And what is the client running? A web browser running on machine with an OS. So, you need compiler, programming, and testing infrastructure for:
The application provider's OS
The application provider's network services
The application
The client's OS
The client's network client
And this is supposed to be a less complicated system to write, distribute, and debug than traditional systems that you can do away with traditional compile-farms? Software is a service, no need to install anything. Unless, of course, you want to print something. Or is that a service too? Burning a DVD is a service? Put your DVD-R in the drive, connect to your favourite DVD authoring service, and... go to sleep. Maybe tomorrow your disc will be done. Unless DVD or HD-DVD quality video is something you expect to get solely off broadband.
There are so many exceptions to what software-as-a-service can reasonably do that the majority of people who are reading this do on a daily basis that I just have to laugh when people bring this up. Beyond a wet dream for Microsoft where they lovingly sit back and watch the monthly subscription dollars roll in, this is never going to happen.
There never, ever, has been an absolute right to anonymity. The day people have that right, is the day that society will cease to exist.
Society exists because of law and peer pressure to conform to its rules. Where anonimity is guaranteed, peer pressure cannot exist, and law cannot be enforced.
There are restrictions on what government can do to invade your privacy, but privacy and anonimity are two different things. In fulfilling its duties to you, government necesarily has a lot of information about you. Because this information is required by the government, there are also restrictions on accessing that information by other parties. Because of these government restrictions, people mistakenly think those restrictions can and should carry over to everyone. There is a mistaken belief that all people are or should be restricted from determining information about another person. This is patently false and rediculous on its face. Who is to say that the blogging groups right to private criticism of a public figure is more important than my right to find out the motives behind that criticism? Who is to say that opening my eyes to observe someone else is a crime? Is there some sort of "I want to remain anonymous" flag that people have? Like the broadcast flag? You go around wearing this flag, and this makes it so no one is alowed to observe or recognize you.
The blogger(s) waded into a public debate. They can do what they want to try to remain anonymous, but the newspaper along with any other member of the public has the right to do what they can to find out who it is.
In short, YOUR RIGHT TO ANONYMITY ENDS WHEN YOU DO ANYTHING THAT SOMEONE ELSE CAN OBSERVE. If you want to stay anonymous, don't do anything.
I've spoken to my daughter about this girl, and we've come to a mutually agreeable solution. My point was that this is reacting to a situation that has already occured. What do I do about new friends? Call their parents and put them through a checklist of how they raise their children?
The internet poses a real danger in its anonymizing aspects. You know the saying, "God created man, but Colonel Colt made them equal"? The internet is an intellectually and socially empowering force the way firearms are empowering physically. I don't believe firearms are inherently bad, but I would be criminally negligent to allow a child access to one. Society has laws governing this, and rightfully so. Because of the unique way that the internet pierces age and social bariers, we need ways to ensure that children are not thrust into situations before they can handle them. We need to be aware as parents, and as a society a certain amount of regulation is not a bad thing.
Children don't magically become able to understand a danger because I sit down and explain it to them. This has nothing to do with communication, and everthing to do with a child's set of experiences. The human brain works associatively, and without enough base experiences to link to, an explanation no matter how well put together, no matter how loving, has no meaning. "Hot" is meaningless until the child has some basis to understand. This understdanding comes, but it is a process, not an event. Raising a child properly involves controlling those things that the child can't be expected to, and encouraging the child to make responsibile decisions in those areas that the child can control. I would be a poor parent indeed if I told my two-year old not to touch the hot stove, then left him alone in the kitchen with red-hot burners. Control is right and absolutely necesary in some situations. There are also infinite shades of grey as well between the two poles of control and trust, where you need to partially control, and partially encourage and trust. Wisdom is involved in knowing where along the scale your child is at.
In the experience I documented before, despite my having sat down with her and explained the benefits and dangers of internet communications and relationships, my daughter got in over her head. She confided later that she was embarassed by the things this guy was pressing her on, and didn't know how to extricate herself from the situation. Her sense of right and wrong told her that she shouldn't blow someone off, but it also told her she was in over her head. If I did anything wrong, it was in watching things unfold for too long before I stepped in to assist her. In my own defense, I didn't have a full understanding of the facts of the situation from the beginning, so I monitored with increasing frequency as the alarm bells went off one by one. I'm not sure I personally could have monitored her any better than I did - there is afterall a fine line between being a good parent and being invasive. I am sure, though, that I am not happy with the level of monitoring that went on (or didn't) at her friend's house.
