If they fail to triple their offer, begin redirecting to goatse. You should see them quadruple their offer then. It's called hardball.
If you wanted to be really evil and as much of a bastard as a typical domain squatter for some reason, then sure. But why? By doing what you've suggested, you also end up polluting Slashdot, CNN and Google with crap, which is no better than your average link spammer.
There are many domains which people own that they're not particularly attached to and would be happy to sell. For someone looking in from outside, it's reasonable to think that this might be one of them, particularly if it's not immediately clear that the person's using it. (Lack of a website would imply this to some people.)
All they've done so far is politely ask if they can buy it. The request was short on words but that looks more like translation issues rather than an angry demand to hand over from a corporation full of lawyers. It could just as easily be someone's small family business which thought it'd be useful to have.com on the end of their name. How else are they supposed to find out if the owner's interested in selling if not by asking?
They do have a large amount of internet cafes. But many run Linux.
I find this very interesting because when we went further south through Chile, Peru and Bolivia last year we saw lots of Internet Cafe's, and they were nearly all running Windows. (For perspective though, we didn't leave the main tourist trails except in Chile.) Many of them didn't look like terribly secure installations, and there was about a 50/50 split of users between tourists and locals. The locals were nearly all school-aged children who seemed to be there 100% for gaming. The only non-Windows platform we found for 2 months was a Backpackers' accomodation in Puerto Varas (southern'ish Chile) which was run by a German guy, and he'd set up a Linux box which I think was running Suse.
Apart from being referred by Google, you also get the answers if you install something like User Agent Switcher and pretend to be GoogleBot... which (I think) means that Google should definitely be de-listing Experts Exchange from their results if they're going to be consistent with their policy.
Personally I'm fairly certain it's because EE is serving different pages to GoogleBot, and to people who are referred by Google. (See my other comment over here.)
This is what I thought until I looked more closely. EE definitely seems to serve different pages to GoogleBot, and appears to serve different pages to people referred directly from Google. I believe this is a distinct violation of Google's listing policy, and to be consistent with how they treat all the other website operators Google should be immediately de-listing Experts Exchange until it serves identical pages to Google as what it serves to everyone.
Try installing User Agent Switcher in Firefox, then browse to this URL. If it's like me, you'll get no comments at the bottom, but as soon as you switch to mimicing GoogleBot, you'll get a heap of responses.
EE is definitely serving different pages to people referred directly from Google. Try clicking through to a result from Google and you'll get the comments at the bottom. If you open a blank tab, though, and paste the same URL into that tab, you won't get the responses (unless you're pretending to be GoogleBot again). This is definitely what happens for me, anyway.
There's also something weird happening in the Related Solutions section of EE pages, which is probably to do with EE giving Google different URLs to crawl. eg. Take a look at the "Related Solutions" section of this page on EE, and look closely at the URLs. (I reached this EE page using the top result of the Google search that someone pointed out elsewhere in the thread.)
When I look at the URLs in the Related Solutions section, they all point to what first looks like static HTML, but with "?eeSearch=true" appended to the end of the URLs. If I then go to the Google Cache edition, it looks similar but doesn't pass the eeSearch=true parameter.
I'm not sure what effect this has because with or without appending '?eeSearch=true', I still get the same behaviour which is to show comments on the page if I'm pretending to be GoogleBot, and not show them if I'm not. It's almost certainly something to do with tricking Google, probably to make Google think that they're static HTML pages when they're actually not.
One has to wonder whether Judge Harvey is allowing his natural desire as an academic to blaze a novel trail in the law to lead him to such a harmful decision
How is it harmful? If it's not this then it's either going to be completely open for everyone to publish (which isn't unusual), or it's going to be completely suppressed so that nobody can publish it (which also isn't unusual).
He's tried to choose something in the middle, and it's likely to be an experiment to see how effective it is which errs on the side of the defendents, because if he couldn't do this he might have just let their names be printed. Presumably what he's concerned about is taht 3 months from now, jurors might be sitting at home googling the name and will come across persistent articles describing a heap of disturbing rumours around today which by then could have been discredited, and that could put the fairness of the trial in trouble.
Obviously this doesn't guarantee that nobody will publish the names online, but it'll cut down on a lot of it, and exactly how useful it is will be something that many people will be watching.
Bets that this judge is some OAP who was shown by his grandson how you could "google" someone...
Actually what's particularly interesting about this case is that the judge also teaches Information Technology and has written a text-book on cyber law in New Zealand, and he's made a submission to the NZ government about spam legislation which I haven't read, but you could probably look at if you want some guideline idea of his IT competence.
One of New Zealand's media commentators with a lot of IT experience (Russell Brown, for whom I have a lot of respect) threw in a few comments over here, and wasn't immediately condemning of the actions of the judge. Brown commented that he thinks this judge probably has more technical knowledge of the Internet than any other judge in the country, and coming from him it's either quite compelling or very detrimental to every other judge.
New Zealand's had problems in the past with courts trying to suppress names, particularly in cases when there's been international interest in the case, because the suppression orders only apply in New Zealand. I don't understand what he expects to achieve except possibly hoping that jurors won't be able to hide at home and google the names as easily during critical points in the trial, especially since the details of this trial are unlikely to gather much interest outside NZ. I think Brown's theory that this is an experimental act from the judge to see what happens sounds fairly feasible.
