That's a hilarious comment on an American forum, since the US likes to pretend it singlehandedly won WWII, when in reality it was mostly the Russians who destroyed the German army, and the Brits who destroyed the Luftwaffe.
The difference is that neither Russia nor GB had a choice in the matter; the US, however, did. The US could have just leaned back and let Germany take over Europe; Europe would have been so weak that it wouldn't have been a threat to the US.
The US army came in late and had to rush simply to get into Germany before Stalin took all of it for himself.
The US made big sacrifices during WWII and was crucial in the success of the allies. And even if you just consider the time after WWII, the US invested in a massive effort to de-Nazify Europe, get Europe back on its feet again, turn Germany into a democracy, and keep the USSR from taking over Europe. Of course, the US acted out of enlightened self-interest, since a free and democratic Europe was in their interest; but you can bet that if the US hadn't been there, the aftermath of WWII would have been continued bloodshed and hostilities among the French, British, and Germans.
The Russians, in contrast, turned the nations behind the iron curtain into totalitarian regimes and sucked them dry economically.
I wanted. Then I spoke to them with my thoroughly thick french accent. The fucking majority then grimaced, some even went on to tell me that french people are assholes and support terrorism.
You should have felt right at home; that's how Parisian shops and waiters often treat foreigners.
Nonetheless I certainly told my family, friends and colleague to chose other spot for vacation than the US, or learn to disguise their accent and speak perfect english.
I know what you mean: I feel the same way about France and French.
No matter how strange it might sound, it's the governement's job to interfere with your personal rights - mostly to make sure that you are able to exercise those rights in real life. Also, it is governement's duty to revoke those rights whenever their exercise is abusive.
Nonsense.
There are plenty of "abusive" things that I can do that are perfectly legal.
Furthermore, the government cannot revoke rights without due process. Being "caught" three times is not sufficient, at the very least, you need to be convicted three times of a criminal offense.
And legislators cannot just invent arbitrary punishments as they see fit, they need to be commensurate with the offense and compatible with the constitution and human rights principles.
And even when it is constitutionally permitted, creative punishments are a dangerous path to tread on because people tend to underestimate the impact they have. In a few years, banishment from the Internet will mean that people can't apply for jobs, can't do banking, can't get a mortgage, can't apply for unemployment benefits, and this is a sleazy attempt by media companies to get an extremely harsh punishment in under the radar.
We should stick to fines, incarceration, and the death penalty: those are things people understand. What percentage of an annual salary should a third offender pay? For how many years should he be incarcerated? Or by what method should he be executed? Put your cards on the table and don't try to hide behind obfuscations.
The "bloat" in Vista isn't the kernel, it's all the stuff that goes on top like the GUI.
The NT/XP/Vista series of kernels is seriously bloated: it has all sorts of crap that gives operating system "designers" a woody but ends up being useless in practice. The Vista kernel is probably the most bloated kernel ever written.
Rubbish. Vista runs fine on the modern-day machines it was "designed for".
Then Microsoft screwed up and designed for the wrong kind of machine, because really "modern day" machines are the $200 fanless book PC, the iPhone-like UMPC, and the $300 Eee PC. Fewer and fewer people want noisy, expensive behemoths just to get eye candy (and Linux manages to deliver the eye candy on the $200 PC anyway).
UNIX and Linux easily scale from 133MHz/16MB (and smaller) machines to supercomputers. Maybe you choose to leave out some modules or tools on the smaller machines, but it's the same codebase.
Microsoft has been incapable of delivering such a scalable system. Windows Mobile is an entirely different codebase; it's not just a version of Windows XP/Vista with some functionality missing. And it's not just the kernel that fails to scale, it's the UI, the tools, everything.
(Apple is as bloat-prone as Microsoft, but they started with a more scalable platform when they adopted Mach, so they are in a somewhat better situation than Microsoft.)
Microsoft screwed up their engineering, and they screwed the industry in the process, and the market should punish them for that.
The right to an internet account? So, France supplies every citizen with an account until they've had three strikes?
