Yes. And other things they lacked were passports (several of the convicted men), plane tickets and a bomb. That's to say they were capable of entering an airport but had no chance of even checking in luggage, let alone enetering the departure area or boarding a plane. Their claim was that they intended to create small explosions in airports as a political act or protest. That claim seems more inline with the evidence to me, but I didn't look into it in any detail. I expect that if they had not been Muslims they might have got charged with lesser offences, and probably only faced one trial, not two. We have a new justice system. If, after being held without charge for en extended period, then charged with offences whose details are not revealed to you, with testimony for the prosecution made anonymously, with evidence available to the prosecution that is witheld from the defence, with some sessions of the court held in secret.....if after all that a jury fails to convict you...well the government starts over and has another shot. This is an example of our high state of civilisation and fearless honesty, one of the reasons we are able to assume the moral high ground and subvert, sanction and attack other sovereign nations who pose no threat to us (unless disparaging words are considered a threat). It has nothing to do with oil, or with dividing potential opposition to other policies and accommodations made with other countries in the region. That would be a ridiculous thing to assert.
"ou, sir, are the biggest fucking idiot I have met all day.
It doesn't dupe FF, IE, or Chrome. It displays web pages."
It seems you didn't visit your parents today.
At no point have I suggested it's a dupe of any of the graphical browsers. If you want to believe that's what I wrote so you can sound off like an asshole the morning after curry night...that's your problem. Meanwhile there's the plain text right above, easily understood.
There are other browsers whose only mission is to display web pages, it's hardly a new idea. There are console browsers, framebuffer browsers, ncurses browsers, webkit backends, gecko backends, browsers from the school of emacs and from the school of vi, even one modeled on the modus operandi of the text editor ed. Nothing about Uzbl is a new idea, only the hype is new. The www has been around a long time now and so have all the ideas in Uzbl.
It's all been done before and once the novelty and hype has worn off there's nothing there you couldn't already have been using for years.
"The guy had an itch and he scratched it, there is nothing wrong in that. Not everything that is made has to be useful."
That's true, and so is the fact that Uzbl is about as attractive and useful as a dirty stranger scratching an itch.
A www browser controlled by vim-like key bindings? Well that isn't unique, there are other browsers which do that already, in fact you can do that even with Firefox or Opera, as well as some of the console based browsers. It's the kind of throwback 'feature' that excites impressionable students, idiots, and people who write desperately bad distro/free software reviews where they claim they "fall in love" with "wonderful" "awesome" "elegant" "smooth" "integrated" applications and distros (visit LXer.com for acres of that kind of inane verbiage).
And the UNIX philosophy is "do one thing and do it well", not "duplicate something badly for no useful purpose" (c'mon, everyone knows that's the Arch philosophy).
Actually you're more likely to get something much worse, that is a hidden recovery partition. It consumes disk space, a lot of it in the case of Vista or 7. My Acer (Vista) desktop's was 20GB (on a 160GB disk), and no DVD available. My Father's Toshiba laptop (Vista) has a hidden 40GB (!) (on a 320GB disk) restore partition, and no DVD supplied (availability I don't know about...maybe Toshiba aren't such dicks as Acer, maybe they are)....you know how the OEMs like to put as much performance sapping shit as possible on a new install, as well as time-expiry demos and whatever ad-filled shite was available to them? Well they insist it all must be restored on a recovery as well.
A restore DVD looks like a genuinely useful feature next to a recovery partition, almost as good as an install CD. I called Acer to request a restore DVD so I could actually use the 20GB for my data and they absolutely refused. I was asking to purchase one, not trying to get something gratis.
Well anyway I wiped the recovery partition because I need the disk space and prefer to run Debian. The Debian install consumes an entire 4GB of disk space even with numerous applications installed. / is on a 12GB partition so I gained 28GB of space for data by removing Vista (20GB)and recovery space (20GB). I had wanted the restore disk so I could restore the system to new if I ever want to sell it. But now some time has passed I realise that having Vista installed may not be such a compelling feature at sale time anyway.....
