> I did the test many times and put a linux box in front of a reasonably willing (although
> reasonably dumb) subject and frankly, they didn't even figure out how to reset their desktop
This has absolutely nothing to do with user-friendlyness, it's merely a case of what people are used to. What normal person would think that to reset your computer you have to click on "Start" and then on "Turn off your computer" to be given the option of "Restart"?
In terms of user-friendlyness for someone who has used neither before I imagine they would be very similar. The three things working for Windows are:
It being pre-installed on 90% of computers sold. Have you ever tried installing XP from scratch? Compared to SuSE 8.0 (FTP install), XP took three times as long, needed user intervention every 10 minutes, needed seperate drivers from the manufacturer for half my peripherals as well as rebooting at least 4 times until i had all the lates security patches installed.. SuSE was up and running in 30 minutes by essentially choosing "standard system" left my windows install intact, included it in the boot manager, found graphics, sound, printer...
previous exposure. People have learnt the ways of windows, even if they are inconsisten. They don't like to change.
program lock-in. As many others have said, deliberately incompatible document formats mean it IS a nightmare to convert to LINUX if you have a large number of interlinked spread-sheets etc. Then again, in my experience different windows/office versions are not always as compatible as they claim:).
that's the one thing i found most objectionable in the US education system. Students, both in high school and college fight for against each other. People didn't copy of each other, because no-one would let them, nor did they help each other.
In my experience European schools encourage people to work together. Now, whether that'll teach you more or not, i do not know, but it certainly makes for a much better environmen for learning... how ironic that this survival of the fittest approach to educating people is most prominent in a country where ~50% of the people think Darwinism is an invention of satanists/the devil himself:).
> Because the USA is filled with Facism as well, perhaps we arent as bad as Germany [...]
I think you will find most Germans would take offense at being called fascist today... I have lived there for a while, and it is a hell of a lot "less" fascist today than most other countries, including the US. Most of the stuff the Republican party (and parts of the Democrats) come out with would be labelled "extreme-right"/"neo-nazi" if a German party dared voice such views.
These things are slightly more acceptable in England or France, but again, no-where near like the US. (partially of course because the US can get away with it and is not as dependent on cooperation with other countries as European nations are)
> This includes the cost of coke, worker health care,
> lowered environmental impact costs (allowed to pollute),
> subsidized transportation,...you name it.
Wow, this IS novel!!! I never knew the public healthcare system in Europe were seen as a subsidy:). Funny that most if not all companies in Germany and France seem to complain about the high cost of highering workers due to such things...
Same with subsidized transportation. This is paid from TAXES which the corporations and workers pay!!! And accusing Europe of polluting more than the US is plain stupid... ever had a look at global energy consumption?!?
I'm not saying Europe is not using protectionist means, but that was about the weakest collection of accusations i have ever seen! And if you were referring to Russia and China etc., I would hazard a guess that their competitive advantage comes from seriously low wages, I can't imagine the Russian government throwing money they don't have to subsidise their steel industry...
ponxx
Re:Bleeding edge compatibility
on
MP3Pro Released
·
· Score: 1
I assume that should have been GBytes?!? Or are you really struggeling for HD space for those 5 or 6 songs you ripped!?
On a more serious note: If anyone had bothered to look at the format, it's compatible to MP3!!! No need to rip files again! Your new player still plays MP3s, and the old player even plays the new MP3s, though you obviously get slighly lower quality...
> and poll after poll is showing that Americans
> are increasingly not interested in liberalism
no really... great observation skills there. For years I have been wondering where in the world the liberal establishment that controls the media/schools/government/unions/ etc. etc. actually is. For as long as I have had exposure to the US by living there for a while, having many friends there, travelling etc. I have been of the opinion that it is one of the, if not the most conservative of all western countries!
I think the reason liberal publications did well on the web in its early stages was due to the part of society with web-access in its early days: university students, most of them in sci/maths/CS courses. As web-access has become more representative of society (and english sites being targeted mainly at US-audiences), its contents has come a lot closer to the other media, which is decidedly more conservativ.
Though the good thing about the internet is that niches and communities can still thrive. Be it for techies, tree-huggers, feteshists, horse-breeders, creationists, minority religious groups, whatever really. If an opinion exists it will have its niche somewhere. Volunteer run community sites are the counter-part to big-media, and provide tons of information!
