"Owners certainly have the option of buying aftermarket parts just as PC users have the option of third party software."
And this is part of the problem - MS uses copyright law (in combination with secrecy, where we once were taught you had to choose one or the other) to prevent third parties from offering the support they are withdrawing. So no aftermarket parts.
"Copyright is not evil in principle (authors/artists need to earn a living)"
On the surface you are right, but this sentence is loaded the wrong way. There is a false implication here - that one must have copyright in order for authors and artists to make a living. This is demonstrably false.
Copyright IS "evil" to some degree though that's not the word I would have chosen (a little more loading) it fundamentally boils down to a violation of the fundamental liberty of a person to use their own property. If you have purchased a copier, and you have purchased a book as well, and you wish to run that book through the copier, there is no one else involved here from a strict natural rights perspective, it's you disposing of your property as you see fit, period.
BUT it was nonetheless accepted as providing society with enough benefit to justify that evil, by encouraging more authors and artists to complete their works and get them printed and distributed than might otherwise do so. Our founders valued the book enough to give up fundamental rights that they risked their lives to secure, in the hopes of creating a country with more books on its shelves. I am not at all sure they were wrong.
But originally you got copyright for a limited time, fair use was interpreted pretty liberally, and it actually required you to donate a couple copies of the book to the library of congress! to make sure that after the thing went out of print it would still be available for study by future generations.
Copyright as interpreted and applied today is a far cry from that deal. A far, far cry.
HTML 5 is vaporware, and best if it stays that way.
"Progressive enhancement became unpopular several years back, now it's javascript first and maybe test that the most basic features don't completely break without it, no guarantees included."
Bad behaviour enabled by bad browser development, which then incestuously cites the bad behaviour on the part of developers as justifying or even requiring more bad behaviour on the part of the browser. As long as every major browser ships with such an insane configuration that such nonsense works in it, the idiots that are doing this will have no reason to stop.
Well we have different experiences then. I have actually been offered jobs as 'web programmer' that involved no programming in fact. I have also seen jobs as 'web programmer' that did involve some programming, but obviously the 'web' part in that case was a misnomer.
"I don't see passage of ex post facto legislation that remedies the disparity in wealth distribution as "corruption", but I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree there."
Sounds like you believe the ends justify the means and care not for law and order, or justice, just getting what you want, which means you are no different from those you hate - except that they are better off of course.
"Because those are the only things funded by the federal government. I'm glad we're having an earnest discussion here, and not resorting to disingenuous rhetoric."
I am trying to have an earnest discussion here, but it's good to hear you admit you are not.
And yes, those things are the most significant impact made with your tax dollars. Some pennies may go to other things, of course.
"Why will rich people simply quit paying themselves so much?"
Because that will be the route which preserves their wealth most effectively. Again, it strains credibility to think that you could be so dense you have to have this spelled out for you.
"For that matter, why are they currently paying themselves so much?"
Prestige, liquidity, convenience... there are reasons but when one end of the equation is changed (tax laws) the other end will change as well.
Just try to imagine you are truly wealthy, with a net worth of oh say 200 billion dollars. That's mostly tied up in property of one form or another, stocks, perhaps a controlling share in one or more companies, real estate, etc. You decide when, and how, to change those assets into income, and if the tax structure argues against doing it at a particular time and in a particular way you probably wont do it. You didnt get where you are by being an idiot, and you have top notch professional help to boot.
So you dont have a mortgage (unless the accountants found a way to make one pay you) and you really have little need for income. You probably like to have some money to flash around, and you probably arranged yourself a cushy job title with a nice salary, but if it costs you too much money because of a change to the tax rules you will simply restructure. You can continue doing the same job, at a reduced salary, or even call it volunteer work, and go right on. Instead of taking the money out of one pocket and paying it to the other, you just leave it where it is. This is a minor inconvenience, nothing more.
On the other hand, the rest of us tend to not have the net worth to fall back on. We may rent, or we may have a mortgage so the bank effectively owns our home. We have expenses we cannot avoid, and that income has to be there every month or disaster will strike.
"The super-elites controlled the instruments of force in 18th century France as well. The ensuing revolution was indeed breathtaking."
