The problem both Labor and the Conservatives have with PR, is that it would lead to coalition governments. This is easy to see. The Liberals had 23% of the last vote, the Conservatives 36%, and Labor 29%. This is more or less the share of the popular vote that the three parties have had for the last 30+ years.
You can see that if each party has the same number of seats as they have percentage of the votes, then no party is generally going to have a total majority over the other two. You will just about always have a situation, like in Holland, where the third party is in every government, sometimes in coalition with Labor and sometimes with Conservatives.
The reason why both of the two larger parties do not want this, is that they represent essentially minority interests. The Conservative Party historically represents inherited wealth and also the rural areas. Which are dominated by large landowners. The Labor party represents big cities, the industrial workforce and the public sector trade unions. And of course the large welfare population of dependents. Both are ready and eager to impose heavy costs on the country as a whole, as long as they get some, often fairly small, percentage of those costs for their own interest groups. This tendency, which is a form of looting, gets more extreme with the second and especially the third term of any government. In the first term of any government, it tends to behave responsibly. The first Blair term, for instance, was marked by restraint in public spending and no deals with the public sector unions.
The second and third terms have seen enormous public spending, mostly on public sector union wages, which has been marketed as 'investing in our great public services'. This has imposed costs on the country which dwarf the benefits to the recipients of the benefits, but no-one cares what it costs the country, as long as they are doing better.
The Conservatives are no better. We can expect something similar in the second and third terms of any Conservative government. The interesting difference about this Labor government has been its approach to the finance sector, which is referred to in the UK as 'the City'. This Labor government has been much closer to the City than any previous one.
You can see that this pattern of behavior will be eliminated by coalition governments. The problem is, in your first term you generally govern for the country, the better to get a second term. When in the second or third term you move to payoff time, and start the outrageous rewarding of your interest group, if its a coalition government, the other partner will just say no, force an election, and then move into coalition with the other large party. It will be game over.
The sheer rage that the idea of proportional representation arouses in the hearts of Conservative Party stalwarts is due to this. They are seeing the prospect of the second and third term troughs being smashed before their eyes. No more feasting. The whole rationale of the parties goes.
What happens with coalition government, on say the Dutch lines, is that it replaces the focus on who is in power, with a focus on what the program is going to be, what the policies are. In the UK at the moment all anyone cares about is who is in power, because whoever it is, can hand out the spoils. Once you cannot do this any more, you have to focus on governing for the country. Now that is not what either of the two large parties want to do, at least, no more than they absolutely have to.
And this is why far more of the UK wants PR than anyone in either of the two big parties will admit. It is not just the 25% that vote Liberal. It is also those who routinely switch from one party to the other, to give the other guys a chance.
If you think about it, in the situation I have described, what does the rational voter do? He/she is confronted with a two party system in which the second and third terms of any government are going to feature irresponsible looting of a sort mos
The real thing we have to worry about is the fatwa gap, never mind the IP gap.
There are billions of people all over the world living in jurisdictions where their clergy have not issued fatwas for generations. You will be surprised to learn that it happens in the developed world, too. The Episcopalian Church in the US is one of the worst offenders in this respect, it seems not to have issued any fatwas since the Revolution. We need to act now to remedy this desperate situation and to restore the feeling of certainty that a robust fatwa regime would give to these troubled flocks.
And in the meantime, we need to be very careful in how we conduct ourselves in regard to these fatwa deficient countries. We should not get contaminated by their insecure, rootless, fatwa deficient moral wanderings.
Thanks to the OP for drawing this general problem of the lack of robust cultural norms to our attention, a pity that he got diverted to one of the smallest and least problematic examples of it.
"Wouldn't flying an airliner through some airborne ash, be like a couple hours worth of sandblasting? I'd hate to think what that does to the engines."
Yes. No sensible person would advocate allowing planes to fly through clouds of ash. The question is not that, the question is whether they could have taken more energetic and prompt measures to assess and monitor where the dangerous levels of ash were, and whether the continued ban was necessary. It seems, in retrospect, that this was the failure. We seem to have substituted cries of 'safety first' for immediate and continued investigation of what the situation really was.
The way to look at this might be as follows. We have an example of the precautionary principle in action, and can use it to assess the probably results of making this a guideline for setting public policy. The leading case where it is claimed that we should apply the supposed principle is Global Warming. It is argued that the precautionary principle mandates immediate drastic action to lower CO2 emission levels if there is even the slightest chance that continuing at present levels would lead to the end of human civilization on Earth.
We had a similar argument about ash: if there is even the slightest chance that flying through the ash will cause planes everywhere to fall out of the sky, we should ground them all at once.
In fact, the situation turned out to be much more nuanced and complicated. When the analysis was done, it turns out that there there was probably no need to ban all air travel, though there was a real danger, and a real need to take precautions and do proper assessment of damage. It is not safe to fly through clouds of ash. But there were not clouds of ash everywhere that was closed. In fact, we would in retrospect have done better to investigate the real situation carefully by test flights immediately. We'd then have discovered that quite a lot of flying, quite a lot of the time, would have been perfectly safe, and that there are ways of telling when its prudent to limit flights in the light of changing weather and eruptions.
The bottom line is, we incurred huge unnecessary costs, and worse, until quite late in the crisis the authorities acted as if their use of the PP made it unnecessary to investigate in detail what the real situation was.
Now if we imagine a world in which the PP is used all the time, on larger and larger issues, including Global Warming, we see that the result for public policy would be one in which policy makers neglect proper analysis and start to jump in fear at shadows. That is, cases in which there is neither real danger nor any proper analysis will increasingly dominate expenditure on measures which are done with no proper reason behind them, on a 'just in case' basis. The costs of these measures, which it is thought 'denialist' to weigh, will be huge, will in fact be so great as to prevent any proper treatment of the real danger.
This case shows that there is no substitute in public policy for proper risk assessment, and for proper analysis of the benefits and costs of proposed actions. Its a commonplace in medicine, where we have the 'number to treat' parameter - that is, how many do we have to treat to save a life, what are the side effects on those we treat? We need exactly the same thing with all public policy issues.
The difficulty with the Precautionary Principle, which you can see here, is that its invocation is used to avoid rigorous analysis of the real risks and costs of alternative actions. And it results in completely pointless and inordinately expensive measures being taken.
Think about that, the next time you see some huge windfarm, blades stationary, in a flat calm on a prolonged cold spell in the winter, when electricity demand is soaring. If there is only the smallest chance that covering the planet with windmills will save civilization, surely we ought to do it? Not really!
They resume flights. Things appear perfectly normal. In a few weeks time, small numbers of engine failures and instrument and control failures start happening, apparently randomly. It is said to have no relation to the dust. It is very hard to track down the cause, or tell if its unusual for some reason, or just statistical noise, because the planes have been flying all over the world, not just in the affected areas. A few weeks after that, we have three or four total engine failures at once over built up areas in Europe. Or maybe over the Atlantic. People meet and consider what to do.
Then a 747 goes down in the middle of the Atlantic.
Same old, same old. Always start with an arbitrary point in the Apple line, and demand to have it met at a given price. Wrong, proves nothing. Always start with a need, then find a Dell or HP that meets it, then look at how much you'll have to pay for a Mac that meets it. You'll pay double. Sometimes a bit less.
