The government wound in some "independent" reviewer of anti-terror legislation to claim the bit of the Act they used wasn’t really anti-terror legislation. You can judge how independent he is by the fact that the same man stood up in Parliament a few days later to argue in favour of a (now defeated) proposal to allow the police to lock "terrorist suspects" up for 6 weeks at a stretch.
We used to sneer at all those tinpot Balkan dictatorships where you had to carry identity papers everywhere, the police could lock anyone up on a whim, and the only telephones you could buy were designed to allow Them to monitor you. And they used to make unbelievably weird claims about the evils of foreign governments. Then we went and elected a Labour government...
What worked for me in that kind of situation was going to a small company (10-20 employees, the sort of outfit where you know and work with the owners of the business). You end up having to take on anything that's going, and sometimes find it's much more interesting than you thought.
They say (at least here in Britain, don’t know about elsewhere) that small businesses are less secure. I find they are also less likely to make casual sweeping decisions to close departments.
I suspect a whole lot of ISOification, COBITisation and ITILement will heading their way
Doubt it. This is the Civil Service - the people who draft legislation for the plebs to follow. They clearly think the Data Protection Act applies to other people, as sending this information at all (irrespective of security in transit) was apparently a breach of it. Note as well this is the third time recently - procedures have already twice been Tightened Up, To Prevent This Ever Happening Again.
If people started identifying with their government
Ah, but which government?
Here in Britain we now have "the Government", meaning Tony Blair and his cronies at Westminster, and then a whole bunch of other talking shops - notably more popular among politicians than other people. There is the Scottish parliament, the Welsh parliament, various ex terrorists and their friends doing nothing much in Northern Ireland (which is possibly the point), and the EU over in Brussels. Not to mention the UN.
Every one of these entities - except the one in Northern Ireland - feels a need to justify its existence, to make its mark on people's lives. This costs money - especially for the EU, which among other things likes to be seen as the generous provider of subsidies to all and sundry.
When all these politicians stop inventing jobs for themselves, and start trying to do the real, necessary jobs properly and responsibly, the rest of us might start to support them - maybe even vote for mainstream party candidates again.
> No one is twisting your arm to use Microsoft products..
Then why does it hurt?...
1. My kids go to school, where they run - guess what. They come home and insist they need MS Word, or Publisher, or Powerpoint, etc.. They don't say "I need to do so and so", because that isn't what they are taught. Oh, and guess who volunteered early on in the term of the present British government to provide IT training for teachers.
2. I do Unix support, and the machine I'm given to do it with runs - guess what. My working life is spent going through Win-to-Unix kludges to get needlessly limited access to the systems.
3. The kids come home, and want to play games. These come in versions that run on various proprietary consoles and... you guessed it.
Quite the reverse. This behaviour benefits Windows more than Linux, by increasing its "market" share. This is borne out by the fact that - despite all the "activation" hype around XP and the threatening MS ads - it still seems to be possible to install and even keep updated pirate copies of Windows.
A massive outbreak of honesty would be the best thing that could happen to FOSS.
Then there are the speed cameras that track you wherever you drive. They were used after the murder of that policewoman in Bradford to track and identify the getaway car... leading to the arrest of the man who'd been forced to hire it and had then apparently reported the fact to the police.
I hear the latest ticketing systems for railways now report back to Big Brother, too.
Undoubtedly evolution has done a good job on us, but we keep moving about. I'd bet that the people in the study suffering most from vitamin D deficiency were dark-skinned people living in high latitudes, and - at longer odds - that the Australians who piped up about skin cancer were all of European, not aboriginal extraction.
One problem with software patents is that software is pretty well solid inventions, where other products are not.
If you sit down to write some software, a relatively high proportion of your effort is actually spent on design; maybe like 25%, with the other 75% on testing, documentation etc. Manufacturing is close to zero.
Compare that with a hardware product such as a vacuum cleaner. The scope for ideas is limited, because the vacuum cleaner is a well-understood product. Nearly all of a business's capacity is devoted to manufacturing; a great deal of the design team's effort goes on things like safety testing (most software can't kill anyone, but a vacuum cleaner can).
In consequence the sheer number of ideas a software designer has to generate to get a product built becomes a problem. If every one of these ideas has to be checked against every possibly-relevant patent, software development will immediately bog down in patent lawyers and there will be no innovation.
Some large organisations work around this by cross-licensing agreements, effectively agreeing among themselves not to enforce their patent rights. This actually defeats the point of patents as protection for the described inventions; those organisations are not benefiting from their inventions as such, only from the fact that they have enough patents that others feel the need to let them join the no-patent-search club.
