Exactly what I was thinking... After reading the quote from the article, I read the actual article in its long winded and boring entirety to find out what the answer to the question is (my guess is the iPod), turns out anonymous fuckface quoted the very fucking last paragraph of the article, getting us all curious for nothing...
Thanks a bundle, asshat, I just wasted 5 minutes of my life thanks to you!
I've been using it for years; I just bound the previous/next desktop to the same keys used under gnome (CTRL+ALT+Left/Right), and it works just fine. Not as cool as the spinning cube in xgl/aiglx though...;)
You don't think it's possible that a computer geek from a rich family might have at some point in her life used IRIX, or at least used it enough to recognize a very distinctive tech demo that came with IRIX at the time and could be used as a file manager?
So if I were to put you in a nuclear power plant that's about to blow, you'd be able to save the day because you happen to have a Windows XP machine (Hey, I know this! This is Windows!) with a file manager (Windows Explorer, obviously) sitting there on that desk?
I have no trouble whatsoever with little geek kids knowing UNIX; that's entirely plausible. But it's a far stretch to assume that they can figure out how to control the whole park just because they're familiar with the OS running on the servers...
When Gonzalez says it's only for kiddie porn, he knows it's not true, because he's a lawyer.
Absolutely; we all know how porn works. You don't just download it once, and then jack off to it indefinitely. You always need fresh material. So if you want to catch someone who downloaded kiddy porn once, just wait till he does it again. Just like us regular porn leechers the kiddy porn downloader also needs his regular fix. All you have to do to catch him is get a court order to sniff his traffic and wiretap his phone/cellphone, and sooner or later you'll catch him redhanded. Sure, you won't catch the guys who downloaded that stuff just once. Big deal; those guys probably downloaded it by accident (or perhaps out of curiosity); after checking out what the hell it was they downloaded in the first place, they found out it wasn't what they thought it was, or they weren't interested after all, and erased the crap.
Or hey, how about you just get a court order to search the suspect's computers? Kiddy porn is far too hard to come by for those guys to just delete it after three wank sessions, and chances are you'll even find photos and magazines stashed away somewhere at his place. Same logic applies to the distributors btw; you can't distribute what you don't have.
So there's really no reason to ask for longer data retention for the reasons quoted. That's just a cover story; I wonder what the real story is though...
You're just seeing half the picture here. It doesn't matter that the price would go up if the price of energy doubles; it doesn't matter the price would be cheaper if they didn't offer showers. What matters is he pays for it anyway, and he won't get any price reduction if he doesn't use their showers, so the grandparent was completely correct in asserting that this, to him, seems like a valid way of paying less for his energy usage.
Next time you call someone an idiot and an irrational punk, make sure your own statements are correct. Sure, it won't make you look like an arrogant prick who just got owned in the eyes of half the slashdot community, but that's not necessarily a bad thing...
In Britain, there is a TV license. Just out of curiosity, is there a possibility here in the US to get a music license and just be allowed to listen to what you want, when you want, or are we stuck with the buy plastic CD even though we don't want a plastic CD?
The TV licence is a licence that allows you to pick up TV broadcasts on a TV set or a similar device intended to display the broadcasts to you. It is NOT a licence to watch what you want, when you want. It is NOT a license to watch movies that haven't aired yet without buying a plastic DVD or VHS/Betamax cassette. And just to be complete: it is NOT a license to download a movie you missed on TV either. It's ONLY a license to watch TV broadcasts.
However, I would applaud a licence such as the one you propose. Government sponsored popular culture, paid for by the taxpayers. Eat what you want, as much as you want. The problem is it's never gonna happen; it's economically not feasible. Besides, even if we could assure the entertainment industry those taxes would net them the same amount of money than they make now on record sales etc..., they would still not be interested, since the people could now consume a lot more for the same money.
Based on this, it might sound like a good idea to go to a model where culture/entertainment is done by the government instead of the current capitalistic model; culture and entertainment would surely become a lot cheaper. However, when the government is the only source of culture/entertainment, there's always the danger that it will result in propaganda and/or cencorship.
Many cars have computers, and those computers have software. Also creative nonfunctional elements which could appear in paint jobs, seat fabric, etc.
Hmm, good point; the design of the car may be (and probably is) copyrighted indeed. The same might hold up for parts of the car, such as patterns in the fabric used for the seats or things like that. Thanks for pointing that out.
If all works of art (using the broad term here) were impossible or prohibitively impractical/expensive to copy, copyright law would never have existed because there simply wouldn't be any need for it.
I disagree. For example, paintings became copyrightable prior to the development of photography. There's never been a magic technology that allows copying to occur more easily for infringers than for copyright holders. At most there is parity between them, which means it would be exactly as easy for the copyright holder to make a copy as it would be for anyone else. Often economies of scale favor the copyright holder, actually. One more CD made at the factory is much cheaper than if I burn one on a CDR.
Heh, I disagree with your statement as well. Paintings were easy to reproduce long before the invention of photography. The person reproducing the painting merely copied an existing design; the original artist is the one who did all the hard work of coming up with it and getting it onto a canvas in the first place. Painting is a little more than just applying some brushstrokes against canvas; it involves coming up with a design in the first place (unless you paint a portrait/landscape/still life/... based on real world people/scenes/objects/... you can observe while you paint), then correctly drawing the rough outlines onto the canvas, choosing the correct base and top paint colors (yes, paintings use layers) etc... Copying is a lot easier in comparison. Or to put it in terms most of us will have no trouble understanding: I played many Mozart, Beethoven etc... pieces on the piano. Doesn't mean I could've composed them though.
