I'm usually one to jump on the Stop Global Warming bandwagon, but the pretty picture in the BBC article sure does seem to indicate a large range of probablities between the "best case" and "worst case" scenarios.
It's not so clear from the BBC article but the range from "worst case" to "best case" was largely reflecting different future policies on greenhouse gases.
There are some local issues as well; pressure on land has lead to building on flood plains, and trying to stop them from flooding only drives the problem further downstream.
Also Britain is still on the rebound from the last ice age, causing the south East to slowly sink. Even if you don't factor global warming in, in the very long term flooding in London is likely to happen. That part of it is not new, of course. Google for Dunwich (not the Cthulhu one).
That's like saying "I guarantee there is no danger of flooding here. But I would be happy to sell you flood insurance."
It's more like car insurance. If some a**hole crashes into your car, claims it's your fault, then tries to sue you for damages, you'll be glad that your insurers will defend the claim on your behalf. You don't have to be in the wrong to incur legal costs.
The US has done no such thing, and doesn't really have any legal basis for doing so... corporations have free speech rights here.
SCO is suing Novell to stop them saying they own Unix in a US court. Red Hat is suing SCO to stop them spreading FUD about Linux, again in the US.
The US courts seem reluctant to issue injunctions, like the German ones have, before the case has been heard in full. Maybe this derives in part from the weight they place on the first amendment; hard to say.
A ruling from a German court can, and, in light od the recent drive (last five-ten years) to harmonize US with European copyright law, SHOULD be considered by a US court.
I'm not a lawyer but wouldn't think that a preliminary injunction would have much weight. It's not like the case has even been tried once, let alone gone to appeal.
Re:Billed per Byte?? What is this, 1967???
on
Mirror.ac.uk To Close
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· Score: 2, Informative
Hey, this is supposed to be the 21rst century...not the 19th century, get with it..
This is 90s style deregulation at work. Tranatlantic cables are expensive; rather than pass on an ever increasing connection charge to every subscribing university, they set a bandwidth based charge, and let the increasing demand for bandwidth drive the provision.
Re:Here is what needs to be done
on
CSS for the LDP?
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· Score: 1
I am not at all a CSS expert, but it sounds to me like what's being proposed is the stripping out of any marking and formatting that can be and is useful when viewed with a browser, say lynx, that doesn't support CSS.
No, you haven't got it. The idea is to make the formatting flow naturally from the structure. Take one simple example: suppose in your document you have no headings and instead you have just dropped in in a FONT tag to make them large and bold. If you have a text mode browser that, for example, underlines headings, it won't be able to do anything sensible with the FONT tag. If there were a proper heading there with the CSS saying large and bold, the text mode browser could just ignore it and do its underlining thing.
Sure, you can write junk HTML by littering the document with <SPAN STYLE="whatever">. That's horrible, and not what CSS is supposed to be about.
That is bullshit. Of course two inputs can be found which produce the same message digest.
No, obviously they exist but they can't be found in a computational feasible way. Obviously, RSA is trivially breakable by trial division, given infinite time, too.
I don't see what that would achieve either: two strings of gibberish that happen to have the same MD5 sum.
Well, it's a partial crack. I'm not a crypto expert but a partial crack is often a way into an algorithm.
Privacy concerns aside, mechanical locks are established technology that works reliably.
The security of indivudual key systems is good but realistically in campus environment you need master keys and submaster keys. You have relatively inflexible access control on submaster keys. If you think about what a master key is, it's essentially equivalent to a backdoor password. As soon as it is compromised, to regain security, all the locks that master operates need to be changed.
This isn't just theory; when I was at college, the master key system for several of the buildings was hacked within weeks.
Is it just me or does this seem alot less of the "EU using anti-trust laws", and more of "EU removing USA trust from domiance in EU market." Why do have the feeling if MS was based in UK that suit wouldn't have been filed.
The EU commission does enforce anti-trust laws on European companies on a regular basis. And yes, they would love Europe to have a stronger position in the global software market.
However, in this case, it's hard to see a strong domestic interest. Who benefits: Apple, Real? They aren't well-known European companies.
All the things you mentioned can be fixed without breaking the X protocol.