I saw RMS speak recently for the first time, and he alluded to his laptop running a custom distro (which presumably was gNewSense) on the grounds that there are supposedly no completely free distros at all.
I found this confusing for exactly the reason that Debian specifically says that 'contrib' and 'non-free' are not part of the Debian system, even though Debian makes them available, which means that anyone who wants a completely Free installation should fairly easily be able to ignore those two sections and have a completely Free system. (This assumes that the FSF agrees with Debian Legal about what's Free, and they've had their little spats in the past.)
Considering other things he says, though, I think RMS's main argument against distros like Debian, which I don't completely agree with, is that they even associate themselves with non-free software, and ultimately this is bad for Free Software in the long term.
I know a few people who use Debian (including myself), but I don't know of anyone who goes to great lengths to avoid the non-free and contrib sections. They're more interested in having their system do what they want straight away. So I think RMS's point (and the FSF's point) would be that having a distribution that goes to some effort to make it easy to install non-free software in the way that Debian does (even if it's not officially supported) is likely to discourage the advancement of Free Software in the long term. The users are no longer demanding Free software if they can easily install proprietary software, and Debian (or whatever distro) is no longer prioritising the advancement of Free versions of many of the packages if users are already mostly satisfied without them.
I also wondered about Debian when I first heard about the FSF distribution. When RMS was here recently I found his complaint that there are "no completely Free distributions" a little confusing. Debian does include non-free packages, but it separates them into the non-free and contrib sections exactly so that people who want a completely Free installation can easily filter out the non-free components... and this is why I was surprised that RMS didn't just use that formula for his laptop. Although knowing how he reasons, it'd probably be enough for him to argue that Debian even associates itself with non-free software and makes it easy for people to install it if they need to, which the FSF might believe is bad for Free Software in the long term.
Even if the FSF wanted a completely free GNU distribution of its own, however, wouldn't it be easier to simply take Debian and simply strip out the non-free and contrib sections? Ultimately it should be as simple as not providing access to those packages in the repositories, since Debian's already declared that those packages will never be required for a complete working distribution. Why take a distro based on Debian which makes it more convoluted, then reverse it back to what Debian probably was in the first place?
gNewSense claims in its FAQ that Debian/Ubuntu aren't really free, but apart from saying so the FAQ doesn't really address this. I know the two have had their disagreements on licenses (notably the Debian team deciding that the GFDL isn't really Free). Is it something to do with this?
I'm sure there would be good reasons for doing this, and to be honest I don't even think it's necessary to have reason that convinces everyone in Free Software. As long as people are motivated to do it, good for them (and perhaps for everyone). If anyone could comment on this, though, I'd be interested to know more about what the reason is.
That's true, although it's still consistent with global warming theory, which predicts that there should be more extremes in both directions. (More frequent and extreme droughts, more frequent and extreme storms, etc etc.) Expect insurance premiums to go up.
The problem here is that even if SVG is not intended to fill the niche of flash, It has been presented as such by many many people.
Well to be fair, Flash used to do a lot less and once upon a time (maybe 5-6 years ago) it was very feasible to combine SVG and a little Javascript to get a similar experience to what Flash was used for.
Actually it wasn't possible because when Flash was that simple, nothing reliably supported SVG except for a fairly klunky plugin provided by Adobe, ironically enough, which let you kind of use SVG as long as you were happy to present it inside a rectangular box after the user had gone through an ugly plugin installation process, and probably only on Windows PCs (from memory). Back around that time I remember a lot of people complaining about the lack of reliable SVG support, because the majority of stuff that was done in Flash (primarily irritating banner ads) could have been done much more nicely and standards compliantly using SVG and a little Javascript.
People who claim this now are probably continuing the same kinds of arguments from years like 2002. Since then, however, Adobe's made changes to later versions of Flash which has made it much more of an application development platform that goes far beyond everything for which SVG was intended.
After doing something for years and years, changing the way you do something, whether it's a swimming stroke or tennis or golf swing, isn't done instantly. It takes quite a bit of concerted effort and attention to change it. I'd be really interested in how and what the coach does to get the swimmers to change.
Perhaps there's a coaching aspect to it but I think if someone stays at the top of their field for a long time, it says a lot about that person's abilities. I wonder if it's simply that the best swimmers or the best golfers or the best athletes do change, and are simply very good at shaking old habits and adapting to improved techniques when they become apparent. If they don't, they're not the best any more, and are often quickly forgotten as someone else comes through and pushes them out of the way.
Linux needs to stop preaching about free software and get back to work - in the end, users don't give a damn whether or not they can 'modify' this new driver they're installing to get compiz to work. As long as it's free as in beer and it works, they're happy. At most, an EULA dialog should be thrown up. [--snip--] In short, devs need to really get their fingers out and concentrate on creating a truly kick-ass operating system that'll work out of the box on practically any machine you throw it at.
But in the end you really have to appreciate that with Free Software, developers will only develop for whatever motivates them, right? What makes the users' welfare or your welfare more important than the developers' welfare? I certainly wouldn't develop Free Software just to help users unless there was a reason it helped me feel good, too.
Yesterday I sat in on a couple of seminars by RMS, who's currently in town where I am. I don't agree with some of what he promotes, at least to his fundamentalist extent, but there's no way I'd ever try to ask him to give up on his crusade for "Free" software and just write code for people to use how they want. He wouldn't do it, anyway, except on his own terms, and neither would anyone. RMS is doing what he actually believes in, because he thinks that doing everything he can to make sure people always have an option that's completely Free according to a specific definition is much more important than simply having something that works right now.
