.NET and Silverlight are not an attempt to make a better javascript, they're an attempt to tie the web so intimately to Windows that it becomes a requirement, just like IE before them.
I believe the security update will automatically prompt you to regenerate the host key (it did for me at least on ubuntu), so it shouldn't really be an issue.
If the host keys are vulnerable on a server, doesn't this just leave you open to a man in the middle attack anyway? That's not as serious as generating keys you use to login with, in which case you need to regenerate those as soon as possible. Is it possible to break into a server just by guessing the host or server keys?
As I understand it, the keys which are generated on debian/ubuntu are the ones which are affected, so depending on the source of public keys in authorized_keys, they might not be vulnerable.
The keys which are guessable for every server will be those which identify the server to clients, making it possible to do a man in the middle attack, impersonating the server (if you can guess the key and intercept a client trying to log in by poisoning DNS).
Most people will generate their keys on a local machine (which could be OS X, Linux, whatever), and upload the public one to login with, and those keys would not be vulnerable necessarily, they'd only be vulnerable if created on a debian derivative (ubuntu).
Thanks for the reference, however, that law is specifically talking about private places:
Est puni d'un an d'emprisonnement et de 45000 euros d'amende le fait, au moyen d'un procédé quelconque, volontairement de porter atteinte à l'intimité de la vie privée d'autrui : 1 En captant, enregistrant ou transmettant, sans le consentement de leur auteur, des paroles prononcées à titre privé ou confidentiel ; 2 En fixant, enregistrant ou transmettant, sans le consentement de celle-ci, l'image d'une personne se trouvant dans un lieu privé. Lorsque les actes mentionnés au présent article ont été accomplis au vu et au su des intéressés sans qu'ils s'y soient opposés, alors qu'ils étaient en mesure de le faire, le consentement de ceux-ci est présumé.
It is punishable by one year's imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros to intrude on the private life of others by any means :
1. In capturing, recording or transmitting, without the consent of their author, their words spoken in a private or confidential context; 2. In capturing, recording or transmitting, without the consent of the subject, the image of someone situated in a private place When the acts mentioned in this article have been in sight and with the knowledge of the interested parties, without any opposition from them, even though they were able to oppose it, the consent of those parties is assumed. Please forgive the rough translation.
In fact it says that you do not have the right to take or transmit pictures without people's consent when they are 'in a private place'. It doesn't say anything about public places (there may be another article of the law about that, I don't know). Like you I'm not a lawyer, but this law doesn't say what you said it does about photography in *public* places, and thus doesn't apply to google (unless they were taking pictures inside houses etc).
yes I did read it - I see you neglected to quote the most relevant part:
Taking photographs of a person in a public place would not normally be regarded as an invasion of privacy. So photographs in the street are not illegal. What would be illegal would be entering private property or taking photos of people in a situation where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy (in their back garden, inside their house, etc). Google doesn't use telephoto lenses - I suppose it's conceivable they could be asked to remove a picture of the interior of someone's property from the street (if such a thing ended up on Google Maps), but not of the street itself with people in it.
You're also wrong in the UK, the US, Australia and most other countries I can think of, unless by 'claim offence' you mean they can claim they were offended rather than seek legal remedy. What sources exactly have you based your opinion on?
Here's a few of links explaining the situation in the UK, Australia and US for photography of people in public places :
In most countries, it is legal to take and sell photos of people without their consent in a public place - otherwise it would be practically impossible to take pictures anywhere. What you're not allowed to do is to sell them for use in advertising, to endorse products or services etc. without the consent of the people involved (model release).
I'm not aware of the specific laws in France, it just seems to me that these picture agencies would have thoroughly investigated that before selling pictures of people taken in France. It seems particularly absurd to pic on google in this case, given all the other examples of public photography available. However the rules as quoted in the summary would outlaw tourists taking any pictures too - that seems unlikely in the extreme.
Since the google pics are not used to advertise a product or service (the people are in fact really incidental), they should be safe.
The case you're talking about took and used a photo for advertising, to endorse a product, and hence was illegal.
If this were true then it would be illegal to take a photograph in a public place in France with any people in it. Just considering professional photographers alone, that makes thousands of offenders a year.
There are over 5000 infringing photographs of people in France on Corbis if you search for 'crowd france'.
Not even if that 'culture' is responsible for the brutal treatment of the majority of the population, all the while enriching the leaders? I'm sure that's what you've heard on Chinese news, but is it all true, or is some perhaps exaggerated?
It's all the same country to these people, so they go where the work is (and there's lots to be had in Tibet now the railway is open). Do you know many Tibetans? Do they think it's the same country?
Funny, we get plenty of news about it here. For certain values of news. You certainly sound like you've been fed a lot of propaganda about the evil west, given your comments about the BBC etc. They are sometimes incompetent, but not usually misleading or particularly biased.
