(Note from BB - I've been getting mails from users indicating that TDE is now privately owned, I will be attempting to confirm this ASAP)
Well we're dealing with some real worldly types here, aren't we? It's not exactly difficult to find out, you switch their home page to English if you can't read Spanish and you get all the investor information you need. See the options there at the top-right?
I'm sure all the Spanish businesses trading internationally that you've just knocked off the Internet will thank you for your tactful approach to the problem. As will people trying to stay in touch with friends and relatives in Spain, especially so soon after the terrorist bombing in Madrid. Taking a leaf out of the Rumsfield book of diplomacy or something are we?
The first thing you get if you go to your About Us page followed by the link under "People Who Dislike the SOSDG And The AHBL" is "Power Without Accountability". Do you think they might actually have a point? Or do you labour under the delusion that if people (not spammers, but legitimate businesses and private individuals) don't like you're doing then you must be doing it right?
Of course you will argue that you only provide the list, it is up to others how to use it. Unfortunately your lists are implemented by scripts and there were very few scripting languages that came with a conscience last time I looked. However at least it means you've neatly absolved yourself of any responsibility so you can block an entire country of 40 million people without bothering about the repercussions in your US-centric blacklist (which basically amounts to regarding anything from outside North America as suspicious).
How the hell can this and several other posts in this thread be modded as insightful?
If I wanted to read a board dedicated to thinly-desguised xenophobia and racism coupled with idiotic blind unthinking patriotism then I'd have gone to free republic.
However I'm on slashdot. And can't we just tell the main demographic is teenagers who have hardly ever set foot outside their parents' basement, let alone country, closely followed by those who should have moved out 10 years ago.
"I have always said that as soon as ID cards become cumpulsory, I would take my citizenship, and my skills elsewhere."
You'd better start planning now then, you may need 10 years of living in the country you want to emmigrate to to get citizenship and until you do you still need a British passport which will be going biometric sometime in late 2006/early 2007.
Blunkett has been on the telly this morning (Breakfast with Frost) saying that people won't have to carry cards everywhere, but that doesn't matter as police will be able to stop people and check their biometrics (e.g. fingerprint, face recognition, or iris scan) against the central database without the card if required.
Now I don't know about you, but don't think the police stopping people in the street and forcing them to put their finger on a fingerprint reader against their will is a reason for introducing biometric ID cards and the central database behind it.
I hope this little fact gets repeated long and often in the upcoming debate as I don't think many other people do either.
However CDMA has a few features that GSM would be better to have, like the ability to tell your phone to turn on the new voice mail waiting signal. SMS to say you have voice mail works, but either you delete it without checking, and forget, or you leave the SMS in the inbox, and latter check without deleting it, either way getting out of sync.
An extension to GSM, called CPHS, has this feature.
Is there any reason at all that this vaunted "noise control" could not be addressed privately?
Yes. What are the chances of the majority of people across e.g. New York who feel that noise pollution adversely affects the forming an organisation, funding it, running a scientifically valid investigation, and then implementing a city-wide scheme to reduce it?
Nil.
I assume from your viewpoint that all US cities' mayors should be immediately sacked and any planning and services they were doing should be scrapped and the inhabitants left to do the job themselves as best they can? I give those cities less than a week before they fall into chaos.
The Siemens S55 asks for permission the first time a Java application tries to dial out/make an Internet connection/and so on after running. There's no way around it.
I haven't seen a Symbian mobile in action but I imagine it'll be something similar.
Yep. Networks have started installing firewalls for GPRS connections to the internet at the network level. Otherwise you could be pinged and charged for traffic you didn't want.
The difference between computers and mobiles is that the mobiles work to the same standard, but how they do that is up to the manufacturer so the bugs that can be exploited still vary by make and model.
As an example, a fairly old Siemens GSM mobile (C35 I think) did freeze when trying to open a SMS with a specific string in it. No other phones were affected.
