Yes, it's probably against the law in most jusridictions to steal cars. Hover, other laws differ from country to country and in the US, where you obviously reside, they differ from state to state, even.
Example? Sit onto a bench in central park and drink a beer? Busted! This is perfectly legal in most of Europe. Another example? Drink a beer at the tender age of 17? In most of the US a crime in most of Europe wine and beer can be consumed from 16 up. In Switzerland a 17 year old boy can screw a 15 year old girl (or vice versa) without falling afoul against the law. Something, I would guess, gets you stamped as a felon and a sex offender agains kids for the rest of your life in most states
There's a whole damn library about privacy legislation throughout the EU.
Those binding directives must be implemented into law in all of the EU countries. You can add Iceland, Norway and Switzerland to the mix. This partially translates to criminal offenses if violated and yes - systematically storing and processing personally identifiable data without permission, reason and safeguards may be a crime depending on circumstances.
You may claim that this is stupid. I for one however rather sip a beer, sitting on a park bench on a sunny day then have my private data (including phone, financial and medical data) splattered around the world and sold to every sleazy marketoid that pays for it.
(i reproduce the reply of the anon coward, since it definitely adds to the discussion):
Hell they already have... I went to their little kick off here is Atlanta. It was so sad. Half the room was happy and excited (the Orcale side). Half the room was REALLY! pissed off ( the Sun side). After the lunch break I noticed about half of the people left and didn't return. I left right after.
During the morning slides I noticed that MySQL was never mentioned nor was the word MySQL found on any of the presentation slides I saw. They also said in so many nice words that any applications built by Sun are headed to the trash heap except Glassfish. Good bye Identity Management, Java Messaging and so many great applications.
It really does piss me off that all the training and set up of Sun systems I have done on our network that we have been bought and sold to a company that it the past we refused to even talk to much less run their shit on our network.
I just called and asked "How much for a Licenses?" and I was told no one knows to write and email to and address that department doesn't have a phone. No shit!
Disclaimer: I'm a Nokia user since the 6110 and intend to stick with the brand.
What surprises me is that you have to root a phone at all.
I use a 9300 (affectionally called "The Brick" by afficionados) for four years now and I'll probably get myself an N900 by the end of the year.
When you give yourself root under Maemo you receive a warning that there's potential for big bork. But it's a supported process.
When I want to install software I can install whatever I please (on newer Symbian phones, you may have to allow installation of unsigned apps). Neither Mr. Jobs nor the Walt Disney Corporation dictates what I do with my device, which I own. And if Mr. Jobs declares that freedom to install anything may bring doen the whole cellular network then maybe all IPhones should be withdrawn from sales at once!
Observing how so many people actually juistify the abuse dished out to them for a very, very hefty pricetag has somehow the fascinating quality of watching a lorry, loaded with explosives, running downhill with the brakes malfunctioning...
BACS is a bit more then a messaging service between banks, it's a clearing house, implying that it handles settlement between counterparties. SWIFT doesn't do that.
In addition: I was very specifically replying to this statement:
This agreement allowed intelligence agencies in the U.S. to secretly access banking information for all customers, including non-U.S. citizens.
.
This is very inaccurate at the minimum, or could - by less tolerant dudes then me - be construed as a whacked out conspiracy theory.
At the 'tax avoidance' or 'terrorist activity' level, and for inter-country cash transfers, SWIFT is definitely a mechanism that would be used by individuals
No it wouldn't. An individual might be part of a SWIFT message, but this is absolutiely not necessarily the case. This doesn't discount the fact that intercepting SWIFT may prove useful to intelligence outfits. But it is certainyl not so that SWIFT enables prying into actual bank accounts, which the original quote implied.
This agreement allowed intelligence agencies in the U.S. to secretly access banking information for all customers, including non-U.S. citizens.
Uhhh, no; it does not. You may want to look up what SWIFT actually does:
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication ("SWIFT") operates a worldwide financial messaging network which exchanges messages between banks and other financial institutions. SWIFT also markets software and services to financial institutions, much of it for use on the SWIFTNet Network, and ISO 9362 bank identifier codes (BICs) are popularly known as "SWIFT codes".