I did use paragraphs but what I forgot to do was set formatting to plain text:-)
USA based Best Buy is somewhat unrepresentative of what the other 95% (!) of the world might buy. Looking at stores here so I can make an equally anecdotal and parochial assertion, I find that many new PCs are still sold with only 2GB RAM, many even with 1GB. These are the boring machines which most people buy and use at home, or have in their place of work.
There is one great reason to support 32-bit...the fact that most consumer/office PCs in use are still 32-bit hardware;-)
Even on 64-bit hardware if you don't have much RAM, i.e. 2GB or less (that's still almost every consumer/office computer sold) then it probably makes more sense to run a 32-bit OS. The trend for more compact PCs means that it isn't necessarily simple to add another stick of RAM. To do so on my budget desktop machine would entail removing the HDD, the DVD-RW to get to the RAM. Removing the HDD and DVD-RW means removing the CPU heatsink and fan because it's all crammed in so tight. This is way past what most people are able to do, and the machine is quite typical of the small, quiet PCs people buy these days.
There is still extremely widely used software which is offered only in the form of 32-bit executables and if it also needs to be run under an emulator then the cost of a 32-bit compatibility library+OS/API emulation is usually very crappy performance.
And many hardware and software vendors are simply lazy and slow. They offer a Win32.exe, and maybe an x86 rpm and a deb and that's it. Whether it's a driver or a crucial piece of software they effectively limit the end user's ability to choose 64-bit. And how about all the old ancillary devices which will *never* have a Windows or Apple 64-bit driver? Throw out your scanners, old printer, copier and so on. And good luck with all those personal music players which are not USB compliant and need a vendor supplied driver....that's many millions of devices which people use every day.
Actually this is one area where MS could make a huge positive difference because if they make 64-bit Windows 7 ubiquitous then the pressure is very much on all the 3rd party software and hardware suppliers to keep up, or lose sales. I notice that every boxed sale of Windows 7 will include both 32-bit and 64-bit editions so that's a start in pushing a large number of not very interested consumers to make a better choice very easily (I'm assuming people will actually choose to buy Windows 7, unlike Vista).
Meanwhile GNU/Linux seems the best choice for desktop 64-bit at the moment for desktop use because all the free software is by definition ready and available, as well as Adobe Flash and proprietary graphics drivers from Nvidia and ATI. 32-bit compatibility is also good and fairly close to being a non-issue....almost there. I've no experience of the latest OS X but it seems like Apple have put an awful lot of effort into making 64-bit OS on 64-bit hardware the default choice, and are taking the opportunity to have many users switch via the latest upgrade. Clearly they are looking at a 64-bit only environment long term. MS as usual are moving more slowly.
The OP finds that battery life is poor using Ubuntu but then asserts battery life is poor in free operating systems in general. Spot the elementary mistake...err..that's the mistake of logic, not the choice of OS ha ha ha
Yes the kernel will be tickless by default but that's not really worth anything when multiple services are (in effect) polling continuosly....the wireless never sleeps, the bluetooth never sleeps, the metasearch crawler never sleeps, the CPU and disk are constantly busy...and battery life is woeful...surprise. Ubuntu with its Compiz UI would be better compared to Vista than XP because they are both (Ubuntu and Vista) intrinsically resource hungry. If good battery life is a priority then XP or a distro without all the UI candy and make for a much better choice. Plain old Debian with Gnome or KDE (or Xfce if composited desktop and nice transparency is required) will fare much better than Ubuntu every time, will have better performance all around and has the added benefit of negating the need to ever visit the truly dire Ubuntu Forums.
I'm interested to see what the net will be like if/when the legislators and lobbyists get their way it's no longer possible to make bit for bit perfect copies of everything out there. Maybe I missed something along the way but I thought that was what digital technology was *for*. Meanwhile governments and businesses expend huge efforts in creating doomed-to-fail/annoy/explode-in-your-face legislation, preventing access and blindly obstructing the core function of the whole endeavour. Maybe they should just switch it off and we'll all go back to vinyl LPs, VHS video, paper books, cable TV, electric typewriters, fax machines and non-networked computing? And if they can't switch it off then they need to learn to live with it. It's like not liking water being wet and also being determined to fix it...
"Byng's execution was satirized by Voltaire in his novel Candide. In Portsmouth, Candide witnesses the execution of an officer by firing squad; and is told that "in this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others" (Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres)."
