I was a bit disappointed with the review, many of the features described as "new" (e.g. tabbed browsing, KDE splash screen) have been around for a while already. A lot of the other stuff is just as well described in the KDE release notes.
It's not bad as such, but it didn't help me much either.
I can't quite follow you there: if the Russians were in control of the virus (i.e. intentionally releasing it) they'd be in the position to add some message purporting to come from "Andy".
However if they *can't* control their hackers (who can?) and this went out without their knowledge, than they can't have inserted a comment in the virus to detract from that.
How about lawyers don't get paid if they loose a case?
That's an appealing idea - however often cases are not just win or lose. E.g. if someone is sued for a certain amount his lawyer might not manage to win, but might get the amount reduced. (Or maybe jail time is reduced, probation is granted etc.) If the rule was as you suggest, then potentially a lawyer would stop working once he feels the case is lost.
It would also prevent the little guy from going up against a large corporation.
In some cases it would - then again the current system allows the big guy to sue the little guy until he gives up because he runs out of money. So both systems will fail some of the little guys at some point. To evaluate them you'd have to compare how they compare on average. I think the current US system looks very bad there - employing over half of the worlds lawyers just has to be a ridiculous amount of overhead.
Gates is getting a knighthood for contributions to international business while at the same time the EU (therefore by extension the UK) is fining microsoft for anti-competitive practices. Don't you just love irony?
Well, it's the separation of power thing. The judiciary is supposed to be independent of the executive. Good to see that they are.
Just get two different sources of the video, and do a diff on them.
I'm not sure whether it's so easy - this would work if each version had just one watermark, so video A would have watermark x and video B watermark y. However they might use different sets of watermarks, so video A might have set a,d,x,z and video B might have set b,d,q,x. You'd get rid of a, b, q and z in the comparison, but d and x would still be there.
If you are chosing the sets carfully you might even be able to detect which two sets were combined.
I don't know why this is, but it seems that conversations where you only hear one side are much more difficult to block out than normal conversations. Somehow the brain injects constantly "that's wierd" messages and turns attention to it. A similar effect is observable when you have people talking just behind a cubicle wall, as opposed to a conversation were you could see the participants. (Which is one of the ways in which cubicles destroy productivity.)
The problem is that you can turn off your ringer - but not the ringer of the woman sitting two rows behind you, who needs 10 minutes to find her cell phone in her handbag...
What really puzzles me is the pop-under stuff. Sure it's annoying, but can that really work? I might get rid of it because it wastes resources, but many users are probably unable to tell that it's even there...
It seems the only advantage a pop-under would offer to the advertiser, is that the user can't automatically click it away as it starts to load. That's ok as far as that goes - but won't users who are in the habit of do doing that, just discard it after they find it? Especially though since they are now annoyed?
On the other hand - the other users who might be coerced into clicking on it - they might now not even see the ad. I just can't understand how this can work for the advertiser.
I think there are several sections of the desktop market, maybe a useful distinction would be:
business/office desktop
PC gaming
multimedia home use
I my opinion Linux is more than ready for the first section - sure there are things which don't run on Linux, but that applies the other way round, too. For gaming Linux has a long way to go - there are some options but for hardcore gamers it's just not the right system, currently. For the multimedia section Linux has made great strides, but if you get a CDROM for the Louvre, a language learning program, dictonaries etc - they are usually Windows/Mac only.
I think we are now in the position where many companies develop an interest in Linux, we'll probably see many new users in that segment of the desktop market. The other segments will take some more time.
Nice to know. They just check plagiarism. I wonder how many sides has the dice they use for qualifications.
I don't know that - my assumption here is that the system's task is solely to check for plagiarism, and that the value of the paper is determined by human examiners. I didn't see anything which indicates that they let the system grade the paper.
Did you see something to that effect?
"What I object to most about the policy at McGill is that it treats students as though we are
guilty until proven innocent," said Rosenfeld
Well it seems the examiner has the right, even the duty to examine the papers which have been submitted. Checking for plagiarism seems fair, and also that he is using technical aids for doing so.
The article also mentions:
"The reality is that the high monitoring of students really isn't about catching cheaters, it is a substitute for hiring enough faculty members to take the time to read student work," said Ian Boyko, national chair of the student federation.
It seems that all the system does is check for plagiarism. Assuming it does that in a sensible manner (not providing false positives without pointing to the reference material) then it's just relieving the examiners from boring repetetive work.
A seperate issue is if they don't just have to have the paper checked, but also integrated into the database. I tend to think papers submitted to the university examiners should be public domain, though.
Well, we have our own business scandals (e.g. Elf in France, ParmaLat in Italy). However it seems that the US legal system is particularly prone to abuse - not that ours couldn't do with some reform either....
