Without actually having seen your situation, it does seem as if you've given people something very wordy, and the most important parts of it seem buried in lots of stuff that's not so important. If that's only the relevant part of the email, how much other stuff was around it?
What happens if you get straight to the point and simply start the email by saying something like "Please restart your computer tonight, and DO NOT shut it down. Detailed instructions about how to do this are below." For anyone who actually cares about why or how, you could then continue with a "This is because..." section.
Reading what you've shown, the most important part of the instruction is hidden in the middle of a paragraph. It starts off with a phrase about Microsoft issuing something, and some people will just ignore it from that point because Microsoft isn't something they really care about, and you're not obviously telling them to do anything.
It's also expanding a very simple instruction into a daunting wordy 5-step process that most people won't need to understand in that much detail. This is one of the reasons that I often find Microsoft KB instructions frustrating to follow, because every time they suggest something like editing a registry key, the actual relevant part gets hidden in the middle of a lengthy process that's dumbed down and designed for a person who's never seen the registry before, and surrounded by warnings about how editing it could cripple your system, etc etc.
A 6 year old with nothing better to do than impress someone might read the whole thing, but an adult who's trying to focus on their day-job for which they're employed will probably try to locate what you're actually saying in as short-a-time as possible and ignore it if they can't find it in the time they have.
Maybe it was also because people weren't running the red lights very often, so it might have made sense.
I'm sure everywhere has its own reasons which probably include profit in some cases, and I'm not convinced on private companies being involved in these things, but I really wish we had some red light cameras near where I am.
Especially in the rush hour (but also other times), I can nearly always guarantee that when I'm waiting to cross the street as a pedestrian, I'll get a cross light, wait for about another second, and then the last car zooms through the intersection.
Presumably something like modification of licence plates (particularly for the purposes of framing someone else) would be treated more seriously though, if the person was caught. What kind of penalty does Maryland have for that?
Unfortunately, there are people who want to bring politics into enforcing the law, so we need checks and balances on the entire government. That's where the media comes in.
This may be okay if you have a media that's actually motivated by some kind of ethics. In my area (and I suspect many others), the economy isn't really large enough to support much more than a commercially sponsored media primarily interested in turning news into entertainment, and presenting whatever news in whatever form and bias it takes to get as many viewers/readers as possible to sell advertising.
The local media around here tends to be full of people who seem more interested in having themselves seen than in accurately portraying something. It makes sense, too, because in the entertainment industry one of the most important things for future employment is to be seen.
If we keep copying whatever Microsoft implemented 3 years ago, we'll never pass them.
To be fair about this, though, Microsoft also does a lot of copying of others, including Linux-based distros and their components.
Linux distros in general, I think, tend to have a much better packaging and distribution system than Microsoft, but it's not making Linux distros stand out. Until recently, Open Source organisations and developers provided a much better web browser than Microsoft, and many people would say they still do. These are things that Microsoft will probably copy sooner or later, just as others (including OSS developers) copy Microsoft.
The 'Year of the Linux Desktop' is never achieved because nobody actually knows or cares about what it is. I've been using Linux distros (mostly Debian) for my desktop for about 6 years now, and it works perfectly for me. Does this mean 2002 was the "year of the Linux Desktop"?
Unless anyone actually defines it with something measurable, and a certain way to determine if Microsoft stuff has actually been surpassed, it'll never happen because these sorts of stories and comparisons are never serious anyway. They'll only pick out things to make the article sound interesting enough to get readers, and typically that means pointing out flaws.
Perhaps if people looked back at 2008 and explained why it was the "year of the linux desktop" instead of trying to find reasons that it wasn't, everyone might feel better about themselves and they could go for pony rides or boat rides or something.
Realistically though, this is India. Parts of it might appear the same on the surface where you'd visit as a tourist, but it's still not the USA or any similar country. There are a massive number of people (nearly 4 times the USA's population crammed into 1/3 the land area), poverty in general and overall standards of living are much lower, there are major distinctions in wealth, and a strong social class system still exists in some places and results in discrimination and unfair due process that couldn't be tolereated in many developed countries... despite some attempts from parts of government to curb people's attitudes. India is constantly on edge about its neighbours (especially Pakistan), and on a recurring basis it's a subject of some quite major terrorist attacks inside its own territory.
Through accident or otherwise, at least according to the linked article, it sounds as if these guys were mapping the area without having properly lodged an application and information with the local authorities beforehand to tell them what was going on and what to expect. To me it doesn't look as if they're being treated completely fairly, either, but compared with many others in India they're still pretty well off. Simply coming out and saying the government is being stupid because it apparently doesn't know about things like satellites doesn't seem very relevant to the situation. It'd make more sense to criticise some of the other problems that are much more serious, but they're also unlikely to change overnight. The authorities act as they are for a variety of reasons which are pretty complex and different from what might be usual, and it shouldn't be too unexpected that this sort of thing will happen from time to time.
