I hope they're not naming it that in leu of Norway's governmental competence or whaling practices...
Are you referring to the Norway that has the highest quality of life of any country in the world according to the UN, or some other Norway? Sounds like they have a competent government to me...
Now, tell the class whether "You [heretics|papists|infidels|whatever] are going to Hell!" is "a religious belief" or "deliberately offensive speech that is just intended to upset and provoke".
The whole basis of law is definitions - defining where the line is drawn. Sometimes that's easy ("you must be over 18") sometimes it's difficult ("make reasonable efforts", "due care and attention") but that's what the law does, it draws lines.
Why? Speaking and acting are two different things. Theres an old saying "sticks and bones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" that makes the difference clear.
So libel laws shouldn't exist then? You think it's ok if I take out a full-page ad in the NYTimes saying that I believe you're a child molester?
In other words, a right is a permission to do something without limits.
Um. No it isn't. You have a right to carry a gun, but not a nuclear bomb. If you have a drivers licence then you have a right to drive on the highway, but only if you stay within the speed limit.
It's not ok to put up that billboard, but if you really want to put up the money to do it, you have every right to.
So then, you are saying no line, no limit when it comes to free speech?
You Americans are really confused. Your own legal system defines lots of instances where the line is drawn with regards to "speech". Libel, for instance. If you think libel laws are ok, but that there shouldn't be a law that covers someone putting a billboard in front of a hostipal with "Has someone you loved just died of cancer? Ha ha ha! That's funny!", then you are confused.
I find a lot of Catholic belief particularly offensive, such as their medieval attitudes towards science, their anti-contraceptive stance and their denial of female reproductive rights. But I wouldn't ever want to censor them.
No, of course not! But none of those things are examples of deliberately offensive speech that is just intended to upset and provoke. They are religious beliefs.
Now, if the Catholic Church decided to start sending letters to women who have had abortions that said "You are a murdering whore" with pictures of dead feotuses in - in that case I think a civilized society should have a law against that type of behaviour. But of course I am forgetting - the USA is different. Anti-abortionists in the USA probably send that type of letter and are protected against any legal action by your noble constitution.
Just in case someone still doesn't understand my point and responds to this saying "yes, but to me abortion is more offensive than getting a letter in the post" or something like that, let me give another example. If a pro-abortionist sent out letters to anti-abortionists saying, for instance, "Ha ha look at this! We did it again!" with a picture of an aborted feotus, then that too is deliberately offensive and upsetting speech.
So I guess now Catholic websites are illegal as they are clearly meant to offend people who don't believe in such things. Get a fucking clue...anything can be agrued to be offensive to anyone. You probably only complain when it affects you though. Sensible indeed...sensible to the senseless.
Just for the record, I am not Catholic. In fact I don't believe in God. Your suggestion that "anything can be argued to be offensive to anyone" is plainly not true and is not a rational argument.
In this case, I believe these sites were deliberately trying to cause offense to Catholics. I don't have any problem with the Italians having laws against speech that deliberately incites hated or deliberately tries to offend. It's a very different situation to say, having laws against speech that criticises the Catholic Church or supports other religions.
There have to be limits, and I think it is sensible to have laws against deliberately offensive speech that is just intended to upset and provoke. To those that say it is bad to have this type of law, I say, where do you draw the line? Is it ok for me to put a billboard next to a hospital that says "Has someone you loved just died of cancer? Ha ha ha! That's funny!" Is that ok?
LMAO - have you seen bbc coverage recently? They are Tony's bitch.
Depends on what side of the political spectrum you're on. Labour politicians have complained that the BBC is against them. The good thing about the BBC is that it is reasonably well protected from political interference -- if it wasn't I'm sure Thatcher would have shut it down or sold it.
The news media is so consolidated and conservative, there's no way they'd risk offending viewers or advertisers
Get your news from the BBC. It's not perfect, but it's the best news service there is and since they don't have advertising they are not biased. And believe it or not they actually have a legal mandate from the Queen of England to be completely neutral and unbiased on all subjects! Those crazy Brits...
I think the point is, Napster-type services are not destroying the music industry. That's what the big multi-national record labels want you to believe. Rather, it is destroying a specific part of the music industry -- their part of it.
