You're absolutely correct. But this is just the continuance of exactly what everyone is complaining about. The spinelessness to agree to a very one sided treaty, and continued acquiesence to US demands even in the face of the US refusing any reciprocation.
To clarify, it's not the Americans we are whining about here, it is the UK government.
I object to paying for localisation when my spell checker on Word would still complain about the word localisation no matter how many times I select the British English dictionary!
Well I think the piracy rates clearly show plenty of people are just not willing to put up with it. The same can be seen in usage of free software being higher in Europe.
Being English and therefore not having any translation cost argument, I have also written to Adobe asking about this. I do quite a bit of web work, and also like my camera, so their software would be very useful.
In the end I've swapped to using the GIMP. I'm just not willing to pay the extra they are charging for not being American. I agree the EU should look into these practices.
They did a test on Top Gear, with a Prius racing the circuit at it's maximum possible speed, and a BMW M3 casually keeping up. The Prius got 15 mpg anf the M3 got 17 mpg!
However, that is flat out racing, and I call BS on any normal driving situation.
I've got a Citroen C2 (1.4 HDI), which will happily do motorway speeds of 70-75 mph, up and down hills without changing from 5th gear. It's only 65 bhp and that's more than enough. I also have a Honda Prelude 2.0i which has substantially more power and the engine is as comfortable at 100 mph as the C2 is at 70.
On my commute to work, the C2 averages 68 MPG, and the Prelude averages 27 MPG.
The mailbox limit could purely be due to backup problems. My workplace has a similar rule, because the overnight backups of the shared drives were still going at 6 am the next morning. The mailboxes were huge files and everyone's was updated every day.
However we are allowed to move stuff to an archive file rather than delete it all. But outlook sets the modification time of any PST file it opens, whether or not it is changed. So normally I have to leave the archive closed and only rarely touch it. I can see why the IT team might think this is too tricky for normal users.
Why is it that Microsoft is actually a pretty good hardware company? All their peripherals are pretty good. Xbox has a few issues but it's really a one off.
Intel on the other hand is just about the worlds best software company. I spent a lot of time at university working with intel developer tools and libraries without ever encountering a single issue.
I've always found that I'm a terrible teacher, as I don't learn in the most usual way. If I'm given a fact I'll just forget it. Given a theory I can remember it.
Normally I find myself trying to describe why something is like it is (even though these days I consciously try and avoid doing it). I tend to get a lot of blank looks, and people wondering why I don't just tell them the 'simple' version. To me a list of facts is just useless as I would forget the lot!
What I'm getting towards is there is probably much similarity in how you and your son's brains work - especially if you're both interested in computing. Even if you're a terrible teacher for everyone else, you may find you are good at teaching your son. Or maybe not! - my brain works the same way as my dad's, but my brother's does not.
The LHC is really too big to take a mind-blowing photo of. A lot of those photos show straight line collider tubes - it takes more work to realise that it's really circular. It needs words to describe the scale of the project.
In fairness that's the main thing I've seen them advertised as. At 1W of power, you can leave them on 24x7x365 for £1 / year - with US energy prices that would probably be $1 / year I guess.
This is very useful for highlight lighting - I've got a glass fronted cabinet that looks great lit up but I can't justify using 80W of power for the incandescent bulbs just for decoration.
Also, they are incredibly efficient at very low luminosity, where incandescents and CFLs are terrible. My brother is setting up a cinema room in the attic and using low power LEDs as background lighting.
I'm getting some SMD bulbs which produce very nice quality light. Normal LEDs are packaged to intentionally direct the beam, as this has generally been desirable for most applications so far. But this isn't necessary.
LEDs don't inherently produce highly directed light, and hopefully we will see more of these SMD bulbs in future.
Here's the one I've got - it's a spotlight bulb because that's what the light fitting takes, but there are standard bulbs also available.
Joining a side in the war was far more to do with the political, moral and ethical views of the sides, and the US was always clearly going to be on the allied side even with a substantial population of German descent.
Even without American help, WW1 could definitely have changed course due to the British invention of the tank. There was long term stalemate in the trenches and the war would most likely have taken longer without the US, but a different outcome seems unlikely.
