It could be worse. In the UK our moral guardians are trying to protect us from harm by criminalising the writing of descriptions of violent sexual acts.
That's not actually true. I happen to have the law you're thinking of (section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008) open in another tab. What it actually says is: "It is an offence for a person to be in possession of an extreme pornographic image" (and then goes on to define what constitutes such an image). Only images count.
Somewhat offtopic, but what had failed to catch my attention until recently about this act is "SCHEDULE 14 Special rules relating to providers of information society services". This specifies that anyone in the UK who provides information services is breaking the law if they possess such an image anywhere in the world, whether or not the image is legal in the part of the world it is located.
I suspect that the reason that these, and others, don't make the Nebula Award lists is that the authors wouldn't consider accepting a Nebula because they don't write SF&F from their points of view.
There's also, I suspect, a political aspect. If you're a writer who identifies themselves with the SF genre (as the judges for the Nebula are), you're unlikely to vote for a book by a writer who apparently considers themselves 'above' SF. This also applies to the Hugo, although with a larger voting base it's a little harder to upset the judges.
That was followed by discovering Tolkien in 1974 through a friend, and then joining the SF book club (back then we consided the term "Sci Fi" to be a perjorative) and quickly found Stephen Donaldson.
Nothing has changed.
Lately, I've tried to pick up more recent SF only to be sadly disappointed in the quality. None of the current authors seem to rise to even half the level of authors I've mentioned.
The problem is, every author you've mentioned above is considered a classic writer, a master of some specific aspect of the genre. Who are this generation's classics? We'll not know for a while to come, yet. In the meanwhile, have you tried Vinge (A Fire on the Deep)? Banks (Excession)? Stross (Singularity Sky)? Branching out to fantasy (but avoiding Tolkien-alikes) have you tried Clark (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell) or Mieville (Perdido Street Station)? Have you taken your time to look through the recent lists of Hugo winners, and pick out anything that sounds interesting to you?
When you go to BN or Borders, the SF aisle seems to be burdened with Star Trek, Star Wars, and other TV series related books.
My local bookshops seem to be about half and half. Also, don't be too quick to write off the media tie-ins. There's some good writing going on in those series, and always has been. They're getting a little old now, but you should be able to get these two Star Trek books still:
* Galactic Whirlpool by David Gerrold (don't be put off by the title) * The Final Reflection by John M. Ford
Oh, come on... I admit it should've been done sooner. But even Spielberg isn't good enough to be able to release the fourth installment before the third!
By which I mean production code, not the 'Hello World!' you did in Jr. High. I'll go first. In the mid 90's I wrote a COBOL program to link a mainframe to a HP printer to print transcripts at a uni. The SYSPROG set up the VTAM lines and I glued the PCL together with COBOL. I checked in about 3 years ago and a friend of mine said they were still running it. So at that time it was pushing 10 years. Which makes me proud actually.
Anyone else with a story?
Oldest code I know to be in use: some time around 1995 or 1996 I wrote the RDF output driver and program loader for NASM. These have been updated since, but some of the original code from them is still in use. They are still in quite frequent use by hobbyist operating system projects.
Oldest code that may be in use: in 1991 I wrote a DOS utility to scan for changes to.EXE files which I released as freeware. I have no idea how many people ended up using it, but it may still be out there on some old systems. I last saw it installed on a Win98 system about 5 years ago.
From my understand a legal document is only considered "legal" when it is signed, sealed and delivered (know this is true for contracts, think it is also applic with documents like this - inferred contract?). So since the letter didn't have enough postage, technically it wasn't delivered
So my gut feeling would be that the letter isn't legally binding. Would be fun to argue in court
Jaj
This is a legal notice, which is slightly different from a contract because it's expected that the recipient might try to claim that it was never received, whether or not it actually was. Therefore, the court will generally assume that it has been delivered as long as proof that it was posted is available.
But according to this article, blanketing the nation with CCTV doesn't have the same effect on either the city of London or the country as a whole.
Except the country hasn't been blanketed in surveillance cameras. Seriously. There are one or two in high crime areas, really. Nearest one to me is... well, frankly, I don't know. There are some privately owned ones, but I don't think there's a government camera within 10 miles of me.
Implementing mass surveillance of all Her Majesty's subjects going about their daily business neither reduces crime nor leads to significantly more convictions.
I'd like to see your source that states that CCTV coverage does not reduce crime. All studies I have seen so far suggest that it does reduce crime when it is deployed in the right area (i.e., high crime areas where there are no other nearby areas that the criminals could simply move to).
The way I figure it, well, it could just be ignored as we ignore the HTML 3.0 standards now if we wanted.
