In my country, Denmark, it is indeed illegal. From what I understand, I am glad it is so.
Did I mention that we have never had your problem with telemarketing either? Or that email and SMS spam is strictly illegal and swiftly and harshly prosecuted?
Or that we actually have an efficient and respected state department which looks after consumer rights in cases like deceptive marketing and defective products? For example they recently went after Apple when Apple refused to repair faulty macBooks.
Sometimes, more and more frequently lately, I am glad I don't live in the US.
Yes, people are using it as part of lying about their education, see fx this
If the employer is willing to accept someone from a college they never heard anything about, then who cares if they went at all?
Having any university degree should make a difference if a person used several years studying a subject, as a college degree implies. And if you pay extra for good grades, such as magna cum laude (really, this seems to happen!), then it also implies a good degree kind of mastery.
It doesn't seem unlikely that some employer would accept a diploma from a college they never heard of. You can't know every college. And the diploma mills go to great length to be able to look like a real university, to survive a glancing examination of their web site.
Diploma mills are frauds who give out realist looking university diplomas, complete with grade and course itemization, to anyone who will pay for them. No need to have any real knowledge or take any real courses, just as long as you can pay.
Many of them try to justify it by saying that they evaluate the persons "life experience" to judge whether the person is worthy of the diploma, but in reality most of them just give the diplomas to anyone who pays the fees.
It is pretty obvious that the diplomas are used by their buyers to get jobs for lying about their abilities, i.e. pretty much plain fraud.
I noticed that the articles of diploma mills are frequent targets of whitewash (see fx this). I don't know for certain who the whitewashers are, but I assume it is either the diploma mills themselves (most like), or people holding the diplomas and afraid to be exposed. Many of Wikipedia's articles rank highly in Google, so they are an important target.
I have a number of diploma mills in my watchlist, and sometimes I have to revert whitewashing every day...
It's a lot like when people used to let high school math coaches claim to have solved Fermat's Little Theorem. We all knew they didn't, but there's a lot to be said for the puzzle of locating the coaches' mistakes.
I actually independently formulated and proved Fermat's Little Theorem just after high school, using only high school math.
Google apparently still allows ads for Diploma mills. Usually they claim that they examine your "life experience", and then grant you a diploma based on what you already know. In practice, they just sell you pieces of paper without checking, and you can then use the diploma to pretend to other people you have taken a real university degree, i.e. fraud.
For example a reporter was able to buy a degree in aerospace engineering, a field he knew nothing about, from Ashwood University. Ashwood University is deceptively named to be similar to Ashford University.
But if you search for "Ashwood University" in Google you get plenty of ads. As well as the Wikipedia article which document the fact that the operation is fraudulent. The Wikipedia article is vandalized regularly by people trying to edit out the well-documented criticism. The vandals are probably the university owners or degree holders.
I have sent an email to Google some time ago, saying that they were advertising for fraud. But my email had no lasting effect, obviously.
If there are RPM (or apt) based distributions which have a similar scheme then I would love to know about it. Mandrake has (or at least used to have) a script called something like 'urpmi_rpm-find-leaves' which gave a list of RPMs which were not depended upon. By filtering the output through 'grep lib' one could get part of the way there, but it would still leave quite a few RPMs to locate by hand.
Debian (and perhaps Ubuntu) does.
When you install packages with the "aptitude" tool, it will remember which packages you specifically asked for, and which got installed to satisfy dependencies.
When you uninstall a package, all packages which got installed as dependencies, but which are no longer needed, will automatically be uninstalled.
This one is not a bad idea. Though it is not really worth it to use lots of land for a marginal energy gain with mais, it will build the infrastructure for when we can make it from cellulose.
While it would certainly be better than nothing, it wouldn't necessarily be much of a guarantee. I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped closed sourced drivers which only worked with the specific interface version of the Linux kernel which shipped with the preinstalled Linux OS. Or for example a printer could work with lpr via a closed source driver, but not with CUPS.
For it to really be a guarantee, the hardware has to have open source drivers and specifications available.
As I said, I just took a backup of all my email. After checking the "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)" button mention in my initial post, I was able to download all mail, not just the mail in my inbox.
Google is actually "not being evil" here, by making it easy to extract your email.
Just go to "settings"->"forwarding and pop" and select "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)". You can then download a copy of all the mail to your computer using a normal email client (You can choose to keep a copy on gmail). You can also get all mail automatically forwarded to an outside email address.
That makes it easy to switch email provider; I used it the other day to download a copy of all my email, just in case. It seems to me that Google has chosen not to lock in users, but to simply try retain customers by being better. Which is the way it should be, and which makes me more comfortable relying on google services in the future.
Yes, could care less is correct, because it's short for the phrase: I suppose I could care less, but I'm not sure how.
I agree with you, and concede the point.*
*Here "I agree with you, and concede the point" is actually short for the phrase "I could agree with you, and concede the point, but I consider using words which mean the opposite of what you are trying to say in normal conversation to be extremely silly.".
