Already Google admitted to being in cahoots with the NSA/FBI/CIA (etc) in providing them with data on their Google web app usage. Link or it didn't happen. I could find info on Google providing technology that allowed the NSA/FBI/CIA to cull through its own information, but nothing on providing these agencies with private information.
Facebook is just as bad with their beacon source This proves the parent poster's point. Facebook tried it and there was hell to pay.
Try turning the privacy settings up by disabling everything when adding an app. It won't let you, because then the app "wouldn't work" correctly. Then don't add the app. Facebook gives you fine-grained control over what you want to let applications do, so they can't spider your friends.
Is that why Canada is 3rd in the world in broadband adoption and the US is 13th? Canada's government regulation of Bell Canada has had a direct impact on driving down the cost of high-speed internet (actual high-speed, not FCC-defined "high-speed"), while the US's deregulation has had a direct impact of limiting choice and increasing the costs for the American consumer. You keep banging the "government = bad" drum if you want. Good luck surfing Freenet at 2Mbps for $50 a month.
For example, in Eclipse, why can't I add an external folder to the classpath without stupid variables? Why only a jar? In Netbeans there isn't a distinction. This may not be any less annoying, but you can "Add Class Folder" to the classpath, "Create New Folder", "Advanced >>", "Link to folder in the file system" and point it at your external source. If you just need to add it to a runtime classpath, you can do that under the "Classpath" tab in the "Open run dialog..." window, go to "User Entries", "Advanced...", "Add External Folder". It would be nice if the runtime classpath functionality was also the build classpath functionality.
We aren't talking about some arbitrary procedural law here. We are talking about suppression of ideas and torture of dissidents. These are international concepts, ones which many countries hold up as bad behavior. If Yahoo knew that the information it was providing the Chinese government would lead to violations of basic human rights, then shame on them for being complicit. The Chinese government should know that if they want to behave this way, that they will have to live without the Googles and Yahoos of the world, and be an international embarrassment.
Actually, the study attempts to make this estimate, although the summary seems to ignore this. Quoted from the study:
It is then assumed that only 20% (1 in 5) of these downloaded songs would have been purchased legitimately if piracy did not exist. You can argue that the study pulls that number out of its ass, and Ars seems to think that this is
a bit better than one-to-one, but not by much. It seems to be about 80% better. Anyway, I don't think that music piracy is costing us $12.5 billion, but at least summarize the study fairly.
Well, I would have preferred HTML 5 to add things that I could use (perhaps an include or multi-file-select), but I think the answer to your question is: readability. The div's can nest up to the point that you forget what the is paired with. I end up writing XHTML like this:
<div id="foo">
<div id="bar">
<div id="baz"> ... lots of stuff...
</div> <!-- End of "baz" -->
</div> <!-- End of "bar" --> </div> <!-- End of "foo" -->
If what I'm using to id my div's is actually a common semantic, then maybe it should have its own tag.
I think it usually comes down to the definition of the content that they want to restrict to minors. In the case of sexual material, the courts have accepted the governments evidence that exposure to sexual material is bad for kids, and thus the government has a legitimate compelling interest in restricting access to that material. They do not have the same convincing studies to show that violent content, in general, is harmful to children, and so they try to come up with definitions that pass muster as "obviously" bad for children, such as depicted violence against policemen, or mutilation of corpses. The courts generally find some example of content that fits the definition but may have some literary or artistic merit (God of War has been cited in some cases), and throw the law out as unconstitutional.
Here Spitzer faces a similar challenge: coming up with a definition of what to restrict, and hoping that content which minors perhaps should have access to doesn't fall within that definition. Others have suggested that it is illegal in NY to permit minors into R-rated films. Does anyone have a link to the law? I would be very surprised if such a law actually existed. I like Spitzer for other issues that he's tackled, such as payola, but I think he's going down a fruitless path here. He should learn from past mistakes by about 9 other states.