You think people weren't *terrified* by the protests/etc even likely to the point where they decided not to carry the torch? No. And debasing the terms in an attempt to render discussion meaningless is not debate, it's sophistry. Terrorism is illegal for good reasons, public protest (which sometimes verges on violence) is not, for equally good reasons.
They were tolerated in Tibet and in Tiananmen square until things got violent. Do you believe that protests in Tiananmen square were violent initially? Do you believe you have the right to form another political party in China, or to protest in the streets against the PRC (not just about economic grievances, about political ones)? I'd be interested to know specifically what you think is wrong with western coverage of that event. From the news I saw at the time, the protests were peaceful until an armed crackdown by the government involving tanks (tanks against civilians!) in the centre of town.
So, you're agreeing with me then I don't view government handled visits to selected sites as access for reporters. If you do, that's fine, but to me that's worse than useless, it produces the kind of biased coverage you complain so much about.
What? Are you saying they *plan* riots? Pah, evidently I was saying they don't happen without cause, not they don't happen without forethought. I don't consider the Chinese governments claims credible no, just as I would not consider the American gov. of the 60s credible when talking about protests on its policy in Vietnam (for example). They are not a trustworthy source, particularly with the frankly ludicrous claims about a 'Dalai clique' planning it all from India and San Francisco. I'm sure Western interference is most unwelcome, and western governments would do well to look to their own hypocrisy before criticising, but that should not stifle all criticism abroad of the actions of China. There is a difference between criticising the actions of the government of China and criticising the country or people.
...and of people start burning the place down...just sit back and do nothing? You are not really reading, or considering, many of the points raised, except where they play to your image of a biased blinkered westerner. Evidently riots need to be stopped, but for them to happen there are serious underlying problems. We have race riots in the west too sometimes, and they are evidence of serious problems, not something to be ignored.
Yes, I am in China, and yes, I can see that page. Welcome to the world! Not so long ago those pages were blocked (unless by China you mean Hong Kong?). Do you discuss the Cultural Revolution in China much? If so what do you hear? What about Tiananmen square? I've only been on holiday to mainland China so remain ignorant of people's opinions there. Where are you from?
If you *are* from China the best you can do to counter western misapprehensions is to post reasoned responses on boards like this one, not rail against an enemy which doesn't really exist. Since you speak English, you would do well to stop dismissing western news sources out of hand and read some of them - they're the same mix of good, bad and indifferent you'll find in China (perhaps slightly more scope for disagreement with the gov : ), but with a very different view on the world.
Headcount has increased from 35,000 to 80,000 This is actually a very bad sign, particularly in a software company.
Ballmer really has no clue (when you hear him speak in public this is obvious), but I hope he sticks it out and stays, as Microsoft will die quicker as a result.
Try looking a little deeper (in history - as is often the case, the British and, later, the Americans that have a lot to answer for), and even at your own inbuilt bias. Like your unfounded (by you) statement saying that the movement of people is due to a government pacification project - care to provide some evidence for that? You just state it like it's obviously fact, with nothing to back it up at all. I can do that too...
Chinese treatment of Tibet is strikingly similar to British gun-boat diplomacy in China - I wouldn't condone either action. Looking at this as some kind of competition amongst nations is silly (because all nations fabricate their past, though some more than others), and western nationalism is just as deplorable as Chinese/Tibetan flavours.
As to stealth colonisation, that's difficult to get figures for because the PRC is not known for reliable statistics. If you want proof, I point you to this on the BBC website:
That article mentions the Golmud-Lhasa railway, which will be a mixed blessing for Tibet, in bringing lots of trade and lots of Chinese.
Try to look at the situation as if Tibet is part of China instead of that it isn't.
Long term, the assimilation of Tibet by China will lead to higher living standards there, but the methods used are as brutal as those used by the English in Ireland or Scotland long ago (to give another western example). To offer more prospects to a country and its people does not excuse trying to wipe out the national identity and culture. The world has moved on from an age where 'civilising' nations or minorities is an acceptable excuse for mistreating them. Given the situation, I'd expect there to be a lot of reverse migration into China, what's wrong with that?
Personally I have no opinion on whether Tibet is part of China or not (that's best left to Tibetans and Chinese), but I do mind people being mistreated and feel others should speak out on it. In Iraq, Tibet, or Burma, wherever. Monks are being forced to denounce the Dalai Lama, there's practically martial law declared, a lot of people have been arrested (far more than I'd expect for a simple riot), and no news is being allowed out of the province.
You're kidding, right? What about what happened in France? I would call that violent, for sure. It's only smart moves by officials that stopped the same from happening in other places, IMO.
That was not terrorism, and you're demeaning the term by calling low-key protests that. It wasn't even a riot, perhaps if you've seen selected clips you might think things were violent - I would note that what violence there was was from both sides in various places, not just pro-tibetan supporters. You should be thankful that such protests are allowed in many countries. From what I know (admittedly a limited amount), they would not be tolerated in China.
