You don't pay these fees. You order from foreign webshops instead.
Almost every country in the EU has these fees, the exceptions being Luxemburg, UK, Ireland, and Cyprus, none of which is cheaper than buying the fee-paid price in Finland. Buying from outside the EU involves additional issues, such as hassles and paperwork to clear customs, and paying VAT on the shipping costs (which are always a lot higher per unit for small shipments to individuals than for bulk shipments to businesses).
In short, it's cheaper to buy a 2TB USB drive here (€90) including all taxes, than to buy one in the UK (£98). Shipping costs are lower within Finland than from the UK as well.
Would not help if the chip has RFID or similar remote detection capabilities, which was implied by the article. Your every movement through places equipped with suitable detectors would be tracked and recorded for later analysis. Probably all entrances to government buildings and popular public venues (even park gates) would be covered in such detectors. Persons passing through without a chip could be regarded as de facto suspects to be stopped and interrogated, and lack of a chip in any public place would become sufficient cause for body cavity searches.
Keep a faintly optimistic expression on your face at all times, brother.
It's depressing to think how much the "usage taxes" will be for such drives, if used as external devices. At present, we pay euro18 for 1TB to 3TB USB disks to the so-called rights groups. This would rise proportionately to at least euro360 for 60TB. This fee allows us to lawfully make copies of published works (music, movies, TV) in Finland. However, it probably does not allow uploading of such works, or copying internationally; one should have access to licensed media, even if from the library or from broadcast TV.
We have about 30TB of storage on-line at home, of which 6TB is internal disks in the media server and 12TB is external disks for its backups (all are only about half full). Similarly, the web server and PCs have about 5TB of internal disks and 7TB of backup and archive storage in external disks. It's irritating to pay such fees when one is the creator of much of the data going onto these 19TB of external disks (including photos and home movies on the media server), and license fees have been paid for the remainder (source CDs, DVDs). It will likely become even more irritating when the fees are scaled up.
No, it does not have to, but as less people have to pay for rubbish, I assume that the percentage of people that are paying for rubbish decreases, therefore, the motivation to use pirate software should also decrease and so should piracy.
Indeed, some of us don't pirate any software at all. We use Linux variants exclusively at home, and the vast majority of our software is FOSS (LibreOffice, Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus, VLC, Octave, LaTeX, Chromium, etc.), or at least freely licensed (Opera).
However, we do pay for licenses for some software, including Mathematica, Bibble Pro, Noise Ninja, and FotoPlayer. These vendors were farsighted enough to make Linux or cross-platform versions of their software, and their products happen to fit our needs better than any free alternative. BTW, it was a toss-up between Mathematica and Maple, both of which are available for Linux.
If I were to vote for the language that is the hardest to understand when read out loud (whether by machine or human), my vote would not go to perl, but lisp.
I'd vote for APL (the FFT example is illuminating). At least Lisp constructs are pronounceable, this is not. Then again, a one-liner for Conways' game of life is impressive. APL was one of the first two computer languages I learned, and it remains one of my favorites.
No, you didn't. You just discovered a word you had never heard before.
And the AC used it wrongly, too. Theophobia is the fear of one or more gods, and is therefore an attribute of a pious follower of some religion, and would likely be approved by that religion. More likely, the AC meant religiophobic, as religiophobia is the fear of religions.
This type of comment reduces complex issues to simple bitter theophobic (yep I just coined a word) rhetoric and it is no better than the folks who force their religious beliefs on other through institutionalized oppression and social shunning.
Nonsense. Your assertion that absence of superstition is no better than any of the contradictory superstitions which cripple our societies is a contemptible form of moral relativism.
A little introspection in the world would be a revolutionary thing.
And is explicitly banned by most of the big religions extant today ("don't ask the wrong questions or you're an apostate/heathen/whatever"), thus reinforcing GP's point that "superstition is slavery". Which was the point you disagreed with, and must confuse you quite a bit.
