Quebec is actually masculine, as is Canada (le Quebec, le Canada).
All so very complicated, because I thought it was "vive la France", and therefore countries were in the feminine -- I'm probably wrong about that too.:-P
I must say, as a native speaker of English, the whole masculine/feminine thing as used in French (and other languages) has always been exceptionally difficult for me to get my head around. The rules seem fairly arbitrary at times.:-P
The two basic errors are: concluding that anonymous speech on the Internet requires forged headers or other falsified information (and therefore that a ban on forged headers is an unconstitutional ban on anonymous speech)
Cool, so does that mean fake ID is constitutionally protected so that I can preserve my anonymity when doing things in public?
Sometimes (well, quite often actually) judges rule on technology issues without really having nearly enough understanding of the underlying issues and what it means. It's amazing how a poorly misunderstood bit of technology can lead to a ruling which has absolutely no relation to how reality works.
And, just because you have the right to free speech, doesn't mean that I'm required to actually listen to you. Decreeing that allowing forged headers in order to allow the special case of some religious or political nut screaming in my ear is ludicrous. Your freedom to speak does not confer an obligation on me to listen.
Someone should start spamming this guy with several thousand emails with forged headers expounding the virtues of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or calling him at home with forged caller id telling him to vote for the Nut Job Party so he can see the flaw in his reasoning.
If the analog is a phone call, you don't have the right to anonymously phone me over and over.
We love you, we really do. But your delusional and increasingly demented ravings give all supporters of free software a bad name.
Not really as much as you'd think.;-)
And if you're going to represent the opinions of a large group of users like you do, would it kill you to buy a nice shirt and a razor?
Have you considered that he represent all of us crotchety old UNIX guys with batman shirts and who haven't shaved lately?
Besides, it's like Greenpeace or PETA. Someone has to be bat-shit crazy for a good cause so it stays in our minds and keeps perspective. You don't have to agree with everything they do, merely be happy that someone is out there doing it -- you then just need to set your perspective relative to them and go from there.;-)
... is that this Canadian and a lot of people that I know will, with glowing hearts, ignore this piece of nonsense on the basis of prior art.
Another poster has already pointed out that prior art doesn't apply, but I'll provide a sample nonetheless here.;-)
p.s. With the Conservatives in power when this was done, and the fact that they are more than likely to get back in, does anyone think that this will change?
I move we make these mice honorary Canadian citizens. They might be better than the weasels we have in Parliament.
That's why we need a freedom of trade amendment to the Constitution. Without it, people want trade to be tilted their way, and then there goes your freedom to trade.
But, in this case, isn't the network infrastructure a scarce resource owned by the telco? In which case "freedom of trade" is kind of like allowing you to sell the milk from my cows so you can pursue your trade in milk??
I'm not saying I'm in favor of telcos and bandwidth limits, but, until we turn the telecom infrastructure into a public utility.. they're still owned and maintained by private companies at their expense. Otherwise the telcos would be asked to keep increasing their capacity, let everyone use it, and not get paid for it.
I'm all in favor of limiting their ability to skew the rules into their favor, but I don't think that a "freedom of trade" principal here would actually cover the underlying problem -- governments permitting monopolies, and no competition.
If they try to charge those kind of rates we will just route around them. We use the large ISPs because we find them the best bargsin. Jack up prices to that sort of level and there will be other options.
Route to where? If the major infrastructure and backbone is in the hands of the major telcos, short of laying an entirely new set of cables, where are you going to route to??
Get bandwidth expensive enough and we could just do local neighborhood p2p filesharing. Imagine a 10.0.0.0/8 wifi network covering a neighborhood and sharing the big popular downloads among themselves.
Ultimately, all of this needs to get routed over someone's wires.
Maybe I'm just suffering from a complete lack of imagination, but I just don't see how you can get around sending stuff over the wire of a large company who is metering it. I'm just not seeing how you're actually solving the problem, just hoping that making it distributed will somehow create new bandwidth capacity and places for the data to travel over.
I have serious doubts as to their projected costs. This will have changed so radically in 4 years that these predictions are about as stable as gas predictions that far out.
Have you observed the prices of broadband dropping lately? I sure haven't, and you'd think that over time it would.
If the prices haven't been coming down, and they've been curtailing the amount of bandwidth you get... it does seem like it won't get any better than it is now.
Luckily, I believe in the market and I think someone will lay the groundwork for serious bandwidth soon, instead of continuing to use copper for everything.