The German court has jurisdiction solely in Germany - it's not inconceivable that companies in other European countries would get similar rulings, though.
Patents don't really apply to SCO's claim, so the difference of US and EU law in that respect does not matter. As far as licensing and IP matters - US companies have the same right to bring suit in Europe as European companies. So if SCO were to sue, their claim would be carefully considered by the judges, too. Also the EU commission has no say in judicial matters. Fines are not randomly handed out either - even though we'd like to see those for SCO.
Sorry but I don't think your post is correct in any of the points you make. What is true though, is that some EU countries have laws which protect companies from competitors making wild claims. You can go to court and ban them from repeating the claim should they be unable or unwilling to back it up. That's it, though.
Most countries in Europe have Free Speech. I don't think any extend that right to entities which are not people (e.g. corporations) though. So you can say what you want, but not on company letterhead. If you make statements in a company press release, or sending threatening letters to others, then the other side has the right to go to court. If you are unable unable (or unwilling) to back up, then the court can order you to stop.
Well fact is that the French put their own country on the line, at a time at which the German army was perceived to be vastly superior. (And allied with Russia, too.) They did not have the option to retreat across the channel and they did not come in after Germany's army had already been defeated in Russia. They knew that no matter whether there'd be victory or defeat - the war would be fought on their own territory, in their own cities.
Yes many people in France (and in Britain, and in the US and...) were sympathetical to the Nazis.
They French and British units fighting in France were quickly defeated by the Germans, that is true also. However that happened to the armies of many other countries in Europe - Poland, Greece, Norway etc etc etc. The German army was vastly superior at the time.
It's time to face reality here: accusing the French of being cowards is not something based on valid historical assessments but pure chauvinism. And anybody who thinks a joke is still funny after being constantly retold for more than 50 years is only excused if he has a brain tumor.
Get back to me when your govenment mandates that *all* image processing software *must* include that feature
Hmmm - but do you think the right time to complain about things like that, is when they already made their way into the law? It seems it might be more effective to make your concerns known earlier than that.
It seems that banknotes are quite frequently used as graphical elements in advertisments etc. Since Photoshop seems to target the professional market I can see how that would be annoying for said professionals.
I like the speedpass idea in principle - digging around for change wastes everyone's time. However why does it always have such a privacy-invading solution? Many people don't want to have their movements tracked, it wierds them out - and as a result there are still long queues in front of the toll stations. Acceptance is a lot lower than what it could be.
I don't have a complete alternative, but I'm thinking of something like "digital money" i.e. you purchase tokens (digital coins, generated with a public key/private key method) which you can load into your speedpass, then when you reach the toll station it transfers the appropriate tokens to the toll station. It could also show how many tokens you have still left.
The token generating procedure is solved, I believe (there is literature on that available). I'm not sure how to do the loading of the speedpass, though.
A possibility might be to have a seperate button on the device which would permit authenitfications at just one specific toll station, so you can re-charge. Or you'd need special machines where you can re-charge (which is a bit awkward, I admit).
The devices would have to be more expensive to make, but maybe the higher acceptance would make it economically viable, anyway.
Well if I had an actual case I'd have taken christmas off. You know because I'd already done most of the work way *before* I sued the other company.:-)
A Republic is to a democratic state what Latin is to Greek. Do you really think US citizens have no voting rights, because the founders decided to use Latin?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not bad as such, but it didn't help me much either.
However if they *can't* control their hackers (who can?) and this went out without their knowledge, than they can't have inserted a comment in the virus to detract from that.
That's an appealing idea - however often cases are not just win or lose. E.g. if someone is sued for a certain amount his lawyer might not manage to win, but might get the amount reduced. (Or maybe jail time is reduced, probation is granted etc.) If the rule was as you suggest, then potentially a lawyer would stop working once he feels the case is lost.
In some cases it would - then again the current system allows the big guy to sue the little guy until he gives up because he runs out of money. So both systems will fail some of the little guys at some point. To evaluate them you'd have to compare how they compare on average. I think the current US system looks very bad there - employing over half of the worlds lawyers just has to be a ridiculous amount of overhead.
Well, it's the separation of power thing. The judiciary is supposed to be independent of the executive. Good to see that they are.
I'm not sure whether it's so easy - this would work if each version had just one watermark, so video A would have watermark x and video B watermark y. However they might use different sets of watermarks, so video A might have set a,d,x,z and video B might have set b,d,q,x. You'd get rid of a, b, q and z in the comparison, but d and x would still be there.
If you are chosing the sets carfully you might even be able to detect which two sets were combined.
Soooo... somebody put a webserver on the rover and it was slashdotted?
That was already done in Germany, they can't talk about their claims there until they are willing to show their "proof" in court.
