"Why? If the little green light's not on, the camera's not on. "
Yeah, that's what the GM onstar customers thought too -- with their emergency in-car Microphones. If the onstar microphone is off, it should be off. Right? It turns out that the manufacturer and the FBI had very different off-label usage ideas for that device.
The bottom line is that the government thinks it has the right to spy on you, and it thinks it can demand that your ISP and the other companies doing business with you that they spy on you as well (without informing you). The ultimate wet dream for politicians and police enforcement is to have a google-like tool that would give them up-to-date information on all its citizens, coupled with video-feeds into all the bedrooms.
Right now, lowly police peons can already run background checks, credit checks, medical/medication checks, on any women they're dating (without supervision and without permission whatsoever). It won't be long before they take it to the next level, and have access to the same tools the FBI and Homeland Security have.
"It wasn't just that the Pinto's flaw was deadly, it was that it was scary..."
Scary is the operative word here, that's why I clipped the rest of your comment. Emotions are what drives most juries. In California, allowing your child to go in a house where there is a swimming pool may be less scary than allowing your child to go in a house where one of the occupants owns a gun. But considering those two scenarios, your child will be much more likely to die from the swimming pool than from the gun.
The same goes for exploding gas tanks. They're visual, they're dramatic, they're scary. If you can imprint such a fear in a jury, then you're much more likely to make them rule in favor of the person making the claim.
"When I talk to open source developers, at least half are talking about Windows, from SugarCRM, MySQL, PHP. "
Some developers install MySQL on Windows. Does he really think this is good news for his company?
In my shop, we used to pay $11,000 for a license of SQL Server 2000 (the Enterprise version), now we're paying around $2,000 or $3,000 for SQL Server 2005 (it's for the Workgroup version, but the Workgroup version works just as well for us as the Enterprise version did previously). That's a net loss of 8,000 or 9,000 per license for Microsoft, and I know we're not the only ones doing this.
Companies are either switching to the much cheaper alternatives offered by Microsoft, or they're switching to the much cheaper free open source alternatives (that may, or may not, be used on Windows). And no matter what way you look at this, Microsoft is getting squeezed from every which way by Free software. This is good for us, but this can't be good for Microsoft -- surely.
Seems like the solution to that is obvious -- don't obey robots.txt for the purposes of the malware scan.
Google already does that. It won't index content that's blocked, but it will still crawl it -- just in case. The rationale given is that when google was first starting out, web sites like the California DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) and web sites like the New York Times, would just block all bots by default. And Google felt it couldn't afford to ignore such mainstream web sites, especially since most users wouldn't understand that a public site as big and as mainstream as the DMV would be accessible to them -- but not accessible to Google.
So Google will still crawl the site, index the keywords found in its urls and possibly index their titles, to possibly link to those sites/pages if needed, but it won't cache the content of those pages and I assume it won't do a full text indexing of each page either (although, I don't know if that last assumption is correct).
Either way, this practice of crawling everything has made life difficult for web site owners that have written bot-traps for bots that don't obey their robots.txt (a bot-trap is usually an invisible link that could only be seen by a bot, and such a link would point to a location that's forbidden in the robots.txt). This has become a problem especially since many malicious bots like to impersonate the googlebot to gain maximum access to a site, and google has refused to publish an up-to-date list of all the IP addresses it uses.
stated in the article, or any reference to this issue that I can find. Can you provide a cite to back that up?
If it were true, the the title would be even more misleading, since it's not all iPods, but is all harddrives.
The article is misleading, yes, but it is not the magnet that's doing the interference. In 1995 cell phones were also found to interfere with pacemakers at the same range. This is not news, there are a number of devices that can interfere with pacemakers -- all patients with pacemakers already know this.
Here is a list of at least 30 common devices that would probably interfere with a pacemaker. This is nothing new. All pacemaker patients are told about this when they first get one.
The iPod angle was just a way to get the story in the news.
First off, there was a choice between Iraq or Iran. Gee, we picked the lesser of two evils.
Not really, the US doesn't always pick the lesser of two evils. The US Government first picks an enemy for its own reasons, then and only then, it rationalizes its decision after-the-fact by demonizing its chosen enemy and by praising its chosen ally.
I could give you specific examples, but frankly -- I'm not even sure you'd be willing to change your mind -- so I'm not going to bother citing those examples unless you specifically ask for them.
First, you copy -- once you've mastered that part -- then you develop new styles and new techniques of your own. It takes patience and dedication to refrain from skipping that first not-so-exciting step. And unless you're an individual that comes out of the womb an original genius, this is how most people learn to speak, to walk, to write, to draw, to play the piano, to learn sciences, to program a computer, etc. First you copy, then you master, then -- and only then -- you experiment.