Copyright has nothing to do with whether potentially infringing actions are easy or hard. It's irrelevant.
Correct. But since physical objects aren't copyrighted, it doesn't matter. Everything that's copyrighted is pretty trivial to copy anyway. If all works of art (using the broad term here) were impossible or prohibitively impractical/expensive to copy, copyright law would never have existed because there simply wouldn't be any need for it. However, you are correct in pointing out that the effort involved in making a copy of a copyrighted work is irrelevant.
Copyright applies to ideas, physical items don't need copyright
And yet, plenty of tangible works are copyrighted, from sculptures to architectural works. And you don't need a replicator to make copies of them, by the way.
Hmm... Not sure. What's copyrighted is the work of art. In the case of a CD, the work of art is not the physical medium itself, nor the bitpattern contained on the reflective surface, but the music that's represented by that bitpattern. Copying it to audio cassette results in a radically different physical medium, the storage pattern completely changes as well, and even the storage technique (digital vs analog) is completely different; in fact, you couldn't deviate more from the original physical object. It is, however, still considered a reproduction of the same work of art. In the case of a statue or painting though, the work of art is directly tied to the physical medium. However, what is the "work of art" being copyrighted here? The physical object, or the abstract idea or concept represented by the physical object? Frankly, I have no idea... Not that it matters: reproducing the idea means reproducing the physical object. So the point is moot, no matter what side of the line the point happens to fall on.
Bad analogy. Here's a better one: crimes are committed every day. Everyone I meet is a potential murderer. So it's OK for me to stripsearch every person I meet on the street, and it's OK for me to break into everyones houses to search for the gun they might intend to shoot me with.
We are not talking about the right to take action when the evidence is clearly there, like you suggest. We're talking about the right to search for evidence without proper authorisation, under the guise of "protecting the people". A government that protects me must protect me not only from physical harm, but also from loss of rights. How can they do that by means of invading those rights they're supposed to protect in the first place?
That being said, I'm sure the government doesn't care either way. Black ops anyone? If some matter demands immediate action, legal or not, the government will find a solution. It usually involves a sniper, explosives, or a team of paracommandos. And frankly, I don't care either. I know I'll never be the target of such treatment because the government makes damn sure they got the right guy before they take him out; they don't just send in the "last resort" crew for just about any petty thief. The things that worry me more are the things they'll have less of a problem rationalising and justifying than murder, and wiretapping falls nicely within that category.
ps: I'm not American, and contrary to your statement in a previous post, I wouldn't want to be one either. As a matter of fact, I think this whole nationality and patriotism stuff is utter nonsense. I'm the son of Spanish emigrants living in Belgium, I'm Spanish by nationality, but was born in Belgium. I neither consider myself Spanish nor Belgian; I don't consider myself European either. I consider myself "me". I don't need to belong to a group and be fanatic about it in order to justify my existence. Be proud of the things you are for which you made a deliberate choice to be. Don't be proud for some attribute given to you at birth, in which you had no say. You might just as easily have been a Canadian, Israeli, Chinese or Maori. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying it's not OK to be glad you're an American. After all, you guys have it pretty good back there, there's certainly reason to be thankful for that. Many people in Afrika are a lot worse off than you guys. But being actually *proud* of being born in a certain geographic location, like it's some sort of achievement. Seriously, WTF?
I guess an issue to me is, well video is fine for extra study, and may even be a suitable replacement for those who cannot come to lecture for whatever reason. But what happens when the entire class goes away?
Yes... I see your point... After all, there's the precedent of universities banning textbooks in education a couple of centuries ago, after a brief experimental phase following the invention of the printing press. Students figured "what's the point of coming to class when I can just learn it from a book", and the poor professors were left lecturing before empty classrooms.
The printing press has been a disaster for global education levels throughout the world, and should be shunned... One can only imagine the apocalyptic consequences should we start introducing even more advanced technology in our sacred halls of education...
Face it, some students will always attend classes, because they know they can't learn on their own without interaction with an expert in the field, because they don't want to make it harder on themselves, because discipline and obedience are important facets of their lives, and a host of other reasons. The students who won't attend classes if you don't make them mandatory, are the ones you wouldn't get any relevant feedback from anyway. Oh noes!!! Johnny isn't in his seat, at the back of the class, looking bored or playing chess with Joe on their graphical calculators... Nevermind the fact that Jack, Wendy, Mark, Oliver and thirty other people whose names I can't remember right now are sitting here on the front rows, attentively listening to everything I say and asking the occasional question every now and then... Without Johnny sitting there all the way back, not paying attention at all, how will I EVER know if people actually UNDERSTAND anything I say?
To me it boils down to a handful of things:
University education is not mandatory; education stops being mandatory at age 18 (here in Belgium; don't know about other countries, but once you reach the age you can enroll in university education, your education is a matter of choice, no longer mandatory)
University students are adults, not children you have to babysit
University students, or their parents, already pay the bills. Whether or not they deem it necessary to make full use of all resources you have to offer, to assist in their education, is a choice for them to make, not for you.