I can't find the spec you are asking for at under $2k - well, I haven't tried, but doubt that you can. So what? Its not what I need, either at $2k or $1500. So at either price, its too expensive.
Good post. Hits the nail on the head. Look at purpose and use, then look at what meets it, and you will generally end up paying double for a Mac. At least. This last post says he paid one third, and it does not surprise me.
Don't believe build quality either. Macs do not have better components, and they are not more thoughtfully assembled. The cases are shinier. But no, they are not better components, they're not better cooled, they are no more long lived. In fact, often the components are decidedly entry level. Nor are they more reliable or longer lived.
So what explains the rave reports on this subject? Cognitive Dissonance, is what.
Yes. But not if you try to match an Apple spec exactly, then you will mostly find yourself paying roughly the same. The answer is yes, because if you try to match what you need, instead of matching their price points, you will find that the Apple offering you have to go to a higher model than you need, and because they come out of the box with such a weird mixture of high and low end stuff, you will then need to add options, and you will end up spending about twice as much.
You can see this pretty clearly across the range, but if you look at the Mini its especially clear. You insist on having a jacket pocket sized core 2 machine. By the time you find one, its going to cost roughly the same, or maybe you can do it yourself assembly for somewhat less, but its not worth it.
Does this prove the Mac is good value, or no more expensive? Yes, if you really, really need to put it in a coat pocket. Otherwise its grossly overpriced, you can get better quality and more performant hardware for about half the price. You'll find the same thing happens with the floor standers, and actually, if you really think about what you need you'll find the same thing with the all in ones. People will always say to you, you cannot get as big an LCD screen as that, with that computer built into it, for much under that. Maybe not, but if you do not really need it to be all in one, and if you think about what you need and realize that actually two or three smaller screens would give you what you will most need in daily work, and that what will help a lot will be something better than an entry level graphic card.... And if you already have a monitor....
So yes, they are way over priced. But not because you can buy the same thing cheaper from someone else. Because what you're buying is way over priced for what you really need. And what you get is not better than what you really need. Just different.
As a matter of fact, this is not true, he did not buy his first ISP then. I do not know what year it was, later than that at any rate, but he did not buy it. The real story is, News in the UK became convinced they could repeat their success with football and TV. The idea was that if you had compelling content, you could make everyone buy your access vehicle to get to it. It had worked with sport on Sky, so it would work with all the News content on the Internet.
Only problem was, they had no access. So they reached a deal with BT in the UK, who would supply wholesale internet access. The result was called UK Online. It was supposed to be a mixture of content and access. Some who were around at the time tried to explain to BT and to News that this was not going to work. It would not work because it would limit the fabulous online News content to the few who changed ISPs. But it would also limit ISP subscriptions to those who really wanted the News content. The argument was thus made: better just sell the content on its own to anyone who could access it, ie to anyone with an Internet access.
News refused to do this, on the grounds that the content would not bear the tariff. They could not see that this showed that they were just selling Internet access at a high price with a glorified sort of home page. BT could not see it either, and in one lovely episode, forbade their advertising department from fielding ads which referred to 'all the great content available on the web'. Content, you see, was supposed to be joined at the hip to access, in walled gardens.... The web was not supposed to be content, it could not be talked about in public as that. There was, it was said, a market for combined content and access. There was another Rupert in BT at the time, a computer illiterate senior manager, whose reaction to a web site was to ask to have a printout of that. I heard that one of his staff, a Macfanatic of the time, wrote him a little website in hypercard and then printed out the cards, to explain to him how it worked!
The end game was predictable. UK Online never worked, never got to critical mass, was finally sold to Tiscali, who went bust and were sold to Carphone Warehouse, and its an historical memory now. Times and all the other papers went online free.
News however persists with the desire to sell all its compelling content. And to deny access to it to all but the favored. Is it going to work any better this time around? I doubt it. But do not cite the history of News in its first ISP as evidence of commercial acumen. Say rather, that they adopted the AOL model just when it was dissolving. As indeed did Apple, with e-World, for similar reasons.
Agreed. This is where Apple has been going for a long time now, and the world of a locked down device, where you only access media through one controlled point, where all apps have to be obtained from one supplier who keeps a tight lock on what can be installed, that's a wet dream for Big Content. If you think about it, the most important aspect of it is that you can bar hacks that will unlock DRMd media. As long as you just had DRMd media, but freedom to install whatever software you wanted, and the ability to transfer files from machine to machine simply by copying them across, DRM was always going to be readily hackable.
What we are moving towards is a situation where you will buy your content from Apple only, you will not be able to copy it without Apple's consent, you will install no apps that Apple does not like. So DRM will really work. Not only that, but all the content will at last be family friendly and politically correct. No need to worry about nasty subversive political sites, or swimsuit pictures showing up unexpectedly.
Apple is far, far worse than Microsoft. Microsoft is an old fashioned tech company, similar in attitude to IBM or HP etc. Its anti competitive of course, very market share focussed. But it does not have this stifling desire to control what customers do and read, it does not worry much about what content is accessed by the products it sells which give it its market share.
Apple is not really, in spirit, a tech company at all, or rather, its a unique sort of tech company, its a tech company in the tradition of Walt Disney 1955. So it is always thinking, how to use its tech position to control what customers do, think and read. That is the fundamental aim to which all its design tends. Its natural allies are Big Content companies. It has sometimes been said that Apple had DRM imposed on it against its will. Don't believe it. DRM and lockin are central to the Apple value system, they are shared values with the content and media industries. It seems inexplicable to Apple fans that it should be trying to ban the reading of perfectly lawful publications on its devices. You have to realize that Apple thinks of itself as Walt Disney 1955, but who in the 21st century has chosen to deliver its family friendly and politically correct content via computers and tablets. This is all of a piece, part of the same thing. This is why your music was DRMd, even when the rights owners did not want it to be. DRM is central to the Apple vision of how the world should work, as is content censorship.
I read that you cannot activate the iPad from Linux. Now, why would that be, exactly....? Its because open source is the enemy for Apple, even more than for MS, because it represents intellectual freedom. That is what is really at issue here. Do you want to live in a world in which a sort of latter day Disney tells you what you can read? Most of the press and media do. They cannot wait to be part of that latter day Disney consortium. That's the appeal of Apple today.
The Slate article is spot on. Its come a long way, and its ended up, like many revolutionaries, turning into a far worse version of what it originally campaigned against.
Before prostate surgery for you or someone you know, whether robotic or human, check it out very carefully. I did on behalf of someone else, and came to the conclusion that the optimal treatment is intermittent hormone blockage. The technique is, you have total hormonal block for about 9 to 15 months - until PSA falls to zero. Then you go off the blockade.
The rationale is that prostate cancer grows in the presence of testosterone. When testosterone is removed, it dies. It then, in the total absence of testosterone, becomes hormone refractory, that is, it grows in the absence of hormone. You then restore the hormone, and it reverses again.
That at least was my own conclusion, and what I will try if need be. I concluded that local treatments have almost universal side effects of impotence and incontinence, which I think are underreported. And that the dangerous forms of the cancer are probably inoperable locally anyway.
If over some age, don't know quite what, perhaps 80, I concluded there is no point in surgery. We will almost all of us die with prostate cancer. Very few of us will die of it. Over 80, local treatment is probably almost never a good idea.
