Maybe, just maybe, this one uncorroborated report nght be not entirly accurate. It could be a hoax (either with boingboing.com being an active participant in that, or with them having been tricked, too), it could be that the person really was trying to crack the site, and happened to be using Lynx in the process.
At the moment, all we know is that someone was arrested for allegedly trying to crack the DEC website, and that boingboing.com have posted a copy of a message sent by an unknown person to an unknown mailing list saying that somone who accessed the DEC site using Lynx was arrested, and that they hope to have more details soon.
I bet some people would like to take their copyright with them to the grave, so that noone else benefits from their own expression of the idea.
You are utterly missing my point, that almost everything is based on some previous work. (As Isaac Newton put it, "standing on the shoulders of giants".) Why should you be allowed to prevent others from benefiting from your ideas? Is every idea of yours utterly original, or have you benefited from the ideas of others? And if you have benefited from the ideas of others (which I am certain you have,) why should you be able to prevent others from benefiting from your ideas?
The point, of course, is that the permanent privitisation and monopolisation of our culture is a Bad Thing. Creative work has continually borrowed from that which came before it - eternal copyrights are beneficial to only a very few, works entering the public domain is beneficial to almost all. Consider, for instance, all the modern works that are based on Shakespear's plays.
When are people going to realize that a private ISP has no obligation to allow content they're not comfortable with.
If a private ISP has a contract with someone to host a website for that person, then the ISP is obliged to allow any content that is not prohibited under that contract (and which is not prohibited by law.) It is irrelevent whether or not the ISP is comfortable with the content; if their T&Cs do not ban it (or give them a way of terminating the contract early,) they are obliged, by contract law, to host it for the duration of the contract with their customer.
Would you buy webhosting from someone who's T&Cs said "we may at any time terminate any site which we do not like"?
it seems you think it's in the private company's "duty" to post what the website's owners want, regardless of content.
The contract between the website's owners and the hosting company does place exactly such a duty on the hosting company (subject to any terms in that contract regarding what content may be put on the website.) The enforceability of contracts is vital to businesses - suppose I hire you to write some software for me, you deliver that software, and then I turn around and say "I don't feel like paying you, go away and stop bugging me." You would, quite rightly, be able to sue me for the money I had agreed to pay you for that spftware. Similarly, if you said to me "sorry, I was too busy browsing Slashdot to write your software," I would (probably) be able to sue you for any losses of mine that result.
The point is, if you freely enter into a contract with someone else, you have a duty to carry out your obligations under that contract. As a business owner, surely you appreciate why it is important that contracts are enforced.
And by having it need a key, you are missing the point of it being an Emergency Power Off. A hypothetical scenario for you: Which is least bad, "Oh shit, who's got the key for the power off, Phorm's getting electrocuted! Oh, too late..." or *thunk* *whirr* "You ok?"
If you need to cut the power in an emergency, you want to do it now, not in five minutes, when someone's found the key.
Nintendo sells the same Game Boy Advance SP everywhere. But the ones sold in the U.S., which cost nearly 30% less than in Europe, come with a single-voltage power adaptor that won't work in Europe.
And:
[Guy in Fiji bought an iMac in the US, which went bang when plugged in in Fiji (240V) because] iMac G5s sold in the U.S. are designed to work only with the electric power systems in the U.S. and Japan...
The iMac G5s Apple sells everywhere except the U.S. and Japan are dual voltage, meaning they can cope with the electrical systems in Fiji, Europe and most of Asia, as well as those in Japan and the U.S.
The trick is, that although different power supplies increase manufacturing costs, they also increase the company's ability to price fix internationally.
How are they going to prevent me from importing a printer together with the cartridges?
They can make it more difficult for you with their power supplies. If you buy something that is designed to only accept 120V supplies (i.e. USA, Canada, and some others) and plug it into a 230V supply (most of the rest of the world, including Europe, ther Middle East, Australia, New Zeland) the likely effect will be it going *bang*.
It is not "giving up" to say that this is a good thing. Software patents are bad, are should be got rid of, but given that *at present* they do exist, acts like this, which protect OSS from some of them, are good.
The death of software patents will be a great thing if/when it happens, and is something that should be campaigned for, but until it happens, moves like this, which lessen the impact of software patents, are good.
