wikipedia's articles also tend to get searched - not everyone just reads them top to bottom. If I would want to know, about a specific person in the book, I might just search on the page. If the character in question is the culprit, then the search might take me straight past the 'SPOILER ALERT' note without me seeing it.
What I would suggest in such cases, is to have one page: "The Mousetrap", and on that page, in a section "spoilers" (or whatever you might want to call it) link a second page "The Mousetrap (spoilers)". A tad more effort to edit the page to make sure the first one doesn't contain spoilers, but it DOES allow for people to search through the page as they see fit without accidentally hitting on any spoilers. And if someone WANTS the spoilers, just click on the link and all is revealed.
Seriously, only use a separation with "SPOILER ALERT" if you are absolutely sure, the page is read sequentially with no jumping around.
They behave the way they do because they are control freaks.
What is it with all the hate-mongering nowadays?
Have you also thought, that the same control also keeps the phone fairly free of malware? You might be able to diagnose that - but most of the people outside the geek community can't. I have a tough enough time telling people that they need to secure their PCs - you don't believe how many are out there that simply shrug and say "Why bother? I have nothing important on my computer."... The fact that their system could in turn be abused into participating in cyber-crime? "Nah... Why would anyone want to use my computer for that?"
They buy brand new, surprisingly expensive, fixed gear bikes. This, of course, makes them harder to ride up hill, but they are ok with that because fixed gear is cool, road or mountain bikes are not.
Not sure on the fixed-gear bike thing - don't have one of those. But sometimes restrictions can also be positive... Say, forcing you to rethink perspectives when using a prime lens on a camera as opposed to a zoom.
Also, sometimes the extra gears themselves can cause problems. One of the things Linux on the desktop still isn't happening, is that Linux may have all those fancy extra gears - but usability wasn't high up on the scale of important things, so the gears are in an awkward order, making them unnecessarily hard to use... (And - before you just apply your fanboi hatred on me - I have been using linux for a LONG time - since before linux 1.0 came out... I still use linux, but my desktop machine for the past 3 years has been a Mac - they're more expensive, but to ME, the extra convenience they offer on the desktop is worth it. Your mileage obviously varies...)
Like many here you're not getting one thing - developers / geeks do not account for 90% of possible iPhone customers. There is something that is a problem for YOU and a problem for many OPEN-SOURCE type people - but not really something that is seen as a problem by the majority of people out there.
And it's not even limited to the iPhone - most people still use MS Office, despite how many competitors again? Despite the free OpenOffice?
You might like Android - and you're perfectly in your right to be. Be happy with it. But please accept, that if I had to buy a new phone for my parents/grandparents, it'd be an iPhone - I think it would be more geared to what she'd need and what she'd be capable of using, simply because it is more streamlined. The closed Appstore may be something you hate - on the other hand, as far as non-geeks are concerned, I'd rather have the AppStore than seeing a proliferation of new phone threats (like - wouldn't you hate being spammed by a mobile botnet?). As a developer myself, I also see the stores limitations, but as a normal person, I see the advantages of the store as well in that it gives some more peace of mind to the less tech-savvy user.
Don't get me wrong - the iPhone has its own set of quirks I don't like. On the other hand - for me (and most people), it was APPLE that made smart phones a lot easier to use - everyone, including Android, is trying to copy that ease of use (with varying amounts of success).
What annoys me about the whole discussion of the iPhone is this: Noone attacks MS for being a commercial enterprise. MS is commonly attacked for 'innovating' things that have been out there for ages. With Apple it's the other way around - they're being attacked for trying to make money - while it's the 'open source' crowd 'innovating' all the things Apple has done on the phone.
The same with the iPad - the iPad came out to much ridicule from the tech-savvy crowd - but see how many projects there are out to 'innovate' a tablet computer now that the iPad is out? Some of those may even offer some more eye-candy - but eye-candy alone isn't going to make me buy one of them. It's the usability - the general usability for the majority of people out there (inclusive of all the non-geeks) - that needs looking at, not flashy graphics.
To me that sounds like you don't want to think about photo composition when you shoot - just give me a humongous multi-megapixel image, and I'll crop what I want.
It'll do the same as many zoom lenses do - it will stop many people about what makes a photo good - you just zoom the lens to make the subject cover the photo without even trying whether another vantage point may make the photo more interesting.
Try this some time - take a prime lens when you go out taking photos, it will force you into thinking about vantage points differently, because you may not easily get close enough to something, or not far enough away.
That said, most of the time, I DO have a zoom lens (70-200mm) on my camera - it is a more convenient for a quick snap here or there, but more often than not, I do put on a lens that doesn't lend itself to what I'm most likely going to see on a day trip, just to force me to think differently about what there is to see...