Not necessarily inherently, but if they're planned to terrorise, then they certainly worked and *are* terrorism.
Bullshit. You're trying to use the term because you think it has lots of emotional weight; terrorism is a paramilitary tactic, not a civilian protest, or even a civilian riot.
Reporters go there all the time. It was only *during* the riots that they couldn't go there.
Really, that's funny because the last I heard the only thing reporters were allowed to do was to go on carefully choreographed tours, where monks protested anyway (and probably suffered dearly for it). People don't riot spontaneously, and when they do there are usually profound discontents involved. Solve the discontents and you remove the reasons for rioting, try to clamp down on them and the central government will have peace for another 10 years.
The Pirate Bay cannot be accessed through the largest Danish ISP...there's some clothed child modeling, there's some regular porn, and there's some lolicon. Oh, and http://www.koreabonsai.com/ [koreabonsai.com] And how does this compare in scale and scope with widespread filtering of everyday communications and news media, and arrest of prominent bloggers like Hu Jia? People spend time in prison for political statements in China and are sometimes killed - that is not the case in Sweden.
Banning reproduction of copyright works and exploitation of children is not the same as political repression. If you had used detention without trial, unaccountable politicians and widespread surveillance in the west as examples you might have more of a case, but the west is still a long way better than China in those respects.
But James Miles was there, could report, and he had a permit. Apparently, openness is increasing! He was there anyway and was expelled shortly after the riots, and no further journalists have been allowed in. Hardly increasing openness. I actually think the games coming to China is a good thing, and will increase openness, but probably not for Tibet as the issue is too sensitive.
But we treat China that way. How can we say that Myanmar is China's problem? Presumably you don't say Myanmar is China's problem, and I certainly don't, and no one I know has, so why use 'we'? Your claims are based on faceless enemies with conveniently caricatured opinions. If you're happy arguing with the air that's fine, but if you want a discussion you should stop coming up with imaginary opponents.
They've removed lot's[sic] of sites from the Great Firewall of China, for instance the English Wikipedia, after western politicians said that a change like that would reflect well upon China. This is perhaps true, but seems unlikely frankly. Blacklists in western countries tend to be for hate speech or child pornography, which I find reasonable (though some may not). They are not comparable in scale or subject matter to those in China.
Defending it's people from ethnic cleansing [economist.com] by the Tibet people against the Han-Chinese population While preventing race riots is an admirable goal, looking at the deeper causes of this conflict is in order. Tibet has been flooded by Han in the last decade as part of a pacification project by the central government. That has understandably lead to widespread resentment there. We'll probably never know the true story because no journalists are allowed to report from that area, I wonder why?
Us Westeners sabotaging the path of the eternal fire, or not preventing Tibet terrorists from doing so, on it's way to Beijing as a way to get back at them for stopping ethnic cleansing isn't exactly helping matters - especially not when it's done by traveling across the world, just to beat up a girl in a wheelchair [wikipedia.org] - because that's usually the best way to get sympathies. 'Westerners' are not some monolithic block to be denounced as ox ghosts and snake demons, and your treatment of the subject doesn't do it justice. There have been no Tibetan terrorists active in the west (taking terrorism to mean violent action against civilians), only peaceful protest - maybe some of that got out of hand, but it's hardly more than rowdy protests. Frankly given your ill-informed comments I doubt you're from Sweden, or you'd know better. Are there even Tibetan terrorists (Race riots are not terrorism)?
To make matters worse, I know the largest Swedish newspapers publish Photoshop jobs (publishing photos of a large group of Chinese polices - but failing to include the even larger group of angry activists next to them) and pure lies (pictures of Nepalese officials treating activists badly, and claiming that they're Chinese) as proof of how evil the Chinese government is. These are not photoshop jobs, they're unwarranted editorialising (i.e. cropping out protesters) and incompetence (protests in Nepal misused), not evidence of a global conspiracy. If the Chinese government was interested in the truth, they'd open up the province to reporters and allow them to report. I find that far more interesting than any bad reporting in the west (of which there is plenty, along with the good;learn to discriminate).
After this, I have no problems seeing why one would try to limit the access for one's people to these lies - the only thing it would result in is civil war, something that is never good, and would hurt the Chinese process towards giving the people a decent standard of living, freedom of speech, and, eventually, democracy. While the Chinese people's destiny is their own problem, and I agree this intervention by US Senators is hypocritical given the problems with democratic process and a free press in that country, the Chinese government is not shielding their people from lies, and is actively encouraging xenophobia and stoking nationalism by producing some of the broad caricatures you have so ably aped in your post. The cultural revolution is not so long ago, and we're seeing the same sort of tactics again, but directed outwards toward other nations. If you believe everything you just said I'm afraid you're a pawn in a game between governments.
