the bozos in senior management just finished buying up several failing companies and paying some large bonuses to themselves.
and there it is! The company likely could have saved just as much money by cutting those bonuses in half, or maybe even just defering them. But no, management has to have their bennies, we'll just stick it to the employees.
Cut half ? Deferred ? Sorry ?? Why should a management that steered the company into such a financial situation get any bonus at all ? Cut their bonus 100%, do this retroactively for last year's bonus as well, and let them share whatever cuts employees have to suffer on to of that.
In most states here employees don't work under a contract.
Um... why ??
Why didn't you simply politely ask for a contract that fixes whatever you agreed to with your employer on paper ? besides, isn't even an oral agreement technically a contract ?
Referring to liberal = "tree huging, pot smoking, down with the Man" or even "bigger goverment controling more of your life to prevent the world from eating your children"
The original senses of the word have to do with "lack of restraints"; its root means "freedom". The political definitions you refer to are much newer.
It also should be noted that the aboce definitions of "liberal" are a US invention which is not shared by the rest of the world. We usually call such positions "socialist" or "left wing". A classical liberal approach is putting freedom over control in every aspect of politics.
One of the things I like best about GNU/Linux, the operating system, is that it doesn't have a core team
Well, you might be in for a surprise. There will be a day, when you read on Slashdot: "Linus quits kernel maintenace". And at that point, if Linux doesn't have a core team, Linux will be in trouble. Yes, I know. "X" will take over, "X" beeing Alan Cox or Matt Welsh or another of the handful of persons assumed to have sufficient standing with the community. But even if that works - Linux names him successor - it will work only in this first iteration. And I doubt even that.
f.
Re:The police sided with the customer.
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 2
You cuff someone if they're dangerous. He was being completely calm, and the cops could see that. So putting him in cuffs was definitely going overboard.
Huh ? Aren't we talking about the U.S.of A. ? The land where they arrest any pickpocket with a SWAT team ? Where handcuffs are mandatory ? Where people accused of obscure nonviolent bookkeeping crimes are forced to enter the court not only in handcuffs but barbarically chained at their feet ? Where a parking or speeding ticket can get you incarcarated, if you happen to be in the wrong place ? Where killing an unarmed law abiding citizen with 37 bullets results in an aquittal for all 4 involved cops, including a friendly pat on their back by the involved authorities ?
Tell me, according to which standards is that "overboard" ?
How is this different from what the EULA in this case is doing -- it says, in essence: as a condition for you using this software, we require the right to uninstall certain software from your computer. You agreed.
In many countries (don't know about the US) laws regulat what you can into non individual "Terms and Conditions", the fine print, so to speak.
Contrary to indivdually negotiated contracts many things can not legally contracted there.
Both the article as well as the slashdot poster hit the nail on the head.
Do It ! Please !
You would be amazed how good political muscle can work if applied this way.
Just take someone and (politically) string him up! And don't take Hollings - as much tempting he is as a target he's far east of seventy and probably doesn't need (or even maybe doesnt seek) another term in the Senate. Take one of his allies instead. Get one who's prominent enough to be associated with Hollings' legislation, one who is young enough to loose something when booted out of Congress (The Never Come Back), but too old already to just shrug it off and do something else. Preferably have him (or her) squeal all over the place.
In short, inflict maximum pain. Make the guy (or the lady) an example.
It's an old principle of Germanic Law: Justice has to be seen.
This thing is horrifying. Stuff like "don't trust your roommate" "avoid cooperation with your sibling or spouse" and similar phrases seem to come straight from an Orwellian Fantasy.
"Never look at anyones code" "don't let anyone access your files" etc are similarily disturbing. You guys are freaks.
This is ridiculous. You essentially teach people to be ego-minded loners. To create good team players, sharing of ideas, code, whatever must be natural for people.
When I entered University, we were told in Orientation Week: get into a learning Group. Cooperate. Yes, you may be able to get this done alone. But the successfull people work in Groups.
Admittedly,this was nearly 20 years ago and an ocean away. But things cant have changed so much.
Apart from that, I've never been or have heard of someone who wasn't able to express his opinion, even if that opinion was 'turks out'
Ahem... wait a moment. Where have you been living during the seventies and eighties ? Do you happen to know how many issues of the "Radikal" paper (which, nota bene, we are talking about here) were not banned ? Does "Mescalero" ring any bell with you ? "Buback-Nachruf" ?