He was a bit tired and grumpy by the end of the night, but by now I feel I can actually understand why he wants people to use the term GNU/Linux when referring to the whole system, and why he's so bitchy about the Linux kernel developers who are putting functionality of the kernel with specific devices above the user's freedom to have a kernel they're in complete control of.
Developers and promoters of Free Software will always have different motivations for doing what they do, and trying to unify everyone or even a significant group of developers under some kind of common goal like "replacing Microsoft on the desktop" is pointless. They do what they do for their own reasons, and trying to convince them to change their priorities because it suits your priorities or someone else's priorities is never going to work.
Seems to me that litigation is pretty lousy substitute for negotiating skills.
So you're saying that Apple should be allowed to break the law? These laws are supposed to apply to everyone, and if you're claiming that it should be ethically okay for Apple to break the law as long as it doesn't get caught, you're giving Apple an unfair advantage over its competitors who go to greater lengths to pay their employees properly because they know they're legally required to.
If Apple doesn't like the law they should convince people and lawmakers that it should be changed. Until then they should follow it as far as I'm concerned. I'm often skeptical about the excessive use of litigation to solve problems, but in this case I think it makes sense, particularly if Apple is clearly and intentionally breaking the law at the expense of people who aren't.
I arrange life around getting exercise indirectly
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How Do Geeks Exercise?
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Most of the time I don't have the luxury of just getting out of the house/office. And being an introvert, I'm not enamored of the idea of exercising in full view of *shudder* people.
I think you may have misunderstood the meaning of the word 'introvert'. All it means in simplistic terms is that someone tends to be more relaxed and recharge themselves by getting away from others for a while. This is opposed to extraverts, who tend to be more relaxed when they're surrounded by friends and talking a lot (or some similar variant). Being embarassed to exercise in public, I think, is quite a different thing and I can easily relate to that.
I'm definitely an introvert, but I talk to people easily if I feel I actually have something worthwhile to say, and I get out a lot. I walk 35 minutes to work (down a hill), 45 minutes home (up a hill), and I invested in having some decent rain gear so I can comfortably do this irrespective of the weather, which is an important consideration where I live. Every 2-3 weeks I'll typically spend a Friday and Saturday night out on a weekend hike up or around a mountain somewhere, usually with friends. (I joined a hiking club to get into this properly, since before that none of my friends were really interested.) I guess this is a fortunate benefit I get from where I live and being interested in doing it, but I do it primarily out interest in going to look at places rather than getting exercise.
I have to admit that going to a gym or jogging down the street or generally going out explicitly to exercise doesn't appeal to me at all. Personally I just try to arrange my life around making sure I do enough walking, and the exercise I get is a side effect rather than a conscious effort to stay fit.
To refuse you would have to be asked. I don't think any one needs to ask Obama for his records but McCain (or even Paul who I would rather see as President), most certainly. But if Obama were to be asked and then refuse, well then that would smell to me.
Why? I can think of lots of reasons why someone (political candidate or not) might not want to share their medical records with the world. Most of them have nothing to do with them possibly losing votes due to having terminal cancer.
This is going to be an interesting innovation if it works as advertised. Should especially make the more dangerous situations (capture alive and hostage) easier to deal with since the soldiers will have guns that can shoot to kill or injure, allowing them to fire into situations they normally couldn't.
You might be right for soldiers since they tend to have different objectives and priorities, but I'm not as sure about this for civilian police forces. Most police forces which I know of are trained that if they're going to shoot at all, they should be shooting to kill. There's generally good reasoning behind this too, because you probably shouldn't be shooting someone at all unless you or someone else is in immediate and serious danger from them. If that's the case, why put the outcome in doubt by trying to be non-leathal about it and making it much harder to avoid screwing up?
Irrespective of the mode, you're still propelling a projectile at someone. It's either going to kill them, hurt and stop them, hurt them without stopping them, or not affect them at all. If you're trying to tune things to get a specific outcome (hurting and definitely stopping) instead of one of the extremes, it'll be much harder to get it right and you're at a higher risk of screwing things up. The speed of the projectile certainly won't be the only deciding factor.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. On the one hand, you have MS (anti-competitive, anti-freedom), and on the other, you have China (anti-freedom, police state).
I don't avoid MS Office or Windows because they're from Microsoft. I avoid them because they cost a lot and I don't really like them that much anyway. I also don't like the way that Microsoft doesn't give me the freedom to use them how I want to. Why should a format, OS and/or Office suite that originates from China be judged any differently?
I'm not a great fan of China or its policies, many of which I find quite abhorrent and I'll protest about them in my own way for what they are. China's a massive and very complext place, though. If UOF and EIOffice are actually beneficial and useful (neither of which I could vouch for because I haven't seen them), wouldn't it just make sense to encourage them on their individual merits?
Exceptions to this might be if you could show that the UOF specifications were developed by jailed political prisoners being unjustly forced to live in torture chambers and design document format specifications against their will, and perhaps you wouldn't want to encourage that kind of thing if it's likely to continue happening. But if you ignored ideas simply because of where they came from rather than the merits of the ideas themselves, you'd be restricting yourself a lot and we probably wouldn't have many of the beneficial things we have today.
Prolonged exposure to roadside air anywhere isn't exactly a day at the spa...