If this was anything resembling an open market where competition and other factors might change things, I might think you had a chance in hell of being right. However, the way the telecom industry in the US is structured, the 'market', as it applies here, is a complete myth.
The big telcos own all of the infrastructure, and have shockingly little incentive to make things better. No new player can come along and compete. I see absolutely nothing to believe that the market will sort things out.
Heck, increasingly I have very little faith in this so-called 'market' which everyone seems to think will magically correct imbalances over time -- there's just too many distorting factors, and people end up waiting around for the same players to do something different when nothing else has changed. And it's not just in the telco industry that the industry has managed to get some leverage against the notion of this guiding market.
The way I read this, they will police their website for what you upload. Likely to cover their asses against the *AAs who would inevitably sue their asses into the ground if a 3rd party started doing covers of songs they didn't have licenses for.
I think this is a big CYA on behalf of the game maker, not some infringement on your rights. I mean, someone could put up Happy Birthday and then the company would get sued by Time Warner.
Obviously, nobody can stop you from making your own cover, it's just that the makers of GH won't let you post it on their site, because they don't want to get sued into oblivion. Sadly, I think this is just stark reality in our current climate of copyright madness.
MythTV is great if you like to fiddle with your DVR hardware instead of actually WATCHING the television.
And, as far as I can tell, if you don't have digital TV.
My cable TV is digital cable, and my TV would be incapable of accessing all of my channels. To the best of my knowledge, most of these tuner cards work if you've got old fashioned analog cable.
In my case, it's far less hassle (and far more convenient) to buy/rent my PVR from my cable company. I'm not convinced that building my own would cover all of my channels, or be even remotely worth it to me.
Then again, I could be completely wrong and you can access the digital cable channels with that kind of setup. But, if it can't, that's a huge loss of utility for me. That, and my current PVR has two tuners and is directly integrated with my same TV guide as I have from my cable company.
For me, trying to roll my own just seems like a waste of energy.
Which is sad, because I just realized that I can't think of any famous female programmers off the top of my head. Of course, the regular ratio isn't terribly different...
There's no reason you can't renegotiate your contract or go elsewhere and get overtime.
Ahh, the unfailing lament of the free market capitalist who believes that the market will solve all problems, and that any casualties of such an atrociously Darwinian and uncaring system are their own problem.
See, the free market really only tries to do a couple of things -- allow people to pursue their own interests with no regard whatsoever for everyone else. It largely tends to make a bunch of groups rich, and completely steam roll over everyone else.
I believe that market factors will drive a lot of things, and many of them it will do a good job of. Actually trying to improve the lives of people is not one of them, and certainly, it doesn't attempt to help people who have stumbled on the way. That's why civil societies have governments, to try to help out everyone else and protect the rights of all of us. Not being unduly abused by your employer is one of them.
I already said elsewhere in this thread you'd trot out this old chestnut, and you've not disappointed me. And, as you said to me, I completely disagree with you.
Uncontrolled, unbridled capitalism is only good if you're rich, or in the middle of getting rich -- it basically craps on everyone who isn't, and leaves them to fend for themselves on the bottom.
Sure you can, if your employment contract says you get overtime. Most companies are still going to pay for overtime regardless of whether the government tells them to or not.
Well, the specific case I can think of was Apple. They were demanding increasingly long hours (as I recall) but not paying additional amounts for it.
The problem is, if it's too open ended in terms of how much your employer can demand unpaid overtime, then it'll just get out of control. If they're not going to be required to pay it, it should be bounded in terms of how much they can ask for.
The problem, is certain professions have been deemed to have a very expandable amount of required extra time, without really giving anything back to the employee. IT, of course, being one of them.
This type of thing should be left to employers and not mandated by the government. Thank you for putting some control back where it belongs.
If we put control over everything in the hands of the employers, they'd all decide to screw over the employees. You now have to work 200 hours/week for 80% less money -- because we said so.
The reason that government mandates this is to provide minimum standards, and not create abjectly crappy working conditions for people. You know, try to improve people's lives instead of making them indentured servants.
Of course, this is the point where you say that if you don't like it, you're free to leave and get another job. To which I'll respond that just leads us in the race to the bottom of crappy employment standards, and undoes several generations of changes in working conditions.
Setting the standard to whoever is willing to work in the worst conditions for the least money doesn't benefit any of us. It treats people like commodities, and devalues both their work, and their existence.