I think magazines can survive and do well, but they are probably better off being run as a hobby rather than a business! The one thing big business/big media has trouble competing with is people that aren't in it to make a profit! Which is the reason MS doesn't really know what to do about Linux:)
" I can install it for my parents, show them the icon for IE, put a few games on for my Dad, show him the icons, show my mom the "Word" icon, and how to print, and they're set, happy and have little problems.. I only need to teach them when blue screens pop up, or things lock up, press the reset button and start over... and don't get me started in printing in Linux.. sigh."
so which of those can you NOT do in Linux? Replace IE by Konqueror, Word by StarOffice. Once a printer is installed printing is trivial (and i can't really see your problems with installing it either, SuSE did it all for me last time i tried).
The thing that's difficult is installing new programmes, and the lack thereof. If you go to a shop and buy some random chess programme or a spanish course or whatever, it's Windows... even if it was there for Linux, you can't just put the CD in wait for the "Do you want to install xyz programme" box appear and click yes.
For preinstalling a system for a specific purpose that can't easily be broken, I think Linux is far superior. Try to protect a Win install in a school from tinkering by students without making it completely useless... If you don't want users to install new software, Linux + KDE/GNOME is fine...
As to features of MS Office... who uses them?? My parents certainly don't. Maybe they'll make something italic/bold, or have some hard-formatting for font or colour or such, but I doubt they ever used a feature that Star Office (or even K-office) doesn't have...
"Free speech is in the constitution to permit people to criticise leaders"
Free speech is not restricted to criticising your leaders, but a universal right! It allows me to say that Bush is an idiot, that there is no god, or that the world was created in 7 days. Or that 2+2=5 as for that. If you start restricting these rights to political speech you're down a very slippery slope and soon there will be a debate on what is political anyway...
Being allowed to describe a technology is certainly part of it. And the fact that a coporation could lose money from you exercising your right to free speech is absolutely no argument whatsoever. A big-business dicatorship is just around the corner if you go there (well, in reality that's the status quo anyway, but let's be idealistic and pretend we live in a democracy at the moment:) )
You can protect your innovation by keeping it secret (e.g. Coca Cola's formula) or by applying for patents, in which case it gets published but you have to pay fees to use it. It should be prefectly legal and legitimate to describe how a technology works, or even how to exploit loopholes. AFAIK it is legal to publish bugs and security exploits on the web.
Anyway, what i'm wanting to say is: all speech is protected by the constitution, no disctinction is made between political / religious / legal / techie or business speak! It would have been illegal to break into some company and steal the decryption technique / keys. But I can't see how publishing information obtained in a legal way (or even just linking to it, which is very clearly just speech) could be illegal...
(The DMCA makes attempting to circumevent an encryption scheme illegal (i think) and i can't see how that can possibly be consitutional!)
"You radical greenies are so quick to point out that the U.S. pollutes so much, yet the reality is this only reflects the highly industrialized nature of our economy."
and "In fact, the U.S. has the best conservation techniques in the world"
Don't be ridiculous, Kyoto was about climate change, mostly CO2 emission. Conservation techniques do not reduce CO2 emissions, unless you are talking about conservation of ENERGY. Building / buying / driving cars that take 25 to 30 liters for 100km is not advanced, nor economically necessary, nor are they better cars! Having bad insulation on a house, but the air conditioner or heater running all year is not advanced!!!
"we actually pollute less and less per citizen every year"
not true in terms of CO2 emissions, it has been rising year after year after year, can't remember whether it plateaued during the 70s oil crisis / economic slowdown, but it has definitely picked up again!
The only thing that will make people AND companies create energy-efficient machines and use them responsibly is an increase in energy prices and an influence of politics to support such research, neither of which is going to happen in the US until it's too late, at least as opinions like youre are the majority (which they are) and the likes of Bush and his oil-buddys run the country...
The US is going to wake up when Oil reserves really get low and prices *really* high, you think petrol is expensive now? You ain't seen nothing yet....
