OTOH, I've met Lawrence Lessig, and he made me believe that just possibly there's at least one lawyer out there who makes a positive contribution to humanity.
Of course, imagine what he might have achieved if he'd learned to play piano in a brothel 8-)
He's a great speaker, he understands the issues we care about, and he understands how to make Washington and the court system work. If you can possibly attend, go to it.
The initial design was done by a moron, who is just out of Uni and who read too many UML design books, but never seen/written a real program. The code was
- over engineered
- threaded unnecessarily
Ah yes, all other code was coded by morons. Strange how anything ever works really.
I got to [...] maintain it [...] I have learnt
- a lot of Java thread issues
Maybe you just learned better to understand Java threading issues. It's surprising how many times you look at something that's "really stupid", but once you've "fixed" it, the fix turns out to look exactly like the original did.
Sun defending its statement that XML and Java are bolted at the hip
Sun are just a bunch of lying toads. It's hard to get into a PR mud-slinging battle with M$oft and come off worst, but they seem to have managed it (I liked the other poster's comment about 17 year olds comparing Chevys and Fords)
If XML has any close ties with Java, then it's despite Sun, not because of it. The heroes of XML are the early adopters who built the first tools for it. If these people chose to build those tools in Java, it was because they liked Java as a language and an environment for code-sharing, not because Sun was encouraging them to. Over XML, and especially over SOAP, Sun has played the sort of "dog in the manger" attitude that we're usually used to seeing from M$oft. Fortunately their corporate squabbling doesn't seem to have broken things for the rest of us.
I love XML & especially RDF, development under Java, because there's a really good (although still small) Open Source community around it. It's not big corporate funding from M$oft or Sun driving it though. Kudos to IBM for their work on Apache and XML.
"Western" civilization is pretty much defined by the commonplace ability to read. It's what sets us apart from the Ancient Greeks. Whilst reading was the reserve of a tiny elite, and all innovation depended upon discourse in some Socratic forum, society stayed static (and almost moribund) for millenia.
A reading society is a society in which anyone can learn enough to invent new technologies, and that's a society which soon becomes industrialised.
Before commonplace reading, we (in the West) were trailing along in a post-collapse version of Roman society, with a few communities of scholars (usually either dedicated monks, or dedicated heretics) being the only source for innovation. Once reading took off as a mass occupation, we went through the Renaissance and the inevitable industrialisation and shift to a technology-driven society.
I was on someone's LAN, on the fun side of their firewall.
This is a little worrying in some ways - they're also on your side of your firewall. Imagine an automatic laptop-hacking machine, left within range of a cafe / station etc. that slurped up every interesting laptop that walked into range...
As I'm an obvious target for such a thing, can anyone suggest resource sites on how to secure my own laptop against such an attack ? I'm used to dealing with firewalls, SYN attacks et al, but someone having the ability to hammer directly on my card slot is a new one for me.
if a methodology is so fragile that the tiniest deviation leads to failure then that methodology is worthless in the real world.
More than anything else, I think this is why XP will work very well for a few people, and be absolutely reviled in a few years as the worst thing since COBOL.
Don't ask yourself "What would Dilbert do with this ?", ask "What would Dilbert's PHB make of it ?" If something can be bastardised by mindless management cretins, then it will be.
I like the idea of XP, but I'd be very cautious about applying it to a whole office as an edict from on high. Someone in that target group will get it so badly wrong, you'll wish you hadn't started.
I work at <mumble>, a big-name Blue Chip that's generally well-liked in the industry. We're the "acceptable face" of big IT corporates, and known for our agressive inventing, not our agressive defence of trivia (Hey, if I didn't like the place, I wouldn't be here).
Even here, we've recently had corporate pep talks to make us invent more, patent more of what we invent, and make more use (by licensing for money) of what we patent. If it has sunk in to our level, then everyone is doing it.
Neither DOM nor SAX really specify a parsing mechanism. Rather they specify the means by which the parser exposes the parsed content to the client app. SAX is events, DOM is the whole thing, in a bucket.
DOM is nearly always easier to work with, except when it isn't. Then it becomes completely unworkable (usually due to either huge documents, or long time delays) and you use SAX because you've simply no other choice.
