One of the first actions that I take when arriving in a hotel room is to disconnect the alarm clock, so that the room at night is not illuminated by its red LCD glow!
I have no doubt that there are many lawyers who are good and kind people.
However the problem is not with individuals, but law as a profession.
First, that lawyers conduct the application of law is in an adversarial arena; one party winning over the other through persuasion and charisma. This is probably distasteful to geeks who believe that pure logic should carry the argument, not who "has the better lawyer".
Second, lawyers serve to perpetuate their own kind. Laws are written to be as obfuscated and inaccessible as possible to the layman, so that the scenario above is usually the only recourse. In contrast to your engineer, who will tell you how to perform minor maintenance yourself, did your lawyer tell you how to sue fax spammers on your own in the future?
> "Here's something you may not know about that might be useful to you"
I refer you to the old adage "no corporation is your friend".
No one is going to spend money to tell you, zippthorne, about something that might be useful to you unless they will benefit from your purchase of the item, either directly ( as the retailer or producer ) or indirectly ( magazines ).
> You can say anything you like, and will never be arrested.
I read this in USA Today over breakfast yesterday:
"US District Judge Joseph H. McKinley Jr. called Spencer's writing of the poem an extremely dangerous thing. Spencer will be on supervised release for three years after he completes the 33-month sentence. "
I'll let you track-down the story as you might learn something along the way.
> my hosts file is gonna get big fast, adblock > and javascript blocking will become required > addons for all my web browsers.
That is a very accurate assessment. My ISP sells throughput in "units", dimensioned in GB. The cardinality of a "unit" varies by time of day and week, so that usage is shaped to conform to the ISP's costs ( they make it very easy to monitor and estimate usage ).
Although we don't have much chance of consuming a 125 GB "off-peak unit", an 8GB "peak unit" is much easier to burn-through and Privoxy is therefore laden with rules. There's no point disabling the proxy only for off-peak hours..
In fact my partner will summon me if she sees any form of online ad; since its appearance is so unexpected she wonders if "something has gone wrong".
Amazon.co.uk Ltd, Amazon.de GmBH and Amazon EU Sarl most assuredly do not, yet we Old Europeans still shop there.
It's about the long-tail of products in the range, not prices. A lot of the items in the Amazon catalogue aren't even available through high-street shops, so what difference would a few dollars more make?
> Who cares if X or Y is left out of a distro? If it's available, it's installable.
Yes, the distro compilers could make their ISOs much quicker to download if they omitted X and Gnome. After all, they're available in source format for later download and compilation.
And as for Open Office, well that'll only take 6 hours to compile...
The *point* of a distro is to provide a convenient, tested, coherent system.
> Google noticed this later and reported on themselves
Just to correct a point that keeps recurring, Google were not proactive in this issue and did not "report themselves".
Following the discovery that Street View cars were fitted with Wifi sniffing equipment, which raised queries from German and UK authorities, on 27 April Google responded with a blog post in which they said Google does not collect or store payload data. This was repeated in releases sent to data protection authorities.
The Data Protection Agency in Hamburg was unconvinced and asked Google to provide a manifest of the exact data that was being collected. Google then discovered that they were collecting payload data and blogged accordingly.
You will notice that at all times Google were reacting to requests.
Not only does it prevent Google's Instant Search from working, but it also removes all the clones of Wikipedia and any page on which someone has quoted from Wikipedia.
Perhaps it should be expressed instead as "information tends towards the public domain".
The meaning of IWTBF is the antonym of what you stated; instead of having to "be freed" by some liberator, information *will free itself* if constraints to its movement *are not applied*.
The activity is on the part of the anthropomorphic information itself.
That is: passwords, secrets and proprietary information will gradually drift towards becoming public knowledge unless an entity spends time, money and resources in stemming that movement. For information to become free, no-one has to do anything. It will gradually happen as an aspect of daily human interaction.
> I purchased a five-year certificate from > rapidssl.com for $60 a few years ago.... > The cost is minimal.
It's not just a cost issue, it's the principle.
You bought a "five-year" certificate. Why does it expire in five years? Does it spoil like milk? Do the bits wear with repeated use? No, it's a scam. RapidSSL don't have do do a single thing after generating the cert other than awaiting your next payment.
> Not only is a serious portion of the space dedicated to ads
Indeed, I regularly tear-out the double-sided ads from The Economist. This week's UK edition had 52 grams of such ads and that's only about two-thirds of the total ads in the paper.