Your only job is to make sure everyone gets the best possible chance to learn something, not to force education upon anyone. At the end of the year, your job becomes testing the students to see whether they actually learned what they were supposed to learn. Your job is NOT, NEVER WAS, and WILL NEVER BE to deny carreer opportunities to people who chose not to do things your way, but still manage to get the same results. The same results, in this case, meaning "demonstrating they know their subject matter"; not "fail my ridiculous requirements pertaining class attendance and/or reproduction of the course material exactly the way I covered it, with no room for alternate correct interpretations".
A service I pay for which requires me to do things I wouldn't normally do, which aren't required for the correct functioning of said service, is slavery in disguise.
An education system that allows people like I met during my studies to graduate, and people like me to get into their last year before losing interest, is a fundamentally flawed one. I studied CS at the university of Leuven, Belgium. Had to do every year twice, but that was mostly due to the fact I never opened my books untill the day before the exam, and then usually covered only 2/3rd of the course, showing up at the exam without having slept most of the time, well... I guess you have your fair share of similar students, so I guess you can imagine what type I was. Despite that, I made it into my last year, where I finally lost interest since only a little fraction of what I learned was a
The guy appears to be a total jerk to have raised such a son and go to such efforts to keep him from getting caught.
Well, can you blame him? Maybe he didn't even know his son had a gun. Even if he knew, he probably didn't know, and surely couldn't believe, his son was a mugger. Also, don't blame all the kid's problems on the parents; you're just as aware as I am of the fact that after a certain age, friends contribute more to one's upbringing than parents. Furthermore, his son being a criminal doesn't mean he's a jerk. Think a little before you go randomly insulting people with misinformed knee-jerk statements.
However, I for one would be very careful about creating exceptions to a law that protects privacy, who knows what other exceptions they may invent against me?
Exceptions for the cops are already in place: they can film you, but you can't film them. That doesn't mean you can break the law though, but from what I read in the previous article there's an exception if both parties know they're being filmed. The sign clearly stated such, so the cops would have known if they bothered to read it. Ignorance of the law is no excuse to break it, and ignorance of the wording on the sign you just passed is no excuse for suing someone who's done nothing wrong.
The police didn't break any laws
They refused to leave after being asked several times to do so. One cop even stuck his foot in the door, so even assuming the front yard was not private property, the house clearly is (just clarifying, 'coz the street I live in, everything between the street and the outer wall of our house is property of the town I live in, not private property). As far as I know, remaining on someone's private property after being asked to leave, is illegal.
What is the proper etiquette to talk to the family of a man who commits muggings at gunpoint?
Why would you treat him any other than you would treat any other random civilian? Being family of someone who at the time the actions took place was suspected of committing muggery does not mean you're in on the deal, so there's no justification for being treated as such. However, this gets abused fairly often; I know a girl whose whole family is on some government black list here in Belgium, barring her and her family from ever holding public office, simply because her grandfather or something was a collaborator in the second world war.
This means they had every reason to investigate.
Sure, "investigate" being the keyword here. Not "harrass". Maybe in your world all verbs have the same meaning, but there's roughly 6 billion of us who'd happily trade with your world if we'd only knew for certain that "trade" doesn't mean "make war" in your language...
Thanks, I'll check 'em out in my spare time (kinda busy with other stuff right now).
And yes, you're right, QCad definitely needs forking; the problem is not many people have a need for an open free CAD application, and few of them are coders... Fewer of them still, understand the whole math behind CAD applications. I guess that kind of sums up the reason there's so few FOSS CAD applications out there. At least, that's my theory.
I need a simple and free CAD application for a one-time project, and I was wondering, since you're in the industry and all... Which one would you recomment? What I need is a simple 2D CAD application that's free and runs on both Windows and Linux (and preferably other OS'es) so I can share my files with others with as few restrictions on the platform it runs on as possible. I have some experience width CAD from using RoboCAD back in highgschool (which is now free as in beer, but it's a DOS application and its age shows). I know there's QCAD, which probably does everything I want, but I don't like their license. Is there something better out there, and if so, which one would you recommend?
Third and Finally - Even though TV tells you that cell phone triangulation is a common practice, it's not. Triangulating on a cell phone call requires police, on foot, with three antennas, to find the right signal and take a measurement, from there they sit down with a map and work it out.
Bullshit. Most criminals are caught after the crime has been committed, yet still their cellphone location data is used to prove they were in fact at the crimescene at the time the crime was comitted. So now you're telling me your police department has access to a time machine, so they can send 3 agents back in time to triangulate his signal? And no, I'm not referring to stuff I saw in TV shows.
Policemen on foot, triangulating the signal, are only useful if you need to *catch* the man and need to pinpoint the criminal's location as he moves in realtime without having to rely on constant communication with the cellphone company. If you just need to know where he was on the night of October 8th at 11:25pm, a court order for the cell service provider to release those logs will suffice.
No, I don't like cops. I don't think anyone does, except their colleagues and possibly their mothers. However, most cops over here are pretty decent, so it's not that much of a deal. It's more like "look over there, the assholes who enjoy giving us tickets for parking wrong".
I am however a foreigner in this country, and it shows. Lucky for me, I can no longer be considered a youth, and I dress well (read: I don't look gangsta). That goes a long way in the eyes of a cop.