JDOM ? I've never felt the slightest need for it myself. Maybe it's because I first hit XML DOMs through M$oft's (where there is no JDOM). Once you've got the knack of using the DOM, I don't see what JDOM offers long-term.
3. Cross-platform. Let's just say that more than Win32, MacOS, and WinCE are on the roadmap
I've got a "roadmap" that tells me where Captain Kidd's treasure is buried. We want product, not "Trust us, we're M$oft" promises about future coverage.
So if you have it all figured out, why don't you clue them in? (for a hefty consulting fee)
My consulting fees are already hefty enough, thanks for asking. I'm doing pretty much what you suggest, only I'm not doing for M$oft. 8-)
.NET is SOAP compliant,
Only because SOAP is a broad standard, and can contain multitudes. If you use it with.NET though, M$oft have pushed it about as far as possible to avoid interoperability with other non-M$oft SOAP services.
Look at the change history from 0.9 -> 1.0 -> 1.1
Why do we need to do everything by serialising objects anyway ? That's only of interest if you're stuck in the "Everything is a COM object" mindset. That's a terrible starting point for starting to build eServices.
you Linux bigots
Oh come on, I might be bigoted, but I'm no penguin-squeezer. I just write apps, I'm not into OS flamewars.
That's probably the most arrogant response I've ever seen on/.
Well thanks, but I'm not that good 8-)
FYI, the.NET framework is just as platform neutral as the JVM.
First off, M$oft have some major territory to defend here. It's almost inconceivable that they would do this.
Now, to quote M$oft's own site:
On what platforms will the.NET Framework run?
The Beta 1 version will run on Microsoft® Windows® 2000, Windows 95/98/ME, and Windows NT® 4.0.
There is also a version of the.NET Framework called the.NET Compact Framework. It is designed to bring some of the capabilities of the.NET Framework to devices such as cell phones and enhanced televisions. The.NET Compact Framework will run on Windows CE and other embedded operating systems.
So, we haven't ruled it out, but neither have they ruled it in. Where some cross-platform portability might appear is on the low-end clients, not the servers..NET for EPOC I can believe,.NET for Solaris, Linux or BSD ? Now that'll be the day...
Read the JUMP.NET stuff - long on J++ portability, very short on compatibility with other Javas. Any reliance on Swing, EE or even JDBC ? You're screwed.
As an ex-J++ developer, I'd also like to point out to M$oft that it's a bit damned late to be apologising now ! You left me hanging in the breeze for over a year with this "J++ cancelled, oh no it isn't, oh yes it is" business. I've now switched platform away from it, doing my own hand-coded changes, and this late arrival of a migration tool certainly doesn't make me forgive this.
.NET is still, under the hood, built out of COM. That is not being platform neutral. This "We'll support you, so long as you support COM, is what I mean by 'Thinking down to Windows' level'".
M$oft are still trying hard to break SOAP. Despite their protestations, SOAP is not about shuffling COM objects all around the place, and I'm damned if I'm going to start building SOAP services that depend on COM serialisations, losing all of SOAP's inherent cross-platform nature. This rubbish they keep spouting about.NET being part of SOAP services is just their "Embrace, Extend, Exterminate" policy coming back.
If either of these coding platforms were to bind itself (and they don't) to any client model (and there's more than two), then it would immediately be dead in the water.
There's no need to restrict the client model, and developers will run a mile from any tool that tries to limit them like this.
XML won't cut it as a net-wide service. XML is great, as far as it goes, but it's a long way short of what you need to build real re-usable eServices. So far, M$oft have entirely ignored these extra parts, usually by pretending that they're not needed or are already covered by some half-baked feature in the latest version of Word.
It's worth noting that M$oft have finally showed up on the W3C RDF interest list. They still don't understand what semantics are, but they're learning.
If you're out on the fringes of this stuff, it's time to start swimming faster and watching your back. "Torpedo in the water !"
If Microsoft can deliver on a *cross-platform* solution
Yes, if M$oft did this, then they could compete with Java and may even beat it.
But that's not what they're doing..NET works on any platform that's Windows, or is prepared to think down to Windows' level. If.NET gains any cross-platform capability, it's because the platform goes out of its way to accomodate.NET, not the other way round.
everything in.NET is available as a distributed object by default by SOAP
First off, what is SOAP supposed to be about ?