A bill for a helicopter may not cure stupidity, but it will reduce its ability to afford to go there the next year.
The bill for a helicopter ride may not cure stupidity, but it will reduce its ability to cause another helicopter rescue trip far away from home......if the stupid person has no funds to go on vacation somewhere else, they will still manage to get themselves in the same trouble in a nearby park / hiking 'facility' / inadvertent stupidity proving grounds...
No matter how broke the poor idiot may be - you cannot take away his means to hike about (unless he loses the use of his legs in one of his stupid episodes).
If you were the OWNER of slashdot, I would likely follow your wishes if they were for me to stop posting.
But since you're not - I don't think you're in a place to 'demand' it (whether it would be within the law to demand so or not).
This is a place for discussion, and as such, anyone is invited.
Your house is on private ground - but obviously, it HAS to border on some public space through which to access it. In that public area, you may take whatever photos you like - but even on public ground, if a person living right next to that particular spot would kindly ask you not to take photos of THEIR possession, which is visible from said public space, then they should get their wish.
I am an active (hobby) photographer, so I do know about the restrictions.
I DO also get pissed off with people trying to restrict me from taking photos. But if someone kindly asks me not to take a photo of their property, I will accept that.
This guy wants to take photos of the buildings of those whose place are pixelated in street view, ONLY because the respective owners or tenants DO NOT WANT it.
And that's plain just a transgression of common decency of one human being to another.
If the photographer is genuinely interested in a building that happens to be pixelated in street view, let him take photos of it - as far as I'm concerned, even let him publish the photo. But just taking photos of houses BECAUSE the owner doesn't want it, irrespective of whether the house looks dull, amazing, rich, poor, in good nick or a dump...
And - for the record, the house I currently live in IS on street view, and I don't give a rats ass on whether it's on there or not. But, just as I would like my own wishes against what I might consider annoying behaviour respected (if someone felt he needed to behave like a complete twat around me), I think the wishes of those people who do NOT want their houses on street view should be respected.
This should be very basic common decency of one human being to another.
Something that seems increasingly harder to find...
Let's ignore the question of the legality of google streetview itself (as far as German law is concerned) for the moment.
This photographer doesn't just assert his right to take panoramic photos - he also asserts the right to completely override a person's wishes.
If someone registers NOT to have their home photographed, and he goes there taking photos and publishing them either way, is that the right way to deal with people?
I wonder - what are all the legal things I am perfectly in my right to do around him if he's out in public - particularly those he might not enjoy so much?
So, picture this 'A' asks for something NOT to be done. B goes out of his way to do EXACTLY what person A asked NOT to be done. (You might want to note, that the photographer did not have the intention to go and take photos of any of the buildings, UP UNTIL he finds them pixelated in street view).
Think carefully:
1) is B fighting for the freedom of the net? (or however he might want to justify his action)
2) is B just plain an , for decidedly overriding the wishes of those applying for their houses NOT to be pixelated?
Think very carefully - there are many things perfectly legal that YOU as a person might still not want done TO or immediately AROUND you - but it's exactly that, that the photographer is aiming for.
Indeed, if it's speed limited, then it would be a lie.
With your broadband modem, if it's configured for 6.7MBit/s, then that is your speed limitation. Whether the network behind it can serve it is another matter.
The article itself, on the other hand, is doubly bogus - for one thing, they don't seem to get the wording 'up to', the other thing is that the compare the MEDIAN speed to the 'up to' speed.
Picture this: Your sports car can go UP TO 300km/h. There is no speed limit on the motorway (in Germany, at least) - yet traffic moves at a median speed of around 130km/h.
Does this mean the 'UP TO 300km/h' on your sports car brochure is wrong? No... The median speed has nothing to do with what the car would be capable of.
Same thing here - if they were to say 'up to 6.7MBit/s' in the brochure, but their observed TOP speed over half a year would never go past 4MBit/s, they might have a case. Saying the median is lower than the top speed - only one word springs to mind: Duh!
Ah - and decrypting the messages would have solved the problems, as it is phyiscally impossible to write plaintext 'in-code' AND encrypting it?
The whole thing is bloody nonsense - if I were to plan any attacks, I certainly wouldn't just trust the encryption by a mobile provider as my 'safe haven'...
I just wonder, how they classify guilty knowledge?
Is it really guilty knowledge of a criminally relevant nature?
Picture this:
Interrogator A: Do you know about an upcoming terrorist attack?
Suspect: No!
Machine indicates guilty knowledge!