Subject to the exception provided below [that IBM can revoke this pledge for people who try to assert patent claims against OSS], and with the intent that developers, users and
distributors of Open Source Software rely on our promise, IBM hereby commits not to
assert any of the 500 U.S. patents listed above, as well as all counterparts of these patents issued in other countries against the development, use or distribution of Open Source
Software.
So, while you could use the patents covered in a BSD licenced program, anyone wanting to use your code in their non-OSS program would have to work around the patent, or obtain a patent license from IBM.
That the BSD license allows third parties to use your code in their closed source programs does not change the fact that something in the code may be covered by a patent of IBM's, and that IBM have pledged not to assert that patent against OSS does not affect their ability to assert it against other software.
Oh, really?
how much would you be willing for your taxes (or the cost of your new car) to rise by to prevent 100 of the 42,643 annual deaths on US roads? (Figure for 2003, source.) 500 of them? 1000? 10,000? Unless your answer is "unlimited", you've just put a price on American lives.
Or, consider that courts award compensation in wrongful death suits. That is, by its very nature, putting a price of people's lives.
Just because you don't like to think you put a price on people's lives, doesn't mean you (or rather, your society) doesn't do it.
I don't understand why xxx hasn't been approved yet. Followed by a mandate that pornographic sites must use
And how, exactly, would you enforce such a mandate? If you think that laws requiring porn sites to be in.xxx would be passed and enforced globally, I've got afewbridgesandotherfamousmonuments for sale when you get back from cloud cuckoo land.
Not to mention, of course, the question of what is pornographic. Sex education sites? Sites with information about sexual diseases? (For both of those, with pictures? Without pictures?) LGBT community discussion sites? Archives of alt.sex.stories? A usenet server that carries the alt.sex groups, along with the rest of usenet? An ebay auction for a sex toy? An ebay auction for something that could equally be used in a sexual or a medical situation? Slashdot? (After all, trolls post text porn, and links to goat.cx.) An IRC network that happens to have channels where users share porn? Even if its only a small percentage of the channels, and most users don't encounter them?.....
So, the short answer is, a mandatory.xxx (or equivilent other TLD) doesn't exist because it would be impossible to define what should go in it, and even more impossible to enforce. (To anyone who want to point out the logical flaw in "even more impossible", spank me. While wearing a tight leather catsuit. Yes please! *ahem* Just proving my point about how Slashdot might be required to be a.xxx site. Honest.)
If you don't like the new itnerface, just use it with a country code domain rather than.com. I've checked the UK, Canadian, French, German, and Australian versions, and all have the classic interface, rather than the new one.
RTFA, why don't you?
It says that they were asked about KDE 3.3, but felt it was too buggy ("The main reason is that KDE 3.3 in unstable started with some RC bugs".) They also mention that big upgrades of both KDE and Gnome at the same time would be harmful to their sanity...
And how is that different to OpenOffice or Word, both of which allow you to specify styles? That people don't always use styles is a criticism of the way people use word processors, not of word processors themselves.
Word processors, specificaly WYSIWYG, are stupid and inefficient, we should all use TeX instead.
But the TeX commands and syntax are too complex, so use a nice program to generate the TeX. A WYSIWYG word processor, opps, I mean, a WYSIWYM document processor, that outputs TeX.
So, word processors are "stupid and inefficient", unless they output TeX and are called document processors?
It is entirely possible to prove an email is authentic. For example, any PGP signed email was signed by the owner of the key that signed that message. And, as other posters have pointed out, the issue of dealing with alleged forgeries is one the courts have been dealing with for a long time - fundamentally, the fact that someone can forge email in your name is no different to the fact that someone can forge paper documents in your name. Why does everyone think that something being on a computer, or online, suddenly means that all similar past situations and experiences are irrelevent? Or, of course, the author might admit they wrote something, in wich case the question of proving the authenticity is moot.
You're thinking of Prime Minister's Questions, in the House of Commons. Basically, any MP can ask the PM a question (the leader of the opposition usually gets 4, and the leader of the third largest party 2.) There are also question times for each government department, where MPs can put questions to government ministers. (See this factsheet (pdf) for more about how parliamentary questions work.)
Of course, sometimes PMQs are used to give the PM a nice easy question for political point scoring. And example, from last week shows.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations, which provides independent circulation data for most UK publications, gives The guardian's average daily circulation as 376,314, of which 331,380 are UK sales (of the remainder, 4,045 are in the Republic of Ireland, and 40,889 are other countries. Based on September figures.) If each copy was read by one and only one person, this would be 0.55% of the UK population (approximatly 60 million people).