>Living standards? I would want to agree, but most of Europe is very behind
Very simplistic statement, and in my view wrong. Depends strongly on your definition of living standard. What do you consider important, and who's living standard are you talking about. If you're rich you can have a pretty damn nice life most anywhere in the western world!
> like being forced to pay a tax that goes to churches in Germany
I don't think so.... The churches have an agreement with the government to collect a tax for them from the members of this church. This is bad enough in my view, but if you're not a member , you don't pay anything, and you can withdraw your membership from a church at any time, and no-one thinks you're going to bring the world to its end if you say you're an atheist, as I got the impression in some parts of the US:)
> Saner, I don't think so
Saner in some respects, definetely! I have lived in several countries, including European ones and the US. All have their advantages and disadvantages. Considering all the Slashdot USians keep saying how European governments run their citizens lives, I personally found there to be a lot less personal freedoms in the US. Going to school you needed a pass from a teacher to even go to the toilets, you got hell for wanting to drink a beer at the age of 18 if you got caugth, there was a government (local, state? ) enforced curfew for under 18s... all things that I consider part of personal freedom! I'm not even going to start on the laws governing sex / pornography etc...
Anyway, in some respects the US is saner, in some Europe is, in quite a surprisingly large number Australia and New Zealand are, or Kanada, or theses days a lot of former Warsaw Pact countries, like the Czech Republic.
But I do agree that bashing Europeans/Americans is more fun than presenting a sensible and balanced argument:)
> Kyoto would have penalized the US while
> allowing China to pollute as much as it wants.
Oh dear... right, normally i try not to engage in Off Topic discussion, but this is just soooo ignorant:
The Kyoto protocol required the US, Europe, Japan etc. to *reduce* co2 emission, and it did not ask this of developing countries. Now you might think this is unfair. BUT at the moment all Western nations produce far far far more CO2 per person than any other nations. In fact the US produce much more CO2 than China, despite having only a quarter of the population!
The US alone are responsible for over 25% of CO2 emissions in the world, while having less than 5% of the worlds population, which is why the US are one of the countries that have to reduce emissions most (even though I believe Kyoto actually required others to do more, and was already distorted to what it is by the american side, which makes it ever the more cynical that they now renege on it!).
If you want it *fair* and *market-economy* (which in theory are US ideals) you'd give every country the right to CO2 emissions proportional to the number of inhabitants, and then let them trade these licenses for pollution amongst each other. Even if we just set todays total emission as standard the US would be pretty screwed (as would all other industrialised nations) and there would be a much needed transfer of money/resources into the 3rd world as well as development of environmentally friendly technology, driven by market forces!!
Now what are the chances of the US government (or any other western country) to support such a *fair* agreement? ZERO!!!
And anything that allows the US to pollute more than other countries (like Kyoto) is inherently unfair, but biased FOR the US, not against!!! As I said, Europe et. al are no better, but unfair to the US is just not an argument in this case!!!!!!
"We did not expect or agree that our writings would be used commercially."
So in what way is Google Groups more "commercial" than the newsserver an ISP provides as a service for its customers (for which they pay as part of their ISPs fees)?
Replace public domain in my comment with a non-legal term meaning you have given the public access to it.
"Your letter to the Times is available to anybody who wants to look it up and make a copy for personal or other fair use. But if somebody started publishing copies, they would be violating the law."
That situation is not analagous to the Google case. By posting on usenet you do implicitly agree that your post will be copied to many servers and stored for some time, as this is what usenet is meant to do. I am not aware there is even a convention for what an acceptable time to keep posts on the server is.
Googles archive (like Deja's before) is essentially just a newsserver where articles have a long lifetime and it incorporates a search feature. Many groups get archived somewhere by some individual and quite a lot of these are out on the web. Posters should either post under a pseudonym or just have the cool to say: "yes, I posted that, that was 7 years ago, so what!"
> BTW: Does anybody know why about one third of
> the articles has a score of 4 and above? Is
> anybody an expert in Usenet matters nowadays?
I get the impression the moderation system is broken! After there were no mod points for anyone for a while, now everybody seems to have them, I certainly had way over my share for the last couple of days!
If you post on usenet you put things in the public domain, and you will have to live with it being archived. If you wrote a letter to the NY times 20 years ago that was subsequently published it is still available in the archives today and there is nothing to be done about it!
