But check how much of this leads to endless linksites that link to link sites that lead to crappy paysites.
This investation of fake sites who get in the way of real results is just most evident when searching for porn.
Just because you find a lot of images through image search doesn't mean they link to anything good, oh sure, your average 12 yr old may be satisfied but as an old guy, my tastes have advanced beyond that.
It is just the basic set of laws that stand at the top of the law pyramid, these laws are what must be obeyed and nobody can infringe upon them, not by making new laws, not by new policy. Typically these foundation laws are far harder to change then regular law.
And if in holland a new policy or law goes against the "grondwet" (groundlaw) we refer to it exactly like an american refers to the constitution. For instance discriminatin, Artikel 1, "Allen die zich in Nederland bevinden, worden in gelijke gevallen gelijk behandeld. Discriminatie wegens godsdienst, levensovertuiging, politieke gezindheid, ras, geslacht of op welke grond dan ook, is niet toegestaan."
Rough translation" All who are in The Netherlands, shall in equal circumstances be treated equally. Discrimination according to religion, philosophie, political leaning, race, sex or whatever else, is not allowed".
Whatever law is passed, it got to follow this first law. It cannot be changed (well not likely in dutch climate of coalition goverment that can barely agree on simple things) and it cannot be ignored and with the always hot issue of immigration it is constantly reffered to.
So it is not an american thing, most countries will have a similar system, and people who think they have their fundemental rights infringed will try to get their justice by pointing out these fundemental rights. The US constitution protects against unfairly harsh punishement, this woman thinks she received an unfairly harsh punishment so that is the law she refers too.
This is a case of the current administation NOT wanting the law to be applied to their cronies.
When a law is introduced it should be applied equally to everyone. If you introduce a speeding law then police cars too can be ticketed for speeding (although the police do have the right to speed without lights or sirens but only when necesarry for their work) and if the state then refuses to prosecute police officers who speed, they are wrong.
The RICO act is meant to be used against the organisation of crime (most crime is a one person affair) and that includes crimes that the powers that be might not consider to be crimes.
In a way what is happening here is that what happened in america when crimes against blacks were not prosecuted.
If this case holds up in court, and so far it has, then you should really ask why this case was not brought by the public prosecutor.
But this is not an unjust application of the law. This is exactly what the law was created for, just that some people don't want it to be used this way because they are guilty of it, or bought by the people guilty of it.
Ask yourselve what the term organized crime means, it ain't hard. Now do you think that the companies involved may have committed a crime? Did they organize it? Bingo. Organized crime. Stop watching mafia movies and join the real world. The biggest criminals don't need guns.
I am afraid you are very very wrong, and you should think a slashdot reader would know better. Copyright infringement is frequently called organized crime, people who make fake products are said to be organized crime, despite the fact that these "criminals" rarely if ever deal with violence.
The only qualifier for organized crime is in the words itself. Organized and crime. Yes the Rico act is meant to deal with more then just a handfull of bruglers and a fence who decide to operate together but make no mistake if you set up a group of people to commit a crime, you are organized and will be called as such by everyone in the legal proffesions except your lawyer.
Think about it like this. Blackmail, what really is the difference between forcing you to give me money through threathening your life or ruining your life to the point that you may commit suicide?
The idea that organized crime is just thugs who go around beating up people for money is just ridiculous. It really just is nothing more then criminals who organize.
Indeed, how many russion casualties have there bee
on
Why ISS Computers Failed
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Tell me, how many casualties have the russians had in the last decade, even last two decades? This was in the days of Mir, when the russians maintained a continues space pressence year after year and the US was out of space for year after year for blowing up space shuttles.
So whose tech is behind whose? The ISS didn't plunge out of the sky when the Space Shuttle was not available, apparently the russian capability is more then enough to operate it.
And finally, who build the de-humidefier that was the fault in the first place?
Yeah, and it is my fault if you break in to my house. Hell, if you shoot me clearly I am to blame for not wearing a bullet proof vest.
What is the color of the sky in your world?
MS can be blaimed for bot nets, it can be blamed for lousy security in general, but stopping spam is NOT their task, do you blaim architect of your house for not including a bulk mail destructor in your mailslot?
MS if you are listening, if you want to beat google in the search engine market, give good "erotic" results. I can find everything I want about linux easily enough, but when I want to download some eh nature images to remind me that there is more then hardware, you get swamped with false results.
Get live search to give proper results for porn, and googles days are numbered.
If it was true, then a newbie washed up in that area would indeed be chow. Furthermore there are no specfic areas to target, you cannot take out an eye, just pummel away. Fancy combat skills? Again no, just the same basic attack over and over and hope their health bar goes down faster then your own. A horde helping out an allience? Fighting effectivly with items way below your level? No no.
Will he get ganked in later chapters? Have to que to kill a boss, wait hours for a spawn? Will there be a love interest? A plot? Interaction with other characters? Will half the people he meet be bunnyhopping around the place? Will there be gold spammers?
Frankly it reminds me a bit off various other US comics, who in general are far too busy being comics to really bother with the original subject. Maybe it will get better, but frankly I see "shameless cash-in" so far.
I posted this somewhere else as well but your argument is so flawed I feel I must repeat myself.
Commericial radio in holland got its frequencies through a public auction that gave them a license of a set number of years. When that license ran out the goverment wanted to hold another OPEN PUBLIC auction. Commercial radio was bigger then everyone thought and the goverment was sure that they could raise a lot of money through this because more bidders would now want take part.
They were right, and the current license holders were scared, they had gotten the original licenses on the cheap and now had to compete with big internatinal players, paying way more for their new license and that would eat into their massive profits.
Cue the license holders complaining very loudly over the radio about how this was going to ruin radio, destroy freedom and bring about the end of the world. They used a bloody air-raid siren in their ads. All because the goverment was doingexactly what it had said it would do originally and commericial radio stations would have to bid with ther commericial radio stations.
The point? How do you prevent people with ready acess to the voter from making their voice heard? Do you think any of these commercial radio stations gave airtime to people defending the goverments action?
It is well known that big media is controlled by a handfull of super wealthy individuals. Check the british elections and how Labour suddenly became acceptable when several right wing newspaper suddenly started supporting Blair.