WW2 is of course a more difficult argument. The Germans made definite strategic errors when bombing Britain, stopping bombing many targets just before they caused unrecoverable damage. With better decisions they could have defeated Britain, which would have made it incredibly difficult for the US to fight in Europe even if they wanted to. That would probably have freed up the troops to win the war in Russia.
Anyway, to get to the point I was originally going to make, until the last few years, there has been no resentment towards the US for entering the war late. As you say America stood for something truly good, and was admired by most Europeans.
If the EULA was on the back of the box (or a notice saying you must agree to an EULA available elsewhere - not inside the box) telling you what you were buying, before you agreed to pay the price, then that might be correct.
If it is not, then no, you haven't bought a licence to use the game as defined in the EULA. You've bought the physical media for the game and are only constrained by copyright laws and any other applicable laws.
A lot of application and games writers are complaining bitterly about the move to multi-core processing, as it does mean you need to change the way the code is written to take advantage of it.
I write stuff that runs on big UNIX boxes that has been necessarily multi-process for a long time. It's just a matter of finding things that can be done independantly and then explicitly putting them in their own process.
Ideally languages and compilers will do this at some point but so far mainstream languages do not. Also when you're doing desktop GUI apps it's often tricky to do a good job of multi-processing, and the GUI toolkits don't yet do much to help.
I think this is a good point. I can't really think of any other goods of the same level of complexity as software, that are not regulated and produced according to strict standards. However the cost of failure in software is relatively low - at least in the sense that it can be measured in dollars rather than lives.
I suggest leaving it to the market to decide precisely because of this sort of issue - an FTP server designed to be openly accessible shouldn't have this kind of vulnerability. Users wouldn't accept this sort of problem, so yes it should be treated as a bug.
Even so, sending a few Kb of malicious data down to the server is hacking and the legal 'blame' for this should be with the hacker not the developer.
But not all software is subject to this requirement. Probably the majority of applications developed run within firewalled corporate networks and do not need to be designed with security as such a prime factor.
Management are trying to maximise profit, and typically don't care anywhere near as much as developers whether the job is done 'right'.
The problem is most buyers of software are way more interested in shiny bits and pieces than the security. If (more) people weren't willing to put up with insecure software, managers would be asking the developers to work more on the security aspects of the application.
They do apply to software. EULAs in most places at least are pretty much unenforceable nonsense. If software doesn't do it's job, you can return it for a refund.
Most software vulnerabilities are caused by inputting in random or intentionally malicious data. Continuing the car analogy, I can go a pour sugar (or worse) into a car's fuel tank and it will break the car (or explode and kill someone depending what I used). That isn't a bug. If I do this to my own car I'm completely to blame for my actions, and if I do it to someone else's car it's a crime.
The same should apply to software. I think in fact there are already more demands on software than tangible goods. It's pretty easy to get confused and put petrol in a diesel car - especially if you've got one of each:) Its an easy mistake to make, but the same sort of thing in software would be treated as a bug.
If a user was intentionally mis-using software I had written, I wouldn't consider it a bug. Although a vulnerability is generally mis-use by someone other than the owner of that piece of software, I'd still have to conclude it's not a bug. If I'd built a car, I would be more than a little annoyed if I got the blame that someone had broken into it and run someone else over with it.
I think it needs to be left to the market to decide what is acceptably secure software. Many Ford cars from the early 90s had locks that were far too easy to break - just stick a screwdriver in and it opens - even did it myself when I locked the keys in the car once. They got a bad reputation, and Ford improved the security to a level the market was happier with.
The market in software doesn't work quite as well as for cars unfortunately, but that's another issue.
Compiling java doesn't lose the benefits - I've heard this argument a few times and it's bizarre. You can compile it on any platform. You only need to write it once.
And as for troubleshooting, what makes Java any harder to debug than any other language?
Actually at work I've used this where a screen is a subclass of both a data source and a standard screen type. Doing this makes it much easier to write a standard template that gets copied and pasted into each screen.
Now I'm not going to claim that sounds like a great idea, but after working with it for a bit, I have to say it's incredibly robust. A completely new and inexperienced programmer can be given screens to customise and time after time they create bug free screens quickly. The template screens are well commented and show the basic way to do all the expected customisations - ideal for a newbie to work with. Meanwhile the framework code is very well structured and ideal for an expert to maintain and improve.