If all of the jobs are crappy and trying to screw you over, we all lose.
I have iTunes and I've got a number of playlists with over 100 songs, though I've not tried the "unlimited number of playlists" feature just yet...
Every time I see one of these articles I think "iTunes, or the iTunes Music Store".
They're very different animals, and ultimately do very different things. The music store has some restrictions (because there's no way in hell the labels would have allowed it), but the actual iTunes software imposes no such limitations.
... buy music, download it to my unencumbered computer system using open source software I compiled myself, play it directly using open source software I compiled myself, or transfer it to my portable player (and have it play there) using open source software I compiled myself... then it's truly DRM free.
You know, except for downloading it to my portable player (an iPod, actually) using open source software, I can do all of this now. (And, before anyone points out whatever piece of open source would let me do that on my iPod, allow me to say I like iTunes, so I'm not interested.)
I buy a CD, rip the tracks into MP3 on my FreeBSD box, and import that over a Samba share into my iTunes. Some times I rip it from inside of iTunes, but I'm not required to.
Once it's in iTunes, it does some nice features which I think are actually adding value for me -- tracking play count, last played on, and some other nice features which I use. However, if you go for a different kind of player, you can get your end-to-end in OSS.
Yes, they're starting to have some services which will sell you an unencumbered MP3. But, go buy a real, physical CD. You can turn that into unencumbered MP3 all you like.
Which makes one wonder - what would I ever need a web server the size of a business card? I appreciate efficiency and all, but honestly...
Why? Because he could, obviously. He really needs no better reason than that.
Projects like this don't get done because the world is clamoring for a web server that has a foot print which is comparable to a business card. They get done because someone with the necessary skillset (or, who is developing the skillset) did it for practice/experience/fun. This is no different that the vast majority of open source projects -- someone did it because they wanted to.
Sure, it's not something which is likely sale-able. But, if you were interviewing someone to do work in a related area, and their "resume" included a little wee web server like this, you'd have no doubt but that he knows what the hell he's doing. In some ways (likely that you and I can't quite imagine) he likely has advanced the state of the art.
I know for a fact that I (and likely 90% or more of all Slashdotters) couldn't ever hope to do this. This isn't cool because of its utility, it's cool because it's novel, and, well, it's just plain old cool. That's the point.
Not hat I'm exactly happy about Google's history, but damn, when an ISP can see every page you visit no matter who's hosting it they should be expected to hold to a higher standard of behavior.
Yes. As much as people argue that an ISP isn't a common carrier, they essentially fill the role.
They can't have it both ways. Either they're just a medium and what you transmit is none of their business, allowing them to retain zero liability for what you send. Or, they're not a common carrier, and they can read it all they want but also be on the hook for policing it.
Slashdot Mirror
All so very complicated, because I thought it was "vive la France", and therefore countries were in the feminine -- I'm probably wrong about that too. :-P
I must say, as a native speaker of English, the whole masculine/feminine thing as used in French (and other languages) has always been exceptionally difficult for me to get my head around. The rules seem fairly arbitrary at times. :-P
Thanks for the update.
Cheers
Cool, so does that mean fake ID is constitutionally protected so that I can preserve my anonymity when doing things in public?
Sometimes (well, quite often actually) judges rule on technology issues without really having nearly enough understanding of the underlying issues and what it means. It's amazing how a poorly misunderstood bit of technology can lead to a ruling which has absolutely no relation to how reality works.
And, just because you have the right to free speech, doesn't mean that I'm required to actually listen to you. Decreeing that allowing forged headers in order to allow the special case of some religious or political nut screaming in my ear is ludicrous. Your freedom to speak does not confer an obligation on me to listen.
Someone should start spamming this guy with several thousand emails with forged headers expounding the virtues of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or calling him at home with forged caller id telling him to vote for the Nut Job Party so he can see the flaw in his reasoning.
If the analog is a phone call, you don't have the right to anonymously phone me over and over.
Cheers
OK, I stand corrected. Apparently, it was firefox (or me).
However, it is "la belle provence". I don't have access to the original speech, but part of me is thinking that it should be in the feminine.
Then again, it's possible de Gaulle used the masculine form in error or in deference in case it would be inappropriate.
Cheers
Wow. Just fucking wow. You sir, are brilliant!!
