had already decided that with the PS3, I would by from Japan,... Such behavior by Sony only strengthens the resolve to learn Japanese.
If they are such lousy vendors, then you should spend your cash elsewhere. Surely our right to do WTF we want with our stuff is more important than the latest version of Grand Turismo?
I would doubt that the US would extradite anyone to another country unless they had commited a crime in that country. To hand someone over to a foreign government to answer to accusations of crimes that were commited in ones own country is kowtowing.
Well you've just explained Australian foreign policy when it comes to the USA. Sounds like Kowotwing to me. Nice to know if another government demnds to put me on trial, my government will meekly hand me over.
From TFA ..at all relevant times, he was residing in Australia,
This was the first time I have ever been motivated enough to write to my representatives. Considering the complete lack of a response, it may be the last.
I know people who have worked in politician's offices, and the tide of mail is apparently astounding and relentless. However it does shape what appears on a politician's radar, even if you do not get a reply. One or two people is not going to make them sit up and take notice, but the more people write, the greater the profile for an issue. Your MEPs will assume that people do not care unless people keep telling them otherwise.
Yes, exposure to EM radiation is dangerous. So is exposure to sunlight. While you should not needlessly expose yourself to EMR, the power involved is low compared to other sources that we are pretty blase about.
On the long term, the more diverse an environment is, the more like it is to survive
That didn't help the tropical paradise of Guam which has been turned into a snake monoculture. Yes, as soon as something that eats snakes goes feral in Guam it's going to devastate the island's snake population, but that's not going to bring back all the birds and other wildlife.
Monocultures may be more risky, but all of our most productive systems (agriculture) and monocultures. Hopefully we'll maintain enough diversity in agriculture to avoid famine, but there will always be a market for weird produce sold in organic health food shops; the poeple that shop here don't particularly care what other people are eating.
Paterson could argue that portions of the rights were retained and Microsoft illegally contributed QDOS technologies into their Windows and OS/2 products. Maybe even DR-DOS contains his technologies and millions of lines of his code as it is just an implementation of QDOS. Odds are that the agreement is that old and forgotten that no-one has all the details anymore and it would be hard to refute lots of allegations.
Were Paterson as deranged as SCO, he could even offer all Windows an introductory licence offer for $700 and sue IBM because OS/2 has coincidental contact with DOS. He could own the whole world Muhhahaha!!!!
There as much (possibly more) merit as the SCO case, but I predict that you will not see FUD peddling about Windows users being sued.
Everything they do they do because they can using their searching technology to make the way things are done even better.
There's heaps that Google could do with calendars.
For some time now I have been thinking how cool it would be to integrate text, spatial and temporal searching. For example, "tell me when any of my favourite musicians will be performing within a 2 hour drive of my current location" or "I will be visiting these cities on these dates, tell me about these sorts of events occuring while I am there". Google is rapidly building up enough data to let people add time and space dimensions to their searches.
Please do note that I deliberately didn't mention names as I did feel that I had missed *something*, but yes the signifcance was lost on me. And I certainly didn't think I had left enough detail in my post (for more than one person) to pick the exact session!
By reading the other posts, it seems that other people did get something out of the session. But personally, the session was not what I was expecting (having tinkered with Perl profiling shortly before that LCA). On the flipside, the only way to get good at presenting is to present lots, and LCA is also a valuable opportunity to develop skills in the way you describe. I do believe that I made constructive suggestions on the feedback sheet, it's very hard to improve if people lie about what they thought.
However the original point is that while there were better and worse sessions (like *any* conference), on the whole the sessions at LCA were great.
This is actually quite ironic in that I am currently helping troubleshoot a PHP app that sucks because the author has made gratuitous use of regexes. doh...
My boss is a good example of how a management position need not be a souless paper shuffling job. He sees the management position as a way of tapping into organisation funds more directly, and because he pulls in his weight of work (his customers love having a clueful provider) we've got a pretty open R&D policy provided we deliver. He likes it because us minions mean that he can investigate a bunch more things than could could on his own.
A session on profiling web apps was poor. Yes, I *would* expect a web-mail app to spend a lot of time in regexs, that's how you look for injected content. Another session was thinly disguised corporate promotion.
The Postgres dudes were really good, the session on "Authentication Stone Soup" (something like that) was really excellent. The GStreamer demo was an eye-opener. Any talk by Rusty or Tridge is a must see.
