Sounds like the BBC. The BBC is great, but I do wonder about it's future. I hope it survives.
I do too but it unlikely. Rupert Murdoch has done a behind the scenes deal with the Tories: His news empires will do everything legally possible to swing the British public to voting tory if they promise to carve up the BBC when they get into power. He hates having to compete with a huge statefunded body that brings almost the same level of bargaining power to TV program negotiations that his company commands.
Currently the BBC has a huge stock of back catalogue prgramming that he needs to but in order to pad out his satellite network channels. He would rather he could force them to sell cheap but if he refuses to buy the BBC just twiddle their thumbs until he caves in, their is no reason for them to do otherwise. Normal companies on the other hand have to try and maintain a bottom line so have to cave in or try and sue for monopolistic practices.
I am completely against the idea the ISP's should be able to charge high bandwidth websites a premium because I cant help but think they would abuse this but it does remind me of the following: Here in the UK we require large supermarkets and shopping malls to pay the local council some money to upgrade the local road system to cope with any increase in the volume of traffic.
There is an even more obvious solution: bomb Somalia, or at least the coast that lays next to the shipping lines, and burn it down to the bedrock.
Normally I would find this unthinkable, but as more and more of the countries revenue comes from theft and murder the more complicit the citizens become. Unfortunately however there will always be some people in Somalia though who are opposed to piracy.
At what point does it become acceptable to punish the entire population for the crimes of a few pirates? Also, would this apply equally to other countries? There is a lots of debate in my country about whether the invasion of Iraq was legal under international law, should some random country who are effected by this (ie - Iran, Syria) be entitled to kill me if this is found to be illegal?
This is always the question: Can you punish innocent people for the crimes of their neighbours just because it is the only way to stop the criminal of the two getting away with it?
Yes, lets give control of the client to the server, nothing ever could go wrong. It's not like making JS into a common service on all clients can potentially open the flood gates for malware like activex did... oh wait...
Please do not compare JavaScript to ActiveX. Firstly, ActiveX code had unrestricted access to your entire local machine. This was such a godawful idea that many people screamed how stupid it was almost as soon as it was announced. Javascript on the other has much more limited access. It is not able to access my local machine, and nobody is talking about changing this.
What they are talking about is making you able to write JS code that would be executed on the server side and maybe other places too. There is no indication that they intend to drop all the security restrictions ala ActiveX so code that was embedded in a web page would still run with a different level of access to JS code I executed myself as part of a local file saved to my desktop. If I am stupid enough to download a file to my desktop then execute it without it coming from a trusted source then I am going to run into trouble sooner or later anyway, regardless of if the file is written in JavaScript.
Really they are just talking about making JavaScript more like.NET which may or may not be a good idea depending on your point of view. I know it can be executed as both a server-side scripting language to control dynamic websites and a client side language to provide desktop applications and as part of the browser in the form of silverlight. I do not know enough about.NET security policies to know the inherent problems this may cause or if the code has to be structured differently for each context.
Any.NET gurus care to add about its pitfalls in this regard?
They decided to use VAC instead of Punkbuster on the PC. Like many of their decisions, this one wasn't well thought out.
Actually I think it was a brilliant idea.
Ever submitted a support request to evenbalance? (the makers of PB) I have and they are terrible, they reply 3 or 4 days later saying they will not help you or saying some stock answer that doesn't really answer your question. Steam's support department on the other hand are actually helpful.
The problem seems to stem from the fact that if I as a customer submit a problem to PB, and PB tell me to take a running jump there us nothing I can do about it. I am not able to influence a games developers decision to use PB, and the company will probably never even hear about my issue unless I complain to them afterwards. With Steam on the other hand they are also the people who sold me the title. This causes a slight change in the support teams helpfulness since they actually know they are customer facing. Evenbalance support on the hand is not customer facing, it is end-user facing instead and this makes the world of difference to their underlying attitude.
My other issue with PB is how the seem to value security through obscurity above all else. I have never like this approach from PB, especially when I have to run their software as an Administrator level process on my PC. To my knowledge, Steam does not prompt me for the same user privilege level when starting although I MW2is the first VAC enabled game I have bought.
Maybe I am just hoping that the VAC will be better then EvenBalance because I know they cannot be much worse.
So in other words, Congressman King is a supporter of a known terrorist organization (the IRA).
I always find this funny when people from the US moan about other countries supporting terrorists or allowing terrorist groups to fund raise. For many years the IRA raised funds in the states and it was only when Clinton came into power that he put a stop to this.
