The point I was making (and read other comments to this) is that it's actually entirely possible that politicians *aren't* in fact thinking like this - it just makes a good story for the Mail. Giving a good "whoosh" every time someone thinks there's a faint chance a politician might want to do something they wouldn't approve of would turn into a full-time job for most people - if this actually turns into a proposal it'll be made public, and that's when the actual political process (Parliament, etc) kicks off.
* This is the Daily Mail - a notoriously unpleasant and right-wing newspaper which leaps at any chance to run "shock horror" stories about things like this even if they aren't actually necessarily 100% true, because it sells newspapers to their target market (right-wing anti-government types).
* The Daily Mail doesn't like the BBC either.
* "Ministers are considering" is generally code for "Someone suggested this in passing". It doesn't mean at all that there's any actual policy there or anything else. Hell, it might just mean someone talked to someone in the pub who suggested it in passing.
In summary, take this story with a pinch of salt. It might become a more concrete proposal at some point in the future, but I think that'd be unlikely.
The reality is probably somewhat different than this article suggests. Don't forget that thisislondon.com = the Evening Standard = Associated Newspapers, the same people who brought you the Daily Mail. The Mail is one of the heaviest and most obnoxious pushers for the Law and Order lobby in this country (and very keen on Registration And Surveillance of such 'undesirable elements' as immigrants), but at the same time it has a vested interest in running "big brother" hysteria stories like this one, which if you actually read it is short on details and big on hyperbole. I presume that the reality is that someone from the council might put a leaflet through your letterbox if your recycling box is empty, not that you're going to get carted off to the cellars of the Ministry of Love.
Indeed, it should be mentioned at this point that the Mail was such a big supporter of the British Union of Fascists and, indeed, of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s that it had the nickname "The Daily Heil".
I'm afraid it's your responsibility to both be aware of the law on vehicle registration before you buy one, and to comply with it. When I bought my car a couple of years ago the dealer was very definite - driving, or even keeping a vehicle on the road without a valid tax disc is an offence. Any responsible dealer won't let a car be driven off their forecourt without tax and insurance - even if you have insurance, an untaxed vehicle is being driven illegally so your insurance would have been null and void had you had an accident.
Your neighbours probably phoned the DVLA because a car with no tax == an abandoned car. I've done that myself after someone left a car with expired tax outside my house for a fortnight.
That said, my brother bought a car from a, um, well-known second-hand car dealership a couple of years ago, and they pushed the same story - that it's just fine to drive it home without tax (because, presumably, they'd cashed in the tax disc). As far as I know, it's not.
An AC has already said this, but just to reiterate - it's ignoring the "Block robots/spiders" option on Livejournal accounts. I don't mind my LJ being out there - it wouldn't be on the net otherwise, but it's generally considered polite to observe robots.txt and friends. I have a more public blog for the profound (!) stuff, and the drivel-which-only-friends-cares-about goes on LJ so it's kept seperate and doesn't get indexed.
If it was, say, MSN Search making this screwup rather than Google, all hell would be breaking loose.
Yup, although it's not a tax, it's a licence fee - while it's a legal requirement to have a TV licence, the money raised goes to run the BBC. The money is not raised nor spent by the government.
And this is why the BBC doesn't have to dedicate itself to the pursuit of displaying advertisements to eyeballs, which in turn is why our television's so enormously better than the shitty, advertising-dominated stuff Americans seem willing to put up with.
Ooh, you mean like that popup ad I used to get telling me that "YOUR COMPUTER IS BROADCASTING AN IP ADDRESS!" and how that was a terrible, awful security threat?
More seriously, though, you're absolutely and utterly right that people need to take more responsibility for their own computer security, and that includes not only using SSL wherever it is available and being aware that network traffic is liable to sniffing by unscrupulous persons, and choosing strong passwords that a dictionary attack won't hit.
I've been trying to get this through peoples' heads for a very long time, but most folks still seem to think that all their security woes will go away if they simply install a firewall. Sigh.