Some guy wrote an article critical of a terrorist assasination but opened it with a statement that he couldn't hide some hidden "glee" about it, because he disliked the victim so much. This late seventies article - first published, IIRC, in Radikal, and reprinted by student papers all across Germany - set in motion an incredible persecution campaign all across Germany hauling everybody who dared to reprint it into court, accusing these student paper editors of "recruitment for a terrorist organization" or even of terrorist activities. Heck, even in my small backwater university (where I served in student representation for the Young Christian Democrats, i.e. the conservatives:-) ) we still had defense funds and court dates far into the mid-eighties for some poor chaps who had run our student paper back then.
I could go on. Your "It's only against the Nazis - everbody else is safe" stance is a common myth among politicallly naive middle class people here. Truth is, anything out of mainstream runs into severe troubles. Left Wing, Right Wing, Kurdish Separatist, Islamist, or, more recently, Globalization Opponent - once the powers that be consider you a threat, or even a major pain in the ass, you have essentially lost freedom of expression in Germany.
Just open you eyes some time. To quote Rosa Luxemburg, "Freedom is always the Freedom of Dissenters".
Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit der Andersdenkenden.
So, dear Besserwisser, pray tell why was Wolfenstein 3D banned (and banned in this case is not "indiziert", but "beschlagnahmt", if you know the difference).
It was essentially about shooting up bad Guys with Swastikas. They argued that the mere display of Swastikas was illegal.
They are however very quick to pounce on anything that may be glorifying the Nazis in anyway AFAIK but I don't live there I only visited.
Gloriyfing ? You mean, like Wolfenstein glorified Nazis by letting you shoot them ?
Hogwash. Nazi Symbols are generelly banned in Germany. There are a few restrictions to this, essentially traditional art (Films: yes: Computer Games: No) and science. But nobody asks for your intentions when you display the Swastika. You just get fined.
Ahh, whatever. While heads-upping our beloved friends/customers/sleeping-former-public-servants could you please also heads-up their PR department about causing a substantial blunder and promoting Radikal to audiences that never heard of it before ?
Since the Marquardt Deciscion (German MP A. Marquardt was aquitted of aiding and abetting for linking to Radikal) about anybody knew about that particular article anyway, since it was "Exhibit A" in the prosecution's (failed) case. Now their spectacular blunder made sure this article is conserved and available from about every well run free speech archive, and there are Radikal mirrors springing up left and right.
Oh, and that Google shit - my God, this is a PR minefield if there ever was one. Given that the original article at XS4ALL is gone anyway, there is about zero chance that link and cache still exist the day this case reaches a regular court of law. This whole thing is just a spectacular waste of everyone's time. OTOH, since Google is the most admired an popular search engine around, you're going to win popularity contests with internet users real soon now.
Possibly they details Deutsche Bahnhof's schedules, movement plans
No. They detail how to disable certain well selected parts of the electronic rail control systems, in order to force Deutsche Bundebahn to operate their trains at crawling speeds in the sabotaged areas. This way they attempt to sabotage DB's operations without endangering peoples lives.
And, given the very dangerouis sabotage actions we have seen here in the past (like destroying rails, short-circuiting high power supply wires etc) I'd regard this as much milder form of violence.
German Constitution Article 5: Everybody has the right to distribute and express his OPINION freely as well as to inform himself freely.
Pfft. As we all know, the German Constitution in general, and this very article especially, are not worth the paper they are written on. This Article even contains that infamous sentence "Censorship does not happen" and is one of the most dishonest and misleading texts ever written in a constitutional document. Note that Par. 2 of this Article reads "These rights can be limited by general laws, laws for the protection of minors, and laws for the protection of personal honour." Which means, by about anything.
German Constituonal practice furthermore interprets constitutional rights not as absolute immutable rights but as entitlements that can and will be balanced with about boatloads of other entitlements. So you will find court decisions denying your right of free speech or freedom of information for sake of boatloads of other interests.
Oh, and of course, "Censorship" (which doesn't happen, you know) also doesn's mean censorship but some kind of complicated "pre-censorship" - related to but not identical with the "prior restraint" concept in the US). And, of course, in reality this also happens frequently.
