They are essentially MacGuffins, used only to advance the plot of the stories.
Not at all (unless you talk about the "I, robot" movie that has nothing in common with Asimov's story). They're the central part of Asimov's stories, namely that these laws may lead to quite unexpected results that are not explainable on first sight, but become obvious after a closer look.
Is that I cannot set the encoding of the text I am sending so it's essentially impossible to use their web client to send email in a non-european char set and I end up using a 3rd party email client with their SMTP server to do it properly...Also some charsets dont even display correctly in gmail.
That looks more like a problem with your browser, or your fonts. I've sent test mails with umlauts, greek characters, cyrillic characters, arabic characters and an euro sign, and they were encoded correctly by Google. In opposite to GMX, which starts sending HTML entities, or sends the Euro as an U+0080.
I'd like to see an effort to bring the functionality of ARexx to *nix platforms. Including arexx ports in applications.
All KDE applications have a DCOP interface, which allows them to be scripted in any language you desire. So it's not AREXX, but the same sort of functionality.
I still wound up paying 11 dollars to sell a 75 dollar item
In Germany, you just transfer your money to the seller's bank account. Which costs you just 0.00€.
Of course, if the seller then just disappears with the money, you can only go to the police - but then, there's not much else you can do as a buyer on eBay anyway - eBay only protects the seller. But trustworthy sellers let eBay verify their account (then it's called "Überweisung+"), which is as good as it can get to allow the police to catch the seller if necessary.
If this IP block is known to be safe from identification,
Which bakka said that? The Law is that ISPs are not allowed to store data collected for billing longer than needed for billing (the Principle of Data Avoidance), and you don't need to store IP adresses for flat rates for it.
T-Com says otherwise and are now in court because of that.
Heise
That doesn't change the fact that ISPs will need the IP for billing for non-flat rates until so many days after the bill that there can't be any complaints against it anymore. It also doesn't change the fact that EU law will probably require to store IP adresses for a loooong period of time soon anyway. It also doesn't change the fact that ISPs will store the IP for a while to go after spammers etc.
That's pretty far from "safe from identification".
If I highlight a URL in a different document and want to paste it into the Firefox URL window, under your system I'm hosed because clicking in the window highlighted the existing URL and blew away my clipboard.
Nitpick: selecting something under *nix will put the data into the selection buffer, not the clipboard. The clipboard even works the same under W32 and *nix, but W32 doesn't have a selection buffer.
Thus, it makes sense for W32 to select the text upon mouse click (though I still can't stand it), while it makes sense for *nix to not kill the selection buffer (and have a "=>" button to clear the URL bar with the mouse easily).
(I personally think that would be a bogus interpretation of the DMCA, since I think the copyrighted information inside the NEF file belongs to the photographer, not Nikon. But Nikon apparently thinks they own the information inside the NEF).
This is a little strange, isn't it? If a photographer takes a picture, it's pretty clear that the photog owns the copyright to that photo. Nikon couldn't possibly claim any rights on photos taken with their camera, least of all because it would make it impossible for professionals to use that equipment. And with $5K cameras, you're really only looking at the professional market.
Yup, if you have a right to the information, then Nikon preventing you from accessing it can be seen as illegal suppresion of information in Germany. It's just a legal theory, though - you have to actually sue to check. And if Nikon gives you an utility to extract the information then that might not work:-(
It's not really weird, I think most speakers of English would be startled to see anyone write about "driving 50 m/h". In fact it actually looks really odd to me, even though I'm used to km/h...
You pretty much have to replace "speakers of English" by "US-Americans" here - anyone using the current unit system will use and understand km/h in written text because it is the natural thing to do. Of course, if you're used to obsolete mph, then kph might sound like it makes sense;)
Highway speeds are way too low. Why is it that in Germany you can drive as fast as you can, Switzerland is 120 KPH, Austria 130 KPH, France 130 KPH, Canada 100 KPH, and the US 90-110 KPH?
Just to dissolve a myth: while there is no general speed limit on highways in Germany, many highways do have speed limits (often 130 km/h). There aren't that many suitably long streches left without speed limit where the traffic situation will allow you to actually do 200 km/h. Not that it would be safe driving anyway.
Otherwise, of course, I have to agree with your point.
I assume your wierd "KPH" notation means km/h as well?
I'm unsure what you mean by the "size" of a TLD. Number of domains?
Yes (what else could it be?).