Yes, breathtaking in terms of barbarism, of atrocity, of mans inhumanity to man. If you preach class warfare and dream of seeing those whose wealth you envy beheaded in the street then we really have nothing whatsoever in common.
"Haha, what? I'd love to live in your world, where telecoms never got retroactive immunity."
I would not want to live in your world, where apparently there is no distinction between law and corruption (or at least, no preference on your part?)
" I would very much be interested in additional funds going towards all of the amazing things that our government provides."
So you want more of our underclass in prison or growing up in a slum with no father at home, more foreigners being blown to bits abroad, and more analysts trawling through databases gathered without warrant?
Glad we got that out of the way then. It seems we just disagree on fundamentals.
"You yourself claimed that they don't actually need any of their income, did you not?"
Can you truly be so dense or are you just trolling? A rich person has no need of income because they have wealth. If you tax income they will simply quit paying themselves so much. The only people that will actually pay your tax would be a few with high incomes and no personal wealth, people who actually arent doing nearly as well as you suppose and certainly are not members of any economic super-elite.
"That's why I expect some process a bit more forceful and violent will take the place of orderly taxation at some point in the future."
So you expect the instruments of force which the super-elites control, to act forcefully and violently against them? Breathtaking.
No ex post facto laws remember. Changes go forward. Raise taxes on upper incomes starting next year and you will notice fewer people in those income ranges next year as well.
"I've never turned down a raise because the additional income would be taxed at a higher rate"
I presume you are not particularly wealthy, and I know you arent facing a 100% tax bracket.
"Then they should have no problem being taxed to hell, since they won't really miss any of that income anyway, right?"
Not at all, and you are completely missing the point - they would not, actually, wind up paying this tax.
"You can not accumulate wealth without income. "
Perhaps, not, but you can certainly remain wealthy without income once that state has been achieved, and you can hire accountants to reduce your taxable income as well as legislators to create special loopholes just for you in some cases!
The idea that it's possible in this situation to levy punitive taxes against the most wealthy and powerful individuals is absurdly naive.
"So then we're in agreement. We should tax the truly wealthy at 90% marginal income tax rates, and they won't really be affected, since they can go without any income at all if they need to. After all, they still have their assets."
I dont know who you think you are agreeing with but it certainly isnt me, because I refute each and every one of those assertions, as naive and uninformed at best, straight out wrong-headed at worst.
One problem is that if you institute a punitive tax rate on income like that, the people affected will reduce their income. Another is that their combined income is indeed likely to be quite a bit less than you think, as the number of such people is quite low. Truly wealthy people, try to understand, are not dependent on income. It's not income that makes someone wealthy, you can have a high income with high expenses and be quite poor. A wealthy person has assets, and can go without any income at all if they need to.
"I think this is because Mozilla's goal is NOT to make a better or more secure browser; their goal is to enable the browser as an application platform and/or advertisement delivery platform."
Citation needed?
Not doubting you at all (this makes perfect sense of their actions,) but if there is an official statement to that effect it would be a nice marker of exactly when they went off the rails.
Chrome doesnt even properly support that by extension. (There is a not-script extension, but the author indicates that because of Chromes architecture, it does not block the scripts initially, but only after initial loading and parsing, which is not acceptable.)
"Agreed. Noscript is difficult for non technical users to figure out. On the other hand blindly disabling all javascript can make things broken in this era where so many places think the browser is for apps and not for web sites"
In the long run the only solution is to make sure that Joe User gets a browser that doesnt just allow javascript to run willy-nilly. All the grubby little operations trying to get some money out of his pocket would then have to deal with it, and the web would be a much cleaner place for everyone (and much safer for Joe User.)
"We need a middle road; something that disables third party scripts."
Noscript does this beautifully, but as you said, installing it and configuring it is difficult for precisely the users that need it most.
What Mozilla *should* be doing is building this in by default so the users that need it most dont have to fight with it. Instead they are doing the exact opposite - making it even harder for the less technically minded to get online without being owned (and reinforces the notion that a browser that enforces sane policies like not running arbitrary javascript are 'breaking the web' - rather than the websites themselves being seen at fault here, as they are.)