Cheers
Not really as much as you'd think. ;-)
Have you considered that he represent all of us crotchety old UNIX guys with batman shirts and who haven't shaved lately?
Besides, it's like Greenpeace or PETA. Someone has to be bat-shit crazy for a good cause so it stays in our minds and keeps perspective. You don't have to agree with everything they do, merely be happy that someone is out there doing it -- you then just need to set your perspective relative to them and go from there. ;-)
Cheers
Another poster has already pointed out that prior art doesn't apply, but I'll provide a sample nonetheless here. ;-)
I move we make these mice honorary Canadian citizens. They might be better than the weasels we have in Parliament.
Cheers
And, I believe it's "Vive la Quebec". (Dropping the accent because Slashcode borks unicode apparently)
Cheers
Or, you know, aliens in Spielberg movies. :-P
Cheers
But, in this case, isn't the network infrastructure a scarce resource owned by the telco? In which case "freedom of trade" is kind of like allowing you to sell the milk from my cows so you can pursue your trade in milk??
I'm not saying I'm in favor of telcos and bandwidth limits, but, until we turn the telecom infrastructure into a public utility .. they're still owned and maintained by private companies at their expense. Otherwise the telcos would be asked to keep increasing their capacity, let everyone use it, and not get paid for it.
I'm all in favor of limiting their ability to skew the rules into their favor, but I don't think that a "freedom of trade" principal here would actually cover the underlying problem -- governments permitting monopolies, and no competition.
Cheers
Route to where? If the major infrastructure and backbone is in the hands of the major telcos, short of laying an entirely new set of cables, where are you going to route to??
Ultimately, all of this needs to get routed over someone's wires.
Maybe I'm just suffering from a complete lack of imagination, but I just don't see how you can get around sending stuff over the wire of a large company who is metering it. I'm just not seeing how you're actually solving the problem, just hoping that making it distributed will somehow create new bandwidth capacity and places for the data to travel over.
Cheers
Have you observed the prices of broadband dropping lately? I sure haven't, and you'd think that over time it would.
If the prices haven't been coming down, and they've been curtailing the amount of bandwidth you get ... it does seem like it won't get any better than it is now.
If this was anything resembling an open market where competition and other factors might change things, I might think you had a chance in hell of being right. However, the way the telecom industry in the US is structured, the 'market', as it applies here, is a complete myth.
The big telcos own all of the infrastructure, and have shockingly little incentive to make things better. No new player can come along and compete. I see absolutely nothing to believe that the market will sort things out.
Heck, increasingly I have very little faith in this so-called 'market' which everyone seems to think will magically correct imbalances over time -- there's just too many distorting factors, and people end up waiting around for the same players to do something different when nothing else has changed. And it's not just in the telco industry that the industry has managed to get some leverage against the notion of this guiding market.
Cheers
Is this even an issue?
The way I read this, they will police their website for what you upload. Likely to cover their asses against the *AAs who would inevitably sue their asses into the ground if a 3rd party started doing covers of songs they didn't have licenses for.
I think this is a big CYA on behalf of the game maker, not some infringement on your rights. I mean, someone could put up Happy Birthday and then the company would get sued by Time Warner.
Obviously, nobody can stop you from making your own cover, it's just that the makers of GH won't let you post it on their site, because they don't want to get sued into oblivion. Sadly, I think this is just stark reality in our current climate of copyright madness.
Cheers
And, as far as I can tell, if you don't have digital TV.
My cable TV is digital cable, and my TV would be incapable of accessing all of my channels. To the best of my knowledge, most of these tuner cards work if you've got old fashioned analog cable.
In my case, it's far less hassle (and far more convenient) to buy/rent my PVR from my cable company. I'm not convinced that building my own would cover all of my channels, or be even remotely worth it to me.
Then again, I could be completely wrong and you can access the digital cable channels with that kind of setup. But, if it can't, that's a huge loss of utility for me. That, and my current PVR has two tuners and is directly integrated with my same TV guide as I have from my cable company.
For me, trying to roll my own just seems like a waste of energy.
Cheers
Admiral Grace Hopper comes to mind.
Cheers
Ahh, the unfailing lament of the free market capitalist who believes that the market will solve all problems, and that any casualties of such an atrociously Darwinian and uncaring system are their own problem.
See, the free market really only tries to do a couple of things -- allow people to pursue their own interests with no regard whatsoever for everyone else. It largely tends to make a bunch of groups rich, and completely steam roll over everyone else.