If SOAP is an rpc mechanism over commonplace Internet-friendly transports, then that's a very valuable tool to have. We can build stuff with that, build it now, and build it between almost any two platforms that are still significant to the net. We want this badly.
In M$oft's "SOAP-on-a-ROPE" world, SOAP has become "Internet DCOM". They've broken it, and especially the SOAP mindset. It's now all about shoving stateful objects from place to place, and objects that are only meaningful in a Windows world. They can FOAD with this whole idea; SOAP is built around being cross-platform, and I'm not having Redmond break it.
If we want to shove objects around the place, CORBA still does it better than.NET. What happened though, was that the world found it didn't really want to do this after all. It's just too difficult to get interoperability between different sites in different companies, when most of the traffic is trivial "Validate this CC for me" stuff. Sure, in the future everything will work, and we'll be able to punt objects around. In the real world, right this minute, I just want a clean and simple interface that lets me talk to an eService provider and buy "5 minutes play time for the latest Metallica album over Napster". I'm certainly not going to start instantiating COM objects (from my Servlets environment) just so that I can talk to a poxy.NET-based service.
M$oft still don't understand the 'Net. They think it's like a big multinational, only bigger, but still responsive to central control. Compare BizTalk and the Semantic Web (if you can do it without laughing). BizTalk is centralist and controlling, SW is about publishing to a widespread lingua franca. The difference commercially between these two is that SW can tolerate BizTalk, but BizTalk dies unless everyone uses it.
It will be a long struggle, comrades, but the inevitable collapse of the Imperialist hegemony is at hand ! To the barricades !
Is code quality worse now that people are used to just sitting down and hacking it out?
Yes, much worse.
Debugging is done by the quickest and dirtiest method. It always has been, that's just human (and geek) nature. The difference is that In The Olden Days, it was so slow to do the compile, run, test cycle that you would make damn sure the program couldn't possibly go wrong first -- simply through laziness. It was easier to know about things like loop invariants, because it was so damned painful to compile anything. If a bug showed up, it was because you'd made a mistake (despite trying) - it wasn't just a case of "run it and see what falls out".
These days, pressing the button is quick and easy. If it compiles, throws something on the screen, and doesn't let the magic smoke out immediately, then it's "finished" (I'm telling you kid, it ain't). Very few people have any idea of whether their code is really bug-free or not, simply that it has shown no obvious bugs as yet. This is a very scary quality standard.
There's a drug (whose name escapes me) that does nothing at all for curing HIV, but is effective at stopping transmission from mothers to new borns. It's cheap too. This is the sort of healthcare that Africa is currently being prevented from having access to.
Not all HIV treatments are rocket-science. Yes, it's unreasonable to expect the same standards as you might expect on the US West Coast, but that's not the same as saying that there's nothing more that could be done.
This report claims that stated policy is bad, because it's not enforcable and it can be misleading.
It's not a stated policy that misleads though, because that's verifiable (we can already do this - it's only site inertia and lack of demand that stops us). It's the mis-use of TRUSTe and Which -style branding that's a more serious problem. Joe Sixpack doesn't assume a site is secure because he read the small print in a policy statement, it's because there's a big flashy logo from a trade organisation that he's impressed by.
I can't believe that our society (US) allows corporations to have access to our school systems,
Why not ? You're the ultimate Capitalist state. The deal is that you get cheap cars and gas, and that anything Cornelius Vanderbilt (and his moral inheritors) wants to do to you in return is explicitly permitted. If the government starts to not like it, the Capitalist party (as Gore Vidal described it; one party, with two right wings) will install a new and more compliant Barbie-doll president.
If you want something that behaves like socialism (where an individual's privacy is a matter for the individual), move to a socialist country.
Granted, a stated policy can still be a bad policy.
OTOH, without a statement of the policy, then we have nothing. It's not enough, on a privacy issue, to simply live in a country where most sites are well behaved. It's not the multitude of good sites that are the problem, it's the minority of privacy abusers. Without stated policies, we can't detect these and avoid them.
Secondly, we need automatic policy publication through systems like P3P. Even that much isn't yet a solution, as we also need the next step; protocols like APPEL that allow us to express our own preferences for an acceptable policy. We're not even home yet, as we then need browsers to start supporting it. Actually we need IE, the mass-market choice, to do it so as to give a critical mass.
