"So it represents no one company, and when it does something it will do it with industry backing. This is a Good thing."
And which industry??? The org domain represents charities, clubs, and free software. The ISOC represents the commercial software and telecoms industries.
It's no use claiming that everyone will agree, if the org domain is administered by some of the people most hostile to those using the domain.
"Can we just get the RIAA, MPAA, most major computer software and hardware vendors, the major ISPs, portals and most patent holding corporations together and have one big fuckin' sueing party?"
Excellent idea. Can I suggest somewhere nearby where that comet is expected to land?
(a) Setup Mandrake-Linux so that it dual-boots on a windowsXP machine, and (b) setup WindowsXP so that it dual-boots on a linux machine.
What? Windows can't do that? Well that kind of makes the comparaison irrelevant, wouldn't you say? You can hardly compare ease-of-use between a powerful tool and a toy.
Knowing that, at any moment, the gov't could walk into the library and demand a list of everything everyone has been reading, or searching on the internet, is incredibly chilling to people's willingness to read, or search, materials that aren't "popular."
I would also suggest that if the vast majority of peacable citizens could be persuaded to educate themselves about science which would prove useful militarily (they don't need to read the books dammit, just borrow them) then such people would help to preserve others' anonymity at the library.
The article tells us that since the 50's, every single state has passed laws making library records confidential. What does that tell you? Overwhelmingly, every single state in the United States is against this release of information. So how does El Presidenté Bush's opinion over-ride that of the people who elected him?
"You have no right to complain about the MPAA and DVD CCA's war against fair use if you're willing to fund them. I for one will never buy a DVD that gives money to the MPAA. It is not worth it. My rights are more important than my entertainment. It's unfortunate that so many of the Slashdot crowd does not practice what it preaches."
+5: willing to defend rights.
Why can't more people see this, rather than rushing to throw cash at New Line Cinéma?
But why would any of us want to buy DVDs? I couldn't care less what's released on DVDs, because I don't trust any of the people making the technology, and I can't play DVDs on my computer. So why bother?
"Nice to see that Hilary Rosen's email address isnt anywhere to be found on the RIAA website."
Rosen isn't the email you want - RIAA is a decoy to attract bad press away from the companies it represents, and they don't care if you hate them.
Lookup the member-list of RIAA (google has links to it), and put your argument to the boss of Sony music, or EMI classical, someone who stands to lose business if they're seen as being unpopular.
"Maybe they could just put the diameter of the pizza or the number of ounces up there and skip the meaningless (ever-changing) names."
Well, duh! How the f=£& are you supposed to buy something without knowing what size it is? Trade-descriptions act and all that...
Advertising a "12-inch (medium)" pizza may be acceptable, but anything else is just deceptive when your competitors are using different sizes.
Re:American Culture
on
The Last Place
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Also in the news yesterday: US foreign-office spamming Arab nations with USian "culture" in the form of pop music, "news" in the worst sense of the word, and plain old propoganda.
Interesting to see how long it took the US propoganda, err. office of foriegn communications to get setup. I seem to recall a bill being passed to make it legal for them to lie in the reporting of foreign news, and to just plain make-up wire-stories in the hope that foreigners will believe them.
So that represents exactly what americans are to the rest of the world: Frauds and Liars. Enshrined under US law.
"Actually, region encoding is protected by copyright law"
Region encoding is also illegal under European free-trade law, because it's intention is to enable price-fixing. Don't forget this program was written in Europe.
Brings an interesting point: exactly how hard would it be to release every research paper from a given univeristy onto the web?
The university will say 'high cost' -- you have to scan all those papers, proofread them, track down the authors and ask for permission, compensate them for using their intellectual property (sic), and just think of all the problems trying to publish in journals...
But what is the actual cost? Why does my university accept 2 paper copies, and not ask me for the text-file / LaTeX file on disk? Why do they ask for permission to show it in their library, but not ask for nonexclusive web-publishing rights? Does anyone else think that a university could build a comprehensive database of their research for next to no money that way?
Your choice. Travel to Nottingham to use their library, or download my thesis from the web. Perhaps the cost of travel is a useful filter for people trying to read your work.
