All road cars pretty much have the same control layout. You wouldn't want next year's model to swap the accelerator and brake pedals, would you? Nor would you want to find out that your friend "customized" his car controls to do the same when you're trying to rush him to the hospital in his car.
Beyond a certain point, incremental improvements in ease of use is not worth destroying *consistency*. When I click on the Edit menu, I'd like it to return a standard list *every* time, not just showing the 5 most frequently used items.
If you think about it, all user interfaces are just a means to an end; unless, of course, you're a user interface designer.
A republic (in the modern sense) is just a state without a monarch as head of state. There is nothing special about a republic, and you can have perfectly democratic and/or representative monarchies (ie. monarchies with powers bound by a constitution such as Great Britain) with a high amount of liberty for most citizens, and yet have have quite oppressive republics with little liberty for most citizens.
What the US constitution (and others like it) really espouses is Liberty. Liberty is closely tied to Rights and how Rights are structured as to permit an individual to do anything according to his will as long as it does not infringe on the Rights of others. This idea is also related to the "pursuit of happiness", but be aware that Liberty is not to maximise happiness, but to enable its pursuit.
Britain, instead of rejecting the Monarchy, bound the Crown by setting up, using legal and political means, a structure (the unwritten constitution) that enabled representation for the aristocracy and gentry through Parliament. This was gradually expanded to universal suffrage in the 20th century and correspondingly the power of the Crown gradually contracted to the ceremonial role it plays today.
The reason I point this out is because in your post, you seem to have some sort of implicit admiration for anarchy. This I feel is misguided. Order is important in a society as it establishes what is acceptable and what is not (and how this is enforced). This threshold, however, is dynamic and multi-dimensional and there are many factors at play in any given society.
Without order and a power structure, society will break down, and new forms of authority will fill the power vacuum and the cycle repeats ad infinitum. Most humans need order, whether because of genetics, social conditioning or individual experience. They need a society that can give them the framework for security and production as these are linked directly to the most primal human instinct - survival.
The nature of power (in the human sense) is neither good or evil, it is just the measure of adherence of the Many to the will of the Few. A fundamental idea of the US constitution is the "balance of power" which was actually heavily influenced by the ideas of a Frenchman (Montesquieu) who admired the British system of checks on the power of the Crown through a legal framework and a body of elected representatives.
In short, the balance of power is not to limit the amount of power, yet that may be a side effect that brings many benefits; the essence of the idea is to prevent the corruption of power through institutional vigilance within government. As such, it is not about big government or small government, it is about good government.
The façade is on the new Southgate isn't too bad, but yes, it's built with concrete and steel, bleh. At least they blended it in with the rest of the area unlike Cabot Circus in Bristol.
Bath is actually a great place to visit in this time of year, as the Christmas Market is about to start (on Thursday) and it's going to last till 6th December.
I mean, you don't need Einstein to tell you than when you offload real risk from the lending institution to investors, that the lenders and their middle-men will make crater-loads of money, while people that buy the products that they off-load the risk to have no real idea of its trustworthiness. The fact that investment banks that then sold off these packages while at the same time making exotic and wildly speculative bets against (or on) them completely destabilized the international financial system.
If you want to blame the Community Reinvestment Act or other similar legislation to kickstart lending to low-income areas, you are free to, but to convince others you better have some real evidence to back it up.
Really, the question should be - Would Microsoft make any money in addition to the money it's already making if it fully adopted F/OSS principles? A company is only as ethical as their shareholders' restraint of greed allow, and this focus on shareholder value, although useful to drive productivity and efficiency, tend to become a problem when market players are to such a size to which it can exert undue influence in the market.
