U-571 is based on a true story - the capture of the first Enigma from U-110. However in the interests of selling the film to a nationalistic US public, the fact that the Engima was captured by British sailors on HMS Bulldog has been conveniently forgotten, and all the Brits are replaced with Americans in the film.
Oddly enough, some Brits find this a bit cheeky.
No doubt, Americans would be similarly amused if a film were to be released portraying Guadalcanal being liberated by British forces with nary an American in sight...
If this is the case why do so few people drive automatics? The US is the only country where automatics outnumber manuals. Or are all non-Americans 'esoteric freaks' and all Americans 'normal people' to use your language?
The vast majority of cars sold in Europe are manual, and automatics are seen as the exclusive preserve of little old ladies, disabled people and fat businessmen. In fact, in most (all?) countries you have to take your test on a manual, otherwise you will get a licence that limits you to driving only automatic cars. No self-respecting person under the age of 60 would be seen driving an automatic (unless they were disabled of course) and the idea of an automatic sportscar is just bizarre - props to Audi for refusing to pander to North American tastes by decining to offer an auto version of the TT (I shudder at the thought...)
Like many Americans, John Katz makes the mistake of thinking that US law applies outside the US. Jon was not questioned under the DMCA, which obviously has no authority in Norway. He was questioned under Norwegian intellectual property statutes.
iCraveTV was sued in both Canadian and US courts, however it is debateable as to whether the US court has jurisdition. It could be argued that the breach of copyright occurred in the US. If iCraveTV has no exposure in the US market (no offices, US arm of the business), the courts decisions are pretty much unenforceable.
This is an aspect of US courts I have never understood - they are willing to award court decisions against foreign companies that have no chance of ever being enforced. I know of a British outdoor activities organisation that was sued in a Californian court for negligence (they 'damaged' an American tourist.) They didn't bother defending the case and the plaintiff was awarded damages of several million dollars which she has no hope of ever collecting. Why didn't the judge just say 'hey if you want to collect, sue them in an English court.'? This mentality extend even to Congress, I have a friend who was 'summoned' to testify before Congress (the German bank he works for is doing something that upsets the US government.) He told them to piss off. Still, he gets a bit nervous everytime his passport gets swiped when he lands at JFK...
Well all the French tenses that are such a pain to learn at high school exist in English too: compound perfect (passé composé): I have loved pluperfect: I had loved future perfect: I will have loved past historic: I loved imperfect: I was loving past anterior: umm, OK, sort of like the pluperfect..., but a bit posher.
The real problem here is that English is not taught properly anymore, so teaching grammar is left up to the poor French, Spanish, German and Latin teachers. Most Anglophone kids have no idea what 'voice', 'mood' or 'gender' mean until they start studying a second language which is a real shame.
OK, bonus points to anyone who can come up with a future subjunctive clause in six words or less (in English)...
Here's what I sent to my MP, quoting liberally from STAND's article.
Dear Mr Truswell,
I am writing to you to express my deep concerns regarding the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill, 2000 and to urge you to vote against it at its second reading on 6th March.
As I am sure you are aware, the bill makes provisions relating to the interception of communications and the carrying out of electronic surveillance. It also provides for the establishment of a tribunal for which it is to be commended.
The bill is deeply flawed, however, in several respects and may result in the criminalisation of large portions of the internet-using public. I list my principal objections below:-
1) Section 11.(4) obliges employees at internet service providers (ISPs) to observe wiretap warrants or face two years imprisonment. Revealing the existence of a wiretap is punishable by five years imprisonment and there is no whistleblower clause (Section 18.(2)). In fact, the requirement to install a wiretap on request by warrant is extended to " a person (...) who has control of the whole or any part of a telecommunication system located wholly or partly in the United Kingdom." (11.(4)(c)), which can be easily interpreted to mean any person who own a land-line telephone, fax or mobile phone.
This widens the number of people capable of being prosecuted for refusing to serve a warrant considerably. One of the features of the internet is that potentially, anyone can operate a "public telecommunications service" online. By widening the definition, the bill is placing a huge liability on British companies to provide interception capabilities, which foreign companies do not have to comply with.
