For example, I say to you "Hey dude! How about a free pound of coke!" You jokingly say something like "LOL sure dude, bring a big straw." And we both laugh it off. But you're neighbor overhears and calls the cops/DEA.You just conspired to buy a pound of cocaine. And you'd lose in court, like 97% of fed trial defendants.
I regularly do a pound of coke Occaisionally even with a straw...
Lets turn that around then. You think it's wrong for an individual to put lives at risk on a few occaisions while claiming to do it for the greater good, but you think it's okay for a governement to kill innocent bystanders and call it 'unavoidable collateral damage'?
I'll take Julian over the US governement any time.
Last year in his speech at the Open World Forum in Paris, Mark was trying to convince people that more open source projects should get in lockstep with the Ubuntu six-month release cycle. I would be surprised if he had changed his mind so soon.
1) I'm not a 'yankee'. I'm European. 2) http://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/10/09/1750214/DC-Internet-Voting-Trial-Attacked-2-Different-Ways 3) The problems with the 2000 presidential elections were exactly what I was refering to, as the problems were with votes that were to be counted electronically. The fact that they were paper ballots makes no difference whatsoever. 4) Are you mad? Paper voting is more secure than electronic voting according to all people that have studied the subject in depth (see point 2). The only real proponents are manufacturers of electronic voting systems and lazy politicians and government employees who only look at the glossy folders made by said manufacturers. In the Netherlands they've reverted back to paper voting exactly because people in-the-know were able to fully convince the government electronic voting is unsafe. 5) What has the current government in Venezuela to do with this topic? 6) I agree completely that the US political system is a mess. They have to fix that for themselves. Making sure at least the voting results reflect reality is a different issue and needs to be taken seriously no matter what political system is in use. 7) With 'STFU' I meant to say: if you keep pushing electronic voting, don't come back and complain once it blows up in your face. You deserve all the negative fallout you get and then some for being too lazy to read up on the subject on your own and unwilling to look further than 'oooh, fast results'. 8) Sorry to hear about your annoying cousin. On the plus side, he might grow out of it.:)
"How would you even know if it happened in the US or not?"
Great point. Let me rectify my statement:
The chance that Brasil openly reverts to some form of dictatorship is quite a bit greater than the same thing happening in the US, or most western european states.
It's always nice to hear from citizens of budding democracies. Brasil has had a democratic government since 1985. A full 25 years. Take it from a citizen from an 'old' democracy, now over 160 years old: democracy needs defending. Always. Even if an electronic process works now, if people start to trust it someone can still take advantage of the flaws at a later moment. Lets do a small mental excercise:
- 2010, electronic elections are a complete succes. No fraud whatsoever. - 2014, people welcome a new democratically elected leader only two hours after the close of polls. - 2018, even though the democratically elected leader seems to have less support, he or she wins again, this time by a narrow margin - 2022, the elected leader, now less popular than ever cannot run for president again. He, however, has a protege that is 'acceptable' to many Brasilians. Polls are uncertain if he will take the lead on election day. The president has managed to influence the electronic voting process in an unexpected and mostly covert way to get his protege into office. The president and the protege assure everyone the elections were democratic and honest, even though the difference with the nearest opponent was less than 2%... Are you sure your new president is truly the man the people wanted?
The funny thing? The US has demonstrated that even a small amount of 'automation' might lead to such results and we all know how that ended.
To summarize: STFU and go insist on paper ballots all the way or don't come and complain that your rights have been 'eroded' come next elections. The chance that Brasil reverts to some form of dictatorship is quite a bit greater than the same thing happening in the US, or most western european states.
"What if the person/people who started our universe were just a bunch of scientists in their universe?"
Worse, what if our universe is one of a bunch of test-tubes in the drawer of some spotty-faced alien kid? Part of last years science project, now long forgotten about?
What if her mother walks in in a few minutes, finds it and cleanes it out... Will we even realise that our universe ends, never mind how or why?
(The kicker: religious people objecting to the fact that I had to make the alien kid female:P)
Due to limitations with TeX can't be bothered to fit it into the margins"
It doesn't matter. He did it by extending C-x M-c M-butterfly to include quantum-effects. As a result, all solutions will, by definition, be out-of-bounds.
