Wasn't there something like this in one of the Hitchhikers' Guide books?
Assuming you own your house (with a mortgage) - how easy is it to hand the keys back to the mortgage company and declare yourself bankrupt to deal with any shortfall between the price the house sells for and your outstanding mortgage when you live in Guatemala?
How common is home ownership there anyway?
I guess I just dont get this whole "email the CEO" thing. We keep seeing people getting replies from Steve Jobs (no doubt really from his team) and I have read of people having luck with other big companies. I think the problem would go away if they just stopped answering normal customers emails to the CEO and executives, or at least just replied with the customer service contact details.
Shit flows much faster downhill than it does uphill.
FWIW, I think this guy could have worded his email a little more diplomatically - I've contacted MDs offices before now (never actually spoken to the MD, but have spoken to his secretary once or twice) and if you're calm, polite, explain that you're sorry to bother them but you're experiencing an issue and that while you don't make a habit of contacting the MD you can't think of any other way to get it resolved, you almost always get a call back with exactly what you asked for very quickly indeed. But I do sympathise with the general gist of what he's saying, and any senior exec whose team can't handle getting snotty emails - either directly or CC'd in - needs a new team.
I actually think it probably does a lot of companies good to get the occasional call like that - so many senior execs seem to be totally unaware of what a complete mess their company has become that with any luck it'll shake them up a bit. If you're an ardent, dyed in the wool capitalist, think of it as a friendly warning before the free market starts to exert a not-so-friendly warning.
He didn't send out a letter, he made a phone call.
It's equally likely that a more accurate description would be he no longer has authority to do that.
That's a very good point. I'm wondering if the OP was using the wrong word there.
No, the parent is right.
Little test for you: Go onto almost any non-techie forum and post that this is happening in their "Computers" section (many such forums have computer sections). I bet you anything you like 90% of the responses you get will be along the lines of "anything that catches child molesters is a good thing" - and you'll likely get a few which get really quite vociferous in arguing how anyone who is against it must be child molester themselves.
And the only reason the newspapers wrote anything at all about it is Rupert Murdoch doesn't speak Swedish.
I'm not American, so you'll have to bear with me here.
I gave up physics, biology and chemistry at 16, so that's a few years ago now, but I don't think we were once told that the word "theory" has a slightly different meaning in science to its colloquial meaning. The colloquial understanding of the word "theory" is probably closer to "hypothesis" - and it's absolutely crucial to understand this because without it the creationist "it's just a theory, we don't know for sure" argument is much harder to refute.
At least if you know the definition of the word "theory" in a scientific context, you can understand that the statement "it's just a theory" is utterly fatuous.
You see, I'm not entirely convinced this is the case.
Lots of countries have quite strict rules regarding political parties accepting donations; I think it's rather more likely that the officially-given arguments (piracy will destroy the industry, causing immense loss of revenue to the nations' economy and huge job loss) are actually believed by politicians.
In which case, the counter-arguments that I've mostly seen (which by and large amount to "waah I don't like it!" and seldom provide any hard research or evidence to suggest why such proposals are a bad idea) are fantastically weak.
I say again: The RIAA/MPAA and their sister organisations in other countries are putting forward all sorts of hard numbers backed up with reams of evidence (I'm not going to speculate on how reliable that evidence is) suggesting how terrible piracy is and how it must be stamped out at all costs.
Those protesting it are at worst countering with "Waaah I don't like it!" and at best countering with "Those numbers don't sound quite right to me but I'm not going to explain why not". They're not saying "Numbers from this other comparable industry demonstrate how more lenient copyright laws are a good thing", they're seldom saying "Look at this group of people who actually produce entertainment, the directors, actors and musicians. They mostly reckon the MPAA/RIAA are completely wrong". Why the hell not?
Copyright holders have very few valid economic arguments; the economic effects of copyright are fundamentally equivalent to any other taxation scheme. Claiming that more copyright is better for the economy is equivalent to claiming more tax is better for the economy.