2) Section 8.(3) allows for the mass monitoring of communications sent from or received outside the UK with the permission of the Home Secretary. Note that this allows for the serving of unnamed warrants which grant blanket permission to the security services to monitor any particular type of communication. The section, in limiting itself to communications external to the UK, is clearly aimed at national security concerns but is easily open to abuse. This is because data on the Internet is not confined to national boundaries. Domestic internet traffic will frequently travel via a route that takes it overseas. The e-mail that a constituent in Yorkshire sends his MP in London might very well get there via Amsterdam and New York, such is the nature of the internet. Clearly, then domestic traffic will fall under the remit of Section 8.(3).
3) Section 12.(1) allows the Home Secretary to oblige ISPs to monitor their own users. Currently, ISPs do not do this (for obvious reasons of privacy) and in fact the technology to do so does not exist - it would be incredibly complex and cumbersome to implement due to the vast amount of traffic that flows through an ISP. Any monitoring system attached to an ISP will, by necessity, be accessible from the rest of the internet and it will come under electronic attack from crackers (or 'hackers' as the popular press incorrectly calls them.) The monitoring equipment will be an easy target for hackers, many of them beyond the jurisdiction of UK courts, who will make their own uses for the names, addresses and credit card numbers collected by the monitoring equipment.
4) Section 16.(1) prohibits revealing the existence of a wiretap warrant in a court of law. Thus, there is no legal recourse for those who believe they are the illegitimate target of a wiretap.
5) Section 46.(2) governs the treatment of keys to encrypted data. Anyone under suspicion of any crime or in conflict with any public authority is required to hand over their private keys or face two years imprisonment. Handing over a key should not be a trivial exercise. The potential liability to companies and individuals of losing control of their private keys is incalculable. Allowing any statutory body to demand these keys trivialises the importance of encryption in the future of the internet. It is comparable to allowing any government body access to the most private areas of citizens' life.
The government is in the habit of indicating that this bill is necessary to defend against monstrous criminal acts. They claim that without it, drug barons, child pornographers and terrorists will use encryption to evade paying for their crimes. Usefully, this bill guarantees that they will. If you encrypt all your data, and refuse to hand over the key, you can be punished to a maximum of two years . This makes it worthwhile for criminals to pursue this aim, while actively dissuading regular citizens from taking the risk that they will be imprisoned for being unable to decrypt their own data. As the old Net proverb has it: if you outlaw encryption, only outlaws will use encryption. Additionally, the defence of "forgetting your passphrase" will quickly become discredited: making it even more difficult for innocent citizens to use this as a legitimate defence. This section also reverses the burden of proof - rather than the burden being on the authorities to prove that the defendant has a key, the burden is on the defendant to prove that he or she does not have a key.
To summarise, the bill is poorly drafted and provides powers to the authorities at the expense of public privacy, and even goes against the basic assumption of innocence which is a cornerstone of English criminal law. I urge you to vote against the government on this bill.
Can anyone post a summary of the major advantages and disadvantages of PalmOS compared to Epoc32? I've heard quite a few people in the industry saying that PalmOS is doomed due to it's lack of a TCP/IP stack and the fact that it runs only on Dragonball. Anyone have any comments? It really seems that all the mobile phone makers are leaning toward Epoc on ARM as their embedded OS of choice.
However, it seems that Palm has a much more open development environment - I know you can get Palm SDKs for just about any platform - is the same true of Epoc?
Even though I believe that the firm itself got its advice from some punky West-Coast firm, it is firmly in the grand legal tradition of IP law invented over the last two hundred years, ever since the writing of the US Constitution itself, the first document to introduce the concept of a civil patent.
Crap. Patents are not an American invention - check out the English Monopolies Act (Statute of Monopolies) 1624. Other things otherwise smart people regularly claim are American inventions:
Trial by jury
Representative government
Common law
Automobiles
Railroads
Radio
The English language (I kid you not - this got me into a foul argument with a bank teller who checked my passport when cashing a cheque - "You speak good English", "Well, yeah, I'm from England", "Oh, do they speak English there?")
Is it just me or does it look spookily like Bagpuss (star of nightmare-inducing 1970s necromancy-fest masquerading as kids' show)? Will they stop there? Will we end up with Professor Yaffle the woodpecker, Gabriel the toad, Madeline the rag doll and the rest of the demonic horde? Perhaps even the mice on the mouse organ????