Besides in the FAQ google say they honor the 'X-No-archive: yes' header and it also gives you the chance to request deletion of individual old postings, so if you are really concerned about what you once wrote you can make the effort to get it out of the public domain again! So in fact you have more chances to exercise your copyright here than in other traditional media once you have released your post into to open:)
Google seems to be doing OK with providing a free search engine... Also once they get beyond beta stage, they might find an ad-based revenue model similar to their web search, e.g. inoffensive text-based ads that are relevant to the newsgroup / searchterms entered.
this is actually allowed??? You're joking! Are you? Does that mean that companies are authorised to leave a back-door in a program you sell that allows them to essentially hack into your computer at any time to disable a piece of software they sold you?!? And how are they going to get your IP? Does this program report it's host IP to the company????
If anyone knows of a company that already does this sort of thing, can you let me know so I can make ever effort to avoid it? Well, at least we're going to get some comedy hacks:)
The only description so far I have heard of rebirthing involved people being wrapped in many blankets having to struggle free, and at least one accidental death in the process.
I imagine this is simply a case of two different techniques having the same name, though having had a look at that website with statements like this:
Research into rebirthing has led to a different view of this "condition", however. From a rebirthing perspective, hyperventilation occurs when a person is so full of suppressed fear that he/she can no longer "hold it down".
> As I understand it, swapping music non-commerically
> between friends is legally okay, right?
I am pretty sure this statement is true in some if not most western countries, evidenced by the royalties paid on blank media. Now the main question is what constitutes a "friend" or "acquaintance" or however it might be worded in the law?
I suggest writing a napster-like service that requires you to chat to whomever you want to download a song from for at least say 30 seconds(?). Surely that is enough to constitue a friendship for geeks:)
We'll see lots of fun things happening here until the law catches up with technology (by which time there will be new thech !!!)
It's strange to see what happened in the UK and Ireland with Sky. For some strange reasons there are hardly any decent "free-TV" channels.
In Germany there are RTL, Sat1, Pro7, Kabel1, and a zillion other ones. You can sometimes get them via aerial, most areas via cable and everywhere by satellite. And while you have to pay for the dish, there is no subscription cost to satellite TV. If you're in the UK and get Sky you will notice all the German channels you get thrown in "for free" cause they use the same satellite and are not encrypted:).
I would have thought it's more lucrative anyway to be financed by adverts if you're received by as many people as possible.
I believe you'll find that raw potatoes are in fact not poisonous! It's the leaves and "fruit" that are poisonous, which is what confused the europeans, who were not expecting to eat the "roots".
Where-ever you look, be it TV, Newspapers, the Radio, internet discussion groups, EVERYONE says that the US is full of liberals trying to bring the country to ruins. However, I have almost never read an even left-leaning opinion, nor have I seen any left-wing or liberal politicians. Gore, Clinton and the like might be classed as "less conservative than a few others" but that's about as far as I'd go!
There is no left in the US, so what is everybody whingeing about? It's just like the fact that the places where people hate foreigners most, are usually small villages where they haven't seen one in a long time! It's a safe thing to do to blame everything on someone that hardly exist, or at least is in a minority!
Slashdot Mirror
> reasonably dumb) subject and frankly, they didn't even figure out how to reset their desktop
This has absolutely nothing to do with user-friendlyness, it's merely a case of what people are used to. What normal person would think that to reset your computer you have to click on "Start" and then on "Turn off your computer" to be given the option of "Restart"?
In terms of user-friendlyness for someone who has used neither before I imagine they would be very similar. The three things working for Windows are:
that's the one thing i found most objectionable in the US education system. Students, both in high school and college fight for against each other. People didn't copy of each other, because no-one would let them, nor did they help each other.
:).
In my experience European schools encourage people to work together. Now, whether that'll teach you more or not, i do not know, but it certainly makes for a much better environmen for learning... how ironic that this survival of the fittest approach to educating people is most prominent in a country where ~50% of the people think Darwinism is an invention of satanists/the devil himself
I think you will find most Germans would take offense at being called fascist today... I have lived there for a while, and it is a hell of a lot "less" fascist today than most other countries, including the US. Most of the stuff the Republican party (and parts of the Democrats) come out with would be labelled "extreme-right"/"neo-nazi" if a German party dared voice such views.