Any organisation with an innovative product but no existing stock of patents has no way to break in. No matter how brilliant its programmers/inventors, the dead weight of patent searches it needs to undertake to get a product out without infringment will sink it.
I recognize it's not for general public yet. Just tried it. Got a DVD from the shelf, put it in the drive. Started xine. Clicked "DVD"; it started playing, but no sound. Configured xine to use alsa, through its GUI, and restarted it as instructed. Voila, home entertainment PC (except no video recording, since I didn't buy the DVD recorder or TV tuner, both of which are available). This shows 2 things.
one can do this already, even with non mainstream kit
I at least have never felt the need to do it before
Maybe Intel are going to tweak Fedora to autostart xine on detecting a video dvd, and make xine autodetect the sound system? Somehow I doubt it. Conclusions:
No new technology worth discussing
No use
As others have pointed out, will sell like hot cakes to the technological illiterates.
It seems to me easier to persuade ISPs than some governments (China? Brazil?). After all the ISPs are having to dig deeper into their pockets for the infrastructure to do the spammers' messages, and they aren't being paid.
If all ISPs refused to peer with spam-friendly outfits, or those hosting spammers' websites*, that would achieve the same thing.
* I don't distinguish between spammers who send bulk email and those who employ the former to advertise their junk.
Life, as lots of others have said. However... ISTR Jupiter itself being rated as the most likely place in the Solar System to find life, bar none (even Earth). I know that was before the discovery of the ocean on Europa, but still I would have thought they'd try to avoid contaminating Jupiter too.
> It is quite easy to have a great job, a family and a car in any totalitarian state. In fact, that's what they want
Not in the only one I've ever been to (Czechoslovakia circa 1985). Cars, and other consumer goods, were hard to come by. Public transport was, however, heavily subsidised and therefore cheap and ubiquitous. Very likely this is related to the fact that cars go where the owner wants whereas public transport only takes you along the routes the State lays down.
Interesting how much pressure there is here in Britain to demonise cars and subsidise public transport these days.
> They want people to fit a standard predictable profile, where their entire day is spent working, or worrying about their children, and spending a decent proportion of their income on consumer goods such as cars.
Spot on there. But you don't need lots of consumer goods to achieve this, just make your industries inefficient so that prices rise. Nationalisation, taxation and regulation can achieve this.
Caldera (back when SCO were called that) bought Digital Research, apparently just to get the right to sue MS over DRDOS.
3 months ago this was wound up. I suppose SCO's lawyers need to keep looking busy. Or maybe there's something more sinister going on, since this is Slashdot?
Years ago I knew a commissioning engineer who used to test hand-wired circuit boards that way. Didn't check it for shorts between the power planes first, just plugged in a good meaty power supply - if he saw smoke, he knew they used to be shorted together. This approach actually worked fine, until he got one on which a novice wireman had gridded the power planes together throughout, at about half inch intervals...
Don't forget, terrorists do research. Imagine an office building where someone can get taken on as a cleaner in one of the less sensitive office suites, without security checks. Obviously they get a key to that suite.
Now imagine you work there, in a different suite, in some counter-terrorism capacity. Do you start looking under your car for plastic explosive, or not?
Or imagine you work elsewhere, but a colleague has an office there and keeps your name and address handy...
security is SO important in the European capital of radical Islam
A bit rich coming (I strongly suspect) from the nation that funds the IRA... but basically I agree. Surveillance by the Government is far more of a problem than this, which is about surveillance by fellow citizens. Especially when the Government releases terrorists onto the streets, then claims it needs to watch us all as an anti-terrorist measure.
OK, but what do they do when HTML becomes obsolete? I know it's a hackneyed point, but education really does - in my experience - broaden the mind. After a degree in physics (because that was what I found interesting) I got a job in electronics without too much problem. Others, with more vocational electronics qualifications, found it easier. Since then I have moved fairly easily into systems design and control systems; some people who (over-) specialised in electronics are now struggling.
Slashdot Mirror
>>They used anti-terror laws against Iceland, who are not at all terrorists.
>When? Do you have a cite on this?
It's well known. Google "iceland terror" and - among lots of others - http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=a9R6kEktPff0&refer=europe
The government wound in some "independent" reviewer of anti-terror legislation to claim the bit of the Act they used wasn’t really anti-terror legislation. You can judge how independent he is by the fact that the same man stood up in Parliament a few days later to argue in favour of a (now defeated) proposal to allow the police to lock "terrorist suspects" up for 6 weeks at a stretch.