Hard to believe but the article show there are *still* 'analysts' who despite having not even the first idea what the GPL asserts, get their opinions into these kinds of articles.
From TFA:
"To force the free distribution of source code, the GPL requires publishers to place the source code on the disk they distribute their applications on. Under GPL, "you've got to give it away for free, and you've got to give the source code away for free as well," says analyst Kiewe."
Yes, and the moon is made of cheese and bad things don't happen to good people.
Published: April 15 2005 03:00 | Last updated: April 15 2005 03:00
IBM is to bring Big Brother to the roads of the United Arab Emirates via a$125m contract to fit surveillance "black boxes" in the country's cars, whose drivers are among the world's worst.
The technology developed for the deal, believed to be the largest in the telematics sector to date, marks the first substantive step towards a future when all drivers, anywhere, will be monitored continuously, in real time, by on-board sensor systems which continuously assess cars' speed and whether they are being driven erratically or dangerously.
IBM said last night the four-year deal provided for "tens of thousands" of the units to be fitted to cars in the UAE, where, despite there being only 2m drivers, one person is injured every two hours and killed every 15 hours.
Similar in concept to the black boxes found in aircraft, the new telematics device combines microprocessors with advanced global positioning satellite (GPS) tracking and other wireless communications to capture, analyse and deliver data via a wireless network to the UAE's Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.
The device is so advanced that it can monitor the speed of the moving vehicle and compare it to the defined speed limit on each street. If the car exceeds the limit, the device sends out a warning message to the driver.
"With these new devices we expect to see a substantial decrease in the number of traffic accidents and violations," said Dr Tayeb Kamali, chief executive of the UAE agency which has commissioned the technol ogy. "The data we collect - faster, more effectively - will help with speed detection, emergency cases, navigation and traffic management," he added.
Trials of GPS-monitored speed sensing systems have already begun in the Netherlands and several other EU countries but so far there has been no attempt to extend the technology to cover other forms of bad driving."
If you bought a new car in the last couple of years in UAE then you're lucky, your govt loves and protects you (from yourself).
Yes am sure:-) It's there to make your brain scream when you drive too fast. I was fairly amazed by it....had just arrived, my partner was living there and picked me up from the airport when this big SUV came screaming past with music *blasting* and an amazing and very non-musical noise accompanied it. She explained what it was, I didn't believe her so she put her foot down and gave me a demo. I'd been living in Bangkok before so for a noise to surprise me it really had to have an impact. Like someone else said, the locals seem to view it as a hint to turn the music up even louder (if possible).....funny place....drive like total psychopaths, get impatient and angry, honk the horn way too much, but if they see a woman waiting to cross the road they are courteous and slow down and let her cross (and not just the pretty ones). Personally I think everyone needs to relax and have a beer....
This happens but I've also met people in India who came back with good amounts saved. I met a tractor parts supplier who set up his business from the money he made in UAE (construction) and a man running a trucking company (had worked a long time as a driver in UAE), same story, so it can't be happening to everyone. One unfortunate social phenomenon is Indian workers coming home from the middle east with more money than would ever have been possible if they had stayed at home, and then deciding they now make a much better marriage prospect, even if already married....the current wife is abandoned.
tor can be blocked if you can stop the initial connection to a tor node or can block tor's directory servers. This is something like playing whack-a-mole but it can be done and was in the past. I haven't been in UAE for a couple of years so perhaps they got bored of chasing their own tails. The other approach for a govt to take is to run tor exit nodes themselves and capture the traffic as it exits unencrypted, which doesn't give you both sides of an exchange but does give you a nice starting point for identifying interesting people. That's what a well resourced govt would do and the UAE is certainly not short of resources.
Google Talk isn't encrypted by default, the end user has to take care of this themselves. It will be interesting to see how censoring governments respond when Google releases Google Talk with encrypted calls and messaging.
Sometimes tor works, sometimes not. Sometimes p2p networks are acessible, sometimes not. Why is Skype and other internet telephony forbidden? It gives users access to encrypted communication and threatens Etisilat's monopolistic pricing. Why does the Blackberry get a UAE specific update? To disallow encrypted communication. I can't work out why flickr is blocked....