Shirley you can't be serious. That is the point of war. To win by killing your enemy faster than they can kill you. And there is no "good" or "bad" here. Only winner and loser. I guess it's just a question of which side you would like to be on. There is no good or bad? What? Of course there is good and bad in war, there are good wars (astonishingly few, WWII comes to mind), and there are bad wars (all the others I can think of), and there are good and evil actions within them. This tech would not 'save lives', unless you mean only of soldiers, and it's disingenuous if not downright sickening for the producers to claim otherwise. Give it to the armed 18 year olds in a war zone hyped up on adrenalin and bloodlust we usually use for armed warfare, and they'd probably use it for all kinds of unsavoury things.
Or even taking it a step further and standardizing on some kind of networked multiplayer video game so that even machines need not be destroyed, just bits in memory. This is startlingly naive; if wars could be settled by games, we would all have been playing chess instead of killing each other for the last few thousand years - that's not the way the real world works because everyone is looking for a *real world* advantage.
The problem with visions of mesh based networking taking over the world is that there is no solution to the problems of overload that a full mesh infrastructure brings - you need supernodes which have fast direct connections between them for long-distance traffic, and someone has to pay for those (at present ISPs). While in principle the internet is one big mesh and you can route around problems (a great design), in practice it works because most packets take a very direct route to another computer, say through 10 hops or so. If they went through 60-100 hops, you'd be looking at a massively slower internet. At the end of those fat pipes are modems and servers which let you talk to the internet, and someone has to pay for those (at present it's not the gov).
I think ISPs will eventually be the answer to this problem, not an obstacle. Ultimately they stand to gain from distributing routers that share the service with passing users from any other ISP (peering agreements could make it universal). Eventually we'll all live in an inter-connected cloud, and perhaps eventually the role of ISPs will change to a utility or a public monopoly, but at present they're the best hope we have for instigating something like this.
You can already see this happening with initiatives like fon and wifi networks like The Cloud. Hopefully ISPs will wise up sooner rather than later to the massive income they could achieve by micro-billing everyone instead of trying to charge loads for fixed connections.
When I walk down the streets of the city I live in, there are no less than 10 wireless access points visible almost everywhere - we already have a mesh, it's just not connected yet.
I'm sure either would do fine. Why don't you mock up a simple app in both and see which you prefer. Or take a look at this video.
Django has far more admin/auth stuff built in, so if that would be useful to you, it might have a head start. Also, do you have existing experience/skills in Ruby or Python?
Both are nicely done and both will scale with a bit of work on them or the db, despite the ranting of ignorant internet pundits.
Twitter seem to be doing a huge amount of messaging, which is unusual for a web app, so unless you're planning a clone, you probably wouldn't run up against a similar situation. I don't understand why they don't have a back end built with something like xmpp, and have the web app just talk to that.
the fact is that Zed Shaw has written solid code for Mongrel, which is pretty much the only way you can deploy a Rails application these days. Not any more - see mod_rails
1) Automated copy-n-paste is still copy-n-paste Maybe it's changed since the last time I used it, but creating a rails application COPIES a bunch of files... My applications should be 100% code I write directly. rails myapphere
creates a bunch of folders with a file structure within. The files are virtually blank, usually about 6 lines of which 4 are comments. You're probably talking about scaffolding, which is an optional step to get a CRUD interface up and running. If you don't want it, don't use it, it's deliberately minimal, and completely optional. It's quite possible to build an app without it.
2) RoR gives you the 1% that's used 10% of the time, not the 10% that's used 90% of the time....It probably saved me about 1/2 of setting things up by hand. That's simply not good enough. hmm, so it creates too many files for you, and yet it doesn't do enough, which is it?
It should be able to create an app that supports validation It can, see validates_presence_of.
sorting, filtering, searching, relationships, and css skins. Most of these are trivial until adapted for a particular app, and if you'd like them, look into examples on the web, you'll find them. The whole point of the framework is to try to stay out of the way - if you want a CMS in a box, use something like Drupal, or one of the Rails CMS attempts.
3) No UI components, which are the hardest part of web development...Rails does only a tiny amount of what it could and should. Some UI components would be nice, but it sounds like you want it to write your app for you. If you think this is important, you should start working on a widget set, or investigate those already available in HTML/javascript. Seriously.
4) It's NOT MVC The Model-View-Controller design pattern is about limiting the amount of communication necessary by having one instance of some code (the controller) that all access to data (the model) from other code (the views) goes through. This is exactly what Rails does, and if you refresh your browser, you'll see changes to the model, or if you like your app can refresh using AJAX when the model changes (if you really must have a real-time view?). Your definition is not the generally accepted one of MVC. What problem do you have that you needed this for?
5) And on the topic of "MVC", why would anyone want a framework that forces you to use MORE RESTRICTIVE urls. Can't imagine. I can imagine most people enjoying a sensible default mapping though - it's better for users and better for developers to be consitent. You can in fact organise hierarchies. What did you find impossible to do with routes.rb?