I honestly believe that him clamping down on IRA fund-raising (and Armalite buying) in the US was a major factor in encouraging the IRA to sit down around the table and move away from just being terrorists and take the political process seriously.
Not entirely. We used to use an Orange Pay As You Go mobile as a pager to receive text messages from our server monitoring software. This seemed to work fine for a while, then all of a sudden the delay in us receiving the text messages became astronomical. This was immediately apparent when a server crashed during core office hours since we heard the audible alert in the office, resolved the problem and then 3 hours or something later the support phone bleeped on someone's desk with the alert we should have received hours before. We solved this by moving to a different phone company and everything was fine.
This is on the UK's most popular network in an office in the middle of London. The only way to be sure an SMS gets somewhere on time is to request an SMS delivery notification when you send the message, that way you at least get a notification when the network hands the SMS off to the receiving phone. This can be very handy for telling when someone turns their phone on, since the phone will immediately receive any queued SMS from the network and acknowledge receipt to the sender.
Sorry, I meant comparatively untaxed compared to us in Europe. I know you do pay tax on it at about 30-40 cents per gallon, but compared to the $3.49 my country currently pays as tax per gallon at the pump you are untaxed:)
If you implement a cap-and-trade system, it will destroy small business and people will have to depend on the government to even pay for the energy to heat their homes.
You have to supply more information about this. Most of Europe already has a cap-and-trade system in place for CO2 emissions. Maybe certain types of cap-and-trade system would be a problem but without further details about which type we cannot implement you are just spouting hot air. Us in the UK have been part of a cap-and-trade system since 2005 and it has not destroyed all our small businesses. The banking industry betting all our money on bankrupted americans who should never have had a mortgage in the first place has caused small business here far more problems. I say americans since in every other country if your mortgage exceeds the value of your house then the bank still is entitled to the rest of your assets to cover the difference, in the US you can hand back the keys to your house and the bank had to swallow the cost of negative equity. This made your mortgages underwritten by fanny rae and freddie mac such a piss poor investment compared to mortgates in the rest of the world.
None of this should come as any great surprise. The vast majority of Slashdotters (and the founders doubly so) are US citizens. One of the reasons that you guys are so scared of this field of science is that it has the possibility to have the greatest affect on your lives.
Most other countries have been hedging their bets with regards to climate science and have kept things like mass transit as viable options for people to move around. They would certainly need heavy amounts of investment in order to provide for everyone but the underlying infrastructure is in place already.
How hard would it be for cites like Los Angeles to implement a viable mass transit system that covered a vast majority of its population? Surely your cities have evolved with untaxed fuel so it has been plausible for people to drive much longer distances and hence they have a lower population density. This is borne out by the fact that every single city in the US has a population density that would be considered low by European standards.(http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-density-125.html)
For us in Europe climate change is going to be an inconvenience, but for almost every city in the US the loss of a mode of cheap medium distance personal transport will require a massive amount of change to their whole way of life. No wonder they require a greater degree of proof than the rest of the world since for them the changes they would need to make cost a whole lot more.
Of course it's a formality. They have hopefully already been told by their commanding officer that this is joke and if anything the extra publicity regarding this will help their careers. This way they can be removed from the front line on full pay while someone drags their feet deciding the charges are a joke.
They have done their bit, let them see their families stateside for a while.
Hooah.
Even if this ended up in front of a jury of their military peers, can anyone imagine a conviction? I can't and I would be very surprised if the prosecutor fancies his chances or actually wants to argue this one on the courtroom floor.
Er given that Aspergers is a form of autism thus making it inappropriate to extradite him, it actually has a lot to do with the issue.
There is another reason not to extradite him: He will not get a fair trial.
The US Govt will pick the most backward part of the country where the jury will know nothing about IT (East Texas probably). Then they will try and get him sent to federal prison for many many years by mentioning 9-11 and terrorism a lot stirring up all the bullshit patriotic fervour they can.
His defence team will do their best to explain that any computer connected to the internet and left switched on should be secured with a password at the very least, but this will be lost on jury who will think of this as just technobabble.
His only hope is to just plead guilty as early as possible and try and not get sent to federal prison or get to serve his sentence in the UK.
Sorry if this offends any Americans, but 9-11 was used as a justification to invade Iraq, a country that had sweet FA to do with it. It is has already been mentioned so many times in this guys case that it makes me very doubtful that any jury could put that out of their minds, even if it is not brought up at all during his trial.
