For three decades or so, Britons stood in the shadow of IRA terrorist attacks. Did they let the IRA win by surrendering their way of life ? No. They went on with their lives as they always had, and in time it became clear, even to the IRA, that their attacks were not helping them achieve their goals.
Now the terrorists have changed. Does Britain's new generation of leaders stand up to them and refuse to sacrafice freedoms, as in the past ? No, they make compromises - big compromises - which will encourage this generation of terrorists and future ones when they realise that their attacks are making a difference.
Much as it saddens me to write this, perhaps Margaret Thatcher would have done a better job of standing up to today's breed of terrorists. In spite of all her other faults, her one strength was that she wouldn't compromise.
(Geez, I can't believe I just said something good about Maggie Thatcher).
I bought my father an HP PSC-1315 about 6 months ago. It scans, prints and photocopies. Quality is quite good for such a cheap unit, and my father uses it happily on his Linux PC. You can buy a photo-paper ink cartridge for it that produces impressive images.
I think that pretty much all of the PSC range uses the same chipset and so are supported by the same SANE driver, even the latest stuff.
Wrong, I've got one of the affected units here in Australia. The shop where I bought it rang me half an hour ago and confirmed it. I'm waiting for them to ring be back with replacement details.
I bought my wife one of these about a month ago. It played music just great, but it kept on locking up when she recorded with it. Not just occasionally, but nearly every time.
Being a musician who jams with a bunch of other people, the recording feature was one of the main reasons she wanted an MP3 player. So, we took it back and got it replaced with a new one. Which has the same lock-up problems.
And guess what - the new unit one of the affected ones.
I printed the Register article and took it in to show the store where we bought it. I'm waiting right now for a phone call for replacement details.
BTW, thanks Slashdot for tipping me off about this.
Only rich mega-corporations have enough money to become official Olympic sponsors. What about small British companies ? They're contributing to the games through their taxes (presumably the British government is throwing dollars at the games), why shouldn't they get some benefit in return through spinoff advertising ?
Gas prices will probably continue soaring until we have a Boston Gas Party
A Boston Gas Party wouldn't achieve much. The Boston Tea Party was a protest against taxes. Taxes are within the control of governments. However, the high price of gas comes about mainly as a result of market forces (increased demand and decreased supply). A Boston Gas Party would have no beneficial effect on gas prices; if anything, the uncertainty caused in the market by such an action would probably only force prices up. Not to mention the environmental disaster of pouring gas into the harbor.
The best way to make governments lower gas prices is by getting them to stop going to war against countries that produce the stuff.
And several states in Australia are doing it all again when Melbourne hosts the Commonwealth Games in April 2006.
Here where I work, I realised the impact that the Sydney 2000 change would have about 3 days before it came into effect. It took four people a total of a couple of hours to patch 50 Windows and Solaris servers. Its no big deal guys.
Because China is an up-and-coming superpower. Take a longer-term view. Like it or not, China is on the "up" escalator at the moment - their economy is growing faster than anyone else's, they have more people than anyone else. They are bridging the technology gap between themselves and the west at an astonishing pace.
Russia is on the "down" escalator. They had a fairly good time of it through most of the 20th century, but any power that they have today is a decaying relic of that period.
As for America - I'll reserve my judgement on that country. However, given America's stifling attitude towards things that produce real innovation these days, its a bit harder to argue that they are still on the way "up".
I was actually in a meeting with the ATO's e-tax IT project manager a couple of months ago. He had been invited to a meeting held by various state government agencies in my state (one of which I work for) discussing problems with Internet-access PC's that we provide to the public.
The main gist of the meeting regarded what happens when people using these public PC's enter private details (eg. credit card numbers), then when the next member of the public comes along they have access to their details.