And do not forget that the biopsy procedure is not risk free, particularly for older men. It can induce total urinary blockage. This then leads to permanent catheterization, which will inevitably result in blockages, followed by hospital visits in the middle of the night, followed by MRSA infections. This happened in a case I knew well. The result was real misery for quite a few years, followed eventually by death from the complications of repeated MRSA infections.
As I said sadly at the time, the tragedy is, he was one of the few men of his age in the country who when biopsied did not test positive. But even if it had, surgery was impossible given his heart health. It wasted the rest of a life, for no good reason.
I wish this were true. And to some extent it is true. You can get hearing aids 'free' in the UK under the NHS. But what sort of hearing aids are they? They are simple amplifiers, of the kind that were first made back in the fifties or sixties.
Now, the NHS supplies batteries on an exchange basis, also free. However, the problem with the aids is not the batteries. The problem is that the small pipes that lead from the mike to the speaker get blocked with moisture or wax or whatever.
So, you are an 80 year old lady with one of these things. You have a man around, reasonably handy, you are in luck, he is going to take a look, figure out some kind of pipe cleaner device, realise this has to be done once a month or every couple of weeks, and you will be OK. You will still have all the problems of analog amplification devices, the feedback, the background noise amplification etc. But at least it will work the way it is supposed to. Badly, but it will work.
You don't have a man around you are SOL.
As with many aspects of the NHS, what is happening is that treatment options are made available, but very restricted ones. So what the poster would do in the UK, as in the US, is buy his own. And it would cost just as much in the UK as in the US to get an equivalent digital device. Well, more, because you don't have Costco.
Now, ask yourself, how much better off am I really in the UK? Not much. You want as a US resident what the UK National Health Service supplies, you can go buy it. It will probably cost less than $20.
Its similar to proclaiming that the NHS makes consultant appointments for skin cancer checks free. Well, yes, if you are prepared to wait three months and take whoever's turn it is. You want to see someone next week, pay.
This commonly stated point of view is plain wrong. Apple, like all other suppliers of any product, does business in accordance with the law of the applicable jurisdiction. The law relating to the installation of OSX on white boxes is copyright, specifically Title 17, first sale, contract law, and the various sale of goods and consumer protection legislation. The question is whether Apple can simultaneously sell OSX at retail in the form of fully functioning retail copies, and also then tell the buyer on what hardware he may install it.
Psystar fell at the first fence in terms of testing this. Their method of operation breached copyright.
What they did was to buy a copy of OSX. They then installed it on a Mini. So far they were legal.
Next they modified this installed copy, which created a derivative work. Probably at this point they were borderline. If done solely for their own use, probably they would have been OK.
But they now went on to use this as a master copy to install the derivative work on other machines. Breach of copyright.
They next transferred the derivative works to customers, sometimes having included other copies of OSX than the one installed from, sometimes even failing to do that. This was also breach of copyright. Even were the modifications essential to use with the new machine, transfer of those modifications is only lawful under Title 17 if you get the consent of the copyright holder.
But this is all about Psystar's method of operation. It is not about the rights and wrongs of the matter. Whether if you install OSX on a white box, or have someone do it for you on the white box you own, and with a retail copy you own, is a quite different issue and has not been tested. It is going to turn on the issue of whether you are the owner, or the licensee. The case of Blizzard and the case of Vernor vs Autodesk are in conflict here, and the issue is moot.
If you are the owner, then contrary to the above post, your installation on the machine of your choice is protected by section 117 of Title 17. This allows you to make any adaptations and copies which are essential to use with a machine. If your copies are lawful, then circumventing protections in order to make them will also be lawful. In terms of the EULA and contract law, it is not clear that post sale restrictions on use are in fact enforceable. It is not clear, for instance, that if Apple were to put in their EULA the condition that you were forbidden to load and run Open Office on your Mac, this would be enforceable. Other conditions that are not clearly enforceable might include if MS forbade you to install Windows for dual boot on a Mac, if they forbade you to install Windows in a VM, if they forbade you to run Office under Wine.
It is a common cry of the Mac Fanatic that OSX is Apple's and they can do what they like, and if you don't like it don't buy it. But it is both false in terms of the way that business law works in the US, and it is wrong as a matter of public policy, since were it correct, it would permit wholesale anti competitive action by companies, which would have the potential for harming Apple and its customers as much as anyone. The whole intellectual pseudo problem is created by the desire of the Mac Fanatics to have one set of rules for Apple, and another for everyone else. But this is not how the law works.
Bottom line: if they sell it at retail you can install it on whatever you want. If they do not like this, it is them that has to change, and stop selling it at retail in a form which is installable on machines they do not like. And if you can do it yourself, you can pay someone to do it, as long as you own the software and hardware at the time of the work being done.
No amount of cajoling will make nurses wash their hands between patients. There has to be some form of sanction. But the UK health industry is nationalized, therefore it is represented by the government employees trade union, and that is opposed fiercely to all discipline of all sorts. There are thus no sanctions whatever, and the result is that despite endless government initiatives, hand wash stations all over the place in hospitals, hands are not being washed. And there are still infections. It is one of the great unspoken risks about going in for surgery in the UK.
In fact, if you go in to one of the few hospitals that pre screens patients for MRSA, the people doing the screening, the first thing they ask is if you have been in hospital recently. If you say no, they tell you that you will almost certainly be clear. The main vector of infection in the UK is the National Health Service. If you know many people who have been hospitalized, you find that many of them have been infected. And many more die of it than is admitted. The cause of death on the certificate will be the proximate cause. Whether they had a bad case of MRSA when they died of it, who knows?
As long as people on wards dealing with patients have no sanctions to fear from not washing their hands, enough of them will not bother to make it impossible to really change matters, and as long as they are all represented by Unison with its close links to the Labour Party, there will be no sanctions.
So we will see people talking about contracting out of hospital cleaning services - an obsession with Unison, but irrelevant, and we'll also hear about over prescribing of antibiotics, also not the problem. Do something to make these guys wash their hands, and the operative word is MAKE, and the problem will vanish overnight.
Back in the 80s there was some point in HIGs, and Apple back then was generally felt to lead the way. The reason was that there were, among your users, a very high proportion of new users. So we conflated ease of use with ease of learning, and it was not completely stupid, for much of the market using and learning were the same thing.
Now however HIGs have become part of the problem rather than part of the solution, because they make the implicit assumption that everyone works in the same way, and has the same basic skills. We just do not. And anyone who experiments a bit with end users will find this out in a flash. I have had people who loved spatial browsing because it might be cluttered, but they always knew where they were. Then there are people who love Gnome and the desktop and love to put all their files all over it where they can see them. And then you have the odd case of some totally non-technical person, who you try out with Fluxbox, and you get the reaction that this is great, this is how I always thought Linux was supposed to be, no clutter and very minimalist and above all fast. It turns out that hand edited menus and the explicit startup of the file manager are actually something some non-technical people welcome and find refreshing. Others of course will run a mile. One size does not fit all.
The Gnome ideal, that there is such a thing as the right way to set up a desktop, an application, is the problem. There simply is not, and when you take that approach, the penalty is that you inconvenience and impair working for at least one third of the people using it. Far beter to have a few broad choices, and then let people refine within it, and offer some guidelines. If you are not very computer familiar, start out with this, then see if, a while later, you want to move to this, and here is a very minimalist alternative.