As to the Nazi reference, ignoring the obvious flirtation with Godwins Law, the problem with Nazi cops was not that they could ask you for your ID, but the other things they did. I don't mind a cop asking me for my ID; I do mind a cop harassing me and possibly throwing me in jail because I happen to be a Jew (which I'm not, but hypothetically speaking). Asking for an ID was not evil in 1940, and still isn't today.
ps: the example you gave about the cop shooting innocent unarmed people, that happens here too. Survival tip: don't be a Turkish or Moroccan youth in a bad neighbourhood, walking in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure, the cops usually get fired and face consequences, and it doesn't happen all that often, but it happens on occasion. Usually they pull the same old tired "I thought he was going for a gun" defense, which might be true, or might not be; I wasn't there.
And don't even get me started on our military... Although I don't think we're any worse or better than other armies in that respect. We all know about those soldiers torturing the iraqui prisoners, but Belgium has its own track record of military abuse in foreign countries. And most of the time we don't even go there to fight, but to rebuild what the US has leveled, which makes it even weirder...
The scope changes absolutely nothing. I agree with you on the issue of low-tech countries though, which is why there should be a fallback mechanism, or barring that, a distinction between "verified" and "unverified" accounts.
Just like PayPal, actually... You can happily use PayPal for online payments up to a certain amount without any verification, but you have the possibility to verify your identity so you can transfer larger amounts, plus people doing business with you will see you're verified and know you are who you claim to be.
Man, you people are paranoid. WTH is wrong with a country requiring their citizens to carry an ID with them all the time? I've had mine since I was 12, and only *one* time did somebody require me to show it to them. That person was a cop, giving me a ticket for a traffic violation. It serves the same purpose as a drivers license: to allow the police to identify you when you commit a violation or a crime. The only reason he asked for my ID and not my drivers license was because I comitted the traffic violation by bike. If I were driving a car, he would have just asked for my drivers licence.
Other than that, the ID only leaves my wallet to show my dorky picture to friends. Now, what does it matter if the information is written on the thing, embedded in a chip, or both? None whatsoever. But hey, as soon as identities and electronics meet, armageddon must be near, right?
The positive benefits of an ID are stuff like ease of identification when I'm found dead, or badly hurt somewhere, so they can contact my immediate family; police knowing who I am when they arrest me for comitting a crime; age verification towards merchants who may not sell certain products to minors etc...
The downsides? I can only think of one: when the thing gets stolen, I'm required to report it and get a new one. That means paperwork and a couple of trips to city hall. Big fucking deal.
If you people actually took the time to educate yourselves about stuff you so religiously oppose, instead of following the herd and repeating the voice of the dumb masses, you might have noticed that the API is freely available, opensource implementations are already there, hence there is no bloody way the government can track you through it because nothing gets communicated to a central government server during any of your transactions. Otherwise it would bloody well show up in the API and opensource implementations and you can bet your ass it would be a huge scandal, and the whole eID deal would be dismissed faster than you can say "dog". The worst they could do is have the chip secretly log all transactions behind our backs, then datamine our returned IDs when they expire and we're supposed to exchange them for new ones. Yeah, 5 friggin' years later, they can finally get to my transaction logs. Whoopty-fucking-doo!
Maybe it's just 'coz most of you people live in the US... Living under a government that tested illicit drugs on their own troops to verify their validity as a weapon during the Vietnam era, that tested chemical warfare shit on their own soldiers during the gulf war, that constantly lies to their people to justify going to war (WMDs in Iraq anyone?) killing thousands of their citizens... Maybe all of that made you people a little paranoid and crazy in the head when it comes to trusting any government. But trust me; the worst shit that happens around here is some helicopter manufacturer paying some politicians to give them a positive evaluation when they're competing with another manufacturer to get this large government contract in, or politicians comitting fraud to line their own pockets and build luxury villas in a nice and quiet neighbourhood.
We Europeans value our privacy just as much as you yanks, the difference is we approach the privacy issue on a "think first, analyze the situation, then speak" basis, whereas you guys have more of a "shout fanatically as soon as anything even remotely applicable to our privacy gets mentioned" mentality. Fanatical shouting about stuff you don't understand doesn't make you seem more knowledgeable to anyone except your equally dumb peers who don't understand the stuff themselves, but have the same desire as you to belong to some "elite group of critical thinkers", although their thoughtprocesses could probably be surpassed by Lassie on a bad day.
True, but... As a Spanish resident of Belgium since my birth, I don't have an eID. I'm a foreigner, I don't have a belgian ID; you guys got the plastic credit-card like IDs, we get the big ugly paper ones.
Also, your solution works for Belgium, and Belgium only. Websites often operate worldwide. What we need is a global solution, not a solution that only works in a negligible part of the world.
I'm currently part of a project that will use eID as well. It's not fully implemented yet, the part that uses eID is still in the planning phase, but already we have come up with fallback solutions in case eID is not available, 'coz even here in Belgium we can NOT expect every customer we get to have an eID card.
No, but I've seen modems with one output that can go to your phones. The answering machine could be implemented in software on your computer, since it would have to remain on 24/7 anyway.
I probably don't want to talk to a person who screens calls like that.