I don't know why this is, but it seems that conversations where you only hear one side are much more difficult to block out than normal conversations. Somehow the brain injects constantly "that's wierd" messages and turns attention to it. A similar effect is observable when you have people talking just behind a cubicle wall, as opposed to a conversation were you could see the participants. (Which is one of the ways in which cubicles destroy productivity.)
The problem is that you can turn off your ringer - but not the ringer of the woman sitting two rows behind you, who needs 10 minutes to find her cell phone in her handbag...
It seems the only advantage a pop-under would offer to the advertiser, is that the user can't automatically click it away as it starts to load. That's ok as far as that goes - but won't users who are in the habit of do doing that, just discard it after they find it? Especially though since they are now annoyed?
On the other hand - the other users who might be coerced into clicking on it - they might now not even see the ad. I just can't understand how this can work for the advertiser.
- business/office desktop
- PC gaming
- multimedia home use
I my opinion Linux is more than ready for the first section - sure there are things which don't run on Linux, but that applies the other way round, too. For gaming Linux has a long way to go - there are some options but for hardcore gamers it's just not the right system, currently. For the multimedia section Linux has made great strides, but if you get a CDROM for the Louvre, a language learning program, dictonaries etc - they are usually Windows/Mac only.I think we are now in the position where many companies develop an interest in Linux, we'll probably see many new users in that segment of the desktop market. The other segments will take some more time.
I don't know that - my assumption here is that the system's task is solely to check for plagiarism, and that the value of the paper is determined by human examiners. I didn't see anything which indicates that they let the system grade the paper. Did you see something to that effect?
Well it seems the examiner has the right, even the duty to examine the papers which have been submitted. Checking for plagiarism seems fair, and also that he is using technical aids for doing so.
The article also mentions:
"The reality is that the high monitoring of students really isn't about catching cheaters, it is a substitute for hiring enough faculty members to take the time to read student work," said Ian Boyko, national chair of the student federation.
It seems that all the system does is check for plagiarism. Assuming it does that in a sensible manner (not providing false positives without pointing to the reference material) then it's just relieving the examiners from boring repetetive work.
A seperate issue is if they don't just have to have the paper checked, but also integrated into the database. I tend to think papers submitted to the university examiners should be public domain, though.
Well, we have our own business scandals (e.g. Elf in France, ParmaLat in Italy). However it seems that the US legal system is particularly prone to abuse - not that ours couldn't do with some reform either....
The German court has jurisdiction solely in Germany - it's not inconceivable that companies in other European countries would get similar rulings, though.
Sorry but I don't think your post is correct in any of the points you make. What is true though, is that some EU countries have laws which protect companies from competitors making wild claims. You can go to court and ban them from repeating the claim should they be unable or unwilling to back it up. That's it, though.
Most countries in Europe have Free Speech. I don't think any extend that right to entities which are not people (e.g. corporations) though. So you can say what you want, but not on company letterhead. If you make statements in a company press release, or sending threatening letters to others, then the other side has the right to go to court. If you are unable unable (or unwilling) to back up, then the court can order you to stop.
Yes many people in France (and in Britain, and in the US and ...) were sympathetical to the Nazis.
They French and British units fighting in France were quickly defeated by the Germans, that is true also. However that happened to the armies of many other countries in Europe - Poland, Greece, Norway etc etc etc. The German army was vastly superior at the time.
It's time to face reality here: accusing the French of being cowards is not something based on valid historical assessments but pure chauvinism. And anybody who thinks a joke is still funny after being constantly retold for more than 50 years is only excused if he has a brain tumor.
Hmmm - but do you think the right time to complain about things like that, is when they already made their way into the law? It seems it might be more effective to make your concerns known earlier than that.
It seems that banknotes are quite frequently used as graphical elements in advertisments etc. Since Photoshop seems to target the professional market I can see how that would be annoying for said professionals.
I don't have a complete alternative, but I'm thinking of something like "digital money" i.e. you purchase tokens (digital coins, generated with a public key/private key method) which you can load into your speedpass, then when you reach the toll station it transfers the appropriate tokens to the toll station. It could also show how many tokens you have still left.
The token generating procedure is solved, I believe (there is literature on that available). I'm not sure how to do the loading of the speedpass, though.
A possibility might be to have a seperate button on the device which would permit authenitfications at just one specific toll station, so you can re-charge. Or you'd need special machines where you can re-charge (which is a bit awkward, I admit).
The devices would have to be more expensive to make, but maybe the higher acceptance would make it economically viable, anyway.
Well if I had an actual case I'd have taken christmas off. You know because I'd already done most of the work way *before* I sued the other company. :-)
I think that's ok - if they are doing something good, they should get good publicity.
A Republic is to a democratic state what Latin is to Greek. Do you really think US citizens have no voting rights, because the founders decided to use Latin?