Pakistan blocks yet another place for failing to obey diktats from the stone-age. Maybe they'll just discard everything with origin from the Renaissance onwards.
TFA deals with exactly that. The US government is allowed to hold copyrights which are assigned to it, including the copyright of works by outside contractors (many activities producing "government" documents are outsourced, even in Defense). TFA conjectures that some of the documents disclosed by Wikileaks would fall into this class, so that Wikileaks could be pursued in foreign courts for copyright violations. Also, the US government is explicitly allowed to assert copyright over its own works outside the US. So in principle almost any unauthorized disclosure of US government documents outside the US would be a violation of US government copyright.
It's a Byzantine, almost Stasi-like approach to quashing what are probably truthful revelations. One would hope this interpretation would be thrown out by any reasonable court in the EU. It would be a faint hope indeed in many countries (such as the UK).
Just like I said, no way to do it safely. That has about the same amount of entropy as a single character password.
FWIW, it claims it would take a few hundred billion centuries to crack one of my former home passwords (I changed it last year, but remember it well). However, while I think that password/passphrase was probably secure enough, the tool's dictionary appears to be short on words so its estimate of brute-force cracking time is not reliable.
It flagged that disused passphrase as having mis-spelled words largely because it did not recognize two fairly common words stuck together. Actually, the passphrase had no mis-spellings and no 1337-substitutions or interstitial characters. It also flagged the passphrase as having a mis-spelled US city because it did not recognize another fairly common word. BTW, by fairly common words, I don't mean rare or scientific terms like "coprophage" or "syzygy".
More often than not, scientists falsify their results to get ahead.
Your statement asserts that more than half of scientific results are deliberately falsified. Bullshit.
There are, of course, a few who might deliberately falsify results, but they are a tiny minority. They are also always caught out in the end. Scientists know that the truth will always win for any testable hypothesis, and the idea of faking results is ludicrous.
It's depressing, albeit unsurprising, that you were modded "insightful". The article which was linked to in the slashdot story you linked to was concerned with medical and social pseudosciences (where innumeracy prevails,.05 seems to be a magical significance level, and results are blithely cherry-picked). If you had bothered to read that article, you might have noticed that real science was not impugned.
Some of the countries on the South shore of the gulf want it to be referred to as the Arabian Gulf. Which pisses off the Iranians (as intended) who prefer to call it the Persian Gulf. Google is avoiding picking sides by leaving it unlabeled.
I work in Toronto, live in the town of Ajax just east of there.
I used the word "banal" on numerous occasions (spoken and in email or documents) when I lived in Toronto, and the permanent residents seemed to understand it. Other people even used the word in my hearing, and used it correctly. Their vocabulary was not too bad for that side of the Atlantic. Of course, most of us lived in the Western and Northern suburbs rather than in Ajax...
Color me amazed; I've been here a while and still have some issues. BTW, the accented characters like ä and ö have to be expressed in html on Slashdot.
Google Translate thought the page said the following:
Google translate really sucks on Finnish, both in word order and in interpreting the many cases (and lack of articles). Then again, it's a non-Indo-European language in which concepts don't map too well to those of Indo-European languages and are sometimes expressed in context-dependent ways, so any mechanical translation will suck a bit. I recall that when Finland joined the EU, the professional translators in the European Parliament were confident they could master the language and provide simultaneous translation in just a few months. They were, of course, somewhat chastened and humiliated when that schedule was revised. In the end, the simultaneous translation did get going, but it was largely by recruiting people who already knew Finnish quite well (typically Finns).
The very USPS page that is linked to from this summary says that batteries that are in devices are generally exempt from this. Essentially you can ship all the iPods/iPads/iPhones you want. It is external (ie not built-in) batteries that have additional restrictions, though those are not very severe.
Was the "good job not reading" a reference to yourself? Oh, the irony!
According to the USPS, they will prohibit shipping of lithium batteries and any device containing them effective May 16.