Whilst I could have read about other things (like Perl 6), it was nice to sit in a lecture and hear about it, as I'm never going to get time to read about it at work or at home.
Best of all, at the end of the day I could sit with the experts in the Belgian Beer cafe and talk about the day's content.
Unless you qualify your post with specifics, I'm going to consider it a troll.
Consumers could purposefully purchase stuff they don't like, in order to try to screw up the profile data, to keep the music companies from knowing what their favorites are. If buying a couple $0.50 songs from a genre you hate will keep them from raising one of your favorites from $2 to $4, it would be worth it.
What's new about this? I do not buy "popular" music and mostly buy from small labels (indy, dance, industrial) and from stuff I have seen live. Without any attempt to confuse them, music companies just keep releasing an unrelenting stream of bilge that makes me want to stick bamboo skewers through my ear-drums.
Listener: "hahaha!!! I shall punish you by throwing money at you until you are confused!!!" Record co: "Woe is me! Hit me! I'v been really bad! Hit me!"
1 - To BSG fans, while it may be a good show, it's still not Star Trek. It's not set in the familiar setting and universe that Star trek fans like and know.
I empathise with your desire to have the show you like, but that line reads so much like the main reason I was given for why we have to use Windows instead of Linux.
So the government could determine a fair market value for Linux et al., and maybe reimburse the populace in a class-action manner by offering them discounted licences for proprietary software?
You know, this could really be a way of making the GPL more business friendly...
Yes, this is a *very* extreme conclusion, but I'm curious as to just how far such legalities could be drawn.
How about a browser mod that does something like Google's "did you mean:" and intercept URLs that are similar to the ones you normally use. It could also be used to intercept crafted URLs like www.micorsoft.com@1.2.3.4.
Some of the aus. groups I frequent are still great sources of information and expertise, especially timely stuff. Besides a few islands, I'm guessing that alt. is probably a wasteland of pr0n and spam. These "tiny pockets" are far from worthless to me.
The nice thing about Usenet is that no one entity can own the service or content. A bit sad since some of my social groups seem to have ended up on Live Journal.
I've been kind of hoping that Usenet dies a death of sorts, leaving it to people who can be bothered to learn how to use it.
I agree on the effects of anonymity, on more than one occasion we had some clueless Septemer troll's account pulled by sending a sternly worded email to their ISP. Those were the days...
We used to do exactly that mod to Amiga 1200s all the time. You get a 44 way connector and cable, tease the wire apart on the other end and crimp on a regular 40 way IDE connector. If you were particularly sane, you even soldered in a seperate power connector (rather than using the power on the 44 way) so you had plenty of juice. No Amiga in our user group escaped with its warranty sticker intact... Why? 3.5" drives are heap cheaper.
For the most part, mapping data is collected by government agencies. The access policies vary, but from what I can tell, the USA has the biggest, most easily accessible collection of GIS data. Don't gripe to Google, look at your national mapping initiatives and such.
The main reason that the codes are purely numeric (other from the colon separator character) is the desire to retain as simple a relationship as possible with numeric values of latitude and longitude, as encoded directly into all but the leading character of each "cycle" of the hierarchy. Having said that, a case could be made for using a letter instead of a number for the leading character (since these are in effect a "special digit" rather than a number), however the decision has been made to use two existing precedents (WMO squares, see above, plus "Blue Pages" subdivisions of these squares), rather than introduce a new notation convention.
Viz, they explicitly thought about using a non-base10 system, but had additonal design goals.
ArcSDE (and I suspect PostGIS) already stores geometry as (slightly less accurate) integer to avoid handling lots of floats. In fact, I'd also argue that the UK's postcode system is a hierarchical location identification system that uses a alpha-numeric namespace in order to generate short, memorable unique identifiers. I'd classify this as obvious, if it stands I'll just base64 encode my WKT geometries.
I did a ghost tour in Hobart, and the guy said that they found a tunnel running from Parliament to the basement of a building that was likely to have been a brothel at the time the tunnel was operational.
Who needs brute force? When he's out or asleep, I'll boot using a Knoppix CD and image the HD to an external device.
I recall certain underworld figures were busted because their crypto was no protection against the keylogger the feds installed (when is the last time you checked inside your keyboard?).
