That worry has to be at least slightly tempered by the knowledge that Mugabe doesn't need a civil suit to make his displeasure known. It's not as though he's above appropriation of private property and threats of violence against people for no better reason than that they make inviting targets. If he wants to try to bully the BBC into giving him good coverage, he's likely to do so no matter what the Australian Supreme Court says about this case.
BTW Truth is not necessarily a defence against defamation in Australia, if intent to cause harm is the motive you can still lose a case. The defamation laws are highly tilted in the favour of the rich over here.
Which is obviously why he wants the suit to be handled in Australia. It's a good old case of jurisdiction shopping; the Australian laws are more favorable, so he wants the case to be tried there. The American laws are more favorable to Dow Jones, so they want the case tried in America.
That said, there is a certain degree of reason to the Australian court's ruling. If a web site can actually be read anywhere, then damage from defamation can happen anywhere, and the plaintiff should be able to sue wherever he suffered the damage. The fact that there's a specific person involved naturally limits the number of places where damage can take place, so it inherently limits the amount of jurisdiction shopping that can take place and the number of applicable defamation laws that the publisher needs to consider.
And it was damn spooky. I was lucky(?) enough to make a trip to East Germany in 1989, and came into the country through Checkpoint Charlie. We got there from the airport partly on the U-Bahn, and passed through at least one ghost station. Just the existence of the ghost stations was a bit spooky, but when you realized why they were there it became quite unsettling. It really brought home the reality of the cold war like nothing else I saw (at least until our bus had to wait behind Soviet tanks on maneuvers).
If you don't think the govermenet is trust worthy, then move.
I have a far more radical idea. If the government is untrustworthy, badly managed, taking the wrong approach, or whatever, how about trying to improve it? The United States is still at least nominally a representative democracy, and one of the underlying principles is that the government is subject to change if the people don't like it. Identifying problems, like TIA being a really bad idea, is the first step in fixing them.
I know that its disconcerting to know that you may experience an invasion of privacy but most of us are too inconsequential for the government to bother with.
It may be true that you're too inconsequential for the government as a whole to care about, but that doesn't mean that there's no problem with that information being out there. The government for better or worse is made up of individuals, and some of those individuals will have access to that information; in fact it will be more useful to the government if lots of people within the government have access to it. Most of those people may be fine, but there are still people who are going to abuse any power they get.
Take the more limited example of existing police databases. There are plenty of examples of police officers who have abused those systems to harras ex-girlfriends, get even with people who have pissed them off, etc. Extending those databases to include even more kinds of data that could be abused will only make things worse. For one thing, it will make abusing the database more tempting, by making more kinds of mischief possible. For another thing it will make the potential abuses more damaging.
The key thing to me is that such abuse is all but inevitable, while the supposed benefits are largely hypothetical. Every time people have created databases of this general type, that data has been used abusively at least occasionally. There's every reason to think that the TIA database will be abused, too. At the same time, there's no certainty that it will be possible to use that same data to track down potential terrorists. I know for sure that given such a database I would find it much easier to write a script that took somebody's license plate number, dug up their credit card purchases, and emailed ones that were potentially embarrasing to all of their known email contacts that to track down possible terrorist activity.
Come to think of it, it may not be some sort of requirement to add the "Paid Advertisement" disclaimer, it may be some thinking by the newspaper editor to avoid complaints from stoopid people who might buy the advertised product and be disappointed.
There is a legal requirement that any and that is designed to look like normal content must be clearly labeled as an advertizement. In fact, the legal requirement is rather stringent, so that things that you might not think of as advertizements are legally classified as such and have to be labeled. A good example is that some scientific journals have a fee for publishing articles. That makes the articles technically advertizements under the law and they have to be labeled that way, even though they don't qualify as ads by the layman's definition.
get in your time machine and pick a year, any year. go to that year. you will find the EXACT SAME PROPORTION of people who believe one thing or another as they believe today.
But that simply isn't true. There are real changes in what people believe and what they practice. They may not be as fast as some people claim, but society's attitudes really can change. Human nature may not change, but much of our view of morality is learned, so that attitudes really will change if people are taught different things. As an example, male homosexuality was considered normal and acceptable in Ancient Greece, and the majority of men practiced it at least occasionally. Nobody thought that it was a horrible sin. Today many people think that it's a horrible sin, and the rate at which it's practiced is much lower. That's a substantial, real change in people's views of moraliy.