And on the USPS page for the restriction, the USPS anticipates that after 1 January 2013 people will be able to resume mailing devices containing lithium batteries to overseas destinations. And that shipping such devices is banned from May 16 this year.
Sadly, even though you kept the original DVDs as proof of purchase, you still broke the law by ripping them. You'd still be labeled a "pirate" by the content industries.
Actually, that's country-dependent. In this country, we're allowed to lawfully format-shift media. In fact, we're allowed to lawfully copy any published media, including media borrowed from public libraries. The libraries have quite a few CDs and DVDs. This is because we pay a copyright levy on all blank CDs, blank DVDs, blank BluRays, and on all Flash media devices as well as USB disks and whatnot.
It the most maddening bit of the DMCA that by using your DVD the way you want, you're still violating the law.
Agreed completely, at least for those countries where this is true.
This is one of the reasons we rip every DVD to our media server as soon as we buy it. No unskippable bits, no insults from FBI warnings or other time wasting, just the movie or set of episodes or videos that we paid for. There are a couple of drawers full of disks that are no longer needed for viewing (kept as backup and as proof of purchase). Another reason for ripping stuff to the server is simple convenience: not having to dig around for the right disk and stuff it in a mechanical device to play, hoping it has not gotten scratched through handling.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't pay these fees. You order from foreign webshops instead.
Almost every country in the EU has these fees, the exceptions being Luxemburg, UK, Ireland, and Cyprus, none of which is cheaper than buying the fee-paid price in Finland. Buying from outside the EU involves additional issues, such as hassles and paperwork to clear customs, and paying VAT on the shipping costs (which are always a lot higher per unit for small shipments to individuals than for bulk shipments to businesses).
In short, it's cheaper to buy a 2TB USB drive here (€90) including all taxes, than to buy one in the UK (£98). Shipping costs are lower within Finland than from the UK as well.
they'll simply weigh your cart and charge you a flat rate per pound
Kind of tricky if you've only bought some helium-filled balloons... Does the store owe you a few pennies?
Floppy hats and long hair across the face.
Would not help if the chip has RFID or similar remote detection capabilities, which was implied by the article. Your every movement through places equipped with suitable detectors would be tracked and recorded for later analysis. Probably all entrances to government buildings and popular public venues (even park gates) would be covered in such detectors. Persons passing through without a chip could be regarded as de facto suspects to be stopped and interrogated, and lack of a chip in any public place would become sufficient cause for body cavity searches.
Keep a faintly optimistic expression on your face at all times, brother.
Gamemaker can do anything!
MyCleanPC says GameMaker is a pathetic sluggish virus-laden pedo-loving terrorist loonie spammer. Just like MyCleanPC, in fact.
Looking forward to the feelies, where 4D is utterly insufficient...
It's depressing to think how much the "usage taxes" will be for such drives, if used as external devices. At present, we pay euro18 for 1TB to 3TB USB disks to the so-called rights groups. This would rise proportionately to at least euro360 for 60TB. This fee allows us to lawfully make copies of published works (music, movies, TV) in Finland. However, it probably does not allow uploading of such works, or copying internationally; one should have access to licensed media, even if from the library or from broadcast TV.
We have about 30TB of storage on-line at home, of which 6TB is internal disks in the media server and 12TB is external disks for its backups (all are only about half full). Similarly, the web server and PCs have about 5TB of internal disks and 7TB of backup and archive storage in external disks. It's irritating to pay such fees when one is the creator of much of the data going onto these 19TB of external disks (including photos and home movies on the media server), and license fees have been paid for the remainder (source CDs, DVDs). It will likely become even more irritating when the fees are scaled up.
No, it does not have to, but as less people have to pay for rubbish, I assume that the percentage of people that are paying for rubbish decreases, therefore, the motivation to use pirate software should also decrease and so should piracy.