Why do foreigners live there? Generous salaries and no tax. I'm not sure many people want to set up home permanently but if you can work there for a higher salary than at home, pay no tax, get generous benefits (health, a house etc) then in 5 or 10 years you can have saved a really big pile. For workers from India, Pakistan, Philipines etc there aren't the generous benefits and nice accommodation but they can make a lot more than at home especially if they are skilled. They can go home at the end of their contract and buy a home or set up a business, pay off their family's debts etc. For them it beats a life of guaranteed breadline existence.
If you have a new car (purchased in the last 2 years) it has a tracker in the license plate. I know this is true in Dubai, it may be different in other emirates. You will get in some deep trouble if the license plates are not affixed properly or appear to have been tampered with. You can see traffic accidents where the cops arrive, check the license plates are affixed and in order (on the right vehicle) and then their work is done and they leave. Same for the speed siren (maybe siren isn't the best term but when it's going at full volume it's impressive...can be heard very loudly from inside other cars...all mobile with windows up and aircon on)....it starts of as a gentle reminder and gets louder and louder and louder....
I hadn't mentioned homosexuality and I don't equate sex outside of marriage with homosexuality (necessarily).
Adultery = prison in UAE.
Dubai is liberal only compared to states where full sharia law is practised. If you're a foreigner or a local who dresses western style yes you can drink alcohol and if you're on a tourist visa you can share a hotel room with your partner without being married. If you're local or have a resident visa then you had better be very careful about your private life and keep it extremely private, even secret if you sleep with anyone other than your spouse. You'll notice that nobody in local dress is ever seen drinking alcohol. They won't be served and may have a lot of explaining to do. Similarly at the duty free shops and on UAE airlines an Arab won't get a drink unless in western clothes. It's a distinctly odd place where appearance is everything. You can *kind of* do as you please as long as you're furtive and don't embarrass anyone or do anything unconventional publicly. This 'freedom' doesn't extend to expressing yourself freely or to accessing uncensored tv, radio, or internet.
Yes it's so progressive that every new car comes with a tracking device built in so the govt always knows where you're driving. It also knows when you go to fast. They have this amzing system whereby if you drive over the speed limit a siren sounds in your car and gets louder and louder until you slow down to within the limit. Driving around Dubai you'll be passed by speeding cars with a terrible wailing siren sounding out over the terrible bass heavy music. These drivers are Emiratis, locals (70% of the population is foreign workers). They won't have to pay the fine so as long as they can stand the noise they'll drive as fast as they like. It's a bizarre phenomenon.
It's absolutely no surprise that the state monopoly telco would also like access to all your communications whatever device you use. Skype is banned, and tor is blocked and using any privacy enhancing encryption leads not to the unfettered web but to the court house.
Also progressive: jail time for sex outside of marriage, deportation with no notice if your boss withdraws your work permit and so on. I guess it looks progressive next to Saudi, but mostly it isn't progressive, only rich.
I think it's worth mentioning that the US's DMCA doesn't discriminate as to the *purpose* of circumvention of copy protection, the *act* of circumvention is in itself an offence (the merits of this approach are clearly debatable, but that is the US law as it stands. It even applies to/. posters).
In the UK if the legislation is in respect of circumvention *only* for the purpose of copying copyrighted works then the UK law has been broken, because under UK law these reproductions *are* copyrighted. So whether one considers the act to have occurred in the US (where the person was physically) *or* in the UK (where the server is) the law has been transgressed.
What really stinks, and imo is more important, is that the NPG was already in talks with Wikimedia to come to a mutually acceptable solution but this twit has probably torpedoed it and killed any existing goodwill and stifled any immediate prospect of friendly cooperation. He struck huge blow(hard) for freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't endorse anything, didn't claim they weren't engaged in terrorism (or criminal activity) and I didn't mention America.
