They are not sworn and therefore do not fall under perjury.
Did you even bother reading the letter? I quote: "MobiTV hereby states, under penalty of perjury, that the above notice is accurate". It was a DMCA takedown notice. The DMCA requires takedown notices to be made under penalty of perjury.
I get the impression you think perjury is only applicable if somebody is sworn in as a witness in court. That's simply not the case. Why do you think laws like the DMCA include statements like this?
It's libellous[sic]
What's with the [sic]? That's spelt correctly.
There is nothing illegal in sending a letter making claims and demands.
I do believe that's what I said. In fact, I explicitly said that the problem was that it was more than simply a letter with demands.
It's obvious you don't know what libel is. This C&D was a private communication
It's obvious you didn't read my comment or the letter. They stated that they were also contacting the ISP about this.
it's barratry
Way to misquote me. The full quote is "If they take it any further, it's barratry".
So far, they've sent a single C&D (which isn't a legal action at all)
A DMCA takedown notice isn't legal action? The fact that they threaten "further" legal action certainly suggests they think it is legal action.
What about a URL to make donations to a terrorist organization? What about a URL where, every time you go there, it sets off an automated script that pulls the trigger on a shotgun and shoots an adorable kitten in the face?
These are bad examples because in order to actually do the harmful act, you either have to POST information (something distinctly different from retrieving the URL), or the other party has to subvert the HTTP protocol (which you can't reasonably be considered responsible for). Straight from RFC 2616:
The important distinction here is that the user did not request the side-effects, so therefore cannot be held accountable for them.
Or think about it this way: whenever you visit a web page, the author of that web page can induce you to request any URL they like automatically. Chances are, you won't even be aware of it. Still think it's a good idea to hold people accountable for merely visiting a URL?
Does MobiTV and Verizon have the right to send a cease and desist letter? Sure
Do they have the right to send a letter asking them to stop? Sure. But this cease and desist letter goes far beyond that, it claims that they are infringing copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets and it claims so under penalty of perjury. Furthermore, they state they have also sent such claims to the ISP, a third-party. I think that is unsupportable and illegal, and I don't believe they have the right to do that. It's libellous and if they take it any further, it's barratry.
what about compensating people for the work they do
Copyright doesn't do this though. With a copyright-based business model, they are compensated for manufacturing copies, not creating something. The "work" copyright holders are compensated for is something machines can do for free. That's the reason why they need copyright — the competition they are being protected from is extremely efficient. And as a society, we are pretending that efficiency doesn't exist and society becomes less efficient itself.
You'll find that many of the people against copyright actually advocate business models that are based around compensating people for creating things, not the meaningless make-work that copyright-based business models are all about.
encouraging them to do more work in the future?
I think the idea that they can work to create something and then milk its profits until years after they are dead does the opposite in many cases.
Sure, open sourcers would still produce things, and there would be people willing to work for free for the fame or future job prospects or whatever, but not everybody wants to work for free!
Hey, not everybody wants to work full stop. I guess we should just pay everybody a wage for doing nothing, right? Or maybe what is good for society should be the basis of law rather than people's pipe dreams. It's not everybody else's responsibility to pretend bits are uncopyable in order for you to get paid to make copies, and it's not the government's responsibility to stop them.
I like the idea of working hard and getting a higher income than the guy who doesn't, and having a nice house and a new car parked in front of it. I don't understand why people want to reduce the opportunity to do that.
Straw man. Being against copyright has nothing to do with being against the opportunity to work harder than other people for greater rewards. If anything, proponents of copyright are contradicting that philosophy. You think Bill Gates works thousands of times harder than the average McDonalds employee?
Precisely. Who says their difficulty in finding a replacement web developer is down to the platform? Too many times I've seen people asking for an experienced graphic designer and expert developer rolled into one, while offering a salary that would be miserly for just the one. And don't be surprised if nobody responds to a request for a Photoshop wizard with ten years experience in Rails. It's rare to find people who are an expert in two very different fields and you have to pay them accordingly.
Developers who care about a browser following standards shouldn't care how it deals with incorrect stuff.
