... because, under European Union law at least, it's illegal to either:
Use said data with express and explicit permission from it's 'owner', which is the person it pertains to
or
Store such data of any kind outside of the EU.
If they're breaking these laws, they should beware. Some EU countries, unlike the US, seemingly, take the privacy of their citizens/subjects very seriously.
Mind you, having set up an account with amazon.com and finding that the information in my account is stored independently of that for amazon.co.uk (so I would have a blank account on amazon.com, were I to move stateside or want something delivered there or somesuch), I'm annoyed with them. Not to mention their 'patent' abuses...
Then, surely, you, by failing to take action, are in some way, if only slightly, 'profitting' from this action (in that your time, which you could spend relaxing/earning money/having fun/etc., which is arguably a profit of some sort on your part), and thereby profiting from harm caused.
Does this mean that you consider it ethical to profit from the suffering of others?
Well, that's another reason why you guys on the wrong side of the Pond need a government-funded health 'insurance' system (like the UK's NHS, and similar systems in most of the civilised world) - if the government has to pay the health bills, not just for the smoker, but also for the rest of the population he or she attempts to kill, then taxing them becomes much more intuitively defendable. Of course, anything that even/looks/ like the state will get in the way of 'private enterprise' (i.e., making huge amounts of money from getting people to pay too much for their health, something that is on our (European) bills of human rights, and arguably should be on yours) will be struck down immediately by a bunch of fools who cannot see that capitalism is not necessarily the Best Way, collectively known as the American People.
Indeed, much the same reasoning applies to the horrendous energy overspend and pollution problems caused by government intervention, subsidy and protectionism exercised to keep foreign, cheaper, better quality, and less pollution products from effective competition in the American marketplace, and sensible politics from the shores of the USA. Ah well, your loss (of life), but ours too (pollution of the world at a rate of 5 fold per capita than the rest of the 1st world, and even more so than other places, contributing to extreme climate change now and in the immediate future).
America - the small former colony that refuses to act anything more than a child in its playpen of international affairs.
The 'phones currently on most planes are low-level satellite up-links (normally the Racal MCS-6000 nowadays, which has an uplink bandwidth of about 64K, IIRC) which are then split into up to 8 lines (radio for cockpit and 7 speech lines of about 8Kbps - if not all lines are in use, they have 3 lines of 17.8K, or somesuch, and an extra one. This, as you can guess, is not great, but when it came out, some years (5?) ago, it was pretty nifty.
Now, however, broadband satellite uplinks are on the way - with a 128K + shared data pipe connection for passengers, and dynamically portioned speech bandwidth of about the same, featuring useful items like a data uplink channel that relays data about the plane's systems to an external system (redundancy for the black box system, and useful as an aide in diagnosing problems from the ground as well as in the air). These should be avaliable RSN, and will be fitted to a plane near you soon. Hopefully:-).
[Snip]
And that's why the current incarnation, or perhaps all, of capitalism sucks - wealth is granted unproportionately to merit, or even ability, and thus the way society operates is distorted beyond what the people who make up the society themselves regard as 'just'.
But then, I can't think of a better way to run a country that will work with us humans as we are (greedy, selfish,...). Ah well;-(
--
Jon Chatow
The problem as I see it is that.com has become the 'big' TLD, and almost all companies marketing themselves in such a way that the non-aware man on the street thinks that all domain names end.com.
Here in the UK, I get very annoyed when I go to a.com site, which used to mean 'international company', and instead it's Bob's Grocery store or whatever, taking up a site that could be more usefully used by someone who wasn't going to refuse to sell outside of his state, let alone country.
There's notbing per se wrong with.co.us; the problem is marketing. Blame Sun;-)
Agreed - for those who can't be bothered to work it out, $3300 ~ £2060. This is for the X[G]9 - for the X[G]19, an even nicer laptop from Sony with CD-RW drive as standard, priced at $4000 on the US website, the equivalent price is about £2500, significantly less than the cost of the X[G]9 in the UK. The X[G]18 and X[G]19 are not even avaliable in the UK, or the rest of Europe for that matter according Sony Europe's website.