HIGs are a snare and a delusion, very apt that they are sometimes rudely referred to as 'interface fascism'.
At the moment in the UK, subscription to the BBC is compulsory, as a condition of being able to have a TV. And if you watch TV without subscribing, you will be hauled before a magistrate, fined, and maybe imprisoned. People are imprisoned all the time for doing this.
What we need to do is make it voluntary. Everyone should be able to subscribe to the channels of their choice, or not as the case may be. Then, when subscription to the BBC is voluntary, we can just stop arguing about it and let them do what they want. If we don't like it, we would cancel our subscriptions.
This is so simple and obvious, its very difficult to understand why everyone doesn't support it automatically. What possible case can there be for making subscription to one particular broadcaster compulsory, and enforced by criminal law sanctions? Its totally nuts. We don't make subscription to one particular newspaper a condition of being able to read the press. We don't make subscription to one particular web site a condition of being able to have Internet Access. What is the problem here?
Yes, its great news. Now, we have a great way of stopping some of these idiotic ideas in their tracks, which is what patents usually do, or stopping them once they have got going, which is almost as good. But it comes too late for many ideas, which are already in the public domain.
For example, we can no longer patent the idea of killing huge numbers of birds by erecting vast quantities of whirling mobile metal machines on migration routes, on the pretext of generating electricity. The thing I truly wish we could have patented is the idea of allying with industry to develop wild areas while erecting these things, but calling the result conservation. Where was the USPO when we really needed it?
We can no longer patent the idea adjusting the surface station record to show unprecedented warming regardless of what it actually shows. We cannot either patent the famous method of 'hiding the decline' in the proxy record.
We cannot patent the idea of pretending that the Arctic is going to melt and flood the planet sometime very soon, thus raising vast amounts of grant money to do studies to find out how soon.
More serious, we cannot patent the idea of seeding the upper atmosphere with sulfur, and so there is every chance that fools will actually try and produce a new ice age by doing it.
So its a great idea and a most innovative step by the USPO, but they should have done this 20 years ago, and we could have either become enormously rich, or spared the world the greatest mass hysteria since.... Well, certainly since the millenial frenzy around the year 1,000, but maybe one has to go back even earlier.
Still, look on the positive side. If we are a little creative and surreptitiously join some green circles, there is no shortage of truly insane public policy ideas being floated. The best may have gone, but never underestimate the capability of the environmental movement to come up with more. It may be too late for society, but there is probably still time to get very rich if we get busy patenting now.
I work in the climate science department of a well known university in E Anglia, UK, and am proud to be the owner of a 4 x 4 and also an excruciatingly bad programmer. No, sorry, I got that wrong, I have no car, walk to work, and only write in equisitely structured C++.
You can all assuage your guilt from driving those 4 x 4s and writing all that crap code in Python. Ruby or whatever by sending me large sums of money, and I will continue my low guilt lifestyle as long as the cheques keep coming.
You can carry on shopping at malls in your 4 x 4s, and writing your terrible code.
We will all be happy. I will get rich. Everyone wins. We save the planet. What's the problem?
This is a futile effort to compete with London, and indeed with the UK, on this dimension. You may not have realized that one of Britain's great tourist attractions is that it is the most surveilled country, and London the most surveilled city, in the world. People come from all over to experience the magic of proper surveillance, at which we lead the world. There are so many cameras in London that if they were all actively used, everyone in London would be watching them all the time, and there would be no-one to surveil, because we would all be surveilling.
This is why, if you watched the recent Queen's speech, you would have been informed of a remarkable innovation in political thought. The UK government has committed to reducing the deficit by half, and it has also committed to reducing the number of people surveilling to no more than half of the population at any one time.
In order to do this, it is proposing to install people counters in all places where the cameras are watchable, and if the number goes over 50%, as it often does nowadays, then the last entrants will have their names taken and incur heavy fines.
To avoid the problem of people giving false names, face recognition software will be installed at all cameras watching surveillance centers.
This is widely reported as a brilliant initiative, which will cement the British surveillance lead, and ensure that for the next few years, tourists will continue to flock to London, confident that they are seeing a world leader in surveillance.
And causing civil servants in other countries to go home in a state of furious rage, muttering to themselves and their bemused wives about the growing surveillance gap, and worse still, the widening meta surveillance chasm.
Remember, this debate is at bottom about a specific clause. It is about the ability of software suppliers to tell you where you buy the hardware you run their software on.
It is absurd to argue that only by giving software suppliers the right to restrict what brand of hardware is used with their software, can the GPL remain enforceable. It makes as much sense as arguing that only by allowing people to give urine can we allow them to give blood.
I don't think that any software supplier should be obliged to sell anything in particular. If Apple wants not to sell their software at retail all over the place, they should not have to. It would also be quite wrong for any software company to be obliged to make their software work on particular hardware they didn't care for. No reason at all why they should do that. Finally, if people want to sell bundled combinations of hardware and software, and perhaps only bundled combinations, that is quite unobjectionable also.
But that is not the public policy issue here. The issue here is whether, solely by contractual conditions on sale and or installation, the software maker should be able to tell you what you may and may not install it on and use it with. From this point of view what counts is not that Apple sells hardware and software. What counts is that it chooses to sell the software independently of the hardware, but then wants to restrict what hardware this software is used with.
This is what is so unfortunate about it from a public policy point of view. The only way to make this happen is by giving all software makers who sell unbundled the exact same right to specify what hardware may or may not be used by buyers. This is why you cannot do it without also giving MS the right to stipulate that Windows may be installed as a dual boot system on any but Apple labeled hardware.
Such a world restricts intellectual freedom for the convenience of corporations and is open to enormous anti competitive abuse. We should not want such a world, even if it happens to be convenient, though not essential, for Apple's business model.
The public policy issue here is control. Back off the details of the case, generalize it, and you see there are two possibilities about the relationship between software and the brand of hardware it runs on.
CASE 1 is that the maker of the software has the legal right to specify what brand of hardware the stuff can be used on.
CASE 2 is that he cannot specify the brand of hardware the stuff can be used on.
The public policy issue is not about EULAs in general, or even copyright, or Apple, or about any technicalities of the software itself. It is about what rights you want to have software makers to have in respect of the brand of hardware.
Let us give two very specific examples. If the GPL were to be revised to say that it was permitted to install GPL software on any machine as long as it was not Apple labeled, would you approve of this? If MS were to forbid the installation of Windows in dual boot mode on Apple labeled equipment, but permit dual booting on all other brands, would you approve of them having such a power?
Would you, for instance, approve of proceedings by MS subsequent to making such a modification to the Windows license, if it took Apple to court over bootcamp, for contributory copyright infringement?
Welcome to the world of control. This is what the key issue is. To me, intellectual freedom requires us a society to opt for CASE 2. As for PJ, she may be right or wrong about the future of Psystar, but when it comes to public policy on this issue, she is in denial.
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The problem both Labor and the Conservatives have with PR, is that it would lead to coalition governments. This is easy to see. The Liberals had 23% of the last vote, the Conservatives 36%, and Labor 29%. This is more or less the share of the popular vote that the three parties have had for the last 30+ years.
