Astroturfer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Marketing drone^H^H^H^H^H expert: That's not a wire, that's just, um, the mouse's tail. Yes. The tail. Because mice have tails, right? Ahaha. Hey look, behind you, a three-headed monkey!
Strange - I don't live in the UK, but I can turn on my TV and tune in to the BBC just fine. Sure, it's BBC World, which is *meant* to be viewed by viewers outside of the UK, but technically, it's the same thing - to quote you, "people from outside the UK getting their hands content funded by UK license payers' money, with out [sic] paying anything".
But you do know the driving conditions: they're the specs of the target architecture. It's still not an easy problem, of course, but it's not like you are supposed to write a compiler that emits perfect code for any target architecture - that would indeed be a rather hard problem.
Not really. The problem with cases like this is that there's one party involved (SCO, in this case) that is not actually interested in a quick resolution - or any resolution at all. Quite the opposite, actually; SCO has been and still is trying everything it can to stall the trial as much as possible, and it will continue to do so in the future.
The reason for this is that they're ultimately paid by M$ (and maybe Sun) to create trouble - the whole trial is just a vehicle for FUD, meant to create doubt in middle and high management whether Linux is "safe" to use. Attacks from a technical perspective didn't work, so now they're trying to spread legal FUD - the same thing they've already done with patents and the like, too. The judge is probably well aware of all this, but the court still has to assume good faith and act as if the case potentially has merit.
It's not clear to me how to deal with problems like this without also adversely affecting those who actually *do* have a good reason to sue and who *are* interested in a quick resolution (where it's possible).
eBay *is* very well-entrenched, that much is true, but eBay also sucks big time - they're expensive, unpleasant to work with, and will bow to corporate pressure (deleting your auctions because the RIAA/MPAA/BSA/... demand it without even looking at them etc). The *only* thing eBay has going for itself is the amount of users (and thus auctions).
Of course, this doesn't mean that eBay will go bankrupt when Google becomes a real competitor; there's also the possibility that they will improve their service and lower their fees. Either outcome is fine with me; the problem is not so much eBay as such (i.e., they're not inherently more evil than other companies), it's the problem that they have no competition.
Tor is not a HTTP proxy, it's a Socks proxy. You can tunnel pretty much anything through Tor, although it may not be suitable for all purposes (VoIP, for example, would probably not be very useful due to the lag etc. Tor unfortunately introduces).
I think the only thing Tor specifically disallows is to use it to connect to SMTP servers, but that's only to make sure it won't be abused as an anonymous untraceable spam relay.
Google's business case is selling ads (and, to a lesser extent, selling technology they developed to other companies), and they seem to be quite successful, too - even with several thousands of high-paid employees and even though pretty much all of their services are free, they're making a nice amount of money.
Censoring email names never results in less hate crime (or less crime of any kind whatsoever, for that matter). Whatever gave you that outlandish idea?
It's important to realise that using names like "hitlerhatesjews" or "mayallahkilltheinfidels", offensive as they may be, are not hate crime. Hate crime, by definition, is crime motivated by hatred of a particular group - but it has to be a crime to begin with. Beating up someone because he's Jewish definitely is hate crime; not liking someone because he is is not.
Whether names like that should be banned or not is a separate matter, of course (personally, I think Yahoo! is certainly well within both its legal and ethical rights when it does so).
But I'm not sure about names containing strings like "Osama". I mean... "Osama" (or "Usama") is a pretty common given name in the middle east; it seems a bit over the top to ban it just because there's one high-profile criminal with that name. Last I checked, the name "Ted" was not restricted, for example, even given the Unabomber's existence, so it does seem like Yahoo is following sort of a double standard here.
And of course, banning strings like "allah" is even more idiotic, but at least they reversed that.
Here's an easy way to get answers without investing any kind of work really:
1. Ask a yes/no question (for example, "is the Goldbach hypothesis true?") 2. Flip a coin.
The answer you get will be right about 50% of the time, on average.:) In my case, flipping a coin yielded the answer that the Goldbach hypothesis *is* true; if anyone doesn't believe that, feel free to prove me wrong.:)
Don't be silly. It was not the server's only purpose to index or link to illegal content; the purpose was to link to *any* content whatsoever that users chose to submit for indexing, without trying to find out whether it was legally shared or not or even looking at it.
This is the same reason why Smith and Wesson can continue to manufacture guns even though people use them to kill each other. Illegal killings are not the *only* purpose of guns - so they're not illegal to manufacture/sell/possess themselves, even though the actual number of murders committed each year would probably be significantly lower if no guns were available.
Also, I'm not sure about your "it's legal to link to illegal content, sort of" comment. Is it legal (in Switzerland) or not? If it is, then there's no legal grounds for seizing the servers, period; and if it is not, well, then it is *is* illegal (not just "sort of"), and it's the operators' own fault for breaking the laws of the country they operate in.
