There is no requirement in Denmark that the ministers are members of the parliament, even though that is usually the case.
It doesn't really matter, their seat in the parliament only give them a democratic mandate for one vote in the parliament. Any power beyond that come from the mandate granded to them by the other members of the parliament (or the prime minister), not directly by the voters. So whether they have a seat in the parliament or not doesn't make it any more or less democratic.
This is quite unlike a system like in the US or France, where a president is elected directly by the people.
If the commision was elected by the parliament, EU would be much closer to be as democratic as its member states. That would be one less indirection, and a system that would be much more transparent to the voters.
Organizations should have a choice. Choosing a mixed setup is rarely wise because of the support cost. Going for a pure Microsoft, Apple or Linux solution wlll almost always be preferable.
Of course some flexibility is a good idea. If the user has special needs, knows what he is doing, and understand that he will not get support from the IT center, he can choose another platform than the organizational standard.
The council consist of ministers from the local governments, who are appointed by the prime minister, who are elected by a majority of the parliament, whose members are elected by the people.
The commission consists of people apointed by the local governments.
In both cases the best we can hope for is a tripple indirect democracy.
This is ok as long as the directly elected representives can propose and reject legislation. This is the case in the national parliaments, but in the EU parliament they cannot propose legislation, and the rules have deliberately made it very difficult for them to reject legislation. This is actually the first time the parliament have managed to get enough votes to reject a law.
> it sounds like bittorrent would be an expression > of free speech and a form of political protest to > me.
Good point. It means that the quote can be used as a public character assasination, but not as part of legal case. If they use this quote in a court, they admit they believe bittorrent is protected speech.
No "casual player" is ever going to compete on the top of the global ladder. That requires skill, which require more practice than a casual player can manage.
For the *casual* gamer, PvP in Guild Wars is just fine. GvG will make you meet other guilds at your own level, whatever that is. And yes, yu can get pretty far with the standard templates. But of course, poor losers will always blame their loses on the templates, rather than their lack of skill.
Compared to a FPS, being really competitive in Guild Wars require that you play the PvE game through once. The PvE game as been structured as one large training mission for PvP. It takes at most 100 hours (if you suck) to play the game through and obtain any particular build you desire. You are then as competive as anyone. If you want to change your build, you can do that with points obtained in PvP.
Unfortunately a handful of people with severe personality disorders have desided that they'd rather spend their time bragging about their comprehension deficit about what the game was supposed to be on the fora, than play the semi-obligatory training mission.
Any game with a monthly fee is by definition for obsessive gamers. A monthly fee also encourage grind in order to stretch the content out over as many months as possible, and grind is another thing that bores casual gamers.
A casual friendly MMORPG will have no monthly fee and no more grind than a single player games. And the gamers should not be expected to play the game more than they would a typical single player game.
The closest thing I have found is Guild Wars, which being fully instantiated may not qualify as a MMORPG. It mostly play like a single player game, where you can party with (and against) other players if you so desire. Multiplayer, but not really massive.
I don't agree with his basic premise (that non-copyleft license creates a fair competitive situation between free and proprietary development), but apart from that he does an excellent job dispeling a lot of myths and FUDs about both the GPL and free software development in general.
The whole interview reads almost like a "myth/fact" listing.
Basically because Linus Torvals was way better to build a community than Bill Jolitz, so BSD split into multiple competing projects without a single unifying charismatic figure(head).
The BSD'ers tend to blame the AT&T lawsuit, but if that had any effect, it would have been on commercial support, and in the early years both Linux and and the BSD's were mostly driven by enthusiasts.
And the Linux community was, back then way more open, inviting and fun based than the BSD communities. The fraction of enthusiasts who actually care about all the legal and political stuff is insignificant. A few paraphrase whatever opinions happens to be "politically correct" for the software they work on, but most ignore it completely.
The GPL *does* help, mostly on the embedded market interestingly enough. The embedded companies are those who complain most about it, because the culture of secrecy is very strong there. But the GPL makes it much easier for engineers to get permission to participate in the community (since the work can't be secret legally anyway), and thus make ports to embedded platforms easier by promoting sharing.