You can see that if each party has the same number of seats as they have percentage of the votes, then no party is generally going to have a total majority over the other two. You will just about always have a situation, like in Holland, where the third party is in every government, sometimes in coalition with Labor and sometimes with Conservatives.
The reason why both of the two larger parties do not want this, is that they represent essentially minority interests. The Conservative Party historically represents inherited wealth and also the rural areas. Which are dominated by large landowners. The Labor party represents big cities, the industrial workforce and the public sector trade unions. And of course the large welfare population of dependents. Both are ready and eager to impose heavy costs on the country as a whole, as long as they get some, often fairly small, percentage of those costs for their own interest groups. This tendency, which is a form of looting, gets more extreme with the second and especially the third term of any government. In the first term of any government, it tends to behave responsibly. The first Blair term, for instance, was marked by restraint in public spending and no deals with the public sector unions.
The second and third terms have seen enormous public spending, mostly on public sector union wages, which has been marketed as 'investing in our great public services'. This has imposed costs on the country which dwarf the benefits to the recipients of the benefits, but no-one cares what it costs the country, as long as they are doing better.
The Conservatives are no better. We can expect something similar in the second and third terms of any Conservative government. The interesting difference about this Labor government has been its approach to the finance sector, which is referred to in the UK as 'the City'. This Labor government has been much closer to the City than any previous one.
You can see that this pattern of behavior will be eliminated by coalition governments. The problem is, in your first term you generally govern for the country, the better to get a second term. When in the second or third term you move to payoff time, and start the outrageous rewarding of your interest group, if its a coalition government, the other partner will just say no, force an election, and then move into coalition with the other large party. It will be game over.
The sheer rage that the idea of proportional representation arouses in the hearts of Conservative Party stalwarts is due to this. They are seeing the prospect of the second and third term troughs being smashed before their eyes. No more feasting. The whole rationale of the parties goes.
What happens with coalition government, on say the Dutch lines, is that it replaces the focus on who is in power, with a focus on what the program is going to be, what the policies are. In the UK at the moment all anyone cares about is who is in power, because whoever it is, can hand out the spoils. Once you cannot do this any more, you have to focus on governing for the country. Now that is not what either of the two large parties want to do, at least, no more than they absolutely have to.
And this is why far more of the UK wants PR than anyone in either of the two big parties will admit. It is not just the 25% that vote Liberal. It is also those who routinely switch from one party to the other, to give the other guys a chance.
If you think about it, in the situation I have described, what does the rational voter do? He/she is confronted with a two party system in which the second and third terms of any government are going to feature irresponsible looting of a sort mos
The real thing we have to worry about is the fatwa gap, never mind the IP gap.
There are billions of people all over the world living in jurisdictions where their clergy have not issued fatwas for generations. You will be surprised to learn that it happens in the developed world, too. The Episcopalian Church in the US is one of the worst offenders in this respect, it seems not to have issued any fatwas since the Revolution. We need to act now to remedy this desperate situation and to restore the feeling of certainty that a robust fatwa regime would give to these troubled flocks.
And in the meantime, we need to be very careful in how we conduct ourselves in regard to these fatwa deficient countries. We should not get contaminated by their insecure, rootless, fatwa deficient moral wanderings.
Thanks to the OP for drawing this general problem of the lack of robust cultural norms to our attention, a pity that he got diverted to one of the smallest and least problematic examples of it.
"Wouldn't flying an airliner through some airborne ash, be like a couple hours worth of sandblasting? I'd hate to think what that does to the engines."
Yes. No sensible person would advocate allowing planes to fly through clouds of ash. The question is not that, the question is whether they could have taken more energetic and prompt measures to assess and monitor where the dangerous levels of ash were, and whether the continued ban was necessary. It seems, in retrospect, that this was the failure. We seem to have substituted cries of 'safety first' for immediate and continued investigation of what the situation really was.
The way to look at this might be as follows. We have an example of the precautionary principle in action, and can use it to assess the probably results of making this a guideline for setting public policy. The leading case where it is claimed that we should apply the supposed principle is Global Warming. It is argued that the precautionary principle mandates immediate drastic action to lower CO2 emission levels if there is even the slightest chance that continuing at present levels would lead to the end of human civilization on Earth.
We had a similar argument about ash: if there is even the slightest chance that flying through the ash will cause planes everywhere to fall out of the sky, we should ground them all at once.
In fact, the situation turned out to be much more nuanced and complicated. When the analysis was done, it turns out that there there was probably no need to ban all air travel, though there was a real danger, and a real need to take precautions and do proper assessment of damage. It is not safe to fly through clouds of ash. But there were not clouds of ash everywhere that was closed. In fact, we would in retrospect have done better to investigate the real situation carefully by test flights immediately. We'd then have discovered that quite a lot of flying, quite a lot of the time, would have been perfectly safe, and that there are ways of telling when its prudent to limit flights in the light of changing weather and eruptions.
The bottom line is, we incurred huge unnecessary costs, and worse, until quite late in the crisis the authorities acted as if their use of the PP made it unnecessary to investigate in detail what the real situation was.
Now if we imagine a world in which the PP is used all the time, on larger and larger issues, including Global Warming, we see that the result for public policy would be one in which policy makers neglect proper analysis and start to jump in fear at shadows. That is, cases in which there is neither real danger nor any proper analysis will increasingly dominate expenditure on measures which are done with no proper reason behind them, on a 'just in case' basis. The costs of these measures, which it is thought 'denialist' to weigh, will be huge, will in fact be so great as to prevent any proper treatment of the real danger.
This case shows that there is no substitute in public policy for proper risk assessment, and for proper analysis of the benefits and costs of proposed actions. Its a commonplace in medicine, where we have the 'number to treat' parameter - that is, how many do we have to treat to save a life, what are the side effects on those we treat? We need exactly the same thing with all public policy issues.
The difficulty with the Precautionary Principle, which you can see here, is that its invocation is used to avoid rigorous analysis of the real risks and costs of alternative actions. And it results in completely pointless and inordinately expensive measures being taken.
Think about that, the next time you see some huge windfarm, blades stationary, in a flat calm on a prolonged cold spell in the winter, when electricity demand is soaring. If there is only the smallest chance that covering the planet with windmills will save civilization, surely we ought to do it? Not really!
They resume flights. Things appear perfectly normal. In a few weeks time, small numbers of engine failures and instrument and control failures start happening, apparently randomly. It is said to have no relation to the dust. It is very hard to track down the cause, or tell if its unusual for some reason, or just statistical noise, because the planes have been flying all over the world, not just in the affected areas. A few weeks after that, we have three or four total engine failures at once over built up areas in Europe. Or maybe over the Atlantic. People meet and consider what to do.
Then a 747 goes down in the middle of the Atlantic.
Same old, same old. Always start with an arbitrary point in the Apple line, and demand to have it met at a given price. Wrong, proves nothing. Always start with a need, then find a Dell or HP that meets it, then look at how much you'll have to pay for a Mac that meets it. You'll pay double. Sometimes a bit less.
I can't find the spec you are asking for at under $2k - well, I haven't tried, but doubt that you can. So what? Its not what I need, either at $2k or $1500. So at either price, its too expensive.