Failing that, some crack-head will kick in the front door and hock the server. (as a side note, my Unix console is a 486 laptop in the middle of the desk, "steal me instead!")
If the data is that sensitive, I'd read Cryptonomicon a few more times.
Slashdot Mirror
If they are such lousy vendors, then you should spend your cash elsewhere. Surely our right to do WTF we want with our stuff is more important than the latest version of Grand Turismo?
Nothing like a pointing device that has hexadecimal buttons. We still have a couple of these on A0 boards.
Xix.
Well you've just explained Australian foreign policy when it comes to the USA. Sounds like Kowotwing to me. Nice to know if another government demnds to put me on trial, my government will meekly hand me over.
From TFA
I know people who have worked in politician's offices, and the tide of mail is apparently astounding and relentless. However it does shape what appears on a politician's radar, even if you do not get a reply. One or two people is not going to make them sit up and take notice, but the more people write, the greater the profile for an issue. Your MEPs will assume that people do not care unless people keep telling them otherwise.
Xix.
Yes, exposure to EM radiation is dangerous. So is exposure to sunlight. While you should not needlessly expose yourself to EMR, the power involved is low compared to other sources that we are pretty blase about.
There is a lot of info available on the subject.
That didn't help the tropical paradise of Guam which has been turned into a snake monoculture. Yes, as soon as something that eats snakes goes feral in Guam it's going to devastate the island's snake population, but that's not going to bring back all the birds and other wildlife.
Monocultures may be more risky, but all of our most productive systems (agriculture) and monocultures. Hopefully we'll maintain enough diversity in agriculture to avoid famine, but there will always be a market for weird produce sold in organic health food shops; the poeple that shop here don't particularly care what other people are eating.
Xix.
Paterson could argue that portions of the rights were retained and Microsoft illegally contributed QDOS technologies into their Windows and OS/2 products. Maybe even DR-DOS contains his technologies and millions of lines of his code as it is just an implementation of QDOS. Odds are that the agreement is that old and forgotten that no-one has all the details anymore and it would be hard to refute lots of allegations.
Were Paterson as deranged as SCO, he could even offer all Windows an introductory licence offer for $700 and sue IBM because OS/2 has coincidental contact with DOS. He could own the whole world Muhhahaha!!!!
There as much (possibly more) merit as the SCO case, but I predict that you will not see FUD peddling about Windows users being sued.
Handy Windows FUD creation kit:
while(<www.sco.com>) {
s/SCO Unix/QDOS/g;
s/Linux/Windows/g;
s/BSD/DR-DOS/g;
}
Xix.
There's heaps that Google could do with calendars.
For some time now I have been thinking how cool it would be to integrate text, spatial and temporal searching. For example, "tell me when any of my favourite musicians will be performing within a 2 hour drive of my current location" or "I will be visiting these cities on these dates, tell me about these sorts of events occuring while I am there". Google is rapidly building up enough data to let people add time and space dimensions to their searches.
Xix.
Please do note that I deliberately didn't mention names as I did feel that I had missed *something*, but yes the signifcance was lost on me. And I certainly didn't think I had left enough detail in my post (for more than one person) to pick the exact session!
By reading the other posts, it seems that other people did get something out of the session. But personally, the session was not what I was expecting (having tinkered with Perl profiling shortly before that LCA). On the flipside, the only way to get good at presenting is to present lots, and LCA is also a valuable opportunity to develop skills in the way you describe. I do believe that I made constructive suggestions on the feedback sheet, it's very hard to improve if people lie about what they thought.
However the original point is that while there were better and worse sessions (like *any* conference), on the whole the sessions at LCA were great.
This is actually quite ironic in that I am currently helping troubleshoot a PHP app that sucks because the author has made gratuitous use of regexes. doh...
Xix.
My boss is a good example of how a management position need not be a souless paper shuffling job. He sees the management position as a way of tapping into organisation funds more directly, and because he pulls in his weight of work (his customers love having a clueful provider) we've got a pretty open R&D policy provided we deliver. He likes it because us minions mean that he can investigate a bunch more things than could could on his own.
Xix.
It's amazing how interesting RDBMS indexing strategies are after a beer.
I had a mixed bag.
A session on profiling web apps was poor. Yes, I *would* expect a web-mail app to spend a lot of time in regexs, that's how you look for injected content. Another session was thinly disguised corporate promotion.