And so it should - these services cost money and to expect tax dollars to cover them 100% is not reasonable. Well, I live in a country where health and rescue services are covered 100%, and I have to say I'm glad they are, because it's more humane, *and* it's cheaper overall. If you compare general health care costs across countries the results are startling.
Figures from 2004, in USD
Health care costs per capita in the US : 6,102 Health care costs per capita in France : 3,159 Health care costs per capita in the UK : 2,508
Health care in America is more expensive because it is run on a private system, and private companies have every incentive to charge more and to investigate every possible illness. Now this means you get slightly better, or at least more extensive, treatment if you're well off or are well covered by medical insurance, but for the majority of people it means service based on your income and worrying over whether they can actually pay, and for most employers it means a heavy insurance burden. Having seen the inside of hospitals in all three countries I wouldn't say service is 3x better in the US.
Even discounting private healthcare spending, *public* health care spending in the US is actually higher than that of France or the UK, and yet visits to the doctor per capita are lower in the US than most other countries.
So I'm not convinced spending a little less on tax and a lot more on insurance is a good deal. There are areas where it is morally better, and cheaper, to help those well off than you, and one of those is healthcare.
To build a large site, you wouldn't use a WYSIWYG tool, it's simply inappropriate and is meant for doing mockups or very small sites (even there I don't think it will save you any time if you know what you're doing). Therefore trying to use something like Dreamweaver (or any other similar tool) to manage something like the nytimes.com website would take you far longer to do things like change the formatting of all news articles etc.
What specifically did you think the advantages of using such a tool might be?
i totally disagree, i know by experience that people who design for print always create unusable things when designing layouts for the web, (or any other interface for an application), simply because most of them are ignorant about the many things that really make a good website (good content, intuitive navigation and content structure, providing ways for the user to interact with the site by adding content to it etc...). The web still has a lot to learn from print design, and attitudes like yours are why we still have spaces in between paragraphs (rather than indents), no drop caps, and generally awful layout and typography on the web. The web has a lot to learn from print design, and those principles which you feel you've discovered as unique to websites have been considered by designers for decades (google information design or Tufte).
Of course there are differences, but there are far more points in common, and *every* good design starts by considering the constraints (i.e. on the web things like navigation, structure, hierarchy etc), and the content which is to fit those constraints. A poster is different from a milk carton, which is in turn different from a newspaper, a website is different again, but all those things can be designed by the same person, if they take the time to understand the medium.
Instead of the really important aspects, graphic designers prioritize little stupid details like round corners, drop shadows etc... when designing for the web, and they are convinced that these details will make their site successful, they are clueless! (most of them are egocentric bitches too but that's another story)
Take as an example this site, it's gorgeus, still most people don't know it and those who do probably visit it once and never come back. That site is truly hideous, borderline unusable, and not a good example of design in many ways - while it makes a nice straw man for you it has nothing to do with the New York Times website, which is a very good design, and subtly hints at their newspaper heritage while using html well. You fundamentally misunderstand the role of design if you think it's about surface features and glitz like rounded corners.
Of course a good design adds a lot to a website, but for me it's just the icing on the cake. QED
If they know code so well, why not use Dreamweaver in pure code mode?
If you haven't used anything but Dreamweaver, perhaps Dreamweaver feels like it saves you time - other people know it as a buggy piece of shit designed to produce second rate WYSIWYG layouts. If you wanted to pick up using it you could do so in a day; it's hardly something they'd have trouble with. Most of the work will be in tweaking CSS for various browsers and adjusting styles, not in writing html. But even for pure code, Dreamweaver is not as good as other tools out there.
A real html/text processing tool (TextMate, BBEdit, whatever) combined with a CMS or scripts can do what Dreamweaver does in very little time, and is a lot more flexible for the needs of a large organisation where a lot of their content probably comes from text files intended for the print edition, or a database.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they could call it PaysForSure after their successful and reliable music service.
willyhill, you are a worse blight on Slashdot than the plague of twitter posts which you go on about.
Are you a short perl script?
You certainly sound like one, as you repeat just about the entire post over and over, it seems in response to any post by twitter.
.NET and Silverlight are not an attempt to make a better javascript, they're an attempt to tie the web so intimately to Windows that it becomes a requirement, just like IE before them.
I believe the security update will automatically prompt you to regenerate the host key (it did for me at least on ubuntu), so it shouldn't really be an issue.
If the host keys are vulnerable on a server, doesn't this just leave you open to a man in the middle attack anyway? That's not as serious as generating keys you use to login with, in which case you need to regenerate those as soon as possible. Is it possible to break into a server just by guessing the host or server keys?
As I understand it, the keys which are generated on debian/ubuntu are the ones which are affected, so depending on the source of public keys in authorized_keys, they might not be vulnerable.