Some specifications (e.g. the CSS specifications) define error handling, so the Acid tests need to include invalid things in order to test the conformance to these parts of the specifications.
Part of the reason why error handling is defined is so that current implementations will have defined behaviour when they encounter code that is written to a future specification. When you write a stylesheet using CSS 3, it would be nice to have browsers that only understand CSS 2 behave consistently even though they don't understand the CSS 3 parts of your code.
For instance, if a browser that understands CSS 2 encounters a CSS 3 property it doesn't recognise, should it ignore just that property or the whole ruleset? Don't you think this is important to include rules like this for compatibility reasons? And shouldn't browsers be tested to follow those rules?
I really, really wish people would get over the Acid tests; perhaps in favor of "the CNN test", or the "does it work with my proprietary intranet badly-coded webapps?" test.
But those kinds of "tests" only test new browsers. The developers behind CNN's website and all those proprietary intranet applications bodge their code to make them work in existing browsers already, so nothing in existing browsers is being tested. At most, you could say that they test the popularity of the browser.
Sure, the Acid tests aren't particularly interesting to users, but in case you haven't noticed, developers are pretty important to the web too, and the Acid tests are highly relevant to them.
Something odd's going on with the moderation in this thread. I was modded Troll and Flamebait as well, and the comment you replied to is an AC that seems to be permanently at -1 (even with other comments), despite having 100% Interesting moderation.
Why should musicians be less important than people building houses or growing crops ?
Well which is more important to you? Having a home and food on the table, or having a CD collection? I believe there aren't many people in the world who would choose being able to listen to music over being able to eat.
You make the typical error of suggesting that existence has a purpose and yet it doesn't. So whatever you do it is as important, or if you prefer, as unimportant as any other things you could do at that same moment.
Oh, please. If existence is so irrelevant, then who gives a damn about the musicians? Why do you care what they earn? Wouldn't that be assuming that their existence has a purpose? You aren't going to convince anybody that musicians should be rich by making appeals to nihilism.
So yes, musicians deserve to have millions as much as the next guy in society
That's just it though: most people aren't millionaires. So let's stop assuming successful musicians should be. Successful construction workers don't usually make millions. Successful farmers don't usually make millions. Successful scientists don't usually make millions. If successful musicians don't usually make millions, why should that be something awful that needs government intervention? Isn't it perfectly reasonable for successful musicians not to be rich? What is there that needs correcting?
Sadly, the salary of one's job is not based on how important it is but on how in demand it is.
You are ignoring the other half of the equation, the supply. Copies of songs are in infinite abundance. The demand might be there, but the scarcity is not. They are a free good. There's a lot of demand for air too, but you aren't going to get rich selling that either.
It's long been fairly well understood that the way to become rich is to produce one small thing that everyone wants, and sell it everywhere cheaply.
That's one way of becoming rich. Another is to find something people want that you can acquire a monopoly on, and sell it without competition. People selling CDs have chosen this course, and they are only able to do so with the government's help.
A musician makes music, which is sold on CD for about ten bucks
No, those people aren't in the business of selling music. They are in the business of manufacturing copies. That is something anybody can do. Machines can do it for essentially no cost. That's why they need the government to protect them from competition.
In both cases, millions of copies of the item can be produced and sold. And millions of 10.00 sales result in millions of dollars of profit.
Sure, but the only reason they can get away with charging $10.00 is because the government helps them. And the only reason all those sales go to them rather than some other manufacturer is because the government helps them. Without government help, the competition would drive their prices down and take a large portion of their sales.
There's NOTHING wrong with that
Sure there is, the government is stepping in to make particular people rich instead of letting the free market do its job. I'm not totally against the concept of copyright and I'm certainly not arguing that free markets are perfect. But you're only looking at the demand side of the equation and giving them a free pass on the supply side, and that's something that we, as a society, are totally subsidising them on. And when they are making millions of dollars, it's not a bad idea to question how justified that subsidy is.
your problem is you can't do it yourself! I read your post and I hear a guy who despises those who do what he cannot,
Yeah, see, the trouble with that is there's nothing whatsoever in my comment to suggest this. It's pure fantasy on your part.
