Can you not give them a VM for the mission critical stuff? Sooner or later it will become an issue, when MS stop supporting IE6 completely you can't continue to run a browser that's notoriously bad security-wise and is no longer even receiving patches, surely. Best to start the movement now as it will be more painful later, if users need IE6 for mission critical applications or sites, give them a VM. Blacklist everything apart from those sites/apps so they can't use the VM for all their browsing purposes and point out that the best resolution is for them to find alternatives for those mission critical apps. See how long it takes before they're insisting you ditch IE6.
The problem is going to be when more and more sites just plain stop supporting IE6, you'll have a browser that's to your tastes but every site you visit will look fugly instead.
If a client cares about that more than all of the problems with IE6, then they should not have a position in their company that allows them to make IT-related decisions.
It isn't always the regular staff that are against moving up from IE6. I have a situation where one business we work with is still on IE6, and the IT staff are the ones against changing it. They have the "If it seems to work don't fix it" mentality about it, and trying to convince them that it is the source of a problem is like banging my head against a wall...
In my experience that's always been the case. Users always want the latest software so they can... look at lolcats in HTML5 or whatever users do... while IT are always wary of moving to a new system because they generally know if it breaks, it's their necks. If the latest sites don't work in the browser they do support, that's someone else's problem. I've worked for digital agencies, big blue chips and government bodies and this has been the case each time.
This is not just about CO2. It's about fast-growing commercial trees replacing the natural habitats of the land.
Because, of course, if those land owners couldn't make money from growing commercial trees they'd just turn it all over to mother nature, rather than, say, using it for cattle, or landfill, or lobbying the government to allow them to build on it...
If there was a way to remove the paper from the equation without burning it or adding it to landfill, some kind of treatment that would lock in the CO2 for instance, would this tip the scales in favour of paper having a net positive effect on emissions? My worry is that, on the cold facts, the most sensible approach is to largely do away with paper production, but perhaps we've just not considered an alternative which allows us to grow the trees without turning it into greenhouse gasses later, when we dispose of the paper.
You also have the same issue we have everwhere in life - the second money or fame become a factor, people have a reason to spin their findings. Right now we have so many people trying to, on one side, prove global warming is nothing to do with humans and is perfectly natural and something we can live with, and on the other side that it's all caused by humans and unless we fix things now we have 20 years left, and the ones who win the arguments aren't necessarily the ones who have the best science. They're the ones with the money, or the ones who can align their findings with government stances, or the ones who can best play to the conservative or liberal media, so instead of reasoned debate we tend very quickly towards polarised viewpoints and then expect everyone to jump into one or the other. Then we'll rush off and implement some highly reactionary solution which ignores the real issues.
Personally I think the truth is somewhere between the two camps, but even as someone who tries to follow the best evidence on this subject, I find it difficult to reconcile a lot of the findings. For that reason I recognise that my opinion is pretty much a gut feeling and in no way scientific, even though it's driven completely by science.
The obvious issue you're missing here is that people are specifically setting aside land for trees for renewable paper resources. If the demand for the paper wasn't there, there'd be no monetary incentive to grow the trees, these aren't just "found trees" on land nobody owns, they're a for-profit concern. The only way this would be viable is if governments paid the owners for the trees to remain uncut, or purchased the land for the same purpose, but that would likely require some kind of green tax and for people to actually support their principles with cold, hard cash, which is usually the sticking point.
Assuming we can't find such a solution, the question right now is whether growing the trees and sinking them into paper is better for the environment than, say, turning the same land over to cattle or food production. In an ideal world people would just grow trees, but this is far from an ideal world, so we have to look at practical solutions.
What humans too frequently forget is that the Earth is a fragile eco-system and you can quite often do a lot of bad by trying to do good. One example is the negative publicity about nuclear in the 80's, for instance, which has probably been more detrimental to the Earth since we've relied on the more polluting coal and oil industries instead - in an ideal world we'd rely on renewables of course, but again, the real world requires practical solutions. Another case in point, only today there's a story about the clean air act in the US actually contributing to climate change, good intentions which, prima facie seem to be laudable but have negative outcomes, we're just too reactionary a race and the whole "stop using paper" movement is another potential area where we need to consider all the facts before making a decision, and all the solutions. For instance, off the top of my head, it might be better that trees collect the CO2 into paper simply because we then have a form of carbon that's easier to deal with than having it loose in the atmosphere, even if we're not dealing with it very well right now, and of course that has to be offset by the negative impact of actually producing and transporting paper products.
