As others have pointed out, the Maginot line was built AFTER WWI.
It did actually "work" in a sense in WWII, though, in that it deterred Germany from attacking head on along their shared border with France. Only problem was that they "just went around it" by entering via Belgium and through the Ardennes forest, which the French had assumed would be impassable for an invasion army...
You won't see this being used in the office for spreadsheets, word processing, etc etc
Really? The first thing I thought when seeing it was that this would be perfect for things like Visio or other diagram editors, but also for moving text and images around in presentation apps like Powerpoint. It would also be a great interface for doing things like cut and paste, or for changing text sizes etc.
The uses may not be huge in all kinds of apps, just the same way as mouse usage varies, but they might mean profound changes in how we organize interfaces, and mean that a lot of clutter can just be removed from the interface because the operations can be intuitively done without any icons or menu choices.
Well, actually, no... It's a basic human right to be able to access the cultural sphere. The statement above is simply a crypto-fascist bureaucrat's attempt to justify stealing control over cultural access from the music industry and hoarding it for himself.
The statement didn't come from anyone in government.
One of the largest payment processors in the US routinely sends chargeback info as normal mail in large envelopers prominently stamped with their company name (very obvious it's a credit card processor) and some slogan about their payment processing business.
Inside the envelope you will not only find the basis for the chargeback and the customer name, but you will also find fun things like copies of their statements with the charged back payments highlighted, etc (instead of blacking out the non-offending ones - I'm so happy to know that my spending habits will provide amusement for bored office workers if I ever charge anything back) and full card details.
Larger merchants gets at least one envelope a day from this provider, and in many companies there's no way anyone would notice if one of the envelopes wouldn't arrive or would be pilfered by someone in the post room (as many online merchants that sell intangibles know they'll get nowhere disputing the chargebacks in most cases because they don't have enough proof about who used the service).
It's a lot easier than you think to support the kind of feature sets most forums supports. I've written parsers to do more or less that (but accepting actual HTML tags) in both C++ and PHP, and it's quite straightforward. A very basic tag parser plus a stack of open tags and a lookup table to determine when to automatically close tags (to prevent tags that shouldn't enclose content, like "img" from enclosing anything following it at the same level, is really all you need. A few hundred lines at most in a reasonably high level language.
I've done parsers that "scrub" HTML for constructs that might cause security risks or mess up the site layout too, that had to accept almost all "sane" html, and even that isn't particularly hard, though quite a bit more work.
I use apt on Fedora Core all the time. I generally prefer yum though. RPM just doesn't have anything to do with it - apt isn't tied to the package format.
So what you need is the ability to embed scriptable VRML or perhaps SVG with 3D extensions in layers in existing web-pages. That is far from a "3D web" with avatars and the like, and a much more reasonable request.
As for MMORPG, nothing is stopping you from using separate clients for that. Nothing says you need to do all your online activities in the browser - most of us don't.
Whenever someone interrupt me when writing e-mails, I'll often continue to write the e-mail while turning to answer their questions. I don't think I could keep it up for a lot of time - I can type the e-mail out while talking about something else, but I'm not good at actually focusing on both the content of the e-mail and a conversation at the same time.
For me at least it partially just began with getting to the stage where I can type fully without watching the screen or the keyboard as a side effect of usually having the TV on while programming. Once I got to that stage, getting to the stage where I could hold a conversation at the same wasn't that difficult. I usually find it harder to focus on what someone else is saying and typing at the same time if I don't look away from the screen.
It's not something I've put much effort into, and so my limit before I have to look back at the screen to check that I'm still on the right track is probably on the order of a paragraph or two.
I wrote most of this message while watching/paying attention to a movie, for example, but I had to occasionally glance back at the screen.
It's not something I do often, though - but it's a fun way of annoying people... The implication if you continue typing while talking to someone is that you're not paying attention, but if you actually look them in the eyes, and carry on a coherent conversation with them, they can't "get you" for it, and that seems to annoy and confuse people a lot more than if you actually don't look away from the screen and just grunt at them.
