In thailand's case, its easy to make laws, but difficult to enforce. All the brothels have to pay regular bribes to the police to stay open.
And they have prosecuted pedophile foreigners. Really the problem is the disparity between to wealth of the foreigners vs. the income of the local people and police. You blame the Thai government for allowing this stuff to happen, but the only way they could really stop it would be to no longer allow any tourists into their country.
Tourism and prostitution go hand in hand. I guess they could do like Australia and ask on the immigration card "Are you here as a sex tourist?" and not allow entry to those that check it. LOL
In Thailand I haven't seen any child prostitution, but then I didn't go looking for it. The only mention I've seen are numbers posted that you can call to report it. In Jamaica it was much more rampant. Pre-teens working the streets like any other prostitute. So why does Thailand get the bad rap for being a destination for pedophiles? Because they actually prosecute tourists when they catch them while the Jamaican government does absolutely nothing.
You should really be putting blame on the nasty farang that travel to Thailand to do despicable things. But this being slashdot we gotta blame everything on some government or another.
that doesn't matter. When travelling you have to respect the laws of the nation you're visiting. For example, in Thailand its illegal to say anything bad about the King. This goes against the right to free speech. Maybe you don't like it but you have to abide by the law. If you don't like the laws of a country then don't go there.
Australia is a sovereign nation and has the authority to make any laws it wants. Its up to Aussie citizens to vote in people to make the laws governing them. You may disagree with their laws, and their laws may be immoral and stupid, but if you visit their country you have to abide by them.
If you can't live without your kiddie porn then you shouldn't go to Australia.
yes they definitely say themselves as fighting for freedom from American imperialism. Most of the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, as is Osama bin Laden. We don't know exactly what the terrorists themselves were think seeing as how they're all dead, but bin Laden has said many times he want the US out of the Middle East in general and Saudi Arabia specifically.
And didn't Sun Tzu once say you should strike your enemy at its heart, not at its arms? The heart of America is its economy, and many companies were headquartered in the WTC. And of course he wanted the US to go crazy so hitting civilians is a good way to do that. Attacking the USS Cole got some reaction, but just a few cruise missiles fired at a couple places. And its harder to attack a warship than it is to attack civilians.
It worked out really well for him. The US went insane and killed bin Laden's #2 enemy, Saddam Hussein. When your biggest enemy spends hundreds of billions of dollars to kill your second biggest enemy... I don't think even bin Laden dreamed things would work out so well.
what happens is the server sets the visited link to show an image, while the unvisited link doesn't. The browser sees that an image is supposed to be displayed for the visited site, checks its history, sees that you have indeed visted that site and then downloads that image to display on the link. The server sees that you downloaded visited-slashdot.png... so it knows you have visited slashdot.
Of course visited-slashdot.png doesn't even need to exist, it just needs to see the request for that file from your browser to know you've been there.
Really CSS just shouldn't allow different images for visited and unvisited links... nobody uses this feature.
But when looking for a new car you get certain feelings about certain brands. When you're looking at a chevy truck you'll get a feeling that its really solid (Like a Rock!) that Ford looks like its durable (Ford Tough!) and when you look at a mazda you'll get the feeling that this car has really got some pep (zoom! zoom!).
Those little jingles and slogans may not even pop into your head while test driving but they're there and have an influence over your purchasing decision. Sure you'll look at the price and all the other considerations, but if the Mazda is only a couple of hundred dollars more but it just felt more fun to drive, well you'll pay the extra to get the zoom zoom.
oh and in linux sftp is integrated with the the filemanager. Meaining I can have use gui on my desktop to browse the files on the server, and then drag and drop them somewhere else. Can even edit the files with whatever text editor I have on my desktop system. The key is to have good software on the desktop and have an awesome way of accessing the server (SSH).
no a treatment is more profitable because when the patent runs out you can make a small variation on it and get a new patent. Bribe doctors to prescribe the "new and improved" version and you can keep making profit of the same disease for many decades.
If they come out with a cure, well sure they make a profit that one time off of it, but once they wipe out the disease they can no longer make profit off of it. Yeah they get good PR, but what the hell good is that going to do when there isn't any need for their product anymore?
See each disease is has its own market of people that have that disease. You cure the disease then that market is gone forever. If you only treat that disease you can continue developing new products for that market forever.