The first thing that came to mind for me - those touch-screens in public places, like for booking train tickets, or even pub trivia games or cash machines. Maybe I'm overly prone to OCD, but I shudder to have to touch those, not knowing who has used them before me. They're generally smeared with other people's greasy finger marks. If I could air type just in front of the device, I'd feel a lot better. Maybe an alternative would be allowing us to shrink netbooks and laptops by effectively turning the whole of the keyboard area into a big trackpad when your hand is hoverwing over it, and eliminating the UI nightmare of trying to integrate a pad and keyboard while minimising space. I agree on a phone it's difficult to see the point right now, but the research in general is certainly not a waste of time.
Actually I think this is an ad-driven rather than user-driven site. Unfortunately "man bites dog" will always sell more clicks than "dog bites man", you're unlikely to see true balance while salacious stories generate more revenue, though admittedly it's better than a lot of what else is out there.
You realise the purpose of a judge is to make a ruling based on law (okay, they use case precedent, too, but ultimately there's a foundation in law underpinning all of that). Therefore it's the politicians who need to understand how these things work, and then they need to draft clear, well-defined laws that leave no room for misunderstanding. Judges have some leeway in their rulings, but ultimately they have to follow the written law.
The only correlation I can see between the two is the voice. It must be something to do with that. If you can get enough gravel into your voice, you have a free reign to torture whoever you like (or... don't like, I guess).
Regardless, you can't move the entire responsibility away from the person who made the comment onto the person who did the deed if the two are inextricably linked. Just because the people who vandalised the house arguably committed a worst crime, doesn't negate the potential that whoever spurred them on committed a crime - the question to ask is, would they have committed the crime if the lie had never been spread?
Common carrier status was established specifically to deal with the ISP paradigm. It doesn't automatically extend to anyone offering any kind of service. Yes, you can check millions of posts daily for rudeness, you just need a LOT of administrators. The chances are that will render the service unprofitable and therefore it's unworkable, a compromise might be for the company to proactively chase abuse reports and take down libellous comments immediately, but if the law says every comment has to be checked before it's posted then the law is wrong, not the judge who enforces it. You can't extend the common carrier status to everyone just because you like their free service.
In the British honours system the knightly style of Sir is accompanied by the given name, and optionally the surname. So, Elton John may be called Sir Elton or Sir Elton John, but never Sir John. Similarly, actress Judi Dench DBE may be addressed as Dame Judi or Dame Judi Dench, but never Dame Dench.
Maybe when Google owns everything end to end they can just have a splash screen to the whole internet saying "I agree not to be offended by anything I may see beyond this point", if you don't check it you don't get in.
That's different - ISPs are protected by their common carrier status, specifically for this reason. That doesn't extend to people running forums. I don't know enough about Brazillian law to say if the decision was right or wrong - the way you'd hope it would work is that a forum owner is liable only if they refuse to remove the injurious comments after being notified, as pre-administration would be far too costly, but if the law is clear the judge has little choice but to apply it.
Not if it encouraged people to speak out against stupid laws/court decisions. It's the fact that people are so apathetic about these things in the first place that lets them gain legal traction.
So does that mean slashdot should be held liable for all the libel that happens here? The individule being held accountable is one thing however you cant cold a company to blame fore everything users will post.
You're assuming a company has to do business in that country. If Google doesn't like the fact that they're responsible for what users write, they can block the site in Brazil, or find another way to manage this (having administrators check comments before they appear, etc). Of course, the effect of that would be that a lot of companies would withdraw support from that country, and I'll be the first to say this is why I dislike the ruling, because it will damage the level of service that can be offered to those countries, but the fact remains that if a country has a law, enacted by a government of the people of that country, then companies should obey that law even if it hurts their bottom line. Would you feel different if Google bought up land next to a school and then allowed people to illegally dump toxic waste there? If the law is wrong then let the company petition for a change, but if the law is well defined and they're clearly in breach they have to be as accountable as you or I.