In the united states we also have a system of reducing the effects of alcohol related violence. We call it prison.
And that is why you're one of the countries in the world with the highest percentage of your population in prison, surpassing many oppressive dictatorships. Despite that you still have some of the highest crime rates in the world too...
Anyway, just nitpicking. It does have some of the most bizarre liquor laws of anywhere I've ever been to. I can only pity the poor coddled European who might wind up in Pennsylvania, desiring a case of wine on a Sunday, or something similarly impossible.
Depends where in Europe we're from;) Norway and Sweden at least have government monopolies with heavy restrictions on wine and spirits, and at least Norway have very strict restrictions on when any alchohol is sold. I hardly ever drink, so I don't remember for sure, but I think beer can only be sold before either 6pm or 8pm, and the government monopoly shops usually close at 6pm (earlier on Saturdays) and are closed on Sundays.
If you want a non smoking place to drink, then some enterprising person will start such a place. Then with this huge non-smoking crowd out there, they would flock to it..
Really? So where are all the non-smoking places to drink or eat in countries without these laws then? The problem is that these are social places - when you have a group with both smokers and non-smokers, the group will go to a single location, and that is far more often driven by what place is hot at the moment than any other concerns.
So this is a typical example of where free enterprise has completely failed a large group of people.
Banning alcohol is entirely different because it does not generally negatively affect those who don't drink. I never smoke and usually don't drink. I don't mind of anyone does either, but I absolutely hate being near someone who smokes. The stench is unbearable. These days I actually find myself walking in large curves around people smoking - and I don't care if they realise.
In any case, in several of the countries putting in place smoking bans, the bans have actually been put in place as a logical extension to employee health and safety regulations. If your laws don't allow exposing employees to chemicals with known longtime exposure risks without adequate protections, then why would it be logical to allow exposing them to consistent and unavoidable high concentrations of second-hand tobacco smoke, when we know it causes significant health risks?
And no, this is not about choice - employment laws in most countries specifically recognize that employees are usually at a disadvantage, and that there are always people in personal situations that doesn't give them a realistic choice.
You entirely miss the point. This is intended for prevention by denying known repeat offenders access to pubs. So it's more targetted at stopping persistent troublemakers that are known to cause problems when drunk.
I still don't like the fingerprinting bit - it seems like it's begging for someone to abuse it.
Actually voice recognition is becoming quite common in IVR (interactive voice response) systems. The local cinema chain for instance, use it to let you choose which cinema you want to be put through to. This works reasonably well, as the number of "legal" responses is limited. Unfortunately for me English is not my first language, and my Scandinavian accent seems to really mess up the recognition - the worst misrecognition so far was mistaking "London" for "Birmingham"... I'd really love to see the code for that engine...
I've also come across systems using voice recognition of UK postal codes (they have letters, and most phones here doesn't have letters printed on the number pad, so asking people to type it in is a lousy alternative too), which also seems to work reasonably well, except if you have an accent and an unfortunate postal code (mine ends with "DD" - with a human I have a reasonable chance of people getting it right if I say "delta delta", though even that confuses people).
The key lesson is that even this kind of limited recognition (that only picks the "best fit" from a fixed list of words to recognize) is only ready for prime time if you have an interface that is easy to bypass. The cinema app. I mentioned for instance only let you talk to an operator after it has misrecognised the city name 3 times, which makes it ridiculously annoying, because not only do you have to try three times, but you also have to listen through the wrongly recognised name and then press a button and listen to it give you the instructions for how to try again. It's a perfect example of how not to do things.
If I buy a book about serial killers, and my wife happen to disappear a week later, do you think it would be better or worse for me if the police found the purchase on my credit card statement?
That is one of many reasons is why you should think about what tracks you are leaving, even when there is nothing nefarious about your purchases.
In this case there is at least one possible explanation: If I was a likely murder suspect I damn well would like to know what to expect from the police.
There are of course reasons why he might have done this that aren't quite as nice. In either case I must say I think it was a rather naive and stupid move.