Doing it in an academically 'proper' way causes more problems when you throw in programmers with no clue what they're doing. The weird way works very well in the real world.
What I meant is that the public key decryption process involves using your own private key and the other side's public key. As well as security this allows the receiver to see the data arrived un-tampered-with from the correct sender - only they can have encoded something that decrypts with their private key.
So to verify identity you only have to have a registry of the public keys. It's not like SSL invented a whole new chunk of functionality to provide this identification side.
In my opinion SSL mixed two requirements, identification of site owner and secure communication. Well that is really just because the way public key encryption works provides both of these. The identification might not be required, but it's there anyway.
My Vostro 1510 cost £60 ($120) to downgrade to Win XP. I think even that was worth it.
I've tried my very best to be nice to Vista but its just not working. I've got a newish dual core Vista desktop at work - its even got 4GB RAM - and it just doesn't perform. I already kept my old desktop and installed Ubuntu and moved off all my database and web servers etc onto that machine because Vista couldn't cope.
The guy in charge of PC purchasing at work had been very insistent on new PCs running Vista. He's now changed his mind. I've paid £60 to have XP on my new laptop, and I'm replacing my new work desktop with my old XP laptop.
I agree that the bill isn't quite so bad, but the massive problem is that it's just fundamentally wrong. I agree there could be a problem with a terrorist being released and allowed to carry out some plot.
But in the hands of a bad government, I can't see what the difference is between without charge and without evidence.
If there is a genuine problem with the level of evidence required to even charge someone with an offence, that is what should be fixed. As you say, this is without charge, not without trial. The evidence required to convict someone is very high. But simply charging someone with an offence requires a lower standard of evidence.
I think if someone is accused of a crime, they should very quickly be formally charged, or released. If they are charged, they can then be held for a substantial amount of time while a case is built. They may be released after charge, or acquitted in court. But either way the accusation has to be formally and publicly registered and goes into the judiciary system. NOT deicded arbitrarily by whoever is the home secretary.
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You're absolutely correct. But this is just the continuance of exactly what everyone is complaining about. The spinelessness to agree to a very one sided treaty, and continued acquiesence to US demands even in the face of the US refusing any reciprocation.
To clarify, it's not the Americans we are whining about here, it is the UK government.
I object to paying for localisation when my spell checker on Word would still complain about the word localisation no matter how many times I select the British English dictionary!
Well I think the piracy rates clearly show plenty of people are just not willing to put up with it. The same can be seen in usage of free software being higher in Europe.
Being English and therefore not having any translation cost argument, I have also written to Adobe asking about this. I do quite a bit of web work, and also like my camera, so their software would be very useful.
In the end I've swapped to using the GIMP. I'm just not willing to pay the extra they are charging for not being American. I agree the EU should look into these practices.
They did a test on Top Gear, with a Prius racing the circuit at it's maximum possible speed, and a BMW M3 casually keeping up. The Prius got 15 mpg anf the M3 got 17 mpg!
However, that is flat out racing, and I call BS on any normal driving situation.
I've got a Citroen C2 (1.4 HDI), which will happily do motorway speeds of 70-75 mph, up and down hills without changing from 5th gear. It's only 65 bhp and that's more than enough. I also have a Honda Prelude 2.0i which has substantially more power and the engine is as comfortable at 100 mph as the C2 is at 70.
On my commute to work, the C2 averages 68 MPG, and the Prelude averages 27 MPG.
Ssh, don't tell Nintendo
The mailbox limit could purely be due to backup problems. My workplace has a similar rule, because the overnight backups of the shared drives were still going at 6 am the next morning. The mailboxes were huge files and everyone's was updated every day.
However we are allowed to move stuff to an archive file rather than delete it all. But outlook sets the modification time of any PST file it opens, whether or not it is changed. So normally I have to leave the archive closed and only rarely touch it. I can see why the IT team might think this is too tricky for normal users.
I'm not joking here, I'm genuinely confused.
Why is it that Microsoft is actually a pretty good hardware company? All their peripherals are pretty good. Xbox has a few issues but it's really a one off.