"Oh gimme a break, I've spent *hours* today thinking of the children, my wrist is too sore to do it any longer."
You must be Catholic!
A quick tip: use a rod to hit children so as to spare your wrists. IIRC it's somewhere in the Catholic manual, too. Chapter "Proverbs" I believe. I quite understand if you can't keep track of everything in the book, though. Thinking of the children is hard work. It's the same for me an Unix man pages. So many systems to look after, so little time. Oh well, we do the best we can I guess.
(I'm happy to have found at least one area of common ground with Catholics. We both fail to see the difference between physical and sexual abuse of children...)
"Oh gimme a break, I've spent *hours* today thinking of the children, my wrist is too sore to do it any longer."
Ah, you must be Catholic! Just a quick tip: use a rod to spare your wrists, when hitting children. I believe it's mentioned in your operating manual as well. Somewhere under "Proverbs" although I do understand you wouldn't know the manual by heart as you're so busy thinking of the children. I have the same with man pages and watching many systems;).
(I fail to see how physical abuse of children is any better than sexual abuse, and it seems that the Catholic church has come to the same conclusion. At last we have something in common...)
I'm pro-vacination. Lets/really/ look at the odds, then:
>150mi women (CIA Factbook) in the US. Chance of contracting HPV during full lifetime: 90%. (hpvhealth.net).
If we estimate 2mi girls aged 14 a year, the maximum age to vaccinate if you/really/ want to get there before they become sexually active, we should have about 13 deaths each year due to the vaccine.
Chance of dying, annually, of HPV related cancer: "Between three thousand and four thousand women die of cervical cancer every year, with HPV being responsible for around 70% or more of all cervical cancer cases." (hpvhealth.net) Which means some 2450 deaths attributable to HPV related cancer annually. Those deaths are probably (I haven't researched those statistics) >35yo's.
Now calculate for yourself if you like the odds of 13 kids dying of the vaccine or rather almost 2500 deaths among adults. If you're gonna be nerdy about it, calculate the years saved/spoiled by either approach. Perhaps you can go deeper and calculate years in good health.
"if YOU can't understand how the vote is secured, refuse the voting system !"
Now that's an acurate description of how best to look at it.
Thing is, there's nothing inherently wrong with electronically supported counting of votes, as long as the votes themselves are each seperately available in physical form.
Here in the Netherlands we've recently switched back wholesale to voting with a red pencil instead of voting computers precisely because it's the only way to have those votes available for a true recount. Funny thing is, right after the most recent election officials started complaining counting was 'difficult, timeconsuming and old-fashioned'. Just a few days after said election, several districts have resorted to recounts that demonstrate why having the votes on paper instead of in a computer is a good idea.
"PS. The harshest measures so far were against US companies. Does Intel and Microsoft mean anything to you?"
Might this have something to do with the fact that US companies have different strategies and simply do not want to change their ways for the European market but do want the benefits of that same market? Said in a different way: if they don't like the European rules they could choose to not compete in the European market.
Anyway, The good news (to you) is, that ms Kroes is leaving office for another post real soon now. The bad news (to you), is that she's leaving it for the post of foreign trade, which deals with ict, e-commerce en telecom, among other things. I wouldn't count her out just yet. In Europe, things will get better, as far as I'm concerned. I'm quite certain that the wave of ever bigger companies because of 'economies of scale' were bad for society at large and I hope the trend will be reversed.
Replying to you, belatedly because of time difference, as you make the two points that interest me most:
"Once the structures are in place, more and more pieces of software will be written (and/or plugins will be written) to add tags to files wherever possible."
"The main thing, as the summary mentions, is that tagging cannot be locked into a specific context."
I think you're right on both counts and it makes me think again. As with science, immediate usability isn't always what counts most. I guess I was a bit too cynical and dismissive at first.
I'll take a wait-and-see stance for now. The problem that remains is, if anyone will use it untill it's been worked out to a point that it'll 'just work'.
The best chance for that, is if the tools allow people who already do tag simpler ways of working and tagging information is made portable. In other words, the KDE people may be on to something but I didn't get that impression from how the presentation I saw.
I saw a preview of the semantic desktop at the Open World Forum in Paris and I think it has the same down-fall as other initiatives: you need to tag most of it yourself.