Given V.A.T. (Europe-wide sales tax) at 17.5%, the money the seller of a £3600 machine would get would be £3060. This means that this Sony laptop costs £1000 ~ $1600 to ship the machine from the US to the UK; to 'ship' an adult person here and back by air costs about half this.
Extortionate? Certainly. Why? Because Sony, and the computer market generally, is allowed. Or rather, the US authorities have the sense to encourage competition, not excessive pricing.
I must say that, although I agree that in the USA, the United Kingdom, and indeed throughout the world, there is by no means an accurate representation of the various levels of the socio-ethnic groupings present, I do not agree with your interpretation of the comment you are replying to as semi-inflammatory attacks in certain systems.
I do not believe that the correct way of redressing this problem is to give people jobs by quota - that is merely discrimination by other means. I have discussed this with friends who, given a selection of candidates, have evaluated one as far better than the others but then have had to select another for the job because the new selection is female, or from an ethnic background, or whatever. This is obviously a form, albeit a less discussed and less recognised form, of discrimination.
The only real way to build equality is to make sure that the levels of education are, for all, both equal and excellent. This must mean that we must make sure that each child has the same, perfect family with the same income, the same surroundings, the same upbringing, the same number and character of siblings, and so on (as a recent article in The Spectator commentated). Even if we accept such totalitarianism and, in some respects, socialism, we would sacrifice the diversity of Society for the purpose of perceived equality, which may well be not what we really want to end up with as our society.
All very possible - I use Notepad and otherwise to edit all HTML; auto-indentation and syntax-based colouring systems help wonders (see the webpages for Zap for some ideas). Mind you, I don't really consider frames and so on as markup, more layout. But each to his/her own..
Slashdot Mirror
... because, under European Union law at least, it's illegal to either:
or
If they're breaking these laws, they should beware. Some EU countries, unlike the US, seemingly, take the privacy of their citizens/subjects very seriously.
Mind you, having set up an account with amazon.com and finding that the information in my account is stored independently of that for amazon.co.uk (so I would have a blank account on amazon.com, were I to move stateside or want something delivered there or somesuch), I'm annoyed with them. Not to mention their 'patent' abuses...
Then, surely, you, by failing to take action, are in some way, if only slightly, 'profitting' from this action (in that your time, which you could spend relaxing/earning money/having fun/etc., which is arguably a profit of some sort on your part), and thereby profiting from harm caused.
Does this mean that you consider it ethical to profit from the suffering of others?
Err, British. Tim(othy) Berners-Lee. ;-)
But hey, most people reading this think that all British people are English...
Well, that's another reason why you guys on the wrong side of the Pond need a government-funded health 'insurance' system (like the UK's NHS, and similar systems in most of the civilised world) - if the government has to pay the health bills, not just for the smoker, but also for the rest of the population he or she attempts to kill, then taxing them becomes much more intuitively defendable. Of course, anything that even /looks/ like the state will get in the way of 'private enterprise' (i.e., making huge amounts of money from getting people to pay too much for their health, something that is on our (European) bills of human rights, and arguably should be on yours) will be struck down immediately by a bunch of fools who cannot see that capitalism is not necessarily the Best Way, collectively known as the American People.
Indeed, much the same reasoning applies to the horrendous energy overspend and pollution problems caused by government intervention, subsidy and protectionism exercised to keep foreign, cheaper, better quality, and less pollution products from effective competition in the American marketplace, and sensible politics from the shores of the USA. Ah well, your loss (of life), but ours too (pollution of the world at a rate of 5 fold per capita than the rest of the 1st world, and even more so than other places, contributing to extreme climate change now and in the immediate future).
America - the small former colony that refuses to act anything more than a child in its playpen of international affairs.