Yes. And other things they lacked were passports (several of the convicted men), plane tickets and a bomb. That's to say they were capable of entering an airport but had no chance of even checking in luggage, let alone enetering the departure area or boarding a plane. Their claim was that they intended to create small explosions in airports as a political act or protest. That claim seems more inline with the evidence to me, but I didn't look into it in any detail. I expect that if they had not been Muslims they might have got charged with lesser offences, and probably only faced one trial, not two. We have a new justice system. If, after being held without charge for en extended period, then charged with offences whose details are not revealed to you, with testimony for the prosecution made anonymously, with evidence available to the prosecution that is witheld from the defence, with some sessions of the court held in secret.....if after all that a jury fails to convict you...well the government starts over and has another shot. This is an example of our high state of civilisation and fearless honesty, one of the reasons we are able to assume the moral high ground and subvert, sanction and attack other sovereign nations who pose no threat to us (unless disparaging words are considered a threat). It has nothing to do with oil, or with dividing potential opposition to other policies and accommodations made with other countries in the region. That would be a ridiculous thing to assert.
Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
A highly configurable browser? Wow that's new. Hey it even let's you decide what to do with cookies! Fucking amazing.
"ou, sir, are the biggest fucking idiot I have met all day.
It doesn't dupe FF, IE, or Chrome. It displays web pages."
It seems you didn't visit your parents today.
At no point have I suggested it's a dupe of any of the graphical browsers. If you want to believe that's what I wrote so you can sound off like an asshole the morning after curry night...that's your problem. Meanwhile there's the plain text right above, easily understood.
There are other browsers whose only mission is to display web pages, it's hardly a new idea. There are console browsers, framebuffer browsers, ncurses browsers, webkit backends, gecko backends, browsers from the school of emacs and from the school of vi, even one modeled on the modus operandi of the text editor ed. Nothing about Uzbl is a new idea, only the hype is new. The www has been around a long time now and so have all the ideas in Uzbl.
It's all been done before and once the novelty and hype has worn off there's nothing there you couldn't already have been using for years.
"The guy had an itch and he scratched it, there is nothing wrong in that. Not everything that is made has to be useful."
That's true, and so is the fact that Uzbl is about as attractive and useful as a dirty stranger scratching an itch.
A www browser controlled by vim-like key bindings? Well that isn't unique, there are other browsers which do that already, in fact you can do that even with Firefox or Opera, as well as some of the console based browsers. It's the kind of throwback 'feature' that excites impressionable students, idiots, and people who write desperately bad distro/free software reviews where they claim they "fall in love" with "wonderful" "awesome" "elegant" "smooth" "integrated" applications and distros (visit LXer.com for acres of that kind of inane verbiage).
And the UNIX philosophy is "do one thing and do it well", not "duplicate something badly for no useful purpose" (c'mon, everyone knows that's the Arch philosophy).
"all you get is a worthless "restore" CD"
Actually you're more likely to get something much worse, that is a hidden recovery partition. It consumes disk space, a lot of it in the case of Vista or 7. My Acer (Vista) desktop's was 20GB (on a 160GB disk), and no DVD available. My Father's Toshiba laptop (Vista) has a hidden 40GB (!) (on a 320GB disk) restore partition, and no DVD supplied (availability I don't know about...maybe Toshiba aren't such dicks as Acer, maybe they are)....you know how the OEMs like to put as much performance sapping shit as possible on a new install, as well as time-expiry demos and whatever ad-filled shite was available to them? Well they insist it all must be restored on a recovery as well.
A restore DVD looks like a genuinely useful feature next to a recovery partition, almost as good as an install CD. I called Acer to request a restore DVD so I could actually use the 20GB for my data and they absolutely refused. I was asking to purchase one, not trying to get something gratis.
Well anyway I wiped the recovery partition because I need the disk space and prefer to run Debian. The Debian install consumes an entire 4GB of disk space even with numerous applications installed. / is on a 12GB partition so I gained 28GB of space for data by removing Vista (20GB)and recovery space (20GB). I had wanted the restore disk so I could restore the system to new if I ever want to sell it. But now some time has passed I realise that having Vista installed may not be such a compelling feature at sale time anyway.....
Linux users are all albinos?
"different cultures and different ideas of truth and embellishment, etc."
I read that a few times and it keeps coming out as "Foreigners bother me and I think they are all intrinsically dishonest by virtue of being foreign."
A childhood watching The A Team? A lifetime watching Fox?
