The current system, where any wine producer can just stick any place name on their wine, doesn't make sense.
It'd be like seeing something labeled "Scottish salmon", when in fact it was caught and processed in Norway.
Considering there are other ways to label wine (grape variety, for example), I'm glad that common sense is being imposed. Not that I care very much really, but I'm certainly not against such an outbreak of common sense.
That would involve owning a PS3 though. Pretty pricy if all you want is a media front end (although obviously a great idea if you've already got one, or if you wanted one to play the games anyway).
Not to point out the obvious, but killing flies and destroying space junk are two very different things.
The insect laser only needs to wound the insect enough that it is no longer a trouble- badly damage the wings, or cause it bodily injury. The insect then tumbles harmlessly to the ground.
The debris laser needs to do one of two things- either impart enough thermal energy to the junk so that it's trajectory is changed, causing it to de-orbit, or to disintegrate it into such tiny pieces that it no longer poses a threat upon impact. Both of which are likely to need more energy than de-winging a mosquito.
Lasers are easy- we've had them for many years. Tracking the debris is easy- we're doing it now. Having something that can point accurately at something we're tracking- that's easy enough too. Having something that can do all that with enough power to actually be useful, able to do it over and over again without running out of consumables, and do that on a sane budget-that's tricky.
For one, how do you get a rocket with "significant mass" anywhere? We have enough difficulty getting modules the size of a family car into space, I dread to think how we would significantly increase that. And if you can move a rocket around which is as massive as the asteroids, surely you will have already solved the problem in some way?
For two, I'm inherently nervous about slinging asteroids at Earth with an intention for them to touch down, or enter a steady orbit. Makes you wonder exactly what the dinosaurs were up to in the weeks preceding their unfortunate incident...
But at the end of the day this is what a lot of people on/. have asked for in the past...less irrelevant ads that bug the crap out of them. Well, you got your wish. These are targeted based on your actions and thus will be of more interest to you.
I have never and would never ask for that.
I'll tell you what I want from adverts. Smaller ones. Ones that are less resource hogging on my poor variable bandwidth and variable hardware. Ones that don't pop up, browser-jack, cover the page content I'm trying to read, or (worst of all) play a sound. And I definitely don't want to see ones that are trying to trick people into clicking them, by pretending to be a system message, featuring a non-game game, or asking misleading questions ("if you don't want to not close this window, click OK, otherwise click Cancel"). And I don't want it to stalk me, trying to guess what I want by what pages I've visited. It is rarely, if ever, accurate in guessing what I want, and almost always infuriating.
I want to see adverts that feature simple text, simple pictures, or maybe even a very simple animation.
I browse with adblock on my netbook, as I just can't stand the slow down and hassle of all the ads. I'm currently tolerating ads on my new desktop, but I think they're going to break me soon.
If ads didn't drive me away with their increasingly obnoxious attempts to grab my attention, a lot more ads would be being displayed to me day in and day out. Their loss.
When I was at college, My tutor told us that it was very simple. If you want to use an encyclopaedia (Wikipedia explicitly included) to help you with your research, that's fine. But if you want to cite, go to the footnotes, check the source, pop into the library, copy your citation from the original, and carry on.
Any college that doesn't tell it's students this is doing them a great disservice. Students can't be expected to navigate the horrors of proper referencing without a little guidance.
Disappointing that a highly paid lawyer wouldn't know better though. I'm guessing admissibility of evidence is a pretty early class topic in all good law degrees.
A BSD licence is a software licence hat, quite explicitly, says "you don't have to give anything back if you don't want". That is why it is the licence of choice for proprietary enterprise, and the projects who wish to work with them.
It is the software equivalent of signing a contract with someone explicitly outlining their right to slam doors in your face.
I'm not criticising the BSD licence; I think it is possibly the most liberal of all the FOSS licences, and serves many huge projects very well indeed. But if you don't want people exercising their rights that you have explicitly granted them, use a licence that doesn't grant them those rights.
1) Wouldn't that put them in breach of their own licence?
2) MS could do a deal with any other company that uses the data to act as a middleman. With BSD licence, once the data has been passed to a second party, it is theirs to do with as they wish.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't adding new C&C servers be as simple as pushing an update to the bots? If there are still remaining C&C servers to update with (let alone still a third), that should be pretty routine for them.
Shutting down 20 out of 30 servers seems worse than useless to me. If you need to get all 30 at once, all that has been achieved is that they're back to square one.
Seems like a decent enough example of petitio principii to me.