You have a right to have an Internet account, just like you have a right to contract with people for other goods and services.
Taking that right away is a serious interference by the government in your personal rights, not to mention in the market. Taking that right away interferes with your ability to earn a living, participate in the political process, do banking, etc. It's not as serious as throwing you in jail, but quite serious nonetheless. And soon, it may actually be a worse penalty than house arrest.
They only need to change 8 votes out of 314 in order to get the opposite result. If this really were an obstacle, it would be one that lobbyists could easily overcome, with both carrots and sticks.
Also keep in mind that th MEPs apparently have fairly little power; their vote was advisory. If the appointed council decides to pass this anyway. Given how powerful France is and that Germany also has a bunch of big media moguls and is in love with having the government keep order, they may make this a law anyway.
Why can't they? That in itself is also an assumption, and it may be wrong depending on where you apply this idea.
In this case, the criticism of the choice experiments depends on the assumption that any preferences the subject has don't change during the experiment. But that's just as shaky of an assumption as the assumption that the subject doesn't have any preferences to begin with.
The author of this paper has done a valuable service to point out a potential issue. But there are really at least three possibilities: the original assumption ("no preferences") was correct, the author's assumption ("slight, fixed preferences") is correct, or there are some slight preferences but they can change between trials. Which one applies is an experimental question.
The solutions that the psychologists came up with is correct under the assumption that the subject has either no preferences, or has no stable preferences. The new analysis is for the case where there is a pre-existing preference and it's stable across experiments, even if the preference is slight. That's a good and valid point, but it is a point about assumptions and consequences, not about getting the math wrong.
So, the psychologists didn't get their math wrong, but they made an assumption that has a significant chance of being wrong. However, until someone actually does the experiment, we simply don't know whether the original assumptions were right or whether the new assumptions are right. (I suspect it probably depends on the experiment.)
This sort of thing happens all the time in the sciences, including physics, chemistry, and biology. It's not a problem with people failing to understand mathematics, it's just that every experiment and every analysis needs to make a lot of assumptions that can't all be examined in detail, and sometimes even the seemingly most reasonable assumptions turn out to be wrong.
Google doesn't want to get a reputation for ripping people off, so baseless as these accusations are, they had to pull it.
Still, anybody who complained to Google about similarities to 37Signals should get a life. 37Signals didn't invent simplicity and they didn't invent any of the application categories they are making money with. Nor is there anything illegal, unethical, or even bad about re-implementing someone else's application.
(I also find the 37Signals applications overpriced and underperforming, but that's a separate debate.)
I appreciate your sentiment, but please, as a person who makes a living as a photographer, ensure you're being accurate when you say these things - leaving out important caveats as I've previously mentioned, is not a good thing.
Well, and you should be accurate, too. If there are no physical barriers, no signs telling you to keep off the property and if there are no signs prohibiting photography, you can take photographs the same way you do on public land. That was the case with this family's driveway.
Also curious, just what private property do you think is exempt from the owner imposing a condition of entry regarding photography? Cause that ain't so.
Oh, but that is quite wrong. Just because you own a property doesn't mean you automatically have the right to refuse people entry or tell them to leave; many private properties have easements, and people can be present even if the owner objects.
And since (excepting violations of law unrelated to property ownership) the only legal means of stopping people from taking photographs is for the property owner to tell the photographer to leave their land, if the property owner can't do that, he can't stop people from taking photographs.
You're just not allowed to go on it? Or don't they have trespass laws in the USA?
Yes. But if you don't want people to go on your private property, you have to put up clear signs saying so.
If you don't put up signs, you may be creating easements: other people, or the public in general, may acquire permanent rights to enter or cross your property.
It may also, however, be implicitly prohibited where there is a reasonable expectation to privacy
That has nothing to do with private property vs. public property. I can't take a picture of you anywhere you have a reasonable expectation of privacy, even if it's on public land.
which could be argued fairly easily by the very virtue of having your home situated sufficiently far from the street.