Perhaps a better example is slavery. 200 years ago, slavery was a geuninely polarizing issue in the USA. Some people felt that it was a terrible evil, others didn't have strong feelings about it, and yet others felt that it was not just acceptable but that God wanted whites to hold dominion over blacks. Today the vast majority of Americans genuinely belive that slavery was (and is) despicable and unsupportable. Only far out wackos seriously believe that it's part of God's plan for the universe.
this is a common misperception you have demonstrated, this myopic view of history. you see a frightening loosening of morals over time before you. it is a false perception, relax.
I don't think that it's so much a loss of morals as it is a change in morals. Some things that used to be viewed as immoral are considered OK today, and some things that used to be considered OK are now considered immoral. It's just that:
People who place a high value on morals tend to be more worried about (perceived) moral slippage than (perceived) moral advance. An important part of this is that "things are going to hell in a handbasket" is a much more effective rallying cry than "things are better now than they ever used to be".
There's a substantial me versus them component. Perceived declines in moral standards are almost always things that other people do, while percieved improvements are frequently in the things that the person himself does. Many people are reluctant to admit that their previous behavior doesn't live up to their current standards, so they're less likely to point out areas of moral improvement.
A good example of this is a comparison of some aspects of common 1950s behavior with today's. I remember a vigorous dispute about this, in which one side pointed to higher church membership in the 1950s as a sign of greater morality, while the other responded with greater modern racial tolerance as a sign that church membership wasn't the only facet of morality. I'm not sure if either side was right or wrong, but it seems pretty clear to me that both sides were looking only at one side of the issue.
which is why people still drive Studebakers, old Ferraris and old Porsche's I suppose
People care about even stranger things than that. Just yesterday, I saw a group of Edsel fans driving their cars in the Doodah Parade. When I thought that was goofy enough, the people standing next to me pulled out their pictures from a trip to a Corvair fan get together (The Great Western Fan Belt Toss & Swap Meet). ISTR that there are even Trabant fan clubs, of all things. Name a piece of obsolete technology, and there's a good chance that some people will be fanatically devoted to it.
But that's only true if you bother to upgrade your version of Windows. Many people don't seem to believe it, but as long as you keep the same software on the same hardware, its speed remains reasonably close to constant. (Yes, this is neglecting things like the machine slowing down as the hard drive gets full and fragmented.) So for the majority of people who don't want to update their copy of Windows because they don't want to put up with the stupid UI changes with every version, this isn't much of an issue.
They aren't collecting enough to build proper tests if all they are collecting is spam.
It depends on what their purpose is. If I want to train my personal spam filter, I already have a large corpus of non-spam to use- all of the emails that I've saved over the past few years. OTOH, I don't save all of the spam that I get, so I need a training set of spam to use for the other side of things. Since spam is, by its very nature, a bulk thing that's sent out indiscriminately, other people will probably have a spam corpus that is reasonably similar to what I receive, so I can reasonably use an archive of other people's spam to train my own spam catcher. I think that it would have been very useful to have a few thousand standard spam messages when I started using bogofilter.
FWIW, it also looks as though they are trying to collect an archive of non-spam email. There is a spot on their page where a non-spam archive will be in the future. I'm not sure if I'd want to send them my personal email to put into that kind of a list because some of it includes personal information, but I could certainly see somebody developing an archive of innocuous non-spam mail- mailing lists, legitimate business mail (like "the item you have been waiting for is now in stock" notices), and the like.
First, although XML seems more 'open', in reality it is simply a higher-level encoding that may or may not be easier to understand but is guaranteed to both take longer to parse and take up more space than the conventional.doc format because of the size of the tags, making this a downgrade 'optimization' of both speed and size -- where is the win here?
Give me a break. When was the last time that Microsoft resisted a format because it was modestly less space and processor efficient than the old format? My guess, given the size of current MS documents and their programs' efficiency, is that it was approximately the 12th of never. And if size is really a concern, it should be easy to use a standard compression algorithm, like gzip or bzip2, to reduce their size. AFAIK, XML takes up a fair bit of disk space because of the tags but it compresses very well.