These things are slightly more acceptable in England or France, but again, no-where near like the US. (partially of course because the US can get away with it and is not as dependent on cooperation with other countries as European nations are)
ponxx
> lowered environmental impact costs (allowed to pollute),
> subsidized transportation,
Wow, this IS novel!!! I never knew the public healthcare system in Europe were seen as a subsidy :). Funny that most if not all companies in Germany and France seem to complain about the high cost of highering workers due to such things ...
Same with subsidized transportation. This is paid from TAXES which the corporations and workers pay!!! And accusing Europe of polluting more than the US is plain stupid... ever had a look at global energy consumption?!?
I'm not saying Europe is not using protectionist means, but that was about the weakest collection of accusations i have ever seen! And if you were referring to Russia and China etc., I would hazard a guess that their competitive advantage comes from seriously low wages, I can't imagine the Russian government throwing money they don't have to subsidise their steel industry...
ponxx
On a more serious note: If anyone had bothered to look at the format, it's compatible to MP3!!! No need to rip files again! Your new player still plays MP3s, and the old player even plays the new MP3s, though you obviously get slighly lower quality...
> are increasingly not interested in liberalism
no really... great observation skills there. For years I have been wondering where in the world the liberal establishment that controls the media/schools/government/unions/ etc. etc. actually is. For as long as I have had exposure to the US by living there for a while, having many friends there, travelling etc. I have been of the opinion that it is one of the, if not the most conservative of all western countries!
I think the reason liberal publications did well on the web in its early stages was due to the part of society with web-access in its early days: university students, most of them in sci/maths/CS courses. As web-access has become more representative of society (and english sites being targeted mainly at US-audiences), its contents has come a lot closer to the other media, which is decidedly more conservativ.
Though the good thing about the internet is that niches and communities can still thrive. Be it for techies, tree-huggers, feteshists, horse-breeders, creationists, minority religious groups, whatever really. If an opinion exists it will have its niche somewhere. Volunteer run community sites are the counter-part to big-media, and provide tons of information!
I think magazines can survive and do well, but they are probably better off being run as a hobby rather than a business! The one thing big business/big media has trouble competing with is people that aren't in it to make a profit! Which is the reason MS doesn't really know what to do about Linux :)
so which of those can you NOT do in Linux? Replace IE by Konqueror, Word by StarOffice. Once a printer is installed printing is trivial (and i can't really see your problems with installing it either, SuSE did it all for me last time i tried).
The thing that's difficult is installing new programmes, and the lack thereof. If you go to a shop and buy some random chess programme or a spanish course or whatever, it's Windows... even if it was there for Linux, you can't just put the CD in wait for the "Do you want to install xyz programme" box appear and click yes.
For preinstalling a system for a specific purpose that can't easily be broken, I think Linux is far superior. Try to protect a Win install in a school from tinkering by students without making it completely useless... If you don't want users to install new software, Linux + KDE/GNOME is fine...
As to features of MS Office... who uses them?? My parents certainly don't. Maybe they'll make something italic/bold, or have some hard-formatting for font or colour or such, but I doubt they ever used a feature that Star Office (or even K-office) doesn't have...
Free speech is not restricted to criticising your leaders, but a universal right! It allows me to say that Bush is an idiot, that there is no god, or that the world was created in 7 days. Or that 2+2=5 as for that. If you start restricting these rights to political speech you're down a very slippery slope and soon there will be a debate on what is political anyway...
Being allowed to describe a technology is certainly part of it. And the fact that a coporation could lose money from you exercising your right to free speech is absolutely no argument whatsoever. A big-business dicatorship is just around the corner if you go there (well, in reality that's the status quo anyway, but let's be idealistic and pretend we live in a democracy at the moment :) )
You can protect your innovation by keeping it secret (e.g. Coca Cola's formula) or by applying for patents, in which case it gets published but you have to pay fees to use it. It should be prefectly legal and legitimate to describe how a technology works, or even how to exploit loopholes. AFAIK it is legal to publish bugs and security exploits on the web.