When you're running a company you're trying to maximise your profits. You're not going to go out of your way to damage a competitor's profits. if you can damage your competitor's revenue to the point that you force them out of business then their patents would go to auction and you'd have to bid against others for them. Really it would be much more sensible to just merge with your competitor, or make a deal to buy or license the patents you need.
Spending a lot of money to damage your competitor is just cutting into your own profits, which is stupid, and goes against the whole idea of the free market system.
This isn't really a case of big pharma not behaving as good capitalists. This is a case of market failure. The market provides more incentives to produce treatments while not providing incentives for producing cures. Capitalism just doesn't do R&D in the best interests of humanity.
It would be really hard to sneak a nuke into the US.
This story is anecdotal, but whatever. My uncle got stopped crossing over into the US. All the border people were pretty freaked out and within minutes of him getting out of the truck they were all over it with scanners. Why? because he set off a radiation alarm. Literally HE set off a radiation alarm. A few days prior to crossing the border he had that test done where they put radioactive dye in your bloodstream. The small amount of radiation from that was enough to set off the alarm while crossing the border.
maybe you could encase the nuke in lead or something, but those radiation sensors they keep at the border are pretty sensitive. I'm pretty sure they'd have them at all the ports and on coast guard ships to check incoming boats and ships as well.
yeah a nerve gas attack on the most crowded subway system in the world killed 13 people. Its a cause for concern, but I don't think it qualifies as a weapon of mass destruction.
thats bullshit. Programmers spend a good amount of their time writing code that is the first do something in a specific area. Because if someone else had already done it before then we'd just use the software someone else already wrote for that task.
Oh look I just "invented" using recursion to descend down a tree of XML nodes to find a certain condition. Is that patented? Maybe it is, but it shouldn't be. I've never seen this done before but its obvious to any decent programmer that when dealing with data in a tree structure, you use recursion. But when they first came out with XML someone had to be the first to do this. But its completely obvious. Its just applying an algorithm thats in every CS textbook to a new technology.
The patent in question? If I didn't have javascript available on the browser and someone told me they wanted a menu on the webpage I'd probably sit down and write some code that would be in violation of the patent. Nowadays I'd do the menu in javascript, possibly using ajax (depending on how complicated the menu had to be). Ohhhh using ajax for a menu... is that patented yet? In five seconds of thinking about implementing menus on a webpage I thought of that one. But if no one's done it before then its not obvious!
Dude, you can't argue this isn't obvious. The menu is the most common UI element out there. When they added the applet tag to html, its not very innovative to say "hey lets use the applet funtionality to implement a menu!" Old concept applied to new technology is obvious.
well those simulatoins take place over millions of years. and although it looks like a galaxy eating another would be catastrophic fo any people living there, it really wouldn't. Most of space is... empty space. We focus on the stars and planets because they interesting, but there is a lot more space than stars and planets.
So there may be a few collisions of stars and planets when a galaxy eats another galaxy, but it wouldn't happen as often as you think. And since the process of a galaxy eating another galaxy takes so long, the only people living in either galaxy that might notice going on would be astronomers.
I find UI of MacOSX to be shit compared to Linux. But thats probably because I use my computer differently than you. I often have many windows open at once, And under Linux this is easy to manage. Under MacOSX is really frustrating. If you just have a single browser window open and playing some music in iTunes, well MacOSX does that really well. But if you have a few firefox windows open, multiple file manager windows open, and a bunch of terminal windows open, MacOSX really sucks. Expose is useless because the file manager windows al look alike and the terminals all look alike.
And the sex vs. violence thing is subjective too. I'd really like my kids to be exposed to neither of them. Yeah sex is good, but some of the stuff in porn is pretty messed up. Kids understand that violent stuff you see in movies isn't something you should be trying at home. But when a kid doesn't really know anything about sex sees a video where a dude forces a girl to deeptroat him until she pukes... well that probably warps a kid's brain. And even in the more traditional pornos you rarely see anyone using a condom. This probably isn't the best thing for kids to be seeing.