This is a fine example of what 50 years of self-serving politicians and obedient judges can do to an apparently simple legal text.
They recently banned Unreal Tournament. Censorhsip doesn't happen, you know - we have that in the Constitution.
Why? International ISPs can simply peer amongst themselves, and as the US's share of content and users drops relative to the world, the amount of bandwidth the rest of the world needs to/from the US will drop.
Not really. The 'Gateway of last ressort' function can only be done by a Tier 1 ISP (directly or indirectly). That is, Non-US ISPs will always have to maintain the links to the US free of charge to US ISPs, and therefore US ISPs will always have a cost advantage. Which in turn will advance the concentration of content in the US you mentioned.
This may or ma ynot be right, but asymmetric peering costs are a problem that has to be dealt with.
Look at Somalia: they have no government, and the cheapest cellphone costs on the continent.
That is, until the US government in their eternal wisdom, decided to brand this Somali company as unwanted competi^H^H^Hterrorist organization, froze all their assets in the US and embargoed them, thus effectively putting them out of business.
You just don't do business without paying proper tribute to the US.
A funny remark. May I offer a not funny response ?
They should do the same thing with China...
They probably do. They certainly did so in the past, and they are doing it to about every country in the world, except Canada and maybe Mexico.
The operative word is "Tier 1". Let me explain a bit:
typically an ISP has three types of connections: "Customers" pay him to route their traffic, "Peers" are other ISPs who exchange traffic with him for their respective customers at no cost, and "upstream providers" are ISPs he pays to route all traffic from his customers he can't route via Peers.
A Tier 1 ISP, now, has zero upstream connections. He doesn't need to.
To meet this definition, a Tier 1 ISP has peering conections to every other Tier1 ISP. There are only very few ISPs that meet this criteria. All of them are US ISPs (though some of these - like UUNET - are globally active nowadays). Life is good for a Tier 1 ISP, since he only pays for his backbone (as everybody else does), and doesn't pay for traffic at all. And they have no incentive to let anyone else into the club - since they can earn more by forcing others to pay them for routing their traffic. Therefore it is practically impossible for an ISP to become Tier 1 ISP, even if he sits in the US, because the big guys simply won't peer with him. (For a more complex - albeit 3 years old - treatise, try this article ). More so, this applies to Non-US ISPs. Not only is there less incentive for the existing Tier1 ISPs to peer with them coompared to US ISPs (because US customers generally demand less access to foreign sites) but also the cost of shared cost peering is much higher, since the lines are longer - often across an ocean - and therefore more expensive.
As a result of this there is - AFAIK - not a single Non-US Tier 1 ISP. We all pay for upstream bandwidth - you don't.
Now look at this from a country based view: everyone pays for connection to the US, and for all traffic routed there, while US companies essentially get international connectivity for free. As a result of this Internet connectivity is much less expensive in the US then in any other part of the world.
This is even though the US today already is a minority on the Internet, and if not, certainly will be very soon. It is this way, because that Tier 1 Old Boys Network got started in the US, and these guys won't let anybody else in.
So the African Countries' complaint is correct, as should be the complaint of any state outside of North America. And at some point in the future, expect to see drastic political action to rectify this.
My personal suspicion is that this will start in China, but the bets are still open.
f.
Re:Litigation time...
on
Spy v. Spy
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
If the software has no legal use, the producer is essentially an aide to the crime. How do you think they prosecute virus writers ?
This function has no legal use. Go figure.
Re:This is a trojan horse, plain and simple.
on
Spy v. Spy
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
If my employer installs this on every PC in the company...
... then he violates the law in almost every civilized nation on earth.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be sort of fair...
Why didn't you simply politely ask for a contract that fixes whatever you agreed to with your employer on paper ? besides, isn't even an oral agreement technically a contract ?
This US of A thing gets stranger all the time...
It also should be noted that the aboce definitions of "liberal" are a US invention which is not shared by the rest of the world. We usually call such positions "socialist" or "left wing". A classical liberal approach is putting freedom over control in every aspect of politics.
Yes, I know. "X" will take over, "X" beeing Alan Cox or Matt Welsh or another of the handful of persons assumed to have sufficient standing with the community. But even if that works - Linux names him successor - it will work only in this first iteration. And I doubt even that.
f.
Tell me, according to which standards is that "overboard" ?
Correct.
An ad constitutes a solicitation for offers.