He did not crash a plane into jack shit, instead he logged into a few computers that did not have a password set on the admin account but were still on the internet. The idea that ANY military machine is set up with a blank password on the admin account is just inept. This is why he has being extradited, he made the US military look completely stupid with regards to IT security.
He should still have been arrested, he should still have been made to realise what he did was stupid, but there is no need to send him to prison for it. He is not a danger to society and you can be damn sure he has given up looking for crap on UFO's on US military computers by now. His life is now screwed up enough already.
The US cannot consider itself color-blind or non-racist until the same gamut of insults can be levelled at any public figure without fear of censorship or witch-hunting.
What utter crap. The US can consider itself free of racism when there are the same ratio of black politicians as there are black citizens. This also applies to Caucasians, Hispanics, Native Americans, and every other ethnic group that makes up the population. This applies to any country, which shows that the vast majority are racist to a greater or lesser extent. Much of the racism in the world is subconscious though which makes it much harder to deal with.
There is an excellent section on this in the book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell. He tests himself and discovers that he has a slight autonomic preference towards white faces which he finds disturbing as he is partially of afro-Caribbean descent. It is definitely worth reading.
Back on this original topic of censorship of this image it fairly obvious why Google pulled this image: It is the presidents wife. It is no different to the "Miserable Failure" one that went round a few years ago where it linked to President Bush. Pissing off the ruler of your home country is generally a bad idea, especially when your competitors are busy spending large amounts of money lobbying on Capitol Hill that you are engaging in anti-competitive and privacy abusing practices.
I think it is more like the EU would prefer a few large European companies and smaller non-European competitors. If this was SAP buying Sun, it would have been approved months ago.
Yes it would have been approved months ago, but not for the reason you mention. It would have gone through as SAP does not produce a major product in the database market.
The European Competition Commission did not block the sale of MySQL to Sun. That was a big American company buying a smaller European company. They are now questioning (with good reason) whether the number of major players in the Database market should be reduced as Oracle gain even more dominance. Now in an ideal world the sale would have been turned down in the US, but the problem is that SUN may not survive on its own so it has to be taken over by someone. It is currently losing $100 million a month (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10379673-92.html).
This is what the US senators are trying to get over to the EU. They are desperately hoping that all the Sun employees in the US do not go adding to the high unemployment there already. However the European Commission has the opposite worry: They are probably very concerned that MySQL will be wound up by Oracle who see it as undercutting there flagship database product. This will contribute heavily to European unemployment instead. Even if the MySQL product continues I cannot see why you would not start to rationalise the development of both products and try and get the two teams more entwined. I know the two products are very different, but the skillset of two teams must be similar and it would be an obvious way to cut SUN's overheads since the majority of the development is community lead anyway. They would try and tempt some Lead MySQL dev's to the states then just cut the rest loose since most of the non-open source parts of MySQL are the parts aimed at enterprise that probably do not sit very well with Oracle anyway.
Ultimately it is highly unlikely that the sale will be blocked, but it is more likely that Oracle may be forced to sell the MySQL division or their existing InnoDB division as a condition of this purchase. I would be quite happy to InnoDB and MySQL rolled into one then sold. This is probably highly unlikely though.
I love the way they ask "Did you modify yours for homebrew or altering things you paid for and not to engage in piracy?"
Thats a laugh. Now that they have been booted off live I bet everyone is claiming they did not do it for piracy. When they were paying the money for someone to modify a new $200 piece of hardware and void its warranty were they so sure they were never going to play a cheap knock off game then.
I know if I was going to risk someone trashing a new console under those circumstances I would justify it to myself by saying that it might save me money as I could buy cheaper games for it.
The problem is that without Linus I have a feeling that Linux would now be where Hurd is. Sometimes the people who have the best ideas are not necessarily the best people to implement them.
Is there any reason they can't just give it to both of them?
This has always been my concern about cloud computing and moving toward web apps and online content. Honestly I don't think that the idea of turning our desktops into terminals will catch on, and I'm not really sure that advocates have considered the cost. You're really just moving the hardware requirements to the server side as far as I can tell. Plus, the necessity of perpetual highspeed internet connections...
Errr, no. Think AJAX. A great deal of processing can still be done on the client, but it can be done in a more universal interpreted language that is separated from the hardware it is running on. This is actually good news for application / service providers as it can allow them to only develop a single version of a product for any hardware.
All the people posting stuff about this being inefficient are spot on though, but who cares. The average PC nowadays is so far over specified for what it actually needs to do in and office environment that we no longer need to worry as much about efficiency. Instead the bottle neck in most situations is manpower as man hours are more expensive than mips.