And atheists fear death above all else. They will never react against a successful death cult. That does not make sense to them.
As an atheist, I think I fear organised religion above all else. By their nature, organised religions generally tend to have a high proportion of people who want to be told what to think and what to do, as opposed to thinking for themselves, and this will often lead to corruption at the higher levels where you're more likely to find people willing to take advantage of that.
How about this: If you're worried about sensitive data getting out, don't give firms private data in the first place without checking out their privacy policy.
Apart from sometimes being very inconvenient given how a small number of mega-corps tend to own the vast majority of communications and commercial infrastructure these days, and it's often extremely difficult if at all possible to get certain services without signing away ridiculously one-sided agreements in favour of a corporation, this only works so far.
A lot of the data that companies hold about me will be there through no doing of my own whatsoever. They have it because someone else decided to send me email using their webmail account, or because someone decided to use an online service for storing contact information about me, or because they have security cameras pointing at the street that I happened to walk along, and so on.
Personal responsibility certainly plays a part, but I do think there's a place for legislation to govern what organisations can legally do with people's personal information that they hold.
Actually in this case it sounds as if they're wasting the court's time and everybody else's money by intentionally making themselves difficult to find. At what point do you draw the line?
Someone's owed a lot of money by this couple, and fair treatment of them shouldn't be overlooked, either.
It really depends on the person. I know plenty of people who have an ISP-supplied email account but don't even know how to check it, let alone receive anything that's sent to it. These same people quite happily leave Facebook running all day in the background, and will use it as their primary means to communicate.
In this case, there were also several other reasons to verify that the profiles were correct besides names and regions. The article states that it was made more certain thanks to them listing dates of birth, and friends. Being Facebook, they probably also had photos up on the profiles, in case there was any doubt.
Personally I think that as long as serious efforts are made to contact people in whichever ways are most appropriate and supported by good reasons, and a judge is satisfied that it's likely a person is just going to stupid efforts to avoid being served, and also satisfied that the efforts are reasonable and that the person should have received the papers beyond a reasonable doubt, it should be up to that person to challenge any judgements afterwards and put forward whatever legitimate reasons they have for not having received the papers.
How does he know that the person is infact the one he wants? It could be someone registering with a false name.
From the article: "McCormack argued that he knew he found the right people online because they listed their birth dates, full names, and they had listed each other as friends, according to the AFP. This was apparently enough to convince the judge, who said that McCormack could serve the couple Facebook papers as long as he also left them at their last known address and also via e-mail.
Obviously it depends on context, but on a case-by-case basis it's usually possible to tell if you can be reasonably certain if it's the right person or not. Sometimes judges can be ignorant of certain domains but most judges tend not to be as stupid as many people on Slashdot claim they are, and they know a lot about the law and how it applies. You can't be absolutely certain that a Facebook profile is the person you want and you can't be sure that the profile's inbox is being monitored by the associated user, but you might also ask how you know for certain that you're handing documents to the correct person rather than a lookalike, or someone falsely claiming to be them. At some point you just have to draw the line of what's reasonable, or the system falls apart. Once you've passed a certain point of reasonable doubt and things have progressed, I think it's fair to leave it up to the other person to prove why that they couldn't have been aware of the papers.
Having a reasonable excuse for not being able to be contacted is one thing, but personally I think if people go to ridiculous lengths to avoid being served with legal papers, they shouldn't be given much sympathy. If you're covering your ears and singing to yourself specifically so you can avoid hearing someone giving you bad news, it's really your own fault if things move on and decisions are made without you being present. Someone else is owed lots of money here, and they deserve a fair hearing, too.
Honestly, I'd wait for the New Zealand Fire Service report before taking this seriously. All that the article says is that a warehouse caught fire in Auckland (not too unusual), and that people in Auckland saw a meteor and reckoned it "landed" somewhere near there. One person thinks he heard it crash with an exploding noise.
In short, some spectators are claiming a meteorite was involved in the fire, and the media's jumped on it because it makes the story more interesting. The NZ Herald seems to be the only news agency in New Zealand which I can find that's spinning the meteorite idea (actually the NZ Herald and Slashdot now that I've checked Google News). My guess is that it's just a coincidence that the fire started at roughly the same time.
People frequently see meteors in the sky and assume they can tell where the landed, even though most don't even land. People are nearly always wrong, and get confused by the perspective and brightness and distance which makes it look as if bright meteors are much closer than they are, and are heading much more steeply into the ground than they are.