And note that when China was during its most innovative period, people copied each other all the time, and this was viewed with great pride -- not as some act of pilferage. For example, some of the great works produced by Chinese philosophers didn't bear the name of their original authors, they bore the names of the Philosophers those authors were trying to emulate.
<< Who? I know of no outspoken proponents of environmentalism that come off like "rambling kooks".>>
The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state. --Kenneth Boulding, originator of the "Spaceship Earth" concept (as quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)
We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion--guilt-free at last! --Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue).
Free Enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process.... Capitalism is destroying the earth. --Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists
We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects.... We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land. --David Foreman, Earth First!
Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed. --Pentti Linkola
If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other. --Amory Lovins in The Mother Earth-Plowboy Interview, Nov/Dec 1977, p.22
The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world. --John Shuttleworth
What we've got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy. --Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)
I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems. --John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs. --John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing....This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run. --Economist editorial
We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity's sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight. --David Foreman, Earth First!
Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental. --Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!
If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS --Earth First! Newsletter
Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets...Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. --David Graber, biologist, National Park Service
"On win2k, XP or Vista now, you can decide what the system does with a "bluescreen" (under My Computer->Properties). Rebooting immediately is the default since thats preferable for 99% of users, but there's a checkbox to display the bluescreen anyways, and write out a full or partial memory dump. Using microsoft's free kernel debugger, you can then analyze that crashdump. It's relatively easy to pin down which module caused the crash..."
Yeah, you can thank people like Mark Russinovich for that. It's ironic that the very people you've learned crash dump analysis from were the very same people that were once pursued as hackers and labeled as dangerous criminals by Microsoft.
"Oh, and I love "gets more and more obscure with each passing day" - starting two years ago or so, microsoft set up a symbol server so you can automatically load operating system debugging symbols for the exact binaries you are running with. Makes the above debugging process a lot easier...."
Yes, Microsoft is getting better at exposing system level information, but it didn't have a choice in the matter -- it had to -- in order to stay competitive with its open source counterparts. Note that it only started this effort after having already lost considerable marketshare to Linux and Apache.
Chances are, this physician gets paid 20 Euros an hour, and he is not allowed to work over time -- or else he's forced to take additional vacation. But this is probably an even trade for him in the end, since his education was most likely fully paid by the French government, he has access to top quality high tech medical equipment, and just like the rest of the French doctors in France -- he will never get sued for malpractice.
In this case, the person has been camping out on my land for months, and inviting his friends over. It doesn't sound like he was going to tell the landlord about the hole in the fence.
I shouldn't have used that analogy, I should have known people who didn't read the article would get creative with it. The guy wrote a program that would allow one's computer to lie to the network about being up-to-date. That's it. And yes, he violated his Universities IT Terms and Services, and yes he distributed his program to other people, and yes -- the University can do pretty much do what they want with him.
But let's not get carried away, he was a tenant of this "landlord" in question. It's not like he (or his friends who were also legitimate users of this network) used additional resources because of this.
It's a fairly common first defense, but it needs to be corroborated. The evidence you (PP) cited seems to not corroborate his claim of benign intentions.
You're also making a fairly common assumption, that he needs to corroborate his benign intent somehow. How would one go about doing that? The network wasn't actually hurt by this, it would seem. It's not proof that his intent was benign I agree, but at least -- it corroborates that his story might actually be true in this case.
I can only equate this to catching someone trespassing on your land, and finding no damage and no missing property. Either you believe that the trespasser was malicious in his intent, or you don't and believe that his intent was benign. It's a judgment call for the most part.
This idea seems pretty flimsy... If you are incorporating known, ground based beacons/signals to provide positioning data wouldn't it be easy enough for the enemy to emulate those beacons/signals from some location near to the real one to create multiple signatures and distort positioning data? Wouldn't this confuse the proposed system?
This technology could have other military applications. You could use it to send homing missiles to target specific signals. The Russians have already killed a Chechnen leader with a missile that homed in on his satellite phone. It wouldn't be a stretch of the imagination to think that the US military wouldn't be trying to do the same kind of thing for other types of signals. They could target specific radio/television broadcasters, moving transmitters, and/or specific cell tower/radio infrastructures. And this technology could still be used as an additional system in addition to the gps system, to supplement the gps information just in case.