For what it's worth, I write code for a living. A lot of people consider that to be just as creative as music. It's certainly of more practical value.
and would spite them their just rewards for their hard work.
Oh, I have nothing at all against rewarding them for their hard work. What I object to is rewarding them for the things that don't take any hard work — the manufacturing of copies.
Are other artists as likely to experience this success once such things become more mainstream and less unique?
Part of the criteria that people use in deciding the value of something is how rare and unusual it is, and since this is one of the first such instances of an artist-produced album, I wonder if the profits that Trent Reznor has enjoyed here will be sustainable for other artists.
Of course other artists won't be as successful. Of course these types of profits aren't sustainable. Is that a bad thing?
These guys are entertainers, and yet a lot of people seem to think that they automatically deserve to be multi-millionaires. That's insane. They don't build houses for people to live in. They don't grow food for people to eat. They don't advance our understanding of the world. They are modern day jesters, a distraction when you have nothing better to do.
I like music as much as the next person, but please let us have some perspective here. If musicians don't make a lot of money, that's absolutely fine. A million bucks is something a musician should work a lifetime to achieve, not something they can pick up from a year's work with one album. And it's sure as hell not society's job to subsidise them with copyrights until they are filthy rich.
Actually, Python has been appearing on phones for quite a while, notably Nokia Series 60. I'm not sure, but it might also be possible to use Jython with J2ME devices.
What happened to Tcl? Well judging from the look of it, I'd say it was run over by a car, then hit by a train, then had a nasty encounter with stampeding bison, then got a nasty infection from a facehugger, then beaten up by Ripley and was then promptly nuked from orbit. It's for the best, it was in a great deal of pain and nobody wants to live like that.
Seriously though, that's one ugly language. I always got the impression it's what the inventor of Brainfuck would create if he were actually being serious.
And it's probably the one thing MS has thoroughly earned with all the IE bullsh*t over the last 10 years.
Personally, I'm wondering if they can possibly release Internet Explorer 8 in nine weeks. Because the 12th of May is the ten year anniversary of the CSS 2 specification and Internet Explorer 8 might actually include full CSS 2 support (not including the aural stuff).
While this is good news for those of us in the geek crowd, I'm extremely surprised MS went this route.
Me too. I'm a web developer and I hate Internet Explorer's quirks, but if I were in charge of the Internet Explorer team, I wouldn't be able to justify this decision to my superiors, not for Internet Explorer 8 (9, yes, after publicising this strategy).
Reading between the lines, I get the impression things happened from the bottom up. The Internet Explorer team consider their bad reputation and endless concessions to backwards compatibility with quirks mode to be millstones around their necks. But professionalism and the usual Microsoft backwards compatibility attitude forced them into defaulting to the Internet Explorer 7 rendering engine.
However, as part of Microsoft's legal wrangles with the EU, Microsoft have been pushing the boat out on interoperability, and the Internet Explorer team saw an opportunity and used that as a justification for dumping the backwards compatibility.
Remember, jokes aside, it's not like Microsoft is one big hive mind. There are a bunch of internal groups all making and justifying their own decisions to each other. I doubt the board of directors handed down an edict saying that Internet Explorer must work this way because of the legal issues, but I do think the legal issues enabled the Internet Explorer team to do what they already wanted to do.
When the people writing the standards write standards with the words "SHOULD" or "SHOULD NOT" or "RECOMMENDED" or "MAY" or "OPTIONAL" you now have a standard which can have many different faces, or compliance levels.
No, if it does the absolute minimum specified, then an implementation is compliant with the specification. Just because the specification describes further behaviour that is a good idea, it doesn't make the implementation non-compliant or "partially" non-compliant. "Compliant" is still an absolute term.
IMHO, this is poor standards writing.
Not really. The problem is that some behaviour is suitable for the vast majority of implementations, but there are special cases where it's justified to ignore that part of the specification. The spec writers don't want to label reasonable behaviour that doesn't cause problems as "non-compliant", so they put SHOULD instead of MUST. If an implementation ignores those parts where it doesn't make sense, it's still compliant, it's just a bad implementation. Compliance is not a synonym for "good", it's a requirement for "good".