And judging from your attitude, you're probably the reason they screen their calls like that, so I doubt they want to talk to you. You're happy, they're happy, the world just became a better place.
I certainly won't talk to a machine. I might stumble over my words. Am I supposed to have a ready-made speech for you to record?
Well, did you have a ready-made speech for the occasion where I actually pick up the phone? No? Damn, how do you intend to convey me your message? What? Improvise, you say? Well, what's so hard about improvising to a machine? "Hey, it's me, John. I just wanted to tell you Jeff couldn't make it to our D&D session tonight, so we could either reshedule for tomorrow if that's OK with everyone, or just skip this week and meet again next week. Let me know if tomorrow is OK with you or not, k? Bye man." Whoah, that was *HARD*!
It's not as if I could call back later to delete the message I left, or could determine if you got the message.
It's not as if you could call back later and change whatever you said in our first conversation either. However, you could call back, and tell me you made a mistake and correct it. You can do the same with the answering machine by leaving a second message. And if it's important for you to know if your message has been received, you just say "call me back as soon as you get this" at the end of the message, and guess what... As soon as I get your message, I will call you back.
I may be paying long distance charges.
You would be paying long distance charges regardless of who's picking up the phone: me, or the machine. If it's me, chances are you'll be talking a lot longer than to the machine, and pay more to get your message accross. If the machine picks up, I'll have to call you back, and you can talk to me for free. I don't see your problem.
So, screw you. I have better things to do. I could talk to some nice and friendly people.
Really? You're so amusing when you lie, you know that? If you really had better things to do, or nicer and friendlier people to talk to, why did you just call me?
"Hi, it's Mike. I'm not in, so leave your message after the beep" costs you less 5 seconds of your life. If the answering machine is set to pick up immediately, it will even *save* you time, because the machine will have picked up before I have the time to walk over to the phone and pick it up manually.
On the other hand, you might be that pesky asshole I don't really want to talk to. You know, the one that won't shut up, the one I can't possibly end a phonecall with in less than 20 minutes without being rude.
So let's do the math again:
You call me, leave a message after the beep. You lose: 30 seconds total, 45 tops.
You call, I pick up, you're the talkative asshole. I lose: at least 5 minutes, possibly half an hour or more.
My time doesn't have to be more important than yours to justify my screening of the calls; I stand to lose more time than you by picking up the phone. You can whine about it all you want, that won't change the facts.
Besides, my time might very well be more important than yours, and probably is. Remember that you're the one picking the time of the call, not me. You time the call to coincide with a moment you're not doing anything important anyway, unless it's an emergency call. Chances are I'm actually in the middle of something. Are you trying to tell me that whatever it is you want to tell me is more important than anything I might be doing at that time?
If whatever you want to tell me is important enough to interrupt my shedule for, it's important enough to leave a message for. If you can't be bothered to interface with a machine for 20 seconds to help me manage my time, I can't be bothered to interrupt my shedule to talk to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly what I was thinking... After reading the quote from the article, I read the actual article in its long winded and boring entirety to find out what the answer to the question is (my guess is the iPod), turns out anonymous fuckface quoted the very fucking last paragraph of the article, getting us all curious for nothing...
Thanks a bundle, asshat, I just wasted 5 minutes of my life thanks to you!
I've been using it for years; I just bound the previous/next desktop to the same keys used under gnome (CTRL+ALT+Left/Right), and it works just fine. Not as cool as the spinning cube in xgl/aiglx though... ;)
So if I were to put you in a nuclear power plant that's about to blow, you'd be able to save the day because you happen to have a Windows XP machine (Hey, I know this! This is Windows!) with a file manager (Windows Explorer, obviously) sitting there on that desk?
I have no trouble whatsoever with little geek kids knowing UNIX; that's entirely plausible. But it's a far stretch to assume that they can figure out how to control the whole park just because they're familiar with the OS running on the servers...
Remote X... You didn't really think the powermac was the actual server, did you?
Or hey, how about you just get a court order to search the suspect's computers? Kiddy porn is far too hard to come by for those guys to just delete it after three wank sessions, and chances are you'll even find photos and magazines stashed away somewhere at his place. Same logic applies to the distributors btw; you can't distribute what you don't have.
So there's really no reason to ask for longer data retention for the reasons quoted. That's just a cover story; I wonder what the real story is though...
You're just seeing half the picture here. It doesn't matter that the price would go up if the price of energy doubles; it doesn't matter the price would be cheaper if they didn't offer showers. What matters is he pays for it anyway, and he won't get any price reduction if he doesn't use their showers, so the grandparent was completely correct in asserting that this, to him, seems like a valid way of paying less for his energy usage.
Next time you call someone an idiot and an irrational punk, make sure your own statements are correct. Sure, it won't make you look like an arrogant prick who just got owned in the eyes of half the slashdot community, but that's not necessarily a bad thing...
However, I would applaud a licence such as the one you propose. Government sponsored popular culture, paid for by the taxpayers. Eat what you want, as much as you want. The problem is it's never gonna happen; it's economically not feasible. Besides, even if we could assure the entertainment industry those taxes would net them the same amount of money than they make now on record sales etc..., they would still not be interested, since the people could now consume a lot more for the same money.