And yes, counter-measures could be taken I suppose, but those counter-measures would impose a real cost to the enemy. Being in a war with the United States is hard enough, but being paranoid about your telecommunication infrastructure acting as a beacon for an incoming missile -- makes it harder still. Just ask Osama Bin Laden, some journalists are speculating that he personally stopped using his satellite phone since 1998 -- for fear of being tracked and/or targeted by a homing missile.
We signed a looong lease before the revolution. If we tried to buy land in Cuba now to build a base, Castro would say "no way." But he's bound to honor the old agreement.
No, the only reason the US base is still in Cuba, is not because Castro honors contract law (or property law), and it's not because Castro is afraid of losing trade relations with the US (he can't lose what he doesn't have in the first place). The only reason the US base is still in Cuba is because the US base is protected to the hilt.
Besides, it's not like a prior lease agreement with a tenant would apply after the said tenant tries to kill you, invade your country, or more recently -- blows up the tourists visiting your island. I may not be one of those sharp international lawyers, as some of you slashdoters may be, but I've watched enough Judge Judy to know -- that if a tenant tries to kill you -- you can evict him right away -- lease or no lease.
"You understand it wrong. The OpenXML format is completely open for every feature implemented in Office 2007 [...]"
The problem with this statement is that Office 2007 still contains most of the code base for Office 95, and it contains the code of every Office version thereafter. So unless you know something I don't know -- there is no way to be sure that "the OpenXML format is completely open for every feature" of Office 2007.
The second problem is that during its anti-trust case, Bill Gates was on the record saying that his Office Suite wasn't tied to his Operating System, and that some kind of wall was erected between those two divisions so they couldn't talk to each other and share undocumented features, when in fact current analysis of their leaked code -- shows the exact opposite -- that their Office suite was indeed and (still is) closely intermingled with their OS at the undocumented system's calls level.
So for you to be so sure of the openness of OpenXML, you must not only know something I don't, but you must also be far more knowledgeable than Bill Gates was on this subject, since he either lied under oath about this particular topic, or was just too ignorant to know what was happening at the source code implementation level.
In either case, I'm not even sure why we're even discussing this. If you have to argue, and if I have to take your word for it, that a particular piece of closed source code, inside an "open" data format, does nothing that's needed by Office 2007, then this "open" format is not really open -- is it?
"I live in Ireland. It took one decade of single digit growth to turn this country from a second world laughing stock to a first world economy (though truth be told the economy could be ais to still be a laughing stock). So how come it's going to take several decade for China to do the same? Interia? Give me a break. "
You're wrong. Compared to all the other tax havens, Ireland is *still* a third World country.
1. Switzerland
2. Luxembourg
3....
18....
19. Macau
20. Isles of Man
21. Barbados
22. Vanuatu
23. Ireland
"I don't think it's unreasonable for a large global company like Google to check who they are delivering content to and filter based on requests from countries. However, it would be unreasonable for a small web site. And here's the idea (I claim first thought on anyone who attempts to patent this business idea - prior art): Create a company that is a clearing house for the request by governments and what content should not be served to them. Web sites could connect to the clearing-house server and get a quick read on what IP address goes in what country, and what content is prohibited in that country. A cache can be created, so that you don't have to check each and every packet. Hell, Google could even do this and offer it as a service, allowing the web sites to put Google adds on their site without reimbursement for payment.
Problem solved."
Would this company also accept requests from local governments? Who would be allowed to make such requests? Who would pay for this service? The governments making the requests? The small web site owners? I personally wouldn't want to pay for such a service. You're making the assumption that governments speak with a consistent and unified voice -- they do not. In the United States alone, government officials can not make up their minds about banning something, or unbanning it. That's what we have courts for I suppose, and even different courts and different judges will disagree with themselves.
In this particular case, Google did the right thing. It received an email and a fax from a local government. Or at least, it received an email and a fax from someone purporting to be an election commission official and claiming to have some kind of absurd law on the books. So Google did nothing. Google shouldn't buckle at the first sign of a fax, nor should anyone else.
"A discussion of what content would be appropriate for banning is not apropos. Remember that there is much more content than free speech type. We could be talking about programs, music files, documents, plans for weapons, etc. These items may be legal in some countries, and illegal in others. It's up for the individual countries to decide. It's not up to a company that serves content throughout the world to use their own local idea of what is right and wrong to determine whether a take-down request is reasonable or not. "
Who said it was for the individual countries to decide? Countries are social constructs. They're countries because we say they're countries. And if a foreign country demands something from us that we find morally objectionable, it's our right to refuse. The same goes for one's own government, if one's own government demands something unreasonable from us, it's our right -- some say it would be our duty to refuse.