Anyway, what i'm wanting to say is: all speech is protected by the constitution, no disctinction is made between political / religious / legal / techie or business speak! It would have been illegal to break into some company and steal the decryption technique / keys. But I can't see how publishing information obtained in a legal way (or even just linking to it, which is very clearly just speech) could be illegal...
(The DMCA makes attempting to circumevent an encryption scheme illegal (i think) and i can't see how that can possibly be consitutional!)
Don't be ridiculous, Kyoto was about climate change, mostly CO2 emission. Conservation techniques do not reduce CO2 emissions, unless you are talking about conservation of ENERGY. Building / buying / driving cars that take 25 to 30 liters for 100km is not advanced, nor economically necessary, nor are they better cars! Having bad insulation on a house, but the air conditioner or heater running all year is not advanced!!!
"we actually pollute less and less per citizen every year"
not true in terms of CO2 emissions, it has been rising year after year after year, can't remember whether it plateaued during the 70s oil crisis / economic slowdown, but it has definitely picked up again!
The only thing that will make people AND companies create energy-efficient machines and use them responsibly is an increase in energy prices and an influence of politics to support such research, neither of which is going to happen in the US until it's too late, at least as opinions like youre are the majority (which they are) and the likes of Bush and his oil-buddys run the country...
The US is going to wake up when Oil reserves really get low and prices *really* high, you think petrol is expensive now? You ain't seen nothing yet....
Very simplistic statement, and in my view wrong. Depends strongly on your definition of living standard. What do you consider important, and who's living standard are you talking about. If you're rich you can have a pretty damn nice life most anywhere in the western world!
> like being forced to pay a tax that goes to churches in Germany
I don't think so.... The churches have an agreement with the government to collect a tax for them from the members of this church. This is bad enough in my view, but if you're not a member , you don't pay anything, and you can withdraw your membership from a church at any time, and no-one thinks you're going to bring the world to its end if you say you're an atheist, as I got the impression in some parts of the US :)
> Saner, I don't think so
Saner in some respects, definetely! I have lived in several countries, including European ones and the US. All have their advantages and disadvantages. Considering all the Slashdot USians keep saying how European governments run their citizens lives, I personally found there to be a lot less personal freedoms in the US. Going to school you needed a pass from a teacher to even go to the toilets, you got hell for wanting to drink a beer at the age of 18 if you got caugth, there was a government (local, state? ) enforced curfew for under 18s... all things that I consider part of personal freedom! I'm not even going to start on the laws governing sex / pornography etc...
Anyway, in some respects the US is saner, in some Europe is, in quite a surprisingly large number Australia and New Zealand are, or Kanada, or theses days a lot of former Warsaw Pact countries, like the Czech Republic.
But I do agree that bashing Europeans/Americans is more fun than presenting a sensible and balanced argument :)
> allowing China to pollute as much as it wants.
Oh dear... right, normally i try not to engage in Off Topic discussion, but this is just soooo ignorant:
The Kyoto protocol required the US, Europe, Japan etc. to *reduce* co2 emission, and it did not ask this of developing countries. Now you might think this is unfair. BUT at the moment all Western nations produce far far far more CO2 per person than any other nations. In fact the US produce much more CO2 than China, despite having only a quarter of the population!
The US alone are responsible for over 25% of CO2 emissions in the world, while having less than 5% of the worlds population, which is why the US are one of the countries that have to reduce emissions most (even though I believe Kyoto actually required others to do more, and was already distorted to what it is by the american side, which makes it ever the more cynical that they now renege on it!).
If you want it *fair* and *market-economy* (which in theory are US ideals) you'd give every country the right to CO2 emissions proportional to the number of inhabitants, and then let them trade these licenses for pollution amongst each other. Even if we just set todays total emission as standard the US would be pretty screwed (as would all other industrialised nations) and there would be a much needed transfer of money/resources into the 3rd world as well as development of environmentally friendly technology, driven by market forces!!
Now what are the chances of the US government (or any other western country) to support such a *fair* agreement? ZERO!!!
And anything that allows the US to pollute more than other countries (like Kyoto) is inherently unfair, but biased FOR the US, not against!!! As I said, Europe et. al are no better, but unfair to the US is just not an argument in this case!!!!!!
sorry for that... rant over....