I'd say Mac OSX has shitty UI. The dock is just kludging together the taskbar concept from windows, the quicklaunch bar and the notification area into one big The problem is it doesn't do any of those very well. When I click an icon on the dock, I don't know if I'm clicking on a task or a launcher. Well I guess there's a little dot beside the icon when its a task, but that just indicates the app is loaded, not that I've had it open... many of those dots are there because MacOS decided to start that app at boot.
If you have more than one window open in a single app, There's no easy way to switch between them. I can right-click on the icon and select on, or press F9 and use expose. Expose, while it looks cool, is bad UI because it requires me to watch an animation, look at all the windows and pick out the one I want. When you use expose the windows are always in a different spot so you have to re-orient yourself everytime you use it. With a real taskbar, the button for your window is always in the same location.
If I want to open a new window for an app, I have to check for a tiny dot. If there isn't one then just click the icon on the dock. If there is a dot, then I have to right-click and select new window. If I happen to not notice the dot and just click on the icon, I get the window I had open before. FAIL.
I guess you're not supposed to have more than one window open for a single app in MacOS. except if you want to move a file to a different folder you have to have two finder windows open because MacOSX doesn't allow you to cut and paste files. Odlly copy and paste works ok, just not cut and paste. Very inconsistent.
The problem with the MacOSX UI is its constantly working against itself. You need to right-click more often in MacOSX than any other OS but apple seems to discourage right-clicking by providing single button mouses and having only one button on their laptops. Yeah you can buy another mouse or do a two-finger click but it seems like apple doesn't want you to use one button on the hardware side but makes you use two button on the software side. The dock makes it difficult to manage an application that has more than one window open, so it discourages you from having multiple windows open for a single app, but finder requires you to have two windows open to move files.
My experieince with MacOSX in general is that if you do things the way Steve Jobs thinks you should be doing things, everything works fine. But if you stray from that path, everything becomes unnecessarily difficult. The Apple slogan shouldn't be "think different" it should be "think like steve jobs".
Posting this from Ubuntu on a Macbook Pro. I tried MacOSX for three months and then had to install an OS that makes sense.
I remember seeing major bugs reported in the newest version of firefox and everyone being told to update immediately. But that didn't effect me because Ubuntu wasn't on the bleeding edge of firefox releases.
One of the big criticisms of ubuntu is that they're pushing bleeding edge software all the time. now you're saying they're wrong for not pushing the bleeding edge firefox? Ca't have it both ways.
Let your product install to the user's/home directory, and statically compile your libraries in, and it'll install/run on virtually any Linux system out there.
Why would you do this? its really trivial to build a package that installs to the proper locations and set the libraries you need as dependencies. You don't have to support that many different distros... you could support just one and linux users of other distros would soon figure out how to make it work with alien.
Just annoying that linux has really awesome tools for installing stuff but some developers are too caught up in the windows "double click setup.exe" mentality to use them.
Uh yeah you will be able to get a non-smartphone a couple of years from now. Maybe not in the US, but outside the US simple phones that offer basic voice and SMS will continue to outsell smartphones for the next five years.
this is what they moved the control buttons to the right side of the window for? Some animated icon in the top right corner to let me know that the application is "doing something"?
Ummmm.... yeah. Don't really know what to say to that.
I'm not glad they're doing something different. Every time Ubuntu has changed things it has always sucked. The UI is fine, problem is windows and mac users are too stuck in their ways to even consider trying to use ubuntu. I read on forums that for a lot of users the first thing they do is remove the top panel and add the application menu to the bottom panel to "make it more like windows". Which is odd because since I've tried ubuntu under the default settings, I can't go back. First thing I do in windows now is add a top panel to put shortcuts to my most used places and apps. I tried MacOS for three months and even the UI experience there wasn't as nice as the default ubuntu setup.
Hopefully this Unity interface stays on netbooks and they don't try to shove it onto people using real computers. Lack of a decent taskbar is what drove me away from MacOS.
looks like the macOS dock to me. Which is one of the stupidest ideas to come around in UI design in the last decade, and necessitating apple having to invent a bunch of UI hacks like expose to make it usable.
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In thailand's case, its easy to make laws, but difficult to enforce. All the brothels have to pay regular bribes to the police to stay open.
And they have prosecuted pedophile foreigners. Really the problem is the disparity between to wealth of the foreigners vs. the income of the local people and police.