I don't live in a city anywhere near as large as most cities (~300,000) and I doubt we have anywhere near as many cars, but I've generally found air around vehicles much easier to breathe than air around groups of people, specifically because the latter is often full of smokers (where I am, at least). Cigarette smoke lingers a long way from people who smoke and for a long time after, and the air's much more stale. This is especially the case since local laws recently forced smokers out of workplaces, which means everyone smokes on the streets.
Perhaps vehicle manufactures have had much more motivation to clean up the exhaust their products produce than tobacco companies.
This is looking at things on a small scale, of course. I'd presume that vehicle exhausts have a much more significant effect on global problems than cigarette smoke.
The problem is, none of those technologies are superior to mice. [--snip--] Mice are more precise than fingers.
That's true, but on the more-precise-than-fingers point, I think it's only correct when you're very strict about your definition of "precise". Keep in mind that you're taking a very flexible arm and hand with 4 fingers and an opposable thumb, and using it to control a device that's about as complex as a baseball bat. (Move it thump move it thump.)
Mice are specifically more accurate than fingers when it comes to accurately indicating tiny screen points in a way that strictly logical software can unambiguously interpret, but you're still losing a lot of flexibility of your hand and fingers as an input device just to remove this ambiguity.
Personally I'm skeptical if touch screens (as they are today) will replace mice, and generally I think Gartner's full of crap when it comes to this and just about everything else they claim to predict, but a mouse isn't exactly a perfect device. It just happens to balance accuracy and utility between humans and the current day's computers better than anything else we have at the moment.
So, to increase accuracy, I'm supposed to slap at the screen with my pizza-slopped fingers? Facial recognition? Maybe banging my head on my desk will act as a signal to restart Windows yet again.
I don't have much respect for Gartner and the technology would have to improve a lot for me to believe this, but I wouldn't rule it out in the long term. Maybe 20-30 years at a guess and even then, I'm not sure if a mouse would go away entirely or if it'll be a touch screen that replaces it. If fingerprints are a problem, you'd expect manufacturers to redesign touch-screens so they're less of a problem, or more durable and easily cleaned. If resolution and accuracy is an issue now (which I think it is), it'll probably improve over the next few years. Just because today's monitors are a bit sensitive to cleaning products doesn't mean tomorrow's have to be.
But realistically, the concept of actually having an explicit device (a "computer", PC, laptop, tablet, whatever) which you use to do a million things, or carry around with you everywhere, could easily become quite dated. The concept of "logging in" (as we know it) might also become dated for most things.
What's to say that the concept of a single device won't be replaced by a concept of lots of much more flexible devices which are more ubiquitous, and why should I need to go out of my way to tell each of these devices who I am? Why shouldn't people just be walking up to a wall or a desk or a refrigerator or scribbling on paper or whatever and interacting with it ubiquitously, without having to think deeply about the digital side of what they're doing? Why would I need to sit down at my PC and add up my finances every few days if my wallet automatically and accurately kept track of it for me?
If you have enough of this kind of environment, the need for dedicated consoles and the bits that go with them evaporates. In these cases, a mouse is a bit redundant because by assuming the use of a mouse you're trying to force the ideal method of interaction for one device onto a whole lot of other devices, each of which is different. That's when I personally think the mouse will disappear.
But the truth peers 'round the corner here. They're not interested in accuracy, else they'd be all for determining how well this works, or not. The process and the results would both be open. What they're interested in are convictions, because that's how they keep score.
You might be right, but I'm sure there are other reasons. Not to claim that it's right to ignore this, but presumably they're also concerned about the likely colossal expense of re-examining every single case for which this kind of evidence was used in a timely fashion, re-establishing other evidence to keep the convictions -- if that's even possible long after the date, and massive compensation payouts for wrongful imprisonment (or perhaps to families in cases of execution) in the many cases that can't reliably be proved without the DNA evidence. This is also not to mention the likeliness of a large number of people who could actually be quite dangerous getting released on technicalities before they're ready.
Right or wrong, this situation has potential to be a lawyers' dream.
you missed deterrent to committing the crimes in the first place.
But a deterrent only works to a certain point. If you change a 100 year sentence to 200 year sentence it won't affect anything. A lifetime sentence to a death sentence? Maybe for a few people. A jail that provides basic human rights to a jail that "unofficially" and hypocritically allows you to be raped and tormented by your co-prisoners? Well, maybe that depends on whether you're likely to be the victim or the perpetrator. If it really had an effect though, you might expect the US to have a smaller prison population because obviously nobody would want to be there.
Part of the problem, I think, is that a lot of people who commit crimes aren't necessarily considering the implications beyond their immediate circumstances anyway. You might want tougher sentences for revenge or occasionally for safety of the rest of the population, but personally I'm skeptical about the effect of tougher sentences as deterrents to crime. Keeping in mind that if the state treats people badly or inhumanely, it's also setting an example. ie. If we let people get raped in prison, then we're announcing to every prisoner that we think rape is okay, or at least sending very contradictory and confusing messages to people who might not be in a state of mind to interpret anything terribly complicated. If anything, I think that unless the prison system is designed very carefully, tougher sentences probably just help people who are more likely to commit crimes to meet more people who'll encourage them and to get into a habit of it for next time they get out.
I don't have a problem with this. The kid obviously did not take the weight of the crime he committed seriously - he acted with contempt and callousness.