During the meeting it became apparent that public access PC's run by some other agencies allowed members of the public to download and install software (including e-tax) onto them (!!!). Yes, some people in Australia who can't afford a home PC use a public-access Windows machine to do their tax returns !!! And when they finish, their tax details remain on the PC for anyone else to see, unless they know how to delete them !!! And yes, some agencies in my state are stupid enough to provide public-access Windows PC's where people can come along and install anything on them !!!
But I digress. I approached the ATO manager during the break. One of the things I asked him was along the lines of this discussion - what are non-Windows users supposed to do if they want to do their tax returns online ? He mentioned emulators (yeah, great).
I suggested an idea to him that I had had during the meeting - that the ATO provide a web-based version of e-tax.
As far as the subject of that meeting was concerned, the main problem with e-tax was persistence of data. If a member of the public uses a public-access machine, then the details they enter are likely to remain on the PC and be viewable by subsequent users of that PC. To respond to this, the ATO provides public-access machines in some of its branches, with a version of e-tax that deletes all details when the user logs out of the application. However, this presents a problem - Australian tax returns are fairly complex, and quite often people are unable to enter all of their details in one e-tax session (they might not have enough time, or they realise half-way through that they are missing an important bit of information, or whatever). So, they shut down the app, lose all the information they have entered, and have to start from scratch when they come back. The manager had admitted this shortcoming during the meeting.
Anyway, I suggested to the manager that the ATO create a web-based e-tax system - one that lets people create a tax-preparation account, and save their preparation details in the system, ie. on the ATO's web server, as they go until their return is complete, at which point they can submit the final return. That way no personal info need be stored on local PC's; the ATO wouldn't have to worry about distributing new versions of the e-tax client each year when tax rules change; and best of all, Mac and Linux users could use it.
The manager rubbed his chin and said that he thought the idea was "interesting", but judging from his body language I don't think its going to arrive any time soon.
BTW, the public-access PC's that I look after run a locked-down version of Linux, with the Firefox browser as the only accessible app, which means I don't have to worry about having to support e-tax on them:-).
I work for a state government department with about 1200 staff. For about 18 months, we had an 850Mhz Celeron PC running OpenBSD acting as a local firewall at each of our 6 main sites (which account for about 90% of our staff). During that time, we had one machine fail, which we replaced with a stand-by machine fairly quickly.
Our ISP provides primary firewalling for us as part of the govt. contract with them, but we use the OpenBSD machines mainly to prevent viruses from propagating internally within the organisation between our sites. We also use the OpenBSD boxes for firewall rules that are liable to change regularly for whatever reason, so that we don't have to bug the ISP and wait for them to make the changes at their end.
About a year ago, we put 2 OpenBSD boxes in parallel for redundancy at our main site, we had to pay to get our ISP to give us 2 ports on the router, but we may have been able to do the networking some other way.
We have recently had to buy 2 new HP servers for our two main sites, not because of reliability concerns, but because we had introduced a gigabit network between the sites, and the old PC's struggled to get much above 100Mb/s, even with gigabit cards in them.
For reliability, I'd say yeah, maybe don't use an old Pentium I with a 2Gb disk, but use a recently retired semi-modern machine (I guess it depends on how long you hold on to your hardware for; we replace PC's here after 3-4 years, which is an ideal age to turn a box into a firewall). I'd probably be just as comfortable with a 4-year-old PC that had gotten past the "infant mortalilty" period of new hardware, as with a brand new new server that hadn't.
BTW, I also use an OpenBSD box at home as a firewall. I use Linux on my desktop at home, but my wife uses Windows. The OpenBSD box, along with two simple rules (never install dodgy software, and never use IE) means that we have never had a virus or spyware on the Windows box in the 2 years we've had this setup, even though I never patch it (I recently put SP1 on), and I've only recently installed an anti-virus program.