I'm glad you made the choice you did about drugs, and I'm glad your parents had the foresight to sit you down and explain them. I'm also pretty sure that explanation or not, you parents would have stepped in and taken control had the situation arose when you were six where you could have made the choice to take heroin. The truth is, children are being exposed to issues at an earlier and earlier age, and a good parent cannot simply trust that their child will be old enough to be able to understand explained dangers before they are actively faced with them. The internet is one reason for this - a very young child can be exposed to things well above their experience level before they can be reasonably prepared to deal with it. If that 17 year old guy that was chatting up my daughter old saw my daughter face to face, I don't think he would have done what he did, but my daughter's friend posed her as being older than she was, and a dangerous situation was created that quickly escalated beyond what my daughter could handle. I fully support initiatives to better protect children from these situations online because I cannot as a parent be everywhere.
This isn't necesarily as easy as it sounds. Let me tell you some of my experiences.
I monitor my children's internet usage, but what about friends? My oldest daughter is 11 and she has a friend the same. Her friend's parents seem to be quite relaxed about their daughter's internet usage. This friend of my daughter met a 17 year old guy on WoW and introduced him to my daughter. IT seems that this friend of my daughter's had introduced herself and my daughter to this guy as being older than they are. She also got involved in some rather sexual conversations - claiming to this guy she had just lost her virginity. My best guess is that she was talking herself up, trying to sound more mature so she could get this guy's attention. She succeeded, and it put my daughter in a situation she really wasn't equipped to handle. I put a stop to this, but the question remains - do I cut her off now from this friend?
I don't know how old you are now, but when you were in that age range and entering teen years, what would your reaction have been if your parents tried to dictate who your friends could be? My daughter is young enough now that I can probably get away with it this time, but what about in two more years? What if she gets a friend who is a latchkey daughter of a single mom? Can I depend on being able to monitor what she is doing on the internet at her friend's house? Can I depend on that parent? I'm not slagging single mothers, but she may just not have the time or ability to monitor her child. Do I tell my daughter she can't be this girl's friend?
When I was a kid, there was a certain amount of interdependency that parents could depend on with other parents and even with complete strangers. If I was a kid acting out in a mall, most any nearby adult would have considered it proper to issue a little correction. This was the way society worked in the past. Now, this is considered politically incorrect. This is because as a society we are so afraid of coming to moral decisions - afraid to make a determination of absolute right and wrong. I can't tell a kid that what he's doing is wrong because it's not my place to make that decision. And woe betide the politician who wants to legislate anything that smacks of interference.
I am all for this proposal. Sure it may be difficult or even impossible to implement, and there may be ways around it, but those aren't reasons not to try. We need to step up to the plate and as a society come to the decision that it is our responsibility to make places as safe as possible. Because no parent can be everywhere, and I want to believe that other people will look out for my children, just as I would like to think that I would look out for theirs.
I dislike the way Microsoft is attempting to ram OOXML down people's throats after a perfectly usable standard has already been adopted. "May the best format win" is not the tack to take with an international standard. When it comes to implementations, diversity is better. When it comes to standards, you only want one. The accepted procedure for an official international standard is to adopt one, then revise it if/when needed to address weaknesses or new technologies. If ODF doesn't support functionality Microsoft needs, then they should work with OASIS or the ISO to add it.
I also dislike the specification itself. First of all it is a monster - 6,000 pages worth. On top of that, it incorporates by reference binary blobs that have no format definition. So you have a monster specification for a document format that, at the end of the day, you still could read without reverse engineering MS Office files.
So, if your company feels like it wants to write code around OOXML, please feel free. I'm certainly not touching it.
Theoretically the standard does have input from multiple parties. The ECMA process had 21 voting parties (20 voted in favour, IBM voted against). That was a process where more than one person had input. The current ISO process has fourteen different countries submitting contradictions. You and I both know that input is useless if it doesn't cause a change, but all it takes is one change in the standard to answer those contradictions for Microsoft to be able to claim that changes were made based on outside input. I guess it depends on the legal definition of "input" that the law has. I haven't read the law, so I don't know.
As far as multiple implementations... Corel has already announced support for OOXML in Word Perfect. Novel has announced an OOXML filter for OpenOffice.org suite. Lovely how Novel's little deal is more and more of a stab in the back.
According to Andy Upgrove, the Netherlands essentially were bought out by Microsoft like ANSI was. If Microsoft is successful in getting ISO approval, this California law will essentially get read in as a "Thou shalt use Microsoft Office" law.