So what the intelligence services could access up to now where payments, or more precisely, messages that where trasnmitted via SWIFT. The dodgy money changer, around the corner, doesn't use SWIFT for transfers and SWIFT wouldn't know about your banking relationships, unless you're the final beneficiary from a payment via them. And there's no point for them to store data on an end-customer level, since it's a messaging service between financial institutions, exclusively.
Here's around Europe it's only optional for the first six purchases. Then you either register or you don't buy from merchants using the system.
Unfortunately I buy airline tickets with my card and airlines around here all insist on it.
What worries me a bit, apart from the phishing potential, is to use the card in a dodgy internet caffee in Bucharest, or so, for payment, since you're really not quite sure about the potentially sisnister software running on the box.
According to what was made public Oracle was made aware of the reservations of the EU commission, on which Oracle answered: "That they are essentially dumb farks that understand neither business nor open source".
For starters: This is not a clever approach to deal with the European commision. Oracle could sell MySQL and there would be no problem at all. But no, ol' Larry decided to get confrontational.
Further, the EU Commissions role is to ensure a competitive, fair and transparent market and to protect the consumer from abuse not to ensure Suns or Oracles profit, as the letter appears to imply.
Thanks for trying, but no cigar for you senator dudes.
And during the summer months is it generally easier to have a prolonged positive phase, while during the winter the depressive phases can be harder to deal with.
That is true and pretty much proven. The lack of natural light in winter can contribute to deficiencies of serotonine. The higher up North you go, the worse it gets (at least for the Northern hemisphere).
You can try light therapy, which I did with good success. It takes half an hour a day and Philips, probably among others, sell special lamps to do just that (search for "Philips Energy Light").
There's an important disclaimer to make, when you suffer from depression (seasonal or otherwise). Get professional help. Just because a dude on the internet claims that light therapy does it for him, this may not be the case for you. Depression is a very serious illness that can kill you.
But there are cases where being able to change your damn schema without jumping through hoops is desirable
No question. However, changing the schema became pretty straight forward with the introduction of relational databases.
I'm not claiming that alternative storage and rerieval technologies don't have a place (see Googles Map Reduce), but what I read from proponents of such schemes usually indicates that a lot of them don't really have a clue what they're talking about.
Alas, NoSQL certainly sounds like a cool, new buzzword
I have a feeling that this part hype, part inept programmers who don't actually understand SQL, or database optimization. The first sign for me that someone is selling bullshit is when they try to act like this is some never before seen problem, when in fact there is a good four decades of research of database optimization.
Thank you very much for this comment, you put it far more eloquently then my venting, I just wanted to grace this thread with. The real kicker though is
There are three specific problem areas: scaling out to data sets like Digg's (3 TB for green badges) or Facebook's (50 TB for inbox search) or eBay's (2 PB overall); per-server performance; and rigid schema design.
This statement is just so full of shit. And the real larff riot, for me at least, is when people or shops employing MySQL (for heavens sake!) make such statements.
Ej, folks: Rigid schema design is an asset, not a liability!
If I press end on a ringing call it will SMS that person with a "I'm really busy right now, I'll call you back as soon as I can" That is a ROCKING feature that I dont see on any of these phones.
My 9300 (Symbian under S80, sadly discarded) has another SMS killer feature: You can schedule SMSes and I haven't seen that anywhere else.
Can you then explain why, in Europe, I can chuck any SIM into any (not SIM locked) GSM device and it just bloody works?
This phone crippling crap is performed by US carriers mostly in order to maximize their profits and there are no technical reasons whatsoever to restrict any capabilities of a certified GSM phone.
Like it or not: A phone, which is crippled by design, like the iPhone, is defective by design.
Is having plants full of random mutations of unknown sort really better than plants with carefully controlled modifications?
It's sure better then handing the key to our nutrition to the likes of Monsanto and Syngenta, which is the primary reason I'm rather violently opposed to genetically engineered food.
Monsantos new, improved image campaign (feed the world with less resources and irrigation lie) makes me really want to barf, when you consider that 85% of the crop they sell is enginnered so that they can tolerate more pesticides (conveniently also sold by Monsanto) thus poisoning our environment even more.
You don't necessarily have to be a lefty weirdo or a fanatical greeny to deplore the tactics of those truly evil corporations.
wouldn't be suprised if Apple spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year paying people to look for good & bad press about their company on sites like this one. $200 for hush money is a joke and an insult, and the family in this case knows it.
