OK, I have to say that maybe I jumped to conclusions too fast here. He has submitted to detailed papers on this and I am currently trying to digest them.
The real issue here is not the nonsense this guy has come up with (others have shown why this is not only useless, but actually causing trouble, mathematically). The real issue is why BBC (and maybe other media) spread this nonsense. Will we read about somebody with a "Dr" in front of his name who has constructed a perpetuum mobile or squared the circle next time? Will, in a word, BBC make an article out of any nut who claims he has solved a long-standing problem without going through the trouble and checking with one or two experts first?
Can somebody explain US laws to me here? Is it or is it not legal to put up a website that helps to print fake boarding passes? If it is not legal, why was the case dropped? If it is legal, would it be ok to put the website online again?
I have a hard time to imagine what law could be violated by this unless somebody tried to actually use such a fake boarding pass to get on a plane or into a restricted area.
I could imagine that the mere act of printing a fake boarding pass *could* (depending on how it is done) violate the copyrights of the company. Anything else?
Everyone now already knows that this is FUD and what UN sells is just a tiny fraction of the toxic amount which is already just a tiny amount.
What I still do not understand is why anyone would want to use Polonium210 to kill somebody in the first place? There are dozens of substances available to everyone and probably thousands available to a secret service and all of these substances would be as efficient, cheaper, and less problematic for the one who applies them.
So why on earth use Polonium210?
My only explanation so far is that it is an extremely sadistic way to kill somebody: no antidote, it takes days and is extremely painful.
would it be legal to distribute this video in that way? I do not know if it was the copyright holders who put that video online in YouTube, but in a lot of cases, this is clearly not the case. Music videos, copies of TV spots, movies, and other stuff is put there in a clear violation of copyright. Even a private video where some youngster dances to a track of copyrighted music is clearly illegal according to copyright law. So I think YouTube has much bigger problems than the occasional "censorship" of something that is probably illegal to make publically available in the first place.
This review does not even mention that e.g. the option for accepting cookies from the original server only has been removed. This is not even mentioned in the release notes. They claim in the corresponding bug it was done because a workaround based on Javascript from other than the original hosts exists, but instead of adding an option to also disable Javascript unless it is from the original host, they removed the option alltogether. The spell-checker solution is far less than optimal: instead of creating an interface to existing dictionaries users might have, e.g. for OpenOffice, with their own additional words etc. they come up with yet another dictionary.
You are talking about a country where a significant part of the population, including some high-ranked politicians question evolution and believe in stuff like Armageddon. The president ends each and every speech, including those about global warming with something like "God bless you and/or America". Even if some of these people think that global warming could indeed be caused or sped up by humans, they probably welcome it is something in their Gods plan to final make Armageddon happen. If the people of the US continue to vote for representatives like this, global warming is actually pretty far down on the list of things to be truely afraid of.
Isn't that way of interacting with a computer just a tiny bit anachronistic? I have been working with editors for editing code since 1980 and had been using lots of editors... from ISPF and vi over (x)emacs to IDEs like VisualC++, Netbeans or Eclipse. I wish that some of the more modern IDE plugins would suck less when it comes to syntax highlighting and automatic code formatting, but I do not see much place for dinosaurs like vi(m) in my daily routine any more. I wonder why those who still use vi not also use Wordstar as their favorite word processor? Ctr-somethings wherever you look! Or do they?:)
Couldn't this easily be prevented if the browser had an option to only allow Javascript from the original site? I think a similar option for cookies exists and having it for Javascript would be quite useful and prevent other unwanted things.
Many European countries have laws that specially protect any form of private communication: it is a severe offense to read private communication not addressed to you and it is a severe offense to publish private communication without the written consent of the author. Violating these laws would result in severe penalties, including prison terms of several years. That is how it should be.
Blame Australian citizens for not having their politicians come up with similar reasonable laws. Maybe they are too busy to shit their pants from evil alien immigrants?