As I understand it, this is the ***REAL*** reason why you shouldn't use a cellphone on a plane. Its a courtesy to the phone companies. Imagine a cellphone tower near say JFK airport - if every plane that flew past it had 100's of cellphones switched on, then as they came into the tower's range, they would be negotiating to use that tower as their base. Then, a few seconds later, as the plane moved out of range, the tower would have to shut down all those connections. Imagine if towers had to do this, day-in, day-out, as each plane flew past !!!
In real life, a small percentage of people leave their phones switched on when they get on a plane (they forget to turn them off, or they're just jerks). This has no effect whatsoever on the plane's navigation capabilities. I can't imagine that the airlines care enough about the "annoyance factor" of cellphones to ban them for that reason either.
The GST is a flat 10% tax that applies to nearly every new item (ie. goods) or service supplied. It doesn't apply to some "basic" or "essential" items, such as food ingredients and medicines, although it does apply to prepared food.
GST does not apply to second-hand items, ie. the government receives GST only once for any given item.
Also, if I buy a new item, then use that item say as part of a manufacturing process of a bigger thing that I then sell, then I get a tax credit back so that the original item doesn't attract GST twice. But, I have to be registered as a GST supplier to claim this tax back.
IIRC, all GST is collected by the Federal government, but it gets distributed to the states and forms the backbone of their revenue sources. The states are prohibited from collecting income tax.
"Some eBay buyers reported that they had been charged an additional 10 per cent on top of their winning bid or 'Buy It Now' price without having been properly alerted beforehand of the additional charge".
Sounds like this requirement is a good idea.
As an Aussie, I remember once buying a shirt in a shop in California. When I got to the checkout, I was charged for state tax on top of the price that was on the ticket. I didn't complain, because I realised at the time that that's how things are done in California.
In Australia, however, it is universally assumed that advertised prices include all taxes. That's how things are done here. For an Australian website to advertise prices otherwise would be, IMHO, misleading.
Yes, there are going to be lots of items that don't attract GST, so fine GST should not be charged on them. And yes, people outside Australia don't have to pay any GST. Fine. The simple solution is to require any sales that are subject to GST to have a note alongside the price sayng "plus 10% GST to Australian shipping addresses" or something. Easy.
I've gone to a lot of effort to eliminate robots from the above stats. Robots account for about 15-20% of hits at my site too, so yes if they were included then IE would be down to about 75% here also. I'm only really interested in what people are browsing with, not robots, and I think that most of the stats you see published also have the robot hits removed.
I made a post here about a month ago, before the Firefox slowdown had become apparent, it gives a breakdown of how things were about a year ago, and how they were in March.
Sorry, I didn't mention in the original post - all hits from computers in the IP range of my state government (not just my department, the whole state) have been removed.
Here are some stats from a site that I help maintain. It is an Australian state government website that receives about 3 million hits per month. The site is not technology-oriented, and about half of the hits come from overseas, so they're probably a reasonably good sample of browser use.
Here are some running percentages for IE and Firefox over the past year:
The big jump towards Firefox occured late last year with the Mozilla Foundation's marketing blitz. Since then, there does indeed appear to be a slowing up in migration towards Firefox. This month's stats so far actually show a reversal.
I imagine it will just be a matter of time before someone figures out how to diable this - find the bit of machine code that does the check, and modify it to skip it. Just guessing here, but it might be best done at the point in the Windows install process just after the files have been copied from CD to disk, and before the OS has booted for the first time.
Would developing a fix like this be legal ? Would it be illegal in some countries, but legal in others ?
If someone developed a fix like this somewhere where it was legal to do so, then posted a utility on the web that did the fix, and I downloaded it, could I legally use it ?
Slashdot Mirror
Why charge people $199 every 4 years, when you can charge them $199 every 12 months ?
Question to moderator: why was this comment modded off-topic ? It raises a perfectly valid point.
For three decades or so, Britons stood in the shadow of IRA terrorist attacks. Did they let the IRA win by surrendering their way of life ? No. They went on with their lives as they always had, and in time it became clear, even to the IRA, that their attacks were not helping them achieve their goals.