For the vast majority of musicians and performers (the vast majority not being Madonna or Britney...) the Web is a very positive thing - a way for them to promote themselves and distribute their music at very low cost.
One of the ways the big multinational record labels have defended the price of CDs in the past has been by saying that selecting and promoting an artist or band is very expensive. Not any more it's not - bands can promote themselves, and we the collective Joe Public can do the selecting, thank you very much.
Although it sounds great, it'll take more than 15 years to build from the start of the construction project - so we're talking at least 20 years.
By then, it is predicted that computing will have advanced enough to build a globally-large coordinated telecope ("GCT").
Yes, but by the time we can build a GCT, we'll only be ten years away from building a massively distributed telescope made of billions of tiny nanobots floating in space gathering photons and performing massively complex calculations with quantum computing methods. So we might as well just all wait around until then.
If I receive emails with the Klez virus attached, that means someone I know is probably infected, doesn't it?
In which case (since the From: field is not necessarily indicative of who it came from) how can I find out who it came from so that I can tell them that they're infected?
Re:The Difference In Receipt Rates Is In the User
on
Klez: a closer look
·
· Score: 2
She receives several copies a day of the Klez virus. I've never received it despite having about the same overall email traffic.
I think the problem is that it just takes one person that you know to have this virus and not know about it.
This article is very timely for me. I had never received an email virus until about a week ago. Now I get Klez virtually every day.
Fortunately I look the descision a long time ago not to use Outlook as my email client (I use Eudora). However, Klez is still a nightmare because it can randomly choose an address for the "From:" field from the computer it has infected, which means that if someone you know gets infected, you can get irate emails from people telling you not to send them viruses!
I've been hearing this for over five years now yet I have yet to meet anyone who uses Linux as a desktop machine.
Funny you should say that. We first assessed Linux as an operating system in 1998. At that stage, we decided it was not ready to be fulfil any role in our company. In 2000 we looked again, and decided that it was a good option for our company web and email servers. Earlier this year we decided that Linux was now a good option for our office file/print server. I expect that sometime next year we will decide Linux is ready for our desktops.
So, five years is about right. Be prepared to meet lots of people using linux as their desktop in a year or two.
I use XP as my main desktop, and one thing I really don't like is the way it automatically updates itself. Sure, it asks to you before doing it, but when it asks "Update Windows Media Player - security patch" I expect it to just patch the hole, not change the file setting of my machine so that files I previously opened in another application now open in Media Player (this happened to me the other day).
The day I move to Linux as my desktop machine is getting closer and closer.
You can make a proposal, for instance "KDE would be great if it had feature X" or whatever. Then other visitors to the site could vote on the proposals. You would then end up with a scored proposal list.
You should also be able to just make comments.
Although the developers lists exist, I think there really needs to be something for the average user to post to, especially as KDE becomes more popular as a desktop.
I think you're target audience has proven, on more than one occasion, that collecting information like that is frowned upon.
I disagree. It depends on who's collecting the information - do you trust them?
I don't like the fact that Windows XP seems to communicate regularly with Microsoft. But I'm happy to run the test builds of Mozilla that send crash info. back to the Mozilla team. I'm sure many others in the OSS community feel the same way.
Personally I think that the KDE guys should have a special version of KDE that logs the users interactions and then sends it to a central database. Or perhaps rather than a special version, a first use config option - "do you mind if we gather stats about your usage of KDE?" This would allow the KDE guys to profile different types of user, and see which types of user makes use of which functionality. Just as KDE has themes for visual elements, so it could have themes for menus and buttons, based on the user profiles generated by the logging version of KDE.
The result of this could be that the first time you started up KDE you would be able to choose from three profiles, roughly translating to 'programmer/advanced user', 'intermediate user' and 'average Joe user'.
I've had DSL from Telefonica in Spain now for about a year. The prices are similar to those you quote.
There seems to be loads of competition here to provide DSL and cable services. Six different comms companies have laid fibre in the street I'm in (including BT, funnily enough). Thankfully the city council was organised enough to get them all to do it at the same time.
P.S. For any American's reading, Spain is in Europe;-)
Oh yea, and i suppose the government controlling everything is better than Microsoft controlling everything. Thanks, but i'd rather have Microsoft controlling everything.