(since I have Kharma to blow, what the heck)
And then maybe add some gushing comments on sites like this along the lines:
When my 19 year old Apple IIC broke they didn't only fix it for free, but had it personally delivered by Megan Fox, who supplied me with a blowjob.
Uuh, I don't really think it lends your argument credence to support it with an opinion piece.
And it doesn't really matter if it's the FT. The Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal, for example, is pretty much a congregation of neocon rightwing wackos.
Quite simply, if they let every third-party app have free access to the CPU, the battery would last about 10 minutes.
Ah, a technical wizzard. I can tell by this really sharp analysis.
But then please explain why my Symbian based Nokia 9300 allows to install whatever the fark I wish, multitasks 3rd party apps just fine, requires a reboot maybe twice a year and lives on a (n exchangable) battery load for about a week?
Maybe it has to do with the fact that Britain is surrounded by the sea? A ground offensive may have been rather hard under those circumstances.
I'm not claiming that all Americans are delusional. Let's just say that a few main protagonists of the FGOP and (Former Grand Ol' Party) definitely show signs of delusion. Just think of the ex "we don't torture" veep (reminds me more and more of an ugly version of the ex-Iraqi information minister), who suddenly came crawling out of the bunker, which he never left during his presidency. Or the curerent ideological leaders of the FGOP. Here we have Mr. Limbaugh, a thrithe divorced drug addict and Miss Coulter, an anorexic bimbo with nothing really to say, which she compensates by screeching. Oh, and let's not forget "hockey mom goes clothes shopping for 150k" Governor Palin. I would call those folks pretty delusional (let alone hypocritical).
I don't disagree with your assessment about WW2, btw, just wanted to point out why it may have been a tad harder to run over the Brits.
China becomes the new superpower and America takes up France's position of Ex-Superpower Turned Whiney Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys...
Uhh, I live in one of France's neighbouring countries and have to say that I rather have a bunch of cheese eating (especially since they have excellent cheese, but I digress) surrender monkeys then a congregation of war mongering torturers with dellusional tendencies as neighbors.
Slashdot Mirror
Example? Sit onto a bench in central park and drink a beer? Busted! This is perfectly legal in most of Europe. Another example? Drink a beer at the tender age of 17? In most of the US a crime in most of Europe wine and beer can be consumed from 16 up. In Switzerland a 17 year old boy can screw a 15 year old girl (or vice versa) without falling afoul against the law. Something, I would guess, gets you stamped as a felon and a sex offender agains kids for the rest of your life in most states
There's a whole damn library about privacy legislation throughout the EU.
Those binding directives must be implemented into law in all of the EU countries. You can add Iceland, Norway and Switzerland to the mix. This partially translates to criminal offenses if violated and yes - systematically storing and processing personally identifiable data without permission, reason and safeguards may be a crime depending on circumstances.
You may claim that this is stupid. I for one however rather sip a beer, sitting on a park bench on a sunny day then have my private data (including phone, financial and medical data) splattered around the world and sold to every sleazy marketoid that pays for it.
Your priorities may differ, of course.
Hell they already have... I went to their little kick off here is Atlanta. It was so sad. Half the room was happy and excited (the Orcale side). Half the room was REALLY! pissed off ( the Sun side). After the lunch break I noticed about half of the people left and didn't return. I left right after.
During the morning slides I noticed that MySQL was never mentioned nor was the word MySQL found on any of the presentation slides I saw. They also said in so many nice words that any applications built by Sun are headed to the trash heap except Glassfish. Good bye Identity Management, Java Messaging and so many great applications.
It really does piss me off that all the training and set up of Sun systems I have done on our network that we have been bought and sold to a company that it the past we refused to even talk to much less run their shit on our network.
I just called and asked "How much for a Licenses?" and I was told no one knows to write and email to and address that department doesn't have a phone. No shit!
First off, a digital signature isn't DRM, get a clue.
Bub, you shouldn't spout bullshit on a public forum when it's you, who doesn't have a clue.
I suggest you push your fanboiism aside and actually look up what DRM is and how it's (usually) implemented.
what next? MySQL?
Yes!
next question, please...
Glenn Beck just urinated on his producer.
Was this televised? This sounds like a once in a lifetime chance to watch Fox News.