Indeed, some of us don't pirate any software at all. We use Linux variants exclusively at home, and the vast majority of our software is FOSS (LibreOffice, Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus, VLC, Octave, LaTeX, Chromium, etc.), or at least freely licensed (Opera).
However, we do pay for licenses for some software, including Mathematica, Bibble Pro, Noise Ninja, and FotoPlayer. These vendors were farsighted enough to make Linux or cross-platform versions of their software, and their products happen to fit our needs better than any free alternative. BTW, it was a toss-up between Mathematica and Maple, both of which are available for Linux.
Renaissance? Please don't tell us that PERL has been "born again". It's not stupid enough for that...
If I were to vote for the language that is the hardest to understand when read out loud (whether by machine or human), my vote would not go to perl, but lisp.
I'd vote for APL (the FFT example is illuminating). At least Lisp constructs are pronounceable, this is not. Then again, a one-liner for Conways' game of life is impressive. APL was one of the first two computer languages I learned, and it remains one of my favorites.
. . . theophobic (yep I just coined a word) . . .
No, you didn't. You just discovered a word you had never heard before.
And the AC used it wrongly, too. Theophobia is the fear of one or more gods, and is therefore an attribute of a pious follower of some religion, and would likely be approved by that religion. More likely, the AC meant religiophobic, as religiophobia is the fear of religions.
This type of comment reduces complex issues to simple bitter theophobic (yep I just coined a word) rhetoric and it is no better than the folks who force their religious beliefs on other through institutionalized oppression and social shunning.
Nonsense. Your assertion that absence of superstition is no better than any of the contradictory superstitions which cripple our societies is a contemptible form of moral relativism.
A little introspection in the world would be a revolutionary thing.
And is explicitly banned by most of the big religions extant today ("don't ask the wrong questions or you're an apostate/heathen/whatever"), thus reinforcing GP's point that "superstition is slavery". Which was the point you disagreed with, and must confuse you quite a bit.
Pakistan blocks yet another place for failing to obey diktats from the stone-age. Maybe they'll just discard everything with origin from the Renaissance onwards.
If I remember right, government works automatically fall into public domain. Wikipedia seems to think so too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain#Government_works
TFA deals with exactly that. The US government is allowed to hold copyrights which are assigned to it, including the copyright of works by outside contractors (many activities producing "government" documents are outsourced, even in Defense). TFA conjectures that some of the documents disclosed by Wikileaks would fall into this class, so that Wikileaks could be pursued in foreign courts for copyright violations. Also, the US government is explicitly allowed to assert copyright over its own works outside the US. So in principle almost any unauthorized disclosure of US government documents outside the US would be a violation of US government copyright.
It's a Byzantine, almost Stasi-like approach to quashing what are probably truthful revelations. One would hope this interpretation would be thrown out by any reasonable court in the EU. It would be a faint hope indeed in many countries (such as the UK).
Just like I said, no way to do it safely. That has about the same amount of entropy as a single character password.
FWIW, it claims it would take a few hundred billion centuries to crack one of my former home passwords (I changed it last year, but remember it well). However, while I think that password/passphrase was probably secure enough, the tool's dictionary appears to be short on words so its estimate of brute-force cracking time is not reliable.
It flagged that disused passphrase as having mis-spelled words largely because it did not recognize two fairly common words stuck together. Actually, the passphrase had no mis-spellings and no 1337-substitutions or interstitial characters. It also flagged the passphrase as having a mis-spelled US city because it did not recognize another fairly common word. BTW, by fairly common words, I don't mean rare or scientific terms like "coprophage" or "syzygy".
More often than not, scientists falsify their results to get ahead.
Your statement asserts that more than half of scientific results are deliberately falsified. Bullshit.
There are, of course, a few who might deliberately falsify results, but they are a tiny minority. They are also always caught out in the end. Scientists know that the truth will always win for any testable hypothesis, and the idea of faking results is ludicrous.