HTML 3 isn't a standard. Neither is HTML 4, or any version of XHTML. We call them "standards" as a shortcut for "technical recommendations made by an industry body that is not an officially recognised standards organisation".
The ongoing process is to make OOXML an actual standard. ISO is the world's best recognised standards organisation. If OOXML is made into an ISO standard, it will likely become a legal requirement to use it in numerous situations. Certainly many current ISO standards are subject to such regulations.
As for technical merit, the OOXML standard is overly complex, described in an extremely long document that doesn't fully explain the meaning of all the terms in use within it, some of which are probably not adequately understood by anybody who doesn't work on the MS Word codebase. It is impossible for anybody other than Microsoft to produce a conforming implementation, and apparently not even Microsoft have bothered to do that. As far as standards go, this one would be broken.
I usually get mod points about once a week or two and haven't seen any come my way in about the past three weeks.
That's about how long it took me to notice too. I haven't had any mod points for somewhere in the region of 3 years now, despite persistently having high karma over this period. Welcome to the ranks of the mod-banned, slashdot's elite secret society.
Re:Will it like my Hauppauge PVR-150 TV card
on
Slackware 12.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's my hope that someone can tell me that "Yes, Slackware will work for you."
Slackware will work for you if you know how to make it work. Slackware is a distribution for experts. Slackware is a distribution for people who don't mind^W^Wwant to get their hands dirty.
The Clint Eastwood movie Sudden Impact has a violent rape scene; and in fact the movie is about the rape victim's search for vengeance.
So if any of you UK residents have any Clint Eastwood movies your best bet is to get rid of them NOW before your thought police come for you.
Not quite yet.
There are two things to bear in mind:
1. The law only applies to pornography, which is essentially defined as something whose primary purpose is to provide sexual arousal. Sudden Impact will be legal for the same reason that Lolita is (despite its depiction of underage sex) -- it's primary purpose is entertainment of a different kind.
2. I haven't seen Sudden Impact, but I'd question whether its rape scene meets the requirements of the law being considered, which IIRC requires an act to be depicted that would be likely to result in death or severe disablement.
a two-finger vertical stroking motion allows you to scroll up and down through documents
I had an acer laptop about 4 or 5 years ago that supported a similar gesture for scrolling. This is nothing new. The rest of it, perhaps, but scrolling gestures have been around a while...
Been there, done that with Ubuntu...but the problem remains: The adapter is of USB form factor and its connection manager works only with Windows.
Most mobile internet connection devices emulate USB modems. Have you tried modprobe usb_serial to see what happens? You may need to play around with USB Modeswitch if the device is one of the new 'auto installing' devices.
security firm named Qinetiq Security firm? Are people starting to forget that Qinetiq is a privatised government agency (formally known as DERA, the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency)?
Whereas in Germany, and in some other European countries, they have to pay (quite a bit) you more for every KW/h you sell them than for the ones they sell you.
Hmmm...
1. Acquire two neighbouring houses 2. Use one house's supply to provide power back to the grid via the other 3. PROFIT!!!
We prescribe these drugs to millions of kids who most likely have nothing "wrong" with them, and people have a problem when some adults do the same thing?
Ritalin (Methylphenidate) is a highly addictive controlled drug with a method of action that is very similar to that of cocaine. The fact that it is regularly prescribed to kids is one that a lot of people are unhappy about anyway.
I have serious doubts that these drugs are actually helping anybody do research who didn't already have some kind of problem, but it's none of our damn business, either.
That's a good question. The article doesn't mention how their survey filtered out people who are taking these drugs for properly diagnosed medical conditions. I don't know what proportion of adults suffer from ADHD, but I'm willing to bet its substantially higher in academic circles (one of the key symptoms -- obsessively thinking about whatever it is that has captivated your interest to the point you cannot concentrate on anything else -- is something that I guess would actually help in a research environment).
Slashdot Mirror
It could be worse. In the UK our moral guardians are trying to protect us from harm by criminalising the writing of descriptions of violent sexual acts.
That's not actually true. I happen to have the law you're thinking of (section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008) open in another tab. What it actually says is: "It is an offence for a person to be in possession of an extreme pornographic image" (and then goes on to define what constitutes such an image). Only images count.
Somewhat offtopic, but what had failed to catch my attention until recently about this act is "SCHEDULE 14 Special rules relating to providers of information society services". This specifies that anyone in the UK who provides information services is breaking the law if they possess such an image anywhere in the world, whether or not the image is legal in the part of the world it is located.
Now to business, :)
Firebug Official for FF3 Please
Err... firebug 1.1 supports FF3 just fine. No need to hack around with it like so many other addons require...
Seconded. There are a lot of great SF community blogs, and most of my reading list comes from the discussions on them these days.