Nick (hiding behind sofa)
PS For those of you who have never seen Bagpuss, think Reanimator crossed with those Chucky movies.
True, CDs are cheaper in the US - the problem being that lots of good stuff simply doesn't get a US release, due to the US' notoriously music markets conservatism. The result is that I tend to buy a lot of Jap/Euro imports, which tend to run $15-$20 - *more* expensive than the European prices.
And I'm not talking really obscure stuff here, albums by Catatonia, Air, Daft Punk, Saint Etienne, all available only on import.
It's easy to sue a foreign government on your home turf - provided you're willing to wave principles of international law like sovereign immunity. If the foreign government doesn't cough up the damages you seize their assets in your country. The US did it with Iran after the shah was deposed. Apart from the embassy and consulates though (which are inviolate) the US doesn't actually have any assets in France. However, under EU law a court order in one member state is easily enforceable in another so maybe France will just seize all those tanks and F16s that the US has on the bases it rents from Germany... Might not be possible under the NATO Status of Forces agreement however.
OK, I'll correct you. Even if MS moved its base of operations to Europe it would not fall outside the remit of US anti-trust laws as it would (presumably) continue to trade in the US market. MS does not have its base of operations in Europe but the commision are prefectly within their rights to investigate MS. The commision could even order the break-up of a US company and the company would either have to comply or withdraw from the European market place.
The problem with the hardware based music players (Rios etc.) is that you are quite limited with the amount of music you can fit on them - 32MB is less than an single album. What would really be nice is a minidisc player that supports MP3 as well as ATRAC (MD's standard compression scheme which is about half as efficient as MP3.)
An MD has a capacity of 140MB - 2-3 albums worth.
Nick
PS: for Americans - yes I know that everyone in the US thinks that MD is a failed tech but it's really popular in the rest of the world - when I was last in Europe I was astonished to see that even low-end integrated stereos are sold with an MD rather than a tape deck.
You always have the choice to work in the UK and indeed in any of the 14 other EU nations. And don't use your son as an excuse not to move back - my father moved from Argentina to the UK aged 8 to escape the Perons and I myself shuttled between Canada, France and the UK as a kid. Never did us any harm and it probably does kids good to experience different education systems.
If you want to return to Europe, do so. If you want to stay in the US - deal with it but don't try and make yourself out as a victim. Houses and cars can be sold and children moved to different school systems - it's not that big of a deal.
Well it's usually quicker but I tend to renew my visa at Christmas and as the US Embassy in London observe all the US, British and Irish holidays, they only have about 6 working days over the Christmas period.
Yeah, I know you can get J-1 for longer than a yeat but I am on a NASA grant that gets renewed every year. As I a result my IAP-66 (the pink slip) only lasts one year so the consulate gives me a one-year J-1. The fact that I'm on a four year PhD programme doesn't seem to have any bearing.
As a European my experiences with INS are not so bad, sure I've got to take a four week vacation in the UK every time my visa needs renewing to give the US consulate time to deal with my application but at least I can do a postal application for a new visa and know that it will be a rubber-stamp job. My visa (J-1) is always multiple entry so I can come and go from the US as much as I want.
Compare this to the Chinese students and post-docs in my department. They have to have an interview every time they apply for a visa and the visas are only single entry. A case in point, one of our postdocs was sent to a conference in Italy. His first port of call was obviously the Italian consulate in Boston to get a visa to enter Italy. Now of course he only had a single-entry US visa and had used that entry up on arriving in the US so he had to renew the visa. You can only renew US visas in a US consulate, the nearest to Boston of which is in Montreal. So his second port of call was the Canadian consulate in Boston to get a visa to enter Canada. At the US consulate in Canada he pleaded for a double-entry visa as of course one entry would be used up returning to the US.
Luckily, we have a large contingent of Chinese students and researchers who are well versed in this circus.
So there you have it, a trip to Milan requiring several months of planning and a considerable amount of cash. But at least he learnt that not all Western cuisine sucks...
Could someone explain to me why eToy even bothered responding to this suit? How can the decision of a judge in Los Angeles be enforced against an artist collective in Zurich? And why would a Californian judge even bother to make a ruling on a case that is clearly out of his jurisdiction?