Take the current media companies case with filesharing. In this world you got two sources of big money, the media companies on the one hand and the hardware makers on the other. Before Sony became a media company they were PRO-consumer. Harddisk makers and others actively lobby against media lobbyists against things like a mediatax on harddisks.
In your world, the media companies would still get their voice out through the businesses they own, but how would the hardware makers let themselves be heard? Through buying ad time from the media companies? We saw how that works recently, with Google refusing to sell ad space to an opposition campaign.
Our current system is far from perfect, but a pure voter controlled system would give the media companies FAR too much direct power. At least right now we get the occasional balance because big bucks doesn't always agree with big bucks. Just the media forming the opinion of the people controlling the law? No thanks.
First you would need to ensure that you got a way for ALL concerned to have an equal voice. That can't work unless the state control the media, another horror in itself.
The current system ain't perfect, but it might be the least bad we can come up with.
They were first, everyone else came later and NEVER got permission. Only problem, I am not sure the rest of the world wants to take back the australians, or the americans for that matter, there is reason we got you off to the colonies.
It always amazes me that illegal immigrants dare to complain about illegal immigrants just because they been scewing the people who always been there for longer.
In a true democracy you don't vote for people, you vote for ideas. In an ideal world, every decision would be done by consulting the people. Sounds nice.
Except can it work? How would anything be done unless it is popular? How do you do anything that the major opinion makers do not want to?
In holland we had a bit of trouble with commercial radio, years ago frequencies were auctioned off, then when the contract ran out the goverment wanted to auction it off again, this lead to complaints from the previous winners because they might not win a new bid now that it had been shown how big the market had become. They argued that it was them that had made commercial radio big, had made the risky investment and should be given special consideration.
The details however do not matter, what matters is that these radio stations have a very easy time to influence the voter/listener. They aired constant commercials stating their case, pretending this was the end of the world, a blow against freedom etc etc etc, when what they really were upset about was not being able to make huge profits anymore.
What if the dutch goverment had done something that say Philips did not not like (dutch electronics giant), Philips to get the same amount of publicity would actually have to pay for it. And what if a goverment action hurt say corner grocery stores? How they hell are they going to get their message across?
Just as politicians often seem way to easily influenced by lobyist, the average voters has the same problem with popular media. Oh sure, you are different, we all like to think that and perhaps for you it is true, the rest of us are fed our thoughts by the glowbox.
This is extremely relevant, what do ALL people who work in tv got in common? Right wingers? Lefties? Liberals? No you idiot, the answer is in the question, THEY ALL GOT JOBS.
Doesn't matter how right or left they are, they all got paying jobs, and the fast majority extremely well paying jobs.
Daily public opinion is formed by people earning far above the average wage level. Do you really think the news presented by a millionaire, edited by someone making 5x average, owned by billionaire is going to be unbiased on reporting on economics?
These people would gain the power to influence every referendum, as they now do the elections by simply reporting from their world. This isn't about corruption, it is about simply not knowing what it is like to be poor. I once had a very "intresting" discussion with someone about a project by the dutch city of Arnhem, which was to give people on welfare a free washing machine. Her idea was that you could always just get the one from your parents and be really carefull with it, it did not fit in her minds that poor families might not be able to give their old washing machine to their childeren going out of the house because they still needed it themselves. She got all her first gear from her parents and just could not get the idea that this might not happen for all people.
Do you really want people like that, influenced by millionaire media to vote on every bit of goverment regulation?
It sounds like a nice idea, but you would first have to get a truly independent media going that can honestly a fully report on every issue AND then get people to watch it.
For the liberals, just follow the witch hunts that emerge after a child murder, would you really want it to be possible for someone to get a vote going banking on public sentement?
The current system is far from perfect, but perhaps it is the best we can get as long as we remain imperfect human beings.
The consumentenbond is very powerfull, IF a company has its product rated as best it WILL use that in all its ads, it is marketing gold. Being labelled as bad is the exact opposite, MS just got itself a whole shitload of bad advertising and not by some computer mag or newspaper but by an organisation most dutch people believe.
To give you an idea off how powerfull consumer organisations are in holland, this is the only country in the world were Sony will freely and without question exchange PSP's with ANY defective sub-pixel. The ONLY country in the world. Not after you threaten a lawsuit, not after hours on the phone, turn it into a store, if they make trouble refer them to a letter Sony send to kassa and get your new PSP (did it twice until it went past even dutch warranty). Some stores (not sony itself) still try to make trouble, go ahead ask for the manager and tell them to call Sony, Sony will chew them out for you, Sony doesn't want more trouble.
In fact if you are in the netherlands you don't have to accept dead subpixels on anything. I exchanged my iPod video after 6 months, an mp3 player is a device that should last longer, and Apple just had to replace mine or face a court case it was going to loose by default.
This is the country MS refused to simply give XP (costs them NOTHING) to legit buyers of Vista?
Seriously, MS really needs to hire a better public relations officer. They might be lucky that this is the weekend and as such the free working week newspapers won't carry the story but this is just asking for a whole lot of bad press.
On a side not, might Vista's uptake lack because it is harder to pirate? The only people I know who use Vista are those who got it with their new computer for "free". I build my own (and run linux anyway for desktop) so for me Vista would cost a shitload of money. Piracy seems out, wich makes me not use it and therefore I get no experience with it, except for when my friends ask me for advice and I can't give it because I don't know Vista. This actually matters to some as I have helped two people reformat and install XP to get rid of Vista.
I wish just once there was a story from MS that doesn't make it sound like it got some kind of horrible fascination with shooting itself in the foot.
How long have we had computers around now? They sure have gotten intelligent right. No, your basic PC is still the same collection of dumb electronics as it were 20 years ago. No OS/interface has even come close to being intelligent.
Even a simple thing as translation is beyond todays tech. At best you might hope for a mere word for word translation, with the program often having no clue how to deal with words that are not exactly in its dictionary. As for context based translation, forget it.
So how is this "robot" going to understand a human? It can't. It would be like marrying a severly retarded person.
But this 50 years in the future. So? We have had 50 years of computing by now if not more and what progress has really been made?