I suspect that the reason that these, and others, don't make the Nebula Award lists is that the authors wouldn't consider accepting a Nebula because they don't write SF&F from their points of view.
There's also, I suspect, a political aspect. If you're a writer who identifies themselves with the SF genre (as the judges for the Nebula are), you're unlikely to vote for a book by a writer who apparently considers themselves 'above' SF. This also applies to the Hugo, although with a larger voting base it's a little harder to upset the judges.
That was followed by discovering Tolkien in 1974 through a friend, and then joining the SF book club (back then we consided the term "Sci Fi" to be a perjorative) and quickly found Stephen Donaldson.
Nothing has changed.
Lately, I've tried to pick up more recent SF only to be sadly disappointed in the quality. None of the current authors seem to rise to even half the level of authors I've mentioned.
The problem is, every author you've mentioned above is considered a classic writer, a master of some specific aspect of the genre. Who are this generation's classics? We'll not know for a while to come, yet. In the meanwhile, have you tried Vinge (A Fire on the Deep)? Banks (Excession)? Stross (Singularity Sky)? Branching out to fantasy (but avoiding Tolkien-alikes) have you tried Clark (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell) or Mieville (Perdido Street Station)? Have you taken your time to look through the recent lists of Hugo winners, and pick out anything that sounds interesting to you?
When you go to BN or Borders, the SF aisle seems to be burdened with Star Trek, Star Wars, and other TV series related books.
My local bookshops seem to be about half and half. Also, don't be too quick to write off the media tie-ins. There's some good writing going on in those series, and always has been. They're getting a little old now, but you should be able to get these two Star Trek books still:
* Galactic Whirlpool by David Gerrold (don't be put off by the title)
* The Final Reflection by John M. Ford
Both are, IMO, excellent novels.
Oh, come on... I admit it should've been done sooner. But even Spielberg isn't good enough to be able to release the fourth installment before the third!
No, but to Lucas it's childs play.
If you let someone else select your books, you'll get books that are to someone else's taste.
Yes, but if you find somebody whose taste overlaps yours well enough, this isn't an issue. The problem is finding that person.
That being said, I'd have to agree with bball99 - Tor has sent me about 10 books for free and so far I've read (and liked) the first 3.
From what I've read about the offer, I suspect those books are being picked by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Just so you know.
By which I mean production code, not the 'Hello World!' you did in Jr. High. I'll go first. In the mid 90's I wrote a COBOL program to link a mainframe to a HP printer to print transcripts at a uni. The SYSPROG set up the VTAM lines and I glued the PCL together with COBOL. I checked in about 3 years ago and a friend of mine said they were still running it. So at that time it was pushing 10 years. Which makes me proud actually.
.EXE files which I released as freeware. I have no idea how many people ended up using it, but it may still be out there on some old systems. I last saw it installed on a Win98 system about 5 years ago.
Anyone else with a story?
Oldest code I know to be in use: some time around 1995 or 1996 I wrote the RDF output driver and program loader for NASM. These have been updated since, but some of the original code from them is still in use. They are still in quite frequent use by hobbyist operating system projects.
Oldest code that may be in use: in 1991 I wrote a DOS utility to scan for changes to
From my understand a legal document is only considered "legal" when it is signed, sealed and delivered (know this is true for contracts, think it is also applic with documents like this - inferred contract?). So since the letter didn't have enough postage, technically it wasn't delivered
So my gut feeling would be that the letter isn't legally binding. Would be fun to argue in court
Jaj
This is a legal notice, which is slightly different from a contract because it's expected that the recipient might try to claim that it was never received, whether or not it actually was. Therefore, the court will generally assume that it has been delivered as long as proof that it was posted is available.
But according to this article, blanketing the nation with CCTV doesn't have the same effect on either the city of London or the country as a whole.
Except the country hasn't been blanketed in surveillance cameras. Seriously. There are one or two in high crime areas, really. Nearest one to me is... well, frankly, I don't know. There are some privately owned ones, but I don't think there's a government camera within 10 miles of me.
Implementing mass surveillance of all Her Majesty's subjects going about their daily business neither reduces crime nor leads to significantly more convictions.
I'd like to see your source that states that CCTV coverage does not reduce crime. All studies I have seen so far suggest that it does reduce crime when it is deployed in the right area (i.e., high crime areas where there are no other nearby areas that the criminals could simply move to).
Or any variation of so called structured BASIC?
Where do you draw the line? The introduction of procedures? IF...END IF blocks? Dropping line numbers? The addition of object-oriented facilities?
Serious question... each of these is actually a pretty minor change, so where does the language stop being BASIC?