In general I don't have a problem of using extra sources of information like Facebook. What I find disturbing about this is that the judge's decision was influenced, even according to the judge, by photos that someone else posted to facebook. From what I can tell that photographer was never cross-examined to establish the actual context of the photograph. For all we know, someone who didn't like the guy might have coerced him into a non-representative situation for a moment so they could snap the photo to put on Facebook, then tag him in the photo to make it easy for any prosecuting lawyer to stumble upon.
Was he dragged to a party by friends to take his mind of things after 2 weeks of hell? Who else was there? Were they all close friends, and were they the sorts of people who'd try to embarrass him for his mistake? Well I hope the courts investigated that properly. Perhaps he did deserve what he got in this case, but if it's as easy to influence a judge as this article implies, it concerns me.
Slashdot Mirror
If you wanted to be really evil and as much of a bastard as a typical domain squatter for some reason, then sure. But why? By doing what you've suggested, you also end up polluting Slashdot, CNN and Google with crap, which is no better than your average link spammer.
There are many domains which people own that they're not particularly attached to and would be happy to sell. For someone looking in from outside, it's reasonable to think that this might be one of them, particularly if it's not immediately clear that the person's using it. (Lack of a website would imply this to some people.)
All they've done so far is politely ask if they can buy it. The request was short on words but that looks more like translation issues rather than an angry demand to hand over from a corporation full of lawyers. It could just as easily be someone's small family business which thought it'd be useful to have .com on the end of their name. How else are they supposed to find out if the owner's interested in selling if not by asking?
I find this very interesting because when we went further south through Chile, Peru and Bolivia last year we saw lots of Internet Cafe's, and they were nearly all running Windows. (For perspective though, we didn't leave the main tourist trails except in Chile.) Many of them didn't look like terribly secure installations, and there was about a 50/50 split of users between tourists and locals. The locals were nearly all school-aged children who seemed to be there 100% for gaming. The only non-Windows platform we found for 2 months was a Backpackers' accomodation in Puerto Varas (southern'ish Chile) which was run by a German guy, and he'd set up a Linux box which I think was running Suse.
Apart from being referred by Google, you also get the answers if you install something like User Agent Switcher and pretend to be GoogleBot... which (I think) means that Google should definitely be de-listing Experts Exchange from their results if they're going to be consistent with their policy.
Personally I'm fairly certain it's because EE is serving different pages to GoogleBot, and to people who are referred by Google. (See my other comment over here.)
This is what I thought until I looked more closely. EE definitely seems to serve different pages to GoogleBot, and appears to serve different pages to people referred directly from Google. I believe this is a distinct violation of Google's listing policy, and to be consistent with how they treat all the other website operators Google should be immediately de-listing Experts Exchange until it serves identical pages to Google as what it serves to everyone.
Try installing User Agent Switcher in Firefox, then browse to this URL. If it's like me, you'll get no comments at the bottom, but as soon as you switch to mimicing GoogleBot, you'll get a heap of responses.
EE is definitely serving different pages to people referred directly from Google. Try clicking through to a result from Google and you'll get the comments at the bottom. If you open a blank tab, though, and paste the same URL into that tab, you won't get the responses (unless you're pretending to be GoogleBot again). This is definitely what happens for me, anyway.
There's also something weird happening in the Related Solutions section of EE pages, which is probably to do with EE giving Google different URLs to crawl. eg. Take a look at the "Related Solutions" section of this page on EE, and look closely at the URLs. (I reached this EE page using the top result of the Google search that someone pointed out elsewhere in the thread.)
When I look at the URLs in the Related Solutions section, they all point to what first looks like static HTML, but with "?eeSearch=true" appended to the end of the URLs. If I then go to the Google Cache edition, it looks similar but doesn't pass the eeSearch=true parameter.
I'm not sure what effect this has because with or without appending '?eeSearch=true', I still get the same behaviour which is to show comments on the page if I'm pretending to be GoogleBot, and not show them if I'm not. It's almost certainly something to do with tricking Google, probably to make Google think that they're static HTML pages when they're actually not.
How is it harmful? If it's not this then it's either going to be completely open for everyone to publish (which isn't unusual), or it's going to be completely suppressed so that nobody can publish it (which also isn't unusual).
He's tried to choose something in the middle, and it's likely to be an experiment to see how effective it is which errs on the side of the defendents, because if he couldn't do this he might have just let their names be printed. Presumably what he's concerned about is taht 3 months from now, jurors might be sitting at home googling the name and will come across persistent articles describing a heap of disturbing rumours around today which by then could have been discredited, and that could put the fairness of the trial in trouble.
Obviously this doesn't guarantee that nobody will publish the names online, but it'll cut down on a lot of it, and exactly how useful it is will be something that many people will be watching.
Actually what's particularly interesting about this case is that the judge also teaches Information Technology and has written a text-book on cyber law in New Zealand, and he's made a submission to the NZ government about spam legislation which I haven't read, but you could probably look at if you want some guideline idea of his IT competence.
One of New Zealand's media commentators with a lot of IT experience (Russell Brown, for whom I have a lot of respect) threw in a few comments over here, and wasn't immediately condemning of the actions of the judge. Brown commented that he thinks this judge probably has more technical knowledge of the Internet than any other judge in the country, and coming from him it's either quite compelling or very detrimental to every other judge.
