All those profiles are considered "members" probably. It's just an easy way to boost your membership numbers.
Still I wonder what that will bring to the site: instead of 6.5 million people that are actively looking for a date, you add 333.5 million people that are presumably not actively looking for a date to the site.
Now I'm imagining using such a site, and browsing profiles. When looking at a profile of prospective dates, the chance that this individual is also in the market for a date is less than 2% instead of 100% (assuming for the sake of the argument that members that registered themselves are all looking for dates). Add to that the chance that she may be interested to go on a date with you (which is, say, 10%) it's getting pretty horrible. Not even 0.2% chance to actually get a date!
That would make the site useless. It means having to send out over 500 date requests to land a single date - on average. That's for all practical purposes a no-go. At a 10% chance it's very much hit and miss already, but that way the numbers still are manageable.
In FF3 it's just two clicks to disable the status bar. I've done this on my netbook, not on my desktops. Another two clicks to get it back when needed.
Why not just leave it in as option? Disabled by default maybe.
Isn't the edge of your touchpad acting as scrollwheel? It does on my ancient EEEPC (a 701 model). Took a while to get used to but now I really like it. Works really well, and excellent alternative when space comes at a premium.
Corruption is a big issue in governments - and will always rear it's ugly head whenever governments are involved.
It's made possible by a lack of competition: a government is a natural monopoly. Costs don't matter for a government. If say the government wants to build a road, they would invite tenders from various companies. Now say the winner wins by bribing the government official. This bribe will be recovered in their profit margin, plus a bit more.
The fact that there is a bribe means that this contractor's quote is higher than necessary. But the government doesn't care, they can just raise taxes. They won't go bankrupt.
On the other hand when a private company wants to build a road on their factory terrain, there is no room for bribes. Bribes raise their costs, and in the end the profit margin of the ordering company. At worst they simply go out of business for they can not compete with the other companies.
If now your complete country is planned by the government there always will be people trying to take advantage of it, and that includes bribes.
On top of that for a government doesn't matter too much if they don't reach the best possible result - they do not have competition, they can't go out of business. So they don't care too much either.
Source: main source is the South China Morning Post (a Hong Kong newspaper). This one not available online for non-subscribers (I always buy single copies). And various news reports, history lessons, etc.
No matter what, it's a fact that North Korea can not feed its own population. Malnutrition is a real issue in the country - only thanks to food donations mainly from South Korea they stay alive.
A few years ago I read a quite telling study: North Koreans are, on average, several cm shorter than their Southern counterparts. And that length difference is fully attributed to the poor nutrition in the north: genetically they're the same race.
Central planning doesn't work, that has been proven by the soviets already. The small patches of private land handed to farmers yielded more produce than the much larger communal farmed land.
And about the putting on an act: read any story by journalists visiting NK and you hear about this. They are not allowed to go out on their own; the whole trip is pre-arranged; and even everyone they meet en route one visit to another appears to be an "actor".
China is also North Korea's only ally; and as far as I know to travel to North Korea you have to first go to Beijing as there's the only place in the world to apply for a visa (China is the only country with diplomatic ties with NK, and as such their only embassy), and the only city with regular flights to Pyongyang.
So even though GP gets the obligatory +1 insightful for China-bashing, it's not totally false. But then it's the half-truths that make politics go.
They are conditioned to believe that if they touch the papers that are dropped from the sky that they will die. And if they touch them anyways they are sent to labor camp.
And a result of the second is the first so it's not just conditioning: it's true. Just like we westerners are conditioned to believe that when you shoot someone you will go to jail.
That said I think North Korea is a really bizarre country... and for that reason very interesting.
Your tweets - those things may fall under local jurisdiction, but if you travel to the US (or other countries: e.g. Thailand has strict laws relating to insulting their king) you may still have a problem, and:
Your account details such as contact information registered with it; access logs; friend lists; etc. Some of that may be public on Twitter's site, some not. That part of your account will fall squarely under US laws and regulations.
I'm sure the subpoenas involved here are about the second part. The first part is fully public anyway.
Sure it may be a problem. It seems like leveraging one monopoly to gain market share elsewhere. Or is it.
Chrome is definitely not dominant.
YouTube, however, is arguably a monopoly.
Now would encoding YouTube fully in WebM and dropping Flash and H.264 there be anti-competitive behaviour? I don't think so - it'd be silly to demand they support all those formats. And third parties may freely create their own compatible players for WebM. It's easy enough and reasonable to argue that they do Youtube in WebM only for business reasons.