No, that can't be argued very easily in this case. If you have a gravel driveway that isn't clearly marked as private land--no trespassing, then evidently you don't mind people driving up that driveway. Hence, if you still want people not to take photographs, you have to say so explicitly on a sign somewhere.
If someone puts a 12 foot solid hedge around their property but for the entrance gate, whilst you could take photos at that point, it could be assumed that if you were to enter and take photos from a vantage point not visible from public property (leaving aside the issue of trespass for the moment), that you are violating a reasonable expectation of privacy in your photography on private property.
You can't leave aside the issue of trespass because that's what everything revolves around legally. If I'm not trespassing, then you don't have an expectation that what you do is hidden from me and I can take pictures. If you want me to stop taking pictures, basically all you can do is to tell me that I'm trespassing and need to leave immediately.
Legally, what you are saying doesn't exist: there is no situation in which you have an expectation of privacy on your property yet you allow me to be present there. In practice, of course you can use the threat of telling me to leave your land to get me not to take photographs; but you have no other means of getting me to stop taking pictures.
So? If you allow me to enter your driveway and you haven't put up a sign prohibiting photography, I can legally take pictures; I don't need to ask you for permission.
It doesn't matter whether it's private property, if it doesn't clearly and explicitly prohibit photography, you can take photographs; you don't need to ask for permission.
Furthermore, property owners may not even be legally allowed to impose such restrictions; although these roads are privately owned, they are intended for unrestricted public access, which means that they may count as "public places" for the purpose of photography.
Even if it's private property, so what? If a privately owned road doesn't tell you to keep out, you can enter. Furthermore, unless it's clearly and explicitly forbidden, you can take pictures on private property; you don't need to ask permission. And there are many forms of privately owned property where they owner can't forbid you to take pictures even if the want to. Finally, if a property runs up to you and tells you not to take pictures, all he can do is ask you to leave; he can't demand that you erase the pictures you have already taken.
Photography is an important part of a modern democracy and it needs to be protected; don't mislead people about where they supposedly can't take pictures.
I don't think the article is claiming that it *can* copy itself, though (if it could, they'd have more than seven in existence), just that that's their eventual goal.
Film locations seem to be Romania, Croatia, Canada, and South Africa, not USA. There seem to be a significant number of German actors. Maybe you can dig up where the film crews and post-production are based.
but in essence, this is a way to turn 75 million German dollars into a 5 million dollar film, all above board and within the law.
Well, so in their effort to support German movies through tax breaks, they screwed up in how they defined the kinds of projects that get support. I have news for you: lawmakers, like programmers, make mistakes. Unlike programmers, they don't have the luxury to test before release, their adversaries aren't pimply script kiddies but highly paid lawers, and they can't just push out a new release overnight. That's real life, deal with it.
And because tax laws always lag behind a growing economy, this means there are a lot of people who if they donate X dollars they get Y dollars more back from the government, where Y is greater than X.
That's the way it's supposed to work.
and the worst of it is as long as the company who owns the rights to the movie is in Germany, and as long as they produce actual films, the tax loophole HAS NOT CHANGED.
So? It keeps German actors and film crews employed so that, very occasionally, they can make a good movie.
What do you prefer? Some government bureaucrat picking movies? Or would you rather German actors and film crews to all become cab drivers and waiters because they can't make a living?
So, if you've played a video game and loved the story, environment, characters, you're already invested in the franchise and, bluntly, "care". To see Uwe Boll shit on something you
I know what you mean: I often have the same experience with movies based on books I like. Why get upset about it?
Slashdot Mirror
That's a hilarious comment on an American forum, since the US likes to pretend it singlehandedly won WWII, when in reality it was mostly the Russians who destroyed the German army, and the Brits who destroyed the Luftwaffe.
The difference is that neither Russia nor GB had a choice in the matter; the US, however, did. The US could have just leaned back and let Germany take over Europe; Europe would have been so weak that it wouldn't have been a threat to the US.