If I remember my school philosophy classes, petitio principii is (or can encompass) arguing for an end result or conclusion which has been assumed from the start, without adequately demonstrating the logic of aiming for this result. That is, you've avoided the obvious question of "why".
TFA is someone advocating making Ubuntu look like Windows, but without providing any argument as to why you would want to do this.
It isn't exactly text book usage (not least because it isn't really advocating, in as much as just describing) but it's 1000 times closer to the proper usage of the term than the usual misuse you see. I sense that you're just criticising it because you don't really understand the proper usage either, but enjoy playing the grammar/usage Nazi on the internet.
Well, it was to deal with the "Al Qaeda" threat post 11th September- if you remember rightly, extradition requests were made to the Afghanistan government, diplomatic V-signs were returned, and so in went the bombers. A fair amount of effort in the early war was spent combing the mountains and Tora Bora cave network looking for Bin Laden and his lieutenants. Official line was that the Taliban were official supporters of Al Qaeda, and so were complicit in guilt.
Maybe a stretch to say they just invaded to catch Bin Laden, but it was certainly triggered and driven by the desire to deal with the organisation he was fronting.
I doubt the US government really has anything deeply personally against Assange, in as much as they want to deal with the organisation he is fronting, and perhaps retaliate for what they have done so far.
Or to put it another way: If they put the same effort into doing something about Osama bin Laden as they're putting into doing something about Julian Assange, I suspect bin Laden would be either in Gitmo or 6 feet under by now. But the again, maybe that's because Assange committed the cardinal sin of questioning the US military, whereas all Osama's done is blow up a few buildings and since then acted as a convenient Emmanuel Goldstein.
Ah yes, because invading Afghanistan and destabilising large swathes of western Pakistan pales in comparison to the political backbiting, legal threats and media smearing Assange/Wikileaks have suffered. I highly suspect the lawyers and spin-doctors outnumber the 120,000 troops deployed since 2001 by more than a few, and the death toll of this smear campaign is sure to sky-rocket any day now!
So just to clarify. If I swap the sim card in my jailbroken phone while I'm on holiday, the good folks at Apple (or my carrier) will start taking photos, sound recordings and GPS records of me.
Are they going to ask my permission first? If so, why not just wait until the user phones up and reports their phone stolen, rather than try to Sherlock Holmes their inputs to determine whether it has been stolen?
I don't really want my carrier randomly taking pictures and sound recordings of me so that some analyst somewhere can have a gaze and see if I look like a robber. What if it takes pictures of it's child owner naked, or records a conversation which discusses bank details, or an employee discussing trade secrets or what not?
They're both religions based on the coming of a new prophet, who writes a new body of religious text to sit on top of essentially the existing Abrahamic religious texts.
That might be pretty much where the similarities end, but it's pretty obvious where the GP was coming from. Both have deviated from existing Christianity/Judaism in a similar sort of fashion.
I do not believe that the rest of the world is better off for being more heavily regulated than the US, nor do I believe that it is even remotely possible to prevent politicians from being bought and sold.
This must be why China, a country with more draconian, neo-Leninist regulations than Wikipedia would care to document, is now the second largest economy in the world, and is due to overtake the US in mere years.
Admitedly their softened approach did appear to kick start things (apparently being a complete political police state isn't condusive to world trade), but they're still more regulated that anywhere in the western world, with huge swathes of nationalised industry, and it doesn't appear to be doing them any harm economically.
Or are you talking about being an MVNO? Because those, even those that were arms of the big guys, have done so well over the last few years. The only carrier that seems to have entered the market recently is Wal*Mart, who is an MVNO (they don't have their own towers), and they have hundreds of billions they can spend to do it.
I don't really want to play the "here in the UK" card again (I seem to so much at the moment), but it probably is relevant here as our market conditions are near enough identical. So:
Here in the UK, there are only 2 major wired networks (Virgin's cable and BT's Openreach network) and maybe 4 wireless providers that I can think of.
However the VN market is relatively booming. Virgin have a VN running over T-Mobile's wireless network, Tesco have a VN, as do Asda/Walmart, BT have a VN (I think over Vodaphone's infrastructure), there's a whole host of minnows, and even a Phone Co-opertative.
I'd be surprised if it proved impossible to replicate this relative success in the US.
The internet is never going to have the kind of disaster that will lead to robust consumer protections despite the mono/oligopic nature of ISPs & wireless providers.