You had an above post that suggested that free shipping was *occasionally* included. I would say that it's frequently included, along with the $150 savings. You can check the archives at dealnews.com for expired deals (ex. here). I don't think this is all "beside the point", though. Your original contention seemed to be that in most cases you could build a cheaper system than Dell, which you illustrated using a single example. I just provided a counter-example. You go on to contend that only computer illiterate people should use Dell, which seems strange to me. I would think that computer literate people would value their own time enough to spend a little time on Dell (or any other site) finding a system that is cheaper, the same cost, or within a margin that they believe is worth the time-saving cost (say, $15 to save hours of my time). What you are getting with Dell is really a cheaper price on a system, generally. This is even before you include the "value added services" you talk about. It's not like those services are some nebulous construct, either. If I want to spend time putting together a computer and getting all the drivers, I would do it for someone else and bill them for $50/hr. I'll let Dell bill me the extra $15.
That may be the cheapest you could find at that moment, and at that level, but Dell has discounts all the time on various models. Perhaps I don't want a Sempron, maybe I want the Athlon X2. Go here:
The far right model is typically around $419 w/ free shipping. I doubt that you can build it for cheaper than that (adding the X2 instead of the Sempron, a 160GB HD instead of 80GB, and an extra 512MB DIMM is more than $57).
Can you tell me your tickling technique? I just updated the nvidia-legacy drivers, and I only get 800x600. The "nv" driver works fine at 1280x1024, but "nvidia" is always faster for me (even for 2D).
From what I understand, there are rules which govern jurisdiction when the actions of people in one "state" have impact on those in another "state". In some situations, a court may determine that it has the ability to adjudicate against a foreign defendant, even internationally. IANAL, and I've only started to read about this, so take this with a grain of salt. The NY Times could be said to be "publishing" in the UK, depending in your definition of publish. Perhaps a better word would be "distribute".
In 2002 St. Louis County tried to ban sale or rental of violent video games to minors without parental consent. It was basically an extension of Indianapolis's 2000 ban on violent arcade games, and contained much of the same wording in its definition of "graphically violent".
When will the public realize that their politicians are NOT doing them good when they bring in these laws, but doing them harm? It is now so obvious to every district and federal court that these laws are unconstitutional, that the judges are making the states (i.e. tax-payers) pay the defendants' legal costs because they are knowingly WASTING THE COURTS' TIME.
Well, what do you want? Do you want to be able to throw your music on your iPod? You can do through a number of applications, although I find Amarok's new versions (>= 1.4.1) are the most seamless way to do that. I use my 4th generation 40GB iPod exclusively through Linux, and have had minor issues (had trouble getting rid of that "Do Not Disconnect" message in Mandriva/PCLinuxOS, that's about it), but no show-stoppers. As far as iTunes, I haven't tried to pull down music from the music store. I'm assuming it's not possible right now.
I find the summary deceiving. To pose the question, "does Linux work with my iPod?" and then answer "no, it hasn't reached that stage yet" is not giving a true picture. If someone asked me that question, I would say "yes, mostly" and then get them to clarify what they wanted to do.
From those explanations, it seems that Prof. Thorne will be returning his Penthouse subscription and Prof. Hawking will be getting his Private Eye, contrary to the summary. Hawking bet against the existance of black holes.
I think WordPress considers WordPress to be "blogware". I haven't used it much (i.e. at all), but can it manage collaboration between many people with varying security roles, who throw in various kinds of media (images, video, audio, documents, presentations, etc.)? Can it do workflow management? I think a multi-thousand employee company would want to do more than read each other's blogs.
Not that I like to see the cost of games rise, and comparing playing games to spending time with friends and family is an apples-to-oranges situation, but if we go by sheer hours of time occupied? Your $60 gets you an evening of entertainment. It seems like video games have a pretty high hours to price ratio, assuming you pick your games accordingly. Many PS2 RPGs are 60-90 hours of gameplay for around $60. You would have to watch a $20 DVD 10 times or so (assuming a 2hr film) to come out ahead. I tend to only buy 3 or 4 brand new games a year (bargain bin and rentals for the rest). If they go from $60 to $70, I don't think this behaviour will change too much. I don't think I'll be shelling out $600 for new console, however. Nintendo may win a spot in my living room for this generation of consoles.
Guess who decides what does and does not interfere with the educational process.
Previous court cases do. It is generally accepted that only lewd, vulgar and plainly offensive speech should be supressed. The next thing you might say is that the school can then deem something "plainly offensive", but the courts have limited this as well. The relevant court cases are Tinker, Bethel and Hazelwood. As far as people not taking it that far, well that's a consequence of not standing up for your free speech rights. These court decisions have provided pretty clear guidelines for school policies when it comes to free speech, though.