And they can't cover their tracks. They need to be visible to their customers, and their customers need to be visible to the spam victims.
Using the law to close down the professional spammers will get rid of almost all the non-virus related spam. If the cases are publicised enough, it will also be a deterent for the amateur spammers, i.e. those who spam for their own goods rather than functioning as midlemen.
As a monopoly, Microsoft has more restrictions in what they can do (or would have, under an administration who understood economics) than other companies.
Of course, Microsoft has nowhere near a monopoly on mail servers, so as long as they only implement the policy on Hotmail, there is no problem. Only if they start to employ the policy in the software bundled with MS Windows or MS Office, (Outlook and Outlook Express) will there be a case.
The national governments do not want to give away real power. Thus we have three bodies. The council, which consist of the national governments, where the big decisions are made. The commission which consist of the people appointed by the national governments, which take care of day-to-day operations. And the parliament with no real power which serve to give an illusion of democracy, and as a highly paid retirement post for national politicians.
The people who created the EU probably would have prefered a strong parliament, but the governments (supported by nationalist sentiments in the home countries) prevented that.
Still, EU is better than most other International bodies. WTO, UN, NATO have *no* elected bodies, which means that issues like these aren't even discussed openly. It is understandable for NATO and of no matter for UN, but a huge problem with WTO, which in many ways affect the life (and liberties!) of European citizens just as much as EU.
The problem was that Bill Jolitz had no skill on working with people over the net. He came through as a rambling madman.
The other BSD people at least seemed sane, but presented themselves as hard working Unix professionals, who gave up enourmous personal sacrifices for the BSD cause.
Meanwhile, Linus (with his brilliant net personality) collected a bunch of kids from the existing Minix hacker culture, some DOS/MS Windows nerds who wanted to play with source, and a lot of college students who, like Linus, wanted to run Unix at home just like they ran on the Suns at school. They were all obviously both having fun and learning at the same time.
At the time where the free operating systems began to be noticed by the management, who might have preffered the sour and dire pseudo-professional attitude of the BSD people, it was because Linux had already become a big phenomen thanks to the inclusive "free software should be fun" attitude of the early Linux years.
Do you think color-ls could have sprung from the BSD community? Yes, in Bill Joys day. Young Bill Joy would have hacked color-ls if he had a color terminal. But not from the later, grown up community of highly skilled profesionals around the free BSD net-releases. Color-ls is a stupid and disgusting idea, any professional would reject right away. But it is fun, and reflect the difference in attitude between BSD and Linux those days.
Google Mobile is their interface adapted for the tiny screen on a mobile phone. It allows you to search either other wap sites, or the entire net. Very useful.
> Err, if they open sourced their big moneymakers, wouldn't they go out of business
Not necessarily. They are already mostly a support company and the IBM name plus the fact that they developed the software will win them a majority of the contracts, even if they make the software itself free.
I suspect we will se IBM make more and more of their software free. Just not everything at once.
I have seen his code. Gates was *not* a pretty good programmer. GOTO in BASIC should *not* be implemented as an O(n) operation, where "n" is the real line number. Even if you implement BASIC in 16KiB (which is not that little in 6502 assembler) GOTO should be an O(1) operation.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, "we" made lots of jokes about planes crashing into skyscrapers.
Shouldn't calls to emergency servives always have a higher priority compared to normal calls?
There is no requirement in Denmark that the ministers are members of the parliament, even though that is usually the case.
It doesn't really matter, their seat in the parliament only give them a democratic mandate for one vote in the parliament. Any power beyond that come from the mandate granded to them by the other members of the parliament (or the prime minister), not directly by the voters. So whether they have a seat in the parliament or not doesn't make it any more or less democratic.
This is quite unlike a system like in the US or France, where a president is elected directly by the people.
If the commision was elected by the parliament, EU would be much closer to be as democratic as its member states. That would be one less indirection, and a system that would be much more transparent to the voters.
Organizations should have a choice. Choosing a mixed setup is rarely wise because of the support cost. Going for a pure Microsoft, Apple or Linux solution wlll almost always be preferable.