Until the Fire Service comes out and states outright that it was a meteorite, and perhaps finds fragments, I'm not going to give the claim much credit. For a warehous fire in Auckland, it's more likely arson or an electrical fault.
However each further extension doubles the fee. Thus even the richest company can't keep things out of the public domain indefinitely, but they would be able to protect works that are still realistically earning them money.
I'd prefer something like this over the current system, but philosophically I'm not really convinced. If a copyright owner thinks they can make a large amount of money from their existing copyrighted works, it presumably means that they're in a lot of demand. If a work is in much demand by people, why should the copyright term for a work continue to be extended such that the creator can continue to hold the monopoly?
Personally I don't really care that Disney can still make money from Steamboat Willy -- the only reason they ever could was because I (as a member of society) allowed them to have a temporary monopoly so that they might have enough of an incentive to create it. I think I should be able to do this for yet-to-be-created works, and have some reasonable expectation of when I'll be able to have access to what was created because I helped to provide an incentive.
Copyright itself is only an artificial construct designed to provide an incentive for the initial creation, after all, and it's supposed to provide rights for the rest of society just as much as the creator.
I mean, I've never heard anyone who was honestly "pro-abortion," just "pro-having the option when life hits the fan."
What about people who'll just happily get an abortion without concern because they don't want another kid? There are definitely people out there who don't make any special effort to avoid pregnancy because they know that abortion's an option afterwards if they're ever so unlucky.
I've read enough articles from reputable news sources about people claiming to be university trained computer experts saying some very ignorant and fallacious things to say that this story is definitely in the realm of probability.
I wouldn't rule it out completely, but unless the source of this email is clearly published and verified, I'm taking it with a grain of salt. At this point, it's a blog author claiming they received an email, of which they've published an extract and removed the last name and school which would otherwise have described the source in a way that would let someone verify it.
Perhaps it is genuine, but to me it still seems far more likely that someone's sent a hoax email and Ken Starks has fallen for it, or that the entire thing is a hoax from the beginning to generate publicity for the HeliOS project. It's a very heavily commented-on blog posting compared with other posts to that blog.
Maybe this teacher doesn't exist. I'd like to see some verification of the email, because at this point it seems most likely to me that somebody's either sent a hoax email to Ken Starks of HeliOS Solutions (and he's fallen for it), or possibly he's even dreamed up the entire hoax to draw attention to his project.
As it stands, the source of this whole issue is an absurd-sounding email with no headers or trace information with which to verify its source, and with the full name and school removed such that it's impossible for anyone to check with the alleged source (because it hasn't been stated).
I think in the anecdote in question you can attribute the whole incident to an ignorant teacher.
Personally I think that by far the most likely explanation for this whole thing is a hoax. Somebody wrote a fake email to Ken Starks (of HeliOS) that criticised Linux-based OS's in an absurd way. Mr Starks fell for the bait, and published the email on his blog with a mocking refutation. Now Slashdot's linked to it, too, which has made for an amusing discussion but I'm skeptical of its origins without further verification.
That, or the blog owner just dreamed up the hoax himself to bring attention to his project. For a blog that appears to average about 15-20 comments per posting, this new one which features 332 comments (right now) certainly seems popular.
It sounds like the professors are more butthurt she got their email addresses than interested in responding to the concern she expressed.
I read it and I have mixed feelings because of the possible precedent as much as anything. If she'd sent it to 10,000 professors instead of 391, would it be any different? What if she started sending emails about every other matter that concerned her? Especially if the university and people in it have a culture of not bulk-emailing staff, I might be quite annoyed by this if I was a professor who received it.
I think what it may come down to is whether the university is acting consistently with how they've acted in the past, or if they're just coming down on her because she's sending emails about something that's contradictory to what they want.
I never smile anyway, but what's with this "you can't wear glasses" rule? That seems really stupid considering I'm always wearing glasses.
It doesn't seem strange to me. If a passport photograph is supposed to be to help confirm someone's identity (so you can prove you're a particular person from some country), the photo should be of the person's face. It shouldn't be of whatever item of clothing they happened to be wearing on the day. Why allow part of the image to be obscured unnecessarily?
When an immigration officer for some country checks your passport, you won't necessarily be wearing the same glasses shown in the photo, or someone else could show up with glasses similar to yours in an attempt to pass themselves off as you. At least this way if they're doubting it, as well as checking other identification items of the passport, they can ask you to remove your glasses and have something consistent with the photo and more difficult to forge for comparison.
I'm not an advocate of governments going to ridiculous extents to assume guilt and run faulty software over their photos, but simply requiring people to keep a straight face and make their face visible doesn't by itself mean that this is going to happen. There are plenty of reasons why it's a good thing, and having standards that help passports do what they're intended to do (to identify a person is the same as that described on the passport with the least possible doubt) is what helps different countries trust each other's passports when those passports are presented.