What the machine doesn't get, the guilty knowledge is actually the suspect having an illicit affair with the interrogator's wife...
You think the machine can handle the difference?
Even if the suspect shows a guilty knowledge during the whole test, even on completely irrelevant questions - will the investigator really think it could be guilty knowledge about anything that isn't criminally relevant?...or maybe, it is about a crime, but not about terrorism? Would the suspect now need to confess to everything (maybe a break-in somewhere), just to prove he/she has a 'good' reason for 'guilty knowledge' that doesn't have anything to do with an impending terrorist attack?
And - if that were to cover it - what in the case of two crimes - a break-in I committed, and knowledge of an impending terrorist attack. If I can 'show' I was the perpetrator behind a break-in (or even show that I know who was behind the break-in); will the machine still be able to say that there is guilty knowledge about two completely separate things?
Yes, but he would have been able to move away from the small town - if he really wouldn't have been able to live it down there...
Also, recording things stated on radio - two things on that: (a) I think people are more aware of how public radio/TV is compared to how public they think a comment on facebook might be. You don't 'exprect' hundreds of thousands to see that comment.
(b)if you recorded every little tidbit from radio for a decade - you still wouldn't have much of a search index to find something. (Unless, you'd already be quite the misanthrope to start with -- but then again, most of us normally don't make much of some misanthrope's utterings).
Nowadays with search engines, you wouldn't need to spend any amount of work into informing yourself on what's going on - you just google the name of a person and see what's coming off it. No matter, whether he'd felt it necessary to skip his town on the other side of a planet because of something he/she did as a youth...
The question isn't "who thinks this info is private?".....the question is "who thinks data shouldn't be private?"...
As is usually the case, the law only begins stepping in AFTER the baby has been poured out with the bath water...
Yes, the data is currently available, because people didn't lock the access points. But - outside of the IT geek/nerd community - how many people do you think have Internet connections and aren't aware how to properly secure their network?
And - even if they can secure them - there is still the question about their awareness of what their data can be used for, when they enter it somewhere. How much of what you enter is actually a legitimate concern of the company in question? And how much is just collected for marketing or other purposes the end user might react negatively to?
The US may be at the technical forefront in areas - but you're behind when it comes to the awareness of data security and particularly data privacy issues. What you consider to be the pesky/narrow-minded rules of European governments as to data security - might one day just save you from companies riding rough shot over what you want and think, because they have the necessary data to do so. Of course, if, say, you're into S&M stuff, it may be great that you get advertising tailored to you on sites that deal with it. But, would you want that data to 'leak' out, and all of a sudden co-workers start raising eyebrows, why you get so many porn related ads while looking at google maps?
What about the 17 year old that proudly blogged how he screwed a neighbours kid out of some stuff or other... It's bad enough for the youth to live it down that time. But would you want potential future employers 20 years later make a call on how trustworthy, how grown-up you are by what you posted back then, and might be indexed by some other service in the future?
if you ask people whether anyone likes guns at an NRA convention, you'll get one result -- if you ask at a pacifist convention, you're likely to get a strongly diverging result...
Many of the slashdot crowd will be people that work with a lot of text (source-codes, DB dumps, shells,...) - for many of us, the matte screen is the better choice.
On the other hand - for many people primarily using their laptops to access Facebook, consuming multimedia content,... the more vivid colours of the glossy screen have a higher appeal...
So - for the slashdot crowd, what split between those groups do you expect to find here?
Now look at the general population? I'll bet you, the split will be the other way around... And - for people not using computers quite as much, how much easier do you think it will be to sell them a computer with a 'vibrant'/'vivid' display?
What's right for most of us, may not be the right thing for most people out there...
What I found a bit surprising, though - for a professional photographer friend of mine, matte is the screen of choice as well - for less glossy, but apparently more accurate colour representation...
Berner Zeitung (one of the two main papers in the Swiss capital) used this approach about 10 or so years ago, but (unfortunately, I thought) shut it down after a bit over a year.
What they did was to allow anyone free access to the full articles of the current day, but at the same time offer an online subscription for (IIRC) ~USD 40,-/yr. The online subscriber got some extra benefits in being able to access all full articles - not just the current day; and were able to download pdf page views of the actual papers as well, and give a search functionality for their news archive.
Overall at the time, I really liked the offering, and was saddened when they shut it down (not profitable)... I just think, they had been too early trying it. I think it could be a decent model for a lot of papers today...
The original set is at fault - if you accept both 'boy/girl' and 'girl/boy' (because the Tuesday boy could have been born before the girl, or be born after the girl), then we also need TWO boy/boy combinations:
Not sure whether I would side with the 'Higher consumption levels os correlated with lower abuse.' point - sure, abuse may be lower in 'western' nations, where porn is fairly freely available.