Of course some flexibility is a good idea. If the user has special needs, knows what he is doing, and understand that he will not get support from the IT center, he can choose another platform than the organizational standard.
The council consist of ministers from the local governments, who are appointed by the prime minister, who are elected by a majority of the parliament, whose members are elected by the people.
The commission consists of people apointed by the local governments.
In both cases the best we can hope for is a tripple indirect democracy.
This is ok as long as the directly elected representives can propose and reject legislation. This is the case in the national parliaments, but in the EU parliament they cannot propose legislation, and the rules have deliberately made it very difficult for them to reject legislation. This is actually the first time the parliament have managed to get enough votes to reject a law.
Is there anything unnatural about having an outdoor work, and thus, a strong tan?
I guess mans natural habitat is now indoor working in front of a computer...
> it sounds like bittorrent would be an expression
> of free speech and a form of political protest to
> me.
Good point. It means that the quote can be used as a public character assasination, but not as part of legal case. If they use this quote in a court, they admit they believe bittorrent is protected speech.
No "casual player" is ever going to compete on the top of the global ladder. That requires skill, which require more practice than a casual player can manage.
For the *casual* gamer, PvP in Guild Wars is just fine. GvG will make you meet other guilds at your own level, whatever that is. And yes, yu can get pretty far with the standard templates. But of course, poor losers will always blame their loses on the templates, rather than their lack of skill.
Compared to a FPS, being really competitive in Guild Wars require that you play the PvE game through once. The PvE game as been structured as one large training mission for PvP. It takes at most 100 hours (if you suck) to play the game through and obtain any particular build you desire. You are then as competive as anyone. If you want to change your build, you can do that with points obtained in PvP.
Unfortunately a handful of people with severe personality disorders have desided that they'd rather spend their time bragging about their comprehension deficit about what the game was supposed to be on the fora, than play the semi-obligatory training mission.
Yes, but now you are comparing Guild Wars PvP to MMORPG's. The original poster was comparing to FPS.
Guild Wars, being something new, is not a perfect match for those who are already happy in either the FPS or the MMORPG camp.
Guild Wars is for the rest of us.
Any game with a monthly fee is by definition for obsessive gamers. A monthly fee also encourage grind in order to stretch the content out over as many months as possible, and grind is another thing that bores casual gamers.
A casual friendly MMORPG will have no monthly fee and no more grind than a single player games. And the gamers should not be expected to play the game more than they would a typical single player game.
The closest thing I have found is Guild Wars, which being fully instantiated may not qualify as a MMORPG. It mostly play like a single player game, where you can party with (and against) other players if you so desire. Multiplayer, but not really massive.
I don't agree with his basic premise (that non-copyleft license creates a fair competitive situation between free and proprietary development), but apart from that he does an excellent job dispeling a lot of myths and FUDs about both the GPL and free software development in general.
The whole interview reads almost like a "myth/fact" listing.
Basically because Linus Torvals was way better to build a community than Bill Jolitz, so BSD split into multiple competing projects without a single unifying charismatic figure(head).
The BSD'ers tend to blame the AT&T lawsuit, but if that had any effect, it would have been on commercial support, and in the early years both Linux and and the BSD's were mostly driven by enthusiasts.
And the Linux community was, back then way more open, inviting and fun based than the BSD communities. The fraction of enthusiasts who actually care about all the legal and political stuff is insignificant. A few paraphrase whatever opinions happens to be "politically correct" for the software they work on, but most ignore it completely.
The GPL *does* help, mostly on the embedded market interestingly enough. The embedded companies are those who complain most about it, because the culture of secrecy is very strong there. But the GPL makes it much easier for engineers to get permission to participate in the community (since the work can't be secret legally anyway), and thus make ports to embedded platforms easier by promoting sharing.
Basically, Sun simultainiously released three new architectures as replacement for their 68020 sun3.
One based on 80386, nicknamed RoadRunner. This was the most expensive of the three, but could run some DOS programs.
One based on SPARC. This was the fastest and cheapest, but not compatible with antyhing.
One based on 68030, which was somewhere between the two others in speed and price, but could run existing applications.