New Zealand's had problems in the past with courts trying to suppress names, particularly in cases when there's been international interest in the case, because the suppression orders only apply in New Zealand. I don't understand what he expects to achieve except possibly hoping that jurors won't be able to hide at home and google the names as easily during critical points in the trial, especially since the details of this trial are unlikely to gather much interest outside NZ. I think Brown's theory that this is an experimental act from the judge to see what happens sounds fairly feasible.
I saw RMS speak recently for the first time, and he alluded to his laptop running a custom distro (which presumably was gNewSense) on the grounds that there are supposedly no completely free distros at all.
I found this confusing for exactly the reason that Debian specifically says that 'contrib' and 'non-free' are not part of the Debian system, even though Debian makes them available, which means that anyone who wants a completely Free installation should fairly easily be able to ignore those two sections and have a completely Free system. (This assumes that the FSF agrees with Debian Legal about what's Free, and they've had their little spats in the past.)
Considering other things he says, though, I think RMS's main argument against distros like Debian, which I don't completely agree with, is that they even associate themselves with non-free software, and ultimately this is bad for Free Software in the long term.
I know a few people who use Debian (including myself), but I don't know of anyone who goes to great lengths to avoid the non-free and contrib sections. They're more interested in having their system do what they want straight away. So I think RMS's point (and the FSF's point) would be that having a distribution that goes to some effort to make it easy to install non-free software in the way that Debian does (even if it's not officially supported) is likely to discourage the advancement of Free Software in the long term. The users are no longer demanding Free software if they can easily install proprietary software, and Debian (or whatever distro) is no longer prioritising the advancement of Free versions of many of the packages if users are already mostly satisfied without them.
I also wondered about Debian when I first heard about the FSF distribution. When RMS was here recently I found his complaint that there are "no completely Free distributions" a little confusing. Debian does include non-free packages, but it separates them into the non-free and contrib sections exactly so that people who want a completely Free installation can easily filter out the non-free components... and this is why I was surprised that RMS didn't just use that formula for his laptop. Although knowing how he reasons, it'd probably be enough for him to argue that Debian even associates itself with non-free software and makes it easy for people to install it if they need to, which the FSF might believe is bad for Free Software in the long term.
Even if the FSF wanted a completely free GNU distribution of its own, however, wouldn't it be easier to simply take Debian and simply strip out the non-free and contrib sections? Ultimately it should be as simple as not providing access to those packages in the repositories, since Debian's already declared that those packages will never be required for a complete working distribution. Why take a distro based on Debian which makes it more convoluted, then reverse it back to what Debian probably was in the first place?
gNewSense claims in its FAQ that Debian/Ubuntu aren't really free, but apart from saying so the FAQ doesn't really address this. I know the two have had their disagreements on licenses (notably the Debian team deciding that the GFDL isn't really Free). Is it something to do with this?
I'm sure there would be good reasons for doing this, and to be honest I don't even think it's necessary to have reason that convinces everyone in Free Software. As long as people are motivated to do it, good for them (and perhaps for everyone). If anyone could comment on this, though, I'd be interested to know more about what the reason is.
That's true, although it's still consistent with global warming theory, which predicts that there should be more extremes in both directions. (More frequent and extreme droughts, more frequent and extreme storms, etc etc.) Expect insurance premiums to go up.
Well to be fair, Flash used to do a lot less and once upon a time (maybe 5-6 years ago) it was very feasible to combine SVG and a little Javascript to get a similar experience to what Flash was used for.
Actually it wasn't possible because when Flash was that simple, nothing reliably supported SVG except for a fairly klunky plugin provided by Adobe, ironically enough, which let you kind of use SVG as long as you were happy to present it inside a rectangular box after the user had gone through an ugly plugin installation process, and probably only on Windows PCs (from memory). Back around that time I remember a lot of people complaining about the lack of reliable SVG support, because the majority of stuff that was done in Flash (primarily irritating banner ads) could have been done much more nicely and standards compliantly using SVG and a little Javascript.
People who claim this now are probably continuing the same kinds of arguments from years like 2002. Since then, however, Adobe's made changes to later versions of Flash which has made it much more of an application development platform that goes far beyond everything for which SVG was intended.
Perhaps there's a coaching aspect to it but I think if someone stays at the top of their field for a long time, it says a lot about that person's abilities. I wonder if it's simply that the best swimmers or the best golfers or the best athletes do change, and are simply very good at shaking old habits and adapting to improved techniques when they become apparent. If they don't, they're not the best any more, and are often quickly forgotten as someone else comes through and pushes them out of the way.
Linux needs to stop preaching about free software and get back to work - in the end, users don't give a damn whether or not they can 'modify' this new driver they're installing to get compiz to work. As long as it's free as in beer and it works, they're happy. At most, an EULA dialog should be thrown up. [--snip--] In short, devs need to really get their fingers out and concentrate on creating a truly kick-ass operating system that'll work out of the box on practically any machine you throw it at.
But in the end you really have to appreciate that with Free Software, developers will only develop for whatever motivates them, right? What makes the users' welfare or your welfare more important than the developers' welfare? I certainly wouldn't develop Free Software just to help users unless there was a reason it helped me feel good, too.