Civil disobedience baby!
If they take your additional monitor away, buy your own additional monitor. Document this thoroughly (e.g. serial number, receipts, clear label, etch the plastic, etc).
And don't ask for permission to buy your own monitor, do it first, install it first, and ask for forgiveness later.
They can always refuse that you buy an additional monitor, but they would really have to be d___s to ask you to remove it (and if they did go that far, I'd suggest you start looking for another job then).
"We have similar laws in the US, which prevents Senator Thompson's "Law and Order" episodes from airing air while he is running for President. It also means Al Franken can not continue his radio show while he runs for Senate."
The problem with this law is that if you ask an entertainer to give up his day job (to avoid influencing his campaign), you should also ask incumbents running for office to do the same. Being an incumbent does give you a significant advantage in elections. And if you expect an actor, or a radio personality, to use (or misuse) his job in the Private sector for his own campaign, you should also expect an incumbent to use (or misuse) his own public office and media appearances for his own personal campaign as well.
"The law is a good one, in general, it prevents networks sympathetic to a particular candidate to run their speeches 24/7 and deny access to all others."
I don't know. This American law you mentioned was written by incumbents -- for incumbents. And the same goes for the Japanese law, that law restricts the non-traditional communication channels, probably because doing so would benefit the traditional incumbent class -- who probably authored this law in the first place.
Personally if I were Japanese, and not part of the elite already, I would be trying to actively disobey such a law. This law is not only out of date, and not applicable, it re-enforces the wrong power structure.
The other instructors in our department recommended that I make my PowerPoint slides available on the course web site before the lectures. [...] These students downloaded the notes, frequently skipped class, did not participate in class discussions, and then complained that their low test scores were due to my bad teaching, not their lack of effort.
Since your colleagues made that recommendation to you, would it be possible that your colleagues didn't get the same negative results you did when they uploaded their slides?
There is no need to answer that question. Online, there is just no way to tell whether you're a good lecturer -- or not. Besides, I just wanted to recommend http://toastmasters.org/ a public speaking club that's very useful for practicing and receiving feedback in a safe supportive environment (not that you need it, I'm just mentioning it -- just in case).
There are several problems with a strict interpretation like this. The US market has developed differently from the rest of the world because they standardized on protocols and technology were the American market didn't.
I believe there was a much more immediate reason for the quick adoption of cell phone technology in Europe.
When I moved to London for instance, it would have taken BT at least four weeks before they would send me a technician to activate my land-based phone service, and that was on an existing phone line mind you so I doubt a technician was really necessary, plus they required a security deposit of something like 190 pounds -- just for the activation -- an outrageous amount if you ask me (at the time, 1 pound sterling was equivalent to 1.5 American dollars).
You combine this with the fact that cell phone providers in the UK were offering all kinds of low-cost (almost free) cell phone plans (many more than the ones allowed by law in the US), and the decision was a no-brainer for me. Which brings me to my second point: By making sure that the consumer wouldn't get ripped off by the cell phone companies, the United States government inadvertently squashed a certain kind of low-cost cell phone market before it even began. In the UK for example, if you don't want to pay for cell phone service, but still want a phone, you can get yourself a cell phone plan (with a special area code) where it's the people calling you that have to pay a significant surcharge for calling your cell phone. This kind of cell phone plan may seem kind of unfair to us Americans, but it has actually its good points, when people have to pay something to call you, it's like having a true emergency phone -- one that doesn't get called that much, and it is this kind of low-cost freedom that spurred the initial explosive cell phone market growth in the UK. It was very visible too. Everyone, especially poor people had those cell phones, in fact in the UK poor people were more likely to have a cell phone than rich people, and upon my return to the US, it was completely different of course -- rich people were the only ones with cell phones -- they were very few -- and still now -- the cell phone is taking a while to trickle all the way down to the bottom of the economic ladder.
Do I think it's a good idea or even that it'll happen? Not really. But it's a nice gesture from a company who is usually just crap.
A nice gesture? It's a neutral gesture at best -- done to try to protect their reputation. Many of my customers just refuse to use Pay Pal these days, just because of all the spoofed Pay Pal crap they've been receiving in their inbox. Trying to solve this issue, or even just trying to mitigate its effect, may certainly affect the company's own bottom line.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why? If the little green light's not on, the camera's not on. "
Yeah, that's what the GM onstar customers thought too -- with their emergency in-car Microphones. If the onstar microphone is off, it should be off. Right? It turns out that the manufacturer and the FBI had very different off-label usage ideas for that device.