Based on this, it might sound like a good idea to go to a model where culture/entertainment is done by the government instead of the current capitalistic model; culture and entertainment would surely become a lot cheaper. However, when the government is the only source of culture/entertainment, there's always the danger that it will result in propaganda and/or cencorship.
Bad analogy. Here's a better one: crimes are committed every day. Everyone I meet is a potential murderer. So it's OK for me to stripsearch every person I meet on the street, and it's OK for me to break into everyones houses to search for the gun they might intend to shoot me with.
We are not talking about the right to take action when the evidence is clearly there, like you suggest. We're talking about the right to search for evidence without proper authorisation, under the guise of "protecting the people". A government that protects me must protect me not only from physical harm, but also from loss of rights. How can they do that by means of invading those rights they're supposed to protect in the first place?
That being said, I'm sure the government doesn't care either way. Black ops anyone? If some matter demands immediate action, legal or not, the government will find a solution. It usually involves a sniper, explosives, or a team of paracommandos. And frankly, I don't care either. I know I'll never be the target of such treatment because the government makes damn sure they got the right guy before they take him out; they don't just send in the "last resort" crew for just about any petty thief. The things that worry me more are the things they'll have less of a problem rationalising and justifying than murder, and wiretapping falls nicely within that category.
ps: I'm not American, and contrary to your statement in a previous post, I wouldn't want to be one either. As a matter of fact, I think this whole nationality and patriotism stuff is utter nonsense. I'm the son of Spanish emigrants living in Belgium, I'm Spanish by nationality, but was born in Belgium. I neither consider myself Spanish nor Belgian; I don't consider myself European either. I consider myself "me". I don't need to belong to a group and be fanatic about it in order to justify my existence. Be proud of the things you are for which you made a deliberate choice to be. Don't be proud for some attribute given to you at birth, in which you had no say. You might just as easily have been a Canadian, Israeli, Chinese or Maori. Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying it's not OK to be glad you're an American. After all, you guys have it pretty good back there, there's certainly reason to be thankful for that. Many people in Afrika are a lot worse off than you guys. But being actually *proud* of being born in a certain geographic location, like it's some sort of achievement. Seriously, WTF?
Yes... I see your point... After all, there's the precedent of universities banning textbooks in education a couple of centuries ago, after a brief experimental phase following the invention of the printing press. Students figured "what's the point of coming to class when I can just learn it from a book", and the poor professors were left lecturing before empty classrooms.
The printing press has been a disaster for global education levels throughout the world, and should be shunned... One can only imagine the apocalyptic consequences should we start introducing even more advanced technology in our sacred halls of education...
Face it, some students will always attend classes, because they know they can't learn on their own without interaction with an expert in the field, because they don't want to make it harder on themselves, because discipline and obedience are important facets of their lives, and a host of other reasons. The students who won't attend classes if you don't make them mandatory, are the ones you wouldn't get any relevant feedback from anyway. Oh noes!!! Johnny isn't in his seat, at the back of the class, looking bored or playing chess with Joe on their graphical calculators... Nevermind the fact that Jack, Wendy, Mark, Oliver and thirty other people whose names I can't remember right now are sitting here on the front rows, attentively listening to everything I say and asking the occasional question every now and then... Without Johnny sitting there all the way back, not paying attention at all, how will I EVER know if people actually UNDERSTAND anything I say?
To me it boils down to a handful of things:
A service I pay for which requires me to do things I wouldn't normally do, which aren't required for the correct functioning of said service, is slavery in disguise.
An education system that allows people like I met during my studies to graduate, and people like me to get into their last year before losing interest, is a fundamentally flawed one. I studied CS at the university of Leuven, Belgium. Had to do every year twice, but that was mostly due to the fact I never opened my books untill the day before the exam, and then usually covered only 2/3rd of the course, showing up at the exam without having slept most of the time, well... I guess you have your fair share of similar students, so I guess you can imagine what type I was. Despite that, I made it into my last year, where I finally lost interest since only a little fraction of what I learned was a
The guy appears to be a total jerk to have raised such a son and go to such efforts to keep him from getting caught.
Well, can you blame him? Maybe he didn't even know his son had a gun. Even if he knew, he probably didn't know, and surely couldn't believe, his son was a mugger. Also, don't blame all the kid's problems on the parents; you're just as aware as I am of the fact that after a certain age, friends contribute more to one's upbringing than parents. Furthermore, his son being a criminal doesn't mean he's a jerk. Think a little before you go randomly insulting people with misinformed knee-jerk statements.
However, I for one would be very careful about creating exceptions to a law that protects privacy, who knows what other exceptions they may invent against me?
Exceptions for the cops are already in place: they can film you, but you can't film them. That doesn't mean you can break the law though, but from what I read in the previous article there's an exception if both parties know they're being filmed. The sign clearly stated such, so the cops would have known if they bothered to read it. Ignorance of the law is no excuse to break it, and ignorance of the wording on the sign you just passed is no excuse for suing someone who's done nothing wrong.
The police didn't break any laws
They refused to leave after being asked several times to do so. One cop even stuck his foot in the door, so even assuming the front yard was not private property, the house clearly is (just clarifying, 'coz the street I live in, everything between the street and the outer wall of our house is property of the town I live in, not private property). As far as I know, remaining on someone's private property after being asked to leave, is illegal.
What is the proper etiquette to talk to the family of a man who commits muggings at gunpoint?