While I hope ISO doesn't ratify OOXLM, the cynical side of me doesn't have a whole lot of hope.
The stupid masses you refer to must be the masses that read these articles, fall for the sensational headlines, and respond as you just have. The fact that no one is actually reading the the bill in question before leaping to wild conclusions about government censorship is rather annoying. The whole point of the bill is to stop ambush marketing with respect to the games. That is, to stop people from trying to look like they are official olympic supporters without actually being.
I submit that the bill is very excellently worded, and I challenge you (or anyone else) to read the bill and come up with an example where the bill would unfairly restrict your freedom. By that, I mean restrict you from doing anything except ambush marketing. Anyone that needs to use any of the "restricted" words in order to promote legitimate business can do so:
(4) Nothing in subsection (1) or (2) prevents (g) the use by a person of their address, the geographical name of their place of business, an accurate indication of the origin of their wares or services, or an accurate description of their wares or services to the extent that the description is necessary to explain those wares or services to the public
So, as you can see, that little exception covers pretty much any legitimate use you might have. Describe how exactly this is Orwellian, please.
(4) Nothing in subsection (1) or (2) prevents
(g) the use by a person of their address, the geographical name of their place of business, an accurate indication of the origin of their wares or services, or an accurate description of their wares or services to the extent that the description is necessary to explain those wares or services to the public;
I wish people would read the text before going off on how unfair it is. It is very well written, and I invite people to read it before believing the sensationalistic headlines about "owning winter".
First of all, the London you speak of is in the UK, not Canada, so you can consult your own government on what sort of laws you want to have over there.
Secondly, reading the text of the bill, I don't see that even being a prohibited use. The stated reasoning of the bill is to act as "protection against certain misleading business associations". The wording instructs the courts to interpret whether the use of the protected words is for the purpose of misleading the consumer into believing that you are a sponsor of the games when you are not. Your case does not fall into that category, and would thus not be prohibited by the act. Thirdly, even if it was, if you owned a small guest house in Vancouver, you would not need to advertise "Thinking of coming to the Olympics in 2010" - you would more than likely be able to rent out the house in that time period. I don't even see a need to mention the event in that context - those shoping around will know.
The act is written to narrowly interpret a broad spectrum of words. By that I mean, the courts are allowed to consider many words that could potentially be infringing, but those words must be used in a misleading manor in order to be prohibited.
All in all, it's one of the better balancing acts my government has done in order to prohibit ambush marketing, and I aplaud it.
So, your argument doesn't really hold water with me.
No, "Winter" is not being given away, just the right to use the word in certain advertising contexts that could be confused with the winter games. Every Olympic games there are vulture companies that tie themselves in advertising knots to appear to be official supporters without actually being. They use phrases like "Official supporter of Winter sports". This always burns my bacon that they get away with it. If you want to cash in on the Olympics, then support them and get the rights. Otherwise, get lost.
The courts have better things do deal with than tie themselves in knots over this. I can't see this really being applied except in blatant cases, and overall I think it's a good thing. Another thing I can't see is why this is being painted so negatively.
The old (for computers) addage goes: "The difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman is that a used car salesman knows when he's lying".
I imagine, as far as most of the sales people goes, this is probably the case here. I doubt most of them even knew that the prices were different.
And, since the interior of a politician is not a naturally tenable place for Common Sense, the Common Sense didn't have much time to come to terms with its existance being Common Sense before it had to come to terms with not being Common Sense any more.
It's just common sense. If I pick up a megaphone, get up on a soap box downtown, and yell a string of slanderous statements, Fanon Megaphones isn't going to get sued. Shoot the messenger and all.
The answer to all these problems is very simple. For any mission critical application, use UTC and only UTC. No time zones, no date line, no converting. If the software isn't even aware of the concept of date/time localization, then it's not going to run into problems.
Oh, and while they're at it, standardize on metric too. Maybe we can save our interstellar probes at the same time we are saving our warplanes.
It has always been this way going to the States. Now it is that way coming to Canada too.
I agree that this will be a much bigger problem for Americans than Canadians, as Americans imprison a n order of magnitude higher percentage of their citizens than we do. Why this is I don't know - either Canadians are that much more law abiding, or the U.S. government regularly breaks the first rule of leadership, which is to never make a rule no one will follow. My personal guess it is a mixture of both, with the latter being favoured more highly than the former.