"The UK has similiar legislation, and I'm pretty sure most of the rest of EU has similiar legislation."
The UK is trying to pass a bill which makes it illegal to intentionally or accidentally make a computer slow down without the permission of its owner. There's no monopoly on clueless politicians abroad.
How come you pay 15% of earnings (plus same again from your employer / self-employed company) to "social security" yet still have to pay for treatment at hospital? Am I missing something here?
3.) Idiot web designers that refuse to let you view their page/application unless you have one of their approved browsers (Like Webtrends)
I know what you mean: i've found several. However, the companies who won't write a usable website tend to fail in other areas of customer service too, so no great loss.
Recent example I can think of: Argos catalog store. Front page spits in your face with Mozilla or Galeon, so I couldn't buy anything. But then, everything else about Argos sucks also, and I found a rival store which was far better.
Same example many times over. I've used loads of complex ordering-systems, wizards, web-applications, and games using Galeon, and I've not yet found a site to break it. The only problem is browser-detection, and I'm quite happy to see those sites fail.
Slashdot Mirror
"So it represents no one company, and when it does something it will do it with industry backing.
This is a Good thing."
And which industry??? The org domain represents charities, clubs, and free software. The ISOC represents the commercial software and telecoms industries.
It's no use claiming that everyone will agree, if the org domain is administered by some of the people most hostile to those using the domain.
"So, like, when should we start going to slashdot.com instead of slashdot.org?"
Or, when are we going to slashdot.gnu, as soon as mozilla ships with a new default TLD server?
"What's stopping the 'censor' blocking access to servers that are known to run Infranet?"
Well, I guess the plan to enable it by default on Apache installations is one thing stopping that...
"Can we just get the RIAA, MPAA, most major computer software and hardware vendors, the major ISPs, portals and most patent holding corporations together and have one big fuckin' sueing party?"
Excellent idea. Can I suggest somewhere nearby where that comet is expected to land?
"the thing LOCKS! onto your wrist"
Didn't the BladeRunner prison have a similar device?
/me remembers Dilbert's gyroscopic mouse cartoon
"Of course, some people might prefer that their computer didn't know where their hands were at all times..."
Where's he [God] going to get the lawyers?
What's the opposite of Devil's Advocate?
Good point. For a real test,
(a) Setup Mandrake-Linux so that it dual-boots on a windowsXP machine,
and
(b) setup WindowsXP so that it dual-boots on a linux machine.
What? Windows can't do that? Well that kind of makes the comparaison irrelevant, wouldn't you say? You can hardly compare ease-of-use between a powerful tool and a toy.
Knowing that, at any moment, the gov't could walk into the library and demand a list of everything everyone has been reading, or searching on the internet, is incredibly chilling to people's willingness to read, or search, materials that aren't "popular."
I would also suggest that if the vast majority of peacable citizens could be persuaded to educate themselves about science which would prove useful militarily (they don't need to read the books dammit, just borrow them) then such people would help to preserve others' anonymity at the library.
The article tells us that since the 50's, every single state has passed laws making library records confidential. What does that tell you? Overwhelmingly, every single state in the United States is against this release of information. So how does El Presidenté Bush's opinion over-ride that of the people who elected him?
"You have no right to complain about the MPAA and DVD CCA's war against fair use if you're willing to fund them. I for one will never buy a DVD that gives money to the MPAA. It is not worth it. My rights are more important than my entertainment. It's unfortunate that so many of the Slashdot crowd does not practice what it preaches."
+5: willing to defend rights.
Why can't more people see this, rather than rushing to throw cash at New Line Cinéma?
"duh: if you're not really a fan then buy Now "
A spammer couldn't have put it more elegantly.
But why would any of us want to buy DVDs? I couldn't care less what's released on DVDs, because I don't trust any of the people making the technology, and I can't play DVDs on my computer. So why bother?
To misquote rosen, perhaps this will mean they take 10 minutes out from trying to steal our music.
"Nice to see that Hilary Rosen's email address isnt anywhere to be found on the RIAA website."