I like your optimism (or possibly pessimism). If history teaches us anything, it's that corporations without checks and balances tend to be self destructive (see your own examples).
If ISPs are not properly regulated, their behaviour will get steadily crazier. Expect to see traffic shaping so widespread that half of the websites you search for can barely be accessed. Expect to see throttling become a standard weapon in the patent/copyright/price wars between companies. Expect to see price gouging (I know, I mean more so).
If things follow historical precedent (again, see your own examples) eventually things will be so bad that the government (funded by our old friend the tax payer) will be forced to step in and clear up the mess.
Survival of the fittest may have favoured genetic change in our prehistory, but not so anymore. With hereditary property inheritance, fitness to survive is as much determined by the wealth handed down from your parents, not the genes.
How many baby Murdochs are now top lieutenants in daddy Rupert's media empire? (hint- all three were given top jobs, although only one has managed to stick it out). And do you think Paris Hilton would have had the abilty (genetic or otherwise) to build an international hotel chain?
Not that I'm arguing that we should all adopt hardline socialism. I'm just pointing out that free market dogma does not lead to the betterment of the species.
When you reboot a computer (especially an old one without much by way of persistent memory) you are losing all your session-specific data, and restarting your programmes from their original parameters. Assuming you don't feed in exactly the same inputs, the new session will produce markedly different results.
When a TV show is "rebooted" you are getting rid of everything that has happened so far and restarting based on just the original premise.
I'm sure bus operators would change their schedule if thousands of people are arriving at a local train station at a particular hour of the day.
Supply and demand and all that jazz. Running empty busses from a deserted train station on a Sunday isn't profitable. Running busses to a bustling transport hub is.
And if they don't, I'm sure someone else will sense the opportunity for profit and swoop in. In my town, the main bus service doesn't run on a Sunday- but another national provider, who doesn't usually run an urban service here the rest of the week, does. As I say, supply and demand.
Slashdot Mirror
The current system, where any wine producer can just stick any place name on their wine, doesn't make sense.
It'd be like seeing something labeled "Scottish salmon", when in fact it was caught and processed in Norway.
Considering there are other ways to label wine (grape variety, for example), I'm glad that common sense is being imposed. Not that I care very much really, but I'm certainly not against such an outbreak of common sense.
That would involve owning a PS3 though. Pretty pricy if all you want is a media front end (although obviously a great idea if you've already got one, or if you wanted one to play the games anyway).
Who needs stickers when you've already got the tattoo?
Not to point out the obvious, but killing flies and destroying space junk are two very different things.
The insect laser only needs to wound the insect enough that it is no longer a trouble- badly damage the wings, or cause it bodily injury. The insect then tumbles harmlessly to the ground.
The debris laser needs to do one of two things- either impart enough thermal energy to the junk so that it's trajectory is changed, causing it to de-orbit, or to disintegrate it into such tiny pieces that it no longer poses a threat upon impact. Both of which are likely to need more energy than de-winging a mosquito.
Lasers are easy- we've had them for many years. Tracking the debris is easy- we're doing it now. Having something that can point accurately at something we're tracking- that's easy enough too. Having something that can do all that with enough power to actually be useful, able to do it over and over again without running out of consumables, and do that on a sane budget-that's tricky.
For one, how do you get a rocket with "significant mass" anywhere? We have enough difficulty getting modules the size of a family car into space, I dread to think how we would significantly increase that. And if you can move a rocket around which is as massive as the asteroids, surely you will have already solved the problem in some way?
For two, I'm inherently nervous about slinging asteroids at Earth with an intention for them to touch down, or enter a steady orbit. Makes you wonder exactly what the dinosaurs were up to in the weeks preceding their unfortunate incident...
But at the end of the day this is what a lot of people on /. have asked for in the past...less irrelevant ads that bug the crap out of them. Well, you got your wish. These are targeted based on your actions and thus will be of more interest to you.
I have never and would never ask for that.
I'll tell you what I want from adverts. Smaller ones. Ones that are less resource hogging on my poor variable bandwidth and variable hardware. Ones that don't pop up, browser-jack, cover the page content I'm trying to read, or (worst of all) play a sound. And I definitely don't want to see ones that are trying to trick people into clicking them, by pretending to be a system message, featuring a non-game game, or asking misleading questions ("if you don't want to not close this window, click OK, otherwise click Cancel"). And I don't want it to stalk me, trying to guess what I want by what pages I've visited. It is rarely, if ever, accurate in guessing what I want, and almost always infuriating.