The US army came in late and had to rush simply to get into Germany before Stalin took all of it for himself.
The US made big sacrifices during WWII and was crucial in the success of the allies. And even if you just consider the time after WWII, the US invested in a massive effort to de-Nazify Europe, get Europe back on its feet again, turn Germany into a democracy, and keep the USSR from taking over Europe. Of course, the US acted out of enlightened self-interest, since a free and democratic Europe was in their interest; but you can bet that if the US hadn't been there, the aftermath of WWII would have been continued bloodshed and hostilities among the French, British, and Germans.
The Russians, in contrast, turned the nations behind the iron curtain into totalitarian regimes and sucked them dry economically.
I wanted. Then I spoke to them with my thoroughly thick french accent. The fucking majority then grimaced, some even went on to tell me that french people are assholes and support terrorism.
You should have felt right at home; that's how Parisian shops and waiters often treat foreigners.
Nonetheless I certainly told my family, friends and colleague to chose other spot for vacation than the US, or learn to disguise their accent and speak perfect english.
I know what you mean: I feel the same way about France and French.
No matter how strange it might sound, it's the governement's job to interfere with your personal rights - mostly to make sure that you are able to exercise those rights in real life. Also, it is governement's duty to revoke those rights whenever their exercise is abusive.
Nonsense.
There are plenty of "abusive" things that I can do that are perfectly legal.
Furthermore, the government cannot revoke rights without due process. Being "caught" three times is not sufficient, at the very least, you need to be convicted three times of a criminal offense.
And legislators cannot just invent arbitrary punishments as they see fit, they need to be commensurate with the offense and compatible with the constitution and human rights principles.
And even when it is constitutionally permitted, creative punishments are a dangerous path to tread on because people tend to underestimate the impact they have. In a few years, banishment from the Internet will mean that people can't apply for jobs, can't do banking, can't get a mortgage, can't apply for unemployment benefits, and this is a sleazy attempt by media companies to get an extremely harsh punishment in under the radar.
We should stick to fines, incarceration, and the death penalty: those are things people understand. What percentage of an annual salary should a third offender pay? For how many years should he be incarcerated? Or by what method should he be executed? Put your cards on the table and don't try to hide behind obfuscations.
The "bloat" in Vista isn't the kernel, it's all the stuff that goes on top like the GUI.
The NT/XP/Vista series of kernels is seriously bloated: it has all sorts of crap that gives operating system "designers" a woody but ends up being useless in practice. The Vista kernel is probably the most bloated kernel ever written.
Rubbish. Vista runs fine on the modern-day machines it was "designed for".
Then Microsoft screwed up and designed for the wrong kind of machine, because really "modern day" machines are the $200 fanless book PC, the iPhone-like UMPC, and the $300 Eee PC. Fewer and fewer people want noisy, expensive behemoths just to get eye candy (and Linux manages to deliver the eye candy on the $200 PC anyway).
UNIX and Linux easily scale from 133MHz/16MB (and smaller) machines to supercomputers. Maybe you choose to leave out some modules or tools on the smaller machines, but it's the same codebase.
Microsoft has been incapable of delivering such a scalable system. Windows Mobile is an entirely different codebase; it's not just a version of Windows XP/Vista with some functionality missing. And it's not just the kernel that fails to scale, it's the UI, the tools, everything.
(Apple is as bloat-prone as Microsoft, but they started with a more scalable platform when they adopted Mach, so they are in a somewhat better situation than Microsoft.)
Microsoft screwed up their engineering, and they screwed the industry in the process, and the market should punish them for that.
The right to an internet account? So, France supplies every citizen with an account until they've had three strikes?
You have a right to have an Internet account, just like you have a right to contract with people for other goods and services.
Taking that right away is a serious interference by the government in your personal rights, not to mention in the market. Taking that right away interferes with your ability to earn a living, participate in the political process, do banking, etc. It's not as serious as throwing you in jail, but quite serious nonetheless. And soon, it may actually be a worse penalty than house arrest.