I remember something like this from several years (probably more than a decade, but I'm not sure) ago - an overzealous ISP had removed all newsgroups with the word "sex" in them from their feed after some scandal was blown out of proportion by the yellow press. Unfortunately, they had been a bit overzealous; the list of removed groups included not only various sex-positive ones etc., but also groups related to Essex, Sussex and Middlesex, among other things.
Slashdot articles aren't rateable by everyone. In fact, they're not rateable at all; they're taggable, but you can only tag them if you're a subscriber, and tagging is not the same as rating, anyway.
Yeah... because heaven forbid that we use something better than linear searching to test for matches. I don't really know the details of how face recognition works, but I'd be surprised if you couldn't use a tree-like structure to do only O(log n) comparisons to find a specific person.
Besides, the argument that it won't be feasible on a technical level/too expensive/too complicated is a bit naive, too. The same thing could said about China's "great firewall" (and probably has been said about it prior to its being built), but somehow, it didn't keep them from implementing that one, either.
Voting on Mozilla bugs never does anything. It's opium for the masses - it gives you the feeling that you can do something and make a difference, but it's really just a convenient way for the developers to channel user input into an area where it's easy to ignore.
It might surprise you, but Al Jazeera *is* an unbiased news source. If you'll think back a few years, you might remember that it was generally lauded in the Western world prior to 2001 as an example of professional, unbiased journalism in the Arabic world; it was only when the propaganda machines were turned on that they suddenly became a "problem". Al Jazeera hasn't changed, though - it's just spin, and you seem to have fallen for it head over heels.
BTW, you also may (or may not) know that Al Jazeera is generally regarded as pretty pro-Western in the Arabic world. And while it's not a guarantee for unbiasedness, I'd much rather trust a news source that's hated by the propaganda machines and fascists on *both* sides, not one that's only hated by one side but loved by the other, because the former news source actually has a realistic chance of being reasonably unbiased.
This is obviously just yet another spin-doctored story from an anti-American UN... just like the claim that there were no WMDs in Iraq. We showed them, though - just look what we found when we actually went there! Oh, wait...
(Just as a note for the more challenged among the moderators, the above was funny/sarcasm.:) If you do feel particularly cynical, you can also give it a +1 Insightful.)
Slashdot Mirror
Astroturfer^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Marketing drone^H^H^H^H^H expert: That's not a wire, that's just, um, the mouse's tail. Yes. The tail. Because mice have tails, right? Ahaha. Hey look, behind you, a three-headed monkey!
Strange - I don't live in the UK, but I can turn on my TV and tune in to the BBC just fine. Sure, it's BBC World, which is *meant* to be viewed by viewers outside of the UK, but technically, it's the same thing - to quote you, "people from outside the UK getting their hands content funded by UK license payers' money, with out [sic] paying anything".
So, what exactly is the problem?
Don't be too hard on the lawyers - it's just 99% of them that give the rest a bad name.
But you do know the driving conditions: they're the specs of the target architecture. It's still not an easy problem, of course, but it's not like you are supposed to write a compiler that emits perfect code for any target architecture - that would indeed be a rather hard problem.
The rules are different for monopolies - 'nuff zed.
Not really. The problem with cases like this is that there's one party involved (SCO, in this case) that is not actually interested in a quick resolution - or any resolution at all. Quite the opposite, actually; SCO has been and still is trying everything it can to stall the trial as much as possible, and it will continue to do so in the future.
The reason for this is that they're ultimately paid by M$ (and maybe Sun) to create trouble - the whole trial is just a vehicle for FUD, meant to create doubt in middle and high management whether Linux is "safe" to use. Attacks from a technical perspective didn't work, so now they're trying to spread legal FUD - the same thing they've already done with patents and the like, too. The judge is probably well aware of all this, but the court still has to assume good faith and act as if the case potentially has merit.
It's not clear to me how to deal with problems like this without also adversely affecting those who actually *do* have a good reason to sue and who *are* interested in a quick resolution (where it's possible).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batmobile
eBay *is* very well-entrenched, that much is true, but eBay also sucks big time - they're expensive, unpleasant to work with, and will bow to corporate pressure (deleting your auctions because the RIAA/MPAA/BSA/... demand it without even looking at them etc). The *only* thing eBay has going for itself is the amount of users (and thus auctions).
Of course, this doesn't mean that eBay will go bankrupt when Google becomes a real competitor; there's also the possibility that they will improve their service and lower their fees. Either outcome is fine with me; the problem is not so much eBay as such (i.e., they're not inherently more evil than other companies), it's the problem that they have no competition.
And just because YOU aren't interested in things like Flickr, nobody else can or should be either?
Tor is not a HTTP proxy, it's a Socks proxy. You can tunnel pretty much anything through Tor, although it may not be suitable for all purposes (VoIP, for example, would probably not be very useful due to the lag etc. Tor unfortunately introduces).
I think the only thing Tor specifically disallows is to use it to connect to SMTP servers, but that's only to make sure it won't be abused as an anonymous untraceable spam relay.