Yesterday I sat in on a couple of seminars by RMS, who's currently in town where I am. I don't agree with some of what he promotes, at least to his fundamentalist extent, but there's no way I'd ever try to ask him to give up on his crusade for "Free" software and just write code for people to use how they want. He wouldn't do it, anyway, except on his own terms, and neither would anyone. RMS is doing what he actually believes in, because he thinks that doing everything he can to make sure people always have an option that's completely Free according to a specific definition is much more important than simply having something that works right now.
He was a bit tired and grumpy by the end of the night, but by now I feel I can actually understand why he wants people to use the term GNU/Linux when referring to the whole system, and why he's so bitchy about the Linux kernel developers who are putting functionality of the kernel with specific devices above the user's freedom to have a kernel they're in complete control of.
Developers and promoters of Free Software will always have different motivations for doing what they do, and trying to unify everyone or even a significant group of developers under some kind of common goal like "replacing Microsoft on the desktop" is pointless. They do what they do for their own reasons, and trying to convince them to change their priorities because it suits your priorities or someone else's priorities is never going to work.
Seems to me that litigation is pretty lousy substitute for negotiating skills.
So you're saying that Apple should be allowed to break the law? These laws are supposed to apply to everyone, and if you're claiming that it should be ethically okay for Apple to break the law as long as it doesn't get caught, you're giving Apple an unfair advantage over its competitors who go to greater lengths to pay their employees properly because they know they're legally required to.
If Apple doesn't like the law they should convince people and lawmakers that it should be changed. Until then they should follow it as far as I'm concerned. I'm often skeptical about the excessive use of litigation to solve problems, but in this case I think it makes sense, particularly if Apple is clearly and intentionally breaking the law at the expense of people who aren't.
I think you may have misunderstood the meaning of the word 'introvert'. All it means in simplistic terms is that someone tends to be more relaxed and recharge themselves by getting away from others for a while. This is opposed to extraverts, who tend to be more relaxed when they're surrounded by friends and talking a lot (or some similar variant). Being embarassed to exercise in public, I think, is quite a different thing and I can easily relate to that.
I'm definitely an introvert, but I talk to people easily if I feel I actually have something worthwhile to say, and I get out a lot. I walk 35 minutes to work (down a hill), 45 minutes home (up a hill), and I invested in having some decent rain gear so I can comfortably do this irrespective of the weather, which is an important consideration where I live. Every 2-3 weeks I'll typically spend a Friday and Saturday night out on a weekend hike up or around a mountain somewhere, usually with friends. (I joined a hiking club to get into this properly, since before that none of my friends were really interested.) I guess this is a fortunate benefit I get from where I live and being interested in doing it, but I do it primarily out interest in going to look at places rather than getting exercise.
I have to admit that going to a gym or jogging down the street or generally going out explicitly to exercise doesn't appeal to me at all. Personally I just try to arrange my life around making sure I do enough walking, and the exercise I get is a side effect rather than a conscious effort to stay fit.
To refuse you would have to be asked. I don't think any one needs to ask Obama for his records but McCain (or even Paul who I would rather see as President), most certainly. But if Obama were to be asked and then refuse, well then that would smell to me.
Why? I can think of lots of reasons why someone (political candidate or not) might not want to share their medical records with the world. Most of them have nothing to do with them possibly losing votes due to having terminal cancer.
You might be right for soldiers since they tend to have different objectives and priorities, but I'm not as sure about this for civilian police forces. Most police forces which I know of are trained that if they're going to shoot at all, they should be shooting to kill. There's generally good reasoning behind this too, because you probably shouldn't be shooting someone at all unless you or someone else is in immediate and serious danger from them. If that's the case, why put the outcome in doubt by trying to be non-leathal about it and making it much harder to avoid screwing up?
Irrespective of the mode, you're still propelling a projectile at someone. It's either going to kill them, hurt and stop them, hurt them without stopping them, or not affect them at all. If you're trying to tune things to get a specific outcome (hurting and definitely stopping) instead of one of the extremes, it'll be much harder to get it right and you're at a higher risk of screwing things up. The speed of the projectile certainly won't be the only deciding factor.
I don't avoid MS Office or Windows because they're from Microsoft. I avoid them because they cost a lot and I don't really like them that much anyway. I also don't like the way that Microsoft doesn't give me the freedom to use them how I want to. Why should a format, OS and/or Office suite that originates from China be judged any differently?
I'm not a great fan of China or its policies, many of which I find quite abhorrent and I'll protest about them in my own way for what they are. China's a massive and very complext place, though. If UOF and EIOffice are actually beneficial and useful (neither of which I could vouch for because I haven't seen them), wouldn't it just make sense to encourage them on their individual merits?
Exceptions to this might be if you could show that the UOF specifications were developed by jailed political prisoners being unjustly forced to live in torture chambers and design document format specifications against their will, and perhaps you wouldn't want to encourage that kind of thing if it's likely to continue happening. But if you ignored ideas simply because of where they came from rather than the merits of the ideas themselves, you'd be restricting yourself a lot and we probably wouldn't have many of the beneficial things we have today.
I don't live in a city anywhere near as large as most cities (~300,000) and I doubt we have anywhere near as many cars, but I've generally found air around vehicles much easier to breathe than air around groups of people, specifically because the latter is often full of smokers (where I am, at least). Cigarette smoke lingers a long way from people who smoke and for a long time after, and the air's much more stale. This is especially the case since local laws recently forced smokers out of workplaces, which means everyone smokes on the streets.
Perhaps vehicle manufactures have had much more motivation to clean up the exhaust their products produce than tobacco companies.