Siemens brought out a firmware upgrade to fix the problem and as a stopgap the owner could put the SIM in any other mobile and delete the message.
Depends on the market. The US mobile market is much younger than the European and Japanese one, which is saturated. US networks still want to get customers on board quick so they give mobiles away for silly money.
I was shocked when a number of people walked out in the middle of the Zion "dance" scene. I'm totally flummoxed by this, as I thought it was one of the coolest scenes in the film.
Something from a an inteview with one of the actresses in Calendar Girls...
Like the calendar itself, the £1.5m film is perfectly demure. Celia Imrie, whose bosoms are in one scene shielded by a pair of iced cherry tarts, said: "The Americans are very prudish, so you don't see that much, thank God. Even so, we had to be naked on set at various times, which was a bit scary."
Because we don't pay for incoming calls...!
You don't pay extra for calling a landline, just another mobile network, the reason being that there is some interconnection between networks going on that costs more.
Not the pricing on our incoming calls - incoming calls are always free.
How it works is you pay one rate to call someone on your own mobile network or a landline, and a higher rate to call someone on another mobile network.
So if your friend and her mother are on different networks, they need to sort something out between each other unless they like throwing money away.
The reason for asking someone what network they're on is you don't know if you're paying 5p a minute or 35p a minute until you get the bill. (Some European networks have sorted this out and play a tone at the start of the call if it's off-net or let you check with a *# code, none in the UK do.)
But it sounds a bit better than than the description of US networks call pricing somewhere in this same thread...
Contrary to quaint local folklore there are places outside the US that are actually subjected to the market and the UK is one of them.
I take it you're in total agreement with HTB-1 visas (or whatever the US equivelent of a FTV is) and outsourcing? Nothing strikes you as remotely odd that in two years hundreds of thousands of jobs have disappeared or gone abroad, businesses have folded, and the stock market has disappeared up its own arse putting people's retirement in doubt.
No I'm not some red-flag waving communist but the idea that the government should sit idly by twiddling its thumbs saying, "we can't take any inititive to stop what's happening. That would be interfering with the free market. See you down the unemployment office," seems to me to be fatalistic and dogmatic.
You're missing the big picture somewhat. The market will always try and reduce the cost of production to zero to undercut competitors. Big businesses that can will outsource as much as possible to cheaper countries. Smaller companies that can't will die. At that point there will be hardly anybody to buy any products anyway as their jobs will have been outsourced and nobody will have any disposible income as they are either unemployed or doing menial work.
If I were you I would get your country's government to stand up for your country's businesses (I don't mean the globalised megacorporations that don't belong to any country any more) because nobody else will. There's no shame in your government cutting taxes or red tape, investing (not subsidising, there is a difference), or making business development loans available if the end is keeping people in jobs and allowing them to improve an industry in which your country is a recognised leader.
Likewise there's no shame in making the big boys pay tax on outsourced services and clamping down on them squirreling away money that should be collected as tax in some offshore bank somewhere. How much tax do you think the likes of Microsoft or Murdoch pays? As little as they can. As we've seen with Enron, Worldcom, etc etc...
If I need to explain it anymore than that, well, it's a lost cause.
Is there any difference between grants for games companies than grants for films, the arts, museums, neighbourhood community projects, etc...
Or even just reducing the burden of taxes on these organisations would help.
Because it costs much less to invest in your own country's companies, keeping your own population in jobs, educated and trained, and having your country produce something whih is then exported and brings money in for the country than slinging everyone out on their ear and watching unemployment benefit costs going off the scale.
In the UK taxes are going up again in April. Small and medium-sized companies really will go to the wall, as if enough aren't already now.
If we take the current system to its logical conclusion and outsource everything to the lowest bidder in India, there is very little left that could be done in this country apart from police, lawyers, politicans, and hairdressers. And it won't be some work-free utopian paradise service economy where people spend all day skipping through fields. It'll be an uneducated unemployed population who can only claim off the state because there are no jobs available.