BTW: why does it say "Status: deleted" (with an icon of a garbage can) on the ISO 29500 page? I must be hallucinating.
Because that document has been superceded by these four documents.
The way I figure it, well, it could just be ignored as we ignore the HTML 3.0 standards now if we wanted.
HTML 3 isn't a standard. Neither is HTML 4, or any version of XHTML. We call them "standards" as a shortcut for "technical recommendations made by an industry body that is not an officially recognised standards organisation".
The ongoing process is to make OOXML an actual standard. ISO is the world's best recognised standards organisation. If OOXML is made into an ISO standard, it will likely become a legal requirement to use it in numerous situations. Certainly many current ISO standards are subject to such regulations.
As for technical merit, the OOXML standard is overly complex, described in an extremely long document that doesn't fully explain the meaning of all the terms in use within it, some of which are probably not adequately understood by anybody who doesn't work on the MS Word codebase. It is impossible for anybody other than Microsoft to produce a conforming implementation, and apparently not even Microsoft have bothered to do that. As far as standards go, this one would be broken.
And the "fetch more comments" link doesn't work; they probably only tested it in Firefox.
Funny. As a Firefox user, I was thinking they'd probably only tested it in Explorer...
I usually get mod points about once a week or two and haven't seen any come my way in about the past three weeks.
That's about how long it took me to notice too. I haven't had any mod points for somewhere in the region of 3 years now, despite persistently having high karma over this period. Welcome to the ranks of the mod-banned, slashdot's elite secret society.
It's my hope that someone can tell me that "Yes, Slackware will work for you."
Slackware will work for you if you know how to make it work. Slackware is a distribution for experts. Slackware is a distribution for people who don't mind^W^Wwant to get their hands dirty.
As the law stands in the UK you have have sex at 16 lawfully but can not take photographs or record it on video as the participants are under 18.
This isn't quite true. The law contains a specific exception for images of somebody you are involved in a sexual relationship with.
Of course, if you split up, you'll have to destroy them...
The Clint Eastwood movie Sudden Impact has a violent rape scene; and in fact the movie is about the rape victim's search for vengeance.
So if any of you UK residents have any Clint Eastwood movies your best bet is to get rid of them NOW before your thought police come for you.
Not quite yet.
There are two things to bear in mind:
1. The law only applies to pornography, which is essentially defined as something whose primary purpose is to provide sexual arousal. Sudden Impact will be legal for the same reason that Lolita is (despite its depiction of underage sex) -- it's primary purpose is entertainment of a different kind.
2. I haven't seen Sudden Impact, but I'd question whether its rape scene meets the requirements of the law being considered, which IIRC requires an act to be depicted that would be likely to result in death or severe disablement.
Wow. I've just realised that I never see spam on slashdot; this is the first one I ever remember seeing.
a two-finger vertical stroking motion allows you to scroll up and down through documents
I had an acer laptop about 4 or 5 years ago that supported a similar gesture for scrolling. This is nothing new. The rest of it, perhaps, but scrolling gestures have been around a while...
Been there, done that with Ubuntu...but the problem remains: The adapter is of USB form factor and its connection manager works only with Windows.
Most mobile internet connection devices emulate USB modems. Have you tried modprobe usb_serial to see what happens? You may need to play around with USB Modeswitch if the device is one of the new 'auto installing' devices.
Whereas in Germany, and in some other European countries, they have to pay (quite a bit) you more for every KW/h you sell them than for the ones they sell you.
Hmmm...
1. Acquire two neighbouring houses
2. Use one house's supply to provide power back to the grid via the other
3. PROFIT!!!
(Not even a "..." in this one!)
We prescribe these drugs to millions of kids who most likely have nothing "wrong" with them, and people have a problem when some adults do the same thing?
Ritalin (Methylphenidate) is a highly addictive controlled drug with a method of action that is very similar to that of cocaine. The fact that it is regularly prescribed to kids is one that a lot of people are unhappy about anyway.
I have serious doubts that these drugs are actually helping anybody do research who didn't already have some kind of problem, but it's none of our damn business, either.
That's a good question. The article doesn't mention how their survey filtered out people who are taking these drugs for properly diagnosed medical conditions. I don't know what proportion of adults suffer from ADHD, but I'm willing to bet its substantially higher in academic circles (one of the key symptoms -- obsessively thinking about whatever it is that has captivated your interest to the point you cannot concentrate on anything else -- is something that I guess would actually help in a research environment).
Not when an 18 year old kid who's never seen a 200 meg hard drive is writing the review.
200? Luxury! In my day, we had an operating system imposed limit of 32, and considered ourselves lucky if we had that much.
(Sorry. The post was asking for it.)