I have no basis for saying whether or not he's guilty, but take a bit of a closer look at the claims:
The article you link to say that "forensic tests on the blood cannot exclude Nina Reiser as a donor". Translation: They do not have a definitive DNA match, which means either that someone did a rather good job at cleaning, and/or that it's not new. The police better get more certain than that if they want to rely on it in court.
The only "history of abuse" I am aware of is a claim by Nina that he was abusive as part of their divorce battle. From what little I've seen of the case the claim was never substantiated, and the temporary restraining order was eventually dropped, though I may be mistaken on that.
As for having his passport on him, I very often have my passport on me. In my case it's simply because it's the only photo id I have (I don't have a drivers license) that is valid in the UK (where I live), and so it's handy to have on me. But more than that, because I'm a frequent traveller I generally keep my passport IN the jacket I usually use when I travel because I just forget it (I also frequently have months old stubs from boarding passes in my pockets...) or don't care about taking it out.
As for having lots of cash on him, there are plenty of valid reasons, many of which could also explain the passport. One example would be the need to quickly transfer money to pay his Russian employees salaries - I've more than once had to carry large amounts of cash to Western Union etc. to do rapid money transfers to foreign countries, or to buy a bankers draft for that matter, for perfectly legitimate reasons. At one point after I moved to the UK, for instance, I had to pay about 10.000 pounds as a security deposit and first few months rent to rent a flat with some colleagues, and ended up having to max out my debit card cash limits at the ATM's outside the bank branch because they wouldn't debit the money directly, and getting my Norwegian bank to transfer money would take several days.
The banking system is really inconvenient if you frequently deal with foreign countries, and cash often becomes the only viable means of shortening the time it takes.
Countries like Russia in particular are problematic. At one point I was paying a Russian guy for a license to some software he'd developed, and the money had to be transferred from my bank in Norway via a bank in New York, because my Norwegian bank just wouldn't do transfers to Russia at all due to fraud risks (it's not a general thing with Norwegian banks - it depends on which particular bank you deal with, and you'll find the same in the US), so I had the choice between opening an account at a different bank and carry cash (or waiting 3 days for a direct transfer), or pay extra for the transfer via New York. In that case I chose the latter, since the transfer was happening in dollars anyway, and it was a onetime thing.
I'm not saying any of these are right, but that it's a bit early to assume that they prove anything.
Gmail is TINY in terms of number of users by webmail standards. Last estimate I heard was around 5 million users, though it's probably a bit larger by now. That makes even a lot of regional/national non-English language webmail providers larger than them.
Despite the Slashdot fanboys Gmail just never became a threat to the large players.
Indeed. To add to your last point: It really should be compulsory to actually READ the Communist Manifesto before discussing what Marxism is, or before making broad generalisations about socialism.
Pay particular attention to the chapter on alternative forms of socialism. Socialist ideologies spanned a vast spectrum politically, from far left to far right, already when the manifesto was written in the the last 1840's. Socialism is neither inherently good, nor bad. Marx and Engels' made the point that already back then there were "reactionary" socialist ideologies that were aimed at marrying what was essentially feudal systems with limited social support systems, not unlike stalinism, and that the label socialism is no guarantee that an ideology is good.
The idea that "socialism" is a unified ideology belonging on the left is relatively new, and is causing a lot of communications problems, as when left wing people call themselves socialists they tend to refer to socialist ideologies related to Marxism (though many of them are very watered down), whereas when right wing people refer to socialism they tend to include anyone who calls themselves socialists, which includes a wide range of ideologies that may refer to Marx or use Marxists symbology, but that widely completely disregard Marxist philosophy as you point out, and that additionally in most instances fall into one or more of the categories of reactionary socialism that Marx and Engels warned about in the Communist Manifesto.
Now, it doesn't help that a lot of left wing socialists fell for the deception of many of these regimes. That was a monumental fuckup that is inexcusable, and so it's understandable that a lot of people are confused about what people mean when they refer to socialism.