The bottom line is that the government thinks it has the right to spy on you, and it thinks it can demand that your ISP and the other companies doing business with you that they spy on you as well (without informing you). The ultimate wet dream for politicians and police enforcement is to have a google-like tool that would give them up-to-date information on all its citizens, coupled with video-feeds into all the bedrooms.
Right now, lowly police peons can already run background checks, credit checks, medical/medication checks, on any women they're dating (without supervision and without permission whatsoever). It won't be long before they take it to the next level, and have access to the same tools the FBI and Homeland Security have.
"It wasn't just that the Pinto's flaw was deadly, it was that it was scary..."
Scary is the operative word here, that's why I clipped the rest of your comment. Emotions are what drives most juries. In California, allowing your child to go in a house where there is a swimming pool may be less scary than allowing your child to go in a house where one of the occupants owns a gun. But considering those two scenarios, your child will be much more likely to die from the swimming pool than from the gun.
The same goes for exploding gas tanks. They're visual, they're dramatic, they're scary. If you can imprint such a fear in a jury, then you're much more likely to make them rule in favor of the person making the claim.
"When I talk to open source developers, at least half are talking about Windows, from SugarCRM, MySQL, PHP. "
Some developers install MySQL on Windows. Does he really think this is good news for his company? In my shop, we used to pay $11,000 for a license of SQL Server 2000 (the Enterprise version), now we're paying around $2,000 or $3,000 for SQL Server 2005 (it's for the Workgroup version, but the Workgroup version works just as well for us as the Enterprise version did previously). That's a net loss of 8,000 or 9,000 per license for Microsoft, and I know we're not the only ones doing this.
Companies are either switching to the much cheaper alternatives offered by Microsoft, or they're switching to the much cheaper free open source alternatives (that may, or may not, be used on Windows). And no matter what way you look at this, Microsoft is getting squeezed from every which way by Free software. This is good for us, but this can't be good for Microsoft -- surely.
Seems like the solution to that is obvious -- don't obey robots.txt for the purposes of the malware scan.
Google already does that. It won't index content that's blocked, but it will still crawl it -- just in case. The rationale given is that when google was first starting out, web sites like the California DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) and web sites like the New York Times, would just block all bots by default. And Google felt it couldn't afford to ignore such mainstream web sites, especially since most users wouldn't understand that a public site as big and as mainstream as the DMV would be accessible to them -- but not accessible to Google.
So Google will still crawl the site, index the keywords found in its urls and possibly index their titles, to possibly link to those sites/pages if needed, but it won't cache the content of those pages and I assume it won't do a full text indexing of each page either (although, I don't know if that last assumption is correct).
Either way, this practice of crawling everything has made life difficult for web site owners that have written bot-traps for bots that don't obey their robots.txt (a bot-trap is usually an invisible link that could only be seen by a bot, and such a link would point to a location that's forbidden in the robots.txt). This has become a problem especially since many malicious bots like to impersonate the googlebot to gain maximum access to a site, and google has refused to publish an up-to-date list of all the IP addresses it uses.
stated in the article, or any reference to this issue that I can find. Can you provide a cite to back that up? If it were true, the the title would be even more misleading, since it's not all iPods, but is all harddrives.
The article is misleading, yes, but it is not the magnet that's doing the interference. In 1995 cell phones were also found to interfere with pacemakers at the same range. This is not news, there are a number of devices that can interfere with pacemakers -- all patients with pacemakers already know this.
Here is a list of at least 30 common devices that would probably interfere with a pacemaker. This is nothing new. All pacemaker patients are told about this when they first get one. The iPod angle was just a way to get the story in the news.
First off, there was a choice between Iraq or Iran. Gee, we picked the lesser of two evils.
Not really, the US doesn't always pick the lesser of two evils. The US Government first picks an enemy for its own reasons, then and only then, it rationalizes its decision after-the-fact by demonizing its chosen enemy and by praising its chosen ally. I could give you specific examples, but frankly -- I'm not even sure you'd be willing to change your mind -- so I'm not going to bother citing those examples unless you specifically ask for them.
First, you copy -- once you've mastered that part -- then you develop new styles and new techniques of your own. It takes patience and dedication to refrain from skipping that first not-so-exciting step. And unless you're an individual that comes out of the womb an original genius, this is how most people learn to speak, to walk, to write, to draw, to play the piano, to learn sciences, to program a computer, etc. First you copy, then you master, then -- and only then -- you experiment.