Good post. Hits the nail on the head. Look at purpose and use, then look at what meets it, and you will generally end up paying double for a Mac. At least. This last post says he paid one third, and it does not surprise me. Don't believe build quality either. Macs do not have better components, and they are not more thoughtfully assembled. The cases are shinier. But no, they are not better components, they're not better cooled, they are no more long lived. In fact, often the components are decidedly entry level. Nor are they more reliable or longer lived. So what explains the rave reports on this subject? Cognitive Dissonance, is what.
Yes. But not if you try to match an Apple spec exactly, then you will mostly find yourself paying roughly the same. The answer is yes, because if you try to match what you need, instead of matching their price points, you will find that the Apple offering you have to go to a higher model than you need, and because they come out of the box with such a weird mixture of high and low end stuff, you will then need to add options, and you will end up spending about twice as much.
You can see this pretty clearly across the range, but if you look at the Mini its especially clear. You insist on having a jacket pocket sized core 2 machine. By the time you find one, its going to cost roughly the same, or maybe you can do it yourself assembly for somewhat less, but its not worth it.
Does this prove the Mac is good value, or no more expensive? Yes, if you really, really need to put it in a coat pocket. Otherwise its grossly overpriced, you can get better quality and more performant hardware for about half the price. You'll find the same thing happens with the floor standers, and actually, if you really think about what you need you'll find the same thing with the all in ones. People will always say to you, you cannot get as big an LCD screen as that, with that computer built into it, for much under that. Maybe not, but if you do not really need it to be all in one, and if you think about what you need and realize that actually two or three smaller screens would give you what you will most need in daily work, and that what will help a lot will be something better than an entry level graphic card.... And if you already have a monitor....
So yes, they are way over priced. But not because you can buy the same thing cheaper from someone else. Because what you're buying is way over priced for what you really need. And what you get is not better than what you really need. Just different.
They were lying. Simple.
As a matter of fact, this is not true, he did not buy his first ISP then. I do not know what year it was, later than that at any rate, but he did not buy it. The real story is, News in the UK became convinced they could repeat their success with football and TV. The idea was that if you had compelling content, you could make everyone buy your access vehicle to get to it. It had worked with sport on Sky, so it would work with all the News content on the Internet.
Only problem was, they had no access. So they reached a deal with BT in the UK, who would supply wholesale internet access. The result was called UK Online. It was supposed to be a mixture of content and access. Some who were around at the time tried to explain to BT and to News that this was not going to work. It would not work because it would limit the fabulous online News content to the few who changed ISPs. But it would also limit ISP subscriptions to those who really wanted the News content. The argument was thus made: better just sell the content on its own to anyone who could access it, ie to anyone with an Internet access.
News refused to do this, on the grounds that the content would not bear the tariff. They could not see that this showed that they were just selling Internet access at a high price with a glorified sort of home page. BT could not see it either, and in one lovely episode, forbade their advertising department from fielding ads which referred to 'all the great content available on the web'. Content, you see, was supposed to be joined at the hip to access, in walled gardens.... The web was not supposed to be content, it could not be talked about in public as that. There was, it was said, a market for combined content and access. There was another Rupert in BT at the time, a computer illiterate senior manager, whose reaction to a web site was to ask to have a printout of that. I heard that one of his staff, a Macfanatic of the time, wrote him a little website in hypercard and then printed out the cards, to explain to him how it worked!
The end game was predictable. UK Online never worked, never got to critical mass, was finally sold to Tiscali, who went bust and were sold to Carphone Warehouse, and its an historical memory now. Times and all the other papers went online free.
News however persists with the desire to sell all its compelling content. And to deny access to it to all but the favored. Is it going to work any better this time around? I doubt it. But do not cite the history of News in its first ISP as evidence of commercial acumen. Say rather, that they adopted the AOL model just when it was dissolving. As indeed did Apple, with e-World, for similar reasons.
Agreed. This is where Apple has been going for a long time now, and the world of a locked down device, where you only access media through one controlled point, where all apps have to be obtained from one supplier who keeps a tight lock on what can be installed, that's a wet dream for Big Content. If you think about it, the most important aspect of it is that you can bar hacks that will unlock DRMd media. As long as you just had DRMd media, but freedom to install whatever software you wanted, and the ability to transfer files from machine to machine simply by copying them across, DRM was always going to be readily hackable.
What we are moving towards is a situation where you will buy your content from Apple only, you will not be able to copy it without Apple's consent, you will install no apps that Apple does not like. So DRM will really work. Not only that, but all the content will at last be family friendly and politically correct. No need to worry about nasty subversive political sites, or swimsuit pictures showing up unexpectedly.
Apple is far, far worse than Microsoft. Microsoft is an old fashioned tech company, similar in attitude to IBM or HP etc. Its anti competitive of course, very market share focussed. But it does not have this stifling desire to control what customers do and read, it does not worry much about what content is accessed by the products it sells which give it its market share.
Apple is not really, in spirit, a tech company at all, or rather, its a unique sort of tech company, its a tech company in the tradition of Walt Disney 1955. So it is always thinking, how to use its tech position to control what customers do, think and read. That is the fundamental aim to which all its design tends. Its natural allies are Big Content companies. It has sometimes been said that Apple had DRM imposed on it against its will. Don't believe it. DRM and lockin are central to the Apple value system, they are shared values with the content and media industries. It seems inexplicable to Apple fans that it should be trying to ban the reading of perfectly lawful publications on its devices. You have to realize that Apple thinks of itself as Walt Disney 1955, but who in the 21st century has chosen to deliver its family friendly and politically correct content via computers and tablets. This is all of a piece, part of the same thing. This is why your music was DRMd, even when the rights owners did not want it to be. DRM is central to the Apple vision of how the world should work, as is content censorship.
I read that you cannot activate the iPad from Linux. Now, why would that be, exactly....? Its because open source is the enemy for Apple, even more than for MS, because it represents intellectual freedom. That is what is really at issue here. Do you want to live in a world in which a sort of latter day Disney tells you what you can read? Most of the press and media do. They cannot wait to be part of that latter day Disney consortium. That's the appeal of Apple today.
The Slate article is spot on. Its come a long way, and its ended up, like many revolutionaries, turning into a far worse version of what it originally campaigned against.
Surely if its a one shot thing, a customer version of webconverger or maybe slitaz?
Before prostate surgery for you or someone you know, whether robotic or human, check it out very carefully. I did on behalf of someone else, and came to the conclusion that the optimal treatment is intermittent hormone blockage. The technique is, you have total hormonal block for about 9 to 15 months - until PSA falls to zero. Then you go off the blockade.
The rationale is that prostate cancer grows in the presence of testosterone. When testosterone is removed, it dies. It then, in the total absence of testosterone, becomes hormone refractory, that is, it grows in the absence of hormone. You then restore the hormone, and it reverses again.
That at least was my own conclusion, and what I will try if need be. I concluded that local treatments have almost universal side effects of impotence and incontinence, which I think are underreported. And that the dangerous forms of the cancer are probably inoperable locally anyway.
If over some age, don't know quite what, perhaps 80, I concluded there is no point in surgery. We will almost all of us die with prostate cancer. Very few of us will die of it. Over 80, local treatment is probably almost never a good idea.