Dropping support for H.264 from Chrome might be considered so - but then Chrome is just a minority player, nr 3 at the moment behind FF and IE. Dropping H.264 and having many other video sites not work any more may be a problem for many users, who then drop Chrome.
At the moment, the "worst" outcome I see of YouTube dropping H.264 would be that FF and IE are forced to adopt WebM in their browsers. Alongside H.264 and whatever codecs they want to add. Or YouTube losing their visitors who en masse flock to the new competitor H264Tube instead.
Format wars were VHS vs Video2000 vs Betamax. BluRay vs HD-DVD. And the losers were primarily the manufacturers that bet on the wrong tech, and the other manufacturers that could barely sell anything before the format was settled on. After all users had to shell out real money in serious amounts to buy one, and even more if they wanted to be compatible with the others. The space taken by an unsightly pile of equipment notwithstanding.
Now H.264 is effectively free for end users. I know there are license fees and whatnot but no end user has ever seen a bill for an H.264 player as far as I am aware. In other words: if it's not already included in your OS, you will be able to download it somewhere, and such an installation is usually very very easy. And has to be done only once. Problem solved.
WebM same story. But without the license fees.
And before anyone starts to complain about "installing so many plug-ins", I'd say many FF users chooses FF for the many plug-ins available. It's just that they're called "add-ons" in newspeak.
So it may be a format war, but for most of the end users there is no difference. Video on the web will just play. Be it in Flash, H.264, WebM, or whatever comes next.
Does Twitter do any business in the EU in the first place? I don't think just having Twitter accounts held by EU citizens count.
Do they advertise? I don't recall having ever seen a Twitter promotional.
Do they have any direct sales of advertisements to EU based companies, the sales of which is fully settled within the EU? It seems an EU company have to buy this advertising in the US instead, as I can't find any EU address on their web site.
From their web site it seems they only have their headquarters in San Fransisco, US - no other office locations listed. It seems it's a pure US company, doing business in the US only.
Until they're actually doing business in the EU, the EU doesn't have much leverage against them.
Now they are complaining EU laws are being violated.
Let's see what happens when some EU member's law enforcement wants certain information about an individual related to a crime. Will they issue a subpoena to Twitter? That'd be fun. Twitter would probably frame it and hang it on the wall or so. EU subpoenas don't have much value in the US, until a US court accepts it and issues a US version.
Those MEPs are just crazy. But well I agree they will score political points. The image of the US is not that great in Europe indeed. And don't we all need someone else to bash? Europe has the US to bash, the US has China. Interestingly I don't see much China bashing going on in Europe.
This is the exact problem the Internet is facing: it's worldwide, and doesn't care much about borders. On the other hand our legal systems worldwide assume the existence of borders. And that's where the two clash.
Twitter being a US company I would expect falls under US law. If all their servers are in the US only, it would be clear that they simply fall under US law, as it's a purely US based service. It's like the more traditional scenario of someone selling goods in a shop in the US. This operation falls fully under US law, even when they mail out their goods to foreign customers. However a branch in France of the same company would fall under French law.
In this case Twitter definitely has servers in the US, and thus falls under US law. If they get a subpoena from the US law enforcement they have to act on it. EU law has nothing to say there, imho. The EU may not agree with it - that's their problem. They may consider diplomatic assistance if one of their citizens is involved, like the French embassy may do in case a French citizen is accused of a crime and arrested in the US.
There's no more they can do. Well they can of course start a campaign in Europe reminding all EU citizens that when using Twitter their account falls under US jurisdiction. But how much most people would care remains to be seen.
I have the feeling that publishing such personal information is against the spirit of what Assagne is after with WikiLeaks. Assagne himself is very secretive when it comes to his private life - he values privacy of the person.
The openness he is after is in the public sphere: governments and large corporations. Governments are working directly for the public (and are paid for by the public via a.o. taxes, tariffs and levies), and as such the public has a right to know what's going on in their government. Large corporations are often publicly traded, and their actions affect the public at large, so they also should remain transparency.
I can't imagine you will find leaks of, say, the full details of telephone subscribers on WikiLeaks. Neither should you be able to find lists of say unemployment benefit receivers. That's not about keeping corporations and governments transparent and open - an open government and strong personal privacy can go very well together.
Then there is the little issue that what we know as Anonymous is not an organisation, does not have members, does not have leaders, let alone a correspondence address (other than boards.4chan.org/b/). They are anonymous after all.