I did use paragraphs but what I forgot to do was set formatting to plain text :-)
USA based Best Buy is somewhat unrepresentative of what the other 95% (!) of the world might buy. Looking at stores here so I can make an equally anecdotal and parochial assertion, I find that many new PCs are still sold with only 2GB RAM, many even with 1GB. These are the boring machines which most people buy and use at home, or have in their place of work.
There is one great reason to support 32-bit...the fact that most consumer/office PCs in use are still 32-bit hardware ;-)
Even on 64-bit hardware if you don't have much RAM, i.e. 2GB or less (that's still almost every consumer/office computer sold) then it probably makes more sense to run a 32-bit OS. The trend for more compact PCs means that it isn't necessarily simple to add another stick of RAM. To do so on my budget desktop machine would entail removing the HDD, the DVD-RW to get to the RAM. Removing the HDD and DVD-RW means removing the CPU heatsink and fan because it's all crammed in so tight. This is way past what most people are able to do, and the machine is quite typical of the small, quiet PCs people buy these days.
There is still extremely widely used software which is offered only in the form of 32-bit executables and if it also needs to be run under an emulator then the cost of a 32-bit compatibility library+OS/API emulation is usually very crappy performance.
And many hardware and software vendors are simply lazy and slow. They offer a Win32.exe, and maybe an x86 rpm and a deb and that's it. Whether it's a driver or a crucial piece of software they effectively limit the end user's ability to choose 64-bit. And how about all the old ancillary devices which will *never* have a Windows or Apple 64-bit driver? Throw out your scanners, old printer, copier and so on. And good luck with all those personal music players which are not USB compliant and need a vendor supplied driver....that's many millions of devices which people use every day.
Actually this is one area where MS could make a huge positive difference because if they make 64-bit Windows 7 ubiquitous then the pressure is very much on all the 3rd party software and hardware suppliers to keep up, or lose sales. I notice that every boxed sale of Windows 7 will include both 32-bit and 64-bit editions so that's a start in pushing a large number of not very interested consumers to make a better choice very easily (I'm assuming people will actually choose to buy Windows 7, unlike Vista).
Meanwhile GNU/Linux seems the best choice for desktop 64-bit at the moment for desktop use because all the free software is by definition ready and available, as well as Adobe Flash and proprietary graphics drivers from Nvidia and ATI. 32-bit compatibility is also good and fairly close to being a non-issue....almost there. I've no experience of the latest OS X but it seems like Apple have put an awful lot of effort into making 64-bit OS on 64-bit hardware the default choice, and are taking the opportunity to have many users switch via the latest upgrade. Clearly they are looking at a 64-bit only environment long term. MS as usual are moving more slowly.
The OP finds that battery life is poor using Ubuntu but then asserts battery life is poor in free operating systems in general. Spot the elementary mistake...err..that's the mistake of logic, not the choice of OS ha ha ha
Yes the kernel will be tickless by default but that's not really worth anything when multiple services are (in effect) polling continuosly....the wireless never sleeps, the bluetooth never sleeps, the metasearch crawler never sleeps, the CPU and disk are constantly busy...and battery life is woeful...surprise. Ubuntu with its Compiz UI would be better compared to Vista than XP because they are both (Ubuntu and Vista) intrinsically resource hungry. If good battery life is a priority then XP or a distro without all the UI candy and make for a much better choice. Plain old Debian with Gnome or KDE (or Xfce if composited desktop and nice transparency is required) will fare much better than Ubuntu every time, will have better performance all around and has the added benefit of negating the need to ever visit the truly dire Ubuntu Forums.
I'm interested to see what the net will be like if/when the legislators and lobbyists get their way it's no longer possible to make bit for bit perfect copies of everything out there. Maybe I missed something along the way but I thought that was what digital technology was *for*. Meanwhile governments and businesses expend huge efforts in creating doomed-to-fail/annoy/explode-in-your-face legislation, preventing access and blindly obstructing the core function of the whole endeavour. Maybe they should just switch it off and we'll all go back to vinyl LPs, VHS video, paper books, cable TV, electric typewriters, fax machines and non-networked computing? And if they can't switch it off then they need to learn to live with it. It's like not liking water being wet and also being determined to fix it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pour_encourager_les_autres
"Byng's execution was satirized by Voltaire in his novel Candide. In Portsmouth, Candide witnesses the execution of an officer by firing squad; and is told that "in this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others" (Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres)."