Another advantage of paper voting is that you can spoil your ballot in order to register your disgust with all the candidates. With the mechanised voting systems in the US, you have to vote for someone. Your only option if you don't like any of the candidates is to stay at home, and be classed as apathetic. Voter turnout in the US is the lowest of any democracy and this is usually attributed to apathy, but I wonder if it would be higher if Americans had the option of spoiling their ballots and registering their disapproval of all the candidates. This could easily be rectified by having a 'non of the above' option on the voting machine (or the internet voting page.)
Huh, why did I get moderated as offtopic? I post regarding the credibility of the cited author and look what happens. Either the moderator didn't read the article so doesn't know who Ungoed-Thomas is or *gasp* Ungoed-Thomas has moderator access!!!:-)
...is a well-known cretin and I would take any article with his name in the byline with a very large pinch of salt. His problem is that he doesn't actually understand what the internet is or how it works, and is firmly of the opinion that it is simply a haven for anarchists, animal rights activists, left-wingers and any other group that he despises. He could be dangerous if he wasn't so incompetent. One of his favourite tactics is to approach organisations via email using an assumed name (strangely he usually choses a female identity.) Unfortunately, his understanding of email is so limited that it doesn't occur to him to spoof the From: and Reply-to: headers. See NTKs passim or do a google search on his name for a really good laugh.
You're wrong. Noah Webster and his cronies thought that English spelling needed to be more logical. He was responsible for colour->color, centre->center, theatre->theater etc. Spelling reform was rampant in the 19th century and the American Philological Association came up with spellings that have since reverted back to the original British forms 'are->ar, definit->definite, gaurd->gard'. Some of their changes, such as catalogue->catalog have stuck in US spelling. This all culminated in the federally funded Simplified Spelling Board who used your tax dollars to come up with through->thru and others.
The spelling reform zeal eventually died out which is why some words remain unreformed, for example the British 'defence' was changed to 'defense', otensibly to make it more in line with the Latin root, defensere, although of course, it could easily have come from defendere, to support. However the reformers never got as far as the word 'fence' which also comes from defensere.
I'm a Brit and the whole dating thing really confused me when I first came to the US. I mistook the word 'dating' as a euphemism for 'having sex with' or 'in a relationship with'. Brits and other Europeans generally don't do the dating thing, you either become friends with someone and a romantic relationship might ensue or (and this is the British approach) you score at a party/bar/club and only afterwards start going out to dinner/movies etc. The whole concept of going on dates with people you don't know particularly well seems pretty strange. To a European it would seem much more normal to go out as a large mixed group of friends and just meet people.
If online gambling was illegal in the plaintiff's jurisdiction this would have no impact on his case against the credit card company. You do not give up your right to sue, simply because the alleged tort was commited against you while you were engaged in an illegal act.
Consider the case of a kid who enters an unsecured construction site to tag a newly-built building. He's commiting a civil offence (trespass) and quite possible a criminal offence (criminal damage.) However, if he falls down an improperly marked and cordoned excavation and breaks his back he still has the right to sue the site owners for negligence.
OK, here's a quick summary of the story as people are complaining it has been/.ed. Basically, Ghanaian cocoa is very tasty, commands a premium and supports many rural Ghanaians. The flavour comes from careful breeding and selection over many plant gnerations.
The Mars corporation identified and patented the genes responsible for the flavour and design a process to produce the flavour industrially, independent of growing cocoa.
The result of course is that people will stop buying cocoa from Ghana and instead buy the Ghanaian cocoa flavouring from Mars. So the Ghanaians who spent generations developing the best cocoa in the world are screwed, and the Mars corp makes a packet. And TRIPS means that Ghana HAS to honour the Mars corps patent.
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly enough, some Brits find this a bit cheeky.
No doubt, Americans would be similarly amused if a film were to be released portraying Guadalcanal being liberated by British forces with nary an American in sight...
Nick
Nick
Nick
iCraveTV was sued in both Canadian and US courts, however it is debateable as to whether the US court has jurisdition. It could be argued that the breach of copyright occurred in the US. If iCraveTV has no exposure in the US market (no offices, US arm of the business), the courts decisions are pretty much unenforceable.