This will be continue to be an issue for Americans travelling elsewhere if the U.S. makes similar information sharing agreements with others, as the U.S.'s imprisonment rate per capita is similarly higher than most of the rest of the free world.
It says that, like the extraterrestrials, humans have three choices: colonize the galaxy, remain on Earth, or become extinct.
Yes, I needed this article to tell me that humanity can survive here, survive somewhere else, or die. I can now die in peace knowing that someone figuret this out - knowing that the path that humanity might take over the next 5.5 billion years have been recorded by this article. Perhaps I should go into writing - maybe I can make money and get slashdotted by writing these fine articles:
War and Peace - an article which will come to the conclusion that there will either be a world war in the next ten years, or there won't be
Free Radicals - an article that will point out that radical fundamentalism over the next severl decades will either calm down or flare up more
Suffusion - An article that re-delves into the cold fusion debate and ends up pointing out that the idea may or may not have merit
The sun is about 4.5 billion years old, and has a lifespan as a main sequence star of about 10 billion years. I hardly think that this paper, no matter how eloquent, is going to affect the course of humanity's decisions in the next few billion years.
OMFG - WE'VE ONLY GOT 5.5 BILLION YEARS LEFT! COLONIZE NOW OR DIE!
I've come up with a new law:
The odds of an announcement regarding an "inexpensive source of energy" having a disclaimer that "this method of creating electricicty creation [sic] is in its very early stage" approaches one as the amount of energy in the proposed invention increases, and/or as the cost decreases.
First of all, the IETF which handles the RFC standards track process that both POP3 (RFC 1939) and IMAP4 (RFC 3501) is not a formal standards body. It is a loosely knit group of volunteers that issue standards based on an informal consensus basis. In fact, the acronum "RFC" that is used for all their standards is indicative of this background - it stands for "Request For Comments". Today some RFCs are more than Requests For Comments, but they are certainly less than vetted and formal international standards.
Secondly, POP and IMAP started out with widely different goals. POP originated in the early 80's. The first RFC for it was RFC 918 was issued in 1984. Back then, very few people had continuous internet connections. It was designed as an offline mail retrieval system. Dial up (or connect however way you do), grab mail from remote server to local computer, disconnect, then read mail. IMAP was designed a few years later as an online remote mailbox accessing system. You stay connected and access your server-hosted mailbox from a remote location. Even today, this paradigm generally persists. POP3 is capable of leaving messages on the server, and IMAP4 is capable of downloading, but in general people use POP when they want to grab and IMAP when they want to leave the mail as server hosted.
Two different protocols for two different purposes that happened to later overlap. There are a thousand such protocols. FTP can be used to retrieve a web page, just like HTTP can. Does that make them competing standards? There are many examples similar to what you have given. Because different standards in the past have been able to accomplish similar things does not make tThe very purpose of a standard is to have uniformity - this purpose is defeated by competing standards that have the same purpose. ODF and OpenXML are two recent, competing standards that have essentially the same purpose. They are not old standards that had different goals that subsequently moved to become somewhat overlapping. Microsoft is misusing arguments that other people have used to voice support for choice in software to voice support for a competing, superfluous standard.
If you want a real example of the "good" that competing standards accomplish, look at VHS vs Betamax. Neither of those were more than industry standards - no international standards organization adopted them. Because there were no international standards, the fiasco cost consumers millions of dollars. Betamax is widely believed to have been the technically superior format that lost out due to the better marketing that VHS had. Is that what you want for ODF vs Open XML? Do you want two competing formats that polarize the industry, where the technically superior one is not necesarily the winner but where marketing wins the day?
You actually are mostly making my point for me. The "a", "b", and "g" and upcoming "n" suffixes denote ammendments to the same 802.11 IEEE standard. The reason they exist are to give additional functionality or updated performance, while ensuring adherance to the same standard. For example, it is because they are ammendments of the same standard that allow b and g to work with each other. The 802.11 standard is the poster child for creating a successful single standard that is widely adopted by countless (competing) vendors and continuously updated to reflect improvements in technology.
Choice is standards is a negative thing for consumers, which is also something you example with your reference to GSM vs. CDMA. While there are enough differences in the goals of GSM vs CDMA that might technically make a valid case for both standards existing, their wide adoption in different geographical areas represents something of a failure in the standards process to ensure interoperability for the consumer.
So, thank-you for making my point on why we do not want competing standards, only competing implementations.