But I don't think this necessarily means that the domain extension.de is the cause - it's surely more to do with the size of the German population and the fact that all German ISPs have a.de domain.
It's certainly nothing to do with population - the USoA have a huge population as well, yet.us is virtually unused. The fact that all ISPs might have a.de domain is also not the cause - it's an effect. Which is that.de is a well-established, respectable TLD due to sensible registration rules and prices.
I've nothing against national domains. [...] But this is simply not a suitable model for the rest of the world. Why should I, running an international company from Brussels, be forced to choose between.be and.com, neither suitable for what I want, which is a host of services and names under a single, well-protected, name.
Are you an company with dependencies in other countries? Go for.com. Are you a Belgian company, organization, private person? Go for.be. And there'll also be.eu. And - you can go for all three of them! So where's your problem?
.de is huge, I'm sure, but it's hardly a vindication of the current TLD policy.
Well,.de is essentially an example of a national TLD done right (and.tv is one of a TLD done horribly wrong). Essentially, geographic TLDs are the way to go..com,.net,.org are pretty much dysfunctional - simply because everyone can register domains there. Of course, the broken rules for.us were the reason for that...
The concept of national domains is anarchaic, and irrelevant. It's a totally useless concept and every popular country domain is one that is abused - e.g..tv,.to, etc.
Dude,.de is one of the biggest TLD at all - it is approximately as big as.org and.net combined. And no, it's not abused. In fact, I expect from a German company to be reachable under company.de if they want to be taken seriously.
Here in Ireland (and in the rest of the EU) your tax is automatically taken out of your paycheck and you don't need to worry about filling in tax returns every year unless you run a business.
Yeah, if you don't bother about the 2k€ tax refund you might get. In Germany the situation is especially pathetic as there are so many possibilities for deductions that good tax programs will point out to you. Like e.g. the "SteuerSparErklärung 2005" by the "Akademische Arbeitsgemeinschaft". Which is Windows only, but requires only W95 and thus runs happily in WINE with a bit massaging. No surprise, as it seems to be using Qt 3.3.3. I'm just wondering why they don't do a native port to Linux anyway as it should be fairly easy.
In order to get a cart you have to put a quarter into the lock to get them out. When you are done, you can get that quarter back if you put your cart back. Only if you put the cart back.
I haven't seen a shopping cart without a deposit like that in the last 5 or so years in Germany. Everyone uses them. Btw, Aldi is a German company...
Im afraid you are wrong about the bi-directionality:
European airlines will soon share information about their passengers with
U.S. officials...
The agreement also would allow U.S. carriers to share information...
In fact, European airline have been forced since months to share information; nothing new here. The article only says the agreement would allow sharing in the other direction; not a word about whether it actually happens (it doesn't, and if it would, it wouldn't be so intrusive).
Fact remains the USA doesn't have sufficient law for data protection (= protecting you from your data), while the EU has.
Americans will have no control over what is done with this data. It will be retained forever, and shared within the EU as the EU sees fit.
Huh? In opposite to the USA, the EU does have laws to govern the use of data. And it was the US who forced the airlines to submit the data against constitutional rights, or they wouldn't be allowed to fly to the USA anymore. Somehow you've got your facts wrong here.
The French decision is anti-free-speech and favors big companies over small companies.
No, it doesn't. You keep forgetting that
free speech doesn't mean that you can say everything in every situation. Also, free speach is about political speech, which this clearly isn't. And, in fact, allowing anti-competive ads would favour big companies because small ones couldn't affort as much of those anti-competive ads as big ones.
Why shouldn't lesser-known companies be able to buy an ad that alerts potential customers to the fact that the dominant player has competition?
They can. Just not when the user searches for their competition, because if they search for their competition, then that's what they want.
Nobody hinders them from doing ads on what they want, but if they enter a brand, then that's what they're supposed to get.
Similarly, consider generic drugs. If people selling the cheap drug can't let people searching by brand name that there is a cheaper alternative, this punishes the customer and props up a monopoly.
a) if the consumer is too brain dead to search for generic terms, he gets what he deserves b) you forget that you can't buy drugs over the internet everywhere on the world (whether this is good or bad is highly debatable).
Besides, trademarks are overloaded. According to French logic, Apple Computer could stop an apple grower from placing an ad connected to the word "Apple" because it is a trademarked term.
I like trademarks no more than the next guy, but your statement is factually wrong and has no connection to the issue at hand.