With MS being the dominant player in the OS and Office Suite markets, I would agree with RMS' assessment that MS is a lost cause in that regard, at least in the current market structure. It is simply not profitable for MS to welcome F/OSS models within the company, especially in areas in which they are already dominant. This constant fear that actions by MS reaching out to the FOSS community is a Trojan horse is a reasonable reaction. After all, if FOSS support MS technologies too well, MS can just release a new version of the technology, while FOSS plays catch-up (ie. the Trojan horse scenario, OS/2)
However, Mono and WINE and other similar projects are important in the sense that it is unreasonable to expect Windows or Office or any other MS technology to disappear overnight. Then the problems becomes how this transition happens, ie. on a technological viewpoint, how FOSS can be a viable alternative while allowing people and organisations to keep their current investment in MS technologies. It's a hard question, and in reality, the only thing that would really make a difference is to handle the demand side of the equation. If big projects and end-users demand cross-system operability and the use of open solutions, then we change the actual environment and ecosystem, and MS would have no choice but to fight or adapt.
We are already seeing this in government contracts in Europe and it is starting to make a difference. There is a strong argument to build software using F/OSS principles, and the main thrust should be persuading everybody on the merits of it. On the other hand, even though MS compatibility in F/OSS is essential for further adoption, we should always be vigilant. As such, both Miguel and RMS is right.
Read the story again. The argument is for a longer school year, and not necessarily more hours in school. Think about that for a minute, especially on how it affects knowledge retention. If you have a good argument, by all means make it, but if the debate on education in the country in general is at the same level as in your post, we are in a very sorry state indeed.
And what if the clients' actions were illegal. How do you weight up the right to privacy against the public interest (a basic question in British constitutional law, or so I've heard)? You speak as if everything was in black and white. Just because there is a privacy angle to this does not mean you win the argument.
You accuse others of hypocrisy, but yet you fail to realize your own arrogance.
And you're a dimwit waving the "boo-hoo, the nanny-state is comming" banner.
This is the problem in modern politics; people like you who like to cheer for this team, or that ideology. If only it was that simple.
The struggle to keep individual rights begins with information and transparency in actions which affect all of us. Iceland's economy was largely kept afloat because of the tremendous (and maybe illegal) risks that their banks took.
Now that this has been exposed, shouldn't this be a problem that we should all be concerned about.
Compare this to the story that one of your ilk posted several hours before. What does civil liberties have to do with a (ill-conceived) social engineering program that has to do with rehabilitation of whole families? What is the cause of all that fake outrage, when stuff like this is occurring under our noses. The answer is from people like you, hiding behind the civil liberties cause when your real motives are partisan. The fact that you probably don't realize it saddens me tremendously on how much the level of political discourse has fallen generally.
To protect private interests against the public's need to know.
This is the stuff that we should be angry about. Not putting some trailer-trash families in rehabilitation programs discussed about in the recent front page article (That's the one with the hyperbole about 24hr surveillance BTW).
Trying to apportion blame onto New Labour for plans such as this waters down the argument of good governance and the emphasis that should be placed on civil liberties. This is a struggle that transcends party politics; whoever is in power has to answer to the people, accountability is the key.
It doesn't equate to civil liberties being lost, and there should not be a knee jerk reaction to it pretending it is something it is not. It actually does a disservice to the cause of civil liberties because of introducing fringe issues into the discussion.
To be honest, I do not believe that the Tories would have done any different than Labour if they had been in power. Think back to the Thatcher years, it was the state that had to absorb the enormous number of claimants to the disability benefits and welfare because of Thatcher's restructuring of British industry. This is the legacy we are actually seeing now, the people that had been so dependant on the welfare system has largely been those that are made unemployable structurally by poorly thought out free-market policies.
Now, I am not a Labour supporter by any stretch of imagination, but I believe that for the Tories to market themselves as the alternative is the biggest joke of all. Under Major, the problems we are facing now would be more serious or at the very least, be of the same level of severity.
What we need in politics is a voice of reason, to temper the tendency of government to over-react. The British press has a history of sensationalism, but this problem has been exasperated in recent years by quality journalism found in the like of Daily Mail and the Sunday Express. What we need are politicians to say not that they are addressing the issue whenever some scare story pops up, but to say that after analysing the issue, it is not at all an issue that needs to be addressed.
There will always be a problem with non-productive members of society. The answer to that problem is much more nuanced.