This campaign to stop even the consideration of Open XML in ISO/IEC JTC1 is a blatant attempt to use the standards process to limit choice in the marketplace for ulterior commercial motives
Choice in the marketplace (in products) is great, and something I support wholeheartedly. However, choice in a standard is exactly what you don't want. ISO standards exist to increase interoperability, not to provide alternatives for people who want to pick this or that protocol. There is an international standard for document format - instead of muddying the water and introducing a competing standard (arguably an oxymoron), why not simply promote the "choice" they claim to espouse and produce a product that implements the standard and give the market choice.
Microsoft seems to have it backwards. When it comes to standards, they advocate choice. When it comes to software, they advocate monoculture.
The questions I ask are rhetorical - I know the answer, and so should most people. The open source community (among others) have blasted Microsoft for years for trampling choice in software. Now they are seeing that open source (and competition in general) has a real chance of making significant headway with a well documented, open standard that anyone can implement, that will interoperate, and isn't controlled by themselves, so now they use the community's arguments, but in an area where it's not appropriate. They use the words the community has used to attack their software monoculture to attack a standards monoculture. It's calculated, and a smart move on their part. Utterly contemptuous and underhanded, but very very smart.
Slashdot Mirror
- The application provider's OS
- The application provider's network services
- The application
- The client's OS
- The client's network client
And this is supposed to be a less complicated system to write, distribute, and debug than traditional systems that you can do away with traditional compile-farms? Software is a service, no need to install anything. Unless, of course, you want to print something. Or is that a service too? Burning a DVD is a service? Put your DVD-R in the drive, connect to your favourite DVD authoring service, and... go to sleep. Maybe tomorrow your disc will be done. Unless DVD or HD-DVD quality video is something you expect to get solely off broadband.There are so many exceptions to what software-as-a-service can reasonably do that the majority of people who are reading this do on a daily basis that I just have to laugh when people bring this up. Beyond a wet dream for Microsoft where they lovingly sit back and watch the monthly subscription dollars roll in, this is never going to happen.
There never, ever, has been an absolute right to anonymity. The day people have that right, is the day that society will cease to exist.
Society exists because of law and peer pressure to conform to its rules. Where anonimity is guaranteed, peer pressure cannot exist, and law cannot be enforced.
There are restrictions on what government can do to invade your privacy, but privacy and anonimity are two different things. In fulfilling its duties to you, government necesarily has a lot of information about you. Because this information is required by the government, there are also restrictions on accessing that information by other parties. Because of these government restrictions, people mistakenly think those restrictions can and should carry over to everyone. There is a mistaken belief that all people are or should be restricted from determining information about another person. This is patently false and rediculous on its face. Who is to say that the blogging groups right to private criticism of a public figure is more important than my right to find out the motives behind that criticism? Who is to say that opening my eyes to observe someone else is a crime? Is there some sort of "I want to remain anonymous" flag that people have? Like the broadcast flag? You go around wearing this flag, and this makes it so no one is alowed to observe or recognize you.
The blogger(s) waded into a public debate. They can do what they want to try to remain anonymous, but the newspaper along with any other member of the public has the right to do what they can to find out who it is.
In short, YOUR RIGHT TO ANONYMITY ENDS WHEN YOU DO ANYTHING THAT SOMEONE ELSE CAN OBSERVE. If you want to stay anonymous, don't do anything.
I've spoken to my daughter about this girl, and we've come to a mutually agreeable solution. My point was that this is reacting to a situation that has already occured. What do I do about new friends? Call their parents and put them through a checklist of how they raise their children?
The internet poses a real danger in its anonymizing aspects. You know the saying, "God created man, but Colonel Colt made them equal"? The internet is an intellectually and socially empowering force the way firearms are empowering physically. I don't believe firearms are inherently bad, but I would be criminally negligent to allow a child access to one. Society has laws governing this, and rightfully so. Because of the unique way that the internet pierces age and social bariers, we need ways to ensure that children are not thrust into situations before they can handle them. We need to be aware as parents, and as a society a certain amount of regulation is not a bad thing.
Children don't magically become able to understand a danger because I sit down and explain it to them. This has nothing to do with communication, and everthing to do with a child's set of experiences. The human brain works associatively, and without enough base experiences to link to, an explanation no matter how well put together, no matter how loving, has no meaning. "Hot" is meaningless until the child has some basis to understand. This understdanding comes, but it is a process, not an event. Raising a child properly involves controlling those things that the child can't be expected to, and encouraging the child to make responsibile decisions in those areas that the child can control. I would be a poor parent indeed if I told my two-year old not to touch the hot stove, then left him alone in the kitchen with red-hot burners. Control is right and absolutely necesary in some situations. There are also infinite shades of grey as well between the two poles of control and trust, where you need to partially control, and partially encourage and trust. Wisdom is involved in knowing where along the scale your child is at.