But, what makes you believe that there is a cause/effect relationship between them?
By the same argument you could say that nuclear power plants also lower abuse (most of them are in nations with lower abuse levels)...
More people having cars lowers abuse levels? (again, the wealthier nations with more people with car ownership are also among those with a higher percentage of people owning cars)...
I would agree, that porn might help relieve some, let's call it 'stresses' -- but that it is one of the bigger reasons for lower levels of abuse?
You don't think that a higher degree of education and higher prevalence of women's rights might have more to do with that?
I am thankful that the language is living and even evolving - but needless change is still needless. Introducing the word 'tweeting' does not really add much meaning to the language. A message posted as a tweet is not inherently worth more (or less), just by virtue of being transmitted via twitter.
The words computer or PC means something that you couldn't easily use a single pre-existing word for.
Re the French - it's not that the government is trying to guide the growth of the language, but rather trying to control or restrict -- with I find worse.
So, recap: Bringing in a new word which replaces something that before you would have had to describe in a lot of other words - that makes sense. Replacing an existing word for no big gain does not make much sense and does not do language a favour.
I need to see whether I will find it again - but I do remember reading something about the danger of English breaking apart because it's absorbing way too many words from way too many different languages and cultures, in too short a time. This might leads to rifts in English being 'different' in different areas (and by different I mean well beyond simple differences in local dialects). This might end up in English becoming LESS of an international language that promotes understanding.
Yes, you hear 'someone faxed about this' - but if you hear how CNN and other places use it, you hear 'Our viewer Jack tweeted: Me too!' (or whatever)......literally, as a drop in replacement for wrote.
The problem is, that us 'technophiles' here might know what the word means, but for a vast number of the people out there - the word might mean next to nothing.
When programmable computers were developed, bringing in the word computers made sense for it, as it was something new, something that didn't really have much meaning about it. A lot of NY Times readers are probably not that technophile as you and I may be.
Look at other languages, and you will see the kind of damage this does - take German for example:
German has already taken on a lot of 'new' words from English, like 'computer' for example - though in this particular case, the German word 'Rechner' for it still survives. 'Server' though does not have a counterpart in our language. For a 'computer' I'm absolutely fine with that, as we didn't have this kind of machinery before its invention. But, in order to appeal more to younger Germans, a lot of cosmetics have also been re-labelled - 'eye shadowr' instead of 'lidschatten' - but in this case for absolutely the same product, so the 'new' words doesn't add anything at all, apart from maybe sound a bit more 'worldly' and 'exotic' as it isn't our language. This is fine for younger Germans, but I did hear my mother complaining the other day, that she can't find the things she's used to anymore - like Lidschatten. She sees all those English labels now, and simply doesn't assume it's the same thing any more, as they completely ditched the German word from it, and from the labels attached to it.
And this way, older Germans are slowly being 'ignored' in terms of language.
In some companies, managers now more often speak of '(future) challenges' (in the midst of a German sentence), the German words '(künftige) Herausforderungen'. And they simply feel like they're over and above everyone by being able to use such words - they simply don't get that the German words for this mean absolutely the same - but they might sound a little less 'cool' to the managers own ears. To one manager I tried to bring this across by telling him somehting in English, but replacing all the English words he would normally use in his German, with their 'old' German counterparts - he thought it sounded stupid (which it did) - but completely failed to see that his German interlaced with English words would sound exactly as stupid - the only difference being that I did it for the 'comedic' effect, and he does it because he feels it's the only way of being taken serious.
Later I found, if you put a single word in English as opposed to German, sometimes people start attaching far more weight to that one word - why else would the person saying it have bothered to put an English word there - the English word almost gets slang status through this.
So, yes, tweeting isn't really anything else than writing - just in another medium, just like you write by fax or mail, or speak on the phone (Or when did you last hear "Auntie Mary phoned 'Hi'?' or 'Grandpa mailed 'How are you?'?
Slashdot Mirror
...which is also the reason the state is sharing liability for all gun murders, after they gave permission to everyone to 'bear arms'...
Hold on - the state isn't sharing in that liability either...
wikipedia's articles also tend to get searched - not everyone just reads them top to bottom. If I would want to know, about a specific person in the book, I might just search on the page. If the character in question is the culprit, then the search might take me straight past the 'SPOILER ALERT' note without me seeing it.