Then you can easily have automated unit tests which show absolute compliance.
You can have that anyway. You aren't talking about making compliance deterministic, you are talking about making something beyond compliance deterministic.
I think it's a hilarious book, but I do wonder how much of it translates well to a non-British reader. A lot of my favourite parts, even the tone of voice and regional dialect in some cases, seem to depend on being familiar with the UK. Slashdot-relevant quote:
Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: "Learn, guys..."
Has this guy done anything relevant in the past couple of decades? Here's a choice quote of his:
Unix and the Internet turn 30 this summer. Both are senile, according to journalist Peter Salus, who like me is old enough, but not too old, to remember. The Open Sores Movement asks us to ignore three decades of innovation. It's just a notch above Luddism. At least they're not bombing Redmond. Not yet anyway.
The hard part of being down on Linux and the Open Sores Movement is worrying about that menace hanging over us at year's end. No, not Y2K, but Linux's nemesis, W2K, Windows 2000, the operating system formerly known as Windows NT 5.0.
W2K is software also from the distant past -- VAX/VMS for Windows. But it will overpower Linux. NT, now approaching 23x6 availability, is already overpowering Linux. NT and NetWare constitute 60 percent of server software shipments. All Unixes make up 17 percent, and Linux is a small fraction of that. When W2K gets here, goodbye Linux.
That depends on the details of the protocol, but in general, P2P is easier on the network. The overhead of coordinating the clients is tiny compared with all the video data going between users that are relatively close to one another (e.g. using the same ISP, meaning no external network traffic is being generated). It also means ISPs can offset the costs of bandwidth transfers by investing in local servers on the P2P network that cache the most popular content.
IE2 was unbloated but lacked support for many features that Netscape 3 had
Given that Netscape 3 was released a year after Internet Explorer 2, that's a pretty unfair comparison, don't you think? Internet Explorer 3 was released at the same time as Netscape 3, why not compare like for like?
Netscape 3 was really good, a lean and fast browser. It didn't have good support for CSS, but was years ahead of IE.
Netscape 3 didn't have any support for CSS, while Internet Explorer 3 was the first major browser with CSS support. Given that Internet Explorer 4 overtook Netscape 4 just a year later, I don't think your claim of Netscape being "years ahead" has much merit.
Microsoft's part in it was only by bundling the browser into the OS, not by making a product that could compete with Netscape.
No, Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape 4 were about equal. The problem is that Netscape stopped releasing new versions and Mozilla.org decided to spend years rewriting everything. The only weapon Netscape had against Microsoft's desktop monopoly was ISP bundling, and the ISPs were driven into Microsoft's arms because they were the only major browser vendor making regular, free releases.
That statement is usually based on police records, here in the UK and those are generally very low compared to reality. The reason? people just don't bother reporting most crimes
No, that simply isn't true. There is something known as the British Crime Survey which consists of tens of thousands of interviews with the public annually. These results are factored into crime statistics all the time specifically to avoid the reporting biases you complain about. Straight from the source:
The BCS measures the amount of crime in England and Wales by asking people about crimes they have experienced in the last year. The BCS includes crimes which are not reported to the police, so it is an important alternative to police records. Victims do not report crime for various reasons. Without the BCS the government would have no information on these unreported crimes.
Right, and what's stopping you from sharing accounts now, without OpenID? This isn't a problem that OpenID introduces, it's a problem that's always been there.
The is something I was trying to explain the last time OpenID came up on Slashdot. Because authentication isn't done by the websites and web applications themselves, it means users can shop around for an authentication system that suits them, and none of the websites or web applications that you log into need worry about it. If/when OpenID starts to become mainstream, I'd expect to see a lot of interesting work done on authentication. A hardware scheme like this isn't feasible if you have to persuade each individual website and web application provider to implement it.
So, when can we log into Slashdot with our OpenIDs? Has there been any word on the subject at all from Taco et al?