"Yeah, Uni Sysadmins hate to look stupid, because in an environment with a couple of hundred graduatiing CS students they are very easy to replace at the drop of a hat."
Ha ha ha. A degree in computer science qualifies someone to be a sysadmin about as a much as it qualifies them to be a chartered accountant - a lot of CS degrees hardly touch systems admin at all, for starters, and given that the prime requirement for being a good sysadmin is experience, there's a big difference between 'has run Linux' and 'can administer large heterogeneous networks containing thousands of hosts and tens of thousands of users'.
Good academic sysadmins are actually pretty hard to come by. it's a field which involves providing very high levels of service to demanding users who want to do any number of unconventional things but who will want to do them right now, on a budget of about half what's really needed. In addition, academic admins tend to have to be a lot more generalistic in their outlook than admins of other large networks as there are fewer of them to go round.
(disclaimer - I've been a sysadmin at various academic sites for 8 years which means that while I may be biased, I've also observed the strange world of academia for longer than most students get to do so for)
I fully expect to be hearing from the administrators of Lewis Carroll's estate regarding my website (not quite as well-trafficked as Google and I'm not about to IPO, but it's the principle of the thing, surely?) - http://uffish.net.
After all, Carroll coined the word 'uffish' in Jabberwocky, and I'm using it without permission. No fair! I wanna lawsuit too!
The BBC is not a part of the government, nor is it owned by or controlled by the government. While the BBC World Service is funded by an annual grant-in-aid from the Foreign Office, they have no editorial control (and the World Service is financially seperate from the rest of the corporation). The BBC has no shareholders.
The BBC is legally a corporation established by Royal Charter and operates under strict rules of editorial independence and public service, which means that almost uniquely among broadcasters its job is to deliver programmes to audiences, rather than audience eyeballs to advertisers.
In order to receive television broadcasts in the UK it's necessary to have a television licence (see the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949 for details - in the old days you needed a licence for a radio as well, but no more). This isn't a tax, and the BBC isn't funded out of general taxation - it's a simple deal that if you want to watch television, you need a TV licence. The money from the TV licence goes to the BBC. In addition, the BBC makes a lot of money from the sale of programmes overseas and from various other commercial enterprises (magazines, DVDs, whatever). This money goes back into the BBC - there aren't any shareholders to be paid, just more programmes to be made.
If you ask me, just under a tenner a month is a bargain for what it means - some of the best quality television in the world, a bunch of excellent radio stations and value-added stuff like news.bbc.co.uk. And what the TV licence means most of all is that all this stuff goes out without commercials and without commercial or political considerations. The BBC's editorial independence regularly lands it in hot water with governments who don't like it broadcasting certain things ("Maggie's Militant Tendency", the whole Hutton business). There's a lot of stuff which would never have appeared anywhere else as the BBC can actually take risks rather than just always following the path of maximum guaranteed commercial gain.
Having recently taken a trip to the USA and tried watching television there, I really started to appreciate just how important the BBC is. Bite-size chunks of advertiser-friendly blandovision split up into five minute segments interspersed with huge amounts of commercials don't seem to educate, entertain and inform very much.
Ultimately, nobody is forcing you to pay the television licence fee unless you have a television. If you don't want to have to get a licence, the choice to not own a television is available to you!
Well, I know there's no such thing as more-or-less legal, there's just "things you're less likely to get sued for".
I actually got something wrong in my followup - it's *not* legal, AFAIK, to record stuff off the radio in the UK, especially rebroadcast music, for the purpose of building up your record collection. My bad. This would kind of make this illegal again, but I think we've played enough "Is!" "Is not!" "Is too!" ping-pong on this one.
And followup heavily overrated because, let me say this once again:
UNITED STATES LAW DOES NOT APPLY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
I am in the United Kingdom. Please stop making assumptions that everyone is in America or that the US Congress and the RIAA somehow write copyright law for the whole world. Because they don't.