Students have practically no rights when on the premises or using school resources.
Incorrect. See Tinker v. Des Moines: "First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. This has been the unmistakable holding of this Court for almost 50 years."
These rights were eroded somewhat in later decisions (forgive me for not looking them up right now), but basically all they said was that free speech can only be surpressed in situations where the student's speech interfered with the educational process.
I never said that only users with cherry-picked hardware could take the plunge, I just said that users with hardware that fall into a %5 minority should take the fanboy's, "Installing Linux is easy!" with a grain of salt. Perhaps they should have somebody with know-how standing by to take their questions. I don't think this is really different from the Windows scenario. I just recently reinstalled Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron 6000, which I think is a pretty standard laptop, with the install disk that came with the machine from Dell, and virtually nothing worked out of the box: low-res video, no sound, no ethernet, no wireless. Going to Dell's support site (from a different computer, because the laptop had no internet) yielded a list of devices for each hardware type (over a dozen different wireless cards), even after I told it the serial number of the laptop. My main point here is that people develop convenient memory loss when contrasting the ease-of-install of Windows vs. Linux.
As to your second point, I think users should be able to swap large Office documents, and the unfortunate situation we are in means that those Office documents are MS Office documents. If Linux (or, specifically, OpenOffice) cannot handle the most complex of those documents, whose fault is that? It seems to me it is more the fault of the people who have chosen to lock themselves into a document format than it is a deficiency in the usability of OpenOffice. I agree that this is a big problem for users, but don't tell me that MS Office is better just because OpenOffice can't handle its format well enough.
I seem to see these every few weeks here on/. This user starts from the assumption that Linux is now easy to install and use for anyone with any hardware. This is, of course, not true.
First of all, his choice of distributions is based on what comes with an old Linux for Dummies book. He could have perhaps looked into (or asked a friend) what modern distributions are popular from a usability and hardware detection standpoint. He likely would have tried (K)Ubuntu or Mandriva.
Second of all, he does have somewhat unusual hardware. I would go so far as to recommend that nobody with a Sony Vaio should take the Linux plunge unless they are prepared to do some manual hardware configuration. My wife had a Vaio which I ran through multiple distros/versions, and always had some issue with the hardware.
Third, he assumes that complete interoperability with Microsoft Office is a condition for success in his test. I have always viewed OpenOffice's MS Office compatability as a convenience, but realize that I will likely never be able to rely on it. Anyone who has to swap complex, particularly formatted documents in MS Office format must use MS Office. This should not, however, be a reason given for Linux non-usability.
All this is to say that if he wants a usability test, then first hand over his laptop to someone like me, I'll get everything working as smoothly as I can, and then we can discuss his issues with usability. If he wants an ease-of-install comparison, then compare how much of his hardware works after he installs Windows XP from scratch vs. some Linux distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that why Canada is 3rd in the world in broadband adoption and the US is 13th? Canada's government regulation of Bell Canada has had a direct impact on driving down the cost of high-speed internet (actual high-speed, not FCC-defined "high-speed"), while the US's deregulation has had a direct impact of limiting choice and increasing the costs for the American consumer. You keep banging the "government = bad" drum if you want. Good luck surfing Freenet at 2Mbps for $50 a month.
He's likely changed at least half of these positions since then...
Oops, Australian forum. Nevermind, I was overcome by the possibility of a first post...
Owners of forums are explicitly exempt from libel prosecution.
We aren't talking about some arbitrary procedural law here. We are talking about suppression of ideas and torture of dissidents. These are international concepts, ones which many countries hold up as bad behavior. If Yahoo knew that the information it was providing the Chinese government would lead to violations of basic human rights, then shame on them for being complicit. The Chinese government should know that if they want to behave this way, that they will have to live without the Googles and Yahoos of the world, and be an international embarrassment.
I think it usually comes down to the definition of the content that they want to restrict to minors. In the case of sexual material, the courts have accepted the governments evidence that exposure to sexual material is bad for kids, and thus the government has a legitimate compelling interest in restricting access to that material. They do not have the same convincing studies to show that violent content, in general, is harmful to children, and so they try to come up with definitions that pass muster as "obviously" bad for children, such as depicted violence against policemen, or mutilation of corpses. The courts generally find some example of content that fits the definition but may have some literary or artistic merit (God of War has been cited in some cases), and throw the law out as unconstitutional.