Is this part of the kernel? Does every package that is part of Debian have to be GPL-compatible? Apache's license is incompatible with the GPL, yet Apache is a Debian package. The Latex license is incompatible with the GPL, yet Latex is available for Debian without a fork. (see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLI ncompatibleLicenses)
I wonder how this would be compatible with US laws. The article does not say how Google will try to get an agreement from the user that this can be done.
This is certainly illegal in many European countries where Google would have to get an agreement that they record and process the sounds AND an agreement that would allow to store this information on their server. By default, no digital processing or use of the sound other than what has explicitly agreed to by the user is allowed. In most cases, the agreement MUST be done in a way that is comparable to signing a written contract.
Given all these legal limitations, I wonder if anyone would choose to still use this, ahem, "service"?
This time I am talking about your post. Aljazeera is not nearly as fundamentalist as e.g. Fox News, but even if it were, it would not automatically mean that a "science article" published there is nonsense. Like every other news source, they get most of these articles from agencies that sell them.
While it is obvious and quite dated knowledge that the sheer size of a brain is no indicator for "intelligence" (let us avoid the discussion what intelligence is in the first place for the moment), it is provably wrong that dolphins just do what they are "conditioned" to do. There have been many experiments that show that dolphins are capable to do a lot more than just demonstrate conditioned reflexes, including understand a several-word sign language and coming up with what could be called creative solutions.
Nothing of that sort has been demonstrated for goldfish yet, but that does not mean it cannot be done, just that we simply do not know yet.
It has been shown for other species that they show surprisingly intelligent behaviour when trained and it is probably impossible to defined what "more intelligent" should mean for non-humans (it is already quite arbitrarily defined for humans). So the bottom line is - more animals are more intelligent than most people think. And dolphins have shown a quite surprising range of abilities that was not observed in any other marine animal yet.
That depends on whether a dictionary should be seen to be normative or descriptive. As far as I know this dictionary is intended to describe how a term is actually used, no matter how a third party (or indeed the creators of the dictionary) think it *should* be used.
Everyone is bitching about the industry, but enough keep buying. Are these people addicted to the crap they sell? And if their practices are really so despisable, why aren't there other companies with better practices getting more and more successful?
My impression is that people just love to bitch but 99% will end up in a record store and buy the latest copy protected crap anyways. And that is exactly why DRM solutions are more and more becoming an everyday reality too.
I assume they whole fuss is being made because they store the IP address with each query. Otherwise, it would not be a privacy issue. So one has to wonder: why *do* they store the IP address? What is the value to them? And if they are concerned about privacy, why not store a hash instead of the original IP, if some sort of information grouping is wanted? So, obviously, *if* they indeed store the IP address the only explanation is that they do not give a damn about privacy and actually use that information.
BTW, I would assume that this practice is actually illegal in some European countries which have strict laws about what information can be stored and for how long and how it can be used or shared later.
I am so happy to be several thousand kilometers away from a society where this is possible.
The saddest thing about this is that it is quite clear what kind of adults one can expect when children are brought up like this instead of treating them and respecting them as thinking creatures. I do not see how this behavior was at all "anti-social" -- in other parts, people would be happy to see those kids do something different from sitting in front of TV commercials or 3D shooters all day -- but even if it was, maybe it would make more sense to explain to them why it was antisocial and how they could make up to whoever they did damage to, instead of bullying and frightening them?
I think it is already well-known now that the US has a frighteningly high ratio of fat and obese people. It should be well-known by now that the health status in the US is lower than in most other western industrialized countries, with diet-related diseases like diabetes being extremely frequent and getting even more frequent still.
It should be well-known that feeding high-fat and high-sugar fast food to school children who get carried around in cars all the time is not a good idea. It is not a good idea for a school to raise money for getting their kids hooked on junk food.
So anything that will restrict this tragedy is a good thing. For instance the simple fact that schools would offer non-crap food that actually tastes good (which is a challenge to do at a low cost) would be an incredible improvement already. There is not much sense in restricting a child from eating the unhealthy stuff if the alternatives are missing or just some sad and terribly tasting vegetables.
Also, better than forcing your child like this would be to raise it in a way that makes it easy for them to just choose the healthy stuff out of their own free will. Educate them about what is going on (schools could help here instead of helping the fast food companies) and provide them with well-tasting, home-cooked, healthy stuff at home.