Why would you treat him any other than you would treat any other random civilian? Being family of someone who at the time the actions took place was suspected of committing muggery does not mean you're in on the deal, so there's no justification for being treated as such. However, this gets abused fairly often; I know a girl whose whole family is on some government black list here in Belgium, barring her and her family from ever holding public office, simply because her grandfather or something was a collaborator in the second world war.
This means they had every reason to investigate.
Sure, "investigate" being the keyword here. Not "harrass". Maybe in your world all verbs have the same meaning, but there's roughly 6 billion of us who'd happily trade with your world if we'd only knew for certain that "trade" doesn't mean "make war" in your language...
Emm, I don't know if you're jesting, or being dead serious, but we still do.
Thanks, I'll check 'em out in my spare time (kinda busy with other stuff right now).
And yes, you're right, QCad definitely needs forking; the problem is not many people have a need for an open free CAD application, and few of them are coders... Fewer of them still, understand the whole math behind CAD applications. I guess that kind of sums up the reason there's so few FOSS CAD applications out there. At least, that's my theory.
Ah, just the man I wanted to talk to... ;)
I need a simple and free CAD application for a one-time project, and I was wondering, since you're in the industry and all... Which one would you recomment? What I need is a simple 2D CAD application that's free and runs on both Windows and Linux (and preferably other OS'es) so I can share my files with others with as few restrictions on the platform it runs on as possible. I have some experience width CAD from using RoboCAD back in highgschool (which is now free as in beer, but it's a DOS application and its age shows). I know there's QCAD, which probably does everything I want, but I don't like their license. Is there something better out there, and if so, which one would you recommend?
Bullshit. Most criminals are caught after the crime has been committed, yet still their cellphone location data is used to prove they were in fact at the crimescene at the time the crime was comitted. So now you're telling me your police department has access to a time machine, so they can send 3 agents back in time to triangulate his signal? And no, I'm not referring to stuff I saw in TV shows.
Policemen on foot, triangulating the signal, are only useful if you need to *catch* the man and need to pinpoint the criminal's location as he moves in realtime without having to rely on constant communication with the cellphone company. If you just need to know where he was on the night of October 8th at 11:25pm, a court order for the cell service provider to release those logs will suffice.
No, I don't like cops. I don't think anyone does, except their colleagues and possibly their mothers. However, most cops over here are pretty decent, so it's not that much of a deal. It's more like "look over there, the assholes who enjoy giving us tickets for parking wrong".
I am however a foreigner in this country, and it shows. Lucky for me, I can no longer be considered a youth, and I dress well (read: I don't look gangsta). That goes a long way in the eyes of a cop.
As to the Nazi reference, ignoring the obvious flirtation with Godwins Law, the problem with Nazi cops was not that they could ask you for your ID, but the other things they did. I don't mind a cop asking me for my ID; I do mind a cop harassing me and possibly throwing me in jail because I happen to be a Jew (which I'm not, but hypothetically speaking). Asking for an ID was not evil in 1940, and still isn't today.
ps: the example you gave about the cop shooting innocent unarmed people, that happens here too. Survival tip: don't be a Turkish or Moroccan youth in a bad neighbourhood, walking in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure, the cops usually get fired and face consequences, and it doesn't happen all that often, but it happens on occasion. Usually they pull the same old tired "I thought he was going for a gun" defense, which might be true, or might not be; I wasn't there.
And don't even get me started on our military... Although I don't think we're any worse or better than other armies in that respect. We all know about those soldiers torturing the iraqui prisoners, but Belgium has its own track record of military abuse in foreign countries. And most of the time we don't even go there to fight, but to rebuild what the US has leveled, which makes it even weirder...
Seeing as how I'm the one selling the tickets, I doubt it's that much of a concern to me.
Yes, I'm actually in the online ticket sales business. ;)
The scope changes absolutely nothing. I agree with you on the issue of low-tech countries though, which is why there should be a fallback mechanism, or barring that, a distinction between "verified" and "unverified" accounts.
Just like PayPal, actually... You can happily use PayPal for online payments up to a certain amount without any verification, but you have the possibility to verify your identity so you can transfer larger amounts, plus people doing business with you will see you're verified and know you are who you claim to be.
Man, you people are paranoid. WTH is wrong with a country requiring their citizens to carry an ID with them all the time? I've had mine since I was 12, and only *one* time did somebody require me to show it to them. That person was a cop, giving me a ticket for a traffic violation. It serves the same purpose as a drivers license: to allow the police to identify you when you commit a violation or a crime. The only reason he asked for my ID and not my drivers license was because I comitted the traffic violation by bike. If I were driving a car, he would have just asked for my drivers licence.
Other than that, the ID only leaves my wallet to show my dorky picture to friends. Now, what does it matter if the information is written on the thing, embedded in a chip, or both? None whatsoever. But hey, as soon as identities and electronics meet, armageddon must be near, right?
The positive benefits of an ID are stuff like ease of identification when I'm found dead, or badly hurt somewhere, so they can contact my immediate family; police knowing who I am when they arrest me for comitting a crime; age verification towards merchants who may not sell certain products to minors etc...
The downsides? I can only think of one: when the thing gets stolen, I'm required to report it and get a new one. That means paperwork and a couple of trips to city hall. Big fucking deal.