You blame the Thai government for allowing this stuff to happen, but the only way they could really stop it would be to no longer allow any tourists into their country.
Tourism and prostitution go hand in hand. I guess they could do like Australia and ask on the immigration card "Are you here as a sex tourist?" and not allow entry to those that check it. LOL
In Thailand I haven't seen any child prostitution, but then I didn't go looking for it. The only mention I've seen are numbers posted that you can call to report it. In Jamaica it was much more rampant. Pre-teens working the streets like any other prostitute. So why does Thailand get the bad rap for being a destination for pedophiles? Because they actually prosecute tourists when they catch them while the Jamaican government does absolutely nothing.
You should really be putting blame on the nasty farang that travel to Thailand to do despicable things. But this being slashdot we gotta blame everything on some government or another.
that doesn't matter. When travelling you have to respect the laws of the nation you're visiting. For example, in Thailand its illegal to say anything bad about the King. This goes against the right to free speech. Maybe you don't like it but you have to abide by the law. If you don't like the laws of a country then don't go there.
Australia is a sovereign nation and has the authority to make any laws it wants. Its up to Aussie citizens to vote in people to make the laws governing them. You may disagree with their laws, and their laws may be immoral and stupid, but if you visit their country you have to abide by them.
If you can't live without your kiddie porn then you shouldn't go to Australia.
yes they definitely say themselves as fighting for freedom from American imperialism. Most of the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, as is Osama bin Laden. We don't know exactly what the terrorists themselves were think seeing as how they're all dead, but bin Laden has said many times he want the US out of the Middle East in general and Saudi Arabia specifically.
And didn't Sun Tzu once say you should strike your enemy at its heart, not at its arms? The heart of America is its economy, and many companies were headquartered in the WTC. And of course he wanted the US to go crazy so hitting civilians is a good way to do that. Attacking the USS Cole got some reaction, but just a few cruise missiles fired at a couple places. And its harder to attack a warship than it is to attack civilians.
It worked out really well for him. The US went insane and killed bin Laden's #2 enemy, Saddam Hussein. When your biggest enemy spends hundreds of billions of dollars to kill your second biggest enemy... I don't think even bin Laden dreamed things would work out so well.
That was so they could torture them and it would all be nice and quasi-legal while torturing an american citizen would be just plain illegal.
at that time they'll find out that I've been visiting https://secure-proxy-server-that-i-trust.net/ an awful lot.
the website doesn't get a list of websites.
what happens is the server sets the visited link to show an image, while the unvisited link doesn't. The browser sees that an image is supposed to be displayed for the visited site, checks its history, sees that you have indeed visted that site and then downloads that image to display on the link. The server sees that you downloaded visited-slashdot.png... so it knows you have visited slashdot.
Of course visited-slashdot.png doesn't even need to exist, it just needs to see the request for that file from your browser to know you've been there.
Really CSS just shouldn't allow different images for visited and unvisited links... nobody uses this feature.
But when looking for a new car you get certain feelings about certain brands. When you're looking at a chevy truck you'll get a feeling that its really solid (Like a Rock!) that Ford looks like its durable (Ford Tough!) and when you look at a mazda you'll get the feeling that this car has really got some pep (zoom! zoom!).
Those little jingles and slogans may not even pop into your head while test driving but they're there and have an influence over your purchasing decision. Sure you'll look at the price and all the other considerations, but if the Mazda is only a couple of hundred dollars more but it just felt more fun to drive, well you'll pay the extra to get the zoom zoom.
oh and in linux sftp is integrated with the the filemanager. Meaining I can have use gui on my desktop to browse the files on the server, and then drag and drop them somewhere else. Can even edit the files with whatever text editor I have on my desktop system. The key is to have good software on the desktop and have an awesome way of accessing the server (SSH).
CLI beats you there... I write a script to rsync the important files, put it in cron and I don't have to do anything after that to backup my files.
no a treatment is more profitable because when the patent runs out you can make a small variation on it and get a new patent. Bribe doctors to prescribe the "new and improved" version and you can keep making profit of the same disease for many decades.
If they come out with a cure, well sure they make a profit that one time off of it, but once they wipe out the disease they can no longer make profit off of it. Yeah they get good PR, but what the hell good is that going to do when there isn't any need for their product anymore?