As a sibling post points out, The Guardian claims a readership of just over 1 million, or 1.7% of the UK population (based on data from the National Readership Survey).
As for the piece with the assassination comment (which I have a dead-tree copy of, if anyone's interested), it was in The Guardian's listings magazine, The Guide, which the NRS gives a readship of 1,180,000 (just under 2% of the UK population.) However, I'm sure many of those readers would not have actually read the column in question (I don't remember reading it when it came out.)
Most of Europe is using DVB-T. Your most promising non-US source of ATSC stuff is probably going to be Canada (Mexico, Argentina and South Korea are the only others planning to usa ATSC, according to that map.
The resoloution is very poor. Consider taking a photo of an A4 page (210*297mm) with a 3 megapixel camera. This gives 1456 pixels across the short edge of the page (ignoring the difference in aspect ratios - digicams are usually 4:3, A4 paper (or any of the A-series sizes) are 1:sqrt(2)) which works out at 7 pixels/mm, or 176 dpi. Compare that with a scanner, which is typically 300 or 600 dpi.
And, even if you did get the resolouting by stitching multiple photos together, the lighting would be no where near as even as the lighting in a scanner.
See http://www.rootsworks.com/ocr/digicamocr.htm for an example of someone who tried it, and concluded that "The bottom line? It's not worth the trouble unless you have clean copy and get a sharp photo - and a really close up one of a small section at that. I can type it faster than I can OCR it, and correct it."
Every time the government arbitrarily sets the mininum wage to be higher, thousands of people end up losing their jobs, as it forces companies to try to get by without low-end jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, just maybe, this one uncorroborated report nght be not entirly accurate. It could be a hoax (either with boingboing.com being an active participant in that, or with them having been tricked, too), it could be that the person really was trying to crack the site, and happened to be using Lynx in the process.
At the moment, all we know is that someone was arrested for allegedly trying to crack the DEC website, and that boingboing.com have posted a copy of a message sent by an unknown person to an unknown mailing list saying that somone who accessed the DEC site using Lynx was arrested, and that they hope to have more details soon.
The People Who Owned The Bible, a (slightly silly) short story about every-lengthening copyright terms.
The point, of course, is that the permanent privitisation and monopolisation of our culture is a Bad Thing. Creative work has continually borrowed from that which came before it - eternal copyrights are beneficial to only a very few, works entering the public domain is beneficial to almost all. Consider, for instance, all the modern works that are based on Shakespear's plays.
Would you buy webhosting from someone who's T&Cs said "we may at any time terminate any site which we do not like"?
The point is, if you freely enter into a contract with someone else, you have a duty to carry out your obligations under that contract. As a business owner, surely you appreciate why it is important that contracts are enforced.
And by having it need a key, you are missing the point of it being an Emergency Power Off. A hypothetical scenario for you: Which is least bad, "Oh shit, who's got the key for the power off, Phorm's getting electrocuted! Oh, too late..." or *thunk* *whirr* "You ok?"
If you need to cut the power in an emergency, you want to do it now, not in five minutes, when someone's found the key.
How is it a good idea (for anyone other that HP)? The sole purpose of this is to force people to pay more for the same products.
It is not "giving up" to say that this is a good thing. Software patents are bad, are should be got rid of, but given that *at present* they do exist, acts like this, which protect OSS from some of them, are good.
The death of software patents will be a great thing if/when it happens, and is something that should be campaigned for, but until it happens, moves like this, which lessen the impact of software patents, are good.
That the BSD license allows third parties to use your code in their closed source programs does not change the fact that something in the code may be covered by a patent of IBM's, and that IBM have pledged not to assert that patent against OSS does not affect their ability to assert it against other software.
how much would you be willing for your taxes (or the cost of your new car) to rise by to prevent 100 of the 42,643 annual deaths on US roads? (Figure for 2003, source.) 500 of them? 1000? 10,000? Unless your answer is "unlimited", you've just put a price on American lives.
Or, consider that courts award compensation in wrongful death suits. That is, by its very nature, putting a price of people's lives.
Just because you don't like to think you put a price on people's lives, doesn't mean you (or rather, your society) doesn't do it.