I think it came installed by default in Firefox last time I installed Ubuntu. Currently doesn't seem to work very well, but the effort is worthwhile, and hopefully the software will improve.
If people really wanted the old stable versions then they would be using 2.6.16.y, which is still being maintained using the same old stable policies as 2.4
The fact that most people don't seem to run 2.6.16 seems to indicate that people are happy to forgo some stability in exchange for having the new features in the latest 2.6.x kernel available now.
I also checked the fact, and came to the same conclusion. Mod parent up.
I am a Wikipedia administrator, and I think this block on IP edits is completely correct. IP edits (edits from users without accounts without accounts) from proxy servers with many misbehaved users should always be blocked.
If the Terrestrial Planet Finder or Darwin gets built then we should be able to analyze the planet's atmosphere using passive spectroscopy. This could for example reveal whether the atmosphere contained O2.
The Terrestrial Planet Finder is far more interesting than putting human boots on mars or the moon, IMO. Cheaper too. Unfortunately NASA doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry to built it.
Thats a C&D. The guy was not sued, just informed politely he was infringing
Well, of course they didn't sue because desisted. It seems clear to me that the polite request would have a lawsuit if he had not. So the difference is not important.
Free software developers don't have huge amounts of money to defend against lawsuits, so of course patent issues will heavily tend to them desisting before an actual trial is started. That is another reason why patents are so destructive to free software - maybe they don't actually cover the subject or are valid, bug free software developers can't afford to defend against them.
and provided with an alternative approach when he asked
What alternative approach was he provided with? To be forced to remove ASF support? That doesn't seem so great an alternative to me.
Slashdot Mirror
They can of course only prosecute the spammers who live in our jurisdiction, i.e. Denmark.
This crap should be illegal.
In my country, Denmark, it is indeed illegal. From what I understand, I am glad it is so.
Did I mention that we have never had your problem with telemarketing either? Or that email and SMS spam is strictly illegal and swiftly and harshly prosecuted?
Or that we actually have an efficient and respected state department which looks after consumer rights in cases like deceptive marketing and defective products? For example they recently went after Apple when Apple refused to repair faulty macBooks.
Sometimes, more and more frequently lately, I am glad I don't live in the US.
Yes, people are using it as part of lying about their education, see fx this
If the employer is willing to accept someone from a college they never heard anything about, then who cares if they went at all?
Having any university degree should make a difference if a person used several years studying a subject, as a college degree implies. And if you pay extra for good grades, such as magna cum laude (really, this seems to happen!), then it also implies a good degree kind of mastery.
It doesn't seem unlikely that some employer would accept a diploma from a college they never heard of. You can't know every college. And the diploma mills go to great length to be able to look like a real university, to survive a glancing examination of their web site.
Diploma mills are frauds who give out realist looking university diplomas, complete with grade and course itemization, to anyone who will pay for them. No need to have any real knowledge or take any real courses, just as long as you can pay.
Many of them try to justify it by saying that they evaluate the persons "life experience" to judge whether the person is worthy of the diploma, but in reality most of them just give the diplomas to anyone who pays the fees.
It is pretty obvious that the diplomas are used by their buyers to get jobs for lying about their abilities, i.e. pretty much plain fraud.
I noticed that the articles of diploma mills are frequent targets of whitewash (see fx this). I don't know for certain who the whitewashers are, but I assume it is either the diploma mills themselves (most like), or people holding the diplomas and afraid to be exposed. Many of Wikipedia's articles rank highly in Google, so they are an important target.
I have a number of diploma mills in my watchlist, and sometimes I have to revert whitewashing every day...
It's a lot like when people used to let high school math coaches claim to have solved Fermat's Little Theorem. We all knew they didn't, but there's a lot to be said for the puzzle of locating the coaches' mistakes.
I actually independently formulated and proved Fermat's Little Theorem just after high school, using only high school math.
Perhaps you meant Fermat's last theorem.
From the summary: Dawn will be the first science mission powered by electric ion propulsion
s . For example, Deep Space 1 used electric ion thrusters.
No, a quick Wikipedia check says otherwise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster#Mission
Google apparently still allows ads for Diploma mills. Usually they claim that they examine your "life experience", and then grant you a diploma based on what you already know. In practice, they just sell you pieces of paper without checking, and you can then use the diploma to pretend to other people you have taken a real university degree, i.e. fraud.
For example a reporter was able to buy a degree in aerospace engineering, a field he knew nothing about, from Ashwood University. Ashwood University is deceptively named to be similar to Ashford University.
But if you search for "Ashwood University" in Google you get plenty of ads. As well as the Wikipedia article which document the fact that the operation is fraudulent. The Wikipedia article is vandalized regularly by people trying to edit out the well-documented criticism. The vandals are probably the university owners or degree holders.
I have sent an email to Google some time ago, saying that they were advertising for fraud. But my email had no lasting effect, obviously.