An order is an offer.
Charging (or delivery, btw) of the goods constitues acceptance of that offer.
In many countries (don't know about the US) laws regulat what you can into non individual "Terms and Conditions", the fine print, so to speak.
Contrary to indivdually negotiated contracts many things can not legally contracted there.
Both the article as well as the slashdot poster hit the nail on the head.
Do It ! Please !
You would be amazed how good political muscle can work if applied this way.
Just take someone and (politically) string him up! And don't take Hollings - as much tempting he is as a target he's far east of seventy and probably doesn't need (or even maybe doesnt seek) another term in the Senate. Take one of his allies instead. Get one who's prominent enough to be associated with Hollings' legislation, one who is young enough to loose something when booted out of Congress (The Never Come Back), but too old already to just shrug it off and do something else. Preferably have him (or her) squeal all over the place.
In short, inflict maximum pain. Make the guy (or the lady) an example.
It's an old principle of Germanic Law: Justice has to be seen.
even this is quite legal in many jurisdictions. Just because something is written in the License Agreement doesn't mean it is legally valid.
This thing is horrifying. Stuff like "don't trust your roommate" "avoid cooperation with your sibling or spouse" and similar phrases seem to come straight from an Orwellian Fantasy.
"Never look at anyones code" "don't let anyone access your files" etc are similarily disturbing. You guys are freaks.
This is ridiculous. You essentially teach people to be ego-minded loners. To create good team players, sharing of ideas, code, whatever must be natural for people.
When I entered University, we were told in Orientation Week: get into a learning Group. Cooperate. Yes, you may be able to get this done alone. But the successfull people work in Groups.
Admittedly,this was nearly 20 years ago and an ocean away. But things cant have changed so much.
Some guy wrote an article critical of a terrorist assasination but opened it with a statement that he couldn't hide some hidden "glee" about it, because he disliked the victim so much. This late seventies article - first published, IIRC, in Radikal, and reprinted by student papers all across Germany - set in motion an incredible persecution campaign all across Germany hauling everybody who dared to reprint it into court, accusing these student paper editors of "recruitment for a terrorist organization" or even of terrorist activities. Heck, even in my small backwater university (where I served in student representation for the Young Christian Democrats, i.e. the conservatives
I could go on. Your "It's only against the Nazis - everbody else is safe" stance is a common myth among politicallly naive middle class people here. Truth is, anything out of mainstream runs into severe troubles. Left Wing, Right Wing, Kurdish Separatist, Islamist, or, more recently, Globalization Opponent - once the powers that be consider you a threat, or even a major pain in the ass, you have essentially lost freedom of expression in Germany.
Just open you eyes some time. To quote Rosa Luxemburg, "Freedom is always the Freedom of Dissenters".
Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit der Andersdenkenden.
So, dear Besserwisser, pray tell why was Wolfenstein 3D banned (and banned in this case is not "indiziert", but "beschlagnahmt", if you know the difference).
It was essentially about shooting up bad Guys with Swastikas. They argued that the mere display of Swastikas was illegal.
Not sure what "treble damage" is, but fees are clear: In German civil courts, the looser automatically pays both parties' fees.
Hogwash. Nazi Symbols are generelly banned in Germany. There are a few restrictions to this, essentially traditional art (Films: yes: Computer Games: No) and science. But nobody asks for your intentions when you display the Swastika. You just get fined.
*lol*
Telematik or not ?
Ahh, whatever. While heads-upping our beloved friends/customers/sleeping-former-public-servants could you please also heads-up their PR department about causing a substantial blunder and promoting Radikal to audiences that never heard of it before ?
Since the Marquardt Deciscion (German MP A. Marquardt was aquitted of aiding and abetting for linking to Radikal) about anybody knew about that particular article anyway, since it was "Exhibit A" in the prosecution's (failed) case. Now their spectacular blunder made sure this article is conserved and available from about every well run free speech archive, and there are Radikal mirrors springing up left and right.
Oh, and that Google shit - my God, this is a PR minefield if there ever was one. Given that the original article at XS4ALL is gone anyway, there is about zero chance that link and cache still exist the day this case reaches a regular court of law. This whole thing is just a spectacular waste of everyone's time.
OTOH, since Google is the most admired an popular search engine around, you're going to win popularity contests with internet users real soon now.