Oh yes, I can see it now:
UNITED STATES OF MICROSOFT AMERICAN(tm) - CITIZENSHIP AGREEMENT
By residing in the United States of Microsoft America(tm) you hereby agree:
a) to pay one half of your earnings to Microsoft Government(tm) on a monthly basis, for all the great services that they provide.
b) Microsoft Government(tm) will not be held responsible should you injured, die, be made bankcrupt, or suffer any other type of misfortune as a result of the actions, or inaction of Microsoft Government(tm).
c) Should the United States of Microsoft America(tm) suffer any security breach by a terrorist or another country during times of war, Microsoft(tm) will not be held responsible for any resulting loss of life or property.
d) Anyone publicising any failure, negligence or other fault of the Microsoft Government (tm) will have their Microsoft Citizenship(tm) immediately revoked.
Yes, I think Sony is often cleverer than people realise. Everybody sees Microsoft attempting to muscle in on Sony's territory with the X-Box, but what few can see is that Sony is actually in a very good position to own the future of the what we call "personal computing".
I think the reason people can't see it is that they expect there to be an evolution of the desktop. However, mobile devices are increasingly where it's at, and it's an area in which Microsoft are much weaker than the desktop. I believe Sony's partnership with Ericsson points to the future, and it's a future that doesn't include MS.
With Sony's strengths in electronics and global distribution, the PlayStation, their partnership with Ericsson in the mobile world, the fact that they are also a massive content provider, their strong Vaio laptop range - Microsoft have a lot to worry about with Sony. It wouldn't really suprise me at all if Sony's ten year plan involves small and neat laptop style communication devices which don't include any MS software. If I had to place bets on the future of computing, my money's with Sony, not Microsoft.
My introduction to programming was reading the manual of my nextdoor neighbour's ZX80 when I was about 10 years old. I think that qualifies me as a true nerd.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope they're not naming it that in leu of Norway's governmental competence or whaling practices...
Are you referring to the Norway that has the highest quality of life of any country in the world according to the UN, or some other Norway? Sounds like they have a competent government to me...
Now, tell the class whether "You [heretics|papists|infidels|whatever] are going to Hell!" is "a religious belief" or "deliberately offensive speech that is just intended to upset and provoke".
The whole basis of law is definitions - defining where the line is drawn. Sometimes that's easy ("you must be over 18") sometimes it's difficult ("make reasonable efforts", "due care and attention") but that's what the law does, it draws lines.
Why? Speaking and acting are two different things. Theres an old saying "sticks and bones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" that makes the difference clear.
So libel laws shouldn't exist then? You think it's ok if I take out a full-page ad in the NYTimes saying that I believe you're a child molester?
In other words, a right is a permission to do something without limits.
Um. No it isn't. You have a right to carry a gun, but not a nuclear bomb. If you have a drivers licence then you have a right to drive on the highway, but only if you stay within the speed limit.
It's not ok to put up that billboard, but if you really want to put up the money to do it, you have every right to.
So then, you are saying no line, no limit when it comes to free speech?
You Americans are really confused. Your own legal system defines lots of instances where the line is drawn with regards to "speech". Libel, for instance. If you think libel laws are ok, but that there shouldn't be a law that covers someone putting a billboard in front of a hostipal with "Has someone you loved just died of cancer? Ha ha ha! That's funny!", then you are confused.
I find a lot of Catholic belief particularly offensive, such as their medieval attitudes towards science, their anti-contraceptive stance and their denial of female reproductive rights. But I wouldn't ever want to censor them.
No, of course not! But none of those things are examples of deliberately offensive speech that is just intended to upset and provoke. They are religious beliefs.
Now, if the Catholic Church decided to start sending letters to women who have had abortions that said "You are a murdering whore" with pictures of dead feotuses in - in that case I think a civilized society should have a law against that type of behaviour. But of course I am forgetting - the USA is different. Anti-abortionists in the USA probably send that type of letter and are protected against any legal action by your noble constitution.
Just in case someone still doesn't understand my point and responds to this saying "yes, but to me abortion is more offensive than getting a letter in the post" or something like that, let me give another example. If a pro-abortionist sent out letters to anti-abortionists saying, for instance, "Ha ha look at this! We did it again!" with a picture of an aborted feotus, then that too is deliberately offensive and upsetting speech.