I did post some torn-out ads back to the Editor once, asking how much cheaper it would be to transport four million issues every week when the total shipping mass was reduced by about 240 tonnes but sadly I never received a reply...
> Any of my mailing list e-mail is threaded by > subject. Very useful. How else is it supposed > to thread? It breaks down if the subject changes
E-mail threading generally uses the ``References:'' header, not the subject line, for exactly that reason; to prevent thread breakage when someone changes the subject string.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the first actions that I take when arriving in a hotel room is to disconnect the alarm clock, so that the room at night is not illuminated by its red LCD glow!
I have no doubt that there are many lawyers who are good and kind people.
However the problem is not with individuals, but law as a profession.
First, that lawyers conduct the application of law is in an adversarial arena; one party winning over the other through persuasion and charisma. This is probably distasteful to geeks who believe that pure logic should carry the argument, not who "has the better lawyer".
Second, lawyers serve to perpetuate their own kind. Laws are written to be as obfuscated and inaccessible as possible to the layman, so that the scenario above is usually the only recourse. In contrast to your engineer, who will tell you how to perform minor maintenance yourself, did your lawyer tell you how to sue fax spammers on your own in the future?
> I can't create and remember 100 distinct strong username/password combinations on all of those websites
Apparently "computers" can be "programmed" to perform information retrieval operations.
Perhaps some "software" such as PasswordSafe or MyPasswordsafe could be used for password creation, secure storage and on-demand retrieval.
> "Here's something you may not know about that might be useful to you"
I refer you to the old adage "no corporation is your friend".
No one is going to spend money to tell you, zippthorne, about something that might be useful to you unless they will benefit from your purchase of the item, either directly ( as the retailer or producer ) or indirectly ( magazines ).
> Online ads can be beneficial when related to your search terms.
Only if one is actively participating as a potential consumer. Consider the following search terms which I have recently entered:
"first airliner autolanding date"
"ubuntu slow throughput ath9k driver"
"why are submarines painted black"
"how heavy are clouds"
In none of those instances would advertisements be at all useful, desired or relevant.
I have never had any difficulty booking hotel rooms in the USA, Ireland and UK using a Visa Debit card.
What difficulties were you encountering?
Just a few more dollars and the Flattr team can afford to buy that ever-desirable Second Vowel!
Don't pass-up the opportunity to help a bunch of great guys escape the Web 2.0 trap.
> I'm wondering if we'll just revert back to plain ol' IP addresses.
"You won't believe what Mike posted on 2001:40fc::dead:beef today!"
Hmm, has potential!
> You can say anything you like, and will never be arrested.
I read this in USA Today over breakfast yesterday:
"US District Judge Joseph H. McKinley Jr. called Spencer's writing of the poem an extremely dangerous thing. Spencer will be on supervised release for three years after he completes the 33-month sentence. "
I'll let you track-down the story as you might learn something along the way.
> my hosts file is gonna get big fast, adblock
> and javascript blocking will become required
> addons for all my web browsers.
That is a very accurate assessment. My ISP sells throughput in "units", dimensioned in GB. The cardinality of a "unit" varies by time of day and week, so that usage is shaped to conform to the ISP's costs ( they make it very easy to monitor and estimate usage ).
Although we don't have much chance of consuming a 125 GB "off-peak unit", an 8GB "peak unit" is much easier to burn-through and Privoxy is therefore laden with rules. There's no point disabling the proxy only for off-peak hours..
In fact my partner will summon me if she sees any form of online ad; since its appearance is so unexpected she wonders if "something has gone wrong".
> So, is Amazon's tax-free status unfair?
Amazon.com Inc may have "tax-free status"...
Amazon.co.uk Ltd, Amazon.de GmBH and Amazon EU Sarl most assuredly do not, yet we Old Europeans still shop there.
It's about the long-tail of products in the range, not prices. A lot of the items in the Amazon catalogue aren't even available through high-street shops, so what difference would a few dollars more make?
> Who cares if X or Y is left out of a distro? If it's available, it's installable.
Yes, the distro compilers could make their ISOs much quicker to download if they omitted X and Gnome. After all, they're available in source format for later download and compilation.
And as for Open Office, well that'll only take 6 hours to compile...
The *point* of a distro is to provide a convenient, tested, coherent system.