Apparently we now allow judges with a child-like intelligence.
I haven't looked at this case in detail, but most judges are very strict about interpreting the law as accurately as possible, keeping in mind precedents that have been set in the past with a goal to stay as consistent as possible. That's their job, after all.
It's possible that the judge is at some kind of fault here, but I'd be tempted to look at what the law actually says about how to define pictures of children, and what other judges have said in the past, before assuming this.
... it is also pertinent to note here that the GNU standards document, section 3.1 [gnu.org]: "Which Languages to Use" strongly advises plain old C for both performance and absolute maximum cross-platform compatibility.
I read that in the GNU coding standards a couple of years ago and thought that it seemed very dated and not well argued. It reads as if it's saying "use C for everything because GNU doesn't want to support anything else and people shouldn't have to install a non-C compiler". The GNU explanation assumes that most users still compile their own software, and it mostly ignores that there are also quite a few compelling reasons to avoid using C, depending on what you might be doing.
C definitely has it's place. It's an important language to understand, especially for anyone planning to compile and/or use libraries commonly found in Linux-based distros, or most of UNIX for that matter.
Under various circumstances there are still good reasons to use C, but it's definitely not the only significant language out there today in Open Source development. If the story submitter wanted to write graphical KDE software, it'd be more important to learn about QT and (probably) the C++ interfaces to QT. Personally I think it's reaching a state where for many kinds of Linux and UNIX development, after reaching a certain point, understanding specific languages isn't as important as understanding the libraries and APIs and how they interact.
Or they could just make some code changes to the rootkit cleaners available in the repository so that it ignores any hypothetical pre-installed rootkits. Most people are going to install programs from the official repository instead of directly downloading the source.
This is true, but I'm also not completely sure what need the Chinese government would need for installing a root kit in all Chinese Internet cafes. After all, the Chinese government already has an authoritarian control over what ISPs can and can't do. There's also an ingrained culture of censorship which is an accepted part of daily life, as well as a substantial amount of loyalty (perhaps misguided) to the government from much of the Chinese population. Even many Chinese people who've moved overseas still hold much loyalty to the state, either because they just do or perhaps because it's those with closer connections and cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party who are more likely to be able to afford to travel, or whatever.
I'm not an insider and would be interested to hear from anyone with more experience, but I get the impression that if the Chinese government required that all internet cafes must install some specific kind of monitoring software and report the logs back to a government monitoring department, 99% of them would simply do it without question. It doesn't affect their core business, and it's an accepted part of the way of life and of doing business in China. The other 1% would be forcibly shut down without recourse.
I don't think it is so much that the show got less believable, as that the rules started changing from episode to episode.
I think this is definitely true. I don't watch a lot of TV and I bought the first 3 seasons of BSG after a friend recommended it. I've enjoyed it, mostly for the drama, and I'll probably buy S4 when it's finally available just so I can see how it ends, but there have also been a lot of inconsistencies that I've found irritating or confusing.
This isn't exactly a new thing, though. It goes right back to the first season when we were shown that Cylons were clearly biologically different from humans (glowing read spine, etc), yet creating a "cylon detector" is such a difficult thing. I never really understood the whole Cylon Detector plot, which at the time seemed like an excuse to give Baltar something to do and create conflict with other characters. After seeing season 3, I now think that's probably exactly all that it was... lazy design of the details and hoping that things would make more sense later on. Baltar's a really fun character and it's interesting seeing him weasel his way around everything, but early on the character didn't really have much to work with so they just made up something empty.
I think the plot problems are because the writing team never really figured out any solid rules or boundaries or what would happen to begin with. The writing of the drama and character development is often pretty interesting and it's what keeps me watching the show, but the plots and details often seem as if they were just tied together to create an excuse to be able to have something fail or work as the writers want it to. As you've said (I think), it's like technobabble solving the problem, but with all the extra meaningless dialogue to go with it. Instead, they just let crazy and irrational details get in and don't even try to explain them.
If you compare BSG to something like Babylon 5, I think B5 would easily come out on top (at least for the first 4 seasons), despite having been one of the first series of its kind to actually experiment with a major story arc. B5 had all the strong drama and character development of BSG, but JMS also put so much effort into defining much of the relevant stuff about his universe to a needle's-width before he even produced the first episode. He knew what the rules were from the beginning, and 4-5 years in advance, he knew how all the main parts of his story would fit into the rules.
Are there concerns that the Chinese government are going to be spying on citizens using the open source Red Flag operating system
On that topic, is it very easy to get the source code for Red Flag Linux and to compile the whole thing from source?