The only part I dont agree with here is switching to Chrome. That's jumping from the pan to the fire. Firefox is being run into the ground by idiots that want it to be Chrome - but Chrome already IS Chrome.
There is a neat extension that gives you a restart option on the file menu. (Another of those wonderful UI features that firefox has eliminated over the years so users had to add it back via extension.) I use that about once a day, with 30 tabs open it still only takes a couple seconds, and I have no problems with excess memory usage.
Just with the way mozilla developers keep working overtime to destroy the only half-usable browser on the market.
I am on 17.7 ESR myself, after fruitlessly searching for a decent alternative browser following the Firefox 4 madness.
The ESR releases give you a lot more time to wait for them to come to their senses, but I can find no sign whatsoever to give me hope they ever will. I think it's (past) time for a fork.
Non technical users are precisely the ones that most need an easy way to disable javascript. Reveton removal costs upwards of $100 a pop and some people manage to catch it more than once in a day.
This is absolutely absurd, and plenty of proof for anyone that's been living in a cave for the past 15 years and didnt already know, that mozilla is off the rails.
It depends. I have generated 'applications' by ticking some switches and letting a program spit out an application based on that. Was I engaged in programming at the time? Hardly. Just using a program for its intended use.
I think it's just the least evil option, practically.
Sucks to let people go because of investigative malfeasance (as long as they committed a real crime at least.) But sucks even more to become a police state where people are subject to search without probable cause.
And getting the police to police themselves seems to be just as difficult in practice as it is in impossible in theory. The instinct to form a gang and protect it seems to be built into humans. Cops will form a 'blue wall' around bad cops, prosecutors need the police too much to antagonize them. A separate, independent police force can act as a check on a corrupted force, but who checks the second force? It becomes an infinite regress until we are all either behind bars or wearing a uniform, and there is no one left to grow food.
"Writing complex javascript, vbscript and other languages are still programming whether you believe it is below you or not, because it falls squarely within the definition of creating a program"
No, it doesnt. The program here is the browser, and you didnt program it. You are using it, as designed.
It's not a matter of sneering or putting anyone down, it's a matter of words having meanings.
Programming is creating programs. Web pages are not programs. They are documents. (And the harder they try to be programs instead, the less accurate it is to speak of them as web pages.) Now web programming *could* mean something, if you were speaking about developing Apache, or Firefox, or something of that nature, but I am pretty sure that is not what was being referenced, and I dont think those people would appreciate being referred to in that way if it was.
But using programs already written, creating and distributing documents and images and data files of all sorts in particular, is not programming. That doesnt mean it isnt a worthwhile activity - quite the contrary! If you are reading a value judgement here it is entirely you. Creating and maintaining websites and infrastructure is a very worthwhile pursuit. But that doesnt make it "programming."
For a lot of people "programming" is what they call it when anyone uses a computer in a way that is over their head. Generally the same people that cannot figure out how to find their start button without help. They should not be allowed to redefine our language.
There is no private right for action on the H1B rules. These companies can break the rules day in and day out forever and unless the government calls them on it, no one can.
Which is why she is suing on different grounds and making it a discrimination case.
No, we dont want to let them go. But it's the least bad option.
A little history, when our country first started, there were no rules about excluding evidence. Illegally obtained evidence should be evidence in two cases - the case against the person that committed the original crime, and a case against the state agent that broke the law to obtain it as well.
Trouble is, the state agents never get prosecuted. Imagine that? The other state agents wont investigate them, wont charge them, wont take it to court. This threatened to make the fourth amendment simply a pleasant fiction, a dead letter, unenforceable.
So the courts thought and thought and the only way they could come up with to enforce the fourth amendment was to exclude evidence. A judge cannot convict a state agent for violating your rights without someone else willing to investigate, charge, and prosecute him. But a judge CAN throw out the evidence that was obtained illegally, and thus attempt to remove the motivation to commit this crime in the first place.
It's a horribly imperfect solution but no one yet has found a better one.
Slashdot Mirror
"Owners certainly have the option of buying aftermarket parts just as PC users have the option of third party software."
And this is part of the problem - MS uses copyright law (in combination with secrecy, where we once were taught you had to choose one or the other) to prevent third parties from offering the support they are withdrawing. So no aftermarket parts.