Many countries let you get debit cards from you're 13. The main limitations is that those debit cards usually don't have visa or mastercard numbers tied to them, and so depend on merchants supporting various local debit card schemes (such as switch/maestro or solo in the UK)
The UK is almost as bad. The Lib-dems have managed to carve out a good position, and theoretically the same could happen in the US (the US did have more parties early in it's history), but the UK has smaller voting districts due to the smaller population, and so it takes a lot less for local voting patterns to allow smaller parties to advance.
It's a result of one-man circuits. Some other countries, such as France, have similar systems, but in most of those countries additional parties were strong from early on and managed to stay in position through complicated systems of voting alliances. In France, for instance, the PS and PCF (socialists and communists) cooperate to split the voting districts between them based on who's strongest where, and have been successfull in getting the voters to accept that, so that they get any voting district where the PS + PCF vote combined is more than 50%, roughly distributed according to their difference in strength nationally (and the right wing parties do the same).
But ultimately using one-man circuits is a fucked up system which leaves everyone who don't like either of the major parties with representation they either don't support at all, or that is the "lesser evil". Are anyone really surprised that the number of people voting is as low as it is?
The only way to fix these problems is to reform the voting systems so that it's not an either-or proposition. Without proportional voting people will be able to keep getting away with anything, because they know that the alternative is unacceptable for most of their voters.
In the UK that means voting lib-dems, as they're the only of the three major parties to have promised to put in place proportional voting.
Slashdot Mirror
It did actually "work" in a sense in WWII, though, in that it deterred Germany from attacking head on along their shared border with France. Only problem was that they "just went around it" by entering via Belgium and through the Ardennes forest, which the French had assumed would be impassable for an invasion army...
The exact original quote (note a poem) is lost, but here's a page with a very thorough review of the various known versions: Martin Niemöller's famous quotation: "First they came for the Communists".
Doesn't sound very likely, given that China openly executes people for some types of theft.
You miss the point. The goal isn't to achieve better usable compression, but to encourage research they believe will lead to advances in AI.
Really? The first thing I thought when seeing it was that this would be perfect for things like Visio or other diagram editors, but also for moving text and images around in presentation apps like Powerpoint. It would also be a great interface for doing things like cut and paste, or for changing text sizes etc.
The uses may not be huge in all kinds of apps, just the same way as mouse usage varies, but they might mean profound changes in how we organize interfaces, and mean that a lot of clutter can just be removed from the interface because the operations can be intuitively done without any icons or menu choices.
The statement didn't come from anyone in government.
One of the largest payment processors in the US routinely sends chargeback info as normal mail in large envelopers prominently stamped with their company name (very obvious it's a credit card processor) and some slogan about their payment processing business.
Inside the envelope you will not only find the basis for the chargeback and the customer name, but you will also find fun things like copies of their statements with the charged back payments highlighted, etc (instead of blacking out the non-offending ones - I'm so happy to know that my spending habits will provide amusement for bored office workers if I ever charge anything back) and full card details.
Larger merchants gets at least one envelope a day from this provider, and in many companies there's no way anyone would notice if one of the envelopes wouldn't arrive or would be pilfered by someone in the post room (as many online merchants that sell intangibles know they'll get nowhere disputing the chargebacks in most cases because they don't have enough proof about who used the service).
I've done parsers that "scrub" HTML for constructs that might cause security risks or mess up the site layout too, that had to accept almost all "sane" html, and even that isn't particularly hard, though quite a bit more work.
I use apt on Fedora Core all the time. I generally prefer yum though. RPM just doesn't have anything to do with it - apt isn't tied to the package format.
"Private" in that context means "not in an official government capacity" and/or "not open to the public".
As for MMORPG, nothing is stopping you from using separate clients for that. Nothing says you need to do all your online activities in the browser - most of us don't.
For me at least it partially just began with getting to the stage where I can type fully without watching the screen or the keyboard as a side effect of usually having the TV on while programming. Once I got to that stage, getting to the stage where I could hold a conversation at the same wasn't that difficult. I usually find it harder to focus on what someone else is saying and typing at the same time if I don't look away from the screen.