If I only look at games then the recent Supreme Commander is offcourse the sequel to Total Annihilation and any number of RTS games. The AI? Frankly it sucks donkey balls, start skirmish mode, turn off fog of war and prepare to cry as the AI commander builds an endless amount of lowest level power generators right next to a land factory meaning that it is stuck for the rest of the game because it can't move for the low level units squeezed around it and the structures.
This happens every single game, all you have to do is build a basic defence to defeat the light attacks get an artillery force and just shell the commanders position from a safe position (they blow up), repeat for all the commanders and voila, another skirmish won.
There is not a single game that I ever played that is an exception to the dumb ai rule. No matter what game, once you figured out the AI routine, you got them beat, because they are NOT AI. They are scripts. No more intelligent then a tech support guy who works of a cue sheet.
A real AI would have to be capable to deal with something it hasn't been programmed for, that is what we humans can do most of the time. No AI tech I have seen or read about is capable of doing that, in fact the best we are trying at the moment is to come up with specialists programs that in a very limited scope can excel at a very limited task.
Take for instance those robots you get that can sort a number of objects. Very nice, but if they were truly intelligent you could take a robot tasked with sorting by color and get it to sort by alphabet, ON ITS OWN! Humans can, if you are a sorter at a production line told to sort apples by size, and all of a sudden I replace it with books and tell you to sort by alphabet, you can do it. Tell me of a program that even comes close to this.
50 years from now? We haven't made any real progress in the last 50 years. It ain't about hardware, the problem is that a program that can deal with anything might just not exist.
The best bet might be to recreate a real human brain, however if you do it with biology, then offcourse you just managed to create a human being, who we better give all the same rights anyway or find ourselves just with a new form of slavery.
No, sorry if this guy really think AI has advanced this far, some game company should set him a challenge of creating a proper AI for a game.
I absolutly loved the longest journey, but when dreamfall came out I was too busy to get it, bought it months later, only to find that there were patches out. For some reason, funcom, has split distribution up around the world and the patches only work on certain versions, my version did not have a patch. Not because the game didn't have troubles, but because the distributor apparently hadn't bothered to patch.
To top it off it also wanted to install a protection system, I don't like those. Apart from everything else they got a habbit of sticking around and being impossible to delete.
So I just downloaded a version from bittorrent got the right patches and did not have to bother with DRM.
So tell me again why I need to pay for software? Essentially all I got was a box with a useless dvd inside and perhaps the feeling that i did the right thing. But I got to play the game THANKS to the people who shared it and hacked up a fix.
It is intresting to note that games often are not just cracked right after release, but often days before it. DRM ain't stopping anyone, the only people you hurt are paying customers.
It seems a bit like this, imagine that each time you wanted to open the door on your car you had to donate blood to analyse your DNA. Fair enough? Did I mention the car is a convertible, the roof is open and the engine is running? It like putting ten locks on your door, and leaving the window open.
The reason it was so good was that for the first time in a game, you weren't in a game. Doom shared that a bit, was one of the first games you could just play without reading the manual. Doom was "real". What I mean by that is that a door looked like a door, worked like a door. Med packs were clearly visible and so on. Compare this to say a driving sim, where you do not have working mirrors, you can only see straight ahead, you have to drive by jerking the wheel hard left or hard right. Doom was "natural".
System shock was not, but it is the first game I remember where you really felt part of the world. Since then I learned that EVERY fps that you are alone. Think about this, even in Alien VS Predator, as either the alien or the marine, you are alone. Not so in System Shock. At one point you are reading mails from someone trying to find a safe spot, as you progress you are getting closer and closer and hope to find them alive. You don't offcourse, solo FPS is solo, but still, for a moment you felt like others were in the space station with you. A magic moment in a PC game. Perhaps even better then actually having an AI with you, this woman never got in my way, didn't commit suicide, didn't get stuck, yet I felt she was another human in this alien world.
But this is about System Shock 2 right? Can I be honest? Didn't like it as much as the original, it was too much. I would have preffered they spend more time on the bugs and less time on the three different main classes and all the various options. Nice and all but endless choice is too often an excuse for not enough flesh in the story. Shodan is back? Yeah, okay, she was nice and crazy and all but we knew her already. There was no shock. Also, the first time you were a hacker, so no wonder you were a bit crap in the beginning with combat, this time you are a soldier, so why do you still suck?
Most likely the flash player send two requests to the server, one for the video and one for the flash ad. Just have the proxy return an empty ad, and voila, no ad.
We are talking about flash based video players right? First block, don't install flash. Second block, do NOT allow the url that server the player to load. Third block, do not allow the video to be loaded.
I am not familiar with browser based blocking, but the last two are trivial with proxy software. My current favorite is privoxy but you might find bfilter to your tastes as well. Hell, if you are really ambitious you can use squid to send all web traffic through several filters. The only effective way to put an ad on the web that cannot be blocked BUY COCA COLA is to make it part of the very page, even then it can be filtered out.
If you are talking about an ad that is part of the video you want to watch. Well even that is not impossible. It would require someone with a knowledge of flash but this might work.
Create a player similar to the google player, but make it just get the video and NOT overlay the ad. Could that work? I very much doubt that at the moment google is doing anything too complex with their player and just passed the required information to get the video straight to the plugin. Filter the required part out, disregard the ad part and voila.
They could offcourse re-encode the video with the ad, but that would take tons of storage for all the different versions and the ad would scale badly if you play it fullscreen.
But I like the bit about being able to vote on ads. Just a small link beside the ad "This ad is so offensive that not only will I never buy from you, I will kill the first I see who buys from you and laugh all the way to the electric chair".
No, not because of linux on the desktop, not even of linux on the server. What it is scared of that with 95% of the desktop it still does NOT control the market. Oh it controls consumers but consumers are fickle. Consumers will buy whatever is cool at the moment. iPhone? Not MS software. iPod not MS software. Mobile phones not MS software. Media centers not MS software. Cars not MS software. Biggest selling console not MS software.
MS has had very little success getting its software onto something else then the PC despite the fact that many would claim that to Joe Public computing IS microsoft. Just how then do you explain that so few choose their phone to have a windows version? Why does the Zune not sell?
And all the while that pesky opensource remains there, undefeated, unwilling to adopt, making small gains perhaps but never just giving up like it is supposed too.