Slashdot Mirror
Did you even bother reading the letter? I quote: "MobiTV hereby states, under penalty of perjury, that the above notice is accurate". It was a DMCA takedown notice. The DMCA requires takedown notices to be made under penalty of perjury.
I get the impression you think perjury is only applicable if somebody is sworn in as a witness in court. That's simply not the case. Why do you think laws like the DMCA include statements like this?
What's with the [sic]? That's spelt correctly.
I do believe that's what I said. In fact, I explicitly said that the problem was that it was more than simply a letter with demands.
It's obvious you didn't read my comment or the letter. They stated that they were also contacting the ISP about this.
Way to misquote me. The full quote is "If they take it any further, it's barratry".
A DMCA takedown notice isn't legal action? The fact that they threaten "further" legal action certainly suggests they think it is legal action.
These are bad examples because in order to actually do the harmful act, you either have to POST information (something distinctly different from retrieving the URL), or the other party has to subvert the HTTP protocol (which you can't reasonably be considered responsible for). Straight from RFC 2616:
Or think about it this way: whenever you visit a web page, the author of that web page can induce you to request any URL they like automatically. Chances are, you won't even be aware of it. Still think it's a good idea to hold people accountable for merely visiting a URL?
Do they have the right to send a letter asking them to stop? Sure. But this cease and desist letter goes far beyond that, it claims that they are infringing copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets and it claims so under penalty of perjury. Furthermore, they state they have also sent such claims to the ISP, a third-party. I think that is unsupportable and illegal, and I don't believe they have the right to do that. It's libellous and if they take it any further, it's barratry.
Copyright doesn't do this though. With a copyright-based business model, they are compensated for manufacturing copies, not creating something. The "work" copyright holders are compensated for is something machines can do for free. That's the reason why they need copyright — the competition they are being protected from is extremely efficient. And as a society, we are pretending that efficiency doesn't exist and society becomes less efficient itself.
You'll find that many of the people against copyright actually advocate business models that are based around compensating people for creating things, not the meaningless make-work that copyright-based business models are all about.
I think the idea that they can work to create something and then milk its profits until years after they are dead does the opposite in many cases.
Hey, not everybody wants to work full stop. I guess we should just pay everybody a wage for doing nothing, right? Or maybe what is good for society should be the basis of law rather than people's pipe dreams. It's not everybody else's responsibility to pretend bits are uncopyable in order for you to get paid to make copies, and it's not the government's responsibility to stop them.
Straw man. Being against copyright has nothing to do with being against the opportunity to work harder than other people for greater rewards. If anything, proponents of copyright are contradicting that philosophy. You think Bill Gates works thousands of times harder than the average McDonalds employee?
Precisely. Who says their difficulty in finding a replacement web developer is down to the platform? Too many times I've seen people asking for an experienced graphic designer and expert developer rolled into one, while offering a salary that would be miserly for just the one. And don't be surprised if nobody responds to a request for a Photoshop wizard with ten years experience in Rails. It's rare to find people who are an expert in two very different fields and you have to pay them accordingly.
Some specifications (e.g. the CSS specifications) define error handling, so the Acid tests need to include invalid things in order to test the conformance to these parts of the specifications.
Part of the reason why error handling is defined is so that current implementations will have defined behaviour when they encounter code that is written to a future specification. When you write a stylesheet using CSS 3, it would be nice to have browsers that only understand CSS 2 behave consistently even though they don't understand the CSS 3 parts of your code.
For instance, if a browser that understands CSS 2 encounters a CSS 3 property it doesn't recognise, should it ignore just that property or the whole ruleset? Don't you think this is important to include rules like this for compatibility reasons? And shouldn't browsers be tested to follow those rules?
I wonder if there will be a release version of Safari that passes Acid3 before a release version of Firefox passes Acid2?
But those kinds of "tests" only test new browsers. The developers behind CNN's website and all those proprietary intranet applications bodge their code to make them work in existing browsers already, so nothing in existing browsers is being tested. At most, you could say that they test the popularity of the browser.