Re:Why run the whole thing under x86?
on
Fun With Wine
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· Score: 1
No, you don't have to pay for Windows. There are (or at least were) versions of VirtualPC that came with a Linux distribution (I think they chose RedHat) instead of Windows. They charged substantially less for it because you didn't have to spring for a Windows license. I'm not sure if that version is available anymore, but if you already have a copy you can use it as suggested to run Windows programs on your Mac without paying Microsoft anything.
Re:Obligatory submarine joke...
on
Book on NR-1
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· Score: 1
I don't know. Given the typical quality of spelling on/., you can never be sure if the answer is what you're expecting or not.
It's not quite as slender a reed as you might think. I recently attended a seminar at which one of the speakers discussed bacterial evolution by inter-species gene transfer. One of the key points of his talk was that recently transfered genes really don't fit into the recipient genomes very well. Unless they actually give the recipient a selective advantage, they tend to be weeded back out of the population because they cause a whole host of subtle and not-so-subtle problems. So when you stop applying the selective pressure to keep them (i.e. stop prescribing the antibiotics) they can get selected back out pretty quickly.
No, no, no. If you burn the body, all you'll be doing is creating fire resistant strains of bacteria. Pretty soon there will be strains of bacteria that can survive in bodies full of burning antibiotics, and then where will we be?
There's an obvious reason why he did this: none of his readers could be expected to know calculus. It had, after all, just been invented, or was still in the process of being invented. If he wanted people to understand the concepts, he either had to teach them the math or figure out a way of presenting it convincingly without the reader needing to know calculus. Neither one is an easy prospect. I haven't read Principia myself, but I remember a physics prof mentioning that in some cases he deliberately avoided using calculus because he thought that his demonstrations would be more likely to convince people if they didn't use all that new fangled math, and it wound up being vastly more complicated as a result.
Solaris is inherently far more secure, so it is unlikely that it will be "leaked" out to the press.
What a ridiculous comment. A leak isn't some random process by which the data slips out of the datasystem accidentally. It's a process by which a member of the organization sends the document to somebody outside of the organization in order to serve their ends. Unless Solaris has some features I've never heard of, it's not going to prevent a determined insider from sending ESR Sun strategy documents.
Which of these do they have the right to sue, and who would they most likely sue?
Heh. You obviously don't understand the principle behind lawsuits very well. The correct answer is:
7. All of the above
If you have enough money to afford the lawyers, which Microsoft certainly does, you sue anyone who you have anything like a case against. As long as the argument isn't completely specious, you're unlikely to suffer anything worse than having the suit thrown out of court. Meanwhile, you've harassed all of the people who have been using Linux, and if you're lucky and/or good you've gotten injunctions to prevent them from developing and/or distributing it. The value to Microsoft of winning in court is so great that there's little incentive for them not to go after anyone they can in a case like that.
It's like MS only letting Outlook run on Windows; Apple really doesn't have anything to say about that.
That's a bad example, because Outlook does run on MacOS. I know, because I use it. It currently only runs on OS9, but there are at least rumors that it will be ported to OSX. A better example would be Access, which is Windows only.
One last suggestion: if someone shows up and threatens you, just give him the keys. Your life is worth much more than your car.
One other potentially helpful suggestion: get Lojack. It won't do a thing to keep your car from getting stolen, but it can be a big help in getting it back if it is stolen. Allegedly Lojack is enough of a threat to the kind of professional thief who targets common model cars that they've started leaving the cars to sit for a couple of days before stripping them for parts so that their whole operation won't be caught when the police use it to trace the car.
Do remember that Honda is in the business of selling cars, so they may have a motivation to overestimate how long you can go between changes. This lets them make the maintenance costs look lower and the car wear out faster so that you'll want to buy a new one sooner. I also know that my Honda's operating manual specifies 3,750 miles if you regularly:
Do a lot of stop and go driving
Drive on dirt roads
Drive when the temperature is above 90 F (32 C)
Drive when the temperature is below freezing, or
Live in Canada
That covers a lot common driving circumstances, so it's quite likely that most people would have to go for the shorter interval to keep in line with the manufacturer's recommendations.