For what it's worth, my understanding is that recording programmes *in the UK* is more-or-less legal if it's for the purpose of personal use or for convenience in watching/listening at a later date. I don't believe you're entitled to make copies of broadcast works for any other purpose.
Of course, the fact that nobody's going to sue you for recording EastEnders and keeping it for your own use means that the law's pretty well unenforced unless people start taking the piss (i.e. recording stuff off the television and selling copies on eBay)
For starters, I'm in the UK, so what the various Associations of America say has relatively little impact in my mind. Secondly, you seem to be missing the fairly simple point that *ideology* is not necessarily the same as *legality* - in your ideological world this may be legal, but in the real world it's most likely that laws are being broken somewhere, even if it's only on a technicality.
Something which is illegal *on a technicality* is still illegal, and some people thinking something *should* be legal doesn't necessarily make it instantly so. This story was about the legality or otherwise of a particular music download site, and therefore is something that's governed by facts rather than being an ideological matter.
Your ideology has little to do with the law *as it stands now*. So don't tell me I've been brainwashed, when it's pretty obvious that your thinking is pretty closed as well.
..then it probably is, and that's why I treat these claims with a hefty degree of scepticism. Let's look at a few points:
If they claim they're legal because "we're licensed as if we were broadcasting the material", then as far as I understand you have no right to make or keep a recording of anything they might broadcast. Broadcasting is "we broadcast it and you listen", and there's no automatic right to tape records off the radio.
It's highly possible that the reason they haven't been closed down is that taking legal action against shady Russian entities is extremely difficult at the best of times.
If they're interested in people uploading stuff *to* them in exchange for download rights, then the legitimacy of their source material seems doubtful.
Ultimately, applying Occam's razor to this story makes me wonder that if it's so spotlessly legal, why isn't everyone setting up stores like this on Russian territory?
Anyway, something here smells sufficiently fishy for me to be extremely sceptical of the wisdom of giving them money.
Commercial doesn't necessarily equal evil. If commercial means "having the money to implement things we think are cool in interesting ways without having to scrape around", that's a good thing. If, for instance, Google were having to go to venture capitalists to raise the funding to develop Gmail, development would be primarily driven by commercial concerns and interfered with by investors wanting to maximise return rather than the way it's being done, which seems to be to be more or less a drive to Do The Right Thing. If investors were clamouring for a return on their investment, you can bet Gmail would be being rushed into full service right now rather than going through a good long testing and shakedown period for making sure everything works the way it should.
However, in the long term Google ain't a charity and all of the staff and system resources needed to provide the search engine, Google News and Gmail have to be paid for somehow. If the least obnoxious way of doing that is via Google's fairly unobnoxious and much-less-evil-than-many-others approach to inline advertising, that's fine with me.
If Google do go public then they'll have to be very careful to make sure they keep the freedom they have at the moment - but it seems to work so well right now that any shareholder demanding changes for the sake of changes would be a fool.
Just to be clear, I was following up to a followup to the original query, which people might have missed. *That* was accusing the BBC of being anti-US (for no readily apparent reason, as if anyone's read the story quoted it's just reporting the facts, not editorialising)
Hoo, looks like someone's spouting what they've been fed by right-wing commentators..
It's on the verge of libellous to suggest that the BBC is deliberately and routinely biased against the US. I presume that you've never analysed the news coverage which is presented to you in any kind of critical way, or you'd figure out that "loving to trash the US" means something completely different to "reports both sides of a story rather than automatically following some kind of uncritical "Whoop, go US! U-S-A! We rule!" stance. The latter stance is the point of view of the Fox Newses of this world.
Bias is in the eye of the beholder. During the Iraq war the BBC was angrily accused of bias by both anti-war activists and pro-war folk like the government. If you're being accused of bias by people on both sides of an argument, you're doing pretty well.