Yes, they can. However, systems that negotiate endless protocol extensions to work around the broken features of earlier ones, become difficult to maintain. SMB for example.
Not that I think throwing it all away and starting again would be better, though. However, maybe there is scope to test them, and redefine them as standard extensions at some point. Maybe now the balance has tipped back towards X.org this might happen.
It would be sort of like you clicking "I Do Not Agree" on a Windows installation, then somehow getting the software installed anyway. Microsoft wouldn't RETRACT your license, rather, they'd sue you because you're using the software without one.
Except that the GPL is far less dubious legally than Microsoft's EULA which could easily be tossed out in court (YJMV).
Nope. SCO believe that all GPL'd software is really public domain, since the GPL is (allegedly) unconstitutional. And they think that, by getting the GPL ruled invalid, suddenly all this code will become public domain and fair game for anyone who wants it.
It's even more perverse than that. If they believed that, then (by distributing Linux) they would be putting their own code in the public domain. So what they are effectively arguing is: when *we* distribute GPLd code we keep all our rights. When you do it you lose yours.
Notice how the consumers never entered this equation at all? Isn't it feasible that Joe User LIKES having an operating system that doesn't require him to go hunting all over the internet for simple things like media players and Instant messaging?
The is real competition in the PC market, and that's at the OEM level. They choose to bundle various stuff; however, their hands are pretty much tied with IE and Media Player because they have to pay for them whether they want to bundle them or not.
It's really absurd to suggest that PCs wouldn't come with browsers if IE was unbundled.
To make? Sure. Afterall, an ATM card or credit card is nothing more than a piece of plastic with a standardized magnetic stripe that repeats the same 16 numbers that are on the front of the card over and over.
I would consult a lawyer before trying it. It might well be considered a counterfeit document.
This is similar to credit card scam that Bruce Schneier pointed out in his latest cryptogram.
You receive a telephone call from someone purporting to be from your credit card company. They claim to be from something like the security and fraud department, and question you about a fake purchase for some amount close to $500.
Hmm, while such a scam is vaguely plausible, the story has been doing the rounds with the same names and amounts that I think it safe to file it under Urban Legends
I received a copy circulated at work, identical in all respects with USD changed to GBP. Go figure.
Yeah, but all it would take is one meltdown and we suddenly have a disaster a few orders of magnitude larger than 9/11.
9/11 deaths: 3,000. Chernobyl deaths: 44.
I'm not sure where you get the 44 deaths from but the long term death toll is likely to be much higher. I'm not sure what the most accepted figure is but 44 isn't even close. This page, for example, suggests 47 000. Unless someone can provide links to a more definitive study, I think one order of magnitude higher than 9/11 is about right.
Just being a company does not give them the right to "refuse you service AT ANY TIME". They entered into a contract with you. The terms of the contract must be obeyed by both parties.
Well, I pay my bill monthly. If I don't like my ISP I have to give them a month's notice to quit. Likewise they have a similar termination right. A lot of the time, arguing about contract terms is pointless. They can decline to renew without giving a reason, the same as I can. I've hit caps a couple of times, and my ISP hasn't suggested they would terminate within a payment period.
One thing I don't understand is why the broadband suppliers are called monopolies. For cable that is more or less so but for ADSL, I could go to 50 or more firms. Is that not the case in the US?
Every article on/. or much of anyplce i seem to go online, seems to be have a very anti-US flavo(u)r to it.
That's probably because online you get exposed to a wider variety of views than you do elsewhere. If you hear anti-US views, that's not so surprising because the US doesn't have many international friends at the moment.
Conversely, online I find (pro-Bush, libertarian, anti-Kyoto) views expressed that I wouldn't hear otherwise. It's good that sometimes we get to see outside your comfortable little world.
Hearing a diversity of views is a good thing. Just filter out the cheerleaders from all sides.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm usually one to jump on the Stop Global Warming bandwagon, but the pretty picture in the BBC article sure does seem to indicate a large range of probablities between the "best case" and "worst case" scenarios.
It's not so clear from the BBC article but the range from "worst case" to "best case" was largely reflecting different future policies on greenhouse gases.
There are some local issues as well; pressure on land has lead to building on flood plains, and trying to stop them from flooding only drives the problem further downstream.