So, knowing that there are many ways how to do this better, this option is probably still better than nothing, given the monstrous situation of how kids get fed in the US.
My own kids rarely feel the urge to eat fast food and know why high-sugar stuff is unhealthy and while they love sugar like all kids they know how to avoid getting too much of it. They prefer natural juices over sodas simply because they taste better.
There are lots of topics related to this, including how the US actually supports the production of cheap sugar and including how schools cannot really decide on this because of low budgeting and bad education politcs.
The bottom line is that anything that will raise awareness about the tragedy of the food situation in the US is good.
Unfortunately they missed the chance to supply a well-documented and easily usable API (that would not require you to be a seasoned XUL/Javascript/Thunderbird programmer) for the spam filter functionality. I am sure that this would have motivated many more people to contribute spamfilter "plugins". There a *lots* of people and groups out there who have worked and still are working on spam filtering. The Thunderbird designers failed to create an infrastructure that would have motivated them to make their stuff work with Thunderbird.
My personal main interest in this processor is its lower power consumption. I hate noisy computers and seeing anything that makes it easier to build a powerful silent computer makes me happy.
How well can one expect the power adaption to load and dual core technology to be supported in Linux distros like Ubuntu or OpenSuse? How easy will it be to build a system with > 4 GB RAM with this processor type?
Do you know any links to original articles (in Spanish) or the original text of the law?
What interests me is the exact regulation concerning P2P use by end users and that thing about the criminal offense of the ISP. "it's a criminal offense for ISPs to facilitate unauthorized downloading." is just too dumb to be true.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I have to say that maybe I jumped to conclusions too fast here. He has submitted to detailed papers on this and I am currently trying to digest them.
For anyone interested: http://www.bookofparagon.com/News/News_00012.htm
The real issue here is not the nonsense this guy has come up with (others have shown why this is not only useless, but actually causing trouble, mathematically).
The real issue is why BBC (and maybe other media) spread this nonsense. Will we read about somebody with a "Dr" in front of his name who has constructed a perpetuum mobile or squared the circle next time? Will, in a word, BBC make an article out of any nut who claims he has solved a long-standing problem without going through the trouble and checking with one or two experts first?
Can somebody explain US laws to me here? Is it or is it not legal to put up a website that helps to print fake boarding passes? If it is not legal, why was the case dropped? If it is legal, would it be ok to put the website online again?
I have a hard time to imagine what law could be violated by this unless somebody tried to actually use such a fake boarding pass to get on a plane or into a restricted area.
I could imagine that the mere act of printing a fake boarding pass *could* (depending on how it is done) violate the copyrights of the company. Anything else?
Everyone now already knows that this is FUD and what UN sells is just a tiny fraction of the toxic amount which is already just a tiny amount.
What I still do not understand is why anyone would want to use Polonium210 to kill somebody in the first place? There are dozens of substances available to everyone and probably thousands available to a secret service and all of these substances would be as efficient, cheaper, and less problematic for the one who applies them.
So why on earth use Polonium210?
My only explanation so far is that it is an extremely sadistic way to kill somebody: no antidote, it takes days and is extremely painful.
would it be legal to distribute this video in that way? I do not know if it was the copyright holders who put that video online in YouTube, but in a lot of cases, this is clearly not the case. Music videos, copies of TV spots, movies, and other stuff is put there in a clear violation of copyright.
Even a private video where some youngster dances to a track of copyrighted music is clearly illegal according to copyright law. So I think YouTube has much bigger problems than the occasional "censorship" of something that is probably illegal to make publically available in the first place.
This review does not even mention that e.g. the option for accepting cookies from the original server only has been removed. This is not even mentioned in the release notes. They claim in the corresponding bug it was done because a workaround based on Javascript from other than the original hosts exists, but instead of adding an option to also disable Javascript unless it is from the original host, they removed the option alltogether.
The spell-checker solution is far less than optimal: instead of creating an interface to existing dictionaries users might have, e.g. for OpenOffice, with their own additional words etc. they come up with yet another dictionary.