Your argument along the lines of - "first they came fore the Jews", is nonsensical. The definition of a state revolves around the responsibility it has to it's subjects. The state is always responsible for at least some sort of welfare to its people, whether it is in the form of keeping order, providing infrastructure and emergency response or maintaining national security.
The program in question is not restricting individual rights for arbitrary or political ends, but it is an extension of the criminal justice system, in a social engineering capacity. Now, I do not support the use of such programs as I do not believe they are effective, but it is disingenuous to claim that this is a erosion of civil liberties.
There are issues that are much more importance this this, including the extension of the 28-day detention for terror suspects without charge, in effect a suspension of Habeas Corpus by the state. That is stuff we should be focusing on with regards to civil liberties, and there is where our outrage should lie.
This argument against this program should be cost and benefit to society. How much are we actually spending on this program and how much benefit does it give us.
Your reaction is pure hyperbole, even though I do not agree with some of the social engineering that is being down by the state (such as the issuance of ASBOs as a step under the criminal justice system).
You can see that these families are offending and creating a poor environment for their communities. There are several levels of intervention and that the last of which is the core residential unit, which is some sort of support facility which these families attend, as a family unit. Afterwards they are moved into social housing.
This is the same type of people that in the US people would be called trailer trash. The difference is that in the UK, the system of social housing is quite good, and these people live in populated areas and causes disturbances resulting in less desirable neighborhoods. I am curious if this works at all, and the raw data of the existing program should be released and analysed, but I don't believe this program is used to create a system to oppress political ideas.
The unstable ABI is the result of the kernel devs wanting for devices drivers to be in the source tree. The implication is that with a stable ABI, there would be no incentive to release source code and to include this code in the kernel.
Windows H/W support from my POV is abysmal, and that is even with MS' at-all-cost backward compatibility culture. Creative's SB Live drivers do not work at all in Vista. They work fine on all recent versions of Linux distros. Because Windows is so widely used, H/W manufactures have to make passable drivers in order to get their product sold. However, once they are finished with selling them, you get situations like these in which old devices are unsupported. Normally this is ok as the backward compatibility works, but it doesn't all the time.
From my point of view, the current Linux dev model for driver is the right way to go with the current state of things in the free software world. Having a stable ABI for kernel modules will fix some short term problems but cause long term ones in the dev model.
Unilateral contracts are distinguished by three points - 1. A specific reward or payment to a group of persons or the wider public, 2. for a particular action from the offeree which will form acceptance and performance, 3. and with the intention to create legal relations.
In this case, the intention of the parties is the most important part for the courts to consider. In Carlill v. Carbolic, the offerer specifically stated that money was deposited with a bank for the reward. This action indicated to the courts that the intention to pay was present, even if this action was only to erect an illusion of intention, it is enough to satisfy that point in law.
It is entirely predictable in this case for Mason to argue that the offer was not serious with no real intention to create legal relations. This is the same argument made by Carbolic in the landmark case. However, what Kolodziej has in front of him now is to prove that Mason's action on TV amounted is serious. This is plausible. One line of attack he can use is that Mason made his comments on Dateline, as opposed to something like Jerry Springer. It really depends on how the arguments are made, and how the judge decides given the facts and arguments.
Let's face it. A lot of the people that say they are leaving a particular place because certain political reasons are just doing so because it's convenient to do so. Apart from people that are really under political oppression, those that emigrate would most likely be because of a better standard of living, weather, career opportunities or to be closer to family and friends, etc.
Slashdot is probably the worse place to ask for immigration advice. If you want to move to a country which has good protections on privacy, free speech and civil rights in general, but you don't fight to keep those rights, then you are a net liability to that nation, whichever you might wish to choose to settle in.
No matter how people of markets as the magical solution to everything, it is unlikely that privacy and civil liberty protections in law was drafted with immigration policy in mind.
Freedom is not a thing, a state of being or something you can achieve. Freedom is a balance; a balance of self and society, a balance between individual satisfaction and collective well-being. When this balance is lost, then to one extreme there is oppression, or to the other there is anarchy.
"Inconsistent measurement explains only part of the difference between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Were measurements to be standardized, according to Eberstadt, "America might move from the bottom third toward the middle, but it would be unlikely to advance into the top half."