Now the terrorists have changed. Does Britain's new generation of leaders stand up to them and refuse to sacrafice freedoms, as in the past ? No, they make compromises - big compromises - which will encourage this generation of terrorists and future ones when they realise that their attacks are making a difference.
Much as it saddens me to write this, perhaps Margaret Thatcher would have done a better job of standing up to today's breed of terrorists. In spite of all her other faults, her one strength was that she wouldn't compromise.
(Geez, I can't believe I just said something good about Maggie Thatcher).
I think that pretty much all of the PSC range uses the same chipset and so are supported by the same SANE driver, even the latest stuff.
Wrong, I've got one of the affected units here in Australia. The shop where I bought it rang me half an hour ago and confirmed it. I'm waiting for them to ring be back with replacement details.
... and to the Australian market too.
I bought my wife one of these about a month ago. It played music just great, but it kept on locking up when she recorded with it. Not just occasionally, but nearly every time.
Being a musician who jams with a bunch of other people, the recording feature was one of the main reasons she wanted an MP3 player. So, we took it back and got it replaced with a new one. Which has the same lock-up problems.
And guess what - the new unit one of the affected ones.
I printed the Register article and took it in to show the store where we bought it. I'm waiting right now for a phone call for replacement details.
BTW, thanks Slashdot for tipping me off about this.
Only rich mega-corporations have enough money to become official Olympic sponsors. What about small British companies ? They're contributing to the games through their taxes (presumably the British government is throwing dollars at the games), why shouldn't they get some benefit in return through spinoff advertising ?
Martian organisms might be revived too - if there are any.
Martian organisms might be revived, or they might be finished off by the octaflouropropane :-).
SCO's licence only insures you against getting sued by SCO. Any other litigious jerk can still have a go at you.
A Lloyds insurance policy would presumably insure you against everyone.
A Boston Gas Party wouldn't achieve much. The Boston Tea Party was a protest against taxes. Taxes are within the control of governments. However, the high price of gas comes about mainly as a result of market forces (increased demand and decreased supply). A Boston Gas Party would have no beneficial effect on gas prices; if anything, the uncertainty caused in the market by such an action would probably only force prices up. Not to mention the environmental disaster of pouring gas into the harbor.
The best way to make governments lower gas prices is by getting them to stop going to war against countries that produce the stuff.
And several states in Australia are doing it all again when Melbourne hosts the Commonwealth Games in April 2006.
Here where I work, I realised the impact that the Sydney 2000 change would have about 3 days before it came into effect. It took four people a total of a couple of hours to patch 50 Windows and Solaris servers. Its no big deal guys.
Because China is an up-and-coming superpower. Take a longer-term view. Like it or not, China is on the "up" escalator at the moment - their economy is growing faster than anyone else's, they have more people than anyone else. They are bridging the technology gap between themselves and the west at an astonishing pace.
Russia is on the "down" escalator. They had a fairly good time of it through most of the 20th century, but any power that they have today is a decaying relic of that period.
As for America - I'll reserve my judgement on that country. However, given America's stifling attitude towards things that produce real innovation these days, its a bit harder to argue that they are still on the way "up".
Or destroys itself first.
I was actually in a meeting with the ATO's e-tax IT project manager a couple of months ago. He had been invited to a meeting held by various state government agencies in my state (one of which I work for) discussing problems with Internet-access PC's that we provide to the public.
:-).
The main gist of the meeting regarded what happens when people using these public PC's enter private details (eg. credit card numbers), then when the next member of the public comes along they have access to their details.
During the meeting it became apparent that public access PC's run by some other agencies allowed members of the public to download and install software (including e-tax) onto them (!!!). Yes, some people in Australia who can't afford a home PC use a public-access Windows machine to do their tax returns !!! And when they finish, their tax details remain on the PC for anyone else to see, unless they know how to delete them !!! And yes, some agencies in my state are stupid enough to provide public-access Windows PC's where people can come along and install anything on them !!!