Good post, but..
"Copyright is not evil in principle (authors/artists need to earn a living)"
On the surface you are right, but this sentence is loaded the wrong way. There is a false implication here - that one must have copyright in order for authors and artists to make a living. This is demonstrably false.
Copyright IS "evil" to some degree though that's not the word I would have chosen (a little more loading) it fundamentally boils down to a violation of the fundamental liberty of a person to use their own property. If you have purchased a copier, and you have purchased a book as well, and you wish to run that book through the copier, there is no one else involved here from a strict natural rights perspective, it's you disposing of your property as you see fit, period.
BUT it was nonetheless accepted as providing society with enough benefit to justify that evil, by encouraging more authors and artists to complete their works and get them printed and distributed than might otherwise do so. Our founders valued the book enough to give up fundamental rights that they risked their lives to secure, in the hopes of creating a country with more books on its shelves. I am not at all sure they were wrong.
But originally you got copyright for a limited time, fair use was interpreted pretty liberally, and it actually required you to donate a couple copies of the book to the library of congress! to make sure that after the thing went out of print it would still be available for study by future generations.
Copyright as interpreted and applied today is a far cry from that deal. A far, far cry.
And patents are even worse.
HTML 5 is vaporware, and best if it stays that way.
"Progressive enhancement became unpopular several years back, now it's javascript first and maybe test that the most basic features don't completely break without it, no guarantees included."
Bad behaviour enabled by bad browser development, which then incestuously cites the bad behaviour on the part of developers as justifying or even requiring more bad behaviour on the part of the browser. As long as every major browser ships with such an insane configuration that such nonsense works in it, the idiots that are doing this will have no reason to stop.
Well we have different experiences then. I have actually been offered jobs as 'web programmer' that involved no programming in fact. I have also seen jobs as 'web programmer' that did involve some programming, but obviously the 'web' part in that case was a misnomer.
"I don't see passage of ex post facto legislation that remedies the disparity in wealth distribution as "corruption", but I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree there."
Sounds like you believe the ends justify the means and care not for law and order, or justice, just getting what you want, which means you are no different from those you hate - except that they are better off of course.
"Because those are the only things funded by the federal government. I'm glad we're having an earnest discussion here, and not resorting to disingenuous rhetoric."
I am trying to have an earnest discussion here, but it's good to hear you admit you are not.
And yes, those things are the most significant impact made with your tax dollars. Some pennies may go to other things, of course.
"Why will rich people simply quit paying themselves so much?"
Because that will be the route which preserves their wealth most effectively. Again, it strains credibility to think that you could be so dense you have to have this spelled out for you.
"For that matter, why are they currently paying themselves so much?"
Prestige, liquidity, convenience... there are reasons but when one end of the equation is changed (tax laws) the other end will change as well.
Just try to imagine you are truly wealthy, with a net worth of oh say 200 billion dollars. That's mostly tied up in property of one form or another, stocks, perhaps a controlling share in one or more companies, real estate, etc. You decide when, and how, to change those assets into income, and if the tax structure argues against doing it at a particular time and in a particular way you probably wont do it. You didnt get where you are by being an idiot, and you have top notch professional help to boot.
So you dont have a mortgage (unless the accountants found a way to make one pay you) and you really have little need for income. You probably like to have some money to flash around, and you probably arranged yourself a cushy job title with a nice salary, but if it costs you too much money because of a change to the tax rules you will simply restructure. You can continue doing the same job, at a reduced salary, or even call it volunteer work, and go right on. Instead of taking the money out of one pocket and paying it to the other, you just leave it where it is. This is a minor inconvenience, nothing more.
On the other hand, the rest of us tend to not have the net worth to fall back on. We may rent, or we may have a mortgage so the bank effectively owns our home. We have expenses we cannot avoid, and that income has to be there every month or disaster will strike.
"The super-elites controlled the instruments of force in 18th century France as well. The ensuing revolution was indeed breathtaking."
Yes, breathtaking in terms of barbarism, of atrocity, of mans inhumanity to man. If you preach class warfare and dream of seeing those whose wealth you envy beheaded in the street then we really have nothing whatsoever in common.