I did not accuse them of bias. I just said that they made assertions that purported to explain the differences (with the implication that the US system yields the same medical, and not inferior, outcome as other countries that spend approx. 50% on health), without actually backing it up.
Now talking about bias, the page that you linked was specifically written by a conservative think tank to counter the perception of brokeness in the US heath care system. Seeing that all it can do is to say that the US would not be at the bottom of infant mortality statistics if the measurements are standardized doesn't really sound good to that side of the argument. Remember, other industrialized countries spend significantly less.
Just like the article by Dr. Linda Halderman on Pajamas Media (in more ways than one), your comment contains no facts or analysis to back up your assertions. Conveniently several countries are omitted. There is no independent corroboration of the veracity or accuracy these assertions.
Those that forget history are doomed to repeat it. This is part of the problem that "Precedent" solves in Common Law jurisdictions. If every judge interpreted law without "Precedence" as a guide, then you have a problem with consistency.
The other part of the problem is that no law can cover every conceivable situation. Sometimes bad laws are made, that's the reason that Jurisprudence is importance. In Common Law countries, it is a flexible system that allow lawmakers to make laws which are applied to specific situations by the judicial system.
In any case, the problem with inaccessible law is not specific to the Common Law, there is a lot of statutes which are equally hard to understand and apply.
A more realistic solution would be to introduce a summary of the existing legal situation on common law and statutes every year from the government that is brief and simple to understand but detailed enough to be useful. This should be accessible to everyone, and the relevant case law around this published and available on the Internet for free.
Basic legal education should be mandatory at the high school stage. Courts should be simplified so that technicalities are kept to a minimum.
I have a G1. It works well considering it is 1st generation hardware/software. No A2DP, but same situation as iPhone (3.0/Cupcake). Other than that, software-wise the widgets are smooth, and you can actually run services in the background. Some of the applications need improving, like the mail client needs IMAP IDLE support, etc.. but it's getting there. You can get a custom cupcake build for the G1 now which fixes a lot of those problems.
Hardware-wise, the G1 is not as pretty, but the upcoming devices should give the iPhone a run for its money. The really good thing about it though is that it's got the right number of real buttons, which make navigation a lot more manageable.
Talking about the N800, OS2008 is great. Nokia has been doing a lot for mobile Linux and I plan on upgrading my trusty ole 770 running OS2008 to whatever device they have for Maemo 5.
This thing goes back all the way to Lincoln. They get the staffers to pull up names of family and places and then sign the letters themselves (or not as in Rumsfield cases). There's even a little bit on how Obama is handwriting every single note before typing it up (not that I find that any better or worse than how Bush did it). It's just a token gesture, that's all. It's just a list of things they run through during the week that's decent, but most importantly cost effective.
At the end of the day, what matters most is how much care soldiers and veterans are receiving during and after their tours of duty.
Be internet is doing a ADSL2+ 24mb/s for 17.50 GBP, which works out to 25 dollars a month... That's not too bad is it?
Virgin Broadband is doing a 50mb/s cable service for 35 GBP which is a lot more and probably not worth it because it's cable.
You can check availability at www.samknows.com for almost all ADSL LLU (and cable) providers in the UK. Almost all exchanges have ADSL equipment and most have ADSL2+.
BTW, 3G HSDPA coverage is very good in the UK in and is 80-90% of all areas, while 2G/GPRS coverage is near 100%.
Getting a HSDPA USB dongle is really cheap as well, some plans are as low as 5 GBP a month (1GB limit).
What if you're forced to watch the same movie over and over again for a week, is that torture? It's not just what one gets subjected to, but also how. Worse of all, this is totally psychological, leaving not physical traces. If they thought of a way to inflict physical pain without the traces, the probably would use that too... oh wait they have, it's call waterboarding..
Slashdot Mirror
You have a point.
All road cars pretty much have the same control layout. You wouldn't want next year's model to swap the accelerator and brake pedals, would you? Nor would you want to find out that your friend "customized" his car controls to do the same when you're trying to rush him to the hospital in his car.
