Yes you can dispute automatic radar ticket in France. However, if you get disconnected by the HADOPI, you can only dispute it after they disconnect you, which is an obvious violation of basic rights.
My guess is that as soon as they start to actually disconnect people (which as not happened yet, AFAIK), someone will fight this, and win, and the HADOPI will collapse.
On the other hand, as soon as you use proprietary software, the software vendor is effectively a man-in-the-middle... They just do it in a more visible way.
So, if I want to use this form to request the information they have about me, I have to give them a postal address, a phone number, and a copy of a state issued ID. I'm not sure I'm willing to give them even more information, just to know that they store about me...
Just one more project that I haven't seen in the previous posts: OCaml is a nice programming language that is used for teaching in France, and also used in a few real-world projects.
I think this is perhaps the second most quintissential example of the patent office gone wrong. The best example was when someone patented the tire swing
My personal favorite is the patent on the wheel. There is an austalian one and an american one.
Man, I'm glad I live in a country where I can have an unlimited data plan for 19 EUR, with a public IP adress (not a fixed address, though), mostly no filtering, and I can use any damn phone I want with any OS I want. Granted, the country is small (Luxembourg) so the cost of operating the network is kinda lower, but still...
Anyway, I'm not sure how they could tell the difference between my smartphone and my PC: my smartphone is a N900, which runs a Linux TCP/IP stack, and mostly the same programs as a desktop Linux: I routinely use ssh, empathy (for VoIP), ping, and nmap on the phone, and sometimes I run OpenVPN and rtorrent (not necessarily together).
Status-quo for PCs as of lately - the entire lazy uninspiring market just trails Apple, who, as much as I dislike the whole flashy iDesign, have been the only true innovators for years now.
The netbook was a good innovation IMHO (small, light and cheap, with just enough power for daily needs), and it certainly didn't come from Apple.
Sure, this new technology is kinda cool, but it will require putting some equipment in the ceiling, and getting some network cable up there. Wouldn't it be simpler, cheaper, and more efficient to just put Ethernet plugs in the room?
The keyboard and screen would be permanently in the room, and each student brings it's own computer. Using this approach, students can have complete control over the computer (i.e. root access). Agreed, you could achieve similar results with a bootable USB stick, and permanent computers in the classroom, but with this approach students can plug the computers to the TV at home, even if they don't have access to a real computer (they still need to buy a keyboard, but that's pretty cheap.)
And by the way, the website says it has an SD slot, and there will be a version including an Ethernet port.
What is the point of making stuff transparent? I can think of two important differences between a regular phone and an hypothetic transparent phone: you can more easily lose the transparent one, and the screen will be much harder to read. Am I missing something?
Oh, don't get me wrong - the Bitcoin computing infrastructure would be significantly greater than the amount Visa needs. The estimates I've seen are that BTC would need a full rack worth of 2U servers to compete with Visa... Which I think isn't really that big a deal for pushing that much money around. The rape isn't paying for Visa's computers. Visa rapes you for *profit*.
If Bitcoin becomes widely used and it is run by roughly a rack worth of servers, then I will buy two racks of servers and corrupt the system to divert a shitload of money to me. Bitcoin is only possible if it uses more power than any single entity can realistically get, which is in fact quite a lot...
How would you structure the distribution of a fiat currency? Giving it out to the people running the network (miners are providing the processing to secure the transaction log) is a pretty decent way, I think. How would you do it differently? Who deserves the generated currency more?
I don't have a problem with the fact that people running the system get some money. I have a problem with the fact that people who created the system get a fucking lot of money. More than ten percent of the total amount of Bitcoins ever available is mined in the first year. That's just insane.
Anyway, as for the large number of coins that were mined and never circulated, I honestly don't think it's people trying to take advantage of it like a pyramid scheme. If that was the case they'd have cashed out en masse during last month's valuation bubble.
The last bubble was too small to cash out en masse, that would have driven the price down to essentially zero. In fact a single compromised account has been shown to be enough to drive the price to essentially zero...
That energy is actually put to a good use - it provides security for the block chain against double-spending attacks, by making them computationally infeasible. And it gives pretty good value for the money: as far as costs go for a payment-processing network, it's damned cheap compared to what Visa or Paypal charges.
I'm willing to bet that if Bitcoin ever becomes as widespread as Visa, then the cost of the instructure will become at least as big as the cost of the Visa infrastructure. In the meantime, it's already a lot of wasted energy.
Yes, early adopters come out well. That's true in any venture. But at the end of the day, that doesn't mean it won't be useful as a payment processing network. The amount that early adopters will get out of this utterly pales in comparison to what the big financial corporations are raping you for.
It's extremely easy to design a system with all the advantages of Bitcoin, but without this absurd bonus for early adopters. In fact, if a system similar to Bitcoin ever becomes widespread, I think it will be a fork without this ponzi-like structure.
Well, not really. If you buy a used CD, someone else might end up buying a new one instead of that used one. Also, people will more easily buy new CD's if they know they can resell them afterwards, so the market of used CD's does help sales of new CD's.