Yes you're right. I didn't proofread well, lost a < sign there. Probably I simply didn't proofread at all. All those < and > and & characters that are zapped... oh well thinking about it, it makes sense when typing in html.
There is no difference in the kind of work - music, software, books, paintings, whatever: it all falls under the same copyright terms. Otherwise one would get arguments over say whether it's a book or just a print-out of software source code.
Secondly a lot of copyright these days is owned by companies, and companies tend to not die. They may go bankrupt, but otherwise have eternal life. For companies the copyright term starts to count from the moment of creation.
Why copyright has to stay with a person for life, I don't know. Why it has to extend beyond life? Well at least it prevents killings to get a work out of copyright protection.
What I'd like to see is a serious copyright reform, including two main issues: the first is a decrease of copyright terms to something like 20 years (the current patent protection period), not much more, possibly a bit less. The second is that copyright terms start from the moment of creation or publication of a work, also when it's a person creating it, and not a company. Copyrights should remain inheritable like they are now in case the creator dies during his copyright term. But no more "50 years from death" nonsense.
And of course some minor issues like removing those recent restrictions on reverse engineering and breaking of encryption. Also it should be easy for a person to put a work in the public domain (fully copyleft). Though for that I like the BSD-style license, basically saying "do with this work what you like, as long as you don't claim it's your work, and don't use my name to endorse your product".
The hack impresses me, very very cool. Though I thought it's NetBSD that's the one that always tries to run on everything from your digital watch to your toaster.
Anyway, the real question: is there any use to this? It's not like FreeBSD is known for having many games to play with.
The only person(s) who counts, is the copyright holder in that matter (there may be more than one, each having copyright on different parts of the software). If the copyright holder cares, s/he may do something about it. If the copyright holder doesn't care, there is no case. And indeed in this case there is a good chance the copyright holder doesn't care, or at least doesn't care enough to do something about it.
Slashdot Mirror
All those profiles are considered "members" probably. It's just an easy way to boost your membership numbers.
Still I wonder what that will bring to the site: instead of 6.5 million people that are actively looking for a date, you add 333.5 million people that are presumably not actively looking for a date to the site.
Now I'm imagining using such a site, and browsing profiles. When looking at a profile of prospective dates, the chance that this individual is also in the market for a date is less than 2% instead of 100% (assuming for the sake of the argument that members that registered themselves are all looking for dates). Add to that the chance that she may be interested to go on a date with you (which is, say, 10%) it's getting pretty horrible. Not even 0.2% chance to actually get a date!
That would make the site useless. It means having to send out over 500 date requests to land a single date - on average. That's for all practical purposes a no-go. At a 10% chance it's very much hit and miss already, but that way the numbers still are manageable.
The 701 (the first incarnation of the EEEPC) doesn't have that yet. It has a traditional single-touch pad.
In FF3 it's just two clicks to disable the status bar. I've done this on my netbook, not on my desktops. Another two clicks to get it back when needed.
Why not just leave it in as option? Disabled by default maybe.
Isn't the edge of your touchpad acting as scrollwheel? It does on my ancient EEEPC (a 701 model). Took a while to get used to but now I really like it. Works really well, and excellent alternative when space comes at a premium.
Corruption is a big issue in governments - and will always rear it's ugly head whenever governments are involved.
It's made possible by a lack of competition: a government is a natural monopoly. Costs don't matter for a government. If say the government wants to build a road, they would invite tenders from various companies. Now say the winner wins by bribing the government official. This bribe will be recovered in their profit margin, plus a bit more.
The fact that there is a bribe means that this contractor's quote is higher than necessary. But the government doesn't care, they can just raise taxes. They won't go bankrupt.
On the other hand when a private company wants to build a road on their factory terrain, there is no room for bribes. Bribes raise their costs, and in the end the profit margin of the ordering company. At worst they simply go out of business for they can not compete with the other companies.
If now your complete country is planned by the government there always will be people trying to take advantage of it, and that includes bribes.
On top of that for a government doesn't matter too much if they don't reach the best possible result - they do not have competition, they can't go out of business. So they don't care too much either.
Source: main source is the South China Morning Post (a Hong Kong newspaper). This one not available online for non-subscribers (I always buy single copies). And various news reports, history lessons, etc.
Of course. But whether it's poisoning by Americans or the effects of the labour camp... the result is the same.
Your link is broken.