Beyond a certain point, incremental improvements in ease of use is not worth destroying *consistency*. When I click on the Edit menu, I'd like it to return a standard list *every* time, not just showing the 5 most frequently used items.
If you think about it, all user interfaces are just a means to an end; unless, of course, you're a user interface designer.
A republic (in the modern sense) is just a state without a monarch as head of state. There is nothing special about a republic, and you can have perfectly democratic and/or representative monarchies (ie. monarchies with powers bound by a constitution such as Great Britain) with a high amount of liberty for most citizens, and yet have have quite oppressive republics with little liberty for most citizens.
What the US constitution (and others like it) really espouses is Liberty. Liberty is closely tied to Rights and how Rights are structured as to permit an individual to do anything according to his will as long as it does not infringe on the Rights of others. This idea is also related to the "pursuit of happiness", but be aware that Liberty is not to maximise happiness, but to enable its pursuit.
Britain, instead of rejecting the Monarchy, bound the Crown by setting up, using legal and political means, a structure (the unwritten constitution) that enabled representation for the aristocracy and gentry through Parliament. This was gradually expanded to universal suffrage in the 20th century and correspondingly the power of the Crown gradually contracted to the ceremonial role it plays today.
The reason I point this out is because in your post, you seem to have some sort of implicit admiration for anarchy. This I feel is misguided. Order is important in a society as it establishes what is acceptable and what is not (and how this is enforced). This threshold, however, is dynamic and multi-dimensional and there are many factors at play in any given society.
Without order and a power structure, society will break down, and new forms of authority will fill the power vacuum and the cycle repeats ad infinitum. Most humans need order, whether because of genetics, social conditioning or individual experience. They need a society that can give them the framework for security and production as these are linked directly to the most primal human instinct - survival.
The nature of power (in the human sense) is neither good or evil, it is just the measure of adherence of the Many to the will of the Few. A fundamental idea of the US constitution is the "balance of power" which was actually heavily influenced by the ideas of a Frenchman (Montesquieu) who admired the British system of checks on the power of the Crown through a legal framework and a body of elected representatives.
In short, the balance of power is not to limit the amount of power, yet that may be a side effect that brings many benefits; the essence of the idea is to prevent the corruption of power through institutional vigilance within government. As such, it is not about big government or small government, it is about good government.
The façade is on the new Southgate isn't too bad, but yes, it's built with concrete and steel, bleh. At least they blended it in with the rest of the area unlike Cabot Circus in Bristol.
Bath is actually a great place to visit in this time of year, as the Christmas Market is about to start (on Thursday) and it's going to last till 6th December.
I mean, you don't need Einstein to tell you than when you offload real risk from the lending institution to investors, that the lenders and their middle-men will make crater-loads of money, while people that buy the products that they off-load the risk to have no real idea of its trustworthiness. The fact that investment banks that then sold off these packages while at the same time making exotic and wildly speculative bets against (or on) them completely destabilized the international financial system.
If you want to blame the Community Reinvestment Act or other similar legislation to kickstart lending to low-income areas, you are free to, but to convince others you better have some real evidence to back it up.
Really, the question should be - Would Microsoft make any money in addition to the money it's already making if it fully adopted F/OSS principles? A company is only as ethical as their shareholders' restraint of greed allow, and this focus on shareholder value, although useful to drive productivity and efficiency, tend to become a problem when market players are to such a size to which it can exert undue influence in the market.
With MS being the dominant player in the OS and Office Suite markets, I would agree with RMS' assessment that MS is a lost cause in that regard, at least in the current market structure. It is simply not profitable for MS to welcome F/OSS models within the company, especially in areas in which they are already dominant. This constant fear that actions by MS reaching out to the FOSS community is a Trojan horse is a reasonable reaction. After all, if FOSS support MS technologies too well, MS can just release a new version of the technology, while FOSS plays catch-up (ie. the Trojan horse scenario, OS/2)
However, Mono and WINE and other similar projects are important in the sense that it is unreasonable to expect Windows or Office or any other MS technology to disappear overnight. Then the problems becomes how this transition happens, ie. on a technological viewpoint, how FOSS can be a viable alternative while allowing people and organisations to keep their current investment in MS technologies. It's a hard question, and in reality, the only thing that would really make a difference is to handle the demand side of the equation. If big projects and end-users demand cross-system operability and the use of open solutions, then we change the actual environment and ecosystem, and MS would have no choice but to fight or adapt.