Here is a quote from the final deciding law lord Viscount Sankey on the page you mention:
Throughout the web of the English Criminal Law one golden thread is always to be seen, that it is the duty of the prosecution to prove the prisoner's guilt subject to what I have already said as to the defence of insanity and subject also to any statutory exception. If, at the end of and on the whole of the case, there is a reasonable doubt, created by the evidence given by either the prosecution or the prisoner, as to whether the prisoner killed the deceased with a malicious intention, the prosecution has not made out the case and the prisoner is entitled to an acquittal. No matter what the charge or where the trial, the principle that the prosecution must prove the guilt of the prisoner is part of the common law of England and no attempt to whittle it down can be entertained. When dealing with a murder case the Crown must prove (a) death as the result of a voluntary act of the accused and (b) malice of the accused.
This seems to imply that English Common Law has recognised the principle of presumption of innocence since long before this case.
*This* is the traditional common law, the one that the USA inherited.
Sorry, but that is utter rubbish. By the time this case was tried in 1935, the American and English legal systems had completely devolved so this case has no bearing on US Law.
It's fundamentally some academic quirk on common law jurisprudence - under traditional common law principles, the law is "discovered", not "made" by judges. And thus, judges do have a tendency sometimes to "pretend" that all they're doing is applying existing legal principles, instead of changing the laws by setting a precedent. And then after the decision we'll have to accept that "common law was like that all along!", which is not really that accurate.
Take note, I'm not intending to glamorize the US system (which I don't harbor complements), but just to set things straight. I do study the laws of your jurisdiction extensively, as a law student in Hong Kong.
This is where an awful lot on common law came from. Although very rarely used since we now rely far more on written statutes this was once far more influential when there was not a single repository of statute and case law that could be easily referenced.
Why do you quote US sentences with other countries? "Innocent until proved guilty" comes from US, and while usually true elsewhere too, you seem to just flame with this shit again.
Sorry to disapoint you but your legal system is only based on ours (I am a UK citizen). The presumation on innocence and the adversarial system you inherited just stems from english common law. Here is a link regarding presumption of innocence:
What 'most places' are those? In most American jurisdictions you are well within your rights to resist a mugging attempt with whatever force is reasonably required to terminate the encounter in your favor.
Reasonable force would probably involve you not kicking him when he was on the floor and stopped being a threat. If you continued putting the boot in then your intent stopped being self defence and became revenge, at that point manslaughter charges are a serious possibility. Unless the guy is very unlucky or you are Bruce Lee, it is very hard to fatally kick someone while they are standing. Assuming you get them on the floor it is very hard to make the argument that it still self defence unless they are armed.
"Terminate in your favor" is not the same thing as "Terminate with extreme prejudice":)
The vast majority of Slashdot readers do not write graphics drivers. A great many people here probably do not even use Linux.
I would even hazard a guess that there are far more people here who play computer games than there are people who would be able to do anything even if they did have the full hardware specs of an Nvidia card.
Third, Google has complied with legal takedown notices, whereas Pirate Bay has basically said "go walk the plank". Google has shown good faith when asked to, while Pirate Bay has not.
Please remember that the DMCA does not currently exist in Sweden. The legal take down notices you refer to are not actually legally binding take down notices like in the US.
They are instead whiney letters sent by lawyers. The only reason the send them is in the hope they scare you into obeying. The only thing they proof is that you were informed what you were doing may have been illegal so may be referred to in the result that what you were doing was actually held to be illegal in future.
However this is of very little merit nowadays as most lawyers will quite happily send them even if they are bald faced lie since they face no punishment for doing so.
If some lawyer sent me a letter saying not to do some thing I enjoyed, I might be damn tempted to challenge in court as is my right. Even if I knew I would lose this is still my right. Copyright is a civil matter if enforced by a private lawyer so it is also my right to carry on what I was doing until a court ordered me not to. Then they can fine the crap out of me for willfully carrying on with my actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like the BBC. The BBC is great, but I do wonder about it's future. I hope it survives.
I do too but it unlikely. Rupert Murdoch has done a behind the scenes deal with the Tories: His news empires will do everything legally possible to swing the British public to voting tory if they promise to carve up the BBC when they get into power. He hates having to compete with a huge statefunded body that brings almost the same level of bargaining power to TV program negotiations that his company commands.
Currently the BBC has a huge stock of back catalogue prgramming that he needs to but in order to pad out his satellite network channels. He would rather he could force them to sell cheap but if he refuses to buy the BBC just twiddle their thumbs until he caves in, their is no reason for them to do otherwise. Normal companies on the other hand have to try and maintain a bottom line so have to cave in or try and sue for monopolistic practices.