I'd assume that they're working on the HURD because they think that it's interesting, fun, and/or a good learning experience. Not all Free Software development has to take place with the goal of taking over the world. A lot of it, as ESR points out, is done to satisfy the interests of the individual authors. That's why there are a million projects on Freshmeat that are essentially clones of the same basic project- mp3 player frontends, database systems to catalog CD collections, etc. Individual programmers write them for their own personal reasons and then provide them for anyone else who wants a copy.
There's no guarantee that a new band can sell a single cd, however, without a lot of promotion, etc.
Well they're unlikely to sell many disks without promotion if they're priced the same as disks by established, well known, heavily promoted artists. But if they were sold for a really good price, and the label made it clear that they were new, interesting albums by unestablished groups rather than remainder bin stuff that couldn't sell, I think that there would be a market.
I know people who spend money to go to live performances by bands they've never heard of just to see if they're any good. I think that those same people would be willing to spend a few bucks at a time on new, potentially exciting CDs. I'd expect this to be particularly true of the broke High School/College students who allegedly make up such a critical part of the P2P scene. You could also add to this by focusing the limited advertizing budget for the label on the advantages of trying new music. Instead of hyping a particular band, you'd try to sell people on the idea of being among the elite who discover the new, hot bands before they become well known. Convince a small group of people that it's hyper-cool to turn their friends on to the latest band and you're set.
Slashdot Mirror
That worry has to be at least slightly tempered by the knowledge that Mugabe doesn't need a civil suit to make his displeasure known. It's not as though he's above appropriation of private property and threats of violence against people for no better reason than that they make inviting targets. If he wants to try to bully the BBC into giving him good coverage, he's likely to do so no matter what the Australian Supreme Court says about this case.
Which is obviously why he wants the suit to be handled in Australia. It's a good old case of jurisdiction shopping; the Australian laws are more favorable, so he wants the case to be tried there. The American laws are more favorable to Dow Jones, so they want the case tried in America.
That said, there is a certain degree of reason to the Australian court's ruling. If a web site can actually be read anywhere, then damage from defamation can happen anywhere, and the plaintiff should be able to sue wherever he suffered the damage. The fact that there's a specific person involved naturally limits the number of places where damage can take place, so it inherently limits the amount of jurisdiction shopping that can take place and the number of applicable defamation laws that the publisher needs to consider.
And it was damn spooky. I was lucky(?) enough to make a trip to East Germany in 1989, and came into the country through Checkpoint Charlie. We got there from the airport partly on the U-Bahn, and passed through at least one ghost station. Just the existence of the ghost stations was a bit spooky, but when you realized why they were there it became quite unsettling. It really brought home the reality of the cold war like nothing else I saw (at least until our bus had to wait behind Soviet tanks on maneuvers).
I have a far more radical idea. If the government is untrustworthy, badly managed, taking the wrong approach, or whatever, how about trying to improve it? The United States is still at least nominally a representative democracy, and one of the underlying principles is that the government is subject to change if the people don't like it. Identifying problems, like TIA being a really bad idea, is the first step in fixing them.
It may be true that you're too inconsequential for the government as a whole to care about, but that doesn't mean that there's no problem with that information being out there. The government for better or worse is made up of individuals, and some of those individuals will have access to that information; in fact it will be more useful to the government if lots of people within the government have access to it. Most of those people may be fine, but there are still people who are going to abuse any power they get.
Take the more limited example of existing police databases. There are plenty of examples of police officers who have abused those systems to harras ex-girlfriends, get even with people who have pissed them off, etc. Extending those databases to include even more kinds of data that could be abused will only make things worse. For one thing, it will make abusing the database more tempting, by making more kinds of mischief possible. For another thing it will make the potential abuses more damaging.
The key thing to me is that such abuse is all but inevitable, while the supposed benefits are largely hypothetical. Every time people have created databases of this general type, that data has been used abusively at least occasionally. There's every reason to think that the TIA database will be abused, too. At the same time, there's no certainty that it will be possible to use that same data to track down potential terrorists. I know for sure that given such a database I would find it much easier to write a script that took somebody's license plate number, dug up their credit card purchases, and emailed ones that were potentially embarrasing to all of their known email contacts that to track down possible terrorist activity.
There is a legal requirement that any and that is designed to look like normal content must be clearly labeled as an advertizement. In fact, the legal requirement is rather stringent, so that things that you might not think of as advertizements are legally classified as such and have to be labeled. A good example is that some scientific journals have a fee for publishing articles. That makes the articles technically advertizements under the law and they have to be labeled that way, even though they don't qualify as ads by the layman's definition.