What I would suggest in such cases, is to have one page: "The Mousetrap", and on that page, in a section "spoilers" (or whatever you might want to call it) link a second page "The Mousetrap (spoilers)". A tad more effort to edit the page to make sure the first one doesn't contain spoilers, but it DOES allow for people to search through the page as they see fit without accidentally hitting on any spoilers. And if someone WANTS the spoilers, just click on the link and all is revealed.
Seriously, only use a separation with "SPOILER ALERT" if you are absolutely sure, the page is read sequentially with no jumping around.
MS Office *is* technically superior to OpenOffice. It has a large number of features that are not duplicated in OO.
Is MS Office really superior in anything that 90% of the users actually need from their word processor?
The (not-so-creeping) featuritis doesn't necessarily make a product 'superior' for the most people.
They behave the way they do because they are control freaks.
What is it with all the hate-mongering nowadays?
Have you also thought, that the same control also keeps the phone fairly free of malware?
You might be able to diagnose that - but most of the people outside the geek community can't.
I have a tough enough time telling people that they need to secure their PCs - you don't believe how many are out there that simply shrug and say "Why bother? I have nothing important on my computer."... The fact that their system could in turn be abused into participating in cyber-crime? "Nah... Why would anyone want to use my computer for that?"
They buy brand new, surprisingly expensive, fixed gear bikes. This, of course, makes them harder to ride up hill, but they are ok with that because fixed gear is cool, road or mountain bikes are not.
Not sure on the fixed-gear bike thing - don't have one of those. But sometimes restrictions can also be positive... Say, forcing you to rethink perspectives when using a prime lens on a camera as opposed to a zoom.
Also, sometimes the extra gears themselves can cause problems. One of the things Linux on the desktop still isn't happening, is that Linux may have all those fancy extra gears - but usability wasn't high up on the scale of important things, so the gears are in an awkward order, making them unnecessarily hard to use... (And - before you just apply your fanboi hatred on me - I have been using linux for a LONG time - since before linux 1.0 came out... I still use linux, but my desktop machine for the past 3 years has been a Mac - they're more expensive, but to ME, the extra convenience they offer on the desktop is worth it. Your mileage obviously varies...)
Like many here you're not getting one thing - developers / geeks do not account for 90% of possible iPhone customers. There is something that is a problem for YOU and a problem for many OPEN-SOURCE type people - but not really something that is seen as a problem by the majority of people out there.
And it's not even limited to the iPhone - most people still use MS Office, despite how many competitors again? Despite the free OpenOffice?
You might like Android - and you're perfectly in your right to be. Be happy with it. But please accept, that if I had to buy a new phone for my parents/grandparents, it'd be an iPhone - I think it would be more geared to what she'd need and what she'd be capable of using, simply because it is more streamlined.
The closed Appstore may be something you hate - on the other hand, as far as non-geeks are concerned, I'd rather have the AppStore than seeing a proliferation of new phone threats (like - wouldn't you hate being spammed by a mobile botnet?). As a developer myself, I also see the stores limitations, but as a normal person, I see the advantages of the store as well in that it gives some more peace of mind to the less tech-savvy user.
Don't get me wrong - the iPhone has its own set of quirks I don't like. On the other hand - for me (and most people), it was APPLE that made smart phones a lot easier to use - everyone, including Android, is trying to copy that ease of use (with varying amounts of success).
What annoys me about the whole discussion of the iPhone is this: Noone attacks MS for being a commercial enterprise. MS is commonly attacked for 'innovating' things that have been out there for ages. With Apple it's the other way around - they're being attacked for trying to make money - while it's the 'open source' crowd 'innovating' all the things Apple has done on the phone.
The same with the iPad - the iPad came out to much ridicule from the tech-savvy crowd - but see how many projects there are out to 'innovate' a tablet computer now that the iPad is out? Some of those may even offer some more eye-candy - but eye-candy alone isn't going to make me buy one of them. It's the usability - the general usability for the majority of people out there (inclusive of all the non-geeks) - that needs looking at, not flashy graphics.
To me that sounds like you don't want to think about photo composition when you shoot - just give me a humongous multi-megapixel image, and I'll crop what I want.
It'll do the same as many zoom lenses do - it will stop many people about what makes a photo good - you just zoom the lens to make the subject cover the photo without even trying whether another vantage point may make the photo more interesting.
Try this some time - take a prime lens when you go out taking photos, it will force you into thinking about vantage points differently, because you may not easily get close enough to something, or not far enough away.
That said, most of the time, I DO have a zoom lens (70-200mm) on my camera - it is a more convenient for a quick snap here or there, but more often than not, I do put on a lens that doesn't lend itself to what I'm most likely going to see on a day trip, just to force me to think differently about what there is to see...