The legality of the file is not a property of the file itself, and cannot be determined from the file's content. If I buy an MP3 on Amazon, I can legally use it. If I put it on bittorrent and you download it, you have the same file as I do, but the RIAA says you're not allowed to use it.
They still took almost two years to find the remains of Air France Flight 447.
And the part about confirming that Osama Bin Laden is indeed dead is just ridiculous. It's quite certain that they did dump a body in the sea, the relevant question is whether that body was Osama's or not. And he's not going to answer that.
Of course it's just a way to make it harder for people to find information in those mails, and there is no real reason to only give printouts.
The French ISP Free did the same stunt a few months ago. Following the three-strike HADOPI law, they had to identify users of IP addresses suspected of illegally downloading stuff, and they gave it print. Everybody thought it was a smart way to resist that stupid law.
On the other hand, if the spyware can not keep the light off, it can probably easily keep the light on all the time. Then users would either assume that it's broken or believe that the LED just means that the computer is on. In the worst case, they would bring the laptop back to the repairman...
Google voice and video chat is just Jabber. It's an open protocol and you can communicate between users on different servers and using different softwares.
So you can use a FOSS client (e.g. telepathy) and run your own server, and advise your technologically-challenged friends to use the user-friendly Google client. Everybody wins!
Jabber is a good open protocol for Instant Messaging, and it has extensions for voice and video. The main idea is that it works like the email system: you can have an account on any server, and chat/talk/video with someone on a different server. There a many different clients to use the Jabber protocol, just like there are many different mail clients. And all of them are supposed to interact nicely with each other.
My favorite client is telepathy which support the voice and video features (but getting the right codec is somewhat painfull), and has good NAT traversal capabilities. It runs on Linux, and on my N900.
If you're looking for something more Windows-friendly, you can use the Google Talk plugin: Google Talk is just a Jabber server, and you can use it with any other Jabber server, and any client. The plugin is available for Windows and Linux (and there is probably something for Android).
The problem is not that the WiFi might or might not be secure. The problem is that the basic premise of the system is to trust data send by random unknown cars. What happens if a malicious car sends false informations?
So you're saying that the US way of arresting a criminal is to shoot to kill, and then check the identity of the dead body? Even if we had all the proofs that Bin Laden is the worst criminal on earth (which we don't by the way), there was still the possibility that he was not in this particular compound...
And what about the other guys who have been killed during the assault?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes you can dispute automatic radar ticket in France. However, if you get disconnected by the HADOPI, you can only dispute it after they disconnect you, which is an obvious violation of basic rights.
My guess is that as soon as they start to actually disconnect people (which as not happened yet, AFAIK), someone will fight this, and win, and the HADOPI will collapse.
The main motivation for this technology is probably the ability to inject or replace ads in any webpage...
On the other hand, as soon as you use proprietary software, the software vendor is effectively a man-in-the-middle... They just do it in a more visible way.
So, if I want to use this form to request the information they have about me, I have to give them a postal address, a phone number, and a copy of a state issued ID. I'm not sure I'm willing to give them even more information, just to know that they store about me...
Just one more project that I haven't seen in the previous posts: OCaml is a nice programming language that is used for teaching in France, and also used in a few real-world projects.
I think this is perhaps the second most quintissential example of the patent office gone wrong. The best example was when someone patented the tire swing
My personal favorite is the patent on the wheel. There is an austalian one and an american one.
Man, I'm glad I live in a country where I can have an unlimited data plan for 19 EUR, with a public IP adress (not a fixed address, though), mostly no filtering, and I can use any damn phone I want with any OS I want. Granted, the country is small (Luxembourg) so the cost of operating the network is kinda lower, but still...
Anyway, I'm not sure how they could tell the difference between my smartphone and my PC: my smartphone is a N900, which runs a Linux TCP/IP stack, and mostly the same programs as a desktop Linux: I routinely use ssh, empathy (for VoIP), ping, and nmap on the phone, and sometimes I run OpenVPN and rtorrent (not necessarily together).
Status-quo for PCs as of lately - the entire lazy uninspiring market just trails Apple, who, as much as I dislike the whole flashy iDesign, have been the only true innovators for years now.
The netbook was a good innovation IMHO (small, light and cheap, with just enough power for daily needs), and it certainly didn't come from Apple.
Sure, this new technology is kinda cool, but it will require putting some equipment in the ceiling, and getting some network cable up there. Wouldn't it be simpler, cheaper, and more efficient to just put Ethernet plugs in the room?
The provisional specifications include an SD card slot.
The main intended use is for classrooms.
The keyboard and screen would be permanently in the room, and each student brings it's own computer. Using this approach, students can have complete control over the computer (i.e. root access). Agreed, you could achieve similar results with a bootable USB stick, and permanent computers in the classroom, but with this approach students can plug the computers to the TV at home, even if they don't have access to a real computer (they still need to buy a keyboard, but that's pretty cheap.)
And by the way, the website says it has an SD slot, and there will be a version including an Ethernet port.
What is the point of making stuff transparent? I can think of two important differences between a regular phone and an hypothetic transparent phone: you can more easily lose the transparent one, and the screen will be much harder to read. Am I missing something?