But that simply isn't true. There are real changes in what people believe and what they practice. They may not be as fast as some people claim, but society's attitudes really can change. Human nature may not change, but much of our view of morality is learned, so that attitudes really will change if people are taught different things. As an example, male homosexuality was considered normal and acceptable in Ancient Greece, and the majority of men practiced it at least occasionally. Nobody thought that it was a horrible sin. Today many people think that it's a horrible sin, and the rate at which it's practiced is much lower. That's a substantial, real change in people's views of moraliy.
Perhaps a better example is slavery. 200 years ago, slavery was a geuninely polarizing issue in the USA. Some people felt that it was a terrible evil, others didn't have strong feelings about it, and yet others felt that it was not just acceptable but that God wanted whites to hold dominion over blacks. Today the vast majority of Americans genuinely belive that slavery was (and is) despicable and unsupportable. Only far out wackos seriously believe that it's part of God's plan for the universe.
I don't think that it's so much a loss of morals as it is a change in morals. Some things that used to be viewed as immoral are considered OK today, and some things that used to be considered OK are now considered immoral. It's just that:
A good example of this is a comparison of some aspects of common 1950s behavior with today's. I remember a vigorous dispute about this, in which one side pointed to higher church membership in the 1950s as a sign of greater morality, while the other responded with greater modern racial tolerance as a sign that church membership wasn't the only facet of morality. I'm not sure if either side was right or wrong, but it seems pretty clear to me that both sides were looking only at one side of the issue.
People care about even stranger things than that. Just yesterday, I saw a group of Edsel fans driving their cars in the Doodah Parade. When I thought that was goofy enough, the people standing next to me pulled out their pictures from a trip to a Corvair fan get together (The Great Western Fan Belt Toss & Swap Meet). ISTR that there are even Trabant fan clubs, of all things. Name a piece of obsolete technology, and there's a good chance that some people will be fanatically devoted to it.
But that's only true if you bother to upgrade your version of Windows. Many people don't seem to believe it, but as long as you keep the same software on the same hardware, its speed remains reasonably close to constant. (Yes, this is neglecting things like the machine slowing down as the hard drive gets full and fragmented.) So for the majority of people who don't want to update their copy of Windows because they don't want to put up with the stupid UI changes with every version, this isn't much of an issue.
It depends on what their purpose is. If I want to train my personal spam filter, I already have a large corpus of non-spam to use- all of the emails that I've saved over the past few years. OTOH, I don't save all of the spam that I get, so I need a training set of spam to use for the other side of things. Since spam is, by its very nature, a bulk thing that's sent out indiscriminately, other people will probably have a spam corpus that is reasonably similar to what I receive, so I can reasonably use an archive of other people's spam to train my own spam catcher. I think that it would have been very useful to have a few thousand standard spam messages when I started using bogofilter.
FWIW, it also looks as though they are trying to collect an archive of non-spam email. There is a spot on their page where a non-spam archive will be in the future. I'm not sure if I'd want to send them my personal email to put into that kind of a list because some of it includes personal information, but I could certainly see somebody developing an archive of innocuous non-spam mail- mailing lists, legitimate business mail (like "the item you have been waiting for is now in stock" notices), and the like.
Give me a break. When was the last time that Microsoft resisted a format because it was modestly less space and processor efficient than the old format? My guess, given the size of current MS documents and their programs' efficiency, is that it was approximately the 12th of never. And if size is really a concern, it should be easy to use a standard compression algorithm, like gzip or bzip2, to reduce their size. AFAIK, XML takes up a fair bit of disk space because of the tags but it compresses very well.
No, you don't have to pay for Windows. There are (or at least were) versions of VirtualPC that came with a Linux distribution (I think they chose RedHat) instead of Windows. They charged substantially less for it because you didn't have to spring for a Windows license. I'm not sure if that version is available anymore, but if you already have a copy you can use it as suggested to run Windows programs on your Mac without paying Microsoft anything.
I don't know. Given the typical quality of spelling on /., you can never be sure if the answer is what you're expecting or not.