A bill for a helicopter may not cure stupidity, but it will reduce its ability to afford to go there the next year.
The bill for a helicopter ride may not cure stupidity, but it will reduce its ability to cause another helicopter rescue trip far away from home... ...if the stupid person has no funds to go on vacation somewhere else, they will still manage to get themselves in the same trouble in a nearby park / hiking 'facility' / inadvertent stupidity proving grounds...
No matter how broke the poor idiot may be - you cannot take away his means to hike about (unless he loses the use of his legs in one of his stupid episodes).
If you were the OWNER of slashdot, I would likely follow your wishes if they were for me to stop posting.
But since you're not - I don't think you're in a place to 'demand' it (whether it would be within the law to demand so or not).
This is a place for discussion, and as such, anyone is invited.
Your house is on private ground - but obviously, it HAS to border on some public space through which to access it. In that public area, you may take whatever photos you like - but even on public ground, if a person living right next to that particular spot would kindly ask you not to take photos of THEIR possession, which is visible from said public space, then they should get their wish.
I am an active (hobby) photographer, so I do know about the restrictions.
I DO also get pissed off with people trying to restrict me from taking photos. But if someone kindly asks me not to take a photo of their property, I will accept that.
This guy wants to take photos of the buildings of those whose place are pixelated in street view, ONLY because the respective owners or tenants DO NOT WANT it.
And that's plain just a transgression of common decency of one human being to another.
If the photographer is genuinely interested in a building that happens to be pixelated in street view, let him take photos of it - as far as I'm concerned, even let him publish the photo. But just taking photos of houses BECAUSE the owner doesn't want it, irrespective of whether the house looks dull, amazing, rich, poor, in good nick or a dump...
And - for the record, the house I currently live in IS on street view, and I don't give a rats ass on whether it's on there or not. But, just as I would like my own wishes against what I might consider annoying behaviour respected (if someone felt he needed to behave like a complete twat around me), I think the wishes of those people who do NOT want their houses on street view should be respected.
This should be very basic common decency of one human being to another.
Something that seems increasingly harder to find...
Let's ignore the question of the legality of google streetview itself (as far as German law is concerned) for the moment.
This photographer doesn't just assert his right to take panoramic photos - he also asserts the right to completely override a person's wishes.
If someone registers NOT to have their home photographed, and he goes there taking photos and publishing them either way, is that the right way to deal with people?
I wonder - what are all the legal things I am perfectly in my right to do around him if he's out in public - particularly those he might not enjoy so much?
So, picture this 'A' asks for something NOT to be done.
B goes out of his way to do EXACTLY what person A asked NOT to be done.
(You might want to note, that the photographer did not have the intention to go and take photos of any of the buildings, UP UNTIL he finds them pixelated in street view).
Think carefully:
1) is B fighting for the freedom of the net? (or however he might want to justify his action)
2) is B just plain an , for decidedly overriding the wishes of those applying for their houses NOT to be pixelated?
Think very carefully - there are many things perfectly legal that YOU as a person might still not want done TO or immediately AROUND you - but it's exactly that, that the photographer is aiming for.
The article doesn't show the false positive rate on people that have been diagnosed NOT to suffer from autism...
I hope it doesn't say 90% of them are autism sufferers...
Indeed, if it's speed limited, then it would be a lie.
With your broadband modem, if it's configured for 6.7MBit/s, then that is your speed limitation. Whether the network behind it can serve it is another matter.
The article itself, on the other hand, is doubly bogus - for one thing, they don't seem to get the wording 'up to', the other thing is that the compare the MEDIAN speed to the 'up to' speed.
Picture this: Your sports car can go UP TO 300km/h. There is no speed limit on the motorway (in Germany, at least) - yet traffic moves at a median speed of around 130km/h.
Does this mean the 'UP TO 300km/h' on your sports car brochure is wrong?
No... The median speed has nothing to do with what the car would be capable of.
Same thing here - if they were to say 'up to 6.7MBit/s' in the brochure, but their observed TOP speed over half a year would never go past 4MBit/s, they might have a case. Saying the median is lower than the top speed - only one word springs to mind: Duh!
Ah - and decrypting the messages would have solved the problems, as it is phyiscally impossible to write plaintext 'in-code' AND encrypting it?
The whole thing is bloody nonsense - if I were to plan any attacks, I certainly wouldn't just trust the encryption by a mobile provider as my 'safe haven'...
I just wonder, how they classify guilty knowledge?
Is it really guilty knowledge of a criminally relevant nature?
Picture this:
Interrogator A: Do you know about an upcoming terrorist attack?