The recent hoohah that led to the resignation of both the Chairman and Director-General of the Beeb resulted from one point in a live discussion between a presenter and a journalist that was broadcast at 0607 one morning and never repeated. That point was found to be untrue (heh, well, technically untrue) and top people in the BBC resigned. Doesn't sound like systematic bias to me.
(What moderator decided the post I'm replying to was "Insightful"? Yeesh.. if unsubstantiated regurgitated sniping counts as insight..)
I'll certainly answer the question. No, VNC wouldn't be a suitable replacement because from what I remember, VNC can only display entire desktops rather than, say, a single xterm or an instance of XEmacs. The great thing about X is that you can ssh -X to a remote machine, xterm & and it'll work without having to start an entire managed desktop session at the other end.
It's been a while since I touched VNC, so I'm happy to be proved wrong, but as far as I know you can't do that with VNC.
It's interesting that you choose X extensions as the primary thing to bang on. It could be argued that X extensions are somewhat akin to kernel modules, but I don't see huge numbers of people clamouring for a return to the days when all your device drivers had to be built and linked specifically into the kernel rather than dynamically loaded on demand when they were needed. My Linux boxes here need 20+ kernel modules to work properly, so how do X extensions differ? Yes, some of them are pretty much bags hung on the side, but the core functionality of X is still available without, well, nearly all of them.
Oh, and plenty of people still display X applications remotely. Have you set foot in any universities recently? Plenty of sites have central UNIX hosts available for people to run stuff on and display via their PC or whatever, because not everybody can have (or indeed wants) a UNIX box on their desk.
Finally, X has one thing going for it above all else at the moment - ubiquity. You can get an X server to run on more or less everything. Pipedreams about single-handedly replacing X are fine if you assume that every machine using X is a desktop Linux box, but when you take all those old VMS machines, PCs running eXceed, Suns, HP/UX boxes, and the zillions of weird applications that would still need to work properly across a wide variety of platforms, it's definitely more than "simply replacing X". You're talking about something that's more or less on the scale of replacing TCP/IP, and I don't see many people casually announcing that they're going to do that as a final year project.
I don't know if anyone bothered reading anything other than the pull-quotes before getting all huffy, or indeed if the story's been changed since release, but in the next paragraph it goes on to clearly say that there's no proof.
Additionally, it goes on further to say how well Linux has been doing recently in the server market.
Anyone who thinks that there is *no* possibility of *any* link between some Linux zealot with a screw loose and a grudge against SCO and MyDoom is in denial. It's one of many theories, but it's certainly a plausible theory.
I believe that the Northumbria story there is number 306 in the list of "names which former polytechnics considered but which turned out to be a bit rude when abbreviated, tee hee". There's more of those than there are ex-poly universities in the UK, and I don't think any student of these matters would consider any of them to be more than urban legend. Let me guess, a friend told you that they'd heard that...?
Hey, be fair - Ford's 60, not 90, and in physical good nick. There's plenty of life in the old dog yet, although it does seem slightly bizarre to be doing film 4 now rather than several years ago. Perhaps it would be wise to cut back a bit on the acrobatics and write a plot that's suited to an older, wiser Indy (and if it's set in the 1950s, Indy will have aged about as much as Ford has since the Last Crusade), but writing people off just because they're nearly old enough to collect their pension's a bit unfair.
And hey, Ford now is about two years older than Roger Moore was when he last played James Bond in 1987.
It's all a matter of datum, I think. I've been down to Greenwich with a GPS-12 and stood on the line, and it was shown as being just slightly off. Maybe 13 seconds or something -- can't remember, as my GPS with the waypoints concerned is at home.
The GPS displayed zero about 30m west of the line. Of course, this might all just be a matter of measurement accuracy, and a matter of the datum in use. Not enough of a difference to worry about, anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
The point I was making (and read other comments to this) is that it's actually entirely possible that politicians *aren't* in fact thinking like this - it just makes a good story for the Mail. Giving a good "whoosh" every time someone thinks there's a faint chance a politician might want to do something they wouldn't approve of would turn into a full-time job for most people - if this actually turns into a proposal it'll be made public, and that's when the actual political process (Parliament, etc) kicks off.