But I digress. I approached the ATO manager during the break. One of the things I asked him was along the lines of this discussion - what are non-Windows users supposed to do if they want to do their tax returns online ? He mentioned emulators (yeah, great).
I suggested an idea to him that I had had during the meeting - that the ATO provide a web-based version of e-tax.
As far as the subject of that meeting was concerned, the main problem with e-tax was persistence of data. If a member of the public uses a public-access machine, then the details they enter are likely to remain on the PC and be viewable by subsequent users of that PC. To respond to this, the ATO provides public-access machines in some of its branches, with a version of e-tax that deletes all details when the user logs out of the application. However, this presents a problem - Australian tax returns are fairly complex, and quite often people are unable to enter all of their details in one e-tax session (they might not have enough time, or they realise half-way through that they are missing an important bit of information, or whatever). So, they shut down the app, lose all the information they have entered, and have to start from scratch when they come back. The manager had admitted this shortcoming during the meeting.
Anyway, I suggested to the manager that the ATO create a web-based e-tax system - one that lets people create a tax-preparation account, and save their preparation details in the system, ie. on the ATO's web server, as they go until their return is complete, at which point they can submit the final return. That way no personal info need be stored on local PC's; the ATO wouldn't have to worry about distributing new versions of the e-tax client each year when tax rules change; and best of all, Mac and Linux users could use it.
The manager rubbed his chin and said that he thought the idea was "interesting", but judging from his body language I don't think its going to arrive any time soon.
BTW, the public-access PC's that I look after run a locked-down version of Linux, with the Firefox browser as the only accessible app, which means I don't have to worry about having to support e-tax on them
I work for a state government department with about 1200 staff. For about 18 months, we had an 850Mhz Celeron PC running OpenBSD acting as a local firewall at each of our 6 main sites (which account for about 90% of our staff). During that time, we had one machine fail, which we replaced with a stand-by machine fairly quickly.
Our ISP provides primary firewalling for us as part of the govt. contract with them, but we use the OpenBSD machines mainly to prevent viruses from propagating internally within the organisation between our sites. We also use the OpenBSD boxes for firewall rules that are liable to change regularly for whatever reason, so that we don't have to bug the ISP and wait for them to make the changes at their end.
About a year ago, we put 2 OpenBSD boxes in parallel for redundancy at our main site, we had to pay to get our ISP to give us 2 ports on the router, but we may have been able to do the networking some other way.
We have recently had to buy 2 new HP servers for our two main sites, not because of reliability concerns, but because we had introduced a gigabit network between the sites, and the old PC's struggled to get much above 100Mb/s, even with gigabit cards in them.
For reliability, I'd say yeah, maybe don't use an old Pentium I with a 2Gb disk, but use a recently retired semi-modern machine (I guess it depends on how long you hold on to your hardware for; we replace PC's here after 3-4 years, which is an ideal age to turn a box into a firewall). I'd probably be just as comfortable with a 4-year-old PC that had gotten past the "infant mortalilty" period of new hardware, as with a brand new new server that hadn't.
BTW, I also use an OpenBSD box at home as a firewall. I use Linux on my desktop at home, but my wife uses Windows. The OpenBSD box, along with two simple rules (never install dodgy software, and never use IE) means that we have never had a virus or spyware on the Windows box in the 2 years we've had this setup, even though I never patch it (I recently put SP1 on), and I've only recently installed an anti-virus program.
As I understand it, this is the ***REAL*** reason why you shouldn't use a cellphone on a plane. Its a courtesy to the phone companies. Imagine a cellphone tower near say JFK airport - if every plane that flew past it had 100's of cellphones switched on, then as they came into the tower's range, they would be negotiating to use that tower as their base. Then, a few seconds later, as the plane moved out of range, the tower would have to shut down all those connections. Imagine if towers had to do this, day-in, day-out, as each plane flew past !!!