In the experience I documented before, despite my having sat down with her and explained the benefits and dangers of internet communications and relationships, my daughter got in over her head. She confided later that she was embarassed by the things this guy was pressing her on, and didn't know how to extricate herself from the situation. Her sense of right and wrong told her that she shouldn't blow someone off, but it also told her she was in over her head. If I did anything wrong, it was in watching things unfold for too long before I stepped in to assist her. In my own defense, I didn't have a full understanding of the facts of the situation from the beginning, so I monitored with increasing frequency as the alarm bells went off one by one. I'm not sure I personally could have monitored her any better than I did - there is afterall a fine line between being a good parent and being invasive. I am sure, though, that I am not happy with the level of monitoring that went on (or didn't) at her friend's house.
I'm glad you made the choice you did about drugs, and I'm glad your parents had the foresight to sit you down and explain them. I'm also pretty sure that explanation or not, you parents would have stepped in and taken control had the situation arose when you were six where you could have made the choice to take heroin. The truth is, children are being exposed to issues at an earlier and earlier age, and a good parent cannot simply trust that their child will be old enough to be able to understand explained dangers before they are actively faced with them. The internet is one reason for this - a very young child can be exposed to things well above their experience level before they can be reasonably prepared to deal with it. If that 17 year old guy that was chatting up my daughter old saw my daughter face to face, I don't think he would have done what he did, but my daughter's friend posed her as being older than she was, and a dangerous situation was created that quickly escalated beyond what my daughter could handle. I fully support initiatives to better protect children from these situations online because I cannot as a parent be everywhere.
This isn't necesarily as easy as it sounds. Let me tell you some of my experiences.
I monitor my children's internet usage, but what about friends? My oldest daughter is 11 and she has a friend the same. Her friend's parents seem to be quite relaxed about their daughter's internet usage. This friend of my daughter met a 17 year old guy on WoW and introduced him to my daughter. IT seems that this friend of my daughter's had introduced herself and my daughter to this guy as being older than they are. She also got involved in some rather sexual conversations - claiming to this guy she had just lost her virginity. My best guess is that she was talking herself up, trying to sound more mature so she could get this guy's attention. She succeeded, and it put my daughter in a situation she really wasn't equipped to handle. I put a stop to this, but the question remains - do I cut her off now from this friend?
I don't know how old you are now, but when you were in that age range and entering teen years, what would your reaction have been if your parents tried to dictate who your friends could be? My daughter is young enough now that I can probably get away with it this time, but what about in two more years? What if she gets a friend who is a latchkey daughter of a single mom? Can I depend on being able to monitor what she is doing on the internet at her friend's house? Can I depend on that parent? I'm not slagging single mothers, but she may just not have the time or ability to monitor her child. Do I tell my daughter she can't be this girl's friend?
When I was a kid, there was a certain amount of interdependency that parents could depend on with other parents and even with complete strangers. If I was a kid acting out in a mall, most any nearby adult would have considered it proper to issue a little correction. This was the way society worked in the past. Now, this is considered politically incorrect. This is because as a society we are so afraid of coming to moral decisions - afraid to make a determination of absolute right and wrong. I can't tell a kid that what he's doing is wrong because it's not my place to make that decision. And woe betide the politician who wants to legislate anything that smacks of interference.
I am all for this proposal. Sure it may be difficult or even impossible to implement, and there may be ways around it, but those aren't reasons not to try. We need to step up to the plate and as a society come to the decision that it is our responsibility to make places as safe as possible. Because no parent can be everywhere, and I want to believe that other people will look out for my children, just as I would like to think that I would look out for theirs.
I dislike the way Microsoft is attempting to ram OOXML down people's throats after a perfectly usable standard has already been adopted. "May the best format win" is not the tack to take with an international standard. When it comes to implementations, diversity is better. When it comes to standards, you only want one. The accepted procedure for an official international standard is to adopt one, then revise it if/when needed to address weaknesses or new technologies. If ODF doesn't support functionality Microsoft needs, then they should work with OASIS or the ISO to add it.
I also dislike the specification itself. First of all it is a monster - 6,000 pages worth. On top of that, it incorporates by reference binary blobs that have no format definition. So you have a monster specification for a document format that, at the end of the day, you still could read without reverse engineering MS Office files.