And do not forget that the biopsy procedure is not risk free, particularly for older men. It can induce total urinary blockage. This then leads to permanent catheterization, which will inevitably result in blockages, followed by hospital visits in the middle of the night, followed by MRSA infections. This happened in a case I knew well. The result was real misery for quite a few years, followed eventually by death from the complications of repeated MRSA infections.
As I said sadly at the time, the tragedy is, he was one of the few men of his age in the country who when biopsied did not test positive. But even if it had, surgery was impossible given his heart health. It wasted the rest of a life, for no good reason.
I wish this were true. And to some extent it is true. You can get hearing aids 'free' in the UK under the NHS. But what sort of hearing aids are they? They are simple amplifiers, of the kind that were first made back in the fifties or sixties.
Now, the NHS supplies batteries on an exchange basis, also free. However, the problem with the aids is not the batteries. The problem is that the small pipes that lead from the mike to the speaker get blocked with moisture or wax or whatever.
So, you are an 80 year old lady with one of these things. You have a man around, reasonably handy, you are in luck, he is going to take a look, figure out some kind of pipe cleaner device, realise this has to be done once a month or every couple of weeks, and you will be OK. You will still have all the problems of analog amplification devices, the feedback, the background noise amplification etc. But at least it will work the way it is supposed to. Badly, but it will work.
You don't have a man around you are SOL.
As with many aspects of the NHS, what is happening is that treatment options are made available, but very restricted ones. So what the poster would do in the UK, as in the US, is buy his own. And it would cost just as much in the UK as in the US to get an equivalent digital device. Well, more, because you don't have Costco.
Now, ask yourself, how much better off am I really in the UK? Not much. You want as a US resident what the UK National Health Service supplies, you can go buy it. It will probably cost less than $20.
Its similar to proclaiming that the NHS makes consultant appointments for skin cancer checks free. Well, yes, if you are prepared to wait three months and take whoever's turn it is. You want to see someone next week, pay.
You got to compare like with like.
If its so great, why do we have to make it a crime to watch TV in the UK, if you do not subscribe to it. Whether you watch it or not.
We don't make it a crime to read newspapers without subscribing to the Times.
This commonly stated point of view is plain wrong. Apple, like all other suppliers of any product, does business in accordance with the law of the applicable jurisdiction. The law relating to the installation of OSX on white boxes is copyright, specifically Title 17, first sale, contract law, and the various sale of goods and consumer protection legislation. The question is whether Apple can simultaneously sell OSX at retail in the form of fully functioning retail copies, and also then tell the buyer on what hardware he may install it.
Psystar fell at the first fence in terms of testing this. Their method of operation breached copyright.
What they did was to buy a copy of OSX. They then installed it on a Mini. So far they were legal.
Next they modified this installed copy, which created a derivative work. Probably at this point they were borderline. If done solely for their own use, probably they would have been OK.
But they now went on to use this as a master copy to install the derivative work on other machines. Breach of copyright.
They next transferred the derivative works to customers, sometimes having included other copies of OSX than the one installed from, sometimes even failing to do that. This was also breach of copyright. Even were the modifications essential to use with the new machine, transfer of those modifications is only lawful under Title 17 if you get the consent of the copyright holder.
But this is all about Psystar's method of operation. It is not about the rights and wrongs of the matter. Whether if you install OSX on a white box, or have someone do it for you on the white box you own, and with a retail copy you own, is a quite different issue and has not been tested. It is going to turn on the issue of whether you are the owner, or the licensee. The case of Blizzard and the case of Vernor vs Autodesk are in conflict here, and the issue is moot.
If you are the owner, then contrary to the above post, your installation on the machine of your choice is protected by section 117 of Title 17. This allows you to make any adaptations and copies which are essential to use with a machine. If your copies are lawful, then circumventing protections in order to make them will also be lawful. In terms of the EULA and contract law, it is not clear that post sale restrictions on use are in fact enforceable. It is not clear, for instance, that if Apple were to put in their EULA the condition that you were forbidden to load and run Open Office on your Mac, this would be enforceable. Other conditions that are not clearly enforceable might include if MS forbade you to install Windows for dual boot on a Mac, if they forbade you to install Windows in a VM, if they forbade you to run Office under Wine.
It is a common cry of the Mac Fanatic that OSX is Apple's and they can do what they like, and if you don't like it don't buy it. But it is both false in terms of the way that business law works in the US, and it is wrong as a matter of public policy, since were it correct, it would permit wholesale anti competitive action by companies, which would have the potential for harming Apple and its customers as much as anyone. The whole intellectual pseudo problem is created by the desire of the Mac Fanatics to have one set of rules for Apple, and another for everyone else. But this is not how the law works.
Bottom line: if they sell it at retail you can install it on whatever you want. If they do not like this, it is them that has to change, and stop selling it at retail in a form which is installable on machines they do not like. And if you can do it yourself, you can pay someone to do it, as long as you own the software and hardware at the time of the work being done.
In the UK, the issue is the public sector unions.
No amount of cajoling will make nurses wash their hands between patients. There has to be some form of sanction. But the UK health industry is nationalized, therefore it is represented by the government employees trade union, and that is opposed fiercely to all discipline of all sorts. There are thus no sanctions whatever, and the result is that despite endless government initiatives, hand wash stations all over the place in hospitals, hands are not being washed. And there are still infections. It is one of the great unspoken risks about going in for surgery in the UK.
In fact, if you go in to one of the few hospitals that pre screens patients for MRSA, the people doing the screening, the first thing they ask is if you have been in hospital recently. If you say no, they tell you that you will almost certainly be clear. The main vector of infection in the UK is the National Health Service. If you know many people who have been hospitalized, you find that many of them have been infected. And many more die of it than is admitted. The cause of death on the certificate will be the proximate cause. Whether they had a bad case of MRSA when they died of it, who knows?
As long as people on wards dealing with patients have no sanctions to fear from not washing their hands, enough of them will not bother to make it impossible to really change matters, and as long as they are all represented by Unison with its close links to the Labour Party, there will be no sanctions.
So we will see people talking about contracting out of hospital cleaning services - an obsession with Unison, but irrelevant, and we'll also hear about over prescribing of antibiotics, also not the problem. Do something to make these guys wash their hands, and the operative word is MAKE, and the problem will vanish overnight.
Back in the 80s there was some point in HIGs, and Apple back then was generally felt to lead the way. The reason was that there were, among your users, a very high proportion of new users. So we conflated ease of use with ease of learning, and it was not completely stupid, for much of the market using and learning were the same thing.
Now however HIGs have become part of the problem rather than part of the solution, because they make the implicit assumption that everyone works in the same way, and has the same basic skills. We just do not. And anyone who experiments a bit with end users will find this out in a flash. I have had people who loved spatial browsing because it might be cluttered, but they always knew where they were. Then there are people who love Gnome and the desktop and love to put all their files all over it where they can see them. And then you have the odd case of some totally non-technical person, who you try out with Fluxbox, and you get the reaction that this is great, this is how I always thought Linux was supposed to be, no clutter and very minimalist and above all fast. It turns out that hand edited menus and the explicit startup of the file manager are actually something some non-technical people welcome and find refreshing. Others of course will run a mile. One size does not fit all.