Other people may be better at this than I am, but I can't even be bothered to tag my e-mails, let alone each and every file. Granted, this system does some 'auto-tagging' but to call it a semantic desktop because of that is a bit rich. YMMV and I like to be persuaded to look again.
Well, I seem to have the exact same trouble with a KK 64-bit upgrade from JJ, on a dell Latitude E6500. I'm guessing all the Intel changes in the new kernel and the use of advanced features in that kernel by Karmic might have something to do with it. My desktop machine, on the other hand, is fine. Exact same upgrade but AMD/Nvidia hardware.
And the simple truth is that you should be nervous. The cloud has distinct advantages that are being overshadowed by large disadvantages: the 'Next Big Lock-in (tm)'.
Basically this is the same thing 'our' community has been saying for years now: it's all about Open standards, Open document formats and Open API's. In classic style, the blogger either fails to see this point clearly or fails to clearly point this out. Your pick:).
Nicolas Barcet, the Ubuntu Server product manager at Canonical, held a talk at the Open World Forum in Paris last week. He explained how Canonical is putting its support behind Project Eucalyptus because they see an Open implementation of Amazon's API's as the way to force an Open standard for cloud computing. I think they may have a point.
"And I have seen Ubuntu (one of my FAVORITE desktop OS'es) take no less than 8 hours to complete."
With version 9.04, from CD on the same hardware? I've seen Ubuntu take a long time to install, but not that long on P4 hardware. Please elaborate on the circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, I say to you "Hey dude! How about a free pound of coke!" You jokingly say something like "LOL sure dude, bring a big straw." And we both laugh it off. But you're neighbor overhears and calls the cops/DEA.You just conspired to buy a pound of cocaine. And you'd lose in court, like 97% of fed trial defendants.
I regularly do a pound of coke
Occaisionally even with a straw...
Lets turn that around then. You think it's wrong for an individual to put lives at risk on a few occaisions while claiming to do it for the greater good, but you think it's okay for a governement to kill innocent bystanders and call it 'unavoidable collateral damage'?
I'll take Julian over the US governement any time.
Last year in his speech at the Open World Forum in Paris, Mark was trying to convince people that more open source projects should get in lockstep with the Ubuntu six-month release cycle. I would be surprised if he had changed his mind so soon.
1) I'm not a 'yankee'. I'm European. :)
2) http://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/10/09/1750214/DC-Internet-Voting-Trial-Attacked-2-Different-Ways
3) The problems with the 2000 presidential elections were exactly what I was refering to, as the problems were with votes that were to be counted electronically. The fact that they were paper ballots makes no difference whatsoever.
4) Are you mad? Paper voting is more secure than electronic voting according to all people that have studied the subject in depth (see point 2). The only real proponents are manufacturers of electronic voting systems and lazy politicians and government employees who only look at the glossy folders made by said manufacturers. In the Netherlands they've reverted back to paper voting exactly because people in-the-know were able to fully convince the government electronic voting is unsafe.
5) What has the current government in Venezuela to do with this topic?
6) I agree completely that the US political system is a mess. They have to fix that for themselves. Making sure at least the voting results reflect reality is a different issue and needs to be taken seriously no matter what political system is in use.
7) With 'STFU' I meant to say: if you keep pushing electronic voting, don't come back and complain once it blows up in your face. You deserve all the negative fallout you get and then some for being too lazy to read up on the subject on your own and unwilling to look further than 'oooh, fast results'.
8) Sorry to hear about your annoying cousin. On the plus side, he might grow out of it.
"How would you even know if it happened in the US or not?"
Great point. Let me rectify my statement:
The chance that Brasil openly reverts to some form of dictatorship is quite a bit greater than the same thing happening in the US, or most western european states.
It's always nice to hear from citizens of budding democracies. Brasil has had a democratic government since 1985. A full 25 years. Take it from a citizen from an 'old' democracy, now over 160 years old: democracy needs defending. Always. Even if an electronic process works now, if people start to trust it someone can still take advantage of the flaws at a later moment. Lets do a small mental excercise:
- 2010, electronic elections are a complete succes. No fraud whatsoever.
- 2014, people welcome a new democratically elected leader only two hours after the close of polls.