French courts ruling that Google can't let a competitor use the AdWords feature to attach an ad to a search that mentions a competitor's name
And that's supposed to be a wrong decision... why? What Google was doing is as sleezy as Gator merging ads for competitors into companies web pages. It's unfair competition, plain and simple (no, I'm not French).
E_elven wrote: Only if you're too much of a pansy for telnet.
I've never understood this "Real men use crappy tools" philosophy
Actually, telnet wrapped with rlwrap to give you line editing is the thing I use all the time. It even gives you key bindings via.inputrc. Of course you don't have triggers or automapping with it, but the latter is beeing done better on paper anyway.
As for tinyfugue, the first thing I see of it: 1) it doesn't support non-ASCII characters in my locale (which happens to use UTF-8), 2) cursor up doesn't give me my last input line, 3) it sets the terminal to cursor positioning mode, so I can't scroll back using the scroll bar, 4) it doesn't exit when I press ^C suitably often. Sorry, nice try, but these things just have to work without any configuration at all.
In fact, most European nations seem to use the "round-price-inclusive-of-tax" technique.
Inclusive of tax? Yes, all of Europe I've seen. Round price? No. The same.99 stuff as in America. Or.xx9 for gasoline. Did you know that in France, prices are often.99, but that there aren't any 1 or two centimes pieces, just 5?
That would increase costs to the company. Take a department store. They can mass produce a sign for a certain item without any worries. Because sales tax can be different all the way to the county level, the company now has to make signs for every variation of price.
Well then maybe the problem is the difference in sales tax...
One person thought that he'd get away from the crowd by guessing a date in the 13th month of 2003 (what does he know that we don't?)
That may either be a typo or the simple fact that he used a different date format than you expected. Now it's 2003-04-01, but that's 01/04/2003 somewhere and 04/01/2003 somewhere else.
The English system of measurements is one language I won't miss too much. But, I will miss a few things:
pints
the 100-degree-day
a cup of flour (or you name it)
running the mile
Translate those to metric and you lose a lot of the magic (or complain factor for the 100-degree-day).
Don't worry, those phrases will need a much longer time to die out. Look at an European language of your choice and see how much phrases you find that contain references to units that aren't used anymore. "meilenweit" (literally: as long as a mile; can be used for too long distances), "ellenlang" (literally: as long as uhm... the distance between your ellbow and the tip of your fingers; again for something loooooong), "der Groschen ist gefallen" (the penny dropped; it's just not the penny, but a 10pf coin), "Pfundskerl", and probably much more. You'll still be able to complain about the 100-degree-day when the U.S. of A. has converted to the metric system in 2384.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all (unless you talk about the "I, robot" movie that has nothing in common with Asimov's story). They're the central part of Asimov's stories, namely that these laws may lead to quite unexpected results that are not explainable on first sight, but become obvious after a closer look.
Of course, if the seller then just disappears with the money, you can only go to the police - but then, there's not much else you can do as a buyer on eBay anyway - eBay only protects the seller. But trustworthy sellers let eBay verify their account (then it's called "Überweisung+"), which is as good as it can get to allow the police to catch the seller if necessary.
Which bakka said that? The Law is that ISPs are not allowed to store data collected for billing longer than needed for billing (the Principle of Data Avoidance), and you don't need to store IP adresses for flat rates for it. T-Com says otherwise and are now in court because of that. Heise
That doesn't change the fact that ISPs will need the IP for billing for non-flat rates until so many days after the bill that there can't be any complaints against it anymore. It also doesn't change the fact that EU law will probably require to store IP adresses for a loooong period of time soon anyway. It also doesn't change the fact that ISPs will store the IP for a while to go after spammers etc.
That's pretty far from "safe from identification".
Thus, it makes sense for W32 to select the text upon mouse click (though I still can't stand it), while it makes sense for *nix to not kill the selection buffer (and have a "=>" button to clear the URL bar with the mouse easily).
Otherwise, of course, I have to agree with your point.
I assume your wierd "KPH" notation means km/h as well?
Fact remains the USA doesn't have sufficient law for data protection (= protecting you from your data), while the EU has.
As for tinyfugue, the first thing I see of it: 1) it doesn't support non-ASCII characters in my locale (which happens to use UTF-8), 2) cursor up doesn't give me my last input line, 3) it sets the terminal to cursor positioning mode, so I can't scroll back using the scroll bar, 4) it doesn't exit when I press ^C suitably often. Sorry, nice try, but these things just have to work without any configuration at all.