We are already seeing this in government contracts in Europe and it is starting to make a difference. There is a strong argument to build software using F/OSS principles, and the main thrust should be persuading everybody on the merits of it. On the other hand, even though MS compatibility in F/OSS is essential for further adoption, we should always be vigilant. As such, both Miguel and RMS is right.
Read the story again. The argument is for a longer school year, and not necessarily more hours in school. Think about that for a minute, especially on how it affects knowledge retention. If you have a good argument, by all means make it, but if the debate on education in the country in general is at the same level as in your post, we are in a very sorry state indeed.
And what if the clients' actions were illegal. How do you weight up the right to privacy against the public interest (a basic question in British constitutional law, or so I've heard)? You speak as if everything was in black and white. Just because there is a privacy angle to this does not mean you win the argument.
You accuse others of hypocrisy, but yet you fail to realize your own arrogance.
And you're a dimwit waving the "boo-hoo, the nanny-state is comming" banner.
This is the problem in modern politics; people like you who like to cheer for this team, or that ideology. If only it was that simple.
The struggle to keep individual rights begins with information and transparency in actions which affect all of us. Iceland's economy was largely kept afloat because of the tremendous (and maybe illegal) risks that their banks took.
Now that this has been exposed, shouldn't this be a problem that we should all be concerned about.
Compare this to the story that one of your ilk posted several hours before. What does civil liberties have to do with a (ill-conceived) social engineering program that has to do with rehabilitation of whole families? What is the cause of all that fake outrage, when stuff like this is occurring under our noses. The answer is from people like you, hiding behind the civil liberties cause when your real motives are partisan. The fact that you probably don't realize it saddens me tremendously on how much the level of political discourse has fallen generally.
To protect private interests against the public's need to know.
This is the stuff that we should be angry about. Not putting some trailer-trash families in rehabilitation programs discussed about in the recent front page article (That's the one with the hyperbole about 24hr surveillance BTW).
Trying to apportion blame onto New Labour for plans such as this waters down the argument of good governance and the emphasis that should be placed on civil liberties. This is a struggle that transcends party politics; whoever is in power has to answer to the people, accountability is the key.
It doesn't equate to civil liberties being lost, and there should not be a knee jerk reaction to it pretending it is something it is not. It actually does a disservice to the cause of civil liberties because of introducing fringe issues into the discussion.
To be honest, I do not believe that the Tories would have done any different than Labour if they had been in power. Think back to the Thatcher years, it was the state that had to absorb the enormous number of claimants to the disability benefits and welfare because of Thatcher's restructuring of British industry. This is the legacy we are actually seeing now, the people that had been so dependant on the welfare system has largely been those that are made unemployable structurally by poorly thought out free-market policies.
Now, I am not a Labour supporter by any stretch of imagination, but I believe that for the Tories to market themselves as the alternative is the biggest joke of all. Under Major, the problems we are facing now would be more serious or at the very least, be of the same level of severity.
What we need in politics is a voice of reason, to temper the tendency of government to over-react. The British press has a history of sensationalism, but this problem has been exasperated in recent years by quality journalism found in the like of Daily Mail and the Sunday Express. What we need are politicians to say not that they are addressing the issue whenever some scare story pops up, but to say that after analysing the issue, it is not at all an issue that needs to be addressed.
There will always be a problem with non-productive members of society. The answer to that problem is much more nuanced.
Your argument along the lines of - "first they came fore the Jews", is nonsensical. The definition of a state revolves around the responsibility it has to it's subjects. The state is always responsible for at least some sort of welfare to its people, whether it is in the form of keeping order, providing infrastructure and emergency response or maintaining national security.