Also Britain is still on the rebound from the last ice age, causing the south East to slowly sink. Even if you don't factor global warming in, in the very long term flooding in London is likely to happen. That part of it is not new, of course. Google for Dunwich (not the Cthulhu one).
That's like saying "I guarantee there is no danger of flooding here. But I would be happy to sell you flood insurance."
It's more like car insurance. If some a**hole crashes into your car, claims it's your fault, then tries to sue you for damages, you'll be glad that your insurers will defend the claim on your behalf. You don't have to be in the wrong to incur legal costs.
The US has done no such thing, and doesn't really have any legal basis for doing so... corporations have free speech rights here.
SCO is suing Novell to stop them saying they own Unix in a US court. Red Hat is suing SCO to stop them spreading FUD about Linux, again in the US.
The US courts seem reluctant to issue injunctions, like the German ones have, before the case has been heard in full. Maybe this derives in part from the weight they place on the first amendment; hard to say.
A ruling from a German court can, and, in light od the recent drive (last five-ten years) to harmonize US with European copyright law, SHOULD be considered by a US court.
I'm not a lawyer but wouldn't think that a preliminary injunction would have much weight. It's not like the case has even been tried once, let alone gone to appeal.
Hey, this is supposed to be the 21rst century...not the 19th century, get with it..
This is 90s style deregulation at work. Tranatlantic cables are expensive; rather than pass on an ever increasing connection charge to every subscribing university, they set a bandwidth based charge, and let the increasing demand for bandwidth drive the provision.
I am not at all a CSS expert, but it sounds to me like what's being proposed is the stripping out of any marking and formatting that can be and is useful when viewed with a browser, say lynx, that doesn't support CSS.
No, you haven't got it. The idea is to make the formatting flow naturally from the structure. Take one simple example: suppose in your document you have no headings and instead you have just dropped in in a FONT tag to make them large and bold. If you have a text mode browser that, for example, underlines headings, it won't be able to do anything sensible with the FONT tag. If there were a proper heading there with the CSS saying large and bold, the text mode browser could just ignore it and do its underlining thing.
Sure, you can write junk HTML by littering the document with <SPAN STYLE="whatever">. That's horrible, and not what CSS is supposed to be about.
That is bullshit. Of course two inputs can be found which produce the same message digest.
No, obviously they exist but they can't be found in a computational feasible way. Obviously, RSA is trivially breakable by trial division, given infinite time, too.
I don't see what that would achieve either: two strings of gibberish that happen to have the same MD5 sum.
Well, it's a partial crack. I'm not a crypto expert but a partial crack is often a way into an algorithm.
Privacy concerns aside, mechanical locks are established technology that works reliably.
The security of indivudual key systems is good but realistically in campus environment you need master keys and submaster keys. You have relatively inflexible access control on submaster keys. If you think about what a master key is, it's essentially equivalent to a backdoor password. As soon as it is compromised, to regain security, all the locks that master operates need to be changed.
This isn't just theory; when I was at college, the master key system for several of the buildings was hacked within weeks.
Is it just me or does this seem alot less of the "EU using anti-trust laws", and more of "EU removing USA trust from domiance in EU market." Why do have the feeling if MS was based in UK that suit wouldn't have been filed.
The EU commission does enforce anti-trust laws on European companies on a regular basis. And yes, they would love Europe to have a stronger position in the global software market.
However, in this case, it's hard to see a strong domestic interest. Who benefits: Apple, Real? They aren't well-known European companies.
All the things you mentioned can be fixed without breaking the X protocol.
Yes, they can. However, systems that negotiate endless protocol extensions to work around the broken features of earlier ones, become difficult to maintain. SMB for example.
Not that I think throwing it all away and starting again would be better, though. However, maybe there is scope to test them, and redefine them as standard extensions at some point. Maybe now the balance has tipped back towards X.org this might happen.
The fourth book in the series is utter crap and a real waste of the paper it's printed on
Well, much as I love reading Le Guin, I did find the fourth book hard to take. I guess that was kind of the point, though.
However, it does prepare one for the fifth part of the series. So, I agree to some extent: don't stop at the fourth.
Although one should note that there are five Earthsea novels in the series; the last two being relatively recent additions.