It's not something I've put much effort into, and so my limit before I have to look back at the screen to check that I'm still on the right track is probably on the order of a paragraph or two.
I wrote most of this message while watching/paying attention to a movie, for example, but I had to occasionally glance back at the screen.
It's not something I do often, though - but it's a fun way of annoying people... The implication if you continue typing while talking to someone is that you're not paying attention, but if you actually look them in the eyes, and carry on a coherent conversation with them, they can't "get you" for it, and that seems to annoy and confuse people a lot more than if you actually don't look away from the screen and just grunt at them.
And that is why you're one of the countries in the world with the highest percentage of your population in prison, surpassing many oppressive dictatorships. Despite that you still have some of the highest crime rates in the world too...
Doesn't look like it's working too well.
Depends where in Europe we're from ;) Norway and Sweden at least have government monopolies with heavy restrictions on wine and spirits, and at least Norway have very strict restrictions on when any alchohol is sold. I hardly ever drink, so I don't remember for sure, but I think beer can only be sold before either 6pm or 8pm, and the government monopoly shops usually close at 6pm (earlier on Saturdays) and are closed on Sundays.
Really? So where are all the non-smoking places to drink or eat in countries without these laws then? The problem is that these are social places - when you have a group with both smokers and non-smokers, the group will go to a single location, and that is far more often driven by what place is hot at the moment than any other concerns.
So this is a typical example of where free enterprise has completely failed a large group of people.
Banning alcohol is entirely different because it does not generally negatively affect those who don't drink. I never smoke and usually don't drink. I don't mind of anyone does either, but I absolutely hate being near someone who smokes. The stench is unbearable. These days I actually find myself walking in large curves around people smoking - and I don't care if they realise.
In any case, in several of the countries putting in place smoking bans, the bans have actually been put in place as a logical extension to employee health and safety regulations. If your laws don't allow exposing employees to chemicals with known longtime exposure risks without adequate protections, then why would it be logical to allow exposing them to consistent and unavoidable high concentrations of second-hand tobacco smoke, when we know it causes significant health risks?
And no, this is not about choice - employment laws in most countries specifically recognize that employees are usually at a disadvantage, and that there are always people in personal situations that doesn't give them a realistic choice.
I still don't like the fingerprinting bit - it seems like it's begging for someone to abuse it.
I've also come across systems using voice recognition of UK postal codes (they have letters, and most phones here doesn't have letters printed on the number pad, so asking people to type it in is a lousy alternative too), which also seems to work reasonably well, except if you have an accent and an unfortunate postal code (mine ends with "DD" - with a human I have a reasonable chance of people getting it right if I say "delta delta", though even that confuses people).
The key lesson is that even this kind of limited recognition (that only picks the "best fit" from a fixed list of words to recognize) is only ready for prime time if you have an interface that is easy to bypass. The cinema app. I mentioned for instance only let you talk to an operator after it has misrecognised the city name 3 times, which makes it ridiculously annoying, because not only do you have to try three times, but you also have to listen through the wrongly recognised name and then press a button and listen to it give you the instructions for how to try again. It's a perfect example of how not to do things.
It would only be a problem if you can't capture a sufficient number of pixels in a small enough amount of time.
That is one of many reasons is why you should think about what tracks you are leaving, even when there is nothing nefarious about your purchases.
In this case there is at least one possible explanation: If I was a likely murder suspect I damn well would like to know what to expect from the police.
There are of course reasons why he might have done this that aren't quite as nice. In either case I must say I think it was a rather naive and stupid move.
The article you link to say that "forensic tests on the blood cannot exclude Nina Reiser as a donor". Translation: They do not have a definitive DNA match, which means either that someone did a rather good job at cleaning, and/or that it's not new. The police better get more certain than that if they want to rely on it in court.
The only "history of abuse" I am aware of is a claim by Nina that he was abusive as part of their divorce battle. From what little I've seen of the case the claim was never substantiated, and the temporary restraining order was eventually dropped, though I may be mistaken on that.