The program in question is not restricting individual rights for arbitrary or political ends, but it is an extension of the criminal justice system, in a social engineering capacity. Now, I do not support the use of such programs as I do not believe they are effective, but it is disingenuous to claim that this is a erosion of civil liberties.
There are issues that are much more importance this this, including the extension of the 28-day detention for terror suspects without charge, in effect a suspension of Habeas Corpus by the state. That is stuff we should be focusing on with regards to civil liberties, and there is where our outrage should lie.
This argument against this program should be cost and benefit to society. How much are we actually spending on this program and how much benefit does it give us.
Your reaction is pure hyperbole, even though I do not agree with some of the social engineering that is being down by the state (such as the issuance of ASBOs as a step under the criminal justice system).
If you actually go to the source -
http://www.respect.gov.uk/members/article.aspx?id=8678
You can see that these families are offending and creating a poor environment for their communities. There are several levels of intervention and that the last of which is the core residential unit, which is some sort of support facility which these families attend, as a family unit. Afterwards they are moved into social housing.
This is the same type of people that in the US people would be called trailer trash. The difference is that in the UK, the system of social housing is quite good, and these people live in populated areas and causes disturbances resulting in less desirable neighborhoods. I am curious if this works at all, and the raw data of the existing program should be released and analysed, but I don't believe this program is used to create a system to oppress political ideas.
The unstable ABI is the result of the kernel devs wanting for devices drivers to be in the source tree. The implication is that with a stable ABI, there would be no incentive to release source code and to include this code in the kernel.
Windows H/W support from my POV is abysmal, and that is even with MS' at-all-cost backward compatibility culture. Creative's SB Live drivers do not work at all in Vista. They work fine on all recent versions of Linux distros. Because Windows is so widely used, H/W manufactures have to make passable drivers in order to get their product sold. However, once they are finished with selling them, you get situations like these in which old devices are unsupported. Normally this is ok as the backward compatibility works, but it doesn't all the time.
From my point of view, the current Linux dev model for driver is the right way to go with the current state of things in the free software world. Having a stable ABI for kernel modules will fix some short term problems but cause long term ones in the dev model.
Unilateral contracts are distinguished by three points - 1. A specific reward or payment to a group of persons or the wider public, 2. for a particular action from the offeree which will form acceptance and performance, 3. and with the intention to create legal relations.
In this case, the intention of the parties is the most important part for the courts to consider. In Carlill v. Carbolic, the offerer specifically stated that money was deposited with a bank for the reward. This action indicated to the courts that the intention to pay was present, even if this action was only to erect an illusion of intention, it is enough to satisfy that point in law.
It is entirely predictable in this case for Mason to argue that the offer was not serious with no real intention to create legal relations. This is the same argument made by Carbolic in the landmark case. However, what Kolodziej has in front of him now is to prove that Mason's action on TV amounted is serious. This is plausible. One line of attack he can use is that Mason made his comments on Dateline, as opposed to something like Jerry Springer. It really depends on how the arguments are made, and how the judge decides given the facts and arguments.
And you are also responsible for actions that hurt others. This is the basis for the law of tort.
Let's face it. A lot of the people that say they are leaving a particular place because certain political reasons are just doing so because it's convenient to do so. Apart from people that are really under political oppression, those that emigrate would most likely be because of a better standard of living, weather, career opportunities or to be closer to family and friends, etc.
Slashdot is probably the worse place to ask for immigration advice. If you want to move to a country which has good protections on privacy, free speech and civil rights in general, but you don't fight to keep those rights, then you are a net liability to that nation, whichever you might wish to choose to settle in.
No matter how people of markets as the magical solution to everything, it is unlikely that privacy and civil liberty protections in law was drafted with immigration policy in mind.
Freedom is not a thing, a state of being or something you can achieve. Freedom is a balance; a balance of self and society, a balance between individual satisfaction and collective well-being. When this balance is lost, then to one extreme there is oppression, or to the other there is anarchy.
Did you actually read the page you linked to?
"Inconsistent measurement explains only part of the difference between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Were measurements to be standardized, according to Eberstadt, "America might move from the bottom third toward the middle, but it would be unlikely to advance into the top half."