"Haha, what? I'd love to live in your world, where telecoms never got retroactive immunity."
I would not want to live in your world, where apparently there is no distinction between law and corruption (or at least, no preference on your part?)
" I would very much be interested in additional funds going towards all of the amazing things that our government provides."
So you want more of our underclass in prison or growing up in a slum with no father at home, more foreigners being blown to bits abroad, and more analysts trawling through databases gathered without warrant?
Glad we got that out of the way then. It seems we just disagree on fundamentals.
"You yourself claimed that they don't actually need any of their income, did you not?"
Can you truly be so dense or are you just trolling? A rich person has no need of income because they have wealth. If you tax income they will simply quit paying themselves so much. The only people that will actually pay your tax would be a few with high incomes and no personal wealth, people who actually arent doing nearly as well as you suppose and certainly are not members of any economic super-elite.
"That's why I expect some process a bit more forceful and violent will take the place of orderly taxation at some point in the future."
So you expect the instruments of force which the super-elites control, to act forcefully and violently against them? Breathtaking.
"What, retroactively?"
No ex post facto laws remember. Changes go forward. Raise taxes on upper incomes starting next year and you will notice fewer people in those income ranges next year as well.
"I've never turned down a raise because the additional income would be taxed at a higher rate"
I presume you are not particularly wealthy, and I know you arent facing a 100% tax bracket.
"Then they should have no problem being taxed to hell, since they won't really miss any of that income anyway, right?"
Not at all, and you are completely missing the point - they would not, actually, wind up paying this tax.
"You can not accumulate wealth without income. "
Perhaps, not, but you can certainly remain wealthy without income once that state has been achieved, and you can hire accountants to reduce your taxable income as well as legislators to create special loopholes just for you in some cases!
The idea that it's possible in this situation to levy punitive taxes against the most wealthy and powerful individuals is absurdly naive.
"So then we're in agreement. We should tax the truly wealthy at 90% marginal income tax rates, and they won't really be affected, since they can go without any income at all if they need to. After all, they still have their assets."
I dont know who you think you are agreeing with but it certainly isnt me, because I refute each and every one of those assertions, as naive and uninformed at best, straight out wrong-headed at worst.
One problem is that if you institute a punitive tax rate on income like that, the people affected will reduce their income. Another is that their combined income is indeed likely to be quite a bit less than you think, as the number of such people is quite low. Truly wealthy people, try to understand, are not dependent on income. It's not income that makes someone wealthy, you can have a high income with high expenses and be quite poor. A wealthy person has assets, and can go without any income at all if they need to.
"I think this is because Mozilla's goal is NOT to make a better or more secure browser; their goal is to enable the browser as an application platform and/or advertisement delivery platform."
Citation needed?
Not doubting you at all (this makes perfect sense of their actions,) but if there is an official statement to that effect it would be a nice marker of exactly when they went off the rails.
Chrome doesnt even properly support that by extension. (There is a not-script extension, but the author indicates that because of Chromes architecture, it does not block the scripts initially, but only after initial loading and parsing, which is not acceptable.)
"Agreed. Noscript is difficult for non technical users to figure out. On the other hand blindly disabling all javascript can make things broken in this era where so many places think the browser is for apps and not for web sites"
In the long run the only solution is to make sure that Joe User gets a browser that doesnt just allow javascript to run willy-nilly. All the grubby little operations trying to get some money out of his pocket would then have to deal with it, and the web would be a much cleaner place for everyone (and much safer for Joe User.)
"We need a middle road; something that disables third party scripts."
Noscript does this beautifully, but as you said, installing it and configuring it is difficult for precisely the users that need it most.
What Mozilla *should* be doing is building this in by default so the users that need it most dont have to fight with it. Instead they are doing the exact opposite - making it even harder for the less technically minded to get online without being owned (and reinforces the notion that a browser that enforces sane policies like not running arbitrary javascript are 'breaking the web' - rather than the websites themselves being seen at fault here, as they are.)
I hope every end user that contracts Reveton as a result of this sues Mozilla. I really do. And I hope they win.
The only part I dont agree with here is switching to Chrome. That's jumping from the pan to the fire. Firefox is being run into the ground by idiots that want it to be Chrome - but Chrome already IS Chrome.