Sure, the Acid tests aren't particularly interesting to users, but in case you haven't noticed, developers are pretty important to the web too, and the Acid tests are highly relevant to them.
Do you realise that's exactly what copyrights were originally called?
Something odd's going on with the moderation in this thread. I was modded Troll and Flamebait as well, and the comment you replied to is an AC that seems to be permanently at -1 (even with other comments), despite having 100% Interesting moderation.
Well which is more important to you? Having a home and food on the table, or having a CD collection? I believe there aren't many people in the world who would choose being able to listen to music over being able to eat.
Oh, please. If existence is so irrelevant, then who gives a damn about the musicians? Why do you care what they earn? Wouldn't that be assuming that their existence has a purpose? You aren't going to convince anybody that musicians should be rich by making appeals to nihilism.
That's just it though: most people aren't millionaires. So let's stop assuming successful musicians should be. Successful construction workers don't usually make millions. Successful farmers don't usually make millions. Successful scientists don't usually make millions. If successful musicians don't usually make millions, why should that be something awful that needs government intervention? Isn't it perfectly reasonable for successful musicians not to be rich? What is there that needs correcting?
You are ignoring the other half of the equation, the supply. Copies of songs are in infinite abundance. The demand might be there, but the scarcity is not. They are a free good. There's a lot of demand for air too, but you aren't going to get rich selling that either.
That's one way of becoming rich. Another is to find something people want that you can acquire a monopoly on, and sell it without competition. People selling CDs have chosen this course, and they are only able to do so with the government's help.
No, those people aren't in the business of selling music. They are in the business of manufacturing copies. That is something anybody can do. Machines can do it for essentially no cost. That's why they need the government to protect them from competition.
Sure, but the only reason they can get away with charging $10.00 is because the government helps them. And the only reason all those sales go to them rather than some other manufacturer is because the government helps them. Without government help, the competition would drive their prices down and take a large portion of their sales.
Sure there is, the government is stepping in to make particular people rich instead of letting the free market do its job. I'm not totally against the concept of copyright and I'm certainly not arguing that free markets are perfect. But you're only looking at the demand side of the equation and giving them a free pass on the supply side, and that's something that we, as a society, are totally subsidising them on. And when they are making millions of dollars, it's not a bad idea to question how justified that subsidy is.
Yeah, see, the trouble with that is there's nothing whatsoever in my comment to suggest this. It's pure fantasy on your part.
For what it's worth, I write code for a living. A lot of people consider that to be just as creative as music. It's certainly of more practical value.
Oh, I have nothing at all against rewarding them for their hard work. What I object to is rewarding them for the things that don't take any hard work — the manufacturing of copies.
Of course other artists won't be as successful. Of course these types of profits aren't sustainable. Is that a bad thing?
These guys are entertainers, and yet a lot of people seem to think that they automatically deserve to be multi-millionaires. That's insane. They don't build houses for people to live in. They don't grow food for people to eat. They don't advance our understanding of the world. They are modern day jesters, a distraction when you have nothing better to do.
I like music as much as the next person, but please let us have some perspective here. If musicians don't make a lot of money, that's absolutely fine. A million bucks is something a musician should work a lifetime to achieve, not something they can pick up from a year's work with one album. And it's sure as hell not society's job to subsidise them with copyrights until they are filthy rich.
Actually, Python has been appearing on phones for quite a while, notably Nokia Series 60. I'm not sure, but it might also be possible to use Jython with J2ME devices.
What happened to Tcl? Well judging from the look of it, I'd say it was run over by a car, then hit by a train, then had a nasty encounter with stampeding bison, then got a nasty infection from a facehugger, then beaten up by Ripley and was then promptly nuked from orbit. It's for the best, it was in a great deal of pain and nobody wants to live like that.
Seriously though, that's one ugly language. I always got the impression it's what the inventor of Brainfuck would create if he were actually being serious.
Personally, I'm wondering if they can possibly release Internet Explorer 8 in nine weeks. Because the 12th of May is the ten year anniversary of the CSS 2 specification and Internet Explorer 8 might actually include full CSS 2 support (not including the aural stuff).