I want to see adverts that feature simple text, simple pictures, or maybe even a very simple animation.
I browse with adblock on my netbook, as I just can't stand the slow down and hassle of all the ads. I'm currently tolerating ads on my new desktop, but I think they're going to break me soon.
If ads didn't drive me away with their increasingly obnoxious attempts to grab my attention, a lot more ads would be being displayed to me day in and day out. Their loss.
Quite.
When I was at college, My tutor told us that it was very simple. If you want to use an encyclopaedia (Wikipedia explicitly included) to help you with your research, that's fine. But if you want to cite, go to the footnotes, check the source, pop into the library, copy your citation from the original, and carry on.
Any college that doesn't tell it's students this is doing them a great disservice. Students can't be expected to navigate the horrors of proper referencing without a little guidance.
Disappointing that a highly paid lawyer wouldn't know better though. I'm guessing admissibility of evidence is a pretty early class topic in all good law degrees.
That's hardly being fair to the N-Gage, Pandora, GP2X, Gizmondo, or the other countless handhelds that nobody remembers.
Just because there are only 2 good competitors, that doesn't mean that there are only 2 competitors.
A BSD licence is a software licence hat, quite explicitly, says "you don't have to give anything back if you don't want". That is why it is the licence of choice for proprietary enterprise, and the projects who wish to work with them.
It is the software equivalent of signing a contract with someone explicitly outlining their right to slam doors in your face.
I'm not criticising the BSD licence; I think it is possibly the most liberal of all the FOSS licences, and serves many huge projects very well indeed. But if you don't want people exercising their rights that you have explicitly granted them, use a licence that doesn't grant them those rights.
1) Wouldn't that put them in breach of their own licence?
2) MS could do a deal with any other company that uses the data to act as a middleman. With BSD licence, once the data has been passed to a second party, it is theirs to do with as they wish.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't adding new C&C servers be as simple as pushing an update to the bots? If there are still remaining C&C servers to update with (let alone still a third), that should be pretty routine for them.
Shutting down 20 out of 30 servers seems worse than useless to me. If you need to get all 30 at once, all that has been achieved is that they're back to square one.
Seems like a decent enough example of petitio principii to me.
If I remember my school philosophy classes, petitio principii is (or can encompass) arguing for an end result or conclusion which has been assumed from the start, without adequately demonstrating the logic of aiming for this result. That is, you've avoided the obvious question of "why".
TFA is someone advocating making Ubuntu look like Windows, but without providing any argument as to why you would want to do this.
It isn't exactly text book usage (not least because it isn't really advocating, in as much as just describing) but it's 1000 times closer to the proper usage of the term than the usual misuse you see. I sense that you're just criticising it because you don't really understand the proper usage either, but enjoy playing the grammar/usage Nazi on the internet.
Or in short: don't be an ass.
Steve Jobs?
Well, it was to deal with the "Al Qaeda" threat post 11th September- if you remember rightly, extradition requests were made to the Afghanistan government, diplomatic V-signs were returned, and so in went the bombers. A fair amount of effort in the early war was spent combing the mountains and Tora Bora cave network looking for Bin Laden and his lieutenants. Official line was that the Taliban were official supporters of Al Qaeda, and so were complicit in guilt.
Maybe a stretch to say they just invaded to catch Bin Laden, but it was certainly triggered and driven by the desire to deal with the organisation he was fronting.
I doubt the US government really has anything deeply personally against Assange, in as much as they want to deal with the organisation he is fronting, and perhaps retaliate for what they have done so far.
It takes a paranoid to do what Assange did with the U.S.'s secrets, too, instead of trying the legal way to get the information declassified, first.
1: Ask the US Government to declassify the documents
2: Get told to bugger right off
3: ???
Or to put it another way: If they put the same effort into doing something about Osama bin Laden as they're putting into doing something about Julian Assange, I suspect bin Laden would be either in Gitmo or 6 feet under by now. But the again, maybe that's because Assange committed the cardinal sin of questioning the US military, whereas all Osama's done is blow up a few buildings and since then acted as a convenient Emmanuel Goldstein.
Ah yes, because invading Afghanistan and destabilising large swathes of western Pakistan pales in comparison to the political backbiting, legal threats and media smearing Assange/Wikileaks have suffered. I highly suspect the lawyers and spin-doctors outnumber the 120,000 troops deployed since 2001 by more than a few, and the death toll of this smear campaign is sure to sky-rocket any day now!
Seriously, perspective much?