No matter what, it's a fact that North Korea can not feed its own population. Malnutrition is a real issue in the country - only thanks to food donations mainly from South Korea they stay alive.
A few years ago I read a quite telling study: North Koreans are, on average, several cm shorter than their Southern counterparts. And that length difference is fully attributed to the poor nutrition in the north: genetically they're the same race.
Central planning doesn't work, that has been proven by the soviets already. The small patches of private land handed to farmers yielded more produce than the much larger communal farmed land.
And about the putting on an act: read any story by journalists visiting NK and you hear about this. They are not allowed to go out on their own; the whole trip is pre-arranged; and even everyone they meet en route one visit to another appears to be an "actor".
China is also North Korea's only ally; and as far as I know to travel to North Korea you have to first go to Beijing as there's the only place in the world to apply for a visa (China is the only country with diplomatic ties with NK, and as such their only embassy), and the only city with regular flights to Pyongyang.
So even though GP gets the obligatory +1 insightful for China-bashing, it's not totally false. But then it's the half-truths that make politics go.
They are conditioned to believe that if they touch the papers that are dropped from the sky that they will die. And if they touch them anyways they are sent to labor camp.
And a result of the second is the first so it's not just conditioning: it's true. Just like we westerners are conditioned to believe that when you shoot someone you will go to jail.
That said I think North Korea is a really bizarre country... and for that reason very interesting.
There are two parts to your Twitter account:
Your tweets - those things may fall under local jurisdiction, but if you travel to the US (or other countries: e.g. Thailand has strict laws relating to insulting their king) you may still have a problem, and:
Your account details such as contact information registered with it; access logs; friend lists; etc. Some of that may be public on Twitter's site, some not. That part of your account will fall squarely under US laws and regulations.
I'm sure the subpoenas involved here are about the second part. The first part is fully public anyway.
Sure it may be a problem. It seems like leveraging one monopoly to gain market share elsewhere. Or is it.
Chrome is definitely not dominant.
YouTube, however, is arguably a monopoly.
Now would encoding YouTube fully in WebM and dropping Flash and H.264 there be anti-competitive behaviour? I don't think so - it'd be silly to demand they support all those formats. And third parties may freely create their own compatible players for WebM. It's easy enough and reasonable to argue that they do Youtube in WebM only for business reasons.
Dropping support for H.264 from Chrome might be considered so - but then Chrome is just a minority player, nr 3 at the moment behind FF and IE. Dropping H.264 and having many other video sites not work any more may be a problem for many users, who then drop Chrome.
At the moment, the "worst" outcome I see of YouTube dropping H.264 would be that FF and IE are forced to adopt WebM in their browsers. Alongside H.264 and whatever codecs they want to add. Or YouTube losing their visitors who en masse flock to the new competitor H264Tube instead.
I don't see the "format war" potential here.
Format wars were VHS vs Video2000 vs Betamax. BluRay vs HD-DVD. And the losers were primarily the manufacturers that bet on the wrong tech, and the other manufacturers that could barely sell anything before the format was settled on. After all users had to shell out real money in serious amounts to buy one, and even more if they wanted to be compatible with the others. The space taken by an unsightly pile of equipment notwithstanding.
Now H.264 is effectively free for end users. I know there are license fees and whatnot but no end user has ever seen a bill for an H.264 player as far as I am aware. In other words: if it's not already included in your OS, you will be able to download it somewhere, and such an installation is usually very very easy. And has to be done only once. Problem solved.
WebM same story. But without the license fees.
And before anyone starts to complain about "installing so many plug-ins", I'd say many FF users chooses FF for the many plug-ins available. It's just that they're called "add-ons" in newspeak.
So it may be a format war, but for most of the end users there is no difference. Video on the web will just play. Be it in Flash, H.264, WebM, or whatever comes next.
They don't seem to have any business in the EU:
Does Twitter do any business in the EU in the first place? I don't think just having Twitter accounts held by EU citizens count.
Do they advertise? I don't recall having ever seen a Twitter promotional.
Do they have any direct sales of advertisements to EU based companies, the sales of which is fully settled within the EU? It seems an EU company have to buy this advertising in the US instead, as I can't find any EU address on their web site.
From their web site it seems they only have their headquarters in San Fransisco, US - no other office locations listed. It seems it's a pure US company, doing business in the US only.
Until they're actually doing business in the EU, the EU doesn't have much leverage against them.
Now they are complaining EU laws are being violated.