This is an interesting analogy.
I am completely against the idea the ISP's should be able to charge high bandwidth websites a premium because I cant help but think they would abuse this but it does remind me of the following: Here in the UK we require large supermarkets and shopping malls to pay the local council some money to upgrade the local road system to cope with any increase in the volume of traffic.
There is an even more obvious solution: bomb Somalia, or at least the coast that lays next to the shipping lines, and burn it down to the bedrock.
Normally I would find this unthinkable, but as more and more of the countries revenue comes from theft and murder the more complicit the citizens become. Unfortunately however there will always be some people in Somalia though who are opposed to piracy.
At what point does it become acceptable to punish the entire population for the crimes of a few pirates? Also, would this apply equally to other countries? There is a lots of debate in my country about whether the invasion of Iraq was legal under international law, should some random country who are effected by this (ie - Iran, Syria) be entitled to kill me if this is found to be illegal?
This is always the question: Can you punish innocent people for the crimes of their neighbours just because it is the only way to stop the criminal of the two getting away with it?
If something goes wrong and the target gets killed, it's just another day.
Most of the time that is not something going wrong, that is something going right :)
Yes, lets give control of the client to the server, nothing ever could go wrong. It's not like making JS into a common service on all clients can potentially open the flood gates for malware like activex did... oh wait...
Please do not compare JavaScript to ActiveX. Firstly, ActiveX code had unrestricted access to your entire local machine. This was such a godawful idea that many people screamed how stupid it was almost as soon as it was announced. Javascript on the other has much more limited access. It is not able to access my local machine, and nobody is talking about changing this.
What they are talking about is making you able to write JS code that would be executed on the server side and maybe other places too. There is no indication that they intend to drop all the security restrictions ala ActiveX so code that was embedded in a web page would still run with a different level of access to JS code I executed myself as part of a local file saved to my desktop. If I am stupid enough to download a file to my desktop then execute it without it coming from a trusted source then I am going to run into trouble sooner or later anyway, regardless of if the file is written in JavaScript.
Really they are just talking about making JavaScript more like .NET which may or may not be a good idea depending on your point of view. I know it can be executed as both a server-side scripting language to control dynamic websites and a client side language to provide desktop applications and as part of the browser in the form of silverlight. I do not know enough about .NET security policies to know the inherent problems this may cause or if the code has to be structured differently for each context.
Any .NET gurus care to add about its pitfalls in this regard?
You must be confused; you implied that the IRA are/were Terrorists.
They were Terrorists, they are now Politicians though so I am not sure which is worse :)
They decided to use VAC instead of Punkbuster on the PC. Like many of their decisions, this one wasn't well thought out.
Actually I think it was a brilliant idea.
Ever submitted a support request to evenbalance? (the makers of PB) I have and they are terrible, they reply 3 or 4 days later saying they will not help you or saying some stock answer that doesn't really answer your question. Steam's support department on the other hand are actually helpful.
The problem seems to stem from the fact that if I as a customer submit a problem to PB, and PB tell me to take a running jump there us nothing I can do about it. I am not able to influence a games developers decision to use PB, and the company will probably never even hear about my issue unless I complain to them afterwards. With Steam on the other hand they are also the people who sold me the title. This causes a slight change in the support teams helpfulness since they actually know they are customer facing. Evenbalance support on the hand is not customer facing, it is end-user facing instead and this makes the world of difference to their underlying attitude.
My other issue with PB is how the seem to value security through obscurity above all else. I have never like this approach from PB, especially when I have to run their software as an Administrator level process on my PC. To my knowledge, Steam does not prompt me for the same user privilege level when starting although I MW2is the first VAC enabled game I have bought.
Maybe I am just hoping that the VAC will be better then EvenBalance because I know they cannot be much worse.
So in other words, Congressman King is a supporter of a known terrorist organization (the IRA).
I always find this funny when people from the US moan about other countries supporting terrorists or allowing terrorist groups to fund raise. For many years the IRA raised funds in the states and it was only when Clinton came into power that he put a stop to this.
I honestly believe that him clamping down on IRA fund-raising (and Armalite buying) in the US was a major factor in encouraging the IRA to sit down around the table and move away from just being terrorists and take the political process seriously.
This, too, seems to be a peculiarly US problem.