See each disease is has its own market of people that have that disease. You cure the disease then that market is gone forever. If you only treat that disease you can continue developing new products for that market forever.
True competitors are in a zero sum situation.
When you're running a company you're trying to maximise your profits. You're not going to go out of your way to damage a competitor's profits. if you can damage your competitor's revenue to the point that you force them out of business then their patents would go to auction and you'd have to bid against others for them. Really it would be much more sensible to just merge with your competitor, or make a deal to buy or license the patents you need.
Spending a lot of money to damage your competitor is just cutting into your own profits, which is stupid, and goes against the whole idea of the free market system.
This isn't really a case of big pharma not behaving as good capitalists. This is a case of market failure. The market provides more incentives to produce treatments while not providing incentives for producing cures. Capitalism just doesn't do R&D in the best interests of humanity.
It would be really hard to sneak a nuke into the US.
This story is anecdotal, but whatever. My uncle got stopped crossing over into the US. All the border people were pretty freaked out and within minutes of him getting out of the truck they were all over it with scanners. Why? because he set off a radiation alarm. Literally HE set off a radiation alarm. A few days prior to crossing the border he had that test done where they put radioactive dye in your bloodstream. The small amount of radiation from that was enough to set off the alarm while crossing the border.
maybe you could encase the nuke in lead or something, but those radiation sensors they keep at the border are pretty sensitive. I'm pretty sure they'd have them at all the ports and on coast guard ships to check incoming boats and ships as well.
yeah a nerve gas attack on the most crowded subway system in the world killed 13 people. Its a cause for concern, but I don't think it qualifies as a weapon of mass destruction.
thats bullshit. Programmers spend a good amount of their time writing code that is the first do something in a specific area. Because if someone else had already done it before then we'd just use the software someone else already wrote for that task.
Oh look I just "invented" using recursion to descend down a tree of XML nodes to find a certain condition. Is that patented? Maybe it is, but it shouldn't be. I've never seen this done before but its obvious to any decent programmer that when dealing with data in a tree structure, you use recursion. But when they first came out with XML someone had to be the first to do this. But its completely obvious. Its just applying an algorithm thats in every CS textbook to a new technology.
The patent in question? If I didn't have javascript available on the browser and someone told me they wanted a menu on the webpage I'd probably sit down and write some code that would be in violation of the patent. Nowadays I'd do the menu in javascript, possibly using ajax (depending on how complicated the menu had to be). Ohhhh using ajax for a menu... is that patented yet? In five seconds of thinking about implementing menus on a webpage I thought of that one. But if no one's done it before then its not obvious!
Dude, you can't argue this isn't obvious. The menu is the most common UI element out there. When they added the applet tag to html, its not very innovative to say "hey lets use the applet funtionality to implement a menu!" Old concept applied to new technology is obvious.
well those simulatoins take place over millions of years. and although it looks like a galaxy eating another would be catastrophic fo any people living there, it really wouldn't. Most of space is... empty space. We focus on the stars and planets because they interesting, but there is a lot more space than stars and planets.
So there may be a few collisions of stars and planets when a galaxy eats another galaxy, but it wouldn't happen as often as you think. And since the process of a galaxy eating another galaxy takes so long, the only people living in either galaxy that might notice going on would be astronomers.
you must be a lawyer. Who cares if its legal. Its wrong. Apple sucks.
Its all subjective.
I find UI of MacOSX to be shit compared to Linux. But thats probably because I use my computer differently than you. I often have many windows open at once, And under Linux this is easy to manage. Under MacOSX is really frustrating. If you just have a single browser window open and playing some music in iTunes, well MacOSX does that really well. But if you have a few firefox windows open, multiple file manager windows open, and a bunch of terminal windows open, MacOSX really sucks. Expose is useless because the file manager windows al look alike and the terminals all look alike.
And the sex vs. violence thing is subjective too. I'd really like my kids to be exposed to neither of them. Yeah sex is good, but some of the stuff in porn is pretty messed up. Kids understand that violent stuff you see in movies isn't something you should be trying at home. But when a kid doesn't really know anything about sex sees a video where a dude forces a girl to deeptroat him until she pukes... well that probably warps a kid's brain. And even in the more traditional pornos you rarely see anyone using a condom. This probably isn't the best thing for kids to be seeing.