No linux on the desktop ain't going to happen anytime soon, but that is not what MS is really afraid off, it doesn't fear that it is going to loose 95% of the desktop market, but that that market itself will stop growing or even shrink.
Is that likely? Don't matter, what matters is what MS thinks. They been pushing the end of the desktop of ages (and then claiming it will outlive everything) so they worry when they don't see themselves being the software supplier of choice in this new market.
Take google, is google ran its servers on windows as it should (in MS view) do you really think Ballmer would be throwing any chairs? No, it is the realisation that MS one way or another is NOT making a penny out of google (well a few thousand desktop sales perhaps but who cares about that).
None of the mobile phone companies have yet properly chosen Windows as the one and only OS and just keep on insisting on experimenting with software that does not make MS any money.
Nintendo? Do you really think MS was pleased when they included opera as the browser? Do you realize just what this means? Several MILLION people will see for the first time in their live a NEW browser. MS does not like this, it does not survive well when people have a choice, especially when this choice is the default and just works out of the box. That ain't how MS works.
It gets worse, not just are individual consumers learning there are choices and not choosing MS as their software supplier, companies like IBM, HP, Dell are showing that they are far from the loyal lapdogs MS thought they were. Oh the revolution ain't there yet, it may never happen, but if you are a despot and you hear a voice shouting OFF WITH HIS HEAD and you see your "loyal" guards knod in agreement, it is time to worry.
If you think a company like IBM would not relish a change to see MS humbled, you do not understand human nature.
Then their are countries, China is a huge unexplored market, it should buy MS software NOT mess around with linux even if it is just sales tactics. That is not how MS works, it doesn't compete, it dominates. The old example of Munich must be mentioned, for the first time in decades MS was faced with a counter proposal and they reacted instantly by not just lowering the price but by the way of free training and more effectly making MS pay munich to deploy windows. Still no takers. You know you are in trouble when you can't PAY people to use your software.
No, the revolution won't come in 2007 or 2008. Most likely it will never come, it is already here. When was the last time you came across an IE only website? How many years have you been able to file your taxes from Linux/Mac? (Holland several years now) Java programs are finally getting traction, just look at P2P.
AMD opens it graphics cards to opensource, a thing many said was impossible, Intel already heavily supports opensource drivers for its hardware. Are there any giant PC makers left that do not sell Linux no matter how obscurely? Lots of hardware makers now mention linux in their support list.
Oh, it is all small stuff, but it is there and MS is scared
This is the mint, they deal with TONS of cents EACH AND EVERY DAY, you think 4.768.000 coins is going to scare them? They got machines for that. Oh and processing fees.
If you have any kind of a decent bank, they just take your old jar of coins, empty it in a machine and a little later they got a nice total and the money sorted. if your bank charges you for this, you know you got a bad bank. Granted, it is getting harder to find a good bank, in my youth banks went out of their way to advertise bank accounts to small kids, allowing them to save coins and then deposit them in a savings account. Their way of getting future business I guess. Today if you show up with a ton of cash to put into their accounts so they can make amazing profits on it, they charge you a deposit fee. Ah progress.
Amazon also Mein Kampf (illegal in several european countries) and David Hamillton (images illegal again in several countries but not the same) so that at least proves nothing. I thought that the book in question was on a banned list similar to Mein Kampf. IF that is not the case, my case still stands, it should be CLEAR what is illegal and what is not. IF the law in question only makes it possible to consider the anarchists cookbook illegal then that is exactly what I think is extremely wrong with the US system of freedom of speech unless we say otherwise.
The law should never be left open to interpretation to the mood of the moment.
They are the organization put in charge of rating games and have the backing that un-rated games may not be sold, given to them by the politicians and perhaps ultimately the voter (who either voted for the politician because he thought that was a good idea, thought something else was a good idea and didn't think this important, voted because well his dad voted for this party, didn't vote, voted for the guy that lost)
Anyway, that is who they are.
A simple google could have told you that much more clearly.
Perhaps you should have asked WHY this organisation has been created and why it has been given the powers that it has. Because england always "enjoyed" heavy regulation of what can and cannot be shown, it keeps the masses in line. Worked too, you won't find many european countries were the elite are still the elite. Regulate what the plebs can see so they don't any silly ideas, the powers that be can always get around regulations, and have, and will.
Just check the various indecency acts, then try to find a private library WITHOUT books that violate it. Classic nude art? Yesterday's playboy. Not for the common man, but those of breeding.
And to be fair, you got to admit the system works, why england is what it is today because of its rigid class system. What do you mean lapdog to the US? At least it is lapdog with a pedigree.
The X-box is dead, end of story, but the PS2 STILL have games being developed for it, first class titles too. One of the things the "old" ps3 could do, is take these new PS2 games and upscale them a bit, it can't do magic but with its more modern hardware it could give it a slightly better visual quality, not unimportant if you have a HD-TV.
How can a game that has yet to be lreased already be assigned to history?
In an odd way, Sony has created Microsofts problem with the PC. Sure sure, MS could WISH Vista was the new OS and everyone would just buy Vista only games and publish Vista only games, but the reality is that the market has far more XP games, even 2000 games, yes 98 games STILL being sold, among them, games published by MS itself.
So your argument falls flat, the PS2 isn't retired yet, and for Sony to remove compatibility with the PS2 from the PS3 means that this christmas, some of the hot game titles out there, will have people wondering if they should get a PS2 or a PS3. The economy ain't all that, can you guess what a lot will decide?
But surely everyone who wants a PS2 already has one? Then explain why the PS2 sales keep ranking near the top? No, this is very similar to MS and Vista when people really want to run their XP software.
As for the costs, they already got a working design, if they just focussed on that and made that cheaper they could have saved themselves far more in bad publicity. Sometimes you need to accept that a few bucks saved don't matter when its costs you a fortune in lost sales.
The two in question here are "significantly" and "vitually". Watch the best tv series ever, Yes Minister, episode The Right to Know, for an excellent explenation of how these words can be used.
Sometimes I think all people should be forced to watch that series at least once in their lives, and if possible before election time.
Slashdot Mirror
But check how much of this leads to endless linksites that link to link sites that lead to crappy paysites.