* This is the Daily Mail - a notoriously unpleasant and right-wing newspaper which leaps at any chance to run "shock horror" stories about things like this even if they aren't actually necessarily 100% true, because it sells newspapers to their target market (right-wing anti-government types).
* The Daily Mail doesn't like the BBC either.
* "Ministers are considering" is generally code for "Someone suggested this in passing". It doesn't mean at all that there's any actual policy there or anything else. Hell, it might just mean someone talked to someone in the pub who suggested it in passing.
In summary, take this story with a pinch of salt. It might become a more concrete proposal at some point in the future, but I think that'd be unlikely.
The reality is probably somewhat different than this article suggests. Don't forget that thisislondon.com = the Evening Standard = Associated Newspapers, the same people who brought you the Daily Mail. The Mail is one of the heaviest and most obnoxious pushers for the Law and Order lobby in this country (and very keen on Registration And Surveillance of such 'undesirable elements' as immigrants), but at the same time it has a vested interest in running "big brother" hysteria stories like this one, which if you actually read it is short on details and big on hyperbole. I presume that the reality is that someone from the council might put a leaflet through your letterbox if your recycling box is empty, not that you're going to get carted off to the cellars of the Ministry of Love.
Indeed, it should be mentioned at this point that the Mail was such a big supporter of the British Union of Fascists and, indeed, of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s that it had the nickname "The Daily Heil".
I'm afraid it's your responsibility to both be aware of the law on vehicle registration before you buy one, and to comply with it. When I bought my car a couple of years ago the dealer was very definite - driving, or even keeping a vehicle on the road without a valid tax disc is an offence. Any responsible dealer won't let a car be driven off their forecourt without tax and insurance - even if you have insurance, an untaxed vehicle is being driven illegally so your insurance would have been null and void had you had an accident.
Your neighbours probably phoned the DVLA because a car with no tax == an abandoned car. I've done that myself after someone left a car with expired tax outside my house for a fortnight.
That said, my brother bought a car from a, um, well-known second-hand car dealership a couple of years ago, and they pushed the same story - that it's just fine to drive it home without tax (because, presumably, they'd cashed in the tax disc). As far as I know, it's not.
An AC has already said this, but just to reiterate - it's ignoring the "Block robots/spiders" option on Livejournal accounts. I don't mind my LJ being out there - it wouldn't be on the net otherwise, but it's generally considered polite to observe robots.txt and friends. I have a more public blog for the profound (!) stuff, and the drivel-which-only-friends-cares-about goes on LJ so it's kept seperate and doesn't get indexed.
If it was, say, MSN Search making this screwup rather than Google, all hell would be breaking loose.
Yup, although it's not a tax, it's a licence fee - while it's a legal requirement to have a TV licence, the money raised goes to run the BBC. The money is not raised nor spent by the government.
And this is why the BBC doesn't have to dedicate itself to the pursuit of displaying advertisements to eyeballs, which in turn is why our television's so enormously better than the shitty, advertising-dominated stuff Americans seem willing to put up with.
Ooh, you mean like that popup ad I used to get telling me that "YOUR COMPUTER IS BROADCASTING AN IP ADDRESS!" and how that was a terrible, awful security threat?
More seriously, though, you're absolutely and utterly right that people need to take more responsibility for their own computer security, and that includes not only using SSL wherever it is available and being aware that network traffic is liable to sniffing by unscrupulous persons, and choosing strong passwords that a dictionary attack won't hit.
I've been trying to get this through peoples' heads for a very long time, but most folks still seem to think that all their security woes will go away if they simply install a firewall. Sigh.
"Yeah, Uni Sysadmins hate to look stupid, because in an environment with a couple of hundred graduatiing CS students they are very easy to replace at the drop of a hat."