Privacy can be so much better than it is at present, and there are already demonstrations of these W3C-derived standards in action. They're a good fix ! Damn near complete user satisfaction, just by getting well-integrated browser negotiation of your preparedness to disclose.
Underlying it all though, is a stated policy on the site. Without that, you have nothing.
The RIP Act is certainly a big problem with the UK, but it's only one specific instance of a more widespread problem; Reactionary Ignorant Politicians.
Witness the recent furore over internet adoptions; a UK couple "bought" two American babies from a US-based on-line eBaby auction. The second-highest bidder complained to the news media. Maybe we need to fix this, but we should do that by either the USA stopping baby sales for profit, or the UK imposing controls on the import of unlicensed babies to unsuitable parents.
We can't import strong crypto, but babies are OK ? Something is wrong there !
The UK government's reaction though was to threaten prosecution for UK ISPs allowing connectivity to offshore baby shops. Doh! These people are too clueless to be allowed to make policy.
Our previous "Minister for DotComs" managed to stamp out independent IT consultancy, including my own, by introducing punitive taxation on one-man-bands, yet continues to pork-barrel the Big Six consultancies with government contracts to deliver non-working mega-systems. This government continues to mouth platitudes about "UK eCommerce leadership", but their actions are entirely contradictory. Blair is almost proud of having less IT knowledge than George W.
Do you know the actually benefits of CCTV cameras?
This reduces all kinds of crime, muggings, beatings, rapes, burglarys etc.
Get real. CCTV cameras do a little to counter popular spots for Friday-night drunken brawling, are useful for supporting evidence in shoplifting or car theft (assuming the thief has already been arrested), but do little else.
Unless you're the thickest of criminals, you don't mug people where the cameras are. So what ? There are plenty of other suitable ambushes, and typical camera sites tend to be large open spaces (so as to give a good field of view) and these weren't where the muggings happened anyway.
Burglaries ? Do the police really have a camera pointed at your back entry ?
Slashdot Mirror
I know just what you mean....
OTOH, I've met Lawrence Lessig, and he made me believe that just possibly there's at least one lawyer out there who makes a positive contribution to humanity.
Of course, imagine what he might have achieved if he'd learned to play piano in a brothel 8-)
He's a great speaker, he understands the issues we care about, and he understands how to make Washington and the court system work. If you can possibly attend, go to it.
The initial design was done by a moron, who is just out of Uni and who read too many UML design books, but never seen/written a real program. The code was
- over engineered
- threaded unnecessarily
Ah yes, all other code was coded by morons. Strange how anything ever works really.
I got to [...] maintain it [...] I have learnt
- a lot of Java thread issues
Maybe you just learned better to understand Java threading issues. It's surprising how many times you look at something that's "really stupid", but once you've "fixed" it, the fix turns out to look exactly like the original did.
Sun defending its statement that XML and Java are bolted at the hip
Sun are just a bunch of lying toads. It's hard to get into a PR mud-slinging battle with M$oft and come off worst, but they seem to have managed it (I liked the other poster's comment about 17 year olds comparing Chevys and Fords)
If XML has any close ties with Java, then it's despite Sun, not because of it. The heroes of XML are the early adopters who built the first tools for it. If these people chose to build those tools in Java, it was because they liked Java as a language and an environment for code-sharing, not because Sun was encouraging them to. Over XML, and especially over SOAP, Sun has played the sort of "dog in the manger" attitude that we're usually used to seeing from M$oft. Fortunately their corporate squabbling doesn't seem to have broken things for the rest of us.
I love XML & especially RDF, development under Java, because there's a really good (although still small) Open Source community around it. It's not big corporate funding from M$oft or Sun driving it though. Kudos to IBM for their work on Apache and XML.
"Western" civilization is pretty much defined by the commonplace ability to read. It's what sets us apart from the Ancient Greeks. Whilst reading was the reserve of a tiny elite, and all innovation depended upon discourse in some Socratic forum, society stayed static (and almost moribund) for millenia.
A reading society is a society in which anyone can learn enough to invent new technologies, and that's a society which soon becomes industrialised.