It's not quite as slender a reed as you might think. I recently attended a seminar at which one of the speakers discussed bacterial evolution by inter-species gene transfer. One of the key points of his talk was that recently transfered genes really don't fit into the recipient genomes very well. Unless they actually give the recipient a selective advantage, they tend to be weeded back out of the population because they cause a whole host of subtle and not-so-subtle problems. So when you stop applying the selective pressure to keep them (i.e. stop prescribing the antibiotics) they can get selected back out pretty quickly.
You do RC, but you obviously didn't read the actual linked article, since it's talking about the first confirmed case of VRSA.
No, no, no. If you burn the body, all you'll be doing is creating fire resistant strains of bacteria. Pretty soon there will be strains of bacteria that can survive in bodies full of burning antibiotics, and then where will we be?
There's an obvious reason why he did this: none of his readers could be expected to know calculus. It had, after all, just been invented, or was still in the process of being invented. If he wanted people to understand the concepts, he either had to teach them the math or figure out a way of presenting it convincingly without the reader needing to know calculus. Neither one is an easy prospect. I haven't read Principia myself, but I remember a physics prof mentioning that in some cases he deliberately avoided using calculus because he thought that his demonstrations would be more likely to convince people if they didn't use all that new fangled math, and it wound up being vastly more complicated as a result.
What a ridiculous comment. A leak isn't some random process by which the data slips out of the datasystem accidentally. It's a process by which a member of the organization sends the document to somebody outside of the organization in order to serve their ends. Unless Solaris has some features I've never heard of, it's not going to prevent a determined insider from sending ESR Sun strategy documents.
Heh. You obviously don't understand the principle behind lawsuits very well. The correct answer is:
7. All of the above
If you have enough money to afford the lawyers, which Microsoft certainly does, you sue anyone who you have anything like a case against. As long as the argument isn't completely specious, you're unlikely to suffer anything worse than having the suit thrown out of court. Meanwhile, you've harassed all of the people who have been using Linux, and if you're lucky and/or good you've gotten injunctions to prevent them from developing and/or distributing it. The value to Microsoft of winning in court is so great that there's little incentive for them not to go after anyone they can in a case like that.
That's a bad example, because Outlook does run on MacOS. I know, because I use it. It currently only runs on OS9, but there are at least rumors that it will be ported to OSX. A better example would be Access, which is Windows only.
One other potentially helpful suggestion: get Lojack. It won't do a thing to keep your car from getting stolen, but it can be a big help in getting it back if it is stolen. Allegedly Lojack is enough of a threat to the kind of professional thief who targets common model cars that they've started leaving the cars to sit for a couple of days before stripping them for parts so that their whole operation won't be caught when the police use it to trace the car.
Do remember that Honda is in the business of selling cars, so they may have a motivation to overestimate how long you can go between changes. This lets them make the maintenance costs look lower and the car wear out faster so that you'll want to buy a new one sooner. I also know that my Honda's operating manual specifies 3,750 miles if you regularly:
That covers a lot common driving circumstances, so it's quite likely that most people would have to go for the shorter interval to keep in line with the manufacturer's recommendations.
I'd assume that they're working on the HURD because they think that it's interesting, fun, and/or a good learning experience. Not all Free Software development has to take place with the goal of taking over the world. A lot of it, as ESR points out, is done to satisfy the interests of the individual authors. That's why there are a million projects on Freshmeat that are essentially clones of the same basic project- mp3 player frontends, database systems to catalog CD collections, etc. Individual programmers write them for their own personal reasons and then provide them for anyone else who wants a copy.
Well they're unlikely to sell many disks without promotion if they're priced the same as disks by established, well known, heavily promoted artists. But if they were sold for a really good price, and the label made it clear that they were new, interesting albums by unestablished groups rather than remainder bin stuff that couldn't sell, I think that there would be a market.
I know people who spend money to go to live performances by bands they've never heard of just to see if they're any good. I think that those same people would be willing to spend a few bucks at a time on new, potentially exciting CDs. I'd expect this to be particularly true of the broke High School/College students who allegedly make up such a critical part of the P2P scene. You could also add to this by focusing the limited advertizing budget for the label on the advantages of trying new music. Instead of hyping a particular band, you'd try to sell people on the idea of being among the elite who discover the new, hot bands before they become well known. Convince a small group of people that it's hyper-cool to turn their friends on to the latest band and you're set.