And note that when China was during its most innovative period, people copied each other all the time, and this was viewed with great pride -- not as some act of pilferage. For example, some of the great works produced by Chinese philosophers didn't bear the name of their original authors, they bore the names of the Philosophers those authors were trying to emulate.
Sometimes you're talking to someone and they say they're an environmentalist but they think Greenpeace et al are a bit off the deep end.
Yeah, even Patrick Moore, one of the original co-founders of Greenpeace, believes that Greenpeace has gone a little bit off the deep end.
<< Who? I know of no outspoken proponents of environmentalism that come off like "rambling kooks".>>
The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.
--Kenneth Boulding, originator of the "Spaceship Earth"
concept (as quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)
We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion--guilt-free at last!
--Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue).
Free Enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process.... Capitalism is destroying the earth.
--Helen Caldicott, Union of Concerned Scientists
We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects.... We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.
--David Foreman, Earth First!
Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed.
--Pentti Linkola
If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.
--Amory Lovins in The Mother Earth-Plowboy Interview, Nov/Dec 1977, p.22
The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world.
--John Shuttleworth
What we've got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.
--Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)
I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.
--John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.
--John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing....This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.
--Economist editorial
We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity's sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight.
--David Foreman, Earth First!
Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.
--Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!
If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS
--Earth First! Newsletter
Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets...Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.
--David Graber, biologist, National Park Service
The collective nee
"On win2k, XP or Vista now, you can decide what the system does with a "bluescreen" (under My Computer->Properties). Rebooting immediately is the default since thats preferable for 99% of users, but there's a checkbox to display the bluescreen anyways, and write out a full or partial memory dump. Using microsoft's free kernel debugger, you can then analyze that crashdump. It's relatively easy to pin down which module caused the crash..."
Yeah, you can thank people like Mark Russinovich for that. It's ironic that the very people you've learned crash dump analysis from were the very same people that were once pursued as hackers and labeled as dangerous criminals by Microsoft.
"Oh, and I love "gets more and more obscure with each passing day" - starting two years ago or so, microsoft set up a symbol server so you can automatically load operating system debugging symbols for the exact binaries you are running with. Makes the above debugging process a lot easier...."
Yes, Microsoft is getting better at exposing system level information, but it didn't have a choice in the matter -- it had to -- in order to stay competitive with its open source counterparts. Note that it only started this effort after having already lost considerable marketshare to Linux and Apache.
Chances are, this physician gets paid 20 Euros an hour, and he is not allowed to work over time -- or else he's forced to take additional vacation. But this is probably an even trade for him in the end, since his education was most likely fully paid by the French government, he has access to top quality high tech medical equipment, and just like the rest of the French doctors in France -- he will never get sued for malpractice.
In this case, the person has been camping out on my land for months, and inviting his friends over. It doesn't sound like he was going to tell the landlord about the hole in the fence.
I shouldn't have used that analogy, I should have known people who didn't read the article would get creative with it. The guy wrote a program that would allow one's computer to lie to the network about being up-to-date. That's it. And yes, he violated his Universities IT Terms and Services, and yes he distributed his program to other people, and yes -- the University can do pretty much do what they want with him. But let's not get carried away, he was a tenant of this "landlord" in question. It's not like he (or his friends who were also legitimate users of this network) used additional resources because of this.
It's a fairly common first defense, but it needs to be corroborated. The evidence you (PP) cited seems to not corroborate his claim of benign intentions.
You're also making a fairly common assumption, that he needs to corroborate his benign intent somehow. How would one go about doing that? The network wasn't actually hurt by this, it would seem. It's not proof that his intent was benign I agree, but at least -- it corroborates that his story might actually be true in this case.
I can only equate this to catching someone trespassing on your land, and finding no damage and no missing property. Either you believe that the trespasser was malicious in his intent, or you don't and believe that his intent was benign. It's a judgment call for the most part.
why aren't we going for: "One desktop per family"?
Because children are pure. After all, you couldn't have teenagers or adults get their grubby little hands on laptops.
This idea seems pretty flimsy... If you are incorporating known, ground based beacons/signals to provide positioning data wouldn't it be easy enough for the enemy to emulate those beacons/signals from some location near to the real one to create multiple signatures and distort positioning data? Wouldn't this confuse the proposed system?
This technology could have other military applications. You could use it to send homing missiles to target specific signals. The Russians have already killed a Chechnen leader with a missile that homed in on his satellite phone. It wouldn't be a stretch of the imagination to think that the US military wouldn't be trying to do the same kind of thing for other types of signals. They could target specific radio/television broadcasters, moving transmitters, and/or specific cell tower/radio infrastructures. And this technology could still be used as an additional system in addition to the gps system, to supplement the gps information just in case.