I believe that market factors will drive a lot of things, and many of them it will do a good job of. Actually trying to improve the lives of people is not one of them, and certainly, it doesn't attempt to help people who have stumbled on the way. That's why civil societies have governments, to try to help out everyone else and protect the rights of all of us. Not being unduly abused by your employer is one of them.
I already said elsewhere in this thread you'd trot out this old chestnut, and you've not disappointed me. And, as you said to me, I completely disagree with you.
Uncontrolled, unbridled capitalism is only good if you're rich, or in the middle of getting rich -- it basically craps on everyone who isn't, and leaves them to fend for themselves on the bottom.
Cheers
Well, the specific case I can think of was Apple. They were demanding increasingly long hours (as I recall) but not paying additional amounts for it.
The problem is, if it's too open ended in terms of how much your employer can demand unpaid overtime, then it'll just get out of control. If they're not going to be required to pay it, it should be bounded in terms of how much they can ask for.
The problem, is certain professions have been deemed to have a very expandable amount of required extra time, without really giving anything back to the employee. IT, of course, being one of them.
Cheers
If we put control over everything in the hands of the employers, they'd all decide to screw over the employees. You now have to work 200 hours/week for 80% less money -- because we said so.
The reason that government mandates this is to provide minimum standards, and not create abjectly crappy working conditions for people. You know, try to improve people's lives instead of making them indentured servants.
Of course, this is the point where you say that if you don't like it, you're free to leave and get another job. To which I'll respond that just leads us in the race to the bottom of crappy employment standards, and undoes several generations of changes in working conditions.
Setting the standard to whoever is willing to work in the worst conditions for the least money doesn't benefit any of us. It treats people like commodities, and devalues both their work, and their existence.
If all of the jobs are crappy and trying to screw you over, we all lose.
Cheers
Nope. And, now, apparently, you can't sue over that fact any more. :-P
Cheers
That's not its feet. ;-)
Cheers
Every time I see one of these articles I think "iTunes, or the iTunes Music Store".
They're very different animals, and ultimately do very different things. The music store has some restrictions (because there's no way in hell the labels would have allowed it), but the actual iTunes software imposes no such limitations.
Cheers
You know, except for downloading it to my portable player (an iPod, actually) using open source software, I can do all of this now. (And, before anyone points out whatever piece of open source would let me do that on my iPod, allow me to say I like iTunes, so I'm not interested.)
I buy a CD, rip the tracks into MP3 on my FreeBSD box, and import that over a Samba share into my iTunes. Some times I rip it from inside of iTunes, but I'm not required to.
Once it's in iTunes, it does some nice features which I think are actually adding value for me -- tracking play count, last played on, and some other nice features which I use. However, if you go for a different kind of player, you can get your end-to-end in OSS.
Yes, they're starting to have some services which will sell you an unencumbered MP3. But, go buy a real, physical CD. You can turn that into unencumbered MP3 all you like.
Cheers
And, in fairness, in actual printed newspapers I frequently cringe at the atrocious spelling and grammar I see.
Doesn't mean I'm in favor of it.
And, I don't know about the rest of you, but Firefox is spell-checking as I fill in forms, so it's not like it's tough to get some help.
Cheers
Kood we get our edditors some speelchuckers pleez?
Seriously, this is just getting sad.
Cheers
Why? Because he could, obviously. He really needs no better reason than that.
Projects like this don't get done because the world is clamoring for a web server that has a foot print which is comparable to a business card. They get done because someone with the necessary skillset (or, who is developing the skillset) did it for practice/experience/fun. This is no different that the vast majority of open source projects -- someone did it because they wanted to.
Sure, it's not something which is likely sale-able. But, if you were interviewing someone to do work in a related area, and their "resume" included a little wee web server like this, you'd have no doubt but that he knows what the hell he's doing. In some ways (likely that you and I can't quite imagine) he likely has advanced the state of the art.
I know for a fact that I (and likely 90% or more of all Slashdotters) couldn't ever hope to do this. This isn't cool because of its utility, it's cool because it's novel, and, well, it's just plain old cool. That's the point.
Cheers
Yes. As much as people argue that an ISP isn't a common carrier, they essentially fill the role.
They can't have it both ways. Either they're just a medium and what you transmit is none of their business, allowing them to retain zero liability for what you send. Or, they're not a common carrier, and they can read it all they want but also be on the hook for policing it.
Cheers