The Gnome ideal, that there is such a thing as the right way to set up a desktop, an application, is the problem. There simply is not, and when you take that approach, the penalty is that you inconvenience and impair working for at least one third of the people using it. Far beter to have a few broad choices, and then let people refine within it, and offer some guidelines. If you are not very computer familiar, start out with this, then see if, a while later, you want to move to this, and here is a very minimalist alternative.
HIGs are a snare and a delusion, very apt that they are sometimes rudely referred to as 'interface fascism'.
At the moment in the UK, subscription to the BBC is compulsory, as a condition of being able to have a TV. And if you watch TV without subscribing, you will be hauled before a magistrate, fined, and maybe imprisoned. People are imprisoned all the time for doing this.
What we need to do is make it voluntary. Everyone should be able to subscribe to the channels of their choice, or not as the case may be. Then, when subscription to the BBC is voluntary, we can just stop arguing about it and let them do what they want. If we don't like it, we would cancel our subscriptions.
This is so simple and obvious, its very difficult to understand why everyone doesn't support it automatically. What possible case can there be for making subscription to one particular broadcaster compulsory, and enforced by criminal law sanctions? Its totally nuts. We don't make subscription to one particular newspaper a condition of being able to read the press. We don't make subscription to one particular web site a condition of being able to have Internet Access. What is the problem here?
Yes, its great news. Now, we have a great way of stopping some of these idiotic ideas in their tracks, which is what patents usually do, or stopping them once they have got going, which is almost as good. But it comes too late for many ideas, which are already in the public domain.
For example, we can no longer patent the idea of killing huge numbers of birds by erecting vast quantities of whirling mobile metal machines on migration routes, on the pretext of generating electricity. The thing I truly wish we could have patented is the idea of allying with industry to develop wild areas while erecting these things, but calling the result conservation. Where was the USPO when we really needed it?
We can no longer patent the idea adjusting the surface station record to show unprecedented warming regardless of what it actually shows. We cannot either patent the famous method of 'hiding the decline' in the proxy record.
We cannot patent the idea of pretending that the Arctic is going to melt and flood the planet sometime very soon, thus raising vast amounts of grant money to do studies to find out how soon.
More serious, we cannot patent the idea of seeding the upper atmosphere with sulfur, and so there is every chance that fools will actually try and produce a new ice age by doing it.
So its a great idea and a most innovative step by the USPO, but they should have done this 20 years ago, and we could have either become enormously rich, or spared the world the greatest mass hysteria since.... Well, certainly since the millenial frenzy around the year 1,000, but maybe one has to go back even earlier.
Still, look on the positive side. If we are a little creative and surreptitiously join some green circles, there is no shortage of truly insane public policy ideas being floated. The best may have gone, but never underestimate the capability of the environmental movement to come up with more. It may be too late for society, but there is probably still time to get very rich if we get busy patenting now.
I work in the climate science department of a well known university in E Anglia, UK, and am proud to be the owner of a 4 x 4 and also an excruciatingly bad programmer. No, sorry, I got that wrong, I have no car, walk to work, and only write in equisitely structured C++.
You can all assuage your guilt from driving those 4 x 4s and writing all that crap code in Python. Ruby or whatever by sending me large sums of money, and I will continue my low guilt lifestyle as long as the cheques keep coming.
You can carry on shopping at malls in your 4 x 4s, and writing your terrible code.
We will all be happy. I will get rich. Everyone wins. We save the planet. What's the problem?
This is a futile effort to compete with London, and indeed with the UK, on this dimension. You may not have realized that one of Britain's great tourist attractions is that it is the most surveilled country, and London the most surveilled city, in the world. People come from all over to experience the magic of proper surveillance, at which we lead the world. There are so many cameras in London that if they were all actively used, everyone in London would be watching them all the time, and there would be no-one to surveil, because we would all be surveilling.
This is why, if you watched the recent Queen's speech, you would have been informed of a remarkable innovation in political thought. The UK government has committed to reducing the deficit by half, and it has also committed to reducing the number of people surveilling to no more than half of the population at any one time.
In order to do this, it is proposing to install people counters in all places where the cameras are watchable, and if the number goes over 50%, as it often does nowadays, then the last entrants will have their names taken and incur heavy fines.
To avoid the problem of people giving false names, face recognition software will be installed at all cameras watching surveillance centers.
This is widely reported as a brilliant initiative, which will cement the British surveillance lead, and ensure that for the next few years, tourists will continue to flock to London, confident that they are seeing a world leader in surveillance.
And causing civil servants in other countries to go home in a state of furious rage, muttering to themselves and their bemused wives about the growing surveillance gap, and worse still, the widening meta surveillance chasm.
Remember, this debate is at bottom about a specific clause. It is about the ability of software suppliers to tell you where you buy the hardware you run their software on.
It is absurd to argue that only by giving software suppliers the right to restrict what brand of hardware is used with their software, can the GPL remain enforceable. It makes as much sense as arguing that only by allowing people to give urine can we allow them to give blood.
Yes, its that Pythonesque.
I don't think that any software supplier should be obliged to sell anything in particular. If Apple wants not to sell their software at retail all over the place, they should not have to. It would also be quite wrong for any software company to be obliged to make their software work on particular hardware they didn't care for. No reason at all why they should do that. Finally, if people want to sell bundled combinations of hardware and software, and perhaps only bundled combinations, that is quite unobjectionable also.
But that is not the public policy issue here. The issue here is whether, solely by contractual conditions on sale and or installation, the software maker should be able to tell you what you may and may not install it on and use it with. From this point of view what counts is not that Apple sells hardware and software. What counts is that it chooses to sell the software independently of the hardware, but then wants to restrict what hardware this software is used with.
This is what is so unfortunate about it from a public policy point of view. The only way to make this happen is by giving all software makers who sell unbundled the exact same right to specify what hardware may or may not be used by buyers. This is why you cannot do it without also giving MS the right to stipulate that Windows may be installed as a dual boot system on any but Apple labeled hardware.
Such a world restricts intellectual freedom for the convenience of corporations and is open to enormous anti competitive abuse. We should not want such a world, even if it happens to be convenient, though not essential, for Apple's business model.
The public policy issue here is control. Back off the details of the case, generalize it, and you see there are two possibilities about the relationship between software and the brand of hardware it runs on.
CASE 1 is that the maker of the software has the legal right to specify what brand of hardware the stuff can be used on.
CASE 2 is that he cannot specify the brand of hardware the stuff can be used on.
The public policy issue is not about EULAs in general, or even copyright, or Apple, or about any technicalities of the software itself. It is about what rights you want to have software makers to have in respect of the brand of hardware.
Let us give two very specific examples. If the GPL were to be revised to say that it was permitted to install GPL software on any machine as long as it was not Apple labeled, would you approve of this? If MS were to forbid the installation of Windows in dual boot mode on Apple labeled equipment, but permit dual booting on all other brands, would you approve of them having such a power?
Would you, for instance, approve of proceedings by MS subsequent to making such a modification to the Windows license, if it took Apple to court over bootcamp, for contributory copyright infringement?
Welcome to the world of control. This is what the key issue is. To me, intellectual freedom requires us a society to opt for CASE 2. As for PJ, she may be right or wrong about the future of Psystar, but when it comes to public policy on this issue, she is in denial.