Me too. I'm a web developer and I hate Internet Explorer's quirks, but if I were in charge of the Internet Explorer team, I wouldn't be able to justify this decision to my superiors, not for Internet Explorer 8 (9, yes, after publicising this strategy).
Reading between the lines, I get the impression things happened from the bottom up. The Internet Explorer team consider their bad reputation and endless concessions to backwards compatibility with quirks mode to be millstones around their necks. But professionalism and the usual Microsoft backwards compatibility attitude forced them into defaulting to the Internet Explorer 7 rendering engine.
However, as part of Microsoft's legal wrangles with the EU, Microsoft have been pushing the boat out on interoperability, and the Internet Explorer team saw an opportunity and used that as a justification for dumping the backwards compatibility.
Remember, jokes aside, it's not like Microsoft is one big hive mind. There are a bunch of internal groups all making and justifying their own decisions to each other. I doubt the board of directors handed down an edict saying that Internet Explorer must work this way because of the legal issues, but I do think the legal issues enabled the Internet Explorer team to do what they already wanted to do.
No, if it does the absolute minimum specified, then an implementation is compliant with the specification. Just because the specification describes further behaviour that is a good idea, it doesn't make the implementation non-compliant or "partially" non-compliant. "Compliant" is still an absolute term.
Not really. The problem is that some behaviour is suitable for the vast majority of implementations, but there are special cases where it's justified to ignore that part of the specification. The spec writers don't want to label reasonable behaviour that doesn't cause problems as "non-compliant", so they put SHOULD instead of MUST. If an implementation ignores those parts where it doesn't make sense, it's still compliant, it's just a bad implementation. Compliance is not a synonym for "good", it's a requirement for "good".
You can have that anyway. You aren't talking about making compliance deterministic, you are talking about making something beyond compliance deterministic.
I think it's a hilarious book, but I do wonder how much of it translates well to a non-British reader. A lot of my favourite parts, even the tone of voice and regional dialect in some cases, seem to depend on being familiar with the UK. Slashdot-relevant quote:
Has this guy done anything relevant in the past couple of decades? Here's a choice quote of his:
That depends on the details of the protocol, but in general, P2P is easier on the network. The overhead of coordinating the clients is tiny compared with all the video data going between users that are relatively close to one another (e.g. using the same ISP, meaning no external network traffic is being generated). It also means ISPs can offset the costs of bandwidth transfers by investing in local servers on the P2P network that cache the most popular content.
Given that Netscape 3 was released a year after Internet Explorer 2, that's a pretty unfair comparison, don't you think? Internet Explorer 3 was released at the same time as Netscape 3, why not compare like for like?
Netscape 3 didn't have any support for CSS, while Internet Explorer 3 was the first major browser with CSS support. Given that Internet Explorer 4 overtook Netscape 4 just a year later, I don't think your claim of Netscape being "years ahead" has much merit.
No, Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape 4 were about equal. The problem is that Netscape stopped releasing new versions and Mozilla.org decided to spend years rewriting everything. The only weapon Netscape had against Microsoft's desktop monopoly was ISP bundling, and the ISPs were driven into Microsoft's arms because they were the only major browser vendor making regular, free releases.
No, that simply isn't true. There is something known as the British Crime Survey which consists of tens of thousands of interviews with the public annually. These results are factored into crime statistics all the time specifically to avoid the reporting biases you complain about. Straight from the source:
Right, and what's stopping you from sharing accounts now, without OpenID? This isn't a problem that OpenID introduces, it's a problem that's always been there.
The is something I was trying to explain the last time OpenID came up on Slashdot. Because authentication isn't done by the websites and web applications themselves, it means users can shop around for an authentication system that suits them, and none of the websites or web applications that you log into need worry about it. If/when OpenID starts to become mainstream, I'd expect to see a lot of interesting work done on authentication. A hardware scheme like this isn't feasible if you have to persuade each individual website and web application provider to implement it.
So, when can we log into Slashdot with our OpenIDs? Has there been any word on the subject at all from Taco et al?