It's hit the spotlight in the UK with British Telecom staring outsourcing call centre jobs (yes, even the lowest-skilled jobs are being outsourced) to India.
I would have thought that computer programmers, being the first on the receiving end, would have realised the economics a long time ago. Sadly not.
Well you can have mine, then. It's got the low microphone problem and Ericsson still can't/won't fix it. You have to scream down the thing and the other person's going, "Eh? Speak up?"
So I bought a rock-bottom cheap one as a stop-gap (T200) and that gave up after a couple of months as well with the No Network bug.
I will never buy another Ericsson again because something always goes wrong 3-6 months down the line.
(Having said that, everything will probably work great from the P800 onwards.)
If you want something cutting edge, the P800 is well out of date already, Ericsson have missed their original release date by six months while sorting out the software.
Slashdot Mirror
From the Press release...
(Note from BB - I've been getting mails from users indicating that TDE is now privately owned, I will be attempting to confirm this ASAP)
Well we're dealing with some real worldly types here, aren't we? It's not exactly difficult to find out, you switch their home page to English if you can't read Spanish and you get all the investor information you need. See the options there at the top-right?
I'm sure all the Spanish businesses trading internationally that you've just knocked off the Internet will thank you for your tactful approach to the problem. As will people trying to stay in touch with friends and relatives in Spain, especially so soon after the terrorist bombing in Madrid. Taking a leaf out of the Rumsfield book of diplomacy or something are we?
The first thing you get if you go to your About Us page followed by the link under "People Who Dislike the SOSDG And The AHBL" is "Power Without Accountability". Do you think they might actually have a point? Or do you labour under the delusion that if people (not spammers, but legitimate businesses and private individuals) don't like you're doing then you must be doing it right?
Of course you will argue that you only provide the list, it is up to others how to use it. Unfortunately your lists are implemented by scripts and there were very few scripting languages that came with a conscience last time I looked. However at least it means you've neatly absolved yourself of any responsibility so you can block an entire country of 40 million people without bothering about the repercussions in your US-centric blacklist (which basically amounts to regarding anything from outside North America as suspicious).
Feel free to answer my points all you want.
How the hell can this and several other posts in this thread be modded as insightful?
If I wanted to read a board dedicated to thinly-desguised xenophobia and racism coupled with idiotic blind unthinking patriotism then I'd have gone to free republic.
However I'm on slashdot. And can't we just tell the main demographic is teenagers who have hardly ever set foot outside their parents' basement, let alone country, closely followed by those who should have moved out 10 years ago.
"I have always said that as soon as ID cards become cumpulsory, I would take my citizenship, and my skills elsewhere."
You'd better start planning now then, you may need 10 years of living in the country you want to emmigrate to to get citizenship and until you do you still need a British passport which will be going biometric sometime in late 2006/early 2007.
Blunkett has been on the telly this morning (Breakfast with Frost) saying that people won't have to carry cards everywhere, but that doesn't matter as police will be able to stop people and check their biometrics (e.g. fingerprint, face recognition, or iris scan) against the central database without the card if required. Now I don't know about you, but don't think the police stopping people in the street and forcing them to put their finger on a fingerprint reader against their will is a reason for introducing biometric ID cards and the central database behind it. I hope this little fact gets repeated long and often in the upcoming debate as I don't think many other people do either.
However CDMA has a few features that GSM would be better to have, like the ability to tell your phone to turn on the new voice mail waiting signal. SMS to say you have voice mail works, but either you delete it without checking, and forget, or you leave the SMS in the inbox, and latter check without deleting it, either way getting out of sync.
An extension to GSM, called CPHS, has this feature.
100% legal MP3s, but you'd better like the music on the Warp (as it only sells that label's catalogue).
Is there any reason at all that this vaunted "noise control" could not be addressed privately?
Yes. What are the chances of the majority of people across e.g. New York who feel that noise pollution adversely affects the forming an organisation, funding it, running a scientifically valid investigation, and then implementing a city-wide scheme to reduce it?