The keys which are guessable for every server will be those which identify the server to clients, making it possible to do a man in the middle attack, impersonating the server (if you can guess the key and intercept a client trying to log in by poisoning DNS).
Most people will generate their keys on a local machine (which could be OS X, Linux, whatever), and upload the public one to login with, and those keys would not be vulnerable necessarily, they'd only be vulnerable if created on a debian derivative (ubuntu).
1 En captant, enregistrant ou transmettant, sans le consentement de leur auteur, des paroles prononcées à titre privé ou confidentiel ;
2 En fixant, enregistrant ou transmettant, sans le consentement de celle-ci, l'image d'une personne se trouvant dans un lieu privé.
Lorsque les actes mentionnés au présent article ont été accomplis au vu et au su des intéressés sans qu'ils s'y soient opposés, alors qu'ils étaient en mesure de le faire, le consentement de ceux-ci est présumé.
It is punishable by one year's imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros to intrude on the private life of others by any means :
1. In capturing, recording or transmitting, without the consent of their author, their words spoken in a private or confidential context;
2. In capturing, recording or transmitting, without the consent of the subject, the image of someone situated in a private place
When the acts mentioned in this article have been in sight and with the knowledge of the interested parties, without any opposition from them, even though they were able to oppose it, the consent of those parties is assumed. Please forgive the rough translation.
In fact it says that you do not have the right to take or transmit pictures without people's consent when they are 'in a private place'. It doesn't say anything about public places (there may be another article of the law about that, I don't know). Like you I'm not a lawyer, but this law doesn't say what you said it does about photography in *public* places, and thus doesn't apply to google (unless they were taking pictures inside houses etc).
You're also wrong in the UK, the US, Australia and most other countries I can think of, unless by 'claim offence' you mean they can claim they were offended rather than seek legal remedy. What sources exactly have you based your opinion on?
Here's a few of links explaining the situation in the UK, Australia and US for photography of people in public places :
UK
US
Australia
In most countries, it is legal to take and sell photos of people without their consent in a public place - otherwise it would be practically impossible to take pictures anywhere. What you're not allowed to do is to sell them for use in advertising, to endorse products or services etc. without the consent of the people involved (model release).
I'm not aware of the specific laws in France, it just seems to me that these picture agencies would have thoroughly investigated that before selling pictures of people taken in France. It seems particularly absurd to pic on google in this case, given all the other examples of public photography available. However the rules as quoted in the summary would outlaw tourists taking any pictures too - that seems unlikely in the extreme.
Since the google pics are not used to advertise a product or service (the people are in fact really incidental), they should be safe.
The case you're talking about took and used a photo for advertising, to endorse a product, and hence was illegal.
If this were true then it would be illegal to take a photograph in a public place in France with any people in it. Just considering professional photographers alone, that makes thousands of offenders a year.
There are over 5000 infringing photographs of people in France on Corbis if you search for 'crowd france'.
http://www.corbis.com/
...and of people start burning the place down...just sit back and do nothing? You are not really reading, or considering, many of the points raised, except where they play to your image of a biased blinkered westerner. Evidently riots need to be stopped, but for them to happen there are serious underlying problems. We have race riots in the west too sometimes, and they are evidence of serious problems, not something to be ignored. Yes, I am in China, and yes, I can see that page. Welcome to the world! Not so long ago those pages were blocked (unless by China you mean Hong Kong?). Do you discuss the Cultural Revolution in China much? If so what do you hear? What about Tiananmen square? I've only been on holiday to mainland China so remain ignorant of people's opinions there. Where are you from?If you *are* from China the best you can do to counter western misapprehensions is to post reasoned responses on boards like this one, not rail against an enemy which doesn't really exist. Since you speak English, you would do well to stop dismissing western news sources out of hand and read some of them - they're the same mix of good, bad and indifferent you'll find in China (perhaps slightly more scope for disagreement with the gov : ), but with a very different view on the world.
Ballmer really has no clue (when you hear him speak in public this is obvious), but I hope he sticks it out and stays, as Microsoft will die quicker as a result.
Try looking a little deeper (in history - as is often the case, the British and, later, the Americans that have a lot to answer for), and even at your own inbuilt bias. Like your unfounded (by you) statement saying that the movement of people is due to a government pacification project - care to provide some evidence for that? You just state it like it's obviously fact, with nothing to back it up at all. I can do that too...
Chinese treatment of Tibet is strikingly similar to British gun-boat diplomacy in China - I wouldn't condone either action. Looking at this as some kind of competition amongst nations is silly (because all nations fabricate their past, though some more than others), and western nationalism is just as deplorable as Chinese/Tibetan flavours.
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As to stealth colonisation, that's difficult to get figures for because the PRC is not known for reliable statistics. If you want proof, I point you to this on the BBC website
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/guides/456900/456954/html/nn5page1.stm
That article mentions the Golmud-Lhasa railway, which will be a mixed blessing for Tibet, in bringing lots of trade and lots of Chinese.