If you people actually took the time to educate yourselves about stuff you so religiously oppose, instead of following the herd and repeating the voice of the dumb masses, you might have noticed that the API is freely available, opensource implementations are already there, hence there is no bloody way the government can track you through it because nothing gets communicated to a central government server during any of your transactions. Otherwise it would bloody well show up in the API and opensource implementations and you can bet your ass it would be a huge scandal, and the whole eID deal would be dismissed faster than you can say "dog". The worst they could do is have the chip secretly log all transactions behind our backs, then datamine our returned IDs when they expire and we're supposed to exchange them for new ones. Yeah, 5 friggin' years later, they can finally get to my transaction logs. Whoopty-fucking-doo!
Maybe it's just 'coz most of you people live in the US... Living under a government that tested illicit drugs on their own troops to verify their validity as a weapon during the Vietnam era, that tested chemical warfare shit on their own soldiers during the gulf war, that constantly lies to their people to justify going to war (WMDs in Iraq anyone?) killing thousands of their citizens... Maybe all of that made you people a little paranoid and crazy in the head when it comes to trusting any government. But trust me; the worst shit that happens around here is some helicopter manufacturer paying some politicians to give them a positive evaluation when they're competing with another manufacturer to get this large government contract in, or politicians comitting fraud to line their own pockets and build luxury villas in a nice and quiet neighbourhood.
We Europeans value our privacy just as much as you yanks, the difference is we approach the privacy issue on a "think first, analyze the situation, then speak" basis, whereas you guys have more of a "shout fanatically as soon as anything even remotely applicable to our privacy gets mentioned" mentality. Fanatical shouting about stuff you don't understand doesn't make you seem more knowledgeable to anyone except your equally dumb peers who don't understand the stuff themselves, but have the same desire as you to belong to some "elite group of critical thinkers", although their thoughtprocesses could probably be surpassed by Lassie on a bad day.
True, but... As a Spanish resident of Belgium since my birth, I don't have an eID. I'm a foreigner, I don't have a belgian ID; you guys got the plastic credit-card like IDs, we get the big ugly paper ones.
Also, your solution works for Belgium, and Belgium only. Websites often operate worldwide. What we need is a global solution, not a solution that only works in a negligible part of the world.
I'm currently part of a project that will use eID as well. It's not fully implemented yet, the part that uses eID is still in the planning phase, but already we have come up with fallback solutions in case eID is not available, 'coz even here in Belgium we can NOT expect every customer we get to have an eID card.
That's why I always tape my sessions. ;)
No, but I've seen modems with one output that can go to your phones. The answering machine could be implemented in software on your computer, since it would have to remain on 24/7 anyway.
And judging from your attitude, you're probably the reason they screen their calls like that, so I doubt they want to talk to you. You're happy, they're happy, the world just became a better place.
Well, did you have a ready-made speech for the occasion where I actually pick up the phone? No? Damn, how do you intend to convey me your message? What? Improvise, you say? Well, what's so hard about improvising to a machine? "Hey, it's me, John. I just wanted to tell you Jeff couldn't make it to our D&D session tonight, so we could either reshedule for tomorrow if that's OK with everyone, or just skip this week and meet again next week. Let me know if tomorrow is OK with you or not, k? Bye man." Whoah, that was *HARD*!
It's not as if you could call back later and change whatever you said in our first conversation either. However, you could call back, and tell me you made a mistake and correct it. You can do the same with the answering machine by leaving a second message. And if it's important for you to know if your message has been received, you just say "call me back as soon as you get this" at the end of the message, and guess what... As soon as I get your message, I will call you back.
You would be paying long distance charges regardless of who's picking up the phone: me, or the machine. If it's me, chances are you'll be talking a lot longer than to the machine, and pay more to get your message accross. If the machine picks up, I'll have to call you back, and you can talk to me for free. I don't see your problem.
Really? You're so amusing when you lie, you know that? If you really had better things to do, or nicer and friendlier people to talk to, why did you just call me?
"Hi, it's Mike. I'm not in, so leave your message after the beep" costs you less 5 seconds of your life. If the answering machine is set to pick up immediately, it will even *save* you time, because the machine will have picked up before I have the time to walk over to the phone and pick it up manually.
On the other hand, you might be that pesky asshole I don't really want to talk to. You know, the one that won't shut up, the one I can't possibly end a phonecall with in less than 20 minutes without being rude.
So let's do the math again:
- You call me, leave a message after the beep. You lose: 30 seconds total, 45 tops.
- You call, I pick up, you're the talkative asshole. I lose: at least 5 minutes, possibly half an hour or more.
My time doesn't have to be more important than yours to justify my screening of the calls; I stand to lose more time than you by picking up the phone. You can whine about it all you want, that won't change the facts.Besides, my time might very well be more important than yours, and probably is. Remember that you're the one picking the time of the call, not me. You time the call to coincide with a moment you're not doing anything important anyway, unless it's an emergency call. Chances are I'm actually in the middle of something. Are you trying to tell me that whatever it is you want to tell me is more important than anything I might be doing at that time?
If whatever you want to tell me is important enough to interrupt my shedule for, it's important enough to leave a message for. If you can't be bothered to interface with a machine for 20 seconds to help me manage my time, I can't be bothered to interrupt my shedule to talk to you.