I'd say Mac OSX has shitty UI. The dock is just kludging together the taskbar concept from windows, the quicklaunch bar and the notification area into one big The problem is it doesn't do any of those very well. When I click an icon on the dock, I don't know if I'm clicking on a task or a launcher. Well I guess there's a little dot beside the icon when its a task, but that just indicates the app is loaded, not that I've had it open... many of those dots are there because MacOS decided to start that app at boot.
If you have more than one window open in a single app, There's no easy way to switch between them. I can right-click on the icon and select on, or press F9 and use expose. Expose, while it looks cool, is bad UI because it requires me to watch an animation, look at all the windows and pick out the one I want. When you use expose the windows are always in a different spot so you have to re-orient yourself everytime you use it. With a real taskbar, the button for your window is always in the same location.
If I want to open a new window for an app, I have to check for a tiny dot. If there isn't one then just click the icon on the dock. If there is a dot, then I have to right-click and select new window. If I happen to not notice the dot and just click on the icon, I get the window I had open before. FAIL.
I guess you're not supposed to have more than one window open for a single app in MacOS. except if you want to move a file to a different folder you have to have two finder windows open because MacOSX doesn't allow you to cut and paste files. Odlly copy and paste works ok, just not cut and paste. Very inconsistent.
The problem with the MacOSX UI is its constantly working against itself. You need to right-click more often in MacOSX than any other OS but apple seems to discourage right-clicking by providing single button mouses and having only one button on their laptops. Yeah you can buy another mouse or do a two-finger click but it seems like apple doesn't want you to use one button on the hardware side but makes you use two button on the software side. The dock makes it difficult to manage an application that has more than one window open, so it discourages you from having multiple windows open for a single app, but finder requires you to have two windows open to move files.
My experieince with MacOSX in general is that if you do things the way Steve Jobs thinks you should be doing things, everything works fine. But if you stray from that path, everything becomes unnecessarily difficult. The Apple slogan shouldn't be "think different" it should be "think like steve jobs".
Posting this from Ubuntu on a Macbook Pro. I tried MacOSX for three months and then had to install an OS that makes sense.
I think a nuclear war would be a bigger threat to the economy than IP infringement.
I remember seeing major bugs reported in the newest version of firefox and everyone being told to update immediately. But that didn't effect me because Ubuntu wasn't on the bleeding edge of firefox releases.
One of the big criticisms of ubuntu is that they're pushing bleeding edge software all the time. now you're saying they're wrong for not pushing the bleeding edge firefox? Ca't have it both ways.
Let your product install to the user's /home directory, and statically compile your libraries in, and it'll install/run on virtually any Linux system out there.
Why would you do this? its really trivial to build a package that installs to the proper locations and set the libraries you need as dependencies. You don't have to support that many different distros... you could support just one and linux users of other distros would soon figure out how to make it work with alien.
Just annoying that linux has really awesome tools for installing stuff but some developers are too caught up in the windows "double click setup.exe" mentality to use them.
Uh yeah you will be able to get a non-smartphone a couple of years from now. Maybe not in the US, but outside the US simple phones that offer basic voice and SMS will continue to outsell smartphones for the next five years.
this is what they moved the control buttons to the right side of the window for? Some animated icon in the top right corner to let me know that the application is "doing something"?
Ummmm.... yeah. Don't really know what to say to that.
I'm not glad they're doing something different. Every time Ubuntu has changed things it has always sucked. The UI is fine, problem is windows and mac users are too stuck in their ways to even consider trying to use ubuntu. I read on forums that for a lot of users the first thing they do is remove the top panel and add the application menu to the bottom panel to "make it more like windows". Which is odd because since I've tried ubuntu under the default settings, I can't go back. First thing I do in windows now is add a top panel to put shortcuts to my most used places and apps. I tried MacOS for three months and even the UI experience there wasn't as nice as the default ubuntu setup.
Hopefully this Unity interface stays on netbooks and they don't try to shove it onto people using real computers. Lack of a decent taskbar is what drove me away from MacOS.
looks like the macOS dock to me. Which is one of the stupidest ideas to come around in UI design in the last decade, and necessitating apple having to invent a bunch of UI hacks like expose to make it usable.