I did not accuse them of bias. I just said that they made assertions that purported to explain the differences (with the implication that the US system yields the same medical, and not inferior, outcome as other countries that spend approx. 50% on health), without actually backing it up.
Now talking about bias, the page that you linked was specifically written by a conservative think tank to counter the perception of brokeness in the US heath care system. Seeing that all it can do is to say that the US would not be at the bottom of infant mortality statistics if the measurements are standardized doesn't really sound good to that side of the argument. Remember, other industrialized countries spend significantly less.
Just like the article by Dr. Linda Halderman on Pajamas Media (in more ways than one), your comment contains no facts or analysis to back up your assertions. Conveniently several countries are omitted. There is no independent corroboration of the veracity or accuracy these assertions.
Those that forget history are doomed to repeat it. This is part of the problem that "Precedent" solves in Common Law jurisdictions. If every judge interpreted law without "Precedence" as a guide, then you have a problem with consistency.
The other part of the problem is that no law can cover every conceivable situation. Sometimes bad laws are made, that's the reason that Jurisprudence is importance. In Common Law countries, it is a flexible system that allow lawmakers to make laws which are applied to specific situations by the judicial system.
In any case, the problem with inaccessible law is not specific to the Common Law, there is a lot of statutes which are equally hard to understand and apply.
A more realistic solution would be to introduce a summary of the existing legal situation on common law and statutes every year from the government that is brief and simple to understand but detailed enough to be useful. This should be accessible to everyone, and the relevant case law around this published and available on the Internet for free.
Basic legal education should be mandatory at the high school stage. Courts should be simplified so that technicalities are kept to a minimum.
In a word, yes.
I have a G1. It works well considering it is 1st generation hardware/software. No A2DP, but same situation as iPhone (3.0/Cupcake). Other than that, software-wise the widgets are smooth, and you can actually run services in the background. Some of the applications need improving, like the mail client needs IMAP IDLE support, etc.. but it's getting there. You can get a custom cupcake build for the G1 now which fixes a lot of those problems.
Hardware-wise, the G1 is not as pretty, but the upcoming devices should give the iPhone a run for its money. The really good thing about it though is that it's got the right number of real buttons, which make navigation a lot more manageable.
Talking about the N800, OS2008 is great. Nokia has been doing a lot for mobile Linux and I plan on upgrading my trusty ole 770 running OS2008 to whatever device they have for Maemo 5.
Oh not this #$@% again.
This thing goes back all the way to Lincoln. They get the staffers to pull up names of family and places and then sign the letters themselves (or not as in Rumsfield cases). There's even a little bit on how Obama is handwriting every single note before typing it up (not that I find that any better or worse than how Bush did it). It's just a token gesture, that's all. It's just a list of things they run through during the week that's decent, but most importantly cost effective.
At the end of the day, what matters most is how much care soldiers and veterans are receiving during and after their tours of duty.
You can fix that quite easily. Just modify your request headers.
http://www.lewiz.org/archive/2007/01/03/hacking-t-mobile-web-proxy/
Be internet is doing a ADSL2+ 24mb/s for 17.50 GBP, which works out to 25 dollars a month... That's not too bad is it?
Virgin Broadband is doing a 50mb/s cable service for 35 GBP which is a lot more and probably not worth it because it's cable.
You can check availability at www.samknows.com for almost all ADSL LLU (and cable) providers in the UK. Almost all exchanges have ADSL equipment and most have ADSL2+.
BTW, 3G HSDPA coverage is very good in the UK in and is 80-90% of all areas, while 2G/GPRS coverage is near 100%.
Getting a HSDPA USB dongle is really cheap as well, some plans are as low as 5 GBP a month (1GB limit).
What if you're forced to watch the same movie over and over again for a week, is that torture? It's not just what one gets subjected to, but also how. Worse of all, this is totally psychological, leaving not physical traces. If they thought of a way to inflict physical pain without the traces, the probably would use that too... oh wait they have, it's call waterboarding..
As naive as his belief that Saddam has WMDs?? Say it ain't so!