Google's business case is selling ads (and, to a lesser extent, selling technology they developed to other companies), and they seem to be quite successful, too - even with several thousands of high-paid employees and even though pretty much all of their services are free, they're making a nice amount of money.
This project seems to fit right in.
Censoring email names never results in less hate crime (or less crime of any kind whatsoever, for that matter). Whatever gave you that outlandish idea?
It's important to realise that using names like "hitlerhatesjews" or "mayallahkilltheinfidels", offensive as they may be, are not hate crime. Hate crime, by definition, is crime motivated by hatred of a particular group - but it has to be a crime to begin with. Beating up someone because he's Jewish definitely is hate crime; not liking someone because he is is not.
Whether names like that should be banned or not is a separate matter, of course (personally, I think Yahoo! is certainly well within both its legal and ethical rights when it does so).
But I'm not sure about names containing strings like "Osama". I mean... "Osama" (or "Usama") is a pretty common given name in the middle east; it seems a bit over the top to ban it just because there's one high-profile criminal with that name. Last I checked, the name "Ted" was not restricted, for example, even given the Unabomber's existence, so it does seem like Yahoo is following sort of a double standard here.
And of course, banning strings like "allah" is even more idiotic, but at least they reversed that.
The original Lemmings had (has) 120 levels, 30 each on four difficulties.
Here's an easy way to get answers without investing any kind of work really:
:) In my case, flipping a coin yielded the answer that the Goldbach hypothesis *is* true; if anyone doesn't believe that, feel free to prove me wrong. :)
1. Ask a yes/no question (for example, "is the Goldbach hypothesis true?")
2. Flip a coin.
The answer you get will be right about 50% of the time, on average.
Don't be silly. It was not the server's only purpose to index or link to illegal content; the purpose was to link to *any* content whatsoever that users chose to submit for indexing, without trying to find out whether it was legally shared or not or even looking at it.
This is the same reason why Smith and Wesson can continue to manufacture guns even though people use them to kill each other. Illegal killings are not the *only* purpose of guns - so they're not illegal to manufacture/sell/possess themselves, even though the actual number of murders committed each year would probably be significantly lower if no guns were available.
Also, I'm not sure about your "it's legal to link to illegal content, sort of" comment. Is it legal (in Switzerland) or not? If it is, then there's no legal grounds for seizing the servers, period; and if it is not, well, then it is *is* illegal (not just "sort of"), and it's the operators' own fault for breaking the laws of the country they operate in.
The law is different *inside* the USA, too. Just check out the DeCSS case brought against 2600 Magazine, for example.
I remember something like this from several years (probably more than a decade, but I'm not sure) ago - an overzealous ISP had removed all newsgroups with the word "sex" in them from their feed after some scandal was blown out of proportion by the yellow press. Unfortunately, they had been a bit overzealous; the list of removed groups included not only various sex-positive ones etc., but also groups related to Essex, Sussex and Middlesex, among other things.
Extremely idiotic.
Yes, you are. :)
Slashdot articles aren't rateable by everyone. In fact, they're not rateable at all; they're taggable, but you can only tag them if you're a subscriber, and tagging is not the same as rating, anyway.
No, no, it's much easier - it just makes you an America-hating pinko liberal terrorist commie. >_>
Yeah... because heaven forbid that we use something better than linear searching to test for matches. I don't really know the details of how face recognition works, but I'd be surprised if you couldn't use a tree-like structure to do only O(log n) comparisons to find a specific person.
Besides, the argument that it won't be feasible on a technical level/too expensive/too complicated is a bit naive, too. The same thing could said about China's "great firewall" (and probably has been said about it prior to its being built), but somehow, it didn't keep them from implementing that one, either.
Voting on Mozilla bugs never does anything. It's opium for the masses - it gives you the feeling that you can do something and make a difference, but it's really just a convenient way for the developers to channel user input into an area where it's easy to ignore.
Why not? Who says nerds aren't interested in politics?
It might surprise you, but Al Jazeera *is* an unbiased news source. If you'll think back a few years, you might remember that it was generally lauded in the Western world prior to 2001 as an example of professional, unbiased journalism in the Arabic world; it was only when the propaganda machines were turned on that they suddenly became a "problem". Al Jazeera hasn't changed, though - it's just spin, and you seem to have fallen for it head over heels.
BTW, you also may (or may not) know that Al Jazeera is generally regarded as pretty pro-Western in the Arabic world. And while it's not a guarantee for unbiasedness, I'd much rather trust a news source that's hated by the propaganda machines and fascists on *both* sides, not one that's only hated by one side but loved by the other, because the former news source actually has a realistic chance of being reasonably unbiased.
This is obviously just yet another spin-doctored story from an anti-American UN... just like the claim that there were no WMDs in Iraq. We showed them, though - just look what we found when we actually went there! Oh, wait...
:) If you do feel particularly cynical, you can also give it a +1 Insightful.)
(Just as a note for the more challenged among the moderators, the above was funny/sarcasm.