The Postgres dudes were really good, the session on "Authentication Stone Soup" (something like that) was really excellent. The GStreamer demo was an eye-opener. Any talk by Rusty or Tridge is a must see.
Whilst I could have read about other things (like Perl 6), it was nice to sit in a lecture and hear about it, as I'm never going to get time to read about it at work or at home.
Best of all, at the end of the day I could sit with the experts in the Belgian Beer cafe and talk about the day's content.
Unless you qualify your post with specifics, I'm going to consider it a troll.
Xix.
What's new about this? I do not buy "popular" music and mostly buy from small labels (indy, dance, industrial) and from stuff I have seen live. Without any attempt to confuse them, music companies just keep releasing an unrelenting stream of bilge that makes me want to stick bamboo skewers through my ear-drums.
Listener: "hahaha!!! I shall punish you by throwing money at you until you are confused!!!"
Record co: "Woe is me! Hit me! I'v been really bad! Hit me!"
I empathise with your desire to have the show you like, but that line reads so much like the main reason I was given for why we have to use Windows instead of Linux.
Xix.
So the government could determine a fair market value for Linux et al., and maybe reimburse the populace in a class-action manner by offering them discounted licences for proprietary software?
You know, this could really be a way of making the GPL more business friendly...
Yes, this is a *very* extreme conclusion, but I'm curious as to just how far such legalities could be drawn.
Xix.
How about a browser mod that does something like Google's "did you mean:" and intercept URLs that are similar to the ones you normally use. It could also be used to intercept crafted URLs like www.micorsoft.com@1.2.3.4.
Xix.
I can see it now:
"1802: Unauthorized audio device detected"
And if you fiddle the BIOS, well that's DMCA.
Some of the aus. groups I frequent are still great sources of information and expertise, especially timely stuff. Besides a few islands, I'm guessing that alt. is probably a wasteland of pr0n and spam. These "tiny pockets" are far from worthless to me.
The nice thing about Usenet is that no one entity can own the service or content. A bit sad since some of my social groups seem to have ended up on Live Journal.
I've been kind of hoping that Usenet dies a death of sorts, leaving it to people who can be bothered to learn how to use it.
I agree on the effects of anonymity, on more than one occasion we had some clueless Septemer troll's account pulled by sending a sternly worded email to their ISP. Those were the days...
I first read it as "Windowx XP: Reduced Media Edition: All Your MP3 Are Belong To RIAA".
Viz, some kind of DRM story.
We used to do exactly that mod to Amiga 1200s all the time. You get a 44 way connector and cable, tease the wire apart on the other end and crimp on a regular 40 way IDE connector. If you were particularly sane, you even soldered in a seperate power connector (rather than using the power on the 44 way) so you had plenty of juice. No Amiga in our user group escaped with its warranty sticker intact... Why? 3.5" drives are heap cheaper.
Xix.
For the most part, mapping data is collected by government agencies. The access policies vary, but from what I can tell, the USA has the biggest, most easily accessible collection of GIS data. Don't gripe to Google, look at your national mapping initiatives and such.
Xix.
Viz, they explicitly thought about using a non-base10 system, but had additonal design goals.
ArcSDE (and I suspect PostGIS) already stores geometry as (slightly less accurate) integer to avoid handling lots of floats. In fact, I'd also argue that the UK's postcode system is a hierarchical location identification system that uses a alpha-numeric namespace in order to generate short, memorable unique identifiers. I'd classify this as obvious, if it stands I'll just base64 encode my WKT geometries.
Xix.
I did a ghost tour in Hobart, and the guy said that they found a tunnel running from Parliament to the basement of a building that was likely to have been a brothel at the time the tunnel was operational.
As far as legal departments go, IBM has been pretty good at keeping their legal dealings watertight.
Who needs brute force? When he's out or asleep, I'll boot using a Knoppix CD and image the HD to an external device.
I recall certain underworld figures were busted because their crypto was no protection against the keylogger the feds installed (when is the last time you checked inside your keyboard?).
Failing that, some crack-head will kick in the front door and hock the server. (as a side note, my Unix console is a 486 laptop in the middle of the desk, "steal me instead!")
If the data is that sensitive, I'd read Cryptonomicon a few more times.