So I guess now Catholic websites are illegal as they are clearly meant to offend people who don't believe in such things. Get a fucking clue...anything can be agrued to be offensive to anyone. You probably only complain when it affects you though. Sensible indeed...sensible to the senseless.
Just for the record, I am not Catholic. In fact I don't believe in God. Your suggestion that "anything can be argued to be offensive to anyone" is plainly not true and is not a rational argument.
In this case, I believe these sites were deliberately trying to cause offense to Catholics. I don't have any problem with the Italians having laws against speech that deliberately incites hated or deliberately tries to offend. It's a very different situation to say, having laws against speech that criticises the Catholic Church or supports other religions.
There have to be limits, and I think it is sensible to have laws against deliberately offensive speech that is just intended to upset and provoke. To those that say it is bad to have this type of law, I say, where do you draw the line? Is it ok for me to put a billboard next to a hospital that says "Has someone you loved just died of cancer? Ha ha ha! That's funny!" Is that ok?
LMAO - have you seen bbc coverage recently?
They are Tony's bitch.
Depends on what side of the political spectrum you're on. Labour politicians have complained that the BBC is against them. The good thing about the BBC is that it is reasonably well protected from political interference -- if it wasn't I'm sure Thatcher would have shut it down or sold it.
The news media is so consolidated and conservative, there's no way they'd risk offending viewers or advertisers
Get your news from the BBC. It's not perfect, but it's the best news service there is and since they don't have advertising they are not biased. And believe it or not they actually have a legal mandate from the Queen of England to be completely neutral and unbiased on all subjects! Those crazy Brits...
I think the point is, Napster-type services are not destroying the music industry. That's what the big multi-national record labels want you to believe. Rather, it is destroying a specific part of the music industry -- their part of it.
For the vast majority of musicians and performers (the vast majority not being Madonna or Britney...) the Web is a very positive thing - a way for them to promote themselves and distribute their music at very low cost.
One of the ways the big multinational record labels have defended the price of CDs in the past has been by saying that selecting and promoting an artist or band is very expensive. Not any more it's not - bands can promote themselves, and we the collective Joe Public can do the selecting, thank you very much.
Although it sounds great, it'll take more than 15 years to build from the start of the construction project - so we're talking at least 20 years.
By then, it is predicted that computing will have advanced enough to build a globally-large coordinated telecope ("GCT").
Yes, but by the time we can build a GCT, we'll only be ten years away from building a massively distributed telescope made of billions of tiny nanobots floating in space gathering photons and performing massively complex calculations with quantum computing methods. So we might as well just all wait around until then.
If I receive emails with the Klez virus attached, that means someone I know is probably infected, doesn't it?
In which case (since the From: field is not necessarily indicative of who it came from) how can I find out who it came from so that I can tell them that they're infected?
She receives several copies a day of the Klez virus. I've never received it despite having about the same overall email traffic.
I think the problem is that it just takes one person that you know to have this virus and not know about it.
This article is very timely for me. I had never received an email virus until about a week ago. Now I get Klez virtually every day.
Fortunately I look the descision a long time ago not to use Outlook as my email client (I use Eudora). However, Klez is still a nightmare because it can randomly choose an address for the "From:" field from the computer it has infected, which means that if someone you know gets infected, you can get irate emails from people telling you not to send them viruses!
Nightmare.
I've been hearing this for over five years now yet I have yet to meet anyone who uses Linux as a desktop machine.
Funny you should say that. We first assessed Linux as an operating system in 1998. At that stage, we decided it was not ready to be fulfil any role in our company. In 2000 we looked again, and decided that it was a good option for our company web and email servers. Earlier this year we decided that Linux was now a good option for our office file/print server. I expect that sometime next year we will decide Linux is ready for our desktops.
So, five years is about right. Be prepared to meet lots of people using linux as their desktop in a year or two.
I use XP as my main desktop, and one thing I really don't like is the way it automatically updates itself. Sure, it asks to you before doing it, but when it asks "Update Windows Media Player - security patch" I expect it to just patch the hole, not change the file setting of my machine so that files I previously opened in another application now open in Media Player (this happened to me the other day).