Exactly the point I was about to make. While I disagree with the decision and think it sets a dangerous precedent, the difference between what happened with Google and GP's examples is what steps were taken to prevent the injurious action. If skin-heads are protesting in your mall and you do nothing, you might be partly responsible for their actions by implicitly allowing them to carry them out. If you try to stop them or call the police, even if they can't be stopped, at least you have attempted to mitigate what's happening. I don't know enough about Brazillian law to comment on the outcome of this case, but throwing up some strawmen worse case scenarios and implying that one equals the other is just wrong.
Still nice to have the option of a battery switch, though - if you know you're going to be away from a source of power or doing some intesive activity with the phone, for instance. The three key things to eliminate battery headaches are 1) know your apps, what are you running that could be turned off, do you have bluetooth/wifi enabled, etc, 2) always keep a spare, hopefully you'll never need it but the first time you absolutely do need your phone and the battery dies, you'll be so grateful for that spare, 3) either get a few spare charger cables and dot them around places you'll likely need them (one at home, one in the office, one in the car, one at the parents even) or get a phone that uses a generic cable you can easily find anywhere (i.e. mini USB) - if it becomes second nature to plug in whenever you're stationary you'll very rarely have to suffer depleted phone batteries in the first place.
I think for the most part I'd rather have more freedom in the apps and forgoe OS updates, but then I tend to shop around a lot when I buy a new phone, and unless I'm happy on day 1 that it will serve my purposes for the next 18 months, I won't buy it, so to me any OS updates are a bonus, not expected, which is probably why I'm more than happy to trade them off if it means I have more freedom to do what I want.
I'd argue that what the iPhone did was make smartphones appealing to users who wouldn't traditionally buy a smartphone. Even at the time it was released there were other phones which outstripped the iPhone in terms of features (in fact I'd argue that the original iPhone was not a smartphone at all), but the iPhone did open up a lot of the features of smartphones to regular users. It was a good entry level smartphone, and continues to be a good entry level smartphone, but it hardly pushes the envelope in any way (style-wise it looks great of course, but that's barely changed since it was first released).
Slashdot Mirror
Can you not give them a VM for the mission critical stuff? Sooner or later it will become an issue, when MS stop supporting IE6 completely you can't continue to run a browser that's notoriously bad security-wise and is no longer even receiving patches, surely. Best to start the movement now as it will be more painful later, if users need IE6 for mission critical applications or sites, give them a VM. Blacklist everything apart from those sites/apps so they can't use the VM for all their browsing purposes and point out that the best resolution is for them to find alternatives for those mission critical apps. See how long it takes before they're insisting you ditch IE6.
The problem is going to be when more and more sites just plain stop supporting IE6, you'll have a browser that's to your tastes but every site you visit will look fugly instead.
If a client cares about that more than all of the problems with IE6, then they should not have a position in their company that allows them to make IT-related decisions.
It isn't always the regular staff that are against moving up from IE6. I have a situation where one business we work with is still on IE6, and the IT staff are the ones against changing it. They have the "If it seems to work don't fix it" mentality about it, and trying to convince them that it is the source of a problem is like banging my head against a wall...
In my experience that's always been the case. Users always want the latest software so they can... look at lolcats in HTML5 or whatever users do... while IT are always wary of moving to a new system because they generally know if it breaks, it's their necks. If the latest sites don't work in the browser they do support, that's someone else's problem. I've worked for digital agencies, big blue chips and government bodies and this has been the case each time.
Well, it would certainly be a surprise for pirates...
This is not just about CO2. It's about fast-growing commercial trees replacing the natural habitats of the land.
Because, of course, if those land owners couldn't make money from growing commercial trees they'd just turn it all over to mother nature, rather than, say, using it for cattle, or landfill, or lobbying the government to allow them to build on it...
If there was a way to remove the paper from the equation without burning it or adding it to landfill, some kind of treatment that would lock in the CO2 for instance, would this tip the scales in favour of paper having a net positive effect on emissions? My worry is that, on the cold facts, the most sensible approach is to largely do away with paper production, but perhaps we've just not considered an alternative which allows us to grow the trees without turning it into greenhouse gasses later, when we dispose of the paper.