You know what my Nokia 5800's survived? Not being the subject of a major spam campaign by the media, that's what.)
Hey, my Nokia 9300 even survived a massive tsunami of astroturf.
What surprises me is that you have to root a phone at all.
I use a 9300 (affectionally called "The Brick" by afficionados) for four years now and I'll probably get myself an N900 by the end of the year.
When you give yourself root under Maemo you receive a warning that there's potential for big bork. But it's a supported process. When I want to install software I can install whatever I please (on newer Symbian phones, you may have to allow installation of unsigned apps). Neither Mr. Jobs nor the Walt Disney Corporation dictates what I do with my device, which I own. And if Mr. Jobs declares that freedom to install anything may bring doen the whole cellular network then maybe all IPhones should be withdrawn from sales at once!
Observing how so many people actually juistify the abuse dished out to them for a very, very hefty pricetag has somehow the fascinating quality of watching a lorry, loaded with explosives, running downhill with the brakes malfunctioning...
In addition: I was very specifically replying to this statement:
This agreement allowed intelligence agencies in the U.S. to secretly access banking information for all customers, including non-U.S. citizens.
.
This is very inaccurate at the minimum, or could - by less tolerant dudes then me - be construed as a whacked out conspiracy theory.
At the 'tax avoidance' or 'terrorist activity' level, and for inter-country cash transfers, SWIFT is definitely a mechanism that would be used by individuals
No it wouldn't. An individual might be part of a SWIFT message, but this is absolutiely not necessarily the case. This doesn't discount the fact that intercepting SWIFT may prove useful to intelligence outfits. But it is certainyl not so that SWIFT enables prying into actual bank accounts, which the original quote implied.
This agreement allowed intelligence agencies in the U.S. to secretly access banking information for all customers, including non-U.S. citizens.
Uhhh, no; it does not. You may want to look up what SWIFT actually does:
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication ("SWIFT") operates a worldwide financial messaging network which exchanges messages between banks and other financial institutions. SWIFT also markets software and services to financial institutions, much of it for use on the SWIFTNet Network, and ISO 9362 bank identifier codes (BICs) are popularly known as "SWIFT codes".
So what the intelligence services could access up to now where payments, or more precisely, messages that where trasnmitted via SWIFT. The dodgy money changer, around the corner, doesn't use SWIFT for transfers and SWIFT wouldn't know about your banking relationships, unless you're the final beneficiary from a payment via them. And there's no point for them to store data on an end-customer level, since it's a messaging service between financial institutions, exclusively.
Allowing Flash allows running applications (or contents), which is not approved by the Jobs mob or the Walt Disney Corporation.
However, if the iPad can pull of the little feat. of being a Flash killer is highly doubtful.
Unfortunately I buy airline tickets with my card and airlines around here all insist on it.
What worries me a bit, apart from the phishing potential, is to use the card in a dodgy internet caffee in Bucharest, or so, for payment, since you're really not quite sure about the potentially sisnister software running on the box.
next question, please...
For starters: This is not a clever approach to deal with the European commision. Oracle could sell MySQL and there would be no problem at all. But no, ol' Larry decided to get confrontational.
Further, the EU Commissions role is to ensure a competitive, fair and transparent market and to protect the consumer from abuse not to ensure Suns or Oracles profit, as the letter appears to imply.
Thanks for trying, but no cigar for you senator dudes.
And during the summer months is it generally easier to have a prolonged positive phase, while during the winter the depressive phases can be harder to deal with.
That is true and pretty much proven. The lack of natural light in winter can contribute to deficiencies of serotonine. The higher up North you go, the worse it gets (at least for the Northern hemisphere).
You can try light therapy, which I did with good success. It takes half an hour a day and Philips, probably among others, sell special lamps to do just that (search for "Philips Energy Light").
There's an important disclaimer to make, when you suffer from depression (seasonal or otherwise). Get professional help. Just because a dude on the internet claims that light therapy does it for him, this may not be the case for you. Depression is a very serious illness that can kill you.
But there are cases where being able to change your damn schema without jumping through hoops is desirable
No question. However, changing the schema became pretty straight forward with the introduction of relational databases.
I'm not claiming that alternative storage and rerieval technologies don't have a place (see Googles Map Reduce), but what I read from proponents of such schemes usually indicates that a lot of them don't really have a clue what they're talking about.