Rosen isn't the email you want - RIAA is a decoy to attract bad press away from the companies it represents, and they don't care if you hate them.
Lookup the member-list of RIAA (google has links to it), and put your argument to the boss of Sony music, or EMI classical, someone who stands to lose business if they're seen as being unpopular.
"Maybe they could just put the diameter of the pizza or the number of ounces up there and skip the meaningless (ever-changing) names."
Well, duh! How the f=£& are you supposed to buy something without knowing what size it is? Trade-descriptions act and all that...
Advertising a "12-inch (medium)" pizza may be acceptable, but anything else is just deceptive when your competitors are using different sizes.
Also in the news yesterday: US foreign-office spamming Arab nations with USian "culture" in the form of pop music, "news" in the worst sense of the word, and plain old propoganda.
Interesting to see how long it took the US propoganda, err. office of foriegn communications to get setup. I seem to recall a bill being passed to make it legal for them to lie in the reporting of foreign news, and to just plain make-up wire-stories in the hope that foreigners will believe them.
So that represents exactly what americans are to the rest of the world: Frauds and Liars. Enshrined under US law.
"Actually, region encoding is protected by copyright law"
Region encoding is also illegal under European free-trade law, because it's intention is to enable price-fixing. Don't forget this program was written in Europe.
Brings an interesting point: exactly how hard would it be to release every research paper from a given univeristy onto the web?
The university will say 'high cost' -- you have to scan all those papers, proofread them, track down the authors and ask for permission, compensate them for using their intellectual property (sic), and just think of all the problems trying to publish in journals...
But what is the actual cost? Why does my university accept 2 paper copies, and not ask me for the text-file / LaTeX file on disk? Why do they ask for permission to show it in their library, but not ask for nonexclusive web-publishing rights? Does anyone else think that a university could build a comprehensive database of their research for next to no money that way?
Your choice. Travel to Nottingham to use their library, or download my thesis from the web. Perhaps the cost of travel is a useful filter for people trying to read your work.
"The UK has similiar legislation, and I'm pretty sure most of the rest of EU has similiar legislation."
The UK is trying to pass a bill which makes it illegal to intentionally or accidentally make a computer slow down without the permission of its owner. There's no monopoly on clueless politicians abroad.
"Well when Japan gets it's 100 billionth citizen that'll be something they'll have to consider."
When Japan gets it's 100 billionth citizen, they will have long since invaded much of eastern China. How big do you think Japan is?
How come you pay 15% of earnings (plus same again from your employer / self-employed company) to "social security" yet still have to pay for treatment at hospital? Am I missing something here?
If content-type contains "5601-1987", delete (korean character-set)
If subject contains "±", delete ("ADV" in japanese)
If message contains "<img" or "<html" (case-insensitive) then move to "suspected-spam" (98% spam, 2% hotmail users)
"are you or have you ever been a member of the Nazi party?"
How come they don't ask that when you visit America? Nazis are tolerated, but communists aren't allowed to land in the US
I was struck by the arbitrariness of this location ( the only place in the US where 4 states meet)
As opposed to English/celt boundaries? All lay-lines, iron-age ditches, and river boundaries?
Incidentally, was Tintagel castle built (Arthur of Briton's castle) on some really important spot where everything converged?
GPS Coordinates, I'd imagine that they don't account for continental drift, eh?
Apparently the Greenwich observatory is already a hundred metres west of the GPS' meridian, so here in the UK, GPS is incorrect by definition.
Absolute coordinates are of little use when the ground is moving under them...
3.) Idiot web designers that refuse to let you view their page/application unless you have one of their approved browsers (Like Webtrends)
I know what you mean: i've found several. However, the companies who won't write a usable website tend to fail in other areas of customer service too, so no great loss.
Recent example I can think of: Argos catalog store. Front page spits in your face with Mozilla or Galeon, so I couldn't buy anything. But then, everything else about Argos sucks also, and I found a rival store which was far better.
Same example many times over. I've used loads of complex ordering-systems, wizards, web-applications, and games using Galeon, and I've not yet found a site to break it. The only problem is browser-detection, and I'm quite happy to see those sites fail.