I searched Google for 'Red Flag Linux' which quickly led me to the English index page that's thin on information. The Download link only seems to allow for downloading an ISO, but I didn't go as far as downloading it. The Wikipedia article for Red Flag Linux states that it's an Open Source model, but doesn't seem too clear beyond that.
Can the entire Red Flag system be compiled from source? Not that it'd really matter, I guess. Most Chinese sysadmins would probably just install the binaries from an official repository anyway.
Sure, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon each had a hand in a mismanaged war. John Adams, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR each violated civil liberties to stop alleged enemies of the state. Many presidents have overseen the causes of recessions and other economic maladies. How many have been through all 3? (I can't think of any.) How many have polled approval ratings in the low 20s?
Wikipedia has an interesting discussion article about historical rankings of US Presidents in the sense of who made a good president and who made a bad one, including citations of a variety of surveys that have taken place over time.
Personally I think the argument for James Buchanan is quite a good one. Not many presidents have seen their country fall into a devastating civil war.
Slashdot Mirror
Without actually having seen your situation, it does seem as if you've given people something very wordy, and the most important parts of it seem buried in lots of stuff that's not so important. If that's only the relevant part of the email, how much other stuff was around it?
What happens if you get straight to the point and simply start the email by saying something like "Please restart your computer tonight, and DO NOT shut it down. Detailed instructions about how to do this are below." For anyone who actually cares about why or how, you could then continue with a "This is because..." section.
Reading what you've shown, the most important part of the instruction is hidden in the middle of a paragraph. It starts off with a phrase about Microsoft issuing something, and some people will just ignore it from that point because Microsoft isn't something they really care about, and you're not obviously telling them to do anything.
It's also expanding a very simple instruction into a daunting wordy 5-step process that most people won't need to understand in that much detail. This is one of the reasons that I often find Microsoft KB instructions frustrating to follow, because every time they suggest something like editing a registry key, the actual relevant part gets hidden in the middle of a lengthy process that's dumbed down and designed for a person who's never seen the registry before, and surrounded by warnings about how editing it could cripple your system, etc etc.
A 6 year old with nothing better to do than impress someone might read the whole thing, but an adult who's trying to focus on their day-job for which they're employed will probably try to locate what you're actually saying in as short-a-time as possible and ignore it if they can't find it in the time they have.
Maybe it was also because people weren't running the red lights very often, so it might have made sense.
I'm sure everywhere has its own reasons which probably include profit in some cases, and I'm not convinced on private companies being involved in these things, but I really wish we had some red light cameras near where I am.
Especially in the rush hour (but also other times), I can nearly always guarantee that when I'm waiting to cross the street as a pedestrian, I'll get a cross light, wait for about another second, and then the last car zooms through the intersection.
Presumably something like modification of licence plates (particularly for the purposes of framing someone else) would be treated more seriously though, if the person was caught. What kind of penalty does Maryland have for that?
This may be okay if you have a media that's actually motivated by some kind of ethics. In my area (and I suspect many others), the economy isn't really large enough to support much more than a commercially sponsored media primarily interested in turning news into entertainment, and presenting whatever news in whatever form and bias it takes to get as many viewers/readers as possible to sell advertising.
The local media around here tends to be full of people who seem more interested in having themselves seen than in accurately portraying something. It makes sense, too, because in the entertainment industry one of the most important things for future employment is to be seen.
To be fair about this, though, Microsoft also does a lot of copying of others, including Linux-based distros and their components.
Linux distros in general, I think, tend to have a much better packaging and distribution system than Microsoft, but it's not making Linux distros stand out. Until recently, Open Source organisations and developers provided a much better web browser than Microsoft, and many people would say they still do. These are things that Microsoft will probably copy sooner or later, just as others (including OSS developers) copy Microsoft.
The 'Year of the Linux Desktop' is never achieved because nobody actually knows or cares about what it is. I've been using Linux distros (mostly Debian) for my desktop for about 6 years now, and it works perfectly for me. Does this mean 2002 was the "year of the Linux Desktop"?
Unless anyone actually defines it with something measurable, and a certain way to determine if Microsoft stuff has actually been surpassed, it'll never happen because these sorts of stories and comparisons are never serious anyway. They'll only pick out things to make the article sound interesting enough to get readers, and typically that means pointing out flaws.
Perhaps if people looked back at 2008 and explained why it was the "year of the linux desktop" instead of trying to find reasons that it wasn't, everyone might feel better about themselves and they could go for pony rides or boat rides or something.