This is looking at things on a small scale, of course. I'd presume that vehicle exhausts have a much more significant effect on global problems than cigarette smoke.
It just happens to balance accuracy and utility between humans and the current day's computers better than anything else we have at the moment.
Isn't that what he just said?
Yes I think the parent did say something similar to what you quoted from me in that sentence.
That's true, but on the more-precise-than-fingers point, I think it's only correct when you're very strict about your definition of "precise". Keep in mind that you're taking a very flexible arm and hand with 4 fingers and an opposable thumb, and using it to control a device that's about as complex as a baseball bat. (Move it thump move it thump.)
Mice are specifically more accurate than fingers when it comes to accurately indicating tiny screen points in a way that strictly logical software can unambiguously interpret, but you're still losing a lot of flexibility of your hand and fingers as an input device just to remove this ambiguity.
Personally I'm skeptical if touch screens (as they are today) will replace mice, and generally I think Gartner's full of crap when it comes to this and just about everything else they claim to predict, but a mouse isn't exactly a perfect device. It just happens to balance accuracy and utility between humans and the current day's computers better than anything else we have at the moment.
So, to increase accuracy, I'm supposed to slap at the screen with my pizza-slopped fingers? Facial recognition? Maybe banging my head on my desk will act as a signal to restart Windows yet again.
I don't have much respect for Gartner and the technology would have to improve a lot for me to believe this, but I wouldn't rule it out in the long term. Maybe 20-30 years at a guess and even then, I'm not sure if a mouse would go away entirely or if it'll be a touch screen that replaces it. If fingerprints are a problem, you'd expect manufacturers to redesign touch-screens so they're less of a problem, or more durable and easily cleaned. If resolution and accuracy is an issue now (which I think it is), it'll probably improve over the next few years. Just because today's monitors are a bit sensitive to cleaning products doesn't mean tomorrow's have to be.
But realistically, the concept of actually having an explicit device (a "computer", PC, laptop, tablet, whatever) which you use to do a million things, or carry around with you everywhere, could easily become quite dated. The concept of "logging in" (as we know it) might also become dated for most things.
What's to say that the concept of a single device won't be replaced by a concept of lots of much more flexible devices which are more ubiquitous, and why should I need to go out of my way to tell each of these devices who I am? Why shouldn't people just be walking up to a wall or a desk or a refrigerator or scribbling on paper or whatever and interacting with it ubiquitously, without having to think deeply about the digital side of what they're doing? Why would I need to sit down at my PC and add up my finances every few days if my wallet automatically and accurately kept track of it for me?
If you have enough of this kind of environment, the need for dedicated consoles and the bits that go with them evaporates. In these cases, a mouse is a bit redundant because by assuming the use of a mouse you're trying to force the ideal method of interaction for one device onto a whole lot of other devices, each of which is different. That's when I personally think the mouse will disappear.
You might be right, but I'm sure there are other reasons. Not to claim that it's right to ignore this, but presumably they're also concerned about the likely colossal expense of re-examining every single case for which this kind of evidence was used in a timely fashion, re-establishing other evidence to keep the convictions -- if that's even possible long after the date, and massive compensation payouts for wrongful imprisonment (or perhaps to families in cases of execution) in the many cases that can't reliably be proved without the DNA evidence. This is also not to mention the likeliness of a large number of people who could actually be quite dangerous getting released on technicalities before they're ready.
Right or wrong, this situation has potential to be a lawyers' dream.
But a deterrent only works to a certain point. If you change a 100 year sentence to 200 year sentence it won't affect anything. A lifetime sentence to a death sentence? Maybe for a few people. A jail that provides basic human rights to a jail that "unofficially" and hypocritically allows you to be raped and tormented by your co-prisoners? Well, maybe that depends on whether you're likely to be the victim or the perpetrator. If it really had an effect though, you might expect the US to have a smaller prison population because obviously nobody would want to be there.
Part of the problem, I think, is that a lot of people who commit crimes aren't necessarily considering the implications beyond their immediate circumstances anyway. You might want tougher sentences for revenge or occasionally for safety of the rest of the population, but personally I'm skeptical about the effect of tougher sentences as deterrents to crime. Keeping in mind that if the state treats people badly or inhumanely, it's also setting an example. ie. If we let people get raped in prison, then we're announcing to every prisoner that we think rape is okay, or at least sending very contradictory and confusing messages to people who might not be in a state of mind to interpret anything terribly complicated. If anything, I think that unless the prison system is designed very carefully, tougher sentences probably just help people who are more likely to commit crimes to meet more people who'll encourage them and to get into a habit of it for next time they get out.
In general I don't have a problem of using extra sources of information like Facebook. What I find disturbing about this is that the judge's decision was influenced, even according to the judge, by photos that someone else posted to facebook. From what I can tell that photographer was never cross-examined to establish the actual context of the photograph. For all we know, someone who didn't like the guy might have coerced him into a non-representative situation for a moment so they could snap the photo to put on Facebook, then tag him in the photo to make it easy for any prosecuting lawyer to stumble upon.
Was he dragged to a party by friends to take his mind of things after 2 weeks of hell? Who else was there? Were they all close friends, and were they the sorts of people who'd try to embarrass him for his mistake? Well I hope the courts investigated that properly. Perhaps he did deserve what he got in this case, but if it's as easy to influence a judge as this article implies, it concerns me.