Because neither McDonalds nor Burger King has ever been ruled to have a monopoly in the fast food market, or even the hamburger market.
It's not like it doesn't happen in the food industry. The big brewers got slapped in the UK in the mid-80's. Free as in beer, anyone?
It would be sort of like you clicking "I Do Not Agree" on a Windows installation, then somehow getting the software installed anyway. Microsoft wouldn't RETRACT your license, rather, they'd sue you because you're using the software without one.
Except that the GPL is far less dubious legally than Microsoft's EULA which could easily be tossed out in court (YJMV).
Nope. SCO believe that all GPL'd software is really public domain, since the GPL is (allegedly) unconstitutional. And they think that, by getting the GPL ruled invalid, suddenly all this code will become public domain and fair game for anyone who wants it.
It's even more perverse than that. If they believed that, then (by distributing Linux) they would be putting their own code in the public domain. So what they are effectively arguing is: when *we* distribute GPLd code we keep all our rights. When you do it you lose yours.
The closest you can get is Speakers Corner in London, where one is permitted to say anything one wishes as long as it is not an incitement to treason.
which includes republicanism, of course.
Certainly at the time the US bill of rights was written, there was no British bill of rights
The US one was written before 1689, then?
For pedants, yes, I know that was before the act of Union.
Notice how the consumers never entered this equation at all? Isn't it feasible that Joe User LIKES having an operating system that doesn't require him to go hunting all over the internet for simple things like media players and Instant messaging?
The is real competition in the PC market, and that's at the OEM level. They choose to bundle various stuff; however, their hands are pretty much tied with IE and Media Player because they have to pay for them whether they want to bundle them or not.
It's really absurd to suggest that PCs wouldn't come with browsers if IE was unbundled.
To make? Sure. Afterall, an ATM card or credit card is nothing more than a piece of plastic with a standardized magnetic stripe that repeats the same 16 numbers that are on the front of the card over and over.
I would consult a lawyer before trying it. It might well be considered a counterfeit document.
This is similar to credit card scam that Bruce Schneier pointed out in his latest cryptogram.
You receive a telephone call from someone purporting to be from your credit card company. They claim to be from something like the security and fraud department, and question you about a fake purchase for some amount close to $500.
Hmm, while such a scam is vaguely plausible, the story has been doing the rounds with the same names and amounts that I think it safe to file it under Urban Legends
I received a copy circulated at work, identical in all respects with USD changed to GBP. Go figure.
In America, soccer is a girls' game.
I think quite a few Brazilians might disagree with you there.
Yeah, but all it would take is one meltdown and we suddenly have a disaster a few orders of magnitude larger than 9/11.
9/11 deaths: 3,000.
Chernobyl deaths: 44.
I'm not sure where you get the 44 deaths from but the long term death toll is likely to be much higher. I'm not sure what the most accepted figure is but 44 isn't even close. This page, for example, suggests 47 000. Unless someone can provide links to a more definitive study, I think one order of magnitude higher than 9/11 is about right.
What the fuck do you people have against the number 5?
We're still sorting out the licensing issues with SCO.
Just being a company does not give them the right to "refuse you service AT ANY TIME". They entered into a contract with you. The terms of the contract must be obeyed by both parties.
Well, I pay my bill monthly. If I don't like my ISP I have to give them a month's notice to quit. Likewise they have a similar termination right. A lot of the time, arguing about contract terms is pointless. They can decline to renew without giving a reason, the same as I can. I've hit caps a couple of times, and my ISP hasn't suggested they would terminate within a payment period.
One thing I don't understand is why the broadband suppliers are called monopolies. For cable that is more or less so but for ADSL, I could go to 50 or more firms. Is that not the case in the US?
Every article on /. or much of anyplce i seem to go online, seems to be have a very anti-US flavo(u)r to it.
That's probably because online you get exposed to a wider variety of views than you do elsewhere. If you hear anti-US views, that's not so surprising because the US doesn't have many international friends at the moment.
Conversely, online I find (pro-Bush, libertarian, anti-Kyoto) views expressed that I wouldn't hear otherwise. It's good that sometimes we get to see outside your comfortable little world.
Hearing a diversity of views is a good thing. Just filter out the cheerleaders from all sides.