The 'phones currently on most planes are low-level satellite up-links (normally the Racal MCS-6000 nowadays, which has an uplink bandwidth of about 64K, IIRC) which are then split into up to 8 lines (radio for cockpit and 7 speech lines of about 8Kbps - if not all lines are in use, they have 3 lines of 17.8K, or somesuch, and an extra one. This, as you can guess, is not great, but when it came out, some years (5?) ago, it was pretty nifty.
:-).
Now, however, broadband satellite uplinks are on the way - with a 128K + shared data pipe connection for passengers, and dynamically portioned speech bandwidth of about the same, featuring useful items like a data uplink channel that relays data about the plane's systems to an external system (redundancy for the black box system, and useful as an aide in diagnosing problems from the ground as well as in the air). These should be avaliable RSN, and will be fitted to a plane near you soon. Hopefully
[Snip] And that's why the current incarnation, or perhaps all, of capitalism sucks - wealth is granted unproportionately to merit, or even ability, and thus the way society operates is distorted beyond what the people who make up the society themselves regard as 'just'. But then, I can't think of a better way to run a country that will work with us humans as we are (greedy, selfish, ...). Ah well ;-(
--
Jon Chatow
The problem as I see it is that .com has become the 'big' TLD, and almost all companies marketing themselves in such a way that the non-aware man on the street thinks that all domain names end .com.
.com site, which used to mean 'international company', and instead it's Bob's Grocery store or whatever, taking up a site that could be more usefully used by someone who wasn't going to refuse to sell outside of his state, let alone country.
.co.us; the problem is marketing. Blame Sun ;-)
Here in the UK, I get very annoyed when I go to a
There's notbing per se wrong with
Agreed - for those who can't be bothered to work it out, $3300 ~ £2060. This is for the X[G]9 - for the X[G]19, an even nicer laptop from Sony with CD-RW drive as standard, priced at $4000 on the US website, the equivalent price is about £2500, significantly less than the cost of the X[G]9 in the UK. The X[G]18 and X[G]19 are not even avaliable in the UK, or the rest of Europe for that matter according Sony Europe's website.
Given V.A.T. (Europe-wide sales tax) at 17.5%, the money the seller of a £3600 machine would get would be £3060. This means that this Sony laptop costs £1000 ~ $1600 to ship the machine from the US to the UK; to 'ship' an adult person here and back by air costs about half this.
Extortionate? Certainly. Why? Because Sony, and the computer market generally, is allowed. Or rather, the US authorities have the sense to encourage competition, not excessive pricing.
Well, is this product any good? Does it work well over low bandwidths? etc...
I must say that, although I agree that in the USA, the United Kingdom, and indeed throughout the world, there is by no means an accurate representation of the various levels of the socio-ethnic groupings present, I do not agree with your interpretation of the comment you are replying to as semi-inflammatory attacks in certain systems.
I do not believe that the correct way of redressing this problem is to give people jobs by quota - that is merely discrimination by other means. I have discussed this with friends who, given a selection of candidates, have evaluated one as far better than the others but then have had to select another for the job because the new selection is female, or from an ethnic background, or whatever. This is obviously a form, albeit a less discussed and less recognised form, of discrimination.
The only real way to build equality is to make sure that the levels of education are, for all, both equal and excellent. This must mean that we must make sure that each child has the same, perfect family with the same income, the same surroundings, the same upbringing, the same number and character of siblings, and so on (as a recent article in The Spectator commentated). Even if we accept such totalitarianism and, in some respects, socialism, we would sacrifice the diversity of Society for the purpose of perceived equality, which may well be not what we really want to end up with as our society.
In equality, homogeneity.
All very possible - I use Notepad and otherwise to edit all HTML; auto-indentation and syntax-based colouring systems help wonders (see the webpages for Zap for some ideas). Mind you, I don't really consider frames and so on as markup, more layout. But each to his/her own..