The 68030 (sun3x) sold a few for a transition phase, but everybody switched to SPARC very fast. The RoadRunner was basiclaly pointless.
And they can't cover their tracks. They need to be visible to their customers, and their customers need to be visible to the spam victims.
Using the law to close down the professional spammers will get rid of almost all the non-virus related spam. If the cases are publicised enough, it will also be a deterent for the amateur spammers, i.e. those who spam for their own goods rather than functioning as midlemen.
As a monopoly, Microsoft has more restrictions in what they can do (or would have, under an administration who understood economics) than other companies.
Of course, Microsoft has nowhere near a monopoly on mail servers, so as long as they only implement the policy on Hotmail, there is no problem. Only if they start to employ the policy in the software bundled with MS Windows or MS Office, (Outlook and Outlook Express) will there be a case.
You are paying for access to the Internet, not for the content. The DoubleClick guy was excplicitly talking about content, not access.
/. subscription.
None of your US$ 39.95 are going to the content, unless they inlclude stuff like a
> Not once that I've ever heard of have we seen a
> reduction in copyright strength or an increase in
> the rights of the general public.
Danish copyright did for some time forbid making personal copies of digital material without explicit permission by the copyright holder.
The national governments do not want to give away real power. Thus we have three bodies. The council, which consist of the national governments, where the big decisions are made. The commission which consist of the people appointed by the national governments, which take care of day-to-day operations. And the parliament with no real power which serve to give an illusion of democracy, and as a highly paid retirement post for national politicians.
The people who created the EU probably would have prefered a strong parliament, but the governments (supported by nationalist sentiments in the home countries) prevented that.
Still, EU is better than most other International bodies. WTO, UN, NATO have *no* elected bodies, which means that issues like these aren't even discussed openly. It is understandable for NATO and of no matter for UN, but a huge problem with WTO, which in many ways affect the life (and liberties!) of European citizens just as much as EU.
The problem was that Bill Jolitz had no skill on working with people over the net. He came through as a rambling madman.
The other BSD people at least seemed sane, but presented themselves as hard working Unix professionals, who gave up enourmous personal sacrifices for the BSD cause.
Meanwhile, Linus (with his brilliant net personality) collected a bunch of kids from the existing Minix hacker culture, some DOS/MS Windows nerds who wanted to play with source, and a lot of college students who, like Linus, wanted to run Unix at home just like they ran on the Suns at school. They were all obviously both having fun and learning at the same time.
At the time where the free operating systems began to be noticed by the management, who might have preffered the sour and dire pseudo-professional attitude of the BSD people, it was because Linux had already become a big phenomen thanks to the inclusive "free software should be fun" attitude of the early Linux years.
Do you think color-ls could have sprung from the BSD community? Yes, in Bill Joys day. Young Bill Joy would have hacked color-ls if he had a color terminal. But not from the later, grown up community of highly skilled profesionals around the free BSD net-releases. Color-ls is a stupid and disgusting idea, any professional would reject right away. But it is fun, and reflect the difference in attitude between BSD and Linux those days.
Morale: Don't forget the fun.
> Actually the worst part is that Theo is often right, which
> means you do have to actually listen to him rather than the easier just ignore him.
No you don't. If he has a valid point, someone with more social skills will eventually bring it up.
Those Debian guys impress me, it take something to make RMS look pragmatic and moderate on freedom issues.
Google Mobile is their interface adapted for the tiny screen on a mobile phone. It allows you to search either other wap sites, or the entire net. Very useful.
> Err, if they open sourced their big moneymakers, wouldn't they go out of business
Not necessarily. They are already mostly a support company and the IBM name plus the fact that they developed the software will win them a majority of the contracts, even if they make the software itself free.
I suspect we will se IBM make more and more of their software free. Just not everything at once.
I have seen his code. Gates was *not* a pretty good programmer. GOTO in BASIC should *not* be implemented as an O(n) operation, where "n" is the real line number. Even if you implement BASIC in 16KiB (which is not that little in 6502 assembler) GOTO should be an O(1) operation.
> Because downgrading all of my hardware is worth it just to run Linux?
Jamie downgraded all his hardware just to not run Linux.