It's depressing, albeit unsurprising, that you were modded "insightful". The article which was linked to in the slashdot story you linked to was concerned with medical and social pseudosciences (where innumeracy prevails, .05 seems to be a magical significance level, and results are blithely cherry-picked). If you had bothered to read that article, you might have noticed that real science was not impugned.
Some of the countries on the South shore of the gulf want it to be referred to as the Arabian Gulf. Which pisses off the Iranians (as intended) who prefer to call it the Persian Gulf. Google is avoiding picking sides by leaving it unlabeled.
Out of curiosity, where are you?
I work in Toronto, live in the town of Ajax just east of there.
I used the word "banal" on numerous occasions (spoken and in email or documents) when I lived in Toronto, and the permanent residents seemed to understand it. Other people even used the word in my hearing, and used it correctly. Their vocabulary was not too bad for that side of the Atlantic. Of course, most of us lived in the Western and Northern suburbs rather than in Ajax...
I buy a computer, or laptop, or phone, to help ME out with attaining knowledge not to serve the corporate master who built the computer/laptop/phone.
"You're doing it wrong, sinner. Send us a load of money as your penance." - Apple.
Fun fact: most of us can't read Finnish.
Color me amazed; I've been here a while and still have some issues. BTW, the accented characters like ä and ö have to be expressed in html on Slashdot.
Google Translate thought the page said the following:
Google translate really sucks on Finnish, both in word order and in interpreting the many cases (and lack of articles). Then again, it's a non-Indo-European language in which concepts don't map too well to those of Indo-European languages and are sometimes expressed in context-dependent ways, so any mechanical translation will suck a bit. I recall that when Finland joined the EU, the professional translators in the European Parliament were confident they could master the language and provide simultaneous translation in just a few months. They were, of course, somewhat chastened and humiliated when that schedule was revised. In the end, the simultaneous translation did get going, but it was largely by recruiting people who already knew Finnish quite well (typically Finns).
So... in other words... they prepared the abbatoir... lured in the sheeples... and now it is time for the slaughter?
FTFY
The very USPS page that is linked to from this summary says that batteries that are in devices are generally exempt from this. Essentially you can ship all the iPods/iPads/iPhones you want. It is external (ie not built-in) batteries that have additional restrictions, though those are not very severe.
Was the "good job not reading" a reference to yourself? Oh, the irony!
From the linked article (emphasis mine):
According to the USPS, they will prohibit shipping of lithium batteries and any device containing them effective May 16.
And on the USPS page for the restriction, the USPS anticipates that after 1 January 2013 people will be able to resume mailing devices containing lithium batteries to overseas destinations. And that shipping such devices is banned from May 16 this year.
Do you think you have the right to do this?
Yes, both morally and legally.
Sadly, even though you kept the original DVDs as proof of purchase, you still broke the law by ripping them. You'd still be labeled a "pirate" by the content industries.
Actually, that's country-dependent. In this country, we're allowed to lawfully format-shift media. In fact, we're allowed to lawfully copy any published media, including media borrowed from public libraries. The libraries have quite a few CDs and DVDs. This is because we pay a copyright levy on all blank CDs, blank DVDs, blank BluRays, and on all Flash media devices as well as USB disks and whatnot.
It the most maddening bit of the DMCA that by using your DVD the way you want, you're still violating the law.
Agreed completely, at least for those countries where this is true.
This is one of the reasons we rip every DVD to our media server as soon as we buy it. No unskippable bits, no insults from FBI warnings or other time wasting, just the movie or set of episodes or videos that we paid for. There are a couple of drawers full of disks that are no longer needed for viewing (kept as backup and as proof of purchase). Another reason for ripping stuff to the server is simple convenience: not having to dig around for the right disk and stuff it in a mechanical device to play, hoping it has not gotten scratched through handling.
However, Canadians can now enjoy a Spring.
Maybe we'll have five days of spring this year!
You lucky, lucky bastards. - Finland.