You are talking about a country where a significant part of the population, including some high-ranked politicians question evolution and believe in stuff like Armageddon. The president ends each and every speech, including those about global warming with something like "God bless you and/or America". Even if some of these people think that global warming could indeed be caused or sped up by humans, they probably welcome it is something in their Gods plan to final make Armageddon happen. If the people of the US continue to vote for representatives like this, global warming is actually pretty far down on the list of things to be truely afraid of.
Isn't that way of interacting with a computer just a tiny bit anachronistic? I have been working with editors for editing code since 1980 and had been using lots of editors ... from ISPF and vi over (x)emacs to IDEs like VisualC++, Netbeans or Eclipse. :)
I wish that some of the more modern IDE plugins would suck less when it comes to syntax highlighting and automatic code formatting, but I do not see much place for dinosaurs like vi(m) in my daily routine any more.
I wonder why those who still use vi not also use Wordstar as their favorite word processor? Ctr-somethings wherever you look! Or do they?
Couldn't this easily be prevented if the browser had an option to only allow Javascript from the original site? I think a similar option for cookies exists and having it for Javascript would be quite useful and prevent other unwanted things.
Many European countries have laws that specially protect any form of private communication: it is a severe offense to read private communication not addressed to you and it is a severe offense to publish private communication without the written consent of the author. Violating these laws would result in severe penalties, including prison terms of several years. That is how it should be.
Blame Australian citizens for not having their politicians come up with similar reasonable laws. Maybe they are too busy to shit their pants from evil alien immigrants?
Is this part of the kernel? Does every package that is part of Debian have to be GPL-compatible?I ncompatibleLicenses)
Apache's license is incompatible with the GPL, yet Apache is a Debian package. The Latex license is incompatible with the GPL, yet Latex is available for Debian without a fork.
(see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPL
So what is the problem here?
I wonder how this would be compatible with US laws. The article does not say how Google will try to get an agreement from the user that this can be done.
This is certainly illegal in many European countries where Google would have to get an agreement that they record and process the sounds AND an agreement that would allow to store this information on their server. By default, no digital processing or use of the sound other than what has explicitly agreed to by the user is allowed. In most cases, the agreement MUST be done in a way that is comparable to signing a written contract.
Given all these legal limitations, I wonder if anyone would choose to still use this, ahem, "service"?
This time I am talking about your post. Aljazeera is not nearly as fundamentalist as e.g. Fox News, but even if it were, it would not automatically mean that a "science article" published there is nonsense.
2 0060819.LETTERS19-12/TPStory/Comment= 143&art_id=vn20060817031855765C442092l ?id=3d68da16-b7b1-4334-bf4d-aa9ebdd0f303&k=89468
Like every other news source, they get most of these articles from agencies that sell them.
So if you prefer to read that nonsense from a different source, go here:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=14&click_id
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.htm
and probably hundreds more all over the internet.
While it is obvious and quite dated knowledge that the sheer size of a brain is no indicator for "intelligence" (let us avoid the discussion what intelligence is in the first place for the moment), it is provably wrong that dolphins just do what they are "conditioned" to do. There have been many experiments that show that dolphins are capable to do a lot more than just demonstrate conditioned reflexes, including understand a several-word sign language and coming up with what could be called creative solutions.
Nothing of that sort has been demonstrated for goldfish yet, but that does not mean it cannot be done, just that we simply do not know yet.
It has been shown for other species that they show surprisingly intelligent behaviour when trained and it is probably impossible to defined what "more intelligent" should mean for non-humans (it is already quite arbitrarily defined for humans). So the bottom line is - more animals are more intelligent than most people think. And dolphins have shown a quite surprising range of abilities that was not observed in any other marine animal yet.
That depends on whether a dictionary should be seen to be normative or descriptive. As far as I know this dictionary is intended to describe how a term is actually used, no matter how a third party (or indeed the creators of the dictionary) think it *should* be used.
Everyone is bitching about the industry, but enough keep buying. Are these people addicted to the crap they sell? And if their practices are really so despisable, why aren't there other companies with better practices getting more and more successful?