Suspect: No!
Machine indicates guilty knowledge!
What the machine doesn't get, the guilty knowledge is actually the suspect having an illicit affair with the interrogator's wife...
You think the machine can handle the difference?
Even if the suspect shows a guilty knowledge during the whole test, even on completely irrelevant questions - will the investigator really think it could be guilty knowledge about anything that isn't criminally relevant? ...or maybe, it is about a crime, but not about terrorism? Would the suspect now need to confess to everything (maybe a break-in somewhere), just to prove he/she has a 'good' reason for 'guilty knowledge' that doesn't have anything to do with an impending terrorist attack?
And - if that were to cover it - what in the case of two crimes - a break-in I committed, and knowledge of an impending terrorist attack. If I can 'show' I was the perpetrator behind a break-in (or even show that I know who was behind the break-in); will the machine still be able to say that there is guilty knowledge about two completely separate things?
Yes, but he would have been able to move away from the small town - if he really wouldn't have been able to live it down there...
Also, recording things stated on radio - two things on that: (a) I think people are more aware of how public radio/TV is compared to how public they think a comment on facebook might be. You don't 'exprect' hundreds of thousands to see that comment.
(b)if you recorded every little tidbit from radio for a decade - you still wouldn't have much of a search index to find something. (Unless, you'd already be quite the misanthrope to start with -- but then again, most of us normally don't make much of some misanthrope's utterings).
Nowadays with search engines, you wouldn't need to spend any amount of work into informing yourself on what's going on - you just google the name of a person and see what's coming off it. No matter, whether he'd felt it necessary to skip his town on the other side of a planet because of something he/she did as a youth...
The question isn't "who thinks this info is private?"... ..the question is "who thinks data shouldn't be private?"...
As is usually the case, the law only begins stepping in AFTER the baby has been poured out with the bath water...
Yes, the data is currently available, because people didn't lock the access points. But - outside of the IT geek/nerd community - how many people do you think have Internet connections and aren't aware how to properly secure their network?
And - even if they can secure them - there is still the question about their awareness of what their data can be used for, when they enter it somewhere. How much of what you enter is actually a legitimate concern of the company in question? And how much is just collected for marketing or other purposes the end user might react negatively to?
The US may be at the technical forefront in areas - but you're behind when it comes to the awareness of data security and particularly data privacy issues. What you consider to be the pesky/narrow-minded rules of European governments as to data security - might one day just save you from companies riding rough shot over what you want and think, because they have the necessary data to do so. Of course, if, say, you're into S&M stuff, it may be great that you get advertising tailored to you on sites that deal with it. But, would you want that data to 'leak' out, and all of a sudden co-workers start raising eyebrows, why you get so many porn related ads while looking at google maps?
What about the 17 year old that proudly blogged how he screwed a neighbours kid out of some stuff or other... It's bad enough for the youth to live it down that time. But would you want potential future employers 20 years later make a call on how trustworthy, how grown-up you are by what you posted back then, and might be indexed by some other service in the future?
if you ask people whether anyone likes guns at an NRA convention, you'll get one result -- if you ask at a pacifist convention, you're likely to get a strongly diverging result...
Many of the slashdot crowd will be people that work with a lot of text (source-codes, DB dumps, shells, ...) - for many of us, the matte screen is the better choice.
On the other hand - for many people primarily using their laptops to access Facebook, consuming multimedia content, ... the more vivid colours of the glossy screen have a higher appeal...
So - for the slashdot crowd, what split between those groups do you expect to find here?
Now look at the general population? I'll bet you, the split will be the other way around... And - for people not using computers quite as much, how much easier do you think it will be to sell them a computer with a 'vibrant'/'vivid' display?
What's right for most of us, may not be the right thing for most people out there...
What I found a bit surprising, though - for a professional photographer friend of mine, matte is the screen of choice as well - for less glossy, but apparently more accurate colour representation...
Berner Zeitung (one of the two main papers in the Swiss capital) used this approach about 10 or so years ago, but (unfortunately, I thought) shut it down after a bit over a year.
What they did was to allow anyone free access to the full articles of the current day, but at the same time offer an online subscription for (IIRC) ~USD 40,-/yr. The online subscriber got some extra benefits in being able to access all full articles - not just the current day; and were able to download pdf page views of the actual papers as well, and give a search functionality for their news archive.
Overall at the time, I really liked the offering, and was saddened when they shut it down (not profitable)... I just think, they had been too early trying it. I think it could be a decent model for a lot of papers today...
It's still 50/50...