Not entirely. We used to use an Orange Pay As You Go mobile as a pager to receive text messages from our server monitoring software. This seemed to work fine for a while, then all of a sudden the delay in us receiving the text messages became astronomical. This was immediately apparent when a server crashed during core office hours since we heard the audible alert in the office, resolved the problem and then 3 hours or something later the support phone bleeped on someone's desk with the alert we should have received hours before. We solved this by moving to a different phone company and everything was fine.
This is on the UK's most popular network in an office in the middle of London. The only way to be sure an SMS gets somewhere on time is to request an SMS delivery notification when you send the message, that way you at least get a notification when the network hands the SMS off to the receiving phone. This can be very handy for telling when someone turns their phone on, since the phone will immediately receive any queued SMS from the network and acknowledge receipt to the sender.
It's been taxed for decades.
Sorry, I meant comparatively untaxed compared to us in Europe. I know you do pay tax on it at about 30-40 cents per gallon, but compared to the $3.49 my country currently pays as tax per gallon at the pump you are untaxed :)
If you implement a cap-and-trade system, it will destroy small business and people will have to depend on the government to even pay for the energy to heat their homes.
You have to supply more information about this. Most of Europe already has a cap-and-trade system in place for CO2 emissions. Maybe certain types of cap-and-trade system would be a problem but without further details about which type we cannot implement you are just spouting hot air. Us in the UK have been part of a cap-and-trade system since 2005 and it has not destroyed all our small businesses. The banking industry betting all our money on bankrupted americans who should never have had a mortgage in the first place has caused small business here far more problems. I say americans since in every other country if your mortgage exceeds the value of your house then the bank still is entitled to the rest of your assets to cover the difference, in the US you can hand back the keys to your house and the bank had to swallow the cost of negative equity. This made your mortgages underwritten by fanny rae and freddie mac such a piss poor investment compared to mortgates in the rest of the world.
None of this should come as any great surprise. The vast majority of Slashdotters (and the founders doubly so) are US citizens. One of the reasons that you guys are so scared of this field of science is that it has the possibility to have the greatest affect on your lives.
Most other countries have been hedging their bets with regards to climate science and have kept things like mass transit as viable options for people to move around. They would certainly need heavy amounts of investment in order to provide for everyone but the underlying infrastructure is in place already.
How hard would it be for cites like Los Angeles to implement a viable mass transit system that covered a vast majority of its population? Surely your cities have evolved with untaxed fuel so it has been plausible for people to drive much longer distances and hence they have a lower population density. This is borne out by the fact that every single city in the US has a population density that would be considered low by European standards.(http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-density-125.html)
For us in Europe climate change is going to be an inconvenience, but for almost every city in the US the loss of a mode of cheap medium distance personal transport will require a massive amount of change to their whole way of life. No wonder they require a greater degree of proof than the rest of the world since for them the changes they would need to make cost a whole lot more.
Of course it's a formality. They have hopefully already been told by their commanding officer that this is joke and if anything the extra publicity regarding this will help their careers. This way they can be removed from the front line on full pay while someone drags their feet deciding the charges are a joke.
They have done their bit, let them see their families stateside for a while.
Hooah.
Even if this ended up in front of a jury of their military peers, can anyone imagine a conviction? I can't and I would be very surprised if the prosecutor fancies his chances or actually wants to argue this one on the courtroom floor.
Er given that Aspergers is a form of autism thus making it inappropriate to extradite him, it actually has a lot to do with the issue.
There is another reason not to extradite him: He will not get a fair trial.
The US Govt will pick the most backward part of the country where the jury will know nothing about IT (East Texas probably). Then they will try and get him sent to federal prison for many many years by mentioning 9-11 and terrorism a lot stirring up all the bullshit patriotic fervour they can.
His defence team will do their best to explain that any computer connected to the internet and left switched on should be secured with a password at the very least, but this will be lost on jury who will think of this as just technobabble.
His only hope is to just plead guilty as early as possible and try and not get sent to federal prison or get to serve his sentence in the UK.
Sorry if this offends any Americans, but 9-11 was used as a justification to invade Iraq, a country that had sweet FA to do with it. It is has already been mentioned so many times in this guys case that it makes me very doubtful that any jury could put that out of their minds, even if it is not brought up at all during his trial.
He did not crash a plane into jack shit, instead he logged into a few computers that did not have a password set on the admin account but were still on the internet. The idea that ANY military machine is set up with a blank password on the admin account is just inept. This is why he has being extradited, he made the US military look completely stupid with regards to IT security.