As for having his passport on him, I very often have my passport on me. In my case it's simply because it's the only photo id I have (I don't have a drivers license) that is valid in the UK (where I live), and so it's handy to have on me. But more than that, because I'm a frequent traveller I generally keep my passport IN the jacket I usually use when I travel because I just forget it (I also frequently have months old stubs from boarding passes in my pockets...) or don't care about taking it out.
As for having lots of cash on him, there are plenty of valid reasons, many of which could also explain the passport. One example would be the need to quickly transfer money to pay his Russian employees salaries - I've more than once had to carry large amounts of cash to Western Union etc. to do rapid money transfers to foreign countries, or to buy a bankers draft for that matter, for perfectly legitimate reasons. At one point after I moved to the UK, for instance, I had to pay about 10.000 pounds as a security deposit and first few months rent to rent a flat with some colleagues, and ended up having to max out my debit card cash limits at the ATM's outside the bank branch because they wouldn't debit the money directly, and getting my Norwegian bank to transfer money would take several days.
The banking system is really inconvenient if you frequently deal with foreign countries, and cash often becomes the only viable means of shortening the time it takes.
Countries like Russia in particular are problematic. At one point I was paying a Russian guy for a license to some software he'd developed, and the money had to be transferred from my bank in Norway via a bank in New York, because my Norwegian bank just wouldn't do transfers to Russia at all due to fraud risks (it's not a general thing with Norwegian banks - it depends on which particular bank you deal with, and you'll find the same in the US), so I had the choice between opening an account at a different bank and carry cash (or waiting 3 days for a direct transfer), or pay extra for the transfer via New York. In that case I chose the latter, since the transfer was happening in dollars anyway, and it was a onetime thing.
I'm not saying any of these are right, but that it's a bit early to assume that they prove anything.
Despite the Slashdot fanboys Gmail just never became a threat to the large players.
Pay particular attention to the chapter on alternative forms of socialism. Socialist ideologies spanned a vast spectrum politically, from far left to far right, already when the manifesto was written in the the last 1840's. Socialism is neither inherently good, nor bad. Marx and Engels' made the point that already back then there were "reactionary" socialist ideologies that were aimed at marrying what was essentially feudal systems with limited social support systems, not unlike stalinism, and that the label socialism is no guarantee that an ideology is good.
The idea that "socialism" is a unified ideology belonging on the left is relatively new, and is causing a lot of communications problems, as when left wing people call themselves socialists they tend to refer to socialist ideologies related to Marxism (though many of them are very watered down), whereas when right wing people refer to socialism they tend to include anyone who calls themselves socialists, which includes a wide range of ideologies that may refer to Marx or use Marxists symbology, but that widely completely disregard Marxist philosophy as you point out, and that additionally in most instances fall into one or more of the categories of reactionary socialism that Marx and Engels warned about in the Communist Manifesto.
Now, it doesn't help that a lot of left wing socialists fell for the deception of many of these regimes. That was a monumental fuckup that is inexcusable, and so it's understandable that a lot of people are confused about what people mean when they refer to socialism.
Many countries let you get debit cards from you're 13. The main limitations is that those debit cards usually don't have visa or mastercard numbers tied to them, and so depend on merchants supporting various local debit card schemes (such as switch/maestro or solo in the UK)
It's a result of one-man circuits. Some other countries, such as France, have similar systems, but in most of those countries additional parties were strong from early on and managed to stay in position through complicated systems of voting alliances. In France, for instance, the PS and PCF (socialists and communists) cooperate to split the voting districts between them based on who's strongest where, and have been successfull in getting the voters to accept that, so that they get any voting district where the PS + PCF vote combined is more than 50%, roughly distributed according to their difference in strength nationally (and the right wing parties do the same).
But ultimately using one-man circuits is a fucked up system which leaves everyone who don't like either of the major parties with representation they either don't support at all, or that is the "lesser evil". Are anyone really surprised that the number of people voting is as low as it is?
In the UK that means voting lib-dems, as they're the only of the three major parties to have promised to put in place proportional voting.
In the US I guess it means you're screwed.