Intel on the other hand is just about the worlds best software company. I spent a lot of time at university working with intel developer tools and libraries without ever encountering a single issue.
I've always found that I'm a terrible teacher, as I don't learn in the most usual way. If I'm given a fact I'll just forget it. Given a theory I can remember it.
Normally I find myself trying to describe why something is like it is (even though these days I consciously try and avoid doing it). I tend to get a lot of blank looks, and people wondering why I don't just tell them the 'simple' version. To me a list of facts is just useless as I would forget the lot!
What I'm getting towards is there is probably much similarity in how you and your son's brains work - especially if you're both interested in computing. Even if you're a terrible teacher for everyone else, you may find you are good at teaching your son. Or maybe not! - my brain works the same way as my dad's, but my brother's does not.
The LHC is really too big to take a mind-blowing photo of. A lot of those photos show straight line collider tubes - it takes more work to realise that it's really circular. It needs words to describe the scale of the project.
In fairness that's the main thing I've seen them advertised as. At 1W of power, you can leave them on 24x7x365 for £1 / year - with US energy prices that would probably be $1 / year I guess.
This is very useful for highlight lighting - I've got a glass fronted cabinet that looks great lit up but I can't justify using 80W of power for the incandescent bulbs just for decoration.
Also, they are incredibly efficient at very low luminosity, where incandescents and CFLs are terrible. My brother is setting up a cinema room in the attic and using low power LEDs as background lighting.
I'm getting some SMD bulbs which produce very nice quality light. Normal LEDs are packaged to intentionally direct the beam, as this has generally been desirable for most applications so far. But this isn't necessary.
LEDs don't inherently produce highly directed light, and hopefully we will see more of these SMD bulbs in future.
Here's the one I've got - it's a spotlight bulb because that's what the light fitting takes, but there are standard bulbs also available.
http://www.globalgreen.co.uk/led1.php
Joining a side in the war was far more to do with the political, moral and ethical views of the sides, and the US was always clearly going to be on the allied side even with a substantial population of German descent.
Even without American help, WW1 could definitely have changed course due to the British invention of the tank. There was long term stalemate in the trenches and the war would most likely have taken longer without the US, but a different outcome seems unlikely.
WW2 is of course a more difficult argument. The Germans made definite strategic errors when bombing Britain, stopping bombing many targets just before they caused unrecoverable damage. With better decisions they could have defeated Britain, which would have made it incredibly difficult for the US to fight in Europe even if they wanted to. That would probably have freed up the troops to win the war in Russia.
Anyway, to get to the point I was originally going to make, until the last few years, there has been no resentment towards the US for entering the war late. As you say America stood for something truly good, and was admired by most Europeans.
If the EULA was on the back of the box (or a notice saying you must agree to an EULA available elsewhere - not inside the box) telling you what you were buying, before you agreed to pay the price, then that might be correct.
If it is not, then no, you haven't bought a licence to use the game as defined in the EULA. You've bought the physical media for the game and are only constrained by copyright laws and any other applicable laws.
A lot of application and games writers are complaining bitterly about the move to multi-core processing, as it does mean you need to change the way the code is written to take advantage of it.
I write stuff that runs on big UNIX boxes that has been necessarily multi-process for a long time. It's just a matter of finding things that can be done independantly and then explicitly putting them in their own process.
Ideally languages and compilers will do this at some point but so far mainstream languages do not. Also when you're doing desktop GUI apps it's often tricky to do a good job of multi-processing, and the GUI toolkits don't yet do much to help.
I think this is a good point. I can't really think of any other goods of the same level of complexity as software, that are not regulated and produced according to strict standards. However the cost of failure in software is relatively low - at least in the sense that it can be measured in dollars rather than lives.
I suggest leaving it to the market to decide precisely because of this sort of issue - an FTP server designed to be openly accessible shouldn't have this kind of vulnerability. Users wouldn't accept this sort of problem, so yes it should be treated as a bug.
Even so, sending a few Kb of malicious data down to the server is hacking and the legal 'blame' for this should be with the hacker not the developer.
But not all software is subject to this requirement. Probably the majority of applications developed run within firewalled corporate networks and do not need to be designed with security as such a prime factor.