So in what way is Google Groups more "commercial" than the newsserver an ISP provides as a service for its customers (for which they pay as part of their ISPs fees)?
Replace public domain in my comment with a non-legal term meaning you have given the public access to it.
"Your letter to the Times is available to anybody who wants to look it up and make a copy for personal or other fair use. But if somebody started publishing copies, they would be violating the law."
That situation is not analagous to the Google case. By posting on usenet you do implicitly agree that your post will be copied to many servers and stored for some time, as this is what usenet is meant to do. I am not aware there is even a convention for what an acceptable time to keep posts on the server is.
Googles archive (like Deja's before) is essentially just a newsserver where articles have a long lifetime and it incorporates a search feature. Many groups get archived somewhere by some individual and quite a lot of these are out on the web. Posters should either post under a pseudonym or just have the cool to say: "yes, I posted that, that was 7 years ago, so what!"
> the articles has a score of 4 and above? Is
> anybody an expert in Usenet matters nowadays?
I get the impression the moderation system is broken! After there were no mod points for anyone for a while, now everybody seems to have them, I certainly had way over my share for the last couple of days!
Besides in the FAQ google say they honor the 'X-No-archive: yes' header and it also gives you the chance to request deletion of individual old postings, so if you are really concerned about what you once wrote you can make the effort to get it out of the public domain again! So in fact you have more chances to exercise your copyright here than in other traditional media once you have released your post into to open :)
ponxx
Google seems to be doing OK with providing a free search engine... Also once they get beyond beta stage, they might find an ad-based revenue model similar to their web search, e.g. inoffensive text-based ads that are relevant to the newsgroup / searchterms entered.
this is actually allowed??? You're joking! Are you? Does that mean that companies are authorised to leave a back-door in a program you sell that allows them to essentially hack into your computer at any time to disable a piece of software they sold you?!? And how are they going to get your IP? Does this program report it's host IP to the company????
If anyone knows of a company that already does this sort of thing, can you let me know so I can make ever effort to avoid it? Well, at least we're going to get some comedy hacks :)
I imagine this is simply a case of two different techniques having the same name, though having had a look at that website with statements like this:
Research into rebirthing has led to a different view of this "condition", however. From a rebirthing perspective, hyperventilation occurs when a person is so full of suppressed fear that he/she can no longer "hold it down".
I can't say i'm overly impressed ...
> between friends is legally okay, right?
I am pretty sure this statement is true in some if not most western countries, evidenced by the royalties paid on blank media. Now the main question is what constitutes a "friend" or "acquaintance" or however it might be worded in the law?
I suggest writing a napster-like service that requires you to chat to whomever you want to download a song from for at least say 30 seconds(?). Surely that is enough to constitue a friendship for geeks :)
We'll see lots of fun things happening here until the law catches up with technology (by which time there will be new thech !!!)
In Germany there are RTL, Sat1, Pro7, Kabel1, and a zillion other ones. You can sometimes get them via aerial, most areas via cable and everywhere by satellite. And while you have to pay for the dish, there is no subscription cost to satellite TV. If you're in the UK and get Sky you will notice all the German channels you get thrown in "for free" cause they use the same satellite and are not encrypted :).
I would have thought it's more lucrative anyway to be financed by adverts if you're received by as many people as possible.
I believe the poster said he was from Ireland (as in the Republic of Ireland I would imagine), so he is neither part of the UK, nor does he get BBC.
I believe you'll find that raw potatoes are in fact not poisonous! It's the leaves and "fruit" that are poisonous, which is what confused the europeans, who were not expecting to eat the "roots".
Where-ever you look, be it TV, Newspapers, the Radio, internet discussion groups, EVERYONE says that the US is full of liberals trying to bring the country to ruins. However, I have almost never read an even left-leaning opinion, nor have I seen any left-wing or liberal politicians. Gore, Clinton and the like might be classed as "less conservative than a few others" but that's about as far as I'd go!
There is no left in the US, so what is everybody whingeing about? It's just like the fact that the places where people hate foreigners most, are usually small villages where they haven't seen one in a long time! It's a safe thing to do to blame everything on someone that hardly exist, or at least is in a minority!
I concede defeat...
not to mention the civil war...