This investation of fake sites who get in the way of real results is just most evident when searching for porn.
Just because you find a lot of images through image search doesn't mean they link to anything good, oh sure, your average 12 yr old may be satisfied but as an old guy, my tastes have advanced beyond that.
It is just the basic set of laws that stand at the top of the law pyramid, these laws are what must be obeyed and nobody can infringe upon them, not by making new laws, not by new policy. Typically these foundation laws are far harder to change then regular law.
And if in holland a new policy or law goes against the "grondwet" (groundlaw) we refer to it exactly like an american refers to the constitution. For instance discriminatin, Artikel 1, "Allen die zich in Nederland bevinden, worden in gelijke gevallen gelijk behandeld. Discriminatie wegens godsdienst, levensovertuiging, politieke gezindheid, ras, geslacht of op welke grond dan ook, is niet toegestaan."
Rough translation" All who are in The Netherlands, shall in equal circumstances be treated equally. Discrimination according to religion, philosophie, political leaning, race, sex or whatever else, is not allowed".
Whatever law is passed, it got to follow this first law. It cannot be changed (well not likely in dutch climate of coalition goverment that can barely agree on simple things) and it cannot be ignored and with the always hot issue of immigration it is constantly reffered to.
So it is not an american thing, most countries will have a similar system, and people who think they have their fundemental rights infringed will try to get their justice by pointing out these fundemental rights. The US constitution protects against unfairly harsh punishement, this woman thinks she received an unfairly harsh punishment so that is the law she refers too.
What else should she refer too?
Hand in your slashdot UID RIGHT NOW traitor! Geez gods, talk about covorting with the enemy. What next, you run Vista and like it? You hunt penguins?
This is a case of the current administation NOT wanting the law to be applied to their cronies.
When a law is introduced it should be applied equally to everyone. If you introduce a speeding law then police cars too can be ticketed for speeding (although the police do have the right to speed without lights or sirens but only when necesarry for their work) and if the state then refuses to prosecute police officers who speed, they are wrong.
The RICO act is meant to be used against the organisation of crime (most crime is a one person affair) and that includes crimes that the powers that be might not consider to be crimes.
In a way what is happening here is that what happened in america when crimes against blacks were not prosecuted.
If this case holds up in court, and so far it has, then you should really ask why this case was not brought by the public prosecutor.
But this is not an unjust application of the law. This is exactly what the law was created for, just that some people don't want it to be used this way because they are guilty of it, or bought by the people guilty of it.
Ask yourselve what the term organized crime means, it ain't hard. Now do you think that the companies involved may have committed a crime? Did they organize it? Bingo. Organized crime. Stop watching mafia movies and join the real world. The biggest criminals don't need guns.
I am afraid you are very very wrong, and you should think a slashdot reader would know better. Copyright infringement is frequently called organized crime, people who make fake products are said to be organized crime, despite the fact that these "criminals" rarely if ever deal with violence.
The only qualifier for organized crime is in the words itself. Organized and crime. Yes the Rico act is meant to deal with more then just a handfull of bruglers and a fence who decide to operate together but make no mistake if you set up a group of people to commit a crime, you are organized and will be called as such by everyone in the legal proffesions except your lawyer.
Think about it like this. Blackmail, what really is the difference between forcing you to give me money through threathening your life or ruining your life to the point that you may commit suicide?
The idea that organized crime is just thugs who go around beating up people for money is just ridiculous. It really just is nothing more then criminals who organize.
Tell me, how many casualties have the russians had in the last decade, even last two decades? This was in the days of Mir, when the russians maintained a continues space pressence year after year and the US was out of space for year after year for blowing up space shuttles.
So whose tech is behind whose? The ISS didn't plunge out of the sky when the Space Shuttle was not available, apparently the russian capability is more then enough to operate it.
And finally, who build the de-humidefier that was the fault in the first place?
Yeah, and it is my fault if you break in to my house. Hell, if you shoot me clearly I am to blame for not wearing a bullet proof vest.
What is the color of the sky in your world?
MS can be blaimed for bot nets, it can be blamed for lousy security in general, but stopping spam is NOT their task, do you blaim architect of your house for not including a bulk mail destructor in your mailslot?
MS if you are listening, if you want to beat google in the search engine market, give good "erotic" results. I can find everything I want about linux easily enough, but when I want to download some eh nature images to remind me that there is more then hardware, you get swamped with false results.
Get live search to give proper results for porn, and googles days are numbered.
If it was true, then a newbie washed up in that area would indeed be chow. Furthermore there are no specfic areas to target, you cannot take out an eye, just pummel away. Fancy combat skills? Again no, just the same basic attack over and over and hope their health bar goes down faster then your own. A horde helping out an allience? Fighting effectivly with items way below your level? No no.
Will he get ganked in later chapters? Have to que to kill a boss, wait hours for a spawn? Will there be a love interest? A plot? Interaction with other characters? Will half the people he meet be bunnyhopping around the place? Will there be gold spammers?
Frankly it reminds me a bit off various other US comics, who in general are far too busy being comics to really bother with the original subject. Maybe it will get better, but frankly I see "shameless cash-in" so far.
I posted this somewhere else as well but your argument is so flawed I feel I must repeat myself.
Commericial radio in holland got its frequencies through a public auction that gave them a license of a set number of years. When that license ran out the goverment wanted to hold another OPEN PUBLIC auction. Commercial radio was bigger then everyone thought and the goverment was sure that they could raise a lot of money through this because more bidders would now want take part.
They were right, and the current license holders were scared, they had gotten the original licenses on the cheap and now had to compete with big internatinal players, paying way more for their new license and that would eat into their massive profits.
Cue the license holders complaining very loudly over the radio about how this was going to ruin radio, destroy freedom and bring about the end of the world. They used a bloody air-raid siren in their ads. All because the goverment was doingexactly what it had said it would do originally and commericial radio stations would have to bid with ther commericial radio stations.
The point? How do you prevent people with ready acess to the voter from making their voice heard? Do you think any of these commercial radio stations gave airtime to people defending the goverments action?
It is well known that big media is controlled by a handfull of super wealthy individuals. Check the british elections and how Labour suddenly became acceptable when several right wing newspaper suddenly started supporting Blair.