Hard to believe but the article show there are *still* 'analysts' who despite having not even the first idea what the GPL asserts, get their opinions into these kinds of articles.
From TFA:
"To force the free distribution of source code, the GPL requires publishers to place the source code on the disk they distribute their applications on. Under GPL, "you've got to give it away for free, and you've got to give the source code away for free as well," says analyst Kiewe."
Yes, and the moon is made of cheese and bad things don't happen to good people.
News Just In:
2nd hand gossip about unverified phone conversation to unknown persons passes for news at slashdot...oh wait...
"http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/321ffaf8-ad4b-11d9-ad92-00000e2511c8.html?nclick_check=1"
"Big Brother set to monitor UAE drivers
By John Griffiths in London
Published: April 15 2005 03:00 | Last updated: April 15 2005 03:00
IBM is to bring Big Brother to the roads of the United Arab Emirates via a$125m contract to fit surveillance "black boxes" in the country's cars, whose drivers are among the world's worst.
The technology developed for the deal, believed to be the largest in the telematics sector to date, marks the first substantive step towards a future when all drivers, anywhere, will be monitored continuously, in real time, by on-board sensor systems which continuously assess cars' speed and whether they are being driven erratically or dangerously.
IBM said last night the four-year deal provided for "tens of thousands" of the units to be fitted to cars in the UAE, where, despite there being only 2m drivers, one person is injured every two hours and killed every 15 hours.
Similar in concept to the black boxes found in aircraft, the new telematics device combines microprocessors with advanced global positioning satellite (GPS) tracking and other wireless communications to capture, analyse and deliver data via a wireless network to the UAE's Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.
The device is so advanced that it can monitor the speed of the moving vehicle and compare it to the defined speed limit on each street. If the car exceeds the limit, the device sends out a warning message to the driver.
"With these new devices we expect to see a substantial decrease in the number of traffic accidents and violations," said Dr Tayeb Kamali, chief executive of the UAE agency which has commissioned the technol ogy. "The data we collect - faster, more effectively - will help with speed detection, emergency cases, navigation and traffic management," he added.
Trials of GPS-monitored speed sensing systems have already begun in the Netherlands and several other EU countries but so far there has been no attempt to extend the technology to cover other forms of bad driving."
If you bought a new car in the last couple of years in UAE then you're lucky, your govt loves and protects you (from yourself).
Yes am sure :-) It's there to make your brain scream when you drive too fast. I was fairly amazed by it....had just arrived, my partner was living there and picked me up from the airport when this big SUV came screaming past with music *blasting* and an amazing and very non-musical noise accompanied it. She explained what it was, I didn't believe her so she put her foot down and gave me a demo. I'd been living in Bangkok before so for a noise to surprise me it really had to have an impact. Like someone else said, the locals seem to view it as a hint to turn the music up even louder (if possible).....funny place....drive like total psychopaths, get impatient and angry, honk the horn way too much, but if they see a woman waiting to cross the road they are courteous and slow down and let her cross (and not just the pretty ones). Personally I think everyone needs to relax and have a beer....
This happens but I've also met people in India who came back with good amounts saved. I met a tractor parts supplier who set up his business from the money he made in UAE (construction) and a man running a trucking company (had worked a long time as a driver in UAE), same story, so it can't be happening to everyone. One unfortunate social phenomenon is Indian workers coming home from the middle east with more money than would ever have been possible if they had stayed at home, and then deciding they now make a much better marriage prospect, even if already married....the current wife is abandoned.
tor can be blocked if you can stop the initial connection to a tor node or can block tor's directory servers. This is something like playing whack-a-mole but it can be done and was in the past. I haven't been in UAE for a couple of years so perhaps they got bored of chasing their own tails. The other approach for a govt to take is to run tor exit nodes themselves and capture the traffic as it exits unencrypted, which doesn't give you both sides of an exchange but does give you a nice starting point for identifying interesting people. That's what a well resourced govt would do and the UAE is certainly not short of resources.