Ha ha ha. A degree in computer science qualifies someone to be a sysadmin about as a much as it qualifies them to be a chartered accountant - a lot of CS degrees hardly touch systems admin at all, for starters, and given that the prime requirement for being a good sysadmin is experience, there's a big difference between 'has run Linux' and 'can administer large heterogeneous networks containing thousands of hosts and tens of thousands of users'.
Good academic sysadmins are actually pretty hard to come by. it's a field which involves providing very high levels of service to demanding users who want to do any number of unconventional things but who will want to do them right now, on a budget of about half what's really needed. In addition, academic admins tend to have to be a lot more generalistic in their outlook than admins of other large networks as there are fewer of them to go round.
(disclaimer - I've been a sysadmin at various academic sites for 8 years which means that while I may be biased, I've also observed the strange world of academia for longer than most students get to do so for)
Haven't seen this mentioned here already, but a small update is that according to a later NANOG post, ARIN's legal eagles will be taking up this case.
This is good news.
I fully expect to be hearing from the administrators of Lewis Carroll's estate regarding my website (not quite as well-trafficked as Google and I'm not about to IPO, but it's the principle of the thing, surely?) - http://uffish.net.
After all, Carroll coined the word 'uffish' in Jabberwocky, and I'm using it without permission. No fair! I wanna lawsuit too!
The BBC is not a part of the government, nor is it owned by or controlled by the government. While the BBC World Service is funded by an annual grant-in-aid from the Foreign Office, they have no editorial control (and the World Service is financially seperate from the rest of the corporation). The BBC has no shareholders.
The BBC is legally a corporation established by Royal Charter and operates under strict rules of editorial independence and public service, which means that almost uniquely among broadcasters its job is to deliver programmes to audiences, rather than audience eyeballs to advertisers.
In order to receive television broadcasts in the UK it's necessary to have a television licence (see the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949 for details - in the old days you needed a licence for a radio as well, but no more). This isn't a tax, and the BBC isn't funded out of general taxation - it's a simple deal that if you want to watch television, you need a TV licence. The money from the TV licence goes to the BBC. In addition, the BBC makes a lot of money from the sale of programmes overseas and from various other commercial enterprises (magazines, DVDs, whatever). This money goes back into the BBC - there aren't any shareholders to be paid, just more programmes to be made.
If you ask me, just under a tenner a month is a bargain for what it means - some of the best quality television in the world, a bunch of excellent radio stations and value-added stuff like news.bbc.co.uk. And what the TV licence means most of all is that all this stuff goes out without commercials and without commercial or political considerations. The BBC's editorial independence regularly lands it in hot water with governments who don't like it broadcasting certain things ("Maggie's Militant Tendency", the whole Hutton business). There's a lot of stuff which would never have appeared anywhere else as the BBC can actually take risks rather than just always following the path of maximum guaranteed commercial gain.
Having recently taken a trip to the USA and tried watching television there, I really started to appreciate just how important the BBC is. Bite-size chunks of advertiser-friendly blandovision split up into five minute segments interspersed with huge amounts of commercials don't seem to educate, entertain and inform very much.
Ultimately, nobody is forcing you to pay the television licence fee unless you have a television. If you don't want to have to get a licence, the choice to not own a television is available to you!
Well, I know there's no such thing as more-or-less legal, there's just "things you're less likely to get sued for".
I actually got something wrong in my followup - it's *not* legal, AFAIK, to record stuff off the radio in the UK, especially rebroadcast music, for the purpose of building up your record collection. My bad. This would kind of make this illegal again, but I think we've played enough "Is!" "Is not!" "Is too!" ping-pong on this one.
Anyway. IANAL. Then again, hardly anyone here is.
And followup heavily overrated because, let me say this once again:
UNITED STATES LAW DOES NOT APPLY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
I am in the United Kingdom. Please stop making assumptions that everyone is in America or that the US Congress and the RIAA somehow write copyright law for the whole world. Because they don't.