They only need to change 8 votes out of 314 in order to get the opposite result. If this really were an obstacle, it would be one that lobbyists could easily overcome, with both carrots and sticks.
Also keep in mind that th MEPs apparently have fairly little power; their vote was advisory. If the appointed council decides to pass this anyway. Given how powerful France is and that Germany also has a bunch of big media moguls and is in love with having the government keep order, they may make this a law anyway.
They can't move the goats or car during the game.
Why can't they? That in itself is also an assumption, and it may be wrong depending on where you apply this idea.
In this case, the criticism of the choice experiments depends on the assumption that any preferences the subject has don't change during the experiment. But that's just as shaky of an assumption as the assumption that the subject doesn't have any preferences to begin with.
The author of this paper has done a valuable service to point out a potential issue. But there are really at least three possibilities: the original assumption ("no preferences") was correct, the author's assumption ("slight, fixed preferences") is correct, or there are some slight preferences but they can change between trials. Which one applies is an experimental question.
The solutions that the psychologists came up with is correct under the assumption that the subject has either no preferences, or has no stable preferences. The new analysis is for the case where there is a pre-existing preference and it's stable across experiments, even if the preference is slight. That's a good and valid point, but it is a point about assumptions and consequences, not about getting the math wrong.
So, the psychologists didn't get their math wrong, but they made an assumption that has a significant chance of being wrong. However, until someone actually does the experiment, we simply don't know whether the original assumptions were right or whether the new assumptions are right. (I suspect it probably depends on the experiment.)
This sort of thing happens all the time in the sciences, including physics, chemistry, and biology. It's not a problem with people failing to understand mathematics, it's just that every experiment and every analysis needs to make a lot of assumptions that can't all be examined in detail, and sometimes even the seemingly most reasonable assumptions turn out to be wrong.
Google doesn't want to get a reputation for ripping people off, so baseless as these accusations are, they had to pull it.
Still, anybody who complained to Google about similarities to 37Signals should get a life. 37Signals didn't invent simplicity and they didn't invent any of the application categories they are making money with. Nor is there anything illegal, unethical, or even bad about re-implementing someone else's application.
(I also find the 37Signals applications overpriced and underperforming, but that's a separate debate.)
How is hot-swapping a drive self healing?
It isn't. Who said it was?
The company claims two innovations: self healing and rapid replacement. Both are commonplace.
Clear now?
I appreciate your sentiment, but please, as a person who makes a living as a photographer, ensure you're being accurate when you say these things - leaving out important caveats as I've previously mentioned, is not a good thing.
Well, and you should be accurate, too. If there are no physical barriers, no signs telling you to keep off the property and if there are no signs prohibiting photography, you can take photographs the same way you do on public land. That was the case with this family's driveway.
Also curious, just what private property do you think is exempt from the owner imposing a condition of entry regarding photography? Cause that ain't so.
Oh, but that is quite wrong. Just because you own a property doesn't mean you automatically have the right to refuse people entry or tell them to leave; many private properties have easements, and people can be present even if the owner objects.
And since (excepting violations of law unrelated to property ownership) the only legal means of stopping people from taking photographs is for the property owner to tell the photographer to leave their land, if the property owner can't do that, he can't stop people from taking photographs.
You're just not allowed to go on it? Or don't they have trespass laws in the USA?
Yes. But if you don't want people to go on your private property, you have to put up clear signs saying so.
If you don't put up signs, you may be creating easements: other people, or the public in general, may acquire permanent rights to enter or cross your property.
It may also, however, be implicitly prohibited where there is a reasonable expectation to privacy
That has nothing to do with private property vs. public property. I can't take a picture of you anywhere you have a reasonable expectation of privacy, even if it's on public land.
which could be argued fairly easily by the very virtue of having your home situated sufficiently far from the street.
No, that can't be argued very easily in this case. If you have a gravel driveway that isn't clearly marked as private land--no trespassing, then evidently you don't mind people driving up that driveway. Hence, if you still want people not to take photographs, you have to say so explicitly on a sign somewhere.