Google Talk isn't encrypted by default, the end user has to take care of this themselves. It will be interesting to see how censoring governments respond when Google releases Google Talk with encrypted calls and messaging.
Sometimes tor works, sometimes not. Sometimes p2p networks are acessible, sometimes not. Why is Skype and other internet telephony forbidden? It gives users access to encrypted communication and threatens Etisilat's monopolistic pricing. Why does the Blackberry get a UAE specific update? To disallow encrypted communication. I can't work out why flickr is blocked ....
Why do foreigners live there? Generous salaries and no tax. I'm not sure many people want to set up home permanently but if you can work there for a higher salary than at home, pay no tax, get generous benefits (health, a house etc) then in 5 or 10 years you can have saved a really big pile. For workers from India, Pakistan, Philipines etc there aren't the generous benefits and nice accommodation but they can make a lot more than at home especially if they are skilled. They can go home at the end of their contract and buy a home or set up a business, pay off their family's debts etc. For them it beats a life of guaranteed breadline existence.
If you have a new car (purchased in the last 2 years) it has a tracker in the license plate. I know this is true in Dubai, it may be different in other emirates. You will get in some deep trouble if the license plates are not affixed properly or appear to have been tampered with. You can see traffic accidents where the cops arrive, check the license plates are affixed and in order (on the right vehicle) and then their work is done and they leave. Same for the speed siren (maybe siren isn't the best term but when it's going at full volume it's impressive...can be heard very loudly from inside other cars...all mobile with windows up and aircon on)....it starts of as a gentle reminder and gets louder and louder and louder....
I hadn't mentioned homosexuality and I don't equate sex outside of marriage with homosexuality (necessarily).
Adultery = prison in UAE.
Dubai is liberal only compared to states where full sharia law is practised. If you're a foreigner or a local who dresses western style yes you can drink alcohol and if you're on a tourist visa you can share a hotel room with your partner without being married. If you're local or have a resident visa then you had better be very careful about your private life and keep it extremely private, even secret if you sleep with anyone other than your spouse. You'll notice that nobody in local dress is ever seen drinking alcohol. They won't be served and may have a lot of explaining to do. Similarly at the duty free shops and on UAE airlines an Arab won't get a drink unless in western clothes. It's a distinctly odd place where appearance is everything. You can *kind of* do as you please as long as you're furtive and don't embarrass anyone or do anything unconventional publicly. This 'freedom' doesn't extend to expressing yourself freely or to accessing uncensored tv, radio, or internet.
Yes it's so progressive that every new car comes with a tracking device built in so the govt always knows where you're driving. It also knows when you go to fast. They have this amzing system whereby if you drive over the speed limit a siren sounds in your car and gets louder and louder until you slow down to within the limit. Driving around Dubai you'll be passed by speeding cars with a terrible wailing siren sounding out over the terrible bass heavy music. These drivers are Emiratis, locals (70% of the population is foreign workers). They won't have to pay the fine so as long as they can stand the noise they'll drive as fast as they like. It's a bizarre phenomenon. It's absolutely no surprise that the state monopoly telco would also like access to all your communications whatever device you use. Skype is banned, and tor is blocked and using any privacy enhancing encryption leads not to the unfettered web but to the court house. Also progressive: jail time for sex outside of marriage, deportation with no notice if your boss withdraws your work permit and so on. I guess it looks progressive next to Saudi, but mostly it isn't progressive, only rich.
I think it's worth mentioning that the US's DMCA doesn't discriminate as to the *purpose* of circumvention of copy protection, the *act* of circumvention is in itself an offence (the merits of this approach are clearly debatable, but that is the US law as it stands. It even applies to /. posters).
In the UK if the legislation is in respect of circumvention *only* for the purpose of copying copyrighted works then the UK law has been broken, because under UK law these reproductions *are* copyrighted. So whether one considers the act to have occurred in the US (where the person was physically) *or* in the UK (where the server is) the law has been transgressed.
What really stinks, and imo is more important, is that the NPG was already in talks with Wikimedia to come to a mutually acceptable solution but this twit has probably torpedoed it and killed any existing goodwill and stifled any immediate prospect of friendly cooperation. He struck huge blow(hard) for freedom.