Try to look at the situation as if Tibet is part of China instead of that it isn't.
Long term, the assimilation of Tibet by China will lead to higher living standards there, but the methods used are as brutal as those used by the English in Ireland or Scotland long ago (to give another western example). To offer more prospects to a country and its people does not excuse trying to wipe out the national identity and culture. The world has moved on from an age where 'civilising' nations or minorities is an acceptable excuse for mistreating them. Given the situation, I'd expect there to be a lot of reverse migration into China, what's wrong with that?
Personally I have no opinion on whether Tibet is part of China or not (that's best left to Tibetans and Chinese), but I do mind people being mistreated and feel others should speak out on it. In Iraq, Tibet, or Burma, wherever. Monks are being forced to denounce the Dalai Lama, there's practically martial law declared, a lot of people have been arrested (far more than I'd expect for a simple riot), and no news is being allowed out of the province.
You're kidding, right? What about what happened in France? I would call that violent, for sure. It's only smart moves by officials that stopped the same from happening in other places, IMO.
That was not terrorism, and you're demeaning the term by calling low-key protests that. It wasn't even a riot, perhaps if you've seen selected clips you might think things were violent - I would note that what violence there was was from both sides in various places, not just pro-tibetan supporters. You should be thankful that such protests are allowed in many countries. From what I know (admittedly a limited amount), they would not be tolerated in China.
Not necessarily inherently, but if they're planned to terrorise, then they certainly worked and *are* terrorism.
Bullshit. You're trying to use the term because you think it has lots of emotional weight; terrorism is a paramilitary tactic, not a civilian protest, or even a civilian riot.
Reporters go there all the time. It was only *during* the riots that they couldn't go there.
Really, that's funny because the last I heard the only thing reporters were allowed to do was to go on carefully choreographed tours, where monks protested anyway (and probably suffered dearly for it). People don't riot spontaneously, and when they do there are usually profound discontents involved. Solve the discontents and you remove the reasons for rioting, try to clamp down on them and the central government will have peace for another 10 years.
...and so are you for believing the opp
Banning reproduction of copyright works and exploitation of children is not the same as political repression. If you had used detention without trial, unaccountable politicians and widespread surveillance in the west as examples you might have more of a case, but the west is still a long way better than China in those respects. But James Miles was there, could report, and he had a permit. Apparently, openness is increasing! He was there anyway and was expelled shortly after the riots, and no further journalists have been allowed in. Hardly increasing openness. I actually think the games coming to China is a good thing, and will increase openness, but probably not for Tibet as the issue is too sensitive. But we treat China that way. How can we say that Myanmar is China's problem? Presumably you don't say Myanmar is China's problem, and I certainly don't, and no one I know has, so why use 'we'? Your claims are based on faceless enemies with conveniently caricatured opinions. If you're happy arguing with the air that's fine, but if you want a discussion you should stop coming up with imaginary opponents.
The problem with visions of mesh based networking taking over the world is that there is no solution to the problems of overload that a full mesh infrastructure brings - you need supernodes which have fast direct connections between them for long-distance traffic, and someone has to pay for those (at present ISPs). While in principle the internet is one big mesh and you can route around problems (a great design), in practice it works because most packets take a very direct route to another computer, say through 10 hops or so. If they went through 60-100 hops, you'd be looking at a massively slower internet. At the end of those fat pipes are modems and servers which let you talk to the internet, and someone has to pay for those (at present it's not the gov).
I think ISPs will eventually be the answer to this problem, not an obstacle. Ultimately they stand to gain from distributing routers that share the service with passing users from any other ISP (peering agreements could make it universal). Eventually we'll all live in an inter-connected cloud, and perhaps eventually the role of ISPs will change to a utility or a public monopoly, but at present they're the best hope we have for instigating something like this.
You can already see this happening with initiatives like fon and wifi networks like The Cloud. Hopefully ISPs will wise up sooner rather than later to the massive income they could achieve by micro-billing everyone instead of trying to charge loads for fixed connections.
When I walk down the streets of the city I live in, there are no less than 10 wireless access points visible almost everywhere - we already have a mesh, it's just not connected yet.
I'm sure either would do fine. Why don't you mock up a simple app in both and see which you prefer. Or take a look at this video.
Django has far more admin/auth stuff built in, so if that would be useful to you, it might have a head start. Also, do you have existing experience/skills in Ruby or Python?
Both are nicely done and both will scale with a bit of work on them or the db, despite the ranting of ignorant internet pundits.
Twitter seem to be doing a huge amount of messaging, which is unusual for a web app, so unless you're planning a clone, you probably wouldn't run up against a similar situation. I don't understand why they don't have a back end built with something like xmpp, and have the web app just talk to that.