The more likely flow of argument is that industry goon tells USTR representative that more copyright is good for him, then the USTR threatens various countries, who cave in as handing money to the industry goon is cheaper than fighting trade wars.
Of course, the main reason they get away with that is because IPR funding isn't accounted for in state budgets as it's an externally gathered tax. Had the actual state budget had a '"insurance" payoffs to the MAFIAA so nothing "happens" to our trade status' line it might have been a bit harder to motivate.
This is exactly the kind of response I'm talking about.
Forget about anything that's specific to your country, because we've seen similar behaviour worldwide. Copyright holders will bamboozle representatives (be it MPs, senators or whatever you call them in your country) with all sorts of figures about how much the film and record industries are worth, how much they're losing out to piracy right now, point out that every £/$/€ they lose to piracy means that the proportion of that which would normally be paid in tax won't, present some terrible disaster scenario about how many jobs would be lost (indirectly as well as directly) and how things are getting so much worse.
They've been doing this for decades and they've got pretty good at it - any counter argument has to be backed up with some real research, preferably from someone whose opinion is going to carry some weight, rather than some randomer simply saying "bullshit" and calling the film industry the MAFIAA.
I also mean economic arguments in countries where they haven't legislated corruption to quite such an absurd level as the US ;)
I personally think there should be a referendum on every single law, and only then should it pass . Sure it costs money, but then you know the people are making the laws, not bought out politicians and corporate interests. WTF is the point of having a elected government if they keep trying to pass shit people do not want?
Ah, the Irish system. They have referendums (referenda?) all the time on important issues.
I'm afraid they too have their faults. Usually there are two ways to make sure a referendum gets you the results you want.
1. If you don't get the result you want, run it again a few weeks or months later.
2. Change the way you word the question. A referendum is almost invariably posed as a question to the public: "Do you think we should do this? Yes or no?". All you do is you word the question such that nobody's quite sure which box they should tick.
You know something? Those of us who have moderate views on copyright protection have tried suggesting all sorts of moderations like this.
I know of no country where a single one of them has been implemented. Yet I know of lots of countries which have enacted absurd "just shy of perpetual copyright, any attempt to break it is a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment and silly fines" laws. Clearly the copyright holders are asking for silly things and getting them.
We need to ask why that is. Is it because nobody is contacting their representative to say "hang on a minute here..."? Or is it because the arguments we put forward are viewed as being so pathetically weak that they may as well be ignored? Bear in mind that copyright holders are using economics arguments, which are always going to be perceived as being much stronger than "I don't like this law because I don't think it's very nice" arguments.
IME, Google's premium support generally does exactly this.
You may not always like the answers - some aspects of their systems work slightly differently to what one might expect and cannot be configured otherwise, so I hope you haven't developed a whole bunch of business processes which assume particular behaviour - but they're normally intelligently written in clear English and bear some resemblance to the question asked.
Very few Christians believe much of the Old Testament. It's the fundamentalists (with the emphasis on "mentalist") who do, and they're a relatively small but very vocal bunch.
Life's too short to spend 8 hours a day doing something you hate.
It does indeed - I believe the roll over point on any modern Linux kernel is 2^64 bytes.
Let me know when you've downloaded that much.
Have you seen the specs for 4G? It's a pure packet-switched wireless network with target data rates on the order of 100Mbps for mobile devices and 1Gbps for non-mobile devices.
A 5GB cap is simply insane for a network like that.
It's a big cap, but I don't think it's necessarily an insanely big cap. Even web browsing can take up a surprising amount of bandwidth these days - most websites gave up trying to accommodate dial-up users in their design some time ago, and turning on Firebug will demonstrate that many even relatively simple pages can easily involve downloading 500k or more. Start using sites like Flickr or YouTube and that will go up very quickly.
Put a family of four in the house all with their own computers, and I can see it looking a bit tight come the end of the month.
Which is fine and dandy except....