For what it's worth, my understanding is that recording programmes *in the UK* is more-or-less legal if it's for the purpose of personal use or for convenience in watching/listening at a later date. I don't believe you're entitled to make copies of broadcast works for any other purpose.
Of course, the fact that nobody's going to sue you for recording EastEnders and keeping it for your own use means that the law's pretty well unenforced unless people start taking the piss (i.e. recording stuff off the television and selling copies on eBay)
For starters, I'm in the UK, so what the various Associations of America say has relatively little impact in my mind. Secondly, you seem to be missing the fairly simple point that *ideology* is not necessarily the same as *legality* - in your ideological world this may be legal, but in the real world it's most likely that laws are being broken somewhere, even if it's only on a technicality.
Something which is illegal *on a technicality* is still illegal, and some people thinking something *should* be legal doesn't necessarily make it instantly so. This story was about the legality or otherwise of a particular music download site, and therefore is something that's governed by facts rather than being an ideological matter.
Your ideology has little to do with the law *as it stands now*. So don't tell me I've been brainwashed, when it's pretty obvious that your thinking is pretty closed as well.
..then it probably is, and that's why I treat these claims with a hefty degree of scepticism. Let's look at a few points:
If they claim they're legal because "we're licensed as if we were broadcasting the material", then as far as I understand you have no right to make or keep a recording of anything they might broadcast. Broadcasting is "we broadcast it and you listen", and there's no automatic right to tape records off the radio.
It's highly possible that the reason they haven't been closed down is that taking legal action against shady Russian entities is extremely difficult at the best of times.
If they're interested in people uploading stuff *to* them in exchange for download rights, then the legitimacy of their source material seems doubtful.
Ultimately, applying Occam's razor to this story makes me wonder that if it's so spotlessly legal, why isn't everyone setting up stores like this on Russian territory?
Anyway, something here smells sufficiently fishy for me to be extremely sceptical of the wisdom of giving them money.
Commercial doesn't necessarily equal evil. If commercial means "having the money to implement things we think are cool in interesting ways without having to scrape around", that's a good thing. If, for instance, Google were having to go to venture capitalists to raise the funding to develop Gmail, development would be primarily driven by commercial concerns and interfered with by investors wanting to maximise return rather than the way it's being done, which seems to be to be more or less a drive to Do The Right Thing. If investors were clamouring for a return on their investment, you can bet Gmail would be being rushed into full service right now rather than going through a good long testing and shakedown period for making sure everything works the way it should.
However, in the long term Google ain't a charity and all of the staff and system resources needed to provide the search engine, Google News and Gmail have to be paid for somehow. If the least obnoxious way of doing that is via Google's fairly unobnoxious and much-less-evil-than-many-others approach to inline advertising, that's fine with me.
If Google do go public then they'll have to be very careful to make sure they keep the freedom they have at the moment - but it seems to work so well right now that any shareholder demanding changes for the sake of changes would be a fool.
I've written a few thoughts on my initial impressions of Gmail. Not much that hasn't been said before, but hey, it's another data point.
In summary - WHOA, keyboard shortcuts!
Just to be clear, I was following up to a followup to the original query, which people might have missed. *That* was accusing the BBC of being anti-US (for no readily apparent reason, as if anyone's read the story quoted it's just reporting the facts, not editorialising)
Hoo, looks like someone's spouting what they've been fed by right-wing commentators..
It's on the verge of libellous to suggest that the BBC is deliberately and routinely biased against the US. I presume that you've never analysed the news coverage which is presented to you in any kind of critical way, or you'd figure out that "loving to trash the US" means something completely different to "reports both sides of a story rather than automatically following some kind of uncritical "Whoop, go US! U-S-A! We rule!" stance. The latter stance is the point of view of the Fox Newses of this world.