Let's see what happens when some EU member's law enforcement wants certain information about an individual related to a crime. Will they issue a subpoena to Twitter? That'd be fun. Twitter would probably frame it and hang it on the wall or so. EU subpoenas don't have much value in the US, until a US court accepts it and issues a US version.
Those MEPs are just crazy. But well I agree they will score political points. The image of the US is not that great in Europe indeed. And don't we all need someone else to bash? Europe has the US to bash, the US has China. Interestingly I don't see much China bashing going on in Europe.
Totally agreed.
This is the exact problem the Internet is facing: it's worldwide, and doesn't care much about borders. On the other hand our legal systems worldwide assume the existence of borders. And that's where the two clash.
Twitter being a US company I would expect falls under US law. If all their servers are in the US only, it would be clear that they simply fall under US law, as it's a purely US based service. It's like the more traditional scenario of someone selling goods in a shop in the US. This operation falls fully under US law, even when they mail out their goods to foreign customers. However a branch in France of the same company would fall under French law.
In this case Twitter definitely has servers in the US, and thus falls under US law. If they get a subpoena from the US law enforcement they have to act on it. EU law has nothing to say there, imho. The EU may not agree with it - that's their problem. They may consider diplomatic assistance if one of their citizens is involved, like the French embassy may do in case a French citizen is accused of a crime and arrested in the US.
There's no more they can do. Well they can of course start a campaign in Europe reminding all EU citizens that when using Twitter their account falls under US jurisdiction. But how much most people would care remains to be seen.
I have the feeling that publishing such personal information is against the spirit of what Assagne is after with WikiLeaks. Assagne himself is very secretive when it comes to his private life - he values privacy of the person.
The openness he is after is in the public sphere: governments and large corporations. Governments are working directly for the public (and are paid for by the public via a.o. taxes, tariffs and levies), and as such the public has a right to know what's going on in their government. Large corporations are often publicly traded, and their actions affect the public at large, so they also should remain transparency.
I can't imagine you will find leaks of, say, the full details of telephone subscribers on WikiLeaks. Neither should you be able to find lists of say unemployment benefit receivers. That's not about keeping corporations and governments transparent and open - an open government and strong personal privacy can go very well together.
Then there is the little issue that what we know as Anonymous is not an organisation, does not have members, does not have leaders, let alone a correspondence address (other than boards.4chan.org/b/). They are anonymous after all.
Yes you're right. I didn't proofread well, lost a < sign there. Probably I simply didn't proofread at all.
All those < and > and & characters that are zapped... oh well thinking about it, it makes sense when typing in html.
There is no difference in the kind of work - music, software, books, paintings, whatever: it all falls under the same copyright terms. Otherwise one would get arguments over say whether it's a book or just a print-out of software source code.
Secondly a lot of copyright these days is owned by companies, and companies tend to not die. They may go bankrupt, but otherwise have eternal life. For companies the copyright term starts to count from the moment of creation.
Why copyright has to stay with a person for life, I don't know. Why it has to extend beyond life? Well at least it prevents killings to get a work out of copyright protection.
What I'd like to see is a serious copyright reform, including two main issues: the first is a decrease of copyright terms to something like 20 years (the current patent protection period), not much more, possibly a bit less. The second is that copyright terms start from the moment of creation or publication of a work, also when it's a person creating it, and not a company. Copyrights should remain inheritable like they are now in case the creator dies during his copyright term. But no more "50 years from death" nonsense.
And of course some minor issues like removing those recent restrictions on reverse engineering and breaking of encryption. Also it should be easy for a person to put a work in the public domain (fully copyleft). Though for that I like the BSD-style license, basically saying "do with this work what you like, as long as you don't claim it's your work, and don't use my name to endorse your product".
Seriously: what do you want to do with such a cluster, and why is a PS3 more interesting than general PC hardware?
Tell Netcraft what? Tell them "BSD is dying"? They know that already!
RTFA. It only runs on PS3 with firmware version 3.21. Your quote confirms why.
The hack impresses me, very very cool. Though I thought it's NetBSD that's the one that always tries to run on everything from your digital watch to your toaster.
Anyway, the real question: is there any use to this? It's not like FreeBSD is known for having many games to play with.
The only person(s) who counts, is the copyright holder in that matter (there may be more than one, each having copyright on different parts of the software). If the copyright holder cares, s/he may do something about it. If the copyright holder doesn't care, there is no case. And indeed in this case there is a good chance the copyright holder doesn't care, or at least doesn't care enough to do something about it.