Nil.
I assume from your viewpoint that all US cities' mayors should be immediately sacked and any planning and services they were doing should be scrapped and the inhabitants left to do the job themselves as best they can? I give those cities less than a week before they fall into chaos.
Okay, whoever moderated the parent insightful obviously hadn't heard about the Hutton Inquiry.
The Siemens S55 asks for permission the first time a Java application tries to dial out/make an Internet connection/and so on after running. There's no way around it.
I haven't seen a Symbian mobile in action but I imagine it'll be something similar.
Now Windows Smartphone I'm not so sure about...
Yep. Networks have started installing firewalls for GPRS connections to the internet at the network level. Otherwise you could be pinged and charged for traffic you didn't want.
The difference between computers and mobiles is that the mobiles work to the same standard, but how they do that is up to the manufacturer so the bugs that can be exploited still vary by make and model.
As an example, a fairly old Siemens GSM mobile (C35 I think) did freeze when trying to open a SMS with a specific string in it. No other phones were affected.
Siemens brought out a firmware upgrade to fix the problem and as a stopgap the owner could put the SIM in any other mobile and delete the message.
It's completely factual and messing around plumbing wifi in British trains smacks of re-arranging the deckchairs while the Titanic sinks.
Depends on the market. The US mobile market is much younger than the European and Japanese one, which is saturated. US networks still want to get customers on board quick so they give mobiles away for silly money.
Maybe the version of desktop Linux they push will have the support done by the OEM?
Or the OEM will pay them to provide support to the end user?
Or something which makes them money, which is what their desktop Linux didn't do.
Doesn't really matter if all the nTags have Bluetooth, does it?
They could use smoke signals if they wanted to.
There's a 1x1 gif image in the sitefinder page, this is the URL that refers to it...
g nw ildcard/1/G.2-Verisign-S/s75019259531159?[AQB]&ndh =1&t=19/8/2003%2018%3A54%3A6%205%20-60&pageName=La nding%20Page&ch=landing&server=US%20East&c1=NOTHIN G&c2=NOTHING%20%2800/00%29&c3=NOTHING%20%28DYM%29& c12=No&c13=00&c14=No&c15=00&c16=Yes&c17=15&c22=NOT %20SET&g=http%3A//sitefinder.verisign.com/index.js p&s=1024x768&c=16&j=1.3&v=Y&k=Y&bw=1024&bh=614&p=R ealPlayer%28tm%29%20G2%20LiveConnect-Enabled%20Plu g-In%20%2832-bit%29%20%3BWindows%20Media%20Player% 20Plug-in%20Dynamic%20Link%20Library%3BShockwave%2 0Flash%3BShockwave%20for%20Director%3BMicrosoft%C2 %AE%20Windows%20Media%20Services%3BAdobe%20Acrobat %3BMozilla%20Default%20Plug-in%3BJava%20Plug-in%3B QuickTime%20Plug-in%206.0.2%3B&[AQE]
http://verisignwildcard.112.2o7.net/b/ss/verisi
Why would they want to know my plugins and screen size, amongst other things?
Oh well, not to difficult to get Mozilla to block that at the cookie it sets.
And have the prices remained as low as they were to drive out K Mart or have they risen again?
I was shocked when a number of people walked out in the middle of the Zion "dance" scene. I'm totally flummoxed by this, as I thought it was one of the coolest scenes in the film.
Something from a an inteview with one of the actresses in Calendar Girls...
Like the calendar itself, the £1.5m film is perfectly demure. Celia Imrie, whose bosoms are in one scene shielded by a pair of iced cherry tarts, said: "The Americans are very prudish, so you don't see that much, thank God. Even so, we had to be naked on set at various times, which was a bit scary."
Because we don't pay for incoming calls...! You don't pay extra for calling a landline, just another mobile network, the reason being that there is some interconnection between networks going on that costs more.