Before commonplace reading, we (in the West) were trailing along in a post-collapse version of Roman society, with a few communities of scholars (usually either dedicated monks, or dedicated heretics) being the only source for innovation. Once reading took off as a mass occupation, we went through the Renaissance and the inevitable industrialisation and shift to a technology-driven society.
Just found this link: http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/isaac/wep-faq.htm l
I was on someone's LAN, on the fun side of their firewall.
This is a little worrying in some ways - they're also on your side of your firewall. Imagine an automatic laptop-hacking machine, left within range of a cafe / station etc. that slurped up every interesting laptop that walked into range...
As I'm an obvious target for such a thing, can anyone suggest resource sites on how to secure my own laptop against such an attack ? I'm used to dealing with firewalls, SYN attacks et al, but someone having the ability to hammer directly on my card slot is a new one for me.
the wildly popular 802.11b wireless networking technologies
Is this a true description of WiFi ?
I'm in the UK, in a real geek environment, and we've only just gone partially wireless. By UK standards, I think we're still ahead of the pack.
What's it like in the USA ? Are AirPorts really popping up in every Starbucks ?
if a methodology is so fragile that the tiniest deviation leads to failure then that methodology is worthless in the real world.
More than anything else, I think this is why XP will work very well for a few people, and be absolutely reviled in a few years as the worst thing since COBOL.
Don't ask yourself "What would Dilbert do with this ?", ask "What would Dilbert's PHB make of it ?" If something can be bastardised by mindless management cretins, then it will be.
I like the idea of XP, but I'd be very cautious about applying it to a whole office as an edict from on high. Someone in that target group will get it so badly wrong, you'll wish you hadn't started.
Absolutely.
I work at <mumble>, a big-name Blue Chip that's generally well-liked in the industry. We're the "acceptable face" of big IT corporates, and known for our agressive inventing, not our agressive defence of trivia (Hey, if I didn't like the place, I wouldn't be here).
Even here, we've recently had corporate pep talks to make us invent more, patent more of what we invent, and make more use (by licensing for money) of what we patent. If it has sunk in to our level, then everyone is doing it.
Neither DOM nor SAX really specify a parsing mechanism. Rather they specify the means by which the parser exposes the parsed content to the client app. SAX is events, DOM is the whole thing, in a bucket.
DOM is nearly always easier to work with, except when it isn't. Then it becomes completely unworkable (usually due to either huge documents, or long time delays) and you use SAX because you've simply no other choice.
JDOM ? I've never felt the slightest need for it myself. Maybe it's because I first hit XML DOMs through M$oft's (where there is no JDOM). Once you've got the knack of using the DOM, I don't see what JDOM offers long-term.
3. Cross-platform. Let's just say that more than Win32, MacOS, and WinCE are on the roadmap
I've got a "roadmap" that tells me where Captain Kidd's treasure is buried. We want product, not "Trust us, we're M$oft" promises about future coverage.
So if you have it all figured out, why don't you clue them in? (for a hefty consulting fee)
My consulting fees are already hefty enough, thanks for asking. I'm doing pretty much what you suggest, only I'm not doing for M$oft. 8-)
Only because SOAP is a broad standard, and can contain multitudes. If you use it with .NET though, M$oft have pushed it about as far as possible to avoid interoperability with other non-M$oft SOAP services.
Look at the change history from 0.9 -> 1.0 -> 1.1
Why do we need to do everything by serialising objects anyway ? That's only of interest if you're stuck in the "Everything is a COM object" mindset. That's a terrible starting point for starting to build eServices.
you Linux bigots
Oh come on, I might be bigoted, but I'm no penguin-squeezer. I just write apps, I'm not into OS flamewars.
That's probably the most arrogant response I've ever seen on /.
Well thanks, but I'm not that good 8-)
FYI, the .NET framework is just as platform neutral as the JVM.
First off, M$oft have some major territory to defend here. It's almost inconceivable that they would do this.
Now, to quote M$oft's own site:
So, we haven't ruled it out, but neither have they ruled it in. Where some cross-platform portability might appear is on the low-end clients, not the servers. .NET for EPOC I can believe, .NET for Solaris, Linux or BSD ? Now that'll be the day...
Read the JUMP .NET stuff - long on J++ portability, very short on compatibility with other Javas. Any reliance on Swing, EE or even JDBC ? You're screwed.