So just to clarify. If I swap the sim card in my jailbroken phone while I'm on holiday, the good folks at Apple (or my carrier) will start taking photos, sound recordings and GPS records of me.
Are they going to ask my permission first? If so, why not just wait until the user phones up and reports their phone stolen, rather than try to Sherlock Holmes their inputs to determine whether it has been stolen?
I don't really want my carrier randomly taking pictures and sound recordings of me so that some analyst somewhere can have a gaze and see if I look like a robber. What if it takes pictures of it's child owner naked, or records a conversation which discusses bank details, or an employee discussing trade secrets or what not?
Sounds very iffy to me.
They're both religions based on the coming of a new prophet, who writes a new body of religious text to sit on top of essentially the existing Abrahamic religious texts.
That might be pretty much where the similarities end, but it's pretty obvious where the GP was coming from. Both have deviated from existing Christianity/Judaism in a similar sort of fashion.
I would be very surprised if _France_ had no restrictions on wine/grapes?!
Yup:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_wine_regulations
And more generally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Geographical_Status
I do not believe that the rest of the world is better off for being more heavily regulated than the US, nor do I believe that it is even remotely possible to prevent politicians from being bought and sold.
This must be why China, a country with more draconian, neo-Leninist regulations than Wikipedia would care to document, is now the second largest economy in the world, and is due to overtake the US in mere years.
Admitedly their softened approach did appear to kick start things (apparently being a complete political police state isn't condusive to world trade), but they're still more regulated that anywhere in the western world, with huge swathes of nationalised industry, and it doesn't appear to be doing them any harm economically.
Or are you talking about being an MVNO? Because those, even those that were arms of the big guys, have done so well over the last few years. The only carrier that seems to have entered the market recently is Wal*Mart, who is an MVNO (they don't have their own towers), and they have hundreds of billions they can spend to do it.
I don't really want to play the "here in the UK" card again (I seem to so much at the moment), but it probably is relevant here as our market conditions are near enough identical. So:
Here in the UK, there are only 2 major wired networks (Virgin's cable and BT's Openreach network) and maybe 4 wireless providers that I can think of.
However the VN market is relatively booming. Virgin have a VN running over T-Mobile's wireless network, Tesco have a VN, as do Asda/Walmart, BT have a VN (I think over Vodaphone's infrastructure), there's a whole host of minnows, and even a Phone Co-opertative.
I'd be surprised if it proved impossible to replicate this relative success in the US.
The internet is never going to have the kind of disaster that will lead to robust consumer protections despite the mono/oligopic nature of ISPs & wireless providers.
I like your optimism (or possibly pessimism). If history teaches us anything, it's that corporations without checks and balances tend to be self destructive (see your own examples).
If ISPs are not properly regulated, their behaviour will get steadily crazier. Expect to see traffic shaping so widespread that half of the websites you search for can barely be accessed. Expect to see throttling become a standard weapon in the patent/copyright/price wars between companies. Expect to see price gouging (I know, I mean more so).
If things follow historical precedent (again, see your own examples) eventually things will be so bad that the government (funded by our old friend the tax payer) will be forced to step in and clear up the mess.
Survival of the fittest may have favoured genetic change in our prehistory, but not so anymore. With hereditary property inheritance, fitness to survive is as much determined by the wealth handed down from your parents, not the genes.
How many baby Murdochs are now top lieutenants in daddy Rupert's media empire? (hint- all three were given top jobs, although only one has managed to stick it out). And do you think Paris Hilton would have had the abilty (genetic or otherwise) to build an international hotel chain?
Not that I'm arguing that we should all adopt hardline socialism. I'm just pointing out that free market dogma does not lead to the betterment of the species.
When you reboot a computer (especially an old one without much by way of persistent memory) you are losing all your session-specific data, and restarting your programmes from their original parameters. Assuming you don't feed in exactly the same inputs, the new session will produce markedly different results.
When a TV show is "rebooted" you are getting rid of everything that has happened so far and restarting based on just the original premise.
Seems like a good enough analogy to me.
I'm sure bus operators would change their schedule if thousands of people are arriving at a local train station at a particular hour of the day.
Supply and demand and all that jazz. Running empty busses from a deserted train station on a Sunday isn't profitable. Running busses to a bustling transport hub is.
And if they don't, I'm sure someone else will sense the opportunity for profit and swoop in. In my town, the main bus service doesn't run on a Sunday- but another national provider, who doesn't usually run an urban service here the rest of the week, does. As I say, supply and demand.