You don't have the right to ignore laws you don't agree with.
Sorry
Only in a literal sense. You don't "have the right" to ignore a law - that's just by definition of a law. He was talking about what's evil, not what's lawful. In fact, without even taking a stance on whether this particular law is evil or not, I think we could safely say that following an evil law may in itself be evil.
Some will say these copyright laws harm our cultural wellbeing. With or without a 'right' to do so, I can see how some would say the morally correct action is civil disobedience.
In my experience that's far too long. Here's the message as seen by the user:
...permissions and integrity of your filesystem.
[More information] [Retry] [Ignore Error]
The customer would then assume the software has destroyed their filesystem. They'd call and leave a screaming voicemail starting something like 'Someone needs to call me RIGHT NOW.'
Messages need to be ten words or less to have a fighting chance. And I'm talking about simple words. Even then, people will still call in. We recently had a customer call in wondering what to do about this error in our shipping software: "you have to specify a weight greater than 0 pounds."
Here's how to make error messages work: make them simple and actionable for the sake of the literate. For the rest, charge per incident for support and hire a lot of cheap labour.
While your typical
Great, then it'll take them 5 years to upgrade Firefox and notice something is wrong. Hey, that's just around the time they're upgrading their computer anyhow!
The whole thing needs a complete redesign. I think doing something to get rid of the whole HTML thing would be a giant improvement; just display things straight into a window from application code
Right. HTML is a great language for documents, horrible for applications. The solution you are looking for is called Cappuccino and it throws out HTML and CSS in favour of a regular Objective-C Cocoa like paradigm where you just draw in a window or place UI widgets using layout managers.
Trying to write a web application in HTML is like painting with a tennis ball for a brush. It's the wrong tool for the job and you'll spend half the time bending the various components to your will.
Ambiguity: Telling the truth when you don't mean to.