So, if your company feels like it wants to write code around OOXML, please feel free. I'm certainly not touching it.
Theoretically the standard does have input from multiple parties. The ECMA process had 21 voting parties (20 voted in favour, IBM voted against). That was a process where more than one person had input. The current ISO process has fourteen different countries submitting contradictions. You and I both know that input is useless if it doesn't cause a change, but all it takes is one change in the standard to answer those contradictions for Microsoft to be able to claim that changes were made based on outside input. I guess it depends on the legal definition of "input" that the law has. I haven't read the law, so I don't know.
As far as multiple implementations... Corel has already announced support for OOXML in Word Perfect. Novel has announced an OOXML filter for OpenOffice.org suite. Lovely how Novel's little deal is more and more of a stab in the back.
According to Andy Upgrove, the Netherlands essentially were bought out by Microsoft like ANSI was. If Microsoft is successful in getting ISO approval, this California law will essentially get read in as a "Thou shalt use Microsoft Office" law.
While I hope ISO doesn't ratify OOXLM, the cynical side of me doesn't have a whole lot of hope.
I submit that the bill is very excellently worded, and I challenge you (or anyone else) to read the bill and come up with an example where the bill would unfairly restrict your freedom. By that, I mean restrict you from doing anything except ambush marketing. Anyone that needs to use any of the "restricted" words in order to promote legitimate business can do so:So, as you can see, that little exception covers pretty much any legitimate use you might have. Describe how exactly this is Orwellian, please.
First of all, the London you speak of is in the UK, not Canada, so you can consult your own government on what sort of laws you want to have over there.
Secondly, reading the text of the bill, I don't see that even being a prohibited use. The stated reasoning of the bill is to act as "protection against certain misleading business associations". The wording instructs the courts to interpret whether the use of the protected words is for the purpose of misleading the consumer into believing that you are a sponsor of the games when you are not. Your case does not fall into that category, and would thus not be prohibited by the act. Thirdly, even if it was, if you owned a small guest house in Vancouver, you would not need to advertise "Thinking of coming to the Olympics in 2010" - you would more than likely be able to rent out the house in that time period. I don't even see a need to mention the event in that context - those shoping around will know.
The act is written to narrowly interpret a broad spectrum of words. By that I mean, the courts are allowed to consider many words that could potentially be infringing, but those words must be used in a misleading manor in order to be prohibited.
All in all, it's one of the better balancing acts my government has done in order to prohibit ambush marketing, and I aplaud it. So, your argument doesn't really hold water with me.
No, "Winter" is not being given away, just the right to use the word in certain advertising contexts that could be confused with the winter games. Every Olympic games there are vulture companies that tie themselves in advertising knots to appear to be official supporters without actually being. They use phrases like "Official supporter of Winter sports". This always burns my bacon that they get away with it. If you want to cash in on the Olympics, then support them and get the rights. Otherwise, get lost.
The courts have better things do deal with than tie themselves in knots over this. I can't see this really being applied except in blatant cases, and overall I think it's a good thing. Another thing I can't see is why this is being painted so negatively.
The old (for computers) addage goes: "The difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman is that a used car salesman knows when he's lying".
I imagine, as far as most of the sales people goes, this is probably the case here. I doubt most of them even knew that the prices were different.
We never left that behavior behind.
And, since the interior of a politician is not a naturally tenable place for Common Sense, the Common Sense didn't have much time to come to terms with its existance being Common Sense before it had to come to terms with not being Common Sense any more.
It's just common sense. If I pick up a megaphone, get up on a soap box downtown, and yell a string of slanderous statements, Fanon Megaphones isn't going to get sued. Shoot the messenger and all.
The answer to all these problems is very simple. For any mission critical application, use UTC and only UTC. No time zones, no date line, no converting. If the software isn't even aware of the concept of date/time localization, then it's not going to run into problems.
Oh, and while they're at it, standardize on metric too. Maybe we can save our interstellar probes at the same time we are saving our warplanes.
It has always been this way going to the States. Now it is that way coming to Canada too.
I agree that this will be a much bigger problem for Americans than Canadians, as Americans imprison a n order of magnitude higher percentage of their citizens than we do. Why this is I don't know - either Canadians are that much more law abiding, or the U.S. government regularly breaks the first rule of leadership, which is to never make a rule no one will follow. My personal guess it is a mixture of both, with the latter being favoured more highly than the former.