The day I move to Linux as my desktop machine is getting closer and closer.
I love these kind of stats.
Slashdot has, say, 100,000 US readers per day.
Each spends an hour reading slashdot when they should be working.
Let's say an average Slashdot reader is worth say, $40 an hour, and they read Slashdot on 300 days during the year.
That means Slashdot costs the USA $1,200,000,000 dollars a year! Crikey! Don't tell Bush!
Here's me thinking I'm giving a good idea to the KDE community and I get modded as over-rated. Strange are the ways of the Slashdot moderator.
Another idea - a "joe user" feeback site for KDE.
I envisage it working like this:
You can make a proposal, for instance "KDE would be great if it had feature X" or whatever. Then other visitors to the site could vote on the proposals. You would then end up with a scored proposal list.
You should also be able to just make comments.
Although the developers lists exist, I think there really needs to be something for the average user to post to, especially as KDE becomes more popular as a desktop.
I think you're target audience has proven, on more than one occasion, that collecting information like that is frowned upon.
I disagree. It depends on who's collecting the information - do you trust them?
I don't like the fact that Windows XP seems to communicate regularly with Microsoft. But I'm happy to run the test builds of Mozilla that send crash info. back to the Mozilla team. I'm sure many others in the OSS community feel the same way.
Personally I think that the KDE guys should have a special version of KDE that logs the users interactions and then sends it to a central database. Or perhaps rather than a special version, a first use config option - "do you mind if we gather stats about your usage of KDE?" This would allow the KDE guys to profile different types of user, and see which types of user makes use of which functionality. Just as KDE has themes for visual elements, so it could have themes for menus and buttons, based on the user profiles generated by the logging version of KDE.
The result of this could be that the first time you started up KDE you would be able to choose from three profiles, roughly translating to 'programmer/advanced user', 'intermediate user' and 'average Joe user'.
I've had DSL from Telefonica in Spain now for about a year. The prices are similar to those you quote.
;-)
There seems to be loads of competition here to provide DSL and cable services. Six different comms companies have laid fibre in the street I'm in (including BT, funnily enough). Thankfully the city council was organised enough to get them all to do it at the same time.
P.S. For any American's reading, Spain is in Europe
Oh yea, and i suppose the government controlling everything is better than Microsoft controlling everything. Thanks, but i'd rather have Microsoft controlling everything.
Oh yes, I can see it now:
UNITED STATES OF MICROSOFT AMERICAN(tm) - CITIZENSHIP AGREEMENT
By residing in the United States of Microsoft America(tm) you hereby agree:
a) to pay one half of your earnings to Microsoft Government(tm) on a monthly basis, for all the great services that they provide.
b) Microsoft Government(tm) will not be held responsible should you injured, die, be made bankcrupt, or suffer any other type of misfortune as a result of the actions, or inaction of Microsoft Government(tm).
c) Should the United States of Microsoft America(tm) suffer any security breach by a terrorist or another country during times of war, Microsoft(tm) will not be held responsible for any resulting loss of life or property.
d) Anyone publicising any failure, negligence or other fault of the Microsoft Government (tm) will have their Microsoft Citizenship(tm) immediately revoked.
f) etc. etc.
Yes, I think Sony is often cleverer than people realise. Everybody sees Microsoft attempting to muscle in on Sony's territory with the X-Box, but what few can see is that Sony is actually in a very good position to own the future of the what we call "personal computing".
I think the reason people can't see it is that they expect there to be an evolution of the desktop. However, mobile devices are increasingly where it's at, and it's an area in which Microsoft are much weaker than the desktop. I believe Sony's partnership with Ericsson points to the future, and it's a future that doesn't include MS.
With Sony's strengths in electronics and global distribution, the PlayStation, their partnership with Ericsson in the mobile world, the fact that they are also a massive content provider, their strong Vaio laptop range - Microsoft have a lot to worry about with Sony. It wouldn't really suprise me at all if Sony's ten year plan involves small and neat laptop style communication devices which don't include any MS software. If I had to place bets on the future of computing, my money's with Sony, not Microsoft.
The zx80 keyboard?
My introduction to programming was reading the manual of my nextdoor neighbour's ZX80 when I was about 10 years old. I think that qualifies me as a true nerd.