The original set is at fault - if you accept both 'boy/girl' and 'girl/boy' (because the Tuesday boy could have been born before the girl, or be born after the girl), then we also need TWO boy/boy combinations:
boy(Tuesday) / boy(any-day)
boy(any-day) / boy(Tuesday)
boy(Tuesday) / girl
girl / boy(Tuesday)
and it's back to 50/50...
Not sure whether I would side with the 'Higher consumption levels os correlated with lower abuse.' point - sure, abuse may be lower in 'western' nations, where porn is fairly freely available.
But, what makes you believe that there is a cause/effect relationship between them?
By the same argument you could say that nuclear power plants also lower abuse (most of them are in nations with lower abuse levels)...
More people having cars lowers abuse levels? (again, the wealthier nations with more people with car ownership are also among those with a higher percentage of people owning cars)...
I would agree, that porn might help relieve some, let's call it 'stresses' -- but that it is one of the bigger reasons for lower levels of abuse?
You don't think that a higher degree of education and higher prevalence of women's rights might have more to do with that?
...that he didn't finish the tweet with 'LOL'... :-(
...that 25years ago, we all saw that the surveillance states of the Eastern block were an abomination not worthy of a free society...
Now, we create surveillance society V2.0 here in the west...
I am thankful that the language is living and even evolving - but needless change is still needless. Introducing the word 'tweeting' does not really add much meaning to the language. A message posted as a tweet is not inherently worth more (or less), just by virtue of being transmitted via twitter.
The words computer or PC means something that you couldn't easily use a single pre-existing word for.
Re the French - it's not that the government is trying to guide the growth of the language, but rather trying to control or restrict -- with I find worse.
So, recap: Bringing in a new word which replaces something that before you would have had to describe in a lot of other words - that makes sense.
Replacing an existing word for no big gain does not make much sense and does not do language a favour.
I need to see whether I will find it again - but I do remember reading something about the danger of English breaking apart because it's absorbing way too many words from way too many different languages and cultures, in too short a time. This might leads to rifts in English being 'different' in different areas (and by different I mean well beyond simple differences in local dialects). This might end up in English becoming LESS of an international language that promotes understanding.
Yes, you hear 'someone faxed about this' - but if you hear how CNN and other places use it, you hear 'Our viewer Jack tweeted: Me too!' (or whatever)... ...literally, as a drop in replacement for wrote.
The problem is, that us 'technophiles' here might know what the word means, but for a vast number of the people out there - the word might mean next to nothing.
When programmable computers were developed, bringing in the word computers made sense for it, as it was something new, something that didn't really have much meaning about it. A lot of NY Times readers are probably not that technophile as you and I may be.
Look at other languages, and you will see the kind of damage this does - take German for example:
German has already taken on a lot of 'new' words from English, like 'computer' for example - though in this particular case, the German word 'Rechner' for it still survives. 'Server' though does not have a counterpart in our language. For a 'computer' I'm absolutely fine with that, as we didn't have this kind of machinery before its invention.
But, in order to appeal more to younger Germans, a lot of cosmetics have also been re-labelled - 'eye shadowr' instead of 'lidschatten' - but in this case for absolutely the same product, so the 'new' words doesn't add anything at all, apart from maybe sound a bit more 'worldly' and 'exotic' as it isn't our language. This is fine for younger Germans, but I did hear my mother complaining the other day, that she can't find the things she's used to anymore - like Lidschatten. She sees all those English labels now, and simply doesn't assume it's the same thing any more, as they completely ditched the German word from it, and from the labels attached to it.
And this way, older Germans are slowly being 'ignored' in terms of language.
In some companies, managers now more often speak of '(future) challenges' (in the midst of a German sentence), the German words '(künftige) Herausforderungen'. And they simply feel like they're over and above everyone by being able to use such words - they simply don't get that the German words for this mean absolutely the same - but they might sound a little less 'cool' to the managers own ears. To one manager I tried to bring this across by telling him somehting in English, but replacing all the English words he would normally use in his German, with their 'old' German counterparts - he thought it sounded stupid (which it did) - but completely failed to see that his German interlaced with English words would sound exactly as stupid - the only difference being that I did it for the 'comedic' effect, and he does it because he feels it's the only way of being taken serious.
Later I found, if you put a single word in English as opposed to German, sometimes people start attaching far more weight to that one word - why else would the person saying it have bothered to put an English word there - the English word almost gets slang status through this.
So, yes, tweeting isn't really anything else than writing - just in another medium, just like you write by fax or mail, or speak on the phone (Or when did you last hear "Auntie Mary phoned 'Hi'?' or 'Grandpa mailed 'How are you?'?
Tweeting should just go...