Here Spitzer faces a similar challenge: coming up with a definition of what to restrict, and hoping that content which minors perhaps should have access to doesn't fall within that definition. Others have suggested that it is illegal in NY to permit minors into R-rated films. Does anyone have a link to the law? I would be very surprised if such a law actually existed. I like Spitzer for other issues that he's tackled, such as payola, but I think he's going down a fruitless path here. He should learn from past mistakes by about 9 other states.
You had an above post that suggested that free shipping was *occasionally* included. I would say that it's frequently included, along with the $150 savings. You can check the archives at dealnews.com for expired deals (ex. here). I don't think this is all "beside the point", though. Your original contention seemed to be that in most cases you could build a cheaper system than Dell, which you illustrated using a single example. I just provided a counter-example. You go on to contend that only computer illiterate people should use Dell, which seems strange to me. I would think that computer literate people would value their own time enough to spend a little time on Dell (or any other site) finding a system that is cheaper, the same cost, or within a margin that they believe is worth the time-saving cost (say, $15 to save hours of my time). What you are getting with Dell is really a cheaper price on a system, generally. This is even before you include the "value added services" you talk about. It's not like those services are some nebulous construct, either. If I want to spend time putting together a computer and getting all the drivers, I would do it for someone else and bill them for $50/hr. I'll let Dell bill me the extra $15.
That may be the cheapest you could find at that moment, and at that level, but Dell has discounts all the time on various models. Perhaps I don't want a Sempron, maybe I want the Athlon X2. Go here:
x /dimen_e521?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd
http://www.dell.com/content/products/features.asp
The far right model is typically around $419 w/ free shipping. I doubt that you can build it for cheaper than that (adding the X2 instead of the Sempron, a 160GB HD instead of 80GB, and an extra 512MB DIMM is more than $57).
Can you tell me your tickling technique? I just updated the nvidia-legacy drivers, and I only get 800x600. The "nv" driver works fine at 1280x1024, but "nvidia" is always faster for me (even for 2D).
From what I understand, there are rules which govern jurisdiction when the actions of people in one "state" have impact on those in another "state". In some situations, a court may determine that it has the ability to adjudicate against a foreign defendant, even internationally. IANAL, and I've only started to read about this, so take this with a grain of salt. The NY Times could be said to be "publishing" in the UK, depending in your definition of publish. Perhaps a better word would be "distribute".
In 2002 St. Louis County tried to ban sale or rental of violent video games to minors without parental consent. It was basically an extension of Indianapolis's 2000 ban on violent arcade games, and contained much of the same wording in its definition of "graphically violent".
Only not /.'s, but state governments:
Indianapolis
Missouri
Washington
Illinois
Michigan
California
When will the public realize that their politicians are NOT doing them good when they bring in these laws, but doing them harm? It is now so obvious to every district and federal court that these laws are unconstitutional, that the judges are making the states (i.e. tax-payers) pay the defendants' legal costs because they are knowingly WASTING THE COURTS' TIME.
Well, what do you want? Do you want to be able to throw your music on your iPod? You can do through a number of applications, although I find Amarok's new versions (>= 1.4.1) are the most seamless way to do that. I use my 4th generation 40GB iPod exclusively through Linux, and have had minor issues (had trouble getting rid of that "Do Not Disconnect" message in Mandriva/PCLinuxOS, that's about it), but no show-stoppers. As far as iTunes, I haven't tried to pull down music from the music store. I'm assuming it's not possible right now.
I find the summary deceiving. To pose the question, "does Linux work with my iPod?" and then answer "no, it hasn't reached that stage yet" is not giving a true picture. If someone asked me that question, I would say "yes, mostly" and then get them to clarify what they wanted to do.
From those explanations, it seems that Prof. Thorne will be returning his Penthouse subscription and Prof. Hawking will be getting his Private Eye, contrary to the summary. Hawking bet against the existance of black holes.