This is an aspect of US courts I have never understood - they are willing to award court decisions against foreign companies that have no chance of ever being enforced. I know of a British outdoor activities organisation that was sued in a Californian court for negligence (they 'damaged' an American tourist.) They didn't bother defending the case and the plaintiff was awarded damages of several million dollars which she has no hope of ever collecting. Why didn't the judge just say 'hey if you want to collect, sue them in an English court.'? This mentality extend even to Congress, I have a friend who was 'summoned' to testify before Congress (the German bank he works for is doing something that upsets the US government.) He told them to piss off. Still, he gets a bit nervous everytime his passport gets swiped when he lands at JFK...
Nick
compound perfect (passé composé): I have loved
pluperfect: I had loved
future perfect: I will have loved
past historic: I loved
imperfect: I was loving
past anterior: umm, OK, sort of like the pluperfect..., but a bit posher.
The real problem here is that English is not taught properly anymore, so teaching grammar is left up to the poor French, Spanish, German and Latin teachers. Most Anglophone kids have no idea what 'voice', 'mood' or 'gender' mean until they start studying a second language which is a real shame.
OK, bonus points to anyone who can come up with a future subjunctive clause in six words or less (in English)...
Nick
Dear Mr Truswell,
I am writing to you to express my deep concerns regarding the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill, 2000 and to urge you to vote against it at its second reading on 6th March.
As I am sure you are aware, the bill makes provisions relating to the interception of communications and the carrying out of electronic surveillance. It also provides for the establishment of a tribunal for which it is to be commended.
The bill is deeply flawed, however, in several respects and may result in the criminalisation of large portions of the internet-using public. I list my principal objections below:-
1) Section 11.(4) obliges employees at internet service providers (ISPs) to observe wiretap warrants or face two years imprisonment. Revealing the existence of a wiretap is punishable by five years imprisonment and there is no whistleblower clause (Section 18.(2)). In fact, the requirement to install a wiretap on request by warrant is extended to " a person (...) who has control of the whole or any part of a telecommunication system located wholly or partly in the United Kingdom." (11.(4)(c)), which can be easily interpreted to mean any person who own a land-line telephone, fax or mobile phone.
This widens the number of people capable of being prosecuted for refusing to serve a warrant considerably. One of the features of the internet is that potentially, anyone can operate a "public telecommunications service" online. By widening the definition, the bill is placing a huge liability on British companies to provide interception capabilities, which foreign companies do not have to comply with.
2) Section 8.(3) allows for the mass monitoring of communications sent from or received outside the UK with the permission of the Home Secretary. Note that this allows for the serving of unnamed warrants which grant blanket permission to the security services to monitor any particular type of communication. The section, in limiting itself to communications external to the UK, is clearly aimed at national security concerns but is easily open to abuse. This is because data on the Internet is not confined to national boundaries. Domestic internet traffic will frequently travel via a route that takes it overseas. The e-mail that a constituent in Yorkshire sends his MP in London might very well get there via Amsterdam and New York, such is the nature of the internet. Clearly, then domestic traffic will fall under the remit of Section 8.(3).
3) Section 12.(1) allows the Home Secretary to oblige ISPs to monitor their own users. Currently, ISPs do not do this (for obvious reasons of privacy) and in fact the technology to do so does not exist - it would be incredibly complex and cumbersome to implement due to the vast amount of traffic that flows through an ISP. Any monitoring system attached to an ISP will, by necessity, be accessible from the rest of the internet and it will come under electronic attack from crackers (or 'hackers' as the popular press incorrectly calls them.) The monitoring equipment will be an easy target for hackers, many of them beyond the jurisdiction of UK courts, who will make their own uses for the names, addresses and credit card numbers collected by the monitoring equipment.
4) Section 16.(1) prohibits revealing the existence of a wiretap warrant in a court of law. Thus, there is no legal recourse for those who believe they are the illegitimate target of a wiretap.
5) Section 46.(2) governs the treatment of keys to encrypted data. Anyone under suspicion of any crime or in conflict with any public authority is required to hand over their private keys or face two years imprisonment. Handing over a key should not be a trivial exercise. The potential liability to companies and individuals of losing control of their private keys is incalculable. Allowing any statutory body to demand these keys trivialises the importance of encryption in the future of the internet. It is comparable to allowing any government body access to the most private areas of citizens' life.