Alas, NoSQL certainly sounds like a cool, new buzzword
I have a feeling that this part hype, part inept programmers who don't actually understand SQL, or database optimization. The first sign for me that someone is selling bullshit is when they try to act like this is some never before seen problem, when in fact there is a good four decades of research of database optimization.
Thank you very much for this comment, you put it far more eloquently then my venting, I just wanted to grace this thread with. The real kicker though is
There are three specific problem areas: scaling out to data sets like Digg's (3 TB for green badges) or Facebook's (50 TB for inbox search) or eBay's (2 PB overall); per-server performance; and rigid schema design.
This statement is just so full of shit. And the real larff riot, for me at least, is when people or shops employing MySQL (for heavens sake!) make such statements.
Ej, folks: Rigid schema design is an asset, not a liability!
If I press end on a ringing call it will SMS that person with a "I'm really busy right now, I'll call you back as soon as I can" That is a ROCKING feature that I dont see on any of these phones.
My 9300 (Symbian under S80, sadly discarded) has another SMS killer feature: You can schedule SMSes and I haven't seen that anywhere else.
This phone crippling crap is performed by US carriers mostly in order to maximize their profits and there are no technical reasons whatsoever to restrict any capabilities of a certified GSM phone.
Like it or not: A phone, which is crippled by design, like the iPhone, is defective by design.
Is having plants full of random mutations of unknown sort really better than plants with carefully controlled modifications?
It's sure better then handing the key to our nutrition to the likes of Monsanto and Syngenta, which is the primary reason I'm rather violently opposed to genetically engineered food.
Monsantos new, improved image campaign (feed the world with less resources and irrigation lie) makes me really want to barf, when you consider that 85% of the crop they sell is enginnered so that they can tolerate more pesticides (conveniently also sold by Monsanto) thus poisoning our environment even more.
You don't necessarily have to be a lefty weirdo or a fanatical greeny to deplore the tactics of those truly evil corporations.
wouldn't be suprised if Apple spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year paying people to look for good & bad press about their company on sites like this one. $200 for hush money is a joke and an insult, and the family in this case knows it.
(since I have Kharma to blow, what the heck)
And then maybe add some gushing comments on sites like this along the lines:
When my 19 year old Apple IIC broke they didn't only fix it for free, but had it personally delivered by Megan Fox, who supplied me with a blowjob.
And it doesn't really matter if it's the FT. The Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal, for example, is pretty much a congregation of neocon rightwing wackos.
Quite simply, if they let every third-party app have free access to the CPU, the battery would last about 10 minutes.
Ah, a technical wizzard. I can tell by this really sharp analysis.
But then please explain why my Symbian based Nokia 9300 allows to install whatever the fark I wish, multitasks 3rd party apps just fine, requires a reboot maybe twice a year and lives on a (n exchangable) battery load for about a week?
Sheesh! Fanbois...
How can you claim that 'closed-source software' is the cause of all the ills you mentioned?
Where exactly did he say that?
You sir, are a contender for the bad strawman of the day award.
I'm not claiming that all Americans are delusional. Let's just say that a few main protagonists of the FGOP and (Former Grand Ol' Party) definitely show signs of delusion. Just think of the ex "we don't torture" veep (reminds me more and more of an ugly version of the ex-Iraqi information minister), who suddenly came crawling out of the bunker, which he never left during his presidency. Or the curerent ideological leaders of the FGOP. Here we have Mr. Limbaugh, a thrithe divorced drug addict and Miss Coulter, an anorexic bimbo with nothing really to say, which she compensates by screeching. Oh, and let's not forget "hockey mom goes clothes shopping for 150k" Governor Palin. I would call those folks pretty delusional (let alone hypocritical).
I don't disagree with your assessment about WW2, btw, just wanted to point out why it may have been a tad harder to run over the Brits.
China becomes the new superpower and America takes up France's position of Ex-Superpower Turned Whiney Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys...
Uhh, I live in one of France's neighbouring countries and have to say that I rather have a bunch of cheese eating (especially since they have excellent cheese, but I digress) surrender monkeys then a congregation of war mongering torturers with dellusional tendencies as neighbors.
But your mileage may vary, of course.