There is a neat extension that gives you a restart option on the file menu. (Another of those wonderful UI features that firefox has eliminated over the years so users had to add it back via extension.) I use that about once a day, with 30 tabs open it still only takes a couple seconds, and I have no problems with excess memory usage.
Just with the way mozilla developers keep working overtime to destroy the only half-usable browser on the market.
I am on 17.7 ESR myself, after fruitlessly searching for a decent alternative browser following the Firefox 4 madness.
The ESR releases give you a lot more time to wait for them to come to their senses, but I can find no sign whatsoever to give me hope they ever will. I think it's (past) time for a fork.
Non technical users are precisely the ones that most need an easy way to disable javascript. Reveton removal costs upwards of $100 a pop and some people manage to catch it more than once in a day.
This is absolutely absurd, and plenty of proof for anyone that's been living in a cave for the past 15 years and didnt already know, that mozilla is off the rails.
It depends. I have generated 'applications' by ticking some switches and letting a program spit out an application based on that. Was I engaged in programming at the time? Hardly. Just using a program for its intended use.
I think it's just the least evil option, practically.
Sucks to let people go because of investigative malfeasance (as long as they committed a real crime at least.) But sucks even more to become a police state where people are subject to search without probable cause.
And getting the police to police themselves seems to be just as difficult in practice as it is in impossible in theory. The instinct to form a gang and protect it seems to be built into humans. Cops will form a 'blue wall' around bad cops, prosecutors need the police too much to antagonize them. A separate, independent police force can act as a check on a corrupted force, but who checks the second force? It becomes an infinite regress until we are all either behind bars or wearing a uniform, and there is no one left to grow food.
""Web programming" does not mean restricting yourself simply just creating HTML documents, which, I'd have to agree, is not programming."
And the converse is that when you go beyond and actually do some "programming" you are no longer within the domain of the web.
"Writing complex javascript, vbscript and other languages are still programming whether you believe it is below you or not, because it falls squarely within the definition of creating a program"
No, it doesnt. The program here is the browser, and you didnt program it. You are using it, as designed.
It's not a matter of sneering or putting anyone down, it's a matter of words having meanings.
Programming is creating programs. Web pages are not programs. They are documents. (And the harder they try to be programs instead, the less accurate it is to speak of them as web pages.) Now web programming *could* mean something, if you were speaking about developing Apache, or Firefox, or something of that nature, but I am pretty sure that is not what was being referenced, and I dont think those people would appreciate being referred to in that way if it was.
But using programs already written, creating and distributing documents and images and data files of all sorts in particular, is not programming. That doesnt mean it isnt a worthwhile activity - quite the contrary! If you are reading a value judgement here it is entirely you. Creating and maintaining websites and infrastructure is a very worthwhile pursuit. But that doesnt make it "programming."
For a lot of people "programming" is what they call it when anyone uses a computer in a way that is over their head. Generally the same people that cannot figure out how to find their start button without help. They should not be allowed to redefine our language.
Unfortunately you are wrong.
There is no private right for action on the H1B rules. These companies can break the rules day in and day out forever and unless the government calls them on it, no one can.
Which is why she is suing on different grounds and making it a discrimination case.
"Web programmer" that's pretty funny. Do you call secretaries "office document engineers" as well?
No, we dont want to let them go. But it's the least bad option.
A little history, when our country first started, there were no rules about excluding evidence. Illegally obtained evidence should be evidence in two cases - the case against the person that committed the original crime, and a case against the state agent that broke the law to obtain it as well.
Trouble is, the state agents never get prosecuted. Imagine that? The other state agents wont investigate them, wont charge them, wont take it to court. This threatened to make the fourth amendment simply a pleasant fiction, a dead letter, unenforceable.
So the courts thought and thought and the only way they could come up with to enforce the fourth amendment was to exclude evidence. A judge cannot convict a state agent for violating your rights without someone else willing to investigate, charge, and prosecute him. But a judge CAN throw out the evidence that was obtained illegally, and thus attempt to remove the motivation to commit this crime in the first place.
It's a horribly imperfect solution but no one yet has found a better one.