Realistically though, this is India. Parts of it might appear the same on the surface where you'd visit as a tourist, but it's still not the USA or any similar country. There are a massive number of people (nearly 4 times the USA's population crammed into 1/3 the land area), poverty in general and overall standards of living are much lower, there are major distinctions in wealth, and a strong social class system still exists in some places and results in discrimination and unfair due process that couldn't be tolereated in many developed countries... despite some attempts from parts of government to curb people's attitudes. India is constantly on edge about its neighbours (especially Pakistan), and on a recurring basis it's a subject of some quite major terrorist attacks inside its own territory.
Through accident or otherwise, at least according to the linked article, it sounds as if these guys were mapping the area without having properly lodged an application and information with the local authorities beforehand to tell them what was going on and what to expect. To me it doesn't look as if they're being treated completely fairly, either, but compared with many others in India they're still pretty well off. Simply coming out and saying the government is being stupid because it apparently doesn't know about things like satellites doesn't seem very relevant to the situation. It'd make more sense to criticise some of the other problems that are much more serious, but they're also unlikely to change overnight. The authorities act as they are for a variety of reasons which are pretty complex and different from what might be usual, and it shouldn't be too unexpected that this sort of thing will happen from time to time.
As an atheist, I think I fear organised religion above all else. By their nature, organised religions generally tend to have a high proportion of people who want to be told what to think and what to do, as opposed to thinking for themselves, and this will often lead to corruption at the higher levels where you're more likely to find people willing to take advantage of that.
Apart from sometimes being very inconvenient given how a small number of mega-corps tend to own the vast majority of communications and commercial infrastructure these days, and it's often extremely difficult if at all possible to get certain services without signing away ridiculously one-sided agreements in favour of a corporation, this only works so far.
A lot of the data that companies hold about me will be there through no doing of my own whatsoever. They have it because someone else decided to send me email using their webmail account, or because someone decided to use an online service for storing contact information about me, or because they have security cameras pointing at the street that I happened to walk along, and so on.
Personal responsibility certainly plays a part, but I do think there's a place for legislation to govern what organisations can legally do with people's personal information that they hold.
Actually in this case it sounds as if they're wasting the court's time and everybody else's money by intentionally making themselves difficult to find. At what point do you draw the line?
Someone's owed a lot of money by this couple, and fair treatment of them shouldn't be overlooked, either.
It really depends on the person. I know plenty of people who have an ISP-supplied email account but don't even know how to check it, let alone receive anything that's sent to it. These same people quite happily leave Facebook running all day in the background, and will use it as their primary means to communicate.
In this case, there were also several other reasons to verify that the profiles were correct besides names and regions. The article states that it was made more certain thanks to them listing dates of birth, and friends. Being Facebook, they probably also had photos up on the profiles, in case there was any doubt.
Personally I think that as long as serious efforts are made to contact people in whichever ways are most appropriate and supported by good reasons, and a judge is satisfied that it's likely a person is just going to stupid efforts to avoid being served, and also satisfied that the efforts are reasonable and that the person should have received the papers beyond a reasonable doubt, it should be up to that person to challenge any judgements afterwards and put forward whatever legitimate reasons they have for not having received the papers.
From the article: "McCormack argued that he knew he found the right people online because they listed their birth dates, full names, and they had listed each other as friends, according to the AFP. This was apparently enough to convince the judge, who said that McCormack could serve the couple Facebook papers as long as he also left them at their last known address and also via e-mail.
Obviously it depends on context, but on a case-by-case basis it's usually possible to tell if you can be reasonably certain if it's the right person or not. Sometimes judges can be ignorant of certain domains but most judges tend not to be as stupid as many people on Slashdot claim they are, and they know a lot about the law and how it applies. You can't be absolutely certain that a Facebook profile is the person you want and you can't be sure that the profile's inbox is being monitored by the associated user, but you might also ask how you know for certain that you're handing documents to the correct person rather than a lookalike, or someone falsely claiming to be them. At some point you just have to draw the line of what's reasonable, or the system falls apart. Once you've passed a certain point of reasonable doubt and things have progressed, I think it's fair to leave it up to the other person to prove why that they couldn't have been aware of the papers.
Having a reasonable excuse for not being able to be contacted is one thing, but personally I think if people go to ridiculous lengths to avoid being served with legal papers, they shouldn't be given much sympathy. If you're covering your ears and singing to yourself specifically so you can avoid hearing someone giving you bad news, it's really your own fault if things move on and decisions are made without you being present. Someone else is owed lots of money here, and they deserve a fair hearing, too.
Honestly, I'd wait for the New Zealand Fire Service report before taking this seriously. All that the article says is that a warehouse caught fire in Auckland (not too unusual), and that people in Auckland saw a meteor and reckoned it "landed" somewhere near there. One person thinks he heard it crash with an exploding noise.