- 2018, even though the democratically elected leader seems to have less support, he or she wins again, this time by a narrow margin
- 2022, the elected leader, now less popular than ever cannot run for president again. He, however, has a protege that is 'acceptable' to many Brasilians. Polls are uncertain if he will take the lead on election day. The president has managed to influence the electronic voting process in an unexpected and mostly covert way to get his protege into office. The president and the protege assure everyone the elections were democratic and honest, even though the difference with the nearest opponent was less than 2%... Are you sure your new president is truly the man the people wanted?
The funny thing? The US has demonstrated that even a small amount of 'automation' might lead to such results and we all know how that ended.
To summarize: STFU and go insist on paper ballots all the way or don't come and complain that your rights have been 'eroded' come next elections. The chance that Brasil reverts to some form of dictatorship is quite a bit greater than the same thing happening in the US, or most western european states.
'At least Adobe provided a work-around by adding a "play on youtube" option in the right click context menu.'
*Head assplodes.*
These benevolent people at Adobe at least provide a bloody workaround?!
Why don't they fix the Linux flash player altogether? They're the ones, making it this crappy on Linux in the first place, aren't they?
Sorry, should've mentioned I actually believe it's turtles all the way down... :D
(Un)fortunately, the specific 'non-free' enhancements seem to be excluded. Groklaw has the inside:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100928224103271
Make what you will out of it, but OOXML may stay an outcast in Open^WLibreOffice for the foreseeable future.
"What if the person/people who started our universe were just a bunch of scientists in their universe?"
Worse, what if our universe is one of a bunch of test-tubes in the drawer of some spotty-faced alien kid? Part of last years science project, now long forgotten about?
What if her mother walks in in a few minutes, finds it and cleanes it out... Will we even realise that our universe ends, never mind how or why?
(The kicker: religious people objecting to the fact that I had to make the alien kid female :P)
"He proves P != NP.
Due to limitations with TeX can't be bothered to fit it into the margins"
It doesn't matter. He did it by extending C-x M-c M-butterfly to include quantum-effects. As a result, all solutions will, by definition, be out-of-bounds.
"Good lord, seriously, you're doing it wrong."
No need to be so intolerant towards different customs or beliefs!
It's not as if he's using emacs, after all...
"No."
Your comment seems to end rather abruptly. Did you lose carrier while submitting? I was sure you were going to say:
"No one can be told what Wave is. You have to see it for yourself."
*sigh* I guess we'll never know for sure, now.
"Stories like this almost make me physically ill."
Lucky you. I was glad I made it to the toilet in time. :P
"Oh gimme a break, I've spent *hours* today thinking of the children, my wrist is too sore to do it any longer."
You must be Catholic!
A quick tip: use a rod to hit children so as to spare your wrists. IIRC it's somewhere in the Catholic manual, too. Chapter "Proverbs" I believe. I quite understand if you can't keep track of everything in the book, though. Thinking of the children is hard work. It's the same for me an Unix man pages. So many systems to look after, so little time. Oh well, we do the best we can I guess.
(I'm happy to have found at least one area of common ground with Catholics. We both fail to see the difference between physical and sexual abuse of children...)
"Oh gimme a break, I've spent *hours* today thinking of the children, my wrist is too sore to do it any longer."
Ah, you must be Catholic! Just a quick tip: use a rod to spare your wrists, when hitting children. I believe it's mentioned in your operating manual as well. Somewhere under "Proverbs" although I do understand you wouldn't know the manual by heart as you're so busy thinking of the children. I have the same with man pages and watching many systems ;).
(I fail to see how physical abuse of children is any better than sexual abuse, and it seems that the Catholic church has come to the same conclusion. At last we have something in common...)
"You certainly can't get a supported solution for something like that from anyone but Sun/Oracle."
I believe the likes of http://www.nexenta.org/ and http://www.getgreenbytes.com/ would like to differ.
I'm pro-vacination. Lets /really/ look at the odds, then:
>150mi women (CIA Factbook) in the US. Chance of contracting HPV during full lifetime: 90%. (hpvhealth.net).
If we estimate 2mi girls aged 14 a year, the maximum age to vaccinate if you /really/ want to get there before they become sexually active, we should have about 13 deaths each year due to the vaccine.