Management are trying to maximise profit, and typically don't care anywhere near as much as developers whether the job is done 'right'.
The problem is most buyers of software are way more interested in shiny bits and pieces than the security. If (more) people weren't willing to put up with insecure software, managers would be asking the developers to work more on the security aspects of the application.
They do apply to software. EULAs in most places at least are pretty much unenforceable nonsense. If software doesn't do it's job, you can return it for a refund.
Most software vulnerabilities are caused by inputting in random or intentionally malicious data. Continuing the car analogy, I can go a pour sugar (or worse) into a car's fuel tank and it will break the car (or explode and kill someone depending what I used). That isn't a bug. If I do this to my own car I'm completely to blame for my actions, and if I do it to someone else's car it's a crime.
The same should apply to software. I think in fact there are already more demands on software than tangible goods. It's pretty easy to get confused and put petrol in a diesel car - especially if you've got one of each :) Its an easy mistake to make, but the same sort of thing in software would be treated as a bug.
If a user was intentionally mis-using software I had written, I wouldn't consider it a bug. Although a vulnerability is generally mis-use by someone other than the owner of that piece of software, I'd still have to conclude it's not a bug. If I'd built a car, I would be more than a little annoyed if I got the blame that someone had broken into it and run someone else over with it.
I think it needs to be left to the market to decide what is acceptably secure software. Many Ford cars from the early 90s had locks that were far too easy to break - just stick a screwdriver in and it opens - even did it myself when I locked the keys in the car once. They got a bad reputation, and Ford improved the security to a level the market was happier with.
The market in software doesn't work quite as well as for cars unfortunately, but that's another issue.
Compiling java doesn't lose the benefits - I've heard this argument a few times and it's bizarre. You can compile it on any platform. You only need to write it once.
And as for troubleshooting, what makes Java any harder to debug than any other language?
Actually at work I've used this where a screen is a subclass of both a data source and a standard screen type. Doing this makes it much easier to write a standard template that gets copied and pasted into each screen.
Now I'm not going to claim that sounds like a great idea, but after working with it for a bit, I have to say it's incredibly robust. A completely new and inexperienced programmer can be given screens to customise and time after time they create bug free screens quickly. The template screens are well commented and show the basic way to do all the expected customisations - ideal for a newbie to work with. Meanwhile the framework code is very well structured and ideal for an expert to maintain and improve.
Doing it in an academically 'proper' way causes more problems when you throw in programmers with no clue what they're doing. The weird way works very well in the real world.
Yes this is correct.
What I meant is that the public key decryption process involves using your own private key and the other side's public key. As well as security this allows the receiver to see the data arrived un-tampered-with from the correct sender - only they can have encoded something that decrypts with their private key.
So to verify identity you only have to have a registry of the public keys. It's not like SSL invented a whole new chunk of functionality to provide this identification side.
My Vostro 1510 cost £60 ($120) to downgrade to Win XP. I think even that was worth it.
I've tried my very best to be nice to Vista but its just not working. I've got a newish dual core Vista desktop at work - its even got 4GB RAM - and it just doesn't perform. I already kept my old desktop and installed Ubuntu and moved off all my database and web servers etc onto that machine because Vista couldn't cope.
The guy in charge of PC purchasing at work had been very insistent on new PCs running Vista. He's now changed his mind. I've paid £60 to have XP on my new laptop, and I'm replacing my new work desktop with my old XP laptop.
I agree that the bill isn't quite so bad, but the massive problem is that it's just fundamentally wrong. I agree there could be a problem with a terrorist being released and allowed to carry out some plot.
But in the hands of a bad government, I can't see what the difference is between without charge and without evidence.
If there is a genuine problem with the level of evidence required to even charge someone with an offence, that is what should be fixed. As you say, this is without charge, not without trial. The evidence required to convict someone is very high. But simply charging someone with an offence requires a lower standard of evidence.
I think if someone is accused of a crime, they should very quickly be formally charged, or released. If they are charged, they can then be held for a substantial amount of time while a case is built. They may be released after charge, or acquitted in court. But either way the accusation has to be formally and publicly registered and goes into the judiciary system. NOT deicded arbitrarily by whoever is the home secretary.