If someone puts a 12 foot solid hedge around their property but for the entrance gate, whilst you could take photos at that point, it could be assumed that if you were to enter and take photos from a vantage point not visible from public property (leaving aside the issue of trespass for the moment), that you are violating a reasonable expectation of privacy in your photography on private property.
You can't leave aside the issue of trespass because that's what everything revolves around legally. If I'm not trespassing, then you don't have an expectation that what you do is hidden from me and I can take pictures. If you want me to stop taking pictures, basically all you can do is to tell me that I'm trespassing and need to leave immediately.
Legally, what you are saying doesn't exist: there is no situation in which you have an expectation of privacy on your property yet you allow me to be present there. In practice, of course you can use the threat of telling me to leave your land to get me not to take photographs; but you have no other means of getting me to stop taking pictures.
So? If you allow me to enter your driveway and you haven't put up a sign prohibiting photography, I can legally take pictures; I don't need to ask you for permission.
It doesn't matter whether it's private property, if it doesn't clearly and explicitly prohibit photography, you can take photographs; you don't need to ask for permission.
Furthermore, property owners may not even be legally allowed to impose such restrictions; although these roads are privately owned, they are intended for unrestricted public access, which means that they may count as "public places" for the purpose of photography.
Even if it's private property, so what? If a privately owned road doesn't tell you to keep out, you can enter. Furthermore, unless it's clearly and explicitly forbidden, you can take pictures on private property; you don't need to ask permission. And there are many forms of privately owned property where they owner can't forbid you to take pictures even if the want to. Finally, if a property runs up to you and tells you not to take pictures, all he can do is ask you to leave; he can't demand that you erase the pictures you have already taken.
Photography is an important part of a modern democracy and it needs to be protected; don't mislead people about where they supposedly can't take pictures.
I don't see anything particularly "disruptive" about this. Lots of storage systems are "self healing" and based on hot-swappable elements.
The whole thing sounds like astroturfing.
Gravel is not an indication of a road being "private".
Either mark the road as "Private - Do Not Enter" or don't complain when people drive there and take pictures.
In fact, if you don't mark the road that way, the public may acquire a right to drive there over time, private property or not.
You can bet there would be a big shareholder lawsuit.
I don't think the article is claiming that it *can* copy itself, though (if it could, they'd have more than seven in existence), just that that's their eventual goal.
If wishes were horses...
you apparently didn't get the point. Uwe Boil is an American citizen, and all his movies are produced in America.
Oh, please, get your facts straight:
http://www.nndb.com/people/066/000087802/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uwe_Boll
http://www.boll-kg.de/
Film locations seem to be Romania, Croatia, Canada, and South Africa, not USA. There seem to be a significant number of German actors. Maybe you can dig up where the film crews and post-production are based.
but in essence, this is a way to turn 75 million German dollars into a 5 million dollar film, all above board and within the law.
Well, so in their effort to support German movies through tax breaks, they screwed up in how they defined the kinds of projects that get support. I have news for you: lawmakers, like programmers, make mistakes. Unlike programmers, they don't have the luxury to test before release, their adversaries aren't pimply script kiddies but highly paid lawers, and they can't just push out a new release overnight. That's real life, deal with it.
And because tax laws always lag behind a growing economy, this means there are a lot of people who if they donate X dollars they get Y dollars more back from the government, where Y is greater than X.
That's the way it's supposed to work.
and the worst of it is as long as the company who owns the rights to the movie is in Germany, and as long as they produce actual films, the tax loophole HAS NOT CHANGED.
So? It keeps German actors and film crews employed so that, very occasionally, they can make a good movie.
What do you prefer? Some government bureaucrat picking movies? Or would you rather German actors and film crews to all become cab drivers and waiters because they can't make a living?
So, if you've played a video game and loved the story, environment, characters, you're already invested in the franchise and, bluntly, "care". To see Uwe Boll shit on something you
I know what you mean: I often have the same experience with movies based on books I like. Why get upset about it?