As an ex-J++ developer, I'd also like to point out to M$oft that it's a bit damned late to be apologising now ! You left me hanging in the breeze for over a year with this "J++ cancelled, oh no it isn't, oh yes it is" business. I've now switched platform away from it, doing my own hand-coded changes, and this late arrival of a migration tool certainly doesn't make me forgive this.
.NET is still, under the hood, built out of COM. That is not being platform neutral. This "We'll support you, so long as you support COM, is what I mean by 'Thinking down to Windows' level'".
M$oft are still trying hard to break SOAP. Despite their protestations, SOAP is not about shuffling COM objects all around the place, and I'm damned if I'm going to start building SOAP services that depend on COM serialisations, losing all of SOAP's inherent cross-platform nature. This rubbish they keep spouting about .NET being part of SOAP services is just their "Embrace, Extend, Exterminate" policy coming back.
Given these basically impossible goals, .NET is a triumph. OTOH, if you're not M$oft, and #2 doesn't apply to you, then what's in it for you ?
If either of these coding platforms were to bind itself (and they don't) to any client model (and there's more than two), then it would immediately be dead in the water.
There's no need to restrict the client model, and developers will run a mile from any tool that tries to limit them like this.
XML won't cut it as a net-wide service. XML is great, as far as it goes, but it's a long way short of what you need to build real re-usable eServices. So far, M$oft have entirely ignored these extra parts, usually by pretending that they're not needed or are already covered by some half-baked feature in the latest version of Word.
It's worth noting that M$oft have finally showed up on the W3C RDF interest list. They still don't understand what semantics are, but they're learning.
If you're out on the fringes of this stuff, it's time to start swimming faster and watching your back.
"Torpedo in the water !"
If Microsoft can deliver on a *cross-platform* solution
Yes, if M$oft did this, then they could compete with Java and may even beat it.
But that's not what they're doing. .NET works on any platform that's Windows, or is prepared to think down to Windows' level. If .NET gains any cross-platform capability, it's because the platform goes out of its way to accomodate .NET, not the other way round.
everything in .NET is available as a distributed object by default by SOAP
First off, what is SOAP supposed to be about ?
If SOAP is an rpc mechanism over commonplace Internet-friendly transports, then that's a very valuable tool to have. We can build stuff with that, build it now, and build it between almost any two platforms that are still significant to the net. We want this badly.
In M$oft's "SOAP-on-a-ROPE" world, SOAP has become "Internet DCOM". They've broken it, and especially the SOAP mindset. It's now all about shoving stateful objects from place to place, and objects that are only meaningful in a Windows world. They can FOAD with this whole idea; SOAP is built around being cross-platform, and I'm not having Redmond break it.
If we want to shove objects around the place, CORBA still does it better than .NET. What happened though, was that the world found it didn't really want to do this after all. It's just too difficult to get interoperability between different sites in different companies, when most of the traffic is trivial "Validate this CC for me" stuff. Sure, in the future everything will work, and we'll be able to punt objects around. In the real world, right this minute, I just want a clean and simple interface that lets me talk to an eService provider and buy "5 minutes play time for the latest Metallica album over Napster". I'm certainly not going to start instantiating COM objects (from my Servlets environment) just so that I can talk to a poxy .NET-based service.
M$oft still don't understand the 'Net. They think it's like a big multinational, only bigger, but still responsive to central control. Compare BizTalk and the Semantic Web (if you can do it without laughing). BizTalk is centralist and controlling, SW is about publishing to a widespread lingua franca. The difference commercially between these two is that SW can tolerate BizTalk, but BizTalk dies unless everyone uses it.
It will be a long struggle, comrades, but the inevitable collapse of the Imperialist hegemony is at hand ! To the barricades !
Is code quality worse now that people are used to just sitting down and hacking it out?
Yes, much worse.
Debugging is done by the quickest and dirtiest method. It always has been, that's just human (and geek) nature. The difference is that In The Olden Days, it was so slow to do the compile, run, test cycle that you would make damn sure the program couldn't possibly go wrong first -- simply through laziness. It was easier to know about things like loop invariants, because it was so damned painful to compile anything. If a bug showed up, it was because you'd made a mistake (despite trying) - it wasn't just a case of "run it and see what falls out".