He should still have been arrested, he should still have been made to realise what he did was stupid, but there is no need to send him to prison for it. He is not a danger to society and you can be damn sure he has given up looking for crap on UFO's on US military computers by now. His life is now screwed up enough already.
In general rich and/or powerful parents have rich and/or powerful kids.
Granted. This has an awful lot to do with parental attitudes. If you have educated parents you are more likely to get an education yourself.
The US cannot consider itself color-blind or non-racist until the same gamut of insults can be levelled at any public figure without fear of censorship or witch-hunting.
What utter crap. The US can consider itself free of racism when there are the same ratio of black politicians as there are black citizens. This also applies to Caucasians, Hispanics, Native Americans, and every other ethnic group that makes up the population. This applies to any country, which shows that the vast majority are racist to a greater or lesser extent. Much of the racism in the world is subconscious though which makes it much harder to deal with.
There is an excellent section on this in the book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell. He tests himself and discovers that he has a slight autonomic preference towards white faces which he finds disturbing as he is partially of afro-Caribbean descent. It is definitely worth reading.
Back on this original topic of censorship of this image it fairly obvious why Google pulled this image: It is the presidents wife. It is no different to the "Miserable Failure" one that went round a few years ago where it linked to President Bush. Pissing off the ruler of your home country is generally a bad idea, especially when your competitors are busy spending large amounts of money lobbying on Capitol Hill that you are engaging in anti-competitive and privacy abusing practices.
I think it is more like the EU would prefer a few large European companies and smaller non-European competitors. If this was SAP buying Sun, it would have been approved months ago.
Yes it would have been approved months ago, but not for the reason you mention. It would have gone through as SAP does not produce a major product in the database market.
The European Competition Commission did not block the sale of MySQL to Sun. That was a big American company buying a smaller European company. They are now questioning (with good reason) whether the number of major players in the Database market should be reduced as Oracle gain even more dominance. Now in an ideal world the sale would have been turned down in the US, but the problem is that SUN may not survive on its own so it has to be taken over by someone. It is currently losing $100 million a month (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10379673-92.html).
This is what the US senators are trying to get over to the EU. They are desperately hoping that all the Sun employees in the US do not go adding to the high unemployment there already. However the European Commission has the opposite worry: They are probably very concerned that MySQL will be wound up by Oracle who see it as undercutting there flagship database product. This will contribute heavily to European unemployment instead. Even if the MySQL product continues I cannot see why you would not start to rationalise the development of both products and try and get the two teams more entwined. I know the two products are very different, but the skillset of two teams must be similar and it would be an obvious way to cut SUN's overheads since the majority of the development is community lead anyway. They would try and tempt some Lead MySQL dev's to the states then just cut the rest loose since most of the non-open source parts of MySQL are the parts aimed at enterprise that probably do not sit very well with Oracle anyway.
Ultimately it is highly unlikely that the sale will be blocked, but it is more likely that Oracle may be forced to sell the MySQL division or their existing InnoDB division as a condition of this purchase. I would be quite happy to InnoDB and MySQL rolled into one then sold. This is probably highly unlikely though.
Personally, I respect Stallman's philosophical approach to the whole thing way more than Linus' business approach.
I am very sorry to shit on your ego but I doubt you will feel the same when you are a real grown up and actually pay your own way through life.
Are you actually a business person? What is your specialty? If mummy and daddy go broke could your business survive?
I love the way they ask "Did you modify yours for homebrew or altering things you paid for and not to engage in piracy?"
Thats a laugh. Now that they have been booted off live I bet everyone is claiming they did not do it for piracy. When they were paying the money for someone to modify a new $200 piece of hardware and void its warranty were they so sure they were never going to play a cheap knock off game then.
I know if I was going to risk someone trashing a new console under those circumstances I would justify it to myself by saying that it might save me money as I could buy cheaper games for it.
The problem is that without Linus I have a feeling that Linux would now be where Hurd is. Sometimes the people who have the best ideas are not necessarily the best people to implement them.
Is there any reason they can't just give it to both of them?
This has always been my concern about cloud computing and moving toward web apps and online content. Honestly I don't think that the idea of turning our desktops into terminals will catch on, and I'm not really sure that advocates have considered the cost. You're really just moving the hardware requirements to the server side as far as I can tell. Plus, the necessity of perpetual highspeed internet connections...
Errr, no. Think AJAX. A great deal of processing can still be done on the client, but it can be done in a more universal interpreted language that is separated from the hardware it is running on. This is actually good news for application / service providers as it can allow them to only develop a single version of a product for any hardware.