In short, some spectators are claiming a meteorite was involved in the fire, and the media's jumped on it because it makes the story more interesting. The NZ Herald seems to be the only news agency in New Zealand which I can find that's spinning the meteorite idea (actually the NZ Herald and Slashdot now that I've checked Google News). My guess is that it's just a coincidence that the fire started at roughly the same time.
People frequently see meteors in the sky and assume they can tell where the landed, even though most don't even land. People are nearly always wrong, and get confused by the perspective and brightness and distance which makes it look as if bright meteors are much closer than they are, and are heading much more steeply into the ground than they are.
Until the Fire Service comes out and states outright that it was a meteorite, and perhaps finds fragments, I'm not going to give the claim much credit. For a warehous fire in Auckland, it's more likely arson or an electrical fault.
I'd prefer something like this over the current system, but philosophically I'm not really convinced. If a copyright owner thinks they can make a large amount of money from their existing copyrighted works, it presumably means that they're in a lot of demand. If a work is in much demand by people, why should the copyright term for a work continue to be extended such that the creator can continue to hold the monopoly?
Personally I don't really care that Disney can still make money from Steamboat Willy -- the only reason they ever could was because I (as a member of society) allowed them to have a temporary monopoly so that they might have enough of an incentive to create it. I think I should be able to do this for yet-to-be-created works, and have some reasonable expectation of when I'll be able to have access to what was created because I helped to provide an incentive.
Copyright itself is only an artificial construct designed to provide an incentive for the initial creation, after all, and it's supposed to provide rights for the rest of society just as much as the creator.
What about people who'll just happily get an abortion without concern because they don't want another kid? There are definitely people out there who don't make any special effort to avoid pregnancy because they know that abortion's an option afterwards if they're ever so unlucky.
I wouldn't rule it out completely, but unless the source of this email is clearly published and verified, I'm taking it with a grain of salt. At this point, it's a blog author claiming they received an email, of which they've published an extract and removed the last name and school which would otherwise have described the source in a way that would let someone verify it.
Perhaps it is genuine, but to me it still seems far more likely that someone's sent a hoax email and Ken Starks has fallen for it, or that the entire thing is a hoax from the beginning to generate publicity for the HeliOS project. It's a very heavily commented-on blog posting compared with other posts to that blog.
Maybe this teacher doesn't exist. I'd like to see some verification of the email, because at this point it seems most likely to me that somebody's either sent a hoax email to Ken Starks of HeliOS Solutions (and he's fallen for it), or possibly he's even dreamed up the entire hoax to draw attention to his project.
As it stands, the source of this whole issue is an absurd-sounding email with no headers or trace information with which to verify its source, and with the full name and school removed such that it's impossible for anyone to check with the alleged source (because it hasn't been stated).
Personally I think that by far the most likely explanation for this whole thing is a hoax. Somebody wrote a fake email to Ken Starks (of HeliOS) that criticised Linux-based OS's in an absurd way. Mr Starks fell for the bait, and published the email on his blog with a mocking refutation. Now Slashdot's linked to it, too, which has made for an amusing discussion but I'm skeptical of its origins without further verification.
That, or the blog owner just dreamed up the hoax himself to bring attention to his project. For a blog that appears to average about 15-20 comments per posting, this new one which features 332 comments (right now) certainly seems popular.
I read it and I have mixed feelings because of the possible precedent as much as anything. If she'd sent it to 10,000 professors instead of 391, would it be any different? What if she started sending emails about every other matter that concerned her? Especially if the university and people in it have a culture of not bulk-emailing staff, I might be quite annoyed by this if I was a professor who received it.
I think what it may come down to is whether the university is acting consistently with how they've acted in the past, or if they're just coming down on her because she's sending emails about something that's contradictory to what they want.
It doesn't seem strange to me. If a passport photograph is supposed to be to help confirm someone's identity (so you can prove you're a particular person from some country), the photo should be of the person's face. It shouldn't be of whatever item of clothing they happened to be wearing on the day. Why allow part of the image to be obscured unnecessarily?
When an immigration officer for some country checks your passport, you won't necessarily be wearing the same glasses shown in the photo, or someone else could show up with glasses similar to yours in an attempt to pass themselves off as you. At least this way if they're doubting it, as well as checking other identification items of the passport, they can ask you to remove your glasses and have something consistent with the photo and more difficult to forge for comparison.
I'm not an advocate of governments going to ridiculous extents to assume guilt and run faulty software over their photos, but simply requiring people to keep a straight face and make their face visible doesn't by itself mean that this is going to happen. There are plenty of reasons why it's a good thing, and having standards that help passports do what they're intended to do (to identify a person is the same as that described on the passport with the least possible doubt) is what helps different countries trust each other's passports when those passports are presented.