Chance of dying, annually, of HPV related cancer: "Between three thousand and four thousand women die of cervical cancer every year, with HPV being responsible for around 70% or more of all cervical cancer cases." (hpvhealth.net) Which means some 2450 deaths attributable to HPV related cancer annually. Those deaths are probably (I haven't researched those statistics) >35yo's.
Now calculate for yourself if you like the odds of 13 kids dying of the vaccine or rather almost 2500 deaths among adults. If you're gonna be nerdy about it, calculate the years saved/spoiled by either approach. Perhaps you can go deeper and calculate years in good health.
"if YOU can't understand how the vote is secured, refuse the voting system !"
Now that's an acurate description of how best to look at it.
Thing is, there's nothing inherently wrong with electronically supported counting of votes, as long as the votes themselves are each seperately available in physical form.
Here in the Netherlands we've recently switched back wholesale to voting with a red pencil instead of voting computers precisely because it's the only way to have those votes available for a true recount. Funny thing is, right after the most recent election officials started complaining counting was 'difficult, timeconsuming and old-fashioned'. Just a few days after said election, several districts have resorted to recounts that demonstrate why having the votes on paper instead of in a computer is a good idea.
"PS. The harshest measures so far were against US companies. Does Intel and Microsoft mean anything to you?"
Might this have something to do with the fact that US companies have different strategies and simply do not want to change their ways for the European market but do want the benefits of that same market? Said in a different way: if they don't like the European rules they could choose to not compete in the European market.
Anyway, The good news (to you) is, that ms Kroes is leaving office for another post real soon now. The bad news (to you), is that she's leaving it for the post of foreign trade, which deals with ict, e-commerce en telecom, among other things. I wouldn't count her out just yet. In Europe, things will get better, as far as I'm concerned. I'm quite certain that the wave of ever bigger companies because of 'economies of scale' were bad for society at large and I hope the trend will be reversed.
Replying to you, belatedly because of time difference, as you make the two points that interest me most:
"Once the structures are in place, more and more pieces of software will be written (and/or plugins will be written) to add tags to files wherever possible."
"The main thing, as the summary mentions, is that tagging cannot be locked into a specific context."
I think you're right on both counts and it makes me think again. As with science, immediate usability isn't always what counts most. I guess I was a bit too cynical and dismissive at first.
I'll take a wait-and-see stance for now. The problem that remains is, if anyone will use it untill it's been worked out to a point that it'll 'just work'.
The best chance for that, is if the tools allow people who already do tag simpler ways of working and tagging information is made portable. In other words, the KDE people may be on to something but I didn't get that impression from how the presentation I saw.
I saw a preview of the semantic desktop at the Open World Forum in Paris and I think it has the same down-fall as other initiatives: you need to tag most of it yourself.
Other people may be better at this than I am, but I can't even be bothered to tag my e-mails, let alone each and every file. Granted, this system does some 'auto-tagging' but to call it a semantic desktop because of that is a bit rich. YMMV and I like to be persuaded to look again.
Well, I seem to have the exact same trouble with a KK 64-bit upgrade from JJ, on a dell Latitude E6500. I'm guessing all the Intel changes in the new kernel and the use of advanced features in that kernel by Karmic might have something to do with it. My desktop machine, on the other hand, is fine. Exact same upgrade but AMD/Nvidia hardware.
Another two useless data-points :)
And the simple truth is that you should be nervous. The cloud has distinct advantages that are being overshadowed by large disadvantages: the 'Next Big Lock-in (tm)'.
Basically this is the same thing 'our' community has been saying for years now: it's all about Open standards, Open document formats and Open API's. In classic style, the blogger either fails to see this point clearly or fails to clearly point this out. Your pick :).
Nicolas Barcet, the Ubuntu Server product manager at Canonical, held a talk at the Open World Forum in Paris last week. He explained how Canonical is putting its support behind Project Eucalyptus because they see an Open implementation of Amazon's API's as the way to force an Open standard for cloud computing. I think they may have a point.
With version 9.04, from CD on the same hardware? I've seen Ubuntu take a long time to install, but not that long on P4 hardware. Please elaborate on the circumstances.