Or a dialup user who is allocated a new DHCP dynamic IP for each reboot.
Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke.
Even includes a section on the plausibility of the technologies used in the book.
If there are RPM (or apt) based distributions which have a similar scheme then I would love to know about it. Mandrake has (or at least used to have) a script called something like 'urpmi_rpm-find-leaves' which gave a list of RPMs which were not depended upon. By filtering the output through 'grep lib' one could get part of the way there, but it would still leave quite a few RPMs to locate by hand.
Debian (and perhaps Ubuntu) does.
When you install packages with the "aptitude" tool, it will remember which packages you specifically asked for, and which got installed to satisfy dependencies.
When you uninstall a package, all packages which got installed as dependencies, but which are no longer needed, will automatically be uninstalled.
Not to be pedantic, but...
:)
:)
Ok, to be really pedantic, Google's owners per definition own 100% of the shares.
And it is "owners", not owner's.
pushing ethanol fuel (big ethanol lobby)
This one is not a bad idea. Though it is not really worth it to use lots of land for a marginal energy gain with mais, it will build the infrastructure for when we can make it from cellulose.
While it would certainly be better than nothing, it wouldn't necessarily be much of a guarantee. I wouldn't be surprised if they shipped closed sourced drivers which only worked with the specific interface version of the Linux kernel which shipped with the preinstalled Linux OS. Or for example a printer could work with lpr via a closed source driver, but not with CUPS.
For it to really be a guarantee, the hardware has to have open source drivers and specifications available.
I am in no way an expert, but I read about other upcoming types of RAM which also sound interesting:
Z-RAM. One cell is a single transistor. Faster than SRAM, which uses 6 transistors per cell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRAM
TTRAM. One cell contains 2 transistors. As fast as SRAM, according to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TTRAM
As I said, I just took a backup of all my email. After checking the "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)" button mention in my initial post, I was able to download all mail, not just the mail in my inbox.
Google is actually "not being evil" here, by making it easy to extract your email.
Just go to "settings"->"forwarding and pop" and select "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)". You can then download a copy of all the mail to your computer using a normal email client (You can choose to keep a copy on gmail). You can also get all mail automatically forwarded to an outside email address.
That makes it easy to switch email provider; I used it the other day to download a copy of all my email, just in case. It seems to me that Google has chosen not to lock in users, but to simply try retain customers by being better. Which is the way it should be, and which makes me more comfortable relying on google services in the future.
Regards, Thue
Yes, could care less is correct, because it's short for the phrase:
I suppose I could care less, but I'm not sure how.
I agree with you, and concede the point.*
*Here "I agree with you, and concede the point" is actually short for the phrase "I could agree with you, and concede the point, but I consider using words which mean the opposite of what you are trying to say in normal conversation to be extremely silly.".
most people could care less about which graphics card they have
u um.jpg
They could care less? It would only possible do be able to care less if you actually cared.
http://www.impleader.com/photos/blog/caringcontin
The Free Software Foundation is working on an open source implementation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnash
I think it came installed by default in Firefox last time I installed Ubuntu. Currently doesn't seem to work very well, but the effort is worthwhile, and hopefully the software will improve.
The American government honours treaties now?
Yes, and we haven't "not-honored" any that we've signed on to
How about the Geneva Conventions. They include a clause against torture, but the US has Used torture in the "War on Terror".
I think the 2.6.16 does intent to add new features such as drivers, as long as he can be fairly sure it doesn't break any existing functionality.
If people really wanted the old stable versions then they would be using 2.6.16.y, which is still being maintained using the same old stable policies as 2.4
s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Version
The fact that most people don't seem to run 2.6.16 seems to indicate that people are happy to forgo some stability in exchange for having the new features in the latest 2.6.x kernel available now.
I also checked the fact, and came to the same conclusion. Mod parent up.
I am a Wikipedia administrator, and I think this block on IP edits is completely correct. IP edits (edits from users without accounts without accounts) from proxy servers with many misbehaved users should always be blocked.
If the Terrestrial Planet Finder or Darwin gets built then we should be able to analyze the planet's atmosphere using passive spectroscopy. This could for example reveal whether the atmosphere contained O2.
The Terrestrial Planet Finder is far more interesting than putting human boots on mars or the moon, IMO. Cheaper too. Unfortunately NASA doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry to built it.
Thats a C&D. The guy was not sued, just informed politely he was infringing
Well, of course they didn't sue because desisted. It seems clear to me that the polite request would have a lawsuit if he had not. So the difference is not important.
Free software developers don't have huge amounts of money to defend against lawsuits, so of course patent issues will heavily tend to them desisting before an actual trial is started. That is another reason why patents are so destructive to free software - maybe they don't actually cover the subject or are valid, bug free software developers can't afford to defend against them.
and provided with an alternative approach when he asked
What alternative approach was he provided with? To be forced to remove ASF support? That doesn't seem so great an alternative to me.