In real life, a small percentage of people leave their phones switched on when they get on a plane (they forget to turn them off, or they're just jerks). This has no effect whatsoever on the plane's navigation capabilities. I can't imagine that the airlines care enough about the "annoyance factor" of cellphones to ban them for that reason either.
The GST is a flat 10% tax that applies to nearly every new item (ie. goods) or service supplied. It doesn't apply to some "basic" or "essential" items, such as food ingredients and medicines, although it does apply to prepared food.
GST does not apply to second-hand items, ie. the government receives GST only once for any given item.
Also, if I buy a new item, then use that item say as part of a manufacturing process of a bigger thing that I then sell, then I get a tax credit back so that the original item doesn't attract GST twice. But, I have to be registered as a GST supplier to claim this tax back.
IIRC, all GST is collected by the Federal government, but it gets distributed to the states and forms the backbone of their revenue sources. The states are prohibited from collecting income tax.
That's probably it in a nutshell.
"Some eBay buyers reported that they had been charged an additional 10 per cent on top of their winning bid or 'Buy It Now' price without having been properly alerted beforehand of the additional charge".
Sounds like this requirement is a good idea.
As an Aussie, I remember once buying a shirt in a shop in California. When I got to the checkout, I was charged for state tax on top of the price that was on the ticket. I didn't complain, because I realised at the time that that's how things are done in California.
In Australia, however, it is universally assumed that advertised prices include all taxes. That's how things are done here. For an Australian website to advertise prices otherwise would be, IMHO, misleading.
Yes, there are going to be lots of items that don't attract GST, so fine GST should not be charged on them. And yes, people outside Australia don't have to pay any GST. Fine. The simple solution is to require any sales that are subject to GST to have a note alongside the price sayng "plus 10% GST to Australian shipping addresses" or something. Easy.
I've gone to a lot of effort to eliminate robots from the above stats. Robots account for about 15-20% of hits at my site too, so yes if they were included then IE would be down to about 75% here also. I'm only really interested in what people are browsing with, not robots, and I think that most of the stats you see published also have the robot hits removed.
(Safari went from under 1% to about 2.5%)
Sorry, I didn't mention in the original post - all hits from computers in the IP range of my state government (not just my department, the whole state) have been removed.
Here are some running percentages for IE and Firefox over the past year:
2004-05: IE 94.1%, Firefox 0.6%
2004-06: IE 94.0%, Firefox 0.9%
2004-07: IE 93.1%, Firefox 1.3%
2004-08: IE 93.1%, Firefox 1.8%
2004-09: IE 92.6%, Firefox 2.0%
2004-10: IE 92.5%, Firefox 2.5%
2004-11: IE 91.9%, Firefox 3.1%
2004-12: IE 89.3%, Firefox 4.5%
2005-01: IE 88.0%, Firefox 5.6%
2005-02: IE 87.9%, Firefox 5.7%
2005-03: IE 88.0%, Firefox 5.9%
2005-04: IE 87.3%, Firefox 6.2%
2005-05 (first 12 days): IE 88.8%, Firefox 5.9%
The big jump towards Firefox occured late last year with the Mozilla Foundation's marketing blitz. Since then, there does indeed appear to be a slowing up in migration towards Firefox. This month's stats so far actually show a reversal.
I imagine it will just be a matter of time before someone figures out how to diable this - find the bit of machine code that does the check, and modify it to skip it. Just guessing here, but it might be best done at the point in the Windows install process just after the files have been copied from CD to disk, and before the OS has booted for the first time.
Would developing a fix like this be legal ? Would it be illegal in some countries, but legal in others ?
If someone developed a fix like this somewhere where it was legal to do so, then posted a utility on the web that did the fix, and I downloaded it, could I legally use it ?
Any lawyers like to comment on this ?
I wonder how long until someone reverse-engineers this and releases an open-source version ?
Or how about: "It works - just".