We used to sneer at all those tinpot Balkan dictatorships where you had to carry identity papers everywhere, the police could lock anyone up on a whim, and the only telephones you could buy were designed to allow Them to monitor you. And they used to make unbelievably weird claims about the evils of foreign governments. Then we went and elected a Labour government ...
What worked for me in that kind of situation was going to a small company (10-20 employees, the sort of outfit where you know and work with the owners of the business). You end up having to take on anything that's going, and sometimes find it's much more interesting than you thought.
They say (at least here in Britain, don’t know about elsewhere) that small businesses are less secure. I find they are also less likely to make casual sweeping decisions to close departments.
I suspect a whole lot of ISOification, COBITisation and ITILement will heading their way
Doubt it. This is the Civil Service - the people who draft legislation for the plebs to follow. They clearly think the Data Protection Act applies to other people, as sending this information at all (irrespective of security in transit) was apparently a breach of it. Note as well this is the third time recently - procedures have already twice been Tightened Up, To Prevent This Ever Happening Again.
Presumably, the owner mainly wanted a games console but thought it might be handy to have general purpose computing available as and when necessary?
And not everyone has space for a "cast-off 500MHz PC" as well as the games machine.
If people started identifying with their government
Ah, but which government?
Here in Britain we now have "the Government", meaning Tony Blair and his cronies at Westminster, and then a whole bunch of other talking shops - notably more popular among politicians than other people. There is the Scottish parliament, the Welsh parliament, various ex terrorists and their friends doing nothing much in Northern Ireland (which is possibly the point), and the EU over in Brussels. Not to mention the UN.
Every one of these entities - except the one in Northern Ireland - feels a need to justify its existence, to make its mark on people's lives. This costs money - especially for the EU, which among other things likes to be seen as the generous provider of subsidies to all and sundry.
When all these politicians stop inventing jobs for themselves, and start trying to do the real, necessary jobs properly and responsibly, the rest of us might start to support them - maybe even vote for mainstream party candidates again.
> No one is twisting your arm to use Microsoft products..
...
... you guessed it.
Then why does it hurt?
1. My kids go to school, where they run - guess what. They come home and insist they need MS Word, or Publisher, or Powerpoint, etc.. They don't say "I need to do so and so", because that isn't what they are taught. Oh, and guess who volunteered early on in the term of the present British government to provide IT training for teachers.
2. I do Unix support, and the machine I'm given to do it with runs - guess what. My working life is spent going through Win-to-Unix kludges to get needlessly limited access to the systems.
3. The kids come home, and want to play games. These come in versions that run on various proprietary consoles and
Quite the reverse. This behaviour benefits Windows more than Linux, by increasing its "market" share. This is borne out by the fact that - despite all the "activation" hype around XP and the threatening MS ads - it still seems to be possible to install and even keep updated pirate copies of Windows.
A massive outbreak of honesty would be the best thing that could happen to FOSS.
Then there are the speed cameras that track you wherever you drive. They were used after the murder of that policewoman in Bradford to track and identify the getaway car ... leading to the arrest of the man who'd been forced to hire it and had then apparently reported the fact to the police.
I hear the latest ticketing systems for railways now report back to Big Brother, too.
Undoubtedly evolution has done a good job on us, but we keep moving about. I'd bet that the people in the study suffering most from vitamin D deficiency were dark-skinned people living in high latitudes, and - at longer odds - that the Australians who piped up about skin cancer were all of European, not aboriginal extraction.
One problem with software patents is that software is pretty well solid inventions, where other products are not.
If you sit down to write some software, a relatively high proportion of your effort is actually spent on design; maybe like 25%, with the other 75% on testing, documentation etc. Manufacturing is close to zero.
Compare that with a hardware product such as a vacuum cleaner. The scope for ideas is limited, because the vacuum cleaner is a well-understood product. Nearly all of a business's capacity is devoted to manufacturing; a great deal of the design team's effort goes on things like safety testing (most software can't kill anyone, but a vacuum cleaner can).
In consequence the sheer number of ideas a software designer has to generate to get a product built becomes a problem. If every one of these ideas has to be checked against every possibly-relevant patent, software development will immediately bog down in patent lawyers and there will be no innovation.
Some large organisations work around this by cross-licensing agreements, effectively agreeing among themselves not to enforce their patent rights. This actually defeats the point of patents as protection for the described inventions; those organisations are not benefiting from their inventions as such, only from the fact that they have enough patents that others feel the need to let them join the no-patent-search club.