Bias is in the eye of the beholder. During the Iraq war the BBC was angrily accused of bias by both anti-war activists and pro-war folk like the government. If you're being accused of bias by people on both sides of an argument, you're doing pretty well.
The recent hoohah that led to the resignation of both the Chairman and Director-General of the Beeb resulted from one point in a live discussion between a presenter and a journalist that was broadcast at 0607 one morning and never repeated. That point was found to be untrue (heh, well, technically untrue) and top people in the BBC resigned. Doesn't sound like systematic bias to me.
(What moderator decided the post I'm replying to was "Insightful"? Yeesh.. if unsubstantiated regurgitated sniping counts as insight..)
I'll certainly answer the question. No, VNC wouldn't be a suitable replacement because from what I remember, VNC can only display entire desktops rather than, say, a single xterm or an instance of XEmacs. The great thing about X is that you can ssh -X to a remote machine, xterm & and it'll work without having to start an entire managed desktop session at the other end.
It's been a while since I touched VNC, so I'm happy to be proved wrong, but as far as I know you can't do that with VNC.
It's interesting that you choose X extensions as the primary thing to bang on. It could be argued that X extensions are somewhat akin to kernel modules, but I don't see huge numbers of people clamouring for a return to the days when all your device drivers had to be built and linked specifically into the kernel rather than dynamically loaded on demand when they were needed. My Linux boxes here need 20+ kernel modules to work properly, so how do X extensions differ? Yes, some of them are pretty much bags hung on the side, but the core functionality of X is still available without, well, nearly all of them.
Oh, and plenty of people still display X applications remotely. Have you set foot in any universities recently? Plenty of sites have central UNIX hosts available for people to run stuff on and display via their PC or whatever, because not everybody can have (or indeed wants) a UNIX box on their desk.
Finally, X has one thing going for it above all else at the moment - ubiquity. You can get an X server to run on more or less everything. Pipedreams about single-handedly replacing X are fine if you assume that every machine using X is a desktop Linux box, but when you take all those old VMS machines, PCs running eXceed, Suns, HP/UX boxes, and the zillions of weird applications that would still need to work properly across a wide variety of platforms, it's definitely more than "simply replacing X". You're talking about something that's more or less on the scale of replacing TCP/IP, and I don't see many people casually announcing that they're going to do that as a final year project.
I don't know if anyone bothered reading anything other than the pull-quotes before getting all huffy, or indeed if the story's been changed since release, but in the next paragraph it goes on to clearly say that there's no proof.
Additionally, it goes on further to say how well Linux has been doing recently in the server market.
Anyone who thinks that there is *no* possibility of *any* link between some Linux zealot with a screw loose and a grudge against SCO and MyDoom is in denial. It's one of many theories, but it's certainly a plausible theory.
I believe that the Northumbria story there is number 306 in the list of "names which former polytechnics considered but which turned out to be a bit rude when abbreviated, tee hee". There's more of those than there are ex-poly universities in the UK, and I don't think any student of these matters would consider any of them to be more than urban legend. Let me guess, a friend told you that they'd heard that...?
Hey, be fair - Ford's 60, not 90, and in physical good nick. There's plenty of life in the old dog yet, although it does seem slightly bizarre to be doing film 4 now rather than several years ago. Perhaps it would be wise to cut back a bit on the acrobatics and write a plot that's suited to an older, wiser Indy (and if it's set in the 1950s, Indy will have aged about as much as Ford has since the Last Crusade), but writing people off just because they're nearly old enough to collect their pension's a bit unfair.
And hey, Ford now is about two years older than Roger Moore was when he last played James Bond in 1987.
It's all a matter of datum, I think. I've been down to Greenwich with a GPS-12 and stood on the line, and it was shown as being just slightly off. Maybe 13 seconds or something -- can't remember, as my GPS with the waypoints concerned is at home.
The GPS displayed zero about 30m west of the line. Of course, this might all just be a matter of measurement accuracy, and a matter of the datum in use. Not enough of a difference to worry about, anyway...