This will be continue to be an issue for Americans travelling elsewhere if the U.S. makes similar information sharing agreements with others, as the U.S.'s imprisonment rate per capita is similarly higher than most of the rest of the free world.
Pulitzer here I come!
The sun is about 4.5 billion years old, and has a lifespan as a main sequence star of about 10 billion years. I hardly think that this paper, no matter how eloquent, is going to affect the course of humanity's decisions in the next few billion years.
OMFG - WE'VE ONLY GOT 5.5 BILLION YEARS LEFT! COLONIZE NOW OR DIE!
I've come up with a new law: The odds of an announcement regarding an "inexpensive source of energy" having a disclaimer that "this method of creating electricicty creation [sic] is in its very early stage" approaches one as the amount of energy in the proposed invention increases, and/or as the cost decreases.
First of all, the IETF which handles the RFC standards track process that both POP3 (RFC 1939) and IMAP4 (RFC 3501) is not a formal standards body. It is a loosely knit group of volunteers that issue standards based on an informal consensus basis. In fact, the acronum "RFC" that is used for all their standards is indicative of this background - it stands for "Request For Comments". Today some RFCs are more than Requests For Comments, but they are certainly less than vetted and formal international standards.
Secondly, POP and IMAP started out with widely different goals. POP originated in the early 80's. The first RFC for it was RFC 918 was issued in 1984. Back then, very few people had continuous internet connections. It was designed as an offline mail retrieval system. Dial up (or connect however way you do), grab mail from remote server to local computer, disconnect, then read mail. IMAP was designed a few years later as an online remote mailbox accessing system. You stay connected and access your server-hosted mailbox from a remote location. Even today, this paradigm generally persists. POP3 is capable of leaving messages on the server, and IMAP4 is capable of downloading, but in general people use POP when they want to grab and IMAP when they want to leave the mail as server hosted.
Two different protocols for two different purposes that happened to later overlap. There are a thousand such protocols. FTP can be used to retrieve a web page, just like HTTP can. Does that make them competing standards? There are many examples similar to what you have given. Because different standards in the past have been able to accomplish similar things does not make tThe very purpose of a standard is to have uniformity - this purpose is defeated by competing standards that have the same purpose. ODF and OpenXML are two recent, competing standards that have essentially the same purpose. They are not old standards that had different goals that subsequently moved to become somewhat overlapping. Microsoft is misusing arguments that other people have used to voice support for choice in software to voice support for a competing, superfluous standard.
If you want a real example of the "good" that competing standards accomplish, look at VHS vs Betamax. Neither of those were more than industry standards - no international standards organization adopted them. Because there were no international standards, the fiasco cost consumers millions of dollars. Betamax is widely believed to have been the technically superior format that lost out due to the better marketing that VHS had. Is that what you want for ODF vs Open XML? Do you want two competing formats that polarize the industry, where the technically superior one is not necesarily the winner but where marketing wins the day?
You actually are mostly making my point for me. The "a", "b", and "g" and upcoming "n" suffixes denote ammendments to the same 802.11 IEEE standard. The reason they exist are to give additional functionality or updated performance, while ensuring adherance to the same standard. For example, it is because they are ammendments of the same standard that allow b and g to work with each other. The 802.11 standard is the poster child for creating a successful single standard that is widely adopted by countless (competing) vendors and continuously updated to reflect improvements in technology.
Choice is standards is a negative thing for consumers, which is also something you example with your reference to GSM vs. CDMA. While there are enough differences in the goals of GSM vs CDMA that might technically make a valid case for both standards existing, their wide adoption in different geographical areas represents something of a failure in the standards process to ensure interoperability for the consumer.
So, thank-you for making my point on why we do not want competing standards, only competing implementations.
Microsoft seems to have it backwards. When it comes to standards, they advocate choice. When it comes to software, they advocate monoculture.
The questions I ask are rhetorical - I know the answer, and so should most people. The open source community (among others) have blasted Microsoft for years for trampling choice in software. Now they are seeing that open source (and competition in general) has a real chance of making significant headway with a well documented, open standard that anyone can implement, that will interoperate, and isn't controlled by themselves, so now they use the community's arguments, but in an area where it's not appropriate. They use the words the community has used to attack their software monoculture to attack a standards monoculture. It's calculated, and a smart move on their part. Utterly contemptuous and underhanded, but very very smart.
As a Canadian citizen, I can assure you I do that daily. ;)