You also have the same issue we have everwhere in life - the second money or fame become a factor, people have a reason to spin their findings. Right now we have so many people trying to, on one side, prove global warming is nothing to do with humans and is perfectly natural and something we can live with, and on the other side that it's all caused by humans and unless we fix things now we have 20 years left, and the ones who win the arguments aren't necessarily the ones who have the best science. They're the ones with the money, or the ones who can align their findings with government stances, or the ones who can best play to the conservative or liberal media, so instead of reasoned debate we tend very quickly towards polarised viewpoints and then expect everyone to jump into one or the other. Then we'll rush off and implement some highly reactionary solution which ignores the real issues.
Personally I think the truth is somewhere between the two camps, but even as someone who tries to follow the best evidence on this subject, I find it difficult to reconcile a lot of the findings. For that reason I recognise that my opinion is pretty much a gut feeling and in no way scientific, even though it's driven completely by science.
The obvious issue you're missing here is that people are specifically setting aside land for trees for renewable paper resources. If the demand for the paper wasn't there, there'd be no monetary incentive to grow the trees, these aren't just "found trees" on land nobody owns, they're a for-profit concern. The only way this would be viable is if governments paid the owners for the trees to remain uncut, or purchased the land for the same purpose, but that would likely require some kind of green tax and for people to actually support their principles with cold, hard cash, which is usually the sticking point.
Assuming we can't find such a solution, the question right now is whether growing the trees and sinking them into paper is better for the environment than, say, turning the same land over to cattle or food production. In an ideal world people would just grow trees, but this is far from an ideal world, so we have to look at practical solutions.
What humans too frequently forget is that the Earth is a fragile eco-system and you can quite often do a lot of bad by trying to do good. One example is the negative publicity about nuclear in the 80's, for instance, which has probably been more detrimental to the Earth since we've relied on the more polluting coal and oil industries instead - in an ideal world we'd rely on renewables of course, but again, the real world requires practical solutions. Another case in point, only today there's a story about the clean air act in the US actually contributing to climate change, good intentions which, prima facie seem to be laudable but have negative outcomes, we're just too reactionary a race and the whole "stop using paper" movement is another potential area where we need to consider all the facts before making a decision, and all the solutions. For instance, off the top of my head, it might be better that trees collect the CO2 into paper simply because we then have a form of carbon that's easier to deal with than having it loose in the atmosphere, even if we're not dealing with it very well right now, and of course that has to be offset by the negative impact of actually producing and transporting paper products.
The first thing that came to mind for me - those touch-screens in public places, like for booking train tickets, or even pub trivia games or cash machines. Maybe I'm overly prone to OCD, but I shudder to have to touch those, not knowing who has used them before me. They're generally smeared with other people's greasy finger marks. If I could air type just in front of the device, I'd feel a lot better. Maybe an alternative would be allowing us to shrink netbooks and laptops by effectively turning the whole of the keyboard area into a big trackpad when your hand is hoverwing over it, and eliminating the UI nightmare of trying to integrate a pad and keyboard while minimising space. I agree on a phone it's difficult to see the point right now, but the research in general is certainly not a waste of time.
Actually I think this is an ad-driven rather than user-driven site. Unfortunately "man bites dog" will always sell more clicks than "dog bites man", you're unlikely to see true balance while salacious stories generate more revenue, though admittedly it's better than a lot of what else is out there.
By "the approved lab", I think he meant whatever the local equivalent certification body happens to be.
*Soviet Russia line*
You realise the purpose of a judge is to make a ruling based on law (okay, they use case precedent, too, but ultimately there's a foundation in law underpinning all of that). Therefore it's the politicians who need to understand how these things work, and then they need to draft clear, well-defined laws that leave no room for misunderstanding. Judges have some leeway in their rulings, but ultimately they have to follow the written law.
The only correlation I can see between the two is the voice. It must be something to do with that. If you can get enough gravel into your voice, you have a free reign to torture whoever you like (or... don't like, I guess).
Regardless, you can't move the entire responsibility away from the person who made the comment onto the person who did the deed if the two are inextricably linked. Just because the people who vandalised the house arguably committed a worst crime, doesn't negate the potential that whoever spurred them on committed a crime - the question to ask is, would they have committed the crime if the lie had never been spread?