Not the pricing on our incoming calls - incoming calls are always free.
How it works is you pay one rate to call someone on your own mobile network or a landline, and a higher rate to call someone on another mobile network.
So if your friend and her mother are on different networks, they need to sort something out between each other unless they like throwing money away.
The reason for asking someone what network they're on is you don't know if you're paying 5p a minute or 35p a minute until you get the bill. (Some European networks have sorted this out and play a tone at the start of the call if it's off-net or let you check with a *# code, none in the UK do.)
But it sounds a bit better than than the description of US networks call pricing somewhere in this same thread...
Er, sorry to have to break it to you, but we've got this in Europe already too.
Contrary to quaint local folklore there are places outside the US that are actually subjected to the market and the UK is one of them.
I take it you're in total agreement with HTB-1 visas (or whatever the US equivelent of a FTV is) and outsourcing? Nothing strikes you as remotely odd that in two years hundreds of thousands of jobs have disappeared or gone abroad, businesses have folded, and the stock market has disappeared up its own arse putting people's retirement in doubt.
No I'm not some red-flag waving communist but the idea that the government should sit idly by twiddling its thumbs saying, "we can't take any inititive to stop what's happening. That would be interfering with the free market. See you down the unemployment office," seems to me to be fatalistic and dogmatic.
You're missing the big picture somewhat. The market will always try and reduce the cost of production to zero to undercut competitors. Big businesses that can will outsource as much as possible to cheaper countries. Smaller companies that can't will die. At that point there will be hardly anybody to buy any products anyway as their jobs will have been outsourced and nobody will have any disposible income as they are either unemployed or doing menial work.
If I were you I would get your country's government to stand up for your country's businesses (I don't mean the globalised megacorporations that don't belong to any country any more) because nobody else will. There's no shame in your government cutting taxes or red tape, investing (not subsidising, there is a difference), or making business development loans available if the end is keeping people in jobs and allowing them to improve an industry in which your country is a recognised leader.
Likewise there's no shame in making the big boys pay tax on outsourced services and clamping down on them squirreling away money that should be collected as tax in some offshore bank somewhere. How much tax do you think the likes of Microsoft or Murdoch pays? As little as they can. As we've seen with Enron, Worldcom, etc etc...
If I need to explain it anymore than that, well, it's a lost cause.
I can tell this is an American board.
Is there any difference between grants for games companies than grants for films, the arts, museums, neighbourhood community projects, etc...
Or even just reducing the burden of taxes on these organisations would help.
Because it costs much less to invest in your own country's companies, keeping your own population in jobs, educated and trained, and having your country produce something whih is then exported and brings money in for the country than slinging everyone out on their ear and watching unemployment benefit costs going off the scale.
In the UK taxes are going up again in April. Small and medium-sized companies really will go to the wall, as if enough aren't already now.
If we take the current system to its logical conclusion and outsource everything to the lowest bidder in India, there is very little left that could be done in this country apart from police, lawyers, politicans, and hairdressers. And it won't be some work-free utopian paradise service economy where people spend all day skipping through fields. It'll be an uneducated unemployed population who can only claim off the state because there are no jobs available.
It's hit the spotlight in the UK with British Telecom staring outsourcing call centre jobs (yes, even the lowest-skilled jobs are being outsourced) to India.
I would have thought that computer programmers, being the first on the receiving end, would have realised the economics a long time ago. Sadly not.
Well you can have mine, then. It's got the low microphone problem and Ericsson still can't/won't fix it. You have to scream down the thing and the other person's going, "Eh? Speak up?" So I bought a rock-bottom cheap one as a stop-gap (T200) and that gave up after a couple of months as well with the No Network bug. I will never buy another Ericsson again because something always goes wrong 3-6 months down the line. (Having said that, everything will probably work great from the P800 onwards.)
If you want something cutting edge, the P800 is well out of date already, Ericsson have missed their original release date by six months while sorting out the software.