All the people posting stuff about this being inefficient are spot on though, but who cares. The average PC nowadays is so far over specified for what it actually needs to do in and office environment that we no longer need to worry as much about efficiency. Instead the bottle neck in most situations is manpower as man hours are more expensive than mips.
Here is a quote from the final deciding law lord Viscount Sankey on the page you mention:
Throughout the web of the English Criminal Law one golden thread is always to be seen, that it is the duty of the prosecution to prove the prisoner's guilt subject to what I have already said as to the defence of insanity and subject also to any statutory exception. If, at the end of and on the whole of the case, there is a reasonable doubt, created by the evidence given by either the prosecution or the prisoner, as to whether the prisoner killed the deceased with a malicious intention, the prosecution has not made out the case and the prisoner is entitled to an acquittal. No matter what the charge or where the trial, the principle that the prosecution must prove the guilt of the prisoner is part of the common law of England and no attempt to whittle it down can be entertained. When dealing with a murder case the Crown must prove (a) death as the result of a voluntary act of the accused and (b) malice of the accused.
This seems to imply that English Common Law has recognised the principle of presumption of innocence since long before this case.
*This* is the traditional common law, the one that the USA inherited.
Sorry, but that is utter rubbish. By the time this case was tried in 1935, the American and English legal systems had completely devolved so this case has no bearing on US Law.
It's fundamentally some academic quirk on common law jurisprudence - under traditional common law principles, the law is "discovered", not "made" by judges. And thus, judges do have a tendency sometimes to "pretend" that all they're doing is applying existing legal principles, instead of changing the laws by setting a precedent. And then after the decision we'll have to accept that "common law was like that all along!", which is not really that accurate.
Take note, I'm not intending to glamorize the US system (which I don't harbor complements), but just to set things straight. I do study the laws of your jurisdiction extensively, as a law student in Hong Kong.
You should have started you studies with:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custom_(law)
This is where an awful lot on common law came from. Although very rarely used since we now rely far more on written statutes this was once far more influential when there was not a single repository of statute and case law that could be easily referenced.
My only studies of law were of the history of the english legal system. I do hartily recommend this book to anyone interested: http://www.sweetandmaxwell.co.uk/Catalogue/ProductDetails.aspx?recordid=766&productid=14738
Why do you quote US sentences with other countries? "Innocent until proved guilty" comes from US, and while usually true elsewhere too, you seem to just flame with this shit again.
Sorry to disapoint you but your legal system is only based on ours (I am a UK citizen). The presumation on innocence and the adversarial system you inherited just stems from english common law. Here is a link regarding presumption of innocence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence
Here is a link on english common law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_law
For the most part it is a reasonable system so your founding fathers chose not to change too much of it when they threw off the yoke of english rule.
What 'most places' are those? In most American jurisdictions you are well within your rights to resist a mugging attempt with whatever force is reasonably required to terminate the encounter in your favor.
Reasonable force would probably involve you not kicking him when he was on the floor and stopped being a threat. If you continued putting the boot in then your intent stopped being self defence and became revenge, at that point manslaughter charges are a serious possibility. Unless the guy is very unlucky or you are Bruce Lee, it is very hard to fatally kick someone while they are standing. Assuming you get them on the floor it is very hard to make the argument that it still self defence unless they are armed.
"Terminate in your favor" is not the same thing as "Terminate with extreme prejudice" :)
The vast majority of Slashdot readers do not write graphics drivers. A great many people here probably do not even use Linux.
I would even hazard a guess that there are far more people here who play computer games than there are people who would be able to do anything even if they did have the full hardware specs of an Nvidia card.
Third, Google has complied with legal takedown notices, whereas Pirate Bay has basically said "go walk the plank". Google has shown good faith when asked to, while Pirate Bay has not.
Please remember that the DMCA does not currently exist in Sweden. The legal take down notices you refer to are not actually legally binding take down notices like in the US.
They are instead whiney letters sent by lawyers. The only reason the send them is in the hope they scare you into obeying. The only thing they proof is that you were informed what you were doing may have been illegal so may be referred to in the result that what you were doing was actually held to be illegal in future.
However this is of very little merit nowadays as most lawyers will quite happily send them even if they are bald faced lie since they face no punishment for doing so.
If some lawyer sent me a letter saying not to do some thing I enjoyed, I might be damn tempted to challenge in court as is my right. Even if I knew I would lose this is still my right. Copyright is a civil matter if enforced by a private lawyer so it is also my right to carry on what I was doing until a court ordered me not to. Then they can fine the crap out of me for willfully carrying on with my actions.