Any organisation with an innovative product but no existing stock of patents has no way to break in. No matter how brilliant its programmers/inventors, the dead weight of patent searches it needs to undertake to get a product out without infringment will sink it.
could you levitate a black hole against the force of gravity and feed it matter
Do both at once - feed the matter in fast enough, from underneath. You're now playing the world's most dangerous game of keepy-uppy.
Wonder if this would generate enough power to make the Alcubierre warp drive feasible?
Just tried it. Got a DVD from the shelf, put it in the drive. Started xine. Clicked "DVD"; it started playing, but no sound. Configured xine to use alsa, through its GUI, and restarted it as instructed. Voila, home entertainment PC (except no video recording, since I didn't buy the DVD recorder or TV tuner, both of which are available).
This shows 2 things.
Maybe Intel are going to tweak Fedora to autostart xine on detecting a video dvd, and make xine autodetect the sound system? Somehow I doubt it.
Conclusions:
Mind you ISTR there has already been mention of the terrible effect of terraforming on the Martian environment.
Hmmm - If
It seems to me easier to persuade ISPs than some governments (China? Brazil?). After all the ISPs are having to dig deeper into their pockets for the infrastructure to do the spammers' messages, and they aren't being paid.
If all ISPs refused to peer with spam-friendly outfits, or those hosting spammers' websites*, that would achieve the same thing.
* I don't distinguish between spammers who send bulk email and those who employ the former to advertise their junk.
Life, as lots of others have said. However ... ISTR Jupiter itself being rated as the most likely place in the Solar System to find life, bar none (even Earth). I know that was before the discovery of the ocean on Europa, but still I would have thought they'd try to avoid contaminating Jupiter too.
Far too often they act to protect the criminals. Remember the Tony Martin case.
Really? Who owns the Post Office, again?
Not in the only one I've ever been to (Czechoslovakia circa 1985). Cars, and other consumer goods, were hard to come by. Public transport was, however, heavily subsidised and therefore cheap and ubiquitous. Very likely this is related to the fact that cars go where the owner wants whereas public transport only takes you along the routes the State lays down.
Interesting how much pressure there is here in Britain to demonise cars and subsidise public transport these days.
> They want people to fit a standard predictable profile, where their entire day is spent working, or worrying about their children, and spending a decent proportion of their income on consumer goods such as cars.
Spot on there. But you don't need lots of consumer goods to achieve this, just make your industries inefficient so that prices rise. Nationalisation, taxation and regulation can achieve this.
Caldera (back when SCO were called that) bought Digital Research, apparently just to get the right to sue MS over DRDOS.
3 months ago this was wound up. I suppose SCO's lawyers need to keep looking busy. Or maybe there's something more sinister going on, since this is Slashdot?
Years ago I knew a commissioning engineer who used to test hand-wired circuit boards that way. Didn't check it for shorts between the power planes first, just plugged in a good meaty power supply - if he saw smoke, he knew they used to be shorted together. This approach actually worked fine, until he got one on which a novice wireman had gridded the power planes together throughout, at about half inch intervals ...
Well, not really. However it does seem to be true. Do a whois search
...etc
- and from the original article:
Nominet is "in contact" with Parliament and will confirm to anyone that asks that Parliament owns parliament.uk
So the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority says Nominet runs
One wonders why Nominet don't go so far as to include parliament.uk on their whois server, or do whatever else Thawte want to confirm registration?
Maybe it just comes down to money. If Parliament offered to pay them their usual fee to register the name, who would have a problem?
Oops - forgot the lawyers, who wouldn't have anything to write letters about at £££s per word.
Don't forget, terrorists do research. Imagine an office building where someone can get taken on as a cleaner in one of the less sensitive office suites, without security checks. Obviously they get a key to that suite.
...
Now imagine you work there, in a different suite, in some counter-terrorism capacity. Do you start looking under your car for plastic explosive, or not?
Or imagine you work elsewhere, but a colleague has an office there and keeps your name and address handy
security is SO important in the European capital of radical Islam
... but basically I agree. Surveillance by the Government is far more of a problem than this, which is about surveillance by fellow citizens. Especially when the Government releases terrorists onto the streets, then claims it needs to watch us all as an anti-terrorist measure.
A bit rich coming (I strongly suspect) from the nation that funds the IRA
Damp string? We had to get up at 2am to cycle back and forth to the POP and fetch the bits by hand, one at a time.
OK, but what do they do when HTML becomes obsolete? I know it's a hackneyed point, but education really does - in my experience - broaden the mind. After a degree in physics (because that was what I found interesting) I got a job in electronics without too much problem. Others, with more vocational electronics qualifications, found it easier. Since then I have moved fairly easily into systems design and control systems; some people who (over-) specialised in electronics are now struggling.