Not to mention, of course, the question of what is pornographic. Sex education sites? Sites with information about sexual diseases? (For both of those, with pictures? Without pictures?) LGBT community discussion sites? Archives of alt.sex.stories? A usenet server that carries the alt.sex groups, along with the rest of usenet? An ebay auction for a sex toy? An ebay auction for something that could equally be used in a sexual or a medical situation? Slashdot? (After all, trolls post text porn, and links to goat.cx.) An IRC network that happens to have channels where users share porn? Even if its only a small percentage of the channels, and most users don't encounter them?
So, the short answer is, a mandatory
If you don't like the new itnerface, just use it with a country code domain rather than .com. I've checked the UK, Canadian, French, German, and Australian versions, and all have the classic interface, rather than the new one.
It says that they were asked about KDE 3.3, but felt it was too buggy ("The main reason is that KDE 3.3 in unstable started with some RC bugs".) They also mention that big upgrades of both KDE and Gnome at the same time would be harmful to their sanity...
And how is that different to OpenOffice or Word, both of which allow you to specify styles? That people don't always use styles is a criticism of the way people use word processors, not of word processors themselves.
Ahh, I get it...
Word processors, specificaly WYSIWYG, are stupid and inefficient, we should all use TeX instead.
But the TeX commands and syntax are too complex, so use a nice program to generate the TeX. A WYSIWYG word processor, opps, I mean, a WYSIWYM document processor, that outputs TeX.
So, word processors are "stupid and inefficient", unless they output TeX and are called document processors?
It is entirely possible to prove an email is authentic. For example, any PGP signed email was signed by the owner of the key that signed that message. And, as other posters have pointed out, the issue of dealing with alleged forgeries is one the courts have been dealing with for a long time - fundamentally, the fact that someone can forge email in your name is no different to the fact that someone can forge paper documents in your name. Why does everyone think that something being on a computer, or online, suddenly means that all similar past situations and experiences are irrelevent?
Or, of course, the author might admit they wrote something, in wich case the question of proving the authenticity is moot.
You're thinking of Prime Minister's Questions, in the House of Commons. Basically, any MP can ask the PM a question (the leader of the opposition usually gets 4, and the leader of the third largest party 2.) There are also question times for each government department, where MPs can put questions to government ministers. (See this factsheet (pdf) for more about how parliamentary questions work.)
Of course, sometimes PMQs are used to give the PM a nice easy question for political point scoring. And example, from last week shows.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations, which provides independent circulation data for most UK publications, gives The guardian's average daily circulation as 376,314, of which 331,380 are UK sales (of the remainder, 4,045 are in the Republic of Ireland, and 40,889 are other countries. Based on September figures.) If each copy was read by one and only one person, this would be 0.55% of the UK population (approximatly 60 million people).
As a sibling post points out, The Guardian claims a readership of just over 1 million, or 1.7% of the UK population (based on data from the National Readership Survey).
As for the piece with the assassination comment (which I have a dead-tree copy of, if anyone's interested), it was in The Guardian's listings magazine, The Guide, which the NRS gives a readship of 1,180,000 (just under 2% of the UK population.) However, I'm sure many of those readers would not have actually read the column in question (I don't remember reading it when it came out.)
*slaps self for not using preview* I'm not sure why the link vanished, but the map I was refering to is http://www.dvb.org/graphics/internal/Adoption-Map_ DVB-T.jpg.
Most of Europe is using DVB-T. Your most promising non-US source of ATSC stuff is probably going to be Canada (Mexico, Argentina and South Korea are the only others planning to usa ATSC, according to that map.
The resoloution is very poor. Consider taking a photo of an A4 page (210*297mm) with a 3 megapixel camera. This gives 1456 pixels across the short edge of the page (ignoring the difference in aspect ratios - digicams are usually 4:3, A4 paper (or any of the A-series sizes) are 1:sqrt(2)) which works out at 7 pixels/mm, or 176 dpi. Compare that with a scanner, which is typically 300 or 600 dpi.
And, even if you did get the resolouting by stitching multiple photos together, the lighting would be no where near as even as the lighting in a scanner.
See http://www.rootsworks.com/ocr/digicamocr.htm for an example of someone who tried it, and concluded that "The bottom line? It's not worth the trouble unless you have clean copy and get a sharp photo - and a really close up one of a small section at that. I can type it faster than I can OCR it, and correct it."