Maybe it's changed since the last time I used it, but creating a rails application COPIES a bunch of files... My applications should be 100% code I write directly. rails myapphere
creates a bunch of folders with a file structure within. The files are virtually blank, usually about 6 lines of which 4 are comments. You're probably talking about scaffolding, which is an optional step to get a CRUD interface up and running. If you don't want it, don't use it, it's deliberately minimal, and completely optional. It's quite possible to build an app without it. 2) RoR gives you the 1% that's used 10% of the time, not the 10% that's used 90% of the time....It probably saved me about 1/2 of setting things up by hand. That's simply not good enough. hmm, so it creates too many files for you, and yet it doesn't do enough, which is it? It should be able to create an app that supports validation It can, see validates_presence_of. sorting, filtering, searching, relationships, and css skins. Most of these are trivial until adapted for a particular app, and if you'd like them, look into examples on the web, you'll find them. The whole point of the framework is to try to stay out of the way - if you want a CMS in a box, use something like Drupal, or one of the Rails CMS attempts. 3) No UI components, which are the hardest part of web development...Rails does only a tiny amount of what it could and should. Some UI components would be nice, but it sounds like you want it to write your app for you. If you think this is important, you should start working on a widget set, or investigate those already available in HTML/javascript. Seriously. 4) It's NOT MVC
The Model-View-Controller design pattern is about limiting the amount of communication necessary by having one instance of some code (the controller) that all access to data (the model) from other code (the views) goes through. This is exactly what Rails does, and if you refresh your browser, you'll see changes to the model, or if you like your app can refresh using AJAX when the model changes (if you really must have a real-time view?). Your definition is not the generally accepted one of MVC. What problem do you have that you needed this for? 5) And on the topic of "MVC", why would anyone want a framework that forces you to use MORE RESTRICTIVE urls. Can't imagine. I can imagine most people enjoying a sensible default mapping though - it's better for users and better for developers to be consitent. You can in fact organise hierarchies. What did you find impossible to do with routes.rb?
Figures from 2004, in USD
Health care costs per capita in the US : 6,102
Health care costs per capita in France : 3,159
Health care costs per capita in the UK : 2,508
Health care in America is more expensive because it is run on a private system, and private companies have every incentive to charge more and to investigate every possible illness. Now this means you get slightly better, or at least more extensive, treatment if you're well off or are well covered by medical insurance, but for the majority of people it means service based on your income and worrying over whether they can actually pay, and for most employers it means a heavy insurance burden. Having seen the inside of hospitals in all three countries I wouldn't say service is 3x better in the US.
Even discounting private healthcare spending, *public* health care spending in the US is actually higher than that of France or the UK, and yet visits to the doctor per capita are lower in the US than most other countries.
So I'm not convinced spending a little less on tax and a lot more on insurance is a good deal. There are areas where it is morally better, and cheaper, to help those well off than you, and one of those is healthcare.
To build a large site, you wouldn't use a WYSIWYG tool, it's simply inappropriate and is meant for doing mockups or very small sites (even there I don't think it will save you any time if you know what you're doing). Therefore trying to use something like Dreamweaver (or any other similar tool) to manage something like the nytimes.com website would take you far longer to do things like change the formatting of all news articles etc.
What specifically did you think the advantages of using such a tool might be?
Of course there are differences, but there are far more points in common, and *every* good design starts by considering the constraints (i.e. on the web things like navigation, structure, hierarchy etc), and the content which is to fit those constraints. A poster is different from a milk carton, which is in turn different from a newspaper, a website is different again, but all those things can be designed by the same person, if they take the time to understand the medium. Instead of the really important aspects, graphic designers prioritize little stupid details like round corners, drop shadows etc... when designing for the web, and they are convinced that these details will make their site successful, they are clueless! (most of them are egocentric bitches too but that's another story)
Take as an example this site, it's gorgeus, still most people don't know it and those who do probably visit it once and never come back. That site is truly hideous, borderline unusable, and not a good example of design in many ways - while it makes a nice straw man for you it has nothing to do with the New York Times website, which is a very good design, and subtly hints at their newspaper heritage while using html well. You fundamentally misunderstand the role of design if you think it's about surface features and glitz like rounded corners. Of course a good design adds a lot to a website, but for me it's just the icing on the cake. QED
If you haven't used anything but Dreamweaver, perhaps Dreamweaver feels like it saves you time - other people know it as a buggy piece of shit designed to produce second rate WYSIWYG layouts. If you wanted to pick up using it you could do so in a day; it's hardly something they'd have trouble with. Most of the work will be in tweaking CSS for various browsers and adjusting styles, not in writing html. But even for pure code, Dreamweaver is not as good as other tools out there.
A real html/text processing tool (TextMate, BBEdit, whatever) combined with a CMS or scripts can do what Dreamweaver does in very little time, and is a lot more flexible for the needs of a large organisation where a lot of their content probably comes from text files intended for the print edition, or a database.