Take the current media companies case with filesharing. In this world you got two sources of big money, the media companies on the one hand and the hardware makers on the other. Before Sony became a media company they were PRO-consumer. Harddisk makers and others actively lobby against media lobbyists against things like a mediatax on harddisks.
In your world, the media companies would still get their voice out through the businesses they own, but how would the hardware makers let themselves be heard? Through buying ad time from the media companies? We saw how that works recently, with Google refusing to sell ad space to an opposition campaign.
Our current system is far from perfect, but a pure voter controlled system would give the media companies FAR too much direct power. At least right now we get the occasional balance because big bucks doesn't always agree with big bucks. Just the media forming the opinion of the people controlling the law? No thanks.
First you would need to ensure that you got a way for ALL concerned to have an equal voice. That can't work unless the state control the media, another horror in itself.
The current system ain't perfect, but it might be the least bad we can come up with.
They were first, everyone else came later and NEVER got permission. Only problem, I am not sure the rest of the world wants to take back the australians, or the americans for that matter, there is reason we got you off to the colonies.
It always amazes me that illegal immigrants dare to complain about illegal immigrants just because they been scewing the people who always been there for longer.
In a true democracy you don't vote for people, you vote for ideas. In an ideal world, every decision would be done by consulting the people. Sounds nice.
Except can it work? How would anything be done unless it is popular? How do you do anything that the major opinion makers do not want to?
In holland we had a bit of trouble with commercial radio, years ago frequencies were auctioned off, then when the contract ran out the goverment wanted to auction it off again, this lead to complaints from the previous winners because they might not win a new bid now that it had been shown how big the market had become. They argued that it was them that had made commercial radio big, had made the risky investment and should be given special consideration.
The details however do not matter, what matters is that these radio stations have a very easy time to influence the voter/listener. They aired constant commercials stating their case, pretending this was the end of the world, a blow against freedom etc etc etc, when what they really were upset about was not being able to make huge profits anymore.
What if the dutch goverment had done something that say Philips did not not like (dutch electronics giant), Philips to get the same amount of publicity would actually have to pay for it. And what if a goverment action hurt say corner grocery stores? How they hell are they going to get their message across?
Just as politicians often seem way to easily influenced by lobyist, the average voters has the same problem with popular media. Oh sure, you are different, we all like to think that and perhaps for you it is true, the rest of us are fed our thoughts by the glowbox.
This is extremely relevant, what do ALL people who work in tv got in common? Right wingers? Lefties? Liberals? No you idiot, the answer is in the question, THEY ALL GOT JOBS.
Doesn't matter how right or left they are, they all got paying jobs, and the fast majority extremely well paying jobs.
Daily public opinion is formed by people earning far above the average wage level. Do you really think the news presented by a millionaire, edited by someone making 5x average, owned by billionaire is going to be unbiased on reporting on economics?
These people would gain the power to influence every referendum, as they now do the elections by simply reporting from their world. This isn't about corruption, it is about simply not knowing what it is like to be poor. I once had a very "intresting" discussion with someone about a project by the dutch city of Arnhem, which was to give people on welfare a free washing machine. Her idea was that you could always just get the one from your parents and be really carefull with it, it did not fit in her minds that poor families might not be able to give their old washing machine to their childeren going out of the house because they still needed it themselves. She got all her first gear from her parents and just could not get the idea that this might not happen for all people.
Do you really want people like that, influenced by millionaire media to vote on every bit of goverment regulation?
It sounds like a nice idea, but you would first have to get a truly independent media going that can honestly a fully report on every issue AND then get people to watch it.
For the liberals, just follow the witch hunts that emerge after a child murder, would you really want it to be possible for someone to get a vote going banking on public sentement?
The current system is far from perfect, but perhaps it is the best we can get as long as we remain imperfect human beings.
The consumentenbond is very powerfull, IF a company has its product rated as best it WILL use that in all its ads, it is marketing gold. Being labelled as bad is the exact opposite, MS just got itself a whole shitload of bad advertising and not by some computer mag or newspaper but by an organisation most dutch people believe.
To give you an idea off how powerfull consumer organisations are in holland, this is the only country in the world were Sony will freely and without question exchange PSP's with ANY defective sub-pixel. The ONLY country in the world. Not after you threaten a lawsuit, not after hours on the phone, turn it into a store, if they make trouble refer them to a letter Sony send to kassa and get your new PSP (did it twice until it went past even dutch warranty). Some stores (not sony itself) still try to make trouble, go ahead ask for the manager and tell them to call Sony, Sony will chew them out for you, Sony doesn't want more trouble.
In fact if you are in the netherlands you don't have to accept dead subpixels on anything. I exchanged my iPod video after 6 months, an mp3 player is a device that should last longer, and Apple just had to replace mine or face a court case it was going to loose by default.
This is the country MS refused to simply give XP (costs them NOTHING) to legit buyers of Vista?
Seriously, MS really needs to hire a better public relations officer. They might be lucky that this is the weekend and as such the free working week newspapers won't carry the story but this is just asking for a whole lot of bad press.
On a side not, might Vista's uptake lack because it is harder to pirate? The only people I know who use Vista are those who got it with their new computer for "free". I build my own (and run linux anyway for desktop) so for me Vista would cost a shitload of money. Piracy seems out, wich makes me not use it and therefore I get no experience with it, except for when my friends ask me for advice and I can't give it because I don't know Vista. This actually matters to some as I have helped two people reformat and install XP to get rid of Vista.
I wish just once there was a story from MS that doesn't make it sound like it got some kind of horrible fascination with shooting itself in the foot.
How long have we had computers around now? They sure have gotten intelligent right. No, your basic PC is still the same collection of dumb electronics as it were 20 years ago. No OS/interface has even come close to being intelligent.
Even a simple thing as translation is beyond todays tech. At best you might hope for a mere word for word translation, with the program often having no clue how to deal with words that are not exactly in its dictionary. As for context based translation, forget it.
So how is this "robot" going to understand a human? It can't. It would be like marrying a severly retarded person.
But this 50 years in the future. So? We have had 50 years of computing by now if not more and what progress has really been made?