Oh, don't get me wrong - the Bitcoin computing infrastructure would be significantly greater than the amount Visa needs. The estimates I've seen are that BTC would need a full rack worth of 2U servers to compete with Visa... Which I think isn't really that big a deal for pushing that much money around. The rape isn't paying for Visa's computers. Visa rapes you for *profit*.
If Bitcoin becomes widely used and it is run by roughly a rack worth of servers, then I will buy two racks of servers and corrupt the system to divert a shitload of money to me. Bitcoin is only possible if it uses more power than any single entity can realistically get, which is in fact quite a lot...
How would you structure the distribution of a fiat currency? Giving it out to the people running the network (miners are providing the processing to secure the transaction log) is a pretty decent way, I think. How would you do it differently? Who deserves the generated currency more?
I don't have a problem with the fact that people running the system get some money. I have a problem with the fact that people who created the system get a fucking lot of money. More than ten percent of the total amount of Bitcoins ever available is mined in the first year. That's just insane.
Anyway, as for the large number of coins that were mined and never circulated, I honestly don't think it's people trying to take advantage of it like a pyramid scheme. If that was the case they'd have cashed out en masse during last month's valuation bubble.
The last bubble was too small to cash out en masse, that would have driven the price down to essentially zero. In fact a single compromised account has been shown to be enough to drive the price to essentially zero...
That energy is actually put to a good use - it provides security for the block chain against double-spending attacks, by making them computationally infeasible. And it gives pretty good value for the money: as far as costs go for a payment-processing network, it's damned cheap compared to what Visa or Paypal charges.
I'm willing to bet that if Bitcoin ever becomes as widespread as Visa, then the cost of the instructure will become at least as big as the cost of the Visa infrastructure. In the meantime, it's already a lot of wasted energy.
Yes, early adopters come out well. That's true in any venture. But at the end of the day, that doesn't mean it won't be useful as a payment processing network. The amount that early adopters will get out of this utterly pales in comparison to what the big financial corporations are raping you for.
It's extremely easy to design a system with all the advantages of Bitcoin, but without this absurd bonus for early adopters. In fact, if a system similar to Bitcoin ever becomes widespread, I think it will be a fork without this ponzi-like structure.
used cd's deprive the riaa of any income
Well, not really. If you buy a used CD, someone else might end up buying a new one instead of that used one. Also, people will more easily buy new CD's if they know they can resell them afterwards, so the market of used CD's does help sales of new CD's.
The legality of the file is not a property of the file itself, and cannot be determined from the file's content. If I buy an MP3 on Amazon, I can legally use it. If I put it on bittorrent and you download it, you have the same file as I do, but the RIAA says you're not allowed to use it.
This idea is explored in more details in the following blog post What Colour are your bits?
They still took almost two years to find the remains of Air France Flight 447.
And the part about confirming that Osama Bin Laden is indeed dead is just ridiculous. It's quite certain that they did dump a body in the sea, the relevant question is whether that body was Osama's or not. And he's not going to answer that.
Of course it's just a way to make it harder for people to find information in those mails, and there is no real reason to only give printouts.
The French ISP Free did the same stunt a few months ago. Following the three-strike HADOPI law, they had to identify users of IP addresses suspected of illegally downloading stuff, and they gave it print. Everybody thought it was a smart way to resist that stupid law.
On the other hand, if the spyware can not keep the light off, it can probably easily keep the light on all the time. Then users would either assume that it's broken or believe that the LED just means that the computer is on. In the worst case, they would bring the laptop back to the repairman...
Google voice and video chat is just Jabber. It's an open protocol and you can communicate between users on different servers and using different softwares.
So you can use a FOSS client (e.g. telepathy) and run your own server, and advise your technologically-challenged friends to use the user-friendly Google client. Everybody wins!
Jabber is a good open protocol for Instant Messaging, and it has extensions for voice and video. The main idea is that it works like the email system: you can have an account on any server, and chat/talk/video with someone on a different server. There a many different clients to use the Jabber protocol, just like there are many different mail clients. And all of them are supposed to interact nicely with each other.
My favorite client is telepathy which support the voice and video features (but getting the right codec is somewhat painfull), and has good NAT traversal capabilities. It runs on Linux, and on my N900.
If you're looking for something more Windows-friendly, you can use the Google Talk plugin: Google Talk is just a Jabber server, and you can use it with any other Jabber server, and any client. The plugin is available for Windows and Linux (and there is probably something for Android).
The problem is not that the WiFi might or might not be secure. The problem is that the basic premise of the system is to trust data send by random unknown cars. What happens if a malicious car sends false informations?
Where's my Gnu Call software to replace Skype
We have Jabber. It supports voice and vidéo, and there's a user-friendly client provided by Google for our friends who still use Windows.
So you're saying that the US way of arresting a criminal is to shoot to kill, and then check the identity of the dead body? Even if we had all the proofs that Bin Laden is the worst criminal on earth (which we don't by the way), there was still the possibility that he was not in this particular compound...
And what about the other guys who have been killed during the assault?