My impression is that people just love to bitch but 99% will end up in a record store and buy the latest copy protected crap anyways. And that is exactly why DRM solutions are more and more becoming an everyday reality too.
I assume they whole fuss is being made because they store the IP address with each query. Otherwise, it would not be a privacy issue. So one has to wonder: why *do* they store the IP address? What is the value to them? And if they are concerned about privacy, why not store a hash instead of the original IP, if some sort of information grouping is wanted?
So, obviously, *if* they indeed store the IP address the only explanation is that they do not give a damn about privacy and actually use that information.
BTW, I would assume that this practice is actually illegal in some European countries which have strict laws about what information can be stored and for how long and how it can be used or shared later.
I am so happy to be several thousand kilometers away from a society where this is possible.
The saddest thing about this is that it is quite clear what kind of adults one can expect when children are brought up like this instead of treating them and respecting them as thinking creatures. I do not see how this behavior was at all "anti-social" -- in other parts, people would be happy to see those kids do something different from sitting in front of TV commercials or 3D shooters all day -- but even if it was, maybe it would make more sense to explain to them why it was antisocial and how they could make up to whoever they did damage to, instead of bullying and frightening them?
Disgusting, dumb, insane and counter-productive.
I think it is already well-known now that the US has a frighteningly high ratio of fat and obese people. It should be well-known by now that the health status in the US is lower than in most other western industrialized countries, with diet-related diseases like diabetes being extremely frequent and getting even more frequent still.
It should be well-known that feeding high-fat and high-sugar fast food to school children who get carried around in cars all the time is not a good idea. It is not a good idea for a school to raise money for getting their kids hooked on junk food.
So anything that will restrict this tragedy is a good thing. For instance the simple fact that schools would offer non-crap food that actually tastes good (which is a challenge to do at a low cost) would be an incredible improvement already. There is not much sense in restricting a child from eating the unhealthy stuff if the alternatives are missing or just some sad and terribly tasting vegetables.
Also, better than forcing your child like this would be to raise it in a way that makes it easy for them to just choose the healthy stuff out of their own free will. Educate them about what is going on (schools could help here instead of helping the fast food companies) and provide them with well-tasting, home-cooked, healthy stuff at home.
So, knowing that there are many ways how to do this better, this option is probably still better than nothing, given the monstrous situation of how kids get fed in the US.
My own kids rarely feel the urge to eat fast food and know why high-sugar stuff is unhealthy and while they love sugar like all kids they know how to avoid getting too much of it. They prefer natural juices over sodas simply because they taste better.
There are lots of topics related to this, including how the US actually supports the production of cheap sugar and including how schools cannot really decide on this because of low budgeting and bad education politcs.
The bottom line is that anything that will raise awareness about the tragedy of the food situation in the US is good.
Unfortunately they missed the chance to supply a well-documented and easily usable API (that would not require you to be a seasoned XUL/Javascript/Thunderbird programmer) for the spam filter functionality. I am sure that this would have motivated many more people to contribute spamfilter "plugins". There a *lots* of people and groups out there who have worked and still are working on spam filtering. The Thunderbird designers failed to create an infrastructure that would have motivated them to make their stuff work with Thunderbird.
My personal main interest in this processor is its lower power consumption. I hate noisy computers and seeing anything that makes it easier to build a powerful silent computer makes me happy.
How well can one expect the power adaption to load and dual core technology to be supported in Linux distros like Ubuntu or OpenSuse? How easy will it be to build a system with > 4 GB RAM with this processor type?
I would already be glad if Thunderbird at least had features for associating deadlines with alarms, arbitrary notes and tags to emails.
I hope not.
This guy has doen the same as all other scammers. I have no symphaty for him and I hope his case gets also looked at by criminal investigators.
Thank your for clearing this up. Do you have any links to original articles or the text of the law online (in Spanish)?
Do you know any links to original articles (in Spanish) or the original text of the law?
What interests me is the exact regulation concerning P2P use by end users and that thing about the criminal offense of the ISP. "it's a criminal offense for ISPs to facilitate unauthorized downloading." is just too dumb to be true.