If I only look at games then the recent Supreme Commander is offcourse the sequel to Total Annihilation and any number of RTS games. The AI? Frankly it sucks donkey balls, start skirmish mode, turn off fog of war and prepare to cry as the AI commander builds an endless amount of lowest level power generators right next to a land factory meaning that it is stuck for the rest of the game because it can't move for the low level units squeezed around it and the structures.
This happens every single game, all you have to do is build a basic defence to defeat the light attacks get an artillery force and just shell the commanders position from a safe position (they blow up), repeat for all the commanders and voila, another skirmish won.
There is not a single game that I ever played that is an exception to the dumb ai rule. No matter what game, once you figured out the AI routine, you got them beat, because they are NOT AI. They are scripts. No more intelligent then a tech support guy who works of a cue sheet.
A real AI would have to be capable to deal with something it hasn't been programmed for, that is what we humans can do most of the time. No AI tech I have seen or read about is capable of doing that, in fact the best we are trying at the moment is to come up with specialists programs that in a very limited scope can excel at a very limited task.
Take for instance those robots you get that can sort a number of objects. Very nice, but if they were truly intelligent you could take a robot tasked with sorting by color and get it to sort by alphabet, ON ITS OWN! Humans can, if you are a sorter at a production line told to sort apples by size, and all of a sudden I replace it with books and tell you to sort by alphabet, you can do it. Tell me of a program that even comes close to this.
50 years from now? We haven't made any real progress in the last 50 years. It ain't about hardware, the problem is that a program that can deal with anything might just not exist.
The best bet might be to recreate a real human brain, however if you do it with biology, then offcourse you just managed to create a human being, who we better give all the same rights anyway or find ourselves just with a new form of slavery.
No, sorry if this guy really think AI has advanced this far, some game company should set him a challenge of creating a proper AI for a game.
I absolutly loved the longest journey, but when dreamfall came out I was too busy to get it, bought it months later, only to find that there were patches out. For some reason, funcom, has split distribution up around the world and the patches only work on certain versions, my version did not have a patch. Not because the game didn't have troubles, but because the distributor apparently hadn't bothered to patch.
To top it off it also wanted to install a protection system, I don't like those. Apart from everything else they got a habbit of sticking around and being impossible to delete.
So I just downloaded a version from bittorrent got the right patches and did not have to bother with DRM.
So tell me again why I need to pay for software? Essentially all I got was a box with a useless dvd inside and perhaps the feeling that i did the right thing. But I got to play the game THANKS to the people who shared it and hacked up a fix.
It is intresting to note that games often are not just cracked right after release, but often days before it. DRM ain't stopping anyone, the only people you hurt are paying customers.
It seems a bit like this, imagine that each time you wanted to open the door on your car you had to donate blood to analyse your DNA. Fair enough? Did I mention the car is a convertible, the roof is open and the engine is running? It like putting ten locks on your door, and leaving the window open.
The reason it was so good was that for the first time in a game, you weren't in a game. Doom shared that a bit, was one of the first games you could just play without reading the manual. Doom was "real". What I mean by that is that a door looked like a door, worked like a door. Med packs were clearly visible and so on. Compare this to say a driving sim, where you do not have working mirrors, you can only see straight ahead, you have to drive by jerking the wheel hard left or hard right. Doom was "natural".
System shock was not, but it is the first game I remember where you really felt part of the world. Since then I learned that EVERY fps that you are alone. Think about this, even in Alien VS Predator, as either the alien or the marine, you are alone. Not so in System Shock. At one point you are reading mails from someone trying to find a safe spot, as you progress you are getting closer and closer and hope to find them alive. You don't offcourse, solo FPS is solo, but still, for a moment you felt like others were in the space station with you. A magic moment in a PC game. Perhaps even better then actually having an AI with you, this woman never got in my way, didn't commit suicide, didn't get stuck, yet I felt she was another human in this alien world.
But this is about System Shock 2 right? Can I be honest? Didn't like it as much as the original, it was too much. I would have preffered they spend more time on the bugs and less time on the three different main classes and all the various options. Nice and all but endless choice is too often an excuse for not enough flesh in the story. Shodan is back? Yeah, okay, she was nice and crazy and all but we knew her already. There was no shock. Also, the first time you were a hacker, so no wonder you were a bit crap in the beginning with combat, this time you are a soldier, so why do you still suck?
Most likely the flash player send two requests to the server, one for the video and one for the flash ad. Just have the proxy return an empty ad, and voila, no ad.
We are talking about flash based video players right? First block, don't install flash. Second block, do NOT allow the url that server the player to load. Third block, do not allow the video to be loaded.
I am not familiar with browser based blocking, but the last two are trivial with proxy software. My current favorite is privoxy but you might find bfilter to your tastes as well. Hell, if you are really ambitious you can use squid to send all web traffic through several filters. The only effective way to put an ad on the web that cannot be blocked BUY COCA COLA is to make it part of the very page, even then it can be filtered out.
If you are talking about an ad that is part of the video you want to watch. Well even that is not impossible. It would require someone with a knowledge of flash but this might work.
Create a player similar to the google player, but make it just get the video and NOT overlay the ad. Could that work? I very much doubt that at the moment google is doing anything too complex with their player and just passed the required information to get the video straight to the plugin. Filter the required part out, disregard the ad part and voila.
They could offcourse re-encode the video with the ad, but that would take tons of storage for all the different versions and the ad would scale badly if you play it fullscreen.
But I like the bit about being able to vote on ads. Just a small link beside the ad "This ad is so offensive that not only will I never buy from you, I will kill the first I see who buys from you and laugh all the way to the electric chair".
No, not because of linux on the desktop, not even of linux on the server. What it is scared of that with 95% of the desktop it still does NOT control the market. Oh it controls consumers but consumers are fickle. Consumers will buy whatever is cool at the moment. iPhone? Not MS software. iPod not MS software. Mobile phones not MS software. Media centers not MS software. Cars not MS software. Biggest selling console not MS software.
MS has had very little success getting its software onto something else then the PC despite the fact that many would claim that to Joe Public computing IS microsoft. Just how then do you explain that so few choose their phone to have a windows version? Why does the Zune not sell?