And yes, counter-measures could be taken I suppose, but those counter-measures would impose a real cost to the enemy. Being in a war with the United States is hard enough, but being paranoid about your telecommunication infrastructure acting as a beacon for an incoming missile -- makes it harder still. Just ask Osama Bin Laden, some journalists are speculating that he personally stopped using his satellite phone since 1998 -- for fear of being tracked and/or targeted by a homing missile.
We signed a looong lease before the revolution. If we tried to buy land in Cuba now to build a base, Castro would say "no way." But he's bound to honor the old agreement.
No, the only reason the US base is still in Cuba, is not because Castro honors contract law (or property law), and it's not because Castro is afraid of losing trade relations with the US (he can't lose what he doesn't have in the first place). The only reason the US base is still in Cuba is because the US base is protected to the hilt.
Besides, it's not like a prior lease agreement with a tenant would apply after the said tenant tries to kill you, invade your country, or more recently -- blows up the tourists visiting your island. I may not be one of those sharp international lawyers, as some of you slashdoters may be, but I've watched enough Judge Judy to know -- that if a tenant tries to kill you -- you can evict him right away -- lease or no lease.
"You understand it wrong. The OpenXML format is completely open for every feature implemented in Office 2007 [...]"
The problem with this statement is that Office 2007 still contains most of the code base for Office 95, and it contains the code of every Office version thereafter. So unless you know something I don't know -- there is no way to be sure that "the OpenXML format is completely open for every feature" of Office 2007.
The second problem is that during its anti-trust case, Bill Gates was on the record saying that his Office Suite wasn't tied to his Operating System, and that some kind of wall was erected between those two divisions so they couldn't talk to each other and share undocumented features, when in fact current analysis of their leaked code -- shows the exact opposite -- that their Office suite was indeed and (still is) closely intermingled with their OS at the undocumented system's calls level.
So for you to be so sure of the openness of OpenXML, you must not only know something I don't, but you must also be far more knowledgeable than Bill Gates was on this subject, since he either lied under oath about this particular topic, or was just too ignorant to know what was happening at the source code implementation level.
In either case, I'm not even sure why we're even discussing this. If you have to argue, and if I have to take your word for it, that a particular piece of closed source code, inside an "open" data format, does nothing that's needed by Office 2007, then this "open" format is not really open -- is it?
"I live in Ireland. It took one decade of single digit growth to turn this country from a second world laughing stock to a first world economy (though truth be told the economy could be ais to still be a laughing stock). So how come it's going to take several decade for China to do the same? Interia? Give me a break. "
... ...
You're wrong. Compared to all the other tax havens, Ireland is *still* a third World country.
1. Switzerland
2. Luxembourg
3.
18.
19. Macau
20. Isles of Man
21. Barbados
22. Vanuatu
23. Ireland
"I don't think it's unreasonable for a large global company like Google to check who they are delivering content to and filter based on requests from countries. However, it would be unreasonable for a small web site. And here's the idea (I claim first thought on anyone who attempts to patent this business idea - prior art): Create a company that is a clearing house for the request by governments and what content should not be served to them. Web sites could connect to the clearing-house server and get a quick read on what IP address goes in what country, and what content is prohibited in that country. A cache can be created, so that you don't have to check each and every packet. Hell, Google could even do this and offer it as a service, allowing the web sites to put Google adds on their site without reimbursement for payment. Problem solved."
Would this company also accept requests from local governments? Who would be allowed to make such requests? Who would pay for this service? The governments making the requests? The small web site owners? I personally wouldn't want to pay for such a service. You're making the assumption that governments speak with a consistent and unified voice -- they do not. In the United States alone, government officials can not make up their minds about banning something, or unbanning it. That's what we have courts for I suppose, and even different courts and different judges will disagree with themselves.
In this particular case, Google did the right thing. It received an email and a fax from a local government. Or at least, it received an email and a fax from someone purporting to be an election commission official and claiming to have some kind of absurd law on the books. So Google did nothing. Google shouldn't buckle at the first sign of a fax, nor should anyone else.
"A discussion of what content would be appropriate for banning is not apropos. Remember that there is much more content than free speech type. We could be talking about programs, music files, documents, plans for weapons, etc. These items may be legal in some countries, and illegal in others. It's up for the individual countries to decide. It's not up to a company that serves content throughout the world to use their own local idea of what is right and wrong to determine whether a take-down request is reasonable or not. "
Who said it was for the individual countries to decide? Countries are social constructs. They're countries because we say they're countries. And if a foreign country demands something from us that we find morally objectionable, it's our right to refuse. The same goes for one's own government, if one's own government demands something unreasonable from us, it's our right -- some say it would be our duty to refuse. Civil disobedience baby!