These days, pressing the button is quick and easy. If it compiles, throws something on the screen, and doesn't let the magic smoke out immediately, then it's "finished" (I'm telling you kid, it ain't). Very few people have any idea of whether their code is really bug-free or not, simply that it has shown no obvious bugs as yet. This is a very scary quality standard.
Good point, but you're wrong.
There's a drug (whose name escapes me) that does nothing at all for curing HIV, but is effective at stopping transmission from mothers to new borns. It's cheap too. This is the sort of healthcare that Africa is currently being prevented from having access to.
Not all HIV treatments are rocket-science. Yes, it's unreasonable to expect the same standards as you might expect on the US West Coast, but that's not the same as saying that there's nothing more that could be done.
Mbeki's attitude doesn't help either 8-(
This report claims that stated policy is bad, because it's not enforcable and it can be misleading.
It's not a stated policy that misleads though, because that's verifiable (we can already do this - it's only site inertia and lack of demand that stops us). It's the mis-use of TRUSTe and Which -style branding that's a more serious problem. Joe Sixpack doesn't assume a site is secure because he read the small print in a policy statement, it's because there's a big flashy logo from a trade organisation that he's impressed by.
I can't believe that our society (US) allows corporations to have access to our school systems,
Why not ? You're the ultimate Capitalist state. The deal is that you get cheap cars and gas, and that anything Cornelius Vanderbilt (and his moral inheritors) wants to do to you in return is explicitly permitted. If the government starts to not like it, the Capitalist party (as Gore Vidal described it; one party, with two right wings) will install a new and more compliant Barbie-doll president.
If you want something that behaves like socialism (where an individual's privacy is a matter for the individual), move to a socialist country.
Granted, a stated policy can still be a bad policy.
OTOH, without a statement of the policy, then we have nothing. It's not enough, on a privacy issue, to simply live in a country where most sites are well behaved. It's not the multitude of good sites that are the problem, it's the minority of privacy abusers. Without stated policies, we can't detect these and avoid them.
Secondly, we need automatic policy publication through systems like P3P. Even that much isn't yet a solution, as we also need the next step; protocols like APPEL that allow us to express our own preferences for an acceptable policy. We're not even home yet, as we then need browsers to start supporting it. Actually we need IE, the mass-market choice, to do it so as to give a critical mass.
Privacy can be so much better than it is at present, and there are already demonstrations of these W3C-derived standards in action. They're a good fix ! Damn near complete user satisfaction, just by getting well-integrated browser negotiation of your preparedness to disclose.
Underlying it all though, is a stated policy on the site. Without that, you have nothing.
The RIP Act is certainly a big problem with the UK, but it's only one specific instance of a more widespread problem; Reactionary Ignorant Politicians.
Witness the recent furore over internet adoptions; a UK couple "bought" two American babies from a US-based on-line eBaby auction. The second-highest bidder complained to the news media. Maybe we need to fix this, but we should do that by either the USA stopping baby sales for profit, or the UK imposing controls on the import of unlicensed babies to unsuitable parents.
We can't import strong crypto, but babies are OK ? Something is wrong there !
The UK government's reaction though was to threaten prosecution for UK ISPs allowing connectivity to offshore baby shops. Doh! These people are too clueless to be allowed to make policy.
Our previous "Minister for DotComs" managed to stamp out independent IT consultancy, including my own, by introducing punitive taxation on one-man-bands, yet continues to pork-barrel the Big Six consultancies with government contracts to deliver non-working mega-systems. This government continues to mouth platitudes about "UK eCommerce leadership", but their actions are entirely contradictory. Blair is almost proud of having less IT knowledge than George W.
Do you know the actually benefits of CCTV cameras?
This reduces all kinds of crime, muggings, beatings, rapes, burglarys etc.
Get real. CCTV cameras do a little to counter popular spots for Friday-night drunken brawling, are useful for supporting evidence in shoplifting or car theft (assuming the thief has already been arrested), but do little else.
Unless you're the thickest of criminals, you don't mug people where the cameras are. So what ? There are plenty of other suitable ambushes, and typical camera sites tend to be large open spaces (so as to give a good field of view) and these weren't where the muggings happened anyway.
Burglaries ? Do the police really have a camera pointed at your back entry ?