And all the while that pesky opensource remains there, undefeated, unwilling to adopt, making small gains perhaps but never just giving up like it is supposed too.
No linux on the desktop ain't going to happen anytime soon, but that is not what MS is really afraid off, it doesn't fear that it is going to loose 95% of the desktop market, but that that market itself will stop growing or even shrink.
Is that likely? Don't matter, what matters is what MS thinks. They been pushing the end of the desktop of ages (and then claiming it will outlive everything) so they worry when they don't see themselves being the software supplier of choice in this new market.
Take google, is google ran its servers on windows as it should (in MS view) do you really think Ballmer would be throwing any chairs? No, it is the realisation that MS one way or another is NOT making a penny out of google (well a few thousand desktop sales perhaps but who cares about that).
None of the mobile phone companies have yet properly chosen Windows as the one and only OS and just keep on insisting on experimenting with software that does not make MS any money.
Nintendo? Do you really think MS was pleased when they included opera as the browser? Do you realize just what this means? Several MILLION people will see for the first time in their live a NEW browser. MS does not like this, it does not survive well when people have a choice, especially when this choice is the default and just works out of the box. That ain't how MS works.
It gets worse, not just are individual consumers learning there are choices and not choosing MS as their software supplier, companies like IBM, HP, Dell are showing that they are far from the loyal lapdogs MS thought they were. Oh the revolution ain't there yet, it may never happen, but if you are a despot and you hear a voice shouting OFF WITH HIS HEAD and you see your "loyal" guards knod in agreement, it is time to worry.
If you think a company like IBM would not relish a change to see MS humbled, you do not understand human nature.
Then their are countries, China is a huge unexplored market, it should buy MS software NOT mess around with linux even if it is just sales tactics. That is not how MS works, it doesn't compete, it dominates. The old example of Munich must be mentioned, for the first time in decades MS was faced with a counter proposal and they reacted instantly by not just lowering the price but by the way of free training and more effectly making MS pay munich to deploy windows. Still no takers. You know you are in trouble when you can't PAY people to use your software.
No, the revolution won't come in 2007 or 2008. Most likely it will never come, it is already here. When was the last time you came across an IE only website? How many years have you been able to file your taxes from Linux/Mac? (Holland several years now) Java programs are finally getting traction, just look at P2P.
AMD opens it graphics cards to opensource, a thing many said was impossible, Intel already heavily supports opensource drivers for its hardware. Are there any giant PC makers left that do not sell Linux no matter how obscurely? Lots of hardware makers now mention linux in their support list.
Oh, it is all small stuff, but it is there and MS is scared
This is the mint, they deal with TONS of cents EACH AND EVERY DAY, you think 4.768.000 coins is going to scare them? They got machines for that. Oh and processing fees.
If you have any kind of a decent bank, they just take your old jar of coins, empty it in a machine and a little later they got a nice total and the money sorted. if your bank charges you for this, you know you got a bad bank. Granted, it is getting harder to find a good bank, in my youth banks went out of their way to advertise bank accounts to small kids, allowing them to save coins and then deposit them in a savings account. Their way of getting future business I guess. Today if you show up with a ton of cash to put into their accounts so they can make amazing profits on it, they charge you a deposit fee. Ah progress.
Amazon also Mein Kampf (illegal in several european countries) and David Hamillton (images illegal again in several countries but not the same) so that at least proves nothing. I thought that the book in question was on a banned list similar to Mein Kampf. IF that is not the case, my case still stands, it should be CLEAR what is illegal and what is not. IF the law in question only makes it possible to consider the anarchists cookbook illegal then that is exactly what I think is extremely wrong with the US system of freedom of speech unless we say otherwise.
The law should never be left open to interpretation to the mood of the moment.
Maybe I should just have put, interferring busy bodies.
They are the organization put in charge of rating games and have the backing that un-rated games may not be sold, given to them by the politicians and perhaps ultimately the voter (who either voted for the politician because he thought that was a good idea, thought something else was a good idea and didn't think this important, voted because well his dad voted for this party, didn't vote, voted for the guy that lost)
Anyway, that is who they are.
A simple google could have told you that much more clearly.
Perhaps you should have asked WHY this organisation has been created and why it has been given the powers that it has. Because england always "enjoyed" heavy regulation of what can and cannot be shown, it keeps the masses in line. Worked too, you won't find many european countries were the elite are still the elite. Regulate what the plebs can see so they don't any silly ideas, the powers that be can always get around regulations, and have, and will.
Just check the various indecency acts, then try to find a private library WITHOUT books that violate it. Classic nude art? Yesterday's playboy. Not for the common man, but those of breeding.
And to be fair, you got to admit the system works, why england is what it is today because of its rigid class system. What do you mean lapdog to the US? At least it is lapdog with a pedigree.
The X-box is dead, end of story, but the PS2 STILL have games being developed for it, first class titles too. One of the things the "old" ps3 could do, is take these new PS2 games and upscale them a bit, it can't do magic but with its more modern hardware it could give it a slightly better visual quality, not unimportant if you have a HD-TV.
How can a game that has yet to be lreased already be assigned to history?
In an odd way, Sony has created Microsofts problem with the PC. Sure sure, MS could WISH Vista was the new OS and everyone would just buy Vista only games and publish Vista only games, but the reality is that the market has far more XP games, even 2000 games, yes 98 games STILL being sold, among them, games published by MS itself.
So your argument falls flat, the PS2 isn't retired yet, and for Sony to remove compatibility with the PS2 from the PS3 means that this christmas, some of the hot game titles out there, will have people wondering if they should get a PS2 or a PS3. The economy ain't all that, can you guess what a lot will decide?
But surely everyone who wants a PS2 already has one? Then explain why the PS2 sales keep ranking near the top? No, this is very similar to MS and Vista when people really want to run their XP software.
As for the costs, they already got a working design, if they just focussed on that and made that cheaper they could have saved themselves far more in bad publicity. Sometimes you need to accept that a few bucks saved don't matter when its costs you a fortune in lost sales.
The two in question here are "significantly" and "vitually". Watch the best tv series ever, Yes Minister, episode The Right to Know, for an excellent explenation of how these words can be used.
Sometimes I think all people should be forced to watch that series at least once in their lives, and if possible before election time.