If they take your additional monitor away, buy your own additional monitor. Document this thoroughly (e.g. serial number, receipts, clear label, etch the plastic, etc).
And don't ask for permission to buy your own monitor, do it first, install it first, and ask for forgiveness later. They can always refuse that you buy an additional monitor, but they would really have to be d___s to ask you to remove it (and if they did go that far, I'd suggest you start looking for another job then).
"We have similar laws in the US, which prevents Senator Thompson's "Law and Order" episodes from airing air while he is running for President. It also means Al Franken can not continue his radio show while he runs for Senate."
The problem with this law is that if you ask an entertainer to give up his day job (to avoid influencing his campaign), you should also ask incumbents running for office to do the same. Being an incumbent does give you a significant advantage in elections. And if you expect an actor, or a radio personality, to use (or misuse) his job in the Private sector for his own campaign, you should also expect an incumbent to use (or misuse) his own public office and media appearances for his own personal campaign as well.
"The law is a good one, in general, it prevents networks sympathetic to a particular candidate to run their speeches 24/7 and deny access to all others."
I don't know. This American law you mentioned was written by incumbents -- for incumbents. And the same goes for the Japanese law, that law restricts the non-traditional communication channels, probably because doing so would benefit the traditional incumbent class -- who probably authored this law in the first place.
Personally if I were Japanese, and not part of the elite already, I would be trying to actively disobey such a law. This law is not only out of date, and not applicable, it re-enforces the wrong power structure.
The other instructors in our department recommended that I make my PowerPoint slides available on the course web site before the lectures. [...] These students downloaded the notes, frequently skipped class, did not participate in class discussions, and then complained that their low test scores were due to my bad teaching, not their lack of effort.
Since your colleagues made that recommendation to you, would it be possible that your colleagues didn't get the same negative results you did when they uploaded their slides?
There is no need to answer that question. Online, there is just no way to tell whether you're a good lecturer -- or not. Besides, I just wanted to recommend http://toastmasters.org/ a public speaking club that's very useful for practicing and receiving feedback in a safe supportive environment (not that you need it, I'm just mentioning it -- just in case).
There are several problems with a strict interpretation like this. The US market has developed differently from the rest of the world because they standardized on protocols and technology were the American market didn't.
I believe there was a much more immediate reason for the quick adoption of cell phone technology in Europe.
When I moved to London for instance, it would have taken BT at least four weeks before they would send me a technician to activate my land-based phone service, and that was on an existing phone line mind you so I doubt a technician was really necessary, plus they required a security deposit of something like 190 pounds -- just for the activation -- an outrageous amount if you ask me (at the time, 1 pound sterling was equivalent to 1.5 American dollars).
You combine this with the fact that cell phone providers in the UK were offering all kinds of low-cost (almost free) cell phone plans (many more than the ones allowed by law in the US), and the decision was a no-brainer for me. Which brings me to my second point: By making sure that the consumer wouldn't get ripped off by the cell phone companies, the United States government inadvertently squashed a certain kind of low-cost cell phone market before it even began. In the UK for example, if you don't want to pay for cell phone service, but still want a phone, you can get yourself a cell phone plan (with a special area code) where it's the people calling you that have to pay a significant surcharge for calling your cell phone. This kind of cell phone plan may seem kind of unfair to us Americans, but it has actually its good points, when people have to pay something to call you, it's like having a true emergency phone -- one that doesn't get called that much, and it is this kind of low-cost freedom that spurred the initial explosive cell phone market growth in the UK. It was very visible too. Everyone, especially poor people had those cell phones, in fact in the UK poor people were more likely to have a cell phone than rich people, and upon my return to the US, it was completely different of course -- rich people were the only ones with cell phones -- they were very few -- and still now -- the cell phone is taking a while to trickle all the way down to the bottom of the economic ladder.
Do I think it's a good idea or even that it'll happen? Not really. But it's a nice gesture from a company who is usually just crap.
A nice gesture? It's a neutral gesture at best -- done to try to protect their reputation. Many of my customers just refuse to use Pay Pal these days, just because of all the spoofed Pay Pal crap they've been receiving in their inbox. Trying to solve this issue, or even just trying to mitigate its effect, may certainly affect the company's own bottom line.