I think WordPress considers WordPress to be "blogware". I haven't used it much (i.e. at all), but can it manage collaboration between many people with varying security roles, who throw in various kinds of media (images, video, audio, documents, presentations, etc.)? Can it do workflow management? I think a multi-thousand employee company would want to do more than read each other's blogs.
Not that I like to see the cost of games rise, and comparing playing games to spending time with friends and family is an apples-to-oranges situation, but if we go by sheer hours of time occupied? Your $60 gets you an evening of entertainment. It seems like video games have a pretty high hours to price ratio, assuming you pick your games accordingly. Many PS2 RPGs are 60-90 hours of gameplay for around $60. You would have to watch a $20 DVD 10 times or so (assuming a 2hr film) to come out ahead. I tend to only buy 3 or 4 brand new games a year (bargain bin and rentals for the rest). If they go from $60 to $70, I don't think this behaviour will change too much. I don't think I'll be shelling out $600 for new console, however. Nintendo may win a spot in my living room for this generation of consoles.
Guess who decides what does and does not interfere with the educational process.
Previous court cases do. It is generally accepted that only lewd, vulgar and plainly offensive speech should be supressed. The next thing you might say is that the school can then deem something "plainly offensive", but the courts have limited this as well. The relevant court cases are Tinker, Bethel and Hazelwood. As far as people not taking it that far, well that's a consequence of not standing up for your free speech rights. These court decisions have provided pretty clear guidelines for school policies when it comes to free speech, though.
Students have practically no rights when on the premises or using school resources.
Incorrect. See Tinker v. Des Moines: "First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. This has been the unmistakable holding of this Court for almost 50 years."
These rights were eroded somewhat in later decisions (forgive me for not looking them up right now), but basically all they said was that free speech can only be surpressed in situations where the student's speech interfered with the educational process.
I never said that only users with cherry-picked hardware could take the plunge, I just said that users with hardware that fall into a %5 minority should take the fanboy's, "Installing Linux is easy!" with a grain of salt. Perhaps they should have somebody with know-how standing by to take their questions. I don't think this is really different from the Windows scenario. I just recently reinstalled Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron 6000, which I think is a pretty standard laptop, with the install disk that came with the machine from Dell, and virtually nothing worked out of the box: low-res video, no sound, no ethernet, no wireless. Going to Dell's support site (from a different computer, because the laptop had no internet) yielded a list of devices for each hardware type (over a dozen different wireless cards), even after I told it the serial number of the laptop. My main point here is that people develop convenient memory loss when contrasting the ease-of-install of Windows vs. Linux.
As to your second point, I think users should be able to swap large Office documents, and the unfortunate situation we are in means that those Office documents are MS Office documents. If Linux (or, specifically, OpenOffice) cannot handle the most complex of those documents, whose fault is that? It seems to me it is more the fault of the people who have chosen to lock themselves into a document format than it is a deficiency in the usability of OpenOffice. I agree that this is a big problem for users, but don't tell me that MS Office is better just because OpenOffice can't handle its format well enough.
I seem to see these every few weeks here on /. This user starts from the assumption that Linux is now easy to install and use for anyone with any hardware. This is, of course, not true.
First of all, his choice of distributions is based on what comes with an old Linux for Dummies book. He could have perhaps looked into (or asked a friend) what modern distributions are popular from a usability and hardware detection standpoint. He likely would have tried (K)Ubuntu or Mandriva.
Second of all, he does have somewhat unusual hardware. I would go so far as to recommend that nobody with a Sony Vaio should take the Linux plunge unless they are prepared to do some manual hardware configuration. My wife had a Vaio which I ran through multiple distros/versions, and always had some issue with the hardware.
Third, he assumes that complete interoperability with Microsoft Office is a condition for success in his test. I have always viewed OpenOffice's MS Office compatability as a convenience, but realize that I will likely never be able to rely on it. Anyone who has to swap complex, particularly formatted documents in MS Office format must use MS Office. This should not, however, be a reason given for Linux non-usability.
All this is to say that if he wants a usability test, then first hand over his laptop to someone like me, I'll get everything working as smoothly as I can, and then we can discuss his issues with usability. If he wants an ease-of-install comparison, then compare how much of his hardware works after he installs Windows XP from scratch vs. some Linux distribution.
Eclipse + Web Tools Platform. It contains a graphical XML Schema editor which is similar to XMLSpy's.