> Google noticed this later and reported on themselves
Just to correct a point that keeps recurring, Google were not proactive in this issue and did not "report themselves".
Following the discovery that Street View cars were fitted with Wifi sniffing equipment, which raised queries from German and UK authorities, on 27 April Google responded with a blog post in which they said Google does not collect or store payload data. This was repeated in releases sent to data protection authorities.
The Data Protection Agency in Hamburg was unconvinced and asked Google to provide a manifest of the exact data that was being collected. Google then discovered that they were collecting payload data and blogged accordingly.
You will notice that at all times Google were reacting to requests.
In the form of "-wikipedia"
Not only does it prevent Google's Instant Search from working, but it also removes all the clones of Wikipedia and any page on which someone has quoted from Wikipedia.
Very refreshing.
> THOSE are data sets that need to be freed
Arrrgh...
Perhaps it should be expressed instead as "information tends towards the public domain".
The meaning of IWTBF is the antonym of what you stated; instead of having to "be freed" by some liberator, information *will free itself* if constraints to its movement *are not applied*.
The activity is on the part of the anthropomorphic information itself.
That is: passwords, secrets and proprietary information will gradually drift towards becoming public knowledge unless an entity spends time, money and resources in stemming that movement. For information to become free, no-one has to do anything. It will gradually happen as an aspect of daily human interaction.
> I purchased a five-year certificate from
> rapidssl.com for $60 a few years ago....
> The cost is minimal.
It's not just a cost issue, it's the principle.
You bought a "five-year" certificate. Why does it expire in five years? Does it spoil like milk? Do the bits wear with repeated use? No, it's a scam. RapidSSL don't have do do a single thing after generating the cert other than awaiting your next payment.
According to:
http://www.rapidssl.com/buy-ssl/index.html
they will sell us a "wildcard" cert for the low-low price of $796 for five years. So I correct myself; it's the cost AND the principle.
> Like how Turkey so upset about Israel killing Turks crossing into Israeli waters
The flotilla was still in international waters.
Who told you they were in Israeli waters? Why did you believe them?
Err sorry 'bout that, Slashdot seems to have chewed my posting.
Summary:
Germany accounts for 9% of World exports, US 10%.
81% of German exports are merchandise, 72% of US exports are merchandise.
Germany wins.
> Not only does the US still manufacture goods, it has the
> #1 output of manufactured goods in the entire world.
Can I ask to see the figures on which you base this claim?
By most trading measurements Germany is considered the leading exporter of manuf
The WTO, who know a bit about international trade, state clearly:
"Germany was the world's largest merchandise exporter in 2008"
whereas
"The United States was the largest exporter and importer of commercial services
Germany accounts for 9% of international exports and the US 10%, but only 72% of
or Germany.
> Not only is a serious portion of the space dedicated to ads
Indeed, I regularly tear-out the double-sided ads from The Economist. This week's UK edition had 52 grams of such ads and that's only about two-thirds of the total ads in the paper.
I did post some torn-out ads back to the Editor once, asking how much cheaper it would be to transport four million issues every week when the total shipping mass was reduced by about 240 tonnes but sadly I never received a reply...
> That would remove all protection from the traditional lone inventor who
> comes up with something useful and wants to sell it to the big companies
Hmm, I assume you've never actually tried to sell a patent to the"big companies" as a lone inventor.
They usually say, en bloc, "that's clever but we have no immediate market opportunity for that".
Then they carefully design non-infringing products that perform a similar function.
Yes, I am bitter.
> He made the mistake of presuming that the circuitry inside would
> be no bigger than the effective external contact area.
Not really a presumption considering that some operators actually mark the micro-SIM cutting lines for you:
http://aaisp.net.uk/i/sim.png
> Any of my mailing list e-mail is threaded by
> subject. Very useful. How else is it supposed
> to thread? It breaks down if the subject changes
E-mail threading generally uses the ``References:'' header, not the subject line, for exactly that reason; to prevent thread breakage when someone changes the subject string.
> Considering that the telecos are gouging to the tune of $130 a month!
So why are you still repairing computers instead of running a dial-up ISP charging, say, $30 per month?
> if you think a business is not going to collect
> all the information they can about their
>customers, you are quite deluded.
``We don't run any sort of transparent proxies or other systems to covertly log what you do on the internet, and do not sell data to anyone.''
That's from my ISP. Doesn't yours say something similar?
If not, change.