The government is in the habit of indicating that this bill is necessary to defend against monstrous criminal acts. They claim that without it, drug barons, child pornographers and terrorists will use encryption to evade paying for their crimes. Usefully, this bill guarantees that they will. If you encrypt all your data, and refuse to hand over the key, you can be punished to a maximum of two years . This makes it worthwhile for criminals to pursue this aim, while actively dissuading regular citizens from taking the risk that they will be imprisoned for being unable to decrypt their own data. As the old Net proverb has it: if you outlaw encryption, only outlaws will use encryption. Additionally, the defence of "forgetting your passphrase" will quickly become discredited: making it even more difficult for innocent citizens to use this as a legitimate defence. This section also reverses the burden of proof - rather than the burden being on the authorities to prove that the defendant has a key, the burden is on the defendant to prove that he or she does not have a key.
To summarise, the bill is poorly drafted and provides powers to the authorities at the expense of public privacy, and even goes against the basic assumption of innocence which is a cornerstone of English criminal law. I urge you to vote against the government on this bill.
Nick
However, it seems that Palm has a much more open development environment - I know you can get Palm SDKs for just about any platform - is the same true of Epoc?
Nick
Nick
Crap. Patents are not an American invention - check out the English Monopolies Act (Statute of Monopolies) 1624. Other things otherwise smart people regularly claim are American inventions:
Nick
Nick (hiding behind sofa)
PS For those of you who have never seen Bagpuss, think Reanimator crossed with those Chucky movies.
And I'm not talking really obscure stuff here, albums by Catatonia, Air, Daft Punk, Saint Etienne, all available only on import.
Nick
Nick
Nick
An MD has a capacity of 140MB - 2-3 albums worth.
Nick
PS: for Americans - yes I know that everyone in the US thinks that MD is a failed tech but it's really popular in the rest of the world - when I was last in Europe I was astonished to see that even low-end integrated stereos are sold with an MD rather than a tape deck.
If you want to return to Europe, do so. If you want to stay in the US - deal with it but don't try and make yourself out as a victim. Houses and cars can be sold and children moved to different school systems - it's not that big of a deal.
Nick
Yeah, I know you can get J-1 for longer than a yeat but I am on a NASA grant that gets renewed every year. As I a result my IAP-66 (the pink slip) only lasts one year so the consulate gives me a one-year J-1. The fact that I'm on a four year PhD programme doesn't seem to have any bearing.
Nick
Compare this to the Chinese students and post-docs in my department. They have to have an interview every time they apply for a visa and the visas are only single entry. A case in point, one of our postdocs was sent to a conference in Italy. His first port of call was obviously the Italian consulate in Boston to get a visa to enter Italy. Now of course he only had a single-entry US visa and had used that entry up on arriving in the US so he had to renew the visa. You can only renew US visas in a US consulate, the nearest to Boston of which is in Montreal. So his second port of call was the Canadian consulate in Boston to get a visa to enter Canada. At the US consulate in Canada he pleaded for a double-entry visa as of course one entry would be used up returning to the US.
Luckily, we have a large contingent of Chinese students and researchers who are well versed in this circus.
So there you have it, a trip to Milan requiring several months of planning and a considerable amount of cash. But at least he learnt that not all Western cuisine sucks...
Nick
Nick
Nick
Enough whining for now...
Nick
Nick
The spelling reform zeal eventually died out which is why some words remain unreformed, for example the British 'defence' was changed to 'defense', otensibly to make it more in line with the Latin root, defensere, although of course, it could easily have come from defendere, to support. However the reformers never got as far as the word 'fence' which also comes from defensere.
Mark Twain's comment on spelling reform should be the last word on the subject.
Nick
Nick
Consider the case of a kid who enters an unsecured construction site to tag a newly-built building. He's commiting a civil offence (trespass) and quite possible a criminal offence (criminal damage.) However, if he falls down an improperly marked and cordoned excavation and breaks his back he still has the right to sue the site owners for negligence.
Nick
The Mars corporation identified and patented the genes responsible for the flavour and design a process to produce the flavour industrially, independent of growing cocoa.
The result of course is that people will stop buying cocoa from Ghana and instead buy the Ghanaian cocoa flavouring from Mars. So the Ghanaians who spent generations developing the best cocoa in the world are screwed, and the Mars corp makes a packet. And TRIPS means that Ghana HAS to honour the Mars corps patent.
Nick