Oh, you are so good...
And, given the very dangerouis sabotage actions we have seen here in the past (like destroying rails, short-circuiting high power supply wires etc) I'd regard this as much milder form of violence.
So you Quote Art 5 GG:
Pathetic. Note sentence (2), which makes the article essentially worthless.
Try a little proof of concept: Write a short tutorial on how to capture the flag in Unreal Tornament. Put it up on your web site. Get hauled to jail.
You actually believe that propaganda line, do you ? My ass! Stalin used to call people like you "usefull idiots".
People even get convicted for telling politically incorrect jokes in this country (Germany, that is. I live there).
Fuck censorship!
This Article even contains that infamous sentence "Censorship does not happen" and is one of the most dishonest and misleading texts ever written in a constitutional document.
Note that Par. 2 of this Article reads "These rights can be limited by general laws, laws for the protection of minors, and laws for the protection of personal honour." Which means, by about anything.
German Constituonal practice furthermore interprets constitutional rights not as absolute immutable rights but as entitlements that can and will be balanced with about boatloads of other entitlements. So you will find court decisions denying your right of free speech or freedom of information for sake of boatloads of other interests.
Oh, and of course, "Censorship" (which doesn't happen, you know) also doesn's mean censorship but some kind of complicated "pre-censorship" - related to but not identical with the "prior restraint" concept in the US). And, of course, in reality this also happens frequently.
This is a fine example of what 50 years of self-serving politicians and obedient judges can do to an apparently simple legal text.
They recently banned Unreal Tournament. Censorhsip doesn't happen, you know - we have that in the Constitution.
Pissers...
It is a circulus vitiosus.
That is, until the US government in their eternal wisdom, decided to brand this Somali company as unwanted competi^H^H^Hterrorist organization, froze all their assets in the US and embargoed them, thus effectively putting them out of business.
You just don't do business without paying proper tribute to the US.
They probably do. They certainly did so in the past, and they are doing it to about every country in the world, except Canada and maybe Mexico.
The operative word is "Tier 1". Let me explain a bit:
typically an ISP has three types of connections: "Customers" pay him to route their traffic, "Peers" are other ISPs who exchange traffic with him for their respective customers at no cost, and "upstream providers" are ISPs he pays to route all traffic from his customers he can't route via Peers.
A Tier 1 ISP, now, has zero upstream connections. He doesn't need to.
To meet this definition, a Tier 1 ISP has peering conections to every other Tier1 ISP. There are only very few ISPs that meet this criteria. All of them are US ISPs (though some of these - like UUNET - are globally active nowadays). Life is good for a Tier 1 ISP, since he only pays for his backbone (as everybody else does), and doesn't pay for traffic at all. And they have no incentive to let anyone else into the club - since they can earn more by forcing others to pay them for routing their traffic. Therefore it is practically impossible for an ISP to become Tier 1 ISP, even if he sits in the US, because the big guys simply won't peer with him. (For a more complex - albeit 3 years old - treatise, try this article ). More so, this applies to Non-US ISPs. Not only is there less incentive for the existing Tier1 ISPs to peer with them coompared to US ISPs (because US customers generally demand less access to foreign sites) but also the cost of shared cost peering is much higher, since the lines are longer - often across an ocean - and therefore more expensive.
As a result of this there is - AFAIK - not a single Non-US Tier 1 ISP. We all pay for upstream bandwidth - you don't.
Now look at this from a country based view: everyone pays for connection to the US, and for all traffic routed there, while US companies essentially get international connectivity for free. As a result of this Internet connectivity is much less expensive in the US then in any other part of the world.
This is even though the US today already is a minority on the Internet, and if not, certainly will be very soon. It is this way, because that Tier 1 Old Boys Network got started in the US, and these guys won't let anybody else in.
So the African Countries' complaint is correct, as should be the complaint of any state outside of North America. And at some point in the future, expect to see drastic political action to rectify this.
My personal suspicion is that this will start in China, but the bets are still open.
f.
If the software has no legal use, the producer is essentially an aide to the crime. How do you think they prosecute virus writers ?
This function has no legal use. Go figure.
... then he violates the law in almost every civilized nation on earth.
This function has no legal use.
Spector sells a criminal tool without any legitimate need and should be investigated and brought to justice. You can't sell burglar tools either.
f.