Common carrier status was established specifically to deal with the ISP paradigm. It doesn't automatically extend to anyone offering any kind of service. Yes, you can check millions of posts daily for rudeness, you just need a LOT of administrators. The chances are that will render the service unprofitable and therefore it's unworkable, a compromise might be for the company to proactively chase abuse reports and take down libellous comments immediately, but if the law says every comment has to be checked before it's posted then the law is wrong, not the judge who enforces it. You can't extend the common carrier status to everyone just because you like their free service.
From Wikipedia:
In the British honours system the knightly style of Sir is accompanied by the given name, and optionally the surname. So, Elton John may be called Sir Elton or Sir Elton John, but never Sir John. Similarly, actress Judi Dench DBE may be addressed as Dame Judi or Dame Judi Dench, but never Dame Dench.
Maybe when Google owns everything end to end they can just have a splash screen to the whole internet saying "I agree not to be offended by anything I may see beyond this point", if you don't check it you don't get in.
That's different - ISPs are protected by their common carrier status, specifically for this reason. That doesn't extend to people running forums. I don't know enough about Brazillian law to say if the decision was right or wrong - the way you'd hope it would work is that a forum owner is liable only if they refuse to remove the injurious comments after being notified, as pre-administration would be far too costly, but if the law is clear the judge has little choice but to apply it.
Not if it encouraged people to speak out against stupid laws/court decisions. It's the fact that people are so apathetic about these things in the first place that lets them gain legal traction.
So does that mean slashdot should be held liable for all the libel that happens here? The individule being held accountable is one thing however you cant cold a company to blame fore everything users will post.
You're assuming a company has to do business in that country. If Google doesn't like the fact that they're responsible for what users write, they can block the site in Brazil, or find another way to manage this (having administrators check comments before they appear, etc). Of course, the effect of that would be that a lot of companies would withdraw support from that country, and I'll be the first to say this is why I dislike the ruling, because it will damage the level of service that can be offered to those countries, but the fact remains that if a country has a law, enacted by a government of the people of that country, then companies should obey that law even if it hurts their bottom line. Would you feel different if Google bought up land next to a school and then allowed people to illegally dump toxic waste there? If the law is wrong then let the company petition for a change, but if the law is well defined and they're clearly in breach they have to be as accountable as you or I.
Exactly the point I was about to make. While I disagree with the decision and think it sets a dangerous precedent, the difference between what happened with Google and GP's examples is what steps were taken to prevent the injurious action. If skin-heads are protesting in your mall and you do nothing, you might be partly responsible for their actions by implicitly allowing them to carry them out. If you try to stop them or call the police, even if they can't be stopped, at least you have attempted to mitigate what's happening. I don't know enough about Brazillian law to comment on the outcome of this case, but throwing up some strawmen worse case scenarios and implying that one equals the other is just wrong.
Still nice to have the option of a battery switch, though - if you know you're going to be away from a source of power or doing some intesive activity with the phone, for instance. The three key things to eliminate battery headaches are 1) know your apps, what are you running that could be turned off, do you have bluetooth/wifi enabled, etc, 2) always keep a spare, hopefully you'll never need it but the first time you absolutely do need your phone and the battery dies, you'll be so grateful for that spare, 3) either get a few spare charger cables and dot them around places you'll likely need them (one at home, one in the office, one in the car, one at the parents even) or get a phone that uses a generic cable you can easily find anywhere (i.e. mini USB) - if it becomes second nature to plug in whenever you're stationary you'll very rarely have to suffer depleted phone batteries in the first place.
I think for the most part I'd rather have more freedom in the apps and forgoe OS updates, but then I tend to shop around a lot when I buy a new phone, and unless I'm happy on day 1 that it will serve my purposes for the next 18 months, I won't buy it, so to me any OS updates are a bonus, not expected, which is probably why I'm more than happy to trade them off if it means I have more freedom to do what I want.
I'd argue that what the iPhone did was make smartphones appealing to users who wouldn't traditionally buy a smartphone. Even at the time it was released there were other phones which outstripped the iPhone in terms of features (in fact I'd argue that the original iPhone was not a smartphone at all), but the iPhone did open up a lot of the features of smartphones to regular users. It was a good entry level smartphone, and continues to be a good entry level smartphone, but it hardly pushes the envelope in any way (style-wise it looks great of course, but that's barely changed since it was first released).