I haven't looked at this case in detail, but most judges are very strict about interpreting the law as accurately as possible, keeping in mind precedents that have been set in the past with a goal to stay as consistent as possible. That's their job, after all.
It's possible that the judge is at some kind of fault here, but I'd be tempted to look at what the law actually says about how to define pictures of children, and what other judges have said in the past, before assuming this.
I read that in the GNU coding standards a couple of years ago and thought that it seemed very dated and not well argued. It reads as if it's saying "use C for everything because GNU doesn't want to support anything else and people shouldn't have to install a non-C compiler". The GNU explanation assumes that most users still compile their own software, and it mostly ignores that there are also quite a few compelling reasons to avoid using C, depending on what you might be doing.
C definitely has it's place. It's an important language to understand, especially for anyone planning to compile and/or use libraries commonly found in Linux-based distros, or most of UNIX for that matter.
Under various circumstances there are still good reasons to use C, but it's definitely not the only significant language out there today in Open Source development. If the story submitter wanted to write graphical KDE software, it'd be more important to learn about QT and (probably) the C++ interfaces to QT. Personally I think it's reaching a state where for many kinds of Linux and UNIX development, after reaching a certain point, understanding specific languages isn't as important as understanding the libraries and APIs and how they interact.
This is true, but I'm also not completely sure what need the Chinese government would need for installing a root kit in all Chinese Internet cafes. After all, the Chinese government already has an authoritarian control over what ISPs can and can't do. There's also an ingrained culture of censorship which is an accepted part of daily life, as well as a substantial amount of loyalty (perhaps misguided) to the government from much of the Chinese population. Even many Chinese people who've moved overseas still hold much loyalty to the state, either because they just do or perhaps because it's those with closer connections and cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party who are more likely to be able to afford to travel, or whatever.
I'm not an insider and would be interested to hear from anyone with more experience, but I get the impression that if the Chinese government required that all internet cafes must install some specific kind of monitoring software and report the logs back to a government monitoring department, 99% of them would simply do it without question. It doesn't affect their core business, and it's an accepted part of the way of life and of doing business in China. The other 1% would be forcibly shut down without recourse.
I think this is definitely true. I don't watch a lot of TV and I bought the first 3 seasons of BSG after a friend recommended it. I've enjoyed it, mostly for the drama, and I'll probably buy S4 when it's finally available just so I can see how it ends, but there have also been a lot of inconsistencies that I've found irritating or confusing.
This isn't exactly a new thing, though. It goes right back to the first season when we were shown that Cylons were clearly biologically different from humans (glowing read spine, etc), yet creating a "cylon detector" is such a difficult thing. I never really understood the whole Cylon Detector plot, which at the time seemed like an excuse to give Baltar something to do and create conflict with other characters. After seeing season 3, I now think that's probably exactly all that it was... lazy design of the details and hoping that things would make more sense later on. Baltar's a really fun character and it's interesting seeing him weasel his way around everything, but early on the character didn't really have much to work with so they just made up something empty.
I think the plot problems are because the writing team never really figured out any solid rules or boundaries or what would happen to begin with. The writing of the drama and character development is often pretty interesting and it's what keeps me watching the show, but the plots and details often seem as if they were just tied together to create an excuse to be able to have something fail or work as the writers want it to. As you've said (I think), it's like technobabble solving the problem, but with all the extra meaningless dialogue to go with it. Instead, they just let crazy and irrational details get in and don't even try to explain them.
If you compare BSG to something like Babylon 5, I think B5 would easily come out on top (at least for the first 4 seasons), despite having been one of the first series of its kind to actually experiment with a major story arc. B5 had all the strong drama and character development of BSG, but JMS also put so much effort into defining much of the relevant stuff about his universe to a needle's-width before he even produced the first episode. He knew what the rules were from the beginning, and 4-5 years in advance, he knew how all the main parts of his story would fit into the rules.
On that topic, is it very easy to get the source code for Red Flag Linux and to compile the whole thing from source?
I searched Google for 'Red Flag Linux' which quickly led me to the English index page that's thin on information. The Download link only seems to allow for downloading an ISO, but I didn't go as far as downloading it. The Wikipedia article for Red Flag Linux states that it's an Open Source model, but doesn't seem too clear beyond that.
Can the entire Red Flag system be compiled from source? Not that it'd really matter, I guess. Most Chinese sysadmins would probably just install the binaries from an official repository anyway.
Wikipedia has an interesting discussion article about historical rankings of US Presidents in the sense of who made a good president and who made a bad one, including citations of a variety of surveys that have taken place over time.
Personally I think the argument for James Buchanan is quite a good one. Not many presidents have seen their country fall into a devastating civil war.